Inventing Ireland
Page 47
Lois and Laurence know that it is the dandy's tragedy to be able to play every part except his or her own, to become a martyr to performance. The available forms always seem to be appropriate to a prior experience, and never to this one. Their styles end up overriding the very experiences they should embody. Elizabeth Bowen noted how this decadence had manifested itself in Anglo-Irish writing, leading real people to make over their lives in terms of available literary images, whether ascendancy Gothic or peasant buffoon:
Propaganda was probably at its most powerful before there was a name for it. Both classes in Ireland saw themselves in this mirror: the gentry became more dashing, the lower classes more comic. We are, or can become at any moment, the most undignified race on earth – while there is a gallery, we must play to it.36
The relation between the Irish and English has been endlessly complicated by such play-acting, "a mixture of showing off and suspicion, nearly as bad as sex".37 The ambivalence felt by Bowen towards the English is, in the end, based on an outraged conviction that only the Anglo-Irish had, in the twentieth century, the courage still to live the myth of a traditional England. The property which had given them their high social position was, however, now preventing them from keeping it up, a bitter dandiacal paradox first recorded by Oscar Wilde, and crystallized by Bowen when she defined an Irish estate as "something between a raison d'être and a predicament".38
Like all dandies, the Anglo-Irish were reluctant occupiers of the role, but once committed to it, they discharged it with verve:
Husbands and wives struggled, shoulder to shoulder, to keep the estate anything like solvent. . . The big house people were handicapped ... by their pride, by their indignation at their decline and by their divorce from the countryside in whose heart their struggle was carried on. They would have been surprised to receive pity. I doubt, as a matter of fact, that they ever pined themselves ... It is, I think, to the credit of the big house people that they concealed their struggles with such nonchalance.39
This is, of course, an implied rebuke to those natives who put on the poor mouth as a means of coping with impoverishment: but Bowen is also making the point that property, like an assumed style, helps to uplift morale and behaviour. A house for her is never a mere setting, but a coded set of instructions as to how its occupants should behave. The whining of the mendicant peasant, like the destructive rage of the rebel, might be traced to their lack of such a civilizing influence: "I submit that the power-loving temperament is more dangerous when it either prefers or is forced to operate in what is materially a void. We have everything to dread from the dispossessed".40 That sentiment is wonderfully multivalent, since it also anticipates the autocratic madness of certain Anglo-Irish dispossessed, barking, like Beckett's Pozzo, their orders into an empty, contextless space.
The problem for those who choose to live only by style is that their performance is always liable to breakdown: the refusal to register suffering can all too easily shade into a reluctance to feel anything at all. It is summarized in the tide of another of Elizabeth Bowen's novels: the death of the heart. Often this refusal of feeling, strangely compounded of inexperience and disillusion, is set against a background of social disintegration. Like Beckett's clowns, Bowen's ladies and gentle-men find themselves caught in a crisis of perpetual anticipation followed by inevitable disappointment, with all their days an expensive preparation for some splendid epiphany which never transpires. The dandy who begins with a taste for the heroic soon finds that there is no theatre in which to enact heroism, and so he or she is driven back into the studio and drawing-room, there to bemoan such frustration. Perhaps the most finished example of the type in nineteenth-century literature is Flaubert's Frederic Moreau, a figure who arises in the interregnum between a lost ancien régime and its replacement by a clear new code. Still touched by romantic theory, Moreau can nonetheless feel the emptiness within: his plight is to be sure that society is a fraud, and yet to be unsure whether the self that makes this diagnosis is any better. Refusing all risk, he permits the world to overwhelm him. "What have I to do with the world?", he asks in the manner of Lois Farquar: "Others struggle after riches, fame, power – I have no occupation .
Each self with which Frederic Moreau experiments is not sustainable for long: for the intelligence which tells him that the world is corrupt is used finally and most formidably against himself. What makes him a poignant figure is also what makes Lois and Laurence so moving. If Laurence is a reminder that the dandy is forever in danger of falling into cynicism, Lois is a warning that the dandy must cultivate illusions, even after the chance to entertain any illusions has been lost. "Illusions are art, and it is by an that we live, if we do",41 wrote Bowen. This is the option taken up by Lois. On one side of her is the cynic Laurence; on the other is the sentimental Liwy, who thinks Melisande a beautiful poem and marries the first soldier who crosses her path. Apart from the temptation to lapse into cynicism, the dandy may also be beguiled into indulging rather than transcending the self: if feeling can be denied by an assumed imperturbability, it can also be dissipated into easy sentiment by a realist, whose very nose seems already too "experienced". Lois, a true dandy, remains suspended between codes and worlds.
As did her creator, who remained a wanderer to the end. Elizabeth Bowen saw herself as a being without final context, and she understood the desperation behind the attempt to build a world on nothing but an illusion of style. This had been the complex fate of the Anglo-Irish from the outset, but it was the last ones like herself who lived it most fully:
Tradition is broken. Temperament, occupation, success or failure, marriage, or active nervous hostility to an original milieu have made nomads of us. The rules we learnt in childhood are as useless, as impossible to take with us, as the immutable furniture of the family home.42
Yet, in that very disavowal of a native background or identity, she becomes a voice for all those uprooted, dispossessed Irish, from the Gaelic earls who fled in 1607, through the rapparees and exiled Fenians of later centuries, down to the Joyce and Beckett who had to put themselves at a distance from Ireland in order to convince themselves that the place had ever existed.
For the dandy's tragedy turns out to have been the story of the bards who woke up to find themselves wandering spailpíní, and of gentry who were reborn as tramps. All such nomads know the truth of Wilde's aphorism: that the first duty in life was to adopt a pose, a style, a way of being in the world, and what the second was nobody had yet found out. Erecting a fragile world of words in the midst of the surrounding disorder, these artists were all hybrids, with that raffishness which is always the other side of the dandy's elegance. Bowen saw such complex persons as "never being certain that they are not crooks, never certain that their passports are quite in order",43 and above all, like those dandies who were prone to facial twitches, "unnerved by the slightest thing". That such a description applies as much to Gaelic as to Anglo-Irish writers and leaders may well be what makes Bowen the Aogán Ó Rathaille of her time and class. The great Gaelic poet who refused to call abjectly for help had his counterpart in the woman who, when she drove from Bowen's Court for the last time, refused to look back. The old order left her as stranded as any of her characters, and the new offered no place, so she was left with no choice but to invent herself:
I think we are curiously self-made creatures, carrying our personal worlds around with us like snails their shells, and at the same time adapting to wherever we are . . . cagey, recalcitrant, on the run, bristling with reservations and arrogances that one doesn't show.44
Twenty-One
Fathers and Sons
In societies on the brink of revolution, the relation between fathers and sons is reversed. The Irish risorgimento was, among other things, a revolt by angry sons against discredited fathers. The fathers had lost face, either because they had compromised with the occupying English in return for safe positions as policemen or petty clerks, or because they had retreated into a demeaning cycle of alcoho
lism and unemployment. The Irish father was often a defeated man, whose wife frequently won the bread and usurped his domestic power, while the priest usurped his spiritual authority. Most fathers accepted the English occupiers as part of the "given" and warned their sons against revolt. This did not prevent the fathers from being enthusiastic revivalists; on the contrary, their very caution made revivalism all the more necessary as a form of cultural compensation. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Simon Dedalus recalls the athletic feats of his youth and asks whether his son can vault a five-barred gate. Wherever one looks in the literature of the Irish renaissance, one finds fathers lamenting the red-blooded heroes now gone and evoking the conquests achieved in their own pasts. Joxer and Boyle, Michael James and Philly Cullen, these are all debased versions of the revivalist search for a hero, who can, of course, only be a hero if his deed has been done in the past.
In a colony the revolt by a son against a father is a meaningless gesture, because it can have no social effect. Since the natives do not have their hands on the levers of power, such a revolt can neither refurbish nor renew social institutions. To be effective it must be extended to outright revolution, or else sink back into the curtailed squabbles of family life.1 The pressure and intensity of family life in such a setting is due to the fact that the family is the one social institution with which the people can fully identify. The law, the state apparatus, the civil service, and even the official churches are in some sense alien. Albert Memmi noted disconsolately how few of his fellow-Tunisians under occupation showed any awareness of, much less aptitude for, government: they were simply subjects rather than citizens. This lack of civic commitment he adduced as the major reason why colonized peoples are usually among the last to awaken to national consciousness. When the sons of each generation rebelled, they soon saw the meaninglessness of their gesture and lapsed back into family life, as into "a haven in a heartless world": yet it was a haven that, in every respect, reflected the disorder of the outside colonial dispensation. The compromised or broken father could provide no convincing image of authority. In Memmi's words: "It is the impossibility of enjoying a complete social life which maintains vigour in the family and pulls the individual back to that more restricted cell which saves and smothers him".2 All that remains is for the son, thus emasculated, to take the place of the weak and ineffectual father.
The classic texts of the Irish renaissance read like oblique meditations on this theme. Many secondary artists, such as Patrick Pearse and Patrick Kavanagh, wrote about the over-intense, clutching relationship between mother and son without displaying any awareness of the underlying implication that the very intensity of the mother-son relationship suggests something sinister about the Irish man, both as husband and father. Women sought from their sons an emotional fulfilment denied them by their men, which suggests that the husbands had often failed as lovers: but the women could not have achieved such dominance if many husbands had not also abdicated the role of father. The space vacated by the ineffectual father was occupied by the all-powerful woman, who became not just "wife and mother in one"3 but surrogate father as well. Many primary writers – Joyce, Synge and O'Casey among them – therefore sidestepped the cliché and resolved to examine the deeper problem of the inadequate Irish male.
O'Casey is famous for his juxtapositions of industrious mothers and layabout fathers, of wronged girls and unscrupulous, sweet-talking men. In Juno and the Paycock Mary Boyle is left pregnant by a rascally schoolmaster and then disowned by her boyfriend of long standing. All this she can take. It is only when her father disowns her and her child that she breaks down: "My poor little child that'll have no father". Mrs. Boyle's rejoinder is O'Casey's terse epitaph on the Irish male: "It'll have what's far better. It'll have two mothers".4
That same indictment of Irish fatherhood echoes through the work of Joyce, who chronicles a whole series of unreliable, inadequate or absent fathers, priests and authority figures. The Stephen who at the beginning of A Portrait proclaimed his father "a gentleman" ends by scoffing at him as "a praiser of his own past".5 By the start of Ulysses he has fled the father in search of an alternative image of authority and self-respect: "Why did you leave your fathers house?" asks his saviour, only to be told "To seek misfortune".6 At the core of Joyce's art is the belief that fathers and sons are brought together more by genetic accident than by mutual understanding, and that most sons are compelled to rebel. "Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?"7 asks Stephen. Pondering his dead mother's love, he wonders "Was that then real? The only true thing in life?"8 So the basic groundwork of Ulysses is identical to that of Juno – the truth of maternity interrogates the myth of paternity.
Similarly, Synge's plays depict a rural Ireland whose enterprising males are cither in jail, the grave or America, leaving such "puny weeds" as Shawn Keogh to inherit the land. In this kind of place, father-killing may be a moral necessity as well as a dire compulsion. In Synge's Playboy, frustrated young women lament the banality of their confessions to Father Reilly, "going up summer and winter with nothing worthwhile to confess at all";9 and Pegeen condemns a father who believes so little in protecting his daughter that he abandons her for the flows of drink at Kate Cassidy's wake – an all-male affair that ends with "six men stretched out retching speechless on the holy stones".10 What brings Pegeen and Christy together is their shared belief that fathers are intolerable, since Christy was driven to "kill" his father, who tried to earn extra drinking money by marrying off his hapless son to the horrendous Widow Casey. It is no surprise to learn mat, although Marion's other children have abandoned him, they are still haunted by his ghost: "and not a one of them, to this day, but would say their seven curses on him, and they rousing up to let a cough or sneeze, maybe, in the deadness of the night".11 Both Synge and Joyce depicted motherless sons in their masterpieces, the better to dramatize the real roots of the problem of the Irish male as inadequate father.
Although Joyce, Synge and O'Casey all vividly describe the widespread disenchantment with the Irish male as father, none of them offers a convincing analysis of the causes of parental failure. And this despite the fact that a remarkable number of the foremost writers of the period either lost their fathers at an early age (Synge, O'Casey), had ineffectual fathers (Joyce, Shaw, O'Connor), or had fathers who might be described as gifted failures (Yeats, Wilde). The tortuous attempts by certain non-Irish critics to account for the recurring theme of weak paternity may make us glad that the artists did not similarly seek to explain away the phenomenon. One reason for the obsession is hinted at in the opening story of Dubliners, where Joyce depicts an orphaned boy fighting free of the oppressive aura that surrounds a dead and discredited priest. In Synge's Playboy the priest never appears onstage, as if to suggest that he is no longer an authoritative force in the people's lives. The orphaned youth and discredited priest seem paradigms of a late-Victorian culture deprived both of God and of the consolations of a received code. "If there is no God", cries out a baffled soldier in a novel of Dostoevsky, "then how can I be a captain?" Many a Victorian father may have asked the same question about his own fatherhood, just as many a Victorian son may have decided, with another of Dostoevsky's characters, that after the death of God anything – even father-murder – was possible. It is no accident that the self-invented Christy Mahon promises Pegeen Mike the illicit delights of poaching fish in Erris "when Good Friday's by".12 Henceforth, the day on which God died will be the day on which man learns to live.
This revolt of an artistic son against an unsatisfactory father was, of course, a leitmotif that spanned the literature of Europe from D. H. Lawrence to Thomas Mann in the early years of the twentieth century. The breakneck speed of change in society gave added force to the concept of "generation", and the gap which had always separated fathers from sons grew so wide as to suggest that the young and old inhabited totally different countries. For the first time in history, perhaps, writers found themselves forced to write solely
for their own immediate generation – as F. Scott Fitzgerald joked, an artist speaks to "the youth of today, the critics of tomorrow and the schoolmasters of ever afterward".13 To a modernist generation intent on making things new, the fact of fatherhood was an encumbrance and an embarrassment. The emerging hero was self-created like Jay Gatsby, who sprang from some Platonic conception of himself, or an orphan of indeterminate background, or a slayer of fathers.
There were, however, particular pressures in Ireland which gave that revolt an added urgency. The fathers were often broken men, and emigration had robbed the community of potential innovators. In such a context, the revivalist search for heroic models could take on a negative overtone: in a land peopled by Michael Jameses and Simon Dedaluses, the cult of heroism might as easily be a confession of impotence as a spur to battle.
Whenever a social order starts to crumble, these dramas are enacted in a reversal of the relations between fathers and sons. Frantz Fanon observes that, as families break up into their separate elements under the new stress, the true meaning of a national revival emerges: "Each member in this family had gained in individuality what it had lost in belonging to a world of more or less confused values".14 Women assert their independence of fathers and husbands, often appearing more manly than their partners: this masculinization of Irish women may be found in many classic works of the Irish revival. Equally telling is Fanon's account of the men. At first, he says, the father gives the impression of indecision and evasiveness, while even those sons who have adopted nationalist positions remain deferential in the home. With the coming of revolution, "the person is born, assumes his autonomy and becomes the creator of his own values". The father still recommends prudence but the son, in rejecting that counsel, does not reject the father. "What he would try to do on the contrary", writes Fanon, "would be to convert the family. The militant would replace the son and undertake to indoctrinate the father".15