Books: Farce of the Year

THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW PATH (245 pp.)—Honor Tracy—Random House ($3.50).

When it comes to pulling legs, the Irish have a natural preference for the leg to be English and themselves on the pulling end. In defying this convention, Novelist Honor (The Deserters) Tracy, herself part Irish, and a Catholic at that, has shown a distinct preference for legs that protrude beneath the cassocks of Irish parish priests.

To borrow the book’s idiom, The Straight and Narrow Path is the tale of a great haroosh*in the village of Patrickstown, and it may be said without fear of successful contradiction that neither Barry Fitzgerald nor Spencer Tracy nor Bing Crosby nor John Wayne will bid for the role of the priest, if the book, by some unlikely chance, is made into a film.

Upstairs Bathroom. Honor Tracy, for her first novel published in the U.S., has written the farce of the year. But Catholic readers, especially those of Irish descent, are warned that they will probably find it also highly scandalous. Patrickstown is all right in its own way—only an hour’s jaunt out of Dublin, with good fishing, cozy drinking facilities, its inhabitants (now that Lord Patrickstown, the last of the Protestant gentry, is a convert) sleeping peacefully under the benign but totalitarian rule of Roman Catholic Canon Ignatius Peart. The canon’s only worries are the prevalence of love in the hayricks and the difficulty of raising funds to fit his parish house with an upstairs bathroom (which the local water pressure will not reach).

At least, these are all his worries until Dr. Andrew Butler, an English anthropologist “with a class of hair like an old nest,” puts up at Mangan’s Hotel for some rest after a breakdown from overwork on the tribal customs of the Congo. All might have been well had Dr. Butler not written a feature article for the London press. Butler included a description of nuns from the Patrickstown convent jumping over fires on Midsummer Eve and made some unfortunate references to some of the rites of The Golden Bough in connection with these innocent goings on.

As spiritual director of the nuns, Canon Peart decides, under the prodding of the local legal shark, to sue for libel and defamation of character — he needs the money to pay for that dry bathroom which was necessary for the dignity of the parish. Suing the Sassenach and his newspaper seems the answer.

The Watery Mind. At this, “a number of bees quietly biding their time in the national bonnet sprang to life with an angry hum.” Everyone, including the canon, knows that the nuns did skip over fires on Midsummer Eve, but this is nothing to the big fact that no Englishman —and a writer at that — can “put down” an Irish priest in his own parish. The Englishman, of course, cannot see the logic of this, and takes the unreasonable attitude that his own good name is at stake; he will not let the London newspaper pay off. The case sets all Ireland roaring. Resolutions are passed. Committees are formed. Processions are staged. Anonymous letters flood the mails and editorial columns.

Peace descends only when Malachy, the Patrickstown simpleton, is vouchsafed a vision of the Virgin, and the populace turns from litigation to religion. Not, however, before the Irish, who stand “on the periphery of chaos,” move into dead center and, in the book’s most comic turn, infect the Sassenach with their own fey reasoning. “The bog water is rapidly rising in my brain,” Butler finds, and obedient to the hypnosis that compels non-Irish reporters to write in a kind of stage Irish when describing St. Patrick’s Day parades, he begins to talk in the wild, oblique, subjunctive manner of the natives.

During the Irish Rebellion of 1798 priests were sometimes executed by the “pitch cap”: a tonsure of tar was ignited on the condemned man’s head. Honor Tracy gives her own light twist to those cruel days. She drops a ripe red mulberry on the head of the canon. Its juice is the same color as his own flushed scalp. From there on, talented Author Tracy rarely, if ever, relents. In one word, the story is Irish, perhaps — to borrow the judgment Joyce’s Dedalus made of his “all Irish” father — it is “all too Irish.”

The Half of It. The reader who suspects that all this has been told before will be right. Two years ago Honor Tracy, then a 38-year-old journalist on assignment for the Sunday Times of London, made a pointed little pen sketch of the village of Doneraile in County Cork and its 82-year-old priest, Canon Maurice O’Connell, who was then raising funds to build himself a new house. Miss Tracy’s story was too pointed for the old canon, who sued the newspaper, which settled out of court with an apology. Journalist Tracy (who, like her fictional hero, is thatch-headed), thereupon sued the Sunday Times on the grounds that its retraction reflected on her standing as a truthful journalist. A British court awarded her $8,400 damages (TIME, April 26, 1954). It was an entertaining case, covered in long columns in the Irish press, but Victor Tracy has apparently decided that the verdict was not enough. She wanted the last word too. This highly pleasurable Irish stew, fictionizing the actual events, shows that when the jury described her as “a women of great resolution and determination,” it didn’t say the half of it.

* Something between a hassle and a brouhaha, or maybe a shenanigan.