Maraú Península: Celebrating Mavis Gallant’s Centennial

Sunday, August 14

Celebrating Mavis Gallant’s Centennial

To mark her hundredth birthday, a collection of short stories by the expat writer.
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Celebrating Mavis Gallant’s Centennial

Mavis Gallant, who would have turned a hundred this past Thursday, published more than a hundred stories in The New Yorker between 1951 and 1995. For most of that time, she lived in what you could call, to borrow the title of one of her works, varieties of exile: in 1950, she left her job as a journalist in her home town, Montreal, and travelled around Europe for a decade, before settling in Paris. She died there, at age ninety-one, in 2014.

Being an expatriate may have been painful or isolating at times, but it was a boon for Gallant’s work. It allowed her to stand at a slight distance from her subjects and see clearly both the larger panorama of the societies she had infiltrated and the smallest details of the human interactions within them. She was also, of course, implicated in what she observed, and was herself observed and sometimes judged for the unconventional life she chose: living independently, without children or a husband (an early marriage ended in divorce when she was twenty-five), supporting herself through her writing. And then there was her self-judgment. As she noted in her diary, in 1956, “I am afraid of artistic fakery. Today looking at the powerful, fierce, pitiless head of Michelangelo I suddenly thought, Would he have liked me? The answer was he would have tolerated me, but would have seen through pretensions and fakery. I loathe it in others; I am merciless with myself.”

In her sharp and often painfully honest stories, Gallant captured so fiercely the disillusionments of life: “When she rode the Métro, people pushed and were just as rude as in New York,” she writes in “The Other Paris.” “Restaurant food was dull, and the cafés were full of Coca-Cola signs. . . . Where was the Paris she had read about? Where were the elegant and expensive-looking women? . . . Travelling through Paris to and from work, she saw only shabby girls bundled into raincoats, hurrying along in the rain.” But Gallant also captured moments of clarity and acceptance. In “Varieties of Exile,” Gallant’s most autobiographical character, Linnet Muir, hears of the death of a man she once knew: “Who remembers now the shock of the known name? It was like a flat white light. One felt apart from everyone, isolated. The field of vision drew in. Then, before one could lose consciousness, vision expanded, light and shadow moved, voices pierced through. One’s heart, which had stopped, beat hard enough to make a room shudder.”

In honor of the centennial of Gallant’s birth, please enjoy these stories.

—Deborah Treisman, fiction editor