Inventing Ireland
Page 65
His shabby boarding-house-turned-brothel is a fitting metaphor for the decayed ideals of a free Ireland. He is the first character onstage to speak directly to the audience, as if he were mediating between Behan, the actors and onlookers. No sooner has the play begun, than he confides in the audience that Monsewer is an "old idiot", that in 1960 the days of heroes are over and the IRA as dead as the Charleston. Yet he, too, feels the tug of the past. When told that the IRA prisoner in Belfast jail will soon die, he growls "and who asked him to give himself the trouble?"; yet, seconds later, he voices his resolve to stand by Monsewer, "because we were soldiers of Ireland in the old days". In that, he speaks for the Behan who shot at a Free State policeman at the age of nineteen, but he also speaks for the older man, when he says "It's the H bomb. It's such a big bomb it's got me scared of all the little bombs. The IRA is out of date . . . and so is the RAF, Swiss Guards, Foreign Legion, Red Army . . . "33
While the other characters in the house seem minor pawns in a power-game between England and Ireland – Leslie is to die if the boy in Belfast Jail is executed – Pat sees the truth: that such a backyard squabble means little. If anyone else onstage shares this realistic view of things, it is Leslie. To his IRA captors he appears less a person than an image: in capturing him, they believe they have someone important, who can force his superiors to the negotiating table. But Leslie knows that in modern warfare a soldier is disposable:
You're barmy if you think that what's happening to me is upsetting the British government. I suppose you think they're all sitting round in their West End clubs with handkerchiefs over their eyes, dropping tears into their double whiskies . . . Yeah, I can just see the Secretary of State for War now waking up his missus in the night: "Oh, Isabel-Cynthia love, I can hardly get a wink of sleep wondering what's happening to that poor bleeder Williams".34
The IRA are accused of being hostages to an outworn belief in military chivalry: amazingly, it is the IRA which believes that British fair-play will see their boy right. As a realist, Leslie agrees with the disillusioned republican Pat's reading: and so, as in earlier playwright's work, the seeming opposite becomes an actual double. Leslie even echoes Pat's view that all modern armies and soldiers are the same. On being introduced to Monsewer, Leslie remarks acidly "Just like our old Colonel back at the depot. Same face, same voice. Gorblimey, I reckon it is him".35 If the warders in The Quare Fellow were finally indistinguishable from the prisoners, so in The Hostage kilted rebels are interchangeable with moustachioed colonels.
Leslie drives the parallel home in an even more telling response to his girlfriend Teresa's explanation of the idealism which fires the young republican condemned to death in Belfast:
TERESA: It's because of the English being in Ireland that he fought.
LESLIE: And what about the Irish in London? Thousands of them. Nobody's doing anything to them.36
Of course, Behan doesn't simply rehash O'Casey's themes, but he updates them in the light of more recent history. In The Plough and the Stars, the Covey had asked the British soldier what he was doing in Ireland, and got the rather illogical, if romantic, reply: "defending my country". Four decades later, the response of the British Tommy is more pragmatic:
RIO RITA: Ah you murdering bastard. Why don't you go back home to your own country?
LESLIE: You can take me out of it as soon as you like. I never bloody well asked to be brought here.37
His freedom from the dead pull of the past is epitomized by the fact that he is an orphan, like Teresa, who rejects the "madness" of Monsewer. She is appalled by the relish with which Monsewer anticipates the martyrdom in Belfast Jail: "he is mad to say that the death of a young man will make him happy". Together, Teresa and Leslie unlearn the remaining clichés about past Anglo-Irish relations. When Teresa suggests that England was exploiting Ireland for hundreds of years, Leslie answers "That was donkey's years ago – Everyone was doing something to someone in those days".38 The same armies which crushed the Irish also harried the English poor. This cheerful pragmatism contrasts with the stylized gestures of the IRA men who talk little and mostly of the past, while Leslie thinks only of a future with Teresa. Everything about Leslie is real, from his unheroic reasons for enlisting in the army, to his desire that tea and cigarettes be brought in by Teresa.
To the first Gaelic League audience of An Giall – many reared on a narrow conception of the stiff-upper-lipped British soldier – this portrayal must have been a challenge. Leslie has no time for his superiors, and is quick to spot their Irish counterparts. He is being used by the Secretary of State for War as surely as Pat is being exploited by the IRA, which cares little for the socialism to which he has been always committed. So, as Leslie debunked the armchair patriots swigging whiskey in London, Pat mocks the pretensions of his superiors in the republican movement. "Nine years I spent in prisons", he recalls, to which the IRA man says "The loss of liberty is a terrible thing". "That's not the worst thing", says Pat, "do you know what the worst thing is?" "No". "The other Irish patriots in along with you".39 These narrow-gauge nationalists in their trenchcoats and berets seem to be involved in some puritanical game, which prompts Pat to ask whether they haven't their initials confused: "Are you in the IRA or the FBI?" The IRA men feel obliged to remind Leslie "You are the hostage" and when he questions the rules of the game, they say "This is war".40 As part of their game, they tell him to stand in a chalk circle drawn on the floor, but Leslie flees this vicious circle in which they would contain him, and is shot dead. The very manner of his death suggests just how unbreakable that cycle of history is, for his death is the predicted reprisal for the execution of the young lad in Belfast Jail.
Prejudices on both sides are inflamed. Pat, who had so often seemed to agree with Leslie, now retreats into the role of hard-line nationalist. Torn between an understandable pride in the past and a realization that such pride may be no longer useful but lethal, Pat is a fair representative of the Irish condition. On the one hand, he tells a distraught Teresa that Leslie's death was unintentional; on the other, he hints that it was somehow deserved, once the boy in Belfast Jail died too. Yet he seems to be heartbroken at the close, at the death of a young Englishman who has been his secret double. It is left to Teresa to point the moral:
It wasn't the Belfast Jail or the Six Counties that was troubling you, but your lost youth and your crippled leg. He died in a strange land, and at home he had no one. I'll never forget you, Leslie, till the end of time.41
One final question remains: in The Hostage (though not in An Giall), the dead British soldier slowly gets up and sings a last song:
The bells of hell
Go ting-a-ling-a-ling,
For you but not for me.
Oh death where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling,
Or grave thy victory?
If you meet the undertaker
Or the young man from the Pru,
Get a pint with what's left over.
Now I'll say goodbye to you.
Leslie may simply be repeating his cheerful pragmatism, urging those he leaves to drink a pint with the change left when the funeral money is spent; or he may, indeed, be suggesting that the weeping will be less for the departed than for those doomed to remain. But there may be something more at work here. All through the play, characters had seemed painfully aware of their roles and some had even stepped right out of role for moments to discuss the material: in that sense, it is quite consistent of Leslie to rise, since the actor must do exactly that every night. In music-hall and vaudeville characters slip easily and on stage from one role to another: Leslie is but the latest to do so. He may also be making a final point. When alive, he had repeatedly warned the IRA men, who foolishly thought that the British authorities cared for an army private, that this was not the case. The IRA did not heed his warning, nor perhaps did people in the audience. If Leslie arises now, it is not to allay the IRA's feeling of guilty complicity in his death, so much as to remind all, once again, that soldiers are dispens
able, that willing cannon-fodder comes easily, and that there are plenty more cheap recruits where he came from.
Read in this way, The Hostage seems less a misrepresentation of An Giall than a massively different text, one of the first examples of that form of writing more recently tided by Rushdie "The Empire Writes Back". If John Bull's Other Island could carry different meanings in Dublin and in London, then Behan was simply taking that contrast onto a new plane with his reworking of An Giall for a London audience which included many of the Sloane Street set. Why this need to "write back"? Obviously, Behan felt the urge to dismantle the remains of the imperial agenda, not just in Ireland but in the imperial capital itself. The right of a state to take a life had been seen as absolute in imperial days: that right was thrown into question in the colonies, later still in Britain. The liberals of Britain felt the desire to stand accused in these matters by former colonial subjects, so Behan was almost effortlessly recruited into the ranks of the Angry Young Men in the late 1950s. Though this was a valid enough way of interpreting his work, that work was in the end quite different from that of, say, John Osborne, whose anger was less with imperialism than with its failure to implement itself full-bloodedly. Behan was, instead, one of the first post-colonial writers to impinge on the consciousness of post-war Britain.
In what name does such an artist write? Initially, in the name of his own emergent nation-state. Only later does he come to realize that this very form is itself an artificial imposition which contains, within it, many of the familiar oppressions: and so he must proceed from nationalism to liberation. If Britain had colonized in the name of an imperial self, then a writer like Behan served to initiate a questioning as to how stable or perfect that self really was. His attack on the right of that stable self to take life in The Quare Fellow was extended to an assault on the notion of authorship as such in The Hostage, and more particularly on the authority of any one text. As a bisexual male42 who wrote in Irish as well as in English, Behan cheerfully embraced his own hybridity. Aware that the dramatic form in which he worked was largely alien to Gaelic literary traditions, he nonetheless gloried in the sheer artificiality and conventionalism of his adopted medium. One of the first plays in Irish had been Hyde's Casadh an tSúgáin (The Twisting of the Rope), and at first he thought of ironically calling his play on capital punishment The Twisting of Another Rope.
The dialect in which Behan's characters speak was neither standard Irish nor standard English, and whenever he worked in English, Behan left a number of Gaelic phrases untranslated, as if to remind audiences of all that must be lost in such a carry-over. This was in no way to suggest the feasibility of a return to some pre-colonial identity, merely to resist his own too-facile absorption into the canon of English literature. He sensed, as Synge had before him, that the target language in any translation always enjoyed an excessive status, and so he liked to put that status into question. All of this was of a piece with his incorporation of the act of criticism into the literary text. To the very end, Behan's fear was that his own formal wildness might be domesticated and misinterpreted as literary realism.
Thirty
Beckett's Texts of Laughter and Forgetting
The Easter Rebellion happened when Samuel Beckett was ten. It scarcely touched the lives of his parents and neighbours at all: relations with servants and local shopkeepers went on as they had before. The father's business of quantity-surveying was in no way threatened: indeed, if the destruction of buildings was widespread, it could only have been enhanced. Out in Foxrock, and well away from the fighting, the family treated the event as "something akin to an irritating wildcat strike".1 Towards the end of the week, Bill Beckett took both of his sons to the top of a local hill, from which the burning inner city could be clearly seen. He began to laugh like someone at a holiday fireworks display, but "Sam was so deeply moved that he spoke of it with fear and horror more than sixty years later".
This vignette has been cited as proof that Samuel Beckett, from the very outset, found himself estranged from the emerging Ireland, but in fact his experience would have been typical of the great majority of Dubliners in Easter Week. They had not voted for (or against) the forces which staged the Rising, just as they would not have a chance to vote for (or against) the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Theirs was a history which seemed always to happen in their absence, or at least without their active participation: and frequently, large sections of the public had been either too bored or too frightened even to watch for long as powerless spectators. To many, the old Ireland had ceased to exist after the famines of the 1840s and the vast migrations to England and North America: what was left was a tremendous silence, a vast emptiness, which one poet has called "an awful absence moping through the land".2 The effect of such disasters was to make the Irish feel like strangers in their own country.
For the young Sam Beckett, that sense of estrangement had been even more keen: his parents, unlike many other Protestant families, were not Empire loyalists, but they were certainly not Irish republicans either. They lived in something akin to a cultural vacuum: "Foxrock deliberately avoided much of Irish popular culture, while providing regrettably little English culture, high or low, to put in its place".3 It is hardly surprising that their son should have eventually set up shop in the void: many decades later, he recalled his sense of decontextualization and bafflement:
. . . when you started not knowing who you were from Adam trying how that would work or a change not knowing who you were from Adam no notion who I was saying what you were saying whose skull you were clapped up in whose moan you had . . .4
Small wonder that the protagonist of his early stories comes to conclude that his true home is "nowhere so far as I can see".5 Yet such a nowhere would, in time, be revealed as an artistic blessing. It would make of Beckett the first truly Irish playwright, because the first utterly free of factitious elements of Irishness. If Fanon could chide black nationalists for forgetting that "niggers" were disappearing, Beckett could offer a similar service to his native people. In this, too, he was strangely representative of that silent majority of fellow-islanders who remained "too Irish to be nationalists".
What began in the young boy's mind on that Dublin hill in 1916 was what the writer Aijaz Ahmed would much later call "a nationalism of mourning". Beckett himself would joke that if all who claimed to have been in the General Post Office in 1916 had truly taken part, then the building would have burst at the seam's. In his first published novel, Murphy, he set a mischievous scene there: a Cork mystic named Neary convinces himself that the "deathless rump" of the Cuchulain statue is "trying to stare me down" and so he takes remedial action:
... Neary had bared his head, as though the holy ground meant something to him. Suddenly, he flung aside his hat, sprang forward, seized the dying hero by the thighs and began to dash his head against his buttocks, such as they are.6
The book takes similar liberties with a "nobly proportioned" member of the Garda Siochána (Civic Guard) and with the new state which he represents: a character is described as being "famous throughout civilized world and Irish Free State".7
That jibe was Beckett's repayment in kind for the banning of his first book by the state censors, whose prurience he mocks by supplying the phrase MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC in bold type as a "filthy synecdoche" for the sexual act. At another juncture, after describing a kiss as "the slow-motion osmosis of love's spittle", he adds jocosely "The above passage is carefully calculated to deprave the cultivated reader". In general, his treatment of the new state may be summed up by the book's adage: "Turf may be compulsory in the Saorstát, but one need not bring a private supply of it to Newcastle".8 Dublin in the 1920s and early 1930s was in the grip of a triumphalist revivalism which grew daily more self-congratulatory and more censorious: and literary nationalism was still the prevailing fashion. Many mediocre poets, fearing that they did not possess the requisite coefficient of Irishness, sought it in mechanical imitations of Gaelic prosody. And Beckett was merciless:
The answer to these repressions, adopted by many children of Protestant families in the 1920s, was a return to England, which for them was still the parent country: but Beckett, when he went to London, was thoroughly miserable. Patronized as a Paddy, he reportedly found simple actions like ordering a taxi or buying a newspaper a humiliating ordeal.10 This is the double burden of Murphy, which may be in open revolt against Irish revivalism, but which is, if anything, even more critical of 1930s England. The protagonist undergoes that deracination which is the final lot of the post-colonial exile, a predicament defined with cruel clarity in Beckett's elegy for Foxrock and its doomed scions in All That Fall: "It is suicide to be abroad. But what is it to be at home, Mr. Tyler, what is it to be at home? A lingering dissolution".11 That passage, and the feelings which fed into it, represent a radical rewriting of Synge's much more optimistic line from the first decade of the century in Deirdre of the Sorrows: "There's no place but Ireland where the Gael can have peace always".12 In Murphy one of the greatest fears of the protagonist is of "falling among Gaels".13