Latest news with #MavisGallant
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Sophisticated Short Stories out now: Failed Summer Vacation By Heuijung Hur, Poppyland By D J Taylor, The Latehomecomer By Mavis Gallant
Failed Summer Vacation By Heuijung Hur, Translated by Paige Aniyah Morris (Scratch Books £10.99, 184pp) There's an air of quiet mystery to these seven askance short stories, a sense that nighttime dreaminess has seeped into the daytime world, leaving reality awash with strange, unsettling feelings and inexplicable happenings. Hur's world is one of emotional alienation and failed human connection. Unexplained, menacing triangles fall from the sky in a story that begins with housemates deciding to get a dog (Shard), a smashed music box becomes symbolic of a troubled friendship (Ruined Winter Holiday), and a futuristic Earth is the scene of unexpected violence between crew members on an expedition team (Flying in the Rain). Poppyland By D J Taylor (Salt £9.99, 208pp) Norwich is the geographical setting for most of the stories in this wry, wistful, astutely observed collection, but its real territory is that liminal space where hopes and dreams are dashed against the disappointing realities of the present. Relationships drift, husbands stray, families fight, ambitions are thwarted and even eyeliner is 'overwrought'. D J Taylor is an affectionate chronicler of his characters' failings and eccentric foibles, gracing the melancholy of their situations with surprising shimmers of beauty from the 'great wide sky' in Drowning in Hunny to the warm glimmer of poppies 'crimson and consoling' in Poppyland. The Latehomecomer By Mavis Gallant (Pushkin Press Classics £12.99, 288pp) Canadian author Mavis Gallant was an exceptional short story writer, with over a hundred stories to her credit, most of which were published in The New Yorker. The 16 sophisticated tales gathered here beautifully capture the elegance and economy of her prose. Her characters are displaced, out of step with themselves and their surroundings, dislocated by war or hardship, the hapless husbands, put upon wives and a wry observant child struggle to find their place in a changing world. None more so than Thomas, who's the Latehomecomer of the collection's title; a young German prisoner of war arrives home, and – swamped with overwhelmingly bitter memories – he's advised by a fascist neighbour-turned-black-marketeer to do the impossible: 'Forget everything …Forget. Forget.'
Telegraph
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Born in 1922 – and now the literary sensation of 2025
Mavis Gallant mostly didn't keep her reviews; even when they were kind, she too often felt they were 'off the target'. But there was one review in El País, when she was first translated into Spanish, which she liked and kept. The reviewer said that when Gallant came to Western Europe from Canada after the Second World War, no one knew who she was and she didn't know anyone – she had lived as anonymously as possible with an exercise book, a notebook and a pencil. She was like Kafka 's invisible woman, the reviewer went on, and the invisible woman took note of everything that Europeans thought was of no importance. Now, people saw that these things were indeed important. I have recently edited and introduced a selected volume of Gallant's short fiction for Pushkin Press, The Latehomecomer (its title taken from one of the tales within), and this seems to me to describe wonderfully well both Gallant's history as a writer, and the mood and form of her stories. To begin with, there's the uprootedness, and the not-quite-belonging, the origins of which she traces very early in her own life. She was born in 1922 and grew up in Montreal, the only child of restless, attractive, heedless parents; similar figures haunt a number of her stories, like the couple who 'drank old-fashioneds and danced to gramophone records out on the lawn' in summer in 'The Doctor'. For reasons she's not wholly able to fathom, although they were both English-speakers and nonbelievers, they thought it a good idea to send their small daughter, aged four, to board at a French convent school run by nuns, 'where Jansenist discipline still had a foot on the neck of the 20th century'. In one of her stories, when a child explains that Satan approached her – 'furry dark skin, claws, red eyes, the lot' – and made her cross the street in front of a car, she realises suddenly that her parents don't believe in Satan, or in most of what she's being taught at school. The writing instinct may begin in such jolts to apprehension, the registering of deep dissonance between two cultural systems – unbolting the door, as she puts it, 'between perception and imagination'. Two contradictory ways of seeing can coexist in the same world; best to test everything you're told. Gallant's adored, glamorous father, a thwarted painter, died of kidney disease when she was just 10; they told her he'd gone to England, and she waited for him to return, until, aged 13, she began to doubt, and set about uncovering the truth. Her mother remarried and Gallant was packed off to one school after another in Canada and America, where she didn't thrive. She returned eventually to Montreal: in actuality, first to work as a reporter on the Montreal Standard, and then forever afterwards, in some of her best stories. Aged 27, she writes, she was 'becoming exactly what I did not want to be: a journalist who wrote fiction along some margin of spare time'. She also dreaded finding that she had 'a vocation without the competence to sustain it'; her father had not lived long enough to discover whether or not he could actually paint well, and had made his living in a firm selling furniture. That anxiety never left her, it fuelled her: she was one of those writers driven by doubt to be good, to be better. She'd had a couple of stories published in a Canadian literary review, but now she set herself a test, and decided to send three to The New Yorker, one after another: one acceptance would be good enough. If she couldn't live off her writing, she would 'destroy every scrap, every trace, every notebook, and live some other way'. The second story was taken, the third she sent from Paris, where she would eventually settle for good: a youthful wartime marriage in Canada didn't last long, and she never had children. Her vocation, and the need to write anonymously, where no one knew who she was and she didn't know anyone, sent her to Europe. 'I still do not know,' she wrote, 'what impels anyone sound of mind to leave dry land and spend a lifetime describing people who do not exist.' In her diaries, she recorded months of semi-starvation in Madrid in 1952 while she waited to see whether The New Yorker would take any more stories. In fact, they already had, and a crooked literary agent had pocketed the money; she found this out eventually by a lucky chance. 'The sensation of disgust was curious, as if a colony of flies were stuck to me... The first thing I bought was good white bread.' Her relationship with The New Yorker, and with its fiction editor William Maxwell, would be fundamental. One hundred and sixteen stories, the lion's share of her work, appeared in the magazine. Gallant did publish two novels – Green Water, Green Sky, in 1959, and A Fairly Good Time, in 1970 – and for years she toiled on a book about Dreyfus, which she eventually shelved, but it's for her short stories that she will be remembered. Her imagination works in pieces of broken-off intensity; life reveals itself to her in signs, snatches of speech, fragments of memory. Sometimes, she runs together 'suites of connected stories', as the novelist Brandon Taylor has called them, which suit her vision exactly; these don't pretend to join the pieces of a life into a single shape, but place them side by side, like discontinuous phases of experience, each with its own centre, its own sharp point – rather like an actual life, in fact. Everyone is interesting in her fiction. Gallant's protagonists may not be particularly sympathetic, they may be dense or narrow or just feeble, yet they're all felt and conveyed with the same evenhandedness, the same keen appetite. Stella, in the story 'In Italy' – a foolish nice girl, a 'compound of middle-class virtues' married to a cynical sophisticate more than twice her age – tries to keep warm over the stove in their rented Italian villa, reading copies of Woman's Own and The Lady, which her mother sends from England. 'I thought it would be fun,' she says mournfully about her marriage. Lightweight snob Peter Frazier in 'The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street', trying and failing to profiteer in post-war Europe, is demoralised by his new colleague and Canadian compatriot Agnes – she's from such a different background to his, so solemn and so striving. He feels 'as you feel the approach of a storm, the charge of moral certainty round her, the belief in work, the faith in undertakings... ashes in the mouth'. The French-Canadian doctor who makes such a fuss of Linnet Muir (a recurring figure in Gallant's fiction), presenting her with a sentimental picture, won't help her when she runs away from school; to the child's disappointment, he sides with her parents' adult authority. Gallant tells what is clearly her own story with the same mix of detachment and fascination. She reports on Linnet's childhood and youth in Canada in the first person, but as coolly as if they had happened to somebody else. The quirks and oddity of her history are for adding to the oddity of all those others. Gallant doesn't belong to any obvious tradition of women's writing: her protagonists are as likely as not to be men, and we're not much invited to identify with them – we are to watch them, rather. Her narrative approach and writing temperament feel almost opposite to those of her compatriot Alice Munro, who was a decade younger, and from such a different Canada. In a Munro story, we're often submerged in the reality of one moment after another; in a Gallant story, we seem to be told about events after the fact, across some distance of time. Both writers can, of course, do the other thing as well. Gallant's stories map out a considerable stretch of history: mid-century Canada, then post-war Europe, then Europe after 1968. Her diaries of the événements, published as Paris Notebooks, are a nuanced and complex record of heady days. She is an instinctively political writer, not partisan but a moralist, charting the shadowy black comedy of the intricacies of allegiance, ideology, history, action. 'Even the name he had given his daughter was a sign of his sensitivity to the times. Nobody wanted to hear the pagan, Old Germanic names anymore – Sigrun and Brunhilde and Sieglinde.' 'The Latehomecomer' is especially poignant, painful: Thomas returns to Berlin having spent years after the war as a prisoner in France, through a series of bureaucratic errors. His mother meets him at the station and turns out to be remarried now to a boor, living in a flat whose previous tenants left in a hurry; she has a new gesture, too, of hiding her mouth with her hand, ashamed of having lost her front teeth. When she tells Thomas to wish on the new moon, he wishes he were 'a few hours younger, in the corridor of a packed train, clutching the top of the open window, my heart hammering as I strained to find the one beloved face'. If Gallant isn't lyrical exactly, her flights of language can be breathtaking. But this story's fine emotional positioning couldn't work if its tone were merely outrage, or denunciation: that would be too sentimental in the face of what has happened to Thomas. Gallant is a great comic writer, though, and finds absurdity in the darkest places. Thomas's mother's neighbour asks him what he was paid as a prisoner. 'I had often wondered what the first question would be once I was home. Now I had it.' She's good, too, at skewering ponderous public conscientiousness. 'Irina' features the elderly widow of a great man, a Swiss writer, Nobel Prize-winner – the last 'of a Tolstoyan line of moral lightning rods... prophet, dissuader, despairingly opposed to evil, crack-voiced after having made so many pronouncements'. Gallant isn't obviously a feminist writer, and yet Irina gives such an eloquent account, to her little grandson, of how women have been short-changed in their relationships, from generation to generation. 'You see, in those days women had nothing of their own. They were like brown paper parcels tied with string. They were handed like parcels from their fathers to their husbands. To make the parcel look attractive it was decked with curls and piano lessons, and rings and gold coins and banknotes and shares.' On every page of all Gallant's collections there are such sumptuous sentences: the intelligence so forceful and distinctively hers, the perception so original, the phrasing so economical and elegant, the words gorgeous in their solidity, comedy and tragedy tangled inseparably together. She died in 2014: she had 'lived in writing', she said, 'like a spoonful of water in a river'. Taking note of the small things that seemed of no importance, Gallant traced in them the large shapes of our history.
Yahoo
03-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The Writer Who Understood Aloneness
In his introduction to Varieties of Exile, a collection of stories by Mavis Gallant, Russell Banks notes that, more than any other literary form, the short story 'speaks to and for every human being who thinks of him or herself as alone, cut off from God, and counted as unimportant and unworthy of attention except when considered en masse.' Gallant indeed wrote almost exclusively about the marginals of the world: the orphaned and the exiled; the abandoned and the uprooted; the people who, like the protagonist of her story 'New Year's Eve,' feel that they are forever being deposited in a place 'where there was no one to talk to' and one 'was not loved.' The aloneness in Gallant's writing is often not so much stated as implied. It hovers in the air, creates an atmosphere whose absence of emotional connection is often experienced as existential—an isolation so penetrating, it seems inborn. This sense of things is central to her writing. It comes not through character or plot development so much as through a tone of voice difficult to analyze but distinctly present: moody, profoundly withholding, with a feeling that humanity in general is destined—yes, perhaps even before birth—to straddle an inner fault line that short-circuits whatever drive is necessary to make a life feel achieved. Gallant died in 2014 at the age of 91. While her stories have repeatedly been gathered in a great number of collections, over the past 20 years, New York Review Books has assumed the task of publishing a uniform edition of her work: Paris Stories in 2002, Varieties of Exile in 2003, The Cost of Living in 2009, and now, this year, The Uncollected Stories, in all probability the last of the set. She was born Mavis Young in 1922, in Montreal, to an American mother and a British father, both more than a bit indifferent to parenthood; they sent her to boarding school at the age of 4 and hardly ever had her in the house from then on. In later years, she said: 'I had a mother who should not have had children, and it's as simple as that.' When her father died—she was 10—her mother quickly remarried and moved to New York, leaving Mavis behind in Montreal with a guardian. Although in later years she periodically joined her mother and stepfather in New York, from that time on, she would feel ungrounded, never again at home anywhere, most especially not within herself. At 18, she was entirely on her own; at 20, she embarked on a brief marriage with a man named John Gallant (whose name she kept); at 22, she went to work as a journalist at a Montreal newspaper (no mean feat for a woman in the 1940s); soon after that, she began writing stories. In 1950, she sent one of them to The New Yorker. It was rejected, but the second story she sent in was taken, and very soon, the magazine's fabled editor William Maxwell was instructing her to send him anything else she had on hand. Maxwell was quickly besotted with Gallant's writing and went on to publish almost every work she sent him over the next 45 years: 116 stories in all. He was the editor heaven had sent her; a melancholic midwesterner also saturated in a damaged childhood, he had a sensibility that more than matched her own. [Read: The vivid, way underappreciated short stories of Mavis Gallant] No sooner had The New Yorker accepted that second story than Gallant swiftly decided three things: All she wanted to do was write, she'd risk making a living from her work, and she would leave Canada permanently, because in order to write, she said, she must feel perfectly free. 'Perfectly free' meant living as a foreigner; she had grown addicted to not feeling at home anywhere. So she settled in Paris, where she lived for the rest of her days among a people and a culture with whom she never felt at ease, much less intimate—and her writing flourished. The three Gallant stories that most move me— 'Let It Pass,' 'In a War,' and 'The Concert Party'—appear in Varieties of Exile. To my mind, they make wonderfully metaphorical use of the ur-loneliness behind humdrum emotional remove: Gallant's signature preoccupation. I call them the Lily Quale stories. All three are set first in suburban Montreal just before World War II, and then in the south of France just after the war. Anchored in an inner rootlessness that never loosens its hold on the protagonists, they were written in the 1980s, when Gallant, then in her 60s, knew everything she needed to know and was at the top of her game. Narrated in the first person by Steve Burnet, a low-level Canadian diplomat in his 40s or 50s, the stories relate the history of himself and Lily Quale, both born in the 1920s in the aforementioned Montreal suburb, he to upper-class English Protestants, she to working-class Irish Catholics. The cultural divisions between them are strong but prove, in fact, to be inconsequential; some shared yearning for the world beyond their backwater town draws them ineluctably to one another. Of course, what they long to experience is themselves, not the wider world—but this they do not yet know. From the start, Lily is seen as a beautiful and alluring wild child driven by a hunger for excitement so extreme, it speaks to an inner need that no one can understand and nothing can dispel. Even though she is part of a functioning family, within herself, Lily is alone, entirely alone—not exactly a stray like other Gallant strays, but a stray nonetheless. She holds herself unaccountable, as women who make their way in the world sexually often do. As for Steve (smart, passive, mild-mannered), for as long as he can remember, he has anguished over Lily. They've been making out since their teenage years, but he has always known that although she holds him in special regard, he is essentially one among many in a 'large pond' she has 'stocked with social possibilities, nearly all boys,' every one of whom wants her. Amazed by 'the scale of her nerve' and her bottomless 'use of gall'—her betrayals are routine—Steve nevertheless knows that whenever she calls, he'll be there. He has promised that he'll get her out of the provinces; the mistake he makes is thinking that this promise has created a bond between them, one that will induce in her a measure of loyalty. [Read: Paris: The taste of a new age] In their early 20s, Steve and Lily decide to marry and leave for Europe. This is what Lily has been angling for, the thing she most wants—the thing dependable Steve is about to make possible. Yet, predictably, even then, she is driven to risk it all. Days before the wedding, on her lunch hour from a tedious secretarial job in downtown Montreal, Lily sleeps with Ken Peel, a sporting-goods-store owner notorious for conducting sexual liaisons in the back of his shop. Happening to pass down the street at the exact moment Lily is emerging from Peel's store, Steve immediately intuits what has happened. In a flash of stunning inner clarity, he understands Lily anew: He sees, 'with a dream's narrowed focus, a black and white postcard image of Lily on the edge of Peel's couch, drawing on a stocking. For the first time I noticed how much she resembled the young Marlene, the Weimar Dietrich: the same half-shut eyes, the same dreamy and invulnerable gaze. She slid into the stocking, one perfect leg outstretched, the other bent and bare.' That 'invulnerable gaze' speaks volumes. Suddenly, Steve knows that their situation is static: He is as paralyzed as she is driven. She will never be faithful to him. He marries her anyway. With a gift of family money, Steve buys a ramshackle house in the south of France that leaves them almost broke, and they settle in among a group of American and European itinerants, poseurs of one sort or another. Among these people is an English homosexual whose gardener is a 19-year-old blond rent boy. Lily, soon feeling as empty as she did at home, comes to see the boy as a kindred spirit. Her restlessness reawakens, is soon uncontainable, and she runs off with the rent boy. (Or, as Steve puts it, a day arrived when 'the two blond truants plodded up the hill to the railway station.') Before she's through, Lily will have two more husbands and end up, depleted, back in Montreal. In the following two stories, Steve describes the depression he falls into after, as he puts it, 'my marriage had dropped from a height.' He never marries again, never even falls in love again. Throughout the years, he drifts in and out of his memories, obsessing over Lily's defection. He remembers his aunt, who was appalled by Lily, telling him that women can do without a great deal, but they cannot do without sex and money—maybe one or the other, but definitely not both. 'No,' he thinks, years after Lily is gone, 'what went wrong had nothing to do with either.' It flashes on him, why she really left him. The important thing about Lily was the ambition behind her longings. He often thought that she should have married some European artist or thinker, or 'the billionaire grandson of some Methodist grocer,' not him. Now, decades later, he realizes, 'Lily must have seen me—my mind, my life, my future, my Europe—as a swindle.' This swollen necessity of hers, this gaping hunger, this abstract loneliness: It was this that Steve's own vacancy was so brilliantly doomed to fail. The affable Steve—'one of the rare foreigners to whom the French have not taken immediate and weighty dislike'—is Gallant's ultimate marginal. Aside from Lily, no one and nothing has ever held his emotional attention for very long. Within him, there resides a great emptiness, which he shares with Lily; from it, each foolishly hoped to be rescued by the other. It is interesting to note that whereas Steve, in pursuit of what he thinks of as freedom, never breaks with the conventions of his class, Lily, in the same pursuit, becomes something of an outcast. [Read: The new singlehood stigma] These are both people who spend their lives looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the process making instrumental use of each other without ever understanding that no one and nothing can do for them what they cannot do for themselves. Yet I must admit that it is Lily, a fictional favorite of mine, with whom I nonetheless sympathize; I suspect that, as a contemporary reader, I understand her perhaps even better than Gallant did. Let us not forget that Lily's was a time when no woman could imagine making her way alone in the world. Whatever the future held for her, she was bound to pursue it through a man in whom she aroused desire: the only card she ever had to play. Being loved could mean nothing to Lily, except for what being loved could get her: That was everything. In this, she was hardly alone. I have known Lily Quale all my life. She was the transgressive among us. Mine was a generation of women characterized by a vivid split between girls like me who didn't act out and girls like Lily who did. Only they dared the unknown; the rest of us lived with one Steve Burnet or another for more years than we care to remember, longing to be rescued from the hungers we either stifled or endured, while the stray within us hardened. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
03-05-2025
- General
- Atlantic
The Writer Who Knew The Cost of Freedom
In his introduction to Varieties of Exile, a collection of stories by Mavis Gallant, Russell Banks notes that, more than any other literary form, the short story 'speaks to and for every human being who thinks of him or herself as alone, cut off from God, and counted as unimportant and unworthy of attention except when considered en masse.' Gallant indeed wrote almost exclusively about the marginals of the world: the orphaned and the exiled; the abandoned and the uprooted; the people who, like the protagonist of her story ' New Year's Eve,' feel that they are forever being deposited in a place 'where there was no one to talk to' and one 'was not loved.' The aloneness in Gallant's writing is often not so much stated as implied. It hovers in the air, creates an atmosphere whose absence of emotional connection is often experienced as existential—an isolation so penetrating, it seems inborn. This sense of things is central to her writing. It comes not through character or plot development so much as through a tone of voice difficult to analyze but distinctly present: moody, profoundly withholding, with a feeling that humanity in general is destined—yes, perhaps even before birth—to straddle an inner fault line that short-circuits whatever drive is necessary to make a life feel achieved. Gallant died in 2014 at the age of 91. While her stories have repeatedly been gathered in a great number of collections, over the past 20 years, New York Review Books has assumed the task of publishing a uniform edition of her work: Paris Stories in 2002, Varieties of Exile in 2003, The Cost of Living in 2009, and now, this year, The Uncollected Stories, in all probability the last of the set. She was born Mavis Young in 1922, in Montreal, to an American mother and a British father, both more than a bit indifferent to parenthood; they sent her to boarding school at the age of 4 and hardly ever had her in the house from then on. In later years, she said: 'I had a mother who should not have had children, and it's as simple as that.' When her father died—she was 10—her mother quickly remarried and moved to New York, leaving Mavis behind in Montreal with a guardian. Although in later years she periodically joined her mother and stepfather in New York, from that time on, she would feel ungrounded, never again at home anywhere, most especially not within herself. At 18, she was entirely on her own; at 20, she embarked on a brief marriage with a man named John Gallant (whose name she kept); at 22, she went to work as a journalist at a Montreal newspaper (no mean feat for a woman in the 1940s); soon after that, she began writing stories. In 1950, she sent one of them to The New Yorker. It was rejected, but the second story she sent in was taken, and very soon, the magazine's fabled editor William Maxwell was instructing her to send him anything else she had on hand. Maxwell was quickly besotted with Gallant's writing and went on to publish almost every work she sent him over the next 45 years: 116 stories in all. He was the editor heaven had sent her; a melancholic midwesterner also saturated in a damaged childhood, he had a sensibility that more than matched her own. No sooner had The New Yorker accepted that second story than Gallant swiftly decided three things: All she wanted to do was write, she'd risk making a living from her work, and she would leave Canada permanently, because in order to write, she said, she must feel perfectly free. 'Perfectly free' meant living as a foreigner; she had grown addicted to not feeling at home anywhere. So she settled in Paris, where she lived for the rest of her days among a people and a culture with whom she never felt at ease, much less intimate—and her writing flourished. The three Gallant stories that most move me— 'Let It Pass,' 'In a War,' and ' The Concert Party '—appear in Varieties of Exile. To my mind, they make wonderfully metaphorical use of the ur-loneliness behind humdrum emotional remove: Gallant's signature preoccupation. I call them the Lily Quale stories. All three are set first in suburban Montreal just before World War II, and then in the south of France just after the war. Anchored in an inner rootlessness that never loosens its hold on the protagonists, they were written in the 1980s, when Gallant, then in her 60s, knew everything she needed to know and was at the top of her game. Narrated in the first person by Steve Burnet, a low-level Canadian diplomat in his 40s or 50s, the stories relate the history of himself and Lily Quale, both born in the 1920s in the aforementioned Montreal suburb, he to upper-class English Protestants, she to working-class Irish Catholics. The cultural divisions between them are strong but prove, in fact, to be inconsequential; some shared yearning for the world beyond their backwater town draws them ineluctably to one another. Of course, what they long to experience is themselves, not the wider world—but this they do not yet know. From the start, Lily is seen as a beautiful and alluring wild child driven by a hunger for excitement so extreme, it speaks to an inner need that no one can understand and nothing can dispel. Even though she is part of a functioning family, within herself, Lily is alone, entirely alone—not exactly a stray like other Gallant strays, but a stray nonetheless. She holds herself unaccountable, as women who make their way in the world sexually often do. As for Steve (smart, passive, mild-mannered), for as long as he can remember, he has anguished over Lily. They've been making out since their teenage years, but he has always known that although she holds him in special regard, he is essentially one among many in a 'large pond' she has 'stocked with social possibilities, nearly all boys,' every one of whom wants her. Amazed by 'the scale of her nerve' and her bottomless 'use of gall'—her betrayals are routine—Steve nevertheless knows that whenever she calls, he'll be there. He has promised that he'll get her out of the provinces; the mistake he makes is thinking that this promise has created a bond between them, one that will induce in her a measure of loyalty. In their early 20s, Steve and Lily decide to marry and leave for Europe. This is what Lily has been angling for, the thing she most wants—the thing dependable Steve is about to make possible. Yet, predictably, even then, she is driven to risk it all. Days before the wedding, on her lunch hour from atedious secretarial job in downtown Montreal, Lily sleeps with Ken Peel, a sporting-goods-store owner notorious for conducting sexual liaisons in the back of his shop. Happening to pass down the street at the exact moment Lily is emerging from Peel's store, Steve immediately intuits what has happened. In a flash of stunning inner clarity, he understands Lily anew: He sees, 'with a dream's narrowed focus, a black and white postcard image of Lily on the edge of Peel's couch, drawing on a stocking. For the first time I noticed how much she resembled the young Marlene, the Weimar Dietrich: the same half-shut eyes, the same dreamy and invulnerable gaze. She slid into the stocking, one perfect leg outstretched, the other bent and bare.' That 'invulnerable gaze' speaks volumes. Suddenly, Steve knows that their situation is static: He is as paralyzed as she is driven. She will never be faithful to him. He marries her anyway. With a gift of family money, Steve buys a ramshackle house in the south of France that leaves them almost broke, and they settle in among a group of American and European itinerants, poseurs of one sort or another. Among these people is an English homosexual whose gardener is a 19-year-old blond rent boy. Lily, soon feeling as empty as she did at home, comes to see the boy as a kindred spirit. Her restlessness reawakens, is soon uncontainable, and she runs off with the rent boy. (Or, as Steve puts it, a day arrived when 'the two blond truants plodded up the hill to the railway station.') Before she's through, Lily will have two more husbands and end up, depleted, back in Montreal. In the following two stories, Steve describes the depression he falls into after, as he puts it, 'my marriage had dropped from a height.' He never marries again, never even falls in love again. Throughout the years, he drifts in and out of his memories, obsessing over Lily's defection. He remembers his aunt, who was appalled by Lily, telling him that women can do without a great deal, but they cannot do without sex and money—maybe one or the other, but definitely not both. 'No,' he thinks, years after Lily is gone, 'what went wrong had nothing to do with either.' It flashes on him, why she really left him. The important thing about Lily was the ambition behind her longings. He often thought that she should have married some European artist or thinker, or 'the billionaire grandson of some Methodist grocer,' not him. Now, decades later, he realizes, 'Lily must have seen me—my mind, my life, my future, my Europe—as a swindle.' This swollen necessity of hers, this gaping hunger, this abstract loneliness: It was this that Steve's own vacancy was so brilliantly doomed to fail. The affable Steve—'one of the rare foreigners to whom the French have not taken immediate and weighty dislike'—is Gallant's ultimate marginal. Aside from Lily, no one and nothing has ever held his emotional attention for very long. Within him, there resides a great emptiness, which he shares with Lily; from it, each foolishly hoped to be rescued by the other. It is interesting to note that whereas Steve, in pursuit of what he thinks of as freedom, never breaks with the conventions of his class, Lily, in the same pursuit, becomes something of an outcast. These are both people who spend their lives looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the process making instrumental use of each other without ever understanding that no one and nothing can do for them what they cannot do for themselves. Yet I must admit that it is Lily, a fictional favorite of mine, with whom I nonetheless sympathize; I suspect that, as a contemporary reader, I understand her perhaps even better than Gallant did. Let us not forget that Lily's was a time when no woman could imagine making her way alone in the world. Whatever the future held for her, she was bound to pursue it through a man in whom she aroused desire: the only card she ever had to play. Being loved could mean nothing to Lily, except for what being loved could get her: That was everything. In this, she was hardly alone. I have known Lily Quale all my life. She was the transgressive among us. Mine was a generation of women characterized by a vivid split between girls like me who didn't act out and girls like Lily who did. Only they dared the unknown; the rest of us lived with one Steve Burnet or another for more years than we care to remember, longing to be rescued from the hungers we either stifled or endured, while the stray within us hardened.
