Irish Types and Stereotypes
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing IRISH TYPES AND STEREOTYPES BY PEARL K. BELL FROM ITS TITLE, The Onion Eaters, to the last of its witless scatological buffooneries, J. P. Donleavy's new novel (Delacorte, 306...
...She heaps his hospital table with expensive fruit that rots, untouched, beside the dying man, and tries in vain to have him speak the prayer of contrition that will grant him God's forgiveness...
...At the last minute he rushes off the boat back to the girl waving goodbye from the pier...
...Rather, she is much closer in method and intent to such earlier masters of the short story as Chekhov...
...That Donleavy has been so greatly praised by Irish critics is only further proof of that country's bottomless masochism...
...Because Donleavy has been hailed by many critics as a major writer, an exuberantly angry and daring creator of horny clowns brawling their reckless way from bar to rumpled adulterous bed in scurrilous defiance of the stuffed-shirt world...
...Years later, the henpecked egg dealer he has become makes a small act of defiance by returning home many hours later than usual...
...There was only one man in the family, and the lodgers were all women...
...The long story "A Happy Death" establishes a mood of familial squalor and bitterness with marvelous economy...
...She has an acute, loving eye for the often distressing details of Irish country life, perfect pitch for the Irish gift of talk, and her artistry is so subtle and unobtrusive that we can easily underestimate the poise and sophistication of her skill-fulness...
...With swift strokes, Miss Lavin opens a door into the hell of this seemingly unexceptional family...
...In "The Great Wave," Miss Lavin writes of a timeless catastrophe—the day a monstrous tide wiped out everyone on a small Irish island except a young seminarian home for a holiday, and the boy he took along in his fishing boat...
...His Irish of Ireland are vaudeville stereotypes from a New York St...
...Donleavy was born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, went to Dublin after the War to study at Trinity College, and has since used Ireland as his favorite fictional camping ground...
...In "At Sallygap," a young fiddler is about to leave with a band for Paris...
...Suddenly, however, as he is dying, she remembers the handsome young man she married, full of hope and love, many years ago...
...A wild elation welled up inside her, waiting for a torrential release in shouting or screaming...
...Clementine the audacious sinner is in fact a droning bore who, while he can think of nothing else, detests sex...
...In a fury of self-pity, she spends her days hurling abuse at him, and she has taught her children to do the same...
...Well...
...A friend throws his fiddle after him...
...Whether this long overdue volume will bring her the attention she deserves is doubtful, for she fits no contemporary literary fashion...
...No sooner does he take possession of his legacy than he is beset by thieving obsequious servants, lascivious neighboring squires, mad scientists, insatiable women with webbed feet and thunderous voices, and a venomous menagerie of dogs, snakes and pigs...
...I WONDER if even a fraction of Donleavy's admirers have even heard of Miss Lavin, whose Collected Stories (Houghton Miffin, 425 pp., $8.95) makes the best of her work available in America for the first time...
...But this symbolic joke, if that's what Donleavy means it to be, is without a punch line...
...Nevertheless, Donleavy incautiously betrays his true feelings about sex by equating it time and again with excrement...
...In case it spreads around...
...Then everyone wants it...
...Jovce and Frank O'Connor...
...The power-hungry woman consumed by her blind, inhuman greed is a recurrent type in Miss Lavin's stories...
...He was rarely called Father by any of the children, which was hardly surprising since he had less authority in the house than any of them...
...A frightened child calls up to her exasperated, overworked mother from the bottom of the stairs...
...Why bother...
...There was no need to mention a name...
...She had battered in his patience at last...
...Reading it is rather like being trapped in a train outside Hoboken, all the windows mercilessly wide open to the stench of the Jersey marshes...
...At last he was going to try to get even with her...
...The book's unrelievedly dull stream of flat, inane dialogue is meant, I suppose, to register despair in a hopeless world made faintly tolerable through random, inexhaustible fornication...
...Similarly grandiose nonsense was subsequently written about Donleavy's later novels, with their puckish alliterative titles—The Saddest Summer of Samuel S and The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B. Now, in The Onion Eaters, Donleavy's typewriter is stuck at the third letter of the alphabet...
...His feckless American hero, Clayton Claw Cleaver Clementine, a gloomy wreck of a man, has inherited a moldering near-ruin in rural Ireland called Charnel Castle...
...it is smashed to bits, his one chance at freedom smashed with it...
...Writers & Writing IRISH TYPES AND STEREOTYPES BY PEARL K. BELL FROM ITS TITLE, The Onion Eaters, to the last of its witless scatological buffooneries, J. P. Donleavy's new novel (Delacorte, 306 pp., $7.95) gives off a bad smell...
...Obscenity, as everyone should know full well by now, is not liberating...
...As V. S. Pritchett has remarked of her stories, "They give a real and not a fancied view of Irish domestic life and it combines the moving with the frightening...
...Her extraordinary talent for observation leads her to the unseen but omnipresent terrors and disappointments beating out a harsh rhythm under the surface of ordinary life...
...In his extravagant introduction to Donleavy's first novel, The Ginger Man, the Irish critic Arland Ussher called upon the majestic ghosts of Joyce, Swift and Synge to praise the book's rogue of a hero, Sebastian Dangerfield, and tried to persuade the unwary reader that those tedious adolescent fantasies added up to "a figure of our present disorder, of America at odds in the Old World...
...Fishermen and farmers, nervous young girls dressed up for their first dance, long lines of grieving widows who survive in a hard world that marks men for death long before it notices their women—the Ireland we know through Mary Lavin's stories is bleak but captiva-tingly alive, a superstitious, priest-ridden, backward country whose bickering and tragedy, she convinces us, share in the reality of existence everywhere...
...As his wife fumes by the fire, filled with boredom and contempt for the man who preferred her to Paris, "She began to think that in his weak way he was defying her at last...
...we cannot take his word for it when the vision he begins with is so barren...
...All the compassion she had withheld from him in life is squandered, in a last demented gamble, on his death...
...A pronoun identified him at any time...
...In the arid desert of his life, all that blooms is disgust...
...With quiet power, Miss Lavin makes the frailty of man faced by the demonic force of nature overwhelming, and the story leaves tracks in the mind that will stay for a very long time...
...But a novelist must earn the right to this loathing if we are to believe him...
...He's coughing and moaning...
...Patrick's Day Parade remembered in a drunken dream...
...A mean retread of the old gag about sex being too good for the lower classes...
...Clementine's triple endowment is merely the occasion on every other page for sniggering sexual acrobatics and solemnly droll commentary that are both fatuous and pointless...
...Orgies offering neither joy nor release are rounded off with sententious homilies: "Authority has always been out to stop ecstasy...
...She was ready...
...Mother...
...But her mother will not listen...
...The mother has only scorn for her husband, who has wasted away the years at a menial job in the town library while she took in twice as much money by renting out rooms in the house...
...When I had finally choked my way dutifully to the end of this malodorous doodle, I felt that neither my nose nor my already shaky faith in the acumen of American publishers would ever be the same again...
...Before we are a third into the barely comprehensible happenings, we know we are dealing with that sick exercise in self-deception, the Puritan mired in his own guilty feculence...
...With her Irish women and men, one is face to face with a brilliantly rendered reality...
...If all he can turn up is a bizarre pack of dirty jokes, there is nothing to win our assent...
...He's bad...
...Yet she also shows us how lonely and bored they are, how much their unthinking workadav cruelty is shaped by the harsh necessities of rural and small-town life...
...thus he must impugn the world itself as foul...
...How rare it is to encounter a contemporary writer who can make a story seem as ancient as a folk saga, and never indulge in cloying archaism...
...With the manic energy she had given to despising him, she is now desperate to vouchsafe him "a happy death...
...At the moment of his death, "Still screaming and sobbing, she was led out of the ward, and it was utterly incomprehensible to her that God had not heard her prayers...
...If people get a taste...
...All this chaos, it develops, is actually a tangled skein of variations on a detail that presumably has great comic and metaphysical significance for Donleavy—Clementine, like all his male ancestors, has three testicles...
...Yet to read the work of the Irish writer Mary Lavin on the heels of Donleavy's tiresome zombies makes one see how much his is an Ireland of the mind...
Vol. 54 • August 1971 • No. 16
