Vocations

  Also published by Handheld Press

  Handheld Classics

  1 What Might Have Been: The Story of a Social War by Ernest Bramah

  2 The Runagates Club by John Buchan

  3 Desire by Una L Silberrad

  Handheld Research

  1 The Akeing Heart: Letters between Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Ackland and Elizabeth Wade White by Peter Haring Judd

  2 The Conscientious Objector’s Wife: Letters between Frank and Lucy Sunderland, 1916–1919, edited by Kate Macdonald

  First published in the UK in 1921 by Martin Secker.

  This edition published in 2018 by Handheld Press Ltd. 34 Avenue Heights, Basingstoke Road, Reading RG2 0EP www.handheldpress.co.uk

  Copyright of the Introduction © Chrissie Van Mierlo

  Copyright of the Notes © Kate Macdonald

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

  ISBN 978-1-9998813-4-4 (epub)

  ISBN 978-1-9998813-5-1 (mobi)

  Series design by Nadja Guggi and typeset in Adobe Caslon Pro and Open Sans.

  Chrissie Van Mierlo took her degrees at the University of Nottingham, Birkbeck College and Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of James Joyce and Catholicism: The Apostate’s Wake (2017, Bloomsbury).

  Cover image: ‘A Nun’ by Joaquin Sorolla (1863–1923) from The Mary Evans Library. While the Mercy convent dominates the action in the novel, the Dominicans who might have received the Curtin sisters may be considered as being represented here by Sorolla’s Dominican nun.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Notes

  Introduction

  by Chrissie Van Mierlo

  (Page numbers refer to the printed version.)

  Background

  Jeremiah O’Donovan, who would later take the first name Gerald, was born at Kilkeel, Co. Down on 13 July 1871. The son of Jeremiah and Margaret (née Regan), his father’s job as a local government official took the family around the country, resulting in a fragmented education. Despite this, O’Donovan entered Ireland’s famous national seminary at Maynooth in 1889. His progress was not altogether straightforward, and he left the college briefly during a flirtation with the Jesuit order. He was readmitted shortly thereafter, and ordained into the priesthood on 23 June 1895. Following a couple of brief appointments, he was moved to the parish of Loughrea in Co. Galway in 1897. There he encountered many of the social issues that would later be tackled in his writings: the absenteeism of the landlords, excessive clerical control, and poverty. In fact, life in Loughrea is mercilessly skewered in his first novel, Father Ralph, where the town appears under the thinly veiled guise of Bunnahone.

  It is worth examining this period in his life, as his experiences in Loughrea fuelled much of his later fiction. The young priest’s sympathies with Ireland’s cultural revival and ‘nation building’ were now apparent; during this period, he became a notable proponent of the Irish language movement (though he did not speak Gaelic himself1), the Irish theatre, and the Irish co-operative movement. The diary of the prominent Anglo-Irish politician and agricultural reformer Sir Horace Plunkett (1854–1932) records that by February 1899 O’Donovan had joined Plunkett’s Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), a body that was primarily concerned with establishing agricultural co-operatives, although it soon became associated with nationalist political activity. O’Donovan’s position at Loughrea also allowed him to put other burgeoning social ideals into practice. Responding to the resurgence of the temperance movement in Ireland at the end of the nineteenth century, he founded St Brendan’s Total Abstinence Society in 19002. The society, which was located in rented rooms at a military barracks and possessed a gymnasium and library, had a considerable membership of around 300 men (Lally 2008, 33).

  O’Donovan’s involvement in the building of St Brendan’s cathedral in Loughrea reflects another preoccupation, the promotion of the Irish arts. The enlightened Bishop of Loughrea John Healy was of a similar mind to O’Donovan when it came to the importance of engaging Irish artists and craftsmen, and in 1901 the bishop appointed the younger man to be administrator of the parish, enabling him to commission works for the new building (Ryan 1993, vii). O’Donovan also had the support of scholar, playwright and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre Edward Martyn, the man who provided most of the funds for the project. By April 1901, O’Donovan had commissioned sculptor John Hughes to create an unconventional statue of the Virgin and Child for the cathedral (Frazier 2000, 325). The building also features banners designed by artist Jack B Yeats (brother to the poet) and his wife Mary Cottenham and sewn by the Dun Emer Guild (founded by the Yeats sisters with Evelyn Gleeson in 1902). Windows by stained glass artists Sarah Purser and Michael Healy also contribute to the distinctly Celtic flavour of the decoration, a contrast to the trend for Italian and German ornamentation in Irish churches of the period. Despite his relative youth and inexperience, O’Donovan’s talents were apparent, and in 1902 he undertook a lecturing tour of the United States of America in order to raise funds for St Brendan’s. He would return the following year as part of an IAOS delegation (Candy 1995, 57).

  By 1901, O’Donovan’s sphere of influence extended considerably beyond the parish of Loughrea. He made trips to Dublin as often as twice a week, delivering public lectures and visiting the well-known novelist George Moore and his circle, with whom he had become friends. As Adrian Frazier observes, the company he kept in Dublin illustrates ‘how far out of the grooves of the Catholic clergy O’Donovan had already run by 1902’ (Frazier 2000, 325). O’Donovan was garnering a reputation as an intelligent cleric of action and a ‘patriot priest’, but crisis was soon to arrive. In Father Ralph the protagonist’s decision to give up the priesthood is shown to be, in part, a response to the anti-modernist excesses of the Catholic hierarchy in the first years of the twentieth century. In reality it seems likely that O’Donovan’s clash with his superior, Bishop O’Dea of Clonfert (who had succeeded the sympathetic Bishop Healy in 1904), precipitated the split. While the details of what occurred between O’Dea and O’Donovan remain unclear, it is likely that a combination of personal, social, intellectual and spiritual concerns ultimately led to O’Donovan’s decision to leave. Undoubtedly his shocking decision to abandon the priesthood influenced George Moore’s well-known novel The Lake (1905). Although the novel is not strictly à clef, Frazier further notes that ‘Moore was writing the final section of The Lake just as O’Donovan was throwing up his parish duties in Loughrea and seeking advice on how to support himself by his pen’ (Frazier 2000, 553, n. 145), and these literary ambitions are mirrored by the novel’s protagonist, the renegade priest Father Oliver Gogarty3.

  After his departure from Loughrea, O’Donovan spent four years in Dublin and in London. He took with him to London letters of introduction to publishers from Moore. Like Kitty in Vocations, and several other O’Donovan protagonists, fleeing
to the city from the ‘provinces’ equates to a certain kind of freedom, albeit a freedom that is compromised by practical realities. These were certainly not easy or settled years, and 1910 saw O’Donovan working as sub-warden at Toynbee Hall in East London, a Christian socialist educational settlement. Like the protagonist in Waiting, O’Donovan fell in love with a Protestant, Beryl Verschoyle, who was of Northern Irish and English descent. The couple were married at Whitechapel Registry Office on 15 October 1910 and would go on to have three children: Brigid was born in December 1911, Dermod in June 1913 and Mary in April 1918.

  The early essays and short fiction that O’Donovan had been writing now gave way to the semi-autobiographical, intensely realist Father Ralph (1913). A succès de scandale, the novel sold extremely well and was positively received in many of the literary papers, though it naturally provoked the ire of the Catholic press. Father Ralph was swiftly followed by Waiting in 1914, at which point the outbreak of war brought O’Donovan’s burgeoning career to a halt. He initially joined the British army and was stationed in Hull, then at the Ministry of Munitions. In late 1917 he was working in the Italian section of the Ministry of Information in London, where he met the Italian-speaking Rose Macaulay, and they began a secret and long-standing affair that would continue until the end of his life (Lefanu 2003, 134). Details of the relationship between O’Donovan and Macaulay were lost forever when her flat was bombed during the Blitz and his letters to her were destroyed. Macaulay enjoyed her single, non-domestic life as an increasingly well-known literary figure in interwar London, but she accepted the moral consequences of her adulterous relationship and withdrew from receiving holy communion in the Church of England until long after O’Donovan’s death (Smith ed. 1961, 42, 61–62). O’Donovan may have remained married to Beryl for the sake of their children, perhaps also because of his affection for her. It is possible that a lingering sense of Catholic morality endured long after he had left the Church, a character trait that can also be discerned in some of his fictional creations.

  Work was scarce in post-war London, and the O’Donovans moved back to Italy for a short time. While there, Gerald published How They Did It (1920), concerning the ineptitudes of the British war effort, and Vocations in 1921. But his literary career was about to come to an abrupt and premature end. In the year when James Joyce’s monumental portrait of Dublin life Ulysses was published, to be hailed the world over as the great modernist novel, O’Donovan’s last work, The Holy Tree (1922), was brought out by Heinemann. Written in an Irish ‘peasant’ style, the ‘Holy Tree’ in question is a symbol of the author’s complex philosophy of love. O’Donovan stopped writing in the year that Ireland made a decisive break with Britain with the inception of the Irish Free State, and it is possible that the dramas of the nascent state, which developed along decidedly Catholic lines, no longer held his interest.

  In contrast to the vigour of his early years, from this point on he lived a life of relative isolation. In the 1920s, O’Donovan briefly worked as Plunkett’s secretary. He also refused an offer to write George Moore’s biography. His daughter Brigid remembers him as ‘lying on a sofa all afternoon reading his way through the Cambridge Ancient History and endless detective stories, one a day’ (cited in Candy 1995, 60). In the Second World War he took up new political interests, including work on a committee for Czech refugees. This was abruptly halted when, while on a discreet holiday with Macaulay in the Lake District, he suffered serious head injuries as a result of a car accident, for which she blamed herself. The death of his youngest daughter Mary in 1941 was another devastating blow. Following surgery for cancer, O’Donovan died at the family home in Albury, Surrey on 26 July 1942 aged seventy-one. Macaulay wrote the short, anonymous obituary for him that appeared in The Times.

  Vocations

  O’Donovan’s interest in the role of the convent in Irish life can be traced back to his days as a young priest. At Loughrea, he rented rooms in the Mercy convent in order to establish St Raphael’s Home Industries Society, a society that taught women practical skills like embroidery and lacemaking. These interests are reflected in one of his early articles; in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record for the second half of 1898, O’Donovan contributed a short essay entitled ‘Two Pioneer Convents’4. Both these Galway convents were, like the convent in Vocations, Mercy communities: The Sisters of Mercy of Portumna and The Sisters of Mercy of Gort. O’Donovan is concerned with the practical role convents might play in raising the standard of living, because, as he optimistically notes to his readers, ‘The priests of Ireland have always shown themselves in sympathy with the temporal as well as the spiritual interests of their flocks’ (O’Donovan 1898, 503).

  With this in mind, he praises the efforts of both convents in drawing upon available funds to establish Technical Schools. At Portumna the nuns concentrated their efforts on agricultural endeavours, such as butter-making, as well as training girls to be cooks; at Gort local girls were taught weaving, lace-making, hosiery and embroidery. As well as raising agricultural standards and spreading the spirit of co-operation, these endeavours were intended, in O’Donovan’s view, to help stem the flood of Irish girls emigrating to Australia and America. The descriptions of the Mercy establishments contained in the piece echo some of the physical descriptions of the convent grounds in Vocations; but, by contrast, in these instances the appearance of ‘sweet do-nothingness’ betrays ‘the hives of industry within’ (O’Donovan 1898, 509–10). O’Donovan the parish curate naturally focuses his attentions on what convents should be doing, rather than making explicit the many failings that he would later explore in his fiction. A piece he published in the Leader on 10 January 1901 entitled ‘Dishonouring Irish Saints’ levels more direct criticism of the French influence on Irish convents (Candy 1995, 64).

  Concerns about the standards of Irish education, and particularly about excessive clerical control over schools, is an abiding theme in O’Donovan’s life and work, something that is most pointedly depicted with the schoolmaster Maurice in Waiting. These concerns clearly extended to the fate of Irish girls. While his views on the ‘woman question’ are hardly progressive by contemporary standards, the fact that he pronounced publicly on this issue at all is comparatively unusual, and his concerns appear to be genuine and grounded in practical experience. In the O’Growney Memorial Lecture that he delivered in 1902, he suggested that women could play a larger role in the revival of the Irish language (O’Donovan 1902). A further public pronouncement came at the 1904 meeting of the Maynooth Union, where he criticised the clergy for the inadequate training of women in domestic affairs (Anon, Record of the Maynooth Union 1905, 12). Another pet project was the introduction of district nurses into rural Ireland.

  The outspoken priest’s concern that Irish girls were trained ‘to be accomplished rather than to be accomplishing’ (Candy 1995, 57) is the very frustration that emerges with the Curtin family in Vocations, although this was written almost two decades later. As we have seen, Vocations was born out of the productive post-war period in O’Donovan’s writing career, which saw him turn back, yet again, to the experiences of his early life. By the time he finally came to revisit his experiences of the Irish convent, he was father to two daughters (as well as a son) and it is perhaps natural that he now turned his attention away from the larger questions of nation and state that he had addressed in the 1920 work Conquest and towards the fate of the individual girl or young woman within an excessively repressive and coercive religious society.

  Father Ralph (1913) and Waiting (1914) were both published by the popular and well-established Macmillan press. The publication of the highly controversial first novel was by no means straightforward, however, and Macmillan’s New York office was not prepared to issue the novel owing to Catholic objections. The press must have hoped that Waiting would prove as popular as Ralph, but unfortunately the second novel did not live up to expectations. Disappointing sales may have been a result of the fact that the initial shock of the tell-all pries
t cum critic had worn off, and O’Donovan’s relationship with Macmillan appears to have ended. Subsequently, O’Donovan would issue How They Did It with Methuen and Conquest with Constable in London and Putnams in New York. By the time O’Donovan published Vocations, he was now working with Martin Secker of London, the house that, at around the same time as issuing Vocations, was taking some considerable risk by publishing the first UK edition of D H Lawrence’s Women in Love. O’Donovan’s novel appeared priced at 8s. 6d.

  O’Donovan’s old associate George Moore had every reason to be sympathetic with the subject matter of Vocations given that he had himself tackled the issue of celibacy in works such as the 1895 short story collection Celibates (he would go on to revisit the subject in the 1927 work Celibate Lives). Moore used his influence to smooth the way for the US publication of the novel. Although he was unable, with characteristic concern for his own interests, to commit to writing a positive review himself, he wrote to Horace Liveright in New York:

  I have just read a book which I think very well of. It tells the truth in so interesting a way that I could not put the book down, but kept on reading it for three or four days […] If it were not for my own work I could write a prodigiously favourable article about it (cited in Candy 1995, 168).

  Vocations was subsequently advertised with Moore’s endorsement, which also appeared on the paper jacket of the 1922 edition.

  The novel came out initially in two editions: the 1921 UK edition with Martin Secker and the 1922 US edition with Boni & Liveright. Given typical minimum print-runs of 1,000 copies, it is likely that 2,000 copies appeared between the UK and US editions. While these numbers are unimpressive when placed against an Irish sensation like Charles Kickham’s Knocknagow (1870), or even Father Ralph, they are nonetheless suggestive of the fairly solid readership that O’Donovan had built up over the course of his short career and are similar to print numbers for comparable works from the period.