“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 weren'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.”
On Sunday morning Lucille takes her nieces to church. It seems to be the only condition she imposes on her relations: The children must be decent. The girls go willingly, with their new hats and purses and gloves and coral bracelets and strings of pearls. The parents, ramshackle, sleepy, dim in the brain because it is Sunday, sit down to their coffee and privacy and talk of the past.
“We weren't crooked,” says Peter. “We weren't even smart.”
Sheilah's head bobs up; she is no drowner. It is wrong to say they have nothing to show for time. Sheilah has the Balenciaga. It is a black afternoon dress, stiff and boned at the waist, long for the fashions of now, but neither Sheilah nor Peter would change a thread. The Balenciaga is their talisman, their treasure; and after they remember it they touch hands and think that the years are not behind them but hazy and marvelous and still to be lived.