by Mary Lavin
About the Author
Mary Lavin was born in 1912 in the USA, but moved as a child with her Irish parents to Athenry, Co. Galway, and then to Dublin and her farm in Co. Meath. Lavin wrote two novels, The House in Clewe Street and Mary O’Grady, but is best known for her many short story collections, including Tales from Bective Bridge, The Becker Wives and Other Stories, In the Middle of the Fields, Happiness and Other Stories, and The Stories of Mary Lavin (Volumes I, II and III). She enjoyed an eminent reputation in the land of her birth, where she twice served as writer-in-residence at the University of Connecticut and had many stories published in the prestigious New Yorker magazine. She won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Allied Irish Banks Literary Award. She was also awarded an honorary doctorate from University College Dublin in 1968. Mary Lavin was also a member of Aosdána, Ireland’s state-sponsored affiliation of distinguished creative artists; she was elected Saoi, its highest honour, in 1992 for achieving ‘singular and sustained distinction in literature’. In her private life, she was widowed for fifteen years following the death of her first husband, William Walsh, in 1954, with whom she had three daughters. In 1969, she married the distinguished former Australian Jesuit priest Michael McDonald Scott, who predeceased her in 1990. Mary Lavin died in 1996 and is buried with her family in Navan, Co. Meath.
Also by Mary Lavin
Tales from Bective Bridge
The Long Ago
The House in Clewe Street (novel)
The Becker Wives
At Sallygap
Mary O’Grady (novel)
A Single Lady
The Patriot Son
A Likely Story
Selected Stories (USA)
The Great Wave
The Stories of Mary Lavin (Volume 1)
In the Middle of the Fields
Happiness
Collected Stories (USA)
The Second Best Children in the World
A Memory
The Stories of Mary Lavin (Volume 2)
The Shrine and other stories
Selected Stories
The Stories of Mary Lavin (Volume 3)
A Family Likeness
In a Café
In the Middle
of the Fields
In the Middle
of the Fields
and other stories
Mary Lavin
Introduction by Colm Tóibín
MODERN IRISH CLASSIC
In the Middle of the Fields
First published in 1967 by Constable
This edition published in 2016 by
New Island Books
16 Priory Hall Office Park
Stillorgan
County Dublin
Republic of Ireland
www.newisland.ie
The stories in this book were revised by the author following their publication in the 1967 edition. In 1985, the revised stories were included in The Stories of Mary Lavin (Vol 3). It is these revised versions that comprise this present edition.
‘In the Middle of the Fields’, ‘The Lucky Pair’, ‘Heart of Gold’, ‘The Cuckoo Spit’, and ‘One Summer’ first appeared in The New Yorker.
Introduction © Colm Tóibín, 2016
Copyright © The Literary Estate of Mary Lavin, 2016
The right of Mary Lavin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.
PRINT ISBN:978-1-84840-531-8
EPUB ISBN:978-1-84840-532-5
MOBI ISBN:978-1-84840-533-2
All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owner.
British Library Cataloguing Data.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), 70 Merrion Square, Dublin 2, Ireland, and Meath County Council.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For
MICHAEL SCOTT, S.J.
*
The Literary Estate of Mary Lavin also wishes to remember the author’s three daughters, Valdi MacMahon, Elizabeth Walsh Peavoy and Caroline Walsh.
Contents
Introduction by Colm Tóibín
In the Middle of the Fields
The Lucky Pair
Heart of Gold
The Cuckoo-spit
One Summer
The Mock Auction
Introduction
by Colm Tóibín
Frank O’Connor called his book about the short story ‘The Lonely Voice’ and wrote: ‘Always in the short story there is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society.’ John McGahern wrote that the short story ‘came into its own like song or prayer or superstition in poorer more fragmented communities where individualism and tradition and family and localities and chance and luck are dominant.’ Some writers and critics took the view that in the middle of the twentieth century the short story rather than the novel could best flourish in Ireland, a society which was mainly rural and oddly fragmented, and where it was possible to dramatise single images of pure isolation and demand that they stand for a more general isolation.
The short-story writers of Mary Lavin’s generation, such as Frank O’Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin and Liam O’Flaherty, were in full possession of the sense of fracture which led to the lonely voice, but most of them also had the benefit of reading widely in Russian literature and contemplating the achievement of George Moore and James Joyce. Some of them, especially Frank O’Connor and Mary Lavin, also had the benefit of working with American editors and knowing that they would have a wide audience outside Ireland for their work. Both Lavin and O’Connor were to have a long relationship, for example, with The New Yorker magazine. While this brought them a wide audience and offered them a certain financial independence, it also came with temptations to make the Irish experience amusing or alarming or strange.
Mary Lavin’s body of work makes clear, however, how much she resisted the temptations to make her stories too obviously Irish. She wrote with sympathy and emotional accuracy about the Irish middle classes; but she described memory, grief and isolation as human rather than Irish themes. Stylistically, she displayed immense technical guile and tonal control. The title story in her volume In the Middle of the Fields, for example, remains a masterpiece of the short story form, dealing with isolation in images both poetic and sharp. In her fictional gaze, she remained steely and sympathetic, in possession of poise and wisdom. She remains an exemplary figure in Irish writing in the twentieth century.
Mary Lavin was more interested in a character she had invented in all its strangeness and individuality than she was in the wider society; she was more interested in families than politics; she was more interested in the drama around the solitary figure than the drama around Irish history, or large questions of identity. It is the clarity of these interests and her refusal as an artist to be diverted from them that make her work seem now undated, make her stories have the still and haunting presence of a painting by Morandi or William Scott. Her stories chart
the aura around small hidden dramas and provincial lives. She, from her own reading of Russian and French literature, knew that such limits had created a great tradition, the stories of Tolstoy or Turgenev, for example, or the best work of Flaubert.
In Mary Lavin’s stories much is dispensed with. The stories are set in Ireland, but it is an Ireland normalised, as calm background, rather than an alarming Ireland. She had read carefully enough in Jane Austen to know that nations change, but other things don’t, and it is the job of the artists to care more about the other things. Thus instead of reading these stories of loss and trauma as metaphors for something that lived outside her stories, Lavin’s stories are best read as having taken all that in, the history of Irish loss, the idea of a public trauma in Ireland, and using it as a metaphor for something which she thought might endure – how strange loss is when it becomes personal, how sharp and unpredictable, and how interesting and wayward it is when reduced in this way, and how open and large it can become, once trusted, as she in her art learned to trust it.
She thus can shine a more intense light on character, on consciousness, on motive in all its waywardness and ambiguity, on solitude, on need, on voice. Her characters appear at a time after love and where Catholicism, like Ireland, is in the background. She removes the props by which we might read her characters easily; she refuses to allow us to come to know them by a simple set of signals or tensions. They live in a twilight time not of national life but of their own life; their desires are numerous and require a great deal of detail to describe.
When I came to Dublin as a student in 1972, Mary Lavin was a familiar presence in the city. I often watched her as she moved with a sort of stateliness in the National Library, or as she sat in a small café known as the Country Shop, or as she drank coffee in Bewley’s in Grafton Street. She was usually alone. She wore black. Her hair was parted in the middle and pulled untidily into a bun at the back. Her gaze was kind and sad and oddly distracted, but it had a funny strength to it as well.
She came a number of times to read in UCD when I was a student there. She had a way of engaging anyone who spoke to her, but there was also something grand and serious about her. There was a light in her dark eyes, a warm way of focusing and concentrating as she spoke.
I remember once after one of those readings asking her what she read, and she told me that she read literary criticism because it kept her mind engaged. In 1981, when her Selected Stories came out from Penguin, I went to her house in County Meath and interviewed her. The house was modern and beautiful, built on a bend in the River Boyne. (The landscape in all its beauty is captured in the opening of ‘The Cuckoo-spit’.) The long living room was, I remember, on two levels and the walls were filled with paintings. Her talk was rambling and fascinating. She had a way of starting something and then letting it lead her elsewhere, but part of her mind never left the point to which she would eventually return. ‘What was I saying,’ she would say. But she would know what she was saying.
She told me that she often wrote a story in bed and then worked on many, many drafts. And, when I asked her how would she decide to write one story if she had several in her mind, she told me that she had a contract with The New Yorker, but they only paid for the stories they used, and thus each time she began a new story, she chose to write the one they were least likely to take. And sometimes, she said, she was right and sometimes she was wrong. But she would not have written merely to please them.
In the six stories that make up the volume In the Middle of the Fields, death is both shadow and substance. It lingers in the spaces between the words and informs how the characters feel. The title story is one of the best stories ever written about grief and its aftermath, about controlled grief. In the first sentence Lavin establishes that her protagonist, Vera, is alone in an isolated rural place. And then the next sentence reads: ‘And yet she was less lonely for him here in Meath than elsewhere.’
The loss is complex, or it comes in a complex guise. People think that Vera wants to talk about her dead husband, or be reminded of what she has lost. ‘They thought she hugged tight every memory she had of him. What did they know about memory?’ She hopes for a time when she had ‘forgotten him for a minute.’ It is clear that the grief does not have to be named as ‘grief’, or brought out for inspection. All she knows is that how she feels is not stable, it cannot be trusted. It is wayward.
The newly widowed woman has to remake the rules for herself, including the most ordinary rules of behaviour.
The tone in the opening of ‘In the Middle of the Fields’ enacts a worried, almost a frenzied solitude. There is an undertone of fear in the first sentences: ‘Like a rock in the sea, she was islanded by fields, the heavy grass washing about the house, and the cattle wading in it as in water. Even their gentle stirrings were a loss when they moved away at evening to the shelter of the woods. A rainy day might strike a wet flash from a hay barn on the far side of the river – not even a habitation.’
‘Not even a habitation’, except the habitation of loss, and a loss that can barely be named in the next sentence: ‘And yet she was less lonely for him here in Meath than elsewhere.’ His name is not given immediately, or how he died. It is clear that the grief is embedded in Vera, as it is in the cadences of this opening paragraph. It does not have to be brought out for inspection. It is like water in the sea in the first sentence, or the grass ‘washing about the house’ in the second, or ‘the gentle stirrings’ in the third. It is not stable.
Therefore the ways now it will have to be dramatised and explored will require not only tact but irony. The feeling here is not only deep, it is also protean and cannot be easily isolated. It will be enough to offer it to the reader in glancing moments; that will be more powerful than confronting it or trying to exorcise it. Thus the death described in the story will not be the death that is at the story’s centre. This will be the death of Crossan’s wife Bridie Logan, and it will be given in enough detail so that as we watch the protagonist of the story being distracted by it, we too become distracted by it and become aware of it as distraction all at the same time.
Something has to happen. It may be enough that Crossan comes to do some work that Vera’s husband would have arranged. And watching him, and making sure the work is done, that might also be enough.
And it almost becomes enough. Crossan disturbs Vera at night. They talk. There is tension lurking behind the talk, but no obvious drama. Just a sense that this is the way conversations with men of her own age will be for her in the future – it will be about work and will be almost impersonal. Maybe the story will end soon when she closes the door and turns off the light and goes back up the stairs.
‘Are you ever lonely here at night?’ he asks suddenly. Vera deals with the question coldly and efficiently. But a page and a half later it comes again. This time there is a variation. It is: ‘Tell me,’ he whispered, his words falling over each other, ‘are you never lonely – at all?’
‘What did you say?’ she said in a clear voice, because the thickness of his voice sickened her. She had hardly heard what he said. Her one thought was to get past him.’
The story now moves in a space that is almost comic, almost frightening, utterly uncertain. This next moment will have the power of parody, it will parody what Vera has lost; it will mock the uncertainty of her solitude. It will sharpen the pain.
This is the arrow in flight. (Lavin called the short story form ‘an arrow in flight’.) But then Lavin turns the arrow as it moves, and it is Crossan who appears pathetic, almost touching, and Vera, instead of being humiliated, gains a sort of strength from watching him. It would have been so easy to have her break down, or call for help. Lavin writes: ‘There was something actually pitiful in the way he shambled into the light, not raising his eyes. And she was so surprisingly touched by him that before he had time to utter a word she put out her hand. ‘Don’t feel too bad,’ she said. ‘I don’t mind.�
� Even then, as the story has twisted, as Mary Lavin has concentrated fiercely on the realm of the personal to make each response by her two protagonists count for something. The arrow has hit home.
In these stories, emotions dart, fresh longings emerge; what the characters often do is the very opposite of what they intend to do. The wavering shadow of loss affects their every action, as in ‘The Cuckoo-spit’, another story in which the main character is Vera and a widow.
In ‘The Lucky Pair’, we see a younger Vera, who has lost her mother, beginning a relationship with a young man who has also been brushed by loss. Vera here is filled with uncertainty, unease. In ‘Heart of Gold’, the death of Mona also unmoors Sam who says that death ‘leaves the living half dead, too.’ In ‘One Summer’, we see Vera living alone with her father, not realizing until the end of the story how much he has been haunted and unmoored by the death of her mother.
In ‘The Mock Auction’, Mary Lavin moves into the territory of Maria Edgeworth and Somerville and Ross or even the Irish fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. If there is a house, it will be in a state of decay. If there is a family, they will not pass things on easily or at all to the next generation. At the centre, there is the fierce isolation of both Miss Lomas and Christy, both of them aspects of Frank O’Connor’s ‘outlawed figures’. There is a lack of a cohesive community that allows many conflicting emotions to present themselves. Moments of pure comedy vie with a sense of solitariness and desolation. This is Lavin paying homage to an Irish tradition.
In the other five stories, however, she stands apart from the Irish tradition, or she attempts to remake it, or refine it. Unlike other Irish writers, she allows much to be stable, including the holding of land and the belonging to a class. (In this, she has much in common with Kate O’Brien.) Against this stable background, she allows grief and the living in an aftermath to come to the very centre of her characters’ lives. She works by implication, with tact and care. She uses colour sparingly and is more content to suggest that very little is happening, that the story depends on just a small moment, or a set of small moments. She lets her characters have more than one characteristic; their feelings are handled with accuracy and complexity. Thus the calm tone of modesty that was Mary Lavin’s hallmark allows for a deep ambition that can result in a kind of grandeur.