Born in bilingual Canada, Nancy Huston and Mavis Gallant are both native English-speaking authors who chose to live in Paris, Mavis from 1951 and Nancy, 1973. Unlike many North American expatriates who returned home after a few years, they remained in our city, making a life in writing.
When the Village Voice closed in 2012, Mavis had lived here for sixty years and Nancy almost forty. In fact, they were essentially viewed in their home country as Paris writers. Yet many differences separate these two women and their generations thirty years apart—their backgrounds, lives, works, and choice of language—Nancy writes almost exclusively in French while Mavis never departs from English. And, of course, their chosen city is a distinctive place for each of them. Mavis Gallant’s stories resurrect the postwar Paris of the ’50s, “a jumble of unsung lives and war survivors,” including artists and intellectuals exiled from Central and Eastern Europe. On the other hand, Nancy Huston depicts Paris as a city of the mind at the vanguard of the various modes of thought and literary currents that stimulate ways of seeing and writing about the world.
Nancy Huston
“I went to Paris to find myself,
and I was not there either.”2
—huston,
Village Voice reading, March 4, 2002.
“There was a stunning picture of Nancy Huston in Le Monde,” Mavis Gallant wrote in a letter to me, “I’ve often heard her name, but I don’t think that anyone told me that she was young and beautiful.” This was in April of 1989, and I was surprised to learn that the paths of these two authors had never crossed in the sixteen years they had lived in the same city. Strange as it may seem, praised in the Anglophone world as a regular New Yorker contributor and a unique voice from Paris, Mavis was unknown in France, while Nancy was already much present on the French literary scene at the time.
Born in Calgary in “the least bilingual state of all Canada,” Nancy Huston was raised in an English-speaking household and learned basic French at school. Later on, at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, her interest in contemporary French literature took her to Paris. During her junior year abroad, she wrote her thesis on the French language under the guidance of the eminent linguist and philosopher Roland Barthes. This remarkable achievement was to be the start of a long and rich writing career in France and in French.
Nancy gave a number of readings at the Village Voice and participated in many different literary events, introducing authors and organizing roundtables. I have selected her talk of March 14, 2002, when she ushered in her essay Nord perdu.3 This work is an original, perceptive, and witty series of reflections she later translated herself as Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue and Self. For her, transnational life or life in translation means a constant tug of war between two languages, cultures, and countries. If she airs grievances in this gem of a book, the author also comes to value the deep texturing of such an experience: a foreign accent immediately catches one’s attention as this person might have a story to tell, that of another life in a distant country with its own compelling history and culture.
This topic was of particular interest to the Village Voice audience of writers, readers, and general public, often puzzled by French mores and cultural oddities. However, even more intriguing to us was Nancy’s exceptional linguistic ability. It appeared that she had become a renowned French writer in no time, even compared to “a female Beckett” by Mavis Gallant.
Nancy Huston, reading at Village Voice Bookshop, March 14, 2002. © Flavio Toma
At her presentation of Nord perdu, Nancy shed light on the bilingual writer’s shift of language. It was not always evident, but she saw it as being individual and, in her case, grounded in her own life circumstances. Had Nancy and Mavis met to debate this question, they would have agreed that, in the end, the choice of language for a bilingual writer is deeply personal.
Q: “How did you come to be writing your fiction in French?”
Nancy Huston: “The basic reason for that strangeness is my mother: she left the family when I was six years old and my brother eight, and the way to deal with that blow was to abandon our mother tongue. Yet, there is another connection with my mother, and it is music. She played the piano, and usually young people leave playing at adolescence, but I continued to play, at least for a while, out of my desire for a connection with my mother. Both English and piano were abandoned and replaced by the French language and by the harpsichord that I associate with French. There are fewer emotions in the harpsichord, and the French language is very monochord. From the start, English was my mother’s tongue, which, symbolically, also meant the piano fortissimo.”
Q: “Do you feel French? And do your French readers see you as a French writer or a foreign author writing in French?”
Huston: “No, I don’t feel French, and I’m not even Francophile. There is a Canadian adage that says: ‘I went to Paris to find myself, and I was not there either.’ I don’t have a particular admiration for the French language, though, for a while, I was a Francophile, but for a very short time. For me, French was more like a territory full of musical possibilities.”
Q: “You write your novels in French, but you also use English here and there, and translate some of your writings into English, such as this essay. Aren’t you tempted to go back to your native language?”
Huston: “A few months ago, I could have answered such a question by saying that I write in the language of my characters, English or French, depending on their origins. However, now it’s a little bit more complex; the process is more chaotic: I can’t choose in which language to write, coming and going between French and English. I look at it negatively, as if I were handicapped, as if I didn’t speak any language fluently. I talked about this with André Brink, the only author I know to be in my situation, going linguistically through the same thing as I do. Irrespective of the subject, he writes in English or Afrikaans and then translates himself in both directions. ‘Go ahead,’ he said, ‘don’t worry about it. We live twice; it’s a privilege.’ And so, I try to look at it this way.”
Q: “Does your choice of language change the story you have in mind? After all, there are certain things one can express more easily in one language than in another.”
Huston: “Going through my journals, I tried to find out whether I privileged one language over the other for certain topics, and I couldn’t discern such a pattern. However, I’m much more at ease in French in theoretical discussions because it was the kind of French required for my studies in France, and it’s easier for me to ‘délirer et déconner’ in English though I can still pretty well do it in French. [laughter] For me, the best moment in my writing is when I feel that I hear the same music in French and in English.”
Mavis Gallant
“Paris is so different, so special, so inexplicably home.”
—gallant, letter to me, dated August 2001.
Born in French-speaking Montreal, Mavis fiercely clung to English, her mother tongue: “I owed it to children’s books that I absorbed once and for all the rhythm of English prose. By eight, it was irremovably entrenched as the language of my imagination.”4
When I first met Mavis Gallant in the mid-eighties, she had been a Parisian for more than thirty years, and most of her one hundred and sixteen stories—all written in English—had already appeared in The New Yorker, as well as been reprinted in various Canadian and US editions. A reference for regular readers of the US weekly, Mavis was often compared to Chekhov, the Russian master of the short story. However, in spite of her long stay in Paris, she remained virtually unheard of in France.
To me, this was a paradox. How could she be overlooked by French publishers when her Parisian social circle included French and European intellectuals and artists, as well as American literary figures, such as the famous novelist Mary McCarthy or Janet Flanner, the flamboyant Paris correspondent for The New Yorker until 1975? Furthermore, Gallant lived in the heart of Montparnasse, within walking distance of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, well known for its publishing houses and bookstores. Strangely enough, not one of them seems to have been aware of their distinguished and prolific neighbor.
Mavis gave a dozen readings in our bookstore, introduced a couple of times by Marta Dvorak.5 Our author also put forward a number of Canadian writers such as Mordecai Richler and Margaret Atwood. Her own first book launch at the Village Voice took place in 1985 for her collection Overhead in a Balloon: Stories of Paris,6 published in Canada (Ontario). The reading was arranged by Simone Suchet of the Canadian Cultural Center, in charge of promoting English Canadian literature in France.
Mavis continued to be ignored by the French in her adopted city until 1988. It was the year when a new Parisian publishing house brought out her journal of May ’68 to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the student uprising.7
On May 17, 1988, she presented the work at the Village Voice, summoning up the scenes she had observed as she walked through garbage-strewn streets. Adventurous, she had immersed herself in the demonstrations, and now, reading to us from her journal, she conjured up the violent and confused mood of the time, depicting students standing on barricades and hurling heavy cobblestones at the police. With nowhere to go and not knowing what might happen, other astonished Parisians wandered aimlessly about.
De Gaulle had disappeared, leaving behind a shadow government and a population fearful of civil war. Still, Mavis Gallant was out there, braving the disorder to catch bits and pieces of various people’s reactions. At one point, during the later May counterdemonstration, she heard people shouting “Cohn Bendit Dachau.”* Only familiar with the German pronunciation of the death camp’s name, she did not get the true meaning of the hideous slogan yelled out in a French accent. “I didn’t include it in my account,” she informed us, “as I had not heard it firsthand.”8
Her book Chroniques de mai 68 was widely reviewed, and its author, congenially nicknamed “Miss Barricades,”9 was invited to talk about it on Bernard Pivot’s Apostrophes, the most popular literary program on television in those years. As a result of this national exposure, her Paris stories in Overhead in a Balloon soon appeared under the French title Rue de Lille.10 They were received with mixed reviews: Gallant’s style was praised, but most readers shunned the work. Her publisher argued that short stories did not sell well in France and dryly assumed that French people expected a Canadian writer to set her works not in Paris but amid Canada’s wild landscapes.
Known as a New Yorker author, Gallant broadened her overall readership through the years, essentially through the US imprint of the New York Review of Books that published three volumes of her stories, reflecting the range of her imagination, style, and talent. In 2002, the first of the three featured her Paris Stories,11 selected with an introduction by Michael Ondaatje, the Ontario author of The English Patient.
Soon enough, a Canadian TV crew was dispatched to Paris to interview her in the context of the city where she had chosen to be her true self, that is, a writer. Well intentioned, they took the author on a whirlwind tour, asking her to comment directly on the sights as they passed by them. In a letter to me, Mavis described this venture with some irritation, but also with her typical wit: “I let myself be trundled around like a passive spaniel (poodle might be more exact) to no real purpose clear to me, from the Bois de Boulogne to that little square at the bottom of rue Mouffetard. Everything seemed haphazard and random, I’ve no particular fondness or attachment for or to either—they are not part of my personal map of Paris.”12
Actually, her “personal map of Paris” was the Paris of her heart, evoked in “The Other Paris”13 through her character, Felix, a young Eastern European war orphan exiled in Paris, far afield from the cliché of the romantic “gay Paree” to be found in popular American songs and movies. Her Paris was a place with “people uprooted and in permanent transit, the ones I cared to write about throughout my life,” she told us at a reading.14
These were the same people who had captured her imagination back in wartime Montreal. In the story “Varieties of Exile,”15 Linnet Muir, the young journalist, aka Mavis Gallant, reports on the crowds of European refugees streaming into the country. “I was attracted to Europe and always knew that I would fit there.”16
In Spain, our young, intrepid author wrote stories on a hungry stomach, desperately waiting for the payment of her first New Yorker stories. Later, in Florence, she had “a distinct ‘déjà vu’ experience, as if I knew every street and doorway,” she wrote. “Even in cities that were postwar poor or still partially in ruins, I felt the continuity of art and literature.”17
Traveling on to Germany, Mavis went from city to city—Berlin, Bayreuth, and Munich, asking people how they had experienced the war, and how they could have gone along with Hitler’s policies. She was trying to get to the bottom of what had really occurred during their years under Nazi rule, but she admitted “I now know there is no such thing as ‘what really happened’ anywhere; yet I still scramble after the facts of the matter.”18 She also wanted to understand how Germans went about reconstructing their shattered lives in a country in complete disarray, just like that train stopped at the Pegnitz Junction in the middle of nowhere, its passengers stranded in transit, as depicted in her novella The Pegnitz Junction, her favorite among all of her stories.19 In an afterword to her Paris Stories, Mavis confided that “no city in the world drew me as strongly as Paris.”20 It was Michael Ondaatje, the uprooted Sri Lankan Canadian, who understood that her Paris reflected the “underground map of Europe in the twentieth century with wanderers caught in a permanent in-between”21 that resonated with his own fictional characters.
Inspired by the success of these Paris Stories in the NYRB edition, two other writers, great admirers of her work, published their respective selections of her anthology in that same US imprint. Russell Banks chose her Canadian characters for whom he felt “an abiding affection” under the title Varieties of Exile, while Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri selected Gallant’s Early and Uncollected Stories, published as The Cost of Living.22
Known for her affinities with Gallant’s writing, Jhumpa Lahiri was commissioned by Granta to interview the author in Paris. The two women spent three days talking about their respective lives and works, concluding their stimulating and friendly exchanges with a joint reading at the Village Voice.23
On February 19, 2009, before a packed audience, Jhumpa revealed with some emotion that “to be here with Mavis is something I would never have dreamed until it happened this moment. . . . For years, Mavis has been a source of inspiration; she taught me the art of linking stories with the same character migrating from one story to another, and my work owes a lot to her.” As a final tribute, she read a short excerpt from The Unaccustomed Earth, her recent collection of interrelated short stories.
Wearing the turquoise silk scarf Jhumpa had brought her as a gift, Mavis, in turn, enacted a passage from her only play, What Is to Be Done?24 a satirical wartime comedy based on the nonsensical correspondence of two lovers across the Atlantic Ocean. In her letters, the young woman extols the war effort and their bright future while her fiancé primarily indulges in fantasies about their lovemaking.
Mavis’s performance was a huge success, triggering uninterrupted fits of laughter from the audience. Duly applauded, she was beaming with a joy as I had never seen her express at any of her other readings. Several days later, I received a note from her, telling me how much she had enjoyed this evening of “complicité et amitié with Jhumpa Lahiri, such as I’d felt at that other reading with Michael Ondaatje—her kin-spirit.”25
Mavis’s last talk at the Village Voice took place on December 3, 2009, attended by the large circle of her Parisian friends and acquaintances. She chose to read “The Picnic,” one of her earlier stories (1952) reprinted in Lahiri’s The Cost of Living.
Mavis Gallant, Village Voice reading, February 19, 2009. © Steve Murez
The work is set in postwar France, in a small town in the East where American troops are stationed. Billeted with a local family, an officer decides to organize a Sunday picnic as a “symbol of unity between the two nations” which, rather than the expected cordial entente, only reveals engrained cultural prejudices on both sides. Mavis spoke in a voice that was intimate and let the irony come through, subtly expressing the complex, frustrating relationship between the French people and their American “saviors.”
Several people in the audience then asked her to talk about her writing. It was the first time at a reading that she agreed to do it. She referred to “the presence of preexisting figures in the genesis of a new story,” specifying that “these figures did not talk, but waited to be developed into full-blown characters. They are there, even their names are there, and I know what they are thinking . . . I also know how the story ends, but it requires from me that I write down pages and pages of dialogue that will not go into the story. I have to have them talk; I have to hear their voices and hear what they are thinking.”26
Mavis lived her entire adult life in France, but she never became French, perhaps her way of holding onto her Canadian roots and the Montreal of her childhood, at once an enchantment and a place of inconsolable grief, brought upon by the loss of her father at an early age. Yet Canada had not left her and, more than once, I happened to find in the folds of her letters a dried maple leaf, inviting me “to imagine the beige tracings as brilliant yellow and the reddish tone as scarlet, and then imagine the whole tree.”27