Mary Lavin is among the most talented of Irish short story writers to appear in this century. As early as April 1939, when Mary Lavin was only twenty-seven years old, she published her first story, “Miss Holland,” in The Dublin Magazine. Seumas O'Sullivan, the editor of The Dublin Magazine, called it “a finished piece of work” and said that”its delicate restraint appealed greatly …” O'Sullivan, who was keen to encourage talented young Irish writers and provide them with a literary journal in which to publish their work, told Mary Lavin that he would be glad to consider anything that she submitted. However, he indicated that the space at his disposal for stories and sketches was very limited. Like all editors, he had a long waiting list of Irish writers.¹ In “Miss Holland,” Mary Lavin developed her protagonist through interior monologue, rather than direct statement, “looking closer than normal into the human heart.”² It was in her characterization of Miss Holland that Mary Lavin excelled. Although her story was not a tale of action so much as the development of a state of mind, it still used specific moments which helped to depict Miss Holland and made her into a credible character with whom it was easy to identify. When politics was the topic discussed at lunch, Miss Holland spent the rest of the day reading the newspaper, looking up politics in the Encyclopedia Britannica and even going to the British Museum to do some research. She then felt certain that she would be able to make a significant comment at supper:

All through supper she would sit in a tight, straight rigidity of nervousness, indifferent to the food, waiting for an opportunity to enter the conversation in a striking way. Those opportunities never came … She clung tightly to her little piece of potential conversation in case a chance would come to use it at the very last minute. Later she said it to herself, in the dark, in bed, with great success …

After the publication of “Miss Holland,” Mary Lavin continued to send her work to O'Sullivan. She apologized in June 1939 for sending him so much material, and hoped he would realize that it was “from under—and not over—confidence ….” Mary Lavin indicated that when she originally asked O'Sullivan to read ”Miss Holland” she had nothing to lose, but she might now forfeit his good opinion, if he did not enjoy her newly submitted work, and this made her terribly nervous.³ In September 1939 O'Sullivan indicated that he wanted to publish Mary Lavin's story “A Fable.”⁴ In “A Fable” (eventually published in the October 1940 Dublin Magazine) Mary Lavin attempted to elude and exploit the restrictions of length that were imposed upon her as a short story writer. In her use of the fable she telescoped a great deal of human experience into a situation in which she asked the reader to sacrifice his credulity. Although many short story writers before Mary Lavin, like Chekov in “The Bet” and Tolstoi in several of his shortest pieces, used the fable, it did not prove entirely sucessful as a literary device once realism began to dominate fiction in the second half of the nineteenth-century. The demand for verisimilitude seemed to deny its validity. “A Fable” developed a trite moral thesis—that too much beauty in a woman created jealousy—to which Mary Lavin also referred in subsequent short stories. In “The Inspector's Wife” (published in The Long Ago, [The Long Ago, and Other Stories] 1944) the realistic representation of envy and self-deception first advanced in “A Fable” was more elaborately and plausibly developed. And in “A Frail Vessel” (published in The Patriot Son, and Other Stories, 1956) the jealousy of one woman toward another, more beautiful, woman was more believably described. While some of the characters in “The Inspector's Wife” and “A Frail Vessel” assumed an identity of their own, in “A Fable” they remained flat and undeveloped: symbols of an attitude and nothing more.

In “A Fable” Mary Lavin, to some extent, reversed the situation found in Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story “The Birthmark” in which a scientist attempted to make his already beautiful wife even more perfect by removing a birthmark from her cheek. While Hawthorne's scientist desired perfect beauty and tried to make his wife's birthmark disappear so “that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness without the semblance of a flaw,”, the townspeople in Mary Lavin's fable were only content when the beautiful woman whose face “was like a bough of apricot blossoms” has the flesh on her face torn by the thorns of a bramble. In “A Fable” the perversity of human nature was such that if the villagers had been unable to bear the beauty of the woman's unscarred face, they seemed to long for her once her beauty was less than perfect. A beautiful face for them, as for the young boy in Chekov's “Beautiful Women,” aroused a heavy sense of melancholy—even hatred.

On the 7th of May 1941 O'Sullivan asked Mary Lavin if he might publish her short story “Say Could That Lad Be I,” instead of “Grief.” O'Sullivan had a space problem during the war years because of the paper shortage, and “Say Could That Lad Be I” was very much shorter than “Grief.” He also wanted to include in his July 1941 issue of the magazine “something cheerful—like your gay white prince episode, to cheer up the readers.”⁵ The issue already contained a melancholy short story. “A Woman from Leam Lara,” by Margaret O'Leary and a memorial notice to F. R. Higgins.⁶ In “Say Could That Lad Be I” Mary Lavin's white prince, a cross between a wire-haired terrier and a blood hound, was a rambunctious and fighting dog who continually got himself and his owner into difficulty. Mary Lavin's amusing tale was told in simple language and with evocative images. She captured the spirit of a past era while her narrator, an old man looking back on his boyhood, spoke with fond recollections. The reader was able to visualize the village shop with its plates of dried fruit on one side and yards of lace and ladies' bonnets on the other. Mary Lavin provided just enough detail to create an impression when she referred to “… the shopboys kneeling into the window spaces in every shop, trimming up the wick and striking matches and putting down the globes over the flame.” After they were lit, the lights swung back and forth on the ceiling and for a short time sent big unnatural shadows of the shopboys and items in the window out over the footpath.

In “Brigid,” published in the January 1944 issue of The Dublin Magazine, Mary Lavin made the attitudes of the characters in her short story dramatically justifiable. The irritable way Owen's wife spoke to him, her belittling and reprimanding tone, reflected the tension in their home:

“‘Listen to that rain’ said the woman to her buband, ‘will it never stop?’”

“‘What harm is a sup of rain?’ said the man.

“‘That's you all over again,’ she said. ‘What harm is there in anything, as long as it doesn't affect yourself’”

Owen's wife was annoyed not so much by the rain or her husband's attitude toward it as by his insistent desire to care for and keep his dim-witted sister on their property:

I won't let it be said that I had a hand or part in letting my own sister be put away … I won't give in. Poor Brigid. Didn't my mother make me promise her that I'd never have hand or part in putting the poor creature away.

According to Owen's wife, Brigid's presence made her daughters less marriageable. “Is any man going to marry a girl when he hears her own aunt is a poor, half-witted creature, soft in the head …” Owen's wife was jealous of the attention her husband devoted to his sister, and it was this, Mary Lavin suggested, which accounted for her ill nature. Owen, on the other hand, was perturbed by his wife's lack of tolerance, and this made him bitter:

I suppose one of our fine daughters would think it the end of the world if she was asked to go for a bit of a message? Let me tell you they'd get men for themselves quicker if they were seen doing a bit of work once in a while … Mind you now, anyone would think that you were anxious to get them off your hands, with the way every penny that comes into the house goes on bits of silks and ribbons for them.

The conflict and tension in “Brigid,” which often resulted from jealousy, was apparent in several other stories by Mary Lavin, noteably “A Single Lady,” “Frail Vessel” and “The Cemetery in the Demesne.” In each of these tales there was always one character who became obsessive in the belief that someone whom he or she loved was being thwarted by another, more dependent, individual. In later years the theme of dependency and emotional imprisonment continued to preoccupy Mary Lavin.

Like so many of Mary Lavin's early short stories, “Brigid” displayed characteristics of the inexperienced, but talented, writer. Although the story's first sentence was written in lyrical and highly alliterative poetic prose, it neither related to nor prepared one for the harsh and brutal world that Mary Lavin's characters inhabited and appeared curiously out of place. The second sentence, however, with its appropriate, homely image brought the reader back to reality:

The rain came sifting silently through the air, and settled silently on the fields giving them a downy look like the cheek of a lovely young woman. But under the trees the rain fell between the leaves in single, heavy drops; noisily, like cabbage-water running through the large holes of a colander.

Mary Lavin's use of symbolism in “Brigid” was too overt. Early in the tale the conversation between Owen and his wife assumed almost too much significance:

“‘Quit that,’ said the woman. ‘Can't you see you're raising ashes?’

“‘What harm are the ashes doing?’

“‘I show you what harm,’ she said, taking down a dish of cabbage and potato from the shelf over the fire, ‘there's your dinner destroyed with them.’ The yellow cabbage was slightly sprayed with ash.

“‘Ashes are healthy, I often heard it said.’”

Even when Owen went to see his dim-witted sister, he held an “ash plant in his hand.” It was therefore not surprising to learn that he had been burned to death on falling into his sister's hearth. Mary Lavin had ordered events too self-consciously. Everything was too contrived.

Although “Brigid” concluded melodramatically, it finished as it began, suspended in mid-air:

She wanted to scream and scream and to run out of the house, but first she tried to drop him out as far as she could from the ashy hearth, then, suddenly feeling the living eyes watching her from behind, and seeing the dead eyes staring up at her from the blistered red face, she sprang upright knocking out a chair, and ran out of the house and ran down the boreen. Her screams brought people running out from their doors, the light streaming out each side of them. She couldn't speak, but she pointed up the hill. And then she heard the sound of their feet running as they went in the way she had pointed. She sat down on the curbstone of the pump, and after sitting there a long time she put her hands to her face, but they smelled of burned hair. She looked at the pump as if she would wash them, but she didn't stand up, and then in the darkness the pale rain fell around her. She sat where she was.

In Mary Lavin's open-ended tale it was uncertain what would happen to Owen's wife or Brigid. The reader's imagination was aroused. Yet when Mary Lavin provided her tale with a longer and more detailed ending, on its publication in book form in 1959, the appeal and effect were lessened. The self-depreciating and self-pitying statements by Owen's wife, (“I failed him always … I never loved him like he loved me”) together with her gratuitous questions (“Oh, how had it happened? How could love be wasted, and go to loss like that?”), weakened the sketch. They violated the portrait of Owen's wife and were out of character.

Mary Lavin's debt to O'Sullivan extended through the years. In March 1954 she told her favourite editor that when a new volume of her stories appeared she hoped “to give it a little lustre by an acknowledgement to The Dublin Magazine.”⁷ A few days later O'Sullivan said that he would be delighted to publish “An Akoulina of the Irish Midlands” in the July 1954 issue. He said that it was really kind of Mary Lavin to let him have it since his poverty-stricken magazine could not afford to pay anything like the amount which was customary with English and American magazines.⁸ In “An Akoulina of the Irish Midlands” Mary Lavin made her omniscient narrator, who was willing to acknowledge her miscalculations and misassumptions, believable and appealing. At first Mary Lavin's narrator assumed that Akoulina, the story's protagonist, was upset because of a tiff that she had had with her lover, Andy. Later, when the narrator discovered that religion was the problem, she again made an erroneous assumption, that Andy was a Protestant and Akoulina a Catholic:

“So they were not of the same religion? That was something I hadn't expected … Perhaps it was because the little Protestant church had a lonely look about it, that I jumped to the conclusion Andy was the Protestant, for he too always struck me as having a lonely air about him … ‘Oh, you'll convert him, Lena,’ I said complacently. And just how complacently I accepted the local interpretation of the word ‘conversion’ can be seen from the glib way I used the common colloquialism. ‘You'll make him turn with you,’ I said. But Lena looked at me sorrowfully. ‘Oh Miss, you don't understand,’ she said. ‘It's not Andy; it's me that's the Protestant.’ Why, of course! How could I have forgotten it? Didn't she live in the little church.”

It was the inquisitive, observant, yet retiring, narrator, and not Akoulina or Andy, whom Mary Lavin most carefully developed in her tale. Although the narrator never intruded, she possessed a definite personality and felt a strong sympathy with Lena.⁹ The narrator, almost obsessed by Lena, watched her constantly. On a few occasions she called her “my Lena,” and, when Andy reprimanded Lena, the narrator said that “it was a moment of intolerable pain” to her.

There was a marked resemblance between the narrator in “An Akoulina of the Irish Midlands” and Turgenev's short story “The Tryst.” In both stories the narrator, unnoticed, watched a pair of lovers in the woods, and in each instance she possessed excessive empathy toward the young woman. The remark made by Turgenev's narrator about the protagonist, Akoulina, when she said that she”was especially taken with the expression of her face; it was so simple and gentle, so sad and so full of childish wonder at its own sadness,” might have been made by Mary Lavin's narrator about Lena. Although Mary Lavin's narrator stated on several occasions that she had accidentally come upon the lovers, Lena and Andy, in the woods, her continual self-justification caused the reader to doubt her. The narrator's protective feeling toward Lena and obsessive desire to watch her every movement had implicit sexual connotations. While spying on Lena in the woods, the narrator could not turn her eyes away from Lena's glowing face. When the narrator saw that Lena was wet to the skin from the rain and had a frightened look on her face, she nearly betrayed herself in her desire to comfort Lena. The narrator noticed Lena look up at Andy with such intensity of feeling that the “realized, with a sinking heart, that such love could never be fully matched.” Only when the narrator sensed that Lena was about to give herself (physically) to Andy, did she stop spying. It was as though she could not bear to see or think of Lena and Andy making love:

“‘What will we do?’ he said, and looking forward into the leafy undergrowth where it thickened, until it was as close and secretive as a house, he began to breathe heavily, and something of the intensity so habitual to Lena, but rarer to him, animated his face and lit his eyes. ‘Let's see what it's like further on, in here … We never went further than this …’ His arm had tightened so convulsively around her waist that it was impossible to tell whether he led her, or whether of her own will she disappeared with him into the depths of that close and secretive copse.”

One never discovered, however, if Lena and Andy made love in the woods because Mary Lavin's narrator (probably in deference to Ireland's archaic censorship rules) conveniently passed over this a period of time and the next sentence read “A few minutes later I stood up from my cramped and unwilling position.”

Like all good short story writers, Mary Lavin used time with skill. She was always in control of her story, allowing her descriptive passages to proceed only so far. Although she frequently passed over a period of time, she did so without damaging her story's continuity. In fact, on occasion, Mary Lavin increased the immediacy of a situation and even heightened it by skipping from one moment to another. In “An Akoulina of the Irish Midlands” she ended a section of her tale with Lena saying to the narrator, “Don't be watching out for us to-night. To-day is my half-day, Miss. I'll be meeting him in Belinter Woods.” She began the next section of her story with the narrator's comment, “I had no idea of going near Belinter Woods that afternoon …. That I should happen to have been upon the scene at all was the merest accident.” The time Mary Lavin passed over was irrelevant. Because her desire was to show the effect that Lena had on the narrator, she did not care about those hours when the narrator was not in the company of Lena.

However, Mary Lavin was not so preoccupied with character portrayal and the handling of time as to neglect other facets of writing. In “An Akoulina of the Irish Midlands” she created an appealing atmosphere even it it was at times tinged with an excessively romantic ambience:

… the clouds began to break, and patches of blue showed through the beeches over my head. Soon it was in the wood alone that the rain still fell, dropping not only from the sky, but from the leafy branches, and even there, as if to show the attitude of all nature, at my feet a blade of grass that had been weighted down with a big raindrop, let fall its crystal drop and sprang upright. And soon, darting out of their green tunnels in the undergrowth, scattering rain from their glossy wings, the birds were beginning to sing again, while all the air breathed with a new sweetness, not the particular perfume of any single bush of tree, but the gentle exhalation of a million fresh-washed leaves.

Nature description in Mary Lavin's short stories seldom lasted for any length of time and in “An Akoulina of the Irish Midlands” pastoral interludes invariably gave way to thematic development. Mary Lavin was preoccupied with problems that religious differences inevitably brought to any relationship in Ireland; and much of the dramatic tension in her tale occured because her two lovers were of different religions. The reader wondered if Lena and Andy would encounter the same marital problems as Maime (a Catholic) and Elgar (a Protestant) did in another short story, “The Convert.” This was a mixed marriage, also of love, that disintegrated as the years passed. The religious differences of Maime and Elgar were never forgotten because in moments of stress Maime always taunted her husband for being a Protestant.

Between 1939 and 1954, while Mary Lavin published in The Dublin Magazine, she developed into a talented young writer. She created credible and dramatically justifiable characters, made relevant use of detail, employed evocative images, established meaningful themes and skilfully ordered events in her various tales. By 1954 Mary Lavin's style had become more sophisticated. She had begun, for example, to experiment with various narrative techniques in “An Akoulina of the Irish Mirlands,” something she had not done in 1939 when she wrote “Miss Holland.” If it had not been for Seumas O'Sullivan's encouragement, Mary Lavin might not have acquired the necessary self-confidence and Ireland might not have witnessed the development of one of its most readable and esteemed modern authors.

Notes

1. State University of New-York at Binghamton Library, O'Sullivan to Lavin, 16 May, 1939.

2. In the preface to her Selected Stories (1959) Mary Lavin said that this was what short story writting was for her.

3. Trinity College, Dublin. Seumas O'Sullivan Correspondence, No. 1705. Hereafter, T.C.D., S.O.S. Correspondence.

4. State University of New-York at Binghamton Library, O'Sullivan to Lavin, 7 September, 1939.

5. State University of New-York at Binghamton Library, O'Sullivan to Lavin, 7 May, 1941.

6. Margaret O'Leary was another short story writer indebted to O'Sullivan. In a letter written on the 14th of January, 1945 she said that she valued his”appreciation” of her work because he was “the only person … whose literary judgement she could rely on.” T.C.D., S.O.S. Correspondence, No. 2152.

7. T.C.D., S.O.S. Correspondence, No. 2761.

8. State University of New-York at Binghamton Library, O'Sullivan to Lavin, 28 March, 1954.

9. When”An Akoulina of the Irish Midlands” was republished in volume one of Mary Lavin's. Collected Short Stories (1964), the narrator became a man.