Follow Canada Immigration and listen to Canadian stories: It is difficult to talk about Mavis Gallant today without mentioning Alice Munro. Both are Canadian female writers, yet beyond that, they are opposites in every way: Munro spent her life in Ontario, observing the people and events of small towns, while Gallant was born in Montreal, the largest metropolis in Quebec, and then chose self-exile, earnestly determined to become a wanderer. When she was ten, Gallant's father passed away and her mother remarried; she changed 17 middle schools over eight years before finally graduating in New York. At 18, she returned to Montreal and worked for a few years as a reporter for a newspaper that no longer exists, The Standard, during which time she interviewed French cultural icons like Jean-Paul Sartre. Later, before she was even 30, she had already planned her future: to move to France and start her life as a nomad from there. Mavis Gallant achieved what many writers dream of—supporting herself through her writing—but she also lost much; for instance, after one divorce, she never had another husband.
In every sense, Gallant was a wanderer. The only stable things in her life were her language—living in the French-speaking world, she insisted on writing in English—and her role as a long-term contributor to The New Yorker, the most famous cultural publication in the English-speaking world, which truly supported many excellent writers. Judging by the short story collection "Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories," Gallant wrote the kind of fiction that The New Yorker preferred: autobiographical and reminiscent, placing the individual against the backdrop of an era, while commenting on and unfolding plots that were hardly plots at all. The protagonist in the stories, Linnet Muir, is a fictionalized version of Gallant herself, so you can almost believe that every word or inner monologue of Linnet's is what Gallant herself wanted to say: she possessed a tremendous passion to let readers understand her state of mind and her journey.
In the title story of the collection, Gallant tells us how her desire to wander the world sprouted: "In the third year of the war, I began to meet refugees. There were a great many refugees in Montreal—to me, it was a boundless miracle. I could not get enough of them." This was entirely factual. In 1942, at the most difficult moment of the war, the province of Quebec, separated by the ocean from the British mainland, began to accept refugees. "Each of them... was a book I wanted to read from beginning to end." Gallant then begins to recount how Canada became a place of exile for the British: if Australia was a nation created by convicts, then Canada was a country that already existed, only to be chosen later by British parents—who had neither the heart nor the ability to raise their children—as a "depository." They sent their children on their way, gave them some money, and—even more shockingly—managed to prevent them from returning.
As the emotional tone of "Home Truths" suggests, Mavis Gallant welcomed, or was at least curious about, all forms of exile. She tells us with great interest how she chose to mingle with those refugees and "remittance men" (British men exiled there, living on remittances from their parents) to escape a normal, boring life trajectory. Linnet Muir was engaged three times by the age of 19. A fact to note here is that Canada's economy took off with the start of World War II. In a country of only 10 million people, one-tenth of the population donned uniforms and participated to varying degrees in the war across the ocean at different times; therefore, during that period, the domestic unemployment rate was almost zero. Linnet-Mavis (born in 1922) would certainly realize what price she would pay for getting engaged early and accepting "arrangements" in a country so desperate for people. Later, Margaret Atwood, who was 17 years her junior, would mock the efforts of parents and elders to train a generation of "qualified" Canadian women from a much clearer feminist standpoint.
A country that is taking off may precisely suppress individual humanity because, whether in discourse or practical need, it releases a gravitational pull, trying to hold people firmly on its own soil and demanding that more citizens strive for loyalty. A better story in this collection, "Between the Zero and the One," recounts Linnet's observations while working in a government department during the war. The office was filled with men who could not go to the front for various reasons or no longer needed to. Together with the women, they listened to the calm war reports on the radio and talked about the young men who might never return. Safety, idleness, and a lack of reflection bred a virus of superiority. They looked down on refugees and also on the French-speaking Canadians in Quebec. Gallant wrote: "Why couldn't they move, walk, stretch, run? Each of them seemed to be tied to an invisible square; in this square were my desk, my drafting paper, my rubber bands. Every morning, I had to check the contents of the square..." At the beginning of the story, she also mentions that between the ages of 36 and 45, men seemed to stop growing as if they were static—for Canadians who experienced that transition from crisis and scarcity to prosperity, this should be a fairly accurate summary.
Exile constitutes a condemnation, resistance, and breakthrough against an unchanging rhythm. In The Paris Review's "Art of Fiction" interview, Mavis Gallant spoke with relish about her self-driving trips and hiking in various countries: "I have gone to places where I didn't know a single soul, and returned with my notebook full of addresses." But she also said: "There are other environments where I cannot establish any connection, not just because there is no common language. Even in your own country, similar things can happen." "Strangers in the homeland" is a particularly accurate description for those who clearly hold nationality and citizenship but are driven around without a fixed place to live, or who do not feel protection and love from their compatriots, neighbors, friends, or the system.
Of course, Mavis Gallant had no reason to hate her own country. However, in a sense, perhaps the more politically enlightened, legally sound, and culturally developed a country is, the more sensitive people's self-esteem becomes, and the easier it is to be touched by subtle factors, causing resentment or unease, and thus making reactions that seem excessive to people elsewhere. Self-exile is one such reaction. Simply out of boredom, mixed with some youthful rebellious mentality and socialist dreams, Linnet was willing to plunge into the arms of the goddess of freedom.
The short story "Home Truths" has only a very simple plot: Linnet meets a British "remittance man," Frank Cairns, on a train. He has no children, no destination, has lived in Sri Lanka, carries a few books in his bag, and loves to say, "Life has no meaning." When Linnet discovers that the news of her meeting Cairns just a few times has already been spread, she immediately packs her bags, leaves her rented place, and moves back to Montreal. She is already engaged and is preparing for her future exile: first by getting married to escape her parents, and then by going into exile to escape her husband. Beyond that, any chance romance is impossible and risky for her.
So this is a fairly pure state of exile, not just a "trip you can take at any time"; she never intended to stop. The Canadian military participated in World War II most heavily in two places: the Normandy landings and Italy, especially the invasion of Sicily. Cairns in the story later died on the Italian battlefield. Following that, Linnet has a somewhat incoherent monologue: she says the exile is dead, and Montreal is starting to "integrate" the refugees of that year, giving them citizenship and letting them settle down. The machine of gravity has started again. Thus, Mavis Gallant chose to live in France, returning to Canada once or twice a year even in her seventies and eighties to maintain a sense of being "elsewhere." Now that she is over ninety, can she still move around? I think someone who has lived such a completely spontaneous life would surely prefer to vanish on the road.