Short Stories: The arc of Desmond Hogan's literary career has all the sparkle and mystery of one of his own prismatic fables.
Born in Ballinasloe in 1950, he founded the Irish Writers' Co-operative with Neil Jordan in the early 1970s and published his absorbing first novel, The Ikon Maker, under its imprint in 1976. By the time his second novel, The Leaves on Grey (1980), appeared he was being hailed in London and New York as one of the brightest new stars in the literary firmament.
Hogan duly justified such acclaim, producing three further novels and three stunning books of stories between 1981 and 1989, in which year he became the youngest writer to be included in William Trevor's landmark Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories.
Then, just as he seemed poised to become a dominant force in contemporary fiction, Hogan disappeared from view. Forsaking London for the far west of Ireland in the mid-1990s, he seems to have become a man following a felt route back to a lost Eden, as if acting on an impulse recorded in The Edge of the City (1993): "I want to find again the afterglow of a performance in a marquee on the fair-green, to return to the 18-year-old, to shield him now against all that is going to lash at him. My country, a journey."
That this personal odyssey should culminate in his return to fiction gives one a frisson of surprised delight akin to that felt by the narrator of Larks' Eggs on finding a bird's nest by the River Suck.
Larks' Eggs - first published in these pages in April - is one of 12 new stories in this handsomely produced volume. The other 22 are drawn from Hogan's earlier collections and include such masterpieces as The Mourning Thief, Players and The Airedale. In assembling this rich and varied selection, Antony Farrell deserves much credit for bringing Hogan's short fiction to the attention of a new generation of readers and writers, allowing for a fresh evaluation of his contribution to the Irish short story tradition.
The defining feature of a Desmond Hogan short story, the quality that gives it its haunting power, is its combination of lyric compression and novelistic amplitude. His best stories revolve around quotidian epiphanic moments in which characters "touch upon truth", truth that is often spirit-bruising. Repeatedly, we come upon characters trying to "decipher an area of loss" or reconcile themselves to the fact that "the human spirit is tarnished". In evoking such symbolically charged moments, Hogan shows himself to be a master of the laconic, unadorned line, exemplifying VS Pritchett's definition of a short story as "something glimpsed from the corner of an eye, in passing".
Hogan's thematic affinities with those other master storytellers, Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faoláin, are equally noteworthy. Taking up where they leave off, his keenly imagined fables illuminate the unappeased yearnings of those stranded in the backwash of Ireland's accelerated modernisation, those waiting, like Damien in Portrait of a Dancer, for a moment of love to "exonerate one of a life of loneliness". Hogan's imaginative sympathy for the plight of such forlorn figures bears out O'Connor's thesis that "there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel - an intense awareness of human loneliness'.
Just as time is a betrayer for those trapped at home, memory is a wound for those who leave. Of the many unremarkable departures in Hogan's fiction, journeys to Britain are by far the most common. No other writer of his generation attends to the "purgatorial world" of the impecunious Irish in England with such empathetic insight.
Hogan's exiles bridge the temporal and socio-economic gap between Patrick MacGill's brutalised Edwardian navvies and Joseph O'Connor's middle-class 1980s migrants. All are in some way "hurt by Ireland", and most appear willing to trade the privations of displacement for the freedoms of exile, though some, such as Moira in The Sojourner, still feel a poignant need for "the intimacy, the pain of ballroom Ireland".
Ultimately, however, Hogan seems less interested in the experiential dimensions of emigration than in England's symbolic significance as the place where a particular version of Irishness ruptures and unravels. If, as Declan Kiberd suggests, early 20th-century London was the crucible in which the elements of modern Ireland were distilled, Hogan's stories show how the city later became a repository for the nation's troubling, unassimilable excess.
A single line from The Sojourner, set in 1970s Shepherd's Bush, brilliantly registers the disjunction between romantic ideal and hidden social reality: "Irish country and western singers roared out with increasing desperation and one sensed behind the songs about Kerry and Cavan, mothers and luxuriant shamrock, the foetus of an unborn child urging its way from the womb of a girl over for a quick abortion."
The 12 new stories show Hogan evolving a looser, more confessional style, which has fewer modulations of tone and voice than his earlier work. The form is more diaristic, the dialogue more elliptical, so that each story has the quality of a finely drawn mosaic.
Hogan's imaginative sympathies remain with the marginalised, however. Traveller youths feature in more than half of these new works, the best of which, Winter Swimmers, reaffirms his gift for interleaving passages of synoptic narration with sentences of lyric grace: "With his talk of mending I thought, recovery is like a billycan in the hand, the frail, fragilely joined handle." In displaying anew Desmond Hogan's poetic intensity and individuality of vision, Winter Swimmers underwrites its own genial salute: "Here's to the storytellers. They made some sense from these lonely and driven lives of ours."
Liam Harte lectures in Irish and modern literature at the University of Manchester. His latest book, Ireland: Space, Text, Time, jointly edited with Yvonne Whelan and Patrick Crotty, will be published next month by the Liffey Press
Larks' Eggs: New and Selected Stories, By Desmond Hogan, Lilliput Press, 344 pp. €17.99