Inventing Ireland (12 page)

The problem of the Dysarts is that of so many of the big house
families in the novels of Jane Austen: a stasis that amounts to torpor. Their denizens' every gesture seems self-cancelling, as when the mother of the house plants duckweeds in the mistaken belief that they are asters. (The visiting Englishwoman is, of course, amazed that such a lady should be doing the gardener's work at all.) Against that torpor, the impulse-ridden Francie has a certain jaunty nobility, the nobility of a beautiful wild thing rather than that of the domesticated and tamed. Somerville and Ross debated long the advisability of killing her off at the end: "It felt like killing a wild bird that had trusted itself to you. We have often been reviled for that, as for many other incidents in
The Real Charlotte,
but I think we were right".
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Edith Somerville's mother was one of the many readers who could find no nobility, only vulgarity, in Francie. "She deserved to break her neck for her vulgarity", she wrote rather harshly, "the girls had to kill her to get the whole set of them out of the awful muddle they had got into".
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"All here loathe Charlotte", she intoned, protesting against the general nastiness of the characters and the weakness of Christopher.

Like many early reviewers, Mrs. Somerville admired the brilliant writing and cordially despised the "disagreeable characters", ignoring the fact that the novel is at its best in recording the plight of females in a small-town culture, the impossibility of their being away for long from disagreeable people. Even in the writing of it, Somerville and Ross were repeatedly chided for their dereliction of social duty on tennis-court and lake: the former complained that
her suitor
Herbert Greene had a persistent habit of ignoring the fact that she had work to do.
¹⁶
A century earlier, Jane Austen had complained that
women had "scarce a half-hour they can call their own": and Edith Somerville's reports to her partner suggest that in the interim little had changed:

To attempt anything serious or demanding steady work is just simply impossible here, and I feel sickened of even trying – we are all so tied together – whatever is done must be done by everyone in the whole place and as the majority prefer wasting their time that is the prevalent amusement.
¹⁷

Their problem was that of their characters: to learn how to keep on terms with an often disagreeable social world without too great a dishonesty to themselves. Their satire was a classic instance of Austen-esque "regulated hatred":
¹⁸
they sought by it to find a mode of existence within society for critical attitudes which, if taken any further, might destroy it altogether. As a duo they could form a sort of
alternative society, offering one another mutual protection and support: only an
individual
as steely as Austen could hold out against the mindless sociable consensus. Edith Somerville saw in her mother's misreading of her greatest novel incontrovertible evidence of the collapse of cultural standards in Anglo-Ireland. "It shows a failure of understanding that is awful in the light it sheds on the gulf between our and their mental standpoints", she confided to Martin: "My feeling is that
any
character is interesting if treated realistically. They care for nothing but belted earls or romantic peasants".
¹⁹
Again, the contempt for conventional taste is Austenesque, recalling that artist's determination to create a heroine "whom nobody will like very much". Francie Fitzpatrick is no
Emma Woodhouse, but she shares some of her qualities of self-deception, impulsiveness and, at times, heedlessness. Of her Violet Martin said, "I think she ought to be in some way striking or in some way typical of her type, but not necessarily with leanings towards perfection".
²⁰

For all her flaws, Francie is far more charming than Mrs. Somerville allowed, and that charm is repeatedly heightened by contrast with her cousin. Where Francie comes across as insouciant and guileless, Charlotte appears as painfully manipulative; the former is all feminine vivaciousness, while the latter, even if she is blessed with a colourful use of language and a taste for advanced novels, tends to employ her intellect mainly to sardonic effect. Though named for Charlotte, the book begins and ends with the Francie who fails hopelessly to read her cousin's real motives. "The central struggle of the novel", in the words of one commentator, "is a struggle in which Francie scarcely knows she is engaged".
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The narrative cannot, therefore, be continuously centred in her consciousness, if only because she has so little inner life to report: but what fascinates in
The Real Charlotte
is the author's elegant refusal to privilege any one consciousness at all. If Francie's is too rudimentary for constant interest, Charlotte's is too malign for ongoing empathy, Christopher's too tentative in its movements, Roddy's too self-caressing; and Hawkins (for whom Francie falls) appears to have no spiritual life at all. The result is a decentred narrative, in the course of which even household animals – cats, dogs, cockatoos – have fleeting moments of dramatized awareness.

The social world of Lismoyle is the more fully rendered in consequence: we see the characters not only as they see themselves, but through all the fluctuations of public opinion. Because Francie can move so easily from place to place, or from one social setting to another, the reader builds up something approaching a total portrait
of a society, observing the amusing differences between one code and another, as she moves through its different layers. The indeterminate status of Charlotte Mullen, equally, allows her to speak on self-confident terms with the lady of the manor or, conversely, employ the Irish language to intimidate her tailor, Danny Lydon, or her powers of English to frighten the washerwomen tenants of her cottages. The filth of these cottages she sees more as a rebuke to the occupants than to herself: it is clear that Somerville and Ross, raised on the notion of responsible landlordry, would not share the view. They have the moral courage in such a scene to raise problems for which they have no ready answer.
The Real Charlotte
thus becomes one of the very rare Irish narratives which is actually a novel in the comedy-of-manners mode, calibrating itself to the layers of a fairly complex (if restricted) society.

Intending to criticize a society which they yet wished to remain within, Somerville and Ross chose to express their ultimate values by
technique, with
irony as a prevailing narrative point of view. Like other novels of manners, this is designed not just to be read but re-read, and its art is a strategy of preparations. The authors have an overall design in mind; the characters may be seen to fight it as it slowly envelops them; but in the end that design wins out and is shown to have been unavoidable. Every seemingly casual conversation or minor epiphany points forward as well as back, gaining resonance and meaning. When Roddy Lambert uses too much topsail on his boat, thereby almost drowning himself and his crew, something permanent has been implied about the self-destructive showiness of a man living well beyond his means: and so we are not surprised, hundreds of pages later, when his new wife proves also unequal to her challenges, "like a little boat staggering under more sail than she can carry".
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The novel begins with a moment when Roddy Lambert saved Francie from falling from a bolting horse-and-cart; it progresses to a scene in which he warns her that "someday you'll be breaking your neck"
²³
and with warnings that Francie is no great shakes as a rider; it plays tragic variations on her early reluctance to have
him
for rescuer ("Botheration to him! Why couldn't he have been somebody else?"); and it ends with her terrible and final fall. This patterning, as subtle as it is pervasive, suggests a controlling intelligence which is not simply sceptical but also definitive of social value, and an intelligence, moreover, which is embodied in the overall design. Amidst all the off-key notes struck repeatedly by most of the characters, the authors now and then strike a clear and singular sound, against which all others are heard as wanting. This is what lifted
their art above the provincial guffawing of which they were sometimes accused, for as
C. S. Lewis has written: "Where there is no norm, nothing can be ridiculous, except for a brief moment of unbalanced
provincialism in which we may laugh at the merely unfamiliar. Unless there is something about which the author is never ironical, there can be no true irony in the work".
²⁴

Much of the irony is at Charlotte Mullens expense. Though she is the character left to pick up what pieces remain at the end, she is also a classic study of "the banality of evil". In another world, and blessed with better looks, she might have been a cigar-smoking Emma Bovary, as well as the reader of French fiction which she is: but in this one, her attempt to import her orphaned cousin to reanimate a big house proves wholly abortive. Indeed, when Francie quite coolly refuses the offer of marriage from Christopher Dysart, for which Charlotte so long had plotted, it is as if the Heathcliffean element in the story passes from Francie (in whom it was benign) to Charlotte (in whom it festers). Thwarted in her desire for Roddy Lambert by Francie's marriage to him, she is left with nothing to pursue but her revenge, and so "the real Charlotte's will and the terror of her personality"
²⁵
are finally allowed to show through. That personality has always been "amphibious", in the sense that the surface bubbles betrayed the real creature beneath, whom few in Lismoyie had suspected of having anything to conceal: and the ease with which she effects this deception suggests that her inventors were, to some extent, gleefully complicit in her contempt for a society so easily misled. Yet, in the final analysis, even her attempts at vengeance peter out into triteness and insignificance, as when she "looses" the new Mrs. Lambert (in the absence of her husband) to the predatory Hawkins.

If
The Real Charlotte
dismisses its characters with a shrug that is more exasperated than amused, that is only because the writers have been unable to imagine anyone surviving long in this society with an intelligence similar to their own. In Lismoyle provincialism and ridicule remain the order of the day, and this cannot but disappoint in a book which sought to ask the question: who shall inherit Ireland? The answer appears to be: nobody in particular, except for a few, random profiteers, and certainly not the Francie Fitzpatricks. At the closing scene, the servant Norry carries the terrible news of her fall to the now hopelessly-divided Charlotte and Roddy:

Neither Charlotte nor Lambert heard clearly what she said, but the shapeless terror of calamity came about them like a vapour and blanched the
hatred in their faces. In a moment they were together at the window, and at the same instant Norry burst out into the yard, with outflung arms and grey hair streaming. As she saw Lambert, her strength seemed to go from her. She staggered back, and, catching at the door for support, turned from him and hid her face in her cloak.
²⁶

This is an ominous image of a landless class left rudderless in a new Ireland, whose putative inheritors are quite unequal to the challenges with which they have confronted themselves. Yet – and this is strange – at various moments in the unfolding of the tale, it is such persons who act as a choric voice within the plot for the authors' overall design.

Julia Duffy, facing ruin and appearing quite drunk to Christopher and Francie, can nonetheless encapsulate the entire second half of the novel in her ranting complaints:

Where's Charlotte Mullen, till I tell her to her face that I know her plots and her thricks? 'Tis to say that to her I came here, and to tell her 'twas she lent money to Peter Joyce that was grazing my farm, and refused it to him secondly, the way he'd go bankrupt on me, and she's to have my farm and my house that my grandfather built, thinking to even herself with the rest of the gentry. . .
²⁷

That Miss Duffy should be at once a landless peasant and ruined aristocrat increases the suspicion that Somerville and Ross implied more here than they cared to say. In the fate of a demoralized peasantry, hiding its terrified face in its cloak, they read the failure and the
destiny of their own class. Near the very end, another rudderless old retainer, Billy Grainy, repeats the warning first given to Francie by Julia Duffy: "Ah-ha! go home to himself and owld Charlotte, though it's little thim regards you".
²⁸
Miss Duffy had earlier mocked Francie: "Lady Dysart of Bruff, one of these days, I suppose . . . That's what Miss Charlotte Mullen has laid out for ye ...",
²⁹
followed by a derisory laugh. Second time around, in the lamentations of Billy Grainy, Francie intuits some sense of her fate in the faces of peasants at a passing funeral. "The faces in the carts were all turned upon her, and she felt as if she were enduring, in a dream, the eyes of an implacable tribunal".
³⁰
A moment later the keen has broken out and she is dead. Somerville and Ross, in that gesture, implicitly concede that theirs has been an unconscionably jaunty book about a hopeless situation.

The cousins' concern about the fate of women in society led them to a stria investigation of some of its most persistent codes: and they are
unsparing in the attitude which they adopt towards those "turkey hens" among their
female characters, who abjectly defer to husbandly ways. The first Mrs. Lambert is slaughtered thus casually in a passing parenthesis, for the crime of uttering the words "Mr. Lambert" in conversation:

Mrs. Lambert belonged to that large class of
women who are always particular to speak of their husbands by the full style and title.
³¹

This woman, who will later mistake a Shakespearian quotation for a strange term in cookery, dies an early death; and it is not altogether clear that the authors dissent from Charlottes accounting of her as "that contemptible, whining creature".
³²
Indeed, Charlotte, precisely because as an unmarried forty-year-old she lives at a certain angle to Lismoyle society, becomes in the hands of Somerville and Ross an invaluable instrument for social satire, more often vehicle than target: