The Magic Bucket

By Melvin Maddocks

THE UNCROWNED QUEEN OF IRELAND

by JOYCE MARLOW 334 pages. Saturday Review Press.

$13.95.

How remote, how quaint the well-behaved Irish rebellion of Charles Stewart Parnell seems today, with its motto, "Home Rule," and its hope of working out a decent compromise through the parliamentary system. Yet how much more remote, how much more quaint must appear the Great Love that brought down Parnell and his cause--the ten-year affair he conducted with Katharine O'Shea, another Irishman's wife.

The Parnell legend, so peculiarly suited to the romantic side of 19th century politics and the sentimental side of the Irish heart, reduced James Joyce to bitter parody in his short story, Ivy Day in the Committee Room (1905) published 14 years after Parnell's death. Joyce Marlow's antidote to Parnellism--the stuff of which greening statues in the park and old candy-box covers are made--is sobriety. Mrs. Marlow is an exactress who did not abandon drama when she left the stage. Yet her biography of Katharine (and inevitably, Parnell) weighs evidence with the scruples of a professional historian and character with the caution of a professional skeptic. The historian's fussing over documentation may be too detailed for any but devotees of failed crusades. But the skeptic's portrait of Parnell and Kitty has enough point to deflate the legend without ruining it, making the doomed lovers wholly credible to a modern reader.

The woman who did more to affect Anglo-Irish history than any other 19th century female (Queen Victoria excepted) was born Katharine Wood, the daughter of an Anglican vicar. "Look lovely and keep your mouth shut," her brother advised her, voicing the wisdom of the age. At 22 she married a horsy, socially acceptable Irishman named Willie O'Shea, known chiefly for his velvet jackets and his passion for get-rich-quick schemes--sulfur mines in Spain, railroad lines in Zululand. Katharine settled down to the role of conformist motherhood. But one day in 1880, when she was 35 and walking on the downs near Brighton, she asked herself in the classic fashion: "Why should I be supposed to have no other interests than Willie and my children?" By then she had met Parnell, and the question was already rhetorical.

A year younger than Kitty and a bachelor, Parnell was an odd sort for an Irish revolutionary. There was none of the inflammatory rabble-rouser about him; indeed he had an unmistakably U English accent and was mad about cricket. They made a handsome couple; her lover matched Kitty's delicate face with a rather fragile body, and, apparently, unforgettable eyes. For all his magnetism and occasionally furious drive, Parnell was innately lazy. Between leading the Irish nationalists in Parliament and being Kitty's lover, he seems to have preferred the latter role. While her husband was conveniently absent, Parnell read Alice in Wonderland in Mrs. O'Shea's dressing room and shot out candles with an airgun in her sitting room.

Kitty stuffed her lover's finicky stomach with the best English food, fussed over his frequent colds, and emptied his pockets when he came home from the wars. When he had to be away, he wrote her "Dear Wifey" notes asking her to be a "brave little woman"--letters, one reader has observed, "such as a kitchenmaid might receive from the underfootman."

In 1889, just as Parnell (with Kitty as intermediary) seemed to be charming Gladstone and the Liberals into acceding to Irish nationalist terms for home rule, Willie O'Shea brought suit for divorce. This, after pretending ignorance for almost ten years while three children were fathered by Parnell. When the cuckold finally brought down his house on himself, he also brought it down on his rival. Parnell's exertions to save his discredited leadership failed miserably, and soon eroded his health. "The most famous adulterer of the century," as a Methodist minister of the time put it, died in Kitty's arms in 1891, not long after making an honest woman of her.

There is both a monstrous willfulness and a monstrous absurdity to the whole affair. But no amount of contemporary psychology can controvert the evidence that here, in all its banality and glory, was a true love story. Kitty (in the metaphor of her biographer) was a magic bucket in a fairy tale. When Parnell died, she went empty. The sometime spell that had changed her from a Victorian housewife into a femme fatale was broken. All too soon she lost her powers, her odd beauty, and from time to time her sanity. After World War I she ended up back in Brighton, at the scene of her vision, in a seaside hotel--a short, plump, obscure old lady, puffing along the promenade in all weather. Almost mercifully she died in 1921: a Juliet whose author had fallen asleep and allowed her to live 30 years too long.

. Melvin Maddocks

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