In Paris with Mavis Gallant, Writer

In a preface to her 1996 collected works, currently out of print in North America, Gallant describes literature’s purpose as evoking “a climate of the mind.” Like much (and there’s not much) of what Gallant has said when asked to comment on what she does, the de­scrip­tion is terse and opaque. But then, her stories speak for themselves, doing exactly what they’re supposed to without need of authorial clarifications and embellishments. Consider, for instance, this passage from “Between Zero and One” (1975), one of Gallant’s Linnet Muir series of stories on a young woman’s time in a bygone Montreal:

“I remember a day of dark spring snowstorms, ourselves reflected on the black windows, the pools of warm light here and there, the green-shaded lamps, thedramatic hiss and gurgle of the radi­ators that always sounded like the background to some emotional outburst, the sudden slackening at the end of the afternoon when every molecule of oxygen in the room had turned into poison.”

The intensity and beauty of this passage come not just from its choice and expression of detail, but from the evenness of tone Gallant achieves while building to its startling last word, which gathers unto itself the unsettling implications of the preceding parts of the sentence. This evokes an office setting in World War II-era Montreal, or, more precisely, a climate of the mind borne of the smallish, bitter lives that come together and break apart in that office over the course of the story.

Measuring the passage’s veracity by the historical record, or determining how much of the narrator’s experiences are variations on the author’s time in Montreal as a journalist with the Standard in the 1940s, is much like uncovering which Mississippi streets and Civil War sites Faulkner knew firsthand. The result may be a frisson of local pride, but this is a distraction when approaching a great writer. The prospect of such a reading experience is made all the more enticing in Gallant’s case because of her chosen form: the short story. In her handling, the short story works up intensely concentrated encounters between people, around which move whole constellations of discreet meanings. To engage such art requires a commitment of intellect and imagination capable of meeting and withstanding Gallant’s vision of the world: a sometimes fatalistic, sometimes sympathetic regard for the all-too-human longings and occasionally funny cruelties that people visit upon each other. And this is a regard that proceeds from an unflinching commitment to revelation for its own sake.

Gallant takes offence at efforts by others to undermine that commitment by attaching it to secondary interests. She once dismissed academic comment­aries, in a piece reprinted in Paris Notebooks, her collected non-fiction, as “the fleas of literature.” Reminded of this dismissal, she was immediately amused. “Did I?” she said with a smile, her eyebrows turned up. “Well I believe it, because I’m apt to say things are ‘the fleas of.’” The self-effacement quickly gave way to stronger feelings. “I’ll tell you what my thing is with academics,” she continued in a harder tone. “They take something that is complete, say a story, that is not material to work with – it’s complete; it is to the writer anyway – and they take it as crude ore that they’re taking out of the ground, to suit some purpose of their own, and I find this outrageous.”

We’d met in front of La Coupole, a Montparnasse institution that, in earlier days, “was as dim as a night train and served terrible food,” where “out-of-town diners used to search for a glimpse of Sartre or Beckett and try to make out if the forks were clean.” The description comes from one of Gallant’s Henri Grippes stories, which concern a congenitally unlikable, comedic character whom the author gleefully described, in an aside, as “absolutely awful.” La Coupole has changed; it’s a clean, well-lighted place now, its bohemian hist­ory homogenized by guidebooks into a literary tourist’s stop. Gallant was grateful for assistance out of her taxi; candid about the inevitable weakening of her constitution, she was nevertheless lively and canny throughout our conversation, ignoring respectful queries about whether it was getting late and dismissing the tape recorder when the cassettes stopped.

Helping an elegantly dressed old woman out of her cab soon gave way to working hard to keep up with the pace and range of her conversation. We sat and talked for some two hours, and Gallant would often answer a straightforward question with a narrative that moved across personal, historical, and geographic terrains. Asked, for instance, to distinguish between Catholic culture in Quebec and France, she replied, “It depends which period you’re talking about. If it’s now, in Quebec, it barely exists, it’s much more liberal. But then?...” She trailed away for a moment, then explained her point via story and image. “I lived two years in Spain, under Franco, and there were things allowed in a couple of bookstores that wouldn’t have been allowed in Quebec. There was Trotsky’s Hist­ory of the Russian Revolution, in two volumes in English, which you could find there.”

This digression held much in the way of answering my question, but mention of her time in Spain sent her into another recollection. “I remember being twice in a bus in Madrid and seeing, one, a Scotsman in a kilt, walking along a street looking in windows, and followed by boys who thought this was hilarious.” Again she paused for a moment, but then offered her second strange sighting on a bus in Madrid. “The other was a woman in slacks, in 1952.” Here she leaned in a little, to under­score the comparative absurdity of this finding. “The people in the bus got up and came over to my side and were talking about the mujer in pantalones. Well, in Quebec, if it had been a mujer in shorts, there would have been a cop called, right away. But that’s so long ago.”

Gallant enjoyed clarifying her point about religion in France, where the Church “is smaller now” and the second religion is Islam. “It’s Catholic, Muslim, Jewish,” she said, then broke into a high-pitched voice while making a falling gesture with her hands, “and way down there, a few Protestants, poor little things, an endangered species.” While the Church may be in decline in France, its presence is inherently part of the life of the nation: “But it’s a culture,” Gallant explained, “that’s it.” She made several points in this concise, emphatic way. There was much matter behind any one instance, but there’s no time for clarification; she assumes you’re with her and moves on.

“One of the things I’ve always noticed in France: that they use Christian and Catholic to mean the same thing. I remember a woman once saying to me, ‘Although I am a Christian, I have nothing against Jews or Protestants.’” The genial satire on display here gave way to a sharper sort of humour on other topics. She was (correctly, it turns out) dubious about the odds of Ségolène Royal becoming France’s first woman president, because while “women have rights in France, still the men have an attitude” – one that she demonstrated, wordlessly, by pulling her face into a Gaullic male grimace at the notion of a woman assuming the country’s highest office. As for the 1968 Generation, now the establishment in France, she was particularly lethal in her assessment of the Socialists: “These are people who have ideas but have never had to wait for a bus.” She was equally efficient with writers whom she holds in low regard. “He’s basically bourgeois,” she said, dismissing the controversial Michel Houellebecq.