Waiting for Gallant

Reviewed by Michael Greenstein for Throwback Thursday

Mavis Gallant concludes the “Preface” to her Selected Stories with some advice to her readers: “Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” Gallant’s serious waiting game appears in the structure of most of her stories, especially in “The Remission,” published in 1979, but dealing with “The Fifties” – hence a delay of decades. In addition to this lag of a quarter of a century, the story concerns characters waiting for the death of Alec Webb who has chosen to end his days in the south of France instead of remaining in his native England.

The remission in question refers to Alec’s declining health, and the opening sentence briskly establishes his fate: “When it became clear that Alec Webb was far more ill than anyone had cared to tell him, he tore up his English life and came down to die on the Riviera.” Gallant obscures this clarity and clarifies obscurity through narrative veils and multiple points of view, while coming down refers not only to declining health, but to financial straits of the Webb family. The narrator’s fine balance of clauses hinges on that tearing up of a way of life as a response to life itself. She then frames his life and death in a mid-century historical context: “The time was early in the reign of the new Elizabeth, and people were still doing this – migrating with no other purpose than the hope of a merciful sun.” History mingles with geography after the waiting dash linking the Riviera to its merciful sky. The final sentence of this opening paragraph balances his predicament once again: “The alternative (Alec said to his only sister) meant queuing for death on the National Health Service, lying on a regulation mattress and rubber sheet, hearing the breath of other men dying.” Gallant’s queue of characters awaits their outcomes during the course of a short story. Her parenthesis introduces another point of view that adds to the waiting of dying men. To paraphrase the author: read one sentence or paragraph and wait until the next.

Pauses of parentheses and dashes are part of her narrative migration: “Alec, as obituaries would have it later – was husband to Barbara, father to Will, Molly, and James.” Here, the parenthetic clause pauses to include two time frames of life and afterlife; his obituaries add to the wait time of narration. Since Alec’s death is a foregone conclusion, we must look forward to other webs of narration in “The Remission.” His removal from England rends and lacerates his children’s lives as well as his own. His uprooting comes with consequences: “The difference was that their lives were barely above ground and not yet in flower.” Displacement and exile – so central to Gallant’s fiction – parallels her own childhood filled with lacerating dislocations, which are transmuted into narrative deferments.

Sensitive to seasons, the story weighs discomforts of weather within France itself. The five Webbs arrive at a property called Lou Mas during a particularly hot September. Gallant scrutinizes this slice of Provence as if it were an optical illusion, grounded in reality while suspended in fiction. “Mysterious Lou Mas, until now a name on a deed of sale, materialized as a pink house wedged in the side of a hill between a motor road and the sea.” Polarities between the Mediterranean and mechanical roadways play out in the story. Its architecture consists of balconies and parapets, “and the slender pillars in the garden holding up nothing.” Gallant waits until the end of a sentence to undercut the solidity of previous structures. Her painterly eye captures the southern light, “like color straight from a paintbox.” Alec shields his eyes against this brightness, but his response is also part of his rational outlook on life: “he had a prudent respect for second sight.” Similarly, the reader delays response until second and subsequent readings. Alec’s second sight differs from Barbara’s vision, yet both arrive with elements of blindness: “She had received notice in dreams that their change of climates was irreversible.” Gallant’s cinematic montage appears in paragraph after paragraph with shifting focuses of consciousness.

We must wait until later in the story for the transfer of these modes of perception between husband and wife after Barbara has taken her lover, Eric Wilkinson: “Love for Wilkinson had blotted out the last of her dreams and erased her gift of second sight.” Her erasure of Alec coincides with his decline and death, and her own ironic occlusion of second sight. The story concludes with the dark gap marking the end of Alec’s span: “He ceased to be, and it made absolutely no difference after that whether or not he was forgotten.”

Barbara and the reader have waited for Alec’s death. He cannot be buried underground since there is not enough room because Russians have filled the space. “There must be a waiting list” – one of the many lists in Gallant’s rhetorical arsenal of irony and satire. Her rapidly changing points of view recall Viriginia Woolf’s streams of consciousness and cubist angles. From a sharpened angle James reacts to the characters attending his father’s funeral: “Over his governess’s dark shoulder he saw the faces of people who had given him secondhand clothes, thus (he believed) laying waste to his life. He smashed their faces to particles, left the particles dancing in the air like midges until they dissolved without a sound. Wait, he was thinking. Wait, wait.” His unique perspective replaces his parents’ second sight with second-hand clothes in his impoverished status. He further fragments his vision into small shards, while the triple repetition of “wait” falls within a Cubist orb of triangles. This suppressed and surprising violence appears near the beginning of the story when the children “hung over a stone balustrade waving and calling to trains, hoping to see an answering wave and perhaps a decapitation.” Thus, James’s over-the-shoulder thoughts return to his over-the-balustrade waving.

Aside from the three children and Barbara’s three Welsh brothers, the story includes structures and images of Cubist triangulation. “Barbara knelt in a corner, in a triangle of light” – a naked model for Gallant’s Impressionist brush. She remains framed in that devotional light as she considers her finances: “While Alec slept, or seemed to, she knelt in the last triangle of sun on the balcony reading the spread-out pages of the Continental Daily Mail.” If this triangle frames and imprisons her nude and kneeling body, it gets transferred to Alec’s geometry. Gallant prepares for this transfer through sudden adjustments of points of view. Barbara responds to the village doctor who is looking after her husband: “Alec’s new doctor was young and ugly and bit his nails.” If these “and” coordinates are Hemingwayesque, the triple balance is thoroughly Gallant’s hallmark with its descent to the unkempt last word. Their dialogue is heightened by the narrator’s intervention: “She saw, in the way he looked at her, that she had begun her journey south a wife and mother whose looks were fading, and arrived at a place where her face seemed exotic.” She heads south in exotic and ironic ways; this biting description reverses the doctor’s bitten nails. Their visual dialogue ends in a broader consideration and the delay between physical arrival and psychological reflection and epiphany: “Until now she had thought only that a normal English family had taken the train, and the caricature of one had descended it. It amounted to the same thing – the eye of the beholder.” Gallant’s eye fluctuates between normal and caricature, fully aware in this instance that caricature derives from overloading a cart or wagon. Within the limits of a short story, she fleshes out more than the two dimensions of caricature and develops a more rounded third dimension in oscillating points of view from character to character.

The eye of the beholder refocuses abruptly to Alec: “From his balcony Alec saw the hill as a rough triangle.” Topography represents the rough family psyche, as well as the menage a trois in the French Riviera’s Cubism and Impressionism. After the funeral Mrs. Massie, a neighbour and writer of gardening books, addresses the children as “The Three Musketeers,” but instead of staying together they separate. Their dissolution is part of a larger pattern of solidity fragmenting in “The Remission’s” kaleidoscopic web.

At the funeral, neighbour and novelist Mr. Cranefield (whose pen name is E. C. Arden) observes the procession: “Mr. Cranefield’s attention slipped from Molly to Alec to the funeral, to the extinction of one sort of Englishman and the emergence of another.” The novelist shifts perspectives between characters before extending his thoughts to historical patterns of society writ large. The narrative changes focus to Molly’s mind: “How will he hear me, Molly wondered. You could speak to someone in a normal grave, for earth is porous and seems to be life, of a kind. But how to speak across marble?” From English family to grave, Gallant investigates the abnormal alongside the normal and speaks across marble, for in the first section of the story we see Barbara’s financial situation: “What she saw now was a lump of money like a great block of marble, from which she could chip as much as she liked.” Gallant draws attention to economic status, sculpts her blocks in Cubist shapes, and waits for the reappearance of marble as a temporary resting place for Alec’s cadaver. Structurally, each of the several sections of the story serves as a block waiting for Alec’s remission, afterlife, and the author’s last word as she jigsaws minds and landscapes at a readerly and writerly pace.

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About the Author

MAVIS GALLANT was born in Quebec, Canada, in 1922. She began her career as a journalist, before switching to fiction in 1950. She moved to Paris a decade later, and spent the rest of her life there. She published 116 stories in The New Yorker over the course of her career; in addition, she wrote two novels, a play, and a collection of essays. A recipient of the 2002 Rea Award for the Short Story and the 2004 PEN/Nabokov Award for lifetime achievement, she died in 2014 at the age of ninety-one.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published extensively on Victorian, Canadian, and American Jewish literature.
He has published 250 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Book Details

• Publisher McClelland & Stewart

• Publication date Sept. 28 1996

• Language ‎English

• Print length 896 pages

• ISBN-10 0771033087

• ISBN-13 978-0771033087