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The modern Irish short story is about as old as the century, that is, as old as the modern short story itself. Literary historians generally regard Gogol and Hawthorne: as the fathers, respectively, of the short story in Russia and America (the other two countries reckoned to have been the major developers of the genre) yet the modern Irish short story is very seldom credited with significant parentage. But in fact it was not the immaculate conception it might appear to have been, with giants such, as Liam O’Flaherty and James Joyce materialising as if by some form of abiogenesis: it had not only a father, but a mother as as well. The father was George Moore (and it is perhaps characteristic of that smooth-tongued charmer that he was himself the first to claim fatherhood - what’s more, to claim it long before there as child on the way), the mother was (were?) that remarkable writing team of Edith Somerville and Martin Ross.
No literary parentage could have been more fruit of promise, for father and mother emerged from the opposed cultures (Catholic and native/Protestant, or Anglo, and settler) which had become the constituents of the Irish family. Their attitude to the Irish society of their time - i indeed the very areas of their concern - could not have been more divergent, but just as many of the latter’s antecedents had taken on the customs of the native and become ‘more Irish than the Irish themselves’, so did their literary descendants gradually come to write ’Irish’ stories which were as germane and as committed as those being produced by the descendants of the former. Time had written off the condescensions and antagonisms, and whereas in seven centuries of history the political transplant had not yet successfully taken, in less than a single century the literary transplant was complete and both host and guest were part of the one native tradition.
The Irish pre-eminence in the field of the short story has [9] frequently been remarked by commentators, both native and foreign. But what accounts for such pre-eminence? How is it that a country which boasts no notable tradition of novel-writing repeatedly throws up outstanding short story writers? The explanation can, I believe, be traced to the fortuitous correspondence between two prominent Irihs characteristics and the two vital ingredients of the short story.
Words are to the writer’s art much as bricks are to a house, and just as a house is not a home, a way with words will not, alone and of itself, be sufficient equipment for a short story writer. It isn’t even his primary equipment. The short story writer’s basic and essential gift must be his approach to the material of life, his vision of the world about him, the outlook that is exclusive to him alone by virtue of his particular emotioal and intellecutal chemistry; in other words, his way of seeing; if his way of seeing is sufficiently individual, sufficiently differentiated, and if to it is added a gift of expression both above average and out of the ordinary, then you have a short story writer. A way of saying and a way of seeing are the flesh and spirit of the short story.
As far as a way of saying is concerned, there is general acknowledgement of the Irish writer’s - indeed the Irishman’s - exceptional facility. More often than not it is phraseology that has been the Irish short story’s hallmark - a phraseology heady with colour and freshness, heady, above all, with an almost intoxicated sense of release. So persuasive has been the Irihs way with words that the English language officially recognised it with a word of its own (suggested by the Irish of course): blarney.
What can account for the phenomenon of Irish-English? Why is it that, as H. E. Bates put it in his book The Modern Short Story, ‘Ireland (and America ) are now the places wehre the English language, both spoken and written, shows its most vigrous and plastic vitality’? it is not difficult to explain the fecundity of American-English - a country the size of the USA, in which so much regional varition is fuelled by such a hyper-competitive ethic, is bound to find its way of speech constantly energised by the cross-fertilisation of its society and the need to keep abreast of that society’s mania for experimentation and invention. But the rhythms and scale of the Irish way of life are so different from those of America that such influences can hardly have contributed to the vigour and plasticity of Irihs-English. What, however, must in large measure account for it is the fact that, as an American commentator, Charles E. May, wrote in [10] Short Story Theories, [...] in Ireland the English language is not yet stale.’ It is not stale because it was not until well into the nineteenth century that the English language in Ireland could be said to have been the only spoken language of the vast majority of the people. Before 1800 Irish held sway, and so when, during the ensuing hundred years, the native populat adopted English as their vernacular, they were still thinking in Irish and consdquently cobbled together their version of English with distinctively Irish words, inflections and constructions. And not only was the very shape and design of their English sentence influenced, but is style and personality - its air -was determined by what I can only call the philological impetus of the Irish language.
This impetus is a direct reflection of the speaker’s culture and way of life: in America, for instance, it is verbal (in the sense of being powered by verbs) because American-English has to keep pace with the goahead-and-get-things-done drive which its people have inherited from their pioneering stock; but in Ireland a traditionally near-to-standstill pace has afforded generous opportunity for the bodying forth of a bubbling Celtic imagtination, and as a result simple conversation has been infalted to the status of a performance whose descriptive force has depended on its supply of adjectival lift-off. Yet this adjectival impetus is only the beginning of the Irish language’s motive power: whereas in English the use of the adjective has to be restrained because it is normally placed before the noun and the noun has to be identified fairly smartly if the sense is not to be lost, in Irish the noun is placed first and so, the substantive being firmly established, there is almost no end to the number of adjectives which may be piled on it, each adding more and more life and colour to the description. This particular adjectival balance of the Irish language would seem to me to be the major influence on the development of the English spoken in ireland and written by Irish writers.
But what about the other - the more important - attribute of the short story writer, his special way of seeing? Is there a special Irish way of seeing? I would answer that question with the following anecdote.
Many years ago I was standing in a bus queue in Cork. A station-wagon approached, its driver anxiously searching for a place to park. The area of roadway on either side of the the bus-stop had, of course, to be kept clear, but, there seemed to be just about a car’s length free space between one of the white [11] boundary lines of that area and the tow of cars parked beyond it. Into that space the station-wagon fitted itself and out of the vehicle stepped its driver - an ageing, genial, country genetleman type, all tweeds and twinkle - who immediately proceeded to inspect his position and ssure himself that he had in fact found aspace, however circumscribed, which would remove him from the fear of a fine for illegal parking. What he saw made him replace his smile of self-satisfaction with a puzzled frown: certainly hour wheels had cleared the white line, but the back of the station-wagon protruded over it and into thw space allocated to the bus stop. A technical infringement, at the very least? Undecided, he turned to the bus queue, and , addressing no one in particular, asked ‘Do you think I’d get, away with that?’ For a few minutes no one in particular particular hazarded an answer until an ancient, wizened, diminutive type took off his cap, slowly scratched his stubbled cheek, and replied, ‘Well, sir, ’tis like this: are yeh lucky?’
For me that, answer encapsulates some basic elements of the Irish way of seeing as well as the pith of their way of saying - latter, of course, being in some part a product of the former. It has a touch of fatalism - inculcated into them by centuries of religious rigour and, inclement weather; a large dash of superstition - still rife in general customs and conventions, especially in rural areas; a hint of the accommodations sometimes made necessary with force majeure on the temporal plane - impressed upon them by the weight of their country’s history; and of course the very form of the reply - a question answering a question - is the summation of the whole Irish temperament, the implicit belief that in this world, as in the world of the short story, there just are no answers; inklings and illuminations are the most one can expect.
Apart from the prowess of the Irish in the writing of short stories, there is the question of their addiction to the form. Why is. the short story, rather than any other medium, the most popular Irish means of sophisticated artistic self-expression? Historical development suggests the answer. A peasant people -intermittently at war - which for much of their history most of the Irish have been - is hardly likely to throw up significant painters, nor would their circumstance be conducive to the cultivation of a developing musical tradition (though in peasant peoples folk music usually flourishes and Irish folk songs are not only numerous but abound in ballads, i.e., short stories). This narrows [12] the field down to literature, and here the importance of the seanachie (storyteller) as a pivotal figure in rural Irish life down to the nineteenth century must account for the predisposition of the twentieth-century Irish writer towards the short story.
Every anthologist has to don, with the best grace, the editorial harness - most particularly the anthology’s title, which is is his bit and bridle. In this case I have no problem deciding what qualifies as a short story; my standard being merely that of length rather than any academic distinction between anecdote and short story proper. I.have adopted 7,000 words as my upper limit - anything longer I regarded as having passed through the short story barrier into the area of the long short story - but the - but the question ‘What is an Irish short story?’, cannot be answered by slide-rule or word count. The English critic, Walter Allen, in a recent series of articles on the Irish short story asked himself whether it was ‘simply a story that happens to be written in English by an Irishman’. Wise man, he didn’t attempt to answer, though he did suggest that in its early days at least the Irish short story defined itself as being in general critical of the conditions of Irish life - Moore’s The Untilled Field and Joyce’s Dubliners being the trend-setters - and such a comment be no less true of the Irish short story today.
I have not attempted, to conform to any special pattern or to illustrate - any particular trend in making the choice for this anthology and so I have arranged the stories in chronological order of author’s birth. One rule, however, I felt, could be observed: every story had to have an Irish context. Apart from that my concern has been to present what in my opinion are outstanding and characteristic stories by as many as possible authors who have given the Irish short story its high reputation, as well as those of more recent and current times who are, maintaining, that reputation and shaping its future course. |