SOURCE: Keefer, Janice Kulyk. “‘Radiant Paradigms and Chinks of Light’: Mavis Gallant's Polish Émigrés in Paris.” In Varieties of Exile: New Essays on Mavis Gallant, edited by Nicole Côté and Peter Sabor, pp. 37-48. New York: Peter Lang, 2002.

“If we are moved by a story, it has meant something, perhaps something important to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as story, meaningless” (Geddes, 817). I've adapted this remark of T. S. Eliot to remind us that whatever our theoretical orientation or critical practice, we must be passionate readers—resistant, yes, but also responsive to what complex literary texts have to offer us, attentive to the terms they work within. It behooves us, in other words, to be moved by what we read, and what we choose to write upon.

“Forain” and “A State of Affairs,” two of Mavis Gallant's more recent stories, seem to me to be among the most moving works in her oeuvre—moving precisely because of the obliquity with which she approaches the inherently elegiac nature of her subject: the last remnants of the Polish émigré community in Paris—those émigrés who arrived, that is, in the decade following the end of World War II. Perhaps I find these texts particularly moving because of my own “Polish connection,” or perhaps it is because of the tenderness with which Gallant describes the love between husband and wife in both stories, and the attention she pays to what Irving Layton, in his elegy for Keine Lazarovitch, has called “the inescapable lousiness of growing old” (Geddes, 210). At any rate, I hope to offer you a reading of “Forain” and “A State of Affairs” that will illuminate how these stories mean and how they move us.

The fictive worlds Gallant creates in these texts are structurally complex, ironically charged, historically engaged, and the prose through which those worlds unfold is, as always, beautifully intelligent. “Forain” and “A State of Affairs” are in some ways mirror images of each other, with the important difference that the former is told from the point of view of Blaise Forain, a dubious Parisian publisher of Eastern European literature in translation, while the latter is given us from the perspective of Mr Wroblewski, an elderly Polish émigré, whose occasionally mistaken perceptions, not always reliable memories, and fictionalizing desires make him in some ways as problematic a focalizer as Blaise Forain.

“Forain” opens on a leaden winter day, with the funeral of Adam Tremski, a Polish Jew who has perished of “mortal grief” (Selected Stories, 637) at the death, not long before his own, of his wife Barbara. Mr Wroblewski, of “A State of Affairs”—the phrase is his euphemism for words like “problem,” “difficulty,” “catastrophe” (648)—is in precarious health and his wife Magda is afflicted by Alzheimer's, though the disease is never named as such. Both Tremski and Wroblewski are historically marked men: Wroblewski, though not Jewish, survived internment at Dachau—what Tremski went though during the war is alluded to by a charcoal portrait of him done in June 1945: “a face that had come through: only just” (638). Barbara, who left her Polish officer husband for life with the seedy, entropic Tremski, rescuing him from his hopeless incapacity for business, and Magda, a former musician and teacher, are women of exemplary intelligence and beauty: stunning in their youth, they retain their attractiveness and elegance in old age. Their husbands deserve them, tout court: they possess an integrity and selflessness that make them two of the most sympathetic men in Gallant's oeuvre. When Tremski falls apart after Barbara's death, becoming incapable of shaving or putting his false teeth in; when Mr Wroblewski lies to a friend in Warsaw about the conversation on Schubert he's just held with the minimally capable Magda, it breaks your heart. The marriages between Adam and Barbara, Maciek and Magda are defined by mutual love, loyalty, and respect—qualities rare enough to find between the numerous husbands and wives depicted in Gallant's fiction.

“All that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt,” or so Yeats advises us (Selected Poetry, XX). Masterful touches of ice and salt are provided in “Forain” and “A State of Affairs” in ways which bring to mind Nabokov's use of irony and satire to camouflage the outright tenderness with which, for example, he represents Krug's wife and child in Bend Sinister, or his own wife and child in Speak Memory. In her exposure of the unscrupulousness of a publisher more concerned with the profit than with the poetic motive, and her introduction, into the lives of the Wroblewskis, of a bank official who first offers and then withdraws a vital service which would have eased Mr Wroblewski's mind regarding his invalid wife, Gallant deflects our attention from the pathos of the émigrés to the complexities and ironies of the contexts—social, cultural, historical—in which that pathos achieves such memorable expression.

Elegy, in other words, goes hand in hand with exposure, with the utterly deft critique of social forms and values that has always distinguished not only Gallant's fiction, but also her early journalism, and the essays and narratives collected in Paris Notebooks. Thus in “Forain,” our glimpse of the generation of old, post-war Polish émigrés, in mourning not only for lost friends “but for all the broken ties and old, unwilling journeys” (627) is supplemented by a succinct, caustic view of the new, post-Wall generation of mobile or migrant Poles who come to Paris not to escape persecution, but to lead more exciting, and more materially rewarding lives. The “thin, pretty girl, part of the recent, non-political emigration” who comes to work for Forain's company has no compunctions about faking the last chapter of Tremski's unfinished manuscript, or about “spreading the story that Forain had been the lover of Barbara” (641). However wittily presented, these falsifications of Tremski's manuscript and of Barbara's memory bring to mind that signal act of desecration referred to in “A State of Affairs”—Sartre's urinating on Chateaubriand's grave at St-Malo.

The “filth that can wash over quiet lives,” the “violations” of ordinary human decency (650) are linked by Gallant not only to Sartre's clownish gesture, and, more chillingly, to the anti-semitism which still erupts in Warsaw, but also to the surveillance and harassment of immigrants in contemporary Paris, immigrants without the cachet of the Polish émigrés, with their Nansen passports. In “Forain,” Gallant gives us a glimpse of “lines of immigrants standing along the north side of central police headquarters” with “Algerians in a separate queue” (638). She singles out the Portuguese taxi driver intimidated by Forain at the end of the story, and the waiter who cheats Forain of his wine at a café—a young, clumsy man with “coarse fair hair: foreign, probably working without papers, in the shadow of the most powerful police in France” (638). The xenophobia of the French, the plight of the involuntarily “displaced and dispossessed” (629) to which Gallant has drawn our attention for the past forty years or more—that these issues find a place in “Forain” bears witness to the inclusiveness of Gallant's vision, the rigorous nature of her sympathy, which refuses to restrict itself to whatever is in moral fashion. In “A State of Affairs,” we are reminded that “In Paris […] the entire life of every immigrant is lodged inside a computer or crammed between the cardboard covers of a dossier held together with frayed cotton tape” (647). This kind of scrutiny is presumably an advance upon conditions “in the old days,” when refusal of applications for French citizenship by people like the Wroblewskis “was so consistent that one was discouraged at the outset” from applying (649). Though Marie-Louise, sent by the city's social services to help care for the helpless Magda, has automatic French citizenship due to her birth in Martinique, what Gallant emphasizes as a donnée of contemporary Parisian life is the radical insecurity that afflicts the lives of migrants, whether from Poland or Algeria. As Gallant presents it in “Forain” and “A State of Affairs,” Paris is a city of highly selective light, of corporate castles and child beggars.

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Among the new wave of arrivals from Lech Walesa's Poland, “Forain” shows us, are scholars seeking out their displaced compatriots in order to chronicle and evaluate what has ceased to be lived experience and become “history”: “Scholars who looked dismayingly youthful, speaking the same language, but with a new, jarring vocabulary […] taping reminiscences, copying old letters” (628). Yet their subjects, instead of feeling gratitude at this validation of their lives, are not impressed: “History turned out to be a plodding science. What most émigrés settled for now was the haphazard accuracy of a memory like Tremski's” (629).

Adam Tremski, of course, is Gallant's invention. He is the most distinguished of Forain's “flock” (634) of East and Central European émigré writers—unlike the others, he could have found a better publisher, just as he could have moved up from the shabby, standard-issue émigré apartment he still occupied at his death. Nevertheless he does not join “the leviathan prophets, the booming novelists, the great mentors and tireless definers” lionized in the West (634), but remains in the company of those “self-effacing, flat-broke writers who [had] asked only to be read, believing they had something to say that was crucial to the West, that might even goad it into action” (637). Gallant doesn't spare these ingenuous, unworldly writers any irony: we learn that even the intelligent Tremski believed that a “great new war would leave central Europe untouched. The liberating missiles would sail across without ruffling the topmost leaf of a poplar tree.” Ingenuousness, however, is matched by a wry embrace of sauve-qui-peut: “As for the contenders, well, perhaps their time was up” (637).

Gallant is especially perceptive about the plight of those writers, who, much to Blaise Forain's chagrin, continue long past 1989 to write “stories in which Socialist incoherence was matched by Western irrelevance” (636). Though these accounts of the “East-West dilemma” may be of historical value, their critique of ‘the Way of the West’ still valid, they are unmarketable, and thus unpublishable. Besides, even in the heyday of the Cold War, most Western readers and not been able to keep straight the names of Forain's various writers, and reviewers had rarely mentioned their work. Now the barbarism of the French reading public (635) is aggravated by the no less barbaric dictates of the Market Economy, for which money and memory have become interdependent. When the Berlin Wall came down, we learn, it brought with it the fortunes, such as they were, of Blaise Editions, causing an irreversible and catastrophic decline in sales. Whereas the Wall can be “hammered to still smaller pieces and sold all over the world,” the work of Forain's authors can't. The satiric edge of Gallant's humour makes the situation more rather than less emphatic, as analogies are drawn between the (presumed) End of Communism and Vatican II's axing of the traditional Mass, so that publishers of prayer books in Latin and of “subtle and allusive stud[ies] of corruption in Minsk,” circa 1973 (636), stand side by side in bankruptcy court. As for the members of Forain's flock, they would seem destined for the fate of double disappearance, their manuscripts rotting unread as they themselves die off.

Blaise Forain is one of the more hapless and engaging of Gallant's rogues: initially, at least, it is his honesty that quiets our unease at the way he operates. If he is “unreliable” (634) about paying his flock of writers their dues, it is not to get rich at their expense. He has “next to no money,” we are told, and is “in continual debt to printers and banks” (634); quite sensibly, he needs to turn a profit—equally sensibly, he would prefer to be given the cash spent by Central and European embassies on gold medals and lavish receptions to mark the cultural service he has rendered to the “other Europe.” If it is a question of medals or money, there is no question—despite the fiction in government circles that “trade and literature are supposed to have no connection” (635). But at certain points after Tremski's death, we are made aware of how the publisher is compromising his already-fraught integrity. Not only does Forain toy with the idea of effectively cannibalizing the lives and work of his “flock” to produce a “sly, quiet novel teasingly based on” [Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard] and set in the new, unified Germany (636), but a year after Tremski's death, Forain persuades himself that the man who'd made him his literary executor would have approved of the last chapter of an unfinished manuscript being “knitted up from fragments he had left trailing” (641). But even worse than Forain's publishing of Tremski's adulterated manuscript is his shift of allegiance from the Tremskis to the writer's stepdaughter, the crassly resentful, unintelligent Halima. When he catches himself in this act of disloyalty, Forain promises himself, head bowed as if in prayer, that “he would keep in mind things as they once were, not as they seemed to him now” (641)—a crucial task, one would think, for someone who “wanted every work he published to survive in collective memory, even when the paper it was printed on had been pulped, burned in the city's vast incinerators or lay moldering at the bottom of the Seine” (635). Forain's pious gesture at the end of this story, however, only leads him to “make a fool of himself to no purpose” (641), becoming a confrère of Halina's father who had fought a “war for nothing” (632).

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The problematic role played in “Forain” by the preserver, disseminator, and adulterator of Tremski's work is transformed in “A State of Affairs” to the less complex intervention of a Fournier, rather than a Forain—the bank employee who summons Mr Wroblewski to her office to present him with a gift far more useful than the Christmas chocolates distributed to the elderly every year by the Mayor of Paris. This gift is a cash reserve from which he can draw, at times of need, without paying interest. The soul of courtesy, Mr Wroblewski undergoes an interview with Carole Fournier, explaining how important this cash reserve will be for his wife, should he predecease her. But when Mme Fournier learns Mr Wroblewski's age, and calculates the cost to him of undergoing the medical examinations the bank would demand of him, she withdraws the offer. Perhaps the émigré's only gain from the interview is a memory triggered by the sight of Carole Fournier's profile—the memory of Elzbieta Barszczewska, a wildly popular Polish actress of the interwar years. This incident seems trivial compared to the fact exposed at the end of the interview—that Mr Wroblewski's greatest problem is his own inevitable and impending death (654). And yet, on the story's final page, it is to Barszczewska that Wroblewski alludes in the poignantly deceptive letter he composes to his friend in Warsaw, summoning the shared memories of their youth.

Carole Fournier is, of course, a far less important and malign presence than Blaise Forain, but her embarrassment and panic at Mr Wroblewski's allusion to the fact of mortality have a particular significance. For Fournier is the product of an age in which azure computer screens, not God, “sugges[t] the infinite” (651), and where the mirror-glass of office towers masquerade as the sky. The information age, and the age of market values, Gallant seems to suggest, are anathema to both the preservation of memory and the consciousness of history: the antithesis to the computer screen in Fournier's office is, of course, the exchange of letters between Mr Wroblewski and his friend in Warsaw—the “dead” letters, too, which Magda writes, letters which, we are told, would be perfectly apropos if they'd been written forty-five years ago.

Mr Wroblewski's persistent connection to his unnamed correspondent in Warsaw—the thought of whom, he confesses, never quits him (654), is the trace, in this story, of that “angel of history” which haunts so much of Gallant's fiction—memory not as nostalgia, or passive reflection of the past, but as the painfully active desire to “stay in place, resurrect the dead and reconstruct the wreckage” (Lichtheim, 12). The memory of Mr Wroblewski's Warsaw friend is “completely alert” (643), so that the hate mail and death threat he receives after speaking in a radio broadcast of his experiences in the Warsaw ghetto reconfirm his earlier experiences of Polish anti-semitism as something bred in “the brain, blood and bone” (642). Mr Wroblewski's own memory—and conscience—is alert enough to catch, in his friend's disclaimer—“I don't mean this for you. You were always different” (642)—a distressing echo of what Wroblewski himself may have said to this same friend some fifty years ago, when the vilification of Jews was rampant in Poland: “Naturally you are completely different: I'm talking about all the others” (643).

That an elderly man should be sent a death threat for recalling to public memory horrific events and the shameful prejudices which contributed to those events is “the dark riddle” (63) woven into “A State of Affairs,” one which grimly counterpoints the donnée of the story—an elderly man's impending death “in a foreign city” (631). And it is no accident that the collective amnesia which has seized hold of post-Wall Europe—if not entrenched long before—is foregrounded in “Forain.” Barbara's daughter from her first marriage is unable or unwilling to convey the importance of Tremski's work to her French husband, or to their twelve-year-old daughter. Unlike Magda Wroblewski, whom memory has abandoned except in cruelly selective ways, Halina chooses not to know, and not to remember. She is not alone, of course, as we learn from one of the story's more devastating aperçus:

It was remarkable, Tremski had said, the way literate people, reasonably well travelled and educated, comfortably off, could live adequate lives without wanting to know what had gone before or happened elsewhere.

(630)

Among the literate are journalists who substitute “a few names, a date looked up, a notion of geography” (631) for a sustained form of historical consciousness.

Any such consciousness is, of course, dependent on memory, which, as Gallant's oeuvre has so convincingly shown, is notoriously capricious or unreliable, and yet which remains crucial to the preservation of human decency and dignity. Memory is dependent, in “Forain” and “A State of Affairs,” on the material as well as the imagined: the Nansen passports Mr Wroblewski is so apprehensive about surrendering to the State, the 1950s apartment Tremski refuses to quit: “two rooms on a court, windowless kitchen, splintered floors, unheatable bathroom, no elevator, intimidating landlord” (628). Tremski's attachment to the physical traces of the past is his way of keeping faith with memory. It seems entirely fitting that Forain's prayer for the repose of Tremski's soul comes in the form of a mental inventory of the contents of the writer's apartment. There is something unbearably poignant about this list of objects soon to vanish—layers of coats on pegs, boots and umbrellas, unread newspapers and journals, shelves of books and empty or overflowing files, and photographs of friends from the 50s and 60s. The unopened crates and boxes littering the place remind us of Tremski's essential homelessness, that he never seemed really to have moved into this apartment where he lived for some forty years (640). The table that serves for both writing and eating, the narrow couch that doubles as Halina's bed, the window providing “the sort of view that prisoners see” (637)—all of these remind me of the dismally cramped apartments one finds in former Soviet bloc countries, and in which all too many people are still compelled to live out their lives.

In “A State of Affairs,” the equivalent of, or counter to, Tremski's apartment, is the bust of Magda made by an impoverished émigré sculptor. Because the work was never cast, no trace of the likeness remains, for the original was lost or broken long ago. The absence of this material record of Magda's youth is especially devastating to Mr Wroblewski, since it was through this work of art, we learn, that he first came to understand his wife's beauty (648). But it's not just the loss of the distant past, but the erasure, as well, of the immediate past that Mr Wroblewski finds so distressing—the unexplained cutting down, for example, of a stand of trees in his neighbourhood, an absence which, ironically, the otherwise oblivious Magda points out to him.

In this context, then, the demolition of the Berlin Wall becomes especially significant. Hateful as it was, the wall offered what Forain calls a “radiant paradigm,” whereby the world could be divided, with Manichean neatness, into good and evil, truth and lies, the desirable and the abominable. With the disappearance of the Wall, more is lost than Blaise Forain's solvency: the paradigm it offered may have been fictive, but it formed a focus for that moral discourse Auden describes in “September 1, 1939”—those “ironic points of light” that “Flash out wherever the Just/Exchange their messages” (Selected Poems, 89)—the kind of discourse Tremski and his fellow émigré writers helped to sustain.

In “A State of Affairs,” that “radiant paradigm” has shrunk to mere “chinks of light” (643)—what Mr Wroblewski would like to show his Jewish friend to displace the “dark riddle” of racial hatred. Were this friend able to travel to Paris, Mr Wroblewski believes, he would encounter the “jovial, generous, welcoming” mood of “One Europe, One World” (643), a Europe in which no one will suffer for being thought a stranger, a foreigner, an outsider. In Mr Wroblewski's fantasies, the two elderly men would sit together in a Montparnasse café to discuss “the news and […] what it means” in a world that can be judged by something as innocuous as the colours reflected by the glassed office buildings: “pale gold, gray, white and blue” (654). It is not difficult to construe what Mr Wroblewski's friend, given his “amazing memory of events,” his ability to supply a “historical context for everything” (643), would make of such “chinks of light” as the new Europe affords. The endings of “Forain” and “A State of Affairs” offer ironic parallels between the deceptions and disloyalty practiced by Blaise Forain towards Adam Tremski, and the heartbreaking lies told by Mr Wroblewski to his Warsaw friend about Magda's fine health and his own unruffled state of mind.

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“In the end it was always a poem that ran through the mind—not a string of dates.”

(629)

The poem that runs through “Forain” and “A State of Affairs” is an elegy for the “displaced and dispossessed” (628). I would like to end this paper by looking at the imagery of darkness and light through which this poem comes to haunt Gallant's prose, and to move us towards a perception of our own moral riddles, our own mortality.

Most of the mourners at Adam Tremski's funeral are elderly Polish émigrés, some of whom have “migrated to high-rise apartments in the outer suburbs, to deeper loneliness and cheaper rents” (630).

Some had spent all these years in France without social security or health insurance, either for want of means or because they had never found their feet in the right sort of employment. Possibly they believed that a long life was in itself full payment for a safe old age. Should the end turn out to be costly and prolonged, then, please, allow us to dream and float in the thickest, deepest darkness, unaware of the inconvenience and clerical work we may cause.

(632-3)

That “thickest, deepest darkness”—a dearly-earned oblivion—makes the “glitter and well-being” (640) of material prosperity in Paris more than a little suspect: though “Every light in the city [may be] ablaze in the dark rain” (640), we can infer that to most émigrés these “lighted windows see[m] exclusive, like careless snubs” (651). In “A State of Affairs”, we learn how the Wroblewskis have put behind them the “gray dawns” of emigrant neediness, the begging—but not the crawling—for “enough to eat, relief from pain, a passport, employment” (646). Yet between the azure computer screen of Carole Fournier and the mirror facade of the Montparnasse tower, “a sheet of black glass [that] means nothing” (654), what is there for them to choose?

Writing to his friend, Mr Wroblewski tries to disarm the “dark riddle” that continues to plague them both: “From that distance,” he urges, “the dark has no power. It has no life of its own. It is a reflection” (654). In Paris together they will “exchange visions through the afternoon and into the evening, with the lights inside the café growing brighter and brighter as the trees outside become part of the night” (644). Mr Wroblewski's visionary fantasy is comparable to his wife's delusion that there is a musician playing Schubert all night long in the neighbouring apartment. And yet the limbo in which Magda's loss of memory has stranded her is a constant warning to her husband: “She is poised on the moment between dark and light, when the last dream of dawn is shredding rapidly and awareness of morning has barely caught hold. She lives that split second all day long” (644). For both their sakes, Mr. Wroblewski must “hold to his side of the frontier between sleeping and waking” (647) for as long as he can.

Given so much darkness—the anxiety and despair of these émigrés' old age, their poverty or financial worries—and given the suspect glitter of the city's lights, what do they offer us, those ironic illuminations Gallant presents to us—the radiant paradigm of the Berlin Wall, the chinks of light proffered by the New Europe? Perhaps it is only the lessons we can draw from them, if we are capable of doing so—that the radiance stemmed from an untenable simplification of moral possibilities, and the chinks of light from self-protective blindness: that reality, with or without quotation marks, is far more complex, ambiguous, paradoxical than we can bear to admit. We can remember here those qualities of contradiction and irresolution that distinguished Adam Tremski, a Jew who may have been “a true convert” to Catholicism, or “just a writer who sometimes sounded like one,” a man who “could claim one thing and its opposite in the same sentence” (629). We can also remember the consoling truth devised by Mr Wroblewski at the end of “A State of Affairs”: “A sheet of black glass means nothing: it is not a cloud or the sky” (654).

Perhaps these lessons—what we remember of what has moved us—give us light enough to see by: just.

Bibliography

Gallant, Mavis. The Paris Notebooks. Essays and Reviews by Mavis Gallant. Toronto: Macmillan, 1968 and 1986.

———. The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996.

Yeats, W. B. Selected Poetry, ed. Timothy Webb. London: Penguin, 1991.