[Review] Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland by W. J. McCormack (2nd Ed., Dublin 1991

Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland by  W. J. McCormack (2nd Ed., Dublin 1991) is an excellent look at one aspect of 19th century Ireland: the experience of a thin layer of petty-bourgeois intellectuals of the "Protestant ascendancy" in Dublin during the rise of an Irish national consciousness. McCormack does a fine job with the toing and froing and unique historical contingencies of this cohort.

McCormack is also invaluable in discussing the fiction, long and short, created by LeFanu. His chapter on the novel Uncle Silas is admirably thorough.

LeFanu was a writer in a period of interregnum:  a sober and moderate conservative aware of the need for his ruling class to trim its sales and avoid a showdown with the plebian Irish majority. (In Dublin he wrote novels aesthetically retarded by their use of English characters and settings, attempts to curry favor with London publishers like Bentley.)

Readers who enjoy Le Fanu's Martin Hesselius stories will find some fascinating material in McCormack's treatment of the influence of Emanuel Swedenborg's thought on the author of "Green Tea" et al.

….Much of Le Fanu's later fiction is repetitive and, though this feature may be obsessive rather than mechanical, a full study of all his novels and stories cannot be justified. Fortunately Le Fanu seems to have embodied the essence of his experience in Uncle Silas with a formal economy missing in his other novels. The success of that novel—and to a lesser extent the success of the stories in In a Glass Darkly—is intimately connected with his reading of Emanuel Swedenborg's theology. By a circuitous route, this interest in Swedenborgian thought underlines the continuity between Le Fanu and the generation of Yeats and Wilde. Having read Uncle Silas and In a Glass Darkly with some attention to the theological allusion, it is possible to see in the following remark of Yeats's an unacknowledged debt to Le Fanu's fiction: 

    It was indeed Swedenborg who affirmed for the modern world, as against the abstract reasoning of the learned, the doctrine and practice of the desolate places, of shepherds and midwives, and discovered a world of spirits where there was a scenery like that of earth, human forms, grotesque or beautiful, senses that knew pleasure and pain, marriage and war, all that could be painted on canvas, or put into stories to make one's hair stand up.6 

    The paintings to which Yeats refers may have been Blake's, but it is principally in Le Fanu's fiction that Swedenborgianism is incorporated into hair-raising plots, And the same theories of the soul and its remorse are put to dramatic effect in Yeats's play about Jonathan Swift, while in Purgatory the Le Fanuesque theme of a Great House destroyed by the depravity of its master is interwoven with a murder which must repeat itself according to the Swedenborgian formula. Seeing Le Fanu as a contemporary of Ainsworth's or Wilkie Collins's, we are inclined to forget that within his lifetime the giants of the Irish literary renaissance were born—W. B. Yeats, George Moore, J. M. Synge. As a child Oscar Wilde was occasionally a playmate of Le Fanu's children. The Victorians are closer to the generation of the modernist movement than the latter cared to admit.

Ӂ

In his notes in The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature by H. P. Lovecraft (2012) Joshi writes:

The slight notice accorded to Le Fanu—now recognised as a major weird writer—is perhaps HPL's greatest critical misjudgment in this essay. He had been prejudiced against Le Fanu after reading the rather tedious House by the Churchyard, but even when, in 1932, he read "Green Tea" (in Dorothy L. Sayers's Omnibus of Crime), he did not change his opinion significantly: "It is certainly better than anything else of LeFanu's that I have ever seen, though I'd hardly put it in the Poe-Blackwood-Machen class" (HPL to Clark Ashton Smith, 16 January 1932 [ms., JHL]).

Ӂ

I have elsewhere posted about pieces of fiction that share - all proportions guard - comparable grammar, diction, and scene-building.

Reading McCormack, and then some Le Fanu stories from Madam Crowl's Ghost, I was struck by the opening of "The White Cat of Drumgunniol." Perhaps I detect its  echo in the opening of "The Dunwich Horror" a century later:

The traveler from Limerick toward Dublin, after passing the hills of Killaloe upon the left, as Keeper Mountain rises high in view, finds himself gradually hemmed in, up the right, by a range of lower hills. An undulating plain that dips gradually to a lower level than that of the road interposes, and some scattered hedgerows relieve its somewhat wild and melancholy character.

     One of the few human habitations that send up their films of turf-smoke from that lonely plain, is the loosely-thatched, earth-built dwelling of a "strong farmer," as the more prosperous of the tenant-farming classes are termed in Munster. It stands in a clump of trees near the edge of a wandering stream, about half-way between the mountains and the Dublin road, and had been for generations tenanted by people named Donovan.

"The White Cat of Drumgunniol"

When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

     Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

     As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

"The Dunwich Horror"

Ӂ

The best purely literary-critical discussion of Sheridan Le Fanu remains the "Green Tea" chapter in Jack Sullivan's Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (1978). But I would recommend McCormack's study to any reader hungry for richer context. 

Jay

3 April 2022