Collected Short Stories, page 28
Rita lifted Kevin’s stick, marched over to the pony and mounted him smartly. She tapped him with the stick and he suddenly took fright and galloped down the sloping field. She was bounced about without grace or rhythm. She tried not to scream, and as she was joggled off she held on to the reins and was dragged along the ground.
She heard a volley of cheers from the road and she scrambled to her feet and lashed out at the pony with her stick. And suddenly the pony rose up stiffly on its hind legs, grimaced horribly, the silver bit in its mouth and grass between its teeth.
‘Rita! Rita!’ Eileen yelled as she and Kevin ran down to her. Eileen snatched the stick and broke it in two, the pony still pirouetting, and breathing with a fearful choking sound.
‘Now you see how you get him to do his tricks! You see it now!’ Eileen said in a broken voice. ‘It’s horrible, horrible,’ she cried, waiting for the pony to cease its painful caperings.
‘There, Dandy! That’ll do! Down, please, down!’ she said soothingly, and at that moment she saw the fear of punishment in its dark eyes, saw the cruelty that produced circus joys.
At last, exhausted, the pony placed its forefeet on the ground. Its sides heaved rapidly and little patches like snow gathered at the corners of its mouth. It stood still, subdued, motionless with expectant fear.
Rita was crying and rubbing her knee, and Joan was helping her to pick the pieces of crushed grass from her frock.
Kevin stared dumbly, now at the pony, and now at the broken stick lying at Eileen’s feet. He was thinking of something, something that puzzled him. But what it was he did not know.
Afterword
Michael McLaverty was one of the quiet masters of Irish letters. He wrote eight novels between 1939 and 1965, including the critically acclaimed Call My Brother Back (1939) and Lost Fields (1942). Despite his undoubted talent as a novelist, however, McLaverty’s essential gift was for the short story. His reputation as a master of the form was secured in the 1930s and 40s by the publication of two short story collections, The White Mare (1943) and The Game Cock (1947). These two collections contained classics such as ‘Pigeons’, ‘Look at the Boats’ and ‘The Wild Duck’s Nest’ and, along with the novels, established McLaverty as an important and influential writer.
Born in 1904, McLaverty attended, like Brian Moore after him, St Malachy’s College in Belfast. He took his BSc and MSc at Queen’s University Belfast before training as a teacher at St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill, in London. As a young man, he began to write, inspired by the memory of childhood holidays on Rathlin Island, off the Antrim Coast in the far north of Ireland. Rathlin made an indelible impression on him, forming the background to many of his early stories of children and the dispossessed. He remembered and celebrated, too, the town of Toome in County Antrim, near the home of his grandparents; Belfast where he brought up his own family; and County Down, where he spent holidays, wrote many of his most famous stories, and chose to be buried.
Much of McLaverty’s best work was produced while he had full-time teaching responsibilities; he disciplined himself to write at the end of each day. Taking early retirement in September 1964, he believed he would be able to give more time and energy to his creative work. Unfortunately, however, he faced the artist’s deepest fear: a blank page, on which he could make no mark. Roy McFadden’s poignant picture of his friend, in his poem ‘D-Day’, captures the moment:
He groomed his desk, dusted with deference
The touchy typewriter;
Discharged and fuelled fountain pen,
And tapped the paper square:
Adjusted to celestial audience.
But it was not compelling. Undismissed,
The centipedal street
Occluded with occurrences.
While he, irresolute,
Contended with the self’s recidivist.
The shock of this unexpected silence brought about a profound sadness, settling into depression from which, in addition to a heart condition that required the fitting of a pacemaker, McLaverty suffered periodically until his death in 1992. Moreover, his Hopkins-like scruples over the possible effect of his work on the spiritual life of his readers worried constantly at him, stifling the flow of the later novels as he sought to preserve his audience from moral taint. Although one final, critically unsuccessful novel, The Brightening Day, was published in 1965, McLaverty effectively wrote no more after his retirement.
This was not, however, the end of McLaverty’s literary career. In 1968, David Marcus, influential editor of the ‘New Irish Writing’ page in the Irish Press, asked for contributions from established Irish writers. Michael McLaverty sent him the short story, ‘Steeplejacks’, and it was published that same year. Marcus’s open admiration and sustained support for McLaverty’s work played a key role in the publication by Poolbeg Press of a new collection of short stories, The Road to the Shore, in 1976 and of Collected Short Stories in 1978. The publication of these two collections, along with Poolbeg’s reprinting of his eight novels, brought about an unexpected Indian summer for McLaverty, in which he was, to his considerable astonishment, rewarded with a new wave of literary recognition. Reviewing The Road to the Shore in the Irish Press in 1976, Sean O’Faolain described McLaverty as ‘a northern laureate’ and in the same year Marcus paid tribute to McLaverty by giving over an entire page in ‘New Irish Writing’ to ‘After Forty Years’, a poignant elegy for lost love and broken trust which echoed in tone and theme Joyce’s ‘The Dead’.
In the fleeting and precise brush-strokes of ‘After Forty Years’ and as in his other short stories, McLaverty touches the truth, delicately and unerringly, never disturbing what Blake called ‘the winged life’. A dedicated disciple of Tolstoy and Chekhov, paying homage to Maupassant and Mansfield, his work reminds us that the form best suited to the Irish psyche may be, after the lyric poem, the short story. The stories in this collection, described by Walter Allen at the time of its first publication as ‘small miracles’, are a timely reminder of the rare gift of a writer who never wished to put himself forward, preferring instead to let his writing, as he put it himself, ‘make its own way’.
Sophia Hillan
Queen’s University Belfast
JULY 2002
Editor’s Note
Interested readers may wish to study the earlier published versions of Michael McLaverty’s short stories, many of which can be found in the National Library in Dublin. Publication details are listed in the bibliography below. These earlier versions often reveal significant differences, such as the more colloquial language used in ‘Aunt Suzanne’ or the radically different ending of ‘The Wild Duck’s Nest’. The original published versions of both these stories, and of ‘The Boots’, ‘The Turf Stack’, ‘The Grey Goat’, ‘The Letter’, ‘The Trout’ and ‘Leavetaking’ may also be found in my own book, In Quiet Places: The Uncollected Stories, Letters and Critical Prose of Michael McLaverty (Poolbeg, 1989).
‘The Poteen Maker’ first appeared under the title of ‘Moonshine’, ‘The Schooner’ as ‘Becalmed’, and ‘Look at the Boats’ as ‘The Sea’.
‘The Green Field’, Irish Monthly 60 (August 1932)
‘The Turf Stack’, Irish Monthly 60 (December 1932)
‘The Boots’, Irish Monthly 61 (May 1933)
‘The Grey Goat’, Irish Monthly 61 (August 1933)
‘The Letter’, Irish Monthly 61 (December 1933)
‘The Wild Duck’s Nest’, Irish Monthly 62 (April 1934)
‘The Trout’, Irish Monthly 63 (January 1935)
‘The Return’, Catholic World (Spring 1935)
‘Evening in Winter’, Irish Monthly 63 (May 1935)
‘The Prophet’, Irish Monthly 64 (February 1936)
‘Pigeons’, New Stories, ed. E.J. O’Brien, 2, no. 8 (April–May 1936)
‘Aunt Suzanne’, Ireland Today 11, no. 3 (March 1937)
‘Leavetaking’, Ireland Today 11, no. 7 (July 1937)
‘A Game Cock’, Ireland Today 11, no. 10 (October 1937)
‘The Race’, Capuchin Annual (1937)
‘Stone’, ‘The White Mare’ and ‘The Sea’, Capuchin Annual (1939)
‘Becalmed’, Capuchin Annual (1940)
‘Moonshine’, The Bell 2, no. 4 (July 1941)
‘Vigil’, Northern Harvest: An Anthology of Ulster Writing, ed. Robert Greacen (Belfast, 1944)
‘The Road to the Shore’, Selected Writing, ed. Reginald Moore, 5 (London, 1944)
‘The Mother’, Irish Harvest: A Collection of Stories, Essays and Poems, ed. Robert Greacen (Dublin, 1946)
‘Six Weeks On and Two Ashore’, Irish Writing 4 (April 1948)
‘A Half-Crown’, The Bell 17, no. 5 (August 1951)
‘Uprooted’, Dublin Magazine 31, no. 3 (July–September 1956)
‘The Circus Pony’, Dublin Magazine 31, no. 4 (October–December 1957)
‘Mother and Daughter’, Kilkenny Magazine (Spring 1965)
‘Steeplejacks’, Irish Press, 10 August 1968, ‘New Irish Writing’ section.
‘The Priest’s Housekeeper’, Aquarius (1972)
‘After Forty Years’, Irish Press, 13 March 1976, ‘New Irish Writing’ section.
Michael McLaverty, Collected Short Stories
