Steve_Bamlett_blog

In a moment of charged reflection, the middle-aged queer man, Eddie Doyle, whose trials during the death of his half-acknowledged partner, Maurice, are at the centre of John Broderick’s The Trial of Father Dillingham (first published 1982), looks at the self-interested young writer Patrick Bellington and ‘for the first time … felt himself regarding the man with sympathy’. Broderick’s third-person narrator analyses the moment thus: ‘Perhaps his writing, meretricious though it was, meant more to him than money and publicity. And at the moment both of them were in much the same boat. Eddie wondered idly if all sympathy was a transference of mutual difficulties’.[1] A first blog on the novels of John Broderick, prior to reading more. What makes a novel, or any written form, mean more to its writer ‘than money and publicity’.

The novels discussed in this first blog are pictured above (my photographs of books I own).

Writers often use their later novels to reflect on writing careers and The Trial of Father Dillingham is one such novel. One symptom of this in this book is that story itself is laden with books – they are even the ideal repositories for drugs to be placed by a dealer in order to implicate the owner of those books with a taste for the habit. We first see Jim Dillingham’s flat to be told that: ‘Books were everywhere, on tables, chairs and cabinets’.[2]  That fact is a background detail perhaps of the novel that can go unnoticed as can the fact so many of its characters are writers of different kinds, but many people in it embark on the career of writing, in whatever small way, such as Eddie Doyle’s journalistic reviews. The latter are started to engage him on the death of his partner and the fading of the delights of the queer underground of the novel (focused on a pub called The Rainbow).

In contrast Father Jim Dillingham has been forced to leave the Roman Catholic priesthood (like Eddie’s dying partner in leaving but clearly not for the same reason for Jim is as near as a straight character as there is in this book) but because his books of ecumenical theology, written under the pen-name Mark Denison, have seemed to his bishop (Bishop Curley no less – oh, how all occasions do inform against me), to smack of heresy in their dismissal of the doctrine of ‘Original Sin’ and their elevation of an evolved theory that ‘Christianity is the rule of love and order’.[3]

Given the ubiquity of books and writing in the novel, it is unlikely then that the moment that draws Eddie into the orbit of the meretricious writer, Patrick Bellington, in relation to a selective drugs haul by the Irish police-force of drug-dealers, but only those NOT connected to the political and religious hierarchy, is just a coincidence even in a novel that often wants to become a ‘crime’ novel, if crime in a rather trivial way, akin to the minor types of theft that is motivated differently for different people in the novel at different times (think of The La, that wondrous and lovely operatic icon, with ‘a mild but curious form of kleptomania’, for instance).[4] The La steals things so she can increase their, and her own, significance in the eyes of other, the gold snuff-box stolen from Eddie (and in its turn stolen from the La by Dolly to feel her alcoholism). It is passed off by the La a gift to her from Prince Rico Orsini, from ‘one of the oldest families in Italy’, though it had been bought in actually by Eddie’s father in Paris simply as an investment (one that in the end pays off nicely so that Eddie can redeem Dolly from her drinking) in 1920.

Likewise an interest in crime and its detection is matched by an interest in the hypocrisies of an ‘Underground’ in all these novels, once turned into one of the funniest jokes when used of Bishop Curley and his decision to start again in South America with Jim Dillingham, freed of his Irish Roman Catholic identity. Jim says, in announcing his intention to accompany Curley that their role of addressing ‘social problems’ under the nose the local Catholic ‘hierarchy, which is ‘out there too’ that ‘he may have to go underground’: ‘“Underground? With a bishop?” Eddie smiled’.[5] In fact, as the novel makes clear many senior politicians and Catholic clerics inhabited all kinds of semi-criminal undergrounds without fear of the police or detection, even in the ‘half-world of Dublin’ represented by The Rainbow public house, in which Abraham Gillespie, a docker ‘built like a Cretan bull’ does favours for the ‘gentlemen who bought hm drinks at the Rainbow Inn’. Broderick was clearly fascinated by a half-world in which the classes mixed for sexual liaisons under the radar of the world of Catholicised conventions. This was not just an interest in a world of gay men, those labelled in psychiatry as ‘homosexuals’ but of the admixture of experiment, play and even the self-serving meretricious, of sexual experiment.

Abraham Gillespie will significantly move into Maurice’s place with Eddie after the death of that tortured defrocked gay priest, but he is there in the novel from the start and with a message that is queer not gay, about the ‘confusion’ in the cusps in life between supposed binaries like male and female, public and private, and the gentle and the violent in masculinity.

Every Friday, after receiving his pay packet, he washed himself, got into his brown suit and suede shoes and made for the Rainbow, It was a complete philosophy of life, personified but never expressed. What good were labels? You could change them about and nobody could tell the difference. And here was someone to buy him drinks, and listen to him with a kind of respectful awe, in spite of the flickering eye and the shrill asides which accompanied such encounters. But this attentive stranger was different. Abraham would not have minded seeing a lot more of him. It was the first dim formulation of names; the beginning of confusion. (my italics)[6]

Abraham is the focus of the sexual underbelly of this novel – naming its parts precisely, even when he is confused by the roles, he finds himself flexible enough to take with different men. It still came as a surprise to me how brutal he can be with his middle-class gentleman lovers about the actual nature of their interest in him, whatever his in them. As he says to Eddie, once the two are, on Eddie’s suggestion, meeting and having sex in Eddie’s flat rather than in some more underground venue. Abraham’s assertion is clear that for Eddie (and others), “… I’m just a big cock, and you like it that way and so do I”. But he takes the argument further, Eddie has introduced Abraham, taking him away from The Rainbow in the process, to a bourgeois world of all “them books and records and nobs of friends”, but this is not because he wishes Abraham to become like unto himself. Abraham suggests that a bourgeois lifestyle has really been about the apparently contingent benefit of getting ‘myself into some sort of trim again … I fuck better this way”. It is clear that though you can take a Gillespie out of The Rainbow, that does not mean that anyone, as Abraham says, among the ‘nob friends’ will ‘put out the welcome mat for me, even if I fitted in here”. Abraham remains undefined in role, telling Eddie that he’d ‘better tell me what I’m supposed to be”.[7]

There is such wisdom here about how the intersection of class and sexual identity operates in Dublin. It is, as if, Broderick explores the Underworld for two reasons: first, for the ability kit gives him to look at how sex is named and made socially real in the Irish bourgeois novel, but second, to undermine the bourgeois world that is titillated by this playground outside its own powerfully comfortable ranks.  This interest occurs throughout the books and is sometimes only tangentially related to queer themes, though it is less vibrant when that is so. In The Pride Of Summer (an earlier book – 1976), the Underground in Dublin is a sexual marketplace but largely for rich women seeking sexually satisfying working-class men to train them up. For instance in The Castle, a public house owned by Shaun and his sister, Theresa, Lucey, there is an ‘amiable truck-driver’, Bobby Molloy, much like Abraham. Shaun Lucey has lined this driver up for one of his richer female clients (‘a ripe lady of fifty’ – fifty was so much older then). Hence Shaun and Theresa are dismayed to see him in the pub in the company, and NOT for the first time, of ‘one of those persons even more obnoxious than the shameless young girls who sometimes drifted in’. The hints that we are dealing with working class homophobia are clear, but one with a very self-interested financial aspect for the homophobes-in-chief, Shaun and Theresa.

The hints of queerness in 1976 used less direct naming than Broderick would dare in the late 1980s and the young man with Bobby, buying him drinks is merely named as a ‘girlish stranger’ who was unabashed, when Bobby laid ‘a large, freckled hand on the younger man’s knee’ to ‘lean forward and whisper in his companion’s ear, like a woman of the most abandoned sort’.[8] Bobby, with money promised is able to tear himself away from this young man but Broderick surely has great fun in showing that he will only do so when he has ready to have companionship into the night with him: ‘intent on having at least one last gaudy night with him’ in a pub around the corner, at least for starters.[9] I think we must stay here with the label ‘queer’ for Bobby Molloy no more courts a ‘label’ than Abraham, though the latter feels more confusion at the lack of roles for men who have continuing sexual relationships with other men. It is clear that the need for labelling sexual identity may, in these novels be totally an issue without urgency. One reason for this is that the representation of women as sexual beings (‘shameless girls’) is seen as continuous with the same prejudices and biases that underlie homophobia. Unless we grasp this, we will never see why Broderick’s first novel The Pilgrimage (published first in 1961) is such a radical novel (nor I would argue will we ever grasp the true significance of plays by Tennessee Williams). It, unlike The Pride of Summer, decades later but much more prudish, indeed made no bones of the analogies it made between the need to examine how the limitations in the social understanding of independent female sexuality (homosexual or heterosexual) is so implicated in the oppression of the public expression of queer sexuality in men of all classes, other than as it is understood to be linked to prostitution serving the needs of men whose active urges were felt to be those of God-given nature itself. Of course the suppressed topic of the later novel are suggestions about a lesbian love between older women, but they lack the force of the examination of Julia’s sexual needs and experience in the ‘pilgrimage of the body’ that the novel about her, in the large, is for her herself.[10]

Hence them my title and the reason for citing the quotation there, in which Eddie wonders, ‘idly if all sympathy was a transference of mutual difficulties’.^[11] The sympathy in Broderick novels is at best a real transference of analogies between classes and types of people thought to be differentiated (in a binary fashion) by a determinant natural process, such as men and women, the middle and working classes, the sacred and the profane, and (in one instance of the latter), the angel and the whore. The Pilgrimage is a great novel because, though it survives as a queer novel because of the analogies and differentiation made between Julia Glynn, the sexually charged centre of the novel, and the repressed and violent queer man, her husband’s manservant (chosen because Mr. Michael Glynn, wanted sex with him), Stephen, a man whose surname it is unnecessary to remember (even if we are ever told it) and whose sexual nature is throughout confused and fluid. Men continually cast Julia as a whore, even her lover (and nephew-in-law) Jim, and Stephen, when he is having brutal sex with her that is justified for both by placing her in that category.[12]

But what is magnificent in this novel is that it makes itself very much ABOUT the inadequacies of male representations of women. Stephen, for instance, apparently in love with her, has made a portrait sketch of Julia (as angel rather than whore) which he picks up to take to Lourdes together with his rosary beads but it is:

Amateurish ad softened to the point of imbecility. The doll-like face was devoid of expression, like that of a young saint in an oleograph, and the restless eyes were glazed and vacant. In the darkness, prone and far-away, was an anonymous stranger who died at the touching of hands.[13]

But much more important in this novel is not the narrator’s awareness that Stephen, like all the men in the novel, fails to comprehend Julia as a woman or person with the fullness and roundness required of anyone, but including (as E.M. Forster says) ‘characters’ in novels, but that Julia is aware of this too though never allowed to express her perception. For Julia must never be first (be in competition with male perceptions that is) – not only in the conduct and initiation of sex but even as a mind. The narrator can tell us directly, sharing a point of view with Julia, that:

Even with her, the first woman he had loved, he could not reconcile the flower with the earth that gave it substance. He had divided her into two people. She stirred uncomfortably. No woman, in her heart of hearts, likes to be put on a pedestal.[14]

The binary doubling of female character spins on the axis of sexuality: apparently lifted to heaven, woman is made to feel uncomfortable on that whereon she must stand and can only do (as in the end what is expected of her) and FALL as did Eve. Now novels by men often have it both ways, and Broderick’s narrator (either inhabiting Julia’s point of view or not) can point to ‘the occasional feeling of anarchy that lurks in every woman’, which equates women with both the bestial and he disordered only two pages before the narrator tells us (and I find this remarkably wonderful for the character is able to challenge any man who types her) that Julia ‘like everybody else, had a conception of her own character which was completely different from that held by those who knew her’.[15] It is as if the novelist allows us license to see that Julia cannot really be understood in the frameworks of knowledge defined by men in the novel, even those frameworks in which some women collude with priests. And she, unlike almost anyone else sees herself in the same terms as the young man Tommy that she views, after his suicide, as a corpse, once loved (as an ideal) by both her present lover, Stephen, and her husband in the past who put him up in a flat in Dublin beneath his nephew’s. but note first the first sentence I quote here that shows that what we are seen as oft mirrors what people want to see in us – what they give us the licence to be: ‘We can only give to other people what they can see in us’. But what she sees in herself in a bridge between the experience of men and women, thought to be divided in a binary fashion by nature and God:

She didn’t suppose that there was very much difference between the promiscuity of young men like Tommy and the life she had lived herself. It was a hard, inexorable existence: exciting, and completely without tenderness and compassion. It had something of the in it of the ruthless law of the jungle. Those wild creatures who live within its shadows can never completely rid themselves of its influence. They may try to adjust themselves to the humdrum rhythms of conventional existence; but sooner or later they will break the chains and sink back to their accustomed haunts.[16]

In this passage is the message of Father Dillingham’s book, Faith Without Guilt. That is that love and order are a perfect of pursuit of perfectibility that evolution makes possible but only with the knowledge that the return to bestial origins is inevitable. Those origins are the ‘undergrounds’ of Broderick’s novels. It is men who cannot, as Julia sees Stephen cannot, either in love with a boy like Tommy or herself, ‘dissociate lovemaking from the furtive, the sordid, and the unclean. Few Irishmen, she knew, ever were’. This feels like the argument of Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger.  I think we can be sure that this knowledge applies to more males than those resident in Ireland, gay or straight.  But what is wondrous is that Julia’s consciousness about sex is exceptionally clean, ‘since lovemaking was as necessary to her as the other natural functions of the body’. ^[17] Modern feminism has sometimes returned to a kind of puritan ethic about sex because, rightly, feminists are more than most aware that men colonise and debase sex in patriarchy to forms appropriate to the exercise of their power as does Michael Glynn in this novel. But such a straitjacket on the female body is also often a male invention, like the chastity belt. It too betokens possession. And it straightjackets of men too who love men, even when that love is not sexual or primarily so.

Listening to the voice of the La on an old record of a lyric by Thomas Moore with its evocation of male comradeship subject to loss through time and the wear of historical accident, men resist female passion (the female who voices it) for it might be a passion that they could feel for each other and which requires no gender label. All there is the sensations of the body – muscles swelling and contracting, tastes on the senses, light and shade. Sometimes what men call and call the City of God is something they might rather have rid of, together with the constraints of sex/gender, class and religious distinctions between body and soul or ‘ghost’. Therefore, let’s leave these novels till I write on them again later with that scene from The Trial of Father Dillingham.

As the voice swelled, luscious, impassioned and bright, yet strangely ghostly as it sounded from the other room, the three men avoided one another’s eyes and sat rigidly still. The tangled threads of emotion, experience and sympathy which bound them together were stretched to breaking point. One moment of weakness, and the edifice which they had so carefully constructed over the years would have come tumbling down.[18]

And would not it be nice to see the patriarchal city crumble.

All love

Steve

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[1] John Broderick (1982: 211) The Trial of Father Dillingham London, Marion Boyars.

[2] Ibid: 20

[3] The ‘book’ Faith Without Guilt is spoof reviewed in a prologue to the novel, in ibid: 11-13 (quotation is ibid:13). The silently cited reference in my sentence is of course to Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 4, line 34. See https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations/hamlet/act-4-scene-4 .

[4] Ibid: 55

[5] Ibid: 216

[6] Ibid: 23f.

[7] Ibid: 184f.

[8] John Broderick (1976: 68f.) The Pride of Summer London, George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd.

[9] Ibid: 71

[10] John Broderick (2004: 153, originally published 1961) The Pilgrimage Dublin, The Lilliput Press.

[11] John Broderick 1982 op.cit: 211

[12] John Broderick 2004 op.cit: 48 (Jim), 126 (Stephen – though prompted by Julia’s description of his sexual behaviour).

[13] Ibid: 181

[14] Ibid: 176

[15] Ibid 163 & 165 respectively

[16] Ibid: 152

[17] Ibid: 171

[18] John Broderick 1982 op.cit: 44