Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 14

Can I tell you an anecdote?

April 27, 3.45 a.m.

For the last few years, I haven’t written, hardly a word. Sometimes, just to give myself the illusion of production, I’ll simply type out words, the source doesn’t matter, as though the hand-eye-brain exercise of transcription will shake something lose. Sometimes, it does. This is that, an early morning exercise in transcription. I’m not a fan of “trigger warnings” — I can only suppose that MG would have held them in contempt — but some of what follows is graphic. The date is October 23, 1977. Mavis Gallant, MG, is at home, 14, rue Jean Ferrandi, and in conversation with the Canadian Literary Journalist, Geoff Hancock. Their interview appeared in a special edition of Canadian Fiction Magazine and was then collected in Hancock’s anthology Canadian Writers at Work, OUP, 1987. It was, I think, the first long print interview with MG to appear in a Canadian publication. They’re taking at this point about her collection of “German Stories,” collected in The Pegnitz Junction. The title story, MG often said, was the work with which she was most satisfied, of which she was proudest. I’ve read her words transcribed here — it’s like the work of a court reporter — over and over. They are, I think, remarkable. It’s afternoon. They are drinking white wine, chilled by ice cubes. Outside, construction, the dialogue punctuated by the sound of a jackhammer. MG is 57. Between that afternoon in Paris and the event she describes is a span of 35 years. The newspaper was The Montreal Standard. The photo is of Alex Colville who, as a war artist, was among the first of the liberating forces to enter Bergen-Belsen; the painting at the end is his. I remember interviewing him in his home / studio in Wolfville, many years ago, remember his stiff, straight, regimental bearing, his measured tone as he described the experience. It was, in every good way, chilling. So, I think, is this.

HANCOCK

These stories (those in The Pegnitz Junction) connect very closely with something I find in all your writing: people in exile.

GALLANT

I wrote the German stories because I was tying to explain something to myself. They were a kind of personal research. Can I tell you an anecdote?

One thing you truly cannot imagine was what the first concentration camp pictures were for someone my age. That’s something you can’t imagine because you’ve seen them all your life. You were born after the war, which means that this knowledge is part of your culture. When the first pictures arrived in Canada I was twenty-two, working on a newspaper. The pictures I saw had been taken by British and American army photographers. The art director called me into his office. He had all this stuff. You couldn’t believe it. You can’t imagine seeing them. I kept saying, “We’re dreaming. This isn’t real. We’re in a nightmare.” You couldn’t believe it. The Standard had decided to put out a special issue. I was to write what went under the pictures, and a little information of 750 words. I did this at home. I can see this pictures to this day, spread on my table.

Some were the concentration-camp pictures of the dying it was too late to save. I showed one picture to a Montreal doctor who said, “Oh, that’s just tuberculosis.” There were also pictures to do with slave labour, as we called it then. That is one aspect of deportation people seem to have forgotten. Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, Belgian, Dutch — they’ve been forgotten. But among those first pictures, about half were slave labour dead. Buried in shallow graves, dug up for the photographer. A number of them had been burned alive with blow torches because when the Germans were retreating they lost their heads. I prefer to say the Nazis instead of the Germans.

Now, imagine being twenty-two, being the intensely left-wing political romantic I was, passionately anti-Fascist, having believed that a new kind of civilization was going to grow out of the ruins of the war — out of victory over fascism — and having to write the explanation of something I did not myself understand. I thought, “There must be no descriptive words in this, no adjectives. Nothing like ‘horror,’ ‘horrifying,’ because what the pictures are saying is stronger, louder. It must be kept simple.” I remember what I wrote because I kept a copy of it for more than twenty years. I tore it up when I saw that the concentration camp experience, its lesson, its warning, had become kitsch. Kitsch SS, kitsch Gestapo, kitsch prisoners. Even worse, it had been turned into a sexual fantasy. Particularly in films. Young people must come away from those films imagining that the camp scene was pretty good sex.

What I wrote and thought at twenty-two I think and believe now. I wrote, then, that the victims, the survivors that is, would probably not be able to tell us anything, except for the description of life at point zero. If we wanted to find out how and why this happened it was the Germans we had to question. There was hardly a culture or a civilization I would have placed as high as the German.

But what the pictures said was that neither culture nor civilization nor art nor Christianity had been a retaining wall. Why not? What had happened? What had happened to the people who had produced Bach and Goethe, who had been singing “A Might Fortress is our God” since the Renaissance? How could a nation like that one drop to zero so quickly and easily?

We had no way of knowing then or for a long time that there had ever been a German resistance. If the Resistance in other countries has sometimes been inflated out of all historical reality, the German resistance has been played down. If you want to learn anything about it you have to take the trouble, search out the books — very few — and try to find witnesses, first-hand accounts. Ask people in Canada, today, if they have ever heard of Sophie Scholl, decapitated at nineteen for distributing anti-Nazi tracts at the university in Munich. Her brother, aged twenty-one, was beheaded too. Of course, we didn’t know that. Even today no one knows, except those who have taken the time and trouble to find out. All that I knew, or felt, looking at those pictures was that we had to find out, from the Germans themselves, what had gone wrong. I’m putting this very crudely now; don’t misunderstand me. The victims, the survivors that is, could tell us what happened to them, but not why. The why was desperately important to people like myself who were twenty-two and had to live with this shambles.

What I wrote, I need hardly tell you, wasn’t run. Nothing was said to me — I wasn’t asked to rewrite it. When I read the special issue all I could see was the adverbs and adjective smothering the real issue, and the covering article, which was short, was a prototype for all the cliches we’ve been bludgeoned with ever since. I must tell you that I was very spoiled and not used to having my copy tampered with, let alone thrown out. I did ask what had happened. I was told that I was obviously crazy and the editors had never read such crap in their lives. Which may have been true. One man said to me, “Culture! Our readers never went to high school and you’re talking about culture? All the Germans are bastards and that’s that.” But that wasn’t that and it still isn’t. I went home and wrote in my journal, “That is how it is going to be.”

I never lost interest in what had happened, the why of it, I mean. Nothing I ever read satisfied me. Yet I didn’t go to Germany for a long time. In a story called “Virus X” there is a Canadian girl, a young woman, who goes as far as the Rhine and only a few yards further. That was a part of myself. I wasn’t until the early sixties that I began going there, with a purpose. The colonial wars of the fifties and sixties proved that civilization was no barrier anywhere. I had the feeling that in everyday living I would find the origin of the worm — the worm that had destroyed the structure. The stories in Pegnitz Junction are, to me, intensely political for that reason. It is not a book about Fascism, but a book about where Fascism came from. That is why I like it better than anything else. Because I finally answered my own question. Not the historical causes of Fascism — just its small possibilities in people.

Hancock

To back a little bit. Do you want to say anything about John Sutherland?