Poet, Madman, Scoundrel

by David Slattery

  Reid joined the army and fought in the Mexican–American War from 1846 to 1848. In 1849 he wrote War Life, which was a suitably embellished account of his heroic war experiences, because straight reality would not suffice. He wrote under the name Captain Mayne Reid. However, he wasn’t a captain, only a colossal liar.

  In 1849 he sailed to England with a group of Hungarian radicals. He settled in London while the rebels travelled on to Hungary. Prolific writing years followed. He wrote the successful The Rifle Rangers in 1850, followed by The Scalp Hunters in 1851, The Desert Home in 1852 and The Boy Hunters in 1853. During his lifetime, he became one of the most popular novelists of his generation, producing over sixty bestsellers that were translated into ten languages. He had one winning theme so he stuck with it – all of his stories concern young men faced with overcoming overwhelming odds against the backdrop of a romanticised American Wild West. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Leon Trotsky, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle were all fans.

  Perhaps his most famous novel was The Headless Horseman (1856). He also wrote The Quadroon, which was plagiarised by Dion Boucicault123 for his The Octoroon, a book about the interbreeding of different races. However, like Boucicault, he went bankrupt in 1866 because he had spent all of his considerable income on building a Mexican hacienda, “The Ranche”, in England. He toured America and wrote the hugely successful novel The Helpless Hand in 1868 to try to recoup his losses. In examining our literary history, it seems there would have been fewer Irish novels without the spur of bankruptcy, which perhaps is second only to dysfunctional love as a literary motivation. From around 1870 he became acutely depressed and suffered doubts about his art.

  Good Bellows

  If a potential poet hadn’t the energy for a wild or degenerate life, they could have cultivated a decaying respiratory system as a traditional alternative mode of poetic being. Edmund Armstrong (1841–1865) lived the traditional bronchial life of the poet to the full, expiring of tuberculosis at the height of his powers, as you should do as a poet.

  Armstrong grew up in a large house in Dublin where he had a happy childhood. Contentment is a disaster for a potential poet. He went to Trinners in 1859. He was one of our few poets who prioritised perspiration over inspiration. Not for him the unrequited love of a muse, insanity or alcoholicism: he made do with his tuberculosis. Besides, he couldn’t stay out late pursuing debauchery because he rose every morning at 3.30 a.m. to study. This enthusiasm gained him a reputation as one of the college’s best scholars and poets. He won prizes for Latin, Greek and Hebrew poetry.

  He had a shotgun-blast approach to verse: he composed huge numbers of poems during his examinations. However, the effort nearly killed him because a blood vessel in his lung burst from the strain in 1860. He went to Jersey to recover, and undertook an inspirational walking tour of France with his younger brother, who idolised him. It was poetically inspiring because they had just £7 between them for the entire tour. His brother still idolised him when they eventually got back, shattered from the experience.

  In 1863 he was fit enough to return to college. His normal routine was to write five poems per day. He was a poetry factory. He wrote nature poems and poems about his love for Ireland, which surprisingly are no longer popular. But he also wrote humorous poems and one about prostitution from a strictly theoretical point of view. He lost his religious faith, as a romantic poet must, and this caused him considerable existential suffering, which he appreciated would help his poetic output after his appallingly happy childhood. He studied theology as a bizarre way back to faith. He died of tuberculosis in his mother’s arms. His brother edited his collected poems, letters and essays for publication in three volumes in 1877. He deserves our recognition as Ireland’s hardest working poet because sheer output is not valued enough in poetry.

  Family Ties

  If an Irish writer didn’t have tuberculosis or a miserable childhood, or if they were not in an obsessive relationship or bankrupt, they might have found the inspirational misery they needed in their family. The Irish family was invented to incite writing.

  The Wildes were a literary family who are best remembered for the witty aphorisms and plays of Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wilde (1854–1900). But there were other scribblers in the Wilde family who were overshadowed by the attention-seeking Oscar.

  Oscar’s father, William Robert Wills Wilde (1815–1876), from Roscommon, was a doctor and a writer. On graduating in medicine in 1844, he took a post as a physician to a wealthy invalid who was going on a cruise on his private yacht, Crusader. William wrote a travelogue about the voyage that earned him £250, which he used to fund his study of eye and ear surgery in London, Vienna and Berlin. When he returned to Dublin, he set up a private practice but also opened a dispensary for poor patients in a converted stable. He was editor of the Dublin Journal of Medical Science, to which he contributed articles on eyes and ears. He was commemorated eponymously with two surgical procedures: “Wilde’s snare” and “Wilde’s incision”. When not inventing surgical sewing techniques, he wrote guidebooks, memoirs and biographical articles. He wrote movingly on Swift, arguing that he wasn’t insane, as everyone had believed.

  However, William Wilde was only one half of a notably literary marriage. William’s wife and Oscar’s mother, Jane Francesca Agnes Wilde (1821?–1896) was known to her contemporaries as “Speranza”. She was a poet, nationalist and feminist, which is probably the last thing you want your own mother to be. Speranza wrote an introduction to Charles Maturin’s gothic masterpiece Melmont the Wanderer in 1892. In her twenties she published translations of works in German and French. She also knew Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Latin, Greek and Gaelic. She contributed prose under the name John Fanshawe Ellis and poetry as Speranza to the Irish nationalist newspaper The Nation. She wrote the first poetic response to the Famine, which must have been a boon to the starving masses. But she then agitated for rebellion in The Nation when its editor Charles Gavan Duffy (1816–1903) was in prison awaiting trial. The paper was subsequently suppressed.

  In 1864 a probable mistress of her husband sued her for libel. Mary Travers, described as an hysterical former patient, accused William Wilde of seduction. But her real case was against Speranza. She used the name Speranza to sign a scurrilous pamphlet about herself in a twist on the traditional pamphlet war.124 Travers then hired newspaper boys to wave placards about the Wildes at them while they were holidaying in Bray. One conscientious boy got into their house in order to wave his placard at them while they sat at their dinner table. When the real Speranza confiscated the placard, Travers responded by threatening to sue for larceny. Speranza protested to Travers’ father, alleging that the campaign was designed only for financial extortion. This accusation resulted in a suit for libel against the Wildes. The attorneys were delighted with the pamphleteering and placarding campaign, which went beyond their wildest hopes. While Travers won costs and damages of a farthing,125 public sympathy lay with the Wildes. Speranza actually gave evidence to exonerate her husband. But he did not defend himself. Oscar should have followed his father’s example years later at his own disastrous trial for libel by not turning up in court.

  Speranza moved to London in 1876, when her husband died. There she became a successful prose writer and kept a literary salon. However, the money ran out when Oscar went to gaol and was predictably bankrupted from the associated law suits. Like many before and after her, Speranza died in litigation-originated poverty while Oscar was in gaol.

  Oscar had an older brother, William (Willie) Wilde (1852–1899), who was one of the world’s most efficient journalists. In school he excelled at drawing and piano but his talents were neglected in favour of those of his younger brother, who was the family pet. His mother said of him, “Willie is all right; he has a first-class brain. But Oscar will turn out something wonderful.” Can you imagine having to grow up with that smug spoilt little narcissist, as well as having to listen to such discrimi
nation from your mother? Oscar was spoilt rotten. No wonder he ended up in gaol.

  Willie won a gold medal in ethics at Trinners, where he was also a leading debater. He had poems published as an undergraduate, and may have achieved even more than Oscar with a little encouragement from his mother, which he didn’t get. He was called to the bar but never practised law – that’s how sophisticated he was. Instead of the life of a lawyer, he chose the more ethical path of drunkard and pursuer of rich heiresses. He was the expert in ethics, after all, so who are we to judge him?

  When Oscar was gaoled, loyal Willie publicly defended his younger brother’s reputation regardless of how he may have privately felt. When Oscar heard that Willie was supporting him, he put the needs of wit ahead of fraternal gratitude and said, “My poor brother; he would compromise a steam engine.” When Oscar was released on bail in 1895 he was reduced to living with Willie, who rightly exacted revenge for the privilege by lecturing him on ethics.

  Willie inherited the family home in 1876 but was forced to sell it to raise funds because he had failed to find an heiress, despite dedicating himself full time to the project. In May 1879 he moved to London with his mother to live in the shadow of Oscar’s celebrity. The brothers looked alike. This sibling similitude understandably upset Oscar, who was pursuing a career in individuality. He paid William to grow a beard and mustache. Nice work if you can get it!

  Willie was popular company because he had a genial humour rather than the caustic rapier wit of his brother that was in vogue at that time. He was taken on as a correspondent with the Daily Telegraph newspaper, where he excelled at churning out succinct pieces on a huge range of topics. He boasted that he could arrive at his desk at noon, come up with an idea, and then go for lunch and a stroll before retiring to his club to write the article in an hour. He’d then spend the rest of the evening in the Café Royal.

  In 1891 Willie Wilde achieved his life ambition, allowing him to retire from his arduous writing career. He found an heiress who was willing to marry him: Mrs Frank Leslie, who was fifty-five and had been married three times before. They married in New York.

  It is mandatory to relate pithy Wilde-isms whenever the Wildes are mentioned, so here is my favourite. Because the best man at Willie’s wedding was Marshall P. Wilder, the magazine Town Topics joked that the groom was wild, the best man was wilder, but the bride was the wildest. Willie ignored Oscar’s rare piece of practical advice that he should get a pre-nuptial contract, so he was duly divorced and destitute within two years. I cannot imagine what went wrong in the relationship or why a divorce was necessary because Willie had spent the entire marriage in New York’s Lotos Club, entertaining its members with drunken parodies of Oscar’s poems. He also wrote a negative review of his brother’s play Lady Windermere’s Fan for the Daily Telegraph. This was perhaps his masterpiece. When Oscar found out about the review and the poetic parodies, there was a falling out.

  Willie married again in London in 1894. It must have been love because his new wife was not fabulously wealthy. The couple had a daughter, Dorothy Ierne Wilde (1895–1941). Dorothy had the misfortune of inheriting her uncle’s looks without his original intellect. She divided her time between London and Paris, where she was the toast of salons for looking like Oscar. She even dressed up as him and reproduced his maxims. Naturally it was all a bit confusing for those attending the salons. The importance of being Oscar had its demands. She became a lesbian because, I assume, she believed that Oscar would have been a lesbian if he had been a woman, in which case he would have stayed loyal to his long-suffering wife. She also became a morphine addict, I imagine based on Lady Bracknell’s advice on the importance of having an occupation in The Importance of Being Earnest. She became a recluse in London, as she should have, and died in 1941 at the age of forty-six – the same age at which both her father and uncle had died. Her literary legacy consists of witty letters and reminiscences printed as In Memory of Dorothy Ierne Wilde: Oscaria in 1951.

  The catastrophic end of the Wildes did not discourage other erudite families from forming. Stephen and Kathleen Behan were the core of another such family. Like the Wildes, the family is best remembered for the literary contributions of one overbearing member, Brendan, but his brothers also contributed to Irish literary life.

  The Behans ran a different sort of familial literary salon. Their neighbours in Crumlin, Dublin called the home “the Kremlin” because it engendered militant trade unionists, republicans, communists and anarchists. The mother, Kathleen (1889–1984), was the daughter of a prosperous businessman who owned a grocer shop, a pub and a row of houses on Dorset St. However, the business failed because he spent all of his time in the courts, obsessed with the general minutiae of legal proceedings. He was yet another victim of the law. Kathleen and her sisters were placed in an orphanage when he died. Her eldest brother, Peadar Kearney (1883–1942), composed the lyrics of “The Soldier’s Song” (“Amhrán na bhFiann”), which became the Irish national anthem.

  Kathleen married Jack Furlong in 1916. Furlong fought in the Jacob’s Factory garrison126 in the 1916 Easter Rising, while Kathleen was a courier at the bullet-riddled GPO. After Furlong died in the global influenza epidemic of 1918, Kathleen married Stephen Behan (1891–1967). He was a house painter and republican. They had five children, Brendan, Seamus, Brian, Dominic and Carmel. Kathleen wrote a bestselling autobiography in 1984 called Mother of All the Behans.

  The eldest Behan son, Brendan (1923–1964), was addicted to attention and storytelling from his earliest years. He trained to be a house painter like his father. He joined Na Fianna,127 the youth organisation of the IRA, when he was eight, graduating into the IRA proper when he was sixteen. Many members of that organisation were worried that he was too flamboyant for covert operations.

  In 1939 he travelled to Liverpool on his own initiative, where he was arrested carrying explosives. He was sentenced to three years’ detention in Hollesley Bay Borstal, and was deported back to Ireland in November 1941. Within six months he was involved in a shoot-out with gardaí in Dublin and sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude. He served five of those in Mountjoy Gaol, Arbour Hill Prison and the Curragh Camp before being released on a general amnesty. He began to write in prison because being locked up limited the distractions of a social life.

  When he got out, he emigrated to Paris in order to try to put his past behind him. There he wrote twelve poems in Irish and three highly regarded short stories. He made a living as a journalist and as a professional “character”. He sang, and did dramatic parodies and grotesque dramatisations of Brian Boru, Toulouse Lautrec and Maud Gonne, amongst others, in Paris cafés. He established his reputation as a drinker during his time in France.

  His play The Quare Fellow, which was first performed in Dublin in 1954, was a hit in London in 1956. Brendan appeared drunk on British television, thereby establishing his public persona and enthralling the delightedly outraged English viewers. He wrote the play An Ghiall in 1958 in gratitude to the Irish language organisation Gael Linn for their support when he was in prison. But while this was well received in Irish by a potential audience of eleven native speakers, its English-language production, The Hostage, was an international hit.

  His most famous work, the autobiographical Borstal Boy, which he had originally started in Mountjoy Gaol, also appeared in 1958. But, perhaps as a result of his time in prison, he had become addicted to public adulation and socialising, and wasn’t able to focus on writing. He became famous around Dublin pubs in the early 1960s for being the most violent and repetitious of the dipsomaniacs, a role for which the competition was intense at that time.

  It is now traditional to repeat Brendan’s many repetitions, especially when one is drunk in a Dublin pub. Here is the one I like to repeat: Brendan vanished immediately after arriving on a ship in New York Harbour. Three weeks later he turned up and, when asked where he had been, he replied, “I saw a sign that said ‘Drink Ca
nada Dry’, so I did.” He wasn’t able to write because he was consistently drunk. And, naturally, he got drunk because he couldn’t write. His funeral was one of the largest in Dublin, ever.

  Brendan’s brother Brian Behan (1926–2002) was sent to Artane Industrial School when he was twelve just because he didn’t like going to school. Since its formation in the 1920s, the Irish State has been practising this outrageous tyranny on its young citizens without criticism or even mild public outrage. Imagine – not going to school is against the law. This is unjust because what child can afford to sue? In revenge against authority, Brian organised dairy workers into a farm-workers’ union. That was also illegal at the time. He enlisted in the Irish Army in 1945 to avoid gaol, and then emigrated to London in 1950. There he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. He met both Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong in 1951 but, disillusioned with party elites, he quit the communists to join the Trotskyite Socialist Labour League but was soon expelled for “deviationism”. He was thrown out of the British Labour Party and two trade unions. He was even expelled from an anarchist organistation.

  He wrote a novel, Time To Go, in 1979 and ghosted his mother’s bestselling 1984 autobiography. He recycled this as a novel, Kathleen: A Dublin Saga. In 1988 he turned his creativity to the stage with a series of plays which gave substance to his claim that “being stage-Irish was a trade like any other.” His first play, Boots for the Footless, was a success. He also wrote The Begrudgers; Hallelujah, I’m a Bum; Brother of All the Behans; and Barking Sheep. Being thrown out of an anarchist organisation was a special achievement in contrariness. But Brian is now best remembered for his televised fight with his brother Dominic, with whom he maintained a feud.