Joycean Legacies

Martha C. Carpentier

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137503626
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

These twelve essays analyze the complex pleasures and problems of engaging with James Joyce for subsequent writers, discussing Joyce's textual, stylistic, formal, generic, and biographical influence on an intriguing selection of Irish, British, American, and postcolonial writers from the 1940s to the twenty-first century.

1

Kate O’Brien, James Joyce, and the ‘Lonely Genius’

Elizabeth Foley O’Connor

Kate O’Brien (1897–1974) enjoyed a significant popularity in the 1930s and 40s as an Irish novelist and playwright. Her work has an interesting contextual relationship with another literary Irish expatriate – James Joyce – who is her most sustained and pervasive literary mentor. Throughout O’Brien’s nine novels, which were published from 1931 to 1958, she invokes and critiques Joyce’s fiction. In addition, his life and work were recurring topics in a wide range of her unpublished material. In these manuscripts, many of which were delivered as public speeches multiple times and substantially revised, O’Brien is a perceptive critic of her countryman, correctly identifying that the central preoccupation of Joyce’s fiction was to find ‘a new way of crying out loud’ and that he was, ultimately, a secretive and isolated artist.¹ O’Brien repeatedly refers to Joyce as a ‘lonely genius’ and emphasizes his Catholic education, eventual rejection of his faith, focus on ‘the truths of the flesh’ in his novels, and status as an exile – all of which she shared. At many points in these manuscripts the very private, even secretive, O’Brien, who almost never spoke or wrote publicly about her writing, seems to be discussing her own life and work as much as Joyce’s. In this essay, I will first discuss the many parallels between O’Brien’s 1941 novel, The Land of Spices – which, as Aintzane Mentxaka notes, ‘can be seen as a response to Joyce’s first novel, an attempt to provide a “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman”’ – and then turn to O’Brien’s first novel, Without My Cloak (1931), to show that her career-long conversation with, and response to, Joyce and his work is evident even in this early text.² Throughout, I will discuss her focus on Irish women’s quest for sexual freedom and self-determination.

A lesbian writer who did not conform to the traditional female roles of wife and mother, O’Brien made her own way as a woman and a writer. As her literary biographer Eibhear Walshe notes, ‘Kate O’Brien was a subversive. She created novels that were deceptively traditional in form but radical in content – each novel a Trojan horse smuggling in forbidden topics, such as adultery, lesbianism, and venereal disease through the medium of her civilized and graceful narratives.’³ While eschewing the formal experimentation of Joyce, Woolf, and Richardson, O’Brien’s fiction is flexible and agile, often protean in its ability to take on various personae and stances. Also readily apparent is O’Brien’s own ‘marked and lonely voice’, a description that she repeatedly uses to refer to Joyce, as she was one of the first to speak out against the repression and powerlessness of Irish women, as well as to portray positively the vitality of passionate female relationships.⁴ O’Brien did not openly identify with any specific literary movement nor did she have many prominent literary friends in avant-garde circles (37–48). However, as Margot Backus and Joseph Valente have recently noted, O’Brien was ‘clearly inspired by Joyce’ to ‘deliberately plug into well-established Irish circuits of knowing and unknowing so as to make various forms of deviance visible without merely refueling the metropolitan mechanisms of scandal and condemnation that the Irish had, by the early twentieth century, every reason to fear and evade.’⁵ She did this most overtly in her publicity photos, which show her with a very short, mannish haircut, frequently wearing a tie or ascot, and smoking; all markers that would have subtly identified her as both a lesbian and a member of the avant-garde (39). This silent self-classification likely contributed to both her lack of popularity and her censorship. O’Brien’s most commercially successful novels – Without My Cloak, The Last of Summer (1943), which also ran in London as a successful play directed by John Gielgud, and That Lady (1945), which was made into both a 1949 Broadway show and a 1955 movie – appeared to have the most conventional plots and characters. Her most critically acclaimed novels – Mary Lavelle (1936), The Land of Spices, and As Music for Splendour (1958), her last published work of fiction – are the most experimental in form and content and prominently feature same-sex love.

Throughout her career, O’Brien’s fiction is centrally concerned with the paradoxical position of women in a conservative patriarchal society where they are at the same time idealized and ignored. In a 1997 Eire: Ireland essay, the poet Eavan Boland points out that ‘being a woman in Ireland touches on an adventure of powerlessness.’⁶ Moreover, the ‘shame, anger [and] confusions of expression’ that she notes women have experienced in the aftermath of Ireland’s colonization are palpable emotions in O’Brien’s work.⁷ However, O’Brien’s female protagonists – like O’Brien herself – challenge the pervasive sense of powerlessness that Boland characterizes as typical of Irish women. O’Brien creates nuanced female characters who, when pressured to conform to conventional morality and family mores, choose a path that allows them to experience their own freedom. Throughout her oeuvre, O’Brien terms these women ‘free-lances’, a description that was much applied to her as a young woman and one that closely matches her accounts of Joyce and his Ulysses, a text she notes that ‘has thrust its lonely violence into the whole of literature’, revolutionizing the novel in her time.⁸

O’Brien’s public silence on modern fiction, at least until her ‘Long Distance’ column for The Irish Times that ran from 1967–71, resulted in the pervading view that she was uninterested in contemporary writers and unaffected by the revolution occurring in both the style and the content of the novel during the first half of the twentieth century. Rather than proclaim the similarities between herself and this earlier generation, O’Brien preferred to let readers draw the connections for themselves, which often did not happen. The absence of overt experimentation in her work led many critics to view her novels as popular romantic fiction and ignore the elements of her texts that complicate, and even contradict, this assessment.⁹ Aintzane Mentxaka notes that this widespread view of O’Brien as a writer of popular romances is at least partially the result of a critical tradition that emphasized women writers’ ‘dependence on, rather than subversion of, popular genres’ (102). However, O’Brien’s unpublished papers reveal that she was both subversive and an astute critic of what she terms the ‘avant-garde.’ In a 1968 lecture to a Sussex women’s group, she focuses on Joyce’s secretiveness and our inability as readers to ever truly ‘know’ him or his work:

People who care for what they are about should be secretive. Joyce was secretive, and of course, to the end of his life, cunning. And he used his cunning and his silence – a silence hidden, as many significant silences are – under floods of most friendly talk and letter-writing – he used these two weapons in protection of his third, his greatest, exile. Out of his understanding of exile he cunningly and silently made his whole opus. Surrendering his spirit to exile from Dublin, he set up the scaffolding for the city he was to give to literature and immortality. And within that cage he was to slave like a committed saint throughout his life – seeking to defeat time, to find the answer to death, and to relate our general nature, the everyday of our sensuality and our sentimentality, to our terrors, nightmares, and desolations, to the absurd question of life’s purpose.¹⁰

This passage, like much of O’Brien’s unpublished writings, clearly reveals her own insight into, and kinship with, Joyce. A close analysis of O’Brien’s novels shows that she was a perceptive critic of Joyce and his work, and well-versed in his fiction. In the above passage, she cites the same arms that Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man uses, to face the repression of Ireland and the Catholic Church – ‘silence, exile, and cunning’ – in order to effectively plumb the central struggle of Joyce’s entire oeuvre.¹¹ O’Brien also realizes that underneath Joyce’s persona of gregarious jocularity there was an isolated and tireless writer who needed both physical and psychic distance from his ‘dear dirty Dublin’ in order to immortalize his city and its people; yet he did so in a way that communicates with readers across the divide of time and place by subtly illuminating the central issues of life, death, love, and fear. Moreover, O’Brien’s comments also apply to how she – another cunning, secretive, and silent exile – approaches her work.

Like Joyce, who left Dublin as a young man for a variety of Continental locales, O’Brien left her home in Limerick as a young woman for England; while Joyce only returned twice to his native land, O’Brien traveled to Ireland regularly to see her family and even lived in Roundstone, Connemara, from 1950–60 (Walshe, 113–31). Although O’Brien’s upbringing was far less peripatetic than Joyce’s, their childhoods bear several marked similarities. She was born on December 3, 1897, in Limerick and was the seventh child and fourth girl, while three younger brothers followed, of Thomas O’Brien and his wife Katherine ‘Katty’ Thornhill. When O’Brien’s mother died of cancer in 1903 at the age of 39, the five-year-old O’Brien was sent to join her sisters at the nearby Laurel Hill Convent and was, like Joyce at Clongowes Wood College, the youngest pupil in the school (1–20). She excelled academically, particularly enjoying her studies of the Irish language – a love she obviously did not share with Joyce – and in the fall of 1916 traveled to battle-ravaged Dublin to attend University College Dublin on a scholarship, at the time still a relatively rare occurrence for a woman.

The beginning of her studies at UCD was also marked by the death of her father, Thomas O’Brien. Like Anthony Considine in her first novel, Without My Cloak, her father was a successful horse dealer, and the family was part of the Irish Catholic bourgeois class that began to emerge in the late nineteenth century and which she was one of the first to depict in fiction. Although O’Brien was proud of her origins, she was antagonistic to the insular moral codes and patriarchal structure of Irish life. Her estrangement from Irish culture began in 1919 when she graduated from UCD and went into voluntary exile in England. She worked several jobs, including as a translator for the foreign news page of the Manchester Guardian, as a teacher at an Ursuline Convent School for girls in Hampstead, and as a secretary to her brother-in-law, Stephen O’Mara, the then mayor of Limerick. This last job led in 1921 to an extended trip to Washington D.C., where she and O’Mara raised funds for the Irish Republic (26–28). Returning to Ireland in June 1922, O’Brien spent almost a year in the Basque country of Spain, a stay that would prove important for the setting of Mary Lavelle and which also instilled in her a life-long love of the country and its people. Her marriage to the Dutch writer and journalist Gustaaf Renier brought her back to England in the summer of 1923, but the union lasted less than a year (31–37). In 1926, she wrote her first play, The Distinguished Villa, in six weeks, for a bet. Set in working-class London, the play was successful and enjoyed a two-month run in London and a tour of the provinces; it eventually debuted at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in January 1929 (38). Her second play, The Bridge, premiered in London in May 1927 to more mixed reviews. O’Brien wrote at least one other full-length play and two film scripts during this period – none of which are believed to have ever been performed – as well as collaborating on several of the adaptations of her novels for radio and the stage.¹² However, like Joyce, who was interested in drama but only published one play, Exiles (1918), O’Brien concentrated primarily on fiction.

Just as Joyce’s Ulysses was famously published on his fortieth birthday on February 2, 1922, O’Brien’s first novel, Without My Cloak, first appeared on December 3, 1931, her thirty-fourth birthday (Walshe, 50). But unlike Joyce, who had trouble securing publication and only received widespread critical acclaim relatively late in his career, Without My Cloak was published by William Heinemann and won the Hawthornden, James Tait Black, and Book Society prizes. These awards helped O’Brien initially achieve critical acclaim and a measure of commercial success. She even is mentioned in David Lean’s 1945 Brief Encounter – a film that depicts a housewife’s affair with a man she meets at a train station – when the heroine drops into her local library to pick up ‘the new Kate O’Brien’ (Mentxaka, 101). Nevertheless, censorship and a changing post-Second World War literary landscape resulted in most of O’Brien’s novels being out of print by the time of her death. Walshe, her biographer, attributes O’Brien’s relative neglect to the fact that she is a ‘deeply problematic writer’ who does not fit easily into preconceived categories; ‘O’Brien’s is a voice rarely heard in the Independent Ireland, the voice of an intellectually informed, sexually dissident, (col)lapsed Catholic. The disturbances and conflicts within her novels are consequent on this isolation and therefore worth examining’ (1–2). The same, of course, could be said about Joyce. While several critics have discussed links between The Land of Spices and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, there has not been a sustained examination of the connections between the two and the central role that Joyce holds throughout O’Brien’s fiction.¹³ This is partially due to their differences in gender and age, as well as O’Brien’s perceived lack of experimentation, isolation from the avant-garde, and the divergent cultural and social standards for male and female writers.

The dearth of easy answers about Joyce and his work has generated a thriving Joyce industry that continues to churn out scholarly critiques of his work more than a hundred years after his first publication. In comparison, the superficial accessibility of O’Brien’s work has had a contrary effect. Despite, or possibly because of, the deceptively simple, conventional style of many of her novels, readers have ignored a deep ambiguity and modernist irresolution in her work. The casual reader often goes away with a slight unease, while the avant-garde reader turns away in disdain from such outwardly conventional narrative style. O’Brien did enjoy immediate critical acclaim following the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Kate O’Brien, James Joyce, and the ‘Lonely Genius’
• 2 Thanks Be To Joyce: Brendan Behan à Paris
• 3 Houses of Decay: Joyce, History, and J.G. Farrell’s Troubles
• 4 Adaptations of Joyce in the Fiction of Patrick McCabe
• 5 The Nightmare of History in George Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter
• 6 ‘Bizarre or dream like’: J.R.R. Tolkien on Finnegans Wake
• 7 The ‘Baroque Weaving Machine’: Contrasting Counterpoint in James Joyce and Anthony Burgess
• 8 Wars Waged With/Against Joyce: James Joyce and Post-1984 British Fiction
• 9 Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and the Joycean Bildungsroman
• 10 ‘A Stone in Place of a Heart’: The Influence of James Joyce on the Late Style of Raymond Carver
• 11 Imagining the ‘wettest indies’: The Transatlantic Network of James Joyce and Derek Walcott
• 12 An Artistic Metempsychosis: James Joyce’s and Sadeq Hedayat’s Nonlinear and Chaotic Imagination
• Index