A society, or attitudes towards that society, can be judged by the covers of its books. Since he has been out of print now for a number of years, prospective readers of Athlone novelist, John Broderick (19271989), have mainly had to resort to secondhand copies of the Pan paperback editions of his novels, issued in the Sixties, Seventies and early Eighties. The artwork on the covers of these is hilarious, but also very revealing. From his first offering, The Pilgrimage (1961), to the last, London Irish (1979), Broderick's books were accompanied by kitschy pictures of sultry women, of furtive men with lustful eyes, of confused-looking priests acting much the same as the furtive men. Occasionally, a standard Catholic symbol, a rosary or crucifix, was thrown in to accentuate the risque quality. Happily playing to Ireland's repressed image, British publishers had thus decided that Broderick should be promoted as a writer engaged in titillating iconoclasm ; he was, in that delightful, outmoded phrase, "racy of the soil." Certainly, there are reasons Broderick was thus stereotyped and packaged. A decade after his death, however, the package needs reopening.
Rather than a minor novelist, Broderick might have been remembered as a literary and travel journalist. He came to prominence in the fifties as a reviewer for The Irish Times and as a travel writer for radio - he spent quite some time abroad, particularly in Paris where he befriended Julian Green. While he continued with his uncompromising and frequently barbed brand of journalism up to his late years, after the publication of The Pilgrimage posterity was handed an image of him as an irreverent, scandal-mongering novelist with a tendency towards pornography. Due to its fairly direct treatment of "whores" and "queers," the novel was banned (according to Broderick, this always meant "that you had written something that was very sexy"), though this had a reverse effect and it went on to sell over 100,000 copies.
Notoriety inadvertently secured, he entered a short period of productivity he was never to quite match again. By 1965 he had four novels published and these alone secured for him a small seat in the Irish pantheon. Having recovered from alcoholism, between 1973 and 1979 he published a further four novels of varying quality. The fact that his ninth book, A Prayer for Fair Weather (1984), was the first not to make it into paperback was a sign of decline. By the time of The Flood (1987), the first instalment of a planned trilogy (The Irish Magdalen, the second instalment, was issued posthumously in 1991), Broderick was at his worst.
Such a fading of a talent that had started so promisingly contributed to a waning of Broderick's reputation in the years after his death. The main reason his stature has remained uncertain, however, lies in the peculiar nature of his work, in the fact that along with Broderick's greatest artistic strength came his greatest weakness.
For Broderick, any cosmopolitan experience was to be turned to specifically local use: "I think it would be a very good thing if the Irish novelist travelled and did all his examination of the different cultures and the clashes of his personality ... and then brought it back and wrote about his own people." He was a prime example of the "parochialism" Patrick Kavanagh espoused, the mentality that would be "never in any doubt about the social and artistic validity of his parish." Seeing "a great field for an Irish Balzac," he wanted to emulate Francis MacManus's kind of attention to provincial Ireland, though in the more acerbic vein of Brinsley MacNamara. "We have a complete new class emerging in this country," he said in 1970. "Not particularly an admirable one but such as it is, it is our own. I think the future of the Irish novel lies in depicting the human elements in that, its pretensions and so on."
Unfortunately, this mission took absolute precedence over aesthetic consummation. Broderick was so intent on providing a thesis on Irish life in his novels that his characters tend to be used as mere caricatures, and a condescending authorial voice intrudes far too often in order to emphasise his satire. While he was eminently in touch with world developments in literature, he remained remarkably unadventurous himself. There was something almost congenital in this: when he did venture away at all from his midlands backdrop, to Britain in London Irish (1979) and The Rose Tree (1985), or to suburban Dublin in Don Juaneen (1963), there was a notable declension in quality. What is momentous in Broderick is his obsession with the themes of sex and religion. Ireland, he thought, "wasn't intellectually biased, but it was very biased as regards sex, which was the verboten, forbidden thing." In reaction, his novels are ceremonially laden with sex scenes that were quite shocking for the time. He thought the Irish particularly "pathological" about homosexuality and decided upon this as the centre of his approach ("if you wanted to hit them, that was where to hit them"), and his main novel on this theme, The Waking of Willie Ryan (1965), might be considered his best.
He dealt with Catholic matters as persistently as did Mauriac ("the only influence of which I am conscious") and his detailed probing of the lives of priests should be seen as a continuation of the work of George Moore and Gerald O'Donovan. Despite antagonism towards the institutional Church, and despite difficulties in reconciling his own homosexuality with its moral teaching, he was as attached to traditional Catholicism as Evelyn Waugh. "We are told," he said in 1979, "that pop Masses appeal to the young; which is like saying that Barbara Cartland should be encouraged because she appeals to more readers than Jane Austen." There are detailed descriptions of private and public Catholic practice in all his work, and his best novel on this subject, The Trial of Fr. Dillingham (1974, 1981), is also one of his most convincing generally.
Though no great artist, Broderick is one of the important Irish "middle" writers from whom much about the sociology and history of Irish fiction, if not its high aesthetics, can be learned. He certainly wanted to provide more than cartoonish, salacious romances of Irish life, and perhaps the most fascinating paradox is that despite his religiosity, his fiction remained relentlessly, masochistically bleak. His oeuvre is not of uniform value, but surely some Irish publisher will soon realise that at least half of it deserves reprinting.
The initial, understandable reaction of the cynic is to snort at the lapse into cultural cosiness often involved in the contemporary celebration of writers who were vilified in their own time. It is not enough, however, to walk away mumbling about the irony of it all. Writers are either publicly remembered, or they are not and, in any case, participation in commemorations need not necessitate any resort to Bloomsday excesses. "A lot of people are not going to like it," Broderick said on the publication of one of his books, "but then, I never worry about that. In time they will, they will ..." When the Athlone people turn out this weekend for the first John Broderick commemorative weekend , they will surely begin a requisite reassessment of their troubled and troubling townsman. Hopefully, it will all have the effect - but without the aid of pictures this time - of making his work "sexy" again.
John Kenny teaches in the English Department at UCG