[ top ] Works
[ top ] Criticism
[ top ] Commentary [ top ] Sean OFaolain, The Irish: A Character Study (1947), p.114; in his discussion of priests in Irish novels, OFaolain remarks, ODonovans animus is a professional dissatisfaction with the Church: he had Modernist leanings. (p.114). Note also OFaolains comments in the course of writing on George Tyrrell in The Irish Times (3 April 1943), where he called ODonovan the only other Irishman who seemed to be keenly responsive to that subtle and penetrating and attractive idea of reconciling science with Catholic dogma (John F. Ryan, intro., Father Ralph, 1993 edn.) [ top ] James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922, Conn: Greenwood Press 1997, Part II: Intelligentsia Fiction, 1900-1922: If Joyces Bildungsroman enacts a decisive break with Catholic Ireland then ODonovans traces a gradual disillusionment with it. The narrative follows Ralphs own struggle to cope with the positive and negative aspects of his experience of Irish life. It is a process that involves him in testing the adequacy of several different interpretative paradigms for the experience he is undergoing. He is brought up as an implicit believer in traditional Catholic Ireland. As a young adult he changes into a believer in a nnew liberal Catholic Ireland. Finally, he becomes a pessimistic acceptor of the irreformability of Catholic Ireland. [/ ; &c.] (p.147.) Vivian Mercier, Irish Literary Revival, in W. E. Vaughan, ed., A New History of Ireland: Ireland under the Union II, 1870-1921, Vol. VI (Clarendon Press 1996) [Chap. XIII], gives summary of Father Ralph with remarks concluding: ODonovan does not show much gift for character-drawing here, though he later wrote five other [379] nvoels; he might have been better advised to tell his story quite frankly as autobiography, but he does give us an insight into the catholic church in ireland quite different from Moores on the one hand and Canon Sheehans on the other. (pp.379-80.) [ top ] Conor Cruise OBrien, Ancestral Voices, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland (Poolbeg 1994), recounts that one J. ODonovan wrote a letter of protest to The Leader (12 Jan. 1901), taking issue with the editor D. P. Morans statement that [e]ven Mr. Yeats does not understand us, he has yet to write one line that will strike a chord of the Irish heart. By way of answer, ODonovan recounts an instance to the contrary that struck me very much, viz., I have a dainty volume of Mr Yeatss collected poems. One evening I missed my book from its accustomed place. I asked my housekeeper if she saw it. In some confusion she said it was in the kitchen where she had taken it to read one of the poems The Ballad of Peter Gilligan to a neighbour. To tell you the truth, sir, the two of us cried over I. [56] OBrien seems not to imagine that the writer might be Gerald ODonovan [formerly Jeremiah], author of Fr. Ralph. [ top ] Tim P. Foley (Notes & Queries, June 1998), pp.232-33: Foley gives notice of an unpublished letter of W. B. Yeats to Gerald ODonovan in which Yeats thanks the latter for his letter long after their earlier meeting in Loughrea, when the latter had mentioned a broken pane of glass in the fanlight made by a drunken woman who had some distaste for the Bishop, and which Yeats simply ascribed to urban boredom. The letter is in the possession of the Ryans, of Galway. (Bibl., John F. Ryan, Gerald ODonovan, Priest, Novelist, and Irish Revivalist, in Journal of Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, xvliii, 1966), pp.1-47; cited here at p.29). [ top ] [Síofra ODonovan], Clergymans Flight to Literature and Love: Loughrea Cathedral, Galway, and its links to novelist Gerard ODonovan, in Literary Landmarks [column], The Irish Times (28 July 2001) [Weekend Sect.], remarks on his distaste for convention; quotes his speech before the Maynooth Union in 1900: go into your churches and you will find the more pretentious of the statues come from Italy and Munich. If you say that you do not like the work, the good priest looks you all over with a smile of a superior pity and reduces you to your proper level by the clinching remark: Why, this statue was made at Carrara.; entered Maynooth, 1885; ord. 1895; second curacy at Loughrea, a town of squalor, poverty and chronic wretchedness (Bishop Healy of Clonfert); fnd. St. Brendan Total Abstinence Society; mem. of Co-operative Society, Gaelic League and Irish Lit. Theatre; received orders to reduce lecturing and travel and concentrate on parish duties; left parish in 1904; Western News reported: The scene at the Railway Station when Father ODonovan was about to depart was a remarkable one. Long before the train started, the platform and the road leading from the town were crammed with young and old, anxious to get his blessing before he left, and several knelt on the ground to receive it, and as the train steamed from the station cheer after cheer was raised for the good Soggarth [...] ; penniless in London in 1908; fell in love with Beryl Verschoyle, fg. Fermanagh colonel; m. 1910; Bridget, dg., sec. to T. S. Eliot at Faber; wrote Lovesong of Bridget J. ODonovan to him (and was ignored); Bridget believed her father to have one br., drowned at sea; in reality hi was one of six; Father Ralph deemed a great Irish novel by Church of Ireland Gazette and a libel on the Irish clergy and people by the Freemans Journal; long-term affair with Rose Macauley, Bloomsbury novelist; Frank Harris celebrated The Holy Tree as a book of love; Virginia Woolff regarded him as a second-rate novelist; on his death Beryl wrote in her diary: Gerard left me in the morning; OFaolain saw ODonovan as a romantic sport - out of the boglands, defying Rome, writing so well (The Bell). [ top ] Derek Hand, review of Gerard Donovan, Schopenhauers Telescope (Scribner), reviewed in The Irish Times (24 May 2003), Weekend, p.12[...] Gerard Donovan is a thrice-published Irish poet, and, he brings a poets eye and sensibility to language and detail to this, his first novel. His characters concerns the powers of narrative, and of knowledge and its application, are shared by the author, who attempts to manufacture a modern myth. / It is at the level of form that reservations can he raised about Schopenhauers Telescope. So much emphasis is placed on these two men as mouthpieces for ideas that some essential empathy is lost. Like a Socratic dialogue, the outcome of the argument, undoubtedly fluid at the beginning, seems pre-determined as the novel comes to the close. / However, it is refreshing in a world so full of post-modern ironic indifference that Donovan is prepared to have something to say and not merely content to amuse. At a time when. the world seems more violent than ever, when history becomes a utilitarian tool to justify any position one, could care to imagine, a novel that focuses on the dilemma of the individual response to these concerns is a novel to be read. [ top ] Quotations Gombeen town: [T]he whole town depends on the shopkeepers. Not only do they own the shops, but they own the other houses as well and all the land round about, and they have most of the farmers [...] in their books [...] . The gombeen men pay most of the dues and the priests stand as their friends through thick and thin. Theres nobody in the town for the priests, but Hinnissey and Darcy and the like. If a man wont go to mass Father Tom abuses him and threatens to get Mr Darcy and Mr Donoghue to give him the sack. And if a man objectes to the wages he gets from Hinnissey, Hinnissey threatens him with hell and damnation from Fr. Tom. (1913 Edn., p.295; cited in James H. Murphy, Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1873-1922, Conn: Greenwood Press 1997, Part II: Intelligentsia Fiction, 1900-1922, p.96.) [ top ] Mysteries of faith: Light gleamed on the wet roofs of the houses, sodden thatch glowing with myriads of jewels. Under these roofs, too, were mysteries of faith, hearts through which flowed that living stream that had fructified life ever since man felt the need for religion; Further, He took off his clerical collar and proceeded to dress in secular clothes. He had several efforts to knot his tie. It was years since he had worn one and he had forgotten how to tie it. Every new effort resulted in a more hopeless failure. He shut his eyes at length and trusted to the memory of his fingers with complete success. [Q.source] Green & Orange: There was her father-in-law with his little bundles of hate, and her own father at Lissyfad with his: mere bundles of Green and Orange misunderstandings and pitiful spites. They were blind and couldnt see. How alike they were, too, in all essentials, generous, lovable, different though they thought themselves. Would love, the solvent, ever do for them what it had done for her and her husband? (Conquest, 1920, p.35; cited in Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal; The Irish Revolution in Literature [... &c.], 1977, p.63. [For longer extracts, see Library.] [ top ] References [ top ] Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction [Pt. 2] (Cork: Royal Carbery 1985), remarks that Fr. Ralph is in a tradition than includes James Joyces Portrait of the Artist, and modernist novel by an author with inside knowledge of the Catholic Church in Ireland; compared in standpoint with M. J. F. McCarthy and W. P. ORyan [sic for Ryan]; all the estimable characters either modernists or voteens and people who avoid thinking ... innuendos about priestly amours; Waiting (Macmillan 1914) includes a version of a mission by the Seraphists which Brown calls revolting in the extreme. Maurice Blake, a national schoolteacher and national revival enthusiast is persecuted by the priest when he marries a Protestant, and deselected as constituency candidate by his intrigues. Times Lit. Suppl., a bitter and, if true, a deadly attack on the priesthood, regarded by the Church Times as more angry and malevolent than its predecessor. Also founded IAOS [sic], and elected representative for Connaught; Conquest (Constable 1920), even the most tolerant must turn against England, a thesis thrashed out at the dinner table; Vocations (Martin Secker 1921), placed his vocationless nun in an invented milieu - the atmosphere of a lunatic asylum, disparaged as unrealistic in Times Literary Supplement review; The Holy Tree (Heinemann, 1922), Anne, married to a man she does not love, falls in love with Brian Hogan and he with her ... the struggle ... in [here] mind ... between passion and various influences. [ top ] Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2 selects Father Ralph, pp.1077-88, The novel begins, It was his mothers idea that Ralph OBrien should be a priest; and traces his progress from a sheltered education in Dublin, the removal of his family to Inniscar in the Irish midlands where he attends a seminary, his graduation at Maybooth and ordination; disfavour with his selfish and conservative superior Father Molloy and the bishop; conflict when the bishop returns to Rome with the Popes condemnation of Modernism [the synthesis of all heresies] in 1907, confirming Papal Infallibility decree arising from the Vatican Council of 1867-1870, The bishop arrived home, and was received at the railway station by the brass band. ... The bishop ... made a glowing speech on the wisdom of the Pope, whose unceasing care of his people would be manifest when the great encyclical [Pascendi Dominici Gregis] which he had in his pocket was read in the churches. In the ensuing scenes, the young priest refuses to make a declaration before the bishop imposed on the younger clergy of the diocese, repudiating all the so-called modernist errors. His mother, Hilda, writes to the priest beginning, You have broken my heart ... I have no son ... I hope to begin my life of reparation in the convent ... May God in His mercy bring you back to the true fold. The novel ends, Only one dream had faded into the sea, he thought .../And then? [Vol. 2, p.1077]. [ODonovan] shares with the regional mode an equal, perhaps even greater, determination to get the facts of landscape and character right, 1021; Father Ralph dramatises the conflict when a priest is ordered to submit formally to the decree (lamentabili) that preceded the encyclical [compares ODonovan with liberal priests Walter McDonald and Michael OHickey, Maynooth professors immortalised in OCaseys Drums Under the Window (1945)] pp.1023; 1218, BIOG, Cork family; father built piers; ord. to diocese of Clonfert; curacy of Kilmalinogue and Lickmassy, moving to Loughrea, 1896; representative of Connacht on Horace Plunketts IAOS, along with Edward Martyn; attracted Jack B. Yeats and Sarah Purser to work on the new cathedral, and the Abbey to perform there; new bishop [Thomas ODea] in 1903; freeland in London, and subwarden of Toynbee Hall, 1910-11; British Dept. of Propaganda, wartime; later worked for Collins publishing house; three children by his marriage, 1910; one died young; d. of cancer July 1942. [ top ] Belfast Public Library holds Conquest (1920); Father Ralph (1914); The Holy Tree (1922); Waiting (1914). BNB, Out Of Print, 1950-1984 CAT, &c.; Father Ralph, rep. (Dingle: Brandon 1993). [ top ] Notes [ top ] Rose Macaulay (1881-1958), who was estranged from the Anglican church during a long affair with a married man who died in 1942, was author of the novels Potterism (1920) and They were Defeated (1932) as well as the prose Life Among the British (1942; rep. 1996) in the British Writers series; later returned to fiction with The World my Wilderness (1950), The Towers of Trebizond (1956) and Pleasure of Ruins (1953); correspondence with Rev. J. H. C. Johnson published as Letters to a Friend (1961-62). [Note, Macauleys given name was Emilie Rose.] [ top ] |