When Jean-Paul Sartre held a news conference in Montreal in 1946, a young journalist for The Standard, Mavis Gallant, was there in her eye-catching red coat. Afterward, they spoke about Sartre’s existential novel “Nausea,” which Gallant admired. Years later, she remembered asking him “stupid questions about writing.” But he was kind to her — “what used to be called a sweet guy.” Gallant vowed then that when she got to be in Sartre’s position, she would be nice to aspiring writers too.
Four years later, 28 and divorced, she quit the newspaper and, with no financial security, moved alone to Europe to begin the process of becoming a generous, venerated author. Mostly she was chasing that great existential concern — freedom — the major project and treasure of her life, the basis for her art. A new omnibus edited by Garth Risk Hallberg, THE UNCOLLECTED STORIES OF MAVIS GALLANT (New York Review Books, 590 pp., paperback, $22.95), includes an early story that is forgettable except for its ending with a Gallant mantra. A man in a foreign, rainy city returns to his rented room and thinks: “Whatever happens I am free.”
Her work soon became unforgettable. She wrote two novels, a play and essays on life in her adopted Paris, but the short story was her imagination’s home. Its regular inhabitants were displaced people: immigrants, orphans, tourists, marital escapees, refugees, characters in the wrong place at the wrong time, caught out in unseasonal weather. They haunt boardinghouses, dilapidated hotels, tacky resorts, train carriages. Good luck getting a hot bath. Over five decades, The New Yorker published 116 of these deadpan, icy stories mined with moments of brutal humor.
I first heard of Gallant, who died in 2014, from a YouTube video nine years ago, listening to Fran Lebowitz declare her “the best short-story writer in English.” I thought: Wait, who? Lebowitz reserves puffs exclusively for cigarettes, so I sat up. Since then, I’ve added my own equally bold claim: Gallant is the genius absurdist of the 20th century.
Conditions were overripe for absurdism. Born in Montreal, Gallant was sent away to a convent school at the age of 4. “If I knew why,” she said in old age, “I would know why the earth turned.” Gallant’s father died when she was 10; she was told he’d gone to England. Her mother once declined to visit her in the hospital because it was raining. With many unanswerable whys in her baggage, Gallant landed in a stunned, post-Holocaust Europe to a pervasive air of meaninglessness.
Initially, she pawned belongings to survive. A traded clock equaled breakfast. Her characters, buffeted by the era’s fluctuating currencies, inherited this crisis of equivalence. In “A Day Like Any Other,” a mother dresses her daughters in “starched frocks … made to order wherever a favorable exchange prevailed.”
With a dearth of fixed value, monetary or otherwise, Gallant’s characters develop idiosyncratic ways of evaluating life. They use private rulers, private legends. In relationships they look for favorable exchanges, and rarely find them. For one woman, the word “marriage” equals a view into a room “littered with clothing.” For another, the feeling of “something missing” in a love affair evokes a train trip as a child, when she awoke to find that “the restaurant car had disappeared in the night.” A grandmother, in memory, becomes a list: “goat’s milk, goat eyes and the frightened man.”
No writer is more attuned to how we live by these personal similes and synecdoches — where the part stands for the whole — while expecting to relate to one another. Horror for Gallant is getting locked inside other people’s codes of meaning, their arbitrary exchange rates.
The bleak comedy of taking the part for the whole is intense and explicit in “Virus X,” a jewel among jewels in “Uncollected Stories.” Lottie, a Canadian sociology student, arrives in Paris and notices a sprig of holly on her hotel door. “A city that knew about holly,” she thinks, “would know about Christmas, true winter, everything.” Everything! Lottie takes a trip to Alsace with Vera, a chaotic acquaintance from Manitoba. There they find what Vera thinks is part of the Maginot Line, the French border fortifications against the Nazi invasion. It’s nothing but a moss-covered ruin.
“Is that what it is?” Lottie cries. “The Maginot Line? No wonder they lost the war.”
“Why do you think one piece is all of everything?”
From Vera comes a question that could resound across Gallant’s fictional universe. Gallant felt viscerally the political deadliness of mistaking one piece for everything. Her fiction explores how an individual’s complexity can be reduced to symbol. A flag. A passport. A sewn star.
“Virus X” turned into a liberating $6,000. Gallant often associated getting paid with packing her bags (she spent some of the “Virus X” fee on a disappointing trip to Finland). But what had she exchanged for this freedom? Was it worth it? She had periods of writerly despair and low funds. She endured ill health alone. Then a letter would arrive from her New Yorker editor, William Maxwell. In one, he suggested how Gallant’s work smashed exchange value: “There is no way of paying for a story like this under our present payment system. If you like I’d be happy to give you the magazine.”
In Sartre’s “Nausea,” Antoine Roquentin experiences a chestnut tree merging with everything else in a park. He sees not distinct objects but a seething, gelatinous presence. I get the gist: Reality stripped of firm values and concepts (“tree,” “lamppost,” “bench”) becomes an encroaching sludge. But I don’t feel the slosh of raw existence in my stomach.
With Gallant, I do. She can deliver top-line disgust, the existentialist’s moldy bread and butter, showing how life curdles when it seems to lack any sane form. Lunch is “lamb stinking of garlic and spilling blood,” a custard flan arrives sprinkled with parsley (mistaken for quiche in the restaurant kitchen). Her most bewildered characters meet the grossest dogs: pugs with “rashes all over their bodies” who are “always throwing up.”
But it’s her destabilizing narration that truly greens my gills. She lures you into playing the same game as her characters as they reach for meaning, their rulers and symbols clashing. Because they’re in a story, you suspect they come wired with “literary devices.” That custard flan must mean something! Her work lacks the fixed horizon of fictional conventions, and so events and objects sway between significance and randomness.
The effect is a kind of motion sickness, some problem with the inner inner ear. When I’m traveling along her sentences, I’m like Marian, a fashion model in Gallant’s story “Thieves and Rascals”: “I’m always too cold in winter and too hot in summer. I always have a slight headache, I’m always just a little bit hungry.”
Why is this fun? Some people enjoy the artificial fear of a slasher movie. With Gallant at the wheel, telling jokes over her shoulder, I enjoy being aesthetically carsick. The exhaust fuming off her pages, reeking of life’s absurdities and pathos, is invigorating. She blurs her reader’s sight, but in that blur are images of real, moving people.
This is Gallant’s moral vision. She knew we’re at our most dangerous when the road seems clear and steady, when we look happily at the view with a caramel in our cheek, thinking we can measure, from the scantest evidence — a name, a badge, one humid afternoon — what someone else is really like.
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