Mary Lavin honoured at New York literary event

THE IRISH writer Mary Lavin was remembered in a day-long seminar at Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, yesterday. Other commemorations marking the centenary of Lavin’s birth on June 10th, 1912 are expected in Dublin and Louvain later this year.

Some 60 people attended the New York seminar, which was the brainchild of Caroline Walsh, the literary editor of The Irish Times who died last December.

“Caroline organised this event with myself this time last year. She was wonderful, upbeat,” recalled James Ryan, Walsh’s husband. “It is a profound sadness that Caroline is not with us,” he added, a writer and director of the creative writing programme at University College Dublin.

Mary Lavin’s granddaughter Alice, the daughter of Caroline Walsh and Mr Ryan, also attended the commemoration.

The seminar could not have happened without the support of Caroline’s only surviving sibling, Elizabeth Walsh Peavoy, Lavin’s only surviving daughter and the manager of Mary Lavin’s literary estate, Mr Ryan added.

Three writers and academics who teach Mary Lavin in US universities delivered lectures on the writer’s oeuvre. The award-winning Irish writer Colm Tóibín, who is now teaching English and comparative literature at Columbia University, said he “devoured” Lavin’s work as a teenager in Enniscorthy.

Her descriptions of life as a widow were, he said, “almost too close to the space between how we lived then and what was unmentionable – the business of silence around grief, the life of a woman alone, the palpable absence of a man, a husband, a father, the idea of conversation as a way of concealing loss rather than revealing anything, least of all feeling”. Tóibín recalled seeing Lavin around Dublin in the early 1970s.

“She had a way of engaging anyone who spoke to her, but there was also something grand and serious about her. There was a light in her dark eyes, a warm way of focusing and concentrating as she spoke.”

Lavin’s short stories, many of which she wrote for the New Yorker, are considered masterpieces of the genre. As Greg Londe, who teaches 20th-century and contemporary Irish literature at New York University, noted, Lavin’s writing “swerves from historical incident and public occasion”, ignoring the strife in Northern Ireland and the feminist movement that marked the 1970s.

“Mary Lavin was more interested in a character she had invented all in its strangeness and individuality than she was in the wider society; she was more interested in families than politics; she was more interested in the drama around the solitary figure than the drama around Irish history, or large questions of identity,” Tóibín explained.