Now that we are enmeshed in the decade of commemorations, it might be apposite to recall that one of the most outlandish and Bohemian – if not exactly instructive – commemorations of 1916 was a supposedly scandalous novel published just over three decades after the event, and which has had a half-life stretching right into the present century.
It was entitled On est trop bon avec les femmes or "We always treat women too well," written by the highly regarded French writer Raymond Queneau, and published in 1947. Its similarity with most novels ends there. For one thing, it is a bodice-ripper, centred on the events of 1916, and featuring a cast of rebels whose names were, in many cases, those of characters in Ulysses. For another, it seems to have been written almost as part of a wager between two novelists. And, finally, its author hid behind not one but two levels of pseudonymity, until he was outed by a fellow writer seven years later.
Ostensibly the diary of an Irishwoman named Sally Mara (who appears in the text as Gertie Girdle), and supposedly translated from Irish (the “translator’s” name is also a fake, as there was no translation), it tells how the heroine was held captive in a building in Dublin (not the GPO) by rebels during the Rising, but turned the tables on her captors by seducing them serially before they were finally rounded up by the British forces led by her fiancé.
Queneau (aka Mara) apparently wrote the novel following a dramatically successful initiative in the bodice-ripping department by his contemporary and friend Boris Vian, who had earlier written – in 10 days, for a bet – another bodice-ripper, loosely modelled on contemporary American pulp fiction, which sold half a million copes.
Dennis Duncan of Birkbeck College in London, from whose paper on Queneau’s book I have gratefully culled these and other details, argues that Queneau’s book is different from Vian’s in that it displayed “an ironic distance, a way of undermining the genre, even as he fulfilled his sex and violence remit”.
And fulfil it he did. Even though some of the details would be out of place in a family newspaper such as this, it is perhaps relevant to point out that the horny rebels not only used the phrase "Finnegans Wake" as their password and battle-cry, but as a full-throated expression of sexual ecstasy. And, as Duncan tells us, Queneau had acknowledged his debt to Joyce as early as 1938, and kept a notebook to document his reading of Ulysses.
It didn't make Queneau's fortune, despite being republished quite a number of times, and was made into an apparently unwatchable movie in 1971. The growing realisation that it was a send-up of, rather than a genuflection to, the bodice-ripper genre was aptly expressed by John Updike, who did a foreword for an edition of it published by the New York Review of Books in 2003. He praised, in particular, Queneau's "cerebral prankishness, electric pace, and cut-on-the-bias poetry".
It did not impinge negatively on Queneau's future or on his creativity – one of his poems, Si tu t'imagines, became a hit lyric for Juliet Greco. Copies, you may be pleased to hear, are still widely available through the customary mega-retailers of used books. But somehow I don't think that RTÉ will be filming it as part of next year's commemorations.
Curiously, the story of Sally Mara, or Gertie Girdle, reminded me of another occasion, in or around the 50th anniversary of 1916, when a group of Irish Times journalists, myself included, were upstairs in the Pearl Bar.
We turned to discussing a news item involving half a dozen of our London contemporaries who had, in an unbelievably short space of time, made a lot of money by combining to write a highly successful bodice-ripper. Following a planning session devoted, in the most casual of ways, to the draft outline and main characters, each journalist had written one chapter.
Well, we thought, if the Brits can do it, why can’t we? There was a brief – probably, as it turned out, too brief – discussion of the mechanics of characterisation and plot, and we all adjourned in high spirits and in anticipation of similar success.
In a couple of weeks’ time, we promised each other, we would meet again to put the deft finishing touches to an anonymous but multi-authored novel that would not only set new standards for salaciousness but would make our collective fortunes.
When we reassembled at the appointed time and place, increasingly lame excuses were proffered for almost everyone’s failure to meet what should have been, by our normal standards, a very relaxed deadline.
But one of us – to our collective shame and embarrassment – had actually taken the whole damn thing seriously, and arrived proudly bearing a number of carefully written pages.
Needless to say, not another word of the planned great work was ever written.
The only journalist who had met the deadline, on that long-ago occasion, was Maeve Binchy. I wonder where her chapter is now.