`Is It Dead or Alive?'

On Thursday I interviewed by telephone a patent attorney in Chicago who is also an electrical engineer and an accomplished painter. She sees nothing unusual in her intellectual ambidexterity and notes without emphasis that her mother was an artist and her father a patent attorney and mechanical engineer – as though such gifts, like baldness, run in families. Our conversation took place during an exchange of e-mails I was having with Buce at Underbelly, himself a formidable multi-tasker: bankruptcy attorney, professor emeritus of law, textbook author, former journalist and well-read world traveler. Our conversations mostly stick to books (he recommended A Tale of Love and Darkness, by Amos Oz, and I’ve already checked it out of the library). We both prize the Canadian short story writer Mavis Gallant, now 85 years old, and we bemoaned our repeated failures at proselytizing her work. Buce writes: “Funny about Gallant, I can't sell her either.”

The reason, I think, may be simple: Hers is a style that permits readers to assume she has no style. She presents the reader with no willful obscurity, no pyrotechnics. Matter and style merge, become indistinguishable. Gallant, as Henry James said of Ivan Turgenev, “deals death to the perpetual clumsy assumption that subject and style are -- aesthetically speaking, or in the living work -- different and separable things.”

Gallant says as much in her essay “What is Style?”, written in 1982 and collected in Paris Notebooks: Essays and Reviews (1987):

“Leaving aside the one analysis closed to me, of my own writing, let me say what style is not: it is not a last-minute addition to prose, a charming and universal slipcover, a coat of paint used to mask the failings of a structure. Style is inseparable from structure, part of the conformation of whatever the author has to say. What he says – this is what fiction is about – is that something is taking place and that nothing lasts. Against the sustained tick of a watch, fiction takes the measure of a life, a season, a look exchanged, the turning point, desire as brief as a dream, the grief and terror that after childhood we cease to express. The lie, the look, the grief are without permanence. The watch continues to tick where the story stops.”

Like James, Gallant writes about nomads, people displaced by private or public history, who often are sad without quite knowing why. They drift through Europe several class-rungs below James’ American exiles, and Gallant herself is a Canadian who has lived in France for almost 60 years. Still, as a starting place for a reader new to Gallant, I would recommend the “Linnet Muir” story cycle, set in Montreal and written mostly in the nineteen-seventies. The sequence traces the touchy, unhappy title character from her childhood, and quietly becomes a Bildungsroman without the Roman. Gallant excels at the story-sequence form (it’s not a form, of course), midway between discrete stories and a novel. It occurs to me that another reason she is under-appreciated is her fundamental seriousness (not humorlessness). She writes for grownups in an adolescent age. In “What is Style?” she continues:

“Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story – or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall – is, `Is it dead or alive?’ If a work of art needs to be coaxed into life, it is better scrapped and forgotten.”

Don’t you, Buce, agree?