Two John D.Sheridan novels from the 1940s.
‘But I think it’s a strange thing that a country that can’t afford to clothe and feed its people can afford all the things that rotten conditions make necessary. It can afford prisons, sanatoria, asylums, reformatories and all the rest. It can afford judges to lecture poor, harassed working mothers of so-called juvenile delinquents.’
John D.Sheridan (1903-1980) was one of the most prominent literary figures in Ireland up to the 1970s. Journalist, novelist, biographer, essayist and screenwriter, he even wrote short verses for primary schoolbooks – remember ‘Here Comes The Bus’? He also wrote Saturday columns in the Irish Independent up to the early 1970s, which are still funny, and he wrote the very popular poem ‘Joe’s No Saint’ (in the 1940s) which was much loved by Gay Byrne and often quoted by him. The quotation above is taken from his novel Paradise Alley (1945)which is the lifestory of Anthony Domican, a National teacher in Dublin’s northside docklands from 1903 to the early 1940s, and the speaker is Anthony himself. He sees before him every working day, not only the poverty and deprivation of Dublin’s working class, but their courage and intelligence. Sheridan drew on his early experiences teaching in a docklands school for some of the material in his book, though his character Anthony is far older than he is. Early in the book when Anthony is a young teacher, during the Lock-Out of 1913, his sympathies are entirely with the strikers, and although he deplores the strikers’ children being sent to Liverpool and supports the priest who tries to stop it, he gives the strikers in this dockside confrontation all the best lines. Anthony is first attracted to his future wife Mollie when he sees her attacking her businessman father about how little he pays his workers.
When Anthony makes the argument, quoted at the top, it is many years later, Ireland has gained her independence (the process of winning this independence in the years 1916-22 never features in the book at all, which is interesting) and he is disputing with his cousin, Mandy (Manus) Logue, another Donegal man, who has made a fortune in the fruit and vegetable trade. Anthony is putting the case for implementing the ideals of the Papal social encyclicals, Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadrogesimo Anno (1931), which many Catholics around the world believed offered the best way of improving social and economic life without resorting to socialism or communism. The book has a lot of philosophical arguments and reflections like this. Anthony marries Mollie and they have four children. When he retires and wonders what he is going to do with his life after that.He becomes involved in adult education, a strong trend in social Catholicism. It is a rambling kind of life-story, but always interesting.
The Magnificent MacDarney is a much livelier read, about the decline of Dan MacDarney, sometime actor, advertising agent, man-about-town, raconteur, charmer, sponger, layabout. In the pubs around Dublin:
Men still nodded to him, but they looked at him with eyes that were wary with memories, and they fobbed him off with excuses that, five years ago, would have been an insult to his intelligence, and were now only an insult.
The reader doesn’t feel sorry for him, though; he has given his wife Sarah a very hard life. His oldest son John, the family ‘success’, has become a rather pompous doctor – when he comes home from England for Dan’s funeral, his brother and sister, Dick and Nora, wonder if he will charge a fee. Dick has put in years learning the grocery trade and by a stroke of good luck has managed to set up a small shop of his own. Nora is a secretary in a business in Dublin’s Grafton St. They despise their father, who not only contributes nothing, but is a drain on the family’s resources. Their mother only makes ends meet by letting half of their rather large and uncomfortable old house to two eccentric lodgers known to the family as the Wains. The MacDarneys are lucky enough to have the house at a low rent (£60 a year in 1947 – Sheridan is very good on details like this, which enhances the value of his writings – for me, anyway).
What is remarkable about both books – apart from the vivid writing, and the good characters and story – is the completely-taken-for-granted Catholic belief-system. When MacDarney tells a drinking acquaintance, Steevo, that he hasn’t been to Confession for at least ten years, Steevo, a fairly hard chaw himself, tells him he is ‘a right bloomin’ eejit’, just as nowadays one would chide a person who never has a medical check-up. Steevo invites MacDarney to come along with him and a few others, to the Jesuits in Milltown Park for a retreat. Any echo here of James Joyce’s short story ‘Grace’ is unintentional, I’d say, because there is no irony about the participation of a reprobate like Dan MacDarney in the retreat, or about the preacher’s sermon at the retreat, or any of the events that ensue.
In Paradise Alley, two of Anthony’s four children embark upon the religious life. Denis, the sporty, witty and down-to-earth son, becomes a Jesuit. Mary, a civil servant who also writes articles and music reviews for the newspapers, enters the Dominicans in her late twenties. Brigid, unimaginative though lovable, gets her university degree, teaches, then gets married. Christopher, the eldest son, is a continual disappointment – lazy, entitled, borrowing large sums of money from his father’s friends, losing good jobs, barely passing his exams, drinking, hanging around with a bad crowd. His eventual fate also underlines the supreme importance of the faith for Sheridan and his characters. Anthony’s relieved reaction to news about Christopher’s reception of the Sacraments and exemplary behaviour before his death as an RAF pilot in the Second World War calls to mind Mr Crouchback in Evelyn Waugh’s Men At Arms (1952). When the Second World War breaks out Mr Crouchback offers his 40-something son Guy, who hopes to be accepted in a fighting unit, an Our Lady of Lourdes medal which he says protected his other son, Gervase, who was killed in the First World War. What Mr Crouchback means by ‘protection’ is that the medal saved Gervase from mortal sin during his last leave. Waugh presents this as an example of the old man’s extreme innocence and unworldliness, but Sheridan presents Anthony’s relief at Christopher’s ‘good end’ as wholly rational, and Mollie’s grief as irrational.
Both of these novels by Sheridan have many values in common with other popular British and American novels of their time – belief in the importance of individual fulfilment, championship of social equality, and repudiation of the tyranny of elders – Anthony often wonders if he has been too strict a father to Christopher. Both novels also, particularly MacDarney, describe food, domestic interiors and clothes in the kind of vivid detail that make them a treasure for the social historian. Both novels are in the world and of the world but that world is completely and confidently Catholic. Paradise Alley and The Magnificent MacDarney deserve to be read for their own sake as great stories vividly told, but they would also be appreciated by anybody who would like to understand, a little better, the firm grip which Catholicism had on its Irish adherents in the middle of the twentieth century.
John D.Sheridan, Paradise Alley (Dublin: Talbot Press 1945)
John D.Sheridan, The Magnificent MacDarney (Dublin: Talbot Press 1949).
Evelyn Waugh, Men At Arms(London 1952). The first of the trilogy.
CLEAR CLASSIC BOOKS: a few words.
I’m Caitriona Clear, and I’ve been addicted to reading since my first trip to Roscrea Public Library in 1964. In this blog I’ll be sharing my thoughts about books old and new, and once I learn how to navigate the site a bit better, I’ll be reviewing a few recently-published books as well.
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