The theoretical self-image of the Anglo-Irish was aristocratic and gentlemanly, but in practice, as Edmund Burke sarcastically noted, they were a middle class masquerading as an aristocracy. Though Gold-smith, Swift, Sheridan and Berkeley were all recruited by Yeats in The Winding Stair (or his pantheon of ascendancy intellects, they were each of them impeccable representatives of the Irish Protestant middle class: hard-working men who lived by the pen and who felt, if anything, a very unYeatsian contempt for the idleness and mendacity of the rural ascendancy. Two centuries after Goldsmith's strictures, one of them, Louis MacNeice, remarked that (with the exception of Lady Gregory's and one or two others) the Big Houses contained no culture worth speaking of, "nothing but an obsolete bravado, an insidious bonhomie and a way with horses".26 They were brought down less by IRA firebombs than by a combination of fast women and slow horses – in other words, by a decay that came mainly from within. This was recognized by Synge when he wrote that they were neither much pitied nor much deserving of pity.27
Yet, even if Yeats's overt attempt to concoct an Anglo-Irish pantheon in The Winding Stair is almost wholly factitious, his covert appeal to Protestant themes and spiritual techniques in the book is exemplary. How, then, to explain his youthful interest in Roman Catholicism?
As in Latin America today, the Catholic Church was splitting into two factions, a popular church filled with native folk inflections of Catholic lore and an insurrectionary politics on one side, and, on the other, an ecclesiocracy which collaborated with repressive government, while seeking at a spiritual level a more rationalized theology. When still a young writer, Yeats had seen in such Protestantization of rural life only a form of creeping Anglicization.
As he grew older, Yeats's view of Protestantism changed greatly. He became far more positive in his treatment of it, though, in truth, elements of that change are present as early as 1899 in "The Valley of the Black Pig". This poem links the fundamentalist's calamitarian idea of apocalypse with the end of empire:
The dews drop slowly and dreams gather unknown spears
Suddenly hurtle before my dream-awakened eyes,
And men the clash of fallen horsemen and the cries
Of unknown perishing armies bent about my ears.
We who still labour by the cromlech on the shore,
The grey cairn on the hill, when day sinks drowned in dew,
Being weary of the world's empires, bow down to you,
Master of the still stars and of the flaming door.28
Years later, in "The Cold Heaven", he evokes the Lutheran image of a naked soul under "the injustice of the skies for punishment".29 Protestant biblical phrasing would increasingly inform his celebration of writers like Synge, whose art allowed people to see "as we were Adam, and this the first morning".30 The terms in which he cast Synge's art in "J. M. Synge and the Ireland of His Time" were those of the self-election of a proud, Protestant soul:
... To speak of one's emotions without fear or moral ambition, to come out from under the shadow of other men's minds, to forget their needs, to be utterly oneself, that is all the Muses care for... All art is the disengaging of the soul from place and history, its suspension in a beautiful or terrible light to await the Judgement, though it must be, seeing that all its days were a Last Day, judged already.31
Synge's Ireland, like the biblical Israel, was a land at once very old and strikingly new. Its Hiberno-English was a "language as much alive as if it were new come out of Eden"32 and so ancient too that it befitted a land verging on some apocalypse.
From the writings of Shaw, Yeats learned that the ideal of self-election was intimately linked to the crusade for Irish self-determination; and, in the Free State as one of its first senators, Yeats spoke up repeatedly for the civil rights and values of the Protestant community. In each case, Yeats sided with the underdog, initially with the Catholic peasantry in an English-occupied Ireland, and later with the minority in a new state already enacting legislation to outlaw liberties of the individual conscience. Like his father before him, Yeats continued to believe in a fusion of the two island traditions, but he found this quite consistent with the principle that both sides could "glory in our difference" at a personal level. Ordinary people could and should pay full respect to their inherited traditions, while offering tender care also to rival codes; it was up to the "saving remnant" of the nations intellectual leaders to exemplify in their writings and in their lives that fusion of values which should be enshrined in the states eventual constitution.
This would seem to be the central, if unexpressed, thesis which lies behind the poetry in The Winding Stair and the poetic thinking of A Vision. Through the 1920s and early 1930s, Yeats attempted to dissolve the antinomies of his thought with a Third or Middle Way. The major task facing his newly-independent nation was the reconciliation of disparate, once warring, factions, and the assignment of a new, expanded meaning to the phrase "Anglo-Irish". In similar fashion, Yeats tried to solve the gap in modern democracies between the One and the Many by the redeeming remnant of the Few; and, in personal psychology, to reconcile male and female in the ideal of androgyny. The poems of The Winding Stair show a writer resolving the clash of action and contemplation by the middle term of art. Of nothing was this search for a third term of synthesis more notable than of Yeats's view of the two major religious traditions of the island. Even the primary gyre in A Vision might loosely be termed Protestant, in its sponsorship of democratic, rational, Anglicized thought, as against the antithetical or Catholic gyre, which is hierarchical, aesthetic, visionary and subjective. The underlying desire of the book, of course, is to render those labels meaningless by reaching that point at which each gyre is interpenetrated by its own opposite; and so to write a kind of constitution for the infant state.
Yeats's project, in short, was to Catholicize the all-too-Protestant Ireland of his youth, and then to Protestantize the all-too-Catholic Ireland of his age. Perhaps inevitably, this programme was of limited use to those northern poets of Protestant heritage who succeeded him. W. R. Rodgers, a clergyman-turned-bohemian, was an exception to that rule, however. He was inspired not only by Yeats's millennarian vision of things, but also by his view of poetry as something born out of a man's struggle against himself. He also emulated the pursuit of erotic excitement in the later poems: but there was sometimes an excessive swagger about the gesture, as there was a kind of forced exuberance about the wordplay and the punning. Rodgers was working through a long-delayed reaction against the puritanism of a Presbyterian home in which mirrors and alcohol were banned and in which "Sunday dinner was cooked on Saturday night".33 Small wonder that his verses became tipsy when he voiced his almost illicit celebration of the idea of "Ireland":
O these lakes and all gulls that live in them,
These acres and all legs that walk on them,
These tall winds and all wings that cling to them,
Are part and parcel of me, bit and bundle,
Thumb and thimble.34
By contrast, John Hewitt's Methodist background was implicit in the caution with which he embraced the same notion:
This is my home and country. Later on
perhaps I'll find this nation is my own.35
Hewitt's lines are, accordingly, sober, straight and neat, his virtues those of the Roman legionary doing his duty to reclaim the wild soil of "The Colony". Though he is British as well as Irish, he knows that his people may have to come down on the side of one or the other term:
we would be strangers in the Capitol;
this is our country also, no-where else;
and we shall not be outcast in the world.36
But, coming from the north where he had many brushes with the intransigence of the unionist establishment, he felt it enough to be the critic of his own people's rigidity, to be the dissident among dissenters. Not for him the dazzling dialectics of a Yeats, forever crossing and recrossing the sectarian divide.
There were those on both sides of the religious
divide who knew what Yeats's project implied and did not like it one bit. The leading philosopher at Trinity College, A. A. Luce – who was a tutor to the young Samuel Beckett – issued dire warnings that if the Irish language were to be made a compulsory study for Protestants in schools, within a century half the Protestants of Ireland would have turned Catholic.37 If the corollary of Luce's First Law is that the systematic study of Swift, Berkeley and Goldsmith would in time make many Catholics turn Protestant, then that did not come to pass either! Professor Luce, though a gifted scholar, proved somewhat lacking in prophetic power. Nor was this his only mistaken prediction. The same man, in his report on his tutee Samuel Beckett at the end of his second college year, pronounced that the undergraduates prospects were "quite dismal".38
Twenty-Six
Religious Writing: Beckett and Others
Three hundred years from now, Beckett will be remembered more for his prose than his plays, and not only because he wrote some of the most beautiful prose of the twentieth century but also because he was in such texts a supremely religious artist. In an Ireland whose institutional churches had for centuries policed spirituality, he confronted some of the great themes of the puritan conscience: work, effort, reward, anxious self-scrutiny, the need for self-responsibility, and the distrust of artifice and even of art. His work seems like an answer to Shaw's prayer for a writer who would redefine Protestantism. Beckett always wrote out of the conviction that theology was too important to be left to theologians.
His pilgrims progress – which might better be called a via dolorosa – begins with the story "Dante and the Lobster", a meditation on the problem of pain. The informing idea is that although humans may be improved by suffering, which they can locate in a wider pattern of moral significance, a lobster boiled while "lepping fresh" can hardly be so improved. Luther's thoughts on a merciful god are replicated and the possibility of a piety which nonetheless has room for pity is mooted. Still, doubts nag. "It's a quick death", concludes the narrator with jesting desperation, only to be undercut by a more subversive and authoritative voice: "It is not".1
With the sudden death of his own father – a man seemingly in the prime of a successful life as a quantity-surveyor – Beckett had to confront the meaning of human suffering even more starkly in the mid-1930s. Most of his finest poems date from this period. They have sometimes been misread as simple love-lyrics, when they are in fact elegies mourning a man snatched from his family.2 The arbitrary, undeserved nature of suffering is something on which Beckett meditates in all his writings: and this becomes the attempt to scrutinize and fathom the mind of a God who does not feel obliged to make any clarifying appearances of explanations. "Do you believe in the life to come?" asks a character in Endgame, only to be told "Mine was always that".3 (This joke reappeared on a wall in Ballymurphy during the current Northern Irish war as "is there a life before death?") Or consider the following exchange between the tramps in Waiting for Godot:
Vladimir: You're not going to compare yourself to Christ!
Estragon: All my life I've compared myself to him.
Vladimir: But where he lived it was warm, it was dry!
Estragon: Yes. And they crucified quick.4
Kenneth Tynan once quipped that Beckett had a very Irish grudge against God, which the merely godless would never feel – a line which may indeed derive from the famous moment in Endgame when Hamm and Clov curse their creator: "The bastard! He doesn't exist!"5
If the godhead must assume a callous and indifferent front, so that faith may be a meritorious leap in the dark, then Beckett takes on some of these attributes as a creator. For one thing, his narratives often seem clinically unconcerned with the sufferings which they evoke, but this cruelty – like that of the theologians' god – is assumed, so that the reader may supply the missing flood of tenderness and emotion. The narrative is cruel only to be kind: and the mask of callousness is worn only as a test. For Beckett, as for the Old Testament God, every act of creation is a drastic exercise in self-limitation, a deliberate courting of failure. Since God was a perfect being, the creation of a flawed universe could only be a sacrifice of this perfection: and, in an equivalent way, for Beckett every created text is "a stain upon the silence", a silence which might have been the more admirable without it. In the familiar romantic equation of artist with godhead, Beckett discovered a most unfamiliar notion of art as self-impoverishment.
In his first collection of stories More Pricks Than Kicks, the protagonist Belacqua Shuah aspires to nothingness, quite literally: "What I am on the lookout for is nowhere, so far as I can see".6 He wishes to live his life in a "Beethoven pause". Named after a character in Dante who lazily deferred his repentance until the last possible moment, and was therefore condemned to wait at the foot of Mount Purgatory enduring the same span of time in waiting as he had once passed in indolence, he embraces this idleness not as a punishment but as a liberation. He is "a dirty low-down Low Church Protestant high-brow"7 in flight from the world of work, like the young Beckett who resigned his lectureship in French at Trinity College and confessed to bemused friends that he preferred to lie on his back and fart and think about Dante. So Belacqua chooses to stay in bed, curled up in the foetal position adopted by his Danteesque model.
Yet Belacqua's declaration of war upon the work ethic is couched in decidedly Protestant terms, as the inevitable outcome of his desire for self-sufficiency in the world of pure mind. "The mind at last its own asylum" he muses longingly, in a parody of the famous passage in the great Protestant epic of Milton:
A mind not to be chang'd by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.8
(That Satan should have spoken these deathless lines merely shows that Milton's devil is a Protestant.) Yet Belacqua fails to achieve this self-responsibility, for "his anxiety to explain himself constituted a breakdown in the self-sufficiency which he never wearied of arrogating to himself".9 He fondly imagines himself an indolent Bohemian, but at heart he is a puritan, seeking to replace the smooth Catholic rituals of the aesthetic adventure with a more literal-minded low-church honesty. He is, in fact, an anti-Bohemian, and so the narrative deliberately trips over itself, with jagged phraseology, intrusive footnotes, and authorial interruptions. That awkward style embodies a classic puritan theme: that only by our sufferings do we achieve any importance or convince ourselves that we exist. So Belacqua crawls cruciform along the ground beside Trinity College, strangely enjoying the pain of the rain beating against his exposed body, just as he likes to squeeze a boil on the back of his neck, because the ensuing pain is a "guarantee of identity".
For Beckett's early heroes (if that is the word), the most prolonged crucifixion of all is the necessity to earn a living by the sweat of their brows. They may be in reaction against the indolent, elegant nineties, but not entirely. So the novel Murphy was well described as a compound of Sodom and Begorrah. There is indeed a Wildean touch about many of its one-liners: "You saved my life. Now palliate it".10 To Murphy the raising of Lazarus "seemed perhaps the one occasion on which the Messiah had overstepped the mark"11; and this fin-de-siècle languor is a pervasive element of Murphy's accidie.
An even deeper explanation of his indolence lies in his conviction that everyday work would prevent him from coming alive in his mind. His girlfriend Celia begins to understand that "a merely indolent man would not be so affected by the prospect of employment", that at the root of Murphy's refusal of the shallow Protestant ethic is a deeply puritan desire to unlock and occupy his own mind. This tragic conflict, also of concern to Yeats, will lead the later Beckett to create a near-monastic cellular set of structures for the protagonists of the trilogy and of the subsequent prose; but in Murphy, Celia persists for a time in insisting on a virtue that, far from being cloistered, is active in the world. Eventually, however, even she "cannot go where livings are made without feeling they were being made away".12 So she stops pacing her beat
as a prostitute in the market, "where the frenzied justification of life as an end to means threw light on Murphy's prediction, that livelihood would destroy life's goods".13 Murphy, of course, has come to see the limits of a work ethic, which is indifferent to means and obsessed with ends.
Faced with this crisis Murphy – like Beckett – does not turn to Roman Catholicism, but to the religions of the east. In this respect, Beckett was not only following the example of George Russell and W. B. Yeats; he was also anticipating the movements of the 1960s which saw many "turn east". The theologian Harvey Cox has pointed out that these east-turners tended to come from similar backgrounds: they were usually white, upper-middle-class intellectuals, trained in Protestant spirituality, now grown increasingly dissatisfied with its over-rationalization.14 Murphy certainly conforms to the prototype: he has a swami in Berwick Market cast his horoscope, which urges him to avoid exhaustion by speech, since silence is his fourth-highest attribute. A quietist to the last, he rejects the die-fighting ethic and speaks only when spoken to, and not always even then. His meal is "vitiated by no base thoughts of nutrition",15 being more in the nature of a Zen tea-ceremony, whereby the mind can contemplate the permutation of five simple biscuits laid out. Most of all, whenever Murphy sinks into the unconscious and then returns, the narrative makes clear that he has not so much "come to" as "from". In other words, his birthmark truly is his "death-mark", since it records the precise moment when he lost his immortality in a merely corporeal form. Confronted with this loss, Murphy can only invent a set of koans and desperate uninterpretable puns, in the hope that when exhaustion supervenes, then wisdom will supervene too.
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