Life
1899-1980 [Percival Arland Ussher] b. Battersea, London; grew up in Cappagh,
Co. Waterford; ed. Abbotsholme Sch., Derbyshire and TCD, and St. John’s
College, Cambridge; learned Irish; the first trans. of Merriman’s
Midnight Court (1926), with a Preface by W. B. Yeats; translation
of Eachtra Ghiolla an Amaráin of Donnchadh Ruadh Mac Conmara
as ‘Adventures of a Luckless Fellow’ (1929), printed with The
Midnight Court (1929); friendly with Samuel Beckett in the 1930s;
rejected offer of agency for Lord Rathdowne, conveyed to him by Beckett,
for fear that his own father might not bequeath the family estate to him,
1937; contrib. ‘The Contemporary Thought of Ireland’ to Dublin
Magazine, 1947; contrib. ‘Meditation on Marx’ to University
Review (1955), and suffered reactionary attack in same by Rev. Dermot
O’Donoghue; philosophical and hermetic works incl. Journey Through
Dread (1955), on Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre; The Face and
Mind of Ireland (1949) and Three Great Irishmen (1952), on
Shaw, Yeats and Joyce; 12 years president of MIAL; Spanish Mercy
(1959); Sages and Schoolmen (1967), on Platonic philosophers; early
and later marriages; later works The XXII Keys of Tarot (Dublin
1977); The Juggler (1982), journal extracts, with Eros and Psyche
(q.d.), an untimely and apparently anti-feminist essay on the complementarity
of the sexes; latterly lived on Green Rd., Dublin; a funeral oration was
spoken by Mervyn Wall [Eugene Welply], 29 Dec. 1980; extracts of his 14
vol. diary, 1943-77 are From a Dark Lantern (1978) and The Juggler
(1982); there is a head by Marjorie Fitzgibbons in
the RDS. DIB DIW DIL KUN OCIL
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Works
Monographs, Postscript on Existentialism and Other Essays
(Dublin: Sandymount; London: Williams & Norgate 1946); The Twilight
of Ideas and Other Essays (Dublin: Sandymount 1948); The Face and
Mind of Ireland (Gollancz 1949); The Magic People (London:
Gollancz 1950), 158pp.; Three Great Irishmen (London: Gollancz
1952; rep. NY: Biblo & Tannen 1968); An Alphabet of Aphorisms
(Dolmen [1953]), [pamph.]; The Thoughts of Wi Wong (Dublin: Dolmen
Press 1956), [16]pp., ill.; with Carl von Metzradt, Enter These Enchanted
Woods: An Interpretation of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, preface by Padraic
Colum (Palma de Mallorca 1955; Dublin; Dolmen Press 1957, 1966), 63pp.,
ill. by Tate Adams [incls. Servant as Hero; Versions of Goose Girl, Snow
White, Lettuce Girl, Juniper Tree, Cinderella, Goldilocks, Rumpelstiltskin,
Sweetheart Roland, Hansel and Gretel]; Journey Through Dread (London:
Darwen Finlayson 1955); The Thoughts of Wi Wong (Dublin 1956) [pamph.];
The XXII Keys of Tarot (Dolmen 1957, 1969); Spanish Mercy
(London: Gollancz 1959); Sages and Schoolmen (Dolmen 1967); Eros
and Psyche (Runa P. 1977);ed., Caint an tSean-Shaoghail (Dublin:
Oifig an tSoláthair 1948). Also, Yeats and the Municipal Gallery
(1959) [called by A. N. Jeffares ‘the best introduction’ to
‘Municipal Gallery Revisited’; see New Commentary, 1984,
p.399.]
Journal extracts, From a Dark Lantern, ed. Roger Nyle Parisious [otherwise Parris] (Dublin: Cuala Press 1978); The Juggler: Selections from a journal by Arland Ussher [”Being the second series of From a Dark Lantern”], with a memoir by Mervyn Wall (Mountrath: Dolmen Press; N.J.: Atlantic Highlands 1982), 110pp. Query, Journal of Arland Ussher (Dublin: Raven Arts 1980).
Articles incl. ‘Meditation on Marx’, in University Review (Summer 1955), pp.3-17. Also, ‘The Contemporary Thought of Ireland’, in Dublin Magazine, 22 (July-Sept. 1947), pp.24-30; ‘Meditation on Marx’, in University Review (Summer 1955). Also, ‘Arland Ussher’ [autograph entry], in Stanley Kunitz, ed., Twentieth-century Authors: a Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature (NY: H. W. Wilson & Co. 1967 Edn.)
Miscellaneous, introduction to J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (London: Neville Spearman, [1958]), xii, 292pp.
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Criticism
Mervyn Wall [funeral oration], in Journal of Irish Literature,
‘A Wall Number’, Vol. XI, No.1 & 2 (January-May 1982).
Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature, London: Pluto Press 1998), pp.204-07. See also under Brian Merriman [Rx.] for W. B. Yeats’s Preface to Ussher’s trans. The Midnight Court (1926), pp 204-6.
Stanley Kunitz, ed.,Twentieth-century Authors: a Biographical
Dictionary of Modern Literature (NY: H. W. Wilson & Co. 1967 Edn.).
W. J. McCormack, ‘The Biographia Literaria of Vivian Mercier’, in Bullán, 2, 1 (Summer 1995), p.95..
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Notes
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing
(Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3: citation in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’
[1934]: In ‘Man Poem’ (1919) Mr Percy Usher [sic], best known
as translator of Merriman’s ‘Midnight Court’, deals with
himself and the vacuum in a manner that abides no question. One would
like to see this work, before it is improved out of existence, safely
between the boards; [ed. note, Percy Ussher, self-taught Irish scholar
and philosophical belle-lettrist, 1889-1980], 247; Liam de Paor, ‘Ireland’s
Identities’ (in Crane Bag 1979) cites his epigraph for The
Face and Mind of Ireland, itself taken from Montegut: ‘this race
is at the same time inferior and superior to the rest of humanity ..’
[see infra]; also, Ussher’s remark in same:
‘The Irishman is a bohemian and a j’m’enfoutiste
in his way of living, somewhat the play-actor (or ‘playboy’)
alike in sanction and passion, seeing existence as a show - while remaining
as far as possible uninvolved’ (p. 659).
Hyland Catalogue 219 (Oct. 1995; do. 1999) lists an uncorrected proof copy of Spanish Mercy (1st edn. 1959) erroneously entitled ‘Spanish Money’ throughout.
Belfast Public Library holds Journal of Arland Ussher (Dublin: Raven Arts 1980).
Emile Montégut is quoted on the
title page of The Face and Mind of Ireland (1949): ‘[T]his
race is at the same time inferior and superior to the rest of humanity.
One might say of the Irish that they find themselves in a false situation
here below. Placed between memory and hope, the race will never conquer
what it desires, and will never discover what it regrets.’ (The quotation
is also cited in FDA3, no source given.)
Samuel Beckett cites Ussher in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (1944), [as Usher; sic], calling him one of the ‘others’ who represent the progressive tendency of those that celebrate the ‘cold comforts of apperception’ and demonstrate that ‘it is the act and not the object of perception that matters.’ In return, Ussher chose Murphy as an example of a ‘the lack of synthesising philosophy of life’, in his 1947 address, ‘The Contemporary Thought of Ireland’. Ussher finds the same contradiction - flight into madness because he hates the ordered world - in Synge’s Well of the Saints. Also, ‘it is hard to believe that Ireland has become a No-Man’s-Land of the mind, or that she has grown provincial at the moment when she is, for the first time after centuries, a nation.’ (Dublin Magazine, 22, July Sept. 1947), pp.24-30. In reporting this, John Harrington comments, Ussher is particularly helpful in his emphasis on the excruciating reality of the moment as a local problem, not a cosmopolitan or metaphysical construction of reality. (The Irish Beckett, Syracuse UP 1991, pp.30, 103, &c.)
Robert Greacen, Brief Encounters (Belfast: Lagan Press 1991), notes that Ussher described his essays as ‘philosophical belles lettres’. The articles appeared in New English Weekly, edited by A. R. Orage; cites Three Great Irishmen; The Face and Mind of Ireland, and The Magic People (on the Jews).
The Journals of Arland Ussher are in the possession of Roger Parris [viz., Roger Nyle Parisous] and will shortly reach publication in full (BS2002). Mr. Parris notes that both The Magician and From a Dark Lantern are more extended selections from the Journals. I hold the manuscripts and hope to publish a comprehensive view as Arland instructed me.
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)