For thirty years, I have been teaching literature to college undergraduates and graduate students. And every semester—except on those rare occasions when the subject of the class has been too narrowly focused to include Mavis Gallant’s fiction—I have taught at least one, sometimes two, of her stories.
This is partly for selfish reasons. There are few writers whose work gives me so much pleasure to read to a group—in this case, a group of students. What a joy it is to hear, translated into my own voice and rhythms, the crispness and grace of Gallant’s sentences; the sparkle of her wit; the accuracy of her descriptions. How satisfying to pretend, if only for a few moments, that the sensible, capacious, no-nonsense humanity of her vision of the world is my own.
In addition, I feel a kind of messianic zeal, which I share with many writers and readers, to make sure that Gallant’s work continues to be read, admired—and loved. One can speculate about the possible reasons why she is not more universally known. Though her work appeared regularly and for decades (from the 1950s until the mid-1990s) in The New Yorker, where it attracted a loyal and enthusiastic readership, Gallant, who died in 2014, never became quite as popular, as widely recognized, or as frequently celebrated as any number of writers (John Updike would be one example) who published as regularly in the same publication over roughly the same period of time.
Perhaps the simplest explanation is that she was a Canadian short story writer, born in Montreal in 1922, living in Paris, where she worked initially as a journalist, writing in English, and publishing in the United States. It was hard for any country to claim her, to make her a public figure (which she would have resisted), or for readers to classify her as one thing or another. Things (including books) are always easier to describe when they are like something else, and it was Gallant’s great strength and less than great public relations problem that her work is so unlike anyone else’s. What one extracts from what (little) Gallant has said about her life is the central fact of her wanting to do what she wanted, which was to write.
Finally, the classes I teach (and this has evolved over time) are centered on close reading, on examining every word, every sentence, considering word choice, diction, tone, subtext, and so forth. Most, if not all, serious fiction rewards this, but some writers reward it more than others. And there are some writers who provide evidence for—proof of—what I find myself telling students: some fiction simply cannot be understood—on the simplest level of plot and character—unless you pay attention and concentrate on every sentence, every word.
Mavis Gallant’s work demonstrates the technical daring and innovative freedom that, as in a painting by Velázquez, remain hidden unless you look closely, pay attention, and at the same time manage to surrender to the mystery of art, to the fact that it cannot be reduced, summarized, or made to seem like anything but itself. She places a huge amount of faith in her reader’s intelligence, a faith that demands and rewards careful reading. But she’s also very funny, and a great deal of fun. Her stories are full of satisfying reverses and breathtaking passages of dazzlingly precise, virtuosic writing.
One such story is “Mlle. Dias de Corta,” which appears among the stories of the eighties and nineties in the recent reissue of The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, which was first published in 1962.
In the story, Gallant does a kind of magic trick, introducing us to a fairly unpleasant elderly Parisienne—xenophobic, passive-aggressive, self-involved, sly: a considerable range of unattractive personality traits. The story is framed as a letter addressed (though the letter can never be sent, because the narrator has no idea about what might be the correct address to send it to) to the eponymous young would-be actress who boarded with the narrator and her son decades before, and with whom the narrator’s son had a brief, disastrous affair. By the time we have reached the final sentences, our heart is breaking for this woman with whom, in all likelihood, we would prefer not to spend five minutes—unless we managed to persuade ourselves that she is (as indeed she is) a member of a vanishing breed, a subject of anthropological interest.
It is necessary to read closely, to understand what this woman is saying underneath what she appears to be saying: what she wants and needs to say, what she cannot say, and why she so often chooses to say something else entirely. On our second or third or fourth reading, aspects of the story emerge, complications we may have missed earlier—for example, the exact nature of the narrator’s worries about her son, Robert, and about the frostiness of their relationship. The way in which his affair with the young actress has divided him and his mother—and brought them together—may be opaque to the reader who skims rapidly through the text. Similarly, the history of the narrator’s marriage and the complexities of her worrisome financial situation can be apprehended only if we slow down and attempt to fathom what is being said—and not said.
Among the incisive and revealing passages are excerpts such as this one, from “The Moslem Wife,” the first in the collection. A woman named Netta reflects on the beginning of her childhood fascination with her cousin Jack, whom she later falls in love with and eventually marries:
Netta curtsied to her aunt and uncle. Her eyes were on Jack. She could not read yet, though she could sift and classify attitudes. She drew near him, sucking her lower lip, her hands behind her back. For the first time she was conscious of the beauty of another child. He was younger than Netta, imprisoned in a portable-fence arrangement in which he moved tirelessly, crabwise, hanging on a barrier he could easily have climbed. . . . She heard the adults laugh and say that Jack looked like a prizefighter. She walked around his prison, staring, and the blue-eyed fighter stared back.
Or this one, in which a desperate Paris art dealer named Sandor Speck reflects on the breakup of his marriage:
In his experience, love affairs and marriages perished between seven and eight o’clock, the hour of rain and no taxis. All over Paris couples must be parting forever, leaving like debris along the curbs the shreds of canceled restaurant dates, useless ballet tickets, hopeless explanations, and scraps of pride; and toward each of these disasters a taxi was pulling in, the only taxi for miles, the light on its roof already dimmed in anticipation to the twin dots that in Paris mean “occupied.” But occupied by whom?
Line by line, word by word, no one writes more compactly, more densely, with more compression. Great short stories are sometimes said to be as rich as novels. Gallant’s are like encyclopedias—of her characters’ psyches and lives. In a single paragraph from “Across the Bridge,” Gallant tells us much of what we might ever want to know about four characters: the narrator, her parents, and the suitor, Arnaud, to whom the narrator is engaged and whom she doesn’t want to marry because she has her heart set on some totally unsuitable young man in Lille. Gallant paints four portraits so deftly and with such a light touch that we may feel she is telling us something trivial, or perhaps of no importance:
My mother was a born coaxer and wheedler; avoided confrontation, preferring to move to a different terrain and beckon, smiling. One promised nearly anything just to keep the smile on her face. She was slim and quick, like a girl of fourteen. My father liked her in floral hats, so she still wore the floral bandeaux with their wisps of veil that had been fashionable ten years before. Papa used to tell about a funeral service where Maman had removed her hat so as to drape a mantilla over her hair. An usher, noticing the hat beside her on the pew, had placed it with the other flowers around the coffin. When I repeated the story to Arnaud he said the floral-hat anecdote was one of the world’s oldest. He had heard it a dozen times, always about a different funeral. I could not see why Papa would go on telling it if it were not true, or why Maman would let him. Perhaps she was the first woman it had ever happened to.
Each narrative offers us an entire existence (we feel that if a story doesn’t illuminate a whole life, Gallant was not interested in writing it) and a whole world, a milieu precisely situated in time and on the map of Europe and Quebec. She builds her fictions with moments and incidents so revealing and resonant that another writer might have made each one a separate story, and she has the nerve to include dramatic and significant events that—as so often happens in life—turn out to have unpredictably minor consequences. In “Irina,” the most devastating moment—an old man bursts into tears when he recalls a heartbreak in the distant past—is one that a child half glimpses and doesn’t understand. On occasion, the most influential character in the story never appears, like the irascible dead husband—and famous writer—whose oversize personality fills the background of “Irina.”
No one provides more concrete and factual information (details of personal and European history and politics, of family, employment; brushstrokes that establish a city, a subculture, or a domestic constellation) while at the same time making you feel as if you suddenly understand something essential about human life, something that perhaps you always knew, though you still can’t begin to express it. No one’s characters (young and old, male and female, rich and poor, from at least a dozen different countries) are more meticulously rendered. The characters’ specificity makes us feel simultaneously delighted, enlightened, and choked up. With a masterful control of tone that allows her to locate the perfect point on the continuum between engagement and detachment, and with a view of character at once scathing and endlessly tolerant and forgiving, Gallant displays an almost preternatural gift for making readers not meet but care profoundly about men and women and children whom they otherwise wouldn’t have met and might not have chosen to know. She accepts and reveals our flawed and complex human nature without pretending that our problems have solutions, or that experience—even tragic experience—necessarily changes or improves us.
In an afterword to the Collected Stories, Gallant advises her readers: “Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” Such advice may be superfluous. When you finish each of Gallant’s stories, it’s instinctive to stop and regroup. As much as you might wish to resume and prolong the pleasure of reading, you feel that your brain and heart cannot, at least for the moment, process or absorb one word, one detail, more.
The settings of her stories range from the French capital to the Ligurian Riviera, from Berlin to the Helsinki airport, from a small town in Switzerland to a grand hotel on the Côte d’Azur. Details of geography and local culture are crucial in Gallant’s work, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that so few of her characters come from, or feel at home in, the places where they happen to find themselves. Quite a few are understandably astonished to have wound up poor and adrift in post–World War II Europe, inhabiting the inhospitable border between exile and expatriation, covered with the almost visible film of desperation and the faint squalor that clings to those who feel they have come down in the world and—lacking talent or vocation—must struggle for survival.
Many of Gallant’s motley assortment of refugees, fugitives, expatriates, and travelers are displaced persons, scrambling on the margins of a society to which they will never belong and which they regard with the avid longing, curiosity, and clinical objectivity with which the beautifully drawn children in these tales observe the all but inscrutable adults around them. A number of stories tally the costs of dislocation. In “The Remission,” a terminally ill, impecunious Englishman brings his wife and three children to a decaying villa on the French–Italian border, where he intends to die. Instead, he survives for three years, long enough for his family to have a series of experiences that will change them far more than his death and absence. “The Latehomecomer” concerns a young German returning to Berlin in 1950 from a term as a prisoner of war in France, a sentence unfairly protracted by a bureaucratic mistake. And in “Baum, Gabriel, 1935-( ),” a German-Jewish refugee orphaned by the Nazis supports himself by working as an extra in TV dramas filmed in Paris, a job that eventually obliges him to play a German soldier.
The Second World War and its aftermath shapes or at least shadows many of these narratives. Acutely conscious of history and politics, Gallant’s work creates and reflects a milieu very distant from that of contemporary American stories in which the make of a car or a song on the radio may be the only detail that locates the story in time. But Gallant is an artist, not a historian, and she never lets us forget that her focus is not purely on politics, history, and war but on the effect that politics, history, and war have on individual lives. What’s painful for the “latehomecomer” is not the memory of his postwar imprisonment so much as the discovery of the vast distance that his mother’s life has traveled away from his own during his long absence. The opening of “Mlle. Dias de Corta”—“You moved into my apartment during the summer of the year before abortion became legal in France; that should fix it in past time for you, dear Mlle. Dias de Corta”—is not, as it turns out, principally a means of fixing the story in time, but rather a double-edged sword meant to reopen the wounds suffered by the letter’s imagined recipient and by the story’s simultaneously unpleasant and sympathetic narrator. So, too, in “The Moslem Wife,” the horrors of the Occupation pale beside the dark, unfathomable currents of sexual thrall in which a woman is held by the handsome, shallow husband she has loved since they were children.
Given that there is no “typical” Gallant work, “The Ice Wagon Going down the Street”—among my favorites of her stories—could be said to typify her themes, her style, her strategies, her perspective. Her trademarks: the specificity, the density of detail and incident, the control of language and tone, and her gift for creating a deceptively comfortable distance between the characters and the reader, then suddenly and without warning narrowing that distance, with a force that leaves the reader with the equivalent of whiplash, though the part that has been thrown out of joint is not the neck, but the heart.
As “Ice Wagon” begins, Peter and Sheilah Frazier, a down-on-their-luck but proud and (in their own minds) stylish couple, have returned from Europe to Peter’s native Canada, where they are camping out, with their two daughters, in Peter’s sister’s cramped Toronto flat. Peter is from a “good” Canadian family ruined by financial scandal, while Sheilah is a British beauty from a lower social caste.
The opening lines—the continental “peacocks” are lounging about on a Sunday morning while Lucille, Peter’s “wren” of a Canadian sister, has taken the also wrenlike daughters off to church—tell us all we need to know (or think we need to know) about this brittle folie à deux. Much of our information about the Fraziers comes through delicate grace notes—ironic word choices (“world affairs,” “international thing”), the subtle manipulations of tone, the grandiosity, mutual consolation, self-congratulation, and faint recrimination that form the text and subtext of the couple’s conversation.
Now that they are out of world affairs and back where they started, Peter Frazier’s wife says, “Everybody else did well in the international thing except us.”
“You have to be crooked,” he tells her.
“Or smart. Pity we weren’t.”
It is Sunday morning. They sit in the kitchen, drinking their coffee, slowly, remembering the past. They say the names of people as if they were magic. Peter thinks, Agnes Brusen, but there are hundreds of other names. As a private married joke, Peter and Sheilah wear the silk dressing gowns they bought in Hong Kong. Each thinks the other a peacock, rather splendid, but they pretend the dressing gowns are silly and worn in fun.
It is a measure of Gallant’s authority and nerve that the name Agnes Brusen, dropped boldly, without explanation, near the start of the story, will not reappear or be referred to again until seven dense and eventful pages later.
Before Agnes can make her formal appearance, we must follow the Fraziers on their nominally fabulous but in fact deeply sad trajectory through Europe, struggling among all the other sexy, social-climbing, ambitious young couples who flocked to the Continent in the aftermath of the war as if it were a Gold Rush town mined with excitement and glamour. Nearly every important event takes place in retrospect. Though everything proceeds smoothly in Gallant’s eventful, easy-to-follow narratives, sooner or later it becomes clear how gracefully she dispenses with conventional notions of chronology. Consequently, reading her work is not like being shown how one moment follows another, but rather like watching a hand very slowly pull back a curtain until, inch by inch, everything is revealed.
“Ice Wagon” tracks the Fraziers from Paris, where Peter ruins his nonexistent career during an incident involving a party, a flowerpot, and great quantities of alcohol. From then on, everything that happens to the Fraziers is either a fiasco, an embarrassment, a betrayal, or a disappointment. The family moves to Geneva, where they live in conditions of increasing squalor. (“The flat seemed damp as a cave. Peter remembers steam in the kitchen, pools under the sink, sweat on the pipes. Water streamed on him from the children’s clothes, washed and dripping overhead.”) Their one talismanic possession is Sheilah’s black Balenciaga gown, a symbol of elegance and style that they cling to as a religious couple might treasure the family Bible.
During their time in Geneva, Peter had a job as a file clerk, cataloging photos “in the information service of an international agency in the Palais des Nations” and sharing an office with another Canadian—a homely little mole of a woman by the name of Agnes Brusen.
In Geneva Peter worked for a woman—a girl. She was a Norwegian from a small town in Saskatchewan. . . . Soon after Agnes Brusen came to the office she hung her framed university degree on the wall. It was one of the gritty, prideful gestures that stand for push, toil, and family sacrifice. . . . The girl might have been twenty-three: no more. She wore a brown tweed suit with bone buttons, and a new silk scarf and new shoes. She clutched an unscratched brown purse. She seemed dressed in going-away presents. . . . He was courteous, hiding his disappointment. The people he worked with had told him a Scandinavian girl was arriving, and he had expected a stunner. Agnes was a mole.
Almost immediately, Agnes becomes involved in a triangulated relationship with the Fraziers—not a romantic triangle, but one including humiliations, disappointments, and misunderstandings. The Fraziers are appalled to learn that Agnes is a regular visitor at the home of a couple who have dropped Peter and Sheilah from their guest list for reasons having to do (Peter thinks) with Sheilah’s class background. Eager to know why Agnes has been admitted to the lost paradise, Peter and Sheilah invite her to dinner—and to one of the most excruciating social disasters in literature. At yet another unfortunate party, this time a costume ball, Agnes, a teetotaler, gets so drunk that their hostess strong-arms Peter into taking Agnes home. And that night, and the next day, something happens between Agnes and Peter. The something is not sex, but an encounter just as profound and perhaps more likely even than sex to leave a man and a woman forever imprinted on each other. For that one day, the artifice and pretense of Peter’s life drop away. But Peter and Agnes—and the narrator—insist that “nothing happened.”
But what were they talking about that day, so quietly, such old friends? They talked about dying, about being ambitious, about being religious, about different kinds of love. What did she see when she looked at him—taking her knuckle slowly away from her mouth, bringing her hand down to the desk, letting it rest there? They were both Canadians, so they had this much together—the knowledge of the little you dare admit. Death, near death, the best thing, the wrong thing—God knows what they were telling each other. Anyway, nothing happened.
It would be necessary to read every word of this long, complicated story to get the full import—to feel the force—of its ending. It’s as if the eye of the hurricane has been hovering over Agnes and Peter, rather than over Peter and Sheilah, gathering momentum, until in its final paragraphs the story (to extend the storm metaphor) blows the roof off.
Mavis Gallant’s work leaves an afterimage that stays with us and that we can conjure up, the way we can close our eyes and see how Velázquez paints an egg. Her fiction has the originality and profundity, the clarity, the breadth of vision, the wit, the mystery, the ability to make us feel that a work has found its ideal form, that not one word could be changed, all of which we recognize as being among the great wonders of art.