But What Will You Live On?

The Irish American writer Mary Lavin is one of the twentieth-century masters of the short story. J. D. Salinger, Eudora Welty, and Elizabeth Bowen were all Lavin aficionados. Frank O’Connor wrote in his influential 1962 study of the short story, The Lonely Voice, that Lavin “fascinates me more than any other of the Irish writers of my generation.” Anthony Burgess told The Irish Press in 1977 that he didn’t admire any novelists—“even the great ones”—but added, “I envy the skill of Mary Lavin, and have done so for years.”

Lavin wrote for The New Yorker during its heyday. She was a regular alongside John Updike, John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, Philip Roth, and V. S. Pritchett, as well as less recognizable names like Robert Henderson and Elizabeth Spencer (a cousin of the late Senator John McCain). Ahead of the thirtieth anniversary of Lavin’s death next year, Gráinne Hurley has written a new book on the writer’s relationship with The New Yorker and the letters she exchanged with her editor, Rachel MacKenzie. Hurley’s book reminds us of how distinctive Lavin’s work and career were.

Lavin is sometimes remembered (if at all) as something of a feminist writer. In an obituary for Lavin in The Irish Times, Eileen Battersby writes that Lavin was “one of modern Irish fiction’s most subversive voices” and that her work “explored the often brutal tensions, disappointments and frustrations dictating the relationships existing within so called ‘normal families.’” Battersby may have been thinking of any number of Lavin’s stories in which a single woman (often widowed) struggles financially or relationally to make her way in rural Ireland. Subversive they are, but not in the way Battersby means.

Consider “Lilacs,” one of Lavin’s earliest stories. Ros (short for Rose) and her husband, Phelim, run a manure business on a small farm outside town. A large dunghill has sat outside the kitchen window all of Ros’s married life. Ros and her daughters hate it; the “faint odour of stale manure” hangs permanently in the air. One morning Ros finally speaks to Phelim about moving it. Her elder daughter, Kate, berates her for being too “soft”:

“You’ll have to be harder on him. You’ll have to keep at him night and day. That is to say if you care anything at all about me and Stacy.”

“Ah Kate. Can’t you see there’s no use? Can’t you see he’s set in his ways?”

“All I can see is the way we’re being disgraced,” Kate said angrily.

Phelim dies shortly afterward, and Ros immediately regrets confronting him about the dunghill: “‘Oh Stacy, Stacy,’ Ros cried, throwing herself into her younger daughter’s arms, ‘Why did I cross him over that old dunghill?’”

When the local farmers arrive on the Wednesday after Phelim’s funeral to drop off their loads, Ros is outside giving directions and shoveling piles of brown muck. Kate is shocked. Ros tells her daughters that she was a “bad old woman” to have argued with her husband “over a heap of dung”: “I had no right agreeing with anyone but your father. It was to him I gave my word. It was him I had a right to stand behind. He always said there was no shame in making money anyway it could be made, as long as it was made honestly.” And so Ros keeps the business going.

You might expect Lavin to side with Kate against Ros at this point by undermining Ros’s old-fashioned fidelity to her husband, especially a husband who was “a hard man . . . a man who’d never let himself be thwarted.” But that is not what happens. Lavin in no way presents Ros’s actions or statements as misguided or weak. Ros, the reader gathers, is clearly right to lament putting her daughters, however briefly, above her husband.

When Ros dies suddenly, Kate also decides to keep the business going—to get “a decent dowry out of it”—and eventually marries a local farmer. It is the quieter, more fragile Stacy who plans to get rid of the manure pile for good and plant lilacs in its place, something Ros and her daughters had long discussed. Yet, the family solicitor asks the key question: “But what will you live on, Miss Stacy?”

What is subversive about “Lilacs,” like many of Lavin’s stories, is the way it reminds us that there is no simple choice in life between lilacs and manure, between living according to certain ideals and more practical concerns. “Lilacs” is about making more difficult choices.

Phelim was indeed a stubborn man, but Ros notes that she, too, can be stubborn, which is surprising since she is otherwise so meek. As an old man, Phelim is preoccupied with practical concerns (he is remembered at his funeral as “a heavy man with a red face . . . seldom seen out of his big rubber boots caked with muck”). But Ros chooses to remember a different Phelim—“the Phelim whose hair had not yet grown coarse but was soft and smooth as silk, like it was the time he led her in off the road and up a little lane near the chapel one Sunday when he was walking her home from Mass. That was the time when he used to call her by the old name.” She remembers that his initial motivation for starting a dunghill was so that he could make enough money to marry her. In one of the story’s most touching passages, Ros recalls Phelim telling her that

“I’d buy that place we often looked at, you and me when we were out walking, that place on the outskirts of the town, with a big yard and two big sheds that only need a bit of fixing. . . . I could fix up the cottage, too, and make a nice job of it. That’s another thing I wanted to ask you, Rose. How would you like to live in that cottage, after I’d done it up of course, live in it with me?” he added when he saw he’d startled her.

The way he describes dung in this scene—“I used to love looking down at the gold rings of dung dried out by the sun, as they flashed past underneath the horses’ hooves”—almost makes Ros laugh, but it was “like poetry,” she adds. “He wasn’t like anybody else in the world she’d ever known.”

“Lilacs” is, among other things, a story about how grace keeps marriages together—which Ros, whose name almost certainly alludes to Dante’s rose in Paradiso, extends in Marian fashion towards her husband. It reminds us that it is better to forget others’ faults than to harbor grievances; that we all have a cross to bear, however small or absurd; and that bearing it can be a beautiful thing.

In another story, “Sarah,” Lavin considers a young woman who has three sons out of wedlock with three different men. She lives with her two brothers, never misses Mass, and observes “abstinence on all days abstinence was required.” Because of this, she is cautiously accepted by the townspeople, “there being greater understanding in their hearts for sins against God than for sins against his Holy Church.” But when she becomes pregnant again after apparently sleeping with a married man, her older brother drags her out of the house by her hair and throws her into the cold rain. “No one is going to say I put up with that kind of thing,” he says. “I didn’t mind the other times when it was probably old Molloy or his like that would have been prepared to pay for his mistakes if the need arose, but I wasn’t going to stand for a thing like this.” Sarah dies in a ditch, “where she and her likes belong,” the man’s wife remarks bitterly. Sarah’s dead child is found lying beside her.

What’s interesting about this story is that Sarah hardly speaks—she has just two lines—and while she is guilty of adultery (Lavin warned her own daughters about the moral dangers of premarital sex), she dies because she has sinned against the town’s sense of propriety. Her brother’s action is brutal, out of proportion with her sin. In this sense, Sarah is a kind of scapegoat.

Still, she possesses an integrity the other townspeople lack. She faithfully bears all of her children to term, even the final one, rather than secretly abort them—something many young women would do at the time because of the stigma of having a child out of wedlock. When she is pregnant with her last child, she continues to attend Mass: “She carried the child deep in her body and she boldly faced an abashed congregation at Mass on Sundays, walking down the centre aisle and taking her usual place under the fourth station of the cross”—where Jesus meets His Mother. The wife of the man with whom Sarah supposedly had sex (it is never definitively confirmed), who is also pregnant, stays home in bed because “she was self-conscious about her condition.”

Lavin is no polemicist. She is a realist, interested in capturing the joys and suffering of life in rural Ireland. She is never sentimental. Battersby is right that her work offers a candid depiction of life’s “disappointments and frustrations.” But Lavin has great affection for her characters and obvious sympathy for human frailty. She refuses to portray women as victims (even when they have been wronged), adultery as freeing (see “In the Middle of the Fields”), pregnancy as an inconvenience (see “The Lost Child”), or religious organizations as inescapably corrupt (see “Brother Boniface”) at a time when many writers increasingly made one or all of these things into a schtick.

Like her characters, Lavin sometimes struggled to make ends meet. When her first husband died after a short illness in 1954, she almost stopped writing for good because, she later said, she “didn’t think life worth living.” An invitation from The New Yorker to submit new work helped her move beyond her grief. Lavin eventually secured the highly coveted first-reading agreement, which came with a substantial annual retainer, and the money was a lifeline for the single mother of three daughters. A devoted parent, Lavin would only write when her daughters were at school. She once wrote thirty thousand words in ten days—in longhand, since she never learned to type.

Hurley notes that The New Yorker had only recently started publishing stories not set in New York when Lavin began publishing with the magazine. (At the time, it still required stories to be set in the season in which they were published. Stories about writing or writers were rejected outright, as was any story that had too much bodily fluid.) Lavin was one of the magazine’s few Irish contributors.

She was an accommodating writer, regularly reworking stories to suit The New Yorker’s editors, knowing that she could republish them later in any form she wished. She had a warm working relationship with MacKenzie, even if some New Yorker writers found the latter too motherly. (Muriel Spark complained that MacKenzie was “a clinger and control freak” and asked to work with someone else.) Lavin and MacKenzie shared a love of gardening and cars: Lavin would regularly take her daughters to continental Europe in “ramshackle” sports cars, and MacKenzie was known in New York for her pink Cadillac.

They also seemed to share a broadly Christian ethic, though this isn’t highlighted in Hurley’s book. Lavin was a devoted Catholic, though not without her quibbles with the Church. She married the Jesuit priest Michael Scott in 1969 after he received a papal dispensation to laicize. “What a vulgarity,” Lavin wrote MacKenzie in 1964, “the expression is—‘the pill’ don’t you think?” MacKenzie’s father, to whom she was close, was a Presbyterian minister.

Hurley’s book can sometimes read like a ledger of Lavin’s income and expenses, but it also provides an intriguing glimpse into this under-appreciated Irish American writer’s working and home life during an important period of her career. It also reminds us that great magazines nurture great writers—and that today we are in desperate need of both.