Author Mavis Gallant photographed at the Ritz Carleton in Montreal in 2002.John Morstad/The Globe and Mail
I’ve always said that the best desert-island book would be The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant; first, for its peerless entertainment value. Second, for the fact that you could carve a boat from its bulk and get yourself home.
When it was published in 1997, Selected Stories (titled Collected Stories in the U.S.) had been limited to 912 pages owing to weight considerations. Gallant had still hoped to collect the remainder of her work, a situation her Canadian publisher, Douglas Gibson of McClelland & Stewart, tried to rectify in 2009 with the publication of a book called Going Ashore.
To try to navigate Gallant’s fiction outside Selected Stories is to enter a hall of mirrors. Stories were collected and re-recollected in various groupings south (where they often appeared first) and north of the border. Several collections, including My Heart Is Broken, The Other Paris and The Pegnitz Junction, are now out of print in Canada.
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The American novelist Garth Risk Hallberg – who discovered Gallant in 2017 and became a massive, instant fan – blithely waded into this quagmire in 2023, when he undertook the task of assembling a kind of catalogue raisonné of Gallant’s writing by cross-referencing Canadian and U.S. editions of her work, and wading through her skyscraper-high correspondence with editors at The New Yorker.
The fruit of those efforts is the 624-page Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, which was published by New York Review Books in January (the title is something of a Catch-22, given that, by virtue of having been collected, its stories are no longer uncollected).
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Uncollected’s 30 stories include the diamond-sharp Thank You for the Lovely Tea, the more emotionally abstract Bonaventure and Its Image on the Mirror (from My Heart Is Broken), a novella Hallberg accurately calls “a barbed and intricate masterpiece.” Three early, previously unpublished stories are in the book’s appendix. More than a third of stories are set in Canada. The rest are mostly set in Europe.
I was thus disappointed to learn that Uncollected Stories is not available in our country. When I asked Stephanie Sinclair, publisher at McClelland & Stewart (which holds the Canadian rights to Gallant’s fiction but is no longer a Canadian publisher, being owned by multinational Penguin Random House), if she planned to change this, she told me via e-mail that M&S is going to publish a different Gallant collection in fall 2027 (tentative). The editor would be a Canadian, though she was as yet unable to share a name with me.
Would the aim of this book – to be published two-and-a-half years from now – be the same as Hallberg’s with Uncollected? That is, to restore all of Gallant’s work to print? Sinclair wrote back: “Not entirely! We believe Gallant’s work is due for a reassessment, and while the New York Review Books has done superb work in providing dedicated long-time readers with comprehensive collections of her work, we really want to focus on bringing her incomparable fiction to new generations of readers. So, our focus and priority are on that.”
But reassessments will be difficult without those comprehensive collections. After the above exchange, I went on Bookmanager, a book inventory platform, and found Selected Stories listed as “out of stock indefinitely” (in other words, out of print). It is still available from Indigo as an e-book. At the time of writing, a used paperback copy was available on Amazon.ca for the very specific price of $1,183.46.
Given that we’re due for a reset with Gallant, it would surely make sense to give up all the cat-herding and publish her stories in two big volumes. In the U.S., thanks to Hallberg’s efforts, Gallant is now fully restored to print in four. With genuine kudos to Hallberg (who has written a terrific introduction to Uncollected Stories), it should embarrass us that it has fallen to an American to resuscitate such a major Canadian literary icon.
Montreal Standard Time: Early Journalism, by Mavis Gallant.Supplied
Indeed, while our attention has been rightfully focused on resisting national annexation, the literary annexation of Gallant – who never lived in the U.S. – is already well under way at major online American retail sites such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, where the following description of The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant has sat, uncontested, since last November: “A collection of over thirty short stories by one of the greatest fiction writers in American history, now available in a single volume for the first time ever.”
Before Mavis Gallant moved from Montreal to Paris to fulfill her destiny as one of the world’s greatest short-fiction writers, she was the most read columnist at the Montreal Standard, a weekly with national circulation (and preoccupations to match).
Published by Véhicule Press, Montreal Standard Time, a selection of the 125 articles Gallant wrote between 1944 and 1950 – beginning in her early 20s – isn’t just for die-hard completists. Even those who’ve never read her fiction will find in its wide-ranging subject matter a fascinating portal into the mood and goings-on of late- and postwar Montreal and Canada: francophone and anglophone, urban and rural.
A Canada, that is, before widespread universal health care (it hadn’t yet landed in Quebec), official multiculturalism or a publishing industry. One where criminals were still hanged for crimes. Indeed, as a reminder of the many positive changes that have taken place here since its contents were written, Montreal Standard Time has unexpected relevance in a moment where we find ourselves pausing our usual self-flagellation to don a set of patriotic togs (finding, to our surprise, that they fit quite nicely).
The columns themselves are astonishingly witty and self-assured (today, someone Gallant’s age would have been relegated to the “youth beat”). Two about our national character are a case in point. “Why are we Canadians so dull?”, a provocative response to a report about Canada-to-U.S. brain drain, written when she was 23, opens with this withering zinger: “If you told a Canadian that his national characteristic was caution, he would be very proud.”
In another, “Are they Canadians?”, Gallant assesses the pros and cons of immigrant assimilation, seemingly coming out on the pro side: “After several years in Canada, they should not feel it necessary to get into an uproar every time a European border moves half an inch,” she wrote of immigrants. “They should be able to see it objectively from a Canadian point of view. If there has never been a clearly defined Canadian point of view, of course, it is our fault, not theirs.”
Elsewhere, she points to a national tendency still sadly in evidence today: paying attention to people and things after they get recognition in the U.S.
The displaced persons, prisoners of war, exiles, immigrants and other outsiders that will later populate Gallant’s fiction are all here, waiting in the wings.
Several pieces are about women and girls who are sequestered in some way. Like the Dionne quintuplets, who at 15 were no longer on public display, but nevertheless living behind an eight-foot fence topped with barbed wire. Or the 100 young women who voluntarily left Poland to work in a Quebec textile mill after the war, only to find themselves miserably confined to a local convent at night. Or the English war bride who endured strafings and machine-gun fire as a signals Wren, and wonders why she finds adjusting to her lonely suburban Montreal existence so difficult.
One imagines Gallant chose some of her subjects with an eye toward the writer’s life she was soon to pursue. She praises the novels of Hugh MacLennan and Dorothy Duncan, for instance, for tackling uniquely Canadian subjects (though not for their quality).
When, at the age of 25, she interviewed francophone author Roger Lemelin (then on the verge of going supernova with his novel La Famille Plouffe) she must have been conscious of the fact that he had been her age when he found success with his first novel, three years previously. As one of Montreal Standard Time’s co-editors, Bill Richardson, points out, Gabrielle Roy, another profiled author then little known in English Canada, would – as a strong-minded, independent woman who’d also been a journalist and lived in Paris – have been a lodestar for Gallant as well.
She was apparently not afraid of preburning bridges. In a piece on cartooning, the woman who would become one of the most oft-published fiction writers in the history of The New Yorker refers to that magazine’s “little world” as one where “women can’t do a darn thing right.”
The natural cheek that tends to get suppressed to homeopathic levels in her stories is here given delightful free rein. In the bold (and impressively well-informed) “What is this thing called jazz,” for example, Gallant captures a still-recognizable breed of tiresome music aficionado: “Jazz addicts,” she writes, “often spend more time worrying about how it all started than listening to the music. Some of them think nothing good has happened since New Orleans, where it began more than 50 years ago, or that it all died in Chicago when the white musicians who began playing there in the 20s moved on to New York.”
Though all the pieces are pleasingly literary, “A Wonderful Country,” an account of a Hungarian DP who goes from laconic to loquacious when presented with a manual eggbeater while touring a Montreal apartment, could be a Gallant story with just a few tweaks. Praise be that this distinct description of the apartment’s “lifeless” living room survived the fact-checking process: “You could smell wax and lemon oil and sense a faint layer of dust. But you couldn’t see very much because the air was dark green from years of being strained through window shades.”
