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MAVIS GALLANT’S CHOIC
Jhumpa Lahiri
Exactly five years ago, in February, 2009, I travelled to Paris to interview Mavis Gallant for Granta. It was my second trip to Paris, my first after discovering her work. And so it was her Paris in which I found myself, a city she had long ago claimed and made her own, a city she had described to me repeatedly and unforgettably in her stories. From reading her, I recognized its dark mornings, its buildings, its streets, though I hardly knew my way around.
She picked me up in a taxi on Rue Jacob and told the driver to take us to the Village Voice Bookshop, where we were given a room upstairs to talk. A small woman, eighty-six years old, at once fierce and frail, with a girlish voice, a disarming smile, dramatic rings on her fingers. To prepare to meet her, I had reread everything, brought several tape recorders, and written out pages of questions. But, as soon as I posed the first, the conversation, much like her stories, veered sharply off course. She was at once gracious and proud, loquacious and cagey. She saw immediately beyond the contours, the confines of the conversation. She could not be captured or contained. She refused to discuss what did not interest her, just as she refused to waste words on the dispensable and predictable elements of a plot. There are only certain moments in life that matter, she told me. Those were the moments in which meaning lay.
In some ways, I was not the right person at all to interview her. I loved her work too much, and my debt to her was too great. I longed, in the course of three conversations that February, for some form of connection. But this proved to be impossible. I felt bewildered, disoriented, overwhelmed by her presence. It was not unlike the way I felt when reading her. But she was not a story I could go back to and read, and right away I felt she was running away from me. After the first conversation, I ignored my questions and listened. It was only afterward, hearing the tapes and transcribing them, that I absorbed the things she said.
Our last evening together, I sat across from her at a Vietnamese restaurant, part of a small group at a long table. She was quiet, and seemed tired. I intuited, in the course of our time together, that she was reading but no longer writing, and I sensed her frustration because of it. At the last minute, before leaving, I told her the only thing I felt was worth conveying: “No one writes as you do.” I saw in her eyes that she had heard me, that it meant something to her. In the years that followed, we exchanged a few letters. Hers, written on postcards, were whimsical observations about nothing in particular. I kept the envelopes, addressed to me in her increasingly unsteady hand, propped against the wall of my writing desk.
In Italy, where I live now, I have put some distance between myself and the world that has formed me. Mavis is a part of that world. I have not read her in a few years, but I think of her constantly in Rome. I understand now what drew her to live and work abroad, untethered. I understand why she never returned. I understand the need to be detached not only from one’s past but, to a certain degree, from one’s present. Only then can one see without impediment or inhibition, as she did.
In her essay “What Is Style,” she writes, “Literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death.” I have thought often and hard about this statement. It seemed at first a sweeping declaration, somewhat opaque. But over time this observation has grown specific, profound, startling in its significance. Stories were her means of survival. She belonged to them and nothing else. The defiant choice she made, to live as an expatriate, without family, and solely by means of her writing, was and remains a revolutionary act. Both in life and on the page, she blazed a trail no one since has dared follow.
When I visited her in Paris, I was aware of the cost of this choice. She was alone, increasingly dependent on others. She had already given everything she had to the lives she had invented, the moments of truth and revelation she saw fit to preserve. She had understood families, history, the effects of war, pettiness, loneliness, absurdity, identity, exile, pain. She understood the brutality of life. She made her home in Paris and in the pages of this magazine. She marked her territory and mined it, as no one did.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s most recent novel is “The Lowland.”
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