Larks' Eggs: New and Selected Stories Desmond Hogan Lilliput Press, ?17.99 IN 1976, two young Irishmen walked into Kenny's Bookshop on High Street in Galway with a bag containing copies of their debut works and an invoice book.
he event was so unusual that ever after (as recorded in the book Faces in a Bookshop) they were always referred to by Mrs Kenny as "the two lads". They were Neil Jordan and Desmond Hogan, and the adventurous project that they had just launched, along with Steve McDonagh and some others, was the Irish Writers' Co-operative.
At a time when few Irish writers were being published, and almost all publishers were based in England (although a number of Irishpublishers were starting to make their presence felt)and had little knowledgeof - or interest in - Irish writing, this bold gesture and declaration of independence by Jordan and Hogan had a startling impact.
I remember it as a schoolboy and it was one factor that inspired me to start the Raven Arts Press a year later. Indeed, while never a member of the Irish Writers' Co-operative, I found myself present at several of their editorial meetings, presided over by Steve McDonagh, including one where we all crowded into Neil Jordan's flat. Neil had happily allowed it to be commandeered for the occasion, and appeared for a few moments to say hello before rushing off, busy with the diverse career which had already started to claim him.
Desmond Hogan was not present that day either, having moved on in a career which, while not as high-profile as the other of Mrs Kenny's "lads", has been equally fascinating to chart. Both writers were intense harbingers of new styles and directions in Irish writing.
By 1979, Hogan's stories were being published by Hamish Hamilton, in the volume The Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea, and over the next nine years he was to publish three novels and three further collections of short stories. All were widely acclaimed, although they were not without their detractors.
This new and long overdue retrospective selection contains two pieces from that first 1979 collection. In Foils, a youth in a small Irish town confides his dream of being a writer to an elderly spinster who befriends him.
Initially she scoffs: "'Don't be silly' . . . her face squeezing up in scorn." The idea seems an impossible pipe-dreamin such a place. When the youth does make an impacton the lives around himit is because he has attempted suicide, which to hermind seems an extraordinary and unheard-of thing inthat town.
Ireland has changed since 1979. This year Kenny's bookshop will start a new life, existing only in cyberspace, as a virtual bookshop. Most Irish small towns now have at least one writer to whom writing seems a realisable dream and even a career. And amid all the shiny new modernity, every small Irish town unfortunately also has dozens of young male suicides.
Irish writing has changed and become internationally popular. Among the first really to effect that change and awaken interest in Britain and America was Hogan, with that quick succession of books in his unique style. And yet over the past decade, Hogan has very much retreated from that high public profile - producing fewer books and in a far more fractured style.
This is why this collection of 22 previously published stories and 12 generally very short new pieces is a welcome chance to re-evaluate his work. Some of the earlier stories are true classics that stretch and change the tradition of Irish short-story writing: the reader occasionally (as in Lebanon Lodge) feels he has undergone the imaginative journey of an entire multi-generational novel in just10 pages.
Although the stories in Larks' Eggs have been published over four decades there are strong overlaps and links, almost as if some of the new works are deliberately revisiting, and reflecting on, earlier themes and incidents.
In the landmark and remarkable 1989 story The Mourning Thief, the central character remembers a cherished moment when he visited the National Gallery in Dublin with his father and encountered the curator (the unnamed Thomas McGreevy).
The 2005 story Pictures takes this exact samememory and repaints it in vivid new colours. Although Hogan hints at McGreevy's friendship with Beckett,another great friendshipin McGreevy's life wasJack Yeats.
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These later Hogan stories - where images have floated loose from the earlier, more linear narration to readlike prose poems createdfrom winding and oftendeliberately confusing sentences - at times resemble the later Jack B Yeats paintings with those great (if occasionally perplexing) cluster-bursts of rich colour and startling images that stand in sharp contrast to the literalness of his early paintings.
I love, and am fascinated by, the later Jack Yeats paintings, but I confess that I understand the earlier ones better. I have to say that I rather feel the same about Hogan's fictions (or "narratives", as the blurb calls the later ones). Those earlier stories, such as The Mourning Thief and Airedale, are deeply personal and rooted in Hogan's own experience growing up in an Ireland which spiritually and sexually had little room for him.
But he also used those stories to comment politicallyon Ireland and set out a vision of an alternative way of being Irish for someone who "hated the colours of the Irish flag. . . mixing like the yolk in abad egg."
While never in any way polemical, he dissected a society where "Irish family memory in general could not afford to go back very far." In one story, Lebanon Lodge, sets in the 1930s, Irish Catholics are jealous of Irish Jews because of their positiveness, and some Irish Jews become vehement anti-Semitic Blueshirts as a form of native camouflage.
There was the sense of a man both creating his own imaginative space and engaging with "the many souls born out of his father's statelet". The new stories are awash with startling images but there is a sense of the writer having retreated far more into a purely personal world, which this reader (perhaps through a lack of intelligence or perception) felt less engaged with and more excluded from, while perpetually being challenged by Hogan's mastery of language and his ability to cause an image to open suddenly like a bright shaft of light.
Readers may be divided over whether they preferthe old or new stories, but what nobody can be in any doubt of is that this is a deeply challenging and rewarding writer who - like the late Francis Stuart, who is quoted on the back cover - hasdismantled and reassembled his own experience over and over to flesh out new meanings, new insights and vividnew directions.
