Mavis Gallant
Mavis Leslie de Trafford Gallant,, was a Canadian writer who spent much of her life and career in France. Best known as a short story writer, she also published novels, plays and essays.
Personal life
Gallant was born in Montreal, Quebec, the only child of Albert Stewart Roy de Trafford Young, a Canadian furniture salesman and painter who was the son of an officer in the British Army, and his wife, Benedictine Wiseman. Young died in 1932 of kidney disease, and his widow soon remarried and moved to New York, leaving their daughter behind with a guardian. Gallant did not learn of her father's death for several years and later told The New York Times: "I had a mother who should not have had children, and it's as simple as that."Gallant was educated at 17 public, private, and convent schools in the United States and Canada. She spent most of the years 1935–1940 in and around New York City, the setting for many of her earlier stories.
She married John Gallant, a Winnipeg musician, in 1942. The couple divorced in 1947. According to Gallant's biographer, the marriage was "briefer than the dates suggest since her husband was in the armed forces overseas for much of the time".
Career
In her 20s, Gallant briefly worked for the National Film Board before taking a job as a reporter for the Montreal Standard. While working for the Standard, she published some of her early short stories, both in the newspaper and in the magazines Preview and Northern Review.Gallant left journalism in 1950 to pursue fiction writing full-time. She moved to Europe with the hope of being able to work exclusively as a writer rather than supporting herself with other work, and lived briefly in Spain before settling in Paris, France, where she resided for the remainder of her life. Despite residing in Paris, Gallant never surrendered her Canadian citizenship or applied for French citizenship.
Her first internationally published short story, "Madeline's Birthday", appeared in the September 1, 1951 issue of The New Yorker. The magazine soon published other stories of hers, including "One Morning in June" and "The Picnic". She did not initially know these later stories had been accepted by the magazine, as her literary agent, Jacques Chambrun, pocketed her $1,535 in royalties and told her the magazine had declined her stories, while simultaneously lying about her residence to the magazine so they could not contact her directly; she discovered that she had been published only upon seeing her name in the magazine while reading it in a library, and thus established her longstanding relationship with the magazine by directly contacting and befriending New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell. Chambrun had also embezzled money from W. Somerset Maugham, Ben Hecht, Grace Metalious, and Jack Schaefer, among others.
She published 116 stories in The New Yorker throughout her career, putting her in the same league as John Cheever or John Updike. Alongside Alice Munro, Gallant is one of only a few Canadian authors whose works have regularly appeared in the magazine.
She wrote two novels, Green Water, Green Sky and A Fairly Good Time ; a play, What Is to Be Done? ; numerous celebrated collections of stories, The Other Paris, My Heart Is Broken, The Pegnitz Junction, The End of the World and Other Stories, From the Fifteenth District, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories, Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris, In Transit and Across the Bridge ; and a non-fiction work, Paris Notebooks: Selected Essays and Reviews. Numerous new collections of stories from the earlier books, including The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories and Varieties of Exile, were also released in the 1990s and 2000s. The Cost of Living collected stories from throughout her career, which had been published in literary magazines but not in earlier collections. Her "Linnet Muir" series of stories, which appeared in several of her books before being collected in their entirety in Home Truths, are her most explicitly semi-autobiographical works.
Throughout Gallant's early career, Canadian literary critics often wrote of her as being unfairly overlooked in Canada because of her expatriate status; prior to the 1970s, in fact, her books were not picked up by Canadian publishers at all, and were available only as rare and expensive American imports until Macmillan of Canada bought publication rights to From the Fifteenth District. According to journalist Robert Fulford, the neglect flowed in both directions, as Gallant did not actually undertake any serious effort to secure a Canadian publisher until Macmillan editor Douglas Gibson approached her in the late 1970s. The Canadian publication of From the Fifteenth District did not initially quell the criticism, however, as the book failed to garner a shortlisted nomination for the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction despite being widely regarded as her greatest work. In response, Gibson compiled Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories, a collection of previously published stories selected to highlight the Canadian themes and settings present in her work. That volume won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction in 1981.
She only rarely granted interviews until 2006, when she participated in two television documentaries: one in English for Bravo! Canada, Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant, and one in French as part of the series CONTACT, l'encyclopédie de la création, hosted by Canadian broadcaster Stéphan Bureau. Gallant was honored at Symphony Space in New York City on November 1, 2006, in an event for Selected Shorts—fellow authors Russell Banks, Jhumpa Lahiri and Michael Ondaatje honoured her and read excerpts from her work, and Gallant herself made a rare personal appearance, reading one of her short stories in its entirety.
Gallant's private journals were slated for publication by McClelland and Stewart and Knopf, with the first volume covering the period from 1952 to 1969, but as of 2023 have yet to appear. Some excerpts from the diaries were published by The New Yorker in 2001, 2012, and 2022.
Gallant was candid about her desire for autonomy and privacy. In an interview with Geoff Hancock in Canadian Fiction magazine in 1978, she discussed her "life project" and her deliberate move to France to write by saying, "I have arranged matters so that I would be free to write. It's what I like doing." In the preface to her collection Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories, she used the words of Boris Pasternak as her epigraph: "Only personal independence matters."
Death
Gallant died, aged 91, on February 18, 2014.Critical assessment
Grazia Merler observes in her book, Mavis Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices, that "Psychological character development is not the heart of Mavis Gallant's stories, nor is plot. Specific situation development and reconstruction of the state of mind or of heart is, however, the main objective." Frequently, Gallant's stories focus on expatriate men and women who have come to feel lost or isolated; marriages that have grown flimsy or shabby; lives that have faltered and now hover in the shadowy area between illusion, self-delusion, and reality. Because of her heritage and understanding of Acadian history, she is often compared to Antonine Maillet, considered to be a spokesperson for Acadian culture in Canada.In her critical book Reading Mavis Gallant, Janice Kulyk Keefer says: "Gallant is a writer who dazzles us with her command of the language, her innovative use of narrative forms, the acuity of her intelligence, and the incisiveness of her wit. Yet she also disconcerts us with her insistence on the constrictions and limitations that dominate human experience."
In a review of her work in Books in Canada in 1978, Geoff Hancock asserts that "Mavis Gallant's fiction is among the finest ever written by a Canadian. But, like buried treasure, both the author and her writing are to discover." In the Canadian Reader, Robert Fulford writes: "One begins comparing her best moments to those of major figures in literary history. Names like Henry James, Chekhov, and George Eliot dance across the mind."
Depiction of fascism
Fascism is a recurring subject in Gallant's stories. She once described her 1973 collection The Pegnitz Junction as "a book about where fascism came from... not the historical causes of Fascism—just its small possibilities in people." Critics have also singled out Gallant's later story "Speck's Idea" as offering a sustained engagement with the psychological appeal of fascism. The story, which is Gallant's most widely anthologized work and has been called "arguably her masterpiece," depicts an art dealer in 1970s France who seems to slowly embrace fascism. At the same time, there are details in the story that seem to undermine his association with fascist ideology.According to critic Andy Lamey, the protagonist of "Speck's Idea" should indeed be viewed as a fascist, "but of a particular, non-ideological type." In the 1970s, France was undergoing a debate about the country's collaboration with its Nazi occupiers during World War II. Lamey offers historical material to suggest that Gallant's story is informed by this debate. He characterizes "Speck's Idea" as a "dramatization of how a segment of the French population, which its central character represents, could tolerate and condone fascism for reasons other than a deep attraction to fascist ideas. These reasons include indifference and self-interest. Gallant's protagonist ultimately illustrates how fascism drew not merely on ideological, but also on opportunistic, motivations."
Awards and honors
In 1981, Gallant was named an Officer of the Order of Canada for her contribution to literature. She was promoted to Companion of the Order in 1993.In 1983-84, she returned to Canada to be the writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. In 1989, Gallant was made a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Queen's University awarded her an honorary LL.D. in 1991, and the Quebec Writers' Federation Awards committee has named its annual non-fiction literary award in her honor. She served on the jury of the Giller Prize in 1997.
In 2000, Gallant won the Matt Cohen Prize, and in 2002 she received the Rea Award for the Short Story. The O. Henry Prize Stories of 2003 was dedicated to her. In 2004, Gallant was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as a PEN/Nabokov Award.
On November 8, 2006, Gallant received the Prix Athanase-David from the government of her native province of Quebec. She was the first author writing in English to receive this award in its 38 years of existence.
In popular culture
In 2018, the Pakistani-American author Sadia Shepard was accused of having copied Gallant's short story "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street" in her story "Foreign-Returned".Director Wes Anderson based one of the stories in his 2021 film The French Dispatch on "The Events in May: A Paris Notebook", a two-part New Yorker story written by Gallant. A fictional reporter inspired by Gallant was portrayed in the film by actress Frances McDormand.
Novellas and short stories
The Other Paris.My Heart Is Broken: Eight Stories and a Short Novel.The Pegnitz Junction: A Novella and Five Short Stories The End of the World and Other Stories From the Fifteenth District: A Novella and Eight Short Stories Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories- Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris In Transit: Twenty Stories
- ''Across the Bridge: Stories''
Compilations
The Moslem Wife and Other Stories- The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant
- The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant
- Paris Stories
- Varieties of Exile
- Montreal Stories
- Going Ashore: Stories. 31 previously uncollected stories.
- The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories. 19 stories from Going Ashore, and an additional story, "Rose".
- ''The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant''
Novels
Green Water, Green Sky.A Fairly Good Time.Plays
What Is to Be Done?, 1983Non-fiction
Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews, 1986Stories
All stories published in The New Yorker except as noted.| Title | Publication | Collected in |
| "Good Morning and Goodbye" | Preview | - |
| "Three Brick Walls" | Preview | - |
| "A Wonderful Country" | Montreal Standard | - |
| "The Flowers of Spring" | Northern Review | - |
| "Madeline’s Birthday" | September 1, 1951 | Going Ashore |
| "One Morning in May" a.k.a. "One Morning in June" | June 7, 1952 | The Other Paris |
| "The Picnic" | August 9, 1952 | The Other Paris The End of the World and Other Stories |
| "The Deceptions of Marie-Blanche" | Charm | The Other Paris |
| "The Other Paris" | April 11, 1953 | The Other Paris The End of the World and Other Stories |
| "Señor Pinedo" | January 9, 1954 | The Other Paris |
| "Wing's Chips" | April 17, 1954 | The Other Paris |
| "The Legacy" | June 26, 1954 | The Other Paris |
| "By the Sea" | July 17, 1954 | In Transit |
| "Poor Franzi" | Harper's Bazaar | The Other Paris |
| "Going Ashore" | December 18, 1954 | The Other Paris |
| "About Geneva" | Charm | The Other Paris The End of the World and Other Stories |
| "Autumn Day" | October 29, 1955 | The Other Paris |
| "A Day Like Any Other" | ? | The Other Paris |
| "In Italy" | February 25, 1956 | In Transit |
| "Thank You For the Lovely Tea" | June 9, 1956 | Home Truths |
| "Thieves and Rascals" | Esquire | Going Ashore |
| "Bernadette" | January 12, 1957 | My Heart Is Broken |
| "An Emergency Case" | February 16, 1957 | In Transit |
| "A Short Love Story" | Montrealer | - |
| "Jeux d'Ete" | July 27, 1957 | In Transit |
| "The Moabitess" | November 2, 1957 | My Heart Is Broken |
| "The Old Place" | Texas Quarterly 1.2 | The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant |
| "Green Water, Green Sky"* | June 27, 1959 | * Excerpt from Green Water, Green Sky |
| "Travellers Must Be Content"* | July 11, 1959 | * Excerpt from Green Water, Green Sky |
| "August"* | August 29, 1959 | * Excerpt from Green Water, Green Sky |
| "Jorinda and Jorindel" | September 19, 1959 | Home Truths |
| "Up North" | November 21, 1959 | Home Truths |
| "Acceptance of Their Ways" | January 30, 1960 | My Heart Is Broken The End of the World and Other Stories |
| "When We Were Nearly Young" | October 15, 1960 | In Transit |
| "Crossing France" | The Critic | The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant |
| "Better Times" | December 3, 1960 | In Transit |
| "Rose" | December 17, 1960 | The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories |
| "A Question of Disposal" a.k.a. "Two Questions" | June 10, 1961 | In Transit |
| "My Heart Is Broken" | August 12, 1961 | My Heart Is Broken |
| "The Cost of Living" | March 3, 1962 | My Heart Is Broken |
| "Night and Day" | March 17, 1962 | Going Ashore |
| "One Aspect of a Rainy Day" | April 14, 1962 | Going Ashore |
| "The Hunter's Waking Thoughts" | September 29, 1962 | In Transit |
| "Sunday Afternoon" | November 24, 1962 | My Heart Is Broken |
| "Willi" | January 5, 1963 | Going Ashore |
| "Careless Talk" | September 28, 1963 | In Transit |
| "An Unmarried Man's Summer" | October 12, 1963 | My Heart Is Broken The End of the World and Other Stories |
| "Ernst in Civilian Clothes" | November 16, 1963 | The Pegnitz Junction |
| "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street" | December 14, 1963 | My Heart Is Broken Home Truths |
| "The Image on the Mirror" | - | My Heart Is Broken |
| "An Autobiography" | February 1, 1964 | The Pegnitz Junction |
| "The Circus" | June 20, 1964 | In Transit |
| "Paola and Renata" | The Southern Review | Going Ashore |
| "Virus X" | January 30, 1965 | Home Truths |
| "Orphans' Progress" | April 3, 1965 | Home Truths |
| "In Transit" | August 6, 1965 | In Transit |
| "The Statues Taken Down" | October 9, 1965 | In Transit |
| "Questions and Answers" | May 28, 1966 | In Transit |
| "Vacances Pax" | July 16, 1966 | In Transit |
| "Bonaventure" | July 30, 1966 | Home Truths |
| "A Report" | December 3, 1966 | In Transit |
| "The End of the World" | June 10, 1967 | The End of the World and Other Stories |
| "The Accident" | October 28, 1967 | The End of the World and Other Stories |
| "The Sunday After Christmas" | December 30, 1967 | In Transit |
| "April Fish" | February 10, 1968 | In Transit |
| "Malcolm and Bea" | March 23, 1968 | The End of the World and Other Stories |
| "Saturday" | June 8, 1968 | Home Truths |
| "The Captive Niece" | January 4, 1969 | In Transit |
| "Good Deed" | February 22, 1969 | In Transit |
| "The Rejection" | April 12, 1969 | Going Ashore |
| "The Prodigal Parent" | June 7, 1969 | The End of the World and Other Stories Home Truths |
| "The Wedding Ring" | June 28, 1969 | The End of the World and Other Stories |
| "The Old Friends" | August 30, 1969 | The Pegnitz Junction |
| "New Year's Eve" | January 10, 1970 | The End of the World and Other Stories |
| "In the Tunnel" | September 18, 1971 | The End of the World and Other Stories Home Truths |
| "O Lasting Peace" | January 8, 1972 | The Pegnitz Junction |
| "An Alien Flower" | October 7, 1972 | The Pegnitz Junction |
| "The Pegnitz Junction" | - | The Pegnitz Junction |
| "His Mother" | August 13, 1973 | From the Fifteenth District |
| "The Latehomecomer" | July 8, 1974 | From the Fifteenth District |
| "Irina" | December 2, 1974 | From the Fifteenth District |
| "The Four Seasons" | June 16, 1975 | From the Fifteenth District |
| "In Youth Is Pleasure" | November 24, 1975 | Home Truths |
| "Between Zero and One" | December 8, 1975 | Home Truths |
| "Varieties of Exile" | January 19, 1976 | Home Truths |
| "Voices Lost in Snow" | April 5, 1976 | Home Truths |
| "The Moslem Wife" | August 23, 1976 | From the Fifteenth District |
| "Potter" | March 21, 1977 | From the Fifteenth District |
| "The Doctor" | June 20, 1977 | Home Truths |
| "With a Capital T" | Canadian Fiction | Home Truths |
| "From the Fifteenth District" | October 30, 1978 | From the Fifteenth District |
| "The Burgundy Weekend" | Tamarack Review | Going Ashore |
| "Baum, Gabriel, 1935-" | February 12, 1979 | From the Fifteenth District |
| "The Remission" | August 13, 1979 | From the Fifteenth District |
| "Speck's Idea" | November 19, 1979 | Overhead in a Balloon |
| "A Revised Guide to Paris" | February 11, 1980 | Going Ashore |
| "From Sunrise to Daybreak" | March 17, 1980 | - |
| "The Assembly" | Harper's Magazine | Overhead in a Balloon |
| "Dido Flute, Spouse to Europe" | May 12, 1980 | "Going Ashore" |
| "From Gamut to Yalta" | September 15, 1980 | "Going Ashore" |
| "Europe by Satellite" | November 3, 1980 | - |
| "Mousse" | December 22, 1980 | Going Ashore |
| "French Crenellation" | February 9, 1981 | Going Ashore |
| "A Painful Affair" | March 16, 1981 | Overhead in a Balloon |
| "This Space" | July 6, 1981 | - |
| "On With the New in France" | August 10, 1981 | Going Ashore |
| "La Vie Parisienne" | October 19, 1981 | Going Ashore |
| "Larry" | November 16, 1981 | Overhead in a Balloon |
| "Siegfried's Memoirs" | April 5, 1982 | Going Ashore |
| "Treading Water" | May 24, 1982 | Going Ashore |
| "A Flying Start" | September 13, 1982 | Overhead in a Balloon |
| "Luc and His Father" | October 4, 1982 | Overhead in a Balloon |
| "Grippes and Poche" | November 29, 1982 | Overhead in a Balloon |
| "A Recollection" | August 22, 1983 | Overhead in a Balloon |
| "Rue de Lille" | September 19, 1983 | Overhead in a Balloon |
| "The Colonel's Child" | October 10, 1983 | Overhead in a Balloon |
| "Lena" | October 31, 1983 | Overhead in a Balloon |
| "Overhead in a Balloon" | July 2, 1984 | Overhead in a Balloon |
| "The Chosen Husband" | April 15, 1985 | Across the Bridge |
| "From Cloud to Cloud" | July 8, 1985 | Across the Bridge |
| "Florida" | August 26, 1985 | Across the Bridge |
| "Leaving the Party" | March 3, 1986 | - |
| "Kingdom Come" | September 8, 1986 | Across the Bridge |
| "Dede" | January 5, 1987 | Across the Bridge |
| "1933" a.k.a. "Declassé" | Mademoiselle | Across the Bridge |
| "Let It Pass" | May 18, 1987 | - |
| "The Concert Party" | January 28, 1988 | - |
| "In a War" | October 30, 1989 | - |
| "Across the Bridge" | March 18, 1991 | Across the Bridge |
| "Forain" | June 24, 1991 | Across the Bridge |
| "A State of Affairs" | December 23, 1991 | Across the Bridge |
| "Mlle. Dias de Corta" | December 28, 1992 & January 4, 1993 | Across the Bridge |
| "The Fenton Child" | - | Across the Bridge |
| "In Plain Sight" | October 25, 1993 | The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant |
| "Scarves, Beads, Sandals" | February 20 & 27, 1995 | The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant |