Gallantly

Mavis Gallant was stunningly prolific, with 116 stories in The New Yorker alone. Of the two dozen books she published, nine are curated selections with titles like Paris Stories and Montreal Stories (there is some repetition among them). Despite persistent if haphazard attempts at cataloguing her fiction, much has escaped the anthologists. The American novelist Garth Risk Hallberg, an ardent Gallant fan, has assembled a definitive edition of “uncollected stories”— meaning either that they have never been included in a book or that they were not chosen for the 1996 compilation, The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant.

Hallberg found one explanation for the many stray, ungathered stories in an editorial note by Gallant’s Canadian publisher, Douglas Gibson. Before she died in 2014, they had been in conversation about bringing out another collected volume, since “hundreds of pages had been cut” from the first. Hallberg’s entries, therefore, are not simply overlooked B‑side oddities. They are as worthy of anthologizing as the most famous in her oeuvre.

But it’s a little confusing: Gallant aficionados are likely to find in these pages a few pieces they have read before. Hallberg includes an appendix of three early “sketches” (penned when she was in her twenties) and an erudite introduction about her career and style. Otherwise, the forty-one stories are organized by setting: “North America,” “Southern Europe,” and “Paris and Beyond.”

This structure underlines familiar Gallantian themes. She often explores the mutual superiority complexes of Canadians and Europeans, particularly in the decades after the Second World War, when many in Canada thought of Europe as impoverished. Like Henry James, Gallant loves to contrast knowingness and innocence and to turn the tables on both. Europeans and North Americans are consistently flummoxed by the sophistication of the other. In “Jorinda and Jorindel,” an English cook, not so subtly called Mrs. Queen, follows her employer to Canada. She cannot understand its scale or get comfortable in a country “where the railway engines are that size and make that kind of noise, and where the working people are as tall as anyone else.”

Europe is a drafty place in postwar Gallant, full of damp and dim dwellings. In “The Moabitess,” tourists arriving at a Riviera hotel stare “with mute despair” at the rain coming off the Alps “like gray veils.” Pressed against the window, they watch as “buses, wet and cold as toads, crawled along the sea road.”

One might be forgiven for feeling rather blue after spending some time with Gallant. An expat who spent much of her adult life with very little income, she is often called unflinching for her frequent portrayals of long-term unhappiness and stagnation. In her universe, mothers tend to be bitter and controlling, while men are generally befuddled, aimless, condescending, or absent. One typical man in “Poor Franzi” is described as a mixture of “blandness and good manners and something evasive that might be panic.” In the devastating “My Heart Is Broken,” a young wife staying at a remote mining camp is sexually assaulted by one of the workers. She is blamed for the violent event, which forces her husband out of a job. In a startling passage, she confides in an older woman that what hurt most was that her attacker wasn’t in love with her. “If he’d liked me, I wouldn’t have minded,” she says. “If he’d been friendly.”

In life, Gallant had the reputation of being somewhat prickly, and in writing, her humour — always present, always subtle — can be cruel. The unhappily married veteran at the centre of “Better Times” seduces a series of women “who sobbed in bars, forgot their own names, lost their purses; soft little women, appealing as tiny animals, usually married to hopeless men.”

One somewhat opaque yet richly rewarding story exemplifies both Gallant’s thematic palette and her understated precision. “Virus X” follows Lottie, a young Canadian graduate student of German descent, on her first trip abroad in 1952. Upon arriving in Paris, she is shocked to find it is not as fashionable as Vogue made it seem. Nobody is wearing Dior’s “New Look,” as she is, and the polluted air tastes metallic: “The street had been cut out of charcoal-colored paper with extremely fine scissors.” She meets another girl from Winnipeg, Vera, whom she finds boorish (and whose Ukrainian heritage means a class difference back in Manitoba). Vera pressures her into taking a trip to the northeastern part of France, which Lottie, for unexplained reasons, finds menacing. It turns out that she fears crossing over into Germany. “So this was the place she loathed and craved, and never mentioned,” the narrator says, as Lottie stares across the Rhine at dark clouds and hills. “It was the place where her mother and father had been born, and which they seemed unable to imagine, forgive or describe.”

When Lottie’s staid and provincial boyfriend, Kevin, shows up (he pronounces Ukrainian in five syllables, “Ukarainian”), it becomes clear that Vera won’t ever go back to the society he represents. Feeling defeated by Europe, Lottie decides to return with him. She cannot face the complexity of history or culture that she thought she was there to study; Vera, the less respectable girl from the wrong side of the tracks, can handle it. The war’s horrors are only obliquely referred to — the “bombed station” is the starkest reminder — but it hangs behind everything.

As it does in so many of these stories. In “An Autobiography,” a Swiss schoolteacher has two German students who are too young to have lived through the war. “They are ignorant and new,” she notes. “Everything they see and touch at home is new. Home is built on the top layer of Ur.” In this strangely antiseptic version of the Continent, “every house is like the house of newly wed couples who have been disinherited or say they scorn their families’ taste.”

Is this anthology only for scholars? You can read a lot of Gallant — all the fiction books she published during her lifetime and now hundreds of pages more (not to mention her essays, plays, and journalism) — and still be surprised by her melancholic insights and her ingenious turns of phrase. With this edition, Hallberg has created both an archive and a playground, a gift both for academics and for those of us who merely want to spend more time inside this sprawling imagination, this pure, clear‑eyed perception.