Maura Laverty and sexual desire.

clearclassicsblog post 44.

‘If I swam a mile in the canal I wouldn’t feel clean again,’ is Mary’s terse verdict on her wedding night with her repellent second husband, in Maura Laverty’s novel Alone We Embark (1943). The ever-wise Gran in Never No More: the story of a lost village (1942) describes sex to her grand-daughter as ‘being lifted out of this world and into the next in the arms of someone you love more than yourself.’ Though she insists that only in marriage can this pleasure be enjoyed, the claim that sex is, or should be, enjoyable for women, comes up a lot in Laverty’s novels.

My first blog post was about Maura Laverty’s cookery writing, and I wrote about her fourth novel, set in the Dublin slums, some weeks later, but today I want to explore how she wrote about women and sexual pleasure. Laverty’s four novels for adults (listed below) were written and published in a flurry of creativity in the 1940s. Two of them were banned but even the ones which were not banned, were never popular in Ireland. Growing up in an extended family where every house’s bookshelves were crammed to overflowing with all kinds of books, by Irish and international authors, I never heard of Laverty’s Never No More until Virago republished it in 1985 and I stumbled across it in O’Mahony’s of Limerick. I devoured it at one gulp and it did the rounds of all my friends, my mother, my aunts (who had never heard of it either) until it fell apart. Eventually I came across several first and second hardback editions of it. It remains in my top 5 favourite books of all time. It was not banned, and neither was its sequel, the sparkling No More Than Human (1944) which continues the story of Delia Scully, chronicling her adventures in Spain, closely based on Laverty’s own life. I found a first edition for this for 20p in the dumps outside a charity shop, although Virago reissued it too.

Rathangan, Co.Kildare, where Maura Kelly (Laverty was her married name) grew up, was recognisably fictionalised as Ballyderrig in Laverty’s first novel, so recognisably,in fact, that the novel was burned publicly there. Laverty used real people’s names and stories in it, an unforgivable act that can only be explained by a mistaken belief on her part that people in country towns don’t read books. It was never banned, though, so why wasn’t it more popular in Ireland, outside Rathangan where people had no reason to object to it? I think it was because it described with rather too detailed relish, conditions of rural life that Irish people were on the run from and hoping to leave behind them in those modernising times – indoor plumbing, fleas, Travellers and beggars, ‘consumption’ and other diseases, rambling houses, ‘cures’, corner-boys, a poltergeist. Did the fact that it was indulgent about sexual transgression also make it unpopular? To take just one story from the book, Sheila is forced to marry Frank, and goes to the altar pregnant with her lover, Red Connolly’s, child. When the baby arrives after six months even the slow-witted Frank begins to have suspicions, but the doctor

…who had a great feeling for romance, rose nobly to the occasion. ‘What are you complaining of, man?..that it didn’t take your wife as long as it does any other woman? That’s because she’s a fine quick woman….In all my experience I’ve only seen a woman in a thousand that can do it.’

Frank subsequently dies, and Sheila and Red marry and emigrate with their child. In Laverty’s novels, sexual license is punished only when it is dirty, disorderly or coercive, or when it hurts good people. Sarah Gorry, the local sex worker in Never No More, does washing in the houses of all the women of the neighbourhood because she is ‘as correct in manner and conversation as any woman living.’ A slovenly and sly character in No More Than Human (set in Spain) is despised for being sexually active, but Rosario, a Galician seamstress who entertains her lover while her plasterer husband is out all day, is generous and kind to Delia, and a good seamstress. An adulterous middle-class character in Lift Up Your Gates (1946), Shiela (sic – unusual spelling), is portrayed unsympathetically not necessarily because she is cheating on her husband who is away fighting in the Far East, but because she calls the guards on the tenement-dwellers when they have a party, and because she deceives herself that her relationship with her inamorato is love rather than simple sexual desire. It is the self-deception, not the desire that is disapproved of: in the same novel, Rosie breaks it off with Mattie Herlihy, a grocer’s assistant, because he says ‘a cold goodbye to me every night as if I hadn’t a mouth on me’ – he never kisses her. (Not every woman likes kissing though, and one very practical mother-of-five in Never No More is fond of boasting that she has never been kissed in her life.) The ‘go-boys’ or corner-boys in Never No More are appalled to learn, from the maid in his house, that the doctor and his wife sleep in separate rooms, and they ask the maid to place a large plant pot strategically on the landing to see if one of them goes walking to the other room at night. They are rewarded when they see the doctor’s wife with a bandage on her shin the next day, and glad that they don’t have to ‘wrong the doctor’ by believing his marriage to be unconsummated. The go-boys, unemployed unmarried men of all ages who prop up street corners, are a kind of moral commentary on the events of the town, and people who get married too late, who cheat on long-standing boyfriends or girlfriends, or who remarry too soon after the death of a spouse, are ‘scrawed’ – pelted with scraws (sods of earth) or ‘blown’ – treated to insultingly loud sounds ‘from the very effective instruments which could be made by knocking the bottoms out of porter bottles’. (This was a common form of community critique all over Europe; historians and folklorists call it ‘rough music’ or ‘charivari’).

Alone We Embark is a lot less earthy than Never No More and No More Than Human and it was probably banned because the adulterous lovers (spoiler alert) get away with their misdeeds, yet it insists upon the price as well as the pleasure of indulging sexual desire. At the start of the novel, Mary is almost engaged to the handsome and good and perfect Denis, but a group of strolling players come to the village of Tullynawlin and she falls head over heels in love with the handsome singer, Rowan. Nothing will do her but to dump Denis and marry him, but he turns out to be an untrustworthy and unfaithful husband and after a few years, he dies of TB, leaving her with a little boy, Peejay (yes, that’s how the poor child’s name is spelt). It’s a long and tortuous road for her back to Denis, which involves marrying the grasping businessman Johnny Casey, while Julia, the choric single shopkeeper and the only sensible person in the entire village, looks on helplessly. When the married Mary yields to Denis’s embraces, it is ‘woman-pity’ ( a rather strange compound word) rather than desire that moves her. She’s beyond desire at this stage. She just doesn’t want to experience its opposite – disgust. It’s a strange book with a rather abrupt, deus-ex-machina ending, as if the author suddenly got tired and decided to wrap it up. (Lift Up Your Gates, on the other hand, has an artistically appropriate ending.)

We shouldn’t be surprised, I suppose, that an Irish female writer wrote about sexual desire in the mid-twentieth century. She got away with it up to a point, but her novels – the two unbanned ones, that is – were never as popular in Ireland as they were in the English-speaking world where they sold well and went into several editions. Laverty was a highly successful popular broadcaster, journalist,cookery writer and playwright. She was also – and this is something I didn’t realise for years – a highly sophisticated and well-read media person of her time, and her descriptions of Irish life should be understood in that light. Her deceptively easy and intimate style can mislead us into thinking of her as some kind of naive genius. She was far from that, and echoes of her style and tone can be found in many British writers of her day – Mary Westmacott, Dorothy Whipple, Monica Dickens, Marghanita Laski, E.M.Delafield, even Nancy Mitford. Her depictions of female desire probably owe more to the new-found feminism espoused by literary figures of her day, than to her memories and experiences of rural and urban life. So, regarding her novels, maybe sometimes we should trust the taste of contemporaries a bit more. Maybe Laverty’s novels, urban and rural, were a bit eccentric and off-the-wall in their portrayals of Irish life. I wonder what a Spaniard would make of her portrayals of Spain in the 1920s?

Maura Laverty, Never No More: the story of a lost village (London: Longmans, Green 1942).

____________Alone We Embark (same publisher 1943).

____________No More Than Human (ditto 1944.

____________Lift Up Your Gates (ditto 1946).

….and we’re done with Maura Laverty. I’ve been writing about and thinking about this writer for nearly 30 years, and I think she and I have reached the end of the road. I will still continue to enjoy her books – looking forward to re-reading Lift Up Your Gates now – and to recommend them to people, but I have said all I want to say about her novels and her food-writing.