The Novel and the Short Story in Ireland

The Novel and the Short Story in Ireland: Readership, Society and Fiction, 1922-1965. Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy by Anthony Halpen April 2016 Anthony Halpen Institute of Irish Studies The University of Liverpool 27.03.2016 i ABSTRACT The Novel and the Short Story in Ireland: Readership, Society and Fiction, 1922-1965. Anthony Halpen, The Institute of Irish Studies, The University of Liverpool. This thesis considers the novel and the short story in the decades following the achievement of Irish independence from Britain in 1922. During these years, many Irish practitioners of the short story achieved both national and international acclaim, such that 'the Irish Short Story' was recognised as virtually a discrete genre. Writers and critics debated why Irish fiction-writers could have such success in the short story, but not similar success with their novels. Henry James had noticed a similar situation in the United States of America in the early nineteenth century. James decided the problem was that America's society was still forming - that the society was too 'thin' to support successful novel-writing. Irish writers and critics applied his arguments to the newly-independent Ireland, concluding that Irish society was indeed the explanation. Irish society was depicted as so unstructured and fragmented that it was inimical to the novel but nurtured the short story. Ireland was described variously: "broken and insecure" (Colm Tóibín), "often bigoted, cowardly, philistine and spiritually crippled" (John McGahern) and marked by "inward-looking stagnation" (Dermot Bolger). This study examines the validity of these assertions about Irish society, considering whether day-to-day life in Ireland was so exceptionally different to other contemporary states where the novel did prosper. The conclusion from the evidence is that Ireland was different but not unique. One chapter examines literacy and the reading traditions in Ireland, and it is clear that there was a skilled audience for the novels and an effective book trade. The novel in Ireland is discussed and three case studies (Elizabeth Bowen, Kate O'Brien and Liam O'Flaherty) are considered. The study concludes with the confirmation, through two case studies (Séan O'Faoláin and Frank O'Connor), that the short story continued to be widely acclaimed and widely practised by many Irish writers. The conclusion reached is that Irish society was not as popularly depicted nor was it exceptional. It was a matter of writers' talents not society's failings. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to all the staff and postgraduate students within the Institute of Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool for their help and support over the last several years while I researched this study. I am grateful to the Institute's lecturers, to the indispensable Dorothy Lynch and Viola Segeroth, and to Doctors Ciarán O'Neill, Anna Pilz, Jane Davison, Whitney Standlee, Paddy Hoey, Steve Bellis, Stephen Kelly and Bryce Evans for their encouragement and example. I appreciate the kindness and patience shown me by present post-grads, Ivy Manning, Michael Robinson, Darren Dunning, James Gallagher, Anna Walsh and Dennis Jenkins and to Chris Kedge for his unfailing good humour and his willingness to debate every issue. I am particularly indebted to Dr. Niall Carson who has given me so much of his time to help, suggest and advise, and has been a great friend and teacher. My supervisor, Professor Frank Shovlin, has been exemplary in guiding and prodding as required and for his patience and sheer hard work, and his willingness to share his knowledge and insights. I must acknowledge the several people in Ireland who were willing to discuss their interpretations of their lived history and to check and challenge my tentative conclusions. I thank in particular Patsy and the late Pat Jordan. I am deeply grateful to all my family who have encouraged me throughout the years of this study and have put up with my disappearances behind books and computers: Paul, Miyo and Erika; Sue, Tony, Joel and Megan: and Angela who has checked through my scripts with a good critical eye and useful comments, and concise advice. Anne, of course, never complained, simply took on my share of all that needed doing. She remained my chief encouragement, walking with me every step of the way. iii CONTENTS Introduction: "Ah, Wisha! The Irish Novel" 1. Chapter One: The Official State; or the Ireland "we would have" 40. Chapter Two: The Reality of Irish Society - and its novels 94. Chapter Three: Reading Ireland 151. Chapter Four: Ireland's Novels 1922-1960s 205. Chapter Five: The Short Story 265. Conclusion 318. Appendix A 333. Bibliography: Primary Fiction Works Cited 401. Primary Fiction Works Consulted 405. Secondary Sources 411. iv NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHICAL PRACTICE 1. Throughout this study, titles of books, periodicals and journals are italicized. 2. As many of the novels of the period are now unobtainable, only the novels that have been sourced and read are given with full publishing details. 3. Dates of newspaper articles and similar are given in the form: (29.03.2016). 4. Dates of Dáil and Séanad Debates are give in the form: 29 March 2016. 5. Legislation is given in the form: the Censorship of Publications Act (1929). Introduction: ”Ah, Wisha! The Irish Novel” Henry James, discussing the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, stated his proposition simply: the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had other things to do than to produce flowers, and before giving birth to writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for them to write about.1 Seán O’Faoláin, in his insightful critical analysis ‘The Dilemma of Irish Letters’ (1949), applied James’s assertion about the needs of the novel to the Irish literary context, whilst adding the contrast with the short story. In this critique of newly- independent Ireland, he concludes: “In such an unshaped society there are many subjects for little pieces, that is for the short story writer: the novelist or the dramatist loses himself in the general amorphism, unthinkingness, brainlessness, egalitarianism and general unsophistication”.2 Following James, he directly links context and form. The society is an amalgam of the outmoded colonial-day attitudes and the greediness of the new elites. In such a fragmented world, it is only the short story, with its focus on fragments, and peopled by the excluded, that can narrate that society. This assertion that post-independent Ireland’s society and its attitudes created a milieu inimical to the writing of successful novels but conducive to the 1Henry James, Hawthorne (London: MacMillan, 1879), 3. 2 Seán O’Faoláin,’The Dilemma of Irish Letters’, The Month, Vol.2, No. 6 (1949), 375-76. 1 composition of short stories was to be propounded by many other writers and critics over the years. Nearly forty years on, Colm Tóibín argued that Ireland at independence was ”a country where history wiped out any hope of us forming a cohesive, safe, secure, well-adjusted, class-ridden society.” He sees instead “something broken and insecure”, leading him to ask: How can the novel flourish in such a world? The novel explores psychology, sociology, the individual consciousness; the novel finds a form and a language for these explorations. We require an accepted world for the novel to flourish, a shared sense of time and place.3 That the argument still remains plausible is suggested, nearly sixty years on from O’Faoláin’s analysis, by Declan Kiberd’s assertion that “Novels deal with already made societies, and Ireland in 1904 was still a society in the making. The short story or anecdote was designed to describe a submerged, colonised people, whereas the novel was more suited to the calibrated world of social classes.”4 These assertions cannot be proved, being based on reasoned, but subjective, opinions about aesthetic qualities and values, but they are susceptible to the weight of evidence from examples. Most of the critics who do propound the case offer some reasoning, if not always much evidence. In his analysis, Henry James argued that Hawthorne was not a realist writer, and certainly his characters were not imitative of realistic types, “But none the less, Hawthorne’s work savours thoroughly of the local 3 Colm Tóibín, ‘Martyrs and Metaphors’, in Dermot Bolger (ed.), Letters from the New Island (Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1991), 45. 4 Declan Kiberd, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (London:Faber and Faber, 2009), 34. 2 soil – it is redolent of the social system in which he had his being.”5 James ascribes the weaknesses he perceives in Hawthorne’s work to the crudity and simplicity of that society, noting “It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser, richer, warmer European spectacle – it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for the novelist.”6 He then provides an image of the youthful innocence that attended the creation of the United States – an image that would have resonated with that first generation of writers in the newly-independent Ireland for whom everything must have seemed possible with the exciting dawn of this new, and hard-won, era. James explains: History, as yet, has left in the United States but so thin and impalpable a deposit that we very soon touch the hard sub-stratum of nature; and nature herself, in the western world, has the peculiarity of seeming rather crude and immature.

Load more