BIOGRAPHY: Shane Leslie: Sublime FailureBy Otto Rauchbauer Lilliput Press, 320pp. €40
IN APRIL 1923, Shane Leslie advised his American publisher, Charles Scribner, that if the latter invited him to contribute to Scribner's Magazine, "I should like enormously (and take enormous pains) to send one or two paragraphs of review, criticism and literary gossip. I am well into all the literary world and I could reduce the flotsam and jetsam to a few epigrammatic sentences which would give your readers an idea of what was being written on this side." The offer will resonate with all writers, especially in these straitened times, not least for the way in which a plea for work is couched in terms suggesting Leslie was the one doing Scribner a favour.
Reading this new biography it becomes clear that the need to earn an income explains both Shane Leslie’s prolific output – he was the author of more than 60 works, covering fiction, poetry, criticism and biography – and also why he is scarcely remembered today. Though he invariably wrote well, he wrote at speed and Otto Rauchbauer notes how on occasion there were “some negative consequences of hasty composition”. Like his near-contemporary fellow author, the 18th Lord Dunsany, he is now most likely to be classified as a belletrist, a term which regrettably does some disservice to his undoubted intellectual abilities.
Born in 1875, Shane Leslie’s history might have been otherwise had he not decided to convert at the age of 23 from his family’s traditional Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. At the same time he insisted on renouncing his birthright: succession to the Castle Leslie estate in Co Monaghan passed onto his younger brother Norman (who, with tragic irony, was killed in France six years later). The consequence of this abnegation was that he also lost the revenue derived from the family property. Whereas his grandfather had enjoyed an annual income of £25,000, Shane Leslie received just £200 from the estate, together with some money from his mother. Writing became a critical means of livelihood.
While he retained a powerful affection for Castle Leslie, and travelled there from England every year until his death in 1971, there is no evidence that Leslie ever lamented his conversion or its consequences. "It was like exchanging one's first love for a mistress," he wrote in 1955, an unlikely analogy but one which indicates the intensity of passion involved; for a brief while he even contemplated becoming a Dominican friar and lifelong celibate. Though marriage in 1912 put an end to such ideas, thereafter he was an advocate and apologist for his adopted faith, prepared to submit to chastisement – and editorial revision – when his 1926 novel The Cantabmet with disapproval in Roman Catholic circles. Likewise, four years earlier, Leslie, using the pseudonym Domini Canis(The Watchdog of the Lord), had forcefully attacked Ulyssesin a number of publications for what he perceived to be Joyce's calculated anti-Catholicism. As he wrote to the New York lawyer and cultural patron John Quinn, "as long as I hold the Catholic symbol I wince at studied disrespect and perversion of sacred things".
Yet it is apparent that Leslie also disliked Ulysseson stylistic grounds, Rauchbauer observing that he saw the work "as a frontal attack on both English and Irish literature".
Writing to Oliver St John Gogarty in June 1922, he remarked, "If we are to stand for a Gaelic and Catholic Ireland Ulysseshas to go by the board. It is Bolshevism applied to our unhappy literary movement . . . It sweeps all the small fry before it in its muddy and rancid spate." Leslie was no modernist and while acknowledging "[h]ere is a work of semi-diabolical beauty and ugliness" he could not embrace the stylistic innovations of Ulyssesany more than he could its Rabelaisian content. His own prose is traditional in form, as is his poetry where his preferred forms were either the sonnet or, for longer works, the rhyming couplet. Literary innovation will not be found in his published work.
Does this necessarily mean Shane Leslie deserves to be designated a sublime failure (the subtitle of this biography taken from one of the subject's own books, Studies in Sublime Failure)? Perhaps not, except that much more had been expected both by himself and by those who knew him.
A comparison can be, and regularly was made with the career of his first cousin Winston Churchill (their mothers were two of the magnificent Jerome sisters). Leslie’s forays into political activism – he stood unsuccessfully as a candidate for John Redmond’s Irish Party in the 1910 General Election and also engaged in unofficial work for both the British government and Redmond in the United States during the first World War – were not marked by success and disinclined him to public service.
Like Churchill, he was subject to attacks of what his cousin called the “Black Dog” of depression and suffered several breakdowns during the course of his life. In his case, these may have been due at least in part to an awareness that he could never hope to match his cousin’s achievements.
Rauchbauer quotes a touching description written by Leslie of Churchill’s funeral service in St Paul’s Cathedral and remarks that “he was ever aware of his own precarious social and financial position”. While this sensitively written and considerate book is unlikely to lead to a widespread revival of interest in someone who can best be categorised as a minor man of letters, it ought to introduce Shane Leslie to the broader audience he deserves. There is, after all, still a place for belles-lettres in the spectrum of literature.
Robert O'Byrne is a journalist and author. His most recent book is The Irish Georgian Society: A Celebration