Alice Curtayne – as explained in one of my first blogs – made her name with her scholarly biography of Catherine of Siena in 1929, and in the next six years published full-length books about Dante, Anthony of Padua, St Brigid and Patrick Sarsfield and a book of essays, Borne on the Wind, all of which were based on extensive research and all of which well-received and all of which (except St Anthony of Padua) I’ve mentioned and cited before – though I got the publisher of the St Brigid volume wrong, it was Browne & Nolan, not Talbot Press. (Thanks to Alan Hayes of Arlen House for pointing this out, and that is sincere, not begrudging thanks! Alan’s knowledge of Irish women writers in the 1930s and 40s is truly encyclopaedic and he is generous with it.) What I haven’t mentioned yet are her shorter booklets on saints and pilgrimages, published by the Anthonian Press.
The Anthonian Press was based in Temple St in Dublin, and also published periodicals, prayer books, holy pictures and other religious material, for which there was a huge market in a state which was 90% Catholic, strongly devout and, thanks to the National school system, almost universally literate. The Catholic Truth Society of Ireland were Anthonian Press’s main competitors, with similarly-themed booklets aimed at an identical market, some of these also by well-known writers including Annie M.P.Smithson, Maura Laverty, and Francis Stuart. (Irish Messenger Publications, a Jesuit outfit, also published this kind of booklet along with their very successful periodical, The Irish Messenge of the Sacred Heart.) Anthonian Press struck lucky when they commissioned Alice Curtayne to write some of their booklets, because she was able to compress the broad and deep scholarship which characterised her longer books into 25 or 30 pages, without sacrificing anything of style or substance. The same press also published Curtayne’s The New Woman, the text of a lecture she gave in the Theatre Royal in Dublin in October 22 1933 under the title ‘The Renaissance of Woman’, which I discussed in the earlier blog.
These booklets – which cost 3d or 6d and were available in church porches as well as shops – were pocket-sized and attractively produced; Curtayne’s short biography of Bernard of Clairvaux has skilful greenish pen-and-ink drawings and her book on St Francis of Assissi is illustrated with striking silhouettes – no artist was credited in any of the books. (Some of the striking cover art on CTSI booklets from the period was gathered into one volume in 2013, and is well worth a look.) Bernard, Curtayne tells us, was a key player in the great religious revival which saw the reform and expansion of the Cistercian order from Clairvaux in Burgundy. Pope Eugenius III (1145-53) was one of his monks, and it is said that Bernard was the man behind the throne. Bernard made many foundations, wrote books, had a very public duel of words with Abelard (of Heloise fame), who was a heretic, and he welcomed the Irish monk Malachy on the latter’s way to Rome, and became such an admirer of him that he wrote the Irishman’s biography. It was because of Bernard and Malachy that the Cistercians came to Ireland. Malachy died at Clairvaux (1148) and Bernard was buried beside him, at his own request, when his time came. The Irish angle in the story is emphasised but not overly so – Curtayne assumes that her audience will be interested in European Catholicism for its own sake.
Her booklet about Brigid is subtitled ‘the Mary of Ireland’, quite a strong claim for any Christian to make,but obviously not a heretical one, because this volume, like the others, bears an Imprimatur and Nihil Obstat from the diocese of Dublin – i.e. there is nothing in it of which they do not approve. It is so engagingly written that I’m going to quote some of the opening lines to give a flavour of it:
If, through some mystery of iniquity, the Church were silenced in this land and there was an end to native literature and art, still the very stones would cry out these names; wells, ruins, raths and townlands would tell their story. Mountains would have to be levelled to blot out their memory. These three upon whom abut all our history, literature, art, building and topography, are Patrick, Brigid and Colmcille.
This is true, when one thinks of placenames and other lore throughout the country, for Patrick and Brigid anyway – and Colmcille in the north. Her earlier booklet on St Patrick was more prosaic and, although conscientious and in line with the scholarship of the time, not as heartfelt or attractive as her brief biography of Brigid.
Completely different in theme and subject matter, her booklet on the Matt Talbot(1856-1925) shows how her years in the Catholic Evidence Guild in Liverpool had helped her to develop a Catholic ‘apologetic’ (i.e. system of explanation) adapted for modern urban-industrial life. Working-class religiosity could be portrayed as toadying to the bosses (as it was in James Plunkett’s Strumpet City some decades later) and Curtayne is keenly aware of this as a possible reading of Talbot’s life. She is, therefore, at pains to point out that Talbot never passed a picket or opposed strike action by his colleagues in the timberyard. If he was uneasy about taking strike pay, it was because he didn’t picket or play an active part in the union. (His colleagues insisted on his taking the strike pay all the same.) Talbot was a heavy drinker from ages 12 to 28, when he gave up drink completely and suddenly and then developed the all-consuming piety that was to characterise him. He is most famous perhaps for the severe physical mortifications he undertook – chains and cords twined around his limbs and torso, a plank for a bed, and almost perpetual fasting. Outside of his work, he spent most of his time in prayer or reading devotional books. He ‘got’ (as Catholics say) at least one Mass every day and several on Sunday. (Mass every day and twice on Sunday was, I can testify, not unusual for the very devout of Limerick city up to the 1970s.)The book written about Talbot by Joseph Glynn shortly after his death sold over 120,000 copies in Ireland, went into several editions, and was translated into most European languages (from Breton to Russian) selling particularly well in the German-speaking lands. Curtayne claims that Talbot was an entirely self-taught mystic, unknown to any priests. But Glynn’s book (which she acknowledges and obviously uses) names several priests who were Talbot’s spiritual advisers, and others to whom he regularly gave money for the poor. Even his mortification of the chains was undertaken with spiritual direction, because Talbot brought a friend of his to a priest to be ‘enrolled in the chain’, which implies that he had been so enrolled himself. Curtayne also gives the impression of a lonely and above all, silent life, but Glynn had already shown that Talbot, who lived with his mother until her death in 1915, was close to two of his sisters who lived nearby and that he had several friends and acquaintances who visited him and whom he visited, and who testified, after his death, to his generosity, kindness to children and holiness. Although he was never overbearing, he did not hold back from urging his friends and colleagues to greater feats of devotion and mortification, or upbraiding those who laughed at dirty stories. Some might have wished him to be a little more ‘silent’.
Curtayne also wrote booklets about pilgrimages – climbing Croagh Patrick and ‘doing’ Lough Derg, an experience she also described in her novel, House of Cards. Curtayne climbed ‘the Reek’ on Garland Sunday in July, the pilgrimage day. She finds the climb brutally hard and the cold at the summit comes as a shock, as does the noise, the ‘ringing of hobnailed boots on stones’ as several hundred people did the ’rounds’. Mass is a huge milling crowd, with great confusion around reception of Communion, but then there is the relief of the picnic breakfast, and ‘who can forget the joy of unscrewing a thermos flask of hot coffee?’ (Not tea, interestingly. I wonder if her preference for coffee was because of her years in Italy?) On the way down, she and her friend meet a teenage girl ‘leaping joyfully up’ in a pink frock and a straw hat, and notice with horrified admiration that she is barefoot. This is in the early 1930s; my mother climbed Croagh Patrick in the early 1940s in bare feet almost as a matter of course, and I even encountered people doing it barefoot in the 1990s. In St Patrick’s Purgatory, or Lough Derg, the pilgrim place in Co.Donegal dating back to the fifth century, the food-and-sleep-deprived two nights and (most of) two days combined with the rigid timetable of ’rounds’ and prayers stun the pilgrim ‘like hammerblows to the head’, but they also ‘allure and assuage the mind’. There was no bar on smoking in the breaks between prayers, and she describes how the men’s cigarettes ‘glowing redly through the darkness’ added to the atmosphere. I remember my father telling me that cigarettes were the only thing that made Lough Derg bearable. So I had two pilgrim parents ( born in the 1920s, a generation younger than Curtayne), who were by no means unusual in the Ireland of their time. Curtayne was writing for people like them.
Opening her short life of Francis of Assissi with a discussion of Francis’s Catholic biographers, including Chesterton, she deplores how many Protestant ‘Reformers’ (sic: she always writes Reformers and Reformation in quotation marks) and atheists have adopted Francis for themselves, shearing him of his Catholicism. She shudders at the British Society of Franciscan Studies, which had its roots in the secular 19th-century discovery of Francis as
an inspirer of the troubadours, a romantic vagabond…..and as such he was appropriated by the most prosaic, the most staid, the most conservative and the most un-Catholic period of the modern era.
After this deft swipe (on which she wastes very little time) she moves on to tell us of Francis’s early life and his foundation of the Franciscan order, his love of animals and the natural world, and his development of the crib as a devotional aid. Her sharp comments on the secular adoption of Francis, like her disparaging comments on modern feminism in her biography of Catherine of Siena which I quoted in the earlier blog, remind us that for her, Catholic heroes of every era are current and contemporary.
Curtayne’s book-length biographies were criticised by a small minority of reviewers for being ‘too psychological’ in presenting (or as we’d say today, ‘imagining’) the saint as a human being with whom modern readers could identify. Curtayne herself explained in a widely-publicised talk around that time that she was practising a ‘new hagiography’ which had exactly this aim in mind. Strange, then, that she characterised Matt Talbot as an inhumanly solitary figure, especially when Glynn’s biography was there to guide her. Was she, as a modern Catholic, uneasy with Talbot’s cords and chains and anxious to ‘explain them away’ as self-inflicted and not sanctioned by any religious authority? Did she herself find Talbot hard to identify with?
These immensely readable and attractive booklets give a further insight into the cultural values of the time and underline the importance of Curtayne both as an interpreter of modern Catholicism and a storyteller.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Alice Curtayne features in Brian Cleeve’s dictionary of Irish writers, published by Mercier in the late 1960s, but there is no mention at all of her in the monumental 1996 Dictionary of Irish Literature, published in Connecticut with Richard Hogan as general editor and several Irish contributing editors(including Peter Costello, currently literary editor of the Irish Catholic). This dictionary’s omission of Curtayne is all the more striking because of its inclusion of biographer/historian/hagiographer Helena Concannon, another excellent writer but, I’d venture to suggest, one who was not as widely-read as Curtayne. But Alice, I am glad to say, is included in the Oxford Concise Companion to Irish Literature also brought out in 1996, and edited by Robert Welch.
BOOKS CITED ABOVE:
(Dates of publication are not always given in these booklets, but the date of the imprimatur and nihil obstat, where given, is cited. )
Alice Curtayne,St Patrick (Dublin: Anthonian 1931).
—————————St Bernard: Abbot of Clairvaux and doctor of the Church (Dublin: Anthonian 1933).
————————–St Brigid: the Mary of Ireland (Dublin: Anthonian 1933).
—————————St Francis of Assissi: founder of the Franciscan Order (Dublin: Anthonian 1934).
—————————Lough Derg: St Patrick’s Purgatory: the Sanctuary of Station Island or An Excursion into the Fifth Century (Dublin: Anthonian 1933).
—————————-The New Woman (Dublin: Anthonian 1934).
—————————Croagh Patrick: an account of the Great National Pilgrimage to Ireland’s Holy Mount (Dublin: Anthonian 1934).
—————————The Holy Man of Dublin or The Silence of Matt Talbot (Dublin: Anthonian n.d. received National Library of Ireland 1937). No imprimatur or nihil obstat on this.
Sir Joseph Glynn, Life of Matt Talbot (Dublin: Catholic Truth Society of Ireland 1927).This is the second or third edition, because it mentions the sales of the 1926 one. It carries a nihil obstat and a provisional imprimi potest, rather than an imprimatur, and there is a prominent disclaimer about the miracles and cures attributed to Talbot before and after his death.
Brian Cleeve,Dictionary of Irish Writers Vols 1-3 (Cork: Mercier 1966-72.
Robert Hogan (ed.) Dictionary of Irish Literature: revised and expanded edition two volumes (Connecticut: Greenwood 1996).
Robert Welch (ed.) Concise Companion to Irish Literature (Oxford University Press 1996).
Lir MacCarthaigh (ed.) Vintage Values: classic pamphlet cover design from twentieth-century Ireland (Dublin: Veritas 2013).
Clear Classic Books 
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