Cousins Removed – Frank McNally on a Belfast-born writer’s passage to India

When the writer James Henry Cousins (1873-1956) returned to Dublin from his home in India during the summer of 1925, just as it is this weekend, Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock was playing at the Abbey.

It summed up everything that had gone wrong with Ireland during his years of exile, he thought.

“It had all the valued elements of stage-craft”, Cousins later wrote: “construction (that blessed word of our theatrical youth), stark realism, tenseness, character (at the lowest level), smartness of phrase (that meretricious passport to cleverality), local colour (exaggerated and applied with a broom).

“One could not judge the real effect of the horrid story on the audience, for the ill manners of the cheaper parts made judgement impossible. I was told that the post-freedom crowd had brought the theatre back to the early days of the dramatic revival, when the back streets had to be educated to look on a play as a serious work of art.”

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Elsewhere on his European trip, Cousins also attended Playboy of the Western World in Liverpool, but left after half an hour to “shed tears over the grave of the dramatic idealism in the beginning of which I had had a share”.

While in Dublin, he attended a party hosted by his old friend WB Yeats and was disappointed “at the poverty of conversation”. He looked forward to something better at the home of another former compadre, AE (George Russell), whose literary soirées he remembered fondly:

“Times, alas! had changed. Instead of the gang, overflowing from chairs on to tables and the floor, the only person present was Padraic Colum when I arrived, and no more turned up. People had moved away, interest had gone into other things than ideas.”

Born in Belfast 150 years ago, Cousins was descended from Huguenots and grew up Protestant, working for a time as private secretary to the lord mayor. But he moved to Dublin in 1897, where he felt instantly at home with the “soft brogue”.

The feeling was cemented on one of his first days in the capital, as he strolled along College Green:

“‘The blessing of God on you,’ a familiar flavorous voice, that would make anyone seen green, said in Irish’.” It was Douglas Hyde, who, after hearing the reasons for his move, wished him luck and added: “I knew you had a southern soul in your northern body.”

Cousins considered himself “fifty per cent liberated” then. As with Yeats and AE, his allies for a time in the emerging national theatre, however, his soul was also interested in eastern religion, something he took more seriously than them in the end.

Among other activities in Dublin, he founded (with his wife Gretta) the Irish Vegetarian Society. His circle of literary friends meanwhile expanded to include James Joyce.

Joyce despised the Belfast man’s writing but accepted his hospitality, staying with Cousins and his wife in Sandymount in mid-June 1904, a pivotal time.

They invited him to spend two weeks there, but he fled their house after two days, claiming to have been made ill by a “typhoid turnip”.

Even so, he paid tribute to both in his Dubliners stories. Gretta gave her name to that book’s most famous female protagonist, from The Dead, while Cousins is believed to have been the physical model for Chandler in A Little Cloud.

Any likeness ended there. Whereas Chandler and his wife have a noisy baby, the Cousinses never did, mainly because, in line with their spiritual beliefs, they gave up sex early in the relationship.

In a joint biography, We Two Together, Gretta recalled that she had been left “white and thin” during her first year of marriage by the shock of what lovemaking involved: “Something in me revolted then, and has ever since protested against, certain of the techniques of nature connected with sex.”

A believer in reincarnation, she doubted humanity would ever be “purified and redeemed” until evolution “substituted some more artistic way of continuance of the race.”

Yeats had come to dislike Cousins’s writing by 1903 and thereafter marginalised him. The Belfast man in turn hated the new realism of Synge and others. His Irish nationalism and interest in Theosophy also left him increasingly at odds in his day-job, as a teacher in Dublin’s High School.

So eventually, where Yeats and Russell had talked, the Cousinses walked. In 1915, they took their spiritual journey to its logical extreme and left Ireland for India, where they would spend the rest of their lives.

Among the people James spoke with on the 1925 visit to Dublin was Eamon de Valera, already “quietly confident that he would come into power”. They met again some years later when Dev was chairing the League of Nations, and Gretta (a former suffragette) had discussions with him about the empowerment of women.

De Valera asked them to come “home” then, but home was India now.

In 1937, while the taoiseach oversaw the introduction of a new Irish constitution, James H Cousins formally converted to Hinduism.