‘Did I wish to live then? Or did I not at all?’: Ralph Cusack’s once-ness

 

OR

 

On Cadenza: a neglected work of Irish modernism and why it matters as much today as it ever did….

 

 

Emily Brontë wrote only one (Wuthering Heights), while Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is greater, in so many ways, than the collected works produced by any number of more prolific novelists. There is a lot to be said for only writing one of any thing – one poem, one novel, one short story. Like so much else in life, there is a lot to be said for trying it, just once, inhabiting the space of a text that you yourself create and create yourself in. It can become an obsession, even without publication, as Emily Dickinson understood, but the ‘partially cracked poetess at Amherst’ also knew that publishers and editors, critics and academics, know nothing of the real experience of writing. That is something only those who have tried it can know, and you cannot know it unless you try it, even once.

 

There is a lot to be said, then, for the single, solitary works of authors who write no more than one novel or collection of poems, for whatever reason. Proust’s novel, published in seven volumes (three of which appeared posthumously), is an extreme example in some respects. There is also the idea – expressed by Martin Heidegger, for example, when he claimed that ‘[t]o think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world’s sky’ – that one only ever writes one work, no matter how many ways it is divided into separate volumes or collections. That point seems to make sense when one considers the overarching unity not only of purpose but of vision that pervades the works of great writers as different and formally various as W.B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, or David Foster Wallace. Of course it is possible to see differences and changes, abrupt shifts of interest and style, as one moves across the trajectories of their careers, but in an important sense they were all striving to write one work, a work that perhaps eluded each of them in what Patrick Kavanagh called ‘the final up-toss’.

 

As someone who has written a few poems, attempted to write a handful of short stories, started a novel and an autobiography, these ideas are often on my mind: the non-academic side of my brain that is, at the end of the day, where my best work gets done. They are also in mind, however, when I think about a work like Ralph Cusack’s Cadenza, first published in London by Hamish Hamilton in 1958 and reprinted, with an afterword by Gilbert Sorrentino, by the Dalkey Archive Press in 1984. Cusack never published anything else, that I can discover, but he appears as a marginal character in Anthony Cronin’s mythologies of modernist Irish literary culture, The Life of Riley (1964) and Dead as Doornails (1976). Samuel Beckett’s biographer James Knowlson refers to the fact that Beckett had some contact with Cusack throughout the 1940s, but during that decade Cusack was known less as an aspiring novelist than as a painter. A cousin of Mainie Jellet, Cusack was self-taught as an artist but he was of sufficient talent to be elected a member of the Dublin Painters’ Society in 1940 and a number of his works were included in exhibitions of the White Stag group in Dublin during that decade. He also worked as a stage designer, often with Anne Yeats, and in the 1940s he painted sets for productions of Seán O’Casey’s Red Roses for Me (1943), for example, and many other plays at the Olympia, the Gaiety, and other popular theatres.

 

It is interesting to think about how quickly such things are forgotten, how dispensable the work of set designers and production managers often seems to be as literary and cultural histories are written. At the same time, it is remarkable to consider that the White Stag group, which includes important artists (and not only painters) such as Brian Boydell, Thurloe Conolly, Robert Dawson, Kenneth Hall, Jocelyn Chewett, Dorothy Blackham, and Basil Rakoczi, were largely forgotten until recently, as Bruce Arnold has suggested:

 

There were aspects of Irish culture in those years that were stultifying, such as censorship, religiosity, authoritarianism, a prevailing impoverishment affecting all classes and lacking the remedy of the larger artistic market in London, or the more      exciting one in Paris. For all the good achievements, for all the diversity of talent, the end of the Second World War came as a release, not just for the White Stag visitors, but for many artists who went abroad. A uniquely exciting and creative period, quite brief, had passed. The vacuum of departure sucked in new voices, new styles, new directions in art. Public memory was short. The White Stag artists were soon forgotten.

 

Arnold’s essay on the White Stag Group was occasioned by the exhibition of works by the artists mentioned, and others, in the Irish Museum of Modern Art in 2005, which he curated with S.B. Kennedy. While the exhibition drew attention to a neglected ‘moment’ in the history of Irish visual art and challenged conceptions of its historical development in the twentieth century, however, it also brought individual artists to attention who subsequently went on to make significant contributions to other areas of cultural life. The most prominent figure here is Brian Boydell, arguably the most important Irish composer of the post-war period, but for many of the White Stag artists, as Arnold also suggests, ‘being part of “Irish” art [...] never mattered.’ Certainly in the case of the leading members of the group – Hall and Rakoczi, who were exiled to Ireland during the war – the ‘Irish ties’, as Arnold says, ‘were lightly borne.’

 

Cusack’s Cadenza does not bear the author’s Irish ties lightly, even if he shares with Rakoczi and Hall a strong desire to escape what was for them, as it was for Samuel Beckett, a stifling and ‘stultifying’ context for the production of art in the 1940s. Perhaps it was this, in a way, that accounted for the relatively low creative output of someone like Cusack, although he did get away and spent the last decade of his life in France, where he died at the age of fifty-two in 1965. The entry on him in the Dictionary of Irish Biography describes Cadenza, after Anthony Cronin, as a ‘pretentious schoolboy fantasy’, but that judgment is simply wrong. On the contrary, Cadenza is, as Gilbert Sorrentino puts it in his afterword to the Dalkey Archive Press edition, ‘a book of memory, termination and death, written with an Anglo-Irish arrogance worthy of Beckett, an arrogance that leaches out of these things the sentimentality and hideous falsity that they usually encourage.’

 

Cadenza is all of this and more. Most importantly, for readers in 2014, it is a book that shows just how far back the economic, social, and cultural problems that beset contemporary post-Celtic Tiger Ireland may be traced. In section 19 of the novel – it is organized in 60 numbered sections – as Desmond, the protagonist, seeks to escape from Dublin on a train heading West, he observes the following scene:

 

The rash of bungalows, spreading from the defacing tram-chimney of Sutton, had not then crawled over the alluvial fields, and seagulls were wheeling by late ploughing, early landing. Kilbarrack and Blackbanks were alone with their widgeon and pintail; and the shelduck waddled near their burrows in the bank.

Inland were farms dominated by huge red-painted iron Dutch barns as ugly and out of place as they were large and useful. No hint of functional beauty here or near it; for Fingal loves all things hideous; cement its favourite colour; cement Institutions its favourite consolation.

 

In these sentences Cusack critiques a culture of so-called civic progress that is presided over by what he goes on to call ‘the eternal triangle of cattle market, bank account and church.’ No matter what changes have occurred in Ireland in the last few decades, it is still a country where middle class attitudes informed by à la carte Catholicism continue to dominate and direct public discourse and social and cultural policy. Artists like Cusack, even though he only wrote one novel, sought to unsettle and upset this mindset. In the character of Desmond in Cadenza he created a figure of resistance who, by occupying a train carriage and refusing to leave it, pre-figures the frustrations of today’s commuter-dissident, caught up in a perpetual cycle of travel at the behest of capital. As the train carriage occupied by Desmond travels on, he looks out as it pauses at a station and reflects: ‘I looked out and was most thankful that I need not get out: never: never ever again.’

 

304D – the carriage in which Desmond travels – carries him ‘onwards and backwards and all ways’, and Cadenza is a novel that allows us to look back, to the 1950s and earlier. Looking back into that world as Cusack portrays it is disturbing, but the realization that the world of today is not very much different makes it harder to take. One of the most powerful moments in the novel centers on a scene in Desmond’s adolescence where he is caught naked in a garden with a young female friend. The scene is heartbreaking on many levels, not just because their innocent exploration of their physical selves is intruded on by adults who describe their actions as ‘Disgraceful...outrageous, MONSTROUS’, but because the scene ends with the girl in question (Celia) being sent ‘to a convent down the country where her mother’s sister was Mother Superior.’ This is a brief moment in the novel (section 18), but it is haunting, not least because of the way that it points forward to more recent accounts of what happened to many hundreds if not thousands of women and girls in Ireland throughout the decades that Desmond remembers in Cadenza. In this regard, then, Cadenza should not be considered solely or simply as a work of ‘comedy’, as Sorrentino suggests. Rather, it is a text that threatens to expose the rottenness that lies at the heart of Irish social and cultural life throughout the twentieth century. That it has never been appreciated as such is the true tragedy of its neglected once-ness.

 

Cadenza is a critically neglected work, and it is a once-off, by an author who was also an artist and a designer of note in his time. His time, however, and the time of Cadenza, is not the once-upon-a-time of fantasy fiction, as Anthony Cronin has suggested, but it is the time of our contemporary Irish historical moment. To understand where we are today, as artists and as citizens, it is not enough to pay attention to the culture we inhabit in the present. It is necessary, also, to explore those spaces that were created by others before us in the past, even if they were isolated moments of expression, and perhaps especially so if they were once-offs and not created as part of more sustained projects of self-articulation. The urgency of a work like Cadenza is felt all the more because it was the only novel published by Cusack. It shows what can be achieved by the thing tried once, whether it is a work of literature or a contribution to the visual arts, but the time of a text’s truest significance may not be in the year, decade or even century of its first or only appearance. ‘Did I wish to live then? Or did I not at all?’ Desmond asks in section 48 of the novel. The voice of resistance sounded throughout Cadenza is as clear today as it was when the work was first published, but who is to say if it is not too late to be heard?

 

 Must it be so?

           All burnt? All burning?

           Yes. Burn it down; burn it down!

           Burn everything down; burn everything!

           Then recommence: start all over again: build up and burn!

           New convents, new monasteries, retreat-houses, brotherhoods, churches, presbyteries, seminaries, asylums!

           Then set the match again! Set it once again!

           Surely a fine fire?

           BURN...