With the prospect of publication in The New Yorker, Gallant moved to Europe in October 1950. After a brief stay in London, she went to Paris and lived in a hotel populated by expatriates. The experience provided a seed, perhaps, for the brilliant title story in this volume, “The Cost of Living,” which was published in 1962, about a decade after “Madeline’s Birthday.” Compared to the single narrative arc of “Madeline’s Birthday,” the plot of “The Cost of Living” is involuted, told through the murky prism of memory, its force accumulating like a series of waves. It is a denser and more challenging story, virtually impossible, in my opinion, to digest properly in a single reading; it is thus a story that reveals a new level of technical mastery and sophistication in Gallant’s development. We leave behind the domestic comforts of an eighteenth-century house in Connecticut for a hotel — a favorite setting in Gallant’s work — on the Left Bank of Paris, claustrophobic and squalid, with silverfish and dusty claret hangings. We travel from the bourgeois landscape to the bohemian, from a suburban American summer to an urban European winter. In the opening paragraph, the unforgiving atmosphere is rendered with Dickensian flourish: “dark with the season, dark with the cold, dark with the dark air of cities.” The lack of natural light is absolute: “The only light on the street was the blue neon sign of a snack bar.”
The story is narrated in the first person by an Australian woman named Patricia, or Puss, who runs away to Paris at twenty-seven and scrapes by giving piano lessons. Her older sister, Louise, prudent and parsimonious, follows “wisely, calmly,” with money inherited after their parents’ death, and though she can afford better, stays with Puss at the same shabby hotel. Louise is disappointed by Paris, a recurring dilemma in Gallant’s world. She arrives “thinking that Paris would be an easy, dreamy city, full of trees and full of time…angelic children sailing boats in the fountains, and calm summer streets.” Instead, the parks are “full of brats and quarreling mothers.” Louise is one of the many industrious tourists in Gallant’s fiction who, having invested in a journey to Europe, seeks to reap cultural gain: “Once she had visited all the museums, and cycled around the famous squares, and read what was written on the monuments, she felt she was wasting her opportunities.” Among the other residents at the hotel are two aspiring, impoverished French actors — Sylvie (who lives in an unheated linen cupboard and whose indiscretions “spread like the track of a snail” across Paris), and Patrick, who is awaiting a visa and strives to get to America.
Two sisters, two actors; two Anglo-Saxons, two French; three women, one man. The permutations are many, and Gallant choreographs these four principal characters in a dance of shifting alliances and betrayals, a knotting together and an unraveling of familial, cultural, and sexual ties. The walls of the hotel are thin, so that conversations are easily overheard, private moments routinely glimpsed. But there is little comfort in all this closeness. Instead there is a disconcerting lack of solidarity, as well as honesty, among the characters. Puss, Louise, Sylvie, and Patrick live a communal life in which things are borrowed, passed back and forth, exchanged: books, bathtubs, lovers, viruses. And money. In fact, the fifth character driving this story is money: the need for it, the ebb and flow of it, the unequivocal way it dictates our lives. But unlike books and bathtubs, money is seldom successfully shared. As Puss reflects, “Friendship in bohemia meant money borrowed, recriminations, complaints, tears, theft, and deceit.” The lingering effect of the story is as dark as the Paris winter, laying bare the precariousness of expatriate life, and a ruthless calculus of human relationships.
Following a stay of a few months in the hotel, Gallant moved in with a Parisian family; during our interview, she told me that she soon tired of living with expatriates, wanting instead to observe the French. She said that initially, as in “The Cost of Living,” she described the French through the eyes of foreigners. But even in an early story like “The Picnic” (1952), she begins to enter the mind of French characters in the description of Madame Pégurin, an elderly woman who loves her pets more than her own children, rattles the pages of Le Figaro, and tells the American children living in her house that she dislikes foreigners. The subtleties of how we perceive each other and ourselves are never lost on Gallant; of these children, at once innocent and ignorant, she writes, “But they, fortunately, did not consider themselves foreign, and had pictured instead dark men with curling beards.”
Though Gallant has lived in Paris now for nearly sixty years, she has remained attuned in her fiction to the shock of arrival, the discomfiture of the new, and alongside it, the eternal restlessness of human nature. She creates characters who yearn to live life abroad, as well as characters who must. There are women who follow their husbands to Europe, and those who flee them. There are children sent away to edify and find themselves, and children dragged along by their parents. Certain characters gladly jettison the past, considering their non-European upbringings a disease, while others cling stubbornly to food, language, and other customs. Louise, in “The Cost of Living,” goes out of her way to procure soda biscuits in Paris, convinced that they are necessary for nursing the grippe. As is frequently the case among expatriate communities, cultural affinities trump class distinctions, making for strange bedfellows in unfamiliar surroundings. In “Acceptance of Their Ways,” Mrs. Freeport, who cannot stand Italy “without the sound of an English voice in the house,” takes in an English paying guest: “In the hush of the dead season, Mrs. Freeport preferred Lily’s ironed-out Bayswater to no English at all.”
Gallant’s stories teem with characters unwilling fully to adjust, unable to take such things as family and homeland for granted. Instead there are makeshift families, adopted languages, improvised ways. But being foreign is not just a matter of crossing borders. The sense of being adrift, the absence of terra firma, is existential — perhaps not in the manner of Beckett or Camus, but with an impact that is nevertheless profound. Reality is vertiginous, these stories tell us, no matter where and how experienced. “Night and Day,” about a man emerging from anesthesia following an accident, hovers in the interstices of consciousness: the character, suffering from amnesia, is rootless in the most basic of ways. Bound to a hospital bed and lacking a past, he observes, “This is what it means to be free.”
Compounding the dislocation experienced by many of Gallant’s characters is World War Two, the legacy of which permeates almost all of these stories, so much so that the war often serves as their unwritten prologues. The scars of war are fresh enough so that being Jewish in Europe remains shameful; children have lost their fathers in battle, and the American military is still present on European soil. The collective posture is one of frugality, of deprivation, and of doing without. Softening cauliflowers are salvaged from garbage cans, coffee grounds used more than once, chicken cooked in vinegar instead of wine. People have been forced to flee their homes, leaving everything behind: “all the tablecloths, the little coffee spoons!” This is the fate of Frau Stengel in “A Day Like Any Other,” a Volksdeutsche refugee from Prague who keeps a picture of Hitler pressed between two magazines. Others must open up their homes to boarders in order to make ends meet. The result is a thrusting together of people from mismatched worlds, a mis-en-scène Gallant exploits to stunning effect again and again. In addition to the devastation of history’s recent past, the stories allude to the politics of France in the Fifties and Sixties: the country’s diminishing status as a colonial power, beginning with Indochina’s independence in 1954 and followed by the Algerian War of 1954–62. The student uprisings of 1968 (which Gallant writes about in her book of nonfiction, Paris Journals), occur toward the end of this collection’s timeline.