The write approach to romance

Straight from the Heart : Irish Love Letters Edited by Bridget Hourican Gill Macmillan, 224pp. €19.99

THE INTRODUCTION TO this collection of love letters opens with a reference to the novelist JG Farrell and a letter he wrote in 1973 to his girlfriend, Sarah Bond, explaining that he was in a public library “flicking through a dry and weighty volume of Victorian social history” when he stumbled on a love letter addressed to “Tony” – “naturally, I read it greedily.”

This sense of positive greediness frames Hourican’s criteria for what (if anything) can make a letter distinctly Irish. Though a conclusion is never neatly arrived at, her process is inclusive: 60 people, a wide time period (1160-2000), diverse political sympathies, writers from Synge to Somerville, and figures such as Áed mac Crimthainn and John Ford.

Playwrights are placed alongside politicians, and farmers alongside actors, and famous stories such as that of WB Yeats and Maud Gonne stay warm beside the embers of Berlioz’s feverish love for the Co Clare woman Harriet Smithson. The letters are sent from hotels and prisons, from Australia and from 60 Shelbourne Road, Dublin 4, all linked through the mysterious prism of romantic love.

In explaining her exclusion of certain things, Hourican makes some interesting historical observations. There is a lack of letters in Irish, for example, because lovers wrote more in poetry than in prose (though she does include an extract from the 12th-century Book of Leinster, and the poem Aoibhinn, a leabhrain) and there are fewer prison letters, as they are another genre in themselves, and perhaps require a separate book entirely.

She maps out what makes this collection topical; in an age of social media and other distractions, the art of letter writing has changed, yet love remains resolute. Our sense of disseminating that love textually has become fragmented. This is clearly a worrying trend, and a dangerous progression. Letters are important. Put into context, these particular letters link not only time periods and social change but also a diverse set of minds and ideas, connected through reflection. It is also noted that letters are sensual documents, from one pair of lover’s hands to another, and the whirl of ceremony that accompanies letter writing gives a formality to an often wild emotional landscape. A text message or e-mail may contain such feelings, but the medium is inferior.

Hourican writes that she had preconceived ideas of what she might find among the letters. Her worry that a “generalised emotion” among politicians and soldiers would “fall prey to the moon, stars and other ritual metaphors”, and, “on the other end of the scale, rhetoric and pomposity” would surge, largely proves unfounded. Other conceits emerge, however, for example that some writers “exploit their lovers for art”, with their letters as a work in progress, mining emotions for scenes that will later appear in novels or poems. They are still frail, however. We see Shaw, encased in wit, defensively write about his heart as “machine”; Yeats’s polished prose barely hides his distress that Maud Gonne is about to marry John MacBride; and Joyce reveals surprising neediness when an unfounded rumour about Nora emerges – and, when she writes back, a humility: “As long as I live I shall always remember the quiet dignity of that letter, its sadness and its scorn, and the utter humiliation it caused me.”

The insight into these figures’ vulnerabilities is fascinating; Parnell’s entreaties to his “Wifie”, Katherine O’Shea, are endearing; Michael Collins’s reflection to Kitty Kiernan that she is “not forgotten” profoundly resonates; and Iris Murdoch’s complicated feelings towards possibly her deepest love (“the most remarkable person that I met as an undergraduate”), Frank Thompson, are true and sad, as so many of these letters are, and through seeing both sides of the correspondence there is a revival of a dusty dialogue.

There is also something powerful about the fact that many of these figures, often several decades and histories apart, reference each other, providing a comforting lineage; Wolfe Tone references Sterne (by quoting Tristram Shandy), who in turn references Swift (“Not Swift so lov’d his Stella . . . as I will love and sing thee”); and art imitating life, and life art, is reflected in Joyce’s meditations on Parnell throughout his work, perhaps inspired by the tender strength (obvious in his letters) that Katherine O’Shea brought him, yet tragedy would of course touch “Queenie’s Darling King”.

Tragedy looms over the collection, but so does the regenerative strength true love can bring. One of the most shattering accounts is of Éamonn Ceannt, as he writes to his wife, Áine, an hour before his execution as leader of the Easter Rising. While he focuses his mind on death, he apologises for his cold exterior, which “was but a mask”, and tenderly recalls their love,“my sweetheart of the hawthorn hedges and summer’s eves”. And there is Annie Hutton, who became engaged to Thomas Davis in 1845; six weeks later he died from scarlatina. She went on to write a letter to a friend about her “short month of happiness . . . yet a whole existence of love”.

This “whole existence of love” could have been better served with a less incongruous design, and less emphasis might have been placed on figures whose letters have previously been mined (Yeats) with more scope given to people like Hanna Sheehy and Frank Skeffington, and their pleasingly equal partnership.That aside, this is a worthy contribution towards understanding our obsession with Irish identity, and the importance of writing and preserving letters. Most importantly, it is a reminder of the mysterious impulse of love and of the questions Joyce wrote so despairingly of to Nora: “Is there any hope yet of my happiness? Or is my life to be broken?” For this set of correspondents, there is no in-between.

Siobhán Kane is a freelance arts journalist and a doctoral student; she runs the music and literary collective Young Hearts Run Free