The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, and the author of Kurlek, Margaret Laurence: The
Long Journey Home, and As Though Life Mattered: Leo Kennedy’s Story.

Mavis Gallant is one of the great short-story writers of our time. In a
lengthy autobiographical preface to this hefty collection of 52 stories,
she notes that she has been writing for more than 50 years, and that
fiction “brings to life a distillation of all weathers, a climate of
the mind.” She suggests that Samuel Beckett’s answer might serve her
case: asked why he wrote, Beckett replied, “Bon qu’a ca,” it was
all he was good for.

Readers of these stories—which are grouped not by date written but by
periods represented, beginning with the 1930s and 1940s—can only
rejoice that Gallant has remained faithful to her calling. The first
apprenticeship for this Montrealer was in journalism, but she did not
want to be “a journalist who wrote fiction along some margin of spare
time,” and after a story was accepted by The New Yorker she took off,
in 1950, for Paris.

Since then, the material for her stories has come from a shrewd yet not
unsympathetic assessment of the lives of expatriates in Europe. Is she
“Canadian”? Very definitely. Gallant denies that there is any such
thing as a “Canadian” childhood: “One’s beginnings,” she
writes, “are regional. Mine are wholly Quebec, English and Protestant,
yes, but with a strong current of French and Catholic.” The eye that
pierces the subtleties of social class and regional roots in European
expatriates was formed by “two systems of behaviour, divided by syntax
and tradition; two environments ... two codes of social behaviour.”

Her touchstone for good writing is a sentence that sounds true: “True
to what? Some arrangement in my head, I suppose.” Gallant’s work has
already stood the test of time, and will continue to do so. Her
characters and their lives resonate and linger in the mind.