‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street’ by Mavis Gallant

Two self-imposed rules: no writer I have published with CBe; and no Chekhov, no Isaac Babel, no Alice Munro, no certain others who I’d like to believe can be taken as read (and re- and re-read). I sincerely believe that Mavis Gallant belongs in the latter gang, and she is here only because she seems to have a cult rather than a wide following. ‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street’ is one of her best-known stories; but really, there are no duds.

No, begin at the beginning: Peter lost Agnes. Agnes says to herself somewhere, Peter is lost.

But that’s the end, the final sentences. This is the beginning:

Now that they are out of world affairs and back where they started, Peter Frazier’s wife says, ‘Everybody did well in the international thing except us.’

‘You have to be crooked,’ he tells her.

‘Or smart. Pity we weren’t.’

But no, the real beginning is at the top of the page, the words of the title, the ice wagon going down the street. “When I was a kid I would get up in the summer before the others, and I’d see the ice wagon going down the street.” That’s Agnes speaking. The street was in Saskatchewan. Agnes’s family was not rich. Agnes is Peter’s boss in the office in Geneva, a girl, twenty-three at most. “The people he worked with had told him a Scandinavian girl was arriving, and he had expected a stunner. Agnes was a mole: She was small and brown, and round-shouldered as if she had always carried parcels or younger children in her arms.” Peter is afraid: “He saw the ambition, the terror, the dry pride. She was the true heir of the men from Scotland; she was at the start. She had been sent to tell him, ‘You can begin, but not begin again.’”

Agnes, who never drinks, gets drunk at a party and tells Peter about the ice wagon while, under orders from the hostess of the party, he is escorting her home. And while Peter’s wife, Sheilah, back at the party, is starting an affair with a man who will get the Fraziers out of Geneva and onto “the Oriental tour that should have made their fortune”. They reach Agnes’s apartment: “The room was neat and belonged to no one.” She showers and puts on a dressing gown and rubs her cheek on his shoulder. “He thought, This is how disasters happen.” Nothing happens. He goes home.

But something has happened, something that will have Peter still wondering, years later, “what they were doing over there in Geneva – not Sheilah and Peter, Agnes and Peter. It is almost as if they had once run away together, silly as children, irresponsible as lovers.” Something to do with the ice wagon – which he imagines seeing in the place of Agnes, and “the weak prairie trees and the shadows on the sidewalk”. He could take that morning that belongs to Agnes for himself, if he wanted, “but what can Peter do with the start of a summer day? Sheilah is here, it is a true Sunday morning, with its dimness and headache …” Peter has always been lost.

First published in The New Yorker, 1963, and available online to subscribers; variously collected, including in Paris Stories, NYRB, 2002, and Collected Stories, Everyman, 2016

‘Voices Lost in the Snow’ by Mavis Gallant

I believe that all writers have a few short stories that they’re forever trying to emulate or write their own version of. Mavis Gallant’s ‘Voices Lost in the Snow’ is one of mine. The narrator, Linnet, recalls her childhood in 1930s country Montreal from the perspective of many years later, grown and living in North America. The Saturdays spent calling on friends with her father, now long dead, have become one long “whitish afternoon” in memory. “Two persons descend the street, stepping carefully,” Gallant writes. “The child, reminded every day to keep her hands still, gesticulates wildly—there is the flash of a red mitten. I will never overtake this pair. Their voices are lost in the snow.”

So many specific details from this story remain with me. That flash of a red mitten against the snow, the mother with her Russian novels, the dish of pink, green and white mint wafers offered by Georgie, Linett’s godmother, when Linnet and her father visit on one of those Saturdays. I also admire the characterization of the narrator’s younger self—an example that children in a story can still have agency and play an active role in determining the outcome of events (whether they’re aware of it or not.) “Being young, I was the last one to whom anyone owed an explanation”, she reflects, and Gallant puts the reader in the child’s position in this story by never explicitly stating that the visit to Georgie’s house is a proposition of sorts: when read closely, the subtext reveals that the father is prepared to leave his wife for the other woman, but only if the child is part of the deal. To me, this story captures the way a moment or encounter from childhood can gain significance years later with the new perspective that growing older gives us on the things we couldn’t understand when we were young. Part of that involves recognizing that are our parents not indestructible figures, but flawed, vulnerable and human.

First published in The New Yorker, April 5, 1976, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Varieties of Exile, The New York Review of Books, 2003, and The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Bloomsbury, 2004

‘Voices Lost in Snow’ by Mavis Gallant

For me, Mavis Gallant is the greatest Canadian prose writer. Of the many choices I might have made from her magisterial oeuvre—’An Autobiography,’ ‘The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street,’ ‘The Fenton Child,’ the list goes on—I’ve settled on ‘Voices Lost in Snow,’ one of her lovely evocations of 1930s Anglo Montreal. I just love how weird this story is: it begins as a kind of essay in interwar child-rearing strategies before becoming more straightforwardly narrative, but even once it does we’re hard-pressed to know what’s going on (which is fitting, since its subject is the power of childhood ignorance). Most of my students don’t really care for this story, but those who do (and there’s always a handful, it’s quite gratifying) care for it a lot.

Gallant is the master of obliquity: not even in the final section, the most dramatic, is it obvious that the narrator’s father has suggested to her mother’s friend, one of the child’s many godparents, that they embark on a long-contemplated affair (more than that, even, that they run away together), but only if the child is part of the package. It takes all our readerly efforts to see this silent offer being first made and then rebuffed. Reflecting on this moment later in life, the narrator announces “I brush in memory against the spiderweb” of lies, half-truths, and evasions that marks adulthood. That description sends us back to an earlier moment in the story, the description of the narrator’s escape from serious illness: the child’s new doctor, French Canadian, and thus a scandal to the story’s Anglo characters, solemnly declares, “Votre fille a frôlé la phtisie”—she had a brush with consumption. ‘Voices Lost in Snow’ is made up of such echoes, which readers brush past in near incomprehension.

Above all, I love it for a scene in which father and daughter, trudging through the snowy streets of Montreal, hear “a mob roaring four syllables over and over,” “the name of a hockey player admired to the point of dementia.” The father jerks back as if in physical pain, a look of helplessness on his face. He spits out this heartbreaking line (so resonant to any introvert): “Crowds eat me. Noise eats me.”

First published in The New Yorker, March 28, 1976. Collected in Home Truths, Random House, 1985 and Varieties of Exile, NYRB Classics, 2003. Read the story here

‘An Unmarried Man’s Summer’ by Mavis Gallant

Maybe the summer, if you want to be all seasonal about it, is a good time to open up Mavis Gallant’s Selected Stories and turn to page 284. Here you will make the acquaintance of Walter Henderson, “a stripling to his friends”, who are the elderly folk of the French Riviera. They look at Walter, and listen to his sociable stories, but see a long-lost loved one, whether that means a lover or “an adored but faithless son”. But this is how Walter spends his winters (driving his car “gaily, as if it were summer”). His summers are a different matter, as he “lolls on a garden chair, rereading his boyhood books”. Only, in Walter’s forty-fifth year, a complication arises, in the form of a family visit…

The details are craftily, cattily observed, the intrigue of the story leisurely. Walter, so used to reading and telling stories of his own, has to acknowledge the discomfiting existence of other people’s. Meditations on age take place against the drowsy backdrop of a “breather” for his guests that they seem reluctant to end. The good news is that Gallant’s Selected Stories runs to nearly 900 pages, making it a pleasantly Walter-like companion for train journeys, sojourns in the sun.

First published in the New Yorker, 1963 and available online to subscribers here and collected in The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Bloomsbury, 1997. Picked by Michael Caines, who works at the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 2013) and the editor of a TLS bicentennial celebration of Jane Austen. He is writing a short book about literary prizes, and a slightly longer book about Brigid Brophy. He is founding editor of the Brixton Review of Books. You can read his full Personal Anthology here.

‘New Year’s Eve’ by Mavis Gallant

Whatever happens on New Year’s Eve “happens every day for a year”. That is a scary thought. Especially for the unhappy bereaved Plummers and unhappy almost-orphan Amabel, who spend a squirmingly uncomfortable last night of the year in Moscow enduring the wrong opera in the wrong language with the wrong people.

It’s not a long story and there’s not much plot, just Amabel’s delusions and the Plummers’ dark innards scalpeled open. But every sentence of Gallant’s exact and flowing prose brings a little ping of surprise – oh, she’s going to do that now! Hey, I wasn’t expecting that! Gallant’s characters are frequently outspoken but rarely understand each other. (And when they do, they pretend not to.) Here, Cyrillic script and minds disorderly with time and loss add further division. Nothing, it seems, will rescue the Plummers from their lonely cells, but, at the end, there is a hint that Amabel’s incapacity for deep thought may save her – and that is also typical of Gallant, where intelligence is so often a bar to any conventional form of happiness.

‘New Year’s Eve’ is both heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, and if the evening’s events will indeed repeat themselves throughout 2019, we could all do worse than indulge in some Gallant before the fireworks start.

First published in The New Yorker, 10 Jan 1970. Available in various Gallant collections, including The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant, Bloomsbury

Chosen by Jo Lloyd. Jo is from South Wales, where she enjoys naming the elements. Her short fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Best British Short Stories, and the 2018 O Henry Prize Stories.