"Like a Homing Bird to Its Nest": Irish Writers and Mid-Century U.S. Magazines

Abstract

"Like a Homing Bird to Its Nest":Irish Writers and Mid-Century U.S. Magazines Sinéad Moynihan (bio) In March 1954 the Irish writer, cook, and radio personality Maura Laverty wrote to her U.S. agent Helen Strauss at the William Morris Agency. Explaining that she enjoyed personal connections with the editors of particular U.S. magazines, Laverty requested that she continue to send stories directly to those editors rather than through Strauss. In the letter Laverty uses a particularly suggestive turn-of-phrase: There are a few markets in America on which I have concentrated. Occasionally, I write something which I feel is tailored for them—and, sure enough, when I send it off, it wings straight to their pages like a homing bird to its nest. The editors concerned are my very good friends—Betty Finnin of "Woman's Day," Father Ralph Gorman of "The Sign," Anne Einselen of "the [Ladies' Home] Journal."1 Laverty's framing of a given story as "a homing bird" winging its way to a U.S. magazine nest raises provocative questions about how we conceive of Irish literature published beyond the borders of the nation-state. How are we to theorize work written by home-based Irish writers primarily for U.S. readers? How are we to understand the ways in which Irish writers exploited the commercial possibilities of their work in a U.S. marketplace? The history of mid-twentieth-century Irish literature might look very different indeed if reoriented around a "home" comprised of the pages of U.S. magazines. [End Page 311] This article focuses on Laverty's relationship with Woman's Day, a "store-distributed" monthly magazine sold exclusively at the A&P (The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company) grocery stores in the United States. Alongside British and American writers such as Mary Norton, Rumer Godden, Shirley Jackson, and Dodie Smith, Laverty was one of the magazine's most prolific contributors of fiction in the mid-twentieth century, publishing nineteen stories and an autobiographical essay in its pages between 1949 and 1958. Other Irish writers who appeared in Woman's Day include Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor, and Bryan Mahon.2 I read Laverty's Woman's Day stories in the context of changes in the art of homemaking occurring in the decades after World War II—particularly in relation to domestic purchasing and preparation of food. Social historians note how the rise of labor-saving appliances and convenience foods in the United States was accompanied by doubts that they "could really deliver on their promises of freedom."3 Laverty's stories of Irish village life, many of which link romance with food consumption, thus enabled Woman's Day readers to partake in a fantasy of "old-fashioned" homemaking. Yet as this Irish author skillfully negotiated the tensions that animated the postwar U.S. kitchen, her fiction neither eschewed convenience nor expressed disdain toward readers who took domestic shortcuts. In making the above argument, I draw attention to the truly heterogeneous U.S. venues in which mid-century Irish writers placed their work. The relationships that Frank O'Connor, Maeve Brennan, and Mary Lavin enjoyed with the New Yorker magazine—along with, to a lesser extent, Brian Friel, Benedict Kiely, and John McGahern—continue to attract scholarly attention.4 Heather Ingman notes that [End Page 312] "the number of Irish writers published with the magazine raises the question of the extent to which the editorial policies of the New Yorker affected the shape of the Irish short story during this period."5 The New Yorker, however, was just the tip of the iceberg, for an exponential growth in Irish writers' contributions to a wide variety of U.S. magazines occurred between 1940 and 1970. From the pulps (Argosy) to the so-called "smart" magazines (American Mercury, New Yorker, Esquire); from the famous weeklies (Collier's, Saturday Evening Post) to the national monthlies (Atlantic, Harper's); from high-end fashion (Vogue, Harper's Bazaar) to women's service magazines (Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, Good Housekeeping); from special-interest magazines (Holiday, Mademoiselle) to Catholic periodicals (The Sign, Ave Maria, The Critic, St. Jude), Irish writers were publishing...