A Time Outworn by Val Mulkerns: a sunlit novel, with shadows

Val Mulkerns was a prominent Irish writer and literary critic in the decades when a woman writer in Ireland was a rara avis – although fiction writers such as Elizabeth O’Connor, Kate O’Brien, Mary Lavin and Edna O’Brien, to name a few, indicate that the phenomenon was not unknown. At least two of those above succeeded partly because they left Ireland, and we know, of course, that novels by the two O’Briens (unrelated) were banned here, as were so many others.

Val Mulkerns lived in Ireland almost all her life, and succeeded in being a respected novelist in a country where the literary scene was completely dominated by men. Even her own memoir, Friends with the Enemy (2017) amply illustrates that fact, as the title suggests.

She published 10 books, including novels and collections of short stories. A Time Outworn – the title drawn from Yeats - was her first. It appeared and was very well received in 1951, but has been out of print since, and is re-issued now to commemorate the centenary of her birth in 1925.

It’s a remarkable novel, covering about a year or so in the life of Maeve, who narrates it. She’s a sprightly, attractive, independent Dubliner, aged 18. The story begins at a crucial juncture in her life, just as she finishes secondary school, and is embarking on adulthood. It’s a love story, a story of a girl’s struggle to find a career, and above all an exposition of Dublin and Ireland at that time. 1943. The second World War is in progress, and impinges to a somewhat marginal extent on the novel, as on life in Ireland at the time.

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Without giving away the plot, which takes some surprising twists, I can say that it involves a romance which goes wrong, partly thanks to Maeve’s independent streak. The account of her passionate relationship with her boyfriend, Diarmuid, is absolutely convincing. Indeed, all her emotions, sexual and otherwise, ring true. She is passionate not just about Diarmuid, but also about her ambitions, about places, and about life itself.

Two other aspects are extremely striking and interesting. First, it provides an extraordinarily vivid picture of what Irish society was like in the 1940s. Her accounts are not entirely surprising to someone of my vintage – Ireland didn’t change all that much over the next few decades so some of what is described is familiar to the generation which succeeded hers (Val Mulkerns’ daughter, Maev, who writes a fascinating introduction to the novel, was in my year in UCD). But the descriptions are so detailed and accurate that they make one laugh with recognition, also gasp and occasionally wince.

The novel is set mainly in Dublin, Mulkerns’ city, and partly in the Tipperary town of Thurles. The physical places as well as their inhabitants and mores are evoked brilliantly. Maeve’s Dublin is middle class, not particularly well-off but not poor by any means. As the novel opens she is awaiting the results of her Leaving Certificate. Unless she gets a scholarship she won’t be able to fulfil her ambition to go to university.

She doesn’t get a scholarship, and instead has to settle for a course in shorthand and typing and perhaps a job in the lower rungs of the Civil Service, which she is not looking forward to. Some of her better-off friends, including the love of her life, Diarmuid, are going to college. A kind, elderly man, a friend of her father’s, offers her a job in Thurles, running a lending library.

This is her escape route – since the library is a little room at the back of a grocery store and Thurles a small town in rural Ireland, it doesn’t strike one as the answer to the wanderlust of an ambitious literary young woman, but Maeve is delighted with the prospect, and she enjoys the job. Given the wartime setting, however, there is no possibility of going very far anyway. In the event, Thurles, now a little over an hour from Dublin on the train, is distant enough. There is no question of popping up to Dublin every weekend – a fact on which the plot turns.

Another benefit of the somewhat unlikely job in Thurles is that it bestows on the author a golden opportunity to paint a picture of small-town Ireland, which possibly was her intention – she has a historian’s eye, as well as a novelist’s. We are treated to a graphic account of living conditions and the social life of the town.

The room was perhaps the size of a large coffin. The bed took up the whole length of it, and along the near wall there was barely enough room for a narrow chest of drawers affair, with a jug and a basin on top, and a small cloudy mirror…Thick layers of dust lay along the frames of the bewildering array of religious pictures covering every inch of the walls, except for the very few inches taken up by the mirror.

The kitchen is very hot, the rest of the place unheated. But Miss Walsh, the landlady, is a good-humoured, extremely religious, woman. Warm and inquisitive, she provides plenty of chat, gossip, and thickly buttered bread – a treat for Maeve, used to Emergency rationing.

The town is dominated by the terrifying parish priest, who chases courting couples at night - but note that while he is a tyrant, he is also a figure of fun among the youth whose sexual lives he is policing. There is a new cinema – which Maeve shuns, being a literary young lady with all the snobbishness of youth. The new schoolmaster from Kerry who shares her lodgings sets up a drama group, which performs The Merchant of Venice – acceptable to the priest, and to Maeve, who remarks

‘It had always seemed to me one of the sunlit plays, with Shylock as the first, faint shadow that would deepen into the tragedies’.

That could be a comment on this novel.

Because it is, mostly, sunlit. The narrator experiences the great joy of young love, in iconic Dublin lovers’ settings, like the Hill of Howth. She can be ecstatic about the natural beauty of Ireland – her evocations of Donegal, of Connemara, of the Aran Islands, are exquisite and she views them with the wonder and delight which are at their most intense when you are 18:

I began to go over in my mind the stages of the journey: the trip by bus from Gweedore to Letterkenny, along a stretch of wild coast where the sea was a flickering indigo, changing colour with every whim of the wind, and the land was rocky and barren and beautiful, haunted by legends of the Gaelic civilisation it cradled. If you looked back you saw Muckish Mountain, coloured like a grape, and idly leaning, one shoulder higher than the other, and further back was Errigal, conical and purple and mystic, like a mountain in a dream. At Letterkenny – sprawling, friendly Letterkenny, indifferent to the Gothic beauty of its cathedral – you changed into a train, slightly worse than a goods train, which shattered mind and body till you got (miraculously|) to Strabane’.

The deep appreciation of the Donegal landscape, the love of beauty, is echoed again and again in the novel. Mulkerns’s skill at depicting landscape and townscape, and conveying the great almost mystical pleasure which a sensitive young person takes in beauty, is unsurpassable. But she tempers it with that fine irony – ‘the train worse than a goods train’ from Letterkenny to Strabane.

For readers of a certain age, who may remember this train (I travelled on it when I was two or three, in the late 1950s) these reminders of railways which have been long relegated to history, of streets like O’Connell Street which were once majestic and bustling with business and entertainment, of the little towns with big cinemas and even bigger churches, are definitely a part of the charm of this novel. Mulkerns, through the eyes of her narrator Maeve, is simply documenting what she observed, and observed well, in 1943, but for us now, this is an invaluable glimpse of a life aspects of which we may faintly recognise but which is past.

One of the most striking set pieces, one of my favourites, is a party which a larger than life Mrs Kiernan, mother of one of Maeve’s friends, throws, in the early chapters. It is September. The house is a large country house on the edge of Dublin; a bevy of young women and men, as well as older people, are invited for nine PM (later than we’d invite guests these days). The girls wear evening gowns and jewels and flowers, and are like flowers opening to the world of romance and fun:

And then Mrs Kiernan delighted us all by producing her last minute surprise, a collection of lovely Chinese lanterns that she sent one of the men to hang from trees near the house, and we suspended several in the porch, one in each corner. It looked like the setting for a harlequinade, and we wondered what the place would look like at dusk, when the lanterns would be lighted. There would be scores of them inside too, since electricity had never been installed. Mrs. Kiernan said it was vulgar. The light would be provided by candles, a few oil lamps, and the lanterns. It was all highly dangerous, of course…It seemed natural for an old house so near Sarah Curran’s old home.’

Plenty happens at this party – Mulkerns’ portrayal of the group of schoolgirls – the literary one, the shy one, the athletic one, the flirt – is sharp and spot on.

The mention of Sarah Curran’s old home locates Springfield House somewhere in Rathfarnham, in the foothills of the Dublin mountains. One wonders if the party ever occurred, in the author’s first year out of school? A Time Outworn is indeed a bildungsroman, as Carlo Gébler mentions in his lovely introduction to the novel. But it is fiction, and its relationship to Mulkerns’ own life, about which we know something thanks to her memoir, is slant.

Like Maeve in the novel, Mulkerns finished school in 1943. Like Maeve, she didn’t win a scholarship to college, but she did not go to Thurles to work in a lending library. Instead she took a secretarial course and worked for a few years in the Irish Civil Service. In 1948, she left Dublin and for three years taught in schools in Carlisle, Hertfordshire and London.

This novel was written mainly while she was teaching in England, and published there in 1951 – she used the £100 she received from the publisher to fund a long, magical trip to Italy.

Mulkerns had a more exciting and adventurous young adulthood than Maeve. One wonders if certain episodes (like that party in Rathfarnham) are based on some such event in Hertfordshire, rather than in Emergency Ireland (I hope not! Mrs Kiernan and the Chinese lanterns at Springfield House lighten up my image of Dublin in the 1940s). But it is clear, from reading the novel and the memoir in quick succession, that the exuberance, the independence, the joyful optimism of Maeve – during most of the novel – reflect the personality and some of the experiences of the author.

It is not that she paints an unrealistically positive picture of Ireland during the 1940s. Certain aspects of the attitudes that are portrayed in the novel, probably unconsciously, illustrate the dark side of Ireland at the time - the side with which we are all too familiar in literature and film. I don’t mean the excessive unctuousness of Miss Walsh, the absurd power of the priest, or the lack of free education. But the characters in the novel exhibit definite misogyny, which must have been common in at the time and which explains some of the horrible history we hear so much about.

Even in the educated, light-hearted circles who populate the book, women are blamed by one another for the sexual infidelities of men. Maeve at one stage says, I wish I liked women. Corporal punishment of children is taken for granted. Brian Clancy, the utterly charming schoolteacher in Thurles, apologising for being late because he had to stay back in school with boys doing detention, says, ‘You could leather them till the arms would fall out of your sockets, and damn the heed they’d pay to you. ' In her memoir, Mulkerns deplores physical violence towards children – now illegal in Ireland. But in 1951 she would not have taken it very seriously. Nobody did. We always have blind spots.

So, we get a glimpse of a society with mores, customs and expectations different from those of today. But we also get a picture of an Ireland which is not all misery and Magdalene homes and emigration. Maeve, like Val Mulkerns, was lucky in her cheerful character, her great personal gifts, and the circumstance of belonging to a kind middle class family. And we are lucky to have this document of a group of people who had happy, fairly prosperous, lives – a picture of Ireland which is a welcome antidote to the ‘miz lit’ to which we are so much more accustomed, justifiable as it is. The sun sometimes shone on Ireland and the Irish in the 1940s and 50s. And this is a sunlit novel. With shadows.

A Time Outworn by Val Mulkerns is published by 451 Editions. It was first published in 1951 by Chatto & Windus. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a writer and academic. She is a member of Aosdána.