Going Ashore
Authors: Mavis Gallant
PRAISE FOR
Going Ashore
“Gallant possesses a gift for sensory observation and astute detail in the densely political and historical texture of her fictive worlds…. [These are] stories of a master.”
–
Globe and Mail
“CanLit’s most famous expat satisfies with a boldly styled new story collection…. Throughout this fine collection, whole novels’ worth of lives come into focus through Mavis Gallant’s famously exact, exacting observations of elegant, awful, all-too-human beings.”
–
National Post
“[A] wonderful new collection … Happily, the stories have now been born again and they wear remarkably well…. Deeply satisfying.”
–
Toronto Star
PRAISE FOR MAVIS GALLANT
“The irrefutable master of the short story in English, Mavis Gallant has, among her colleagues, many admirers but no peer. She is the standout. She is the standard-bearer. She is the standard.”
– Fran Lebowitz
“There isn’t a finer living writer in the English language.”
–
Books in Canada
“She is a very good writer indeed.”
–
New York Times
“Mavis Gallant is a marvellously clear-headed observer and a rare phrasemaker.”
–
Times Literary Supplement
“Mavis Gallant writes some of the most superbly crafted and perceptive stories of our time.”
–
Globe and Mail
“One of the best writers of our language, an artist who is above fad and fashion.”
–
Saturday Night
DRAMA
What Is to Be Done
(1983)
ESSAYS
Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews
(1986)
FICTION
The Other Paris
(stories, 1956)
Green Water, Green Sky
(novel, 1959)
My Heart Is Broken
(stories, 1964)
A Fairly Good Time
(novel, 1970)
The Pegnitz Junction
(stories, 1973)
The End of the World
(stories, 1974)
From the Fifteenth District
(stories, 1979)
Home Truths
(stories, 1981)
Overhead in a Balloon
(stories, 1985)
In Transit
(stories, 1988)
Across The Bridge
(stories, 1993)
The Moslem Wife
(stories, 1996)
The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant
(stories, 1996)
Paris Stories
, ed. Michael Ondaatje (stories, 2002)
Montreal Stories
, ed. Russell Banks (stories, 2004)
Going Ashore
(stories, 2009)
To Mary K. MacLeod
Readers have no respect for official chronologies. The order in which a writer writes and that in which a reader reads obey different imperatives: a writer is constrained by the tedious sequence of the calendar; the reader follows the serendipity of chance encounters and unpredictable attractions. The writer who, late in her career, decides to publish her early efforts runs the risk of having them read in the light of her mature, expert work, and judged accordingly. It is useless for the writer to say (if she could hover, like Alice’s gnat, by the reader’s ear) “I know you are a friend, a dear friend, and an old friend. And you won’t hurt me.” Readers, unlike Alice, have no mercy, and few Keats devotees have forgiven him for having written, when very young, “My ear is open like a greedy shark / to catch the tunings of a voice divine.” As someone once remarked, there are some things that even youth does not excuse.
Not unnaturally, longtime admirers of Mavis Gallant may fear that the earlier work will not live up to the promise of her later masterpieces. Such admirers may now set their critical minds at ease. The stories collected in this volume (written between 1954 and 1971, with the exception of a few brief satirical
intermezzi
from the eighties) bear the most merciless of readings. We can imagine the sense of happy wonder with which William Maxwell, Gallant’s first and life-long editor at the
New Yorker
, must have read the first stories she sent him. If they were anything like those in this collection, he must have realized that here was that rarest of birds: a craft-conscious writer.
Several of the stories in
Going Ashore
are among Gallant’s best: brilliant, hard-pointed gems whose deadly sharpness is whetted rather than softened by her intelligent humor and unsentimental compassion. They strike
le ton juste
, that ineffable sense of “just right” that the lucky reader feels not often enough in a lifetime. They require careful attention: Gallant is an exacting guide who, unless it is essential to what she intends to tell us,
won’t let us waste time in the forecourt, admiring the view or discussing the weather. We enter her stories in mid-course, or after all is over, and sometimes leave even before the main event has happened: half-way through a Mediterranean cruise, on the morning of a birthday party that may never take place, long before an unwanted birth. Gallant never mocks her characters, however foolish or obtuse they might be, and if we find their misadventures funny, we are never allowed to forget that ours too are implicitly bound in the same volume. “All lives are interesting,” she once wrote, reviewing a literary biography; “no one life is more interesting than another.”
For those who want to know what goes on behind the magician’s curtain as he’s sawing the lady in half, Gallant has described, as best as a writer can put the unexplainable into words, her creative process: how the stories begin with an image preserved sometimes for years before it yields its whys and whens and wheres; how the characters come to her fully equipped with name, age, nationality, voice, opinions; how they cause her to take down long passages of dialogue before the plot begins to take shape; how a first sentence must “sound true” before she can move to the second. All this is privileged information, but does little to explain the profound, vital sense of revelation that comes from reading Gallant’s stories. There is in them a journalistic accuracy relevant to their settings, whether Quebec or France, the United States or Europe, but this (the reader knows) is mere scaffolding, strong and legitimate as it must be. Under the appearance of a rigorous species of documentary realism, Gallant’s stories relentlessly ask a few unanswerable and essential questions about our bewildering human condition. We come away from her stories with a keener knowledge of ourselves.
Borges once said that he wrote short stories because to write a novel was an exaggeration. Beyond the
bon mot
lies a truth: stories tend towards concentration, novels towards digression. The stories of Mavis Gallant are masterpieces of rhetorical stinginess, of words saved for the right moment, of parsimonious descriptions and strict accounting. Nothing goes to waste in her telling. “I don’t need it,” says one of Gallant’s characters, allowing the narrator to pocket a disputed necklace. “It never brought me
bonheur.”
To which the narrator adds for the reader’s benefit: “I am
sorry to use a French word here, but
‘bonheur’
is ambiguous. It means what you think it does, but sometimes it just stands for luck; the meaning depends on the sense of things….” Indeed it does. And it is precisely that “sense of things” that Mavis Gallant has been laying bare for us for the past fifty-odd years.
ALBERTO MANGUEL
Mondion, 16 January 2009
This book was conceived in a Toronto-Paris phone conversation in 2007, when Mavis Gallant remarked to me that it was unfortunate that so many of her stories were out of print, or had never appeared in a book.
This caught my attention. After all, I had been Mavis’s publisher in Canada ever since we launched
From The Fifteenth District
together in 1978, and I was well aware of the thousands of admirers eager to read her work. I knew, of course, that hundreds of pages had been cut from the
Selected Stories
in 1996 to bring it down to a flimsy 887 pages. But surely the other titles that remained in print covered the rest of her work?
Not so, she assured me. Intrigued, I encouraged her to compile a list of the “missing” stories, and promised to publish them. She was delighted, and asked me – in a typically direct way – if I could bring the book out before she died. We are such old friends that I felt able to answer with another question: “What are your plans in this regard, Mavis?” She laughed, and started to make research enquiries.
Then serious ill-health intervened. An appalling incident in January 2008 left her lying unconscious on her apartment floor from Thursday until Sunday, when concerned neighbours broke in with the help of a locksmith. My wife and I visited her some weeks later in the Paris hospital where she had baffled doctors with her miraculous recovery. But her energy was affected. Later, in another trans-Atlantic call, I gently suggested that, given the lack of progress on the new book, perhaps I should step in and take on the task of collecting the stories. “That,” said Mavis, “would be noble of you.”
Inspired by the adjective, I set to work. Mavis had some confidence in me because almost thirty years earlier I had daringly written her a letter that began: “You have written a wonderful book. It is called
Home Truths
and it consists of stories about Canadians at home and abroad. The Table of Contents I suggest is …” Mavis was so pessimistic about the book’s
chances that she hoped aloud that my shirt was tattooed on my back (“Otherwise you’ll lose it!”), but she went ahead and deleted some stories and added some others, and the book went on to fame and fortune and a Governor General’s Award. So we had already worked well together in this way, back in 1981.
With the help of friends – notably the remarkable Christine Evain, a professor at Ecole Centrale at Nantes, a great authority on Mavis Gallant, and a tireless literary detective, and William Toye of Toronto – I was able to amass copies of these hidden stories and to select the best of them for this book.
The selection principle was very simple. None of these fine stories are currently available in any book. Many, in fact, have never appeared in book form before, either because they were unusually long – like “The Burgundy Weekend” – or unusually short, like so many of the satirical pieces that punctuate the more conventional short stories, and reveal another aspect of Mavis Gallant’s wicked wit.
As for the order of the stories, after the opening title story it becomes roughly chronological, with distinct geographic leaps. We move from Quebec to post-war Europe, with side trips to Germany and the south of France, before we settle in Paris for a spell. Then a series of stories set in New York and New England during the “Mad Men” era leads us back to the France that constitutes Mavis Gallant’s main beat. The short jeux d’esprit (such as “Treading Water,” ostensibly taken from the diary of Wagner’s wife, or “Mousse,” a satire on French politics around 1980 – and the dates of original publication are significant) serve as abrupt transitions, and the jolting variety of tone is intended to keep us on our toes as we move through the book.
Mavis Gallant has, of course, approved of this selection, and has even made some minor editorial improvements to the text. I am confident that the resulting volume is one that will delight her admirers, who will find that, at eighty-six, she is able to bring out a book of distinctive yet unfamiliar stories that are full of surprises.
DOUGLAS GIBSON
TORONTO
December 2008