clearclassicsblogpost 50
What I want to do in this, my 50th blogpost, is to compare Alice Curtayne’s first book, her very popular life of Catherine of Siena, (published in 1929,with seven editions between that and 1942), with her last full-length book, her biography of Francis Ledwidge, first published in 1972, and reprinted in 1998 and 2017.
Every history and biography tells us as much about the time when it is written as it does about the past, and Saint Catherine of Siena consciously does this, Curtayne arguing that Catherine (1347-1380) is as relevant to the twentieth century as she was to the fourteenth. For example, the freedoms enjoyed by the fourteenth-century citizens of Siena are praised and the reader is told that ‘One has ceased even to dream of such liberty today.’ Curtayne also, as I noted in another blog, dismisses modern feminism as ‘foolish’ when compared to the freedom which could be enjoyed by women in the fourteenth century. There are more casual references to modern times; Siena during Carnival is like Hampstead Heath on an August Bank Holiday – not Bray, or Ballybunion, note. Curtayne is writing for an English audience, so she must hope they will take it on the chin when she describes William Flete, an English hermit in Italy in Catherine’s time, as a ‘typical Englishman’ in his ‘sangfroid, his self-complaisance and his serenely unconscious egotism.’ An English writer of the nineteenth century is also invoked when Catherine’s white-hot spirituality is compared to the ‘icy philosophy’ of George Eliot. (That author’s ‘heavy jaws and large, drooping mouth’ are also mentioned, which is hitting below the belt, because Marian Evans couldn’t help her looks, whatever about her philosophy.) Gabriel Rossetti’s mischievous remark about every literary movement having its ‘Scamp and its Bore’ is also referenced – lightly, but the reader gets the message; the author is well-read.
The medieval era is not, however, idealised, and Curtayne refers in passing to the ‘cold despair’ of which the ‘later Middle Ages were capable’. There are other glorious generalisations; the women who called on Catherine in Avignon, she tells us, were ‘awful’. Boccaccio was a ‘coarse sniggerer’,and the anti-Papal states agitation of 1379 was ‘worse than the plague’ – the Black Death that had more than halved the population of Europe in that unlucky century. Comments like this liven up the narrative, and I relish them, even as my hand twitches for a red marker.
Catherine was a politician as well as a mystic, who gathered quite an entourage of noisy supporters around her (known first derisively, but then respectfully, as caterinati), and she confronted not only the ‘religious’ but the ‘temporal’ leaders of her day (there wasn’t much difference between them). Curtayne consulted primary and secondary sources in Italian for this book, all cited in her extensive bibliography. Her appendices are lengthy, too, and one of them takes issue with the arguments of Dr Robert Fawtier, a French scholar who wrote a thesis on Catherine in 1921. Curtayne criticises him for his selective use of Catherine’s letters, though she concedes, at the end of her four-page point-by-point refutation, that he is a true ‘caterinato‘ and supporter of the saint. Curtayne did not defend a PhD on Catherine of Siena at the Sorbonne, and her confidence in arguing with a scholar who did, is breath-taking. Another of her appendices, however, quotes in full Innocenzo Taurisano O.P.’s refutation of Fawtier (in Italian), so this must be the authority she is using. She was a careful and judicious reader as well as a painstaking researcher, but she made up her own mind.
Curtayne’s biography of the poet Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917) is beautifully-written, evoking rural Meath and the landscapes of Gallipoli, Salonika and Belgium, and (as in all her books) assembling a cast of characters who are described clearly and vividly for the reader. But this book is completely different, not only in subject matter and period, but in tone, from the Catherine of Siena one. In that, she ‘defends’ a female Catholic saint/political figure in a secular era (the 1920s) in a Protestant country (England). The book is polemical because it deals head-on with the contested territories of belief, politics and gender. But there was no shortage of ‘contested territories’, literal and metaphorical, in Ireland and Europe in Ledwidge’s short lifetime either. In this country alone, nationalism versus unionism, constitutional versus physical force nationalism, labour as a variety of nationalism, and so on, were not only of historical but of contemporary interest when the book was published in 1972. But, while the reader is left in no doubt of Curtayne’s opinions on the many issues which faced Catherine of Siena, s/he finishes the Ledwidge biography without being certain of Curtayne’s opinions on Irish nationalism past or present. In 1972, people were still basking in the afterglow of the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, and apart from a few mild academic articles, historical revisionism had not yet become popular. It is remarkable, therefore, that Curtayne neither apologises for Ledwidge’s enlisting to fight in the Great War, nor feels she has to justify his decision to do so. She demolishes, though, the popular belief that he enlisted because of Lord Dunsany’s encouragement: ‘This is not only false; it is a mean partisan invention that diminishes the stature of the two men and casts a squalid light on their friendship.’
Leaving aside polemic and pleading sets her free to explore the multi-faceted story of Ledwidge’s short life, which encompassed many of the ordinary experiences of his time, and some of the extraordinary ones too. His mother was widowed and had to go out working in the fields, his eldest brother died of TB, but the Ledwidges had at least the advantage of a good, solid three-bedroomed house built for them by the local authority under the Labourers’ Acts of the 1880s. Although his formal education ceased after his Confirmation at the age of 12, Ledwidge was a talented product of the National School system and a beneficiary of one of its visionary teachers. He started, and gave up, an apprenticeship to grocery, then he was variously a yard-boy, road-mender and general labourer. Elected as a member of Navan Rural District Council in 1914, he was also, in this capacity, a Guardian of the Poor – despite having very few of the goods of this world himself, except a bicycle. He was encouraged in his poetry by a scion of the local landed aristocracy, Lord Dunsany, and there is no contradiction between this and the fact that he worked as a full-time trade union organizer for a while. He joined the Irish Volunteers as soon as they were founded, and he joined the Inniskilling Fusiliers not long after war broke out, partly because he had no job, and partly because he trusted John Redmond. Tens of thousands of other nationalist Irishmen also followed Redmond’s call and enlisted in the British army to fight in the Great War, including Curtayne’s own brother, Richard, who died at the Somme in 1916. And then, having survived Gallipoli and recovered from his wounds, having read the glowing reviews of his first book Songs of the Fields when it appeared in 1915, having come home several times to meet friends and family, Ledwidge was killed by a shell when mending a roadway in Ypres in July 1917. He was not the only working-class poet in these islands to die in the Great War, and he bears comparison with London poet Isaac Rosenberg, an engraver’s apprentice, who died at Arras in April 1918.
Religion hardly features at all in the Ledwidge biography – after all, he was not a saint nor a priest, so why would it? But even when she was writing about non-religious figures like Dante and Patrick Sarsfield, in the 1930s, Curtayne wove a Catholic world-view into the story, and her only novel, House of Cards (1939), is unmistakably and unshakeably Catholic. Ledwidge, like most Irish people, was a Catholic but he doesn’t seem to have been more than conventionally devout. Curtayne’s only direct comment on religion in the entire book is when she deplores the fact that courtship often had to be kept secret in rural areas due to a ‘Jansenistic’ attitude to ‘company-keeping’ at this time. She quotes, without comment, a letter of Ledwidge’s which tells of a Church of England chaplain who started talking to Ledwidge in an Egypt hospital when he was wounded, but who left abruptly and never came near him again once he found out that the poet was ‘R.C’. (In fairness, the parson was probably afraid of being accused of proselytism – Catholics were very sensitive on this point.) Ledwidge himself commented: ‘I wonder if God asked our poor chaps if they were R.Cs or C of Es when they went to Him on August 15th [at Gallipoli]’. The orthodox Catholic of that time would have believed that there was no salvation outside the One True Church, but Ledwidge’s practical ecumenism was probably shared by most soldiers and chaplains of all faiths, in that terrible war.
Dermot Bolger, in his afterword to the 1998 edition of the Ledwidge book, described it as ‘pioneering and selfless’. When it came out first in 1972 he was a young teenager, and he spent all his pocket-money including his bus fare, on it, and had to walk from Dublin city centre to Finglas. The Catherine of Siena book must also have inspired writers when it came out first, especially females writing about other females – of which there were an ever-increasing number, from the 1920s onwards. A connection that could be made between Catherine of Siena and Francis Ledwidge across the centuries (and across the span of their biographer’s life, too) is that they were both Europeans of their time, participants (in different ways) in political conflicts that shook them out of their home comfort zones, physically, mentally and culturally. The year after the Ledwidge biography was published, Ireland would join the EEC, but Alice Curtayne was a European long before this.
Alice Curtayne, Saint Catherine of Siena (London: Sheed & Ward 1929; Illinois: Tan 1980).
__________Francis Ledwidge: a life of the poet (New York: Martin Brian and O’Keefe 1972: Dublin: New Island Books 1998; reissued in 2017 with the assistance of Meath County Council.)
Information on Isaac Rosenberg (1891-1918) comes from Ian D.Todd, ‘In Search of First World War Poets’ in Battlefield magazine, Vol.30, Issue 3, Spring 2026.
BOOKS IN A CHARITY SHOP: I’ve been volunteering in a charity shop in Galway over the past 8 weeks or so, in a backroom capacity, sorting clothes and other donations and basically doing what needs to be done, but I end up spending a bit of time sorting out the books. The ones that sell are biography & memoir, history, classic novels (Irish, British, American and European in translation), poetry and, believe it or not, religion – a shelf which comprises mainly Catholic and Christian works, but includes every other religion too, has to be replenished more often than fiction and crime fiction (a separate category). I thought True Crime would fly off the shelves, but it doesn’t and neither does cookery. And there is a complete and almost untouched shelf of really good infant and childcare guides. Since we priced travel guides (Lonely Planet and Rough guides, kind of thing)at 50c each,and displayed them prominently, they have started to move too. It’s all fascinating and I have become a bore about alphabetisation and categorisation. My first and early ambition was to be a librarian or to work in a bookshop but I got derailed into academia. Now I’m getting my chance!
Clear Classic Books 
Leave a comment