[In the following interview, originally conducted on May 6, 1997, Gallant discusses her literary milieu, its autobiographical dimension, and the French response to her body of work.]

Prior to requesting an interview with Mavis Gallant, deservedly and universally recognized as a master of the short story today (which means of all time), I undertook to read her new Collected Stories.¹ Easier said than done. I can take on an 887—page novel with the greatest of ease, but taking on fifty-two short stories amounting to the same number of pages turned out, in this case, to be the equivalent of taking on fifty-two entire novels written by anyone else. For Gallant's stories burst through the limits of what many critics dismiss as the minor art of short-story writing and become indisputably major works of art, thereby elevating the genre itself into higher realms than ever attained before, rather to our consternation and bewilderment but certainly to our heartfelt admiration. I couldn't help wondering how she has managed to do this.

It should be noted from the start, however, that the book's title is a misnomer. I don't know by what aberration fifty-two stories by an author who has already published more than twice that number can be called “collected stories.” Surely “selected stories” would be more appropriate? It is, in fact, published in the U.K. and Canada under that more accurate title.

More noteworthily, perhaps, as I read story after story and found each so vastly different one from the other, I began to ponder whether I could come up with a working definition of “short story” that could possibly cover them all, let alone those by Chekhov, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, et alia. Most dictionaries were of no help whatever, presumably on the assumption that any fool can figure a short story is simply a story that is short. The Shorter Oxford gives us: “A story with a fully developed theme but shorter than a novel.” Do Gallant's stories have a common theme? Not that I could tell, as I read. Do other authors' stories? Having a theme does not strike me as a predominant, let alone a commonly shared characteristic. I spare you my frustrating researches into dictionary definitions of fiction in general or the novel in particular, but I will share the upshot with you, a startling discovery: one of the potentially and, as here, actually one of the greatest genres of belletrism has not yet been adequately defined. I find this odd, unacceptably odd. As far as Gallant is concerned, her stories do share certain common threads—threads impossible to label as “themes”—but how to sort them out? I managed to collect three rather prickly definitions, not culled from dictionaries, and set off to meet Ms. Gallant as prearranged.

On 6 May 1997, a miserably gray and rainy afternoon in Paris, we were to meet in the nonsmoking section of the Dôme in Montparnasse, near her home. I arrived first, and as I laid out my recording equipment, the garçon-serveur bet me he knew which habituée of the café I was going to interview. When she arrived, he nodded his head at me in typically Gallic body-language to communicate the accuracy of his prediction.

Mavis Gallant approached my table scattering charm like so many droplets from her raincoat. She reminded me of Botticelli's figure of Spring spilling flowers as she proceeds. That the pert, spry, youthfully alert creature before me should bear a few faint liver spots on her hands and brow seemed to me as incongruous as Proust's illusion, in The Past Recaptured, that his friends were disguised under cotton wigs to look old. Mavis Gallant immediately impressed me as ineffably young, whatever her age. In any event, we two relics of quondam Saint-Germain-des-Prés immediately hit it off and chattered away so intently on shared interests that we occasionally had to prod each other into remembering why we were here. Things either of us said set the other off on tangents, zigging and zagging, so that raps on the table from opposite sides were sometimes required to return us to the subject at hand.

I began by checking how her last name was properly pronounced.

“Like the English word, but with the accent on the last syllable,” she told me. “I was once married to a Mr. Gallant. The name is Acadian.”²

I thereupon plunged into the heart of my problem. “I have had great trouble in pinning down an acceptable, overall definition of the short story as a genre, a definition that would not only include other writers' short stories but all of yours. It seems to me no two of yours could fit any one definition.”

“Some, surely?”

“Well, let me give you some stabs at definitions I have come across, for your reactions. Beryl Bainbridge has said, ‘A short story is a waste of a good idea.’”

“Oh, that's flip,” she instantly replied, with a dismissive laugh.

“You agree then that expanding any of your stories into novel-length would not improve them? To me, one of the most admirable constituents of your stories is precisely that not one word needs to be added or changed.”

“Which kind of stories?”

“That's what I'm trying to pin down. For example, how does this next relate to your stories? Ambrose Bierce has said, ‘A novel is simply an easier way of writing a short story.’”

“Ah, that's flip too, but it's not all that wrong. Because almost any story could be a novel. It's not laziness that keeps mine short.³ It's that they have a natural size, length I mean, that arrives with them. They arrive with their luggage.”

I must quote a most significant passage from Mavis Gallant's preface at this point:

The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image, like a slide or (closer still) a freeze frame, showing characters in a simple situation. … The quick arrival and departure of the silent image can be likened to the first moments of a play, before anything is said. The difference is that the characters in the frame are not seen, but envisioned, and do not have to speak to be explained. Every character comes into being with a name (which I may change), an age, a nationality, a profession, a particular voice and accent, a family background, a personal history, a destination, qualities, secrets, an attitude toward love, ambition, money, religion, and a private center of gravity.

Over the next several days I take down long passages of dialogue. Whole scenes then follow, complete in themselves but like disconnected parts of a film. I do not deliberately invent any of this: It occurs. Some writers say they actually hear the words, but I think “hear” is meant to be in quotation marks. I do not hear anything: I know what is being said. Finally (I am describing a long and complex process as simply as I can), the story will seem to be entire, in the sense that nearly everything needed has been written. It is entire but unreadable. Nothing fits. A close analogy would be an unedited film. …

Sometimes one sees immediately what needs to be done, which does not mean it can be done in a hurry: I have put aside elements of a story for months and even years. It is finished when it seems to tally with a plan I surely must have had in mind but cannot describe, or when I come to the conclusion that it cannot be written satisfactorily any other way; at least, not by me.

Back to our table. “Your stories often strike me as compact novels.”

“Well yes, many are.”

“I say this, not because some of them come in chapters, but because you know your characters so well, there are so many of them, and they so come alive on the page, and especially because of your stories' thought-provoking impact, the necessity to mull them over at length in order to extract all they contain, the sheer impossibility therefore of simply turning a page as though proceeding from one chapter of a novel to another. Readers are not used to getting all this in short stories, not to this degree, so that the idea of novels' being more difficult to write, as most people would expect, does take on a different light, no?”

“Well, who is on tiptoe all the way through novels, apart from Proust? Whereas in short stories you have to be on tiptoe the whole time, because one word can throw the whole thing off.”

“Le mot injuste can disappear more easily in a novel than in a short story?”

“Yes, that's what I mean.”

“But there's a third definition of a short story I'd like you to comment on.” I passed her the following, typed out in advance:

The protagonist in a short story should have a goal and have obstacles to overcome before reaching it. The obstacles are internal in a literary story and change the protagonist. The obstacles are external in a commercial story and require action on the part of the protagonist. A resolution is desirable in all cases, even one resulting in a compromise.

“Saint George and the dragon, cut and dried,” she scoffed. “What story by Chekhov has a protagonist who has changed? The tragedy is exactly the same at the end as at the beginning. Where on earth did you find this?”

“It's by an editor of one of America's foremost literary reviews.⁴ It came with a rejection slip. I was shocked. The only occasions I can think of where it might fit would be in a ‘boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl’ movie.”

“Well, it's very hard in a movie to show an internal struggle. This man ought to be shot for sending you this. What a pompous ass.”

“I would imagine he is Academia speaking. You agree it fits none of your stories?”

“Absolutely.”

“In an ‘Authors’ Guild Bulletin' Daniel Menaker said that tending your prose was ‘like editing ice cream.’ What did he mean by that?”

“That there was practically nothing for him to edit. He was much happier with other writers, where he could have a field day. But returning to your editor, you know, such editors in general don't really care about us. You remember when the Greek colonels were in power, in the seventies, and they put all the poets on an island? Well, I thought to myself, the Greek population must be relieved, pffft! all those tiresome dissident poets are out of the way, hooray!”

I will spare the reader our many digressions this brought on, until I returned to the charge. But this may be as good a point as any to provide some examples of the gems studding Mavis Gallant's short fiction which have made me so enthusiastic an admirer of her work.

I've discovered something. … It is that sex and love have nothing in common. Only a coincidence, sometimes. You think the coincidence will go on and so you get married. I suppose that is what men are born knowing and women learn by accident.

(From “The Moslem Wife”)

Where was the Paris she had read about? Where were the elegant and expensive-looking women? Where, above all, were the men, those men with their gay good looks and snatches of merry song, the delight of English lady novelists? Traveling through Paris to and from work, she saw only shabby girls bundled into raincoats, hurrying along in the rain, or men who needed a haircut. In the famous parks, under the drizzly trees, children whined peevishly and were slapped.

(From “The Other Paris”)

His wife had been born a Catholic, though no one was certain what had come next. To be blunt, was she in or out? The fact was that she had lived in adultery—if one wanted to be specific—with Tremski until her husband had obliged the pair by dying. There had been no question of a divorce; probably she had never asked for one. For his wedding to Barbara, Tremski had bought a dark blue suit at a good place, Creed or Lanvin Hommes, which he had on at her funeral, and in which he would be buried. He had never owned another, had shambled around Paris looking as though he slept under restaurant tables, on a bed of cigarette ashes and crumbs. It would have taken a team of devoted women, not just one wife, to keep him spruce.

(From “Forain”)

The waiters are patient, except when a customer's reaction to a slopped saucer is perceived as an affront. …

Most of the old ladies at other tables … make a mess with crumbs, feed piecrust to their unruly lapdogs, pester the waiter with questions … repetitive and tedious: Why is that door open? Why doesn't someone shut the door? Well, why can't you get somebody to fix it? …

A man he knows of is said to have filed an affidavit that he was too badly off to be able to pay his yearly television tax and got away with it; here, in Paris, where every resident is supposed to be accounted for; where the entire life of every authorized immigrant is lodged inside a computer or crammed between the cardboard covers of a dossier held together with frayed cotton tape. …

Under a streaming umbrella he walked the ramparts again and when the sky cleared visited Chateaubriand's grave; and from the edge of the grave took the measure of the ocean. He had led his students here, too, and told them everything about Chateaubriand (everything they could take in) but did not say that Sartre had urinated on the grave. It might have made them laugh.

(From “A State of Affairs,” as examples of pinning down whole worlds in few words.)

It will be appreciated, I think, given these strictly narrative excerpts, that Gallant writes for Stendhal's and Shakespeare's “happy few.” But back to our dialogue.

“It would be infinitely easier for me to review your fifty-two individual stories than to write something on your book as a whole, not only because your stories are so vastly different one from the other, but also because the characters are on such different levels of interest … and intellect too.”

“Well, they were written over a long period, over forty years. Don't forget I started publishing in the early 1950s, so there are bound to be various things one has concentrated on. For some years I was interested in Germany and a lot of that is in the book, but then I lost interest. It's funny.”

“How much of what you write is biographical, or even autobiographical?”

“The only things really autobiographical are the five Linnet Muir stories. Those things did happen to a young woman, as I can vouch for, but there is also fiction. If it had been straightforward autobiography I would have used my own name. I used Linnet because it's the name of a bird, and Mavis is the name of a thrush. At this distance, it all becomes fiction.”

“Are there Linnet chapters missing from this selection?”

“No, they're all there. When I wrote them I was rejective of that kind of life and now I am more tolerant. That's funny, too. Now I don't even mind that I had those experiences. When I was Linnet's age I couldn't bear to look at the artifacts of the Catholic Mass, the wafers of the Eucharist, and so on. I was very small and very frightened. I was told that if I opened my eyes during the elevation of the Host I'd go blind, so I sat there.” She squinched her eyes together. “I would never have dreamt then that at my age now I'd have friends who were priests and nuns, which I do. I don't mean I'm about to convert to Catholicism. This is outside the way my mind works. But I do think I would never inflict all that environment onto a child. But still, without it, I would have become just like any other English Canadian, unable to express my feelings.”

“Are you able to say in your own words what you are trying to do when you are writing a short story?”

“No, not at all. The one thing that hasn't changed since I started doing it seriously is that I want to be clear. I don't want to be ambiguous. I want to be clear, absolutely clear.”

“Well, not only do you succeed in that, but it seems to me you manage to bring in additional truths that equally clearly revolve around your central truths.”

“I don't want someone reading to think, ‘I don't know what this is about.’ Forget it. And I would like it not to be boring.”

“No question of that.”

“No, I'm serious. I think it's important. There are many writers who impose being bored on you. People often don't know when they're being bored any more.”

“Many writers give a great deal of importance to the first sentence of their stories; the first sentence should whisk them off into interest in the subject.”

“Well, it shouldn't be a barrier. It has to be an open gate.”

“Have you always been conscious of this?”

“I'm not sure. Certainly the first paragraph is something I often change. It has to be an open door that you want to walk into.”

“Have you noticed that many young people today will start a story in the ‘had’ tense?”

“I loathe them.”

“All apostrophe d's, I mean, even in narration, so that you can't immediately know whether they mean ‘he had’ or ‘he would.’”

“People talk like that. There's nothing one can do.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, to stop it. Except going on doing your work. The language is badly taught. Even the teachers don't know, any more. A great many published books I try to read I can't cope with at all.”

“Is there any common factor in all your stories, even generally speaking?”

“I really don't know. I'm not trying to be uncooperative. I really don't know. If I tried to analyze my work, I will have had it. I don't analyze it. This book has just come out in England and everyone who has reviewed it so far mentions exile, scenes of exile, everybody's an exile, and I got so fed up with this that I took the book and classified each story. Among the fifty-two stories, thirty concern people living in their own country, who have never moved and who are still living in their same neighborhood and street. These are the Canadian stories, the German stories too, except for one where the main character is a prisoner of war. But that happens. And those of my characters who are abroad have jobs; some are on holiday, so of course they're away from home; and there are others who have perfectly plausible political or historical reasons for being away. Relatively very few of them are really in exile. You can count them on one hand.”

“Yes, but there is a possible explanation for that. You are able to get inside people who are of different nationalities from your own, which is quite unusual. In fact, it is very rare.”

“Well, not if you know about them. I don't think I'd be able to write about Albanians getting on a boat and going to Italy. I could not put myself into the skins of people in Hong Kong. I could not put myself in the place of a Vietnamese farmer. It's true people are very much the same the world over, each different and distinctive, but my characters live in places I've been to and can make my way through, and I have lived amongst them.”

“Still, don't you think most fiction writers are provincial compared to you?”

“They write about their milieu, about where they live and work, and it can be fabulous. Look at Alice Munro.”

“Do people ever compare you two, simply because you share Canadian citizenship?”

“Oh, constantly, continually.”

“Who comes out on top?”

“Depends who's doing the comparing. We're very different. We've led different lives. She comes from a small town. What she makes of it is very good. I've been abroad, mostly. She doesn't travel. She doesn't like it, she says. I couldn't do that. My instinct about small towns is to run away from them. But Alice Munro has enormous appeal, believe me. As for me, even as a child, when we went to the country, summers, I loved coming back to Montreal. I even loved the streetcars. I loved the lights of the cinemas where I was not allowed to go.”

“We both seem to have thought that Paris was the only place on earth we could live. What about the France of today, and the general dégringolade⁵ of the last few years?”

“Well, I still like city-living, and this city is the most livable to me. I also like New York.”

“To live in or to visit?”

“It's too late for me to live there. I wanted to live there for a couple of years, no more, in the 1950s and 1960s, and was turned down because I didn't have a regular income and it was just too difficult. I would have had to ask someone to sponsor me, and what if something happened and that person would have been responsible? But I like going there; I was there a couple of months ago; it's much better than it was, cleaner.”

“Look, I'm still keen on identifying some common factor that underlies your stories. In my notes here I've come up with a tentative statement. May I try it out on you?”

“Of course.”

“‘Mavis Gallant discovers or uncovers a set of characters, sometimes as many or more than appear in other writers' novels, and she explains what they are, where they are, and what they may or may not become, which is usually to continue to be what they are.’”

A long pause while she reflected. Then with a smile as bright as a rising sun, “That's probably so, I should think.”

“Really? It was very difficult to come up with even this little.”

“But I'm thinking of how you say there are a lot of characters, but in my stories of Edouard, Juliette, and Lena there are only three characters, there aren't more, and they really remain pretty much what they were, except that Juliette loses that girlish side which Edouard is just as glad she loses because it's so boring, but he's exactly the same as a young man as he is as an older one.”

“Often, too, your characters increase their self-knowledge.”

“Oh well, if they don't they're zombies.”

“Yes, but there are a great many zombies in the world, after all.”

“Yes.”

“Or, as Bernard Shaw put it, there are more chumps than geniuses. In any event, there's nothing derogatory in saying that the level of your stories varies, and it seems to me this is a function of your personages or cast of characters, and a question I insert here is: are they sometimes based on real people, as a beginning, as a point of departure?”

“No, no, no. No. And if they are, I wouldn't always know it. It functions exactly as I described it in the preface. It's the only time I've ever tried to describe it, and I did it because William Maxwell said, ‘Keep it personal’; so I did. It's kind of an image that comes to me, and I don't want it to sound like hallucination, because it isn't, but it's like an image of people and I seem to know all about them. That really is so.”

“You seem to know all about them as you set out, or do you uncover them as you go?”⁶

“I know all about them right off.”

“That's most extraordinary.”

“Well, I know what they're like, let's say. I have written stories where there were real people, but I learned very early not to do it, because I really hurt someone's feelings very much when I was young. She recognized herself and was really hurt, and I never did it again. But apart from that, you must know this yourself, you write about people and you don't know when you are using some people you know and you discover it only when the thing is in proof.”

“Oh, I very often know in the beginning.”

“Oh, my god!”

“And then they take on lives of their own and change completely as they go.”

“Oh, dear. I had one story called ‘Luc and His Father,’ a French story, and when it was translated into French and I came to Luc and his father in the book Overhead in a Balloon, I said, ‘My god, that's the so-and-sos with their son and he was such a dumbbell, and he couldn't get into any of the engineering schools; they had to send him to that primer in Fontainebleau; that's the one who got mixed up with that girl, and they were so upset at the time, and oh! the only thing to do,’ I said to myself, ‘is to send them the book, with a fond dédicace, and no mention of anything.’ And I did, and they didn't recognize themselves. The mother said to me, ‘You know, there are a lot of people like that; we know people like that, with stupid children.’”

“I made my previous comment because the Carette sisters are such smaller people compared to a great many of your others, who are wider in scope, wider in interests, with basically more interesting minds.”

“No, but people like that exist, and the French Canadians of that era were very much like that; they didn't travel much, but I did know them. Take the street I used in “The Chosen Husband.” I asked an elderly French Canadian woman I knew, a very old lady, to help me relocate that street and a certain house on it. We went for a walk, and I said, ‘I think it's the Rue Saint-Hubert that I want.’ We went down that street together (I gave her a very good lunch in a restaurant), then we stopped and I said, ‘Look, a widowed mother and her two daughters are standing at a window. They are to meet for the first time a young man, a caller, who may turn out to want to marry the younger daughter, Marie. They've got to see this suitor coming up from Sherbrooke Street, so they have to be able to see him walk up from where the bus stop is, and the window has to be large enough so they can see en retraite. So what do you think? And they're paying rent like this and like that.’ We stopped again and she said, ‘That's the place.’ She took the matter very seriously. She wasn't a reader, you know. She said, ‘C'est captivant.’ Then she looked up and said, ‘That's the window,’ adding, ‘Look at the beautiful glass [i.e., the windows' heavy glass panes with beveled edges]; you know they don't make that any more.’ And she was right. And I said, ‘Well, who did live there?’ because she knew the whole history. And she said the so-and-sos and their daughter married a notary from Outremont, and she went to live in …’ So I said, ‘That's perfect.’ So I had everything right. Then we went to a church together, where the weddings take place in the story. I didn't do that out of imagination. I wanted it really set, anchored.” There was great emphasis on that last word.

“Another story of yours I found absolute bliss was ‘The Four Seasons.’”

“Ah, yes. The core of the story was an incident I was told about. An English family, living on the French side of the Italian frontier, had decamped in 1940, leaving behind their Italian maid, who was a child, without paying her several months' back wages. After the war, they returned and paid her the exact sum, but not the exact equivalent. So she actually received next to nothing. It was just awful. They were at once so awful and so respectable, so respectable you just couldn't believe it.”

“Yes, but the marvelous thing about it is the way you captured it all. It's all there. I was wondering, and you must excuse me, I hope I'm not being impertinent, but I think it was a mistake to open the collection with ‘The Moslem Wife’ immediately before ‘The Four Seasons’; they are such different stories.”

“Oh, completely different.”

“‘The Moslem Wife’ begins with pages of narration, whereas ‘The Four Seasons’ plunges immediately into the mêlée; every reader is immediately swept off into the action, no doubt raring to read through the whole book, whereas ‘The Moslem Wife’ is more difficult to read. Unless one has to read a certain amount of Mavis Gallant to catch on to what she is getting at, which may be the case.”

“It's a story that men usually like, ‘The Moslem Wife.’ And I've often wondered exactly why. They certainly wouldn't identify with that man. Oh, after all, they might, you never know.”

“A story that rather mystified me, on the other hand, is ‘The Other Paris.’ I liked it enormously, and this was the first but not the last time I asked myself, ‘What is this writer aiming for, exactly?’ I also thought ‘New Year's Eve’ was tremendous.”

“Oh, ask me about the ones you don't like. That will be easier.”

“There were none I didn't like.”

“There must be some you didn't like.”

I had to think hard. “I did wish ‘The Latehomecomer’ had been expanded into a full-fledged novel. I wanted more.”

“It's a German word. Spätheimkehr is ‘latehomecoming,’ and Spätheimkehrer or ‘latehomecomer’ is the word for any late-returning German prisoner of war, though most of these were returning from the Soviet Union. You mean because it was written from a man's point of view?”

“No, I don't think that matters. I have no preferences as to whether a thing is written from a man's or a woman's point of view.”

“I always have a man read it through when I write from a man's point of view. Any man. Not a writer, just someone. And I once did change something because the person who read it said, ‘I've never seen a guy do that.’ I forget what it was.”

“In ‘Across the Bridge’ I was wondering about the opening sentence.”

“‘We were walking across the bridge from the Place de la Concorde, my mother and I—arm in arm like two sisters who never quarrel.’ You couldn't get into it? You found the girl tiresome? I wouldn't blame you.”

“Look, if so it would be no reflection on the writer but on the reader. Maybe I just wasn't up to snuff that day.”

“Listen, Nureyev once said something very true in an interview in Le Monde, which I cut out, in fact. He said there are nights when something goes wrong, and you have to take the blame and not say it was a bad audience. I agree with that.”

“How about the Henri Grippes stories?”

“Ah, I love Henri Grippes. He lives just down here.” She laughed, with a wave of the hand westwards down the Boulevard Montparnasse.

“Now wait a minute; is there somebody who ‘is’ Henri Grippes?”

“He's a mixture.”

“Were there other Grippes installments that are not in this collection?”

“No, but there's one I'm writing now.”

“You can go back to them just like that?” The first Henri Grippes story was published in 1981.

“He's my détente, my complete détente. I can do just as I like with him.”

“Do you have men read those stories too before you send them out?”

“No, for some reason. But don't forget, he is not involved with anyone at all. He is not a sexual person; he's not homosexual; he has a woman now and then. The reason for that is I don't want to do a Madame Maigret; I don't want to create a character who exists for no other purpose but to simplify the plot. I really just want a scheming writer and a slum landlord and the twists and turns of someone in Paris. In the current one he's trying to sell some property that he's never officially declared.”

“Are the Henri Grippes stories known in France?”

“They've all been published here, in French.”

“What are typical French comments on them?”

“Oh they like them well enough.”

“They don't resent une sale étrangère⁷ knowing so much about them?”

“No, and I was afraid of that. My first book published here was Overhead in a Balloon, and that had a couple of Grippes stories in it. Practically all the characters are Parisians, all French, and I was very frightened. I thought they were going to say dreadful things. Sometimes they do say, ‘O, vous n'êtes pas tendre avec nous.’”

“So they do turn the screw a little bit?”

“Not really. The reviews certainly don't. I was afraid in Germany of the same thing, but it didn't happen.”

“What would you think of a Frenchman going to live in Canada and writing about Canadians?”

“I'd be fascinated.”

I had to laugh at the unexpectedness of that retort.

“It's true. Unless he was going to write the same old clichés about Québec and the red maple trees.”

“I'd like to read aloud an example of one of the many passages in your writing that for me lift right off the page and become life. It's from ‘When We Were Nearly Young’ [set in 1951-52]”:

I sat nervously smoking, and Carlos sat with his head in his hands. Thought suspended, fear emerged. Carlos's terror that he would soon be thirty and that the effective part of his life had ended with so little to show haunted him and stunned his mind. He would never be anything but the person he was now.

“It seemed to me a cutoff edge then.”

“There are gems like this throughout the book, though sometimes in completely different ways.”

“I'm glad I wrote that and the one called ‘Señor Pinedo’ too, because there are things I've forgotten about the Spain of that time, and when I reread them for this selection things came back I would never have otherwise remembered, how television used to sign off with ‘¡Arriba España, Viva Franco!’ and all that.”

“Did you ever revise for this book, as Henry James did for his New York Edition?”

“Oh no, I didn't touch anything.”

“For the danger there, as with him, might be killing the spontaneity?”

“Yes, when it's done, it's done. É fatto. When you're done with it, if you don't like it, write something else, forget it.”

“I find very often you give more information about your characters in one paragraph than many novelists would do in several chapters.”

“Well you have to, because this is condensed. On the other hand it mustn't be like a block of concrete either. It has to be done in a certain way.”

“You say in your preface that you have to wait a few months and then reread, and then you can cut out what has gone dead.”

“Yes, things do go dead.”

“But how can you tell on which occasion your judgment can be trusted, the first time around or a few months later?”

“The first time around there's heat. When you're cool, well, sometimes there is some deadwood that has to be cut out, in fact nearly always.”

“There isn't a possibility that not everything can bear being read five times, ten times?”

“Oh, I do it over and over again. In fact, most of the work is in the rereading.”

“Certainly the most time-consuming part of writing is revising.”

“Yes, rereading and revising.”

“But there comes a time when you're out of it.”

“Ah, when you're out of it, then it's finished. Then you know it's finished. It's just like the surface of this table.”

“Well then, how can you go back years later?”

“Oh well, then it's because it wasn't finished, obviously. It's very surprising, you probably have a thousand folders, as I have, of unfinished work, and sometimes you look at something again and you say either, ‘Well you know, this wasn't bad at all, why did you ever put it aside?’ or, ‘This is never going to be any good.’”

“Do you ever regret having settled in Paris?”

“No. Really and truly.”

“Even when you're cussed out?”⁸

“You can be cussed out anywhere. What bothers me here is the way people can jostle you on the street, and that's more and more, and sometimes it seems they're doing it on purpose. Just coming over here, I walked, and I had my umbrella up, and a young man, not a kid but a young man, walked by, and of course the whole world is taller than I am, and he just pushed the umbrella in such a way that it turned in my hand, and he walked on.”

“He didn't say anything?”

“Oh, they never do.”

“And if they do they scream at you.”

“But they do scream at each other, and it's not written on you or on me that we're not French. They are still taught good formal manners and so forth, but they are not taught consideration, consideration for others, and that's the difference between the French and other people.”

“Another story I liked enormously was ‘A State of Affairs.’”

“Oh you liked that, did you?”

“Well, it's not every day that tears come to my eyes when I'm reading prose. As a child did you ever read the Oz books?”

“No, I didn't, oddly enough. I read them as a curiosity when I was older.”

“They were the books that first opened my mind to things imaginative.”

“When I was a child in Canada, there were more English books than American books around. If I had American books, it was because my mother had basically American connections, and that's why I had Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. My mother gave it to me.”

“Have you never written a story that was simply true, that was not fiction or fictionalized but was just a simple récitation of something as it happened?”

“I don't think I've ever done that, no. I would try and fit such a thing into something else, maybe a study of the complete ignorance of people about other people.”

“I have purposefully not pried into your private life because I am convinced, especially after having read Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf, that finally there is an unbridgeable gulf between the life and the work.”

“I entirely agree.”

“And really, for the outside world, it's only the work that counts. But just to make sure, my final question to you is this: do you think there are any events in your own private life that do have bearing on your creativity?”

“Just what I put in the preface. I thought about it a lot last year when I was writing that preface; I spent three months on it, not working on anything else; it's the first time I ever talked about my work, and I wanted to get it right once and for all. I think the essential point is having books very young. I was taught to read very young, and nobody has ever written who doesn't read.”

“Oh there are people nowadays who have hardly read, people who think any words they spill on a page make a poem.”

“But I think the reading I did young in English and in a French environment triggered something. I don't really know.”

“Surely reading someone like Proust at any age eggs you on into loving literature, seeing the magic that's possible, and tempts you to try it out yourself?”

“Well, I already loved literature before I started reading Proust. There's always a volume of his hanging around someplace that I dip into …”

At which point the second side of my recording tape wound out. We continued conversing—one can hardly call it an interview—and when we finally separated, expressing hopes we would see each other again, Mavis Gallant walked off in the direction of Henri Grippes's residence, firmly anchored in place and in her mind, and I thought: one day perhaps there will be a plaque on his door.

Since then I have gone through the stories all over again, earnestly seeking a typical piece to analyze here, but to no avail. There is no typical story. Mavis Gallant seems to reinvent the foundational structure of the short-story form each time she launches herself into a new one. Still, a general critique can be made, a critique which is not a criticism: it is that she demands a great deal from her readers. This is not dispraise; it is praise of the highest order. As readers, we have to be “on tiptoe” as with only the greatest writers, those who have as many things or more to tell us between as they do inside their lines—Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare himself—where our attention must be glued to the sticking point at all times, or we risk missing essentials. If I were forced to point out anything negative, I might say that narration sometimes comes too early in some of the stories, before the fully dramatized bits, so that the reader has to work really hard to get into the swing of the tale; but even there, juggling narration and dramatization is a problem for all writers of fiction, and in Gallant, at least, the struggle is worth the effort.

Another general characteristic, and one which I take as exemplary and positive, is that she often deals with characters who are not from the same milieux as those of her putative readers, characters they would not run into by turning a corner in their town, city, or farm where they live and breathe, characters who are not necessarily even speakers of English. Yet, through her unique touch, these foreigners repay our undivided attention by becoming as real (or more real) to us as (or than) do our neighbors next door. This is a most extraordinary achievement.

A call for total attention is, moreover, not a requirement she shares with many other North American writers of short stories, most particularly those who hail from the United States, where in general attention is increasingly paid to the lowest common denominators, also known as “ordinary people,” who if anything are even more inarticulate than their creators, whose hold on the language is increasingly wobbly. True, many of Mavis Gallant's extensive cast of characters are ordinary people, but there is always one telling difference: they have extraordinarily interesting minds, exemplifying what conscious awareness of self, others, and society as a whole can attain: they are sooner or later capable of seeing themselves.

What finally has to be said and even underlined is that Mavis Gallant has not only written wonderful short-story masterpieces but has thereby advanced the form itself. That alone makes her Collected Stories a book to cherish, for years, to be dipped into only when the reader's receptivity is at its highest. As she puts it in her preface:

There is something I keep wanting to say about reading short stories. I am doing it now, because I may never have another occasion. Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

Normally, short-story writers are given short shrift when literary prizes are being handed out, lazy minds having settled that the genre is a minor one—which, after all, it often is. Well, in my opinion here is a writer who has singlehandedly expanded its scope into a major art, and has “contributed to international understanding” as well. If I had anything to say about it, Mavis Gallant would be nominated for the next Neustadt Prize.

Notes

1. Mavis Gallant. The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant. New York. Random House. 1997. xix + 890 pages. ＄45. ISBN 0-679-44886-1.

2. Gallant is Canadian.

3. The stories in this selection are from five to sixty pages in length.

4. John Weber, an editor of Potpourri.

5. Things falling apart, a collapse, by which I meant the difficulty of coping with everyday life despite constant strikes, bombs in subways, inept politicians yapping on unconnectedly, everything wrong in France being blamed on us foreigners, et cetera.

6. Apologies for my having on occasion, during this conversation, forgotten some elements from the preface, which I had at the time read only once and even then all of three months and over 800 pages previously.

7. Currently, many of France's troubles are blamed by the far-right Front National on us “filthy foreigners,” the very words.

8. Etre engueulé: to be told off in no uncertain terms, to be sworn at—a Parisian specialty, particularly with perfect strangers.