I have long had a special fondness
for Ireland. My wife's mother was born
in Belfast and met a young Yankee stationed there during WWII and said yes when
he asked her to marry him and come live in California. My wife, although born
in Los Angeles, is thus an Irish citizen and has a soft Irish accent that,
among many other beauteous features of mood and mien made me fall in love with
her over thirty-five years ago.
In 1996 and 97, I was fortunate
enough to get a senior Fellowship at University College, Dublin, teaching the short
story, which has always been a special talent for the Irish. I was also asked
to teach a class on the American short story at Trinity. We lived near Blackrock just to the south of
Dublin, close to University College, Dublin, to which I could walk. Once a
week, I took the Dublin Area Rapid Transit into the city to Trinity to teach at
that iconic campus.
I loved that year in Dublin—loved the
city, loved the people, loved the Guiness. I enjoyed going to the historic Abbey Theatre
to see Irish plays. And I loved taking the bus with my wife and daughter to Belfast to visit
relatives. I love both the North and the South and hope the current peaceful
co-existence between them continues.
After my retirement, I arranged to
teach a three-week summer class in Dublin on James Joyce. I took twenty
American students to the city, and we walked the walk of Stephen Dedalus and
Leopold Bloom, and we read all the stories in the Dubliners and we read
Ulysses. I did this twice, once with my
daughter attending, which was a joy, and once, when I contracted a terrible lung
disease that almost killed me. I remember the chilling simple comment of one of
my student evaluations: "I think he is dying." I haven't been back since, sad to say, but I
hope to return, bearing no hard feelings.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy my take on three Irish short-story
writers—one from Dublin, one from Galway, and one from Belfast.
Clare Boylan
If
you come to Clare Boylan’s stories looking for gritty realism about dirty old
Dublin or folklore spun by a traditional storyteller, then be prepared to
change your expectations about Irish fiction.
The booming Irish economy, called the Celtic Tiger by other members of the
European Union, although short-lived, changed the cultural landscape of the old
country.
Except for one
character calling a man a “shifty wee shite” or another skeptically inquiring,
“are you coddin,” Boylan’s stories bear few tale-tell cultural markers; most
could have taken place in any mid-sized western city or the suburbs thereof.
And, the only
traditional oral tale is “Concerning Virgins,” a fascinating yarn about a
terrible old man named Narcissus Fitzgerald living with two daughters, who
advertises for a virgin with whom to have a son and gets a predictably
surprising, poetically just, response.
Boylan collects
thirty-eight stories in her Collected
Stories (2002) from her previous three short story collections published
originally between 1983 and 1995, ranging from her first, “Appearances,” in
which a young girl is ominously enticed into a secluded area by a man promising
to show her a special secret (which turns out to be his prized collection of
religious medals) to the title story of her last collection “That Bad Woman,”
in which a married woman facing menopause merrily has an affair with a shocked
and reluctant lover.
Granted,
some of these stories are just clever bits of ironic reversal, for example “My
Son the Hero” in which a mother who suspects her son of murder discovers that
he was telling the truth when he said he got scratched saving a cat from a
tree, or “The Stolen Child,” in which a childless woman steals a baby, tries to
abandon it, saves it from drowning, and finally discovers that the mother was
glad to get rid of it for a while.
Don’t
look for political or economic criticism here; the closest candidate is
“Thatcher’s Britain,” a phrase which makes a character think of England as a
pleasant place with thatched houses, fields of hay, and employment for all,
only to discover that many Irish there live in derelict houses.
Don’t look for
easy satires about the Catholic Church either, except in the story
“Confession,” which deals lightly with lying to the priest about sex.
Boylan’s
best stories are those which deal perceptively with the secret life of women,
regardless of what society they live in. “A Nail on the Head” is a sad story
about a woman whose husband brings strangers home to dinner. In “A Particular Calling,” a traveling
electrolysis lady who visits various towns advertising “the usual service” is
coarsely misunderstood by five drunken farmers.
And “The Little Madonna” sensitively links a woman facing menopause with
a sixteen-year old mother.
Clare
Boylan is a sophisticated, witty writer who can spear the cocky and the
condescending with biting barbs. She
knows men well enough to make them uncomfortable, and women well enough to
bring them shocks of recognition. She
is too good a writer to remain one of Ireland’s best-kept cultural secrets.
Gerard Donovan
Ireland’s past is marked by
quixotic revolts and ignominious failures.
In 1848, during the Potato Famine, a small band of idealistic poets
known as the Young Irelanders tried to convince starving farmers to rebel
against the British. The uprising
petered out in a garden, and is still known as “the siege of Widow McCormack’s
cabbage patch.” However, since 1973, when Ireland joined the European Union, a
booming economy and a youthful population has given the country its greatest
success story.
Gerard Donovan, who grew up in
Galway, is well aware of the social and cultural effects of this success. The characters in his book Young
Irelanders (2009), far from poetic rebels, are more like John Cheever’s
prosaic American suburbanites. “Archeologists” juxtaposes the new Ireland of
shopping centers and housing tracts with the old Ireland that lies just beneath
the surface. A couple hired by a company to look for artifacts before
development discover the bones of a female child—a young Irelander—and find
their own relationship torn between old and new expectations.
Several
stories deal with couples whose marriages are threatened by changing values in
a country where people no longer fear the wrath of the village priest. In
“Morning Swimmers,” three middle-aged men go for morning swims in Galway
Bay. On this particular morning one
overhears the other two talking about an affair his wife is having. In typical Cheever fashion in “How Long
Until,” a man asks his wife how long she would wait after his death before she
slept with someone else. As the story
cranks up to a crisis, the man lamely says, “It was just a question.” Many of
the stories unearth secrets between husbands and wives. When in “Shoplifting in the USA” a man who
works for an American storeowner tells his wife that his employer is obsessed
with catching thieves, she confesses that she has been a thief all her life.
In “Another Life,” a woman discovers after her
husband’s death that he owns a home in another town, in which he has been
supporting a woman who has had his child. The most Cheever-like story, with
echoes of “The Swimmer,” is “Country of the Grand,” in which a man makes a
tortured symbolic journey though his past. “Harry Dietz” is a similar
hallucinatory story in which an Irish man living in the United States takes a
drive to Chicago in his pajamas because he has lately “run out of life,” and
the “emptiness is pouring into his head.” Although new to Ireland, the subject
of these stories will seem familiar to American readers who know the work of
Updike and Cheever.
Bernard MacLaverty
The first story in Bernard
MacLaverty’s collection Matters of Life and Death (2006) is an
emblematic introit that he says he hopes encapsulates many of the horrors of
Northern Ireland since Bloody Friday.
Metaphorically titled “On the Roundabout,” to suggest the never-ending
dizzyingly circularity of sectarian violence in the North, the story takes
place soon after the beginnings of the so-called Troubles in the early
seventies. A man driving into a traffic
circle with what he calls his Norman Rockwell family rescues a young man being
savagely beaten by two laughing assailants.
That’s all that happens, but in its restrained elegance, the story
epitomizes the deep-seated hatred that has crippled the country for years.
Three additional stories derive
either directly or indirectly from the Troubles. In “A Trusted Neighbor,” a
Protestant policeman seems like a friend to his Catholic neighbor, until, with
something of a shock at the end, we learn that he is setting him up for a
vicious attack. “The Trojan Sofa” is a comic tour-de-force told from the point
of view of an eleven-year-old boy whose Catholic father sews him up in a sofa,
which he then sells to a British Major.
Once the boy is in the house, he is to let his father in to loot it--a
robbery his father justifies by saying that the wrong done to Ireland by the
British is so great that anything done to them in retaliation is honorable.
“Learning to Dance” is a sad and
subtle sonata about two young boys who are placed in the temporary care of a
childless doctor and his wife when their father, a prominent man, is killed in
what we assume was an act of sectarian violence. As usual in a MacLaverty story, nothing much
happens, but the story is a moving elegiac evocation of loss, sadness, and
perplexity.
Like many others, MacLaverty
learned to write this kind of subtle atmospheric story from Chekhov—a mentor to
whom he pays tribute in “The Clinic,” in which a man passes the time in a
doctor’s office while anxiously waiting to hear if he has diabetes by reading a
Chekhov story entitled “The Beauties.”
The man’s experience with his fear and his experience with the story
merge in the end when love and beauty are reaffirmed as both the man in
Chekhov’s story and the man in MacLaverty’s story feel the “wind blow across
[their] soul.”
In
“Visiting Takabuti,” another Chekhovian story, a maiden aunt takes her
two nephews to see a famous female mummy in a Belfast museum. On the bus ride home, she thinks about a
traditional Irish tale in which, at the moment of death, the soul tiptoes to
the door but then turns back and kisses the body that has sheltered it all
these years. Although the story’s ending
may seem a bit too symbolically pat and predictable, MacLaverty creates the
woman so delicately that the reader cannot help but be moved.
The longest story in the
collection, “Up the Coast,” moves back and forth between the point of view of a
young woman who has gone to a remote area to paint and a young man who hunts
her down and rapes her. MacLaverty
refuses to sensationalize or politicize the act, choosing instead to focus on
the understated artistic means by which the woman transcends the violation.
Although Bernard MacLaverty is probably best known to Americans because of the
film versions of two of his novels, Cal and Lamb, he is a very
fine short-story writer in a tradition of Irish masters of the form from James
Joyce to Frank O’Connor to William Trevor.