Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  Set in the Troubles of 1920, the story centres on Lois Farquar, the orphaned niece of Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, owners of the Danielstown estate. Outside rebel soldiers engage in the final phase of a war of liberation against the British, one of whose soldiers, Gerald Lesworth, falls in love with Lois: inside, the Naylors and their visitors concentrate on tennis parties and dances. The house epitomizes order and continuity, the values on which it is assumed that Lois will pattern her life; but it exacts a huge tribute from its occupiers, condemning them to cold nights and claustrophobic days. Lois feels haunted by the house, because its lack of an inner dynamic seems a reflection of her own:

  And she could not try to explain . . . how after every return – awakening, even, from sleep or preoccupation – she and those home surroundings further penetrated each other mutually in the discovery of a lack.15

  She is, therefore, immobilized by the very traditions which, in theory, should uplift her.

  It would be facile to present her life as a stalemate between self-expression in Gerald's arms and doing the right thing by the Naylors, who disapprove of such an attachment. In truth, she trusts her own feelings too little to know whether what she experiences with the English soldier is love. The forms of good behaviour have preceded her to every experience. In the company of a world-weary older man, whom she rather fancies, a Mr. Montmorency, she wonders how her carefree dancing up the estate avenue must appear in his eyes:

  He had seemed amazed at her being young when he wasn't. She could not hope to explain that her youth seemed to her also rather theatrical and that she was only young in that way because people expected it. She had never refused a role . . . She could not hope to assure him she was enjoying anything he had missed, that she was now unconvinced and anxious but intended to be quite certain, by the time she was his age, that she had once been happy. For to explain this – were explanation possible to so courteous, ironical and unfriendly a listener – would, she felt, be disloyal to herself, to Gerald, to an illusion both were called upon to maintain.16

  For Bowen, there is not necessarily anything ignoble about this willingness of Lois to impersonate the kind of woman others may want her to be: after all this was the author who insisted that it is by illusions that people live. But in playing a role, Lois becomes dimly aware of a buried life within her which seems humiliated by such gestures. Like Christopher Dysart, similarly situated in The Real Charlotte, she feels enough to know that she should feel more, knows enough to sense how little she really knows. She, also, is effete, with the added hopelessness that she recognizes such effeteness in herself. Caught in the open spaces between a role and a self, she finds a strange attraction in a house whose very architecture and furniture provides her with those stage directions which tell an actor how to perform: "I like to be in a pattern ... I like to be related; to have to be what I am. Just to be is so intransitive, so lonely".17

  Yet, there is in Lois a real scruple about such pattern and relation: her mind is too fine to be violated by a single idea. She may envy those who know exactly who they are, but she also fears such certainty. When she finds her path on the estate crossed by a rebel Irishman in a trenchcoat, she feels a weird mixture of envy and terror:

  It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry . . . She could not conceive of her country emotionally. . , His intentions burned on the dark an almost invisible trail; he might well have been a murderer he seemed so inspired.18

  The "lack" around which the house is structured is of a basic, animating principle: its members nervously rely on the mercy of rebels and on the efficiency of British soldiers to guarantee their own safety, yet they stand for nothing themselves. Lois is a good deal more compliant in these evasions than she would care to admit. When she overhears Mrs. Montmorency speaking of her in an adjoining room, she panics and rattles the bedroom utensils, so as not to hear the rest: "She didn't want to know what she was, she couldn't bear to: knowledge of this would stop, seal, finish one. Was she now to be clapped down under an adjective, to crawl round lifelong inside some quality like a fly in a tumbler".19 All she hears, therefore, is "Lois is very – "; but what she is, she will never know.

  The contemplation of the daily round at least allows for the postponement of such ultimate questions: in these matters Lois at times appears to be little better than the other occupants of Danielstown. Sir Richard retreats into worries about dinner etiquette in order to spare himself thinking of the dire destiny of his estate; and Lois, finding in Gerald's kiss "an impact, with inside blankness", effectively cocoons herself inside the house which wants no truck with him. Identity is more to be feared than desired: that kiss is, in its way, as invasive and categorical as the prowler in the trenchcoat, promising this woman only "a merciless penetration".

  Yet Lois is as much a victim of Danielstown values as the Irish rebel who crosses her path: for the Anglo-Irish are as guilty of ignoring the needs of the heirs within as of the dependents without. In return for nothing, the young are compelled to adopt a time-honoured set of manners and attitudes, to be "sealed" and "finished", so that the social forms may survive the death of their contents. Living in a period house, they are effectively told to embalm themselves alive, perform approved routines, and deny all feeling. Gerald Lesworth may talk at times like a set of press cuttings, but he is infinitely more modern a personality than anyone at Danielstown, precisely because he can talk about his feelings. He is only an anachronism in the sense that he is fighting in Cork for an England of the mind, which still means something in gentry Ireland, but which his own country has long ceased to be. War has modernized the national manners: where once the English repressed feeling, now they express it.

  A minor character in the novel, Mrs. Carey, speaking to the wife of a British soldier, "feared she detected in her a tendency, common to most English people, to talk about her inside. She often wondered if the War had not made everyone from England a little commoner".20 Lady Naylor, for her part, is quite dismayed by the new English propensity to "tell one the most extraordinary things, about their husbands, their money affairs, their insides. They don't seem discouraged by not being asked. And they seem so intimate with each other: I suppose it comes from living so close together".21 She regards Gerald as a most improper suitor for Lois, since he comes from a lower social class, but most of all because he is modern, i.e., English. ("They tell me there's a great deal of socialism now in the British Army", muses her distraught husband.) Gerald represents what England is becoming, and the planters believe instead in a pre-war England, which has changed beyond all recognition, but whose lineaments they can still vaguely discern in the ascendancy holdings of west Cork. So he must die for an ideal which in his own country has long been disposed of, offering protection to a people who do not even care for him. Elizabeth Bowen was all too aware of the accompanying ironies: by the time she wrote The Last September, her theme was historical ("in those days" is the phrase which opens the second paragraph), and she had seen the great life's work of her lawyer father on Statutory Purchase in Ireland outdated even before its day of publication by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.

  This tragedy of irrelevance is made possible only by the unawareness of what is at stake among the rulers of Danielstown. Whether that ignorance is willed or deliberate depends very much on the individual. Sir Richard seems genuinely distracted by household affairs; his more practical wife, however, says "I make a point of not noticing". This becomes the prevailing attitude adopted by occupants of the house not alone to outsiders but to one another. Lois turns away from Lady Montmorency's definition of her, and not merely through politeness, but as a protest against a world in which one is more likely to be talked at than talked to. She knows that if she overhears it all she will be even less free to invent herself, and more likely to be shaped by an implied pressure of social expectation. What is said in Danielstown is less often heard than overheard, as an unwelcome insight into what others may think of the overhearer.

  Ideally, the youn
g should have their part in shaping the house, in bringing in new blood; but, instead, sex seems "irrelevant" and the house asserts its absolute right to shape them. In his anger and frustration, its heir Laurence yearns for "some crude intrusion of the actual",22 adding that "I should like to be here when this house burns". Lois also launches a covert counter-appeal to the values of the insurgents in an early conversation with Gerald, in which she marvels that, while nearby soldiers were dying, she was cutting out a dress that she didn't even need:

  How is it that in this country that ought to be full of such violent realness, there seems nothing for me but clothes and what people say? I might just as well be in some cocoon.23

  What she wants Gerald to do is to agree, and to admit that this is hardly a state of things worth fighting for.

  Anglo-Irish self-control in such circumstances is patently ridiculous but so also is the "moral" English pretence that it would be ignoble to abandon such people. In a sharp outburst, Lois voices her rejection of the role of besieged maiden, and devastatingly links her repudiation to the revivalist image of Cathleen ní Houlihan:

  Can you wonder this country gets irritated? It's as bad for it as being a woman. I never can see why women shouldn't be hit, or should be saved from wrecks when everybody complains they're superfluous.24

  This appeal to Gerald, early on in the book, to come out in his true modern colours and stop playing the Galahad, is matched at a much later stage by the moment when Lois and her friend Marda, having stumbled upon a sleeping rebel in a mill, refuse to betray him to the authorities. Enraged by a society in which the true expression of feeling is inadmissible, Lois smoulders with much the same kind of resentment as the rebels: it is, of course, a kindness to Danielstown, as much as to the surprised rebel, that nothing is to be said.

  During the encounter, the insurgent's gun had fired quite by accident (like the balloons which seemed to burst, spontaneously and point-lessly, at the British army dance). This evocation of a violence without agency conveys the sense of powerlessness of all individuals, nationalists, imperialists and gentry, in the vacuum of authority left by the Naylors. It also suggests that the big house children are subconsciously willing the final conflagration. The rebels, like Lois and Marda, are simply marginal witnesses and participants in a history which eludes any final control by individuals: "not noticing" is part of their ethic too. And yet somehow that rebellion frees both parties, returning Ireland to the Irish, and freeing Lois and her cousin Laurence to become themselves.

  As always, Lois is somewhere else when the great events happen. By the time Gerald dies, they are no longer lovers, so she denies herself any false romantic gesture over him, unlike the hypocritical Lady Naylor, who writes a letter to his mother praising the dead man's heroism and happy life. By the time that Danielstown burns, Lois is too far away for her response to be worthy of report. Yet there can be no doubt that the end of the house means that at long last she can escape the cocoon: she is free now to enter a world of risk and growth rather than languish in one of fear and inexperience. The next tragedy in which she participates will at least have the merit of being her own.

  Bowen's Court, of which Elizabeth was sole female heir, did not burn: instead, she maintained it, at large expense and emotional stress, until the burden became too great, and it was sold and razed in 1960. Many of her friends, Seán Ó Faoláin included, considered her foolish to keep up the struggle for so long, but she felt the obligation very deeply, even though she betrayed characteristically little emotion on the day when she finally drove away from it.25 If the artist had shown a secret complicity with Irish insurgents in causing Danieistown to burn, then it must be said that the same artist had created the estate out of nothing: the rebel who smouldered within her was more than counterbalanced by the lady of the manor, who presided like a goddess over a world of her own creation. After Bowen's Court was gone, she began to look back with increasing tenderness on her own race and class: and the virtues of nonchalance replaced the imbecilities of "not noticing" in her assessment of the Anglo-Irish:

  If they formed a too-proud idea of themselves, they did at least exert themselves to live up to this: even vanity involves one kind of discipline . . . To live as though living gave them no trouble has been the first imperative of their make-up; to do this has taken a virtuosity into which courage enters more than has been allowed. In the last issue, they have lived at their own expense.26

  However, this willingness to see such people even more tenderly than they saw themselves had been evident in The Last September. When Laurence announces that he wishes to be around when Danieistown burns, Mr. Montmorency is outraged not just by the expression of such sentiments, but by the young man's insistence that they would all be so careful not to notice. To Mr. Montmorency, life was "an affair of discomfort, but that discomfort should be made articulate seemed to him shocking".27 To the cynicism of the modern undergraduate, he would infinitely prefer the desperate composure of the dandy: and, if The Last September retains the power to move readers, that is, at least in part, because it is one of the very few works of literature to consider the dandy as a fit subject for tragedy.

  Traditionally, the dandy has been the stuff of comedy, especially in the brilliant Anglo-Irish example of Oscar Wilde. There are, in truth, many lines and passages in The Last September to which he would happily have laid claim, as when Lady Naylor voices her derisive opinion of a young suitor from a villa in Surrey, that bastion of transient modernity:

  His mother, he says, lives in Surrey, and of course you do know, don't you, what Surrey is. It says nothing, absolutely; part of it is opposite the Thames Embankment. Practically nobody who lives in Surrey ever seems to have been heard of, and if one does hear of them they have never heard of anybody else who lives in Surrey. Really, altogether, I think all English people very difficult to trace. They are so pleasant and civil, but I do often wonder if they are not a little shallow, for no reason at all they will pack up everything and move across six counties.28

  This neatly sums up the dandy's perennial problem: how to maintain an aristocratic hauteur and decorum in the absence of any available court at which to rehearse and play out such gestures. Self-conquest and self-discipline were the answers, according to Yeats, who said that there is always something of heroism in being sufficiently master of oneself to be witty. In Wilde's personal confession that he had to strain every muscle in his body to achieve mastery of a London dinner-table, Yeats found his pattern of such self-conquest: what seemed spontaneous and stylish was in fact the outcome of rigorous rehearsal.

  This is why it "takes a heroic constitution to live modernism",29 because the resistance offered by the modern world to the élan of a person is out of all proportion to his or her strength: hence the dandy's intermittent desire for the relief of death. Mr. Montmorency is not the only inhabitant of Danielstown who grows tired from the strain of maintaining a jaunty front: even Laurence and Lois in their more typical moments might be seen as types of the dandy-in-revolt:

  Lois thought how in Marda's bedroom, when she was married, there might be a dark blue carpet with a bloom on it like a grape, and how this room, this hair, would be forgotten. Already the room seemed full of the dusk of oblivion. And she hoped that instead of fading to dusk in summers of empty sunshine, the carpet would burn with the house in a scarlet night to make one flaming call upon Marda's memory.30

  The dandy's craving for oblivion is "not a resignation but a heroic passion",31 in fact the only form of heroism still practicable in the absence of a courtly backdrop. A hero thus becomes someone who knows, and says, and lives the truth that traditional heroism is no longer possible. Against the platitudinous salute to Gerald's death which causes Lady Naylor and her friends to say "It was heroic", before looking down at their gloves and dogs, Lois sums up the dandy's crisis in conversation with a female friend:

  "I wouldn't mind being properly tragic . . ."

  "If one's not quite certain, one never knows where one is".<
br />
  "– It's just that I feel so humiliated the whole time".32

  The problem is that there is nothing for such a one to do, as she tells Laurence: "But I want to begin on something . . . There must be some way for me to begin . . . what do you think I am for?"33

  Nobody at Danielstown, least of all Mr. Montmorency, is capable of answering that. When asked what the British soldiers are dying for, he insists that "our side is no side" – "rather scared, rather isolated, not expressing anything except tenacity to something that isn't there – that never was there. And deprived of heroism by this wet kind of smother of commiseration".34 Nothing is left to such a man but beautiful manners and a perfect stylization of every gesture, for here indeed is Walter Benjamin's essential dandy, "a Hercules with no work". Mr. Montmorency, who had great plans for a new life in Canada, is left to attend to nothing more portentous than the folding of his wife's dresses. Of such a man might Benjamin have been thinking, when he wrote his account of the dandy's tragedy in which

  . . . nonchalance is combined with the utmost exertion of energy. . . There is a special constellation in which greatness and indolence meet in human beings too . . . But the high seas beckon to him in vain, for his life is under an ill star. Modernism turns out to be his doom. The hero was not provided for in it; it has no use for his type. It makes him fast in the secure harbour forever and abandons him to everlasting idleness. In this, his last embodiment, the hero appears as a dandy . . .35

  The point about such a one is that he is a descendant of noble ancestors, who must now live with the seismic tremors of the bourgeois market, learning how to conceal his horror at these shocking fluctuations and deteriorations with a pose of imperturbability. The dandies, who are the final, decadent flowering of their tribes, were expected to project an illusion of control in a changing, disintegrating society: to combine astute reaction with a relaxed demeanour and facial expression. All at Danielstown are in that sense dandies, operating under a dire stress which can never be shown. Lois and Laurence are simply the ultimate versions, who sense that being a dandy is yet another role, and who protect themselves against this humiliation by so distancing themselves from their relations that even their existence takes on the quality of a performance. Finding all about them strange on principle, they are doomed to isolation.