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Reviewed by:
  • Shane Leslie: Sublime Failure
  • Geert Lernout (bio)
Shane Leslie: Sublime Failure, by Otto Rauchbauer. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2009. 320 pp. €40.00

If Joyceans know Shane Leslie at all, it is as the author of two extremely negative reviews of Ulysses, one of which appeared in the Catholic journal Dublin Review under the name of "Domini Canis," in which the anonymous "dog of the Lord" (or heretic-hunting Dominican) called for extreme censorship, a type of reaction that Joyce may well have welcomed as the correct religious interpretation of a book that opens with a blasphemous version of the Catholic Mass.1 Although Leslie is now forgotten, between the two World Wars, he was not just a prolific and successful writer but also a major Catholic intellectual with connections in the highest political and ecclesiastical circles in London and New York.

Despite his fame and despite a stunning output as a writer, Leslie has all but disappeared. The Modern Language Association bibliography lists only three articles about him,2 two of them on his role as reviewer of Ulysses; it is more than a little ironic that Leslie's only reason for survival is as part of a footnote in the biography of a writer he so totally condemned.

Shane Leslie was born as John Randolph Leslie, the son of a protestant Anglo-Irish landlord (with holdings in County Monaghan that included Saint Patrick's Purgatory, the pilgrimage site at Lough Derg). His mother, Leonie Jerome, was one of three daughters of an American businessman, all of whom married into English society; one of the other sisters was Winston Churchill's mother, which made the future British Prime Minister Leslie's first cousin. As a scion of an absentee landlord family, Leslie enjoyed the correct kind of English education: first Eton, then a year at the Sorbonne, and then King's College in Cambridge, where he came under the double influence of the Oxford Movement and of the Irish Revival. His conversion to Catholicism was nothing if not methodical: first he joined the Anglo-Catholic (or "high-church") movement within the Church of England; then he embraced and practiced Christian socialism (visiting Leo Tolstoy, one of the movement's prophets, in Russia). Ultimately he made the big jump, even changing his name from the English John to the Irish Shane, while seriously contemplating becoming a Dominican friar.

Today we can no longer imagine the import of Leslie's conversion, but at the time it must have been close to social and cultural suicide. It [End Page 164] is a pity that, despite access to the complete archives, Leslie's biographer, Otto Rauchbauer, has not managed to throw more light on this decision, which Leslie, in later life, refused to comment on because he felt that it was beyond rational explanation. As pointed out by his Anglican bishop, Leslie's conversion came at a most difficult time for the credibility of the Church of Rome—right in the middle of the so-called modernist crisis, when the authoritarian Pope Pius X steered the Church away from the historical study of the Biblical texts and the Christian past and away from all political, social, and cultural accommodation to the modern age (and to other Christian churches). Socially the decision meant that Leslie lost the right to the baronetcy, which went to his brother instead. Yet after his father's death in 1944, Leslie did become the third Baronet of Glaslough after all, and he was succeeded by his son, Sir John Leslie, the fourth and current Baronet, who in 2002 enjoyed a brief brush with fame when he inadvertently revealed that Paul McCartney and Heather Mills were going to get married at Castle Leslie. Leslie's social suicide did not lead to abject poverty either. He became an old-fashioned man of letters or "scholar-squire," as his biographer calls him (8).

Becoming a Catholic was one thing, but joining the Celtic Revival and running for Parliament on John Redmond's nationalist Irish Party ticket in 1910 Ulster was an entirely different affair; it did not help that Leslie lost the election. He sent a sarcastic telegram to his parents...

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