Mavis Gallant is that lone wolf or dark horse of Canadian literature. Born to an anglophone family in Montreal, Gallant’s childhood would best be described as unhappy. Her father was a stunted and unachieved artist cum furniture salesman. While her mother was the kind of woman who should not have children, a cold detached social climber, who had no maternal virtue or instinct, and often saw fit to forfeit charge of young Mavis to others. Including boarding schools or guardians. Her father died relatively young from kidney disease and her mother as aforementioned left Gallant to her own devices at boarding schools in the charge of others, which imbued the young Mavis with a sense of self-reliance and independence at an early age; two traits which would come in hand as she pursued a life of the literary and journalistic. A young Gallant who recently moved back to Montreal used quick wits to talk herself into jobs in which she had no formal education or training for. She started working for the Canadian National Film Board as Administrative Support, a job the ambitious Gallant loathed, in part by the tedium of the work itself, but also due to the film boards director’s disdain for women in the workforce, complaining that if there wasn’t a war, none of them would be there. Thankfully the stint was short, and Gallant moved on to work for the Montreal Standard a now defunct English language newspaper. During this time, she would send her work to The New Yorker for review, though initially rejected, she found encouragement from then groundbreaking and legendary editor, William Shawn, whose encouragement had often produced the fruitful tutelage of many successful writer’s careers over the years.
Mavis Gallant is often introduced as a writer ‘your,’ parents would rather you didn’t know about. Not because her work or subject matter were riddled in smut, vulgarity, or crude happenings, but rather then interesting facts regarding her professional writing career. Mavis Gallant left a stable, respectable, and decent job as a journalist with the former Montreal Standard at the age of 28 and decided to pursue a career and life of as a freelance writer. Furthermore, Gallant left Montreal, Quebec and Canada behind, traveling to Europe where she roamed the continent, writing and sending her work to The New Yorker, which happily published her stories, but an ill-advised and greedy agent (Jacques Chambrun) embezzled the money, hiding the fact that The New Yorker was publishing her fiction and ensuring that the vagabond Gallant’s whereabouts were never found by the magazine. By happenstance and chance, Gallant stumbled across the magazine and saw one of her stories published and with what little money she had left rang the office to inquire. It was then the fraudulent dealings of Chambrun (also known as ‘The Agent,’) were uncovered, and they extended beyond Gallant, and included many high profile writers such as: W. Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley, and H.G. Wells, as his most high-profile victims. From there, however, the relationship between Mavis Gallant and The New Yorker was sealed, Gallant became a seasoned then staple and finally veteran contributor to the magazine. Her short stories paved the way for Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood and have become something of a hallmark of the good old New Yorker, one which enjoyed the company and contributions of other such illuminating alumni: Jamaica Kincaid, James Merrill, Pauline Kael, James Wood, Dorothy Parker, and James Baldwin.
In all of that there is always the sense of the ‘Old World,’ in Mavis Gallant. In her fiction her characters are imbued with the manners, niceties, social graces, and prejudices of an otherwise bygone era. Her characters are displaced aristocrats, pauper artists, bohemians, desolate girls left in a boarding school, ordinary tax agents, insipid bureaucrats, observant, and clever children – the list of colourful characters of Mavis Gallant are endless. As a writer, Gallant remained sophisticated and her themes were always cosmopolitan and worldly, which separated her and segregated her from Margaret Atwood, the political and socially conscious writer and lecturer, and Alice Munro as a realist portraitist in miniature. The sense of displacement and lack of sense of home, in Gallant’s work may stem from her own rootlessness and displacement. Throughout her life, Mavis Gallant was either moved or shipped away. Transplanted then transported once again. Her fictional characters in turn reflect a state of continued transit, upheaval, displacement, and wanderlust. Gallant, however, did finally make a home for herself in Paris in the 1950’s, which after the war (or so they say) was an affordable city, one touched with the corrosive understanding of what had taken place during the interwar years. There were demands for justice of the Vichy government and talks of collaborators with the occupying Nazi’s. All this seedy dirty business, however, is more aptly explored in the works of Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano, who excavates the collective obfuscation of the past as it relates to the personal trauma and the institution of collective amnesia. Gallant, in turn, however, found a home. She resided in Paris for the remainder of her adult life, but remained a conscientious Canadian, never abandoning her passport or taking French citizenship, but also remaining distant from the expansive country that was her homeland.
Though Mavis Gallant is renowned and remembered for her short stories and novels, “Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews,” hankers back to her days as a journalist with the Montreal Standard. The first section of this anthology of non-fiction work is devoted exclusively to the May 68 student protests that shut down the entire city of Paris and shook the French nation. In it Mavis patrols the streets in discord, observing the civil disobedience that had taken place within the city. Throughout these two pieces (specifically commissioned for The New Yorker) Mavis Gallant showcases sympathy for the students at protest and war with the social conservatives, traditions, elitism, capitalism, American imperialism, and rampant consumerism, not to mention the Gaullist attitudes of the post-War French society. Through discord, disobedience, and general destruction, the students and their sympathizers shut down French society. Remaining cautiously objective, Mavis Gallant immerses herself into the youthful idealistic world which has come to shut down the country. There’s tender admiration in her approval of their protest, as she observes their spitfire firebrand demands for change—for revolution. She finds de Gaulle a absent and sad figure. Cowardly even. Hiding and silent, then resolute and steely affirmative the next. The students demands and their political ambitions failed, but as consolation the winds of social change rollicked through the country thereon after.
There was something palpable about the way Mavis Gallant wrote about the events of May 68. She walks the streets, which she remarks look war torn. She sees the students as they are: unorganized, idealistic, and full of life, and she sees where they vent their opposition too as old, crumbling, and archaic institutions of impressive longevity, but insular and elitist that is a wonder that the events of 68 took so long to transpire. Spring certainly is a month of change. Beyond that, Gallant can provide a grasp of the common people, the bystanders who are involuntarily struck by the measures taking place around them. They are baffled, scared, uneasy, and inconvenienced. The government failed them in those moments, through its own inaction and gross incompetence to quell and negotiate with the students and the sympathetic workers; and yet, somehow, de Gaulle’s party came out on top again, with an even more fevered mandate by the populace then before, yet the public had their fil of de Gaulle himself. He was to authoritarian, to conservative, to self-centered, to old. The damage had been done. An unpopular politician is but a blight or blemish. A malicious tumor that must be amputated from the party unless the cariogenic rule of association be applied to them as well. best to leave a drowning man to his fate when the party can be saved. Unfortunately, the only criticism I can leverage against Mavis Gallant’s take on the events of 68, are her liberal and casual employment of French slogans, sayings, and dialogue into her work. there are no footnotes of translations and monolingual readers may have a disconcerting time trying to understand what is being said. translations should have presented or provided, regardless. Reportage is the facts and the figures, and though Gallant encompasses more then just the dry sensibilities of the events and provides a human narrative, readers may still wish to understand what exactly is being said on the streets to her. Gallant’s reportage of the events of May 68 takes up a great deal of the anthology, while her other essays and reviews remain equally as interesting, they come together as more then filler pieces, collected not on any thematic basis or concern, and often lack unified or harmonized thought beyond the fact that they showcase Gallant’s ability maintain her reportage heritage as a journalist.
Gallant’s portrait of the French writer and theatre critic Paul Léautaud was a gem within the anthology. Gallant provided a thoroughly amusing and engaging portrait of what one might call the stereotypical French intellectual or writer, complete with absurdist misanthropy, caustic wit, and unfortunate circumstance of being a career pauper, as if it has become a tradition in the Baudelaire sense. In Mavis Gallant own words in regard to Léautaud’s impoverished state:
“He was sustained, without knowing it, by the French refusal to accept poverty as a sign of failure [. . .].”
Mavis Gallant is one of those writers who you think should be better known then is. She’s fallen to the back of the shelf or is pulled down during post-secondary school academic studies, where droll professors’ drone on and on about simplicity as form. Gallant of course, is the rarest exception to the rule. Her stories and sentences are refined and polished whereby the encapsulated a world in transition. One can only imagine Mavis leaving her apartment at 14 rue Jean Ferrandi, Paris 6, and heading off to Café Le Dôme for a bite to eat, a drink, and of course to work. It was said, Mavis Gallant often lived places which lacked adequate heating which made work difficult, but the cafés became a welcome refuge, both the threshold into the world, and a safe distance from it, to observe, compile and write at. “Paris Notebooks: Essays & Reviews,” is a treat of a book, but its also a slow burn. It should be consumed moderately and within varying breaks, if only to enjoy each piece’s unique perspective, understanding, and commentary. There have been discussions over the past 9 (plus) years of the possibility of publishing and releasing Gallant’s diaries. They were originally set to be published in 2013-2014 but have so far been unreleased and no further detail has been released regarding the state of their publication. Despite circling obscurity, Mavis Gallant is remains one of the quiet giants and remarkable writers of the 20th Century, her commentary on the human condition and ability to encapsulate the cosmopolitan exaptation and displacement of the modern individual should not be overlooked or ignored, as Gallant is also a master of the short story.
Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
M. Mary
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