OH, MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary, 12

The Abnormality of Everywhere

April 25

First, thanks for reading, for commenting, for correcting. Much appreciated. A special thanks to the reader who pointed out that Malcolm Gladwell (who?) has a blog that disports itself in the world under the same title as this one, at least, up to the point of the colon. (Sounds gastrointestinal, apologies to the delicate among you.) There are no new ideas under the sun. I haven’t looked into the matter but I feel fairly sure that Mac got there first. Perhaps I’ll undertake some rejigging.

Geoff Hancock spent a couple of days with Mavis Gallant — the original MG — in Paris, in 1977. His long interview with her is collected in his book Canadian Writers At Work. (OUP, 1987) As I read their exchange last night - a lively, and sometimes testy back and forth — I began jotting down some of her replies to his questions, with nothing much in mind. When I studied them, laid out on the page, they looked to me like a found poem, and this is what I lay before you this morning. These are 100 instances of MG’s words, as recorded and reported by Geoff Hancock, but abstracted from the context of the conversation, and rearranged mostly in the cause of willy-nillyness. They’re drawn from the beginning, the middle, the end, rearranged at whim, and none is repeated for effect; there are multiple instances of MG asking, perhaps even coyly, “Do you really want to hear this?” or “Are you really interested?” And there are many quick dismissals of particular lines of inquiry: “I don’t know,” “I can’t say,” and so on. This is just for fun, a collage, a little bit dadaist in tone, almost like something John Ashbery could have written, with a hangover, on a very off day. (MG and JA shared an agent and somewhere, I can’t think of the source, there’s a story about a meeting between the two of them that didn’t go as well as it might have done; alcohol was somehow implicated, but no daggers were deployed, no blood drawn.) Anyway, for what it’s worth, which is precisely nothing, save as a curiosity, here is The Abnormality of Everywhere.

1. Can I tell you an anecdote?

2. Once in Yugoslavia I sat for a painter.

3. People sometimes thought I was Spanish.

4. As it happens, I’ve been taken for Irish in Ireland.

5. Most people are unless they’re neurotic.

6. (laughs)

7. Tolstoy gets everyone’s age wrong.

8. What does it matter?

9. I must tell you something here.

10. This is the first time I’ve ever spoken of it.

11. A free flight was a big thing in those days.

12. People didn’t know what they had.

13. A series of airtight compartments.

14. It was a long, long flight.

15. Do you really want to hear this?

16. I don’t know if I can talk about it.

17. Many people seem to have children as insurance against being unloved.

18. I got on well with other children but mistrusted adults.

19. The girl is obviously close to me.

20. We followed the kid for days.

21. May I roast in hell for having forgotten his name.

22. He gave me five dollars and told me not to mention it.

23. There really was a pattern.

24. Yes.

25. All the time, yes.

26. It’s a habit now.

27. Does it really interest you?

28. I wasn’t a storm trooper, you know.

29. Do you really want to hear this?

30. Oh, poor you!

31. (laughs)

32. It’s a long and boring story.

33. Once, in Switzerland, when I woke up after a long operation, I had the temporary amnesia you sometimes have from anaesthetic.

34. But that’s a private matter.

35. Memory and imagination do the work.

36. In Canada, this attitude hasn’t changed for fifty years.

37. More went on in Canada than Canadians ever knew.

38. I can’t comment on that.

39. Nostalgia is not something I’m inclined to feel consciously.

40. I’m very firm about that.

41. No.

42. Good God, no.

43. It’s in my head.

44. I can’t imagine anyone bothering with that.

45. I don’t know.

46. Perhaps.

47. I don’t know.

48. Perhaps. I don’t know.

49. Perhaps.

50. Is that so!

51. That’s interesting.

52. I’ve not thought of that, but it’s interesting.

53. Do you really want to know this?

54. An intelligent man like you!

55. I would have written Death in Venice but an elderly German gent got there first.

56. (laughs)

57. You mean you took that seriously?

58. You really took that seriously?

59. People sometimes take seriously things I mean as a joke.

60. Don’t you?

61. The lucky people are the thoughtless ones.

62. The poor, the honest, the conscientious bore the brunt.

63. People simply don’t leave each other alone enough.

64. All I need is nobody bothering me.

65. I read I don’t know how many newspapers a day.

66. Those words haven’t the meaning they had then.

67. There’s no mystery and no pattern that I’m aware of.

68. I think it is just simply a way of looking at things.

69. There is something abnormal about everywhere.

70. Canada seems to encourage people to get hold of the wrong end of the stick and then bash one over the head with it.

71. You’re thinking of a different Canada.

72. I wonder if you are aware  of the number of Canadians abroad who pretend not to be Canadians?

73. Look at us. Awful. Dreadful.

74. Is that what I really mean?

75. I don’t mean anything quite so simple.

76. Oh, God.

77. Oh, come on!

78. It would be too easy to say yes.

79. Yes.

80. Oh, yes, but just for fun.

81. Oh, yes.

82. What do you want me to tell you?

83. Hotel rooms are divine.

84. I write almost without commas.

85. Only two things were given me.

86. Even when people like you,  they just slightly hope you might fail.

87. Most of my work is cutting.

88. Canadians are very literal readers.

89. That is a good example of the meaningless remark.

90. When it’s done it’s done, you can’t change it.

91. Do you have a good racetrack in Vancouver?

92. I’m not much of a shopper.

93. I don’t think I can talk about it.

94. I think that’s a lot of baloney.

95. Canadians rarely write.

96. The French are not inquisitive.

97. The failure of a woman reassures men just as men.

98. I work long hours but the hours are mine.

99. While he painted me I looked out the window and thought that if I were a painter, I would not be painting me, but the harbour.

100. So that’s the end of that.