When St John Ervine remarked in an essay, “I have never met anyone who was not depressed by Belfast,” he was summing up his own attitude to the city, telling it as it was and offering a rationale for the actions of his character Robert “Darkie” Dunwoody. He is the wayward man of the book’s title who can’t wait to get out of the horrible place, despite the ties that bind him to it.
Born, like his creator, into the small shopkeeping class of east Belfast in the late Victorian era, Robert resists pressure to serve behind a counter, or to follow his mother's plan and become a minister of religion. He also resists the wiles of prissy Brenda, a childhood friend who has set her sights on him. He is in the grip of an overwhelming wanderlust. At 17 he stows away on the Belfast-to-Glasgow boat, and subsequently endures hard times, including nights on a slag heap, before securing employment as an ordinary seaman on a voyage to Australia. Adventures and misadventures ensue, on and off the high seas, all recounted in a rather routine, Boy's Own or Jack London mode.
Ervine (below, in a 1921 caricature) deals briskly, but not very resourcefully, with the atmospheres of foreign parts. Colour and cliche are laid on thickly. “One of the dagos was a miserably mean fellow”; “They were nearly wrecked as they came ashore on the island where they landed, but the pity of God was extended to them and they were saved.”
The rough and ready seaman's life includes an episode in a San Francisco brothel – "'Come in, kid,' Clara called to him, and he entered the room. The negress followed him" – but not the smallest erotic charge attends this interlude. Instead a well-developed Ulster rectitude causes Dunwoody to feel ashamed after the event. It is, however, a rite of passage on the journey towards maturity, along with all the other tests and trials undergone by Dunwoody, all the brawls and perils and stratagems for survival. By the end of part two of The Wayward Man, with its lashings of turmoil on land and sea, the scene is set for the return of the prodigal.
The Wayward Man was first published in 1927. It harks back to a kind of Edwardian realism nurtured in the shade of Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, and embodying a distinctive Ulster Protestant strain. Ervine is most at home among the streets lined with kitchen houses, the terraces and shops and gospel halls, the narrowness and the conflicts and bravado of east Belfast. For this reason the first part of The Wayward Man rings truer than the seafaring imbroglios of the second part, or the quasi-emotional entanglements that dominate the final part.
Dunwoody as a young boy chafing under the claustrophobic conditions of backstreet Belfast holds our attention, and the background to his dissatisfactions is expertly delineated. Because it’s Belfast this background includes sectarian goings-on. Sometimes these are slipped in with a dry intonation, as when Robert comes face to face with a blank wall “on which infuriated theologians” had “scrawled insults to the Pope”.
More alarmingly, we have the set-piece assault on Robert by belligerent Taigs of his own age, who try to force him to curse King William. He has strayed into the Short Strand, a district “inhabited by Catholics of a rough class”. Other accoutrements of the Protestant North come into the picture, including the Twelfth hullabaloo and Salvation Army antics. It all adds up to a workmanlike evocation.
Part three deals with Robert’s return after a seven-year absence; his marriage, encouraged by his mother, to buttoned-up Brenda; his affair with a girl of flimsier character, leading to the birth of a child; and his final abandonment of the lot of them as his impulse to wander the world kicks in once more, and the book comes around full circle.
Stability versus restlessness, caution versus audacity, staying put versus taking off: these are staples of a certain kind of Edwardian and Georgian fiction, right down to The Wind in the Willows. Ervine treats such temperamental oppositions in a Northern Irish context.
This new edition of The Wayward Man is part of what might be called a programme for the reinstatement of certain neglected Northern Irish novelists. The same publisher has already brought out the Fermanagh writer Shan Bullock's novel The Loughsiders, with a collection of his stories, The Awkward Squads; and in the US the enterprising Valancourt Press is reissuing Forrest Reid and Stephen Gilbert. All this is valuable and notable in sociological as well as literary terms, with each author furnishing intriguing glimpses into bygone worlds.
