Mavis Gallant
The Cost of Living: Early and Uncollected Stories
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009
368 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1408806104

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There are several pitfalls to avoid when reviewing books of “early and uncollected stories”. One of them extends to any collection of short fiction, and requires that the reviewer expend as few words as possible when summarising the events of each story he means to discuss. Otherwise, you know how it can be: nothing but a succession of short stories made shorter. In this case, no summaries are required, as Mavis Gallant possesses a Chekhovian gift for opening sentences. With each story’s first paragraph, the reader is able to find his feet in a single breath. “The three Marshall children were dressed and ready for the picnic before their father was awake”; “Jane and Ernestine were at breakfast in the hotel dining room when the fog finally lifted”; “Sitting next to the driver, who was certainly his father, he saw the fine rain through the beams of the headlights, and the eyes of small animals at the edge of the road.”

Which brings us to another pitfall: comparing the short-storyist to Chekhov at the earliest opportunity. With that out of the way, we can move to the third (and most dangerous) hazard, which is to treat the fledgling and previously unpublished works of an internationally renowned writer as merely noteworthy or, worse still, of biographical interest.

Gallant has published over a hundred stories in The New Yorker since 1951. She has two novels, over a dozen collections of short fiction, and an array of articles and reviews. The Cost of Living gathers stories written in the first 20 years of her career, between 1951 and 1971, when she lived in Europe (London, then Paris) after having spent her childhood in Canada and adolescence in New York. Like most debutantes, her early efforts were autobiographical. In Gallant’s case this produced stories populated with a cast of émigrés—people with multiple-nationality disorders, strays, and general lost souls. One wonders if Gallant’s early experiences mirrored those of, say, Madeline (of her story “Madeline’s Birthday”):

The days of her lifetime had been spent in so many different places – in schools, in camps, in the houses of people she was or was not related to – that the first sight of day was, almost by habit, bewildering.

Here and elsewhere, Gallant’s protagonists are adrift and estranged, often far from home—that is, if they ever had an idea of home to begin with—or else they are parentless or husbandless, jobless or at any rate, critically penniless. All of them, in one way or another, are lost in the world in which they find themselves.

Following in Gallant’s footsteps, Patricia, the narrator of the titular story, moves to Paris for an artist’s life. Instead of the “easy, dreamy city, full of trees and full of time” that she hopes for, Patricia finds Paris “full of brats and quarrelling mothers”. For her, along with the majority of Gallant’s protagonists, the idea of home is only rentable, temporary, and in many cases, ultimately fleeting. In these stories of hotel rooms and strangers’ houses, we find that the greatest irony of the well-travelled is that they are inescapably tied to their lives as travelers, in constant pursuit of a life which stands still, if only for a moment. In contrast, those who have never travelled—the landlocked or abandoned—look to others who have left home with a painful longing, and the unavoidable conclusion that they are trapped. Stick or twist, in Gallant’s world there is no escaping one’s internal condition; for whatever satisfaction migration brings, it is a distraction at best, and at worst, a repression. These stories provide a chorus of echoes for Robert Louis Stevenson’s quip: “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.”

The brevity of these stories emphasises the entrapment theme. Despite their geographical scope, there is a claustrophobic locality to each story, a constriction imposed partly by the form, which together with Gallant’s careful distribution of detail creates what V.S. Pritchett called the “glimpse through” effect so common in modern short fiction. We view the lives of her characters “from the corner of the eye, in passing”. In this regard she joins the company of Eudora Welty, Jane Anne Philips, and Raymond Carver: writers who harnessed the inherent domesticity of the short form by making the world seem a small, unchanging place. Gallant’s characters often wallow in a Carveresque funk. In his essay “Fires”, Carver recalls a bleak epiphany after a long wait at the laundromat. It was 1960, before he became a full-time writer, and he had been working long hours in menial jobs to support his wife and children. He writes:

I realized – what had I been thinking before? – that my life was a small-change thing for the most part, chaotic, and without much light showing through.

It is this very blend of chaos and small-change (reflective, perhaps, of a similar frustration in her early career) that pervades Gallant’s early stories. Despite the miles that some of her characters have travelled in order to satisfy their urges to begin afresh, they stumble upon the same realisation: that their lives for the most part are small-change things, that poverty is a universal constraint, and that—what had they been thinking before?—the one place from which they cannot escape is their own disillusion. Gallant begins in “Travellers Must Be Content” with the idea that “Success can only be measured in terms of distance travelled”; yet it is this notion which her characters repeatedly question.

Many of the stories collected here address the aftermath of the Second World War. Europe itself has become a broken home, fractured most obviously by the Iron Curtain, but also by the multitude of refugees, foreign troops, and disgruntled expatriates populating central Europe. The characters in “Willi”, “One Aspect of a Rainy Day”, and “A Day Like Any Other” struggle to retain their identities in the wake of the Allied victory. Post-war German citizens, particularly those still living in France, prove good subjects for Gallant’s abandonment theme—more so than the British, French, or Americans. Perhaps this is because Gallant, like Carver, preferred to write about losers. Her characters feel “disapproval almost as an emanation” or are “lonely in the daytimes, and terribly shy and unhappy at night”. Her losers are so good at losing that they risk overdosing on self-pity. Patricia, for instance, remarks: “I came home tired every night, disinclined to talk. I saw that everyone in this hotel was as dingy, as stationary, as I was myself, and I knew we were tainted with the same incompetence.”

Yet the collection is not some monolith of despair, and Gallant is not immune to offering lifelines to some of her lost souls. It is clear that, while autobiographical, the stories engage in a thoroughgoing exploration of the traveller’s psychology. They show characters searching for home, for a sense of relief—some emotional reunion with the root chord of their lives—and at times such a reunion seems possible. In “Going Ashore”, Emma Ellenger approaches Gibraltar with an ecstatic optimism:

A tide of newness came in with the salty air: she thought of new land…A new life. She knelt, patient, holding the curtain, waiting to see the approach to shore.

Yet Gallant teaches us elsewhere that such optimism is to be distrusted. For others in the collection, all Romantic notions of journeys and foreign lands must be put to rest. By the end of “Travelers Must Be Content”, Wishart’s “tirelessly creative” mind finally wears itself out. There is a feeling, when we leave him, that some moment of reconciliation has cured his compulsion for travel:

He took good care not to dream, and when the bus drew in at the Grasse, under the trees…he did not look like a failed actor assailed with nightmares but a smooth and pleasant schoolmaster whose sleep is so deep that he never dreams at all.

Gallant’s elegant sentences mark her arrival as a master of the short form. These are stories from a writer finding her feet, about people finding theirs, and it is with the greatest literary symmetry (and a touch of injustice) that a third of the included works have been homeless until now.

Paul Sweeten is reading for an MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford.

It would be a well-educated guess to suppose that 3-D cinema will never yield an artistic masterpiece. That may not be enough to stop it becoming the dominant format in near-future years. Now that Avatar has broken every money record in film history, we should be bracing ourselves for the 3-D revolution. First, old lookers will be revamped in three dimensions: Jurassic Park, Terminator II, Return of the King, and so on and so forth. I doubt anyone will bother with 8½, The Pianist, or 12 Angry Men—and perhaps that tells us something about the artistic integrity preciously preserved within the traditional format. According to some predications, however, 2-D is in danger of becoming the new black and white. Children will cringe at the sight of anything flat shown on television, and film as we know it may never be the same again. 2-D may become the reserve of art house, demand its own category at the Oscars, and any director working in two dimensions may have to do so under the accusation of “trying to make a point”.

Anyone who has peered over their frames at the raw projection of a 3-D film will notice two things: the glasses significantly tone down the brightness of the picture and the 3-D-ness of any object is created by putting in lots of fuzz. You can have a grand time watching Avatarian fuzz if ever James Cameron’s script compels you to switch off for a scene or two. It’s a perfect opportunity to look around, try to work things out. What exactly is happening here? Art is reaching like it never has before.

Art has never reached; it has only been motionless in glass cases, or hanging on walls, or when it has moved it has moved within the unbreakable seal of a stage or a screen. Now film has escaped that seal. It is among its audiences, and perhaps the reason a 3-D picture will never be taken seriously is that it cannot sit still for us to consider it as an artefact. Look at it. It’s just flopping out all over the place.

When Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List, the girl in the red coat symbolised the unobserved tragedy of the Holocaust. It remains an iconic moment in cinema, and its effect is almost unexplainable. Even without its wider meaning, there is something profound in that redness moving through the monochrome world; a profundity made greater by the distance that black and white forces between an audience and reality. With a single dash of colour Spielberg reminds us that this is a film, and yet, this is not a film. When 2-D is as ancient as black and white, perhaps it will be the use of a three-dimensional object which adds meaning to a historical drama. The effect in Schindler’s List may not then be so moving, particularly when the little girl’s appearance will be anticipated by an on-screen prompt: PUT ON YOUR 3-D GLASSES NOW.

Paul Sweeten is reading for an MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford.

The Habit of Art
Written by Alan Bennett
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
National Theatre until May 2010

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By now, Alan Bennett has written enough great plays to have set himself up for a proverbial fall from greatness. At this time in his career, certain responses are to be expected, chief among them the dismissive and worn out: “His earlier stuff is better.” It’s true that the author of Talking Heads and The History Boys invites unreal expectations. Whatever comes next won’t really matter; it will be an audience’s chance to dislike something, to balance the record, to relax in the knowledge that a national treasure is as fallible as the rest of us: a mixed bag, only human. We’d forgive him, of course. We’d say “nobody’s perfect”. Hearing that Alan Bennett was writing a play about the life of W.H. Auden, we might have thought this is it. This is the one that lets the side down. There are high bars, great expectations, boots to fill. The difficult 39th album.

But of course he’s done it again. The Habit of Art, now showing at the National Theatre, reconfirms Bennett’s status as one of our finest playwrights.

When finding their seats, audiences would be forgiven for thinking they had wandered into the wrong side of the theatre. The stage looks authentically backstage: a half-made set of MDF doorframes and unpainted cupboards, stray chairs and loose papers, an Oxford gown limp on a coat hook and enough clutter to make the flat in Bottom look minimalist. This is all partially explained by the play’s rather complicated structure. From beginning to end it is a play-within-a-play. A group of actors have been left to their own devices, abandoned by their director, and given the task of rehearsing for a new drama showing at the National Theatre.

The scenes they rehearse focus on the lives of W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. Auden has returned from New York and faces a lonely retirement in his Christ Church lodging when Britten comes to discuss a new opera he’s working on—what will later become Death in Venice. Richard Griffiths plays the actor called Fitz, who is playing Auden, and Alex Jennings plays an actor called Henry, who plays Britten. It’s all very meta.

There is much in character dialogue between Auden and Britten, but also much disruption of the rehearsal. For a third of the play, actors play actors, or writers, and the whole piece remains concerned with acting itself, writing itself—that is, with the habit of art. As a result, this is a play to get or not get; one with those terribly taxing things—layers—and one which will turn-off many theatre-goers for simply being too elaborate.

Still, Auden and Britten are, as most would agree, what the play is about. Bennett has bookended, at least for the moment, what has been almost ten years of successful and successive biographical films. And no subjects have been more to the public’s taste than great artists. There’s the Jackson Pollock film and the Shakespeare film, the Jane Austen film; Beatrix Potter, Truman Capote, and now Keats. Biographical plays are fewer, certainly, but perhaps only because plays are fewer. Shadowlands and The Invention of Love come to mind. And now we have The Habit of Art.

Yet this is a biographical play with a difference. As the writer of the play-within-the-play makes clear, the portrait of Auden offered to us will leave any audience asking: “Where is the poetry?” There’s no sign of it. Not in the script, not in Griffiths’s portrayal, nowhere. It’s not what we would expect from a play about a poet. Consider the Keats film: when Ben Wishaw isn’t quoting or being quoted to, he stares wistfully into the middle-distance with a poetical glint in his eye; nightingales can be heard in the air and at any moment you expect a butler to walk in and announce,”‘You got a place where I can put this urn?’

Instead, Bennett’s Auden is an intellectual curmudgeon—so far beyond the concerns of the material world that it’s difficult to tell where the mess in his room ends and his clothes begin. Griffiths plays him droll, tired, a year from death, with the faintest suggestion that behind the Oxford man, the homosexual, and the lonely soul, there is a poet struggling to see the worth in his art. But he is lonely before he is a poet, and he is a homosexual before he is a poet. Griffiths’s performance is truly exceptional in its subtlety, and is wonderfully matched by Jennings, in whose Benjamin Britten there is more of the artist on display. He is passionate, erudite, plays the stage piano freely but without excess, and is in full danger of earning himself the title of Quintessential Englishman 1972. However, the dynamic (which seems the only word for it) between poet and composer is not given any serious attention until the second half of the play.

The meta-narrative of The Habit of Art, with its almost ridiculous complexity (comical complexity, certainly), is fulfilling enough to sustain the first hour. But full as it is with Bennett’s signature wit and ear for dialogue, we begin to ask where it’s all going. Particularly, where is our Auden? We know the man was a genius, so where is his profundity? Interruptions to the rehearsal are as frustrating as waiting for Godot as we desperately want the actors to get on with it and show us Auden being a poet.

Yet he never recites a line. Instead, with half an hour to go, Bennett gives us permission to forget about the rehearsal. Forget the layers, he says. For a long scene Britten and Auden converse without interruption, and we are given a heavyweight debate which is both surprising and moving. The men discuss their art, their habit, and what they reveal about their artistic processes satisfies every layer concerned. We realise that all this time we have been watching the pursuit of great art—the unconfident poet, the uncertain composer, but also the struggling actors playing them. The Habit of Art itself is a struggle, yet behind its barefaced devices is a playwright reaching for something beyond a postmodernist puppet show. All great art begins with the unshakable habit, and this seems to be Bennett’s meaning.

In the closing moments, Auden and Britten briefly revert to Fitz and Henry, who leave the stage before coming back to bow as Griffiths and Jennings. At this point, you would be forgiven for leaving the National-within-the-National thinking you had come out on the wrong side of the theatre. You might ask, “Where was the poetry?” and also “Where was the play?” But Bennett’s great affirmation is the pursuit of art rather than art itself. In the absence of a single stanza of poetic verse, the drama makes clear that in acting, writing, and music, in the words of Auden himself, “what matters is the work.”

Paul Sweeten is reading for an MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College, Oxford.