The Place is Alive

"Acceptance of Their Ways," by Mavis Gallant from the collection My Heart is Broken

Lily kept her drinking to Nice, where, anonymous in a large hotel, friendly and lavish in a bar, she let herself drown.

“Acceptance of Their Ways,” by Mavis Gallant, from the collection My Heart is Broken

Photo by Christine Isakzhanova on Unsplash

In this story, Lily is on a tight budget, except when she receives money from an inheritance. Then she can leave Italy and the boarding house and travel to the beautiful city of Nice, to indulge herself.

Nice becomes a landscape for another sort of Lily, “an old forgotten Lily-girl, tender and warm, able to shed a happy tear and open a closed fist.” In this way Nice is a synecdoche, which substitutes the part for the whole. (“hired hand” for “worker). But it can also be used, as Gallant does here, for the whole standing in for the part, all the ways Lily can be in Nice.

So Nice, through synecdoche, is not a static setting but rich and alive, in relationship with the protagonist, and infused with meaning and emotion. There’s also a paradox. In Nice, Lily lets herself go a little wild, but she confines this behavior only to Nice and not Italy.

Gallant’s sentence has an eloquent rhythm right at the heart of it. She opens with the base clause, “Lily kept her drinking to Nice.” What follows is a relative pronoun, “where,” but the clause that’s about to unfold is interrupted by two modifying adjectival phrases. Here is the source of the eloquence, which comes from balance, a subset of parallelism, with the two phrases syntactically similar:

1. anonymous in a large hotel

(adjective) (preposition) (indefinite article) (adjective) (noun)

2. friendly and lavish in a bar

(adjective) (conjunction) (adjective) (preposition) (indefinite article) (noun)

Gallant uses epistrophe, the repetition of word(s) at the end of a phrase or clause with ‘in a.’ This allows the two phrases to echo each other with two soft stresses, which are followed by a heavier stress: “in a large hotel”; “in a bar.” (heavy stress in bold).

The second phrase augments the eloquence with the balanced “friendly and lavish” and a pattern of stresses: “friendly and lavish.” Both of these phrases elaborate on Lily’s behavior and state of being in Nice.

What follows is the rest of the relative clause, with the entire clause looking like this: “where she let herself drown.” I love that surprising word “drown.” That one word, a metaphor, complexifies everything. With metaphors, you have what’s being described, the target, and the image, or the source, to which the target is being compared. Here, however, we have only the source, “drown.” The target is left open, so it could mean becoming drunk or Lily’s emotional state or both.

Mavis Gallant

Your Turn

Open with your base clause and include a place.

Use “where,” a relative pronoun.

Interrupt the relative clause with two adjectival phrases that elaborate on the behavior and/or state of being of the character in this place. Can you use epistrophe?

Finish the relative clause. Can you use a metaphor?

Try it!

How did it go?

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About Me

I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word,” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007.

My short story collection, In this Ravishing World, won the W.S. Porter Prize and the Prism Prize for Climate Literature and was published in July 2024. My award-winning novel, Afterword, was published in May 2023. My novel, The Translator, was a finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize, and The Painting, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. My nonfiction books, How to Write Stunning Sentences and Stunning Sentences: A Creative Writing Journal, are bestsellers. My short stories have appeared in Zyzzyva, Chicago Quarterly Review, Fugue, Nashville Review, Your Impossible Voice, and many other publications. I teach creative writing at Stanford Continuing Studies. Please visit my website: www.ninaschuyler.com

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