This column was supposed to be about F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, which is 100 years old next month. But then I fell to reading about the first film version of the book, directed in 1926 by Dublin-born Herbert Brenon.
After that, I went down a rabbit hole in pursuit of Brenon’s father. He was a former Irish Times editorial writer, poet, and politician, later discovered to be a fraudster at the expense of an “imbecile” friend, and yet acclaimed as a genius by the judge who ruled against him. By then, I’d forgotten all about Gatsby.
But first, for a moment, back to Herbert Brenon.
He was born at No 25 Crosthwaite Park in what was still Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in 1880, before moving to England in infancy with his parents and later emigrating to the US aged 16.
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He became one of Hollywood’s first big-name directors, a silent-movie “auteur” known for his intolerance of studio interference and disregard for budgetary constraints.
On set, he was described as an “Irish curmudgeon,” with dictatorial tendencies. His devotion to realism was such that when making Beau Geste (also 1926), he moved the entire unit and cast to the Mohave Desert for weeks.
Another colleague accused him of “imperial syndrome”, citing a film in which a pregnant woman has money thrown at her by the father and tears it with her teeth. The director insisted on using real banknotes, which “the poor propman” had to borrow from the crew.
Brenon the director did not, as the saying goes, lick it off the ground. His father, Edward St John Brenon (1842/3-1916) had been an imposing figure in his own right.
The son of a Church of Ireland schoolmaster, he was a precocious student, gifted in languages and music. He grew up to be a poet and a would-be politician, first for the Conservatives in England, then Parnell’s Irish Party.
For a while, he was also a journalist in The Irish Times. But he himself became a story on the paper’s front page in 1880, during a court case involving an intercepted telegram in which Parnell supposedly offered him any Irish constituency he wanted.
After that, he continued his journalism career in London. By then, however, he had become involved in an epic deception that Scott Fitzgerald might have struggled to invent and that, 30 years later, landed him back in a Dublin court.
The case had its roots in a youthful friendship with a man named John Boyce, an aspiring painter with whom Brenon travelled to Rome in the 1860s.
Boyce had inherited properties in Waterford and Cork.
But while he stayed in Italy, eventually reduced to living in a garret in Naples, as an “imbecile”, Brenon returned home to pursue political and other careers and to collect rents from Boyce’s property, which he claimed his friend had gifted him.
For a time, Boyce’s family suspected Brenon had murdered their relative.
Then in 1907, the old man was tracked to his Neapolitan eyrie and brought back to Dublin where he was installed in the Stewart’s Home for “lunatic patients of the middle class”.
A detailed reconstruction of the subsequent legal case, from contemporary press reports, can be found on the blog Stories of the Four Courts by Ruth Cannon (ruthcannon.com).
But in summary, Brenon argued that Boyce, disappointed with his own failures in life, had recognised him as “a man of remarkable promise”, with the potential to be “one of the great men of English history”.
To facilitate this, Boyce signed over all his properties to Brenon, who in turn would look after him in his declining years.
The counter narrative, also heard in evidence, argued that Boyce was a virtual prisoner in Naples, living in poverty.
On one occasion, he had had to ask Brenon for a “pair of trousers”.
It was noted in passing that a letter from Brenon to Boyce was on headed paper bearing the Latin motto Amitricie Sine Fraude (“Friendship Without Deceit”).
This resulted in an outbreak of our old friend: “laughter in court”.
The judge ultimately ruled for Boyce’s estate, finding that their man had been of unsound mind when signing his property over.
But his Lordship was sufficiently impressed by Brenon to issue this backhanded compliment:
“I have seen a great many witnesses examined and cross-examined, and I feel bound to say that I have never seen in the box a witness who so nearly missed greatness; and it is vanity that has caused him to be a failure.
“Whether he formed too high an estimate of himself and of his powers or not, I don’t know, but I can say that for quickness of intellect, for keen intelligence, for rapier thrusts [. . .] I never met a witness of his class. He exercised over me . . . the glamour of his personality.”
Brenon snr would have been big in Hollywood too, clearly.
But where was I?
Oh yes, The Great Gatsby, which turns 100 on April 10th. To mark the centenary, the RTÉ Concert Orchestra will that night present an evening of jazz age classics at the National Concert Hall, conducted by Guy Barker. More details are at orchestras.rte.ie
