Mavis Gallant Left a Journalism Career to Tell True Stories

M axine Crook made a few mistakes introducing Mavis Gallant in a 1976 interview for the national CBC radio show Morningside. This was, perhaps, understandable: while the Montreal-born Gallant was by then a regular and celebrated contributor of short fiction to The New Yorker, she was not well known in Canada. She had lived abroad for more than twenty-five years, and very little of her work had been published here. Few Canadians likely knew that Gallant had kept her married name and honorific after divorcing in 1949; Crook addressed her as “Miss.” Then Crook referred to a series of short stories Gallant had recently written about wartime Montreal as “articles.” She called one of them “My Youth Is Pleasure,” inadvertently depriving it of the charm of its true title, “In Youth Is Pleasure.” Gallant was gracious; she and Crook went on to have a friendly conversation. But it is hard to imagine her ever making these kinds of mistakes herself. She was, in many ways, a meticulous person, always beautifully turned out, always the consummate host, always the prompt correspondent. Professionally, she lived by getting things right; in her mind, her work lived or died by it. Her prose has the ring of silver on crystal. Her stories concern such critical and unanswerable questions as why people marry, why they abandon children, and what happened in Germany before, during, and after the concentration camps. She would spend months and sometimes years on a single story, writing first in longhand and then typing it up, liberally revising each draft before typing it up again. Only when she was close to satisfied would she drop it in the post to her editors at The New Yorker. Most of her work appeared first in the magazine and was later collected and published in books, enough to fill a shelf or two: several short story collections, two novels, a play, and a compilation of nonfiction. Despite near-unanimous acclaim from critics and fellow writers, Gallant’s talent never received the popular recognition that peers such as Alice Munro, John Updike, or Raymond Carver did. The argument has been made that Gallant is a writer’s writer, that her work is too sophisticated for widespread appeal. Her stories are steeped in her own extensive knowledge of culture, history, and politics; it might be said that they challenge readers to know more, be smarter. Certainly, it can be said that her narratives defy chronology, and her compassion, though ever present, is often by stealth. Whatever the reason, her books sold modestly and went in and out of print throughout her career. When she died, in 2014, at age ninety-one, some of her stories hadn’t seen light since the 1980s—some, even, since the 1950s.

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Fortunately, several books have been reissued posthumously. In Canada, McClelland & Stewart has published new versions of five Gallant titles in the past ten years. In the US, Knopf revived the largest of her collections, Collected Stories, in 2016. (In Canada, the same book is called Selected Stories and is available from McClelland & Stewart as an ebook.) Linda Leith of Montreal brought out Gallant’s play, What Is to Be Done, in 2017, thirty-four years after its only previous printing; Godine of Boston reissued Paris Notebooks, the non-fiction collection, in 2023. And last year, Daunt Books in the UK published Gallant’s debut novel, Green Water, Green Sky, which first came out in 1959. In January, New York Review Books—which has steadily brought almost all of Gallant’s fiction back into print over the past twenty-three years—released The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, gathering up work otherwise unavailable in the US. Some of it was originally declined by The New Yorker; a few stories were never included in any of Gallant’s books. Until now, “The Old Place” lived only in the spring 1958 issue of Texas Quarterly; “Crossing France” only in volume nineteen, issue three of The Critic. Also on offer are starter stories published in the 1940s in small journals with tiny circulations—what amounted to Montreal’s literati of the day. One of these, “The Flowers of Spring,” is the first story Gallant ever sent to The New Yorker. It was rejected, but the magazine asked to see more of her writing and accepted her next submission. That is Gallant lore, a story she frequently told in interviews. But Garth Risk Hallberg, who edited Uncollected, unearthed correspondence in The New Yorker archives that tells another story about that second submission—which is that it, too, was rejected. In his introduction to the book, Hallberg suggests Gallant must have “misremembered the sequence of events.” His framing is meaningful; he does not say Gallant “must have forgotten.” Memory is at the heart of her work. Also in Uncollected is “A Wonderful Country,” a story that appeared in the Montreal Standard, a weekly newspaper. From 1944 to 1950, Gallant was a staff writer for the paper, contributing well north of 100 articles to its pages. This past October, Véhicule Press published thirty-eight of those stories in Montreal Standard Time, the first ever collection of Gallant’s journalism from the 1940s. The book is introduced by Neil Besner, who wrote the first PhD on Gallant’s work, in 1983, and annotated by retired CBC journalist Bill Richardson, who maintains an online diary about Gallant. The afterword comes from Marta Dvořák, a Canadian literature scholar who wrote Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear, and was also her close friend. The book’s preface is provided by Gallant’s literary executor, Mary K. MacLeod. Delivering the Writers’ Trust of Canada Margaret Laurence lecture in 1988, Gallant called journalism her “apprenticeship.” It taught her the benefit of having to quickly fill, rather than face, a blank page. She learned to smooth out the “wrinkles of grammar and syntax” in her prose. She discovered she had a gift for “ideas,” those juicy but hard-to-catch worms with which writers hook editors. She became, in other words, a professional writer, one who could be counted on to deliver clean and lively copy, on the regular. But reporting also fed the other writer in Gallant—the artist—providing invaluable material for her short stories. In researching “The Making of a Hoodlum,” an article about a petty street criminal who was sentenced, on a technicality, to life in prison, Gallant was invited into the home of a young woman who, while pressing shirts at an ironing board, recounted her brother’s “semi-delinquent” escapades. A few years later, Gallant wrote “The Legacy,” a story about a woman whose brothers’ childhood misbehaviour brought the police to the door, where they extorted $600 from the boys’ mother, money their sister had been counting on for a trip to France. “The Legacy” appears in the new Uncollected volume. “The Making of a Hoodlum” is the last article in Montreal Standard Time. It was also Gallant’s final story as a staffer at the Standard. In October 1950, she left her job to pursue a career in fiction. The decision hinged, she said later, on a nod from The New Yorker; she had resolved to send them three stories, and if they rejected all three, she would abandon her ambition. But she quit the Standard before sending the first of the three stories, a “contradictory and odd” way to go about things, she acknowledged in the preface to Selected Stories. Why would she not have waited for word from The New Yorker before giving up the security of the Standard ? “I think I was afraid of having a failure of nerve,” she wrote nearly fifty years later. Here, too, is that misremembered sequence: the letter from The New Yorker rejecting “The Flowers of Spring” is dated March 24, 1949, more than a full year before Gallant resigned from the Standard. Her work lived or died by being right. Misremembering the details of her early submissions might say something about Gallant’s pride, but the facts behind the misremembering reveal something more important about her gumption. That she submitted earlier and oftener than she remembered, that she had two rejections and still, a year later, she submitted again—she was as determined as she was talented. And it might be said that misremembering is critical to fiction, that it is an essential part of how great writers render real life true. They take what they’ve seen, what they’ve heard, what they’ve felt, and they slide these memories around, both in time and in space, in search of what they’ve sensed happening below the surface—the anger tamped down, the love unexpressed, the falseness of a promise, the agency people deny themselves. As a journalist, Gallant took in reams of this underground information. But she could report only what was on the record, whereas fiction allowed her to tell stories as she knew them. In “The Making of a Hoodlum,” the woman at the ironing board was likely quoted simply as a “family friend” of the hoodlum. In “The Legacy,” this woman blooms fully fledged as Marina, loyal daughter, aggrieved sister, aging woman both bitter and afraid. Gallant recognized her at that ironing board. “I was taught to read when I was very young,” she told Morningside’s Crook in 1976. “I think it gave me . . . almost like a colour transparency of fiction that I probably applied to life after that.” Life seemed “right,” she said, when it matched the transparency. Open Montreal Standard Time and Uncollected side by side and spot a strand of fishing line running between them. Search under “Report on a Repat,” an article Gallant wrote for the Standard, about a Canadian soldier named Private Roland Langlois, who returned from the war in the summer of 1945. Gallant described him descending a train at a Montreal station, where hundreds of people were waiting for other servicemen, and finding his wife under a placard with the letter L. Then turn to “Bonaventure,” in Uncollected, a story about a young Canadian musician named Douglas Ramsay. The story is set at a chalet in Switzerland in the 1960s, but its key moment takes place in Montreal, before Ramsay was born, in a memory appropriated from his parents: his father descending a train at Bonaventure station in Montreal and finding his wife sitting under the letter R. She means to end their marriage that very day; instead, that very day, their son is conceived. It is 1942, and Ramsay’s father has been injured at Dieppe. He cannot make sense of having survived, of “the hundred-million-to-one shot that landed me back among living people when I had joined the dead.” Real-life Private Langlois was also at Dieppe. When his regiment landed, “there was nothing to shoot at,” he told Gallant. “You understand, that was the worst part.” These two books bring a wide swath of Mavis Gallant’s writing back into circulation. One consists wholly of material written in Canada, the other largely in Europe. Unlike Marina, Gallant did go to France. There was no failure of nerve. She travelled around the continent for the better part of ten years and settled permanently in Paris, where she “lived in writing,” as she wrote in the Selected Stories preface, “like a spoonful of water in a river,” until she died. The post Mavis Gallant Left a Journalism Career to Tell True Stories first appeared on The Walrus.