Canadian Writers Abroad

Review of Montreal Standard Time: the Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant, Edited by Neil Besner, Marta Dvořák and Bill Richardson.
Véhicule Press, 2024.

Reviewed by Debra Martens

This book review is the hundredth for Canadian Writers Abroad, and it should be no surprise that I am marking it with the author with whom CWA began: Mavis Gallant. My interest in Gallant goes back to my MA thesis on her work, during which period I interviewed her. Decades ago, the work of Mavis Gallant was not well known in Canada, partly because she was a short story writer, and partly because she made her living outside of Canada, having settled in Paris in the 1950s, supporting herself by the stories that she sold to The New Yorker. Gallant’s situation motivated me to launch Canadian Writers Abroad to address how expat writers like her were, and are, overlooked by the press and literary establishment, in Canada. It was really only with the publication of the collection Home Truths, or the semi-autobiographical Linnet Muir stories, that she was fêted in Canada; Home Truths won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction in 1981.

I have been dipping into the collection of Gallant’s journalism for months now. But newspaper articles from the 1940s are not as good as Mavis Gallant short stories. They are, however, interesting, in the light that they — the articles and her time in Montreal — cast on her later career as a fiction writer. Lest you should be a reluctant reader uncertain of your ability to make the connection between the journalism and the fiction, the editors do it for you. We begin with a preface by Mary K. MacLeod, introducing us to an exchange of letters between Mavis Gallant and one of her editors at the Standard, Stanley Handman, with whom she had a fraught relationship but who admired her work. Then we have an introduction from Neil Besner, longtime Canlit academic, who informs us that the intention of the editors in publishing this selection of “representative pieces” from her 125 pieces for the Standard (between 1944 to 1950) has been “to show the wide range and scintillating excellence of this work.” And to show how her journalism “informs her fiction,” already working in her “singular narrative style — that rich alloy of irony, deadpan humour, minutely reported detail, and lyrical intensity that is hers alone.”

At the back of the collection, the indomitable Bill Richardson provides annotations to the journalism pieces, which look at first glance like Coles notes but turn out to provide very interesting historical contexts. What else would Montrealers have read in the Standard the day that it ran Gallant’s first piece, “Meet Johny” (with 19 photos by Hugh Frankel), about a six-year-old boy who lives by the rules of a street gang, bullying or beating other children in order to gain a nickel? They would have been familiar with fisticuffs from the comic strips Popeye and L’il Abner. Would have read reports of the war, and in this issue, (September 2, 1944), a lighthearted account by a sports writer about serving as a punching bag for the Women’s Army Corps recruits. In passing, Gallant mentions that Johny’s father went to war five years ago and hasn’t been heard of since. Like her, Johny is a semi-orphan.

Interestingly, in the annotation for “What Is This thing Called Jazz,” Richardson doesn’t mention that Gallant’s (ex)husband was a jazz musician. Instead, Marta Dvořák handles that nugget of information in her afterword: Gallant’s source for that piece was “her young husband, Johny Gallant, a jazz pianist at Montreal’s Ritz Café” — he “taught her how to listen.” They were married for five years (1942-1947).

The collection’s first and last Johnys, “Meet Johny” (1944), and “The Making of a Hoodlum: the story of Johny Young” (1950), show how Gallant’s personal profiles developed. Also of interest are the war pieces: interviews with war brides, a prisoner of war, refugees, and immigrants. Her general cultural pieces are quite good: “Why Are Book Prices So High?” (1946) and “Why Are We Canadians So Dull?” (1946), are both still weirdly relevant today. While my younger self might have enjoyed the condescension in “Canadians So Dull,” my adult self squirms at the tone. Still, note the prescient lines “the Canadian fear of change” and that we “balance on a tightrope between two powers like America and Britain” (today swap Britain for China?). Worse, and maybe I shouldn’t repeat it here in case Trump sees it, she writes: “One reason is that we have no mass attitude toward anytthing. The huge report of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Canadian feeling toward the US stated flatly that, as a group of people with unified opinions and outlook, Canada does not exist.” She goes on to quote others saying it is the job of writers and artists to define what is Canadian, not historians.

Fittingly, “Why Are Book Prices So High?” appears during Canadian Book Week (Richardson’s annotation) in November. Gallant blames the cost partly on the war, mentions the standard publishing contract drawn up by the Canadian Authors Association, and suggests the fault lies with a lack of readership. She concludes with a statement that could be printed today: “The question of Canadian book buying still remains a sort of spiral, with publishers blaming small audiences, and the small audience blaming the cost of books.” Finally, the piece on radio is almost a complete reversal of the dull stance: “Radio Finds its Voice,” which is about the CBC and Andrew Allan’s role in promoting Canadian writers through radio plays.

By far my favourite pieces are her interviews with authors: Louis Hémon,  Hugh MacLennan and his writer wife Dorothy Duncan, Gabrielle Roy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Hiebert, Rober Lemelin. Here we have glimpses into Gallant’s formation as a writer, and her choice to make a living at writing fiction abroad. She writes with admiration of Gabrielle Roy’s time abroad, and points out that MacLennan studied at Oxford and Princeton. In “Duncan & MacLennan: Writers,” writing about Two Solitudes, she describes the difficulties faced by a novelist setting a book in Canada (non-Canadian ignorance of history and geography requires a setting to be explained); she set her short stories outside of Canada, until her Linnet Muir stories.

This volume comes at a time of Gallant revival, spiked by the hundredth anniversary of her birth in 2022 and by the publication of The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant, edited by Garth Risk Hallberg (New York Review Books, 2025), as well as Tess Hadley’s selection, The Latehomecomer: Essential Stories (Pushkin Press, 2025); and a reprint of Gallant’s 1959 novel, Green Water, Green Sky (Daunt, 2024). Bill Richardson ran a series about Gallant on his Substack in 2022, “Oh, MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diaries.” Emily Donaldson weighs in on this revival, bemoaning Canada’s neglect of Gallant in her Globe and Mail piece, “The Literary Annexation of Mavis Gallant Should Embarrass and Enrage Us,” (April 4, 2025), which points out that Hallberg’s Uncollected is not available in Canada and that Gallant is referred to as an American author.

Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) published 17 collections of short stories and novellas, two novels, and a play. A difficult childhood included a stint at a boarding school in the United States. Returning to Montreal from New York City, she worked at the National Film Board and then the Montreal Standard. She left the Standard and Montreal in 1950 for Europe at the age of 28, where she travelled around Spain, England and after a rough start (lost payments), settled in Paris to live off the sale of her short stories to The New Yorker. 

Further

• “Garth Risk Hallberg, “Chasing Mystery Through Fiction: On the Life and Literary Career of Mavis Gallant,” LitHub (January 20, 2025).
• Bill Richardson, “Oh, MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diaries,” Substack; and “Bill Richardson Rounds Up Mavis Gallant,” Canadian Writers Abroad (August 8, 2022).
• Emily Donaldson, “The Literary Annexation of Mavis Gallant Should Embarrass and Enrage Us,” Globe and Mail (April 4, 2025).
• Tess Hadley reviews The Uncollected Works and Green Water, Green Sky, “Packing Like a Fury,” in the London Review of Books (April 3, 2025).
• Gallant’s early lack of Canadian recognition is mentioned in The Canadian Encyclopedia piece by Randy Boyagoda.
• Heather O’Neill, “100 Years of Mavis Gallant,” The Walrus (September 15, 2022).
• Margaret Atwood on Gallant’s “Orphan’s Progress” in The New Yorker (April 6, 2025).
• The New Yorker is a treasure trove of online Gallant pieces, including several authors reading aloud her stories.
•  Isabel Huggan shares a letter from Mavis Gallant in Bookworm 94, the newsletter of the Literary Review of Canada (May 6, 2025) (on Substack).
• Montreal Standard Time is dedicated to Nancy Baele, who wrote “Memories of Mavis” in the Ottawa Citizen (February 19, 2014) and who contributed to Bill Richardson’s “Oh, MG.”
• Grazia Merler, Mavis Gallant: Narrative Patterns and Devices, Tecumseh (1978) and Borealis Press.
• Daunt Books
• Pushkin Press
• Previously on Gallant in CWA: Going Ashore with Mavis Gallant, Paris, Marvellous Mavis, Great Gallant, and Mavis Gallant.