Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, August 9

Leo Twins chez Le Dôme

3.06 a.m. Looking through my various notes, which are full of cryptic jottings about this, that, the other: trails of crumbs I’d meant to follow. Feeling a bit bereft, truth be told but looking forward to the compline service on Wednesday night, 7.00 p.m in Vancouver, August 10, which will be 5 a.m. in Paris, August 11. 100 years since the birth of Mavis Gallant (MG), this diary’s animating force. The service will be in her honour. Some of you have asked if the proceedings will be recorded. That’s the plan, but not a video; I’m all in for the radio experience. All going well I’ll post it here on Thursday — round about noon. If you’re in Vancouver and want to attend, St. James’ Anglican Church, 303 E. Cordova, 7.00 P.M., as noted. I don’t think there’s anything to flag by way of trigger warning. I’m expect benignity and beauty, stem to stern, transept to nave. The Rev. Kevin Hunt, organist P J Janson, some soloists from the St. James’ choir — shout-out to Trevor and Lyle — along with cantor Shefa Siegel, Veda Hille, and Gabrielle Rose. Sounds good to me.

Of all the many interviews MG gave the Q & A that’s impressed me most is a conversation — it truly is that, the best kind of interview, where you feel like you’re at the next table, eavesdropping and hanging on every delicious word — between MG and Marta Dvorak, two women who held each other in high regard, in mutual fondness, and who, as it happened, shared their August 11 birthday. Marta was born in Hungary, moved to Winnipeg with her family after the 1956 uprising, and eventually to Hamilton; her parents were musicians and her mother, the violinist Marta Hidy, was hired to be the midwife for the nascent music programme at McMaster University. Marta Dvorak — yes, kin to the composer — settled on literature as her study, did undergraduate work in Canada, made her way back to Europe, to Paris, received her PhD, taught in Rennes, and then secured an appointment teaching Canadian and world literature at the Sorbonne. She has written widely and deeply about our domestic literature, also about Indian literature; for the writing of MG she has a particular affinity and deep knowledge. I’ve been luckier than I can say to have had Marta Dvorak in my corner during these four months of diary keeping. She made time for an interview and has been a steady and steadying source of inspiration and intelligence and advice. She is generous. Today, with my pirate instincts in full billow and sail, I’m going to share the May, 2009 exchange between MG and MD that took place at Le Dôme in Paris; some days back I hoisted from it MG’s musings on Wagner, Bayreuth, and MRI’s. Amazing to think that MG here was closer to 90 than to 80, and not in the peak of health; her energies, however, her acuity, seen undiminished. I love the way she slips between English and French, when one language seems better to suit the moment. The ideas they explore here — it’s a lively back and forth volley about music and art and writing — are fully developed in Marta’s outstanding Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear, University of Toronto Press, 2019. “When Language is a Delicate Timepiece,” was published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, June, 2014. (Somehow, in the quick passage between copy and paste, some of the spacing got a bit scrambled and out of whack, nothing too jarring, probably there’s way of fixing it but, well, you know, in that regard you can’t even see my wheelhouse. Whatever that is.) Happy birthday, Marta. Thanks for the gift of your friendship and for your beautiful, important work.

When Language is a Delicate Timepiece

MD: It’s delightful to be here again in Le Dôme with you, Mavis. You’re reputed for your “alloyed North American and European vision”. And this place which – like the Coupole – has been a home away from home for you is soaked in history. Not just your generation, but expatriate writers and artists from the U.S. and Canada for almost a century have been mixing and interacting here with their French and European counterparts. The place is perfect as a framework for our conversation, which I’d like to nudge in the direction of the theme of transatlantic crossings. These imply of course not only dialogue across space, but also displacements and mutations in genres and cross-fertilization in the artistic media. One of the things I’d like to discuss with you is your connections with the worlds of music and painting. How do you explain your early interest in the visual?

MG: When I was a child, my Christmas and birthday gifts would be books and a new box of paints. My father painted. He was not a painter but for years I thought he was. For years it was such a large element in our lives. No matter where we were, there was a big room that was the studio and he painted. He didn’t paint professionally. He just ... did it. There was great longing there. He would take me to the Montreal Art Gallery when I was very small, so small that he had to pick me up to look at the paintings. I remember still that he said, you see snow is not white, it’s grey, it’s green, look there, and there, how there’s a shadow? I still can see that. You don’t forget that. It’s true, snow is not really white – if you get close to it, it’s grey in fact, it’s a greyish white. So my father always gave me paint boxes. My mother gave me books, endless books – which I’d finish reading by Boxing Day, my father some if he had them as a child but I wasn’t always interested in boys’ books.

MD: The Hardy Boys?

MG: Yes, that kind, but British. And I had lovely paint boxes. He painted a screen for my bedroom with mermaids coming out of the foam ... green waves and these lovely mermaids with the hair, and there were lots of art books. There was no question that I should be an artist. In fact he wasn’t a professional. He was a very talented amateur. I think now, looking back, you know, the teaching in England left some- thing to be desired. When Matisse was already going on in France, they were still doing the ... [laughs].

MD: We could perhaps say that your father triggered your interest in perception and taught you to see. That might explain the fact that – as you’ve pointed out in prefaces and previous interviews – it’s a fixed image or a mental image which is usually the starting-point for a piece of fiction.

MG: How do you know that it isn’t for other writers too?

MD: This is what I’m wondering.

MG: Writers don’t usually discuss these things when they get together – they tend to talk about things like their agents! [laughs]

MD: Did your early interest in the visual affect your work as a feature journalist in Montreal? Did you ever investigate the interactions going on in the art world? Tendencies inspired by the scene in France, André Breton and the surrealists, perhaps?

MG: Breton est venu au Canada, c’est vrai ... and the artists were very happy to know him. But that was a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the intelligentsia. In 1946 I did a piece for Harper’s Bazaar on the arts in Québec. I worked with Ronny Jaques, the photographer, and Roger Lemelin. There was that group of intellectuals in the 1940s, Refus Global. I went to interview Paul-Emile Borduas. He was living in Saint Hilaire. It was just after the war. He was a young man and he had children whom he later abandoned as you know, but that’s another story. He had a nice house in Saint Claire, a big, airy house, and he had little children who peeped around the door where we were doing the interview, des petites souris comme ça, c’était bien, and I got along well with him but I didn’t see him again.

MD: To pick up on what you said about a tiny fraction of the intelligentsia – what about Anne Hébert? I know how close you both were – was this when you met her?

MG: I met her in France in 1955 – we both knew what it was like to be hard up in post-war Europe. She had been working at the Canadian Film Board before, too, but I didn’t know her then. She was in what was called the French section, which was about three people. As I told you in my last letter, like many, many writers, I didn’t much enjoy the company of other writers (as I did of painters, for instance). My friendship with Anne Hébert came about because Jean-Paul Lemieux and Madeleine Desrosiers (his wife), both painters, had asked me to call on her in her hotel in Menton. I’d met Jean-Paul Lemieux and Madeleine through Phillip Surrey who was a Montreal painter. Phillip Surrey was to me the Montreal painter; I still think so. He did those streets with the red brick houses and the snow – so absolutely true and real. He and his wife knew a lot of French-Canadian artists and his wife spoke good French. However I noticed that chez eux everyone spoke English! When they entertained the language somehow turned to English; I think that the French speakers just got sick of hearing broken French all the time so they turned to English.

MD: So even then you preferred to mix with painters.

MG: I was naturally drawn to them, and the attraction is even greater when you’re living in a provincial society. In New York I would never have bothered because it was all around you – you went to galleries and all that. Montreal was the least provincial of the Canadian cities but it was still a provincial city. But I did know writers like Gabrielle Roy, though I wasn’t an intime by any means. Elle était extrêmement difficile.

MD: How did you meet her ?

MG: She’d just written the first Quebec novel set in the Montreal working class. It had simply never been done before. Nobody did it. Apart from Emile Zola, there was very little working class in French literature, which the French Canadians tended to imitate. She was the first. It was called Bonheur d’occasion and then The Tin Flute in English. I had read it in French – it hadn’t been translated yet – and I admired it. I thought, at last someone has done something different. I asked The [Montreal] Standard if we could run a photo story. In those days there was no TV, so I began to do a lot of photo-stories in a special section with pictures and captions where I presented books I’d read, books I thought did something new, you see. It was about a working-class girl in Montreal who gets pregnant. A sloppy plot, but the first of its kind. I suggested we take photographs of actors playing various scenes in the St Henri neighbourhood, the novel’s original setting. I wanted to take pictures like sfumati – sort of blurred, you know. I said I’d translate what goes under the pictures and make it like a continuous story – now they’re getting married, now this, this and that. I tried to get some French-Canadian actors – professionals – to do this, and the first thing that I ran into was they wanted to be paid Union rates. I told their delegate, Monsieur I can’t pay you anything. All I can get for you are your taxi fares and maybe a hamburger. I have no budget for this at all. He said he couldn’t do this for an English paper – really said English you know – unless we paid Union rates. I said never mind, and went to an English amateur troupe who didn’t expect to be paid anything except a streetcar ticket and they happily agreed. Somebody told Gabrielle Roy about all this. She’d been living in California – she went down there pour être seule, I remember she said, and then she said ça suffit d’être seule. So she came back to Canada. She was very, very beautiful.

MD: Was she?

MG: Yes, young and gorgeous. She came with me during some of the shooting in different locations of Montreal which I’d found. She never made any suggestions. She was just very pleased.

MD: Did you ever discuss the writing itself?

MG: Oh no, I admired her. I told her it was the first book of its kind and that I wanted to tell people about it, that’s all.

MD: At the time weren’t you already writing yourself?

MG: Oh, little things, yes. I was writing but I hadn’t tried to publish. I published one thing around that time. It was a short story, just a sketch really, in The Standard magazine section. It was my own newspaper that ran it. It was called “A Wonderful Country”, about a Czech couple looking for a place to stay in Montreal, because huge numbers of immigrants from Central Europe were coming into Canada then.

MD: Right, post-war Montreal was a magnet.

MG: The story actually goes back to September 1940 and my first job – I was eighteen. I looked in a newspaper and there was a job that looked interesting. It was working for a real estate firm – I’d never worked anywhere – I was young.You took people who wanted to rent an apartment and you wrote down everything that’s in it (laughs) but these people didn’t understand English and they didn’t understand French. It was to me completely fascinating. They evolved into characters for future pieces. This was a true account. It was a Czech gentleman who you could tell had never been in a kitchen in his life, because back in Prague, they probably had servants galore. This kitchen was completely equipped, and there was an egg-beater, and he said, what is it, and I said, you beat eggs and cream and all that, and I showed him. He looked at this; he’d never seen one – you know, not a whisk but the kind with a handle you turn – and he said, what a wonderful country, and I thought, Oh my God, and he was sincere. So I wrote it up as a piece and the magazine published it.

MD: One can tell from your Linnet Muir persona that you were always fascinated by migrants and displaced people in general.

MG: Yes, I was always on the lookout for immigrants. I once met a Czech couple, because they asked me for directions in the street. We sat down on a park bench and started to talk, and I went back to the newspaper and I said I’d met a couple I wanted to interview. It was as simple as that, and we became good friends. There was a quality to the way they lived, even in exile, which was to me very attractive. Very attractive.

MD: That was your romantic nature too.
MG: Well, I thought that it was a true way of living.
MD: True? Why? Why would theirs be truer than yours?
MG: Because I wanted it. Their way of life was to me immensely attractive even when they were poor, which is not the right way of looking at things really. It’s a romantic way of looking at things. When you’re poor, you’re poor and it’s no joke. So no wonder so many of them emigrated.

MD: Yes. I gather that your newspaper tended to follow your lead. Would you say The Standard was generally supportive of your ventures into feature articles and interviews?

MG: Have I ever told you the story of how an editor of my paper reacted when I told him Jean-Paul Sartre was coming to Montreal and I wanted to meet him?

MD: No, you haven’t.

MG: He was the editor who gave you your assignments, Faites-ci, Faites-ça. And they didn’t want women around – c’était très dur pour une femme à l’époque. Somebody told me that Jean-Paul Sartre was coming to Montreal. It must have been 1947, soon after the war. Paul Hindemith was coming the same week and he was going to give a lecture, too. I was a great admirer of Hindemith – I think Mathis der Maler is stunning, don’t you?

MD: Yes, and interestingly Goebbels called it atonal noise, didn’t he?

MG: Yes, something like that. I was determined to interview both. So I went to this fellow who was always at daggers drawn with me. As a matter of fact, I met him on a street in Montreal long after I moved to France, and he said in the conversation, “I know that you didn’t like me, but you’ve forgotten what you were like. You were always trying to promote French speakers and shove in a French-Canadian actor you happened to know. You never accepted an assignment without saying, ‘Why do I have to do this when I want to do that?Why do I have to do it this way when I want to do it that way? Why can’t I go and meet a friend of this person first and ...’” and he said, “you never just said, all right and went off and did it. No, we had this argument every time – it was exhausting to work with you”. I said I was sorry. So this is the person I went up to in 1947 and said, Look, next week, there’s going to be Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Hindemith, and I would like to cover them both. Jean-Paul Sartre is going to have a press conference in the Mount Royal Hotel ... quelqu’un me l’avait dit, so I knew ... and Hindemith will be lecturing and I’m going to go to the lecture. So could I have a photographer for Jean-Paul Sartre? This editor sat back and said, “Listen Mavis, I’m sick to death of these French-Canadian geniuses that you’re always trying to cram down my throat” [laughs] – et c’était Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Hindemith! So I knew there was no point arguing, and I did what one must never do and I don’t advise. I went to an editor who was over him.

MD: But it worked.

MG: This fellow was civilized. He said, of course you must do Jean-Paul Sartre, and you must have a photographer. About Hindemith, nobody will know who he is here, and if you want to do it, do it after working hours, on your own time. That’s all I was asking, because he was going to lecture in the evening anyway. I was an immense admirer of Hindemith. I had all his records, and I played and played Mathis der Maler.

MD: I remember your mentioning you interviewed Sartre once. Was this the occasion?

MG: Yes, I did an interview with Sartre, who was charming by the way, most charming. The other reporters there were all French-speaking, and at that time Quebec was not the open place it is now. It was very closed. Sartre was on the index, the Vatican index. He was considered immoral. Sartre had a completely hostile lot of men in front of him. I was the only woman there, and I was the only one from an English paper. Some-one brought his books. I remember there was a fellow next to me who brought in a book of his and was holding it up like this, with the page open, showing some infamy that Sartre avait écrit, and Sartre just didn’t know what was happening. I waited till all these jerks had gone out of the room. I had been told that he liked girls, so I wore a red coat so that he would notice me, and I went up to him afterwards before he could escape from the room. This was in the Mount Royal Hotel. I told him I had just read La Nausée and I thought il a fait quelque chose de nouveau ... I was really thinking, il a fait quelque chose de nouveau. He was charming, polite, patient with my naïve questions.

MD: Such as?

MG: I remember asking, how much of you was in the main character of La Nausée, the one who sits on the park bench in Le Havre, comment il s’appelait? Antoine, oui .... He said, in anything, in any character you write in fiction, there is something of you inevitably. I don’t agree, but I thought it was very good to know, to be told that. I was just walking on air. I was in the habit of interviewing people from Montreal who were nearly greats or middle greats and they are hell to interview – oh, the vanity. And here was to me a great writer, and he was simplicité itself and gentillesse, he gave me time. I remember we were alone in the room. I walked back to the newspaper because I wanted to think it over, you know. I thought, that is how a great person should behave with a young writer, with a young reporter. That’s the way, that is right. And then I thought, one day – c’était épouvantable that I was able to think that, such immense nerve I had – I thought, one day, they will interview me. And I would be very nice to young people and I would never snub them. It was only after that I thought, kiddo, you haven’t written anything [laughs] no, nothing really worth talking about. Still I thought, one day, they’ll come to interview me.

MD: That’s a lovely story. I’m interested in what you just said about Sartre saying, sort of like Flaubert, Madame Bovary, c’est moi, this notion that you put something of yourself into all of your characters? And you’re saying you don’t.

MG: I don’t think it’s true. It’s not my experience.

MD: Exactly. And is it because you’re more distanced from your characters? Because ... MG: I’ve been told that. MD [overlapping]: There’s always a touch of irony?
MG: Some people think it’s a flaw, that there’s too much of a distance. Sometimes I re-read because I’m going to give a reading, or I re-read because they’re translating a work. I check it with the French translation. Sometimes there is a jolt of recognition. In a story called “The Moslem Wife”, I came across something. It’s when the doctor comes back from the war, and tells Nettie he’s now divorced and wants to live with her, marry her, anything she wants – he’s obviously crazy about her. She says, not a hope, because she’s waiting for her awful husband Jack to come back. He says, Well, don’t be hard on Jack, and she says, I’m hard on myself. I read this and I had a shock of recognition. In the sense that I can make myself do anything, you know. I can really do that even now. Nettie is still very different, you remember. She doesn’t start reading poetry till after the war. Still, I had a jolt – I realized, that’s me.

MD: Right. But could we say that on the whole, the characters that you create are more objects of observation than objects of empathy?

MG: No, I don’t think so. These are technical terms you’re using. I don’t ... I hope they’re true.

MD: Yes, of course they’re true. They’re specimens of humanity.

MG: Do you think so?

MD: Well, often. I feel that you observe individuals, or rather you identify types and make them into individuals. In other words, you can be fairly sure that somebody exactly like that, complete with all the quirks, is walking down the street outside.

MG: Oh, that’s good. My ex-husband John thought that he was in all the characters and he would start to read a story and he would say to himself, no don’t do that, don’t write about that, and he’d go and get a drink of cold water in case he found himself in it.

MD: Did he read all your stories?

MG: Oh, he was very proud of me. People used to ask him if I was his sister because I had the same name.

MD: I didn’t know that he took a great interest in your writing.

MG: He read everything I published.
MD: He was a musician, wasn’t he?
MG:Yes.

MD: Is he the one who got you interested in Wagner? I know you’re a Wagner fan and used to go regularly to the Bayreuth festival.

MG: I became an admirer when I started going to the Bayreuth festival in the early sixties. I had a friend who used to lend me a little studio where I could stay, and the mother of a friend of mine knew how to get me tickets – that I paid for of course. Watching the operas performed in a concentrated time-span helped me see what Wagner was getting at. I was very taken. I went for many years.

MD: Tell me what you mean by what Wagner was getting at.

MG: Well, life on earth and life beyond. The end, the very end .... Well, I don’t think I would ride my horse to Valhalla and go into the flames. It would be very bad for the horse and my English blood wouldn’t stand for that, to be cruel to a horse [laughs], but the end of the Twilight of the Gods when the Rhine overflows, you know, dadadadadida, it just kills me every time, and then everything is calm. And I think, that’s death. I think that’s it, that’s how one dies; I think the Rhine overflows. Unless they’ve given you so much dope that you don’t know what’s happening. Then it just gets calmer and calmer.

MD: Which of the contemporary composers are capable of such transcendence, or just of giving us as much pleasure as Wagner? Who comes close for you?

MG: You know, when I was in hospital I had an IRM. I think it’s called MIR or something like that in English. Have you ever had one?

MD: No.

MG: Well, they see right into the core of your brain. As I was listening – because you hear this incredible noise – I thought, this is like certain kinds of modern music – boom, boom, ding, ding, ding, zzzshh. I was fascinated by this. They pull you out and they take the things off and ask, are you alright? And I said yes, I’m all right, mais je voudrais parler en français parce que c’était en français. J’ai dit, ça me frappe car c’est comme la musique moderne. On pourrait jouer ça à un concert. Ce serait accepté – il y a tous les bruitages, les sifflets, les tidididdi et puis derrière ça, on pourrait jouer quelque chose de Bach derrière, dans les interstices, you know, boom boom, and then you’d hear the lovely ...

MD: architectural ...

MG: Ce que Colette appelait la machine à coudre divine – the divine sewing machine, Bach. Then to conclude this performance there should be the end of the Twilight of the Gods, at the very end when you come to the last dingding boom boom, just the twilight dadadadida. While I was in the MIR listening to the noise, I thought, this is creation, but it’s creation of a different type – of a modern city with modern people in it, who are not like us and yet ... certainly not like me – a sort of iron city with elevators, tout ça mais il n’y a rien. Il n’y a pas d’arbres. Il n’y a pas ça. Il n’y a pas d’arbres.

MD: What’s the biggest difference between these modern people and us? What do you mean by modern people and not like us?

MG: I just want to point out that I’m not making fun of contemporary music; it’s very complicated, on the contrary. And not wanting to do what was done before – that’s normal, too. But there is also a certain amount of snobbisme involved, in the whole industry.

MD: Would you say that their conceptual approach has sort of done away with melody?

MG: Perhaps, but even when I first heard Béla Bartók, I felt there was no melody. My husband Johnny, who was a musician, was crazy about Béla Bartók but he didn’t go beyond that. To him, modern music stopped there. And to me, French music stopped with Debussy and Ravel – I hadn’t gone any further than that when I met him in the summer of 1942 at the home of mutual friends. I was nineteen, and a young married couple I knew were also friends of his. The husband was going to be in the army and Johnny was already in the RCAF, the Canadian air force. We were both invited for Sunday lunch. The couple had some recordings of Shostakovitch (remember this was 1942), and some piano reductions of some of his work. The young man and our hostess played (she wasn’t a professional musician but she played), and I thought I had never heard anything so silly. Then he played part of the Fifth Symphony, and she said to me, well do you like it?, and I said, there’s no melody. But Johnny said, it’s full of melody. It’s you who doesn’t know how to listen. So I thought, Tiens! Tiens! I’d never been talked to that way. So I thought, I’d better find out.

MD: So he taught you how to listen. Just as your father taught you how to see. Did you acquire a taste for Shostakovitch?

MG: Oh yes, especially for his chamber music.
MD: Mmm, don’t you just love the trios especially?
MG: Oh yes. And I thought that what was extraordinary was that originally it was just waves of sound. Just like Béla Bartók, at the beginning.

MD: It’s easier for Hungarians because we immediately detect the folk melodies.

MG: The folk music in it.
MD: Which is modal and often perceived as atonal.
MG: Bartók died poor, didn’t he?
MD: He did die poor.
MG: That was something my husband said to me. He said, he died poor and in America, the Land of Plenty. So you know, things come in bits and pieces in one’s life.

MD: That’s lovely, “Things come in bits and pieces”.

MG: Well, they do. On the other hand, you are also carried along. I think if you want a kind of life, you are automatically carried on. When people say that they wish they had done this and that but they never made it, they didn’t really want it. I never thought anything could go wrong. It was only when I got older and began to have poor health. Then I said, was I doing the right thing? Was I? I wasn’t sure. On the other hand, I don’t see with my temperament what else I could have done.

MD: I think you’d be competent in anything you took up, but I can’t imagine you doing anything else than writing.

MG: No, I can’t either.

MD: You were already a well-established feature writer with a by- line and picture, when you threw up your safe job and headed off to the unknown. You say you found Montreal provincial. You’d lived for some years in New York previously. Why did you choose to go to Europe, to France, rather than go back to New York which was also an exciting cultural capital?

MG: Been there, done that. And also we had – I had – Paris on the brain. From quite early on, from films.

MD: From films?

MG: Les films d’avant guerre, you know. And of course I could read French. I read Colette, what you read when you’re young.

MD: Yes, you mention Colette in several of your essays and reviews. One can tell she was a writer you admired.

MG: Yes I did. I loved her work, particularly when I was young.

MD: So you don’t admire Colette as much as you did when you were twenty? Have your tastes changed a great deal?

MG: You read different things at different times. There’s a Virginia Woolf period one goes through. I had a long Elizabeth Bowen period and I still admire her. I think she’s unfairly forgotten. The House in Paris is a magnificent novel. But I still love most of Colette’s work. I don’t like what she wrote when she was broke and was writing for Vogue, because it was like a caricature of the way she writes. She wrote for money. She always said that. Actually, she was always hard up and suddenly she had something terre à terre. That was just wonderful. C’était à la limite du vulgaire et j’adore ça. The Colette novels I read when I was young were among the only ones I could afford, the secondhand paperbacks from before the war which you could buy in one or two French bookstores in New York at the time. There aren’t any now – the one that was in Rockefeller Centre just closed because they can’t pay the rent anymore. I think it’s tragic.

MD: That is tragic. But to crash on, the other French writers you evoke recurrently in your essays and interviews range from Proust and Gide to Céline, Mauriac and Marguerite de Yourcenar. Would you say your preference goes to contemporary writing?

MG: Well, you need to read your own contemporaries first. The past can come later. Actually, I don’t read contemporary French fiction any- more. It bores me. Today there’s no one like Gide or Camus – readers could hardly wait for their next book to come out.

MD: Let’s take the past, then. You told me in a previous interview that you’ve read a lot of Flaubert and feel an affinity for his writing.5 And in “The Events in May: A Paris Notebook”, in the middle of the May 1968 upheavals you were recording in your diary, you all of a sudden bring up a Maupassant story about a grandmother who wakes up on her deathbed, sees they’ve already moved her favourite clock and changes her will. Is he among the short story writers who have influenced you?

MG: A bit. A bit. I’ll tell you what I thought, though. I thought he was a very cruel writer.

MD: He is. He is a very cruel writer.

MG: And also the constant surprise at the end was not anything I was interested in. But there was another Paris writer I adored, who died just at the end of the war, the author of Bella – Giraudoux.

MD: Of course. You once wrote a review for The New York Times Book Review, deploring that French students aren’t taught his work on the grounds that they no longer have the mythological background needed to understand him, and that his French is too subtle. I have it here – I underlined one of your trademark comparisons. You wrote you were devoted to Giraudoux’s writing as some people are Gaullists or vegetarians!6

MG: Yes, I read all of Giraudoux. I was at the age. I was nineteen, twenty. Oui, je crois que c’est Bella where the woman has a very delicate heart. It was an attitude to illness I had never come across. Elle avait un coeur très fragile and has a lover if you remember. She’s married, elle est mariée and she has a lover who tells the story. He’s the “I”. And he has a kind of studio thing down in central Paris and she takes the metro early in the morning et elle ne se maquillait pas, c’était pas la peine ... moi j’ai trouvé sa sophistication absolument extraordinare. C’était merveilleux. She takes the early morning metro – I don’t know where the husband is while she’s doing that, but anyway she takes the metro sans maquillage and there they meet and so on. The husband somehow finds out or she tells him, and she’s behind a curtain in this den of love, and the lover from his point of view is going to give her up in a minute because he has other women. It’s a very cynical novel. She steps out – remember she has a heart condition – yes, she steps out from behind the curtain and she says to her husband, j’aime Charles, et elle meurt.

MD: How stunningly romantic.
MG: Oui, poof! Just like that.
MD: Another writer you pay homage to in another review for the NYTBR is Nabokov, who I revere. You bring out his mastery of a loved English language, his crystal clarity and seamlessness, but also his razor-sharp irony and playfulness. Interestingly, when you highlight his qualities, you demonstrate your own. I love how you describe the hero’s Belgo-Russian wife with your trademark list. Here it is – I’ve underlined the clinching simile: “Armande is stupid, conceited, cold- hearted, and she snores like a bulldog”. That snoring bulldog detail is a real trouvaille.

MG: Oh, do you like that? I’m glad.

MD: Still, the French writer that you appear to admire most is Marguerite Yourcenar. Your essay on her work foregrounds her calm, dispassionate approach, a dazzling clarity, a use of language calling up the visual arts – carved, etched, chiseled, engraved: One can’t help but notice that both Nabokov and Yourcenar are diasporic writers who have chosen domicile in a foreign place, just like you, living in one language and writing in another. You suggest that there is a correlation between this and their fine prose (and after all, Nabokov did learn English at his nurse’s knee). You say that expatriate writers “usually treat their native language like a delicate timepiece, making certain it runs exactly and that no dust gets inside”. When you compare Marguerite Yourcenar’s prose with the precise movement of a well-tended watch, I can’t help think- ing of your style. Would you say this is a specificity you share?

MG: I’m not saying it’s a prerequisite to move if you want to write. If you want to be a writer you have to read a lot. I’ve learned a great deal too from American writers like Fitzgerald (I find The Great Gatsby incomparable) and Hemingway. Hemingway’s dialogues are perfect – exactly the way people speak. It shows you how to keep it clean, how to keep out the adverbs and adjectives.

MD: Hmmm, I suppose we could point out that both Fitzgerald and Hemingway had also been drawn to Paris. What about the imprint left by this whole wave of American modernists that came to Paris – and haunted Le Dôme – someone like Gertrude Stein, for instance? Do you see an influence on the following generation?

MG: Well, for those who had read her, yes, inevitably. I always recommend Paris France. It was printed just after the fall of France, just after the war. I think it’s quite wonderful. Till this day, I like it, and wouldn’t dream of giving my copy away. Her anecdotes are funny. People thought she had no right to be funny during the war. There was one during the drôle de guerre, as they call it – it was from September to the following June when the Germans marched in. The mayor of the town where she and Alice lived (up in the Savoie somewhere) an- nounced that the greatest flautist in France (que ça) would perform for the villagers. Stein found herself sitting next to a lady from the village who had a little dog on her lap. She turned to Stein and said, “Pourvu que mon petit chien aime la flute”. “Pourvu ... pourvu!” Just imagine. I found this story ... so real.

MD: When you yourself moved to Paris, you came into contact with quite a lot of artists and writers, didn’t you?

MG: I wasn’t on intimate terms with celebrities – you must not look for that at all. I met people comme ça mais je ne cherchais pas.

MD: What about Samuel Beckett?

MG: Well, I never had a Beckett phase during my youth. I came to his work when I was older. You really have to see things in their own time. Like right after the war. The great one, Waiting for Godot. That really was what Europe was like when I arrived. It fit. They had come out of a terrible war, terrible experiences. There was among intellectuals a kind of hopelessness.

MD: What do you think they were waiting for?

MG: Whatever’s up there. Not that I think Beckett was religious. But I never thought he was doing nothing. I never believed that. Even when you had a very short play and they were only up there for a few minutes, sitting on park benches, their arms sort of like that, I didn’t think it was silly. I thought I just had different things to say and differ- ent ways, you know. Beckett admired James Joyce, by the way, and he wanted to speak as good French as Joyce. That’s what his friend A.J. Leventhal said.

MD: Really? A kind of emulation amongst modernists. What about you and Joyce? You said you went through a Virginia Woolf period at one time. Did you also admire Joyce?

MG: Oh yes, I adored Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I also loved his short stories, Dubliners. And there are still things that are very vivid in my mind from Ulysses. I had a friend in Canada who knew Ulysses almost by heart. We had met when both of us were working on The Standard (one of the three English dailies which came out, morning, noon, and evening – it doesn’t exist anymore). She was nineteen and I was twenty-one. After I moved to Paris we often talked on the phone, and every 16 June we would read a part of Ulysses to each other – she in Toronto and I here in Paris. June 16 is Bloomsday, as you know, Marta. The whole of Ulysses takes place on a Thursday 16 June, 1904. Her name was Barbara Kilvert. She died a few years ago. There are very few friends you can do things like that with. Now, on 16 June, I read some of Ulysses on my own – usually at breakfast.

MD: What about Finnegans Wake?

MG: I never got it. Did you? Anything that needs a guide is for universitaires who have the patience.

MD: I’ve heard academics – even Joyce specialists – say that you can only take it in two pages at a time. But to get back to Beckett, was there a special dimension for you just because you moved in the same circles?

MG: Of course it was all mixed with the fact that he lived in Paris, that he knew people I knew and all that. I knew his cousins. But I never had a conversation with him alone. And you don’t know anyone unless you have a conversation with them alone.

MD: Did you ever feel the inclination to have a private conversation? MG: No.
MD: I gather he was difficult, then.
MG: Well, when I read the memoirs now of people who say, “Aah Beckett, il adorait mes enfants,” be careful, because these people are alive and kicking. Or when they say, “Beckett, comme il riait avec nous” – ça, take it with a grain of salt. Je ne l’ai jamais vu sourire, sans parler de rire. He was best friends with one of my closest friends, A.J. Leventhal, who was a teacher at Trinity in Dublin. He was ten years older than Beckett and they had met on campus.They stayed friends for life.What Leventhal had, to my mind, was a wonderful mind, and a lovely, soft voice that was English with Irish mixed in, beautiful to listen to. I listened to it a great deal in the Coupole. But as I said, I wasn’t going out of my way to meet other writers. I was not looking for that. They were not the people I was ever going to write about, and I was especially trying to find out about attitudes during the war.

MD: What do you mean by attitudes during the war?

MG: Ce qui m’expliquerait pourquoi les choses se sont passées de telle ou telle façon. Comme j’ai fait en Allemagne plus tard.

MD: Yes, you spent some months living in Germany, but also Italy and Spain where the roots of fascism could be found. So you were trying to find out what made people tick, what made ordinary people behave in a way we qualify as collective madness today.

MG: Yes, in one way or another. Even in Canada we’d had an awful lot of propaganda. I had worked in the winter of 1943 at the National Film Board where they made documentary films. I have never really trusted a documentary after that. To this day I’m very careful with documentaries. There was a lot revolving round Canada winning the war single-handed and all, but all countries were doing that. I remember one film in particular, something about holding the fort you know. I was with another young woman, negative cutting at that point. We were just earthworms. You cut the negatives and you spliced them and when you saw blobs on the screen it was called a wet splice, which sounded like pornography to me [laughs]. There was something about the images in the completed film that seemed odd – shots I’d seen before, in a different context. I didn’t understand, so I went and asked for the shot list – where the shots came from. There was one in particular of little blond children looking up at a sort of a sky, but not with a fear of bombs – rather staring into the future, a wonderful future. I felt, what is this nonsense? It turned out these were not Canadians at all, they were not British – they were American children filmed in the 1930s when the big TVA dam was built in Tennessee by the Tennessee Valley Authority. These shots were from a film made for Americans back in 1936 or so, about the future – the wonderful future of Mary Anne and Little Johnny was this great dam, you see. It was all a fake, nothing to do with the war.

MD: How amazing.

MG: There was nothing I could do – I wasn’t in a position to do anything. I never trusted a documentary again.

MD: So you went to Germany – which provided material for the stories collected in The Pegnitz Junction, and Italy as well – and you address the climate which saw the rise of Mussolini in “The Four Seasons” and “The Moslem Wife”.

MG: Oh, and I lived in Spain for nearly two years.

MD: Of course, Spain, the setting for your story “Señor Pinedo” and its portrait of a tranquil fascist functionary. You said in a recent TV documentary shot by a Québécois company (Contact TV)11 that there was a thirteen-year gestation period for some of your German stories, needed for them to be enlightening. Did you feel that there was a cer- tain shared attitude or outlook in these European countries or ...

MG: Oh no, no.
MD: No? Were they very different?
MG: No, except that they had a backing in arts that we didn’t have at all, that was for us very new. They had what I was looking for – a long, long history. But it was really unfair of me, because Canada was a colony, and then they strung these colonies together with string and said you were a country but – si vous voulez! An old house to me meant 1920. If somebody referred to an old house, je pensais dix-huit cent vingt, quelque chose comme ça.

MD: But did you detect a difference between France and its neigh- bouring countries?

MG: Well, obviously, because one of the neighbouring countries was Italy which had been the enemy country till 1943.Spain, si, it wasFranco. And Germany, the other side.

MD: But was it just because they were on different sides of the war? MG: But that’s a whole mentality.
MD: Yes, a whole mentality. I remember your saying in the interview for Contact TV that you came to a conclusion – to me, disquieting. You said, “Je crois que les gens font ce qu’ils peuvent faire impunément,” in other words you feel that people do whatever they can get away with. Your experience is that bakers, postmen and notables alike will all set their neighbour’s garage on fire if they don’t like him and if the police will condone it. And yet you have a tenderness for people that is manifest. We never feel that there’s a cruel or cynical streak in you, as there is in Maupassant, as you said. A huge difference, as a person, and as a writer. How does one go from reading Colette and Maupassant to writing totally differently?

MG: I wouldn’t have wanted to write like them, first of all because I don’t write in French. And the French have a different background, different guides and models.

MD: Yet when you write about the French, about Parisians, Mavis, it sounds so authentic; it rings so true. How do you do it?

MG: You just go into another room, so to speak. Still, I’m always afraid that when I’m writing about French characters I might make a mistake. You can’t just call them Suzanne and make them say what an English girl would say. You know my agent Michèle Lapôtre, don’t you? And her husband René? René is very fussy about other people writing about France, but he told me he had never found a mistake. He said, Vous ne vous êtes jamais trompée.

MD: That’s a big compliment.

MG: Oh, it’s a big compliment. Vous ne vous êtes jamais trompée. Sometimes there have been tiny details that have made me call someone French on the phone and I say, Now here’s a character who’s graduated from a very good school and he doesn’t want to be seen showing off but his parents would like him to look successful. What kind of a car would he drive? You know something like that, and then they tell me maybe this, maybe that. Because I want to get it right.

MD: How interesting that we’ve been talking about Beckett, whose approach was so different. Writing Watt in French and English versions, or rather translating idioms literally so that they would appear strange. Like “the bouncing baby boy” becoming “le bébé rebondissant”. While your narrative voices always ring true. This brings me to the question of readership. Beckett was put on a pedestal in both France and the UK, but as people such as Linda Leith and Doug Gibson pointed out in another 2006 TV documentary, Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant, you were neglected for decades in Canada, where your going to live abroad was seen as a form of disloyalty.

MG: Yes, as I told you in my last letter, I had thirty years of career in New York and London during which Canada was either indifferent or hostile. Since then, Canada has truly made up for it, but I have an elephant’s memory. Memory doesn’t stop me from standing up for Canada when decency requires it, but that is just like sticking up for my ex-husband even after we divorced.

MD: To give our readers a better idea, would you mind relating that incredible incident in the prairies you wrote to me about? The incident at a short-story conference in the mid 1970s? We needn’t name names.

MG: Yes, this was a gathering where the other writers made a point of showing disdain to the person from Paris. Trying to strike up some sort of conversation with a writer from – well, I won’t say – I mentioned the problem of reading to an audience when literature is meant to be one- to-one, between writer and reader. He drew himself up and said, “You haven’t heard what I do with a reading” and stalked off. Except for one writer who had travelled and lived in the US for a time, everyone was so aggressive toward me that on the last night I was on the brink of tears at dinner at the Faculty Club. It was after one of the writers said in a nasty way, “People have been complaining about you”.

MD: It’s totally understandable that you should have wished to keep your distance from that scene. But since then, Canada has been scrambling to catch up, just as French publishing houses have been scrambling since the late 1980s to translate your work. New collections are jostling one another. There have been the Random House and Bloomsbury/ McClelland & Stewart editions of your Collected Stories and Selected Stories, respectively, and in the last five years alone, new editions and combinations of stories edited by writers like Michael Ondaatje and Russell Banks who admire you intensely and have wished to pay tribute to your work in their prefaces. And another two forthcoming.

MG: Yes, there’s Going Ashore, a collection that is mostly early work (many of the stories have been published in reviews or magazines – mostly in The New Yorker – but not collected in books), to be published in April 2009 by McClelland & Stewart. The collection includes several satirical pieces and light pieces of humour. In the autumn of 2009, The New York Review of Books is publishing many of the same stories in a more concise book, entitled The Cost of Living. The Canadian collection is introduced by Alberto Manguel and the American edition by Jhumpa Lahiri.

MD: Mavis, this has been a wonderful talk. It’s made me think of some- thing you said when you reviewed a critical biography on Elizabeth Bowen. I’ve underlined this characteristically homely extended metaphor: “A writer’s life stands in relation to his work as a house does to a garden, related but distinct. It is the business of critical biography to make the two overlap – to bring some of the furniture out to the garden, as it were, and spread flowers all over the house”. Thank you for mingling house and garden for us. You’re extraordinary.

MG: No, it was a pleasure. C’était un plaisir.