These Are A Few Of “My Favourite Things”

With the clarion beauty of Julie Andrew’s voice ringing my brain, I don’t want to talk about “Raindrops on Roses” or “Whiskers on Kittens” but rather Wes Anderson, The New Yorker, Substack and Mavis Gallant and the recent pleasant convergence of all these things.

Wes Anderson and The French Dispatch

Director Wes Anderson’s recent film, The French Dispatch is a self-described “love letter to journalism.” Many of you will be familiar or like myself, besotted with his works including The Budapest Hotel, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonlight Kingdom. I enjoy the zany, pastel, intricate sets and his penchant for working with physically atypical actors. His affectionate and humorous studies of human foibles are heartbreaking. Wes Anderson’s films are densely packed with scene and character details and demand re-watching. Check out the soundtrack of David Bowie covers in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou performed by the Brazilian musician, Seu Jorge.

The French Dispatch is a collection of vignettes that are un homage to journalism, The New Yorker in particular. The film is set in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé (I know, so good) and filmed in Angoulême, France. His typical eclectic cast includes Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Tilda Swinton along with over thirty other actors.

The vignette, “Revisions on a Manifesto” is based on the student riots in Paris 1968 and inspired by Mavis Gallant‘s two-part article “The Events in May: A Paris Notebook” which was published in The New Yorker.

In the “My Favourite Things” department, France McDormand plays the Mavis Gallant-inspired character and mentors the student revolutionary, Timotheé Chalamet, editing his manifesto and sleeping with him.

The New Yorker’s Susan Morrison’s interview with Wes Anderson here.

But what I was most interested in were the short stories, because back then I thought that was what I wanted to do—fiction. Write stories and novels and so on. When I went to the University of Texas in Austin, I used to look at old bound volumes of The New Yorker in the library, because you could find things like a J. D. Salinger story that had never been collected.

Wes Anderson, 2021

  I’m with you, Wes. The New Yorker is a cerebral drip-feed of contemporary short stories by writers such as Miranda July, Lauren Groff, Tessa Hedley, Kevin Barry, Mary Gaitskill, Jennifer Egan, Miriam Toews, Zadie Smith and so on presented weekly with author interviews and currently a podcast of the author reading their work. And then there are the archives…Cheever, O’Connor, Munro, Bradbury, Barthelme and so on. Give up your day job now so that you can stay home and read!

Mavis Gallant (MG) and The New Yorker

MG published the first of her over one hundred short stories, “Madeline’s Birthday” in The New Yorker in August 1951.

“Without finding words for it, Paul knew that her untidiness had something to do with her attitude toward him and the entire household. He wished she would employ a less troublesome method of showing it.”

Mavis Gallant 1951

In 1995, she published her last, “Scarves, Beads and Sandals”. 

“There was a vogue for bright scarves, around the straw hats, around the hair, wound around the neck along with strings of brights beads, loosely coiled–sand-coloured or coral or a hard kind of blue. The beads cast reflections on the skin of the throat or on a scarf of a different shade, like a bead dilluted in water.”

“Scarfless, shoeless, unbound, delivered, they waited for the last wine bottle to be emptied and the last of the coffee to be drunk or spilled before they decided what they specifically wanted or exactly refused.”

Mavis Gallant 1995

MG was a Montrealer, trained and worked as a journalist and in her twenties embarked on a life as an ex-patriate writer in Paris. She was a master of the short story. She died at age ninety-one in February 2014.

From the Deborah Treisman post-script.

“There’s an unapologetic tone to most of Gallant’s stories, as well as to the stories about her. She didn’t apologize for wanting to write at a time when women, Canadian women, as Alice Munro has documented, were not expected to put themselves forward or to speak out. She didn’t apologize for leaving Canada—and leaving her homeland forever in a quandary about the extent to which it could claim her. She lived most of her life as a perpetual foreigner, in France, childless and husbandless (an early marriage ended when she was twenty-five). Had she lived some other way, she would not have been the writer that she was. But it’s easy to underestimate how difficult these decisions may have been for her, or her vulnerability, when she made them.”

D Treisman 2014

Substack and Bill Richardson

Substack is a subscription newsletter app that allows writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers with or without a paywall. My current subscriptions include Story Club with George Saunders and The Line, an irreverent independent Canadian current affairs column featuring Jen Gerson, Andrew Potter and Matt Gurney.

And if it wasn’t for Bill Richardson’s Substack, Oh MG: My Mavis Gallant Centennial Diaries, I wouldn’t know that it is the Centenary of Mavis Gallant’s birthday this August 11^th or considered writing this piece.

Bill Richardson is a Canadian Broadcaster and Writer who has most recently published a groundbreaking children’s book, Last Week illustrated by Emilie Leduc about a grandparent who chooses Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). Come to think of it, access to MAiD is another one of “My Favourite Things.” I digress but if you are interested consider Stephanie Green’s recent book, This is Assisted Dying: A Doctor’s Story of Empowering Patients at the End of Life.”

Bill is writing a daily journal honouring MG, her world and her works. It is funny, clever, insightful and informative. Bravo Bill!

Mavis Gallant (MG)

And now down the MG rabbit hole. MG occupies a large stall in my stable of Canadian female writers–MG, MA and AM. Mavis, Margaret and Alice. (all sporting an M somewhere and contemporaries after a fashion!)  Readers not familiar with MG could refer to the excellent introduction by Francine Prose (nominative determinism, she’s an author of over twenty novels and the excellent How to Read Like a Writer) in the 2016 Everyman Edition of The Collected (but by no means Complete) Stories of Mavis Gallant.

“Her trademarks: the specificity, the density of detail and incident, the control of language and tone and her gift for creating a deceptively comfortable distance between the characters and the reader, then suddenly and without warning narrowing that distance…the equivalent of whiplash…not the neck, but the heart”

 Francine Prose 2016

Prose quotes MG from the preface to her Selected Stories and the afterward of her collection Paris Stories:

“Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.”

Mavis Gallant 1996

Yes. The best-written and then closely read short stories leave an “afterburn” in the reader. They incite a reflection and contemplation, perhaps even a reappraisal of the reader’s situation.

From Alberto Manguel in the forward of the 2009 collection Going Ashore:

“The stories of Mavis Gallant are masterpieces of rhetorical stinginesss, of words saved for the right moment, of parsimonious descriptions and strict accounting.”

Alberto Manguel 2009

Truth-seeking characters, often outsiders with understandable, ordinary character flaws drive the plots of MG stories.

“The first flash of fiction arrives without words. It consists of a fixed image, like a slide or (closer still) a freeze frame, showing characters in a simple situation.

Mavis Gallant 1996

Where to begin with or to return to her works?

For an introduction to MG perhaps start with the 1981 Home Truths, a collection of selected Canadian Stories which includes the 1963 ex-patriot love story, “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street”

“Agnes is the only secret Pete has from his wife, the only puzzle he pieces together without her help.”

Mavis Gallant 1963

Or perhaps the five-story Linnet Muir series which MG described as the most autobiographical of her works? The New Yorker in its monthly Podcast Fiction Series with Deborah Treisman offers Atwood reading “Voices Lost in Snow,” which appeared in the magazine in 1976. and can also be found in the short-story collection Varieties of Exile. This story, from the Linnet series, is a first-person recounting of an obedient, silenced child cataloguing the failings of neglectful parents.

Also featured in New Yorker’s Podcast Fiction Series series are Karen Russell reading “From the Fifteenth District,” Ann Beattie reading “Dédé” and Antonya Nelson reading “When We Were Nearly Young”.

And further down the podcast rabbit hole, The Spoken Web (Kate Moffatt, Kandice Sharren, and Michelle Levy) presents an archival audio-recording of MG.  In 1984, MG read her story, “Grippes and Poche” at the Images Theatre at Simon Fraser University. MG reads from an editorial proof and peppers her presentation with wonderful asides and explanations deviating as necessary from the text. As a bilingual Canadian, living in Paris, she comments on drifting into French or the difficulty of pronouncing French words with an English pronunciation to English audiences.

In the companion episode, the producers speculate that the recording was made on reel-reel tape and then transferred to cassette tape for archiving purposes. For some of us, these technologies were ordinary.

The CBC Compass program archives have an interview with MG in Paris in 1965 around the time of the release of My Heart is Broken. where you can watch her mannerisms and appreciate her wit as she tries to be patient with the interviewer as she describes the essential ingredient of independence being economic freedom.

I read some of these MG stories decades ago with the lens and attitude of a younger, impatient person. The MG 100^th Anniversary is a great excuse to re-visit her works. I have a lot to learn from her writing. I missed the 2017 publication of her remaining diaries so that is also on my list of readings. I’ll be keeping up with Bill Richardson’s highlights and suggestions on his Substack and wonder(and wander) along with him.

“As near as I’m aware, there are no plans to put her face on a stamp. There hasn’t been a run on the bunting market to accommodate all the parades and grandstands and so forth.”

Bill Richardson 2022

Maybe Wes Anderson will make a movie?

In the meantime, there’s lots of reading to do!