I am a long-time fan of the Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty, probably for 20 years, given that I have such a strong favorable feeling about Grace Notes which I read sometime before 2006 (in the pre-blog days). I decided to try his short stories, thinking that his book Cal, set during The Troubles might be too disturbing for me at the moment. It turns out that almost all the stories involve a dying character, a character whose mother has dementia, or, in one case, a person called out during the night to make a plaster death mask.
Occasionally MacLaverty distracts you from the grim facts of life with passages like this: “He loved the way the trees grew straight upwards, regardless of the tilt of the land. As if they took their orders from the centre of the earth and not from the slant of the forest floor.” That called to my mind a couple of trees in my neighborhood that grow straight up from a steep hillside.
One of the stories, “The End of Days: Vienna 1918” is as sad and painful as you can imagine. An artist is concerned about his pregnant wife who is feverish and growing weaker. Despite having plenty of money, they are cold and hungry because no food and no coal are available for purchase. it sinks in that it is influenza she has and he tries to reassure her that most people recover from it. He mentions his mentor the artist Gustav Klimt who had died of influenza in the 1918 epidemic. An important clue for me was that the artist had become more respectable since his marriage to Edi, and that he had been called a “purveyor of pornography” and when we learn his name was Egon, I realized this was the story of the death of Egon Schiele and his pregnant wife Edi. It was interesting to come to the realization that this story was about a historical figure. I wondered if other stories were about historical figures that I did not know.
The book ended with a story of a man with septicemia in County Derry in 1942 who was saved at the last moment by an American Army doctor with access to “antibacterial juice,” as he called it, discovered by Fleming that would become mass produced by Americans. Along with the happy outcome of a man’s life unexpectedly saved, came the display of American racism toward Black people, in this case, the Black soldiers were disparaged by the American doctor. And the ugly dismissal of Catholics by the Protestant Irish doctor’s family, with specific reference to the man saved by the penicillin. It was a nice touch that the American doctor was Catholic.
You might think the title story was about what writers have to face each day, and while the main character was a writer whose wife had died three years before, the blank pages had a surprising use. When his wife’s friend came to visit to help him out, she takes a look at his itchy ankles. He puts blank pages on the floor, “carpet bombing” the front room. Later he sees a black speck which disappears “as if by magic.” Did I mention that he had a cat?
Bernard MacLaverty, Blank Pages: And Other Stories, W.W. Norton, 2022, 272 pages (I read the Kindle version).