The new anthology The Writer's Torch – Reading Stories from The Bell features eighteen short stories from the pages of Dublin's iconic literary magazine The Bell (1940 -1954), along responses by eighteen of Ireland's foremost contemporary writers.
Below, we present an extract from A Story With A Pattern by Mary Lavin which features in The Writer's Torch, followed by an excerpt written in response by novelist Kathleen Mac Mahon, grand-daughter of Mary Lavin, whose latest novel The Home Scar is out February 9th.
'Which of the stories did you like best?’ I asked.
He looked at me. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, ‘Did I say I liked them? I thought they were written with a good style, and I thought you brought the people in them to life, but I don’t think that I remember saying that I liked them.’
Now this, you will admit, was disconcerting.
‘Yes,’ said my friend. ‘Your stories have a great many good qualities, but I wouldn’t exactly say that I liked any of them.’ As he repeated this he looked at me with his head a little to one side as if he would be better able to judge my reaction to his words by holding himself that way. And then, evidently discerning that I had been somewhat taken back, he put out his hands, one to either side of me, and pressed me together as you’d press a concertina. ‘Don’t be offended,’ he said. ‘Remember that I know nothing at all about the subject. You might be right; for all I know. All I can do is give you my opinion; that is to say, tell you what I think. And what I think, if I might venture to put it bluntly, is that your stories in their present form, good as they are, will never appeal to a man. They may appeal to women. But they’ll never appeal to a man. A man would only read a page or two of your work, and then he’d throw it aside. Because,’ he paused, ‘because a man wants something with a bit of substance to it, if you know what I mean? A man wants something a bit more thick, if you understand.’
And carefully pinching off a piece of the smoke-laden air around us, he held it between his forefinger and thumb to show me just how thick men liked their reading matter to be.
‘Now your stories,’ he said, ‘are very thin. They have hardly any plot at all.’
‘But don’t you think...?’ I said, beginning to explain a point, but he brushed my unfinished sentence away, together with a bothersome bluebottle that had come our way at that moment.
‘And the endings,’ he said. ‘Your endings are very bad. They’re not endings at all. Your stories just break off in the middle! Why is that, might I ask?’
I’m afraid that I smiled superciliously.
‘Life itself has very little plot,’ I said. ‘Life itself has a habit of breaking off in the middle.’ I knew I was not being very explicit, but after all, his criticism had been casual enough! Perhaps I had become annoyed.
He, however, remained very affable, and he took up my argument blandly.
‘But don’t you see?’ he exclaimed. ‘It is just because life seems vague and disorderly, because it seems purposeless and chaotic, that people turn for distraction to books! We turn to books because in them we hope to find that the author, with a keener eye than ours has been able to make a selection from the multiplicity of incidents that crowd upon us, and present them in a manner that will show that there is after all some relation between cause and effect.’ He drew a deep breath. ‘Only for books I would, long ago, have fallen into despair myself! But instead of that I read for a solid hour every night, before I put out the light. And so,’ here he slackened the grip which he had retained upon my arms, and spread his hands out wide to either side of me, like great flat, protective wings, ‘and so although I may not know much about writing, I can give you a plain man’s opinion about your work. And mind you I may be able to give
you some useful information!’ He stopped for a moment. ‘By the way,’ he said quickly, ‘would you mind telling me—I’m not asking out of curiosity mind you, and there’s no impertinence meant—but I’d like to know if you make much money out of your stories?’
‘Well,’ I began slowly, in order to gain time, and find a suitable answer for the question. ‘Well, you see...’ I began.
But he cut me short again. ‘I see nothing,’ he said, abruptly. ‘Don’t tell me that you’re not interested in whether your work sells or not, because that’s only nonsense, if you’ll excuse my saying so! Only a fool would say a thing like that. If you said that to a jackass he’d kick you, if you’ll pardon the expression. Why do you write stories if you don’t care whether they’re read or not? And how can people read them if they don’t buy them? Be reasonable about the matter! Admit that you’d like your stories to sell. And, as I said before, if you take my advice, they might!’
‘What is your advice?’ I said at last, testily enough it must be admitted.
‘My advice is to give your stories more shape, to give them more plot; to give them more pattern, as it were!’
Excerpt from A Response by Kathleen MacMahon
‘A Story with a Pattern’ opens with the writer subjected to, but not falling victim to, an attack of mansplaining. It’s a delightful and mischievous testimony to the existence of the phenomenon long before the term itself was invented, but the core of the story— as the title suggests—is a debate over what actually constitutes a story in the first place. Both are as relevant now as they were when the story was written. Every time I read one of my grandmother’s stories, I’m struck by this quality she has of continued relevance. She was modern then, but she also manages to be modern now, the elegance of her stories underpinned by a mind that is always asking questions not just of life but also of the act of storytelling itself. The question she’s asking in this story is a particularly tricky one, but it’s central to the craft of writing fiction. If there’s little rhyme or reason to life, should there be any rhyme or reason to a story? ‘Your stories are very thin,’ her accuser tells her. ‘They have hardly any plot at all.’ ‘Your endings are very bad. They’re not endings at all. Your stories just break off in the middle!’ ‘Life itself has very little plot,’ says the writer. ‘Life itself has a habit of breaking off in the middle.’
At the time she wrote those lines, Mary Lavin was only 34, a young married woman and the mother of two small girls. She would lose her husband eight years later—a tragedy that proved her point that life has a habit of breaking off in the middle.
The Writer’s Torch – Reading Stories from The Bell, edited by Phyllis Boumans, Elke D’hoker and Declan Meade, published by The Stinging Fly Press
