NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
CLASSICS
THE COST OF LIVING
MAVIS GALLANT was born in Montreal and worked as a journalist at the Montreal Standard before moving to Europe to devote herself to writing fiction. After traveling extensively she settled in Paris, where she still resides. She is the recipient of the 2002 Rea Award for the Short Story and the 2004 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement. New York Review Books Classics has published two previous collections of Gallant’s stories, Paris Stories, selected and introduced by Michael Ondaatje (2002), and Varieties of Exile, selected and introduced by Russell Banks (2003).
JHUMPA LAHIRI is the author of the short-story collections Unaccustomed Earth and Interpreter of Maladies, and of a novel, The Namesake. Her interview with Mavis Gallant appeared in the summer 2009 issue of Granta.
THE COST OF LIVING
Early and Uncollected Stories
MAVIS GALLANT
Introduction by
JHUMPA LAHIRI
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Contents
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Introduction
THE COST OF LIVING
Dedication
Epigraph
Madeline’s Birthday
One Morning in May
The Picnic
A Day Like Any Other
Going Ashore
Autumn Day
Thieves and Rascals
Bernadette
Travelers Must Be Content
Acceptance of Their Ways
Rose
The Cost of Living
Night and Day
One Aspect of a Rainy Day
Sunday Afternoon
Willi
Malcolm and Bea
The Rejection
The Wedding Ring
The Burgundy Weekend
Copyright and More Information
Introduction
I HAPPENED to have the privilege of interviewing Mavis Gallant while the present collection was being assembled. Sitting with her in February 2009 at the Village Voice Bookshop in Paris, I asked how she thought her stories, published over the course of half a century, had changed. “I don’t compare,” she replied. “It’s just a straight line to me.” To prove her point, she briefly lifted, with her fingers, an apricot-colored necklace that rested against her chest. “They’re like the beads on this.”
The twenty stories here were published during the first twenty years of Gallant’s career, between 1951 and 1971. They were written prior to the age of fifty; she turned eighty-seven just as this volume went to press. Many are culled from her first two collections, The Other Paris (1956) and My Heart Is Broken (1964), and also from In Transit, which was published in the late Eighties but contains earlier work. One story, originally published in The New Yorker, is a chapter from her first novel, Green Water, Green Sky (1959). In fact, all but three of these stories initially appeared in The New Yorker. None were included in The Collected Stories, published in 1996, which compiled only a fraction of Gallant’s work, and a good third of them have never been collected in a book at all. They are arranged in chronological order. The earliest, “Madeline’s Birthday,” was published in The New Yorker on September 1, 1951. It is among more than one hundred stories by Gallant that the magazine would accept.
“Madeline’s Birthday” was the second story Gallant submitted to The New Yorker; the first was returned with the inquiry, “Do you have anything else you can show us?” At the time, she was a twenty-seven-year-old reporter at the Standard in Montreal. Gallant was born in Montreal in 1922, ten years after John Cheever, ten years before John Updike. Along with Cheever and Updike, she kept company, in the pages of The New Yorker, with Donald Barthelme, J.D. Salinger, Frank O’Connor, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, all of whom were publishing fiction there regularly during the Fifties and Sixties. Most of Gallant’s New Yorker stories were edited by William Maxwell; My Heart Is Broken is dedicated to him. Before “Madeline’s Birthday” was accepted, she had already resolved to move to Paris and was determined to make her living exclusively as a writer of fiction. The sheer bravado of this decision, particularly for a single woman of that period, is astonishing. Gallant simultaneously abandoned a reliable paycheck and her country of origin in exchange for an artist’s life on foreign soil. The New Yorker remained her home across the ocean; the magazine’s steady support through the years was crucial to her, just as the steady stream of stories she contributed were for the magazine.
Readers of Gallant’s fiction tend to associate it with Canada and France, and Michael Ondaatje, Russell Banks, and Douglas Gibson have all made selections of her work that highlight those attachments. But between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, the years following her father’s death and her mother’s remarriage, Gallant lived in and around New York City, a place she told me she loves, while attending a series of schools, sometimes as a boarder. These were the years leading up to World War Two, of the Great Depression and FDR’s second term as president; Duke Ellington and his orchestra were playing at the Cotton Club, and the Empire State Building had recently been completed. Many of Gallant’s earliest stories reflect her encounter with the United States: the characters in “Going Ashore,” “One Morning in May,” “The Picnic,” and “Autumn Day” are all Americans, and many of them are New Yorkers. “Thieves and Rascals” takes place entirely in Manhattan, in its apartments and on its sidewalks, with the Museum of Modern Art, Grand Central Station, and Columbia University contributing to the backdrop. “Madeline’s Birthday” is set just outside New York, in Connecticut, but as in many suburban tales, the city and its ways are an implicit presence throughout.
Part of Madeline’s predicament is that she is a city child stuck in the country. She is the by-product of a broken marriage; her mother lives in Europe, and her father has remarried a woman she’s never met. She is consequently a vagabond: “The days of her lifetime had been spent in so many different places—in schools, in camps, in the houses of people she was or was not related to—that the first sight of day was, almost by habit, bewildering.” A student at boarding school, Madeline ends up living alone in a Manhattan apartment for three weeks because her mother has forgotten to instruct her to go to the home of Mrs. Tracy, a family friend, for the summer. Once the oversight is rectified and Madeline is safely installed in Connecticut, Mrs. Tracy believes she’s saved Madeline from neglect, while Madeline, accustomed to her independence, feels like she’s been taken hostage. Madeline is half girl, half woman, a creature at once precocious and vulnerable. She is neither a child, like Mrs. Tracy’s six-year-old daughter, Allie, nor an adult, like Mrs. Tracy, whose husband works in the city and comes home only on weekends. On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, Madeline dreams of receiving a dollhouse, but her stepmother sends an unsuitable evening gown instead. Along with Madeline, Mrs. Tracy has taken in a German student named Paul, a boy orphaned by the war. Rounding out the cast of characters is Doris the maid, running an electric blender in the kitchen, and finally, offstage but central to the drama, there is Edward, the part-time patriarch of the household.
The maiden publication of any major writer is of interest, but “Madeline’s Birthday” introduces a voice that is preternaturally mature. For a relatively fleet, satirical tale that isolates only an hour or two of human drama, it is surprisingly capacious, and also unsettling. It is a double portrait of adolescent angst and alienation on the one hand, and the false order and forced cheer of domesticity on the other. Part of its complexity is due to the fact that we have access not just to one or two but several points of view. This is the narrative equivalent of what acrobats do as they leap from on
e swinging bar to another—a feat ambitious enough in a novel, forbidding in the restricted confines of short fiction. The startling precision of Gallant’s language, her agility as a storyteller, and her uncanny ability to distill, in a handful of words, the inner states of her characters—all are amply evident in this striking debut. Of Madeline’s intolerance for Paul, with whom she must share a bathroom, Gallant writes, “They did not even have a cake of soap in common.”
Thematically, “Madeline’s Birthday” sets a precedent for a great deal that followed. It is about characters juxtaposed but estranged, about children living without parents, about women living without husbands. It is about attitudes toward foreigners (Mrs. Tracy is disappointed in Paul, who is dark, bespectacled, and “anything but arrogant,” for not corresponding to her notion of Germans), and about the repercussions of history on personal lives. It is essentially about a denial of the truth; for Mrs. Tracy, who believes fervently in the healing powers of summers spent in her country house, who identifies wholly with its breezes and hinges and coverlets, has only the dimmest perception of the people surrounding her. Nonetheless, Mrs. Tracy makes a single observation that redeems her. “They’re both adrift, in a way,” she says of Madeline and Paul. Here Mrs. Tracy names a condition that is central to Gallant’s writing. Her characters (including, as we shall see, Mrs. Tracy herself) are all adrift, either cut loose from their origins or caught between currents that are personal, temporal, political, sometimes a combination of all three. Bringing that drift into focus is the essence of Gallant’s art.
With the prospect of publication in The New Yorker, Gallant moved to Europe in October 1950. After a brief stay in London, she went to Paris and lived in a hotel populated by expatriates. The experience provided a seed, perhaps, for the brilliant title story in this volume, “The Cost of Living,” which was published in 1962, about a decade after “Madeline’s Birthday.” Compared to the single narrative arc of “Madeline’s Birthday,” the plot of “The Cost of Living” is involuted, told through the murky prism of memory, its force accumulating like a series of waves. It is a denser and more challenging story, virtually impossible, in my opinion, to digest properly in a single reading; it is thus a story that reveals a new level of technical mastery and sophistication in Gallant’s development. We leave behind the domestic comforts of an eighteenth-century house in Connecticut for a hotel—a favorite setting in Gallant’s work—on the Left Bank of Paris, claustrophobic and squalid, with silverfish and dusty claret hangings. We travel from the bourgeois landscape to the bohemian, from a suburban American summer to an urban European winter. In the opening paragraph, the unforgiving atmosphere is rendered with Dickensian flourish: “dark with the season, dark with the cold, dark with the dark air of cities.” The lack of natural light is absolute: “The only light on the street was the blue neon sign of a snack bar.”
The story is narrated in the first person by an Australian woman named Patricia, or Puss, who runs away to Paris at twenty-seven and scrapes by giving piano lessons. Her older sister, Louise, prudent and parsimonious, follows “wisely, calmly,” with money inherited after their parents’ death, and though she can afford better, stays with Puss at the same shabby hotel. Louise is disappointed by Paris, a recurring dilemma in Gallant’s world. She arrives “thinking that Paris would be an easy, dreamy city, full of trees and full of time…angelic children sailing boats in the fountains, and calm summer streets.” Instead, the parks are “full of brats and quarreling mothers.” Louise is one of the many industrious tourists in Gallant’s fiction who, having invested in a journey to Europe, seeks to reap cultural gain: “Once she had visited all the museums, and cycled around the famous squares, and read what was written on the monuments, she felt she was wasting her opportunities.” Among the other residents at the hotel are two aspiring, impoverished French actors—Sylvie (who lives in an unheated linen cupboard and whose indiscretions “spread like the track of a snail” across Paris), and Patrick, who is awaiting a visa and strives to get to America.
Two sisters, two actors; two Anglo-Saxons, two French; three women, one man. The permutations are many, and Gallant choreographs these four principal characters in a dance of shifting alliances and betrayals, a knotting together and an unraveling of familial, cultural, and sexual ties. The walls of the hotel are thin, so that conversations are easily overheard, private moments routinely glimpsed. But there is little comfort in all this closeness. Instead there is a disconcerting lack of solidarity, as well as honesty, among the characters. Puss, Louise, Sylvie, and Patrick live a communal life in which things are borrowed, passed back and forth, exchanged: books, bathtubs, lovers, viruses. And money. In fact, the fifth character driving this story is money: the need for it, the ebb and flow of it, the unequivocal way it dictates our lives. But unlike books and bathtubs, money is seldom successfully shared. As Puss reflects, “Friendship in bohemia meant money borrowed, recriminations, complaints, tears, theft, and deceit.” The lingering effect of the story is as dark as the Paris winter, laying bare the precariousness of expatriate life, and a ruthless calculus of human relationships.
Following a stay of a few months in the hotel, Gallant moved in with a Parisian family; during our interview, she told me that she soon tired of living with expatriates, wanting instead to observe the French. She said that initially, as in “The Cost of Living,” she described the French through the eyes of foreigners. But even in an early story like “The Picnic” (1952), she begins to enter the mind of French characters in the description of Madame Pégurin, an elderly woman who loves her pets more than her own children, rattles the pages of Le Figaro, and tells the American children living in her house that she dislikes foreigners. The subtleties of how we perceive each other and ourselves are never lost on Gallant; of these children, at once innocent and ignorant, she writes, “But they, fortunately, did not consider themselves foreign, and had pictured instead dark men with curling beards.”
Though Gallant has lived in Paris now for nearly sixty years, she has remained attuned in her fiction to the shock of arrival, the discomfiture of the new, and alongside it, the eternal restlessness of human nature. She creates characters who yearn to live life abroad, as well as characters who must. There are women who follow their husbands to Europe, and those who flee them. There are children sent away to edify and find themselves, and children dragged along by their parents. Certain characters gladly jettison the past, considering their non-European upbringings a disease, while others cling stubbornly to food, language, and other customs. Louise, in “The Cost of Living,” goes out of her way to procure soda biscuits in Paris, convinced that they are necessary for nursing the grippe. As is frequently the case among expatriate communities, cultural affinities trump class distinctions, making for strange bedfellows in unfamiliar surroundings. In “Acceptance of Their Ways,” Mrs. Freeport, who cannot stand Italy “without the sound of an English voice in the house,” takes in an English paying guest: “In the hush of the dead season, Mrs. Freeport preferred Lily’s ironed-out Bayswater to no English at all.”
Gallant’s stories teem with characters unwilling fully to adjust, unable to take such things as family and homeland for granted. Instead there are makeshift families, adopted languages, improvised ways. But being foreign is not just a matter of crossing borders. The sense of being adrift, the absence of terra firma, is existential—perhaps not in the manner of Beckett or Camus, but with an impact that is nevertheless profound. Reality is vertiginous, these stories tell us, no matter where and how experienced. “Night and Day,” about a man emerging from anesthesia following an accident, hovers in the interstices of consciousness: the character, suffering from amnesia, is rootless in the most basic of ways. Bound to a hospital bed and lacking a past, he observes, “This is what it means to be free.”
Compounding the dislocation experienced by many of Gallant’s characters is World War Two, the legacy of which permeates almost all of these stories, so much so that the war often serves as their unw
ritten prologues. The scars of war are fresh enough so that being Jewish in Europe remains shameful; children have lost their fathers in battle, and the American military is still present on European soil. The collective posture is one of frugality, of deprivation, and of doing without. Softening cauliflowers are salvaged from garbage cans, coffee grounds used more than once, chicken cooked in vinegar instead of wine. People have been forced to flee their homes, leaving everything behind: “all the tablecloths, the little coffee spoons!” This is the fate of Frau Stengel in “A Day Like Any Other,” a Volksdeutsche refugee from Prague who keeps a picture of Hitler pressed between two magazines. Others must open up their homes to boarders in order to make ends meet. The result is a thrusting together of people from mismatched worlds, a mis-en-scène Gallant exploits to stunning effect again and again. In addition to the devastation of history’s recent past, the stories allude to the politics of France in the Fifties and Sixties: the country’s diminishing status as a colonial power, beginning with Indochina’s independence in 1954 and followed by the Algerian War of 1954–62. The student uprisings of 1968 (which Gallant writes about in her book of nonfiction, Paris Journals), occur toward the end of this collection’s timeline.
Two stories, “Willi” and “One Aspect of a Rainy Day,” are about German characters in postwar Europe, a subject which Gallant would explore more extensively in the 1973 collection, The Pegnitz Junction. The characters dream of home but cannot return, and are not made to feel at home in France, where they live. They exist without resident permits, without legitimacy, with little but memories of a previous life. Willi, a former prisoner of war, now serves as a consultant on films made about the Occupation; twenty years on, the horrors of the Holocaust are already material for the movies. “One Aspect of a Rainy Day,” about a German scholarship student, concerns a general strike and a political demonstration. Because of rain and an absent mayor, the demonstration is futile. “They might have been coming from anywhere—a cinema, or a funeral,” the narrator observes when the desultory group breaks apart. The story was published in 1962, the year after the Paris Massacre, when French police attacked roughly thirty thousand unarmed peaceful Algerian demonstrators. “Sunday Afternoon” also takes place during the Algerian conflict. Veronica, a nineteen-year-old girl from London, sits in her apartment in curlers and a bathrobe while her American boyfriend, Jim, who has forgotten why he fell in love with her, talks to a Tunisian friend about whether Algeria will go to the Communists. Veronica is excluded from the conversation, expected only to pour the coffee; the story is less about politics than about the chauvinistic world of men. Veronica resists autonomy, crying when Jim tells her that she’s free. We know he will never marry her: “She was the homeless, desperate girl in Paris against whom he might secretly measure, one future day, a plain but confident wife.”
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