Gallant The Latehomecomer

Essential Stories
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80533-230-5
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 288 Seiten

In stories of astonishing compression and insight, Mavis Gallant wrote of characters severed from their home, exiles disconnected from each other and from themselves. Tracing the fault lines of the post-war world in the intimate lives of her characters, she could conjure an entire worldview in a telling gesture or passing comment.This new volume, selected and introduced by Tessa Hadley, collects the finest work from across Gallant's career. Here are stories of young men returning from wartime internment to changed families, snobbish social climbers haunted by the words of their downtrodden colleagues, and children peering through glass at the secrets and infidelities of their parents. Complex, moving and painfully true, they secure her position among the world's great short story writers.

Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) was born in Montreal and worked as a journalist before moving to Europe to devote herself to writing fiction. After traveling extensively she settled in Paris, where she lived until her death, though she never renounced her Canadian citizenship. Starting in 1951, the New Yorker published 116 of her stories. She was the recipient of the 2002 Rea Award for the Short Story and the 2004 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement.Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels and three collections of stories. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and 'Bad Dreams' won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Gallant, Mavis

Leseproben

Introduction

Mavis Gallant mostly didn’t keep her reviews; even when they were kind, she too often felt they were “off the target”. But there was one review in El Pais, when she was first translated into Spanish, which she liked and kept. The reviewer said that when Gallant came to Western Europe after the war, no one knew who she was and she didn’t know anyone—she had lived as anonymously as possible with an exercise book, a notebook and a pencil. She was like Kafka’s invisible woman, the reviewer went on, and the invisible woman took note of everything that Europeans thought was of no importance. Now people saw that these things were indeed important.

This seems to describe wonderfully well both Gallant’s history as a writer, and the mood and form of her stories. To begin with, there’s the uprootedness, and the not-quite-belonging, whose origins she traces very early in her own life. She was born in 1922 and grew up in Montreal, Canada, the only child of restless, attractive, heedless parents; similar figures haunt a number of her stories, like the couple who “drank old-fashioneds and danced to gramophone records out on the lawn” in summer in “The Doctor”. For reasons she’s not wholly able to fathom, although they were both English-speakers and nonbelievers, they thought it a good idea to send their small daughter, aged four, to board at a French convent school run by nuns, “where Jansenist discipline still had a foot on the neck of the twentieth century”. In one of her stories, when a child explains that Satan approached her—“furry dark skin, claws, red eyes, the lot”—and made her cross the street in front of a car, she realizes suddenly that her parents don’t believe in Satan, or in most of what she’s being taught at school. The writing instinct may begin in such jolts to apprehension, the registering of deep dissonance between two cultural systems—unbolting the door, as she puts it, “between perception and imagination”. Two contradictory ways of seeing can coexist in the same world; best to test everything you’re told.

Gallant’s adored, glamorous father, a thwarted painter, died of kidney disease when she was just ten; they told her he’d gone to England, and she waited for him to return until, aged thirteen, she began to doubt, and set about uncovering the truth. Her mother remarried and Gallant was packed off to one school after another in Canada and America, where she didn’t thrive. She returned eventually to Montreal: in actuality first, to work as a reporter on the Montreal Standard, and then forever afterwards, in some of her best stories. Aged twenty-seven, she writes, she was “becoming exactly what I did not want to be: a journalist who wrote fiction along some margin of spare time”. She also dreaded finding she had “a vocation without the competence to sustain it”; her father had not lived long enough to discover whether or not he could actually paint well, and had made his living in a firm selling furniture. That anxiety never left her, it fuelled her: she was one of those writers driven by doubt to be good, to be better. Certain superstitions accompany that fear of being merely shoddy or ordinary: don’t let the scaffolding show, allow the story to stand by itself. Don’t waste space, don’t state the obvious, don’t say anything twice.

She’d had a couple of stories in a Canadian literary review, but now she set herself a test, and decided to send three to the New Yorker, one after another: one acceptance would be good enough. If she couldn’t live on writing she would “destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook, and live some other way”. The second story was taken, the third she sent from Paris, where she would eventually settle for life: a youthful wartime marriage in Canada didn’t last long, and she never had children. Her vocation, and the need to write anonymously, where no one knew who she was and she didn’t know anyone, sent her to Europe. “I still do not know,” she wrote, “what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist.” In her diaries she recorded months of semi-starvation in Madrid in 1952, while she waited to see whether the New Yorker would take any more stories. In fact they already had, and a crooked literary agent had pocketed the money; she found this out eventually by a lucky chance. “The sensation of disgust was curious, as if a colony of flies were stuck to me… The first thing I bought was good white bread.” Her relationship with the New Yorker, and with its fiction editor William Maxwell, would be fundamental. One hundred and sixteen stories, the lion’s share of her work, appeared in the magazine.

Gallant did publish two novels—Green Water, Green Sky in 1959, and A Fairly Good Time in 1970—and for years she toiled on a book about Dreyfus which she eventually shelved, but it’s for her short stories that she will be remembered. A certain density of reference, perfectly in proportion in a short story, can feel overfreighted and mannered across a longer distance. Her imagination works in pieces of broken-off intensity; life reveals itself to her in signs, snatches of speech, fragments of memory. “The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image, like a slide or (closer still) a freeze frame…” Sometimes she runs together “suites of connected stories”, as Brandon Taylor calls them, which suit her vision exactly; these don’t pretend to join the pieces of a life into a single shape, but place them side by side like discontinuous phases of experience, each with its own centre, its own sharp point—rather like an actual life, in fact. The invisible woman is an archaeologist assembling small shards of material evidence into partial shapes, and an anthropologist hungry with curiosity—setting one way of seeing alongside another, making both strange. Her stories compose a meticulous record of Europe in the aftermath of war, and then in the Cold War, as well as the lost world of the Canadian past. Each of the tribes she describes—French Canadians and English Canadians, German ex-prisoners-of-war, Jewish survivors, French bureaucrats, French novelists, French tax inspectors, Swiss moralists, intellectual exiles from behind the Iron Curtain—has its own tokens of exchange, its own ideology, its sacred images, its taboos, its secret dreams, its obscure shames. Each tribe gives the others very little thought; Gallant writes at the intersection of their worlds. She took note of everything that seemed of little importance.

Everyone is interesting in her fiction. Gallant’s protagonists may not be particularly sympathetic, they may be dense or narrow or just feeble, yet they’re all felt and conveyed with the same even-handedness, the same keen appetite. Stella, in the story “In Italy”—a foolish nice girl, a “compound of middle-class virtues” and married to a cynical sophisticate more than twice her age—tries to keep warm over the stove in their rented Italian villa, reading copies of Woman’s Own and The Lady which her mother sends from England. “I thought it would be fun,” she says mournfully about her marriage. Lightweight snob Peter Frazier in “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street”, trying and failing to profiteer in post-war Europe, is demoralized by his new colleague and Canadian compatriot Agnes—she’s from such a different background to his, so solemn and so striving. He feels “as you feel the approach of a storm, the charge of moral certainty round her, the belief in work, the faith in undertakings… ashes in the mouth”. The French-Canadian doctor who makes such a fuss of Linnet Muir, presenting her with a sentimental picture, won’t help her when she runs away from school; to the child’s disappointment he sides with her parents’ adult authority.

But the stories strike surprises out of these individuals: for a moment they can see more than they know, become more than themselves. Peter Frazier can’t forget what Agnes told him about watching the ice wagon in the mornings when she was a child; the doctor turns out to be a poet in his private life. Poor Madame Carette in “1933”, a stickler for perfect manners, widowed at twenty-seven and forced to move to a smaller flat, weeps for her own wicked thoughts with her elbows on the table, to the dismay of her little daughters. Selfish Lena, in her eponymous story, ruined another woman’s life but is magnificent in her extreme old age. These moments, when her protagonists are momentarily lifted out of their frames, aren’t redemptive or anything so grandiose. Nor are they moments of love, exactly, although there may be true closeness and comradeship in the stories—between Peter Frazier and his wife, for example, or between the Carette sisters and their mother, or between the widowed grandmother in “Irina” and her new man-friend. Irina’s tenderness toward her grandson is exquisite too. The most piercing apprehensions,...