It amazed me that Canadian recognition of Mavis Gallant as one of our most gifted writers was so long in coming, most likely because, to her credit, she never ran with the Canlit hounds, but instead chose “exile, cunning.” Once, during the ’70s, Mavis, who had come to Canada on a university reading tour, phoned me in Montreal. She had been astonished by the hostility of Canadian cultural nationalists who demanded to know why she wrote stories about damn foreigners and why she continued to live abroad, as if that were an act of treachery.
There is a story I cherish about Mavis. Once, I’m told, a naive young Canadian reporter asked her, “Why do you live in Paris?”
To which Mavis replied, “Have you ever been to Paris?”
Mavis Gallant’s prose is impeccable, her intelligence daunting, but what is most impressive to me is the ease with which she assumes so many diverse identities in her stories, getting the social nuances and inner-life details exactly right, settling for nothing less than a character’s tap-root. Possibly it should come as no surprise that in “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” she should faultlessly render a feckless international civil servant, the butt-end of a once prosperous Presbyterian family, adrift in Geneva, filing photographs for an obscure UNESCO agency – Peter Frazier of the Ontario Fraziers. After all, she must have endured more than one such emotionally frozen bore in her formative Canadian years, never mind obligatory expatriate dinner parties in Paris. “If he had been European he would have ridden to work on a bicycle, in the uniform of his class and condition. He would have worn a tight coat, a turned collar, and a dirty tie. He wondered then if coming here had been a mistake, and if he should not, after all, still be in a place where his name meant something.” Instead, oh dear oh dear, one day he finds himself reduced to working “for a woman – a girl,” Agnes Brusen, a Norwegian out of small-town Saskatchewan, who hangs her university degree on a wall of their shared office that contains two desks, filing cabinets, and a map of the world as it was in 1945. “It was one of the gritty, prideful gestures that stand for push, toil, and family sacrifice.” Eventually, Peter of the Ontario Fraziers is liberated. He leaves for a job in Ceylon after “somebody read the right letter, passed it on for the right initials …”
Given that Mavis is a first-rate storyteller, I suppose it might also be expected of her that, writing in the first-person in “An Autobiography,” she should so movingly portray a Parisian woman who teaches botany to the children of the newly rich in a Swiss school in the immediate postwar years. Two of her pupils are German, and in one damning, typically understated paragraph Mavis tells us more about the new Germany than most writers can manage in a chapter of flat statement. The girls’ “parents certainly speak English, because it was needed a few years ago in Frankfurt, but the children may not remember. They are ignorant and new. Everything they see and touch at home is new. Home is built on the top layer of Ur. It is no good excavating; the fragments would be without meaning. Everything within the walls was inlaid or woven or cast or put together fifteen years ago at the very earliest.”
What is truly remarkable is that in “The Latehomecomer,” writing again in the first person, Mavis can so convincingly imagine young Thomas Bestermann, a German soldier, returning to his forlorn mother’s house in a ravaged Berlin, after having been detained overlong as a prisoner of war in France.
Years ago, V.S. Naipaul complained that he could not write any more novels set in England because he did not know what an Englishman did when he went home at night. But in this superb story, Mavis, seemingly without effort, never striking a false note, appears to convey precisely how people talked, and what they felt, in a working-class home in Berlin, circa 1950.
Mavis is an astute, unsentimental observer of the expatriate life. Never guilty of an unnecessary sentence, or redundant adjective for that matter, her beautifully composed stories can also be read for the considerable pleasure of their incidental observations. In “The Moslem Wife,” a tale of two British hotel-keepers on the Riviera, she notes: “The Riviera was no place for Americans. They could not sit all day waiting for mail and the daily papers and for the clock to show a respectable drinking time. They made the best of things when they were caught with a house they’d been rash enough to rent unseen.”
She is also blessed with a sure grasp of Ontario. In “In Youth Is Pleasure,” a charming story about a young woman returning from school in New York to the Montreal where she was born, she writes: “The first time I ever heard people laughing in a cinema was there [in New York]. I can still remember the wonder and excitement and amazement I felt. I was just under fourteen and I had never heard people expressing their feelings in a public place in my life. The easy reactions, the way a poignant moment caught them, held them still – all that was new. I had come there straight from Ontario, where the reaction to a love scene was a kind of unhappy giggling, while the image of a kitten or a baby induced a long flat ‘Aaaah,’ followed by shamed silence. You could imagine them blushing in the dark for having said that – just that ‘Aaaah.’ ” In this story, incidently, she conveys how dreadfully easy it is for an intelligent, young single woman to be dismissed and, on occasion, importuned in a man’s world, and she manages this without once stooping to flat statement or feminist cant.
“The Moslem Wife” and the other stories in this volume present some of the many fictional worlds of Mavis Gallant. But, remember, this collection, rich and far-ranging as it is, should count as no more than an introduction to the work of one of our wisest and most gifted writers.
BY MAVIS GALLANT
DRAMA
What Is To Be Done? (1983)
ESSAYS
Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews (1986)
FICTION
The Other Paris (1956)
Green Water, Green Sky (1959)
My Heart Is Broken: Eight Stories and a Short Novel (1964)
A Fairly Good Time (1970)
The Pegnitz Junction: A Novella and Five Short Stories (1973)
The End of the World and Other Stories (1974)
From the Fifteenth District:
A Novella and Eight Short Stories (1979)
Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981)
Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris (1985)
In Transit (1988)
Across the Bridge: New Stories (1993)
The Moslem Wife and Other Stories (1994)
Margaret Atwood
The Edible Woman
Surfacing
Yves Beauchemin
The Alley Cat
Earle Birney
Turvey
Marie-Claire Blais
Mad Shadows
A Season in the Life of Emmanuel
Fred Bodsworth
Last of the Curlews
Ernest Buckler
The Mountain and the Valley
Morley Callaghan
Such Is My Beloved
They Shall Inherit the Earth
Canadian Poetry
From the Beginnings
Through the First
World War
Leonard Cohen
Beautiful Losers
The Favourite Game
Ralph Connor
Glengarry School Days
The Man from Glengarry
Sara Jeannette Duncan
The Imperialist
Marian Engel
Bear
Sylvia Fraser
Pandora
Mavis Gallant
The Moslem Wife and
Other Stories
Frederick Philip Grove
Fruits of the Earth
Over Prairie Trails
A Search for America
Settlers of the Marsh
T.C. Haliburton
The Clockmaker
Jack Hodgins
The Invention of the World
Spit Delaney’s Island
Anna Brownell Jameson
Winter Studies and
Summer Rambles in
Canada
A.M. Klein
The Second Scroll
Raymond Knister
White Narcissus
Margaret Laurence
A Bird in the House
The Diviners
The Fire-Dwellers
A Jest of God
The Prophet’s Camel Bell
The Stone Angel
This Side Jordan
The Tomorrow-Tamer
Stephen Leacock
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich
Literary Lapses
My Financial Career and Other Follies
My Remarkable Uncle
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
Hugh MacLennan
Barometer Rising
Alistair MacLeod
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
John Marlyn
Under the Ribs of Death
Joyce Marshall
Any Time at All
Rohinton Mistry
Such a Long Journey
L.M. Montgomery
Anne of Green Gables
Emily Climbs
Emily of New Moon
Emily’s Quest
Susanna Moodie
Life in the Clearings
versus the Bush
Roughing It in the Bush
Brian Moore
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
The Luck of Ginger Coffey
Howard O’Hagan
Tay John
Michael Ondaatje
Running in the Family
Martha Ostenso
Wild Geese
David Adams Richards
Blood Ties
The Coming of Winter
Lives of Short Duration
John Richardson
Wacousta
Mordecai Richler
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
A Choice of Enemies
The Incomparable Atuk
Joshua Then and Now
St. Urbain’s Horseman
Son of a Smaller Hero
Ringuet
Thirty Acres
Sinclair Ross
As For Me and My House
The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories
Gabrielle Roy
The Cashier
Garden in the Wind
The Road Past Altamont
Street of Riches
The Tin Flute
Where Nests the Water Hen
Windflower
Ernest Thompson Seton
Wild Animals I Have Known
Robert Stead
Grain
Catharine Parr Traill
The Backwoods of Canada
Sheila Watson
The Double Hook
Ethel Wilson
The Equations of Love
Hetty Dorval
The Innocent Traveller
Love and Salt Water
Mrs. Golightly and Other Stories
Swamp Angel
Adele Wiseman
Crackpot