LETTERS: Correspondence with William Shawn.
Mavis Gallant – William Shawn correspondence
1968 – 1983
Gallant, Mavis. Correspondence with William Shawn, 1968-1983.
Ca. 31 items. Editorial correspondence between novelist, essayist, and playwright Mavis Gallant (b. 1922, Montréal, Québec) and New Yorker editor William Shawn. The majority of the letters between Gallant and Shawn were written during the final proofing stages of Gallant’s journals, which The New Yorker excerpted in September 1968 (the roughly 30,000-word piece later comprised a portion of Gallant’s 1986 book-length Paris Notebooks). In her journals, Gallant gives social and political commentary on recent events, in particular the 1968 student uprising in Paris. In his correspondence, Shawn discusses her “remarkable” work and tells her that it encompasses “easily the finest writing that has been done on the events” and that he has heard “only praise”; Gallant nonetheless expresses concern about the piece’s accessibility to readers – mostly in terms of length and subject matter – on more than one occasion.
Overall the correspondence discusses proofs and edits, dates that the piece will run, Gallant’s payment, and related matters. The handful of later letters includes ideas for articles from Gallant and Shawn’s responses. The tone in these letters is quite familiar as Gallant shares the success of her play What is to be Done? (first produced in 1982) and discusses their loss of mutual friend and colleague Janet Flanner.
Gallant was a journalist for The Montreal Standard, 1944 – 50, before selling her first article to The New Yorker and then establishing herself as a writer in Europe. Her work is best known for its inherent feminist perspective, and her fiction in particular for its various conceptions of personal independence (or more often than not, lack thereof); her novels Green Water, Green Sky (1959) and A Fairly Good Time (1970) have been described as “deal[ing] with the complex experiences of women trapped in the feminine mystique” (Feminist Companion to Literature in English, New Haven: Yale UP, 1990; p. 408).
Letters are broken down as follows:
8 TLS from Gallant to Shawn, one to two pages.
6 ALS from Gallant to Shawn, single leaves, one to two pages.
5 TLC from Shawn to Gallant, all one page.
6 Telegrams from Shawn to Gallant.
Manuscript material:
Typescript, 1 pp., of name changes for real persons referred to in Gallant’s journal.
Related material:
Memorandum, two pages, from her longtime editor William Maxwell to Shawn, July 13, no year; regarding Gallant’s manuscript. He excerpts a few of Gallant’s letters and writes, “Some time when you are free to discuss the handling of the proofs with her, I have a couple things to say.”
Memorandum, photocopy, one page, November 1970, from Maxwell to Shawn. He refers to Gallant’s introduction to a book of the letters of Gabrielle Roussier in which she discusses the status of women under French law and calls it “simply extraordinary, as writing and the facts.”
Correspondence from Shawn to Diarmuid Russell at Russel & Volkening in New York remitting payment to Gallant.
News clipping with photo of Janet Flanner with Gallant’s autograph note for Shawn to upper margin, “Lovely picture of Janet. MG.”
Print review of Gallant’s work.
Highlights:
TLS, Gallant to Shawn, August 1, 1968, one page. Gallant explains her writing processes, emphasizing the difference between a journal and fiction or literature. In part:
You must have had a hard time with all the repetitions and trivia. I usually typed each day’s journal the following morning, copying what I had written in longhand the day before. […] I never change or edit journals, for fear of turning them into fiction or literature, and that accounts for the grammar and spelling, and for remarks of no interest to anyone else, such as my opinion of a book or about one of my neighbors.
TLS, Gallant to Shawn, August 18, 1968, two pages. Gall
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