By the end of World War II, the Irish short story had become an established subgenre of twentieth-century literature. Its form and content, pioneered before World War I by George Moore and James Joyce, had been redefined by Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain (“the Romulus and Remus of Irish short fiction,” in the words of Mary Lavin, whose later achievement drew praise from them both). In Irish and in English, Liam O'Flaherty had extended the range of models against which writers who began publishing in the thirties and forties might measure their own work. Continued experimentation as well as imitation characterized the early work of these younger writers who, following the example of O'Connor, O'Faolain, and O'Flaherty, imposed their own individual style on the subgenre, further contributing to expansion of its potential. They introduced new concepts of literary craft; they attracted new readers in Ireland, England, and the United States; they projected new images in literature. By the mid-1940s, periodicals dedicated to introducing sophisticated readers to changing concepts in literature and art—for example, Atlantic Monthly, published in the United States, but widely read in England, and both the English and the American editions of Harper's Bazaar—had begun to include an Irish short story in almost every issue. Editors of fashionable magazines bid against one another to attract not only the “three O's,” as O'Connor, O'Faolain, and O'Flaherty came to be known in the trade, but also new Irish names that represented the best new work in the field. Little magazines of the period, sometimes called “shoestring” publications, also bid for their stories, offering smaller audiences and less money than their well-heeled rivals, but also a more enduring prestige, plus an opportunity to treat topics that did not, in the opinion of editors of more widely circulated magazines, appeal to the general reading public.

As the first half of the twentieth century drew to a close, O'Connor, O'Faolain, and O'Flaherty remained, among living writers, the acknowledged masters of the Irish short story (George Moore died in 1933, James Joyce in 1941). Recognized as writers of outstanding ability not only by critics but by the “three O's” themselves, however, were five newer voices in Irish short fiction: Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Bowen, Benedict Kiely, Bryan MacMahon, and Michael McLaverty. As these writers added to the body of their published fiction year by year, the validity of early opinions of their work was confirmed. Today they continue to be regarded as eminent literary artists. Indeed, as indicated in the following brief accounts of their careers, together these five have been awarded almost all the honors and literary prizes for which writers of short fiction in English are eligible.

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Hailed by Joyce Carol Oates as “one of the finest of short story writers” of the twentieth century and by V. S. Pritchett as an artist “with the power to present the surface of life rapidly, but as a covering for something else,” American-born Mary Lavin (1912-) is, of the five, the one uniquely committed to short fiction.¹ Although she has published also two novels, several poems, two children's books, and three or four critical essays, it is as a writer of short fiction—both the short story and the longer novella, or tale—that she prefers to be known. In this genre she is represented by twelve separate volumes, each containing new stories as well as stories previously published in periodicals, plus four retrospective collections. A number of stories published in periodicals has not yet appeared in book form.

Born in East Walpole, Massachusetts, Mary Lavin has been a resident of Ireland since the age of ten, except for short visits to the United States (most of them to teach or lecture on creative writing in American universities). Although her American origins are reflected in some of her stories, for the most part she sets her fiction in Ireland and identifies her characters as Irish men, women, and children. Her dual national experience no doubt has contributed to the “double vision” observed by some critics, the ability to sustain a narrative tone that is simultaneously universal and particular, objective and subjective. It may also explain why, with few exceptions (e.g., “The Patriot Son,” “The Face of Hate,” and the charming and whimsical tale entitled “A Likely Story”), nationality is not a significant identifying factor in her characterizations, and why she is able to focus so skillfully on the true landscape of her stories, the human heart. The extent to which her stories are published, read, and studied in other countries and cultures testifies to their universality.

Mary Lavin's earliest efforts in fiction were encouraged by Lord Dunsany, who first knew her as the daughter of Tom Lavin of Bective House, an estate belonging to an Irish-American, Charles Bird, not far from Dunsany's own estate in County Meath. At her father's request, Dunsany read her first unpublished stories in 1938, finding in them “astonishing insight … reminiscent of the Russians.” It was Dunsany who introduced her work to Ellery Sedgwick, just as the well-known editor of the Atlantic Monthly was about to retire; through Sedgwick it reached the desk of Edward Weeks, Sedgwick's successor. It was Dunsany also who advised Mary Lavin to submit her first stories for publication, disregarding letters of rejection but heeding the editorial advice that accompanied them, and Dunsany who helped her find her first literary agent. It was he who supported her admission to the Dublin literary circle, dominated by Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain, in which her concepts of writing as art, fiction as craft, and the short story as a product of the disciplined imagination were reinforced.

No adviser could have been better suited to the needs of the young writer than Lord Dunsany, who refused to recommend changes in her fiction, lest he alter for the worse either her style or her content. Instead, he suggested authors she might read, as examples of writers in full command of language and the skillful ways it can be used in the service of the short story (Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Maupassant were among them). Only in her use of punctuation would he agree to be her mentor, as his letters reveal, but even in this he moved cautiously, noting by example rather than by instruction what differences in meaning might be achieved by the addition or deletion of a comma, or how altering a mark of punctuation might resolve problems of ambiguity.

Prior to her first attempt at writing short fiction, Mary Lavin had not thought of herself as a creative writer. A teacher of French at the Loreto School in Dublin, where she herself had received her secondary education, she had earned first-class honors at University College Dublin in 1936 for her M.A. thesis on Jane Austen. In 1938 she was at work on her Ph.D. dissertation on Virginia Woolf. One day, trying to understand Virginia Woolf, to think as the older writer might think, Mary Lavin speculated on what, at that moment, Virginia Woolf might be doing—whether and what, for example, she might be writing. Picking up her own pen and turning over the pages of her dissertation in progress, she drafted her own first short story, “Miss Holland.” The experience fascinated her: creative writing, she found, drew on facets of her personality and intellect very different from those required for literary scholarship. Immediately she set to work on several more stories, among them those read by Lord Dunsany and those she sent, at the request of Ellery Sedgwick and Edward Weeks, to the Atlantic Monthly. The Atlantic became the first publication to accept a Mary Lavin story (“The Green Grave and the Black Grave,” which appeared in May 1940). The Dublin Magazine, edited by Seumas O'Sullivan (James Starkey), became the first to print an example of her work (“Miss Holland,” April-June 1939). Meanwhile, the dissertation on Virginia Woolf was set aside, never to be submitted in fulfillment of the Ph.D.

By 1942, when the Atlantic Monthly Press brought out Tales from Bective Bridge, Mary Lavin's first volume of short stories, six of the stories that she had written rapidly between 1938 and 1941 had appeared in magazines, and more were scheduled for future periodical publication. In 1943, Tales from Bective Bridge was republished in England; this edition won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the year's best work of fiction and was selected for distribution as a Readers Union book. Since then Mary Lavin has had two Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships (1959 and 1960) and has been awarded the Katherine Mansfield Prize (1961), the Ella Lynam Cabot Award (1971), the Eire Society of Boston Gold Medal (1974), the Gregory Medal (1975), and the American Irish Foundation Literature Prize (1979). In 1964 and 1965 she was elected president of Irish PEN. In 1968 the degree of Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) was conferred on her by the National University of Ireland. In 1971 and 1972, she was elected president of the Irish Academy of Letters, and in 1981 she was named to the Aos Dana, Ireland's newly constituted equivalent of the French Academy. In 1982 she received a five-year grant, as a member of Aos Dana, that freed her to pursue the art of short fiction without concern for its commercial potential.

As a native-born American long resident in Ireland, Mary Lavin belongs to both Ireland and the United States, a fact that has been recognized by the American universities that seek her participation in creative writing programs and by successive Irish governments that have appointed her to such quasi-public bodies as the Arts Council and the Cultural Relations Committee of the Department of External Affairs. She has long been a member also of the Board of Trustees of the National Library of Ireland. These appointments indicate the esteem in which she is held in her country of residence, where she is regarded as a major influence on younger writers, a link not only between them and the generation of O'Connor, O'Faolain, and O'Flaherty, but also between contemporary writers and those European masters of short fiction recommended to her by Lord Dunsany when she herself was young. Indeed, it is because she continues to experiment with the forms of short fiction, in language, length, content, and narrative mode, that she remains very much a contemporary writer of international reputation, despite a career that extends over nearly half a century. She also represents, among women writers, a continuation of a line of descent from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf, a distinction she shares with her older contemporary, Elizabeth Bowen, whom she also admires.²

Because Mary Lavin's fiction reflects the sights, smells, and sounds of places where she herself has lived and presents characters that follow patterns of life familiar to the people of such places, she is sometimes regarded as a naturalist or as an autobiographical writer. Similarly, because her stories are built around events that have a beginning, middle, and end, she also has been described as an old-fashioned storyteller, a traditionalist with a talent for recreating milieu, conveying verisimilitude, and eliciting, through what appear to be documented representations of reality, the reader's willing suspension of disbelief. Analysis of themes, characters, forms, and narrative modes, however, reveals subtleties beneath the surface of Mary Lavin's fiction, the “extraordinary sense” described by V. S. Pritchett “that what we call real life is a veil.” Reviewers have noted also the skill with which she suggests rather than discloses the story beneath her surface story and hints at stasis beyond kinesis, permanence beneath change.

In discussions of her work, Mary Lavin has confirmed observations by scholars and critics of a still point beyond the physical, emotional, and sometimes intellectual eddy and flow of her fiction. Indeed, it is in this still point that a story has its genesis, she declares. As she herself describes the creative process, as she knows it, a story begins when she is struck by what appears to her to be a universal truth: “That happens.” A question forms in her mind: “To whom does that happen?” It sharpens her observations, it makes her keenly aware of the people around her. Gradually an answer suggests itself: “That happens to that kind of person.” It is followed by other questions: “Why?” “Under what circumstances?” When they are answered to her satisfaction, she has the nucleus of the story, the insight that will attract readers of different cultures in different countries. It remains only for her to form a situation around that insight, to make real and believable the people to whom “that happens,” to fix them in time and place. From the storehouse of her memory, she draws the physical features of people and place; the discriminating details of gesture, voice, and action; the play of light and shadow on a landscape; the quirky moods of household pets; the squeaks of doors and groans of floorboards; the rhythmic patterns developed through habit and imposed by custom that make her fiction, art imitating life, seem to be life itself. If the same views of city or country appear in story after story, if her characters seem to inhabit similar if not identical houses or flats, the reasons are easily given: Why should the author try to imagine a house she has never seen, try to estimate the number of steps in a staircase that she never has climbed, try to position doors, or furniture, or a fireplace, when her home in Bective in County Meath or her Dublin townhouse or her mother's family's shop in Athenry has appropriate rooms in which her characters can live their fictional lives, with only minor changes needed to suit their taste, income, or background? Why wonder how far a character might have to go from home to store, school, neighbor, church, hospital, or post office, when the distance can be measured in the author's own real world of the present or can be remembered from the past?

Mary Lavin's early stories—those written in the late 1930s and 1940s—focus on the universal truth of restricted vision. In stories such as “The Green Grave and the Black Grave,” “At Sallygap,” “Sarah,” “Brother Boniface,” “Brigid,” “The Small Bequest,” “The Cemetery in the Desmesne,” and “The Nun's Mother,” she treats relationships assumed to be intimate and reveals the gulfs that exist between husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers, longterm neighbors, childhood friends, and others who think of themselves as really knowing each other. Sometimes their unperceived misunderstandings simply leave each feeling lonely and isolated; sometimes there is friction and a sense of betrayal that leads to chronic irritation or bursts of anger; sometimes separation seems to be the only solution, but lies must be told to justify the leaving; sometimes the truth is revealed, but always without hope that anything can be changed. And in one story at least—“The Small Bequest”—truth alone is not sufficient: the claim of close ties is not merely rebuffed but rejected with vengeance.

Many of the stories written during the 1950s and early 1960s test the universal truths Mary Lavin explores in her early writings: if this kind of thing happens to this kind of person under these circumstances, what happens in similar circumstances to a different kind of person? What happens to the same kind of person in different circumstances? Mary Lavin's fascination with these questions is revealed in such stories as “The Widow's Son,” in which the author actually provides the reader with alternate endings, then discusses the implications of each. For the most part, however, she tests her truths in different stories: “A Tragedy” may be read as an alternative to “Frail Vessel”; “The Long Holidays” may be seen as a comic version of what might have happened to another Miss Holland (albeit one with somewhat more self-confidence, more inclination to manipulate others).

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Mary Lavin also began to develop story cycles, individual tales that are connected through use of the same characters: for example, the Grimes family (for which the Mahons of Athenry, Mary Lavin's mother's family, served as models) appears, in this period, in “A Visit to the Cemetery,” “An Old Boot,” “The Little Prince,” “Frail Vessel,” and “Loving Memory”; Vera, a recurring character who sometimes shares traits and experiences of the author herself, is portrayed in “What's Wrong With Aubretia?” and “One Summer.” Critics who view Mary Lavin's work as autobiographical also describe her widow stories as a group belonging to this period, for in the decade following the death of Mary Lavin's first husband, William Walsh, in 1954 (she was remarried in 1969 to Michael MacDonald Scott), she wrote “Bridal Sheets,” “In a Café,” “In the Middle of the Fields,” and “The Cuckoo Spit.” But “Love Is for Lovers,” “Lilacs,” “The Dead Soldier,” “Brigid,” and “The Widow's Son” all concern widows, too, and all were written long before the author herself experienced widowhood. Nor can these stories be read as related in the way the Grimes family stories are related, for although superficial similarities of detail invite comparisons between some of her widows, others are unlike in all respects but their widowhood. What probably is true is that Mary Lavin brought to her widow stories of 1954 and after insights gained from her personal experience, always the raw material of her art (but always, as she emphasizes whenever she discusses her conception of writing as art, only raw material until it is synthesized and universalized). Finally, in the 1950s and early 1960s, Mary Lavin returned to some of the themes she had explored in her early work and to some collateral themes that had been suggested by them. For example, in “The Great Wave” and “Bridal Sheets” she evokes again the world of “The Green Grave and the Black Grave.” “Brigid” also might be read as a related story, for although its central character is a farmer's wife, she is as unprepared for the shock of her husband's sudden death as the wives of the islanders of “Bridal Sheets” and “The Green Grave and the Black Grave.”

Since the late 1960s Mary Lavin has preferred to write in the form of the short novel or tale rather than the short story: that is, the form that generally ranges from approximately seventy to nearly two hundred printed pages. As a result she has published less frequently in periodicals such as the New Yorker, in which stories usually run between five and fifteen pages in length and rarely exceed forty pages. Instead, following the practice familiar to readers of Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad, she has turned increasingly to book publication, reducing the number of titles included in a single volume to between three and five (cf. A Memory, and Other Stories, 1972, and The Shrine, and Other Stories, 1977) instead of twelve or thirteen, as in her earlier volumes. (While this change possibly has made her work less accessible to readers of periodicals, it has assured her more recognition among readers of books.³) Her first experiments with the tale were published in The Becker Wives, and Other Stories (1946), in which the title story is seventy-one pages long and “A Happy Death” is but a slightly shorter sixty-eight pages. These short novels were preceded by her first full-length novel, The House in Clewe Street (1945), which had been serialized in the Atlantic Monthly in 1944-45 before it was published in book form. They were followed by Mary O'Grady, a second full-length novel, published in 1950. At this point the author returned to writing short stories of conventional length, partly because she was dissatisfied with her novels (critics did not share her dissatisfaction), partly because she found writing short fiction more satisfying. For a time the length of her stories was influenced, no doubt, by the fact that in 1958 the New Yorker had taken a first-reading option on her new work; the number of its issues in which a tale or novella could be published was limited. But again and again Mary Lavin was tempted by the form of the longer tale or novella, which allowed her to develop themes she felt she could not handle adequately within the conventional length of the short story. The success of such stories as “Happiness” and “A Memory” testifies to the accuracy of her artistic judgment.

Mary Lavin's art is economic, disciplined, compressed. Her working method is to allow her imagination to range freely, often over hundreds of pages of rough draft, until her characters and their backgrounds have been established, details of her story have been worked out, and the causes of the action have been analyzed. At this point she attacks her manuscript ruthlessly, discarding everything that is not essential to the central story she wishes to tell. Stripped of all but essential text, her stories emerge as brilliant, hard, gemlike. The quality of her art is her major contribution to the Irish short story. Important also is the nature of its content. She neither romanticizes nor trivializes the Irish experience, as did so many writers of the nineteenth century. Nor does she share the odi-atque-amo attitude toward Ireland familiar to readers of Moore and Joyce. Her work is closest perhaps, as they themselves observed, to that of O'Connor, O'Faolain, and O'Flaherty, but it transcends the national and historic context of their stories to present a world that is externally Irish but beyond time, place, and event in its understanding of that which is universally human in the Irish experience. In making this contribution to Irish literature, Mary Lavin has enhanced both the significance and the dignity of the Irish short story.

Notes

1. Biographical and critical information concerning the life and work of Mary Lavin has been drawn for the most part from the results of research undertaken with the assistance of grants from the American Philosophical Society and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in connection with my full-length study of the genesis and development of Mary Lavin's novels and short fiction (in progress). Specifically, I should like to acknowledge permission to consult Mary Lavin correspondence and manuscripts in the possession of the author; in the Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University; in the Morris Library, University of Southern Illinois; and in the Library of the State University of New York at Binghamton; and I wish to thank the author and the directors of these libraries for their assistance and cooperation. Portions of this essay repeat conclusions expressed in my published essays on Mary Lavin's working methods and achievement as a writer of short fiction (see Bibliography) and my evaluation of her career as a novelist in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. I have consulted also studies of Mary Lavin's work by Zack Bowen, Richard F. Peterson, and A. A. Kelly and the Mary Lavin bibliographies discussed below.

2. Mary Lavin's short stories have appeared in a wide variety of English-language magazines, journals, and newspapers, chiefly in Ireland, England, and the United States but also in other parts of the world. Many have been reprinted in textbooks and anthologies; usually revised, most have been collected with new stories not previously published in periodicals in books under the author's name. Entire collections as well as selected stories have been translated for publication in Dutch, German, Hebrew, Walloon, French, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Japanese. Two stories have been scripted for films; one inspired an opera. Critical studies and bibliographies have appeared in English as well as in other languages. In fall 1979, the Irish University Review published a special issue in which a number of scholars from different countries reexamined the corpus of Mary Lavin's published fiction and reassessed her work. Although the most recent bibliography (Ruth Krawschak, with the assistance of Regina Mahlke, Mary Lavin: A Check List, Berlin, 1979) supersedes the bibliography that appears in this issue of the Irish University Review, it is itself in need of updating, not only because additional critical studies have appeared since it was published, but because the author herself is constantly at work—writing new stories, rewriting unfinished stories, and revising stories to be republished.

3. Despite a wide interest in her work in the United States, especially in colleges and universities where there is a particular demand for fiction written by women, Mary Lavin's publishers have been unaccountably lax about issuing her stories in paperback. Only Tales from Bective Bridge, The Becker Wives, and a recent Penguin edition of selected titles, the latter limited in distribution to England and Ireland, are available in paperback. Viking Press recently has contracted for a new collection to be published in both hardcover and paperback, but no publication date has yet been announced.