The Irish Novel 1960 - 2010

1963: Michael Farrell, Thy Tears Might Cease

Also Published in 1962 Walter Macken, The Silent People; Brian Moore, An Answer from Limbo; Paul Smith, The Countrywoman; Jack White, The Devil You Know 1963 Michael Farrell,Thy Tears Might Cease Drawing on the author’s boyhood and youth, Thy Tears Might Cease is perhaps the most thorough chronicle available of provincial Irish society in the early years of the twentieth century. Farrell (1899–1962), a native of Carlow town, was a noted radio personality and cultural commentator . His writing career consisted largely of a regular column – ‘The Open Window’ by Gulliver – in The Bell. The author’s only novel, Thy Tears Might Cease was long completed and accepted for publication before Farrell’s death but appeared posthumously only in an edited version prepared by his friend Monk Gibbon. The opening part of Thy Tears Might Cease is entitled ‘The White Blackbird’, and that is a fitting description of the protagonist, Martin Matthew Reilly. But the phrase might also be applied to the town of Glenkilly, whose variegated social and political populace is depicted with painstaking relish. At its centre stands Martin’s solid Catholic bourgeois family, an embodiment of the town’s ‘citizen merchant’ (25) class. Confident, comfortable, respected, these burghers give little indication of being a subject people, nor are they impatient to attain separation from Britain. ‘We must mix’ (79), Martin’s Aunt Mary says, explaining her barely lukewarm attitude to the issue. Noticeably absent from Glenkilly are the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association and similar contemporary manifestations of Irish Ireland – indeed proponents of such organisations are regarded as ‘them Gaelic brats in Dublin’ (33). Yet the Reillys’ nationalist credentials are not in doubt, as their adherence to John Redmond, the leader of the Home Rule movement, demonstrates. A narrow post-independence nationalism reconstructed earlier conditions along polarised lines, but the elaborate description by which the author documents his vanished Edwardian world rejects such a revision. As a Reilly, Martin is a member of this settled community, but he is also an exception within it, a ‘half-and-half’ (520), as he calls himself, being the offspring of a liaison between a married English Protestant and Matthew Reilly. His mother has died in childbirth, and his father 1963: MICHAEL FARRELL, THY TEARS MIGHT CEASE 11 drowned himself shortly thereafter, leaving Martin to be reared by his aunt and uncle. An obvious air of tragic romance surrounds such origins, and this follows Martin throughout his youth. But it is also possible to read in his parentage a story of Parnellite sexual rebellion, complete with modernist overtones of dislocation and downfall. Not too much is to be made, perhaps, of the fact that both parents are buried in Paris, but it does emphasise that their story is not Glenkilly property. In any event, these beginnings give Martin a complex heritage – Anglo and Irish in cultural terms, passion and loss from a psychological perspective, singularity and doubt when it comes to loyalties and causes. One of the conventions of a Bildungsroman such as Thy Tears Might Cease is that, as the protagonist makes his way, his experiences teach him to know his place in the order of things. But as Martin’s history unfolds, it reveals an increasing difficulty in establishing where he belongs, culminating in a realisation that ‘No rightful name belonged to him, no family, no Church, no country, no sweetheart’ (531). As a result he decides to take a position in Cochin-China, although typically enough that is no future for him – nor is there any other. One unavoidable sign of Martin’s difference are his feminine features , detailed in his eyes, his frequent blushing, his highly strung temperament and his fondness for the company of young women. Millie, the working-class girlfriend he acquires when he becomes a medical student in Dublin, comments on the girlish quality of his behaviour with her. In boarding school he develops a crush on Norman Dempsey, while also receiving the sexual attentions of one of the school’s priests. Yet, despite Martin’s troubled reactions to these experiences, his sexual identity is not ultimately the point at issue. Rather, his femininity points to the refinement and incorruptibility of his inner nature. ‘Romantic Martin Reilly!’ (476) he is called, derisively, but in his idealism and ardour he not only embodies a young man’s typical quest for something to believe in but also elements of the spirit that animated his parents. Boarding school leaves him only with the ambition...