Chasing Mystery Through Fiction: On The Life And Literary Career Of Mavis Gallant

The Archives of The New Yorker consist of thousands upon thousands of letters and memos and cablegrams and onionskin-thin carbon copies—enough that, by the mid-1980s, a vertical stack of them might have reached the height of the Chrysler Building. Instead, more sensibly, the archivists have opted for boxes. These can be found a few blocks down Forty-Second Street, in the catacombs of the New York Public Library. The filing system, like the magazine itself, retains a whiff of midcentury punctilio: a “whichy thicket” regimented by date and rubric’ed by genre and only then, almost as an afterthought, subdivided by author’s last name. Still, given a margin of time and a taste for digging, any fool with a library card can enter the third-floor rare books room and scrutinize the editorial correspondence of a Nabokov or a Cheever, a John Updike or an Alice Munro.

In the autumn of 2023, I was that fool. What had drawn me to the NYPL was an artist less well known than the foregoing, but, I’d come to feel, every inch their equal: the late Canadian short-story writer Mavis Gallant. I’d first encountered her work back in 2017, a period when, for complicated reasons, I’d begun to despair of the whole enterprise of prose fiction. In some sense, Gallant had been my cure. Reeled in by a late-1970s picaresque called “Speck’s Idea,” I spent the winter hopscotching my way through her Paris Stories. The following winter, I devoured a Montreal-themed companion volume, Varieties of Exile, wondering anew at each story’s complexity, its beauty, its independent life. By spring, I’d ordered a used hardcover of Gallant’s magnum opus, The Collected Stories, and resolved to parcel out whatever remained, one piece per day, like a kid rationing Halloween candy.

For weeks after the big book arrived, I spent the daylight hours plotting for the moment when my own kids would be in bed and I could return to the vivid dream that was my reading. It wasn’t always easy to stop. Nonetheless, I remember looking up from the page a half-dozen times (“The Remission,” “Across the Bridge,” “Potter,” “In the Tunnel,” “The Pegnitz Junction”) and thinking, blasphemously, “This is the greatest short story ever written.”

And I remember a note of melancholy setting in as the pages dwindled. I started poking around to see whether, in the long decades of her working life, any further Gallant stories might have slipped through the cracks. What I found was the paradox that eventually sent me to her letters. On the page, Gallant had been exacting, consummate, but her history in book form fell so eccentrically between mercenary and haphazard that it was hard to say how many books she’d even written. A collection published under the same title in the United States and abroad might turn out to share only 80 percent of the same contents. Or two collections published under different titles might be 50 percent the same. A cluster of stories from The New Yorker might appear in one book in the States, only to resurface a few years later in Canada with new and different neighbors. There were times when a single story was available in as many as four editions at once. Yet amid this restless shuffling and reshuffling, a few stories never made it past the serial-publication stage, and dozens more ultimately fell out of print.

I decided to excavate a couple. From the serials, “Crossing France” (published in 1961 in The Critic): by turns droll, dreamy, casually devastating—pure-D Mavis. From the out-of-print books (namely 1964’s My Heart Is Broken), “Its Image on the Mirror”: a barbed and intricate masterpiece of nearly novelistic proportions. Were these the lost pieces Gallant had deemed “not worth reprinting,” as she’d written in the mid-1990s…and if so, had she made a mistake? Or were they simply among the many stories she’d cut from The Collected Stories for length, or tired of for personal reasons (or perhaps forgotten about altogether)— stories that otherwise, she averred, “stood up to time”?

Gallant was no longer around to answer my questions. She had died in 2014, at ninety-one. Yet as I watched the centenary of her birth approach and then pass without fanfare, a larger and more consequential question seemed to loom. Might returning the lost work to print somehow blemish the record of perfection she’d left behind? Or conversely, might the uncollected stories of Mavis Gallant—whatever story lay behind them—do something to burnish the legacy of this great artist, revered among her readers but to others, unconscionably, a stranger?

*

The first thing to note about The New Yorker’s Gallant files is their sheer profusion. From 1951, when she made her debut with “Madeline’s Birthday,” through the 1995 publication of “Scarves, Beads, Sandals,” Gallant would place an astonishing 103 short stories in the magazine—more than Munro, more than Cheever in his prime, nearly as many as the ubiquitous Updike. Apart from periods when she was composing her sublime but still lesser-known novels (Green Water, Green Sky and A Fairly Good Time), most every year of the century’s second half would bring subscribers a new Mavis story, or three, or six. In practical terms, this means numerous thick sheaves of exchanges with her editors: greetings, queries, parries, updates, and, above all, acceptances.

Equally striking, given the quantity of these letters, is their quality. Gallant was scarcely twenty-eight when she first began publishing in the magazine, yet no sooner does the correspondence turn personal than she’s flashing the tools she’d honed as a reporter for her hometown Montreal Standard: the keen eye, the resourcefulness, the unfailing aplomb. Beset with fleas in Paris in 1950, she goes for irony, observing the likeness of DDT containers to “shakers of Roger & Gallet cologne.” Laid up with pneumonia in Strasbourg in 1953, she notes dryly that therapeutic bloodletting “is still done in France…not to me.”

In Wes Anderson’s film The French Dispatch—partly a fictionalization of Gallant’s return to reporting during the upheavals of May ’68—Frances McDormand invests the Mavis character, Lucinda Krementz, with some of this boreal unflappability (if not quite the mischievous high spirits that are everywhere in Gallant’s writing). But McDormand takes care to show, too, the artist’s vulnerability, the wound beneath the cool. It’s a layering that lends force to Gallant’s early letters, where the alternation of toughness and pathos feels both like a rhetorical seduction strategy and like a slow-motion working out of her later, more diaphanous style. In one paragraph, she might confess intimately that the room where she’s writing “is so cold that I have to stop and sit on my hands”; in the next she is recalling

a wonderful thing said of me at a party, which will keep me cheerful all winter. I had come into a room, wearing an enormous coat, and heard someone say in French that I was une journaliste Canadienne, and that although I was hiding it under my coat, I owned “une grosse poitrine qui est merveilleuse.” Had I heard this in English I would have been offended but in French it sounded just fine.

As revealing as this is as texture, though, what stays with one about the letters is the light they shed on the circumstances of their composition—and thus on the unfolding of Gallant’s career as a whole. For unlike Cheever in his Westchester aerie, or Updike with his cozier version of “silence, cunning, and exile” amid the libidinous burghers of New England, Gallant was by this point dispatching her bolts of impeccable prose from across the Atlantic, where she’d gone to live the life of an expatriate freelancer.

It’s a story that’s been told often enough to harden into legend, not least by Gallant herself. Recounting her abbreviated newspaper years in the finale to her celebrated Linnet Muir sequence, “With a Capital T” (reissued here), she portrays the midcentury newsroom as stifling and chauvinistic, and herself—or rather, her alter ego, Linnet—as a “resourceful truant,” arranging interviews to cover cab fare and then hanging around hotels afterward to peruse periodicals from the States. An element of self-deprecation is doubtless on display. In her countryman Mordecai Richler’s estimation, Gallant was already “a journalist of repute, a glamorous figure…I can still see Mavis’s photograph at the top of her column,…Mavis, looking decidedly saucy in her beret.” At twenty-three, she interviewed Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet to the degree that Gallant was capable of recognizing the figure she cut, it would have been all the more galling that her salary at the Standard remained half that of her male colleagues. In the Linnet Muir series, as in “Its Image on the Mirror,” she connects the brittle hierarchies of bureaucratic existence (“the trace of Empire…the old men with their medals”) to those of Quebec as a whole, both English- and French-speaking. Authority may have devolved to an offstage blur, where “behind frosted-glass doors lurk male fears of female mischief,” but its edicts persist: “a creeping, climbing wash of conflicting and contradictory instructions [that] threatens to smother you.” And lest the level of patriarchal condescension seem exaggerated for effect, one line overheard by Linnet gets repeated years later in the preface to The Collected Stories, a souvenir from real life: “If it hadn’t been for the god-damned war we would never have hired even one of the god-damned women.”

It makes sense, then, that Gallant would have kept her true vocation under wraps. Even before abandoning poetry in her teens, she’d been attempting short stories; writing seems to have been the one constant as she lost her father and then (to estrangement) her mother, all while cycling through seventeen boarding and day schools north and south of the border. Upon her return to Montreal, she had published a pair of sketches in Preview, a mimeographed local journal. A third snuck into the Standard two years later and was read aloud on CBC radio. But it was mostly in private that she continued to write fiction; nothing could be more emblematic of the distance from official life than the picnic hamper in which she kept her stories. Now, with thirty bearing down and the hamper overflowing, she decided that she had to commit: either pursue the artist’s life in liberated Europe or abandon it altogether. As a test (or was it a dare?), she readied three stories to submit to The New Yorker, a bastion of taste and among the highest-paying venues around. “One acceptance would be good enough. If all three were refused, I would take it as decisive,” she recalled. “The first story came back from The New Yorker with a friendly letter…The second was taken.”

And the rest, it is tempting to say, is history; when Gallant tells Jhumpa Lahiri in an interview sixty years later that her third story, sent from Paris, “was also accepted,” the offhandedness seems to scotch further questions. In any case, Lahiri, one of Gallant’s closest readers, is surely right to focus on the “sheer bravado” of all this. Given the forces ranged against “a single woman of that period,” the smash cut that takes Gallant from obscurity to success offers not just an aesthetic thrill but a moral one. “She blazed a trail no one since has dared to follow.”

What the letters reveal, however, is something rather less swashbuckling: the real-world precarity that awaited Gallant in Paris. That is, instead of willing herself, through sheer self-belief, to a career as (of all things) a short-story writer, she spent the first part of her overseas adventure working through penury and struggle—and a long series of rejections that illuminates by contrast how hard-won her published work, collected and uncollected, really was.

There had been, to begin with, The New Yorker’s initial pass, on “The Flowers of Spring,” circa March 1949. And Gallant must have misremembered the sequence of events, because a second story, called “Everything as Before,” was shot down a few months later. The third piece she sent was in fact the decisive one, “Madeline’s Birthday,” and it too was dismissed as not “right for The New Yorker,” though with a caveat: “It has so many qualities we do like…that we wonder if you would care to try a revision.” Gallant, a stone newspaperwoman, took all of six days to turn the rewrite around. By the time she left the Standard, in the fall of 1950, some expository additions had been grafted onto the original, and the story had “gone through.”

But then, for her first full year in Paris…rejection: an ash heap of pieces that survive only as names or synopses. “An Evening of Pleasure”—rejected. “A Saint Called Elinore”—rejected. “Evie’s House”— rejected. A story about Eisenhower’s visit to Paris—rejected. And as late as August 1951, “Madeline’s Birthday” had still not run. She’d been paid for it before the crossing: her check, for roughly $600, would have been $6,000 today. But after room and board (and a splurge on a $75 red alligator handbag), the money was running out. Seen in this context, Gallant’s early jokes about the stingy radiator and the pestilential hotel take on a new air of foreboding. By the end of her second winter in Europe, she would be writing in her diary of “not eating enough,” feeling “watery and faint,” selling clothes and her grandmother’s ring for food: “I live on bread, wine, and mortadella. Europe for me is governed by the price of mortadella.”

Even more consequential than the physical indignities of poverty, for Gallant, would have been the sense of risk to her larger project. She had given herself a year to make a go of it, she told The New Yorker, and was now producing stories at a feverish clip. She mailed her first from Paris in December 1950 with a cover letter saying, “I’ll be anxious to know what you think.” A second submission, soon after, reiterates and then enacts the anxiety: “Perhaps it is too slight?” Having preempted the editorial verdict, she professes not to take it hard when the story is turned down. But when another rejection follows, a week later, she admits forthrightly to being “heartbroken.” She seems at times—quite uncharacteristically—to have exchanged her native acumen for that of The New Yorker: “I have no judgment of my own work,” she writes in one letter, “and really, very little confidence except during the actual period of writing, so that I rely a great deal on what you think.” Elsewhere: “It is always a close tie between a drawer and a wastebasket.”

That Gallant persisted through this period of false starts is down to her own character. Still, fate was kind in its choice of editors. Her first at The New Yorker, Mildred Wood, augmented her “no”s with generous notes, at one point going so far as to send along a Cheever story as a model. And after lunching with Gallant in New York prior to her departure, Wood became more emphatic, even warm, in her encouragement. Her last letter of 1950 reads: “Do, please, send us anything you think might work for us without waiting to hear the latest decision. And don’t be discouraged about this rejection. Don’t please. Happy New Year and More Stories.”

By this point, though, a colleague had taken over the Gallant file. This was William Maxwell, not only a formidable reader of fiction but a fellow practitioner, the author of the accomplished novels They Came Like Swallows and The Folded Leaf. This could have been a recipe for disaster (overt competition, passive aggression), but by all accounts Maxwell saw other writers as teammates, or comrades-in-arms. Moreover, his own experience at the desk seems to have given him a sense of what Gallant needed to hear, which in those days, despite her fierce drive for autonomy, was outside approval: “Go right on writing.”

In a long letter to Gallant toward the end of 1951—just before rejecting two more of her stories, the vanished “Wonderful Gals” and the Salinger-ish “Thieves and Rascals” (later to resurface in Esquire)— Maxwell drops the editorial “we” to offer a kind of intimate address. “I hope that you are not foolish enough to be discouraged at this point. Your command of humorous detail is getting stronger and sharper, and so is your sense of character.” Then, as if feeling this insufficient, or peremptory, he talks about mourning a writer and editor named John Mosher, much loved at The New Yorker: “He had a misanthropic humor rather like yours—and since he died you are the first writer whose work has amused me in quite that way. I have very serious hopes for you.”

The next year, Maxwell would substantiate these hopes by taking three of her stories—the first she’d succeeded in selling since leaving Montreal. And by 1953, she would be earning a “quantity bonus” for her frequent appearances in the magazine, as well as an annual “cost of living” adjustment and a 25 percent premium for a “first reading agreement.” (“I trust I have made this as confusing as possible.”) The glimpses of vulnerability in Gallant’s early letters seem to have left a deep imprint on Maxwell. “I have the feeling of looking over your shoulder at a just barely polite distance,” he writes, “and when you look up with a shade of alarm, I say ‘Go on, go on.’” And though the rejections were now few and far between, he would feel moved, when they came, to cushion the blow:

When a story of yours doesn’t seem right to us, this opinion isn’t arrived at by comparing it unfavorably with the work of other writers, but merely in relation to the standard, the extremely high standard, that you have set for yourself. We never have anything like as many stories from you as we would like to be running in The New Yorker.

The mode of honest praise is one of the hardest to master, skating close as it does to insincerity, or to fawning. Still, some of the most memorable passages in the Maxwell oeuvre are his attempts to capture his spontaneous effusions for the work of Mavis Gallant. “This all takes place between the eyeball and the eyelid,” he writes in 1963. “Do you know how good it is?” And wonderfully, out of the blue, in another letter: “Make me happy, send me a story.”

*

It is almost impossible to overstate the allure this would have held for any writer, let alone one as starved for sustenance, figurative and literal, as Gallant was in the early 1950s. In the decades that followed, as she seemed to gratify Maxwell’s wish to see her in the fiction pages “every other week,” the bond between writer and magazine grew correspondingly strong. The identification would persist in the monumental Collected Stories, whose acknowledgments inform us that, with three exceptions, “all of the stories in this work…were originally published in The New Yorker.” The dedication was to Maxwell, who edited her until 1975, and to Daniel Menaker, who succeeded him.

There’s a certain modish brand of criticism that might use these details, along with a full accounting of Gallant’s years in the wilderness, to stage an institutional Pygmalion—as if the writer, before winning favor for her submissions, had to first submit to the strictures of “the New Yorker story.” The great obstacle to this is of course Gallant herself, who in art as in life bent the knee to exactly no one. A benefit of this new edition, then, is to clarify the lines of influence, and to underscore her blazing independence of mind.

One way it does so is by presenting a dozen pieces first published in other magazines—a larger portion than in any of her previous collections. This isn’t to say that Gallant took the judgment of her New Yorker editors lightly, allowing second-tier work to slip into print. In fact, the opposite. No one was harder on a story, or less inclined to settle for “good enough,” than Gallant. As she posited to an interviewer in 1988, the essence of her art was an unceasing vigilance: “In a successful short story, you are standing on your toes the whole time. You don’t dare let down for a second.” Even after her 1952 breakthrough, the correspondence is studded with the titles of manuscripts she must have agreed fell short of this “extremely high standard”: “The Elephant’s Funeral,” “The Dancing Hour,” “And Planted Firm Britannia’s Flag.” If the picnic hamper in Montreal had given way to a linen closet near Montparnasse (where manuscripts got stashed “between bath mats and towels”) the work she deemed truly “not worth reprinting” ended up in the same old place: the wastebasket, “torn to shreds.”

But on those occasions when Gallant shook off a rejection from Maxwell & Co. and pursued another home in print, The Uncollected Stories shows her to have been almost invariably right. The one exception might be “The Flowers of Spring,” from 1950—the first full-length story she ever published, now returned to print after seventy-five years. When she passed the manuscript to Northern Review, Canada’s leading literary magazine, she may still have been out to prove that she could escape Montreal. At any rate, “The Flowers of Spring” can be seen to form a missing link between her three early sketches (reprinted here as an appendix) and the mature work. There are moments of illumination—the hospitalized veterans wheeled into the sun “like plums to be ripened,” the visiting wife’s idea that certain feelings “photographed badly”—and also a quality of estrangement that Mildred Wood had singled out as “too cryptic.” Far from avoiding this quality in future stories, however, Gallant would redouble her efforts to turn it to account. And by the time of “The Old Place,” eight years later, physical and existential dislocation—the state she called being “set afloat”—would be revealed as her great subject, deployed not to seal us off from character but to deliver it to us in all its fathomlessness.

This story, last seen in the spring 1958 issue of Texas Quarterly, also marks one of her first attempts to render what Francine Prose has called “an entire existence and a whole world, a milieu precisely situated in time and on the map.” It concerns a college-age American named Dennis Arnheim whose suffocating mother has been killed in a car crash a few years after his father’s death at war. She is survived by Dennis’s unloved stepfather, a colorful immigrant named Dr. Rudolf Meyer, and a question of inheritance—“what to tell his stepfather about the house”—pulls the two men into closer propinquity. Gallant was only eight years removed from newspaper work when “The Old Place” appeared, but her mastery of her chosen medium is almost alarming. She introduces the stepfather in swift sure strokes, even as she probes the limits of such economy:

He said he was Russian, but he also said he was Viennese…He said that his mother was Hungarian and that his first wife had been the most beautiful woman in Central Europe…He had been in a concentration camp: his number was tattooed just above his right wrist. However, and this was typical, he said he had been in no fewer than six: Auschwitz, Ravensbruck, Belsen, Dachau, Mauthausen, and Buchenwald. He was huge and tall and well-muscled, and said he had been fencing champion of Vienna and amateur boxing champion of Austria. Gray curly hair stood straight up all over his head like a tangled wire wreath. He wore double-focus spectacles, which fit badly, so that he had to throw back his head to get a good view through the lower half-circle.

We, too, are being given double vision here: The more the jumble of particulars piles up, the less (and more) we know about the man. And rather than smooth away the discontinuities—trivial, world-historical—Gallant lets them strike suggestive sparks. For the stepson is likewise built from scraps, just on a different scale, and as the story goes on, other doublings jostle to the fore. If, like his stepfather, Dennis can “appear haughty,” it is only because he is continually throwing himself back to an objective distance from the world, as though refusing to have feelings about the story he’s in might protect him from the fact that it’s a tragedy.

The emotional climax comes overseas, where Dr. Meyer has taken “the extraordinary notion of revisiting the concentration camps”—and, not incidentally, of introducing his new family to his adult daughter, Charlotte. Now living in neutral Switzerland, she “had been through too much and had no heart left,” the doctor says. “The truth is she has no natural feelings.” In other words, Charlotte is Dennis seen through a glass darkly, and he returns from the encounter “with the same halfhearted despair he had felt coming away; a mirror image of himself in limbo.”

So vivid is the writing here, so forcefully sketched the inner conflict, so deft the movement through time, that it is easy to forget that the moment, like the rest of the story’s long second act, occurs in the fictional past, while Dennis’s mother is still alive. One can almost lose sight, that is, of the “question of disposal” on which Dennis’s memories now hang. But in the end, the story will wind its way back to Dr. Meyer’s urgent entreaties—“I have little money to leave and I must think of my poor Charlotte.” And as he holds out to Dennis the photographs he’s taken on their trip, “the empty barracks, the disused railway sidings…as if he were holding squares of silence in his hands,” a buried trip wire comes, just barely, into view. Dennis is being asked not only to sell the house but to offer up the proceeds to his fellow survivors. It’s a choice that anticipates Gallant’s great German stories of The Pegnitz Junction, fifteen years later, which muster even more dazzling temporal structures to evoke the double bind of history. What claim does Dennis have on “the old place”? What claims does it have on him? And in the face of such claims, acknowledged or suppressed, can a person ever become as free, or even as biographically coherent, as he longs to be? Or are we consigned to live like Dr. Meyer, “his past life float[ing] over their heads, tantalizing and brilliant, like a cluster of escaped balloons”?

“Crossing France,” finished around the same time, shows some of this same mastery, as does a comparably constructed story, “Paola and Renata,” from a few years later. Superficially less weighty, they belong to a decade’s worth of glittering comedies inspired by Gallant’s sojourns in southern Europe (see also “The Moabitess,” “Jeux d’Été,” and the superb “Better Times”). The New Yorker’s rejection of these two stories involved much behind-the-scenes gnashing of teeth. Of “Crossing France,” for example, Maxwell fretted to a colleague that its boys-on-bicycles donné was simply too close to a Harold Brodkey story recently published in the magazine. And “Paola and Renata,” he remarks, accurately, “is so well written that it seems a crime to be sending it back.” Gallant might have been heartened to hear such misgivings. As things stood, she had the good sense to send the two pieces on to the sterling little magazines where each would find a home.

Still, the standout among her non–New Yorker pieces is the novella “Its Image on the Mirror,” whose length foreclosed any appearance in the magazine. Unusually for Gallant, it centers not on an ad hoc ménage but on an intact nuclear family—specifically, on the fraught relationship between two sisters, Jean and Isobel Duncan. The story is also notable for its sustained and virtuosic use of dramatic monologue, where Gallant had previously reserved the first-person voice for memoiristic recollection. One can almost feel her gathering breath to record, from within the armor of imposture, everything she has to say about parents and marriage and womanhood and Canada and “the common inheritance, the family walls.” As if to create further deniability, Gallant places the more glamorous sister, Isobel, center stage. But the entire story lives in plainer Jean, who narrates their lives ostensibly from the wings.

It is difficult to hear Jean talk of Isobel and her lovers without thinking of the narrative structure of The Great Gatsby, a novel Gallant held “without peer”: “They were the lighted window, I was the watcher on the street.” But Gallant takes us deeper. Trapped in her own staid marriage, Jean does not attempt to hide her jealousy of Isobel, or persuade us of her comparative innocence: “My nights were long and uneasy and full of ugly thoughts.” Nor, in the privacy of retrospect, does she spare other characters her lacerating candor. Her dismissal of one of Isobel’s children—“He was a detestable little boy”—rivals Hemingway for how much meaning it squeezes into six words. But Jean is also capable of plangent evocations of life in the 1940s, charged with hardship and destruction (“the harsh wartime paper of letters from overseas, the ends of cigarettes…smoked with a stranger”), and of a lyricism that touches poetry, as when she sums up the drumbeat of overseas postings and deaths: “The men we knew dissolved in a foreign rain.”

Particularly in America, particularly now, we prefer a more Calvinist shade of empathy: bestowed reflexively, but only on the obvious good guys. Gallant’s version is both more implacable and more universal, and seems to me closer to the God’s honest truth. Her “unsentimental compassion,” in Alberto Manguel’s fine phrase, is not a commodity to be granted or withheld, but an unfolding that sees people in all their messiness and refuses to flinch. Wounded, rebarbative, brilliant, at a loss, Jean Duncan is an extraordinary act of commitment on Gallant’s part. The character may be what admirers (often male) mean when they call Gallant “daunting” or speak of her as a writer’s writer (or even that loneliest of creatures, a writer’s writer’s writer). But “Its Image on the Mirror” asks less of a reader’s intellect than it does of her heart, and if you can commit to Jean the way Gallant does, she will carry you through the temporal twists and eddies to a resolution you won’t soon forget.

And then there is “With a Capital T,” which Gallant gave to Canadian Fiction Magazine’s 1978 festschrift in her honor, rather than to The New Yorker. In final decisions over what to include in The Collected Stories, not having passed through the usual channels may have told against it, considering the other Linnet Muir pieces appear in the book in sequence. But to skip the last, the capstone, story, is to be deprived of their novelistic patterning, a Proustian full circle wherein the prohibitions of childhood (“not to say, do, touch”) become the adult’s pursuit of freedom…and wherein the rival who threatened to snatch Linnet’s father in “Voices Lost in Snow” reappears in a new light. I mean not just Linnet’s feckless godmother, Georgie, but also something like time itself:

Her life seemed silent and slow and choked with wrack, while mine moved all in a rush, dislodging every obstacle it encountered. Then mine slowed too; stopped flooding its banks. The noise of it abated and I could hear the past.

*

A thoroughgoing perfectionist, Gallant often arranged her collections thematically, as if to soft-pedal any diachronic shift in approach. (As she said years later when asked if her storytelling had changed, “I don’t compare…It’s just a straight line to me.”) The Uncollected Stories follows Gallant’s practice, adapting the loose geographic structure of her 1981 collection Home Truths. But because its continental divisions also track a broad evolution in her subject matter—from North Americans to exiles to Europeans at home—the stories follow a rough chronology as well. The net effect is another windfall: a portrait of Gallant’s development over time.

This can be seen most clearly in the thirty-odd stories first printed in The New Yorker, which cover the waterfront from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s. They reveal Gallant to have been not only a student of her form, an admirer of Chekhov and Eudora Welty, but also a fearless experimenter, interrogating every formal assumption and discarding those that might stand in her way. She liked to claim of William Maxwell, “He made no attempt to influence his writers,” but this seems wishful, if not hagiographic. Their editorial exchanges read at times like the best writer’s workshop ever conducted, at others like a literary sparring session; what matters is that Gallant gave as good as she got, or better. It may be fair to say that, apart from the inexhaustible Updike, no contributor from this period was more closely associated with “New Yorker fiction.” But it is equally true that no writer, not even Donald Barthelme, did more to broaden its vocabulary. Three stories, early, middle, and late, suffice to illustrate the point.

First, “Thank You for the Lovely Tea,” published in 1956. She later chose it as the leadoff piece for Home Truths—an honor preserved here, and likely for the same reasons. The opening in particular shows the same deft touch with place that “The Old Place” did with time. We are at a girls’ boarding school in Canada, where

It was the last lap of term, the dead period between the end of exams and the start of freedom. Handicrafts and extra art classes were improvised to keep them busy, but it was hopeless; glooming over their desks, they quarreled, dreamed of summer, wrote plaintive letters home.

Seemingly leisurely, this description is quickened by purpose: It soon alights on Ruth Cook, the smart, bored, contemptuous girl who, ignoring the drone of her art teacher, writes “Life is Hell” on the top of her desk, “hoping that someone would see it and that there would be a row.” An antagonist comes blundering up the walk outside: “untidy” Mrs. Holland, her widowed father’s new “friend,” arrived to take Ruth and two classmates to tea. Just like that, Ruth is cemented as our protagonist—the figure who, by the force of her desire, will fulfill in some surprising way the teacher’s prophecy: “It is a year of change.” And this is all in keeping with Maxwell’s amiable gloss on Aristotle: “By convention, at least, there has to be—oh, nothing so vulgar as a moral…but something stated or unstated that the reader takes to be the reason the author wrote this story instead of some other.”

But where we are braced for climax—change, recognition—Gallant proceeds to mount her own bravura lesson in “Perspective as well as Proportion,” an ironic roundelay that sends us in stages through Mrs. Holland’s head and the headmistress’s and the two classmates’. By the time we return to Ruth in act three, we’ll have glimpsed not only what each character wants—the story of which she might be the center—but also what each is missing about the others…the failures of generosity that freeze them in place. A prophecy has been fulfilled: Life is hell, if not in the religious sense, then in the more ordinary sense of everyday unhappiness. Whose story is this, then, really? Who might walk out of it different than they came in? The answer appears to be the narrator herself, hedged by retrospect from the story’s first lines—perhaps a Ruth given heart by time and distance, or someone very much like her.

“Bonaventure,” from 1966, is of another order of ambition altogether, expanding the aperture to take in music and sex and Freud and the Brothers Grimm and thirty years of history. Yet even as the story goes wide, Gallant’s pursuit of subjectivity intensifies, with sometimes disorienting effects. Instead of the stately merry-go-round of “Thank You for the Lovely Tea,” we are plunged into the protagonist’s turbulent interior: “He was besieged, he was invaded, by his mother’s account of the day he was conceived….Before he was—Douglas Ramsay—the world was covered with mist, palm fronds, and vegetarian reptiles.” Eventually the mists clear and we find ourselves in Switzerland, where Ramsay, a young composer, has come to stay as the guest of a maestro’s widow, and perhaps to sleep in his bed. A neat setup, a cousin to “Goldilocks,” yet we remain so close to consciousness that the tale keeps folding in on itself, as if there has been “a mistake in time.” Ramsay slips from a present predicament, one of my favorite in Gallant’s work—“it was a June day, he was recently twenty, and he had to get rid of chocolate wrappers”—to a reverie about his hostess, to a memory of a girlfriend in Berlin, then back to the hostess…but is she now standing before him, or is she still simply a figment of memory (or imagination)? The question remains unanswerable for pages.

The story is also, like much of Gallant, very funny, not least because of these distortions. An endearing childishness undercuts Ramsay’s heroic self-image, leaving room for our sympathies to steal in. We watch him go from denying the very existence of his parents to crying at the thought of a letter received from his father during a hospital stay. And we may think, Who wasn’t asinine at twenty?…at least until Ramsay, spellbound, watches himself take the step that will either exile him from this fairy tale or seal him permanently in. “There they were, Anne cold and excited, her heart like a machine under his hand, and Ramsay the vivisectionist, and poor Peggy, who had been in love.” Even here at the turning point, a sense of traumatic repetition undercuts the realism, furthering the feeling of a midsummer night’s dream, or sex comedy, or nightmare. Or perhaps of Gallant’s proprietary genre, the “squashed novel.” This well after Maxwell had cautioned her, “you know you have a tendency to get the hook in firmly…by telling something fairly far—too far, maybe—into the story, and then shuttling back and forth, instead of sticking to chronology.” But The New Yorker had by the mid-1960s accepted who would be the maestro and who the pupil. According to a note from Maxwell, William Shawn, the editor in chief of The New Yorker, thought “Bonaventure” “one of your best.”

In “Dédé” (1987), previously anthologized in The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties, we can see the final fruits of Gallant’s experiments with structure, language, and interiority: a sense of freedom brought under calm control. The story returns once more to a child on the cusp of adulthood, a perspective Gallant loved. But her present-tense opening anchors us so securely in the mind of fourteen-year-old Pascal Brouet that she can depart from it for almost the entire remainder of the story, leaving us to fill in his reactions. “Going round and round,” as Maxwell might say, she loops through memories of Pascal’s daft uncle Dédé and a dinner party he will ultimately ruin, and rescue. It is as if the sturdily circular structure of “The Old Place,” the point-of-view shifts of “Thank You for the Lovely Tea,” and the poetic bursts of “Bonaventure” had been chiseled away to yield a Gothic illumination. But what is being illuminated here? On one level, the manners and morals of the Parisian bourgeoisie two decades after a failed revolution. On another, in the person of Dédé, the persistence of something anarchic, contrary, ungovernable—yet also imaginative, and pure, and kind. In a conversation with The New Yorker’s Deborah Treisman, Ann Beattie chooses the image of the dragonfly—fierce but gossamer—to capture the grace with which Gallant flits through her beautifully rendered scene. It’s a flight that will end, characteristically, with Pascal himself up in the air. He could follow in the steps of his father, the Argus-eyed magistrate who (when he is not half asleep) is said to see everything—“a steady look, neither hot nor cold.” But Pascal seems to sense, as Gallant does throughout her work, that for a truly just life something more is needed than a commitment, however unblinking, to “Truth with a Capital T.” We require a compound vision that, even if it “never miss[es] a turning”—even if it is the very soul of toughness—never loses sight of human fragility or forgets the human heart.

*

We read Gallant today, in other words, not because she accepted the parameters of the story or the world that were handed to her but because she dared to go her own way—and in so doing redefined, as every great writer must, what the story and the world can be. To put it another way, where most writers aim for mastery, Gallant never stopped chasing mystery. In my view, her Collected Stories is one of the great works of fiction of the last century; it has the burnished perfection Linnet Muir aspires to: “seamless, and as smooth as brass.” But that doesn’t mean its author has nothing else to say.

Late in the preparation of this volume, flipping back through the Canadian editions of Gallant’s previous works, I happened across the Editor’s Note to Going Ashore. In it, Douglas Gibson, her publisher in Canada since the 1970s, recounted a transatlantic phone conversation from the last decade of her life: “Mavis Gallant remarked to me that it was unfortunate that so many of her stories were out of print, or had never appeared in a book.” It turns out that in the 1990s, hundreds of pages had been cut from The Collected Stories for reasons more commercial than aesthetic. The publisher’s absolute limit seemed to be 900 pages, beyond which, as Gallant pointed out in interviews, “You wouldn’t be able to pick it up.” But she regretted not having those pages available elsewhere, and further tempted Gibson on the phone with talk of stories “that had never appeared in a book.” When he promised to publish the missing stories, he says, Gallant was “delighted, and asked—in a typically direct way—if I could bring the book out before she died.”

Their joint attempt to fashion a sequel to The Collected Stories was interrupted by a health crisis, whose repercussions would dog her last five years. But we can take some satisfaction that The Uncollected Stories completes a project conceived by Gallant herself, at both ends of a singular life: first as a vision of the artist she might become; later as a summing up of the one she always was.

With this publication, the entirety of Mavis Gallant’s fiction is restored to print. Her oft-quoted injunction from The Collected Stories remains in force: “Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after the other, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” Some of these have had to wait longer than others; any one of them is a good place to start. But I’m struck, looking back at “Orphans’ Progress,” at “Virus X,” at “An Autobiography,” at “The Statues Taken Down,” at “His Mother,” by the recurrence of a word not always associated with uncompromising artists: love. In “Its Image on the Mirror,” Gallant writes, arrestingly, “We would rather say adore: it is so exaggerated it can’t be true. Adore equals like, but love is compromising, eternal.”

So are these stories, this incomparable body of work. I do not adore them; I love them. Here’s hoping you will, too.

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From The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant by Mavis Gallant, edited by Garth Risk Hallberg. Available from New York Review Books.