Recent Irish Novels [1]
by Katharine Tynan
Originally published in Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Volume 9, No.36, December, 1920
NO one can say that in the years following the War Irish publishers have been unaware of their duty to Irish letters. The firms already established have been producing lavishly; new firms have sprung up. Dublin has been having a little revival all of her own. Young writers have been given a hearing, whereas in England, where the demand governs the supply, they would have been sent away sorrowing. There are signs that this generosity of production is coming to at least a pause: labour unrest and the cost of production are freezing or about to freeze the genial current of the Irish publishers' souls.
If these signs mean anything one can only be grateful for the writers who found a hearing during the plentiful days. Perhaps it may be that less fiction is being produced. There is a long difference between the lyrical impulse, which produces the brief sudden song in days of greatest stress, and the steady design to write a novel. Most of our young novelists-to-be are expending their energy in politics at the moment. And Irish readers of other than political matter must be, one thinks, fewer than ever. So this spring of tumultuous birth in the history of a people may be a very cold and deathly winter to the creative faculty in literature.
I do not think that any of the younger writers of recent years, with the exception of Mr. Brinsley Macnamara, have produced anything big, or promising bigness, in the way of the novel though there has been a good deal of interesting work. The impulse towards the novel has been nothing like so widespread and so eager as the impulses towards poetry and the drama which preceded it. Indeed one might say that these impulses are always with us. A young Irish writer, Mr. Eimar O'Duffy, has made one of his characters say that the modern Irish writer is lazy, because his output is in small plays and small poems. He himself has written a first novel as long as "Vanity Fair." There is some truth in what he says. The brief, sudden, sharp appeal of the poem, the play, the speech, are more to the Irish intellectual liking than the spadework of the novel. The Irish novel, as it stands, is the creation of the Anglo-Irish rather than the Celtic-Irish writer: Irishmen have not yet taken, except in scattered instances, to the writing of the novel.
In my own judgment of Mr. Brinsley Macnamara I set my hopes of him as a novelist less on the novel he has written, i.e., The Valley of the Squinting Windows than on the half-novel, The Clanking of Chains, which the writer has taken as a medium for expressing his own political passions and revulsions, and for telling the story of Sinn Fein as it rose upon the ashes of the Constitutional Movement. The Valley of the Squinting Windows is a very dreary book. Its outlook on life is distorted. Not a flower grows in it but is predestined to the hoof of the beast. It belongs to the class of book which used to be called "powerful"; and the adjective, often enough, covered no more than a morbid purview. But this would not be true of The Valley of the Squinting Windows, violently ugly and depressing as that book often is, because behind it are real passion and sincerity. The sharp cruelty and malevolence are never as depressing as, for example, the unwholesomeness of Mr. Eimar O'Duffy's school boys and young men. Mr. Macnamara's novel is written in so violent a reaction against cruelty and base-mindedness that he becomes cruel and misjudging himself. You read, in fact, feeling that Mr. Macnamara's window squints very badly indeed. No place and no people could ever be so hopelessly base as he makes the inhabitants of Garradrimna and Tullanahogue, with the exception of those two victims of the Furies, the innocent two, who flee through the pages of the book predestined to disgrace and despair. Even the prototype of books of this character, The House with the Green Shutters, has more compunction in it, more pity, than Mr. Macnamara's terrible first book. This human tragedy, unlike that other, leaves one without tears and without hope.
But it is sincere and poignantly felt; and the havoc and degradation of the human soul is drawn with a ruthless power. There never could have been such places as Garradrimna and Tullanahogue outside Hell, because there is no unrelieved blackness in any human community, least of all in Ireland; indeed John Brennan and Rebecca Kerr and Father Considine are too white to exist in a community of such appalling peasants as Mr. Macnamara creates; there must have been more of their sort, unless innocence is as much of a freak in the world as a white blackbird.
Personally, I read The Valley of the Squinting Windows in a mood of distaste and protest. I read The Clanking of Chains with an absorption that could not lay it down. No novel was ever less of a novel than this. There is an absurd heroine upon whom Mr. Macnamara has wasted no time. She is just a puppet, so shadowy and so poor that one might suspect Mr. Macnamara of being a woman-hater, if it were not for the memory of Rebecca Kerr. The absurdly-named Mirandolina is hardly worth a man's consideration, even in playtime: but she does not exist; she never takes shape; The Clanking of Chains is a novel without a heroine.
Not so Michael Dempsey. On this hero Mr. Macnamara has lavished all his skill and all his heart. He is profoundly human and convincing--this shop-boy visionary, against the background of whose mind move kings and heroes, patriots and martyrs, while he is selling sugar and soap across the counter of Marcus Flynn's shop. As a profound and intimate study of the mind of Sinn Fein, the altogether new mind which has come to the youth of Ireland, this study of Michael Dempsey will have, I believe, a great historical value. To my mind, nothing has been written like it: it is absolutely a revelation. Can young men such as he, one asks oneself, in other circumstances have been shouting for the Parliamentary Party and receiving Mr. Asquith with frenzied manifestations of delight? Perhaps they would have been standing aside. Perhaps they, or those like them, were standing aside, with profound dissatisfaction, during the more than twenty dead years between the death of Parnell and the creation of the Volunteers. Perhaps the curious admiration in which Sinn Fein holds Carson, is due to the fact that he showed the way to bring back a new soul into Ireland.
The Clanking of Chains is a reaction from the smug self-satisfaction to which so many generations of Irishmen, since the ridiculous thing came in with O'Connell, have subscribed or pretended to subscribe. It reached its apex in the latter years of the Party's domination, and it had brought a new face into Ireland. It is a most curious thing to contrast a newspaper print of a group of Town Councillors, or some other corporate body, of the first decade of the century with a similar group of Sinn Fein representatives. The former are smug, flaccid, exuding self-satisfaction, middle-aged and elderly men of a bourgeois type: the latter, lean, dark, eager, longhaired, often very handsome in the manner of a poet, earnest, with an almost undue predominance of forehead. Perhaps the followers of the Party only pretended to believe what they said about Ireland and the Irish: we are a shrewd and a humorous people, and perhaps many of these gentlemen had their tongues in their checks when they claimed the immunity of the Irish race from all human weaknesses. The idealist, but profoundly practical, Sinn Fein young men would hardly claim as much, though they might with more justice; but still one gets the backwash of it in the newspapers and from certain platforms.
Reaction has made Mr. Macnamara too bitter. He is illogical; for, having made Michael Dempsey an idealist of the finest type, he gives him for only companions a drunkard and a madman: all the rest are like a pack of wolves to tear him from his pedestal and destroy him and his passionate idealism together. Ballycullen is, as were Garradrimna and Tullanahogue, entirely, or almost entirely, sottish, evil-minded, canting, vulgar, envious, and debased; which is beyond the possibilities. In the last chapters even the Volunteers are no better than the gombeen man and his crew. This is entirely wrong and warped and leaves one with a sense of Mr. Macnamara's having his hand against every man. His bitterness flows over like a sea. He forgets his past admiration for the Volunteers, and they make but a sorry end, an end which on the face of it is impossible. If Michael Dempsey had lifted his Fiery Cross in any Ballycullen in all Ireland, he would have found at least a score of followers. But for the rest of it the book depicts with great power the class which had political influence in Ireland under the Parliamentary Party. It could hardly have been written of England: it might have been written of France. The gombeen man is a type common to both countries, as is the village miser who accumulates money for the passion of hoarding it, and cares not at whose expense he grows rich. The unctuous person who turns politics to his own purposes is or was scattered up and down Ireland. To deny his existence, in a country where the ideal truly flourishes, where the people largely are gentle and courteous, high-minded and unselfish, is merely foolish. High lights and shadows are necessary in a picture; and without black, white would be a cold uniformity.
One complains of Mr. Macnamara that he gives black for a background rather than white cr rose-colour or emerald green. Reaction and despair overspread his world. These things will pass as he grows older perhaps, and he will learn that ideals are compatible with success. In his books the idealist is born to destruction, but one doubts that the whole world is ready to cast a stone at the ideal. The evidence is all against it. There must be a great many idealists in Ireland to-day. Mr. Macnamara finds none in Ballycullen except, to set against Marcus Flynn and Thomas Cooney, Kevin Shanaghan and Conor Carbery, the drunkard and the madman, through whom God speaks. But warped as he is there is generosity. The passionate indignation covers the soldiers who come back to the unfriendliness of Ballycullen, and John Redmond cast down and meanly abused. There are wonderful passages. Of the soldiers:
"'Isn't this getting to be a bloody awful place,' they would say, one to another, as they stood lonely by the corner. There they would be, strange aliens with frightened eyes, trying to express themselves in the jagged jargon of hell which was their only acquisition from the Great War. . . They somehow always appeared draggled and forlorn, all mud and blood, as they came into Ballycullen and into the pubs. They might have a few pounds saved from the money they got from passing through hell, and immediately they would fall into the hands of the corner-boys of Ballycullen; there might be a few quiet days in the attempt lo win oblivion and blindness from appalling memories and horrid sights. Then a fight, maybe, with one of the corner-boys, and blood drawn in the muck of the streets, and shouts and the re-whooping of half-frightened, half-savage war-cries from Ypres and Bethune, with Sergeant Leonard suddenly coming sweating amongst them to quell the noise."
The Clanking of Chains will displease many people. The casting out of Michael Dempsey and some virulent passages on the Volunteers of Ballycullen suggest that the Volunteers had not yet revealed themselves to the eye of the writer. To read this book is to thank Heaven that the day is past in Ireland when the publican was king, but the publican was king in an unbelievable manner when Michael Dempsey was cast out of Ballycullen. But perhaps this was antecedent to our days, when the Volunteers lay upon themselves a self-denying ordinance and observe it to admiration.
To turn from this book to Mr. St. John Ervine's Foolish Lovers is to turn from something big in the making, still somewhat chaotic and libellously dark in the shading, to a calm and secure accomplishment. The Foolish Lovers is a delightful book. It is wise, it is witty, it is tender: the author takes infinite pains and his details build up reality for the reader. John, the Ulsterman is, I think, a triumph, naif, opinionated, obstinate, forceful, one might detest him, but one loves him. His wooing of Eleanor is a masterpiece. Something of the queer loving tenderness which depicted Mrs. Rainey in Mixed Marriage is given to the portrait of Mrs. MacDermott. It would be so easy for the hand to shake, to make a false line in this admirable bit of portraiture. A little hard and dour on the surface, but strong and sweet and loving, Mrs. MacDermott lives. One is persuaded that Mr. Ervine has a wonderful mother and gives her all she deserves. In a sense the sweetheart and the wife are subsidiary. They stand in the shadow of this masterful, uncaressing, unkissing woman, with her mother-tenderness and mother-wit just out of sight. There is something of the attitude of the Frenchman to the mother in this book of quiet achievement.
In one sense this is a very valuable book at the moment. We of the South and West are too apt, especially at a time like the present, to see all Ulster with an Orange shadow upon it. Here we have a family of Ulster Presbyterians, quiet, somewhat grim, industrious, proud, honest, with queer intense loyalties. The Celt who, in the days when talk flowed like a river, when we were orators first, accredited himself or allowed himself to be accredited with all the more remote virtues, might be amazed to find that in Ulster there were just such dreamers and visionaries, with just such unworldly loyalties as he liked to think he possessed. Uncle Matthew and Uncle John are just Presbyterian cousins of the ideal Celt. There is some very fine writing and thinking indeed in these early chapters on Ballyards and the MacDermotts: both brain and heart have gone to their making, and Mr. St. John Ervine makes us believe in them. They are too good not to be true.
He knows his London and the journalistic world well. He has a touch of Dickens at his least sentimental, of Mr. de Morgan at his best, in the London chapters; but when all is said it is by the MacDermotts and Ballyards the book lives. Let us hope that this is the beginning of a long series of Ulster Presbyterian novels to come from the pen of this most accomplished writer. He explains the queer friendship--unreciprocated perhaps--of Sinn Fein for the Ulster Volunteers. If there were many MacDermotts among them then Ireland would indeed be the poorer without them; for they are hers, not Scotland's nor England's.
A brilliant novel from the pen of Miss Edith Somerville, Mount Music, appeared last winter and was reviewed by me in STUDIES. Let me say something again of this book, without which no review of recent Irish novels could be complete. Since the death of Violet Martin broke this wonderful companionship there is no loss of beauty, vivacity, wit, imagination or humour, in the work of the one left behind. Perhaps those two minds were so finely fused that when one partner had been taken away by death their spirits were still inextricable. The controversy while both lived as to which was the finer mind is not set at rest. Miss Somerville produced perhaps the most delightful book of the happy series in Irish Memories, but in that Martin Ross still had a hand as she had a hand in Mount Music. One has discovered just one thing. The gloomy power which created the Real Charlotte was Miss Martin's. The sunshine, and the laughter are more particularly Miss Somerville's. Mount Music is as fine an achievement as any of its predecessors. It has one big figure, a bit dark in the portraiture, in Dr. Mangan. Miss Martin must have had her share in him. His life-likeness to some of his prototypes in the Irish country towns must be apparent to anyone who knows the life. All the country-people and country towns-people are most faithfully observed. The cheerful vulgarity is brilliantly rendered, as also are the oddities and the tenderness. The defect, if it be a defect, is that these people are observed always from above them, never from beside them or within them. So that the vulgarity and the quaint delightful oddities are in a sense but half the picture. Something was denied to, some door locked against, these Irishwomen of genius who represented so admirably the good landlord, the good Protestant attitude towards those who were always their servants or their social inferiors. The wide humorous view of the Irish Celt, which is genius in Somerville and Ross, is yet something accidental. One feels that there must be much more than that to them: that, in the case of retainers and dependants these writers saw only as much as they were allowed to see: and that is true of all the Anglo-Irish novelists. On the other hand to the Protestant life of Ireland belong the masterpieces of these writers' making. The Real Charlotte, and Francie, are almost oppressively living and breathing; for the matter of that so is the Big Doctor, though to say so much calls for a certain amount of retraction. But he is the exception that proves the rule. Long, long after one has laid a Somerville and Ross book aside the people they have created recall themselves to the mind because they live. Even the vulgarity of certain of the Catholic types--those young ladies and old ladies, for instance, who came to Larry Coppinger's picnic--is appallingly well-observed and true to life, although there would be the other kind, the extraordinarily refined and Madonna-like creatures who are at least as true Irish types; but perhaps they are too retiring, and the blowsy, good-hearted vulgarians take the novelist's eye. Anyhow Mount Music shows a hand that has not lost its cunning. Miss Somerville writes like an artist, like a painter. Her beautiful prose lives. It is plein air. Your pulses gallop with the hoofs of the horses: you see twilight and morning on glens and hillsides, and you hear the raining song of the lark from the bosom of a high cloud as this enchantress wills it. Laughter lightens the sad days: and of honest tenderness there is abundance and to spare. It is bestowed most lavishly on Christian, the heroine of Mount Music, not to be forgotten: and it is in Mrs. Mangan, and in the death of the Big Doctor.
With all the praise and affection this partnership has received one feels that their greater praise will be in the future. They have made live an Ireland that is dead or dying: and their places are assured. They are as real and as faithful as Carleton or Maria Edgeworth.
After these two writers of an assured reputation I come to something very different. Farewell to Garrymore is just such a small and modest book as might easily escape notice, amid the clamour of more pretentious literature; which would be a pity, for the book in its way is a little masterpiece. There is absolutely no literary artifice of any kind. So little is it coloured by anything that has gone before that the writer might quite conceivably never have read a book. She might be just telling her own story of the days she remembered, from so fresh and so innocent a mind and heart that she sees the childish world with the eyes of a child, yet with the glamour that only comes with loss and experience. It is a very gracious and beautiful Ireland which is revealed to us in these pages. The scene is laid in the Queen's County, in a prosperous and pleasant setting. The time is those fruitful and sunny years between the Fenian Movement and the Land League; when Ireland had not yet emerged from feudalism and there were still tender and faithful ties between the Protestant employer and his Catholic servants. The Protestant strong farmer's household is the environment of the tale. The grown-up heroine is the general servant of the household, Judy Lanigan; the little sweet heroine is Bess, the child of Mr. Creagh, the strong farmer. Both alike are the most charming creations, pictured with a delicate clearness and distinction. Of story there is not Very much. There is Judy's lover, Fergus, who got into some vague trouble, and went to America, and all but died if Judy had not gone out and married him, although it nearly broke her heart to leave the Creaghs. For the rest it is a record of the quiet life of the Creaghs and their jaunts to see other strong farmers or the Rectory people. But it is as sunny and sweet as those long dead years are in the memory of one who was young with them. There is a certain inconsequence in the writing. You are not introduced to the dramatis personae. They wander into the book, and sometimes you have a little difficulty in sorting them out, but presently in as leisurely a fashion as life itself they group themselves in the background or the foreground, as may be, and you come to know them. The book has the leisureliness of the slow years, which in most stories are summarized into mere glimpses. It has lasting value as the record of days and a speech and an attitude of mind which are gone. All the delicious quaintnesses and richnesses with which the dialect made the English speech a new thing are here to delight those who used them and had forgotten them. The book is a faithful record of something that is over for ever, and it is made for us by one who observed it with the eyes of love and was able to recreate it for us and to keep it, lying under the enchanted light of long ago. As such it should live. "Sure you were always God Almighty's little girl!" said Fergus to Miss Bess in the last chapter of this most lovable book. The personality of the writer looks from the pages--a "God Almighty's little girl" grown up.
Eight Short Stories, by Mr. Lennox Robinson, are a noteworthy achievement. They will not reach as many people as The White-Headed Boy or The Lost Leader--but all who care for the fantastic, the elusive, the distinguished in liberature, will delight in these slender tales. They have a French quality of lightness and shadowiness, with something very definite. Even when the tale is macabre as in "A Pair of Muddy Shoes," the touch is light and delicate. He cares for the nuances of life, not for its insistent, garish effects. "The Face" is a beautiful story--pure poetry: and there is the craftsman in "The Sponge" and "The Weir." To the man in the street Mr. Robinson would have nothing to say. He calls for an elect audience.
Mr. Eimar O'Duffy's Wasted Island is an unpleasant book in many ways. It belongs to the class of temperamental novels, and despite the number and variety of its incidents it centres entirely about the personality of the writer, which he is unable or unwilling to get outside. So much is this true that, when one is done with the book, one remembers very little of the incidents but a great deal of the author as he reveals himself while pretending or intending to reveal others. One has a picture of him as a very young man, a rebel against the conventions, and very eager to show how rebellious he is. It is a Gallic rather than a Celtic temperament. But energy and vitality go to the making of this long book. It is an energy that needs clarifying. The new wine is rough on the palate. The book is certainly ugly. All Mr. Duffy's young men speak with the Dublin accent, which I refuse to believe of his associates, for I know some of them. An older man would not have made the sex episodes so ugly, any more than he would have played skittles with sacred things. But Mr. O'Duffy is out to shock the Dublin bourgeois, and so youth has its fling.
He will probably be in time to come a little ashamed of his first book and of his youthful dread of honest sentimentalities. But there is promise in it. Even the offence it gives proves that it is not negligible.
For the rest I would recommend Mr. Bernard Duffy's Oriel: a charming tale full of light and colour, leisurely, with the airs of Ireland in it, and Mr. Forrest Reid's Pirates of the Spring, a book of wise knowledge and sympathy with boys and their thoughts and ways--a book over which grown men and women will linger happily, fortunate for once in finding a boy's book not after the conventional manner, stuffed with sawdust heroes, but the boy, living, bright, original, as we know him.
KATHARINE TYNAN.
1 Brinsley Macnamara: The Clanking of Chains. (Maunsel, 6s. 6d ).
St. John Ervine: The Foolish Lovers. (Collins, 7s. 6d.).
E. OE. Somerville: Mount Music. (Longmans, 7s 6d ).
M. A Rathkyle: Farewell to Garrymore. (Talbot Press, 3s 6d ).
Lennox Robinson: Eight Short Stories. (Talbot Press, 3s 6d ).
Eimar O'Duffy: The Wasted Island. (Martin Lester, 7s ).
Bernard Duffy: Oriel. (Talbot Press, 7s )
Forrest Reid: Pirates of the Spring (Talbot Press. 7s )