Life
1883-1971 [b. John Greer Irvine; occas. St. John Greer Ervine]; b. 28
Dec. in working-class Ballymacarret, East Belfast, his father died shortly after his birth
(also in 1883); his grandmother, Mrs. Greer, having moved to town from
Donaghadee, Co. Down [as in Mrs.
Martin’s Man (1914)], she established hardware shop on Albertbridge
Road [like that in his play Boyd’s Shop]; ed. Westourne School,
Newtownards Rd., under the benign teaching of headmaster McClelland (on
whom Mr Carlow in Alice and Family is modelled); financial circumstances frustrated Trinity entrance; became insurance clerk in Belfast, aged
15 [var. 17]; moved to London as clerk, 1901; abandoned religious affiliation;
joined Shaw’s Fabians; contributed to The New Age; involved
in repertory theatre; met W. B. Yeats; Abbey plays incl. Mixed Marriage
(1911), study of a Belfast tragedy, The Magnanimous Lover (1912),
the story of an Ulsterman who rediscovers religious faith in Liverpool
and proposes to the woman whom he earlier made pregant and abandoned,
only to be rejected by her because of his want of proper feeling; and
John Ferguson (1915), concerning a devout believer whose son murders
the landlord rapist of his sister, causing Ferguson to abandon his own
belief in expiation though the boy gives himself up to save an innocent
accused in his place; supported Home Rule and disliked Carson, looking
to AE and Plunkett as the men of the new Ireland; became Abbey manager,
1915, but incurred dislike of actors through his insistence that ‘no
worthwhile plays were being written in Ireland’ and hardening Unionist
attitude; dismissed the actors on their refusing to appear under his management
in Limerick; resigned 1916; fiction includes Eight Ó Clock (1913),
stories; and the novels Mrs Martin’s Man (1914); Alice
and a Family (1915), concerning the London working-class family life
of ’erbert Nudds ; served in World War I with the Dublin Fusiliers
(which he joined in disgust at the cheers that greeted Casement’s
execution); ‘found God’ in the trenches; lost a leg in Flanders
(partly recounted in Sophia (1941), being based on the idea that
the title character, having died at the beginning of the novel, observed
her family’s progress - consisting in her rector husband Godfrey,
who remarries, and her daughters Ann and Olivia - with much of the dialogue
passing between her and her father, Mr. Considine, a shrewd embodiment
of Protestant non-Conformism; issued Changing Winds (1917), a novel
in response to 1916 Rising featuring George Russell, Pearse (John Marsh),
and other contemporaries, advocating Home Rule politics and a’ mingling’
of the bloods; The Foolish Lovers (1920), a novel narrating the
attempt of John MacDermott who escapes stultifying life in Ballyards (Newtownards)
to London and the life of a writer, but is forced to abandon his ambitions
and return; also Wayward Man (1927), focused on Robert Dunwoody
and his family, and set in ‘Donaghreagh’, but also in Ulster,
Glasgow, and America where his wanderlust takes him; his play The Lady
of Belmont produced at Gate Theatre, Dublin (1930); Observer and
Morning Post drama critic to 1939; settled in Devon; elected IAL,
1933-36; wrote successful West End plays such as The First Mrs Fraser
(1931), set in London and centred on the character of Janet Fraser, divorced
from a Scotsman, whom she manages to remarry having seen off his second
wife, a flapper Elsie, through a manner of blackmail (forcing her to run
off with Lord Larne, after Janet’s present man detects Elsie carrying
on with a dancer Mario; includes a parody of the Irish literary revival
type; freq. Visitor to Northern Ireland; wrote Boyd’s Shop (1936),
a sentimental play set in Donaghadee, Co. Down, first performed in the
Playhouse, Liverpool; revived by Ulster Group Theatre, Belfast, 1939,
running for 15 weeks; Friends and Relations (1941), another Ulster
play; appt. Professor of Dramatic Literature for Royal Society of Literature;
wrote Sir Edward Carson and the Ulster Movement (1916) and other
biographies on Carson, Wilde, Parnell [1925], General Booth, G. B. Shaw,
and William Craig, in Craigavon (1949), interspersed with diatribes
against the ‘Eireans’, and not liked by Lady Craigavon; his
shift from nationalism to unionism instanced by Parnell and Craigavon;
there is an archive of his papers, with a bibliographical catalogue, at
Queen’s University, Belfast;
some of his manuscripts are held in the Belfast Central Library
Irish Collection; subject of biographical notice in Threshold
by John Boyd (1974), professing that he was passionate about Ulster
and had a ‘pathological hatred or the rest of Ireland’ after
1916 and the War of Independence, and likewise for romantics and bohemians;
became increasingly Unionist; issued an autobiography as Some Impressions
of My Elders (1922); married with no children; DDLitt, QUB; MIAL; FRSL;
declined into senility before his death; awarded LLD by St Andrews Univ.. NCBE DIB DIW DIH IF2 OCEL DIL DUB OCIL FDA
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Works
Fiction, Eight O’Clock and Other Studies (Dublin &
London: Maunsel 1913) [stories, incl. with title-story ‘Clutie’,
John’, ‘Retirement’, ‘The Fool’, ‘The Well
of Youth’, ‘The Burial’, ‘Discontent’, and ‘The
Match’]; Mrs. Martin’s Man (Dublin & London: Maunsel
1914; pop. edn., 1915), 312pp.; Alice and a Family (Dublin &
London: Maunsel; NY: Macmillan 1915); Changing Winds (Dublin &
London: Maunsel; NY: Macmillan 1917), 571pp.; The Foolish Lovers (London:
Collins; NY: Macmillan 1920); The Wayward Man (London: Collins;
NY: Macmillan 1927), p.375 [ded. ‘To Leonora’; 3rd imp. London
Jan. 1928]; The Mountain and Other Stories (London: Allen &
Unwin 1928) [incl. with title story and those already published in Eight
O’Clock Stories, ‘Old Mrs Clifford’ ‘Safety’;
‘Mr Tripney Goes Abroad’; ‘Ambition’; ‘The Blind
Man’; ‘Derelicts’; ‘Colleagues’; ‘The Conjurer’;
‘Mr Peden Keeps His Cook’; ; The First Mrs. Fraser (London:
Collins; NY: Macmillan 1931); Sophia (London: Macmillan 1941);
Collections, The St. John Ervine Omnibus (London: Collins 1933) [containing The Foolish Lovers; The Wayward Man; The First Mrs Fraser].
Prose, Sir Edward Carson and the Ulster Movement (Dublin & London: Maunsel; New York: Dodd, Mead 1915); "The Case for Conscription", New Ireland 2 (3 July 1915), pp.118-120; ‘After the Abbey’, New Ireland 2 (4 March 1916), pp.277-278; Some Impressions of My Elders (NY: Macmillan 1922; London: Allen & Unwin 1923), prev. printed as ‘Some Impressions of My Elders: Bernard Shaw and J. M. Synge’, in North American Review, CCXI [New York] (May 1920), pp.669-81, and ‘Some Impressions of My Elders: John Galsworthy’, in North American Review, CCVIII [New York] (March 1921), pp.371-84); ; The Organised Theatre: a Plea in Civics (London: Allen and Unwin 1924; NY: Macmillan 1925), 213pp. [based on Shute Lectures at Univ. of Liverpool, Autumn 1923]; Parnell [1925] (London: Ernest Benn; London: Queensway; Boston: Little, Brown 1925, 1927; rep. Benn 1928); How to Write a Play (London: G. Allen & Unwin; NY: Macmillan 1928); The Theatre in My Time (London: Rich & Cowan 1933; NY: Loring & Mussey 1934; Toronto: Ryerson 1936); God’s Soldier: General William Booth (London & Toronto: Heinemann 1934; NY: Macmillan 1935); Craigavon: Ulsterman (London: Allen & Unwin 1949), 676pp. [front. port. of Craigavon at microphone broadcasting ‘We are king’s men’ [in response to de Valera’s neutrality]; Oscar Wilde: A Present Time Appraisal (London: George Allen & Unwin 1951; NY: Macmillan 1952; NY: William Morrow 1952); Bernard Shaw: His Life, Work and Friends (London: Constable; NY: William Morrow 1956).
Plays, Four Irish Plays [Mixed Marriage; The Magnanimous Lover; The Critics; The Orangeman] (Dublin & London: Maunsel; NY: Macmillan 1914); Jane Clegg (London: Sidgwick & Jackson; NY: Henry Holt 1914); John Ferguson, a Play in Four Acts (Dublin & London: Maunsel; NY: Macmillan 1915); The Ship, A Play in Three Acts (NY: Macmillan 1922) [based on Thomas Andrews and ‘the Titanic’]; Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, A Light Comedy in 4 acts (London: Allen & Unwin; NY: Macmillan 1923), 96pp.; The Lady of Belmont, play in 5 acts (London: Allen & Unwin 1923), 95pp.; Anthony and Anna: A Comedy in in Three Acts (London: Allen & Unwin; NY: Macmillan 1925; rev. edn. 1936); Four One-Act Plays [The Magnanimous Lover, Progress, Ole George Comes to Tea, She Was No Lady] (London: Allen & Unwin; NY: Macmillan 1928); The First Mrs. Fraser, a Comedy in Three Acts (London: Chatto & Windus 1929; NY: Macmillan 1930); Boyd’s Shop, A Comedy in Four Acts (London: Allen & Unwin; NY: Macmillan 1936); People of Our Class (London: Allen & Unwin 1936); Robert’s Wife (London: Allen & Unwin; NY: Macmillan 1938); Friends and Relations, a Comedy in three Acts (London: Allen & Unwin 1947); Private Enterprise (London: Allen & Unwin 1948); The Christies, a Play in Three Acts (London: Allen & Unwin 1949); Brother Tom, a Country Comedy in Three Acts (London: Allen & Unwin 1952); John Cronin, ed. Selected Plays of John Ervine (Washington: Catholic Univ. of America; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1988), with bibliography [infra]
Miscellaneous, incl. ‘The Irish Rebellion’, in Century Magazine (NY 1917); Preface to H. R. Hayward, ed., Ulster Songs and Ballads (1925); Foreword to R. L. Russell, The Child and his Pencil (1935); also ‘St. John Ervine’s Broadway, Parts 1 and 2’, in Peter Drewniany and Robert Hogan, eds. George Spelvin’s Theatre Book [theatrical criticism from New York World, 1928-1929] (Spring-Summer 1980), pp.1-97; pp.1-94. SEE also Ervine’s remarks on Yeats and Synge in respective files (Rx) infra.
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Selected Plays of St. Greer Ervine, chosen and with an intro. by John Cronin [Irish Drama Selections 5] (Colin Smith 1988; Cath.Univ. of America Press 1988), 387pp., [contains Mixed Marriage, Jane Clegg, John Ferguson, Boyd’s Shop; Friends and Relations; also prose extracts including ‘How To Write a Play’ and a bibl. checklist [ 0 86140 101 8 hb; 102 pb]. The Ship, play in three Acts ([NY:] Macmillan 1922); Robert’s Wife, a comedy in Three Acts (London: G. Allen & Unwin; NY: Macmillan 1938), 101pp.; The First Mrs Fraser a comedy in three acts (Chatto and Windus 1929) [Your father ... He’s beginning to court me all over again ... and I rather like it, Ninian ... [END]; The Christies, play in three acts (Allen and Unwin 1949), 93pp.; Boyd’s Shop, a comedy in four acts (London: G Allen & Unwin/NY: Macmillan 1939) [performed for first time on Wed. 19 Feb. 1936 at Playhouse, Liverpool.] 110pp., ending, wouldn’t it be a great idea now if you two were the first pair Dunwoody married?’ NOTE, The Foolish Lovers (London: Collins & Son [1920]) [ ded. ‘To my mother who asked me to write a story without any bad words in it and to Mrs J Ó Hannay who asked me to write a story without any ‘sex’ in it.’]; 392pp.
Cathach Books (Cat. 12) lists Four Irish Plays [Mixed Marriage, The Magnanimous Lover, the Critics, The Orangeman] (Dublin & London: Maunsel 1914).
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Criticism
Bibliography
by Paul Howard, ‘St. John Ervine, A Bibliography of His Published
Works,’ in Irish Booklore, vol. 1, no. 2 (August 1971), pp.203-209.
J. W. Cunliffe, Modern English Playwrights: A Short History of the English Drama from 1925 (1925; rep. Kennikat 1969); Denis Ireland, ‘Red Brick City and Its Dramatist: A Note on St. John Ervine’, in Envoy, I (March 1950), pp.59-67.
Robert Hogan After the Irish Renaissance (London: Macmillan 1968), pp.264-65. Sam Hanna Bell, The Theatre in Ulster (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1972).
John Boyd, ‘St John Ervine, a Biographical Note’, in Threshold, 25 (Summer 1974), pp.101-15.
J. W. Foster, Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction (Gill & Macmillan 1974), pp.130-39 [commentary on The Foolish Lovers, Mrs. Martin’s Man, The Wayward Man].
Norman Vance, Irish Literature: A Social History, (London: Basil Blackwell 1990), Chap. V.
Patrick Maume, ‘Ulster men of Letters: The Unionism of Frank Frankfort Moore, Shan Bullock, and St. John Ervine’, in Richard English and Graham Walker, ed., Unionism in Modern Ireland: New Perspectives on Politics and Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1996), pp.63-80, espec. pp.71-75.
Dawson Byrne, ‘St John Ervine Episode’ [ chap.], The Story of Ireland’s National Theatre (1929).
Edna Longley, ‘"A Barbarous Nook: The Writer and Belfast", The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994), espec. pp.100-01.
Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, 1931; Mercier
Edn. 1966, p.36.
Collins publishers (appended to The Wayward Man, 1927).
Sean O’Faolain, An Irish Journey, 1940.
P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.39.)
Maurice Headlam, Irish Reminiscences (1947). p.49.
John O’Donovan, Shaw and the Charlatan Genius, a memoir [by &c] with 18 illustrations (Dolmen 1965).
Loreto Todd, The Language of Irish Literature (1989).
Austin Clarke, ‘Early Memories of F. R. Higgins’, in Dublin Magazine (Summer 1967), pp.68-73.
Roy Foster, ‘When the Newspaper have forgotten me ...’, in Yeats Annual 12, ed. Warwick Gould and Edna Longley, 1996; p.166.)
Seamus Deane, Celtic Revivals, 1985, p.51.
Cheryl Herr, ed., The Land They Loved (1991), notes that when in 1915 P. J. Bourke’s For the Land She Loved was produced at the Abbey the Castle remonstrated with St. John Ervine for ‘permitting this piece of sedition to be performed’ (Seamus de Burca). Ervine responded by barring de Burca from the Abbey.
Norman Vance, Irish Literature, A Social History (Basil Blackwell 1990), p.13.
John Boyd, ‘St John Ervine, a Biographical Note’, in Threshold, 25 (Summer 1974), pp.101-15.
Francis MacManus, ed., M. J. MafcManus, Adventures of an Irish Bookman (Dublin: Talbot Press 1952), Chap., ‘The Last Stage Irishman’.
Paul Bew, Fortnightly Review, Oct. 1991, p.19.
Robert Greacen, Review of Patricia Craig, Rattle of the North [anthol.], in Books Ireland, Oct. 1992.)
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Quotations
Craigavon: Ulsterman (1949): ‘My purpose in this book,
is not to write a formal biography, though I see no harm in writing one,
but, first, to tell the facts of James Craig’s career, and, second,
to expound and interpret as far as I am capable of doing so, the beliefs
and political faith of Ulster Unionists, of whom I am one. … Why
it is that Ulster Protestants, who were vehement and determined Republicans
in the eighteenth century, were Royalists in the nineteenth; and why was
the Henry Joy McCracken of my childhood a Unionist when his renowned kinsman
a century earlier was hanged as a rebel in Belfast? I doubt, indeed, if
there are many Presbyterians in Ulster who cannot claim at least one rebel
in their family history. / That change began with disillusionment in the
eighteenth century itself, and was started by abhorrence at the barbarity
perpetrated by the rebels in the South. It was established and firmly
fixed by the complete revolution in the economic conditions of Northern
Irish life. The industrial revolution was also a political revolution
in Ulster. Ulstermen became, in the jargon of our own time, extroverts,
while Southern Irishmen continued to be introverts, began, in deed, as
Sinn Féin grew in authority, to be neo-introverts, suffering severely
from ingrowing minds and ingrowing souls. Ulster, no more than any other
place, does not stand alone; and it was their perception of this fact
throughout the nineteenth century which made Unionists of Ulster Protestants
who had previously been resolved upon a republic. Our province exists
because Great Britain exists, because the United States of America exists,
because the British Commonwealth of Nations exists; and its history cannot
be separated from theirs nor can it be told in disregard of their existence.’
[&c.] (vii.) … We regard de Valera as a man who shuts himself
away from reality and buries himself in the remote past. All Sinn Féiners,
and especially those who mumble economic nonsense in Gaelic, are reactionaries
to us; dead men fumbling with cerements and pretending that the smell
of corruption is the breath of life. … Michael Collins was infantile
in his addiction to .. an old Irish civilisation whose main features,
apparently, would be primitive "processions of young women", as in Achill,
riding "down on island ponies" to gather cockles … while their male
relations scrabbled in the earth with clumsy and inefficient tools …
[&c.]’ (viii); much of the ensuing pages of the Preface are concerned
with disputing exaggerated claims of Irish participation in the Great
War and the Second World War, departing from an assertion by ‘an
Eirean lady’ in Time and Tide that 350,000 Irishmen were killed
in the earlier conflict; quotes Cardinal MacRory’s remark that ‘Eire
deserves credit in the circumstances for not having allied herself with
the Axis nations and offered them hospitality and assistance’; ‘My
purpose, here, then, in addition to writing the Life of James Craig, is
to try to translate my countrymen, the Ulster people, into such terms
that those who misunderstand and misinterpret them, shall at least perceive
that we have reasons for our attitude towards our fellow-countrymen, and
that we are not, in any serious sense, a set of irreconcilable and unteachable
bigots who spend our time in wishing eternal injury and damnation to His
Holiness the Pope, and declining to associate on terms of equality or
even common civility with Irishmen of another religion than ours; but
that we are animated by a general doctrine of political and social relations
which is derived from our experiences and hopes.’ … it is not
Protestants, but Catholics, who decline, especially in schools and colleges,
to mingle with their opposites in beliefs.’ (xviii.) Further, ‘The
Ulster people were not, and are not, willing to turn away from a prominent
partnership in a galaxy of nations to an introspective, obscurantist,
Gaelic-speaking agricultural republic’ (p.56).
Greating cookin’!: Introduction to Florence Irwin, The Cookin’ Woman, Irish Country Recipes and Others (London: Oliver Boyd 1949), 229pp., ‘Great living implies good and gracious eating; mean and niggardly eating signifies a mean and niggardly outlook on life. Our meals are becoming as mechanised as our minds. But a live mind does not depend on mas meals, it demands particular food.’ (p.ix); ‘Mr. Shaw eats meals that are as sybaritic as a man, deeply addicted to a vegetarian diet, can ever hope to attain.’ (p.viii.)
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Mrs. Martin’s Man (Maunsel 1914): the title character has married a sailor, contrary to the wishes of her family, the Mahaffys; she was a woman of middle height, very slender and very pale. She had calm, passionless eyes and a gnele look, and although she was not a beautiful woman or even a women of good appearance, she had phsyical qualities which made her attractive to men of a hard, rough type. She looked fragile, but beneath her lean appearance there lay a great hiddens tory of nervous force which enabled her to execute gigantic tasks. It was this quality of the implacable which enabled her to open the hardware shop and make it prosper …; [7]; at the opening of the novel she awaits the return of her husband from sea, following a telegram saying that he is tired of the sea; she thinks back to the time when she was living with Mrs. Crothers at Ballyreagh, who has housed her since she was rejected by her family after her marriage to James, a man of strong personality but a lowly sailor; on coming home from sea, James cows Mrs. Crowthers (threatening to remove Martha), and Mrs. Crowther first relents, then loses spirit shortly afterwards and dies, leaving the house to their occupation; Mr. Mahaffy dies, reviling and disinheriting his daughter, but Esther, Martha’s sister, comes to stay with her instead of with her brother; she remembers the birth and death of her first child, which drove James from her (‘he had always been a restless an, but after the death of her baby, there were added to his restlessness anger and sullen tempers and swift changes of mood’); James had turned to Esther, growth beautiful (‘Her lips were full and red and she had little white, sharp teeth. Her breasts were like round towers’); they turn to kissing; she won’t let Esther leave the house for fear of confirming rumours that, but James is tired of both of them (‘crying a girning’); she has a child, Jamesey; she decides to opens a shop and her husband announces that he is coming home no more, though leaving her pregnant with her second child, Aggie (‘the terrible infamy of desertion’); she keeps it to herself that James has deserted her even form her sister, whose bed he has deserted likewise; she prospers; Henry writes to the Queen to find James; on the day the letter arrives - sixteen years after his departure - Martha and Esther confide frankly in each other for the first time; Martha reflects, ‘mebbee, it’s as well for Esther to be havin’ him love her like that, than for her not to be havin’ no one at all!’ [68]; notable conversation between Henry, Jane and Martha in which Henry offers the view, ‘A sure, there has to be sailors, an’ sailors needs women the same as other men!’ [75]; note discourse of decency which arises when Henry tells of sailor’s wife visited by three pretenders, to which Jane, ‘ Ah quit talkin’, Henry and’ be decent!’ [76]; ‘huggin’ and kissin’ your own sister’s [husband] … it’s not decent’ [83]; ‘tay’s the national drink of Ireland’ [91]; meanwhile, Esther is dreaming back to James, the ‘strong rough man, with arms that could crush you and lips tha pressed fiercely on yours’ [89]; enter James: ‘a dark bearded man, rough of aspect, and surly of manner … he looked uncertain’; ‘Come in .. You must be in need of your tay!’ [94]. [&c.]; [Andra’ Macalister:] ‘It’s a poor homecoming for your da to be made turn a Cathlik by Home Rulers, an’ him havin’ to bless himself with Holy [W]ater, an’ say his prayers to the Virgin Mary, an’ mebbe kissin’ the Pope’s toe the way ould Gladstone done. He did indeed, daughter! I say one time myself on a picture. Right down on his bended knees he was, kissin’ the ould Pope’s toes ...’ (Maunsel Edn., 1914, p.175.)
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The Wayward Man (Robert Dunwoody returns to Belfast to take on shopkeeping for his mother, but rejects merchantilism for a poor girl and a life at sea; includes reflections on the Catholic ‘Other’), ‘he had many and singular thoughts about Catholics, who had the fascination of mysterious and forbidden people for him. Sometimes he peered through the windows of repositories at the crucifixes and scapulars and rosaries and statues of Saints and holy Families and, most of all, the pictures of the Sacred heart. These last oddly repelled him, though he could not have said why [... T]here was Jesus, in a blue and red robe pointing to a hole in his side, where a large and very regular heart was visible. Flame rose from it and a wreath of thorns encircled its head. Great gouts of blood dropped from it, and a cross stood up from the flames! ... There were similar pictures of the virgin, whose heart sometimes, was peirced with swords. Robert, horribly fascinated by them, gazed at the pictures and felt sick. [...] the Holy pictures filled him with disgust, yet he was compelled to look at them. Trembling and awe-stricken, he would creep to the chapel door and peep in at the symbols of idolatry.’ ‘Nevertheless, his thoughts about Catholics continued to be odd, and it did not appear to him incredible or wrong that they should be used by soldiers for bayonet practice, though he cried terribly when he reflected that Paddy might some day be destroyed by a militiaman.’ ‘There are two Irelands and not two kinds of Irishmen, there are four million of Irish’ (in Sir Edward Carson and the Ulster Movement, 1915).
The Foolish Lovers (in which John MacDermott champions lower-middle class commercial values), ‘Palfrey had had the best of the argument, because Palfrey could use his tongue more efectively, but John had felt certain that the truth was not in Palfreg, and here tonight, in this palce where Commerce was most compacty to be seen, he knew that there was beauty in the labours of men, that bargaining and competition and striving energies and rivalry in skill were elements of loveliness.’
Letter to The Irish Worker, 1912: ‘The demand in lonely places is urgent, and the supply is monopolised; there is no competition in the mountainy parts of Donegal; the gombeen man devises his own political economy.’ (Cited in Thomas Gordon Brandon, ‘Patrick MacGill’ [MA Thesis, Univ. of Ulster, 1995].
Oscar Wilde: A Present Time Appraisal (Allen & Unwin 1951), ‘It was not much fun to be Mrs Wilde ... he felt disgusted by the physical facts of her pregnancy.’ Further, ‘He was deliberately sodomistic. He not only practised it as a vice but believed it should be practised’ [41]. Wilde, despite his brief abasement in De Profundis, seems never to have known that he was, directly in his argument about art for art’s sake, and indirectly in his downfall, pointing a moral as strictly and severely as a priest or arbitrary politician; and any hope he might have had of spreading his belief was destroyed when after his release from Reading, he reverted to his sewer life in Paris.’ [333].
Some Impressions of My Elders, NY: Macmillan 1922; London: George Allen & Unwin 1923): ‘But there is an explanation of all this crudity and violence in lreland. For all sorts of reasons, political, social, historical and religious, the critical faculty has rarely been employed and certainly has not developed. Either you are for a thing or you are against it. Doubt is treated as if it were antagonism. Reluctance to commit oneself to any scheme, however, fantastic or ill considered it may be, is treated as treason to the national spirit. A man who asserts his belief in the establishment of an Irish Republic by force, if necessary, is an Irishman, even though he may be a "daga", and any one who is doubtful of the feasibility of this proposal is denounced as a West Briton, an anglicised Irishman, even, on occasions as "not Irish at all", although his forbears have lived in Ireland for generations. The state of affairs in Ireland is not unlike the state of affairs in Russia, where literary criticism, as a Russian writer has stated, has always tended to be the handmaid of political faction. "Any writer of sufficient talent", wrote a reviewer in The Times Supplement "who adopted a liberal attitude was certain of the appreciation of the intelligensia’s acknowledged critical leaders, and hence of a wide and enthusiastic audience. But writers whose instinct for the truth led them to doubt the sufficiency of doctrinaire discontent with the established order were debarred from literary advancement, and had to struggle against the grain of popular and even academic valuation’; further, ‘the truth about peasant civilisation is that it is a mean civilisation, in which mean virtues complete with mean vices, and the small and local thing is esteemed above the big and world wide thing.’ (p.106.) (Cited in Richard Mills, DPhil UUC, 1997.)
Sir Edward Carson and the Ulster Movement (1915), ‘The world is full of deadly vapours, and the history of mankind is a long epic of the attempts that men make to dispel them. It sometimes happens that poisoned men behave in a way which makes the task of dispelling these vapours difficult, but the force that animates the world will not be overruled forever by angry little men, inflamed by poisons which they mistake for healing potions. There will come great gales out of heaven that will blow the vapours from the valleys and leave the hill-tops clear to every eye. Every act of reconciliation is a gale from God, and when Protestants and Catholics, Orangemen and Ancient Hibernians put their hands together, and the four beautiful fields of Cathleen ni Houlihan become one pasture, there will be no poisonous vapours left in Ireland to obscure the destiny of Irishmen. (p.122.)
Ulster English: ‘When an English thinks of an Ulsterman, he thinks of a dour, humourless, unkindly and uncouth person, deeply absorbed in the making of money, and almost destitute of culture and charm ...//with extraordinary skill, the Southern Irishman has persuaded the Englishman to accept his myths as eternal truths, and has been assisted in his persuasions by the susceptibility of the Englishman to the "charm" which is better described as humbug ... Already people are agreeing that there is more humour in Ulster than in all the other provinces of Ireland put together.’ (Preface to Ulster Songs and Ballads, ed. H. R. Hayward, 1925; quoted in P. J. Kavanagh, Voices in Ireland, 1994, p.39 - who also cites Ervine’s view of O’Casey’s prose as ‘a mixture of Jimmy O’Dea and Tommy Handley’, adding that he (Kavanagh) knew and loved O’Dea while his father wrote the words for Handley, making Ervine’s words seem a commendation. (Ibid., p.279).
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References
Maunsel (publisher’s list, appended to Mr. Martin’s
Man, pop. edn., 1915): Mr. Martin’s Man, with review notices
including attestation by Rebecca West that he ‘proves himself quite
definitely a novelist who counts, whose books are "right"’ (Daily
News and Leader); ‘Your Mrs Martin’s Man is amazingly
good … bad luck to pubilsh it in the midst of this war confusion
but even that wont drown so fine a thing as yours’ (H. G. Wells to
the author); ‘All through it shines the spirit of Mrs. Martin herslef,
unalterably strong, sweet and sensible’ (TLS); ‘Mr Ervine’s
delineation of this extraordinarly noble woman is perfect’ (Pall
Mall Gazette); ‘One could not imagine a more pathetic and yet
withal a more noble figure than Martha Martin’ (Globe); a
‘book which dares to be outspoem to an alarming extent, yet there
is in it from beginning to end not one word which is not of absolute purity’
(Spectator); ‘Ireland is to be congratulated on her new recruit
- to the ranks of novelists who are also artists … Mrs Martin is
a real creation, an absolutely living, singularly original and satisfying
woman (Morning Post); ‘Mrs Martin’s forgiveness is one
of the most beautiful things in modern fiction’ (Everyman); ‘To
have drawn a woman at once so colourless and so powerful , so beautiful
in spirit, and yet so illuminatingly true to life, is a very considerable
achievement.’ (New Statesman). ALSO, Alice and a Family,
a story of South London by St. John Ervine (‘full of character and
kindly laughter’, TLS; called an ‘experimentalising spirit’
by the Observer).
Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction: A Guide to Irish Novels, Tales, Romances and Folklore [Pt. 2] (Cork: Royal Carbery 1985), lists The Mountain and Other Stories (1928); Belfast novels, The Foolish Lovers (1920) [in which a lad has an affair with the waitress wife of a policeman, leaves Belfast, returns, marries happily and starts a sweet-shop], The Wayward Men (1927) [Alec Dunwoody, a would-be minister with a small business, spends time in low-life New York, with frank brothel scenes, returns, marries, thrives in business], and St. John Ervine Omnibus (1934) [with the aforementioned novels and The First Mrs Fraser].
Margaret Drabble, ed., Oxford Companion to English Literature cites Mixed Marriage (1911); The Magnanimous Lover (1912); John Ferguson (1915), all at the Abbey; wrote as drama critic for Morning Post and Observer in England; The First Mrs Fraser, West End success (1929); also studies of Charles Stewart Parnell (1925), General Booth, and G. B. Shaw (1956).
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2: selects Mixed Marriage [712-16]; the first consequential Northern playwright, ... Shavian and Fabian influence on first plays, produced in England (Jane Clegg, 1913, and The Orangeman, 1914) frustrated by innate Unionism; the historically repetitive Belfast tragedy of Mixed Marriage enters an urban vernacular, 564-565; 719, BIOG: St John Greer Ervine; went to London, 1900; met Shaw and became involved with Fabians; tried to convert the Abbey into a repertory company and almost caused its collapse; leg amputated; wrote prolifically for the London stage and, after 1936, for the Abbey again; died at Seaton in Devon. See also ed. remarks in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), Vol. 3, pp.492, 937, 1138.
D. E. S. Maxwell, Modern Irish Drama (Cambridge UP 1984) lists Four Irish Plays, The Critics, Jane Clegg [DIL performed Manchester 1913, cf. FDA, London 1913], The Orangeman, Mixed Marriage (NY 1911; Dub. 1914); also Mixed Marriage (Maunsel 1911); Jane Clegg (Lon. 1914); John Ferguson (Dub., Lon., and NY, 1915; with intro. by Ervine, NY 1920); Boyd’s Shop (Lon 1947).
Kevin Rockett, et al., eds., Cinema & Ireland (1988), cites Boyd’s Shop, 1936 play, directed as a film by Emmet Dalton, 1960; Television Production Co. with Lennox Robinson, Ernest Blythe, and Louis Elliman[n] [107].
British Library holds [listed under Saint [sic] John Greer Ervine], intro. to Hugh Quinn, Mrs McConaghy’s Money; A Quiet Twelfth; Collecting the Rent (1932); intro to New Eversley Shakespeare (1935); Four Irish Plays (Maunsel 1914); Four One Act Plays [Magnanimous Lovers; Progress; Critics; Orangeman] (Dublin & London: Maunsel; NY: Macmillan 1914); Four One-Act Plays [The Magnanimous Lover, Progress, Ole George Comes to Tea, She Was No Lady] (London: Allen & Unwin; NY: Macmillan 1928); Ervine Omnibus, 3 pts. [Foolish Lovers; Wayward Man; Mrs Frazer] (Collins [1933; reissu. of 1920, 1929, & 1931]); Alice and a Family, A Story of South London (Dublin: Maunsel 1915); The Alleged Art of Cinema [Univ. College London Soc.); Anthony and Anna, comedy in 3 acts (London: Allen & Unwin; NY: Macmillan 1925, 1936); Boyd’s Shop, comedy in 4 acts (London: Allen & Unwin; NY: Macmillan 1936), 110pp.; Changing Winds, novel (Maunsel 1917), 571pp.; Craigavon (Allen & Unwin 1949); Eight O’Clock and Other Stories (Dublin: Maunsel 1913), 120pp.; Foolish Lovers (Chatto & Windus 1929; Collins [1931]), 128pp.; 3316pp.; Francis Place, The Tailor of Charing Cross [Fabian Tract No. 165] (1912), 27pp.; Friends and Relations, comedy in 3 acts (Allen & Unwin 1947), 100pp.; The Future of the Press [Word Press News Lib. No. 3] (London 1933) [port.]; God’s Soldier, Gen. William Booth (Heinemann 1934), vxi, vii, 1165pp.; How to Write a Play (Allen & Unwin 1914), 119pp.; Jane Clegg, a play in 3 acts (Sidgewick & Jackson 1914); If I Were a Dictator (Methuen 1934), 121pp.; John Ferguson, a play in 4 acts (Manusel 1915), 115pp.; Is Liberty Lost? [Post-war Questions] (Individualist Bookshop 1941), 47pp.; The Lady of Belmont, play in 5 acts (Allen & Unwin 1923), 95pp.; The Magnanimous Lovers, play in one act (Maunsel 1912; 4th imp. Allen & Unwin 1931), 26pp.; Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, light comedy in 4 acts (Allen & Unwin 1923), 96pp.; Mixed Marriage, a play in 4 acts [Abbey Theatre Series vol. 15] (Dublin: Maunsel 1911), 58pp.; The Mountain and Other Stories (Allen & Unwin 1928), 239pp.; Old Mrs Clifford; [with] Safety [from A Mountain, &c.] (London: Polybooks 1944), 16pp.; Mrs Martin’s Man (Maunsel 1914), 312pp.; My Brother Tom, a country comedy in 3 acts (Allen & Unwin 1952), 76pp.; Ole George Comes to Tea, comedy in 3 acts (Allen & Unwin 1931), 27pp.; Theatre, A Plea in Cvics (allen & Unwin 1924), 213pp.; Oscar Wilde, A present time reappraisal (Allen & Unwin 1951), 336pp.; Parnell (London: Ernest Benn 1925), 341pp. [port of author]; another ed. (1928 [actually 1927]); another ed. (Queensbury Press [1936]), 318pp.; another ed. [Penguin No.457] (Harmondsworth 1944), 253pp.; People of Our Class, comedy in 3 acts (Allen & Unwin [1948]), 100pp.; Progress [3rd imp.] ((Allen & Unwin 1931), 28pp.; The Ship, play in 3 acts (Allen & Unwin; NY: Macmillan 1922); Sir Edward Carson and the Ulster Movement [Irishmen of Today] (1915), 125pp. [no. publ.]; Some Impressions of my Elders (NY: Macmillan 1922), 305pp,; another ed., (Allen & Unwin 1923; rep. 1924), 286pp.; Sophia (London: Macmillan 1941), 355pp.; The State of the Soul [Essex Hall Lecture] (London: Lindsay Press 1939), 47pp.; The Theatre in My Time (London: Rich & Cowan 1933), 250pp.; The Wayward Man (London: Penguin 1936), 286pp. [END]
Belfast Public Library holds 30 titles, 1914-1959, Jane Clegg (1914, 1924); Alice and the Family; Anthony and Anna; Boyd’s Shop; Changing Winds; Eight O’Clock and Other Stories; The First Mrs. Fraser, (1931), a novel; Foolish Lovers (1920); 4 One Act Plays, The Magnanimous Lover, Progress; Ole George Come to Tea; She was No Lady; (1928); Friends and Relations; How to Write a Play; John Ferguson (1919, 1934); A Journey to Jerusalem; The Lady of Belmont (1923, 1940); The Magnanimous Lover (1912); Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary (1923, 1949); Mixed Marriage (1911, 1920); Mountain and Other Stories; Parnell (1925); People of Our Class; Private Enterprise: a Play in 3 Acts (1948); Robert’s Wife; St. John Ervine Omnibus (n.d.); The Ship: A Play in Three Acts (1922, 1926, 1933); Sir Edward Carson and the Ulster Movement (1915); Sophia; The first Mrs. Fraser, a play (1930); Wayward Man (1932); The Theatre in My Time (1933); If I Were a Dictator (1934); God’s Soldier, General William Booth [1935]; Ulster (1944); Craigavon Ulsterman (1949); My Brother Tom (1952). CATL, Private Enterprise, A Play in 3 Acts (1948).
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Notes
No fees: Shaw conveys Ervine’s complaints about failure of
Abbey to pay fees for production of his plays, in 1931 [see Dan H Laurence
and Nicholas Grene, Shaw, Lady Gregory and the Abbey, A correspondence
and a Record (Gerrards Cross 1993)].
View on Shaw: Ervine converses with others on George Bernard Shaw, in W. R. Rodgers, Irish Literary Portraits (BBC 1972), pp.117-41 [broadcast in 1954]; speaks of suddenly being shorn of his social attitudes by first hearing Shaw talk [or played: check].
Shaw’s methods: Ervine wrote of Shaw’s Prefaces that ‘he used them for the discussion of whatever happened to be in his head’ (cited by Rhoda Nathan, review of Laurence and Leary, eds., Complete Prefaces, Vol. II: 1914-1929, Penguin 1995; Irish Literary Supplement, Spring 1996, p.23.)
Plagiarist? John S. Crone (ed.) writes in The Irish Book Lover of the Parnellite ballad: ‘ Isn't it surprising how that old grand come-all-ye “Cowld Kilmain-ham Jail” crops up in the most unexpected places? Here it is in this month on the leader page of The Times no less! It appears that Sir John Ross, the last Lord Chancellor of Ireland, in his recently published Pilgrim Scrip tells how he and Percy French composed the song—two more claimants to the honour , mark you—that makes five I have known. But Mr. Fletcher, the literary executor of A. D. Godley, the late Public orator at Oxford , denies the statement, gives the date of its first appearance, and says the original MS is still in the possession of God-ley's sister. The fact is: when the ballad first appeared in an English periodical, it was doubtless ‘touched up' doubtless by several persons, real names introduced, and local colour added. It was printed as a ballad slip, and sung through the streets of Dublin . St. John Ervine in his Parnell , quotes it in full, and the curious can compare it with the original in Lyra Frivola ( London 1900). So far, St. John has not replied to the charge.’ ( “Sgéala ó Chathair na gCeó”, in IBL, Vol. XVI, No. 1 ( Jan. & Feb. 1928 ), 2.
Bleaters: Ervine condemned Ireland as a land of ‘bleating Celtic Twilighters, sex-starved Daughters of the Gael, gangsters and gombeen-men’ in letter to Shaw rep. in Shaw: Life, Work and Friends (1956), p.110 (cited in Richard Mills, DPhil UUC, 1997.)
Easter 1916: Ervine’s memoirs and reflections on the 1916 Rising in Dublin are cited in several parts of Max Caulfield, The Easter Rebellion (1963; Gill Dublin: & Macmillan 1995).
The Lady of Belmont catches up with Shakespeare’s Shylock some years after The Merchant of Venice: ‘We cannot go back, we must go on and mingle with the world and lose ourselves in other men. I know that outward things pass and have no duration. There is nothing left but the goodness which a man performs.’ (Quoted in Norman Vance, Irish Literature: A Social History, 1990, p.185; cited in Christopher John Fauske ‘A Life Merely Glimpsed: Louis MacNeice and the End of the Anglo-Irish Tradition’, in Tjebbe A. Westentrop & Jane Mallinson, eds., The Literature of Politics, The Politics of Literature, Vol. 5, Amstersdam: Rodopi 1995, p.189.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)