In his conclusion, Dr. Lyons comes down, very reasonably, against Parnell’s decision to refuse to retire after the divorce-court verdict. I cannot follow him, however, when he suggests that all might have been well if Parnell’s relations with Mrs. O’Shea had been made public at an earlier date. “No doubt, even if the relationship had been made public in 1881 or 1882 there would still have been criticism,” writes Dr. Lyons without overstatement, “and there might still have been pressure on him to retire. But if he had retired then, the retirement might possibly only have been temporary … and would surely have been less damaging both for him and for his party than what actually happened in 1890.” Parnell’s prestige was considerably less great in 1881 or 1882 than it was in 1890—he had accomplished much less—and if his relations with Mrs. O’Shea had been made public in one of the earlier years he would certainly have been obliged either to retire or to split his following. If he had retired, his retirement would almost certainly have been definitive. None of those who urged “temporary retirement” at the time of the split ever seriously tried to show how such a retirement could be ended. And if Parnell had retired, peacefully, in 1882, can we be sure that a united Irish party (under what leader?) would have won the elections of 1886, or that Gladstone and the Liberal party would have become converted to the cause of Home Rule for Ireland? Just as it was impossible for O’Brien and Dillon to “tidy up” the Parnell situation in 1891, so it is impossible for the historian to construct a tidy hypothetical order in retrospect. Living and dead, Parnell defies rearrangement.
It is unfortunate—and yet an index of Parnell’s importance—that one or two Irish critics have taken the appearance of Dr. Lyons’s sober, well-balanced book as the signal for the renewal of intemperate anti-Parnell polemics. Criticism of Parnell’s last disastrous actions should surely, by this time, be kept within bounds by a recognition of his unique services, if not by any glimmerings of a sense of tragedy. The tragic import of Parnell’s last year is admirably brought out by Dr. Lyons, both in the whole story which he has to tell and in those just words: “The very things that had served him so well in the past now led him over the precipice.”
The god Hercules
Deserted Antony whom he had loved so long.
* F. S. L. Lyons, The Fall of Parnell.
THE GREAT CONGER
There are three Yeatses in these two books.* There is the young man who wrote down and embroidered, richly or with careful plainness, the stories of the Sligo countryside: this in The Celtic Twilight, The Secret Rose and Stories of Red Hanrahan, which form the bulk of Mythologies. Then there is the aesthete-illuminé of Rosa Alchemica, Per Amica Silentia Lunae and other reveries, also in Mythologies. Finally, Mr. Monk Gibbon considers the Yeats he knew, the great bonze, the Senator, the literary boss who controlled the world of anthologies and poetry prizes as absolutely and as arbitrarily as Ed Flynn controlled public works contracts in the Bronx. “Every great man’s door crowded with petitioners and everywhere, in the State, in the family, an inequality made law.”
None of these three Yeatses is indispensable; all of them are of some interest. The Celtic Twilight is that part of Irish folklore that Yeats knew, through English; less strange in itself than the archives of the Irish Folklore Commission, yet a mine for those who like to look for the ore of imagery. The tone of this very early work (1893) does not yet exclude humour, humour which was not grand enough for Yeats’s middle period, not harsh enough for his old age. The best is the story of the giant eel’s advice:
I began a tale of an immense conger, three times larger than the one I carried, that had broken my line and escaped. “That was him,” said the fisherman. “Did you ever hear how he made my brother emigrate? My brother was a diver, as you know, and grubbed stones for the Harbour Board. One day the beast comes up to him and says, ‘What are you after?’ ‘Stones, sur,’ says he. ‘Don’t you think you had better be going?’ ‘Yes, sur,’ says he. And that’s why my brother emigrated.”
After this it is hard not to regret the change to Rosa Alchemica and all that (“as I joined the alembic to the athanor and laid the lavacrum maris at their side”). How much was it a publicity device—high stilts to catch the eye—how much an effort to translate into the idiom of the nineties the mental world of the Sligo boy, native superstition disguised as sophisticated superstition? The native superstition seems to have been on the whole kinder, and certainly less hysterical, than the incense and peacocks. The difference is in part that between pre-Christian and anti-Christian. For most of the “mystical” works “anti-Christian” would be too much to say; there is here and there a timid and muffled wish to blaspheme without any great interest either in what is blasphemed against or that in whose interest the blasphemy is supposed to be intended. Yet there is something, a hardening, a discovery of the need for hardness, which gives an underlying seriousness to the nonsense of Rosa Alchemica and The Tables of the Law. The narrator, arguing with Michael Robartes,
could find nothing better to say than: “It is not necessary to judge every one by the law, for we have also Christ’s commandment of love.”
He turned and said, looking at me with shining eyes:
“Jonathan Swift made a soul for the gentlemen of this city by hating his neighbour as himself.”
That last great sentence—it flashes out among the tarnished stage jewellery—could receive a Christian interpretation; perhaps someone is working on it. In its context, both the immediate context of the words and that of Yeats’s life, it suggests a discovery: that cruelty, to yourself and others alike, is the condition of power.
All neighbourly content and easy talk are gone
He that’s mounting up must on his neighbour mount …
Having taken the giant conger’s advice to emigrate, you become the giant conger.
The great conger, very much later, larger and more slippery, was what the unfortunate Mr. Gibbon encountered. Mr. Gibbon had legitimate and honourable literary ambitions. The conger inquired whether it was not time for him to be going. Mr. Gibbon had the courage to refuse to emigrate and the further courage to write a book about the subsequent events.
* William Butler Yeats, Mythologies; Monk Gibbon, The Masterpiece and the Man: Yeats as I Knew Him.
MOTHER’S TONGUE
When Synge died, in 1909, he left behind him, as well as his published work, a considerable quantity of manuscript material—diaries, notebooks and letters—of importance not only for his own biography but for the history of the Abbey Theatre and the Anglo-Irish literary movement. These documents passed to Synge’s nephew, Edward M. Stephens, who made use of them in preparing a vast work, which has not been published, on Synge and the Synge family. On Stephens’s death a few years ago his widow entrusted all these papers to an American scholar, Mr. David H. Greene, who has now produced what is likely to remain the standard biography of Synge.* As befits a biography which, to a great extent, breaks entirely new ground, it is straightforward, economical, free from theorizing and uses important new material copiously and with a minimum of comment. These, gentlemen, are the facts, Mr. Greene seems to tell us, and leaves us to make what we can of them.
The main facts were, it seems, mother and the Irish language. Mother was evangelical, ultra-loyalist (for her the Unionist Irish Times was pro-Fenian) and prim even by the standards of Victorian Dublin. She was disappointed with her son from both a worldly and an other-worldly point of view—not that she would have distinguished the two very sharply—and her yearnings and naggings, with the latter predominating, were the background of his boyhood. In later life his own unhappy relations with various women tended to fall into the ominous pattern of yearning, nagging and religious controversy: this pattern may, of course, have been socially as well as psychologically hard to avoid. He went, understandably enough, abroad—to Germany, then to France—studied languages, wrote some conventional verse, drifted and looked of little account. Then—it seems, on Yeats’s advice—he went to the Aran Islands. H
e had already—unlike any of the other prominent figures of what was to be called the Irish Literary Revival—studied the Irish language seriously. This visit to Aran was the decisive event in his life. Not only did it give him a style—an English that could make direct and creative use of Irish rhythms and idioms—but it also seems to have liberated a suppressed part of his personality. One of the most revealing anecdotes in the book, the significance of which Mr. Greene brings out very well, tells how towards the end, after an operation, Synge exclaimed as he came out from under the anaesthetic: “God damn the bloody Anglo-Saxon language that a man can’t swear in without being vulgar.” Mr. Greene rightly stresses the double impoverishment—social and doctrinal—of the language which he learned, in Yeats’s phrase, “at his mother’s knee.”
Irish was for him a language that a man could swear in without being vulgar, but he found that when he brought some part of the frankness of spoken Irish back into English he himself was denounced for vulgarity by the very people who claimed that they wished to revive Irish—and was therefore promptly defended by those other people against whose “refinement” he was reacting: his mother’s class. The Playboy controversy was an intellectual blindman’s buff, but neither it nor the Playboy riots did much harm. The real tragedy for the Abbey Theatre was Synge’s early death, which deprived the Abbey not only of its first great dramatist but also—as a memorandum printed here for the first time shows—of one who was prepared to argue about what the function of such a theatre should be and to admit that that function might change with time.
* David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens, J. M. Synge, 1871–1909.
SOME LETTERS OF JAMES JOYCE
I want that information about the star of the Sea Church, has it ivy on its seafront, are there trees in Leahy’s terrace at the side or near, if so, what are these steps leading down to the beach? (p. 136.)
I started to write down this passage as an example of the practical nature of almost all the letters in this collection. I was pulled up by the obviously corrupt text. The last words as they stand are meaningless: one can easily surmise that they should read “… if so what, are there steps leading down to the beach?” Pursuing his own concept of art, or exploiting dream-language, Joyce could perhaps have written more or less what is printed here; asking his aunt for information he would have written good plain prose; his editor has got lost somewhere in between. Mr. Stuart Gilbert, as all interested know, was a friend of Joyce’s for years and knows a great deal about him. It is all the more surprising that the present volume* is edited in a relatively perfunctory way—a way which Joyce himself, pedant that he was, might have thought decidedly unbecoming. If it is worth while publishing letters at all it is surely worth while identifying the people named in them, but that is not attempted consistently here. It is true that when Joyce writes (p. 314):
I never met Rops.
Mr. Gilbert conscientiously notes: “M. Daniel Rops, well-known Catholic scholar and writer.” But how many readers will be able to identify, say, the “Dail Éireann Minister of Propaganda” (p. 181) who wished to propose Joyce for the Nobel Prize? Mr. Gilbert does not identify him, although a note on Desmond Fitzgerald (?) would be at least as interesting as one on a French writer whom Joyce had not met. Similarly, how many non-Irish readers will guess who “Hiber and Hairyman” (p. 295) are supposed to be? These points are not, I think, capriciously selected. I looked myself for references to three people in whom, for personal reasons, I was interested. Of these, one is referred to in two letters, noted in the index, and not identified in a footnote; the second, the subject of an entire letter, is noted in the index and vaguely and indirectly identified in a footnote; the third, the subject of a long and rather important passage in a letter, is neither noted in the index nor identified. In all three cases (Mrs. Skeffington, Thomas Kettle, Richard Sheehy) the required information was easily available from sources which, as elsewhere appears, are known to Mr. Gilbert. Similarly, a glance through the index reveals many surnames unsupported by Christian name or initial. Nor is such information given or withheld on any very clear principle. The names of “d’Annunzio, Gabriel,” “Claudel, Paul,” “Eliot, T. S.” and “Shaw, G. B.” abide our question, but the names of “Adams,” “Bence,” “Buss” and “Dunn” are free, together with those of “Einstein,” “Hemingway” and “Goethe.”
The collection edited in this rather quietistic manner consists of 426 letters, ranging in time from 1901 to 1940, with relatively few letters for the earlier years. Some letters available to the editor have been omitted because they “relate to private matters,” others “for reasons of space”; cuts have been made in some letters at the request of their recipients and in others by the editor. One can easily understand these omissions in a collection published during the lifetime of some of Joyce’s immediate family and many of the recipients of the letters. But the mere fact that a deliberate process of selection has been at work, under the control of a dedicated admirer of Joyce, forces one to treat with reserve the publishers’ claim that their book constitutes “a revelation of personality” and that “the character of an astonishing genius is revealed.” Most of the letters printed here reveal nothing more than that Joyce was keenly interested in practical details relating to the composition and publication of his own works and the critical reaction to them; and that he was, for good reasons, worried about his health, especially his eyesight. A few letters reveal his affection for his father, his son and—more anxiously—his daughter. Here and there we have flashes of humour, of superstition or irritation. But those who are interested in “the character of an astonishing genius” would do better to turn to the genius’s work than to these letters, usually hastily scribbled on urgent business. When a man is working sixteen hours a day—as Joyce did on Ulysses—his letters are unlikely to rival those of Madame de Sévigné. The student of Joyce needs these letters, of course; or rather what he needs is the full text of all Joyce’s letters which have been preserved. If these were made available by degrees, on microfilm, in, say, a dozen libraries, and quotable by consent of the recipients (where living), the needs of our generation in this matter would probably be adequately met. At a later time the collected letters might be edited and published.
The present volume contains an agreeable introduction by the editor, with some interesting first-hand information about Joyce and his family, and also a handy chronology of the life of James Joyce by Mr. Richard Ellmann.
* Letters of James Joyce, edited by Stuart Gilbert.
QUEER WORLD
Brendan Behan was arrested in Liverpool late in 1939, at the age of sixteen, for participating in the IRA bombing campaign in England. After two months or so on remand in Walton Prison he was sentenced to three years Borstal detention. The judge at his trial expressed regret at being prevented, by the law and Behan’s age, from sentencing him to fourteen years penal servitude. He thought that the law should make allowances for people like Behan, and he did not mean indulgent allowances.
Borstal Boy is the story of Behan’s time, first in Walton Prison and then in Hollesley Bay Borstal. Mr. Behan is a violent but fair-minded man and, as might be expected, he has written a very good book in very good bad language. Borstal Boy is free from bitterness and self-pity, and free also from any affectation of objectivity. He has some old scores to pay off and he pays them gaily. The prison doctor:
Afterwards I heard the screws talk about the doctor and what a good man he was, and overworked, and he did go round looking like Lionel Barrymore, and sighing like the doctor in The Citadel, but I never heard of him actually doing anything for anyone. The prisoners said that he gave a man two aspirins for a broken leg, but that it was not really viciousness, only stupidity, and anyway, if he wasn’t a prison doctor he’d have to go in the Forces.
A prisoner:
… a real cup-of-tea Englishman with a mind the width of his back garden that’d skin a black man, providing he’d get another to hold him, and send the skin ’ome to
mum….
The last quotation suggests Anglophobia, and there are several passages in the book from which the casual reader might infer that Mr. Behan likes nothing about the Anglo-Saxons except their monosyllables. Anyone who reads the whole book will retain the impression as regards the monosyllables, but will realize that the author is far too good-humoured and intelligent to be any kind of xenophobe. The clue to his humanism is to be found in a remark about his Liverpool landlady:
The landlady was a mean woman from the [Irish] Midlands. I don’t mean that coming from the Midlands caused her meanness. You’ll get good people from there, or from any airt or part of the world, but if Cockneys or a Siamese are mean or decent, they’ll be mean or decent in a Cockney or a Siamese way.
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