MILLICENT BELL
421
(published in 1986) which recorded her responses
to
the confused impres–
sions of those days. There was, after that, no question of her interest in
politics. Gallant has told an interviewer that she finds it "hilarious" to read
in some of the criticism of her writing that she is not interested in poli–
tics. ''I'm extremely interested in politics. My writing is permeated with
politics. I read I don't know how many newspapers a day," she protests.
Many of her best stories have been concerned with those refugees from
Nazism who became a permanent part of the Paris scene. She would con–
tinue to write now and then about the French whom she had come to
know so well- a story such as "Luc and His Father" which describes the
dilemmas of a top civil servant in his relation to his son who simply can't
pass examinations, or such stories of the arts scene as "Speck's Idea," which
describes a dealer's attempt to make his fortune by promoting a forgotten
Fascist painter, or the "Henri Grippes" series about the connivings and
strivings of a third-rate
homme de lettres.
But a stronger source of interest
for Gallant is the culture of expatriation as she has witnessed it among
Paris's population of refugees. These are hardly sentimentally regarded;
they can be ridiculous, contemptible, self-serving rather than noble-as apt
illustrations of the comedy of human self-deception and pretense as any–
one else. Amalia and her husband, in "Questions and Answers," are
Romanians "notoriously ... marked by del usions of eminence and perse–
cution." They are wrung by anxiety and envy because of a more recent
arrival from whom they had once borrowed. Unaccountably, despite her
imprudent lingering on in Bucharest, despite her bad lungs and her
swollen legs, Marie has been lucky; she has a passport and hopes to emi–
grate to America. Amalia cannot bear the way Marie talks to strangers, finds
work and spends her earnings on flowers and strawberries for her friends,
wishes like a child on the new moon, gets a "red card" permitting her to
stay in France for another year-and, above all, never asks for what is owed
her. "Amalia thinks they might forgive Marie if she insulted them"-or if
she allowed them to pity her. "Every situation has an element of farce,"
Gallant has said, shrugging off an interviewer's question as to whether she
considers herself a tragic wri ter.
About the inexpressible horrors behind displacement, the refugees'
memories, Gallant has never presumed to write. Her abiding curiosity lies
elsewhere. She has related how, as a twenty-two year old reporter for a
Canadian newspaper she first saw American Army photographs of the lib–
erated Nazi concentration camps. She felt that it would not be the
survivors whose tales one most needed to understand. They "would prob–
ably not be able to tell us anything, except for the description of life at
point zero. If we wanted to find out how and why this happened it was
the Germans we had to question. What had happened to the people who
