Another side of literary giant Mavis Gallant: the Montreal journalist

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In 1950, 28-year-old Mavis Gallant quit her newspaper job in Montreal and flew to Paris with $500 from the paper’s publisher and high hopes of becoming a full-time author.

She never looked back.

Over the next half-century, her exquisitely crafted stories of expats, drifters and displaced people in post-Second World War Europe earned her a reputation as the “irrefutable master of the short story in English,” to quote American author and commentator Fran Lebowitz. Gallant published 116 short stories in The New Yorker, as well as a dozen short-story collections, two novels, a play, essays and diaries. Her work garnered numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award (1981), Companion of the Order of Canada (1993), PEN/Nabokov Award (2004) and Prix Athanase-David (2006).

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Now, a decade after her death in Paris at 91, a new book provides the prequel to Gallant’s literary career. Montreal Standard Time: The Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant presents 38 of her pieces for the Montreal Standard from 1944 to 1950, selected from among about 125 bylined feature articles. (She wrote an estimated 125 other pieces for the paper, including radio and film reviews.)

On topics from refugees to unwed mothers, and from rising stars of Quebec literature to why Canadians are so dull, the articles reveal a budding talent with boundless curiosity and a razor-sharp wit. Written as Europeans displaced by war were pouring into the city, they explore themes that would permeate her fiction: lives of transience and exclusion; the world of childhood; society’s attitudes toward female deviance. And they showcase Gallant’s ability — exceedingly rare in that era — to move seamlessly between Quebec’s two language solitudes.

The volume offers a new perspective on a writer who uniquely captured Montreal, even if she never again lived in her hometown.

Gallant was ahead of her time in depicting urban, multicultural life, said Neil Besner, one of the book’s three editors. “She saw the various communities in Montreal, beginning with the anglos and the French, but also the various expatriate communities, before diversity was a thing,” said Besner, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Winnipeg who wrote the first PhD thesis on Gallant in 1983.

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“I’ve never lived in a city exactly like Montreal was then,” Gallant said in a 1978 interview.

“It was unique, unclassifiable. All those small worlds of race and language and religion and class all shut away from one another. A series of airtight compartments.”

The book comes out as eye-popping revelations about Gallant’s mother and maternal uncle are opening new avenues of inquiry into the author’s roots.

The survivor of a famously unhappy childhood, Gallant bristled when asked about her mother.

“I had a mother who should not have had children, and it’s as simple as that,” she said.

Mavis de Trafford Young was born in Montreal on Aug. 11, 1922, the only child of English-speaking, reportedly Protestant parents. A few weeks after she turned four, they placed her in a French-language, Catholic boarding school.

In a 2008 interview with CBC’s Eleanor Wachtel, Gallant recalled being left in the austere convent by her mother, who said, “‘I’ll be back in a few minutes,’” but never returned.

Now the site of a modern condo building, Gallant’s school, the Pensionnat St-Louis-de-Gonzague at 333 Sherbrooke St. E., was run by the Soeurs du Bon Pasteur, who specialized in the care of female delinquents and operated a girls’ reform school at 100 Sherbrooke E.

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Years later, when Gallant learned that her former school had burned down, “it was like the burial of a witch,” she writes in the autobiographical short story In Youth Is Pleasure.

Gallant’s adored father, Stewart de Trafford Young, the son of a British army colonel, was a weekend artist who received an allowance from his family in England. Her parents split when she was 10 and her father died not long afterward. Left in the care of her mother and her second husband, Gallant bounced around 17 schools in Quebec, Ontario and the U.S.

At 18, she returned to Montreal with just $5 in her pocket, determined to live by her pen. In her years away, her remembered hometown had assumed glorious proportions in her mind: “… Sherbrooke Street seemed to be glittering and white; the vision of a house upon that street was so painful that I was obliged to banish it from the memorial. (…) If I say that Cleopatra floated down the Châteauguay River, that the Winter Palace was stormed on Sherbrooke Street, that Trafalgar was fought on Lake St. Louis, I mean it naturally; they were the natural backgrounds of my exile and fidelity,” she wrote.

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Gallant’s goal was to work at the Standard, which a friend had told her was the city’s best paper. But she was initially rejected as too young and inexperienced. She reapplied at age 21 and was hired, benefiting from a wartime staff shortage.

The previous year, she had married Johnny Gallant, a jazz pianist from Winnipeg, shortly before he went off to war. The marriage did not last but she kept the bilingual surname.

Gallant’s Montreal-based short stories — less than one-quarter of her work in that genre — span contrasting spheres in the Montreal of the 1920s to 1940s: cosmopolitan coffee klatsches in the Golden Square Mile versus grim convents where little girls are shamed for minor offences and forced to wear rubber bibs during their fortnightly bath to avoid seeing their private parts.

A fashionably thin mother spends the day smoking and reading Russian novels; a father takes along his little daughter to meet friends at the Ritz, where rich hot chocolate is poured from a pink-and-white china pot. They visit a whisky-voiced lady friend in a Sherbrooke St. apartment building resembling a medieval fortress.

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Nuns show prospective adoptive parents around a ward filled with long rows of “cots and undesired infants.”

A maid from the Abitibi, working for a wealthy anglophone family, agonizes over an unwanted pregnancy.

English versus French. Affluent versus poor.

Written decades after her departure, many of the stories read like an elegy for a lost Montreal.

“The reddish brown of the stone houses, the curve and slope of the streets, the constantly changing sky were satisfactory in a way that I now realize must have been aesthetically comfortable. This is what I saw when I read ‘city’ in a book; I had no means of knowing that ‘city’ one day would also mean drab, filthy, flat, or that city blocks could turn into drab squares without mystery,” she writes in Voices Lost in Snow.

In her short story Bonaventure, Gallant compares the demolition of Montreal’s heritage buildings to war-scarred Berlin. “They were the same to him, whether their ruins were dark and soft, abandoned to pigeons and wavy pieces of sky, or created and destroyed by one process, like the machine that consumes itself.”

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“One’s beginnings are regional,” Gallant writes in the preface to The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (McClelland & Stewart, 1996).

“Mine are wholly Quebec, English and Protestant, yes, but with a strong current of French and Catholic.”

But that duality leaves out part of Gallant’s own family, said Stephen Henighan, a novelist and professor in the University of Guelph’s School of Languages and Literatures.

Few Gallant scholars had seen the name of her mother, Benedictine Wiseman, before it was published in obituaries after her death, he said. (At the time some sources incorrectly reported that Gallant’s mother was American.)

“I came across her mother’s name and said, ‘Whoa,’” Henighan said.

In online newspaper archives, he found a trove of articles about Gallant’s mother, Benedictine. In August 1913, 14-year-old “Bennie,” who hated the feminine name Benedictine, ran away from her Montreal home to Toronto, dressed as a boy. She worked as a shoe clerk in a department store and won a singing contest in a Nickelodeon, displaying an ability to sing in both low and high vocal ranges. Nabbed by a police officer who recognized her from a missing-persons poster, she was sent home by a judge who ordered her to don girl’s clothes.

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In the 1911 Census, Benedictine Wiseman, then 13, is listed as a boy, Benedictus, reports author and former CBC broadcaster Bill Richardson, one of the editors of Montreal Standard Time who has researched and recounted the history of Gallant’s maternal family.

In 1921, Benedictine made headlines again, this time for eloping to the U.S. with a married man who had rented a room in the Wiseman family’s dwelling in Montreal. A few months after crossing the border disguised as a boy scout, she was detained by immigration authorities in Syracuse, N.Y., where she claimed to be a cousin of the president of Germany.

“I don’t know where she got that story, as we are Romanians and not Germans,” Gallant’s grandmother, Rosa, told the Montreal Star, when interviewed about her wayward daughter.

But Benedictine’s adventures pale beside the exploits of her brother Nicholas, a con man and bigamist who became a tabloid sensation for wooing and wedding several wealthy women.

Richardson uncovered the history of Gallant’s notorious uncle in a Substack newsletter he has been writing to commemorate the centenary of Gallant’s birth in 1922. However, the book Montreal Standard Time does not address the topic of Gallant’s family.

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“Both (co-editor) Marta Dvorak and I share Aug. 11 birthdays with Mavis Gallant,” Richardson said. “It sounds absurd to say but the truth of it is that I’ve held a special place for her in my heart because I was born on the same day as she was.”

The Wiseman family emigrated from Central Europe to Montreal in 1902, according to documents posted by Richardson. Gallant’s grandfather, Solomon, worked in a bed factory and a tannery, while her grandmother, Rosa, supplemented the family income by teaching languages and music.

A search of city directories by the Montreal Gazette shows the Wiseman family moved frequently in the working-class neighbourhood now called the Plateau-Mont-Royal, at one point living across the street from the city dump, now Laurier Park.

In 1919, Gallant’s grandfather, Solomon, attempted suicide, Richardson discovered. As of 1921, Solomon Wiseman was an inmate at the Douglas Hospital, then called the Protestant Hospital for the Insane.

Nicholas, two years older than Benedictine, was incarcerated from age 15 to 18 in the church-run Mont St-Antoine reform school for larceny, according to documents posted by Richardson.

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In 1925, Nicholas burst onto front pages in the U.S. when he was named as a co-respondent in a high-profile divorce case brought by Boston shoe manufacturer Lyndon C. Grover. Posing as Count Paul Anatole Monte, Nicholas claimed to be in line for a Nobel Prize for having invented a revolutionary airplane motor. Trial testimony revealed that he was engaged not only to Mrs. Grover but also her daughter.

The resulting publicity brought his first wife, née Esther Trachtenberg, out of the woodwork. They had married at Beth Israel Synagogue in Lachine in 1918, when he was a 21-year-old shoe salesman. Esther, now living near Boston with their daughter, pressed charges of desertion and Nicholas was arrested in Staten Island, N.Y., where he had been courting another wealthy society girl.

In an affidavit, Gallant’s grandmother, Rosa (also known as Rose), declared Nicholas a “faker” who had already been married five times.

Documents posted by Richardson suggest the Wisemans declared different religious affiliations at different times, including Catholic, Protestant and Jewish.

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How was the story of Gallant’s flamboyant mother and uncle kept under wraps for so long?

Partly, says Besner, because Gallant shut down questions.

“She wrote to me around 1982 and she said, ‘I was greatly distressed at your going about Montreal and asking people about me,’” he said.

“Which I did not do. So I wrote her back. I said, ‘Listen, I wasn’t trying to dig up dirt on you.’ I didn’t write about her life. I wrote about her books. And so she was okay after that. But she did not like people, in her view, prying into her private life. You can see why. My God, her family, it’s jaw-dropping,” he said.

Montreal publisher and author Linda Leith, the founder of the Blue Metropolis literary festival, first contacted Gallant in 1979, when she wrote to the author with questions for a magazine article about Gallant’s autobiographical Linnet Muir story cycle.

“She wrote back a furious letter to me saying that if I wrote anything to even vaguely suggest there was anything autobiographical in these stories she would sue me and she would sue the magazine,” Leith said.

She reassured Gallant that she would not probe further and the two ended up becoming friends.

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“She definitely was very unwilling to talk about her mother or her family,” Leith said.

“I think in some sense she had created her own story and it was nobody’s business what the facts were.”

However, the discovery of Gallant’s Wiseman forebears adds a new dimension to our understanding of the author, including her lifelong focus on antisemitism and interest in Central Europe, Henighan said.

“What it tells us is that her origins are even more diverse than Gallant revealed in her lifetime. Her family spanned class and religious barriers in ways that wouldn’t cause anyone to bat an eyelash today but would not have been considered socially acceptable then,” he said.

While other Montreal writers, like her friend and contemporary Mordecai Richler, focused on a particular milieu — in Richler’s case the Jewish community around the Main — Gallant transcended the different communities, Besner said.

“She always felt herself to be on the outside, on the periphery, on the margins, and she had a penetrating gaze on all of the groups,” he said.

Echoes of Benedictine’s and Nicholas’s outsized personalities reverberate through some of Gallant’s fiction.

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“She made herself the central figure in loud, spectacular dramas which she played with the houselights on,” Gallant writes of the mother in In Youth Is Pleasure.

And this, of the narrator’s bigamist uncle in the story Rose:

“My uncle had been knocked about, physically and spiritually, as much as any disciplinarian could ask for. (…) But he grew up to be just as willful and heedless as he had been as a boy, hurt his wives, neglected his children, and escaped to Mexico, where he failed in one thing after the other.”

And later:

“I had never been told about my uncle’s scandal, or why he lived in Mexico. I had never been told that the Boston cousin existed; but I knew. I knew about it, although no one had told me a thing.”

AT A GLANCE

Montreal Standard Time: The Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant (Véhicule Press, 306 pages, $29.95) will be available at Indigo, Paragraphe and other independent bookstores as of October 30. 

Highlights from Montreal Standard Time

In interviews, Mavis Gallant often looked back fondly at her six years as a feature writer at the Montreal Standard.

“I loved journalism — I never looked on it as a waste of time. I loved the experience,” she said in a CBC Radio interview with Eleanor Wachtel broadcast in 2008.

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As a young journalist, Gallant, who had luminous eyes and thick, dark hair,  often wore a red jacket or coat to press conferences so she’d be noticed when she put up her hand to ask questions.

A national illustrated weekly that often ran at more than 100 pages, the Standard was packed with feature articles, fiction, comics, recipes and a news wrap-up, said Bill Richardson, a co-editor of Montreal Standard Time: The Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant. It later became Weekend Magazine, distributed across Canada with Saturday newspapers until 1979.

Gallant was one of the few English–Canadian journalists who spoke French at that time. She introduced Canadian readers to French–language writers like Gabrielle Roy, Claude–Henri Grignon and Roger Lemelin. She also investigated conditions in seniors’ homes, homes for unwed mothers and a reformatory for women and underage girls. She interviewed war brides, former prisoners of war and refugees.

Here are some of the highlights from Montreal Standard Time:

Maria Chapdelaine

Gallant travelled by snowmobile to the remote village of Péribonka in the Lac-St-Jean region to trace the inspiration for Louis Hémon’s classic novel, first serialized in 1914 and published in 1916. Some residents still remembered the clueless hired man from France who had worked for farmer Samuel Bédard for seven months in 1911. Villagers were initially insulted by Hémon’s realistic portrayal of pioneer life. But their anger had subsided somewhat by 1945, when tourists flocked there to see Eva Bouchard, said to be the model for Maria.

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You Are What You Are Because You Are in “Existentialism”

In later life, Gallant often told the story of her interview with French philosopher and author Jean-Paul Sartre. She was the only English-language journalist at his 1946 press conference in Montreal, where he was heckled by francophone journalists for his atheistic views. The Catholic Church banned his books two years later.

“He was about the ugliest man I’d ever seen. But he was so courteous, so polite,” she recalled.

Our Shameful Old People’s Homes

We’re still wrestling with some of the issues Gallant covered 80 years ago, including the integration of immigrants, medical aid in dying and woeful conditions in long-term care establishments.

Gallant’s investigation showed that while some seniors’ homes were well managed, others had conditions that “must be seen to be believed.” In one establishment, flies buzzed over plates of food, a pan of urine sat on the floor and a senile patient lay dying in a crowded dormitory.

“I Don’t Cry Any More”

From 1945 to 1951, Canada accepted more than 157,000 political refugees from Europe, known as displaced persons or “DPs.” How were the new arrivals adjusting to life in an unfamiliar country? Gallant tracked some of them down to find out.

A Wonderful Country

The best piece in the book is a semi-fictional reminiscence based on Gallant’s experience as a rental agent for a real estate company. In this funny, poignant story, a Hungarian refugee looking for a furnished house is entranced by an eggbeater.

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