Mavis Gallant, short-story writer, dies at 91
Mavis Gallant, an acclaimed short-story writer who was abandoned as a child and later left Canada for Europe, where she made her name writing about the dislocated and the dispossessed, died on Feb. 18 at her home in Paris. She was 91.
Georges Borchardt, her literary agent, confirmed the death.
Gallant, who was born in Montreal to a U.S. mother and a British father, was sent to boarding school when she was four and spent much of her childhood afterward without a family. When she found her literary voice as an expatriate in Paris, she created a writing life that consciously excluded the ties of marriage and children.
And yet despite this seeming unsettledness — or perhaps because of it — her stories convey a deep-rooted sense of place, inviting the reader into a Paris walkup or a sheet-shrouded marble hall in Montreal. These were not just settings for Gallant. Canada, France and even the United States drove her meditations on regional identity, nationalism and its extremes, and the defining and restricting powers of a mother tongue.
“Hearts are not broken in Mavis Gallant’s stories,” Eve Auchincloss wrote in The New York Review of Books. “Roots are cut, and her subject is the nature of the life that is led when the roots are not fed.”
The New Yorker published Gallant’s short stories for more than 40 years — 116 of them, according to Steven Barclay, a friend and lecture agent. The pieces became familiar to readers for their embrace of life’s paradoxes: They could be tender yet cruel, tragic yet funny. Told in exquisite detail, they are threaded with ironies and reveal lives with enough histories and thwarted dreams to inspire novels.
“Every character,” Gallant wrote, “comes into being with a name [which I may change], an age, a nationality, a profession, a particular voice and accent, a family background, a personal history, a destination, qualities, secrets, an attitude toward love, ambition, money, religion, and a private center of gravity.”
In some stories she revisited characters, most prominently Linnet Muir, the independent young woman who, more than any of her other protagonists, Gallant said, reflected her own life. In the Linnet Muir stories, Gallant articulates most clearly her theme of childhood as a prison that can have destructive effects in adulthood.
Gallant also endowed children with special powers that vanish as they grow up. In The Doctor, she wrote: “Unconsciously, everyone under the age of 10 knows everything.
Under-ten can come into a room and sense at once everything felt, kept silent, held back in the way of love, hate and desire, though he may not have the right words for such sentiments. It is part of the clairvoyant immunity to hypocrisy we are born with and that vanishes just before puberty.”
Unloving, neglectful or foolish parents abound in her fiction and arise in her essays. About her own mother, Gallant said, “I had a mother who should not have had children, and it’s as simple as that.”
Mavis de Trafford Young was born Aug. 11, 1922, to Benedictine Wiseman, a U.S. citizen, and Stewart de Trafford Young, who was British.
Her parents, both Protestants, sent her to a Roman Catholic boarding school run by French-speaking nuns. Her father died when she was 10, she told The New York Times in an interview, “and my mother had already fallen in love with another man.”
Her mother married that man and left Canada, placing Mavis in the care of a guardian. Gallant believed her father would come for her and waited for him for several years, not being told that he was dead. She said she had never gotten over losing him.
“My father, that was the great empty chair,” she said in 2012 in an interview on CBC Radio. She told The Times: “In many, many of the things I write, someone has vanished. And it’s often the father. And there is often a sense that nothing is very safe.”