Truth or Fiction

Jennifer Johnston

Headline Review, €15.99

The novelist Jennifer Johnston was not pleased when the centenary of the birth of her father Denis Johnston was ignored by the Abbey and Gate Theatres, both of which owed so much to his work, support, and courage. Now she has projected herself into the mind of a very old journalist playwright whose work is largely forgotten in his native Dublin and elsewhere.

Desmond Fitzmaurice is cantankerous, wily, manipulative, and often cruelly neglectful of more than the ordinary conventions of living. He is enormously tall, with a magnificent bearing and voice, and is dignified enough to carry the neglect of his once awesome literary reputation with a certain air of rueful glee.

No, according to Johnston, this novel is not painting a portrait of her late father, although Truth or Fiction gives him the instantly recognisable physical characteristics of Denis Johnston, as well as the career path (playwright and war correspondent, later academic) and turbulent private life (two wives, both actors, the second of whom was on open display as his partner and mother of his child in Dublin before he had divorced, or even officially left, the first). And then there was the third wife/mistress, whom he abandoned, but later claimed was the love of his life, and who gave birth to a child which she denied was his within a couple of weeks of his second wife also giving birth to his (undoubted) child.

It's a rake-hell type of story, and had it taken place in aristocratic circles in London, or in literary Bloomsbury, it would have all been smoothed over with the questionably laudable aim of not frightening either the horses or the servants. In Dublin things were different, however: society was, and is, smaller and the class barriers are more blurred due to our denial that they exist.

In Truth or Fiction Caroline Wallace, an English journalist whose own love life is more in a state of stasis than tranquillity, is sent from London to write a series of articles to stimulate interest in Fitzmaurice and his work. She finds him in familiar Johnston territory: a once elegant, now rundown house on Sorrento Terrace in Dalkey, in a state of uneasy truce with his second wife, the bloom having long faded from the marriage. Krapp-like, he spends his days with his library of taped diary entries, justifying the cruelties of which he is all too uneasily aware. He has regular meetings, unknown to his wife, with the exotic Pamela, the first wife who put her career before her domestic duties. (Another echo: Shelah Richards, Denis Johnston's first wife and Jennifer's mother, refused to play the good wife, unlike Betty Chancellor, his second wife who gave up her career for marriage.)

Pamela, whom Fitzmaurice insists on introducing to Wallace, has no illusions: her ex-husband now finds her independence of spirit fascinating, as he did when they met in the fire of youth. But it was unacceptably uncomfortable in a wife who should have been darning his socks and cooking his dinner. And so, with the malicious background punctuation of the neglected second wife, Wallace, with her English liberal consciousness, tries to separate truth from fiction in an eccentric Irish recollection of an even more eccentric Irish past.

The novel is short, only 152 pages, and covers a period of two days. But it is a small gem, as Johnston gleefully sets up culture clashes, insistently mining confusions of perception as the narrating Caroline Wallace becomes fascinated and repelled in turn by the defiantly selfish machismo of her interviewee, uneasily aware that she has no methodology for deciding whether his body of work is important and "good" enough to excuse his personal inadequacies.

It is also a quiveringly tender and sensitive portrait of the frustrations and small physical disintegrations of old age. What it is not is a memoir, her own or her eminent father's. But in inventing a fiction of a figure who once towered, only to be overtaken by time and an utterly changed world, she has paid a writer's tribute.

Jennifer Johnston will be 80 in January, but she has not outlived her time: the writing is as perfect and as minutely aware as ever. Denis Johnston was a remarkable figure and a wonderful writer, but even before he died, he had suffered eclipse, partly because he belonged to the "wrong" tradition (middle-class, intellectual, and Protestant). His daughter, arguably an even finer writer, and certainly a more renowned and celebrated one, has not suffered the pain of literary neglect.

Truth or Fiction is a testament as to why. It manages to take an outsider's stand while yet revelling in its own Irishness. When Caroline Wallace flees back to the sanity of London, Jennifer Johnston begs us not to blame her bewilderment. Maybe, she implies wickedly as she closes another page on her own wry understanding of the little worlds which make up our lives, we're better off being a bit lop-sided.

- Emer O’Kelly

Sunday Independent