Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  In arguing for “historical involvement” as the criterion, I should not like to be taken as abounding in that sense, pleading for a rhapsodical hodgepodge of dirges and war-cries. The only value of the criterion is to make possible some degree of homogeneity in selection. By giving a more precise meaning to the term “Irish writer” we can avoid the indignity of pursuing English literary men with Irish birth certificates. Even there, once the principle is established, much flexibility is needed. Borderline cases, like Louis MacNeice and W. R. Rodgers, might as well be annexed. And even in so English an “Irish writer” as Robert Graves one can sometimes find, or think one finds, an Irish note, as in “Love Without Hope,” which Mr. MacDonagh rightly includes here. Perhaps there is a tradition—that of the four-line epigram—for Irish poets; or perhaps it is only the uneconomic nature of the operation described in “Love Without Hope” that seems to produce an Irish note. In any case, let us claim it:

  Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher

  Swept off his tall hat to the Squire’s own daughter,

  So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly

  Singing about her head, as she rode by.

  * Edited by Donagh MacDonagh and Lennox Robinson.

  OUR WITS ABOUT US

  The Irish Comic Tradition* is an original and important book which combines much lightly carried learning with ingenious and entertaining speculation and a vein of shrewd informal comment unusual in criticism. Its originality is its most striking feature. As Dr. Mercier characteristically says in the opening words of his preface: “This book makes no claim to be the last word on its subject; it is much closer to being the first one.” He is justified in the claim that in undertaking to write it he was

  compelled to attempt almost single-handed a synoptic view of a subject matter ranging over eleven centuries and two languages: that is, if we agree to call Old, Middle, and Modern Irish—which differ at least as much as Old, Middle, and Modern English—one language.

  The Irish Comic Tradition is therefore the work of a pioneer and deserves, at the hands of even critics who disagree with its main thesis—as I do—some of the respect and gratitude which we accord to pioneers in other fields of scholarship. Some Irish scholars and critics, themselves not much noted for breaking new ground, have denounced this particular pioneer, with a suspect vehemence. The cause of their vituperation does not, I think, lie in the vein of malevolence and destructiveness which Dr. Mercier discerns—as Joyce did—in the Irish comic tradition itself. Joyce saw that:

  ’Twas Irish humour, wet and dry.

  Flung quicklime into Parnell’s eye.

  The hostile reaction to The Irish Comic Tradition springs not from Irish humour, but from the humourlessness of some Irishmen. There are Irish people who feel that the words “a witty Irishman” are pejorative: a device whereby the Anglo-Saxon contrives simultaneously to depreciate the importance of wit and circumscribe the possibilities of Irishmen. In fact, for one Irishman who might hope to pass for a wit, there must be ten who very sensibly have no such pretension, and another one or two who have attained the condition diagnosed by Myles na gCopaleen as “Paddy Solemn.”

  Paddy Solemn shudders at the thought, and cringes at the sight or sound, of Brendan Behan; Paddy Solemn likes to use precise-sounding terminology in a vague way, and derives from this a bracing sense of intellectual rigour; Paddy Solemn likes to be thought of as a Thomist, and knows—for he is no fool, despite appearances—that this will do him no harm at all in an academic career bounded on all sides by bishops; Paddy Solemn is not anti-British—for that is a lower-middle-class attitude—but he shakes his head at the sorry intellectual level, and lax moral standards, of English life today. Paddy Solemn has, however, a secret fear. It is that Ireland Will Let Him Down. Of what avail his personal respectability if he is dragged down by a national entity which refuses to be respectable?

  Irish history, after that very remote—and even then somewhat eccentric—Golden Age, becomes a monotonous tale of poverty and rebellion: the antithesis of respectability. And Irish literature? Was it not the learned Atkinson who refused to teach Modern Gaelic on the ground that “All Gaelic is folklore and all folklore is at bottom obscene”? This history and this literature are not quite what one would wish, yet one must make the best of them, or accept one’s meagre share of a largely alien heritage. The late Donal McNaughton—no Paddy Solemn—played on such fears:

  We have no ships to bring the Negroes Yeats

  Or put Paul Henry in the No-Paul-Henry Places.

  With “Made in England” on our very braces,

  What are we but a dresserful of plates?

  In this situation Paddy Solemn needs a national heritage: he does not care to look too closely at the one he is actually stuck with. The trouble with The Irish Comic Tradition from this point of view is that it lays stress precisely on those elements, richly present in the national literary heritage, which are not respectable: the ribald, the dangerously satirical, the grotesque, the obscene. From the point of view of Paddy Solemn The Irish Comic Tradition is a veritable danse macabre of the skeletons in the family cupboard. Paddy Solemn’s predictable reaction was to slam the book and with it the cupboard door.

  It is true that the central theory of Dr. Mercier’s book—as of many other valuable books—is open to question. He sets out—and even, rather unguardedly, declares that he is setting out—“to show that an unbroken comic tradition may be traced in Irish literature from approximately the ninth century down to the present day.” Having read the book I am in some doubt whether this has really been established.

  Irish history from the ninth to the nineteenth century left few things unbroken: not the organization of society, nor ownership, nor even language. Did the literary tradition of the Gaelic aristocracy survive the total destruction both of that aristocracy and of the language which it spoke and wrote? Or is there a more tenacious underlying folk tradition which captures the imagination of Irish writers, even those whose language, family origin and religion have nothing in common with those of the folk in question? Dr. Mercier wavers between, or simultaneously entertains, both hypotheses, under the general and ambiguous heading of “cultural continuity.” He finds it reasonable “to attribute cultural phenomena in the first place to cultural causes.” If “cultural causes” include war and conquest, fire and famine, I agree with him, but would not expect to find much continuity between pre-Conquest Ireland and the land of Ireland’s conquerors and their rebellious serfs. You might not expect to find it, Dr. Mercier says in effect, and yet here is the evidence for it. The evidence is copious, often fascinating and always interesting, but I cannot find it altogether convincing, because too much is left out of account.

  The ambiguous word “cultural” in “cultural continuity” seems to fluctuate between its anthropological and its aesthetic use. The common background of mediaeval literature generally, the common characteristics of comic literature generally, are (at least partially) lost to sight in an insistence on the peculiarities of Irishness. Both national history—especially the history of small nations—and literary history—especially the history of peripheral literatures—tend to distort. They distort because of their inherent need to eliminate what is apparently irrelevant to the continuity of the subject. A large part of the eliminated area is the context that affected all the various phases of the subject’s existence: the general political, economic and military situation of (in this case) Western Europe at any given moment. A history of a particular current in the literature of a peripheral country is particularly exposed to this danger of distortion; that does not mean that such a history is not worth undertaking.

  The idea that there is “an Irish mind,” continuing with its own peculiar quirks, not shared even by other Europeans, from mediaeval times to the days of Samuel Beckett, seems to me implausible. Dr. Mercier, although not consistently a victim of this idea, gives it rather more credit than it deserves. Thus he accepts the notion, dear to so many
Irish intellectuals, that “hatred of life” is a permanent and distinctive element in the Irish character. The main foundation on which this belief rests is that people in the Irish countryside now marry very late. But before the Great Famine they were noted for marrying very early and having enormous families. The phenomenon of late rural marriage—and the ills and eccentricities which go with it—has definite economic and historical roots, and it is unrewarding to seek for symptoms of the same troubles in an earlier age whose real troubles were different. One can, of course, find such symptoms if one looks for them: disgust and fear seem to be constant and universal elements in human existence, and in all “comic” traditions. The very ancient and beautiful Gaelic nature poetry, and the later and more “European” Gaelic love poetry, testify to the fact that in the Irish tradition, as in others, disgust and fear do not exclude all other emotions.

  There is probably no continuous and distinctive “Irish mind,” but there has been since the seventeenth century at least an Irish predicament: a predicament which has produced common characteristics in a number of those who have been involved in it. Probably the most striking of these characteristics among intelligent Irish people (whether educated or not) is a propensity to an ironical mode of expression, sometimes achieving wit. In literature, this is the vein common to Swift, Wilde, Shaw and Joyce, and it tends to distinguish the writing of Irishmen from most other writing in English. Why?

  Part of the answer, but only part, may be that words are the weapon of the disarmed. “You have your bayonets,” said Tim Healy, “do not grudge us our Billingsgate.” A larger part of the answer is, I believe, that the general Irish predicament, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was congenial to the nature of irony, if to little else. Hypocrisy, the permanent and universal element in the ideologies of ruling classes, seeks to mask the gap between profession and action, to cover the realities of social and political struggle with the illusion of harmony. Irony uses the language of hypocrisy—as Swift did in “A Modest Proposal”—with a calculated excess, so that, as the realities show through, the pretences come to seem ghastly. In Ireland, the gaps between ruler and ruled, and between the pretence of benevolence and the realities of exploitation, were, from about 1690 to about 1900, significantly wider than is customary. For some Irishmen, including some who were not themselves directly oppressed, the masks of power and the paradoxes of oppression were lessons in drama and in wit. Easily, too easily, irony became a way of life and the witty Irishman was born.

  * By Vivian Mercier.

  SOMERVILLE AND ROSS

  The protest attending on an alien Ascendancy’s callous caperings is of course always most active in a period of national revival.

  This opinion is, of course, that of Professor Daniel Corkery and he makes it clear, in that interesting and curious work, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, that he would apply the description “an alien Ascendancy’s callous caperings” to at least a great part of the work of Edith Somerville and her cousin Violet Martin who wrote as Martin Ross.

  It would be pleasant in some ways, although perhaps a little dull, to bypass these formidable social, political and moral categories of Professor Corkery’s, to dismiss them as “extra-literary considerations” and get down to a purely aesthetic discussion of the artistic merit of the novels and short stories of Somerville and Ross. But the novels and the stories themselves are full of extraliterary considerations and the Irish reader approaches them with his head buzzing with controversial bees. Anti-Irish …? Stage- Irish …? Snobs? These are stock responses—to use the language of Professor I. A. Richards—and therefore not particularly useful in literary criticism. But they cannot be ignored in any discussion of this body of work; they have to be confirmed, to the extent that they are true, or dismantled, to the extent that they are prejudices, before we can be heard saying something relevant about the merits of the books themselves.

  On one of Professor Corkery’s counts at least we must find a true bill. They were certainly ascendancy. They belonged to old established landed families, the Somervilles in West Cork and the Martins in Galway, and they flourished in a time when such families did in fact constitute an ascendancy. Most of their best work, indeed, was done or at least conceived in what might be called the Indian Summer of the Ascendancy, between the fall of Parnell in 1890 and the outbreak of the World War in 1914. The terrible eighties were behind, and the more terrible twenties undreamed of. There was honey still for tea, and there was hunting, plenty of hunting—and, of course, for the callous, capers. If there was a hint of future trouble in the air—a whiff of the acrid journalism of D. P. Moran, poison laid on certain lands, barbed wire across the path of the hunt—it was no more than lent tang and tension and distinction to the lives of high-spirited people like Edith Somerville and her cousin.

  That they were snobs—in one sense of that word—followed naturally from the fact that they belonged to the Irish landed gentry. They had to look down on other people in order to see them. Or so they sincerely felt. And they wanted to see them clearly, to place them socially: “Catholic middle-class moving up”; “Protestant lower-middle-class, stuck”; “Gentleman run wild, with touch of brogue.” They wrote on these matters with an almost pedantic care for accuracy, within social conventions which they thoroughly understood and thoroughly approved. Their approval is, to profane ears, often excessive, and one cannot help feeling that the ability to detach themselves from the conventional values of their class would have enriched their work. But their snobbery, as I think we must call it, was at least a live and intelligent system of social apprehension, strictly contemporary and even brisk. It is confusing to have to describe it by the same name as we must apply to the dreary and indiscriminate archaism of certain modern writers, or the vicarious nostalgia of Mr. Evelyn Waugh.

  Were they then aliens, colonial writers—to use, again, some of Professor Corkery’s terminology—who exploited Ireland in their work for the amusement of the foreigner? This can only be tested by attention to the work itself. The work to which the reproach is most directed is the popular and comic Irish R.M. series of short stories—Some Experiences of an Irish R.M., Further Experiences of an Irish R.M. and In Mr. Knox’s Country. From among these I have selected—and have had to abridge—the extract which you are about to hear read. It is from a story called “Lisheen Races, Second-hand.” A character called Slipper is describing to a crowd, including the R. M. and a pompous Englishman, a trick he played at the races on one Driscoll:

  ’Twas within in the same whisky tint meself was, with the bandmasther and a few of the lads, an’ we buyin’ a ha’porth o’ crackers, when I seen me brave Driscoll landin’ into the tint, and a pair o’ thim long boots on him; him that hadn’t a shoe nor a stocking to his foot when your honour had him picking grass out o’ the stones behind in your yard. “Well,” says I to meself, “we’ll knock some spoort out of Driscoll!”

  “Come here to me, acushla!” says I to him; “I suppose it’s some way wake in the legs y’are,” says I, “an’ the docthor put them on ye the way the people wouldn’t thrample ye!”

  “May the divil choke ye!” says he, pleasant enough, but I knew by the blush he had he was vexed.

  “Then I suppose ’tis a left-tenant colonel y’are,” says I; “yer mother must be proud out o’ ye!” says I, “an’ maybe ye’ll lend her a loan o’ thim waders when she’s rinsin’ yer bauneen in the river!” says I.

  “There’ll be work out o’ this!” says he, lookin’ at me both sour and bitther.

  “Well indeed, I was thinkin’ you were blue moulded for want of a batin’,” says I. He was for fightin’ us then, but afther we had him pacificated with about a quarther of a naggin’ o’ sperrits, he told us he was goin’ ridin’ in a race.

  “An’ what’ll ye ride?” says I.

  “Owld Bocock’s mare,” says he.

  “Knipes!” says I, sayin’ a great curse; “is it that little staggeen from the mountains; sure she’s someth
in’ about the one age with meself,” says I. “Many’s the time Jamesy Geoghegan and meself used to be dhrivin’ her to Macroom with pigs an’ all soorts,” says I; “an’ is it leppin’ stone walls ye want her to go now?”

  “Faith, there’s walls and every vari’ty of obstackle in it,” says he.

  “It’ll be the best o’ your play, so,” says I, “to leg it away home out o’ this.”

  “An’ who’ll ride her, so?” says he.

  “Let the divil ride her,” says I.

  There was no great delay afther that till they said there was a race startin’ and the dickens a one at all was goin’ to ride only two, Driscoll, and one Clancy.

  “Stand aisy now by the plantation,” says I; “if they get to come as far as this, believe me ye’ll see spoort,” says I, “an’ ’twill be a convanient spot to encourage the mare if she’s anyway wake in herself,” says I, cuttin’ somethin’ about five feet of an ash sapling out o’ the plantation.

  Well, I hadn’t barely thrimmed the ash plant when I heard the people screechin’, an’ I seen Driscoll an’ Clancy comin’ on, leppin’ all before them, an’ owld Bocock’s mare bellusin’ and powdherin’ along, an’ bedad! whatever obstackle wouldn’t throw her down, faith, she’d throw it down, an’ there’s the thraffic they had in it.

  “I declare to me sowl,” says I, “if they continue on this way there’s a great chance some one o’ thim’ll win,” says I.