Mavis Gallant became fluently bilingual at the age of three
Update: A recent post is entitled:
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The current post features a selection of articles about (and one by) Mavis Gallant. The post concludes with a story Gallant wrote as a journalist before she moved to Paris in 1950.
The Walrus, March 2015
A March 2015 Walrus article by David Macfarlane is entitled: “Traces of Mavis: How a great Canadian writer died penniless in Paris.”
Mavis Gallant at her typewriter in the newsroom of the Montreal Standard, where she worked as a feature writer from 1944 to 1950. Library and Archives Canada PA-115248, courtesy of Véhicule Press. The photo appears in The Gazette (Oct. 19, 2024) and The Walrus (Feb. 22, 2025)
An excerpt reads:
An only child, Mavis Young [that being her maiden name] had a solitary upbringing and a disjointed adolescence. She was fluently bilingual by the age of three. Her father died when she was ten; she was then shunted to a succession of schools, some quite far from home, by a mother who, in Gallant’s typically mordant assessment, “should never have had children.”
Gallant liked to boast that she attended seventeen different schools during the unsettled improvisation of her education. Rather than hinder her, her upbringing bequeathed a strong sense of self-reliance. It also gave her something else: whatever the private wounds she carried about her youth, her memories equipped her with an uncanny precision for wry, unsentimental observations of kids.
The New Yorker, Aug. 3, 2016
An Aug. 3, 2016 New Yorker article by Francine Prose is entitled: “Mavis Gallant’s Magic Tricks.”
An excerpt reads:
Finally, the classes I teach (and this has evolved over time) are centered on close reading, on examining every word, every sentence, considering word choice, diction, tone, subtext, and so forth. Most, if not all, serious fiction rewards this, but some writers reward it more than others. And there are some writers who provide evidence for – proof of – what I find myself telling students: some fiction simply cannot be understood—on the simplest level of plot and character – unless you pay attention. Mavis Gallant has a technical daring and an innovative freedom that, as in a painting by Velázquez, remain hidden unless you look closely, pay attention, and at the same time manage to surrender to the mystery of art, to the fact that it cannot be reduced, summarized, or made to seem like anything but itself. She places a huge amount of faith in her reader’s intelligence, a faith which demands and rewards careful reading. But she’s also very funny, and a great deal of fun. Her stories are full of satisfying reverses and breathtaking passages of dazzlingly precise, virtuosic writing.
One such story is “Mlle. Dias de Corta,” which appears among the stories of the eighties and nineties in a new reissue of “The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant,” which was first published in 1996.
The latter story is also featured in Paris Stories (2018) by Mavis Gallant.
Literary Review of Canada, October 2022
An October 2022 Literary Review of Canada article by Gregory Shupak is entitled: “Remembering Mavis: When she looked out the window.”
An excerpt reads:
To mark the centenary of Gallant’s birth, I recently revisited both her work and Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear, a landmark study by Marta Dvořák, a scholar and a confidante of her subject. That 2019 book presents a compelling case that Gallant’s keen visual and aural senses were profoundly shaped by her immersion in art, film, and music. In what Dvořák calls a modernist assimilation of literary texts, visual culture, and music, Gallant submerged herself in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and the Russians, as well as Pablo Picasso, Ella Fitzgerald, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and the film director Wallace Worsley. (She was, broadly, of the left, but that seems not to have determined her aesthetic tastes, as her fondness for the music of the Mussolini-admiring Stravinsky and the antisemitic Wagner evinces.)
The Gazette, Oct. 19, 2024
An Oct. 19, 2024 Gazette article by Marian Scott is entitled: “Another side of literary giant Mavis Gallant: the Montreal journalist.”
An excerpt reads:
On topics from refugees to unwed mothers, and from rising stars of Quebec literature to why Canadians are so dull, the articles reveal a budding talent with boundless curiosity and a razor-sharp wit. Written as Europeans displaced by war were pouring into the city, they explore themes that would permeate her fiction: lives of transience and exclusion; the world of childhood; society’s attitudes toward female deviance. And they showcase Gallant’s ability — exceedingly rare in that era — to move seamlessly between Quebec’s two language solitudes.
Montreal Review of Books, Oct. 30, 2024
An Oct. 30, 2024 Montreal Review of Books article by Roxane Hudon is entitled: “A Montreal Time Capsule: A review of Montreal Standard Time by Mavis Gallant.”
An excerpt reads:
Standouts will vary based on your interests, but I love when Gallant is at her most merciless, wielding wit and humour to uncover wrongdoings. In “Why Are We Canadians So Dull?,” Gallant mocks her countrymen in a satirical piece bemoaning the dearth of support for creative Canadians. “Silliest situation of all is the way Canadians get violent over Americanization yet nine times out of ten won’t buy, read, or listen to a home-grown product,” she writes in 1946. In “Bachelors Aren’t All Eligible”, she bites back at articles instructing women on how to be good wives. “We felt our psychiatrist had overlooked one thing about bachelors — namely women. If they ever did marry, they would have to marry women. There isn’t much choice. So we artfully put the question: ‘Do you like women, as such?’”
Literacy Hub, Jan. 20, 2025
A Jan. 20, 2025 Literary Hub article is entitled: “Chasing Mystery Through Fiction: On the Life and Literary Career of Mavis Gallant: Garth Risk Hallberg Remembers a Master of the Short Form.”
An excerpt reads:
It’s a story that’s been told often enough to harden into legend, not least by Gallant herself. Recounting her abbreviated newspaper years in the finale to her celebrated Linnet Muir sequence, “With a Capital T” (reissued here), she portrays the midcentury newsroom as stifling and chauvinistic, and herself—or rather, her alter ego, Linnet—as a “resourceful truant,” arranging interviews to cover cab fare and then hanging around hotels afterward to peruse periodicals from the States. An element of self-deprecation is doubtless on display. In her countryman Mordecai Richler’s estimation, Gallant was already “a journalist of repute, a glamorous figure…I can still see Mavis’s photograph at the top of her column,…Mavis, looking decidedly saucy in her beret.” At twenty-three, she interviewed Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet to the degree that Gallant was capable of recognizing the figure she cut, it would have been all the more galling that her salary at the Standard remained half that of her male colleagues. In the Linnet Muir series, as in “Its Image on the Mirror,” she connects the brittle hierarchies of bureaucratic existence (“the trace of Empire…the old men with their medals”) to those of Quebec as a whole, both English- and French-speaking. Authority may have devolved to an offstage blur, where “behind frosted-glass doors lurk male fears of female mischief,” but its edicts persist: “a creeping, climbing wash of conflicting and contradictory instructions [that] threatens to smother you.” And lest the level of patriarchal condescension seem exaggerated for effect, one line overheard by Linnet gets repeated years later in the preface to The Collected Stories, a souvenir from real life: “If it hadn’t been for the god-damned war we would never have hired even one of the god-damned women.”
The Walrus, Feb. 22, 2025: A story by Mavis Gallant
A Feb. 22, 2025 Walrus article features a Montreal Standard story by Mavis Gallant. The article is entitled: “‘A Wonderful Country’: A Mavis Gallant Story Rediscovered: The celebrated writer on a newcomer who falls in love with Canada.”
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These excerpts from articles about Mavis Gallant underline that Gallant was aware that young children in general are very much tuned into what goes on in the world. When I was reading the excerpts, I was reminded that, in my late adolescence in Montreal, one day it had occurred to me that, at the age of 12, I knew as much about life as I ever would know. I was aware at that age that, whatever I would know as an adult, nothing would be added to what I knew as a child.
A corollary was that, with notable exceptions, adults as a rule tended not to be aware of what young children tuned into as a matter of course – about how the world works, and what life appears to be about: things observable by any attentive person, such as a child.
I hadn’t thought of this memory until now, when I was reading about Mavis Gallant.
I can add this: As an adult, very young children would, in a sense, let me know that it would be a good idea if I were to spend my years working with children. That’s how I became a teacher.