All in all she presented another instance of the classic Irish radical in deceptively conservative clothing. She effected a brilliant reconciliation at the level of symbolic politics of the best native traditions with a thoroughly renovated modern consciousness. The problem which was solved by the shapers of Irish literature but unresolved in the world of realpolitik found in her a national leader who portended a resolution in a fashion that might be meaningful for all inhabitants of the island.
Thirty-Two
Under Pressure – The Writer and Society
1960–90
Although the Irish Renaissance was largely a celebratory affair, in tone and in mood, it nonetheless shaped a notion of the artist as a person at war with the social consensus, a crusader for some ideal which existed more often in the past or in the future. No matter how ferocious the critique mounted by a writer, he or she could always justify that ferocity by pointing to the patriotic motives which underwrote it.
Independence had not resolved any of these tensions: rather it exacerbated them. Censorship, ostracism and emigration became the lot of the more accomplished artists, proving to Samuel Beckett's satisfaction, at any rate, that the Irish nation never "gave a fart in its corduroys for any form of art whatsoever, whether before the Union or after".1 With so many modernist masterpieces banned, Irish readers often had to content themselves with cowboy tales. These proved hugely popular with a readership which may have identified with the improvisations of a frontier society: certainly, the recurring legend of a seeming rebel who turns out on inspection to be a pillar of society seemed to sort well with the national condition after 1921.
Yet the underlying paradox was that by censoring modernism the Irish authorities maintained it at the level of an heroic opposition, long after it had begun to lose that status in other countries and especially in the wake of World War Two. Though censorship made it harder than ever for writers to make a living in Ireland, it also managed to endow the profession with a conspiratorial glamour: the writer was easily seen as a subversive, a magician, a user of dark hidden powers. Poets such as Austin Clarke maintained a sharply antagonistic commentary on the timidity of political leaders afraid to enter a Protestant church for the funeral of Douglas Hyde: yet the more sensitive among them feared that the muse might be coarsened by the constant practice of satire which was, as Patrick Kavanagh lamented, "unfruitful prayer".2
Deep down, the writers yearned for a rapprochement with the new order yet the fate of the gifted young writer John McGahern, whose novel The Dark was banned and whose teaching contract was not renewed in 1965, made such an adjustment seem difficult. The young had already opened themselves to the world of rock-and-roll, in the conviction that it would prove quite compatible with native tradition. If sexual intercourse began in England in 1963, as Philip Larkin had it, it came also to Ireland in that year with the rattle of the bodhrán and the beat of the portable radio. John Montague played the role of an Irish Larkin as its somewhat wistful laureate:
The Siege of Mullingar, 1963
At the Fleadh Cheoil in Mullingar
There were two sounds, the breaking
Of glass, and the background pulse
Of music. Young girls roamed
The streets with eager faces,
Shoving for men. Bottles in
Hand, they rowed out a song:
Puritan Ireland's dead and gone,
A myth of O'Connor and O'Faoláin.
In the early morning the lovers
Lay on both sides of the canal
Listening on Sony transistors
To the agony of Pope John.
Yet it didn't seem strange, or blasphemous,
This ground bass of death and
Resurrection, as we strolled along:
Puritan Ireland's dead and gone,
A myth of O'Connor and O'Faoláin.3
It took official Ireland and its loyal opposition of writers a few more years to catch the new mood. By 1965 the posture of "inherited dissent" adopted by artists was being castigated by younger critics as a superannuated stereotype, which appealed to "forces of rejection" rather than "forces of affirmation".4 Writers were enjoined to engage with a new, confident, inclusive Ireland of advance factories, material affluence, liberal education and a self-reforming church. The nay-saying which had once been a challenging form of address was now dismissed as a dead formula; yet even after the censors had been removed, many writers continued to act as if they were still under ban, and portraits of a repressive priesthood still dominated fiction. It took a liberal priest, Peter Connolly of Maynooth, to argue that with the lifting of censorship a truly national criticism could again become a possibility.
In 1967 the Minister for Justice introduced legislation to allow for the "unbanning" of books after a period of twelve years, and thereby thousands of volumes were freed to enter the Irish market.5 Henceforth, every bookshop would have a well-stocked section featuring "Irish Writing" on permanent display. Many Irish artists who had begun their careers overseas opted to come home and claim their share in the new riches. A returned Pádraic Colum pronounced himself delighted by the smiling faces of young men and women openly holding hands in the city streets.
Yet, among the artists certain uncompromising souls sensed something more than a truce in the war between Bohemian and bourgeois: the defeat of Irish modernism itself. This had been a movement which assumed that the artist must live at an angle to society: now, even the most scathing assaults on that society by people like Patrick Kavanagh and Kate O'Brien were being transformed into facile testimonies to the tolerance of the Irish mind and, worse still, into weekly television entertainments. If in the 1890s a generation of Irish artists had returned to Dublin from a London which seemed determined to reduce them to the role of mere entertainers, now in the 1960s another generation, whose members had trained as artists in foreign lands, found its writers reduced to the status of "gas bloody men" on prime-time television.
The stage Irishman, a fabrication of the British folk mind, might almost be a thing of the past: but the native élites had replaced him with an equally spurious caricature, the stage writer. Doubtless, the legendary drinking feats of Brendan Behan, Flann O'Brien and Patrick Kavanagh had given credence and a prehistory to the stereotype: perhaps their drinking was an attempt to assert in pubs a machismo which the very act of writing had put into some doubt, given that theirs was a culture in which words were seen as feminine and deeds as masculine. However, it was the unprecedented affluence of the 1960s and early 1970s which saw the widespread emergence of the phenomenon, a phenomenon by no means peculiar to Ireland. Pondering the numbers of writers in residence on campuses, the American critic Irving Howe observed rather wistfully of their easy domestication: "Modernism must always struggle, but never quite triumph – and in the end it must struggle in order not to triumph".6 His fear was that in the US, as elsewhere, the bracing enmity between Bohemian and bourgeois had given way to wet embraces.
So it happened in Ireland. The Fianna Fáil government announced a tax holiday for artists, encouraging many English and American authors to settle on the island. In the event, most who came were purveyors of pot-boilers and airport-novels, whose earnings were vast enough to justify living for at least part of the year under rainy Irish skies and making the promised financial killing. The real effect, however, was on the status and self-image of Irish artists, who now felt free to come in from the cold. Even in the bad old days, Kavanagh had jibed that the standing army of Irish poets never fell below five thousand, but that number now seemed conservative as the bards declaimed their verses in the pubs. Each poet was granted a ritual, often drunken, appearance on television; summer schools resounded to their voices; and some government ministers even appeared in newspaper photographs with artists whose work they had once helped to suppress. The more disreputable a writer had once been, the higher (it seemed) the fee now commanded. These newly-visible Bohemians embodied for the Irish élites all those qualities whic
h fifty years of money-grubbing had led the Paudeens to reject in themselves – lyricism, prodigality, spirituality, open-heartedness. There was an element of repressive tolerance at work in this process, alongside a very genuine admiration of the artist's intrepidity of mind. In the climate so created, it was predictable that some more biddable types would prefer to enact in public the role of writer than to confront in private the anguish of actual writing.
One way of avoiding these pressures was the oldest remedy of all: exile. The novelist Brian Moore left his native Belfast during World War Two, took out Canadian citizenship and, after years of struggle, published The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. It evoked the quiet desperation of drab Belfast lives in a scrupulous rendition of provincialism of mind and body. Thereafter, Moore tended to write cross-cultural novels, often spliced between an Irish and a foreign setting. A similar technique characterizes novels by William Trevor, for instance Felicia's Journey, which cuts between the British midlands and a rural Irish community: but this author, who was born in Cork and has done most of his writing in England, is most well-known in Ireland for The Ballroom of Romance and Fools of Fortune, the first a study in middleaged disappointment, while the second is a chronicle set in Cork during the war of independence. Both Moore and Trevor are rightly renowned for the cool, crafted clarity of their prose, their wry, wistful ironies, and their use of telling detail; and each has won a substantial overseas readership for many other books of high quality which have nothing to do with Ireland.
Throughout this period Samuel Beckett remained in Paris, a last surviving exponent of the monastic discipline of high modernism: his example inspired many of the less compromising sort, poets such as John Montague, Richard Murphy, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney, Tony Cronin, Brendan Kennelly and Nuala ní Dhomhnaill; playwrights like Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and Thomas Kilroy; novelists including Francis Stuart, John Banville and Máirtín Ó Cadhain. This is not to say that the authors named all endorsed his apparent indifference to society: but it is to suggest that his elevation of the estranged artist as a model had immense implications. It fostered a healthy scepticism about the politicians' wet embraces, all the more necessary when in 1980 the Taoiseach Charles Haughey (who had also devised the tax holiday) announced the foundation of Aosdána, a self-electing élite of about 150 artists, who would have a basic income guaranteed by the state as well as the prestige of membership.
What followed, however, was in the case of many artists a remorseless privatization of experience, and an an which located its interest in the pathology of the alienated individual. This may explain why so many Irish poets in the period fought shy of politics and of social issues. The decade after the foundation of Aosdána saw hunger strikes in the north, vast unemployment in the south, the wrongful imprisonment of suspects in British jails, and the divisive divorce and abortion referenda, yet these events passed without finding their laureate. It would be difficult to imagine a Yeats or an O'Casey failing to use such material. Only a vulgar cynic would accuse the writers of being bought by the politicians for, being a self-elective body, Aosdána operates under no direct political constraint, its members being theoretically free to write whatever they wish: but in practice writers were a lot less critical of Haughey than poets like Clarke and Kavanagh had been of Costello or de Valera. Perhaps Haughey's own rather ambiguous relationship with the Irish middle class, which thought of him as rather too raffish for its tastes, gave him a special appeal for artists; or perhaps they were understandably grateful for what was, after all, an imaginative scheme which undid much of the damage caused by the censorship.
Thomas Kinsella was one of the very few artists who refused an invitation to membership of Aosdána. An Irish-language scholar himself, he must have smiled wryly at the ambiguity of the title, aos meaning a "band" and dána either "artistic" or "audacious" (depending on the context). As a student of Eliot and Auden, however, he was also aware of the need to marry modernity to native tradition. When he was a younger man, he had by day earned his living as a civil servant in that Department of Finance which opened up Ireland for overseas trade and investment; by night he wrote poems which worried that Ireland might
. . . have exchanged
A trenchcoat playground for a gombeen jungle.
Around the corner, in an open square,
I came upon the sombre monuments
That bear their names: MacDonagh & McBride
Merchants; Connolly's Commercial Arms.7
This was not at all like Montagues parody of Yeats on Romantic Ireland: it was more a weary parody of the consumerist present, in a grocers republic which could never live up to the Ireland of Easter 1916.
Even after a decade of apparent economic success in the 1960s, Kinsella's voice remained troubled, unsure. If one of the cultural contradictions of capitalism was its tendency to produce "functionaries by day and hedonists by night",8 he seemed to reverse that process, his working career a commitment to that materialistic Ireland which his poems did so much to question:
Robed in spattered iron
At the harbour mouth she stands, Productive Investment,
And beckons the nations through our gold half-door:
Lend me your wealth, your cunning and your drive,
Your arrogant refuse; Let my people serve them
Bottled fury in our new hotels,
While native businessmen and managers
Drift with them, chatting, over to the window
To show them our growing city, give them a feeling
Of what is possible; our labour pool,
The tax concessions to foreign capital,
How to get a nice estate though German,
Even collect some of our better young artists.9
Kinsella's project was representative of a whole generation which sought – as Yeats had at the start of the century – to free Ireland from provincialism by an exacting criticism and European pose. Now, however, there was the added complication of Yeats to be coped with. One way of fighting free of that awesome legacy was to set up shop under the sign of Eliot:
Domestic Autumn, like an animal
Long used to handling by those countrymen,
Rubs her kind hide against the bedroom wall. . .10
or else under the sign of Auden:
I nonetheless inflict, endure,
Tedium, intracordal hurt,
The sting of memory's quick, the drear
Uprooting, burying, prising apart.
Of loves a strident adolescent
Spent in doubt and varity.11
The influence of Auden on Kinsella, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon was at least as extensive as that of Kavanagh. And there was good reason for this. Auden was, along with Philip Larkin, the artist of post-imperial England, a land of anticlimax and antimacassars, evoked with a desperately self-deprecating suburban wit. Their tone seemed strangely suitable for those Irish poets born too late to partake in the heroic phase, either of Ireland or of modern poetry. By a brutally revealing paradox, Auden's England was an appropriate model for yet another tradition winding down into self-irony. In this, as in so much else, Ireland was disappointing all by turning into a botched version of England. As Montague observed in "Speech for an Ideal Irish Election":
Who today asks for more
– Smoke of battle blown aside –
Than the struggle with casual
Graceless unheroic things.
The greater task of swimming
Against a slackening tide?12
In much the same mode, "Casements Funeral" by Richard Murphy was not just a weary rebuke of those "Rebels in silk hats now" who "exploit the grave with an old comrade's speech",13 but also a self-confessed example of such exploitation, a superb parody of "Parnell's Funeral" by Yeats. Parody proved itself to be an appropriate mode for trapped post-Yeatsian minds, unsure whether they could engage in acts of radical creation. The new Ireland seemed like a parody of the old.
Where some writers could find continu
ity in Irish tradition, and a seemingly stress-free carry-over of Gaelic traditions into English, Kinsella remained troubled by the gaps in Irish narrative, and specifically by the traumatic loss of Irish in the nineteenth century. In a 1971 lecture, symptomatically tided "The Divided Mind", he explained that he did not feel fully at home in the English language; that for him Yeats represented the beginning of the Irish line in English; that "silence is the real condition of Irish literature in the nineteenth century"; and that further back beyond that is "a world suddenly full of life and voices, the voices of poets who expect to be heard and understood and memorized", the Hidden Ireland of the ancestral language:
In all of this I recognize a great inheritance and, simultaneously, a great loss. The inheritance is certainly mine, but only at two enormous removes – across a century's silence and through an exchange of worlds. The greatness of the loss is measured not only by the substance of Irish literature itself, but also by the intensity with which we know it was shared; it has an air of continuity and shared history which is precisely what is missing from Irish literature, in English or Irish, in the nineteenth century and today. I recognize that I stand on one side of a great rift, and can feel the discontinuity in myself. It is a matter of people and places as well as writing – of coming from a broken and uprooted family, of being drawn to those who share my origins and finding that we cannot share our lives.14
Like Seamus Heaney and many others, Kinsella tried to bridge that rift by producing translations from Irish poetry and prose: his version of The Tain is justly famous, as are his laconic English translations in An Duanaire: Poems of the Dispossessed (dedicated with a fine sense of irony to T. K. Whitaker, the Irish speaker who suggested the project). Such translations had an undisputed value in the early years of the Irish renaissance, when readers yearned for a glimpse of the poetry hidden in a language which they had never been encouraged to learn. By the late 1970s, however, and well before Heaney's Sweeney Astray (a version of Buile Shuibhne) and An Duanaire were published, it was possible for Michael Hartnett to allege that translations from Irish were often conscience-stricken gestures by poets who felt a sense of frustration, or even guilt, at producing their major work in English.
Inventing Ireland Page 72