A Fairly Good Time
MAVIS GALLANT (1922–2014) was born in Montreal and worked as a journalist at the Montreal Standard before moving to Europe to devote herself to writing fiction. In 1950, after traveling extensively she settled in Paris, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Over the course of her career Gallant published more than one hundred stories and dispatches in The New Yorker. In 2002 she received the Rea Award for the Short Story and in 2004, the PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement. In addition to A Fairly Good Time, New York Review Books Classics publishes three collections of Gallant’s short stories: Paris Stories, Varieties of Exile, and The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories.
PETER ORNER is the author of two collections of stories, Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge and Esther Stories, and two novels, Love and Shame and Love and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo. He is also the editor of two books of oral history, Underground America and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. His book of nonfiction Am I Alone Here? will be published in November 2016. Orner has received Guggenheim and Lannan Foundation fellowships, and two Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at San Francisco State University.
A FAIRLY GOOD TIME
with Green Water, Green Sky
MAVIS GALLANT
Introduction by
PETER ORNER
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
A Fairly Good Time copyright © 1970 by Mavis Gallant
Green Water, Green Sky copyright © 1959 by Mavis Gallant
Introduction copyright © 2016 by Peter Orner
All rights reserved.
Cover image: Peter Turnley, Paris, 1982; © Peter Turnley/Corbis
Cover design: Katy Homans
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gallant, Mavis, author. | Gallant, Mavis. Green water, green sky.
Title: A fairly good time / by Mavis Gallant ; introduction by Peter Orner.
Other titles: Green water, green sky.
Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2015] | Series: New York Review Books Classics
Identifiers: LCCN 2015040639 (print) | LCCN 2015048276 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590179871 (paperback) | ISBN 9781590179888 (epub)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Humorous. | FICTION / Literary.
Classification: LCC PR9199.3.G26 A6 2015 (print) | LCC PR9199.3.G26 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015040639
ISBN 978-1-59017-988-8
v1.0
For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
A FAIRLY GOOD TIME
GREEN WATER, GREEN SKY
INTRODUCTION
THE BOOK jacket copy of the Random House first edition of A Fairly Good Time, Mavis Gallant’s second and last published novel, and among the most neglected masterworks of the last century, begins with this sentence: “The setting of this deliciously funny and heartbreaking novel is the Paris of the 1960’s and its endearing protagonist is a vague, warm-hearted, untidy girl named Shirley Perrigny.” The jacket goes on to call Shirley myopic and gauche before praising the novel’s delightful barrage of wit and finally concluding that, in spite of Shirley’s faults, you’ll end up siding up with her against a shabby world.
Of course, jacket copy is by nature ridiculous. How to distill into a few lines what needed many years and a whole book to express? Marketing will always be a product of its time, in this case 1970. Forty-five years from now, jacket copy written today will probably sound just as goofy, though there might not be any jackets. Even so, I have a notion that this particular copywriter read (or didn’t read) a vastly different novel than I did.
Deliciously funny? It’s true A Fairly Good Time—the title comes from an Edith Wharton line (“If you make up your mind not to be happy there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a fairly good time”)—is funny, very funny. But the tone, the message being sent, is way off and suggests: This is light stuff, you’ll really like it, and then you’ll probably forget about it. But won’t it make a wonderful gift for a witty friend? Had I been the copywriter, I might have tried something catchy to the tune of: Think of this book as a new wave Sun Also Rises written by a woman with a better sense of humor.
And vague? Shirley? She’s brave, exuberant, bewildered, wounded, fickle, mistake-prone, meandery—all this and a lot more. Including, yes, untidy. But isn’t there something inherently logical about Shirley’s theory about making one’s bed? Why make something when you’re only going to unmake it in a few hours? There is nothing hazy, nothing fading away, about this character. Shirley bursts forth as she entered the world in the first place. As her own mother puts it in the hilariously bizarre letter that opens the book: “To think that when you were on the way I believed you were a tumour! But you were you—oh, very much so.”
I have a tendency to fall deeply in love with fictional characters. Call it a flaw in my critical judgment skills. When I was kid, I liberated the neighbor’s rabbits after reading Watership Down. Perhaps you might not want to take books so literally, my mother said. Gallant once wrote, recognizing the odd relationship that fiction has to our lives: “I still do not know what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist.”
I think writers create people who don’t exist in order to fend off a permanent, nagging loneliness, and by some strange alchemy these people—and rabbits—keep us readers company, too. I’ll be lugging along Shirley now for the duration.
•
It is 1963 and newly remarried Shirley, a bookish, twenty-seven-year-old Canadian living in Paris, returns to her apartment one Sunday morning, after being out all night, to discover that her husband, Philippe, has apparently moved out.
She’d told him she was going to a party, but she’d spent the night watching over a friend who’d attempted suicide. Renata hadn’t tried that hard (the pills were crushed aspirin and she may have been only wanting to play at being Marilyn Monroe, who did kill her herself a year earlier), but the circumstances are real enough. Shirley can’t tell Philippe the truth because then she would have to tell him about the illegal abortion Renata had on Friday. Any knowledge would have potentially implicated Philippe under France’s strict antiabortion laws. Abortion didn’t become legal in France until 1975. It’s complicated, even convoluted, but doesn’t this characterize so many of our entanglements—our friendships, our marriages? It’s important to note that these characters are all still in their twenties, when drama for drama’s sake is at a premium.
Not that Shirley is some saint running around Paris helping desperate friends. Well, in some ways she is, but let’s say she’s no wifely saint. A few days after Philippe leaves (he’s only decamped to his mother’s but for a Frenchman this is distance enough), Shirley sleeps with her upstairs neighbor, a Greek architect named James whose greatest fear is that Shirley will attempt to have a conversation with him, and whose idea of a book is the thesaurus he uses to prop open the window. But I can’t help preferring shallow James to over-serious Philippe, a journalist who, in one of the novel’s more brilliant send-ups, is said to have written numerous articles on different subjects, all under the same title: “A Silent Cry.” Infantile drunkenness in Normandy: “A Silent Cry.” The Berlin Wall: “A Silent Cry.” The C
anadian question and the liberation of Quebec: “A Silent Cry.” It is Philippe, the author of “A Silent Cry,” who believes that Shirley’s most damning fault is her openheartedness. “Your life is like a house without doors,” he says.
Still, for the duration of the novel Shirley aches for Philippe.
•
In an essay written during roughly the same period as A Fairly Good Time, Gallant says, “The question of what people see in each other defies analysis.” She was introducing a book of the prison letters of a French schoolteacher, a woman who was held in preventive detention after being caught in an affair with a sixteen-year-old male student. The teacher committed suicide shortly after her release from jail. The case of Gabrielle Russier and Christian Rossi mesmerized France in the late sixties, and while Gallant skewers a French legal system that punished a female teacher but would have excused the same crime if committed by a man, men being men (deliciously funny?), it is the conundrum of love that drives her probe. She goes on to write: “The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true mystery left to us, and when we come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature—or for love, for that matter.”
This is Gallant’s inexhaustible subject. In story after story, book after book. Her work is a living bulwark against the notion that there could ever be a final word said about the behavior of people in love, out of love, seeking love, rejecting love, enduring love, conjuring love . . .
•
In A Fairly Good Time, Philippe’s worst crime is absenting himself from the novel itself. For instance, Philippe misses out, among so many other experiences, on munching éclairs with Cat Castle, an old family friend, in town on “grand tour” from Canada.
“You’ve messed up two marriages now,” said Mrs. Castle.
“Why are you always in such a hurry to get married, I wonder? You seem to get married in a rush, then you rush the other way.”
“Pete died, Mrs. Castle.”
A lesser writer would have milked the moment. Gallant knows better. The ghost of this first husband, Pete, hovers over the book without suffocating it. Shirley mourns like real people mourn, that is, erratically and with much forgetfulness.
A reader is swept along as Shirley drifts one way and then another. Every day without Philippe is a day open to encounters with other people. In a café, she meets Claudie Maurel, a young mother who emerges to play an increasingly important, if at times baffling (even to Shirley), role in the novel. But first, Shirley has to pay her tab, as Claudie has no money to pay the waiter. Those who admire Gallant’s shorter work might be perplexed. Unlike the stories, A Fairly Good Time refuses restraint, and Gallant almost gleefully luxuriates in digressive opportunities. Shirley’s brain wanders as much as her feet. But this is what makes this novel such a revelation. Here, in a book overlooked for nearly half a century, a reader experiences Gallant at her most experimental and spontaneous. At the center of this spontaneity is a character who will not, in the face of grief, repudiate life.
All her screwups, all her losses. Shirley gets up in the morning and goes at it again. And when you might least expect it, in the boldest of narrative maneuvers, the scaffolding of the very book gives way, and Shirley begins (in a letter she never sends) to speak directly for herself about all the things Philippe could never understand, including her first marriage. The result is so affecting that I felt myself drop into a free fall. If I could have, I would have reached into the novel and tried to hold her. It is, as I’ve said, this sort of novel.
For Gallant, I believe, the business of having to begin again, to quote the title of one of her most magnificent longer stories, is “the cost of living.” And when I think of her work, I think of the immense number of opening lines she set in motion. Gallant published a hundred and sixteen stories in The New Yorker alone. In a brief story called “In Transit,” published in the magazine in 1965, a character named Philippe Perrigny and his new wife, Claire, are stuck in a waiting room in the Helsinki airport. A squabbling older couple (“What I wonder is what I have been to you all these years”) prompts Claire to ask about Philippe’s ex-wife.
“Why did you leave her?”
He had been expecting this, and said, “Because she couldn’t concentrate on one person. She was nice to everybody, but couldn’t concentrate enough for a marriage.”
“She was unfaithful.”
“That too. It came from the same lack of concentration. She had been married before.”
“Oh? She was old?”
The earlier story acts as a kind of pre-coda to the novel and in the course of it, Philippe does, in a sense, read the letter Shirley never sends. For a moment, he thinks of how Shirley must have looked before he had known her, when she was even younger and in love.
•
Green Water, Green Sky, published in 1959, is as desolate as A Fairly Good Time is crowded. There’s humor—nothing in Gallant is ever free of humor. Yet here the comedy lacks buoyancy. And the edge is far deadlier. Both novels are set largely among expatriates in Paris, except now we have actual Americans as opposed to wrongly accused Canadians. Both books culminate in August in Paris, that month when the city empties out and in theory only lost souls remain. Unlike the longer novel, which is about marriage, friendship, and everything else under the sun, including the etymology of flowers and the Algerian War, this earlier work is focused nearly exclusively on family. If A Fairly Good Time is a messy, anarchic daydream of a novel that will ravage your heart, Green Water, Green Sky is a spare and undiluted nightmare.
At one point in A Fairly Good Time, Shirley says, “I prefer dark to daylight or any kind of light.” Don’t believe her for a second. Florence Harris, on the other hand, the character around whom Green Water, Green Sky revolves (to call her a protagonist would be to suggest action), truly hungers for all-consuming darkness. It doesn’t make her any less riveting. At a party among strangers, the sort of party Shirley would enjoy and Florence would loathe, Florence would get all the attention.
Divided into four distinct parts, Green Water, Green Sky is radically compressed, a precursor to Gallant’s later stories where she moves, seemingly without effort, and often with hardly a transition, back and forth across decades and space, capturing, as so few ever have, the weight of memory on a page. We first meet Florence, or Flor, as she is called by her family, in Venice as a fourteen-year-old, worshipped and feared by her younger cousin George. They are the kind of cousins who only see each other once every few years, and yet the image of Flor breaking apart a necklace burns into George’s memory.
She unstrung the beads still in her hands and flung them after the others, making a wild upward movement with her palms. “Oh, stop it,” her mother cried, for people were looking, and Flor did appear rather mad, with her hair flying and her dress blowing so that anybody could see the starched petticoat underneath, and the sunburned thighs. And poor little George, suddenly anxious about what strangers might think—this new, frantic little George ran here and there, picking up large, lozenge-shaped beads from under people’s feet.
George has held on to a few of these beads as good luck charms. Eleven years after this scene along the Grand Canal (in the novel, only a few pages later), he brings the last remaining bead to a party in New York to celebrate Flor’s marriage to a man named Bob Harris. (Bob Harris is never just Bob; he’s always Bob Harris as if his name is a single word.) But when George tries to present his sacred treasure to his cousin, a talisman rescued from oblivion, Flor is puzzled. A necklace? “I’m not a person who breaks things,” she says.
An eternal disconnect. The one person we thought would have remembered a life-defining moment has no idea what we’re talking about. George is left gripping the bead in his sweaty palm. But Flor’s connection to her family, to her very life, is a lot more tenuous than your average cousin. And her descent into debilitating mental illness—back then the diagnosis might have been more quaintly called a nervous breakdown—is as startling as it is quick. Wh
ile walking along the Boulevard des Capucines, Flor feels the motionless sidewalk erupt under her feet.
As Flor’s frantic sense of desolation increases, all the energy she can muster is used to push other people away. At a café, Flor begins a letter to her psychiatrist. “What help can you give me?” she writes. “I have often been disgusted by the smell of your dresses and your rotten teeth.”
In Green Water, Green Sky, as in A Fairly Good Time, minor figures achieve indelibility, often in as few as one or two sentences. In part three, when the book retreats in time to the courtship of Flor and Bob Harris in Cannes, a fraud named Wishart—who is a friend of Flor’s mother, Bonnie—nearly steals the show. Yet, above all, it is the book’s relentless examination of the impact of Flor’s mental collapse on herself, and on her mother and husband, that is the source of the novel’s bleak power.
Both novels employ letter writing to remarkable effect, but there’s a moment in Green Water, Green Sky when Gallant takes this nearly vanished, intimate art to an entirely new level. Bonnie writes to George’s parents, breezily thanking them for the new hat. She reports some of the latest news and casually mentions that George might want to postpone his trip to Paris in August, as she and Bob Harris will be out of town, and Flor, you know, never likes to go out these days. Georgie simply wouldn’t have any fun. Inside this “official” letter, Bonnie slides a small note card where she makes an attempt tell the truth: “Polly, Flor is getting so queer, I don’t know her any more.” Can you imagine? An e-mail within an e-mail, or a post within a post, where you tell it like it really is? Bonnie is abominable in so many ways. She’s a controlling, vain, incurable anti-Semitic snob, but she’s also somebody’s mother.
And Bob Harris—a man who is referred to by the family as “the Seal” because he can’t prevent himself from charming people—he, too, injects the story with raw sorrow. Pathetic Bob Harris, the Jew who Bonnie always thought was unworthy of her daughter, Bob Harris who will never touch his wife again—it is this Bob Harris who, while sitting beside Flor in their dark bedroom, remembers her and mourns her at the same time: “Still, remembering, he said, ‘I do love you,’ but he was thinking of the hot, faded summer in Cannes, and the white walls of his shuttered room on a blazing afternoon, and coming in with Flor from the beach.”