Cadenza and A Hyphenated Life by Ralph Cusack

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Cadenza and A Hyphenated Childhood by Ralph Cusack. Dalkey Archive Press. 2026.

Ralph Cusack is one of the greatest twentieth-century artists, writers, and personalities of whom you’ve probably never heard. Irish born, he lived on the French Riviera in the 1930s, painting in the cubist style. He returned to Ireland in the 1940s to design sets for the plays of Anne Yeats, whose famous poet father, already deceased, spent the decade in a temporary grave in the South of France. Then, in the 1950s, the two swapped places: W.B. interred beneath the shadow of Ben Bulben; Cusack back on the Riviera, writing.

There are facts and there are facts, but then there is the substance of a life, a subject Cusack spent ample energy exploring in the two books he authored during his relatively short one. Both of these books – one a reissue, the other making its maiden voyage in print – are slated for a September 2026 release by Dalkey Archive Press. The first, Cadenza, is an autobiographical novel. The second, the unpublished, unfinished memoir A Hyphenated Life, draws primarily from Cusack’s childhood. Both stories are, according to their author, stuffed full of half truths and misremembered events that manage, despite their flights of invention, to tell the larger story of who Ralph Cusack was.

Such an approach only makes sense. This is the man who inspired Anthony Cronin’s character, Sir George Dermot, in Life of Riley – a loudmouthed, highly opinionated, kind-hearted wild man who will happily take you in so long as you don’t mind the reckless drunk driving and hours of classical music with commentary. This is the man who once was a pupil of Evelyn Waugh’s, an intrepid and outspoken child of the type to inspire that marvelous farce of a debut, Decline and Fall. The point is that Cusack lived an incredibly full life, a life so full he couldn’t help writing about it.

Yet it’s amazing he did. Read A Hyphenated Childhood and you’ll agree that the very fact that the man lived long enough to inspire others’ books, let alone compose his own, is downright miraculous (a phenomenon, mind you, that Cusack most certainly would not have believed in). His mother, he writes, spent her pregnancy intentionally trying to destroy the fetus. Despite her best efforts – including jumping ditches on a horse and other physically dangerous activities – the unwanted child arrives unbidden, but the life that awaits him is about as far from rosy as can be imagined. By his own checkered account, Cusack spent his first few years in a laudanum-induced haze – une faiseuse d’anges, he quotes his French nanny as saying – kept quiet and out of the way, only being brought out of his drugged stupor when extended family stopped by (or when “it appeared from [his] breathing or lack of it that [his] condition was excessively comatose”). Later, when mother and son seem at least somewhat emotionally reconciled, she begins taking him to the cliffs near the ocean, where she teaches and then forces him to clamber up and down some of Ireland’s most treacherously precipitous heights.

Various incidents just like these left a series of deep marks in the man. They played an unquestionable role in the shaping of his psyche. They informed his art to a degree not easily measured. But they crucially failed to preclude the cultivation of a very Irish, very twentieth-century kind of levity, which infiltrates Cusack’s prose precisely as it plumbs the most intensely meaningful moments that a life can contain.

Dalkey’s decision to simultaneously publish Hyphenated and republish Cadenza amounts to a tacit bit of readerly direction: Don’t just read Cusack (though you really ought to) but read both books together. They’re a complementary pair. Crack either one of them open and you’re bound to be lulled by Cusack’s beautiful sentences, wowed by the dexterity with which he describes the scenes he witnessed first-hand, and laugh at the eccentric figures and indelible moments that added up to his own brash brand of exuberance.

There is an amazing chapter in Cadenza in which the narrator remembers staying with a blatantly alcoholic priest in some provincial French town. Both men are deep in their cups when the priest gets word that a local man has died – and died far earlier than expected. The death itself is not the problem, as far as the priest is concerned. No, the issue is the habit he has made of storing red wine in the town’s unused caskets. The only solution is for the men to unite and empty the box through a hilarious, drunken binge.

It is all too common to associate a creative, funny, mid-century Irish author like Cusack with the likes of Joyce, Beckett, and O’Brien. While his humor admittedly reminds me a bit of Joyce at times, no amount of humor or free-flowing booze can prevent Cusack from resembling an Irish Proust. Both men beautifully mined their pasts for lost truths. Whereas Proust searches for lost time, though, Cusack is “filled with the shared mortal urge to try and hand on some tiny fraction of what I imagined, of what we all imagine, we have experienced, learned or lost.” He is searching, in short, for a shared history that transcends experience to chart the imaginary. Ostensibly a memoir of youth, A Hyphenated Childhood constantly subverts genre expectations by recognizing the limits of its own truthtelling. Cusack’s admissions of fault memory, consistently featuring throughout the text, finally assume the stature of a refrain. At one point, he even wraps up a story by saying “I wonder where it was.” Such moves are both playful and aesthetically serious at the same time.

Meanwhile, the explicitly fictional Cadenza – which Dalkey is billing as a work of autofiction – is very much based on the author’s life. The novel meanders; the narrator has locked himself in a train cabin with plenty of food and drink. At the same time that he travels across the Irish countryside, he also travels – mentally, nonchronologically – through his memories, some of which will sound familiar to readers of the memoir.

So what are these larger truths at which Cusack’s books aim? A paragraph from Hyphenated offers a hint:

That winter the fog pressed more thickly than ever upon us all. Traipsing to school in the curry-colored murk, the frozen skeletal sentinels of tall sunflowers stood rigid and querulously ironic along the edges of the allotment plots, all aswim in the semi-darkness of the wastelands between the occasional houses, their long dead frost-desiccated leaves twittering in the ice-laden draughts between the mutually invisible uprights of the buildings and their stalks. It was always half-night but never half-day: for the day was as distant as the year’s end and the sun an evocation only. It was half-dark when I set out and half-dark when I came home, with never a shadow to forestall or follow me, for of the father and mother of all shadows there was none.

The sentences are beautiful in themselves, but notice the weight of the fog, the sunflowers as sentinels, both pressing not only against our narrator but against “us all.” It is a weighted dialectic, the darkness of night, the cold of winter and death always having the upper hand. The houses are planted amongst death, momentary breaks from the semi-dark wastelands where the sun, “father and mother of all shadows,” never shows. This is not mere commentary on the weather but a stance on the small-mindedness Cusack runs into everywhere: in Ireland, yes, where his mother staunchly supports the British, but also in England, where Cusack witnesses a total lack of intellectual curiosity mixed with snobbishness, ignorance, arrogance, and cruelty – to say nothing of his travels across Scotland and Wales, Italy and France.

Cusack ultimately imagines a universal history. His personal stories – a splendid blend of actual events, outright lies, exaggerations, and misremembrances – offer visions from an imagination run rampant, in which, rather than search for lost time, we search for lost connections. Both the sometimes-true tales in the novel Cadenza and the sometimes-false stories in the memoir A Hyphenated Childhood are practices in make-believe, and they serve as much-needed invitations to hope.

Matt Martinson lives in the Pacific Northwest. Follow his decade-long quest to read every Dalkey Archive book on Substack: mattlmartinson.substack.com.