In 1965, when I was twenty-five and starting out as a writer, I was reading The New Yorker, as all of us young writers did. The magazine published short stories and I wrote them, though, at that time, not very many of them and not very well. In the April 3rd issue, I came across a story called “Orphans’ Progress,” by Mavis Gallant, a writer I hadn’t heard of. Oddly, it was set in Canada; most of the stories in The New Yorker took place in the United States, and why not? It was an American publication.
In the story, two girls living with a dysfunctional mother in Montreal are taken away from her by well-meaning social workers. The mother is a mess—her husband is dead, she’s become an alcoholic, she’s been sleeping with a series of increasingly awful men, her shoddy abode is exceptionally dirty, her daughters are not bathed, they are not fed healthy food—but the girls love her and she loves them, in her own fashion. Filthy though it was, her home was their nest, and now they have been removed from it. They are sent off to a grandmother in Ontario who is the epitome of cold, self-righteous Protestant virtue. “Whether it is the right thing or the wrong thing as far as the children are concerned, it is the end of love,” the narrator says.
The grandmother’s maid becomes the children’s main informant, filling their ears with stories about how dirty and feckless their mother was, and how “Christian” it was of their straightlaced grandmother to rescue them. After the grandmother dies, the children are shuffled off to a francophone uncle’s home, where their cousins treat them cruelly and make fun of their accents, and then into a convent run by sadistic nuns, where they are not allowed to see their own bodies when taking a bath: the younger girl must wear a rubber apron, the older one a shift. They grow up and are separated. When the younger one passes her mother’s former home—which she has longed for, off and on, throughout her unloved childhood—she no longer recognizes it.
I was deeply impressed by this story: strong, clear-eyed, meticulously detailed, and ambiguous. Were the children better off for having been “rescued”? What would their lives have been like if they’d stayed with their mother? No answers: the reader must decide.
Years later, I came to know Mavis through my partner, Graeme Gibson, who interviewed her for a Canadian Broadcasting Company literary show called “Anthology.” Whenever we were in Paris, where she lived then, we would see her. She preferred Graeme—with his military bearing and background, he must have reminded her of “the boys” she’d known as a wartime newspaper reporter in Montreal—but she came to tolerate me, once she realized I was not just an auxiliary fluff ball. She was a tough little nut, having had to make her own way from an early age: her personal story had parallels with “Orphans’ Progress.” She was packed off to a convent school when she was four—four!—her somewhat batty mother’s excuse being that the nuns had the best French accents. The reality was that Mavis’s mother didn’t have much time for her, being—like the grandmother in the story—not very maternal, though, in her case, this was attributable not to rigidity but to narcissism. Mavis’s father—whom Mavis loved but considered weak—had died early. Like the orphans, Mavis was bilingual, and had a ringside view of the differences and tensions between the anglophones and the francophones in Canada. In her stories, however, she gave no quarter to either: both can be mean, both can be what the Germans call kinderfeindlich—unfriendly to children.
Despite her difficult childhood, Mavis persevered, through grit, bloody-mindedness, an absence of self-pity, and an ironic sense of humor. Lunch with her was always hilarious and often horrifying: the tales she told about her life exceeded in unlikely gruesomeness even her own fiction. She certainly had the “cold eye” that Yeats recommended for writers, and she saw through subterfuge, no matter who was trying it on.
During one of Graeme’s and my visits to Paris, the Canadian Embassy threw a dinner party for us. Mavis was there and took a dim view of the scanty amount of wine that was provided. When dessert arrived, one of the other guests—a Canadian—said, “This has got booze in it.”
“Well,” Mavis said, audibly enough for everyone nearby to hear. “I should certainly hope so.” ♦
