New Ways to Kill Your Mother

W. B. Yeats: New Ways to Kill Your Father

Willie and George

In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care… She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written.’ When Ellmann came to Dublin in 1946 to work on his book, ‘she produced an old suitcase and filled it with manuscripts that I wanted to examine. At the beginning she was anxious about one of them, the unpublished first draft of Yeats’s autobiography, and asked me to return it speedily… I was able to allay her disquiet by returning the manuscript on time.’ She had, Ellmann wrote, provided Yeats with ‘a tranquil house, she understood his poems, and she liked him as a man’. Now she oversaw the poet’s legacy with canniness and care.

When John MacBride, Maud Gonne’s estranged husband, was executed after the 1916 Rising in Dublin, Yeats talked once more of marriage to Maud, and then became involved with her daughter Iseult, to whom he also proposed. Joseph Hone writes about this in his authorized biography of the poet, published in 1942. After Iseult finally rejected him in the summer of 1917, he decided to propose to a young Englishwoman, George Hyde-Lees. He wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I certainly feel very tired & have a great longing for order, for routine & shall be content if I find a friendly serviceable woman. I merely know… that I think this girl both friendly, serviceable & very able.’

She also had money. He wrote to his father: ‘She is a great student of my subjects and has enough money to put us above anxiety and not too much money. Her means are a little more than my earnings and will increase later, but our two incomes together will keep us in comfort.’ They were married in October 1917. He was fifty-two; his new wife, soon to call herself George, was twenty-five. Ezra Pound, best man at the wedding, wrote to John Quinn in New York to say that he had known George Hyde-Lees as long as he had known his wife, who had been her best friend; he found her sensible and thought she would ‘perhaps dust a few cobwebs out of his belfry. At any rate she won’t be a flaming nuissance [sic] to him and his friends.’

Yeats wrote about their honeymoon in the introduction to A Vision:

The first volume of Roy Foster’s biography of Yeats, taking us up to 1914, showed that while no statement or public position by Yeats could be taken at face value, this did not mean that he was a chameleon or in a permanent state of vagueness. He was, it seemed, a chameleon when it suited his imaginative purpose or while he was on the Irish Sea. Once arrived, he could be full of firm and combative conviction. In writing about his life Foster manages an alertness to Yeats’s political skills and certainties and his sense of command, and, at the same time, offers a nuanced reading of Yeats’s protean enthusiasms and loyalties.

The slow release of Yeats’s papers and letters over the past sixty years has helped to establish this sense of a Yeatsian self in constant re-creation. Ann Saddlemyer’s biography of George Yeats offers a more taxing version of the life of Mrs Yeats than Brenda Maddox’s George’s Ghosts (1999), but it does not solve the mysteries surrounding the relationship between Yeats’s marriage and his work: it makes them instead more fascinating and more open to different readings and interpretations.

George Hyde-Lees’s interest in the occult, which began a number of years before she met Yeats, was part of the spirit of the age. In 1891, the year before George’s birth, Alice James confided to her diary: ‘I suppose the thing “medium” has done has been more to degrade spiritual conception than the grossest form of materialism or idolatry: was there ever anything transmitted but the pettiest, meanest, coarsest facts and details: anything rising above the squalid intestines of human affairs?’ Despite her objections, the James family continued to believe in transactions with the spirit world. When, in 1905, during a séance in Boston, a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and pouncing upon the first occasion helpfully to get at me’. Both James in his stories and Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (1924) understood the power that ghosts and séance scenes held in the imaginations of their readers. During the First World War, as Maddox says, ‘grieving millions turned to the spiritualist movement, searching for messages from their lost men’. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote: ‘I seemed suddenly to see that it was really something tremendous, a breakdown of walls between two worlds, a direct undeniable message from beyond, a call of hope and of guidance to the human race at the time of its deepest affliction.’

Both Yeats in the 1880s and his future wife thirty years later would use the occult movement in London as a way of educating themselves outside the confines of a university. Yeats described his early involvement with men ‘who had no scholarship, and they spoke and wrote badly, but they discussed great problems ardently and simply and unconventionally as men, perhaps, discussed great problems in the medieval universities’. In 1911, when she was nineteen, George Hyde-Lees’s stepfather gave her a copy of William James’s Pragmatism, which asserted that ‘the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief’. She continued to admire William James’s writing throughout her life. By 1912 she was attending lectures on early religion and mysticism and reading widely on medieval and Eastern religion. She applied for a reading ticket for the British Museum, expressing her interest in reading ‘all available literature on the religious history of the first three centuries’. By the summer of 1913 she was including the study of the supernormal in her reading; her attendance at séances in London may have begun as early as the previous year. Soon she became interested in astrology. Her study was as serious and systematic as circumstances would allow, helped by an ambitious mother and a private income, and a knowledge of Italian and Latin. She was a regular visitor to her friend Dorothy Shakespear at her London flat after she married Ezra Pound in 1914; her relationship with the Pounds increased the breadth of her reading as well as offering her, and indeed her mother, an example of how someone with her unusual mixture of cleverness, earnestness and independence of mind might marry.

In this world of esoteric reading, leisured mysticism, visiting lecturers and poets making it new, Yeats had iconic status.

George’s mother knew him: her second husband’s sister was Olivia Shakespear, Dorothy’s mother, with whom Yeats had had an affair and remained on good terms. George met Yeats in 1911. She remembered vividly that she saw him and recognized him one morning in the British Museum, and later that same day while he was taking tea with her mother at Olivia Shakespear’s she was introduced to him. He was three years older than her mother and the same age as her father, who had been dead for two years, would have been. Over the next while, as George’s mother and her circle sojourned outside London, they were joined by the poet on a number of occasions. In February 1912 Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory: ‘I am at Margate with a Mr and Mrs Tucker (she was a Mrs Hyde-Lees who I have known vaguely for years). I got rather out of sorts, digestion wrong & so on & wanted to do nothing for a day or two… This is a dismal place & it rains all day but it is very quiet & a good change & I am with pleasant people & out of the Dublin atmosphere.’

Yeats was responsible for the induction with great ceremony and solemnity of George Hyde-Lees into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a sort of Masonic Lodge for those interested in the occult, in July 1914. Here once again her dutiful, serious-minded, studious self emerged as she made her way through the Order’s elaborate stages, arriving at the same level as Yeats by 1917. In these years, as the war intensified, she worked as a parttime volunteer orderly and nurse in London while continuing her reading and visits to the British Museum. At the end of February 1917 she and Yeats went together to a séance; it seems that the following month he discussed with her the possibility of marriage. He did not then formally propose, but instead left her waiting while he dallied with Maud Gonne and her daughter.

When he did propose, six months later, she accepted him. He described himself as ‘a Sinbad who after many misadventures has at last found port’, but in the days that followed explained his plans for a continuing familiarity not only with Maud Gonne but with her daughter Iseult. He made this clear to his betrothed and, in turn, to her mother. Her mother wrote in alarm to Lady Gregory, the person who she knew could most influence Yeats, and one of the few who was already aware of the engagement: ‘I now find this engagement is based on a series of misconceptions so incredible that only the context can prove them to be misconceptions.’ Her daughter, she wrote, believed that the poet had wanted to marry her for some time, but the mother’s own impression now was that, instead, ‘the idea occurred to him that as he wanted to marry, she might do’. George, she wrote,

Having interrogated the poet, who had come to Coole, Lady Gregory, in a letter that is now lost, seems to have tried to reassure the mother. She wrote also to George, expressing the hope that she would come to Galway soon before the floods rose above Ballylee, the ruined castle that Yeats had bought a year earlier. George, in the meantime, had been brought by Yeats to meet Maud Gonne and Iseult. Maud wrote to Yeats:

Despite this, she told others that she believed the marriage to be ‘prosaic’. Arthur Symons wrote to John Quinn: ‘I wish you had heard Maude [sic] laugh at Yeats’s marriage — a good woman of 25 — rich of course — who has to look after him; who might either become his slave or run away from him after a certain length of time.’

Thus in October 1917 George Hyde-Lees found herself on her honeymoon with W. B. Yeats, who was suffering from nervous stomach disorders. They went first to his flat in London and then to a hotel, where he received a note from Iseult wishing him well. Later, George told an interviewer that she felt him ‘drifting away from her’. He wrote to Iseult making clear his belief that he had made a mistake. Both he and George were miserable. Yeats began work on the poem about Iseult Gonne that eventually became ‘Owen Aherne and His Dancers’, using a notebook that Maud Gonne had given him:

‘What followed,’ Saddlemyer writes,

George made this admission that she faked it in the early 1950s to Virginia Moore, who was researching her book The Unicorn: William Butler Yeats’ Search for Reality. Yeats remembered the first words as: ‘With the bird all is well at heart. Your action was right for both but in London you mistook its meaning.’ George remembered writing: ‘What you have done is right for both the cat and the hare.’ Yeats would have understood that she was the cat and Iseult the hare or the bird. George’s hand continued to move and wrote, according to Yeats: ‘You will neither regret nor repine.’

‘The word “fake” would continue to haunt George, even though it was a phrase she herself employed in speaking with Virginia Moore and Ellmann,’ Saddlemyer writes. In 1961, when Norman Jeffares was writing his introduction to Yeats’s Selected Poems, she wrote to him: ‘I dislike your use of the word “Fake”… I told you this before & you had a happier phrasing in your book. However, I cannot ask you to alter this. The word “Fake” will go down to posterity.’

The words she wrote, in any case, worked wonders. Within days, Yeats described his new happiness to Lady Gregory: ‘The strange thing was that within half an hour after writing of this message my rheumatic pains & my neuralgia & my fatigue had gone & I was very happy. From being more miserable than I ever remember being since Maud Gonne’s marriage I became extremely happy. That sense of happiness has lasted ever since.’

It is easy to understand George’s objection to the word ‘fake’, despite her own use of it. By the time she spoke of these events to young and eager scholars, séances and the occult and automatic writing had gone well out of vogue. Also, the memory of what it was like in that hotel room on her honeymoon with the great poet must have been raw beyond explanation, easier to dismiss casually than explain carefully. Using the word ‘fake’ herself was defensive; seeing someone else using it made it different.

Before she married him, she knew Yeats’s work, attended his lectures and bought his books; she knew of his love for Maud Gonne and his affair with her stepfather’s sister. She knew also of his love for Iseult Gonne and may even have known of her mother’s letter to Lady Gregory. She realized now not only that the famous poet did not love her and had married her on a whim, but that the idea of the poet, which would have fascinated her, was far removed from the grumpy, sickly, indifferent and miserable man with whom she was now confined in a small space.

In her panic that day, as she began to write in the room, neither her motive nor the language that came to her can be accurately described, however, as fake. What happened was that her needs and her reading converged as she began to eroticize the occult and its attendant forces, just as Maud Gonne had done with Irish nationalism. She was working with desperate longings under pressure; she was producing sentences that made those apparent, followed by words that came at will, easily, from her conscious and her unconscious selves, brought closer to each other by a fear and pain that offered her an unusual receptivity. It seemed that she both believed and didn’t believe in what she was doing. She was moving deliberately and sleepwalking at the same time. Ellmann’s interview notes with her from 1946 read: ‘Had it not been for the emotional involvement, she thinks nothing would have come of it — but as it was she felt her hand grasped and driven irresistibly.’

Yeats was tireless and unembarrassed in his questioning of the spirit, asking many questions, for example, about former loves. And she, in turn, allowed the automatic writing at times to make clear her own sexual needs. In this strange time between the prevailing influence of Madame Blavatsky and that of Sigmund Freud, they both remained ambivalent about the power of a medium to control the autonomous power of the unconscious mind. In 1913 Yeats wrote: ‘Because mediumship is dramatisation, even host mediums cheat at times either deliberately or because some part of the body has freed itself from control of the waking will, and almost always truth and lies are mixed together.’ George’s problem was that she was now, on a daily basis, embodying this dramatization, in all its ambiguities and complexities. She was both cheating and allowing some part of herself to be freed from conscious control.

She was moving in dangerous territory, having been enough in occult circles to know how much opprobrium was heaped on the quack and the fake. Her husband needed her to keep working, especially once the medium said, in a beautiful phrase, that he had come ‘to give you metaphors for poetry’; she needed him, in turn, to stop talking in public about it, and she used the medium to warn him to be silent. She told Ellmann that her only serious quarrel with him in all the years of their marriage concerned his wish to publish a description of her automatic writing in the second edition of A Vision.

The medium gave him, as promised, metaphors for poetry. The experience, and her wish to keep it hidden, also gave him one of his narrative poems, ‘The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid’, in which the woman in her sleep offers the scholar hidden knowledge:

The narrator has cause to wonder, as George must have done in those early months of their marriage, if the sleeping wisdom that she offers is the sole basis for his love:

His reply to that question must have been of considerable interest:

When George went with her husband to Ireland soon after her marriage, every move she made was studied intensely by the five women who were most involved with the poet. They were his unmarried sisters Lily and Lolly; Maud Gonne and Iseult; and Lady Gregory. The fact that George managed never to quarrel with any of them while maintaining her distance from each says a great deal about her patience and her temperament.

Lily and Lolly wrote to their father in New York describing their new sister-in-law. ‘You feel that she has plenty of personality but that her disposition is so amiable that she does not often assert herself,’ Lolly wrote, ‘not from inertness but because she is happiest in agreement with people around her.’ When they went to the Abbey Theatre, Lily noticed that ‘when the lights went down George used to sit forward and look round me at him, smile to herself and sit back again’. When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs W. B. Yeats.’ Lily thought her sister-in-law ‘delightfully sane, just think of all the pests of women that are going about who suffer from nerves and think it soul — and so does some unlucky man till he marries them — Willy is in luck.’

In London soon after her marriage, George set about befriending Iseult Gonne, inviting her to stay the night, giving her a dress for Christmas and generally taking the harm out of her. The following year, when her mother was imprisoned for sedition, Iseult stayed at Yeats’s old flat in London and was sent money by George, who wrote worried motherly letters to Ezra Pound (who would soon have an affair with Iseult) about the need for her to find a job, doubting if she would consent to doing ‘machine work’. When Iseult began to share a flat with the highly unsuitable mistress of Wyndham Lewis, both Yeats and George arrived from Dublin and swooped on the place, as though they were her parents, removing Iseult, Josephine her maid, her cat, her birds and her furniture to more decent quarters. George was less than two years older than her.

Taking the harm out of Maud Gonne would prove more difficult. In October 1918, while Maud Gonne remained in prison, Yeats and George rented her house, 73 St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. ‘Should you be released,’ Yeats wrote to her, ‘and allowed to live in Ireland we will move out, which strangers would not.’ The following month, while pregnant with her first child, George caught the influenza virus that was raging through Europe. Yeats feared that she was dying. Maud Gonne, too, had been ill in Holloway Prison, and, after much agitation, was released to a nursing home in London. From there she fled to Yeats’s old flat, where Iseult was living. She wrote to Yeats: ‘My home in Dublin is the best place for all of us, with Josephine to cook for us. Please try & arrange that.’ Ezra Pound wrote to John Quinn: ‘I hope no one will be ass enough to let her get to Ireland… It is a great pity, with all her charm, that the mind twists everything that goes into it, on this particular subject’ — he meant politics, adding in brackets: ‘Just like Yeats on his ghosts.’ On 24 November, Saddlemyer writes, ‘disguised as an emaciated Red Cross nurse (perhaps in the very uniform George had cast off on her marriage), Maud slipped through the immigration line and arrived at the door of 73 St Stephen’s Green, demanding shelter’. She was accompanied by her two children and had much menagerie.

Yeats refused to let her in, and even when a doctor arrived and informed Maud Gonne that her continued presence might endanger George’s life, ‘still the lunatic refused to go’, as Lily Yeats wrote to John Quinn. Yeats ‘had a scene with her and turned her out’. She wrote him venomous letters and denounced him to her fellow nationalists. ‘Later she would complain,’ Saddlemyer writes, ‘that although married to a rich wife, he took advantage of her in prison by offering such a low rent, and she never forgot that George’s pet hares ate all the greenery in her garden.’ In spite of this, once the Yeatses moved out, cordial but distant relations were established, and Yeats began to attend Maud’s ‘at homes’ on Tuesdays at number 73. The following summer, as George stayed with her baby daughter in Galway and Ireland prepared for guerrilla war, one of her mediums warned her husband ‘not to be drawn into anything… you may be tempted to join in political schemes if there is trouble and you must not’. The figure of Maud in the automatic writing was the ‘Bird with white & black head & wings’. She was ‘dangerous… Nothing must be said unless she speaks of it — then simply say you are destroying the souls of hundreds of young men. That method is most wicked in this country — wholesale slaughter because a few are cruel… I am not sure of her.’ A few years later Yeats wrote to George that Maud Gonne ‘had to choose (perhaps all women must) between broomstick and distaff and she has chosen broomstick’.

Of the women who were closest to Yeats, Lady Gregory was the one he saw most of after his marriage. George, Yeats’s father noted when he met her in New York, was ‘the only woman I have ever met who is not scared of Lady Gregory. I fancy Lady Gregory is extra civil to her — naturally.’ She was, he wrote, ‘too intelligent’ not to see Lady Gregory’s ‘great merit, but yet alive to the necessities of self-defence’. The two women had much in common: notably steadfastness, conscientiousness, and a belief in Yeats’s genius. ‘They were shrewd judges of character,’ Saddlemyer writes, ‘and generous in the service of others; although good listeners, neither suffered fools or deceivers gladly.’

Later, when the Yeatses had a house in Dublin, Lady Gregory stayed with them on her visits to the city. She attended Yeats’s ‘Mondays’ in the house. ‘It is supposed to be for men only,’ she wrote, ‘and might be better so.’ Unlike Mrs Oliver St John Gogarty, however, who presided at her husband’s evenings, George Yeats ‘always discreetly withdrew, reappearing only to serve refreshments’. When Lady Gregory came to stay, George gave up her room for her, ran messages and answered the telephone for her, all the while maintaining civil and often warm relations with her. In 1927 she wrote to a friend: ‘Lady G was here for one whole month… only left yesterday and I have been sitting in the smallest possible nutshell in order to preserve a moderate outward sanity.’ Even though she blamed Gregory for the controversy over the Abbey Theatre’s rejection of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie, calling her ‘an obstinate old woman’, she kept her resentments to a few correspondents, including Dorothy Pound:

Houses and flats and rooms had the same power for Yeats as phases of the moon. It is not a coincidence that a short time after his marriage he moved Iseult into his flat in London and then rented Maud Gonne’s house in Dublin. By allowing Iseult to inhabit his London rooms and by his own moving daily in the house her mother bought, and then by refusing them entry to 73 St Stephen’s Green, he was enacting and exorcizing these two women’s haunting of him. He was also behaving sensibly. Yeats was good at making sure that even sensible behaviour had an undertow of symbolic resonance.

Thus he bought the derelict Norman keep at Ballylee in 1917, to assist him in his dreaming, telling Lady Gregory that its decoration would ‘depend on my wife if I marry’. In June he wrote to a friend: ‘I am 51 myself and do not like it at all and keep thinking of all the follies I have committed not to have someone to talk to after nightfall and to bring me gossip of the neighbours. Especially now that I am going to own a castle and a whole acre of land.’ Once married, George joined the dream and began to plan the renovation of the tower at Ballylee. ‘Among the duties she took over,’ Maddox writes, ‘was the correspondence with Rafferty, the builder who was renovating Thoor Ballylee. She did more. She paid, from her own bank account, the bills for the tower she had never seen in the country she had never visited.’

George’s work on planning its restoration became, like her automatic writing, her contribution to the store of myth and symbol that would continue to nourish Yeats’s work. Nonetheless, both Yeats and Lady Gregory were concerned that George should not see the tower at its most inhospitable in winter, when it flooded and the walls were wet with damp. When they spent part of the summer of 1919 there, Yeats drew an idyllic picture for his father. ‘It may well be,’ William Murphy later wrote in his biography of Yeats’s father, ‘that one of the happiest days of his life was 16 July 1919. Fishing in the stream by the tower, with George sewing and “Anne lying wide awake in her 17th-century cradle”, he saw an otter chasing a trout.’ His tower, Yeats wrote to John Quinn, was ‘a place to influence lawless youth, with its severity and antiquity. If I had had this tower when Joyce began I might have been of use, have got him to meet those who might have helped him.’ Joyce, however, might have been more interested in the fact that conditions in the tower were so primitive. The nearest shop was four and a half miles away. It had no electricity or plumbing. ‘Water for washing,’ Maddox writes,

The tower at Ballylee belonged firmly in the category of writers’ second houses, offering shelter to areas of imaginative energy rather than the growing family; it was dreamed into being, and then reworked and reconstructed in the way a poem was made. Both George and Yeats entered into the spirit of it wholeheartedly, pouring money into it, including much of the proceeds of Yeats’s American tour in 1920, and mentioning it constantly as the place to which they most longed to go. It was also their main connection to Ireland as the Black and Tan War raged. Lady Gregory must have taken a sly pleasure in writing from Coole in December 1920: ‘Your Oxford life sounds very peaceful — All chaos here still… The Black & Tans visited Ballylee, opened the door with a key & went in & there were rumours they were going to settle there.’ This caused Pound to report to Quinn: ‘George just in to say that the Blackantans have tanned Ballylee.’ No damage was done, however, and, as their second child was born, the Yeatses continued to plan a return to the tower, Yeats writing to Lady Gregory that his wife talked ‘constantly of the trees and of her garden and of the river’.

In April 1921 they returned after an eighteen-month absence and were able to sleep for the first time in the tower itself, in the large bedroom above the ground floor. Yeats wrote to Quinn: ‘It is a great pleasure to live in a place where George makes at every moment a 14th-century picture. And out of doors, with the hawthorn all in blossom all along the river banks, everything is so beautiful that to go elsewhere is to leave beauty behind.’ Yeats wrote at a desk by the window, where he could watch the stares, or starlings, flying in and out of their nest, and, as the Civil War broke out in April 1922, this gave him the final line of each stanza in ‘The Stare’s Nest by My Window’:

While they had sat out the Black and Tan War in Oxford, now they would witness first-hand the Civil War — which was dangerous for Yeats as a supporter of the Free State. In August, when the bridge at Ballylee was blown up, George wrote to Ottoline Morrell:

By the end of 1923, with the Civil War over, her husband having won the Nobel Prize and now a senator in the Irish Free State, with a house in Merrion Square (the equivalent of Berkeley Square in London, Yeats wrote to a friend), with the tower coming into shape, and two engaging children, and the Irish Sea between herself and her mother, who could irritate her, George Yeats had added to her happiness by having a number of Irish friends of her own. Like many women of her class, she was in need of a pair of homosexual men to confide in and gossip with, and these came in the guise of the playwright Lennox Robinson and the poet Thomas MacGreevy. Since most of Dublin suspected their homosexuality, ‘neither was a threat to the good name of Mrs W. B. Yeats’, Saddlemyer writes. She worked with both on the Dublin Drama League, which sought to produce more cosmopolitan work than was being put on at the Abbey. When MacGreevy moved to London in 1925, she wrote: ‘I wish you were back here. Willy said last night very solemnly: “Now MacGreevy’s not here we have to do our own gossiping.”’ In August of that year, the Yeatses spent time in Milan with Robinson and MacGreevy. Yeats, it seemed, did not enjoy the trip as much as George and her two new friends. He stayed in the hotel when the others went out sightseeing.

‘Only six years older than she,’ Saddlemyer writes, ‘Lennox quickly became George’s devoted pal. Together they gambled on the sweeps, went to the races (both horse and dog), the opera, the cinema and the theatre; they shared their experiences in gardening and breeding canaries.’ And they both drank a good deal, Robinson slowly becoming hopelessly alcoholic.

In London, MacGreevy, much to George’s consternation, also befriended her mother, who immediately began to flirt with him. ‘You make me wish I were your own age,’ her mother wrote to him, ‘we could play a good game.’ By encouraging him to become an artist she seemed to feel that she had become one, too: ‘Love must be kept firmly in the present, it is a thing without past or future… The fact remains that, fundamentally and however painfully, we are artists and artists we shall remain, and we both know that art is the only thing that matters and the one thing that makes the world tolerable.’

Soon George’s mother and the young Irish poet were discussing George, much to George’s annoyance:

Robinson and MacGreevy, in the early years of their acquaintance with George, thickened the plot by indulging in unrequited love. In 1919, Robinson, whose idol was Yeats, fell for Iseult Gonne, who rejected him despite Yeats’s suggestion that they should marry. Yeats’s sisters invited the unhappy couple to supper, but Lily remained doubtful that Iseult would change her mind. The following year Iseult married the eighteen-year-old Francis Stuart. George, Saddlemyer writes, sympathized with Robinson’s ‘lingering affection for Iseult’.

Both gentlemen then directed their attention towards the artist Dolly Travers Smith, with whose mother, Hester, a well-known medium, they were also friends, both having boarded with her at different times. (Hester’s books included Oscar Wilde from Purgatory: Psychic Messages.) Hester and Dolly were to become the third mother and daughter in Yeats’s circle who provoked interest in the same men. George thought Hester ‘the unbending hard essence of everything I loathe mentally, emotionally and temperamentally. She makes me think of lumpy beds, Russian fleas and ipecacuanha wine.’

In the same years that she was getting to know Robinson and MacGreevy, George was also spending time at Thoor Ballylee. In March 1926, she wrote to MacGreevy: ‘I go to Ballylee Thursday morning for three glorious days of solitude & cabbage planting & on my return will write you a sober & sane & reasonable letter.’ But there are also letters of complaint about conditions there, and the amount of hard work required to keep the place going. Yeats, in the meantime, was writing poems that used the tower at Ballylee as symbol and icon. In February 1928 The Tower was published. For the cover of the book Thomas Sturge Moore had made an etching of Thoor Ballylee. ‘Now,’ Saddlemyer writes,

The tower had served its purpose; like the automatic writing, Thoor Ballylee had delivered him metaphors for his poetry; it had also allowed George to function in the domestic sphere while at the same time empowering Yeats, offering him both comfort and a charged environment. Once the book was published, neither she nor Yeats had any desire to go back there. Despite all the specially commissioned furniture, the letters to the builder, the planning and dreaming, after 1928 the tower remained closed, a symbol of the way writers use houses for their magic properties rather than their domestic space. Over the next few years, as Lady Gregory’s health was declining, Yeats spent a good deal of time at Coole and ‘dutifully reported on regular inspections of the rapidly deteriorating cottage and castle’. When she grew older his daughter Anne ‘tentatively asked whether she might go there to paint, but George’s monosyllabic refusal was so abrupt that she gave up the idea of ever returning’.

The abandonment of the tower may also be bound up with an essential change in the relationship between George and Yeats.

Around 1928 and 1929 she ceased to have a close sexual relationship with him and became his nurse, the devoted mother of his children and a great worrier on his behalf. Yeats and their children seemed to suffer from great numbers of illnesses. From the time George and Yeats went on holiday to Spain in November 1927 until he died in January 1939, the state of his health and her children’s health became George’s main preoccupation; her tone in letters is often bitter and disappointed. In 1928 she wrote to MacGreevy: ‘had I known that all this might happen I should certainly never have had a family.’ She added ‘burn this when read’ at the top of the letter. When in Spain Yeats’s lung began to bleed, they made their way with difficulty to France and from there to Rapallo. Yeats wrote to Olivia Shakespear that George was ‘all goodness and kindness’. George, as she tried to get the children to Italy, wrote to Robinson: ‘I felt for years that life was quite unnecessary & if only a landslide would remove me they could have jointly a nurse a governess a secretary & a housekeeper & all get on so much better.’

In March 1928, George signed a lease on a large flat close to Ezra and Dorothy Pound overlooking the bay at Rapallo, where they spent two winters. Anne and Michael were sent to school in Switzerland. Yeats was released from being a ‘sixty-year-old smiling public man’ in Ireland. The company in Rapallo included the German poet Gerhart Hauptmann and the American composer George Antheil; others such as Max Beerbohm, Richard Aldington, Siegfried Sassoon and Basil Bunting passed through. In Rapallo Yeats recovered and relapsed and needed constant care. ‘Never was his dependence on George greater, or more pathetic,’ Maddox writes. ‘When told he needed a night nurse so that his wife could get some relief, he wept.’ Mostly in these years she was patient, but his helplessness sometimes exhausted her even temper. When she sent him a lamp to Coole in 1931 and he wrote to ask what oil to put into it, she replied: ‘The lamp of course consumes lamp oil, paraffin. What in Heaven’s name else could it consume?! Its very form shouts paraffin oil; you could surely not have imagined that it demanded Sanctuary oil, or olive oil.’

In Ireland, the Yeatses gave up the house in Merrion Square for a flat in Fitzwilliam Square, and then in 1932 moved to a large house with a garden south of Dublin. When de Valera came to power Yeats flirted briefly with the Blueshirts, a semi-comic Irish Fascist group. George did not share his sympathies. She hated the Blueshirts. Unlike her husband, she was a de Valera supporter and voted Fianna Fáil.

After the Rapallo sojourn he bounced back, writing to Olivia Shakespear in 1933 that the writing of the Crazy Jane poems was ‘exciting and strange. Sexual abstinence fed their fire — I was ill yet full of desire. They sometimes came out of the greatest mental excitement I am capable of.’ Two years later he told Iseult Gonne, who told Richard Ellmann, that ‘everything was terrible. He and his wife had gradually been alienated — he said she was a mother rather than a wife — that she had humiliated him in public.’ By then he had had a vasectomy, and begun to receive injections that increased his sexual desire in the very years when he was mourning lost sexual opportunities in his youth. ‘Wonderful things have happened,’ he wrote to Olivia. ‘This is Baghdad. This is not London.’

The old poet started then to make up for lost time. Just as in the 1890s he had moved between Dublin and London, reinventing himself at each crossing, now forty years later London was once more a place that offered freedoms not available in Dublin. In his seventies, with a few years left, he began to have love affairs. George nursed him when he returned exhausted, and seemed concerned that his friends should hear regular news about his condition before he set off again. In January 1935 she wrote to Gogarty: ‘I would rather he died in happiness than in invalidism. He may not have told you of all his past 18 months’ activities. One of them is that he has been very much in love with a woman in London.’ She told Richard Ellmann that she said to him: ‘After your death people will write of your love affairs, but I shall say nothing, because I will remember how proud you were.’ In June 1936, having left Yeats with Dorothy Wellesley, with whom he was having an affair, she returned to Dublin. Robinson wrote to Dolly: ‘W. B. is not coming back at the moment to G’s relief, though Olive says she wants him back as soon as possible (she knows). I think I know that G at any rate wants to play roulette on Sat — and not have Willy.’ Earlier, however, when she went with him to Liverpool, but did not see him off on the boat for Spain, she wrote: ‘I felt too like the dog who sees his master going for a walk and leaving him at home.’

In other words, her response to his affairs was ambivalent. She drank and was often ill; she was also lonely as Anne left home and Michael went to boarding-school. Nonetheless, she was practical and managerial and full of understanding, even writing to his new loves various accounts of his medical needs. She seems to have encouraged his regular decamping. When he read out loud to George a paragraph of one girlfriend’s letter that suggested that he and the woman might not travel to France alone, ‘she laughed at the idea of our not going alone. That means her blessing… Other people’s minds are always mysterious and I wanted that blessing.’

Blessings might have come easy, but perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of her self-sacrifice was her willingness to cross the Irish Sea with him as far as Holyhead, accompany him through customs, get him on the train in the direction of one of his liaisons, and then return alone on the same day to Dublin. ‘It was,’ Saddlemyer writes, ‘a long day: an 8.25 train in order to catch the mail boat at Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire), landing at Holyhead at 11.45, and departing again at 2.30 for arrival in Ireland at 5.25 p.m. This would become a regular routine.’ No wonder she was drinking.

By the beginning of 1939, Yeats was in the South of France with George; Dorothy Wellesley and her friend Hilda were close by; and Edith Shackleton, another of his lovers, soon arrived. On Friday 27 January, when he lapsed into a coma, Dorothy saw him for a few minutes, then Edith sat by his bedside; the following day, watched over by George, he died. All three women attended the poet’s burial at Roquebrune near Menton on 30 January.

As George returned to Ireland, she must have known that she had deprived the nation of one of its greatest joys — a big funeral. There was always something wonderful about the way she kept apart from Irish patriotism and fanaticism and puritanism; her arrival home now without the body of the great poet was almost heroic. As she set about comforting her family, however, the country went into spasm. Maud Gonne wrote to de Valera, the President and the Abbey Theatre, urging that Yeats be buried in Ireland. The poet F. R. Higgins, representing the board of the Abbey Theatre, replied: ‘We are making every endeavour to have the remains brought home to Ireland… I know personally he had a passionate desire to rest in Sligo.’ The theatre’s message to George about the matter was, as Saddlemyer says, ‘aggressive in its urgency’. The Dean of St Patrick’s in Dublin offered a grave in the cathedral. De Valera hoped ‘that his body will be laid to rest in his native soil’. What was interesting about all this, besides the national ghoulishness in full flow, was that, since George Yeats had remained so private and reserved and in the background during her years in Ireland, no one felt a need to mention her in their statements. Clearly, the Englishwoman Yeats had married was not cut out to become the national widow.

Yeats did indeed wish to be buried in his native soil, but he had witnessed the funeral of George Russell, the poet Æ, in 1935, and been appalled by the level of pomp. Five months before he died he had written to Dorothy Wellesley: ‘I write my poems for the Irish people but I am damned if I will have them at my funeral. A Dublin funeral is something between a public demonstration & a private picnic.’ In March 1939, George wrote to MacGreevy that Yeats had asked to be buried in Roquebrune ‘and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo’. George waited until Richard Ellmann came to Dublin in 1946 to report that her husband had also said: ‘I must be buried in Italy, because in Dublin there would be a procession, with Lennox Robinson as chief mourner.’

When the first biography appeared, she wrote to Frank O’Connor that she was ‘afraid now that it is on the market I will meet people in Dublin who will ask me what I think of the book, so I will slink as I did after Yeats’s death round back streets to avoid the people who said: “You will bring him back, won’t you?”’ His body was finally brought back in 1948, but, after much confusion in the graveyard in France and many versions of the story, it seems unlikely that the bones in the casket brought to Ireland did in fact belong to Yeats.

In 1965, the year of Yeats’s centenary, three years before the death of George, Frank O’Connor made an oration over the grave in Sligo. He said: ‘Another thing he would have wished me to do — and which I must do since none of the eminent people who have written of him in his centenary year has done so — is to say how much he owed to the young Englishwoman he married, and who made possible the enormous development of his genius from 1916 onward.’

In the same year, when Pound came to London for Eliot’s memorial service, he announced that he wished to fly to Dublin on his way back to Italy. George, by then, only answered the phone at ten o’clock in the morning. On this day, by some miracle, she answered it when it rang at three o’clock in the afternoon, and took a taxi to the Royal Hibernian Hotel to meet Pound, who was travelling with Olga Rudge.

They had known one another for fifty-five years. During the war, George had often listened to his broadcasts ‘in a humorous, half-conspiratorial sort of way’. Now they sat in silence. When Anne Yeats arrived she could feel the affection between them, but neither said a word. There is a wonderful photograph of them in the hotel that day, Pound gazing at George fondly, almost adoringly, and she, an old lady wearing glasses and a battered hat, taking him in, her expression placid and candid and wise.

When she died in 1968, she was buried in the grave with her husband’s bones, or others like them, under Ben Bulben in Sligo in the country she’d lived in for more than half a century. Her husband had been, as Frank O’Connor put it, ‘most fortunate in his marriage’.

New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Synge and His Family

In 1980, having been evicted from a flat in Hatch Street in the centre of Dublin, I was, by accident, offered temporary accommodation around the corner at No. 2 Harcourt Terrace. The house, three storeys over basement, was empty, having recently been vacated by its elderly inhabitant. It was early April when I moved in and the cherry tree in the long back garden was in full blossom. Looking at it from the tall back windows of the house, or going down to sit in the garden under its shade, was a great pleasure. The thought might have occurred to me that whoever had just sold this house could be missing it now, but I don’t think I entertained the thought for very long.

The aura of the previous inhabitant of this house, in which I ended up living for almost eight years and where I wrote most of my first two books, appeared to me sharply only once. I was putting books in the old custom-made bookshelves in the house when I noticed a book hidden in a space at the end of a shelf where it could not be easily seen. It was a hardback, a first edition of Louis MacNeice’s Springboard: Poems 1941–1944. I realized that these shelves must have, until recently, been filled with such volumes, and that the woman who had left this house and had gone, I discovered, to a nursing home, must have witnessed a lifetime’s books being packed away, the books that she and her husband had collected and read and treasured. Books bought perhaps the week they came out. All lost to her now, including this one, which gave me a sense of her as nothing else did.

I asked about her. Her name was Lilo Stephens. She was the widow of Edward Stephens, the nephew of J. M. Synge. In 1971 she had arranged and introduced Synge’s My Wallet of Photographs. Edward Stephens, who died in 1955, was the son of Synge’s sister Annie. Born in 1888, when Synge was seventeen, he was aged twenty when his uncle died in 1909. Later, he became an important public servant and a distinguished lawyer. In 1921 he accompanied Michael Collins to London for the negotiations with the British that led to the Treaty which set up the Irish Free State. He was subsequently secretary to the committee that drew up the Irish constitution and thereafter became assistant registrar to the Supreme Court, and finally registrar to the Court of Criminal Appeal.

In 1939 on the death of his uncle Edward Synge, who had not allowed scholars access to Synge’s private papers, Edward Stephens became custodian of all Synge’s manuscripts. He began working on a biography of his uncle, which would partly be a biography of his family. ‘I see J. M. and his work as belonging much more to the family environment,’ he wrote, ‘than to the environment of the theatre.’ He had been close to his uncle, having been brought up in the house next door to him and spent long summer holidays in his company, and been taught the Bible by Synge’s mother, as Synge had. But, in Synge’s lifetime, not one member of his family had seen any of his work for the theatre. At his uncle’s funeral, Edward Stephens would have had no reason to recognize any of the mourners who came from that side of his uncle’s life. For his family, Synge belonged fundamentally to them; he was, first and foremost, a native of the Synge family.

‘It was [Synge’s] ambition,’ he wrote,

In his work, Edward Stephens ‘transcribed in full,’ according to Andrew Carpenter in My Uncle John,

By 1950 the typescript was in fourteen volumes, containing a quarter of a million words. On Stephens’s death in 1955, it had still not been edited for publication.

Lilo Stephens inherited the problem of the Synge estate. Out of her husband’s work — ‘the hillside,’ as one reader put it, ‘from which must be quarried out the authoritative life of Synge’ — two books came. Lilo Stephens made her husband’s work available to David Greene, who published his biography in 1959, naming Edward Stephens as co-author. Later, in 1973, Andrew Carpenter would thank her ‘for her patience, enthusiasm and hospitality’ when he edited her husband’s work to a book of just over two hundred pages, My Uncle John. Lilo Stephens had also inherited Synge’s papers, which had been kept for years in No. 2 Harcourt Terrace as her husband worked on them. In 1971 Ann Saddlemyer would thank her for first suggesting the volume Letters to Molly and providing ‘the bulk of the letters as well as much background material’. Edward Stephens had purchased these letters from Molly Allgood so that they would be safe. Finally, Lilo Stephens ensured the safety of Synge’s entire archive by moving it from Harcourt Terrace to Trinity College, Dublin, where it rests.

Synge’s family remains of considerable interest, either because of the apparent lack of any influence on his work, or because they may or may not hold a key to his unyielding and mysterious genius. He seemed in his concerns and beliefs to have nothing in common with them — he stated that he never met a man or a woman who shared his opinions until he was twenty-three — and yet, for a great deal of his adult life, he lived with them and depended on them. Any version of his life and work has to take his family into account and understand the idea, in Edward Stephens’s words, ‘that the context of his life… was quite different from any other writer of the literary movement. I tried to create a picture of a class or group in Irish society that has almost vanished.’

If a writer were in the business of murdering his family, then the Synges, with their sense of an exalted and lost heritage and a strict adherence to religious doctrine added to dullness, would have been a godsend. Synge’s great-grandfather, Nicholas Grene tells us in his essay on Synge and Wicklow in Interpreting Synge: Essays from the Synge Summer School 1991–2000, ‘owned not only Glanmore [in County Wicklow], with its fifteen hundred acres of demesne including the Devil’s Glen, but Roundwood Park as well, an estate of over four thousand acres’. His grandfather, however, managed to lose most of this property, a portion only of which was bought back by Synge’s uncle. Synge’s father, who became a barrister, died when Synge was one year old. He left a widow, four sons, a daughter and four hundred pounds a year. The first three sons were solid citizens, becoming a land agent, an engineer and a medical missionary to China respectively. The daughter married a solicitor. The youngest, it was presumed, despite his solitary nature and regular illnesses, would eventually find a profession to suit his family, if not his temperament.

In his book Letters to my Daughter, published in 1932, Synge’s brother Samuel, the missionary, wrote:

This was to consign Synge’s mother Kathleen to dust, to suggest a sort of powerlessness for her. She was, in fact, a very powerful person. Synge’s mother was born Kathleen Traill in 1838. Her father was a clergyman of whom Edward Stephens wrote: ‘He spent his life, as he put it, waging war against popery in its thousand forms of wickedness, which did not always endear him to his ecclesiastical superiors.’ Finally he became rector of Schull in County Cork, where he died in 1847 from a fever caught from the people among whom he worked. His widow, who had been brought up in Drumboe Castle in County Donegal, moved to Orwell Park in the southern suburbs of Dublin. From here in 1856, her daughter married John Hatch Synge, the playwright’s father. They lived in Hatch Street in the early years of their marriage, later moving to Rathfarnham, where John Millington Synge was born. Later, after her husband’s death, Kathleen Synge moved her family to Orwell Park in Rathgar.

Synge’s paternal grandfather and his Uncle Francis, who had bought back some of the family estates in County Wicklow, were members of the Plymouth Brethren. Mrs Synge’s father had held strong evangelical views, which his daughter also shared. She brought up her children according to strong religious principles, and her social life, such as it was, seemed to include only people who were of a like mind and background. Edward Stephens wrote:

In an autobiographical essay composed in his mid-twenties, Synge wrote:

Between the ages of four and twenty-one Synge took part in his family’s annual move to Greystones in County Wicklow, where his mother had friends and associates among the evangelical community. These ‘summer visits to the seaside’, Synge remembered, ‘were delightful’. His mother had the policy on holidays as well as during the rest of the year of gathering together as many members of her family as were available. When they were not available in large numbers, she invited friends, usually women of the missionary persuasion, to share the family sojourn in Wicklow, which often lasted for three months.

Nicholas Grene writes about Synge’s relationship to his family: ‘There is nothing very unusual about a writer or artist from a conventional middle-class background diverging from his family’s political, social and religious views. What is striking about Synge’s case is that he maintained such close relations with the family in spite of his dissidence.’ However, while he spent most of his life in Ireland under his mother’s roof, sharing even her holidays, he seems to have been seldom alone with her and this might have helped to maintain close relations. Mrs Synge’s house in Orwell Park had an entrance in the dividing wall to her mother’s adjoining house, where her daughter Annie, her husband and their children, including the young Edward Stephens, lived, as did Aunt Jane, Mr Synge’s sister. On 13 April 1890, after Mrs Synge’s mother’s death, when the Stephens family decided to leave Rathgar, Mrs Synge wrote to her son about her prayers to the Lord: ‘I am… asking Him to find us two houses together as we are here. He can do all things, so if he pleases to do that for me it is quite easy for Him.’

The Lord came to her aid. He was assisted by Mr Talbot Coall, the estate agent; they combined to find two adjoining houses at Crosthwaite Park in Kingstown, now Dun Laoghaire. Thus the extended family remained together and Mrs Synge could continue to instruct her grandchildren in the ways of righteousness, as she had her children. While four of her five children carried her instruction faithfully into adulthood, it made her sad that John, the youngest, did not. In the letter quoted above, she also wrote: ‘Dear Sam is always a comfort when I see him. My poor Johnnie is not a comfort yet.’ Soon after the move she wrote: ‘John — poor boy. I am so sorry for him, he looks unhappy. He has not found the Saviour yet and until he does, how can he be happy?’

Her son, who had not found the Saviour, had found much comfort instead in the natural sciences and in his own imagination. In his autobiographical sketch, he wrote about an awakening that changed everything for him:

Synge was not naturally social. Because of ill health he had been educated at home for much of the time. Thus, when he went to Trinity College in Dublin, he took no great part in academic or student life. His reading had been intense and sporadic. His study of science and archaeology had been done for their own sake. His most notable attribute was his polite distance from those around him. By seventeen he did not seem to have shared his doubts and derisions with his mother, who wrote:

But it was hopeless. He could not be spoken to about matters either spiritual or temporal. Within a year, she was writing again: ‘He does not know how to take care of his clothes and won’t take advice; he has much to learn, poor boy; he is very headstrong.’ That summer she sent for a clergyman, who discussed religion with her son in private, leading her son to the view that he would have to come clean about his unbelief. The Sunday before Christmas, his mother wrote in her diary: ‘Fine, damp, mild day — church very hot — I felt overpowered. Johnnie would not come — very sad.’ And then on Christmas Day: ‘Very peaceful, happy day; went to church — my own sorrow Johnnie — he did not come.’

Later, Synge wrote: ‘Soon after I relinquished the Kingdom of God I began to take a real interest in the Kingdom of Ireland. My patriotism went round from a vigorous and unreasoning loyalty to a temperate nationalism and everything Irish became sacred.’ This was a piece of easy subsequent self-positioning, however, and it is unlikely that a shift in faith as swift and facile as he suggests actually took place. It is much more likely that his religious faith, if replaced by anything, was replaced by an interest in music. As well as attending Trinity, he attended the Academy of Music in Westland Row where he studied the violin, becoming one of the many Irish playwrights whose first love was music. His mother was impressed by his musical ability. A month before his seventeenth birthday, she wrote: ‘Johnnie’s ear is wonderfully good now, he hears if the piano is at all out of tune… [He] and I play together sometimes… He is greatly improved in time; at first he never kept with me and still runs away when he ought to rest, so I have to try and watch him as well as play my own part. We played some nice slow melodies last night, and it sounded wonderfully nice.’

In these letters, written to her son Robert who was in Argentina, she compared her two youngest sons. ‘Johnnie certainly is the literary man of the family. I never saw such a love of reading as he has — he would spend any amount of money on books if he had it… I think Johnnie takes after my father.’ Sam, on the other hand, ‘can’t help being slow. He is very like his dear father in that as well as other things.’ Sam followed his mother in religion ‘and his virtues make him a comfort to me’. Yet John, who his mother believed had ‘a good opinion of himself’, which she thought a pity, impressed her in ways that might have mattered to her more and that she could not take for granted. Mother and son did not fall out over his lack of religion and he was included in all family events and outings, the silent, stubborn dissenter at the table. Nonetheless, she lamented his state of ungrace year after year, in letter after letter; she was the only keener of the eastern seaboard. ‘Oh! My dear Johnnie is a great sorrow to my heart,’ she wrote in 1896 when he was twenty-five,

Synge’s Aunt Jane, who lived in the extended household, had often dandled the young Parnell on her knee when they were neighbours in Wicklow; she now ‘piously wished she had choked him in infancy’, as W. J. McCormack put it in his biography of Synge, Fool of the Family. The Synges were staunch defenders of the union and it is not hard to imagine their horror at the growing involvement of Synge in cultural nationalism. While his mother disapproved of his interest in archaeology, she did not object to his studying Irish at Trinity College. He took Irish with Hebrew, and these were seen as part of the Divinity course, Irish being useful to those who wished to convert the native speakers of the West of Ireland to the reformed faith. His Aunt Jane remembered how her brother Alexander, who had ministered on the Aran Islands, had also learned Irish. Like Lady Gregory, who began to study Irish in these years, Synge and his fellow students used an Irish translation of the Bible to help them. As for Lady Gregory too, some magic came to Synge from the language he was learning, or some set of emotions that were part of that decade. Both he and Lady Gregory, in the same years and through the same influences, gradually began to love Ireland, as though Ireland were a person. They loved its landscape and its ancient culture; they loved the ordinary people they met in cabins or on the roads. It was as if their own dying power in Ireland, the faded glory of their class, gave their emotions about Ireland a strange glow of intensity. They were both slow to turn this new emotion into politics. As Nicholas Grene has pointed out, ‘Synge canvassed for an Anti-Home Rule Petition in 1893 and as late as 1895 was of the view that Home Rule would provoke sectarian conflict.’ So too in 1893, Lady Gregory published anonymously a pamphlet called Home Ruin, essentially a piece of pro-unionist rhetoric. In time, however, they both realized that their project, if not political, was bound up with politics. Synge would later write: ‘Patriotism gratifies man’s need for adoration and has, therefore, a peculiar power upon the imaginative sceptic.’ And also: ‘The Irish country rains, mists, pale insular skies, the old churches, manuscripts, jewels, everything in fact that was Irish had a charm neither human nor divine, rather perhaps as if I had fallen in love with a goddess.’

The goddess came in many guises; flirting with her in these years between the fall of Parnell and independence forced Lady Gregory and Synge and others to deal in vast ambiguities, to turn a blind eye to the irony of their own position. Lady Gregory collected her rents at Coole from the same people from whom she collected folklore and with some of the same zeal. When they did not pay, she threatened them. W. J. McCormack writes in his biography:

When Synge was twenty-one his mother altered her summer routine, exchanging Delgany for the interior of County Wicklow. The fact that the house she rented was boycotted did not seem to bother her, nor did it prevent Synge from going with her. He read Diarmuid and Gráinne that summer and began to explore Wicklow with enormous enthusiasm. But, according to Edward Stephens, ‘they were not allowed to forget that they were staying in a boycotted house. In the evenings sometimes two constables came up the avenue and walked around the outbuildings to see that all was well.’ In 1895 when that house was not available, they rented Duff House on Lough Dan, but, as Stephens wrote, ‘it was with some misgivings… for as the house was owned by Roman Catholics, she feared it would not be free from fleas’.

Synge’s writings about Wicklow, eight articles in all, represent in W. J. McCormack’s phrase ‘a psychopathology of County Wicklow’. He loved the idea of tramps and vagrants and saw his own class as doomed. ‘In this garden,’ he wrote,

In one of the essays, as Nicholas Grene has discovered, he wrote and then omitted ‘his most telling condemnation of his own class’: ‘Still, this class, with its many genuine qualities, had little patriotism, in the right sense, few ideas, and no seed for future life, so it has gone to the wall.’ Synge wondered what use such a decaying class could be to a playwright: ‘If a playwright chose to go through the Irish country houses he would find material, it is likely, for many gloomy plays that would turn on the dying away of the old families, and on the lives of the one or two delicate girls that are left so often to represent a dozen hearty men who were alive a generation or two ago.’

His problem, as these ideas began to formulate in his mind, was his lack of worldly ambition. He wanted to be a musician. When his brother-in-law advised against it, his advice had not ‘the least effect’. His brother Robert, returned from Argentina and now a land agent, offered to take Synge into his office and train him up to become a land agent too. This did not meet with any enthusiasm. His cousin Mary Synge, who was a professional musician, came to stay and advised him to go to Germany to study music. His mother agreed to pay. At the end of July 1893 he left for Koblenz, where he lodged with a family of four sisters whose company he loved, as he loved the company of most women. He stayed in Germany for almost a year, coming home in time to join his mother and the rest of the family for their annual holiday in County Wicklow.

That summer he renewed an acquaintance with Cherrie Matheson, a neighbour in Kingstown who came to stay with the Synges in Wicklow. His falling in love with her served to emphasize his own marginal position in his class. He had no prospects, just as he had no religion. Nonetheless, he wanted to marry her as he returned to Germany in October. From there, in January 1895, he went to live in Paris, where he remained until the end of June, teaching English, attending lectures in the Sorbonne and idling with others of his kind in the city. That summer and winter in Dublin were filled with his obsession with Cherrie, whom he saw a great deal. At the beginning of 1896 he returned to Paris. ‘He had left the woman he idealised,’ Edward Stephens wrote, ‘and had refused to engage in any money-making occupation which might have enabled him to offer her a home. He was going to Paris and to Rome with a general plan for studying languages and literature, inspired by the hope of developing his own productive powers in a way which, as yet, he could picture but dimly.’ After three months in Rome, he wrote to Cherrie proposing marriage. When she refused, he wrote to his mother. Her diary entry reads: ‘I got a sad sad letter from my poor Johnnie.’ He returned to Ireland, and soon began to see Cherrie once more. She remembered:

Synge did not live long enough to reposition himself in a set of memoirs. It was clear, however, from his preface to The Playboy of the Western World that he would, had he lived, have easily joined Yeats, Lady Gregory, Sean O’Casey and many others in doing so. He wrote: ‘When I was writing “The Shadow of the Glen”, some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen.’ This suggested that the girls were native Irish rural girls, proto-Pegeen Mikes. As Nicholas Grene has pointed out, they were ‘Ellen the cook and Florence Massey the maid, both of whom had been brought up in a Protestant orphanage and did not necessarily come from Wicklow at all’.

Yeats outlived Synge by thirty years; Lady Gregory by twenty-three, and they both created versions of him that suited them. In the years when the three of them worked together, there was also a strange hostility lurking in the shadows while centre stage stood solidarity, mutual support and kindness. It was as though both Yeats and Lady Gregory harboured the view that Synge was on the verge of finding them out as they shifted ground and reinvented themselves in the early years of the twentieth century.

There was also the issue of class. In his essay ‘Good Behaviour: Yeats, Synge and Anglo-Irish Etiquette’, Roy Foster pondered the relationship between Yeats and Synge when they first met in Paris in 1896, when Yeats was thirty-one and Synge twenty-five.

Yeats had had bohemianism foisted upon him by his feckless father; Synge had done it all alone as a new way of killing his mother. Yeats later described their first meeting:

Yeats wrote this account of their Paris conversations in 1905, claiming that they had taken place six years earlier, whereas they had taken place nine years before, shortly after Yeats’s own first visit to the Aran Islands. Declan Kiberd in Synge and the Irish Language and Roy Foster, however, have pointed out more essential inaccuracies in what became, for many years, the standard account of Synge’s impulse to go to the islands. Synge, through his study of the Breton language and his meeting with the Celtic scholar Richard Best, had been taking an intense interest in Celtic Studies in Paris in any case, as Declan Kiberd has emphasized. He knew about the islands because his uncle had been a minister there. ‘Doubtless,’ Kiberd has written,

He wrote to his mother in Dublin about his new friends in Paris where he had returned, who included Yeats and Maud Gonne. (One of his friends later reported that ‘Synge gently hated Miss Gonne.’) He explained that he had become interested in socialism, which his mother thought ‘utter folly’. He became a member of the committee of Maud Gonne’s Irish League, but politics did not interest him as much as culture, and he resigned after a few months. In the summer of 1897, despite his cosmopolitanism and his new friends, he came back to Ireland so he could go to Wicklow on holiday with his mother.

That summer, as he became ill, his hair falling out and a lump developing on his neck, some of his family put it down to unrequited love. But it was the beginning of the Hodgkin’s disease that would kill him twelve years later. His mother wrote:

It is interesting that there is no mention here of the Aran Islands. The operation took place in December 1897. The doctors must have known that the symptoms could recur, but they told Synge and his mother, who both seemed to have believed them, that it was a success. His mother watched over him. On 3 January 1898 she noted in her diary: ‘John not well — made me anxious.’ Two days later she wrote to Robert: ‘Johnnie looks much better, but he is not strong, and I am anxious lest he should go to Paris too soon and be laid up again in some way, as the Hotel life is anything but comfortable or healthy. He is very silent, poor fellow, and spends all his time over his books except when he goes out for a walk.’ When he went back to Paris, writing fragmentary beginnings to a novel and attending lectures by a French professor on the connections between Irish and Greek literature, his mother wrote: ‘I heard from Johnnie; troubled by bugs.’

On 23 April 1898 he came home. The difference between his life in Paris, where he spoke fluent French, lived alone and was deeply respected by his many associates, and his life in his mother’s house, must have made him wonder. At least three times a day for meals in Ireland he had to listen to Mrs Synge and her friends and other members of the family on the subject of religion and domestic life and their narrow political prejudices. She was teaching her grandchildren the Bible as she had taught her children, seeing it as part of her duty, according to Edward Stephens, to emphasize the horror of eternal damnation. ‘Sometimes,’ Stephens wrote,

In Paris, he was the earnest playboy of the western world; in Kingstown he was his mother’s youngest son.

Just before Synge’s first visit to the Aran Islands, he had a meeting with Cherrie Matheson, who told him that their differences were irreconcilable. Two days later, he called to her house and had what must have been a deeply dispiriting conversation with Cherrie and her mother. Mrs Matheson, according to Edward Stephens, ‘with Cherrie’s approval, rated him soundly for pressing a rejected proposal of marriage when he was not earning enough money to support himself. He left in despair… His mind was still distraught with anguish when, on the morning of Monday 9 May 1898, he left by the morning train for Galway.’

He wrote of his visits to the islands over the next few years with beauty and reverence and restraint. It must have been a relief that first morning watching the sailors casting off in a fog from Galway pier and arriving in Aranmore after a three-hour journey, no one there knowing anything about Cherrie Matheson and her hectoring mother, or Mrs Synge’s worries about her poor Johnnie. He was now in the land of his dreams. Lady Gregory saw him on the island in 1898; she was in search, too, of nourishment from a primitive world that contained an astonishing life force and an ancient culture. She wrote:

Later, she wrote about his work once he had arrived on the islands. He had, she wrote, ‘done no good work until he came back to his own country. It was there that he found all he wanted, fable, emotion, style… bringing a cultured mind to a mass of primitive material, putting clearer and lasting form to the clumsily expressed emotion of a whole countryside.’

Soon, he was invited to Coole and quickly joined the movement that resulted in the Abbey Theatre. He became, eventually, with Yeats and Lady Gregory, one of the three directors. He wrote five plays for them — The Shadow of the Glen (1903); Riders to the Sea (1904); The Well of the Saints (1905); The Tinker’s Wedding (1907); The Playboy of the Western World (1907). He left one play unfinished, Deirdre of the Sorrows, which was first produced, in a completed version, in 1910. His imagination was powerfully autonomous; his plays combined the knowledge he had amassed through his study and his wanderings in Europe with a real openness and freedom and an immense natural talent. He delighted in language and character, in wild talk and massive abandon, as though he were concerned to dramatize and most portray what he himself in his own life kept in abeyance.

In these eleven years he took part in all the rows that ran at the theatre, seeming much of the time calmer, more focused, less vindictive and, on some matters, more determined than his colleagues. He believed that Yeats was too impetuous to deal with the actors. In some of the correspondence, as Roy Foster has pointed out, ‘he sounds both older and wiser than Yeats; he appears more at ease in dealing with people.’ In 1908, when the Fays had left the theatre, Synge remarked: ‘Since then Yeats and I have been running the show, i.e. Yeats looks after the stars and I do the rest.’ The actors and workers in the theatre liked him. He appeared more natural, more in possession of himself than either of his colleagues. An Australian visitor in 1904 described him: ‘He was full of race and good breeding, courteous, sensitive, sincere… a simple man; but there was something strange and alluring about him, an indescribable charm expressed in his voice and manner and, above all, in his curious smile that was at the same time ironic and sympathetic.’ With the Abbey, as with his family, Synge was skilled at withdrawing. ‘I have often envied him his absorption,’ Yeats wrote, ‘as I have envied Verlaine his vice.’

Lady Gregory disliked The Playboy of the Western World, although she defended it in public. She made sure that Yeats’s play The Pot of Broth was not used as a curtain-raiser, which would be, she wrote to Yeats, foreseeing the riots, like ‘Synge setting fire to your house to roast his own pig’. After Synge’s death, she wrote a passage in her journal that she did not publish: ‘One doesn’t want a series of panegyrics and we can’t say, don’t want to say what was true, he was ungracious to his fellow workers, authors and actors, ready in accepting praise, grudging in giving it… On tour he thought of his own play only, gave no help to ours and if he repeated compliments, they were to his own.’ Yeats in his journal wrote: ‘I never heard him praise any writer, living or dead, but some old French farce-writer.’

The truth was that he understood the value of his own plays and did not rate very highly the work of Yeats or Lady Gregory for the theatre, although he admired other aspects of their work, such as Lady Gregory’s translations. He made no secret of this, and of his profound irritation at Lady Gregory’s tireless and fearless promotion of Yeats’s work and her constant production of her own work. In December 1906 she told Synge that Yeats’s dramatic work ‘was more important than any other (you must not be offended at this) as I think it our chief distinction’. In March 1907, when The Playboy of the Western World had already been produced and Charles Frohman, an American producer, came to the Abbey looking for new work to tour in the US, Synge wrote to Molly Allgood:

They, on the other hand, became increasingly sure that they had invented him. After his death Lady Gregory wrote to Yeats:

Synge’s relationship to the islands of the west, however, came to him via his family as much as it did from Yeats’s inspiration. As soon as he arrived on the Aran Islands in 1898, for example, he wrote to his mother, who wrote to his brother Sam:

And parts of his vitality came to him from his mother as much as anyone else. When he returned to Dublin from the Aran Islands he accommodated himself to his mother’s surroundings once more, joining her on holiday in County Wicklow. He would return to the family from his daily outings by foot or bicycle with stories of tramps he had met, including one who claimed to have known his grandmother and who had told him: ‘I never went there but Mrs Synge offered me a glass of whisky.’ Later, when the young Edward Stephens mentioned the tramp to Synge’s mother, she remarked: ‘I wish Uncle Johnnie would not encourage tramps; I don’t know why he wants to talk to queer people. I’m sure that Mrs Synge never offered a tramp whisky.’

Once the summer was over, Synge followed his usual routine, returning to Paris for the winter. The following year, when he returned to Ireland for the annual long holiday with his mother in Wicklow, his mother had two young women, both interested in evangelical Protestantism, staying. Synge became close to them. His mother wrote: ‘Both girls are very lively and there is a great deal of joking and fun goes on between them and John. I have not seen him laugh so much for years.’ Edward Stephens remembered: ‘John had learned to enjoy their company so much that he never withdrew to read in his room when he had an opportunity of sitting with them on the steps looking at the view or, on wet days, on camp stools in the porch looking into the mist that hid everything but the tops of the trees below the house.’

In September Synge returned to the islands and then in November to Paris, where he began to write his book about the Aran Islands. In May 1900 he returned once more not to miss his three months in Wicklow with his mother, who once more had invited young women, including one Rosie Calthrop, to stay and keep her son company, much to his delight. His mother, however, became jealous that summer of her son paying more attention to another woman than to her. She was not, it seems, content to play the Widow Quin to her guest’s Pegeen Mike. She wrote to Sam:

The idea of Mrs Synge telling her guest that she was jealous of her son’s attention to the guest is intriguing. It is hard to imagine what terms she used to make herself clear. It is also possible that the guest was forced to explain to Synge what the problem was, that the older woman was aggravated by his sudden success with strangers, his charm. Thus it is possible a central part of the action of The Playboy of the Western World was being played out in a rented house in Wicklow in the summer of 1900.

That September Synge set out again to charm strangers by returning to the Aran Islands. This was his third visit. He arrived in a particular state of gloom because Cherrie Matheson had been receiving a gentleman whom she would later marry. They had met on the street and Cherrie had introduced her new boyfriend to Synge. The following month when he returned, this visit having sown the seeds that would become Riders to the Sea, his mother wrote to Sam:

That autumn Synge bought a portable typewriter, a Blickensderfer, which Richard Best chose for him. It came in a varnished wooden case. When he brought it home, he said that it spelt worse than he did. When he went back to Paris, his mother missed him. She wrote to Sam:

The gland in his neck was still swollen when he returned at the beginning of the summer; when he saw the doctor in Dublin he was given an ointment and a different medicine. His mother invited Rosie Calthrop to stay with them once more and wrote to Sam about the amount of money Synge and Rosie had spent on an outing. ‘John does not mind at all,’ she wrote, ‘of course it is my money and he has no scruples about that. However, I don’t mind now and then, but I would not like it often.’ Synge had his typewriter with him and was working on the first draft of a play When the Moon Has Set, which dealt with his own class and was thinly disguised autobiography. He brought it with him when he went to stay at Coole but Lady Gregory told him that it was not good and of no literary interest. From Coole he went west to the islands and then back to Paris. That May of 1902 he was asked to review Lady Gregory’s Cuchulain of Muirthemne, in which a version of the dialect spoken around Coole was used. Synge found this dialect close to the living speech he knew from rural Wicklow. In his review he described the language as ‘wonderfully simple and powerful… almost Elizabethan’. The Elizabethan vocabulary, he wrote,

He was working on the drafts of his early plays. In The Shadow of the Glen and The Tinker’s Wedding he was, to some small extent, dramatizing the role of the artist, or the outsider, versus the role of the settled and respectable community; in other words, he made these plays as versions of his own plight at being turned down by Cherrie Matheson. Other aspects of these plays came from his own dreams and observations, especially in the summer months in Wicklow. Edward Stephens, who was fourteen at the time his uncle worked on these plays, wrote that the material

By the beginning of October 1902 Synge had finished both Riders to the Sea and In the Shadow of the Glen. On his way to the Aran Islands for his final visit — his book on the islands still had not found a publisher — he stopped off at Coole to show the plays to Yeats and Lady Gregory, who described the plays as ‘both masterpieces, both perfect in their way’. Later she wrote: ‘He had gathered emotion, the driving force he needed from his life among the people, and it was the working in dialect that set free his style.’ Yeats saw the language of the Bible as another influence.

Early the following year he decided to give up his room in Paris. When he unpacked his French belongings in Dublin, Edward Stephens watched him taking out ‘the knife and fork and little frying pan that he had used in Paris, he showed them to me as if they were things he regarded with affection. I asked him whether they had ever been cleaned, he replied: “A thing that is used by me only is never dirty.”’ Because of attacks of asthma he spent that summer in Kerry rather than in Wicklow, returning to Dublin for the rehearsals of The Shadow of the Glen, which opened in October to considerable controversy. When Synge and his mother went down to breakfast the morning after the opening night, they read in The Irish Times that the play was ‘excessively distasteful’ while the critic admitted ‘the cleverness of the dialect and the excellent acting of Nora and the tramp’.

Edward Stephens wrote about his grandmother’s response to the coverage of the play:

Mrs Synge also worried about her son, now aged thirty-two, being out late. She wrote in her diary: ‘After a dreadful storm last night, I had a headache from lying awake listening to the storm and watching for Johnnie who was not home until 3.30.’

The Irish Times had nothing much good to say about Riders to the Sea either when the play opened in February 1904. The Synges disapproved of what they read about it. ‘The idea underlying the work is good enough,’ the critic said,

Edward Stephens remembered his father’s response: ‘If they want an Irish play, why can’t they act “The Shaughraun”?’

The plays, however, were much praised by the London critics, but this made no difference to Synge’s family, who were, Edward Stephens wrote, ‘serenely unaware of the importance of his work’. After a time in the west, Synge decided in October 1904 to find his own lodgings in Rathmines and move out of the family home for the first time in Dublin. In January 1905 The Well of the Saints went into rehearsal with a walk-on part for a young actress, Molly Allgood, whose sister Sara was a well-known actress. She was nineteen. Soon she began to play important roles in the theatre’s repertoire, including Synge’s plays. Synge fell in love with her.

Both the Synge family and Lady Gregory disapproved of his relationship with Molly, the Synges for religious and social reasons, Lady Gregory because she did not want directors of the theatre consorting too freely with its employees. While he could not keep the relationship a secret from Lady Gregory, Synge could hide it from his family. On 5 November 1906, when he had moved back into his mother’s house and given up his flat, he wrote to Molly: ‘My mother asked me again if I was alone, and I said I had “a friend” with me. I must tell her soon.’ Seventeen days later, he wrote again: ‘I showed my mother your photo the other night and told her you were a great friend of mine. That is as far as I can go until I am stronger. I am thoroughly sick of this state of affairs, we must end it, and make ourselves public.’ That day, as he was suffering from influenza, Molly came to his mother’s house. Later, Synge wrote to her: ‘My mother is too shy to say much about you, but I think she is pleased. She said you seemed very bright and she hoped I had asked you to come down on Sunday and cheer me up. I said I hadn’t but I would write. Today she has reminded me several times not to forget my note to you.’

The following month, when he told his mother he was engaged to Molly, he wrote:

While Synge sent Molly only the good news about his mother’s response to his marrying a Catholic, it is easy to read between the lines of his letters. The following March, for example, he remarked that his mother ‘is much more rational about it than she was’. This suggests that she had been, in the previous months, irrational in her response. Later that month, she began to ask in some detail about her future daughter-in-law: ‘My mother was enquiring about your temper today, she says my temper is so bad, it would be a terrible thing to marry a bad-tempered wife.’

That January, as the rehearsals for The Playboy of the Western World started, Synge began to write to Molly about the possibility of finding a flat. Molly was playing Pegeen Mike. Willie Fay, who was producing, and his brother Frank realized how much indignation the play would provoke:

In her diary, once she had read the Irish Times account of the play and the opening night, Mrs Synge recorded: ‘I was troubled about John’s play — not nice.’ Synge himself was troubled by a cough that he could not shake off. In all these years he seemed to be suffering regularly from coughs and colds and other ailments. By April, he was making plans to get married. ‘I counted up my money last night and if all goes well I think we shall have £150 for our first year, if we get married soon, that is £3 a week.’ In January 1908 he found a flat in York Road in Rathmines for thirteen shillings and sixpence a week. His mother wrote:

Both Synge and his mother were ill that winter. Both had operations, and it must have been obvious to the doctors that both of them were doomed. In April, Mrs Synge wrote to her son Robert about Synge’s marriage, making clear that she must have been, up to recently, opposing it: ‘Johnnie came to see me on Friday last; he is seriously thinking of being soon married… [and] as he is determined… it is no use opposing him any more and we must only trust that he may get on.’ He was, however, too ill to remain in the flat he had dreamed of with Molly for so long. Once his operation was over, he came home to his mother once more: ‘We got [his] furniture all back from Rathmines yesterday,’ she wrote,

In the time that remained to him, Synge travelled to London, returned to Koblenz to stay with the family who had hosted him years earlier, wrote tender letters almost daily to Molly Allgood and worked on his play Deirdre. Death was never far from his mind. On 2 November 1908 he sent Molly a draft of a new poem:

His mother died while he was in Germany. On 7 November, on his return to her house where he was to stay for the remaining months of his life, he wrote to Molly: ‘I am home at last. I am inexpressibly sad in this empty house.’ In February 1909 he went into hospital in the knowledge that he was dying. In his notebooks from his time on the Aran Islands, there is a passage that he did not transcribe fully when he came to write the book. He was in a curragh on a bad sea:

During his long death battle, Molly came to see him every day until she went to play Pegeen Mike in Manchester where The Playboy was warmly received. On 23 March Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory:

The following day he died. He was buried in the family plot in Mount Jerome cemetery.

Before the funeral, Synge’s brother Robert wrote in his diary: ‘Received a visit from Yeats and the Sec. of Abbey Theatre with a request which I refused as impossible.’ They wanted to have a death-mask made. Edward Stephens wrote: ‘Robert would have disliked it under any conditions but he… believed John’s face to have changed so much during his last illness that no real likeness of him… could have been obtained.’ Stephens noticed that at the funeral the mourners were divided, ‘as they had always been in his lifetime’, between family and the people among whom he had worked. Molly Allgood did not attend his funeral.

Beckett Meets His Afflicted Mother

In his essay on the painter Jack Yeats, which he sent to Samuel Beckett in Paris in 1938, Thomas MacGreevy wrote: ‘During the 20-odd years preceding 1916, Jack Yeats filled a need that had become immediate in Ireland for the first time in 300 years, the need of the people to feel that their own life was being expressed in art.’ Beckett wrote to MacGreevy to say that he did ‘not think there is a syllable that needs touching’ in the first eighteen pages, and that the rest, ‘though I do not find it quite as self-evident as the beginning, holds together perfectly’. But then he said that ‘the political and social analyses are rather on the long side’. He admitted his

Like MacGreevy, Beckett was fascinated by Jack Yeats; in his letters Yeats the painter is almost alone among living Irish figures of the previous generation whom Beckett mentions with constant respect. In 1930 MacGreevy wrote of Beckett to Jack Yeats:

After the visit, MacGreevy wrote to Yeats again: ‘Beckett wrote me about his visit to you. I’m glad you liked him. He was completely staggered by the pictures and though he has met many people through me he dismissed them all in his letter in the remark “and to think I owe meeting Jack Yeats and Joyce to you!”’ In February 1935 Yeats, alert to Beckett’s solitary habits, wrote to MacGreevy: ‘I tried to get Beckett on the phone one day but he was away. I wanted to arrange a day for him to come here — when there wouldn’t be other visitors as he doesn’t so much like having them about.’

Three months later, Beckett wrote to MacGreevy from Dublin:

Early the following year Beckett saw the picture Morning in Yeats’s studio; he wanted to buy it, despite his general lack of funds. ‘It’s a long time since I saw a picture I wanted so much,’ he wrote to MacGreevy. In May 1936 he told MacGreevy that Yeats had ‘brought up the subject of the picture… I since borrowed £10 which he accepted as a first instalment, the remaining £20 to follow God knows when, & have now got the picture. Mother & Frank [Beckett’s brother] can’t resist it much… It is nice to have Morning on one’s wall that is always morning, and a setting out without the coming home.’ Later both men wrote separately to MacGreevy to say that they had bumped into one another at a donkey show in Dublin where Beckett had taken his mother, who was, Beckett reported, ‘the picture of misery’. Yeats was making sketches for a painting.

In the early part of his essay on Yeats, which was finally published in 1945, MacGreevy touched on something that was crucial to Beckett in his twenties and thirties as he sought to get Ireland out of his system, or tried to find a way of including it in the work he would do without any reference to its mythology, its history, the amusing oddness of its people or the so-called lilt of its language. ‘Jack Yeats’s people,’ MacGreevy wrote,

In other words, Yeats was attempting to move beyond what MacGreevy called ‘mere stereotyped inventions’. There was a melancholy and a mystery at the heart of all the movement and gaiety he depicted. He painted Irish light using colours and textures that belonged to his dreams as much as to the actual landscape or to the palette or systems of previous painters. Nothing in his paintings was idealized simply because it was Irish. He could easily, especially in the years when Beckett knew him, have been a German painter. There was a mixture in him of someone rigorous, watchful and solitary and someone fascinated by swirl, swift movement and pure excitement; his canvases were filled with theatricality and crowds, and also with reverie, solitary figures lost in bare, windswept places, tramps and loafers beneath the high, haunted, visionary sky. Yeats personally was elusive and reticent, despite his sociability; it was said that he seldom discussed with anyone, or even generally mentioned, anything of emotional importance to him. He had other things to talk about. And this might have been useful to Beckett. Yeats also wrote experimental plays and novels, and it was he who found Beckett a publisher in London for his first novel, Murphy, after it had been rejected by several firms.

Like Yeats and his brother the poet, and the playwrights Shaw, Synge and O’Casey, Beckett was a Dublin Protestant. The fact that he played no part in the development of the Abbey Theatre, and did not write about Ireland directly or suffer from patriotism or indulge in nationalism, and seemed in ways deracinated, a citizen of nowhere, does not mean that Ireland, its light and its landscape, and to some extent its so-called heritage, did not form him, or have a deep effect on him. His Protestantism shows up in some lovely moments, however, such as when he bathes at the Forty Foot in Dublin in 1936 and sees a Father McGrath, ‘red all over with ingrowning semen & exposure’. The footnote offered by the editors in Volume I of his Collected Letters remarks drily: ‘It is not known to which Father McGrath SB refers.’ Beckett’s South Dublin Unionist background emerges also in some wonderful comments, such as an attack on the police force of the Free State: ‘There is no animal I loathe more profoundly than a Civic Guard, a symbol of Ireland with his official Gaelic loutish complacency.’

Beckett’s problem was that, as a literary artist, he knew that what his predecessors in Ireland had done with the island’s hidden or invented personality would be of no use to him. What Jack Yeats had done had a greater influence on him than the work of any Irish writer. In 1937, he wrote to his aunt Cissie Sinclair, a kindred spirit, about Yeats’s work as though he were writing about the work he himself would begin creating a decade later:

In the years after Beckett met Yeats he set about finding further sources of inspiration not in literary texts or traditions but in the study of European paintings. In the 1930s he was looking at paintings and writing about them with an intensity and sense of discovery. In his interest in art, and his efforts to write a poetry filled with radiant or fragmented statement, the language unadorned, personal, sometimes obscure and strangely beautiful, he came across a soul mate in Thomas MacGreevy. MacGreevy, born in Tarbert, County Kerry in 1893 and so thirteen years older than Beckett, was an art critic and a poet. His poem ‘Exile’ began:

This found echoes in an untitled poem by Beckett, written first in French:

MacGreevy had fought in the First World War, seeing active service at Ypres and the Somme, where he was wounded twice. By the time he met Beckett, he already knew Joyce and his circle in Paris and had met Eliot in London. Besides his short book on Jack Yeats and some poems, a few of them masterpieces of their kind, he wrote books on Eliot and Richard Aldington for the same series as Beckett’s book on Proust, the publication of which he arranged. He later wrote a monograph on Poussin and was director of the National Gallery of Ireland from 1950 to 1963. MacGreevy flits in and out of the lives of various figures in these years. He was a friend of W. B. Yeats’s wife, George, and of Joyce’s wife, Nora; he corresponded with Wallace Stevens, who dedicated a poem to him. Richard Aldington called him ‘a paradox of a man if ever there was one. He looked like a priest in civvies.’ MacGreevy chatted and gossiped a lot, knew a great deal about art and music and literature and was charming and cheerful. He disliked England, even though he retained a British passport and had no objection to actual English people. Like many before and after him, he was homosexual abroad but celibate in Ireland. (When he mentioned his sexual inclinations to a priest, he was told to kick himself every time he had such thoughts.) He was a dapper little fellow who wore a bow-tie; he managed to be Catholic and queer, patriotic and cosmopolitan all at the same time. When he lived in Paris, he often went for a walk during the day to ‘make sure the world was where [he] had left it the evening before’. In the years between Beckett’s arrival in Paris in 1928, where he and MacGreevy taught at the École Normale Supérieure, and the outbreak of the Second World War, MacGreevy was Beckett’s confidant and his closest friend.

Although Beckett was brought up in what was effectively suburban Dublin, the house was close enough to the mountains south of the city, and to the sea and the bare Wicklow Mountains even further south, to make this landscape one of abiding importance to Beckett, who, like his father, was a great walker. The letters in the first volume of his correspondence make clear that, despite his lack of interest in Ireland or Irishness, he loved the Irish landscape. In 1932 he wrote to MacGreevy about a trip to the west of Ireland with his brother Frank, describing Galway as:

Ten days later, he described the Wicklow Mountains:

This habit of walking would fill one of Beckett’s miraculous late pieces, Company, in which he described his narrator walking (‘Sole sound in the silence your footfalls’) but also his own father’s setting out on a long day’s walk as his mother was giving birth:

Beckett seems to have had an uncomplicated relationship with his father. In April 1933 he wrote to MacGreevy:

Two months later, when his father died, Beckett wrote to MacGreevy:

Beckett’s father’s late interest in not doing a stroke of work made its way with many complications and much guilt to his son. Lassitude is one of Beckett’s great subjects. In August 1930, as he worked on his book on Proust, he wrote: ‘I can’t do the fucking thing. I don’t know whether to start at the end or the beginning.’ In December, the book finished, he wrote to the editor in London to say that he had added nothing. ‘I can’t do anything here — neither read nor think nor write. So I am posting it back to you within the next day or two with practically no changes made. I must apologise for the absurdity of the entire proceeding. I expected more generous rifts in the paralysis.’ The following month he wrote to MacGreevy: ‘You know I can’t write at all. The simplest sentence is a torture.’ Soon, he wrote to MacGreevy again from London: ‘If I could work up some pretext for writing a poem, short-story, or anything at all, I would be all right. I suppose I am all right. But I get frightened sometimes at the idea that the itch to write is cured. I suppose it’s the fornicating place & its fornicating weather.’ Two weeks later, nothing had changed: ‘I don’t believe I could put a dozen words together on any subject whatsoever.’ A year afterwards, back in Ireland, there was still no advance. ‘I find it more and more difficult to write and I think I write worse and worse in consequence.’ In 1934 he wrote to his cousin: ‘I can’t do any work, no more than a man can pick his snout and thread a needle at the same time. So I’ve nearly given up trying.’ In 1936 he wrote from Hamburg to the writer Mary Manning in further despair:

(He referred to his Proust book as ‘my Proust turd’.) His interest in the toilet might have been awakened by what he described to Arland Ussher early in 1936 as ‘a sebaceous cyst in my anus which happily a fart swept away before it became operable’. As late as 1939 he was writing to MacGreevy: ‘I drowse through the days & do nothing. I try now & then to get started, but it comes to nothing. If it is to be like that, let it be like that.’

His problem in these years was very simple and not easy to solve: it was how to live, what to do, and who to be. He was clever, well educated, he spoke French and Italian fluently; his German was very good. But his first book of stories had not sold and he could not find a publisher for his novel. He had no idea how he would earn a living, and he was also deeply unhappy. He was not always the saintly figure, full of shy politeness and withdrawn courtesy, that he subsequently became. His loathing for the poet Austin Clarke emerges freely in his letters. He openly satirized him in Murphy as Austin Tick-lepenny and attacked his work in an essay for the Bookman in 1934. Nor was he known for his personal courtesy in the years before he left Dublin. When one night the playwright Denis Johnston asked him for a lift to Foxrock, where they both lived, Beckett replied rudely: ‘No.’

His famous despair is not always on display here, though there are hints of it. In a letter to his cousin in 1934, he wrote about the coming of spring:

At times in his letters, it is easy to see him slowly and laboriously becoming the writer and the man he later was; at other times, it is clear that he could have become someone else. In 1933 he wrote to MacGreevy about the possibility of a career in advertising (‘It has been in my mind for a long time’). In 1936, when he was thirty, he thought of training to be a commercial pilot (‘I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously’). He also considered training to be a film-maker and sent a letter to Eisenstein that same year asking to be admitted to the Moscow State School of Cinematography. As well, he applied to be a lecturer in Italian at the University of Capetown. In the end, in a splendid ruse, he decided to be an art critic and convinced his mother that she should pay for a lengthy stay in Germany so that he could look at pictures.

His letters to MacGreevy about paintings are serious and well informed. He writes about paintings in his early letters better than he writes about anything else, including his own life. There is a sense of his complex personality — on the one hand, his sternness of judgement, on the other, his ability to take pleasure in what he saw — in the way he goes into exacting detail about the paintings he was looking at, including work in the National Gallery of Ireland, which was around the corner from the office in Clare Street where the family quantity surveying business was run. In December 1931, he took in Perugino’s Pietà, newly acquired by the gallery.

In his story ‘Love and Lethe’ in More Pricks than Kicks, Ruby Tough from Irishtown is likened to the Mary Magdalene in this picture: ‘Those who are in the least curious to know what she looked like at the time in which we have chosen to cull her we venture to refer to the Magdalene in the Perugino Pietà in the National Gallery of Dublin, always bearing in mind that the hair of our heroine is black and not ginger.’ The following year he wrote: ‘I seem to spend a lot of time in the National Gallery, looking at the Poussin Entombment and coming stealthily down the stairs into the charming toy brightness of the German room to the Brueghels and the Masters of Tired Eyes and Silver Windows. The young woman of Rembrandt is splendid.’ In his story ‘Ding-Dong’, he described the face of the pedlar woman: ‘Yet like tormented faces that he had seen, like the face in the National Gallery in Merrion Square by the Master of Tired Eyes, it seemed to have come a long way and subtend an infinitely narrow angle of affliction, as eyes focus on a star. The features were null, only luminous, impassive and secure, petrified in radiance.’

His letters from Germany, too, are filled with the names of paintings and a sense of his fierce concentration on the task in hand. Sometimes, the descriptions and lists go on for pages. Although he wrote mainly from Germany about paintings he saw and his own melancholy, he didn’t ignore what was happening around him. From Hamburg he wrote to Mary Manning in 1936: ‘All the lavatory men say Heil Hitler. The best pictures are in the cellar.’ Soon afterwards, he wrote to MacGreevy: ‘I have met a lot of friendly people here, mostly painters… They are all more or less suppressed, i.e. cannot exhibit publicly and dare sell only with precaution. The group was broken up in 1933, their library confiscated.’ In January 1937 he noted that Thomas Mann’s citizenship had been rescinded. The following month he wrote about an art historian he had met: ‘He was removed from his post in the Real Gymnasium here at the Gallery in 1933, like all the others of his kidney.’

While this might seem like nonchalance, it should be placed beside Beckett’s general refusal to write letters filled with news of the day and his subsequent determination to stay in France once war broke out and become involved in the Resistance. It is hard not to underline the passages where Beckett took pleasure in the image of the Pietà, in pictures of the tearful mother and her headstrong son who was lying finally in her lap, hers at last. Beckett was the sort of young man who was made to break his poor mother’s heart. Home from Paris and then London and then Germany and feeling very sorry for himself, he must have been an awful nuisance lounging around the house, or in bed with hangovers — he was drinking a lot — or other unnamable complaints. His mother was neurotic enough in any case, and sad, often depressed, after the death of her husband. Beckett’s brother Frank, who was as solid as his father, took over the family business, and he was now on the point of getting married. For Beckett’s mother, her wayward son became the focus of her worry.

There is an interesting letter written from London in 1935 to MacGreevy that deals with Beckett’s reason for undergoing psychoanalysis there. He went three times a week. ‘For years,’ he wrote,

In other words, it was all about his mother.

In October 1937, when his mother had left him alone (with a cook, of course) in the family house, he wrote a letter marvelling at the pleasantness of Cooldrinagh without her.

In Paris in January the following year, when he was recovering from being stabbed in a serious assault, he wrote to MacGreevy about a visit by his mother and brother: ‘Hope you met Mother & Frank in London. He was relieved to be getting back, and she sorry. I felt great gusts of affection & esteem & compassion for her when she was over. What a relationship!’ In May, when he heard that she had burned her hands badly, he wrote: ‘Of course she kept it from me. I feel sorry for her often to the point of tears. That is the part that was not analysed away, I suppose.’ The following month he wrote: ‘As you can imagine I am not anxious to go to Ireland, but as long as mother lives I shall go every year.’

Beckett’s mother disapproved of her in-laws, the Sinclairs, as much as she would have disapproved of the Joyces, had she heard much about them. Beckett, however, was closely involved with both families: they offered him a way out of his own family; they opened paths for him towards certain freedoms that he sought, though they created problems for him along the way. The Becketts had a lovely habit, over the generations, of producing one or two really sensible members of the family, such as Beckett’s father and his brother, who never put a foot astray, and then various complex figures, such as Beckett’s Aunt Cissie and Beckett himself and indeed his first cousin John Beckett, whose serious, intelligent and eccentrically minimalist style of conducting Bach cantatas in Dublin, and wonderfully laconic and informative introductions, were, for me, one of the very great pleasures of the city in the 1970s. Cissie Sinclair was Beckett’s father’s only sister. She had studied art in Paris with Estella Solomons and Beatrice Elvery, later Lady Glenavy, both artists who regularly showed in the Dublin galleries. Cissie married Boss Sinclair, a Dublin antiques dealer and friend of the painter William Orpen; in the early 1920s the Sinclairs moved to Germany, where they dealt in contemporary German art, as well as antiques. Beckett often visited them there and became emotionally involved with their daughter, his first cousin Peggy, who died of tuberculosis in 1933 aged twenty-two. Her ghost is all over his collection of stories More Pricks than Kicks, and there are stray references to her throughout his work. (And there are elements of Cissie’s last years, when she was confined to a wheelchair and watched the world through a telescope, in Beckett’s play Endgame.) When Hitler rose to power, making life for Jewish art dealers impossible, the Sinclairs returned to Dublin.

They were serious art collectors and interested in music and literature. Both Boss and his son Morris played the violin. Their priorities were rather different from the stolid, dull ones that dominated Beckett’s own household. They were bohemians. They gave parties at which, as Anthony Cronin noted in his biography of Beckett, ‘people sat on the floor and afterwards quite possibly slept on it’. No one among the Sinclairs minded Beckett staying in bed all morning and having no worldly ambitions and many vague and high-toned dreams. Beckett could write to them easily about art and music. There is a marvellous letter to Morris from London in 1934, written in French, in which Beckett describes a concert he went to:

A small rift with the family arose after Beckett published the story ‘The Smeraldina’s Billet Doux’, in which he used a letter from Peggy Sinclair just a year after her death. In a letter to Morris, Beckett wrote: ‘Glad to hear that Boss bears me no ill-will. But that I knew beforehand.’ James Knowlson writes in his biography:

In her biography, Deirdre Bair wrote: ‘Yet he seems to have had little remorse for deeds such as this, complaining only of the loss of visiting privileges, as if someone else, a complete stranger, had committed the transgression.’

A problem arises in the edition of his letters with the sources for this information. Beckett insisted that only letters ‘having bearing on my work’ needed to be published after his death. Edward Beckett, Beckett’s nephew, who represents the estate, is cited in the introduction to Volume I of his letters as ‘a working partner in the preparation of this edition’. The editors acknowledge that ‘he has responded generously where there was disagreement over what counts as “having bearing on the work”.’ But they also make clear that while they followed a policy of including as much as possible, there were disagreements between them and the estate. ‘To take one example,’ they write, ‘it is the editors’ view that Beckett’s frequent, at times almost obsessive, discussion of his health problems — his feet, his heart palpitations, his boils and cysts — is of direct relevance to the work; with this the Estate of Samuel Beckett has disagreed.’ The editors point out that while there are ‘some ellipses’ in the letters as published, they have ‘tried to limit these’. Calling Cissie Sinclair, whom Beckett dearly loved, ‘Smeraldina’s Ma’, just a year after the death of her daughter Peggy, the model for Smeraldina, in a letter to MacGreevy may not improve Beckett’s status among right-thinking people. But for the rest of us, who are interested in his work, it is not merely of prurient interest, though it is that as well. It is of importance how Beckett dealt with people in his family who objected to real people being used as models for characters. In the case of Beckett, whose relationship with the world of ‘real people’ would become increasingly strained as he produced his masterpieces after the war, this early use of his dead cousin, and his own response when problems arose, has ‘bearing on the work’, whether his estate likes it or not.

Bair, in her footnotes, cites ‘the papers of Thomas MacGreevy’ for her information on the strain between Beckett and the Sinclairs over the use of Peggy’s letter. Knowlson cites two different letters to MacGreevy written in August 1934, only one of which is included in the edition of his letters. The one here is printed with three ellipses, and there is no use of the term ‘Smeraldina’s Ma’ to describe Cissie Sinclair. The first paragraph reads:

The next paragraph also begins with ‘…’, and another ‘…’ appears at its end.

The problem for the reader, in a book so filled with detailed and informative footnotes, is that in this case there is no footnote, no clue given as to who might be offender or the offended here. In May 1937, after the death of Boss Sinclair, Beckett wrote to MacGreevy: ‘I suppose you have read about the action for libel that Harry [Boss Sinclair’s twin brother] is taking against [Oliver St John] Gogarty. I am in it up to the neck. And gladly in so far as Boss wanted it done, having seen the offending passage some weeks before his death.’ Gogarty had written an autobiography, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, and included a passage about

There were also references to ‘the twin grandchildren of the ancient Chicken Butcher’ and to an antique dealer called Willie (William was Boss’s original name).

In his statement of claim, Harry Sinclair accepted that his grandfather had in fact enticed little girls into the back room of his premises and interfered with them sexually, but denied that he and his brother had followed in their grandfather’s footsteps, as it were, in this matter. He insisted that he and his brother were easily identifiable and were clearly libelled.

Beckett came back from Paris to give evidence that he recognized the Sinclairs as the subject of Gogarty’s libel. Earlier he had written to MacGreevy: ‘All kinds of dirt will be raked up & I suppose they will try & discredit me as author of the Pricks.’ He was right. The barrister for the defence read out a passage from More Pricks than Kicks, which had been banned in Ireland, that referred to Jesus’s ‘interference in the affairs of his boyfriend Lazarus’. He also made mention of Whoroscope, a book of poems, and forced Beckett to correct his deliberate mispronunciation of the name Proust and admit that he wasn’t a Christian, a Jew or an atheist, alienating the jury as much by his French accent as by his lack of religion or his non-religion. In the summing-up, the barrister referred to Beckett as ‘a bawd and a blasphemer’ and this was used the next day as a column subheading in The Irish Times. In his summing-up the judge said that he himself would not put much faith in the evidence of ‘the witness Beckett’.

In his biography Knowlson writes: ‘Although he rarely discussed the case in his correspondence with friends, his remarks about Ireland became more and more vituperative after his return to Paris.’ It is easy to imagine his mother’s view on the matter as she read about the trial daily in The Irish Times. Beckett did not stay with her when he returned to give evidence. When the trial was over, he went to see his brother, who advised him to go back to Paris without seeing her. Beckett did so. His mother, in retaliation, never spoke to the Sinclairs again.

Although Beckett wrote many letters — 15,000 have been found and transcribed by the editors, and there may be more — he was not, on the evidence of the first volume, a great letter-writer. We are lucky that he put his real energies into his work. And yet there are passages and entire letters in this volume that throw significant light on the development of his thinking about language and prose, as much as about art and music. The most interesting is his letter from Dublin to the writer and translator Axel Kaun, written in 1937 in German:

He went on to say: ‘In my opinion, the most recent work of Joyce had nothing at all to do with such a programme.’

In these years, however, what Joyce was doing continued to fascinate him; he was nourished by his association and friendship with Joyce and his reading of Joyce’s work. Despite his admiration for Shem, as he often calls him in his letters, and indeed his affection for him, the relationship was not simple, not least perhaps because of the class difference between them as Irishmen. Just before Christmas 1937 he wrote to MacGreevy about working on the proofs of Finnegans Wake: ‘Joyce paid me 250 fr. for about 15 hrs work on his proofs. That is needless to say only for your ear. He then supplemented it with an old overcoat and 5 ties! I did not refuse. It is so much simpler to be hurt than to hurt.’ It is hard to know what Joyce was thinking of. And the idea that a notorious scrounger of Irish Catholic origin, great writer or not, was offering acts of charity to Beckett in Paris would not have brought cheer to May Beckett in her large, posh house in Foxrock.

Beckett was invited to dine with the Joyces on Christmas night 1937. Joyce wanted a collection of critical essays on his work in progress to appear in the Nouvelle Revue Française and asked Beckett to do one of them. Beckett wrote to MacGreevy:

Soon, however, he was writing in a different mood about Joyce. On 5 January 1938: ‘He was sublime last night, deprecating with the utmost conviction his lack of talent. I don’t feel the danger of the association any more. He is just a very lovable human being.’ After the stabbing, he wrote to MacGreevy from hospital: ‘The Joyces have been extraordinarily kind, bringing me round everything from a heating lamp to a custard pudding.’ When he arrived home, he found ‘an immense bunch of Parma violets from Joyces’.

There is very little about Beckett’s relationship with Lucia Joyce, James Joyce’s daughter, in his letters, although the short biography of Lucia at the back of the book is helpful. (‘Lucia Joyce, who is widely considered to be the model for the Syra-Cusa in SB’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women, became increasingly infatuated with SB, but in May 1930 SB made it clear that he did not reciprocate her interest. This caused a temporary falling-out with the Joyces.’) When Beckett and Lucia met in London in 1935, Beckett wrote to MacGreevy: ‘The Lucia ember flared up & fizzled out. But more of that viva voce.’

In early 1938 Beckett reported that Joyce was very worried about Lucia; the footnote informs us that she was ‘in treatment for mental illness’. In April 1939 he wrote: ‘I see the Joyces now & then. I go every week to Ivry to visit Lucia, who I think gets slowly worse. She sees nobody but her father & myself.’

The edition of the first volume of Beckett’s letters has been annotated with knowledge and care, using vast research. It will, for the most part, please admirers of Beckett’s art and satisfy those who respect his wishes that only letters that have bearing on his work should appear. There is no spilling the beans, or mad gossip; it was not his style. There is no detailed account of what it was like to be a witness in the Gogarty libel action. Nor is there much fanfare when Beckett meets Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, with whom he was to live for almost half a century and with whom he would spend the war years in France, the years immediately after this first volume of letters. In April 1939 Beckett wrote to MacGreevy with his typical dry, stoical wisdom: ‘There is a French girl also whom I am fond of, dispassionately, and who is very good to me. The hand will not be overbid. As we both know that it will come to an end there is no knowing how long it may last.’

Brian Moore: Out of Ireland Have I Come, Great Hatred, Little Room

In the second chapter of Brian Moore’s early novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Miss Hearne gets to know her fellow boarders, especially the landlady’s brother, the returned Yank, Mr Madden. They discuss the difference between men and women in Ireland and America. ‘Guys beating their brains out to keep their wives in mink,’ Mr Madden complains. ‘It’s the women’s fault. No good… Me, I wouldn’t have nothing to do with them.’ Miss Hearne, deeply alert to nuances of education and class, thinks to herself that he can’t be very well educated if he can speak like that. And then she replies: ‘Oh, that’s not like Ireland, Mr Madden. Why, the men are gods here, I honestly do believe.’ As Mr Madden continues, Miss Hearne becomes aware of his maleness: ‘He was so big, so male as he said it that she felt the blushes start up again. His big hand thumped the table.’

Brian Moore began to think about Judith Hearne when he was twenty-seven, in exile from Belfast, and trying to write short stories in a remote part of Ontario: ‘I thought of this old lady who used to come to our house. She was a spinster who had some Civil Service job to do with sanitation and she lived most of her life with her “dear aunt”. They’d not been “grand” but they had pretensions, and she had very genteel manners.’ The novel is full of Joycean moments. It is set in a Catholic Ireland that is half-genteel and oddly insecure; it allows Judith Hearne’s vulnerable consciousness great dramatic power; it uses different tones and cadences and voices; and it takes from ‘Clay’, the most mysterious story in Dubliners, the idea of a single, middle-aged woman visiting a family and finding both comfort and humiliation there. As Moore moved from a short story to a novel he wrote to his sister in Belfast (as Joyce wrote to his sister in Dublin looking for details of the city) asking for her memories of Miss Keogh, the visitor on whom Judith Hearne was based. However, he disregarded most of what he was told. (The original Miss Keogh had a job, for example.) He used merely the ‘speech and mannerisms’ of the original and he surrounded them with something else, elements of his own isolation as a non-achiever in a family obsessed with achievement, and as an emigrant in Canada. His own loss of faith becomes hers, and his memory that his original had ‘a little weakness for the bottle’ becomes her alcoholism.

Yet none of this explains the intensity of the novel, the versions of spiritual suffering and abject despair set beside tiny instants of pure social embarrassment and nuanced social observation. The novel manages to make the large moments in the book — Judith running at the tabernacle in a Catholic church in a fit of drunken despair, for example — as credible and powerful as the smaller pieces of self-delusion and social comedy. ‘It is also a book about a woman,’ Moore wrote to his publisher, ‘presenting certain problems of living peculiar to women. I wrote it with all the sympathy and understanding that I am capable of.’

Moore knew that you could achieve certain effects by writing about a woman in the Ireland of his time that you could not achieve in writing about a man. A man can swagger with drink, his drunkenness, even in a genteel context, will not bring disgrace, but pity maybe, or tolerance, or a sort of liberation. A middle-aged woman, however, who gets drunk alone in her room in a genteel boarding house and does not remember that she sang all night and has to face her landlady and her fellow boarders the next day is a piece of dynamite. In a society where, as Miss Hearne says, men are gods, how do you go about dramatizing them? In a society where female vulnerability is open and public, where women are alert to their shifting position, watchful, under the bony thumb of the Church, in charge of intimate domestic details but nothing else, women are a godsend to a novelist, living, as Moore told an interviewer:

It is no coincidence, then, that the three finest novels to appear in Ireland between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s were about middle-aged women suffering. They were Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), John McGahern’s The Barracks (1963) and Aidan Higgins’s Langrishe, Go Down (1966). It is no coincidence, either, that the best novels about men in the period after independence dealt with figures in extreme and exquisite isolation, as in the novels of Beckett and Francis Stuart, or offered elaborate comedy, as in Flann O’Brien. In Irish fiction after Joyce, the women suffered and the men were antisocial, and the tone is one of unnerving bleakness.

The problem for Moore, McGahern, Higgins and many others was how to create a male character who was neither comic nor lying on his back in the dark. In a society that was merely half-formed and had no sense of itself, a society in which the only real choice was to leave or live in a cowed internal exile, the failure to create a fully formed male character in fiction was emblematic of a more general failure.

The four novels that Brian Moore wrote after Judith Hearne struggle with this, and all of them bear the mark of the problem more clearly than any sign of its resolution. These novels are The Feast of Lupercal (1957), The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), An Answer from Limbo (1962) and The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1965). The last of these is a coming-of-age novel set in wartime Belfast; the second and third have as protagonists Irishmen in exile in North America; and the first tells the story of Diarmuid Devine, a teacher, who stayed behind in Belfast.

‘The climate of Northern Ireland… is such as to encourage weakness of character,’ Moore wrote.

Devine has something in common with Mr Madden and Bernard Rice, the landlady’s son, the two male figures in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. He is underimagined; there is a crudity and lack of subtlety in his creation. When he overhears two colleagues undermining his masculinity, we are told that ‘he had never been so mortified in his life’ and, a few sentences later, ‘He was very upset.’ Devine’s response to every single moment is predetermined by the author’s vision of him: thus his response is always dull and afraid; his consciousness, through which we see the world, is limited in a way that Judith Hearne’s is open-ended. Like Judith and Mr Madden, he, too, has views on the man/woman question: ‘Character assassins, every blessed one of them,’ his mind tells us. ‘That was a thing he couldn’t help noticing about women, they always had a bad word for one another. Men had far more sense, at least they shut up when they didn’t like a person.’

This last passage seems to offer us a key to the problem with these four novels. The men’s attitudes are not only stereotyped and tiresome but dated in a way that Leopold Bloom’s responses to women, or Stephen Dedalus’s, don’t seem dated. There is no element of richness or surprise, and there is a terrible ironic distance and jauntiness (more noticeable in The Luck of Ginger Coffey and The Emperor of Ice-Cream). Clearly, the passage quoted above could not be easily written now, but Devine would be a more interesting figure had these words not been put into his consciousness in the first place.

Is it a golden rule of fiction that an author cannot create a character whose way of noticing is significantly and emphatically less rich than the author’s own? The problem always is: what colours and nuances to leave out, what tricks and twists of voice or consciousness to throw aside? This question arises when reading the four novels Moore published between 1957 and 1965 and reading Denis Sampson’s biography. Moore became increasingly fascinated by failure, by the idea of the painful case, the more successful he became. All four of these novels deal in failure, and he himself, from early on, was alert to what dull failure in a novel looked like compared to melodrama, say, or, in the case of Judith Hearne, a sort of tragedy. In 1957 in a letter to Diana Athill, his editor at André Deutsch, he wrote:

Brian Moore was born in Belfast in 1921 into what can almost be described as a ruling-class Catholic family. His father was a surgeon, the first Catholic to be nominated to the Senate of Queen’s University Belfast and a pillar of society. His father’s sister Agnes was married to Eoin MacNeill, who became leader of the Irish Volunteers on their foundation in 1913, countermanded the order for the 1916 Rising and later became Professor of Early Irish History at University College Dublin. Moore’s mother, twenty years younger than his father, had been a nurse at the hospital where his father worked. She came from an Irish-speaking background in Donegal, from a family of nineteen children. ‘My mother seemed to be more in sync with me,’ Moore later said. ‘I was very fond of my mother. I think the fact that I had six sisters and that I was one of my mother’s favourite sons, if not her favourite son, had an effect on me.’

All his life Brian Moore loathed his old school, St Malachy’s in Belfast, and he attempted revenge on it in several of his novels. The tone and quality of this loathing must have been enriched by the fact that his father was founder and president of the past pupils’ union. His father was also, Sampson writes, ‘custodian of the prestige and tradition of the school, and so his expectations of his sons’ behaviour and academic achievement carried this burden in addition to the common expectations of an academically successful parent’. Moore took his own academic failure and his loss of faith in Catholicism immensely seriously. He became a socialist in a deeply conservative household, in a city where more than sixty years later mild socialism is still a sour dream. ‘I began to think of myself as a failure at an early age,’ he said, ‘and I began to think of myself as someone who was concealing something.’

Moore shared the dream of many adolescents worldwide: he wanted to blow his homeplace sky-high. The difference was that his homeplace already had its explosive elements. Moore said that he ‘reacted against all that nationalistic fervour’, because he saw that his father’s and uncle’s ‘dislike of Britain extended to approval of Britain’s enemies’. In The Emperor of Ice-Cream, which he described as his most autobiographical novel, Moore dramatized the gap between Gavin’s idealism (and failure to study for exams) in the early years of the war and his family’s conservatism. Gavin’s mother thinks that General Franco is a saint and Gavin’s father is jubilant about Hitler’s prospects, just as our young hero, a member of the ARP, a local defence unit, comes more and more to understand what is happening in Europe. Moore offers perfect set pieces between father and son. (‘I won’t go into the fact that you’re the first member of this family to fail any examination, I won’t mention that when I was your age anything but honours marks would have been inconceivable to me.’ And then: ‘Wipe that grin off your face. After your performance today, I see nothing to smile about, do you?’) A Christmas Day scene between father and son during the early years of the war must have been impossible to resist, and as he smokes cigars after his Christmas dinner, Gavin’s father tells him that the war will soon be over: ‘Oh, the English are going to find out that their troubles are only beginning. Mark my words, Hitler won’t be an easy master. He won’t spare them, not after the way they turned down that perfectly reasonable offer he made last summer.’

The last fifty pages of the novel deal with the German air-raids on Belfast in 1941. Brian Moore, like Gavin, worked in the morgue. ‘I found myself being punched from adolescence into a volunteer job coffining dead bodies for weeks. And that experience naturally had a strong effect on me.’ The father in the novel flees Belfast for the safety of Dublin with all the family except Gavin, but not before he has a sudden, crude and unconvincing change of heart: ‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The German jackboot is a far crueller burden than the heel of old John Bull.’

In reality, Moore’s father, aged seventy-four, worked day and night during the air-raids and frequently slept in the hospital, worried that he would not be able to get there if there were further attacks on the city. ‘My father,’ Moore said, ‘who was pro-German, when he saw what the Germans were able to do, when he saw what modern warfare was really like, when they blew up your home, that was all, things were over.’ In the novel, the father’s change of heart is rendered as another, almost comic aspect of his pomposity; in the real world, Dr Moore’s change of heart is more likely to have occurred slowly and silently. In the novel, the cowardly and hypocritical father returns to hear news of his heroic son, who has braved the bombs to bury the bodies. The book ends: ‘His father seemed aware of this change. He leaned his untidy, grey head on Gavin’s shoulder, nodding, weeping, confirming. “Oh Gavin,” his father said. “I’ve been such a fool. Such a fool.” The new voice counselled silence. He took his father’s hand.’ In the novel, the playboy of the Antrim Road got to kill his father. In the real world, Moore’s father died in 1942 ‘thinking I was a wimp, that I was a person who wasn’t going to achieve anything in life and that was very sad. I’ve had to live with my father’s disappointment.’

Brian Moore had an interesting war. In 1942 he left the ARP and joined the National Fire Service in Belfast and from there he got a job with the Ministry of War Transport in Algiers. After Algiers, he became assistant port officer for Naples, following the Allied taking of the city. Later, he was posted to Marseilles and Sète near the Spanish border. From January 1946 to November 1947 he worked in Warsaw with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. He saw the camp at Auschwitz and then witnessed the Communist takeover of Poland. He did not write immediately about these events: ‘In Europe,’ he said, ‘I had been a spectator at events that were not my events.’ More than forty years would pass before he wrote his terse dramas about belief and power and treachery in Poland and France in The Colour of Blood and The Statement. Nonetheless, these experiences affected him, made him sceptical and wary, a hardened observer. ‘Working with Polish government officials I discovered that Polish Communists were almost always as anti-semitic in their views as the rest of their countrymen.’ He began to develop an eye for detail, for the exotic:

Moore spent five years in Europe. It is not hard to imagine his plight when, at the end of 1947, he was forced to return to Belfast and to his family, once more with no job, no prospects, no qualifications. In the 1930s, as Moore later recalled, Sean O’Faolain argued that the only possible dénouement of an Irish novel was that ‘the hero gets on the boat and goes to England’. Moore, who from an early age had wanted to be a writer, had two reasons for going to Canada. One, he had fallen in love with a Canadian woman; two, in his interview for a visa, he was told that he could become a journalist. In 1948 he started his long North American exile.

He began in Toronto, trying to find newspaper work, his love affair falling apart, but moved soon to Montreal, where he was hired, like Ginger Coffey in his novel, as a proofreader. He liked the city; its provincial energy and divided culture reminded him of home. Slowly, he found better newspaper work and a group of friends. In 1951 he married a fellow journalist, Jacqueline Sirois; their son was born in 1953. That year, too, he became a Canadian citizen. He began to write thrillers for money. Published under pseudonyms, they were immensely successful. They financed the writing of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and subsequent literary novels, and together with his work as a journalist and his personality, which was modest, hard-headed and non-flashy, they helped establish his prose style, which increasingly favoured the non-poetic and pacy, the clear and terse, the brisk and sharp.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne won instant critical success in England, Canada and the United States. It was banned in the Republic of Ireland, and this, at the time, was also a kind of critical success. The letter Moore received from his mother in Belfast concentrated on the more sexually explicit parts of the novel: ‘You certainly left nothing to the imagination, and my advice to you in your next book is leave out parts like this.’ That, too, was part of the rite of passage for an Irish novelist of that time. In her recent memoir, Stet, Diana Athill describes Moore in London in 1955:

In 1959 the Moores moved to New York. In Canada, Brian had become friends with many writers, especially Mordecai Richler; now he became friends with Philip Roth and Neil Simon. He and his wife divided their time between Manhattan and Long Island. Moore won prizes, sold movie rights and began to achieve a sort of fame, but he lived in those years in a world he grew to distrust: ‘I lived in Greenwich Village… and I noticed that the serious writers there were quite interested in bestsellerdom, publicity, immediate personal fame, that they were… shameless little puffers-up of their talents and muggers-in-public for anyone who would write them up.’ This world gave him the background for his protagonist Brendan Tierney in An Answer from Limbo, but the novel is damaged by Moore’s raw disapproval, and is wooden and not quite credible.

Brian and Jacqueline Moore met Frank and Jean Russell in New York in 1963, and the two couples, all of them interested in journalism and writing, began to hang out together. In the summer of 1964, Jacqueline and their son Michael went to Long Island while Brian stayed in New York working on The Emperor of Ice-Cream. Frank Russell, who had won a Guggenheim for his nature writing, also left New York. Brian and Jean became lovers that summer, and not long afterwards Jacqueline and Frank also became lovers. Brian dedicated The Emperor of Ice-Cream to Jean (as he would all his subsequent books) as Frank Russell dedicated his next book to Jacqueline and Michael. It all seemed neat and amicable, but slowly, in fact, became bitter and difficult. Moore broke with friends who supported Jacqueline, including Diana Athill and André Deutsch, to whom he wrote a letter announcing that he was going to find a new publisher.

Within a year Brian and Jean had begun their long sojourn in California, having been enticed there by Alfred Hitchcock, for whom Moore wrote the screenplay of Torn Curtain. (Moore, after all, knew much more about corpses than Hitchcock.)

The California the Moores inhabited was an isolated stretch of coast at Malibu. Moore worked hard on his novels. He had written five, all of which dealt in various ways with his own background. Now he needed new styles, new subjects and no interruptions. The Moores travelled a bit each summer, going to the West of Ireland, the South of France and Nova Scotia, but mainly they lived in solitude and isolation. Consciously and with deliberation, they both withdrew from the world. Denis Sampson writes superbly about some of the strange elements of Moore’s transformation:

It is unclear whether Moore ever believed that he had lost anything by his long exile. He certainly believed that he had gained a great deal. In the 1970s, in a review of John McGahern’s collection of stories Getting Through, he wrote:

Brian Moore did not witness things changing in Ireland, except as a tourist, and he also missed the slow changes in the way men were treated in Irish writing. In the 1960s playwrights such as Eugene McCabe in King of the Castle, Tom Murphy in A Whistle in the Dark and John B. Keane in The Field began to work on the mixture of violence and impotence in the Irish male psyche. And in the 1970s John McGahern published two novels, The Leavetaking and The Pornographer, that opened new ground. The Leavetaking tells almost exactly the same story as The Feast of Lupercal: the protagonist is a teacher and the background is a fearful, authoritarian and Catholic Ireland. In The Leavetaking McGahern found a tone that was poetic, melancholy, slow-moving and serious to describe an adult male protagonist living in an Irish city. More and more, McGahern focused on a tiny territory, using the same motifs, the same landscape down to the same trees and the same shadows, the same set of emotional circumstances. If Ireland was a harsh literary jailer, then McGahern had become its model prisoner.

In the solitary confinement of his own choosing, Moore worked hard during his years in Malibu. Between 1968 and his death in 1999, he wrote fifteen novels. He had clearly discovered certain things about his own talent. The last fifty pages of The Emperor of Ice-Cream showed that he had extraordinary skills at pacing, handling time and action, creating credible excitement. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne showed how good he was at dealing with failure, isolation and loneliness.

The first novel he wrote in his new guise as recluse and cosmopolitan was I Am Mary Dunne, and it was his first since The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne to deal with a woman’s drama, his first story with North American characters, and of all his books the most fraught and intense. The scene between Mary and her friend Janice in a Manhattan restaurant is a display of pure skill: full of careful revelation, memory and reflection, placed beside the comedy of being in the wrong restaurant at the worst table. The two women are bright and upmarket; Mary is perhaps too obviously on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Yet her own account of her adultery and sexual treachery is breathtaking in its detail. This story would be enough for any novel; beside it, the story of Mary’s paranoia and breakdown and loss of identity is not as convincing. In other words, her North American fate of ruthlessly seeking happiness is more dramatic and interesting than her fate as victim, as imagined by an Irish novelist — what Brian Friel, in a letter to Moore, called ‘Gaelic gloom’.

From the beginning of Moore’s career a problem existed that came increasingly to damage his novels — a willingness to work in broad strokes. Some of Mary Dunne’s perceptions as she moves around New York are crude and hackneyed. So, too, in his later novels about women, The Doctor’s Wife (1976) and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981), the social detail, the dialogue and even the characters are brisk, with a strange lack of nuance and shadow. Sheila, the doctor’s wife, has various conversations with her husband that read like early, hastily written drafts. Her American lover has no presence in the book, and the two observers of the scene in the South of France are pure fictional contrivances. Similarly, the rich Northern Irish Catholics in The Temptation of Eileen Hughes are created in very broad strokes indeed, and Eileen’s first sexual experience is a jaded Irish cliché.

Yet there is something fascinating in all three novels. Moore is able to render consciousness itself, the mind’s free flow, as a sort of innocence. Nothing his women do in these books seems worthy of judgement or blame. They appear to the reader as they do to themselves; we experience them at first hand (even though The Doctor’s Wife and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes are written in the third person). All three are books about quest, about intense yearning, and there is a core of deep and sharp feeling in them that survives, after a long struggle, the quickly fixed fictional world around them.

Moore did not lack confidence. He said of The Doctor’s Wife that the character of Sheila, who abandons her husband, had to be Irish and not Californian

In a 1967 interview there is a chilling sentence about the mother in An Answer from Limbo, who comes from Ireland to New York to look after her grandchildren and save her son and his wife some money: ‘I could do the mother with my eyes closed.’ The mother is, in fact, a collection of stereotypes out of central Irish casting. Moore may very well have had his eyes closed when he imagined her. His sense of Irish character and Irish speech becomes weaker and weaker, culminating in Lies of Silence (1990), a novel set in a contemporary Belfast that has as much truth and local flavour as a CNN news report. Also, many of Moore’s North American characters have a strange hollowness and lack of urgency.

He had left the Irish prison and sat alone in his cell in an odd imaginative nowhere. The house in Malibu became even more isolated when the State of California decided to clear that stretch of coast of its inhabitants. The Moores refused to leave, but by 1976 all their neighbours had gone and they were alone. Their nearest friends were Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. In her essay ‘Quiet Days in Malibu’, Didion described ‘the most idiosyncratic of beach communities, 27 miles of coastline with no hotel, no passable restaurant, nothing to attract the traveller’s dollar’.

Moore’s two best novels since The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne are set in wildernesses, where no knowledge of a society, its mores or manners or peculiar speech rhythms is required. The first of these is a very short novel, Catholics, published in 1972. It deals, in oblique ways, with the concerns of Moore’s earlier novels, especially the relationship between the Catholic mother and the agnostic son in An Answer from Limbo and Judith Hearne’s loss of faith. The novel is set in the future, there has been a fourth Vatican Council, but a small band of monks on a remote Irish island are adhering to the old traditions. A man is sent from Rome to deal with them, and the novel tells the story of his confrontation with the Abbot, who is created with the same complexity and richness as Judith Hearne and a subtlety absent from many of Moore’s other novels.

As he worked on the novel Moore wrote to the Irish Jesuit Michael Paul Gallagher: ‘I find myself sympathetic to both sides of this argument (the Ecumenical and the Traditional) and so perhaps the story will work out.’ The drama is between the Abbot’s own worldly authority and the monks’ aggressive faith, between his wavering conscience and his wavering leadership. The tone is dark, the conclusion is poetic rather than forced, and the general atmosphere in its intensity and its interest in poetic moments is very far indeed from most of Moore’s work, and closer to the work of other Irish writers such as John McGahern and John Banville.

In an interview about Catholics quoted by Sampson, Moore is almost prepared to solve the riddle of why this book and the later Black Robe work in ways his other fictions do not:

In the 1970s Moore made contact with other Gaels interested in the meaning of life, among them the poets Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon and the playwright Brian Friel. He had met Friel for the first time in Ireland in 1969 and the two began to correspond. They had much in common. Both had attempted works in which young men deal with their fathers. Both were interested in faith and exile; both were also interested in the creation of women characters. Both had reinvented themselves as distant and reclusive figures. Friel admired Moore’s courage in writing I Am Mary Dunne and wrote a screenplay for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, in which Katharine Hepburn was to play the lead. (It was never used; many years later the role was played by Maggie Smith.) Moore wrote to Friel: ‘I know this sounds un-Ulster and extreme, but as it is much easier for me to say it in print than to your face, I am first among your many admirers.’ The correspondence contains a great deal of the banter that passes for communication between men in Ireland and elsewhere. When Moore took a job one day a week at UCLA, Friel wrote: ‘We’ll overlook the shabby detail that you’ve gone over to Them. As long as you are handsomely paid and the pool is convenient.’ When Moore bought a fancy car, Friel wrote: ‘I can’t see you in that Mercedes Sports (you’re a Raleigh and trousers-and-socks man at heart) but Jean is born for it.’ Sometimes Friel was more serious and supportive: ‘I am genuinely concerned about your reaction to other people’s reaction’ to The Great Victorian Collection, the novel Moore published in 1975. (‘I have had this experience so often. One fluctuates between despair and arrogance.’) When Moore wrote to Friel about his play Faith Healer, Friel replied:

When the film of Judith Hearne was postponed, Friel wrote:

The late 1970s was a period of astonishing creativity for Friel. Although Faith Healer did not win critical acclaim when it was first performed in New York with James Mason as Frank Hardy, a later production in Dublin with Donal McCann in the part made clear that Friel had created one of the most subtle and memorable male characters in Irish writing. But it was his play Translations, first performed in 1980, that seems to have made the greater impact on Moore as he began to work on what is probably his own best novel, Black Robe (1985). Both works deal with a central moment in the colonial drama, Friel with the changing of place names in nineteenth-century Ireland, Moore with the arrival of the Jesuits in seventeenth-century Canada. Both deal with the idea of an intact native culture colliding with a more technologically advanced colonial dream. Both bring the colonist and the native face to face; there is a powerful sense of the two watching each other, with violent and tragic results. Both works represent a great stylistic departure for the two writers.

‘I’ve discovered that the narrative forms — the thriller and the journey form — are tremendously powerful,’ Moore said. ‘They’re the gut of fiction, but they’re being left to second-rate writers because first-rate writers are bringing the author into the novel and all those nouveau-roman things.’ And also:

He also said in an interview that ‘the whole thing could be a paradigm for what is happening’ in Northern Ireland.

Moore’s view of the art of fiction and those ‘nouveau-roman things’ takes him close to the man on the golf course in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel: ‘You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story.’ Although this view was to be the making of Black Robe, it was to ruin his subsequent work. The landscape of Black Robe was very close to him: ‘I would go into my room and my mind would go back to the Montreal winter I remember and the cold and the St Lawrence River. When I thought of the river I could see it, because I had gone up and down it so many times.’ As he was writing the novel, Moore also visited, according to Sampson, ‘various sites and museums of Iroquois, Algonquin and Huron cultures, in particular Midland, Ontario, where the original Jesuit mission of Sainte Marie among the Hurons has been reconstructed, complete with Huron long-houses and villages’.

Moore managed in Black Robe, in a way that Conrad did not in Heart of Darkness, to make the natives, as he says, ‘among the strongest characters in the book’. But the figure of the Jesuit Father Laforgue remains a towering and haunting presence. Moore allows him to be the central consciousness of the book. He gives him faith, but more importantly, he gives him fear. Moore was interested in clashing systems of belief, but it is the sense of the physical in the book — the river, the forest, the cold — and the sense of threat and violence that gives Black Robe its power. The violence is terrifying, almost unbearable. Against a background of implacable nature and inevitable disaster and with the immediacy of Moore’s tone, Laforgue’s faith and the reader’s knowledge of who will finally prevail seem very small things indeed.

Moore was in his mid-sixties when he published Black Robe. ‘I’m entirely conscious that most novelists don’t do their best work past sixty and often seem to run out of material. What keeps me going as a writer is the belief that I can write new kinds of books,’ Moore said in 1995, four years before his death. After Black Robe, he produced five more novels, set in Poland, Ireland, Haiti, France and Algeria. He adapted the style of the thriller and the tale, using clipped sentences, briskly set scenes, dramatizing crises of conscience for individuals and societies. Economy was all. He did not revisit Poland to write The Colour of Blood, but used scenes from Graham Greene’s account of his visit in the 1950s. (A review by Greene gave him the original idea for Black Robe. He and Greene admired each other greatly.) He did not visit Haiti to write No Other Life. ‘There’s too much information in most novels,’ he said. ‘Novelists showing off.’

Brian Moore was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a novelist showing off. In the sentences he wrote and the life he lived, he almost made a display of avoiding show. He remains a fascinating case because he had nothing to go on when he began, no tradition to call on, no example except that of Joyce, who was not much use to him save as an example of sheer dedication. Moore was clearly damaged by exile because the sort of novel he wanted to write required a detailed knowledge of manners and morals; imaginatively, he lost touch with Ireland and never fully grasped North America. Yet he could not have stayed in Ireland: his independent spirit and questing conscience had no place on either side of the Irish border. Out of this sense of loss and exile and displacement, he produced three masterpieces and an emotional territory filled with loners and failures, faith and unbelief, cruelty and loss of identity and a clear-eyed vision of man’s fate.

In the early 1990s Moore and his second wife began to build a house on the coast of Nova Scotia where Jean had been brought up. The house was finished in 1995. Thus Moore spent his last summers in sight of the Atlantic Ocean: ‘It’s beautiful. It looks out on a bay that looks just like Donegal. It’s very wild there and empty. I love it for its emptiness. It’s like Ireland probably once was. Now that I’m old it seems so crazy to build another house, I know. Especially there. But I’m very happy I did all the same.’ That October, he revisited Belfast, walked through his old school for the first time in sixty years and saw the site of the family house on Clifton Street, which he had first described as the professor’s house visited by Judith Hearne forty years earlier. The house had been demolished a month before his visit:

I think as a writer it is very symbolic. Your past is erased. Now it’s as if it’s completely died. I was here a few years ago to film a documentary and I stood in front of the shell and I could remember my father’s brass plate at the door, the patients to-ing and fro-ing. Now what is it? It’s a paradigm of man’s existence on earth. The earth remains and man does not.

Sebastian Barry’s Fatherland

In the first years of the new century the young Irish playwrights wrote about bad fathers. In May 2000, for example, Marina Carr’s play On Raftery’s Hill, in a joint production by Druid in Galway and the Royal Court in London, was performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC as part of a festival of Irish culture. Some in the audience at the opening night were old Kennedy stalwarts; others were loyal devotees of Irish culture. It was clear from the silences and the gasps and the shocked comments at the interval that this Irish father on the stage was not familiar to them. ‘The kitchen of the Raftery household’, where the play was enacted, lacked charm, to say the least. There was no dancing at Lughnasa; there were no wild or comic Irish characters; there was even no bitter melancholy; the language was colourful in ways that did not seem to appeal to the audience. The dark cruelty of the father was relentless. Incest, rape, violence, vicious attacks on animals were all central to the drama and its impact. It was an Ireland recognizable to anyone who attended to page four of The Irish Times, which by the mid-1990s was daily covering cases of family horror. But for those whose image of Ireland came from their memory or from the glories of The Quiet Man or Riverdance, this dark Ireland was new and strange.

In 2004 three first plays by Irish writers dramatized a world dominated by bad or mad fathers. In these plays, fatherhood was to be mocked, subverted, shown in all its madness and perversion. Stuart Carolan’s Defender of the Faith, for example, was, once again, set in a rural kitchen. The setting was South Armagh in 1986. As in Marina Carr’s play, Foucault rather than Freud was the dominant spirit, where power over others was the goal, where mindless control and cruelty lay in a fierce embrace on the hearthrug. Foul statement made a constant raid on the inarticulate.

In Mark Doherty’s Trad, first performed at the Galway Arts Festival in 2004, the word ‘Da’ became almost a chant in the play, as a mad father, well past his sell-by date, led his dim-witted son into the temptation offered by hideous prejudices, many non-sequiturs, hilarious wild goose chases and bizarre urges and desires. In Take Me Away by Gerald Murphy, produced by Rough Magic, the father was a manic figure, unprotected, asking absurd questions, lacking all forms of authority, a joke on the stage. As in On Raftery’s Hill, Defender of the Faith and Trad, the mother in Take Me Away was entirely absent. Thus the father was left exposed in his foolishness, his exaggerated needs, his mad requests, his ultimate humiliation.

In his play Hinterland Sebastian Barry sought to move the drama about fathers and their failures from a purely domestic space into the public realm, or into what seemed at first like the public realm. For an Irish audience the character of Johnny Silvester was clearly, and also deceptively, a closely researched version of Charles J. Haughey, who became Taoiseach in 1979 and held that position through some of the 1980s until he was ousted in 1992. Later, in his retirement, Haughey was plagued by allegations, which he himself subsequently confirmed under oath, that he had taken large sums of money from prominent businessmen for his own private use, and had held an enormous overdraft at Allied Irish Banks. If Ireland needed a public figure to become its disgraced father, then Charles Haughey auditioned perfectly for the role and played it with tragic dignity in a lonely exile in his Georgian mansion in North County Dublin.

This was the house of Hinterland. The stage directions set the play in ‘the private study of a Georgian mansion, outside Dublin. All the paraphernalia of a successful political life — citations, presentations, election posters framed.’ The opening speech, however, offered a clue to the great ambiguity that would surround the text and its dramatic intentions. In what was, ostensibly, a stilted letter to his aunts in Derry — Haughey also had family in Derry — about the effects of partition, Silvester mentioned his father, who was ‘hardly the same man after partition, and his physical breakdown may well have been hastened by the same imposition’. Partition, he wrote, separated ‘father from fatherland’; the play dealt over and over with the matter of fathers — Silvester was haunted by his own father’s failure, his wife by her own father’s reputation, and their son by Silvester’s own disastrous fathering.

What distinguished these fathers in Irish plays of the first years of the twenty-first century was that none of them was a tragic hero; they were not caught between two worlds as one collapsed and the other took its place. In these plays, there was only one world, the one that had collapsed and had brought down a reign of terror, or a reign of madness, with no other world come to replace it. These men were static villains, caught in dramatic headlights, willing to destroy, living in a dream of the past. They would always do their worst, and there would be no moments of redemption or recognition or reconciliation. These fathers did not change; they acted and they remembered and they justified their actions. They and those around them were frozen in a ritual in which there was no exit. They were like figures in a Trojan horse, which does not move, which has no Troy in sight.

The act of not killing the father became the core of both On Raftery’s Hill and Hinterland. Letting the father live, against all dramatic expectation, became a powerful and intriguing way of offering no resolution, no easy hope, and an increased tension. It is important to note that both of these plays were written in a time of great and obvious social change in Ireland, a time of new money, new social and sexual freedom and many bright expectations. These plays became a message from the strange, dark, hidden soul of the society. But they were also plays which dealt with both the private and the public. The unrepentant exile of Charles Haughey was a godsend to a playwright concerned with the dramatic possibilities of intractability; he is a hero who is unready for change, on whom everything is lost. Johnny Silvester’s kingdom in Hinterland has already been taken from him; his house, where his wife weeps, is his prison. As his servant leaves him for the night, Silvester uses precisely the same phrase from Othello as Charles Haughey used in the Dáil on the day of his resignation. ‘I have done the state some service.’ Just as he begins then to quote Yeats’s lines about ‘an aged man’ he is visited by Cornelius, a dead colleague, instantly recognizable to an Irish audience as Brian Lenihan, who held many ministerial portfolios in Fianna Fáil governments, and was defeated for the Presidency by Mary Robinson in 1990. One of Silvester’s earliest comments to his old friend mentions his heart transplant; Brian Lenihan, as an Irish audience would know, had a liver transplant.

Hinterland thus contains large numbers of references to details from the career of Charles Haughey that are given to Johnny Silvester as part of his past. Both Silvester and Haughey, for example, were praised by pensioners for giving them free travel. Both men gave a silver teapot to a female British Prime Minister. As Silvester had betrayed Cornelius during his bid for the Presidency, so too Haughey betrayed Brian Lenihan in the 1990 Presidential campaign. Both Haughey and Silvester have to face tribunals to investigate their financial affairs.

These clues to the emotional or political core of the play are, however, deeply misleading; they represent a sort of decoy to distract the audience from what is really happening. Almost any imaginative writer who creates a set of motives and signature tones for a character from history ends by writing a sort of autobiography. Sometimes this can happen unconsciously; the character begins as a set of facts, and slowly melts into a set of fictions. The process is gradual and tentative; it may have its origins in speculative drafting, seeing how some new ingredient might work, realizing that, while the main character need not be changed, some of the surrounding circumstances will not fit the drama. Gradually, the play, or the novel or the story, becomes a dramatization of an aspect of the secret self.

In considering the relationship between Hinterland and Sebastian Barry’s secret self, it might be useful to quote in full the second stanza from a poem from his collection The Pinkening Boy, which was published in 2004, and written in the same few years as the play. The poem is called ‘The Trousers’. The first stanza deals with the poet’s interest in joining the Royal Marine Yacht Club, his inability to join because his father was not a member, his plans with his father to buy

The second stanza reads:

Hinterland is as concerned with the failures of fatherhood and the surrounding grief and estrangement as the poem ‘The Trousers’. Just as Johnny Silvester summons up his father in his opening speech, so his wife Daisy does hers almost as soon as she arrives on stage. Daisy’s father, like Charles Haughey’s actual father-in-law, was a politician, ‘the soul of probity’. Both Johnny and Daisy will continue throughout the play to make reference to their respective fathers, as though they are desperately trying to eke out an identity for themselves, even one that depends on myths and shadows. So too Aisling, who comes to interview Johnny, refers over and over to her own father. (‘My father is a good decent person, I have to say. As fathers go.’) As Daisy bemoans her husband’s infidelities, she mentions the needs of their son Jack:

Daisy carries on discussing the power of the absent father to do damage in a set of speeches that are the most emotionally forceful in the play:

When Jack arrives on stage, it is clear that he is a tangle of broken wires, still half a child demanding and offering love. Daisy, by this time, has mentioned a particular mistress of her husband’s who had written a book. For an Irish audience, this would have been seen as a reference to the journalist Terry Keane, who published a series of articles in the Sunday Times about her long affair with Charles Haughey and who made no secret of the affair in her column in the Sunday Independent. Once more, a precise reference to an actual event in the life of Charles Haughey had been inserted into the play.

The problem, however, was not this reference to Haughey’s personal life, but the presence of Silvester’s son Jack on the stage. Charles and Maureen Haughey, as is well known, have three sons, all of whom benefit from exceptionally strong mental health; there has not been a sign of a breakdown or a hint of a twitch among them. But healthy children, in general, are no use to a playwright. Suddenly, with the son Jack, the play had moved into areas dictated by its own necessities, the proper realm of fiction. In one sense, the play had always been there, since its emotional life arose not from a set of public events but from a series of meditations about fathers and fatherhood. But in scene after scene, the connections between the Silvesters and the Haugheys had been made abundantly clear. Now the script had departed from the story of the Haugheys to tell another story, one of grief and estrangement and the damage fathers cause to their sons, which belonged more to the emotional life of the poem ‘The Trousers’, in which a son inspects his father as he passes him silently on the street, than to the many volumes by journalists that told the story of Haughey’s reign and his downfall.

The controversy surrounding the play thus centred on the use of Haughey as a central character and the distortion of the facts for dramatic purposes. It simmered in the newspapers and on radio and came to a head at a post-show discussion in the Abbey Theatre on 20 February 2002. The actors, the director and the theatre’s literary manager took part, the author watching from the wings.

Jocelyn Clarke, the literary manager, remembers ‘an unusually full post show discussion house’ in which the first speaker from the audience disagreed with the director’s statement that the play had ‘grace’. ‘The characters,’ she said, according to Clarke, ‘were small-minded and petty, especially the politician, and his relationship with his wife and son was not credible.’ Clarke remembers that a young man then stood up ‘and wondered how Barry could use the life and figure of a still living politician for his play — what right had he to do that to Charles Haughey’s family, and to a lesser extent Brian Lenihan’s family’. Clarke set about defending the play:

‘The audience,’ Clarke remembers, ‘grew more restive.’

Thus the ambiguities surrounding the play and its intentions were spelt out. Its emotional shape came from the author’s private life and that of his family; some of its detail came from the public domain, from aspects of the life of the former Taoiseach. Some of the audience believed that the author had no right to confuse the two, and the play had been damaged by the confusion. The theatre’s literary manager suggested that to see Hinterland as solely about Haughey or as a distortion was a fundamental misreading of the play.

Act 2 of Hinterland centres on Jack’s father-fed neurosis and Johnny’s affair with Connie, the woman whom the audience recognized as Terry Keane. The act opens with Jack trying to hang himself. When Daisy comes in on this scene, she says to her husband: ‘Listen, you can be the king that ruined his country but I won’t let you be the father that ruined his son.’ And it is this sense that the personal is all that matters that impels Hinterland, with Daisy as a sort of chorus, musing always on the career of her husband as a father rather than as a party leader. His neglect of his son is offered as an event that supersedes politics, but stands for the rot at the heart of the public realm as well:

Thus Barry subtly works the connection between a man who calls himself ‘the father of the nation’ and the domestic father, insisting on the failure of the latter as a poison that infects the nation. But he is also using elements in the career and personality of Charles Haughey as a metaphor for what is essentially a private ache. This might seem, as it did to some of the Abbey audience at the discussion, a sort of confusing battle between private and public, an invasion of Haughey’s privacy and the privacy of his wife and children, a distortion of the facts for mere artistic purposes, a dishonest and misleading play on public affairs while all the time masking a personal, private pain. Many of these accusations that were made about the play missed the point, which is that all fiction comes from a direct source and makes its way indirectly to the page or the stage. It does so by finding metaphors, by building screens, by working on half truths, moulding them towards a form that is both pure and impure fabrication. There is simply no other way of doing it. Most plays, novels and stories use the same stealthy process. Barry, by stealing Haughey, simply exposed an age-old system. Fiction, by its very nature, is a form of deceit. Hinterland inhabits beautifully and controversially the interstices between the world as we know it, raw and shapeless, and the world as imagined, tested richly and suggestively by private and hidden experience.

Roddy Doyle and Hugo Hamilton: The Dialect of the Tribe