At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  The Irishman is by nature one of the world’s great talkers—passionate, oratorical, vehement, easily roused to rage, easily appeased by wit. Yet I suspect that silence is really his natural habit; he is, about what truly concerns him, deeply reserved and watchful. Unlike the Englishman, he does not wear his heart on his sleeve and rarely discloses his real feelings. The emotions he reveals are mainly sentiments. He is utterly unromantic. His eyes are on the realities of life, defending them from his ardent fancies and—whatever he may say to beguile either himself or you—he has an unchanging fidelity to the beliefs he has been brought up in. There is a hard, silent being inside the actor’s costume; the Irishman who does not talk much is very impressive.

  Men of this kind, cool of mind, intellectually entrenched in the absolutes that entrance them, have been remarkable in international politics. The rise of Irish figures in the administration of the U. N. and their action in the Congo, point to the emergence of talents that have been romantically wasted by the soldiers of fortune in the past. This temperament, at its highest development, makes the Irishman the most signal example of that rare thing: a citizen of the world. I would put Conor Cruise O’Brien in this class; also an earlier courageous figure, now forgotten, Seán Lester, who stood up against the Nazis in Danzig before the Second World War, a modest man, no talker, but of iron.

  You drive out of Dublin across the center of Ireland to Galway and the west. The romantic hills of Wicklow are left behind; you are in rich farming land; fine parks of the departed landlords appear, and their houses gaze back through the breaks in the beautiful trees. There is little traffic on the roads, but you may find yourself held up by a mile-long procession of cars going to an Irish country funeral: the size of a funeral is an important mark of social status. You pass many little cars containing pairs of neat red-faced priests looking like young blackbirds. Occasionally there is the trim spire of a Protestant church out in the countryside, and in the middle of a village will rise the enormous, ugly Roman Catholic chapel. (There was wholesale destruction of Catholic chapels in the time of Catholic persecution, and whereas the Protestants had the benefit of the English architectural tradition, the Catholics had to rebuild in poverty and in a period of poor taste.)

  If it is a market day, splendid sows will be dozing on the pavements: the town will smell of animals and turf smoke. You will notice that the country pipe smoker has a small tin lid on his pipe to protect his tobacco from the strong wind and the rain. There are fewer donkey carts than there used to be. There are small new housing developments. The little pubs and inns are often grubby and bare, but the hotels are becoming smart; you’ll eat good plain pork and mutton, and the wine is often excellent. You notice advertisements for the local dances—one of the few diversions, outside of television, in the lonely country life. The high television masts are for picking up the British stations and, in this country of Atlantic gales, the masts are strongly supported by struts.

  Social life also means: men in the pubs, women and children at home, or drinking “sessions” that go on until the small hours. It means fairs, where the gambling is the great draw. There are wild country horse races, with the fights, the fleeing bookies, the loud shouts of “Objection’” after every race, the deals going on with jockeys in the corner, the drink flowing, and the crowd dribbling home.

  After Athlone the country begins to get milder, the trees scarcer and bent over by the wind. Families of tinkers are camped along the stone walls—the wildest-looking people in Ireland, though occasionally a noble-looking figure stands out. The land gets rocky, Lough Corrib burns blue, the salmon fishermen are out, and in Galway you see those lordly fish lined up like small submarines in the shallow water, worshiped by the crowd looking over the walls. This superb city, on a bay, that is unequaled in the west of Ireland, is thriving; and it has one of the best restaurants in the country. I forget how many liners call at Galway but the people are proud of the port, and one realizes, as one hears Limerick or Cork pulled to pieces and hears “Cork men” and “Limerick men” spoken of as rival clans, that there is a sort of underground and very masculine war of character between the Irish cities and that it is passionately waged.

  Galway is a rich place. In the evenings, at the best hotel, the survivors of the old upper-class life turn up—remarkably dressed women of a certain age, horsy, sporting, excitable in the Irish fashion. There is an easygoing dash in their appearance, and a marked eccentricity if one compares them with their more stolid opposite numbers in Cheltenham or Bath, knitting or sleeping over their novels. There is a touch of outrageous gaiety. You hear flattering phrases—the first duty of man and woman is to charm, and to hell with the rest. The feeling for amusement and for the sparkle of pleasure goes deep. Life is dull, but luck may change it. And even if you know there is “nothing in luck,” you’d lose a lot of the pleasure of life if you didn’t kid yourself that you believed in it. You can’t live without excitement. With rich and poor it is the same—though there are misanthropists about too.

  I used to sit on a wall with an old peasant in the mountainy country near Clifden while he let his greyhound off to put up a hare. If it came off, he would be shouting with excitement: “He has him! He has not! He has him! He has not! He has him beat. He has him destroyed in the corner. He has not, he’s away over the wall.” And so on. An afternoon came pelting to life for a poor man living alone with his rags, his whiskey bottle and his dog.

  The west of Ireland has been turned into holiday country now and is better off. But its habits don’t change much. It would be hard to find anything approaching the pages of Synge—anyway, he invented that poetic language—but one still sees the women in their long brown shawls, walking two or three miles down the road to Mass on Sunday mornings. Apart from the race days it is the one time when those treeless, rocky roads come to life with people.

  Out of the conflict between imagination and the sense of reality springs the Irishman’s quick intelligence, his wit, his genius as an actor; and from the clash of languages—up to the end of the eighteenth century the greater part of the population spoke Gaelic, and, if they knew English, had inherited it from the Elizabethan invaders—his often superb use of words and his power of oratory. When the Galway peasant asks, “What’s strange beyant?” for “What is the news?”; when he asks, “Is the stranger within?” inquiring after a visitor; or, speaking of some exciting sight he has seen, says, “Twas powerful,” he is uttering possible lines of Shakespeare. Words like “desperate”—“I was looking for a reel of cotton everywhere; it was desperate”—have the excess of older English. Anyone who is critical of Ireland is called “bitter.” I have heard a political woman described as being “pickled in the vinegar of her own bitterness”—in a public speech. The range of language is wide and its utterance orotund. Years ago someone painted on the long gray walls of a demesne near Dublin, in huge white letters, “Vote for Duffy.” The opposition added a sentence in letters six feet high: “And Ireland’s dead will rise and curse you.” It ran for a couple of hundred yards.

  Sententious fantasy haunts the smallest incidents of life. The drunken “Captain” swallows his whiskey in the bar and orders another. He declaims to his friend the priest that the damned English doctors told him he had a coronary condition, “So I came to Dublin and saw an Irish doctor, and do you know what he said? ‘Not at all!’ he said.” At this the chef comes out of the kitchen, a huge fellow like a heavyweight boxer, and calls out: “Come on now, Captain. Will ye come on! You have us destroyed in here.” Getting people out of bars being one of the problems of Irish life, and promoting them to military rank being one of the rhetorical devices for moving them.

  It is fashionable to deplore the “stage Irishman” and to pretend that he is a fiction. He is not; he is as old as Cuchulain, the prodigious hero of Irish legend. Synge’s “playboy” is a fundamental Irish type. The clowning of a Brendan Behan is not an isolated performance; Shaw was a variant of the word-intoxicated man. And in my youth, I
heard Yeats’s voice rise from the conversational to the declamatory as he spoke of marching down O’Connell Street at the head of thousands of men and said, with relish, “We broke four thousand pounds’ worth of plate glass!”—(How much finer were the words “plate glass”—spoken with the Irish short a—as a final phrase than “shop windows”; the poet and Irishman knew the value of the sound of words.)

  From the sense of the personal role and the sense of language derives the long line of Irish dramatists who, after the Elizabethans, dominate the English drama—from Farquhar of The Beaux’ Stratagem to Congreve, Sheridan, Shaw, Wilde, Synge, O’Casey and O’Neill. To that list can be added a long one of minor dramatists. And the gift is not to be confused with exhibitionism or bombast, in life or in literature; it is there because of Irish self-consciousness. The Irishman is well aware of the act he is putting on, the “lie” that he is telling, and is therefore an artist in the act. The well-known despondency into which he falls after his best performances is a sign that exhaustion and self-criticism have destroyed the dream and brought on—as Larry Doyle suggested—a bleak awakening to self-mockery.

  I do not disparage the stage Irishman. He can rise to feats of inventive brilliance as well as descend to depths of sentimental vulgarity. He rarely deludes himself.

  In most Irish minds images and ideas are in collision, and collision is the essence of wit. A jaywalking lady dashes through the traffic and waits half-way across, beside the policeman.

  “That’s a terrible risk ye took, ma’am,” says the policeman.

  “The traffic’s desperate this morning, officer. I thought I’d be safe with you in the middle of the street.”

  “And with me, ma’am,” says the policeman, “you’ll only be middling safe.”

  For such conceits, punnings and ripostes the Irish are famous. Obliquity of mind and speech is second nature to them. They never miss a trick of word-play, and the quickness is embellished by a love of fantasy for its own sake:

  “Did you ever taste my grandmother’s curry?” asks Flurry Knox. “Well, you’d take a splint off a horse with it.”

  The lines come from the writings of Somerville and Ross, but you can hear sentences as good any day in Cork, Galway or Londonderry. The wit also has the advantage—but only in Ireland itself—of containing overtones of political and religious insinuation. It is also an expert way of evading dangerous subjects. An observant Catholic friend of mine who has indignant moral differences with the priesthood and, with Irish evasiveness, never lets on even to himself how far he can go, was lamenting the defeat of a team of Irish riders at the Dublin Horse Show in 1962 and the very bad luck of the American team, who were only just beaten by the Italians. He murmured that politics keep some of the best Irish riders out. “Anyway”—he winked to avoid that awkward subject—“it was a good day for the Pope.” A remark that quickly laughed off the whole Irish quarrel.

  One of the great burdens the Irish have to bear is their reputation for being unconsciously funny—a fine self-consciousness and self-awareness being their pride. It is often indeed argued that this nation of wits have almost no humor. The Irish pride in the “leg pull” is tedious, and it is one of the few matters in which an Irishman deceives himself. He is too egoistic to be a good psychologist. But Irish literature, from Goldsmith to Frank O’Connor and Samuel Beckett, makes nonsense of the notion that the Irish are not humorous. Ordinary Irish humor depends mainly on horseplay, leg-pulling, foolery, disasters and deceptions, and in this there is a genius for farce and knockabout. Although a novel like James Joyce’s Ulysses is a great comic book, a compendium of all the comic situations known to man, it has more intellectual or fantastic sharpness of tongue than humor commonly has. It is the humor of a grammarian, and so is Beckett’s, which is irascible intellectual farce. There is also a deep humor of roguery, for to rogues the Irish are notoriously merciful—as they are to sainthood: it appeals to a strong masochistic strain. A great deal of Dublin laughter is a mixture of the festive and malicious: all one’s friends turn out, in this gossip, to be cynical frauds.

  And snobbery plays its part. The Irish brogue—so alluring to foreigners—is a matter of delicacy; though singsong Cork, dogged Wexford, melancholy Galway and the lowland Scottish hootings of Ulster have their distinct regional dignity, the rank and adenoidal accent of Dublin is riddled by class differences and vulgar snobberies. The lower-middle-class accent of Rathmines; the painful division between those who pronounce “gas” with a short a and those who use the long one; the harsh, sneezing voice of Georges Street, with its inserted aspirate; the would-be English sound of Ball’s Bridge—all have comical overtones of social afflatus. Being a man for language, the Irishman picks these things out with relish.

  The once-ruling or Ascendancy Protestants mocked the brogue and still do, but themselves speak an English that has a clearly un-English inflection, being softer where the English speech is crisp, clipped and hard; but it is indeed a distinction of the educated Irish—whatever their class or derivation—that they give back to English its modulated beauty without fashionable or vulgar distortions—and of the uneducated that they give it vehemence and color. This has made them masters of English rhetoric and prose and, with the Welsh, custodians of the language.

  In humor, this acute Irish ear is merciless to the affectations of language and goes far beyond the narrow scope of English U and non-U; it is silent before the Elizabethan dignity of some peasant speech, but it revels in the mockery of social pretentiousness, provincialities and gentilities. And these abound, for putting on scorn is in the blood. Since the Irish place such value on awareness, they exploit any signs of social delusion in their neighbors.

  In the days of the cult of the Celtic Twilight and, later on, of Sinn Fein, the funny Irishman was held to be a wicked British colonialist invention, and it is true that colonialism always defends itself by regarding the “natives” as comic children. (The Negro is “funny”; in London factories today the colored workers are known as “smoked Irish.”) This humor is usually defensive and insensitive, but one bears with it because it is part of the international rough-and-tumble. Russians and Poles, French and Italians, Americans and British, all go at it; and the Irish aren’t so sacred that they can escape.

  But there is a comicality that springs from the pursuit of abstract thought and logic and its clash with sense or fact: the Irish do produce that. I was traveling by train to Cork during what, in sublime euphemism, were called the Troubles, and we were held up for hours because a bridge had been blown up and the train was to be diverted. Eventually there was a hopeful bustle at the station and I asked the guard, “Are we starting now?” He replied, “We haven’t started starting yet”—a sentence that may be a witticism at the expense of railways, or the utterance of a man bemused by a fine semantic or metaphysical point. Again, it may be an unconscious absurdity. Whatever it is, it is funny, and if you were solemn enough to press the point you would come off second best in the exchange. The Irishman always has the last word.

  The Irish comic gift arises a good deal from the tradition of evasion. The Church, for example, used its influence—an influence that goes into every detail of southern Irish life—to get the pubs closed around lunchtime, so that the workers would be forced to go home to eat. The closure was at once nicknamed “the holy hour.”

  Irish grandeur has had its periods of aristocratic elegance of the careless kind, especially in the eighteenth century, and that has left a strong mark; but carelessness is the qualifying word. To appearances the Irish are indifferent. Ireland is a good deal smarter than it used to be, but you still get the country waiter who seems to have slept in his suit; for the Irish sense of style is inward, not outward, an attribute of the imagination. He is a man for the warmhearted social occasion. Sociability is his triumph and sometimes his ruin. Folly attracts him, luck he prays for; if he is a southerner, his goddess is Fortune. Like the Spaniard, he likes passing the time of day with anyone he happens to meet, for h
e loves turning life into talk and manners.

  A girl is taking a long bus journey to Lisdoonvarna, a spa in Clare. “I talked to everyone on the bus,” says this broth of a girl, delighted with herself. “You couldn’t do that in England.”

  “Why not? Don’t they talk there?”

  “Oh, they do,” she says primly, “but they get familiar. They’ve no manners.

  Propriety and manners, to these egoists, are for keeping a distance. Their sociability achieves a kind of poetry—think of Irish songs about “the gaiety,” and so on—but it is also a preserver of inner retreat. The word “decent” is often heard. I wrote down this quotation at a station in Galway. A girl was leaning out of the coach window eagerly looking for someone, anyone, to talk to. She caught sight of a young man and she chattered in high spirits: “Were ye ever in Cleggen? Were ye now? Did ye know Michael Linden? Did ye not! Well, did ye know Patrick Joyce? Did ye not! Were ye ever in Ennistimon? Were ye not! Were ye ever in Cashel? Were ye now? Did ye know Bartley Hehir? Did ye not! Well, good-bye now. We’re off to America.

  It was like a poem of the continual hail and farewell of Irish life, the meetings and partings; it sang of pleasure, of acquaintance without intimacy, ranging wide, filling up time with light words.