The Censorship of Publications Act, passed in 1967, limited the period in which a book could be banned to twelve years. This meant that five thousand previously banned books could be put on sale in Ireland. Effectively, the act meant the end of draconian censorship of books in Ireland. It was a watershed moment. It seems as though, after 1967, no one ever looked back – books by Brendan Behan, John McGahern and Edna O’Brien, to take just three examples, became part of the ordinary reading experience of Irish people. I read ‘Borstal Boy’ in 1970 because the paperback was in the library of St. Peter’s College Wexford, a Catholic diocesan school.

Suddenly, books had ceased to be dangerous. And historians might be tempted to conclude that once censorship of books ended, the damage the system did and the traces it left were quickly erased. After 1967 we lived, it seemed, not in the shadow of censorship, but in a brave new world that had quickly cast it aside.

I believed that too, until recently. But I have had to re-think the question of how much damage the censorship laws did to the literary culture after 1967 because of the case of John Broderick, who was born in Athlone in 1927 and died in Bath in England in 1989. Earlier this year, I received an email from Lorin Stein who is part of a team at McNally Jackson, the great bookshop in New York, who are reissuing lost classics as McNally Editions. The list, so far, is impressive: it includes Gary Indiana, Lion Feuchtwanger, Gavin Lambert and Mary Gaitskill. 

The email read: ‘Next year McNally Editions - a paperback series published by McNally Jackson - will reissue John Broderick's 1961 novella ‘The Pilgrimage’, about a tormented ménage à trois planning a visit to Lourdes. It is possibly the most decadent Irish novel I've ever read (double emphasis on decadent and Irish); my colleagues and I love it. We wondered whether we could possibly entice you to write a brief foreword.’

I had already written an introduction to Broderick’s selected writings for Lilliput Press, who also publish Broderick’s ‘The Pilgrimage’ and ‘An Apology for Roses.’ In that piece, I had noted Broderick reputation as a book reviewer in the 1970s: ‘For many of us who read his reviews as they appeared in Hibernia and The Irish Times, he could seem at times deeply cantankerous. A review opening “If an author will not take the trouble to write a book properly…” or “I am sick and tired of novelists who write novels about novelists writing novels about novelists” could only have been Broderick. He could dismiss whole movements in a flick of his wrist: “Of all the various fads which have rippled across the literary scene over the past two hundred years symbolism was undoubtedly the silliest, and the most sterile.” And the axe of Athlone could be wielded on the neck of even the most famous writers: “W.B. Yeats was much impressed by this twaddle, and I am not in the least surprised. The old poseur spent his life fooling the mob with mystical roses, most of them artificial.” Or: “Joyce will revert, if he has not already done so, to the universities.”

In the Lilliput introduction, I began with one of my favourite quotations. It is from Brian Fallon’s book on the painter Tony O’Malley: ‘In a country town, everybody knows you and your family, or at least knows about you; every birth or death is a kind of communal event, and there is a certain sense of an enveloping cocoon of fatalism, of a pre-ordained round ending in the local churchyard. It is a difficult thing to put into words, but it is felt by everyone and permeates the small, tight world; and though the town itself may be left behind, you are marked in certain ways for life.’

I also noted that ‘for  many Irish writers, the contours of an exact landscape and the system of speech and local cadence have not only marked them but made their way into the very core of the writers’ poetic diction and style and vision. In prose, Eugene McCabe’s Monaghan, John McGahern’s Leitrim and John Broderick’s Athlone, to take just three examples, have been conjured up as an enveloping cocoon. The landscape, the systems of speech, the legacy of memory are allowed live in the fictional world as though they were characters. Indeed, character itself is often seen as a precise function of place, and community as a kind of poisonous stream in which the solitary conscience has to wade uneasily.’

I was aware, as I wrote this, that adding Broderick’s name to the names of Eugene McCabe and John McGahern was pushing it somewhat, because the jury was still out on Broderick as a literary novelist. There is no single novel of his that matches ‘Death and Nightingales’ or ‘Amongst Women’.

It was also too easy to confine Broderick as a chronicler of the Irish midlands. His best novel, in my opinion, ‘The Trials of Father Dillingham’ is set in Dublin. I wrote in my introduction: ‘The possibility of escape from the cocoon of fatalism thus becomes a significant engine in the work of McGahern and Broderick, making the city of Dublin for both as important a stage as the one where their characters were born or come from. McGahern’s northside in some of his best short stories and in his novels ‘The Leavetaking’ and ‘The Pornographer’ is a place of solitary freedom, just as the Fitzwilliam Square of John Broderick’s ‘The Trial of Father Dillingham’, published in 1982, allows him to make his drama free of family and small-town destiny.’

I did not read ‘The Trial of Father Dillingam’ until the late 1990s when I was editing ‘The Penguin Book of Irish Fiction.’ I was surprised that the book was not better known. In his novel, Broderick sought to dramatize the love between two middle-aged men, Eddie and Maurice, in contemporary Dublin where they create a sort of family with two others – an ex-priest and an ex-opera singer. Part of the value of the novel is the way it normalizes the gay relationship. Broderick is determined not to make his characters alarming, or damaged by their sexuality. Nor are they angels. There is an element of dullness and ordinariness about them that is unusual in a novel of that time that has homosexuality at the forefront. Broderick’s novel is an important document which dramatizes hidden gay lives in the Dublin of forty years ago.

What puzzled me was that I was in Dublin in 1982 when this book came out. I was reading most new Irish fiction. I have no memory of hearing about the book. I learn from Madeline Kingston’s ‘Something in the Head: The Life and Work of John Broderick’, that the book had been turned down by a UK publisher in 1968 and had actually come out first in French in 1974.

Madeline Kingston writes: ‘Had this novel been accepted by a publisher in 1968…it might have given the author’s career an impetus that would have saved him the “lost” drinking years that preceded the 1973 publication of “An Apology for Roses”.’

But I wonder if the trouble begins earlier, with the publication of ‘The Pilgrimage’, Broderick’s first novel, in 1961 and its banning by the Censorship Board. Kingston points out that the ban was not lifted until 1975, although Broderick stated that the local library in Westmeath did ‘their best to keep “The Pilgrimage” in circulation for those who wanted it until it was unbanned.’

But the book did not become part of the literary culture in the same way as books by Edna O’Brien and John McGahern did. I never heard anyone mention it. When I got the email from McNally Jackson, I had not even read the book.

Reading it now, and re-reading also ‘The Trial of Father Dillingham’, it seems to me that had ‘The Pilgrimage’ been freely available in 1961 and ‘The Trial of Father Dillingham’ in 1968, they would have made a difference in Ireland. They would have filled a silence about homosexuality that was almost total. It was not merely that homosexual acts between men were illegal; they were unmentionable. The absence of Broderick’s books meant that rich and complex images of gay people produced by a talented novelist were not available. It was not as though there were other Irish authors dealing with these subjects in the 1960s.  

It was as if, as the American poet Adrienne Rich has written, when you looked in the mirror you saw nobody, just a kind of blankness.

John Broderick’s ‘The Pilgrimage’ has some of the same stifling atmosphere as Brian Moore’s first novel ‘The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne’ (1955) and John McGahern’s first novel ‘The Barracks’ (1963). All three writers chose women as their main protagonists. But, whereas Moore and McGahern dramatize the sad decline of their protagonists, Broderick allows Julia Glyn, his heroine, to have a great deal of sport. What Broderick is attempting is a French novel set in an Irish town; he wishes to put dangerous liaisons into the Irish midlands, to allow his Irish characters the freedom to pray to God for their eternal souls and then get into a state of mortal sin with agility and ease.

It becomes clear in the novel that the religiosity of Julia’s bedridden husband Michael comes hand in hand with his homosexuality. Had the novel been published in Ireland in 1961, it would have been passed around, much discussed, as something shocking, interesting, fresh. There was no image in Ireland then of a married man who was also gay; the society could pretend that such men did not exist or went to England, as Oscar Wilde did.

Broderick himself, as he was well aware, had nothing to lose. He was the heir to a large, thriving business in Athlone, Broderick’s Bakery. ‘If I had been a schoolmaster or a librarian I would never have got away with it,’ he said. He didn’t need the royalties.

But it must have been hard, having written ‘The Pilgrimage’, to witness it become another aspect of the silence that governed sexuality and homosexuality in Ireland. Like ‘The Trial of Father Dillingham’, ‘The Pilgrimage’ dealt too frankly and openly with its own themes.

These books by Broderick, then, are the shadow books, the ones that might have mattered, the books that could have offered not only comfort but perhaps even courage to readers in Ireland. But the censorship laws effectively silenced Broderick. Had ‘The Pilgrimage’ sold well in Ireland, then ‘The Trial of Father Dillingham’ might not have been turned down. ‘The Pilgrimage’ may well be ‘the most decadent Irish novel’. In 1961, when it was written, it awaited its readers.

Colm Tóibín (June 2023)