The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant Read online

I managed to carve out an astonishing amount of autonomy, saved myself from writing on the sappy subjects usually reserved for women, and was not sacked—not even when someone wrote to protest about “that Marxist enfant terrible.” (It was not a safe time or place for such accusations.) My salary was modest, but whole families were living on less. I had amassed an enormous mental catalog of places and people, information that still seeps into my stories. Journalism was a life I liked, but not the one I wanted. An American friend has told me that when we were fifteen I said I intended to write and live in Paris. I have no recollection of the conversation, but she is not one to invent anecdotes based on hindsight. It is about all I have in the way of a blueprint. The rest is memory and undisputed evidence.

  The impulse to write and the stubbornness needed to keep going are supposed to come out of some drastic shaking up, early in life. There is even a term for it: the shock of change. Probably, it means a jolt that unbolts the door between perception and imagination and leaves it ajar for life, or that fuses memory and language and waking dreams. Some writers may just simply come into the world with overlapping vision of things seen and things as they might be seen. All have a gift for holding their breath while going on breathing: It is the basic requirement. If shock and change account for the rest of it, millions of men and women, hit hard and steadily, would do nothing but write; in fact, most of them don’t. No childhood is immunized against disturbance. A tremor occurs underfoot when a trusted adult says one thing and means another. It brings on the universal and unanswerable wail “It’s not fair!”—to which the shabby rejoinder that life isn’t does nothing to restore order.

  I took it for granted that life was tough for children and that adults had a good time. My parents enjoyed themselves, or seemed to. If I want to bring back a Saturday night in full summer, couples dancing on the front gallery (Quebec English for veranda), a wind-up gramophone and a stack of brittle records, all I need to hear is the beginning of “West End Blues.” The dancers are down from Montreal or up from the States, where there is Prohibition. Prohibition would be out of the question in Quebec, although the rest of Canada enjoys being rather dry. I mention it just to say that there is no such thing as a Canadian childhood. One’s beginnings are regional. Mine are wholly Quebec, English and Protestant, yes, but with a strong current of French and Catholic. My young parents sent me off on that current by placing me in a French convent school, for reasons never made plain. I remember my grandmother’s saying, “Well, I give up.” It was a singular thing to do and in those days unheard of. It left me with two systems of behavior, divided by syntax and tradition; two environments to consider, one becalmed in a long twilight of nineteenth-century religiosity; two codes of social behavior; much practical experience of the difference between a rule and a moral point.

  Somewhere in this duality may be the exact point of the beginning of writing. All I am certain of is that the fragile root, the tentative yes or no, was made safe by reading. I cannot recall a time when I couldn’t read; I do remember being read to and wanting to take the book and decipher it for myself. A friend of my parents recalled seeing my father trying to teach me the alphabet as I sat in a high chair. He held the book flat on the tray—any book, perhaps a novel, pulled off a shelf—and pointed out the capital letters. At a young age, apparently, I could translate at sight, English to French, reading aloud without stumbling. I was in no other way precocious: For years I would trail far behind other children in grasping simple sums or telling the time (I read the needles in reverse, five o’clock for seven) or separating left from right. I thought the eldest child in a family had been born last. At seven, I wondered why no one ever married some amiable dog. When my mother explained, I remained unenlightened. (The question possibly arose from my devoted reading of an English comic strip for children, Pip and Squeak, in which a dog and a penguin seem to be the parents of a rabbit named Wilfred.) I did not know there was a particular bodily difference between boys and girls until I was eight; I had thought it a matter of clothes, haircuts, and general temperament. At nine, I still looked for mermaids in the Châteauguay River. My father had painted for me a screen that showed mermaids, with long red hair, rising out of green waves. I had not yet seen an ocean, just lakes and rivers. The river across the road froze white in winter and thawed to a shade of clear golden brown. Apart from the error as to color, it seemed unlikely he would paint something untrue.

  Four weeks after my fourth birthday, when I was enrolled as a boarder in my first school, run by a semi-cloistered order of teaching and missionary nuns, I brought, along with my new, strange, stiff, uncomfortable and un-English uniform and severely buttoned underclothes, some English storybooks from home. (I owned a few books in French, the gift of a doctor, a French Canadian specialist, who had attended me for a mastoid infection after scarlet fever and become a close friend of my parents. I was far too young to understand them. They were moral tales for older children, and even years later I would find them heavy going.) It was a good thing—to have books in English, that is—because I would hear and speak next to no English now, except in the summer holidays and at Christmas and Easter and on the odd weekend when I was fetched home. I always went back to school with new books, which had to be vetted; but no one knew any English and the nun who taught it could not speak it at all, and so the illustrations were scanned for decency and the books handed back, to be stored in the small night-table next to my bed.

  I owe it to children’s books—picture books, storybooks, then English and American classics—that I absorbed once and for all the rhythm of English prose, the order of words in an English sentence and how they are spelled. I was eight before I was taught to write and spell English in any formal way, and what I was taught I already knew. By then, English was irremovably entrenched as the language of imagination. Nothing supposed, daydreamed, created, or invented would enter my mind by way of French. In the paper-doll era, I made up a mishmash of English, French, and the mysterious Italian syllables in recordings of bel canto, which my mother liked and often played. I called this mixture “talking Marigold.” Marigold faded soon, along with paper dolls. After that, for stories and storytelling there was only one sound.

  The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image, like a slide or (closer still) a freeze frame, showing characters in a simple situation. For example, Barbara, Alec, and their three children, seen getting down from a train in the south of France, announced “The Remission.” The scene does not appear in the story but remains like an old snapshot or a picture in a newspaper, with a caption giving all the names. The quick arrival and departure of the silent image can be likened to the first moments of a play, before anything is said. The difference is that the characters in the frame are not seen, but envisioned, and do not have to speak to be explained. Every character comes into being with a name (which I may change), an age, a nationality, a profession, a particular voice and accent, a family background, a personal history, a destination, qualities, secrets, an attitude toward love, ambition, money, religion, and a private center of gravity.

  Over the next several days I take down long passages of dialogue. Whole scenes then follow, complete in themselves but like disconnected parts of a film. I do not deliberately invent any of this: It occurs. Some writers say they actually hear the words, but I think “hear” is meant to be in quotation marks. I do not hear anything: I know what is being said. Finally (I am describing a long and complex process as simply as I can), the story will seem to be entire, in the sense that nearly everything needed has been written. It is entire but unreadable. Nothing fits. A close analogy would be an unedited film. The first frame may have dissolved into sound and motion (Sylvie and her mother, walking arm in arm, in “Across the Bridge”) or turn out to be the end (Jack and Netta in Place Masséna, in “The Moslem Wife”) or something incidental, such as the young Angelo begging for coins from Walter, which barely figures in “An Unmarried Man’s Summer.”

  Sometim
es one sees immediately what needs to be done, which does not mean it can be done in a hurry: I have put aside elements of a story for months and even years. It is finished when it seems to tally with a plan I surely must have had in mind but cannot describe, or when I come to the conclusion that it cannot be written satisfactorily any other way; at least, not by me. A few times, the slow transformation from image to fiction has begun with something actually glimpsed: a young woman reading an airmail letter in the Paris Métro, early in the morning; a man in Berlin eating a plate of cold cuts, next to a lace curtain that filters gray afternoon light; an American mother, in Venice, struggling to show she is having a fine time, and her two tactful, attentive adolescent children. Sometimes, hardly ever, I have seen clearly that a character sent from nowhere is standing in for someone I once knew, disguised as thoroughly as a stranger in a dream. I have always let it stand. Everything I start glides into print, in time, and becomes like a house once lived in.

  I was taught the alphabet three times. The first, the scene with the high chair, I remember nothing about. The second time, the letters were written in lacy capitals on a blackboard—pretty-looking, decorative; nuns’ handwriting of the time. Rows of little girls in black, hands folded on a desk, feet together, sang the letters and then, in a rising scale, the five vowels. The third time was at the Protestant school, in Châteauguay. The schoolhouse had only two rooms, four grades to each. I was eight: It had been noticed that I was beginning to pronounce English proper nouns with French vowel sounds. (I do it to this day, thinking “Neek” for “Nike,” “Raybok” for “Reebok.” The first time I saw Ribena, a fruit drink, advertised in the London Underground, I said, “What is Reebayna?” It is the only trace of that lacy, pretty, sung alphabet.) At my new school it was taken for granted that French and Catholic teaching had left me enslaved to superstition and wholly ignorant. I was placed with the six-year-olds and told to recite the alphabet. I pronounced G with its French vowel sound, something like an English J. Our teacher pulled down over the blackboard a large, illustrated alphabet, like a wide window blind. I stood in front of the blind and was shown the letter G. Above it a large painted hand held a tipped water jug, to which clung, suspended, a single drop. The sound of G was the noise the drop would make in a water glass: it would say gug.

  “The sound of G is gug. Say it after me. Gug.”

  “Gug.”

  “Everyone, now. Gug gug gug.”

  “Gug, gug, gug.”

  “What letter is it?”

  “G.”

  “What does it say?”

  “Gug.”

  “Don’t forget it, now.”

  Whatever it was, it could never be sung.

  The way the stories are arranged in this collection, as well as their selection, was left up to me. The original editor, Joe Fox, whose sad and sudden death some months ago has left him entirely alive in my mind, not yet a memory, had written, “Knowing you, I suspect that you’re going to write back that I should decide. But … only you can decide, and only you can assemble your work in a way that pleases you.” His book, or so I thought of it, was caught in midair by Kate Medina, and I thank her for her good catch and for her patience.

  I keep the sketchiest sort of files, few letters and almost no records. As it turned out, I had published more stories than I had expected. This is a heavy volume, and if I had included everything, even nearly everything, it would have become one of those tomes that can’t be read in comfort and that are no good for anything except as a weight on sliced cucumbers. I rejected straight humor and satire, which dates quickly, seven stories that were pieces of novels, stories that seemed to me not worth reprinting, stories I was tired of, and stories that bored me. I also removed more than a dozen stories that stood up to time but not to the practical requirement I’ve mentioned. Their inclusion would have made this collection as long as the Concise Oxford to “speedometer,” or the whole of The Oxford Book of American Verse plus some of the Oxford English, as far as Sir Thomas Wyatt, or the King James Bible from Genesis to about the middle of Paul’s first Epistle to the Romans.

  With just a few exceptions all the stories were published in The New Yorker. Good and bad luck comes in waves. It was a wave of the best that brought me to William Maxwell, who read my first story and every other for the next twenty-five years. He has turned away the IOUs I have tried to hand him, which announce just simply that I owe him everything. And so I am writing another one here, with no possibility of any answer: I owe him everything. When we met for the first time, in the spring of 1950, I did not immediately connect him to the author of The Folded Leaf. He, of course, said nothing about himself at all. He asked just a few questions and let me think it was perfectly natural to throw up one’s job and all one’s friends and everything familiar and go thousands of miles away to write. He made it seem no more absurd or unusual than taking a bus to visit a museum. Everyone else I knew had quite the opposite to say; I felt suddenly like a stranded army with an unexpected ally. I was about to try something entirely normal and that (he made it sound obvious) I was unlikely to regret.

  He seems to me the most American of writers and the most American of all the Americans I have known; but even as I say this, I know it almost makes no sense and that it is undefinable and that I am unable to explain what I mean. I can get myself out of it only by saying it is a compliment. When he retired, in the mid-seventies, I was inherited by a much younger editor, Daniel Menaker, whom he liked, trusted, and chose. Every writer/editor relationship is a kind of shotgun wedding; it works or it doesn’t. There is no median way and no jogging along. Dan Menaker and I had the same dopey sense of humor. He would call across the Atlantic just to tell me a joke. It was because I knew I could make him laugh that I began to write straight satire, which gradually evolved into stories, such as the stories about Henri Grippes, the Montparnasse author and slum landlord. All the linked stories, silly or serious, at the end of this volume were written with Dan Menaker as first reader.

  There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I may never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  THE THIRTIES AND FORTIES

  THE MOSLEM WIFE (1976)

  THE FOUR SEASONS (1975)

  THE FENTON CHILD (1993)

  THE FIFTIES

  THE OTHER PARIS (1953)

  ACROSS THE BRIDGE (1993)

  THE LATEHOMECOMER (1974)

  SEÑOR PINEDO (1954)

  BY THE SEA (1954)

  WHEN WE WERE NEARLY YOUNG (1960)

  THE ICE WAGON GOING DOWN THE STREET (1963)

  THE REMISSION (1979)

  THE SIXTIES

  THE CAPTIVE NIECE (1969)

  QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS (1966)

  ERNST IN CIVILIAN CLOTHES (1963)

  AN UNMARRIED MAN’S SUMMER (1963)

  APRIL FISH (1968)

  IN TRANSIT (1965)

  O LASTING PEACE (1972)

  AN ALIEN FLOWER (1972)

  THE END OF THE WORLD (1967)

  NEW YEAR’S EVE (1970)

  THE SEVENTIES

  IN THE TUNNEL (1971)

  IRINA (1974)

  POTTER (1977)

  BAUM, GABRIEL, 1935—( ) (1979)

  SPECK’S IDEA (1979)

  FROM THE FIFTEENTH DISTRICT (1978)

  THE PEGNITZ JUNCTION (1973)

  THE EIGHTIES AND NINETIES

  LUC AND HIS FATHER (1982)

  OVERHEAD IN A BALLOON (1984)

  KINGDOM COME (1986)

  FORAIN (1991)

  A STATE OF AFFAIRS (1991)

  MLLE. DIAS DE CORTA (1992)

 
SCARVES, BEADS, SANDALS (1995)

  LINNET MUIR

  THE DOCTOR (1977)

  VOICES LOST IN SNOW (1976)

  IN YOUTH IS PLEASURE (1975)

  BETWEEN ZERO AND ONE (1975)

  VARIETIES OF EXILE (1976)

  THE CARETTE SISTERS

  1933 (1985/8)

  THE CHOSEN HUSBAND (1985)

  FROM CLOUD TO CLOUD (1985)

  FLORIDA (1985)

  ÉDOUARD, JULIETTE, LENA

  A RECOLLECTION (1983)

  THE COLONEL’S CHILD (1983)

  RUE DE LILLE (1983)

  LENA (1983)

  HENRI GRIPPES

  A PAINFUL AFFAIR (1981)

  A FLYING START (1982)

  GRIPPES AND POCHE (1982)

  IN PLAIN SIGHT (1993)

  About the Author

  THE MOSLEM WIFE

  In the south of France, in the business room of a hotel quite near to the house where Katherine Mansfield (whom no one in this hotel had ever heard of) was writing “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” Netta Asher’s father announced that there would never be a man-made catastrophe in Europe again. The dead of that recent war, the doomed nonsense of the Russian Bolsheviks had finally knocked sense into European heads. What people wanted now was to get on with life. When he said “life,” he meant its commercial business.

  Who would have contradicted Mr. Asher? Certainly not Netta. She did not understand what he meant quite so well as his French solicitor seemed to, but she did listen with interest and respect, and then watched him signing papers that, she knew, concerned her for life. He was renewing the long lease her family held on the Hotel Prince Albert and Albion. Netta was then eleven. One hundred years should at least see her through the prime of life, said Mr. Asher, only half jokingly, for of course he thought his seed was immortal.

  Netta supposed she might easily live to be more than a hundred—at any rate, for years and years. She knew that her father did not want her to marry until she was twenty-six and that she was then supposed to have a pair of children, the elder a boy. Netta and her father and the French lawyer shook hands on the lease, and she was given her first glass of champagne. The date on the bottle was 1909, for the year of her birth. Netta bravely pronounced the wine delicious, but her father said she would know much better vintages before she was through.