In Paris with Mavis Gallant, Writer

“M’excuser, monsieur. Je cherche des livres par Mavis Gallant. Où peux-je les trouver?” I asked the bookseller my question and then braced for his answer. This was an upmarket bookstore in Montparnasse, after all, and I was fumbling at the counter with Ontario schoolboy French. If my prior encounters in Paris were a reliable guide, my effort would be met with a practised combination of annoyance, pity, amusement, and withering contempt. But this time proved different. The bookseller ignored how rudely I had chewed through his native tongue.

“Pardon. Je sais que nous devons avoir ses livres, mais nous ne les avons pas,” he said in a sheepish, apologetic way, as if he were acknowledging a failure of literary responsibility. He knew he ought to have Mavis Gallant’s books on offer, but he didn’t. I would expect an exchange like this in a Canadian bookstore, but it was surprising here, in Paris, in Gallant’s own neighbourhood, in a city she’s been living in for some five decades. I was about to meet her at a restaurant across the street and had ducked into the book­store, curious to see where, not if, Gallant was placed on the shelves. She had chosen the restaurant and agreed to a conversation on a Sunday afternoon this past October through a correspondence that had stretched over a year. Though eighty-four, frail by her own admission, and exhausted from participating in two recently filmed documentaries about her life and work, she eventually agreed to my request.

The Parisian bookseller’s response was a familiar one. People don’t read Mavis Gallant so much as know they ought to. In preparing for the interview, I canvassed well-read friends, academic colleagues, editors, and fellow writers about their responses to her work. Her name elicited high regard in both Canadian and American settings. But across the board, there was comparatively little in the way of particulars. “I love ‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street.’ It was in an anthology. I really should read more of her stuff.” “I enjoy her stories. They used to come in the New Yorker all the time, years ago. But I never knew what to make of them by the end.” “Gallant? Oh yes, she’s one of those writer’s writers...”

The last of these responses is perhaps the most telling in terms of Gallant’s standing in the contemporary literary world. At a November 2006 event held in her honour in New York, Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, and Jhumpa Lahiri lined up to offer high-minded appreciations. Their speeches were uniformly glowing, but gave off a proprietary admiration – fellow members of the guild paying respects to one of their betters. A writer’s writer – the phrase implies that only someone intimate with the art can discern the full extent of the brilliance at play. With a readership perhaps better understood in terms of quality rather than quantity, one wonders if the effect of Gallant winning so much esoteric praise has been, in part, to close her writing off from a wider readership.

In the Canadian context, at first glance it’s not the difficulty of reading Gallant so much as the difficulty of locating her that has denied her a native audience commensurate with her inter­national standing. In fact, we’ve devised a deviously effective storyline to make sense of this writer, a storyline that gives Gallant her due and also gives us a reason to avoid reading her.

Born in Montreal in 1922, Gallant had a peripatetic childhood, marked by time in both Canada and the United States. As a young woman, she gave up a career in journalism with the Mont­real Standard and moved to Europe in 1950, submitting three short stories to the New Yorker with the idea that if she were to find success with this first set of submissions, she’d commit to writing for good. She met with immediate success, and through her recurrent appearances in the New Yorker and from the short story collections that were thereby assembled, Gallant developed an impressive position in international circles. She was, however, little known or read in her native Canada before the late 1970s, when Macmillan of Can­ada and then McClelland and Stewart started publishing her work. She won a Governor General’s Award in 1981, and thereafter received a series of awards and honorary doctorates. Her early story collections were reissued with admiring introductions and afterwords by Ondaa­tje, Banks, and Mordecai Richler.

And yet, Gallant has never enjoyed a standing in Canada comparable with the writer who shares her native origins, chosen genre, and international renown – Alice Munro. The reason is ostensibly geographic: Munro’s life and work represent an emphatic and sympathetic commitment to verifiably Can­adian concerns and settings, whereas Gallant comes across, in personality and sensibility, as detached. As such, she can only command so much attention from a literary culture obsessed with national textures, which often frame the reading of native writers as a good citizen’s patriotic duty.

Leaving aside the politics of who and why Canada reads, Gallant can be a very difficult writer to encounter. There are demanding moments in Munro’s fiction, to be sure, but these are mostly borne of the intensities of emotion and epiphanic insights that come of her genius for detailing the complex inner lives of ordinary people. Ultimately, though, Munro’s are comforting fictions: the governing sensibility of her short stories is wise, melancholic, and compassionate. Gallant, on the other hand, forces us to confront sterility, displacement, and alienation in her stor­ies, often without a final resolution of the human difficulties therein revealed. She brings a cold voice and a hard eye to bear on the world, and has created a body of work that reads as a basic rejection of the Canadian literary commitment to imagining the humble virtues and humbling vices of modest local lives.

There was also a joint past that lay all around us in heaps of charred stone. The streets still smelled of terror and ashes, particularly after rain. Every stone held down a ghost or a frozen life, or a dreadful secret. – “An Alien Flower” (1972)

During our conversation, at a grand old restaurant where Paris families were stretching their languorous Sunday brunches into afternoon coffees, it was clear that Gallant had little interest in addressing her relationship to Canada and Canadian writing. She treated my questions on this subject like houseflies and was palpably interested in moving on to other things. There was only one moment where she warmed to the theme. She recalled a 2002 trip to Montreal – “her native city” as she said with fondness. But this was a trip made in ambivalence because her physical mobility was limited; she went with the knowledge that she’d “never see the city again.” Gallant didn’t linger in the elegiac for very long when discussing her time in Montreal, or on any other matter. That’s because her personal feelings and geographies aren’t nearly as important to her as her vocation. Asked about how she’d like to be read and remembered, she answered, “Gallant, writer.” We could describe her with any number of adjectives – the Paris-based-expatriate-Quebecer-anglo­phone-Canadian-Protestant-female-short-story-writer Mavis Gallant. But doing so ignores Gallant’s primary ambition, and the degree to which she has achieved it, in becoming simply, formid­ably, a writer.