Inventing Ireland (78 page)

Domestic Autumn, like an animal
Long used to handling by those countrymen,
Rubs her kind hide
against the bedroom wall. . .
¹⁰

or else under the sign of Auden:

I nonetheless inflict, endure,
Tedium, intracordal hurt,
The sting of memory's quick, the drear
Uprooting, burying, prising apart.
Of loves a strident adolescent
Spent in doubt and varity.
¹¹

The influence of Auden on Kinsella,
Michael Longley and Derek Mahon was at least as extensive as that of Kavanagh. And there was good reason for this. Auden was, along with Philip Larkin, the artist of post-imperial England, a land of anticlimax and antimacassars, evoked with a desperately self-deprecating suburban wit. Their tone seemed strangely suitable for those Irish poets born too late to partake in the heroic phase, either of Ireland or of modern poetry. By a brutally revealing paradox, Auden's England was an appropriate model for yet another tradition winding down into self-irony. In this, as in so much else, Ireland was disappointing all by turning into a botched version of England. As Montague observed in "Speech for an Ideal Irish Election":

Who today asks for more
– Smoke of battle blown aside –
Than the struggle with casual
Graceless unheroic things.
The greater task of swimming
Against a slackening tide?
¹²

In much the same mode, "Casements Funeral" by Richard Murphy was not just a weary rebuke of those "Rebels in silk hats now" who "exploit the grave with an old comrade's speech",
¹³
but also a self-confessed example of such exploitation, a superb
parody of "Parnell's Funeral" by Yeats. Parody proved itself to be an appropriate mode for trapped post-Yeatsian minds, unsure whether they could engage in acts of radical creation. The new Ireland seemed like a parody of the old.

Where some writers could find continuity in Irish tradition, and a seemingly stress-free carry-over of Gaelic traditions into English, Kinsella remained troubled by the gaps in Irish narrative, and specifically by the traumatic loss of Irish in the nineteenth century. In a 1971 lecture, symptomatically tided "The Divided Mind", he explained that he did not feel fully at home in the English language; that for him Yeats represented the beginning of the Irish line in English; that "silence is the real condition of Irish literature in the nineteenth century"; and that further back beyond that is "a world suddenly full of life and voices, the voices of poets who expect to be heard and understood and memorized", the Hidden Ireland of the ancestral language:

In all of this I recognize a great inheritance and, simultaneously, a great loss. The inheritance is certainly mine, but only at two enormous removes – across a century's silence and through an exchange of worlds. The greatness of the loss is measured not only by the substance of Irish literature itself, but also by the intensity with which we know it was shared; it has an air of continuity and shared history which is precisely what is missing from Irish literature, in English or Irish, in the nineteenth century and today. I recognize that I stand on one side of a great rift, and can feel the discontinuity in myself. It is a matter of people and places as well as writing – of coming from a broken and uprooted family, of being drawn to those who share my origins and finding that we cannot share our lives.
¹⁴

Like Seamus Heaney and many others, Kinsella tried to bridge that rift by producing translations from Irish poetry and prose: his version of
The Tain
is justly famous, as are his laconic English translations in
An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed
(dedicated with a fine sense of irony to T. K. Whitaker, the Irish speaker who suggested the project). Such translations had an undisputed value in the early years of the Irish renaissance, when readers yearned for a glimpse of the poetry hidden in a language which they had never been encouraged to learn. By the late 1970s, however, and well before Heaney's
Sweeney Astray
(a version of
Buile Shuibhne
) and
An Duanaire
were published, it was possible for
Michael
Hartnett to allege that translations from
Irish were often conscience-stricken gestures by poets who felt a sense of frustration, or even guilt, at producing their major work in English.

Hartnett bid "A
Farewell to English" in 1975, in the course of which he derided Yeats for his use of token Gaelic phrases gleaned from Aogán Ó Rathaille:

Our commis-chefs attend and learn the trade,
bemoan the scraps of Gaelic that they know:
add to a simple Anglo-Saxon stock
Cuchulainn's marrow-bones to marinate,
a dash of Ó Rathaille simmered slow,
a glass of University hic-haec-hoc:
sniff and stand back and proudly offer you
the celebrated Anglo-Irish stew.
¹⁵

Hartnett's retreat into Irish-language poetry (in which he never quite emulated the quality of his English work) lasted almost a decade, during which he discovered that it may not be a question of a writer choosing a language, so much as a case of the language choosing to work out its characteristic genius through a writer.

For his part, Thomas Kinsella saved himself this detour, when he announced that Irish no longer had the intellectual subtlety or density of reference to sustain a modern sensibility:

To write in Irish instead of English would mean the loss of contact with my own present – abandonment of the language I was bred in for one I believe to be dying. It would also mean forfeiting a certain possible scope of language; for English has a greater scope than an Irish which is not able to handle all the affairs of my life.
¹⁶

In view of the high order of Kinsella's achievement in English, this was hardly a surprising conclusion: yet it must not be generalized, for the work of Seán
Ó Ríordáin attests that Irish is still a language calibrated to certain kinds of modern sensibility. Anyway, the idea of a necessary choice between languages and traditions may seem excessively melodramatic, given the fact that
Hopkins and Eliot were among the strongest influences on Ó Ríordáin. Stronger than either of these, however, was the imprint of Joyce.

Ó Ríordáin's mind was saturated with the symbols of the Roman Catholicism which he had decided to reject; and, like Joyce, he put the
repudiated terminology of theology to use in evolving a personal aesthetic theory. If Joyce spoke of epiphanies as moments of sudden spiritual manifestation, Ó Ríordáin wrote of the
beo-gheit
which leaves a person
fé ghné eile
(under a different aspect). If Joyce annexed the Eucharist for his
epicleti,
Ó Ríordáin stole the notion of
Faoistin
(confession) and
Peaca
(sin), reworking these words until they became aesthetic terms. Joyces surrender to "the whatness of a thing" was recapitulated in Ó Ríordáin's desire to achieve "instress" with his objects. For Ó Ríordáin in his poems,
I
becomes
Thou
and every opposite is revealed to be a double – male blends with female; the poet with his
anima;
and Ó Ríordáin's Gaelic poems may also be seen as an experiment with the English poetic tradition.

There are moments when creation for this poet is indistinguishable from the process of pillaging English, in much the same way as the
anthropophagus
writers of Latin America in the 1920s cannibalized Spanish:

A Ghaeilge im pheannsa
Do shinsear ar chaillís?
An teanga bhocht thabhartha
Gan sloinne tú, a theanga?

An leatsa na briathra
Nuair a dheinimse peaca?
Nuair is rúnmhar mo chroíse
An tusa a thostann?
¹⁷

O Gaelic in my pen
Have you lost your ancestry?
Are you a poor illegitimate,
Without a surname, O Language.

Are the verbs yours
When I commit a sin?
When my heart is secret,
Is it you who are quiet?

The poet who began by writing sprung rhythms in imitation of Hopkins finally concedes that his ideas are often stolen from the very language which he seeks to escape:

Ag súrac atáirse
Ón striapach allúrach
Is sínim chugat smaointe
A ghoideas-sa uaithi.
¹⁸

You are escaping from
The foreign harlot
And I proffer to you the ideas
Which I stole from her.

The chauvinism underlying the word "harlot" might offend many; but in general terms, the lines are a graphic illustration of the cultural trap described by Daniel Corkery as facing every Irish schoolchild in the 1920s and 1930s: a reading in English literature which, instead of sharpening the child's focus on a neighbourhood, actually distracts from it. Ó Ríordáins poems bear palpable traces of his reading of Hopkins, Eliot and Wordsworth. In such a
context,
Daniel Corkery's attack on "the want of native moulds" in Anglo-Irish writing seems faintly ludicrous, especially in view of his recommendation of the Irish language as the natural remedy for such a lack. The diagnosis offered by Corkery had been astute when he said of the aspiring poet that "his education provides him with an alien medium through which he is henceforth to look at his native land".
¹⁹
But Corkery's mistake had been to believe that Irish was, by some mysterious privilege, immune to the incursions of international culture and modern thought. Ó Ríordáin suffered from no such delusion.

Nor did he suffer from Kinsella's syndrome. Far from feeling disabled by a "divided mind", he took that as a postulate and proceeded to use Irish in a brilliant diagnosis of the split condition. He particularly praised those thinkers – Corkery included – who had managed to reinterpret Gaelic voices for modernity:

Gur thit anuas
De phlimp ar urlár gallda an lae seo
Eoghan béal binn,
Aindrias Mac Craith,
Seán Clarach, Aodhgán,
Cith filí.
²⁰

Until there fell down
With a bang onto the foreign floor of our times
Eoghan of the sweet mouth,
Aindrias Mac Craith, Scan Clárach, Aodhgán,
A shower of poets.

Kinsella was less sure that tradition could be so easily translated. All he could discern around him was an almighty mess, the wreckage of history. With Beckett, however, he shared the bleak consolation of being able to diagnose the mess as such, before going on to accommodate it in exact forms, which derived as much from early Irish literature (especially the
Book of Invasions)
as from contemporary psychology and anthropology. If the
Book of Invasions
posited the Irish experience as one of violent, wrenching assimilations, the intellectual structure provided by Jung and
Teilhard de Chardin helped Kinsella to create a sense of order in a world which might otherwise have seemed hopeless. What he said of Joyce was also true of his own achievement: that he took the fragments of Irish experience and somehow found a language in which they could be depicted. He shared Joyces sense that man is educated most fully by sin, illness and suffering: that one must first go wrong in order to gain some inkling of how later one might go right. Kinsella is, in the words of Seamus Heaney, "the poet who affirms an Irish modernity, particularly in his treatment of psychic material which is utterly Irish Catholic".
²¹

That achievement, though hard-won, remains ever-precarious in a land where politics looms around every corner and where "the politics of the last atrocity" can jeopardize the equilibrium of even the foremost poet. The coarseness of Kinsella's
Butcher's Dozen,
a response to the killing of thirteen civil rights marchers on Bloody Sunday 1972, was a reminder of the difficulty of writing poems that are political but, for all that, nonetheless poems.

Of the many talented poets to emerge from
Northern Ireland in the period, Seamus Heaney appears to have faced that challenge with notable poise, though for some years after the eruption of violence in 1968, he was forced to "make statements in prose about why he wasn't making them in verse".
²²
The attempt underlying Heaney's early work is the same as that made by Kinsella: to translate the violence of the past into the culture of the future. This is never easy and the poet is repeatedly astonished by the way in which violence insinuates itself into even the most everyday activities. The farm of his childhood thus becomes a colony in which unwanted kittens are purged, and the urge is to mock attempts by self-deceiving town-dwellers to convert such carnage into pretty
pastoral:

Still, living displaces false sentiments
And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown
I just shrug, "Bloody pups." It make sense:

"Prevention of cruelty" talk cuts ice in town
Where they consider death unnatural,
But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.
²³

In Heaney's first book, the
naturalist dies but death is not yet unnatural; though written by a member of the nationalist minority in the North, that last line has an ominous ring to it. Years were to pass before the artist directly addressed the political violence. However, there is a sense in which the relation between violence and social ritual was always his theme, something acknowledged in
"The Betrothal of Cave-hill":

Gunfire barks its questions off Cavehill
And the profiled basalt maintains its stare
South: proud, protestant and northern and male.
Adam untouched, before the shock of gender.

They still shoot here for luck over a bridegroom:
The morning I drove out to bed me down
Among my love's hideouts, her pods and broom,
They fired above my car the ritual gun.
²⁴

Heaney developed an aesthetic in which the hard, masculine consonants of Protestant English culture "bulled" the softer, feminine words of Gaelic tradition. In the 1960s, at a time when the Lemass/ O'Neill courtship promised much and free trade was instituted between Ireland and England, his implication appeared to be that only a fully Anglo-Irish fusion might produce a single, workable language.
²⁵
In other words, what remained a brutal conflict at the level of politics might somehow be resolved at the level of culture. Hence the fetishizing of childhood landscapes which gave an almost pornographic quality to many of Heaney's poems about south Derry, a place in which land is reduced to mere symbol (as in Gaelic
dinnsheanchas).
The part in such poems is loved in the name of the whole, and made to exist at the level of an image rather than for what it truly is.