Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant

The dark, the ghosts, the candlelight, her tears on the scarred bar--they were real. And still, whether she wanted to see it or not, the light of imagination danced all over the square. She did not dare to turn again to the mirror, lest she confuse the two and forget which light was real. A pure white awning on a cross street seemed to her to be of indestructible beauty. The window it sheltered was hollowed with sadness and shadow. She said with the same deep sadness, "I believe you." The wave of revulsion ceded, sucked back under another wave--a powerful adolescent craving for something simple, such as true love.

Mavis Gallant's Paris Stories are not all set in Paris, although as the editor of this collection, Michael Ondaatje points out, they were all likely written in Paris, where the Canadian ex-pat Gallant lived much of her life. Yet the title refers to a kind of Parisienne spirit: a city hollowed out by war, then filled with the cast-offs of Europe--the war-wounded, refugees from Eastern Europe where the war in a way never disappeared, the profiteers looking for a scheme by which to keep profiting, the writers and drifters. More than the other two collections of Gallant's I have read (all of which have overlapping contents), Paris Stories is about the aftermath of World War II, and the new Europe that unfolds itself over five decades. (The last of these stories was written, I think, in the 1990's, or perhaps even later, though Gallant's rich, dense style seems perpetually frozen in the 1950's, not unlike some of her protagonists.) The story that deals with the war most immediately is the striking "The Latehomecomer," about a German veteran belatedly released from captivity years after the war's end, trying to determine how he fits into the life of his mother, who has remarried:

Here, where it would not be necessary to wear a label, because "latehomecomer" was written all over me, I sensed that I was an embarraassment, too; my appearance, my survival, my bleeding gums and loose teeth, my chronic dysentery and anemia, my cravings for sweets, my reticence with strangers, the cast-off rags I had worn on arrival, all said "war" when everyone wanted peace, "captivity" when the word was "freedom," and "dry bread" when everyone was thinking "jam and butter."

"The Latehomecomer," with its powerful sense of an existence wrenched slightly and forever out of place, is one of the masterpieces of Paris Stories. I think I was most taken by the sumptuousness of "The Moslem Wife," a story about a hotelier and her husband who are driven together despite their essential differences, and then separated by the war. He goes to America--and even marries an American wife--while she remains behind as the hotel is turned into a bivouac for Italians. Like the title latehomecomer, husband and wife, meeting at last in the precarious safety of the post-war era, must determine what they once were to each other, how much was real and how much imagined, and how much of what they had believed has changed or simply been exposed and discredited. Looking back at that description, it seems essentially correct to me, but it fails to capture the wonderful ambiguity of the story, an ambiguity that, like in all of Gallant's stories, hides among richly drawn portraits of material landscapes: chintz curtains, silk flowers in ormolu vases, prized and profitable view of the sea.

In "Baum, Gabriel (1945- )," Gallant describes a veteran of the French wars in Algeria who makes a meager living acting in television shows about the war and occupation. He and his friend--who actually has lines in these programs--bum around the same cafe as the other actors, until it closes suddenly and reopens with a plaque that reads: "PUB LA MEDUSE: THE OLDEST AND MOST CELEBRATED MEETING-PLACE FOR TELEVISION STARS IN PARIS." I just loved the clever humor at the heart of this story: Gabriel lives first as a real soldier in Algeria--already a kind of ersatz version of the French heroes of the World War--and then becomes a fake soldier. Then even being an actor becomes a kind of performance, an actor acting at acting, making set dressing for the cafe. This theme is repeated in "The Remission" when the soon-to-be-widow of an Englishman who has come to the French Riviera to die begins an affair with an actor whose whole talent is to look and sound very English. These stories describe a Europe always renewing itself as a facsimile of itself, always becoming a blurrier, less reliable copy.

One of the most well-known stories in the collection, "Speck's Idea," describes an art gallery collector who seeks to make a name for himself by rehabilitating the career of an overlooked artist, but settles on a dead painter whose collection is jealously guarded by an unsentimental Canadian wife. Speck is convinced that the exhibition will be a smash, and quickly rationalizes his discovery that the artist was a right-wing sympathizer during the war. Ondaatje's foreword describes it as a story about how people lurch into Fascism for non-ideological reasons; the essential performativeness of the exhibition--the carefully written biography in the catalog--resonates, to me, with the actors of "Baum, Gabriel (1945- )" and "The Remission," showing that Fascism, too, can become an act. Xenophobia and viciousness haunt the edges of these stories, like in the quietly effective "Mlle. Dias De Corta," written from the perspective of an aging Frenchwoman to the indeterminately foreign former boarder she has just seen acting in a commercial. The narrator vacillates between adding up all the rent--with interest!--the boarder ran out on, and begging her to come back to stay with them again.

Some of the later stories--I believe the collection is chronologically ordered--struck me as a little too dense, like a thicket, to penetrate. I think I liked this collection a little bit less, on the whole, than the two other Gallant collections I have read. But the best stories, like "The Latehomecomer" and "The Moslem Wife," are some of her very best.