Green Water, Green Sky E-Book

Mavis Gallant

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 208

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

An elegant, melancholic novella about memory, family and the meaning of home. This is the tale of the fractured family life of Bonnie McCarthy, a glamorous American divorcée, and her daughter, Flor. Uprooted and unmoored, mother and daughter lead an itinerant existence, with Venice, Cannes and Paris as their backdrop. When Flor attempts to flee this untidy life and the oppressive rule of her eccentric mother, she instead succumbs to a gradual decline into a breakdown. Green Water, Green Sky was Mavis Gallant's debut novel and is a quietly dazzling example of her masterful shifts in narrative perspective and her visceral exploration of displacement and exile.

Leseprobe

‘Mavis Gallant has, among her colleagues, many admirers but no peer. She is the standout. She is the standard-bearer.’ Fran Lebowitz

‘She’s such a good writer about politics and history and money and economics and war, and she does it so shrewdly and so effortlessly.’ Tessa Hadley

‘A consummate novel of perception and feeling, with a profound understanding of fate, loss, fear and incapacity. Lyric and witty, closely textured, full of light, and uselessly wise.’ David Hayden

‘A very intense piece of writing, very dark, but light and absurd at the same time … Her body of work is unique and profound; I don’t think there will be another quite like her.’ Jhumpa Lahiri

‘I know authors who admit that the one writer they do not read when they are completing a book is Gallant. Nothing could be more intimidating.’ Michael Ondaatje

‘Those who read [Gallant] tend to move, as I did, from ignorance to devotion with uncommon haste.’ Chris Power

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Ay, now am I in Arden; the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place: but travellers must be content.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It, ACT II

Contents

Title PageEpigraphIntroduction1234About the AuthorsAbout the PublisherAlso by Mavis GallantCopyright

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Introduction

Mavis Gallant is known for her short stories, over a hundred of which appeared in the New Yorker starting in the 1950s, but she also published two pieces of long-form fiction: Green Water, Green Sky (1959) and A Fairly Good Time (1970).

Green Water, Green Sky comprises four linked episodes concerning a central cast of characters: Bonnie, a woman approaching forty, recently removed to Europe after an unfaithful marriage (infidelity on both sides); her daughter, Florence (Flor), an anxious girl we watch grow into a uneasy young woman in a failing marriage of her own; Flor’s husband, Bob Harris; and George, Bonnie’s nephew and the erstwhile playmate of Flor. In the first chapter, George is known as Georgie, and he’s a cute but troublesome little boy whose parents have left him vifor an afternoon in the care of his aunt and cousin while they sneak away for some private time. The events of that fateful afternoon unfold with childhood’s dreamy immediacy as Georgie tries to make sense of the rather complicated family relationships unfolding around him – his aunt’s divorce, his cousin’s strange moods, the weirdness of being left by his parents while on holiday in Venice. Then, as Gallant does so brilliantly in her many stories, she slides forward in time seemingly on the span of a breath, and we find that we are viewing those events of the past from many decades in the future, when Flor has grown up and got married to Bob, and the family has come together to welcome the new couple to New York. Gallant layers veil upon veil of history – familial, personal, historical – so common to those lazy but busy afternoons of sitting around the family living room, sharing stories, making accusations of false memories, and so forth.

From there, the novel moves forward in time and we find we are in Paris with Bonnie and Flor, who has become so miserable and so stricken with fear that she can scarcely go out. How far she is from the sprightly and energetic girl we knew her to be in just the previous chapter. Bob is loving but helpless to do anything about Flor’s troubles, which seem to come from some deep, mysterious realm totally foreign to him as someone who is affable and happy. Bonnie is waspish and disapproves of viithe marriage. She also disapproves of Flor’s moods, which to her constitute a kind of moral and spiritual failing in that they represent, to Bonnie at least, Flor’s selfishness in persisting in being so glum. This episode displays Gallant’s uncommon gift for perspective as she moves among Bonnie, Flor, and Bob, each shift adding a layer of complexity and heightening the tension, illustrated most brilliantly by the conflict of Flor’s psychiatrist. Bob and Bonnie would like Flor to stop seeing the doctor, as they find her techniques and tactics useless. Flor would like to stop seeing her doctor, but for more personal reasons, perhaps feeling too perceived. Flor eventually breaks with the doctor, but she conceals this fact from Bonnie and Bob, and the reader watches as this secret subtly creates the conditions for the chapter’s intense, lyrical climax.

The third episode is yet another departure, as we are introduced to Wishart, a wonderfully useless man, who makes his way by serving as the presumed homosexual companion to middle-aged women of some means. When Wishart steps off the train in Cannes to meet up with Bonnie, Flor is a young woman again, being carried all over Europe by her mother. It is during this trip that she meets Bob Harris. Throughout his stay with Bonnie and Flor, Wishart does what men in his position have always done – trying to decipher the subtle language written in symbols on the air, the language of money that viiiwhispers quietly in and through all of the whims, gestures, and small changes of expression among the wealthy. He is a quintessential parvenu, self-created, with a ratty mythology whose ends he constantly clips and prunes. In this episode, Bonnie is worried about Flor, who is beautiful and is beset at every corner by men wanting to marry her. Wishart misinterprets this as Bonnie offering Flor to him, and he badly misplays his hand, bringing an end to his stay and, we are left to imagine, his relationship with Bonnie. When he finally departs to stay with his next wealthy patron, Wishart’s carefully crafted image drops just a little and we see the wreckage of the pathetic man behind, while Bonnie and Flor move on and through their lives, to events we have already witnessed unfold.

The fourth and final episode returns us to Paris and to Georgie, now full grown, visiting his Aunt Bonnie and Bob Harris. We find them all in a bar at night – the mood is downcast, quite sad. Bonnie keeps talking about Flor in the past tense. Bob is overwhelmed. Trying to be a good host. Distracted. Something has gone horribly wrong in this strange recasting of the end of the first chapter. In that scene, it was all sunlight and warm rooms, the two cousins talking, accusing one another in ways subtle and obvious of misremembering their shared history, that history amounting to shockingly little, all told. There was laughter then. Joy. But here, in the final chapter, Flor ixmissing from their gathering, it is darkness and shadow. Bonnie is trying desperately to smooth the history into something amenable. It’s an act that the reader feels sharply and painfully because one recognises the desperation in her trying.

Taken together, the episodes have the eerie texture of a memory or a dream. This is partly because the characters themselves spend so much time searching their own recollections for some critical sign or clue, some missed detail that might explain a loss they don’t even know how to describe. I suppose that’s just another way of saying that Gallant’s characters are wrestling with regret without knowing it. For Bonnie, this regret comes in the form of her failed marriage, her wandering lifestyle, and the way she’s raised her daughter. For Flor, regret is a timorousness, the inability to take decisive action for fear of what she might let go. For George and Bob, regret seems more conventional. George regrets trying to make himself understood to Flor on the day of her visit to New York. Bob comes to understand that he regrets his marriage to Flor, but only after she’s abandoned him to withdraw into herself. Other characters also mull their choices, sifting for grains of pity and hurt: an American neighbour in Paris, Doris, regrets her own husband’s infidelity and later, a small act of betrayal towards Flor while Wishart laments, at last, a life made of inauthentic gestures. x

Time is elusive in Green Water, Green Sky, and it refuses to behave in an orderly fashion. Rather than arranging the events of her narrative into a chronological sequence, Gallant relies upon a network of impressions and associations. In one moment, we’re in a boat in Venice or shaking the sand out of a towel in Cannes, and the next, we’re in New York, thinking about that long-vanished afternoon, or we’re in Paris, writing a letter to our sister, while our daughter rests in the next room and her husband finds his way along a sunny street, and in the very next sentence, we might be years in the past, reflecting on the possibility of hope and love and what the next day might bring. It is a novel that resists the usual structures and forms, and instead takes its strength from the intensity and vividness of its characters’ impressions. It is a technique familiar to us from Woolf and from Joyce and also, more unexpectedly, from Turgenev, whose strange, short novels also possess eerie time signatures.

There are many pleasures in Green Water, Green Sky. Of course, there is Gallant’s swiftness of characterisation, the way she conjures not just a person, but a person with a history and the whole world of impressions they’ve left behind to inhabit the current moment they’re living through. Then there’s the wonderful humour, the skewering irony that flays character and reader alike. Gallant’s flashing intelligence illuminates the scenes and incidents xiand even the seemingly interstitial beats of Green Water, Green Sky. There is no moment left unattended to, and one has the sense that she has seen to every detail and comma. There is, too, the way that the episodes build upon each other, not in the obvious manner of plot progression, but in more subtle, stranger ways. How Wishart’s section comes in the third chapter rather than the second, where it might fit chronologically. How this achieves a sad, ironic dimension as we watch his delusional courtship that was never really a courtship at all. And how Bob Harris, whom we know to be affable and immensely capable and charming as a grown man in the second section appears as a swaggering, but unpolished youth in the third chapter, and we see him anew, the soft tenderness of those early days of his love and ardour for Flor, how it’s turned sad and brutal a few years into their marriage. In the second section, we find out that Bonnie wanted Georgie not to come to Paris to visit them, and in the final chapter, we find that Georgie has come over after all, and they’re trying to be good hosts to him. While the first chapter ends with Georgie trying to give Flor back a glass bead from a necklace she broke and Flor insisting that she did no such thing, in the final chapter, Georgie reflects on that bead, reflects on Flor’s insistence that he didn’t know her, and how he says to Bob Harris that they weren’t very close, and that they saw each other very xiilittle, and that family was an odd thing. I simply do not believe the book would have worked in chronological order. It would have felt weird, stiff, denied of its formal freedom, from which it derives much of its power. The free, lyric association that drives the imagery of the novel – the unfolding and developing system of pictures Gallant deploys, water, sun, light, shadow, all of these come with impressions of memory, impressions of things fleeting and passing out of the realm of the real – also drives its narrative momentum.

When it comes to short story writers, there is often the accusation that they failed to deliver a novel. Or if they have written a novel, there is this notion that the novel is somehow inferior to their work in the story form, or that the story form has somehow robbed them of some necessary faculty for performing at the highest level in the novel form. One might be tempted to say/think that about Gallant. She wrote just two novels, after all. She wrote many suites of stories featuring recurring characters. We might say that these were attempts at novels. Sure. But to me, there is no failure. I see only an author who has come to a form wholly suited to her vast gifts, a form that has been instructive to myself and many others. What Gallant achieves in these novels and in her suites of connected stories – a part of her oeuvre that we might call her long-form fiction – is a freedom from the typical xiiiregimes of meaning and pattern in fiction. And in that freedom, like the modernists who certainly must have inspired her, she attains a degree of truth of expression in both form and content with respect to human consciousness. Another way: Gallant eschews what we might call good novel form and in doing so forces the novel as a genre to more accurately and truthfully express what it is to live as a person shaped and marked by time.

Gallant knows that when it comes to the past, we are all exiles in search of home. For characters of Green Water, Green Sky – Bonnie, Flor, Georgie, and Bob Harris – that home is a strange and receding mirage on the horizon. They advance only to find themselves further away. That is no tragedy. For Gallant, that’s the greatest truth of all: the strangeness one feels in looking at the mirror and not quite recognising the gaze looking back.

Brandon Taylor Paris, 2024

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GREEN WATER, GREEN SKY

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1

They went off for the day and left him, in the slyest, sneakiest way you could imagine. Nothing of the betrayal to come showed on their faces that morning as they sat having breakfast with him, out on the hotel terrace, a few inches away from the Grand Canal. If he had been given something the right length, a broom, say, he could have stirred the hardly moving layer of morning muck, the orange halves, the pulpy melons, the rotting bits of lettuce, black under water, green above. Water lapped against the gondolas moored below the terrace. He remembered the sound, the soft, dull slapping, all his life. He heard them say at the table they would never come here in August again. They urged him to eat, and drew his attention to gondoliers. He refused everything they 6offered. It was all as usual, except that a few minutes after he was in an open boat, churning across to the Lido with Aunt Bonnie and Florence. Flor and Aunt Bonnie pushed along to the prow and sat down side by side on a bench, and Aunt Bonnie pulled George toward her, so he was half on her lap. You couldn’t sit properly: her lap held a beach bag full of towels. The wind picked up Flor’s long ponytail of hair and sent it across George’s face. His cousin’s hair smelled coppery and warm, like its color. He wouldn’t have called it unpleasant. All the same, it was an outrage, and he started to whine: ‘Where are they?’ but the wind blew so that you couldn’t hear a thing.

He had been on the beach most of the morning before he planted himself in front of Aunt Bonnie in her deck chair and said, ‘Where’ve they gone? Are they coming here?’

Aunt Bonnie lowered the book she was reading and regarded George with puckered, anxious face – in his memories, an old face, a frightened face. She sat under a series of disks, in dwindling perspective; first an enormous beach umbrella, all in stripes, then her own faded parasol, then a neutral-colored straw hat. She said, ‘Well, you know, it’s like this, Georgie, they’ve gone off for the day. They wanted to have one little day on their own. You mustn’t be selfish. They’re only looking at old pictures. You’d rather be on the beach than looking at pictures …’

‘I’d sooner be looking at pictures,’ George said. 7

‘… so we brought you over to the beach,’ said Aunt Bonnie, not even listening. ‘You mustn’t be so selfish all the time. Your mother never has a minute. This trip is no fun for her at all.’

Oh, they had managed it beautifully. First they were out on the hot terrace, offering him gondoliers, then he was abandoned with Aunt Bonnie and Flor.

Even years later, when they talked about that day, and his parents wondered how they had found it in them to creep off that way, without warning or explanation; even when they were admitting it was quite the worst thing to do to a child; even then, there was an annoying taint of self-congratulation in their manner. He had been a willful, whiny, spoiled little boy, and some people, Aunt Bonnie for one, claimed that his parents were almost afraid of him. His Fairlie cousins had called him the Monster, while his mother’s relatives, more serious and concerned, often said he was being badly prepared for the blows and thumps of life, and wouldn’t thank his parents later on. As it happened, George had turned out well. At seventeen, he was a triumphant vindication for his parents of years of hell. Oh, Lord, what he had been at five, his mother liked to say, smiling, shaking her head. At seven! He had ruined their holiday in Venice that time, although they always took all the blame: they should never have gone off for the day, creeping away when his back was turned. 8It might have marked him for life. There was a frightening thought. Like any averted danger, they liked to bring it up. ‘Do you remember, George, that time in Venice with Bonnie and Flor?’

Of course he remembered. He still had six little cockleshells picked up on the Lido. He remembered the brilliant parasols, askew in the hot wind, and Flor, his cousin, thin, sunburned, fourteen, sitting straight in the center of a round shadow; she sat and scooped sand with her fingers and looked out on the calm sea. George might have drowned for all she cared. He stumped about on the sand by himself, tomato-pink, fair-haired, deeply injured, rather fat. The sea was so flat, so still, so thick with warmth you might have walked on it. He gathered shells: black, brown, cream-and-pink, with minutely scalloped rims. Aunt Bonnie carried them back to Venice for him in her pockets, and now six were left. They were in a shoebox along with a hundred or so other things he would never throw away. He had another remnant of Venice, a glass bead. It came from a necklace belonging to Flor. She bought it that day, at an open stall, just in front of the place where the boat came in from the Lido. The clock on the Piazza began clanging noon, and the air filled with pigeons and with iron sound. They were filing off the boat in orderly fashion when suddenly Flor darted away and came back with the necklace in her hands. Aunt 9Bonnie hadn’t finished saying, ‘Oh, do you like those glass beads, Flor? Because if you do, I’d rather get you something decent …’ The string of the necklace broke an instant later, the first time Flor pulled it on over her head. The glass beads rolled and bounded all over the paving; pigeons fluttered after them, thinking they were grains of corn. The necklace breaking, the hotly blowing wind, excited Flor. She unstrung the beads still in her hands and flung them after the others, making a wild upward movement with her palms. ‘Oh, stop it,’ her mother cried, for people were looking, and Flor did appear rather mad, with her hair flying and her dress blowing so that anybody could see the starched petticoat underneath, and the sunburned thighs. And poor little George, suddenly anxious about what strangers might think – this new, frantic little George ran here and there, picking up large lozenge-shaped beads from under people’s feet. When he straightened up, hands full of treasure, he saw that Florence was angry, and enjoying herself, all at once. Her hands were still out, as if she wanted to give just anyone a push. But perhaps he imagined that, for she walked quietly beside him, back to the hotel, and told him, kindly, that he could keep all the beads.

He still had one of those beads. He used to roll it about his palm before exams. There were other times, the many times he said, ‘God, help me this once, and I’ll 10never bother you again,’ and it was the bead he held on to, and perhaps addressed. It was a powerful charm; a piece of a day; a reminder that someone had once wished him dead but that he was still alive.

Oh, there was no doubt that Florence had wished him dead. After lunch that day he and Flor had hung over rickety wooden railings and watched a small cargo loading what seemed in his memory to be telephone poles; although he must have been mistaken. Flor leaned forward, resting on her thin brown arms. Their faces were nearly level. She turned and looked at him, half smiling, eyes half closed, as people turn and look at each other sunbathing, on hot sand, and he was giving the smile timorously back when he met her eyes, green as water, bright with dislike, and she said, ‘It would be easy to push someone in right here. I could push you in.’ He remembered the heavy green water closing out the sky and the weight of clouds. The clouds piled on the horizon moved forward and covered the lagoon. Once he had fallen in the pond at his grandmother’s house – the Fairlie grandmother he and Florence had in common. He was sailing a boat and took one false step. The water in this pond was kept dirty for the sake of some dirt-loving mosquito-eating Argentine fish his grandmother cherished – grown fish the size of baby minnows. These darting minnow fish came around him as he lay in the pond, unmoving, and he felt the soft tap of 11their heads against his cheeks. The most oppressive part of the memory was that he had lain there, passive, with the mossy water over his mouth. He must have been on his back; there was a memory of sky. The gardener heard the splash and fished him out and he was perfectly fine; not on his back at all, but on his face, splashing and floundering.

He didn’t think about this in Venice. It was much later when he placed the two memories one on the other, glass over glass. In Venice, he didn’t reply: there wasn’t time. There wasn’t even time for rage or fear. Aunt Bonnie was waiting for them after her afternoon sleep. They were to find her in the Piazza, and feed the pigeons, and listen to the band. He stamped along on fat legs behind Flor, through heat like water, head down. They stopped and weighed themselves on a public scale that told them their fortunes as well as what they weighed. Their fortunes came down on colored cardboard rectangles. George’s said, ‘Do not refuse any invitations this evening’, and Flor’s said that she must take better care of her liver, and that she would soon be seeing someone off by train. ‘Mama’s waiting,’ Flor said, throwing her fortune away. She grabbed his arm and made him walk faster. When they came up to Aunt Bonnie, sitting with tea and a plate of little cakes, they were both flushed with heat, but neither of them complained. They were acting in unison, without having been told. They were doing everything to please Aunt Bonnie. George had an 12