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