1 'The Fire Burned Slow' 1957-1958

Our requirements are so peculiar that it's almost impossible for us to define them, but we're really hoping that we'll be able to say yes on one of your pieces some day.1

When The New Yorker first made overtures to Mary Lavin in November of 1957, she was a 45-year-old widow tasked with the sole responsibility of raising her three young daughters (the youngest of whom was aged four), caring for her elderly mother and managing the family farm in Bective, County Meath.2 At this stage, Lavin was an internationally established writer, with six volumes of short stories, two novels and a children's book under her belt, but she had only resumed writing the previous year, following her husband's untimely death in May 1954.

Lavin's creative hiatus was not due to writer's block but because, as she later explained to The New Yorker, she 'didn't think life itself worth living'.3 Her Atlantic editor, Edward 'Ted' Weeks, visited Lavin two weeks before her husband, William Walsh, died and witnessed first-hand the devastating effect his illness had upon her. He was doubtful 'that she would have either the time or the energy to write after her husband's death. Certainly, she did not have either now, but the difficulty ran deeper than that. She had lost faith in her ability to write.'4

As the family's breadwinner, Lavin relied heavily on writing for her livelihood. There was some income from the farm but the bills were beginning to rack up.5 In the spring of 1956 she had written to her literary mentor, the Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany, about lecturing opportunities in England but he recommended that Lavin consider reading in the US instead as it was more profitable and would be a better fit for her. Dunsany gave Lavin the address for his lecture agents in New York and let her know that Curtis Brown in London could put her in touch with lecture agents in London.6 That summer Lavin consulted her friend Eudora Welty, the celebrated American writer from Jackson, Mississippi, about the possibility of giving readings in America.7 Welty advised Lavin to contact Elizabeth Bowen ('you know how she esteems you') about potential opportunities, given that she had embarked on a series of lucrative literary lectures and readings in universities and colleges across the United States.8 She also thought that Jean Stafford and the Anglo-Irish writer and critic James Stern would be able to give her good advice and she offered to write to the Poetry Center in New York.

Lavin was a great admirer of Bowen's work and Bowen was very pleased to have finally made Lavin's acquaintance and grateful to Welty for opening up the lines of communication between them. Bowen informed Lavin that the National Concert and Artists Corporation in New York managed her readings in the US and she had 'no doubt, knowing how your work is admired "over there", that you would have an enthusiastic reception'. Bowen suggested that Lavin contact the firm directly or get Edward Weeks, Eudora Welty, Jean Stafford or James Stern to do so on her behalf. She sympathised with Lavin on the death of William, having lost her own husband, Alan, four years earlier. Bowen invited Lavin to meet her for lunch upstairs in Jammet's, the famous Dublin restaurant, on 13 September: 'I could then tell you far more about America, besides the pleasure of seeing you and being able to talk.' The two women evidently met on this occasion because on 10 October Welty wrote to see how their meeting went and expressed how much she wished she could have been present also.9

Lavin also reached out to the American novelist and New Yorker contributor Nancy Wilson Ross, who likewise advised her to get in touch with Stern. She raised the possibility of Lavin reading, à la Dylan Thomas, at the Poetry Center where John Malcolm Brinnin was the director.10

Welty duly contacted the National Concert and Artists Corporation for Lavin but the agency was non-committal about the prospect of taking on Lavin on as a client because it felt that she was not very well known in the US, having had only one book published there.11 In fact, the Boston publisher Little, Brown and Company had published two collections of Lavin's short stories: Tales from Bective Bridge in 1942, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1943, and At Sallygap and Other Stories in 1947. It also reprinted her first novel, The House in Clewe Street, in 1945, which had been serialised in The Atlantic Monthly under the title 'Gabriel Galloway', and published her second novel, Mary O'Grady, in 1950.

In 1957 Lavin began corresponding with the renowned American writer J. D. Salinger, best known for his 1951 literary classic The Catcher in the Rye, about potential American markets and publishing opportunities.12 Salinger and Lavin had never met but they had mutual friends in Eudora Welty, Jean Stafford and the theatre director and playwright John Beary, who likely initiated their communication.13 Although Salinger revealed to Lavin that he only faintly knew Welty, he passed word to her through friends they had in common that he and Lavin were now acquainted.14

Lavin was on much more familiar terms with Welty. The two women greatly admired each other's work over the years and they finally met on Welty's first trip to Ireland in 1950, while she was extending her Guggenheim-funded tour of Europe.15 Welty visited Lavin at her farm and the pair became lifelong friends, sending each other copies of their latest publications. Stafford was also a fan of Lavin's writing and in a letter expressed a desire to meet her on a planned visit to Dublin 'because I admire your work enormously'. She subsequently stayed with Lavin and William in Meath in 1949.16 Incidentally, Salinger had also been hoping to visit Ireland, but he explained to Lavin that it was no longer possible due to illness in his wife's family and also because he had returned to work that he had begun a few years earlier.17

Salinger sympathised with Lavin on the precariousness of a literary career and her financial situation and encouraged her to contact The New Yorker, with which he had strong ties, because it paid well.18 Welty and Stafford were among the many female authors, including Maeve Brennan, Mavis Gallant, Elizabeth Hardwick and Dorothy Parker, who were contributing fiction to The New Yorker at this time.19 Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye, made his debut appearance in Salinger's first New Yorker short story, 'Slight Rebellion off Madison', published on 21 December 1946. However, in 1951 The New Yorker had declined to publish an extract from the novel because 'the precocity of the four Caulfield children was not believable, and that the writing was showoffy - that it seemed designed to display the author's cleverness rather than to present the story'.20 The rejection did not colour Salinger's opinion of the magazine and he continued to submit stories and encouraged Lavin to do likewise.21 Lavin subscribed to The New Yorker and Salinger was grateful for her praise of his recent story 'Zooey', which featured in its 4 May 1957 issue.22

Salinger noted that The New Yorker was publishing work by fellow Irish writers Frank O'Connor and Maeve Brennan. O'Connor had a first-reading agreement with the magazine and was a prolific contributor (The New Yorker published forty-eight of his stories, two of which were published posthumously).23 Lavin would go on to meet O'Connor for the first time in 1959 and the two remained firm friends until his death in 1966. Brennan was a New Yorker staffer and contributor of short stories, fashion pieces and the Long-Winded Lady vignettes for the 'Talk of the Town' section.24 There is no evidence that Lavin and Brennan ever met or corresponded, although Elizabeth Cullinan vaguely remembered them meeting on one occasion.25

It had not always been the case that The New Yorker published fiction with an Irish setting. According to New Yorker staffer and writer Wolcott Gibbs, it was a 'virtual rule that we couldn't use them [stories] unless they were definitely set in New York City'.26 This 'virtual rule' was set by The New Yorker's founding editor, Harold Ross, who conceived of The New Yorker as a magazine that would be a reflection of New York City and its residents - vibrant, cultured, and sophisticated: 'The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about. This is not meant in disrespect, but The New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience and thereby will escape an influence which hampers most national publications.'27 Exceptions were made and the directive had evidently relaxed when the magazine began publishing Sally Benson's St Louis stories in the 1940s.28 By the mid-1940s fiction set in Ireland also appeared in its pages.

In 1957 James Thurber wrote to William Shawn, Ross's successor, asking if stories still had to be located in New York, recalling that this had been the case ten years previously. He described it as one of Ross's 'craziest obsessions, especially since by that time it was the Talk of the World and we were no longer provincial'.29 O'Connor's...