MILLICENT BELL
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brother who belongs to a "paramilitary" band vowed to vengeance against
Catholics. A terrifYing story told in Trevor's supreme way.
Mavis Gallant, like Trevor, has always denied that she has any special
motive for telling her tales-any big obsessive subject-and her stories, like
his, are, above all, marvels of particular observation and eschew overt
"themes." She has said that she never sees her work as "something with a
pattern. Something interests me or it doesn't. It's as simple as that." Like
Trevor, she belongs, in her origins, to a Protestant minority in a dominantly
Catholic culture-Montreal French in her case-which may account for
an outsider quality in her view of others, as it may in his. Like Trevor, too,
she may have increased this detachment by choosing at an early moment
to live among foreigners. Trevor moved to England when he was thirty,
even before he began to write fiction. Gallant's start as a writer coincided
with her decision, when she was twenty-eight, to live permanently in Paris.
She sometimes seems an uninvolved, sardonically amused observer of the
oddities of others-these others, moreover, frequently themselves deracine
European residents, whether voluntary emigres from England or North
America or grotesque survivors of the tragic displacements of fascism and
war. Yet it is not just human absurdity that interests her. As with Trevor,
the disasters of History pulse beneath the cool skin of her prose. Despite
their concentration on small episodes in the lives of unremarkable persons,
both writers seem to maintain, in the back of their minds, a sense of the
giant convulsions of modern times. For Trevor this is modern Irish histo–
ry. For Gallant it is Europe from the thirties to the present, with Nazism
as a source of ultimate meaning.
Gallant's idea that she has been a historian is reflected in the fact that
she chooses to arrange the fifty-two stories in her "collected" not in the
order in which they were written but in the order of the decades they
depict-the thirties to the nineties. The first two are Riviera stories that
evoke the begilmings of World War
II.
One might, if one were reading "The
Moslem Wife" superficially, see it as a comic story about the inheritor of a
posh Riviera hotel and her complaisant, "moslem" marriage to a channing,
useless cousin who was too "pally" with female guests. The only thing that
counts, to Netta, is the hotel's meticulous upkeep, the yearly polishing and
painting, the changing of the awnings, the maintenance of the grounds. Even
Jack's desertion seems unimportant. The story runs thirty pages or so and is
almost all-very amusingly-about Netta and Jack and the hotel guests who
include Jack's hypochondriacal mother. But one March the hotel empties
out and Jack goes off for a holiday in America from which he will not return
promptly. Netta, whose father had once told her that there would never be
another man-made catastrophe after the first world war and the Bolsheviks,
is proved wrong, though she "had her workmen come in, as usual." Five
