Mavis Gallant, "Mlle. Dias de Corta"

scattered bones & unread letters

“It was for companionship rather than income that I had decided to open my home to a stranger.”

The novelist Ethan Canin, in a formulation that manages to seem simultaneously obvious and wrong, says, “Nothing is as important as a likable narrator.” For years, whenever I came across a line like this, I’d do the inner equivalent of shouting, Tell it to Humbert Humbert, you philistine! The endless, tedious likability wars (Franzen versus Weiner! Shriver versus everybody!) had, as far as I was concerned, been settled, and Mickey Sabbath just needed to sweep up the bones (careful what he does with them).

 But I’ve come to believe — with a good deal of chagrin, and after hundreds of discarded, unlikable pages of my own — that Canin and the rest of them may be onto something. I hereby do something thoroughly likable: I admit that I was wrong.

Because likability in fiction, I’ve realized, is a much subtler business than likability in life. In life, likability is a matter mostly of dinner-party virtues — is the person before you clever? Is she kind? Is she honest? 

In fiction likability is more a matter of lighting — has the writer done the necessary work, the invisible preparations and delicate adjustments, that will show the narrator so we can see past the scuffs and abrasions of her surface presentation? If she’s a bore, can we see through to her dread of silence, acquired during long and solitary childhood afternoons? If she’s nosy, can we see through to her terror of being the last to know?

Which is to say that Canin’s formula for successful fiction may not be insipid enough. We don’t just need a narrator whom we like; we need one whom we (in the warm and weary manner of adult children beholding their parents; in the manner almost of God beholding his creations) love.

Well, I love the unnamed narrator of Mavis Gallant’s short story, “Mlle. Dias de Corta.” I am infinitely grateful that she’s not in my family — she’s the French equivalent of a Fox News-poisoned retiree, forever fretting acidly about immigrants and re-checking the deadbolt —  but I would cry at her funeral. 

For those who haven’t read Gallant: she is perhaps the least known of the heads on the Mount Rushmore of English-language short story writers — she, Alice Munro, and William Trevor, gazing down in eternal, imposing excellence at everyone who has ever elicited a rejection note from The New Yorker. Gallant is, as a writer, a bit more cosmopolitan than Munro and a bit less bleak than Trevor. “Mlle. Dias de Corta” is my favorite of her stories — and one of my favorite stories, period.

It begins like this:

“You moved into my apartment during the summer of the year that abortion became legal in France; that should fix it in past time for you, dear Mlle. Dias de Corta. You had just arrived in Paris from your native city, which you kept insisting was Marseilles, and were looking for work.”

Thus in under a paragraph does Gallant give us the situation (a woman writing a letter to her former tenant) and the characters (a job-seeking, possible immigrant; an older woman for whom immigrant is a kind of slur). The job-seeker — Mlle. Dias de Corta — is, it turns out, an aspiring actor. And the occasion for the story, the ostensible reason that the narrator has sat down to write the letter that is the story, is: the narrator has, years after they lived together, seen Mlle Dias De Corta on television.

“What I want to tell you about has to do with the present and the great joy and astonishment we felt when we saw you in the oven-cleanser commercial last night.”  

An oven-cleanser commercial! And that brilliantly undermining “astonishment!” We read the story seething and snorting indignantly along with Mlle. Dias de Corta, marveling at the inadequately perfumed hatefulness of the narrator, at her passive-aggression and self-delusion.

But what I love about the story isn’t the virtuoso ventriloquism; it’s how Gallant shows us (though the narrator would hate for us to see it) her sadness, her vulnerability, her actual shocking and persistent love for the woman she can’t stop insulting. Gallant weaves a beautifully patterned, scrupulously textured fabric— and then, in a thousand subtle ways, she tears it.  

This is the first, and my favorite, of the tears:

“It was for companionship rather than income that I decided to open my home to a stranger.”

The first time I read it, the subtle self-martyring of the second half of the sentence (decided to open my home to a stranger) canceled out, or poisoned, the emotional claim of the first (It was for companionship rather than income). I was so busy enjoying my hatred of the narrator that I sped along to the next bit of nastiness, the next piece of gratuitous past-dredging, of which there are plenty. I didn’t believe her.

But on my second or third time through, this sentence stood out as a first glimpse of the story’s actual substance — a moment of actual, naked truth amidst all the prevarications and self-defenses. “Mlle. Dias de Corta” has a gasp-inducing, lovely ending (Gallant finally tears the fabric clean in half) and it works precisely because she has studded her story with these quiet, even negligible-seeming intimations of what’s to come.

Companionship (that starchy, self-protective synonym for love) really is, in the narrator’s pinched and bitter vocabulary, the thing she’s longing for. And it’s precisely the thing that her character — that inescapable pattern of gestures and memories — guarantees that she will never get. She is loathsome, the sort of person you time your comings and goings so as not to to run into in the hallway; the sort of person whose letters you throw out unread. You’ll love her.