Kindred and affinity

ELIZABETH BOWEN

The Irish Cousins Violet Powell (Heinemann 50s) The book jacket of Violet Powell's The Irish Cousins is adorned by a family group: a framed photograph. This perfectly sets the tone of what is within. Kinship, or a close degree of affinity, characterises the features and general attitude of boater-hatted young women in starched white ankle-length skirts and moustached young men, one in a blazer, at rest at the edge of a tennis court, between games. Backdrop, a twinkling shrubbery. There is, to the Anglo-Irish eye, a palpable give-off of Anglo-Ireland; and in its heyday.

Conversation, suspended by the camera, leaves heads turned this way or that, alert and waiting. The personae are the interknit Somerville-Coghill tribes, soon to be further linked by another marriage. On the periphery may be taken to be either-accepted neighbours or summer guests. The locale is Castletownshend, West County Cork, the time circa 1886.

In the forefront, vigorously seated, is Edith tEnone Somerville, `Top Dog', by virtue of seniority, and more than that, of a generation consisting largely of brothers. Next to her, beautiful in profile, holding her racquet to her chin as one might a fan, is Edith's second cousin, Violet Martin—the 'Ross' of the collaboration to be. The Irish Cousins (which takes its title, only a plural added, from the firstfruit novel of that col- laboration: An Irish Cousin, 1889) in- troduces itself as a study : 'The Books and Background of Somerville and Ross.' How inseparable the books and the background are, Lady Violet, Anglo-Irish herself, per-

ceives, and goes on to illustrate. -

Greater interest must concentrate on what was phenomenal: the collaboration. In- terlocking minds, known more to criminal than aesthetic history? No, not that only: this was a rarer case—interlocking creative imaginations. Considering how savagely in- dividual, how overweeningly solitary, as an activity, is inventive writing, how could two practitioners unify into one story?—and car- ry this off not once but again and again? The cousins, we learn, were plagued by what seemed to them fatuous questions on that subject: 'Who holds the pen—or pencil, and so on?' Oneself, one retains some sympathy with the questioners. Leave it, that this was a literary miracle, plus something other. Result, a superb degree of accomplishment, a tremendous range.

Lady Violet, too wise to analyse, contents herself with comments—on the joint vision, Its extra-powerful focus; on the stylishness of the joint style achieved, likened by her, in its variations, to shot silk. It may be sup- posed that Somerville, painter already, charged herself with that memorable verbal scene-painting, together with outer accounts of action (equine or human), weather, sailing adventures, meets, funerals, fairs, leaving to Ross, more fine-strung, 'aware' and tense, the control of dialogue and, where necessary, Penetration into events or persons. Ross's death, in 1915, leaves, in the many suc- ceeding novels and stories, a lacuna difficult to locate—bravely though 'communication' was carried on, defiantly though the works Were, still, double-signed.

The answer may be, that when the cousins met—which oddly, given the smallness of

Ireland and the high value placed on getting together, failed to happen till both were in

their late twenties—there occurred one of those fusions of personality which in one way or another can make history. Their from then on total attachment incurred no censure, and—still stranger, given the habitual jocularity of their relatives—seems • to have drawn down no family mirth. Nor was its nature—as it might be in these days —speculated upon. Absolutely, the upper class Anglo-Irish were (then) non- physical—far from keen participants, even, from what one hears of them, in the joys of marriage.

Edith and Violet loved to travel together, but desired no permanent .break-away from parental homes. The Llangollen Ladies, whose Plas Newydd they viewed on a Welsh tour, seemed to them—it is rec- orded—extremely silly. This couple of gentlewomen from Ireland were encased, armoured, in the invincible heartiness of their-extroverted tribe and specialised class. Round and upon them blew the prevailing gales of clean fun, anaphrodisiac laughter. Anything `extreme' was comic: that went for passion, that went for art. Dogs, jokes, were the accepted currency. Their initial literary endeavours, daylong disappearances, together, to the neglect of tennis, side-split brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts. Only when books `appeared' did menace begin. The two now ceased to be amateurs: things looked serious. The actual crux, or crunch, was The Real Charlotte.

It is owing to The Real Charlotte that all this matters: otherwise, who might care? Here, in their third novel, they cut the cable. They made their own a terrain of outrageousness, obliquity, unsavoury tragedy, sexual no less than ambitious passion. What fired -them into full-stature artists? It is on this masterpiece (which long awaited full recognition) that, as almost unwilling, almost unwitting artists, they do in today's eyes take their stand . . . Secon- dary in literary glory, toweringly 'the thing' in terms of success, the Irish RM stories are less cut-to-pattern in comicality, turn less un- deviatingly on blood sports, than anti-blood- sport generations have preferred to suppose. In these tales are tic meaningless antic caper- ings: on the contrary, outsize characters, clashes, crises, realistic in their very delirium. These not only were Ireland—they still are Ireland. under the skin.

One would like to know more than there seems to be to be known about Violet Martin: 'Ross,' with her indomitable fragility, her dilated great beautiful hare's eyes—whose near-sightedness had to be

aided by pince-nez. The Norman-descended

Martins of Ross, County Galway, had it less good than the later coming, Scottish-

descended Somerville% County Cork. Their fortunes foundered, under a succession of blows—those intricate troubles known to landowners. Ghosts were the least of the tribulations of the dying house.

Halfway through Violet's childhood, Ross, the mansion, had to be abandoned : her brother went off to seek a living in England; mother and a bevy of spinster girls (Violet the youngest) for some years camped, on the cheap, in Dublin (from whence sprang the rattling good Dublin passages in The Real Charlotte.) After that, the heroic return to Galway; the struggle, headed by Violet, to rekindle life—such as it had been, never could be again—in the shell of the house. The whole of the wisdom of sorrow was this young woman's; she was early acquainted with wailings, dementia, speechless despairs. She is remembered for her delightful gaiety. Yet can one doubt, it was she who in- troduced into the Somerville and Ross com- bination that dark streak—which, at the same time, gave it validity?

Lady Violet is to be thanked for The Irish Cousins. Her sense of what is relevant to her subject, and her use of that, would seem to me faultless. Moreover, she has read, and assimilated, the Somerville-Ross writings in their entirety : no small task. She sum- marises each of the many books, in some detail but without an instant of boringness. The effect is to whet a renewed appetite. How many of the lesser-known works are still in print, available, one would like to know? Could not publishing enterprise strike while the iron is hot? There may not yet be .a boom; there is a 'revival' . . . Did these authors impact on their compatriot, James Joyce? Lady Violet holds that they did, and produces evidence—which is daring and interesting. Their place in the Irish literary Valhalla is accorded, their links with the great native tradition traced. I regret only, in this book, a lack of mention of Joseph Sheridan Lefanu, with whose novels several outlined here would seem to have a marked, if unconscious, affinity.