SOURCE: Dunleavy, Janet Egleson. “The Making of Mary Lavin's ‘A Memory’.” Eire-Ireland 12, no. 3 (1977): 90-9.

Now in her early sixties with many awards behind her, including two Guggenheims and the prestigious Lady Gregory medal, Mary Lavin, best known to Americans through her short stories in The New Yorker, served her literary apprenticeship in Dublin in the days when Frank O'Connor, Sean O'Faolain, and Lord Dunsany were the major figures of a circle that helped develop the short story in English from mere tale to art form.¹ The circle in which she served her literary apprenticeship has long since dissolved into history and heritage, but Mary Lavin is still dedicated to writing as her art, fiction as her craft.

A story begins in the artist's imagination, for Mary Lavin, when—suddenly—she is struck by the universality of a particular event.² “That happens”: the truth of this observation sharpens and clarifies in the days, weeks, or months in which she finds corroboration for it in the life around her. Meanwhile, a related question begins to form, teasing her curious mind: “to what kind of person does that happen?” One day the answer comes: “that sort of thing happens to that kind of person.” Another period of observation and corroboration follows, while she ponders still another question: “under what circumstances does that sort of thing happen to that kind of person?” When she has the answer to that, she has the nucleus of her story: the universal truth that, particularized, grows into a work of fiction. From her storehouse of scenes, sounds, and conversations—bits and pieces of life, fragments of experience, that seem, according to Mary Lavin, to collect somewhere without her being aware that her magpie mind is retaining them for future use—come the houses, clothes, gardens, streets, people she needs to particularize the universal truth that, slowly and deliberately, she has compacted from those teasing questions that consciously and unconsciously focus her observations: as if, according to the author, having materialized out of the past, furnishings of life and embodiments of feelings become composite images that “sift through cracks” in her head into the story beginning to take shape.

At this point Mary Lavin is ready to commit a first draft to writing. It is scribbled out, in longhand, from beginning to end, as the pieces “sift through the cracks.” Pressured by an imagination that creates faster than she can write, the author rushes to keep pace. Words suggests paragraphs later to be constructed; dashes indicate connections later to be made; and parentheses mark omissions later to be filled in, as the skeletal prose outline expands within the pages of a copybook. She does not type her drafts because no typewriter can move as fast as her pen. She does not dictate into a recording machine because she writes kinesthetically, bearing down darkly here, underscoring there, forming large letters that dominate the page, small letters that work out details, reducing letters to their simplest forms, according to mood and subject.³ This is the part of the story-writing process when the author needs most to work alone and uninterrupted, for hours at a time—difficult hours to arrange for a naturally convivial woman with a wide circle of friends who gives generously of her time to young writers, teaches courses in creative writing, and participates actively on committees and boards of importance to the intellectual community.⁴

Revision and expansion of this skeleton follow, over periods measured sometimes in weeks, sometimes in months, sometimes in years, since subsequent drafts also are written out in longhand until the author feels that the story has progressed to a point at which she can view it more satisfactorily in typescript. At her instruction, a typist prepares an original and multiple carbon copies. These copies are worked on sequentially and simultaneously: at times, the author concentrates most of her revisions in one copy, then moves to another; at times she moves back and forth among several copies, trying different revisions in each. Those revisions she decides to retain are incorporated into the next typescript she orders—again, in an original and multiple carbon copies—and the process is repeated until a final version satisfactory to the author is achieved.

This is the process Mary Lavin followed throughout the writing of “A Memory,” a novella published in the United States in 1973 as the title story of a collection of short novels.⁵ “That happens”: human beings who suppress their feelings, denying themselves emotional lives, are deeply upset if another human being, for whatever reason, attempts to free their fettered feelings. The idea was not new to her when she began to commit the first skeletal draft of it to writing in January, 1970. Many years before, she had written “Love Is for Lovers,” a short story included in the early prize-winning Tales from Bective Bridge.⁶

“Love Is for Lovers” is the story of Mathew Simmins who “began to think about marriage” only when he had reached “the non-committal age of forty-four.” For 20 years he had worked in Mahaffy's Stores, gradually rising in this establishment as he assumed more and more responsibility from young Mahaffy, who “was said to be one of the best chess players in the world,” but who lacked his father's ability when it came to the family business. At 44, Mathew tells himself that working his way up in Mahaffy's had taken so much of his time and energies that he had had none left over for romance, even as a young man, except for occasional daydreams in which he imagined himself with beautiful girls on advertising posters. But, over the years, even the daydreams had been pushed aside as his mind was taken up more and more with inventories and orders to be filled. Thus when Rita Cooligan, a widowed customer, began her daily flirtations, Mathew allowed himself to be drawn into her age-old games, knowing the meaning of them, enjoying the possibility that at 44 he might let himself be caught, thinking in fact that he wanted to be caught—that marriage perhaps would introduce some welcome warmth and comfort into his cold, bare life. But one unusually warm Saturday afternoon in July, physically sickened by the inescapable heat and glare, seeking in the cool blue of the sky and green of the trees at least visual relief from the oppressive sun, Mathew suddenly felt that the warmth of the Widow Cooligan also was inescapable, and that marriage to her would mean day-after-unrelenting-day of the same oppressive and physically sickening warmth. Fleeing her orange curtains, orange dress, orange couch—Rita Cooligan was very fond of the color orange—he found relief outside in the street, under a cool blue sky, near black iron railings and gray buildings. Safe in his cold, bare room, he determined that, from that moment on, he would live as he lived in the past, avoiding the “hot rays of life.”

Similarities to “A Memory” are apparent. The agones structured in “Love Is for Lovers” by the triangular relationship of Mathew Simmins, Rita Cooligan, and the girl on the bicycle poster are analagous to those structured in “A Memory” by the James-Myra-Emmy triangle. Mathew and James seem to share significant characteristics. Both have rejected love, marriage—any semblance of emotional life—in their commitment to their work. Each is only dimly and imperfectly aware that some part of himself could respond or ever had responded emotionally to another. Just as Mathew is drawn to the Widow Cooligan, anticipating pleasure in the relationship, so James has enjoyed his close friendship with Myra. When Rita and Myra press for greater intimacy, Mathew and James flee. In his youth, Mathew's passions frequently had been stirred by a picture of a girl on a bicycle poster. As a young graduate student completing his Ph.D., James had loved Emmy for one brief, passionate, and deeply unsettling year. In one scene in “Love Is for Lovers,” the Widow Cooligan throws out her arms, playfully barring the door, rather than allow the timid and embarrassed Mathew to leave. In “A Memory,” Myra, in a very different mood, assumes the same posture before a very different James. The Widow Cooligan's Georgian house is “off the main street”; Mathew's lodgings are nearby. Myra's “charming little mews house” appears to be in the same neighborhood, in the lane “at the back of Fitzwilliam Square,” just off Dublin's busy Baggot Street, not far from the National Library. James used to live in the same area, before his friendship with Myra, before his research fellowship had freed him from daily university duties, allowing him to move to his cottage in the country.

Differences are evident. Mathew is consciously drawn to the Widow Cooligan for the physical comforts she can provide: at first he likes even the warmth of the orange color she favors for her wardrobe and the interior of her house. There is no hint of intellectual companionship in his perceptions of her or in their dull, empty conversations. James is attracted to Myra because she seems to offer a “marriage of minds,” with no threat of a physical relationship and all that is usually entails, including conventional marriage and children. At the same time, however, he recognizes that “a nice scent from her clothes … often bothered him, and was occasionally the cause of giving her the victory …” in their “really brilliant arguments. …” In Mathew's past, there was nothing but a fantasy relationship with a picture of a young woman. Preferring his own company, he did not know what it was to be lonely: he had no friends. James's youthful, year-long affair with Emmy had been very real; he is able to acknowledge, to himself and to Myra, that he is strongly drawn toward her, that he would be tempted to spend every evening with her if he lived in Dublin. He has sisters; he knows other people in Dublin; he is known to other people, including the porter at the National Library, who treats him with marked respect.

In sum, James is far more complex than Mathew. Consequently, he is much more interesting, more appropriately the main character of a novella, while Mathew is more appropriately the subject of a short story. Greater differences separate Rita Cooligan and Myra. Rita is not in love with Mathew: to her, his chief attraction is that he is a bachelor. Tired of widowhood, she has become the predator in a series of not-so-subtle games intended to help her catch a second husband. So she plays the helpless, scatterbrained incompetent and the competent motherly woman by turns, confident that she knows “what men like,” and that she will soon be Mathew's wife. Myra, by contrast, is both proud of and amused by her own singlar lack of domesticity. Indeed, it was this quality, and the “strong … intellectual climate of thought in which she lived,” that so attracted James. She, in turn, was pleased to find in him, when first they met, a man capable of appreciating intellectuality in a woman. Thus, their relationship had grown over a “solid phalanx of years” not only because of what it offered to each of them, but also because of what it did not offer, which both avowed they did not want. Yet moments of tenderness had crept into their regular meetings—brief kisses, cheek laid against cheek, hand laid within hand—and each longed to be with the other when they were apart. Understanding this deeper quality to their relationship, Myra endures “the little deprivations” of their separate lives for the joy she feels when they are together. Never would she attempt to trap James into marriage, as Rita Cooligan attempts to trap Mathew, not only for his sake but also because a conventional marriage would not suit her, either. Myra is far more complex than the lonely widow. Moreover, she introduces into “A Memory” a second universal truth absent from “Love Is for Lovers”: “that happens.” Human beings who suppress their feelings, denying themselves emotional lives, for one set of reasons, may seek to express their feelings and live more fully when those reasons no longer are valid.

Readers familiar with Mary Lavin's canon cannot help but note the similarities between “Love Is for Lovers” and “A Memory,” at the same time recognizing the differences. For the author, however, the similarities were not at all apparent in 1970, as “A Memory” began to take shape, perhaps because, as the composite image of James began to materialize, he seemed so clearly different from Mathew in intellect, education, and social and economic status; perhaps because, as Mary Lavin visualized him in a small cottage in County Meath, he seemed so far removed from the shops and shopkeepers of Baggot Street; perhaps because, as she first saw him, his thoughts were focused entirely on himself and the old woman from the village who did household chores for him, without those frequent recollections of Myra—originally Mona—that interrupted him and drew the author's attention to their relationship in later drafts.

James's cottage, as it is described in “A Memory,” is superimposed on the foundations of Mary Lavin's own actual and larger farmhouse in County Meath. It shares her views of surrounding farms. From Dublin, it is reached by the same bus routes, along the same roads, past the same landmarks familiar to the author. Myra's Dublin “flat”—not really a flat at all, as James notes, but a “charming little mews house”—is also taken from the author's life. With its “enormous window by which she had replaced the doors” of the original structure, it stands in the mews behind Dublin's Fitzwilliam Square, where Mary Lavin herself lives and writes when she stays in the city.

James and Myra were first established at their respective address in country and city during the first month of 1970, when the rough idea for “A Memory” began to take shape. From the beginning, like her other stories, the basic outline of the finished piece was apparent. James, content with his life as scholar-ascetic, lived in the country by choice seeking the opportunities it gave him to devote himself to his work without the interruptions and distractions of Dublin. Mona-Myra shared his intellectual interests; seemed to scorn the traditional roles of wife, mistress, and mother; and suggested, by the relationship she offered, what James never before had considered possible: “that a man and woman could enter into a marriage of minds.” In the background there was Emmy, the young girl of James's past, now married and middle-aged. She and her family had moved into neighboring Asigh House. By this act, unwittingly, she had moved back also, after many years of only occasional and fleeting recollection, into James's mind. These three characters remain essentially the same in relation to each other throughout the 26 dated versions and revisions of the story that separate the first rough draft from the final typescript. Synopsis does little to suggest the powerful psychological study that it becomes.

Mary Lavin's first handwritten manuscript of “A Memory” fills a 72-page copybook of the type called an Ink Paper Jotter. Nothing is fully presented in this version: it is but an outline in which some passages are sketched in by means of phrases punctuated by dashes with the word “develop” following them in parentheses; some sequences are merely indicated (e.g. “sewing incident” or “was he on the way to the bus? Very slight indication of the lay of the land here”); some notations are made of dialogue and of the way it is to be used to further the sequence of events in the story (e.g., “Telling it all obliquely through Myra's discussions with him about it”); and many descriptive passages are merely positioned in an impatient scrawl (e.g., “Dublin/the streets—the quays/the bookshops—the people,” the last word heavily underscored for emphasis). Curious notes appear in the margins: for example, some lines from “Bagpipe Music” by Louis MacNeice, which the author incorrectly identifies as “some lines from Eliot,” reminding herself to “look them up” and work them into a later draft.

Given such detailed and explicit notes for development and expansion, anyone unfamiliar with Mary Lavin's working method who examined this outline might well expect that a novel of at least 300 to 400 pages surely would grow out of such a 72-page draft. The expectation would be strengthened if, by chance, this same person were also to talk with Mary Lavin about the reception of the writer in contemporary society. For in such talks—about her own work and the work of others—Mary Lavin frankly and freely explains the advantages of writing novels, of which she has published but two, rather than novellas or short stories: novels are more attractive to book publishers; novels receive more serious consideration from reviewers and critics; novels receive more popular attention from readers; novels earn more income for their authors.

The second through seventh drafts of “A Memory,” dated between March and November, 1970, are indeed longer than the first. As the story is developed, it grows from one Ink Paper Jotter to three, from 72 pages to approximately 200 pages, with much of the skeleton still to be fleshed out. At this point, in fact, it seems as if a 400- or 500-page novel might be in progress. By November, 1970, however, the story has developed sufficiently for Mary Lavin to want to see it in typescript. And once typed copy is before her, the process of artistic reduction begins. For, aware as she is in theory of the practical aspects of novel writing, Mary Lavin approaches a work-in-progress with no practical or mundane considerations whatsoever. Her concern when she writes is for craft. For her, craft is artistic economy. To be able to suggest what is stated or explained, to replace with a single right word the ten previously used to describe an object or situation, to substitute gesture for action: these, to her, are the skills of the literary artist. Thus it is that subsequent drafts of “A Memory,” all 19 of them, are ruthlessly cut and compressed until a final version, satisfactory to the author, is achieved.

Close examination of the heavily edited November, 1970, draft of “A Memory” reveals the author's determination to excise every word that proves not entirely necessary to mood and content. Sometimes verbal compression is achieved slowly, word-by-word: for example, “Mrs. Nally had tried to persuade him to work on alternative days in his study and in his bedroom” becomes “Mrs. Nally suggested once that he work alternative days in his study and in his bedroom”: three words are dropped. Sometimes it moves more easily: in later versions, by a single stroke of the pen a line is condensed further. Sometimes entire lines are deleted: in the final version of the story the line quoted above is omitted altogether, what it says about James and his work habits having been worked into the text in other ways. In the November, 1970, draft Mary Lavin also focuses on propriety of diction and on sound and rhythm as they reveal mood and character, not only in dialogue but also in point-of-view narrative passages. In earlier versions, her concentration was on story, but at this stage of revision she concentrates on modulating diction, sound, and rhythm, altering them skillfully to reflect each shift in point of view without distracting the reader from narrative content. Thus, when the narrative focuses on James, it moves with rhythms the reader learns to associate with him, reflecting his personality also through characteristic sound patterns and through metaphors that mirror his mind. And when the narrative focuses on Myra, rhythm, sound, and diction are again modulated to reflect her personality and to indicate her mood. The MacNiece poem is first worked into the text; later, it is worked into dialogue before being abandoned altogether. Only its rhythms and its pictures of city life, flashing like neon signs, remaining in James's internal monologue to suggest why it had been hovering in the back of the author's creative consciousness. In this and subsequent drafts, more and more factual information necessary to an understanding of the story is presented discursively through each character's thoughts, the reader being left with the task of assembling them in chronological order and determining cause and effect. Revisions transfer this information, from Myra to James and back again, until it blends easily and naturally into point-of-view passages. In earlier versions, facts were presented and cause and effect were stated and explained in passages presented through a narrative voice.

As a result of these revisions, a story that seemed at first to be an objective recounting of a sequence of events in the lives of three characters, each of equal importance and each viewed from outside, begins to become, in November, 1970, an insightful study of James's denial of his emotional self and its effects upon him and on those who have tried to be close to him. By December 3, 1970,—this draft completed during a visit by the author to the United States—James had been enlarged and moved to the foreground; Mrs. Nally, a minor figure who had been presented in sharply focused detail in earlier versions, had been pushed into the background where, in the final version of the story, she is named only once, as the nullified Mrs. Nully, and thereafter is mentioned merely as “an old woman.”

At this stage of revision, in December, 1970, it becomes clear that as the text of the rest of the story had been focused, synthesized, polished, and refined, Mary Lavin had grown increasingly dissatisfied with its conclusion. The first, rough draft had ended with James getting off the bus near his cottage, having walked out on Myra's spontaneous attempt to express her feelings and establish a closer relationship—an attempt by which he is seriously threatened—followed by her accusations and anger. Emmy, remembered earlier, served only as a catalyst for this scene; she was not present, even in memory, in its last episode. In the second draft, the conclusion is developed: an agitated James, on his way home, gets off the bus one stop before he should, walks along the dark road reviewing the distressing events of his evening with Myra, has a moment's panic when he cannot get his bearings, regains control of himself and his world when he recognizes his position, and sets off diagonally across the demesne to reach his cottage by means of a short cut he triumphantly discovers. The implication, clearly, is that he was almost trapped by the illusion that between a man and a woman a kind of marriage could be confined to mind alone, but once more he has managed to avoid an entangling alliance. His suffering, what there is of it, seems minor and of little duration; compared to Myra, he gets off easily. The third draft ends with James on the bus, remembering his conversations about Myra with his sister, whose name changes from Edna to Nora, becoming Kay in the final draft. It is inconclusive, but he seems less unfeeling. The fourth through seventh versions put James on the road again, having gotten off the bus too soon, with no more serious discomfort than an extra mile to “slog on” and another woman to slough off. The eighth rewriting ends with James cursing Myra for having upset his life and having put him in such a state that he must now walk extra miles on an empty stomach before he can reach the comfort and security of his cottage. Still there is no recurrent mention of Emmy, nor of the memory responsible for the mood that began the sequence of events.

Emmy is reintroduced into the story as part of the conclusion in drafts of the end of the story only, not the complete text, dated December, 1970, to February, 1971. In these versions, James, agitated, angry, and weak from hunger, having inadvertently missed lunch and then walked out on Myra before dinner, strikes out through the woods to make up for the fact that he has gotten off the bus at the wrong stop and thereby has given himself extra miles to trudge. He becomes uneasy, however, when he realizes that this short cut takes him close to Asigh House, through land belonging to Emmy and her husband. He does not relish an encounter with either, nor does he wish to be challenged as a trespasser. In the woods he becomes confused and loses his way, adding to his distress. Physically exhausted and emotionally upset, he develops chest pains, which he tries to ignore until he collapses, unable to walk further. Myra and the events of the evening become confused in his mind with memories of Emmy as he sees a light shining from a window some undetermined distance away. Even though one part of him realizes that he is “raving,” to another part it seems as if Emmy is holding the light for him and that, if he can reach it, he will go back 20 years and become a “man of iron” again. In one draft, the light goes out, no one hears him, and James's mood alternates between anger and self-pity as he lies helpless in the woods. In another, his cries for help are heard by the occupants of the house, who are not Emmy and her husband, but who go to find them because James, nearly unconscious, keeps mumbling her name.

It is this last version that Mary Lavin used in a new revision of the complete text dated June 17, 1971, on which she wrote: “Absolutely final I hope.” By this draft, the opening scene had been painted and repainted until James stood out sharply against the background of the little three-room cottage in which he lived. His mind was revealed as so occupied first with Myra and then with Emmy that everything around him reminded him of one or the other, even as he congratulated himself on his ability to avoid emotional entanglements. His character was established not only in the rhythm of his thoughts—the rhythm of “Bagpipe Music”—and the metaphors they suggested, but also in the way he made a fire, sat down to breakfast, and regarded his work. Larger than anything around him, dominating the foreground, he had become, clearly, the central figure of the story. The sequence of events no longer was important in itself; it was merely the vehicle that moved the reader through a day in James's life, providing the opportunity to observe him from multiple points of view.

This version was, of course, not “absolutely final” at all. The end still did not satisfy the author. More drafts followed. But what had been established—what determined the way in which, ultimately, “A Memory” did end—was that the story had become a psychological study. Finally, in February, 1972, Mary Lavin completed “A Memory” in a form she was willing to release to the printer. In this, the published version, Myra, Emmy, the unhappy evening, and memories of the past jumble together in James's mind as he struggles to reach his cottage, through the dark woods, at the same time struggling to comprehend what has happened and what is happening to him. Flashes of insight are followed by a return to darkness as he rejects what he is unwilling to know or to feel. Face down in the wet leaves, “under the weight of bitterness too great to be borne,” his chest exploding with pain, hallucinating in his half-consciousness about the light, actual and symbolic, that he wants and yet does not want to reach, James burns with resentment. Confused images of Myra and Emmy, superimposed on each other, have failed him as, earlier in the day, his work failed him—as, indeed, his very body is beginning to fail him, forcing him to endure awareness of aging, of his own human nature and inevitable mortality, that he has tried to deny.

The psychological portrait completed, the story stripped of all but essential text, “A Memory,” an example of the literary craftsmanship that, years ago, first had admitted Mary Lavin, while still a young woman, to a circle of much older and more practiced literary artists, was ready for publication. Its final length: 62 printed pages, fewer than the pages of the Ink Paper Jotter in which it had had its origin.

Notes

1. Cf. Lord Dunsany, “Preface” to Mary Lavin's Tales from Bective Bridge (London, 1943), p. 6; Frank O'Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (Cleveland and New York, 1963), p. 212.

2. The following outline of the way in which a story begins to form in Mary Lavin's mind before she commits it to writing has been taken from conversations with the author. It is included here not as an attempt to present the creative process as simplistic or formulaic but to suggest some of the origins of Mary Lavin's published fiction.

3. I am grateful to Mary Lavin for the opportunity she has given me to examine and discuss with her unpublished drafts of her published work.

4. For example, Mary Lavin recently completed a term of office as president of the Irish Academy of Letters; she serves on the Board of the National Library of Ireland; she frequently offers courses in creative writing through the School for Irish Studies, Dublin; in the past she often has joined American university faculties for limited terms as visiting writer-in-residence.

5. Mary Lavin, A Memory, and Other Stories (Boston, 1973), pp. 162-223.

6. Mary Lavin, Tales from Bective Bridge (London, 1945), pp. 100-121.