Mavis Gallant's archive at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library has been accessible to researchers for some years now, and the materials it holds — the correspondence with Mary McCarthy and William Maxwell, the working notebooks, the typescript drafts of stories at multiple stages, the diaries kept across the Paris decades — together constitute one of the more substantial archival records of any twentieth-century short-story writer in English. The archive has been used in a small but accumulating body of scholarly work, and its materials have begun to inform the way the stories themselves are read. What follows is an attempt at a profile through the archive, which is to say, a reading of the writer through what the working papers have made visible.
The Gallant who emerges from the archive is, in important respects, not the Gallant of the public profile. The public Gallant — the figure of the late interviews and the New Yorker introductions — was acerbic, formidable, slightly forbidding, and the persona did much of the work of explaining what the stories were doing. The archival Gallant is rather different. The notebooks reveal a writer of considerable practical discipline, whose working method was more strategic and more carefully constructed than the persona suggested, and whose understanding of her own practice was more articulate, in private, than her public reluctance to discuss craft would have led one to expect.
The notebooks and the working method
The working notebooks are the most revealing of the archive's holdings. Gallant kept notebooks across her writing life, and the notebooks are remarkably consistent in form across decades. They contain reading notes, observed scenes from Paris and from the various other places she lived, fragments of dialogue overheard or reconstructed, and — most interestingly — the running self-criticism of stories in progress.
The self-criticism is the part that surprises most readers who know only the published work. Gallant's notebooks are full of severe and specific notes to herself about what is and is not working in particular stories, about which sentences are landing and which are merely competent, about which scenes are doing the work she needs them to do and which are filling space. The notebooks read, in places, like the criticism of a sharp reviewer working on stories that the reviewer is herself writing. The standards applied are exact, and the application is unsparing.
The notebooks also reveal the planning that went into the stories. The standard story of Gallant's practice — that she wrote spontaneously, that the stories arrived more or less as published — is contradicted directly by the notebooks, which document multiple drafts of most of the major stories, with substantial revision between drafts and with the structural choices being worked through on the page over weeks and sometimes months. The Gallant who wrote spontaneously was a public construction; the working Gallant revised heavily, and the revision is documented.
The Paris decade and what it produced
The notebooks from the late 1950s and 1960s, when Gallant was producing the stories that would become the basis of her major reputation, are particularly rich. The Paris of those years — the post-Algerian-war Paris, the Paris of the early Fifth Republic, the Paris of the slowly diminishing Anglophone expatriate community — appears in the notebooks in ways that are recognisable from the published stories but more granular than the published stories were free to be.
The notebooks contain extensive observations of the Paris that the stories abstract from. Conversations in cafés, scenes from the apartment buildings she lived in, fragments of overheard exchange in shops and on the street, notes on the various Anglophone exiles and refugees whose lives intersected with hers. The published stories contain the fictional transformation of this material, but the working notes show what the transformation involved — what was selected, what was suppressed, how the actual observed material was reshaped into the formal constructions that the stories required.
The diaries from the period, where they exist, are less detailed than the notebooks but contain a different kind of record. They show Gallant's practical life — the financial precarity that the working writer's life involved through these years, the negotiations with The New Yorker over rates and over which stories the magazine would and would not run, the social and emotional contours of the Paris life. The diaries are less mined in the existing scholarship than the notebooks, and they probably hold more material than has yet been worked through.
The correspondence and the literary friendships
The correspondence with William Maxwell, who edited Gallant at The New Yorker for much of her productive period, is one of the major literary correspondences of the postwar period and is deservedly the most-cited portion of the archive. The letters document the editorial relationship in detail — Maxwell's suggestions, Gallant's responses, the negotiations over individual sentences and over the larger shape of stories — and they reveal an editorial process that was unusually engaged on Maxwell's side and unusually receptive on Gallant's.
The Maxwell-Gallant correspondence is also a substantive critical document. Maxwell was an unusually perceptive reader, and his letters contain readings of Gallant's stories that are, in places, as sharp as anything the published criticism has produced. Gallant's responses are, in turn, articulate about the choices she had made and the choices she was prepared to revise. The correspondence is a record of a working editorial relationship at the level of seriousness that the contemporary editorial system rarely sustains.
The correspondence with Mary McCarthy is more occasional but is in some respects more revealing. McCarthy and Gallant were not close in any conventional sense, but they corresponded across decades, and the letters between them contain a kind of literary candour that neither writer extended easily in other contexts. The McCarthy letters give us a Gallant who is more direct about her literary judgements and her ambitions than the public persona allowed her to be, and they constitute an important supplementary record for understanding what Gallant thought she was doing as a writer.
What the archive changes about how to read the stories
The accumulated effect of the archival material is to change, in a number of specific ways, how the major Gallant stories should be read. The stories have generally been read as products of a writer of unusual perceptiveness whose practice involved a kind of quiet observation followed by elegant transcription. The archive shows that this is not what the practice was. The practice was a strategic one, with the stories built deliberately, the structural choices worked through across multiple drafts, and the surface ease that the published stories present being the result of considerable hidden labour.
The archive also shows that Gallant was a more political writer than the published reception generally allowed. The notebooks contain extensive notes on the political situations in which the stories are embedded — the post-war European reconstructions, the colonial unwindings, the Cold War alignments and their effects on the various Anglophone exile communities — and the political content of the stories looks rather more deliberate, when read against the notebooks, than it tends to look without that context. Stories that have been read as quiet domestic miniatures look different when one knows what the writer was thinking about while she wrote them.
The archive shows, finally, that Gallant's relationship with her own form was more articulate than the public Gallant suggested. The notebooks contain extensive thinking-aloud about what the short story can and cannot do, about the structural principles she was working with, about the writers she was reading critically while she worked. The Gallant who refused, in interviews, to discuss craft in any detailed way is the public Gallant; the private Gallant had a great deal to say about craft, and what she said is now accessible.
What the profile looks like with the archive in view
The profile that emerges, when one synthesises the archive with the published work, is of a writer of considerable strategic sophistication, working at a level of formal self-consciousness that the published reception of her work has often missed. The stories are not records of perception lightly transcribed; they are constructed objects, built deliberately, revised hard, and arrived at through a working process that the writer chose to keep largely invisible to her public readership.
The reasons for the invisibility are themselves interesting. Gallant came of age in a literary culture that was often suspicious of writers, particularly women writers, who appeared to be too analytic about their own practice. The persona of the spontaneous observer was, among other things, a strategic concealment that allowed the work to be received in particular ways and that protected the writer from particular kinds of dismissal. The archive shows the concealment for what it was, and the concealment is itself part of what one has to read in trying to understand the stories.
The Gallant who is now visible through the archive is in many respects a more substantial writer than the public Gallant allowed herself to be seen as. The strategic discipline, the formal articulacy, the political seriousness that the notebooks document — these are all features of a writer whose accomplishments are larger than the existing critical record has fully acknowledged. The major scholarly work on Gallant that is now beginning to draw on the archive is starting to produce a reception that matches the writer; one hopes the work continues, and one hopes the broader readership will, over time, encounter the Gallant the archive has made it possible to see.
