This long essay started out with a premise that I realized needed a great deal more amplification as well as a change of emphasis. So often, in the activity of writing, an initial thought takes on a life of its own as fingers press on the keys and a typed passage is read, considered, and revised.
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After writing the first biography of Edna O'Brien, I've become interested in the life and work of another notable twentieth-century Irish writer, Mary Lavin (1912-1996). Both were widely acknowledged masters of the short story, and both published in The New Yorker. Both revered the work of Anton Chekhov.
Yet the women's styles and most typical subject matter were markedly different: O'Brien's lyricism vs. Lavin's storyteller's cadences; O'Brien's urgent, emotionally raw depictions of women's sexuality and dashed hopes vs. Lavin's matter-of-factly detailed studies of friction between siblings, married couples, mothers and daughters, and neighbors, and accounts of family tragedies.
The receptions they each received during the years of their greatest fame (1940s–1970s for Lavin; 1960s–1990s for O'Brien) were also very different. Part of this had to do with changing expectations of what fiction could be. The 1970s were a watershed; as the British novelist Barbara Pym discovered when her publisher rejected her new manuscript, books about genteel unmarried women were considered hopelessly old-fashioned. While most of Lavin's characters are far from genteel, we do not witness their couplings.
Younger readers probably always found it easier to appreciate O'Brien's approach; Lavin's is more of an acquired taste. There are narratives delivered by a single speaker who goes on and on in the oral tradition until every tiny aspect of an event is accounted for. There are stories about sisters' rivalries over suitors, long-held grudges, impossible loves, misunderstandings between people of different social classes, and individuals whose behavior has caused them to be whispered about by neighbors. As befits eras when Irish lives were more precarious, many stories involve a death—in the past or soon to occur.
Lavin has been praised for her ability to convey the feelings and motivations of a wide variety of people, and for her fine-grained attention to detail. On the other hand, some of her stories are so long and detailed as they describe lives tightly bound by convention that a modern reader may struggle to maintain her interest.
The driving force of Lavin's stories is character, not plot: she spun her tales out of skeins of conversation and characters' thoughts. Aiming to be true to life, she did not allow the tensions in her stories to be neatly resolved. Even when her stories take place in Dublin, they often have a claustrophobic feel seemingly more suited to a tale of life in a village. (For Lavin, who lived there, Dublin was a village in those days.)
Her writing was critically esteemed and published in several leading U.S. magazines, (a new book documents Lavin's relationship with her sympathetic editor at The New Yorker), as well as in several collections. Yet her public profile was muted, especially as compared to Edna's. To be fair, Lavin had many problems with her publishers, and their failure to agree to print paperback editions of her work lost her a critical mass of her potential audience.
Yet it seems to me that another factor was at play. Especially during the decades when male domination of the literary world was virtually exclusive, women were (however unfairly) described by their looks and style as well as by their work. Even today it is a peculiar truism of biographical commentary about a women writer that she is inevitably described as "beautiful" — no matter how much of a stretch that may seem — or at the very least, as a "belle laide," connoting an unconventional attractiveness.
Edna O'Brien was an attractive young woman who turned herself into a beauty. She watched her diet, favored trendy, ultra-feminine clothes, and ensured that her hair always retained its bouffant waves. She also had an ebullient public personality. This combination of good looks and charm made her the darling of TV talk shows during the 1960s and 1970s. So pervasive was her media fame that some literary types wrongly doubted her value as a writer.
Mary Lavin was a stocky woman whose stern face was dominated by thick, dark eyebrows. Granted, money was tight for her and her three daughters (her first husband had died young), but she was so oblivious of her appearance that (as her biographer explains) she would wear the same dowdy black outfit even after it showed significant signs of wear—a trait that might have been seen as endearing in a man ("he is thinking of higher things"), less so in a woman.
it is hard to imagine a Mary Lavin in today's literary landscape. Perhaps it's no wonder that the period of her greatest fame occurred at a time when a writer's public engagement could consist solely of giving lectures at universities and other serious public forums, and sitting for a solemn book cover photo. Her lectures were said to be down-to-earth and engrossing; her dignified presence was somewhat like that of Eleanor Roosevelt.
To return to the substance of her short stories: I wonder how much patience today's readers would have for tales of long-ago village life, with all the minutiae of daily life they contain and the almost unimaginable constraints governing their characters.
For example, in "Lilacs" (published in 1942, in Lavin's first story collection) a man has discovered that collecting and selling horse manure can provide his family with a good income. But their house stinks — the piles are right outside the window — and the two daughters are understandably distressed. They know that local people can smell the stench on the girls. After their parents die, one sister marries and moves away. Left at home, the sister whose hopes of planting sweet-smelling lilacs had been dismissed by her parents arranges to have the manure removed. The story ends with the family's financial advisor asking her pointedly what she plans to live on.
Readers are left with the inference that this young woman has absolutely no other options. It's not clear in what era the story takes place, though rural Ireland remained extremely backward well into the mid-twentieth-century. But the situation is so awful to begin with that the sense of hopelessness at the end seems contrived.
Compare this story to Edna's "Irish Revel" (published in The New Yorker in 1962), another tale of a young woman's crushing disappointment — in this case, dashed hopes of encountering at a party a young man she had met by chance. It turns out that she was not invited to the party as a guest but as the help. Not only is the young man not present, but a male guest tries to seduce her. The woman lives an isolated rural life; the party was possibly her only opportunity to find love. Surely any reader can sympathize with her feelings of hopelessness, underlined by the discovery that a tire on the bicycle that is her sole means of transport has gone flat.
Now, it's possible that I am simply more willing to grant credibility to a story about a lonely young woman longing for love than one about a young woman entirely dependent for her livelihood on sales of manure. Of course, not all of Lavin's stories are so extreme. But she seemed to have a compulsion to write about especially dreary aspects of Irish life, and to emphasize their misery in flatly descriptive detail poles apart from Edna's animated and engaging prose. It is not surprising that in Lavin's own life she suffered from depression and was eventually hospitalized for a time.
"Happiness" (a story by Lavin first published in The New Yorker in 1968) is about a perpetually restless woman remembered by her daughters for her idiosyncratic notion of the meaning of happiness. In Vera's opinion, it was not about pleasure; in fact, "even illness and pain" could coexist with it. The daughters wondered if she really meant some other quality, like courage. Widowed after a happy marriage, she had taken her girls on a European tour, rejecting the mourners reminding her that life was a vale of tears. But she was so deeply upset that the daughters worried when she swam too far out to sea.
Years later, as Vera is semi-comotose after a bout of frantic gardening, she becomes agitated at the thought of facing the impending death no one has actually mentioned to her. She speaks as if revisiting the time that she was carrying an armload of daffodils to her husband in the hospital, only to be stopped by a nun who grabbed the flowers, which fell to the floor. One daughter, in an effort to soothe her mother, reassures her that there is no need to worry about this, because she is now "finished with this world." Her mother seems to accept this verdict and sinks back into the pillow to die.
There is a strong link between Lavin's own life with her three daughters and that of the woman in the story. Like her, Lavin suddenly had to provide for her girls after the untimely death of her (first) husband. While the woman in the story does not seem to have a career, her whirlwind activities replicate the author's habits. The priest in this story, a friend of the family whose opinions tend to be rebutted by the mother, was surely inspired to some degree by the priest Lavin knew as a young woman and married in middle age, after he was released from his orders.
I think the story is about self-delusion as a (possibly unconscious) strategy for carrying on with life after experiencing tragedy and trying to serve as an example to one's children. But, as with most of Lavin's stories, there is something obdurate about "Happiness" that resists a reader's attempts to parse it. I can't imagine identifying with her characters, or even being able to fully understand them. They dwell in a sort of hermetic space, akin to the unique environment of a fable, and even the universal human emotions they express somehow seem alien. So it seems unsurprising that Lavin's one-time fame — in itself a puzzle — has been eclipsed. Still, I have to confess that I am also not the best reader of Chekhov's short stories, much preferring the larger canvas of his plays.
©Cathy Curtis 2025