The Four Seasons of Mary Lavin: A Biography by Leah Levenson, Marino 368pp, £20
Mary Lavin, one of the world's great short-story writers, died in 1996, leaving behind a lifetime's work of such richness that generations of students should be kept happy delving into the meaning of it. Different approaches will be taken; where did she get the courage to write against the tide of her colleagues, one of whom, Frank O'Connor, lamented that she had written only one story from a patriotic point of view and one was enough? Or how did she ever become one of Tillie Olsen's one in twelve, a woman of that time taken seriously? Some future Time and Motion expert might like to figure out how she juggled the demands on her, considering the tragedy of her early widowhood. And, of course, some students will take the autobiographical route, seeing the work as a literal representation of the life.
This latter route is tempting because the author did use moments of her life in her stories. Many writers do this, and are not easily spotted doing it, but if Mary Lavin wrote a story of a heart-broken, self-conscious widow in a cafe, then all of the tale must be true. If she wrote of a man's fancy, then who was the man? She used the facts of her great unquestioning love for her father, her troubled relationship with her mother, the loves of the men in her life, her family life, as jump-starts for her stories, certainly, but a deep and oftentimes disturbing imagination, almost Gothic in its intensity, soon runs away with the main subject of the tale.
So the autobiographical approach restricts the reading of a body of work which is of such distinction that the critic and shortstory writer V.S. Pritchett was moved to say that it made the novel form irrelevant. The author herself explained that "A character in fiction can arise out of the autobiographical self and lead an independent life".
It is disappointing, therefore, that this first biography dwells too much and too insistently on the author's life and that of her family, who, heaven knows, do not deserve to have their lives rifled through as if they were footballers.
This leads to the question, If some letters are in the public domain, is a biographer entitled to use them at will? The cop-out answer is, Of course, on the one hand, but on the other, absolutely not. We are all propelled by a certain amount of curiosity and we know that other people are too, but that does not give us the right to confuse gossip with the reading of literature, muddling the two into the one paste. The writer who stands back from the catastrophe of life and makes the best of it - that's one thing; me knowing about it, as I now unfortunately do, after reading this book, is quite another.
Although the valuable aspects of the book are overshadowed by the author's approach, they are there, especially in the close reading of some of Mary Lavin's work. Lavin's wit also shines through; in her later years she writes of a hospital stay: "If you put yourself in their hands they are capable of doing pregnancy tests at 71." There are some minor inaccuracies, for instance the photograph claiming to be one of Lavin and Francis Stuart at an Aosdana meeting was in fact taken in a stationary train at Heuston Station at the launch of Modern Irish Stories, and was published by The Irish Times in 1985.
Perhaps one's disappointment in this book is unjustified, and is there only because the book precedes the serious studies of the work that will surely come, a fact that is certainly not Leah Levenson's fault. And a work that will be best loved by biography buffs might indeed draw readers to the stories themselves.
Evelyn Conlon is a short story writer and novelist; her latest book, A Glassful of Letters, was published earlier this year