The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (3 page)

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. A few times, the slow transformation from image to fiction has begun with something actually glimpsed: a young woman reading an airmail letter in the Paris Métro, early in the morning; a man in Berlin eating a plate of cold cuts, next to a lace curtain that filters gray afternoon light; an American mother, in Venice, struggling to show she is having a fine time, and her two tactful, attentive adolescent children. Sometimes, hardly ever, I have seen clearly that a character sent from nowhere is standing in for someone I once knew, disguised as thoroughly as a stranger in a dream. I have always let it stand. Everything I start glides into print, in time, and becomes like a house once lived in.

I was taught the alphabet three times. The first, the scene with the high chair, I remember nothing about. The second time, the letters were written in lacy capitals on a blackboard—pretty-looking, decorative; nuns’ handwriting of the time. Rows of little girls in black, hands folded on a desk, feet together, sang the letters and then, in a rising scale, the five vowels. The third time was at the Protestant school,
in Châteauguay. The schoolhouse had only two rooms, four grades to each. I was eight: It had been noticed that I was beginning to pronounce English proper nouns with French vowel sounds. (I do it to this day, thinking “Neek” for “Nike,” “Raybok” for “Reebok.” The first time I saw Ribena, a fruit drink, advertised in the London Underground, I said, “What is Reebayna?” It is the only trace of that lacy, pretty, sung alphabet.) At my new school it was taken for granted that French and Catholic teaching had left me enslaved to superstition and wholly ignorant. I was placed with the six-year-olds and told to recite the alphabet. I pronounced G with its French vowel sound, something like an English
J
. Our teacher pulled down over the blackboard a large, illustrated alphabet, like a wide window blind. I stood in front of the blind and was shown the letter G. Above it a large painted hand held a tipped water jug, to which clung, suspended, a single drop. The sound of G was the noise the drop would make in a water glass: it would say
gug
.

“The sound of G is
gug
. Say it after me.
Gug.”

“Gug.”

“Everyone, now.
Gug gug gug.”

“Gug, gug, gug.”

“What letter is it?”

“G.”

“What does it say?”

“Gug.”

“Don’t forget it, now.”

Whatever it was, it could never be sung.

The way the stories are arranged in this collection, as well as their selection, was left up to me. The original editor, Joe Fox, whose sad and sudden death some months ago has left him entirely alive in my mind, not yet a memory, had written, “Knowing you, I suspect that you’re going to write back that
I
should decide. But … only
you
can decide, and only you can assemble your work in a way that pleases you.” His book, or so I thought of it, was caught in midair by Kate Medina, and I thank her for her good catch and for her patience.

I keep the sketchiest sort of files, few letters and almost no records. As it turned out, I had published more stories than I had expected. This is a heavy volume, and if I had included everything, even nearly everything, it would have become one of those tomes that can’t be read in comfort and that are no good for anything except as a weight on sliced cucumbers. I rejected straight humor and satire, which dates quickly, seven stories that were pieces of novels, stories that seemed to me not worth reprinting, stories I was tired of, and stories that bored me. I also removed more than a dozen stories that stood up to time but not to the practical requirement I’ve mentioned. Their inclusion would have made this collection as long as
the
Concise Oxford
to “speedometer,” or the whole of
The Oxford Book of American Verse
plus some of the
Oxford English
, as far as Sir Thomas Wyatt, or the King James Bible from Genesis to about the middle of Paul’s first Epistle to the Romans.

With just a few exceptions all the stories were published in
The New Yorker
. Good and bad luck comes in waves. It was a wave of the best that brought me to William Maxwell, who read my first story and every other for the next twenty-five years. He has turned away the IOUs I have tried to hand him, which announce just simply that I owe him everything. And so I am writing another one here, with no possibility of any answer: I owe him everything. When we met for the first time, in the spring of 1950, I did not immediately connect him to the author of
The Folded Leaf
. He, of course, said nothing about himself at all. He asked just a few questions and let me think it was perfectly natural to throw up one’s job and all one’s friends and everything familiar and go thousands of miles away to write. He made it seem no more absurd or unusual than taking a bus to visit a museum. Everyone else I knew had quite the opposite to say; I felt suddenly like a stranded army with an unexpected ally. I was about to try something entirely normal and that (he made it sound obvious) I was unlikely to regret.

He seems to me the most American of writers and the most American of all the Americans I have known; but even as I say this, I know it almost makes no sense and that it is undefinable and that I am unable to explain what I mean. I can get myself out of it only by saying it is a compliment. When he retired, in the mid-seventies, I was inherited by a much younger editor, Daniel Menaker, whom he liked, trusted, and chose. Every writer/editor relationship is a kind of shotgun wedding; it works or it doesn’t. There is no median way and no jogging along. Dan Menaker and I had the same dopey sense of humor. He would call across the Atlantic just to tell me a joke. It was because I knew I could make him laugh that I began to write straight satire, which gradually evolved into stories, such as the stories about Henri Grippes, the Montparnasse author and slum landlord. All the linked stories, silly or serious, at the end of this volume were written with Dan Menaker as first reader.

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.

I
n the south of France, in the business room of a hotel quite near to the house where Katherine Mansfield (whom no one in this hotel had ever heard of) was writing “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” Netta Asher’s father announced that there would never be a man-made catastrophe in Europe again. The dead of that recent war, the doomed nonsense of the Russian Bolsheviks had finally knocked sense into European heads. What people wanted now was to get on with life. When he said “life,” he meant its commercial business.

Who would have contradicted Mr. Asher? Certainly not Netta. She did not understand what he meant quite so well as his French solicitor seemed to, but she did listen with interest and respect, and then watched him signing papers that, she knew, concerned her for life. He was renewing the long lease her family held on the Hotel Prince Albert and Albion. Netta was then eleven. One hundred years should at least see her through the prime of life, said Mr. Asher, only half jokingly, for of course he thought his seed was immortal.