Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, August 28

someone with the same button on as you

Heading out of town tomorrow, bound for the steppes and my rustic dacha, entering a wifi dead zone. Dead-ish. Looking forward to the de-jangling of my nerves, to being somewhere that’s not here, to the break from the store, which I was starting to find more wearing than pleasurable. When you’re as sensitive a plant as I, it’s hard to be on the disbursing end of disappointment; and one often is. “I’m sorry there are no chickpeas in the bulk bin, there’s a problem with the supplier. No, I don’t actually know where they’re grown. Garbanzostan? Yes, that was a joke. I know it’s not a laughing matter, please accept my sincere apologies. No, I have no idea when they might be back in stock. Yes, I know it’s been a long time. We have many different brands of canned chickpeas if —- Yes, I know it’s not the same thing. I know. I understand. No. No, please believe me there is nothing to be gained by my taking the time to go and look in the back. In the back is Tessie making guacamole. It is delicious. Would you like some — Oh. I see. It must be very difficult to have an allergy to avocados. In any case, as I was saying, nowhere in the back is there a sack of chickpeas that I am concealing or holding in reserve owing to some murky imperative known only to myself. No, I’m sorry, I can’t tell you where else you might be able to find them, have you checked the internet? No, I can’t do that for you right now, I would need access to a computer and we only have two and they’re fully subscribed.” And so on.

For every intransigent customer there are many, many who are good humoured and pleasant and happy with what they find; it’s human nature to assign to whatever our difficult, disputatious encounters the level of baseline for comparative measurement. Conflict is compelling; discord is a better narrative foundation than harmony. This is all to say that I won’t miss those three or four times a week when I roll my eyes and mutter to a colleague, “People! Jesus! What the hell is up with people?”

Mavis Gallant (MG) was a writer with strong opinions — it’s what you want from a writer, after all — and she had quite a lot to say, whether in interviews or in her fiction, about people: what they’re like, how they are. Here, just for the fun of it, is a collection of MG aphorisms I’ve gathered up and square-pegged into the round hole of a found poem: eight stanzas of eight lines, a full octave of opinions about people. The title, “Very Few People Can Still Repeat This Without a Mistake,” is from her story “O Lasting Peace.” While my heart belonged to Dada while building this, I think it hangs together weirdly well. You do get a sense, even in these very brief atomizer squirts, of the MG essence, top notes and bottom. Thanks for reading, adios, happy trails to me, xo, B

Very Few People Can Still Repeat This Without a Mistake

I’ve discovered the limit of what you can feel about people:

People who saw a great many ghosts,

People who sincerely wanted to be ill,

The kind of people who live in abandoned stores.

Some people imagine that yoga is joke,

silly people who smoke to keep their figures,

not the sort of people who would ever bother to whisper,

people who just take what you can give them and then go off.

Do you see how easy it is for these people to spy on us?

People eating radishes with butter on them,

people who never set foot in a museum

until drawn by the promise of pornography,

people I’ve just had a glimpse of,

calm, courteous people who had never been on relief,

the only people still working in the whole city:

do people like that commit suicide?

I’m not used to touchy people.

The Scots take great objection to

the wrong people wearing their tartans:

people who could not look at a letter

without saying, eagerly, “Bad news?”,

people who said they had been made unhappy

by paper napkins and washing machines.

People just threw things down a slot and there was a fire smouldering.

People didn’t know what they had:

people who had drifted through the predicament,

people who couldn’t be satisfied,

people who had absolutely no one,

who lived at the top of six steep flights of stairs,

who did not dare go down to buy

a packet of macaroni for fear of the long climb back:

Rape is so important to these people.

Everyone thinks other people are dirty

and that they won’t co-operate.

We think it about the Slavs, the Slavs think it about the Jews,

the Jews think it about the Arabs:

The lucky people are the thoughtless ones.

Only a few lucky people had Nansen passports,

people who did not know or understand how lucky they really were.

Grown people don’t play that way.

The lack of memory is why people are unfaithful;

most people are, unless they’re neurotic.

When people say, “I know exactly

how I felt,” it can’t be true.

Even when people like you, they just

slightly hope you might fail.

A few people in Montreal believed I had died.

Don’t you think some people are better out of the way?

People who do not display what they feel

have practical advantages.

I do not approve of writing classes

for people with no talent;

romantic people are a threat to civilization.

Most people seem to have children

as insurance against being unloved.

People simply don’t leave each other alone enough.

I had been buffeted until now by other people’s

moods, principles, whims, tantrums.

I could not stand the scent of soap, or cologne,

or food cooking, or milk, or smoke, or other people.

Other people paid without knowing it.

Stop concentrating on other people’s business,

chasing after other people and minding their business for them.

What people wanted now was to get on with life.