It happened that I was travelling when I heard the news that Mavis Gallant had died. And it bugged me that I had no one to talk to about her. As a writer, she was more to be admired than loved. Her prose was terribly dense, her themes rarely transparent. She was not at all afraid of being perverse, of being strange. The CBC obit mentioned “The Pegnitz Junction” as her finest story, though who decided that, I wouldn’t know. So I reread it. And wow, is it a strange story! The central character an odd young woman travelling with her lover and his young son, the plot such as it is their oft-interrupted train journey back to Germany from a weekend in Paris. And such weird stuff happens. The first incident is a sort of race/ethno thing, but then at some point, the young woman almost becomes a radio, somehow gets tuned into the inner frequencies of her fellow travelers. Weird stuff.
Gallant was fearless. She had a story called “My Heart is Broken” about a trampish young woman who happily gives it away to anybody, and then, when she is raped, announces that her heart is broken because “he didn’t even like me”. But the Gallant story that stays with me the most, perhaps because I taught it (or wrote a paper on it, I forget which) is “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street”, which pits Agnes, a naïve prairie girl (like me!), against the bedraggled sophisticates Peter and Sheila (“Darling, my hair!”). The story ends mysteriously, like an incantation, a spell: “Let Agnes have the start of the day. Let Agnes think it was invented for her. Who wants to be alone in the universe? No, begin at the beginning. Peter lost Agnes. Agnes says to herself somewhere, Peter is lost.”
Like I say, it kind of bugged me that my life has changed so much that when Mavis Gallant dies, there is nobody I can talk to about it. But in my dotage, I am also learning that, often, if I can just shut up and be patient and stop whining, the universe provides. As it did a few days later, when at a bookstore event, I encountered an acquaintance from grad school. Who had, in fact, done her MA thesis on Gallant. And who was entranced and delighted to hear me quote the CBC obit as saying that the author “lived modestly but joyfully in Paris the rest of her life”. And who related to me the story of how one friend of Gallant’s in Canada, a man, believed so strongly in her talent that when she decided to just chuck it all and move to France in the 1950s, he gave her some money to help her get on her feet. And that what she did with part of that money, once in Paris, was buy herself a red alligator purse.
Fearless. The woman, in art and life, was absolutely effing fearless.
Mavis Gallant 1922 – 2014. RIP.
