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.