Paris Stories Read online

  BOOKS BY MAVIS GALLANT

  DRAMA

  What Is to Be Done? (1983)

  ESSAYS

  Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews (1986)

  FICTION

  The Other Paris (stories, 1956)

  Green Water, Green Sky (novel, 1959)

  My Heart Is Broken (stories, 1964)

  A Fairly Good Time (novel, 1970)

  The Pegnitz Junction (stories, 1973)

  The End of the World (stories, 1974)

  From the Fifteenth District (stories, 1979)

  Home Truths (stories, 1981)

  Overhead in a Balloon (stories, 1985)

  In Transit (stories, 1988)

  Across the Bridge (stories, 1993)

  The Moslem Wife (stories, 1994)

  The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (stories, 1996)

  Paris Stories, ed. Michael Ondaatje (stories, 2002)

  Copyright © 2002 by Mavis Gallant

  Introduction and selection copyright © 2002 by Michael Ondaatje

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Gallant, Mavis, 1922-

  Paris stories / Mavis Gallant ; edited by Michael Ondaatje.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-631-8

  I. Ondaatje, Michael, 1943- II. Title.

  PS8513.A593A159 2002 C813′.54 C2002-904313-1

  PR9199.3.G26A6 2002

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  All of the stories in this selection with one exception were originally published in The New Yorker and later collected in The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (McClelland & Stewart). The exception is “August,” which is an excerpt from the novel Green Water, Green Sky (Macmillan of Canada), and is reprinted here by permission of the author. “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” appears in Home Truths (McClelland & Stewart). “Irina,” “The Latehomecomer,” “The Moslem Wife,” “From the Fifteenth District,” “Baum, Gabriel, 1935–( ),” and “The Remission” appear in From the Fifteenth District (McClelland & Stewart). “Speck’s Idea” and “Grippes and Poche” appear in Overhead in a Balloon (McClelland & Stewart). “Forain” and “Mlle. Dias de Corta” appear in Across the Bridge (McClelland & Stewart). “In Transit” is taken from In Transit by Mavis Gallant. Copyright © 1988 by Mavis Gallant. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Books Canada Limited.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by Michael Ondaatje

  Dedication

  The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street

  Irina

  The Latehomecomer

  In Transit

  The Moslem Wife

  From the Fifteenth District

  Speck’s Idea

  Baum, Gabriel, 1935–( )

  The Remission

  Grippes and Poche

  Forain

  August

  Mlle. Dias de Corta

  In Plain Sight

  Scarves, Beads, Sandals

  About the Author

  INTRODUCTION

  A HANDFUL OF SMALL SHIPWRECKS

  MAVIS GALLANT was born in Montreal in August of 1922. After a peripatetic childhood (she attended seventeen schools), she found a job with the National Film Board of Canada, and then at the Montreal Standard as a journalist. In 1944 she published her first stories, and six years later, determined to become a fulltime writer, she moved to Paris, where she has lived ever since. Paris seems to be her home in every way, emotionally, spiritually, physically, although she is still very much a Canadian who is living abroad.

  In the last fifty years her publications have included several collections of short stories, two novels, works of nonfiction such as Paris Notebooks, which covered the student uprisings of 1968, novellas, plays, and literary essays. Her stories and nonfiction have for years appeared regularly in The New Yorker. And she has won many distinguished literary awards. While her reputation and readership are smaller than she deserves, among writers she is a shared and loved and daunting secret. I know two writers who have told me that the one writer they do not read when they are completing a book is Mavis Gallant. Nothing could be more intimidating. “The long career of Marguerite Yourcenar,” Mavis Gallant once wrote, “stands among the litter of flashier reputations as testimony to … the purpose and meaning of a writer’s life.” One feels the remark is an apt description of Gallant’s own accomplishment.

  This new selection of stories, drawn from the many she has written, is just a hint of her remarkable literary talent. And Paris Stories, as a title, is more suggestive than exact (though Gallant notes that it’s appropriate if only because everything in this collection was written in Paris, either at her desk or in her kitchen). The stories, however, take place all over Europe: in France, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and other parts of the Continent. Many of her characters have roots in Canada, or come from Eastern Europe. Her Europe is a place of “shipwrecks”—a word that occurs more than once in the stories. All her characters are seemingly far from home. They belong, to be honest, nowhere. Most of them are permanent wanderers, though a nomadic fate was not part of their original intent. With no land to light on, they look back without nostalgia, and look forward with a frayed hope. So that even the epigraph, from As You Like It, that Gallant chose for her early novel Green Water Green Sky, seems painfully ironic: “Ay, now am I in Arden, the more fool I. When I was at home, I was in a better place, but travellers must be content.”

  “All immigration is based on misapprehension,” Gallant has written, and she catches or witnesses her subjects in waiting rooms, halfway across bridges, overhead in balloons, in transit—her very titles signal incomplete and transient states. (Only her recurring comic character, Grippes, a writer who happens to be a slum landlord, harassed by neighbors, disturbed by the changing times, is where he wishes to be.) After a while this collection of souls begins to represent for the reader the true state of the world.

  The characters who people Mavis Gallant’s Europe are complex and various. The same is true of her protean prose. She is light years away from writers who claim a recognizably indelible style and constant landscape, although we as readers do become accustomed to her chameleon nature, her quick pace and her sudden swerves, so that we watch and listen carefully for any ground shift of humor or sadness. Her tenderness arrives unexpectedly, while her wit is sly, almost too quick. Comic possibilities are everywhere:

  The Blum-Bloch-Weilers, heavy art collectors, produced statesmen, magistrates, anthropologists, and generals, and were on no account to be confused with the Blum-Weiler-Blochs, their penniless and mystical cousins, who produced poets, librarians, and Benedictine monks.

  “Speck’s Idea”

  I had not even a nebulous idea of how children sprang to life. I merely knew two persons were required for a ritual I believed had to continue for nine months, and which I imagined in the nature of a long card ga
me with mysterious rules.

  “Varieties of Exile”

  Gallant is brilliant at tilting a situation or a personality a few subliminal degrees in the mind of the reader so that he discovers himself located in a strange new place, seeing something from a more generous or more satirical position. The stories feel cubist in their angles and qualifications, although the narrator often gives the air of being attached, lazily, almost accidentally, like a burr to some character—an Italian servant perhaps, a tax consultant, an art dealer …

  Just listing a few of Gallant’s characters reveals the range and diversity of her world—lost sons, émigrés, refugees from the nuclear family or the establishment, all trying to scramble back but with no weapons to do so. She catches the behavior of the out-of-place citizen, who carries a single-minded bundle of craft and belief. What she gives us, in fact, is an underground map of Europe in the twentieth century, and what feels like a set of dangerous unauthorized portraits. Even ghosts have their say in “From the Fifteenth District,” that sly story of complaint.

  The world Gallant depicts is cosmopolitan, and she is a writer of seemingly endless voices and personae, but in these stories she is also regional in the best sense. She has a brilliant sense of place. She speaks, in an essay on Paris, of “a small, dim chapel of gentle ugliness.” The city for her constantly shifts and evolves and Gallant will offer a humorous archaeology of Paris that seems to draw together all aspects of it, as we see in this opening to “Speck’s Idea”:

  Sandor Speck’s first art gallery in Paris was on the Right Bank, near the Church of St. Elisabeth, on a street too narrow for cars. When his block was wiped off the map to make way for a five-story garage, Speck crossed the Seine to the shadow of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, where he set up shop in a picturesque slum protected by law from demolition. When this gallery was blown up by Basque separatists, who had mistaken it for a travel agency exploiting the beauty of their coast, he collected his insurance money and moved to the Faubourg Saint-Germain.

  Most of the time though, Gallant’s subject is the comic opera of character. She slips into and out of minds and moods so quickly that we often miss the technical craft of that journey. And she often looks into the deepest of motives without, it seems, getting up from her chair. But if we reread her, we see how before we know it she will have circled a person, captured a voice, revealed a whole manner of a life in the way a character avoids an issue or discusses a dress. She meets these characters in the zone between thought and possible action. “Forain” takes place in the mind of a character who seemingly stands in mid-gesture, never quite deciding or moving: to act upon what one would like to do is simply too difficult, the end of that corridor is too far away. The action of the story is that of a Parisian publisher of Eastern European émigré writers going to a funeral, thinking about the deceased, and leaving. But these twenty pages are filled with a crowded and complicated nexus of lives, tactfully and beautifully revealed—of writers and their partners and daughters, their agents and publishers—and the half-ambitious and basically exhausted careers of literary exiles in Europe.

  There is always this fraught border between wishful behavior and minimal action. But even though the world Gallant portrays is in shadows, her stories move as quickly and clearly as a glance. They suggest a series of sketches that show every aspect of these incomplete lives. They are often surreally comic, sometimes full of pathos, sometimes vainglorious. We live within them and they show us what we never expected to see about ourselves.

  “Writers, I suppose, are like children imagining,” Mavis Gallant writes. And in a way what we have in her work is something of a child’s strange clarity towards this shadowy, complex world that she is witness to. She studies her characters’ behavior with gall, curiosity, with the toughness of a child looking at and studying adults. What results is a wonderful truth and, at the same time, great self-revelation. Many stories suggest a mask or portrait of the artist, or a persona active in the world out there, somewhat the way a writer like Patricia Highsmith invented the amoral Ripley and allowed him action (deceit, bribery, murder, forgery, good restaurant behavior, casual sex), while she herself resided in her small house in Switzerland. This is how writers spin, this is how a self-portrait can be paradoxically achieved by self-effacement. Henry James could turn a donnée heard at the dinner table over in his hands and create the intricate choreography of What Maisie Knew. Gallant, one suspects, similarly sees and meets people and then invents what becomes a precise landscape of their world. There is no vanity or self-aggrandizement in her process and the portraits are always tough as well as generous. For instance her satire is sharp in “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,” and yet she will take us beyond that satire to feel compassion for a character we would never have believed could be sympathetic. The tenderness does not replace or override the earlier portrait, Peter is still pathetic, but now there is that one moment where something happened, where the man’s awareness of human nature was suddenly profound.

  In any case Gallant always surprises us, never bothering with the dramatically obvious. Thus in “Ice Wagon” the possible adultery by the wife is ignored, is not the point of that story. These are stories in which you sense a great freedom of creation, the next sentence can bring a complete shift of tone or content, while a quick aside can include whole lives—sometimes halfway through one person’s thought you will get another’s history. As a writer Gallant seems beholden to no one. And for such a serious writer, one who can be dark and misanthropic, it is remarkable to see how many of her stories are gently and continually funny, even abundant with farce.

  In one of the more recent stories in this collection, “Scarves, Beads, Sandals,” we see Gallant in her prime, the prose moving at a brisk trot, but somehow still relaxed, utterly casual. Stray thoughts leap from paragraph to paragraph. Does Theo look like Max Ernst or Braque to his ex-wife’s new husband, or is it Balthus? And this minor refrain continues to resurface in an off-hand way throughout the tale. The story also has that most remarkable of Gallant’s qualities—which is the ability to slip or drop into the thought processes of minor characters, without any evident signaling of literary machinery. And there is also a rare narrative intimacy where the mind of the central female character, Mathilde, at times merges with (possibly) something close to the voice of the narrator outside the story. But one could equally be persuaded by a similar intimacy with the ex-husband’s memories, or even the wandering thoughts of Henri Grippes in the story “In Plain Sight.” Gallant’s craft and empathy, with that skill in evoking subtle and obsessive voices, is always ahead of us. She has, after all, what she claims Yourcenar had, “a reflective alliance.”

  “I had a great, great fear that I was bent on doing something for which I have no ability, and that took years and years to get rid of … that I was dedicating my life to something I was not fit for,” Gallant once told an interviewer. With some writers greatness emerges out of their very tentativeness, their own uncertainty about how they make stories, or if it is even possible to make them. It results perhaps in every word and line being tested for falseness or complacency. It results too in a kind of testing, self-critical humor that lies within the text. “I am uncertain about every line I write and I am uncertain until I get readers.” With the arrival of that reader, the uncertainty about “an unsafe life” becomes a shared witnessing. This, for a very few writers, becomes the purpose and meaning of a writer’s life. “Like every other form of art,” Mavis Gallant has written, “literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death.”

  — MICHAEL ONDAATJE

  PARIS STORIES

  To Tess Taconis, en souvenir de notre jeunesse

  THE ICE WAGON GOING DOWN THE STREET

  NOW THAT they are out of world affairs and back where they started, Peter Frazier’s wife says, “Everybody else did well in the international thing except us.”

  “You have to be crooked,” he tells her.

  “Or smart. Pity we we
ren’t.”

  It is Sunday morning. They sit in the kitchen, drinking their coffee, slowly, remembering the past. They say the names of people as if they were magic. Peter thinks, Agnes Brusen, but there are hundreds of other names. As a private married joke, Peter and Sheilah wear the silk dressing gowns they bought in Hong Kong. Each thinks the other a peacock, rather splendid, but they pretend the dressing gowns are silly and worn in fun.

  Peter and Sheilah and their two daughters, Sandra and Jennifer, are visiting Peter’s unmarried sister, Lucille. They have been Lucille’s guests seventeen weeks, ever since they returned to Toronto from the Far East. Their big old steamer trunk blocks a corner of the kitchen, making a problem of the refrigerator door; but even Lucille says the trunk may as well stay where it is, for the present. The Fraziers’ future is so unsettled; everything is still in the air.

  Lucille has given her bedroom to her two nieces, and sleeps on a camp cot in the hall. The parents have the living-room divan. They have no privileges here; they sleep after Lucille has seen the last television show that interests her. In the hall closet their clothes are crushed by winter overcoats. They know they are being judged for the first time. Sandra and Jennifer are waiting for Sheilah and Peter to decide. They are waiting to learn where these exotic parents will fly to next. What sort of climate will Sheilah consider? What job will Peter consent to accept? When the parents are ready, the children will make a decision of their own. It is just possible that Sandra and Jennifer will choose to stay with their aunt.

  The peacock parents are watched by wrens. Lucille and her nieces are much the same—sandy-colored, proudly plain. Neither of the girls has the father’s insouciance or the mother’s appearance—her height, her carriage, her thick hair and sky-blue eyes. The children are more cautious than their parents; more Canadian. When they saw their aunt’s apartment they had been away from Canada nine years, ever since they were two and four; and Jennifer, the elder, said, “Well, now we’re home.” Her voice is nasal and flat. Where did she learn that voice? And why should this be home? Peter’s answer to anything about his mystifying children is, “It must be in the blood.”