Inventing Ireland

by Declan Kiberd

  It was just such a statement of underdevelopment that Patrick Kavanagh explored in The Great Hunger, his long poem of 1942 which he later dismissed as "the tragic thing". Using the word tragic in this pejorative way, he suggested that in tragedy there is always something of a lie, a refusal to believe in the benevolence of an over-watching God who will set the human comedy to rights in the end. Yet the world of subsistence farming which he evoked in The Great Hunger was a place of dire underdevelopment, economic, religious and intellectual; and the poem itself was a fierce anti-pastoral, which won the admiration of Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden for its cultivated banal repetitions and its slack line-endings:

  Maguire was faithful to death:

  He stayed with his mother till she died

  At the age of ninety-one.

  She stayed too long,

  Wife and mother in one.

  When she died

  The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son's backside

  And he was sixty-five.13

  The title teemed to promise a study of heroic peasants in the nineteenth century, but rite text actually delivers a near-nihilist account of unheroic subsistence farmers in the twentieth. All of this is framed sarcastically in the cinematic techniques of a curious "First World" anatomizing the "Third".

  The camera pans in the potato-gatherers at the start, creating a kind of anti-travelogue: but the Kavanagh voice grows more and more caustic in its anti-pastoralism, as it mocks revivalist versions of the peasant:

  There is the source from which all cultures rise,

  And all religions,

  There is the pool in which the poet dips

  And the musician.

  Without the peasant base civilization must die,

  Unless the clay is in the mouth the singer's singing is useless.

  The travellers touch the roots of the grass and feel renewed

  When they grasp the steering-wheels again.14

  The portrait offered is of a Joycean rather than Yeatsian peasant, waking to consciousness in dark loneliness:

  Although the literal idea of a peasant is of a farm-labouring person, in fact a peasant is all that mass of mankind which lives below a certain level of consciousness. They live in the dark cave of the unconscious and they scream when they see the light.15

  The Great Hunger repeats Samuel Beckett's thesis of 1934: that the failure of the revivalist poets to explore self was, among other things, a consequence of their resort for subject-matter to an uncritical celebration of peasant life. The subject of the poem, Patrick Maguire, fails to become himself because he cares too much for the dictates of mother, church and society. He is a proof of Kavanagb's contention that "tragedy is under-developed comedy, not fully born"16 – for, if it were born, the sufferer could find the healing relief of laughter, emitted by one who can afford to take long views. Maguire, by contrast, is a victim of the tragedy that is underdevelopment and of the underdevelopment that is tragedy.

  The 1950s began with the collapse of the coalition government, when a proposal by the young minister Dr. Noel Browne to socialize maternal health care was denounced by the Catholic hierarchy and by the Irish Medical Organization of professional doctors. The so-called Mother and Child Scheme would long be cited by disappointed radicals (and by caustic unionists) as further proof of the contention that "Home Rule is Rome Rule". In point of fact, legislation very similar to that stymied in 1951 was passed just a few years later by a more adroit Fianna Fail administration, back in power under Éamon de Valera as Taoiseach (Prime Minister). However, the economic undevelopment consequent upon the war years and upon the earlier "Troubles" was making governments less popular. Fianna Fáil lost power to another inter-party government led by Fine Gael in 1954. By the mid-1950s unemployment and emigration levels were again soaring, and de Valera was returned to office by a moody and fickle electorate.

  One thing was very clear by now. The death of Arthur Griffith in the first year of the Free State had deprived the country of a man who might arguably have come up with a clear-sighted economic vision to set before the people, drawing on the both/and philosophy of national renaissance which had laid equal stress on industrial and rural development. De Valera, for all his talk of frugal self-sufficiency and his success in clearing some of the slums, had no macroeconomic strategy to meet the needs of a new age. He was by nature a cautious politician, ever ready to agree with the guarded advice of a British-trained Department of Finance whose addiction to economic orthodoxies was at least as great as the Department of Education's commitment to the curricular study of the Edwardian literary canon. Only when de Valera retired to become president in 1959 was the way open for the entrepreneurial and meritocratic successor Sean Lemass.

  A pragmatist with leftward leanings, Lemass soon teamed up with an innovative civil servant named T. K. Whitaker and between them both men committed themselves to long-term economic planning for an industrialized Ireland. Time magazine captured the mood with a cover portrait of Lemass: behind his face perched a lucky leprechaun and the legend "New Spirit in the Oul Sod". It was a reasonably fair if kitschy impression.17 The 1960s would be years of relative prosperity, when multinationals finally invested in Ireland; when children at last knew the benefits of free secondary education; when holidays in European resorts became possible for many; and when the long introversion of Irish intellectual life came to an end.18

  As if to symbolize this opening out, Ireland had been admitted to the United Nations in 1955 and, from the very outset, played an influential role. The policy of neutrality and non-alignment impressed many leaders of the emerging new states in Africa and Asia, as well as the social democratic governments of Europe. In consequence the Irish were asked to act as honest brokers and to provide soldiers for peace-keeping duties in the former Belgian Congo and in Cyprus. They rose magnificently to the task. When in 1965 Sean Lemass paid a courtesy call on the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O'Neill, and when later in that year he signed a Free Trade Agreement with the British, it seemed that a whole cycle of historical difficulties might be coming to a happy resolution. Ireland – or at least the southern part of it – no longer seemed haunted by the past. At the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the Easter Rising in 1966, President de Valera looked a strangely forlorn and fragile figure as he took the salute from those of his old comrades who remained alive. Behind him on the dignitaries' platform sat "the youngest cabinet in Europe", bristling in mohair suits and ready to build if not the land of saints and scholars then at least an island of silos and silicon. Mr. de Valera might have considered the occasion a proud post-colonial moment: but the ambitious politicians behind him shifted uneasily in their seats as he reviewed the decades of progress and frustration. They were interested in the future. To them the best nations, like the best women, were the ones with no history. Ireland, for so long cut off from the outside world, was about to re-enter it fully.

  They were right, of course – but so, in his way, was the old man who bored them under the pale Dublin sun. They would finally enter the European Economic Community amid much fanfare seven years later, but by then the old man, still presiding in the Phoenix Park, would learn just how much unfinished business he was leaving behind Men and women make history, but never in conditions of their own choosing; and now the nightmare of history, as Joyce had feared it might, was to give them 'all a ferocious back kick.

  Twenty-Seven

  The Periphery and the Centre

  The "national movement" for Irish political and cultural freedom has often been described as more a rural than an urban phenomenon. The fact that some of the fiercest fighting between the rebels and the forces of occupation took place in cities has never much dented the notion of rural Ireland as real Ireland. Like other forms of pastoral, this complex of ideas was a wholly urban creation, produced by artists like W. B. Yeats and George Russell and by political thinkers such as Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins. They were to a man the urbanized des
cendants of country people, and they helped to create the myth of a rural nation.

  Those who protested by riot against The Playboy of the Western World in 1907 were not country people themselves, but their citified children and grandchildren.1 The rioters accused Synge of misrepresenting the life of western Ireland, but what really galled them was the remorseless realism of his portrayal of that harsh life, which his detractors chose to view in softer focus, through a haze of sentiment and nostalgia. Like Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger thirty-five years later, The Playboy was an uncompromising exercise in antipastoral, offered at a period when some nationalists in Dublin were concocting a highly conservative version of pastoral: the timeless Irish peasant noted for his stoicism and Christian piety. Country people who read books had long been aware that the bleaker aspects of their lives had gone unrecorded by the sentimental writers of the nineteenth century. A Sligo shoemaker had once confided in the young W. B. Yeats that for him the charms of Kickham's Knocknagow had begun to pall. "I want", he said, "to see the people shown up in their naked hideousness".2 Synge's plays went some way to answering that need: when The Playboy was finally shown in the west, audiences found it unremarkable. Kavanagh's long poem of 1942 added a new realism to writing about rural Ireland, as had Myles na gCopaleen's An Béal Bocht of the previous year; but it was not until Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille (1949) that the revivalist myth of the saintly western peasantry was exploded by a challenge from within that community.

  The object of this myth had been to soften and even obscure the very real class differences emerging in rural communities after the Land Acts of the 1880s. Yeats gave the game away in a striking couplet:

  Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man,

  "Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone".3

  However, his more usual strategy was to emphasize, rather than ironize, the vision of an ahistorical peasantry, unaffected by social change. He did this most succinctly in adopting the authoritative tones of the aristocratic war-hero Major Robert Gregory in "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death":

  I know that I shall meet my fate

  Somewhere among the clouds above.

  Those that I kill I do not hate,

  Those that I guard I do not love.

  That much, at least, was an honest account of the difficulties faced by one Irish gentleman in working up enthusiasm for a British imperial war. But consider the lines which follow:

  My country is Kiltartan Cross,

  My countrymen Kiltartan's poor.

  No likely end could bring them loss,

  Nor leave them happier than before.4

  Here the soft-focus lens is used to dissolve many class antagonisms just then emerging across the countryside. These differences had been faced without compromise as early as 1904 by George Bernard Shaw, whose play John Bull's Other Island dramatized the painful plight of the landless labourers faced with a new set of peasant proprietors intent on writing them out of history. Needless to add, these proprietors were the same arrivistes who were also determined to extirpate their old Anglo-Irish landlords.

  Against that backdrop, the true poignancy of Yeats's lyric lines becomes apparent. In the fate of Kiltartan's landless poor, he has the doomed nobleman read his own: for both will be victims of the pushy new élite, the Catholic farming middle class. The landless labourer, like the ruined landlord, is mythologized by the artists of that class, at just that moment in history when it has effectively put both groups out of business. The Irish Paddy of the nineteenth-century British music hall had been an eloquent demonstration of the fact that every repressive regime, having fully crushed its victims, can then afford to sentimentalize them as literary material; but that manoeuvre was now internalized and a new audience – the emerging Irish middle class – installed the landless peasant, the superannuated aristocrat and the urban poor as the bearers of an updated mythology. The notion of a timeless peasantry, like the dream of an ahistorical nobility, was a fantasy purveyed by the new élites who had seized the positions of power in cities and towns. W. B. Yeats, who liked to think of himself as the scourge of this philistine group, actually stood sponsor for their fondest myth when he celebrated his "dream of the noble and the beggar man".5

  Hence, too, the rather paradoxical celebration of aristocratic values by some leaders of cultural nationalism. Many texts republished during the Gaelic revival, such as Pairlement Chloinne Tomáis, had been vicious satires by the dying Gaelic aristocracy of the seventeenth century against the parliamentarianism and levelling vulgarity of the Cromwellian planters. These texts were now used, with no sense of irony, by the new middle class of nationalist Ireland. In their anxiety to secure their own "aristocratic" credentials, its members blinded themselves to the fact that they represented a group exactly equivalent to those lampooned in their chosen texts. They were all "descended from kings", of course; and that self-image blinded them, as it blinded many others, to the real interests which they represented. Their dream-life expressed itself in the images and symbols of an immediately superior social caste – and their self-delusion was mocked by more radical Irish speakers who recalled the old sarcastic phrase, ag sodar i ndiaidh na nuasal (trotting after the nobility), once used to describe those who aped English upper-class ways. Many proud nationalists could counter this jeer with the claim that the traditions which they invoked were those of a lost Gaelic nobility, such as had been celebrated in the bardic and spailpín poetry of earlier centuries. This faking of an aristocratic lineage allowed the rising native élite to assert a new self-respect, but soon the fight for Irish had given way to the fight for collars and ties, as the latent motivations of many nationalists became more painfully apparent.

  The aristocratic fetishism led to other, equally unfortunate, results. For one thing, it was yet another abject surrender to prevailing English categories of thought. Such conformism to norms which arose neither from their immediate inheritance nor from their daily experience left the people vulnerable, within the prevailing imperial code, to the charge of being second-rate, and recognizably uncouth in the eyes of the declining Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Sensing that the English aristocracy saw itself standing at the apex of imperial culture, some nationalists played up the "noble" strain which was an undeniably potent element of Irish literary tradition: so Cuchulain was recruited as a role-model for the boys of St. Enda's College, Pearse's Scoil Éanna, which served as an Irish version of the English public school.

  The underlying psychology of this section of the national movement was summed up, with his usual cryptic brilliance, by Samuel Beckett in the phrase "the Victorian Gael". The political manifestations of such thinking were soon evident in the infant state. A new use was found for the Irish language as a kind of green spray-paint, useful in concealing the embarrassing similarity of Irish ideas, as well as Irish post-boxes, to their English models. It became all the more necessary to call the native parliament the Dáil, in order to conceal its depressing similarity to the hated Westminster model. A new word was needed, a word from the Irish language, because for decades the revivalists had poured scorn on all parliamentary procedures. The Parliament of Clan Thomas had been ruled by churls and called Pairlement in Gaelic texts, as if the botched version of the true English term were a sign that the new men of the 1650s could never hope to achieve anything more than a pitiful parody of English ways. However, the new men of the 1920s insured against such mockery by changing the word to Dáil, a more aristocratic concept indeed. It goes without saying that the constant vilification of parliament in such works had its political side-effects: it strengthened the hand of republicans who contested the legitimacy of the new parliament in the emergent state.

  What was clear, from the pages of Shaw and Joyce, was a picture of the new peasant proprietors in the countryside and of an emerging middle class in the cities and towns, which tended to be dominated by first- or second-generation immigrants from rural areas. The interests of both groups often overlapped, as
Joyce acidly noted in Ulysses, where the ad-canvasser Bloom tries to design a more efficient system for transporting livestock to and from the city markets, and where a headmaster, Mr. Deasy, pens a solemn letter to the newspapers on the best methods of eradicating foot-and-mouth disease in cattle. Dublin was in 1904 a classic example of a periphery-dominated-centre, that is to say, a conurbation dominated by the values and mores of the surrounding countryside. A photograph taken in the 1880s shows a flock of sheep being herded across the Carlisle Bridge into Sackville Street, en route to the docks. Exactly a century later, in a story called "Parachutes" by John McGahern, a character thinks of Ireland that "even its principal city had one foot in the manure heap". Seeing thistledown blowing like delicate parachutes across the fashionable arcade of Grafton Street, he recalls that behind the shopfronts are "backyards and dumps . . . and yards and gardens".6 This is a bleak leitmotif in a story whose central point is the anomie endured on housing estates by school-teachers imported to the city from rural Ireland. They attribute to the city an experience of numbing anonymity, but McGahern's subtle perception is that this has less to do with urban life than with the squinting-window mentality which rural people have brought with them. They falsely vilify the rhythms of a city life which they have never entirely mastered, and correspondingly sentimentalize the rhythms of a country life which they have not yet, in their minds, completely abandoned.