GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM

Evening Star, Issue 21916, 31 December 1934, Page 10

GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM

HUMORIST BY ACCIDENT Two American women who had gone to hear “ George A. Birmingham ’ preach at Dinard were overheard exchanging opinions afterwards. “ Well, said one, “lam disappointed. I came all the way from St. Briac to hear him preach, and his sermons are not near y so funny as his books. I scarcely laughed at all.” , Many people who take up the novelist’s volume of autobiography ‘ Pleasant Places,’ published recently, may be surprised to find that Canon Hannay is only a humorist by accident. His heart is, and always has been, in the church; the books and plays, however successful, were only side issues. His double life has not, however, been without its embarrassing moments, as witness the incident which he describes as follows:

“ Miss Cathleen Nesbit, not yet a famous actress, was anxious.to obtain a part in my ‘ General John .Regan..’ She wrote me enclosing a large photograph. Knowing no other address, she sent the letter to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. When I went into the clergy’s robing room one Sunday afternoon the letter was lying on the table. Dean Inge was our preacher that day, and there was a large gathering of canons, including the Archbishop of Dublin. “I cut the string of my parcel and uncovered a photograph of a charming young lady with very little on her. (She had been taken as Perdita, who, apparently, wore only a single garment.) Our canons, including the archbishop, who was one of them, discreetly turned their backs. _ I shuffled the photograph back into its paper. But it was no use attempting any explanation. My reputation for clerical decorum was gone.” PEN NAME’S ORIGIN.

The pen name “ Birmingham ” was taken for his first novel, he tells us, because it was a common name in County Mayo, where the scene was set. , “ The 1 George ’ came because ' I knew no ‘ Birmingham ’ with that Christian name. The ‘A ’ I obtained for the sake of euphony.” The book ‘ The Seething Pot ’ brought him into trouble because he was supposed to have caricatured a local priest—a charge which he emphatically denies. Canon Hannay tells us modestly that he has never been a “ best seller.” He made more than one American tour, but the results do not seem to have been encouraging. “ The first had the result of decreasing the 'sales of my books and the second very nearly stopped them altogether. I suppose I lectured very badly.” He held two charges in Ireland. The first,' at Westport, County Mayo, he resigned after twenty-one years’ residence, because his Nationalist views offended many of his parishioners. The other, at Carnalway, in County Kildare, he gave up, partly because the violent developments of the Sinn Fein movement offended him both as an Irishman and a Christian.

Perhaps there were other considerations. "Writing after some years of work in the pleasant cure of Mells, in Somerset, he says: “ I loved the Church of Ireland, and have to thank her not only for my baptism and ordination, but for such religion as I have. Yet, I would not go back to her service now. I think the bonds with which she has tied herself would give me spiritual cramp.’’ This sense of spiritual alienation from his native land may explain the curious strain of, melancholy that underlies the autobiography, despite its many happy and entertaining reminiscences. HIS FIRST PARISH.

In his first Irish parish he got into disfavour over his Nationalist leanings,

but those twenty-one years at Westport, in Co. Mayo, not only provided him, with the material for his best stories, but have left him with the happiest memories. There are many characteristic stories of the Mayo, peasant. His disbelief in love matches, for example, and his faith in the marriage of arrangement. _ - A young farmer, a friend of mine, once called on-me. “I was wishing,” he said, “ to speak to your Reverence about Biddy D.” “ Yes,” I said, “ I hear you are going to marry her.” “ I might not then,” he said, “ for they’re telling me she has varicose veins in her legs.” ... I couldn’t see what I had to do with the matter. 1 soon learned. “ What I wanted to ask your Reverence,” he said, “ was this: has she or has she not?” I had to confess utter ignorance of the condition of Biddy ! g legs. My friend sighed. “ That’s pity now,” he said. “ I thought your Reverence would be sure to know.” Canon Hannay started his first novel when he was a curate near Dublin shortly after his marriage, but he abandoned it after a talk with his wife. She said, and quite rightly, that 1 could not devote myself entirely to the work of the church if I spent a considerable part of my time writing novels. It was a choice between two professions. When the thing was put to me that way I had no difficulty in making my choice. I did want to be a faithful and good clergyman. I did not want particularly to be a novelist. We therefore dropped the whole idea of story writing or novel writing, and it was not for fifteen or sixteen years that we took it up again. At the very beginning of his wife’s long illness, when Ada. lay beside an open window looking out on the waters of the-bay of Tangiers, she said this to me: “ I bave all my life wanted love more than anything, and I have had it.” With me it has been different. I have not consciously hungered much for love or desired it very deeply. Yet it has been given me, and when I thought that I was utterly alone I found that it was mine—the love Of my children, of ray friends, of my people. Is there anything else which life has got to give comparable to that P