Lyrical tale of long friendship between lord and freed slave
It’s virtually impossible to read this book and not be reminded, occasionally, of Nick Carraway and Gatsby, with Nick bearing witness to Gatsby’s showy largesse, his frequent foolhardiness and his great, doomed love. Tony Small was to witness a similar show of extreme privilege in Edward Fitzgerald’s life, Fitzgerald’s great love (besides his mother) being the ideal of an independent Ireland. But, of course, Nick and Gatsby live on in fiction, while Lord Edward Fitzgerald and his black manservant Tony Small belong in the annals of Irish history. Fitzgerald was shot — like Gatsby was shot — and later died in prison, just before the 1798 Rebellion. Tony escaped to the UK, no longer a slave or a servant, but forever changed after years with his lord, later his citizen, his beloved Ned.
The historical facts are here, in this beautiful work, laid out like a Dublin street ballad with its verses and chorus and a short afterword, containing a chapter poignantly titled ‘The Greatest of These’ from Corinthians 13, and Jordan doesn’t seek to reinvent these men, rather to enhance them.
The facts are that Tony Small was an escaped black slave on the run in South Carolina when he discovered Edward Fitzgerald, dying among a pile of the already dead, in the battle of Eutaw Springs in 1781. Fitzgerald was then a lieutenant in the British army. Tony Small rescued Edward, kept them both in hiding in the forest and nursed him back to health. Fitzgerald repaid Tony by awarding him his freedom and taking him back to Ireland, where he worked as Fitzgerald’s manservant until the lord’s untimely death. Where Jordan’s rich imagination soars is in the intimate story he weaves between the pair, as events take them from across North America, the Caribbean, mainland Europe and London, but most notably Dublin, in particular, Leinster House and Frescati House in Blackrock, along with Carton House, all part of the huge Fitzgerald estate. And while Jordan’s pen is equally comfortable in the stables or in the drawings rooms, he can’t resist the pull of the theatre, most particularly Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s own Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. There Tony sees The Tempest and he’s forever left wondering what happened to
Caliban. His master sometimes calls him “Friday” and so — in another flourish of Jordan chutzpah — Tony learns to read fluently by wading through Robinson Crusoe. Indeed (as Tony himself might have said).
He may have landed in clover, but Tony is haunted by his past, by his dead mother, by only half-lucid memories of his native land, although his recall of his years as a slave remains scalpel-sharp. He struggles with being a curiosity in Dublin, often treated by people in the street (and indeed Fitzgerald’s own family) like a fairground attraction. And while he prevails as a loyal servant, even loving friend of Fitzgerald, he’s discerning and shrewd too, discreet in the face of Edward’s flamboyance and unafraid to voice his opinion, even if not exactly invited.
After Edward’s arrest, Tony escaped on the Holyhead Packet and later settled in London. In Jordan’s novel, he finds work as a stagehand in Sheridan’s theatre in Drury Lane. And so, in a marvellously understated finale, we are thrust back into the theatre and an ending rooted wholly in fact. To reveal it would surely be to spoil. Maybe it’s more fitting here to quote from the other Fitzgerald’s immortal ending, Nick Carraway’s magnificent signing off.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”