Poet, Madman, Scoundrel

by David Slattery

  The youngest son, Dominic Behan (1928–1989), was influenced by the republican and intellectual life in “the Kremlin”. He joined the republican youth movement Fianna Éireann, and became a prominent member of the Dublin Unemployed Movement, being frequently unemployed himself. He emigrated to London to pursue the dual family businesses of house painting and writing. By accident he became a broadcaster in 1956, and wrote and recorded songs. He wrote plays, novels, biographies and periodical pieces for newspapers, and a cantata on the life of Christ.

  The Behan siblings had learned how hard it is to escape the influence of our parents. It is difficult, even when such parents are securely locked up. Dublin-born Elizabeth Bowen’s (1899–1973) father was a barrister and was also occasionally insane. This combination, probably not as rare as you might imagine, made for both an exciting childhood and an essential grounding in the gothic. It would have been ideal if he had been confined to the attic but disappointingly he wasn’t because no one prioritised the literary formation of his daughter. Whenever her father was actually mad, Elizabeth, or Bitha as she was called, along with her mother, was obliged to stay with relatives in Kent. To add to her woes, her mother died when she was eight. The displaced, or orphaned, child became a theme in Bowen’s short stories, which were often gothic in tone.

  Bowen was a serious child who didn’t like silliness. Sadly, silliness has fallen completely out of fashion. She developed a fashionable stammer when her mother died. Again, sadly, stammers are no longer chic. People now go to great lengths to get rid of them when once they were so trendy in the literary salons.

  Bowen married Alan Charles Cameron in 1923, which ironically was silly, the same year as the publication of her first volume of short stories. Cameron’s party piece at their literary dinners was to be a deliberately extremely boring storyteller. During the 1930s they lived in Oxford, New York, Italy and London, where she wrote books and had many silly affairs, including one with the Irish writer Sean O’Faolain (1900–1991).

  Bowen really enjoyed the Second World War. She became an air warden in London. Because people could be killed at any moment during the London air raids, life was intense and that intensity was an excuse for her to engage in reckless silly love affairs.

  However, her London house was bombed. In Bowen’s writings, houses often take on sentient qualities and influence the identity of her characters. In The Death of the Heart even the furniture is alive. I assume she blamed the German airforce, the Luftwaffe, for killing her table and chairs.

  She became a journalist for the Ministry of Information, which in practice was really disinformation. She lived between London and her ancestral home at Bowen’s Court in Cork. In the 1940s and early 1950s her literary output was enormous. She wrote short stories, novels, articles, broadcasts, criticism, introductions, prefaces, reviews and travelogues. She wrote on a wide range of subject matters, including London, ghosts, children and hotels. The actor Richard Burton débuted in her play Castle Anna.

  When her husband Cameron, by then a long-time alcoholic, died in 1955, she started to spend more time in Cork, but she found it difficult to maintain Bowen’s Court. It was eventually sold to a farmer in 1960, who demolished it. She then moved back to Oxford. She died in 1973 and is buried with Cameron in Cork.

  Getting Ahead in an Oven

  The Behans may have all been semi-professional contrarians but they were never incredibly annoying like their fellow republican writer Darrell Figgis (1882–1925). Figgis didn’t understand the exquisitely fine creative distinctions between being contumacious, which deserves artistic recognition, and annoying, which deserves a fist in the face. Unfortunately for him, his republican comrades were clear on the difference.

  Figgis, from Dublin, was the son of a tea merchant. He spent his early years in Ceylon, contemporary Sri Lanka, and joined his uncle’s tea business in London in 1898. He spent ten years in the job, which he hated. In 1909 he published his first volume of poetry, A Vision of Life, and became a professional writer the following year. But he felt the need to move to Ireland, dividing his time between being annoying in Dublin and irking the natives on Achill Island. In 1913 he joined the Irish Volunteers.

  After the 1916 Rising he was arrested in Achill and interned in England. While locked up he wanted to become the prisoners’ spokesperson, but instead became the most unpopular inmate. He had a natural talent for irritating other people, a gift that came to the fore in prison. His cellmates hated him, regardless of politics, and fought amongst each other to get away from him. To their inordinate relief, he was freed in December 1916 under a general amnesty.

  In 1917 he wrote a self-aggrandising account of his time in prison, A Chronicle of Jails, because no one else was going to do it. He was arrested again in 1917 and deported to Oxford, probably with the active assistance of the Volunteers. But failing to take a hint, he returned to Ireland and was re-arrested. To the despair of the hardcore republican prison population, he was sent to join them in Durham Gaol. There he irritated them until his release in March 1919.

  He continued to write in parallel to being annoying. Children of the Earth attracted positive critical reviews in 1918. A Second Chronicle of Jails appeared in 1919, again giving himself a constructive role amongst the republican prisoners. In Durham he had been even more unpopular as a cellmate. He was the cause of much bickering and a collapse in morale. Everyone just hated him.

  However Arthur Griffith (1872–1922), who was the leader of Sinn Féin, trusted and promoted him within the party. This was despite, or maybe because of, the fact that Figgis’s The Economic Case for Irish Independence of 1920 was largely plagiarised from Griffith’s own work. Perhaps Figgis knew that there was no downside to telling a politician what they wanted to hear or to repeat their own opinions to them. In 1922 he was vice-chair of the committee established to draft the Free State Constitution. This committee split – you may have seen that coming – due to committee members falling out with Figgis because he was annoying them. One of the sub-committees resulting from the split eventually produced three draft reports. Most of Figgis’s “Draft A” found its way into the Constitution, to the exasperation of many.

  During the 1922 elections, in which he was standing for a seat, he was so unpopular with his fellow republican candidates that a group broke into his house and shaved off half his beard, of which he was extraordinarily proud. He won the sympathy of the public, who didn’t really know who he was. The attack allowed him to top the poll. However, in his latter days in the Dáil, the chamber would quickly empty whenever he stood up to speak. He published The Return of the Hero under the pen name “Michael Ireland” in 1923. Probably those who had never met him praised it.

  Sometimes unpopular people marry popular people to compensate. This was the case with Figgis. His extremely popular wife Millie shot herself with a pistol given to her by the revolutionary leader Michael Collins (1890–1922) in 1922. Everyone blamed the suicide on Figgis, who had started an affair with twenty-one-year-old dancing teacher Rita North. We don’t know if the affair began just before or just after his wife’s death, but either way it dented his already fatally undermined popularity. He was on a downhill roll. North died in 1925 from a botched abortion that made Figgis even more unpopular, if that was possible. He gassed himself in rented rooms in London in October of that year. While Mick Jagger couldn’t get any in 1965, there was widespread satisfaction amongst the republicans in 1925.

  Positions for Female Companions

  Writers are symbiotically related to readers: without one we wouldn’t have the other. It was common for women in the past with time on their hands to sit together in companionable pairs reading edifying books in their literary salons. Two women in Irish history, Eleanor Butler (c.1738–1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831), may have taken this kind of literary companionship one step further.

  (Charlotte) Eleanor Butler was both a so-called female companion and a famous recluse
with a hectic social life. She was born into old gentry in Kilkenny but was educated in Cambrai in France by Benedictine nuns. This experience turned her off religion for the rest of her life. The nuns tend to have that effect on their pupils. She returned to Ireland when her brother John became the 16th earl of Ormond. She didn’t want to marry, so she spent ten years sitting at home twiddling her thumbs. Everything changed for Eleanor in 1768 when thirteen-year-old Sarah Ponsonby visited the Butlers in Kilkenny Castle. Initially, the two became secret correspondents, sharing an interest in the arts and the writings of Rousseau.128

  Sarah Ponsonby, like Butler, was a professional diarist, which was a career that required the financial support of her upper-class family. When Ponsonby left Miss Parke’s boarding school in Kilkenny, she became busy deflecting the unwanted attentions of a middle-aged guardian. At that time, any self-respecting middle-aged guardian would strive to marry their young ward. By now, the Butlers, who were relatively poor even if they lived in a castle, were fed up with Eleanor’s lack of interest in rich men and were considering sending her back to France.

  The two women ran away together in the same carriage, dressed as men and toting pistols. Sarah brought her dog, Frisk, on this escape attempt. She leaped out the window of her house at Woodstock, Co. Kilkenny with him in her arms, which was disturbingly unladylike behaviour. They got as far as Waterford before their frustrated families caught up with them. Eleanor was sent to cousins in Carlow, but she promptly escaped from there to find Ponsonby. Eventually the relatives’ resolve was worn down. They gave up and allowed the two to officially become female companions.

  They settled in Llangollen in Wales with a maid in a rented cottage called Plas Newydd. But their families were assured that they were definitely not lesbians; they were reclusive female companions.

  For the “Ladies of Llangollen”, as they became known, being recluses involved reading, keeping journals, collecting books to read, and house and garden renovations. They went in for a gothic look for the cottage with matching landscaped gardens. In time, their refuge became a popular visitor attraction and they often had guests out of a vast circle of high-profile artistic and intellectual friends. As female companions, they were obliged to wear men’s clothes, and to cut their hair short and powder it.

  Prince Puckler-Mukau described them as “certainly the most celebrated virgins in Europe”. Female visitors to the cottage were reluctant to spend a night alone with them because they were such convincing female companions. It became fashionable for those in the gothic-bohemian set to visit, little realising that frequent house calls are inconvenient for a recluse. Everyone who was anyone visited the ladies: Charles Darwin, Sir Walter Scott, the Duke of Wellington, Josiah Wedgewood, Edmund Burke and Lady Caroline Lamb, amongst others. So frequently did visitors call that it caused Butler to lament in her journal, “When shall we ever be alone together?” Pamela Sims,129 Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s wife, visited. Soon after Fitzgerald’s death in the 1798 Rebellion, Sims visited again but was encouraged to move on after a cup of tea. The two may have been recluses and female companions, but they were definitely not rebels.

  The two were always short of money because being recluses was costly. They had the highest catering bills of any hermits in history. They did have an allowance from their families, but Butler received nothing from her father’s will. Charlotte, Queen Consort of the United Kingdom and wife of George III, gushed her admiration for the gothic eccentricities of their house and garden but, typical of those living it large on the taxpayer, she didn’t make a financial donation. From their retreat they closely followed European politics, and knew what was going on all over Europe. Byron thought that the adulation they received from France, where they supported the Bourbons in the French Revolution, went to Butler’s head, making her a haughty and imperious recluse.

  Butler was regarded as being clever. At the time, no self-regarding woman would have wanted to be that. She was also regarded as odd, which again was a traditional preserve of men. An anonymous contemporary silhouette shows two fat ladies in traditional riding gear. An article in the General Evening Post of 24 July 1790, entitled “Extraordinary Female Affection”, outrageously suggested that their relationship might have been unnatural. Butler, Ponsonby and their loyal maid are buried together at Llangollen Church. I wonder if the maid is in the middle. Out unnatural thoughts!

  While they have only contributed diaries to the canon of Irish literature, Butler and Ponsonby were the objects of much gossip and letters, and they naturally inspired poetry, because everything inspired poetry back then: female companions, fits of passion, Greek vases, various bird species, country lanes, storms and daffodils. Both Anna Seward and William Wordsworth wrote poems celebrating the companionship between the two women.

  Geraldine Cummins (1890–1969) was an Irish female companion with an occult connection to literature: she was a psychic medium who was in contact with dead writers, some of whom dictated books to her.

  She became telepathic after an unsuccessful stint as a suffragette. Cummins was stoned by a mob because she was a suffragist. Being stoned on the streets of Cork meant something entirely different in 1914 than it does now for undergraduates from University College Cork.

  She received training as an oracle under the Irish medium Hester Dowden (1868–1949), who was in regular contact with Oscar Wilde and William Shakespeare. One needs training to communicate with the dead, especially dead wits and playwrights.

  A spirit called Silencio dictated several books to Cummins, including Paul in Athens (1930) and The Great Days of Ephesus (1933). She was also a contributor to the Occult Review. She lived in Chelsea in London with her female companion, Beatrice Gibbs. In 1950 her ownership of Silencio’s books was legally challenged. But Cummins won on the grounds that a spirit, even a literate one, could not own copyright.

  *

  I never saw a man who looked

  With such a wistful eye

  Upon that little tent of blue

  Which prisoners call the sky,

  And at every drifting cloud that went

  With sails of silver by.

  From The Ballad of Reading Gaol,

  written by Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

  after his release from prison

  7

  Irish Science and Thought: Life In (and Out of) the Laboratory

  Anyone who has ever had a chemistry set knows the joy associated with trying to blow up the cat. But few of us have our own laboratory in our basement, a lightening conductor on our roof and a convenient nearby village filled with boorish rustics ready to surround the house at the slightest hint of a scientific breakthrough. The best scientific progress has only ever been possible in the face of the recalcitrant resistance of the local small farmers.

  Ah, I am nostalgic for the mob of peasants! Peasant mobs occur all over Irish history, and are usually to be found surrounding castles, wielding pitchforks and burning brands while shouting threats and abuse at those inside who are usually aristocrats, or “doctors”, in the process of re-assembling dead bodies. Peasant mobs normally dispersed home for supper in the evening before it got dark because they couldn’t imagine what might come out of the castle. It is one thing to complain about scientific progress; it is another to do something about it.

  If you want to go down in Irish history as a scientist, try making something in a laboratory that doesn’t involve too many complicated calculations. Something hideous would be easier to build, and more memorable, than something useful. Consider the success of Doctor Victor Frankenstein. However, when it comes to the sciences, we Irish lack that killer scientific instinct typically found in remote nineteenth-century Transylvanian castles. This is true not just in reconstructive anatomy. In general, we seem to have been better at fighting and writing poems than thinking and doing sums. However, we have had a few worthwhile scientific breakthroughs.

  Doctor Strange
love

  Trinners could have had the atom bomb in the 1940s. They had the man who could have built it in Ernest Walton (1903–1995), but they didn’t have the funds or ambition. In any case, Walton became a pacifist.

  Walton is our only Nobel Prize laureate in science. He was the first person in history to split the atom. In 1951, almost twenty years after their world-changing experiments, the Nobel Prize for physics was awarded jointly to Walton and the British scientist John Cockcroft for their pioneering work on the transmutation of atomic nuclei by artificially accelerated atomic particles. Their experiments pioneered a new branch of physics that produced nuclear interactions in a controlled way. Any controllable interaction can be used as a bomb, which is perhaps the point of physics. It was the first direct verification of Albert Einstein’s famous mass–energy relationship in a nuclear reaction, in which the destruction of just a tiny amount of matter released a huge amount of energy. Walton proved that E does equal mc2. The bombardment of uranium with neutrons and the discovery of the key nuclear-bomb-related neutron itself followed directly from Walton’s research in 1932.

  By 1934 Walton was so highly regarded that he could have gone to any leading physics laboratory in the world. Instead, he chose to return to his alma mater, Trinners, which was underfunded and particularly depressed at that time. During the Second World War, the Physics Department was down to just three staff; the rest may have been supporting the allied national war effort and building bombs. Walton stayed in Dublin because he patriotically decided that the needs of the students, our future physicists, were greater than those of the free world. In other words, he wasted his time teaching.