Mavis Gallant

Canadian writer

• Born: August 11, 1922
• Birthplace: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• Died: February 18, 2014
• Place of death: Paris, France

One of the finest writers of short fiction to have emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, Gallant produced sensitive, subtle, and beautifully crafted works about isolated, lonely people: children ignored by their parents, adults unconnected to their own societies, and expatriates in Europe desperately seeking their own identities.

Early Life

Mavis Gallant (MAY-vihs ga-LAHNT) was born Mavis de Trafford Young in Montreal. When she was four years old, her parents sent her to the Pensionnat Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague, a Roman Catholic French school, where she soon became fully bilingual. Though she was the only Protestant child there, she got along well with the other children. However, her parents’ continuing indifference to her, along with the demands of the nuns for mindless obedience, taught her to distrust adults.

Gallant’s father died in 1932, and her mother promptly remarried and moved to the United States, leaving her daughter with strangers. Mavis seldom saw her mother and stepfather. When she was with them, she found her stepfather cold and dictatorial, while her mother continued to be self-absorbed and unpredictable. Over the years, Mavis was dispatched to seventeen different schools, some of them in the United States and others in Canada, living with a guardian in the United States. In 1940, she graduated from Pine Plains High School in Pine Plains, New York.

From childhood on, Gallant was a voracious reader. She later said that her writing style was formed upon children’s classics such as the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers. Later, Gallant advanced to British and American classics, as well as books by French and Russian writers. She also began writing poems and stories. Early on, she decided to be a writer, though it would be 1944 before she saw her first works in print.

After graduating from high school, Gallant went back to Montreal, where she worked briefly for the Canadian National Railways. She then spent a year in the cutting-room of the National Film Board in Ottawa. In 1943, she married John Gallant, a musician, but the marriage ended in divorce five years later.

Life’s Work

In 1944, Gallant became a reporter for the Montreal Standard and soon was regularly publishing articles under her own byline. Meanwhile, she kept submitting her short stories to magazines. The first to be accepted were “Good Morning and Goodbye” and “Three Brick Walls,” which appeared in Preview in December, 1944. By 1950, Gallant had decided to resign from her newspaper job, move to Europe, and spend all her time writing. Before leaving Montreal, she submitted a story to the New Yorker, and though it was not accepted, the editor responded with a request that she continue sending short fiction to the prestigious magazine. After “Madeline’s Birthday” appeared in 1951, Gallant agreed to send her subsequent work to the New Yorker for a first reading, and thus she was assured of being able to make a living from her writing.

During the next three years, Gallant lived in Paris, Salzburg, and Rome, as well as in Sicily and Spain. In 1953, she settled in Menton-Garavan, near the French-Italian border. Gallant’s first collection, The Other Paris, appeared in 1956. The heroine of the title story is a young American girl, in Paris for the first time, who finds the city not what she had imagined. The story exemplifies the theme that dominates Gallant’s fiction: whether her characters are in the place where they were born or in foreign countries, they feel rootless and abandoned, just as Gallant herself felt during her own dismal childhood and youth.

In the early 1960s, Gallant took a permanent flat in Paris, though she often traveled about Europe. She also frequently traveled to Canada, which was the setting of many of her early stories. As she became more familiar with Europe, however, she often set her stories there. In a series of “German stories,” for example, she provided German readers a new understanding of their recent horrendous past, while making it clear that similar evils could well be repeated in the future. The Pegnitz Junction (1973) included five of these stories, along with the novella of the title, which Gallant considers one of her best works. Another much-admired collection, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories (1981), won for Gallant the 1981 Governor General’s Award, the highest honor that Canada awards to its writers. For six of these stories, the author returned to her early days in Montreal. Though Gallant insisted that these stories are not autobiographical, Linnet Muir, who is the central character and narrator of the stories, rebels against a stifling Calvinistic society, just as the author herself did.

Although Gallant was best known for her short stories and her novellas, she also ventured into other genres. Her first novel, Green Water, Green Sky (1959), consisted of four sections, three of them previously published short stories and the fourth another linked story that had not yet appeared in print. A second novel, A Fairly Good Time (1970), is a satire in which the author points out the disjunction between the beliefs and the behaviors of the French. Her nonfiction works include an account of the Paris student revolts of 1968, which appeared in the New Yorker that year as “Reflections: The Events in May A Paris Notebook,” and Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews (1986). Her play What Is to Be Done was produced in Toronto in 1978. In 2012, the New Yorker published "The Hunger Diaries," an excerpt from the journal she kept in Spain during 1952. In 2013, her journals from 1952 to 1970 were prepared for publication in 2014. Gallant died in Paris, France, on February 18, 2014.

Significance

Critics consider Gallant perhaps the finest stylist among contemporary writers, and they rank her short stories with those of the Russian author Anton Chekhov, one of the pioneers in the form. Like him, Gallant excelled in sensitive but thought-provoking depictions of the modern predicament, in which a sense of loss and feelings of alienation are only exacerbated by the insistent human need to connect.

Although Gallant had long been praised by critics and admired by readers of the New Yorker, she was not well known either in the United States or in Canada until Home Truths brought her the Governor General’s Award in 1981. Since that time, she has been recognized as one of Canada’s most important writers. She was awarded numerous honorary doctorates and also won honors such as the Canada-Australia Literary Prize in 1985, the Canadian Council Molson Prize for the Arts in 1997, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship in 2004, and the province of Quebec's Prix Athanase-David in 2006. Gallant’s works are the subject of several book-length critical studies, including a book by Janice Kulyk Keefer, whose own short fiction shows Gallant’s influence on a younger generation of writers.

Bibliography

Bosman, Julie. "Mavis Gallant Journals." New York Times 2 July 2012: 3. Academic Search Complete. Web. 18 Dec. 2013.

Clement, Lesley D. Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant’s Fiction. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2000. Print. Argues that Gallant’s increasingly sophisticated references to the visual arts reflect changes in her views of life. Notes, bibliography, and index.

Cote, Nicole, and Peter Sabor, eds. Varieties of Exile: New Essays on Mavis Gallant. New York: Lang, 2002. Print. This volume consists of four scholarly papers presented at a Paris conference, a conversation between the author’s French translators, and comments by Gallant herself.

Fassler, Joe. "The Way Vivid, Way Underappreciated Short Stories of Mavis Gallant." Atlantic. Atlantic Monthly Group, 4 June 2013. Web. 18 Dec. 2013.

Gallant, Mavis. "The Hunger Diaries." New Yorker 9 July 2012: 46–53. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 18 Dec. 2013.

Gibson, Douglas. "Mavis Gallant, 1922–." Stories about Storytellers: Publishing Alice Munro, Robertson Davies, Alistair MacLeod, Pierre Trudeau, and Others. Toronto: ECW, 2011. 206–25. Print.

Gunnars, Kristjana, ed. Transient Questions: New Essays on Mavis Gallant. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004. Print. Some of the nine essays in this useful collection analyze particular stories, while others point out repeated themes and symbols.

Keefer, Janice Kulyk. Reading Mavis Gallant. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Print. This major study of Gallant includes chapters on the author’s life, the dominant themes in her works, her use of voice and structure, and critical responses to her works. Index.

Schaub, Danielle. Mavis Gallant. New York: Twayne, 1998. Print. Emphasizes Gallant’s use of narrative devices and language to reveal tensions, especially in the lives of twentieth century women. Chronology, notes, bibliography, and index.

Simmons, Diane. “Remittance Men: Exile and Identity in the Short Stories of Mavis Gallant.” In Canadian Women Writing Fiction. Ed. Mickey Pearlman. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1993. Print. By living abroad, Gallant’s characters seek a cure for their sense of self-exile. Includes a list of Gallant’s uncollected stories.

Smythe, Karen E. Figuring Grief: Gallant, Munro, and the Poetics of Elegy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1992. Print. A study of the ways two Canadian writers deal with the fact of loss and the emotion of grief. Bibliography and index.

Toye, William, ed. The Concise Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. Print. A substantial essay on Gallant that includes biographical information and critical assessments of her works.

Verongos, Helen T. "Mavis Gallant, 91, Dies; Her Stories Told of Uprooted Lives and Loss." New York Times. New York Times, 18 Feb. 2014. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.