Analysis: the influential magazine offered incentives to mid-20th century Irish writers that were not available at home
By Yen-Chi Wu, KU Leuven
In a 1960 letter to Michael McLaverty, John McGahern thanked the older writer for sending him a copy of The New Yorker, which contained a story by their fellow Irish man, Benedict Kiely. Seconding McLaverty's opinion, the young Leitrim writer suggested that Kiely’s story The Wild Boy was poorly written; it read like "something strung hurriedly together for that fat fee the New Yorker pays." Focusing on the big cheque that Kiely supposedly received, McGahern implied that artistic integrity is often compromised by the lure of financial reward.
But within three years, McGahern would publish his first New Yorker story. He would continue to write for the magazine’s "fat fee" and contributed seven stories in total over two decades. He was not alone in his ambivalence to The New Yorker: the American magazine offered incentives to Irish writers in the mid-20th century that the young state could ill provide.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena, Prof Frank Shovlin talks about his book The Letters of John McGahern
Founded in 1925, The New Yorker started as a humorous magazine with a focus on New York society and cultured circles. It was during and after the Second World War when the metropolitan weekly increasingly looked outward, seeking journalists and writers from Europe and beyond to expand its coverage and contents. As its circulation grew in the mid-century, the magazine was able to offer lucrative deals to their international contributors.
In Ireland, the publishing environment became stringent under the Censorship and Publications Act 1929. In certain literary circles, being censored could be worn as a badge of honor, suggesting a writerly defiance against the unholy marriage of Church and State. But being banned at home also meant real financial difficulties. Many Irish writers, like their fellow countrymen, emigrated during the lean years; many more sought publication opportunities abroad to sustain full-time writing at home. The commercial magazines across the Atlantic, including The New Yorker, thus became hugely attractive.
McGahern and Edna O'Brien—both famously banned in Ireland—became fellow contributors to The New Yorker. Around the same time, Maeve Brennan worked as a staff writer for the magazine. Frank O'Connor, Mary Lavin and Brian Friel garnered the coveted "first-reading agreement"—a generous deal that the magazine only offered to their favorite authors. Other notable Irish contributors included Walter Macken and Julia O'Faolain.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Radio 1's History Show in 2017, Anne Enright reflects on the work of Maeve Brennan on the occasion of her 100th birthday
Together, these Irish writers published over one hundred short stories in The New Yorker in the mid-century, sharing space with such renowned American peers as J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth and John Updike. In fact, it was Salinger who suggested Lavin write for The New Yorker, O’Brien formed a close friendship with Roth and O’Connor found an important literary ally in his New Yorker editor, William Maxwell.
In addition to financial reward and literary friendships, publishing in The New Yorker catapulted some of the Irish writers’ careers internationally. O’Connor was so feted that his writing courses became highly sought-after events. The Cork writer’s popularity in the United States, however, did not always translate well to Irish readers and critics. His wit and verbal virtuosity, for instance, struck some of his compatriots as perpetuating a stereotypical Irish humor. Many of his fellow Irish contributors to The New Yorker were faced with similar accusations that they heightened a sense of Irishness for the American readership.
A recent quantitative study offers a different perspective to consider the representations of Ireland in the magazine. The article analyzes the settings of the New Yorker short stories between 1945 and 2019. Unsurprisingly, America comes out on top as the most often mentioned country. But in terms of local diversity—where specific cities and localities are used—Ireland ranks in the top five. According to the statistics, "the country is mentioned using 77 unique locations." One possible explanation for Ireland's comparatively diverse local representations may be simply due to the high number of Irish contributors to The New Yorker.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From RTÉ Archives, David Hanly interviews Edna O'Brien for the Writer In Profile series in 1992
Macken’s Galway, O’Connor’s Cork, Brennan’s Dublin, Lavin’s Meath, McGahern’s inland Ireland, and Friel’s northern counties mapped Ireland in a way that it became more than an abstract foreign place for New Yorker readers. In contrast to the criticism that Irish writers capitalized on Irish stereotypes to sell their stories, their strong presence in The New Yorker enriched American readers’ geographic imagination of the emerald isle.
In fact, many Irish writers ventured beyond the island in their stories: Elizabeth Bowen's wartime story Everything's Frightfully Interesting (1941) is set in a London restaurant during the blitz. O’Faolain’s Love in the Marble Foot (1957) and Lavin’s Trastevere (1971) both take place in Italy. Half of Brennan’s stories center around Herbert’s Retreat, a fictional wealthy community in New York. While entirely set in Ireland, McGahern's Sierra Leone (1977) has the title place loom large, as the female lead considers moving to the West African country to join her lover who is working there. These settings outside Ireland reveal the island’s close ties with Europe, America, and the wider world.
For fame or glory, or simply for the "fat fee," Irish writers carved out a significant place in The New Yorker in the mid-twentieth century. In turn, they contributed to a representation of Ireland that is rich with local diversity and international connections. This strong Irish presence in the popular American magazine also reminds us of Ireland’s remarkable place in the global cultural industry from the mid-twentieth century onward.
Yen-Chi Wu is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at KU Leuven in Belgium. He is a former postdoctoral researcher at Taiwan's Academia Sinica and an Irish Research Council awardee at UCC.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
