[In the following essay, Dunleavy traces the origins and development of Lavin's story “Happiness.”]

Mysterious and fascinating to those who study the craft of fiction, the creative process is equally mysterious and fascinating to those who practice it.

When, for example, did the seeds of “Happiness”, first published in The New Yorker of 14 December 1968, begin to germinate?¹ No one knows, not even the author of the story, for Mary Lavin's method of composition is to allow such seeds to grow at their own rate, in a conscious but untilled corner of her mind, until form and theme become evident. Only then is the first written draft committed to paper, after which the long and sometimes frustrating task of conscious development, pruning and cultivation is begun.²

The metaphor of writer as gardener (frequently used by Mary Lavin herself, in conversations about her work) is especially appropriate in a discussion of “Happiness”, for one of several early seeds of this story was a true anecdote about a child, brought home from school by one of the author's daughters.³ The subject of the anecdote, a little girl, was retarded: remembering all she was expected to remember was especially hard for her; try as she would she could not always meet the standards set by her teachers; indeed, she could not always meet the standards she set for herself. One particularly difficult day she wept bitterly, stung by a scolding she had received, and by her own self-humiliation. The other children tried to comfort her. “It's all right,” she told them. “When I go home I will work in my garden with my little trowel.”

In the earliest attempts to commit “Happiness” to paper, the anecdote is recalled in a cryptic note from the author to herself, a reminder of motifs and images later to be coaxed into prose: “Home yard dry wall my little trowel last before sun falls.” Other notes refer to daffodils and “cohorts”; introduce all but one of the principal characters of the story (a mother and her children); and suggest, in “Uncle Frank”, the remaining character to be developed later.

Happiness—what it is, where to find it, how to know it—is the topic that occupies most of these early pages: the mother, identified as a widow and later given the name “Vera”, is its strongest proponent.⁴ Urging it on her children, she declares that it has nothing to do with externals, with incidents, with individuals; it is not to be confused with pleasure; sorrow is not its opposite; it cannot be given by one who has it to anyone else. Speaking for herself and her sisters, one daughter recalls how such declarations always had puzzled them when they were young: was happinness then ambition? Or luck? Or a conundrum? Or perhaps a feat? Their grandmother, they knew, had not experienced happiness; although their mother claimed to have had a “lion's share” of it, knowing how sad and lonely her widowed life had been, they had their doubts. Uncle Frank had doubts, too. In any case, he believed that putting too high a value on it simply was not right.

Attempting to move from this discussion to a description of the children's grandmother, Mary Lavin warned herself: “This will be a difficult transition.” “Mention a wasp perhaps,” she inserted, not indicating where or why. Sideways in the margin of one page she wrote: “Seeing him think of Hallie Óg might as well have been a little bird that flew in the window. When she moved all her hair fell over like a waterfall.” She began another page: “Well, whether you are suffering or not it has nothing to do with pleasure, or—, or—, or—.” The manuscript grew in bulk; the story did not develop. Finally, the author declared herself defeated: “I'm going to give up anyway. I don't know where this is going. I know where it came from—but that's not the point.” She could not give up, however; on the same page, in the same ink, just below these lines, she instructed herself in how the children were to be depicted: “I think they should know she was not—not happy?—most of the time anyway—mention—so that is why at—.” Incomplete, the thought broke off in mid-sentence. Yet work on the story went on. Manuscript dates establish this period of frustration as summer, 1965.

Mary Lavin does not recall the pains of this early labour: for her, “Happiness” emerged from her creative imagination to take shape on paper not during the summer but in the autumn of that year. Her memory of the event is clear: she was walking along the Strand, in London, “feeling wonderful.” She had booked into a pleasant hotel, the day was fine, she had the afternoon to herself, her children were safe in Dublin, under someone else's care. For one glorious afternoon she did not have to worry about who would take one of them to the soccer match, who would listen to another's chatter about a new boyfriend, whether or not they had clean stockings to wear or a skirt that was pressed or ribbons for their hair. She had nothing to do but stroll back to her hotel and read the new Vogue Magazine she had just purchased. Idly, she began to speculate: “I wonder what my children really think of me? What would they say if they were asked?” The answers came quickly (answers familiar to mothers of teenage daughters): “My mother talks too much.” “My mother never shuts up.” No, she assured herself, think what they would, they never would be so disloyal, so unkind. They would be—more tactful. They would say something like, “My mother always has a lot to say.”

“Mother always had a lot to say. This does not mean she was always talking but that we children felt the wells she drew upon were deep, deep, deep”: suddenly, there was the first line; there was the central figure; there was the story. Looking around, the author saw that she had come to Cadbury's Coffee Shop in Piccadilly. Into the shop she rushed, her leisurely afternoon forgotten. There, on pages 177-180 of her new November 1965 issue of Vogue, beginning in the open spaces of an advertisement for Bounce Hairsetting Gel, she scribbled what became, for her, the first satisfactory working outline of the story that had been eluding and frustrating her since the beginning of June.

Frustration and dismay did not disappear, however, at this point: on page after page of Ink Paper Jotter, the composition book in which she likes to work, Mary Lavin transformed images from her creative imagination into the fictional reality of words and phrases, but each image seemed to grow separately. The story did not take shape, it resisted the form she tried to impose on it. Again and again she seized fresh sheets of paper. Again and again she began her story anew, her hand racing across the page in the opening lines that seemed to come so easily, her mind hoping that they would be the impetus for the rest. When this method failed, she began separate sheets, heading them “Grandmother”, “Take me”, “Cohorts”, “Daffodils”, “Travel”, “Her Childhood”, “Birds”, “Her Marriage”, “Widow”, “Sorrow”, “Fatigue”, “Her incompetence”. Black-ink additions blossomed on blue-ink pages, blue-ink corrections in black-ink lines; red-ink notations appeared in margins; whole pages were criss-crossed in purple; suggestions (“develop this”), explanations (“flapped it open, I mean”), negative comments (“just silly”) were inked and pencilled in everywhere. Uncle Frank vanished; in his place emerged Father Hugh, a foil for Vera, larger and more distinct each time the author focused attention on him. Meanwhile, on inside and outside covers of her Ink Paper Jotters, the author returned frequently to the basic question of the story: What is happiness? “Was it a mystery?” “Was it a sham?” What did the children's mother mean when she urged something she called happiness on them? They had to be kept curious, puzzled—not knowing yet half-knowing yet not believing what they half knew. That, clearly, was essential to the story. The author knew the answer to the question, of course: it appeared in a bold, black hand on one of her manuscript drafts: Happiness was the “life force that burned out pain as fire burns out fire.” To make such a statement in the story, however, would have been inartistic. What Mary Lavin had to do was infuse it into everything Vera did, said, and thought, an immanence never expressed.

From time to time the author stood back to study objectively what she had written. Using the working method of a composer, she determined its form:

1. The motifs and characters to be introduced were listed.

II. The methods of exposition to be used were outlined.

III. The elements to be fused were joined by dashes.

Like a painter, she arranged her values:

Sisters, etc.
Happiness—a list
Sorrow?
A day of misgiving—finishes.
You can't give it
          only you owe.
Was that it? Wasp
End Euston?
Focus again: trowel? garden
One day
Fr. Hugh: when she last at confession
But she opened her eyes
Fear—despair
Fr. Hugh—as I told
Daffodils
Was life SHAM?

Some scenes—studies, obviously, of aspects of the larger work—were sketched separately: “Begin Take Me—the daffodils and the nun, etc. And end with the daffodils.”

Once the author had established the way in which her separate images could be integrated into the story, as she had seen it so clearly the day she had outlined it on the pages of Vogue—once she had solved the artistic problem of its development—once again she was able to return to the opening lines, this time moving forward with confidence to the end of her story. From this point on her working methods were similar to those she employed in writing “A Memory”: a heavily-edited manuscript was sent to her typist; multiple typescripts were prepared; simultaneously, on different typescripts, the author experimented with new or reconsidered ideas, concepts, images and incidents; the revisions she chose to retain were incorporated into one typescript that was sent back to the typist; multiple typescripts of the new version of the story were prepared; these were then revised, and the process was continued until a final version, satisfactory to the author, was achieved.⁵

“Happiness”, however, seems to have been a more difficult story for the author to revise than “A Memory”: in between work on typescripts, the author returned to her Ink Paper Jotters, reworking images by hand, transmitting what she felt but could not yet put into words by the actual physical way in which she wrote the words that came to her: small, precise, dainty; large and looped and sprawling; swiftly, skimming the surface of the page, the dots of i's and the crossbars of t's flying above and beyond the letters to which they belonged; underlined once, twice, three times, in heavy black ink, for emphasis; slipped between lines and stored in corners of pages, as comments to herself, and suggestions for future consideration. Portions of these handwritten manuscripts were incorporated into the revised typescripts returned to the typist. Sometimes, in the new set of typescripts prepared, such changes and additions were retained; sometimes they were subjected to further revision; sometimes they were rejected, an angry X indicating how impatient the author felt that she had wasted time on them.

In the first stages of revision, after the first version of the completed story had been committed to paper, Mary Lavin's working method was to expand and develop. Using herself at times as model, often with tongue in cheek, she constructed a clear and carefully detailed image of the widowed mother, Vera, against a background precise in time, place and sequence of events. The author's own impatience with the paper paraphernalia of daily life, her own unwillingness to allot it the time it requires, was tranferred to Vera. An old fantasy was given to her to act out: sweeping bills and letters and notes and receipts and a hundred bits and pieces of miscellaneous memoranda into her suitcase, telling herself that Father Hugh was right—that she could take care of them on the ferry across the Irish Sea, Vera set off for London. On the ferry, however, she relaxed and enjoyed the voyage (because surely there would be time to work on the train); later, on the train, before she reached Euston Station, she discreetly emptied the suitcase out the window, watching the bills, letters, notes, receipts and hundred bits and pieces of memoranda fly off like birds. Then, free as a bird herself, she settled back for the rest of her journey, “because that's what holidays are for.” The author also gave Vera an extended trip through Europe: real places that had been visited by Mary Lavin and her daughters formed Vera's itinerary, while incidents that almost occurred to the author but did not, or might have occurred but differently, or did occur but not quite as described created and coloured Vera's experiences. In one manuscript the story of the little trowel was told by Vera to her children; in another, the little trowel belonged to Vera who, like the child of the anecdote, went out in the garden and worked with it when the pressures and disappointments of life threatened to overwhelm her. Vera continued to press her concept of happiness, explaining it again and again to her children through examples taken from her own life, from the life of their dead father, and from the lives of their grandmother and grandfather, all presented by Mary Lavin in careful detail. These examples also helped to develop and define Vera herself: for the children, they provided a view “through a telescope” that enabled them to look back along the years; they provided images caught in metaphoric photographs to which their mother, the photographer, “had applied a kind of fixative.” Happiness was for Vera like the trapeze of an acrobat which is caught and let go and caught again, just in time; sorrow was the oppressive kindness of bat-like men and women who, dressed always in black, were dispersed with a laugh. In the end Vera died, having collapsed in her garden where she had been working with her little trowel, in a scene adapted from one described to the author many years ago, an account of the death of a woman she never had met.

It is important to note that the real-life images and incidents that were coloured by the author's memory, embroidered by her creative imagination, and molded by her to fit “Happiness” were introduced into the story only after the author had the idea of it clear in her mind; they were not the source of the idea itself, that of writing a story about a woman for whom the life force “burned out pain as fire burns out fire”—a woman who called that life force happiness. A woman, however, is not a believable imitation of life; the craft of fiction requires the illusion of the woman: specific, identifiable, with a background, family relationships, friends, faults, virtues, pain and passions. To create the woman of “Happiness” Mary Lavin had to portray a particular person in a particular place at a particular time. Real-life images and incidents merely provided the details which she then modified, combined and adapted to fit her story.

Following her usual working method, Mary Lavin incorporated into “Happiness” incidents and details far in excess of what was needed to particularise person, place and time, and beyond what she intended to include in the final version of her story.⁶ Her reasons were sound: she herself had to know her subject thoroughly before she could apply the principles of artistic reduction—before she could sharpen and strengthen her portrait by selecting essential details and eliminating those that were not essential. The effect she sought, in her own word, was “analogous to a woodcut.”

Artistic reduction of “Happiness” was begun in February, 1967. In the nearly eighteen months since she had outlined it on pages from Vogue, the story had grown in manuscript to ninety-nine pages. By the end of the month it had been reduced to thirty-seven pages in typescript. Whole passages had been dropped: the analogy between holding on to happiness and performing on a trapeze; the anecdote of the child with the little trowel; an afternoon which Vera and her children had spent with another family; an episode involving lost tickets. Other passages had been compressed, reduced to half their former length and less. Still the author continued to edit her prose, seeking not so much at this point to reduce unnecessary detail, but to find the one right word that would serve in the place of three or five; to shorten sentences that, in context, she wanted to sound terse, emphatic, concise; to fuse description and dialogue.

By the end of March, 1967, the author was satisfied at last with her work; the manuscript was typed for publication. Twenty-seven dated versions of heavily edited manuscript and typescript—some of them studies, concentrating on parts of “Happiness”, some revisions of the whole story—plus one hundred and eleven pages of undated manuscript had gone into its making.

Notes

1. Chosen for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories, ed. Martha Foley (Boston, 1969), the story was published also in Mary Lavin, Happiness, and Other Stories (Boston, 1970), pp. 9-33 and Mary Lavin, Collected Stories (Boston, 1971), pp. 401-17.

2. For a fuller description of Mary Lavin's working methods, see Janet Egleson Dunleavy, “The Making of Mary Lavin's ‘A Memory’”, Eire-Ireland, XII: 3 (Fall, 1977), 90-92.

3. I am grateful to Mary Lavin for the opportunities she has given me to examine and discuss with her unpublished drafts of her published work. Quotations from unpublished drafts of “Happiness” in this essay are from both dated and undated materials. Internal evidence in undated manuscripts establish that they belong to the same period of composition as dated manuscripts; i.e., June, 1965-March, 1967.

4. Because Mary Lavin often gives this name to her widows, her readers will find it familiar. Each Vera, however, is developed independently; while resembling other Veras in some respects, she differs from others in significant details. The Vera stories, therefore, cannot be considered as episodes in the life of a single Mary Lavin character. At the same time, they invite comparison.

5. Cf.”The Making of Mary Lavin's ‘A Memory,’” pp. 92-99.

6. The manuscript evidence of the point in the creative process at which Mary Lavin particularizes person, place, and time, after her story otherwise has begun to reveal both form and meaning, establishes clearly that she is neither, as some critics have argued, following in the footsteps of the naturalists nor writing autobiographically. For a discussion of this as-aspect of Mary Lavin's work, see Janet Egleson Dunleavy, “The Fiction of Many Lavin: Universal Sensibility in a Particular Milieu”, Irish University Review, VII:2 (Autumn, 1977), 222-36.