John Broderick (1927-1989)

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Commentary
Seán McMahon, ‘Town and Country’, in Éire-Ireland, 6, 1 (Spring 1971), pp.120-31, remarks that Broderick’s ‘four novels written between 1961 and 1965 are in remarkable contrast to these autobiographical novels that seem to appear as regularly as rain and are rarely followed (p.120) by more mature work. This contrast is most evident in his treatment of that most characteristic element in Irish life, the Town.’ (p.121). Further ‘The Town, then is the backdrop of Broderick’s stage. His attitude is one of acceptance, deeper felt than anything so straightforward as love or hate, and acceptance has produced in him a deep awareness of the nature of life as it is lived - not as it may have seemed to the conscious outsider. Yet he is not simply the laureate of Main Street, Ireland. his vision of the town may be more reliable than that of those who rejected it but he is concerned more with characters than with their environment. It is only because they are so involved in each other that he becomes associated in the minds of his readers with the Town. It is the milieu [122] that he knows best and his delineation of characters would be incomplete without the statement of the Town’s effect. One is certain he could write equally well about the environment; in a sense, the Town is an accident.’ (p.123).

Patrick Rafroidi, ‘A Question of Inheritance: The Anglo-Irish Tradition’, in Rafroidi & Maurice Harmon, eds., The Irish Novel in Our Time (Publ. de Université de Lille 1975-76): Rafroidi quotes a review-article on Broderick by Douglas Sealy (Irish Times, 18 Jan. 1966), in which the critic writes that Broderick’s fault is that he is ‘not content with being a novelist, he wants to be a sage as well, and he fills up the interstices of the action with aphorisms which seem to have been imported from some calendar of Thoughts’, supplying an example: ‘Every woman who has been scorched by the fires of sensuality will always choose death rather than the lack of love.’ (Rafroidi, op. cit., p.28).

Michael Paul Gallagher, ‘The Novels of John Broderick’, in Rafroidi & Harmon, eds., The Irish Novel in Our Time (l’Université de Lille 1975-76), p.241 notes review in Kilkenny Magazine (Spring 1963), p.37, in which the reviewer complained: ‘All through the narrative, the author intersperses pensées or maxims which slide into place like so many glass panels separating the reader from the portrayed world. These apothegms range from the profound to the silly.’ [Note that Broderick was a contributor to Kilkenny Magazine ].

James Cahalan, The Irish Novel (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1988), calls the ‘enclosed societal worlds or rural and small-town places’ of his fiction ‘even more obscure that Macken’s Galway’ (p.296). Further remarks: seedy sex; eleven novels; ongoing attack on mores of midland Irish life; talent lapsing into caricature; his fictional father was Brinsley MacNamara; concerned with ‘states of unfreedom in a society of squinting windows’; would-be Balzac, admitting his early novels were too negative, voicing ‘[his] own hope of being able to move from negativity’ to a novel ‘written with love’ (Gallagher, op. cit., 1976, pp.235-36); no-hold barred attempt to plunge beneath the behavioral surface [... etc.] (297-98); Pilgrimage, 298; Dillingham, 298; Willie Ryan, 209 [notes slightly less affluent Catholic world than Kate O’Brien’s]; 298.

J. W. Foster, Colonial Consequences (Syracuse UP 1991), writes that ‘with Kavanagh, MacManus, Mervyn Wall and John Broderick [between the 1930s and 1970s], the literary image of the provinces has been a caustic reply to the extravagant Revival love of Ireland.’ [q.p.]

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D. J. Taylor, review of The Irish Magdalen (1991), in The Independent, UK, 23 March 1991), [q.p.], [with photo-portrait of Broderick], notes that the novel was intended as the second in an ‘Athlone Trilogy’, set in the early 1930s in the thinly disguised town of ‘Bridgeford’ ‘The Flood turns on the attempt of a consortium of locals to sell land to a visiting Englishman without telling him that it lies under water for three months of the years. The Irish Magdalen is an account of the successful rearguard action fought by the local priest who, in employing the half-sister of the local tart as his housekeeper, jeopardises the future of the church building fund sweepstake. ‘The literary echoes that resonate through [the novel] are derived less from modern Irish masters than from Lever and Thackeray.’ Taylor characterises Broderick as a wealthy bachelor whose money came from a family bakery, and who professed himself an unrepentant sensualist (“I did everything I wanted in every conceivable way”). Further, ‘His novels, narrowly focused on the twin shibboleths of money and sex, with religion lurking ... in the background, provoked storms of protest, as did his unorthodox literary opinions consisting in widely publicised animosity towards the literary canon - even Yeats being a “poetic Churchill, full of bluster”.’ Taylor calls him a writer whose primary impulses are elegiac, ‘obsessed with his childhood in the Athlone of the 1930s, he say himself increasingly as the celebrant of a bye-gone way of life.’

D. J. Taylor, ‘Heading for the Troubles’, [review of Irish fiction], in Sunday Times (1 May 1994), [q.p.], quotes from Broderick, The Rose Tree : ‘I thought it was all over, like a fool. Things never are in Ireland’, says a character being hunted by the IRA. [D. J. Taylor is author of After the War, The Novel and England since 1945. ]

Sam Thompson, ‘Perversely cured: The baking, banning and bisexuality of John Broderick’, in Times Literary Supplement, review of The Pilgrimage and The Waking of Willie Reilly [reps.] (17 Dec. 2004), p.26-27: ‘[...] The last chapter of The Pilgrimage is a single sentence, a shocker: “In this way they set out on their pilgrimage, from which a week later Michael returned completely cured”. This is a form of what Martin Amis once called “the kind of challenge that the literary Catholic enjoys throwing out to the world, as if to testify to the macho perversity of his faith”. Amis’s macho Catholics were Graham, Greene and Evelyn Waugh. The final flashy irony of The Pilgrimage is less tremendous, less theodicean, than the irony of A Handful of Dust or The End of the Affair, but it is just as cruel. The “perversity” comes not from the inhumanity with which providence operates, but - more simply from the fact that the characters are weak hypocrites. They have manoeuvred themselves into a position in which the miraculous healing of a sick man - which they have all been publicly praying for - is for them a disastrous evil. This is characteristic of Broderick. Catholicism is bitterly satirised for the misery it imposes, but the fault lies not with religion, and certainIy not with God. It lies in the fact that most people - especially those who call themselves devout - are irreligious creatures who perform rituals and mouth pieties, but believe in nothing. Consequently the Church is a sink of vice; but in Broderick’s work, as in his life, it is central and inescapable, whether defied or embraced. In 1979 he said, “I haven’t got faith at the moment … I do hope the religious experience will come again”; and in 1984, “I am now a practising, albeit critical, Catholic. Mind you, I always had an affection for the faith, warts and all”.’ Thompson notes that the word “watchful” recurs in the novels the novels. (See full text.)

Liam Harte, ‘A man apart’, review of Madeline Kingston, Something in the Head, with rep. edns. of The Pilgrimage and The Waking of Willie Ryan, in The Irish Times (15 jan. 2005), Weekend, p.13: ‘[...] In the early 1980s, Broderick moved to Bath for reasons which, Kingston admits, “are as elusive as so much else about him”. A fugitive from biography, Broderick both covered his tracks and cultivated an air of mystery, bequeathing little in the way of self-revelatory material. Kingston is often left chasing shadows, therefore, and ultimately fails to bring her subject fully to book. The best she can offer is a series of vignettes of a complex personality torn between conformity and dissent: a Mass-going Catholic who fulminated against the post-Vatican II changes in religious practice; a self-proclaimed hedonist (“I did everything I wanted in every conceivable way”) who was appalled by England’s “moral dissipation”; a writer who liked to represent himself as “an Athlone businessman”, yet once appeared in the town clad in black leather, clutching a handbag. / Broderick’s desire to hide his homosexuality appears to have been at the heart of his evasive, obfuscatory ways. As early as 1946 close friends noticed that he had lost his “natural sunshine and spontaneity” and “seemed to be hiding something”. But whereas Kingston is reluctant to pronounce definitively on his sexual proclivities, having found “no evidence of any sustained relationship at any time of his life”, David Norris shows no such reserve. “He was a heavy drinker and a homosexual”, he bluntly states in his foreword to The Waking of Willie Ryan, the novel Broderick rightly considered to be his best. / Reading it and The Pilgrimage 40 years after their first (banned) publication, one is struck by both the derivativeness and the originality of the writing. Broderick’s dissection of religious hypocrisy, spiteful intolerance and emotional entrapment in small-town Ireland, a place that stifles individuality and breeds destructive neuroses, owes much to Balzac, Hardy, Lawrence and Brinsley MacNamara. Yet there is an edgy, daringly innovative quality to his portrayal of subterranean gay culture in 1950s Ireland and his searing indictment of the homophobia of the Catholic bourgeoisie.’ (See full text in RICORSO > Library > “Criticism” > Reviews - as attached.)

Eamon Maher, ‘John Broderick: John Broderick: “a fugitive from a superior civilisation”’, in The Irish Times (23 Feb. 2018)

The Athlone writer John Broderick is never celebrated in Ireland to the extent that his literary talents deserve. It is true that his work is not of a uniformly high quality, but when he wrote well, he was extremely good, as good as any writer of his generation. However, when he was bad, it could be excruciating, with authorial interventions and emotive outbursts against his pet hates commonplace. He was someone who suffered inordinately during his early years as a result of the premature death of his father and the remarriage of his mother to the manager of the successful family bakery, Paddy Flynn. Being a man of independent wealth meant that Broderick could indulge his literary vocation without worrying unduly whether he was successful or not. He was a voracious reader and cited French writers as among his favourites, chief among them Honoré de Balzac and François Mauriac. In fact, he admitted on numerous occasions that Mauriac was the only influence of which he was aware. Undoubtedly a commitment to Catholicism was a shared preoccupation, but so too was their acute sense of place, which resulted in the graphic descriptions of the Landes district near Bordeaux for which the Nobel laureate is rightly renowned, and the uncannily accurate rendering of the topography of Westmeath and Roscommon by Broderick in some of his work, The Fugitives (1962) being a prime example. Broderick’s first novel, The Pilgrimage, published in 1961, was promptly banned by the Censorship of Publications Board. It is difficult to know if the banning was the result of the descriptions of extramarital affairs by the main protagonist, Julia Glynn; or the homosexual proclivities of her invalided husband, Michael; or indeed the miraculous cure of Michael during a trip to Lourdes announced in the last line of the novel, which some viewed as blasphemous. Whatever the reason, the novel certainly seems to have struck a dissonant chord. Its publication came one year after Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls and four years before John McGahern’s The Dark suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Censorship Board. These novels presented a dangerous cocktail of promiscuity, burgeoning female sexuality and musturbation that elements within Irish society were not prepared to face up to in the 1960s. [...] The Pilgrimage, while it does contain sexually explicit scenes, is never salacious or deliberately titillating. Julia Glynn does not suffer from a sense of sin and embarks on affairs with her husband’s nephew Jim, a doctor, and his helper, Stephen, who is described by Julia as being unable to “dissociate lovemaking from the furtive, the sordid, and the unclean”. She continues: “The puritanism that was bred in their bones, and encouraged in their youth by every possible outside pressure, was never entirely eradicated”. Unlike his mistress, Stephen was not capable of engaging in sexual intimacy without feeling guilty afterwards and the intriguing scenario that the end of the novel raises is whether a fit again Michael might take up where he left off and try to pursue a relationship with his manservant. Broderick was a devout Catholic and often experienced difficulties reconciling his homosexual desires with his deep faith. At one point he considered studying for the priesthood and even went so far as to discuss the matter with his friend, Fr Peter Connolly, Professor of English in Maynooth, who wisely discouraged such a course of action. Religion is a common trope in Broderick’s writing. He demonstrated a genuine understanding of the clerical caste and a deep dislike for the hypocrisy and small-mindedness of the moneyed provincial middle classes, to which Broderick belonged. One of his best novels, The Waking of Willie Ryan (1965), recounts the sudden return of the black sheep son of a prosperous family from the mental asylum to which he was committed 25 years previously, with the complicity of his family and the local priest, Fr Mannix. The reason for this action was that Willie was having a sexual relationship with a local man, Roger Dillon, now deceased. In order to be allowed to end his days at home, Willie is obliged to feign spiritual rehabilitation by receiving Holy Communion at a Mass organised in his nephew Chris’s home. The third novel that has been reissued by Lilliput Press, An Apology for Roses, sold more than 30,000 copies in the first week after its publication in 1973. It is not of the same standard as the 1960s novels mentioned above, but it contains lovely vignettes such as the gossip exchanged between the priest Tom Moran’s housekeeper and her friend, or the discreet placing of a handkerchief over the statue of the Virgin Mary before Moran makes love with Marie Fogarty, the daughter of wealthy parishioners. [...] Some other titles by Broderick that are worthy of mention are Don Juaneen (1962) and The Trial of Father Dillingham (1974), both skilful portrayals of Dublin life of the period. However, problems with alcohol and a tendency to court notoriety meant there was a serious declension in his work, which is clearly visible in novels such as The Pride of Summer (1976), which is far less controlled than his better work. In it, he gives free vent to his personal opinions, and not to good effect. Friend and critic Patrick Murray describes Broderick as “a fugitive from a superior civilisation, struggling to survive in a meretricious wasteland”, which is as apt a summation as one will find. Murray adds that his friend was “a disillusioned romantic” at sea in a world which he saw as being devoid of culture and sophistication. His own learning was impressive and some of his best work was done as a literary critic for this newspaper. He was very encouraging of emerging Irish writers and it was therefore sad to see so few of those whom he had helped at his funeral in Athlone in 1989. Notwithstanding, I’m sure he would have been thrilled at the news that the Arts Council has announced a call for writers to apply for funding under a new writer residency programme that is being funded using monies bequeathed to the council by Broderick in his will. He stipulated that they would be used “for the benefit and assistance and advancement of the arts in Athlone”.

See full text in in RICORSO > Library > “Criticism” > Reviews - as attached.

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Quotations
The Pilgrimage (1961) concerns Julia Glynn, 35, married to Michael, a bald and crippled homosexual, who has been sexually educated by an American diplomat and has just concluded an affair with Jim, a town doctor now getting married; she then takes up with Stephen, Michael’s servant, who has been sending her anonymous, sexually explicit letters out of jealousy; Jim becomes involved with homosexual blackmailers; the novel ends abruptly when Michael sets off with the parish priest to Lourdes. Broderick describes the setting thus: ‘[a] little town like all little towns, compounded of petty vices: envy, spite, suspicion, greed. In that atmosphere of careful virtues and furtive pleasures watchfulness flourished like a huge obscene creeper on an ancient house. Julia could feel it thickening the air when she walked through those narrow streets. They knew.’ (p.119). The novel ends on this note: ‘In this way they set off on their pilgrimage from which a week later Michael returned completely cured.’ (p.140.) [Quoted in Klaus Lubbers, ‘John Broderick’ in Rüdiger Imhof, ed., Contemporary Irish Novelists (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag 1990), pp.79-91; p.80.)

O’Flaherty’s Famine (1937) ‘[is a book] without which we can have but an imperfect understanding of the country in which [it] is set.’ Broderick praises the character of Mary Kilmartin, who has been ‘singled out by two generations of critics as one of the great creations of modern literature’. He adds, ‘O’Flaherty himself is clearly in love with her’. He summarises, ‘Mary survives with her baby, to join her husband on a ship for America. [...] The old people die; the district is laid waste; and the gombeen men survive to form the backbone of Catholic Ireland down to the present day.’ (‘Roots’, review of Famine, in The Irish Times, 19 Jan. 1980.) Note that Broderick here treats Joyce as a cosmopolitan rather than a national writer, and one whose books will revert to the university audience.

References

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Notes
The Pride of Summer (1976) contains numerous instances among the cast of gangsters, pimps, gigolos, &c., who bear the names of well-known contemporary figures.

Stimulus to Sin (2007): ‘Between 1956 and 1988 Broderick produced over three hundred review columns on a wide range of books and topics. A carefully chosen selection of these include his thoughts on Francis Stuart, Lee Dunne, Padraic Fallon, Oscar Wilde, Kate O’Brien and Liam O’Flaherty, among others. His journalism also gave him space to reflect on other preoccupations, such as Athlone, Irish society, the Church, books, writers and human nature. It allowed him freedom to write humorously, seriously, sometimes pessimistically, even savagely. His writings are of increasing relevance and interest in today’s Ireland.’

The Pilgrimage   (Lilliput 1961): It opens with Julia, respectably dressed as the dutiful, obedient wife of an invalid, offering tea to the local priest. But she is not wearing knickers as she is planning a quickie with her husband’s nephew. Broderick also explores Dublin’s underground gay scene and how queer men lived double lives. The pragmatic hypocrisy of the book’s characters regarding faith and morality is wonderfully audacious. A short, punchy book that interrogates the lies around sexual identity in provincial Ireland. (See Aoife Breatnach, ‘A top 10 list of the best banned literary filth’, in The Irish Times, 14 Deb. 2020) - available online; accessed 25.07.2021.

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