“Kingdom Come” - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant. First published in 1986
This story is Included in Selected Stories as well as in Across The Bridge
Buried in Print’s Mavis Gallant Project
Mavis Gallant
August 11, 1922 born in Montréal, in 1950 she moves to France to pursue her dream of being a writer
February 18, 2014, dies in Paris, a place she dearly loved
"In her preface to the present collection, Gallant advises her readers: “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.” Such advice may be superfluous. When you finish each of Gallant’s stories, it’s instinctive to stop and regroup. As much as you might wish to resume and prolong the pleasure of reading, you feel that your brain and heart cannot, at least for the moment, process or absorb one word, one detail more." Francine Prose in her introduction to The Collected Short Stories of Mavis Gallant
I have been reading short stories by Mavis ‘ft- since 2013. I was delighted when a blogger I have happily followed for years, Buried in Print, announced they would be reading and posting on all her many short stories (116 published in The New Yorker alone) on a scheduled basis. I am reading along with Buried in Print as I can. I have access to sbout half her stories.
This, to me, was among the most poigant of her stories I have so far read. I really like this story, maybe as it reflects the sadness of life now or because the central character is an elderly man contemplating his life history. At 73, I can relate. A very big difference between me and the man in the story is a am highly connected to my family and feel my blog is something I can take pride in. He has nothing.
Here are the opening lines:
“AFTER HAVING SPENT twenty-four years in the Republic of Saltnatek, where he established the first modern university, recorded the vocabulary and structure of the Saltnatek tongue, and discovered in a remote village an allophylian language unknown except to its speakers, Dr. Domini Missierna returned to Europe to find that nobody cared. Saltnatek was neither lush nor rich nor seductive, nor poor enough to arouse international pity. The university survived on grants left over from the defense budget, and even Missierna had to admit he had not attracted teachers of the first order. He had wasted his vitality chasing money for salaries and equipment, up to the day when an ungrateful administration dismissed him and the latest revolutionary council, thanking him for nothing, put him on a plane.”
Missierna sees in his own end times the decline of Europe
“During the years when he was so obsessively occupied, Europe had grown small, become depleted, as bald in spirit as Saltnatek’s sandy and stony islands. The doubting voices were thin and metallic. No one was listening. His colleagues said, “One step after the other,” and “One at a time.” They trod upon discarded rules of address, raked the ground to find shreds of sense and reason. Salvation was in the dust or it was nowhere. Even if he were to reveal twenty new and orderly and poetic methods of creating order by means of words, he would be told, “We had better deal with matters underfoot, closer to home.”
He has children and grandchildren but he got a divorce long ago so he has no real family connections.
Like in so many of her stories in just a few pages Gallant sums up not just a life but a period of history.
1 comment:
it's interesting that she so often features lonely characters and that they are not always advanced in years, not always living solitary lives. Here, though, it's a sympathetic situation, and intensified by the observations about Europe's decline along his sense that he, too, is declining (for lack of connection and a sense of lacking purpose).
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