MAVIS GALLANT’S APPRENTICESHIP STORIES, 1944-1950: BREAKING THE FRAME LESLEY CLEMENT Medicine Hat College in his 1977 interview with Mavis Gallant, Geoff Hancock, remarking on the visual quality of her stories, conjectured that Gallant “might [have] liked to have been a painter at one time.” To this observation Gallant replied that she often imagines how she would respond to a scene were she recreating it on canvas (55). The daughter of Stewart Young, an artist whom she has described as having “an incredible sense of vocation” but “no talent,” and as painting “like a provincial, minor late-impressionist” (Corbeil 21), Mavis Gallant embarked on her chosen vocation as a writer offiction while working as a journalist in Montreal from 1944 to 1950. This was a period when Quebec art, breaking the stranglehold that Paris’s academies and Ontario’s Group of Seven had exercised over Canada’s art scene, was discovering its own force as an essential medium for a unique culture. The articles Gallant wrote for Harper’s Bazaar and the Montreal Standard describing the cultural milieu of Montreal during the 1940s reveal her fascination with this local art scene, particularly with the changes that Quebec art of the 1940s was undergoing. Gallant never embraced any ofthe aesthetic principles espoused and practised by the various factions that became prominent during this period; however, the exposure to painterly forms and techniques that she experienced can be observed in the evolution of a visually powerful and evocative style within those short stories she wrote during her apprenticeship years. Gallant’sframingofstories such as “Good Morning and Goodbye,” “Three Brick Walls,” “Thank You for the Lovely Tea,” “Jorinda and Jorindel,” and “Up North,” all written or first drafted during this apprenticeship period, resembles the modernist tendency to enclose characters in a suspended or caught moment. This tendency is more characteristic of Joyce in Dublin ers and Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” than of Chekhov and Mansfield, two writers Gallant has acknowledged reading “enormously” when she was young (Martens 169). But already these early stories provide evidence ofother elements borrowed from the visual arts — colour, light and dark, line, composition, and, ultimately, fluidity — elements that, through structure, perspective, and metaphor, would find full expression in her 1959 novel, Green Water, Green Sky,1 and eventually become a trademark of E n g l ish St u d ie s in Ca n a d a , x v iii, 3, Septem ber 1992 Gallant’s style. Like modern painters and writers before her, Gallant ex perimented with techniques borrowed from Cubist, Surrealist, and Kinetic art to attain fragmentation, distortion, and mobility; consequently, these apprenticeship stories become increasingly analogous to visual compositions attempting to break free from their spatial and temporal frames. In a 1988 interview with Linda Leith, Gallant conveys the vibrancy of the Montreal life she experienced during the 1940s when she was establishing herself, first as ajournalist, and then as a writer of fiction: Montreal was a city in transition. All the old conservative dead weight was still there, and of course French Canada was still locked, but there were elements breaking out, and that was what was so exciting. I’m thinking of the painters particularly, and in a city that size you tend to till know one another, the bohemia. (4) As a journalist, Gallant usually chose subjects on which to report, rather than having them assigned to her (Baele Cl). Although covering a great diversity of subjects for her Montreal Standard articles, Gallant gravitated toward those cultural stories involving current topics and issues from the arts. Short pieces include sketches oflocal personalities such as Eldon Grier, who held fresco painting classes at Montreal’s Art Association; Mary Filer, a nurse who gained celebrity in Montreal with her annual painting of Nativity scenes on the city’s Neurological Institute windows; and Dr. George Hall, a collector of early Canadian art.2 Some of Gallant’s feature stories for the Standard Magazine are of broader interest: for example, “Art Hoaxes that Baffle the Highbrow Critics” (23 July 1949: 17) and “Art for the Family Pocketbook” (6 Nov. 1948: 5-f). The articles that best reveal Gallant’s...