In “Saturday”, the mother had dreamed a different kind of life for her daughters.
In “Up North”, Dennis’ mother is dreaming of a different kind of life for herself.
She’s on a train, north of Montreal, heading for Abitibi, Quebec. That’s where Dennis’ father is working in the bush.
A man on the train asks enough questions to figure where the boy’s father fits into the “social hierarchy of the north”.
Because Mavis Gallant does not edge away from the question of class. And the father is part of a lower one, a casual labourer. (In contrast, the man on the train works as an engineer in the camp.)
Which explains why the boy’s mother is so uncomfortable while travelling, the conditions are constrained.
It’s impossible not to sympathize with her, when she is weeping in the train compartment, straining to change her clothing while lying down in the cramped space.
But it’s also impossible not to sympathize with her son, Dennis, who could use a little patience on this long and uncomfortable journey.
It’s familiar by now, Mavis Gallant’s fair-mindedness in her stories, this sense that each character experiences the world (within story and without) in a unique and powerful way.
In fact, there are many familiar elements in this short story (just seven pages long).
For instance, her characters have inhabited bush camps elsewhere, in one of my favourite stories, actually: “My Heart Is Broken”. And other Gallant characters have seen ghosts, most recently in “From the Fifteenth District” (six pages of hauntings). And in so many of her stories, mothers have been emotionally unstable (often reluctant or unwilling to mother) individuals who complicate their children’s lives.
“It’s not proper country,” Dennis’ mother observes of the northern Quebec landscape. But McLaughlin, the engineer, doesn’t find it too “bare” and, after the boy and his mother disembark, McLaughlin continues to travel further north, to potentially more improper places, even more “persistent sameness”.
But it’s not so much what is seen in this story which matters. Rather, what is not seen.
Readers don’t, for instance, see the war, which ended a little more than a year before. (It has taken that long for the mother and her son to leave Liverpool to come to Canada.) They don’t see McLaughlin’s motivation for his enquiries.
And, perhaps most importantly, readers do not see what Dennis sees either. Not the group of settlers, stocky men with packs on their backs. Not the trail of natives near a rail fence. McLaughlin speaks enough of the history of the area to explain an unexpectedly high death rate in years past, enough to make Dennis’ mother think twice about her belief that Dennis has been fabricating these tales. Enough to make Dennis understand that he can see what others cannot.
And isn’t that just what Mavis Gallant handles so deftly, all those things that are right in front of us, which we all-too-often overlook.
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 fourth 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 story: “Orphans’ Progress”.
I like your idea of a four year project as i take it for me as an sffirmation of The future
It’s good to look at it that way. After all, we know we will never read everything we want to read. We might as well focus on the fact that we can plan to do so, regardless. 🙂
When I am actually engaged in a collection, I wonder why I put breaks between them, making it a four-year-long project (instead of three). But when I am between collections, I am happy to be able to read some other short stories and take them on their own terms, rather than constantly comparing them to Gallant!
Katherine Mansfield set a number of her short stories on trains, with women talking to men they never met, opening up to a stranger they knew they would never see again. “Up North” is such a story. Set around 1946 or so, when Gallant must’ve been dreaming about leaving Canada, the woman is the English war bride of a Canadian soldier, she is with her son who barely remembers his father. They are headed Abitibi, in northern Quebec to join her husband who drives a bull doxer for an aluminum company. We never learn how she came to marry a Canadian soldier or anything at all about her life in England. Gallant is a master at using small details to illuminate the past and see into the future:
“He looked all at once ridiculous and dishonored in his cheap English clothes –the little jacket, the Tweedledum cap on his head. He outdistanced his clothes; he was better than they were. But he was rushing on this train into an existence where his clothes would be too good for him.”
The woman hates the train berth. She begins a conversation with a man sitting near her and her son. We learn her husband is a laborer. Her son has never heard anyone speak French and in an intriguing aspect of the story mistakes a group of Frenchmen for elves. Her son asks the man if he has ever seen a ghost. No he has not but where the boy is going he will find lots of Indians, who do see ghosts.
I think in Quebec in 1946 the expression “up North” was more than just a location,it means an almost wild west kind of place far from civilization in Montreal, and light years from London. If the woman thought the train was shabby wait until she gets to Abitibi and takes up the life of a mining camp wife.
We leave the story worrying for the future of the woman but more so her son. His father seems a bit of a brute.
We also wonder about the future of the man on the train.
Do you have some favorite set on a train short stories?
There are so many Alice Munro stories that I love, which take place on trains (or in which the train plays an important role, for escapes and returns, for dalliances and imaginings), that I tend to lose track of them all. “Chance”, “Tricks”, “To Reach Japan”, “Amundsen” and, uh, “Train”. grins Trains are so important in Canadian history. Interesting that they are so important in Mansfield (I read her so long ago that the motif must not have struck me at the time) as well, when there do seem to be many similarities between Oceanic writers and Canadian writers (speaking very generally, of course).
Also, the Gallant story I have been reading today, “Virus X”, has Katherine Mansfield’s grave in it: I thought of you immediately! (There is more to her being mentioned, but I won’t spoil it. All I’ll say is, it’s perfect for the story.)
I thought the elves/ghosts thing was so interesting, because clearly we are meant to note that the Frenchmen are real human beings and are not elves, but, then, what does that say about the ghosts. Are we supposed to think that they are like the elves (of the real world, actually, but the boy has misidentified them) or do both the boy and the man truly see the ghosts as being present in the same way, spirits or hauntings? (Like in “The Fifteenth District”?)
As always, I really like the sound of Mavis Gallant’s way of looking at the world. I always enjoy reading about these stories.
Thank you for saying so, Ali. Four years is a long time for a reading project, but I’ve already read more than half the stories!