Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  It was the second act which, in its expressionism, outraged early critics. Apart from Barney, no other character in the war-zone is identified as an individual: to the generals they are mere numbers. This was a master-stroke by O'Casey: had the play been ritualized from the start, the audience would have had difficulty sensing the characters as suffering persons, but because these characters have been introduced in naturalistic detail in Act One, the audience can know something of the extinction of personality which they now endure.9 Such an effect could not be achieved either by realism or expressionism alone: it was the combination which was O'Casey's brilliant innovation. The backdrop of a ruined monastery suggests that the war has left nothing but the shell of a religion which agreed to validate it: on the other side of the stage, against me crucifix, is pitted the figure of Barney, tied for a breach of discipline to a gunwheel:

  And we show man's wonderful work, well done,

  To the image God ham made.10

  If the soldiers have displayed an irreverence for life in war, they are also its manifest victims. In the war-zone, me idiotic remark of Mrs. Heegan comes strangely true: they come (when it is very late) to sense the sacredness of life. O'Casey never wrote a more tender scene. (Had he managed to extend a similar imaginative sympathy to the rebels of 1916, The Plough would have been a far greater work.) At times, the men's chants attain an intensity reminiscent of Eliot's religious poetry: on other occasions, their homely, cockney diction recalls the voices of the pub at closing time in The Waste Land:

  The padre gives a fag and softly whispers;

  "Your king, your country, an' your muvver 'as you 'ere".

  And last time 'ome on leave I awsks the missus:

  "The good God up in heaven, Bill, 'e knows,

  An' I gets the seperytion money reg'lar".11

  In place of a God who refuses to appear, the soldiers can only conjure up nostalgic images of domestic bliss, of a child with a balloon, of a lane in Cumberland. The scene is cast in poetry, because their confrontation with the realities of terror and doubt has made them unconscious poets. The irrelevance of an officialdom which offers improving lectures on "the habits of those living between the Frigid Zone and the Arctic Circle" is patent: but the real shame is that soldiers capable of such intense effects in their own language should fall for the feeble rhetoric of their commanders, and end up praying to a gun which will surely destroy them. The whole of Act Two is in that sense a reworking of the second act of The Plough, where O'Casey depicted a people unable to understand the events that were overtaking them.

  This act echoes all the key phases of the sacrifice of the Mass – the Kyrie; prayers of the faithful; prayers for the dead. However, there is no consecration, no mention of the silver tassie. That moment had occurred, out of proper time, in Act One, when Harry hoisted the chalice, but it was a false consecration, a blasphemous parody of the Mass, courting punishment. In this act, "every feature of the scene seems a little distorted from its original appearance",12 which is how the tassie will appear on its return in later acts. By then, it symbolizes suffering rather than victory, a casket-turned-chalice. Harry comes to learn this deeper meaning and to confess that "the Lord hath given and man hath taken away!".13 The war may be over in those two closing acts, but its horrors continue: as Harry says of his unrequiting lover, "the shell that hit me bursts forever between Jessie and me".14 The question put in Juno – how does a society which creates heroes with such relish actually treat them when they fall? – is raised again with more subtlety. O'Casey shows that society can never discharge its responsibilities to such figures, for to do so would be to admit the self-deception which is the basis of the communal fantasy. (It seems a loss, in this connection, that he could not have written a play on the Free States similar treatment of defeated republicans after 1923.) O'Casey demonstrates, with rare empathy, how the demobbed soldiers hated returning home, because they were tortured by their inability to describe the war to relatives: a problem which he had faced (and dodged) in The Plough. In Act Three here, nobody can talk honestly to Harry: his isolation is an eerie continuation of his condition in the war-zone, where each soldier stood on a spookily silent set and "only flashes are seen. No noise is heard".15

  Harry Heegan has to cure himself of his own bitterness, because the others have learned nothing from the war even his best friend Barney comes home only to steal his lover. The metaphor of illness which had persisted like a stain through O'Casey's earlier plays (in such figures as Johnny Boyle and Mollser) is enriched here, as the victim somehow fights back and asserts a measure of self-knowledge and of dignity. The post-war world, with its studied effort to be trivial, is acutely rendered, and the mood is similar to that of D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo:

  We hear so much of the bravery and horrors at me front. It was at home the war was lost ... At home stayed all the jackals, middle-aged, male and female jackals. And they bit us all. And blood-poisoning and mortification set in ... They were feeding on our death all the while.16

  The energy of O'Casey's anger is tapped and disciplined by ritualized choruses, by symbol and silence, and by his subordination of character to symbolic pattern, as the phases of prosaic realism are punctuated by passages of austere poetry. All of these make The Silver Tassie the most Yeatsian of plays, which leads to the suspicion that Yeats may have banned it from the Abbey Theatre because of a subconscious resentment that O'Casey had invaded his staked-out territory and made it his own too.

  In later work still, O'Casey would further explore the possibility that a man or woman can take control of destiny. This search for a sort of Protestant self-election explains the visionary quality of Purple Dust and Red Roses For Me, in which he develops a fully-fledged Christian socialism of a kind lacking in the Dublin trilogy. In Red Roses For Me, he finally summons the courage to imagine Dublin not as the city is but as he would want it to be: the inference is that man will only transform the world through socialism after he has been first transformed by religious belief. Neither religion nor socialism alone was enough for O'Casey: religion had shown him the hollowness of life, and then life went and spoiled everything by demonstrating the hollowness of religion. Only a vision encompassing both could satisfy him in the end, and that vision was achieved for the first time in his portrayal of the battle-fields of Europe in The Silver lassie.

  That achievement is of a rare order in modern European writing, and almost unexampled in the dramatic form. It may have seemed churlish to criticize him for evasions, when he also confronted so much that other artists swiftly pass by.

  War, after all, is the ultimate desolation of reality, a fantastic intensification of all that is noble and base in civil society. Writers, by tradition, use art to intensify reality, but war does this for them, unasked. Instead of the more usual task of making the everyday seem exceptional, it demands that the artist make the exceptional available in terms of the familiar. War writing is traditionally imagined as coming from the front-line back to the society in whose name battles are waged. It is seldom, if ever, imagined as written by combatants for other combatants. It is, in fact, rarely written by combatants at all, for they are too busy fighting. Some exceptions there have been in the thick of battle – Owen, Sassoon and the poets of World War One – but the Georgian traditions which they inherited proved quite inadequate to meet the technical challenge posed by the trenches. Their attempt, though never likely to convince, seemed all the more necessary in the face of the cover-up by officialdom: throughout the hostilities in the Great War, not a single paper, British or German, published a photograph of a single maimed body. The myth of the individual was still too strong.

  In consequence, soldiers home on leave could find no words for their experience, and some found it hard to believe that they had been caught up in the hostilities hours before. Even on the battle-fields a sense of unreality seemed to pervade. Unable to see the enemy whom they were killing for days on end, soldiers sometimes resorted to theatrical gestures: a famous German gunner wou
ld stand by his machine above the trenches, fire a round, step gravely back, doff his helmet, and with a ridiculously excessive gesture, bow to the enemy infantry. Perhaps he was hoping to prove that an audience was indeed out there, or maybe he was just hoping to be killed.17 Those generals who would later use the term "theatre" for the zones of battle were merely ratifying a notion which had struck Yeats and others at the start of the century. There was indeed a sense in which the 1916 insurgents were as real a presence in the poetry of Yeats as they ever were in their uniforms in the Post Office. The crisis of representation which dogged the neo-Georgians in the trenches also afflicted them.

  Faced with these difficulties, a poet like Wilfred Owen could only "warn", but the public proved unresponsive. Reared on fables of heroism, it thought the whole thing a bracing game. The poets were on a hiding to nothing. The Great War was, in Scott Fitzgerald's words, the last great love battle, fought for all the old, high abstractions:18 and so was Easter 1916. In England, those few soldier-poets who demanded a more honest language were silenced or put in mental hospitals. Yeats, when he came to edit The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, notoriously excluded their work: Owen, he complained, was "all blood and dirt and sucked sugar-stick".19 This was, of course, the same Yeats who had denied a high degree of reality to the Great War, and who refused to write a poem about it on request.

  One major reason for the widespread reluctance of people to engage imaginatively with the war was the fact that its mass-graves so clearly discredited the meliorism of the late nineteenth century. In "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" Yeats could admit that the "pretty toys" of youth were gone, but it was hard to give them up completely, a prospect which Henry James found "too tragic for any words".20 He predicted that literature would remain silent on the topic, chastened by its own inarticulacy: and so, largely, it turned out. It was as if an entire generation's energy had been used up in the fighting, with little left to depict it afterwards. Even to attempt this seemed, to some sensitive souls, a betrayal of dead comrades left on the battle-field, an outrageous pretence of being able to communicate the immensity of their suffering. Some things resisted even literature. The fact that O'Casey had not been in the trenches may thus be more easily forgiven: had he been there, he would never in all likelihood have attempted The Silver Tassie. He had, after all, walked across a real Dublin battle-field in 1916, and, perhaps as a result, it had never found direct representation in his plays.

  From this distance in time, the myths surrounding 1916 and the Somme seem almost identical. In Ireland it was soon put about that the most creative and promising intellects had been lost in the Rising by a small country that could ill afford such a reckless expenditure of young talent. "Easter 1916" was a primary sponsor of this myth, since it mourned not just Pearse but MacDonagh, the "helper and friend" who "might have won fame in the end". That was the Irish version of the English tale of a lost generation of brilliant officers cut down in their prime at the Somme. Both narratives had equally little basis in fact. Though British losses in the officer corps were heavy, most who served came home to become political and social leaders. Similarly, most of the intellectuals of the Irish Renaissance survived the experience of war and counter-revolution. In the case of England, it has been argued that "the myth of the rising generation provided an important self-image for the survivors" and "a means of accounting for the disappointments of the present".21 James Connolly's sad prediction came true: the worship of the past really was a way of reconciling people to the mediocrity of the present. Moreover, the myth reflected the survivors' guilt at being alive while so many comrades were dead, along with the conviction that it might still be possible to show that the sacrifices had not all been in vain.

  WORLDS APART?

  Fourteen

  Ireland and the End of Empire

  Yeats was simply the first major literary intellectual of the century to lead his followers in darkness down the now-familiar road of decolonization: many would be the writers of emergent nations across the world who would come after him . . . Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Ashis Nandy and so on. Ireland differed from other countries in several important ways, some of which increased the difficulties facing Irish leaders, others of which assisted them in their efforts.

  Most obvious, perhaps, was the sheer duration of the colonial occupation, which lasted more than seven centuries. Set against that, however, was the close proximity of Ireland to England: affinities of climate, temperament and culture made it hard for the English to treat the Irish consistently as their absolute Other and led to attempts, such as the Act of Union in 1800, to assimilate the occupied land into a united kingdom. To some this seemed a benign offer of membership in one of the greatest organizations in human history: to many others it was the most insidious of all oppressive tactics. However one looked at them, the enforced intimacies of Anglo-Irish relations "created bom bitterness and tolerances of unusual refinement".1 It was a measure of the challenge faced by Hyde and Yeats that the Anglicization which they countered had penetrated every layer of Irish life, a situation rather different from that to be encountered in Africa or Asia, whose emerging peoples were generally not so deeply permeated by the culture of the colonizer. Ireland was so thoroughly penetrated that, apart from a few scattered areas of the western seaboard, it had ceased to exist as an "elsewhere" to the English mind.

  These differences apart, there were many striking analogies between the arguments and experiences of the leaders of the Irish Revival and those in the wider world who would eventually follow them. The analogies were unclear to many Irish at the start of this century, for the simple reason that what they were doing seemed almost without parallel: they were the first English-speaking people in this century to win political and cultural freedom from a power which had not been defeated in war. The more acute minds, of course, could make their own comparisons: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the lover of Lady Gregory, was struck by the similarities between the causes of Arab and Irish independence, for both of which he worked . . . and a few years before the Easter Rising, Joseph Plunkett visited Egypt. Yeats sensed acutely enough that just as he and Russell looked to Whitman and Poe as exemplars of the democratic muse, so future Indian and African writers might look to them.

  So he provided the Abbey Theatre in 1913 as a venue for a production of Rabindranath Tagore's The Post Office, a popular Indian play which suggested that redemption would not come from any parliament but only from a supernatural king: the proceeds of the production were in aid of St. Enda's, the school run on Gaelic principles by Patrick Pearse. Throughout his life, Yeats was keen to maintain contacts with Indian writers and intellectuals, sometimes supporting agitations for their defence against British courts. Rabindranath Tagore, for his part, was a serious student not just of Yeats but of other Irish authors: when asked by English administrators if they had not secured his individual freedom, he reminded them that people who had political freedom were not necessarily free in the expressive sense, merely powerful in worldly terms – an argument gleaned from Shaw's criticisms of the English in Man and Superman (1903).

  "Until the Battle of the Boyne", wrote Yeats, "Ireland belonged to Asia".2 By this he meant to imply a common racial and linguistic link between Indo-European peoples: a theory which, however far-fetched, was widely endorsed by leading Indian writers such as Lokmanya Tilak. Undeniably, many of those Irish who went to India had seemed to strike a profound chord with its peoples: Margaret Noble from Dungannon arrived in 1902 and rapidly emerged as an inspiring spiritual teacher and nationalist leader, who at her early death just eight years later was hailed by Tagore as "Mother of the Indian People". Mrs. Annie Besant, whom Yeats had come to know in theosophical circles in London, had a lasting impact on both Irish and Indian cultures, and was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1917: she is credited by many commentators with the successful application of Irish methods of political agitation in the campaigns waged by Indian separatists.3


  If the political influences flowed mostly from west to east, the cultural and spiritual traffic was as likely to move in the opposite direction. Both W. B. Yeats and George Russell studied eastern wisdom: early and late, Yeats proclaimed himself a follower of such spiritual teachers as Mohini Chatterjee and Sri Purohit Swami, with whom he worked on the Upanishads. The poet had hoped to visit India and to meditate there on a holy mountain, emptying himself of all earthly desire. However, the Steinach operation, which seems to have reactivated his sexual urge, put paid to that: literary Dublin, on hearing that monkey glands had been implanted, scoffed that this was like equipping a worn-out Ford with the engine of a Rolls Royce. Yeats did, however, receive a deputation of Indian writers and intellectuals, who asked him why he did not write in Irish. "No man can think or write with music and vigour except in his mother tongue", he told them; "I could no more have written in Gaelic than can those Indians write in English; Gaelic is my native language, but it is not my mother tongue".4

  His hybrid predicament was not at all untypical of persons in the English colonies: and the analogies between the Irish and Indians were explored in this context by such leading contemporary novelists as Rudyard Kipling, who created in Kim (1901) a hero who should have been Irish, but whose father abandoned him in India to a fate which leaves him neither English nor Indian. Kim becomes, in consequence, the cross-dresser par excellence, skilled at imitating everyone else whenever that is necessary, but unclear as to how he could play the part that is truly his own. His ambivalence leaves him in one sense a recognizably Irish figure, at once an exponent of imperialism and one of its victims. He has, however, the unqualified sympathy which Kipling reserved for those who served the British Empire but did not personally benefit from that service. Though Kipling could see the potential of the Irish-Indian analogy in the promotion of empire, it did not seem to strike him that this was also being invoked by militant opponents of the idea in both countries.