Review: Cynthia Zarin on Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant’s stories—intricate, vivid, often hallucinatory—are series of mirrored prisms; each facet catches the light but throws it aslant

“Send Me a Story!”

One of the most disconcerting things about being alive is discovering that what you thought mattered doesn’t—something else does. Mavis Gallant’s stories—intricate, vivid, often hallucinatory—are series of mirrored prisms; each facet catches the light but throws it aslant, on the floor, the ceiling, the back of a hand, a tremor at first inconsequential, but by the end, almost always, a searing and fatal illumination.

Gallant’s own story is equally involute. She was born in Montreal in 1922, her father died when she was ten. Afterwards, Mavis was shuttled between relatives and guardians, attending upwards of fifteen schools. She spent her late adolescence in New York City. There was a brief marriage (Gallant is her married name; she was born Mavis Leslie de Trafford Young), a stint as a reporter for a Montreal newspaper (the subject of her Linnet Muir stories). At twenty-eight, she quit her job and moved to Paris, with the intention of writing short stories. A friend said she was like an architect who had never built a garage, but the charge wasn’t entirely true—at eighteen, she’d already written the preternaturally astute and devastating “Thank You for the Lovely Tea” (though it was not published until 1956), and a few stories had been published in Canadian magazines. Already the characteristic Gallant notes are striking: the shifting point of view, the offhand, blistering denouement, and, above all, the slightly estranged and estranging position of a person in transit, without intimate connections. “I would like,” she wrote in a 1954 diary, “to be as anonymous as a stone or a tree.” Arriving in Paris, she famously sent three stories to The New Yorker. While none of these was published, she embarked on a relationship with the magazine, first with the editor Mildred Wood, and then with William Maxwell, The New Yorker’s legendary fiction editor. By 1963 he wrote to her, “Make me happy. Send me a story.” Over four decades, she would publish 116 stories in the magazine.

While Gallant’s Collected Stories was published by Random House in 1996, it was not a complete volume. The publisher’s limit was about six hundred pages: after that, as Gallant remarked, the book would have been hard to pick up. In the years preceding her death in 2014, at ninety-one, and since then, New York Review Books has published a number of selected compilations: A Fairly Good Time, Paris Stories, Varieties of Exile, and The Cost of Living, this last introducing previously uncollected stories. Now, here is The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, edited by the novelist Garth Risk Hallberg, who first came across Gallant’s stories about a decade ago when, for complicated reasons, he says, he had begun to despair of the possibilities of prose fiction. Gallant’s stories restored his faith.

After devouring her work in print, he found himself in the archives of The New Yorker at the New York Public Library, reading Gallant’s vast correspondence, primarily with Maxwell. From there, he went on to uncover stories that had appeared in journals like The Texas Quarterly and The Northern Review that, like some that were published in The New Yorker, were not reprinted in any of the extant collections. How deliberate were these exclusions? Her longtime Canadian publisher, Douglas Gibson, has said that at the end of her life, Gallant was sorry that so many of her stories were not in print.

Gallant herself believed that it did not serve her stories to read them at one go (or two, or three). Reading these stories now they do seem of a piece with those that have been more readily accessible. They display Gallant’s brilliance, her comic gift, and her limitations. Some stories—particularly “Its Image on the Mirror,” at seventy-five pages—seem to me too long, and bring to mind the phrase, “squashed novel,” that Gallant herself used to characterize some of her work. In these pages, the tension between the characters across time, lacking air, becomes claustrophobic. But another long story collected here, “Bonaventure,” in which Ramsey, young musician on a sojourn in Switzerland, can “say what he thought, but not always what he felt,” is among her very best, with an almost prehistoric menace and sentences so immaculately precise they verge on otherworldly: “Owing to a mistake in time, he was having a conversation with a very young girl who was somehow old enough to be his mother.”

What does it mean to be a “writer’s writer”? Often, it means a writer beloved by other writers, whose work nevertheless does not reach a wider reading public. William Maxwell himself was one, his novels The Folded Leaf and So Long, See You Tomorrow are quiet masterpieces (perhaps he sensed in Gallant a kindred spirit). The introductions to the last four books of Gallant stories published by New York Review Books, by Peter Orner, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Onadaatje, and Russell Banks, border on fan letters. Writing in The New Yorker in 2014 about her 2009 interview with Gallant, Lahiri remarked, “I was not the right person at all to interview her. I loved her work too much, and my debt to her was too great.”

Why so beloved of writers? Gallant’s characters are not only in transit but seem to have no fixed abode: they’ve washed up at hotels, or own them; their society is made up of transients, their attention taken up with fleeting acquaintances whose lives, like their own, are seen sidelong. Conversely, like Nick Carraway, they are rooted to the spot, unable to tear themselves away. I remember once years ago, in a composition class, a student said, with some exasperation, “You know what’s wrong with everything we read? Everything was written by a writer, and you know, that’s not how everyone feels!” Gallant’s stories, more than almost anyone else’s, are about how a writer feels. Gallant’s very quality of estrangement, of never being at home, of meticulously arranging the Rubik’s Cube of action and character so that the last tile slips into place, so Ramsey can “say what he thought, but not always what he felt,” is exhilarating, particularly for writers—exhilarating to watch someone continually at the top of her game, consistently moving the bishop and then the pawn with ingenuity and wit, but also, reading story after story, exhausting. But as Gallant says, that is not the way to read them.

Nevertheless, unlike other recent endeavors, in which stories (or novels, or drafts of poems) consigned to the scrap heap are scraped up and packaged for sale, Hallberg’s Uncollected Stories is a service to the author. Now, her work, as far as can be ascertained, can be read. Some of the editorial decisions here might have been otherwise: the geographical sections seem meaningless to me, and a chronology allowing readers to see where each story first appeared without hunting around in the source material at the end would have been helpful. It would be interesting to know which stories did appear in The New Yorker and elsewhere, to consider those editorial sensibilities. The last story that Mavis Gallant published in the magazine was “Scarves, Beads, Sandals” in 1995. After that, Tina Brown, who had become the magazine’s editor in 1992, told Gallant that they would no longer publish her work.

As Gallant’s history reveals, the vital, fragile relationships between writers and editors are crucial to the flourishing of literature. After Brown’s dismissal, Gallant stopped writing stories. Instead, she told friends, she was readying her diaries for publication. Up until now, her estate has hindered the collection of the diaries in book form, although they have appeared, piecemeal, in The New Yorker. The diaries, too, are shot through with Gallant’s piercing observations, on her feeling self, among other phenomena. On a trip to Venice in 1954, she writes of water that is “opaque, muddled green, as if children had been cleaning their paint brushes.” I hope the diaries too can now be published in full without further delay; when we do, we will finally have all the work that Gallant meant for us to read.

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Cynthia Zarin’s novel Inverno appeared in paperback this month, and her seventh book of poems, Next Day: New and Selected Poems appeared last summer. Her second novel, Estate, will appear this fall. She has written for Book Post about Shirley Hazzard, Laurie Colwin, Colm Toibin, Alan Garner, Elena Ferrante, John Burningham, and sharks.

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