All the questions that Linnet poses at the end of this story? I wonder about them straight away.
“How do you stand if you stand upon Zero? What will the passage be like between Zero and One? And what will happen at One? Yes, what will happen?”
Straight away, straight through, and still onwards.
And because I know that the final six stories in this collection are all about Linnet Muir, I peer more closely, trying to suss out the possibilities.
Is Linnet standing upon Zero? Is Linnet moving between Zero and One? Will the next story (“Varieties of Exile”) be about what will happen? At One?
And because there are so many similarities between Linnet Muir and Mavis Gallant, I peer until I am frowning.
This week, I read this story on Saturday (I’ve read it twice before, years ago.) I read it again on Sunday. And on Monday afternoon. There is a comma hanging on the edge of my inner brow, marking where I have squinted to see the truths behind the story. Truths about Zero and One.
After dinner on Monday, I pull back to focus on the rest of the story. On the rest of the things that this, slightly older, Linnet shares with us (the details she chooses to share, like the parts of the story that she tells the Americans in her first story).
From the furthest distance, there is Montreal.
“Montreal was a city where the greater part of the population were wrapped in myths and sustained by belief in magic.”
There is the office building.
“I climbed to the office in a slow reassuring elevator with iron grille doors, sharing it with inexpressive women and men – clearly, the trodden-on. No matter how familiar our faces became, we never spoke.”
And the office.
“I can see the rolled shirtsleeves, the braces, the eyeshades, the hunched shoulders, the elastic armbands, the paper cuffs they wore sometimes, the chopped-egg sandwiches in waxed paper, the apples, the oatmeal cookies…the thermos flasks.”
And Linnet’s place in it.
“And so, in an ambience of doubt, apprehension, foreboding, incipient danger, and plain hostility, for the first time in the history of the office a girl was allowed to sit with the men.”
And Linnet’s place in it when it is enlarged enough to hold a second woman, Mrs. Ireland.
“She said ‘Don’t you girls ever know when you’re well off? Now you’ve got no one to lie to you, to belittle you, to make a food of you, to stab you in the back.’ But we were different – different ages, different women, two lines of a graph that could never cross.”
There are the two women, looking out a window, which Linnet recalls as dirty. They are discussing Linnet’s engagement, her decision to marry, an unpopular decision with everyone, with the men, with the only other woman in the office.
And that’s where my questions begin anew. Because we do not simply see Linnet look out the window. We do not simply hear Mrs. Ireland dispense her advice (the kind of advice, no doubt, which the younger Linnet in the last story says was something adults felt entitled to give her, something unhelpful, it seems, because she is more concerned with escape).
We see Linnet looking back on Linnet looking out. We see her reflecting on her younger self.
So, back again. Start at the beginning. Go back to Montreal.
“In the very poorest part of the east end of the city, apparitions were commonplace; one lived among a mixture of men and women and their imaginings. I would never have believed then that anything could ever stir them from their dark dreams.”
And there is the other Linnet again. Yes, with the myths and magic from her first observation about the city. But also with an acceptance of apparitions and an acknowledgement that younger-Linnet would not have believed that those people could have been stirred from their dark dreams.
Linnet is just as alone as ever. Her co-workers “were rotting quietly until pension time” and she spends her lunch hours writing in a notebook. She is deeply happy.
She is independent, apart from apparitions, apart from her surroundings. “It was one of the periods of inexplicable grace when every day is a new parcel one unwraps, layer on layer of tissue paper covering bits of crystal, scraps of words in a foreign language, pure white stones.”
If there is movement here, I do not yet recognize the arc. Linnet views herself as moving on a parallel trajectory to Mrs. Ireland. Still a solitary soul.
For me, Linnet is still drawing the graph, her pencil poised to label the axes.
Home Truths Stories: Thank You for the Lovely Tea / Jorinda and Jorindel / Saturday / Up North / Orphans’ Progress / The Prodigal Parent / In the Tunnel / The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street / Bonaventure / Virus X / In Youth is Pleasure / Between Zero and One / Varieties of Exile / Voices Lost in Snow / The Doctor / With a Capital T
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Mavis Gallant’s stories, as I read through her short fiction. This is the final story in Home Truths. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story; I would love the company. Next collection: Overhead in a Balloon.
Oh, I’d like to have this book so I could read the Linnet stories!
I think they might be in the Selected Stories volume, or some of them, based on Mel’s reading of last week’s?
Oh, I’ll check! I had “tidied” up that book when I was reading Fifteenth District. Time to haul it back out!
Oh! There are 5 stories under the heading “Linnet Muir”. 🙂
Yay! But now, I’m so curious…which story is missing! (I feel badly for it. Why is that?!)
With a Capital T is missing. I was wondering why, too. And I also wonder why they are in a different order than your book! I’m going to assume it doesn’t matter…
Thanks for satisfying my curiosity! Maybe because it wasn’t one of the stories published in “The New Yorker” (the other five were, I believe).
About the order, I’m not sure, but “Voices Lost in Snow” kinda reflects on her childhood, so maybe one could begin there (not sure if that is where your copy begins, just guessing randomly about an alternative)?
And “Between Zero and One” and “Varieties of Exile” ever-so-slightly overlap, but I feel like “Varieties of Exile” should come after, because you do see how something turns out in that story and, in the other you’re not even sure it’s going to happen.
Overall, it’s been a real challenge to make sense of the way she is/isn’t published.
I am reading from Home Truths
As I watched Norte Dame on fire, I thought of a so very happy Mavis Gallant on her first visit to the cathedral, letting hundreds of years of French history impact her, knowing she was where she was meant to be.
In the collection Home Truths there are six linked stories centering on Linnet Muir. The stories are structured as Linnet when older looking back on her life.
She is a very independent person, very into a reading life, with no real family ties. From Montreal, she is now maybe twenty-one, World War Two is well underway. She works in office where most of the men are World War One Veterans. There are other women in the office but they are typists. She is the first woman hired to do the work the men do. The office is very much a civil service place where no one works to hard while waiting for their pension. There is resentment against her for taking a job from a man. All the men come across as bland grey unemotional time servers. The war is somehow made to seem not of great concern to Canads
These six stories made look for clues as to why Gallant moved from Canada to France. Montreal seems a boring city with no real identity and little culture.
The only future there for Linnet is to marry. All the married men in her office advise her against marriage. When she announces she intends to marry a young soldier scheduled to be to Europe, everyone advises her not to marry.
““Don’t do it, Linnet. Don’t do it.” Bertie Knox said, “Once you’re in it, you’re in it, kiddo.” I can’t remember any man ever criticizing his own wife–it is something men don’t often do, anywhere–but the warning I had was this: marriage was a watershed that transformed sweet, cheerful, affectionate girls into, well, their own mothers. Once a girl had caught (their word) a husband she became a whiner, a snooper, a killjoy, a wet blanket, a grouch, and a bully.”
When not working, she writes.
We go along when she submits one of her plays to a producer. There is an interesting segment on Linnet’s day at the theater.
Oh, that’s right: I’d forgotten that you found a copy to supplement your copy of the Selected Stories. That’s great: we can debate whether the final story (not included in the later anthology) really adds anything new to our understanding of Linnet.
When I began reading/rereading Mavis Gallant, I was still thinking of her more as a Montreal writer, but now, just a little over halfway through her oeuvre, I definitely feel like she is a European writer in Paris. And, now that I think about it, statistically it seems as though there are relatively few Montreal stories too. (But quite likely the ones included in our school anthologies would have been the ones set in Montreal, so I can see where I got this idea too.)
I was wondering if the men in the office with Linnet felt forced to downplay the presence of the way given that they were not fighting in it, whereas they may have faced social pressure and condemnation for not serving in the military. But, I think it’s also true that many in Quebec did not feel that this was their war, that the anglophone Canadians should bear that burden, since the English presence in the nation was so overpowering/repressive politically and culturally. So maybe it is more a comment on Montreal life.
Bertie really does make marriage sound awful. And I can’t help but be curious about the author’s brief experience with married life here, and the fact that she chose not to marry, even after she settled in Paris.