GALLANT, Mavis

Nationality: Canadian. Born: Mavis Young in Montreal, Quebec, 11 August 1922. Education: Schools in Montreal and New York. Career: Worked at National Film Board of Canada, Montreal, early 1940s; reporter, Montreal Standard, 1944-50; has lived in Europe since 1950 and in Paris from early 1960s; contributor, The New Yorker, since 1951; writer-in-residence, University of Toronto, 1983-84. Lives in Paris. Awards: Canadian Fiction prize, 1978; Governor-General's award, 1982; Canada-Australia literary prize, 1984. Honorary degree: Université Sainte-Anne, Pointede-Église, Nova Scotia, 1984. Member: Foreign honorary member, American Academy, 1988; fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1988. Officer, Order of Canada, 1982.

Publications

Short Stories

The Other Paris. 1956.

My Heart Is Broken: Eight Stories and a Short Novel. 1964; as An Unmarried Man's Summer, 1965.

The Pegnitz Junction: A Novella and Five Short Stories. 1973.

The End of the World and Other Stories. 1974.

From the Fifteenth District: A Novella and Eight Short Stories. 1979.

Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories. 1981.

Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris. 1987.

In Transit: Twenty Stories. 1988.

Novels

Green Water, Green Sky. 1959.

A Fairly Good Time. 1970.

Play

What Is to Be Done? (produced 1982). 1984.

Other

The Affair of Gabrielle Russier, with others. 1971.

Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews. 1988.

*

Bibliography:

by Judith Skelton Grant and Douglas Malcolm, in The Annotated Bibliography of Canada's Major Authors 5 edited by Robert Lecker and Jack David, 1984.

Critical Studies:

"Gallant Issue" of Canadian Fiction 28, 1978; Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices by Grazia Merler, 1978; The Light of Imagination: Gallant's Fiction by Neil K. Besner, 1988; Reading Gallant by Janice Kulyk Keefer, 1989; "The Short Stories of Mavis Gallant" by Diane Simmons, in Canadian Women Writing Fiction edited by Mickey Pearlman, 1993; "Spatial Patterns of Oppression in Mavis Gallant's Linnet Muir Sequence, " in Studies in Canadian Literature, 1993, pp. 132-55; "Structural Patterns of Alienation and Disjunction: Mavis Gallant's Firmly-Structured Stories" by Danielle Schaub, in Canadian Literature, Spring 1993, pp. 45-57; "Mirroring the Canadas: Mavis Gallant's Fiction" by Lorna Irvine, in Colby Quarterly, June 1993, pp. 119-25; "Slices of Life as Historiographic Discourse: Mavis Gallant's The Pegnitz Junction " by Danielle Schaub, in Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature edited by Bernd Engler and Kurt Muller, 1994; "The Secular Opiate: Marxism as an Ersatz Religion in Three Canadian Texts" by Christian Bok, in Canadian Literature, Winter 1995, pp. 11-22; "Mavis Gallant: An Oeuvre Extraordinaire" by David Finkle in Publishers Weekly, 7 October 1996, pp. 46-7.

* * *

Mavis Gallant's fiction is concerned with how we confront the past, either our own youth or what we refer to as history—the collective sum of our memories. She portrays refugees, exiles, and expatriates, many of them North Americans living in Europe like herself. Often her characters are unsure of their identities and alienated from their families and their own past selves. Indeed, one critic, David O'Rourke, considers Gallant's characters to be exiles in time as much as in space; they feel "locked into a present situation, condition, stage of personal history, from which escape is difficult, and sometimes impossible." Many characters in her earlier stories live on the Riviera during the off-season, which becomes, as Michelle Gadpaille says, "a museum of mores, a fitting place to study the habits and the habitats of dying breeds."

The past gives us identity, and many characters in Gallant's fiction cling to their pasts to preserve their identities and lend meaning to the present or at least make it tolerable. Those who succumb to the ease of living in comfortably familiar ways end up paralyzed and lacking in vitality, like Walter of "An Unmarried Man's Summer," Miss Horeham of "The Moabitess," and the characters in "In the Tunnel." The tunnel of the latter story, according to George Woodcock, symbolizes the "self-repetition in which each of the characters lives and the narrowness of insight and view that limits their sense of life." Such characters do not grow or change; they view life in habitual ways that sap their spirits and leave them, in essence, dead—readers have been struck by the frequent symbolic use of physical illness and winter settings in Gallant's work.

Apart from being trapped by personal histories, characters find themselves caught up in historical movements that they cannot control or seldom understand. But history's movements cannot be resisted; when one interviewer suggested that Piotr, the Polish protagonist of "Potter," chooses to fall back into familiar patterns, Gallant said, "He is not hanging on to the past, the political system is hanging on to him."

How do characters respond to history or current events? Some, like Señor Pinedo of the story by the same name, maintain their early illusions despite everything falling apart around them. Pinedo continues to assert the glories of the Falange movement in the face of poverty and oppression. Many of Gallant's Riviera stories portray refugees from the crumbling British Empire during and after World War II, like the Unwins in "The Four Seasons" and the Webbs in "The Remission," who try to recreate old patrician Britain overseas. The Unwins have worked so hard to remove themselves from the flow of time that they remain wilfully blind to the meaning of Mussolini's rise—and so do many Italians. The Webbs similarly hold onto a way of life now no longer relevant, and it is significant that Barbara has an affair with an actor who plays typical prewar British gentlemen in films, while her husband—a real representative of the old gentry—lies dying. Other characters find they cannot escape the pain of the past, like Helena, the concentration camp survivor in "The Old Friends" who "stings" the German commissioner with whom she has lunch with her references to Germany's past (she is symbolized by the wasp she frees at the end of their most recent conversation). The commissioner represents a third way Gallant's characters deal with history, by trying to forget it or its implications. The commissioner cannot believe the holocaust was anything more than an administrative error; "a serious mistake was made," he thinks.

In "The Latehomecomer" Thomas Bestermann returns home long after other soldiers and finds that his fellow Germans, notably Willy Wehler, want nothing more than to forget the war entirely. But that, of course, means denying him, too, since he has known almost nothing but his role as a German soldier. Ernst, who appears in "Ernst in Civilian Clothes" and "Willi," has no other identity but that provided by his uniform, and he has worn many different uniforms during his life. What is left for him when the war is relegated to a safe distance in the world's collective memory? What happens to our identities when they are largely determined by events everyone wants to forget? Many of Gallant's stories focus on World War II and its aftermath because to her it was history's ultimate dislocation. As a journalist in Montreal she was once asked to supply captions to the first photographs to come out of the concentration camps, and she was too stunned by what she saw to do so. After the war she went to Europe and was again struck by the war's destructive legacy. Because of the photographs she became interested in finding out why fascism occurs, not in broad historical terms but in its personal manifestations—what she called in an interview with Geoff Hancock fascism's "small possibilities in people." She sees fascism as the ultimate form of rigid thinking, one that views the world in absolute terms, above all in abstracts that leave no room for humanity. Thus, while a small child lies crushed beneath him Señor Pinedo can only see an opportunity to reassert the glories of his old cause; as Grazia Merler says, he is "a character totally subjugated by the system," whose humanity crumbles under "his blind fidelity to rules and regulations." Of course, what we call history is only our memory of it, and our memory distorts the truth to make it more acceptable.

Many of Gallant's characters live in worlds of their own creation. Carol Frazier, of "The Other Paris," is a classic example: she refuses to see Paris as it is because the reality conflicts with the illusions she has brought with her to the city. Characters like Carol attempt to deny history by replacing it with creations of their imaginations, a hopeless task. In contrast Linnet Muir has no choice to make her own past out of what she learns from her visits to Montreal in the series of stories about her ("In Youth Is Pleasure," "Between Zero and One," and so on). Gallant's fiction portrays a constant struggle with the past. Those who cling to their pasts become prisoners of it; those who deny their pasts lose their identities. However her characters respond, they cannot escape the profound effects that history—personal or national—continues to have on the present.

—Allan Weiss

See the essays on "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street" and "My Heart Is Broken."