The literary implications of all this are not far to seek, and have in fact already been considered. Fintan O'Toole has shown how the forms of drama inherited by Sean O'Casey from Abbey playwrights, while fitted admirably to describe a rural community, were quite inadequate to deal with the layers of urban life.23 Every time O'Casey's characters try to seize the streets as their own, they are driven back to tenements which, with their multiple families in one building, operate like a rural community. O'Casey was doomed to describe the urban in constricting ruralist forms, perhaps because Dublin was intent on so conceiving of itself. The urbanized Synge-song of his characters appealed not to inner-city Dubliners themselves, but to the new élite of civil servants, town-planners, and teachers, living in the city's plushier outer ring. These people sentimentalized O'Casey's lovable proletarians who were, in fact, rapidly becoming the most spectacular victims of the new state policies.
As if in defiance, each of O'Casey's plays moves to a moment when a previously peripheral character becomes central, just as his location of the main action in the tenements is a desperate attempt to centralize communities deemed peripheral in the nationalist mythology. The city itself, with its rotting slums at the centre and its salubrious suburbs housing a rural-educated, ruling élite, seemed, even in physical terms, a periphery-dominated centre. The warders of its main jail spoke mostly in country accents, but the inmates seemed disproportionately drawn from the local hinterland. So, also, at the unemployment exchanges, the civil servants who distributed the benefit-money were often of rural origin, while the chronic unemployed were mainly Dubliners.
Few enough of those unemployed ever crossed the threshold of the Abbey Theatre which, located in the heart of Dublin's north inner city, continued all too often to play the rural classics for tourists and (increasingly) for the natives. The Abbey for long periods functioned more as an artistic museum than as an experimental or a peoples theatre. On radio and in print media, the short story continued to enjoy a vogue as the quintessential Irish genre, purveyed with commercial success in foreign outlets such as The New Yorker by artists willing enough to play up local colour for an international readership. It is only fair to add, however, that the fixation on the short story may be discerned not far below the surface of such modernist masterpieces as Ulysses, At Swim-Two-Birds and Beckett's trilogy as well. Each of these is a thinly-disguised collection of short stories fretted into a form suggestive of the experimental novel. Nor should this seem surprising, given that the short story is the form which renders the lives of the marginal and the isolated, whereas the traditional novel tends to feature the urbane and complex relationships of a fully "made", calibrated society.
As a mainly ruralist genre, however, the Irish short story was as ill-suited as the traditional Abbey play to render the complex gradations of city life. The young James Joyce tried as best he could to press it into the service of that life, on the invitation of the editor of The Irish Homestead for "something simple, rural?, live-making? pathos? which would not shock its readers".24 Sensing that Joyce might be chagrined to see his name alongside the week's cattle prices, he suggested that he use a pseudonym. Joyce despised "The Pig's Paper", as he called it, but pocketed the sovereign in payment and signed "The Sisters" Stephen Daedalus, thus giving birth to that famous nom-de-plume and fictive character.25 Yet, on finishing Dubliners he felt frustrated by a book which seemed to want to be a novel, but couldn't quite move itself into that category.
Each character in the stories seems a sort of periphery-dominated centre him- or herself, a super-sensitive soul on whom other persons and forces wreak a terrible impact. In "The Sisters", for example, a boy is frightened that the noise he makes eating crackers may disturb the repose of others; and in "The Dead", Gabriel Conroy is more aware of how he appears to others than of how he is to himself. To most of the figures in these stories, power and authority lie "elsewhere". In the writings of a French artist such as Balzac, the movement towards selfhood is charted, as it were, by a movement from the provinces to the metropolis, that city of Paris which evokes notions glittering with human possibility. The citizen of a meritocracy can rise through the classes, learning as he goes, until finally he leans out over the rooftops of Paris and says: "Here I am at last at the centre of things, arrived". In the colonial Ireland of Joyce, however, things are not so cut and dried: the capital is, in fact, the centre of paralysis and the only freedom is the freedom to move out, a motion that is endlessly thwarted, just as the attempts by Joyce's introspective characters to transcend interior monologue in acts of real communication with others are often stymied.
The sanctification of rural Ireland as real Ireland by those who actually abandoned it to live in Dublin as members of the ruling élites led to some interesting cultural effects. A pervasive theme in the literature of the mid-century was the question: "can I live in my own place?" The answer was usually "no" and for a variety of reasons: the plum jobs were generally in Dublin, while rural communities seemed to be in terminal economic decline. Independence brought its attendant paradoxes: although the Irish were now, at least in theory, possessed of cultural freedom, in practice they were still prisoners of the iron laws of economics. Those who were not forced to migrate to Britain or North America found, in many cases, that they had to go to Dublin. The result was a capital city which, in classic post-colonial mode, swelled vastly beyond its natural capacity, even as the rural towns seemed, in many cases, to get smaller and smaller. This development was as bad for Dublin and its citizens as it was for the communities of the rural towns. While many Dubliners complained of having to live a sort of underground life in a city which seemed to be under semipermanent occupation by outside forces, people in rural areas felt oppressed and ignored by the burgeoning bureaucracy in the distant capital. The old British policy of ruling the masses from the major colonial seaport remained a central feature of the national life. There was no attempt to reimagine Ireland along decentralized lines: although some idealistic souls talked occasionally of the need to relocate government departments and semi-state offices in regional cities and towns, civil servants proved often resistant to the few changes actually proposed. As Dublin and its hinterland began to hold one million people, one in every three citizens, a common joke was that the entire island would tip over as a result of the imbalance into the Irish Sea.
Those who left the land grew ever more sentimental about the world which they had lost, and the effects of their pastoralism could be discerned in state policy. The brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers who remained on the land were spared heavy taxation, supported by government subvention, and some of them would eventually enjoy an affluence that was in excess of that known by most of the inhabitants of Dublin. With that affluence came the motor-car, the television set, the golf club and the deep-freeze: in other words, rural Ireland slowly acquired many of the trappings of a sophisticated urban lifestyle, even as the capital continued for a long time to be conditioned by the values carried into it by new arrivals from the countryside. When the strain of all this first began to show, it was in the institutions of the capital. Charged with the task of representing "the nation" rather than its own city hinterland, the National Theatre at the Abbey became somewhat moribund, failing to nurture new writing talent from Dublin or to function as a civic theatre. When revitalization came, it would come from the provinces, in the shape of writers like Brian Friel of Donegal or Tom Murphy of Galway, and of actors from the regional companies which seemed to thrive in proportion to the waning of the Abbey. It was as if the old nationalist narrative was beginning to break down, and "Ireland" once again became a problematic notion, as its people renewed their interest in its constituent parts. The novelist John McGahern was only slightly exaggerating when he described it as an island containing thirty-two independent republics.26
Twenty-Eight
Flann O'Brien, Myles, and The Poor Mouth
An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth, 1941) was the only book which Brian O'Nolan, alias Flan
n O'Brien, alias Myles na gCopaleen, wrote in his native language. Why only one, and this in particular? The answer may lie in the identity of the persona to whom the narrative was entrusted, Myles na gCopaleen.
Myles had been the comic hero of Dion Boucicault's play The Colleen Bawn (1860). Blundering but intermittently wily, he shot a murderer and accidentally saved the heroine's life. Liar, convict, horse-thief and poteen-distiller, he was the living antithesis of Victorian respectability, and so was hugely successful on the stage, offering audiences "a vicarious release from the solemn and righteous standards by which they tried to live".1 At the same time as English onlookers continued to shower affection on this brainless but loyal fictional character (whose name means Myles of the Ponies), the real Irish were suffering famine at home and economic exploitation in the ghettos of British cities and towns. All too often, competition for work led to riots between Irish and English labourers; and the newspapers were filled with cartoons of the sinister, simianized Fenian agitator. When Irish bombs began to bedevil the domestic peace of England, and when Darwin challenged its spiritual composure, caricaturists had little compunction in depicting the Irish as monkeys or gorillas. Myles was simply the reverse-side of this coin – a victim of Victorian sentimentality, as his real-life counterpart was a target of Victorian bile. A stage-Irish buffoon, blundering his way through bulls and malapropisms in the foreignness of the English language, he was denied even the dignity of the sufferings of his flesh-and-blood cousin.
The strategy of An Béal Bocht now becomes clear. In the character of Myles na gCopaleen, O'Nolan rescues the buffoon from the Victorian stage and makes him articulate. The feckless clown who had once stuttered in broken English is now permitted to speak in his native language, and so he is shown not as the English wish to visualize him, but as he sees himself. The eclipsing "g", which had been omitted from the final word of his name in The Colleen Bourn, is now restored, so Myles na Coppaleen may resume the fuller status of Myles na gCopaleen. That jocular and exaggerated language, which was once the object of the dramatist's satire, has now become a method, by which other more fitting targets are attacked. Among the new targets are Irishmen (such as Boucicault) who abjectly conform to English stereotypes of the neighbouring island. Hence the mockery of Boucicault's fabricated brogue, of words like "divarsions" and "advintures", which may mean something to amused English onlookers, but have to be pedantically explained to bemused Irish people in footnotes (as scléip and eachtraí ), since the Irish may be encountering them for the first time.
Myles, therefore, attacks more recent writers who have replaced the stage Irishman with a stage Gael, or, as he dubbed them in a letter to Sean O'Casey, "the Gaelic morons here with their bicycle clips and handball medals".2 In depicting the realities of poverty in the west of Ireland, An Béal Bocht is not only a send-up of the scenic landscape, Gothic ruins and romantic music of Boucicault's glamorized countryside; it is, even more urgently, an attack on the Dublin revivalists of the twentieth century, who could idealize the saintly simplicity of western life, only by ignoring the awful poverty on which it was based. With The Great Hunger and, later, Oré na Cille, O'Nolan's novel is a subversive anti-pastoral, a characteristic nineteen-forties reaction against some pious evasions of the revivalists. Through the use of his once-despised but now-functional language, Myles succeeds in depicting a world where all men, and not solely the Irish-speaking peasant, are seen for the buffoons that they are. The difference between Myles na gCopaleen and Myles na Coppaleen is the difference between a vehicle and a target.
The project of transforming a fictional character into the controlling author of a book is wholly consistent with the democratic programme mapped out for the modern novel in At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), which argued that each character should be allowed "a private life, self-determination and a decent standard of living". The borrowing of Myles from a previous work had also been sanctioned there: "The entire corpus of existing literature should be regarded as a limbo from which discerning authors could draw their characters as required".3 Hence, also, the parodies of thinly-disguised refugees from the writings of Tomás Ó Criomhthainn and "Máire".
At the root of his interest in the name and nature of Myles na gCopaleen lay O'Nolan's obsession with the problem of establishing his own literary identity. Apart from its use in An Béal Bocht, the persona was used only in the regular columns of The Irish Times as the nom-de-plume of the anonymous author, who was precluded from signing contributions by his status as a civil servant. When the column began in 1939, it was intended that there should be three articles a week, all in Irish, but soon the versatile author turned to English as well. The latter articles appealed greatly to the upper-class readers, and inexorably their proportion and reputation grew. O'Nolan was well aware of the risk of "Paddywhackery" in the face of such an audience. He had read Yeats's warning that every writer must express or exploit Ireland; and for him that choice lay between expressing the nation to itself (mainly in Irish) or exploiting it for the amusement of a "superior" foreign audience (mainly in English). As if to register the costs to self-expression of reverting wholly to English in his newspaper-column, O'Nolan tampered with the spelling of Myles na gCopaleen yet again. A colleague at The Irish Times later recalled: "The change to Myles na Gopaleen was made, I think, after he had begun to gain some celebrity outside Ireland, in deference to the Anglo-Saxon epiglottis. We in The Irish Times cherished the pedantry of the eclipsis in the genitive, but he had his way".4 It was as if, by this alteration, O'Nolan wished to indicate a loss of authenticity, a regression to the botched identity of Boucicault's clown. Only in An Béal Bocht did he stake out the secret territory of a separate novel in which he could carry out his original assignment under his honest pseudonym of Myles na gCopaleen.
In saving a part of himself for that great satiric work, he mocked by implication the newspaper editor who had initially commissioned all this stage-Irish folly. For the greatest single irony of An Béal Bocht lies in its dedication to R. M. Smyllie, the magisterial editor of The Irish Times and official mouthpiece of the ascendancy. In the dedication, his name is tampered with, in just the same way that his Victorian compatriots had mangled the spelling of Myles: thus R. M. Smyllie is transformed to "R. M. Ó Smaoille", and thence to the clan-leader "An Smaolach". The only Irish known to Smyllie was whiskey, which he drank from a hand covered in a white glove, a consequence of a promise to his mother on her death-bed that he would "never touch a drop again". Of the native language he knew not a word. Despite repeated entreaties to the uncharacteristically tight-lipped author, Smyllie never managed to ascertain the nature of the book, nor the reason for its dedication. He must, on occasion, have suspected that, despite the elaborate leg-pull, the author was in earnest. For, in dedicating his study of Irish identity to an Anglo-Irishman who could never hope to read it, O'Nolan had pointed to a central theme of his book – the tragicomedy of mistaken identity that lay behind the manufacture in Britain of the stage Irishman.
A corresponding anxiety about his own identity as an Irish writer haunted O'Nolan to the end, and was manifest in his restless adoption of varying pseudonyms. He once remarked that a writer needs "an equable yet versatile temperament, and the compartmentation of personality for the purpose of literary utterance".5 Accordingly, he had resorted as a newspaper columnist to Myles na Gopaleen, as a novelist to Flann O'Brien, as an undergraduate wit to Brother Barnabas, and as a Gaelic satirist to Myles na gCopaleen. Amidst all this chopping and changing, one thing is clear: he never had the gall to sail under the colours of Brian O'Nolan. As Anne Clissman has noted: "it was almost as if, by putting Myles na gCopaleen forward, prepared to take on and conquer the world, Brian O'Nolan could retire to an impregnable and safe position".6
All this play-acting with proper names provides a clue to An Béal Bocht's comic theme. If the triumph of Myles na gCopaleen is the recovery of his true identity, then the tragicomedy of the characters is that grinding poverty has left them with no identity w
hatever, not even the sense of a lost one which they might hope some day to recover. Nevertheless, these faceless peasants have aspirations to grandeur, as is clear from their chosen names – Bonaparte, Sitric, Maximilian, Ferdinand, etc. They aspire not towards the emulation of Cuchulain and the ancient Gael, but towards imitation of the great foreign commanders of military history, including Sitric, a Viking who waged unholy war on their ancestors. On his first day at school, Bonaparte O'Coonassa is asked to repeat his name for the roll-call. The litany which follows is a long-winded tribute to ten generations of noble aspiration, which have resulted in a total erosion of Gaelic identity:
Bonaparte, son of Michelangelo, son of Peter, son of Owen, son of Thomas's Sarah, grand-daughter of John's Mary, grand-daughter of James, son of Dermot. . .
Bonapairt Michaclangelo Pheadair Eoghain Shorcha Thomáis Mháire Sheán Shéamais Dhiarmada . . .7
At this point, the hopeful litany is cruelly interrupted by a blow from the English-speaking master and the terse announcement in a foreign language that "Yer name is Jams O'Donnell", a sentence which is uttered to every single child in Corcha Dorcha on arrival at school. In such ways is the identity of the eager youth eroded by the master. Bonaparte himself notes the loss of self consequent upon the teachers interruption of the genealogical tree with a clout:
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