The Lives of John Broderick

Peter D. Guy

Issue 387, vol.97, Autumn 2008

For this article, I aim to look at a number of key areas in his fiction: The paradoxical nature of his Catholicism and how it influenced his work; his francophilia and debt to the European literary tradition; the dominant themes: Jansenism and the distrust of the flesh, the Balzacian concerns of materialism and provincial life and the possibility of grace and salvation in an increasingly secular society; the critical response to his work; the impact of the ‘Catholic’ novelists on his writing and lastly, a reassessment of Broderick’s legacy and lasting influence.

BIOGRAPHY: A GROUNDED BELIEF
John Broderick was born in 1924 in Athlone, where his family owned a prosperous bakery. His childhood was marked by two seminal events - the death of his father in 1927 and his mother’s subsequent remarriage to the bakery manager. Growing up in a provincial midlands town during the nineteen-thirties, he was, in his own words, ‘ill-at-ease with people outside my own family circle’ and it was this painful diffidence, compounded by his mother’s nouveau-riche sensibilities, which demarcated the early life of the author. [2] He first attracted attention as an accomplished broadcaster and book reviewer and it was through this medium that he expounded his francophilia, his premodernist tastes and staunchly orthodox concerns. Post-Vatican II, his sympathies would have probably been with Archbishop Lefèbvre - in Broderick’s words, ‘this attitude of forcing change and a particular brand of liberalism on the laity was really the same old Curial method put behind a different policy.’ [3] His attitude towards the clergy reflects his frustration at the direction the Church was taking - ‘the average priest, intoxicated…drunk with the power of the charismatic idea, loses no opportunity to express his ego, which is usually an inflated one.’ [4] Hence the priest in his fiction is something of an aberration, either dourly apathetic or too consumed with pop trends and fads. This remained the case until more sympathetic portrayals began to emerge in his later fiction.

FRANCOPHILIA AND THE PILGRIMAGE Broderick remained unapologetic in his francophilia, his first novel The Pilgrimage (1961), reflecting his debt toFrench literary tradition. The novel centres on the marriage of the rapacious Julia Glynn to the local businessman Michael Glynn, a closet homosexual bedridden with a severe form of arthritis. Julia has been having an affair with his nephew Jim who, while treating her with contempt, satisfies her voracious demands. While she may have designs upon furthering the relationship, she begins to receive anonymous letters detailing her sexual infidelities. Her suspicion falls upon the sinister manservant Stephen, who both attracts and repels her. When the local priest suggests a pilgrimage to Lourdes, the pilgrimage is as much a metaphor for the immolation of desire as a possible remedy for the stricken Michael. The final chapter consists of a succinct one-line passage: “In this way they set off on their pilgrimage, from which a week later Michael returned completely cured.” [5]

It is a complex but rewarding novel, not least for the themes of homosexuality and marital infidelity. It also offers a strong, self-willed female protagonist in Julia Glynn whose motivations are akin to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary - like Emma Bovary, Julia is no more than the sum of her parts; ‘underneath her thick woollen dress so correct, so respectable, she was naked.’ [6] Comparatively, as the American critic Leo Bersani says of Emma Bovary, ‘the unresponsiveness of Emma’s environment to her dreams of glamour produces the symptoms which… emphasize the highly original thinness of her character.’ [7] Emma awaits the catastrophe of disclosure that will reveal her love for Léon, but she does nothing to encourage the development. She is held back by ‘idleness and fear’, and the disclosure never materialises. [8] Julia, equally, awaits disclosure, but with bated breath. Whilst Emma turns her anxiety as surrogate to her romantic fantasies, Julia appears oblivious to anything but the preservation instinct - and it is for this reason that Julia Glynn is ultimately empowered and Emma Bovary doomed, because Julia is a realist, Emma an incurable romantic. As Julia states rather pointedly, ‘Everything happens in real life…as you well know. It’s only in novels that it doesn’t.’ [9]

In reference to the concluding chapter, the critic Sean McMahon stated, ‘One still feels cheated. It smells of prestidigitation and is unworthy and unnecessary.’ [10] Unworthy only in the sense that the closing chapter does little to erase the narratability and we are forced to draw our own conclusions thereafter. As the Abbot in Brian Moore’s novella Catholics states, ‘No one can order belief… it is a gift from God’. [11] If stability is to return to the community and linearity to the plot, it is done in much the same way as a magician draws a rabbit from the hat. What is the trick? The fact that there is none, that the miracle might be real, is so absurd to a sceptical audience that the final chapter really needs no further explication. It is as damning an indictment of the faithlessness of modern society as any in the Broderick oeuvre. He says everything he wishes to say, by saying nothing at all.

THE EARLY NOVELS: ANTI-MATERIALISM AND THE SINS OF THE FLESHBroderick’s next novel The Fugitives (1962) offers us another example of the Broderick triumvirate; an unreciprocated love affair between two people and a shadowy ‘other’ who has a crucial impact upon the relationship which usually ends in disappointment. In this instance, the relationship exists between Paddy Fallon, an IRA man on the run from a political assassination and his minder, Hugh Ward. The ‘other’ in this instance is Paddy’s sister, Lilly Fallon. Lilly falls under the spell of Ward, whose relationship with Paddy is problematic at best, whilst Paddy regresses into puerile abstractions in which his sexual attraction to his sister is reawakened. Both in this novel and his next, Don Juaneen (1963), we witness a gradual change in focus for Broderick - the Jansenistic distrust of the flesh, violently apparent in his first three novels, is partially subsumed by a greater concern for the intrigues of the closed community. In The Fugitives, we are introduced to Hetty Fallon and Mrs. Lagan with the loaded sentence, ‘It was a ritual’. [12] The two women represent the watchmen of society, taking perverse delight in scoring points over each other by dropping subtle hints and innuendoes on the other’s affairs. Nothing escapes the Medusa’s gaze. In particular, desire is ridiculed and any attempt to forego the deep-seated ‘rituals’ of the community is met by a stern rebuke. As Hugh Ward states, ‘Murder, if you like to call it that, has a long and honourable history in this country. Love has not.’ [13] In Don Juaneen, Rose Blake, one of Broderick’s finest creations, presides over this ‘“poisoned web” of destruction’; Any sign of emotion, of latent desire, is met with invective: ‘Upon my word there are times when humanity disgusts me’ she adds, on discovering her housekeeper in the arms of the raffle man. [14] And later, she adds, ‘All this love business, it makes me sick. When you’re young it’s an excuse to climb into bed and when you’re old it’s something to take like a drug to keep you from facing the fact that nobody gives a damn about you.’ [15]

What gradually emerges during these first three novels is a greater preoccupation with class and a Balzacian contempt for the moneyed classes - for Broderick, the bourgeois class equated frugal narcissism, forever at pains to show that money really cannot buy you love, but it can buy you a better class of husband. As he said in an interview with Julia Carlson, ‘I came from a highly respectable family because they had money. That was the way to achieve respect in Ireland: it was to have money.’ [16] In Don Juaneen, the message is not lost upon John Quill, who argues that ‘money can make you independent…nobody can hurt you if you have money’. To which his daughter astutely replies ‘Yes they can.’ [17] For Sybil Quill, ‘money had enabled her to build the little dream-world in which she existed aimlessly for so long; and now, at the end of it, it was money that shattered it.’ [18] Money shatters every emotion; once you substitute money for desire then you leave yourself open to the ethereality of its possession.

The Jansenistic distrust of the flesh and the oddly hypocritical stance towards the moneyed class is again evident in Broderick’s fourth novel, The Waking of Willie Ryan (1965). Willie Ryan has been incarcerated in a mental institution for the past twenty-five years at the behest of his sister-in-law Mary Ryan, whom he purportedly assaulted. More ominously, he was said to have been involved in a homosexual relationship with one Roger Dillon, a member of Ireland’s faded ascendancy class. Willie’s return causes consternation amongst his petty bourgeois relatives, in particular Mary Ryan. In order to save face, Mary begins an orchestrated campaign to haul Willie back into the bosom of the Church. The Church, as a representation of the Umwelt, emerges from this book in a rather poor light, subject to greater denigration than even the ostentatious Ryans. The priest, Father Mannix, engages in a battle of wits with Willie and is at first confident of victory. The priest relies upon Roger Dillon’s apparent conversion to convince Willie to return to the flock. Willie, however, has yet to play his trump card: Roger’s ‘conversion’ was no more than a piece of showmanship; he continued his the affair with Willie whilst attending Mass, taking apparent pleasure in misleading the Catholic mob whom he held in disdain.

Father Mannix acts on the assumption that ‘no Catholic ever gives up his religion except for personal reasons. And lack of communication is never one of them.’ [19] Willie, however, is aware that a lack of communication is the one reason that a Catholic would begin to doubt. Belief, without conviction, is the simple mouthing of a ritual. When, after the mass, Fr. Mannix learns that Willie accepted the sacrament without confession, he is incensed, condemning him as ‘evil.’ [20] Willie’s checkmate, his revelation, is enough to stop him in his tracks.

Roger never gave up what you like to call “vice”. If it’s of any interest to you now I never wanted it, not with him anyway. It was he who - how would you put it? - seduced me. Yes, that’s how you’d put it. I hated it; but I did it because I loved him. [21]

As Eamon Maher says of this passage, ‘What the priest only realises late in the novel is that his parish is inhabited by people who are completely apathetic to religion outside the social, utilitarian values it brings with it.’ [22] The Waking of Willie Ryan is akin to The Pilgrimage in that Willie receives a final dying grace from a Mrs. Whittaker, who reveals that her brother, Roger, was distraught that Willie would never forgive him for his hypocrisy. The ‘waking’ of Willie Ryan, in a literal sense, is a poorly attended affair and no wonder. The waking of Willie Ryan, in the figurative sense, is the triumph of Willie Ryan’s victory over the Umwelt; for Willie’s triumph is his almost childish innocence, which the combined forces of society cannot purge. Thus, if the miracle of Michael Glynn’s rehabilitation is grounded in a sceptic’s belief, then the reconciliation of Willie Ryan is more a temporal concordance with the living and the dead.

THE MIDDLE NOVELS: THEMES OF EXILE AND DESPAIRAccording to The Daily Telegraph obituary of Broderick, The Waking of Willie Ryan ‘established his reputation’ but then, with devastating concision, wrote, ‘He then wrote nothing for five years, drank a huge amount and nearly died’. [23] As Declan Kiberd writes, ‘In the 1960’s another generation found its writers reduced to the status of “gas bloody men” on prime-time television’. [24] When his next novel was published, An Apology for Roses (1973), there was no palpable declension in his writing, but the author was now investing a greater degree of cynicism in his fiction. His work became more embittered and thus, the culminating act of rebellion in An Apology for Roses is tempered by a new, more ambiguous approach.

Marie Fogarty turns against the bourgeois gods, using sex as a means for liberation and financial independence as just reward for her machinations. ‘Money, the only God whose existence had not been questioned since the rise of civilization’ is the true religion of the privileged, but Marie’s marriage to Brian Langley and subsequent usurpation of her mother’s meddling designs, differs greatly from Willie Ryan’s temporal concordat with his dead lover. [25] For Marie and Brian, ‘possessed all the virtues of an ancient hieratic faith, stern, commanding and implacable. They would have to work hard to be human.’ [26] The Manichean conflict in his fiction seems to become more pronounced at this point, his characters apt to lose the struggle more often than not. The theme, drawn from the French Catholic novelists, is a familiar preoccupation and the author seems to have duly acquired a highly developed sense of sin. There is grace in his world - a conversion can bring hope in a time of despair - but a gathering force of evil lurked around the edges.

Broderick’s next two novels, The Pride of Summer (1976) and London Irish (1979) began to attract the sort of critical opprobrium that would bedevil his later novels. The former, a bawdy satire on bourgeois mores, is peopled with grotesques who distract us from an essentially compassionate account of Protestant ladies subjected to an increasingly vicious campaign of intimidation. In his review of the latter novel, Peter Donnelly mocked Broderick’s description of adult relationships ‘in language that parodies Enid Blyton’ before concluding the review with a devastating précis: ‘He should stick to what he knows, whatever it is; and he should buy a new blue pencil.’ [27] In corresponding to his agent, John Johnson, one can almost feel the tightening grip of despair. In reference to London Irish, he writes, ‘The new novel is finished; whether it is any good is another matter: I never know’. [28]

THE LATER NOVELS: FAITH, SALVATION AND THE FLOODIn a letter from the publishing house William Heinemann, Broderick’s The Trial of Father Dillingham was rejected on account of it being, ‘just this kind of novel which falls to the withering fire of the present problems in publishing and bookselling’ - a reference to the problems experienced in publishing complex, potentially unprofitable literature and the greater material concerns of the publisher. [29] Multiple redrafts of the novel witnessed the introduction of a subplot which derailed a rather moving account of four interconnected characters - Jim Dillingham, a former priest, Maurice a salesman dying of leukaemia, his partner Eddie and finally Maria Keeley, affectionately known as The La, who mothers this close-knit group. Jim Dillingham has to come to a point where he has to face up to implications of the sacramental nature of his priesthood, the impulse that makes him renew his phial of chrism oil and his inability to refuse to administer the last rites to the dying Maurice. [30] Broderick, in writing this work, came close to reflecting his debt to the French Catholic novelists. It is important to remember that the Church, as Broderick saw it, was divided into two separate spheres: there was the Church as extension of the community and the Church as the extension of one’s private faith. The former was damned by association, while the latter was instinctual and deeply personal.

This stance was a by-product, no doubt, of Broderick’s staunchly ‘Catholic’ influences; in particular, François Mauriac. Mauriac differentiated between the common-law believers whose substantiations were afflicted with ‘intellectual poverty, base credulity, hatred, the fear of strange alluring passions, and, under the guise of edification, prejudice against the noble works in favour of false and foolish rhapsodies’ and the more daring proponents of a internalised Christian faith.’ [31] Mauriac railed against the dying of the sacramental light, and thus brought into being an intrinsic tenet of his philosophy: to be a true Christian is to suffer; we all have a cross to bear and we bear it, for the most part, alone. In the novel, the tensions between the man and his vocation are admirably conveyed, akin to the whiskey priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory where in one instant, he celebrates a forbidden Mass; in the second, he is arrested for public drunkenness. We are all tempted by external agencies, but within us all there remains the possibility of salvation and redemption.

After the publication of The Trial of Father Dillingham, Broderick would write two novels set in and around his adopted home in Bath, The Rose Tree (1985)and A Prayer for Fair Weather (1984), neither of which matched the claustrophobic attentiveness of the Athlone novels. Of The Rose Tree, he wrote, ‘the novel is a Jamesian exercise in subtlety. Matters that are understated so that the imagination can work upon them, are always more effective that the plain blunt telling.’ [32] An ironic statement given that his critics had recurrently objected to his authorial intrusions and adjectival insistence. As Patrick Murray states, ‘the intrusive Broderick persona retains a godlike control over the fictional proceedings’ - a statement that reflects Sartre’s comment on Mauriac that it wasn’t enough for him to write about God, he wanted to play him as well. [33]

In a letter to his agent Broderick wrote of starting on ‘a long-delayed memoir of youth…this might be serious, but it would be both loving and affectionate. I only started to be a moralist when I was about fifteen. Before that the sun shone all the time.’ [34] The result of these musing was The Flood, a novel/memoir set in Athlone during the nineteen-thirties. In a letter to his agent Broderick, referring to his publisher Marion Boyars, stated that he would, ‘give her the benefit of the doubt if The Flood is the success it OUGHT TO BE’. [35] The novel, written in a stilted midlands dialect - ‘dis’, ‘dat’ and ‘de udder’ - came in for a torrent of abuse from the critics, with Fintan O’ Toole stating that, ‘Thankfully, it is as unreadable as it is unspeakable.’ [36] In a dejected letter to his agents Broderick, in the course of selling his library, would write, ‘I do hope they prove a little more successful that (sic) my recent novel, the reception of which has depressed me greatly, and I am doing no writing at the moment; nor do I plan to take it up again.’ [37] He would write another novel, The Irish Magdalen (1991), but it would be published posthumously. He suffered a stroke shortly after the airing of a RTE interview by David Hanly in which his sexuality was the main focus of discussion - though Hanly maintains that Broderick appeared quite willing to speak on the matter prior to the interview - and died a few months later on the 28^th of May 1989.

CONCLUSIONWhat then, some nineteen years after his death, is Broderick’s legacy? Those few critical treatments of the author have been, in the main, negative. The publication of his collected writings and reviews help in some way restore a rather battered reputation - he helped create an audience for a number of young Irish authors, and for the most part, his book reviews represent a masterclass in critical writing. His novels, equally, have a need to be reread by a new, more reflective audience. He was, in the words of John Kenny, ‘one of the important Irish “middle” writers from whom much about the sociology and history, if not its high aesthetics, can be learned.’ [38] If an Irish Catholic school of writing emerges. it will owe a debt to Broderick, a writer more in tune with European literary trends than any other of his generation, as will those who reflect upon the verve and pathos of his early work. In a society where popular, easily accessed literature is rapidly becoming more highly regarded than works of true substance, authors like Broderick can easily be forgotten. I am not trying to recast John Broderick as a martyr of Irish mores - rather I am saying that he was a complex man who never fully lived up to the promise of his early work, whose later fiction showed a startling declension, but nothing as traumatic as has been suggested by his critics. Regardless, when one considers the amount of ink expended on lesser talents, it is quite striking that he has remained in a sort of preternatural exile. Simply put, he is an author worthy of re-examination, no more than that.

Peter D. Guy is attached to the National Centre for Franco-Irish Studies, Institute of Technology, Tallaght, Dublin.

Notes:

[1]     M. Kingston (ed.) The Selected Writings of John Broderick Dublin: Lilliput, 2007, p.xv.

[2]     G. O’ Brien, ‘John Broderick: A Life Vindicated’, from The Westmeath Independent, 21^st May 1999, p.17.

[3]     J. Broderick ‘A Man for all Seasons - Pope John XXIII’ from The Irish Times, 15^th Nov. 1980, p.37.

[4]     J. Broderick ‘A Curate’s Egg at Easter’ from The Irish Times, 14^th April 1979, pp.7-8

[5]     J Broderick, The Pilgrimage, Dublin: Lilliput, 2004, p.191.

[6]     Ibid., p.13.

[7]     L. Bersani, Balzac to Beckett - Center and Circumference in French Fiction, New York edition: Oxford University Press, 1970, p.155.

[8]     G. Flaubert, Madame Bovary,(Geoffrey Wall trans.) London: Penguin, 2003, p.214.

[9]     J. Broderick The Pilgrimage, p.77.

[10]    S. McMahon, ‘Town and country’ in Eire-Ireland, vol. VI. Spring 1971, p.127.

[11]    B. Moore, Catholics, London: Triad/Panther, 1983, p.90.

[12]    J. Broderick, The Fugitives, London: Pan, 1976, p.25.

[13]    Ibid., p.61.

[14]    J. Broderick, Don Juaneen, London: Pan, 1979, p.100.

[15]    Ibid,. p.174.

[16]    J. Carlson, Banned in Ireland: Censorship and the Irish Writer, London: Routledge, 1990, pp.42-43.

[17]    J. Broderick, Don Juaneen,. p.184.

[18]    Ibid., p.149

[19]    J. Broderick, The Waking of Willie Ryan London: Panther, 1969, p.128.

[20]    Ibid., pp.156-58.

[21]    Ibid., pp.158.

[22]    E. Maher, taken from an unpublished paper, ‘Catholicism in Two Novels by John Broderick’. Used with permission.

[23]    ‘Obituaries - John Broderick’- from The Daily Telegraph, Monday 31^st July, 1989.

[24]    D. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland - The Literature of the Modern Nation London: Vintage, 1996, p.582.

[25]    J. Broderick, An Apology for Roses London: Pan, 1974, p.127.

[26]    Ibid., p.214.

[27]    P. Donnelly ‘Little to be learned of the Irish or of London’, review of London Irish, The Irish Independent, 25^th August 1979.

[28]    John Broderick Archives, Athlone Civic Library - John Johnson Agency Correspondence, letter dated 3^rd April 1978.

[29]    Broderick Archives - Johnson Correspondence, letter dated 15^th July 1980.

[30]    J. Broderick, The Trial of Father Dillingham, London: Abacus, 1983, pp.148-149.

[31]    Mauriac, François, The Stumbling Block, New York: Philosophical Library, 1952, p.167.

[32]    Broderick Archives - Johnson Correspondence, letter dated 3^rd April 1984.

[33]    P. Murray, ‘Athlone’s John Broderick’, p.24.

[34]    Broderick Archives - Johnson Correspondence, letter dated 17^th April 1982.

[35]    Broderick Archives - Johnson Correspondence, letter dated 2^nd February 1987.

[36]    F. O’ Toole ‘Parable for Racists’, review of The Flood, The Sunday Tribune, 1^st November 1987.

[37]    Broderick Archives - Johnson Correspondence, letter dated 15^th October 1987.

[38]    J. Kenny, ‘John Broderick’ from The Irish Times, Saturday 29^th May 1999.