Biography:It is customary to say of Edward Martyn (1859-1923) that he has been forgotten. Yet this new biography by Madeleine Humphreys is the fourth monograph on his works and days, and "dear Edward" turns up stubbornly, often comically, in every account of the life of Yeats, Lady Gregory, and George Moore, his collaborators in the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre (1899-1901).
He left much to be remembered by. From 1901 or 1902, Martyn bankrolled DP Moran's The Leaderto be a Catholic gadfly to his erstwhile theatre collaborators, setting in train the counter-revolution of Catholic-Gaelic Puritanism. Meanwhile, he put up most of the money for the construction of St Brendan's Cathedral in Loughrea, and guided Fr Jeremiah O'Donovan in the selection of native decorators, not turning away from the best even when they were Protestant, like Sarah Purser and the Yeats sisters. This architectural gem was a gift that still gives pleasure, as Sunday after Sunday does Martyn's endowment at Dublin's Pro-Cathedral of the Palestrina choir. In 1905, he became the figurehead first president of Sinn Féin, for him a tedious public service of interminable committee meetings, but opening up the political future of his country.
Of the hundreds of landlords facing the end of their way of life in late-19th-century Ireland, it is hard to think of many that left better memorials of their time on earth than Edward Martyn.
How he did so may be of some interest to the newly wealthy Irish citizens of the 21st century. It is usually thought that to build a monument to oneself, a man should extend his property, form a dynasty, and propagate heirs. Martyn did the reverse. He refused all his widowed mother's attempts to get him to marry. He set about a course of expenditure of all that he had inherited, with the aim of leaving at last even his corpse to medical students to dissect.
SOME OF HIS closest friends - George Moore and WB Yeats - believed that his noisy hatred of women was the other side of the coin of a silent love of young men. He spent two years at Oxford after Wilde, and got into the swim of the same fashionable, Greek-loving, male worshippers of male beauty, to which he subsequently added other aesthetic fads of the era, Wagner, Palestrina, and Ibsen. One of his Oxford friends was a strange, Estonian, homosexual poet, Count Stenbock. Martyn was working on a poem with a Greek décor in 1885 when he had a crisis of conscience, and burned the manuscript. In an unpublished story from that period, a character envies the hero his large estate, big income, and freedom from familial encumbrances; he can do what ever he wants. "No, I can never do what I want," Martyn's hero gloomily retorts. Apparently, Martyn became frightened by the seas of desire, and clung suddenly to the rock of Catholic dogma. Humphreys is very good on the pinched, unreflective nature of Martyn's Catholicism; it is more a defence mechanism than a credo.
His friend and distant cousin, George Moore, found him a fascinating case, and attempted to tell his story over and over. Moore had a particular interest in people who did not fall into the category of happily married heterosexuals, "celibates" he called them in an impious joke about priests. Their life seemed to him one of great poignancy: lonely, dangerous, hemmed in by private shame and public scandal. Rather than being hounded into prison like Wilde, Martyn became an honoured benefactor of his church and country. By Moore's measure, that was a not satisfactory, but a sorry outcome, because it left his friend a poorer playwright and a baffled and solitary man, without any enjoyment of the satisfactions of desire, the greatest pleasure of this, our only life.
The saddest part of Martyn's life is that he wanted to be a playwright, but a talent that one is born without is not obtainable by sale. He paid for the Irish Literary Theatre because it produced his Heather Field(1899) and Maeve(1900) (Moore and Arthur Symons assisted in the writing) but pulled out when his fellow-directors rejected a third play, A Tale of a Town(1900), as too embarrassingly bad. Later he backed a whole sequence of theatre companies. The last was the Irish Theatre on Hardwicke Street, in which leaders of the Easter Rebellion Joseph Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh took part. One of its founding articles was that half the plays it performed would be by Edward Martyn, a piece of vanity fatal to its success with audiences. Still, even if his plays are far from great, the theatre companies he kept afloat built up an Ibsen tradition in Ireland apart from the Abbey.
WHILE MARTYN'S PRIVATE correspondence is not rich in revelations, this biography brings to light new information and presents the most balanced picture of his personality of the four books thus far published on his life. One story that does not appear here concerns Martyn's response to a lecture by Moore at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1905. The message of Manet, Moore declared, is that "a young man who sets out on artistic adventure must separate himself from all conventions, whether of politics, society, or creed"; art required courage - one "must repudiate all conventions" and "be ashamed of nothing but to be ashamed!" In the code language of that era, the greatest shame, to borrow a rhyme from Lord Alfred Douglas, was the love that dare not tell its name. It was as if Moore was identifying the artistic instinct with unruly desires in general. Every time he heard the word shame in the lecture, Martyn said it was like "someone had shoved a pin into the very quickest part of my body".
YET IT IS hard to say that Martyn ought to have followed the advice to live shamelessly. It certainly would not have made him a great playwright, and it might have led to his utter ruin. As he chose to live his life - shaping it, as Humphreys says, like a work of art - he left monument after monument to his discerning sense of beauty, even though he lacked any specific artistic talent. Meanwhile, other wealthy men of his generation were trying to hold on to their estates, enlarging their families, and hoping in vain that death would not sweep away all trace of their having been.
Adrian Frazier is professor of English at NUI Galway and author of George Moore, 1852-1933
The Life and Times of Edward Martyn: An Aristocratic Bohemian By Madeleine Humphreys Irish Academic Press, 304pp. €45