Inventing Ireland (64 page)

All of the foregoing writers were incorporated, only with immense difficulty and after decades of delay, into the Irish literary tradition. Interest in Clarke and Devlin revived with the liberalization of the 1960s, but MacGrecvy and Coffey were not rediscovered for another decade. Clarke lived long enough as a grand old man of letters in Dublin to witness, and in some measure to sponsor, his own revival: but the growth of interest in the others may have been connected with the elevation to international status of their promoter, Beckett. Yet the refusal of Irish criticism to engage with them in their heyday is sadly symptomatic of two underlying failures of imagination, one obvious, the other more obscure.

MacGrcevy and Coffey and Devlin were deemed marginal because they embraced a modern European poetic at a time when inward-looking Irish intellectuals sought singularity and continuity with a simplified version of the Gaelic past. There was, in addition, no firm intellectual tradition of Irish Catholicism within whose framework the texts of these poets might have been more easily understood. Yet that explanation does not fully account for the case of Clarke: and it is based, moreover, on the questionable assumption that Irish
intellectuals
were as provincial in outlook as the political leaders. The less obvious factor may have been the inability of so many liberal intellectuals to respond with warmth to religious writing. The critic
I. A. Richards had announced the severance of poetry from belief back in the 1920s when these artists began their work. The radical intellects of Ireland in the following decades were so busy seeking a separation of church and state that they were in no mood to sponsor a reconnection of religion and art. The paradoxical consequence must now be more dear: those forces which have worked against an understanding of the mystical element in the writings of Samuel Beckett are the same ones which denied recognition to the achievement of MacGrcevy, Coffey and Devlin. Though nominally opposed to one another, the secular liberals and Catholic conservatives conspired to prevent a sympathetic hearing for these artists. No wonder that the young Beckett felt moved to open the one
really positive review of MacGreevy's
Poems
with the insistence that "All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer".
³⁸

Samuel Beckett may have
preferred to live in a France at war rather than an Ireland at peace, but most of his compatriots were relieved to be out of World War II. Throughout the hostilities Ireland remained officially neutral (although pundits, aware that many thousands of Irish had voluntarily enlisted in the British war effort, used to ask "who are we neutral against?"). The general consensus supported Mr. de Valera's view that Ireland, still trying to rebuild itself after so much destruction, could ill-afford to expend its slender resources in a global confrontation.

Domestic opinion, blissfully unaware of much that the Nazis were doing was anyway divided: while a majority probably sympathized with the British, many could be found to speak up for the Germans, on the age-old principle that "my enemy's enemy is my friend". Even the IRA members interned in the Curragh military camp on suspicion that they might seek an alliance with the Germans were badly split on the issue. The ancient adage that England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity now took on a somewhat modified meaning, as Mr. de Valera began to put his theories of a self-sufficient Ireland, living on frugal comforts, to the test.
¹

During the war years petrol and food were rationed, and economic activity slowed down. Life in Ireland became even more inward-looking. The introspection of the twenties and thirties might have been explained as an attempt by disappointed idealists to find out where their revolution had gone wrong; the introversion of the forties was more provincial in tone, as the whole nation conspired in the fiction that Europe and the wider world did not exist. For all its suspicion of foreign ideas, the new state had played a proud part in international affairs. The Cumann na nGaedheal ministers had worked closely with Canadian leaders in the 1920s to remodel the British Empire into a looser commonwealth of self-governing states. In the 1930s Mr. de Valera had presided over sessions of the League of Nations. This was also the period when thousands of idealistic young priests, nuns and lay persons had travelled to preach the Christian gospel in the developing
world. Ever since the Famine, emigration had perforce made internationalists of the Irish, for there were few families without a son or daughter or cousin writing letters home from some distant land
.

In one sense
neutrality was simply a telling demonstration of Irish sovereignty for it allowed Mr. de Valera to formulate a foreign policy quite independent of Britain yet perfectly in keeping with the anti-conscription ethic which had been the making of Sinn Féin in 1918. A Britain which still bankrolled a corrupt one-party state on a partitioned island was hardly owed any special favours. Though President
Roosevelt of the United States was also recruited to invoke Irish-American feeling in hopes of persuading the Irish to join the allied forces, Mr. de Valera held firm. Only when Belfast was bombed did he relent, to the extent of sending the Dublin and Dun Laoghaire fire-brigades north to help douse the flames. Even at the war's end, when Winston Churchill sneered in a notorious speech at Irish non-involvement, Mr. de Valera waited for days before making a grave but moving reply which perfectly captured the feelings of his people.
²

Yet, in a more cultural sense, the policy of neutrality was also very damaging, for it cut Irish intellectuals off from the wider world. A sense of unreality pervaded cultural life. Nowhere was that more manifest than in the colloquial term used to describe the period from 1939 to 1945: "the Emergency". As a phrase it proves that the Irish can outstrip the English at understatement any day of the week. In the dumb-show which unfolded, Mr. de Valera felt obliged to make an annual exchange of birthday greetings with the Spanish dictator
General Franco and eventually, to pay a formal call of sympathy at the German embassy on the death of
Adolf Hitler.

Censoriousness prevailed in such a climate. A reproduction of
Manet's
Olympus
was denounced when it went on display in a Dublin gallery; jazz music was banned for a time on
Radio Éireann; and a number of priests denounced young women who played
camogie (the women's version of hurling) or, in one ludicrous case, who rode bicycles. Books by Seán Ó Faoláin, Kate O'Brien and dozens of Irish artists were banned, as was Frank O'Connor's translation of Merriman's great Gaelic poem
Cúirt an Mheáin Oíche
(The Midnight Court). Dublin Corporation voted to refuse a gift of
Rouault's painting
"Christ Crowned with Thorns"; and perhaps most ridiculously of all, the Irish secret police (having locked up most republicans) found nothing better to do with their time than to pay a call on the poet Patrick Kavanagh. They seized a copy of his poem
The Great Hunger
on suspicion that passages in it might be obscene. With a strong relish for the absurd, Kavanagh invited his assailants into his apartment, told them that they were probably right, and promptly served them tea.
³

Not all
Irish artists found neutrality quite so amusing. Beckett's caustic opinion of it, even after the end of the war, was deemed improper for broadcasting on Radio Éireann; and the northern Protestant, Louis MacNeice, castigated the policy as one rooted in sheer selfish opportunism:

But then, look eastward from your heart, there bulks
A continent, close, dark as archetypal sin,
While to the west off your own shores the mackerel
Are fat – on the flesh of your kin.
⁴

As events transpired after the war, the Irish did little enough to secure for themselves any benefits of the ensuing peace. Perhaps the most debilitating long-term effect of the neutralist policy was the way in which the introversion which accompanied it lasted well into the 1950s. Initially a defence mechanism, it acquired the force of a habit long after the original causes had been removed
.

MacNeice himself opted for a different form of neutrality, calling down a plague on both houses in the internal conflict of Northern Ireland which he sought to escape by means of a literary career in England A pose of sardonic detachment made it possible for him to mock the revivalist pretensions of the southern state:

Let the school-children fumble their sums
in a half-dead language . . .

and to castigate the Sinn Féin ideal in a Europe at war:

Ourselves alone! Let the round tower stand aloof
in a world of bursting mortar.

Yet he was far too sophisticated a self-critic to rest easy in such postures. For one thing he shared with Yeats an envy of the man-of-action for whom everything is more clear-cut, an envy

of my own
Countrymen who shoot to kill and never
See the victim's face become their own.
⁵

He was keenly aware of how quickly men can turn into what they despise: yet this, with unusually subtle modulations, was what happened to him, for as he grew older he achieved a rapprochement of sorts with "the south".

The Poetry of W. B. Yeats
(1941) chronicles
MacNeice's return to a poetic admiration of Yeats, a swerve which would in time be repeated by Auden and Spender; and the "nomad who has lost his tent"
⁶
found himself increasingly attracted by the indeterminacy of a Dublin whose many masks seemed to hide no face at all:

She is not an Irish town
And she is not English.
⁷

The capital epitomized the identity crisis of a man who expressed the wish that "one could either
live
in Ireland or
feel oneself
in England".
⁸
Estranged as the son of a Church of Ireland bishop from southern Catholics and northern Presbyterians, MacNeice cannily blocked the retreat to all commitments, not even managing a brief membership of the Communist Party during the 1930s. His dread of fixed positions allowed him instead to become a poet of the plural, to celebrate "the drunkenness of things being various": and there is about his performance a touch of the
flâneur,
who savours the sights and sounds of the urban setting, but with a sense that it is a setting in which he himself will never be able to settle on a role other than that of elegist to a more courtly time. MacNeice's "time" was war-challenged London, but somehow the aftermath never quite lived up to his expectations:

And nobody rose, only some meaningless
Buildings and the people once more were strangers
At home with no one, sibling or friend.

Which is why now the petals fall
Fast from the flower of cities all.
⁹

In writing those lines MacNeice spoke also for the tens of thousands of other Irish exiles who had lived out the war years in England, fully convinced that theirs was a community which had been fighting for something worth having.

If Irish neutrality acquired the force of a prevailing habit, the same might be said of Irish
emigration. Most who left did so for economic reasons, but some who followed them did so because so many of their friends and families were elsewhere. In brutal statistical terms the figures are an indictment of successive Irish governments and of their failure to achieve the Sinn Féin ideal of self-sufficiency Since 1921 one out of every two persons born in the twenty-six county state failed to secure permanent employment there: the rest either emigrated or endured chronic 'idleness at
home.
¹⁰
But beneath the bare statistics lurk many diverse personal histories and social implications, which have rarefy been confronted by those who remain on the island To put the matter bluntly, those who left solved at once a personal and a national problem. By going most of them secured a better material life than would have been their lot had they stayed as a drain on an under-endowed public purse. By leaving they helped ensure a higher standard of living for those who remained They were able to leave in hopes of good employment elsewhere because they were well educated, English-speaking Caucasian in appearance and so able to integrate with ease into many developed economies.

In these respects they were far more fortunate than the poor and unemployed of the emerging post-colonies of the equatorial world and of the southern hemisphere: for these, emigration was a much more traumatic, often less feasible option. Yet, had most of the emigrants stayed at home, Ireland would in fact have looked far more like a "Third World" country under the ensuing stresses. It might also have been a more volatile and interesting place.

The patterns of Irish emigration were persistent and deep, but they did not mean that the national experience was an anomaly in the histories of modern Europe. Far from it: they were yet another example of just how much the state-formation of Ireland had in common with that of other European peoples. Ever since the seventeenth century there had been massive migrations from Europe to the Americas and beyond Without them European peoples would have been compelled to launch their industrial and agricultural revolutions against just the kind of demographic backdrop which has retarded such transformations in the "Third World" this century A stark but much-neglected fact is that "the number of people of European ancestry living outside of Europe is currently twice the size of the population of the migrants' countries of origin".
¹¹
Had they also remained Europe today would surely look very different, and so might the "Third World" whose difficulties have been due more to external exploitation by such migrants than to internal factors.

These considerations help to convey something of the complex fate of the Irish, a people once colonized and compelled, by that very fact, to do some of their own colonizing in the wider world If in certain cultural respects the Irish experience had much in common with that of other emerging states in Asia and Africa, in more directly political terms it was a very representative European democracy By the time Mr. de Valera was established in power it was clear that many of the tell-tale symptoms of more fragile post-colonial societies were happily lacking: for example, the land question had been resolved; the military were quite free of autocratic
tendencies, remaining obedient to elected politicians and president; and a reasonable degree of social consensus (some might call it torpor) prevailed Within Europe itself a country such as Greece (the other former colony)
betrayed far more of the classic symptoms of underdevelopment
.

Nevertheless, all through the 1940s and 1950s the government in Dublin persisted with its policy of decolonization: Ireland was formally declared a republic in 1949, as the last legal links with the British commonwealth were purged
Fine Gael (the renamed Cumann na nGaed-heal party) under
John A. Costello had managed to dislodge Fianna Fáil and lead the replacement coalition government in the election of the previous year: now it was seeking to out-de-Valera de Valero. A large statue of Queen Victoria was removed from a courtyard in front of the Dáil. Rival parties vied with one another in paying lip service (usually in English) to the ancestral language, which still dominated the timetable in schools, where its compulsory study yielded less than impressive results; and there was a general consensus that the "fourth green field" of Northern Ireland must be returned However, those young men and women of the IRA who acted to bring this about soon found themselves behind bars, and some were even executed in the south as well as the north. The republic which Pearse and Connolly had sought to establish was looking increasingly verbal and fictional, as an IRA campaign initiated along the border in 1956 slowly fizzled out. The disappointments of republicans, as well as the increasing fanaticism of their postures, were well captured for audiences in London and in Dublin by Brendan Behan. He was simply updating a critique which had been initiated for the previous generation by Liam O'Flaherty, the Aran islander whose novelistic autopsies on
Irish history (
Famine
) and revolution
(The Informer, Insurrection)
were written with a melodramatic and elemental power. It was, however, in his depictions of the peasantry, notably in
Skerrett
and the marvellous Irish-language short stories of
Dúil,
that O'Flaherty achieved his greatest artistic success. There are many who consider
Dúil,
with its rural epiphanies infield or on water, the most poetic and satisfying collection of stories published by any Irish author since Joyce's
Dubliners.