Roy Foster

Sins of the fathers | 13 December 2018

Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and W.B. Yeats all had thoroughly eccentric fathers, who provided inspiration as well as an awful warning

‘To have a father is always big news,’ according to the narrator of Sebastian Barry’s early novel, The Engine of Owl-Light. Stephen Dedalus puts it differently in Ulysses: ‘A father is a necessary evil.’ But later, he qualifies this: ‘Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?’ Colm Tóibín has repeatedly squared up to fathers as well as mothers in his own work (a dead father haunts the family in Nora Webster, and fatherhood is a central theme in The Heather Blazing). His new book takes on the theme of fatherhood in relation to three great Irish writers, supplying a scintillating new perspective on each.

It is three meditative essays, extended versions of lectures given in memory of Richard Ellmann, the legendary biographer of Joyce as well as of Yeats and Wilde; lucky BBC listeners will have heard Tóibín reading them, with controlled passion, on Radio 4. The published version comes with the welcome grace note of a long introduction, which describes a Bloom-like walk around the part of Dublin associated with his chosen writers (Merrion Square, Westland Row, Clare Street). Tóibín’s focus on Dublin is intensely personal, autobiographical, atmospheric. As with the memoir by his fellow Wexford man John Banville, Time Pieces, there is a kind of fierce possessiveness at work here, as well as an elegiac memory of the sleepy city he came to in the 1970s. There are also gimlet-like reflections on writers who preoccupy him (Beckett, Gregory, Synge, O’Casey as well as Yeats and Wilde), not least their ancestral Protestantism. It meant little to them in terms of religious practice (except in Gregory’s case), but inflected the way they were perceived in Ireland. ‘It must be fun,’ reflects Tóibín, tongue-in-cheek, ‘not believing in anything, and having your fellow countrypeople wanting you to clear off to England because of the very religion you don’t believe in.’

The introduction also teases out the ways in which the lives and works of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce interpenetrated each other: Wilde (and his mother) taking up the young Yeats in London; Yeats helping Joyce at the outset of his artistic odyssey; references to Wilde and Yeats threaded through Ulysses.

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