Desmond Hogan-"Lark's Eggs" and Two More Short Stories

"Elysium"
"Memories of Swinging London"
"Lark's Eggs"

The Irish Quarter 

 A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

The Reading Life Desmond Hogan Project

Co-hosted by Shauna Gilligan, author of

Happiness Comes From Nowhere

"The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man."  from The Brothers Karamazov 

"But the more I walked by a rubbish dump, the higher the ecstasy, the more suffocating the knowledge I was trapped".  -from "Elysium" 

Introductory Post by Shauna Gilligan

Previous Posts on Desmond Hogan

There are thirty four stories in Lark's Eggs and Other Stories, as of today, I have posted on twenty one of them.   The more I read Hogan's stories, the more I see in his work.  What will seem like quirks to the first time reader are coming to look like very central elements in his work.  I think the short stories of Desmond Hogan are world class literary treasures.

  I intend to post all of the remaining stories, some one at a time and some in groups.   I am treating Hogan's stories as found objects, a way of looking at literature from the long ago.   Even though the stories in Lark's Eggs and Other Stories were not all published originally at the same time I will also on occasion treat the collection as one object, as that is how it is now being presented to the world.  (Treating some of the stories one at a time and some in groups is not a value judgement.)  My posts on Hogan are primarily for the purpose now of helping me clarify my understanding of them.   If someone is motivated to read Hogan or appreciates my posts in someway, that is great.  I know that none of Hogan's work can be read online (He has no webpage) but you can purchase an E-Book of this collection for a fair prize.  My posts on the three stories I am writing on today will be brief.  I am going to return to some of these stories during Irish Short Story Week Year Three, set to start March 1 2013.  It will run from one to six months.   I believe Hogan's stories will repay repeat rereading.   At the close of this project I will attempt a post on why I think the stories in this collection are important.   I will attempt also to explain or, I hate to say this, deconstruct his methods, talk about how we are to see the sexuality in the stories and ponder the prevalence of Irish Travelers, Teddy Boys and Gypsies.I will also ponder how we should look at the work of Hogan from the prospective of Northrup Frye, in an effort to explain all of the historical and cultural references and how I am seeing his work as providing  exemplary cases of  "redemptive beauty".  

"Larks' Eggs" , the title story in the collection starts out in Connemara, all of the stories have strong geographical anchors, where the narrator, a youngish man is staying because being there faciliates his father's contact with a Protestant girlfriend.  We are told of herbal and folk medicine ways.   The time is 1934.   Hitler had just become Fuhrer.  This may be designed to evoke Ireland's not entirely negative attitude toward Germany  during WWII.  The story has a lot of references to events and entities from 1934, such as the movie staring Douglas Fairbanks, The Mark of Zorro, a seeming foppish man, in exile from his own culture after returning from a colonial ruler (there are no accidents in  art.!)   The narrator and his father's lady friend find some lark eggs. Here is how they are described, "oval, greenish-white, mottled with pale lavender, with marking of rofous". The word "rofous" was probably last commonly used around 1750.  Understanding these old words is a big part of understanding these stories.  In a way it is all about, as Gilligan told us, about the search for a home.   I am making assumptions about how people talked in the west of Ireland in the 1930s but the vocabulary of the narrator seems way elevated.  The story, like other stories are really in a way lots of mini-stories strung together with our objective being trying to figure out what they have to do with each other.    This passage really has a lot in it, enough for numerous academic articles no doubt:

"There was rumoured to have been a homosexual orgy in the rugby changing rooms in the mental hospital grounds that winter, men whose genitals smelt of young mushrooms.."

All of the men in the orgy, which might be a real event or just sort of a legend, were married but for one of them.  At the time of the story, committing a homosexual act could get you put in a mental hospital.  

There is a lot more in this story.   There are some very interesting passages about the differences between Ireland and England and how being in England effect people once they came home.

"Memories of Swinging London" is one of the longest stories in the collection. I have only read it once and I really want to read it a couple of times more before I attempt to post on it in any serious way.   It felt like a truly great work of art on my first reading.   It centers on a man, an Irishman of course, living in London.  It is narrated in the third person (about half the stories are in the first person) and we learn the narrator has been drunk and depressed for the last three weeks because Marion left him.     The central character, Liam, meets a nun at a drama class, one with a Kerry accent.  She wonders who the "Irish drunk" is, even though she notices he is a well dressed one.  She was from west Kerry and had spent a few months doing church work in Africa.  (No matter what you read in Irish literature, drinking, the church and depression will show up).  She studied English literature in Dublin.   She taught drama classes.  He is from Galway, from Ballinasloe.  Now they have a bond, her father used to go to the horse fair there.   He is into Keats and Byron.   He thinks of his wife who left him.  They talk about what they miss about Ireland and what they appreciate most about London.  He appreciates the freedom.   Oscar Wilde famously said he did not become Irish until he moved to England.   This is part of what this story is about.  There is a huge more to this story and I hope to do an individual post on it in 2013.  

"Elysium" just like "Memories of Swinging London" is about someone from Ireland, from bog country (I think being from "bog country" means you are more "Irish" than a big city person).  In this very interesting story, the narrator is a  woman who has been in England for about ten years.   In her teenage years she had lots of casual relationships with men and she developed a bad reputation and brought down a lot of jealousy on herself from her sisters.   (Remember in "Embassy" we learn that women who seems promiscuous were sometimes put in mental hospitals and adultery by a woman was seen as more serious than arson.)  She marries young to a man with some money, he owned a garage and wore American cowboy and western apparel.  (The roots of American country music are in Ireland, this is part of what this is referring to, it tied into the search for a home.)   As the woman gets older, has some children and loses some of her body beauty she comes to see herself as more than just a once sexually vibrant person, she becomes a poet.  She remembers hearing voices in her dreams to go to the bog to receive messages from God.   We see her life go on.  The money keeps pouring in.   She has a kind of revelation as she walks along the beach next to the sluice gate of a sewer.   There is a world in why she has this revelation walking along the beach next to the gate of a sewer, pouring its material into the ocean.   I will return to this story also in 2013.  

Larks' Eggs and Other Stories by Desmond Hogan can be purchased from Lilliput Press, the premier source for quality books from and about Ireland.

Happiness Comes From Nowhere, Shauna Gilligan's marvelous debut novel, can be found here. 

Mel u

"Subha" by Rabindranth Tagore-

"Subha" by Rabindranth Tagore (13 pages, 1918)

In July of last year I read and posted on Rabindranth Tagore's short story, "Hungry Stones".   This morning I read another wonderful and very moving story of total isolation and loneliness by Tagore, "Subha".

Tagore (1861 to 1941) was born in Kolkata, Indian into a family whose wealth and life style can now only be seen in movies.    His father owned an estate so huge that at one point in his life Tagore traveled through it on a luxurious barge and was met on the river bank by tenants paying token rents to him.   Tagore was raised mostly by servants as his mother died young and his father was very busy administrating the vast estates he owned.   Tagore was educated in classical Indian literature and at age eight began to write poetry and ended up reshaping the Bengali Language.   Later in his life he founded a school and devoted himself entirely to his writing and teachings.   His moral authority became so great that he was able to write the national anthems of both India and Bangladesh, give Gandhi the title of Mahatma (teacher),  and  had a status as a moral leader on a par with  Gandi.   He traveled to the west and met William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound and other notable literary figures.   This was in a period when western writers were fascinated by Indian thinkers and Yeats wrote the preface for one of his first translations in English.   He wrote largely in Bengali.   His body of work is a great literary treasure.

"Subha" is near heartbreaking tale of the isolation of a deaf and mute girl.   Subha is born into a financially comfortable family.   She is the youngest of three daughters.    Her mother feels a sense of shame she never overcomes when the family realizes that Subha will never be able to speak or hear.   In the culture of the time congenital impairments of children were seen as sign of a moral defect or depravity in the mother.    Her mother tries to love her but she can barely force the emotion.   Her father loves and accepts her.   In due time her older two sisters are married to proper men and given a proper dowry.   Fiinding a husband for Subha is not so simple.   Future mother in laws fear she will give birth to children with the same impairments she has.   Subha has learned to cope as best she can within the context of her family by communicating with gestures understood only within the family.   Her only friends are the two family cows.

One day Subha meets a fisherman. It happens that the man is somehow viewed as simple.   His only interest in life is casting his fishing net.   His family has long ago accepted that he will never amount to anything.  The man appreciates her silence as talking might frighten the fish.    She comes to enjoy seeing him cast his net.   She begins to feel romantic about him.   I will quote a bit from the story to convey  a feel for the prose.

 With her large eyes wide open, she scanned their faces as though she wished to learn something. But. One afternoon in the midst of all this, as Pratap was fishing, he laughed: 'So then, Su, they have caught your bridegroom, and you are going to be married! Mind you don't forget me altogether!' Then he turned his mind again to his fishing. As a stricken doe looks in the hunter's face, asking in silent agony: 'What have ned I done to harm you?' so Subha looked at Pratap. That day she sat no longer beneath her tree. Banikantha, having finished his nap, was smoking in his bedroom when Subha dropped at his feet and burst out weeping as she gazed towards him. Banikantha tried to comfort her and his own cheek grew wet with tears.

It was settled that on the morrow they should go to Calcutta. Subha went to the cowshed to bid farewell to the comrades of her childhood. She fed them from her hand; she clasped their necks; she looked into their faces, and tears fell fast from the eyes which spoke for her. That night was the tenth of the new moon. Subha left her room, and flung herself down on her grassy couch beside the river she loved so much. It was as if she threw her arms about the Earth, her strong, silent mother, and tried to say: 'Do not let me leave you, mother. Put your arms about me, as I have put mine about you, and hold me fast.'

I found the scene in which she parts with her only friends, the two cows, very moving and very sad.   Something terrible will soon happen to Subha but I do not wish to spoil the ending.   There is a lot to be learned in this story about Indian culture and family life in the 1910s.   I recommend this story without reservation.

"Shubha" can be read Here

If you have a favorite Tagore short story please leave  comment.

I am also seeking suggestions for other short stories by Indian authors from the pre-WWII era (that can be read online)-