Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know
The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
'A father...is a necessary evil.' Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses
William Butler Yeats' father was an impoverished artist, an inveterate letter writer, and a man crippled by his inability to ever finish a painting.
Oscar Wilde's father was a doctor, a brilliant statistician and amateur archaeologist who was taken to court by an obsessed lover in a strange foreshadowing of events that would later befall his son.
The father of James Joyce was a garrulous, hard-drinking man with a violent temper, unable or unwilling to provide for his large family, who eventually drove his son from Ireland.
In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín presents an illuminating, intimate study of Irish culture, history and literature told through the lives and works of Ireland's most famous sons, and the complicated, influential relationships they each maintained with their fathers.
'A supple, subtle thinker, alive to hunts and undertones, wary of absolute truths.' New Statesman
'Tóibín writes about writers' families...with great subtlety and sometimes with splendid impudence.' Sunday Telegraph
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fans of early modern literature will enjoy this look by novelist T ib n (House of Names) at the fathers of three of Ireland's most acclaimed authors. He explores a milieu they shared the "small Dublin world" of the 19th century and the many connections among their three families. W.B. Yeats's grandparents and father knew Oscar Wilde's parents, and a younger Yeats "would later dine at the house of Oscar Wilde in London." His father "even met the young James Joyce on the street," finding him "very loquacious." Wilde's father, William, excelled as a physician, as well as an "antiquarian, topographer, folklore collector, and archaeologist." However, Yeats and Joyce's fathers, both named John, and respectively a painter and a musician, found little contemporaneous fortune. Despite the focus on fathers, the works of the sons pervade this book, and T ib n illuminates them with fresh readings. These include Yeats's poems and Wilde's prison letter De Profundis (which T ib n once spent several hours performing aloud from the cell where Wilde was locked up for "gross indecency"), but Joyce's fiction, filled with references to Yeatses, Wildes, and Joyce's own family, receives particularly close attention. Originally delivered as a series of lectures, this study balances dexterous narration and T ib n's scholarly familiarity with his subjects' place in Irish political and social history.)
