Montreal-born short story great Mavis Gallant lived in Paris for much of her lauded career but made a big impact on the literary community in her native country, Canadian authors said Tuesday after publisher McClelland & Stewart confirmed her death at age 91.
“Mavis Gallant was a marvellous short story writer and a constant hopeful influence on my life,” Nobel Prize-winning short story master Alice Munro said in a telephone interview from Victoria.
“I didn’t know her well. I met her at a few conferences I think here in B.C. But the important thing was that long before that, I knew about her work and the fact that she was a Canadian and she wrote mainly short stories, which you were not really encouraged to do as your main writing.
“So she was important to me in that way.”
The expatriate, bilingual anglophone published more than 100 short stories, many of them in The New Yorker magazine and in such collections as “The Other Paris, “Across the Bridge” and “In Transit.” She also wrote two novels, “Green Water, Green Sky” and “A Fairly Good Time,” as well as the play “What is to be Done?”
“I was delighted that she was Canadian and published in The New Yorker, that gave hope to all of us,” said Toronto-based author Wayson Choy.
“But her style was a kind of brilliant, intelligent and emotional … texture. And it was entirely her own.”
Acclaimed short story writer and novelist Carol Windley said the first book of Gallant’s she read was 1978’s “From The Fifteenth District” and she “was just in awe of her skill.”
“I really enjoyed the depth, the amount of information that she conveyed as she developed her characters and stories, and the international flavour of her work,” she said from Nanaimo, B.C.
“She seemed to have such an immense knowledge of European history as well as human behaviour.”
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Though she lived abroad, Gallant received several high-profile honours in her home country, including a Companion of the Order of Canada and a Governor General’s Literary Award for her collection of stories, “Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories.”
“For more than four decades, Mavis Gallant has provided for more than one generation of writers an example of the dedicated writer who has committed her life and her writing to the pursuit of excellence,” said a jury in awarding Gallant the $50,000 Canada Council Molson Prize for the Arts in 1996.
“Without her, Canadians would not have the literary culture they now have. She has done extraordinary service to her country and its culture.”
Born Mavis Leslie Young in 1922, Gallant was an only child in a fractured, English-speaking Protestant family: her father died when she was young and her mother remarried.
Starting from age four, she attended numerous boarding schools in Canada and the U.S., many of which were French and had no other English-speaking students besides herself.
After graduation, Gallant returned to Montreal and landed an entry-level stint at the National Film Board and then a job as a reporter for the Montreal Standard.
In 1942, Gallant married Winnipeg musician John Gallant, but they divorced five years later.
Though Montreal’s literary scene was thriving around that time – with writers including Gwethalyn Graham, Hugh MacLennan, Irving Layton, Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen also making their mark – Gallant left Canada for Europe in 1950. She eventually settled in Paris, where she felt she could live solely as a fiction author as opposed to having to supplement her income elsewhere.
“The attitude to a writer was very important, and the attitude to a writer here is one I haven’t seen elsewhere,” she said in the 2006 Bravo! television documentary “Paris Stories: The Writing of Mavis Gallant.”
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“I found for the first time in my life a society where you could say you’re a writer and not be asked for three months’ rent in advance.”
Windley said she “understood completely” why Gallant felt she had to live somewhere other than Canada.
“Perhaps it was that ability of hers to really understand a complicated, rich culture, that she felt she had to be right there in that culture in order to write about it,” said Windley.
“I think that she wrote about how difficult it was to be a woman working in journalism at that time, because she was always assigned the typical female kind of area in the news.”
Munro said Gallant’s “writing made many people feel that Canada had broadened out a bit.”
“She was just a marvellous writer. It wasn’t so much what she wrote about as the fact of how she wrote it. Short story writing is a special kind of writing and she did it marvellously well.”
The notoriously private Gallant did visit Canada from time to time, including a 1983-’84 return as writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto, where she later received a doctorate of letters.
She also included Canadian characters and settings in some of her stories, which are revered for their wit and their powerful and astute observations of conflicted human relationships.
“You’re always attached to the city you were born in, even if you think you’re not,” Gallant said in a 1965 interview with CBC-TV’s “Telescope.”
Gallant’s writing also earned her the Matt Cohen Prize, the Rea Award for the Short Story, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a PEN/Nabokov Award.
Her other honours include the Prix Athanase-David literary award from the government of Quebec, and a spot as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Authors who contributed to Gallant’s collections – either through introductions, afterwords or editing – include Richler, Michael Ondaatje, and Russell Banks.
Gallant also wrote, mostly by hand, in personal diaries for more than 50 years.
In a July 2012 interview with The New Yorker, Steven Barclay – who was an editor and friend of Gallant’s – said she was ill in recent years and was in hospital for nine months in 2011.
With files from Canadian Press reporter Cassandra Szklarski
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