In the introduction to her Selected Stories, Mary Lavin wrote in 1981 of the process she used to choose the stories to be included. One from each of her eleven short story collections, she explains.
Hoping that “readers would not be presented with a bookful of stories with which they might already be too familiar from their inclusion in innumerable anthologies”, she plucked the title story from each. As such, the only story which I had read before was “In the Middle of the Fields”.
That was for Irish Short Story Week in 2012, and this year I had selected another author, but then came across the article in Brick 90 by Colm Toíbín about Mary Lavin.
In the article, Colm Toíbín writes of discovering a passage in her short story “Happiness” which gave voice to an aspect of his personal experience which he has never found on the page since. Later, he interviewed Mary Lavin, in 1981, after her Selected Stories was published, and found that she “spoke like the mother in the story ‘Happiness'”.
His second reference to this story took me directly to the bookshelf for this volume. I was already hooked on the idea, long before he calls it “one of the best short stories written by an Irish writer in the twentieth century”.
“The story sets out to lull the reader into trusting that the voice speaks of matters that are odd and gentle, almost eccentric,” Colm Toíbín states.
Indeed, “Happiness” begins with the mother: “Mother had a lot to say. This does not mean she was always talking but that we children felt the wells she drew upon were deep, deep, deep.”
One might think that in short fiction, there is always as much not said as said, but that is not the case. (I think of stories by Lorrie Moore, Aimee Bender, Elizabeth Crane and Amy Bloom.) But with the opening to “Happiness”, it is immediately evident that the author might prize not talking — and say a lot with it — as much as the mother in this story.
It is true that one might debate the ingredients of a successful short story just as the mother debates the ingredients of happiness, with opinions varying as dramatically as the mother’s and Father Hugh’s on happiness. He believes, for instance, that sorrow is a necessary ingredient in happiness, whereas she acknowledges that there might be a “freakish truth” in that for some but not for her.
Father Hugh plays a central role in this story, which makes sense, for he plays a central role in the life of this family, following the loss of its true father. Still, it’s unexpected, the way that the mother and her girls behave around the priest. “As for Mother — she thought nothing of running out of the bathroom in her slip, brushing her teeth or combing her hair, if she wanted to tell him something she might otherwise forget.”
He offers a kind of support that the girls’ mother does not receive from elsewhere, at least not following the death of her husband, whether or not she had received it from him when he was living. Father Hugh is there to offer another voice, an adult voice, whereas the narrator is recalling events that unfolded when she was a child.
“As for Father Hugh, he had given our grandmother up early in the game. ‘God Almighty couldn’t make that woman happy,’ he said one day, seeing Mother’s face, drawn and pale with fatigue, preparing for the nightly run over to her own mother’s flat that would exhaust her utterly.”
The exhaustion born of the death of a spouse, the continued caretaking responsibilities for three daughters and an aging parent: “Happiness” is the stuff of everyday.
“And then the voice takes on an undertow that is unforgettable in its precision,” Colm Toíbín writes. “It moves from the domestic to a set of images that are deeply disturbing and utterly original in their contours and their rhythms and the fresh truth they have to tell about the nature of loss and grief and memory.”
Readers shift from the exchanges between the girls and their grandmother (which are humourous on the page, but which would be infuriating at worst, tiresome at best, in reality) to darker memories that the girls harbour.
“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, if handled with all due attention and care, as Mary Lavin did when she worked.”
This was a whimsical read, inspired by my Brick browsing, but I followed the urge because I also had Mel’s Irish Short Story Month in mind; both the magazine and the event reminded me that I have two of Mary Lavin’s novels on my shelf, as well as many of her short stories to enjoy.
Have you read her stories? Have you chosen something else for Irish Short Story Month instead?
Really pleased to have found this. I’ve yet to read ‘Happiness’ but I recognise what Colm Toíbín says about the voice taking on “an undertow that is unforgettable in its precision.” I’ve strained to express as much about Mary Lavin’s writing in a new blog post –
http://realtimeshortstories.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/cafe-shorts-mary-lavins-in-a-cafe/
– and I hope to direct readers here to discover more about a writer who, in the UK at least, is too little known.
Thanks so much for your participation. It means a lot to me. By the way I did interviews with over 60 Irish authors. One question I asked every one who were the contemporary short story writers that they most admired, Alice Munro was mentioned way more than any one else.
My pleasure, Mel. My year got off to a strained start, so I am quite behind with my reading in general and I only managed a single Irish story, but I hope to read more extensively for this event next year. Glad to hear that Alice Munro’s stories cross the pond so readily: thanks for passing that along!
Wonderful. I have one of her novels on the shelf but have never read anything at all by her. I would like to search out her short stories, just to get a taste of “Happiness”. Sounds irresistible.
I’m really looking forward to re-reading Alice Munro’s “Too Much Happiness” with this story in mind. Wouldn’t such tales make a terrific anthology? I hope you enjoy her work when you find some.
What a lovely tribute to Mary Lavin: I see you posted on the date of her death in 1996. Happiness is one of my favourite stories. I also read her novel, The House in Clewe Street. Here is part of a passage I liked:
“Birth and death. In the common pageant of human history, how monotonously these mummers appear. And when a man’s life is over how few are the scattered incidents that will remain in the memories of those that survive him. They are not much more detailed than the brief records that would inevitably remain in the archives of town hall and church. Little remains of what the heart experienced in the indistinguishable moments. The story of each day is lost in the story of the parish. The story of the parish is lost in the national story, and even that great story is lost itself, in the immensity of the great story of the universe, until, like the leaf on the stem, the stem on the bough, and the bough on the tree, all, all, leaf, stem, bough, and tree, are lost at last in the immensity of the forest in which each yet played its indispensable part.” After reading this passage, I can never decide whether to continue working on a family history or not!
Thanks for sharing the quote, Sandra. It does fit perfectly with this story, for reasons that might not be clear from my post, but as you’ve read it, you would have been quick to spot the alignment. I have her two novels here and was sorely tempted by them, even though the event is actually for short stories. I suppose one could argue that Alice Munro too, though also a short story writer and not a novelist, has published two novels too (at least some critics consider Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are? / The Beggar Maid novels, not collections of linked stories), but I always think of her and Lavin as short story writers all the same!
Oh wow, this story sounds excellent, and so realistic! I love that there are so many differences between the characters, and that the priest is sort of a stand-in father for the family. I need to look for this. It sounds excellent!!
I’ve only peeked inside, but this collection does seem like it would be a good place to start, as gathering up all eleven of the originals might take a good while.