‘Steady diligence struggling under the weight of mundane insight’

Alasdair McKillop on Colm Toibin’s assessment of the influence of fathers on three famous Irish writers

Viking, £14.99

MAD, BAD, DANGEROUS TO KNOW: THE FATHERS OF WILDE, YEATS AND JOYCE Colm Toibin

IT’S a fine one, the line that separates the new perspective and outright quackery. There are many famous figures who give rise to a bottomless curiosity but how much are we going to learn from the names they give their pets? By choosing to write about the fathers of three famous Irish writers, Colm Toibin has planted himself on the sensible side of the line.

With parents you can get stuck into origins and influences, reverberations and echoes, grudges and grievances growing like weeds from childhood soil through the cracked pavements of adulthood.

We know what Larkin said on the subject even if we’ve no idea what he said about anything else. The absence of a parent can be even more profound. Think about John Lennon’s songs or the new poem from Clive James. Waving from the railings of what might be his final ship, James is drawn back repeatedly to the tragic death of the father he barely knew. Parents are great material, it’s what you do with them that’s the problem.

It would be unfair to say Toibin has written the first chapters of three different biographies, but it would be equally unfair to say he has done a great deal more.

Did he mean to rescue the fathers of Oscar Wilde, WB Yeats and James Joyce from the shadows cast by the work of their famous sons? Or did he mean to treat them as the source of light by which the shadows were created? It’s unclear. “They created chaos, all three of these fathers, while their sons made work.” As a general assessment, this is accurate for at least a few pages. Sir William Wilde, it quickly becomes clear, produced enough work for three fathers. He was a wandering polymath, “a famous doctor, specialising in diseases of the eye and ear” and “an important antiquarian, topographer, folklore collector and archaeologist”.

Oscar’s mother was a poet with firm Irish nationalist tendencies that melted in time for her husband to receive a knighthood for his work on the census. They offered Oscar an example of grandeur founded on the written word while displaying a “high-toned eccentricity”. “This instability”, writes Toibin, “may have nourished the later work Wilde did as a dramatist.”

Wilde’s parents found themselves involved in a scandalous libel case and one of the opposing lawyers was Isaac Butt, a leading Irish nationalist. This obviously brings to mind the courtroom encounter between their son and Edward Carson, but we are dealing with delicious little historical coincidences, not genetics or conditioning. Toibin, however, speculates that “the experience of court and then prison was something that had been normalised or even fetishised” in the Wilde home. That’s close to saying Oscar wanted to grow up to be a convict but there are surely easier routes to jail than the one he ended up taking.

James Joyce had the worst father of the lot, which goes some way to explaining why the chapter about him is the most interesting. John Stanislaus Joyce – it would be unthoughtful not to give it in full – was redeemable only through the work of his son. After he lost his job as a rate collector, a post he secured through connections and performed poorly, he became volatile and prone to drunkenness.

His family moved down the housing ladder as frequently as his embattled wife gave him a new child, which was often. But James was able to use him artistically, once confessing that “hundreds of pages and scores of characters in my books” came from his father. It’s on this subject – the portrayal of fathers in Joyce’s most famous novels and what this might tell us about reality – that Toibin is at his best.

WB Yeats had an uncle named after Isaac Butt and his father John was associated with him for a time before abandoning his legal career so that he could pretend to be painter. He seems like a reasonably decent man, just one drained of urgency, determination and commitment. Towards the end of his life, he moved to New York and became a manic letter writer to avoid finishing a