When queried about her feelings toward the New Yorker, she was initially even shorter. “I pass,” she said coolly. But then she opened up to the question about the magazine where her writing has appeared almost exclusively for her entire career. “When I placed my first story, it was still Harold Ross, the founder. I never met him, he died a year later. And then came [William] Shawn, and then came [Robert] Gottlieb, then came...Lady Godiva, who came and went.” She laughed, enjoying this particular description of the controversial editorship of Tina Brown. She spoke well of the current editor, David Remnick: “A very good journalist. The magazine shows that, it’s journalism with a slot for fiction.”
Describing the latest formulation of the New Yorker this way brought Gallant nearer to an understandable lament. The magazine used to feature two stories per issue, she explained. She said this wistfully, but my attempt at a sympathetic response put a stop to that. Her voice cooled once more and then became emphatic. “There’s no point – when it’s changed, it’s changed. And apart from deploring it, you think, ‘Well maybe I’m immune to change,’ and I don’t want to become that way, but after all I’m eighty-four. I have to keep that in mind.” She served notice that she’s “not like that about other things,” then abandoned the whole matter. “I think I should just shut up.”
Don’t forget me, Grippes silently prayed, standing at the periodicals table in La Hune, the Left Bank bookstore, looking for his own name in those quarterlies no one ever took home. Don’t praise me. Praise is weak stuff. Praise me after I’m dead. – “Grippes and Poche” (1982)
Harsh here, as she was elsewhere on other matters, Gallant was liveliest when she interrupted herself with an excited “Oh!” in the midst of answering a formal question. In one instance, when discussing the status of Arab intellectuals within the ranks of Paris’s chattering classes, she recalled a story that she much preferred to tell. She described a Christmastime ride taken with a Muslim cab driver, when returning home after a late evening with friends. After Gallant passed on to the driver a gift of chocolates she’d received, the two struck up an animated conversation on an array of subjects, ranging from diabetes, marriage, and children, to prayer schedules, divine inspiration, and writing. While she told the story, I found myself presuming each turn had reached the insight of the story, only to follow her to another turn, and another, and still another. The telling ended not with a sage statement on religion, or on Paris’s new immigrants, or pluralism in action, but on a light and devious note, with Gallant tricking the cabbie into letting her pay the fare after he insisted that their conversation was payment enough.
It was inevitable, while Gallant sat across from me and told that tale and others, that I would try to discern in them some form of symmetry with her stories, but I also knew that this was a fool’s game. Gallant’s fictions are intricate and precise creations. As she said, “I will rewrite a whole page for a sentence.” But listening to her recount her exchange with a cab driver, as when I was listening to her story of the kilted Scotsman in Madrid, put me in mind of a defining feature of her short stories, one that makes them such a draw on the reader’s imagination and intellect: their ability to work up a compelling situation and dwell patiently and economically in its intersecting complications, gradually coming to a culminating moment that’s postponed and shifts, however many times, before the story ends with a deft deflection of our expectations.
“In the Tunnel” (1971) moves along these lines. It’s the story of a young woman, Sarah, who pursues an ill-starred summer fling with an older man to prove she’s not the headstrong danger to herself that her father thinks she is. And so it goes: “In love, she had to show her own face, and speak in a true voice, and she was visible from all directions.” Sarah’s story is excruciating because of the many assumed turns toward less hopeless conclusions that pass by, but also because the story manages to be at once cruel, funny, and sympathetic.
This is the difficult pleasure of reading Gallant. Whereas the best of Munro builds to reconfirmation of humanity in its daily struggling, Gallant at her best is elliptical and recalcitrant. The endings of her strongest stories feature a distancing from the prior intimacy that has developed between reader and character. “Some summer or another would always be walking on her grave” is a strangely worded, estranging close to “In the Tunnel,” resolving very little for us; the core meaning remains within the character herself. Here, and at the end of many other of her stories – “When We Were Nearly Young” (1960), “The Pegnitz Junction” (1973), “The Four Seasons” (1975), and “Scarves, Beads, Sandals” (1995) come to mind – Gallant invests her characters with the dignity of independence, in thought and emotion, to keep doing as they see fit, however blinkered they may be. Gallant’s opaque endings free her characters from the tainting designs of anyone positioned outside the world of the story, whether author, reader, reviewer, or foot-noting academic flea. At the end of the very best of her stories, I leave with the impression that I’ve been taken as close to the truth of a human life as I can be by a work of literature. But equally, Gallant reveals the greater depths of that truth, which she refuses to collapse into more easily exposed meanings that harmonize with impressive theories and cultural patriotisms, meanings that can be contained within the soothing symmetries, ironies, and reversals that we look for in stories.
The coffees had cooled, and the tables in La Coupole were emptying, the waiters mostly standing around, waiting for the evening to start. And I had yet to ask Gallant about her formation as a writer. I had a feeling that she’d treat the questions like those housefly queries about Canada – inevitable, annoying, unwanted. When I did raise the matter, she invoked the Russians, particularly Chekhov, and also cited Hemingway. “He’s taught us all how to write dialogue.” As would be expected, she prefers his short stories to his novels: “I read some so often, I almost knew them by heart, like music.” And when we turned, finally, to the matter of her writing, Gallant drew on Hemingway again. Her responses were uniformly terse. “I rewrite a lot, but I don’t change much.” “It’s mostly pruning you know.” “Everything starts off too long.”
Perhaps growing anxious at the thought of discussing her work, she offered a casual but conclusive self-reproach, “I’m a traitor to my own cause,” which brought the conversation to its close. Of the few answers Gallant did give about her writing, the most revealing had to do with how she balanced the relationship between depth and concision, so crucial to the short story form. I asked her how she knew when to take and when to give back.
“It comes on its own.”
There’s word of Gallant publishing the journals she’s kept for years. Biographies and critical studies of all sorts will inevitably be written, but one should be skeptical of how far into, or beyond, these five words such material will go toward making sense of why and how Gallant has accomplished as much as she has. Writers of the highest order cannot explain themselves or be explained to a standard matching their greatness, because in a very real way there’s nothing to explain, including why they left one place to live in another or what they make of the place they left. Their work, if successfully brought off, is a testament unto itself. Everything else, Gallant’s example suggests, should be silence; otherwise the work is overshadowed by the obvious and the incidental. Our discomfort before such reticence may be a sign of our insecurity before a writer whose greatness stands independent of a national culture, a minority position, or a regional tradition. This is someone confident enough of her craft to be known, simply, as Gallant, writer.
