Paul Gallico - Paul Gallico's Style and Themes

Paul Gallico's Style and Themes

Gallico is a self-described "storyteller." Many of his stories are told in the apparently artless style of a folk tale or legend. Like other "storyteller" writers, the charm and power lie in something about the cumulative effect of plainly told detail after plainly told detail. A summary outline of a Gallico story may sound uninteresting, even bordering on ludicrous; an individual quotation broken out of its context falls flat; their essence exists only in their entirety.

For example, consider Molly Ivins' summary of The Snow Goose:

The Snow Goose is a tale about a disabled painter living in a lonely lighthouse on the coast of the county of Essex in England. One day a girl brings to him a wounded snow goose, which he nurses back to health. The goose returns each year, as does the girl, and a romance develops between the girl and the artist. But the artist is killed rescuing soldiers after the evacuation of Dunkirk, while the snow goose flies overhead.

Andrea Park, in a review of Love of Seven Dolls, notes that Gallico's work has power only as a textural whole. "It is difficult to describe and impossible to pinpoint the tenuous, even nebulous word magic that successfully carries a reader into the world of fantasy and make-believe. It is perhaps delineated as a quality, a kind of fragile atmosphere that, once established, cannot be broken. Mr. Gallico creates this atmosphere when he writes the sequences with Mouche and the puppets."

Beginning writers are often advised to show rather than to describe. One of the mysteries of Gallico's style is its effectiveness despite his constant violation of this rule. When he wants us to know that a Peyrot is cynical, he says "Wholly cynical, he had no regard or respect for man, woman, child, or God." When he wants us to know that Mouche is innocent, he tells us of her "innocence and primitive mind." When he wants us to know that Rhayader has a warm heart in his crippled body, he says "His body was warped, but his heart was filled with love for wild and hunted things." Much of Gallico's stories are told as a string of assertions and generalities, illuminated only by touches of the particular and specific.

Gallico sometimes sets the scene by describing his stories as legends. Within the text of The Snow Goose he says that "this story... has been garnered from many sources and from many people. Some of it comes in the form of fragments from men who looked upon strange and violent scenes." Later he writes "Now the story becomes fragmentary, and one of these fragments is in the words of the men on leave who told it in the public room of the Crown and Arrow, an East Chapel pub." Given this presentation, it is hardly surprising that it has been taken to be a retelling of an actual legend; Gallico writes that "the person and character of the painter are wholly fictional as is the story itself, although I am told that in some quarters the snow goose appearing over Dunkirk has been accepted as legend and I have been compelled to reply to many correspondents that it was sheer invention."

Martin Levin wrote that "Mr. Gallico has long had a way with the quasi-human—puppets (Love of Seven Dolls), cows (Ludmila,) geese (The Snow Goose)" as well as no fewer than five books about cats.

Often, Gallico's point of view implies that the nonhuman character in some way really possesses a human spirit, or a portion of a human spirit. In The Love of Seven Dolls, the puppeteer's relation to his puppets suggests at least a resemblance to dissociative identity disorder or "multiple personality" disorder, a disorder which was well-known to the lay public in the 1950s. It is significant that Gallico never even hints at such a thing. He notes that the puppeteer's "primitive" Senegalese assistant "looked upon the puppets 'as living, breathing creatures.'" and that "the belief in the separate existence of these little people was even more basic with Mouche for it was a necessity to her and a refuge from the storms of life with which she had been unable to cope." One could go so far as to say that he leaves it deliberately ambiguous whether the relation between the puppeteer and his puppets is purely natural or whether there could be at least a trace of the supernatural in it. This ambiguity is hinted at in the close of the movie adaptation, Lili. Although the puppeteer Paul's hands are engaged in embracing Lili, the four puppets somehow peek around the puppet stage proscenium to smile their happy approval (and applaud), apparently under their own power.

The treatment contrasts with the 1954 Danny Kaye vehicle, Knock on Wood, which turns on the similar theme of a ventriloquist who can express his true self only through his dummy. This movie not only hints at a psychiatric undertone, it revels in it; Kaye's character's love interest is a "lady psychiatrist" (in the phrase used by a contemporary reviewer). The pop-psychiatric point of view was prevalent during the late 1940s and 1950s, the same period that brought us the psychoanalytic musical Lady in the Dark and the book The Three Faces of Eve. Gallico's distancing of his writing from this "modern" point of view and his use of the language of legend and fairy-tale seems deliberate, the literary equivalent of what painter Thomas Kinkade does today in his painting. However, some fans of Gallico and critics of Kinkade would argue that Gallico's literary art is more comparable to the paintings of nineteenth century Russian painter Victor Vasnetsov, as Vastenov's works are more firmly rooted in genuine sentimentality and folk tradition as opposed to Kinkade's work which is often criticized as "cheezy," "schmaltz," and "cookie-cutter pop-art."