Across the Bridge - Mavis Gallant [90]
To my mind, she is a great mistress of the art of implication. Her writing is beautifully economical, and by a hint here and a simple statement of fact there she contrives to give us finely realized portraits of her characters, so that by the end of one of her short stories we know the people better than those we meet in many a full-length novel. We have learned enough about their past, and have had enough hints about their future, to make their present firmly apparent. Though it is unwise to speak of one art in terms of another, her manner might be likened to pointillism; as we read we pay attention to each small dot, and when we have read, and as it were stepped back from the picture, it is suddenly full of light and meaning and we may be startled by what we have found. As with pointillism, the art lies in knowing what dots to choose. If Mavis Gallant were a painter she might be known in the galleries as The Mistress of the Right Dot.
Consider the title story of the book you hold in your hand, “Across the Bridge.” What bridge? The bridge from the Place de la Concorde, to begin with, but when we have finished the story is there not another, and perhaps a third, that has been crossed by the hapless Sylvie Castelli, who is desolate at the thought of her approaching marriage to Arnaud Pons, because she is deeply in love with Bernard Brunelle? Not an unusual situation, at first glance, until we learn that the marriage with Arnaud is of the “arranged” variety and that she barely knows Bernard, and he has not written the letter her mother very sensibly wants to see, in which marriage is plainly offered. Mme. Castelli is a decisive woman and not one to stand in the way of true love. She throws the invitations to Sylvie’s wedding to Arnaud over the bridge into the river, and a difficult situation is thereby set in motion.
What is difficult about it? The nature of the people involved, of course. They are not extraordinary; indeed, they are commonplace. Sylvie’s father is a well-doing physician, an ear specialist; he is also rather a crook, as he demands his fees in cash, so that they need not be revealed to the tax authorities. Mme. Castelli, though no enemy of romance, is essentially a practical person, and wants facts to support her in quashing the engagement to Arnaud. Arnaud himself is a young man against whom not a word can be said, except that he is a dreadful bore and a music snob, and tight with money. But of course they are all tight with money.
The concern of the French middle class – the French of the Continent and of Montreal – with money is one of the things Mavis Gallant understands, down to the last grudged sou. Money, for these people, is not a medium of exchange or an aid to some kind of freedom, but a mystical essence, loved for its own sake and cherished with a darkly religious fervour. The loss of money or of any advantage that might lead to money is the hobgoblin of these bourgeois, and betrays them into covert cheats and mean economies which they persuade themselves are examples of a laudable prudence, and it is of these that they weave the web from which weakly aspiring souls like Sylvie Castelli cannot hope, ever in this world, to escape.
Sylvie is a retiring girl possessed of one puny talent; she can make watercolour copies of pictures that someone else has already painted, and painted infinitely better. Mavis Gallant is unerring in her understanding of that unhappy and large class of persons who have some talent, and some artistic impulse, but not nearly enough to sustain a career