william o'brien's "when we were boys": a new voice from old conventions

William O'Brien's "When We Were Boys": A New Voice from Old ConventionsAuthor(s): James H. MurphySource: Irish University Review, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 1992), pp. 298-304Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484510 .

Accessed: 16/06/2014 03:48

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to IrishUniversity Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 91.229.248.111 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 03:48:25 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=eup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/25484510?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


James H. Murphy

William O'Brien's When We Were

Boys: A New Voice from Old Conventions

William O'Brien's When We Were Boys is a novel whose name at least

will be familiar to acute Joyceans. In "Ithaca" it crops up in the cata

logue of the books "with scintillating titles" on the bookshelves in the

Bloom household.1 There, metaphorically, it has largely lain ever

since. It deserves much more attention. In this article I hope to show

that it is a key text in the articulation of the voice of an emergent Irish

Catholic intelligentsia. William O'Brien (1852-1928) was a journalist and member of par

liament. He was one of the most active militants in the land war. He

was imprisoned with Parnell in Kilmainham Jail in October 1882 and

there wrote the famous "No Rent Manifesto". Later he was a leader of

the Plan of Campaign phase (1886-91) of the land war. When We Were

Boys was written during various spells of imprisonment and was pub lished in 1890. Set in the eighteen sixties the novel is both a romance

and a Fenian adventure story. In her recent, welcome biography of O'Brien, William O'Brien and

the Irish Land War, Sally Warwick-Haller assesses the book in the light of O'Brien's political activities. Because of its relatively benign view

of landlords, when contrasted with the militancy of O'Brien's then

antipathy to that class, she sees it as a work of moderation and con

ciliation. Indeed, the support of two of the novel's characters, Harry and Mabel Westropp, children of Lord Drumshaughlin, for the

Fenians, convinces her that O'Brien believed "that members of the

landlord class could feel sympathy with and for the tenants and win

their heart and trust."2

Warwick-Haller's conclusion is a reasonable one within its own

terms. Not surprisingly she does not set the novel within the general context of the fiction which was being written within the Irish Catholic

community at the time. Until very recently no analysis of that vast

body of literature, which will be referred to generically as Irish Catholic fiction in this article, was available. My own work in the

area, however, suggests a quite different reading of O'Brien's novel

1. James Joyce, Ulysses (Harrnondsworth; Penguin, Garland edition 1986), pp. 581-82. 2. Sally Warwick-Haller, William O'Brien and the Irish Land War (Dublin: Irish

Academic Press, 1990), p. 125.

298



WILLIAM O'BRIEN'S WHEN WE WERE BOYS

from hers.3 In the light of the conventions which held sway in Irish Catholic fiction at the time When We Were Boys can be seen as moving away from rather than towards conciliation with landlordism.

More importantly, too, O'Brien's novel is the first articulation in fiction of a voice critical of the realities of an Ireland, dominated by the lower middle class and the Catholic clergy. It is the voice of the

emergent Irish Catholic intelligentsia. Whether they were journalists such as W.P. Ryan, writers such as George Moore, priests such as

Gerald O'Donovan or members of other professions, the members of the Irish Catholic intelligentsia were all convinced of the need for

modernisation, education, individual freedom, a liberal spirit in

society and a critical stance with respect to current Irish realities.

Though still a small band, increased education and enhanced oppor tunities in the political and literary spheres were ensuring that their

numbers were on the rise.

To appreciate the novelty of When We Were Boys it is first necessary to have a sense of the sort of novel which had hitherto been dominant in the Irish Catholic community. Until the rise of the Catholic intelli

gentsia in the eighteen nineties Irish Catholic fiction had tended to be the preserve of the upper middle class. Though now forgotten the

Catholic upper-middle class in nineteenth-century Ireland had its own

distinctive ethos and aspirations to take a leading part in Irish society.

Upper middle-class Catholics were proud of their Irishness but they were not separatists. They wished to be honoured as respected mem

bers of Victorian society. Therefore they longed for an end to conflict

between Britain and Ireland.

The novels which upper middle-class Catholics produced tended to

envision a world in which Ireland's conflict with Britain was resolved.

Conciliation between landlords and tenants was, therefore, an almost

hackneyed motif in their novels. Rosa Mulholland's Marcella Gray,

published in 1886, makes out the classic case in favour of increased

understanding between landlords and tenants. Indeed, it goes further

and commends Catholic members of the gentry for being in a better

position than their Protestant counterparts to effect the conciliation of

the tenantry, on account of a congruence of their religious sympathies with those of their tenants. Marcella Gray is the archetypal Catholic

gentry novel: that is, a novel in which members of the Catholic gentry

bring peace to Irish land disputes, thus clearing the way for the accep tance of the Irish Catholic upper middle-class by Victorian society.

At the end of Marcella Gray the heroine reflects with satisfaction on

her success at bringing peace and contentment to her estate:

3. James H. Murphy, "Catholic Fiction and Social Reality in Ireland, 1870-1922"

(Ph.D. dissertation, University College Dublin [NUI], 1991).

299



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

Were not these poor overjoyed creatures her actual children? Had

they not been given bodily into her charge? Had not providence ordained that enough sustenance should be derived from the land for her and for them?4

No such success, however, is registered at the end of When We Were

Boys. Though the novel's form and rhetorical conventions are those of

the Catholic gentry novel the assumptions which lie behind them are

comprehensively subverted by the narrative.

Disintegration and bitterness rather than a new unity and peace are

the results of the attempts by the Westropps to spread goodwill and

conciliation. Mabel and Harry do indeed try to befriend the Fenians.

They house an American Fenian captain in their castle. But when the

novel's principal character, Ken Rohan, himself a Fenian, proposes to

Mabel she refuses, realising that, for all her supposed egalitarianism, she cannot marry beneath herself. Mocking the chivalric customs of

her class, Rohan pointedly challenges the motives behind her refusal:

'Would you have stepped aside from my love as if it were a taint, ma foi, if I had knelt en aristocrate ? in the uniform of the Life Guards, par example?'5

The incident not only reveals the naive absurdity of the attempts of

the characters to achieve reconciliation in the Ireland which presents itself in the novel, it creates deeper divisions. Spurned in love, Ken

redoubles his commitment to revolution, declaring that "Patriotism,

Romance, Daring, Action, Hope" were now his mistress.6 Far from presaging a coming together of the classes When We Were

Boys emphasises their social and economic incompatibility. It corrodes the conventions of the Catholic gentry novel and the delusional

assumptions which lie behind them, one by one. For example, a com mon preoccupation of the Catholic gentry novel is the vindication of

Irish virtue and the refutation of any imputation of evil or criminality. False accusation followed by exoneration is a common motif. In Mar cella Gray, for instance, the heroine's future husband is sentenced to death on the basis of false evidence, only to be vindicated and freed at

the end of the novel. Similarly, in When We Were Boys, Ken is brought to trial for a crime he did not commit. Here, however, he is convicted of the murder and the novel ends with his transportation to Australia.

Meanwhile, the real murderer is involved in a further incident in which he kills Harry Westropp.

4. Rosa Mulholland, Marcella Gray (New York: Vatican Library, new edition 1891)

p. 149. 5. William O'Brien, When We Were Boys (London: Longmans, Green, 1890), p. 262. 6. Ibid., p. 281.

300




A further example of O'Brien's method centres on a convention in the Catholic gentry novel whereby violence, apparently emanating from the Catholic community, is revealed as the work of a hidden source of treachery. Sometimes it is identified with the government, sometimes with an unrepresentative secret society. In Marcella Gray the Fenians fill the role. However, in When We Were Boys, they are seen

as the natural and responsible leaders of the people. The real villains are the members of the Catholic petite bourgeoisie, enemies alike of the

aristocracy, the common people and their Fenian leaders. Thus, Lord

Drumshaughlin, father of Harry and Mabel, returns to his Irish estates to find them deep in debt to the moneylender, Dargan. Drum

shaughlin's agent, Harman, is in league with Dargan and is the one

who helps to frame Ken. Dargan's price for leaving Drumshaughlin in

possession of his estates is that he must ensure Dargan's social advancement among the gentry. Already a justice of the peace, he demands that Drumshaughlin back him for membership of the local

gentleman's club. Drumshaughlin refuses to support him and only manages to avoid losing his castle when he discovers that Dargan and

Harman have been defrauding him.

Thus far we have noted the ways in which When We Were Boys undermines both the conventions with which the novel had come to

be encrusted in the Irish Catholic community, under the influence of

upper middle-class writers, and the assumptions about Irish life which

lie behind those conventions. Yet When We Were Boys also achieves

something more. It brings to birth the voice of protest of the emergent Catholic intelligentsia. As we have seen it was a group which longed for modernity and which rebelled against the increasing grip which it

believed the lower middle class and its ally, the Catholic clergy, were

beginning to hold on Irish society.

Drumshaughlin's reference to Dargan as a "vile gombeen man"7

reflects the tone for the novel's portrayal of the petite bourgeoisie. It is a

portrayal filled with contempt and derision for the pretensions to

social betterment of newly monied shopkeepers. Thus, at the begin

ning of the novel, the father of one of the pupils at St Fergal's diocesan

college is described as

... one of those strong farmers who emerged

from the Great

Famine fat with the spoils of their weaker brethren.8

Warwick-Haller notes that there were both pro- and anti-clerical

elements in O'Brien's makeup and that he planned a sequel to When

We Were Boys which was to have given a more positive view of the

7. Ibid., p. 375.

8. Ibid., p. 16.

301




Church. Such a consideration, however, does not detract from the fact

that in When We Were Boys O'Brien inaugurates that double-edged criticism of the Catholic Church which was in various degrees to be

standard in novels written by members of the intelligentsia, from Moore and Joyce to Gerald O'Donovan, Brinsley MacNamara and

beyond. O'Brien sees the Church as being an obstacle to the renewal

and modernisation of society and also as being allied with the odious new lower middle-class establishment. Ken Rohan, for instance, is

critical of the Church's opposition to the Fenians, who are seen to

represent a positive future for the country, though O'Brien is careful to

have him temper his criticism with expressions of loyalty to religion:

'Woe's the day this high-strung Irish race of ours gives up its faith! It is to us what purity is to a woman. Without mystery,

without the supernatural, both in religion and in politics, every fruit we care for turns to ashes upon Irish lips.... Why will Rome

goad and force us to rend the Celtic race asunder? Irish youth is the only youth in Christendom that does not want to pick a

quarrel with Rome, and Rome will insist on picking a quarrel with us/9

Such a position was to be a feature of some, though not all, of the

work of intelligentsia writers. They tended to want to redeem the

Church and to secure its support for their own particular programmes of reform rather than to seek to destroy it altogether. Though Ken

meets clerical opposition, particularly when he stands for election, he is also supported by a patriotic priest and even by a bishop.

As for the clergy's alliance with the petite bourgeoisie, the numerous

clerical establishments of the town of Drumshaughlin not only keep the town's shopkeepers in business and educate their children, their inmates also evince that vulgar greed the intelligentsia thought so

typical of the lower middle class. O'Brien conveys this impression by

highlighting their conspicuous consumption of food during the course of his description of the town's tradesmen. Among them is

... a pastry-cook whose function in life it was to supply the funeral baked meats for a Month's Mind at the Cathedral, or the

wedding cake for the profession of a nun at the Convent, or the

apple-pies and waiters for a particularly large dinner party at his

lordship's, the Bishop's.10

Reviewers, supportive of the Church, were not slow to notice the critical tendencies of When We Were Boys. The Irish Monthly, for

instance, fulminated:

9. Ibid., pp. 136-37.

10. Ibid., p. 14.

302




Ireland would not be the land of the Soggarth Aroon if the clerical element of 'When We Were Boys' was anything like a fair

representation of the Irish priesthood.11

And The New Ireland Review, describing the book as "mischievous", focused in on its version of the alliance between the petite bourgeoisie and the clergy:

We are invited to consider the typical Irish candidate for holy orders as an uncouth

stupid, country lout, whose father has made

money by means whose honesty may well be called into question, whose mother is a

vulgar, purse proud, overdressed dowdy, as

incapable of training her son for the important and responsible position of a priest as she is of enabling him to conduct himself

properly in decent society.12

Of course, When We Were Boys was not the first novel to be critical

of Catholic Ireland. George Moore's A Drama in Muslin, published in

1886, is itself an antidote to the Catholic gentry novel. In addition

many Protestant authors had written novels critical of Catholic

Ireland. What is distinctive about When We Were Boys is the way in

which it tears itself free from the conventions of the Catholic gentry novel and gives vent to a new voice, that of the Catholic intelligentsia. Its perspective differs from that of others critical of Catholic Ireland in

as much as Catholic Ireland is seen not as a remote enemy, easily dismissed, but a looming and immediate presence, freedom from

which can only be gained at a great cost. Moore and his Protestant

counterparts belonged to that group which, according to the contem

porary commentator, M.J.F. McCarthy, was free from clerical control

due to its social position, whereas O'Brien was releasing the voice of

those who came unwillingly within the ambit of the new establish

ment and "indignantly fume against the pretensions of the priests."13 O'Brien's was thus a quite different perspective from that of the early Moore.

In all of this there are rich ironies as far as the career of the author

of When We Were Boys is concerned. William O'Brien was a chief

protagonist in the successful struggle for tenant ownership. Yet it was

this development above all others which consolidated the petit bour

geois conservatism of rural Ireland, dashing the hopes of the Catholic

upper-middle class for a society led by a new Catholic gentry, in the

process. O'Brien's novel thus articulates the voice of protest of the

11. The Irish Monthly, 23 (1895), 557. 12. The New Ireland Review, VI (September 1896 to February 1897), 112-14. 13. MJ.F. McCarthy, Priests and People in Ireland (London: Simpkin, Marshall,

Hamilton, Kent; Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, fifth impression 1906), p. 577.

303




Catholic intelligentsia against the very developments which he had

helped to confirm and strengthen. When We Were Boys is an important novel. It enacts a transition

between the Catholic gentry novel and a fiction which registers the voice of the Catholic intelligentsia. It exposes the delusions and

weakens the conventions of an old form in order to give expression to a new, and persistent, voice.

304



william o'brien's "when we were boys": a new voice from old conventions

Documents