Oh, MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary

April 6, 2022

A couple of years ago, when Pandemic was fresh and coy, I was part of a three-person jury that convened — not even by Zoom, but by conference call — to assess the merits of some writing — fiction, poetry, essays — entered in a contest sponsored by PEN Canada. (There was a corporate co-sponsor, too, either RBC or Arby’s. I should look it up. On the other hand, ambiguity has its own allure. Let’s let it lie. ) The call for submissions was directed to “New Voices.” Typically — even though there’s no writerly reason why a New Voice can’t erupt from an old, even apparently dormant, body — such a designation suggests a competition intended for the young. This was a blind judging, no names or other identifying details were appended, but my sense was that the hopeful aspirants — hopeful as I suppose, otherwise, why enter such a horserace? — were unlined, unspotted, fresh of countenance.

My colleagues in this verdict-reaching exercise were Lynn Coady and Ian Williams, two versatile, prize-winning, credential-laden smiths of words. When I’m invited to the table with such accomplished company, I know my inclusion has nothing to do with acumen, taste, or intuition. I’m not even that decorative asset who can be counted on for a merry laugh and a devil-may-care toss of my wheat-coloured mane when one is most needed. No, my value is as an administrative add-on, owing to my Mussoliniesque penchant — obsession, really — for keeping things running on time, also my respect for rigidity and the rule of law in such proceedings, which can so easily go right off the rails. My ideas are common, shopworn, but I’m a dedicated wrangler, possessed of a strong forearm and a schoolmarm handbell I don’t hesitate to jangle when it’s required.

We received the writing. We read the writing. We spoke about the writing. Lynn and Ian offered their insights — here I feel I should use the adjective “lapidary,” but I’ll hold back— and I offered my reminders about the time, the framework, the regulations. In short order we settled, unanimously, on a laureate. Then came the big reveal, the lifting of the veil: the name of the chosen one.

Em Dial (https://www.em-dial.com) was the winner we settled on — on whom we settled, pardonnez-moi — and she won for a really stunning sequence of poems, “Lineage Without the Bullets.”  They were electric with ideas about race, gender, and identity; ideas that moved even me, a tired, old white man who is forever muttering at the radio dire imprecations along the lines of, “Jesus Christ, shut up already about race, gender, and identity, can’t we just get back to down-home chats about the best way to make mustard pickles?”

Em Dial’s poems were historically explorative, politically inquisitive, formally innovative, they had tremendous verve and trajectory, they were clearly the work of someone with a wide-ranging mind and capacious intelligence. They were, in the best way, studied, learned. Challenging. I mean it when I say that I felt, in reading them, that I was in the presence of something that it would be insufficient to describe as mere talent; here was something like greatness. Frankly, she scared me. I think it is possible that she’s disinclined to follow rules, which I prize.

I didn’t intend to start this probably — scratch probably, substitute certainly — self-indulgent exercise by writing about Em Dial. I meant to begin by making a trivial, self-referential point about Mavis Gallant, but in order to do so I needed a word, and I couldn’t summon said word — this has become commonplace, my synapses fail to fire as they did and as they ought — could only remember that it was a word I learned from one of the poems  in “Lineage Without the Bullets.” It’s called, “Yuri Kochiyama, Malcolm X, and I Share our Birthday Cake and Don’t Talk about the Bullet, May 19, 2034.”  It proceeds from the observation that she, Em Dial, shares a 05.19 birthday with the two American activists / comrades, Yuri Kochiyama and Malcolm X. “Connascent” is the word she deployed, for which, in beginning this, I searched my brain in vain.

I looked it up in my 2-volume OED, the boxed set that comes with the useful, also necessary, magnifier tucked into a discreet drawer built into the top of the container. (Hint to thieves: this easy-to-locate storage facility is probably a good place to look for concealed credit cards, or neatly folded hundred dollar bills, stored as a contingency against whatever emergent emergency will require us to have cash. Which is king.)

According to this source — people in my generation would call it definitive, but hey, we’re falling from our plinths like statues, with great, shattering thuds, not even because we’re getting tugged down but because our knees are giving way — Em Dial’s usage isn’t precisely accurate. Connascent doesn’t designate “born on the same day,” exactly, but “born together, produced at the same time,” which doesn’t apply to this triumvirate. Yuri Kochiyama’s date of production was May 19, 1921. Malcom X came into the world on May 19, 1925. As for Em Dial, I don’t know, but I’d hazard 1995 or 1996 as a guess. So young. So smart.

There should be a word in English — there probably is, but I don’t know it — that describes the irrational delight and sense of connection we feel when we meet, or learn of, people whose birthdays are our own. It establishes a kind of kinship, three or four times removed, and wholly irrational, but real, nevertheless. It’s the source of a minor frisson, not as if someone walked on your grave but, rather, passed nearby on crosstown bus.

“We’re Leo twins,” is what MG said to the excellent writer, and Gallant scholar, Marta Dvorak when she found out they were both born on August 11. As was I, in 1955, on which day MG turned 33. Born Montreal, August 11, 1922. Died Paris, February 18, 2014, age 91. (Her time on earth, it just now occurs to me, was coincident with that of Yuri Kochiyama, whose advent was15 months before MG’s, and who lasted just a few months longer. It’s unlikely that they ever met, but I suspect they would have had a memorable exchange; MG was no stranger to certain strains of “radicalism.”)

MG’s was a great voice, a noble voice, a provocative and important voice. I don’t know when I began reading her, actively, but I can say that she has been, for me, for perhaps 40 years now, a kind of pillar of fire, one of the writers I’ve followed, one of the writers to whom I turn when I want to be reminded of just how beautiful a thing a sentence can be. Her body of work is magnificent. And this is her Centennial year. As near as I’m aware, there are no plans to put her face on a stamp. There hasn’t been a run on the bunting market to accommodate all the parades and grandstands and so forth. This is wrong. I am an old man with a computer. I’m going to do what I can to mark the occasion. I am going to keep a Mavis Gallant diary. It’s the least thing one Leo twin can do for another. So it begins. What will it be? Who will I meet? Where is the flight plan? Oh, dear. I’ve neglected to file one. Too late. Now we are airborne, overhead in a balloon. Let’s just see where the prevailing winds take us. Allons-y. Off we go.