“Next morning I rose and went forth of a bright sunny Sunday to call on my wife and to be introduced for the first time to another girlfriend,” playwright Denis Johnston would write in his diary about the birth of his daughter Jennifer.
“That walk of a father! As though I had done it all myself. Up Pembroke Road to Baggot Street lifting my hat right and left – graceful acknowledgment of the applause that I felt sure the somewhat surprised passersby and bystanders would be according me if only they knew what had been accomplished.”
Days later there was an elaborate naming conference involving Denis and wife, successful Abbey Theatre actress Shelah Richards. Prudence, the name of a much-loved grandmother, was chosen for the second name. The first was more difficult.
“Something beginning with J for alliterative reasons was favoured. And we voted on them over and over again – like they do for popes or presidents of the US until the personal favourites were eliminated and a compromise objectionable to no one was reached in Jennifer.”
Jennifer Prudence, though she did her best to lose the latter, which only her father would use. A father she would love and admire, although both would admit that he was, as he said himself, “a bit of a rogue” .
His writing was undoubtedly the source, the impulse, for her to write, in no small measure an attempt to prove herself to him although his sudden departure as a father and his aloofness hurt. Only in their old age had she finally come to really know both parents. She would long for his approval - it was only through a 1970s radio interview that she learned of his long-hidden pride in her literary accomplishment. She cried.
Her relationship with Richards was more affectionate, although she told an interviewer that her mother was “a spoilt, younger child with a very stormy personality. She expected everything to revolve around her.”
Jennifer Johnston was born in Dublin into a family that was in and of the Dublin theatre and its vibrant revival. It was also part and parcel of the lively Protestant middle class, much of which had thrown its lot in with the new State.
This was not the landed Anglo-Irish ascendancy with which her first novel is associated and which hung like a weight around her neck. She resented categorisation of her early work as Big House “Anglo-Irish”, almost foreign, insisting she was “nominally Protestant” but “chiefly Irish”. She shied away from being classed a “woman” writer although her views were unarticulated feminist and socialist.
“I am neither a philosopher nor a politician, an academic nor a former of opinion in any way,” Johnston wrote in an essay for Edna Longley’s Connections. “All I know how to do is tell stories ... Not give myself a label because we are all diminished by labels, but to shout that I am on the side of the nation, with a small n ...”
Her grandfather, William John Johnston, who would end up on the Supreme Court, was a northern Protestant barrister and then judge who once stood as a Liberal Home Ruler for South Derry. On independence he transferred his judgeship South. Her great-grandfather had been for a time the secretary of the Belfast Protestant Home Rule Association.
Denis’s bar career allowed him to indulge his first passion, theatre, and he became an important figure on the amateur and professional stage, where he met Shelah.
Both parents, Jennifer would write approvingly, wanted to “rock the boat” of the new State. “My grandmother became a suffragette until it was pointed out to her by [her husband] Johnny that chaining herself to the railings in St Stephen’s Green would not be received kindly by his old-fashioned clients.”
[ Jennifer Johnston obituary: Writer who combined brevity with razor-sharp wisdomOpens in new window ]
Her grandmother would be deeply affected by the 1915 death of son Billy at Suvla Bay and of a brother at Festubert. Jennifer to the end carried around Billy’s last letter, which arrived after his death. That family memory and a moving trench diary from a relative of second husband, David Gilliland, would inspire How Many Miles to Babylon (1974).
Life for Jennifer and brother Micheal was unconventional, with both parents away from home much. Denis describes in his diary the rehearsal before a belated christening, a gathering of “embarrassed and insincere godparents”, all of whom had to “publicly renounce the lusts of the flesh”, a promise that “caused some indignation in [painter] Norah McGuinness”.
They were semi-detached members of the Church of Ireland although firmly identifying with a distinctly Protestant anti-clericalism. Shelah was particularly offended by the Ne Temere rule, requiring that all children of a mixed marriage be brought up as Catholics. She contended was tantamount to ethnic cleansing for the small Protestant community, a theme Jennifer took up in Shadow Story (2012).
But things were not going well at home. The marriage broke up and her father left when she was eight, Micheal three. He did not tell her and she would learn the truth from a schoolfriend.
She was not academic and would leave Trinity without completing her degree in English and French. To the amused teasing of family, many years later Trinity awarded her an honorary degree, of which she was intensely proud.
She left college in 1951 at 21 after marriage to Ian Smyth, a miller’s son from Strabane, also a student of English and French. They would live in London and eventually have four children – myself, Sarah, Lucy and Malachi. Life revolved around homebuilding and long summers in Strabane, bridling somewhat at the strict Presbyterian observance, or across the border in Donegal.
She would start writing in the late 1960s, saying later it was the only way she could see of escaping domesticity and its isolation. At 42, The Captains and the Kings (1972) was published to acclaim – she won the Evening Standard Award and Yorkshire Post Award, both for best first work - she then resuscitated the previously rejected The Gates (1973).
How Many Miles to Babylon (1974) was the story of friendship across class boundaries in the first World War. It remains her most popular work.
By then she had left a bereft Ian and startled children for Derry solicitor David Gilliland and acquired five step-children – Anne, Gail, Amanda, John and Philip.
She wrote Shadows on our Skins (1977), reflecting, as she confessed self-deprecatingly, inadequately on her Derry experience. “As a writer she is more effective through nuance than open comment,” critic Eileen Battersby would write, but it was Booker shortlisted in 1977, while “some of her more deserving novels were overlooked”. It won the Whitbread.
She would again touch on the political/religious divisions in Ireland in The Old Jest (1979) and Fool’s Sanctuary (1987).
She ventured occasionally into the theatre, most successfully with a series of one-act monologues that are perhaps more radio than stage, and a stage version of How Many Miles. The pull of the stage was powerful: Denis, Shelah, and all her Fitzgerald cousins, Hollywood star Geraldine, Gate actress Susan, film and TV actress Tara, director Caroline ... Above all perhaps, there was a determination to follow in her father’s footsteps, though theatrical technique proved somewhat elusive.
Her later novels would be more intimately focused on family secrets and lies, and their gradual unveiling to next generations. She teased her readers with the Magritte-inspired title This is Not a Novel (2002) and, later, Grace and Truth (2005), both exercises in exploring family.
She became a member of Aosdána, and served on the board of the Abbey.
After 40 years she would return to Dublin and she lived there until her death.
[ Exhibition marks Jennifer Johnston’s 90th birthdayOpens in new window ]
She always strenuously resisted the notion of a memoir, telling David Norris that “I’d have to tell too many lies”. But she found other ways to write about her life and family. In 1980, the family gathered at the Peacock for the opening of her one-acter The Nightingale and Not the Lark. To their growing horror, on the stage May Cluskey conjured up a vision of an aged, faded actress who bore an uncanny, somewhat unkind, resemblance to Shelah.
“Pure coincidence. Nothing to do with Shelah,” Jennifer insisted.
In Truth or Fiction (2009) she repeated the exercise at greater length and in more excruciating detail on her barely disguised father and the women in his life. “This is not about my father,” she told daughter Sarah.
Jennifer’s perspective on her father is that of a child of a first marriage, deserted by him at the age of eight with her mother and younger brother. She was always somewhat distant, literally and emotionally, from an aloof, not-altogether-attentive but fond Denis. He left Dublin and his first marriage to become a BBC producer and then war correspondent, and as fictional daughter Ellie would complain in the novel, “No one told me you had gone forever. No one gave me that piece of information for five years.”
[ Jennifer Johnston: The letter I kept in my wallet for 30 yearsOpens in new window ]
“There are a number of women who are on my conscience,” Denis would write. “My mother is one, and Jennifer P is another.”
Though in awe of and deeply attached to him there is a bit of what the fictional counterpart is alleged to feel about her father Desmond. “She considers you an old fraud,” he is told. Denis married the successful younger actor Betty Chancellor, and had a simultaneous on-off, torrid affair, with Nancy Horsbrugh-Porter, whom he would later describe as the “real love of my life”. She told him that there were two schools of thought about him in Dublin: one that he was a gorgeous cad, the other that he was a cad. “And then there’s me.” In 1970, Denis would finally return from teaching in the US to Dublin. Jennifer, still based in London and then Derry, would see him intermittently, though there was always a mutual froideur with Betty.
Jennifer’s relationship with her father is far from her whole story. But its narrative of desertion and loss, of secrets and lies, of literary fulfilment and intellectual brilliance, of the stage’s lure, of a late-fulfilled need for approbation and recognition, of love and awe, all shape her life and writing. She remained, it seems to me, wrongly convinced she was still in his shadow, her life like a Shadowdance, his original title for the Old Lady Says No.
In The Irish Times in 1972, about the suggestion that she was too profligate with commas - “the Queen of Commas” – Jennifer laughingly recalled The Seagull and the character of Trigorin’s suggestion for his own epitaph: “Here lies Trigorin. He was a clever writer, but not as good as Turgenev.” Denis may have been on her mind.
Patrick Smyth is Jennifer Johnston’s son. He worked as a journalist for The Irish Times
