Exiles Home Truths

By Patricia Blake

Mavis Gallant is an English-Canadian writer who has spent most of her adult life in France. Thus it is not surprising that her natural subject is the varieties of spiritual exile. Expatriates, orphans, refugees and misfits make up the cast in her two novels and scores of stories. Home Truths, her sixth collection of short fiction, catches her characters in full flight from family, religion and country. All are bearers of a metaphorical "true passport" that transcends nationality and signifies internal freedom. For some this serves as a safe-conduct to independence. For others it is a guarantee of loneliness and despair.

Most of the 16 stories are set in the Canada of the 1930s and 1940s, an era of lingering Victorianism when citizens flouted convention at their risk. A compelling case is the French-Canadian family in Saturday. Fiercely anticlerical, the husband and wife send their children to English-Canadian schools, where the Roman Catholic Church cannot reach them. This seems to result in an estrangement between parents and offspring. The girls marry English Canadians: "the two Bobs, the Don, the Ian, and the last one -- Keith, or Ken?" Their bemused father cannot tell them apart at family gatherings. As for the patriarch's grandchildren, they "seem to belong to a new national type, with round heads, and quite large front teeth. You would think some Swede or other had been around Montreal on a bicycle so as to create this new national type."

Irony serves to sharpen, and humor leaven, the mishaps that befall the book's eccentric families. Unrelentingly bleak, however, are the descriptions of cruelty to children, which are a hallmark of Gallant's stories in Home Truths. Indeed, with a mother like the matriarch in Saturday, there is no need to blame family tensions on Canada's ethnic problems. "She told each of her five daughters as they grew up that they were conceived in horror; that she could have left them in their hospital cots and not looked back, so sickened was she by their limp spines and the autumn smell of their hair, by their froglike movements and their animal wails."

So persistent is the plight of small children in Home Truths that the reader may fairly guess at some trauma glimpsed or experienced during the author's childhood in Montreal. In Orphans' Progress, for example, two wretched little girls are locked up in a French-Canadian convent school. Eight-year-old Mildred and twelve-year-old Cathie are bathed every two weeks, the one wearing a rubber apron and the other a muslin shift so they cannot see their own bodies. The state of Mildred's thumb tells it all: "Sucked white, (it) was taped to the palm of her hand."

A group of stories under the rubric "Canadians Abroad" finds Gallant's characters pursuing an elusive freedom in Europe. A young woman seeks love on the French Riviera with the most improbable of romantic figures, a retired inspector of prisons in one of Britain's former Asian colonies. When she leaves him she takes up with a fellow "in terrible trouble -- back taxes, ex- wife seizing his salary." A pair of perpetual expatriates seem doomed to misadventure: they pile up debts; they are ostracized by fellow Ca- nadian exiles; they have rows with hotel managers, and their children throw up the foreign food.

All this bad news about Canadians is mercifully tempered by the tale of Linnet Muir, told in the six final stories, which rank among Gallant's best. At 18, Linnet has already been blighted by a cold father and a merciless mother. Battling back with her only weapons, "secrecy and insolence," she manages to make her getaway from parental oppression.

Linnet arrives in Montreal during World War II, alone and with $5 in her purse. As she describes her prospects, "My only commercial asset was that I knew French, but French was of no professional use to anyone in Canada then -- not even to French Canadians; one might as well have been fluent in Pushtu." Still, she perseveres, ultimately finds a job on a local newspaper and sets out to become a writer, much as the author herself did in the late 1940s. Such determination and pluck are rare among Gallant's outcast characters. When the girl's native country fails to meet her standards, she puts up a fight. "If I say . . . that the Winter Palace was stormed on Sherbrooke Street, that Trafalgar was fought on Lake St. Louis, I mean it naturally," she says. "They were the natural backgrounds of my exile and fidelity." Her words seem to echo those of James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus. "I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art . . . using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning." . That could be the credo of Mavis Gallant's most affecting heroine.