Plumbing the convoluted Irish soul
I have before me a postcard sent by my mother from Ireland in March 1952, during our family's first period of exile in that storied land. It depicts St. Patrick and is inscribed with this short prayer: ''O Padraig! Between us and the blast from the hills, between us and the evil hearts and evil eyes of people -- keep us, save us, and protect us. Amen." I like this extremely. That ''blast from the hills" is the hard life, and those ''evil hearts and evil eyes" belong not to beings easily condemned as mere enemies -- national, religious, or political -- but to the real sinners in this vale of tears: ''people." This tense entreaty, arising out of a pitiless world, conveys to me the loneliness, suspicion, and general wariness that, if one may speak in generalities, make up a good portion of the Irish soul.
To judge from William Trevor's stories, the country's rebirth in the 1990s as ''the Celtic Tiger" or ''the New Ireland" has done just as little to disperse the gloom as the sobriquet ''Ireland of the Welcomes" did when it was loosed on the land by the Irish Tourist Board in (oddly enough) 1952. Though Trevor left Ireland at about that time, his novels and short stories have continued to portray, both chillingly and compassionately, the spiritual condition which that prayer to St. Patrick evokes. ''A Bit on the Side" (Viking, $24.95) consists of 12 short stories, at least half of which are set in Ireland, others in England and on the Continent -- and one in a boys' boarding school, which, in Trevor's universe, is something like hell.
Of all the friendless, isolated people in the world, a priest following his calling in today's shattered Catholic Church must be one of the loneliest: the ranks of his fellow clergymen ravaged and unreplenished, his solitude amplified by a sense of irrelevance. Such a one is found in ''Justina's Priest," a very great story and perfect illustration of Trevor's undiminished powers of empathy and precision in delineating predicament. The priest in question is Father Clohessy, the lone shepherd of his parish, his gregarious, bibulous assistant absent (''undergoing a period of treatment after a car accident"). ''The grandeur might have gone from his church," Father Clohessy reflects, ''his congregations dwindling, his influence fallen away to nothing, but there was money where there had been poverty, ambition where there'd been humility. These were liberated people who stood about in ways that generations before them had not. They wore what they wished to wear, they said what they wished to say, they stayed or went away."
In the midst of this is Justina, a mentally handicapped young woman, sweet and good, though a trial to her sister, who is also burdened by a feckless husband and an ailing father-in-law. Justina's friend, Breda, has gone to Dublin, clearly become a prostitute, and has written to lure the simple girl to the same life -- though Justina thinks it is only parties and fun that she's being offered. Visiting the house, the priest notes the fleeting, involuntary look of hope on the caretaker sister's face at the notion that Justina might make it to Dublin. ''Was it much of a price to pay," wonders the priest, thinking about the bettered condition of the Irish people, ''that the woman he had visited would rid herself of a backward sister if she could?" The existence of that flicker of unedifying hope may be the price, but thought is not action, and the resolution of this story, like so many of Trevor's, grants human goodness and endurance their role independent of social tropism.
To some extent Trevor's Ireland is an arena of his imagination more than a reflection of its present reality. That's art for you, of course; but in one story, ''Sacred Statues," the hard lot he metes out to his characters is not a plausible one in Ireland of the last couple of decades. In this, Corry, a young man employed as a joiner, is discovered to have a gift for carving religious statues by Mrs. Falloway, a well-off Protestant woman who hopes to redeem Irish churches from the pious clutter of plaster statuary that so characterizes them. She gives him money to leave his job and encourages him in his art. But the church has fallen on evil times, and though Corry is the only provider for a pregnant wife and three children, there is neither money nor will to purchase his work. He is offered an apprenticeship as a stone carver for which he would have talent, but it involves a year's unpaid service. It seems that the alternatives are starvation or taking up brute labor -- unless he can get more money from Mrs. Falloway. We will stop the plot right there -- it becomes poignantly complex -- and observe that the New Ireland may be soulless, but it does provide generous financial support to people with children and that Corry could (after a good deal of paperwork, naturally) have taken that unpaid apprenticeship.
''Sacred Statues" is, nonetheless, thoroughly credible and true to its characters within the circumstances upon which it is predicated. It is a beautiful story about art and the artist and their sacrificial relationship to each other and the world. This is, of course, an exceedingly Irish theme and one that the late Thomas Flanagan looked at in a number of the 44 pieces now collected in ''There You Are: Writings on Irish and American Literature and History" (New York Review Books, $27.95).
Among the writers he treats with real penetration are Yeats and Joyce, and he shows that both the Protestant pagan nationalist and the apostate Catholic modernist exile viewed art as something akin to the divine. The two very different ways in which they did -- Yeats, in the role of the medium, his vision mystical and a bit credulous, and Joyce as, shall we say, God, his vision austere and overweening -- are still major strains, and Flanagan's investigation of them and of their relationship to the country that spawned them has the acuity of a sympathetic, immensely well-read outsider. His introduction to ''Dubliners," for instance, is as good an introduction to Joyce as any there are, and his essay ''James Joyce and the Imagination of Irish History" is really brilliant. In this he shows how Ireland's festered history, which seems to hold so many in its unwholesome clutch, was a force in Joyce's departure from literary precedent. I call this required reading.
Katherine A. Powers, a writer and critic, lives in Cambridge. Her column appears on alternate Sundays. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@earthlink.net.
