Kate O'Brien and Spanish Literary Culture

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ISBN: 978-0-8156-3547-5 (hardcover)978-0-8156-3535-2 (paperback)978-0-8156-5413-1 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Davison, Jane, Ph. D., author.

Title: Kate O’Brien and Spanish literary culture / Jane Davison.

Description: Syracuse, New York : Syracuse University Press, 2017. | Series: Irish studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017034437 (print) | LCCN 2017034707 (ebook) | ISBN 9780815654131 (e-book) | ISBN 9780815635475 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780815635352 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: O’Brien, Kate, 1897–1974—Criticism and interpretation. | Literature and society—Spain. | Spain—Civilization—Influence.

Classification: LCC PR6029.B65 (ebook) | LCC PR6029.B65 Z66 2017 (print) | DDC 823/.912—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017034437

Manufactured in the United States of America

For Rachel and Alex

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1.Jacinto Benavente: An Observer of Manners

2.Don Quixote: A Deadly Book?

3.Teresa of Avila: Feminist and Lesbian Icon

Afterword

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

1.Jacinto Benavente (1866–1954)

2.Don Quixote and Sancho by Gustave Doré

3.Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

Acknowledgments

As an undergraduate at the University of Liverpool, Frank Shovlin introduced me to Kate O’Brien’s work and encouraged me to undertake extensive research on her love of Spain. I would also like to acknowledge O’Brien scholars Aintzane Legarreta Mentxaka and Eibhear Walshe, who have been instrumental in my thinking.

I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the PhD research on which this book is based. Special thanks are due to the staff and postgraduate community (past and present) at the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool, for their continued support and friendship. I would particularly like to thank Marianne Elliott and Anna Pilz for their unwavering encouragement and generosity of spirit. I am especially indebted to my PhD supervisor, Lauren Arrington, for her invaluable advice and guidance during our time working together.

I wish to express my gratitude to Donough O’Brien, on behalf of the O’Brien and O’Mara families, for copyright permission to quote from Kate O’Brien’s letters. I would like to thank Ken Bergin and the archivists at the University of Limerick; Georgia Glover, of David Higham, literary agents of the Kate O’Brien estate; and Jean Rose at the Random House Group Archive. I wish to acknowledge the help of librarians and archivists at the British Library, London; RTÉ Libraries and Archives; and the National Library of Ireland. Special thanks are due to Deborah Manion and the team at Syracuse University Press for all their assistance and support.

This book is indebted to numerous discussions with Barbara McNamara, who commented on ideas and drafts and accompanied me as I retraced Kate O’Brien’s steps in Avila and Madrid. I also wish to thank Noreen Edge for accompanying me on research trips to Dublin and Limerick. A debt of gratitude is owed to my father, Ian, and his wife, Trish, who have been generous in their support. Special thanks go to my children, Rachel and Alex, for patiently enduring my obsession with Kate O’Brien, and I dedicate this book to them. I was very lucky to have my faithful companion, Oscar, by my side as I spent endless hours writing. Our walks together cleared my head and kept me going. Finally, there is one person I would like to acknowledge who has not been able to share the highs and lows throughout this research but was never far away from my thoughts—my mother, Eveline, who died before I began my academic journey.

Abbreviations

Kate O’Brien and Spanish Literary Culture

Introduction

And with Spain I am once and for all infatuated.

—Kate O’Brien, Farewell Spain (1937)

Spain, Kate O’Brien reflected toward the end of her life, was a country which was in fact to influence me very much, and still does, in all my writing.¹ Evidence from her literary output certainly corroborates this statement. Two of her nine published novels, Mary Lavelle (1936) and That Lady (1946), are set in Spain; she wrote the personal idiosyncratic travel book Farewell Spain (1937) and a monograph of Teresa of Avila. However, a closer inspection of both her fiction and her nonfiction identifies a subtler influence of Spain that runs through the core of all her work and shows that her themes and writing style are inextricably linked to Spanish literary culture. As such, this study illuminates the ways in which O’Brien’s engagement with the writings of Jacinto Benavente, Miguel de Cervantes, and Teresa of Avila offered an at times oblique way of resisting and subverting the Catholic and conservative social and cultural imperatives of the Irish Free State. In her intertextual engagement with these significant European writers, O’Brien can be seen to dispute the insularities of 1930s Ireland. This disputation is particularly focused on gender and sexuality, as Kate O’Brien and Spanish Literary Culture analyzes the implications of transcultural intertextuality for O’Brien as a liberal, antifascist, and significantly covert lesbian writer.

Crucially, it was during her time as a governess in Bilbao, Spain, in 1922–23 that O’Brien tells us she first began to write, inspired, in part, by her newly acquired fascination with the country’s literature and culture (FS, 209, 212). After graduating from University College Dublin in 1919, she did not envisage a career as a successful novelist. In fact, she recalls in a television interview from 1962 that although some of her friends had fixed vocations, she did not remember having any particular ambition in myself.² However, in order to earn a living, she went to live in England, working as a journalist for the Manchester Guardian and as a teacher at a London convent school. She also spent time in the United States working as an assistant for her brother-in-law on the Bond Drive (the new Irish state’s fund-raising campaign in America). O’Brien returned to Ireland in January 1922, but, with a reluctance to live and work there, she left for Spain in September of that year to take up a post as governess in a Basque household: I was pleased in my roots with the unexpected Spain I had found—and glad to the extent that I would not realize for years to have opened up an acquaintance with a country I was to love very much…. I have remembered nothing much, nothing of great general or personal interest from that lost year, but I see now that though smudgy, it was a more indelible year for me than many…. I am glad to have had it (FS, 211). Even though she left Bilbao after less than a year, returning to London because of her sudden decision to marry Dutch journalist Gustaaf Renier, her time in Spain fed her imagination and in due course would inspire several novels and stimulate a copious number of references scattered throughout her work. The marriage to Renier lasted only eleven months, and as an independent woman, living in London, O’Brien set her sights on becoming a professional writer.

It would be ten years before O’Brien renewed her acquaintance with Spain when her success as a playwright and novelist provided her with the means and opportunity to return. Between 1932 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, she spent her summers traveling around the northwestern towns and cities of the Iberian Peninsula. She later fictionalized some of these experiences, and she also published a travelogue, Farewell Spain, in 1937 in which her interest in Spanish history, literature, and culture is avowed in tandem with a condemnation of Franco’s ideology. During those summers in Spain, she enjoyed sitting at pavement cafés, reading classic works of literature, attending a bullfight, and traveling through the austere Castilian countryside, constantly observing. Indeed, Mary O’Neill, who appears in Farewell Spain as a travel companion, describes O’Brien as a knowledgeable traveler with a very perceptive temperament.³ O’Brien’s experiences in pre–Civil War Spain contributed greatly to her imaginative development, and Farewell Spain’s importance as a key text in an evaluation of her aesthetic should not be underestimated.

O’Brien was not concerned with the Spanish South and East because she was unreceptive toward the history of the Moors in Spain.⁴ Her lifelong friend Lorna Reynolds confirmed that she had no interest in—in fact, an active dislike of—Moorish Spain. She used to get quite angry with me when I would argue that one could not dismiss the Arab contribution to Spain out of hand…. Christian Spain was what concerned her.⁵ One of the numerous paradoxes of the Spanish Civil War was that the nationals, who were so firmly Catholic in identity, enjoyed a base of support in the Islamic territory of the Moroccan protectorate. An estimated eighty thousand Muslims served in Franco’s forces, accounting for nearly 7 percent of his total manpower.⁶ In Farewell Spain, O’Brien angrily makes the following point concerning the current conflict in Toledo: Spaniards holding a Moorish fortress against Spaniards for the advancing, returning Moor. For anyone who has loved the long history of Castile—unbearable (147). In other words, the antidemocratic stance of the nationalist side was as foreign to the Spanish temperament as the Moors had been centuries earlier.

O’Brien’s identification with the culture of medieval Catholic Spain is evident throughout Farewell Spain. Her cities of pilgrimage include Santander, Madrid, Avila, Salamanca, Santiago de Compostela, Bilbao, and Burgos. She devotes whole chapters to emblematic figures of sixteenth-century Catholic Spain such as Philip II and Teresa of Avila, while recollections of visits to El Escorial and the Prado in Madrid reveal an avid interest in the paintings of religious figures and church interiors by artists such as Goya, Peter Paul Rubens, and El Greco. This veneration for the greatness of continental Catholic tradition is apparent in O’Brien’s fiction. For example, as Tom Mahoney in Pray for the Wanderer (1938) argues: We’ve created no art in Ireland, such as the other great Catholic peoples have (69). For O’Brien, Ireland was a Catholic society estranged from Catholic tradition whose cultural isolationism, anti-intellectualism, and sexual repressiveness had, regrettably, become exacerbated since gaining independence in 1922.

A legacy of British administration in Ireland was the control it had afforded to the Catholic Church in running Irish education and health care systems. This alliance was inherited by the fledgling Irish government, which in effect maneuvered the Catholic Church in the Free State into a hegemonic position. As the church in Ireland continued to grow in wealth and numbers, it assumed power over the lives of its parishioners and public ideological discourse. In 1926, 92.6 percent of the population of the Irish Free State were returned as Catholic in the census, but the figures alone do not reveal the whole picture.⁷ Ireland had a large majority not just of Catholics but of committed, practicing Catholics. With the parish priest acting as the moral policeman of his community, active devotional practice was mandatory. Thus, the Catholic Church in Ireland had a captive audience that it sought to manipulate for its own ends. The power of moral pressure on Irish Catholics exerted by the church cannot be overstated, at personal, organizational, and political levels.

Although Ireland in the late 1920s was beset by many social and economic problems, the main issue from the Catholic Church’s point of view was sexual immorality. Ireland’s population was believed by religio-nationalist ideologues to have been partially corrupted by centuries of imperial domination and the temptations of modernity. It was reasoned, therefore, that if Ireland was to achieve its potential of true Catholic nationhood, its people required an unquestioned faith in the moral leadership of the Catholic Church and the riddance of spiritual and intellectual impurities. The state actively endorsed conservative forms of popular, indigenous cultural activity associated with rural community life, such as storytelling, Irish dancing, and music. The church, however, believed the country was being swamped by a tide of depravity, in the form of evil literature, jazz music, and film from England and America, and the hierarchy’s demands for legislation on issues of personal morality became more vocal.

Catholic pressure groups such as the Irish Vigilance Association and Catholic Truth Society conducted campaigns in favor of the censorship of books and films—and with the help of Catholic publications such as the Catholic Bulletin and Irish Monthly proceeded to inflame public and political opinion. The Censorship of Films Act had already been passed in 1923, and in 1925 Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins was petitioned again, this time to act to prevent the spread of bad books and other disreputable literature. Responding to public and political pressure, O’Higgins created the Committee on Evil Literature in 1926 to consider the censorship of publications. The committee’s report called for the introduction of the Irish government’s most famous measure to safeguard traditional moral values, the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act. The Censorship Board—which comprised five people deemed suitable by the minister of justice—had the authority to prohibit any book or periodical that they found to be indecent or obscene. This act made it illegal to buy, sell, or distribute that publication in Ireland’s twenty-six counties. The legislation reflected the moral concerns and principles of the leaders of the Irish Free State, and it was accepted by most Irish people as a necessary safeguard against external threats to their Catholic identity.⁸ In reality, the act succeeded only in becoming a weapon of cultural and social control.⁹

Kate O’Brien rebelled against the individual and intellectual restraints imposed by the puritanical Catholicism of Ireland, much preferring the personal freedom that she found while working as a governess in Bilbao in 1922–23 and when she returned in the early 1930s. Here she discovered a more celebratory and carefree Catholicism than the authoritarian and pious version she experienced at home. Like Ireland, Spain was overwhelmingly homogeneous in religion, but here nonattendance at weekly Mass did not result in social ostracism. The Spanish married in the Catholic Church, proudly baptized their children, made much of their children’s confirmation, were buried from it, and joyfully participated in colorful processions to commemorate the great festival of Easter.¹⁰ But that was as far as the church’s influence over people’s lives stretched, because, as O’Brien says in Farewell Spain, They can be controlled by a broad ideal and by a symbol which appeals to them, but within that ideal the rules must be limber and have all possible room for personality—which is why, taking it broad and large, the Catholic faith has remained so native to the Spaniard (224).

The individualistic nature of Spanish Catholicism appealed to O’Brien and was, for her, the ideal. In her memoirs, she documents having lost her religious belief before she left her Limerick convent school in 1916.¹¹ Yet a closer inspection of her corpus of work reveals an author who was a sincere believer but who preferred a more self-regulating Catholicism that she discovered during her time in Spain. Whether she practiced her Catholicism when she was in Ireland or England is questionable, but O’Brien regularly attended Mass while she was in Spain. This point is affirmed in several letters to her sisters Anne and Clare, where she confirms her regular attendance at church in Avila and reports that midnight Mass in the medieval city was a beautiful and joyous occasion.¹²

Spain allowed O’Brien to express a nonnormative sexual identity that was impossible in Ireland and invent a liberal version of Catholicism in her novels where individual conscience and personal choice on moral concerns were possible. O’Brien talks about Spain as being individualistic, free and libertarian, in complete contrast to Ireland, which had become increasingly restrictive, parochial, and conservative (FS, 150). She particularly identified with the liberal Spain of the Spanish Second Republic (1931–36), where Catholicism was removed as the official state religion; freedom of speech and association was established; divorce, abortion, and same-sex intercourse were legalized; and women’s suffrage was introduced.¹³ Here, according to O’Brien, in principle at least there was freedom of Speech, freedom of publication, as of religion and of irreligion.¹⁴ It is this Spain that she says farewell to in her travelogue, the one that she fears will be lost if Franco, and fascism, is triumphant in the Spanish Civil War.

In Farewell Spain, O’Brien describes herself as a pacifist but makes no attempt to hide her support of the Republican cause and champions the manifesto of the Second Republic: However Anti-Communist you may be and however you may deplore the burning of churches or the penalizing of the traditional religion of Spain, you cannot, if you take the trouble to read the 1931 Constitution, deny its dignity, justice, humanity, efficiency and natural idealism. Nor can you claim that therein the Church is more than disestablished and politically controlled. And it is a fact that though certain details of these measures of control were much disputed they were in the main accepted by an actively Catholic nation as reasonable and sound (219). O’Brien makes the crucial point that although the Spanish population had voted democratically for the disestablishment of the church, it did not make them anti-Catholic. Like her, they wanted to live in a country that insisted on religious liberty, freedom of education and the press, the right of free association, and having a voice in their own community. The new legislation was seen by some as a direct attack on Catholic values, yet the legal changes were not meant to discriminate against Catholics or to attack their beliefs. Instead, the policies were intended to reduce religion to a purely individual matter in a country in which, like Ireland, the majority of the population declared themselves to be Catholic. O’Brien’s general emphasis on individual rights and actions, as opposed to mass movements, is consonant with the libertarian individualist tradition on the Left. However, as Michael Cronin argues, in O’Brien’s view, both right and left in the 1930s were creating a routinized world, and for her, the crucial issue at stake in the Spanish war appears to be this larger civilization struggle between ‘individualism’ and modern political systems of whatever hue.¹⁵

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was a topic of interest and discussion across much of the Western world and across the spectrum of Irish society. That the tragic events in Spain aroused emotive responses in the political arena, popular press, and literary magazines is not unduly surprising given, as Robert A. Stradling points out: Ireland’s history, ancient and modern, predisposed the nation to involvement in the Spanish Civil War.¹⁶ The conflict certainly bore resemblances to the Irish equivalent, which had ended only thirteen years earlier. In both wars the church backed the winning side; in both conflicts republicanism, in whatever form, was the loser, and the triumphant sides oversaw years of conservative government supported by wealthy landowners and the merchant classes. In contrast to the rest of the British Isles, citizens of the Irish Free State were mainly pro-Franco, which was, for the most part, because of the propaganda circulated by the conservative newspaper the Irish Independent and sections of the Irish Catholic Church. For example, readers of the Irish Independent were informed that communist sympathizers had lied when they claimed that the war in Spain was between democracy and fascism. It was, in fact, the paper claimed, a fight between the Faith and the Antichrist.¹⁷ In the same newspaper, an article published on August 10, 1936, served only to whip up support for Franco and the Right by reporting that bodies of nuns were left on the sidewalks of principal streets.¹⁸ Moreover, church congregations were cajoled into raising funds to support Franco in his quest to bring those individuals who committed atrocities against church property and the clergy to justice.

Although there had been some attacks on church property and the clergy by the Republican faction in Spain, Franco had exaggerated the religious persecution by the Left to strengthen his own cause. He rallied the support of many Catholics and conservatives throughout Europe and the Western world by deceiving them into thinking that the war was first and foremost a Christian crusade against communism. The church’s crusade against the Republican government had been waged for its own institutional interests for survival. Many moderate