Ethel is also given to ‘sneery’ looks when things do not go quite her way.
Daisy, one deduces, had come across library copies of the romances of Rhoda Broughton (Cometh up as a Flower, Red as a Rose is She, etc). But beneath the precociously fluent – but comically inept – veneer of high romantic rhetoric there is the hawk-eye of the child. The child’s view, in any number of ways, registers the surfaces of quotidian life missed by the less innocent, but more penetrative, adult eye. Thirty-seven-year-old (‘elderly’ indeed) Edward Casaubon’s attachment to nineteen-year-old Dorothea Brooke, for example, requires for its full moral analysis the adult seriousness the author of Middlemarch brings to the affair. But what are the characters wearing on that important first visit to Lowick when the Casaubon–Brooke match is tentatively formed? We know about the marriage suit he has in mind, but what colour is the suit which the Revd Casaubon is wearing that day? Of what material is Dorothea’s visiting dress? The innocent eye sees more, and sees less.
FN
Margaret Mary Julia Ashford (‘Daisy’, later Devlin)
MRT
The Young Visiters
Biog
R. N. Malcolmson, Daisy Ashford: Her Life (1984)
130. Mary Webb 1881–1927
Oh, filthy, heavy-handed, blear-eyed world, when will you wash and be clean?
Mary Meredith was born in rural Shropshire – the region in which she set her fiction. She was proud of her ‘blood’; it ran pure Celtic on both sides of her family. Her father, George Meredith, was Welsh by origin (and, coincidentally, bore a famous novelist’s name); he is described as a ‘country gentleman and tutor’. Mary’s mother, a distant descendant of Walter Scott, was from Edinburgh by birth. Mary was the first of six Meredith children. She spent her early years in a fine country house in Much Wenlock. Her father took in boarding pupils and did some gentlemanly farming in the extensive grounds. Mary ‘adored’ him and was, in a sense, his prize pupil. The family was well off and she also had a governess. At fourteen she was sent away to be ‘finished’ at a school in Southport. Aged twenty, Mary was afflicted with what would be a lifelong thyroid deficiency, Graves’ disease. Easily curable now, it was not then and was particularly traumatic for a young woman. She was a lifelong invalid and – crucially – facially disfigured by the condition with goitre, protuberant eyes and chronic lassitude. From birth a reserved girl, she became a reclusive woman.
The Merediths moved home several times during Mary’s adolescence and young womanhood – always, however, to rural locations. Then her life was thrown into emotional turmoil by the death of her father in 1909. The following year she met a teacher, Henry Webb (a nephew of the channel swimmer hero, Captain Webb) and they married in 1912. He was, her biographers tactfully agree, a father substitute. There would be no children to the marriage. Webb’s work took him and his wife to Weston Super Mare, far from her beloved Shropshire. Uprooted, Mary began writing her first regional novel, The Golden Arrow. The central character, John Arden, was clearly based on her father. The Webbs returned to Shropshire in 1914, where she finished the novel which was published in 1916.
It was followed up promptly by another Shropshire saga, Gone to Earth (1917), in which Webb hit her grim groove. It was well reviewed. Amazingly, Rebecca West chose it as her book of the year – something one can only ascribe to a critical neurosis triggered by the war (going badly for the Allies in 1917) and her disastrous love affair with H. G. Wells. As the title suggests, Gone to Earth is a novel which should be prescribed reading for all members of the House of Commons, when they debate, as they seem likely to do until the crack of doom, the issue of hunting with dogs. The heroine, Hazel Woodus, is one of Webb’s hallmark children of nature, a denizen of the woods, hills and streams – with something of the witch (as her mother was) about her. She carries with her a fragrance of ‘morning air’ and her soulmate is a pet fox, ‘Foxy’. Her father makes coffins – ominously. Ominous too is the opening paragraph:
Small feckless clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky – shepherdless, futile, imponderable – and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears.
The novel is set during the First World War (in which Webb had three serving brothers). Delectable Hazel catches the eye of the local squire, a hunting man, Jack Reddin. One glimpses, as in a distorting mirror, reflections of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. To cut a long story short (which Webb doesn’t), Hazel has to choose between two legs or four. The novel ends with him leading a hunt (tally ho!) in which, to save Foxy, Hazel scoops the beast in her arms and plunges down a mine-shaft. Liebestod.
By the early 1920s the Webbs could afford to buy their own house, Spring Cottage, at Lyth Hill, near Shrewsbury. Henry had taken up a teaching post in London in 1921, so Mary had time to herself to write. The frequent separation put the marriage under strain, but Mary’s visits to London, and her increasingly well-regarded fiction, raised her profile in the literary world. Earning well from her fiction, with no family to distract her, Webb had the leisure to be a woman of letters and develop the sub-Brontëan genre of fiction in which she was now a leading light. This eminence was certified by the award of the Prix Femina prize for Precious Bane, in 1924. The novel is historical, set in the early nineteenth century and, inevitably, in Shropshire. The heroine is Prue Sarn – another child of nature, beautiful but for a harelip (the link with Webb’s own disfigurement is painfully obvious) which renders her, in the eyes of the village, perhaps a witch. Despite this, Prue is chosen as his love by a manly weaver, Kester Woodseaves. The novel ends, unusually for Webb, happily, when Kester – like Lochinvar – scoops Prue up to gallop away with her on his horse. A barrage of erotic dialogue ensues:
‘Tabor on, owd nag!’ says Kester, and we were going at a canter towards the blue and purple mountains.
‘But no!’ I said. ‘It mun be frommet, Kester. You mun marry a girl like a lily. See, I be hare-shotten!’
But he wouldna listen. He wouldna argufy. Only after I’d pleaded agen myself a long while, he pulled up sharp, and looking down into my eyes, he said –
‘No more sad talk! I’ve chosen my bit of Paradise. ’Tis on your breast, my dear acquaintance!’
And when he’d said those words, he bent his comely head and kissed me full upon the mouth.
Webb was by now extremely ill and her marriage was effectively at an end. She was unable to finish what would have been her sixth novel, the yet more historical medieval romance, Armour Wherein He Trusted. She died, aged forty-six, in October 1927, and ‘went to earth’ in the grounds of Shrewsbury Cathedral.
Precious Bane had been hugely admired on its publication by the Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. He voiced his admiration for her ‘neglected genius’ in April 1928, in a speech at the annual Royal Literary Fund Dinner. It was written up in the newspapers the following day and, six months after her death, Webb became the novelist of the day. Cape published a collected edition of her novels which sold like hot cakes.
It was not all Baldwinian praise. A smart young London journalist on the Evening Standard, Stella Gibbons, was given the task of editing the The Golden Arrow, which was being serialised in the newspaper in 1928. The result, four years later, was the witty spoof, Cold Comfort Farm. Flora Poste, a metropolitan ‘flapper’, is orphaned and goes to live in her aunt Judith Starkadder’s farm, in ‘Howling, Sussex’. ‘We are not like other folk, maybe,’ she is warned. But they are very like the folk in Precious Bane. Gibbons catches the Webbian tone wittily, as in the opening to Chapter 3 of Cold Comfort Farm (see the passage from Gone to Earth, above): ‘Dawn crept over the Downs like a sinister white animal followed by the snarling cries of a wind eating its way between the black boughs of the thorns.’ Flora is not daunted by broodingly handsome Seth (whom she packs off to Hollywood), the child of nature Elfina, or old Ada Doom, who saw something nasty in the woodshed and has never got o
ver it. She cheerfully propels all of them into the twentieth century.
FN
Mary Gladys Webb (née Meredith)
MRT
Precious Bane
Biog
G. M. Coles, Mary Webb (1990)
131. James Joyce 1882–1941
There is no foulness conceivable to the mind of madman or ape that has not been poured into its imbecile pages … Ulysses would make a Hottentot sick. Alfred Noyes, author of the perennially popular poem, ‘The Highwayman’
Joyce was born in Dublin, middle-class and Catholic. He died neither – nor even a Dubliner, a city he never revisited in the last twenty-one years of his life. Half-ironically, it pleased him to claim aristocratic lineage and he sported a heraldic Joycean device in later life but his youthful family circumstances were humbler. He was the eldest surviving son of John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Joyce (née Murray), a wife ten years younger and many ranks lower, as her husband thought, in social standing. Mary would die prematurely, exhausted by thirteen pregnancies. Her death was traumatic for ‘Jim’ and echoes, guiltily, through the opening chapter of Ulysses. A brood of nine children and a series of reckless mortgages impoverished John Joyce. His son had to adapt to coming down in the world and picked up the tricks of genteel cadging which would serve him in good stead as an author.
Ireland itself was in a period of decline in the late nineteenth century. The opening section of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) centres on a raging argument about Parnell, the nationalist hero who was brought down by scandalous sexual misconduct with Kitty O’Shea. Wilde’s downfall was not more sensational. ‘Dante’ (the Joyce family nickname for his aunt Elizabeth) exults at Catholic morality’s victory: ‘– Devil out of hell! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!’ Stephen’s father weeps for Ireland. Stephen (i.e. James Joyce) merely observes.
As he grew up, Joyce, like Stephen Dedalus, came to think little of his father – perhaps because, like his namesake, he was unwilling to fly high. He acknowledged the inheritance of a fine tenor voice and musical talent; otherwise, he owed no great filial debt. But fathers, as Joyce’s fascination with Hamlet testifies, are not easily erased from their sons’ lives. John Joyce figures prominently in the Portrait, in Ulysses, and as Earwicker in Finnegans Wake. John had failed many careers. In Joyce’s boyhood he was a local government official. The family was well enough off, and at this stage small enough for the six-year-old eldest son to be sent off as a boarder to Clongowes Wood College in co. Kildare. True to the proverb the Jesuits would have him for life – but not quite as the order would have wanted. Joyce professed to hate Clongowes and distilled his hatred into A Portrait where Stephen, true to his martyr’s name, is bullied, ‘pandied’ (corporally punished), misunderstood by teachers and – at the very lowest point – tipped into a cesspit, precipitating a dangerous bout of amoebic dysentery. The school records him as a brilliant pupil and, oddly, given his acute myopia, a decent sportsman.
He was withdrawn from Clongowes for non-payment of fees in 1891 – the year of Parnell’s death. It was not a comfortable home which welcomed him back to Dublin. His father’s improvidence, and drunkenness, and possible financial misdealings had brought the family to bankruptcy. Joyce gives a picture of the domestic squalor in A Portrait: ‘[Stephen] pushed open the latchless door of the porch and passed through the naked hallway into the kitchen. A group of his brothers and sisters was sitting round the table. Tea was nearly over and only the last of the second watered tea remained in the bottoms of the small glass jars and jampots which did service for teacups.’ But there was worse than destitution: John Joyce was violent when drunk and his domestic brutality is vividly depicted in the short story in Dubliners, ‘Counterparts’.
Joyce finished his primary education at another Jesuit institution, Belvedere College. It was a local day school and did not charge. The teachers liked him and he was seriously inclined towards the priesthood. He responded sensitively to the beauty of ritual and – as Chapter 3 of A Portrait records – hypersensitively to the terrors of damnation. Hell, for him, was a gigantic Clongowes cesspit: ‘Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition.’ Terror acted as a moral discipline on Joyce until 1898, when he met a ‘gay girl’ and ventured to have sex. Thereafter ‘He would never swing the thurible before the tabernacle as priest.’ When his mother died, he refused her dying wish to kneel by her bed. Where religion was concerned he would be, in his word, ‘elusive’. Uncaught. However, the indoctrination of his early years could not be entirely rinsed out. In his last year of life he was asked why he carried stones in his pocket to pelt at local dogs. ‘Because they have no souls’, he replied. What, very soon, would happen to his?
Joyce went on to university and graduated in 1902 with a lowly pass degree. He was much better educated than that measly award suggests. He left University College Dublin fearsomely well read, a skilled dialectician and intellectually ‘solitary’ – his own man. Non serviam was his motto. The principal influence on him in these formative years was Henrik Ibsen, whose spirit, he recorded, blew through him ‘like a keen wind’. In his tract, The Quintessence of Ibsenism, George Bernard Shaw conceived the Norwegian’s principal instruction to be ‘repudiation of duty’. James Joyce repudiated church, nationalism and the infatuations of the Irish literary renaissance (‘Ancient Ireland is dead just as ancient Egypt is dead’). His first significant publication was an essay on Ibsen for the Fortnightly Review (April 1900). It drew praise from William Archer, Ibsen’s English disciple and a commendatory letter from the playwright himself. Archer shrewdly nudged the young Irishman away from drama to what he could do best – prose narrative and lyric poetry. It was at this period that Joyce began recording what he called ‘epiphanies’: moments laden with meaning, crystallised in language.
There were a number of false starts. In 1902 he went to Paris to study medicine. He lacked the necessary qualifications, but the city’s bohemian culture captivated him. He returned to less captivating Dublin after a year, to teach. This is the rootless interim commemorated in Ulysses – specifically a week or so that he lodged in a Martello tower, in summer 1904. He developed what would be a lifelong addiction to drink, along with his current, even more bibulous, bosom friend, Oliver St John Gogarty (‘Buck Mulligan’). He toyed with the idea of a singing career. Meanwhile he was struggling with a long Bildungsroman, initially called ‘Stephen Hero’, eventually to be given the Rembrandtian title, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He would be a middle-aged man before it was published. He was also working on a set of poems called ‘chamber music’ – chamber as in chamber-pot, music as in the tinkle of a whore’s urine. Joyce’s scatological sexual tastes have provided mixed distaste and fascination for the Joyce industry. Cesspits always had their strange fascination for him.
In 1904 he managed to smuggle some of the stories later to be published in Dubliners into print, under the loaded nom de plume ‘Stephen Dedalus’. Another turning point came on 10 June 1904, when he first encountered Nora Barnacle, a hotel chambermaid. She was, to his gratified astonishment, easy-going sexually. He came to regard her as his ‘soul’ and his ‘Ireland’. At exactly the same period he met the man who would inspire Leopold Bloom. In the autumn of this eventful year he resolved to leave Ireland with Nora, soon to be pregnant with their first child, Giorgio. He had jumped the gun but he would not make his father’s philoprogenitive error. The method of contraception the couple favoured, initially, was that described in Ulysses between Molly and Leopold – sleeping head to toe. They would not marry until 1931.
Why Joyce should have gone into exile remains slightly obscure – although he wore the condition as a badge of integrity, along with ‘cunning’ and ‘silence’. H
e may have wanted a place more tolerant of a man and a woman ‘living in sin’. Self-preservation as an artist may have come into it. Ireland, as Stephen puts it, was the sow that eats her farrow.
A series of mishaps with teaching posts across Europe led to them finally taking up residence in the tiny nowhere state, Trieste, where he found secure employment in the Berlitz school. The Berlitz method was to teach a language by conversation – dialogue – which suited Joyce, as did the morally relaxed atmosphere of the coastal state. Joyce by now had several literary projects on the go – most hopefully his Dublin short stories which the English publisher, Grant Richards, had agreed to take before getting cold feet. It was a bumpy road to eventual publication in 1914. Censorship problems were invariably the problem. The delayed publication of these naturalistic stories skews one’s sense of Joyce’s extraordinary evolution stylistically and, in a decade, their social relevance had aged. The most important of them is ‘The Dead’, which he finished in 1907. In the spiritually inert character of the ‘West Briton’ journalist, Gabriel Conroy, he left a sly self-portrait of himself in his twenties:
He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead, where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 48
