undefinedCOURTESY MAVIS GALLANT

 

Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922, the only child of an Anglo-Scottish businessman and his American wife. Her father, an amateur painter, died when she was ten; her mother soon remarried. The remainder of Gallant’s childhood was unsettled—the family moved frequently, and in the next eight years she attended seventeen different schools before graduating high school in New York City.

At the age of eighteen she returned, alone, to Montreal. She worked briefly for the Canadian Film Board, then for The Standard—interviewing Jean-Paul Sartre, among others; reviewing film; writing features and a weekly column. In 1950, keeping a promise to herself to leave journalism by her thirtieth birthday, she resigned from the newspaper. A few days later, she submitted her first story to The New Yorker, which was returned with a note asking to see more work; her second submission, “Madeline’s Birthday,” was accepted. Her fiction has continued to appear in The New Yorker over the years—indeed only S. J. Perelman and John Updike have published more pieces in that magazine’s pages.

Soon after quitting journalism, Gallant left for Europe to try to make her living as a full-time fiction writer: “I believed that if I was to call myself a writer, I should live on writing. If I could not live on it, even simply, I should destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook and live some other way.” After traveling for a time she settled in Paris, where she still lives today.

Gallant has published ten collections of short fiction, two novels, and a play, as well as numerous essays and reviews. Her first book, the story collection The Other Paris, appeared in 1956; a novel, Green Water, Green Sky, followed in 1959. Returning to the form after almost thirty years (her second novel, A Fairly Good Time, was published in 1970), she currently is completing her third novel. In 1981, after the publication of Home Truths, subtitled Canadian Stories, she received the Order of Canada as well as the Governor General’s Award, that country’s highest literary honor. Her Collected Stories, almost a thousand pages, was published to acclaim in 1996 and received the Canada Council Molson Prize for the Arts.

The first interview was conducted outdoors at Le Select in Paris on a late afternoon in August of 1996. Gallant had suggested the café, which is not far from her apartment in the Montparnasse neighborhood. Surrounded by street bustle and occasionally interrupted (Gallant has lived in the neighborhood for decades and knows a number of regulars at the café), the conversation continued well into the evening. Gallant’s voice is strong and girlish, her laugh youthful and frequent, often following the most deadpan of comments. The remainder of the interview took place through correspondence.

 

INTERVIEWER

You’ve lived in France for almost fifty years making your living as a writer in English. Obviously you thrive in this circumstance. Why?

MAVIS GALLANT

Other writers have done the same. Marguerite Yourcenar and Saint-John Perse lived for years in the United States but continued to write in French. The French novelist Michel Deon lives in Ireland. Elias Canetti lived in England but never wrote a line of English. W. G. Sebald has lived in England since the 1950s but still writes in German. Although I live in French—that is, in the course of a day I speak more French than English—anything that occurs in my mind, the writing part of my mind, occurs in English.

My first school was a French convent school in Montreal. If one adds those years to several decades lived in France, I’ve spent most of my life actually living in French. But I can’t make myself write in French, except letters to friends. Fiction arrives in my mind by way of English. Writing is English. Writing and English are inseparable. It may be the reason why the first flash of a story takes the form of a still, like a film suddenly stopped and, of course, perfectly silent. When the sound comes it is in English. I don’t think I’m explaining it well. 

INTERVIEWER

Do you think of yourself as a Parisian? An expatriate? 

GALLANT

I am a writer and, of course, a Canadian. Once, in Switzerland, emerging from a long anaesthetic, I had no idea where I was, or why. I knew only that I was a writer and from Quebec. I could hear someone speaking French and I thought I had been in a driving accident somewhere in Quebec. Finally I remembered my name.

INTERVIEWER

Do you still travel much outside France?

GALLANT

I go to Canada once or twice a year. Something I’d like to do is go back to every city I ever knew well in Europe, traveling by train. Every time I get back to Paris I realize it is my favorite place and I decide I will never pack a suitcase again. But then something comes up and I haul it out again.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve said that you feel comfortable in any milieu—at home in any situation. Has there ever been a time when you felt uncomfortable—that you couldn’t suss out the situation?

GALLANT

Yes. I felt it when I visited the Soviet Union; I felt then that there was no contact possible. It was under Brezhnev. And, oddly enough, I felt that there was no contact possible once when traveling in Finland. I used to travel a lot alone by car; I’d fly somewhere, rent a car, and go around by myself. But in Finland I had no language contact—French was a dead loss and I was surprised how many people didn’t speak English. It’s the only country where I cut my traveling short. I was used to just talking to strangers. I wasn’t afraid at that time to pick up hitchhikers. I used to go places where I didn’t know a soul and I’d come back with a notebook full of addresses. It was something I liked doing—I adored driving. I always liked to be on my own. I don’t mean that I never traveled any other way. But there were other situations where I couldn’t connect and not only because of having no common language. It can happen in one’s own country too.

INTERVIEWER

When you say your own country—

GALLANT

Canada. I had no trouble fitting in once I arrived in Europe. I think now that I adapted very quickly to an imaginary place, as one might go through the looking glass or walk into a novel or painting.

INTERVIEWER

In what way? Intellectually?

GALLANT

Oh, intellectually, entirely. This was a long time ago, and Canada in the early fifties was an intellectual desert.

INTERVIEWER

And socially?

GALLANT

I had no problems. When I first came to Paris from Canada, somebody said, Oh, Mavis goes out with French people all the time. And somebody else said, Yeah, but she goes out with cops. She’ll go out with anybody; she goes out with cops. My attitude at the beginning was never to refuse an invitation—at the beginning. Well, unless it was something absolutely hopeless.