Innocence Abroad
Mavis Gallant is one of
those strangely positioned writers whose fans rank her near the top of the
literary ladder but who remains, to the rest of the world, not much more than a
name. A quick rundown, then, of her long and impressive career: It begins in
Quebec, where Gallant was born and lived till the age of 27. In 1950, she quit
a newspaper job and moved to Paris, allowing herself two years to publish
fiction or find another line of work. You might expect a painful drama to
follow, a piling up of drafts and rejections. Instead, she was instantly
mature, prolific, and publishable. Her first submission to The New
Yorker was returned with a friendly letter, but on the second try she got
in. Since then she's published over 100 stories there, more than any writer so
far.
If
arithmetic is the measure, Gallant must be the quintessential New Yorker
fiction writer. For four decades, up until a few years ago--when the magazine
changed editors and began to emphasize the news--her quiet professionalism, her
wry, mildly gloomy sensibility, and her knack for perfect detail were a
near-perfect fit. This last gift of observation, Gallant explains in the
introduction to her huge new Collected Stories , dates back to a
bifurcated childhood:
One's beginnings are regional. Mine are wholly Quebec, English and
Protestant, yes, but with a strong current of French and Catholic. My young
parents sent me off on that current by placing me in a French convent school,
for reasons never made plain. I remember my grandmother's saying, "Well, I give
up." It was a singular thing to do and in those days unheard of. It left me
with two systems of behavior, divided by syntax and tradition; two environments
to consider, one becalmed in a long twilight of nineteenth-century religiosity;
two codes of social behavior; much practical experience of the difference
between a rule and a moral point.
Here is the split mind of a Henry James heroine, raised in
this hemisphere with excessive propriety and then thrust, unprotected, into old
and indecipherable European traditions. Note the characteristically airtight
yet elliptical prose, the world-weary delicacy that records "the difference
between a rule and a moral point" but commits neither to one nor the other.
Later,
living in Paris, Gallant took up the Jamesian theme of innocents abroad, though
she sometimes sketched her expatriates with the quicker, more economical
strokes of a Hemingway. Yet she arrived in France in the 1950s, a time of drab
poverty and rubble, one century after rich New World travelers made their first
bewildering return trips to Europe and one long shock-filled war after the jazz
age and its tremors. To that Europe, Gallant brought a new bemused realism and
an acquaintance with such petty facts as train schedules and plumbing. She
became a deromanticizer, an adjuster of expectations. A Gallant character who
cultivates decadent aristocratic airs or tries too hard to hold on to Puritan
freshness is at best a self-punishing neurotic, at worst a fool.
As if to emphasize the documentary nature of
these pieces, Gallant has arranged them chronologically in her collection, by
decade from the '30s through the '90s. The stories weren't necessarily written
in the decade they're filed under: The opening work, "The Moslem Wife," about
Netta, a strangely sheltered Englishwoman who lives in Southern France with her
callow husband Jack, evokes the Vichy period but was written in 1976. Netta and
Jack run a small hotel; Jack is a philanderer and eventually leaves, and
Gallant traces them through separation and World War II and a pragmatic
last-minute reconciliation--"the same voyage, at the same speed" as the first
time around in their disastrous affair--in a bus station.
Gallant's
stories of men and women--and these include a few tales of trusting men let
down by untrustworthy women--follow a basic pattern: Someone (possessing a
naiveté perhaps reminiscent of the 27-year-old who ran off to Paris to write)
offers someone else his or her love and is let down, but still manages to get
up in the morning for the next several decades. These stories are the tightest
and the best designed, and they yield her most memorable lines, dark, ironic
compressions of incompatible worldviews. Netta, for instance, "took it for
granted, now she was married, that Jack felt as she did about light, dark,
death, and love," and from that we understand that separation is inevitable. Or
take this moment from "Between Zero and One":
When
I was young I thought that men had small lives of their own creation. I could
not see why, born enfranchised, without the obstacles and constraints attendant
on women, they set such close limits for themselves and why, once the limits
had been reached, they seemed so taken aback.
Elsewhere, the wandering observer predominates, and the
stories gain weight in the quest for clinical accuracy. Besides the English in
the south of France, we get lifestyle portraits of Romanians scraping by on
fake passports in Paris, Americans slumming in dirty Madrid, a German soldier
returned from prison camp to Berlin; in the later stories, we meet Canadians
coping with European strays. Often, Gallant keeps the plot to a minimum, merely
visiting her characters several times over a span of years. The young grow up,
and we learn about French school exams and then the petty hierarchies in the
civil service. The elderly are defined by their memory of past events. From the
opening to "In Plain Sight":
On
the first Wednesday of every month, sharp at noon, an air-raid siren wails
across Paris, startling pigeons and lending an edge to the midday news. Older
Parisians say it has the tone and pitch of a newsreel sound track. They think,
Before the war, and remember things in black-and-white. Some wonder how old
Hitler would be today and if he really did escape to South Africa. Others say
an order to test warning equipment was given in 1956, at the time of the Suez
crisis, and never taken off the books.
This passage could easily belong to a piece of
nonfiction--to one of the witty old "Letters from Europe" that used to run in
The New Yorker . And in fact, in the best of these character studies, a
vivid picture of Cold War Europe--infected with mediocre rhetoric, imprisoned
by fake boundaries, inhabited by numb and ambivalent people--begins to take
shape. James and Hemingway give way to the shabby backdrops of John Le Carré's
novels. Yet, unlike Le Carré, Gallant does not believe in plot, or in
speculating on the meaning of her stories. Character is everything; facts make
the man. If Gallant sometimes achieves the same high notes that great reporting
does, her less-successful stories resemble the more meandering old New
Yorker human-interest profiles, in which a person's fleeting thoughts,
neurotic habits, and random memories are woven into a pattering portrait.
Consider the opening to "The End of the World," which introduces an angry son
who, as the story goes on, will be called to Paris to care for a selfish dying
father:
I never like to leave
Canada, because I'm disappointed every time. I've felt disappointed about
places I haven't even seen. My wife went to Florida with her mother once. When
they arrived there, they met some neighbors from home who told them about a
sign saying NO CANADIANS. They never saw this sign anywhere, but they kept
hearing about others who did, or whose friends had seen it, always in different
places, and it spoiled their trip for them. Many people, like them, have never
come across it but have heard about it, so it must be there somewhere. Another
time I had to go and look after my brother Kenny in Buffalo.
There's a healthy faith in
the concrete in this kind of story, and a democratic interest in human nature.
But there's also a cool complacency, an indifferent shrug. By Gallant's own
admission in the introduction, she composes with an eye to craft, not the
deeper heart of a story. Each local ironic effect has to be placed precisely;
each street name has to be gotten right the first time. "I could not move on to
the second sentence until the first sentence sounded true," she writes somewhat
diffidently. "True to what? Some arrangement in my head, I suppose. ... The
first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image,
like a slide or (closer still) a freeze frame. ... Whole scenes then follow,
complete in themselves but like disconnected parts of the film." But a film and
a slide show are not the same thing as fully imagined fiction. These stories
make up a time capsule assembled by a skilled social historian, a rich gallery
of plausible lives. They are well observed, well written, and remote, and no
more than a handful, if that, will last.
