Edited by Neil Besner, Marta Dvořák, and Bill Richardson
[Véhicule Press; December 2024]
Whither Mavis?
The thinking goes that Mavis Gallant is underrated, that she should be appreciated as well as (if not more than) other latter-half twentieth-century North American short form luminaries—John Cheever, Raymond Carver, or Alice Munro. To be clear, Gallant is well-regarded in narrower circles, with fanship that includes Peter Orner, Michael Ondaatje, the late Russell Banks, and Jhumpa Lahiri. In 2021, filmmaker Wes Anderson loosely adopted a portion of her journalistic coverage of the 1968 Paris riots into a section of The French Dispatch, though most (not all) reviews of the film focused not on Gallant but on The New Yorker itself, the publisher of her dispatches.
This review is not that manifesto of appreciation, but in a longer essay I’d try to gather the ways in which her stories (over 100 published in The New Yorker) and her novel A Fairly Good Time are among the best literature we have. Yet almost no one reads Mavis Gallant. Why? It can’t be only that she was Canadian, although Gallant was specifically a Canadian expat in Paris—where she settled for good before turning thirty —which puts her at two removes from US audiences. Perhaps this remove alongside the fact that her subject matter is steeped in the trudging delight of the everyday while lacking the tawdriness of someone like Munro. Gallant’s style resists hagiography, too; first a journalist, her prose leaves few authorial fingerprints; only the story matters. As Lahiri has said quite well, Gallant’s writing is “at once dense and nimble, urgent and orderly, light-hearted and dark; about experiences both pedestrian and profound . . . virtuosic without fuss, compassionate without sentimentality.” (It’s ironic that Anderson, a style fetishist, adopted her work.) So we are left with Mavis Gallant, a self-effacing stylist, Canadian but not, an expat in Paris decades after Stein and her lot, after even Baldwin, impossible to categorize. Who is she, really?
A writer very much her own.
In 1986, Random House published Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews, a gathering of Gallant’s coverage on the Paris riots, her essay about the Gabrielle Russier scandal, and various critical reviews. Nearly forty years later, we now have a second book of Gallant nonfiction, one that peers at a much earlier stage of her life, this time from independent Montreal-based publisher Véhicule Press. Montreal Standard Time is a collection of articles Gallant wrote in her twenties for the newspaper The Montreal Standard between 1944 and 1950, before she moved to Paris, covering a range of topics on Canadian life: profiles of authors and their books, coverage of soldiers returning from the war (and war brides), immigrants, parenting, the lives of women, and other general cultural trends.
When collections of an author’s marginalia are published, it’s fair to ask why. Gallant herself might lack enthusiasm. “Journalism did not influence my writing fiction,” she said in her 1999 Paris Review interview. Neil Besner’s introduction to Montreal Standard Time admits to Gallant’s reluctance but points to a 1988 lecture in which Gallant acknowledged the closeness of the forms, before he goes on to assert that “what readers have never been able to appreciate is just how important Gallant’s early journalism was to her development as a writer.” This is how Montreal Standard Time is presented to us: as a peek into the great writer’s writing before she was great. As a way to see how journalism (may have) shaped her fiction. Try to spot the echoes between this piece and that—an activity Besner encourages, telling us that a 1947 article penned by Gallant “seems . . . to have looked ahead” to her first story published in The New Yorker six years later. So Montreal Standard Time is a curio, a peek at the future composed composer in a not quite composed stage. Perhaps there’s a reassurance in this, as well; perhaps we can more easily see ourselves, our own potential, in the rawer material. Better, perhaps we can more easily see Gallant.
At times Montreal Standard Time is quite revealing, especially of Gallant’s disappointment with Canada’s relationship with literature. She opens “Why Are Book Prices So High?” by bluntly observing that “Canadians who buy books form a very small section of the population,” and in the same article she goes on to critique both Canada’s readers and more so its publishers for the nation’s lack of complex, original literature. On several occasions in Montreal Standard Time, Gallant does this work of stepping back and assessing the national literary landscape, presumably imagining her own place in it. In “Why Are We Canadians So Dull?,” she asserts, “Canadian writing never hurt anyone’s feelings. It didn’t help anybody either,” and she then connects the lack of a compelling canon to a sort of national malaise. “Canada in the early fifties was an intellectual desert,” she tells The Paris Review. No wonder she left.
In several of the collection’s articles, Gallant tamps down her satirical tone and plays the more passive journalist. “Frontier Farmers,” “Stalag Diary,” and other similar pieces take Gallant into thornier national issues: the struggles of government-funded frontier settlements, the war-time experiences of soldiers in enemy prison camps, problematic maternity homes, and more. With such grave topics, Gallant—I think correctly—sets aside her usual preference for amusement. I find myself curious about whether this informed her later aversion to tackling “larger” issues in her fiction, saving them instead for her nonfiction.
To be clear, Montreal Standard Time is (plainly stated) a fun read. The delight Gallant frequently conveys is the same we find in the fiction of Mansfield and Berlin, in Chekhov and, well, Gallant. “Un homme et son peche,” an article about a radio serial focused on corruption in small towns, revels in the creator’s dark views of humanity (“What dominates our lives? Greed!”). “Don’t Call Me War Bride” takes a closely personal view of an English “war bride” struggling to find her place in Montreal; that she especially hates the weather is a glowingly Gallantian detail. And Gallant always seems to find joy in the individual: Even in articles with more serious leanings, once she has an individual to engage with—and to share with the reader—her joy is apparent. “A Wonderful Country,” a fiction-esque profile of an unnamed Hungarian immigrant, begins:
I called him the Hungarian because I couldn’t pronounce his name. If he had a name for me, I never heard it. We weren’t what you’d call chummy.
The article takes us on his search for housing, lingering on a particularly odd apartment visit that allows Gallant to stretch her storytelling talents (“You could smell wax and lemon oil and sense a faint layer of dust. But you couldn’t see very much because the air was dark green from years of being strained through window shades”), allowing for her satirical bent (she wryly conveys the cheap snobbery of the prospective landlords), and ending with a gratifying narrative arc, as the Hungarian’s ebullience ultimately wins her—and us—over.
Generally, Gallant is much less interested in countries or issues; she prefers people, interesting ones. Fittingly, her coverage of a Jean-Paul Sartre visit to Montreal is warmly wicked, as is her teasing piece about the difficulties in coming to an agreed-upon definition of jazz. In another article about newspaper cartoons, she even mocks her future publisher—again, more with wit than anger: “Funniest creature in the world today, judging by the way she keeps turning up in magazines, is the stupid woman . . . In The New Yorker’s little world, women can’t do a darn thing right.” Though perhaps there’s an edge to that last bit—the dark part of the Gallant equation. And there is a bit of anger in these pieces, especially her ongoing frustration with Canada, as again and again she writes firmly about poor treatments of immigrants, some then-popular cultural attitudes (such as the embracing of psychology—she cheerfully savages Hitchcock’s Spellbound—and nonsensical explanations for rising divorce rates), or problematic reform schools for wayward teens.
Montreal Standard Time is a compelling entry into the canon of Mavis Gallant. Depending on what you’re looking for, there is much you might see: the emergence of a developing artist; the origins of future stories; a struggling nation; a historical sense of life in post-WWII Montreal; and, most of all, keenly perceptive and enjoyable writing from a writer who, at least in her later fiction, is a bit hard to see.
Sean Bernard is the author of the Juniper Prize-winning story collection Desert sonorous and the novel Studies in the Hereafter. He serves as prose editor for Veliz Books, on the board of AWP, and as Creative Writing program director at the University of La Verne.
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