Variations on a Borrowed Theme

18/03/2023

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 Frank O’Connor was never shy of an opinion, and knew well what a short story should look like. You ought to be able to say, nothing that happened before this short story is of real importance, nothing that happens after it is likely to be of great importance.” (Paris Review) O’Connor saw Chekhov as a master and was always happy to explain his own methods and dictums. “If somebody tells me a good story, I’ll write it down in my four lines; that is the secret of the theme. If you make the subject of a story twelve or fourteen lines, that’s a treatment. You’ve already committed yourself to the sort of character, the sort of surroundings, and the moment you’ve committed yourself, the story is already written.” (Paris Review) It is a policy that made O’Connor successful but his reputation now seems to rest on his being an Irish writer, as if his status never expanded enough to become the sort of important short story writer who became a model, like Chekhov, Hemingway, Carver and Katherine Mansfield. If few more than O’Connor talked up what a good story should be (and his skill is undoubted) there are others who exemplified it much more in their mastery.  

    Yet were someone to ask how to sketch a story over twenty years, how to capture village life and its passing, they could find worse examples than O’Connor’s ‘A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme’. Let us apply his dictum to the tale. In four lines we could say it is about a woman who finds that the family she adopts is the family that she loves; that her own two now grown-up daughters couldn’t quite move her as the boys she adopts for money, and she realises on her deathbed how important these chosen children were. The treatment would be about how an Irish woman in a small town, now 60 whose husband passes away and needs a bit of cash, adopts first one young child and several years later another, with the locals amused and bemused by this older woman with such young kids who claimed she was doing a good deed for the world while the local see a woman short of a few bob. The boys as they grow up prove to be a handful for this rheumatic woman given to new-found worry but she can’t easily live without them and wonders how especially the younger one will survive without her as she isn’t young. The treatment brings out the vivid flavour of South West Ireland, the awareness that a woman advancing in years might not only feel short of money but still needs to offer affection, and finds that by adopting at such an advanced age it won’t be the children leaving her as much her leaving the children, as the story ends with her death. 

      If O’Connor can say, after Hemingway, that nothing of importance happened before and nothing of importance will happen after the story, we might ask how this works in the context of ‘A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme’, and how the story achieves its ironic but hardly frivolous conclusion based on such a claim? As the story begins Kate isn’t young; she is a widow with two grown-up daughters. By O’Connor’s dictum, these people aren’t really of any importance. Obviously, we might say what is unimportant to the story can be of utmost importance to the characters. Can we say of ‘The Dead’ that what happens before the night of a Christmas party is of some significance to Gretta Conroy, as she recalls a young man who courted her when she was young, and who she believes may have died because he insisted on seeing her when he was sick? We can think too of ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, as Terri speaks about her ex who took his life out of love, she says, and this is of immense import to her. Both of these incidents take place before the stories start. A chronologically oriented story would have opened on these important events but instead, James Joyce and Raymond Carver contain them within the telling of the telling: in both instances, they become important divulgences in the present and subsequently impact strongly on what would seem mundane moments: meals the character are having. We might wonder if after The Dead and after What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, things will be quite different, and we might speculate on how these revelations might impact the relationships the stories concentrate upon. 

    But let us give O’Connor the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge we are now talking about the characters and not just about the story. If in different ways Joyce and Carver’s stories are seen as such wonderful examples of the short story form, it rests perhaps on their capacity both to contain time and contract it. Joyce’s story could have been an unwieldy tale covering Gretta’s early love, her marriage to Gabriel, and their domestic life as they bring up a couple of kids. Carver’s could have been a melodramatic account of Terri and her ex Ed’s tempestuous love. Instead, unity is achieved by focusing the present on a dinner, and the past excavated by the disclosure. Even within the story’s form, we could say what happens before the story is more important than what is happening within the story’s present diegesis; without these earlier events, there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell. Equally, if they insisted on detailing these earlier events as part of their chronology, the stories would have lost their formal perfection. 

   And isn’t vital to much American theatre the event from the past that is more significant than, or at least enormously illuminates, the events of the present? In Long Day’s Journey into Night, the death of the central character’s child aged two is a catalytic event, even if it is far into the past as the play begins; in Death of a Salesman it is far from unimportant that Biff as a boy witnessed his father’s extramarital affair; and in Suddenly, Last Summer, there is Sebastien’s death that haunts the play. In Shakespearian theatre on the other hand the most important events are usually in the present: King Lear wishes to divide his kingdom amongst his three daughters; Cordelia won’t flatter her father and is denied her share; in Macbeth, the title character and his wife scheme to kill the king. If Hamlet can seem the most modern of Shakespeare's plays is it because of the importance of the past on the present; on his uncle murdering his father which happens prior to the diegesis?

    We may have proved that O’Connor’s generalisation is weak but it works very well in the context of his own work, or at least in ‘A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme’. The point of the story is that nothing of importance as happened to Kate Mahoney before her sixtieth year, as though the man she married and the two daughters she gave birth to and brought up needn’t have been hers but happened to be. If her close friend, the ‘old maid’ Hanna Dinan has gone through life childless, Kate has brought up two without it seems feeling especially motherly, and the narrator is determined to present her as a figure of robust fortitude and pragmatic purpose despite her ill- health. The narrator describes her talk as “monumental, like headstones”, while “her hands and legs were knotted with rheumatics, and she had a battered, inexpressive country woman’s face, like a butcher’s block, in which the only good feature was the eyes which looked astonishingly girlish and merry.” She is a woman whose life might seem closer to retirement than to motherhood, someone who should be putting her arthritic feet up rather than bringing children up. But the money from adopting seems the best way to keep her house and there is nothing to suggest she will be sentimental about it. Anyone who thinks herself a “respectable woman who had brought up two honest transactions of her own…” is inclined to see bringing up the children of others as very transactional indeed. A nurse, Miss Hegarty, reckons she shouldn’t take a child from the local authorities because the money will be poor and the task demanding. Better, she says, to find a girl from a good family who has fallen into disrepute and she will get good stock and more money. And so she comes to adopt the first of the two children, Jimmy Mahoney and years later, James.

    One way of looking at the tale is to see O’Connor blending two truisms: life begins at forty, and that you can choose your friends but not your family. The age is upped to sixty and the second commonplace turned into one about choosing your adopted children as you cannot choose your own. The irony rests partly on the honest transactions proving less emotionally important to Kate than the ones she gets paid to have. One may ask whether this is because they are two boys as opposed to two girls, and that Kate may be a lonelier figure at sixty than she was when she was half that age but that would be to generate a degree of speculation that O’Connor’s story doesn’t quite entertain. This may rest on his wish to keep the story light and engaging rather than weighty and problematic, but the writer does sometimes hint at the sort of yearnings Kate has for Jimmy that appeared never to have been there for her husband and her daughters Nora and Molly. We may wonder in certain descriptions what sort of dynamics sit behind these familial relationships hastily offered in the first paragraph as the two girls are described as ‘gentle and timid’, especially when Molly is a couple of pages later described as “…a beautiful and haggard woman.” We might wonder where she got her beauty from since it seems not to come from her mother, and if from her father does that suggest Kate married for love? We needn’t become too genetically focused, nor too presumptuous over what draws people to each other. But if a story tells us of a beautiful daughter after describing a woman with no attractive features at all except for the eyes, we might muse over this anomalous beauty, and may start thinking about the husband who has been presented as of no significance. And what about her haggard look, is that the difficulties of a childhood with a shouty mother, and a husband who is never there (at least in the story), or has the death of her father affected her more than the death of her husband affected Kate? If it seems one is speculating too far we might just as readily say that O’Connor has contextualised too little, that words like beautiful and haggard might make us pause longer than the writer demands, even if the phrasing may insist upon it. 

    We may wonder too if O’Connor was so worried that the story might lack what he calls the bony structure, that he moves it along at a pace too fast for the texture to be registered. Speaking of the great, nuanced and modulated writer Katherine Mansfield O’Connor says he admires her work but adds, “She sees that Chekhov apparently constructs a story without episodic interest, so she decides that if she constructs a story without episodic interest it will be equally good— it isn’t.” “What she forgets,” O’Connor reckons, “is that Chekhov had a long career as a journalist, as a writer for comic magazines, writing squibs, writing vaudevilles, and he had learned the art very, very early of maintaining interest, of creating a bony structure. It’s only concealed in the later work. They [writers influenced by Chekhov] think they can do without that bony structure, but they’re all wrong.” (Paris Review) However, if he criticises Mansfield for not quite being Chekov, someone else may criticise O’Connor for not being Mansfield let alone Chekhov. The flesh isn’t willing even if the bony structure is present. We may be mildly moved by this woman who finds how much she can love in her elderly years, and maybe a little saddened especially for Molly who sees her mother’s devotion to the lads, but when he offers near the end of the story, through Molly’s perspective, that “how could a woman who was already old take the things the world had thrown away and out of them fashion a new family, dearer to her than the old and finer than any she had known”, we may wish that the heft in such a claim had been matched by the fine fabric of the story. Instead, it feels like a light weave; a demonstration, perhaps, rather than an illumination. A pleasant story about Irish folk; a claim we would hardly make about Chekhov’s explorations of Russian life.

 

      

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Variations on a Borrowed Theme

 Frank O’Connor was never shy of an opinion, and knew well what a short story should look like. You ought to be able to say, nothing that happened before this short story is of real importance, nothing that happens after it is likely to be of great importance.” (Paris Review) O’Connor saw Chekhov as a master and was always happy to explain his own methods and dictums. “If somebody tells me a good story, I’ll write it down in my four lines; that is the secret of the theme. If you make the subject of a story twelve or fourteen lines, that’s a treatment. You’ve already committed yourself to the sort of character, the sort of surroundings, and the moment you’ve committed yourself, the story is already written.” (Paris Review) It is a policy that made O’Connor successful but his reputation now seems to rest on his being an Irish writer, as if his status never expanded enough to become the sort of important short story writer who became a model, like Chekhov, Hemingway, Carver and Katherine Mansfield. If few more than O’Connor talked up what a good story should be (and his skill is undoubted) there are others who exemplified it much more in their mastery.  

    Yet were someone to ask how to sketch a story over twenty years, how to capture village life and its passing, they could find worse examples than O’Connor’s ‘A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme’. Let us apply his dictum to the tale. In four lines we could say it is about a woman who finds that the family she adopts is the family that she loves; that her own two now grown-up daughters couldn’t quite move her as the boys she adopts for money, and she realises on her deathbed how important these chosen children were. The treatment would be about how an Irish woman in a small town, now 60 whose husband passes away and needs a bit of cash, adopts first one young child and several years later another, with the locals amused and bemused by this older woman with such young kids who claimed she was doing a good deed for the world while the local see a woman short of a few bob. The boys as they grow up prove to be a handful for this rheumatic woman given to new-found worry but she can’t easily live without them and wonders how especially the younger one will survive without her as she isn’t young. The treatment brings out the vivid flavour of South West Ireland, the awareness that a woman advancing in years might not only feel short of money but still needs to offer affection, and finds that by adopting at such an advanced age it won’t be the children leaving her as much her leaving the children, as the story ends with her death. 

      If O’Connor can say, after Hemingway, that nothing of importance happened before and nothing of importance will happen after the story, we might ask how this works in the context of ‘A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme’, and how the story achieves its ironic but hardly frivolous conclusion based on such a claim? As the story begins Kate isn’t young; she is a widow with two grown-up daughters. By O’Connor’s dictum, these people aren’t really of any importance. Obviously, we might say what is unimportant to the story can be of utmost importance to the characters. Can we say of ‘The Dead’ that what happens before the night of a Christmas party is of some significance to Gretta Conroy, as she recalls a young man who courted her when she was young, and who she believes may have died because he insisted on seeing her when he was sick? We can think too of ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, as Terri speaks about her ex who took his life out of love, she says, and this is of immense import to her. Both of these incidents take place before the stories start. A chronologically oriented story would have opened on these important events but instead, James Joyce and Raymond Carver contain them within the telling of the telling: in both instances, they become important divulgences in the present and subsequently impact strongly on what would seem mundane moments: meals the character are having. We might wonder if after The Dead and after What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, things will be quite different, and we might speculate on how these revelations might impact the relationships the stories concentrate upon. 

    But let us give O’Connor the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge we are now talking about the characters and not just about the story. If in different ways Joyce and Carver’s stories are seen as such wonderful examples of the short story form, it rests perhaps on their capacity both to contain time and contract it. Joyce’s story could have been an unwieldy tale covering Gretta’s early love, her marriage to Gabriel, and their domestic life as they bring up a couple of kids. Carver’s could have been a melodramatic account of Terri and her ex Ed’s tempestuous love. Instead, unity is achieved by focusing the present on a dinner, and the past excavated by the disclosure. Even within the story’s form, we could say what happens before the story is more important than what is happening within the story’s present diegesis; without these earlier events, there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell. Equally, if they insisted on detailing these earlier events as part of their chronology, the stories would have lost their formal perfection. 

   And isn’t vital to much American theatre the event from the past that is more significant than, or at least enormously illuminates, the events of the present? In Long Day’s Journey into Night, the death of the central character’s child aged two is a catalytic event, even if it is far into the past as the play begins; in Death of a Salesman it is far from unimportant that Biff as a boy witnessed his father’s extramarital affair; and in Suddenly, Last Summer, there is Sebastien’s death that haunts the play. In Shakespearian theatre on the other hand the most important events are usually in the present: King Lear wishes to divide his kingdom amongst his three daughters; Cordelia won’t flatter her father and is denied her share; in Macbeth, the title character and his wife scheme to kill the king. If Hamlet can seem the most modern of Shakespeare's plays is it because of the importance of the past on the present; on his uncle murdering his father which happens prior to the diegesis?

    We may have proved that O’Connor’s generalisation is weak but it works very well in the context of his own work, or at least in ‘A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme’. The point of the story is that nothing of importance as happened to Kate Mahoney before her sixtieth year, as though the man she married and the two daughters she gave birth to and brought up needn’t have been hers but happened to be. If her close friend, the ‘old maid’ Hanna Dinan has gone through life childless, Kate has brought up two without it seems feeling especially motherly, and the narrator is determined to present her as a figure of robust fortitude and pragmatic purpose despite her ill- health. The narrator describes her talk as “monumental, like headstones”, while “her hands and legs were knotted with rheumatics, and she had a battered, inexpressive country woman’s face, like a butcher’s block, in which the only good feature was the eyes which looked astonishingly girlish and merry.” She is a woman whose life might seem closer to retirement than to motherhood, someone who should be putting her arthritic feet up rather than bringing children up. But the money from adopting seems the best way to keep her house and there is nothing to suggest she will be sentimental about it. Anyone who thinks herself a “respectable woman who had brought up two honest transactions of her own…” is inclined to see bringing up the children of others as very transactional indeed. A nurse, Miss Hegarty, reckons she shouldn’t take a child from the local authorities because the money will be poor and the task demanding. Better, she says, to find a girl from a good family who has fallen into disrepute and she will get good stock and more money. And so she comes to adopt the first of the two children, Jimmy Mahoney and years later, James.

    One way of looking at the tale is to see O’Connor blending two truisms: life begins at forty, and that you can choose your friends but not your family. The age is upped to sixty and the second commonplace turned into one about choosing your adopted children as you cannot choose your own. The irony rests partly on the honest transactions proving less emotionally important to Kate than the ones she gets paid to have. One may ask whether this is because they are two boys as opposed to two girls, and that Kate may be a lonelier figure at sixty than she was when she was half that age but that would be to generate a degree of speculation that O’Connor’s story doesn’t quite entertain. This may rest on his wish to keep the story light and engaging rather than weighty and problematic, but the writer does sometimes hint at the sort of yearnings Kate has for Jimmy that appeared never to have been there for her husband and her daughters Nora and Molly. We may wonder in certain descriptions what sort of dynamics sit behind these familial relationships hastily offered in the first paragraph as the two girls are described as ‘gentle and timid’, especially when Molly is a couple of pages later described as “…a beautiful and haggard woman.” We might wonder where she got her beauty from since it seems not to come from her mother, and if from her father does that suggest Kate married for love? We needn’t become too genetically focused, nor too presumptuous over what draws people to each other. But if a story tells us of a beautiful daughter after describing a woman with no attractive features at all except for the eyes, we might muse over this anomalous beauty, and may start thinking about the husband who has been presented as of no significance. And what about her haggard look, is that the difficulties of a childhood with a shouty mother, and a husband who is never there (at least in the story), or has the death of her father affected her more than the death of her husband affected Kate? If it seems one is speculating too far we might just as readily say that O’Connor has contextualised too little, that words like beautiful and haggard might make us pause longer than the writer demands, even if the phrasing may insist upon it. 

    We may wonder too if O’Connor was so worried that the story might lack what he calls the bony structure, that he moves it along at a pace too fast for the texture to be registered. Speaking of the great, nuanced and modulated writer Katherine Mansfield O’Connor says he admires her work but adds, “She sees that Chekhov apparently constructs a story without episodic interest, so she decides that if she constructs a story without episodic interest it will be equally good— it isn’t.” “What she forgets,” O’Connor reckons, “is that Chekhov had a long career as a journalist, as a writer for comic magazines, writing squibs, writing vaudevilles, and he had learned the art very, very early of maintaining interest, of creating a bony structure. It’s only concealed in the later work. They [writers influenced by Chekhov] think they can do without that bony structure, but they’re all wrong.” (Paris Review) However, if he criticises Mansfield for not quite being Chekov, someone else may criticise O’Connor for not being Mansfield let alone Chekhov. The flesh isn’t willing even if the bony structure is present. We may be mildly moved by this woman who finds how much she can love in her elderly years, and maybe a little saddened especially for Molly who sees her mother’s devotion to the lads, but when he offers near the end of the story, through Molly’s perspective, that “how could a woman who was already old take the things the world had thrown away and out of them fashion a new family, dearer to her than the old and finer than any she had known”, we may wish that the heft in such a claim had been matched by the fine fabric of the story. Instead, it feels like a light weave; a demonstration, perhaps, rather than an illumination. A pleasant story about Irish folk; a claim we would hardly make about Chekhov’s explorations of Russian life.

 

      


© Tony McKibbin