In this week’s Hub book review, Lydia Perovic examines Montreal Standard Time: The Early Journalism of Mavis Gallant, (Véhicule Press, 2024). Edited by Neil Besner, Martha Dvořák, and Bill Richardson, the book compiles the early work of one of Canada’s best known short story writers during her six-year stint at the Montreal Standard, starting in 1944 when she was just 22.
What becomes obvious after only a few chapters of this selection from the early journalism of Mavis Gallant is that she was a fully formed writer already in 1944, when she got her first—and it will turn out, only—full-time media job, in the nationally distributed weekly, the Montreal Standard. She immediately became one of Standard’s most-read contributors, though the editors probably took more time getting used to her than the readers, especially editors who returned back from active service abroad to find women occupying some of their male colleagues’ jobs.
Would a “lady reporter” cut an unusual figure in the Duplessis Montreal? If so, Gallant never commented on the situation in her writing. Howard Hawks’ His Girl Friday was four years old by then, but this proto-feminist screwball classic was not followed by a wave of co-ed workplace comedies. Over in Montreal, the Duplessis era periodicals preferred to steer clear of political and religious themes, though most of the rest was up for grabs and Gallant’s range here is vast. Quebec, and Canada, lay largely undescribed in the 1940s.
Many of her pieces here would be published in the Life or Ideas or Books sections today. Others would require a rubric called Society. What immediately strikes you is how fundamentally different magazine-type journalism and the longform are today, both in subject matter and in form. I couldn’t pinpoint when exactly the personal essay became the dominant approach to longform in the U.S. and Canada, but the traffic-chasing period of journalism—described in every last painful detail in Ben Smith’s excellent Traffic, for example—only reinforced the dominance of the personal.
The dailies have not remained immune, with “First Person” rubrics and meditative longform to be found everywhere except the straight news reporting sections. Art criticism too succumbed, where it still exists. Movie reviews have always been susceptible, but I’ve read book reviews in the New York Review of Books that begin with long exposition on what the reviewer’s been up to lately. And earlier this year, two New York Magazine pieces went madly viral which means more of the same down the pike for everyone: a confessional by a woman who almost divorced her husband, and another one about making foolish financial decisions.
Gallant’s pieces hail from the era before the dominance of me-writing, and what a welcome experience they are. It’s like having a chance to exercise a long-neglected reading muscle. You’d never have guessed that during the five years at the Standard, Gallant was married, started publishing fiction, got divorced, and made a firm decision to move to Europe for good. (When the last piece in this collection was published, she was already on the other side of the Atlantic.)
Much has been written recently about the bourgeoisification of journalism as a profession—and of literature too, via the MFA programs and the precondition now to have come from money to even attempt a freelance artistic profession of any kind in our largest cities. I am afraid this book too could be used as a proof for the thesis—if it needed more proof. Starting with a portrait of a “city kid wise beyond his years”—a street-urchin figure like the boy of Trufault’s The 400 Blows—Montreal Standard Time is a gallery of characters that wouldn’t really be on the radar of the non-fiction writers today.
Gallant writes about war brides and the displaced persons (DPs) who make it to Canada under the condition that they work as domestic help, and Canadian soldiers who are back home, giving it their best to adjust to peacetime, trying not to mourn girlfriends who married. She writes about one particular loathsome “baby farm” where the unwed mothers bring the children that they can’t support for adoption, and about the terrifying state of a for-profit care home for the elderly. There is a keenly attentive piece about the men who take mining jobs, illustrated by a former RCAF cartoonist in residence who himself lived a life worthy of a novel (do not miss Bill Richardson’s well-researched end annotations for each of the Gallant pieces; this particular one gives us the entire eventful life of Hugh Rickard (1916-1999), cartoonist, soldier, maintenance supervisor).
In another chapter, Gallant writes about female prison inmates in Toronto and the conditions of their lives, and in a piece that reads like a Gallant short story, a Hungarian immigrant viewing an apartment for rent is mesmerized by an egg beater and similar kitchen tchotchke on display. Gallant suggests it’s probably because the immigrant had servants galore back home, not because he was too poor to have come across the then-standard Canadian consumer items.
Just about all of the novelists that Gallant profiles here come from a working-class or farming background. (One exception is the short piece on Dorothy Duncan and Hugh MacClennand who, anticipating the current era, held academic jobs.) Gallant opens her piece on Gabrielle Roy by describing the Montreal area that her first novel Bonheur d’occasion is set in:
Fenced in by smokestacks and textile mills, the St. Henri District of Montreal sprawls crookedly from the Lachine Canal to well-to-do Westmount […] A line of church spires divides the district from the rest of the city. […] When there’s work to be had, the young girls and boys go into cotton mills and tobacco factories. Most men work in two large railway car manufacturing plants.
Louis Hémon, the French expat author of the then-widely read Maria Chapdelaine, lived among Quebec farmers while working on this novel set in a remote Quebec village. He, we learn, “was hired for eight dollars a month with one afternoon a week reserved for his ‘correspondence’. It was during these afternoons that he collected material and made notes for this book.” Roger Lemelin, author of The Town Below and Les Plouffe, Gallant writes, grew up in St. Sauveur, a working-class suburb of Quebec City. He started working in his teens and moved from job to job. When the Guggenheim Fellowship and Richard Wright came his way, he was about to become the general manager of a lumber firm where he started out as a bookkeeper. His future wife worked in a shoe factory.
Still, not all of the book points to a lost world: there are topics here that are still with us. Already back in the 1940s, Gallant was writing about the popularization of psychotherapy concepts and how a certain version of psychoanalysis shapes the understanding of the self among the chattering classes. “Ten dollar fine should be imposed on anyone saying ‘neurotic’, ‘escape’, ‘transference’, ‘suggestion’, ‘sublimation’, ‘inferiority complex’, ‘superiority’, and ‘fixation’,” she writes, adding that inhibition, phobia, repression, sadism, and frustrated should be charged on a sliding scale.
An article titled “Is Mercy Killing Murder?” explores the ethical issues around assisted suicide, while “Give the Kid a Gory Story” tackles whether reading gory tales makes children more violent and insensitive to gore in real life. Then there’s the absolute evergreen, “Why Are We Canadians So Dull?” from 1946. What is behind our “canny cautious conservatism,” asks Gallant: is it the harsh climate, small population? Forever balancing between America and Britain? “Caution and neutrality, our most distinctive traits, have kept us from producing anything new and original.” Besides, “Silliest situation of all is the way Canadians get violent over Americanization yet nine times out of ten won’t buy, read, or listen to a home-grown product. The word ‘Canadian’ is enough to kill it in its own country.”What are we so frightened of? Gallant wonders. “Canadians move when they have to and go into a slump when they don’t. It might make for steady living, but it doesn’t make for much fun.” Eighty years later, to this I can only say…no comment.
