Book Review: Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce

In a gorgeous geekfest of an introduction, Colm Tóibín wanders the streets of Dublin and makes literary discoveries at corners and intersections, spots memorials, and locates places where there once lived the families of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce. He walks us through his own memories of those places; like the National Library where he studied for over two years, also the place where Joyce set Episode 9 of Ulysses. Evoking the place and time, he writes:

The domed Reading Room has not changed since the time of Yeats and Joyce. It has the same light and layout, the same noises, perhaps even some of the same people, or maybe they just look similar.

Tóibín’s is no slouch when it comes to writing about places where the past rides abreast of the hurrying present. My mind went back to his great book Homage to Barcelona, where he wrote:

You could hardly move on the Rambla that morning; the street was crowded as it had always been, but the stretch between the port and the Liceu Opera House was seedier than before... This was Picasso’s stomping ground in the years when he lived in the city; this was where George Orwell, in May 1937, watched fascinated as the crowd built barricades with speed and skill.

In his new book, Tóibín summons those long gone men of genius to earth and like a guide whose voice we hear but cannot see he puts us squarely there with them, in time and place. He notes influences and meetings, like when Wilde invited Yeats for a Christmas dinner in London; or that time when Yeats wrote to Gosse in support of Joyce; or the constant presence of the Wildes and Yeats in the work of Joyce.

Nothing is laid out and overt, though.

“What is strange, as I move up this street in the scarce winter light is how empty Westland Row might seem if you did not look properly, how ordinary and plain.”

Tóibín knows the art, the city and its artists, which offers him that periscopic edge, and he has a lively prose to rattle away the street’s significance in one scintillating burst:

Westland Row appears in Episode 5 of Ulysses, or Leopold Bloom appears in the street in that episode. It is ten o’ clock in the morning on 16 June 1904 as Bloom walks away from the quays via Lombard Street East, passing Nichols the undertakers, which is still in business to this day. He stops to look in the window of the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company at 6 Westland Row, now gone. Then he goes into the post office at 49-50 Westland Row, also disappeared.

In every nook and cranny are there to be found the inkstains left behind by wordmasters who dramatised Dublin for their art. But to glean those scatter marks and resurrect their importance requires a shrewd and scrupulous artist like Tóibín. There is scarcely a smudge of sentimentality when he evokes those times and at the same time cuts to the core of the era when he writes:

It remained an era of individuals, with writers and painters creating their moral worlds from chaos by themselves, for themselves. Leopold Bloom moves alone in the city, as does Stephen Dedalus. Wilde in his London world stood alone too, as he suffered alone. And Yeats stayed proudly aloof, as Joyce did in his exile. Ireland offered them isolation, as Yeats wrote to Gosse. It was a sort of gift.

Their fathers, too, stood apart, following no route that any community had charted.

~

The book, divided into three sections, is devoted to those fathers and their unique individualities, and the various forms in which their presence is seen in their sons’ works. The three essays – on Sir William Wilde, John B Yeats, and John Stanislaus Joyce, respectively – were written for the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature that Tóibín delivered at Emory University in 2017. They rest on page equally grippingly, with accounts of love affairs and libel cases acting as gossipy narrative hooks. Tóibín appears to have read everything, as he plucks quotes from letters, biographies, plaques, newspapers... Add to this the fact that Tóibín is a great writer, and what we end up with is a quilt of great quotes. But above all Tóibín makes stunning literary connections that bespeak a fiercely analytical mind in sound accord with serious erudition.

The connections are rarely elliptical, always enriching, sweeping across personal and literary landscape, the genesis of which might be as banal as a gaze. This is how Tóibín opens his chapter on John B Yeats:

Somewhere in the great, unsteady archive where our souls will be held, there is a special section that records the quality of our gaze.

A photograph of John B Yeats gazes back at us as we read the above line, and before long Tóibín has us wanting to know more about the life of this romantic who spent a better part of his life on finishing a self-portrait, who went to New York and never returned to Ireland, who became one of the greatest letter writers in the English language. Tóibín quotes liberally from those letters, and what emerges is the portrait of a man who yearned to do many things but accomplished very little. “All of his life he thought about what he might have become,” writes Tóibín. “That was one of his great subjects.” John B Yeats’ two daughters appear as “the weird sisters” in Ulysses, points out Tóibín, while also noting the fact that Yeats met a young James Joyce on the streets. The man’s “defiance in the face of old age” influenced his son’s later poems. But beautiful of all is Yeats’ long correspondence with one Rosa Butt. On this Tóibín writes:

In these letters to Rosa Butt, John B Yeats, the foolish, passionate man, with his excited, passionate, fantastical imagination, did not write about the life he had missed, but the life he imagined, and he gave that life a sense of lived reality, as though it were not only somehow possible, but almost present.

The connections between father and son are strongest and most complex in the case of Joyces’. Tóibín brings in one place the actual reality as recorded by Stanislaus Joyce, in his book My Brother’s Keeper, and the various shades rendered, through his fiction, by James to their father’s personality. There is a John Stanislaus Joyce, the drunkard and wastrel, who couldn’t feed his big family and left his wife to die, and there’s Simon Dedalus, who is, in Tóibín’s reading of the character created by James, “a complex figure of moods... a man more at home with his companions and acquaintances than with his family.” James, we realise, was left with memories of a father he wished to salvage in all his nuances.

Stanislaus Joyce concedes that privilege to his brother but not without letting go of his grievances:

In Ulysses, Simon Dedalus, for whom my father served as model, is a battered wreck in whom even the wish to live carefree has become a vague memory, but if the facets of his character that are presented make the figure an effective and amusing literary creation, that is possibly only because the tolerance of literature greatly exceeds that of actual life.

The father whose accomplishments might be somewhat comparable to those of his famous son is Sir William Wilde. A famous doctor – founder of the first Eye and Ear Hospital in Dublin – he was also an important antiquarian, topographer, folklore collector and archaeologist. While Tóibín notes the similarities between the life of both father and son, he points out that the influence Sir William had on his son was characterised by his absence in it, pointedly in the work Oscar wrote in Reading Gaol, De Profundis. Writes Tóibín on this:

Since [Oscar] Wilde put so much energy into letting it be known that he had invented himself, it is easy to understand how having a father might have seemed at certain moments quite unnecessary for him.

William Wilde cuts a figure of great energy and omnivorous interests. Tóibín writes, “William was fascinated by monuments and the diverse ethnicities, by the religions and traditions he came across, by local politics, as well as by the wildlife.” He was knighted in 1864 for the “services rendered to Statistical Science, especially in connection with the Irish Census.” Tóibín best describes Sir William Wilde with the phrase “independence of mind.” That same phrase is maybe attributable to each of the three fathers in the book. In their own style, William Wilde, John B Yeats, and John Joyce drove themselves to become something else, trying and succeeding and failing in reshaping and reinventing their personas, hailed and hated during their time, defying, and defied by, their sons’ genius, but remembered now at least to some degree because of those very sons. Mad, Bad Dangerous to Know is not comprehensive but enticing nevertheless; it lures us into its literary folds and pricks our interest into asking for more. Literature heavyweights like Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, Bram Stoker, Samuel Beckett walk through its revolving door. It makes me want to read Ellmann’s Four Dubliners; W. B. Yeats' Autobiographies; William M. Murphy’s Prodigal Father, a biography of John B. Yeats; Lough Corrib, Its Shores and Islands, which Tóibín calls Sir William’s “most engaging and relaxed book”; two books by Stanislaus Joyce — My Brother’s Keeper, and The Complete Dublin Diary of Stanislaus Joyce; letters of J. B. Yeats, collected by Joseph Hone. It makes me want to drop everything and go read again Ellmann’s seminal biography of James Joyce.

John B Yeats, in one of his immensely quotable letters, writes:

I think every work of art should survive after all the labour bestowed on it, and survive as a sketch.

Pregnant with references and inviting to explore more, Mad, Bad Dangerous to Know will survive as a sumptuous sketch of three great Dubliners.