A Pastoral Vision: The Novels of Canon Joseph Guinan

The early twentieth-century Irish novelist Fr. Joseph Guinan (1863–1932) came from a strong farming family in County Offaly. After attending St. Patrick's Seminary, Maynooth, from 1881 through 1888, Guinan spent five years in Liverpool following his ordination. After some years teaching in St. Mel's College, Longford, which he left owing to failing health, Guinan served as a curate in several parishes until he was appointed parish priest of Bornacoola, County Leitrim, in 1910. In 1920 he became a canon and transferred to Ardagh, where he remained until death. Today, Guinan is chiefly remembered as an imitator of a better-known priest-novelist, Canon Sheehan. Guinan's writing, like Sheehan's, appeared initially in such American Catholic outlets as the magazine Ave Maria published from the University of Notre Dame. Between 1903 and 1928, Guinan published eight novels. Guinan also published a Catholic Truth Society of Ireland pamphlet titled The Famine Years (1908), and a collection of essays, Months and Days (c. 1920–23) modeled on Sheehan's Under the Cedars and the Stars (1903). Historians of clerical attitudes in early twentieth-century Ireland have made use of Guinan's works. The only extensive literary analysis of them is Catherine Candy's Priestly Fictions: Popular Irish Novelists of the Early Twentieth Century (1995). Candy's examination of Guinan's fiction does not fully appreciate their political context and overlooks some of his ambivalences.¹ Reacting to Sheehan's literary example, Guinan constructed a Catholic arcadian vision of the impoverished, small-farm Shannon lowlands of North Longford and South Leitrim as part of a wider clericalist social project, and presents the political, social, and cultural developments of his lifetime in terms of this vision.

* * *

Guinan does not replicate Sheehan's inept excursions into "high society" and his trite plots lack Sheehan's excessive elaboration. When Guinan comments on the invalidism and premature death of the hero of his novel The Island Parish (1908)—"were we to adopt the tricks of the professional novelist, we should have made Father Devoy a bishop, instead of consigning him to the cold clay in the prime of his age"—he is glancing at the glittering career Sheehan forecasts for Fr. Letheby in My New Curate (1900).² Both priest-novelists idealize rural Ireland, reflecting the sensibilities of their exile audiences and memories of British slums as places of dislocation, death, and religious lapsation.³ Guinan's The Soggarth Aroon (1905) comments revealingly that it is not necessary in rural Ireland, as in Liverpool, to make parochial visitations and compel parishioners to attend Mass (SA 99-107). Guinan rejoices that in Ireland even drunken cornerboys are proud to be Catholic and will beat up any Protestant who curses the pope.⁴

Guinan hesitates between using wealthy returned emigrants as deus ex machina for the expected happy endings, and fearing that favorable descriptions of emigrant life encouraged emigration.⁵ Indeed, Guinan emphasizes the sufferings of even successful emigrants. by darkly referring to emigration as well-deserved consequence of moral failings and to returned Yanks as amoral trouble-makers (SA 169).⁶ Like Sheehan, Guinan asserts identity with the common people by idealizing and sentimentalizing poverty. In The Soggarth Aroon, a priest is proud of persuading a young couple to stay in Ireland, where the husband earns "as many shillings as he might have earned dollars in the States," that is, one-quarter the amount (SA 180–81).⁷

Unlike Sheehan, Guinan conveys a strong sense of poverty's physical presence. He is interested in local detail: precise descriptions of farmhouses, the embarrassment of a farmer's daughter greeting a priest in her working clothes, how men at a fair slowly get drunk while buying and selling (SA 88–89, 103–4). Even so, Sheehan deserves his higher reputation because he tries, however hesitantly, to portray priests as human beings, albeit within clearly defined limits. Sheehan's priests...