Packing Like a Fury

It isn’t​ necessarily a good thing when a publisher brings out a writer’s uncollected stories. More is sometimes less. Barrels are scraped, doubts – often the writer’s own, if she or he is no longer around – are set aside; these stories may not have been collected for good reason, and reading someone’s weaker attempts can dilute the power of the rest. The failures give away the writer’s workings – the swan’s feet paddling hard under the assured surface – which can be disenchanting, at least temporarily. There’s no such problem, however, with this thick volume of Mavis Gallant’s Uncollected Stories, which brings together everything left out of the various collections and selections published over the last thirty years. There are 44 stories here and hardly any duds or clumsy landings. (Apparently – wise woman – Gallant threw a lot of work in the waste basket in ‘shreds’.) Each is so good that you have to pace yourself, recalling Gallant’s own admonition in her introduction to the Everyman edition of her Collected Stories: ‘Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.’ She’s right, but it’s easy for her to say. Temptation lies in wait for the unwary reader in every beginning of a new story.

The sheer quantity and variety of Gallant’s output is fascinating. She’s dislocated, a traveller, eager for clues, hungry to read the worlds she’s passing through. Her stories encompass stuffy Québécois Catholics, exiles from Eastern Europe, Swiss Nobel Prize winners, Canadians on the make in Europe after the war, Parisian tax collectors, the posh English living cheaply in Italy. Through her cast of diverse characters, Gallant assembles a record of mid-20th-century North America and Europe. Everywhere she looks she sees a story; her appetite to get inside it, to render its particular textures and its localised meanings, makes her a magnificent ventriloquist and interpreter. The ventriloquism is her form of sympathy – for all sorts of protagonists, nice ones and mean ones, smart ones and silly ones, the intense, the doomed and the hopeful.

Gallant was born in Canada in 1922. She describes her early years in the semi-autobiographical Linnet Muir stories. All but one are collected in Varieties of Exile, Russell Banks’s selection of Gallant’s work; the final story in the sequence, ‘With a Capital T’, appears in the Uncollected. Linnet is the only child of good-looking, glamorous parents who are part of an English-speaking smart set in Montreal, drinking prodigiously and dancing to the gramophone on the veranda on summer evenings. They make the decision, for reasons Linnet can’t fathom when she thinks about it later, to send their four-year-old daughter to board at a French convent school, ‘where Jansenist discipline still had a foot on the neck of the 20th century’. ‘I had a mother who should not have had children, it’s as simple as that’; she ‘found me civil and amusing until I was ten’. Linnet’s adored father, guarded and withholding, with his ‘fear of being bored’, gets more of a free pass, and surely hovers for ever afterwards in Gallant’s laconic and spare style. ‘My father … said hardly anything except for an occasional “Down” to his dogs.’ In the stories, as in life, her father dies of kidney disease when Linnet is ten – the moment things change with her mother. She’s told that he has gone to England, and for two years she waits for him to return before setting about uncovering the truth. The mother remarries and the daughter is consigned to a succession of boarding schools, where she’s miserable and often runs away. (Gallant attended seventeen schools.) The writing conveys the sheer exhilaration of freedom when it comes for Linnet at last: ‘I silently recited the vow I had been preparing for weeks: that I would never be helpless again and that I would not let anyone make a decision on my behalf.’

Gallant worked as a reporter for the Montreal Standard until she was 28. Her experience in the newsroom is the subject of many of the Linnet Muir stories. ‘If it hadn’t been for the god-damned war,’ Linnet hears one of the male editors remark, ‘we’d never have hired even one of the god-damned women.’ Looking back on this period, Gallant said she realised that she was ‘becoming exactly what I did not want to be: a journalist who wrote fiction along some margin of spare time’. It’s significant that her father had wanted to be a painter but instead worked as a furniture salesman. Gallant dreaded finding she had ‘a vocation without the competence to sustain it’.

She often told the story of what happened next. She decided to send three stories to the New Yorker – one acceptance would be good enough. If she couldn’t live on writing she intended to ‘destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook, and live some other way’. She went to Europe to await the verdict. In an interview published sixty years later, she told Jhumpa Lahiri that the magazine took two of the three stories. Garth Risk Hallberg, editor of the Uncollected, has learned from his research in the New Yorker archive that it took Gallant a few more tries than she let on. It’s true, however, that after ‘Madeline’s Birthday’ was finally accepted by the magazine in 1950, she went hungry for some months in Madrid while a crooked agent pocketed the money for further stories in the New Yorker, Esquire and other magazines. Gallant spent more or less the rest of her life in Paris, where she died in 2014. She was married only briefly and had no children. Her ambivalence on watching the événements of 1968 unfold beneath her windows is recorded in her collection of non-fiction, Paris Notebooks (1986). Other essays in that volume – about France, about books – are always interesting, freighted with her intense curiosity about the way people live and imagine their lives. She cherished her privacy and avoided public appearances. ‘I have arranged matters so that I would be free to write. It’s what I like doing.’

Everywhere in Gallant’s writing we feel the strong stamp of her temperament. She is above all economical. She did write two novels, Green Water, Green Sky (1959) and A Fairly Good Time (1970), and there was an abandoned book about the Dreyfus affair, but mostly she wrote short fiction, lots of it, over a career of 45 years. The New Yorker published 116 stories, the lion’s share of her work, and her relationship with the magazine’s fiction editor, William Maxwell, was supremely important. Her economy is there, too, at the level of the sentence: nothing obvious needs to be spelled out, nothing needs saying twice. The writing is compacted, substantial, chunky – bristling with details of place, clothes, dates, furnishings, physiognomy, finances. In ‘The Accident’ (1967), a young man, just before he dies, buys ‘crescent-shaped bread with a soft, pale crust’ and eats it on the street. Gallant is a meticulous record-keeper and her work has the spirit of an anthropological inquiry. In ‘The Old Place’ (1958), the ‘house they had abandoned was eighteen miles from Poughkeepsie, in a valley almost deserted because of a bad road. Traffic had been diverted to the new highway in 1938; scarcely anything passed now, except the mailman’s old Pontiac.’

‘Paola and Renata’ (1965) is about two girls who spend a summer with their mothers on the Italian lakes. Paola wears a ‘bathing cap made of yellow daisies’ because ‘the sun and the lake water would turn [her] lovely head to rust if she didn’t take care now.’ Attracting the right man will be all-important, though marriage hasn’t worked out too well for her mother. Paola’s recently deceased father, ‘a stoutish man with a rather large head and a mistress on the Mediterranean coast’, has left his widow without anything much – a block of flats in San Remo is in the mistress’s name – and she has ‘stopped tinting her hair, as a sign of sorrow or of desperation’, so that it’s ‘half mahogany, half dull grey’.

Wilfrid, the first suitor in ‘The Deceptions of Marie-Blanche’ (1953), set in Montreal during the war, turns out to be gay, though Marie-Blanche never understands why things didn’t work out. Every Friday he brings her ‘a corsage of tinted carnations, tortured onto wire stems and embalmed in prickly greenery’; her mother gets a box of chocolates, on the cover ‘a young person, dressed as Columbine, looking at the moon’. In the dining room, after they’ve all shed a few tears over the memory of Wilfrid’s dead mother, whom Marie-Blanche and her mother never knew, they drink scalding tea and eat ‘éclairs and creamy pastries called religieuses because their shape resembles little nuns’. All this material, this thickness of life, is wonderfully funny, but not because the writing condescends to it from an implied centre of better taste. Gallant’s perception is wholly absorbed in the world of each story. It’s funny that the widow has stopped tinting her hair, but it’s also tragic. It’s tragic that a young man died, but it’s the storyteller’s job to know what kind of bread he ate.

The details matter because they are clues to the lives in the stories. Gallant’s temperament is the opposite of a universalising one: she doesn’t believe that people’s experiences and feelings are the same under their different clothes. She thinks, like an anthropologist, that the clothes – and the rooms and the domestic habits and the politics on the streets – make all the difference to the way lives and feelings are experienced. She needs to speak with omniscient authority about what she sees (nobody inside a story can see the whole picture as she can) yet must at the same time submit to the worlds the stories describe. Judgment is opaque, only realised through the particularities of each case. Gallant was a hugely self-doubting writer – there are those scraps in the waste basket and also her anxious letters, hungry for validation, to Maxwell. (‘I have no judgment of my own work … and really, very little confidence except during the actual period of writing, so that I rely a great deal on what you think.’) And yet inside the stories her narrative positioning is forceful; she has a journalist’s preference for statement over hesitation, objective overview rather than subjective immersion. This is the paradox of her style.

In​ the superb miniature ‘Orphans’ Progress’ (1965), she sets out (in six pages) the history of two sisters in language that sounds like it could come from a case study, though no case study could move so deftly from fact into piercing insight. ‘When the Collier girls were six and ten they were taken away from their mother, whom they loved without knowing what the word implied, or even that it existed, and sent to their father’s mother.’ No one inside the story ever tries to reconstruct the reality of those early years – not even the girls themselves. How could they hold on to anything but fragments, in the face of the certainties of the adults now around them: their grandmother, their grandmother’s maid, their social worker? They learn that they had been ‘uneducated and dirty and in danger’, that their mother never washed her neck and wore men’s shoes ‘because some man had left them behind’. The social worker says their mother was unhappy. ‘She wasn’t,’ Cathie says, but no one believes her. ‘“To the day I die,” said the social worker … “I won’t forget the screams of Mildred when she was dragged out of that pigsty.”’

The maid reports that the sheets on their bed were ‘so dirty, the dirt was like clay’, though the girls remember ‘pictures on the wall, their mother’s and the children’s own drawings’. They learn that French (their mother is French-Canadian) is ‘an inferior kind of speech’. ‘At first, when they were taken away from their mother, Cathie, the elder girl, would wake up at night holding her head, her elbows on her knees, saying in French, “My head hurts,” but a few minutes later, the grandmother having applied cold wrung-out towels, she would say in English, “It’s better.”’ Their grandmother isn’t a monster, but life is cruel. The story’s form of justice is in reassembling, through its omniscience, truths which are constantly being dissolved by time and change and the accidents of history. The sisters are separated later when Mildred is adopted, and by the time they are adults they hardly know each other, though at first each was reflected, Gallant writes, only in the other’s eyes.

It’s here, inside such dense thickets of detail, that Gallant is an intensely moral and political writer. Her antipathy to noble stances and noisy pronouncements hovers everywhere, often as bathetic comedy. ‘Irina’ (1974) – not in the Uncollected – picks sceptically at the private life of a great novelist and moralist, ‘the end of a Tolstoyan line of moral lightning rods’, who ‘went on writing and talking and travelling until he positively could not focus his eyes or be helped aboard a train’. In ‘The Old Friends’ (1969), a female reporter interviews a German actress, Helena, whose childhood was spent in transit camps and whose Yiddish-speaking grandmother was killed. ‘And was the child … sexually? … molested?’ the reporter asks Helena’s interpreter. ‘Rape is so important to these people, Helena has learned; it is the worst humiliation, the most hideous ordeal the Englishwoman can imagine.’ Helena values her friendship with the German police commissioner, who knows about her time in ‘those places’ but ‘accepts at once that it was beyond his imagination’, though he loves her and thinks she looks like a Holbein. Whenever their talk comes close to her past, he finds he can’t swallow and feels a pain ‘like pleurisy, like indigestion’; he doesn’t ‘know the word for anything any more’. A chastened inadequacy is more honourable than avidity.

In ‘Poor Franzi’ (1954), Elizabeth, a well-intentioned American girl working for the occupation forces after the war, simply can’t comprehend the experience of the young man she’s going to marry, around whose history and character – ‘blandness and good manners and something evasive that might be panic’ – she has spun an awed romance. He’s the last scion of an old titled Austrian family; there are photographs of his childhood with his sisters in the garden of the family home, which had ‘received a direct bomb hit while his father and mother sat in the dining room, with nothing to eat’. Franzi has ‘already decided that in order to survive he must not encumber himself’. When his grandmother, the Baronin, dies he burns her papers and photographs and pockets the few jewels she has left. Elizabeth tiptoes around what she imagines is his grief. It doesn’t occur to her that he has no intention of going to the funeral and no feelings to spare for his grandmother – or for her either. ‘They all want to marry Americans.’

American holidaymakers are hungry – more avidity – for the spectacle of European defeat. ‘Well, look at that,’ they exclaim at the sight of the old lady’s rings. ‘And we send them money!’ The irony is intricate and cuts every way; the crassness of the American observers is reproached by the drab piety of their middle-aged English friend, who tells them sentimentally that the Baronin ‘lost everything in the war, and all but two of her family. One of them lives in Salzburg, a grandson, a thoroughly useless person.’ The secret of the story isn’t that Franzi is actually nice, or that he’s suffering, or even that he’s vindicated by history. Possibly he has a better grasp of the postwar surreal: when Elizabeth telephones from the funeral, he’s carousing in the office of the company he works for, pointlessly trying to sell electrical appliances (no one in Austria at that point cares much ‘for jump-up toasters’). His employer admires the convivial business practices he’s seen in American films, the drinking and laughter; ‘he would have liked a switchboard and a girl like Betty Grable,’ but there was only Franzi. At the centre of this comedy of intersecting visions are a few hard, irrefutable facts: the bomb, the dining room, death, defeat and change. Poor Franzi.

Gallant’s​ stories feel enormous; their material is flavourful because it’s so dense and compressed. When she wanted to develop material across a longer space, she sometimes wrote a suite of four or five stories, broken-off pieces connected inside a particular life. The suites don’t pretend to join the pieces into a single shape, but place them side by side as discontinuous phases of experience, each piece with its own centre. These suites – ‘Linnet Muir’, ‘The Carette Sisters’, ‘Édouard, Juliette, Lena’, ‘Henri Grippes’ – were written in the 1970s and 1980s and are all in the Collected; most of Hallberg’s uncollected stories are from the 1950s and 1960s, when Gallant was producing discrete stories. Apart from her experiments with story sequences, it’s difficult to perceive any distinctive change from her early stories to the later ones, except the period details. ‘I don’t compare,’ Gallant said. ‘It’s just a straight line to me.’ Two much longer stories are republished in the Uncollected, ‘Its Image on the Mirror’ (1964) and ‘Virus X’ (1966), which help, alongside the suites, with understanding why the short form is a perfect fit for the way Gallant’s imagination works, and why she isn’t primarily a novelist.

‘Its Image on the Mirror’, about the lives of two sisters in wartime and postwar Montreal, is told by Jean, who is older, plainer and more conforming than the bohemian, beautiful, outrageous Isobel. Jean is devoured by jealousy and love for her younger sister: ‘I warmed my hands at her life,’ she tells us, putting together Isobel’s story, which is of necessity also her own. In Gallant’s fiction we’re very rarely present in a scene as it occurs: everything is shown retrospectively, filtered through thought and talk and the passage of time. (Maxwell described her method as ‘getting the hook in firmly … by telling something fairly far … into the story and then shuttling back and forth, instead of sticking to chronology’.) She often writes in the first person, her narrator becoming her witness and her surrogate. Jean can’t help giving evidence against herself; nobody knows her failures and longings better than she does, no one else could do justice to the enchantments of Isobel. The anthropologist need not be dispassionate to attain an overview. In ‘Its Image on the Mirror’, Gallant’s method is stretched to its limits and doesn’t break. The story’s significance sprawls in different directions, all its elements richly combining; they might have become separate stories in a suite. The girls’ parents decide to move from the old-fashioned privilege of small-town English-speaking Canada; Isobel has a wartime love affair with a tortured married intellectual (he later becomes a dull headmaster); Jean’s own marriage is compromised (didn’t Tom want Isobel first?); and finally there’s Isobel’s diminishment, after she runs off with a doctor to Caracas and comes home to visit, defiant but faded and thin, a slave to her husband and children.

When they work less well, Gallant’s longer excursions can feel as though a short story has been expanded beyond its natural scope. This is true of ‘Virus X’, about two Canadian girls living hand to mouth in postwar France. The girls aren’t quite interesting enough, not quite perceptive enough, to sustain our attention. Gallant’s first novel, Green Water, Green Sky, was reissued last year by Daunt. It’s the story of a mother and daughter, Bonnie and Flor, from an old American family, marooned in Europe by the mother’s silly extramarital affair and consequent divorce. (They might be characters out of Edith Wharton.) The four sections of the novel are discontinuous in time and space: a childhood episode in Venice, remembered all his life by Flor’s stolid cousin Georgie; Flor’s breakdown following two years of marriage to Bob Harris, a Jewish American wine merchant in Paris; then back to Flor’s first meeting with Bob, on holiday by the sea in the south of France; then grown-up Georgie visiting Bonnie and Bob, after Flor has been committed to a psychiatric hospital. It’s full of good things, characteristically Gallant. Here’s Bonnie with Doris, an American neighbour in Paris, getting ready for a trip to Deauville:

Bonnie was packing like a fury now. They would shut themselves up in the oyster-coloured room, Bonnie dressed in a slip because a dress was a psychological obstacle when she had something to do, and gossip and pack … Bonnie was careful to avoid dropping the Deauville hostess’s name, out of an inverted contempt for Doris, but Doris got the point very soon. She was not impressed. She suspected all forms of titled address, and thought Bonnie would have been a nicer and more sincere person if she had used her opportunities to cultivate college professors and their wives … Doris was proud of her education – a bundle of notions she trundled before her like a pram containing twins.

Or here’s Flor, commenting on her mother’s friendship with a waspish gay English chancer: ‘I think he thinks they’re like Oberon and Titania, you know, all malice and showing off. Wishart would love to have wings and power and have people do as he says.’

Yet for all the subtlety of the writing, and the stylishly inverted order of the story’s unfolding, something feels too deliberate. When the second section ends with Flor hallucinating, imagining being lifted from her childhood pony into her estranged father’s arms, it’s as near as Gallant ever gets to glib. In the suites, the breaks between each story allow each phase of a life to have its own end and point, whereas Green Water, Green Sky feels too heavy with one mood, the disaster of Flor’s wasted life flavouring everything, yet not quite justifying the pervasive sense of loss. Gallant’s second novel, A Fairly Good Time, is more like ‘Virus X’: it’s too much, across too many pages. There’s an excess of detail, the point is oblique, and the subject, a widow whose second husband has left her, isn’t compelling enough – her scattiness becomes irritating. Density of reference, perfectly in proportion in a short story, can feel over-freighted and mannered across the expanse of a novel.

Gallant was possessed, in a lifetime of work, by all the voices speaking through her. ‘The first flash of fiction arrives without words,’ she reports. ‘Every character comes into being with a name (which I may change), an age, a nationality, a profession, a particular voice and accent, a family background, a personal history, a destination, qualities, secrets, an attitude toward love, ambition, money, religion and a private centre of gravity.’ Her writing reminds us that representation – forging words into sentences to capture things, places, people, histories – is the primary effort of fiction, its fundamental act. Take the ‘Good Deed’: ‘Houses of widows on the French Riviera have in common the outsize pattern of flowers on the chintzes; there is too much furniture everywhere, most of it larger than life. The visitor feels, as he is intended to, very small. These are child’s-view houses, though real children may feel oppressed in them, and are not often welcome to stay.’ Or ‘His Mother’, set in Budapest:

His mother had come of age in a war and then seemed to live a long greyness like a spun-out November. ‘Are you all right?’ she used to ask him at breakfast. What she really meant was: Ask me how I am, but she was his mother and so he would not. He leaned two fists against his temples and read a book about photography, waiting for her to cut bread and put it on a plate for him. He seldom looked up, never truly saw her – a stately, careless widow with unbrushed red hair, wearing an old fur coat over her nightgown.

The pleasure of reading begins in an excited stab of recognition, though we’re so often recognising people we’ve never met in places we’ve never been.