This was published in 2018, and it's by Colm Toibin (the author of The Magician, Brooklyn, and Long Island).

The subtitle is The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats & Joyce, and the third of those names is why I read it (I'm currently having a little Joyce season).

I found it absolutely fascinating.



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The introduction takes us on a walking tour through the palimpsest of memory, history, and literature that is Dublin.

Must visit, must visit...

I'd not really realized how poorly Dublin had been treated by its English overlords. When these "three prodigal fathers" were living in the city, it was poor and shabby, with very little in the way of actual industry; Wilde and Yeats et al sprang from a background that lacked a rich theatrical tradition or publishing industry. No wonder it formed for Joyce a "centre of paralysis".

But Toibin wants us to move on: "I have walked enough. Some city streets, in the wake of these figures and their sons, are haunted."


I prefer this cover...

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First, Sir William Wilde (1815-76), "an eminent Victorian", and a polymath. He studied medicine, gaining renown in the fields of surgery and epidemiology. He travelled, and published accounts of his journeys. He was a distinguished statistician (and commissioner for several censuses). And both he and his wife, Jane, took a keen interest not only in Irish natural history, but also in its folklore and legend.

Yet there's something rather weird about the couple. W.B. Yeats recognized that understanding Oscar meant taking into account "the mixture of formidable intelligences and unmoored strangeness exuded by his parents". And they're certainly a mass of contradictions. Jane is a society hostess who supports Irish nationalism. William is keen to emphasize the distinctiveness of Ireland, yet writes a "loyal" preface to salute the visit of the Queen and her consort. "This idea of unstable and gnarled allegiances, of some beliefs as a kind of veneer," Toibin writes, "was something that would become, in turn, an essential element in the life of Sir William Wilde himself and the lives of his wife and his son. It was their very instability and unpredictability from which they would get much of their notoriety and power. No one was ever sure what they believed in, where their loyalty lay. Their identities were fragile, wavering, open to suggestion, and open also to pressure... What is fascinating is how the duality of their position made its way into the sexual realm. The Wildes... were an essential part of respectable Dublin society at the height of Victoria's rule, yet they flouted the rules of sexual morality."


William Wilde

W.W. had at least three illegitimate children before his marriage, but his private life really blew up over the case of Mary Travers. Initially a patient, then a kind of employee/mentee, she clearly became at some point something more. But then the relationship soured, and she began to run a pretty scurrilous pamphlet campaign aimed at the Wildes. Lady Wilde fired back with a letter to Mary's father. In this, she accused his daughter of consorting with "low newspaper boys" to set in motion an extortion racket, and enjoined him to bring her to heel. At which juncture, Mary Travers sued Lady Wilde for libel. The case drags up plenty of salty detail (W.W. is accused of raping her while she was chloroformed and unconscious), and ultimately the court finds in favour of the plaintiff. Her award is token (one farthing), but the Wildes have to pay the costs of the case. (There's lots more detail here and here.)

What interests Toibin is the way this trial prefigures Oscar Wilde's own legal debacle, long after his father had died. There are many parallels, he argues, including "the frenetic, fearless, almost manic activity" of the plaintiffs, and the bringing to light of "a long and turbulent sexual relationship between one of the Wildes and a younger person". The big difference, of course, was that W.W. enjoyed the support of the medical establishment, and carried on with his career. O.W., meanwhile, was sent to Reading Gaol (and lived only 3.5 years after the end of his sentence).


Newbury, 2024. The canal that ends in Reading...

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Toibin's subtitle for the section on John B. Yeats (1839-1922) is "the playboy of West Twenty-Ninth Street". And he does come across as the archetypal wastrel... He studied law, but wanted to be an artist. Nothing wrong with that. But when he headed for London to study art (leaving his wife behind), he ended up making no money, so his children had to live with relatives. Nor does he attempt to advance his career by courting the famous. Nothing wrong with that either, you might say, although I guess when you have a family you should leave no stone unturned to provide for them. His fundamental problem, however, can't be argued way: He seems incapable of actually finishing anything.

He has an up and down relationship with William B., his poet son. He criticizes him and the poetry he produces, but continues to tap him for loans. And when J.B. sails for New York in 1907 (never to return), it's W.B. who funds his accommodation.


John B. Yeats

He's still starting, restarting, and never finishing his paintings, but he's also become, says Toibin, one of the best letter writers of the age. Particularly interesting is his correspondence with Rosa Butt (the daughter of Isaac Butt, the lawyer who defended Mary Travers). These letters were made public only in 1979.

The two began to correspond in the year before J.B.'s wife's death (in 1900). "It is obvious," says Toibin, "that at some point in these next few years something happened between them." He tells her in his letters how much he appreciates her physical attractions, fills her in on the miseries of his marriage, and talks about going back to Ireland. But he doesn't want to leave New York as "a failure". He feels this city saved his life, whereas his time in Dublin and London was "awful": "I just stay on here, and dread Dublin as if it were a dark room haunted by a ghost."

They're strange letters, "filled with defiance in the face of old age". They foreshadow, Toibin tells us, some of the poetry W.B. wrote after his father's death: "the wild old wicked man... that wild old man... a coarse old man".

As W.B.'s fame grows, and J.B.'s work seems to have come to nought, the son writes a short memoir in which he recalls his father's negligence, carelessness, improvidence, and downright scariness. His father answers back, reproaching W.B. for not staying with him, and for marrying the wrong person. Without these decisions, the father insists, the son would have produced "realistic and poetical plays -- poetry in closest and most intimate union with the positive realities and complexities of life". He comes across as disappointed in his son's work: "The best thing in life is the game of life, and some day a poet will find this out. I hope you will be that poet. It is easier to write poetry that is far away from life, but it is INFINITELY more exciting to write the poetry of life -- and it is what the whole world is crying out for as pants the hart for the water brook."


Given his struggles, you kind of assume that John B. Yeats couldn't have been that good. Not so... Here's his very powerful portrait of Isaac Butt

W.B. writes to his sister after their father's death in New York: "I think in spite of his misfortunes that his life has been happy, especially in recent years; for more than any man I have ever known he could live in the happiness of the passing moment."

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And finally, "the two tenors: James Joyce and his father".

That father was John Stanislaus Joyce (1849-1831), and I already knew he was a bit of a monster. Feckless, overly fond of a drink, unpredictable, and often violent, he eventually dies, fairly ignominiously, in a boarding house.

James Joyce's relationship with this colourful father was appropriately complex: "Since his father's presence loomed so large in his Dublin, he would go into exile not only to escape the city of his birth but so that both Dublin and the man who had begotten him could move into shadow." And yet, the author "sought not only to memorialize his father but also to retrace his steps, enter his spirit, use what he needed from his father's life to nourish his own art". He tells Harriet Weaver: "Hundreds of pages and scores of characters in my books come from him."

It's the inconsistencies of this vein of inspiration that Toibin sets out to explore. Some of the stories in Dubliners employ an "unsparing, unmerciful" tone to reflect the parental character. But others -- for example, The Dead -- give his father "a rich dignity". In that story, the protagonist, Gabriel, is caught between two identities, Irish and cosmopolitan -- just as "Joyce is caught now between two visions of his father, the one he knows and remembers, and the other that he wishes to bring into being in order to rescue his imagination from a sense of narrow grievance that is capable only of debasing and maiming that same imagination". In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in Ulysses, there's a similar movement backwards and forwards between guilt and glory: "Because Joyce found the space between what he knew about John Stanislaus and what he felt about him so haunting and captivating, he forged a style that was capable of evoking its shivering ambiguities, combining the need to be generous with the need to be true to what it had been like in all its variety and fullness, and indeed its pain and misery."


Trieste, 2023. "Joyce collaborated with the local daily thanks to his friendship with Preziosi, the editor-in-chief. His articles, that appeared also in the evening edition Piccolo della Sera, were written in very good Italian and presented Irish social and political issues"

It's likely that James Joyce never fully came to terms with his towering parent. The author's only grandson was born shortly after the death of John Stanislaus, and the poem he wrote for that occasion, Ecce Puer, closes like this:

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son.

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As well as fascinating cameos of three father-son relationships, each interestingly different, the book also generates a truly enormous reading-list... Now on my radar are not only things by and about Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce themselves, but also work by Samuel Beckett, William M. Murphy, John McGahern, George Moore, Edmund Gosse... So much I would like to follow up...