We Crown Thee King

Lecture Notes "We Crown Thee King" In 1858, during the reign of Queen Victoria, the British state took over the Indian Subcontinent from the British East India Company, creating the so- called Indian Empire or British Raj www Popularly referred to as "the jewel in the crown" of British colonialism, the Raj endured until India and Pakistan became independent in 1947 www The British individuals who emigrated to work on the Indian Subcontinent were called Anglo-Indians, a term we see on page 217 of "We Crown Thee King" www Anglo-Indians in official positions were sometimes referred to as Sahibs ("masters")—for example, "the Burra [great] Sahib" (221) www Initially, the British located the central Raj government in the city of Calcutta (present-day Kolkata) in the delta region of the mighty— and sacred—Ganges river, along which Nabendu (from "We Crown Thee King") walks "in the early morning" (223) www Calcutta is the dominant urban area in the geographic and cultural region called Bengal, which has its own language (Bengali) and is among the most densely populated zones on planet earth www Partly to assert their cultural and linguistic difference from the colonizing British—and partly to modernize and intensify aspects of their art, literature, science, and society—Bengalis in the 19th and 20th centuries generated the Bengali Renaissance, starting with Ram Mohan Roy (who died in 1833) www Another family associated with the Bengali Renaissance had the last name Tagore (formerly Banerjee); the family belonged to the elite Hindu class known as Brahmins www Rabindranath Tagore, the author "We Crown Thee King," became the first Asian or non-Westerner to win a Nobel Prize (Literature, 1913) www He appreciated the tensions between the Raj on the one hand and, on the other, Bengali and Indian demands for political independence www One of Rabindranath Tagore's brothers (Satyendranath) became the first native Indian to be appointed to the Indian Civil Service—that is, the Western-or white- dominated body used by the Raj to administer the Indian Subcontinent www Originally written in Bengali, "We Crown Thee King" appeared in English translation in 1916 (in a volume of Tagore's word entitled The Hungry Stones and Other Stories) www "We Crown Thee King" opens by emphasizing that the character Nabendu Sekhar wants to continue his late father Purnendu's efforts to gain British preferment and honors by means of kowtowing to the Raj authorities—"by diligently plying…salaams [greetings]" (215); we might call this practice "brown-nosing" www By contrast, Nabendu's brother-in-law Pramathanath has come to "[desire] to keep away from Englishmen" (216) and, instead, to seek national independence from the Raj www After living in England for three years, Pramathanath returned home and fraternized with Anglo-Indians, "enjoy[ing] English hospitality at…entertainments" (217) www Make sure that you understand the episode at "the opening of a new railway line" (217) that causes Pramathanath to "burst with indignation" (218) against the Raj on behalf of "his Motherland" (218) www Also: make sure you understand how Pramathanath explains his altered position vis-à-vis the Raj by means of a "story" (218) about a donkey and an idol www It's important that Pramathanath's epiphany-like disillusionment with the Raj occurs in the context of railways, for (from the middle of the 19th century) the British created the Indian rail-transport system, declaring (at the 1870 opening of the Bombay- Calcutta cross-country route) that "the whole country should be covered with a network of lines in a uniform system" www When he first marries into their family, Nabendu attempts to impress his "well educated" (219) sisters-in-law by displaying European letters sent to his late father; the women respond by satirically suggesting that Nabendu should worship English things and people— for example, the eldest sister Labanya (also known as Labanyalekha) constructs a kind of altar centered on "English boots" (220) for his use www For testing purposes, know what a namavali is (220) www Tagore eroticizes politics by having Nabendu become "much infatuated" (221) with Labanya; as winter approaches, he finds himself "enchanted" by her "health and beauty" (223), comparing her to the honeysuckle-like malati plant (used medicinally to, among other things, expel parasitic worms from one's insides) www In fact, Nabendu considers himself to be "placed between the cross-fires of his Sahibs [Anglo-Indian officials] and his sisters-in-law" (221) www He wants Labanya to believe that he attends a speech by the Indian nationalist Surendranath Banerjee (221) www A Bengali Hindu, Banerjee co-founded (in 1876) the Indian National Association, which would merge with the Indian National Congress (founded in 1885), the political party most responsible for Indian independence www A rumor spreads that, in connection with Queen Victoria's birthday, the Raj will honor Nabendu by awarding him an RD: Rai Badahur, meaning "brave prince," which comes with a medal (the Title Badge) www Labanya assures Nabendu's wife (her sister) that "I will see what I can do to prevent it" (222) www Even though both of them have spouses, Nabendu uses cooking and card-playing to flirt with Labanya www Her Indian lawyer husband, a member of the nationalist Congress party, "refuse[s] to pay his respects to European officials" (225) www The husband asks Nabendu for a financial subscription to Congress, assuring him that the donation will remain confidential: "We won't publish your name in the papers" (226) www Overanxious about proving his Bengali or Indian credentials—and about impressing Labanya—Nabendu supplies 1,000 rupees and greenlights publication of his name, even though backing Congress might cause the Anglo-Indian establishment to block his plans for developing a racecourse www The Anglo- Indian press features a letter (signed "One Who Knows") suggesting that news of Nabendu's monetary support of Congress is an "absurd libel" (228) www Urged on by the sexy Labanya, Nabendu approves a response that declares, "[T]he haughty Anglo-Indians are worse enemies than the Russians or the frontier Pathans" (230) www The British Empire vied with Russia for control of the northern (Himalayan) region of India: a geopolitical struggle known as the Great Game www Pathan is another word for Pashtun: the ethnic Afghans of present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, most of whom follow Sunni Islam, the largest branch of Islam www Nabendu's public alignment with Congress precipitates a visit from the Anglo-Indian District Magistrate (DM), the Raj's chief administrative and revenue officer in Nabendu's region (known as a Collectorate [234]) www Nabendu keeps the DM waiting too long, so the latter leaves; the next morning, Nabendu puts on "a big turban" (232) and attempts to secure an interview with the DM, which necessitates payment of bakshish (a tip or, more accurately, a bribe) to the DM's household retainers www Calling Nabendu a "howling idiot" (234) to his face, the DM denies having visited him (in effect, the Anglo-Indian establishment lies to and turns on Nabendu) www A party of six of the DM's chuprassy-grade (i.e. badge-wearing) servants arrives at Nabendu's home, looking for more bakshish; however, Labanya and her husband refuse to "appease" (235) the men, even though they're fellow Indians www Having been thoroughly manipulated by (his desire for) Labanya, Nabendu finds himself lauded and elevated at the annual general meeting of the Congress party www His "emerg[ing]…as a leader of the country" is a political coup for Labanya www Turning the scion of a leading pro-British Indian family into a nationalist in such high-profile ways (the press; Congress's convention) constitutes a massive PR victory for her www Labanya follows up with a household or domestic ceremony, flattering Nabendu with the declaration, "To-day we crown thee King" (237) www The text indicates that Nabendu's wife will later reward him sexually: in "the still secrecy of midnight" (237) www The unidentified narrator has the last word, however; and he believes that Nabendu will eventually turn back to the Anglo-Indian establishment and, thus, receive glowing testimony in two Raj newspapers—the Englishman and the Pioneer www The tale "We Crown Thee King" critiques its protagonist's motivations for political involvement: his interest in the Anglo-Indians seems driven by economics (specifically, his racecourse-building project) and by status (the potential for an RD), while his commitments to Indian nationalism in general and Congress in particular emerge from erotic infatuation with Labanya, who regularly challenges him to man up www Arguably, we could read Labanya (whose name means beauty) as a personification of India—a version of the Motherland www Feminizing the nation is a common practice www Nabendu's story highlights the dilemma of the colonized subject or subaltern: whether to align himself with the colonizer or to campaign for national independence END Lecture Notes • Wodehouse • “The Custody of the Pumpkin”

Pelham Grenville (P.G.) Wodehouse: good-humored satirist of English country houses (rural mansions) and their denizens (inhabitants) ••• Born in 1881, he lived to age 93, receiving a knighthood (i.e. becoming Sir P.G. Wodehouse) in the year of his death ••• A self-declared practitioner of “light writing,” Wodehouse will always be most famous for 35 short stories and 11 novels (published over a span of 59 years) about Jeeves—a “gentleman’s personal gentleman” or valet—who serves and manipulates the clueless and foppish (i.e. dandy-like) Bertie Wooster, a minor aristocrat, a member of the Drones Club in London, and an instance of the “idle rich” bachelor ••• Jeeves’s knowledge, competence, and fix-it abilities inspired the name of the internet search engine Ask Jeeves ••• In Britain during the early 1990s, a popular television series Jeeves and Wooster, based on the Wodehouse tales, starred Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie as Wooster ••• On US television, Laurie is best known for paying Dr. Gregory House in the medical drama House and Senator Tom James in the political comedy Veep ••• Wodehouse’s other great literary series (1917 to 1975) is the nine short stories and 11 novels centered on Clarence Threepwood, the Ninth Earl of Emsworth, and his ancestral seat, Blandings Castle in Shropshire, an English county bordering the country of Wales ••• In the British nobility or peerage, earl is the third- most senior rank, after Duke at the top and Marquess next; an Earl’s wife is a Countess, but Lord Emsworth is a widower ••• We are reading the 1935 version of the Blandings Castle short story entitled “The Custody of the Pumpkin,” which adds some content to the original tale, published in American and English magazines in late 1924 ••• The English-Welsh border region is known as The Marches ••• Wodehouse’s contemporary and supporter, the novelist Evelyn Waugh (author of Brideshead Revisited, among other famous titles) opined, “The gardens of Blandings Castle are that original garden [i.e. the biblical Eden] from which we are all exiled” ••• Yet even the quasi-Eden that is Blandings Castle manifests anxiety over modernizing forces, which the third-person, unidentified narrator of “The Custody of the Pumpkin” calls the “age of rush and hurry” (p. 35) ••• A major reason for loss of prelapsarian (i.e. “before the Fall”) innocence: Huge death toll from machine-gun and poison-gas horror of World War I—also known as the Great War—of 1914-1918, which shattered belief and trust that the English had had in the authority of establishment institutions like the monarchy, government, military, empire, and church ••• Entire generation of young men lost ••• As British regiments were generally formed on a county or regional basis, a single battle could wipe out most of the men from a given community ••• One of the Shropshire regiments was the multi-battalion KSLI (King’s Shropshire Light Infantry), which attained 60 or so battle honors during Great War, including for the Battle of the Somme, on whose first day, 1 July 1916, the British suffered 57,470 casualties (19,240 of them deaths): the worst single disaster in the British army’s centuries-long history ••• As the “spare,” not the heir, of a noble family, we might expect Freddie Threepwood (known as the Honorable or Hon. Freddie) to follow social convention for the aristocratic second sons and pursue a military career (cf. Prince Harry), but apparently he has chosen to 1 be jobless and “just [moon] about the place [Blandings]” (p. 13), a signal perhaps of loss of faith in British civilization and its military- imperial project ••• The association between soldiers and their county of origin dates from one of the so-called Cardwell Reforms of the British army ••• That particular initiative is often referred to the localization scheme of 1871, and it divided Britain into Regimental Districts based largely on county boundaries ••• County pride is clearly manifest in Lord Emsworth’s desire that his pumpkin win “first prize … at the Shrewsbury Show” (p. 18): that is, the agricultural competition for the county of Shropshire, held in the chief county town, Shrewsbury (where Charles Darwin was born and grew up) ••• In this connection, Lord Emsworth thinks of his family’s “scroll of honor” (p. 18), but to Wodehouse’s readers that three-word phrase would have evoked military honor lists that commemorated locals who enlisted for Great War service and then were killed in the trenches ••• A picture of such a list sits in the top-right- hand-corner of this page (St. Chad’s Church, Shrewsbury, Shropshire: “This Tablet … Is Erected in Grateful Recognition of Those [from the parish] Who Fell in the Great War 1914-1918”) ••• Scottish gardener Angus McAllister introduces an astringent “Celtic” element into Lord Emsworth’s English or “Saxon” regime; Scotland is regarded as a “Celtic” country, and Shropshire abuts another “Celtic” nation: Wales ••• In Anthony Trollope’s “The Telegraph Girl,” Sophy Wilson’s music-hall-going and, thus, problematic early love interest Alec Murray has Scottish-sounding first and last names; three medieval Scottish kings bore the name Alexander ••• Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century race theory differentiated between two peoples or ethnicities within the United Kingdom, the nation created in 1800 by the Act of Union, whose repeal or dissolution became the focus of Daniel O’Connell’s Repeal Association and its Monster Meetings ••• According to this scheme, the English were seen as Saxon, descendants of such Early Medieval Germanic invader tribes as the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes ••• Qualities and traits associated with the Saxon character included rationality, dispassion, order, good planning, enterprise, steadfastness, leadership ••• On the surface, Lord Emsworth seems rational, not least because he purchases one of the great symbols of Enlightenment inquiry, a telescope; however, his failure to use that scientific instrument properly works against any conclusion that, in practice and essence, he is logical (the Emsworth is his noble title suggests as much: What is he worthwhileness? Emmm…) ••• As the map that features in your Write Now exercise underscores, the Irish, Scottish, and Manx—and also the Welsh and Cornish (i.e. people from the county of Cornwall in extreme southwestern England)—were seen as Celtic, although we now know that these populations are probably not ethnic Celts ••• Qualities and traits associated with the “Celtic” character included sentiment, passion, disarray, lack of planning, dreaminess, inconsistency, obsequiousness ••• Social theorist Matthew Arnold (an Englishman) could be negative when assessing Celtic nature; however, he also saw much value in the passion, artistic creativity, and openness to sentiment displayed by the Celts ••• Arnold’s influential 1867 lectures known as “Celtic Literature” state, “[S]entimental—if the Celtic nature is to be characterized by a single term—is the best term to take. An organization [i.e. nature] quick to feel impressions...very strongly; a lively personality...keenly sensitive to joy and to sorrow .... If the downs of life too much outnumber the ups, this temperament ... may be seen in passionate, penetrating melancholy; but its essence is to aspire ardently after life, light, and emotion, to be expansive, adventurous, and gay .... [T]he impressionable Celt, soon up and soon down, is the more down because it is so his nature to be up, to be sociable, hospitable, eloquent, admired, figuring away brilliantly. Sentimental, always ready to react against the despotism of fact: that is the description a great friend of the Celt gives of him; and it is not a bad description of the sentimental temperament; it lets us into the secret of its dangers and of its habitual want [i.e. lack] of success. Balance, measure, and patience, these are the eternal 2 conditions...of high success; and balance, measure, and patience are just what the Celt has never had. Even in the world of spiritual creation, he has never, in spite of his admirable gifts of quick perception and warm emotion, succeeded perfectly .... If his rebellion against fact has thus lamed the Celt even in spiritual work, how much more must it have lamed him in the world of business and politics!” ••• As successful businessman. Scottish-American figure Donaldson is Wodehouse’s way of putting the lie to Arnold’s claim about Celtic failure ever to “[succeed] perfectly,” not least in “the world of business” ••• Liberated from the racial prejudices and associated class- straitjacketing characteristic of contemporary British society (consider Lord Emsworth’s inclination to “[pull] the feudal stuff” on McAllister [p. 17]), the Donaldson family has enjoyed socio-economic mobility Stateside ••• At the time of “The Custody of the Pumpkin,” the multiethnic United States has become richer than Britain, whose Empire began to fade after—and, in part, because of—the Great War ••• Wodehouse’s admiration for American openness and entrepreneurialism derived in part from positive professional experiences he enjoyed on Broadway and in Hollywood; the self-made American is reflected in Donaldson’s having subscribed to “personality courses” that train one to “look the boss in the eye and make him wilt” (p. 31) ••• Lord Emsworth is surprised to learn that the “authoritative” (p. 29) Scottish- American (or Celtic-American) Donaldson is rich, but that epiphany warms him up to the fact that Freddie has become “spliced” (p. 25)—that is, married— to Donaldson’s daughter, the saxophone-playing Aggie ••• Lord Emsworth’s encounter with tulips in Kensington Gardens (a kind of countryside space in central London) perhaps evokes the worlds first major economic crash or bubble: the tulipomania of the 1630s ••• The version of “Custody” we are reading reflects the Great Depression, caused by Stock Market crashes in London and then New York in 1929 ••• The American catastrophe in particular resulted from the bursting of a speculative economic bubble in stocks, shares, and commodities ••• Donaldson avers that “[w]e [American businesses] have been through a tough time …. But things are coming back [due to] President [Franklin Delano] Roosevelt and the New Deal” (p. 32) ••• Donaldson’s particular enterprise reflects increasing disposal income and leisure-spending in the United States ••• He invokes his production facility in Long Island City, a municipality (pictured above right) consolidated in 1870 in the New York borough of Queens, which became a major hub for factories •••

W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) • “P&O” Lecture/Exam Notes

Maugham & Travel ¶1 • W. Somerset Maugham was the most commercially successful literary author his generation. A feature of his life and career was extensive foreign travel, which was enhanced by Maugham’s gift for languages. Consider, for instance, his memoir of a sojourn in the province of Andalusia in southern Spain: The Land of the Blessed Virgin (1905). § In 1915, Maugham published the work generally considered his masterpiece: a partially autobiographical novel entitled Of Human Bondage. While its central protagonist, Englishman Philip Carey, engages in some travel (to German and France, for example), towards the end of the text he foregoes plans for extensive additional travel, deciding that the “most perfect” among the “pattern[s]” of life available to him involves work, marriage, and children in his home country.

Maugham & the F.M.S. ¶2 • During five months in 1921, Maugham visited a British imperial possession on the Malay peninsula: the Federated Malay States (F.M.S.). From that experience, he crafted a book- length collection of six short stories, first published (by Heinemann of London) in 1926. “P&O” is the collection’s second story. The book’s overall title, The Casuarina Tree, refers to a tree, native to the Orient, that Maugham believed was used to stabilize soils. Maugham saw the tree as a metaphor. § In general, Maugham questioned whether European colonialism could prove a stabilizing force across the world, and the evidence in “P&O” hardly supports a positive conclusion. Its chief male protagonist, Gallagher, quits not only the “up-country” (i.e. remote) Malay rubber plantation that he’s managed but also the Malay woman long resident in his “bungalow” there. His decision precipitates in her incredulity, hurt, and anger. Gallagher boards an ocean steamer, operated by the P&O (Peninsular and Oriental) shipping company, with the intention of returning to Europe — specifically, to his native Ireland (itself a dominion within the British Empire). When questioned on board the vessel by a fellow passenger, Mrs. Hamlyn, as to whether he “regret[s]” leaving the F.M.S., Gallagher responds, I was glad to get out. I was fed up. I never want to see the country again or any one in it.”

¶3 • The British Empire established the Federated Malay States (out of four indigenous states) in 1895, and that colony would endure until 1946, when Japan invaded as part of its World War II expansion. Today, the territory that was the F.M.S. is incorporated into the larger nation of Malaysia, an elective monarchy that emerged from the late 1950s through the mid-1960s. When forming the F.M.S., a key motivation for the British was the new entity’s ability to supply natural rubber (also known as India rubber or caoutchouc), which became a hot commodity due primarily to the rise of the mass-produced automobile. Natural rubber is produced from latex (or sap) harvested from rubber trees. § Another commercial use for rubber was waterproof footwear, such as the galoshes about which Gabriel Conroy receives teasing (from his wife, Gretta, and aunts) in James Joyce’s “The Dead.” The first word in the term “guttapercha things” —Gretta’s description of the galoshes — comes from the Malay language, and it refers to a latex-producing tree similar to the rubber tree. (Some critics have suggested that both “galoshes” and “guttapercha things” constitute a coded means of discussing condoms in “The Dead.”)

¶4 • Although earth’s largest empire at the start of the twentieth century (controlling around a quarter of the planet’s land and people), Britain had relatively limited access to rubber. King Leopold II of Belgium counted as his personal possession one of the prime rubber-production zones: the Congo Free State, a vast

area in the Congo River Basin of west-central Africa. Another rubber area not administered by the British Empire was Peruvian and Brazilian portions of the Amazon River Basin. While British and part-British corporations attempted to exploit such places (consider, for example, the Congo-focused Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company), the creation of the F.M.S. ensured a relatively stable base for rubber-acquisition by the British. ¶ Also of commercial interest to the British in the F.M.S. was tin. One of the four constituent states of the F.M.S., Perak, possessed the world’s largest alluvial deposits of tin, often mined by immigrant Chinese laborers. A report published in 1921 (N.M. Penzer’s The Tin Resources of the British Empire) noted, “In 1917, 71 per cent of the total output of tin ore from the Federated Malay States came from Chinese- owned mines or mines worked by Chinese for other owners.” It’s small wonder that the Chinese are invoked as “industrious” in the opening, Singapore section of “P&O.”

Discourse on Christian Democracy in “P&O” ¶5 • “P&O” seems a simple tale: Gallagher determines to retire from plantation-management; boards a Europe-bound ship; contracts chronic, incurable hiccups while aboard; and starves to death, being unable to eat properly. The latter stages of his illness and his passing have disquieting effects on many of the other passengers. However, as a result of Gallagher’s demise, Mrs. Hamlyn, the passenger who’s become closest to the Irishman, experiences an essentially positive epiphany concerning her silk-merchant husband. She lets go of the anger and bitterness she’d been harboring towards him as a result of: (a) his abandoning her to pursue a sexual affair with another (older) woman; and (b) his wanting her not to file for divorce, an outcome that would weaken or even ruin his status in society and business. You may know that in 1936 (a decade after “P&O” appeared), the British king, Edward VIII, having reigned less than a year, was obliged to abdicate the throne due to his intention to marry an American, Wallis Simpson, who’d been divorced once and was seeking a second divorce.

¶6 • As with many modern short stories, the fundamental plot of “P&O” belies the tale’s many layers of complexity, which require some detective work to uncover. One of the work’s big themes or interests is (Christian) democracy: specifically, the threat posed to the traditional British class system by increased agitation for democracy. “P&O” highlights this important discourse by means of the debate and vote among the first-class passengers about whether or not to permit the second-class passengers to join them for a fancy-dress party in celebration of Christmas Day. During the discussion, an unidentified first-class passenger remarks that “one ha[s] to be more democratic nowadays.” Gallagher’s death may be said to reverse the opposition to inclusiveness that the first-class coterie initially exhibits. § Given that the festival being honored is the Mass of Christ, the short story is, in effect, asking, “What would Christ Jesus do?” (One notes, of course, that Christianity is not the only religion implicit in “P&O.”) As regards the first-class passengers’ snobby and judgmental opinions, it’s likely that Maugham had in mind specific verses from the Gospels, spoken by Jesus, including:

• Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets. (Matthew 7:12) The first-class passengers recognize the growth of democracy, but will they “do to” the second-class passengers what they wish for themselves?

• A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. | By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:34-35)

• “Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven” (Luke 6:37) After Gallagher’s death, the first-class passengers become less judgmental; and Mrs. Hamlyn ceases condemning her husband (she may even forgive him).

¶7 • When “P&O” debuted, in 1926, Britain was adjusting to significant shifts in the status quo, both domestically and internationally. As regards democracy: women over 30 had received the right to vote under the Representation of the People Act of 1918, a change perhaps echoed in “P&O” when women participate in the first-class passengers’ ballot. The Act also extended the franchise to all men over 21, irrespective of whether they owned property (historically a condition for voting). These democratizing innovations occurred in the final year of the Great War (World War I), a conflict that lessened trust in fundamental British institutions, not least: the monarchy; the aristocracy; the military’s “top brass”: and the Church of England’s bishops and archbishops.

¶8 • Beyond Britain, alternatives to monarchy and/or democracy were emerging. By 1926, the Russian Empire had given way to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) The German Empire had been replaced by the Weimar Republic; and, furthermore, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (or Nazi party), under Adolf Hitler, was on the rise there. In 1922, much of Gallagher’s native country, Ireland — specifically, 26 of its 32 traditional counties — had left the United Kingdom and become the Irish Free State, a dominion within the British Empire.

¶9 • Not everyone was a fan of the various new political arrangements, and for many (perhaps most) members of Britain’s aristocracy — and of its upper classes more generally — democracy could seem a threat to venerable certainties, especially given the high degree of flux occurring across Europe: from Russia in the east to Germany in the center to Ireland in the west. It’s instructive to examine the fact that while the democratic ideology enjoys success in in “P&O,” that success is distinctly limited. As the individual most explicitly connected with the British government, the consul is “all for democracy,” so long the second-class passengers “keep themselves to themselves” — that is, practice self-enforced class segregation. Also noteworthy is the fact that the most vocal opponent to incorporating the second-class travelers into the party for Christmas or Christ’s Mass is the “wife of a [Christian] missionary,” a woman all but professionally engaged, on a daily basis ,with the Gospel message, portions of which we rehearsed above. Consider how “P&O” invokes democracy:

Page 58 (above) • before Gallagher’s death Page 61 (above) • Gallagher’s contribution to the first-class passengers’ debate (note that he explicitly mentions “Christmas”)

Page 92 (above) • after Gallagher’s death Page 93 (above) • democracy … sort of!

Gallagher as Subaltern ¶10 • An essential learning outcome for this module on “P&O” is the word subaltern. A term associated with the British army, it refers to an officer-in-training. (One could compare it to the condition of a student who’s committed to the R.O.T.C. unit at her or his university; upon graduation, that student receives a commission as a Second Lieutenant, a junior-officer rank.) § Scholars decided to borrow the noun subaltern to describe a native whose country is under colonial control. At the time Maugham wrote “P&O,” that description could be applied to a majority of earth’s people, including: (a) the Malays of the F.M.S. and Singapore; and (b) the Irish. (Although the Irish Free State had emerged in 1922, it was under the British crown. No part of Ireland fully severed ties with the British Empire until the late 1940s.) As the image on this page underscores, a cartographic convention was to portray the vast British Empire in pink or “red” on world maps. (The map is from 1915.) § While subaltern can be applied to any colonized native, a more focused sense of the term is a native who, in a manner of speaking, trains “To Be Like” and perhaps also “To Like” the colonist, rather as an army or other service-branch recruit trains to become a loyal, junior-rank officer.

¶11 • Subaltern: the military interface • Although they were colonized by England, beginning in 1169, the Irish became important participants in the non-officer and (perhaps surprisingly) officer ranks of the British military. During the nineteenth century, they were disproportionately represented in both strata compared to the English, Welsh, and Scots — that is, the other peoples of the then United Kingdom. In the same week as Irish rebels were mounting the Easter 1916 Rising in an attempt to overthrow British power, members of the 16th (Irish) Division of the British Army were perishing from German poison-gas attacks at Hulluch, a Great War combat site in northern France. § Often associated with particular regions of Ireland, multiple Irish regiments existed within the British army. Gallagher hails from County Galway; its county capital, Galway City, provided the home depot and recruiting base for the Connaught Rangers, an infantry regiment within the British Army that saw service in the Second Boer War (1899-1902) in South Africa, among other conflicts. It gained “The Devil’s Own” as its moniker, and Maugham’s readers in 1926 might have recalled that particular fact when Gallagher reflects about his “[having had] a devil of a lot of walking exercise on a rubber estate” (emphases added). The Irishman’s phrasing is decidedly military in nature.

¶12 • Subaltern: the language interface • In Ireland, one of the British Empire’s key mechanisms for “training” the natives (or subalterns) was the National School system, introduced by the Stanley Education Act of 1831. The Act’s purpose was to provide free basic education to all Irish children regardless of gender, religious persuasion, or economic circumstances. In under 40 years from the scheme’s inception, over 6,500 National Schools had been established. An essential component of this innovative program was that instruction had to occur in English, not Gaeilge (Ireland’s indigenous language). The Stanley Education Act is the principal reason why English became — and remains — by far the dominant language in Ireland. § Being relatively remote from Dublin (the national capital and the seat of British colonial power), Gallagher’s native county, Galway, on the Atlantic seaboard, retained significant Gaeilge-speaking zones, despite the Stanley Education Act. In the latter stages of his illness, Gallagher experiences an hallucination. The young Edinburg-trained (i.e. Western) doctor on board the P&O vessel reports, “He seemed to think some one was calling him.” The Irishman “ke[eps] on saying one word over and over,” and the doctor assumes that he is “talk[ing] Malay.” That conclusion may be wrong, however, for the doctor admits, “Of course I couldn’t understand a thing.” It’s entirely possible — even likely — that Gallagher has reverted from the subaltern position of speaking English to his native tongue, Gaeilge. While Mrs. Hamlyn seems to assume that the “some one … calling” was the Malay woman Gallagher forsook, it’s also possible that Maugham intended an allusion to the genre in Gaeilge (Irish-language) poetry known as the Aisling (“vision”). In a typical Aisling poem, the male speaker has a vision in which Ireland, in the form of a woman, addresses him, calling upon him to fight for her/Ireland.

¶13 • One notes that some nineteenth-century scholars argued that the Irish and their native language, Gaeilge, originated in the Orient: perhaps India or Persia (i.e. Iran). This theory is known as Irish orientalism. If Maugham knew of it, then the doctor’s idea about Gallagher’s “talk[ing] Malay” becomes even more interesting! § Respecting linkages through language: Gallagher’s position as a “planter” echoes the terms planter and plantation, used to describe large-scale British colonial schemes to appropriate zones in Ireland and resettle them with English, Scotch, or other British individuals and families. Consider, for example, the early-seventeenth-century Plantation of Ulster, Ireland’s northern province.

In quitting the F.M.S., Gallagher ceases to be a subaltern (Irish) who aids the British Empire in its mission to produce more subalterns (Malays).

The Casement Subtext ¶14 • For most readers engaging with “P&O” in and around 1926, the story’s presentation of a fictional Irishman, Gallagher, leaving a rubber plantation — and, furthermore, “never want[ing] to see” it again — would have strongly suggested a very famous real-life Irishman, Sir Roger Casement (1864-1916). While born in Dublin, Casement (pictured on the right) is especially associated with rural coastal County Antrim, a region in the north of Ireland known today as “Game of Thrones Country” (because much of that H.B.O. series was filmed there)! Having become an orphaned youth, a fate that also befell W. Somerset Maugham, Casement was raised on the Antrim coast by some of his father’s cousins. Despite his relatives’ Unionist (i.e. pro-British) political ideology, the teenaged Roger Casement developed a keen interest in Irish cultural nationalism. § Being without parents or money, Casement at age 16 found employment in the merchant-marine sector, which took him to Angola, on the west coast of Africa, then a Portuguese colony. He became aware of the large territory directly to the north of Angola, known as the Congo Free State. By virtue of an international agreement (the Berlin Act), the C.F.S. was the personal possession of Leopold II,

the king of Belgium, who had developed it by means of an organization he co-found: the African International Association. In violation of explicit promises he’d made about philanthropy, Leopold exploited the native Congolese, forcing them to harvest rubber in slave conditions.

¶15 • The labor terrorism in the C.F.S. (a territory 70 times the size of Belgium) included extensive use of the severing of hands and other body parts as punishment for lack of productivity on the part of enslaved Congolese men, women, and children, such as failures to meet harvesting quotas or, simply, refusal to work. One notes that Pryce characterizes the F.M.S. as a “bloody country”; and his being pressured to deploy harsh means to increase productivity may be the unspoken reason why Gallagher removes himself from the plantation, “rac[ing] on” by car towards Singapore and the P&O ship in a car driven in a “reckless” fashion. Exiting the scene precipitates in Gallagher “a sigh of relief.” § The fact that things were rotten in Leopold’s Congolese regime began to be perceived. An early voice, in the 1890s, was that of a Jamaica-born Englishman H.R. Fox Bourne, secretary of the Aborigines’ Protection Society. Also consequential was a French-born Englishman, E.D. Morel. When working as a clerk in a British shipping company, Morel deduced from account books that the vast quantities of rubber (and ivory) being shipped from Boma, capital of the C.F.S., to Antwerp in Belgium must be the product of slave-labor. To excite public interest in the phenomenon, Morel wrote several pamphlets and even founded a magazine: the West African Mail. When the British parliament (Westminster) took up the case in May 1903, it determined to send its consul — or official diplomatic representative — in Boma up the Congo River to investigate first-hand the rubber plantations in the interior (“darkest Africa”). At that time, Roger Casement was serving as the Boma-based British consul, having received the appointment due to the expertise in West African affairs he’d developed, both in the private sector (e.g., as a railway surveyor for King Leopold’s African International Association) and in lower ranks of the British diplomatic service.

¶16 • Begun when he was approaching 39 years of age, Casement’s investigative trip (which some scholars label as ethnographic research) occurred between June and September 1903. It was not his first journey through the region, and — in addition to multiple labor atrocities — he was struck by the depopulation of villages in 1903 over what he’d witnessed earlier. Submitted to the British parliament in January 1904 (the month in which James Joyce sets “The Dead”), the report Casement produced was notable for evidence collected from ordinary Congolese, not just tribal elders. He detailed what he called “wholesale oppression and shocking misgovernment.” In 1910, the British government again dispatched Casement to scrutinize rubber plantations, this time in the Putumayo segment of the Amazon rainforests of Perú, where Native Americans were enduring labor-exploitation. In July 1911, the British monarch knighted Casement — that is, bestowed upon him the style Sir Roger Casement — in recognition of his humanitarian service.

Above: a portion of Roger Casement’s Report … Respecting the Administration of the Independent State of the Congo, Presented to Both Houses of Parliament by Command of His Majesty (1904). • The Report details many atrocities, such as “two [Congolese] men … chained together … made to carry heavy loads of bricks and water … frequently beaten by the soldiers in charge of them.” King Leopold II’s private army in the C.F.S. was called the Force Publique. • Photographs of Congolese with amputated hands supplemented Casement’s words.

¶17 • For two weeks in June 1890, Casement shared a room with the Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad, then visiting the C.F.S. In his diary, Conrad wrote, “Made the acquaintance of Mr. Roger Casement … a positive piece of luck. Thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic.” Conrad also remarked

on Casement’s knowledge of the local languages. His encounter with Casement informed portions of Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, which first appeared in serial form in 1899. After the publication of his report, Casement would successfully call on Conrad and other celebrities — not least, Booker T. Washington, Mark Twain, and Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes) — to support the Congo Reform Association, an organization he co-founded (in March 1904) with E.D. Morel and Rev. Dr. Henry Grattan Guinness, grandson of the famous Dublin brewer. Funded by the chocolate millionaire William Cadbury, it sought to keep pressure on the British government and its allies to force reform in the C.F.S. Concerning Casement, Morel opined, “Here was a man, indeed. One who would convince those in high places of the foulness of the crime committed upon a helpless people.” One activity by the Congo Reform Association was a slideshow of photographs of mutilated Congolese (some taken by a missionary, Alice Seeley Harris), which toured Britain as a lantern lecture tour.

¶18 • While up-country in the Congo in 1903, Casement drew in his mind explicit parallels between the subaltern condition of the Congolese and that of the Irish. In an April 20th, 1907, letter to an Irish historian, Alice Stopford Green, he recalled:

“I had been away from Ireland for years — out of touch with everything native to my heart and mind — trying hard to do my duty, and every fresh act of duty made me appreciably nearer to the ideal of the Englishman. I had accepted Imperialism — British rule was to be extended at all costs … altho’ at heart, underneath all and unsuspected almost by myself, I had remained an Irishman … and finally when in those lonely Congo forests where I found Leopold — I found also myself — the incorrigible Irishman. … I realized then that I was looking at this tragedy [the Congo] with the eyes of another race [the Irish] — of a people once hunted themselves.”

Back home in Ireland, Casement became increasingly active in nationalist causes. In 1913 and 1914, he joined Green and others to highlight the inhuman conditions being endured by the impoverished, largely Gaeilge-speaking residents in the Connemara region of County Galway. In a May 30, 1913, letter to the Irish Independent newspaper, Casement characterized the situation as “appalling” and called for “remov[ing] the stain of this enduring Putumayo from our native land [Ireland].”

¶19 • Casement participated in both cultural and physical-force Irish nationalism. In support of the Easter 1916 Rising, he negotiated with Britain’s Great War enemy, Germany, a shipment of armaments. British intelligence was monitoring Casement, and on Good Friday (April 21st) 1916, the authorities arrested him on Banna Strand, near the town of Tralee in County Kerry, on Ireland’s west coast. The gun-running had failed, and Casement was on track to becoming the sixteenth and final rebel to be executed in direct connection with the Rising. Involving an argument about a comma in a medieval statute, Casement’s London-based trial for “high treason” resulted in the death penalty. (The image on this page shows him leaving the court after the guilty verdict.) Due to Casement’s international renown as a humanitarian, a clemency campaign was advanced by, among others, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. Ask to join, Joseph Conrad refused, disgusted by Casement’s willingness to deal with the Germans. What sank the effort to appeal Casement’s conviction was the leaking to the press and to highly placed establishment personages of portions of his personal sex diaries, the so-called Black Diaries, obtained by dubious means. § Casement engaged in transactional homosexual sex, often in port cities — such as Funchal, capital of the North Atlantic archipelago of Madeira — through which he passed en route between Europe and West Africa. In Casement’s era, U.K. law deemed gay sex criminal, and much social opprobrium also attached to “the love that dare not speak its name.” Explicit and often flamboyant, Casement’s notes about his sexual encounters, once circulated, shut down

any possibility of his avoiding hanging — and a subsequent burial in quicklime — at Pentonville Prison, London, on August 3rd, 1916. In the background was the most famous gay trial of modern times, also centered on an Irishman: the superstar playwright Oscar Wilde. In 1895, Wilde was sentenced by a London court to two years of hard labor for having had anal intercourse with another man. The trail destroyed Wilde’s reputation and broke his health, so that he died at only 46.

¶20 • Like Wilde, W. Somerset Maugham, maintained a wife but was, in reality, a gay man. While his inner circle knew about Maugham’s sexual identity, the general public didn’t. Had it been revealed, Maugham, one of earth’s most famous and successful literary figures, could have been ruined, as the Irish author Wilde had been in the 1890s. The character Gallagher’s large physical size is perhaps suggestive of the much- photographed and much-caricatured Wilde, who stood six feet three inches and was described by a contemporary as having a “very tall, heavy figure.” However, due to the discourse on rubber, it would have been Casement, more than Wilde, who those who first read “P&O” would have more immediately contemplated upon encountering Gallagher. An available interpretation of Gallagher is that he’s a gay man whose sexuality prevents him from entering European society. Thus, he dies — or must die (?) — before the “old” P&O steamer gets to Europe. While the first-class passengers may be anxious about sharing their Christmas party or “fancy-dress ball” with the human beings in second class, almost no one in any stratum of contemporary society would have thought twice about shunning and condemning a gay individual. Gallagher’s name beings with the syllable gall, the Gaeilge (Irish-language) word for stranger. Being gay in and around 1926 effectively made one a stranger in mainstream European society, vulnerable to criminal prosecution. The full name translates as helper (or supporter) of strangers, and it’s conceivable that Gallagher’s support of Mr. Pryce during the first-class passenger’s debate about the party guests exemplifies advocacy by a gay man for his partner. In fine, Gallagher and Pryce may be lovers. Gallagher is willing to pay a social price to support Pryce, whose place of origin — the working-class East End of London — causes him to be termed a cockney (just as a native of the English city of Liverpool are known as a scouser). Three times, the text refers to Pryce as “the little cockney.”

¶21 • Invoked earlier, the phrase “the love that dare not speak its name” became associated with gay sexuality during the Oscar Wilde scandal. Coded or euphemistic language — a kind of rhetorical disguise or (to use a word from “P&O”) “fancy dress” — was necessary for the homosexual community to communicate, and one can discover a range of potentially euphemistic passages in “P&O.” Consider, for instance, the following:

Page 77 (above) • Mrs. Hamlyn experiences Page 61 (above) • Gallagher supports Pryce. At the “uneasiness” as Pryce “disappear[s] into the second- fancy-dress ball, “[t]he consul (always a humorist) … class saloon.” dress[es] as a ballet-girl” (page 94)

Page 83 (above left) and page 86 (above right) • If “P&O” is, at least in part, a commentary about the impossibility of gay sexuality in the Western world of the 1920s, it seems appropriate that a remedy attempted to cure Gallagher’s severe hiccups is the sacrificial cutting of a cock at a “little fire.” Cock was (and remains) a common slang term for the male reproductive organ, and “little fire” can be interpreted as a label for homosexuality, as opposed to the “great fire” of heterosexuality.

Page 78 (left) • Having reflected (to the young, rational doctor) that “[s]trange things happen” in “the East,” where she’s “lived … a long time,” Mrs. Hamlyn observes — and reacts to — a male couple.

¶22 • Fascinating is the fact that the captain’s response to Gallagher’s crisis centers on redirecting the steamer to Aden, a port on the Arabian peninsula. At the time, that city and its hinterland were part of the British Empire. If the term “little fire” functions in “P&O” as code for gay sexuality, one can’t help acknowledging that Aden sounds like a male personal name popular in Ireland: Aidan, which comes from the Gaeilge for Little Fire. Due to his cockney accent, Pryce drops the letter “h,” so home becomes “’ome,” which sounds like the sacred syllable Om (“best of all essences”), which several Eastern religions deploy.

¶23 • Being gay in Pryce’s time meant neither being able to fully gain a home nor fully live into one’s essence. While Pryce implies that Gallagher and the Malay woman who shared his bungalow (and later cursed him) were lovers — and while Gallagher claims that “he’d marry” when back in Galway — the rhetorical presentation of Gallagher as heterosexual may simply be a socially expedient screen. Attempting to rebound from the failure of heterosexual desire that was her marriage, Mrs. Hamlyn (who recognizes “the promiscuity of shipboard”) all but renders herself sexually available to Gallagher. At one juncture, alone with Gallagher on the deck, she is clad in “nothing but a dressing-gown and a little lace cap”; however, although he offers her a (perhaps phallic) cigarette, he makes no move towards physical closeness. By no means is “P&O” an endorsement of heterosexual marriage. Not only is Mrs. Hamlyn a victim of spousal unfaithfulness, Mrs. Linsell openly carries on a “flirtation” and develops “intimacy” with the young doctor despite the presence on the voyage of her naval-officer husband, whom she addresses by “uttering … a stream of vehement reproaches” while the two “[walk] around the deck.”

Gallagher as Irish Threat ¶24 • The mere inscription of an Irishman in the text would have precipitated a variety of anxieties in Maugham’s British readers in the late 1920s. While the description of Gallagher as “a big fellow, well over six feet high, broad and stout” might well have suggested Oscar Wilde (see ¶20 above), the precise phrase Big Fellow was the moniker applied to Michael Collins (1890-1922), who in the aftermath of the Easter 1916 Rising became the leader of Irish paramilitary resistance to the British Empire, with a price upon his head. One of Collins’s fellow rebels recorded in a diary that, in Collins (the Big Fellow), “Ireland has the man of a generation. … He stands out as the greatest force of the [physical-force nationalist] movement.”

¶25 • Even more resonant for British readers would have been the parallels between Gallagher’s starving to death and both Ireland’s Great Hunger (the potato famine) of the 1840s and the more recent, fatal hunger strike by Terence MacSwiney. An Irish cultural and physical-force nationalist, MacSwiney was the Lord Mayor of the Irish city of Cork. In August 1920, he was arrested for possession of “seditious articles and documents,” put on trial, and sentenced to a two-year term in Brixton Prison in England. MacSwiney undertook a prison hunger-strike that garnered international media attention. His death after 73 days of refusing food (and resisting force-feeding) made him one of the most famous men on earth. As Gallagher’s demise enters its final phase, he’s confined to the lazaret (or disease-containment and quarantine portion) of the ship. In an incident that perhaps suggests a prison, when he attempts a kind of escape, the British doctor (who later appears in a “uniform” with “gold braid”) forcibly prevents him. As if rendering the encounter a metaphor for English-Irish relations, the doctor invokes the name of England’s patron saint: “By George, I had a struggle with him.”

One notes that on October 23, 1920, the day before MacSwiney died, William Butler Yeats’s poem “Easter, 1916” was published publicly for the first time (in the London- based New Statesman magazine).

Conclusion ¶26 • In conclusion, it’s appropriate to pause and remember what the Christian West did in the Congo in pursuit of rubber. The photograph was taken by the English missionary, Alice Seeley Harris, in 1904. The man is contemplating the foot and hand of his five-year-old daughter, who’d been murdered and then dismembered by Leopold II’s soldiers as a punishment for her village’s failure to achieve the regime’s rubber quotas. The image became part of the lantern lecture tour operated by the Congo Reform Society, co-founded by Roger Casement, a man whose enemies justified his hanging on account of his being gay. •••

Maeve Brennan • “The Servants’ Dance” • Lecture/Exam Notes Revolutionary Parents: Una & Bob Brennan ¶1 • Although in essence an American author, Maeve Brennan (pictured on the left) was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1917. Her father, Bob Brennan, and her mother, Anastasia (“Una”) Bolger, met when both were members of the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge), an organization established in 1893 with the ambition of reviving Gaeilge, the ancient (versus modern) language indigenous to Ireland. Gaeilge had been rendered a minority tongue due to the Stanley Education Act (1831), the Great Hunger (1840s), and other factors. One of the entities that advanced Ireland’s Cultural Revival of the late-nineteenth and early- twentieth centuries, the Gaelic League operated co-ed, adult language classes throughout Ireland and in Irish communities abroad. (Founded in 1896, the successful London branch published its own journal.) Another feature of the Gaelic League’s educational strategy was summer schools in Gaeltachtaí: zones where Gaeilge remained the only or primary spoken language, such as the Aran Islands, off the coast of County Galway in the West of Ireland. These enterprises developed a reputation as fora for dating. In James Joyce’s “The Dead,” the university-educated Molly Ivors encourages her fellow schoolteacher Gabriel Conroy to attend a Gaelic League summer school on the Aran Islands, along with some of their contemporaries. She challenges him: “[H]aven’t you your own language to keep in touch with — Irish?”

¶2 •In addition to cultural nationalism, Bob and Una Brennan became active in physical- force nationalism in their home county of Wexford in southeastern Ireland. Both were members of the Irish Republic Brotherhood (I.R.B.), among other physical-force organizations. During the Easter 1916 Rising, they participated as leaders in the rebel occupation of the town of Enniscorthy in the center County Wexford, one of the few significant rebel actions outside Dublin. While the British arrested them both, they released Una. Bob, however, received the death penalty, although that sentence was later commuted to penal servitude. On January 6, 1917 (the feast of the Epiphany), with Bob in jail, Una gave birth to Maeve. Bob benefitted from an amnesty and would later fight in the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), also known as the Black-and-Tan War, which concluded with the Anglo-Irish Treaty, an agreement that effected the Partition of Ireland and, thus, the Irish Free State. Later, he fought — and acted as a propaganda agent — in the Irish Civil War (1922-1923).

¶3 • As an active combatant and in other roles, Bob spent much of both wars away from his family, whether on maneuvers or in hiding. Una remained at home, caring for the couple’s three daughters, each named for an ancient Irish queen: Emer, Deirdre (“Derry”), and Maeve. Frequently, their home was raided by gun- carrying men: British soldiers during the War of Independence; Irish Free State soldiers during the Civil War, which pitched pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty sides against each other. The Brennans deemed the Anglo- Irish Treaty, which created the I.F.S., an unacceptable compromise; they demanded a fully sovereign, all- island Irish republic. However, when the I.F.S. (or Michael Collins’s pro-Treaty) side won the Civil War, the Brennans determined to adjust their attitude and support that fledging state.

¶4 • In 1926, the American-born Éamon de Valera, a key anti-Treaty leader during the Civil War, established a political party, Fianna Fáil (“soldiers of destiny”) that would become — and remains — a major force in Irish politics. On de Valera’s behalf, Bob Brennan (who had worked as a journalist in Enniscorthy) set up a national newspaper, the Irish Press, to act, in part, as a mouthpiece for Fianna Fáil. Brennan served as the paper’s general manager (1930-1934), but then de Valera — who had become the head of government — selected him for an appointment at the Irish Free State’s mission (the equivalent of its embassy) to the United States, in Washington, D.C. Having moved there with his family, including the 17-year-old Maeve, he progressed to the mission’s top job, called Minister (ambassador), having served first as Secretary and then Chargé d’Affaires (or second-in-command). As Minister, Brennan’s most important task was successfully advancing with the White House, Congress, and American public opinion De Valera’s efforts to keep Ireland neutral during World War II. He recollected that challenging endeavor in a memoir: Ireland Standing Firm: My Wartime Mission to Washington. Bob and Una Brennan returned to Ireland in 1947, where Bob became the director of broadcasting for Ireland’s national radio service.

Maeve Brennan’s Career as a Magazine Journalist ¶5 • By the time their parents moved back to Ireland, two of the three Brennan sisters, Emer and Derry, were married mothers. For her part, Maeve (henceforth “Brennan”) remained Stateside, in pursuit of a high- level journalistic career. One wonders if she was trying to outdo her father, a journalist, newspaper boss, and creative writer (as well as a soldier and ambassador). In 1941, having graduated from university, she’d relocated from D.C. to New York City, where she secured employment at Harper’s Bazaar magazine, under editor (and fellow Irishwoman) Carmel Snow. Eight years later, when 32, she transferred to the New Yorker magazine, edited at the time by William Maxwell, who observed that to be in Brennan’s company “was to see style being reinvented.” At the male-dominated New Yorker, Brennan gained status initially due to the popularity with the public of short pieces that — under the pseudonym of the “Long-Winded Lady” — she contributed to the Talk of the Town section, housed early in each issue. She also cultivated a public persona on the Manhattan scene, an effort perhaps reflected in the character Charles Runyon in “The Servants’ Dance” (and other short stories by Brennan). Some people claim that Truman Capote based Holly Golightly, the protagonist of his 1958 society novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, on Brennan. In the introduction to a 2016 re-issue of The Springs of Affection, a collection of some of Brennan’s short stories, the editor reflects on her presence in N.Y.C. in the early 1950s (see below).

Her tongue “could clip a hedge” she had “a longshoreman’s mouth”, she said “fuck” in company and drank in Costello’s on Third Avenue. Once, when nobody came to take her order as she sat in a booth there, she lifted a heavy, full sugar bowl and dropped it on the floor. There was no sense, when she married her New Yorker colleague, St. Clair McKelway, fellow drinker – fellow madman, indeed – that he was taking a virgin Irish bride. Brennan was 36. They were, a friend said, “like two children out on a dangerous walk: both so dangerous and charming”.

¶6 • Let’s take a closer look at Brennan’s time at Harper’s Bazaar, which extended from 1943 to 1949. Catering to well-heeled female readers, that N.Y.C.-based title focused primarily on fashion and celebrities. When Brennan joined the staff, World War II (1939-1945) was still in progress, and the magazine had to acknowledge women’s roles in the war effort, working in a variety of venues, from military-intelligence

centers to factory floors. Brennan’s first served as a copywriter, but she rose to the position of associate fashion editor. The adjective indicating “of fashion” or “clothing-related” is sartorial, and we experience multiple sartorial references (concerning both female and male characters) in “The Servants’ Dance,” one of which appears on the top-left corner of this page. (While Brennan authored “The Servants’ Dance” in 1954 for publication in May 22nd issue of The New Yorker, the tale draws on her professional interests while at Harper’s Bazaar.)

¶7 • Taken from page 30 of our edition of “The Servants’ Dance,” the extract rehearses how Charles Runyon, a Manhattan-based literary and theater critic and social butterfly, dresses in a “beige-and-brown” ensemble after breakfast when a house guest in a home at Herbert’s Retreat, an upscale, rural residential development on the Hudson River north of New York City. He joins his host, Leona Harkey, who, like him, wears “Bermuda shorts”: instances of an item (named after the mid-North Atlantic island) originally developed by the British army for uniformed service in tropical and semi-tropical locations. Irish linen — considered the premier version of that fabric — was common in civilian adaptations of Bermuda shorts. Although the narrator doesn’t indicate that the “red linen” of Leona’s short is Irish, most readers in 1954 would have assumed so. Leona employs and probably exploits an aging Irish maid, Bridie (short for Bridget); however, the detail that her shorts are “linen” effectively connects the American to Ireland more personally. The red may be a subtle nod to how the Irish fashion designer Sybil Connolly (1921-1998) updated traditional Irish- peasant clothing, such as the red-dyed homespun skirt. Thanks to Maeve Brennan, among others, Connolly enjoyed a major U.S. debut in 1953 (the year before “The Servants’ Dance”), with America’s Life magazine commenting, “[T]he practical Irish will not accept extremes in fashion …. This fall’s collection again showed off [Connolly’s] knack with classic Irish materials. Because of inexpensive labor costs in Ireland, U.S. stores can import the styles ready made and, even after duty, sell them at prices relatively low for a top European label. … [T]he inspiration for … Connolly’s clothes was strictly Irish.”

Text for composite image • LEFT § Aaron Shikler’s official portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy, First Lady of the United States, wearing a Sybil Connolly outfit. Vogue magazine characterized Kennedy as “the vitamin C of the Erin-go-Couture movement.” • CENTER § A portion of James A. Sugar’s photograph of a funeral procession on Inisheer, one of the three Aran Islands. It appeared in the September 1969 edition of National Geographic magazine. While a few individuals wear modern dress, most of the women sport traditional red homespun skirts.

• RIGHT § To mark the New York debut of Irish designer Sybil Connolly (championed by Maeve Brennan), Life magazine offered a 1953 cover with the anchor phrase, “Irish Invade Fashion World.” The accompanying article (entitled “Enterprise in Old Erin: The Irish Are Making a Stylish Entrance into the World of Fashion”) explained, “32-year-old Dublin designer Sybil Connolly invited ... U.S. fashion editors and buyers to a showing of her new collection and all by herself launched Ireland into the world of fashion.”

¶8 • In addition to having what may be an Irish family name, Charles Runyon can be interpreted as a dandy or fashion- conscious male in the tradition of the renowned and popular Irish playwright Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), whose late- nineteenth-century trials for (what was then the crime of) homosexuality attracted global media attention. Charles’s being characterized as “a wit and an epigrammatist” further aligns him with Wilde, whose epigrams (or pithy sayings) — such as “I can resist everything except temptation” — enjoyed wide currency. Wilde’s dandyism is manifest in Napoleon Sarony’s 1882 “Portrait of Oscar Wilde #15,” reproduced near the top-right of this page. In Brennan’s “The View from the Kitchen” (1953) — another New Yorker short story — Charles and Leona create a kind of parodic monument to the dandy archetype by dressing one of the two statues in Leona’s garden: “The clown wore baggy pants, a flowing tie, and a jacket too small for him. His gray stone wig hung dead from one of his hands, and his face, with its despairing grin, had just been freshly powdered, and painted with purple lipstick.”

¶9 • As mentioned earlier: In Brennan’s era, an Irishwoman, Carmel Snow, edited Harper’s Bazaar (having already edited Vogue). Also on the leadership team was the Paris-born Diana Vreeland, who would go on to edit Vogue. Those two publications dominated the upper tier of the white women’s fashion press in the United States. Concerning Snow, one columnist opined in 1953, “The great couturiers [fashion designers] tremble at the stroke of her pen, which can make or mar their collections.” Beyond its sartorial base, Harper’s Bazaar attempted to live up to its ethos of Fashion, Pleasure, and Instruction by publishing poetry and short stories, including material by the African-American poet Langston Hughes and works by Irish authors Liam O’Flaherty, Elizabeth Bowen, and Mary Lavin. Lavin also succeeded in getting short stories published in the New Yorker, and that example inspired Brennan to submit fiction to the magazine after 1952, once she established herself as one of its employees with a reputation as the Long- Winded Lady (see the image on the left). Her first short stories, including “The Servants’ Dance,” appeared between 1952 and 1956 and had American settings; from 1959, after her mother’s death, she shifted to Irish settings. In addition to Lavin and Brennan, Irish authors whose tales appeared in the New Yorker during the mid-twentieth century included Benedict Kiely, Walter Macken, and Frank O’Connor.

¶10 • Many pressures attended working in the Mad Men-like environment of the New Yorker, an intellectual magazine with an enviable reputation for quality. Despite her manifest talents as a journalist and a creative writer, Maeve Brennan endured sexism in the workplace. Furthermore, her marriage, which ended in divorce, pulled her into an alcohol-fueled social scene that took a significant toll on a personality that may have been bipolar. As she aged, Brennan became psychotic and penniless, living for spells as a bag-lady on the streets of Manhattan. Although “The Servants’ Dance” and other stories portray affluent homes with

maids and such adornments as garden statues and river decks, Brennan ended up making a home out of the women’s toilets in the New Yorker’s headquarters building in Times Square. The staff tolerated this arrangement, despite the fact that Brennan would occasionally suffer hallucinatory and even violent episodes.

The Herbert’s Retreat Stories ¶11 • “The Servants’ Dance” is one of Brennan’s Herbert’s Retreat stories about a fictional bohemian enclave: an artists’ colony on the Hudson River, 30 miles north of New York City. Appearing first in the New Yorker magazine, the stories base Herbert’s Retreat on an upscale residential community called Snedens Landing in Palisades, New York State. Over the years, several celebrities have chosen Snedens Landing as a base. Relatively recently, Bill Murray, Bjork, Al Pacino, and Angelina Jolie (to name but four) have maintained homes there. Closer to Brennan’s time, residents included Aaron Copeland and Noël Coward (from the world of music); John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck (literature); Orson Wells (movies); and the New Yorker’s Roger Angell (journalism, especially baseball writing). Some of the homes had or have fanciful names; for example, Copeland rented “Ding Dong House.” A driving force in the development of Snedens Landing was the sculptor Mary Lawrence Tonetti. (The two sculptures in Leona Harkey’s garden probably gesture towards Tonetti.) Tonetti’s desire to assemble a cluster of creative individuals in a bucolic locale is part of a tradition traceable to Bedford Park, developed in the 1880s, west of London, England. Bedford Park was marketed as an artists’ village in the spirit of the then-popular Arts and Crafts movement, championed by the designer, author, and philosopher William Morris. William Butler Yeats’s father, a lawyer-turned-portrait painter, moved his family from Ireland to Bedford Park; and one of the Yeats sisters, Susan (“Lily”), trained there as an Arts and Crafts embroiderer under William Morris’s daughter, May, before returning to Ireland, where she was instrumental in establishing the cultural-nationalist and feminist Cuala Industries, which manufactured by hand, using Irish female labor, Irish materials, and Irish designs.

¶12 • Maeve Brennan wasn’t the only writer to exploit Snedens Landing (or a fictionalized version of it) as a setting. The playwright Neil Simon located his 1988 theatrical farce Rumors there. Occurring in “the present,” it opens in “[a] large, tastefully renovated, Victorian house in Snedens Landing, New York, about forty minutes from the city.” Respecting the house, the stage directions indicate: “Despite its age and gingerbread exterior, the interior is modern, monochromatic, and sparkling clean. A nice combination.” During her five-year marriage, as St. Clair McKelway’s fourth wife, Brennan lived part-time in her husband’s home at Snedens Landing, and that experience precipitated her seven Herbert’s Retreat stories, produced over a two-and-a-half year period. “The Servants’ Dance” concludes the series. The first tale, “The View from the Kitchen,” appeared in the November 14th, 1953, edition of the New Yorker. In it, the recently widowed Leona Harkey appears, one month into her second marriage — to George Harkey. Also present are: Leona’s “admirer,” Charles Runyon; the Harkeys’ Irish maid, Bridie (short for Bridget); and a neighbor’s newly arrived Irish maid, Agnes. The power-play dynamic between Irish maids — popularly known as Bridgets — and their American mistresses fuels the Herbert’s Retreat stories. The second tale, “The Anachronism,” makes this phenomenon explicit: “It was seldom that one of the houses at Herbert's Retreat was not in an uproar with a[n Irish] maid just gone or about to go, a dinner planned and the hostess frantically phoning her neighbors to discover which of the remaining maids would be available to help out for the evening. All this gave the maids a great sense of power, of course. For some of them, the power was satisfaction enough. Those were the ones who stayed on year after year.”

¶13 • In the mid-twentieth-century American South, upper-middle-class and upper-class white households employed “Help,” almost invariably African-American women. (You may be familiar with the 2009 novel and/or the related 2011 movie The Help, set in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1963, at the height of the Civil Rights movement.) However, outside the South — especially in large Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, and Mid- Western metropolitan areas, such as Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Chicago — comfortably off U.S. families generally obtained their “Help” from a huge pool of Irish domestics: the

Bridgets (or Biddys), whom newspaper cartoons would sometimes caricature. Verbal hints of such caricaturing exist in “The Servants’ Dance,” not least Charles Runyon’s haughty irony in describing Bridie as “that splendid Irishwoman of Leona’s” (p. 29). Several academic studies of Bridgets now exist, a pioneering one being Margaret Lynch-Brennan’s The Irish Bridget: Irish Immigrant Women in Domestic Service in America, 1840-1930 (Syracuse University Press, 2009). More Irish women than men emigrated to America. With birth control essentially illegal in Ireland, families were large; and for the literate, English- speaking daughters of poor families domestic (or “Bridget”) work in the U.S. and Canada became one among few options, another being to enter a convent. In far-from-unproblematic ways, nuns provided or oversaw much hospital, orphanage, laundry, and educational service in Ireland. An extract from Margaret Lynch-Brennan’s introductory chapter helps put the Bridget pathway in context:

¶14 • At Snedens Landing and elsewhere, Maeve Brennan interacted with multiple Irish-born maids. Had her parents’ lives taken a different, more usual direction, Maeve could, conceivably, have found herself contemplating emigration from Ireland: (a) in response to an Irish newspaper advertisement seeking domestics in America; or (b) due to word-of-mouth knowledge, emanating from friends who’d already committed to that form of employment (a kind of transatlantic networking yielding chain migration). Circumstances rendered her, instead, an ambassador’s daughter, an American university graduate, and a top-tier magazine journalist. In the Fall 2004 issue of Irish University Review, the Irish scholar Patricia Coughlan observes that in her American persona as Mrs. McKelway and “as an Irish immigrant,” Maeve Brennan “could have ‘passed’ in both milieus” — that is, as a Leona; or as a Bridie or Agnes, However, according to Coughlan, she “fully inhabited neither” state.

¶15 • Notable about “The Servants’ Dance” and the other six Herbert’s Retreat stories is the disgruntlement or “chagrin” (p. 60) of the Irish maids, especially Bridie. When, early in our focal tale, she delivers a breakfast tray to Charles in his bedroom chez Harkey, Bridie aims a “glare of pure hatred … in full force” at the guest, even though he is “indifferent” to the gesture (p. 29). Also spotlighted is the regime of mutual scrutiny operated by the Bridgets and their American employers. Consider, for example, how, when Charles accompanies Leona through her garden “to the [Hudson] river,” one of the property’s boundaries, the “beady Irish eyes of Bridie follow their movements with malevolent attention” from the vantage point of

“the kitchen window” (p. 31). This discourse of monitoring or even spying crescendos as story concludes. In the closing episode, a tense conversation between Bridie and Charles, we learn that sensitive comments and conversations, originating with both the American bosses and their Irish employees, have been imprinted on “records” by means of “wire-recording things” (p. 60) surreptitiously located around the hall that facilitated the dance. A diatribe uttered by Bridie against Leona — “[t]hings [Bridie] wouldn’t [want to] have repeated for the world” (p. 60) — constitutes part of the recorded content.

¶16 • We must ask why, despite living in the affluent environment that was Herbert’s Retreat, the Irish domestics harbor such anger towards their employers. While “The Servants’ Dance” provides no explicit answers, the active reader can reasonably speculate that their labor conditions are radically unacceptable. For a poor Irish woman, to take up a post as a U.S.-based Bridget could necessitate the employer purchasing the transatlantic sailing ticket and the work uniforms. (The unidentified, third-person narrator of “The Servants’ Dance” remarks that “the girls [i.e. the maids, all adults] liked to escape as thoroughly as they could from the grays and black-and-white of their daily uniforms” [p. 42; emphasis added]). In addition, a given maid might have to pay her employer for a bed-living room and board (i.e. meals) in the family homestead. The total debt burden (which could also extend to medical charges) might have been such as to render impossible a maid’s accumulating any significant savings and, therefore, fiscal independence. Certainly, we recognize that — especially as regards clothing and housing — the Irish maids Bridie, Agnes, and Josie empathize with the financial ruin experienced by one of the Americans in Leona’s circle, Edward Tarnac. Perceived by Charles as a rival for Leona’s affection, “Tarnac is down and out” (p. 35).

¶17 • Arguably, the kind of chronic financial difficulty that the Irish maids may experience is an instance of Debt Bondage. The employer who holds the debt exercises control over the employee until the latter individual — usually low-paid — can reimburse the sum. The United Nations has deemed debt bondage a form of slavery, and while Brennan’s fictional maids or Bridgets may not be in extremis, female labor as domestics has long been (and very much continues to be) a work category susceptible to debt bondage. The dance rehearsed in our story’s title constitutes a critical opportunity for the maids — or at least the younger ones — to free themselves from any debt they owe their American employers. The mechanism is to secure a husband from among the Irishmen who are prepared to journey from New York City for the annual dance. Some years earlier, the maids successfully lobbied to have the dance moved to midsummer due to “too much competition from [Irishwomen in] New York” on its historic date: “St. Patrick’s Day” (p. 38). Despite its relative proximity to New York City, Snedens Landing (on which Brennan bases Herbert’s Retreat) was challenging to access without a car. The rich folks living there preferred seclusion. The dance can be interpreted as a form of Midsummer’s Night Dream in so far as the play of that title by Shakespeare resolves in multiple marriages. A comment from the play’s final scene underscores that resolution: “The iron tongue [i.e. the bell or chimes] of midnight hath told [i.e. counted] twelve: | Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time.”

¶18 • The professions represented by the Irishmen all belong to the municipal-government sector — that is, they are secure, pensionable jobs. Conversing among themselves, the American employers recognize three categories: (a) “Policemen” or “cops”; (b) “Firemen”; (c) worker in “[t]he Department of Sanitation” (51). In New York, Savannah, and other cities with a large proportion of Irish immigrants, such jobs often became dominated by the Irish. (White Savannah was one-quarter Irish-born in 1860.) The jobs offered a mechanism to enter the middle classes by acquiring a home of one’s own and paying for one’s children’s college education at universities with Irish roots, such as Fordham (New York City) and Villanova (Philadelphia). The maids’ anxiety is that their female employers will, in effect, colonize the dance, out- competing them for the Irishmen’s attention in a type of erotic sweepstakes. (That scenario had transpired during the prior year.) The power differential between the American and the Irish women is exemplified in one class of clothing: stockings. Josie wears “dyed pick stockings” (p. 51), derided by Dolly Maitland, one of Leona’s neighbors. That sartorial option cannot match Dolly’s “sexy new stockings” (p. 55), made of “black net … with rhinestones on the insteps” (p. 39) and purchased for “twelve dollars” (p. 45). As a point of comparison: In 1960, six years after “The Servants’ Dance” debuted, the average weekly wage of a live-in female domestic in the U.S. was around $15.

Strategy: Boycott ¶19 • To avoid a repetition of the American women’s “positively feudal” (p. 39) monopolization of the visiting Irishmen, as occurred during the last year’s dance, Bridie advocates that the maids network with them (the men) before the fact to shun the Americans: “We’ll boycott them” (p. 47). Thus, the maids will ignore the likes of the sartorial peacock Charles Runyon, who “fancies” his prowess “in the waltz” (p. 46), while the policemen and their fellows will disregard the likes of the dolled-up Dolly Maitland. Although, earlier, Bridie manifests difficulty with a word — “sye-mull-tane-eussly” (p. 29) — she has ready access to the concept of the boycott, a form of social ostracism. Why? In the 1880s, when (presumably) Bridie’s parents were growing up, Ireland experienced a phase in its tenants’ rights movement called the Land War.

Under that program (which involved scant person-to-person physical violence), one strategy was to shun, disregard, or treat as invisible any colonial landlord or landlord’s agent seeking payment of rent from a native Irish tenant farmer. In September 1880, a major Irish nationalist leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, articulated the strategy in a public speech: “shun him on the roadside when you meet him … shun him in the streets of the town … shun him in the shop … shun him on the fair green and in the market place, and even in the place of worship, by leaving him alone, by putting him in moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of the country, as if he were the leper of old.” The first major instance of effecting the strategy occurred when tenants shunned a landlord’s agent, Captain Charles Boycott, in County Mayo in the West of Ireland. The English-born Boycott soon witnessed his family name enter the English language, plus other languages (e.g., the German verb Boykott and the Spanish verb Boicotear). A kind of folk memory must motivate the Irish policemen, firemen, and sanitation workers to readily comply with the maids’ request for an anti-American boycott.

¶20 • During the dance, the reality of the boycott is first expressed by Leona’s husband, George Harkey, who has himself been shunned by virtue of the Leona-Charles relationship. Alone throughout the day, he downed “five very sweet Manhattans” (an American whiskey-based cocktail) before consuming “a solitary dinner at the village bar-and-grill” (p. 47). As if proving the Latin epigram in vino veritas (“in wine lies the truth”), George is so inebriated that he won’t police his tongue. Noting that the Irishmen have failed to form a “stag line” in order to “[stampede]” Leona and Dolly with dance-requests, he announces, “It’s a boycott. They’re on to you” (pp. 52-53). Having contemplating the matter further, George speculates, “Maybe they [the Irish] want to teach you a lesson. Us a lesson” (p. 54). As tensions mount between the drunk George and his wife (and her friends), George aggressively emotes, “Haw, haw, HAW” (p. 55), repeating with emphasis the “Haw-haw” (p. 51) that he uttered — with personal whiskey flask in hand — shortly after Leona’s entry into the dance hall. (Note the spelling whiskey [from the Gaeilge for “water of life”]: it’s used for both American and Irish whiskey; Scotch whisky lacks an “e.”). In essence, George’s Haw-haw expressions constitute a visceral vocalization of the frustration he feels for being a sexual dupe. Leona is carrying on an affair with Charles or, at least, socializing with Charles in order to gain access to a libidinal social set that includes men of interest to her. George’s “Haw-haw” may be said to expose Leona’s duplicity and unfaithfulness. Given the economy of scale that operates in a short story, any repeated word or term draws the reader’s attention. What should we do with George’s “Haw-haw” and “Haw, haw, HAW”?

¶21 • The outward sign of Leona’s intention to compromise her marriage is the “very pale blue” leisure “deck” — a kind of “perfect boat” — that she’s had constructed by the Hudson River at the base of her lawn (p. 32). Her boast concerning the structure centers on her being “clever” enough “to have [had] it built so low” that “[e]ven from the upstairs window you simply can’t see it” (p. 32). Doubtless, the reader of this claim recalls the tableau of George staring across the lawn “from the window of the second-floor bedroom he shared with Leona” (p. 31)! While the hidden, “divine” (p. 35) deck’s color is that traditionally associated with the Virgin Mary, Leona’s activities on the “wooden” feature hardly suggest virginity. Given that her next-door neighbors, Lewis and Dolly Maitland, frequent the venue with booze, it could be termed a mate- land, a zone of illicit sexual energy. In common with much of Brennan’s fiction, “The Servants’ Dance” manifests an architectural consciousness, so one is justified in pointing out the technical term used by architects and engineers for a recessed structure constructed so as not to be visible from a house or other defined vantage point. That term is ha-ha, essentially a homophone (or sound-match) for what George proclaims at the dance, when implying his disgust for Leona and her clique. In declaring “Haw-haw,” George is all but acknowledging his awareness of the deck’s real purpose. While little reference to ha-has is heard in everyday speech, for Irish women such as Bridie the term would resonate, for the grounds of some colonial Big Houses in Ireland (see ¶14 above) contained ha-has (or sunken ditches), either: (a) to

provide a boundary-barrier that didn’t obscure the vista; or (b) to obscure the native Irish from sight as they moved across the property (perhaps to access the house). Located in a large Dublin park, Deerfield, the official residence of the U.S. ambassador to Ireland, features a ha-ha.

¶22 • The impulse to hide the Irish relates to the conceit that they were subhuman or simian (ape-like): intellectually and morally less evolved — and physically less refined — than the colonial master-race. The nineteenth-century cartoon on the right comes from the London periodical Punch, and it depicts as a gorilla a member of the cultural- and physical-force- nationalist organization Young Ireland, publisher of the Nation newspaper (to which Oscar Wilde’s mother, Jane [“Speranza”] Wilde, was an editorial-level contributor). In “The Servants’ Dance,” the unusual word “moue” appears in italics (indicating a foreign origin) in association with Leona’s entry into the dance hall. Specifically, she approaches the inebriated George, alone on the Americans’ dais, “regarding him with a humorous moue that he found peculiarly repellent” (p. 49). The noun derives from a French word meaning pout, which in turn is traceable to a Dutch word meaning protruding lip. As such, it was often used with respect to apes. One could assert that George’s identification of a moue with Leona renders her less than human, a condition historically ascribed to the Irish, by both the British and American press.

¶23 • The American women’s interest in the Irishmen may reflect an anxiety in post-World War II U.S. society about crises of masculinity as men, already largely separated from manual farm labor, retired their combat uniforms and entered the milieu of the office. That white-collar life seems distinct from the physically demanding police, fire, and sanitation vocations of the Irishmen who attend the dance. While the U.S.-Soviet Cold War that emerged in the 1950s deployed a rhetoric of masculine toughness, the reality of most American men’s lives was passive: commuting to a desk; conforming to a bureaucratic corporation; watching sports on TV; increasingly relying on technology to accomplish tasks. The emerging feminist movement further challenged males’ self-perceptions. In 1958, four years after “The Servants’ Dance,” Esquire, a men’s magazine, published an article by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., entitled “The Crisis of American Masculinity” (see the image on the left). It posited the “unmanning of American men” and argued for a return to an ethos of individual (as opposed to collective) identity: “When a person begins to find out who he is, he is likely to find out rather soon what sex he is.”

¶24 • A 54-year-old man distinguished by “stringy little arms” and a “long stringy neck” (p. 28), Charles concurs with Leona’s assessment that the 38-year-old Edward is “a man … shattered” (p. 32). He characterizes as “endless, exhausting masculinity” Edward’s former public indulgence in a “boat … racing cars, and … vacant-faced girls [i.e. young women]” (p. 34). To Charles, Edward’s ostensible masculinity was “just a show, of course”; and he suggests that deep-seated insecurities motivated the performance: “[t]he psychiatrists know about that” (p. 34). One potential explanation for Edward’s failure to achieve authentic masculinity is familial — especially maternal — indulgence. Charles reflects, “[C]onsider how he was brought up, the youngest son, an adoring mother, a trust fund from that uncle” (p. 34). By contrast with the charade of masculinity manifest in Edward, the blue-collar Irishmen exhibit an urgent, indisputable virility. Lewis Maitland reflects on the dynamic between them and the American women during the prior year’s ball: “I was afraid they’d eat you girls up. The atmosphere got almost primitive” (p. 39). Perhaps unintentionally, Leona’s response contains the most common slang word for orgasm: “I do think they [the Irishmen] like us [the American women] to come” (p. 39).

Cold War ¶25 • To In a 1950 speech, the anti-Communist Senator Joe McCarthy (Republican from Wisconsin) implied masculine deficiency when he decried America’s “position of impotency” vis-à-vis the Russians. Due to her exposure to high-level international diplomacy through her father’s ambassadorial work, Maeve Brennan was keenly attuned to geopolitics. The recording devices secreted throughout the village hall where the dance occurs would have suggested to contemporary readers U.S., Soviet, British, and other Cold War surveillance systems. In 1953, the year before “The Servants’ Dance” appeared, the U.S. executed by electrocution a married couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg: Americans convicted of espionage on behalf of the Soviets, including the transmission of key nuclear-weapons secrets. Ireland’s insistence on non-aligned neutrality caused friction between Dublin and Washington. At a metaphorical level, “The Servants’ Dance” may mirror such issues as: (a) American reluctance to include Ireland in the Marshall Plan, which provided consequential U.S. funding for the post-World War II reconstruction of Europe; and (b) Irish resistance to facilitating U.S. Cold War military-espionage activities.

¶26 • The transportation of the recorded material from Herbert’s Retreat to New York City will likely mean exposure in newspapers and on the radio of the messy private lives of the quasi-celebrity Charles Runyon and his circle. In other words, “The Servants’ Dance” — the last of Maeve Brennan’s Herbert’s Retreat stories — effects at least the temporary demise of Charles, long given to assuming the “world” to be “[m]y stage…my arena” (p. 28) and thus deemed “that little Mr. God” (p. 44) by Bridie. For years, Charles has deployed dress and affect to control his public persona, an activity that — in his 1959 study, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life — the sociologist Erving Goffman labeled Impression Management. Now, however, a new order of things that includes group self-assertion by the Irish and a changing media landscape threatens his long-held certainties. •••

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