Different Strokes

From a distance, Carol Shields and Mavis Gallant might be seen as two leaves on the same branch of Canadian literature. There are several life parallels, including American childhoods: Shields was born in 1935 in Illinois, and Gallant, though born in Montreal in 1922, spent years shuttling between Quebec, Connecticut, and New York. Both settled early in Canada (Gallant at eighteen, Shields at twenty-two) and married young (Gallant at twenty, Shields at twenty-two). Both were tireless writers: Gallant’s professional career began at twenty-two, when she was taken on as a reporter at the Montreal Standard; Shields wrote privately and published her first story in 1962, in the British magazine The Storyteller. Gallant was in Paris selling stories to The New Yorker by the time she was thirty; at the same age, Shields had just won a CBC poetry contest. Both travelled often, and both considered mid-century Canada, to quote Gallant, “an intellectual desert.”

The asymmetries, however, seem more consequential to their work. Gallant’s childhood was unsettled, her relationship with her mother particularly strained; Shields wrote of a pleasant childhood of the Dick and Jane sort and of a mother who validated and believed in her creativity. Gallant’s marriage was brief, Shields’s lifelong. Gallant was childless; Shields had a son and four daughters. France fulfilled Gallant’s profound desire to be surrounded by liberated creatives. For Shields, moving to Canada “was like falling down a dark hole,” and she was “largely unaware of Canadian writers.” Gallant’s star faded; she was never famous, even during her heyday, and remained relatively unknown in her adopted city, not to mention Canada. Shields’s profile rose and rose in her adopted country and beyond — with a Pulitzer Prize, an Orange Prize, two Booker nods, and membership in France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (an honour that, strangely, Gallant never received). When she died in Paris in 2014, ninety-one-year-old Gallant was broke and borderline obscure; Shields, who died at the age of sixty-eight in 2003, was living in Rockland, an affluent neighbourhood of Victoria.

It’s too simplistic to say that Shields embraced the domestic while Gallant rejected it; that Shields was the matron and Gallant the maverick; that Shields was the thoughtful homemaker and Gallant the calculating home wrecker (“Est‑ce que vous êtes discret?” she would ask her lovers). Gallant felt a family would constrain her; she quoted Boris Pasternak’s remark that “only personal independence matters” in the introduction to Home Truths. Shields, though, needed motherhood in order to grow up and to become a writer, describing her children as “a kind of biological component for me that had to come first.”

Their differences make it tempting to think of Gallant and Shields as representing two ends of the creative spectrum: On one, the writer scribbling by candlelight and gnawed at by hunger sends darkly virtuosic works into an ambivalent world. On the other, the celebrated author glides from book to book, accruing prizes and adoration while simultaneously maintaining those things that are meant to elude all serious artists: family life, creature comforts, second homes. Gallant’s career seems romantic, Shields’s idyllic.

Both writers knew how life choices, particularly a woman’s choices and the choices foisted upon her, determine what art she can produce. Gallant wanted nothing to hold her back. If she couldn’t make a go of it on the strength of her writing, she was happy to fail. She was hard on herself (“Don’t describe it, remember it,” she wrote in her diary in 1954) and couldn’t tolerate amateurs. Although she received some support late in her life (the $20,000 Matt Cohen Award, given to her by the Writers’ Trust of Canada in 2000, arrived just in time), she was bound and determined to live her own way, unattached and aloof.

That attitude is perhaps what Shields meant when she wrote that Canadian writers in the 1950s “were men who were trying to write like American or English male writers and a handful of women writers who were trying to write like men.” Or maybe that handful were simply trying to carve themselves some space any way they could. At the Standard, Gallant was just one of the few “women running around,” taking up a position that a man would otherwise fill (and surely fill better, many felt). Shields admired Gallant, calling her one of Canada’s “senior writers” (alongside Alice Munro), who showed “how it is possible to be intelligent on the page without being pedantic.” Through this faint praise, one can surmise her feeling that Gallant was as stubborn as an old mule, but she was as tough as one too, and toughness can sometimes seem like heartlessness to people who have been surrounded more by love than by detachment. Shields was writing with the benefit of hindsight here. Although she was thirteen years younger and died eleven years earlier, she seems, in a way, the more senior of the two; her work is infused with a twee, if prosaic, insight that Gallant’s flinty prose does not possess (one suspects by design).

Two collections show Shields and Gallant at opposite ends of their careers. Montreal Standard Time, a sampling of journalistic and column writing that Gallant completed from 1944 to 1950, bursts with energy. The job at the Standard, which was relaunched as Weekend magazine after she left, was her first; she was unapologetically ambitious (implied by the work) and astute (proven in it). She wrote about miners, farmers, doctors, children, and (with particular interest) immigrants. She took on controversial topics: deaths in nursing homes, assisted suicide, and pregnancies out of wedlock, and she commented on books, marriage, and men, with a satirical, biting timbre. Newspaper articles have the tendency to age as well as bananas, but anyone diving into Montreal Standard Time is doing so primarily to see hints of the great talent Gallant would become. Hers is a trajectory that remains impressive, fuelled by something deeper than what shows in these pieces of reportage. Yes, she is perceptive, witty, and skilled, but so are many young writers who go nowhere. These are only the first embers of the elegance that marked her fiction and later journalism.

The Canadian Shields is effectively a retrospective. Shields comes across as her familiar, affably clever self, as someone who could probably think of a more biting, more scathing comment but chooses the higher road of joy and peace. (One can imagine Gallant thinking of something nice to say and instead choosing the warpath.) The previously unpublished pieces won’t change many minds about Shields’s work: the three short stories are new but forgettable; the non-fiction items — public address, newspaper articles, memoir, and the like (annoyingly, one has to constantly flip to the endnotes to confirm the original context) — are fine without being interesting. The contents will please the diehard completist, but the frequent repetitions of themes, anecdotes, memories, and concerns prove this compilation is less one that Shields envisioned herself than the work of a hagiographer. Indeed, it bears many similarities to the superior Startle and Illuminate, a 2016 selection of her advice and reflections on writing. It does little that the earlier book didn’t — and quite a bit less.

Reading these two collections, I regularly thought of Larry McMurtry, who was pleased to consider himself a minor writer (despite winning the Pulitzer for Lonesome Dove), because “major writers often find themselves writing minor books. Major writers aren’t major all the time, and minor writers occasionally write better than they normally do, sometimes producing a major book.” In that sense, Gallant is the major writer, Shields the minor one who produced two major novels, The Stone Diaries and Unless.

Shields once referred to brutal book reviews as “cruelies”— a way for one writer to tear down another for money. Trying to remain “open to the sensations of delight and instruction,” as she thought reviewers should be, I believe it fair to note that anyone about to embark on an artistic journey will find both advice and encouragement in this book of hers. If we can see a writer trying to square her life with her own mother’s repression and goodwill within a changing world, we can equally see in Gallant’s early work the inclination to say “Fuck it” to anything — including her mother — about to stand in her way. And that too is an important, if very different, message for an artist to receive.

For her part, Gallant was open to comparison. In a 1965 episode of the CBC Television documentary series Telescope, in which she sits in her apartment on Rue Jean Ferrandi, in a voice gentle yet commanding, she says, “There are two kinds of writers to me, the Tolstoy and the Dostoevsky. And they’re both extraordinary, but it’s a completely different school. . . . If you think about it, it’s like a game, you can put every writer into the Tolstoy or the Dostoevsky side. . . . Just think of names and they go instantly Tolstoy/Dostoevsky. Tolstoy’s my side.”