Inventing Ireland

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by Declan Kiberd


  The year 1932 marked one thousand five hundred years of Christianity in Ireland (at least if you were taught, as most were, that St. Patrick had come in 432). A large Eucharistic Congress was held by the Catholic Church in the Phoenix Park, and both major party leaders, de Valera and Cosgrave, were permitted the honour of bearing the papal legate's canopy. As leader of Cumann na nGaedheal, Cosgrave had always submitted legislation with moral content for approval to bishops as a prelude to laying it before the Dáil; but de Valera, after the formal excommunication of republican troops by Catholic bishops in 1922 and despite his own extraordinary personal piety, had been rather slower to come onside. When he did, however, he came with a vengeance.

  His 1937 Constitution was vetted by senior Catholic clergy before being unveiled to the public. Though Collins was now a part of history, for de Valera politics often seemed no more than the prosecution of their personal feud by other means. In theory, de Valera's Constitution was designed to replace that which had been framed by his rival under duress in the aftermath of the Treaty. So the new document declared Ireland "a sovereign, independent, democratic state" in the abstract: that mystical republic for which so many had longed. But there was nothing very republican about the "special position" accorded to the Catholic Church in Ireland as "the guardian of the Faith professed by the great majority of its citizens".4 If northern unionists were offering a Protestant parliament to a Protestant people, ninety miles down a poorly-surfaced interconnecting road Mr. de Valera was offering a Catholic people a theocratic state, whose Constitution began with the preamble "In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity ..." Despite all this, the Protestant Douglas Hyde found no difficulty in accepting a unanimous nomination to become president and guarantor of a Constitution which many felt was less than generous to his co-religionists. Collins's 1922 model had sedulously avoided any special reference to the Catholic Church and had provided for a Senate chamber (Seanad) to represent minority interests, one of the government nominees being W. B. Yeats.

  Though Yeats (like other modern writers) was to flirt with fascism in the foolish conviction that life for artists might be better under cultured despots, his fundamental political instincts remained those of a liberal republican.5 He opposed the ban on divorce in 1925, arguing that "the price you pay for an indissoluble marriage is a public opinion that will tolerate cynical and illegal relations between the sexes".6 He applied similar logic in arguing that to refuse married women the right to remain in the civil service would be to rob it of many gifted women and to encourage a more contemptuous attitude to the marriage vow.

  On the censorship of art, he was never less than scathing. The government had defined the word "indecent" as meaning (among other things) "calculated to excite sexual passion".7 Such a definition, while merely ridiculous to a man of Utters, constituted a sacrilege to a Thomist. Whereas Plato had separated soul and body, St. Thomas had rightly laid down that on the contrary the soul is wholly present in the body and all its parts. This being so, it was unChristian as well as unkind to condemn sexual passion, a return to the dark ages when Platonic thought dominated the painters of Europe, who depicted Christ with a head of pitless intellect and a pinched flat-chested Virgin holding a stiff doll-like child. Such an art arose from a contempt for the God-given body, and therefore for the Creator who had assumed human form. Yet, within fifty years of the death of Thomas Aquinas, that art had been transformed to a celebration of the body so liberal that nobody complained when Raphael chose his mistress as a model for the Virgin – "and represented her", said Yeats, "with all the patience of his sexual passion as an entirely voluptuous body".8 It was for similar reasons that Yeats praised Aubrey Beardsley for painting St. Rose of Lima ascending into heaven on the bosom of the Madonna, her face enraptured with love, but (he coyly added) "with that form of it which is least associated with sanctity".9

  As the protege's of the Irish system of education sought to legislate such art out of existence, it was no wonder that Yeats could complain that Catholic schools tended to destroy the great mysteries, symbologies and mythologies which the Catholic faith, more than most other versions of Christianity, can give. He never tired of reminding Irish readers that God had taken on the indignity of bodily human form. When the Christian Brothers publicly burned a magazine containing the beautiful "Cherry Tree Carol" – in which the infant Jesus speaks from his mother's womb – Yeats mischievously accused them of not really believing in the Incarnation: "They think they believe in it, but they do not, and its sudden presentation fills them with fear, and to hide that horror they turn on the poem".10 For his own part, Yeats never lost his humour. During one debate, he informed his fellow-senators that the three monuments in Dublin's main thoroughfare were all encouraging: the epic lecher Daniel O'Connell, Admiral Nelson (whom Joyce had dubbed "the one-handled adulterer"), and finally Parnell, the Galahad in extremis, proclaiming that no man had the right to set the boundary to the march of a nation and pointing towards the nearest maternity hospital.

  However, by the time that Éamon de Valera came to frame his 1937 Constitution, Yeats was in poor health, the leading artists were either in exile or on the margins of Irish society, and the opposition to it was spearheaded by a group of remarkable women, many of them veterans of the old republican movement. Having caught a whiff of freedom in the revolutionary decades, they were not now willing to become second-class citizens for any man, even one widely believed by his followers to possess semi-divine attributes. They deeply resented a constitution which told them that their sole place was in the home.

  The problem for these radical women lay deep in the psyche of Irish nationalism. The aisling poets of the eighteenth century had always imagined woman not as an autonomous person but as a site of contest: the wilting spéirbhean or skywoman lay back and languished until deliverance came from abroad in the person of a gallant national saviour. In vain did feminists point out that her original problems were due to a similar sort of English gallant: men were the smiters in this monodrama, women the smitten. Even the age-old notion of the land as female and the ruler as her lawful bridegroom conspired in the creation of this myth; and twentieth-century British propaganda posters, depicting Hibernia as a beautiful maiden torn between the demands of thuggish republicans and solid Saxons, did nothing to dispel it.11 There were dozens of masterful women in the national movement who had challenged these stereotypes, in the home and outside it, providing leadership, ideas, art and military force: but whatever chance they might have had of forging a state which truly reflected their interests was lost.

  There were many who argued that the chances of such liberation had never been great. In the years leading up to the Easter Rising Francis Sheehy-Skeffington – who became well-known as a socialist and pacifist – had developed a comprehensive critique of nationalist hypermasculinity. His letter to Thomas MacDonagh praised the rebels' ideals, but denied that the war which they proposed to wage could ever be "manly". The questions which he put were terse: why were arms so glorified! will not those who rejoice in barbarous warfare inevitably come to control such an organization? why were women not more centrally involved? "When you have found and clearly expressed the reason", he told MacDonagh, "you will be close to the reactionary element in the movement itself".12 Skeffington, who was murdered by a British officer in the course of his attempts to prevent looting during the uprising became thereafter an inspirational figure for nonviolent Irish republicanism: but the misogynistic streak which he had detected in the national movement was not so easily purged. Despite the involvement of many strong-minded women – such as Maud Gonne, Constance Markievicz, Louise Gavan Duffy and, indeed, Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington – the Irish political movement remained largely a men's club.

  Anglo-Ireland watched all these developments with a mixture of fascination and horror, but it did not go untouched by them. Writers such as Elizabeth Bowen maintained the tradition of Somerville and Ross, leaving a priceless artistic account of events as viewed through Big House windo
ws. Among the women of the Catholic middle classes, Kate O'Brien and Mary Lavin faithfully recorded the small triumphs and quiet desperations of lives which might otherwise have gone completely unremembered and unremarked.

  Twenty

  Elizabeth Bowen – The Dandy in Revolt

  During the Easter Rebellion of 1916, while gunfire raked across St. Stephen's Green as Countess Markievicz and her force engaged the British army, afternoon tea was served at the usual time in the lounge of the Shelbourne Hotel. We know this because Elizabeth Bowen records it in her elegant history of that ascendancy institution. She was well aware from personal experience of the uses of such nonchalance: to her, polite behaviour was something which "does really help to jack up morale".1 When the Rising broke out, she was away at school in England. News of it was her first indication that something like a national revival had been afoot. Like many of the heroines of her books, she found herself away from the scene of the action when something decisive was happening: the national revival had been judged far too inconsequential a thing for her own Anglo-Irish family to form any clear opinion of it. "Who would ever have thought the Irish would turn out so disloyal?"2 might well be taken as typical of their reaction.

  The Rising was, among other things, a systematic attempt to restore Dublin's metropolitan status, lost since the Act of Union: the Anglo-Irish gentry were by 1916 hopeless provincials, if by provincial one means to indicate people who have no sense of their own presence. Their world, as depicted by Bowen, is one whose members are constantly isolated from the wider society around them by the great walls encircling their demesnes: major events unfold on the other side of those walls, events which the aristocrats within make a point of not noticing. Unlike Edith Somerville, who studied the Irish language and kept abreast of the progress of the Gaelic League, the occupants of Bowen's Court in County Cork built their lives on "the negation of mystical Ireland".3 Her ancestors, she freely conceded, had driven Gaelic culture "underground, with its ceaseless poetry of lament";4 now, though a revival was in full swing, she showed no great curiosity about it. This was a mark of baffled incomprehension rather than ill-will: in her early years, she had been so sheltered that she had no idea that Protestants did not make up the majority religion in Ireland. An only child, she was shunted between Ireland and England, away from an ailing father and into the care of a mother who died suddenly when Elizabeth was only thirteen. If she grew up "farouche, haughty, quite ignorant of the outside world", the sort of self-invention in such a condition was perfectly typical of her class:

  It is possible that Anglo-Irish people, like only children, do not know how much they miss. Their existences, like those of only children, are singular, independent, secretive.5

  The Anglo-Irish curbed their feeling, because their prosperity was erected on "a situation that shows an inherent wrong", the expropriation of the native Irish. Most relationships with the natives could only have issued in unpleasant accusation: it was better, therefore, to confine them to a few loyal cooks and retainers. For the rest, "the new ascendancy lacked feeling, in fact feeling would have been fatal to it". No wonder that Elizabeth Bowen became an expert analyst of the death of the heart. She saw hers as a class which, unlike its English counterpart, achieved its position through injustice – "the structure of the great Anglo-Irish society was raised over a country in martyrdom"6 – and subsequently failed to justify its privilege by service. It enjoyed power without taking responsibility for the wider countryside over which it ruled: instead, it simply pulled up the drawbridge. That this suited the more lethargic and unambitious commoners as well as overlords was among the least of its recommendations:

  The Irish landowner, partly from laziness, but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round . . . The greater part of them being Catholics, and he in most cases a Protestant, they are kept from him by the barrier of a different faith . . . (and) a good-mannered, faintly cynical tolerance, largely founded on classes letting each other alone.7

  This stand-off may have been less pleasant for both parties than she implies. The Last September, set in Cork during the War of Independence, tells of a big house whose younger members yearn for some intrusion from the world of actual rebels; and a former insurgent himself, Seán Ó Faoláin, in reading the book could not help wishing for one of a different kind, a truly contrapuntal narrative about a Danielstown House "that was at least aware of the Ireland outside . . . that, perhaps, regretted the division enough to admit it was there".8 Protesting against the elegant self-enclosure of the novel, he asked for Irish books which were not water-tight compartments: Gogol in Dead Souls had linked divided worlds, and Chekhov had many stories about doctors who climbed walls. Bowen knew exactly what he meant, remarking in a subsequent interview in The Bell that when the Great Irish Novel would finally be written "I fancy you'll find that it has been written by a Protestant who understands Catholicism and who, very probably, has made a mixed marriage".9 For her own part, it was scarcely her fault that she had found such knowledge unavailable, encountering in her earlier years "an almost sexual shyness on the subject of Roman Catholics".

  It might be added that what gives The Last September much of its bittersweet poignancy is the innocence of the Anglo-Irish as they go to meet their doom:

  If Ireland did not accept them, they did not know it – and it is in that unawareness of final rejection, unawareness of being looked at from some secretive, opposed life, that the Anglo-Irish naive dignity and, even, tragedy, seem to me to stand. Themselves, they felt Irish and acted as Irishmen.10

  This poignancy rises to a genuinely tragic resonance in the fact that, having blocked off feeling, these people now seem as admirably unaware of their own suffering as they once were so scandalously unaware of the pain which they inflicted on the dispossessed. A similar imperviousness, if not to feeling then at least to its overt expression, was noted in Elizabeth Bowen by friends and contemporaries. Like others of her kind, she lived at a certain remove from her own emotions, some part of her always held in reserve and able to monitor an experience, even as she submitted to it, with a cold, clinical precision. This observant detachment had long been a feature of Anglo-Irish writing, which achieved an almost anthropological status, seeking to view man as if he were a foreign, even non-human, witness of himself: but, in the writings of Bowen, existence takes on "the trance-like quality of a spectacle",11 not only for the author who anatomizes it but for those caught up in it as well.

  The English planters who had occupied Ireland were, in a sense, the first Provisionals, by no means certain of their tenure in a land where they would always be outnumbered by those whom they had extirpated. They knocked down the woods which had sheltered recalcitrant rebels, and huckstered off the leavings at sixpence a tree. If their grander houses seemed built for eternity, that was largely to allay the fear that they might be going home on the next boat: the exterior show of spaciousness and command was intended to mask an inner uncertainty. All they had to protect themselves against the avenging masses was an attitude, an assumed style. Elizabeth Bowen wrote that the big house of rural Ireland was "like Flaubert's ideal book, about nothing",12 something which constructed itself around a lack, sustaining itself by the inner force of its style. This style, like the Yeatsian antiself, represented an ideal of courtly behaviour and sprezzatura to which the new ascendancy might aspire: it helped the founders of the line cope with the thought that their tenure might only be provisional, and it enabled the final descendants to maintain a semblance of defiant decorum long after the tradition had started to collapse. The training of the Anglo-Irish turned out to be an arduous preparation for the moment when style was all that they had left... for those takers of the toast and tea at the Shelbourne Hotel. The manner remained intact long after the men and women themselves had snapped.

  For Bowen herself, all of this made a perfect sense in terms of her art. If the Anglo-Irish were a hyphenated people, forever English in Ireland, forever Irish in E
ngland, then she knew that better than most. At school in England, she played up her wild Irish side, yet she also tried to make herself more English than the English by her perfect decorum and style. Her truest sense of herself may have come when she was in motion, crossing from one country to another, in the manner of her heroine Lois in The Last September:

  She shut her eyes and tried – as sometimes when she was seasick, locked in misery between Holyhead and Kingstown – to be enclosed in a nonentity, in some ideal no-place, perfect and clear as a bubble.13

  There is a real desperation here, for the bubble which she creates is grimly like the self-enclosed estate at Danielstown: and if you start out building a Utopia, you may indeed end up nowhere.

  Bowen's own style, mannered but functional, was formed (like that of the big house) as a mode in which a desperate soul sought an assured sense of identity: she turned to art for a stability which was unobtainable in the world. That style prefigured an ideal version of herself which she might yet live up to. It had the additional advantage of offering the marooned daughter an attitude with which to address a society: "My writing, I am prepared to think, may be a substitute for something I have been born without – a so-called normal relation to society. My books are my relation to society".14 Nothing made full sense to her that was not in print. She wrote not so much to record as to invent a self, a self which lived on the hyphen between "Anglo" and "Irish". And she explored that moment when the self peeps out of its cocoon in The Last September, the novel for which she always confessed a special feeling of tenderness.

 

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