| PEOPLE AT UCD |
DARING to LOOK The work of writer Mary Lavin, that precise, thoughtful observer of Irish life, is being reassessed and brought to a wider audience. A centenary celebration of her work in New York was an occasion to explain just why Lavin deserves our attention. Belinda McKeon reports.
S
HE FAMOUSLY DESCRIBED the short story as “an arrow in flight”, and at an event in New York to mark her centenary year, the spirit of the Irish writer Mary Lavin (BA 1933, HDipEd 1934, MA 1936, DLitt 1968) seemed present in just such terms: the rooms of NYU Glucksman Ireland House, where the celebration was held, thrilled to the quickness, the precision and the powerful impact of Lavin’s work. “The narrative goes on,” said James Ryan, lecturer in creative writing at UCD, who had organised the day-long symposium with his late wife, Caroline Walsh, Lavin’s youngest daughter and the much-loved literary editor of The Irish Times. Walsh died tragically last December following a short illness, and Ryan spoke movingly of how “delighted” she would have been to hear her mother’s work discussed in so many different and illuminating lights, not just by the three speakers on the day, but by a large audience which included many figures from the world of literature and Irish studies, including Professors Joe Lee
(NYU), Maureen Murphy (Hofstra), Lucy MacDiarmid (Montclair), Kate Costello-Sullivan (LeMoyne) and Mary Burke of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where Lavin was writer-in-residence in the 1960s. Also present were figures who had known Lavin personally, including the historian Margaret Mac Curtain and the writer Cormac O’Malley, who presented several letters and press clippings for display on the day. Also present was Lavin’s youngest granddaughter, Alice Ryan, who worked with her father to realise the event. “Mary Lavin’s name should be on the lips of every lover of great English prose,” said Mary Gordon, McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard University, as she began her talk, “The Many Voices of Mary Lavin”. That Lavin’s work was not more widely known and appreciated was, Gordon argued, “a problem of gender and genre”; to be a short-story writer and a woman both pushed Lavin into a marginal realm, and Gordon was candid about the fact that the passage of time had done little to resolve this situation. This was true in spite of the fact that she
26 | UCD CONNECTIONS ALUMNI MAGAZINE
published regularly with The New Yorker and won recognition including the James Tait Black and Katherine Mansfield prizes and a Guggenheim Fellowship. These laurels notwithstanding, Lavin’s work was not, Gordon suggested, sufficiently fashionable to truly make it past the gatekeepers of late 20th-century literary criticism. “Like Eudora Welty,” Gordon said, “Lavin is a writer of great stylistic and formal range and daring. But her vision is marked by tenderness and generosity. And it is a prejudice of much modernist and post-modernist critical thinking that formal and linguistic rigour cannot be combined with a poignancy or plangency of voice, with a moral vision, with a taste for elegy.” We’d been told by Yeats, Gordon noted, to “cast a cold eye” – but did we have to cast it at all times? Mary Lavin’s work, she said, insisted that we question such limited thinking. In a rich and evocative paper, Gordon illustrated that it was Lavin’s