Review
Bardwell turns her instinctive and not insignificant literary gifts on her own life, to great effect.
- A Restless Life
- Liberties Press
Protestant without a Horse
It was Brendan Behan who first distilled the Anglo-Irish as Protestants on horses.
Leland Bardwell was an exception; she had no horse but because of her worship of her older sister Paloma was content to be a groom for her more ambitious sibling. Paloma did become a champion horsewoman but Leland (née Hone) became something much better – or at least more useful – a writer. Declared plain by her unloving mother and unable to make much contact with her remote father, her early years were sad, restless and a marvellous apprenticeship for her mature talent. Her ‘complex life of uncontrolled chaos’ is told with no mitigation of this sadness, wildness and, as it seems, desperate need for affection.
Different decades found her in different locations, as a child in India and later in Leixlip, school at Alexandra College, London in her late teens and early 20s during the V2 raids, later Paris, teaching in a very ‘alternative’ school in Scotland and finally in a Bohemian Dublin that might have shocked one of the few people she criticises, Archbishop McQuaid. Her lack of criticism of all the inflictors of pain in her life – even the psychotic partner who used to break her ribs – is positively saintly. As is too her making of her own and children’s clothes and subsisting on very little money. As she grows up she begins to understand that her gift of writing is almost instinctive. She calls it a ‘condition’ as if it were pathological but the condition produces five novels, a volume of short stories, at least two plays and five volumes of poetry. It may have been a genetic condition; her uncle was Maurice Collis, biographer of Somerville and Ross, and Joseph Hone, Yeats’s biographer, was also a relation.
The account of many affairs, some of them loveless, and the children ensuing can be heart-rending but the Hone spirit remains indomitable and her gift for scene-setting and character delineating stellar. One section of the book deserves inclusion in any anthology of Soho in the dream days just after the war, when poverty was ignored and art was supreme. Three characters from these and later days stand out: Tony Cronin, almost canonised because of his ready kindness; the green fool from Mucker, Paddy Kavanagh, shown not to be the irascible puritan he pretended to be to suit his purposes, but a warm, loving, self-deprecating homme moyen sensuel, for whom the author acted as a matchmaker with Katherine Moloney, his future wife; and John Jordan, a great talent scotched by TB. Sixteen pages of photographs give faces to the characters so well described in words, the last showing the author, triumphant in a new book-lined residence in Cloonagh, Sligo, as she stares the ‘80s unflinchingly in the face. The book ends in 1970, so there are still more than 30 years to be written about. We look forward, then, to hearing of more creative restlessness.
