At Home and Abroad

by V. S. Pritchett

  He is an Irishman.

  You are caught, on such occasions, in one of the English-speaking world’s most hackneyed jokes, the one that begins: “An Englishman, a Scotsman and an Irishman were sitting in a train.” It ends: “And Paddy said—” Add a Welshman to it and the joke vanishes and becomes a serious historical imbroglio.

  By what devilish inspiration of historical fate were these four ill-assorted, quarrelsome peoples stuck on a couple of small islands off the wet and foggy Atlantic coast of Europe, outside the sweetness of civilization, and forced to live in one another’s pockets for nearly two thousand years? And how is it that the Irish personality, to say nothing of the Irish race or nation, has always emerged with total recalcitrance and distinctness from the other three, despite all the entanglements of their common history? The simple but very unsatisfactory explanation is that the Irish have an island to themselves and that the Scot, the Welshman and the Englishman have to share one; for if we go to the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand or any other English-speaking country where the adventurous peoples of the British Isles have settled in any number, it is the Irishman who stands apart, who retains the consciousness of his race, his nation, his two religions, and his peculiarity, and who is never quite assimilated. Certainly there are great Spanish and Spanish-American families with Irish names and descent, who have been distinguished in history. They have been assimilated. The Irish make much of this, for the flight to those countries was caused by the Irish struggle against the British—but the Scots and English also have given their names to foreign families and have likewise lost their identity. But the British generally survive only in the institutions they create; the Irishman-born or the man who is Irish by descent survives in his racial person.

  In certain weathers, especially in the west of Ireland, where the clouds seem to have been just that minute born out of the sea and to drift about not knowing where to go, Ireland itself almost seems to be newborn. A child could have dabbled it out in simple colors from a paint box. It is more than an emerald isle—it is an ephemeral one. This is, we know, a trick of the Atlantic climate and its light, for there will be hours when the trick is not played—long, gray, heavy hours when the island looks sullen and is sullen. No other island is so moody and variable in aspect, so likely to pass from the earthly to the unearthly before our eyes.

  The Irish air is Atlantic air, but quite unlike, for inst1ance, that of Maine; it is air empowered by the west wind, moist and rain-smelling, the lethargic air of heathery islands that are surrounded even more by air than by sea. One is excited and half asleep by turns. I was leaning one day on the loose stone wall of a little field in Connemara, where an old man was making the hay. “There’s been a lot of sleep made in this field, too,” he said.

  Meteorologists say that the changes in atmospheric pressure to which a human being has to adapt himself in Ireland are more sudden, more extreme, and far more frequent in the course of a day than in any other country. One moment our Irishman is walking as lightly as a deer; the next the sky is weighing on him. In Cork I have rarely been able to get up before eleven; and Limerick—as the famous John Mahaffy, the Trinity College wit, used to say—was the only city in Western Europe where you could see a bittern standing undisturbed in the main street at half past nine in the morning. That fantasy is impossible in modern Limerick, which is close to the new industries of the Shannon, jammed with salesmen, engineers, German technicians and transatlantic passengers, but the bittern could easily inhabit one’s mind at that hour.

  To the extent that climate forms character, one can see what the Atlantic island climate has done for Irishmen. The air, the constantly changing sky and light, that will turn green hills to gold, to purple, to blue and dreary gray in the course of an hour or two, will cause a man to notice the evanescence of things and keep him in a state of daydream or dismay. This will be as true of the mountain landscapes of Cork, Kerry and Galway, where the kind of country changes in every few miles of road, as it is of the brown bogs or waving meadows of the midlands, where the country is luscious and the farms are rich. And the fact that, in beautiful country of fine trees and rich land, the villages and little towns are gray and ugly, points to another aspect of the dreaming life. No one could be troubled, in the short time he was awake each day, to build better. These places are the work of people, you would say, who resented having to live in bricks, stone, slate and mortar. The old Irish race never built a town—so we are told by Arland Ussher, the Gaelic scholar, though the assertion is naturally disputed—and one of the more ingenious grudges held in Ireland against the British is that they never taught the Irish how to do so. Much of what the Irish had—the castles, mills, warehouses, forts, churches, farms—was ruined by wars and by abandonment, so that when we turn from climate to history, we are passing through a land where, in the name of some violent dream or other, real things have been destroyed.

  The first generalization, then, that can be risked about the Irish character is that the tension between dream and reality is fundamental to it. The fact that the Irish claim to be realists confirms the view: no one has so cold and startled an eye for reality as the man who suddenly wakes up. Bernard Shaw put the misanthropic view of this character in the words of Larry Doyle, in John Bull’s Other Island, and as usual in an Irishman’s outburst, the lines are a collection of piercing half-truths:

  An Irishman’s imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he cant face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do…. It saves working. It saves everything except imagination, imagination, imagination; and imagination’s such a torture that you cant bear it without whisky. At last you get that you can bear nothing real at all; youd rather starve than cook a meal, youd rather go shabby and dirty than set your mind to take care of your clothes and wash yourself; you nag and squabble at home because your wife isnt an angel; and she despises you because youre not a hero.… And all the while there goes on a horrible, senseless, mischievous laughter…. laugh, laugh, laugh! eternal derision, eternal envy, eternal folly.…1

  That is a good passage of Irish self-laceration. An imaginative talker has suddenly got an idea on the great central subject of Irish talk: the “unfortunate country”—itself a remarkably evasive understatement about a land that has been racked for centuries by big wars, little wars, enslavement, political murders, executions, starvation and treason—and made the jail the home of honor. Certainly the Irishman is imaginative and cynical, angry and laughing, but Larry Doyle is being glib: the Irish mind is also ancient and humane in its acceptance of savage fatality and the human delinquent—outside the dram shop and even in it. The streak of cruelty that runs through the Irish mind belongs to a pagan world that younger civilizations have overlaid: it is the cruelty of pre-Christian tragedy.

  Still, it is no good running on like this before we know who the Irish are and what kind of Irishman we are talking about. For myself, an Irishman is a man born in Ireland or born of Irish stock. I see no fundamental difference between an Ulsterman, Protestant or Catholic, and any southern Irishman. They are variants of the same mixed races.

  Here the trouble starts, and every Irishman’s eye is alert. Even after forty years of freedom in Eire, and of solidarity with the British in Northern Ireland, a few fanatics keep the issue alive, though nowadays much more in America than in Ireland itself. The theory is that several million of the Irish millions are not Irish at all! The British, who are mongrels themselves, look across the water and see another collection of mongrels who divide into Protestants and Catholics—a crude view, but the British utter it out of bewildered politeness and to save time. Americans divide the Irish into two waves of immigrants: the early wave of Scottish-Irish Protestants whom one finds among the poor whites of Tennessee, the Southern colonelcy and the upper reaches of industrial and academic life; and the later wave, usually Catholic and “native” Irish who emigrated in millions after
the terrible famines and criminal evictions of the 1840s, a pure peasantry to whom ward politics are second nature.

  These divisions are far too simple. The Irish are more conscious of tradition and history than any other race one can think of; more even than the Jews. Most Irishmen feel themselves to be aristocratic, either because they are clansmen or because they descend from conquering invaders. Clan chieftainship becomes kingly in their imagination; colonists become—and it is their word—Ascendancy. All are born great, and greatness is the stuff of myth.

  Your Irishman may claim descent from the Milesian Kings; I know one who lets his mind run back without difficulty to the year 1600—yes, but 1600 B.C. There is no reason why he should not. The traditions of the Irish people are the oldest in Europe north and west of the Alps. Ireland is in fact the only Celtic state left in the world, and every Irishman will tell you—indeed cannot be stopped from telling you—that, in 350 B.C., Britain and Erin were the last of the Celtic conquests. Until 1066, the famous year, Erin ruled all Scotland, Wales and the north of England to the Midlands.

  The sense of the remote past is strong in Ireland, and it creates in the mind a historical dreaming to match the dreaming of everyday life. So does the sense of the near past: Elizabethan; Cromwellian; Williamite; the loss of the Irish Parliament in 1800; the famine and the struggle for freedom from Irish landlords (mainly Protestant) and English rulers in the nineteenth century. So that when we ask, “Who are the Irish?” we are invited to decide whether our man is Celt, Gael, Norseman, a mixture of Norse and Gael, a Norman, Anglo-Norman, Welsh-Norman—the last three being called “old English”!—how they intermarried, which side they took in the Reformation, and whether they were of the upper or lower class. There are Normans who turned Protestant; there are Catholic Normans like the Joyces. And one would need to know why a twelfth-century Joyce should be less “Irish” than the famous native O’Flahertys, known as “the ferocious,” from whom the city of Galway prayed to God to be delivered and who, at last, after hundreds of unavailing years, have got one of their family elected mayor of the city. Which of two famous modern writers—James Joyce or Liam O’Flaherty, both Catholic-born but fiercely anticlerical—is truly Irish?

  Of course, we can simplify and say that any settlers or invaders who came after the English or Welsh-Normans—that is to say, Elizabethan, Cromwellian and Williamite English, lowland Scot or Huguenot French—are not “native” Irish. Then Swift, Grattan, Parnell, Shaw, Lord Dunsany, Plunkett, Yeats, Lady Gregory and O’Casey would not count. Nor Maria Edgeworth, the novelist. Nor the glorious philosopher, Bishop Berkeley. Two, three or four hundred years, in this land of genealogists, do not do the trick. The oddest offenders are the Ulster Protestants, transplanted between the reigns of Charles II and William of Orange from the lowlands of Scotland and without question cousins of the “native” Irish, if not of the same race. The northern Irish Protestants were all “colonists.” Were Americans less American when they were colonists? The character break with the native country is always immediate, even if the political break comes much later. Test any colonists by their mother countries: the Anglo-Irish with their half-English accent are markedly un-English; the Ulster Scots with their half-Scottish lowland accent are markedly un-Scottish.

  But we still haven’t done with the matter, for there are large numbers of Irish who claim to descend from the shipwrecked Spanish sailors of the Armada and who can be added to the old claim that the Celts originated in Galicia, in the northwest of Spain. Of all such assertions this last is the most sympathetic: the rainy climate of Galicia, the moodiness and cleverness of the inhabitants, their wit, their drollness (at the very word gallego every Spaniard begins to laugh), their spirited yet negligent character, and the fact that they play the bagpipes and have sad, lyrical, nostalgic songs, combine to identify them with the Irish more surely than does any other racial speculation.

  We have added racial history to the Irish dream and only one certain thing emerges: it was unlucky, since Ireland lay at one remove from Western Europe and a long way off, that the decisive European invasions of its soil were not dense enough to form a welded community. Britain was thoroughly conquered and settled; Ireland was not. In any case, large parts of the country were for long periods wretchedly poor. The facts of modern Irish history are really better seen from the points of view of the struggle of classes: Shaw was realistic about that. And the younger generation of liberated Irishmen today are more realistic than their elders, the nationalists who—with high imagination—fought for freedom. The Irish nationalist is going out fast. The old “unfortunate country,” romantic in its martyrdom and sorrows, exists as a historic fixation, chiefly in the sentimental minds of Irish-Americans who have lost touch. The young Irishman does not dream—or not so much.

  Anyone who has known Ireland over the last forty years must be struck by its modernization and by the emergence of new Irish types in the cities and farms. The long political struggle with the British was corrupting. The intelligent and active were either frustrated if they had office or power, or were sooner or later called collaborators. Independence has meant a class and technical revolution. Its effect on the land is obvious. Rural Ireland is much trimmer than it used to be. It is rare now to see the peasant cutting his own turf in the bog and going off, with his “private ass and cart,” to stack it by the wall of his cottage. There are now turf-cutting companies and the work is done by machine.

  In some places the primitive peasant life has been vastly changed. The culverts that used to break car springs, upset carts and jar the spine on the narrow Irish roads have gone. There are plantations of firs—to my personal regret—on the once totally bare Dublin mountains. The big estates are broken up and the “landless men”—the wildest of the old militant organizations, given to crime and arson—have their holdings. It is one of the unforeseen ironies arising out of the deep peasant mind—that the new owner will rent out the land to bigger operators who work it. The Irishman is a natural landlord. However poor, he likes rent.

  I stayed recently in a small country house built in the late eighteenth century and surrounded by a demesne of splendid trees and the usual long gray walls which give a fortified appearance to so much of the Irish landscape. It had been for generations in an Irish family that gave famous generals to the British army. The latest general could no longer afford it and had sold it to a working farmer who had done very well in the last thirty years. He had sold his original farm in Kilkenny to a West German speculator for an enormous sum. The new farm was no out-of-date old homestead. It was not a gentleman’s run-down estate. It had the latest equipment.

  In cities like Dublin, Cork, Limerick and Galway, the busy and active young men are practical and positive in mind. They have access to money, to real political power or influence. There used to be something sad about the young man who stayed in Ireland; he was often little more than a convenient servant of a neglected estate, often embittered, often phony and gradually going downhill. He had a dozen excuses for his lassitude. This is no longer true, especially not in the last five years. He can now run new industries. They are small, but it is a beginning. He can fight his own government. He has made successful war on the squalid Irish cabin. The airlines, motor transport, the hydroelectric installations have turned a romantically dead city like Limerick, where the hotels were heavy with Dickensian dirt and the streets dead and idle, into something with a crowded modern sparkle.

  I don’t say that some of this modernization is not superficially dramatic. As I was leaving a Limerick hotel last year, the hall porter was affronted to see the lift boy idling with a friend. “Get that lift moving,” he shouted. The startled boy—not long off the farm, I would guess—got into the lift. It shot up, shot down, shot up again—empty. But at least honor to Action and Efficiency had been done—albeit metaphysically, in the classic Irish tradition. It was a distinct advance over the time, forty years earlier, when in that same hotel—now unrecognizable—I saw the drunken waiter t
hrow a plate of bacon and eggs at a customer, after a night when “the boys in the hills” had been machine-gunning the town.

  At any rate, the modern Irishman is struggling with himself. The British are not there to blame; and there is—perhaps disturbingly—a new wave of foreign land speculators, hotelmen, industrialists and farmers coming in to buy up properties cheaply and display the cold, impatient efficiency of central Europe. A young Dublin acquaintance of mine talks about being “polluted” with work; he is an excellent executive but he feels almost literally polluted: it would be less corrupting to the soul to go fishing.

  His industry is by no means acceptable to many of the older generation. The efficient young man is dismissed by them as a conscienceless and selfish operator. In Dublin last year, a young Canadian Irishman was raging against the young Irish who “have sold their souls” to the British and the Germans. But when I listen to those who still dream of De Valera’s Ireland as a small peasant state using the Gaelic tongue and suppressing all the literature that disturbs the closed mind of “holy Ireland,” and when I hear the young dismissed as mean-spirited opportunists—I remember with relief that the Troubles are indeed over. The young businessman is keen not to appear too religious. He may remark—to incredulous ears—that he is “not very Catholic,” just as in the north he may say he is “not very Presbyterian.” They are beginning to hate the accusation that, now that they rule themselves, they have become a byword for provinciality and dull fanaticism. It is now the Irish who begin to teach the Irish the painful lesson that a country had better not persecute its intellectuals. A slow business: a librarian I know tells people to dare to ask for the book they want, and he guarantees to get it for them. That is a modest but very startling change.

  The difficulty is that the Irish mind has a strong authoritarian bent. Its religions are authoritarian; its tastes are soldierly; its intellect responds to abstract ideas. This militant authoritarianism comes out strongly in the banning of books. The power behind that is ecclesiastical. But as soldiers who live by orders are notorious for being “old soldiers” when it comes to getting round the regulations, so one is always able to buy the banned books—for example, Shaw, Tolstoy, the French Catholic novelists, Graham Greene, D.H. Lawrence—in Dublin under the counter. In other words, the Irish authoritarian will not compromise over the doctrine but he will usually, in practice, wink at circumvention. There is nothing even the most fanatical Irishman likes so much as a successful sin—except sexual sin—so long as you don’t interfere with the theology.