Abstract
“Both in life and on the page, she blazed a trail no one since has dared follow.”
When I first met Mavis Gallant in the early 1990s at a reading she gave at the prestigious Village Voice bookshop in Paris, I could not suspect I would be reading to her two decades later when poor health and failing eyesight confined her to her small Left Bank apartment. Or that on 18 February 2014 I would be accompanying her along with her other close friends to her final resting place almost next door, the Montparnasse Cemetery, to be surrounded by the artists she had crossed an ocean for. Best known for her stories of cultural dislocation, of borderlines and bridges, and for her ability to capture the behaviour of “the out-of-place citizen” (Ondaatje, 2002: ix) and “dissect the misunderstandings of the people from different continents who collide on our streets” (Henighan, 2014), Gallant awed listeners/readers with an acuity of thought and lapidary concision encountered in great ironists and essayists. Who can forget aphorisms such as “there are two races, those who tread on people’s lives, and the others” (Gallant, 1981/1992: 244). But Gallant was delighted when I told her my favourite story was a quirky fantasy I had discovered in a magazine I’d just been asked to review. It was one of the rare stories by Gallant The New Yorker had declined to publish out of a policy of plausibility (which she greatly contributed to fracturing), and which has been overlooked in story collections. Later, when Gallant realized we had the same birthday, 11 August, she dubbed us the Leo twins, and our professional relations morphed into one of the strong friendships to which the otherwise very private writer granted (and triggered) a fierce loyalty. I was not yet a professor at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, but a senior lecturer at the University of Rennes, where in March 1994 Gallant once more found herself in the middle of student riots (this time following the French government’s passing of a subminimum wage for young people under the age of 26). I had invited Mavis to come and read from her work. She arrived the evening before when the students had just voted to strike and barricaded the lecture halls. Three hundred of them wanted to hear her, though, and liberated a hall where the small, elderly, but gumptious Gallant ignored her osteoporosis and stood for an hour without a microphone (the technicians refused to run the risk of damaging any sound equipment). She read and discussed “The Colonel’s Child”, the story of a (deliciously naïve) young Frenchman who went to London to join General de Gaulle and the Free French, convinced “the weight of [his] presence could tip the scales of war, like one vote in a close election” (Gallant, 1985: 166). The political, cultural, and literary issues raised that morning were pursued during the afternoon we spent together, and came out as the first of our interviews — capped in the last stage of her career by the interview which would be published in this journal (Dvorak, 1995; 2009). As part of its aid programme to publishers, the Ministry of Culture had asked me to assess the just-completed translation of Gallant’s recently published and highly acclaimed story collection Across the Bridge (1993). So we discussed the challenges and failures of translation (where irony often dies), as well as of genres, namely the writer’s predilection for the razor-sharp form of the short story genre — making it possible to graze just four crucial moments in a life — over that of the rambling, verbose novel.
Now Gallant, along with Alice Munro, did play with generic categories. She revived the story cycle and the composite novel, and produced brilliantly compressed satirical pieces (which Alberto Manguel includes in the recent collection Going Ashore), alongside roomy novellas. But her predilection for the short form was to come up again on 19 February 2009 at the Village Voice during the joint reading and discussion with Jhumpa Lahiri — whose global nomads tread in the paths of Gallant’s “permanent wanderers” (Ondaatje, 2002: viii). Lahiri, who had selected the stories for Gallant’s new collection gone to press, The Cost of Living (2009b) — twenty pieces spanning the first twenty years of her writing — had flown to Paris to interview the writer for Granta (Lahiri, 2009b: n.p.). At the reading, she paid tribute to the way her mentor had inspired her own craft with her brilliant way of telling a story from four or five points of view, which Lahiri in her introduction to the story collection called “the narrative equivalent of what acrobats do as they leap from one swinging bar to another” (Lahiri, 2009a: x). Mavis pointed out that there are only a few turning points in life, and that “the rest is just rice pudding”. Her dismissal of the novel’s superfluous stuffing and her exclusive focus on numinous moments explain why three years later, when diabetes-induced macular degeneration had cut her off from her beloved books, she was so happy to listen to me reading to her from the recently published fuller edition of Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast, in which the older writer in his last years revisits his younger self and the sketches he had written in Paris in the 1920s and then misplaced. Her eyes lit up when Hemingway mentioned a trick of the trade he had learned from looking at Cézanne’s paintings (undoubtedly referring to the artist’s simplification of natural shapes to their geometric essentials). We can surmise that the literary equivalent was elision: the writer relates a story in which he had omitted the real end (the old man hanging himself) on the grounds of a “new theory”. Mavis beamed and nodded approval when Hemingway asserted that “you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood” (Hemingway, 2011: 71).
Gallant had begun writing as a schoolgirl in the 1930s and publishing in the 1940s, well before the other Canadian giants of the short story, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. Many of the stories published in the 1950s had been written a decade earlier, while she was earning her living as a journalist and feature writer, publishing interviews with admired cultural figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Paul Hindemith. Her peripheral modernism co-habited with the late works of dominant modernist writers such as Hemingway, but not in a filial, derivative manner. Rather, she was like Athena springing fully formed and armed from the head of Zeus (Mukherjee, 2009: 11).When in his review of The Cost of Living Neel Mukherjee compared Gallant’s stories from the 1950s to “little gems, perfectly cut and glittering, whichever way you turn them”, he also detected something crucial and radical happening to her writing of the 1960s: Gallant’s style, always lapidary and luminous, becomes elliptical […] and she begins to leave out more and more information, concentrating on interiority and the movements of thoughts […] The sentences pack in more while remaining pellucid but, at the same time, tight with a dozen emotional possibilities. (2009: 11).
The words “pack” and “tight” are keys to paradoxical trademark features in Gallant’s writing. The artists’ widows in “Speck’s Idea” are accused of being “vain, greedy, unrealistic, and tougher than bulldogs” (Gallant, 2002: 141). In the much anthologized “Bernadette” the title protagonist, an illiterate French Canadian Catholic maid terrified by an unwanted pregnancy is employed by a well-meaning, well-off Left-Wing Anglo suburban housewife who battles for “birth control, clean milk, vaccination, homes for mothers, homes for old people, homes for cats and dogs” (Gallant, 1964: 15). The lists built like crescendos illustrate the (witty) wealth of exquisite detail — eloquent even in what it leaves unsaid — which writers like Ondaatje and Lahiri have praised, the former calling attention to how the writer circles a person, captures a voice and reveals a whole manner of life “in the way a character avoids an issue or discusses a dress” (Lahiri and Ondaatje, 2014: n.p.). Yet Lahiri also marvels at Gallant’s “uncanny ability to distill” (Lahiri, 2009a: x), and in his introduction to Going Ashore, also published in 2009, Alberto Manguel has called her stories “masterpieces of rhetorical stinginess” in which nothing goes to waste in the telling (Manguel, 2009: xii). Just hold up to the light a sentence from “Forain” describing the recently deceased writer character Adam Tremski, who “had shambled around Paris looking as though he slept under restaurant tables, on a bed of cigarette ashes and crumbs” (Gallant, 2002: 258). In the accumulation of detail there is the compression and essence of a life. Or take a sentence from “The Remission”, set among the English expatriates in the south of France, in which the deceased husband’s sister at the funeral is perceived though the eyes of the young widow: “Barbara was aware of Diana, the mouse, praying like a sewing machine somewhere behind her” (Gallant, 1979/2001: 141; 2002: 231). In both cases one is struck by the trademark density which is both full and minimalist, by the analogies which are realist yet startling, grave yet funny.
Gallant excels in engineering double vision (see Dvorak, 2002). A master of irony, which both asserts and undermines, she casually skewers prejudice, patriarchy, and power (from the micro social unit of the family to the macro geopolitical unit of the Empire). Finding jobs in India is “even easier now than when we owned all those places, because now the poor pets can’t run anything, and they’ll pay fortunes”, Sheilah tells her drifting husband Peter in “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” (Gallant, 1964: 265). Two worlds clash in one of Gallant’s earliest stories, “The Picnic”, in which the cornflakes and hot dog-eating American Army troops and their families still posted in provincial France are told to organize a social event symbolizing the “unity between the two nations.” The American magazine covering the event hoping to catch something “colourful or indigenous” such as “folk dances” on the part of the “natives” displays the arrogance of a new world power misreading an also arrogant old colonial power. When the young army officer’s wife boarding with the highest-ranking member of the old families, Madame Pégurin, “asked her if she had a vacuum cleaner, she had been told, ‘No, I have a servant’” (Gallant, 1964: 107; 115). In “1933”, one of the stories set in the Montreal of the 1930s and 1940s split along the fault lines of language and religion inherited from the French (Catholic) and English (Protestant) colonizers, only the landlord’s dog is bilingual. In her advice to her daughter, the French Canadian Roman Catholic widow Mme Carette unwittingly discloses the uneasy alliances and intricate negotiations of identity construction: “An Irish marriage, while not to be sought, was not to be scorned. The Irish were not English. God had sent them to Canada to keep people from marrying Protestants” (Gallant, 1993: 6). In the shifting contours of “them” and “us” however, patriarchy holds its own. The French Canadian landlord makes it a point never to tell his wife where he is going: “he did not think it a good thing to let women know much” (1993: 6), and — in the linked story “The Chosen Husband” — the helpless Mme Carette misses her deceased husband because she needed someone “to help her up the step of a streetcar, read La Presse and tell her what was in it” (1993: 14; 2003: 182). In the war of sexual politics also being waged in the 1940s in the office of the English Canadian newspaper where she works, it is Gallant’s heavily autobiographical, feisty narrator, Linnet Muir, called Bolshie by the manager, who turns defeat into a draw with her dodge and parry tactics: “As soon as I realized that I was paid about half the salary men were earning, I decided to do half the work” (Gallant, 1981/1992: 322). But a model little girl is “clean and silent as a watch” in “Thieves and Rascals” (Gallant, 2009b: 119). Gallant confided to me that her story of a nice girl led astray (set in the 1940s, written in the 1950s) was one of the few rejected by The New Yorker’s still misogynistic editorial board, who considered immoral a story contesting patriarchal values and double standards. Elsewhere, the remorseless eye of the ironist offhandedly zeroes in on human behaviour which readers can choose to see as either local or universal. Parisian art dealer Speck runs into a tree, and “Other drivers, noticing a man alone with a wrecked car, picked up speed” (Gallant, 2002: 162). Such a comical cleavage between the opening topic and the predicate is a trademark feature of Gallant’s satirical pen. Also generating humour are the double devices equivalent to the visual caricatures Mavis loved and talked about (by artists from James Gillray to Saul Steinberg): reducing to a single trait, which is then magnified. In “Speck’s Idea” a mother-in-law crouching by a radiator looks like “a sheep with an earache” (Gallant, 2002: 148). In Gallant’s first story collection, The Other Paris, a middle-aged Marie-Blanche with cheeks “like a Baroque baby’s” who has been running through a series of suitors, artfully arranges her hair in Shirley Temple corkscrew curls which “would swell to the size of Polish sausages” (Gallant, 1956: 123).
Gallant is also a master of the metaphor, where according to Aristotle genius lies. Her talent for double vision, namely yoking two ordinary but dissimilar things together in a startling way, moves our minds towards unperceived filiations — such as praying and operating a sewing machine. The references to Polish sausages and sewing machines are coupled with a focus on contemporary experience and with language grounded in an authentic spoken idiom. We readers are lulled into an impression of a comfortable realism. Why then do writers and reviewers such as Neel Mukherjee find the stories “unsettling like dreams, fluid and strange” (Mukherjee, 2009)? Perhaps because of sudden swerves in logic or causal connections. The mousy young woman from Saskatchewan in “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” explains that she feels uncomfortable in Geneva with the worldly Burleighs: “Their friends are too rich and I’m too Canadian” (Gallant, 1964: 261). On top of such sidestepping, the ground drops out from under our feet each time the author disrupts the sets of references regulating discourse, namely person, time, and place. We never know for long where is here, when is now, and who is I. We wonder where the voice is coming from, and whose skin we are in.
Perhaps this is because Gallant herself had often changed skins. She was born in 1922 to an English father and an American mother of Central European descent in an Anglophone enclave of Montreal, a divided city surrounded by the concentric circles of a French-speaking province (Québec) and an English-speaking continent — which she would portray as a laboratory of global upheavals and societal mutations (Dvorak, 2008). Her English-speaking Protestant parents sent her at age four to a Jansenist convent boarding school run by exclusively French-speaking Catholic nuns. Her two environments were poles apart with respect to language, culture, religion, and axiology. It was this very collision of worldviews which in Mavis’s understanding triggered her writing by helping fashion her interest in language and its relations with perception, imagination, and memory. As Lahiri proclaimed in her tribute posted on the website of The New Yorker — a literary citadel that in 1950 had with one exception never opened its doors to a Canadian — and which saw Mavis, to borrow her words, as a sort of Eskimo with talent: The defiant choice she made, to live as an expatriate, without family, and solely by means of her writing, was and remains a revolutionary act. Both in life and on the page, she blazed a trail no one since has dared follow […] She marked her territory and mined it, as no one did. (Lahiri, 2014: n.p.)
With her father dead and her mother remarried, the young Mavis had been shunted off to 17 different schools in Canada and the US. At the age of 18 she returned to her native Montreal with nothing but her birth certificate and $5 in her pocket. Ten years later in 1950 she jettisoned an established career, uprooted herself again, and relocated to France to write, at the risk of starving. Before settling permanently in Paris, she spent a decade wandering, writing, mapping for us the political and existential resonances of a civilization in transit. She saw the run-down houses and chilly hotels whose climate she captured, from Franco-era Spain and the French and Italian Riviera to post-war, pre-Berlin Wall Germany. “The Moslem Wife” and “The Four Seasons” expose communities sensitive to their own interests and bent on perceiving Mussolini as a peacemaker, while the semi-autobiographical “Senor Pinedo” portrays a tranquil fascist functionary. Gallant almost did starve working on this material, when her New York literary agent “forgot” to let her know that The New Yorker had accepted two of her stories and pocketed the fees himself. Announced on the cover of The New Yorker as “The Hunger Diaries: Mavis Gallant on starving and writing in Spain”, the diary extract published in July 2012 was a sample of a forthcoming publication. Knopf and McClelland & Stewart are to publish in 2015 the first volume of The Journals of Mavis Gallant, the writer’s private journals spanning half a century. The volume edited by S. Barclay and F. Kiernan covering the 1950s and 1960s focuses on Gallant’s lived experience up to the uprisings of May 1968, triggered by the student riots that shattered the French establishment and which she covered for The New Yorker. The pieces which were subsequently collected along with other essays and reviews in Paris Notebooks in 1986 testified to Gallant’s keen eye, razor wit, and extensive knowledge of European and North American history, institutions, art, and customs, which she could buttress via an intricate network of relations she was careful not to mix at parties. The book also testified to the combat Gallant waged on prejudice and sloppy thinking, and incited the Québec Writers’ Federation to name its annual non-fiction prize after her.
The honours showered on Gallant (see Dvorak, 2010) often disclose her uniqueness. She was little known in Canada until 1979, when a Canadian publisher, Macmillan, finally secured the rights to publish her work (From the Fifteenth District) alongside her American and British publishers. The author nonetheless won the prestigious Governor-General’s Award for Fiction for her subsequent story collection (1981). Along with Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades, Home Truths was, to boot, the first time ever the literary prize had been awarded to a book of short fiction — generally considered to be the novel’s poor cousin. Gallant was also the first recipient of the Matt Cohen Award (attributed for a life’s work), when it was established in 2000. In all of its currently 45-year-old existence, she was the first — and only — non-francophone writer to receive the Prix Athanase-David from the Government of Québec for her body of work. In 2002, she was among the very first to receive the Blue Metropolis Literary Grand Prize (awarded since to that other wanderer, Amitav Ghosh [2011]). The Rea Award for the Short Story was attributed consecutively to Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant, who Carol Shields referred to as “the divine Mavis, the divine Alice”. When the PEN/Nabokov Literary Award was attributed to Mavis in 2004, but she could not attend the award presentation ceremony at Lincoln Centre, New York, a special tribute was organized for her in Paris at the Maison des Ecrivains. When Alberto Manguel, who was to introduce her, fell ill and cancelled, Mavis requested that I stand in for him. I chose to introduce her through the qualities called up by the letters of her last name, and I began with G for grit, gumption, and genius.
Gallant has been called “a lodestar for writers from Michael Ondaatje to Russell Banks” (Cole, 2009: 19). Ondaatje, who has been a faithful admirer and friend, notably hunting down for computerless Mavis the last electric typewriter on earth, has insisted that “Gallant seems beholden to no one” and that her craft places her “always ahead of us” (Ondaatje, 2002: xi; xii). Banks, too, acknowledges that her stories “follow no formula and obey no laws” (Banks, 2003: viii). Like authors Stephen Henighan and Randy Boyagoda, also caught between cultures and interested in the complexities of a multicultural, global world, Banks wonders why Gallant has been closed off from a wider readership by her reputation as “a writer’s writer”. He offers up her living abroad and her aversion to public relations. But Henighan and Boyagoda pursue the question through a pertinent comparison with fellow Canadian Alice Munro, who has garnered the ultimate critical recognition of the 2013 Nobel Prize, and who also enjoys the loyalty of a general audience, particularly in Canada and the US. Beyond the politics of marketing and distribution, they point towards the geographic and the psychological. Munro’s “are comforting fictions” (Boyagoda, 2007: n.p.) working a traditional vein of small-town settings, while Gallant, with a disconcerting detachment, “opened a new seam: the short story of urban individuals who interact under the pressure of foreign histories” (Henighan, 2014). In addition, many general readers undeniably find difficult stories which are not about events, but which set out to illuminate “the time that falls between the events” (Urquhart, 2006: vii), and which are as hard to sum up as “any truly lived experience” (Banks, 2003: viii). Lahiri is right that Gallant “demands intelligence from her readers” but that she “rewards them with nothing short of genius” (Lahiri, 2009a: xxi).
This summer (2014) Penguin Canada is reissuing In Transit, Gallant’s collection published in the 1980s but containing earlier work, as part of its aesthetically revamped Penguin Modern Classics series. Also forthcoming, alongside Gallant’s private diaries mentioned above, is her posthumously edited, non-fiction work on the notorious Dreyfus case — highly original for its behind-the-scenes biographical angle and Gallant’s ability to change skins. Mavis had confessed that she and Dreyfus were opposites in every sense, but that she had discovered a fundamental trait in common: an early sense of vocation pursued with single-mindedness. Readers wishing to know more about the author of over 120 stories with the longest history for publishing in The New Yorker can go to all 900 pages of her Selected Stories (1996a, Canada; 1997, UK) or Collected Stories (1996b, US), and can access a variety of radio and television documentaries. These range from CBC-TV’s 1965 profile on Telescope, which addresses the strong connection with painting we often talked about (Dvorak, 2009), and which my book in progress engages with, along with Mavis’s affinities with other art forms such as music and dance. Other English-language profiles can be found in Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant (2006) and The Four Seasons of Mavis Gallant (2012) run on CBC Radio’s Ideas series. All concur that Gallant’s writing proffers a privileged access to a period’s vision of the world and belief-systems, and has often spearheaded the politics of mind-moving. In the cross-pollinations or complex cultural interconnections of a modernity in mutation, Mavis Gallant has moved the short story form into the vanguard and given it a status second to none. She can indeed rest in the midst of the writers, artists, musicians, and philosophers she admired, from Charles Baudelaire, Guy de Maupassant, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett to the Cavaillé-Col family of organ-builders, the composer Henri Dutilleux, and her friends, the photographer Man Ray and his wife Juliet.