Jemma Birrell and Emily Greenhouse report on a unique evening in Paris – part of the launch of Granta 111: Going Back – with photos by Lauren Goldenberg
Granta held its first ever event on the continent on Monday night, at Paris’s legendary Shakespeare and Company bookshop. Next to the antiquarian bookseller, in front of a buzzing crowd of Parisians and English speakers from around the globe, editor John Freeman chaired a discussion on memory and writing with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams, poet and acclaimed writer Owen Sheers and Nathan Englander, one of the most talked-about fiction writers today.
Sylvia Whitman, current owner of the shop and daughter of founder George Whitman, introduces the event
Nathan Englander had graciously stepped in that afternoon to replace Mavis Gallant, doyenne of the short story, who fell ill and was unable to participate as planned.
On the phone to the bookshop that same morning, Gallant spoke of her excitement to speak on a panel on the theme of memory. All fiction, as she sees it, comes from memory and the imagination; she immediately launched into her own memories. She spoke about ‘Across the Bridge’, a story she wrote in the nineties, which takes place in 1953. She’d been churning away on the story one afternoon when she realized she hadn’t had a bite of food all day. Popping out of the house for a moment, she was momentarily baffled by the cars and the men’s haircuts she encountered in the streets – for just those few seconds she really expected to see things as she had in the 50s.
The crowd seen from the shop’s upstairs library
She told of another story she’d written, one that includes a scene with a boy jumping out of the first floor window in his pyjamas after a fight with his mother. The father stood watching (she wrote about a tear in his eyes behind his dark glasses). Some time after the English publication, Gallant read the French translation to check it for errors; it was only then that she realized this story did not in fact come from her imagination but from a memory. She had witnessed the scene. She even remembered the family concerned – to whom she promptly sent the book.
John Freeman and Nathan Englander
At the event, Nathan Englander discussed his own kind of memory. He has been preoccupied lately with two kinds: cultural memory and emotional memory and described himself as having a photographic emotional memory. In his novel The Ministry of Special Cases, set in Argentina, he focussed on the way governments construct false histories and ‘truth’.
C.K. Williams and Owen Sheers
In Gallant’s honour, John Freeman read a passage from her story ‘The Doctor’, in which memory is an another country and the past can render each of us an exile. C.K. Williams, a friend of Gallant’s, spoke of her influence on his work. He read his ‘Bianca Burning’ from Granta: Sex, and described revisiting this young circus seductress fifty years after encountering her ‘lush, ardent … amorously advanced’ eighteen-year-old self. He Googled this Bianca, in fact, and found her on Facebook: a curious stumble through this new world of memory in which the ‘past becomes accessible’. Williams’ co-panellist Owen Sheers spoke of the conflation of memory and imagination, and of memory’s distillation – how you need distance from the subject and place in order to write vividly about it. He had recently been sent back to Zimbabwe to write a piece for Granta and was looking at what had changed, how the country had become ‘unstitched’ over time.
Also published recently... an audio interview with Elizabeth McCracken, a Best Young American Novelist, in which she discusses her story ‘Property’ – printed in our latest issue, ‘Going Back’.
