You can’t really “discover” Mavis Gallant; you can only join the ranks of people who will rhapsodize, almost delirious, about her once they’ve read her short stories, reawakened to literature, to reading, to words! I was so taken by a (very) short story (“Orphan’s Progress”) tucked unceremoniously into the middle of The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, published at the start of this year, that I scurried to the internet to see if I could find out anything about it; just months earlier, Margaret Atwood had written an encomium to that very same brief, brutal masterpiece. How brutal? “When women turn strange, it happens very rapidly,” Gallant writes in the first paragraph of the story, “the first sign is lack of care about clothes and hair, and all at once they are sluts.” The salty sage of our time, Fran Lebowitz, called Gallant “the irrefutable master of the short story in English.”
To refer to a lack of ceremony in the placement of “Orphan’s Progress” is to misrepresent the project of the book: a dazzling collection of stories, some of which might have been lost to time were it not for the devoted efforts of the collection’s editor, the novelist Garth Risk Hallberg. (Hallberg’s introduction is a love letter to put this essay to shame, and a wonderful orientation to the treasures ahead.) There have been collections of Gallant’s work before—including a masterful Collected Stories from Everyman’s Library—but there also existed stories that have never before been gathered or that fell out of print entirely.
This is not surprising, considering that Gallant was one of the most prolific short story writers of her era. She wrote 103 stories just for The New Yorker—more than Cheever, almost as many as Updike—and yet she is nowhere near as well known as those titans, perhaps because of her sex, perhaps because she was not part of a US literary cohort (Gallant was born in Canada and moved to Paris in 1950 at 28). A vignette from her own life that shows just how difficult it was for women of that era to assert the centrality of their experience: Upon the return of her soldier husband from World War II, she told him she wanted to move to Europe. He declined, the marriage ended, and, as she put it, “for the rest of his life he took pride in seeing himself in most of my male protagonists. And it was never true!”
With collections that are arranged chronologically, you can sometimes sense a writer’s growing pains, their less adept expressions of youthful experience, a biographical thread close to the surface. Gallant does pull from her life. She was left at a convent by her mother at the age of four; orphans and other girls searching for connection populate her stories. She was bilingual, and her stories reflect a fine attunement to the slights and superiorities of both anglophones and francophones. During World War II, Gallant worked at a newspaper in Montreal, an experience that awakened her to dynamics that would stay with her the rest of her life. “As soon as I realized I was paid about half the salary the men were earning,” she writes in one story about a cub reporter (“With a Capital T”), “I decided to do half the work.” Harder on herself than any of her editors ever were, she never really did half the work. (“Make me happy,” William Maxwell once wrote to her, “send me stories.”) Gallant never married again, didn’t have children. The women in her stories feel profound, distinct uncertainty toward convention—less as iconoclasts than fierce individuals.
Gallant’s stories leap into explorations of humanity—spritely skipping between humor and horror. She is a master unlike any other—closest in spirit, maybe, to Alice Munro, but entirely her own creator as well. To quote just one more voice in her chorus of admirers, when Jhumpa Lahiri went to interview her in 2009, the novelist found herself somewhat disoriented in the presence of her heroine: “At the last minute,” Lahiri recounted, “before leaving, I told her the only thing I felt was worth conveying: ‘No one writes as you do.’”
Gallant said that her short stories should not be read one after the other, and I have followed her instructions this year, parcelling them out when I am dismayed or uninspired by whatever else I’m reading. There is no better tonic, no faster cure for disillusion. I invite you into the fold.
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