real housewives of lou mas

on mavis gallant's "the remission"

Hello friends—

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First some updates, an update, idk:

I reviewed the new AM Homes novel for 4Columns.

Some news about my books in the UK.

On Sept. 29, I am reading in NYC with some cool people.

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I have been thinking about one of my favorite short stories lately, “The Remission” by Mavis Gallant. As stories go, it is rather modest in its plot: an English family moves to the south of France so that the head of the family can die. They spend many months waiting for him to die, and he keeps not dying. Meanwhile, the children go slightly feral—that is to say, they become French—and the mother becomes entangled with a fellow expat.

While the setting is a village in southern France, the actual setting is the expatriate condition, that strange region of the mind and soul that surfaces in everyone who finds themselves living abroad long enough such that their external material life drifts out of phase with the modes and customs of their homeland. It is like living in a house where the clock is always an hour or two ahead or behind. This is distinct from exile because for the exile, all the clocks are stopped.

You could say that Gallant was interested in the difference between expatriates and exiles, that her true subject was the effect of displacement, the long-trailing edge of living one’s life both here and there. Note that here and there do not have to mean a literal distance. In Gallant’s fiction, sometimes here and there refer to before and after. Abroad can mean Europe. It can mean Canada. It can mean North Africa. Or it can mean a time in your life when something was good or bad, right or wrong. Sometimes in Gallant’s fiction, her characters yearn to return not to their physical home, but to all the things that home meant when they were young and loved, looked after. Sometimes, the past is a place. Sometimes, the future, often meaning freedom for Gallant’s characters, is a place.

 “The Remission,” deals mostly with expatriates who are in the slow process of becoming exiles. The process is largely subtractive, occurring by way of losses both large and small of things both meaningless and precious. An expatriate is someone whose life is not yet ruled by the absence of all the things they’ve given up. Indeed, the very condition under which the expatriate lives is by throwing things away with glee, so certain that they’re coming out ahead in the bargain. This is how Gallant introduces us to her expatriates:

When it became clear that Alec Webb was far more ill than anyone had cared to tell him, he tore up his English life and came down to die on the Riviera. The time was early in the reign of the new Elizabeth, and people were still doing this—migrating with no other purpose than the hope of a merciful sky. The alternative (Alec said to his only sister) meant queueing for death on the National Health Service, lying on a regulation mattress and rubber sheet, hearing the breath of other men dying.

Note how the paragraph ends on an open note, all those progressive verbs: queueing, lying, hearing, dying. Interminable waiting. That’s what Alec fears most. See how these verbs contrast with the sharpness at the start of the paragraph: tore up and came down and to die. Alec’s response to the possibility of interminable waiting is sharp, decisive action. Agency, in other words. It’s there at the level of grammar, right from the outset, one of the primal tensions of the story: that between waiting and doing.

Well, then, who are these Webbs? We find this out in the following paragraph: “Alec—as obituaries would have it later—was husband to Barbara, father to Will, Molly, and James.” Along with this rather piercing observation about the effects of this move on the children, “It did not occur to him or to anyone else that the removal from England was an act of unusual force that could rend and lacerate his children's lives as well as his own. The difference was that their lives were barely above ground and not yet in flower.” And to where has Alec removed his family? To a property called Lou Mas in a region called Rivebelle: “Mysterious Lou Mas, until now a name on a deed of sale, materialized as a pink house wedged in the side of a hill between a motor road and the sea.” As for Rivebelle, it is in some ways an externalization of the liminal expatriate condition itself, summed up in the following way:

It had been tugged between France and Italy so often that it now had a diverse, undefinable character and seemed to be remote from any central authority unless there were elections or wars. At its heart was a town sprawled on the hill behind Lou Mas and above the motor road. Its inhabitants said "Rivabella"; they spoke, among themselves, a Ligurian dialect with some Spanish and Arabic expressions mixed in, though their children went to school and learned French and that they descended from a race with blue eyes. What had remained constant to Rivabella was its poverty, and the groves of ancient olive trees that only the strictest of laws kept the natives from cutting down, and the look and character of the people.

The first time I read this, I didn’t think too much of it. The observations belong to the narrator, but they come at a slant—there is always a slant in fiction—from the general direction of Alec’s sensibility, and this we know because it is the voice of an outsider. Someone for whom the character of these strange, Catholic locals is undefinable. This is more or less confirmed when the narrator observes:”[…]they bore out the expectation set alight by his[Alec’s] reading, seeming to him classless and pagan, poetic and wise, imbued with an instinctive understanding of light, darkness, and immortality.”

We then get the sense of Barbara’s perspective of these locals: “Barbara expected them to be cunning and droll, which they were, and to steal from her, which they did, and to love her, which they seemed to.” The manner of this observation is important because it again, at the level of grammar, tells us something about the dramatic situation regarding Barbara. Chiefly, that she is ignorant to the motives and inner lives of those around her. Yes, she is correct regarding their character, but Gallant sets this off in commas as though it is only by chance that her prejudices and assumptions bear out.

This also seems more or less to be supported by the following observation regarding the children and their lack of material from which to draw assumption about the characteristics of others: “Only the children were made uneasy by these strange new adults, so squat and ill-favored, so quarrelsome and sly, so destructive of nature and pointlessly cruel to animals. But, then, the children had not read much, were unfamiliar with films, and had no legends to guide them.”

Once the Webbs have moved to Lou Mas, they’ve got to go about the business of living. Barbara, the social and bureaucratic face of the family since Alec is ill and the children are, well, children, sets out to secure a household staff and a local doctor for Alec. While we have seen her first impression of the city, Gallant unfolds her increasing familiarity to Rivebelle while at the same illuminating the contours of her personality. After all, it’s rather interesting that the one place she finds compelling is the graveyard—one can’t help but to imagine her imagining her husband soon to be buried there:

Only the graveyard was worth exploring; it contained Victorian English poets who had probably died of tuberculosis in the days when an enervating climate was thought to be good for phthisis, and Russian aristocrats who had owned some of the English houses, and Garibaldian adventurers who, like Alec, had never owned a thing. Most of these graves were over- grown and neglected, with the headstones all to one side, and wild grasses grown taller than roses. The more recent dead seemed to be commemorated by marble plaques on a high concrete wall; these she did not examine. What struck her about this place was its splendid view: She could see Lou Mas, and quite far into Italy, and of course over a vast stretch of the sea. How silly of all those rich foreigners to crowd down by the shore, with the crashing noise of the railway. I would have built up here in a minute, she thought.

What is most telling to me in this passage is that as she moves among these commemorations and monuments to the dead and all that the dead represented, situating them in attitude and the history of their time, where she ends up is pondering the view. She imagines, somewhat tartly, that if it were up to her, she’d build a house up there among the dead. The view. Yet, nestled in the turns and twists of the paragraph is another tell: “The more recent dead seemed to be commemorated by marble plaques on a high concrete wall; these she did not examine.” It’s a simple sentence, yet it contains a great deal of weight because we are left to ponder why she does not examine the monuments to the recently deceased. There are many reasons a woman with a dying husband and three children at home might not be moved to look at statues to recently deceased husbands in a graveyard in Southern France. Maybe she finds it boring. Maybe she doesn’t want to invite bad luck into her family. Maybe it’s too much to bear, her near future so solid and concrete before her, jutting out of the ground with the permanence of oracular prophecy. Or, I don’t know, maybe she doesn’t care about any of that stuff. Gallant knows this, but does not dwell on it because Barbara does not dwell on it. And in that not dwelling, we glimpse some of Barbara’s feelings on the matter. And where does she turn after this looking away? To the view, of course.

Barbara eventually locates a doctor, who Gallant summarizes by summarizing the expatriate attitude: “Alec's new doctor was young and ugly and bit his nails. He spoke good English, and knew most of the British colony, to whose colds, allergies, and perpetually upset stomachs he ministered. British ailments were nursery ailments; what his patients really wanted was to be tucked up next to a nursery fire and fed warm bread-and-milk.” Meanwhile, Alec, resting on the balcony, makes his own observations of expatriate life, “Within those houses was a way of being he sensed and understood, for it was a smaller, paler version of colonial life, with chattering foreign servants who might have been budgerigars, and hot puddings consumed under brilliant sunlight. Rules of speech and regulations for conduct were probably observed, as in the last days of the dissolving Empire.”

Much of the first third of “The Remission” is dedicated to the Webbs observing and learning how to function as expatriates and how to live abroad. We see Lou Mas and Rivebelle and hear about the local British colony, that group of other expatriates also living along the riviera. Summary descriptions of life flecked with small happenings, but at the end of this first movement, there is a shift out of general time into the specific time of incident: “In the spring, the second Elizabeth was crowned. Barbara ordered a television set from a shop in Nice. It was the first the children had seen. Two men carried it with difficulty down the steps from the road, and soon became tired of lifting it from room to room while Barbara decided where she wanted it.”

This episode is comical though it parallels with a rather devastating scene later in the story where Alec is hoisted up the mountain to the hospital for his final days. But for the moment, we just watch as Barbara has the poor shop men carry the TV from room to room in their comically large villa until she decides upon putting it in a room formerly used for theatrical productions. The family go upstairs to tell Alec about the TV and its threats of implosion, and there, his daughter, Molly, fears that if there is a house fire, he won’t be able to escape. This prompts her to touch him and he pulls his hand away to turn page, thinking, “What use was his hand to Molly or her anxiety to him now? Why hold her? Why draw her into his pale world?” Gallant develops this image a little further down in the next paragraph, noting Alec’s thoughts on his condition:

His blood was white (that was how he saw it), and his lungs and heart were bleached, too, and starting to disintegrate like snowflakes. He was a pale giant, a drained Gulliver, cast up on the beach, open territory for invaders. […] Alec's intrepid immigrants, his microscopic colonial settlers had taken over. He had been easy to subdue, being courteous by nature, diffident by choice. He had been a civil servant, then a soldier; had expected the best, relied on good behavior; had taken to prison camp thin books about Calabria and Greece; had been evasive, secretive, brave, unscrupulous only sometimes—had been English and middle class, in short.

Alec’s frank, somewhat amused description of his life is a little heartbreaking. He isn’t the carrying-on type. He isn’t one to make a fuss. He figures, why involve his family in the emotional tumult of his demise when the demise is so common, so typical, so bourgeois. Take on the chin. Get on with it. Whatever. That sort of thing. Yet, his reticence as a father, diffident by choice, is protective. The impulse of someone who wants to leave no absence when he goes.

What follows are two of my very, very, very favorite paragraphs in any short story ever. They are quite long, but you need to read them in their entirety to get why I like them:

That night Alec had what the doctor called "a crisis" and Alec termed "a bad patch." There was no question of his coming down for Coronation the next day. The children thought of taking the television set up to him, but it was too heavy, and Molly burst into tears thinking of implosion and accidents and Alec trapped. In the end the Queen was crowned in the little theater, as Barbara had planned, in the presence of Barbara and the children, Mr. Cranefield and Mrs. Massie, the doctor from Rivabella, a neighbor called Major Lamprey and his old mother, Mrs. Massie's housekeeper, Barbara s cook and two of her grandchildren, and Mademoiselle. One after the other these people turned their heads to look at Alec, gasping in the door- way, holding on to the frame. His hair was carefully combed and parted low on one side, like Mr. Cranefield's, and he had dressed completely, though he had a scarf around his neck instead of a tie. He was the last, the very last, of a kind. Not British but English. Not Christian so much as Anglican. Not Anglican but giving the benefit of the doubt. His children would never feel what he had felt, suffer what he had suffered, relinquish what he had done without so that this sacrament could take place. The new Queen's voice flowed easily over the Alps—thin, bored, ironed flat by the weight of what she had to remember—and came as far as Alec, to whom she owed her crown. He did not think that, precisely, but what had pulled him to his feet, made him stand panting for life in the doorway, would not occur to James or Will or Molly—not then, or ever.

He watched the rest of it from a chair. His breathing bothered the others: It made their own seem too quiet. He ought to have died that night. It would have made a reasonable ending. This was not a question of getting rid of Alec (no one wanted that) but of being able to say later, "He got up and dressed to see the Coronation." However, he went on living.

I love this passage because in another story, this would be the end. It sums up Alec’s life. It sums up the whole of history as he’s lived it. His ordinary, bourgeois, typical existence. He has not been a heroic, bold, brilliant person. His life has been ordinary. Yet, drained of all of his strength and struggling just to stay alive, he stands to salute the Queen. Now, I’m not a monarchist. It doesn’t matter that it’s a queen. What matters is that Alec, recognizes in the moment that only his life but the whole way of life that he has known is passing out of the world. Not merely his particular existence, but the systems of meaning and value and making sense and going to war and fighting for one’s convictions and one’s country, all of that stuff is passing from the world. And here, having been an ordinary person and having given what he was expected to give, he has at last some final symbol of all that sacrifice. It’s culminated in this young woman, this queen, taking on her duty. And he knows, because the story tells us this, that his children will have very different lives. They will live under the star of a new monarch, a new way of living and being and making sense. And they will do it without him.

So, yes, in another story, this would have been the end. Gallant says as much, “He ought to have died that night.” But instead, he goes on living. He does not die. This has somewhat comical consequences. Barbara’s brothers—who financed Lou Mas on the understanding that soon Alec would die and they’d tear the place down and turn it into hotels—are annoyed at his inability to stop living. They force Barbara to enroll the children in school and to let go all of their staff. In short, they’ve got to give up the colonial life and become exiles,“ Alec's remission was no longer just miraculous—it had become unreasonable. Barbara's oldest brother hinted that Alec might be better off in England, cared for on National Health: They were paying unholy taxes for just such a privilege.”

Around this point, a man enters their lives, a Mr. Wilkinson, who first offers Molly a ride home one winter. This is comical as we’ve just watched Barbara give Molly the talk re: men and their motives with respect to Molly’s new maturity: “‘You are never, ever to speak to a stranger on the bus. You're not to get in a car with a man—not even if you know him.’” In almost the very next paragraph, Gallant introduces Wilkinson: “The car that, inevitably, pulled up to a bus stop in Nice was driven by a Mr. Wilkinson. He had just taken Major Lamprey and the Major's old mother to the airport. He rolled his window down and called to Molly, through pouring rain, ‘I say, aren't you from Lou Mas?’”

It's a rather fateful meeting with consequences for the entire family. Molly does take the offer and in trying to explain it to her mother, she inadvertently introduces the two of them. An affair begins:

She sat at the dining-room table, wearing around her shoulders a red cardigan Molly had outgrown. On the table were the Sunday papers Alec's sister continued to send faithfully from England, and Alec's lunch tray, exactly as she had taken it up to him except that everything on it was now cold. She glanced up and saw the two of them enter—one stricken and guilty- looking, the other male, confident, smiling. The recognition that leaped between Barbara and Wilkinson was the last thing that Wilkinson in his right mind should have wanted, and absolutely everything Barbara now desired and craved. Neither of them heard Molly saying, "Mummy, this is Mr. Wilkinson. Mr. Wilkinson wants to tell you how he came to drive me home."

What excellent, precise nouns. What particular objects. The cardigan Molly has outgrown, the Sunday papers from England, Alec’s food untouched. A tableau of the deserted wife on a dark, cold day, her child bringing home a stranger who sparks something familiar in her. Hunger. Desire. For the first time in a long, long while, she recognizes herself in the glance of a man. His wanting her revives her. But here, in this first encounter, it’s like something out of a myth.

Gallant then skips ahead in time, not bothering to elaborate or bore us with the inevitable courtship. Instead, we see how quickly things have progressed in the next scene when Alec must be hospitalized:

It happened at last that Alec had to be taken to the Rivabella hospital, where the local poor went when it was not feasible to let them die at home. Eric Wilkinson, new family friend, drove his car as far as it could go along a winding track, after which they placed Alec on a stretcher; and Wilkinson, Mr. Cranefield, Will, and the doctor carried him the rest of the way. A soft April rain was falling, from which they protected Alec as they could. In the rain the doctor wept unnoticed. The others were silent and absorbed. The hospital stood near the graveyard—shamefully near, Wilkinson finally remarked, to Mr. Cranefield.

I’m not exaggerating. This paragraph follows immediately after the preceding one. We are to conclude from the description of Wilkinson as a “new family friend” that he’s ingratiated himself at Lou Mas and he and Barbara have been carrying on. This knowledge comes indirectly. Also, how incredible is this scene? The person who drives the dying Alec up the mountain is the man sleeping with his wife. And then they all have to get out of the car and carrying him on a stretcher the remainder of the way through the rain, only to be confronted with a view of the graveyard. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s dark, it’s totally natural in terms of its dramatic action. Another writer would try to wring it out, piling paragraph upon paragraph, thinking that the more space and the more dull nouns you can pile into a moment, the better written it is. Gallant leaves out the boring stuff.

More things happen. Alec goes on not dying. The brothers grow frustrated. Barbara writes to ask for more money. And then they threaten to turn her out when they discover she’s got a boyfriend. The children grow restless. Barabra and Wilkinson contrive to have Alec sign his part of the property over to Barbara and himself so that upon his death, Barbara can rescind her brothers’ authority and complete her transformation from expatriate to exile. Because we know that she can never go back. She can never return to England and to her Welsh brothers. She can never again leave this place because the cost of this new life with Wilkinson is the cost of her old life. Her daughter resents her for this and at the funeral says that Barbara never loved Alec.

And so, at Alec’s funeral, you have this really fantastic scene of the post-funeral meal. Everyone’s feelings are hurt. Everyone is nervous and anxious about what will come next. But they are so concerned with prosecuting and investigating the legitimacy of their various griefs and hurts that they forget to think of Alec. Here is what Gallant makes of that moment:

It then happened that every person in the room, at the same moment, spoke and thought of something other than Alec. This lapse, this inattention, lasting no longer than was needed to say "No, thank you" or "Oh, really?" or "Yes, I see," was enough to create the dark gap marking the end of Alec's span. He ceased to be, and it made absolutely no difference after that whether or not he was forgotten.

Dramatically and emotionally, we are far afield from the scene where Alec stands during the Queen’s coronation, the moment that I said another writer would have chosen to end the story. Here, Gallant is choosing to end her story on a moment of forgetting, a moment in which everyone’s lives are unsettled and unresolved. In overshooting that first, obvious ending, we have arrived at a place of real human complication. Unsettling and sad because it is so utterly believable. That first moment could not have been the true ending of the story because it was an ending that seemed to satisfy the false idea the characters had about their situation. If only Alec had died when he was supposed to. Barbara would not have broken up her family. Wilkinson would not have gotten his claws into them. The children would have been English—prim and snobby and rather dull. Everything would have worked out for the better. But that was not true to life. It was not real. It was the sort of thing we wish we can tell ourselves and others about the way we live. That there are neat, precise endings. That the world obeys the aesthetic rules we set out for it.

I think this story perfectly captures what makes Mavis Gallant such as brilliant writer. The quietly experimental and radical vision that powers her fiction. The flexibility of her technique—point of view shifting sometimes within a paragraph, sometimes within a sentence—but more importantly, the way that her technique seems to extend from the consciousness of her characters. Those sentences vibrate, taut, because they are filled with a sensibility. A point of view. The humor is wicked. Clever, sometimes stinging. She can be mean in her stories. But one feels a kind of unkempt shagginess to the emotional lives of her characters, who seem to come out of life itself with ideas and beliefs and rules for themselves.  

As for “The Remission” itself. I read this story once every couple of years. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But I think of it more often than I read it. For a long time, I considered myself an exile though I had never left the region of my birth. I thought that I had been exiled, spiritually, from some place where I truly belonged and had been born in the wrong place. Gallant’s characters are always displaced, trying to get down the rules and modes of the strange lands where they find themselves. But the strangest land of all is invariably the human heart and the space between who we are and who we perceive ourselves to be. For that reason, Gallant’s characters surprise and startle both themselves and the reader. No one behaves quite as they should and yet their behavior is totally believable. It’s so hard to do.

I hope that you will read the story. I hope that you’ll go out and read other of her stories, especially “Speck’s Idea” and the Linnet Muir stories and “The Cost of Living,” which has one of my favorite passages. I hope you’ll enjoy them and let me know what you think.

As for me, on Sunday, I fly to London and then after a few days, I will be in France until the following Monday. I’m traveling to do some early publicity work for my upcoming novel The Late Americans, which will be published by Riverhead in America and Jonathan Cape in the UK. In Paris, I’m doing the Festival America, so if you are around Vincennes, come on out.

See you.

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