Capacious and Alive - Nadia Ghent reviews “The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant.”
Publisher: Los Angeles Review of Books | Author: Nadia Ghent | Genre: Non-fiction | Publication Date: January 21, 2025 | Publication Type: Online & Print Reviews | Content Type: Book Review
The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant by Mavis Gallant. NYRB Classics, 2025. 624 pages.
“THE MONTE DE PIEDAD [a pawnshop] is run like a bank, big, efficient, and clean,” Mavis Gallant writes in her diary in 1952 soon after arriving in Madrid from Montréal. “I part with my typewriter for fifteen hundred pesetas. It turns out that in this country it is the most valuable thing I own.” Gallant, ex-journalist, expatriate Canadian, is forced to choose between writing and starvation. She has left the familiarity of her North American hometown for the uncertainty of a postwar Europe struggling to return to the 20th century, the place where she intends to write fiction unfettered by assumptions about her ability to support herself as a writer. She is expected to fail, a woman alone without husband, family, or money. Still, she is intent on bowing to no one, least of all to the chorus of literary gatekeepers who believe women only want to write about cooking. She is so hungry that she faints in the street.
And yet, she has the confidence to hock the means of her livelihood, her typewriter, knowing that a market exists in the United States for her sharply drawn, realist short stories. She is shrewd but also naive: her first royalty check from The New Yorker is stolen by a dishonest literary agent. Months of “little to eat (potatoes and potatoes)” give way to a decade of wandering throughout the devastated landscapes of an impoverished Europe, sending more stories to The New Yorker and collecting rejections before she finally settles in Paris for the next 54 years and becomes Mavis Gallant, the author.
If this is an apocryphal story about the trials of the starving artist before achieving literary success (only slightly obscured by Gallant herself in her habit of glossing over her years of struggle), it is dismaying to realize that, while the story is true, Gallant is still too little known despite the staggering mastery of her writing. Perhaps this is because she lived between languages and cultures, and no country can entirely claim her: Gallant, who died in 2014, was an English Canadian from the French Canadian province of Québec who lived most of her life in France. After spending her childhood and teenage years in the US, she returned to Canada during World War II to work as a journalist for The Montréal Standard before moving to Paris, where she wrote in English for a select American audience of literary-minded readers devoted to the glossy pages of The New Yorker.
The consummate outsider, Gallant had access to a deeply unstable postwar world divided by borders, gender, and nationalistic labels, where exiles, refugees, immigrants, and the stateless had been set adrift in an endless search for home. If she hadn’t redeemed her typewriter from the pawnshop in Madrid, there might not have been the 103 short stories and 13 brief, humorous “casuals” published by The New Yorker, more than her compatriot, Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro—more even, as Garth Risk Hallberg marvels in his expansive and richly detailed introduction to The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant (2025), than “Cheever in his prime, nearly as many as the ubiquitous Updike.” Nor would there have been such an astonishing body of work—two novels; a total of 120 short stories; a collection of nonfiction, Paris Notebooks (1986); unpublished diaries; and over 60 feature stories from her six years at The Standard—that is manifestly still relevant today. With the publication of this volume, the entirety of Gallant’s fiction is now in print.
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Gallant herself did little to attract public attention. She was one of the few writers able to support herself solely by writing short stories, the most elusive of literary piecework, and writing is what she did, all day, every day, in a modest flat in the sixth arrondissement. “When I left Canada I was looking for a place where I could live on my own terms,” she told an interviewer in 1977. “I found Paris the most open city, the one that leaves you alone most.” Gallant rarely spoke about her early life. The only box off-limits to researchers in Gallant’s archive at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto is the one filled with family memorabilia. Also off-limits are her intensely personal diaries (two brief excerpts were published in The New Yorker), originally slated for publication in 2017, which have been mired in estate litigation and may never become available to the public.
What is known is that, in 1922, she was born Mavis Young, the only child of Albert Stewart Roy de Trafford Young, an Anglo-Scot immigrant to Montréal, and his wife, Benedictine Wiseman, a Canadian American. The details of Gallant’s early life are almost Dickensian. Her father was an unsuccessful painter exiled to Canada by his aristocratic family (a “remittance man” living on family handouts), and her mother was an amateur cellist, unhappily married. When Gallant was four, her parents sent her away to a strict French Catholic convent boarding school in Québec. By far the youngest boarder, she developed the kind of survival skills all abandoned young children learn to get by—selective amnesia and an intense inner world animated by the last memory of her mother leaving her on a chair in the Mother Superior’s office, promising to return soon, which she neglected to do for many years. When Gallant was 10, her father died unexpectedly in his early thirties. Her mother, involved with another man before her husband’s death, told Gallant that her father had gone to London; he had, in fact, succumbed to medical complications, as Garth Risk Hallberg speculates in the introduction, “possibly culminating in suicide.” For years, she believed he would return.
Gallant’s early schooling was marked by upheaval and disruption. Her mother’s remarriage and subsequent move to New York did little to pull Gallant out of her feelings of abandonment; there are hints of sexual harassment by her stepfather and indications of her mother’s mental instability. Over these years, Gallant was enrolled in 17 different schools, sometimes for as short a period as a few weeks. From age 13 to 18, she lived with her mother and stepfather, often fleeing to the home of family friends where she was given access to an extensive library. The father of the family was a psychoanalyst and encouraged her to read Freud and Jung as well as Russian writers in translation—Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky—and the French: Stendhal, Flaubert, and Proust, her favorite. Gallant, who never attended university, may be the last of the true autodidact writers who learned their craft through reading.
Following the outbreak of World War II, Gallant returned to Canada, where, at the age of 18, she found a job in the newsroom of The Montréal Standard, a position that would have been closed to her if not for the absence of male journalists who were overseas fighting the war. No one in Montréal remembered her, and the sense of freedom she found in her birthplace was astonishing: she was on her own and supporting herself even if what she was asked to write compromised her growing political awareness. “With a Capital T,” from the cycle of quasi-autofictional, interconnected Linnet Muir stories written in the 1970s, recalls the conditions of the workplace Gallant-as-Linnet faced:
From behind frosted-glass doors, as from a leaking intellectual bath, flow instructions about style, spelling, caution, libel, brevity, and something called “the ground rules.” A few of these rules have been established for the convenience of the wives of senior persons and reflect their tastes and interests, their inhibitions and fears, their desire to see close friends’ pictures when they open to the social page, their fragile attention span. Other rules demand that we pretend to be independent of British foreign policy and American commerce—otherwise our readers, discouraged, will give up caring who wins the war.
It was in the newsroom that Gallant learned to write, often behind deadline but always with a visual angle in an era in which news photography was becoming its own medium. Tasked with writing captions for the first photographs emerging from the liberation of Auschwitz, Gallant could not bring herself to write anything; “[Imagine] having to write the explanation of something I did not myself understand,” Gallant remarked. These images, ultimately captioned by her editors with patriotic self-congratulations (Canadians are not immune to this), laid the foundation for Gallant’s exploration in fiction of the forces of history, the distortion of memory, and the inadequacy of language to convey one single truth within the uneasily shifting boundaries of an unstable, authoritarian world. A world not dissimilar to our own.
“Journalism was a life I liked, but not the one I wanted,” Gallant wrote in her afterword to the NYRB edition of Paris Stories (2002). She chafed at the provincialism of the newspaper and the conservative culture of Montréal at the time, hilariously epitomized by her request to write a feature about Paul Hindemith and Jean-Paul Sartre, which provoked her exasperated editor to complain, “Listen, Mavis, I’m sick to death of these French-Canadian geniuses that you’re always trying to cram down my throat.” Briefly married to John Gallant, a musician from Winnipeg deployed in the armed forces for much of their marriage (just as Linnet Muir is married to an absent soldier in “With a Capital T”), Mavis Gallant had been steadily writing short stories, filling a picnic hamper with her drafts, her own personal slush pile. It was the portability of the picnic hamper that allowed her to quit her job, divorce her husband, and move to France, pulling a story or two off the pile and sending them to The New Yorker, or to other literary magazines the rare times they weren’t taken. Here is where her nearly five-decade relationship began, not just with The New Yorker (which “justifies the existence of that magazine,” Russell Banks writes in his introduction to 2003’s Varieties of Exile, the second of the now five-volume NYRB Classics collection of Gallant’s fiction) but also with her passionate readers, who came to expect another Gallant story at regular intervals to see them through the tumult of the second half of the 20th century.
These were the years that fiction published in The New Yorker was being shaped by William Maxwell, also a novelist and short story writer, whose sensitivity to other writers’ needs and abilities rather than his own jealousy or competitiveness made him into a superb editor. Maxwell was deft with praise without being overly flattering; he could deliver rejections that were meant to encourage, not devastate. Garth Risk Hallberg characterizes Maxwell’s editorial relationship with Gallant as a conversation between two writers, a relationship carried out through letters from New York to Paris: “[Maxwell’s] own experience at the desk seems to have given him a sense of what Gallant needed to hear, which in those days, despite her fierce drive for autonomy, was outside approval: ‘Go right on writing.’” Their work together consisted mostly of questions flying back and forth across the Atlantic—“at times like the best writer’s workshop ever conducted, at others like a literary sparring session,” Hallberg writes—until Gallant was satisfied that she could go no further with her story.
But it would be wrong to assume that Maxwell alone made Gallant into the writer she was, or that she was shaped into the mold of a New Yorker writer simply through editing, even if during this era she was as closely associated with the ideal of New Yorker fiction as John Updike. Gallant was too independent and uncompromising with herself to be entirely shaped by anybody. Nor were her stories similar to any other writer’s. At a time of moral retrenchment, she pushed the boundaries of what The New Yorker deemed acceptable: “Bernadette,” from The Cost of Living (2009), the third in the NYRB series, about a live-in French Canadian maid impregnated by her English Canadian employer, helped to bring the magazine out of its hidebound 1950s fustiness. And Gallant was meticulous in the presentation of her writing. An undated note in her archive takes the legendary New Yorker copyeditors to task: “You must run this as I have given it to you and DO NOT PUT IN COMMAS. Please tell checking that I will demolish 43rd Street from one end to the other if they do not put those commas back where they found them.” It is clear, Hallberg observes, “who would be the maestro and who the pupil.” Still, Gallant owed Maxwell her life as a writer. She said of him: “He asked just a few questions and let me think it was perfectly natural to throw up one’s job and all one’s friends and everything familiar and go thousands of miles away to write. He made it seem no more absurd or unusual than taking a bus to visit a museum.”
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What The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant allows us to enter is not a museum of midcentury fiction, dead and irrelevant, but a master class in writing, one that is capacious and alive. Hallberg has beautifully arranged the 44 stories geographically and in roughly chronological order, similar to Gallant’s 1981 collection Home Truths, which creates a journey that puts the reader in the place of Gallant herself traveling from North America to Europe, from New World to Old, from the familiar to the unknown. It is a dislocation both physical and existential, where brief moments of illumination sweep across a character’s consciousness before it is plunged back into uncertainty.
Within the first section, “Stories of North America,” Gallant’s writing spans a child’s view of an incomprehensible adult (“Thank You for the Lovely Tea”) to the reverse view, a father facing his incomprehensible offspring (“The Prodigal Parent”), with the middle of the section given over to the riveting novella “Its Image on the Mirror,” a portrait of a family’s dissolution told through the unsettled relations between sisters. Here is Gallant’s exploration of the everyday fascism of family structures, the suffocating ancestral ties that serve only to bind us to unhappiness. In “Thank You for the Lovely Tea,” Gallant situates the reader in a girls’ boarding school, where boredom and cruelty function as the sole curriculum. By exploring the inner thoughts of all five characters—a shifting point of view that instantly destabilizes the reader—she breaks all the rules of Fiction 101. This already is prime Gallant: disorientation and the uneasy relationship between children who have been thrust too early into adulthood and adults who behave like children. “The Prodigal Parent” takes cruelty to another level by portraying a down-and-out father, an echo of Gallant’s own, contorting himself in the face of his wealthy daughter’s utter disdain for him.
It is in these stories of North America that Gallant introduces another dominant theme of her writing—the experience of the immigrant colliding with culturally enforced xenophobia in the hostile territory of their new home. Jean, the narrator of “Its Image in the Mirror,” the plainer sister to the flamboyant Isobel, observes her father’s deeply racist opinions:
Our father believed that Scottish blood was the best in the country, responsible for our national character traits of prudence, level-headedness, and self-denial. If anyone doubted it, our father said, the doubter had only to look at the rest of Canada: the French-Canadians (political corruption, pusillanimity, hysteria); the Italians (hair oil, used to bootleg in the ’twenties, used to pass right through Allenton); Russians and Ukrainians (regicide, Communism, pyromania, the distressing cult of nakedness on the West Coast); Jews (get in everywhere, the women don’t wear corsets); Swedes, Finns (awful people for a bottle, never save a cent); Poles, hunkies, the whole Danubian fringe (they start all the wars). The Irish were Catholics, and the Germans had been beyond the pale since 1914. The only immigrant group he approved of were the Dutch.
This is a nationalism that Gallant knew all too well and abhorred, a rabid ethnocentricity distinct from what she called “a national sense of self”; even patriotism, she writes in the introduction to the Canadian edition of Home Truths, is “so often used as a stick to beat people with.” For Jean, set adrift in the rigidity of her culture while her sister has escaped by marrying an Argentinian doctor, knowledge of such narrow-mindedness does nothing to help her escape. Only the sound of a far-off train allows her to imagine another life: “The drawn-out sweeping whistle rushed by the windows. It was the Boston train, which had seemed to me on winter nights before I married the sound of hope and escape. Afterwards it was the sound of nostalgia.” Gallant’s characters are as trapped in their circumstances as James Joyce’s in Dubliners (1914).
In the section “Stories of Southern Europe,” Gallant pulls the reader into worlds of subjectivity and destabilization. Here are some standouts: a bicycle journey across the French countryside gone terribly wrong, “Crossing France” explores the small disagreements between friends that blow up into major betrayals; Douglas Ramsay, in “Bonaventure,” a composer and “lapsed genius,” clings to a skewed perception of himself when confronted with the legend of a greater musician; and a failing vacation colony director, in “Vacances Pax,” emulates the forced comity of “One Europe,” the notion that ethnic differences don’t matter in the “great soup” of continental togetherness. In the section “Stories of Paris and Beyond,” “Virus X” might jump out at the reader for its prescience: one way I survived the COVID-19 pandemic was through A Public Space’s virtual group reading of Gallant’s 1959 novel Green Water, Green Sky (in the 2016 NYRB edition), led by Eliott Holt. Until then, I had remembered Gallant only as that annoying writer who seemed to have a story in The New Yorker every week during the years I was a struggling music student desperate to stay connected to the written word. A virus changed my thinking about Mavis Gallant.
What makes Hallberg’s editorial choices especially valuable not just to the reader but also to the writer is his decision to include three of Gallant’s earliest stories and a comprehensive bibliography. This means that turning to the book’s last page isn’t so much reaching the end of Gallant as receiving an invitation to go on from there: The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant is a satisfying capstone to NYRB’s commitment to Gallant’s fiction. There are four earlier volumes in the series, as well as the hefty Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant (1996) from Random House. Worth seeking out also is Sadia Shepard’s somewhat controversial yet masterfully intertextual tribute to Gallant, “Foreign-Returned” (about which Gina Apostol has written for LARB), reminding us yet again of the capaciousness of fiction and how stories are not the property of a single class of privileged white writers from the Global North.
These 44 stories trace Gallant’s progress as a writer ruthless in her self-scrutiny. Her prose grabs us by the throat, allowing us to see beyond our own miserly limitations. By examining the depth of her descriptions not just of place but also of person, the deep psychological probing she accomplishes in a few scintillating words and phrases, we become more sensitive to issues of displacement, especially now as nationalism, xenophobia, racism, and transphobia come roaring back into view. This final collection of Gallant’s fiction shows us how to live as humans in a world stacked against us.
LARB Contributor
Nadia Ghent is a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her thesis on the female cosmopolitan in Mavis Gallant’s fiction earned her a master’s degree at Harvard in 2024.
