Varieties of Exile - A Short Story by Mavis Gallant - first published in The New Yorker - January 11, 1976

Buried in Print's Mavis Gallant Project

"Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story — or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall — is, Is it dead or alive?".. 

Mavis Gallant

April 11, 1922 - Montreal

1950 - moves to Paris

September 1, 1951- publishes, in The New Yorker, her first short story.  She would go onto publish 116 stories in The New Yorker. ( I greatly enjoy looking at the covers of the issue in which a story was published.)

February 18, 2014 - passes away in her beloved Paris

Thinking about the quote from Gallant with which I began this post, all her stories past her test-she can put so much life in just a few pages.

“Varieties of Exile” is included in the collection Home Truths. It is one of six linked stories centering on Linnett Muir. (I learned from Buried in Print’s post on this story that Gallant wrote six linked stories about Linnett.) The first story in the series, “In Youth there is Pleasure” introduces us to a young woman moving back from New York City to her home town in Montreal.  I knew I was going to like her when I learned she was reading Sylvia Townsend Warner.  (If you have not read her Elfin Kingdom stories you are in for a real treat.  Like Gallant, Warner published many stories in The New Yorker.). She is maybe 18 and on her own emotionally and financially.

As “Varieties of Exile” opens World War Two has just started.  Montréal is inundated with European exiles.

“In the third summer of the war I began to meet refugees. There were large numbers of them in Montreal–to me a source of infinite wonder. I could not get enough of them. They came straight out of the twilit Socialist-literary landscape of my reading and my desires. I saw them as prophets of a promised social order that was to consist of justice, equality, art, personal relations, courage, generosity. generosity. Each of them–Belgian, French, Catholic German, Socialist German, Jewish German, Czech–was a book I tried to read from start to finish. My dictionaries were films, poems, novels, Lenin, Freud. That the refugees tended to hate one another seemed no more than a deplorable accident. Nationalist pig-headedness, that chronic, wasting, and apparently incurable disease, was known to me only on Canadian terms and I did not always recognize its symptoms. Anything I could not decipher I turned into fiction, which was my way of untangling knots. At the office where I worked I now spent my lunch hour writing stories about people in exile. I tried to see Montreal as an Austrian might see it and to feel whatever he felt. I was entirely at home with foreigners, which is not surprising the home was all in my head.”

As i read this, knowing Gallant wanted so much to leave Canada forever, if this is drawing at all on her life history.  I admit as i read the Canada based stories i look for her reasons for leaving.

All of her coworkers are older men.  Most married but they advise her against marriage.  She meets a man on a train.  She calls him an “English Remitance Man”.  A remitance man lives on money from home, sent on condition he live 

forever in Exile.  Usually he did something his father did not like at all so he paid him to leave.  As Linnett tells the story, the remitance man never really grows up, saved but cursed by his father’s money.  Linnett develops some feelings for him but he is married and her feelings were weak.

Linnett lives a Reading centered life.  She experiences things through her resding.  She makes a reference to Stefan Zweig.  I find this very interesting.  Zweig was driven into exile by his vision of a collapsing European culture.  Even though he made a fortune from his writings, he was kind of a remitance man.  His family wealth freed him to write, travel, and collect objects de art.

He was an Austrian Jew who tried to define himself as Austrian, in exile from his Ashganazi roots.  I saw that Linnett was reading “The Russians”, she is getting more into Central European Literature. 

As the story progresses Linnett marries.  As you read the Linnett stories keep in mind they are her looking back on the past.  She sees her past as part of a plot leading to her present.