'I Don’t See Other People As Peculiar'

For my money, the Canadian short story writer is Mavis Gallant (1922-2014), not Alice Munro, who is too dull to endure. (Joseph Epstein said of her work: “Humor never obtrudes.”) Born in Montreal, Gallant moved to Europe in 1950, hoping to give up journalism and write fiction. She lived briefly in Spain (1952-53) and settled for the remainder of her life in Paris. In 2000, Gallant was interviewed by Atlantis, the journal of the Spanish Association of English Studies about the two stories she wrote set in Spain. She’s a no-nonsense interview with little evidence of the usual writerly self-promotion. I just want to transcribe a few of her remarks and encourage others to read her stories, 116 of which were published in The New Yorker. 

The interviewer, Pilar Somacarrera Íñigo, links Gallant’s stories to “the European and North American comedy of manners of Jane Austen, Chekhov, Henry James and Katherine Mansfield” and asks her why she gave a Spanish setting to the two stories – a rather silly question. Gallant replies commonsensically:

 

“One does not write fiction for any reason, other than a desire to write about a particular thing. One should [not] make the mistake of confusing fiction and essays or reporting.  Fiction is not reporting. The stories I wrote about Spain are fiction but they are based on fact.”

 

One thinks of Henry James gleaning gossip from a dinner party, allowing it to marinade in his imagination and transforming it into fiction. Gallant talks about Franco and the poverty she encountered more than seventy years ago in Spain. “And I thought,” she says, “this earth is soaked in blood. Spain is soaked in blood, I remember thinking that, the blood of the people who died in that terrible [Spanish Civil] war.” Returning to the subject of writing, Gallant says:

 

“[T]here is a desire to impart information which I have. In addition, I can't imagine writing except within a sociological context. I can't imagine writing ‘he said, she said.’ I want to know who he is, who she is, what sort of café they are in, and what time of day it is, what’s going on around them. If I don’t find that, I’m not interested in reading, I want all that. Look at how Chekhov gives it. It’s also that I don’t see other people as peculiar, you know, at all. Even though they might be foreign to me in the sense that they are brought up differently, I don't see them as anything but people. I don't see them as symbols.”

[See the review Gallant wrote of Nabokov’s Transparent Things (1972).]