BiographyThe reclamation of lost voices is often associated with the distant past but can occur within living memory.
Such was the oblivion into which the great African-American writer Zora Neale Hurston had fallen in the 1970s that Alice Walker could not find her grave at first, though she died as recently as 1960.
Dorothy Macardle died two years earlier, in 1958, and also passed into the left luggage room of history destined for those who do not carry the appropriate ideological baggage of their day. The revival of her reputation in the past few years, most notably in the Field Day Anthology of Irish Women's Writing (2002), and by researchers such as Sinead McCoole, Peter Berresford Ellis, Lelia Doolan and Eunan O'Halpin, has been long overdue. Nadia Smith's biography is a much-needed contribution to this exercise in retrieval, allowing us at last to chart the main outlines of a multifaceted career ranging across Irish literary, political and gender history.
Macardle's neglect by scholars derives partly from the regrettable destruction of her personal papers by her younger brother after her death, but may also be due to her contestation of many of the categories used to pigeon-hole the past. A staunch republican, she was also a prominent internationalist and humanitarian; an admirer of de Valera, she was also a committed feminist; a cultural revivalist, she opposed compulsory Irish and published studies of Shakespeare, Sir Thomas Malory and Sir Philip Sidney; an Irish nationalist, she (initially at least) questioned Irish neutrality during the second World War; a leading journalist and historian, she also wrote some of the masterpieces of modern gothic fiction.
Dorothy Macardle was born in Dundalk in 1889 into the wealthy brewing family, and was raised as a Catholic. She was educated in the predominantly Protestant Alexandra College, Dublin, where she later taught English, until her dismissal in 1923 for republican activities. Imprisoned and brutalised during the Civil War, she participated in female prisoners' protests, as well as writing the ghost stories that featured in her first collection, Earth-Bound (1924). During the next decade, several of her plays were produced by the Abbey Theatre, but, as with her own ghosts, have all but vanished from the stage. In the 1930s, Macardle joined the new Irish Press as drama and film critic, and in one of her earliest reviews, drew attention to the impressive performance of the young actor playing in Jew Süss at the Gate Theatre, Orson Welles.
Macardle's popular reputation in Ireland has rested mainly on two landmark publications in republican history: Tragedies of Kerry (1924), an account of Free State terror in Kerry during the Civil War, and her monumental history The Irish Republic (1937, revised 1951). In the eyes of adversaries, her interest in ghosts was nowhere more evident than in the latter, for it was perceived to have been ghostwritten by de Valera, or at least to have been informed throughout by his point of view.
In fact, as Smith shows, its publication coincided with a painful, decisive break with her former mentor, precipitated by the discriminatory clauses against women in the 1937 Constitution to which she strenuously objected. The outbreak of the second World War widened the gulf. Feeling she could not remain personally neutral in the face of Nazism, Macardle moved to London to work with refugees, and make herself available to the BBC for the war effort.
MACARDLE'S EXPERIENCE IN London formed the basis of her engaging novel about Czech refugees, The Seed Was Kind (1944). Amazingly, only one copy of this book is listed online as surviving today - thankfully, in the National Library in Dublin (though Trinity College also have a copy not catalogued online). This novel shows a profound sympathetic engagement with the plight of war-torn Czechoslovakia, an abiding interest also evident in a booklet Macardle co-authored (with M Sargantova) for the Czech government-in-exile, Educating a Free People (1945). If there is a weakness in Smith's treatment of The Seed Was Kind, it lies in its over-reliance on psychological analysis (the novel's depiction of the "bad mother" motif) at the expense of the novel's complex political treatment of nationalism. Macardle, like Hannah Arendt, saw Nazism as an excrescence of empire, not just of nationality: as such, it represented a threat to the very existence of small nations such as Czechoslovakia and Ireland.
MACARDLE'S AWARENESS OF the virulence of the Nazi threat stemmed from two extended periods working as a journalist in the League of Nations at Geneva in the 1930s. As the war developed, she showed a greater appreciation of neutrality, noting that an unstable Ireland might be used by misguided Irish nationalists to recast historical anti-British sentiments in pro-Nazi terms. In the aftermath of the war, Macardle travelled throughout Europe with international relief agencies on behalf of homeless and traumatised children, a sustained humanitarian project that culminated in Children of Europe: A Study of the Children of Liberated Countries (1949), a pioneering book in Holocaust studies.
In the midst of these activities, Macardle also wrote four novels, the first of which, Uneasy Threshold (1941), was filmed by Lewis Allen as The Uninvited (1944). This became a cult movie, earning the ultimate accolade in William Everson's Classics of the Horror Film as "quite possibly the movies' best ghost story". Among those who went to see it at the Savoy in Dublin was de Valera himself who, however, was not amused by the twist in the story that unmasked the apparently benign virgin mother figure as the real force of evil. "Typical Dorothy," was his comment.
Macardle subsequently published three other novels, The Seed Was Kind, Fantastic Summer (1946; aka The Unforeseen in the US), the only novel set in Ireland, and Dark Enchantment (1953), set in the Alpine region of southern France. Not least of the ironies of Macardle's life is that a woman devoted to the welfare of children, and the importance of a loving family, should have explored with such insight the violence that often underlies the romance of family life, not least the veneration of the mother. In successive novels, daughters are mistreated or abandoned by cruel maternal figures and while Smith is correct to relate this to Macardle's own strained relations with her imperious English mother, it might also be seen as a sustained fictional riposte to the idealisation of the mother in the 1937 Constitution.
VIOLENCE AND DARKNESS are not allowed to have the last word, however, which led some critics to take the novelist to task for her (relatively) happy endings. "I decline to become a 'shocker writer' and they are grieved," Macardle responded in 1944. "I don't feel it's my vocation to add to the horrific elements in the world today". No wonder she remarked of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, on being asked to join a panel discussion following a performance in Dublin in 1956, that it presented "an unbearable picture of human misery".
Though it is tempting, on account of Macardle's advanced cosmopolitanism, to view her as a forerunner of contemporary global Ireland, she can also be seen as a resolute defender of the rights of small nations to take their place on the world stage. Having opened Irish eyes to other cultures, perhaps the 50th anniversary of her death next year will bring a belated recognition of her role in shaping an Ireland in which other cultures could also reclaim their own voices.
Luke Gibbons is Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He is, with Clare Wallace, preparing Dorothy Macardle's The Seed Was Kind for publication in Field Day Irish editions in 2008
Dorothy Macardle: A Life By Nadia Clare Smith Woodfield Press, 159pp. €19.95