SOURCE: Koenig, Marianne. “Mary Lavin: The Novels and the Stories.” Irish University Review 9, no. 2 (autumn 1979): 244-61.

“Two bad novels” is Mary Lavin's dismissive description nowadays of The House in Clewe Street¹ and Mary O'Grady,² the only two novels she ever did write. She has wished that “novels could be torn down like houses”.³ But there they are; in fact they are neither all bad, nor all that bad; and they are both puzzling and revealing to the reader who is concerned to define and isolate the central, essential qualities of Mary Lavin's writing.

It is, indeed, difficult to see why she wrote them, what it was she was trying to do, when she had already launched two collections of short stories (Tales from Bective Bridge and The Long Ago [The Long Ago, and Other Stories]) fully-armed in all their accomplishment. It is not as if they were experimental, breaking new ground: they are very conventional. But it is illuminating to read them in conjunction with the stories. What they have in common with the stories, and the ways in which they differ, are of equal interest. Mary Lavin's characteristic settings, people, preoccupations and attitudes undergo a fascinating metamorphosis when transplanted from the one form to the other.

Mary Lavin herself is not much concerned with academic speculations about genre. She is a “natural”, a spontaneous writer: the artfulness and craftiness of her technique come from an instinctive awareness of what is right for a story, as Janet Egleson Dunleavey's article on the revisions of “Happiness” shows.⁴ The novels show her to have been unwary of the demands of their form in her early days, and although since then she has said that she wished she could break them up “into the few short stories they ought to have been in the first place”,⁵ the interview printed in this issue shows her continuing defiant of the imposition of categories.⁶ “I don't see all that much difference between the short story and the novel, to tell you the truth”. And she may yet, in practice, confound all such distinctions. For the moment, however, the pernickety critic may still hope to gain insight into the nature of her craft by a comparison of her handling of the two forms.

The House in Clewe Street first appeared in serial form in Atlantic Monthly, in seven consecutive numbers between November 1944 and May 1945. Its provisional title at the time was Gabriel Galloway. The two titles in themselves indicate one of the basic uncertainties of the book: it hovers between being a family chronicle based on a house and place, on the one hand, and, on the other, a Bildungsroman about a young man, Gabriel Galloway, who is born and grows up in the house, and eventually leaves it for Dublin. Plainly, the two titles emphasise one or the other of these aspects, but the uncertainty is not so easily resolved. The sense of it pervades the book.

I have already said that the two novels are conventional. The House in Clewe Street opens with a leisurely scene-setting passage, placing the town of Castlerampart in its landscape, and Clewe Street in the town, and establishing the importance of Theodore Galloway (Gabriel's grandfather), in a manner reminiscent of The Mill on the Floss (the reading of which was a revelatory experience for Mary Lavin in her adolescence). The worrying thing is that the convention, like the setting, is entirely of the nineteenth century. There is, behind the seeming solidity both of the scene described and the manner of the description, a radical uncertainty of perspective. Is this book, written in 1944, really pretending to be a nineteenth-century novel, or is it a historical novel, a twentieth-century book about the nineteenth century?⁷ With George Eliot, the reader is told exactly (some would say, too explicitly) from what vantage point he is to view the events. Here, in spite of some authorial manhandling in the manner of George Eliot, there is disconcerting vagueness. For instance, it is never clear exactly when the action takes place: some time in the nineteenth century is indicated, but the reader has to clutch at details of dress and transport to orient himself historically. With this unspecific dating there is no sense of the consonance and counterpointing between the development of the individual and the movement of society in general which gives solidity to the nineteenth-century novelist's world.

Three quotations will illustrate this uncertainty. In the first chapter, Castlerampart is presented at a particular moment in its historical development:

Indeed, river and rampart, which once protected their ancestors from without, are now regarded by the people of Castlerampart as protecting them from dangers within.

[My italics]

The word “now”, coupled with the use of the present tense throughout this introductory section, is confusing since the “now” of the author and that of the story cannot be the same.

On the next page, Theodore is described in terms of dress and bearing: “a glance at his smooth white hands, however, made it clear that, whatever way his money was made, it has not been by manual labour.” No observer has been established, so we do not know whose “glance” is recording and drawing conclusions from this appearance. Further on the author offers a lengthy commentary:

To understand the sense of effrontery with which Theresa and Sara too … had suffered upon seeing the shoes and boots left outside the doors to be cleaned, it must be understood that in families of their class in almost every other town in the country, although there was always a servant, and often more than one, to do the services of the house, to cook, to clean, to serve the meals, and to do a thousand services in running from one room to another, from the attic to the cellar, it was the custom that these services must be in the communal interest, strictly dedicated to the running and ordering of the house, and that no personal services were to be expected by any member of the family as an individual … And as for expecting Mary Ellen to blacken their boots for them, not one of the Coniffes would have entertained such an extravagant thought.

This is an accurate amusing piece of social analysis; but is it there as historical background for twentieth-century readers, or does it still exist in the “now” of the story, whenever that is? The point I want to make, with all these examples, is that the techniques derived from nineteenth-century novels and presumably designed to reconstruct the foursquare solidity of such novels are in each case used only as decoration. In this mode, The House in Clewe Street is pastiche.

About half-way through, family chronicle gives way to Bildungsroman, although there is no definite moment at which the reader realises that such a shift is taking place. Gabriel is shown first as a sensitive child in a philistine environment, then as a woman-dominated adolescent, and eventually as a priggish young man on an earnest campaign of self-improvement and enlightenment among Dublin Bohemians. His liberation from Castlerampart takes place alongside that of Onny, the servant girl with whom he elopes. The contrast between his doubts and hesitations and her headlong flight into this new world, and the sardonic commentary on them both by his friend Sylvester, ensure that there is no lack of irony in the presentation of Gabriel. At the same time the value of his agonized effort to formulate a new and real moral code for himself to replace the one artificially imposed by Castlerampart is never minimized.

The creation of Onny is one of the book's achievements. She has a very solid presence. Her animal vitality, her spiritual crudeness, her cunning, her sure sense of her own identity and determination to find self-fulfilment, all point up the pathetic absurdity of Gabriel's possessive and pedagogical attitude towards her. Sylvester is a more mysterious figure, effectively ambiguous, whose cool ironic detachment throughout the story makes his concern for Gabriel in the final episode the more striking. A third figure who presides, more distantly, over Gabriel's progress is Helen, also somewhat mysterious, who has succeeded in achieving what Gabriel is striving for, formulating and maintaining her own independent moral code, in which convention and religion have a place accorded them after cool scrutiny of their values. As Onny says, she is somewhat bloodless, but she has an important place in the story as the representative of Gabriel's ideal of moral self-sufficiency. Between them, these four characters create a debate on the values of society and of “the externals of religion”, on responsibility and independence, self-determination and selfishness, idealism and common sense, which is complex and sustained.

But, in the end, The House in Clewe Street does not succeed as a Bildungsroman either. Confusion sets in: the control of perspective slackens. It becomes impossible to distinguish when irony, in the presentation of Gabriel, gives way to endorsement, though by the last pages it appears to have done so. Gabriel has broken away from his mentors, Sylvester and Helen, and has made a decision “to associate himself with Onny's dishonour” and “to face whatever punishment it should be decreed he deserved”. Zack Bowen interprets the ending as “a reflection of the morality and class-consciousness of his life in Clewe Street and a triumph of that morality which in turn provides Gabriel with an ultimate source of strength and energy”.⁸ This interpretation, however, seems to me to be wrong. A vision of Clewe Street does indeed rise up in Gabriel's mind as a kind of mirage of lost golden innocence, and he does feel the temptation to return there and carry on as if the whole Onny episode had never happened (doubtless he could have done, small towns have plenty of whitewash for returned black sheep)—but he rejects it as a mirage, a false vision, and turns instead to the real view of Dublin spread out before him in the dawn as an image of civitas, “[carrying] aloft her triumphant testimony of man's mighty struggle to cut through ignorance and doubt a path of sane philosophy”. Inspired by the newly-perceived image of the city, “He held up his head, and strode forward.” The grandiose tone clearly indicates the finality of his achievement.

To recognize is not necessarily to accept it, however. The passage in which Gabriel reaches his decision shows him being as priggish, condescending, and possessive towards Onny as he ever was in earlier episodes. He speaks of her having a “bad streak”, of her “weakness of character”. He blames himself for depriving her of her simple superstitious faith:

I begin to see some value in the externals of religion. I begin to see that for people of lesser moral fibre they are necessary … Poor, poor Onny! What an evil day it was for her when I first came into her life.”

The irony here might almost be considered too heavy—except that Helen looks at Gabriel “with an expression of admiration”, and, although Sylvester is not impressed, since the decision arrived at here is the one Gabriel strides off with in the last sentence of the book it seems the irony is unintentional. Such uncertainty results, in the end, in making the book pastiche as Bildungsroman as well.

If one wonders what Mary Lavin was trying to do in 1944 when she wrote The House in Clewe Street, one wonders even more about her intentions in 1950 when she wrote Mary O'Grady. It is the story of Mary's wifehood, motherhood, bereavement and death. She undergoes an inordinate amount of suffering: her whole life is with and for her family, which is decimated by blow after blow of ill-fortune. First her husband dies, then two of her daughters are killed; one son declines into permanent melancholia, another fails the priesthood as a result of the stigma of madness in the family. Significantly, Mary O'Grady is also set in the past, a past more clearly defined than in the previous novel; but, again, the passing of time in the world at large has little effect on the events of the book. In spite of a time-span of some forty years, the atmosphere remains turn-of-the-century. Maybe this is part of the book's meaning, that Mary so much creates her own world within her own family—maybe, but (and here we come to the fundamental criticism of the book) we cannot be sure, because there is again a basic uncertainty and lack of control of perspective. Mary herself so fills the book that there is no room to stand back from her and decide what attitude to take towards her. Is it the author's intention to show the obsessive singlemindedness of her motherhood as limiting to herself and stifling to her children? At the end, is Mary's dying vision of Heaven offered as a comment on the limiting simplicity of her piety? The fact that her intuition about Rosie's pregnancy is proved right may indicate that it is not. Similar uncertainty pervades the book. The fabulous freshness of Tom and Mary's early married years is touchingly portrayed, but is only diminished and tarnished by, rather than re-interpreted through, the passing years and successive chapters. The absence of a frame of reference to provide perspective for the story renders it, for all the effectiveness of individual scenes and episodes, almost meaningless as a whole.

Of course it is easy to point out the faults of “two bad novels”, but it is worth being specific about them because of the surprising fact that stories written more or less contemporaneously with the novels display so completely, so assuredly, those qualities which were to be Mary Lavin's hallmark for the next fifteen or twenty years.⁹ Moreover, the stories have much in common with the novels: they describe the same kinds of people in the same vagueness as to period, they share the concern with family, family history and family relationships. But in the stories, the omission of dates assumes the positive quality of timelessness; similar uncertainty of interpretation, so confusing to an attempt to assess Gabriel's achievement or the value of Mary's life, resolves itself in the stories into ambiguity and irony. Poise, balance, control, the very qualities the novels lack, the stories have to an astonishing degree; but most importantly, they have charm, glamour, “the extraordinary sense” as V. S. Pritchett put it, “that what we call real life is a veil.”¹⁰ Can all this be due to the use of one form rather than another? Charm and glamour are by their nature indefinable, a kind of magical illusion; all one can do is note the circumstances of their appearance, and note also that illusion has much to do with technique.

More than most short-story writers, Mary Lavin in her earlier stories both depends upon and exploits the envelope of silence which surrounds a story. It provides both distance and resonance. Within it irony and ambiguity remain intact, inviolable, inscrutable; it is in the enveloping silence that the “meaning” of the story echoes. Thus it is not the scale of the short story, but its isolation and discontinuity with the world outside itself, that is important. Many incidents from The House in Clewe Street and Mary O'Grady could be isolated with hardly any change and succeed as short stories. The story of Lily's birth, or of the lengthening of her dress in the garden, or of Cornelius' death (brought about by his presumption in trying to hunt with the gentry, a motif which is never re-introduced in the course of the book), or the black comedy of Theodore's funeral; or, in Mary O'Grady, Patrick's trip to the mountains as a child, or his return from America and retreat into melancholia, or even the account of Mary's death—any of these, isolated, would reverberate as the stories do. The account of Lily's marriage to Cornelius, for example, is reminiscent of the story “Frail Vessel”, which is haunting especially because of its ending, Liddy's whispered “Even so”, but Lily is followed through “the obscure days that were to make up the rest of her life.” Wedged into the continuity of the novels, all the incidents are deprived of resonance, their meaning either lost, or entangled in interpretation. “Frail Vessel” is typical of the stories in that it defies interpretation, raising questions which, not answering, it does not evade but suspends for our contemplation.

Within the framework of the short story Mary Lavin's technique is to convey insight in a flash, precision and economy working towards a luminous clarity of vision. A spectacular example is in “A Wet Day”, where the introduction of a single word alters our perspective and our perception of the meaning of the whole story. There are three people involved: a young girl who is the narrator, her aunt, and the parish priest. Half-way through the story we glimpse the aunt in the garden “as she busied herself flicking slugs off the lettuce with an elegant fore-finger.” “Elegant”! So the aunt is elegant! It makes all the difference; we revise our assessment of what is happening. Looking back over the story, we see that, yes, she has been elegant all along, in her appreciation of the fuchsia bush “so shaggy and unpretentious” in its prettiness, and in her tactful lining of her niece to prevent her saying “anything out of place”, but a certain condescension of tone on the niece's part has prevented us from realising it. Now, focussing on her elegance, we see that it, as much as lettuces, is what the priest comes for, some echo of the world of beauty experienced in Rome and from which he feels himself exiled. The revelation comes just in time not only to redeem the aunt from the image of dowdy parishioner exploited for her garden's sake, but also the priest from total paltriness before he reveals even greater depths of meanness in his own account of his treatment of the sick young man, his niece's fiance]. The adjustment of perception in mid-story emphasises the balance and the hair's-breadth control of the whole performance. It is a very sophisticated technique that can so suavely control our response with a single word.

Reviewing The Stories of Mary Lavin in this journal a few years ago, Seamus Deane¹¹ found in her style “the address of someone who believes in innocence, but is not herself innocent”—the discrepancy between content and style adding to the charm. But I am not sure that the opposition is not more radical, that the innocence itself may not be more radical. In the interview (above) Mary Lavin says that all her characters, all her stories are seen against the background of “a small town in the West in which I spent a few months at age ten on first coming from America.” To a clever only child transplanted to an environment not just new to her but already fabled in the stories of her -parent's youth everything must have seemed both exotic and familiar, and on both counts worth observing minutely. That ten-year-old's piercing vision stayed with her into adulthood, adding to the deftness of the prose a quality of insight which, like a child's, measures and judges while remaining detached, and which also endows everything with an element of the fabulous. Reading these stories one is often surprised, so strong is the sense of the fabulous, to find that they are realistic at all, let alone as meticulous as they frequehntly are in their attachment to the mundane details of everyday Irish life.

Myth and folk-lore, fairy-tales, and ghost-stories, underlie Mary Lavin's work. Their presence is occasionally felt in the novels—in the conception of Mary O'Grady as the archetypal Good Wife and Poor Widow, and in many individual scenes and incidents in both novels, but sorts uneasily with the demands of social realism and psychological complexity. In the stories however the same combination is a factor in that effect of “double vision” which V. S. Pritchett noted.¹² The timelessness of her settings—cottages, fields and graveyards, towns, villages and cities: not suburbs, motorways and parking lots—emphasises those aspects of twentieth-century Irish life which link it not only to Ireland's own past, but to the way of life familiar in Europe over centuries. Her characters are subordinate to pattern. There is very little description of any individual. Young girls are seen in terms of dresses, ribbons, hair, and the crisis of growing up in the “putting up” of the hair (“The Long Ago”); defiance of parental will is represented by “two little pale blue feathers” on a hat (“The Will”). Widows wear black. Men, when they are not priests, are shown in their capacity of husband, son, father: either feckless and extravagant or dutiful, either dominated or masterful to the point of being domineering. The characters are recognisable from everyday life, but our deeper sense of familiarity with them derives from the patterns of old tales: wicked destructive sisters, maids abandonned by lovers, widowed mothers of only sons, tyrannical fathers. Cruel stepmothers are absent, but a real, and not even cruel, mother can do the job of separating daughter from father equally well (“A Cup of Tea”).

“A Likely Story” is an actual fairy story, tempered with a lot of everyday realism. The atmosphere is very matter-of-fact. “The Cemetery in the Demesne” reverses this. Nothing fey happens, but the atmosphere is so charged with strangeness that the sick child in the gothic lodge becomes a changeling as well as a sick child, the rites of the Catholic church reach back and entangle themselves with ancient magic, and it is hard to say, in the end, whether the carter is the victim of depression or whether he is bewitched. “The Long Ago” uses a pattern familiar from fairy tales: three young girls with similar sounding names live out histories in which two marry and are widowed and the third, jilted, feels no less bereaved when her ex-suitor dies. It is the story of Hallie's deprived embittered spinsterhood and neurotic dependance on the past, but it is also a tale of love faithful beyond the grave, of girlhood friendship preserved, suffused with all the pathos and nostalgia which the title implies.

Burials, cemeteries, wills, all the paraphernalia of death, figure largely in these stories. “Heaven and Hell [are] the familiars of everyday” (“Limbo”) impinging on ordinary life both with a frisson of the supernatural and with an awareness of judgment, of good and ill. The awareness of “last things” may be firmly put behind closed gates, as Liddy and Alice check the lock of the Old Cemetery (“A Visit to the Cemetery”) but is always adjacent. Liddy and Alice turn away in relief to walk in the wind and talk of boys, but the direction of their walk is the New Cemetery. The hilarity which often accompanies the procedure of death pervades several stories, “A Happy Death”, “The Living”, most of all, “Loving Memory”. In this story obsessional concern over the choice of a headstone for his dead wife provides Matthias with a motive to sustain his own life, but his children find that as a result of his continual haunting of the cemetery their mother's memory lives on in a different way: she becomes one of the “bogeys and bugbears with which exasperated parents scarified their offspring” to bring them in from play after dusk.

As for judgment of good and ill, “a kind of wild justice” rules. As in folk-tales, generosity of spirit is the prime virtue, meanness the worst vice. But in these stories it is not always easy to disentangle them, nor even to distinguish reward from punishment. It is impossible to say which is uppermost, self-interest or generosity, in the impulse that prompts the surgeon in “A Woman Friend” to propose to Bina, nor whether for himself or for her her acceptance is reward or punishment. The last paragraph moves from the one view to the other with perfect evenhandedness. Often, indeed, in these stories “Virtue is its own reward,” the gains and losses of which maxim can be interpreted with varying degrees of irony by idealist or cynic.

The longest and most sophisticated, most brilliant and perhaps most sombre, story to combine everyday life and fairy tale into moral fable is “The Becker Wives”. The effect of this story is rather like that of Flora herself on the Beckers at their first meeting. On taking a “good look” at her, Samuel

was surprised at a boyish quality about her, because … his first impression had been of quite extravagant girlishness … It was a bit of a shock to see that she was wearing a trim black suit and that her small black shoes had buckles, not bows. There was just one thing that was flowery, though: her perfume.¹³

Just so, the first impression the story makes is of something quite extravagantly magical. It comes as a bit of a surprise when a “godd look” shows it as a story about a well-off middle-class family, one of whose members, to show off, marries a clever beautiful girl with a talent for impersonation who is carried away, by her own brilliance and the intoxication of her audience, into madness. The high social comedy of the Beckers, galvanized, lumbering into new life (“‘They look as if they are playing some game,’ Flora whispered.”) Is heightened further by the pervading sense of the uncanny. As the pace increases and becomes hectic—charades, picnics, and impersonations “whenever there was a dull moment in a conversation, or even a lull”—and the Becker wives are observed jettisoning china dogs, vases, and other hitherto prized bric-a-brac under Flora's influence, thus bringing “more air, more colour, more light” to their lives, she seems a good fairy; as it slows again, with her fixation on pregnant Honoria as the only butt of her impersonations, she seems a witch, demonically possessed; and in the end she dissolves, Samuel feels, into a “wraith”, and is indeed, when it is “all over”, only an exhausted girl who will have to be “taken away somewhere … to try to restore the balance of her jangled mind.”

It is, as I said, a moral fable, and the moral is a very simple one: “Pride goes before a fall.” The Beckers “in their presumption” had come to regard Flora as “just another of the Becker wives”; in their hefty materialism they looked on her as a prize possession. Theobald, her husband, is the guiltiest. He of all the Beckers was the only one not to be smugly satisfied with the rightness of their choices—of furniture, china, houses, wives; the only one to feel the lack of spirit, style, verve. So to remedy the deficiency he imports Flora, as a superior commodity. Theodore is the only member of the family absent at the catastrophe. His reaction to finding out that he has after all, as Julia predicted, made “the worst mistake”, the most “disastrous marriage” of them all, is left to the imagination. Samuel's presumption is more sympathetic: he presumed to “understand” Flora. His punishment is accordingly more subtle, “a terrible, terrible sadness” which nevertheless carries the seeds of self-recognition and self-knowledge. Flora receives the worst punishment of all. Julia puts her mistake crudely after their first meeting: “she doesn't believe in hiding her light under a bushel” and “she carried it just a bit too far”. Drunk with admiration, she exploits her talent for inhabiting other people's personalities to the point where her own dissolves. The bleakness o the moral judgment, and the enchantment, the “airy brilliance” of the atmosphere, create a tension which make this story a magical performance of balance.

So far, I have been referring to Mary Lavin's earlier stories. Since In the Middle of the Fields, and Other Stories (which appeared in 1967, and in which the title story, the earliest, was written in 1961), several collections have appeared, and in these later stories taken as a group there is a change. Poise and balance are no longer the most outstanding characteristics. Not that they are less accomplished, but less obviously so. They are less impervious to the outside world, more fluid, more open-textured. The attitude to the characters is less detached and ironic, more sympathetic; among the characters, there are more people who inhabit the same world as Mary Lavin herself and her readers, educated, articulate, familiar with city life even if living in the country, travelling abroad (two stories have settings outside Ireland). In recent stories, Mary Lavin confronts issues, questions of values, social and religious, as she had not done since The House in Clewe Street—of course, doing so in a different manner.

The changing times are more apparent. “In the Middle of the Fields” is set like so many of Mary Lavin's stories in the countryside, but the countryside is not merely a setting, a given. It is examined in a new way.

The wife was with him, as usual, sitting up in front [of the car] the way people sat up in the well of little tub traps long ago, their knees pressed together, allowing no slump.

The continuity with the past accommodating change is exactly the sense pervading the earlier stories, but the articulation of it is new. The change that electricity has brought is described in this story too. “‘Look, that's electricity!’” her mother used to say as the blue spark sprang from her hair under the brush:

That was all they knew of electricity in those dim-lit days when valleys of shadow lay deep between one piece of furniture and another. Was it because rooms were so badly lit then that they saw it so often, that little blue star?

The story as a whole encloses another story, from the past, that of Bridie Logan “mad for love” and her sudden death; a story with the nostalgic bittersweet tone of many of Mary Lavin's earlier ones. “In the Middle of the Fields” frames it: the woman, a widow, is herself enough of an outsider to country life to reflect that “she envied the practical country way that made good the defaults of nature as readily as the broken sod knits back into the sward,” (a reflection that in the event is ironically a bit off the mark). Through her eyes the countryside, its life and its people, are reassessed, change and continuity balanced.

Another story that revisits and reassesses the territory of earlier stories is “Tom”. It is a very personal story, using “frankly biographical material”¹⁴ in which Tom (the author/narrator's father) returns from America and drives through the countryside of his childhood, meeting, though deliberately remaining unrecognised by, people he remembers. Even the name of his childhood sweetheart, Rose Magarry, is a memory of one of Mary Lavin's earliest stories (“Lilacs”).

The changing times inform the central theme in “The Shrine”, a debate between a young geologist interested in developing the land for its minerals to give new economic life to a rural community, and his fiancée's uncle, the Canon, who is exploiting a Shrine, supposedly on the site of a miraculous Apparition, for its commercial potential in order to achieve the same end. In one aspect “The Shrine” is a reworking of the incident in “A Wet Day”: a priest, obsessed with his own concerns, in each case being prepared on their behalf to ruin the happiness of a beloved niece and her young man. The analysis of motive in the later story is much more complex and more explicit. Though the concerns of “The Shrine” are as much as ever in Mary Lavin's work the eternal verities—youth and age, growing up, the conflict of the world and the spirit—they are articulated in relation to an intensely topical issue in modern Ireland, and this gives a greater density and solidity to the story, in contrast to the delicately-achieved precision of “A Wet Day”.

Folk-lore and fairy-tale as a pattern impinge on these stories less, but there is an awareness of ancient atavistic power in the countryside. “A Mug of Water” is about a young English woman, Esmay, on her honeymoon in Ireland. (Incidentally, there is a lapse of Mary Lavin's usually perfect ear when she has Esmay say, of a bee, “Mind would it sting you,” an Irish locution if ever there was one.) Her husband, a doctor, Irish but working in England, is fascinated by the dolmens, burial mounds and passage-graves all over the country, and as he enthusiastically explores them Esmay feels the landscape becoming haunted by the memory of the people who had built them. In the end the story reveals itself as literally a fairy story—a story about fairies; not “little people” but the Old Ones—but not before it has established itself as an exploration of the tensions, the minute shiftings of mood, the heightened sensitivity of the newly-married couple, and set this against a sense of the present day as one moment only in the history of man.

Similarly, in “The Lost Child”, an old disused cemetery for unbaptised children haunts the mind of a modern young woman, Renée, and surfaces when she herself has a miscarriage; she has just become a Catholic after some years of marriage to Mick, a “born Catholic”. As in “The Cemetery in the Demesne” ancient superstition and Catholicism (“a barbarous religion” in the eyes of Renée's sister Iris) link; but whereas in the early story the issue remains latent and ambiguous, here it is confronted and examined.

Esmay and Renée are representatives of a type of person that hardly appears in the world of the earlier stories: a woman who is neither destructive nor pathetic. The widow in “In the Middle of the Fields” is of this type, and so is “Vera”, or rather all the women who go by that name, in “The Cuckoo-Spit”, “One Summer”, “Happiness”, “Trastevere”, and “Villa Violetta”. (In the three last, Vera, whose surname is Traske and who has three daughters, does in fact seem to be the same person, and to have much in common with Mary Lavin herself.)

These characters are treated with more sympathy and inwardness than any in the earlier stories. Even in those stories in the later collections that return to earlier subject-matter—“Asigh”, “Tomb of an Ancestor”, “Heart of Gold”—do not return entirely to the earlier manner. The injured, jilted girl of “Asigh” (and this is true of Vera in “One Summer” as well) shows a self-awareness which rescues and dignifies her. Both “Heart of Gold” and “Tomb of an Ancestor” end happily; “happiness”, a concept hardly granted admittance in the earlier stories except when lost or illusory, is a positive force not only in the story of that name, but in all the recent collections. Moreover the characters are seen to achieve their happiness.

For Mary Lavin in these later stories is as much a moralist as ever. Happiness is no arbitrary gift. “A Memory” is a reworking of the basic situation in “A Woman Friend”, and, in contrast to the masterly ambiguity with which reward and punishment are handled in that story, there is no doubt at all here that James is punished for his meanness of spirit. He is criminal in his rejection of the generous offer of happiness that is held out to him, and his death is the direct result of his behaviour. Although James is incapable of achieving or even recognising it, the possibility of happiness exists even in this austere story, and in this there is a contrast with another early story about a cautious bachelor and a woman friend, “Love is for Lovers”, where the choice seems to be only between the stifling plushy cosiness offered by the woman and the cold-feet-in-bed of continued solitude.

What I have been saying about the later stories amounts in effect to announcing the end of “double vision”, to recur to V. S. Pritchett comments in the passage I have already quoted from. “What we call real life” is no longer “a veil” over “the smoldering of a hidden life”; gone too is the opposition of innocence and sophistication that Seamus Deane noted, which is so largely responsible for the magical aura of the earlier stories. Characteristically in the later stories, surface and depth are unified: where there are depths they are confronted and, delicately of course, tentatively rather than exhaustively, explored. They are brought to light by a technique which combines a structure seemingly casual and open, in fact complex and suggestive, and a style dense with imagery.

This imagery informs, rather than reinforcing or standing for, the meaning. A comparison between “A Memory” and the early “Lilacs” may illustrate what I mean. Stacy, in “Lilacs”, like James in the later story, rejects what she thinks of as the ugly, sordid aspect of life, symbolised for her by the dung-hill from which her family makes its money, (“filthy lucre”), and in the end is trapped by it, because she too depends on it for her livelihood. “Lilacs” achieves its effect through the neatness of the opposition between lilacs and dunghill, the smartness of the reversal in the last line of the story, the diagrammatic simplicity of the parallel, and the way the meaning can lie unvoiced but quite plain behind the metaphor.

In “A Memory” the natural organic life which James rejects, finds messy, is indicated by a whole range of images. There is the fire which he kindles in the first section, references to which ironically punctuate his complacent reverie on the cool “uniquely undemanding quality” of his relationship with Myra. There are the fields which he looks out on “with hatred”; physical fatness; cooking and all domesticity; the process of ageing; children and nappies; the brambles and briars of the wood. The strip of daylight sky by which at the end he tries to orient himself as he stumbles through the wood is both natural and, on the other hand, cool, green and distant. The dense and complicated imagery reaches its climax in the central scene in which James and Myra uncharacteristically quarrel. She flings herself against the door “in an outrageous gesture of crucifixion” to prevent him from leaving; “‘This nailing of yourself to the door like a stoat’,” James says. The image is brutal, and at the same time intimately countrified. Merged as it is with the idea of the crucifixion, nothing could be more shocking. At the end of the story, the image is picked up again when James, like a hunted animal himself, stumbles about in the wood: the same pattern is re-enacted, first the gesture of crucifixion—“If he raised his arms and thrashed about …”—and then the pathetic immobility, “his face pressed into the wet leaves … the rotted leaves were sucked into his mouth.”

The most characteristically recurring imagery in the later stories is that of natural growth, and the power of the earth, the soil. In “A Mug of Water” the tumuli and passage-graves are frightening not only for their association with death but even more because they are womb-like, representing beginnings as much as ends. Esmay, just married, is conscious of her own womb and the possibility of pregnancy; she falls back onto the springy heather as onto a bed, but Mike points out the dangers of hidden rocks; everywhere generation, birth and death are intertwined. The number of gardeners in these stories is striking: the eponymous “New Gardener”, Vera in “Happiness”, Ada in “Senility”, Renée in “The Lost Child”. The central, long passage about Renée's gardening in the last-named story illustrates how casually, unforcedly, the imagery embodies and focusses the theme.

Renée has just returned exhausted (she is in the first, as yet unconfirmed, stage of pregnancy) from the ceremony in which she was received into the Catholic Church, and finds, before she even gets into the house, that the springtime garden is demanding her attention from every quarter. Every detail in this passage (it is six pages long) expresses some aspect of the story's main concerns. The spring weather is full of promise, but “everywhere too there was evidence of the damage done by winter.” The stone dropped in the middle of the field, “roughly chiselled, perhaps by one of the old monks to whom the land had once belonged,” refers us back to those other rocks on Dugort Strand, which, appearing at first glance to be a natural formation, turn out to be a disused cemetery for unbaptised children; an incident which exarcerbates the tension between Renée's sister Iris and her Catholic husband Mike, and leads to a discussion of the question of baptism for a still-born baby or a foetus—“That word!” Renée shudders. Here, however, the rock emphasises the emotional rightness of Renée's decision to “turn”, since even the land she lives on once belonged to the Church: it is “as firmly rooted as a tree”, like a living thing, and Renée plans to bring it even more into the context of ongoing life by moving it into the garden and planting bulbs around it. Next she sees the bulbs which have bolted into premature life “in such a frenzy of growth they had shot out of the ground altogether and lay upended on top of the clay” in an absurd, grotesque and comically touching foreshadowing of the miscarriage. The crocus bulbs have to be reburied to complete their growth. This image recurs movingly in Renée's dream later in hospital, in which men try, but fail, to bury a baby among the crocuses under the elm tree. The roses too, Renée finds, have put out new early shoots which endanger their lives and demand another bout of protective activity; and finally she sees that a load of manure has been dumped on the lawn and “almost smothered her beautiful Chinese peonies that were due to flower for the first time this summer, their leaf-buds already unfurling.” The whole garden thus becomes a metaphor for Renée's condition, physical, psychological, and spiritual, and the metaphor reflects precisely the moment of crisis in her own condition. When she gets to work on the manure her activity changes from. being joyously, maternally benevolent and becomes grimly determined; hating “the filthy stuff”, she reminds herself “that in the ground this too would be transformed”—the connotations of the last word need not be stressed. She endures the dunghill, and all it represents, with fortitude, until she encounters the “mess of worms” and impales one. As traditional denizens of graves the worms have their obvious place in the metaphor, but here they speak of life more explicitly than of death: “how could anyone—above all one in her condition—deny any creature—even a disgusting thing like that—its right to life!” That there can be such explicitness without loss of subtlety is the measure of the successful merging of theme and metaphor. The easy, intimate relation between the two is made possible by Renée herself being sensitive and self-aware enough to appreciate that relation.

The most endearing, to my mind, of Mary Lavin's later stories is “Villa Violetta”. Discursive, almost anecdotal, it tells how Vera, a young widow, a writer, arrives in Florence with her three little girls and finds herself daunted by the task of finding accommodation and organising their lives. The descriptions of her inefficiency and impracticality are very realistic and very funny, with an undercurrent of panic. Her children cope better than she does with the language, and she is constantly getting lost. The first half of the story is dominated by the image of Florence as a maze, alien and forbidding and full of icy marble staircases. In the second half, the maze sorts itself out under the guidance of Father Tom and his touring bus, and becomes benevolent and beautiful, “printed on her mind as a starry map.”

Vera's regaining of her sense of direction, and her emergence from fear and loneliness, is paralleled by the emergence of the little girl Peggy from a prolongued attack of vertigo, her recovery being due to the companionship of Vera's youngest daughter, Linda. The story is all concerned with the surface of life, the demands of the children, their clothes; streets, furniture, money; food, above all, food—and these domestic impedimenta perfectly represent the world of things which Vera must control and make home for herself and her children. A final quotation from this story sums up what seems to be, despite all their acknowledgment of “the weight of living” and “onslaughts upon happiness” (“Happiness”), and all their “intimations of mortality” (“Senility”), the prevailing mood of the later volumes.

Below lay Florence, the late sunlight still gilding its domes and cupolas but in the gardens and public parks the blue of evening was gathering into pools.

But it is of course impossible really to sum up, and maybe misleading to speak of any mood as “prevailing” in a group of stories so dedicated in their awareness of moment-to-moment variability. Mentioning “Senility” alongside “Villa Violetta”, I have stressed by implication Ada's acceptance of age, her concern for Laura, and the dream of past happiness which (perhaps) “having been must ever be”. But “Senility” is a grim story too, and the current of bitterness that runs through it emerges in the story published in this issue—“A Family Likeness”—in which Ada and Laura appear again: Ada shrunken and enfolded like a scarecrow in a too-big coat of Laura's, Laura's hardness emphasised by the exhaustion of early motherhood, both of them strained by their relationship and pinched by the cold wind of a treacherous spring day. The imagery of this recent story, dung and flowers juxtaposed, recalls that of the very early “Lilacs”, used, however, with the dense complexity and subtlety which characterizes the later stories rather than with the transparent clarity of “Lilacs”. Indeed the same imagery is adumbrated in “Senility” where the flowery dream causes Ada humiliatingly to wet her bed.

In this essay I have charted fairly minutely the relationship of the author to her form: the catalytic effect that form had on her material (basically, as I showed, the same as in the novels) and its development. I stressed the distinction between early and later stories, such distinctions being necessary when confronting a body of work so consistent as Mary Lavin's, and one which bears so clearly the author's stamp. “A Mary Lavin story”—the concept is as recognisable as “a Graham Greene novel”, therefore the differences between individual stories are vital, but so too are the links between them, and the qualities that enable us to group them. But “later” is a relative term. “A Family Likeness” demonstrates very clearly both the continuity of Mary Lavin's work, and its direction: towards, that is, a full transcription of everyday life, no longer as an insubstantial veil, but accepted in all its gravity.

Notes

1. The House in Clewe Street (London: Michael Joseph, 1945).

2. Mary O'Grady (London: Michael Joseph, 1950).

3. Interview with Maev Kennedy, The Irish Times, 13 March 1976.

4. See above.

5. Zack Bowen, Mary Lavin (London: Associated University Presses, 1975), p. 43.

6. See p. 207ff.

7. On the lines of Kate O'Brien's Without My Cloak (London: Heinemann, 1931). A comparison between the two books reveals striking similarities. However, Without My Cloak is definitely a historical novel, with a sure grasp of historical perspective.

8. Op. cit., p. 65.

9. Until about 1961. For convenience, I am taking the last story to be included in The Stories of Mary Lavin, Vol. II, (i.e. “The Yellow Beret”) as the last of her “earlier” stories, and “In the Middle of the Fields” as the first of the “later” ones, although “In a Café” really belongs with the “later” group.

10. Introduction to Mary Lavin, Collected Stories (Boston: Houghton Miflin Co., 1971), p. ix.

11. Irish University Review, IV:2 (Autumn 1974), 285.

12. Op. cit., p. x.

13. Earlier, Flora's clothes are described as “an assortment of light colours [that] seemed to cling to her like feathers.” This can be taken as further evidence of Flora's illusory appearance or, churlishly, cited as one of those mistakes which Mary Lavin has admitted are to be found in her early stories (see Interview with Maev Kennedy, quoted above).

14. Interview, see Note 3.

Works Cited

All quotations from Mary Lavin's stories are taken from the following:

The Stories of Mary Lavin, Vol. I (London: Constable, 1964);

The Stories of Mary Lavin, Vol. II (London: Constable, 1974);

In the Middle of the Fields, and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1967);

Happiness, and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1969);

A Memory, and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1972);

The Shrine, and Other Stories (London: Constable, 1977);

Tales from Bective Bridge (London: Michael Joseph, 1943; re-issued Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1978).