The thing about reading the third Linnet Muir story is that I know her now. At least, I feel like I do.
Which is the deep appeal of a linked collection, the sense of gradual immersion.
It’s the same phenomenon that pulls you back to a familiar series, a fledgling – and increasingly secure – connection.
In “Youth is Pleasure”, Linnet was reading Sylvia Townsend Warner. In “Between Zero and One”, Thornton Wilder.
In “Varieties of Exile”, she refers to The Swiss Family Robinson and Through the Looking Glass, and writers from Siegfried Sassoon to Sigmund Freud.
Because, yes, indeed, Linnet is a bookish sort and she orders the world around her with words. Even when she is describing her experiences in the real world, she arranges them in a bookish frame. Speaking of the growing number of refugees in Montreal in the third year of the war, she describes it like this:
“Each of them – Belgian, French, Catholic German, Socialist German, Jewish German, Czech – was a book I tried to read from start to finish. My dictionaries were films, poems, novels, Lenin, Freud.”
This story slightly overlaps the end of “Between Zero and One”. There, near the end, she is engaged to be married, for the third time. Here, readers learn more about her world, then learn of the engagement, then watch that situation play out.
“What I craved at this point was not love, or romance, or a life added to mine, but conversation, which was harder to find. I knew by now that a man in love does not necessarily have anything interesting to say: If he has, he keeps it for other men.”
Even here, she turns to books to make sense of love and romance.
“There is a girl in a Stefan Zweig novel who says to her lover, ‘Is that all?’ I had pondered this carefully many years before, for I supposed it had something unexpected to do with sex. Now I gave it another meaning, which was that where women were concerned men were satisfied with next to nothing.”
Despite the reservations she maintains privately (and the discouragement she receives from her co-workers, all male, as she describes them in this story, although in “Between Zero and One”, a woman discourages her as well). Linnet does marry. And readers learn more about what marriage meant, politically and economically, for a woman in Quebec at that time. Unsurprisingly, Linnet is interested in pushing the envelope.
“My husband, aged twenty-four, had become my legal guardian under Quebec’s preposterous Napoleonic law, but he never knew that. When he went overseas he asked me not to join any political party, which I hadn’t thought of doing, and not to enlist in the Army or the Air Force. The second he vanished I tried to join the Wrens, which had not been on the list only because it slipped his mind.”
Nonetheless, she did not enlist in the Army or the Air Force. She did not join a political party. For the most part, Linnet does what she is told. (At least, that’s what she leads readers to believe.)
And, meanwhile, she writes her way towards another way of being, making manuscripts, making sense of things, even though “this business of putting life through a sieve and then discarding it was another variety of exile; I knew that even then, but it seemed quite right and perfectly natural”.
Three more Linnet stories to read: “quite right and perfectly natural”.
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.
Varieties of Exile” is included in the collection Home Truths. It is one of six linked stories centering on Linnett Muir. (I learned from Buried in Print’s post on this story that Gallant wrote six linked stories about Linnett.) The first story in the series, “In Youth there is Pleasure” introduces us to a young woman moving back from New York City to her home town in Montreal. I knew I was going to like her when I learned she was reading Sylvia Townsend Warner. (If you have not read her Elfin Kingdom stories you are in for a real treat. Like Gallant, Warner published many stories in The New Yorker.). She is maybe 18 and on her own emotionally and financially.
As “Varieties of Exile” opens World War Two has just started. Montréal is inundated with European exiles.
“In the third summer of the war I began to meet refugees. There were large numbers of them in Montreal–to me a source of infinite wonder. I could not get enough of them. They came straight out of the twilit Socialist-literary landscape of my reading and my desires. I saw them as prophets of a promised social order that was to consist of justice, equality, art, personal relations, courage, generosity. generosity. Each of them–Belgian, French, Catholic German, Socialist German, Jewish German, Czech–was a book I tried to read from start to finish. My dictionaries were films, poems, novels, Lenin, Freud. That the refugees tended to hate one another seemed no more than a deplorable accident. Nationalist pig-headedness, that chronic, wasting, and apparently incurable disease, was known to me only on Canadian terms and I did not always recognize its symptoms. Anything I could not decipher I turned into fiction, which was my way of untangling knots. At the office where I worked I now spent my lunch hour writing stories about people in exile. I tried to see Montreal as an Austrian might see it and to feel whatever he felt. I was entirely at home with foreigners, which is not surprising the home was all in my head.”
As i read this, knowing Gallant wanted so much to leave Canada forever, if this is drawing at all on her life history. I admit as i read the Canada based stories i look for her reasons for leaving.
All of her coworkers are older men. Most married but they advise her against marriage. She meets a man on a train. She calls him an “English Remitance Man”. A remitance man lives on money from home, send on condition he live
forever in Exile. Usually he did something his father did not like at all so he paid him to leave. As Linnett tells the story, the remitance man never really grows up, saved but cursed by his father’s money. Linnett develops some feelings for him but he is married and her feelings were weak.
Linnett lives a Reading centered life. She experiences things through her resding. She makes a reference to Stefan Zweig. I find this very interesting. Zweig was driven into exile by his vision of a collapsing European culture. Even though he made a fortune from his writings, he was kind of a remitance man. His family wealth freed him to write, travel, and collect objects de art.
He was an Austrian Jew who tried to define himself as Austrian, in exile from his Ashganazi roots. I saw that Linnett was reading “The Russians”, she is getting more into Central European Literature.
As the story progresses Linnett marries. As you read the Linnett stories keep in mind they are her looking back on the past. She sees her past as part of a plot leading to her present.
Yes, I believe it’s accepted that the Linnet Muir stories are as close to autobiographical fiction as Gallant gets. (I think maybe she speaks of some of the parallels between her life and the fictional Linnet’s life in the interview with, maybe Jhumpa Lahiri?)
But I’m not sure we get a clear answer as to why she left Canada for Europe. Perhaps because she didn’t want to gripe openly about what she had left behind, or maybe she felt no need to, once she was free of it?
Linnet certainly doesn’t seem to feel any sense of belonging, not at home, not at work, not outside of work, except maybe when she is actually writing? She seems more of an exile pictured here, in her native land, than you imagine her feeling (or intuit her feeling, via glimpses of other women experiencing Europe in her other stories) in Europe.
The full passage you’ve quoted is just perfect. My favourite bit is about her untangling knots in fiction. I recently read a collection of stories by an Iranian-Canadian, Nilofar Shidmehr, called Divided Loyalties, and she has a story about a knot as well, which seems to be covering the same territory (this collection is the one which reminded me of your earlier recommendaiton of Goli Taraghi – those are WONDERFUL stories – thank you!) and I imagine it’s true for many fiction writers.
Thanks for the additional information about Zweig. I should have known she would have chosen him for a reason. I wonder why she selected Warner specifically, other than the quality of Warner’s work? How I wish that the project to publish Gallant’s journals wasn’t on hold.
Well, I was so confused about why the Linnet stories were ordered differently in my collection that I just jumped in with this one. And, though you probably know things about her that I don’t yet, it didn’t affect my enjoyment of the story. I enjoyed her thoughts on Remittance Men and on women and wives. And I loved her bookishness, and the fact that she seemed wise beyond her years. I was actually kind of surprised when, in the end, she married number three. Now I want to know how it came about that the was engaged to three men in one year, and why #3 was the one. I will have to read on… maybe I will find out!
It’s as good a place to start as any. You just learn a little more about other periods in her life in the other stories. It’s interesting that she can see that the Remittance Men have a lot of privilege that she lacks but that they, too, are not acceptable at home. That they, too, have been shuttled off to live a life elsewhere, just as she feels she is alone too. And I was surprised by that too…I felt like she must have talked herself out of it twice before (with help from her co-workers) and that her reluctance would result in a refusal on the third time too! She seems so lonely. I think she needs a bookish friend to meet for tea!
Yes!
“Sense of gradual immersion” – nicely described, and great review. From my limited experience, I think linked collections work best when they’re as much a portrait of a life as a place (e.g. Quebec) for that exact reason. You slowly learn about each and see how one affects the other.
And in this case, it’s time as well. And, yet, this office environment when there is only a single woman on staff isn’t all that hard to relate to either. Maybe it’s more about her existing on the margins than about what defines her sense of being a misfit.