MEMOIR- Wicked Little Joe - A Tale of Childhood and Youth By Joseph Hone, the Lilliput Press, 288pp, €20. Joseph Hone's memoir reveals a colder, emotionally distant side to his foster father Hubert Butler, essayist and sage of Maidenhall, Co Kilkenny
IN 1913, JOSEPH HONE, biographer of WB Yeats and George Moore, and his American wife, Vera, had a son, Nat. When he was 18, Nat inherited £10,000 from an uncle and went up to Oxford. He lived like a minor character in an Evelyn Waugh novel, drinking, roistering, misbehaving, and pretty soon his inheritance was spent.
In 1936, in a London pub, Nat met Bridget (Biddy) Anthony, a 20-year-old trainee Irish nurse. They married and, in 1937, their first child, Joseph (or Little Joe, to distinguish him from Old Joe, his grandfather), the author of this memoir, was born.
In 1939, Nat contracted tuberculosis. Unable to cope, he and Biddy gave Little Joe to Old Joe, who in turn placed the two-year-old with his friend Hubert (the future author of Escape from the Anthill) and his wife, Peggy Butler (née Guthrie). Thereafter, Little Joe boarded, first at Peggy's childhood home, Annaghmakerrig, and then at Maidenhall in Kilkenny, which Hubert inherited during the war, with Old Joe paying the Butlers 15/- a week for his keep.
Little Joe, by his own account, was quarrelsome, self-centred, “mutinous”, “sulky”, a malingerer, a liar, and a thief. His woeful schooling, first at Sandford Park, where the headmaster, Hal Dudgeon, terrified him, and then St Columba’s College, only accentuated his worst qualities so that at some point he became Wicked Little Joe. Despite this, the Butlers were prepared to adopt. Nat and Biddy refused and eventually the Butlers decided to stop fostering.
However, and typically I am tempted to say, they omitted to tell Little Joe of their decision. They simply arranged to be abroad during some of his school holidays, though during his holidays when they werein Ireland he continued living at Maidenhall as their surrogate son. I don't think it's unfair to say Hubert and Peggy's messages were mixed.
In July 1953, aged 16, Little Joe embarked on life. He was damaged and emotionally stunted but, like a fairytale hero, he did find his way and he did mature. He went first to Sally Cooke-Smith (née Hone) his aunt and her husband Stanley’s house in Hampstead and worked in their bookshop. Later he learnt Serbo-Croat in Yugoslavia and he worked for film director John Ford, who passed him on to the London-based Irish director Brian Hurst, which lead to work at Pinewood Studios and friendship with the blacklisted American director Joseph Losey. Then he did a year as a schoolteacher in Egypt (which made him into a novelist, he says), which led on to the BBC and the UN and thereafter to a 30-year career as a broadcaster and writer, as well as to marriage, children and stability.
And there the story might have ended except, in 2007, Bernard Meehan, the TCD archivist, told Hone that among Hubert Butler’s papers (which the college had) was a file marked “Little Joe” full of letters about him written by the Hones, the Guthries, the Butlers, and various teachers and psychiatrists during the 1940s and 1950s. Did he want to read them?
At first he declined (“To deny is often to survive”) but then, his novelistic instincts perhaps getting the better of him, he changed his mind. He read the file and re-encountered his childhood and youth, not as he remembered living it, but as others had seen it from outside.
It was, as a comparative experience of this kind must be, salutary, surprising, enlightening and desolating. He also realised that this cache was a gift to one with his literary skills and that to make a book all that was required was that he run the two in parallel, his story and the adult counter version given in the letters. In 2008, Hone started writing, and now, a year-and-a-half later (undoubtedly this was a work that fairly demanded to be written), the book is finished, and it doesn’t make for easy reading.
Old Joe and Vera are here revealed as parsimonious and neurotic. They also, Old Joe especially, had a peculiar talent for making a bad situation worse. Nat, their son, and Biddy (this isn’t so much of a surprise) emerge as even worse than they at first appear: it turns out not only did they give away Little Joe they also gave away the six siblings born after him. As for the theatre director Tyrone Guthrie (a fringe character but an important one since he introduced Little Joe to books and make-believe), he comes across as a woeful judge of character.
However, perhaps the greatest casualties are the Butlers. The Hubert Butler we meet on Hone’s pages is not the sage of Maidenhall but a frigid, cold, emotionally distant Victorian who had no insight whatsoever into the inner life of the child who lived under his roof for so many years. As for Peggy, far from being saintly, she turns out to have been vindictive, abrasive, and cruel.
However, and the author is at pains to remind us of this, these adults, even his parents, all had their reasons and they all, on balance he believes, did more good than bad. He also warns us repeatedly that they were all creatures of their times and are therefore not to be judged by the values of the present.
He is, finally, also emphatic that his feelings were and remain positive: he loves and continues to love his Hone grandparents, the Guthries and most of all the Butlers (whom he regards as his parents). This may seem strange but we have to remember children don’t judge those who rear them if they can possibly help it. They just love whomever they are given, as this sad but important book reminds us.
Carlo Gébler is an author and currently Visiting Writer at the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing, Trinity College