SHORT STORIES: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The Cost of LivingBy Mavis Gallant Bloomsbury, 339pp. £20
THERE ARE TWO great Canadian short story writers. One is Alice Munro. The other is Mavis Gallant. Most readers will be familiar with Munro’s candid art, her reassuring way of drawing the reader into the darker depths of being alive, and her subtle method of making a story move between other stories, other lives.
Munro captures ordinary life, particularly as lived in Canada. Gallant is different; her style is closer to Cheever or Updike. In common with them, she was influenced by William Maxwell. Her Canada exists at a remove; yet it is there, if largely as a way of reminding her characters that they are from elsewhere.
This volume of 20 stories, all but three of which were initially published in the New Yorker, is a book in its own right. But for admirers of Gallant, and for readers of The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant(1997) it is essential reading. These are the stories in which Gallant established her enduring theme of displacement. She left Canada and settled in Paris in 1950; it gave her distance from her homeland. Her astute intelligence has also ensured that she has remained at an equal remove from France. She continues to be alert to "the well-bred Parisian voice that silences stone".
GALLANT WAS A journalist when she began writing, and has retained a factual approach to writing. The children in these stories, as elsewhere throughout her work, are independent and single-minded; they have to be, as the adults tend to be dislocated. These stories reflect a sense of setting out. One of the finest pieces is the title work, in which one of Gallant’s brave young women who had left home in Australia for Paris, and made a life of her own in Paris watches as her elder sister joins her and attempts to do the same. The story, written in 1962, is an important benchmark for Gallant.
The narrative voice is wry, belonging as it does to a woman who reflects: “I was the music mistress, out in all weathers, subject to chills, with plenty of woollen garments to lend. I had not come to Paris in order to teach solfège to stiff-fingered children. It happened that at the late age of twenty-seven I had run away from home.” When her sister arrives, she not only tries to get to know the narrator, she diligently attempts to meet people.
Life in the boarding house is about trying to get by. Money is not only necessary, it helps establish contacts. She often draws on a theme important to Henry James; the new world confronted by the old. This contrast is well illustrated by the odd friendship which develops between Louise, the narrator’s sister, and the calculating Sylvie, an aspiring actress skilled at getting what she wants. “Someone ought to have drawn her – but somebody has: Sylvie was the coarse and grubby Degas dancer, the girl with the shoulder thrown back and the insolent chin. For two pins, or fewer, that girl staring out of flat canvas would stick out her tongue or spit in your face . . . Sylvie was always where you wanted to be; she had always got there first.”
This feel for character is Gallant’s gift. The plots are almost irrelevant. What matters is how these people conduct themselves, how they manage to get by. In Bernadette, a complacent married couple survive all manner of the husband’s deceptions, because they suit each others needs. Robbie the husband once remarked to one of his mistresses that Nora, was “not exciting”. In fact, he felt sufficiently at ease to elaborate: “But she’s an awfully good sort, if you know what I mean. I mean she’s really a good sort. I honestly couldn’t imagine not living with Nora.” Gallant follows this comment with an astute insight that efficiently summarises Robbie’s superficial nature. “The girl to whom this was addressed had instantly burst into tears, but Robbie was used to that. Unreasonable emotional behaviour on the part of other women only reinforced his respect for his wife.”
EVEN MORE interesting than the chill tango conducted between husband and wife is the stoic attitude of their young, mysteriously pregnant servant, Bernadette. She believes her baby will die, as had most of her mother’s. “She saw, as plainly as if it had been laid in her arms, her child, her personal angel, white and swaddled, baptized, innocent, ready for death.”
Most of these stories share a backdrop, the aftermath of the second World War. Much of the displacement shared by the characters is the legacy of the war, but along with different countries and different languages, there are states of mind. The opening story, Madeline's Birthday, dates from 1951, and is the second story Gallant submitted to the New Yorker. It is an astonishing study of a young girl caught between childhood and adulthood.
This is a good book, a generous book. As well as providing such an interesting insight to the young writer, it comes with a thoughtful introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri. Writers often provide forewords, yet here Lahiri has surpassed the customary celebratory piece. She has engaged with the stories and what emerges is a very clear sense of one writer attempting to define what makes another so rare.
And rare she is. Mavis Gallant is a sophisticated hybrid; she looks at Europe as if it were an object of dangerous beauty, all the while keeping a close eye on characters who invariably make the wrong decision. In the magnificent preface she wrote to accompany her selected stories, Gallant stated that stories are not chapters of books. “Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” It is good advice. But stories do more than wait; they linger and endure.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
