Getting Things Right

How Mavis Gallant turned fact into truth

- BY DAFNA IZENBERG

MAXINE CROOK made a few mistakes introducing Mavis Gallant in a 1976 interview for the national CBC radio show Morningside. This was, perhaps, understandable: while the Montreal-born Gallant was by then a regular and celebrated contributor of short fiction to The New Yorker, she was not well known in Canada. She had lived abroad for more than twenty-five years, and very little of her work had been published here. Few Canadians likely knew that Gallant had kept her married name and honorific after divorcing in 1949; Crook addressed her as “Miss.” Then Crook referred to a series of short stories Gallant had recently written about wartime Montreal as “articles.” She called one of them “My Youth Is Pleasure,” inadvertently depriving it of the charm of its true title, “In Youth Is Pleasure.”

Gallant was gracious; she and Crook went on to have a friendly conversation. But it is hard to imagine her ever making these kinds of mistakes herself. She was, in many ways, a meticulous person, always beautifully turned out, always the consummate host, always the prompt correspondent. Professionally, she lived by getting things right; in her mind, her work lived or died by it. Her prose has the ring of silver on crystal. Her stories concern such critical and unanswerable questions as why people marry, why they abandon children, and what happened in Germany before, during, and after the concentration camps. She would spend months and sometimes years on a single story, writing first in longhand and then typing it up, liberally revising each draft before typing it up again. Only when she was close to satisfied would she drop it in the post to her editors at The New Yorker.