Lifeworlds: Literary Geographies in 1930s Ireland

Lifeworlds: Literary Geographies in 1930s Ireland
Dr. Charles Travis
On 21st September 2005, Mr. Travis submitted a thesis entitled:
'Lifeworlds: Literary geographies in 1930s Ireland'. At a meeting held
on 2nd May 2006, the University Council and College Board
respectively approved the thesis and recommended the award of the
degree of Doctor in Philosophy (Ph.D.). Charles Bartlett Travis was
admitted to the degree of Doctor in Philosophy (Ph.D.) at a Public
Commencements held on 7th July 2006.
Sean Keating, An Allegory (1922)
i
Abstract
This study examines the various representations of place by Irish writers who published English language
novels between 1929-1939. The aim of the study was to explore the various affective and subjective
dimensions of place experience, as well as the different „personalities of place,‟ depicted in novels, and other
associated pieces of literature during this period in modern Irish history. The readings of these works have
been placed in the context of accepted historical and cultural narratives of Ireland in the 1930s. A
hermeneutic analysis was focused through five theoretical lenses, developed specifically for this study. These
five lenses were constructed from the following theoretical foundations: Firstly, Anne Buttimer‟s translation
of Heidegger‟s lebenswelt, based upon trends in German Phenomenology. Secondly, the various lifepaths of
separate novelists informed the geographical readings of their novels and associated literature and was based
upon the „life-biography‟ concept developed by Torsten Hägerstrand, and embellished by the
phenomenological practices of Buttimer. Thirdly, a perspective that viewed novelists as humanistic
geographers. Fourthly, a conceptualisation of novels as prose-fiction landscapes, an approach influenced by
the theoretical work of Trevor Barnes and James Duncan, who conversely conceptualised landscapes as text,
based upon the writings of French phenomenologist Paul Ricouer. And fifthly, Mikhail Bakhtin‟s concept of
the chronotope, a literary motif that signifies a spatial-temporal intersection of place. This study was divided
into three main sections. In the first section Rural Lifeworlds, representations rooted in the bogs, fields and
townlands of Peadar O‟Donnell‟s and Patrick Kavanagh‟s prose fiction provide a contrast against the urban
bourgeois framing of the rural Ulster landscape, found in the novels of Belfast residents Forrest Reid and
Michael McLaverty. In the second section House-Islands and the Provincial Town, centripetal narratives
embedded within the landed estates and demesnes of Elizabeth Bowen‟s and Molly Keane‟s prose, depict the
decline of the Protestant Ascendancy „House-Island‟ culture, in contrast to Kate O‟Brien‟s interrogation in
her novels of the ascendant Catholic bourgeois in the Irish provincial town. In the third section Urban
Experiences, Samuel Beckett‟s manic representation of modern Dublin is juxtaposed against Flann O‟Brien‟s
mimetic and expressive narratives and representations of the Free State capital, which frame homes, streets
and districts of Dublin in a language and style that draws from 1930s pop-culture, as well as Celtic
mythology. Finally, selected readings of prose from the works of Patrick Kavanagh and Michael McLaverty
illuminate the affective dimensions of rural to urban migration experienced by emigrants to London, Belfast
and Dublin. In conclusion, the hermeneutic analysis of this study determined that the various representations
of identity, sense of place and landscape contained in English language novels written and published by Irish
writers between 1929-1939, belied „official‟ and ideological framings of the decade, in favour of
heterogeneous and regional distinctions. The prose landscapes of these writers intimate the various affective
and subjective dimensions of the „personalities of place,‟ that operated during the period, and suggests that a
rich mosaic of distinct landscapes coloured the many faces of the Irish island during the 1930s.
ii
Fig. 1 SETTINGS OF NOVELS IN IRELAND: 1929-1939
Co. Donegal
Peadar O‟Donnell
Adrigoole (1929)
The Knife (1930)
Wrack (1933)
On the Edge of the Stream (1934)
Rathlin Island
Michael McLaverty
Call My Brother Back (1939)
Belfast
Forrest Reid
The Retreat (1934)
Michael McLaverty
Call My Brother Back (1939)
Forrest Reid
The Retreat (1936)
Co. Down
Forrest Reid
Uncle Stephen (1931)
Co. Monaghan
Patrick Kavanagh
The Green Fool (1938)
Dublin
Samuel Beckett
More Pricks than Kicks (1934)
Flann O‟Brien
At Swim Two Birds (1939)
Patrick Kavanagh
The Green Fool (1938)
Co. Carlow
Molly Keane/M.J. Farrell
Mad Puppetstown (1931)
Limerick
Kate O‟Brien
Without My Cloak (1931)
Pray for the Wanderer (1938)
North Co. Cork
Figure 1
Elizabeth Bowen
The Last September (1929)
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
__________________________________________________________________________________
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
1
1.1 Aims
1
1.1.1. Choice of Period, Writers and Novels
1
1.1.2. Aims of Study
2
1.2 Literary Geography, Phenomenology, and Landscape
1.3
3
1.2.1 Introduction
3
1.2.2 Humanistic Geography, Subjectivity and Literature
6
1.2.3 Irish Geography and Literature
11
1.2.4 Phenomenology: Towards a „Sense of Place‟
17
1.2.5 Landscape
21
1.2.6 Summary
23
1930s Ireland, History & Culture
24
1.3.1 Introduction
24
1.3.2 From Saorstát to Éire
26
1.3.3 A Protestant Parliament; A Protestant State
29
1.3.4 Irish Novels in the 1930s
31
1.3.5 Summary
34
1.4 Methodology: Hermeneutics and Theoretical Lenses
35
1.4.1 Introduction
35
1.4.2 Hermeneutics
36
1.4. 3 Lens One: Lifeworld
37
1.4.4 Lens Two: Lifepath
38
1.4.5 Lens Three: Novelists as Humanistic Geographers
39
1.4.6 Lens Four: Novels as Maps and Landscapes
40
1.4.7 Lens Five: The Chronotope
41
1.4.8 Summary
43
1.5 Structure of Study: Themes, Authors and Novels
44
1.5.1 Introduction
44
1.5.2 Rural Lifeworlds
44
1.5.3 House Islands and the Provincial Town
45
iv
1.5.4 Urban Experiences
46
PART ONE RURAL LIFEWORLDS
48
CHAPTER 2 RUMOURS FROM THE LOWER HILLS: PEADAR O‘DONNELL
51
2.1 Introduction
51
2.1.1 Lifepath
52
2.2 Adrigoole (1929)
52
2.2.1 Introduction
52
2.2.2 The Lower Hills
53
2.2.3 The Bog-Land
54
2.2.4 The Hiring Fair
55
2.2.5 Space of War and Starvation
56
2.2.6 Summary
59
2.3 The Knife (1930)
60
2.3.1 Introduction
60
2.3.2 The Valley
60
2.3.3 Activist and Óglach
63
2.3.4 Summary
65
2.4 The Wrack (1933)
66
2.4.1 Introduction
66
2.4.2 The Dead Sea
66
2.4.3 Summary
67
2.5 On the Edge of the Stream (1934)
68
2.5.1 Introduction
68
2.5.2 The Townland Mind
69
2.5.3 Space of Class Conflict
69
2.5.4 Space of Domestic Abuse
72
2.5.5 Space of Religious Hysteria
74
2.5.6. Summary
76
2.6 Conclusion
77
CHAPTER 3 POETRY OF THE FIELDS: PATRICK KAVANAGH
79
v
3.1 Introduction
79
3.1.1 Lifepath
80
3.2 The Green Fool (1938)
80
3.2.1 Introduction
80
3.2.2 The Memory of Place
81
3.2.3 The Poetry of Place
82
3.2.4 The Mystical Lore of Place
85
3.2.5 Summary
87
3.3 Patrick Kavanagh: The Flight from the Land (1939)
88
3.4 Conclusion
90
CHAPTER 4 ELYSIUM & EXILE : FORREST REID & MICHAEL McLAVERTY
95
4.1 Introduction
95
4.2 Forrest Reid: Crying for Elysium
96
4.2.1 Introduction
96
4.2.2 Lifepath
96
4.3 Uncle Stephen (1931)
98
4.3.1 Introduction
98
4.3.2 Space of Genius Loci
100
4.3.3 Summary
102
4.4 The Retreat or the Machinations of Henry (1936)
103
4.4.1 Introduction
103
4.4.2 Landscape as Palimpsest
104
4.4.3 Landscapes and Ruins
105
4.4.4 Summary
108
4.5 Forrest Reid’s Intelligible Landscapes
109
4.6 Michael McLaverty: Emigration and Exile
110
4.6.1 Introduction
110
4.6.2 Lifepath
110
4.7 Rathlin Island
111
4.7.1 Short Stories (1933-1939)
111
4.7.2 Call My Brother Back (1939)
113
vi
4.7.3 Summary
116
4.8 Michael McLaverty’s Exiled landscapes
117
4.9 Conclusion: Elysium & Exile
118
PART TWO HOUSE-ISLANDS AND THE PROVINCIAL TOWN
121
CHAPTER 5 ‗ HOUSE-ISLANDS‘:ELIZABETH BOWEN & MOLLY KEANE
123
5.1 Introduction
123
5.2 Elizabeth Bowen: Inside and Outside the ‘House-Island’
124
5.2.1 Introduction
124
5.2.2 Lifepath
124
5.3 The Last September (1929)
126
5.3.1 Introduction
126
5.3.2 Inside the „House-Island‟
127
5.3.3 Outside the „House-Island‟
130
5.3.4 Summary
133
5.4 Molly Keane/ M.J. Farrell: The Estate of Living Memory
134
5.4.1. Introduction
134
5.4.2 Lifepath
135
5.5 Mad Puppetstown (1931)
136
5.5.1 Introduction
136
5.5.2 The Golden Age
137
5.5.3 The War
139
5.5.4 The Free State
141
5.5.5 Summary
143
5.6 Conclusion: House-Island
143
CHAPTER 6: THE PROVINCIAL TOWN & THE CATHOLIC BOURGEOIS: KATE O‘BRIEN
145
6.1 Introduction
145
6.1.1. Lifepath
145
6.2 Without My Cloak (1931)
147
6.2.1 Introduction
147
6.2.2 The Provincial Catholic Bourgeois
149
6.2.3 Town & Family
152
6.2.4 Summary
154
vii
6.3 Pray for the Wanderer (1938)
155
6.3.1 Introduction
155
6.3.2 The Symbolic Space of Weir House
155
6.3.3 The Symbolic Space of Mellick
159
6.3.4 The artistic vs. the orthodox perspective
163
6.3.5 Summary
164
6.4 Conclusion
166
PART THREE URBAN EXPERIENCES
169
CHAPTER 7 ‗BOTTLED CLIMATES‘:SAMUEL BECKETT
171
7.1 Introduction
171
7.1.1 Lifepath
172
7.2 More Pricks than Kicks (1934)
174
7.2.1 Introduction
174
7.2.2. The „Bottled Climates‟ of Dublin
175
7.2.3 A Wet Night
176
7.2.4 Ding-Dong
178
7.2.5 Fingal
181
7.2.6 Summary
183
7.3 Conclusion
183
CHAPTER 8 A CITY OF TWO MINDS: FLANN O‘BRIEN
185
8.1 Introduction
185
8.1.1 Lifepath
186
8.2 At Swim Two Birds (1939)
187
8.2.1 Introduction
187
8.2.2 Mimesis
187
8.2.3. Expressionism
188
8.3 Mimetic Spaces
189
8.3.1 Introduction
189
8.3.2 Domestic Sphere
189
8.3.3 Public Sphere
192
8.4 Expressive Places
194
viii
8.4.1 Introduction
194
8.4.2 Lower Leeson Street
195
8.4.3 Ringsend District
198
8.4.4 The Palace Cinema
200
8.5 Conclusion
204
CHAPTER 9 EMIGRANT CITIES
207
9.1 Introduction
207
9.2 Patrick Kavanagh: Break with the Land
208
9.2.1 Introduction
208
9.2.2 To the Pagan City (London)
210
9.2.3 Summary
211
9.3 Dublin: 1939
212
9.3.1 Introduction
212
9.3.2 The Palace Bar
213
9.4 Michael McLaverty: Belfast
215
9.4.1 Introduction
215
9.4.2 Streetscape Stories (1935-1937)
215
9.4.3 Call My Brother Back (1939)
219
9.5 Conclusion: Emigrant Cities
222
CHAPTER 10 CONCLUSION
227
10.1 Introduction
227
10.2 Rural Lifeworlds
227
10.2.1 Introduction
227
10.2.2 Bogs, Fields and Townlands
228
10.2.3 Gardens and Graveyards; Ruins and Manors
230
10.2.4 Rathlin Island
231
10.3 House Islands and the Provincial Town
232
10.3.1 Introduction
232
10.3.2 The House Island
232
10.3.3 The Provincial Bourgeois Town
234
10.4 Urban Experiences
235
10.4.1 Introduction
235
ix
10.5
10.4.2 The Road and the Threshold: Spaces of Dublin
235
10.4.3 Salon and Parlour: The Palace Bar
237
10.4.4 Spaces of Peripherality: Belfast /London
238
Conclusion
239
10.5.1 Methodological Considerations
239
10.5.2 Final Remarks
241
BIBLIOGRAPHY
243
x
1.
Introduction
Seemingly the literary 1930s and the political 1930s look different according
to the point on the archipelago from which they are surveyed now or
experienced then.
Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism In Ireland (1994)
1.1. Aims
Ireland emerged in the 1930s as an island with two seemingly distinct and partitioned
personalities. In twenty-six southern counties, a strongly Catholic independent Irish Free State had
been established. In the North, a Protestant majority led by Unionists, having consolidated power in
the remaining in six counties, remained a part of the United Kingdom. In spite of these contesting
personalities on a national level, various regions of Ireland were coloured by a heterogeneous
mosaic of local culture, rooted in subjective and affective attachments to place, that subtly belied
the intentions behind the larger and monolithic „official‟ framings of Irish identity on the island.
The aim of this study is an examination of various representations of landscape, identity and sense
of place, drawn from a selection of English language prose fiction novels published by Irish
novelists between 1929 and 1939. This study will consider these novelists as humanistic
geographers, and their prose fiction novels as discursive maps, and landscapes in which the
distinctive „personalities of place‟ of Ireland in the 1930s are both represented and rooted.
1.1.1. Choice of period, writers and novels.
The 1930s remain one of the seminal periods in modern Irish history, and yet human
geographers have largely neglected the decade‟s cultural dimensions. The political effects of the
establishment of the Free State and the separate province of Northern Ireland upon the sociocultural landscapes of the island and upon Irish literature will be discussed more fully in section 1.3
of this chapter. But it can be seen that the social malaise created by the Government of Ireland Act
in 1920, which created the Northern state, the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and the
accompanying Civil War of 1923, lingered in Ireland well into the 1930s. These political changes
coloured aspects and perceptions of cultural life in most, if not all parts of the island and impacted
aesthetic realms, including the representation of landscape, identity and sense of place of Ireland in
imaginative literature, which is the major focus of this study.
The choice of 1930s writers and novelists for this study can be illustrated by the following
anecdote. Addressing a Dublin banquet in 1934, William Butler Yeats, the arch-poet of the Irish
Literary Revival, stunned his audience by declaring: „The future of Irish Literature was the realistic
1
novel.‟1 Within Yeats‟ statement lay the recognition that the unitary vision of Ireland and its culture
represented in the poetry, drama and fiction of the Irish Literary Revival during the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries,
was vastly different from the fragmented social and cultural
landscapes represented in the prose of a new generation of writers during the 1920s and 1930s. The
realism introduced by this new generation of Irish writers can be deduced to be the result of their
collective experience of war, revolution and partition. As the sociologist Karl Mannheim has
observed: ‗A concrete bond is created between members of a generation by being exposed to the
social and intellectual symptoms of a process of dynamic destabilization.‟2
The themes, settings
and places explored in the prose representations of this new generation signalled that „the
intellectual centre of gravity of the country had shifted and the rising names of the ‗twenties and
‗thirties were almost all [. . . ] from Dublin or Cork, or the remoter hinterland, who owed little to
the [mythological] past.‟3 Members of this generation of writers, who have been selected as
subjects for this study include
Peadar O‟Donnell, Patrick Kavanagh, Forrest Reid, Michael
McLaverty, Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane, Kate O‟Brien, Samuel Beckett and Flann O‟Brien.
The writers selected for this study were born during the fin de siécle of the nineteenth
century and matured as a generation during the years of the War of Independence. They
subsequently wrote and published their novels in the post- partition and independent political
milieus of the Free State and Northern Ireland between 1929 and 1939. In contrast to the mystical
and visionary themes of an „imaginary community‟ of Ireland codified by the cultural nationalism
of the Revivalists, this new generation of Irish writers „were faced with problems more insistent:
social, political and even religious; they had grown up in a period of revolution, were knitted with
common life and could not evade its appeal. As time went on these problems became strangely
acute.‟4 The subsequent themes and representations of landscape, identity and sense of place, in
most of the novels of the writers explored in this study, reflect sensibilities associated with Irish
realist prose of the 1930s. For a few of these writers, their engagements are influenced by trends in
the European avant-garde, Modernism and Classical Literature. But for all of the writers explored
in this study, their representations can intimate the various affective and subjective experiences of
place on the Irish island during the 1930s.
1.1.2 Aims of study
The aim of this study has two main components: Firstly, to conduct geographical readings of
the imaginative depictions of the various Irish lifeworlds and chronotopes represented in these Irish
1
Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats: 1865-1939 (London: MacMillan & Co., 1942) p. 419.
Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1992 [1952] ) p. 303.
3
F. S. L. Lyons, „The Minority Problem in the 26 Counties‟ in (ed.) Francis MacManus, The Years of the
Great Test: 1926-39 (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1967) p. 95.
4
Sean O‟Faolaoin, in Terrence Brown, Ireland‘s Literature: Selected Essays (Dublin, 1988) p. 94.
2
2
novels of the 1930s. These readings will be placed in the context of accepted historical and cultural
narratives of the period. Secondly, the aim of this study is to provide local colour and shading for
more standard historical and empirical studies of place and identity in Ireland during the first three
decades of the twentieth century. In effect the study will attempt to frame the various „personalities
of place,‟ depicted by the various representations of lifeworlds and chronotopes in these novels.
The hermeneutic methodology of this study locates itself within past and present trends in
humanistic geography, and the sub-disciplines of historical and cultural geography. It draws from
long standing intellectual traditions associated with research in the social sciences and the
humanities.
Section 1.2 of this introductory chapter reveals the historical and cultural foundation of
literary geography and its recent application by Anglo-American and Irish Geographers. A
discussion of the work of humanist geographers Anne Buttimer, Yi-Fu Tuan and Edward Relph,
will then highlight the relevance of their theoretical approaches to this study. Section 1.3 of this
chapter provides a historical and cultural sketch of 1930s Ireland, to supply a context for the
exploration of the English language Irish novel of the period.
Section 1.4 will discuss the
hermeneutic methodology employed in this study and describe the five theoretical lenses developed
to focus its analysis. These lenses include Buttimer‟s translation of lebenswelt; the concept of
lifepath drawn from the work of Torsten Hägerstrand; the novelist as human geographer; novels as
discursive maps and landscapes, and the representational significance of M. M Bakhtin‟s
chronotope. Finally, Section 1.5 of this introduction describes the three main thematic parts of the
thesis and describes the novelists, places and novels and other pieces of imaginative and critical
literature to be investigated.
1.2. Literary geography, phenomenology and landscape
1.2.1. Introduction
In Writing Worlds: Discourse, Texts and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape
(1992) Barnes and Duncan noted: ‗―Very little attention is paid to writing in human geography.
This is ironic, given that the very root meaning of the word ―geography‖ is literally, ―earth
writing‖ from the Greek geo, meaning ―earth‖ and graphien, meaning ―to write‖.‟5 Ironic indeed,
since the role of geography and literature had been previously linked in the foundations of Western
geographical thought, with literature initially playing a more prominent role in characterising the
nature of the discipline: „For ancient Greeks, and to a lesser degree for Romans as well, geographia
5
Trevor Barnes and James Duncan, Writing Worlds: Discourse, Texts and Metaphor in the Representation
of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992 ) p.1.
3
represents a literary genre more than a branch of physical science. It belonged far more to the
cultural mainstream than to the specialized backwaters to which we, today, have assigned it.‟6
Both Herodotus and Strabo blended the deductive reasoning of science, with the imaginative
and intuitive nature of poetry, when constructing their geographical narratives: „they sifted through
a vast storehouse of traveller‘s tales in order to separate fact from fiction, then retold those which
they thought credible enough to claim a reader‘s attention.‟7 Initially „the geographer‘s science
and storyteller‘s art
[. . . ] could not be fully detached from each other.‟
8
At times this inter-
meshing of the scientific claim to objectivity with the subjective viewpoint of the fictional narrative,
became a point of contention among ancient geographers:
An academic controversy was waged over the reliability of geographical data
in Homer‟s Odyssey. Strabo, who believed the Odyssey to be authentic and
reliable, in a long and controversial passage leveled criticism against
Eratosthenes for holding that Homer should be read as a poet and not as a
scientific authority.9
Since this seminal debate between Strabo and Eratosthnes, the role and importance of the writer has
changed in the evolution of Western academic thought. Before the seventeenth century geography
was largely considered to be „a distinct body of knowledge rather than a discipline.‟10 Drawing
from a diverse array of fields, interests and insights: „Both geography and literature were far more
inclusive and more permeable categories in the eighteenth century, and their flexibility frequently
drew them together [. . .] so individuals often considered as eighteenth century geographers
frequently had wider interests and careers in writing comparable to individuals we now consider
―literary‖.‟11
With the advent of Enlightenment thought in the mid to late eighteenth century, disciplines
in academe began to separate and structure themselves along the coordinates of
Cartesian
rationality. As traditional confessional explanations began to collapse under the emergence of a
new found belief in the primacy of man‟s ability to reason, politics, public life, private life and
religion became separate spheres of existence as reason, divided and sub-divided itself into the
distinct realms of science, morality and art.12 Following this trend, geography and literature drifted
apart, as both became „modern‟ disciplines that constructed revised genealogies to buttress their
6
J. S. Romm, The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992) pp .3-4.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
9
J. K. Wright, Human Nature in Geography (Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1996) p.11.
10
R. J. Mayhew, Geography and literature in Historical Context: Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century
English Conceptions of Geography (Oxford: School of Geography, 1997 ) p.7.
11
Ibid., 43.
12
David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (Penguin: London, 2000) p. 260.
4
respective frames of reference against this „disenchantment of the world,‟13 professed by
Enlightenment philosophers: „Where literature projected a recently developed view of authorship
back across time, geography recognised how recent the incarnation of ―geographer‖ was, but also
denied there had been any conception of geography previous to this [. . . ] The result was that
literature and geography were now separate pursuits, and to discuss them at the same time, was to
―link‖ or work ―across disciplines,‖ where previously they had been part of the same scholarly
endeavour.‟14 Historically, as Michel Foucault notes, the authority of the writer initially rested in
works published to herald scientific theories and discoveries. However as the shift to the trope of
modernity began to emerge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, „truth‟ evident in the
scientific text, began to elide this authority. In the case of science: „the author function faded away,
and the inventor‘s name served only to christen a theorem, proposition, particular effect, property,
body, group of elements, or a pathological syndrome.‟
15
Conversely for political essayists and
creative writers „literary discourses came to be accepted only endowed with the author function.‟16
The academic separation of geography and literature, part of a larger trend within the
discourse of modernity, established the respective roles of the geographer and writer as distinct
from each other. The emergence of humanistic geography in the late twentieth century, heralded a
new focus on the subjective experience of place, and the study and utilisation of literature and role
of the writer started to slowly re-assert itself. This practice became one of the means to counteract
the positivistic models of spatial science espoused during quantitative revolution of the 1950s and
„60s, as it was observed that „the skeletal landscapes of statistics miss [ed] out the richness of
human experience of place.‟17 Accordingly, the renewed emphasis on literature and the role of the
writer aimed to re-assert the human element of subjectivity as a factor in the geographical
perspective: „Various currents of the discipline [. . .] turned to literature in order to explore its
relevance to different points of view: regionalists in search of more vivid description of place;
humanists seeking evocative transcriptions of spatial experience; radicals concerned with social
justice; others trying to establish parallels between history of geographical and literary ideas; or
more discursively-oriented researchers addressing the problems of representation.‟18
J. K. Wright was an early proponent of modern geography‟s re-engagement with writers
and literature. In a brief article „Geography in Literature‟ (1924) for the journal Geographical
Review, Wright stated: „Some men of letters are endowed with a highly developed geographical
13
Ibid.
Mayhew, Geography and Literature, 44-45.
15
Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault‘s thought (ed.) Paul Rabinow
(London: Penguin, 1984 ) p.111.
16
Ibid.
17
Mike Crang, Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, 1998 ) p. 43.
18
Marc Brousseau, „Geography‟s Literature‟ in Progress in Human Geography, 18.3 (1994) p.333.
14
5
instinct, as writers they have trained themselves to visualize even more clearly than the professional
geographer those regional elements of the earth‘s surface most significant to the general run of
humanity.‟19 Noting that Dr. Robert Ramsay‟s Short Stories of America (1921) sub-divided the
United States and Alaska into twenty-five „local color states,‟ Wright observed that „these
boundaries do not coincide with those of political states but are wholly independent regions each
one characterized by sufficiently individualistic type of life to have given rise to a distinctive type of
story.‟20
Citing W. P. James‟ The Lure of the Map (1920) Wright found „local color is an evasive
quality revealing itself in different hues to different seekers [. . . ] and the geographer should be the
last to disdain its existence. A colorless regional monography falls short of geographical truth.‟21
Concluding with Septime Gorceix‟s Le Miroir de la France: Géographie Littéraire des Grands
Regions Française (1923), Wright noted that Gorceix, selected „excerpts from novels, poems,
essays, and descriptions, chosen for the poignancy with which they depict the various pays and
cities of France.‟22 Wright concluded that the study reflected „an admirable combination of
scholarly treatment with genuinely subjective and colourful word painting.‟23 These initial literary
expeditions of geography did not include the Continental scrutiny of language and symbol coupled
with an analysis of the writer‟s function, that pre-occupied the European „structural‟ revolution of
the 1950s and „60s: „The actual ―rise‖ of ―literary geography‖ [. . . ] did not initially occur within
the scope of research on discursive, semantic or symbolic structures –with the corollary rejection of
the subject and/or history –but within a humanist project designed to restore ―man‖, meaning and
values in geography.‟24
1.2.2. Humanistic Geography, Subjectivity and Literature
In a 1947 paper entitled Terrae Incognitae: The Place of Imagination in Geography Wright
coined the term geosophy, -„geo meaning “earth” and sophia meaning “knowledge”‟ to define „the
study of geographical knowledge from any or all points of view.‘
25
He discussed the role of
imagination in the pursuit of geographical knowledge. Examining the relationship between
subjectivity and objectivity, Wright countered the mistaken belief that „subjectivity is the antithesis
of objectivity,‟26 by declaring: „while such a disposition often does, in fact lead to error, illusion, or
deliberate deception, it is entirely possible to conceive of things not only with reference to oneself
J. K. Wright, „Departments: Human Geography‟ in Geographical Review Vol. XIV(1924) p. 659.
Ibid.
21
Ibid.
22
Ibid., 660.
23
Ibid.
24
Brousseau, Geography‘s Literature, 333.
25
J. K. Wright, „Terrae Incognitae: The Place of Imagination in Geography‟ in Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, 37 (1947) pp. 1-15.
26
Ibid., 4.
19
20
6
but also realistically.‟27 He asserted that much of the world‟s accumulated geosophy had been
acquired not from a rigorous application of positivism, but from the „skilful intuitive imagining—or
insight—of philosophers, prophets, statesmen, artists and scientists.‟28 Promoting what he termed
aesthetic geosophy, Wright declared: „Literary historians, but few geographers, have followed the
Sirens‘ call into the terrae incognitae. Need we leave their exploration wholly to literary
scholars?‟29
In contrast, H. C. Darby‟s The Regional of Geography of Thomas Hardy‘s Wessex
(1948), a historical geography embellished with observations and insights culled from Hardy‟s
novels, left a lingering air of scepticism about the viability of such an approach, with Darby himself
questioning the „attempt to build up regional pictures from disjointed quotations.‟30
Darby‟s
reluctance to engage further with the field of literature perhaps foreshadowed the epistemological
vigilance of the quantitative revolution of the 1950s and „60s, with its „thirst for scientificity
[which] did not favour this type of orientation because of its presumed subjectivism.‟31 However,
by the late 1970s and early „80s literature had emerged as a strong methodological component of
humanist geography‟s response to the statistical paradigms formulated by the practitioners of
spatial science.
In 1981, a collection of papers illustrating the various ways in which geographers were
engaging with literature was published.
Humanistic Geography and Literature, Essays of the
Experience of Place, edited by Douglas C. Pocock, declared that geographers should commence
their study of literature with the „acknowledgement of the artist‘s perceptive insight: literature is the
product of perception, or, more simply is perception. The writer therefore articulates our own
articulations about place, our fellow men and about ourselves, providing thereby a basis for a new
awareness, a new consciousness.‟
32
Pocock contended that by practising techniques of „literary
refraction,‟33 geographers could approach imaginative literature in various methodological ways. He
claimed that literature could establish for geographers „the basis for a new [and] ―cleansed‖
perception,‟34 of their fields of study. Pocock‟s edited volume contained the following examples of
the various applications of these techniques.
In a chapter that examined elements of place consciousness in the coalfield novels of D. H.
Lawrence, Ian G. Cook observed that the „novel acts as a ―communication channel‖ between some
27
Ibid.
Ibid., 5.
29
Ibid., 12.
30
H. C. Darby, „The Regional Geography of Thomas Hardy‟s Wessex‟ in Geographical Review 38 (1948)
pp. 430-432.
31
Brousseau, Geography‘s Literature, 334.
32
Douglas C. Pocock, Humanistic Geography and Literature: Essays on the Experience of Place (New
Jersey: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981) p. 15.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid.
28
7
―reality‖ and our personal images of reality,‘35
as well as containing ‗degrees of truth, of
verisimilitude, which is what the geographer is often most interested in.‟
Lawrence‟s 1915 novel
36
Cook mined
The Rainbow to find an illustration of the affective and somatic
representation of environment in the novelist‟s prose fiction: „The place had the strange desolation
of a ruin [. . . ] The rigidity of the blank streets, the homogeneous amorphous sterility of the whole
suggested death rather than life. There was no meeting place, no centre, no artery, no organic
formation. There it lay, like the new foundation of a red-brick confusion rapidly spreading, like a
skin-disease.‟37 Providing a short biographical sketch of Lawrence‟s origins, Cook wrote that the
Welsh author grew up in an environment in which „industrial development had just begun to spread
over the landscape: mines were an ―accident‖ and ―Robin Hood and his merry men were not far
away‖.‟38 He noted that Lawrence transposed the personas of his father and mother upon his
landscape depictions which symbolised in his prose representations
„industry and nature,
respectively.‟39 Within Lawrence‟s deep „imaginative view of the world,‟40 was a profound
„awareness of place,‟41 which caused him to observe: „Every continent has its own great spirit of
place. Every people is polarized in some particular locality, which is home, the heartland. Different
places on the face of the earth have different vital effluence, different vibration, different chemical
exhalation, different polarity with different stars: call it what you like. But the spirit of place is a
great reality.‟42
A chapter by David Seamon explored
the „phenomenological notions of existential
insidedness and existential outsideness developed by the geographer Edward Relph in Place and
Placelessness.‘43 Seamon selected a passage from Doris Lessing‟s journalistic account of her first
year in London, In Pursuit of the English (1960), to illustrate how the author depicted feelings „of
homelessness and not belonging,‟44 as an existential outsider, upon first arriving in England: „The
White Cliffs of Dover depressed me. They were too small. The Isle of Dogs discouraged me. The
Thames looked dirty. I had better confess that for the whole of the first year, London seemed to me
to be a city of such appalling ugliness that I only wanted to leave.‟45 Seamon framed an observation
by the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty and contended that if the „body works as an intelligent, but
Ian G. Cook, „Consciousness and the Novel: Fact or Fiction in the works of D. H. Lawrence,‟ Humanistic
Geography and Literature p. 68.
36
Ibid., 80.
37
Ibid.,77.
38
Ibid.,70.
39
Ibid., 71.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
42
Ibid.
43
David Seamon, „Newcomers, existential outsiders and insiders: their portrayal in two books by Doris
Lessing,‟ Humanistic Geography and Literature, p. 85.
44
Ibid., 86.
35
8
pre-reflective consciousness, then accounts in imaginative literature should provide concrete
validation of his claim.‟46
Seamon illustrated his argument with Lessing‟s depiction of the
claustrophobia that she experienced in the environs of her first house in London: „Decaying,
unpainted, enormous, ponderous, graceless. When I stand and look up, the sheer weight of the
building oppresses me
[. . . ] The flat has six rooms, all painted this heavy darkening cream, all
large, with high ceilings, no sound anywhere, the walls are so thick. I feel suffocated. Out of the
back windows, a vista of wet dark roofs and dingy chimneys. The sky is pale and cold and
unfriendly.‟47 Seamon then turned to Lessing‟s 1969 novel Four-Gated City to exemplify a literary
depiction of existential insideness in which „place is a setting of invisible, shifting energies which
the insider understands without thinking about it.‟48
Such a place according to Lessing could be
represented in „a sort of six-dimensional map which included the histories and lives and loves of
people, London -a section map in depth. This is where London exists, in the minds of people who
have lived in such and such street since they were born.‟49 Generally, Seamon concluded that from
a phenomenological perspective, literature provided geographers with the „ability to be both insider
and outsider: to feel at home in a particular place, yet to understand that place is part of a larger
earth whole.‟50
A chapter by Howard F. Andrews on nineteenth century literary representations of St.
Petersburg, argued that the fictional construction of the genius loci of the Russian city rested on two
concepts: „The existence of St. Petersburg as place, a tangible reality of certain memorable and
describable elements, and as image, a state of the mind adduced by place which is admittedly less
tangible but no less real.‟51 Andrews claimed that Pushkin‟s poem The Bronze Horseman was in
the same measure the creator of the image of the city, as Peter the Great was its architect, and
claimed Gogol‟s cycle of stories Petersburg Tales, elaborated an atmosphere of the city that gave it
„a sense of the bizarre, the fantastic and perhaps also the grotesque.‟52 Noting that Dostoevsky‟s
„imaginary map-like St. Petersburg included a few very real places, but these places are made real
only because concentrations of spiritual energy took place in them,‟53 Andrews concluded that the
city portrayed in Crime and Punishment, with its „apocalyptic and infernal imagery‘54 and
Dostoevsky‟s other novels and diaries, epitomised his „obsession with the alienation and subversion
45
Ibid.
Ibid., 85.
47
Ibid., 87.
48
Ibid. 93.
49
Ibid., 94.
50
Ibid., 98.
51
Howard F. Andrews, „Nineteenth-century St. Petersburg: Work points for an Exploration of Image and
Place,‟ Humanistic Geography and Literature, 174.
52
Ibid., 177.
53
Ibid., 180
46
9
of Russia‘s identity through contact with European institutions and social movements.‟55 Andrews
ascertained that a study of the Russian city through Dostoevsky‟s prose has important implications
for grasping the image and place of a „radically different (urban) structure of consciousness which
underpins his novels and short stories.‟56
The Continental post-structural revolution in language and literature culminated in a crisis of
representation.
This post-modernist dilemma underscored Gunnar Olsson‟s exploration of the
essence of subjectivity and the exiled writer. To illustrate „that meaning is an inter-subjective
relation, for experience is not meaning until communicated and thereby destroyed,‟57 Olsson crossed
out words and phrases in his text as he developed an essential rhetorical question: „how do I ground
my representation when my ambition is to criticise and thereby repressent society altogether?‟58
And he enigmatically claimed: „It is part of my epistemological stance that insiders experience and
outsiders understand; whereas experience is confined to one logical type at a time, understanding is
in the act of crossing categorical boundaries.‟ 59
Olsson contended that the exiled writer‟s representation of place might be the most poignant
of all: „For this reason, it is not surprising that the most penetrating accounts of home stem from
people away: August Strindberg, Henry James, James Joyce, Marc Chagall, Witold Gombrowicz,
Vladimir Nabokov.‟60 It is equally true that home insiders‟ accounts may be equally poignant, but
Olsson recognized that geography‟s frame of reference was „rooted‟ in the physical world, and a
person‟s affective relationship to it: „From the perspective of double bind it is equally interesting
that the yearning often is rendered as a return to physical, indeed earthy objects.‟61 In essence,
Olsson was grounding his practice of literary geography in the corporeal experience of place, rather
than in the merely textual function of literature, a methodology which importantly distinguishes his
work from the semantical techniques of literary criticism, and underscores the relevance of Irish
place and setting in this study.
In addition to Pocock‟s 1981 collection, other humanistic geographers engaged with
literature have made several observations on its usefulness to the discipline of geography. Porteous
has noted: „Plays are not considered, poetry is but occasionally used, the novel reigns supreme. The
advantages of the novel lie in its length (meaty), its prose form (understandable), its involvement
with the human condition (relevant), and its tendency to contain passages, purple or otherwise,
54
Ibid.
Ibid.
56
Ibid., 180-81.
57
Gunnar Olsson, „On Yearning for Home: An Epistemological View of Ontological Transformations,‟
Humanistic Geography and Literature, 122.
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid., 126-7.
60
Ibid., 126-7.
61
Ibid.
55
10
which deal directly with landscapes and places in the form of description (geographical).‟62
Focusing on regional geography Shortridge claimed „Place-defining novels provide a means to
explore the roots of modern vernacular regionalizations and thus aid our understanding of the role
regional labels play in our lives and in the lives of others.‟63 As a historical geographer, Herbert
contended that Jane Austen‟s novels provided „a filtered, subjective view of what places were really
like,‟64 during the eighteenth century, and noted: „Imaginative literature goes well beyond area,
landscape and environment and touches upon topics such as quality of life, social class divisions,
women in society and sources of inequality; all these are relevant to the geographer seeking to
understand the meanings of place.‟65
In his exploration of literature, Yi-Fu Tuan identified three possible modes in which
geographers could engage with the subject. Firstly as a „thought experiment on possible modes of
human experience and relationship.‟
66
Secondly as an artefact whereby literature „reveals the
environmental perceptions and values of a culture: it serves the geographer who is also a historian
of ideas.‟ 67 And thirdly „as an ambitious attempt to balance the subjective and the objective it is a
model for geographical synthesis.‟68 Citing E. M. Foster‟s A Passage to India, as an example of a
prose-fiction novel which illustrated his ideas. Tuan stated that „the model for regional geographers
of humanist leaning is [. . . ] the Victorian novelist who strives to achieve a synthesis of the
subjective and the objective.‟69 Asserting a similar argument, Brosseau contended: „For many
humanistic geographers, literature represents this mystical or even magical realm where the most
concrete aspects of the outside world and the human imagination and subjectivity are blended in
perfect harmony.‟70
1.2.3. Irish Geography and Literature
In the case of Ireland and its writers: „it has been suggested that the strength of feeling for
home-place is more deeply embedded in Irish literature than in any other west European culture.‟71
A few prominent Irish geographers have responded to the Sirens call of literature in their
explorations of place and identity upon the island. An audit of the collected volumes of Irish
Geography from 1944 until the present, finds a few papers dealing with the intersection of literature
J. D. Porteous, „Literature and Humanist Geography,‟ Area 17.2 (1985) p.117.
James R. Shortridge, „The Concept of Place -Defining Novel in American Popular Culture,‟ Professional
Geographer, 43 (3), 1991. p. 290.
64
D. Herbert „Place and Society in Jane Austen‟s England,‟ Geography 76 (1991) p. 207.
65
Ibid., 195.
66
Y. F. Tuan, „Literature and Geography: Implications for Research‘ in (eds.) David Ley and Marwyn
Samuels, Humanistic geography: prospects and problems (London : Croom Helm, 1978) p. 205.
67
Ibid.
68
Ibid.
69
Ibid., 204.
70
Ibid., 339.
62
63
11
and place. A review of an English translation of Tomas O‟ Crohan‟s (Tomás Ó Criomhthainn) The
Islandman,
in 1951 by A. Farrington,
stressed the importance of
Ó Criomhthainn‟s
anthropological role in describing the geographies of his environs: „It tells of the life of the small
community [. . . ] from point of view of one of the inhabitants who was a ―sharp observer as well as
a vigorous participant in all the events of his isolated world‖.‟72 Adopting a hermeneutic approach,
T. W. Freeman‟s paper „John Wesley in Ireland‟ (1975) attempted to reconstruct the Anglican
minister‟s travels in Ireland between 1747 and 1789 from journal entries. Freeman included
Wesley‟s impressions of towns, the estates of the landed gentry, farming techniques and climatic
conditions, conveying the subjective accounts that the minister recorded in the four volumes of his
journals.
Patrick Duffy‟s paper „Carleton, Kavanagh and the South Ulster Landscape c. 1800-1950‟
(1985) explored the possibility of a phenomenological „sense of place‟ in south Ulster expressed
through fiction: „This region of hungry hills and family farming has been celebrated fairly profusely
by the pens of William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh. Both writers are interesting because they
both exemplify some of the distinctive features of Irish regional literature.‟73 Duffy studied the
subjective experiences and impressions over time, that these two writers held about the land and the
distinctive cultures inhabiting this drumlin region. Carelton‟s The Black Prophet –a tale of the Irish
Famine, evoked „memories of a great many dark figures hurrying about the lanes and gardens of a
gloomy famine landscape.‟74
Duffy contrasted Carlton‟s nineteenth century impression, with
Kavanagh‟s early twentieth century novel Tarry Flynn: „notwithstanding the arrival of the tractor
and combined harvester, the spirit I found here had not changed in a hundred and fifty years.‟75
Duffy has also written elsewhere on immigration and its representation. In a chapter entitled
„Literary Reflections on Irish Immigration in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,‟ in Writing
Across Worlds: Literature and Migration (1995), he included a description an „American Wake‟
held in Donegal during the 1880s: „The person would be keened three times altogether during the
night [. . . ] and the whole gathering would accompany him three or four miles along the beginning
of his journey [. . .] as often that would be the last sight of him a lot of them would ever have.‟76
Selecting a passage from Edna O‟Brien‟s Country Girls (1960) he illustrated the manic rush of
sensation experienced by the rural born narrator, who sees the „neon fairyland of Dublin [. . .]
Patrick J. Duffy, „Carleton, Kavanagh and the South Ulster Landscape c. 1800-1950,‟Irish Geography,
Vol. 18 (1985) p. 35.
72
A. Farrington, „The Islandman,‟ Irish Geography, Vol. II, No. 3 (1951) p.132.
73
Duffy, Carleton, Kavanagh and the South Ulster Landscape, 26.
74
Ibid., 28.
75
Ibid., 31.
76
Patrick J. Duffy, „Literary Reflections on Irish Migration in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries‟ in
(eds.) R. King, J. Connell and P. White, Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration (London:
Routledge, 1995) p. 23.
71
12
Lights, faces, traffic, the enormous vitality of people hurrying to somewhere.‟77 A character in Sean
O‟Faoláin‟s Come Back to Erin (1940) gazes at the New York City skyline for the first time
„mesmerized by the vast cubes of buildings, re-cubed by their thousand windows, all now lit, and the
brighter for the oncoming night.‟78 And Richard Power‟s Ull I mBarr an Gheagain ( Apple on the
Treetop) (1958) depicted a noisy landscape of alienation encountered by an Irish immigrant to
Birmingham: „a wasteland, this black city under the glacial street lamps, a moonscape where you
could hear the constant throbbing of machinery, with never a let up.‟79 Frank O‟Connor‟s short
story Uprooted, (1952) depicted the „conflicting and contradictory emotions in rural out-migration
–the need to leave and the pain of loss.‟80 Duffy concluded his study by observing: „Irish writers for
the most part seem to have abandoned their emigrant characters at the boat. They disappear silently
over the horizon, out of sight, out of mind and out of the story.‟81
In another chapter entitled „Writing Ireland: Literature and art in the representation of Irish
place,‟ from In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (1997), Duffy tackled the „notion of
complex and contested representations of Irishness,‟82 and contended: „Irish place and landscape
have been variously constructed and interpreted to fulfil the changing requirements of particular
segments of society, both inside and outside the island. In this respect, literary texts can be
regarded as signifying practices, which interact with social, economic and political institutions so
that they ―are read, not passively, but, as it were, rewritten as they are read.‖ ‟83 Duffy examined
„the flexibilities and fluidities of contested constructions of Irish identity,‟84 in various literary texts.
His thematic framings included: The Myth of the West; Rural Ireland; the Big House; the Urban
World; the North, and Emigration and Exile. Duffy stated that literary texts can be „read in different
ways as in the rural idyll,‟85 and „the embodiment of the nation-state,‟86
and noted that various
Irish writers have been appropriated by the tourism industry: „An expanding array of summer
schools take advantage of the opportunities to sell Yeats, Hewitt, Carleton, Joyce, Kate O‘Brien
[. . . ] and many others as cultural tourism products.‟87 In this regard Duffy concluded, Irish
77
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., 28.
79
Ibid., 28.
80
Ibid, 29.
81
Ibid., 33.
82
Patrick J. Duffy, „Writing Ireland: Literature and Art in the Representation of Irish Place‟ in (ed.)Brian
Graham, In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 80.
83
Ibid., 65.
84
Ibid., 66.
85
Ibid., 80.
86
Ibid.
87
Ibid., 81.
78
13
literature and place are „defined and redefined constantly negotiated as society is contested along its
many and varied axes of differentiation by its myriad actors and their conflicting motivations.‟88
William Nolan‟s chapter „In the mind‟s eye: Francis MacManus and Kilkenny,‟ in Kilkenny:
Studies in Honour of Margaret M. Phelan
(1997),
explored the environs and locale of the
provincial city where „MacManus could observe the mellow core of old Kilkenny and the great
medieval remnants fragmented by later intrusions.‟89 MacManus was particularly influenced by the
writers Daniel Corkery and Aodh de Blacam. Corkery‟s criticism of Anglo-Irish literature in The
Hidden Ireland: A study of Gaelic Munster in the Eighteenth Century (1924) and Synge and AngloIrish Literature (1931) left MacManus inspired, but uneasy: „He was critical of Corkery‘s sweeping
use of the [word] expatriates noting that there was ―no expatriation of the heart. Ireland was
fastened to these writers like flesh to the bone.‖ ‟90 De Blacam‟s Gaelic Literature Surveyed (1930)
had a profound impact on MacManus, and subsequently his three earliest works of fiction, Stand
and Give Challenge (1934), Candle for the Proud (1936) and Men Withering (1939) composed a
trilogy on the life of the Gaelic poet Donnchadh Ruadh Mac Connmara, exploring the effects of
colonisation on early Irish history.
MacManus then created the fictional village of Drombridge as a metonym for Kilkenny and
situated three novels This House is Mine (1937), Flow on Lovely River (1941) and Watergate (1942)
in this imaginary locale. Depicting the Hickey family and their attachment to place, the trilogy
reflected the „melancholic strain in the Kilkenny psyche,‟91 according to the painter Tony O‟Malley,
who also stated that: „MacManus‘s affinity with his created place has an almost pagan intensity and
in reading them one is reading Kilkenny.‟92 Nolan poetically concluded that MacManus: „is more
assured writing of his own time, people and places –leafy country byways with all of their hidden
lives beyond the boisins –proud Kilkenny city peopled with the same brood coming to terms with the
ancient place where the stone holds the sun.‟93
A 1999 paper entitled „The Irish Travels of Asenath Nicholson 1844-45,‟ by Mary Gilmartin
in Text and Image: Social Construction of Regional Knowledges, examined representations of prefamine Ireland in writings of the American travel writer Asenath Nicholson. Examining her 1847
text Ireland‘s Welcome to the Stranger, Gilmartin focused on Nicholson‟s use of oppositions in a
portrayal of the Irish landscape, with its subjective „emphasis on the the poor, the rural, the hidden,
88
Ibid.
William Nolan, „ “In the mind‟s eye” : Francis MacManus and Kilkenny‘ in John Kirwan (ed.) Kilkenny:
Studies in Honour of Margaret M. Phelan (Kilkenny: Kilkenny Archaeological Society, 1997) p.207.
90
Ibid., 208.
91
Ibid., 212.
92
Ibid.
93
Ibid, 220.
89
14
the silenced.‟94
The representations of space examined by Gilmartin included the binaries
embodied in the depictions of male and female; rich and poor; urban and rural; home and away. She
adopted a theoretical stance that was oppositional as well; interested in elucidating spaces elided by
T.W. Freeman‟s
account of the historical geography of the period in Pre-Famine Ireland,
Gilmartin asserted that he is „not unusual‟95 in privileging „causes and solutions in a search for
objective ways of knowing this period.‟96
One of the tropes that Nicholson‟s text communicates through, Gilmartin contended is „a
differentiated scientific voice which sets itself up as woman-centred.‟97 This feminist geographical
reading of Ireland‘s Welcome discovered that the text‟s „main areas of concern are the domestic
and the private. The account concentrates on living conditions, food and clothing. In particular, the
lives and the stories of women and children are privileged -in this way, the version of ―Ireland‖ put
forward in the text differs from conventional accounts by providing an active space and voice for
women‘s experiences.‟98 And Gilmartin highlighted Nicholson‟s motivation behind her journey to
Ireland and the production of her travelogue: „It was my desire to go silently through the poor, and
to tell the story to my own countrymen; that they might be induced to labour more untiringly and
effectually for the destitute portion of this nation.‘99
Drawing upon the recent theoretical practices of the cultural turn in geography, which
include, „the structural devices, the metaphorical engagements, the linguistic tropes,‟
100
Nuala
Johnson‟s Scripting Memory: Literary Landscapes and the War Experience (2003) confronted Irish
amnesia about the First World War. She described Sean O‟Casey‟s The Silver Tassie as „the most
important literary work on the war by an Irish writer of the time,‟101 and discussed the rejection of
O‟Casey‟s play by W. B. Yeats in 1928 to convey the „underlying political difficulty in putting
sympathetically portrayed British soldiers on the stage of the Abbey Theatre in the late 1920s.‟102
O‟Casey‟s juxtaposition of Catholic imagery with battlefield detritus created a space in the play that
queried „the Church‘s response to war, and its role in its perpetuation and legitimisation.‟103 Given
the general cultural amnesia regarding the First World War in the collective memory of the Irish
Free State, the last act featuring survivors meeting at a dance at the Avondale Football Club, bearing
Mary Gilmartin, „The Irish Travels of Asenath Nicholson in 1844-45,‟ in (eds.) Anne Buttimer, Stanley D.
Brunn and Ute Wardenga, Text and Image: Social Construction of Regional Knowledges, 49 Institut für
Länderkunde Leipzig, (1999) p. 253.
95
Ibid., 248.
96
Ibid.
97
Ibid., 251.
98
Ibid.
99
Ibid., 248.
100
Nuala Johnson, „Scripting Memory: Literary Landscapes and the War Experience,‟ Ireland, The Great
War and the Geography of Remembrance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) p. 113.
101
Ibid., 115.
102
Ibid., 117.
94
15
both their war medals and their injuries, was an attempt to create a space of both remembrance and
consolation within a landscape of cultural nationalism: „The wounded returned soldier became a
spectacle in civilian society –a sight of both fascination and dread.‟104
Johnson then turned to role of Irish soldiers as writers, and stressed that their literature
should be read in conjunction with biographies, to elicit the ambivalence and contradictions felt by
Irish men serving in an unpopular war back home. She observed: „while many of these writings
[. . .] are of limited artistic merit they do offer a flavour of the common themes which occupied the
serving soldier‘s mind.‟105 She discussed Francis Ledgewidge, a Republican sympathiser sceptical
about fighting for Britain, who became a soldier under the influence of his mentor Lord Dunsany, a
Unionist peer. Dunsany in turn, brought Ledgewidge‟s collection Songs of the Field to publication in
1914. His later collections, Songs of Peace and Last Songs, were published posthumously.
Johnson contended: „In a fairly obvious way then, the map of the field of Ledgewidge‘s
affections reflected the larger map of the conflicting cultural and political energies which were
operative in Ireland throughout his lifetime.‟106
In a poem written just before his death,
Ledgewidge captured lonely yearning of a soldier for the familiar terrains of his native place: „
―The hills of home are in my mind, And there I wander as I will.‖ For many soldiers this was a
familiar sentiment as they remembered the landscape of home, but for Irish soldiers perhaps the
ambivalence of their position in the British army made such sentiments all the more important.‟107
Johnson wrote that Thomas MacGreevy, a Catholic artillery officer from Kerry, advanced his
works as a poet „beyond the popular pastoral Georgianism common to many writers and focuses
instead on the psychological and physical alienation precipitated by the war.‘108 She included verses
from his poem Nocturne, to illustrate MacGreevy‟s modernism: „I labour in a barren place, /Alone,
self-conscious frightened, blundering; /Far away, stars wheeling in space, /About my feet, earth
voices whispering.‟109
Johnson then surveys the early life of Liam O‟Flaherty from his days as a student postulant,
through his conversion to Marxism, and wrote that after enlisting to join the „world drama,‟ the
novelist experienced the terror and boredom of trench life. After being wounded O‟Flaherty was
discharged suffering from „melancholia acuta‘ 110 in 1918. Johnson claimed that his 1927 novel The
Return of the Brute lacked „much literary sophistication,‟111 but conveyed the brutality of trench
103
Ibid.
Ibid., 122
105
Ibid., 126.
106
Ibid., 128.
107
Ibid., 131.
108
Ibid., 132.
109
Ibid.
110
Ibid.,135
111
Ibid.
104
16
warfare: ‗I just stuck my hands into somebody‘s rotten guts. God! What a stink!‟112 Johnson noted:
„The experience of war itself seems to have debilitated O‘Flaherty‘s literary imagination and the
poverty of his war novel is perhaps in itself an indictment of the war.‘113
Johnson concluded her study with the novelist Patrick MacGill, a Catholic writer from
Donegal. As a child of twelve, MacGill was sent out to a hiring fair and spent his adolescence as a
navvy – an unskilled labourer -in Scotland. He ended up writing „non-fictional‟ novels about the
working-class. Employed as a cub reporter for the Daily Express, MacGill became „unpopular
amongst the political and ecclesiastical establishment,‟114 on his return to Donegal. His war novels
consisted of The Amateur Army (1915), The Red Horizon (1916) and The Great Push (1916) and
Johnson concluded : ‗The spaces of the migrant worker and, in his case, the Irish working-class
migrant in Britain, are obfuscated in his war novels as the spaces of trench warfare transform all
men into migrants as they experienced the alien landscape of war.‟115
The preceding studies of regional authors, emigration, place attachment and memory
provides evidence that a humanist engagement with literature is not completely absent within Irish
Geography.
However, as Duffy observed: „Irish geographers have inherited the intellectual
paradigms and prejudices of their colleagues in Britain and north America, and prominent among
the prejudices is a dismissal of the geographical value of serious study of sense of place and the use
of creative writing in academic work. Such studies are seen to be ‗soft‘, to lack the hard-edge of
objective scientific inquiry.‟116
1.2.4. Phenomenology: Towards a ‗Sense of Place‘
„Sense of Place‟ studies emerged in humanistic geography as a response to the plethora of
spatial models promulgated by the discipline‟s „quantitative revolution‟ of the 1950s and „60s.
Geographers became increasingly aware that subjective and affective dimensions concerning the
human experience of place had been ignored by the practitioners of spatial science. Seeking means
to address this theoretical and empirical blind spot in the discipline, certain geographers employed
techniques associated with phenomenology, a practice that „involves the description of things as one
experiences them.‟117
Phenomenological depictions of these experiences of place embodied
„seeing, hearing, and other sensory relations, but also believing, remembering, imagining, being
excited, getting angry, judging or evaluating, and having physical relations.‟118
112
Ibid.
Ibid., 136.
114
Ibid.
115
Ibid., 138.
116
Duffy, Carelton, Kavanagh and the South Ulster Landscape, 35.
117
Richard Peet, Modern Geographical Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) p. 37.
118
Ibid.
113
17
By the 1970s the salience of related factors pertaining to phenomenological concepts such
as identity, rootedness, imagination, value and intention, became important areas of concern in the
study of place attachment.119
The focus on the meaning and experience of place raised the
relevance of literature as a means through which geography as a discipline, could self-critique the
objective claims proffered by the positivistic models of the quantitative revolution: „Humanistic
geographers hoped to bring people and human agency back to the core of research from which they
had been evicted and replaced by databanks. Literature would soon be associated with this
rehabilitation of subjectivity. It was seen as a valuable source for examining more subjectively the
sense of place.‟120
A small cadre of geographers incorporated a critical eidetic reading of phenomenology in
their studies of place. Through this type of reading, vivid visual memories, hallmarked by their
accuracy of detail, were interpreted, analysed and represented according to a philosophy „founded
on the importance of reflecting on the ways in which the world is made available for intellectual
inquiry [paying] particular attention to the active, creative function of language and discourse in
making the world intelligible.‟121
In Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld (1976) Anne Buttimer
ruefully acknowledged: „Strange indeed sounds the language of poets and philosophers; stranger
still the refusal of science to read and hear its message. The humanistic geographer, attuned to the
voices of the scientist and philosopher cannot afford to dismiss anything which may shed light on
the complexities of man‘s relationship to the earth.‟122
Buttimer claimed that geography as a social science had often lacked „ideas and languages
to describe and explain the human experience of nature, space and time.‟123 Thus a core concern of
pure phenomenology
„was the analysis and interpretation of consciousness, particularly the
conscious cognition of direct experience.‟124 She wrote that the „notion of intentionality suggests
that each individual is the focus of his own world,‟125 leaving them perhaps alienated at times, from
a larger collective experience of the world. Translating the concept of lebenswelt (lifeworld)
developed by German phenomenologists Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl for humanistic
geography, Buttimer contended that „subjective experience, fantasy and taste,‟126 influence a lifeD. Ley, and M.S. Samuels, Humanistic Geography –Prospects and Problems (Chicago: Maarouffa
Press, 1978 ); D. Lowenthal, „Geography, experience and imagination: towards a geographical
epistemology‟ in Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 51:3 (1961)
120
Brousseau, Geography‘s Literature, 334.
121
R. J. Johnston, D. Gregory and D. M. Smith, The Dictionary of Human Geography, 3rd. Ed. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994) p.438.
122
Anne Buttimer, „Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld‟ in Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, 66: 2 (1976) p.277.
123
Ibid., 278.
124
Ibid., 279.
125
Ibid.
126
Ibid., 281.
119
18
world‘s character. Claiming that „people are born into an inter-subjective world [where they] learn
languages and styles of social behaviour, which enable [them] to engage in the everyday world,‟127
she noted: „The notion of the life world connotes essentially the prereflective, taken for granted
dimensions of experience, the unquestioned meanings [ . . .] Broadly speaking, lebenswelt could be
defined as the ―all encompassing horizon of our individual and collective accounts.‖ ‘ 128 But in
arguing for the value of a phenomenological approach, Buttimer did not make the claim that
humanistic and positivistic avenues of enquiry in geography were inevitably opposed, only that
appropriate roles for their respective methodologies warranted further exploration.
In Place and Placelessness (1976) Edward Relph explored the subjective nature of place
attachment as a „phenomenon of the geography of the lived-world of everyday experiences.‟129 He
claimed that „people are their place and a place is its people,‘ and developed the concept of
‗rootedness‘: ‗To have roots in a place is to have a secure point from which to look out on the
world, a firm grasp of one‘s own position in the order of things, and a significant spiritual and
psychological attachment to somewhere in particular.‘130 Relph‟s concept of rootedness infers that
a person identifying strongly with one locale would feel „out-of-place,‟ in another. Coining the
term „existential outsideness‟131 to describe a condition „in which all places assume the same
meaningless identity,‟132 he noted that this perspective had „a long tradition in academic
geographers‘ objective cataloguing of information and neutralization of thought in order to explain
―scientifically‖ the spatial organisation of places.‟133
In contrast, „existential insidedness‟134
would be characterized by a person‟s „belonging to a place and the deep and complete identity with
a place that is the very foundation of the place concept.‟135
Tuan‟s application of phenomenology emerged in
Topophilia (1974). He defined the
neologism of the title as describing „the affective bond between people and place or setting,‟136 and
acknowledged that ‗the study of environmental perceptions, attitudes and values is enormously
complex.‟137 Tuan concluded that human beings over time have persistently searched for an „ideal
environment,‟138 which varies from one culture to another, but whose essence is drawn from „two
127
Ibid., 285.
Ibid., 281.
129
Peet, Modern Geographical Thought, 49.
130
Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976) p. 38.
131
Peet, Modern Geographical Though, 50.
132
Ibid.
133
Ibid.
134
Relph, 55.
135
Ibid.
136
Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study Of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, And Values (Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice-Hall, 1974) p. 4.
137
Ibid., 245.
138
Ibid., 248.
128
19
antipodal images: the garden of innocence and the cosmos.‟139 Human life can be metaphorically
framed as an existential journey between places: „from the shade under the baobab to the magic
circle under heaven; from home to public square, from suburb to city; from a seaside holiday to the
enjoyment of the sophisticated arts, seeking for a point of equilibrium that is not of this world.‟140
In Humanistic Geography (1976) Tuan stated that „scientific approaches to the study of
man tend to minimize the role of human awareness and knowledge. Humanistic geography, by
contrast, specifically tries to understand how geographical activities and phenomena reveal the
quality of human awareness. ‟141 Elaborating further on the latter, Tuan asked the question: „What is
the role of emotion and thought in the attachment to place?‟142 And noted: „Human places vary
greatly in size. An armchair by the fireside is a place, but so is the nation-state. Small places can be
known through direct experience, including the intimate senses of smell and touch. A large region
such as the nation-state is beyond most people‘s direct experience, but it can be transformed into
place - a focus of passionate loyalty -through symbolic means of art, education, and politics. How
mere space becomes an intensely human place is a task for the humanist geographer; it appeals to
such distinctively humanistic interests as the nature of experience, the quality of the emotional bond
to physical objects, and the role of concepts and symbols in the creation of place identity.‘143
In his paper, Tuan listed five themes (the first three which are relevant to the aims of this
thesis) elaborating a phenomenological approach to studying a sense of place: the nature of
geographical knowledge; the role of territory in human behaviour; the creation of place identities;
the role of knowledge as an influence on livelihood; the influence of religion on human activity.
Tuan contended such themes were best elicited by humanist inflections on historical and regional
geographies.144 Viewed through the lens of Tuan‟s application of eidetic phenomenology:
„geography is a mirror revealing the essence of human existence and human striving: to know the
world is to know oneself, just as the careful analysis of a house reveals much about the designer
and occupant.‟ 145
By extension, through such a methodological application Tuan believed that
„the study of landscapes is the study of the essences in the societies which mould them, in just the
same way that the study of literature and art reveals much of human life.‟146 This view of
landscape reflected the cultural turn that shortly followed the humanistic trend in geography. By the
139
Ibid.
Ibid.
141
Yi- Fu Tuan, „Humanistic Geography,‟ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 66 .2 (1976)
p. 267.
142
Ibid., 269.
143
Ibid.
144
Ibid., 267.
145
R. J. Johnston, Geography & Geographers : Anglo-American Human Geography since 1945, (London:
Arnold, 1997) p. 189.
146
Ibid.
140
20
1980s, questions and ideas concerning experience, perception and representation were transforming
and reconceptualising the idea of landscape for many historical and cultural geographers.
1.2.5. Landscape
The word landscape possesses etymological roots buried deep in western medieval history:
„geographical writers on landscape have identified the origins of the present English word in
German and Middle English terms which denoted an identifiable tract of land, an area of known
dimensions like the fields and woods of a manor or parish,‟147 and „landschap, like its Germanic
root, Landschaft, signified a unit of human occupation, indeed a jurisdiction, as much as anything
that might be a pleasing object of depiction.‟148 During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as the
Renaissance blossomed in certain regions of Europe, the term landscape entered the aesthetic and
academic lexicons: „German, Dutch and Italian painters and cartographers of [the] sixteenth
century came to employ the terms Landschaft, landschap and paese in an aesthetic sense but these
words initially had a territorial, thus geographic significance.‟
150
paintings,‟
149
Within the „maps and
of the period „the land its self became an object for a spectator.‟ 151 These artistic
and utilitarian framings of landscape ‗encouraged its contemplation,‘ 152 as a form of ‗theatre, as a
spectacle, as a representation.‟153
In early twentieth century geography Paul Vidal de la Blache‟s
Tableau de la Géographie de la Françe (1903) and Carl Sauer‟s The Morphology of Landscape
(1926) illustrated varying approaches and definitions to the modern geographical study of landscape.
The former viewed landscape as an expression of human activity; the latter as made up of a „distinct
associations of forms, both physical and cultural.‟154 Both studies recognised that „the affective
dimension of landscape indicated a harmony between human life and the milieu in which it is
lived,‟155 with Sauer concluding that there remained „an aspect of meaning in landscape which lies
―beyond science.‖‟156
In 1939, Richard Hartshorne‟s The Nature of Geography, „carefully dissected the confused
use of Landschaft‘157 and „argued for landscape‘s exclusion from the geographical vocabulary
unless it‘s meaning was so refined as to expunge all subjective and personal connotations.‟158 A
humanistic response to this exclusion of subjectivity in the study of landscape can be found in The
147
D. Cosgrove, Social Formation and the Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom-Helm, 1984) p. 16.
S. Schama, Landscapes and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1995) p. 10.
149
A. Baker, Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
p.111.
150
Ibid.
151
Ibid.
152
Ibid.
153
Ibid.
154
Baker, Geography and History,110.
155
Cosgrove, Social Formation and the Symbolic Landscape, 17.
156
Ibid.
157
Baker, 109
148
21
Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (1979). The recognition that the term
landscape was „attractive, important and ambiguous‘159 was embraced by a number of geographers.
For D.W. Meinig the collection‟s editor, landscape was „the unity we see, the impressions of
our senses rather than the logic of the sciences.‟160 In a chapter entitled
„The Beholding Eye,‟
included in the volume‟s collection, Meining asserted a central problem: „any landscape is
composed of not only what lies before our eyes but what lies within our heads. Recognition of that
fact brings us to the brink of some formidably complex matters.‟ 161 Describing how a „varied group
group might describe a common scene,‟162 Meinig listed ten possible ways in which landscape
could be subjectively conceptualised and perceived: As Nature; Habitat; Artifact; System; Problem;
Wealth; Ideology; History; Place, and as Aesthetic.163 Meinig contended that „identification of these
different bases for the variations in interpretations of what we see is a step toward more effective
communication‟164 of the various experiences of landscape. Pierce Lewis‟ chapter „Axioms for
Reading the Landscape,‟ built one of the foundations for geography‟s reconceptualisation of
landscape during the discipline‟s cultural turn in the late twentieth century: „our human landscape is
our unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values our aspirations, and even our fears in
tangible form.‘165 Lewis likened landscape to a „book whose pages are missing, torn, and smudged;
a book whose copy has been edited and re-edited by people with illegible handwriting.‟166
In 1985 Denis Cosgrove traced the subjective dimension of landscape back to the Italian
Renaissance, during the social and economic transition from feudalism to early capitalism. The idea
of landscape Cosgrove argued, was a construction of the urban bourgeois, that along with painting,
cartography, and theatre „suggested that perspective and landscape was not just a way of seeing, but
rather came to be seen by members of dominant groups as the true way of seeing.‟167 Cosgrove
noted that landscape was in effect: „a composition and structuring of the world so that it may be
appropriated by a detached, individual spectator to whom an illusion of order and control is offered
through the rules of space according to the certainties of geometry.‟168 Consequently, landscape as a
mode of representation, became a means to promote political, economic and cultural ideology,
158
Cosgrove, 15
Baker, 110.
160
D. W. Meinig, „Introduction,‟ in (ed.) D.W. Meinig, The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes:
Geographical Essays (NY/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) p.2.
161
D.W. Meinig, „The Beholding Eye,‟ The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, 34.
162
Ibid.
163
Ibid., 34-46.
164
Ibid., 47.
165
Pierce Lewis, „Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene‟ in (ed) D.W.
Meinig, The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes,. 12.
166
Ibid.
167
Don Mitchell, Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) p. 115.
168
Denis Cosgrove, „Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea,‟ Transactions 10
(1985) p.55.
159
22
establishing the role of the artist and spectator as integral elements of
perception.
its construction and
Cosgrove made an important connection between the artist, spectator and the
representation of landscape: „in an important, if not always literal, sense the spectator owns the view
because all of its components are structured and directed towards his eyes only [. . . ] Subjectivity is
rendered the property of the artist and the viewer –those who control the landscape –not those who
belong to it.‟169 This refuted Hartshorne‟s contention regarding the objectivity imparted upon
landscapes, and in this sense: „Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less
a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and
accidents take place. For those who, with the inhabitants, are behind the curtains, landmarks are no
longer geographic but also biographical and personal.‟170
During the late 1980s and early „90s, much uncertainty heralded the post-structuralist „crisis
of representation,‟ and subsequently fuelled debates in which the experience, perception and
representation of landscape became a significant issue for debates and approaches within cultural
geography. As Daniels and Cosgrove (1988) noted, landscapes could be: „Represented in a variety
of materials and on many surfaces –in paint on canvas, in writing on paper, in earth, stone, water
and vegetation on the ground.‟
171
And from this relative point of view, they maintained „A
landscape park is more palpable but no more real, nor less imaginary, than a landscape painting or
poem.‟172 Whether one agrees with this observation made by Daniels and Cosgrove, it can be seen
that the evolution of the concept of landscape has mirrored cultural and intellectual trends which
have spanned from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the late twentieth century. From this
historical perspective it can be seen that the one constant thread running through this evolution in
thought is an emphasis upon the subjective experience of landscape and its subsequent
cartographical and aesthetic representations.
1.2.6. Summary
In its purest essence the word geography translated from its Greek roots means „earth
writing.‟ This section has traced the role of literature from the inception of Western geography as
practicised in classical Greece, to its re-emergence as a pratice in the sub-disciplines of humanistic
and cultural geography in the late twentieth century. Confluent with this re-emergence has been an
emphasis in human geography on the subjective and individual experience of place as illustrated by
the works of Buttimer, Tuan and Relph during the 1970s. These phenomenological investigations
aimed to counter the impersonal, statistical models employed during the quantitative revolution in
169
D. Cosgrove, Social Formation and the Symbolic Landscape, 26.
J. Berger, A Fortunate Man (London: Writers and Readers, 1976) p 15.
171
S. Daniels and D. Cosgrove, The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on Symbolic Representation,
Design and Use of Past Environments,(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) p. 1.
172
Ibid.
170
23
geography during the 1950s and 1960s. These investigations preceded the disciplines‟ cultural turn
in the 1980s, which reconceptualised the nature of Western European landscape representations,
tracing their subjective dimensions back to the Italian Renaissance. An important concept in
historical and cultural geography, landscape provides an arena through which place and identity can
be framed and explored.
This study will draw upon ideas and concepts found in this initial discussion of the practice
of literary geography, the phenomenological investigation of place by humanist geographers
Buttimer, Tuan and Relph, and the subjective nature of landscape representations found in English
language novels written and published by Irish authors between the years 1929 and 1939. Before
describing this study‟s methodology and introducing the writers and works to be examined, a brief
overview of 1930s Ireland, its history and culture during the period, will contextualise the themes
and content emerging from this thesis.
1.3. 1930s Ireland: History & Culture
1.3.1. Introduction
This section provides a brief sketch of the political and cultural history of the Irish Free
State and Northern Ireland during the 1930s. It concludes with a discussion of the cultural contexts
in which Irish authored English language novels of the period were written. The ratification of the
Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922 founded the Irish Free State (Saorstát Eireann) and led to a bitter,
internecine civil war (Cogadh na gCarad -„war of the friends, relatives‟) in 1923. The State was
effectively ruled during the 1920s by a Cumann na nGaedheal government under William T.
Cosgrave from its inception. The assassination of Justice Minister Kevin O‟ Higgins „popularly
considered the strong man of the government,‟173 on 10 July 1927, by IRA dissidents, provoked the
question of whether the transfer of political power in the fledgling state, as it entered the 1930s,
would ever be accomplished by peaceful and democratic means.
This question was answered on 9 March 1932, when the Fianna Fáil party, led by Eamon de
Valera entered Dáil Eireann with pistols in their pockets after winning a majority of seats in the
February election. The grass-root political base of the party was composed of „a complex coalition
of traditionalists, modernisers, visionaries, conservatives, radicals, cranks and optimists.‟174 Based
on the structures of the old IRA, Fianna Fáil membership drew small farmers and landless labourers,
to which elements of urban labour, the larger farmers and the petite bourgeois were later joined.
Having fought on the Republican side against Treaty forces under a Cumann na nGaedheal
government during the Civil War, de Valera and his deputies distrusted the democratic intentions of
Cosgrave‟s administration. They also doubted the loyalty of the Free State Army: „To shoot or
173
J. J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) pp.
152-153.
24
salute was the stark choice some senior officers saw facing them,‟175 as they watched their old
republican foes from the Civil War of 1923 enter the Dáil. The fears of de Valera and his deputies
proved to naught; they were „saluted,‟ and installed as the new government. This peaceful transfer
of political power illustrated the democratic viability of an independent Irish state. Short of a Dáil
majority, Fianna Fáil formed a coalition government with the Labour party, and de Valera set in
motion social and economic programmes, that shaped the political landscape of the decade in three
significant ways.
Once elected as President of the Executive Council, de Valera‟s first act was to declare that
the „Oath of Fidelity‟ to the British sovereign, would be struck from the constitution. This signalled
his intention to alter the structures of the Free State government as set out in the Anglo-Irish
Agreement of 1921 and this would lead to the drafting and implementation of the 1937 Constitution.
Secondly, in June of 1932, he withheld and retained land annuities being paid to the British
government. This instigated the Economic War between the two nations, the immediate effect of
which was to depress the country‟s agricultural prices. The British government imposed a 20 per
cent ad valorem duty on all Irish exports to Britain of livestock and farm produce; the Free State
retaliated by imposing duties on imports of British coal.
The long-term effect of the land annuities retention would be manifested in rates of rural
emigration during the period, though small land owning farmers in arrears did benefit initially from
de Valera‟s policy. The third major programme of de Valera‟s first government was to provide state
support for industry and agriculture. Economic protectionism was a hallmark of this policy strand;
indigenous entrepreneurship was promoted to develop a homegrown industrial sector, and
government pressure was applied to shift farming from pasturage to tillage.
Resistance to the government agenda came from both wings of the period‟s ideological
spectrum, but de Valera‟s political acumen allowed him to steer his Fianna Fáil programmes around
the shifting shoals of parliamentary and radical resistance. The Fine Gael party comprised de
Valera‟s right-wing opposition in the Dáil and emerged in the mid 1930s from a political
amalgamation of three separate entities: the former Cumman na nGaedheal; the Army Comrades
Association, which transformed into the quasi-fascist National Guard, nicknamed the „Blueshirts,‟
led by Eoin O‟Duffy, and the National Centre Party, which wished to maintain Ireland‟s status in the
British Commonwealth. Radical opposition came from de Valera‟s former comrades in the IRA,
who espoused a nebulous form of republican socialism, and the more Trotskyite organisation, Saor
Éire. During the early 1930s, de Valera invoked Article 2A of the Emergency Powers Act to
convene military tribunals against IRA volunteers, and in 1936 abolished the Free State Seanad.
174
175
Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland: 1900-2000 (London: Profile, 2004) p. 359.
John P. Duggan, A History of the Irish Army (Dublin, Gill and MacMillan, 1991) p. 157.
25
Later that year the Spanish Civil War lured groups from both ideological wings to fight for General
Franco‟s Nationalist front, or against his military junta on the Republican side.
1.3.2. From Saorstát to Éire
De Valera‟s official state welcome to the papal nuncio at the Eucharistic Congress in
Phoenix Park during June of 1932, affirmed that the Irish Free State‟s Catholic identity was indeed
distinct and separate from the Protestant heritage of its former coloniser. The same year, the Irish
Free State Official Handbook published a table listing „the numerical strength of the principal
religious denominations in Saorstát Eireann.‟176 Figures revealed that 92.6 per-cent of the
population in the 1926 census had identified itself as Catholic. 177 In the same census, Protestants
were shown to compose 8.4 per-cent of the population.178 However in 1936, new census figures
revealed that „the Protestant proportion of Irish employers and business executives was 20-25 percent; bank officials, 53 per-cent; commercial representatives 39 per-cent; lawyers, 38 per cent.‟179
Trinity College Dublin was the exclusive bastion of this minority coterie, and the 1936 percentages
echoed the historical roles of the Anglo-Irish professional classes and „landed gentry, who for
generations had played a key part in local government and also had provided considerable
employment,‟180 in what had become the twenty six county state in southern Ireland. Despite their
proportional strength during the decade, the social and political influence of Protestant culture on
Free State policy during the decade, was negated by the size of the majority Catholic population: „In
education, as in social law, the state followed the Catholic line: divorce was excluded, birth control
outlawed, the Ne Temere decree enforced Catholic conditioning on children of mixed marriages.‟181
Despite the triumphant declaration of a Catholic Ireland from the government in Dublin, the
rural Irish landscape suffered poverty, emigration and social fragmentation rooted in a lingering
bitterness over the Irish Civil War. By 1935, unemployment rose to nearly 100,000, in a country of
3 million, in which over 50 per-cent of its population was engaged in agricultural labour.182 A grim
depiction of an Irish provincial town in 1932, the same year as the Eucharistic Congress was held,
found it: „incredibly dirty and sordid to look upon. In the long back street inhabited by the
proletariat [there is] human excrement at every second step. There is no vestige of culture in the
place. The local priests were sour and secretive fellows, who confined their activities to the
prevention of fornication, dancing and reading. The only pasttime permitted to the males was
E. M. Stephens, „The Constitution,‟ in (ed.) Bulmer Hobson, Saorstat Eireann: The Free State Official
Handbook (London: Ernest Benn, 1932) p. 70.
177
Ibid.
178
Ibid.
179
Roy Foster, Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 (London: Penguin 1989) p. 534.
180
F.S.L. Lyons, „The Minority Problem in the 26 Counties,‟ in (ed.) Francis MacManus, The Years of the
Great Test: 1926-39 (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1967) 93.
181
Foster, Modern Ireland, 534.
182
Lee, Ireland: 1912-1985, 23.
176
26
drinking in the fifty-three public houses. The females wandered about with a hungry expression in
their eyes.‟183 The roles for Irish women would further be prescribed within the patriarchal clauses
of the 1937 Constitution: „Article 41 emphasized her place ―within the home‖,‘184 and that ‗the
State shall [. . . ] endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to
engage in labour to the neglect of their duties at home.‟185 During the period „De Valera‘s image of
woman was widely cherished in Ireland [. . . ] However, a few educated women did repudiate the
kitchen sink role allotted them by the constitution.‟186
In 1935 the Irish Folklore Commission, founded to study rural folkways and culture, was
inaugurated at the „very moment when the society it celebrated was entering its final stage.‟187
Emigration, though staunched slightly by the Wall Street Crash of 1929, was a recurring theme in
Irish rural life during the period. In a population of approximately three-million, figures showed that
emigration reached a high of „26,000‟ people per year by 1937, „with single people, especially
women predominating.‟188 With the life-blood of the country flowing to its urban centres and
through its ports, the government instituted an educational policy, to the detriment of maths and
science, fostering the teaching of Irish language as a means „to revive the ancient life of Ireland as a
Gaelic State, Gaelic in language, and Gaelic and Christian in its ideals.‟
189
However, a report
issued by the Department of Education in 1928-29 found that „in many districts in which Irish is
being well-taught in the schools, the language has little existence outside the school walls [and] it
may well be that the revival of the language may prove to be beyond their powers.‟ 190 It has been
observed that „the schools -based [language] revival policy in the 1930s had a number of clearly
negative consequences. It resulted in the narrowing of the curriculum to facilitate the teaching of
Irish [and] compounded the educational disadvantage of those with high rates of absenteeism or
who left school early.‟191
De Valera‟s emphasis on Catholicism, the Irish language and frugality during the 1930s
reflected a „philosophy of politics based on the preservation of the small farmer and the social unit
centred around him [. . . ] this type of society was essentially a conservative one. It did not
Liam O‟Flaherty, „The Irish Censorship‟ in (ed.) Julia Carlson, Banned in Ireland: Censorship and the
Irish Writer (London: Routledge, 1990 [1932] )p. 139.
184
Lee, 206.
185
Ibid.
186
Ibid., 207.
187
Foster, 538.
188
Lee, 187; Foster, 539.
189
E.B. Titley, Church, State and the Control of Schooling in Ireland 1900-1944 (Dublin: 1983 ) p. 82, quote
referenced in Foster‟s, Modern Ireland, 518.
190
Séan Ó Catháin, „Education in the New Ireland,‟ The Years of the Great Test, 111-112.
191
Adrian Kelly, „The Irish language revival and the education system,‟ in (ed.) Joost Augusteijn, Ireland in
the 1930s: New Perspectives (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999) p. 45
183
27
understand or accept the maximisation of capital wealth as a principle object of state policy.‟192 In
spite of de Valera‟s adherence to a vision of an idyllic, Gaelic Ireland of small rural land-owners „a
two-party, British-style democracy had ostensibly developed,‟193 with the „official culture‟ and
political power in the new independent state becoming vested in large landed farmers and the urban
Catholic bourgeois. A wry observation on the lack of precedence for the French and American style
of government in Irish culture: „Abair an focal republic i nGaoluinn, (Say the word republic in
Irish),‟194 by Blasket Islander Tomás Ó Criomhthainn after the 1916 Uprising seemed especially
prescient during the 1930s. The authoritarian realpolitik operating under the aegis of the AngloIrish Agreement of 1922 seemed to confirm a belief in a few dissident republican quarters that a
„Sacsa nua darb anim Éire‟ (a new England called Ireland),‟195 had been created and maintained at
the behest of Britain by willing Irish hands.
However, the construction and ratification of the 1937 Constitution, placed Ireland on the
road to becoming a separate republic, and can be recorded as de Valera‟s most significant political
achievement of the period. The new constitution replaced the name of the Irish Free State with Éire,
and „embodied the language of popular sovereignty, with strong theocratic implications.‟196 The
drafts of the document had been „vetted by senior Catholic clergy before being unveiled to the
public,‟197 for ratification, and though it recognised the „special position‟ of the Church in the State,
it maintained the principle of religious freedom, much to the dismay of Archbishop John Charles
McQuaid. The office of President was inaugurated; the Seanad which had been abolished was
restored and proportional representation was retained for Dáil elections. Although Éire was
comprised of the twenty-six counties of southern Ireland, the constitution claimed that „pending the
reintegration of the national territory,‟ all thirty-two counties on the island composed the true corpus
of the Irish nation. The State‟s external association with the United Kingdom had been modified by
de Valera‟s political sleight of hand, and Éire was constituted as a de-facto republic within the
British Commonwealth.
Throughout the decade, in a pragmatic political sense, the principle of Irish neutrality had
been carefully cultivated with de Valera‟s high profile participation in the League of Nations, in
order to craft a separate international identity from Britain, and to steer the fledgling state away from
involvement in the gathering storm of the Second World War. Successive Fianna Fáil coalition
governments survived Dáil elections in 1933 and 1937 and by the end of the 1930s, a concerted
effort was underway in urban areas to clear away slums, described as the worst in Europe, and to
Desmond T. Williams, „Conclusion,‟in The Years of the Great Test, 179
Foster, Modern Ireland, 532.
194
Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Vintage, 1996) p. 286.
195
Ibid.,15.
196
Foster, Modern Ireland, 544.
192
193
28
build safe, affordable housing for the disadvantaged and the poor. A slight relief for small farmers
and landless labourers accompanied the 1938 Anglo-Irish Agreement on trade and finance. This
treaty ended the Economic War and returned ports on the southern coast of the island occupied by
the British navy to the Irish government. In June of that year Douglas Hyde, a Protestant and one of
the founding members of the Gaelic Revival became the state‟s first President, as a compromise
candidate between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.
As the country entered the last year of the decade, Adolph Hitler‟s invasion of Poland in
September of 1939, commenced the Second World War, which lasted until 1945 and was described
in the Free State as the „Emergency.‟ De Valera‟s minister for the Co-ordination of Defensive
Measures, Frank Aiken in parsing the rationales for Éire‟ s political stance during this period, stated:
„In cold economic and military fact is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between the
seriousness of the two emergencies called war and neutrality.‟198 Choosing the latter path, the
fledgling state of Éire left behind the malaise of the 1930s.
1.3.3. A Protestant Parliament; A Protestant State
Northern Ireland was established as a six county „statelet‟ in Ulster by Lloyd George‟s
Government of Ireland Act of 1920. Initially the Act proposed a nine county partition, but with Sinn
Fein‟s abstention from Westminster and pressure from Ulster Unionists, George‟s cabinet ceded
Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan to the South: „The border was [drawn] explicitly to provide
unionists with as much territory as they could safely control [. . . ] to ensure Protestant supremacy
over Catholics even in predominantly Catholic areas.‟199
Unionist political hegemony was further engineered, not only by gerrymandering, but also
through
property franchise, which weighed the vote in favour of the Protestant bourgeois
community and by the abolition of proportional representation in local elections in 1921, and
parliamentary elections in 1929. Indeed, the Act demarcated an enclave on the island „whose twothirds majority, and whose governing class, representing only that majority, remained obsessively
conscious of the need to proclaim their British connection,‟200 causing a Northern Protestant critic to
observe in 1931: „Six largely agricultural counties, carved out of a comparatively poor country, and
artificially magnified into a ―State‖ cannot ―keep‖ with over-industrialised and over-populated
Britain in anything except pauperisation.‟201 By the time the Stormont parliament building opened
in 1932, Sir James Craig had presided over a one-party Unionist government for more than a decade.
Responding to a Nationalist critic‟s soubriquet of Stormont as a „Protestant‟s Assembly‟ during a
197
Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 360.
Robert Fisk, In Time of War, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-45 (London, 1983) p.142.
199
Lee, Ireland: 1912-1985, 45-46.
200
Foster, Modern Ireland, 528.
198
29
parliamentary debate on 24 April 1934, Craig declared: „The Hon. Member must remember that in
the South they boasted of a Catholic State. They still boast of southern Ireland being a Catholic
State. All I boast of is that we are a Protestant Parliament and Protestant State.‟202
The initial Nationalist response to the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 was abstentionism,
believing that the Northern state had no viable future. Both the Irish Parliamentary Party and Sinn
Féin refused to take their seats at Westminster, and for the first two years of Northern Ireland‟s
existence, the minority Catholic population had no political representation in the state‟s government.
In addition the Catholic community boycotted the Lynn Committee, which was set up to restructure
the North‟s educational system, leaving „the Unionist government free to Protestantize,‟203 secular
schools. In 1925, realizing that the partitioned state was fait accompli, Joseph Devlin, leader of the
Irish Party took his seat in the House of Commons along with a Nationalist MP from Antrim. This
began a trickle, which would by 1927 see ten Home-Rule MPs sitting in Westminster, however by
this time the structures for local government and education had been firmly established and were
under solid control of the Unionist majority.
Despite possessing this political hegemony „Unionism was united on very little except the
union. Otherwise it embraced a variety of factions,‟204 including the extremism of the Ulster
Blackshirt movement; the anachronistic rituals of the Orange Order and more mainstream middleclass Unionists. The Catholic community in the North contained fractures of its own: „the younger
generation, both clergy and laity became enthusiastic supporters of Sinn Féin, but the Primate, the
bishops, the older priests and a large proportion of the electorate held aloof from, or were even
hostile to the new movement,‟205 and predominantly backed the Home-Rule constitutional
movement.
The plague of sectarian violence, between Protestant and Catholic communities fuelled by
bigotry and poverty, remained an atavistic thread running through the social and cultural fabric of
Ulster during the 1920s and „30s. In 1922 sectarian violence claimed the lives of 232 people and
wounded over 1000. The government response was to form an armed Special Constabulary known
as the „B-Specials,‟ that recruited members from the Ulster Volunteer Force and more criminal
elements of the United Protestant League. In 1933, Special Powers legislation in regards to arrest
and internment were permanently instituted into law. The Poor Law riots of 1932 temporarily united
201
Denis Ireland, Ulster To-day and To-morrow her part in a Gaelic civilization: a study in political
revolution (London: Hogarth Press, 1931) p. 34.
202
Patrick Buckland, The Factory of Grievances: Devolved Government in Northern Ireland 1921-39
(Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1979) p. 72.
203
Foster, Modern Ireland, 529.
204
Lee, Ireland: 1912-1985, 138.
205
David Kennedy, „Catholics in Northern Ireland, 1926-1939,‟ TheYears of the Great Test, 139.
30
the working class communities from both traditions, but proved to be a brief exception to the rule; in
1935 sectarian riots erupted once more during the Protestant marching season.
Though Unionist leader Craig may have „genuinely wished to reconcile Catholic and
Protestant in Northern Ireland [and] was even prepared to contemplate the possibility of a united
Ireland in his own lifetime,‟206 the British Council for Civil Liberties reported in 1936 that Unionist
leadership in Northern Ireland had created „under the shadow of the British constitution a permanent
machine of dictatorship.‟207 The 1930s „were a dreadful decade for the plain people of Ulster,
Protestant as well as Catholic. Depression in the staple industries, linen and shipbuilding, kept
unemployment at horribly high levels,‟208 that „ averaged 25 per cent and was often noticeably
higher.‘ 209 The agricultural sector in the North fared better during this period maintained by a stable
livestock market, due in part by the Free State‟s economic war with Britain.
The United Kingdom‟s declaration of war against Germany in September of 1939 revived
Ulster‟s industrial sector: „the war economy brought relative prosperity to the North. The hideous
unemployment virtually vanished from 1941 as activity revived in the shipyards and in the aircraft
industry. England‘s danger was Ulster‘s opportunity for a job. Catholics, enjoying nearly full
employment, in striking contrast to the south, provided scant support for IRA activity during the
war.‟210
As southern Ireland entered the „Emergency‟ of the 1940s with a grim determined
austerity, Northern Ireland‟s industrial muscle was allowed one last economic flex before its
eventual decline into redundancy and rust later in the century.
1.3.4. Irish Novels in the 1930s
After the establishment of the Free State and the partitioning of the North in the early 1920s,
Irish novelists who wished to share in the literary current of modernity flowing beyond the shores of
the Irish archipelago found several obstacles laying in their paths. These included censorship, the
lack of audience and a sense of identity which was fragmented and regional in nature, making the
observation: „It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the
―one, yet many‖ of national life, and by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered
jumble of languages and styles,‟211 somewhat problematic in the Irish case, as a strong oral tradition
exemplified by poetry and music existed in the cultural life of its people for hundreds of years, and
predated the emergence of the novel and the nation.
206
Lee, Ireland: 1912-1985, 138.
Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 416.
208
Lee, 254.
209
Foster, Modern Ireland, 555.
210
Lee, 256.
211
Timothy Brennan, „The national longing for form,‟ in (ed.) Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration
(London: Routledge, 1990) p. 49.
207
31
In southern Ireland, the most obvious hindrance to creativity and representation was the Free
State government‟s insular and repressive Censorship of Publications Act of 1929. This piece of
legislation provided for the banning of publications on three grounds: if they were in a „general
tendency indecent or obscene‘212; if they devoted „an unduly large proportion of space to the
publication of matter relating to crime,‟213 and if they advocated „the unnatural prevention of
conception or the procurement of abortion or miscarriage.‟214 Cultural nationalism was also a
factor contributing to the introduction of the legislation, as it was believed that the Act „would more
effectively control distribution [. . .] of British newspapers and periodicals.‟215 The scope of the
legislation affected all types of literature: „between the years 1930 and 1939 some 1200 books and
some 140 periodicals fell foul of the Censor‘s displeasure,‟216 as well as paintings: „By 1930, all of
the nudes had been removed from the Municipal Gallery, Dublin‘s principal gallery of modern
art.‟217
The writer and correspondent Mary Manning sketched a grim portrait of Dublin in 1935:
„The city from a literary point of view, is becoming more and more like an isolation hospital or
internment camp. There is a prohibitive tax on foreign newspapers, and of course the censors are
banning away for dear life.‟218 She sardonically noted: „The amusing thing is, according to the Act,
a book may be banned when it is, in the general tendency, indecent or obscene, but comparatively
few novels are in their general tendency indecent or obscene, so the poor, darling censors, in order
to provide a raison d‘être for themselves, have been compelled to ban hundreds of novels which are
only indecent and obscene to the extent of the three to four pages out of perhaps four hundred. Just
too bad. I must say that most of the banned books seem to be remarkable for little else than their
monstrous and surpassing dullness.‘ 219
In spite of Manning‟s dire prognosis, Irish readership in the Free State during the 1930s was
large: „Cheap novels, weekly newspapers and periodicals were sold in abundance during these
years and they all had seasoned devotees all over the country. [The content of cheap novels in
particular] was uniform: ―guns and roses‖; shoot-outs at corrals and then happy-ever-after tales,
and, when home-produced, and extra large smattering of soft nationalism and a nod in the direction
„Censorship of Publications Act, 1929/Achtum Scrúdóireacht Fhoillseachán, 1929,‟ Public Statutes of the
Oireachtas/ Reachtanna Puiblí an Oireachtas (Dublin/ Baile Atha Cliath: Stationary Office/Oifig an
tSoláThair D‟ Fhoillsigh, 1930) p. 123.
213
Ibid., 125.
214
Ibid., 123.
215
Carlson, Banned in Ireland, 3.
216
Terrence Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1985 (London: Fontana, 1985) p.
149.
217
Carlson, 10.
218
Mary Manning, „Mostly in Memoriam: A Letter from Dublin by Mary Manning,‟ The Saturday Review of
Literature, 16 February 1935.
219
Ibid.
212
32
of the Vatican were added [. . . ] for good measure.‟220 Though the government of the period was
indeed censorious in certain arenas, it did not curtail the liberty of the press until the „Emergency‟
of the early nineteen-forties: „The Irish Independent could, and did say what it liked about de
Valera through out; The Irish Press, as a pro-government paper after 1932 gave the Fianna Fáil
version of contemporary history; and the Irish Times under the editorship of [R. M.] Smyllie,
annoyed everyone from time to time, whilst pleasing many readers by its apparent
independence.‟ 221
The cheap cowboy novels and pulp-fiction romances that proliferated during the period
provided inexpensive entertainment and diversion from the often grim and drab nature of everyday
life of the ordinary citizen of the Free State in the 1930s. Having experienced the trauma of two
wars and suffering the deprivation of a world-wide economic depression, Irish readers of the period
chose to read cheap cowboy novels (and other various pulp-fiction titles) over critical modern
novels and „escaped to a saloon bar in the wild west (decorated with religious icons) for action and
romance.‟222 The mass consumption by the public of a variety of lay and religious newspapers
during the period fostered a sense of national identity and debate for the common citizen. In
particular, one confessional periodical „the Irish Catholic was a microcosm of popular reading
habits in Ireland during the decade. It spawned numerous imitators who all [vied for] the attention
of the average reader.‟223
Overall, the general public was not overly concerned with the enforcement of the
Censorship Act, as it did not interfere with their normal pedestrian day to day reading habits. As
Minister for Justice J. J. Hogan remarked in 1930: „The fact is that very few people in Ireland read
any modern books at all, and any that do are not likely to take the trouble of acting as literary
informers to the Censorship Board. In any event, to attempt a censorship of modern literature, even
in one language, is not unlike trying to drink a river.‟224 Writers and novelists banned under the
Act were not so sanguine about their prospects in the emerging censoriousness of the Irish Free
State: „The most vitriolic criticism of the regime came from writers whose work fell foul of it, for the
mildest of transgressions: as in [. . . ] Russia, dissidence was the business of the intelligentsia rather
than the politicians.‟225 Frank O‟Connor, a writer banned during the 1930s observed that the
legislation embodied „a new establishment of Church and state in which imagination would play no
part and young men and women would emigrate to the ends of the earth, not because the country
Elizabeth Russell, „Holy crosses, guns and roses: themes in popular reading material,‟ Ireland in the
1930s, 11.
221
T. Desmond Williams, „Conclusion,‟ The Years of the Great Test, 175.
222
Russell, 28.
223
Ibid., 15.
224
J. J. Hogan, The Round Table, vol XX, no. 80 (September 1930), p. 835.
225
Foster, Modern Ireland, 535.
220
33
was poor, but because it was mediocre.‟226 W.B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, founded the
Irish Academy of Letters in 1932 in protest of the Act, and wrote to prospective members that
censorship legislation confined „an Irish author to the British and American market; and thereby
make it impossible for him to live by distinctive Irish literature.‟227
In contrast, writers in Northern Ireland lived under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857,
which unlike the censorship legislation in the Free State, was framed by the less censorious attitude
of British Law to publications. Despite this relative freedom of expression during the 1930s, and
aside from the few left-wing radicals and writers that gathered in a Belfast pub, the Brown Horse,
the literary landscape remained virtually empty during the decade, and by „1939 Belfast was
largely a cultural desert [. . . ] Louis MacNeice, though born in Belfast usually cast a jaundiced eye
on his homeland, and at that time was largely associated with the Auden group in England. Local
writers like Tom Carnduff, Denis Ireland, Matt Mulcahy and Richard Rowley did not seem
particularly inspiring to young men who had just left school. The only writers in the city we could
really respect were the poet John Hewitt and the fiction writer Michael McLaverty.‟228 Both these
latter writers were marginalised in the Unionist dominated province from the lack of an audience
and politics: Hewitt by his socialism; McLaverty by his religion. Speaking of his plight as a writer,
McLaverty, who supported his family as a schoolteacher, referred to the dilemma he shared with a
fellow Belfast writer: „Like Forrest Reid my books have had little or no sale. But then he had a
small private income to sustain him and could devote his whole time and energy to writing.‘229
1.3.5. Summary
The polarisation on the island between nationalist and unionist identities which cleaved the
island into two separate political states after partition, further ossified during the 1930s. The
industrial North, once a haven for the Ulster Scots rhyming weavers of Counties Antrim and Down
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was an uninspiring place for writers in the early
modern years of the 1920s and „30s. The state of affairs during the period fulfilled a prophecy made
in 1918 by the poet AE Russell, a County Armagh native: „Ulster will not be able to express its soul
or its Irish character so long as it looks to Great Britain for its cultural ideals. Unionism in Ireland
has produced no literature.‘ 230
In southern Ireland, the romantic Gaelic nation, portrayed by W.B. Yeats in verse and
drama, and for which Padraig Pearse had asked a generation for a blood sacrifice, evaporated with
Frank O‟Connor, An Only Child, (London: MacMillan, 1961) p. 210.
Carlson, Banned in Ireland, 7.
228
Robert Greacen, „Writing in Wartime Belfast,‟ The Irish Times, 16 March 1976.
229
Raymond de Micheaux, „An Ulster Novelist : Michael McLaverty‟ unpublished thesis presented to
Université de Lyon for Diplôme d‟Études Supérieures, 1960, 134, in King, Sophia, Hillen. The Silken
Twine: A Study of the Works of Michael McLaverty (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1992) p.9.
230
AE George Russell, Letters from AE (ed.) Alan Denson (Abelard-Schuman, 1961) pp.126-7.
226
227
34
the violent foundation of the Irish Free State: „War and civil war appeared to have drained all
energy and imagination away: there was precious little left with which to re-imagine the national
condition.‟231 In 1931, Daniel Corkery a nationalist critic, made a pronouncement on the collective
Irish psyche of the post-independence and partition period: „Everywhere in the mentality of the Irish
people are flux and uncertainty. Our national consciousness may be described, in a native phrase,
as a quaking sod. It gives no footing. It is not English, nor Irish, nor Anglo-Irish.‟232
In a
metaphorical sense, the cultural milieu that Irish novelists of the 1930s found themselves surveying
was depicted poignantly by Sean O‟Faoláin, as a shattered landscape shrouded in snow: „under that
white shroud covering the whole of Ireland, life was lying broken and hardly breathing.‟233
The next section will describe this study‟s methodological approach. It will discuss the
origins and evolution of the hermeneutic analysis. This technique of analysis will be employed as
the major methodological tool to interpret the selected English language novels written by Irish
novelists in the 1930s in this study. In addition five primary theoretical lenses developed by the
researcher to focus this study‟s hermeneutic analysis will be described in detail, in order to illustrate
their general relevance to the practice of literary geography, and specifically to the aims and
objectives of this particular study.
1.4. Methodology: Hermeneutics and Theoretical Lenses.
1.4.1. Introduction
The major methodological tool employed in this study will be the hermeneutic analysis.
Within humanistic geography, it is understood that the hermeneutic technique of „interpretation is a
dialogue between one‘s data –other places and other people –and the researcher who is imbedded
within a particular intellectual and institutional context.‟234 The sub disciplines of historical and
cultural geography comprise the particular intellectual contexts of this research; whilst disciplines
located within the social sciences and the humanities, form the broader institutional frameworks for
this study. The hermeneutic analysis in this study will incorporate a series of theoretical lenses to
focus a geographical interpretation of the various subjective representations of landscape, identity
and sense of place located in English language novels written by Irish writers during the 1930s. The
following sub-sections will briefly discuss the definition, origins and development of hermeneutics
as a form of analysis in the humanities and geography, before describing the five primary theoretical
lenses that have been crafted to conduct this geographical exegesis of the novels and writers in this
study. The concluding sub-section will contain a brief discussion and recapitulation of this study‟s
methodology.
231
Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 263.
Daniel Corkery, Synge and Anglo Irish Literature (Oxford: Cork University Press, 1947 [1931]) p. 14
233
Sean O‟Faoláoin The Finest Stories of Sean O‘Faolain (London: Bantam Books, 1959) p. 81.
234
Johnston, et.al., The Dictionary of Human Geography, 3rd Ed., 245.
232
35
1.4.2. Hermeneutics
Historically, the hermeneutic approach has been defined
235
interpretation,‟
as the „art or science of
and „the study of interpretation and meaning.‟236
In ancient Greece,
hermeneutics was associated with the study of the poet-philosopher Homer, among others, and
subsequently was adopted throughout the Mediterranean Basin, as a technique which played a vital
role in shaping the liturgical canons of Christianity, Judaism and Islam over the past two thousand
years. In the Western medieval Christian tradition, the hermeneutic approach strictly involved the
exegesis of biblical texts. But techniques of interpretation developed by this hermeneutic approach
were adapted during the Enlightenment as a method to critique the epistemologies of the natural
sciences, and to more fully explore historical texts as products of their socio-cultural milieus.
Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, due to the work of Friedrich
Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), hermeneutic approaches evolved
into academic exercises where not only texts, but their authors, were subject to critical scrutiny, in
an attempt to uncover the meaning and intent behind a text‟s content and creation. This innovation
became known as the „Hermeneutic Circle,‟ and its technique involved juxtaposing a detail from a
particular segment of a text against its whole, and then „tacking‟ back again in a cyclical process,
whilst simultaneously conducting studies of the historical, social, and cultural milieus of the
author. As a result of this innovation, meanings within a text, as well as meanings outside the
sphere of the text (historical and cultural milieu, period and place, etc.), were gradually distilled in a
process that comprised several iterative cycles of interpretation.237
In geography, the hermeneutic approach was emerged in the 1970s to „contest empiricism
and positivism as manifest in spatial science.‟238 Introduced by Buttimer‟s „dialogical approach‘
(1974) and Tuan‟s concept of „topophilia‟ which stressed that „to know the world is to know
oneself,‟239 the hermeneutic approach was extended to incorporate methodological trends during
the „cultural turn‟ in geography of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing upon the precedents set by
Schleiermacher and Dilthey, humanistic geographers of the late twentieth century recognised that
„meaning is found in all kinds of activities and objects: in written texts, certainly, but also in the
non-textual; for example [. . . ] in landscapes and individual lives.‟ 240 The methodology in this
study will draw upon the hermeneutic precedents set by these two figures, and employ an analysis
associated with the practices of the „Hermeneutic Circle.‟ Utilising five primary theoretical lenses,
constructed from conceptual trends in humanistic geography and literary criticism, the aim of this
235
Macey, Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, 179
Johnston, et.al., The Dictionary of Human Geography, 3rd Ed., 244.
237
Macey, 181; Johnston, et. al., 245.
238
Johnston., 245.
239
Ibid.
236
36
study‟s methodology is to interpret the texts of selected English language Irish novels of the 1930s,
in order to distil the meaning and intention behind the various subjective representations of
landscape, identity and sense of place contained within them. The following sub-sections will
describe these five primary theoretical lenses, and the means in which they will be employed to
sharpen the hermeneutic focus of this study.
1.4.3. Lens One: Lifeworld
In 1976, Anne Buttimer‟s seminal paper Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld discussed the
significance of late nineteenth and early twentieth century German Phenomenology‟s concept of
lebenswelt for the discipline of geography. Conceived in the early work of Edmund Husserl (18591938) as a temporal entity, the concept of lebenswelt became „spatialised,‟ in the work of Martin
Heidegger (1889-1976), a student of Husserl‟s. Translated as lifeworld, this idea has been defined
by Buttimer in geographical terms as „the culturally defined spatiotemporal setting or horizons of
everyday life,‟241 and is a fundamental model utilized by phenomenological investigations in
humanistic geography. This methodological approach
side-steps the purely geometric and
Cartesian framings of space and yet still uncovers „an ordered, articulated region out of which
objects that pertain to one another stand over against us in a surveyable, handy, available and
measurable way.‟242
Whilst the Cartesian attitude adopts an „objective‟ separation between the perceiver
(subject) and the perceived (object), in contrast, the phenomenological perspective contends: „Man
and the world are bound together like the snail to its shell: the world is part of man, it is his
dimension, and as the world changes, existence (in-der-Welt-sein) changes as well.‟243
Consciousness in this regard, can be viewed „as a series of acts, repeated through time and
temporalized in their very structure. Such acts posit objects within the horizon of the life-world,
which is not to say that those objects or the life-world are produced by the mind as its sole effects.
The world is irreversibly there, populated with objects for consciousness, but it is only ―there‖ in
the manner of being meant or intended.‟244
From this perspective „the phenomenological notion of intentionality suggests that each
individual is a focus of his own world, yet he may be oblivious [emphasis mine] of himself as the
creative center of that world.‟245 Buttimer‟s translation of lebenswelt contextualized the concept‟s
relevance for humanistic geographers who were seeking to consider the subjective elements that
240
Ibid.
Buttimer, Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld, 277.
242
Martin Heidegger, quoted in Stuart Elden, Mapping The Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of
a Spatial History (London/NY: Continuum, 2001) p. 52.
243
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (London: Faber and Faber, 1988) p. 35.
244
Judith Butler, „Foreward‟ in Maurice Nathason, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) p. ix.
241
37
constituted an intrinsic relationship between individuals, society and place: „―World‖ to the
phenomenologist is the context within which consciousness is revealed. It is not ―a mere world of
facts and affairs, but . . . a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world.‖ It is anchored in
a past and directed towards a future; it is a shared horizon, though each individual may construe it
in a uniquely personal way.‟246 Lifeworld in this study will be applied to the actual and fictive
realms of 1930s Ireland in the light of Buttimer‟s recognition that „if people were to grow more
attuned to the dynamics and poetics of space and time, and the meaning of milieu in life experience,
one could literally speak of the [. . . ] personality of place which would emerge from shared human
experience and the time-space rhythms deliberately chosen to facilitate such experiences.‟247 The
emphasis on lifeworld in this study will focus on subjective experiences of novelists and their
perceptions and representations in their novels of Ireland during the 1930s. The aim will be to
excavate the affective „personality of place,‟ which the different lifeworlds in the these selected
novels represent.
1.4.4. Lens Two: Lifepath
Torsten Hägerstrand a contemporary of Buttimer‟s, became interested in the life-histories of
individuals in relation to their geographical environments. In 1978 he noted: „A life biography, seen
in its entirety, is made up of both internal mental experiences and events [. . . ] related to the
interplay between body and environmental phenomena.‟248
A recent re-examination of
Hägerstrand‟s and Buttimer‟s conceptualisations by historical and cultural geographers has focused
on elements of subjectivity and identity reflected within individual biographies. A primary focus in
this geographical study of English language Irish novelists of the 1930s, is to highlight the
„biographical perspective,‘249 of the lives of these novelists, which may reflect dimensions of their
inter-subjective worlds, and illuminate how particular a novelist‟s „inner experiences and outer
events are joined in many intricate ways.‟250
Coining the term lifepath to define the blending of ideas promoted by Buttimer and
Hägerstrand, this re-examination focuses on the incorporation of „life writing and life space‘251 to
investigate the personal and subjective lifepaths of individuals in the respective environments and
personal milieus which compose their lifeworlds. This re-examination of Hägerstrand‟s ideas in
245
Buttimer, Lifeworld, 279.
Buttimer, Lifeworld, 281.
247
Ibid., 290.
248
Torsten Hägerstrand, „Survival and Arena: On the life-history of individuals in relation to their
geographical environment‟ in (eds.) Tommy Carlstein, Don Parks & Nigel Thrift, Human Activity and Time
Geography: Vol. 2 (London: Edward Arnold, 1978) p. 123.
249
Ibid.
250
Ibid.
251
Stephen Daniels and Catherine Nash, „Lifepaths: geography and biography,‟ Journal of Historical
Geography 30 (2004) p.456
246
38
particular has conceptualised that „the arts of geography and biography‘252 are „closely connected
[and] life histories are also, to coin a phrase, life geographies.‟253
By extension a variety of
events in a novelist‟s lifeworld can be seen as a series of sites that when linked together,
comprehensively constitute their individual lifepath. Incorporating memories, feelings, knowledge,
imagination and goals, a lifepath traces a novelist‟s trek through the various dimensions of the
„living landscapes‘254 they experience over the course of time.
In turn, the various „living
landscapes,‟ a novelist experiences, can be seen to influence the depiction of actual and imagined
lifeworlds represented in their novels. In the following chapters of this study, a brief description of
the particular novelist‟s lifepath will precede an examination of their writing, to provide a
biographical dimension to the hermeneutic focus of this study.
1. 4. 5. Lens Three: Novelists as Humanistic Geographers
As the preceding two sub-sections have illustrated, an investigation of the lifeworlds
represented in novels and other pieces of imaginary and critical literature must also consider a
novelist‟s lifepath, as a source of inspiration and material.
This underscores „the importance of
looking at the personality and idiosyncrasies of [the] author when examining his/her literary
landscapes,‟255 to fully understand the historical and cultural contexts in which their novels were
written. Therefore, a main contention of this study is that novelists, in contrast to other individuals,
are conscious of being at the creative centre of their inter-subjective worlds; the literary works
they produce are imaginative reflections of the lifewords that they find themselves, along with the
daily, taken for granted elements that comprise the inter-subjective horizons of their individual
existence. Their novels subsequently communicate the subjective, affective and more intimate
geographies of the socio-cultural milieu in which they were created. It has been observed that „the
writer inscribes himself on the spiritual map of his time, of his country,‟256 and it has been
recognized that „some novelists have had an even clearer vision for the facts of geography that are
of most significance to the average man than do professional writers on geographical subjects.‟257
Consequently, it can be seen that the humanistic geographer utilizing a phenomenological
approach and „the novelist have much in common. Both seek to portray the activities of people
within the context of a specific milieu, infusing their descriptions of people and places with a
sensitivity born of a rich and varied experience of life and society. Both seek to engender in their
252
Ibid., 450.
Ibid.
254
Anne Buttimer, The Practice of Geography (London: Longman, 1983)
255
L. Sandberg, and J. Marsh, „Focus: Literary Landscapes –Geography and the Future,‟ The Canadian
Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien, 32.3 (1988) p. 266.
256
Kundera, The Art of the Novel, 144.
257
Wright, Human Nature in Geography, 22.
253
39
audience a deep awareness and empathy concerning others and their lebenswelt.‟258 If it can be
argued that novelists have much in common with humanistic geographers, it can also be contended
that their novels can be perceived as discursive forms of maps and landscapes as well.
1.4.6. Lens Four: Novels as Maps and Landscapes
Since the 1970s, humanistic geographers have contended that the literary scale best suited
to study the imaginative representations of an individual or collective lifeworld is the novel: „As a
literary form the novel is inherently geographical.‟ 259 The space created by the novel can be seen
as a discursive map, elaborating within its pages subjective elements of geography, as well as the
affective dimensions of a sense of place: „The world of the novel is made up of locations and
settings, arenas and boundaries, perspectives and horizons. Various places and spaces are
occupied by the novel‘s characters, by the narrator and by audiences as they read. Any one novel
may present a field of different, sometimes competing, forms of geographical knowledge, from a
sensuous awareness of place to an educated idea of region and nation.‟260 In this light „the places
of a novel may be accurately transcribed (Domney and Son), or disguised (Middlemarch), or
entirely imaginary (Gulliver‟s Travels), but in each case the rendition of venue in the text offers an
exercise in mapping which informs a reader‘s own sense of location.‟261
During geography‟s „cultural turn‟ in the late twentieth century, landscapes became
conceptualised as texts. Equally, texts and by extension -novels, as will be illustrated, can be
perceived as discursive forms of landscape themselves.262 Drawing upon Paul Ricoeur‟s paper: The
model of the text: meaningful action considered as a text (1971), human geographers Barnes and
Duncan (1992) have identified four definitive elements which characterise both written texts and
landscapes: „A landscape possesses a similar objective fixity to that of a written text. It also becomes
detached from the intentions of its original authors, and in terms of social and psychological impact
and material consequences the various readings of landscape matter more than authorial intentions.
In addition, the landscape has an importance beyond the initial situation for which it was
constructed, addressing a potentially wide range of readers.‟263 This reading of „landscape as text‟
draws upon phenomenological and hermeneutic modes of interpretation and their work contributes
to locating „landscape interpretation at the center of an interdisciplinary arena where issues like
258
Cook, Consciousness and the Novel, 66.
S. Daniels and S. Rycroft, „Mapping the modern city: Allan Sillitoe‟s Nottingham novels,‟ Transactions
18.4 (1993) p. 460.
260
Ibid.
261
Ian A. Bell, Reviews „The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland 1800-1990,‟ Journal of Historical
Geography 27.2 (2001) p. 283.
262
Charles Travis, „The Fifth Province: Seamus Heaney and the Reinterpretation of the Cultural Morphology
of Border County Ireland,‟ The California Geographer, Vol. XLI (2001).
263
Barnes and Duncan, Writing Worlds, 6.
259
40
objectification, representation, consciousness, ideology,‟264 have opened „a dialogue between
cultural geographers and literary theorists, cultural anthropologists, and others who, in expanding
the concept of text become interested in landscapes.‟265
Conversely, from a Foucaldian perspective, novels can be seen to constitute „landscapes in
the aesthetic sense.‟ 266 The methodological scope of this study regards novels as landscapes that
can be examined as „compositions arrived at through human design, and in the historical sense,
sites made up of several strata of events. The text becomes a kind of archaeological site that reveals
in its excavation the accretion of histories, not a single narrative tradition but the overlapping and
infiltration of different lives.‟267 This conceptualisation illustrates an evolving, and expanding
definition of landscape and text, whilst providing a fixed point of entry, and a frame of reference for
humanistic, historical and cultural geographical engagements with literature on a variety of scales:
„The excavation of the text reveals the level(s) of inheritance within a fiction, a descension which
frequently spans imaginative and actual past realities, or which unearths conflicts between different
concepts of time and space.‟268 This inter-disciplinary approach between humanistic geography and
literary studies creates a space of engagement that can be illustrated in the following manner: „the
viewer/writer/reader [of the text] stands metaphorically in both the unwritten and the written
landscapes, enters the territory on the page the same time it is created in the mind - a profound
involvement with place through real three dimensional landscapes and the described and imagined
landscape.‟269 Novels for the purposes of this study therefore, will be treated as discursive forms of
landscape that originated in 1930s Ireland, in addition to texts that „represent‟ the subjective
dimensions of the „personalities of places.‟ The following theoretical lens of the chronotope also
perform a dual function in eliciting the „real‟ worlds of 1930s Ireland, and the „represented‟ worlds
in the novels, which are the subject of this study‟s hermeneutic focus.
1.4.7. Lens Five: The Chronotope
Located within the various prose-fiction landscapes of the novels being examined in this
study, are time-space intersections that can be identified as chronotopes.
These spatial-temporal
leitmotifs will be used as a means to illustrate the various socio-cultural milieus of Ireland that
existed inside and outside the prose-fiction landscapes of novels during the 1930s. Inside these
leitmotifs, spatiality and temporality become inseparable: ‗time, as it were thickens, takes on flesh,
becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the moments of
264
Peet, Modern Geographical Though, 233-234.
Ibid., 234.
266
Julie Anne Stevens, The Irish Landscape in Somerville and Ross‘s Fiction and Illustrations 1890-1915.
Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Dublin Trinity College, October 2000, p. 5.
267
Ibid.
268
Ibid.
269
Annie Proulx, Dangerous Ground: Landscape in American Fiction, 2004, p. 8.
265
41
time, plot and history.‟270
Conceptualised by the Russian literary theorist Mikhail M. Bakhtin
(1895-1975), and elaborated upon in his text Vosprosy literatury i estetiki (1975), chronotopes
represent „the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically
expressed in literature.‟271 Bakhtin‟s study of literature, spanned from Greek antiquity to European
modernism, and as he developed his dialogical theory of literature, Bakhtin subsequently identified a
series of archetypical chronotopes. Examples of these „time-space nodes include the road, the
drawing room, the provincial town, [and] the threshold,‟272 among others. But Bakhtin recognised
as well that „chronotopes take on generic form‘273 each „displaying different conception[s] of the
relation between time and space,‟274 which allows their use in this study, as a means to examine
certain spatial-temporal intersections of place which are particular, though not exclusive, to Irish
history, culture and literature during the 1930s.
Bakhtin also placed a special emphasis on the „representational importance of the
chronotope,‟275 and observed that as a leitmotif it „emerges as a center for concretizing
representation, as a force giving body to the entire novel.‟276 He concluded: „All the novel‘s abstract
elements -philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyses of cause and effect -gravitate
toward the chronotope and through it take on flesh and blood, permitting the imaging power of art
to do its work. Such is the representational significance of the chronotope.‟277 In the course of this
study‟s examination of Irish novels of the 1930s, Bakhtin‟s conceptualisation will allow a means to
illustrate that „the chronotope makes narrative events concrete, makes them take on flesh, causes
blood to flow in their veins,‟278 and serve „as the primary point from which ―scenes‖ in a novel
unfold.‟279
Bakhtin also made a distinction between between the „real,‟ socio-cultural historical and
natural worlds, and the ones which are „represented,‟ by chronotopes. However the boundary
created by this distinction is not „absolute or impermeable,‟280 and Bakhtin contended that the
relationship between the „real,‟ world and its chronotopic representation, consisted of „continual
270
M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, Trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin and London : University of Texas Press, 1981) p. 80.
271
Ibid., 84.
272
Pat Sheeran, „The Road, The House, and the Grave: A Poetics of Galway Space, 1900-1970,‟ in (eds.)
Gerald Moran, Raymond Gillespie and William Nolan, Galway History & Society Interdisciplinary Essays
on the History of an Irish County (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1996) p. 758.
273
Julian Holloway and James Kneale, „Mikhail Bakhtin: Dialogics of Space,‟ in (eds.) Mike Crang and
Nigel Thrift Thinking Space (London: Routledge, 2000) p. 82
274
Ibid.
275
Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, 250.
276
Ibid.
277
Ibid.
278
Ibid.
279
Ibid.
280
Ibid., 254
42
mutual interaction [. . . ] The work and the world represented in it enter the real world and enrich it,
and the real world enters the work and its world as part of the process of its creation, as well as part
of its subsequent life, in a continual renewing of the work through the creative perception of
listeners and readers. Of course this process of exchange itself is itself chronotopic: it occurs first
and foremost in the historically developing social world, but without ever losing contact with
changing historical space.‟281
For the purposes of this study, the chronotope will be viewed as a bridge connecting the
actual, exterior landscapes experienced by the Irish novelist of the 1930s, with their
inner,
imaginary and literary ones: „The chronotope may either function as a strictly internal category or
as one which establishes parallels between the world and the text and other cultural spheres,‟282
located within the various socio-cultural and natural landscapes of
Ireland in the 1930s:
„―Externally‖ it can refer to a human universe determined by an epoch and place, a representation
that integrates the understanding of an epoch and that of a cosmos.‟283 In this regard it has been
recognised that within the discipline of geography, the chronotopic analysis „offers great scope to
geographers interested in the constitution of novelistic space.‟284 Through the prism of this
theoretical lens: „Landscape becomes not only ―graphically visible‖ in space but also ―narratively
visible‖ in time.‟285
1.4.8. Summary
Five primary theoretical lenses that have been described in the previous sub-sections will aid
in focusing the hermeneutic analysis of this study. The following paragraph will recapitulate the
methodological interplay between this creative hermeneutic process and the five theoretical lenses
employed to focus a geographical interpretation of English language novels written by Irish
novelists in the 1930s.
Taken as humanistic geographers, Irish novelists of the 1930s occupied distinctive
lifeworlds, which shifted according to the various trajectories of their individual lifepaths. The
dialogical relationship between these two constructs, can be said to have influenced each novelist‟s
perception of the „living landscapes,‟ that they found themselves in and subsequently experienced.
It can be said that the memories, feelings, and knowledge, which resulted from these subjective
experiences
of these „living landscapes,‟ became distilled in the novelists‟ imaginations and
subsequently were rooted in place during the 1930s. Consequently, their novels can be examined
through the preceding theoretical lenses to explore the different affective and subjective impressions
281
Ibid.
Marc Brosseau, „The city in textual form: Manhattan Transfer‘s New York,‟ Ecumene 1995 2(1) p. 111.
283
Ibid.
284
Holloway and Kneale, Mikhail Bakhtin: Dialogics of Space, 82
285
M. Folch-Serra, „Place, voice, space: Mikhail Bakhtin‟s dialogical landscape.‟ Environment and Planning
282
D: Society and Space , 8 (1990) p. 258.
43
of the Irish novelists‟ experience of landscape, identity and sense of place during this decade. The
prose landscapes represented by these novels can then be excavated in order to uncover the various
related lifeworlds and chronotopic features which anchor the novelists‟ various depictions of
Ireland during the 1930s, to represent the different „personality of place,‟ captured by each novelist.
In conclusion, the construction of the methodological approach in this study, which employs a
hermeneutic analysis focused by five primary theoretical lenses, recognises ultimately that
„understanding a text from a historical period remote from our own
[is] essentially a creative
process in which the observer, through penetrating an alien mode of existence, enriches his own
self-knowledge through acquiring knowledge of others.‘286 The following section will outline the
various themes, authors and works to examined in this study.
1.5. Structure of Study: Themes, Writers and Novels.
1.5.1. Introduction
This study is composed of three main parts: Rural Lifeworlds, House Islands and the
Provincial Town, and Urban Experiences. The individual chapters are constructed to provide a
brief overview of the novels examined, a biographical sketch of the novelist and most importantly
the „personalities of the places‟ experienced, perceived and represented by the particular depictions
of landscape, identity and sense of place and various impressions of lifeworlds and chronotopes.
The subdivisions of the chapters will be structured accordingly: historical and biographical
information of each novelist will be included in the Introduction and Lifepath sections of each
chapter (If biographical information is utilised hermeneutically in the reading of a novel, this will be
explained in the particular chapter).
Following these introductory sections will be in-depth
historical-cultural geographical readings of specific novels, utilising a hermeneutic analysis focused
by the five theoretical lenses discussed in Section 1.4 of this chapters. The subdivisions of these
hermeneutic readings will include an Introduction, followed by subdivision titles related to the
novel/text being examined, and generally concluding with a Summary subsection.
Each chapter
will end with a Conclusion, which will generally discuss the content of the chapter in the context of
aims of this study.
1.5.2. Rural Lifeworlds
Various representations of the townland communities existing in a rural landscape
composed of bogs, mountains, drumlin belts, coastlines and the islands of Ulster are explored in
chapters 2, 3 and 4 of this study. Chapter 2: Rumours from the Lower Hills, examines three novels
entitled Adrigoole (1929), The Knife (1930), and On the Edge of the Stream (1934), as well as a
short drama, Wrack (1933) by the socialist and republican activist writer Peadar O‟Donnell, The
natural and social landscapes represented in his prose deconstruct the chronotope of the idyll and
286
Anthony Giddens, New rules of sociological method (London: Hutchinson, 1976) p.17
44
depict the community fragmentation and malaise that existed in rural Ulster during the 1920s and
„30s. Landscapes of war and poverty emerge in his prose and O‟Donnell‟s description of the various
rural communities in his prose reveals tightly knit lifeworlds which were torn apart by the period‟s
rural violence and economic conflict.
Chapter 3: Poetry of the Fields, examines The Green Fool, a 1938 fictive „autobiographical‟
novel by Patrick Kavanagh. From a phenomenological perspective, Kavanagh‟s depictions of his
early lifeworld during his childhood and adolescence in a townland located in south Monaghan,
emerge in the novel‟s thirty two chapters as a series of impressionistic and self contained vignettes,
which detail the taken for granted and pre-reflective accounts of rural life during the 1920s and
1930s. Kavanagh‟s consciousness illuminates
chronotopes associated with the idyll and the
biographical novel. As these prose vignettes are strung together in the body of the novel, a theme
emerges in which the beauty of the rural landscape becomes juxtaposed against the communal
enmity existing the townland of Inniskeen. The chapter closes with a piece journalism on the
problem of rural emigration which Kavanagh wrote in 1939 for The Irish Times,
which
contextualises The Green Fool‘s subjective accounts of his rural Monaghan lifeworld.
Chapter 4: Elysium & Exile, examines urban framings of the rural in the prose fiction of
Belfast based writers Forrest Reid and Michael McLaverty. Reid‟s novels focus on
pagan
landscape depictions surrounding the chronotope of the house in the Ulster countryside. Though
embellished with fantasy, Reid‟s novels Uncle Stephen (1931) and The Retreat (1936) reveal the
palimpsestic nature of the province‟s historical and cultural sedimentation, as he depicts the
existence of material artefacts in the ruins of castles, abbeys and early settlements in his prose
representations of place. Reid‟s detached, introspective and classical framing of rurality, focused
on the lifeworlds of pre-adolescent Protestant boys. In contrast within McLaverty‟s prose the
chronotope of the island is rendered with empirical detail and poetic sensitivity to depict the harsh
conditions of Rathlin Island and its community. Readings of a selection of his early short-stories
and 1939 novel Call My Brother Back reveal a rocky landscape, seen through the eyes of a thirteenyear old boy. McLaverty represents a lifeworld locked between sea and sky, that was slowly dying
in the early decades of the twentieth century.
1.5.3. House Islands and The Provincial Town
Chapters 5 and 6 of this study will draw upon a selection of novels featuring depictions of
the Anglo-Irish „house-island,‟ and Irish provincial town. Novels by Elizabeth Bowen and Molly
Keane depict the decline of the landed Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy „house island‟ culture
during the early decades of the twentieth century. These depictions will be examined in contrast to
Kate O‟Brien‟s fictional accounts of the rise of the provincial town Catholic bourgeois, to its
political apotheosis in the 1930s. The different personalities of place will elicited by a juxtaposition
45
of the Anglo-Irish „house-island,‟ in Chapter 5, with historical depictions of the provincial Irish
town in Chapter 6.
In Chapter 5, A Place of Memory & Ruin: The Anglo-Irish ‗House Island,‘ the prose fiction
landscapes of Bowen‟s The Last September (1929) and Keane‟s Mad Puppetstown (1931)
inextricably centre around the chronotopic spaces of „house islands,‟ located respectively in Cork
and the fictional south-eastern County Westcommon. In both novelists‟ depictions the „houseisland‟ is ever-present as setting and metaphor to convey the disintegrating lifeworlds of the landed
Ascendancy „Big House‟ culture during the Irish War of Independence. These novels attempt to
counter a growing historical amnesia during the 1930s promoted by Irish cultural nationalism of the
period. Themes concerning Anglo-Irish identity, detachment, and alienation emerge in their prose
landscapes, as they depict the culture in which they were born disintegrating during the years 19191921. The two novels of Bowen and Keane examined in Chapter 5 convey landscapes of fear, as
well as the sense of isolation and estrangement that members of the minority
Ascendancy
Protestant culture experienced whilst living within the confines of their „house-islands,‟ in the
decades surrounding the violent birth of the Irish Free State.
In comparison, Kate O‟Brien‟s native Limerick in the west of Ireland is represented in
Chapter 6, The Provincial Town and the Catholic Bourgeois, as the large fictional town of Mellick.
The time span encompassing O‟Brien‟s two novels stretches from 1789 to 1937. Without My Cloak
(1931) provides an historical account of the rise of a Catholic bourgeois family from poverty, and
depicts its social morphology within the Irish provincial town of the nineteenth century. The
lifeworlds of this provincial class are further examined in Prayer for the Wanderer (1938) which is
set in the Irish Free State during the late 1930s.
O‟Brien‟s collective representation of the
chronotope of the petite bourgeois provincial town in both of her novels becomes less descriptive,
and more abstract and polemical, as her depiction of Mellick progresses from the nineteenth
century to the late 1930s. Comprehensively, the first section of Chapter 6 provides a historical and
cultural geography of period and place, in which the growth and inter-dependence of the Catholic
bourgeois and the Irish provincial town are inextricably linked, whilst the second part provides a
polemical critique of provincial Irish middle-class complacency during the censorious regime of the
Irish Free State in the late 1930s.
1.5.4. Urban Experiences
Chapters 7, 8 and 9 of this work focus on the urban experiences, perceptions and various
representation of Irish modernity during the 1930s. Chapter 7: ‗Bottled Climates‘, examines
sketches of Dublin contained in short story collection entitled More Pricks than Kicks (1934)
written by a young and estranged Samuel Beckett. Influenced by continental European avantgarde trends in the arts and literature, Beckett‟s prose-fiction provides a jaundiced and jarring
46
account of Dublin during the period. The chronotope of the „road,‟ frames various perspectives of a
seminal Beckettian figure named Belacqua as he experiences the city and its various characters. A
strong schizo-affective sense of malaise colours the lifeworld of Beckett‟s anti-hero, as he
negotiates manic streetscapes, crowded public houses, and a cityscape overloaded with sensory
stimuli.
Chapter 8: A City of Two Minds examines the mimetic and expressive representations of
Dublin in Flann O‟Brien‟s 1939 novel At Swim Two Birds. The exegesis of O‟Brien‟s text reveals a
city in flux and a representation influenced by Celtic mythology, pop-culture, pulp-fiction and
cinematic trends of the 1930s. What is elicited is the dual language tradition of Dublin in which
English and Gaelic existed side by side, as the city it transformed itself from a colonial
administrative centre to the independent capital of the Irish Free State. The chronotope of the
„threshold‟ and its associated minor chronotopes frame O‟Brien‟s illustration of this transformation.
The manic growth of the city‟s population due to the influx of rural migration is reflected in the
construction and representation of O‟Brien‟s prose-fiction account of a University College Dublin
student‟s lifeworld and his imaginative flights of fancy during the late 1930s.
Lastly, Chapter 9: Emigrant Cities investigates the urban experiences of rural emigrants to
Dublin and Belfast. Kavanagh‟s account combines selections of his prose-fiction from his 1938
novel The Green Fool with excerpts from pieces of his journalism, memoirs and letters, to convey a
lifeworld‘s sense of the existential outsider to Dublin, and his gradual integration through the
chronotopic space of a literary pub represented in the milieu of the Palace Bar. McLaverty‟s
depiction of Belfast in the second part of his 1939 novel Call My Brother Back is framed by the
perspective of a Catholic family who has emigrated from Rathlin Island to the Falls Road in West
Belfast. Streetscapes of sectarianism and poverty encompassing their lifeworld are embellished with
touches of pathos and comedy. The chronotope of peripherality frames McLaverty‟s short-story and
prose novel depictions of Belfast‟s urban condition during the 1920s and „30s.
47
48
Part One
Rural Lifeworlds
49
50
2.
Rumours from the Lower Hills
Peadar O’Donnell
The plain belched smoke. Veinous shoots of flame streaked blood amid the
murk. Ice-toned patches of sky silvered with a gleam of stars. The bellowing
of cattle and the raucous shouts of men rumbled along the ground, spaced by
the knifelike screams of frantic women. A lone note of childish wail came up
thin amid the florid barking of dogs.
Peadar O’Donnell, The Knife (1930)
2.1. Introduction
The rural landscapes depicted in Peadar O‟Donnell‟s prose fiction, represented violent,
unsentimental and anti-pastoral places, in part to reflect the poverty-stricken
lifeworlds of the
insular communities that dotted the valleys, stony bog-lands, islands and coastlines of northwestern Ireland. Intrinsically, his novels were concerned with representing the social fragmentation
of the Irish countryside which suffered war and deprivation, a burgeoning class struggle and the
haemorrhage of emigration during the 1920s and „30s. Working as a teacher and as a union
organizer, before taking command of the East Donegal brigade of the I.R.A. during the Anglo-Irish
War, O‟Donnell began to write in earnest after his imprisonment in 1922 by Free State forces at
the beginning of the Irish Civil War. With the constant threat of execution hanging over his head,
O‟Donnell honed his prose style into a voice for the inarticulate communities of a war torn and
impoverished countryside. Finding these communities marginalized by the „official culture‟ of the
Free State in the years following Irish independence, O‟Donnell‟s decision to commit to writing,
whilst in prison was prescient: „I know that I know the insides of the minds of the mass of the folk in
rural Ireland: my thoughts are distilled out of their lives. Therefore, it is not my task to say anything
new but to put words on what is confused ferment in their minds. How could I say it? Write? I could
try and I did [ . . .] If I could say their lives out loud to these remnants of the Irish of history until
they would nod their heads and say ‗this is us!‘ A powerful, vital folk they are but too blasted
patient; muling along carrying manure on their backs, draining bogs, blasting stones, while out
beyond was their inheritance.‟287
In articulating the experiences of these people in the rural Irish landscape, O‟Donnell
employed the chronotope of the Idyll in which there is „an organic fastening-down, a grafting of
life and its events to a place, to a familiar territory,‟288 and „the conjoining of human life with the
life of nature, the unity of their rhythm [and] the common language used to describe phenomena of
287
Peadar O‟Donnell, The Gates Flew Open (London-Toronto: Jonathan Cape, 1932) 167.
51
nature and the events of human life.‟289 In his fiction, the human aspect of the environment was
elevated above the natural; but in doing so, O‟Donnell drew upon various physical elements of
western Irish landscape and place, in order to create spatial metaphors to illustrate the social
conditions of the communities for which he was agitating.
2.1.1. Lifepath
The sense of place in O‟Donnell‟s fiction was shaped during his early life in the postFamine, rural community in which he was raised. He was born 22 February 1893 in the townland of
Meenmore, in the Rosses of west Donegal. His father, James Sheain Mor, rented a patch of land
on the Marquis of Conyngham‟s estate. Unable to secure a livelihood on his plot, James took part in
the annual summer migration of „tatie hokers‟ to Scotland. O‟Donnell‟s mother Brigid, a strong
supporter of the labour leader James Larkin, was employed as a low paid worker in a local clothing
factory. As a result, „he grew up in a strongly matriarchal community, where women bore the
burdens while men were absent for half the year. His mother was a strong, progressively thinking
woman who obviously influenced him greatly.‟290 The O‟Donnell household was located on a
leased five-acre plot surrounded by ocean, bog-land and mountain. The communal lifestyle of
Meenmore distilled itself into his writing, and the collective activity involved in planting,
harvesting, turf cutting and fishing, became a „dominant motif in O‘Donnell‘s reminisces and
literature; within it he identified the raw materials of a future socialistic society.‟291
The
disintegration of this communal lifestyle in the rural Irish landscape of the 1930s would thereby
form the premise for his novels Adrigoole (1929), The Knife (1930) and On the Edge of the Stream
(1934) and drama Wrack (1932).
2.2. Adrigoole (1929)
2.2.1. Introduction
Though set in a western fringe of Donegal, Adrigoole was inspired by the plight of the
Sullivan family whose members starved to death in a rural townland named Adrigole on the CorkKerry border. O‟Donnell reflected that the place „became more than a townland in a mountainous
corner of Munster; it was a corner of the world and the drama of Adrigoole was simply the local
setting of a world play.‟292 An article in the Irish Independent dated 30 March 1927, depicted the
empty house of the Sullivans after they had been removed: „In the home there was no food, no beds,
but mountain grass and only some poor substitute for bed clothes.‟293 O‟Donnell‟s main character,
Hughie Dalach, after serving a prison sentence for brewing poteen, returns to his impoverished
288
Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 225.
Ibid., 226.
290
Donal. Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O‘Donnell (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001) p. 129.
291
Ibid., 4-5.
292
Peadar O‟Donnell, Adrigoole (London-Toronto: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1929) p. 7.
289
52
farmstead, and discovers that his wife Brigid and one of their children have died of starvation during
his absence. This geographical reading of Adrigoole will divide the novel into the various places
(The Lower Hills, The Bog-land and The Hiring Fair) and themes (Spaces of War and Starvation)
which reflected O‟Donnell‟s engagement and representation of the natural landscapes, impoverished
communities, and social enmity which fragmented many townlands of the West of Ireland during
the aftermath of the Irish Civil War.
2.2.2. The Lower Hills
The narrative of O‟Donnell‟s 1929 novel traced the life of Hughie Dalach, from his boyhood
in a Donegal townland, through his years as a hired labourer in Glasgow. It witnessed his marriage
to Brigid, their return to Adrigoole, their losing struggle against bog and mountain, and their final
estrangement from a spiteful community during the Civil War. Adrigoole addressed the social and
environmental conditions that led to the Dalach‟s desperate spiral into starvation. Commencing in
autumn, the first chapter roots the townland of Adrigoole in its particular landscape of hills and bogs
and traces its communal life through the circle of seasons:
„In the Lower Hills, clearing up the
fields at the end of the harvest was the best loved task of the year. Once the basket of potatoes had
disappeared into the barn, and the last stone or sod had been fixed on the fence round the stacks of
oats, neighbourliness had new freedom.‟294 The social geographies of a rural townland revolved
around the yearly cycle of communal life, defined by age and activity, and sheltered symbiotically
within the natural features of a rugged landscape:
Around blazing fires old men and stories; women leaning wise heads towards
live words and sipping strong tea; the tinkle of dancing knitting-needles. From
the shelter of grey rock, where stars spoiled the shadow, the gurgling laughter
of couples. A blue sky roofing a grey night. And behind it all the mountains of
Donegal, sombre, muscular, massive, full-breasted with earthliness, leaning
against granite headed Errigal, sharp-edged among the stars.295
With the end of the season, the community huddled together as „winter perched on the shoulders of
the hills and whistled sharp, crisp warning. Snow pelted down into the glen, banking against fences
and snuggling under the shelter of rocks. The open doors shut; fires piled peat now added warmth to
the light from the windows. Laughter outside was sudden and short; feet pattered on the frosty road.
The diffused neighbourliness of the open fields collected in pools of eager folk in special houses that
varied from night to night.‟296 In Adrigoole, like many communities on the western fringe of Ireland,
life was synchronized to the seasonal changes; its rhythm and purpose driven by natural conditions
and tasks proscribed by the limits of climate, weather and landscape:
„Tragic Story of Want in West Cork‟, Irish Independent, 30 March, 1927.
Adrigoole, 11.
295
Ibid., 11-12.
296
Ibid., 12.
293
294
53
Spring called for the raising of fences; it split the nightly groups and took the
children from their ramblings, and away from the ponds that were now water
and mud and rock [. . . ] Summer straightened men‟s backs in the fields; cattle
were driven into the mountain, and youngsters thronged among drying peat;
here and there a „gathering‟ to help a widow or delicate neighbour.297
After the long days of summer, the cold brisk days of Autumn follow, recommencing the cycle of
life in O‟Donnell‟s narrative: „Birth, labour, love, marriage, death,‟298 archetypically trace the
eternal path of the seasons in his this rural community. As one reads through Adrigoole, it is
apparent that O‟Donnell‟s writing disintegrated this idyllic trope. It is place he created a prose
fiction landscape poisoned by bitter communal enmity, and devastated by war and poverty, to
reflect the harsh rural environments that existed during the hard early years of the Irish Free State
2.2.3. The Bog-land
The spaces of Western Ireland‟s bog-lands have been venerated by the poet Seamus Heaney:
„The ground itself is kind, black butter,‟299 and mapped in the narrative geographies of Estyn Evans
„as places of refuge,‟ 300 that provided „hiding places as secure as the mountain mastifs.‟ 301 Evans
claimed „mountains and bogs made the subjugation of the whole country well nigh impossible.‟302
These aesthetic and academic framings of the terrain composing O‟Donnell‟s native place contrast
sharply with the harsh landscapes he depicted in Adrigoole. His stony bog-land was an unkind
environment that subjugated its inhabitants: „But the rocks were sharp-edged, deep-rooted, broadfaced; the patches of soil were twisted around granite boulders; there were no ploughs, only spades;
no horses, only donkeys.‟303 To the elder Hughie, the Dalach family patriarch, this landscape is
anything but a refuge to be held in pastoral esteem. He has ruefully watched his son Cormac‟s
husbandry of a rented plot in a landscape composed of bog and mountain, and he believes that this
unforgiving environment will eventually devour the ambitions of his progeny:
The grandfather looked at the empty, greyish bog. Cormac had pushed it
right up to the highest point where the feeling of the mountain was with him;
any farther and Cormac‟s nature would be forcing one work on the skin of
the mountain, and the mountain itself pitting its nature against Cormac‟s. To
put a fiery man, like what Hughie would make, in on that ground would be
like driving a spirited horse over bog. Hughie could kill himself plunging.
Only low-lifed things could live in there; fat, bulbous, lazy frogs that come
out of soft, lifeless, spongy spawn, and go out again in slimy, clammy
death.304
297
Ibid.
Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 225.
299
Seamus Heaney, „Bogland‟ in Seamus Heaney: Selected Poems 1966-1987 (N.Y.: The Noonday Press,
1996) p. 22.
300
E. Estyn Evans, The Personality of Ireland (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1992 [1973]) p.35.
301
Ibid.
302
Ibid.
303
Adrigoole 13.
304
Ibid., 27-28.
298
54
The elder Hughie feels that emigration, not the land, holds the promise for his grandson‟s future:
„He had no feeling that his grandson should be kept at home; out into the world sometime or
deeper into the bog; not the bog; emphatically not the bog [ . . .] Then out into the world let it be.
Young Hughie would make his way there; later he would come back and get a place somewhere
among all the places away down towards the shore where families weathered into the grave after
the young ones had emigrated.‟305 It is decided that his grandson Hughie, will go to Strabane,
where „the folk from the ―back country‖ ‟306 are hired out as a labourers to the big Protestant
farmers in the Lagan Valley of mid-Ulster.
2.2.4. The Hiring Fair
The „Hiring Fair‟ in Strabane during the early decades of the twentieth century had been a
place „where Gaelic servants and the planter masters [would] meet and bargain year after year,
since the native power was broken in Ulster,‟307 with the flight of the O‟Neill‟s many centuries
before. At the fair manual agrarian labourers and domestic servants, many of them children, were
auctioned off, like cattle. This practice lasted well into the late 1930s, until the Second World War
created manufacturing jobs in Britain to attract the Irish emigrant labour market. O‟Donnell‟s
representation of the Hiring Fair was fraught and tense, coloured by the contrasting local
vernaculars spoken across the province of Ulster:
Hughie was puzzled; he felt that even here the grown-ups were afraid. A
buzz of hushed talk arose among the young folk, and instinctively it was in
Gaelic. Round about the Gaelic whispers hung the heavy, solemn, Scotch
accent of the stranger.308
Donal A‟Chailleach, „who had a name for a short temper in the Lower Hills,‟309 is the Catholic
middleman, who acts as a broker between the Gaelic folk from the back hills and the Protestant
landowners at the Hiring Fair. Donal, despite professing a feisty animosity against the Protestant
farmers: „Damn on them; an‘ it‘s us should be up here in these lands; bloody lot o‘ thieves,‟310 is
passive in the face of their aggression: „Donal . . . only grinned when a stocky, middle-aged man in
side-whiskers shouldered him roughly out of the way.‟311 He hails one of the farmers deferentially:
„―Morrow, Mr Craig,‖ Donal greeted. ―Are ye wantin‘ a good couple of youngster‘s the day?‖‟312
Accordingly, Hughie and the other children line up as the wealthy farmers of the Lagan Valley eye
305
Ibid., 26.
Ibid., 54
307
Ibid., 54.
308
Ibid., 53.
309
Ibid.
310
Ibid.
311
Ibid.
312
Ibid.
306
55
them like cattle.313 Mr. Craig tells Donal that „I could be doin‘ wi‘ a likely lump o‘ a lassie‘ he said.
‗Is the big one yourn? ‟314 Donal in turn responds:
„She‟s that. Come over here, Ellen.‟ Ellen a girl of sixteen, came slowly
forward, her head down. Mr. Craig put his hand under her chin, and tilted her
face backwards „She‟s a bit well-featured. I‟d sooner hae a homelier face. I
don‟t want men wastin‟ their time.‟315
The passage through the Hiring Fair in Strabane created the gateway for the „folk from the back
country‟ to the labour markets of the Lagan Valley and then to the „tatie‟ fields of Scotland, where
a ticket to the States could be earned by pulling spuds. The goal of emigration across the Atlantic
was to earn and save enough money in America over a life time to buy a homestead back in the
stony bog-lands
of Adrigoole.
However, Hughie escapes the tide and cycle of emigration.
O‟Donnell‟s depiction of his character‟s evolving lifeworld explores the historical and cultural
spaces of revolutionary Ireland, the aftermath of an internecine civil war, and the related themes of
poverty and social fragmentation which colour the fate of Hughie‟s family within the horizons of
the rural landscape in which they are rooted.
2.2.5. Spaces of War and Starvation
Instead of emigrating, Hugh marries Brigid, whose uncle Neddy Brian owns a small farm
above the Lower Hills. They settle and embark upon a hard life of rural domesticity, that revolves
around the life of the family and the land. Hughie considers himself blessed to be able to live upon
his native soil: „Hughie was lucky coming into Adrigoole in a mood that gave him enthusiasm for
his farm. The littleness of his work in Scotland had cured him of the greatness of his life in the
Lagan. Without friendly soil under foot Hughie was nothing. Scotland had taught him that; strength
and greatness were in Hughie on the land only.‟316 In time though, his grandfather‟s prescience
about the harsh and unforgiving nature of the landscape comes back to haunt him:
There were greater spaces between the rocks here than down in the Lower
Hills, but here the soil had nearly been grown over the bog. Hughie would
have wished it had been otherwise. He did not know it was hereditary in him
to have a feeling against bog. He worked to drive it deeper and to deepen the
layer of life . . . 317.
Hughie‟s battle to earn a living on such poor terrain places a strain upon the family: „ ―It‘s the bog
underneath,‖ Hughie said; ―it‘s hard to drive bog deep, an it sucks an‘ suck at any strong life
above it‖.‟318 Despite his attempts to wrestle the land from the bog, his efforts are futile: „Hughie‘s
sense of irritation against his fields increased. He could scarcely send his spade to the ears without
Grattan Freyer, Peadar O‘Donnell (Lewisburg: Bucknell University, 1973) p. 45.
Adrigoole, 53.
315
Ibid.
316
Ibid., 231.
317
Ibid.
313
314
56
touching bog. He tried to deepen drains, but he was flooded out. He cursed the mountain about him
that day with its bellyful of water.‟319
Hughie‟s struggle with the bog, coincides with the eruption of the Irish War of
Independence. The Dalach‟s learn of the conflict as they shelter IRA men on the run: „ ―Ireland
and England were at war,‖ the hunted men said. All over the country people were organising and
freedom was coming.‟320 In the aftermath of the war „Rumours came into the Lower Hills that
peace might not come to Ireland after all. The English would not allow Ireland to escape from the
Empire and were offering a kind of Home Rule within it, and threatened immediate and terrible
war if their offer was refused.‟ 321 O‟Donnell depicted the subsequent caesura between landless
Republican and the vested interests of empire, property and capital that the Irish Civil War of
1922-„23. This political split undermined the „neighbourliness‟ of small, rural communities, and in
turn led to their social fragmentation:
The Irish Republican Army was overwhelmingly against the British offer,
but the priests and the newspapers were for it, and several well known
officers deserted from the army declared for it too. The majority of the
people turned against the army, and the English supplied weapons for a
Dominion force to oppose it, and enforce the peace terms. Two armies grew
up in the country and bitter words were said and clashes took place. The
Government departments were administered by the Dominion authorities,
and the resources of the country passed under its control, so they could pay
their army, and the recruits poured in.322
The Dalachs support the Republican side during the Treaty split, and as a result they are ostracized
by the petite bourgeoisie of Adrigoole. The metaphor of the bog conveys the creeping social enmity
filling the townland: „The lack of trust in Hughie in his farm was growing; it was becoming a
nightmare with him that the bog was rising; that the mountain was bulging with water, and that the
cold nature of the mountain was coming up through his soil.‟323 The Dalach farm is rumoured to be
sheltering Republicans on the run, and a Free State Army squad, composed of Adrigoole locals,
execute a raid upon their land. Mistaking the figures of Hugh and Neddy Brian walking in the mist
as fleeing Republicans, they shoot at the pair, hitting Hughie and mortally wounding his uncle.
Neddy‟s wake indelibly cements the polarisation between Republican and Free State
families in the community, which up until the shooting had been uneasily living side by side. Soon,
the Free State government begins to collect land arrears to compensate Britain for the property loss
their citizens incurred during the war. This compounds the poverty of those already ostracized by
318
Ibid., 239.
Ibid., 279.
320
Ibid., 235.
321
Ibid., 249
322
Ibid.
323
Ibid., 268-269.
319
57
the Treaty split. Since most members of the petite bourgeoisie, including the shopkeepers, the
clergy and the guards, are gate-keepers to the meagre resources available in the impoverished rural
landscape, the Dalachs are left to scrounge whatever they can from their patch of stony bog-land:
„with the coming of spring new problems had to be faced. Seed potatoes were scarce, and there was
no money to buy more. The arrears of rent, arising out of years of non-payment, were now being
sought.‟324
This drives Hughie to emigrate to Scotland, where he contracts typhoid fever. Brigid rushes
to nurse him, and upon returning to Adrigoole, discovers that the illness has further isolated Dalach
family: „ ―Will neighbours never be neighbours again?‖ Brigid mused.‟325 Hughie attempts to
return, but with his land running to ruin –„Heather was pushing roots into the corners of his
fields,‟326 and the „terrible plague of Civil Bills,‟327 arriving to the small, isolated land owners, he
reluctantly goes back to Scotland to find work. Left to forage for food, one of his children, Grania
dies after eating hemlock, mistaking the deadly plant for wild carrot. Hugh, notified by telegram
returns to mourn the death of his child. As he tries to salvage the year‟s scant crop „Hughie and his
fields parted company.‟ 328 He finds that his heart is no longer in the land:
The constant rain was doing its work; all rain and no strength in his arms
weakened the crops. Hughie walked in his own fields with a grudge in his
heart against them. Heather was popping up in most unexpected places. A
good crop might have won Hughie back to his fields; a good strong sun
crusting the soil and draining the meanness out of the bog would have put
heart in crops, field and Hughie. But only rain, and dull skies, and a glug of
water underfoot. The harvest in that year was the poorest ever.329
Out of a sense of desperation, „ ―I‘m just being drowned,‖ Hughie said; ―just bein‘ drowned‖, ‟330
he joins a neighbour‟s poteen brewing operation: „The farm was gone dead; here was a new
life.‟331 But before he can share in any of the profits from this illicit venture, his neighbour‟s stillhouse is raided, and a fight with the Gardaí ensues. Hughie is arrested, charged and tried. As the
convicted men are transported to prison, there is an exchange between one of the bootleggers and a
Garda Sergeant:
The sergeant said poteen was the curse of any district, and Donal Neil joined
issue with him there. Donal defied the sergeant to tell him a case of a well-todo man that ever made poteen. And the sergeant defied Donal to tell him of a
man that made poteen ever coming to anything, or ever one belonging to him
324
Ibid., 260.
Ibid., 266.
326
Ibid., 268.
327
Ibid., 272.
328
Ibid., 278-279.
329
Ibid.
330
Ibid.
331
Ibid., 280.
325
58
coming to anything, barring he left the district. And Donal demanded the
name of any poor man, or anybody belonging to a poor man, that ever
became anything, barrin‟ he left the district.332
Hughie enters prison, and O‟Donnell‟s depiction of jail life can be read as means through which he
indirectly illustrates the daily grind of living in the clutches of poverty and all its deprivations:
„There was no day, no night, but grey eternity, and walls and walls.‟333 Released from prison, he
travels home from Dublin, to discover that starvation has killed Brigid and one of his children,
Sheila. The cultural memory of famine is transposed upon the scene in grim tones:
The woman, Brigid, she was dead. The child face down on the hearth was
dead. Wrapped in the straw at the back of the door there was a body; little
Sheila. When the straw was moved stench rose. In the bed somebody stirred
and they turned eagerly. Nancy was sitting up. They lifted her out. Donal
grumbled; Eoin cried weakly; faces without flesh or colour; only eyes.334
Faced with the devastation of his family, Hughie is driven to madness: „He wanted to grasp the
back of his head with his two hands. The revolving lights swept forward, came forward, forward
across a great space; he heard the rustle of fire and the crackle of flame.‟335 As the Gardaí and
estranged neighbours arrive Hughie is led away to the mental asylum. O‟Donnell concludes his
novel with a bitter irony, as the townland of Adrigoole collects in horror around the empty house:
A policeman fainted. One raced off for the doctor and the priest and motor
cars; another hurriedly built a fire. The doctor arrived. Neighbours were
already collecting, nervously drawing close. Was it fever? A policeman came
out of the house. He was crying. It was of hunger the Dalachs had died. A
sudden silence fell on the crowd; gasps, sacred names, sobs came in a
scattered volley. And then with one impulse neighbourliness flooded warm . .
. 336.
2.2.6. Summary
O‟Donnell completed his novel Adrigoole, after spending several years working on the Land
Annuities Campaign, protesting the payment of arrears to Britain, by small landowners in the
struggling economy of the newly independent Free State. The deaths of the Sullivan family „lent
force to O‘Donnell‘s argument that breaking the law by witholding land annuity payments was
preferable to starvation.‟337 The issue was adopted by Eamon de Valera‟s political platform for
Fianna Fáil‟s 1932 election campaign, and flared into the Economic War against Britain soon after
de Valera came to power. On the run in Donegal after his prison break in 1924, O‟Donnell had read
the signs of growing desperation in the landscape: „I was more aware now of the weakness of this
332
Ibid., 287.
Ibid., 301.
334
Ibid., 314.
335
Ibid., 313
336
Ibid., 314.
337
Peter Hegarty, Peadar O‘Donnell (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1999) p. 167.
333
59
economy. My eyes were sharper. I noticed how the heather ate its way into land that had fallen into
feeble hands. It saddened me that the mountains should renew their grip on fields that had been won
from them by desperate, hopeful men.‟338 Prompted by the starvation of the Sullivans, the novel also
reflected O‟Donnell‟s sensitivity towards the affective nature of landscape, and his talent for
conveying it into words: „I often walked alone in the shadow of the hills. It was then that the sense of
gloom and doom in my novel Adrigoole, entered my mind.‟339
2.3 The Knife (1930)
2.3.1. Introduction
O‟Donnell‟s novel The Knife was first serialized in An Phoblacht by its editor Frank Ryan
under the headline „Written of the IRA –For the IRA,‟ in November and December of 1930. The
narrative contained a relatively sympathetic portrait of Ulster‟s Orangemen and was informed both
by his experience as an union organiser in the province where he was known as the „Stormy Petrel
of the Transport Workers,‟340 and his days as commander of the Second Battalion of the East
Donegal IRA. This section will be divided into a brief synopsis of The Knife and its setting, a of
O‟Donnell‟s early lifepath to explicate themes illustrated in the novel, and will conclude with a
brief discussion of the cross sectarian alliances in the rural pockets of western Ulster during the
early days of the Irish Free State.
2.3.2. The Valley
O‟Donnell set the story in a small planter district in the Laggan Valley of East Donegal
between 1913-1923.t In the novel he depicts the history of the uneasy cultural topography of the
native and planter communities in the valley:
Three hundred years have piled up since that night and the crusted centuries
entomb the misery of that flight which, even more than the centuries, dims the
race memory of days of early greatness. The treeless hills now swarm with
men and women and barelegged children on whose tongues still lives the
language of the broken nation. A necklace of native farmers rings the hungry
fringes of the plain, halting where the heather halts; the vibrant fields below
are the booty of the planter. Back in the deepest reaches of the mountain tame
natives serve the foreign landlord, and along the thickening veins of
commerce native villages assemble around garrison posts. The native has
taken root in the mountain.341
Peadar O‟Donnell, There Will Be Another Day (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1963) p. 22.
Ibid.
340
Anton McCabe, ‗The Stormy Petrel of the Transport Workers‘: Peadar O‟Donnell, Trade Unionist, 19171920 (Dublin: Elso Press, 2000) p. 8.
t
O‟Donnell employs the local vernacular label „Lagan,‟ as the place-name of the valley in The Knife. This is
in distinction to its official topographical designation during the period. This vernacular use of place name in
O‟Donnell‟s 1930 novel is not to be confused with the larger region in mid-Ulster officially referred to as
the Lagan Valley).
341
Peadar O‟Donnell, The Knife (Dublin: Irish Humanities Centre, 1980 [1930]) pp. 11-12.
338
339
60
The plot centers on the Godfrey Dhus, a Catholic family who buy a house and land in the middle of
a Protestant district, with „every rood of land owned by a solid Orange stock,‟342 after inheriting a
sum of money from a relative in Australia. The publican Dan Sweeney and the local priest Father
Burns comprise the local Catholic bourgeois of the district. They are uncomfortable with of the
social ambitions of the Godfrey Dhus, as are the Orange brethren, who collectively fear that the
family‟s presence and ownership of property will incite native uprisings and violence in the valley.
As O‟Donnell opens The Knife, he provides a historical backdrop which depicts the plantation of
Ulster, which marginalizes its native occupants. In doing so he illustrates the root of hostility
between these two communities that fills the valley in with an uneasy and contested sense of place:
Down in the plain the victor thrives among the fecund fields. He has coaxed
the native youth down from the hills to harness them as servants, and they
have spread over the Lagan, building shelters for themselves in waste patches,
accepting the stranger as their master, adopting his tongue. The Lagan holds
its lapful of strange children, planter and native mixed, not fused, sweating
together, thinking apart, uneasy in silence, sudden in sidelong glances.343
After a few clashes between Catholics labourers and Protestant farmers, the Dhus fall under the
protection of Sam Rowan, a local Orange chieftain, who puts aside his family‟s bigotry, in order to
maintain peace in the district. The family also elicits the sympathy of Doctor Henry, the local
Protestant physician, who along with Sam Rowan and the local Irish Volunteer commander James
Burns, share a romanttic interest in Nuala Godfrey Dhus. Doctor Henry is the most subtle character
in the novel and negotiates skilfully around the sectarian boundaries erected by planter and native
cultures in the valley. Visiting Nuala he reveals the confused nature of his own identity, and offers
an insight into the Protestant fear of Home Rule:
„Now first of all, I‟m only a poor sort of Orangeman –my while in England
made an Irishman of me. Its only at home an Orangeman is not Irish; in
England he‟d beat the face off anybody who insisted he was English. I‟m
against all this fuss and talk and drill and all the Carson nonsense: it is just a
big show off. But down here on the Lagan some think Home Rule is a bit of
heaven with all the priest for it, and more think it‟s a bit of hell with all the
ministers against it, and between them they just keep Orangemen and
Catholics ready to burn one another. When all this bad feeling is there, any
wee thing can set it rioting, and I‟m afraid your coming here will do it.‟ 344
In 1919 the Irish War of Independence sweeps the island and the Godfrey Dhus actively participate
in drilling, gun-running and skirmishing for the Irish Volunteers. After the Government of Ireland
Act of 1920, Laggan Valley Orangemen partitioned out of the Union, gather to discuss their fear of
being put under Catholic rule and contemplate their political and economic options:
342
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 11-12.
344
Ibid., 51.
343
61
Now there is an assurance that the property of the Orangemen of the south
will be safe, if all the offices under the Government are given to Sinn Feiners
[. . . ] It is a step backwards of course, but all the things we used to beat up
drums with wont happen. If we can hold our property you‟ll see that we can
still call the tune. They will be in the Parliament, in the Police, in the Civil
Service, but money and brains well used will give us the reins. 345
The Godfrey Dhus too are opposed to the political treaty which creates the Southern State, but for
different reasons. O‟Donnell‟s novel depicted a local region in which Orangemen and Catholic
natives in Ulster were united in their resistance. The Godfrey Dhus support the Republican side
during the Irish Civil War and in doing so they come into conflict with the Free State Army and the
Catholic Church. At mass Father Burns offers up prayers for the Free State and in doing so enrages
„The Knife‟ who crosses a rubicon by stepping upon the altar to declare: „I‘m saying that the priest
who makes use of the altar as Father Burns is making to-day is not fit to be a priest. Father Burns
has made a platform of the altar.‟346
This violation of the sacred space of the altar in the narrative caused the novel to be
denounced by Catholic bishops upon its publication in 1930 and the „Irish Independent declared it
―A novel that no Irish Catholic, at any rate, can hope to read without a blush of shame.‖‟347 Due to
the Church‟s stand against Republicans, O‟Donnell observed that „the priests became jail officials
in the eyes of many prisoners,‟348 during the civil war. He claimed that Republican anger at clerics
stemmed from „the refusal to allow dead bodies of prisoners into churches [. . .] and the refusal of
priests to ask for the prayers of the congregation for our Roll of Honour.‟349
The novel concludes with „The Knife‟ and Dr. Henry being captured by James Burns, whose
affections for Nuala having been spurned, joins the Free State Army to seek revenge against her
family. The pair are imprisoned and sentenced to death by a Free State military tribunal, but
ultimately Sam Rowan, the local Orange chieftain and his brethren, rescue them from the firing
squad. As they head for the refuge of the Inishowen peninsula, The Knife closes with a romantic
picture of Sam Rowan and Nuala Godfrey Dhus crossing the sectarian divide, breaking the binds of
heritage and tradition. Though O‟Donnell‟s narrative provides perhaps a quixotic solution to the
social enmity inhabiting Ulster‟s cultural landscapes, his sympathetic portrait of Orange small
farmers was informed by his experiences as both an activist for the Irish Transport & General
Worker‟s Union (ITGWU) and ironically, as an IRA Volunteer (Óglach). For this reason, it is
important to return to a consideration of O‟Donnell‟s lifepath and its settings, to discuss his
experiences as a labour agitator and republican volunteer. By doing so, one is able to flesh out the
O‟Donnell, The Knife, 156-157.
Ibid., 177.
347
ÓDrisceol, Peadar O‘Donnell, 57.
348
O‟Donnell, The Gates Flew Open, 44.
345
346
62
complex and heterogeneous relationship between the native and settler communities in the rural
pockets of Ulster, which influenced, informed and coloured the local sense of place of the „Lagan‟
Valley depicted by O‟Donnell in The Knife.
2.3.3. Activist & Óglach
In 1919 O‟Donnell organised two strikes that crossed Ulster‟s sectarian lines and became
milestones in Irish labour history. The first resulted in the occupation of the Monaghan Asylum
with members of the Irish Asylum Worker‟s Union after disputes over the ninety-three hour week
and unequal rates of pay for female nurses arose between the hospital‟s workers and its
administration. On the 28th of January O‟Donnell came up with the tactic of locking out the
hospital‟s governor and occupying the building. Flying the flag
of international Communist
solidarity over the asylum, O‟Donnell later told the press: „We set up a Soviet Committee there, we
hoisted the Red Flag, we controlled the service and no community interest suffered.‟350 As a self
appointed governor, he set up a forty-eight hour work week, fired the matron and placed one
individual he felt was affecting the morale of the strikers in a padded cell.351 This radical strategy of
O‟Donnell‟s soon attracted the attention of the authorities: „The hundred staff inside the building
were soon matched by the [Royal Irish Constabulary] who rushed a hundred armed men to
surround the occupation. The Belfast Weekly Telegraph was mocking in its report, ―Red Flag over
asylum‖, but admitted that the situation was tense, with inmates expressing themselves willing to
support the strikers should the police attempt to storm the building.‟352
The strike ended peacefully after a fifty-six hour week was agreed upon and the union‟s
demands for an equal pay raise for women employees was met. The hospital‟s restored governor
also secured an agreement from O‟Donnell that he „be barred from the lunatic asylum –unless
properly certified.‟353 His strike deputy had been a local Orangeman, Wille Haire, and O‟Donnell
contended that „it is often in the name of his fierce Orange beliefs that [an Orangeman] enters a
progressive fight.‟354
Haire encouraged O‟Donnell to establish the ITGWU in a traditional heartland of
Orangeism in the mill village of Caledon, County Tyrone. After recruiting 107 members from
Fulton‟s Woollen Mill and securing a few concessions on pay and working conditions, the ITGWU
went on strike on 21st February after two members were sacked. Orangemen supporting the union
349
Ibid.
Derry Journal, 28 February, 1919.
351
McCabe, Stormy Petrel,8.
352
Conor Kostik, Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy 1917 to 1923 (London/Chicago: Pluto Press,
1996) p. 70.
353
Ó Drisceol , Peadar O‘Donnell, 14.
354
Edna Longley, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Belfast: Bloodaxe, 1994) p.
113.
350
63
were denied priviliges in their Lodges and O‟Donnell was beaten badly twice by scab workers and
the Royal Irish Constabulary. The ITGWU was branded a nationalist front by the local Orange
establishment, and „the mill became a loyalist fortress with Union Jack‘s hung from the
windows.‟355 After ten weeks the strike ended with the ITGWU defeated. The Armagh Guardian
newspaper reporting on the Twelfth of July celebrations in Caledon commented: „the loyal village
just signally defeated Sinn Fein‘s first attempt to cause strife in the Unionist ranks through the
Labour class.‟356 However, „the senior British official in Ireland, Lord French, regarded the
emergence of a united labour movement [that crossed sectarian lines] as a greater threat than Sinn
Féin,‘ and its campaign to repeal the Act of Union.357 O‟Donnell noted after the Caledon strike that
Ulster Protestants were „the only real fighters in Ireland, as different from the volatile Southerners
as Frenchmen are from Englishmen.‟358 In 1920 with a guerrilla war underway against British
interests in Ireland, O‟Donnell‟s attempt to establish the ITGWU in Derry foundered when
sectarian riots killed twenty people. British based unions were also competing for membership and
O‟Donnell‟s „resolute Ulster campaign found itself sided in the nationalist ghetto.‟359
On the 23rd of October, he collected his last wage from the union and on the 6th of
November, as a member of an IRA unit which attacked the Custom House in Derry, he shot a
policeman. On the night of the 29th of December, O‟Donnell marched out of the city on the
Letterkenny Road at the head of a ten men strong flying column heading for Donegal. His
command in the East Donegal IRA comprised of „five Battalions, drawn from men who held
regular jobs by day, and a Flying Column,‟360 of full time men on the run. His leadership was
informed by socialist principles developed during his training as an ITGWU activist in Dublin,
where he was exposed to the writings of Karl Marx and James Connolly. O‟Donnell observed that
„The Irish countryside never knew James Connolly, but it stirred the live embers of Fenian
radicalism that was its own share of the national tradition of struggle.‟361 The geographical scope
of his command „stretched from Malin Head, the most northerly point in Ireland, across to Fanad
Head and down to Lifford and Glendowan. For a short time Derry city was included.‟362 The range
of his command ensured that O‟Donnell was on active service in Loyalist districts, where he and
his men could find refuge: „Strangely, in the light of later history, many of these houses were
355
McCabe, Stormy Petrel, 15.
Armagh Guardian, 18 July, 1919, referenced in McCabe, Stormy Petrel, 15.
357
ÓDrisceol, Peadar O‘Donnell, 13.
358
Freyer, Peadar O‘Donnell, 47.
359
E. O‟Connor, A Labour History of Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1992) p. 101.
360
Freyer, 30.
361
O‟Donnell, There Will Be Another Day, 19.
362
Ibid.
356
64
Protestant. The local ‗Orangeman,‘ as Ulster Protestants are generally called, might not
sympathize with the rebels, but they would not inform on neighbors to the British.‟363
2.3.4. Summary
The preceding lifepath experiences that occurred to O‟Donnell in his native Ulster at the
time of the Irish War of Independence, inspired the cross-sectarian theme of his novel The Knife.
By depicting Sam Rowan and Dr. Henry as Protestant figures sympathetic to their Catholic
neighbours, O‟Donnell was contrasting the evidence of local identity and heterogeneous loyalty
against the abstract nationalist hagiography promoted by the Irish Free State and Catholic Church in
the period following independence:
The wise men whisper and are convinced, and they enter the struggle calling
loudly to the men of Ireland to press forward. Pearse and Clarke are rescued
from hell, and handed over to the excited nation as saints. Connolly is a
human being again, his death having condoned his socialism, not enthroned it.
The voices of the old garrison will soon be drowned, and while the fighting
men of Ireland struggle and die, the queuing will be renewed. But meantime,
down in the Lagan . . . 364.
The uneasy allegiances between the native and planter communities in the Laggan Valley of East
Donegal depicted in The Knife, were drawn from O‟Donnell‟s early lifepath experiences as a
Labour Activist and Republican Volunteer. In the novel, these two communities in the valley,
though holding republican and loyalist convictions, are united in the sense that they both reject (for
different reasons) the larger political state structures of the Free State, in which they find themselves
after the War of Independence and the partition of the North. It is the collusion of history and place
that largely determines this localised though ambivalent sense of alliance between the Catholic and
Protestant communities in this region of Ulster. As a piece of literary geography O‟Donnell‟s novel
The Knife illustrates through its choice of character, narrative and setting, the contention that
„Ireland was and remains an island of localized regions, a perspective which can only but help
deconstruct the potential divisive nature of island-wide generalization and state sponsored
ideology.‟365 In doing so The Knife offers a literary frame to examine O‟Donnell‟s critique of the
forces of sectarianism, nationalism and property capitalism, as well as excavate the heterogeneous
and localised nature of place and community, operating within the regional landscapes of his
native province
363
Ibid., 29.
O‟Donnell, The Knife, 95.
365
Kevin Whelan, „Settlement and society in eighteenth-century Ireland‟ in Dawe Foster, eds., Poets Place,
p. 61., referenced in, Brian J. Graham, „No Place of the Mind: Contested Protestant Representations of
Ulster‟ Ecumene 1994 1 (3) p. 272.
364
65
2.4 The Wrack (1933)
2.4.1 Introduction
On 21 November 1932, The Wrack premiered at the Abbey Theatre, (the stage-play was
published the following year in 1933). Located on an island off the Donegal coast on a cold winter
evening, the play is set in the Spartan environment of a stone cottage and upon the perilous night
time herring fishing grounds of the Atlantic Ocean surrounding the island. The drama depicted the
poverty of islanders in the face of nature, and their lives, which revolved around shoals of herring
running off the coast. O‟Donnell wrote his drama in response to a joint pastoral letter issued in 1931
by the Catholic Bishops of Ireland. The pastoral letter branded O‟Donnell‟s group Saor Éire
„Communistic,‟
because it had called for a „nationalisation of
banks, industries and large
estates.‟366 The bishop‟s pastoral message was aimed at countering what the Church and State
perceived as the growing Red Menace of Russia: „The bishops called for solutions to the country‘s
social and economic problems that were ―in accordance with the traditions of Catholic Ireland,‖
the very solutions that Fianna Fáil was about to offer the electorate.‟367 It also labelled the IRA
„sinful and irreligious,‟368 and during this period O‟Donnell lived on the run, emerging
clandestinely to deliver a draft of the play to W. B. Yeats.
2.4.2. The Dead Sea
Wrack aimed to address the endemic rural poverty that the bishops ignored in their
condemnations, and O‟Donnell, on the night of the play‟s debut simply said „I just wanted to draw
aside a window-curtain in a cottage on an island.‟369 The bulk of Wrack‘s action takes place within
the stone walls of a damp cottage, and the emotional plotting of the drama depicts the ceaseless
anxiety borne out of attempting to procure resources for survival, as well as the inherent danger in
securing them. This undernourished island community suffering from the ravages of the period‟s
rural poverty must „ ―pluck for everything that‘s dark and clammy‘ -carragen, dilsk, sloak and the
wrack which [gives] the play its title.‟370 In a letter to his publisher Jonathan Cape, O‟Donnell
criticised the xenophobia promoted in the bishop‟s joint pastoral letter to address the social unrest
caused by the existence of rural poverty which he depicted in his drama: „They said Russian Gold
was the cause of the unrest. I said such things as the slapping of wet skirts against people‘s legs.
Therefore Wrack.‟371 In the play, Brigid bemoans the incipient dampness that pervades island life:
„I hate the slapping of wet skirts on my legs. I hate all this pulling and driving and mean living; it‘s
Michael McInerny, Peadar O‘Donnell: Irish Social Rebel (Dublin: The O‟Brien Press, 1974) p. 116
Ibid.
368
ÓDrisceol, Peadar O‘Donnell, 68.
369
Freyer, Peadar O‘Donnell, 105.
370
Hegarty, Peadar O‘Donnell, 197
371
Ó Drisceol, Peadar O‟Donnell, 69.
366
367
66
making me a kind of risen. And there‘s more like me. Look at the way we‘re wearing out.‟372 Her
neighbour Mary Jim broods on the disappearance of herring from the island‟s fishing grounds: „I‘m
dead as the sea out there: we might as well be tied together, me and the sea. What life can people
have on an island when the life goes out of the sea? And isn‘t that sea out there dead?‟373
The plot of the drama is structured by the anticipation of a run of herring, and the
subsequent storm which delivers the shoals of fish, as well as the death of a few islanders. The
underlying current which runs through the plot is the desperation of the community in the face of
scarcity. Peter Dan, the island‟s best fisherman is described by Fanny Brian looking out to sea
stoically hoping to see signs of a herring run: „And this day I watched him for an hour and him stiff
against a rock, his two eyes stuck in the sea-gulls in the Bay. And now he has his big boat out. He‘s
going out this night.‟374 The signs of the impending storm are recognised by Kitty, as she reads the
island‟s landscape for signs to predict the weather: „Cobwebs on the grass is rain. Cormorants is
birds I never heard heed put in.‟375
Living on the edge of survival, the men set out in their boats at night-time into the gales of a
storm. The dilemma faced by one boat crew is whether to sacrifice the haul of herring to save their
neighbours in a foundering boat, or to pull the catch in and survive themselves. As Fanny recounts:
„The thick thighs of the waves crushed the life out of our men, for I saw it. I saw the sea, smooth like
a child‘s skin, with the fouls in a tremble to leap through and smash the whole world around them.‟
376
In the end, the crew overwhelmed by the storm decides to pull in the catch of herring and return
to the island with a Pyrrhic victory. Fanny laments the fragility of life as the islanders‟ attempt to
scratch out a barren existence within the deadly fickleness of their sea-locked environment:
I saw the wee timber boats going out into the darkness. I heard the roar of the
fouls and the bursting of blasts, and before my very eyes the wee timber boats
went whirling round. And then I saw a big coffin drifting helpless in the sea,
and a sail peeling itself off a mast and winding itself around the bodies of dead
men. It was Peter Dan‟s boat. 377
2.4.3. Summary
At the play‟s end, the curtain falls on the community, dropped to its knees within a stone
cottage fervently reciting the rosary, in memory of the dead fishermen. O‟Donnell later reflected on
Wrack : „I intended it to be a glimpse of an island dying; the island I had in mind has since died.‟378
His drama was not only a response to the joint pastoral letter issued by the Catholic bishops, it was
Peadar O‟Donnell, Wrack (London-Toronto: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1933) p. 18
Ibid., 18.
374
Ibid., 23.
375
Ibid., 24.
376
Ibid., 92-93.
377
Ibid.
378
O‟Donnell, Another Day, 129.
372
373
67
attempting to speak to the rural poor represented by the prostrate figures praying in the darkness of
early dawn at the close of his play. O‟Donnell remarked to his publisher at the time of the play‟s
production: „The Irish bishops were playing havoc with the rural minds which would naturally, if
left free to themselves, sympathise with those they were being incited to destroy.‟379
2.5 On the Edge of the Stream (1934)
2.5.1. Introduction
O‟Donnell wrote On the Edge of the Stream while agitating against the efforts of the local
priest and petite bourgeoisie to block the building of a sub-post office on Achill Island in 1932. He
noted at the time: „The menace of money taking a new course is greatest in bad times, for these
new paths help a woman to avoid those shops where she owes money.‟380 The experience on Achill
would influence themes that emerged in his 1934 novel On the Edge of the Stream. In an analysis
of the sub-post office‟s proposed location, O‟Donnell illustrated the socio-spatial significance of
this economic conflict in the rural landscape: „a sub-post office is a terrific affair which can
threaten the whole balance of social forces on an island. The number of shops the population can
afford has been found out by painful trial and error over a long stretch of years. Certain
foundations give the order fixity. The deepest rooted of these is the distribution of post offices
through which the money of the island flows; old-age pensions, American letters, Scotch earnings
–all reach eager hands through these doors. A new sub-post office scatters wealth over new areas,
and the money-bearing traffic tramps out new pathways for itself.‟381
O‟Donnell‟s novel was also influence by the story of Patrick „The Cope‟ Gallagher, who in
1906 organized the Templecrone Co-operative Agricultural Society in Donegal, to challenge the
power of local „gombeen‟ merchants and moneylenders. These members of the petite bourgeoisie
bought the local farmer‟s produce, extended credit and controlled the levers of the rural economy:
„the gombeens [were] supported by the clergy [and] led the opposition to the co-op, and the issue
caused division and rancour in the community.‟382 O‟Donnell blended his experience on Achill,
with the story of „The Cope‟ to produce a piece of satire on the theme of class struggle in a remote
Donegal townland during the Red Scare of the 1930s. This reading of On the Edge of the Stream,
will be divided in to sub-sections which will respectively depict the collective psychology of
O‟Donnell‟s fictional townland of Derrymore, examine the affective dimensions of space in the
townland related to the enmity and fear produced by class conflict and domestic abuse, and
illustrate the effects of religious hysteria within the rural social landscape of the period. The
Hegarty, Peadar O‘Donnell, 198.
Peadar O‟Donnell, Salud! An Irishman in Spain (London : Methuan, 1937) p. 12.
381
Ibid., 11-12.
382
ÓDrisceol, Peadar O‘Donnell, 5.
379
380
68
reading will conclude by briefly revisiting O‟Donnell‟s lifepath during the early 1930s to
contextualise the narrative and themes within On The Edge of The Stream..
2.5.2. The Townland Mind
The fictional townland of Derrymore is located in remote corner of north-west Donegal:
„they had a saying in the town lands beyond that a woman might as well go to America, as marry
into Derrymore, so little would she visit back among her own folks afterwards.‟383 The social
landscape of the townland: „had a lot of its life on view on the road-side –dogs, donkeys, hens,
geese, cattle, children; especially children. The houses were so close together that the same noise,
and that not a great clamour, could draw heads out half a dozen doorways.‟384 The novel‟s story of
class struggle set in a rural Irish townland is also a study in the social psychology of its extended
community. Observing that „a Townland mind is a strange thing,‟385 O‟Donnell wrote:
Now, there is such a thing as a Townland mind, although sensible men and
women might deny it, especially in the spring-time when the soil is the only
mind in anybody and its needs the only thought. But it is just these days that
even up the wee bits of mind in everybody and put them within whispering
distance of one another. Thoughts don‟t run here and there in a Townland
mind, the way they do in yours and mine, when there‟s „varyance‟ within
us.386
The collective psychology of the community consists of a shifting set of allegiances between
families, where sides are taken in order to avoid social ostracization: „The Townland mind works
these conditions out through families. There may be murmurs as an undergrowth within families, but
in the end what the world knows is that the Kellys are for, the Mellys are against, the Sweeneys no
side. To be sure, a family may try taking both sides, but the Townland has no form for that. Such a
family just disintegrates, and drops out of the vital seam of Townland life.‟387
2.5.3. Space of Class Conflict
The petite bourgeoisie power in the townland is symbolized collectively by Hanna Garvey, a
local shopkeeper, the school headmaster Ned Joyce, the priest Father Cassell and Andy „The Post,‟
the mail carrier who acts as a mouthpiece for the establishment. Coveting local power, Ned leads
the efforts of the establishment to rid their environs of co-operative venture by local farmers.
O‟Donnell‟s portrayal of
Ned Joyce depicts an opportunistic figure,
whom possesses the
appearance of a religious fanatic with a „strange excitement in his eyes.‟388 At heart though, Ned is
a cruel materialist, who envies the financial control that Hanna Garvey possesses over Derrymore:
O‟Donnell, On the Edge of the Stream, (London/Toronto: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1934) 9-10.
Ibid., 9.
385
Ibid., 168.
386
Ibid., 168-169.
387
Ibid.
388
Ibid., 268.
383
384
69
My God, the power of Hannah Garvey and her books! It showed a man what
could be done. Hannah Garvey that had begun life at eight pounds a year
helping in a lodging-house during the building of the railway; that had opened
a shop in a thatch kitchen; that to this day couldn‟t read a Fourth Standard
school reader . . . .Look at her, with her Hotel, Post Office, Drapery, Grocery,
Bar, Hearse. And above all, the books. „And I know of every copper in them
against anybody.‟ [. . .] What a grip had all those households out there on their
farms if Hannah Garvey was to hurl the law at them to get in her money? 389
Hanna Garvey‟s financial grip on the townland has the locals complaining; „Prices are outrageous
here‘390 and „Shopkeepers is all rogues.‟391 O‟Donnell introduces the character of Phil Timony, a
local labourer who „had been a practised socialist agitator in Scotland.‟392 Pat, who „got out of the
habit of going to Mass,‟393 after his return from Glasgow, and Donal Breslin, keeper of the local
Government Bull, decide to organize a co-operative store to challenge the monopoly of the local
shopkeepers. Their idea of a co-operative venture is floated at a secret meeting: „Away out of here
people have their own shops: they get together and do away with shopkeepers altogether,‟394 but the
establishment‟s power still is of concern to locals: „But what about the money we owe Hannah
Garvey?‟395 Phil is then encouraged to „tell them about the co-operative stores in Glasgow.‟396 In
his speech to the Derrymore locals, he uses „words that seemed to be stolen from within
themselves,‟397 and „raised the picture of a co-operative store as one of the little things that can be
done.‟398 Phil warns: „There‘s goin‘ to be bad times for the shopkeepers
[. . . ] people won‘t be
able to pay.‟399 Andy „The Post,‟ gets the word out about this radical proposal and invoke the
hysteria of the Red Scare propagated by the Church and State in the early 1930s:
„An‟ the breed of half Derrymore showed itself this day puttin‟ itself on the
same side as the Antichrist‟ [. . . ] Andy bellowed [. . . ] „The shopkeepers of
Garrick is lucky if they are not murdered in their beds; not to talk of
everybody disowning debts. And whose at the head of it all, who, but this
corduroy Yankee from Scotland, the Antichrist here below.‟400
Despite the fear it provokes among the establishment, the Cope is launched and its presence breaks
the monopoly of Hanna Garvey‟s local cartel: „Garvey‘s cart was waging war against the cooperative story and eggs were higher in Derrymore than in any other corner of the country. Women
389
Ibid., 27.
Ibid., 97.
391
Ibid., 98.
392
Ibid., 101-102.
393
Ibid., 66.
394
Ibid., 100-101.
395
Ibid., 102.
396
Ibid., 101.
397
Ibid., 102.
398
Ibid.
399
Ibid.
400
Ibid., 114.
390
70
from far off townlands began stealing into Derrymore at night-time, to slip into this house of that
with smuggled eggs to be sold to Garvey‘s cart at war prices. And they left instructions, too, about
bits of purchases to be made below in the Cope, as the store came quickly to be known; it wouldn‘t
do to let the Cope get crushed when it was doing all this good to the country.‟401 However, what is
seen as „good to the country‟ by the small local farmers, is a threat to the establishment‟s economic
dominance over the population. Ned sensing the political opportunity that the situation offers,
becomes the chairman of the local Merchant‟s Committee. He confides in his wife Nelly:
„The shop keepers below in The Town, they are scared. The country is rising
up against them. Debts are to be disowned. The country will be ruined. So
there was a meeting and I‟m at the head of all the shopkeepers. I have the
power of all the shopkeepers in Carrick in my word. Every page in every book
is open to me.‟402
Nelly is dubious about this: „For God‘s sake don‘t get mixed up with the shopkeepers . . . Ask my
father about The Town, he knows them.‟403 Ned patronizingly replies: „ ―In some ways you have not
developed at all [. . .] your father; what would your father know about Socialism? [ . . .] That‘s
what‘s breaking out here, Socialism. Do you know that it‘s worse than fever and small pox and
plague, all in one? Do you know that‘s the disease this man brought us from Scotland [ . . .] And not
one of them all knew what it was till I pointed it out, not one of them. And then they all could see
it‖.‟404 The Merchant‟s Committee, under Ned‟s sway is stirred with an increasing paranoia about
the Cope‟s objectives: „They sent a letter out on the train last night, to be posted away out of here,
to keep you all in the dark. Is there no law to force people post letters in their own office?‟405
They implore Ned: „could you and the attorney [. . . ] get the Government to open their
letters? If you could get a letter to show they were in touch with bad people away out of here.‟406 He
counters their demands for espionage with a call for an ecclesiastical procession to Phil‟s farm with
„the priest, nuns, bands, sodalities, children, praying against him, on their knees round his
house,‟407 to protest the presence of this Socialist venture. The countryside at large learns the news
of the fearful spectre of Communism that has descended on Derrymore. And on Fair Day, the
farmers of the townland find themselves shunned, with no market for their cattle:
Men, women, and cattle [. . .] crushed their way out of the Fair and the carts
they had brought joined in too. But there was no cheering nor shouting on the
way home this time. The breath had been taken from the women. What would
401
Ibid., 187.
Ibid., 119.
403
Ibid.
404
Ibid., 120.
405
Ibid., 181.
406
Ibid.
407
Ibid., 182.
402
71
become of the people if they could not sell their cattle? What was going to
become of the Townland if the whole world was going to turn against it? 408
The hysteria of the Merchant‟s Committee now spreads through Derrymore with broader divides
appearing along class lines and professions: „Schoolmasters, policemen, priests, doctors, attorneys,
cattle-dealers, they are all alike; they‘re friends of the shopkeepers. Anyway, what would a man like
Phil Timoney that hadn‘t a second pair of corduroy to his name and never darkened his chapel
door?‟409 A community that was initially reluctant to join the ecclesiastical procession, now gathers
and marches en masse to Phil‟s farm, the band playing „„Tis Heaven is the Prize‟, „I am a Little
Catholic,‟ and „Hail, Glorious St. Patrick.‟ Led by a priest, the procession is composed of:
. . . four nuns, the white border to their pale faces glistening like a halo. Next
to them marched the young ladies of the Town, all in white and wearing their
Child of Mary medals on blue ribbons. School children followed, hundreds of
them, drawn from schools around The Town. And the men and the women.410
As the procession draws near the farm, Donal Breslin „got down on his hands and knees and made
his way to the garden gate, sneaked back the bolt and let out the bull.‟411 The Government bull
wanders out of its pasture, its attention drawn to the procession and its banners: „Maybe it was the
drum did the harm. The memory of stolen moments snapped and a flash of annoyance swung the
sniffing head into the clear air. The bull saw Wolf Tone. And the bull let out a below.‟412 It charges
the procession scattering most of the marchers: „Only the nuns stood their ground. Holding each
other‘s hands, with somewhat of the courage of the gentle, Christian martyrs, they stood trembling.
And the bull, really incensed now, came for them bellowing.‟413 Phil ends up saving the day by
using his coat as a cape to bring „the enraged beast to his knees‘414 and saves the „fluttering
sisters.‟415
2.5.4. Space of Domestic Abuse
The pivotal character in the novel is Nelly McFadden, a local woman who comes to suffer
the violent brutality of her husband and the enmity of the community. Nelly‟s interior monologues
allow O‟Donnell to illustrate the darker social geographies of domestic violence, gossip and
superstition that inhabited the rural landscapes of the period. Rebuffing Timoney and marrying Ned,
to please her social-climbing mother, Nelly becomes ostracized in Derrymore: „ ―The like of that
made it hard for a woman to be at ease with her neighbours; especially when she married a stranger
408
Ibid., 197.
Ibid., 201.
410
Ibid., 205.
411
Ibid., 207.
412
Ibid.
413
Ibid., 208.
414
Ibid.
415
Ibid.
409
72
and went to live in a two-story house‖.‟416 Nelly‟s dilemma highlights the elements of abuse,
bitterness and superstition hidden in the community. As Nelly prays in the face of an Atlantic gale
sweeping over the townland, she re-enacts the deeply engraved rituals of faith belonging to the
small communities dotting the western European fringes of an ancient Christian civilization:
Squalls zooming up the back of Slieve Gorm and crashing down on straw
roofs. No sky, no earth, only a black pit where blasts struck with the weight of
breakers and swept onwards with the solid strength of waves. Darkness as
black as clay piled against window-panes. The ominous clasp of a roof
weakening; the tinkle of dry dust falling. God guard everybody on sea and on
land. Pray to the Virgin Mother. Bring down St. Brigid‟s cross from the rafters
and raise it against the danger. Shake water from the Holy Well of Doon three
times into the four earths of the sky; pray to Columcille who was often in
danger himself. Pray . . . . She slept.417
Nelly bears the brunt of Ned‟s impotent anger after the failure the protest march against Phil‟s cooperative venture. Defending him against her husband‟s growing hysteria, she is violently battered
into a state of disbelief:
„Do you think he opened the door to let the sickness in?‟ A thought leapt as
the words rushed, but was only half caught in them. Her startled eyes,
however flashed with it as she swung to face Ned. But there was no time. His
open palm caught her face and then came a torrent of blows. Face, neck, arms,
head –he‟s going to kill me, she thought, striving to keep her feet. He‟s going
to kill me. Her mind faced the thought without panic, and then, as though
there was no terror there to be fought against, she let go. He gathered her in
his arms as she fell, and kissed her.418
Ned panics at the fact that his abuse may stand between him and his quest for local power, and he
tries to locate the blame elsewhere in the social landscape: „I beat the wrong one, it‘s the people . . .
it‘s the tailor . . . .Ned‘s mind was in an uproar. But could it be that he had beaten Nelly? He had
never intended to beat Nelly. It was the black, stupid countryside . . . .He would make them see he
was their leader . . . .And now, it was Nelly . . . . Good God, if the word got out that he had beaten
Nelly.‟419
In denial about the abuse, Nelly becomes her husband‟s co-conspirator: „I‘ll say I struck
myself against something,‟420 and Ned relives a memory repressed since childhood, which is
redolent with the overtone of class and domestic conflict: „Once, long, long ago –it was one of the
boyhood memories that stuck- he had watched a man beat his wife: a rich man too, that had not
heeded the tiny boy who had come in barefoot with their milk . . . . And he had never told it. Was
there any boy ever saw the like of that and never breathed it?‟421 The conflict that is growing within
416
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 49.
418
Ibid., 257.
419
Ibid., 257-258.
420
Ibid., 258.
421
Ibid.
417
73
the margins of Derrymore, as a result of the class struggle that is erupting within the rural
community, is illustrated by O‟Donnell in Nelly‟s experience of domestic abuse. As she hears the
news that the Government bull is mysteriously ill, Nelly projects her own personal sense of fear
upon the outer landscape:
When had there been such darkness in a night? There were no stars. The
cottage windows only managed a white jagged spot; a glint, but no light. She
put out her hand and tried to feel the darkness. She teased it between finger
and thumb. There never had been darkness with such body to it. It was a night
that darkness suited. You would like to be out on a night that was thick, black,
still. Neighbours would be in an out to Donal‟s. And they would be afraid.
The whole Townland buried under this blackness was afraid.422
This darkness a Pantheistic tinge, motivating the community to participate in an older, more pagan
pilgrimage to the dying bull‟s byre, than the earlier ecclesiastical protest: „And up out of the memory
of darkness came stories. Stories of other days of weirdness and alarm. Not that Derrymore had
ever before got its name up with anything like cheering the bull‘s attack on the procession.‟423 In
the „townland mind‟ the scattering of the ecclesiastical protest by the bull and its illness are
superstitiously connected: „God save every four-footed animal in Derrymore; only if something must
die, let nobody begrudge the beast.‟424 And as members of the community make their way to
Donal‟s to pay respect: „The darkness of all dark whispers rising in clouds, burying everybody. And
Donal‘s bull in a heap. Lanthorns came and went through the fields. There was no light except the
fire in Donal‘s kitchen, but there was light in the bull‘s byre. Men and women came quietly and
stood in the shadows for a minute or two and then went out again.‟425 As the bull dies, Andy „The
Post‟ brings the news that „the Holy Fathers is comin‘ to The Town to give a mission.‟426
2.5.5. Space of Religious Hysteria
It is the power hungry school head master, rather than the local priest who invites the
mission: „A Missioner in Dublin in two nights had the people out wrecking Socialist houses.‟427
Ned tells the Merchant‟s Committee, „Let us get him down here, and give him a fortnight, longer if
he likes.‟428 In contrast, Father Cassell is suspicious of the anti-Communist evangelical zeal of the
missionaries: „This religious fever [ . . .] was new, and Father Cassell distrusted new things. He
was an old-fashioned priest in many ways: he liked the fairs, he liked bargaining, he liked making
a profit on his cattle. He liked cattle to thrive, crops to thrive, people to thrive, souls to thrive. And
the way to achieve such end was by quiet work; no noise, no screeching. He was conscientious in
422
Ibid., 259-260.
Ibid., 250-251.
424
Ibid., 263.
425
Ibid., 250-251.
426
Ibid., 264.
427
Ibid., 213.
428
Ibid.
423
74
his own work, never rushed his office, in fact delighted in it, but prayed little. He was suspicious of
much praying.‟429 O‟Donnell‟s depiction of Father Cassell shows sympathy for priests forced by
their bishops during the Red Scare of the early 1930s to make political denunciations from their
pulpits:
Father Cassell puzzled out how he had come to lend himself to this mission.
He went through the details, calculating, uneasy. The shopkeepers had brought
it, but then it was needed, and he needed the shopkeepers. It would be hard to
run a parish in the teeth of shopkeeper enmity. He was a practical man and
could see that. The shopkeepers were now making a banner of him, but this
daft notion of Timony‟s must be put down or there would be trouble. But
sometimes a stick is broken in beating a dog.430
The social mania instigated by the Mission‟s sermons leads to incidents of vandalism again the
Cope. As the Mission continues, a fanatical wave of evangelical Catholicism sweeps through the
community providing an impression of the religious fervour that possessed the Irish Free State
during the days of the Eucharistic Congress in 1932: „Wasn‘t it good for those that lived in the
penal days when you could die for your religion? Came the holiday. And the bands. And the
banners. The men on horseback wore green sashes. Stewards carried swords, long wooden swords
with green ribbons on the hilts. And the bands did not play passing one another [ . . .] It dawned on
a lot of people that it might be hard to get a seat so they sought out the chapel early. A flood of
early comers poured into the chapel gate so that there was a full congregation by the time the
bands and their followers came into the chapel yard. But this was the most vigorous section of the
population, so they crushed their way in, stuffed passages, stairs, until the chapel was one
unsortable crush of bodies.‟431
The Mission culminates in a sermon filled with demagoguery that whips the congregation
into violent religious frenzy: „The Holy Father came out on the altar. He knelt on the bottom step
and prayed. He mounted the altar, bowed his head before the tabernacle and prayed. The
congregation was one tense sheet of attentiveness. The first words crashed on their minds like a
squall from a cliff leaping down on the stilly waters of a little bay. [ . . .] And out of the black
smashing confusion came the voice –was it coming from the depth of the tabernacle? Vibrant
thunder of words from the tabernacle. ―The forces of the Antichrist are abroad. Their agents are in
our midst . . .‖ Curses boomed in the inner uproar.‟432
After the Mass „the congregation was like some great animal forcing its slow way through
grudging waters,‟433 and rushes in its hysteria to demolish the Cope. Winifred Mary, one of the
429
Ibid., 268.
Ibid., 269.
431
Ibid., 275
432
Ibid., 275-276.
433
Ibid., 281.
430
75
shopkeepers, proclaims „Wasn‘t that a sermon?‟434 and confides in Nelly, „It was me who made the
ground ready. How did I ever come to see the thing to do was poison the bull?‟435 And tells her
darkly, „They‘re going to wreck the Cope. Down goes another bull.‟436 Nelly then rushes to the head
of the congregation and proclaims to the mob „The shopkeepers poisoned Donal‘s bull.‟437 The
congregation then realizes that „Not only had The Town mocked them, but had wronged Donal, a
man of their own,‟438 and proceed to riot, demolishing the shop and the hotel owned by Hannah
Garvey, leaving the Cope intact and Phil „sitting on top of a chimney, his corduroy trousers dangling
above the heads of the crowd. And when he spoke the great throng beneath just tilted their faces
upward and listened.‟439 O‟Donnell closed his novel with a socialist triumph, but his campaign for a
sub-post office on Achill, which inspired its writing, ended otherwise.
2.5.6. Summary
The psycho-geographies of the „Townland Mind,‟ illustrated by the affective social
landscapes of class conflict, domestic abuse and religious hysteria portrayed in On the Edge of the
Stream, were drawn from O‟Donnell‟s experience of class struggle, violence, superstition and
religious mania that inhabited pockets of rural Ireland during the late 1920s and early „30s. In
1932, ignoring the advice of W. B. Yeats, who as a witness in a libel case stated that „he wished Mr
O‘Donnell would devote his interest entirely to his novels and leave politics for a pastime in old
age,‟440 O‟Donnell moved to Achill Island to realize a socialist „dream of a workshop among
fisherman.‟441 No sooner had he arrived on the island, that in his own words he „walked into a
Civil War in Achill.‟442 O‟Donnell‟s reputation as a socialist agitator spread through the small rural
community, and his involvement in the sub-post office agitation „brought the Vatican and the Soviet
Union rapidly into the equation. The parish priest Father Campbell, led a campaign against ‗Red‘
O‘Donnell, preaching sermons and leading demonstrations to his cottage –―Faith, Fatherland and
the old post office for ever!‖‟443 Targeted by the Irish Free State and the Church during the early
„30s as „a very dangerous individual,‟444 O‟Donnell later dismissed „the Red Scare [as] nonsense,
in relation to Irish life, but it was necessary to make a climate for new, terrorist legislation [ . . .]
the government raised a great din, press and pulpit forming a jazz band that bare throats could not
cut through to reach the people [. . .] The government and its propagandists made a mistake. Their
434
Ibid., 282.
Ibid.
436
Ibid., 284.
437
Ibid., 286.
438
Ibid., 287.
439
Stream, 288.
440
ÓDrisceol, Peadar O‘Donnell, 73.
441
Ibid.
442
Ibid., 74.
443
Ibid., 74-75.
435
76
propagandists said too much. The government arrested too many, too soon. It was all very well for
the government to denounce the land annuity agitation and the I.R.A. as communist, anti-God, and
generally an affair of blackguards out to destroy the Church, but the arrests gave people the chance
to check this wild talk against life. The Church-burning, anti-God Reds, when arrested, turned out
to be neighbours‘ sons that grew up among them. Their commonsense began to work again.‟445
O‟Donnell spent his time on Achill writing and drilling young IRA recruits. He and his wife
Lile also nursed a local family shunned by terrified locals after they fell ill with Scarlatina. Despite
the fact that he became a thorn in the side of the priest and other members of
the local
establishment, O‟Donnell „was able to fight back. The Cosgraveite shopkeepers were against him,
but he had the support of some of the tougher local families who knew that clerical intervention in
politics had invariably been hostile to the poorer classes.‟446
The sub-post office campaign
ultimately failed, but the experience provided O‟Donnell with material to construct a socially
conscious piece of fiction to critique the power exerted by petite bourgeoisie elements of the
Church and State on the economically deprived rural landscapes of post-independence Ireland.2.6
2.6 Conclusion
Peadar O‟Donnell wrote to his English publisher in 1933: „My pen is just a weapon and I
use it now and then to gather words into scenes that surround certain conflicts.‟447 Consequently,
the various elements of landscape in his prose-fiction represented struggles between individuals and
their environments, as well as the incipient struggle between class in these communities, due to the
developing consolidation of petite bourgeoisie power in the Irish Free State during the early 1930s.
O‟Donnell‟s writing and political activism were inextricably rooted in the communal milieu of his
upbringing in western Donegal and its islands. The beautiful but harsh landscapes of this
environment served as settings and metaphors in his prose-fiction. They were central to his
representations of the conditions within Irish rural communities of the period: „You have an
environment, and if you want to run a theme through it, you call up people out of that environment
to live out your theme.‟448
O‟Donnell‟s political analysis was straightforwardly Marxist and dialectical. He never
fully developed „his analysis beyond a crude economic determinism centred on the ―base‖ and
―superstructure‖ paradigm.‟449 Writing and agitating during the same period as
the Italian
Communist leader Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) was developing his Marxist political theory in
Mussolini‟s Italian gulags, he shared „with Gramsci a belief in the importance of grassroots
444
Ibid., 57.
O‟Donnell, Another Day, 126-127.
446
Freyer, Peadar O‘Donnell, 113.
447
Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O‘Donnell, 128.
448
Hegarty, Peadar O‘Donnell, 167.
445
77
organization and subaltern political struggle,‟450 despite not having access to the theorist‟s work.
O‟Donnell‟s rural origins and activities as a writer and socialist agitator in the 1920s and „30s
personified Gramsci‟s definition of an „organic‟ intellectual. O‟Donnell‟s role as such a figure can
be elaborated from the political and economic tensions created by the new class structure that was
developing in the Free State during the two decades after independence. Gramsci noted that rural
type intellectuals were „linked to the social mass of country people and the town (particularly
small-town) petite bourgeoisie, not as yet elaborated and set in motion by the capitalist system. This
type of intellectual brings into contact the peasant masses with the local and state administration
[. . . ] Because of this activity they have an important politico-social function, since professional
mediation is difficult to separate from political.‟451
O‟Donnell‟s prose-fiction can be seen as an element of his mediation on behalf of rural
Irish communities. Although he was elected as one of the first members of the Irish Academy of
Letters after it was founded by W.B. Yeats in 1932, he disowned the „ ―official culture‖ of postindependence Ireland, with its idealization of the west, [and] valorization of peasant life,‟452 that
characterized elements of the Nobel Prize winning poet‟s work. In regards to Irish rural
communities he declared „the best step towards a new cultural life [was] a sharp rise in the
standards of living, ‟ 453 and dismissed the Free State‟s pretensions towards its rural heritage: „I hate
to see spinning-wheels, thatched cottages, small farms and handicraft kept alive to make a show.‟454
Indeed, the rural landscapes represented in his writing were stripped of these pretensions in order
that the human dimension of their lifeworlds and O‟Donnell‟s call for social justice, could be
clearly understood by his Free State audience.
449
Ó Drisceoil, 128.
Ibid.
451
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, (ed. & trans.) Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998) p. 14.
452
Ó Drisceol, Peadar O‘Donnell, 2.
453
Ibid.
454
Ibid.
450
78
3.
Poetry of the fields
Patrick Kavanagh
Somebody is moving across the headlands
Talking to himself
A grey thinker.
Patrick Kavanagh, The Seed and the Soil (1938)
3.1. Introduction
Patrick Kavanagh‟s eidetic use of language in his 1938 fictive autobiography The Green
Fool, conveyed the natural and cultural terrains of his native milieu of south Monaghan. His writing
style combined a phenomenological representation of the horizons of his early lifeworld as a farmer,
with a commentary laced with dry humour and laconic observation. The lyrical portrayal of his
birth-place Inniskeen and its environs in his prose and verse during the 1930s, was suffused with a
mystic-like illumination of the vernacular elements of its surrounding vistas and social geographies:
„a road, a mile of kingdom. I am king/ Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.‟455
Kavanagh, a mercurial personality, also possessed a critical voice, verging on the acerbic,
that could be as sharp and incisive as a spade cutting into the unforgiving clay of a stony Monaghan
field. He later dismissed his first attempt at prose fiction in a desultorily and caustic manner: „When
under the evil aegis of the so-called Irish literary movement, I wrote a dreadful stage-Irish, socalled autobiography called The Green Fool, the common people of this country gobbled up this
stage-Irish lie.‟456 Despite this later dismissal, this literary celebration of his native townland and its
natural environs imparts a strong sense of place for the lifeworld into which he was born. In this
regard, the chronotope of the Idyll can be identified within the prose of The Green Fool. Kavanagh
coloured his depiction of the Idyll with an „autobiographical self consciousness, ‟457 that calls to
mind the „biographical novel.‟ 458 In such a work, the writer‟s life „course passes from self-confidant
ignorance, through self critical scepticism, to self-knowledge and ultimate to authentic knowing,‟459
and „at its heart lies the chronotope of ―the life course of one seeking true knowledge.‖ ‟460 This
chapter will examine representations in The Green Fool concerning Kavanagh‟s birth-place and
home; the influence of dinnsheanchas on his writing, and the more numinous topographies that he
Patrick Kavanagh, „Inniskeen Road: July Evening‟ (1935) in Collected Poems (Newbridge: Goldsmith
Press, 1972 ) p. 19.
456
Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Kavanagh: Man and Poet, (ed.) Peter Kavanagh, (Maine: National Poetry
Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, 1986) p. 186.
457
Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 130.
458
Ibid.
459
Ibid.
460
Ibid.
455
79
imagined inhabiting the fields and drumlins of his native south Monaghan. The book can also be
read as a chronicle of Kavanagh‟s lifepath as he transformed during the 1930s from a farmer to a
poet possessing an authentic voice of the Irish countryside. The chapter will conclude with a reading
of an newspaper article The Flight From the Land, that he wrote in 1939 which addressed the
problem and causes of rural emigration.
3.1.1. Lifepath
Kavanagh was born into the land owning family of James and Brigid Kavanagh on 21
October 1904. His father, in addition to farming, worked as a local cobbler. The additional income
provided by this trade ensured that Kavanagh‟s were relatively well off by local standards, and
allowed James to purchase adjoining farming properties and expand his holdings. Kavanagh was the
eldest son of nine children and the natural heir of his father‟s land. During the 1920s Kavanagh
began to cultivate his writing: „As I wandered about the roads and fields I composed my verses.‟461
The traces of the landscape in which he was born never left his writing: „I turn the lea-green down/
Gaily now, / And paint the meadow brown/ With my plough,‟462 and he published a collection of
poetry entitled Ploughman and Other Poems in 1936. The publication established him as an
authentic voice of the Irish countryside to Dublin‟s urban literary intelligentsia. His father‟s death
in 1928 left Kavanagh torn between the land and his calling as a poet. In the end, the pen won over
the plough, and following his poetic muse, he made several journeys to London and Dublin during
the 1930s, before settling in the Free State capital in 1939.
3.2. The Green Fool (1938)
3.2.1. Introduction
In May of 1937 Kavanagh travelled to London and sought out literary patronage in earnest,
hoping to secure some paying work as a writer. After a series of false starts, he ended up on the
doorstep of Helen Waddell, an established novelist from Northern Ireland. Kavanagh had a minor
reputation due to his published volume of poetry in 1936, and on the basis of this collection,
Waddell was able to secure the south Monaghan farmer a commission to write a peasant biography,
due to the recent successes of Maurice O‟Sullivan‟s Twenty Years A-Growing (1933) and Tomás O
Criomhthain‟s The Islandman (1934). The original title for Kavanagh‟s book was The Iron Fool,
a phrase taken from Inniskeen‟s regional vernacular „meaning one who purposely pretends to be a
fool.‟463 Kavanagh recalled ruefully: „At wake, or dance for many years I was the fellow whom
jokers took a hand at when conversational funds fell low. I very nearly began to think myself an
authentic fool. I often occupied a position like that of ―The Idiot‖ in Dostoevsky‘s autobiography. I
do not blame the people who made me their fool; they wanted a fool and in any case they lost their
461
462
Patrick Kavanagh, The Green Fool (London: Penguin, 2001 [1938] ) p. 188.
Patrick Kavanagh, „Ploughman‟, Collected Poems, 1.
80
stakes. Being a fool is good for the soul. It produces a sensitivity of one kind or other; it makes a
man into something unusual, a saint or a poet or an imbecile.‟464
His publisher feared that the regional colloquialism would be lost on British audiences and
consequently amended its title to The Green Fool, to reflect Kavanagh‟s origins as an Irish farmer.
Consisting of thirty-two loosely connected chapters, the book reads as a series of anecdotes, each
containing distinct perceptions and representations of Kavanagh‟s early lifeworld experiences. The
text can be approached as a piece of social anthropology as well as a poetic evocation of place, more
than as a definitive account of the writer‟s rural up bringing. Natural and cultural phenomena are
rendered as anecdotal fragments of memory. These vivid images originate from his birth home to the
surrounding fields and
gradually encircle the environs and indigenous culture surrounding
Inniskeen and beyond, like ripples extending outward upon the pond of Kavanagh‟s imagination..
3.2.2. The Memory of Place
Kavanagh opens The Green Fool with his first conscious memory : „When I was about two
years old I was one evening lying in the onion-box that had been converted into a cradle. I looked
up and saw for the first time the sticky black-oak couples of thatched roof. ‟465 This memory
contained a seed of the social enmity which was germinating within his rural community: „The
house where I was born was a traditional Irish cabin, wedge-shaped, to trick the western winds. It
was surrounded on three sides by a neighbour‘s field, which was inconvenient as unless we were on
good terms with the owner of the field –which we were not- the back could not be thatched except
by hanging a ladder across.‟466 It has been noted that „the house we are born in is physically
inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits.‟467 Kavanagh recalled that „in our house the two most
important subjects were the saying of the Rosary each evening and the making of money.‟468 His
memories reconstructed the interior of the house: „the kitchen was [a] cobbler‘s shop,‟469 and his
gaze was outward looking: „the railway line to Carrick was visible from our back window.‟470 He
recollected that „the western sun, without regard for the laws of men, peeped through our small
back window,‟471 to shine upon a top shelf filled with „rent receipts and curtain rings.‟472
463
Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 2001) p. 105.
Kavanagh, Green Foo ,10.
465
Ibid., 7.
466
Ibid.
467
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (trans.) Maria Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1964) 14.
468
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 12.
469
Ibid., 12.
470
Ibid., 9.
471
Ibid., 14.
472
Ibid., 13.
464
81
It has been written that „memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in
space, the sounder they are.‟473 Kavanagh‟s earliest memories were inscribed in „the little hills of
South Ulster,‟474 which nestled the house in which he was born: „Around our house there stood little
hills all tilled and tamed. Yellow flame-blossoms of the whin lit bonfires all over the landscape; the
whin was as persistent and as fertile as sin and disease. The sunny side of the hills was good soil
and boasted some tall thorn trees, but the black side facing the north was crabbed and povertystricken and grew only stunted blackthorns and sorrel plants. There were no trees to speak of
except the poplar and the sally; here and there a cranky old elm which had survived the crying of a
cold kitchen spread about his trunk and tried to look a forest.‟ 475
Kavanagh‟s representation of landscape superimposed the subjective compass points of his
own idiosyncratic mental map upon the drumlin topographies of rural Monaghan: „From the tops of
the little hills there spread a view right back to the days of Saint Patrick and the druids. Slieve
Gullion to the north fifteen miles distant, to the west the bewitched hills and forths of Donaghmoyne;
eastward one could see the distillery chimney of Dundalk sending up its prosperous smoke, or, on a
very bright day, one could see the sun-dazzled tide coming in at Annagasson. To the south stood the
Hill of Mullacrew where once was held a fair famous as Donnybrook and it had as many cracked
skulls to its credit too.‟476 The boglands surrounding his birth-place were represented lushly in
Kavanagh‟s prose and illustrated the lyrical perspective he possessed for the natural milieu
surrounding him: „The bog over which my young eyes strayed, and through which I often waded in
the search for ducks that layed out, was a twenty-acre waste from which the peat had long been cut;
in some of its clear pools greedy pike survived, but only eels could be said to have the security of
tenure. Beautiful blue and white and pink flowers grew on the bog and more magical flowers I have
not seen since; they were exciting as a poem and had a different beauty for my changing moods.‟477
3.2.3. The Poetry of Place
In 1909 when Kavanagh was five, his family‟s thatched roof cabin, encircled by fields,
drumlins and bog was demolished: „The black-oak couples came down and were thrown in the
garden before the door.‟478 English „government subsidies were offered‘479 so households in the
region could „convert from thatch.‟480 The sense of place inhabited by Kavanagh‟s birth cabin
remained locked within his poetical imagination: „We had a new house. A two-storied slated
473
Bachelard, 9.
Green Fool, 12.
475
Ibid., 8.
476
Ibid., 8.
477
Ibid., 7-8.
478
Ibid., 18.
479
Patrick Duffy, „Carleton, Kavanagh and the South Ulster Landscape c. 1800-1950,‟ Irish Geography 18
(1985) p. 34.
480
Ibid.
474
82
dwelling in a townland of thatched houses. It was more imposing on the outside than other house,
but it was colder on the inside. The walls were plumb and level. There were no secret nooks where
one might find an old prophecy or a forgotten ballad or the heads of old clay pipes. A modern
dwelling cut of from the Gaelic tradition.‟481 Although Kavanagh acknowledged the rationale for
erecting a new structure in its place: „The new house was healthy. There was plenty of room for
children; not like the old house which had only two rooms and the kitchen,‟482 he was aware that an
ancient way of life was slowly vanishing from the south Monaghan landscape: „When I arrived in
Mucker the natives were beginning to lose faith in the old, beautiful things. The ghost of a culture
haunted the snub-nosed hills.‟483
With the start of the First World War in 1914 Kavanagh noted ‗the coming of the war
coincided also with the passing of another colourful tribe of beggars. In the district I lived there
once flourished a beggary richly coloured and full of ironic pride. As I recall their fantastic ways
and their quaint nicknames I realise what a lot of poetry has been crushed under the wheels of
prosperity. These were not penny-in-the-gutter beggars, but real romantic people of the roads.
Biddy Dundee, Barney the Bottle, Paddy the Bread, Mary Ann the Plantain. These nicknames were
not put on by common vulgarians. Those old folk of the roads were living records of a poetry-living
people.‟484 Kavanagh‟s prose style in The Green Fool, contained the remaining echoes of this
culture and reflected the „Gaelic bardic tradition of dinnsheanchas (knowledge of the lore of
places)‟485 This practice of poetry was based upon an oral tradition drawn from ancient Irish history
and myth in which locations were mapped according to the lore and impression of the places in
which they were found. Kavanagh excavated the etymological roots of his native townland and
wrote: „The name was a corrupted Gaelic word signifying a place where pigs were bred in
abundance. Long before my arrival there was much aesthetic heart-aching among the folk who had
put up with it, and up in, such a pig-named townland. In spite of all this the townland stuck to its
title and it was in Mucker I was born.‟486
In 1926, Kavanagh‟s father purchased land adjoining his farm: „There were good names on
these hills even though their soil was sticky and scarce of lime. Poets had surely put the names on
them. Translated from the Gaelic they were: ―The Field of the Shop‖, ―The Field of the Well‖,
―The Yellow Meadow‖, ―The Field of the Musician‖.‟
487
With the measured tones of a farmer,
Kavangah gazed upon the new fields and listed their soil types, as well as the distinctive features of
481
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 19.
Ibid.
483
Ibid., 11.
484
Ibid., 59-60.
485
Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 107.
486
Green Fool, 8.
487
Ibid.
482
83
their varying topographies. He intuited that the Field of the Well „was the best and the least
perpendicular of all the fields. It had a well in the middle.‟488 The waters of its well „rose through
yellow clay and had a soft taste.‟489 In contrast, the earth of „the Yellow Field was true to its name;
in wet weather its soil had the consistency and colour of putty, in dry weather it became hard and
cracked like a canyon. Rushes ten feet high grew in this field.‟490
Upon the slope of the third hill, Kavanagh noted: „The Field of The Shop was a long briary
garden as ill-shapen as ever puzzled the schoolmaster‘s chain and brain.‟491 The last field in his
poetical survey possessed a strange, almost mystical presence: ‗ ―The Field of the Musician‖ was a
triangular acre under the shadow of the Rocksavage Forth. The sun hardly ever saw it. It grew a
kind of tough grass, like wire. Something strangely mysterious seemed to hang around the Field of
The Musician. It was a place where fairy-gold might be hidden. It sounded hollow underfoot. I
don‘t know who the musician was that gave this field its name. I have a vague notion that it was no
mortal music he made. This field had one thing which might or might not appeal to a player of
sweet music; an echo which repeated and repeated till lost in the briary hollows of
Donaghmoyne.‟492 Kavanagh recalled sitting in this fourth field to „listen to what music vibrates in
the mystic imagination of an Irishman. I shouted in that field and heard my shout go travelling
towards the Pole star. I had dreams.‟493
Kavanagh‟s survey of the different soil types and
topographies of these four different fields can be seen as anecdotal, impressionistic and
phenomenological, illustrating a truism which holds that „space that has been seized upon by the
imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor.
It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination.‟494
Bordering the acreage of Kavanagh‟s family farm was a landed estate which had fallen into
ruin and neglect: „Rocksavage was a big farm of three hundred acres. It lay among the small farms.
It was the headquarters of a once-great estate. The house in which the two lady-owners of
Rocksavage lived was known among the older folk as the Big House. During my knowledge the Big
House was in a poor condition. It was rich in memories of the days of fast race-horses. On the
dilapidated walls of the horse-stables in Rocksavage were scrawled the names of race-horse famous
in their time.‟495 The „farm was let in con-acre on the eleven month‘s system. The letting was a
godsend to the neighbourhood. Small farmers who had only one old horse or a jennet kept a pair of
488
Ibid., 205.
Ibid.
490
Ibid.
491
Ibid., 206.
492
Ibid., 204-205.
493
Ibid., 207.
494
Bachelard, Poetics of Space, xxxii.
495
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 60-61.
489
84
horses.‟496 Kavanagh wrote that bidding for plots was conducted in December; after the land
nearest the estate was auctioned off, the remaining parcels of land were hired out: „When all the
land in the vicinity of the Big House had been let, we trailed through the muddy fields. Puddles of
yellow water filled the cattle tracks. There was only the ghost of the sun low in the sky. I shivered.
The auctioneer stood on a knoll in a stubble field. Those men hungriest for land gathered close.
Only one woman was among the crowd. There was no chivalry. She had to out-bid the field. The
stubble-field was put up for potatoes or turnips. Father bid fifteen pound an acre.‟497
Abundant forests had once occupied the grounds of the estate‟s demesne: „Before the War
there were thousands of beautiful trees on the farm. Close to our school these trees leaned over the
wall and dropped us nuts –monkey-nuts for making toy-pipes, horse-chestnuts of which we made
whistles and hazel nuts which we ate. Then came the timber-hunger and the trees began to fall.‟498
Students of Irish historical geography have observed that „the most universal landscape change in
early twentieth century Ireland was the negative one of deforestation and tree-felling. The First
World War, and the demise of the landlord owners, led to the wholesale stripping of valuable
timbers on many demesnes and big farms. Many fine beeches that were planted by landlords or
substantial farmers [. . . ] were felled for quick profit in the early years of the Irish Free State.‟499
Like the old Gaelic poet „lamenting the destruction of the woods of Kilcash,‟500 Kavanagh ruefully
watched as: „Rocksavage trees were sold by auction. The man who bought one cut down five as
there was nobody to stop him. Father didn‘t buy any of the trees. There was no young, strong men
in our house to help. There was no love for beauty. We were barbarians just emerged from the
Penal days. The hunger had killed our poetry and we were animals grabbing at the leavings of the
dogs of war.‟501
3.2.4. The Mystical Lore of Place
Located beyond the environs of his family farm in Mucker were the Hill of Mullacrew and
a Catholic shrine named Lady Well. Kavanagh‟s representation of these „sacred spaces‟ was rooted
in a Celtic iconography of place, which held that „gods where everywhere: each tree, lake, river,
mountain and spring possessed a spirit.‟502 He laconically observed: „Though the fairies had many
strongholds in south Monaghan only once did I stumble into Fairyland.‟503 This occurred during a
journey Kavanagh took with his mother in a cart pulled by an ass. Returning home in the rain, the
two approach a rise in the muddy road: „The Hill of Mullacrew was a bald common without a tree
496
Ibid., 61.
Ibid., 62.
498
Ibid., 62-63.
499
Duffy, Carleton, Kavanagh and the South Ulster Landscape, 35.
500
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 63.
501
Ibid.
502
Miranda Jane Green, Celtic Myths (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993) p. 50.
497
85
or land-mark on its crown. A flock of wild scraggy goats were carrying out manoeuvres on the Hill.
Around the Hill‘s base there stood a half dozen houses and the relics of a oul‘ dacency in the form
of two public houses.‟ 504
Kavanagh and his mother then passed through the village of Mullacrew: „Outside one of the
pubs we saw a man moping in the rain. ‗Did ye see any bobbies?‘ he asked us. We said we didn‘t.
This man was on guard while the non-bona-fides quenched their Sunday thirst. The roads around
Mullacrew were a tangled skein; they were laid down by random and led everywhere and nowhere.
My mother knew these roads well and we managed to pick our way till we came to the town of
Louth. The town of Louth had seen better days. At one time all roads led there. One crooked street
comprised the town.‟505 Lost, they travelled in circles, despite asking on several occasions for
directions: „We were in Fairyland, and it was a wet day. Everything seemed strange. The folk we
saw were not ordinary mortals.‟506 Adhering to a country custom Kavanagh wrote: „I suggested
letting the ass go what way he liked. I had often heard of people gone astray following the instinct
in the shape of an ass after human reason had failed.‟507 The creature then led them home, allowing
them to escape from „the Wee Fellas,‟508 and confirming the rural aphorism: „sure the ass is a
blessed animal.‟509
A representation of a pilgrimage site in Kavanagh‟s prose reveals the successions of faith
which have historically occupied the cultural landscapes of this region of Ireland: „Lady Well, about
fifteen miles distant, was a place of pilgrimage for the people of Monaghan and Cavan and Louth.
It was one of the many holy wells of Ireland. Every year all the neighbours around me went there
and carried home with them bottles of its sacred waters. These were used in times of sickness
whether of human or beast. Some folk went barefoot and many went wearing in their boots the
traditional pea or pebble of self torture.‟510 This local Catholic ritual had pre-christian foundations
in Celtic mythology: „Wells, which penetrated deep below ground, were perceived as a link between
the earth and the Underworld [and] Springs were revered in acknowledgement of their medicinal
and purifying properties.‟511 Kavanagh wrote that the poor penitents passed „big houses along the
Bohar Bhee,‟512on their way to „the field of the Well [which] belonged to a Protestant Rector.‟513 The
Rector was a bigot who locked the gates to his field, but this did not prevent the faithful and earthy
503
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 80.
Ibid., 80-81.
505
Ibid.
506
Ibid., 82.
507
Ibid.
508
Ibid.
509
Ibid.
510
Ibid.
511
Green, Celtic Myths, 53.
512
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 53.
504
86
masses from three counties to congregate in its sacred space: „Like the mediaeval [sic] pilgrims very
probably; some were going round on their bare knees making the stations, some others were doing
a bit of courting under the pilgrim cloak. There was a rowdy element, too, pegging clods at the
prayers and the shouting. A few knots of men were arguing politics. I overheard two fellows making
a deal over a horse.‟514 Kavanagh noted that „the well was roofed with galvanized iron and leading
down to its mystic waters were seven or eight stone steps,‟515 and that it was shunned by the church
hierarchy: „There were no priests or monks or any official religious there. The priests didn‘t like
the Well and tried to discourage the pilgrimages. They said it was a pagan well from which the old
Fianians [sic] drank in the savage heroic days. The peasant folk didn‘t mind the priests. They
believed that Saint Brigid washed her feet in it, and not Finn MacCoole.‟516
3.2.5. Summary
Kavanagh‟s various representations of place and culture provide an impression of the
lifeworld of a young farmer from southern Monaghan during the early decades of the twentieth
century. The physical labour Kavanagh expended in his fields seemed to be accompanied by flights
of imagination in which the soil of the outer landscape that he was cultivating, became confluent
with his eidetic images and memories: „For the labouring farmer [. . . ] the entry of nature is no
mere metaphor. Muscles and scars bear witness to the physical intimacy of the contact. The
farmer‘s topophilia is compounded of this physical intimacy, or the material dependence and the
fact that the land is a repository of memory and sustains hope.‟517 Kavanagh‟s 1928 poem „An
Address to an Old Wooden Gate‟ was a result of this poetic intimacy that he possessed with the soil
of his fields: „I was spreading dung in drills for turnips in a field belonging to Red Pat. Red Pat was
not at home. I was alone. I got my tea in the field. Sitting beside a heap of steaming dung I drank
the tea and afterwards felt in great poetic form. I had lately been reading of a poet who made a
poem about a telegraph pole. I started making a poem on an old wooden gate which guarded a field
I knew. For every drill of dung I spread I made a line of verse. I kept adding to the poem till it was
of grand size.‟518
During his adolescence Kavanagh „suffered from a mild form of obsessive- compulsive
disorder.‟519 In The Green Fool
he wrote: „verse-writing was getting a grip on me. It grew
unawares like an insidious disease. But I wasn‘t satisfied. There was something dead and rotten
513
Ibid.
Ibid., 53-54.
515
Ibid., 54.
516
Ibid., 54-55.
517
Tuan, Topophilia, 97.
518
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 188.
519
Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, 284.
514
87
about the verse-world in which I moved.‟520 The use of his fields as a place of mystical reflection
angered his neighbours: „ Men in the little fields below looked up at my lazy dreamer and were filled
with shame and disgust that such a ―useless animal‖ should have come into possession of land. I
was a bad example. ‗Fit him better to be makin‘ drains or trimmin‘ the briars,‘ they said. Perhaps
they were right. A young girl once crossed the fence to me where I sat in The Musician‘s Field. She
wasn‘t a fairy.‟521 Kavanagh‟s poetic modus operandi at the time was to compose verse while he
worked the farm, and he used the surrounding the fields of this landscape as an outdoor bookcase:
„The hedges were the shelves of my library. I had not my literature card-indexed, but I had a plan of
my own as good. I could say: in the second ash tree from the top end of the Field of The Musician is
a poem by Yeats or A. E. There is a short story by A. E. Coppard at the root of the boor tree beside
the gap in the Field of the Well.‟
522
Kavanagh writing during the 1930s reflected an intimate
„geography based on seanchas, in which there is no clear distinction between the general principles
of topography or direction-finding and the intimate knowledge of particular places.‟523 And it can
be observed in this form of mapping place „the poetic image furnishes one of the simplest
experiences of language that has been lived. And [if] considered as an origin of consciousness, it
points to phenomenology. ‟524
3.3 Patrick Kavanagh: The Flight from the Land (1939)
On 15 April 1939 Kavanagh published an article in The Irish Times addressing the
population drain from rural areas. Its style stands in contrast to his verse and prose, but the
journalistic voice that sustains the piece is drawn from the same experience of rural places and
people found in his poetry and fiction. Blaming rural insularity, social ostracism, the lack of
marriage, a faulty educational system and the incumbent attitude of modernity, he acerbically
depicted the plight of the Irish country-side from a point of view that combined anthropological
anecdote with poetical flourish and irredentist philistinism: „The flight from the land looks like
becoming as famous as the Flight of the Earls. It is a serious problem, and needs serious
consideration. In the first place is there a flight from the land. The answer to this should be, I think,
the well known dialectical cliché, ―yes and no.‖ Youth is not flying from the land any faster than it
ever flew. The only difference between present day and forty or fifty years ago is that the usual
wastage is not being replaced by growing families. We are reaping today the fruits of a long and
educated contempt for worm-cutters.‟ 525
520
Green Fool, 190.
Ibid.
522
Ibid., 208.
523
Charles Bowen, „A Historical Inventory of the Dindshenchas,‟ in Studia Celtica 10/11, (1975/76) p. 115.
524
Bachelard, Poetics of Space, xxiv.
525
Patrick Kavanagh, „The Flight from the Land‟ in The Irish Times, 15 April 1939, p. 13.
521
88
He noted that AE Russell‟s book National Being and its „practical suggestions for rural
Irish life,‟526 had been largely ignored by the countryside and championed Muintir na Tíre as an
anchor to stem rural migration. He then addressed the question of rural migration from a socioeconomic perspective: „If there is a flight from the land it is only logical. Why ? Well, right beside
me is the town of Dundalk, with its many factories. That town on Sunday night is indistinguishable
from Camden town, London. There are unskilled young fellows of twenty-three or twenty-four
earning close to four pounds a week. What are their country cousins getting? The wages for
agricultural workers are fixed, but not a three-ten or three-fifteen a week. And, as for the fortyyear-old gossoon on his father‘s farm, the probability is that when he wants to go anywhere he has
to ask Da for a couple of bob. Is that encouraging?‟527 Kavanagh followed up this question by
interviewing a middle-aged bachelor farmer who lived with his seventy-five year old mother, and
asked him „why doesn‘t he get married? The man replied: ‗Because I don‘t need a woman.‟528
After asking him a few more questions, Kavanagh stated: „You‘re a bad patriot,‟ 529 to which the
bachelor farmer replied:
„No man ever got married for the sake of his country, why don‟t you start
yourself?‟
„I‟m an artist, a poet.‟
„A what?‟
„Oh, it doesn‟t matter.‟530
They went on to discuss farming -„as far as the technical side of farming is concerned, we are as upto-date as we need be.‟531 Kavanagh then made the claim that „Education to-day aims at one thing
only –how to beat the examination papers,‟532 and that „All over the world the technician and the
scientist reign.‟533 His prognosis is dire, but his classical remedy aims to elevate the rural dweller
above their self-imposed depiction as a „worm-cutters‟: „Our lives are narrow. I would go so far to
say that the awakening in children of a love for poetry and the finer things in life would be a better
way of keeping them on the land. To be made aware of the beauty, to be shown how to people the
bare fields of the mind with the heroes and lovers of imagination, that would be an achievement.‟534
His next acerbic salvo was against the „empty headed lot of job-hunters and job-fillers‘535
who have studied by rote: „In this category may be placed the National Teachers. What are their
526
Ibid.
Ibid.
528
Ibid.
529
Ibid.
530
Ibid.
531
Ibid.
532
Ibid.
533
Ibid.
534
Ibid.
535
Ibid.
527
89
interests? Dog-racing, jazzing, punting, reading the yellow Sunday papers, the cinema, football.
There are exceptions of course. This is the new rich class which is helping to mould the social
conscience of our people. These are our leaders and educators whose code of cultural values is
lower than a slut‘s from a slum. Am I forgetting the flight from the land? I am not. All these things in
their various combinations are responsible for some, at least, of our present social troubles.‟536 After
laying a jaundiced eye on the creeping elements of modernity and insularity within the rural
landscape, Kavanagh quixotically states that there may be a chance to nurture a renaissance of its
dying communities: „But there remains among the farming classes still a residue of unruffled,
sensuous life upon which might be found a rural Irish culture, a structure of beauty, peace and
intelligence in the midst of a scientific illiterate society.‟537
The Flight from the Land can be
examined as a cultural artefact highlighting issues of rural employment, education and sustainability
during the 1930s.
3.4. Conclusion
In September of 1936 Kavanagh proclaimed in his poetry: „I am the representative of those/
Clay-faced sucklers of spade-handles.‟538 Though he later dismissed The Green Fool as a „stage
Irish lie,‟ the narrative provides a home-insider‟s account of the rural landscape to contrast the
romantic chronotopic representation of the Idyll, constructed by the urbane coterie of the Gaelic and
Irish Literary Revivals. Kavanagh‟s dismissal of his first novel reflects the ambivalence he felt
about his native Inniskeen, which stemmed from his early attachment to place, coupled by his
recognition that he was viewed as an outsider within his own native community because of his
literary pursuits. This ambivalence provided a representation in The Green Fool that while at times
reflected the natural landscape of Monaghan with the pastoral essence of an idyll, also depicted a
rural lifeworld tinged with social enmity.
The value of The Green Fool as a piece of literature to human geographers, despite
Kavanagh‟s dismissal of it, is that it provides an insider‟s account of place in rural Southern Ulster
during the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast, within the Revivalist landscapes of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, rural dwellers had been reduced to noble, idealised and voiceless figures
embodying a pantheistic marriage of nationality and soil, that reinforced a fin-de-siécle cultural
nationalism well into the 1920s and „30s. Adherents to this aesthetic practice represented Irish rural
dwellers in various fashions: „[Padraig] Pearse‘s peasantry is innocent, childlike, submissive,
Catholic; [J. M.] Synge‘s romantic, primitive, artistic; [W.B.] Yeats‘s and Lady Gregory‘s mystical,
otherworldly, traditionalist; [Padraic] Colum‘s and [James] Stephen‘s bright, adaptive, quick-
536
Ibid.
Ibid.
538
Patrick Kavanagh, „Peasant‟ Collected Poems, 30.
537
90
witted .‟539 When Kavanagh arrived on the doorsteps of these Dublin literati, in the early 1930s, it
was as if he had stepped out of the frame of a rural landscape that they constructed in their works of
prose, poetry and drama: „I wasn‘t really a writer. I had seen a strange beautiful light on the hills
and that was all. In my heart I wanted to live the simple life of my people –to marry, found a family
and find immortality as a peasant finds it.‟540
Though he was greeted warmly by these urban literati, as an authentic representative of
rural Ireland, he soon began to see the disparity between the idealistic and romantic portrayals of
countryside and its inhabitants by poets, dramatists and linguists of the Revival and his own
phenomenological experience as a „peasant‟: „The Irish Literary Revival as was called was
responsible for many damaging lies. The ―peasant poet.‖ Having one‘s roots in the soil. They were
all claiming to have their roots in the soil and to be peasants as well – [. . . ] Yeats was a troubled
man because he couldn‘t achieve peasantry. In his last poems he did manage to move his mount
over to the greener going on the stands side if I may use the lingo of the racing game. It was borne
in on me from all sides that I was peasant and a ploughman to boot and that anything outside the
peasant in the ploughing field would not carry the authentic Irish note.‟541
The upper-class poetic depictions by members of the Irish Literary Revival and their bucolic
framing of the rural landscape did not measure up with his own experience of the gruelling work of
the farm labourer. „Fellow writers who visited him in Inniskeen [. . . ] were appalled that the author
of Ploughman and Other Poems was still putting in a backbreaking day‘s stint in the fields in 1936,
instead of having the leisure to cultivate his art,‟542 Revivalist depictions also tended to turn a blind
eye to the atavistic political violence
inhabiting
the Irish countryside. In The Green Fool,
Kavanagh described a riot that ensued between nationalist factions on Polling Day 1918: „Zero
hour. A Sinn Féin hot-head made a rush for the Hibernian banner. The battle was on and I was an
eye-witness [. . . ] The Hibernians fought well, the blackthorn and ash-plants whistled through the
dusk. The Sinn Féiners were in on the banner now and one of them had seized Saint Patrick by the
leg, dragging his whole body out of shape: the pole of the banner dunted its bearer‘s solar plexus
and he dropped to the ground with a groan. That was the beginning of the end. The Hibernians fled
in the direction of the pub. We all followed. I saw one of the fleeing Hibs get a foot and a slap that
sent him sprawling ten yards away. When he arose he was crying. I saw two of his teeth were
broken. He was a fine young lad. ―Oh, what ‗ll I do all?‖ he cried to me, ―what‘ll me mother say?‖
539
John Wilson Foster, Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987) p. 323.
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 239.
541
Kavanagh, Man and Poet, 257-258.
542
Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, 89.
540
91
As I was preparing words of sympathy a brute came up and struck the poor fellow a blow in the
eye.‟543
In a letter to his sister Celia in May of 1934, Kavanagh recounted a rather debased incident
of politically motivated violence in which a follower of Eoin O‟Duffy‟s ill-fated National Guard
was severely beaten: „The Blue Shirts, or rather the Blue Blouses are strong in Inniskeen. Nan
McElroy of Toprass – a very nice girl, wears one; she was coming from a Blue Shirt ―social‖ in
Kilkerly. Frank Goodman was with her. She was attacked and brutally beaten by a mob and is still
in hospital. Eleven fellows are in custody over it.‟ 544
Kavanagh was also sceptical of the benefactors of the Language Revival, whom he felt were
ignorant to the real issues that affected rural dwellers: „As far as I can see and hear, all the speakers
of Gaelic today either talk piffle or are discussing the Gaelic revival itself. The sooner we begin to
examine critically the state of polite and impolite society in Ireland the better.‟545 In The Green
Fool, Kavanagh recounted a visit to a Gaeltachta in the west of Ireland: „I stayed a week in
Connemara and was disappointed with the scenery and the people. When you have seen one bit of
Connemara you have seen it all, and it is all stones. The folk there were inclined to laugh at me.
They spoke Gaelic and yet I felt that the English-speaking peasants of my own country were nearer
the old tradition. There was no culture in Connemara, nothing like County Monaghan where the
spirits of the old poets haunted the poplars.‟546 Kavanagh was distrustful of the language
movement‟s exclusive claim to the indigenous cultural identity to Ireland, observing: „One of the
most remarkable things I must note is that the mould of living in Ireland has survived the death of
the ancient Irish language.‟547
In contrast to the idealised cultural and the romantic views and portraits of the Irish
countryside proffered by members of the Gaelic and Literary Revivals, Kavanagh‟s verse and
prose was a product of his native milieu, and his writing represented the voice and image of „a living
landscape,‟548
an organic entity which „dynamically embraces a spontaneous and reciprocal
relationship between a community and its environment. This relationship of Gemeinschaft creates a
vernacular culture landscape, not imposed from outside or above but developed spontaneously,
543
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 107-108.
Patrick Kavanagh, „Patrick Kavanagh: A Memoir‟ in Lapped Furrows: Correspondence 1933-1967
Between Patrick and Peter Kavanagh with Other Documents, (ed.) Peter Kavanagh (New York: The Peter
Kavanagh Press, 1969) p. 31.
545
Patrick Kavanagh, „Twenty-Three Tons of Accumulated Folklore: Is it any use? Irish Times, 18 April,
1939.
546
Kavanagh Green Fool, 234.
547
Kavanagh, Man and Poet, 243.
548
Kevin Whelan, „Reading the Ruins: the Presence of Absence in the Irish Landscape,‟ in (eds.) Howard B.
Clarke, Jacinta Prunty, Mark Hennessy, Surveying Ireland‘s Past: Multidisciplinary Essays in Honour of
Anngret Simms (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2004) p. 313.
544
92
inwardly.‟549 In a poem entitled Dark Ireland written in 1933, Kavanagh articulated the wary,
xenophobic consciousness of the lifeworlds occupying the living landscape in his native south
Monaghan: „We are a dark people,/Our eyes are ever turned/ Inward,‟
550
however, the image
emerging from its verse is that of a rural culture instinctively aware of its objectification at the hands
of the Literary and Gaelic Revivals: „Watching the liar who twists / The hill-paths awry. / O false
fondler with what / Was made lovely / In a garden! ‟551
549
Ibid.
Patrick Kavanagh, „Dark Ireland‟, Collected Poems, 9-10.
551
Ibid.
550
93
94
4.
Elysium & Exile
Forrest Reid and Michael McLaverty
The primary impulse of the artist springs, I fancy, from discontent, and his art
is a kind of crying for Elysium [. . . ] It is a country whose image was stamped
upon our soul before we opened our eyes on earth, and all our life is little
more than a trying to get back there, our art a mapping of its mountains and
streams.
Forrest Reid Apostate (1926)
The road climbed gradually out of the village, up into the hills, where the air
was clear and cool [. . . ] Away beyond that lovely mountain he would soon be
going to Belfast, and as he looked at its cold, sodden folds, he wondered if he
would be able to see it from the town.
Michael McLaverty, Leavetaking (1937)
4.1. Introduction
As the preceding epigraphs intimate, the rural landscapes in the prose fiction of Forrest
Reid and Michael McLaverty, were framed within perspectives formed by the bourgeois gaze of the
urbanite. Their various literary depictions of the Ulster countryside confirms an observation that
„the visitor‘s evaluation of environment is essentially aesthetic, it is an outsider‘s view. The outsider
judges by appearance, by some formal canon of beauty.‟552
Despite being brought up in different religious traditions, both writers shared a middle-class
urban sensibility, which coloured their works . Reid, the son of a middle-class Presbyterian
merchant and English born mother attended Cambridge University.
In contrast, McLaverty‟s father and mother were Catholics who had emigrated to Belfast
from County Monaghan to seek employment when he was a child. McLaverty attended Queen‟s
University in Belfast and St. Mary‟s in London.
This chapter will consist of an examination of the representation of rurality in two of Reid‟s
novels and in a selection of short stories and a novel by McLaverty. It will conclude with a
discussion which will compare their contrasting urban perspectives on the rural Ulster landscape, its
people and its places.
552
Tuan, Topophilia, 64.
95
4.2. Forrest Reid: Crying for Elysium
4.2.1. Introduction
Place is represented in Forrest Reid‟s fiction as a palimpsest of history, memory and fantasy.
His novels of the 1930s, though conceptualised in the bourgeois environs of leafy south Belfast,
transposed fantasist neo-classical visions upon the graveyards, ruins and manors of County Down
and the rocky cliff-shores of County Donegal. Upon these landscapes he imprinted his mystical
leitmotif of „ghostly houses -and ghostly small boys.‟553 It has been observed that the chronotope
of „an old house [. . . ] with its various renovations, architectural styles, successive occupants,
portraits or accoutrements, thickens time and makes it visible.‟554 In his 1926 memoir Apostate,
Reid revealed his sensitivity to the supernatural dimensions of place and architecture: „If you stand
quite still in an ancient house, you will hear, even in broad daylight, strange sounds and
murmurings. And so it was with me. I came on my mother‘s side, of a very old, perhaps too old a
stock, one that had reached its prime four hundred years ago, and there were whisperings and
promptings which when I was quite alone reached me out of the past.‟555 Reid‟s numinous „visions
of boyhood‟ were grounded in a pre-Christian, pagan sense of place, that he transposed in prose
upon the rural topographies of his native Ulster: „Very early I perceived that one‘s mind was
swarming with ghosts; very early I became convinced that one had thoughts that were not one‘s own
thoughts, that one remembered things one had never been told.‟556
4.2.2. Lifepath
Born in Belfast on Midsummer‟s Day 1875, Reid was the youngest of twelve children, of
whom six survived. His father Robert, was a middle-class Presbyterian shipping merchant, and Reid
was the last child of his second wife, an English woman from aristocratic stock. His father died
when he was five, and Reid formed a strong attachment with his nurse Emma Homes. He attended
Hardy‟s Prepatory School in 1887, Belfast Academy in 1888 and later
after serving as an
apprentice in a tea company, entered Cambridge in 1905. Though finding Cambridge a „rather
blank interlude,‟ he met the novelist E. M. Foster who encouraged his literary ambitions. As an
adolescent, one of Reid‟s past times at school had been to write prose fiction: „It was all, in truth,
less like writing than a form of day dreaming, in which I rebuilt the world after my own fashion 553
Brian Taylor, The Green Avenue: The life and writings of Forrest Reid, 1875-1947, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980) p. 124.
554
Pat Sheeran, „The Road, The House, and the Grave: A Poetics of Galway Space, 1900-1970,‟ in (eds.)
Gerald Moran, Raymond Gillespie and William Nolan, Galway History & Society: Interdisciplinary Essays
on the History of an Irish County (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1996) p. 758.
555
Forrest Reid, Apostate (London: Faber & Faber, 1947 [1926]) p. 10.
556
Ibid.
96
rebuilt it so I could find a place there. And this was the secret of my pleasure, the source of my
impulse, without which perhaps I should not have written a line. It was the pleasure of the exile who
has returned to his native shore; the scenes I was describing so rapturously were not really the
scenes I supposed them to be; they belonged to a country not marked on any map -that lost green
island of the earlier years, which I could no longer visit in the old way.‟557
Completing his studies at Cambridge, Reid returned and settled in „that awful, rainy and
smoky Presbyterian city,‟558 Belfast, where he wrote virtually all of his phantasmagoric style of
fiction. In this regard he „sat very lightly to the Irish Literary Revival.‟559 In 1931 Denis Ireland
remarked: „the cultured Protestant Ulsterman with a literary bent either goes to London and
submerges himself in the stream of English literary life, losing all real contact with his native soil –
or he stays in Ireland and becomes a Nationalist. There seems to be no half way house.‟560 Reid
was an exception to this, and lived quietly in Belfast until his death in 1947. Although his work
was dismissed at times as escapist fiction containing a fantasy world of „beautiful boys in beautiful
landscapes,‟ it was solidly grounded in the soil of his native Ulster. These idealisations were
perhaps Reid‟s reaction to the sectarianism of Belfast and its resultant social malaise. He utterly
rejected Christianity, and his novels reflected an „element of pagan symbolism . . . the idea of a
ghost or revenant, some shade of a lost culture or a guilt appearing out of the past [that] is often
found in Irish literature. [Reid] was a genuine pagan. He stayed [in Belfast] as if in hiding . . . it
was odd to find a mystic, deep in Blake and Yeats among the linen mills.‟561
Two of Reid‟s novels of the decade, Uncle Stephen (1931) and The Retreat, or the
Machinations of Henry (1936) tell the story of Tom Barber at the ages of fifteen and thirteen,
respectively. Barber is a Protestant boy from a middle-class Unionist background, who in the two
novels encounters a spectral companion and an angel whilst he is out exploring the woods, thickets,
cliff faces and shore lines of rural Ulster. Reid‟s interest in young boys bordered on the obsessive;
one of his critical biographers noted that „Reid‘s pederasty, idealised and frustrated‘562 is crucial „in
any interpretation of his life or appreciation of his works.‟563 Reid himself claimed that had he
never written a line of fiction, that it „would not alter my conviction that the years of childhood,
boyhood and adolescence are the most significant. What follows is chiefly a logical development -
557
Ibid., 146.
V. S. Pritchett, Midnight Oil, quoted in Paul Arthur, „John Hewitt‟s Hierarchy of Values,‟ in (eds.) Gerald
Dawe & John W. Foster, The Poet‘s Place (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991) p. 276
559
Taylor, The Green Avenue, 3.
560
Denis Ireland, Ulster To-day and To-morrow, her part in a Gaelic civilization: a study in political
revolution (London: Hogarth Press, 1931) p. 32.
561
Pritchett, Midnight Oil, 276
562
Taylor,The Green Avenue, 2
563
Ibid.
558
97
the child being the father of the man.‟564 It can be seen that „like many pederasts, Forrest Reid
looked back to the lost paradise of his childhood, and much of his writing is imbued with a sense of
a land indescribably remote, a land of lost content; lost for ever, yet attainable, or at least
approachable, through desire and through memory.‟
565
Reid referred to himself as possessing a
„mysterious case of arrested development‘566 and that his fictional boys were „mere pretexts for the
author to live through the years of his boyhood.‟567
4.3 Uncle Stephen (1931)
4.3.1. Introduction
We first meet young Tom Barber at the age of thirteen in Uncle Stephen. The novel opens
at the funeral of his father in a picturesque graveyard near the ruins of Inch Abbey in County Down:
Beyond the iron wicket-gate stretched an avenue of yew-trees with, at the end
of it, four wide shallow steps, dark and mossy, descending in a terrace to the
graves. This avenue was straight as if marked out with a ruler. The yew-trees
were straight, trim and sombre, of a dull bluish-green that was not so dark as
the shadows they threw on the unmown grass. They stood up stiffly against a
deep ultramarine sky, and composed a picture at once formal and intensely
romantic.568
The grounds of the cemetery are ordered and precise; a sculptured tableaux under which „the
triumph of clay and worms, and the horrors that were already out of sight,‟569 are well under way.
This alludes to Reid‟s representations of the Northern rural landscape in his prose, as we shall see,
as a palimpsest of historical artefact, memory and fantasy. Tom has been orphaned and now resides
in Gloucester Terrace with his stepmother Mrs. Giveney and her brother. He feels alienated from
her two older sons Eric and Leonard, but is close to her daughter Jane. In Tom‟s possession is a
book written by his mysterious Uncle Stephen, about whom the Givney‟s remain suspiciously mute
about.
Written about Greek religion, Uncle Stephen‟s text has a strange pull on Tom. The book
echoes Reid‟s own mystical and pagan leanings. During his adolescence, at the time of his
confirmation, he rejected Christianity, stating: „temperamentally I was antagonistic to this religion,
to its doctrines, its theory of life, the shadow it cast across the earth.‟570 His literary interests at the
time had drawn him to the dialogues of Plato, Mackail‟s Selected Epigrams of the Palatine Poets,
Sappho, Theocritus, and Giorgione‟s Fete Champetre, and he recalled: „I had no learning; this
paganism was a subjective thing, bearing no closer relation to reality than my imagined Greece,
564
Ibid.
Ibid., 2-3.
566
Ibid., 5.
567
Ibid., 4.
568
Forrest Reid, Uncle Stephen (London: GMP, 1988 [1931] ) p. 5.
569
Ibid., 6.
570
Reid, Apostate, 152.
565
98
which was merely a glorified reflection of my own countryside.‟571 Reid‟s literary interests in turn
influenced his perception of Ulster‟s rural landscapes:
I had arrived at the Greek view of nature. In wood and river and plant and
animal and bird and insect it had seemed to me there was a spirit which was
the same as my spirit. And here, in this poetry, every aspect of nature seemed
to be perpetually passing into divinity, into the form and radiance of a god,
while the human passed no less easily into tree or reed or flower. Adonis,
Narcissus, Syrinx, Daphne -could I not see them with my own eyes? Could I
not see Philomela flying low above the earth? Had I not, even in this land
once blessed by St. Patrick, caught a glimpse of that ill-mannered boy who,
mocking the great Demeter while she drank, was straightway transformed into
a lizard? The landscape was the landscape I loved best, a landscape
proclaiming the vicinity of man, a landscape imbued with a human spirit that
was yet somehow divine.572
Reid transposed this personal sense of pagan mysticism upon the terrains of his fictional
environments, where it lingered in his luminous prose style. But what also appears in his novel is a
representation of the parochial topography of an Ulster country town of the period. Returning to
Uncle Stephen, we find Tom, with the assistance of his step-sister Jane departing to visit his sixtythree year old uncle at his Manor outside the provincial back water of Kilbarron:
To most people sight-seeing in Kilbarron would have proved rather dull. It
was an ordinary little country town, without a past and without a future, but
Tom discovered attractions. He loitered in the market-place, which was smelly
and more or less deserted; he came out into the High Street. He inspected the
bank, the town hall, and the post office, as conscientiously as they had been
buildings of European fame. Lower down the same street he came to the
Unionist Club and the offices of R. P. Flood, solicitor [. . . ] while just around
the corner was the Royal Cinema.573
Reid based Uncle Stephen‟s Manor upon the estate and grounds of Burrenwood House, located off
the Bryansford Road leading from Newcastle in County Down.
We find Tom meeting his uncle
through a supernatural haze „of a soft floating light that dimmed and shaded off into a surrounding
darkness,‟574 in the library of the Manor: „a figure whose grave, kind face and silver hair were
surrounded by a black-skull cap.‟575 His uncle blesses him, and in the ensuing days makes legal
and educational arrangements for his great nephew‟s new living arrangement. Whilst exploring the
dense thickets surrounding the grounds of the Manor one day, Tom makes a discovery: „The
strangest house he had ever seen, built of wood and thickly covered with a dark, small-leaved ivy [.
. . ] The unusual depth of this vegetable growth was what indeed gave the house its strangeness, its
571
Ibid., 154.
Ibid., 155.
573
Reid, Uncle Stephen, 61-62.
574
Ibid., 46.
575
Ibid.
572
99
at first sight startling suggestion of life. It was alive. Watching it intently, Tom imagined he could
see the walls -though ever so slightly -swelling and contracting in slow breathing.‟ 576
4.3.2. Space of Genius Loci
The presence of a secret garden and a hidden house, whose vegetable overgrowth gives it
the appearance of being alive, blurs the boundary which separates Tom from the surrounding
landscape. What is revealed in Reid‟s prose, is a liminal space of genius loci, which consists of „a
living ecological relationship between an observer and an environment, a person and a place.‟577
Such a space „is a source of self-knowledge and a point of reference that is possibly important in
childhood, but which can provide a centre of personal stability and significance throughout life. It
is perhaps the ability to convey this quality that characterises authors and artists with a ―sense of
place‖. ‟578 As Tom stands in this space of genius loci, he becomes possessed by „the feeling that
someone was watching him, and he never lost consciousness of this, though presently he turned his
back on the house.‟ 579 Tom gazes as in a dream upon: „A narrow lawn of moss-thickened grass
sloped down from the stained door-steps to a grass terrace, where a further flight of balustrated
steps descended to a pool rimmed with stone. On an island in the middle of the pool stood a naked
boy holding an urn tilted forward, though through its weedy mouth no water splashed. The fountain
was choked [. . . ] On the dark surface of the pool floated the flat glossy leaves of water-lilies, and
the lonely little sentinel gazed down on them, or at his own black shadow, or perhaps he was
asleep, awaiting the spell-breaker.‟580
This passage represents the garden and stone-rimmed pool at another large walled house on
the Upper Newtonards Road in Belfast, named „The Moat.‟ Reid recalled: „It [. . .] was, a lovely
spot, always a favourite one of mine. Seated on those steps, watched by boy and owl and otter
[. . . ] I wrote a good deal of Uncle Stephen . Now and then a crimson, spotted ladybird would run
across the white page I had completed.‟581 The hidden house and the garden in Uncle Stephen
symbolise a site of genius loci for Reid that was located between the liminal space of his
imagination and the outer landscape of „The Moat.‟ The stone statue in the centre of the pool can
be seen as a symbolic personification of the mysterious boy Tom discovered watching him in the
garden. As he tells his uncle about his new friend, Uncle Stephen leads him to his bedroom and
shows him a statue of the Greek god Hermes, whom he says „cares for boys.‟ It is soon revealed
that Tom‟s new friend, though unaware of it, is Uncle Stephen as a boy; the older man having
576
Ibid., 76-77.
E. Cobb, „The ecology of imagination in childhood,‟ in (eds.) P. Shepard, D. McKinley The Subversive
Science (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970) p. 125.
578
Relph, Place and Placelessness, 66.
579
Reid, Uncle Stephen, 76-77.
580
Ibid.
581
Taylor,The Green Avenue, 133-134.
577
100
dreamed him into existence, and projected him into his nephew‟s consciousness. Reid‟s depiction
of the garden can be seen as an illustration of a central place of hierophany, a space in which a
divine or transcendent dimension breaks through into everyday life.582
Later in Uncle Stephen, Tom and his mysterious friend journey to a graveyard on the
outskirts of Coombe Bridge, where he claims to have lived as a child: „There were few trees. The
place was exposed to whatever winds might blow. The low stone walls, the straggling gorse bushes
and ragged bramble and heather, gave little or no shelter. It must be a bleak spot enough in spring
and autumn and winter, Tom thought; yet on this grey, still, summer afternoon, which had clouded
over in the last hour, it was beautiful and peaceful. The gravel paths were smooth and black; the
place, though it had this lonely appearance, was not ill-tended.‟583 In the graveyard, an antipodean
image that Reid invoked to contrast the genius loci of the garden, they read the inscription on a
headstone listing Uncle Stephen‟s mother and father, whom Tom‟s mysterious friend recognizes as
his own parents. As they journey back to Kilbarron, Tom reflects that:
The aspect of Coombe Bridge itself struck him as different. Perhaps it was
because the day had altered, and with it the colour of everything: perhaps
because places are always different when you are leaving them.584
The pair arrive back at the hidden house in the Manor‟s demesne, and exhausted Tom „instantly
sank into the dark unconscious world which lay below his dream world, and in which, from night to
night, his life was mysteriously renewed.‟585 Upon awakening, he discovers that his friend has
vanished. Taking his place is Uncle Stephen, who tells Tom: „I can remember last night. I think the
change, the dream, the enchantment, or whatever it was, had worn pretty thin last night. In fact,
from the time we left the churchyard at Coombe Bridge till our arrival here all is clear. I can
remember our journey and how tired you were at the end of it; I can remember carrying you: it is of
what happened earlier that I am doubtful. There must have been a break in consciousness, I mean my consciousness. It is like this: -I can think back over last night, remember what I thought and felt;
but of what came earlier I have only vague impressions, as if I had watched the earlier scenes.‟586
Tom‟s mysterious friend, had earlier been introduced to the local cleric Mr. Knox, the
solicitor Mr. Flood and other sober minded members of the Kilbarron Unionist community. His
sudden disappearance is now a problem, and Uncle Stephen notes: „their faith is going to be put to a
pretty severe test. All the more severe because with neither of them, I fancy, is imagination a strong
582
Rana Singh, The Spirit and Power of Place: Human Environment and Sacrality, National Geographic
Journal of India, Vol. 40, 1994.
583
Reid, Uncle Stephen, 238.
584
Ibid.,240.
585
Ibid., 244.
586
Ibid., 246.
101
point.‟587 Tom and his uncle soon decide to leave the Manor in the care of the house-keeper and
explore the south of Europe for six months, and then settle „somewhere on the Italian coast.‟588
Before they depart however, Uncle Stephen has a conference with the solicitor to explain the
sudden absence of the mysterious, spectral boy, while Tom is compelled to make one last visit to
the secret house hidden in the thicket. He finds that its genius loci has now turned repulsive:
And while he drew nearer this feeling deepened. There was a moment when,
at the entrance to the avenue, he very nearly turned back. For a strange, an
almost ghostly fear had suddenly touched him, like a faint cold sigh of autumn
wind. He did not yield to it: he walked on: but no further than the fountain,
where he stretched himself on the grass. Once only had he glanced at the
house, and it was like a hollow shell, empty and drained of life. Yet he knew
that nothing could have induced him to go inside and climb the stairs.589
As Tom lays in front of the pool that sits before the house, images enter his imagination: „fragments
of Theocritus, from a walk taken by Socrates and Phaidos along the banks of the Ilissos, and from
the deepest impressions of his own summer woods.‟590 He realizes that his relationship with Uncle
Stephen is similar: „In the old days a pupil lived with his master. He had that kind of master
today,‟591 and then thinks of his mysterious friend: „Stephen had gone back into dreamland. But
dream and reality were hardly distinguishable, for what was real yesterday to-day became a dream.
All the past was dreamland: it was only the present moment that wasn‘t.‟592
4.3.3. Summary
Reid‟s setting of a secret garden for Uncle Stephen‘s last scene, can be read on several
levels; as a paen to the fleetingness of youth, as a symbol for the loss innocence or as a metaphor
for the sublimated sexual desire of the biblical Eden, drawing upon a Christian tradition which Reid
utterly rejected. However for Tom the secret garden and its house, once a space of genius loci, is
now a place that makes him morbid. As he rises to leave, Tom gazes upon the stone statue of the
naked boy standing on the island in the middle of the pool, and feels the „impulse to kiss that faintly
smiling mouth‘593 :
The stone was warm. The sun had warmed the curved pouting mouth and the
smooth limbs and body; but when Tom‟s lips pressed on those other lips the
eyes were looking away from him, and dimly he felt that this was the symbol
of life -of life and of all love.594
587
Ibid., 249.
Ibid., 248.
589
Ibid., 253.
590
Ibid.
591
Ibid. 254.
592
Ibid., 254.
593
Ibid., 255.
594
Ibid., 255.
588
102
Thus, the novel ends with a bittersweet homo-erotic image: „ ―Good-bye,‖ Tom whispered into the
delicate unlistening ear. He hurried from the garden, trying to shake from this incomprehensible
mood and return to actuality.‟595 Yet the spatial metaphor of the secret garden, as a place of genius
loci, acts as a frame which to view Reid‟s pagan, neo-classical perspective of „a landscape imbued
with a human spirit that was yet somehow divine.‟596
4.4. The Retreat (1936)
4.4.1. Introduction
The second time we meet young Tom in Reid‟s fiction, is at the age of eleven, before he
meets his Uncle Stephen, and
after the death of his parents. The Retreat commences in a
dreamscape inhabited by a boy „brought up in the Catholic faith,‟597 who is living in the ghostly
house of his Master, an old man whose skin is „the colour of an ancient parchment,‟598 and whom
it seems is waiting for a mysterious visitor. The Master appears to be a Jewish alchemist of sorts:
„He was no priest -of the true church at any rate -nor was that mysterious sign of two interlocked
triangles, drawn in gold on the white marble table a Christian symbol.‟599 Whispering silent
incantations, which causes the boy to draw „a cross upon his breast and whisper a Latin prayer,‟600
the Master casts wood on a hearth and the flames conjure up a spectral panorama:
They had a curious effect, beautiful and fantastic, for at one moment there was
only a veil of trembling shadow, and next a stiff and formal landscape peopled
with ghostly figures leapt into view -all the more lifelike because the figures
and the trees visibly moved. The boy however, knew the origin of this
movement, and it was not of his master‟s making. It was natural: he had seen
it happening in the daytime. Every room in this crumbling half-dilapidated
house was full of draughts, and it must be only such a draught now, passing
between the wall and the hangings, which caused them to ripple and swell.601
The boy then falls asleep, and upon awakening discovers his Master is gone and explores a secret
cabinet. The experience fills him with „an icy presentiment of horror,‟602 and he hears a distant
knocking in the halls of the house, that signals his Master‟s mysterious visitor has arrived. In a state
of terror the boy flings the door open to find a creature from a rural landscape: „It was a deer- still
to young to have horns- with soft dark eyes and smooth dappled coat. And those four small delicate
hoofs it must have been that had made the knocking which so frightened him. It had sought him out,
was actually in the room, bringing with it a kind of wild fragrance of the woods.‟603 The deer leads
595
Ibid., 255.
Ibid., 155.
597
Forrest Reid, The Retreat, or the Machinations of Henry (Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1978 [1936] ) p. 5.
598
Ibid., 3.
599
Ibid., 5.
600
Ibid., 7.
601
Ibid., 8-9.
602
Ibid., 10.
603
Ibid., 11-12.
596
103
him along a passage to another door, which the boy pushes open into another more pastoral world:
„the winter and the night were gone. Gone like a dream -gone and, almost before he had taken two
steps, forgotten. The old man was forgotten, the room forgotten, the house forgotten. There was
nothing -nothing but a world of gleaming sunshine - a world of cool green leaves and running
water.‟
604
At this moment Tom awakes, and it is through this dreamscape sequence resonating
with supernatural tones of a pagan ritual, that Reid segues his novel into the rational domesticity of
the Protestant middle-class, before venturing to the numinous coastlines of County Donegal.
4.4.2. Landscape as Palimpsest
Tom is found to be living in a big house located at Ballysheen in south Belfast. His father, a
Professor and his mother, a home-maker represent the Unionist bourgeois of the period, and Reid‟s
description of the household‟s servants illustrates the class system in place at the time:
Phemie, Mary and William composed the indoor and outdoor staff, and
Phemie and Mary were sisters though you never would have guessed this to
look at them [. . . ] Both were Roman Catholics, while William was a
Protestant and an Orangeman, and walked with an orange-and-purple sash
over his shoulder on the twelfth of July. Phemie had been crossed in love
many years ago, and now hated men though she didn‟t mind boys. She had a
loud voice, muscles of iron, and a temper which Mother said all the cooks
inherited from the cook in Alice in Wonderland. Nevertheless, Tom preferred
her to Mary, though he preferred Mary to William, who was the gardener, and
lived with his wife and family in a cottage not far from old Ballysheen
graveyard, about a mile away.605
The house‟s location and a depiction of its underlying ruins containing artefacts from a vanished
rural landscape, illustrates Reid‟s representation of place as a palimpsest of historical relic and
memory: „All this district was Ballysheen, and Doctor Macrory said there had once been a church
near the graveyard, though nothing was left of it at present except a few stones. And even the loose
stones had nearly all been carted away at one time or another to build walls and byres and
cottages.‟ 606 The leafy suburbs of south-Belfast in The Retreat, had earlier formed a Celtic rural
hinterland:
For that matter Doctor Macrory said there must long ago have been another
house -a big house- where Tom‟s own house now stood. It had disappeared
completely, and was not mentioned in any local history, but the builders had
discovered traces of it when they were laying the foundations, and Doctor
Macrory himself had poked about while the digging was going on. Dr.
Macrory was very much interested in things of that sort. By profession he was
a physician, but his hobby was archaeology, and he had written several
pamphlets on the subject. Tom hadn‟t read the pamphlets, but he had seen
604
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 19.
606
Ibid.
605
104
them, Daddy possessed them, and they were bound in green paper, with Celtic
designs.607
Tom‟s boyhood imagination isolates him from his father: „All of Daddy‘s friends were scientific,
which according to Mother, accounted for the narrowness of their views, their lack of imagination,
and the irritating way in which they pooh-poohed anything they couldn‘t understand.‟608 He also
plays with his cat Henry who „never did anything unless he wanted to do it himself,‟609 and attends
singing lessons and school, at which Reid features: „an English lesson: they were doing Elizabeth‘s
reign; and Mr. Pemberton embarking on a favourite subject, proceeded to give an account of the
Elizabethan theatre.‟610 During the lesson, Tom and his pal, the „scientific‟ Pascoe get up to some
mischief, distracting the lesson, so they are assigned next morning to bring Mr. Pemberton „the first
part of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner written out neatly in ink.‟611 Tom‟s religious back ground
is firmly grounded in the Protestant tradition of biblical exegesis: „ ―The Bible was written to teach
us how to live properly,‖ Mother continued, ―and to reveal the truth. It isn‘t like any other
book.‖‟612 But in the second part of the novel Tom who possesses the inquisitive and imaginative
nature of a child on the verge of adolescence, is able to access a mystical terrain in the rural
landscape where he meets an angel named Gamelyn whose presence belies the religious sobriety of
his brethren in Belfast.
4.4.3. Landscapes and Ruins
Reid situates the second part of his novel on Glenagivney Bay along the coast line of north
west Donegal. Tom and his family are there on holiday, and are to soon be joined by Pascoe, who
comes to visit his aunt. Reid‟s depiction of this western Gaelic fringe of the county, contains
elements of rural landscape as palimpsest, as well as a repository of pagan and mystical experience.
One morning Tom sets out on a solitary excursion into hills of Donegal:
The road was thick with dust and so steep that in places horses and donkeys
had to draw their carts from side to side in a zig-zag track. Here and there it
was actually solid rock, which must make it frightfully slippery in winter,
especially for the small feet of the donkeys [. . .] on either side of the road
stretched the heather, purple and brown and dark olive green, with black
patches were the turf had been cut. There were no trees, but only the wide
gentle curve of the hill rounded against the sky, very simple and somehow
soothing.613
607
Ibid.
Ibid., 20.
609
Ibid., 22.
610
Ibid., 71.
611
Ibid., 77.
612
Ibid., 136.
613
Ibid., 184-185.
608
105
Along the way he imagines a companion for himself and scrambling through a gap in the hedge
appears: „-a very ragged boy, with bare feet, no jacket, and rents in his shirt and trousers through
which his skin showed. He had hair the colour of the bleached ears of wheat, and the brightest eyes
Tom had ever beheld [. . . ] And he just sat there, without speaking again, but watching Tom intently
and looking rather lovely. It was queer, but he was lovely-really lovely: his beauty seemed to shine
through his rags, and he sat with a most peculiar lightness, like a butterfly poised on a leaf.‟614 The
boy announces to Tom that his name is Gamelyn, and states: „I‘m an angel [. . . ] Your angel. You
must have imagined me and wanted me. You must have imagined me very strongly, because if you
hadn‘t I couldn‘t have come.‟615 And he then tells Tom „Once-twice- a third time-and then no
more . . .‟616 will he visit him. Gamelyn vanishes to the „chiming of innumerable tiny bells‘617 which
seem to emanate from the fuchsia flowers above Tom‟s head. After awakening he finds „himself
staring straight into the long narrow face of an inquisitive old goat.‟618
Tom then wanders down to the shore where the vast emptiness of the coastline greets him:
„No sign of a human being: not a soul could have been here to-day; the only marks on the long
brown stretch of sand were the thin strange footprints of sea-birds. The entire crescent of the bay
must measure more than two hundred yards, and it was shut in behind at both ends by cliffs which
rose nearly perpendicularly to a height of some hundred and fifty feet.‟619 Further exploring the
coastline Tom comes upon the remnants of a fourteenth century citadel:
Below him the ground dipped and rose again, forming a narrow ravine which
ran on to the sea. On the opposite side of this ravine, and on a level with the
Fort, were the grey ruins of a castle. The castle had been built in 1313, Daddy
said, and little remained of it now except the lower walls, and here and there
the fragments of a spiral staircase. The floor was solid rock, however, though
partly coated with grass; and looking through a broken archway, her pale mild
face turned toward him, Tom perceived a sheep reposing in solitude.620
Placing Tom amidst the ruins, Reid depicts the psychological element of landscape construction and
the role that history and memory play in an individual‟s subsequent perception of place:
The sun was sinking, and the rich warm flood of light, filling empty spaces
and washing crumbling stones, had a curious effect of spiritualising the scene.
From the precise spot where he now stood, Tom two or three times a day had
looked across at this castle -also he had climbed up and explored every inch of
it -yet never before had it suggested to him anything beyond itself. Now its
alerted aspect awakened a vague stirring in his mind, as if a submerged
614
Ibid., 188-190.
Ibid., 192.
616
Ibid.
617
Ibid, 193.
618
Ibid.
619
Ibid., 199.
620
Ibid., 207-208.
615
106
impression were trying to force its way upward to consciousness; but
unsuccessfully, for it produced in him only a dim sense of being reminded of
another scene, a place still unidentified, but which he had at some time visited,
though he could not tell when. Yet it ought to be easy, he felt, for he knew
very few ruins -Inch, Greyabbey, Bonmargy, Dunluce -he could remember no
others. And then suddenly he knew that it wasn‟t a real place at all he was
thinking of, but only a place in a dream.621
Reid‟s construction of
the novel then follows a narrative that juxtaposes Tom‟s imaginative
dreamscapes with myths and representations drawn from the surrounding Donegal landscape. His
rational friend Pascoe joins him on holidays and following a discussion on religion and spurred on
by the opportunity to earn a six-pence a chapter, decide to read through the entire Bible from
Genesis to Revelations. As a result, Pascoe „by means of logic and pure mathematics [. . . ] actually
deduced, not the area indeed, but the exact shape of Eden.‟622
Tom‟s biblical reading produces a different effect. Asleep in bed, the angel Gamelyn arrives
and takes him to the ramparts of the Fort, above the ruins of the castle, and then to the Garden of
Eden. He encounters a talking menagerie of animals named by Adam, and under the Tree of
Knowledge, has a discussion with a serpent who confides in Tom „I never cared for Eva,‟623 and
hypnotizes him with the secret that „Time is an illusion.‟624 Tom finds himself in the ghostly house
which appeared in the dream sequence that opens The Retreat, and hears the mysterious boy tell
him that he is soon leaving his Master, before he is awakened by Pascoe. Some weeks later, a few
days before the end of their holidays and the return to Belfast, Tom and Pascoe are in a boat on
Glenagivney Bay, with a local old man named Danny McCoy who: „lived alone in a thatched
cottage at the end of the village, and the country people said he was odd because he had been
―away‖ when a boy. This meant [. . . ] that he had been taken away by the fairies.‟ 625 As he rows
the boys across the bay:
The shore glided slowly past: the Manor House glided past; the Fort was
gliding past, when Danny rested his oars and gazed at it. Pascoe went on
reading, but Tom looked up too, though only for a moment, because really he
was watching the old fisherman‟s face. „Strange things do be on the sea at
night,‟ Danny pronounced slowly, „and strange things on the land. I‟ve seen a
light rising out of the sea like a thousand holy burning candles, and I‟ve
climbed the hill to Glenagivney and seen a glory of saints and angels in the
sky.626
621
Ibid., 208-209.
Ibid., 245.
623
Ibid., 272.
624
Ibid., 277.
625
Ibid., 284.
626
Ibid., 288.
622
107
Tom tells Danny that he too has seen such things, and the old man reveals that „a night it might be
two or three weeks ago,‟627 he saw standing on the Fort „two figures on the battlement, and one
might be like your self in your night clothes [. . . ] but the other had a shining round him that was
more than the shining of the moon [. . . ] with the beauty of an angel of God.‟ 628
4.4.4. Summary
At the ending of The Retreat, Reid allows the reader to juxtapose Tom‟s pastoral and
transcendent
experience of Donegal, with a phantasmagoric dreamwalk
to a south Belfast
graveyard, completing a cycle that had commenced in Uncle Stephen. In doing so Reid contrasts
the hierophany of the rural, with a macabre resurrection of the „horrors already out of sight,‟629 in
the urban experience of the city. On the day Tom leaves his holiday in rural hinterlands of Donegal
for the more rational environs of the city, he experiences a „flat sort of feeling [. . . ] that the Fort
and all connected with it belonged to the past.‟630 The third and last visitation of Gamelyn occurs
back in a decrepit graveyard close to the once rural environs of Ballysheen: „Mushrooms grew in
the graveyard [. . . ] Not a headstone was left standing in its original position. Some still survived,
indeed, but they were propped up against the broken wall that surrounded the whole enclosure, and
their inscriptions, as Tom knew, were for the most part indecipherable. When he entered, through a
gap on the north side, the place looked for all the world like some ancient earthworks, except that
the surface was everywhere uneven - all heights and hollows, hummocks and tussocks -with a
sprinkling of bushes, of whin and bramble. It was impossible to tell where the paths had once been;
and when you crossed the long tangled grass your feet unexpectedly sank into holes, or sometimes
struck against a hidden fragment of stone. Walking over it gave Tom a queer feeling, not altogether
pleasant, though this was entirely due to the suggestions of a too active imagination.‟631
Tom finds his cat Henry perched along with a dozen more felines perched on the
headstones, and is drawn once again into a dreamscape: „He had neither looked nor cared whither
he was running, yet it seemed an evil omen. A yellow twilight swam between earth and sky, and
beneath it the landscape had taken on a livid unnatural hue. A black motionless figure crouched at
a little distance. He was trapped. To try and go home would only be to return to the house he had
run away from -the house of his dream, the house the serpent had shown him: how could he ever go
home again if his true home was not there.‟632 A beastly feral cat materialises and seems about to
do battle with a white dog, but the creatures vanish and Gamelyn appears in the visage of a young
man, and gravely counsels Tom: „at present you cannot understand . . . I am you; the beast that is
627
Ibid., 289.
Ibid.
629
Uncle Stephen, 6.
630
Ibid., 321-322.
631
Ibid., 347-348.
628
108
gone was you; do not think about it, but go to sleep.‟633 The novel ends with Tom leaving his
dreamscape and returning to the family house at Ballysheen, where the possibility of visiting
Uncle Stephen‟s estate in the country, whom his father likes despite the old man‟s penchants for
„flights of the imagination,‟ is being discussed as a possibility for the next year‟s holiday.
4.5 Forrest Reid’s Intelligible Landscapes
Reid‟s rural landscapes of Ulster reside within a topography transposed with fantastical and
neo-pagan images that emerged from his imagination, and his study of classical texts. They do not
reflect the sectarian or economic strife of the period in which he was writing, and they betray a
middle-class myopia. Reid‟s interests were not polemical. He opted for a life of the mind and
literature, instead of joining his brothers in the family Linen and Tea business. Until his death Reid
lived a quiet and cloistered life in a council house at 12 Ormiston Crescent in Belfast, detached from
the violence and dreariness of the city. Reid re-imagined the few significant experiences of his life
in his prose fiction. These events whether „spiritual, mystic, or through some process of sublimation,
sexual -[were] of enduring and of motivating significance for Reid,‟634 and he projected his persona
into figures like Uncle Stephen and the elder figure of the Master. Though from a Unionist
background and raised as a Presbyterian, he rejected Christianity for what he felt was a truer more
pagan experience of life. Reid‟s rural landscape depictions therefore are unoccluded by polemical
framings and their palimpsestic natures reveals a recognition of the play of ancient morphologies,
memory and history in their constructions. His friend and mentor E. M. Foster noted: „when his
genius gains the recognition that has been so strangely withheld from it, he will be ranked with the
artists who have preferred to see life steadily rather than to see it whole, and who have concentrated
their regard upon a single point, a point which, when rightly focuses, may perhaps make all the
surrounding landscape intelligible.‟635 Reid‟s focus on ruins and archaeology in his works echoed
Foster‟s perception. His belief in the supernatural dimensions of houses, churchyards, cemeteries,
and relics scattered upon a rural topography informed his mystical depiction of place, which was
solidly grounded in the soil of his native province:
What Reid never forgot was the landscape with which he was most familiar.
The Ulster landscape and Reid‟s landscape are not alternative imaginative
topographies, but based upon firm realities. Reid‟s particular pays sans nom,
that country „whose image was stamped upon our soul before we opened our
eyes on earth‟, may be an ideal country but the landscapes which Reid
described are not idealised. They have their origins in the streets of Belfast, the
shores of County Down, the brooding presence of the Mourne Mountains.
Reid‟s paradisal visions are not „dream substitutes‟ for this reality but the
realisation of the immanence of the one in the presence of the other. His ideal
632
Ibid., 354.
Ibid., 358-359.
634
Taylor,The Green Avenue, 5.
635
Ibid., 6.
633
109
landscapes are not idealisations of the real but rather glimpses of an ideal seen
through the real. 636
The senses of place captured in Reid‟s novels Uncle Stephen and The Retreat are intrinsically
attached to locales in Northern Ireland, despite the universal nature of the Classical imagery and
symbolism Reid employs in their narratives. This use of imagery reflected the mindscape of a
benignly middle-class lapsed Protestant figure who was able to perceive the mystic potential of his
Ulster surroundings, and sublimate an idealised representation of landscape, from his unfulfilled
longings of desire, obsession and imagination.
4.6 Michael McLaverty: Emigration and Exile
4.6.1. Introduction
Seascapes and landscapes serve to anchor Michael McLaverty‟s 1930s depictions of Rathlin
Island. Themes of emigration and exile, poverty and isolation in his prose „reverberate: to separate
a man from his kin is to separate him from his forbearers and from his land, for blood and the land
intimately connect.‟637 His prose representations of Rathlin and its people illuminates a core
argument of traditional human geography that „environment without man is not environment: both
are abstractions unless they are taken together.‟638 McLaverty rendered the barren topography of
this wind swept island with a natural realism that conveyed the power of sea and landscape to
determine the fates of its dwindling community illuminating that the chronotope of „an island is a
bounded site, that at first suggests a self containment, an integral culture and a simplicity lacking in
more open heterogeneous locales.‟639
4.6.2. Lifepath
McLaverty was born in Carrickmacross, County Monaghan on 5 July 1904. His parents
Michael and Catherine emigrated in 1909 to seek employment: „My father was a waiter in the hotel
and he came to Belfast with his two brothers as they did not have enough land to support all of
them [. . . ] My mother was from Kildare via Dublin. My mother took ill after having her ninth baby.
She married when she was only eighteen and having a baby every year was just too much for her
and she died very young.‟640 Emigration and personal tragedy were not alien to McLaverty, and
would influence the development of the fictional characters that he populated Rathlin Island with
in his prose. He attended Queen‟s University, and took a Physics degree in 1927 and a Master‟s
degree in Science in 1933. He also attended St. Mary‟s in Strawberry Hill London, where in 1928
636
Ibid., 182-183.
John W. Foster, „McLaverty‟s People,‟ Eire-Ireland IV (1971) pp. 92-105.
638
E. Estyn Evans The Personality of Ireland (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1992) p.8.
639
Pat Sheeran, The Road, The House, and the Grave, 761.
640
Sophia Hillan King, The Silken Twine: A Study of the Works of Michael McLaverty (Dublin: Poolbeg,
1992) p. 5.
637
110
he received a higher diploma in education, before commencing a teaching career at St. John‟s
Primary School in 1929.
McLaverty began writing fiction during the early 1930s and published short stories in
Ireland Today, the Irish Monthly, the Catholic World and the Capuchin Annual. Many of these
early stories were set in the hinterlands of Rathlin Island and captured a sense of place, that
possessed the intuitive and ambient tone of poetry, reinforced with a pedantic attention to detail.
His stories caught the attention of the American literary anthologist E. J. O‟Brien, who encouraged
McLaverty to commence his first novel: „He told me I should try to write. I thought of my pigeon
house and the places around. I was really willing and felt power stirring in me. I thought not only of
my pigeon shed but also of Rathlin Island where we went for our holidays of years.‟641 Call My
Brother Back was published in 1939. The first part of the book was set on Rathlin and expanded
upon themes contained in the minute sketches of his short stories about the island, its people and its
landscapes. The geographical reading of McLaverty‟s work will be based upon a composite
representation of the island gathered from both his short stories and his first novel.
4.7 Rathlin Island
4.7.1. Short Stories (1933-1939)
In a 1933 story The Letter, McLaverty examined the theme of emigration and the effects
that it had on remaining family members on the island. The piece is set during the bleak and
desolate months of winter and concerns the contents of a post from America. A letter arrives
containing news of the death of a daughter who had emigrated. In the story the daughter‟s mother is
both isolated by her illiteracy. As she can‟t read, her youngest son must perform this task for her.
As he reads the letter, the son discovers the heartbreaking truth about his sister, as he is conveying
the news of her death to his elderly mother. McLaverty‟s representation of the atmospheric
conditions on Rathlin mirrors the forlorn poverty of landscape, mind and soul which drives the cold
tides of emigration:
Winter had come to Roecarra. A December wind blew over the naked-grey
land, whistling sharply through the unmortared stone hedges and making the
donkeys shiver in their beds of sapless bracken. The morning sky was ice-blue
streaked with white skeletons of clouds.642
In The Stone published in 1939, the bitter cold fury of winter continues to lash the remote island
home of Old James Heaney, a lonely bachelor. His only companion is a Collie dog: „Jamesy lived
alone and made his own meals. He was the last of the Heaneys left on the island. Sitting now with
the mug between his bony hands, his grey beard on his chest and long hair fringing his coat collar,
he looked like an ancient prophet. The dog nuzzled under his arm and awakened him from a dream,
641
642
Ibid, 77.
Ibid., 43.
111
whereupon he threw the dregs of tea at the back of the fire and lifted his can and stick.‟643 The
desolate nature of his existence is captured in a depiction of a denuded landscape: „ a wild draughty
place . . . far from the villagers,‟644 upon which his isolated cottage sits: „Near it was an ash tree
trodden bare around the trunk where the hens and goat lay of a hot summer day under the quivering
shade from its little leaves. Now it was deserted, a red flannel rag caught on the black twigs, making
a leafy sound as the wind strummed the branches.‟645
Jamesy‟s preoccupation however, is not with living, but dying. He has just bought a burial
plot on graveyard hill from the parish priest Father Brady. He believes the McBride monument
which he has chosen to be carved for his headstone will bestow upon him immortality: „It would be
his stone that the people‘d talk about when he‘d be gone; and visitors to the island would look at it
and read the name, JAMES HEANEY; a great man they‘d whisper [. . . ] his name was going to live;
it would live forever in solid stone. ―Stone is the only lasting thing in life,‖ he breathed aloud. ―It
bates all‖.‟646 But due to his isolation, Jamesy is taken with a certain degree of paranoia and feels
that the other islanders secretly mock his quest for eternal life; as a result he puts faith in the power
of stone, rather that in the human spirit: „He held his breath, as if to calm his mind, to allow it to
gather the sweet breeze of thought and unfold its joys to him. Stone is lasting: all life ends in death
but stone lives on. It was more lasting than all their children. They needn‘t chaff him any more
about his name dying with neither chick nor child to lave behind him! They needn‘t mock him any
longer! There they were as usual the three of them -Joseph McDonnell, John Joe McQuilkin, and
Johnny John Beg. He‘d have it out with them this evening.‟647 At the appointed time he lashes out at
his neighbours, berating them by reciting Rathlin‟s bloody history which he reads from the
manuscript of its stony landscape:
Like someone performing an ancient rite he slowly raised his stick; it trembled
for a moment on the graveyard, and then slowly turned to Croc-na-Screilean a
small hill gathering a skirt of darkness from the falling night.
„D‟ye see Croc-na-Screilean,‟ he said, his voice quavering.
„Is there any change in it since we were childer? It hasn‟t changed, man no
more than the colour of the sea . . . why?
. . . Because it‟s stone. Stone, the only lasting thing on this earth!‟ [. . . ]
„A hill is only a hill if it has no memories; it has no life!‟
And then in excitement he raised his voice: „I declare to God when I look at
Croc-na-Screilean „tisn‟t a hill I see at all, but our people –the McDonnells, the
McCurdy‟s, the McQuilkins, and the rest –fightin‟ the invaders in the hollow,
Michael McLaverty, „Stone,‟ in Collected Short Stories: Michael McLaverty , (ed.) Sophia Hillan
(Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2002) pp. 33-34.
644
Sophia Hillan King, „The Note of Exile: Michael McLaverty‟s Rathlin Island‟ in (eds.) Gerald Dawe and
John W. Foster, The Poet‘s Place: Ulster Literature and Society, Essays in Honour of John Hewitt, 19071987 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991) p. 185.
645
McLaverty, Stone, 33.
646
Ibid., 36.
647
King, 185-186.
643
112
and our women and children screamin‟ and shoutin‟ at them from the hill. „Tis
what the hill means to me.‟648
Croc-na-Screilean, Anglicized as the „Hill of the Screaming,‟ provides Jamesy with a umbilicus in
his imagination to connect memory, place and identity. It forms a commemorative monument out of
the natural landscape for a bloody massacre which took place in 1642. However a tremendous
storm sweeps over the island‟s landscape leaving it „clear and cold, filled with the noise of the sea.
The land was scoured clean.‟649 Jamesy secure in his faith, is horrified by the site that greets him
when he visits the graveyard to find that the McBride stone is gone replaced by „a great vacancy of
sky.‟650 The story reflected McLaverty‟s concern for the plight of the elderly on the island and their
fierce attachment to its landscape.
In contrast, the tenuous attachment to place of young islanders was a concern of
McLaverty‟s as well, and formed the theme for his 1937 piece Leavetaking. In the story, a young
boy who is about to emigrate to Belfast to attend boarding school visits his elderly aunt and uncle.
A model ship sitting in a glass bottle fascinates the boy, as he listens to his uncle ruefully comment
on the emigration that is draining Rathlin of its lifeblood:„ “It‘s sad to see so many young people
leavin‘ the island and none comin‘ back. There‘ll soon be nothin‘ on the island only rabbits –with
nobody marryin‘, the oul dyin‘, and the young goin‘ away‖ .‟
651
The boy however, is filled with
expectation and excitement as he anticipates life in the city, and wonders if any there is any remnant
of island life that he will be able to remember:
The road climbed gradually out of the village, up into the hills, where the air
was clear and cool. Here he could see Fair Head and dark Knocklayde bulging
strangely near. Away beyond that lovely mountain he would soon be going to
Belfast, and as he looked at its cold, sodden folds, he wondered if he would be
able to see it from the town.652
The mountain links the boy‟s past and future together, as he begins his emigration from the
landscapes of an island to the streetscapes of a city. Themes of isolation, emigration and place
attachment, tied to rural island life, were re-imagined for the longer prose treatment of McLaverty‟s
first novel. The small but poignant sketches found in the construction of his early stories blossoned
into a panoramic and epic view of the saga of the landscapes and people of Rathlin Island.
4.7.2. Call My Brother Back (1939)
McLaverty‟s portrayal of the lifeworlds of the MacNeill family on Rathlin Island is
constructed from stark and imagistic prose and conveys a powerful depiction of a rural people and
648
McLaverty, Stone, 38-39.
Ibid., 41.
650
Ibid.
651
King, Silken Twine, 65.
652
Ibid.
649
113
their attachment, struggle and surrender to the wildness and remoteness of place. The family live
together in a small stone house, and is composed of young siblings Colm, Jamesy and Clare and
their parents Daniel and Mary. Two older siblings Alec and Theresa, have emigrated to Belfast, and
the extended family includes an elderly neighbour Paddy John Beg, who lives across the road, and
their Uncle Robert and Aunt Maggie. As the novel opens McLaverty symbolizes the omnipotence
that sea, sky and landscape have over the lives of the Rathlin islanders:
A dark cloud with tattered edges came drifting over the shoulder of the island
scattering grains of rain upon the rocky land. From the slope of a hill a small
boy watched the cloud approach. Nearer it came, the wind hurrying it along.
The boy ran to the lee of the hill and snuggled into a cleft of rock.653
Embraced within this cleft of rock, we first glimpse the novel‟s central character, thirteen-year-old
Colm MacNeill. In the novel we follow Colm‟s journey as he and his family emigrate from their
stone cottage on the island to the red-brick row houses of west Belfast. McLaverty‟s depiction of
Colm and his bond with the natural features and conditions of the island conveys the affective
dimensions of life in a rural landscape: „The cloud was now drifting towards the Mull of Kintyre; to
the right an arc of rainbow hugged the land, its curve increasing as the rain thinned. The evening
sun shook itself free from its cage of clouds and a whin-gold light winged slowly across the fields.
Suddenly the colours of the rainbow flamed and burst in liquid brilliance; and looking at it the boy‘s
heart ached with a sweet, yearning sadness.‟654 The McNeill‟s subsist on farming, kelp harvesting
and fishing. They are able to occasionally sell goods salvaged from ships wrecked on the island‟s
rocky shores. The community lives a heartbeat away from emigration, and its legacy haunts the
deserted landscapes of the island: „ ―Emigration was the cause of that!‖ put in Paddy John Beg.
―Look at the many ould wrecks of houses there are strewn about the place. Nobody spins now and
Johnny McQuaid had to make hen-roosts out of his loom. It bates all the land could rear three
families in them days where it now can hardly rear one‖.‟655
Father Byrne, encourages the MacNeill‟s to send Colm to school in Belfast. The curate feels
that the boy‟s academic talents will carry him farther than the schoolhouse on Rathlin will. Colm is
curious about life outside the island and glimpses a peek of urban landmarks on a strange postcard
sent to him by his older brother Alec: „Once Alec had sent him a post card with a bulging threelegged pot on it, and when you lifted the pot there were twelve little photographs of Belfast folded
together like a melodeon: there was the shipyard with its gantries: One with Donegall Place with its
653
Michael McLaverty, Call my brother back (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2003 [1939]) p. 1.
Ibid., 2.
655
Ibid., 10.
654
114
trams: One of the City Hall with its dome and turrets: and some of Colleges and Castles. Try as he
could Colm failed to bring them to life.‟656
Conversely, the landscape on Rathlin is alive to the boy. As he makes his way home from his
Uncle Robert‟s after a storm has passed, the island is conjured to life: „as the thickening darkness
hardened the hills and brightened the speckled stars, he became afraid. Rocks and bushes took
queer shapes while in front lights glimmered in the scattered homes and the lighthouse revolved
spokes of light in the darkness. He whistled as he passed an empty house, and when rabbits thudded
out of danger his heart thumped wildly. Passing by Cnoc-na-Screilan (the hill of the screaming) he
blessed himself and ran the rest of the way home.‟657
The death of Daniel hastens the family towards emigration. Sailing back from buying
provisions on the mainland in a open boat through stormy seas, he catches pneumonia. Alec and
Theresa are summoned from Belfast, and arrive at Daniel‟s death bed just before he passes on.
McLaverty‟s description of seasonal changes that follow the father‟s death, traces the harsh cycle of
life that marks existence for the islanders: „The corn and barley ripened early; the beans and hay
were safely stored; and then blighting mists and black frosts swirled over the land. Daniel‘s grave
had lost its freshness and nothing remained on the mound except a circular rusted wire that once
held a wreath of flowers.‟658
After Daniel‟s death come the long months of winter, when days on the island stretch out
like the blade of a long knife: „Winter came. Winds and rain burst upon the island and the cattle
were driven into the shelter of the byres. Waves pounded the shoulders of rock and littered the shore
with sea-rods and gleaming wrack. At night Paddy John Beg came over to the MacNeill cottage for
a ceilidh. Theresa had gone back to her job in Belfast, but Alec remained at the fishing and the farm.
There were dances and cards in the school-house, but Daniel was not long enough in his grave for
the MacNeills to be seen sporting themselves.‟659 The listlesness of life causes Alec, who has lived
in the hustle and bustle of Belfast to decry life on Rathlin:
„We‟d all be better in the town,‟ he‟d say. „Sure there‟s nothin‟ here for
anyone, workin‟ like slaves at the kelp and getting‟ damn all for it in the end.
And look at the land, the spongy look of it would give you cramps in your
belly.‟ And then he‟d talk to them about Ireland and how the people long ago
were robbed of their lands; or standing on a hill he‟d turn towards the
mainland and tell how the good land was in the hands of the planters and the
old Irish scattered like sheep among the mountains and the rocks.660
656
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 31.
658
Ibid., 45.
659
Ibid.
660
Ibid., 46.
657
115
Alec‟s return has brought the complexity of the outer world to the shores of Rathlin. McLaverty
contrasts the distinctiveness of the islanders, which is rooted in the windswept landscape of the
island, with the sectarian political conflict that lies beyond the horizon of its lifeworld. Alec‟s
return to the island has inflicted him with an identity crisis: „When a newspaper was sent to him
he‘d read about the Home Rulers, Sinn Feiners, and election fights in Belfast and other parts of the
country. ―Good God, to think of it‖ he said. ―Here we are on the farl of a rock doing nothing for
our country except whining and whinging. There‘s nothing to fight here. We must be a gutless clutch
of orderly people when we haven‘t even a peeler to look after us. Times I wonder whether we‘re
Irish at all sitting here between Ireland and Scotland; nobody‘s darling and nobody wantin‘ us‖.‟661
The introspective tedium of winter life is soon interrupted by a savage storm which wrecks a cargo
ship on the treacherous shores of the island. Alec and the family, along with the rest of Rathlin‟s
community take part in salvaging the „heavily insured‘662 ship, after determining that the crew has
successfully abandoned it: „Alec was the first to clamber on board and he dangled a rope over the
side and staked his claim. Colm and Jamesy held the row boat out from the ship‘s side. Men were
climbing on to her from all sides and soon there was nothing but hammering and tramping. Alec
screwed off two heavy brass clocks and Paddy appeared with a table on his head and threw it into
the sea where it floated with its legs up.‟663
The wreck of the ship is a bleak metaphor that forecasts a bleak future for the island‟s
dwindling community: „The sea was littered with paper and empty boxes. They waved and called
gleefully to boys in other boats. One boy held up a melodeon and started to play; and when Jamesy
reached the vessel he kept shouting to Alec to get him a melodeon. But Alec paid no heed to him. he
had bags and boxes bulging over the lip of the steamer. Two men began to fight, but no one went
near them. All day long the islanders worked the ship.‟ 664 Their existence is marked by cruel chance
and they must become scavengers in order to survive the harsh and deprived conditions of the
environment: „Doors and planks smacked into the sea, and some men put marks of tar on them so
they could claim them when they‘d be washed ashore. Buckets of coal were lowered at last, and by
nightfall the ship was as draughty as an old disused cow shed.‟665
4.7.3. Summary
The salvage is the last significant event in Colm‟s young life before he is sent to school in
Belfast. His journey away from Rathlin can be read as a social metaphor representing the rural
emigration of the 1930s, as town and cities across Ireland filled up with economic refugees from
661
Ibid.
Ibid., 49.
663
Ibid., 50-51.
664
Ibid., 50-51.
665
Ibid., 50-51.
662
116
places like Rathlin Island. A the older fishing, gathering and agrarian way of life on the island
described in McLaverty‟s short stories of the 1930s, is staring into extinction.
emigrating
islanders like Colm in Call My Brother Back, are cast as strangers into a foreign, urban landscape:
„It seemed like a long time since the wintry day he left the island: the row at Ballycastle station
because his mother couldn‘t get him a half-ticket: seeing the snow on Knocklayde from the train,
frozen fields with ragged bushes and no cattle, black streams with snow on the stones that stuck up
through them; villages hushed and cart wheel marks on the roads; thatched houses stiff in the
ground and hayricks huddled in the haggards and dusted with snow; and then as the train raced
along by the edge of the thin sea into Belfast, seeing at one side trams with tin advertisements, and
boys sliding on a pond whose top was littered with stones.‟666
After a few months we find that Colm has adjusted to life at school in Belfast. But he still
possesses a yearning for his home in a stone cottage on Rathlin. One afternoon in study hall he
takes a pebble given to him by his brother, and elicits a memory of the island from the patterns,
colours and grain of its surface: „He put his hand in his pocket for a pencil and his fingers touched a
green marble pebble [. . . ] He took it out and looked at it in the palm of his hand. It was polished
from rubbing against the things in his pocket; he turned it over admiring its tiny vein of white and its
freckles of brown; and as he looked at it a shore took shape in his mind: grey stones in curve, and
down by the edge of the tide the pebbles rattling as the waves came slashing in, farther back dry
sticks eaten by sea lice, a frayed piece of rope, whitened limpet shells that crackled under the feet,
and a bicycle tyre with rusted rims.‟667 The contours of Rathlin‟s terrain and its people are
transformed by McLaverty‟s short story prose of the 1930s and in the first part his 1939 novel Call
My Brother Back, into an island of the past, whose rocky landscape has been captured in a pebble
scavenged from the empty pocket of memory.
4.8 Michael McLaverty’s Exiled Landscapes
Rathlin Island can be viewed as a chronotopic metaphor for the general condition of
impoverished communities in rural Ireland during the 1930s. Despite not being indigenous to
Rathlin or its people, McLaverty appreciated the island‟s natural beauty. As a seasonal visitor he
came to possess much empathy with the remaining members of its remote community. As the tides
of emigration and poverty washed over the contours of the island during the 1930s, McLaverty‟s
prose served to preserve a dwindling way of life, and his perspective was important because a
„visitor is often able to perceive the merits and defects in an environment that are no longer visible
to the resident.‟668 McLaverty, a resident of Belfast recalled in a letter: „I‘m not a native of Rathlin
though I know it and its people very well. I spent two months on it every summer for about twelve
666
667
Ibid., 56-57.
Ibid., 57.
117
succeeding years. It made a great impression on me when I was young and later when I was writing
about it, scenes and incidents came to my mind with great vividity. It was part of me and still is: in
my mind I often travel the roads, the paths through the hills, and the paths along the edges of the
lake
[. . .] The island is a beautiful one but, sad to say, the young are leaving it and the old are
heading for the graveyard.‟669
4.9 Conclusion: Elysium & Exile.
The rural landscapes represented in the works of Reid and McLaverty contrast significantly.
Reid transposed a fictional tapestry conjured from the inner mind of his imagination, rich with
mythological, neo-classic and pagan metaphors upon a faithful topographical mapping of the Ulster
countryside. In his fiction there is an intersection between a subliminated homoerotic dreamscape
based upon an „amalgam of Ireland and Ancient Greece.‟670 Despite the fantastical narratives and
the placid landscape panoramas depicted within his prose, there is an solid element of historical
awareness and accordingly, his landscapes can be read as palimpsests, and repositories of relics,
artefacts and historical and cultural memory. It is interesting to note that the presence of graveyards
and gardens, like the spatial leitmotif of the house, act as chronotopic spaces in Reid‟s prose,
signifying generational cycles of death and re-birth. Also present in his prose are the presence of
manor house, ruined abbeys, castles and villages.
These structures pre-date the Ulster plantation and intrude upon Reid‟s neo-classical and
pagan renderings of the lifeworlds of „beautiful boys in beautiful landscapes.‟ Taken together these
three elements within Reid‟s fiction, read within the context of his observation in Uncle Stephen
that buried under the soil of Ulster lie „horrors that were already out of sight,‟671 illuminates the
idea that: „In geological terms, the Irish cultural landscape displayed igneous or metamorphic, not
sedimentary, historical layering. Rather than each historical layering being laid down uniformly
over its predecessors, smoothly and quietly building up, and with each earlier layer completely
buried under its successor, the cultural topography was unconformable, with layers abruptly
impinging on each other [. . . ] In a country like Ireland with a troubled history, the seemingly quiet
surface was a troubled crust, which offered only a temporary stay against the flows of unfinished
history seething beneath it.‟672 The sublimination of Reid‟s sexuality and the legacy of Ulster‟s
contested history seep into his narratives and their settings. His themes may consider pagan
homoerotic paeans to lost boyhood, but in Reid‟s fiction there is a subtle tension between the
668
Tuan, Topophilia, 65.
King, Note of Exile,. 183.
670
Brian Taylor „Some Themes in the Novels of Forrest Reid,‟ in (eds.) Paul Goldman and Brian Taylor,
Retrospective Adventures: Forrest Reid: Author and Collector (Hampshire: Scolar Press, 1998) p. 2.
671
Reid, Uncle Stephen, 6.
672
Whelan, Reading the Ruins, 299.
669
118
province‟s historical past and the fantastical perception of the place and time that his characters
inhabit.
In contrast, McLaverty‟s representation of Rathlin Island is concerned with the human
dimensions of a specific social-ecological niche that he experienced as a visitor. The sketches of
island life that emerged in McLaverty‟s short stories of the 1930s perhaps became linked
subconsciously his daily life in Belfast. In this sense, the chronotopic feature of
Rathlin‟s
geographies may have provided an archetypical symbol through which he could focus the
imagination of his mind‟s eye:
„The island seems to have a tenacious hold on the human
imagination. Unlike the tropical forest or the continental seashore it cannot claim ecological
abundance, nor -as an environment -has it mattered greatly in man‘s evolutionary past. Its
importance lies in the imaginative realm. Many of the world‘s cosmogonies, we have seen, begin
with watery chaos: land, when it appears is necessarily an island.‟673
Rathlin provided McLaverty with a symbol to articulate experiences occurring within his
lifeworld: „His first novel which contrasts the lyrical life of Rathlin with that of the anti-Catholic,
anti-Nationalist life prevailing in Belfast came to him on a visit to Rathlin, and in an old house
overlooking a lake he discovered a faded newspaper containing an account of the 1935 Belfast
pogrom. As he read it, all the twisted life of that city, which he had experienced as a boy, suddenly
surged with compulsive force into his mind, and seeing a few swans in the lake below him he
thought of Yeats‘ beautiful poem, ―The Wild Swans of Coole.‖ The recollection of this poem reilluminated for him the tranquillity of the island life compared with the pitiable waste of blood that
was spilt in the poorer quarters of Belfast. He appended Yeats‘ line, ―They paddle in the cold
companionable streams,‖ to convey the atmosphere of the Island section in his book.‟674
In conclusion, both Reid‟s and McLaverty‟s rural landscapes are perceived in their prose
largely by boys on the cusp of adolescence. Reid‟s pre-pubescent male character Tom seems
developmentally arrested on the borderlands of boyhood and adolescence, trapped in an Elysium of
the mind. In the case of McLaverty‟s main character Colm, we see a boy exiled from the
islandscape of his child hood, due to socio-ecological conditions beyond his control. Although
from different religious and socio-economic backgrounds, both Reid and McLaverty inhabited the
common ground of literature in a Belfast torn by sectarian strife, industrial malaise and economic
hardship.
The urban framings of the rural landscape in Reid‟s and McLaverty‟s prose can be
understood in the context of a well established Western literary tradition in which the affective
673
Tuan, Topophilia, 118.
The Rev. Matthew Hoehn OSB, Catholic Authors; Contemporary Biographical Sketches (First Series),
1930-47, (Newark, 1947) p. 473.
674
119
dimensions of
urban depression have a significant effect upon a writer‟s perception and
representation of the countryside: „In Europe preference for the countryside as against the city
found eloquent literary expression in three periods:
[. . . ] Athenians, for instance, felt nostalgia
for the simple rural life when they were cut of from their farms during the protracted
Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.)
[. . . ] It took the rise of great cities in the Alexandrian Age
to produce a strong reaction against urban sophistication and a longing for rusticity [. . . ] The
Virgilian Arcadia was threatened by the shadow of imperial Rome on the one side and by the
inhospitable marshes and bare rocks on the other. Horace found solace and inspiration from his
farm which lay outside of Rome
[. . . ] In the course of the eighteenth century the European
cognoscenti deified nature. To philosophers and poets in particular, nature came to stand for
wisdom, spiritual comfort, and holiness; from it people were supposed to derive religious
enthusiasm, moral goodness and a mystical understanding of man and God.‟675 Both the Elysian
and exiled perspectives offered in Reid‟s and McLaverty‟s representations of the Ulster countryside
provide literary depictions of a landscape in which the contested histories and cultures of a largely
rural northern province during the 1930s can be found located as firmly in their respective
imaginations, as it was in the paved urbane bourgeois environment resting under their feet.
675
Tuan, Topophilia, 106-107.
120
Part Two:
House Islands and the Provincial Town
121
122
5.
House-Islands
Elizabeth Bowen & Molly Keane
Irish history is a constellation of anecdotes glittering on a profound and
untracked gloom.
Elizabeth Bowen (1936)
Nor do houses ever forget. What are ghosts but the remembrances they
shelter?
Molly Keane/ M. J. Farrell (1931)
5.1. Introduction
In their respective „Big House‟ novels, The Last September (1929) and Mad Puppetstown
(1931), Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane, writing as daughters of the landed Anglo-Irish in the
late 1920s and early 1930s, depict the disintegrating lifeworlds of their minority culture during the
years of the Irish War of Independence (1916-1922). Both novels represent in distinct ways „the
hermetic solitude and the autocracy of the great country house, the demonic power of the family
myth, fatalism, feudalism and the ―ascendancy‖ outlook,‟676 at a time in which the „Protestant
experience during the Irish revolution ranged from massacre and flight to occasional inconvenience
and indifference, from outraged opposition to enthusiastic engagement.‟677
The novels of Bowen
and Keane provide insights into the hegemonic lifeworld of a rural culture that had remained
largely hidden within the cloistered „house-islands,‟ of their big house estates: „For over two
centuries this culture had largely presided over a feudal-like agrarian system which towards the end
of the nineteenth century was heavily under capitalized and bedevilled by such phenomena as
middle-men, subletting, absenteeism, and evictions, it was one of the most backward economies in
Europe and remained so well into the twentieth century.‟678
Puppetstown can also be read as
specific,‟
679
„psycho-biographies that
The Last September and Mad
are very situation [and] culture
which occupy the chronotopic space of the Anglo-Irish „house-island‟ where „ghosts
relieve their anguish in the ruined houses of the Ascendancy.‟680 Bowen‟s personal perspective on
these chronotopic spaces, emphasised their secluded nature: „each of these houses, with its intense,
Elizabeth Bowen, „Uncle Silas‟ [1946] in Collected Impressions (London/Toronto: Longmans, 1950) p. 4
Peter Hart „The Protestant Experience of Revolution in Southern Ireland,‟ in (eds.) R. English and G.
Walker, Unionism in Modern Ireland: New Perspectives on Culture and Politics (Basingstoke: MacMillan,
1996) p. 81.
678
Otto Rauchbauer, „The Big House and Irish History: An Introduction‟ in Ancestral Voices: The Big
House in Anglo-Irish Literature- A Collection of Interpretations (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1992) p.5.
679
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic : Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, (ed) Sarah
Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990) p.9.
676
677
123
centripetal life, is isolated by something very much more lasting than the physical fact of space: the
isolation is innate; it is an affair of origin. 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 single,
independent and secretive. Life in these house-islands has a frame of its own.‟681 This chapter will
examine the various representations of space and time attached to depictions of these Anglo-Irish
„house-islands‟ that are found respectively in the novels of Bowen and Keane.
5.2. Elizabeth Bowen: Inside and Outside the House- Island
5.2.1. Introduction
The depictions of place within and without the chronotopic space of the „house island,‟ in
The Last September, can be viewed as a series of frames through which Bowen represents the
various emotions of the landed Anglo-Irish during the Irish War of Independence. Bowen‟s
rendering of the insular lifeworld of the landed Protestant gentry in her fictional estate of
Danielstown, reflects to a certain extent her own experiences at Bowen‟s Court, her family‟s
property in County Cork during the war years of 1919-1921. She wrote The Last September, whilst
living in Oxford England, and recalled through the prism of personal memory: „By now (the year
of the writing: 1928) peace had settled on Ireland; trees were already branching inside the shells of
large burned-out houses; lawns, once flitted over with pleasures, usefully merged into grazing land.
I myself was no longer a tennis girl but a writer; aimlessness was gone, like a morning mist. Not an
hour had not a meaning, and a centre. Also changes had altered my sense of space –Ireland seemed
immensely distant from Oxford, more like another world than another land. Here I was living a life
dreamed of when, like Lois, I drove the pony trap along endless lanes.‘
682
From the preceding
quotation, one can surmise that the depiction of identity and place in The Last September was
inextricably linked in Bowen‟s memory with her own affective experience of life in her family‟s
„house-island,‟ during the war years of the early twentieth century. A brief examination of Bowen‟s
lifepath will precede a further discussion of the emotional and psychological geographies, as well as
the underlying landscape of fear, represented inside and outside the chronotopic space of the
„house-island,‟ in her novel.
5.2.2. Lifepath
Elizabeth Dorothea Cole Bowen, was born the only child of Henry Charles Cole Bowen, of
Cork and Florence Isabella Pomeroy Colley, in Herbert Park Dublin on 7 June 1899. As a young
girl, Bowen developed a stammer which would afflict her through adulthood, and possessed a very
680
Pat Sheeran, The Road, The House, and the Grave, 758.
Elizabeth Bowen, Bowen‘s Court & Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood (London: Virago,
1984 [1942] ) p. 20.
682
Elizabeth Bowen, Afterthought: Pieces About Writing (London: Longmans, 1962) p. 97.
681
124
close relationship with her mother, who prevented little „Bitha‟ from reading until she was seven.
Around this time Bowen also grew aware of certain social distinctions governed by her family‟s
religious position in Ireland: „It was not until after the end of those seven winters that I understood
that we Protestants were a minority, and that the unquestioned rules of our being came, in fact,
from the closeness of a minority world [. . . ] I took the existence of Roman Catholics for granted
but met few and was not interested in them. They were simply ―the others,‖ whose world lay
alongside ours but never touched. As to the difference between the two religions, I was too discreet
to ask questions –if I wanted to know. This appeared to share a delicate, awkward aura with those
two other differences –of sex, of class. So quickly in a child‘s mind, does prudery seed itself and
make growth that I remember, even, an almost sexual shyness on the subjects of Roman Catholics. I
walked with hurried step and averted cheek past porticos of churches that were ―not ours,‖
uncomfortably registering in my nostrils the pungent, unlikely smell that came round curtains,
through swinging doors.‟683
Bowen‟s early sense of difference, was compounded after she suffered the trauma of losing
her mother to cancer, and watching her father succumb to a type of mental illness, diagnosed as
„anaemia of the brain.‟ In 1912, she was sent to school at Harpenden Hall, in Hertfordshire
England, and for the rest of her childhood and adolescence, she lived between England and
Bowen‟s Court, her father‟s estate, in County Cork. As a result of this,
Bowen faced the
predicament of being identified as „Irish in England and English in Ireland.‟684 She reflected later
that the experience of living in between two cultures prompted in her a desire to write: „possibly it
was England made me a novelist. At an early though conscious age, I was transplanted. I arrived
young, into a different mythology –in fact, into one totally alien to that of my forefathers, none of
whom had resided anywhere but in Ireland for some centuries, and some of whom may never have
been in England at all: the Bowens were Welsh. From now on there was to be (as for any
immigrant) a cleft between my heredity and my environment –the former remaining in my case the
more powerful.‟685
In August 1914, Bowen was ensconced at her father‟s estate enjoying tennis parties and
dances, when the eruption of the First World War signalled the death knell for the remaining
vestiges of landed Ascendancy culture in southern Ireland.
She recalled that returning that
autumn to boarding school at Downe House in England, young women of Anglo-Irish pedigree
were constantly reminded of the „―the intolerable obligation of being fought for, and could not fall
Bowen, Bowen‘s Court & Seven Winters, 508.
H.B. Jordan, How will the Heart Endure (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992) pp. xii-xiii.
685
Elizabeth Bowen, Pictures and Conversations (London: Allen Lane, 1975) pp. 23-24.
683
684
125
short in character‖ without remembering that men were dying for them.‟686
She left Bowen‟s
Court in 1918, to serve as an attendant at a hospital for shell-shocked veterans, and to attend Art
School. By 1921, Bowen had begun to write her first novel Hotel, and was briefly engaged to
Lieutenant John Anderson, a British Officer. In 1923 she published a collection of short stories
entitled Encounters, and married Alan Cameron, a war veteran badly gassed during military
service, who was appointed Secretary for Education for the City of Oxford in 1925. It was in
Oxford that Bowen created the fictional „house-island‟ of Danielstown, and The Last September
was subsequently published in 1929. A year later in 1930, after the death of her father, she
inherited Bowen‟s Court. Though married to Cameron she embarked on several affairs with figures
including Sean O‟Faoláin, May Sarton and Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat, who became her
life-long friend. In 1940 Bowen was commissioned by the British Ministry of Information to write
confidential reports on Éire, detailing various aspects of Irish neutrality. In 1965, she purchased a
home in Kent, at the summit of Hythe, and named it Carbery after her mother‟s ancestral home in
Ireland. In addition to publishing works of fiction she wrote two autobiographical works, Bowen‘s
Court in 1942, and Seven Winters in 1943, and worked as a journalist before her death of lung
cancer in 1973. She was buried in Farahy churchyard in Cork. Though her family‟s house survived
the conflagration of war that consumed over two hundred Protestant estates during the Troubles, it
was sold in 1959 and demolished; its grounds cleared for tillage. Consequently the estate that
haunted Bowen‟s imagination, exists today only in the pages of her prose.
5.3 The Last September (1929)
5.3.1. Introduction
The Last September concerns the lifeworld of a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, living within a
landed estate named Danielstown, located outside the British garrison town of Clonmore in Cork,
during the Irish War of Independence. Commencing in the summer of 1920, the novel depicts the
experiences of Sir Richard and Lady Naylor and their orphaned niece Laura Farquar, who
becomes engaged to a British officer stationed at the garrison. The Naylor‟s son Laurence is home
from Oxford for the holidays, and the family hosts various guests, including a married couple, Mr.
and Mrs. Montmorency and a woman named Marda Norton. Because of class and cultural
prejudice, Lady Naylor is not comfortable, or happy with Lois‟ engagement. She eventually
persuades the young working class British officer named Gerald Lesworth, that it is his duty to end
his romantic relationship with Lois. Gerald, after being rebuffed by the class and culture whose
property interests he is defending, is soon killed in an IRA ambush. His death at the close of the
686
Maude Ellman, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2003) p. 29.
126
summer foreshadows the coming destruction of the Naylor‟s „house-island,‟ by Irish guerrillas at
the novel‟s end.
In The Last September Bowen draws from her own experience of place attached to the
chronotopic space of the Anglo-Irish „house-island,‟ during the war years, as means to reflect the
emotional and psychological dimensions its culture‟s experience of isolation, alienation and fear,
during a period in which over two hundred estates were abandoned by their owners after being
burned by Irish republican guerrillas. Bowen stressed the importance of the chronotopic in her
writing: „I am, and am bound to be, a writer involved closely with place and time; for me these are
more than elements, they are actors. ‟687 Writing about the relationship between memory and place,
Bowen noted that a „place or scene cannot
[. . . ] be walked past indifferently; it exerts a pull and
sets up a tremor; and it is to indent the memory for life.‟ 688 In addition, it has been observed that in
Bowen‟s writing „architecture takes the place of psychology: character is shaped by rooms,
corridors, doors and windows, arches and columns, rather than by individual experience.‟689 The
following sections will explore dominant emotional and psychological dimensions of mood and
place in The Last September represented in the spaces located inside and outside the „houseisland,‟ of Danielstown,
5.3.2. Inside the ‗House-Island‘
Bowen‟s representation of mood within the „house-island,‟ of Danielstown spans from
sunny happiness, to empty gloom and apathy, before the estate‟s fiery denouement by Republican
guerrillas at the novel‟s end. These various affective states can be seen to reflect the emotional and
psychological dimension of place experience encountered within the centripetal lifeworld of the
inhabitants of the Anglo-Irish „house-island‟ during the War of Independence. In her novel Bowen
illustrates:
„The house, even more that the landscape, is a ―psychic state,‖ and even when
reproduced as it appears from the outside, it be speaks intimacy.‟690 The first section of the novel
opens on the front steps of the estate with the arrival of Mr. and Mrs Montmorency, driving in an
automobile, under the trees of Danielstown‟s private avenue. Bowen writes that the arrival „was a
moment of happiness, of perfection.‟691 The arrival of guests is a moment that creates an emotional
landmark from which all subsequent events in The Last September will be measured in terms of
pathos, tragedy and ruin. In the first section of the novel, despite the presence of a guerrilla war
infesting the landscape outside the space of their demesne, the Naylors carry on their complacent
lifestyles inside the relatively peaceful environment of their „house-island.‟ They greet guests, host
687
Bowen, Afterthought, 96.
Bowen, Collected Impressions, 268.
689
Ellman, Shadows Across the Page, 42.
690
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 72.
691
The Last September, 7.
688
127
garden parties, ponder their futures and detachedly express a range of
opinions towards the
conflict, which they observe like a tennis match from within the walls of the estate. As running
battles between the British Army and Republican rebels flare up in the surrounding fields, woods
and roads, Bowen depicts the secluded and isolated nature of the „house-island,‟ of Danielstown:
Seen from above, the house in its pit of trees seemed a very reservoir of
obscurity; from the doors one must come out stained with it. And the kitchen
smoke, lying over the vague trees doubtfully, seemed the very fume of living.
692
Lois‟s fickle „psychic state,‟ is an emotional reflection of the house and she betrays an impatience at
the insularity of her domestic situation, which exhibits the detached experience of a singular AngloIrish lifeworld during this period: „How is it that in this country that ought to be full of such violent
realness, there seems nothing for me but clothes and what people say? I might as well be in some
cocoon.‟693 Despite professing a frustration at her inward-looking lifestyle, Lois finds security
within the space of the „house-island.‟ It provides comfort and identity during a time of seemingly
anarchic and revolutionary change. When queried by Marda Norton, another guest at Danielstown,
why she remains at the estate, despite complaining of its insularity, Lois replies: „I like to be in a
pattern.‘ She traced a pink frond with her finger. ‗I like to be related; to have to be what I am, just
to be is so intransitive, so lonely.‟694
The architectural facade of the estate‟s house in The Last September is also utilised by
Bowen to reflect the shifting emotions which characterise the brief and fleeting relationship between
Lois and the British officer, Gerald. The Naylor family and „house-island,‟ of Danielstown have
provided the young working class soldier with a place to emotionally anchor himself, while
conducting his military duty on their behalf: „he thought how nice they were. In his world affections
were rare and square –four square- occurring like houses in a landscape, unrelated and positive,
though with sometimes a large bright looming –as of the sunned west face of Danielstown over the
tennis courts.‟695 However, to convey the emerging futility of young couple‟s relationship, as well
as the tenuous of the British imperial project in southern Ireland, Bowen depicts Gerald arriving one
rainy afternoon to visit Lois. The estate‟s sunny and romantic ambience which had once inspired
and anchored him, has evaporated before his eyes, and he surveys a seemingly empty and deserted
house:
„The place was cold with her absence and seemed forgotten. The tennis part
became a dream –parasols with their coloured sunshine, rugs spread, shimmer
692
Ibid., 66-67.
Ibid., 49.
694
Ibid., 98-99.
695
Ibid., 40-41.
693
128
of midges, amiable competition of voices. Something had been wiped from
the place with implied finality‟ 696
After leaving Gerald to wait for a short while, Lois finally appears on the front steps. It appears that
the „house-island,‟ seems to have been deserted its by servants, due to the war. Lois tells Gerald: „it
is the emptiest house in Ireland- we have no family life, ‟697 In turn Lois‟s own unconscious feeling
about the inevitable outcome of her relationship with Gerald, mirrors the precariousness of the
Anglo-Irish position in southern Ireland. This emotion is projected by Bowen‟s prose upon the space
of a bedroom in Danielstown. Depicting a day dream that Lois experiences which also foreshadows
the coming destruction of the estate, Bowen writes: „Already the room seemed full of the dusk of
oblivion. And she hoped that instead of fading to dust in summers of empty sunshine, the carpet
would burn with the house in a scarlet night to make one flaming call upon [. . . ] memory.‟ 698
Bowen‟s projection of emotion in this passage can be understood in light of the phenomenological
observation that: „House and space are not merely two juxtaposed elements of space. In the reign of
the imagination, they awaken daydreams in each other, that are opposed.‟699
Lois‟s recognition of the Danielstown‟s imminent demise in her daydream has its genesis in
an incident she witnesses previously in the novel, and which has rooted itself in her consciousness.
Bowen uses the incident, coloured by rumours that IRA guns are secretly buried inside the estate‟s
demesne, to illustrate an observation made on the Anglo-Irish culture‟s ambivalent relationship to
place in southern Ireland, during and after the Irish War of Independence: „It has been said that
though they resided in Ireland, Ireland was their country; it never really became their nation
(original emphasis).‟700 While walking earlier in the grounds of the estate, Lois has spied an IRA
man „with the rise and fall of a stride, a resolute profile as powerful as a thought,‟701 crossing
through the woods. At the time she reflects: „It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry;
down from the mountains, making a short cut through their demesne.‟702 From a perspective
framed inside the „house-island,‟ Lois ponders the rebel‟s motivation: „Here was something else she
could not share. She could not conceive of her country emotionally: ‗It was a way of living, an
abstract of several landscapes, or an oblique frayed island, moored at the north but with an air of
being detached and washed out west from the British coast.‟703 The sight of such a figure jars Lois
from her complacency:
696
Ibid., 87.
Ibid., 88.
698
Ibid., 98.
699
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 43.
700
Brian Fitzgerald, The Anglo-Irish, (London: Staples Press, 1952) p. 12.
701
The Last September, 34.
702
Ibid.
703
Ibid.
697
129
His intentions burnt on the dark an almost visible trail; he might well have
been a murderer he seemed so inspired. The crowd of trees, straining from the
passive disputed earth, each sucking up and exhaling the country‟s essence –
swallowed him finally. She thought: „Has he come for the guns?‟ A man in a
trench-coat had passed without seeing her: that was what it amounted to.704
As she rushes back to the house to share her discovery, Lois realizes at the time, that the news of
the rebel will be greeted by members of the household with a sense of resigned apathy and
detachment: „At a touch from Aunt Myra adventure became literary, to Uncle Richard it suggested
an inconvenience; a glance from Mr Montmorency or Laurence would make her encounter sterile.
But what seemed most probable was that they would not listen.‟705 Behind these mental demesnes of
denial, silence and amnesia, members of Danielstown wait in silent anxiety for the inevitable
destruction of the estate. Bowen externalises this collective psychology in her depiction of this
„house-island,‟ sitting secluded within a landscape of growing fear:
the demesne trees of Danielstown made a dark formal square like a rug on
the green country. In their heart, like a dropped pin, the grey glazed roof
reflecting the sky lightly glinted. Looking down, it seemed to Lois they
lived in a forest; space of lawns blotted out in the pressure and dusk of
trees. She wondered they were not smothered; then wondered still more that
they were not afraid. Far from here too, their isolation became apparent.
The house seemed to be pressing down low in apprehension, hiding its face,
as though it had her vision of where it was. It seemed to gather its trees
close in fright and amazement at the wide, light lovely unloving country,
the unwilling bosom upon whereon it was set.706
5.3.3. Outside the ‗House-Island‘
In The Last September, there are various places located outside of the space of the „houseisland,‟ of Danielstown, that Bowen utilises to convey an atmosphere of isolation, ruin and fear in
her novel. One of these places contains the remains of a ruined mill, located in the Darra valley in
which the novel is set. Lois and two of the estate‟s visitors, Marda Norton and Mr. Montmorency,
decide to take a long walk one day, beyond the demesne of the „house-island,‟ and explore the
fields and woods of the valley:
From the slope‟s foot, where Danielstown trees began, the land stretched out
in a plain flat as water, basin of the Madder and Darra and their fine
wandering tributaries, till the far hills, faint and brittle, straining against the
inrush of vaster distance, cut the droop of sky like a glass blade. Fields gave
back light to the sky –the hedges netting them over thinly and penetrably –as
though the sheen of grass were a shadow on the water, a breath of colour
clouding the face of light. Rivers, profound in brightness, flowed over beds of
704
Ibid.
Ibid., 35.
706
Ibid., 66-67.
705
130
glass. The cabins lifting their pointed white ends, the pink and yellow farms
were but half opaque; cast doubtfully on their fields the shadow of living. 707
As they make their way into this
surrounding landscape, the setting takes on a sinister ambience
as the trio stumble upon a relic from the colonial past: „ ―Oh, what is that? The ghost of a Palace
Hotel?‖ The mill startled them all, staring, light-eyed, ghoulishly, round a bend of the valley.‟708
The following descriptions of the ruined structure of the mill, in Bowen‟s prose further illustrates
her use of architecture and place as vehicles to convey the emotional dimension of her fiction. After
gazing at the remains of the building for a moment Lois thinks to herself: „Those dead mills -the
country was full of them, never quite stripped and whitened to skeletons‘ decency: like corpses at
their most horrible,‟709 and she views the mill as gothic and fallen in nature: „like the House of
Usher‘s.‟710 Bowen‟s writing fleshes out the architectural detritus littering the scene, as the party
cautiously approaches the ruined mill: „The river darkened and thundered towards the mill-race,
light came full on the high facade of decay. Incredible in its loneliness, roofless, floorless, beams
criss-crossing dank interior daylight, the whole place tottered, fit to crash at a breath. Hinges rustily
bled where a door had been wrenched away; up six stories panes still tattered the daylight.‟711 Lois
and Marda enter the demolished structure, as Mr. Montmorency waits outside. The women come
upon a sleeping rebel, whom they accidentally awaken. The rebel warns them that it was time „that
yourselves gave up walking. If you have nothing better to do, you had better keep in the house while
you still have it.‟712
The tableaux of ruin depicted by Bowen in her prose, and the IRA man‟s
warning to the women, underscores the decline of the Ascendancy‟s economic and political power
in southern Ireland. The „dead mill,‟ in Bowen‟s novel symbolises the moral decay, that has been
eating at the heart of the centripetal culture of the landed Anglo-Irish for decades since the late
nineteenth century:
Banal in life to have closed this valley to the imagination, the dead mill now
entered the democracy of ghostliness, equalled broken palaces in futility and
sadness; was transfigured by some response of the spirit, showing not the
decline of its meanness, simply decline; took on all of the past to which it had
given nothing. 713
The local village of Clonmore is another place outside of the space of the „house-island,‟ that
Bowen depicts in The Last September. The village is home of the British Army garrison community,
where the 1st Rutlands, and the Field and Garrison Gunner Regiments barracks are based.
707
Ibid.
Ibid., 122.
709
Ibid., 123.
710
Ibid., 124.
711
Ibid.
712
Ibid., 125.
713
Ibid.
708
131
In
Clonmore, Lois and her friends covertly meet with soldiers from the garrison. These clandestine
gatherings are hosted in the home of a petit bourgeois Catholic woman: „Mrs. Fogarty had one of
the narrow houses looking out on the Square; her windows were screened from outside observation
by cubes of evergreen; between the pane and the evergreens rain fell darkly.‟
714
The house‟s
drawing room functions as both a place of secluded rendezvous and as a military shrine:
Mrs. Fogarty‟s drawing-room was thronged with photographs; all the dear
boys who for years back had been garrisoned at Clonmore, many of whom,
alas! Had been killed in the dreadful War. You could not stoop to put down a
cup on one of the little tables without a twinge of regret and embarrassment,
meeting the candid eyes of some dead young man. And there were cushions
with Union Jacks that she wouldn‟t she said, put away –not if They came at
night and stood in her room with pistols. And this was all the more noble in
Mrs. Fogarty in that she was a Catholic, with relations whose politics were not
above reproach at all.715
Bowen‟s depiction of the drawing room suggests the complex, but hidden web of relationships
which operated between the British Army and a few members of the landed Anglo-Irish and
Catholic populations, during the early decades of the twentieth century.
The other significant place in Clonmore that Bowen depicts in The Last September are the
British Army barracks. Bowen‟s representation of this space during a dance that the regiments are
holding one August evening, allows the reader to further explore the landscapes of fear experienced
by British soldiers in Ireland during the War of Independence. For one British officer in particular,
the ambience of the surrounding environment of Cork has become an object of disgust, and the party
provides a necessary diversion from his duties: „Daventry had been shell-shocked, he was now
beginning to hate Ireland, lyrically, explicitly; down to the very feel of the air and the smell of the
water. If it were not for dancing a good deal, whisky, bridge, ragging about in the huts, whisky
again, he did not know what would become of him, he would go over the edge, quite mad, he
supposed.‟716 In need of diversion from her „cocooned life‟ at Danielstown, Lois attends the dance
at the military barracks to escape the isolation of her „house-island.‟
In the company of Gerald and within the relative safety of the garrison, Bowen writes that
Lois „felt home again; safe from deserted rooms, the penetration of silences, rain, homelessness.‟717
Taking a walk outside of the barracks during a break in the dance, Lois and Gerald gaze out upon a
hostile landscape: „They had come to the end of the huts –at the foot of the steep slope a wall, the top
heavily wired. Under the wall a sentry in-humanly paced liked a pendulum. The country bore in it a
strong menace. Gerald looked out at it, his face blinking in and out of the dark, faintly red with the
714
Ibid., 71.
Ibid., 71-72.
716
Ibid., 144-145.
717
Ibid., 150.
715
132
pulse of his cigarette. She nursed her bare elbows, unconsciously shivering.‟718 Bowen‟s depiction
of the Anglo-Irish heiress and the working class British soldier in county Cork during the Irish War
of Independence, illuminates the observation that „many distinctive types of fearsome landscape
exist. The differences between them, however, tend to blur in the experience of the individual victim
because of a dire threat in whatever form normally produces two powerful sensations. One is the
fear of the imminent collapse of his world and the approach of death -that final surrender of
integrity to chaos. The other is a sense of personalized evil, the feeling that the hostile force,
whatever its specific manifestation, possesses will.‟719
Soon after the dance at the barracks, Gerald is killed in an IRA ambush, and the violence of
this act of war ripples through the spaces of the village: „The shocking news reached Clonmore that
night, about eight o‘clock. It crashed upon the unknowingness of the town like a wave that for two
hours, since the event, had been rising and toppling, imminent. The news crept down streets from
door to door like a dull wind, fingering the nerves, pausing. In the hotel bars, heads went this way
and that, quick with suspicion.‟720 Gerald‟s death quickly exposes the hidden social fault lines that
exist between the village, the garrison, and the „house-island,‟ of Danielstown. Mrs. Fogarty, the
Catholic woman, who has hosted generations of young British soldiers in her front parlour finds that
the „Barracks were closed, she could not get past the guards; for once she was at a loss, among
strangers.‟721 The wives of the British soldiers garrisoned at Clonmore, excoriate the rebels as
„beasts
[. . . ] Couldn‘t they be tortured –why should they be hanged or shot?‟722 And then turn
their anger upon the British monarchy and political establishment: „I can‘t understand the King. I
can‘t understand the Government: I think it‘s awful!‟723 In the end the soldier‟s wives turn their
rage on Lois, and the other Anglo-Irish inhabitants of the „house-island‟ estates in Cork: ‗it seems
so odd that [Gerald] shouldn‘t really have meant anything [to them]‟724
5.3.4. Summary
Despite Lois‟s experiences inside and outside the space of the „house-island‟ of
Danielstown, Bowen suggests in The Last September
that
the young Anglo-Irish woman
experiences the cultural vertigo of placelessness, as she witnesses the landed Ascendancy‟s
lifeworld disintegrating around her: „She was lonely, and saw there was no future. She shut her
eyes and tried –as sometimes when she was seasick, locked in misery between Holyhead and
718
Ibid., 153.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Landscapes of Fear (London: Basil Blackwell, 1979) p. 7.
720
The Last September, 198.
721
Ibid., 198-199.
722
Ibid., 199.
723
Ibid., 200.
724
Ibid.
719
133
Kingstown –to be enclosed in nonentity, in some ideal no-place, perfect and clear as a bubble.‟725
Bowen further illustrates this fear of placelessness at the end of the novel, in an exchange between
Lois and her cousin Laurence, as he tries to comfort her after she learns of Gerald‟s death. Unlike
his parents Sir Richard and Lady Naylor, Laurence seems to anticipate the ending of the elegant and
detached lifestyle of the Anglo-Irish „house-island.‟ He finds Lois standing under a holly tree on
the grounds of the estate „not so much rooted as indifferent.‟726 Offering his condolences, Laurence
looks out over his ancestral demesne, „studying with an effort of sight and comprehension, some
unfamiliar landscape.727
As The Last September closes, Bowen paints a picture of this „unfamiliar landscape‟ -one
that is marked by fear and the singular absences of the Ascendancy „house-islands‟: „For in
February, before those leaves had visibly budded, the death –execution, rather –of the three houses,
Danielstown, Castle Trent, Mount Isabel, occurred in the same night. A fearful scarlet at up the
hard spring darkness; indeed it seemed that an extra day, unreckoned, had come to abortive birth
that these things might happen [. . . ] It seemed, looking from east to west at the sky tall with
scarlet, that the country itself was burning.‟
728
It has been observed that „the nature of fear
changes [. . . ] for a society that in the course of time it becomes more complex and sophisticated.
Landscapes of fear are not permanent states of mind tied to invariant segments of tangible reality;
no atemporal schema can neatly encompass them. We need to approach landscapes of fear, then,
from the perspective of both the individual and the group, and to place them -if only tentatively-in a
historical frame.‟729 Bowen‟s representations of places inside and outside of the space of such an
Ascendancy „house-island,‟ in The Last September conveys the emotional and psychological
dimensions of the individual, as well as collective Anglo-Irish lifeworld experience of living
within such a landscape of fear in the summer of 1920 during the Irish War of Independence.
5.4. Molly Keane/ M. J. Farrell: The Estate of Living Memory
5.4.1. Introduction
The subject of Molly Keane‟s 1931 novel Mad Puppetstown though considered as a „a
lighter rehash of the fading Ascendancy world explored by Bowen,‟730 is conversely different from
Bowen‟s experience and representation of period and place during the Irish War of Independence.
Keane‟s fictional estate of Puppetstown survives the early „Troubles,‟ whilst her family‟s actual
estate was destroyed during the conflict. As Keane recalled: „It was a god-awful shock for my
father who was a belligerent little Englishman. Everyone had warned him, had said you must come
725
Ibid., 89.
Ibid.
727
Ibid.
728
Ibid., 206.
729
Tuan, Landscapes of Fear, 8.
726
134
back and live in England and bring the children there, but he said ―I‘d rather be shot in Ireland
than live in England.” He wouldn‘t leave when they came to burn down the house.‟731
Keane, who wrote under the name M. J. Farrell, described her chosen genre as „seventy
thousand words through which the cry of hounds reverberates continuously.‟732
Under the
anonymity of her nom de plume, Keane was able to safely and covertly observe the Anglo-Irish
society in which she was raised: „for a woman to read a book, let alone write one was viewed with
alarm, I would have been banned from every respectable house in County Carlow.‟733 She took her
pseudonym from a public house in County Wexford, that she spied one day, on the way home
from a local fox hunt. Keane recalled: „I didn‘t want to be recognised as a writer. I only wanted to
be good in the hunting field and to be popular at hunt balls. I was so starved of fun when I was
young, and loved so much fun.‟734
5.4.2 Lifepath
Keane was born in County Kildare in 1904. Her father Walter Skrine, who was originally
from Somerset England, and her mother, known as the „Poetess of the Glens‟ who wrote under the
name of Moira O‟Neill, eventually had three sons and one other daughter. They settled in County
Waterford and became known as a serious hunting, fishing and church going family. Keane‟s
parents were aloof and self absorbed, to the detriment of their children: „Life was much more
stringent then, there was no such thing as hot water or central heating. There were fires but they
went out and I remember the deadly cold of the school room and the blue cold coming off the wall. I
never remember a fire in my father‘s library or in the dining room, although my father was perhaps
a bit more warmth conscious.‟735
Her family‟s lifestyle revolved around social functions connected with the annual hunting
season: „even in riding the children were simply expected by their father to be able to ride well and
stylishly, as though through some genetic inheritance.‟736
Keane‟s brothers and sister were
educated in England, but she attended school briefly in Dublin, and was tutored as a child by her
mother and a governess. As an adolescent, Keane was invited to stay at an estate located in the
heart of fox-hunting country in County Tipperary, owned by Major Perry, an established figure in
the fox and hound world of the period‟s Ascendancy: „I almost lived there for six of seven years,
mostly in the winter months, when I hunted three days a week on horses largely provided by
730
James Cahalan, The Irish Novel: A Critical History (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 1988) p. 206.
Polly Devlin, „Introduction‟ in M.J. Farrell (Molly Keane) Mad Puppetstown (London: Virago Press,
1985 [1931]) p. xii.
732
Molly Keane (M.J. Farrell) Devoted Ladies (London: Virago 1984 [1934] ) p. 28
733
Polly Devlin, „Introduction‟ in M.J. Farrell (Molly Keane) The Rising Tide (London: Virago Press, 1984)
p. v.
734
Devlin, Introduction, Mad Puppetstown, vi.
735
Devlin, Introduction, The Rising Tide,. ix.
736
Devlin, Introduction, Mad Puppetstown, vii.
731
135
Woodroof [. . . ] There were so many horses in those days of the late twenties and early thirties that
if you were lightweight and a moderately useful rider your fun was endless.‟737 In addition to
providing her a respite from a dreary home life, Woodroof exposed the sheltered Keane to a more
worldly and sophisticated social milieu than the conservative horse and church circles frequented by
her parents: „My mother disapproved of Woodroof –she was frightened by the idea of it. She
belonged to the nineteenth century and didn‘t change [. . . ] There was a woman there who‘d been
divorced and some what she would have called dirty talk which I didn‘t know a thing about, but I
soon found out and was rather good at. My mother was alarmingly prudish and old-fashioned in
those ways. In fact everyone there was wonderfully kind to me.‟738 She eventually married Robert
„Bobby‟ Lumley Keane, a gentleman farmer from County Waterford in 1938, and lived with him in
his Georgian house in the Blackwater Valley. Throughout the 1930s, Keane continued to write
under the guise of M. J Farrell, and published a number of novels, which form a composite social
history of the Anglo-Irish „house-island.‟
5.5 Mad Puppetstown (1931)
5.5.1. Introduction
Keane‟s novel Mad Puppetstown, traces the life of young Easter Chevington, the daughter
of an extended Anglo-Irish family who resides at Puppetstown, a landed estate in fictional County
Westcommon. The family experiences the fading glory of the fin de siécle Ascendancy before the
start of the First World War. In the aftermath of the 1916 Rising, republican violence scatters the
younger generation of Puppetstown to Europe and England. Despite their status in Ireland, these
scions of the landed Anglo-Irish gentry realize there is no place for them in the Tory social circles
of the British upper class. At the end of Mad Puppetstown, Easter returns with her cousin Basil to
their childhood estate during the early days of the Irish Free State. As she stands in the hall of the
house, Easter is taken back by its sense of abandonment and decay:
We expected it to be larger and heartier, and the servants to look after us, and
Aunt Dicksie delighted to see us and everything like it always was. We didn‟t
expect to find a turkey sitting on eggs in the hall, nor all those bulbs, or that
frightful slack –that was only fit to be put down a rabbit-hole –for dinner, or
the smell of cats, or no water, or nineteen beds in my room.739
This decrepit state of affairs symbolizes the new realities of life for the remaining Anglo-Irish
landed families in the twenty-six counties of Ireland, now governed by a new ruling class composed
of members of the Irish Free State and the Catholic Church. This reading of Mad Puppetstown,
will focus on Keane‟s representations of habitus and place within the Anglo-Irish „house-island,‟
before, during and after the Irish War of Independence. Habitus, can be defined for the purposes of
737
738
Devlin, Introduction, The Rising Tide, ix-x.
Ibid., x.
136
this reading as a „a socialized body, a structured body, a body which has incorporated the
immanent structures of a world or of a particular sector of that world -a field- and which structures
the perception of that world as well as action in that world‘740 Keane observed that the Anglo-Irish
gentry observed a social „code,‟ which was weighed upon the scales of wealth and social status:
„No-one would have thought of marrying someone not of their own class [. . . ] It would have been
more than death. It simply wasn‘t an idea. Those things were completely part of the code.‟ 741 The
following sections, The Golden Age, The War and The Free State will chronologically explore the
sealed environments of habitus and place in Keane‟s representations of the „house-island‟ of
Puppetstown, before, during and after the founding of Saorstát Eireann in 1922.
5.5.2. The Golden Age
As Mad Puppetstown commences in 1908, we find the estate at the height of its glory with
Major Chevington, Easter‟s father, lord of the manor house. The extended family living in the
chronotopic space of Puppetstown‟s „house-island,‟ is composed of Easter‟s two cousins Evelyn
and Basil, their widowed mother, Aunt Brenda, and Aunt Dicksie, a spinster. As Keane opens her
novel she provides a detailed glimpse of the social conventions, styles and manners that comprised
elements of the Ascendancy habitus during the fin de siécle era preceding the start of the First
World War:
Then:They said: “You naughty man!” They wore hair nets and tortoise-shell
combs.
It was more than fast to accept presents from men.
You bought a blood four-year-old up to weight for £60.
There was no wire.
They talked about “the ladies” and “motor cars.” “By George!” they said,
but never used Americanisms; such were not known.
Their top boots were shorter and their spurs were worn lower down on the
heel.
You loved with passion. 742
This long passage, which spans the entire first page of Mad Puppetstown, illustrates through
Keane‟s prose, that she has a focused eye for the detail associated with the Anglo-Irish „houseisland‟ habitus. The Latin etymology of this term intimates a „style of dress and disposition, attitude
or character,‟743 which in the sociological theory promoted by Pierre Bourdieu describes „the
unconscious internalisation of objective social structures which appear spontaneous and natural,
but which are in fact socially conditioned.‟744 Keane‟s passage in the opening chapter of her novel
739
Keane, Mad Puppetstown, 270-271.
Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998) p.81
741
Devlin, Introduction, The Rising Tide, xi.
742
Keane, Mad Puppetstown, 1-2.
743
Macey, Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, 175.
744
Ibid.
740
137
provides a rich tapestry of words which illuminates her intimate knowledge of the closed social
sphere of the Ascendancy „house-island,‟ of this period:
You did not trouble to keep your sense of humour ready in the background.
Love mattered.
Manners mattered.
Children mattered.
Places and dependants mattered too.
Money bought much more.
People drove about in dog-carts and pony traps.
Invitations were issued to tea.
Tea partied mattered too.
Women who powdered their faces were fast.
Women who painted them –bad.
Hunting, low wages, feather boas, nipped in habit coats, curly bowlers,
bunches of violets, black furs and purple hats were much in vogue.
A book called Three Weeks was both enjoyed and abused.
Champagne was a very frequent drink. Women never drank whisky.745
The military ethos of Easter‟s father is conveyed in the costumes she is made to wear as a child: „In
the winter months she wore a round blue cap with H. M. S. Victory written on it in gold letters, and
in the summer months, a white straw hat that sat on the very top of her head and was held in place
below her chin by a very much bitten piece of elastic. This hat had H. M. S. Dreadnaught written in
gold on its blue ribbon –by the way of variety, perhaps‘.746 The „house island‟ lifestyle at the estate
is idyllic, revolving around the pursuits of the landed Protestant gentry: hunting, riding and trips to
the horse racing at Punchestown, with the occasional romance thrown in: „But Puppetstown was not
often dull. It was one of the houses where Sunday Afternoon is an institution, and these are seldom
dull houses, because on Sunday afternoons people feel that they have been enough bored for one
day, and try to go where they will be enlivened of their depression.‟ 747
Aunt Brenda, is popular with British officers garrisoned at the Curragh. Easter and her
cousins schooled at Puppetstown, often play in a tangle of elder, laurel and twisting rhododendron,
an intimate place of childhood experience that they have christened the „Nut Walk,‟ where „silence
burnt like a still flame behind green glass. No bird sang. The children‘s sandaled feet padded
without noise up the loamy path. The day was kept without.‟748 The estate acts as the centre of
Westcommon‟s social universe and caters to the indolent desires and whims of its insular landed
class: ‗In the summer people came to play tennis at Puppetstown and looked at the garden, or at
Aunt Brenda or at the young horses, as their age or mood took them; and in the winter they would
745
Keane, Mad Puppetstown, 1-2.
Ibid., 3-4.
747
Ibid., 129.
748
Ibid., 19.
746
138
sit by an enormous fire in the drawing-room and discuss the week‘s hunting and the intimate affairs
of any neighbours who did not happen to be present.‘749
In August 1914, the shadow of the First World War casts its pall upon the idyllic lifestyle
within the „house island,‟ at Puppetstown. Major Chevington is called from his estate in southern
Ireland to serve his duty for king, country and empire: ‗The Great War had been fought for a year
and more. Easter‘s father was with the South Irish Horse‘750 The glorious facade of the house
begins to crack with the news that Major Chevington has been killed in France. For the older
members of the household his death signals the end of the estate‟s „Golden Age‟:
All the servants at Puppetstown looked back on the days of the Major as on a
golden age –a splendid time the like of which they would never see equalled
again. This would tell tales of fox-hunting and racing; of days when all the
quality would be gathered from the country round to ride schools over the
fences at Puppetstown; of the winners the Major had bred and trained and
ridden they would tell; of the wine in the cellars, the horse in the stables, the
foxes in the coverts, and the notable runs they provided. 751
Keane‟s representation of the Anglo-Irish habitus occupying Puppetstown in the years before the
First World War, attempts to convey the culture‟s insular lifestyle and convention of manners which
operated within the insular social spaces of their estates during this period. Keane drew from her
own early lifepath experiences of living inside the Ascendancy „house-island,‟ to fashion the
intimate details occupying the cultural spaces depicted in her prose. It has been observed that
„Intimate experiences are difficult but not impossible to express. They may be personal and deeply
felt, but they are not necessary solipsistic or eccentric. Hearth, shelter, home or home base are
intimate places to human beings everywhere. Their poignancy and significance are themes of [. . . ]
much expository prose.‟752
5.5.3. The War
As the First World War becomes further protracted and more deeply entrenched, a sense of
attrition begins to set into Keane‟s representation of Puppetstown‟s „house-island.‟ Members of the
household are described as initially greeting the news of war with a sense of animated piquancy:
„They had enormously enjoyed the beginning of it August, 1914, was a time of great cheer and
excitement. After that Christmas Aunt Dicksie and her war-maps and the blood-thirsty cartoons
which she fastened to her bedroom wall with pins, became but an ordinary part of life, such as the
dogs‘ dinners or exercising your pony. Of course, they hated the Germans –but that was a
commonplace of religion.‟753
But after the death of Major Chevington, the estate becomes a
749
Ibid., 129.
Ibid., 81-82.
751
Ibid., 124-125.
752
Tuan, Space and Place, 147
753
Keane, Mad Puppetstown, 115-116.
750
139
haunted space of memory: „The names of most of the young soldiers who had come and gone and
fallen, at Puppetstown, in and out of love with Aunt Brenda were the names of young ghosts now.‟
754
With British military attention diverted from its oldest colony, the 1916 Rising in Dublin
sends violent tremors through the country‟s political landscape. The family members left behind at
Puppetstown begin to live „the leaner years that followed the Major‘s death and the Great War in
Europe and the little bitter, forgotten war in Ireland,‟755 with a detached, and weary resignation.
Keane‟s depiction of the War of Independence in her fictional County Westcommon, incorporates a
physical landscape of mountains to convey currents of danger, fear and distrust of that flowed during
the period: ‗These were the times when the fastness of Mandoran, Mooncoin and the Black Stair saw
secrecy and strivings and plottings, and blood was shed quietly and wickedly, and one half of the
young men of Ireland were held in a pitiless lust of cruelty, and the other half in a wanton spell of
fear. Through all the land no man trusted even his brother. All was silence and covert looks. A word
spoken and carried again could quite well mean death – a lone and unshriven death of which no
man dare bear witness [. . . ] these things ran in a golden exciting vein through the years before the
grim actual happenings took shape of horror in the land.‟756
The „house-island,‟ of Puppetstown
during the war years, becomes an isolated and
vulnerable fortress, rooted in a landscape of violence and fear: „They were strange days for the
gentry of Ireland these, strange, silent, dangerous days. The morning‘s paper (and if the post was
late it was because a bridge had been blown up the night before or the mail raided on its way from
Dublin) might tell of a murder of a friend; or the burning of a house that had lately been like
Puppetstown, careless in its wide hospitality; or, more rarely, of the capture of rebels or a
successful raiding for arms.‟757 It has been observed that „Sense of time affects sense of place,‟758
and Keane‟s depiction of Puppetstown is coloured by her own „house-island‟ experiences between
1916 and 1922 in southern Ireland: „the house we lived in would count as a big house [. . . ] and it
was burned in the Troubles. ‟759 Despite this significant early lifepath experience, Keane‟s fictional
estate survives the conflagration that destroyed over two hundred big houses during this seminal
period in twentieth century Irish history: „Curiously untouched by it, as by the greater war, life at
Puppetstown went on, as though no tide could lick close enough ever to suck Puppetstown to
destruction.‟760 Though the „house-island‟ survives in Keane‟s novel, its habitus has disintegrated:
754
Ibid., 81-82.
Ibid.
756
Ibid., 125-126.
757
Ibid., 127.
758
Tuan, Space and Place, 186
759
Devlin, Introduction, Mad Puppetstown, xii.
760
Keane, Mad Puppetstown, 127.
755
140
„The last of an untrained series of sluts who had [. . .] formed the female staff of Puppetstown was
dismissed and never replaced.‟761 The estate is virtually abandoned during the war years. After the
killing of a British officer to whom she was romantically linked, Aunt Breda flees with her sons
Evelyn and Basil to England. Easter, the estate‟s heiress, is sent to boarding school in France. Only
the spinster, Aunt Dicksie and one of her loyal servants, Patsy, the boot-boy remain to occupy the
shell of the once glorious house.
5.5.4. The Free State
Though Puppetstown is abandoned during the war, with its childhood occupants fleeing to
England and the Continent, the pull of memory and place of the „house island,‟ on its heirs is a
strong one. The wild landscape surrounding the estate seeps into Easter‟s dreams: „And as she lay
back into the smaller world of bed, there came to her a thought of mountains –mountains of a
clearest violet, and a cold, thin wind blowing, and in the clear air a flock of Philippines were
wheeling, their white bodies gleaming like fish in a net. What were the names of those mountains?
Their names? If she had their names she was charmed for ever. Why should she think of a horse
now? She saw it from her bed –an ancient, strange horse of a wild apocalyptic beauty. If he should
speak it would be to praise their names. –Mandoran, Mooncoin and the Black Stair . . . The
charming spell was hers now. Never would she escape it and so in delight she slept.‟762
As the
Anglo-Irish cousins Easter and Basil come of age, they find themselves out of place in British
society. In spite of occupying a similar class position, they discover that the English Tory habitus
is different from the social conventions of the Ascendancy culture in which they were raised:
“ ‗England,‘ Basil said (such an awful word, and his eyes were narrow flames); ‗she‘s too crowded.
We want a littler, wilder sort of place. We‘re half-English, both of us, Easter, but we haven‘t got the
settled, stable drop of blood that goes down with the English. Easter, the thing is we don‘t quite see
the same jokes. Isn‘t this a mad way to talk? My dear, don‘t think me an ass, but you do laugh in the
wrong places for them. You‘ll never be a success here –why you‘re even conscious of their ghosts.
Easter, dear, let‘s run away from them all.‘763
The cousins decide to return to Ireland, but their arrival in the new Irish Free State finds
them disoriented as well. As they travel to Westcommon they observe that: „old women in donkey
carts and children playing in the dust had as good a right to the road as any motorist.‟764 The
cousins arrive at Puppetstown and are shocked at the facade that greets them:
He stopped the car before the gates of Puppetstown, and indeed they were fast
locked; while through the flat windows they could see the lodge was dark as a
bottle in its emptiness. The geraniums that had once been kept in green
761
Ibid., 184.
Ibid., 246-247.
763
Ibid., 239.
764
Ibid., 255.
762
141
window boxes had reverted to a wild small hardiness, and their occasional
flowers glimmered like lighted candlewicks against the window panes [. . . ]
the house, informed with a certain eldritch air of abiding cunning and distrust,
waited for their coming. There was no smoke from any chimney and the long
lines of blinded windows were like so many inturned, indifferent eyes.765
Entering into the front hall of the estate, they come upon the surprised figure of Aunt Dicksie „with
a faint moustache mossing her mouth and chin,‟766 who is suspicious of their sudden return: „She
smelt, Easter thought, just like an old bush. How did she dare to be so unlike the graceful, useful
aunt they remembered? And was it necessary for her to wear men‘s laced and hooked boots, and a
long purple skirt that very nearly had a bustle?‟767 The estate‟s new servants, aren‟t as docile and
deferential as servants had been in Puppetstown‟s golden days. Responding to a command by
Easter, the new cook spits back: „ ―God knows ye quit the place like rats when the Republic boys
was in the sway. Two more years,‖ she prophesied, ―and ye‘ll be undther the grass and yer toes
cocked in the grave‖ (she cocked her two thumbs in grisly pantomime), ―and not another word more
about ye –God damn ye!‖768
Aunt Dicksie believes that her niece and nephew have arrived to usurp her, while Easter
and Basil, wonder why they ever decided to return to the dilapidated „house-island.‟ However, time
passes and as Puppetstown undergoes a gradual renovation, the three family members come to a
realisation, which only Basil is able to fully articulate: „Well quite frankly I know you‘ll say I‘m
mad if I tell you. But I‘m so queer in my mind about houses and places. I know things. For instance
people belong to houses – not the other way about –either living people or dead.‟769 Though the
golden age of Puppetstown is long past, the „house-island‟ enters a phase of contentment in the
early days of the Irish Free State: „All the gaiety and wildness that had been silent so long at
Puppetstown were present in Aunt Dicksie‘s voice; in the rings on her fingers; it was there in the
fire that went singing and whispering up the chimney of the morning room, and in the mists of
amethyst flowers that smoked against the mirror over the mantelshelf.‟770 As Keane closes Mad
Puppetstown, Basil raises a toast to the faded, yet splendid isolation of their new habitus, and Easter
reflects on her homecoming: „Herself and Basil, in love with only Puppetstown, both of them. ―And
never,‖ said Basil, with his dark, friendly smile, ―need we be married –never while we can keep
Aunt Dicksie alive.‖ They turned and drained their glasses to Aunt Dicksie with a very simple
grandeur.‟771
765
Ibid., 256-257.
Ibid., 263.
767
Ibid.
768
Ibid., 274-275.
769
Ibid., 288.
770
Ibid., 296.
771
Ibid., 297.
766
142
5.5.5. Summary
Keane‟s representations of Puppetstown in her novel, depicts the space of a „house-island‟
as a architectural repository of
habitus and active memory. These representations have been
juxtaposed in chronological order, to compare and contrast the chronotopic changes that occurred to
the Anglo-Irish estate in the period preceding and after the foundation of the Irish Free State. It has
been observed that „the experience of space and time is largely subconscious. We have a sense of
space because we can move and of time because, as biological beings, we undergo recurrent phases
of tension and ease.‟772 Keane‟s use of the spaces of memory in her depiction of the social and
physical morphologies attached to the Ascendancy „house-island,‟ charts the ebbs and flows of its
occupant‟s emotional attachment to place over time and during war and exile. In Easter‟s mind, the
environment and habitus of the „house-island‟ in Mad Puppetstown is inextricably linked with the
memory of her father, Major Chevington: „She never afterwards went to Punchestown or saw
primroses growing in a dry green April ditch, in the late afternoon, that she did not remember his
coat and the rough tweed smell of it and his contented voice.‟773 In her representation of the habitus
occupying Puppetstown at its various stages, Keane often blurs the boundary between inhabitants
and architecture. The „house-island‟ has a consciousness of its own. It is one that is seemingly aware
of the fickle and insular nature of its inhabitants. In describing this habitus, Keane affords the
„house-island‟ a personality of place that is in emotional symbiosis with its returning members. It
seems to anticipate over time the mixed sentiments of its exiles, and in the end stands, Keane writes:
„awaiting them with the flat, dignified calm that houses whose inmates leave them for a day‘s
jollying assume like a mood or a garment, and discard only when they have with due dignity
remitted the unkindness of their children‘s desertion. For houses can be as jealous as lovers and
mothers, and under provocation more bitter than either. Nor do houses ever forget. What are ghosts
but the remembrances they shelter?‟774
5.6 Conclusion: The House-Island
Bowen‟s and Keane‟s representations of the Anglo-Irish „house-islands‟ in their novels,
respectively depict spaces inside and outside their desmesnes and the chronotopic changes occuring
to the „house-islands‟ in the period of revolutionary change in southern Ireland during the early
twentieth century. Though both The Last September and Mad Puppetstown were published in 1929
and 1931, they are important in the sense that they attempt to preserve the memory of time and
place, that by the 1930s, because of a collective amnesia engendered by Irish cultural nationalism,
was erased largely from the consciousness of the Irish Free State by its emphasis on the Catholic,
Rural and Gaelic identity of the nation. In the prose fiction landscapes of Bowen and Keane, the
772
773
Tuan, Space and Place, 118.
Keane, Mad Puppetstown, 123.
143
very names of the „house-islands‟ of Danielstown and Puppetstown served to designate and
symbolise the insular chronotopic spaces of power and culture that occupied many regions of
southern Ireland before 1922, and their novels allow us to investigate the „senses of place‟ of a
minority culture in a period of economic and political decline.
The protagonists in The Last September and Mad Puppetstown, are young women of AngloIrish descent raised within the insularity of these „house-islands.‟ Their coming to age as scions of
these estates, has coincided with the death knell of their culture, and the birth of a new political
reality. As creations of Bowen and Keane, whom they resemble, Lois and Easter represent the
awakening identities of
„people whose families had lived in the same country for three or four
hundred years [and] realised suddenly that they were still strangers and that the mystery of it was
not to be revealed to them –the secret lying as deep as the hidden valleys in the Irish hills, the
barriers they had tried to break down standing as strong and immoveable as those hills, brooding
over an age-old wrong.‟ 775
Bowen‟s use of place emphasises spaces inside and outside the cloistered world of the
Anglo-Irish „house-island,‟ to represent a landscape of fear during the summer of 1920, that
permeates her novel. Keane‟s depiction of the „house-island‟ is chronological, and tracks the
changes in place that occur in a period that stretches from the turn of the century, until after 1922.
Lastly, both The Last September and Mad Puppetstown, with their portraits of a period and place
that had largely been forgotten in the Free State of the 1930s, illustrate that for Bowen and Keane,
as heirs of the marginalised Anglo-Irish culture, landscape, identity and sense of place, existed
largely in their memories of the past, as they negotiated the new cultural and political terrain of
independent Ireland. As authors, their predicament can best be illustrated by the following
observation: „the past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can
stroll wherever I please, and which will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was
moving forward so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can still be seen is colorless, [sic]
distorted, frozen . . . Here and there, I see occasional pieces whose melancholy beauty enchants
me.‟776
774
Ibid., 124.
Elizabeth Mary Margaret Plunkett, Seventy Years Young: Memories of Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall; as
told to Pamela Hinkson (London: Collins, 1937) p. 414.
776
Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age (New York: Putnam, 1972) p. 365.
775
144
6. The Provincial Town and the Catholic Bourgeois
Kate O’Brien
„A pretty scene -tranquil and traditional, modestly civilized [. . .] for all the
thoughtful world, a thing of ruins and archaisms.‟
Kate O’Brien, Pray for the Wanderer (1938)
6.1 Introduction
The relationship between the Catholic bourgeois family and the Irish provincial town is a
core theme that emerges in Kate O‟Brien‟s prose fiction of the 1930s. Two of her
novels
specifically capture the lifeworlds, social morphology and apotheosis of this class and its political
and economic ascendancy in provincial Ireland. The first, Without My Cloak published in 1931,
provides a panoramic representation of a Catholic family and their rise from poverty during the
nineteenth century. The second novel, entitled Pray for the Wanderer and published in 1938, was
written partly in response to the banning of her 1936 novel Mary Lavelle. In this second novel,
O‟Brien‟s representation of Mellick is more abstract and polemical; its sense of place is embodied
in her various characters and is illustrated largely through dialogue. What emerges in both novels
however, is the chronotope of a „petty-bourgeois [sic] provincial town with its stagnant life.‟777
This intersection of time and place is „simple, crude, material, fused with houses and rooms of the
town, with sleepy streets, the dust and flies, the club, the billiards and so on.‟778 Both of these
novels of O‟Brien‟s chronicle and critique the social morphology of place and class upon which the
polity of the petite bourgeois Irish Free State was founded, and operated under during the 1930s.
6.1.1. Lifepath
O‟Brien was born on 3 December 1897 into the privileged class of the Irish Catholic
bourgeoisie in Limerick. She was the seventh child, born into a family of five boys and four girls
and her parents, Thomas and Catherine „Katty‟ nee –Thornhill, were members of a wealthy finde-siécle merchant class. Her ancestors had survived the Famine years of the late 1840s, and the
O‟Brien
branch of the family established
themselves during the late nineteenth century as
reputable breeders of hunter and harness thoroughbred horses. The success of their equestrian
business allowed the family to assume a prominent role in Limerick society.
The confluence of social prestige and profit manifested itself in the construction of Boru
House, which included a stable-yard for the family business. Located on Mulgrave Street, running
south-eastward from Limerick, the house was situated on a thoroughfare which acted as the route of
777
Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 247.
145
the mail coach, and effectively served as a boundary between urban and rural locales: „This
closeness of home and workplace and the coming and going of livestock made it more like a
prosperous farmhouse than a city residence. The house was embellished with low-relief limestone
carving of shamrocks, the O‘Brien crest of a raised hand clutching a sword, its name Boru House,
and the date A. D. 1880.‟779
The street where Boru House was located expanded over the course of the nineteenth
century to cater to the demands of it growing population, as rural residents increasingly migrated to
Limerick and its surroundings: „The creation of Mulgrave Street provided the space for important
new institutions such as the Artillery Barracks (1807), the County Infirmary (1811), the County
Gaol (1821), the District Lunatic Asylum and the Mount Saint Lawrence Cemetery (1849).‟780 Her
memory of the childhood house in which she was brought up, reflects her uneasiness with both the
prestige it reflected, and the locale in which she found herself: „Years after she left Boru House
Kate O‘Brien described it as being ‗ugly‘. She was embarrassed by its gaudy heraldic devices and
she shuddered at the memory her nearest neighbours, the inmates of the District Lunatic Asylum.‟781
Despite O‟Brien‟s privileged background, tragedy struck the family in 1903 with the death of her
mother from cancer, when she was five years old. She was sent to board at Laurel Hill Convent and
her upbringing in a school overseen by French nuns from the Faithful Companions of Jesus,
insulated her against „the usual conditioning of a patriarchal society.‟782
In 1916 her father died, and O‟Brien won a scholarship to attend University College
Dublin. The adjustment from life in provincial Limerick was not an easy one for her to make: „The
Dublin to which she came in 1916 was still reeling physically and spiritually from the effects of the
Rising in the previous spring –the shellings and burnings which laid waste the centre, the shock and
horror of the execution of the leaders of the Rising, the deporting of hundreds of the rank and file to
penal servitude in England, the murder of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, the execution of Roger
Casement. The public were filled with gloom and uncertainty: the winds were bitterly cold [. . . ]
O‘Brien never liked Dublin much: she found it a perishing cold place, nor did the opulence of some
of its wealthier suburbs please her: she detested the annual ebullience of almond and cherry
blossom in Ailesbury Road for instance.‟783
She received a B.A. degree with second honours in French and English, and in 1919 she
moved to England where she found employment with The Manchester Guardian. By 1921, O‟Brien
778
Ibid., 248
John Logan, „Family and Fortune in Kate O‟Brien‟s Limerick‟ in (ed.) John Logan, With Warmest Love:
Lectures for Kate O‘Brien, 1984-1993 (Limerick: Mellick Press, 1994) p. 115.
780
Ibid.
781
Ibid., 116.
782
Lorna Reynolds, „Kate O‟Brien: Artist and Feminist,‟ With Warmest Love, 52.
783
Lorna Reynolds Kate O‘Brien: A Literary Portrait (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1987) p. 34.
779
146
was in Washington D.C. working for Eamon de Valera‟s Bond Drive, to raise funds to support an
independent Irish state. The following year she spent ten months as a governess in Bilbao, Spain.
She then returned to London in 1923 and married Gustaaf Renier, a Dutch journalist, who remarked
after the break-up of the marriage that O‟Brien was „not made for matrimony and cannot live with
me under false pretences.‟
784
This observation of Renier‟s leads us to an aspect of O‟Brien‟s life,
which has been at times curiously avoided by academics. That of her sexuality and its orientation:
„Kate O‘Brien, her family, her biographers, critics, and friends all colluded to keep her in the
closet. Not so much covering up her bonds with women, as by denying that those partnerships were
of any relevance to her work.‟785
O‟Brien soon emerged with a serious reputation as writer, after the debut of her first play
Distinguished Villa, in 1926. The drama enjoyed a successful run and O‟Brien‟s unerring eye was
critically lauded for its detailed and satiric observation: „At the time it was the “realism” that
impressed, or shocked, the critics. Of all the tributes that she received the one she most valued was
a telegram from Sean O‟Casey saying, „ ―Dublin ventures to congratulate Limerick‖; she
remembers the message as ―Dublin salutes Limerick‖ ‟.786
During the 1930s, O‟Brien turned the attention of her pen from drama to prose, and
published a number of novels set in a provincial Irish city named Mellick, which was based upon
her native Limerick. Framed by a cityscape of church steeples and castles, O‟Brien‟s prose-fiction
was informed by her intimate knowledge its culture, history and geography. She recalled later: „It
was there that I began to view the world and to develop the necessary passion to judge it. It was
there indeed that I learnt the world and I know that wherever I am, it is still from Limerick that I
look out and make my surmises.‟787 And it has been observed that her fictional representation of
Limerick, has created an indelible literary impression of a place, viewed over a period of time: „If
we may talk at all of the ‗world‘ of the writer, Kate O‘Brien‘s Mellick and the adjoining Vale of
Honey is as distinctive as the most famous, as Hardy‘s Wessex, or George Eliot‘s Warwickshire.‟788
6.2 Without My Cloak (1931)
6.2.1. Introduction
O‟Brien‟s first novel, Without My Cloak, published in 1931,
gives us perhaps the most
detailed depiction of O‟Brien‟s fictional Mellick. The narrative concerns the bourgeoisification of a
Catholic family named the Considines. Their acquisition of financial and political power, reflects
the growth of the urban class structure of a large provincial town in the West of Ireland, during the
784
Ibid., 38.
E. Donoghue, „ “Out of Order” Kate O‟Brien‟s Lesbian Fictions,‟ in (ed.) Eibhear Walshe, Ordinary
People Dancing : Essays on Kate O‘Brien (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993) p. 37.
786
Reynolds, A Literary Portrait, 39.
787
Kate O‟Brien, My Ireland (London: Batsford, 1962) p.148.
785
147
nineteenth century. The novel opens in 1789 with the figure of Anthony Considine, a horse thief,
arriving through a gap in the South East Clare hills, where from a vista, he gazes upon a „grey
smudge of a town called Mellick.‟789 O‟Brien‟s panoramic depiction of this landscape, becomes a
palimpsest in her subsequent pieces of fiction based in this region:
The Vale of Honey is a wide plain of fertile pastures and deep woods watered
by many streams and ringed about by mountains. Westward the Bearnagh hills
[. . . ] shelter it from the Atlantic-salted wind, and at the foot of these hills a
great river sweeps about the western valley, zigzagging passionately westward
and southward and westward again in its search for the sea [. . . ] In the south
two remote green hills had wrapped their heads in cloud; eastward the stonier,
bluer peaks wore caps of snow already. To the north the mountains of St.
Phelim were bronzed and warmly wooded. Villages lay untidily about the
plain; smoke floated from the chimneys of parked mansions and the broken
thatch of cowmen‟s huts; green, blue, brown, in all their shades of dark and
brightness, lay folded together across the stretching acres in a colourtranquillity as absolute as sleep, and which neither the breaking glint of lake
and stream nor the seasonal flame of woodtops could disquiet. Lark songs, the
thin sibilance of dried leaves, and the crying of milk-heavy cows were all the
sounds that came up to the man who stood in the Gap of the Storm and
scanned the drowsed and age saddened vista out of eyes the were neither
drowsed nor sad.790
Anthony leads his stolen roan Rose Red through „the crumbling gates of Mellick,‟791 where in a back
alley he meets the widow Dooney „who kept a potato and crubeen shop in Lady‘s Lane.‟792 Putting
„the come-hether on her,‟793 Anthony, eventually marries the widow, but is killed eleven months
later in a bar brawl on the night of his son‟s birth. Twenty years later, his enterprising son places a
sign that states „John Considine, Hay, Strau and Forage Deeler,‟794 over the door of a small store
located on Kilmoney Street.
Decades pass and we find that the son has become the Considine patriarch Honest John, a
powerful figure whose family business has prospered despite his poverty stricken origins in the
back lanes of Mellick: „he was proud to be Catholic in the days when that was not easy; and he
showed the courage of his rather staid opinions. He had only one enthusiasm and that was for Dan
O‘Connell, ―the Liberator,‖ as he unfailingly called him. After O‘Connell‘s death he lost such
interest as he had had in national affairs, and watched them, [. . .] merely for their material
reactions on his business and family. Political agitators, Ribbonmen, Young Irelanders, and such
like filled him with rage, and he was not shy about cursing them when he got the chance. The Potato
788
Reynolds, A Literary Portrait, 51
Kate O‟Brien, Without My Cloak (London: Virago, 1984 [1931] ) p. 5.
790
Ibid., 3-4.
791
Ibid., 5.
792
Ibid., 13.
793
Ibid.
794
Ibid., 14.
789
148
Blight concerned him chiefly in that it was disastrous to his trade; the Crimean War brought back
prosperity and was remembered with affection. During the Indian Mutiny he was vaguely and
sardonically amused at what he guessed of England‘s difficulties, but his native inclination always
to think and act as an Irishman was perpetually impeded by a secret sentimental tendency to admire
the sturdy little Queen.‟795
6.2.2. The Provincial Catholic Bourgeois
By 1860, Honest John has reached his seventieth year and fathered „thirteen children, of
whom eight, four sons and four daughter‘s have reached maturity.‟796 We find that he has relocated
his thriving mercantile business to more affluent quarters in the New Town district of Mellick:
„standing now between Hennessy‘s Mills and the Passionist Church, with its back windows opening
on the Dock Road, and the river, and on its face a look as blank and sad as any worn by its more
venerable neighbours.‟797 A survey of the streets, docks and business district of Mellick emerges as
O‟Brien introduces Honest John‟s youngest son, who has taken over the reins of the Considine
family enterprise:
Anthony was a business man and a citizen and moved consciously in rivalry,
friendship and pride among his fellow citizens of Mellick. Charles Street and
his direction along it now went parallel with the seaward flow of the river. At
the crossings, where short streets cut the New Town symmetrically from east
to west, he could glimpse the great stream to the right of him down a hill and
observe the regular hurry of its course past the unhurrying docks; carts and
ships and cargoes he noted, his own and other men‟s.798
As the Considines grow and prosper in Mellick, both the family and the expanding town begin
reflect the insular centripetal forces that foster their mutual growth, maintenance and preservation.
O‟Brien depicts a bourgeoisie appropriation of space that is framed symbolically in Anthony‟s
gaze upon the burgeoning district of commerce in the nineteenth century provincial Irish town:
When he looked east ward up the wide crossing streets, he snatched, one block
away, a fragment of the life of King‟s Street, where the shops were gay at this
hour, and where broughams and phaëtons splashed arrogantly through the
mud, bearing wives and daughters of the town to and fro between the tall
brown houses at the southern end and all the fripperies and agitations of their
social habit. The street in which they rode was a lively place compared with
its long grey parallel where Anthony was walking. Charles Street consisted
mainly of stores and offices; it wore the grave, grey look of commerce, an
aspect increased by the dusty pallor laid on the street‟s face by two or three
great flour mills. Drays and carts were its chief traffic, interspersed by the
occasional phaëtons of the merchants.799
795
Ibid., 15.
Ibid.
797
Ibid., 10.
798
Ibid., 10.
796
149
Anthony „whose father thought him an encyclopædia
of culture, had had, even by Mellick
standards, only a very average education, and perhaps the world beyond Mellick would have said
that he was not educated at all,‟800 basks in the relative wealth afforded by the growth and success
of his father‟s business. As a member of the emerging Catholic bourgeois of the large provincial
town, Anthony symbolizes the new elite colonial class of nineteenth century Catholic Irishmen.
O‟Brien depicts him travelling elevated above the common people, surveying the colonial
streetscape of Mellick from his privileged position in a carriage:
The air was blue-grey now, and the lamplighters were out. King‟s Street was
very lively; many of the shops were still open, and Anthony admired the upto-date gaslight in the better-class ones; English redcoats swaggered at every
corner, some shouting in hilarious groups with the bolder girls, some coaxing
the shy ones in doorways. Stars pricked the sky; a hawker‟s fire glowed on the
kerb and a smell of roast potatoes floated up from it deliciously.801
From the vantage point of his inherited privileged, Anthony is also in position to dictate the terms
of Mellick‟s labour relations when trade unionism breaks out in the large provincial town: „Mellick
was very far west of the English midlands where this new-fangled crime had been giving trouble off
and on for forty years. Employment was scarce in Irish towns and those who gave could be
contemptuous of those who needed it.‟802 O‟Brien‟s representation of the economic conditions of
colonial Mellick corresponds with evidence gathered about the economic landscape of the period:
„Ireland experienced severe de-industrialisation during the course of the nineteenth century: in
1821 43% of the working population was employed in trade and manufacturing [. . . ] and by 1881
it was 15%.‟803 Anthony responds to the demands placed by the members of the „insubordinate
labour,‟804 union on the Considine family business by firing its ringleaders: „He knew that they
would grow louder, and he was glad that he had been given the first chance in Mellick to face them.
The idea that anyone, least of all a few illiterate hooligans, should attempt to tell an employer when
to sack or when not to sack his employees, or to say what they should be paid or for what hours
they should work, was simply an insane conception in Anthony‘s view.‟
805
His tactics earn him the
respect of Mellick‟s oligarchy, but at a price:
The story of the little episode flew round the town. The Hennessys had it, the
Verekers, the O‟Donoghues, the O‟Currys, the Devlins, all the important
employers, ever Considine household, and every small, admiring shop and
parlour in town. The dockers‟ secretary had it too, no doubt, and the members
of his little union. The Mellick Sentinel gave an approving paragraph which
799
Ibid.
Ibid., 22.
801
Ibid., 19.
802
Ibid., 268.
803
Logan, Family and Fortune, 111.
804
O‟Brien, Cloak, 270.
805
Ibid., 270-271.
800
150
was telegraphed to the Dublin evening paper. Anthony was a hero in his own
town, and he took his hero-worshipping with an agreeable air of
contemptuousness. So did he take the stone that was flung at him as he drove
up King Street.806
The economic privilege and political power bestowed upon him by the family business infects
Anthony with a taste for grandeur, and he builds himself a country manor: „All he wanted in his
house, as in other things, was the best that his epoch could give him for his money.‟807 The location
of Anthony‟s manor occupies the ruins of an Ascendancy Big House, destroyed by agrarian
violence during the famine years:
He happened to drive by the estate of River Hill, which had been on the
market since its house had been blown up in ‟48. It invitation was irresistible
to his immediate mood. He drove in through its ruined gates and over the
grass-grown avenue under a long tunnel of old lime trees. He stumbled about
among the sad stones of the broken house; he ranged the long slopes meadow
and lawn and strained his eyes to catch every detail of the open view,
southward between the elms and the limes to the grey, slumberous blur of
Mellick and westward over the water to the subtly coloured bogs and the quiet
Bearnagh hills.808
Employing a prestigious architect from Dublin named Mr. Cleethorpes Downey, Anthony „reared
up a large house of bright red brick on a tranquil dreamy hill, below which a great river
murmured.‟809 River Hill is a gauche display of the emerging Catholic bourgeois wealth of the
period. However, Anthony‟s wish to move from the privileged streets of Mellick‟s affluent quarters,
has not been greeted with universal approval by other members of his family. Honest John believes
that his son has built „a country mansion more suited to a duke than a forage merchant.‟810 Whilst
Anthony‟s wife Molly, having grown to cherish her social standing in Mellick, is reluctant to
assume a new role as the Catholic mistress of an isolated country estate:
She had always been happy in King‟s Crescent, because as she said, its houses
were among the best in town, and residence in them gave definite prestige.
She had liked her snobbish neighbours, had liked the nods and becks of
genteel town life, the tattle and the tea-drinking, the pretty posing to and fro in
her carriage, the flattery that twittered unceasingly about her frou-frou
elegance, and the envy that derided it.811
By the late 1870s as O‟Brien‟s ancestors were consolidating their interests in the equestrian
business on Mulgrave Street, their fictional counterparts in Without My Cloak, were beginning to
806
Ibid., 270.
Ibid., 22.
808
Ibid., 32.
809
Ibid., 23.
810
Ibid., 12.
811
Ibid., 26.
807
151
experience the centripetal forces that would as O‟Brien writes, bind the ascendant growth of the
Considine family with the provincial town of Mellick like „chain dropped softly on chain.‟812
6.2.3. Town & Family
Honest John‟s daughter Caroline, trapped in a loveless marriage with Jim Lanigan, wishes to
escape the emotional cul-de-sac of her family. But she is tied in place by the interlocked chains of
her religion, relations and town: „Where could you hide in Mellick from a loving husband?‟813
Through the efforts of her eldest brother Eddy, Caroline meets Richard Froude, an English
Protestant. At forty-two years of age, she resolves to flee with him to England: „A runaway wife
might seem fun to the lightminded on an April evening in London, but in Mellick the Considines
were not amused.‟814 Anthony is dispatched by the family to return his sister to her proper station.
Richard and Caroline consummate their relationship, but she finds herself too firmly ensnared by
the web spun from religion, class and family in Mellick: „The ghosts had chained her back in her
own place where wives are faithful.‟815 Standing on the banks of the Thames, listening to the
current of the river, Caroline is transported on a stream of memories back to the provincial environs
of her native city:
She saw all those generations come whirling towards her now as on that
river‟s flood. All Mellick she seemed to see, men and houses, quick and dead,
in an earthquake rush to overtake her. Faces whose names escaped her, clerks
of her father‟s, old beggar-women, shopgirls, ladies with whom she drank tea,
her confessor, Father McEwen, pretty Louise Hennessy, Mrs. Kelleher the
midwife [. . . ] the grey mass of Considine‟s office with Anthony swinging out
the front door.816
Caroline‟s Catholic sensibilities and her emotional attachments to Mellick, coupled with her
Anthony‟s resolve to return her to the bosom of the Considine family hasten her speedy return. In
the end, Caroline‟s husband „Jim Lanigan went to Mellick Station to meet the Dublin train on a wet,
cold evening,‟817 and escorts her back home in the family carriage. As they travel through town
„Caroline stared at the wet, quiet streets, with the eyes of one who had been absent from them many
years.‟ 818 In her room she lays prostrates before a shrine of „Our Lady of Victories,‘ a Marian icon,
that for Caroline symbolizes ‗home and memory and reality.‟819 As she prays emotionally to the
religious figurine, about the stolen promise of escape from the chains of family and Mellick,
812
Ibid., 436.
Ibid., 148.
814
Ibid., 156.
815
Ibid., 196.
816
Ibid., 183-184.
817
Ibid., 199.
818
Ibid., 200.
819
Ibid.
813
152
Caroline cries out in desperation, the name of her lost lover: „Oh, Richard, Richard, Richard,
Richard!‟820
One other family member who attempts to resist the centripetal forces of Mellick, is
Anthony‟s son Denis: „The ugliness of the River Hill mansion had long been visible to him, almost
as long as he had been aware of his father‘s great pride in it.‟821 After his mother Molly dies giving
birth to his father Anthony‟s ninth child, Denis rejects his place in the family business, for the
vocation of a landscape artist. It is through the eyes of Denis, that O‟Brien depicts the ravaged
social geographies existing in the dark underbelly of Mellick. Though it is the quarter of the old
town from which the Considines originated, it is a place that the family has shunned and tries to
forget:
He discovered Mellick‟s slums, for instance -the crumbling Old Town that
looked so gently beautiful at evening, grey, sad, and tender, huddled on
humpy bridges about canals and twisty streams -and found that under its mask
of dying peace it lived a swarming, desperate full-blooded life, a life rich in
dereliction, the life of beggars, drunkards, idiots, tramps, tinkers, cripples, a
merry, cunning, ribald, unprotesting life of despair and mirth and waste [. . .]
Rheumy and filthy-smelling old men, sharp-eyed wolfish children, lively
tongued women who suckled dirty babies at dirty breasts, the old crone with
lupus-eaten face who seemed to live in the doorway of St. Anthony‟s
Church.822
One of the acts of rebellion that Denis employs against the new-found privilege of his family plays
out on a similar erotic level as Caroline‟s. He falls in love with Christina, a girl from a peasant
background. When Denis announces the affair to his family: „I am her lover, do you hear?,‟823
their reaction borders on the psychotic: „Sophie went into straightforward hysterics and swayed
back and forth on her chair, giving out a staccato series of gasps and giggles. Agnes‘s face was
buried in her hands. She sobbed and prayed aloud with violence.‟824 Anthony‟s response reflects
the class snobbery of their elevated position in Mellick society. Though his father Honest John, is
rooted in the same class as Christina, Anthony condemns his son‟s lover in no uncertain terms: „But
a scullery maid, the bastard of a scullery maid -stupid, quiet, unremarkable, out of a thatched
cottage; illiterate, spiritless, rough with farm slavery and starvation, the usual helpless cargo of the
emigrant ship!‟825
820
Ibid.
Ibid., 263.
822
Ibid., 127.
823
Ibid., 371.
824
Ibid.
825
Ibid., 366.
821
153
6.2.4 Summary
At the close of Without My Cloak, O‟Brien depicts the centripetal pull that place and family
have on the younger members of the Considines. Though elevated from their humble peasant
origins, their position as members of the bourgeois in the Irish provincial town has trapped them
within the confines of property and class. Though free to do as they please within the environs of
the town, this freedom seems to diminish as they move away from their socially constructed centre
of gravity in Mellick. O‟Brien illustrates this aptly by having the Considines conspire to thwart
Denis‟ rebellious romance. The family sends Christina away on a White Star Liner to New York
City. But Denis determined to marry her, despite this interference, follows his lover to America. On
arriving Denis finds that he is unprepared by the city‟s „wild heat for which his rearing in the Vale
of Honey had been the worst possible preparation,‟826 and shortly longs for the climate of Mellick
and its environs: „How cool it would be at River Hill to-night.‟827 Christina, however has adjusted
to the raucousness of the American city, which in contrast to the provincial class strictures of
Mellick, has provided her with a sense of freedom: „New York was proving less terrible than she
had dreamt it. Wild and hot and vast it was, but it was also negotiable [. . . ] though the paving
stones were hot and hard and the vistas nightmarishly unbroken by the colour of a hill or a
ploughed field, two living rivers flowed about the terrible streets. She discovered too that the
harbour where the sea came up bearing ships was at midnight full of peace -not the same peace
that she knew in the Vale of Honey, but another moving, mysterious peace.‟828
When Denis does find Christina, she rejects his offer of marriage. Her new life in America,
and the possibilities open to her, has confirmed Christina‟s conviction that there is a landscape of
freedom beyond the narrow class privileges afforded by a marriage into a powerful bourgeois
family in Mellick: „Indeed for one who was a stranger to the proud middle class, she formed a
surprisingly accurate picture of how that class would regard her tentative of entertaining it [. . . ]
she saw the long array of years that she would have to live at the centre of that great, possessive
horde, unforgiven by them, unaccepted.‟829
In a twist of irony, O‟Brien writes that Christina‟s position in New York, despite being on
the brink of poverty, provides Denis with the emotional ability to break the class strictures which
bind his family to Mellick: „She could give him what Anthony Considine would not -freedom. She
had him and could have him now and still wanting him would let him go.‟830 Denis having travelled
as far his class consciousness and imagination allows him to, decides to return to Ireland, where at
826
Ibid., 387.
Ibid., 393.
828
Ibid., 405.
829
Ibid., 320-321.
830
Ibid., 411.
827
154
the close of the novel in 1877, we find him married to Anna Hennessy, another scion of Mellick‟s
oligarchy. The marriage will ensure that the social status achieved by the Considines and its
attendant tendrils of political and economic power, will preserve the family‟s hegemony for
generations to come, over the large provincial town in which they reside.
6.3 Pray for the Wanderer (1938)
6.3.1 Introduction
O‟Brien‟s 1938 novel Prayer for the Wanderer, concerns a successful writer and dramatist
named Matt Costello, who has lived in London and travelled around to the various capitals of
Europe. Matt an ex-IRA man, whose age of thirty-seven marks the year 1937, when the novel
takes place, has returned to his native town of Mellick. He is seeking refuge, and perhaps emotional
exile after a failed love affair in London, which is shadowed by the gathering storm of the Second
World War, about to sweep across the Continent. In Mellick „under the drug of memory and
tradition,‟831 Costello hopes to re-assemble his life, and possibly make a new beginning. And as he
half-facetiously tells his old friend, a solicitor named Tom Mahoney, he wants to „find out what Dev
is really doing for Cathleen Ni Houlihan‘s four green fields.‟832 As the two saunter down one of
Mellick‟s thoroughfares, O‟Brien depicts the veneer of modernity that has crept into the large
provincial town of the late 1930s:
The wide Georgian street looked noble, beautifully lighted by cold arc lamps.
„Shannon Scheme?‟
„Yes. Good, isn‟t it?‟
„Fine. A creditable-looking town. Up, Dev!‟833
O‟Brien‟s portrait of Mellick and its environs in Pray for the Wanderer, is depicted largely
through the novel‟s characters and their various inner and outer dialogues. This represents an
ordering of the urban space within a large Irish provincial town, and the larger landscapes that
contain it, that is arranged, perceived and contested according to the social and political principles
of the strongly Catholic Irish Free State of the late 1930s, firmly under the leadership of Fianna
Fail‟s Eamon DeValera.
6.3.2 The Symbolic Space of Weir House
O‟Brien‟s novel opens in the grounds of Weir House, the paternal estate of Matt Costello‟s
father, which was built on the banks of a stream on the outskirts of Mellick. His brother Will, „a
citizen of the Irish Free State,‟834 resides in this bucolic milieu with his wife Una, and their five
young children Liam, Maire, Sean, Peadar and Una bán. Matt finds himself one May evening,
sitting in one of its rooms gazing at the bourgeois décor of the house which includes a „wood
Kate O‟Brien, Pray for the Wanderer (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1938) p. 159.
Ibid., 69.
833
Ibid., 93.
831
832
155
fire, the Victorian sofa, pink flowers on the wall, the old brass cake stand‘835 and „silver trophies
too, behind the glass doors of the Chippendale cupboard.‟836
837
blood stock‟
His father had been a „breeder of
champion thoroughbreds, but his brother Will has replaced the family‟s horses
with „Dairy Shorthorns.‟838 Despite being a supporter of W.T. Cosgrave, leader of the opposition
party Fine Gael at the time in 1937, Will is bullish about his economic and political prospects: „We
dairy farmers are a power in the land now,‟839 he tells Matt. O‟Brien writes that Will‟s wife Una
„A wild and blowy rose . . . was still an innocently seductive woman, plump and rather charmingly
untidy, with mousy hair and a fragrance of contentment.‟840
She „was completely subservient to
Will without remembering that so she had vowed to be at the altar.‟841 But as a wife and mother,
she is no sacrificial victim, as her needs are met within the demands of her role: „Will and the
children used her up, and in doing so vitalized her.‟842
Gazing through the „three long windows‘843 of the drawing room that Una has decorated,
Matt reflects on the pastoral Irish setting outside of Weir House. He is „not used to being one of the
family and [has] somewhat complicated his Mellick-bred impulses by becoming a man of the great
world.‟844 In London „his Georgian windows looked on a smooth circle of grass, two plane trees
and a statue of Lord Bacon,‟845 and the return to the atmosphere of his native provincial city has
given Matt a sense of vertigo: „London was no longer three hundred but three thousand miles
away, and the lighting change in perspective was an irrational, intolerable relief‘846 As Matt fixes
his eyes on his immediate surroundings he muses to himself: „a pretty scene -tranquil and
traditional, modestly civilized [. . .] for all the thoughtful world, a thing of ruins and archaisms.‟847
But then Matt‟s thoughts stray beyond the insular shores of Ireland and he recalls the darker events
of the decade, that are stalking the political landscapes of Europe: „Chains clanking; bombers
roaring through the once free sky
[. . .] nationalisms foaming at the mouth; grown men taking
834
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 2.
836
Ibid., 11.
837
Ibid.
838
Ibid.
839
Ibid., 46.
840
Ibid., 5.
841
Ibid., 95.
842
Ibid.
843
Ibid., 42.
844
Ibid., 173.
845
Ibid., 111.
846
Ibid., 188.
847
Ibid., 42.
835
156
instructions from this little creature or that as how they shall think [. . . ] The same doom awaiting
every country in every country‘s re-armament intentions.‟848
Standing in front of the three windows of the drawing room Matt‟s dark introspection
focuses on his native country, and O‟Brien fleshes out the polemical significance of Weir House, as
a spatial metaphor for the provincial Catholic Ireland of the period. Anticipating the 1937 general
election, to be held later in the year, in which de Valera‟s government will attempt to secure a third
term, as well as ratify a new constitution for the country, Matt ruminates: „Well, the Free State
would vote on its Constitution, and Matt imagined, and imagined that De Valera too imagined, that
Ireland, newly patrolled by the Church, would be unlikely to vote solid against the Holy Trinity.
Certainly this household wouldn‘t, whatever it might think of Dev.‟849 Article 41.1 of de Valera‟s
constitution would soon come to dictate: „the family as the natural primary and fundamental unit
group of society, as a moral institution [is] superior to all positive law,‟850 and in Pray for the
Wanderer, Weir House and its occupants symbolise the social construction embedded within this
legislation. The second clause of this article 41.2 also designates the role Irish women should play
to sustain this moral institution, a social function that Una as wife and mother, happily fulfils: „by
her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good
cannot be achieved.‟851
In contrast, the spatial metaphors representing Matt‟s „abandoned, senseless, exhibitionist
life of London, Berlin and Paris,‟852 are the antithesis of de Valera‟s theories on Catholic social
engineering. Matt‟s novels, written in „cellars and lodging houses and borrowed studios,‟853 have
been banned by the Irish Free State. O‟Brien writes: „the details, memories and remorses of these
lives would not stand examination by the philosophic light of Mellick or Weir House. They were too
crude and small to be considered by the ancient and snobbish sophistication of Catholic Ireland. A
sophistication which had produced, but would by no means read, Ulysses -the most powerful outcry
ever raised about the powers of darkness.‟854
Matt tells Una, who lives in the „the here-and-now‘855 of
the provincial Irish country
house and town, that another Irish writer „Sean O‘Faoláin stole the true word for this country [. . .]
That sighing land.‟856 She responds „You writers go in for being absurdly sad,‟857 and states „I have
848
Ibid., 42-43.
Ibid., 44.
850
Bunreacht Na hÉireann / Constitution of Ireland (Dublin: Government Publications, 2000 [1937] ) p. 158.
851
Ibid., 160.
852
O‟Brien, Pray for the Wanderer, 113.
853
Ibid., 114.
854
Ibid.
855
Ibid., 95.
856
Ibid., 221.
849
157
a happy life . . . And I cannot see why millions of others- ,‟858 before Matt interrupts her, to declare:
„Millions of others are slaving [. . .] or workless, or homeless, or fighting in some brutal army for
brutal ideologies they don‘t even begin to understand, or wasting in prisons because they resisted
such ideologies, or hacking coal out of death-trap mines, or working overtime on incendiary bombs,
or ranting away in manic-depressive wards because they should never have been born- ‟.859
O‟Brien‟s portrait of the insular domesticity inhabiting Weir House in Prayer for the
Wanderer is not ironic, merely contemplative, and illustrates her perspective on the political profile
of the provincial landscape of the Irish Free State during the late 1930s, as Europe was arming for
war. However by „running away from his own rather eclectic form of civilized life and in choosing
to return for a breathing space to his father‘s house,‟860 Matt‟s chosen place of exile is within the
naïve bosom of the provincial Irish bourgeois, and its elegant milieu, where „Roses swooned in
beauty on the table; the brood mares and the silver trophies kept their ancient places; beyond the
window lay childhood‘s unchanged garden,‟861 filled with „columbine, lilies and Canterbury bells .
. .sunflowers and late lingering, azaleas. A brilliant parade.‟862 And Matt realizes „even in his
first days of pain that it was good for him to be at Weir House [. . . ] To play noughts and crosses
with Sean, to argue the ―economic war‖ with Will, to flirt with Una.‟863
But as a writer whose novels have been banned by the Free State government, excluding
them from the de Valera‟s edenic garden, Matt is faced with a dilemma: „Could he live in De
Valera‘s Ireland, where the artistic conscience is ignored merely because, artist or not, he loved
that Ireland, its lovely face, its trailing voice, its ribaldry and piety and dignified sense of the wide
spaciousness of time?‟864 Despite the political issues troubling his mind, Matt‟s failed love affair
with an actress named Louise Lafleur, the leading lady of his enormously successful play Heart of
Stone, in London, is the real reason behind his exile to the provincial comfort of Mellick. In spite
of not sharing Matt‟s worldly-wise perspective, Will and Una as members of his family, attempt to
foster a relationship between their troubled relation and Nell Mahoney, Una‟s sister: „Mellick was
match-making with amiable innocence, and probably thinking that the famous Mr. Costello would
be a very suitable parti for the intellectual Miss Mahoney, and wouldn‘t it be lucky for him now if
he married a good, Catholic girl like that who‘d teach him sense and stop him writing those
857
Ibid.
Ibid., 222.
859
Ibid., 222-223.
860
Ibid., 113.
861
Ibid., 308.
862
Ibid., 217.
863
Ibid., 238.
864
Ibid., 160.
858
158
unpleasant bits in his books?‟865 The pairing is doomed to failure, as Matt rejects the parochial
nature of his native place, whilst Nell being „one of the female pillars of Mellick,‟866 lives to sustain
it. However, as the novel continues, O‟Brien‟s characters and their dialogue provide contrasting
impressions of the large Irish provincial town of the late 1930s, framed in the perspective afforded
by the bourgeois gaze.
6.3.3 The Symbolic Space of Mellick
The two different personalities which characterize O‟Brien‟s depiction of the resolution
within the Janus faced Irish provincial town, are the cousins Nell and Tom Mahoney. They reside
together in a „big, Georgian house in King Street,‟867 in Mellick, with Tom‟s mother, Anna
Mahoney, a haughty, affluent widow „dressed in amethyst with a jingling chatelaine, and a silver
spectacle case hanging from her belt.‟868 Nell is a thirty-three year old schoolteacher, with an
M.A. who „teaches world history in Irish.‟869 As a female character in O‟Brien‟s depiction of the
Irish Free State, she goes ambiguously against type, as she is a single, independent woman who
supports herself financially and drives her own automobile. But in the matter of politics: „She‘s all
for Dev, for the greatest good of the greatest number,‟870 and „despised pleaders of ―privilege,‖
was inclined to admire dictators and to laugh at individualists.‟871 As a religious person „She was
an unswerving, faithful Catholic, and a virgin [and] would not surrender virginity without assuming
in exchange the binding vows and obligations of marriage, this was as much a loyalty to her own
intellectual workings as an emotional or religious inhibition.‟872 This strict adherence to the tenets
of her faith prompts an observation from her cousin Tom: „She‘s Puritanical, and has the perfect
right to be that way if she likes.‟873
In contrast, Tom a florid „Mellick man‟874 is a successful solicitor, with an „old family
practice, [. . . ] There‘s hardly a farmer in the county takes his litigation anywhere else but to
Mahoney‘s office.‟875 He is depicted lovingly as „a lazy, spoilt individual [. . .] Picturesque -and
eloquent. . . rather larger than life,‘876 and ‗what people call a ―character.‖‟877
His lapsed
religious habits keep him at a respectful distance from the pew: „I never go to church or chapel, but
865
Ibid., 284-285.
Ibid., 72.
867
Ibid., 58.
868
Ibid., 59.
869
Ibid., 84.
870
Ibid., 79.
871
Ibid., 178.
872
Ibid., 179.
873
Ibid., 190.
874
Ibid., 15.
875
Ibid., 16.
876
Ibid.
877
Ibid., 17.
866
159
I‘m nothing if I‘m not an upholder of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolical.‟878
Invited to the
Mahoney‟s Georgian house for dinner, Matt marvels at „the benefits of this archaic and smooth
routine,‟879 which allows the three strong personalities to live in a civil manner under one roof.
O‟Brien‟s account of the dinner encompasses the lifestyles, social class and architecture of the
period:
The food was good, but Mrs. Mahoney did not urge it upon anyone. She ate
well herself and was imperious with the servants. The dining room in which
they sat was on the first floor, behind the drawing room. Tom‟s offices
occupied the ground floor, and obviously the kitchen and the servants‟
quarters must be in the basement. There was no service lift, yet dinner
proceeded with out a hitch in a prosperous Victorian setting. Matt marvelled.
Continuity indeed! Was it still possible to ask your fellow creatures to race up
and down four flights of stairs with your roast lamb and green peas? 880
Keeping with this „archaic‟ Victorian custom, the genders separate after dinner. The women to the
big drawing room; the men the study: „It was a tall, pleasant room with one long window. Although
overfilled with books, both legal and general, it was orderly and comfortable. There were green
leather armchairs on either side of a Georgian mantelpiece. Tom put decanters and cigars on the
mahogany table desk.‟881 Matt and Tom, who had been acquainted in childhood and at university in
Dublin, settle in for a conversation that is filled with witty repartee, sardonic observation and
contemplative frankness, which constitutes the character of discourse in the bourgeoisie salon.
Tom a practised solicitor, intuits the motivation behind Matt‟s return to Mellick: „It‘s a woman of
course, But surely this isn‘t the first one to make you run for cover? Running this direction, thoughthat gives me pause. When the addicted wanderer makes for home-.‟882 Matt confirms Tom‟s
suspicions, and as their tête-à-tête continues, a dimension of Irish provincial life, hidden under the
veneer of de Valera‟s Catholic ideal emerges into view:
There is a brothel in the town, in the town,‟ sang Tom.
„In Mellick?‟
„Two, I believe. But the outsides are a fine, symbolic warning. Anyway, a
poor chap I know was seen going into one of them of a certain Wednesday
night, and on Friday when he got his wages he got the sack. I tell you, sir, this
city is going to be run on decent lines, or we‟re all going to know the reason
why. Did you think you‟d come to the land of the free?‟883
These hidden aspects of the double-lives depicted in Mellick are alluded to largely through
dialogue. Tom, not a practising Catholic, is suspicious of the new post-independence role that the
878
Ibid., 78.
Ibid., 58.
880
Ibid., 59.
881
Ibid., 61.
882
Ibid., 69.
879
160
Church is exerting on his community: „I support the Eternal Church, which I detach with exactitude
from all this new parish ignorance and darkness.‟884 He describes to Matt the powerful influence
it has come to possesses over local politics in provincial Ireland:
„Religiosity is becoming a job in this country, you might say. A plank. A
threat and a menace. A power in the land, in fact, my boy! In the Island of
Saints and Scholars! Yah -it‟s disgusting! It‟s a matter of municipal policy
now wearing this little button and that little badge, holding a banner here and
running to make a retreat there, with Father O‟Hegarty warning you kindly
about this, and Father O‟Hartigan rapping you over the knuckles about that,
and Father O‟Hanigan running off to talk to the bishop about you! Town
Council Stuff! Pure jobbery. “But is he a good practising Catholic, Father
O‟Dea?” “And are you sure he leads a moral life, Sister Mary Joseph?” And if
you aren‟t sure, will you kindly make it your lifework to find out! My God,
it‟s terrible! We need an Ibsen here, Matt. Is that your line? Have you returned
to save your people? 885
After his rant about the insidious confessional influence in Mellick, Tom reveals that Nell had once
been his fiancée. He tells Matt that when Nell discovered he had fathered a son during a fling with a
shop girl years before: „She flung the ring in my face and swept out.‟886 Tom partially places the
responsibility of Nell‟s reaction on the puritanical strain of Catholic theology promoted within Irish
seminaries, and diffused from pulpits throughout provincial Ireland: „that Jansenism that Maynooth
has threatened at us for so long. Now it‘s ripe at last -we‘re sick, like the rest of the world, but you
can‘t argue with Nell. She knows all the answers.‟887 In spite of his feelings about the dangers of
Irish Catholicism, one of Tom‟s confidants is Father Malachi, a Franciscan priest.
Later in June, we find the priest invited to the study of the house on King Street to meet
with Matt and Tom. O‟Brien captures the ambience of the Irish provincial summer, and uses the
murky darkness of its surroundings to frame the political critique imbedded in the novel: „Moths
beat about the lamp on Tom‘s broad desk, and beyond the dark mass of the sycamore tree in the
back garden the summer night showed clear and calm. Ice tinkled in the whiskey glasses.‟888 In
contrast to the „jobbery‟ and „Jansenism‟ of the political and puritanical members of the Roman
clergy in the Free State, Tom tells Matt: „The Franciscan is the poor man‘s friend
[. . . ] and
that‘s not an easy thing to be now, for a man who believes in a hierarchical God. This fellow has
been at the head and tail of every strike that has afflicted Mellick in ten years. His sermons are a
perpetual embarrassment to his superiors and he‘s come mighty near being unfrocked.‟889 Though
883
Ibid., 71-72.
Ibid., 77-79.
885
Ibid., 72-73.
886
Ibid., 87.
887
Ibid., 80.
888
Ibid., 184.
889
Ibid., 200.
884
161
Matt admires the priest for his labour activism, he takes umbrage when Father Malachi praises his
books as „eloquent and powerful,‟890 but states that they are „ ―news‖ to us here in Ireland, even if
news of an unfortunate or unwelcome character.‟ 891
They engage in a long discussion where Matt‟s books are described as „myth-creating, antisocial and unnecessary,‟892 and
artists are described as „dangerous fellows,‟893 who are „the
instigators and inspirers of egotism, the handers-on of all the romantic and individualist non-sense
that has made a shambles of the world.‟894 Father Malachi then asks „You resent our censorship of
you, I suppose?‟895 O‟Brien‟s response to the banning of her 1936 novel Mary Lavelle, forms the
subtext of Matt‟s response:
„I reject censorship, lock, stock and barrel.‟
„Why?‟
„Because it is a confession of failure. It is a denial of human judgement and
understanding, and a gross intrusion on liberty. If you, Tom or Nell Mahoney
may read my books and sit in judgement on them –by what right do you
decide that it is not for others to do so? Sheer impertinence- and an example of
that fatal tendency in all modern government to level down, not up. In any
case, too many negative regulations are a symptom of weakness in any
authority. Man is born free-‟ 896
Father Malachi then plays the nationalist card, and asks Tom to help him save Matt: „For old Ireland
man! For usefulness and continuity and the Catholic standards in general [. . . ] Ireland throws
away to many of you without a struggle.‟897 To which Matt replies: „Oh well, neither Ireland nor I
can be saved on Ireland‘s dictated terms.‟898
As the conversation wanes, Matt‟s thoughts drift and he „felt suddenly depressed. Three
hundred miles away Louise was at this moment playing the last passages of his last act.‟899 The
image of the actress upon a stage in London, contrasts with the sound of footsteps in the house: „Nell
ascending the long stair case. She would seem ghostlike in the shadows.‟900 Matt has paid court to
Nell for a month since being introduced to her at Weir House in early May.
As summer enters June, Matt is aware that their relationship is approaching its inevitable
conclusion. But Nell has provided him with an understanding of why he has returned to the exile of
his native city, and why he will eventually leave its parochial environs: „In one sharp second of
890
Ibid., 195.
Ibid.
892
Ibid., 196.
893
Ibid., 202.
894
Ibid., 201.
895
Ibid., 205.
896
Ibid., 205-206.
897
Ibid., 206.
898
Ibid., 206.
899
Ibid., 208.
900
Ibid.
891
162
blinding appreciation of her as she sat under the withered hawthorn tree he had seen why instinct
drove him crawling home to Mellick when the last blow struck. It was to encounter this farewell.‟ 901
A few days later, Matt drives „through twisting lanes to the little stone church on the hill top,‟902 to
meet Nell. As he peers inside „Rosary and sermon were ended, and the acolytes were lighting
candles for Benediction. Our Lady‘s altar was a blaze of candles. She was a blue-and-white figure
with a golden crown, and her foot was on the serpent‘s head.‟903 As he waits for Nell he hears the
congregation singing the hymn „ “Do thou, Bright Queen, Star of the Sea /Pray for the wanderer/
pray for me.‖‟904 O‟Brien‟s contrast between the spaces of a small stone church in provincial
Ireland, in which devotions to a Marian statue are being performed, and Matt‟s memory of a lost
lover acting his drama upon a stage in cosmopolitan London, signifies the clash between Nell‟s
adherence to religious orthodoxy, and Matt‟s belief, however illusory, in the power of the artist‟s
capacity to capture an „imaginative truth.‟ 905
6.3.4 The artistic vs. the orthodox perspective
It is between the symbolic spaces of the country house and the provincial town that O‟Brien
frames the location, under a withered hawthorn tree which Matt and Nell conduct the most private
moments of their brief courtship: „a place where the path widened to form a gravelled landing stage,
with mossy water steps against which an old canoe was moored. The river curved eastward here
and was wide and bright.‟906 As the waters of the river flow towards the larger world, indicating
Matt‟s eventual departure from Mellick, O‟Brien writes that „He waited for her by the stone parapet
a little way up stream [. . . ] The summer day still poured its brilliance on grass and water; birds
sang and stirred, dragonflies darted in glory; a salmon came over the weir with the leap of a god.
But a bat wheeled too, smells of syringa and woodbine were sweetly palatable, and one by one the
stars moved into place. Night was taking over.‟907
As Nell joins him, late on a Sunday evening in June for their last rendezvous, Matt takes
notice of „the jacket of her pale, silky, dress‘908 and tells her „ ―That‘s a lovely colour . . . You look
like a ghost sitting there‖ .‟909 The two clearly have affections for each other, but their inner and
outer perspectives are vastly different. Matt has tasted the fruit of artistic success in London, „where
the desert blossomed like the rose‘910 because of his affair with a young, nubile actress. In contrast,
901
Ibid., 211-212.
Ibid., 233.
903
Ibid., 234.
904
Ibid., 235.
905
Ibid., 204.
906
Ibid., 246.
907
Ibid., 245.
908
Ibid., 254.
909
Ibid.
910
Ibid., 69.
902
163
Nell is a virginal daughter of the Irish Free State and embraces de Valera‟s vision to transform
Ireland into a Gaelic Eden. As a result, their personal convictions are irreconcilable as well. Matt
praises the artistic over Nell‟s preference for the orthodox, and tells her: „You believe in a whole
tissue of minor taboos and obligations and prohibitions which derive from your central belief, and
also from being a citizen of Dev‘s Free State and a victim of the universal Zeitgeist [. . .] I believe in
none of these things.‟911
In spite of these personal differences, Matt still proposes marriage to Nell. But she has
wisely decides to reject his offer, intuiting that the success of his play Heart of Stone, has allowed
him to sustain a „crazy and powerful illusion,‟912 of romantic love concerning the actress Louise
Lefleur. As they walk back along the river towards Weir House and its implicit symbolism,
O‟Brien‟s depiction contains a glimpse of the domestic happiness which has been achingly close,
but elusively out of the grasp of the unfortunate pair:
She looked about her and up to the sky. The stars were many and clear.
Cassiopeia hung crookedly above the house. She could see the lighted
drawing room windows, and even remotely hear Will singing. Champagne
had made him vocal, no doubt. Poor Una, accompanying like an angel while
she ached to read Beach Thomas in the Observer.913
Nell leaves in tears, and O‟Brien disrupts the domestic tranquillity of Weir House: „Presently he
heard the engine of her car start up, and heard the car move away along the drive. He listened to its
last faraway hum.‟ 914 Matt then notices that „the voice of the weir was very loud; he marvelled that
they had not noticed it when talking,‟915 as the surrounding landscape swallows up the last remaining
trace of their short-lived courtship. O‟Brien wrote that Matt‟s month long struggle with „paralysis,
with the abnormality of nondirection and defeat [. . . ] was now in train to lead him some strange
dance.‟916 And in the end, Matt realizes that his emotional exile to Mellick, has come to a close.
6.3.5 Summary
O‟Brien closes Pray for the Wanderer with Matt leaving Mellick, but before doing so, she
illustrates the insular nature of family relations in the Irish provincial town habitus of the late 1930s.
As Nell returns to the Georgian house in King Street, with a tear streaked face, she is surprised to
find her cousin Tom awake. Noticing her emotional state, he asks to speak with her in his study: „It
was a room that she hardly ever entered nowadays
[. . . ] She thought it expressed those qualities
of Tom which his manner sought to conceal: his professional integrity and good sense, and his
911
Ibid., 258-259.
Ibid., 159.
913
Ibid., 262.
914
Ibid., 269.
915
Ibid.
916
Ibid., 249-250.
912
164
liking for order and comeliness.‟917 It seems that her relationship has stirred feelings of jealousy and
envy in Tom: „For weeks he had been fighting with the insane desire to quarrel with Nell and punch
the head off Matt Costello.‟918 And in the last conversation with Matt and Father Malachi, the
Franciscan had hinted to Tom that „something he ought to value more than he appeared to was
about to slip through his fingers‟919 and he „made it clear that the town was interested in Matt and
Nell.‟920 When Nell reveals to her cousin that she is aware of Matt‟s past, Tom becomes enraged,
mistakenly perceiving that he has been subjected to a double standard, regarding his affair with the
shop girl: „Eleven years ago, standing in this room you called me a cad and hypocrite and low down
heartless cheat.‟921 By bringing Nell into his most private space, the inner sanctum of his office, to
confront Nell about Matt, he is signalling the depths of his feelings and concerns for her: „He is a
womanizer and a pagan [. . . ] nor the sort of patient, good natured old-time Irish ‗flirt‘ that you
may be accustomed to!‟922
O‟Brien then illuminates the insecurity which lurks in the provincial mindset concerning the
world beyond its horizon: „The sort of article we can‘t attempt to emulate in Mellick, naturally. And
we find that that is what you ―like immensely,‖ that we somehow grossly misunderstood you! It
turns out now that the shortest cut to your heart would have been through the brothels and
bedrooms of Europe!‟923 Nell responds to Tom that she has refused Matt‟s proposal of marriage, and
retorts: „You never wanted me -oh that was obvious -until he did!‟924 Tom then remarks „I‘d have
you know that I‘m none of your modern novelists, biliously certain that it is impossible to do without
what can‘t be had. I‘m a civilized man. I can get on reasonably without the unattainable.‟925 In a
certain sense, in spite of the distinctions in their personalities, over the years and because of their
shared abode, the two cousins have come to be emotional reflections of each other:
„Ah, Tom! The conceit, the coldness.
You‟re a real Irishman!
„Are we conceited? Anyway, its our womenfolk who‟re cold. Ask any
divorce lawyer or gynecologist.‟926
Living within the shared space of the Georgian House on King Street, the cousins have created a
relationship that resembles a platonic form of marriage. Nell has remained single as her first, but
917
Ibid., 275.
Ibid., 284.
919
Ibid.
920
Ibid.
921
Ibid., 291.
922
Ibid., 287.
923
Ibid., 298.
924
Ibid., 297.
925
Ibid.
926
Ibid.
918
165
broken love for Tom „had fixed a standard below which she could not stoop.‟927 And Tom tells her
„after you fell through I never wanted any other wife.‟928 Matt‟s return to Mellick from a strange
world beyond its staid horizon, has excavated the true feelings between Nell and Tom, inhibited and
buried by the complacency and habitual lifestyle of the provincial town. As Tom proposes to her
one more time „Nell heard his voice of eleven years ago, and his words, and smiled now a little at
the echoes. He was the same. Rich and formal in feeling, very traditional, every inch a man. She
looked up wonderingly into his lighted face.‟929
6.4 Conclusion
Within the provincial chronotopic space of fictional Mellick, O‟Brien re-created her native
Limerick Her novels of the 1930s formed a composite social morphology of the Catholic bourgeois
family in provincial Ireland, from before the Act of Union, to de Valera‟s 1937 constitutional
referedum in the Irish Free State. Without My Cloak, O‟Brien‟s first representation of Mellick,
depicted the historical development of a „Catholic Ireland, never a nationalist Ireland,‟930 during
the nineteenth century. The main interest of the mercantile Considine family was „to wring the
supply from [the] small and lazily farmed island. [. . . ] The uncertainty of the Irish yield and the
inertia among tenant-farmers always provided a dangerous element of gamble.‟931 As a result, the
struggle to create wealth and attain social status was of primary importance to the Considines. As a
Catholic bourgeois family, its members were expected to know their places. However, O‟Brien
introduced the element of gender bias in her depiction of nineteenth century Ireland. As a male heir,
Denis‟s attempt to escape Mellick and its class strictures was tolerated to a certain extent by the
Considines; as was the criticism that he levelled against his family‟s raison d‘ être. In an outburst
against his father, he asks „What in the hell‘s the matter with us, that we insist on owning things we
know nothing whatever about?‟932 In the end, Denis in spite of his desire to pursue the life of a
landscape artist, lacks the imagination to create or pursue a life beyond the class horizons of his
family and the insular, but secure environs of Mellick.
But upon the return of his prodigal son, Anthony proclaims to Denis: „River Hill was a
tomb, without you.‟933 In contrast, the standard for Considine women is different. They are expected
to breed further generations and appear elegant. Molly dies giving birth to her ninth child and
Caroline's escape from Mellick is short-lived. Her gender precludes any tolerance shown to Denis.
Her flight from provincial Ireland was met with alarm, and stern measures were taken to secure her
927
Ibid., 271.
Ibid., 295.
929
Ibid., 299.
930
Eavan Boland, quoted in Joan Ryan, „Class and Creed in Kate O‟Brien‟ in (ed) Maurice Harmon, The
Irish Writer and the City, (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1984) p.126.
931
O‟Brien, Cloak, 107.
932
Ibid., 434-435.
928
166
return. One of the core themes that can be distilled from Without My Cloak, is a representation of
how the ascendancy of the Catholic bourgeois and the social morphology of the large provincial
Irish town influenced each other with varying degrees of centripetal force in the insecure rural
economy of the nineteenth century.
This conservative pattern of social and cultural growth dominated Irish provincial life well
into the early decades of the twentieth century.
O‟Brien‟s abstract and minimalist depiction of
Mellick in Prayer for the Wanderer, represents apotheosis of the provincial Catholic bourgeois in
the Free State during the late 1930s. Nell Mahoney and Matt Costello as heirs of this class, play
different roles in O‟Brien‟s representation of the complexity of place during this period.
Nell is
rooted to a „Mellick where a lady is still what she was in 1912,‟934 and lives a social space which
holds that „a wife is just as sacred an undertaking as an Illusion.‟935
In contrast, Matt who has
been exposed as an artist to the romantic, cosmopolitanism of London and the capitals of Europe,
finds upon his return home, that Mellick is a place that would negate his identity as a writer, rather
than solve his emotional problems, if he chose to remain. Rejecting his marriage proposal, Nell
tells him: „Go back to your own world, Matt - you‘ll find some solution there. There isn‘t any in
Ireland.‟936
After ambiguously hinting at a reunion between Nell and her cousin Tom, to perhaps
symbolize the continuing pattern of a late-Victorian sensibility in provincial Mellick, O‟Brien
depicts Matt relaxing over a glass of sherry after making preparations to leave Ireland, following
the news that a theatrical agent in New York needs to urgently discuss production arrangements for
his play. As he sips the sherry, he muses on the condition of his native country: „Oh green and trim
Free State! Smug, obstinate and pertinacious little island, your sins and ignorances are thick upon
your face, and thickening under the authority of your ―sea-green incorruptible‖! But your guilts
seem positively innocent, your ignorances are perhaps wisdom when measured up against the
general European plight.‟937
He then turns his thoughts to the immediate surroundings of Weir
House, which O‟Brien has created as an ironic spatial metaphor operating within the political
discourse of de Valera‟s Free State: „The harmony within this house, for instance -is that
representative and does it promise anything? This uncrowded landscape, flowing peace. This easy
sense of God and of right and wrong, with fastidiousness and curious courage that such possessions
give. God save Ireland. There might conceivably be some general hope in such a salvage.‟938
933
Ibid., 428.
Ibid., 264.
935
Ibid., 265.
936
Ibid., 267.
937
Ibid., 306-307.
934
167
938
Ibid., 307.
168
Part Three
Urban Experiences
169
170
7. „Bottled Climates‟
Samuel Beckett
Habit has been reorganised –an operation described by Proust as „longer
and more difficult than the turning inside out of an eyelid, and which
consists in the imposition of our own familiar soul on the terrifying soul of
our surroundings.‟
Samuel Beckett, Proust (1932)
7.1 Introduction
The representations of Dublin in Samuel Beckett‟s 1934 short story collection More Kicks
than Pricks depicted through the eyes and lifeworld of a enigmatic figure named Belacqua, reveals
the paradox of a manic city, filled with the social malaise of ennui. Despite his later self-imposed
exile to France, Beckett‟s early prose was anchored in a subjective impression of Dublin and its
environs. Its construction was idiosyncratically modernist, suggestive of European artistic trends of
the period and stood in stark contrast to the representations of Irishness produced by the Anglo-Irish
Literary Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which had contributed to the
gestation of an independent state during the formative years of Beckett‟s adolescence.
In a 1934 essay entitled Recent Irish Poetry, Beckett wrote that an artist conscious of the
influence in their works of personal subjectivity: „may state the space that intervenes between him
and the world of objects; he may state it as a no-man‘s-land, Hellespont or vacuum, according as
he happens to be feeling resentful, nostalgic or merely depressed.939‟ Estranged from the heavily
Catholic social milieu of the Irish Free State of the 1930s, as a member of the minority Protestant
bourgeois, Beckett was acerbically critical of the State‟s polity during the two decades after
independence. However, by rejecting the cultural nationalism dominating the Free State, he was not
repudiating Irishness, per se.
Most of the characters in Beckett‟s oeuvre have personalities
influenced by his Irish origins, which can be traced back to his seminal character Belacqua, whom
he created during the early 1930s. Beckett‟s character first appeared to his reading public as a
neurotic anti-hero in his 1934 short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks. Belacqua was a
figure who traveled compulsively around Dublin. In the plotting of these early short stories Beckett
illustrated through the perambulations of Belacqua, Bakhtin‟s contention that „the chronotope of the
road is both a point of new departures and a place for events to find their denouement. Time as it
were, fuses together with space and flows in it.‟940 Within the compressed and nucleated spaces of
Samuel Beckett „Recent Irish Poetry‟ in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (ed.)
Ruby Cohn ( London: Calder, 1983) p. 70.
940
Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 244.
939
171
his short stories, Beckett illustrated the chronotopic feature of „human fates and lives‟941 combining
„with one another in distinctive ways, even as they become more complex and more concrete by the
collapse of social distances (original emphasis).‟942
Beckett‟s modernist reading of Dublin
rejected the mythologies underpinning Irish cultural nationalism, which subordinated the individual
to the collective ideological tropes of an idealised heritage. By casting off the aesthetic framings of
the Irish Literary Revival, Beckett signalled a willingness to pursue his own artistic path, which
would lead him to choose self imposed exile in Paris, by the end of the 1930s.
7.1.1 Lifepath
Beckett was born on 13 April 1906 at Cooldrinagh, his family home in Foxrock, an affluent
suburb of Dublin. His parents William and Mary were upper class Protestants, his father worked as
a quantity surveyor and inherited a construction business. Beckett boarded in private schools, before
reading Modern Languages at Trinity College Dublin. He graduated from Trinity in 1927 and was
awarded a fellowship to teach at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was contractually
obliged to return in 1930 to the University of Dublin to lecture in French, and complete a Master‟s
degree. His immersion in the bohemian Parisian culture of the late 1920s exposed him to the
aesthetic trend of the Surrealists who were preoccupying the Continent‟s artists and intellectuals at
the time: „Not only did their work influence Beckett‘s creative development, but their bitterness
towards World War I also recalled many arguments he had heard in Dublin. Primarily devoted to
unifying the inner and outer worlds, the Surrealists were also committed to exposing the false
dreams and hollow values that had produced the war.‟943
Aside from his lecturing duties at the Ecole, Beckett earned money by undertaking
translations for various magazines, including „transition‘ which declared in a 1929 editorial: „the
new TRANSITION, having little faith in reason or Science as ultimate methods [. . .] in a spirit of
integral pessimism, proposes to combat all rationalist dogmas that stand in the way of a
metaphysical universe.‟944 Beckett became influenced by the artistic philosophy of its editor Eugene
Jolas and after publishing pieces of poetry in its pages, began to fashion his work according to the
dictates of an inner compass, whilst adjusting his lifestyle to an openly libertine atmosphere:
„Beckett‘s two-year stay in Paris found him in a city which brothels were legal, even fashionable,
and where it was not unusual to spend an evening drinking with one‘s friends.‟945 Despite the
personal and intellectual freedom that the city offered him, Beckett was ambivalent about this
Continental metropolis. Reflecting on his attachment to Paris, during the early 1930s he noted: „the
941
Ibid., 243.
Ibid.
943
L. Gordon, The World of Samuel Beckett: 1906-1946 (New Haven & London: Yale University Press,
1996) p. 34.
944
Ibid., 39.
942
172
sensation of taking root, like a polypus, in a place [. . .] is horrible, living on a kind of mucous [sic]
of conformity. And this of all places.‟946
Beckett commenced his academic post at Trinity in October of 1930. He lived a solitary life
in rooms at college, finding comfort only in long walks that he took to stave off boredom and
depression. During his walks, he experienced a clarity of mind and wrote at the time: „the mind has
a most pleasant and melancholy limpness, is a carrefour of memories, memories of childhood
mostly, moulin a larmes [mill of tears].‟ 947 Beckett‟s walks also served as a distraction for the
writer‟s block that he experienced after his return from Paris: „he found himself spending most of his
time walking (his remedy for coping with and possibly inviting the muse) or sitting in one pub after
another until he abandoned any attempt at schedule or routine in disgust. Later, he would use these
long frustrating walks –from one end of Dublin to the other, through the Wicklow Hills, along
country lanes and past deserted railway stations – in his writing, in descriptions of the countryside
or of his thoughts while pacing.‟948
Beckett also frequently patronized the National Gallery of Ireland: „he could spend as much
as an hour in front of a single painting, looking at it with intense concentration, savouring its forms
and its colours, reading it, absorbing its minutest detail. Often it was the tiny narrative or human
aspects that he picked out and, later, could remember seeing in a canvas.‟949 Beckett became
especially intrigued „in the 1930s about the German Expressionists: Kirchner, Feininger, Kandinsky
and Nolde.‟950 Their execution impacted his writing style and influenced the themes he chose to
pursue: „techniques of distortion, fragmentation, isolation and alienation were therefore familiar to
him through painting.‟951
Viewing a landscape painting by Paul Cézanne at the Tate Gallery in London in 1934, he
found a visual analogy for what he was attempting to represent in his prose. He wrote at the time:
„Cézanne [. . .] seems to have been the first to see landscape and state it as material of a strictly
peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever. Atomistic landscape with
no velleities of vitalism, landscape with personality a la riguer, but personality in its own terms, not
in Pelman‘s, landscapality.‟952
Contrasting Cézanne‟s landscape treatments, against the
anthropomorphic projections found within the frames of earlier painters, Beckett noted that Cézanne
„could understand the dynamic intrusion to be himself and so landscape to be something by
945
James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996) p. 139.
Ibid., 168.
947
Ibid., 137.
948
Deirdre Bair, Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1990) p. 169.
949
Knowlson, 195.
950
Ibid., 196
951
Ibid.
952
Samuel Beckett, letter to Thomas McGreevy , 8 Sept. 1934 (TCD) referenced in Knowlson, Damned to
Fame, 197.
946
173
definition unapproachably alien, unintelligible arrangement of atoms, not so much ruffled by the
kind attentions of the Reliability Joneses.‟953 These insights on perception that Cézanne‟s painting
instigated seem to have been gestating in Beckett‟s imagination when he produced the
representations of Dublin in his early prose.
7.2 More Pricks than Kicks (1934)
7.2.1 Introduction
By 1931 Beckett had reached the conclusion that lecturing in Ireland was a „grotesque
comedy,‟954 and abruptly resigned his lectureship at Trinity, to devote himself entirely to writing. He
travelled to Germany, before moving on to Paris where he lived temporarily from February to July
of 1932 in „a little room like a chambre de bonne at the top of the Trianon Palace Hôtel [. . . ] at 1
bis and 3 rue Vaugirard.‟955 Rising every morning, Beckett would „go straight from his morning
tea or coffee to his typewriter or his books, his biblical concordance, his dictionaries, his
Stendhal.‟956 During this period of prolific writing Beckett produced a novel entitled Dream of Fair
to Middling Women. Rejecting the „chloroformed world‟957 of nineteenth century fiction where
characters were transformed into „clockwork cabbages,‟958 Beckett introduced in his fiction a young
man named Belacqua based upon a character from Dante‟s Purgatorio. Belacqua, who possesses a
grotesque appearance, represents the archetypical Beckettian figure in which „tramps, clowns,
alcoholics, failures and misfits are, singularly and collectively, the tormented often demented
Samuel Beckett.‟959 In the novel, Belacqua‟s feelings about Dublin embodied Beckett‟s own
personal sense of malaise for the city of his birth:
For his native city had got him again, her miasmata already had all but laid
him low, the yellow marsh fever that she keeps up her sleeve for her more
distinguished sons had clapped its clammy honeymoon hands upon him, his
moral temperature had gone sky-rocketing aloft, soon he would shudder and
kindle in the hourly ague.960
Beckett‟s writing at the time was informed by his still evolving aesthetic philosophy which placed
„the self against society, the microcosm against the macrocosm, depth against surface, intuition
against intellect. [. . . ] despatching science, theology, and Cartesian dualism, Beckett [envisaged]
an art riddled with questions rather than sealed off in solutions.‟961 This evolving philosophy
influenced and coloured Beckett‟s depiction of Dublin‟s landmark features in the novel, such as his
953
Ibid.
Knowlson, 126.
955
Ibid., 145.
956
Ibid., 146.
957
Ibid.
958
Ibid.
959
M. Junker, Beckett: The Irish Dimension, (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1995), p. 16.
960
Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women (London: Calder, 1993) p. 169.
961
Ruby Cohn, „Foreword‟ in Disjecta, 12.
954
174
ambient and menacing depiction of the River Liffey, as night spread from the sea through its
channel to the city:
Here they had killed the lyrical October days, the magic film of light. And
there, in its neutral sleep, the landscape was spending a slow phase. A man, a
burly man, Nemo to be precise, paused on O‟Connell Bridge and raised his
face to the tulips of the evening, the green tulips, shining round the corner like
an anthrax, shining on Guinness‟s barges. Behind him, spouting and spouting
from the grey sea, the battalions of night, devouring the sky, soaking up the
tattered sky like an ink of pestilence. The city would be hooded, the dusk
would be harried from the city.962
With its surrealistic landscapes, stream of consciousness narrative and arcane references to Dante‟s
Divina Commedia, his novel illustrated that „the literary heritage [was] as real for Beckett the
young intellectual and erstwhile academic as the so-called real world outside his mind.‟963 Partially
as a result of Beckett‟s idiosyncratic stylistic conventions, Dream of Fair to Middling Women
remained unpublished until after his death. Despite this, Beckett‟s representations of Dublin in the
novel would re-emerge, in some cases verbatim, in a 1934 collection of short stories centred on the
travails of his seminal character Belacqua.
7.2.2. The ‗Bottled Climates‘ of Dublin
Upon its publication in 1934, Beckett‟s collection of stories entitled More Pricks than Kicks,
was immediately banned by the Censorship Board, despite the obscure Biblical reference contained
in its title „from Acts ix, 5: ―I am Jesus whom thou persecutest; it is hard for thee to kick against the
pricks.‖ In Beckett‘ usage, martyrdom may figure, but the pricks are also sexual. The title was
enough for the book to be banned in Ireland without even having been read by the censors.‟964
Highly impressionistic and suffused with a neurotic sense of place, these short vignettes set in
Dublin and it environs depended: „very little on actual events or people. He called them ―bottled
climates‖ and said they came into being without any conviction on his part, only because he would
have perished from boredom had he not written them.‟965
The prose style Beckett employed to
depict Dublin and its hinterlands, conveys the idea that „modernity implie[s] a phenomenal world -a
specifically urban one -that was markedly quicker, more chaotic, fragmented, and disorienting than
in previous phases of human culture. Amid the unprecedented turbulence of the big city‘s traffic,
noise, billboards, street signs, jostling crowds, window displays, and advertisements, the individual
962
Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, p. 28.
Lawrence Harvey, Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970) p.
124.
964
Bair,Samuel Beckett: A Biography, 190.
965
Ibid., 172.
963
175
faced a new intensity of sensory stimulation.‟966
The events and scenes that Belacqua experiences
in Beckett‟s collection of stories include a drunken evening containing an encounter with the Civic
Guards and the atmosphere of a bohemian Christmas party, a tragic bus accident and the microcosm
of a public house, and the environs surrounding a Northside lunatic asylum. Three selections of
Beckett‟s representations of Dublin will be examined. Two stories, A Wet Night and Ding-Dong
specifically convey Beckett‟s manic perception of the modernity which was erupting in Dublin of
the early 1930s. At the beginning of both stories Belacqua surfaces from the sub-terranean depths
of College Street near location of the Thomas Moore Statue, to a frenetic and bustling streetscape. In
a third story entitled Fingal, a panoramic view of Dublin‟s coastline is depicted from a perspective
framed by the grounds of a lunatic asylum.
7.2.3. A Wet Night
In this story, Belacqua emerges on to College Street from the „hot bowels of McLouglin‘s‘967
Public House during the dark, frenzied December Christmas holiday rush: „Hark, it is the season of
festivity and goodwill. Shopping is in full swing, the streets are thronged with revelers, the
Corporation has offered a prize for the best-dressed window. Hyam‘s trousers are down again.‟968
Located on Westmoreland Street, Hyam‟s Tailors and Outfiters, was a Jewish owned establishment
in the city, and the fictional McLoughlin‟s, situated on the intersection of D‟Olier, College and
Pearse Streets, was in most probability based upon the Crampton House, a licensed premise which
occupied a place at that junction during the period. Beckett‟s vibrant impressions of the Dublin
streetscape in A Wet Night pulse and flash across the page. Through darkness and rain, the top of
Dame Street in front of the gates of Trinity College is illuminated like a beacon by the ultra-violet
colours of a neon billboard sign:
Bright and cheery above the strom of the Green, as though coached by the Star
of Bethlem, the Bovril sign danced and danced through its seven phases. The
lemon of faith jaundiced, annunciating the series, was in a fungus of hopeless
green reduced to shingles and abolished. Whereupon the light went out, in
homage to the slain. A sly ooze of gules, carmine of solicitation, lifting the
skirts of green that the prophecy might be fulfilled, shocking Gabriel into
cherry, flooded the sign. But the long skirts came rattling down, darkness
covered their shame, the cycle was at an end. Da capo. Bovril into Salome . .
. 969.
Ben Singer, „Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism,‟ in (eds.) Leo Charney
and Vanessa R. Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkely: University of California Press,
1995) pp.72-73.
967
Samuel Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks,(New York: Grove Press, 1972 [1934]) p. 47.
968
Ibid.
969
Ibid.
966
176
Despite Belacqua‟s best intentions to „keep himself to himself on a high stool with a high round and
feign to be immersed in the Moscow notes of the Twilight Herald,‟970 his drunken encounters on this
rainy evening will include the Civic Guards and the colourful members of a bohemian party.
Beckett depicts the pedestrian and vehicular congestion blighting Belacqua‟a path as he
contemplates his possible routes to other public houses from McLoughlin‟s:
Of the two houses that appealed spontaneously to these exigencies the one,
situate in Merrion Row, was a home from home for jarveys. As some folk
from hens, so Belacqua shrank from jarveys. Rough, gritty, almost verminous
men. From Moore to Merrion Row, moreover, was a perilous way, beset at
this hour with poets and peasants and politicians. The other lay in Lincoln
Place, he might go gently by Pearse Street, there was nothing to stop him.
Long straight Pearse Street, it permitted a simple cantilena in his mind, its
footway peopled with the tranquil and detached in fatigue, its highway
dehumanised in a tumult of buses. Trams were monsters, moaning along
beneath the wild gesture of the trolley. But buses were pleasant, tires and glass
and clash and no more. Then to pass by the Queens, home of tragedy, was
charming at that hour, was to pass between the old theatre and the long line of
the poor and lowly queued up for thruppence worth of pictures.971
After negotiating his way across the terrain of this urban landscape Belacqua finds himself at halfnine standing in the rain outside of Kennedy‟s public house where „he had bought a bottle, it was
like a breast in the pocket of his reefer.‟972 Stumbling around the „unintelligible world of Lincoln
Place,‟973 he is obviously seriously intoxicated: „The next thing was his hands dragged roughly
down from is eyes, which he had opened on the vast crimson face of an ogre. For a moment it was
still, plush gargoyle, then it moved, it was convulsed. This, he thought, is the face of some person
talking. It was. It was that part of a Civic Guard pouring abuse upon him.‟974
At this point Belacqua „subduing a great desire to visit the pavement [. . . ] catted, with
undemonstrative abundance, all over the boots and trouser ends of the Guard, in return for which
incontinence he received such a dunch on the breast that he fell hip and thigh into the outskirts of
his own offal.‟975 Contritely he uses the Twilight Herald to clean the trousers and boots of the
Guard, and is sent off with a warning. Belacqua then heads up Kildare Street in the pouring rain and
makes his way to the Grand Canal, where he disrobes and bathes in the „bitter nor‘-wester that was
blowing‘976: „His feet dangled over the canal and he saw lurching across the remote hump of
Leeson Street Bridge, trams like hiccups-o‘- the wisp. Distant lights on a dirty night, how he loved
970
Ibid., 48.
Ibid., 48-49.
972
Ibid., 70.
973
Ibid.
974
Ibid., 70-71.
975
Ibid., 71.
976
Ibid., 73.
971
177
them, the dirty low-church Protestant!‟977 Belacqua now washed by the wet night, makes his way to
the party, which Beckett populates with a bohemian coterie of Dubliners:
Two banned novelists, a bibliomaniac and his mistress, a paleographer, a
violist d‟amore with his instrument in a bag, a popular parodist with his sister
and six daughters, a still more popular Professor of Bullscrit and Comparative
Ovoidology, the saprophile the better for drink, a communist painter and
decorator fresh back from the Moscow reserves, a merchant prince, two grave
Jews, a rising strumpet, three more poets with Lauras to match, disaffected
cicisbeo, a chorus of playwrights, the inevitable envoy of the Fourth Estate, a
phalanx of Grafton Street Stürmers, and Jeremy Higgins arrived now in
body.978
At the party Belacqua meets his „current one and only,‟979 girlfriend Alba. After enduring a soiree
of word-play and innuendos, the couple leave and hail a taxi to Alba‟s home. Beckett ends his story
with a direct allusion to James Joyce‟s The Dead, which was also set during the Christmas holiday
season in Dublin: „But the wind had dropped, as it so often does in Dublin when all the respectable
men and women whom it delights to annoy have gone to be, and the rain fell in uniform untroubled
manner. It fell upon the bay, the littoral, the mountains and the plains, and notable upon the
Central Bog it fell with a rather desolate uniformity.‟980 However the softly falling snow covering
the Irish landscape at the end of Joyce‟s short story, is replaced in Beckett‟s piece with rain, a less
romantic and colourless image to suit his own drab and dreary perspective coloured by the
alienation of the marginalized Irish Protestant living in Dublin City surrounded by a threatening and
encroaching countryside that in the 1930s is overwhelmingly Catholic and nationalist.
7.2.4. Ding-Dong
The second representation of a manic and somewhat chaotic Dublin can be found in the
story Ding-Dong, which centres around a tragic bus accident in which a young tenement girl is
killed. The constant of motion implied by Beckett, is embodied in his representation of Belacqua
who „enlivened his solipsism [. . .] with the belief that best thing to do was to move constantly from
place to place.‟981 The story is situated in the warren of streets surrounding Trinity College, and
Belacqua is depicted climbing the stairs out of a public toilet:
Emerging, on the particular evening in question, from the underground
convenience in the maw of College Street, with a vague impression that had
come from following the sunset up the Liffey till all the colour had been harried
from the sky, all the tulips and aerugo expunged, he squatted, not that he had
too much drink taken but simply that for the moment there were no grounds for
977
Ibid.
Ibid., 65-66.
979
Ibid., 51.
980
Ibid., 82-83.
981
Ibid., 36.
978
178
his favouring one direction rather than another, against Thomas Moore‟s
plinth.982
As Belacqua stands in the fading shadow of Moore‟s bronze statue, contemplating his next move,
he is confronted with an overwhelming myriad of electrified signs, including the large neon Bovril
advertisement, which has become iconic in Beckett‟s urban prose as a symbol for 1930s Dublin.
Belacqua can see the cascading neon colours of the sign winking over the busy intersection of
College Green and Trinity College: „There were signs on all hands. There was the big Bovril sign to
begin with, flaring beyond the Green. But it was useless. Faith, Hope and -what was it? -Love,
Eden missed, every ebb derided, all the tides ebbing from the shingle of Ego Maximus‟983
Belacqua then turns and sees the „blind paralytic who sat all day under the corner of Fleet
Street,‟984 in his „wheel chair being pushed rapidly under the arcade of the Bank, in the direction of
Dame Street. It moved in and out of sight behind the bars of the columns. ‟985
The juxtaposition of a blind figure in a place where the visual sensory overload threatens,
confuses and infiltrates the urban consciousness, can be read as a Beckettian comment on the ironic
state of modernity. As Belacqua peers at the commodified message of the electric Bovril
advertisement he thinks to himself: „Itself it went nowhere, only round and round, the spheres, but
mutely [. . . ] it could only put ideas into his head [. . . ] What he would not give now to get on the
move again! Away from ideas!‟986 As a result of this sensory overload Belacqua turns on his heel
and heads in the opposite direction: „Down Pearse Street, that is to say, long straight Pearse Street,
its vast Barrack of Glencullen granite, its home of tragedy restored and enlarged, its coal
merchants and Florentined Fire Brigade Station, its two Cervi saloons, ice-cream and fried fish, its
dairies, garages and monumental sculptors, and implicit behind the whole length of its southern
frontage the College.‟987 This crowded streetscape lining the northern boundary of Trinity College,
crammed with shops and businesses, is the site of a tragic bus accident, in which a young tenement
girl is struck and killed as she tries to cross Pearse Street. The accident has created a living
spectacle for an assembled crowd of cinemagoers outside a movie theatre, waiting to buy their
tickets to view a film:
All day the road was a tumult of buses, red and blue and silver. By one of
these a little girl was run down, just as Belacqua drew near to the railway
viaduct. She had been to the Hibernian Dairies for milk and bread and then
she had plunged out into the road way, she was in such a childish fever to get
back in record time with her treasure to the tenement in Mark Street where she
982
Ibid., 38.
Ibid., 39.
984
Ibid.
985
Ibid.
986
Ibid.
987
Ibid., 40.
983
179
lived. The good milk was all over the road and the loaf, was sitting up against
the kerb for all the world as though a pair of hands had taken it up and set it
down there. The queue standing for the Palace Cinema was torn between
conflicting desires: to keep their places and to see the excitement. They craned
their necks and called out to know the worst, but they stood firm. Only one
girl, debauched in appearance and swathed in a black blanket, fell out near the
sting of the queue and secured the loaf. With the loaf under her blanket she
sidled unchallenged down Mark Street and turned into Mark Lane.988
Disturbed initially by the myriad of electrified advertisements placing ideas into his head, and now
horrified by the spectacle of the young girl‟s death, Belacqua hurries down Pearse Street, takes a
left on „Lombard Street, the street of sanitary engineers,‟989 and enters a public house, where
despite his grotesque appearance: „He was tolerated, what was more, and left alone by the rough
but kindly habitués of the house, recruited for the most part from among dockers, railwaymen and
vague joxers on the dole. Here also art and love, scrabbling in dispute or staggering home, were
barred, or, perhaps better, unknown. The aesthetes and the impotent were far away.‟990 In Beckett‟s
depiction of this public house located on Lombard Street,
we see Belacqua propped on his
barstool, examining microscopically, the fittings and functions of the pub:
Sitting in this crapulent den, drinking his drink, he gradually ceased to see its
furnishings with pleasure, the bottles, representing centuries of loving
research, the stools, the counter, the powerful screws, the shining phalanx of
the pulls and the beer engines, all cunningly devised and elaborated to further
the relations between purveyor and consumer in this domain. The bottles
drawn and emptied in a twinkling, the casks responding to the slightest
pressure on their joysticks, the weary proletarians at rest on B.T.M. and
elbow, the cash register that never complains, the graceful curates flying from
customer to customer, all this made up a spectacle in which Belacqua was
used to take delight and chose to see a pleasant instance of machinery decently
subservient to appetite. A great major symphony of supply and demand,
effect and cause, fulcrate on the middle C of the counter and waxing, as it
proceeded, in the charming harmonics of blasphemy and broken glass and all
the aliquots of fatigue and ebriety.991
A large portion of Beckett‟s time in Dublin during the early 1930s at Trinity was spent in public
houses and it has been noted that: „the best of conversation can be heard in the Dublin pub, the
inner temple as it were of confabulation, at the shrine of which the Dubliner worships with a
singular passion.‟992 As a consequence, the dialect in Ding-Dong reflects the Irishness of the city
and its personality. As Belacqua finds „himself sitting paralysed and grieving in a pub of all places,
988
Ibid.,40-41.
Ibid., 41.
990
Ibid.
991
Ibid., 51-52.
992
Eoin O‟Brien, The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett‘s Ireland, (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1986) p.
247.
989
180
good for nothing but to stare at his spoiling porter, and wait for a sign,‟993 a beggar woman
appears: „Her speech was that of a woman of the people, but of a gentlewoman of the people.‟994 It
seems that she is selling tickets for seats in heaven, and Beckett‟s prose captures one of Dublin‟s
many distinct vernaculars:
„Seats in heaven‟ she said in a white voice „tuppence apiece, four fer a tanner.‟
„No‟ said Belacqua. It was the first syllable to come to his lips. It had not been
his intention to deny her.
„The best of seats‟ she said „again I‟m sold out. Tuppence apiece the best of
seats, four fer a tanner‟
[. . .]
„Have you got them on you?‟ he mumbled.
„Heaven goes round‟ she said, whirling her arm, „and round and round and
round and round.‟
„Yes‟ said Belacqua „round and round.‟
„Rowan‟ she said, dropping the d‟s and getting more of a spin into the slogan,
„rowan an‟ rowan an‟ rowan.‟995
At the end of Beckett‟s story the beggar woman „went away and her countenance lighted her to
her room in Townsend Street.‟996 Belacqua „tarried a little to listen to the music. Then he also
departed, but for Railway Street, beyond the river.‟997 The destination at the end of Beckett‟s story
was in all probability „The Kips‘: ‗Dublin‘s red-light district [which] was situated at Railway Street
[. . . ] and Montgomery Street (now Foley Street) from which came the popular name for the area
―Monto‖. In this locale, described as ―one of the most dreadful dens of immorality in Europe,‖ the
city police permitted prostitution.‟998
7.2.5. Fingal
In the story entitled Fingal, Beckett‟s character Belacqua takes a girl named Winnie to the
environs of north-county Dublin: „So one fine Spring morning he brought her out into the country,
to the Hill of Feltrim in the country [. . . ] It was a landmark for miles around on account of the
high ruin, The Hill of the Wolves.‟999 Gazing across the bay they see the city and the Dublin
mountains: „It was not been very long on the top before he began to feel a very sad animal
indeed.‟1000 Winnie finds Fingal dull, to which Belacqua responds „ ―it‘s a magic land‖ he sighed
― like Saône-et-Loire‖.‟
1001
The allusion can be taken from Beckett‟s Parisean sojourn. The view
for Belacqua seems a refuge from the travails of the city: „“I often come to this hill!” he said “to
993
Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks,43.
Ibid., 44.
995
Ibid.,45.
996
Ibid., 46.
997
Ibid.
998
O‟Brien, Beckett Country, 176.
999
Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks, 23.
1000
Ibid.
1001
Ibid., 24.
994
181
have a view of Fingal, and each time I see it more as a back-land, a land of sanctuary, a land that
you don‘t have to dress up to, that you can walk in a lounge suit, smoking a cigar‖.‟1002 The mood
between the pair is labile: „Things were beginning to blow up nasty,‟1003 each feeling alternatively
sulky or happy on Beckett‟s turn of phrase, and his framing of landscape. Gazing out over Dublin
Bay, Belacqua spots the Portraine Lunatic Asylum and points it out to Winnie:
They followed the estuary all the way around, admiring the theories of swans
and coots, over the dunes and past the Martello tower, so they came upon
Portraine from the south and the sea instead of like a vehicle by the railway
bridge and the horrible red chapel of Donabete. The place was as full of
towers as Dun Laoghaire of steeples: two Martello, the red ones of the asylum,
a water tower and the round.1004
They agree to walk along the rim of the bay in the direction of Portraine. As they make their way
they pass a man working in a field, his bicycle lying half hidden in the grass. They reach the high
grounds above the asylum and peer down into its grounds:
Below in the playground on the right some of the milder patients were kicking
a football. Others were lounging about, alone and in knots, taking their ease in
the sun. The head of one appeared over the wall [. . . ] One of the gangs was
walking round and round the playground. Below on the other hand a long line
of workmen‟s dwellings, in the gardens children playing and crying. Abstract
the asylum and there was little of Portraine but ruins.1005
Beckett‟s representation of Portraine as a place that is situated between an asylum ruins, Martello
towers and church steeples can be read as a spatial metaphor for his perspective on the censorious
milieu of the Irish Free State during the 1930s. The staunchly confessional state with its censorship
laws and Catholic centred polity was occupying a palimpsest space once inscribed by the hand of
an imperial power. Winnie remarks: „that the lunatics seemed very sane and well-behaved to her.
Belacqua agreed but he thought the head over the wall told a tale. Landscapes were of interest to
Belacqua only in so far as they furnished him with a pretext for a long face.‟1006 In the story Dr.
Sholto an acquaintance of Winnie appears. This gives Belacqua the chance to escape. Fabricating a
story that he will meet the pair at the front of the asylum in three quarters of an hour, he instead
steals a bicycle and heads for „Taylor‘s public-house in Swords.‟1007 When he does not appear at
the appointed time, Winnie tells Sholto: „ ―I supposes he‘s somewhere‖.‟1008 And thinks to herself „
A land of sanctuary, he had said, where much had been suffered secretly. Yes, the last ditch.‟1009
1002
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 24.
1004
Ibid., 26.
1005
Ibid., 30.
1006
Ibid.
1007
Ibid., 35.
1008
Ibid., 32.
1009
Ibid., 33.
1003
182
This passage in Beckett‟s story and its reading of landscape, is illuminated by an enigmatic answer
he gave in reply decades later, to a question on how „had such a small, seemingly backward country
as Ireland produced so many great writers in such a relatively brief period of time.‟1010 Beckett
replied: „When you are in the last ditch, there is nothing left but to sing.‟1011 And then clarified his
response: „It‘s the English Government and the Catholic Church [. . .] --they have buggered us into
existence.‟1012
7.2.6 Summary
Beckett‟s chronotopic representation of Dublin in More Pricks than Kicks captured the
sensibility and personality of the modern city and its streetscapes. Instead of being recognized as a
critical voice which depicted this liminal phenomenon emerging in Dublin of the 1930s, he was
awarded number 465 by confessional Government censors and placed on The Register of
Prohibited Publications. The role of art served as a aesthetic barometer for Beckett, as a means to
gauge the cultural and political atmosphere of the Irish Free State, which he found stifling and
suffocating: „As for the glorification of nationality, he was appalled by its extremes, especially in
such things as the Censorship Act [. . . ] or the four-year-long boycott that had closed the libraries
in County Mayo because the librarian happened to be a Protestant. He viewed the growing
militancy of the Catholic Church in its effort to censor art as an unbearable affront to his personal
liberty and [ . . . ] found it increasingly impossible to continue to work in a society that had just
removed the last remaining nude from the National Gallery.‟1013
7.3 Conclusion
Raised and educated in the cloistered Protestant environs of Portora Royal School in
Enniskillen and Trinity College Dublin, Beckett found himself as a member of a de-classé and
marginalized minority in the emerging realpolitik of the Free State. Finding its polity repressive
he wrote in Censorship and the Saorstat that the government promoted „Sterilization of the
mind‟1014 and that its legislators had „bigger and better things to split than hairs, the pubic not
excepted.‟
1015
Beckett suffered acute depression and anxiety attacks during the period, which led
to his nervous breakdown in 1933. Because psychoanalytical treatment was illegal in Irish Free
State during the period, Beckett had to travel to London to avail of this procedure, which was in its
infancy, but in vogue in European intellectual and artistic circles. This experience certainly framed
his perception of the state of affairs in his native city. The stigma attached to mental illness in Irish
Deirdre Bair „No Man‟s Land, Hellespont or vacuum: Samuel Beckett‟s Irishness,‟ in (eds.) Mark Patrick
Hederman and Richard Kearney, Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies: 1977-1981 (Dublin: Blackwater Press,
1982) p. 101.
1011
Ibid.
1012
Ibid.
1013
Bair, Beckett: A Biography, 126-127.
1014
Beckett, Disjecta, 87.
1010
183
society, could have played a factor in his sense of personal alienation. Beckett‟s heightened
sensitivity to his immediate atmosphere contributed to the vivid and fragmented depictions of the
environment in which he found himself.
In his 1934 essay Recent Irish Poetry, Beckett proclaimed that the role of the artist was to
facilitate „the breakdown of the object, whether current, historical, mystical or spook.‟1016 His
surrealistic and emotionally impressionistic interpretation of Dublin‟s cityscape and the
marginalized figures of
Belacqua, a tenement girl, a beggarwoman and the inmates of the
Portraine Mental Hospital in More Pricks than Kicks, signalled that Beckett would „write as an
inmate in the asylum of the solus ipse, rather than as an Irishman in his native tradition.‟1017
In
conclusion, Beckett‟s notion of Dublin‟s Irishness elicited in More Pricks than Kicks, evokes a
deeper, more modern and existential sort, one that places the idiosyncratic personality above the
heritage of traditions enshrined by the cadre of the Irish Literary Revival, or the propagandists of
cultural nationalism during the 1930s.
1015
Ibid., 84.
Ibid., 70.
1017
Richard Kearney, „Beckett: The End of the Story?‟ in Transitions (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1988), p. 59.
1016
184
8. A City of Two Minds
Flann O’Brien
„All things naturally draw apart and give place to one another.‟
Hercules Furens, translated from the Greek.
Epigraph - At Swim Two Birds (1939)
8.1 Introduction
Flann O‟Brien‟s 1939 novel, At Swim Two Birds concerns the day to day lifeworld of an
anonymous university student, who resides with his uncle in petite bourgeoisie Dublin and is
writing a book about an erstwhile author- publican named Trellis. As the publican‟s characters take
on a life of their own in the urban landscapes of Dublin, elements of the city‟s social and popcultural geographies of the 1930s emerge in O‟Brien‟s idiosyncratic style of prose. His mimetic
and expressive representations depict a meta-physical cityscape in which figures from Celtic
mythology and American cowboys drawn from pulp-fiction Westerns and cinema blend with the
streetscapes and social geographies of working class Dublin of the period, creating ever-changing
melange of place. In turn, the multiple narratives that are contained in the spaces provided by these
representations intertwine like the streets of the newly independent Free State capital -a polis sewn
together from various villages, traditions and heritages.
Like his modernist predecessor James Joyce, O‟Brien anchors his novel‟s representations of
Dublin in the subjective mindscape of his main character. But unlike the Hellenistic and exiled
perspectives contained in Joyce‟s master-opus Ulysses, O‟Brien‟s expressive representations of the
city‟s streetscapes and districts were drawn from the epic story-telling tradition found in the CelticAge epic Tain Bo Cualnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) and the Medieval Irish romance of Suibhne
Geilt (The Rage of Sweeney). It can be understood that „by reaching back into the fluidity of the
oral Celtic tradition, O‘Brien found characters suited to the flux of the new city,‟ 1018 for in Dublin
„the 1930s represent a period when rapid expansion of the city was in its early stages [. . . ] the
built up area had expanded by 50% during the previous three decades and the population had
increased by almost 10,000 in the twenty-five years from 1911.‟1019
The most identifiable
chronotope associated with At Swim Two Birds is that of the „threshold and related chronotopes those of the staircase, the front hall and corridor, as well as the chronotopes of the street and
square [. . . ] places where crisis events occur, the falls, resurrections, renewals, epiphanies,
J. Hassett, „Flann O‟Brien and the Idea of the City‟ in (ed) Maurice Harmon, The Irish Writer and the
City (Gerrard‟s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1984) p. 121.
1019
Arnold Horner, „From City to City-Region, Dublin from the 1930s to the 1990s,‟ in (eds.) F.H.A. Aalen
and Kevin Whelan, Dublin -City and County: From Pre-history to Present, Studies in Honour of J. H.
Andrews (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1992) p. 328.
1018
185
decisions that determine the whole life of man. In this chronotope time is essentially instantaneous;
it is as if it had no duration and falls out of the normal course of biographical time.‟1020 As a piece
of modernist fiction that depicts the urban condition of Dublin during the period, At Swim Two
Birds „mirrors the instability of the city.‟1021 O‟Brien‟s construction of the novel as a „series of
novels within novels mirrors the concentric circles that enfold the events of the city [and] the
anarchic form of [his] novel drapes itself harmoniously around the idea of the city thus far
understood.‟1022 Therefore it can be said that O‟Brien‟s mimetic and expressive representations of
the Irish modern urban condition depicted the changing nature of a fluid, meta-physical metro-pole,
as the once administrative colonial city of Dublin was tentatively transforming itself into the
independent capital of the Irish Free State.
8.1.1 Lifepath
Flann O‟Brien, was born Brian O‟Nolan (Ó Nualláin) in the County Tyrone border town of
Strabane on 11 October 1911. After a series of promotions, his father Michael, a civil servant,
relocated to Dublin, and the family eventually settled in the southern suburb of Blackrock. O‟Brien‟s
ear for representing spoken dialogue in At Swim Two Birds it can be presumed, was finely tuned due
to growing up in a bilingual household: „he heard little English spoken for a number of years. His
childhood reading was necessarily done mostly in English-language books, while his family
conversations were conducted in Irish.‟1023 In 1929 O‟Brien entered University College Dublin, and
in 1932 he passed his B.A. examination in German, English and Irish with second-class honours. At
university O‟Brien and his peers acted as revolving editors of a satirical student periodical named
Comhthrom Feinne, which often took aim in its pages at Catholic middle-class values promoted in
the mainstream campus publication National Student. As editor O‟Brien employed „a myriad of
pseudonymous personalities in the interest of pure destruction,‟1024 and his writing „often mocked
the members of a society called Pro-Fide. It was a Catholic social study group which debated social
issues and sought for a solution to contemporary problems.‟1025
In contrast, Comhthrom Feinne reflected the modernist and European perspectives of a
post-independence cohort of Irish students, wary of the constructions of identity and place shaped
by the literati of the Free State‟s founding generation: „Neither then nor later did [O‘Brien] display
much interest in Celtic twilightery. He was positively hostile to Synge and even, it seems, somewhat
indifferent to Yeats [who] had been effectively typecast in Dublin as a mixture of the fairy lover, the
1020
Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 248.
Hassett, 122-123.
1022
Ibid.
1023
Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2001) p. 505.
1024
Ibid.
1025
Anne Clissman, Flann O‘Brien: A critical introduction to his writings –The Story-Teller‘s Book –Web
(Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1975) p. 11.
1021
186
spiritualist and the pompous ―great man‖ [. . . ] His gods and the gods of his friends were the gods
of his time, big and little: Eliot, Joyce, Aldous Huxley, and Hemingway [. . . ] they also read the 19th
century Russians as well as Proust, Kafka and Kierkegaard.‟
1026
O‟Brien and his peers comprised
„a sort of intellectual mafia, which strongly influenced the cultural and social life of the University
College, and controlled through rather dubious electoral ruses –most of the College clubs and
societies concerned with the arts,‟ 1027 including the university‟s influential Literary and Historical
Debating Society. In 1934 along with a cohort of his peers, O‟Brien published a short-lived satirical
periodical named Blather. In its opening editorial he obliquely declared a manifesto for his
generation, whilst employing an irreverent comedic tone that would resurface in the narrative of At
Swim Two Birds:
„In regards to politics, all our rat-like cunning will be directed towards making
Ireland fit for the depraved readers of Blather to live in [. . . ] We probably have said enough,
perhaps too much. Anyhow, you have got a rough idea of the desperate class of men you are up
against. Maybe you don‘t like us? A lot we care what you think.‟1028
After completing his B.A. degree, O‟Brien commenced a postgraduate degree course. His
MA thesis examined Gaelic nature poetry and in 1935 after acquiring his degree, he followed in the
footsteps of his father and joined the Irish civil service. Strangely, given the urbane setting of his
first novel At Swim Two Birds, his career as a civil servant eventually led him to work in an urban
planning department with a local government authority during the 1950s, as he wrote a column
under the pseudonym Myles na gCopaleen for the Irish Times during the 1940s and 50s.
8.2 At Swim Two Birds (1939)
8.2.1. Introduction
An exploration of At Swim Two Birds will examine mimetic and expressive representations
of place in O‟Brien‟s depiction of 1930s Dublin. The various urban locales contained in these
mimetic and expressive representations suggest that „the very geography of Dublin, with its fiercely
independent villages and suburbs,‟1029 provided O‟Brien with a phenomenological map from which
he could re-imagine and express the city in his idiosyncratic style of prose. A brief introduction to
these respective forms of representation, will define and illustrate their relevance to selected
passages from O‟Brien‟s novel, and will preface an extended geographical reading of the mimetic
and expressive places depicted in At Swim Two Birds.
8.2.2. Mimesis
Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O‘Brien (London: Paladin, 1990) pp.
63-64.
1027
Ibid., 59.
1028
C. Ó Nualláin, The Early Years of Brian O‘Nolan / Flann O‘Brien / Myles na gCopaleen, Translated
from the Irish by Roisin Ni Nuallain, Edited by Niall O‟Nolan (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1998) pp. 103104.
1029
Kiberd, Irish Classics, 514.
1026
187
The mimetic form of representation derives from Plato‟s view of art in which „the artist
makes an ―image‖ - a degraded copy of the external world, which is analogous to an image formed
in a mirror.‘1030 According to Aristotle ‗mimesis is more narrowly defined as a characteristic of
[art] that represents men in action, or men actually doing things.‟1031 Theorists generally agree that
„mimesis, is at one level, a representation of human actions that founds the possibility of both
history and what would now be termed realist fiction,‟1032 and contend that art can „best be
understood as an imitation, a representation, a copy of the physical world.‟1033 O‟Brien‟s mimetic
representation of place in the novel depict the lifeworld of an anonymous student narrator who
lives with his uncle, is writing a book, and spends the majority of his time in his room „observing
the street-scene arranged below,‟1034 or lying in his bed smoking cigarettes. The student is enrolled
at the University College Dublin at Earlsfort Terrace and drinks in a public house off Stephen‟s
Green, named Grogan‟s with his „two true friends,‟1035 Brinsley and Kelly. He also attends the
cinema, bets on horses, and takes late evening walks across Dublin, without purpose, save for the
aim of „embracing virgins,‟ and killing time in the drab and depressing city in which he lives.
In this regard this anonymous student of O‟Brien‟s can be seen as a modern Irish iteration
of the nineteenth century flâneur, a figure who is „the ultimate consumer of the modern city, who
gathers fleeting but significant impressions as he strolls through the streets.‟1036 And as such a
figure, the student acts as a bridge between the mimetic representations of place in At Swim Two
Birds and the more expressive representations contained in its other story-lines.
8.2.3. Expressionism
In general, the expressive form of representation focuses on „the special qualities of mind
and soul that the artist brings to the act of creation.‟1037 This nineteenth century conception of
representation cites various sources of an artist‟s sensibility: „Romantics agreed that the key faculty
was the imagination.‟1038 A later psychoanalytical approach placed the source „in the artist‘s
unconscious mind,‟1039 with Freudians claiming inspiration came from the „imagined fulfilment of
an individual artist‘s unconscious wish,‟1040 and Jungians claiming that the source lay in
„archetypical imagery common to the entire human race.‟1041 A further iteration of this idea places
1030
Richter, The Critical Tradition, 4.
Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory, 254.
1032
Ibid.
1033
Richter, 2.
1034
Flann O‟Brien, At Swim Two Birds (London: Penguin, 2001[1939] ) p. 12.
1035
Ibid., 38.
1036
Macey, Dictionary of Critical Theory, 131.
1037
Richter, The Critical Tradition, 5.
1038
Ibid.
1039
Ibid.
1040
Ibid.
1041
Ibid.
1031
188
this „dream of mankind,‟1042 not in the subconscious mind, but „in a literary tradition that speaks
to‟1043 all. A Marxist analysis of the source of inspiration claims that „artists inadvertently
expressed the ideologies of their times,‟1044 their art and literature relating an understanding of the
world „determined by their position within the class struggle and their moment in history.‟1045
The expressive representations of place in At Swim Two Birds occur in the storylines of a
publican named Trellis who is writing a book. Trellis is a character in the book being written by
O‟Brien‟s anonymous student narrator. And it is the fictional characters in the book which Trellis is
writing, that populate O‟Brien‟s expressive representations of Dublin, which incorporate Lower
Leeson Street, the Ringsend District and the Palace Cinema on Pearse Street. The characters
inhabiting these expressive places include the American pulp-fiction cow-boys Shorty Andrews
and Slug Willard, a demonic figure named the Pooka MacPhellimey, and the Dublin working class
figures of Furriskey, Shanahan and Lamont, who banter with the legendary hero of old Ireland Finn
Mac Cool, about the crazed mythological king Sweeney.
8.3 Mimetic Places
8.3.1. Introduction
The mimetic representation of place in At Swim Two Birds can be divided into two spheres,
the domestic and the public. These two spheres are mimetic in the sense that what O‟Brien is
„presenting here is a portrait of himself similar to that of the student narrator of At Swim, who
attends college very rarely, drinks heavily, watches billiards being played, and manages to get
through his course without opening very many books,‟1046 whilst navigating the various urban
geographies and streetscapes of 1930s Dublin.
8.3.2. Domestic Sphere
The domestic sphere in At Swim Two Birds takes place in the chronotopic space of a household where the anonymous student lives with his uncle. It is depicted through the eyes of the
student with a suffocating insularity, as he and his uncle have a tenuous relationship, that is
characterized by a generational gap in values and outlook between the generation that participated
and witnessed the founding of the Free State and their progeny. Every morning they take breakfast
together, as the student notes „on the insistence of my uncle, who was accustomed to regard himself
as the sun of his household.‟ 1047 As he watches his uncle eat, he sketches a somewhat unflattering
picture of the older man:
1042
Ibid.
Ibid.
1044
Ibid.
1045
Ibid.
1046
Clissman, Flann O‘Brien: A Critical Introduction, 7.
1047
O‟Brien, At Swim, 148.
1043
189
Description of my uncle: Red-faced, bead-eyed, ball-bellied. Fleshy about the
shoulders with long swinging arms giving ape-like effect to gait. Large
moustache. Holder of Guinness clerkship the third class.1048
Employment at the Guinness Brewery during the 1930s was a coveted position, ensuring a steady
wage, benefits and job security, in a time when employment opportunities were volatile due to the
effects of the new State‟s economy. The uncle is presented as overbearing, and suspicious of his
„slothful‟ nephew who spends the majority of his time whilst at home, locked in his room: „I know
the studying you do in your bedroom, said my uncle. Damn the studying you do in your
bedroom.‟1049
The uncle‟s allusion to his nephew‟s „listless‟ reading habits actually masks his fear of
literature and the world of knowledge that it represents outside the borders of his own parochial
mindset. For in the bedroom‟s chronotopic space, the student possesses „works ranging from those
of Mr Joyce to the widely read books of Mr A. Huxley, the eminent English writer.‟1050 Both
authors were banned by the Irish Government‟s 1929 Censorship Act, and in this light the
student‟s bedroom symbolizes a space of freedom and rebellion against the censoriousness of the
Free State. In contrast the uncle‟s pedagogical perspective reflects the values of the confessional
state: „Why does the bishop give those he confirms a stroke on the cheek? Name the seven deadly
sins.‟1051 The uncle laments the fact that the pursuit of higher education at university takes
precedence over the moral importance of religious piety in the lives of the younger generation: „Oh
indeed there is little respect for the penny catechism in Ireland today and well I know it. But it has
stood to us, Mr Corcoran, and will please God to the day we die. It is certainly a grand thing to
see the young lads making it their own for you won‘t get very far in the world without it. Mark that,
my lad. It is worth a bag of your fine degrees and parchments.‟1052 The uncle is an embodiment of
the Irish cultural nationalism professed by an element of the urban Catholic petite bourgeoisie of
the 1930s. In the domestic sphere of At Swim Two Birds, O‟Brien „shows the Dubliner as
repressed, hypocritical, chauvinistic, slightly ridiculous in his pretensions and worried about
entirely trivial questions.‟1053
A set piece in the novel finds the student returning home one evening slightly inebriated.
He is recruited to act as a secretary for a „Committee‟ meeting, which has been called in the
chronotopic space of the uncle‟s sitting room, to organize a local Ceilidhe. As a chairman, the
uncle rules the meeting with an iron hand:
1048
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 11.
1050
Ibid.
1051
Ibid., 93-94.
1052
Ibid., 94.
1053
Clissman, Flann O‘Brien: A Critical Introduction , 116.
1049
190
My uncle gave a sharp crack on the table.
Order, Mr Corcoran, he said in reprimand, order if you please. Mr Connors
has the floor. This is a Committee Meeting. I‟m sick sore and tired saying this
is a Committee Meeting. After all there is such a thing as Procedure, there is
such a thing as Order, there is such a thing as doing things in the right way.
Have you a point of Order Mr Corcoran?1054
The point of order in the meeting has risen over the suggestion to include „one old-time waltz‟1055 in
the dance programme. The majority of members of the committee are adamantly against this
proposal: „The Gaelic League is opposed to the old-time waltz. So are the clergy,‟1056 and in the
end the submission is rejected as a „foreign‟ intrusion on native Irish culture:
But after all a Ceilidhe is not the place for it, that‟s all. A Ceilidhe is a
Ceilidhe. I mean, we have our own. We have our own dances without crossing
the road to borrow what we can‟t wear. See the point? It‟s all right but its not
for us. Leave the waltz to the jazz-boys. By God they‟re welcome as far as I‟m
concerned.1057
Due to largely to the mindset of the uncle and his peers, the student spends most of his time reading
in his room: „it contained most of the things I deemed essential for existence -my bed, a chair which
was rarely used, a table and a washstand.‟1058 At the end of At Swim Two Birds, we find that the
student has passed his examinations with honours. He is given a wrist-watch -„slightly luminous in
the gloom,‟1059 by his faintly baffled uncle, who had believed strenuously that his nephew had
succumbed to „the father and mother of the other vices,‟1060 -idleness. This causes the student to
revise his opinion of the older man: „Description of my uncle: Simple, well intentioned,‟1061 and
gives the student a sense of contrition. However, he can‟t articulate this sentiment to the uncle, as
they are both still circumscribed by their various roles on either side of the post-independence
generation gap. In the end the student retreats up the chronotopic space of a staircase, to the
solitary confines of his mind: „I went slowly up the stairs to my room [. . .] My steps faltered to
some extent on the stairs. As I opened the door, my watch told me the time was five fifty-four. At the
same time I heard the Angelus pealing out from far way.‟1062 The modern accoutrement of the wristwatch contrasts with the more ancient rituals of religious tradition rooted in the Middle-Ages, that
is symbolised by the tolling of cathedral bells across the fading twilight of Dublin‟s 1930
cityscape.
O‟Brien, At Swim, 133.
Ibid.
1056
Ibid., 134.
1057
Ibid., 133.
1058
Ibid.,11.
1059
Ibid.,215.
1060
Ibid., 213.
1061
Ibid., 215.
1062
Ibid., 215.
1054
1055
191
8.3.3. Public Sphere
O‟Brien‟s mimetic representations of the public sphere in Dublin in At Swim Two Birds are
placed on the campus of University College Dublin at Earlsfort Court, the South Dublin villages of
Ringsend, Irishtown and Sandymount, and the premises of Grogan‟s Public House, which during the
1930s was located on the corner of Lower Leeson Street and Stephen‟s Green. Casting his
anonymous student narrator as a modern-day flâneur, who travels by foot through the city, not only
to pass through the campus of his university, but to escape the stuffy insularity of his domestic
sphere, O‟Brien‟s prose captures the ambient personality of the Dublin streetscape as it existed
during the period:
Putting on my grey coat, I made my way to the street. Such was the degree of
my emotional disturbance that I walked down to the centre of town without
adverting to my surroundings and without a predetermined destination. There
was no rain but the streets were glistening and people were moving in a quick
and active manner along the pavements. A slight fog, perforated by the
constellation of street-lamps hung down on the roadway from the roofs of the
house. Reaching the Pillar, I turned about to retrace my steps . . . 1063.
Though enrolled at the university, the anonymous student rarely attends lectures and his
matriculation seems merely a formality. Whilst on campus he diffidently peers at his fellow
students: „My cold hostile eyes flitting about the faces,‟
1064
with the sceptical
gaze of an
existentialist: „Students emerging from the confinement of an hour‘s lecture would grope eagerly
for their cigarettes or accept one with gratitude from a friend. Clerical students from Blackrock or
Rathfarnham, black clothes and bowler hats, would file past civilly and leave the building by a door
opening at the back where they were accustomed to leave the iron pedal-cycles. [. . .] There was a
clock plainly visible but the hours were told by a liveried attendant who emerged from a small
office in the wall and pealed a shrill bell similar to that utilized by auctioneers and street-criers; the
bell served this purpose, that it notified professors –distant in the web of their fine thought –that
their discourses should terminate.‟1065 During his visits to the campus, the anonymous student
mostly repairs to a meeting space at the back of the university building where there is located „an
apartment known as the Gentleman‘s Smokeroom.‟1066 It is in this place that the habitués of the
campus demi-monde congregate, free from the pious institutionalisation of their more confessional
classmates.
This back-room can be read as a spatial metaphor to convey a carnivalesque sense of shared
alienation, a chronotopic space where there is a „temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions
1063
Ibid., 95-96.
Ibid., 44-45.
1065
Ibid.
1066
Ibid., 34.
1064
192
and barriers among men [. . . ] and the prohibitions of usual life.‟1067 The anonymous student
observes: „This room was usually occupied by card-players, hooligans and rough persons [. . . ]
Strong country boys were planking down cards and coins and roaring out the name of God.
Occasionally there was a sudden burst of horse-play, scuffling and kicking, and a chair or a man
would crash across the floor. Newspapers were widely read and notices posted on the wall or letter
so as to impart to them an obscene or facetious import.‟1068 O‟Brien‟s representation of this backroom at UCD creates a „place for working out a new mode of interrelationship between
individuals.‟ 1069 In such a space „carnivalistic mésalliances,‟
1070
bring together „the sacred with
the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise and the stupid.‟ 1071 and
„people who are in life separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free and familiar
contact.‟1072
In this carnivalesque place the anonymous student narrator meets his friends
Brinsley and Kelly, and describes the latter figure as „a student, hitherto a member of the farming
class and now a private in the armed forces of the King.‟1073 The two have become nocturnal
flâneurs and take walking tours through the streetscapes of south Dublin, where working-class and
petite bourgeoisie neighbourhoods are situated cheek by jowl in the patchwork of villages that
constitute the urban body of the city:
Three nights later at about eight o‟clock I was alone in Nassau Street, a district
frequented by the prostitute class, when I perceived a ramrod in a cloth cap on
the watch at the corner of Kildare Street. As I passed I saw that the man was
Kelly. Large spits were about him on the path and the carriage-way. I poked
him in a manner offensive to propriety and greeted his turned face with a
facetious ejaculation.
How is the boy! I said.
My hard man, he answered.
I took cigarettes from my pocket and lit one for each of us, frowning. With
my face averted and a hardness in my voice, I put this question in a casual
manner:
Anything going?
O God no, he said. Not at all man. Come away for a talk somewhere.
I agreed. Purporting to be an immoral character, I accompanied him on a
long walk through the environs of Irishtown, Sandymount and Sydney Parade,
returning by Haddington Road and the banks of the canal.
Purpose of walk: Discovery and embracing of virgins.1074
1067
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, (trans.) Helene Iswolky (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1984) p. 15.
1068
O‟Brien, At Swim, 34..
1069
Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky‘s Poetics (ed. & trans.) Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1984) p. 123.
1070
Ibid.
1071
Ibid.
1072
Ibid.
1073
At Swim, 20.
1074
Ibid., 47-48.
193
The other place that the anonymous student frequents, often in the company of his friends is a
public house on Lower Leeson Street. Located close to the Earlsfort Terrace during the 1930s, it is a
mimetic representation of the place where O‟Brien and his coterie from UCD gathered to discuss
literature, and where the anonymous student narrator of At Swim Two Birds, receives the „first
experience of intoxicating beverages and their strange intestinal chemistry,‟ 1075 in the company of
his friend Kelly: „He suggested that we should drink a number of jars or pints of plain porter in
Grogan‘s public house.‟1076
Kelly and the student walk the short distance from Stephen‟s Green and O‟Brien describes
the student narrator‟s apocalyptic thoughts as makes his rite of passage into the pub culture of
Dublin: „It was my first taste of porter. Innumerable persons with whom I had conversed had
represented to me that spirituous liquors and intoxicants generally had an adverse effect on the
senses and the body and that those who became addicted to stimulants in youth were unhappy
throughout their lives and met with death at the end by a drunkard‘s fall, expiring ingloriously at
the stair-bottom in a welter of blood and puke.‟1077
Despite the gloomy prognosis given the overconsumption of „spiritous liquors and
intoxicants,‟ 1078 the student along with his friends become patrons of this south-side Dublin public
house: „I was siting on a stool in an intoxicated condition in Grogan‘s licensed premises. Adjacent
stools bore the forms of Brinsley and Kelly, my two true friend. The three of us were occupied in
putting glasses of stout into the interior of our bodies and expressing by fine disputation the
resulting sense of physical and mental well-being [. . . ] Each of the arranged bottles on the shelves
before me, narrow or squat-bellied, bore a dull picture of the gas bracket. Who can tell the stock of
a public-house? Many no doubt are dummies, those especially within an arm-reach of the snug. The
stout was of superior quality, soft against the tongue but sharp upon the orifice of the throat, softly
efficient in its magical circulation through the conduits of the body.‟1079
8.4 Expressive Places
8.4.1. Introduction
The preceding mimetic representations of the domestic and public spheres of place in 1930s
Dublin mirrored to a certain extent O‟Brien‟s experience and perceptions of the drab and mundane
city in which he was a student. In contrast, the often colourful expressive representations of place
that he depicts in At Swim Two Birds,
though situated in specific locations in the city, are
embellished with images, characters and storylines drawn from Celtic mythology and articulated in
1075
Ibid., 20.
Ibid., 20.
1077
Ibid., 21.
1078
Ibid., 21.
1079
Ibid., 38.
1076
194
his novel „with astonishing eclecticism from [. . . ] cowboy novels, proletarian balladry, racing
tipsters, encyclopaedias and modernist literature.‟1080 An example of the expressive representation
of place relevant to O‟Brien‟s literary depiction of Dublin in At Swim Two Birds is „Alfred Döblin‘s
Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), which [used] techniques pioneered by James Joyce and John Dos
Passos to paint a kaleidoscopic picture of Berlin.‟1081 It is in O‟Brien‟s re-telling of the romance
of Suibhne Geilt (The Rage of Sweeney) and the saga Tain Bo Cualnge (The Cattle Raid of
Cooley), that elements of Dublin‟s social and pop-cultural geographies emerge to paint a
„kaleidoscopic picture‟ of the city‟s various streetscapes and districts.
8.4.2. Lower Leeson Street
In At Swim Two Birds, O‟Brien‟s anonymous student confides to his friend Brinsley that his
fictional character Trellis: „has bought a ream of ruled foolscap and is starting on his story. He is
compelling all his characters to live with him in the Red Swan Hotel so he can keep an eye on them
[. . . ] Trellis has absolute control over his minions but this control is abandoned when he falls
asleep. Consequently he must make sure that they are all in bed before he locks up and goes to bed
himself.‟1082 Although a premise named the Red Swan Hotel never existed on Lower Leeson Street
in the 1930s, according to an examination of Thom‘s Official Directory for the years 1930-1939, an
establishment listed as the Eastwood Hotel, with a W. J. Cumming as proprietor, stood at an address
of 91-92 on that street, just half a block south-east of Grogan‟s, the public house patronized by
O‟Brien and his fictional student narrator. It is probable that the Red Swan Hotel was based on the
actual location of the Eastwood. O‟Brien‟s expressive representation of the site where the novel‟s
fictional hotel sits on Lower Leeson Street reveals the palimpsestic and historical nature of the
district and its environs:
Extract from Manuscript as to the nature of Red Swan premises, oratio recta:
The Red Swan premises in Lower Leeson Street are held in fee farm, the
landlord whosoever being pledged to maintain the narrow lane which marks
its eastern boundary unimpeded and free from nuisance for a distance of
seventeen yards, that is, up to the intersection of Peter Place. New Paragraph.
A terminus of the Cornelscourt coach in the seventeenth century, the hotel was
rebuilt in 1712 and after wards fired by the yeomanry for reasons which must
be sought in the quiet of its ruined garden, on the three-perch stretch that goes
by Croppies‟ Acre. Today it is a large building of four storeys. The title is
worked in snow-white letters along the circumference of the fanlight and the
centre of the circle is concerned with the delicate image of a red swan,
pleasingly conceived and carried out by a casting process in Birmingham
delf.1083
1080
Kiberd, Irish Classics, 502.
Macey, Dictionary of Critical Theory, 119.
1082
O‟Brien, At Swim, 35.
1083
Ibid., 25-26.
1081
195
In At Swim Two Birds the space of the rooms in O‟Brien‟s fictional hotel are metaphors for the
imaginative places in which the characters created by Trellis reside: „There is a cowboy in Room 13
and Mr M cCool, a hero of old Ireland, is on the floor above. The cellar is full of leprechauns.‘1084
The Red Swann Hotel is the setting in Trellis‘ book that Finn MacCool, a ‗hero of old Ireland‘
relates ‗the account of the madness of King Sweeney,‟
1085
to the Dublin working-class characters
of Furriskey, Lamont and Shanahan.
As Finn tells the story, the King of Dal Araidhe, a man named Sweeney, was cursed by St.
Ronan after attacking him, throwing his Psalter into a lake and killing one of his acolytes. This
curse bid that madness should fall upon Sweeney; that he believe himself to be a bird and live
among the trees, isolated from human contact. At the battle of Magh Rath, madness did envelop
Sweeney‟s mind. Subsequently the king began to live in trees, grow plumage and possess the ability
to leap great distances over the body of Ireland:
After another time he set forth in the air again till he reached the church at
Snámh-dá-én (or Swim-Two-Birds) by the side of the Shannon, arriving their
on a Friday, to speak precisely; here the clerics were engaged at the
observation of their nones, flax was being beaten and here and there a woman
was giving birth to a child; and Sweeny did not stop until he had recited the
full length of a further lay. For seven years, to relate precisely, was Sweeny at
the air travel of all Erin, returning always to his tree in charming Glen
Bolcain, for that was his fortress and his haven, it was his house there in the
glen.1086
After a life of isolation, deprivation and poetry, the repentant Sweeney recovered his sanity and
died in the monastery of St Moling. O‟Brien incorporates the figure of Sweeney in At Swim Two
Birds by bringing him to reside at the Red Swan Hotel, where he joins a „round of Poker ‟1087 with
other characters Trellis has created, including pulp-fiction cowboys, the Pooka MacPhellimey and
the Good Fairy.
In this sense, O‟Brien is placing this aspect of the story-line of the novel into one of the
„visions‟ that Sweeney was recorded as having in the Celtic Age saga, and in doing so bridges the
chronotopic spaces of mythology and modernism.
O‟Brien‟s purpose in re-telling the saga
Suibhne Geilt (The Rage of Sweeney) in his 1939 novel was to critique what he felt was the misappropriation of Irish mythology by an elite minority of the urban bourgeois during the Irish
Cultural Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Suibhne Geilt provided the
title for O‟Brien‟s novel, and may have inspired its structure as well: „the sudden disgression, the
opportunity to include the world of the supernatural with that of a vividly described actuality, may
1084
Ibid., 35.
Ibid., 63.
1086
Ibid., 68.
1087
O‟Brien, At Swim, 139.
1085
196
have offered a model for At Swim as a whole.‟1088
In addition O‟Brien was satirizing the
mediocrity of mass culture and the yellow journalism of the period which he felt was beginning to
infiltrate the urban cultural milieu of Ireland, by invoking heroic figures from the island‟s past. The
working class characters of Furriskey, Shanahan and Lamont having listened to Finn Mac Cool
relate the Celtic epic, display but a passing reverence for Sweeney‟s saga:
You can‟t beat it, of course, said Shanahan with a reddening of the features,
the real old stuff of the native land, you know, stuff that brought scholars to
our shore when your men on the other side were on the flat of their bellies
before the calf of gold with a sheepskin around their man. It‟s the stuff that
put our country where she stands today, Mr Furriskey, and I‟d have my tongue
out of my head by the bloody roots before I‟d be heard saying a word against
it. But the man in the street, where does he come in? By God he doesn‟t come
in at all as far as I can see.1089
Dismissing the epic saga told to him by Finn Mac Cool, Shanahan recites verses to his working
class colleagues Furriskey and Lamont, by the „Booterstown Bard‟ Jem Casey: „By God you can‘t
beat it. I‘ve heard it praised by the highest. It‘s a pome about a thing that‘s known to all of us. It‘s
about a drink of porter.‟1090 By favouring the verses of the „Workman‟s Friend,‟ over those of
Buile Shubhne, O‟Brien‟s characters symbolize a cultural myopia which he felt was contributing to
the social malaise of his contemporary Ireland: „When money‘s tight and hard to get/ And your
horse is also ran,/ When all you have is a heap of debt-/A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY
MAN.‟1091
The working class mentality contained in the mimetic and chronotopic spaces of
Dublin‟s public house culture, is one of the real targets of satire in At Swim Two Birds: „the
reactions of Shanahan and his companions are shown to be typical of modern Ireland, which is
escapist and whose sensibilities are so atrophied that it can no longer respond to the ―grand old
stuff of the native land‖‟1092
At the end of the novel Sweeney, estranged by his experience of
Dublin at the Red Swan Hotel, and horrified by his „vision‟ of the modern city, returns to the forests
of a medieval Gaelic landscape: „Sweeny in the trees hears the sad baying as he sits listening on the
branch, a huddle between heaven and earth [. . .] The eyes of the mad king, upturned in fear and
supplication. His mind but a shell.‟1093
O‟Brien re-imagines another Celtic-Age epic as he
transforms a south Dublin working class neighbourhood, into an American cattle-ranch from the
Wild West, within an expressive representation drawn from a pop-culture trend that dominated
1930s Dublin.
Clissman, Flann O‘Brien: A Critical Introduction, 131.
O‟Brien, At Swim, 75.
1090
Ibid., 76.
1091
Ibid., 77.
1092
Clissman, Flann O‘Brien: A Critical Introduction, 133.
1093
At Swim, 216-217.
1088
1089
197
8.4.3. Ringsend District
O‟Brien‟s expressive representation of the Ringsend District in At Swim Two Birds alters the
south Dublin working class neighbourhood into the cinematic setting of a pulp-fiction Western,
complete with a ranch, grazing range and several modern features, including an urban, electric tram
line:
Relevant excerpt from the Press: The Circle N is reputed to be the most
venerable of Dublin‟s older ranches. The main building is a gothic structure of
red sandstone timbered in the Elizabethan style and supported by corinthian
pillars at the posterior. Added as a lean-to at the south gable is the wooden
bunk-house, one of the most up to date of its kind in the country. It contains
three holster-racks, ten gas fires and a spacious dormitory fitted with an
ingenious apparatus worked by compressed air by which all verminous beds
can be fumigated instantaneously by the mere pressing of a button, the
operation occupying only the space of forty seconds. The old Dublin custom
of importing negroid labour for operating the fine electrically equipped
cooking-gallery is still observed in this time-hallowed house. On the land
adjacent, grazing is available for 10, 000 steers and 2,000 horses, thanks to the
public spirit of Mr William Tracy, the indefatigable novelist, who had 8,912
dangerous houses demolished in the environs of Irishtown and Sandymount to
make the enterprise possible. Visitors can readily reach the ranch by taking the
Number 3 tram.1094
Working on the Ringsend cattle ranch are the cowboys „Shorty Andrews and Slug Willard, the
toughest pair of boyos you‘d meet in a day‘s walk.‟1095 The story of the „Circle N‟ is related
through Trellis‟s working class character of Shanahan, in conjunction with excerpted accounts from
the public Press. O‟Brien writes:
Substance of reminiscence by Mr Shanahan, the comments of his hearers
being embodied parenthetically in the text; with relevant excerpts from the
public Press:
Do you know what I am going to tell you, there was a rare life in Dublin in the
old days. (There was certainly.) That was the day of the great O‟Callaghan,
the day of Baskin, the day of Tracy that brought cowboys to Ringsend. I knew
them all, man [. . . ] One day Tracy sent for me and gave me my orders and
said it was one of his cowboy books. Two days later I was cow-punching
down by the river in Ringsend . . . 1096.
Shannahan continues the tale of his adventures in the saddle with the pulp-fiction cowboys Shorty
and Slug : „but wasn‘t the half of our steers rustled across the border in Irishtown by Red Kiersay‘s
gang of thieving ruffians,‟1097 and a battle with Red Indians and rustlers, who take refuge behind the
Number 3 tram: „We broke every pane of glass in the tram, raked the roadway with a death dealing
rain of six-gun shrapnel and took the tip off an enemy cowboy‘s ear, by God.‟1098 However in the
1094
Ibid., 55-56.
Ibid., 53.
1096
Ibid., 53.
1097
Ibid., 54.
1098
Ibid., 58.
1095
198
mimetic space of 1930s Dublin, the blame for the mayhem in the Ringsend District is placed upon
working-class hooligans:
Relevant excerpt from the Press: A number of men, stated to be labourers, was
arraigned before Mr Lamphall in the District Court yesterday morning on
charges of riotous assembly and malicious damage. Accused were described
by Superintendent Clohessy as a gang of corner-boys whose horseplay in the
streets was the curse of the Ringsend district. They were pests and public
nuisances whose antics were not infrequently attended by damage to property.
Complaints as to their conduct were frequently being received from residents
in the area. On the occasion of the last escapade, two windows were broken in
a tram-car the property of the Dublin United Tramway Company. Inspector
Quinn of the Company stated that the damage to the vehicle amounted to £2
11s. od. Remarking that no civilized community could tolerate organised
hooliganism of this kind, the justice sentenced the accused to seven days‟ hard
labour without the option of a fine, and hoped that it would be a lesson to
them and to other playboys of the boulevards. Conclusion of excerpt.1099
O‟Brien‟s expressive representation of the Ringsend District as the Circle N Ranch in At Swim Two
Birds, can be read in the context of the social and cultural demographical changes that were
occuring to Dublin during the period due to effects of rural emigration: „In the period 1926 to 1936
the populations of towns throughout the country grew only very slightly, some of them experiencing
a loss of inhabitants
[. . . ] Only Dublin city increased its population in any marked way from
394,089 to 472, 935 [. . . ] indicating a measure of internal emigration to the cities in a society
where the population of most small towns remained almost static.‟1100
As a result of de Valera‟s Economic War with Britain and his government‟s agricultural
policies, the Irish countryside was draining itself of a large share of its population. This rural to
urban demographic shift during the decade brought an influx of countryside values and social
mores into the urban centre of the Free State capital: „Dublin 1930s was a city still dominated by a
rural ethos. Cattle were routinely herded across O‘Connell Bridge down to the docks for export;
and a great number of civil servants, teachers, nurses and policemen who ran the city‘s affairs were
migrants from the countryside.‟1101 By featuring a district in south-side Dublin as a cattle-ranch
O‟Brien was able to to re-imagine the Celtic saga Tain Bo Cualnge (The Cattle Raid of Cooley) in a
modern urban setting. It also played on the popularity of the Western pulp-fiction novels and films
among Dubliners during the 1930s. This genre reinforced the set of values and memories which
rural emigrants brought with them to Dublin and provided an inexpensive form of entertainment
for these new members of the urban working class: „Reading fodder for the masses abounded [. . .]
they escaped to the wild west with stories of lone star rangers and cheered when a couple lived
happily ever after in a state of eternal romance. Cultural sophisticates they were not, and in many
1099
1100
Ibid., 59.
Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 152.
199
ways censorship did not concern them. Nevertheless, in the first years of the Irish Free State,
reading as a hobby grew and developed and the influence of these tales of gunslingers and
romantic heroes should not be ignored.‟ 1102
For many Irish people of the period, the author Zane Grey „was the hero of the Wild West:
his tales daring-do in stagecoaches and adventures on the frontier were devoured. The light of
western stars, The lone star ranger and Wildfire were just three of the titles which were sold and
loaned to readers through the Free State.‟1103 Indeed, the proliferation of the Western genre
marginalised the more sophisticated works of O‟Brien and his literary contemporaries: „Zane Grey
had long since won the battle of the OK Corral over James Joyce,‟1104 and as the popularity of this
pop-cultural phenomena increased during the 1930s „even W.B. Yeats found these stories relaxing
and, according to his wife, would often shout in his sleep, ―Don‘t shoot the sheriff! Don‘t shoot the
sheriff!‖‟1105
8.4.4. The Palace Cinema
Towards the end of At Swim Two Birds, the various characters that Trellis has created turn
against him, and O‟Brien places this storyline of revolt within a location on Pearse Street that was
occupied in the 1930s by the Palace Cinema. In a battered state, Trellis is brought to a trial on the
grounds of the theatre where the judge and jury are drawn from the characters he has created. The
„Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class,‟1106 acts as the prosecutor. At the end of a
„fair trial and jury of his own manufacture,‟1107 where he is accused of „domestic interference and
tyranny,‟1108 Trellis is found guilty, and given the death penalty: „A half minute with the razor and
the trick is done.‟1109 However, before the sentence can be imposed, „Teresa, a servant employed at
the Red Swan Hotel,‟1110 kindles a fire from the pages Trellis has been writing on and which his
characters inhabit, rescuing him from execution: „the pages which made and sustained the existence
of Furriskey and his true friends [. . . ] were blazing, curling and twisting and turning black [. . . ]
and then taking flight as is to heaven through the chimney.‟
1111
In general, O‟Brien‟s narrative
concerning Trellis and his characters, as well as the general construction of
the expressive
representations of place in At Swim Two Birds reflect the modern technological medium of film,
with its techniques of flashback, jump cuts and ensemble story-lines.
1101
Kiberd, Irish Classics, 513.
Russell, Holy crosses, guns and roses: themes in popular reading material, 16.
1103
Ibid., 15.
1104
Ibid., 18.
1105
Kiberd, Irish Classics, 512.
1106
O‟Brien, At Swim, 9.
1107
Ibid., 208.
1108
Ibid., 202.
1109
Ibid., 208.
1110
Ibid., 215.
1102
200
The introduction of the cinema in Ireland at the end the nineteenth century and its
proliferation during the first three decades of the twentieth century, signalled this new narrative
perspective. A review in The Freeman‘s Journal of the first film shown in Dublin‟s Star of Erin
Theatre in 1895 reported: „This very wonderful instrument (the Cinématographe) produces with
absolute correctedness in every detail animated representations of scenes and incidents which are
witnessed in everyday life. To those who witness the exhibition for the first time the effect is startling
[. . . ] the effect is so realistic that for the moment one is almost apt to forget that the representation
is artificial.‟1112 It can be observed that by juxtaposing mimetic and expressive representations of
place in At Swim Two Birds, O‟Brien was perhaps attempting to produce a similar effect with his
multiple narrative story-lines and was pointing to the „difficulty of distinguishing and demarcating
the two elements, as he had earlier realised that perception was as conceptual as it was sensory and
that a character envisioned in the mind often had as much reality as one seen in the street.‟1113
Therefore the selection of the location of the Palace Cinema on Pearse Street for the trial of Trellis
can be read as a spatial metaphor on various levels, but most significantly it may illustrate O‟Brien‟s
perspective on the „kaleidoscopic‟ shift to modernity, that was taking place in Dublin during early
decades of the twentieth century. In the novel O‟Brien writes that during his trial Trellis:
. . . saw that he was in a large hall not unlike the Antient Concert Rooms in
Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street). The King was on his throne, the satraps
thronged the hall, a thousand bright lamps shone, o‟er that high festival.
Ornate curtains of twilled beaverteen were draped about the throne. Near the
roof there was a loggia or open-shaped gallery or arcade supported on thin
pillars, each with a guilloche on its top for ornament; the loggia seemed to be
packed with people, each with a cold-watching face. The air was heavy and
laden with sullen banks of tobacco smoke [. . . ] That place is a picture-house
now, of course, said Shanahan‟s voice as it cut through the pattern of the
story, plenty of cowboy stuff there. The Palace Cinema, Pearse Street. Oh,
many a good hour I spent there too.1114
The building in which the Antient Concert Rooms were located until 1921, was built in 1824. The
first owner of the property was the Dublin Oil Gas Station, who used the structure to extract gas
from fish oil. Due to market conditions, the business went bankrupt in 1834 and the rooms in the
building were acquired by the Society of Antient Concerts, which had formed that year for the
cultivation and performance of vocal music. The society remodelled its interior creating an eight
hundred seat concert hall equipped with a Telford Organ and lined with Ionic pilasters enscribed
1111
Ibid., 215-216.
Kevin Rockett, „The Silent Period‟ in (eds.) Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and
Ireland (London: Routledge, 1998) p. 4.
1113
Clissman, Flann O‘Brien: A Critical Introduction, 144.
1114
O‟Brien, At Swim, 193-195.
1112
201
with
the architectural motifs depicted in At Swim Two Birds. The first concert performed in the
rooms were extracts of Handel‟s Messiah, in 1843.
This location on Great Brunswick Street became part of a popular entertainment and art
district during the nineteenth century an included the Theatre Royal and the Queen‟s Royal Theatre.
This district became popular and patrons of the Rotunda Rooms on Parnell Square were drawn to
this growing theatre district south of the Liffey. The Irish Academy of Music held performances in
the location and after the Antient Society ceased to function in the 1860s, the Philharmonic Society
of Dublin took up occupation of the rooms. Charles Stewart Parnell gave a political address on its
stage at one point during the late nineteenth century.
During the Irish Cultural Revival of the same period, the Antient Concert Rooms attracted
controversy when W.B. Yeat‟s drama The Countess Cathleen was staged on 8 May 1899. This was
the first performance of The Irish Literary Theatre Society headed by Yeats. The society evolved
into the Abbey Theatre Company in the early days of the twentieth century. The great Irish tenor,
John McComark made his debut in August of 1904, and James Joyce, who would set a story from
Dubliners and make a reference to the Antient Concert Rooms in Ulysses, sang at the same concert
in the venue.1115
This historical landmark in O‟Brien‟s novel
symbolizes in one regard the
transformation of Dublin from a colonial city to the capital of an independent nation. In 1921 the
renaming of the Antient Concert Rooms as the Palace Cinema, and the renaming of Greater
Brunswick as
Pearse Street, illustrates the nationalist agenda to cultivate a new identity for
Dublin‟s streetscapes: „In 1921 just before the creation of the Irish Free State, Dublin Corporation
set about orchestrating a concerted policy of street renaming. Members of the Assembly sought to
remove those names which could be interpreted as signifiers of an earlier age of empire and instead
introduced the names of Irish patriots to the capital‘s street directory, among them Pearse, Connolly
and Macken.‟1116
On another level the metaphor that the Palace Cinema provides in At Swim Two Birds is the
introduction of film as a modernist form of entertainment which reflected a transforming trend in
the popular culture of Dublin during the 1930s. A study published in 1936 demonstrated that
„Dublin accounted for about 60 per cent of Irish cinema‘s box office.‟1117 The proliferation of movie
theatres also coincided with the growth of Dublin as an urban centre during the period. As such, the
space of the cinema can be viewed as a new chronotope that emerged in the urban cultural landscape
1115
Katriona Byrne, Pearse Street D2, A Study of the Past/A Vision for the Future (Dublin: Argus Press,
2001); Robert O‟Byrne, „Films and fish oil feature in Academy‟s “antient” history,‟ The Irish Times, 22
February, 2001.
1116
Yvonne Whelan, Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, iconography and the politics of identity
(Dublin: UCD Press, 2003) p. 214.
1117
Kevin Rockett, Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography
(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004) p. 88.
202
of 1930s Ireland, and illustrates the protean nature of its antecedent chronotope „the threshold.‟ It
has been observed that : „cinema is recreated in the image of the city, its emergence as a cultural
form coinciding with the growth of the modern metropolis.‟1118 During the period that O‟Brien was
writing his novel, the architectural facades of the city were being transformed by the popular cultural
phenomena of film: „From the 1930s onwards, when modern buildings were being erected in Dublin
[. . .] Their cinematic representation was largely avoided or denied [however] many of the cinemas
themselves were amongst the few buildings within the state in the International Style, and so, both
through their exterior appearance and their un-Irish romantic ―atmospheric‖ interiors, they offered
cinemagoers a rare sensuous and exotic experience.‟1119
The study published in 1936 illustrates this „sensuous and exotic‟ experience was widely
experienced by Dubliners and the „most public manifestation of Irish cinemagoing [was] the famous
Dublin cinema queue.‟1120 A general conclusion can be reached that „the importance attached to
cinema going as the event of the week indicates that despite the severity of film censorship, the
experience of going to the cinema was central to the lives of a great many people, especially
children, young adults and courting couples, in urban areas.‟1121 Despite the state controlled
censorship over film content the „sanitized versions of the films still sharply contrasted with the
Ireland of the 1920s and 1930s. There existed on the cinema screen a world of excitement and
glamour, of difference, which was absent elsewhere in Irish life for most cinemagoers.‟1122
The surge of this trend in popular culture alarmed the hierarchy of the Catholic Church
during the period: „It is not surprising, therefore, that bishops and others should blame the cinema
for anything from emigration to the spread of materialism in Ireland.‟
1123
Cultural nationalists of
the period also protested at the intrusion and effects of this new popular medium on Irish society:
„American and British accents in the cinema provided a rude shock to those who had been engaged
in an ideological struggle to establish a distinctive cultural identity. The Irish language lobby in the
person of Cu Uladh, President of the Gaelic League, complained about the volume of English being
spoken in Irish cinemas. He regarded sound cinema as bestowing unfair advantage on English over
Irish!‟ 1124 O‟Brien‟s depiction of the Palace Cinema in At Swim Two Birds can therefore be read as
a spatial metaphor on three levels. First, as an actual location it illustrates the physical
transformation of place during a period of urban growth in the late nineteen and early twentieth
century Dublin. On a second level, it represents the impact that film had as a medium of the popular
1118
Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996) p. 165.
Kevin Rockett, „(Mis-) Representing the Irish Urban Landscape‟, in (eds.) M. Shiel & T. Fitzmaurice,
Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001) pp. 220-222.
1120
Kevin Rockett, Irish Film Censorship, 88.
1121
Ibid., 89.
1122
Ibid.
1123
Ibid.
1119
203
culture of the city during the first two decades after Irish independence. Thirdly it represents the
emergent chronotopic space of the Cinema on the Dublin streetscape, which in turn influenced the
narrative style that O‟Brien employed to convey the urban shift to modernism in his 1939 novel.
8.5 Conclusion
As a work that depicts the modern urban condition of Ireland during the 1930s, O‟Brien‟s
At Swim Two Birds illuminates an observation made about literary representations of Dublin: „The
city the writers have created is not the same one we walk . . . through, although it may bear many
resemblances to it. Writers may live in the same environment, but the inhabit different
universes.‟1125
The dialogical representations of Dublin‟s environment and personal universes in
O‟Brien‟s novel take on respectively mimetic and expressive forms.
These two forms of
representation also mirror to a certain extent another dual tradition which typifies the idiosyncratic
and essential nature of the city, that of language: „Dublin, as a capital of Ireland has been enriched
by its expression and its revelation in its two languages,‟1126 Irish and English. These „ ―dhá arm
aigne‖ or ―two weapons of the mind‖‟1127 and their respective linguistical constructs were utilized
with devastating effect by O‟Brien to represent the various facets of life in Dublin of the 1930s.
Although At Swim Two Birds was written in English, O‟Brien‟s use of language reflected his
upbringing in Irish: „Like the Gael always, as compared to the Anglo-Gael, his speech is hard and
direct without any wisps of Celtic mist floating around his words.‟1128 The two forms of
representation used in the novel intimate the two contrapuntal linguistical strands running through
Dublin‟s lexical heritage.
The mimetic form of representation in At Swim Two Birds reflects a view of the English
language „which sees it as a system of signs for representing, mapping and categorizing –for
―colonizing‖ the chaos of reality.‟1129 Whilst the expressive forms of representation mirror a view
of the Irish language „as the means to express an essential privacy, the hermetic core of being, to
divine origins and etymologies, thus enabling a community to recollect itself in terms of its past.‟
1130
The existence of these two language traditions within the space of Dublin depicted in O‟Brien‟s
novel illustrates the
ancient concept of the city, defined as a structured form of cynicism:
„synoikismos, literally the condition arising from dwelling together in one house, or oikos, and used
by Aristotle in his Politics to describe the formation of the Athenian polis or city-state.‟1131 These
1124
Rockett, 1930s Fictions, 52.
Alan Titley, „The City of Words,‟ in (eds.) James Kelly and Uáitér Mac Gearailt, Dublin and Dubliners:
Essays in the history and literature of Dublin City (Dublin: Grehan Print Limited, 1990) p. 144.
1126
Ibid., 138.
1127
Ibid.
1128
Ó Nualláin, The Early Years of Brian O‘Nolan, / Flann O‘Brien / Myles na gCopaleen, 108.
1129
Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel (London: St. Martin‟s Press, 1985) p.170.
1130
Ibid.
1131
Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) p. 12.
1125
204
two different linguistical traditions, corresponding to the two different forms of representation
depict a period in Dublin‟s history, and dwell together in the oikos of O‟Brien‟s novel. At Swim
Two Birds is anchored in the mimetic representation of an anonymous student living at his uncle‟s
house in Dublin during the 1930s, as well as the expressive representations of the city in the book
that the student is writing.
The aim of O‟Brien‟s meta-physical depiction of the Dublin in At Swim Two Birds was „to
demonstrate the exile of Ireland from its own past,‟1132 as well as „responding to and affected by the
social and religious ideology of the emerging independent state.‟1133 His re-imagining of the Celtic
Age epic Tain Bo Cualnge and the Medieval Irish romance of Suibhne Geilt in the urbane settings of
1930s Ireland emphasized the „importance of Dublin as an Irish city, something that is often
bizarrely overlooked in the whine of the times with [its] emphasis on Vikings, Danes, Ostmen,
Scandinknaves, Palesmen, Fingalls, Dotthergills, Ascendancy bucks and a lickerous allsorts of
every other hue and cry. The very earliest poems we have of and about and for Dublin are written in
the Irish language and gave birth to a tradition which is vibrant and exciting.‟1134 Subsequently, he
cast his anonymous student narrator as a flâneur, with the cultural memory of a Medieval Irish fili
walking the streetscapes of an Irish Free State capital whose modern consciousness was just
beginning to emerge from a the ruins of a colonial past:
Dublin had been transformed from the elegant, colourful and decaying
colonial centre of English rule in Ireland into a modern if rather dull
administrative and commercial capital. Where pre-Treaty Dublin, the Dublin
of Joyce in Dubliners and Ulysses, was severely inhibited by a stultifying
lack of economic and social opportunity for most of its citizens, the new
Dublin, whilst scarcely the scene of major redevelopment or an economic
boom, had become socially and economically more complex.1135
As a city in transition during the 1930s, Dublin was caught between the relics of its aging colonial
architecture and the drabness and mania, of its post-colonial development projects: „The Citizens‘
Housing Council, wrote in its Report on Slum Clearance in Dublin 1938, that ‗there is a sameness,
amounting in large schemes to dullness, if not actual dreariness,‟1136 and „as early as 1930 at least
one commentator was noting how developments in transport and telecommunications were
producing ―a type of expansion undreamt of even ten short years ago‖.‟1137 At Swim Two Birds can
be viewed as a portrayal of the slowly expanding city of the period in which the middle and working
1132
Kiberd, Irish Classics, 510.
J. Laterns, Unauthorised Versions: Irish Menippean Satire, 1919-1952 (Washington: The Catholic
University of America, 2000) p. 175.
1134
Titley, The City of Words, 138
1135
Brown, Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 218.
1136
Ruth MacManus, Dublin, 1910-1940: Shaping the City & Suburbs (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002) p.
211.
1137
Horner, From City to City-Region, Dublin from the 1930s to the 1990s, 328.
1133
205
class speech of Dublin, Celtic mythology, the confluence of Irish and English languages, as well as
rural and urban values flow together in various narrative streams, illuminating the various
chronotopic spaces emerging from „the threshold.‟ O‟Brien was able preserve in his fiction, the
mimetic and expressive representations of Dublin in a flux between its past and present, through
which the print and cinematic mediums of mass culture, were re-shaping the way that the city would
perceive, re-invent and rescue itself from the history of its colonial past.
206
9. Emigrant Cities
In a high-lamped city they stood
Among
Beggars and beast.
Patrick Kavanagh Gay Cities (1933)
9.1 Introduction
During the 1930s Irish emigration was marked by a „pronounced rural-urban drift,‟1138 as
„the number of agricultural labourers fell from 300 000 in 1911 to 150 000 in 1936. A whole class
was vanishing off the face of the land, the statistics bearing a mute witness to this process.‟1139
Addressing Dáil Eireann on the condition of the Free State economy in July of 1939, Eamon de
Valera declared the obvious: „There is a big flow from villages, small towns and urban areas into
the bigger centres. The smaller centres are diminishing.‟1140 On a political level, this trend of
„intensified‘ emigration‘1141 was bolstered by „unemployment figures which in 1935 rose to nearly
100,000, where it would hover for the rest of the decade.‟1142
Outward emigration relieved „Ireland of the necessity to find ways of creating employment
for her surplus population,‟1143 and thus enabled the official record of „unemployment to fall from
15 per cent to 10 per cent, thanks to this providential dispersal of an otherwise expensive and
potentially dangerous labour surplus.‟1144
The affective dimensions of emigration lurking behind the mute witness of statistics and
the charade of political rhetoric, are represented in Patrick Kavanagh‟s The Green Fool (1938), and
in Michael McLaverty‟s Call My Brother Back (1939). Both writers had emigrated from rural
townlands. Both shared the experiences and perceptions felt by rural migrants as they adjusted to
the new and strange environment of the cities in post-independence and partitioned Ireland. This
chapter focuses on the affective dimensions of place depicted in the works and other writings of
Kavanagh and McLaverty. It will explore feelings of alienation, estrangement, fear and loneliness,
that shaded the rural Irish emigrant lifeworld in the urban spaces of Dublin, London and Belfast.
1138
Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 159.
Ibid.
1140
Eamon DeValera „The Banking Commission and Economic Policy‟ Dail Eireann, 6 and 7 July 1939, in
(ed.) Maurice Moynihan, Speeches and Statements by Eamon De Valera: 1917-73, (Dublin: Gill and
MacMillan, 1980) p. 402.
1141
Lee, 260.
1142
Ibid., 201.
1143
Ibid., 260.
1144
Ibid., 226.
1139
207
9.2 Patrick Kavanagh: Break with the Land
9.2.1. Introduction
Commencing his first journey to the Free State capital in the early 1930s, Kavanagh
declared: „Ten miles from home I was in strange country, among folk who wouldn‘t know me [. . . ]
A granite milestone along the way told me it was forty-five miles to Dublin: the chiselled lettergrooves were filled with moss and I had to trace the letters with my finger like a blind man reading
Braille.‟1145 Estrangement and dislocation accompanied Kavanagh as he left the familiar environs of
his townland in south Monaghan, where he had nurtured a distinct sense of place in his numinous
verse and prose: „I have always been convinced that the district in which I grew up was a separate
cultural entity, not fundamentally different, to be sure, from other parts of the country, but in the
local detail different. My idea of a cultural parochial entity was the distance a man would walk in a
day in any direction. The center was usually the place where oneself lived though not always.‟1146
After a three day journey, during which he impersonated a tramp to receive food and
lodging, he arrived in the capital: „I arrived in the city at half-past two. I was more helpless than a
bull in a mist. Tramps should keep clear of all cities and Dublin in particular. The Dublin police
are the scourge of tramps –worse than blisters. I kept fairly free from their strong grip and
inquisitive tongues.‟1147
Kavanagh felt distinctly out of place: „I wore my working clothes and
boots. On my trousers were the tramp-necessary rectangular knee-patches, my jacket was down to
beggar standard, my boots were a hob-nailed pair of my own making. I made a great mistake in not
taking a second pair of socks, or at least one clean pair.‟1148 The motivation behind his journey to
Dublin at the time, was to undertake a literary pilgrimage: „I went to the National Library, as I was
quite sure that the people there would know the whereabouts of every literary man and woman. I
was mistaken.‟1149 His rustic appearance led one of the clerks to draw a hasty conclusion: „When I
was in the library I thought I could take advantage of the fact and get a book to read. Eliot‘s The
Waste Land was being talked at about at the time. I asked for The Wasteland. The man with the
goatee beard wanted to know if it was a book on drainage, and before I could explain was almost
on the way to procure one of that type for me. I should have said that I asked specifically for the
The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot, so that left the joke a far finer one.‟1150
One of his early literary patrons, AE Russell had sent him an open invitation to visit.
Unannounced, Kavanagh appeared at the stone steps of his Georgian house: „A. E. opened the door
to me, and not merely the door of wood on his house in Rathgar. I was afraid of that man. He
1145
Patrick Kavanagh, The Green Fool, 223-224.
Patrick Kavanagh, Patrick Kavanagh: Man and Poet, 243.
1147
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 227.
1148
Ibid., 222-223.
1149
Ibid., 227.
1146
208
looked like a man who had awakened from a dark trance. His eyes stared at me like two nightmare
eyes from which there was no escape. He appeared quite certain that I was a beggar. I regretted
not having a fiddle under my arm to add a touch of wild colour to my drab tramp.‟1151 The visit was
a formative event in Kavanagh‟s life: „AE started to talk in a voice that was musical as evening over
ploughed fields,‟1152 and loaned the novice poet books by Victor Hugo, George Moore and
Dostoevsky. As dusk descended, Kavanagh left to search for lodgings: „I moped around Nelson‘s
Pillar. The newsboys and the hard cases talked very intimately to me. I was one of themselves. I was
looking for a cheap lodging-house. One fellow suggested a St Vincent de Paul night shelter.
―Chroist, don‘t go there,‖ another advised me, ―they‘d make ye pray there‖.‟
1153
Kavanagh
sought less confessional digs near the quays of Dublin‟s south-inner city: „To one of the worst slum
lodging houses in Gloucester Street I was directed. I paid sixpence for my bed. There were six other
beds in the room which was at the top of a three-storied house. The stink of the room and those beds
has never left my nostrils. My room-mates were the derelicts of humanity. There was a blind man, a
lame man, a horrible looking young fellow with no nose, only two little holes under his eyes, there
was a deaf but not dumb man, and another with a look of the criminal. The communal sanitary
convenience was a rusty bucket which hadn‘t been emptied from the night before, and had
apparently never been scrubbed: it had a scum of many layers.‟1154
Disenchanted by his first journey to the city, Kavanagh retreated back to Inniskeen:
„Although I had seen A. E., had got books, and had tasted the road, I have always regretted going
to Dublin. I had lost something which I could never regain from books. I got to know Dublin much
better later on. It is a city overrun by patrons of poetry and art who praise poets and secure jobs for
their own relations. A Government –since- to whom poet, prophet, and imbecile are fellows with
votes.‟1155 He noted caustically at the time: „Irish writers leave Ireland because sentimental praise,
or hysterical pietarian dispraise, is no use in the mouth of a hungry man.‟1156 However Kavanagh‟s
desire to write continued to lure him away from the environment of his rural parish: „Occasionally I
went to Dublin to see some literary friends. A.E. had gone away. I knew Frank O‘Connor, Sean
O‘Faolain, F.R. Higgins, Seamus O‘Sullivan, and a couple of villainous journalists. The latter
never missed an opportunity of putting a lurid paragraph in the Sunday papers about me. I must be
an interesting character, I thought. So I decided that in future if I was to be exploited I should do
1150
Ibid.
Ibid., 228.
1152
Ibid.
1153
Ibid., 230.
1154
Ibid., 230.
1155
Ibid., 231.
1156
Ibid.
1151
209
the exploiting myself.‟1157 In 1937 after the spring sowing, Kavanagh „decided to go to London.
Ireland was a fine place to day-dream in, but London was a great materialist city where my dreams
might crystallize into something more enduring than a winning smile on the face of an Irish colleen
–or landscape. I broke with the land.‟1158
9.2.2. To the Pagan City (London)
Departing Inniskeen, Kavanagh noted: „Leaving my native place I experienced neither
exultant joy nor tear-moist regrets. To Ireland I bade no patriotic emigrant‘s farewell; towards
London I did not turn hope-wide eyes in vision.‟1159 He arrived in London during coronation of
King George VI in 1937, and adopted the persona of „an illiterate Irish navvy in search of
work.‟1160 The „sheer size of London astounded him, and he tried to cope by thinking of it as
―Crossmaglen‖ on a big scale. Camden town was like Dundalk on a Saturday night.‟1161 Kavanagh
depicted the detrimental effect that urban life in London had upon the personalities of Irish
emigrants, many of whom had never set a foot outside of their native parishes: „Many Irish boys
made Rowton House, Camden Town, first stop from Mayo. The soft voices of Mayo and Galway
sounding in that gaunt impersonal place like warm rain on the arid patches of my imagination.
These boys were true peasants. They walked with an awkward gait and were shy. To me they looked
up as to a learned man and posed crooked questions which I couldn‘t answer. I wasn‘t greatly
interested in these boys; I had seen too much of them in Ireland. Their characters, impressionable
as wax, were soon to wear the impress of common vulgarity.‟1162
Kavanagh‟s impression of the city on the Thames was framed by an unconscious rural
confessionalism: „London is a pagan city, and it is not the poetic paganism of blackbirds. After the
chaste paganism of Ireland London‘s materialist immorality terrified me. There was no shyness, no
shame, and London‘s god, the cat, didn‘t care. There was little innocent courting: on Hampstead
Heath I saw them copulating like dogs in the sun.‟1163 Searching for literary work, he spied the
headline of an Irish newspaper and concocted a story that he was one of the parties in Dublin
responsible for blowing up the statue of George II at Stephen‟s Green in May of 1937. He then
tried to sell the story to the Daily Mail:
The man who interviewed me knew a great deal more about the layout of
Dublin than I did –and about explosives too.
„How far is Stephen‟s Green from Nelson‟s Pillar?‟
„What size are four stores of gelignite?‟
1157
Ibid., 241.
Ibid., 252.
1159
Ibid., 253.
1160
Ibid., 254.
1161
Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, 93.
1162
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 254.
1163
Ibid., 263.
1158
210
„How was mine put off?‟1164
Failing to convince the editor, but edified by his grilling, he managed to sell the story to another
newspaper. It was during this time that he made the acquaintance of Helen Waddell, a novelist from
Northern Ireland who became an early literary patron: „She received me as the Prodigal Son was
received. It was she suggested my writing this book, and introduced me to the Promised Land.‟1165
Waddell secured Kavanagh the commission to write The Green Fool from the publisher Michael
Joseph. In one of the squalid districts of London filled with Irish emigrants, he commenced
writing: „This street was not in a residential area; it was loud with street criers and children. At one
end was a pub, frequented by sensual drinkers and low-priced prostitutes. I have no actual
knowledge that these women were cheap, but as a judge of feminine allure I would say that they
weren‘t too expensive.‟ 1166
The daily rhythm of his lifeworld as a farmer in Mucker carried over to London: „He kept up
his country habit of rising at six or seven and put in four or five hours,‟ 1167 work before lunch:
„Instead of being restricted to composing when he was at his most exhausted after a gruelling day‘s
manual labour and sacrificing companionship and recreation to do so, he was now up at his table
from early morning when he was at his freshest and most energetic.‟ 1168 In contrast to the city in
which he was writing, Kavanagh infused his prose style with a deep poetic and topographical
sensibility, drawing upon the rural lore of dinnseanchas from ancient Gaelic tradition: „Residence
in London helped him to achieve the necessary aesthetic distance; he was surrounded by his future
audience, urban types who had probably never seen a cow or a churn.‟1169 He spent five months
working on his book before he returned to Mucker: „London is the loneliest place I have known:
this loneliness is the only holy thing in the city. I have always thought loneliness holy. I wrote four
hours each day.‟1170
9.2.3 Summary
On its publication The Green Fool was described as a comical autobiography, a piece of
rural anthropology and met with critical acclaim. However, a reference to the Dublin writer Oliver
St. John Gogarty provoked the physician-cum-author to file a libel suit. The suit was based on a
depiction of Kavanagh appearing at the author‟s house: „I mistook Gogarty‘s white-robed maid for
his wife –or his mistress. I expected every poet to have a spare wife.‟1171 Allegedly, what actually
1164
Ibid., 262.
Ibid.
1166
Ibid., 263
1167
Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh:A Biography, 93-94
1168
Ibid.
1169
Ibid., 94.
1170
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 263
1171
Ibid., 228.
1165
211
offended Gogarty was an earlier passage, where Kavanagh inquired at the National Library about
the addresses of various Dublin writers:
A woman searched in a book and after a long time extracted one address, that
of Oliver St John Gogarty.
„Is that the best you can do?‟ I queried. And that was the best they could
do.1172
The urbane Gogarty felt snubbed by what he considered a crass and crude upstart from provincial
Ireland. The libel case illustrated a clash between rural and urban cultural sensitivities. In March of
1939 the suit was heard in a London court-room. The presiding justice pronounced that Kavanagh‟s
allusion to the maid „imputed that Dr. Gogarty was a loose man who had a paramour.‟1173 The jury
found for Gogarty and The Green Fool, in print for less than a year, was withdrawn from circulation
in Britain and Ireland.
9.3 Dublin
9.3.1. Introduction
Kavanagh moved permanently to Dublin in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War. He
shared a small bed-sit on Upper Drumcondra Road, with his younger sibling, Peter who worked as a
schoolteacher. The brothers shared a space the size of an out-shed on their family farm. Peter
recalled: „It was a room about twelve feet square, had two beds, a table, a chair, a gas cooker, gas
fire and gas lights. We squeezed into it and stayed a year. Extraordinary, our resilience then, and
how we managed to live in such quarters. We were like those orientals you sometimes hear about
who live twenty-four to a room.‟1174
Kavanagh published a piece „Europe is at War‟ in The Irish Times which captured the
gloomy atmosphere of the period framed within the tiny space of the bed-sitter: „Midnight in
Dublin. A wild but not cold October wind, is driving rain against my window. The last buses are
swishing by on the blassy-bright streets. The radio in the flat above me has stopped forwarding to
this address the mixture of blather and jazz, which is called propaganda, and which is supposed to
influence the masses. Such of it has filtered through the ceiling has had another effect on me.‟1175
In the murky silence of the single-room apartment Kavanagh reflected on the contrast between his
new urbane environment where „everyone else is thinking in terms of war,‟1176 with the „far-past
peace and quiet in pastoral fields,‟ 1177 and wrote: „In the mirror of this mood I see. What?‟ 1178 A
1172
Ibid., 227.
Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: Biography, 113.
1174
Peter Kavanagh, Sacred Keeper: A Biography of Patrick Kavanagh (Orono: National Poetry Foundation,
1984) pp. 70-71.
1175
Patrick Kavanagh, „Europe is at War,‟ Irish Times 25 October 1939, in Man and Poet, 45.
1176
Ibid.
1177
Ibid.
1178
Ibid.
1173
212
rural landscape emerged in the space of his imagination: „An October evening in a country place. A
small house among leaf-lamenting poplars. In a garden before the house men are pitting potatoes. A
cart is heeled up. Two men are working at the back of the cart unloading the potatoes with their
muddy hands, while a boy with a stable-lamp stand‘s by the horse‘s head.‟1179
9.3.2. The Palace Bar
One of Kavanagh‟s main haunts in Dublin during the late 1930s was the Palace Bar on Fleet
Street, „perhaps the last place of its kind in Europe, A Café Literaire.‟1180 This public house‟s
significance to Kavanagh can be framed a chronotope shared by „salons and parlors [sic],‟1181
where
„webs of intrigue are spun, denouements occur and finally –this is where dialogues
happen.‟1182 This space in the narrative of Kavanagh‟s lifepath during the late 1930s served as „a
barometer of political and business life; political, business, social, literary reputations [were] made
and destroyed, careers [. . .] begun and wrecked.‟1183 Within the intersection provided by this
chronotope: „the graphically visible markers of historical time as well as of biographical and
everyday time are concentrated and condensed; at the same time they are intertwined with each
other in the tightest possible fashion, fused into unitary markers of the epoch.‟1184
Located across Westmoreland Street from The Irish Times office, Kavanagh underscored the
Palace Bar‟s significance: „The headquarters of Irish Literature was Dublin. The job was to break
into that enclave of letters. Frank O‘Connor, Fred Higgins and the Abbey Theatre School. I had
one negative advantage: I had never been identified with the Catholic crowd of writers. The
Protestants had invented Irish Literature as a sort of national religion and they were shy about
letting Catholic outsiders in on the jag.‟1185 This public-house provided Kavanagh with a space of
entry
to make connections into Dublin‟s literary circles. Nicknaming it the
„Malice Bar,‟
Kavanagh described it as the place where „the giant Hemingway-esque editor of the Irish
Times,‟1186
Bertie Smyllie, a Protestant, had „instituted‟ a branch office of the newspaper by his
nightly patronage. Kavanagh sketched him sardonically: „The editor of The Irish Smile sat alone, as
if in a huff. He was the mountain that forced all the literary Mahomets to come to him, he did not go
to them. Now he was waiting there testing his drawing powers. Finally the poet with the corrugated
1179
Ibid.
C. Connolly, Horizon, V (January 25, 1942) p. 36.
1181
Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 246.
1182
Ibid.
1183
Ibid., 247.
1184
Ibid.
1185
Patrick Kavanagh, Lapped Furrows: Correspondence 1933-1967 Between Patrick and Peter Kavanagh,
With Other Documents (ed.) Peter Kavanagh (New York: The Peter Kavanagh Hand Press, 1969) p 46.
1186
Ibid.
1180
213
face went over to the editor and leaning on his shoulder made a few solemn humbug remarks. How
seriously these men took themselves!‟1187
The inner city public house on Fleet Street hosted the centre of literary activity in the city:
„Besides Smyllie‘s inner circle, almost everyone who counted in journalism and the arts was to be
seen in the Palace Bar at some time on the evening of the week: F.R. Higgins, poet and Abbey
Theatre director, M.J. MacManus, novelist and literary editor of the Irish Press, the painter Harry
Kernoff, the sculptor Jerome Conor, Donagh MacDonagh, lawyer and poet, Alec Newman,
assistant editor of The Irish Times and, quite rarely before 1940, Brian O‘Nolan, who had not yet
metamorphosed into the Irish Times columnist, Myles na gCopaleen.‟1188 This chronotopic space
contained a collection of personalities „described by one of their numbers as a literary underworld,
and by another as a pack of grey wolves who sharpened their critical teeth on the bones of each
other‘s talent.‟ 1189 The volatile mix of intellects, critics, writers made for a social cocktail that was
prone to mediocrity and occasional combustibility. Kavanagh noted: „The conversation at the tables
was usually drivel. There were no standards of criticism. That destructive element of inarticulate
Dublin society which became articulate in Gogarty and James Joyce was here represented. A
poisonous element, bitter, clever, good at making hurtful witticisms about their neighbours. But
they had nothing creative to their name.‟1190 He witnessed one such row over the Belfast born poet
Louis MacNeice in the winter of 1939. Capturing the moment in a ballad entitled The Battle of the
Palace Bar, Kavanagh depicted the Dublin poet Austin Clarke insulting the absent MacNeice: „Let
him go back and labour / for Faber and Faber.‟1191 A supporter of MacNeice‟s responded with a
sniping remark about Clarke‟s nervous breakdown. A proper row commenced: „They fought like
barbarians, these highbrow grammarians, / As I have recorded for the future to hear. /And in no
other land could a battle so grand/ Have been fought over poetry, but in Ireland my dear!‟1192
One evening in 1939 Kavanagh auspiciously drew the attention of Smyllie: „As I sat in the
Malice Bar amid the din of journalists talking about poetry I glanced into a corner where I espied a
pair of misfortunate Catholic writers with no one to talk to them but themselves. One of them
thinking I would make a good go-between got his companion in loneliness to introduce themselves
to me. ―Do you know each other? This is Francis MacManus.‖ I shouted loudly: ―I don‘t know
you and I don‘t want to know you.‖ The editor of The Irish Times threw the side of his head
backward listening. I was elected. I wasn‘t going to have my career ruined by Catholic writers.‟1193
1187
Kavanagh, Lapped Furrows, 47.
Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: Biography, 125.
1189
J. Nemo, Patrick Kavanagh, (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 2001) p. 22.
1190
Ibid.
1191
Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography, 127.
1192
Ibid.
1193
Kavanagh Lapped Furrows, 46.
1188
214
Smyllie commissioned Kavanagh to write a series of pieces for the Irish Times on themes related to
the rural landscape, including The Flight from the Land.
These vignettes of prose captured the changing Irish countryside of the late 1930s, and
allowed Kavanagh gain his literary bearings after the personal disaster of Gogarty‟s libel case
against The Green Fool. The time spent at the Palace Bar, acclimatized the native son of Inniskeen
to the rhythms and vagaries of urban life, which the libel case had exposed. As one observer during
the period noted, Kavanagh‟s lurking presence in Dublin‟s public-houses carried the ambience of
his lifeworld from the townlands and fields of south Monaghan: „At moments with his fine head and
glowing face and his great lean height, he had in him a wisp of the unfathomable simplicity of Our
Lord. He was as innocent as a child, and at the same time as bucolic as a young bullock. His laugh
in a pub, terrific and uninhibited, had something of the ancient Fenians in it.‟1194
9.4 Michael McLaverty: Belfast
9.4.1. Introduction
McLaverty‟s narratives of the emigrant lifeworld in his novel Call my Brother Back and
other short stories of the 1930s, are framed from the perspective of the rural Catholic economic
refugee adjusting to the industrial culture and alien space of Belfast. Within these prose streetscapes
and neighbourhoods, the chronotope associated with „peripherality‟ emerges. This intersection of
time and place „is lost in a cyclical, natural or static time-warp, forgotten by history, bypassed by
history.‟1195 Whilst McLaverty‟s works were not intrinsically polemical, they do depict the social
malaise and the human detritus of the sectarian city, which has been fractured by impotent political
leadership and antagonistic religious traditions, rooted in a conflict originating in the seventeenth
century. An examination of McLaverty‟s short prose pieces will be followed by a reading of the
second section of his 1939 novel, which follows the fortunes of the MacNeill family after their
emigration from Rathlin Island to Belfast City.
9.4.2. Streetscape Stories (1935-1937)
Published in 1935, Evening In Winter opens with the story of a boy named Charley, his
father and a December twilight Belfast streetscape: „And now they were walking down the street.
He felt big to be out so late with the sky dark and the lamps lit. The snow had fallen. It wasn‘t deep
snow, but it covered the ground, and lines of it lay on the black garden railings, and on the arms of
the lamp-posts.‟ 1196 The piece is so brief, that the story‟s power is found in the description of the
family house, the inside of the church, and the blanketed winter roads of the city: „A tram passed,
1194
Alan Warner, Clay is the Word (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1973) p. 133.
J. Leersson, „The Western Mirage: On Celtic Chronotope in the European Imagination,‟ in (ed.) Timothy
Collins, Decoding the Landscape, (Galway: Centre for Landscape Studies, 1994) p. 4.
1196
Michael McLaverty, „Evening in Winter ‟ in Collected Short Stories: Michael McLaverty , (ed.) Sophia
Hillan (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2002) p. 126.
1195
215
groaning up the hill where they were walking. Sparks, greed ones and red ones and blue ones,
crackled from the trolley, but the tram went on and slithered out of sight. And now there was
nothing on the road only the snow and the black lines where the trams ran.‟1197
The trappings of urban modernity, with its electrified landscape of lamp-posts and tram lines
rise out of the winter evening: „Up above were the telephone wires covered with crimbs of snow, but
the trolley wires were all dark. Presently they lit up with gold light and soon a black motor-car
came slushing down the hill, covered with snow. Then it was very quiet.‟1198 The December
streetscape of wires and snow provides a backdrop for the more ancient illumination within the
vestibule of the church, with its incense, candle tapers and organ music: „At the sides were windows,
and when the tram-cars passed you could see lightning and blue diamonds and red diamonds,‟1199
and the „boys with fat brass candlesticks and a priest with a golden cloak that sparkled with
lights.‟1200 The memory of the electrified snowscape and the candle lit church remain with the boy
as he goes to bed and stir his imagination as he falls asleep in his cold room: „So his Mammie
brought him to bed, up to the bedroom where the red-lamp was, the red-lamp that burned like a
tulip‘s head before a picture of Holy God. He knelt and said his prayers on the cold, oilcloth floor.
In bed it was cold, too, colder than the seat in the chapel. But it soon got warm; and he thought of
the organ in his ears. . .the candle that wouldn‘t light . . . the tram that went up the hill with lights
crackling from the trolley . . .and stars falling . . . falling.‟1201
In 1937‟s The Game Cock, McLaverty tells the story of a father and son who raise a illicit
fighting rooster named Dick, in the urban milieu of the Falls Road: „When I was young we came to
Belfast and my father kept a game cock and a few hens.‟1202 The story travels from a cityscape of
red-brick row houses to the rural environs of Toome, and then back again. Leaving before dawn to
catch a train to the Northern Counties, McLaverty elicits a conspiratorial mood as the father and son
set out for the cockfight: „The streets were deserted, and our feet echoed in the chill air. Down the
Falls Road we hurried. The shopblinds were pulled down, the tram lines shining, and no smoke
coming from the chimneys. At the Public Baths my father looked at his watch and then stood out in
the road to see the exact time by the Bath‘s clock.‟1203 Before they arrive at the train station, Dick
gets loose. The rooster „raced up North Howard Street, and stood contemplating a dark-green
public lavatory.‟1204 After a scramble to catch the way-ward cock, they make the train at the last
minute. In Toome, they arrive at Granny‟s house. The father feeds Dick bread soaked in poteen, and
1197
Ibid., 127.
Ibid.
1199
Ibid., 127.
1200
Ibid., 128.
1201
Ibid., 129-130.
1202
Michael McLaverty, „The Game Cock,‟ in Collected Stories, 77.
1203
Ibid., 81.
1198
216
takes him off to the match after being told by his mother to „Mind the peelers.‟1205 The boy is left
with his uncle, and they take a walk to the abandoned detritus of a landed estate: „The Big House
was in ruins, crows were nesting in the chimneys, and the lake was covered with rushes and green
scum. When I asked my uncle where all the ladies and gentlemen and the gamekeeper, he spat
through the naked windows and replied, ―They took the land from the people and God cursed
them‖. ‟1206
Later in the afternoon, the father returns with the badly injured rooster: „the cock‘s comb was
scratched with blood, his feathers streaky, and his eyes half shut.‟1207 The game-cock has won five
fights, but seems the worst for it, and the boy is happy when he and his father leave the rural milieu
of Toome for the city „and gladder still when we were in the train where I made the wheels rumble
and chant . . . They took the land from the people . . . God cursed them.‟1208
As they arrive in
Belfast his father‟s shoddy appearance causes a stir on the public transport: „It was dark when we
reached Belfast and I carried Dick in the potato bag. We got into a tram at the station; the lights
were lit and we sat downstairs. The people were staring at my father, at the clabber on his boots and
wrinkles on his trousers. But he paid no heed to them.‟1209 Returning home, they discover that the
rooster is dead, and McLaverty ends the tale on a jocular note, with the father stating that he will get
his prized fighting cock Dick immortalised by the taxidermist. The story playfully depicts the
diffusion of the traditions of rural culture into the urban milieu of Belfast.
McLaverty adopted a darker, more menacing tone in short story Pigeons: „It was published
in the April/May edition of New Stories in 1936 and was the first and only short story [of his] to
deal directly with the political theme of the ‗Troubles‘ in Ireland.‟1210 The narrator, a boy named
Frankie commences the story in the following manner: „Our Johnny kept pigeons, three white ones
and a brown one that could tumble in the air like a leaf . . . That is a long while ago now, for we still
have the pigeons, but Johnny is dead; he died for Ireland.‟1211 The story takes place on the Falls
Road of West Belfast, where on Saturday there was „dinner with the sausages because is it was
pay-day, ‟1212 and „the pigeon-shed was on the slates above the closet,‟1213 in the small bed-room
shared by the brothers. Johnny is older, and gives Frankie two pennies for his candy. Johnny flies his
pigeons once a week, and that day becomes a poignant one in Frankie‟s memory: „Saturday was a
1204
Ibid., 82.
Ibid., 85.
1206
Ibid., 85-86.
1207
Ibid., 86.
1208
Ibid.
1209
Ibid., 86-87.
1210
Sonia King Hillan, The Silken Twine: A Study of the Works of Michael McLaverty (Dublin: Poolbeg,
1992) p. 53.
1211
Michael McLaverty, „Pigeons,‟ in Collected Stories, 8.
1212
Ibid., 9.
1205
217
great for us and our pigeons, but it was on a Saturday that Johnny died for Ireland.‟1214 Frankie
recalls the day in the context of his neighbourhood: „It was a lovely sunny day. Everybody had
clothes out on the lines, and the clothes were fluttering in the breeze. Some of the neighbours were
sitting at their backdoors, nursing babies or darning socks. They weren‘t nice neighbours for they
told the rent-man about the shed on the slates and he made us pay a penny a week for it.‟1215
A „strange man in a black hat and burberry coat,‟1216 approaches them and talks to Johnny,
who with a sad face, tells Frankie to look out after the pigeons for him, as he must leave. Night
arrives stormy and rainy, but Johnny does not come home: „The clock on the mantle piece chimed
eleven and my sisters blessed themselves –it got a soul out of Purgatory when you did that. They
forgot all about my bedtime and I was let stay up though my eyes felt full of sand. The rain was
falling. We could hear it slapping in the yard and trindling down the grate.‟ 1217 The family recites
the Rosary, and still Johnny doesn‟t return. McLaverty weaves a tapestry of impending doom: „It
was a blowy night for someone‘s back door was banging, making the dogs bark. The newspapers
that lay on the scullery floor to keep it clean began to crackle up and down with the wind till you‘d
have thought there was a mouse under them.‟ 1218
Later in the night there is a knock on the door, and a group of men is seen standing in the
yard: „Daddy came in, his face as white as a sheet.‟1219 Frankie is told to go up to his room and he
takes refuge with his sisters. The next time he sees his brother is in the morning: „I turned my head
and looked at the bed. Johnny was lying on the white bed in a brown dress. His hands were pale and
they were joined around his rosary beads, and a big crucifix between them. There was a big lump of
wadding at the side of his head and wee pieces up his nose.‟1220
There is a wake in the house and then a funeral procession to the church, which is patrolled
by the Royal Ulster Constabulary: „There were crowds of peeler in the street, some of them talking
to tall, red-faced men with overcoats and walking sticks. Three men along with my Daddy carried
the yellow coffin down the stairs. There was a green, white and gold flag over it. But a thin
policeman, with a black walking stick and black leggings, pulled the flag off the coffin when it went
into the street. Then a girl snatched the flag out of the peeler‘s hands and he turned pale. At the end
of the street there were more peelers and every one wore a harp with a crown on his cap.‟1221
1213
Ibid., 10.
Ibid.
1215
Ibid., 10-11.
1216
Ibid., 11.
1217
Ibid., 12.
1218
Ibid.
1219
Ibid., 13.
1220
Ibid., 14.
1221
Ibid., 15-16.
1214
218
At the cemetery, Frankie realises that he will not see his brother Johnny again: „I began to
cry when I saw the deep hole in the ground and the big castles of red clay at the side of it.‟1222 The
political dimension of the funeral emerges after its religious rites are finished: „When the prayers
were over a tall man with no hat and a wee moustache stood beside the grave and began to talk. He
talked about our Johnny being a soldier of the Republic, and, now and then, he pointed with his
finger at the grave.‟1223 Through out the story Frankie is worried that his father will destroy the
pigeons. McLaverty‟s ending leaves the reader with a lack of closure: „Yesterday I was lying on the
waste ground watching the pigeons and Daddy came walking towards me smoking his pipe with the
tin lid. I tried to show him the pigeons flying through the clouds. He only looked at them for a
minute and turned away without speaking, and now I‘m hoping he won‘t wring their necks.‟1224 As a
short story, Pigeons anticipated the themes of sectarianism and violence that are contained in the
second section of McLaverty‟s 1939 novel.
9.4.3. Call My Brother Back (1939)
The second section of Call My Brother Back tells the story the MacNeill family as they
adjust to their new life on the Falls Road. McLaverty paints a panoramic view, as Colm and his
brother Alec gaze down upon the divided cityscape of Belfast:
The numerous spires of the Protestant churches were everywhere. Then there
was the Falls Park and they could see people walking about in it, and below it
Celtic Football ground with its oval field and one grand stand, and farther to
the right Linfield ground with its tin advertisements for cigarettes. „Wouldn‟t
you think now to see all the churches,‟ smiled Alec, „and all the factories and
playgrounds that it was a Christian town?‟1225
After the family‟s emigration to the city, the eldest son Alec takes the place of his father Daniel as
the breadwinner. Colm having arrived in Belfast first is a boarder at a Catholic boy‟s college until
the rest of his family emigrates from Rathlin Island.
With the start of the Irish War of
Independence, sectarianism flares in Belfast, and Alec joins the IRA. In the end, like Johnny in
Pigeons, he is killed and Colm seeks employment to supplement the income his mother draws from
charity. After the family moves to the Falls Road from the island, Colm joins them in their red-brick
row house. His brother Jamesy describes the members of the neighbourhood in a letter that he writes
to his relatives on Rathlin: „No. 3 is Mrs Kelly an old cross lady with two sons in America. She was
going to send the peelers on us for lighting the bonfire on the 15th August facing her door. We never
hardly see her [. . .] No. 5 is Colonel Magee and he works in the post office. He is very rich and has
a new bicycle and curls in his moustache. He walks as straight as a lamp-post and he fought in the
1222
Ibid., 16.
Ibid., 17.
1224
Ibid.
1225
Michael McLaverty, Call My Brother Back (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2003 [1939])
1223
219
Boer War. He has a sword in the kitchen and he always cleans it with Brasso and he gave us a
shilling for our football club. His wife keeps flowers in the yard and he has two larks in a cage. On a
Sunday he wears a hard hat and goes for a walk up the road with his wee black pom [. . . ] No. 27 is
the end house on this side of the street and the man works in the brickyard and his clothes and boots
are the colour of clay. He goes to the football matches to see Celtic and if they win he comes home
drunk and he would give you a penny. He hunts us if we play handball against the gable.‟1226 The
neighbourhood represented in Call My Brother Back has not yet been transformed by sectarianism
in to a Catholic ghetto. The people living on Colm‟s street come from a variety of religious and
social backgrounds.
McLaverty also represents the city of Belfast and its industries and ports, its sectarian
quarters and its churches in detail. Through the eyes of Colm, the reader gets a glimpse of the
artery of the Lagan River as its courses through the city‟s harbour: „At the other side of the harbour
were the coal-boats, the crane buckets descending into their bowels and disgorging shining
pyramids of coal on the quay. Over the Queen‘s Bridge lines of coal-carts rattled; trams mumbled;
and once a donkey passed drawing a cart of steaming coalbrick. Colm stood on the bridge counting
the big cross-channel boats, looking at the Lagan water swirling round the quoins of the bridge,
holding captive in one corner orange peel, straw, and empty cigarette packets. From the opposite
side of the bridge he saw coming down the river barges laden with turf-mould and going to dock
under a black shed which had on the roof big white letters –PEAT, MOSS, LITTER.‟1227
As Colm wanders across Belfast, he cannot help juxtaposing the names of its streets with
place names from his native Rathlin Island: „On his way back to the College he wandered about the
city learning the names of the streets: Oxford Street, Victoria Street, Cromac Street, Durham Street,
Townshend Street, Carlisle Circus, and he thought of the island names –Lagavristeevore, Killaney,
Crocnacreeva, Carnasheeran, Crocaharna –words full of music, and he said them aloud to himself
as he went along.‟1228 After the MacNeill‟s settle into the Falls Road, Colm and Jamesy join a local
football club, and McLaverty represents the divided communities of Belfast at sport: „The following
Saturday they challenged a Protestant team to a match in the Bog Meadows. Heaps of stones were
used for goal-posts, and when Jamesy sent in a shot that just passed over the goalkeeper‘s head a
dispute rose. Brickfield Star said it was a good goal, but the other team maintained that the ball
went over the ―bar‖. The match finished in a fight.‟ 1229
pp. 162-163.
1226
Ibid., 89-91.
1227
Ibid., 64-65.
1228
Ibid., 65.
1229
Ibid., 79-80.
220
The sectarianism that pervades life in the city is a new phenomena to Colm: „Sitting with the
paper on his knees [he] saw the twisted life of the city: the fighting at football matches between
Catholics and Protestants; the paintings on the gable-ends of King William on a white horse, his
sword raised to the sky, and printed underneath: REMEMBER 1690 . . . NO POPE HERE. And in
the Catholic quarters, the green-white-and-gold flag of Ireland painted on the walls with UP THE
REPUBLIC.‟
1230
McLaverty‟s novel conveys the institutionalised sectarianism between Protestant
and Catholic communities which is alien to Colm‟s experience as an emigrant to Belfast: „It was a
strange city, he thought, to be living two lives, whereas on Rathlin Catholics and Protestants mixed
and talked and danced together.‟1231
Overwhelmed by the violence and sectarianism of the city, Colm retreats into the poetic
space of memory: „And when he went to bed he tried to sleep by thinking of the island; but, in the
morning, he awakened not to the cry of gulls or the sound of the sea, but to the rattle of early trams
and milk-carts and the newsboys shouting the latest ambush from Cork or shooting in another part
of his own city.‟1232 Belfast and its social malaise invade Colm‟s consciousness and he becomes ill
as a result. In the sanctuary of the hospital, memories of Rathlin become clear and bold: „Then he
thought of the island: his mind wandered over familiar rocks, and rose and fell with the sea waves:
the light of Kintyre carved the darkness: clouds commingled and departed in the sky [. . . ] His name
on the rock would have spots of moss, but someday he‘d go back and scrape his name and bring
Uncle Robert a new pipe.‟1233
Colm recovers from his illness, but the sick tide of sectarianism washes across
neighbourhoods and thoroughfares dividing Belfast into tribal areas: „He would hurry out with his
bag of books, down the Falls Road, looking up at the houses for fresh bullet-marks. Policemen
would be in groups and an armoured car at a corner that separated Catholic streets from Protestant
streets. Everything would be alert and fearful. Here and there a handcart with its legs in the air
would be in the middle of a street; cobble-stones dug up in heaps or holes made so that the
armoured cars and police ‗cage‘ could not get past.‟1234 His brother Alec joins the IRA to protect
the neighbourhood, but is ambivalent about the large cause he has enlisted in. He cannot help but
admire the resilience of his Loyalist foes: „If Ireland is partitioned now it will take a long time
before she‘s made one again. And when unity does come I heard a man say that it would take a
1230
Ibid., 123-124.
Ibid.
1232
Ibid., 148-149.
1233
Ibid., 108-109.
1234
Ibid., 149.
1231
221
hundred years before these people here‘d fit into a National life. They hate the real Ireland! And ‗tis
a pity for they‘re hard workers and good fighters.‟1235
The various urban topographies of the „Troubles‟ begin to manifest themselves upon the
streetscapes of the Shankhill and Falls Road. The partition of Ireland looms: „Coming home from
school Colm saw, day after day, youths painting on the gables: NO PARTITION –WE WANT OUR
COUNTRY.‟ 1236 Alec is shot and killed, his life consumed by the violence of sectarianism that fills
the working class quarters of the city. The MacNeill family is left to fend for itself. Colm‟s mother
is able to draw relief from the White Cross, but he leaves school and finds work in a bakery.
Though told from the perspective of Belfast‟s Catholic minority, McLaverty‟s novel provides a
social criticism of the sectarian geographies operating within Belfast. As Colm and his brother
Jamesy are out walking on North Street during the bustle of the Christmas season, they come across
a street orator, who delivers a tirade against the divided nature of the city: „ ―I‘m a sincere workin‘
man,‖ he orated. ―I grudge nobody his bite of bread as long as he gets it without suckin‘ the blood
from the poor. If he‘s a workin‘ man he‘s a friend of mine whether he‘s a Protestant, a Catholic, or
a Jew. [. . . ] We are all workers –The orator jumped off his bix and with his two hands stretched
above his head he yelled: ‗Yez are all mugs in this town! All mugs! Listen to this, brothers!
Supposin‘ ye got all the Orange sashes and all the Green sashes in this town and ye tied them
around loaves of bread and flung them over Queen‘s Bridge, what would happen? . . .What would
happen? . . . The gulls –the gulls that fly in the air, what would they do? They‘d go for the bread!
But you –the other Gulls – would go for the sashes every time!‖ .‟ 1237
The MacNeill family gathers to celebrate Christmas day and console themselves after Alec‟s
death. Colm ventures out into the countryside surrounding Belfast. The solitary winter walk initially
brings him a sense of peace, which drains away when he returns to the violent quarters of his
neighbourhood: „And all this beauty, all these quiet places flowed into his heart and filled him with a
tired-torn joy. And turning out of it he came to the city and the lights of the tram at the end of the
road. The conductor and driver were smoking within. Everything was quiet. But as the tram moved
off towards the centre of the city, down from the big houses to the long narrow streets, a vague fear
came over him, fear of shots ringing out and splintering glass.‟1238 At the end of the novel Colm is
pictured lying in bed, as confluent images of Rathlin Island and Belfast stream through his head.
9.5. Conclusion: Emigrant Cities.
Depictions of the rural emigrant‟s perceptions and experiences in the Irish city during the
1930s, illustrated by the works of Kavanagh and McLaverty exemplify that „a very high proportion
1235
Ibid., 156.
Ibid.
1237
Ibid., 184.
1238
Ibid., 190.
1236
222
of creative writing relating to migration and its impacts is, strongly autobiographical. Motives for
the production of such writing may be many and varied. Artistic or commercial considerations play
a part, but there are also, in many cases, strongly personal motivations drawn from a possible need
for catharsis, or to allow the act of writing to contribute to the re-definitions of identity.‟1239 The
fictive autobiography, memoirs and newspaper article by Kavanagh reflect a poetic, yet journalistic
style of representation, in which the writer acts as an observer participant in his new urban milieu.
Kavanagh was a member of a generational tide of individuals who migrated from the countryside to
towns and cities during the 1930s. By its sheer demographic numbers, the presence of this
generation began to slowly shape the streetscapes and culture of urban Ireland. James Farrell, an
American novelist of social realism visited Dublin in 1938, and recorded: „The writers are insular
and have little contact with intellectual currents outside of Ireland. It is an outpost of Western
civilization. It is little interested in anything beyond the bordering seas.‟1240 His impression of
Dublin at the time was grim and parochial: „Wide drab streets. Unkempt women, dirty, playing
children, patient little men on corners. There is a lace curtain in every window, and there are
shrines and holy pictures in every house. There is a public house on most corners throughout the
section.‟1241
Despite the dreary period study painted by Farrell, there was evidence of a developing postindependence cultural intelligentsia in Dublin. In spite of the censorship and the clericalism of the
1930s, a loose coterie of writers did meet to discuss art, literature and politics. Though a member of
this wandering group, Kavanagh at times felt out of place in its circles: „As a countryman he lacked
the social graces, the education, and the money he believed many of his literary colleagues enjoyed.
He felt discriminated against and isolated and lashed out with rudeness and bluster.‟1242 Uprooted
from his native south Monaghan, Kavanagh adopted the perspective of the existential outsider
who feels „an alienation from people and places, homelessness, a sense of the unreality of the world
and of not belonging.‟1243 After his move to Dublin in 1939 he wrote: „The Hitler War had started. I
had no job, no real friends. I live by writing articles for the papers, mainly on the pleasures of
country life which, fifty miles away, calls me to return. There is new prosperity owing to the war but
I am a mad messiah without a mission or true impulse, struggle on in Dublin instead of walking out .
. . For many years after my misfortunate arrival in the City devoted to The Lie I was terribly
concerned about things Irish and I slashed out all around me. My misfortune apart from the flaw of
character which must be the original Original Sin -was that I grew up in a society which was locked
Paul White, „Geography, Literature and Migration,‟ in (eds.) R. King, J. Connell and P. White, Writing
Across Worlds: Literature and Migration (London: Routledge, 1995) p. 9.
1240
Ibid.
1241
Ibid.
1242
Nemo, Patrick Kavanagh, 22.
1239
223
in a literary idea that was purely English and which called itself the Irish Literary Revival. This
literary jag cut a man off, not just from Europe, but from the spiritual realities of things seen and
loved.‟1244 Kavanagh‟s sentiments about the literary revival and its relations to society and place
illustrated that he held „an awareness of meaning withheld, ‟1245 by the urban coterie of the
revivalists, and was frustrated by his „inability to participate in those meanings. This is the condition
of existential outsideness that has fascinated so many nineteenth and twentieth century novelists and
poets.‟ 1246
McLaverty‟s writing reflected a different dimension of the rural Irish emigrant experience
of existential outsideness. His novel and short-story prose pieces capture poignantly the mood and
ambience of Belfast City in the 1930s during a distinctive period of economic depression, political
sectarianism and social malaise As December snow falls on a Belfast neighbourhood, McLaverty
contrasted the comfort and refuge of a Church and bedroom, with the modern streetscape of electric
tramlines and telephone wires. In a second piece, the comical account of an ill-fated gamecock
juxtaposed rural and urban sensibilities within a jocular frame. In a third piece, the dark tide of the
Troubles, with its cross-currents of nationalism and sectarianism touched upon a family home in the
Falls Road.
The second section of Call My Brother Back served to illustrate that „the street where one
lives is part of one‘s intimate experience.‟1247 The impressionistic prose styling in the novel created
an ambience of place in which „emotion begins to tinge the whole neighbourhood -drawing on, and
extrapolating from, the direct experience of its particular parts- when the neighborhood is perceived
to have rivals and to be threatened in some way, real or imagined.‟1248 Through the precocious
young eyes of Colm MacNeill the gathering skirt of fear violence and death that enveloped the
working class districts of the city during the 1930s can be experienced. Through the voice of the
„orator‟ McLaverty articulated the social critique of Belfast‟s institutionalised sectarianism:
„ “But is it the policy of this town? Is it? Who does the riotin‟ and the
fightin‟? Look at the lists of dead and wounded these days in the papers.
What d‟ye see? They are all the names of workers –all workin‟ people! Ye
never seen shootin‟ in the Malone Road or Balmoral or in the other flashy
districts of this town. I suppose it puts them off their sleep when they hear
the shots bein‟ carried to them by the wind. And Lady Duff would turn to
Master Harold and say: “There‟s that beastly shooting again. They are
impossible people in this city! Impossible! Harold, get up and close that
window.” And Harold would laugh and scratch himself against his silk
1243
Relph, Place and Placelessness, 51.
Kavanagh, Man and Poet, 79-80.
1245
Relph, 51.
1246
Ibid.
1247
Yi-Fu Tuan , Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: Arnold, 1977) p. 170.
1248
Ibid., 171.
1244
224
pyjamas. And maybe at that moment an ould woman – a rickle of bones –is
shot dead in York Street. And what‟s Harold thinkin‟ about –Keep them at
it! Keep the workers at one another‟s throats and they‟ll forget about high
rents and low wages”.‟1249
The various narratives of rural emigration to the city found in the prose of Kavanagh and
McLaverty flesh out the experiences of „6 per 1,000 of the total population,‟1250 of Ireland during
the 1930s. Their narrative spaces contain the dilemma faced by many of these emigrants: „Our
experience of place, and especially of home, is a dialectical one -balancing a need to stay with a
desire to escape. When one of these needs is too readily satisfied we suffer either from nostalgia and
a sense of being uprooted, or from the melancholia that accompanies a feeling of oppression and
imprisonment in a place.‟1251 This dilemma is illuminated in McLaverty‟s ending of Call My
Brother Back, as young Colm MacNeill‟s memories of Rathlin Island and his emigrant lifeworld in
Belfast become fused in a composite landscape of dream and experience: „He went up to bed, and
on the landing saw the lamp burning before the crib and above it a wavering circle of light on the
ceiling. In bed he lay awake, his mind swirling to and fro . . . rabbits wild and free on the hills
around Belfast . . .swans moving across black water . . . oil-lamps warming the windows in Rathlin .
. .a rusty tin in the fork of a thorn bush . . .a rickle of bones falling dead in York Street.‟1252
1249
McLaverty, Call my brother, 184.
Foster, Modern Ireland, 538-539.
1251
Relph, Place and Placelessnes, 42.
1252
McLaverty, Call my brother, 191.
1250
225
226
10. Conclusion
. . . geography is not an inert container, is not a box where cultural
history „happens‟, but [is] an active force, that pervades the literary field
and shapes it in depth.
Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European novel, 1800-1900 (1998)
10.1 Introduction
Rooted in the sub-disciplines of historical and cultural geography, this study incorporated
theoretical engagements and techniques associated with past and present trends in literary and
humanistic geography. Consequently, this study utilised a hermeneutic analysis, which was focused
through five theoretical lenses as a means to examine the various „personalities of place,‟
represented primarily in English language novels (and other associated pieces of literature) written
by Irish writers in the 1930s.
Collectively, these writers can be identified as members of a distinct generation who
matured in the early twentieth century during a period of war and revolution in Ireland.
Subsequently, they published their novels and other pieces of literature, in the independent and
partitioned regions of the island during the 1930s. Consequently, the various representations of
place uncovered in their novels and embellished in a few instances by pieces of poetry, journalism
and drama, reflect socially and culturally fragmented landscapes, regional identities and particular
senses of place that existed in this seminal period in modern Irish history. The following sections
will discuss the various prose fiction landscapes represented by these writers, as well as the
particular chronotopes and impressions of lifeworld depicted in their novels and other associated
pieces of literature. The last section of this chapter will provide a brief impressionistic overview of
the writers and their prose fiction landscapes, before discussing the merits and demerits of the
methodology and literary scale of this study. A few final remarks and observations will then be
made.
10.2 Rural Lifeworlds
10.2.1. Introduction
The novels of Peadar O‟Donnell, Patrick Kavanagh, Forrest Reid and Michael McLaverty
were all set in various parts of Ulster. However, the particular relationships between the lifeworlds
and the chronotopes depicted by each author illustrates that this province contained various regions
which displayed distinctive personalities of place. The representations of these distinctive places
were influenced by each writer‟s particular location, cultural attachment and class position. A
contrast of place representation in O‟Donnell‟s Adrigoole (1929) and The Knife (1930), with
Kavanagh‟s The Green Fool (1938) will be followed by separate discussions of landscape features
227
depicted in Reid‟s novel‟s Uncle Stephen (1931) and The Retreat (1936) and in McLaverty‟s short
stories of the 1930s, and novel Call My Brother Back (1938).
10.2.2. Bogs, Fields and Townlands
The prose fiction landscapes in the novels of Peadar O‟Donnell and Patrick Kavanagh were
deeply rooted in the soils of their native Ulster. Each writer‟s personal sense of identity, however,
was regional and distinct. O‟Donnell‟s lifepath originated in the bog-lands and hills of Donegal,
whilst Kavanagh was raised in the drumlin belts of south Monaghan. Both writers drew upon the
chronotope of the idyll in their writing, but each employed it differently within their prose. In the
opening chapter of O‟Donnell‟s Adrigoole the symbiosis between community and landscape in
Donegal is represented as idyllic. However as his articulation of the plight of the countryside
develops in the novel and his subsequent works, O‟Donnell‟s narratives begin to shatter the essence
of this chronotope, and he populates his fictional lifeworlds with socially fragmented townlands and
poverty stricken landscapes, which as depicted in The Knife were harsh and unforgiving: „The
Lagan holds its lapful of strange children, planter and native mixed, not fused, sweating together,
thinking apart, uneasy in silence, sudden in sidelong glances.‟1253 In contrast, the prose reflections
of Kavanagh‟s early lifepath perspective projected a poetic sense of the idyll upon the natural
landscape. But within the chronotopic axis of the biographical novel, we find Kavanagh‟s sketch of
his townland of Mucker in The Green Fool tinged at its edges by a lingering presence of social
enmity: „Though little fields and scraping poverty do not lead to grand flaring passions, there was
plenty of fire and an amount of vicious neighbourly hatred to keep us awake.‟1254
The distinctions in place portrayal between O‟Donnell and Kavanagh may have been
influenced by each writer‟s socio-economic position, and their family‟s attachment to the land on
which they lived. O‟Donnell‟s father was a tenant farmer who rented his acreage from an absentee
Donegal landlord and migrated to Scotland as a seasonal worker, his mother was a factory
seamstress. Kavanagh on the other hand, was born into the relative security of a landowning family,
and his father worked as both a farmer and local cobbler. The distinct lifeworld experiences of
O‟Donnell and Kavanagh profoundly influenced their separate representations of place in their
novels.
O‟Donnell‟s prose fiction landscapes depicted the various political, sectarian and class
struggles that took place within Donegal‟s townlands during the 1920s and „30s. His perspective
was that of a labour agitator and republican volunteer. O‟Donnell‟s writing was an extension of his
activism and served to articulate the voiceless and marginalised communities in the west of Ireland.
A strong current of socialism ran through his prose fiction: „human nature is as constant as the
1253
1254
Peadar O‟Donnell, The Knife, 11-12.
Patrick Kavanagh, The Green Fool, 11.
228
tides; race memories, like sunken reefs, add confusion only to the tumult of storms. You can‘t make
either saints or monsters of the men of a craft in one land to their brothers in another; you bring
men nearer one another by telling all what each does for a living than by the most learned talks on
beliefs.‟1255
In contrast, the form of Kavanagh‟s prose style articulated the poetic sense of a small land
owning farmer‟s lifeworld and his loving attachment to the fields he cultivated. His perspective was
shaped by an introspective struggle between the farm he inherited and his almost compulsive need
to portray the details of his surrounding environment. After Kavanagh published his first volume of
poetry in 1936, members of his rural community viewed him as a figure of suspicion: „My poems
had been published by Macmillan; and while the people admired they felt that I was a stranger
within the gates. I know some of them were afraid; in the country places of Ireland writing is held
in certain awe: a writer was a dangerous man from whom they instinctively recoiled.‟1256
Kavanagh‟s prose style was strongly influenced by the poetic techniques associated with the
works of Ezra Pound and the school of Imagism: „It paints pictures telling us of the beauty
perceived through the senses but does not comment on this beauty. It praises by showing.‟1257
Subsequently, The Green Fool can be seen primarily as the work of a poet, who surrounds the
images he has collected with vignettes of prose which mimic in style, the story telling techniques of
the seanchaí. Of the poetic imagination, Kavanagh later observed: „To know fully even one field or
lane is a lifetime‘s experience. In the poetic world it is depth that counts and not width. A gap in a
hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the
juncture of four small fields -these are as much as man can fully experience.‟1258
Conversely, O‟Donnell‟s prose style was anchored in a social realism forged during his
imprisonment as a result of the Irish Civil War. Witnessing the brutality of internecine conflict in
which Free State forces eventually triumphed over Republican resistance, O‟Donnell, who had
dabbled in prose as a school teacher on Arranmore Island, resumed writing in earnest. He
contributed to a Republican prison journal entitled The Book of Cells, and sketched the first few
chapters of a novel. O‟Donnell recalled:
„On the island it had been an ambition to induce
articulation into the life we all lived. Here now there was a turbulence that must break into voice
through a score of minds [ . . . ] Quite a number of cell sheets were written but the fever of the war
was in them all [ . . . ] And then I suddenly became aware of life outside the range of the fever;
waves breaking on the cliffs of Arranmore, the whirl of eddies around Innishfree; the hearty bustle
of the flood tide. I got brine in my face from white horses and heard the curlews cry at night time
Peadar O‟Donnell, Salud! An Irishman in Spain (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1937) pp. 9-10.
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 245-246.
1257
John Nemo, Patrick Kavanagh (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979) pp. 40-41.
1258
Kavanagh, Man and Poet, 15.
1255
1256
229
[ . . .] I began pushing at minds to get a glimpse of life below the fever. I wrote the opening scene of
Storm.‟1259 O‟Donnell‟s prose style distilled itself from his experiences as a teacher and Republican
volunteer. Subsequently „when his first books did appear, the style showed the bareness and clarity
of journalism, without the clichés. The beauty revealed derives directly from the subject matter, not
from literary artifice.‟1260
The respective lifepath experiences of O‟Donnell and Kavanagh influenced each writer‟s
use of language to describe the various hills, bogs, fields, townlands and drumlins, in their prose.
For instance, O‟Donnell‟s representation of the stony bog-land in Adrigoole, which surrounded the
Dalach farm was depicted with a sense of menace and repugnance: „Only low-lifed things could live
in there; fat, bulbous, lazy frogs that come out of soft, lifeless, spongy spawn, and go out again in
slimy, clammy death.‟1261
In contrast, Patrick Kavanagh‟s prose recollection of the bogs
surrounding his family farm in The Green Fool, was poetic and bucolic: „Beautiful blue and white
and pink flowers grew on the bog and more magical flowers I have not seen since; they were
exciting as a poem and had a different beauty for my changing moods.‟1262
The styles of each
writer, however, were rooted in the daily horizons of country people; in their prose O‟Donnell and
Kavanagh were able to articulate observations, reflections and emotions of the rural lifeworlds
which inhabited the harsh beauty of the hills of Donegal and the drumlin belts of south Monaghan.
10.2.3. Gardens and Graveyards; Ruins and Manors
A sheen of pagan mysticism illuminated the prose fiction landscapes of Forrest Reid‟s
Ulster. Framed within an urbane bourgeois perspective, Reid‟s novels were occupied by the
lifeworlds of „ghostly houses -and ghostly small boys.‟1263 Ruined abbeys and castles, graveyards,
secret gardens and sublimely erotic pools were anchored in his novels around the chronotopic
spaces of numinous houses. Ulster‟s pastoral landscapes emerged as a palimpsests in The Retreat,
Reid‟s 1936 novel : „The castle had been built in 1313 [. . . ] little remained of it now except the
lower walls, and here and there the fragments of a spiral staircase. The floor was solid rock,
however, though partly coated with grass; and looking through a broken archway, her pale mild
face turned toward him, Tom perceived a sheep reposing in solitude.‟
1264
Raised the son of a
Unionist merchant in Belfast, Reid‟s interest as an adolescent in ancient literature was enhanced by
his studies of the classics at Cambridge. This led him to reject Christianity and embrace a lifepath
imbued with an earthy sense of paganism, which distilled itself into his narrative style: „I had
O‟Donnell, The Gates Flew Open, 52-53.
Grattan Freyer, Peadar O‘Donnell, 24.
1261
O‟Donnell, Adrigoole, 27-28.
1262
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 7-8.
1263
Brian Taylor, The Green Avenue: The life and writings of Forrest Reid, 1875-1947, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980) p. 124.
1264
Reid, The Retreat, 207-208.
1259
1260
230
arrived at the Greek view of nature. In wood and river and plant and animal and bird and insect it
had seemed to me there was a spirit which was the same as my spirit. And here, in this poetry, every
aspect of nature seemed to be perpetually passing into divinity, into the form and radiance of a god,
while the human passed no less easily into tree or reed or flower.‟1265
Filled with fantasist scenarios and pagan allusions to Greek mythology, Reid‟s writing was
luminous; his use of language erudite, reflecting an intellect well grounded in the Arts and
Humanities. He noted at one time that his fiction provided him with a vicarious pretext „to live
through the years of his boyhood.‟1266 Though his novels Uncle Stephen and The Retreat centred on
the liminal and spectral lifeworlds of pre-adolescent Protestant boys, Reid‟s representation of place
in his prose was clearly mimetic, maintained a Cartesian balance and was firmly rooted in his native
landscape: „The Ulster landscape and Reid‘s landscape are not alternative imaginative
topographies, but based upon firm realities. Reid‘s particular pays sans nom, that country ―whose
image was stamped upon our soul before we opened our eyes on earth,‖ may be an ideal country
but the landscapes which Reid described are not idealised.‟ 1267
10.2.4. Rathlin Island
Rathlin, an isolated island of towering limestone cliffs, located off the north east coast of
Ireland can be identified as a primary chronotopic feature in Michael McLaverty‟s prose fiction
landscape. Rathlin Island embodied the pain of a mother hearing the news of her daughter‟s death
in America while winter winds scream „over the naked-grey land.‟ 1268 The island symbolised the
isolation of an old man standing amongst the detritus of shattered dreams upon „a small hill
gathering a skirt of darkness.‟1269 McLaverty‟s chronotopic space also provided refuge for a young
boy from its stormy climate, who snuggles himself „into a cleft of the rock,‟ 1270 along the strand of
its stony seascape. He once noted that a writer should „look for the intimate thing,‟1271 and the
preceding bonds depicted between Rathlin and its community in McLaverty‟s prose landscapes
signified the ritual nexus that existed between the island and its community for countless
generations.1272 McLaverty once observed ‗a novelist should recreate reality and illuminate it.‟1273
As such, the presence of rural poverty and emigration haunted the lifeworlds of his islanders.
In McLaverty‟s novel Call My Brother Back, the islanders discuss their inevitable fates:
„We‘d all be better in the town . . . Sure there‘s nothin‘ here for anyone, workin‘ like slaves at the
1265
Reid, Apostate, 155.
Taylor, Green Avenue, 4.
1267
Ibid., 182-183.
1268
Sophia Hillan King, The Silken Twine: A Study of the Works of Michael McLaverty, 43.
1269
Michael McLaverty, Stone, 38-39.
1270
McLaverty, Call My Brother Back, 1.
1271
King, 10.
1272
John W. Foster, „McLaverty‟s People,‟ Eire-Ireland IV (1971), pp. 92-105.
1273
King, 13.
1266
231
kelp and getting‘ damn all for it in the end. And look at the land, the spongy look of it would give
you cramps in your belly.‟1274 Trained as a scientist, McLaverty grew up as a Catholic in Belfast
and despite possessing postgraduate degrees, could only find work as a secondary school teacher in
the strife torn city of the 1930s. Consequently the accounts of Rathlin in his prose were the lifepath
depictions of an urban refugee of the Marching Season and seasonal visitor to the island, and
reflected „the note of exile,‟1275 found in the works of the Russian short story writer Anton Chekov.
Despite his education and training, the form of McLaverty‟s prose though reflecting the mimetic
styles of the anthropologist and naturalist painter, was grounded in a sense of poesis: „There is, of
course, a regional basis to McLaverty‘s world and a note-taker‘s reliability to his observation, yet
the region is contemplated with a gaze more loving and more lingering than any fieldworker or
folklorist could ever manage.‟ 1276 Indeed Rathlin Island‟s „shores and fields have been weathered in
his [gaze] and recollected in tranquillity until the contours of each landscape have become a
prospect of the mind.‟1277
10.3 House Islands and the Provincial Town
10.3.1. Introduction
In the various prose fiction landscapes of Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane and Kate O‟Brien,
the centripetal nature of place attachment is a central theme. Both the chronotopic spaces of the
„House-Island‟ and the Provincial bourgeois town represent places which are insular, isolated, and
detached. They are also places from which these three writer‟s characters attempt, at some point, to
escape and flee. The novels of Bowen and Keane depict the fading lifeworlds of the landed
Protestant Ascendancy culture during the Irish War of Independence, in contrast to O‟Brien‟s
representation of the rise of the provincial Catholic bourgeois during the nineteenth century and the
political apotheosis of its lifeworld in the 1930s. A discussion of the emotive and temporal
representations of the „House-Island‟ experience by Bowen in The Last September (1929) and in
Keane‟s Mad Puppetstown respectively, will be contrasted with a summary of O‟Brien‟s depictions
of the provincial Irish town of Mellick, in Without My Cloak (1931) and Pray for the Wanderer
(1938), both of which are based upon her native Limerick.
10.3.2. The House Island
The architecture, grounds and demesne of the fin de siécle Protestant Ascendancy „HouseIsland‟ in southern Ireland served as centripetal loci around which the prose fiction narratives of
Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane revolved. Bowen‟s The Last September illustrated the affiliation
1274
McLaverty, Call My Brother Back, 46.
King, The Silken Twine, 10.
1276
Seamus Heaney, „Introduction‟ Collected Short Stories: Michael McLaverty , (ed.) Sophia Hillan
(Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2002) p. xii.
1277
Ibid.
1275
232
between the Ascendancy lifeworld of the period immediately preceding southern Irish independence
and the insular space inside and the landscapes of fear outside their „House-Islands.‟ Responding to
a query about why she remained at her family‟s estate despite resenting what it represented,
Bowen‟s main character Lois responded: „ ―I like to be in a pattern.‖ She traced a pink frond with
her finger. ―I like to be related; to have to be what I am, just to be is so intransitive, so lonely‖.‟
1278
Bowen and Keane‟s novels depicted the decline of the „pattern‟ of Protestant Ascendancy
power and culture in the violent years preceding the birth of the Irish Free State. As a result, both
novels can be read as fictional memoirs of a vanishing culture, drawn from the lifepath experiences
of Bowen and Keane, written against the backdrop of the strongly Catholic nationalist cultural
landscape of southern Ireland in the 1930s.
The novels of Bowen and Keane also illustrate that the etymology of the term Anglo-Irish,
as a pastiche for a „West- British‟ and composite Irish identity is problematic. In Keane‟s Mad
Puppetstown, Easter‟s cousin Basil, trying to root his identity declares:‗ ―England,‖ [. . . ] (such an
awful word, and his eyes were narrow flames); ―she‘s too crowded. We want a littler, wilder sort
of place‖.‟1279 In The Last September, Lois‟ cousin Laurence, in a discussion with the doomed
British Officer Gerald Lesworth about the conflict surrounding the estate, responds to Gerald‟s
feelings of guilt about England‟s position in Ireland by telling him, „But I‘m not English . . .‟.1280
This sensibility coloured the lifeworlds of the House-Islands depicted in The Last September
and Mad Puppetstown. The prose styles of Bowen and Keane originate from the emotive and
rational dimensions of the human psyche. The literary scaffolding of Bowen‟s affective
representation of space inside and outside the House Island reveals that in her writing „architecture
takes the place of psychology: character is shaped by rooms, corridors, doors and windows, arches
and columns, rather than by individual experience.‟1281 In contrast Keane depicted the Ascendancy
habitus within the estate of Puppetstown through the rational frame of time. The chronotopic
changes of space associated with the Anglo-Irish „House-Island,‟ are traced from the culture‟s
„Golden Age,‟ before 1914, through the violence of the war years marked by the 1916 Rising in
Ireland, to the early days of Irish Free State after 1922. In each of these successive time-frames, the
depiction of the habitus is drawn from a landscape of memory and ruin, which may have occupied
the imaginations of the few members of the Ascendancy who remained in the Irish Free State
during the 1930s.
1278
Bowen, The Last September, 98-99.
Keane, Mad Puppetstown, 239.
1280
Ibid., 92-93.
1281
Ellman, Shadows Across the Page, 42.
1279
233
10.3.3. The Provincial Bourgeois Town
Provincial Limerick in the west of Ireland was the location where Kate O‟Brien rooted her
fictional town of Mellick: „It was there indeed that I learnt the world and I know that wherever I
am, it is still from Limerick that I look out and make my surmises.‟1282 The novels she published
during the 1930s chronicled the social morphology of the Catholic bourgeois family within the
chronotopic space of the Irish provincial town. In part they served to critique the social codes of
gender and class in which O‟Brien was raised, as well to articulate against the censorious native
provincialism which enveloped the Irish Free State in the decade and a half after its independence
from Britain.
Without My Cloak depicted the historical origins of the native bourgeois from the Act of
Union and its ascendancy after Catholic Emancipation in the early nineteenth century. In her first
published novel O‟Brien portrayed the culture of a
„Catholic Ireland, never a nationalist
Ireland,‟1283 and made a fine distinction between the political, confessional and class based origins
of Irish identity that emerged during the period. Honest John Considine, the Catholic feed
merchant in Without My Cloak finds no practical reason to align his economic interests with the
nationalist cause: „Political agitators, Ribbonmen, Young Irelanders, and such like filled him with
rage, and he was not shy about cursing them when he got the chance.‟1284 Honest John‟s primary
motivation was to maintain his status as a provincial power broker in Mellick. His family became a
means through which he could secure his long term business interests. The insularity of O‟Brien‟s
fictional provincial city was reflected in the tightly bounded lifeworlds experienced by the
Considine family members. The forces of capital and clan in the novel were centripetal, and
anchored the destiny of the family to the chronotopic space of Mellick.
In her second novel, Pray for the Wanderer O‟Brien contested the Catholic nationalist
identity of the Irish Free State through the eyes of an ex-IRA man turned writer, who has returned
to his native provincial city located in a valley on the Clare -Limerick border. He finds the place
bucolic „Mellick lay at the heart of it, in the green, watered valley. A gravely poised city, old and
quiet; the river swung beside it and outward south and west in brilliant loops and unfurlings
towards the sea,‟1285 and alternatively archaic, coloured by an „atmosphere of active Catholicism,
decorum, taboo and self-discipline.‟1286
By turns attracted and disillusioned by Free State
government policy which emphasises the fundamental unit of the family, whilst enforcing a strict
regime of censorship, influenced in part by Jansenistic theology, Matt Costello concludes that:
Kate O‟Brien, My Ireland (London: Batsford, 1962) p.148.
Eavan Boland, quoted in Joan Ryan, „Class and Creed in Kate O‟Brien‟ in (ed) Maurice Harmon, The
Irish Writer and the City, (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1984) p.126.
1284
O‟Brien, Without My Cloak, 15.
1285
O‟Brien, Pray for the Wanderer, 183.
1282
1283
234
„neither Ireland nor I can be saved on Ireland‘s dictated terms.‟1287 In the end Matt is forced to
leave the country of his birth in order to maintain his emotional sense of identity and preserve his
romantic, though emotionally immature sense of artistic integrity.
The lifeworlds represented in both novels reflect O‟Brien‟s general lifepath. She based the
narrative of Without My Cloak on her own family‟s genealogy in Limerick during the nineteenth
century. The banning of her novel Mary Lavelle in 1936 under the Censorship Act of 1929,
prompted her to write the polemical Pray for the Wanderer. Whilst O‟Brien‟s illustration of
Mellick in Without My Cloak was influenced by the vivid images of place in nineteenth century
novels exemplified by Thomas Hardy‟s Wessex, or George Eliot‟s Warwickshire, her postindependence depiction the Irish provincial city in Pray for the Wanderer takes on a more
polemical, abstract and slightly minimalist representation. By creating her own version of the
chronotope of the bourgeois town, O‟Brien‟s novel illustrates the dialogical relationships between
the various archaic institutions and lifeworlds the provincial Ireland of the period. As a result
Mellick‟s sense of place is derived from the minute representations of interior décor, manner and
banter which confronts, but wisely does not transgress the social, religious and political insularities
operating in the Irish Free State in late 1930s.
10.4 Urban Experiences
10.4.1 Introduction
The urban landscapes and lifeworld experiences represented in the novels and short stories
of Samuel Beckett, Flann O‟Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Michael McLaverty, despite containing
different narrative styles, all reflect a modernist sensibility, which touch on themes of alienation,
confusion and to a certain extent, chaos. The Dublin city scapes depicted in Beckett‟s More Pricks
than Kicks (1934) and O‟Brien‟s At Swim Two Birds (1939) are respectively manic and imbued
with surrealness. The esoteric chronotopic features located in the short stories of Beckett‟ collection
and in O‟Brien‟s novel, will be compared in the first sub-section. The following sub-sections will
discuss Kavanagh‟s immigrant experience in Dublin taken from his personal correspondence and
pieces of his journalism, and McLaverty‟s representation of the Catholic migrant experience in
Belfast in his novel Call My Brother Back (1938)
10.4.2 The Road and the Threshold: Spaces of Dublin
Samuel Beckett and Flann O‟Brien both experienced, perceived and represented Dublin of
the 1930s in different ways. Though university graduates with respective Protestant and Catholic
backgrounds, their depictions presented alternative versions of the city that remained intrinsically
Irish in nature. Beckett‟s identity as an Irishman from an affluent Protestant background left him
1286
1287
Ibid, 113.
Ibid., 206.
235
marginalized, and at times neurotic, by the period‟s stifling Catholic nationalist culture. His seminal
character Belacqua‟s attachment to Dublin, exemplified Beckett‟s personal sense of malaise: „his
native city had got him again, her miasmata already had all but laid him low, the yellow marsh
fever that she keeps up her sleeve for her more distinguished sons had clapped its clammy
honeymoon hands upon him.‟1288 Beckett‟s main character Belacqua, from his 1934 collection
More Pricks than Kicks appeared rootless and disconnected. Belacqua occupied the chronotopic
space of the road in Beckett‟s short stories: „the best thing to do was to move constantly from place
to place.‟1289 The identities of a coterie of Dubliners depicted at a party the story A Wet Night was
complex and varied, offering a cosmopolitan lifeworld horizon to the city, in contrast to the
monolithic culture of Catholic Ireland colouring the period‟s social landscape: „Two banned
novelists, a bibliomaniac and his mistress, a palaeographer, a violist d‘amore with his instrument
in a bag, a popular parodist with his sister and six daughters, a still more popular Professor of
Bullscrit and Comparative Ovoidology, the saprophile the better for drink, a communist painter and
decorator fresh back from the Moscow reserves, a merchant prince [and] two grave Jews.‟1290
Beckett‟s interest in the painting techniques of the German Expressionists and the artist Paul
Cézanne, distilled itself into his inventive and impressionistic use of the English language: „Bright
and cheery above the strom of the Green, as though coached by the Star of Bethlem, the Bovril sign
danced and danced through its seven phases.‟1291 The long, breathless sentences in the short story
Ding Dong, conveyed a bi-polar experience and perception of Dublin‟s streetscapes: „its highway
dehumanised in a tumult of buses. Trams were monsters, moaning along beneath the wild gesture of
the trolley.‟1292 The feeling is conveyed in to the space of a public house: „The bottles drawn and
emptied in a twinkling, the casks responding to the slightest pressure on their joysticks, the weary
proletarians at rest on B.T.M. and elbow, the cash register that never complains, the graceful
curates flying from customer to customer.‟1293 Within the manic landscapes of Beckett‟s early
prose, his alienated and marginalised character Belacqua, was often forced to negotiate with the
nihilistic personality of Beckett‟s representation of place: „the battalions of night, devouring the sky,
soaking up the tattered sky like an ink of pestilence. The city would be hooded, the dusk would be
harried from the city.‟1294 In a final analysis, Beckett‟s early prose depictions of Dublin and its
modernist lifeworlds, can be best understood in the light of an observation he made once he had
1288
Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women , 169.
Beckett, More Pricks than Kicks, 36.
1290
Ibid., 65-66.
1291
Ibid., 47.
1292
Ibid., 48-49.
1293
Ibid., 51-52.
1294
Dream of Fair to Middling Women, 28.
1289
236
exiled himself from the censorious shores of his native country: „The confusion is not my invention
[. . .] It is all around us and our only chance is to let it in.‟1295
In contrast Flann O‟Brien‟s complex sense of identity was rooted in a lapsed Catholic
counterculture that took hold in the post independent Irish Free State. O‟Brien was not so much
alienated, as bored by the grim Dublin cityscape of the 1930s. His urbane representations in At
Swim Two Birds were drawn from the lifepath experiences he had as a university student. The
mimetic and expressive framings of city contained in his prose, coloured the city‟s drab streetscapes
and districts with periodic colloquialism, elements of 1930s pop-culture and fables from Celtic
mythology. The lifeworld represented in O‟Brien‟s novel was distinctly male. The repression and
grit of Dublin reflected itself in the working class speech of its characters. Preserved within the
space of At Swim Two Birds is the distinct vernacular traits of a seminal period in the city‟s modern
history. O‟Brien „put a preservation order on Dublin lower middle class speech –and it was a
successful one –unlike most of the preservation orders we have put on Dublin‘s buildings.‟1296
Believing that the Dublin man was „Ireland‘s king penguin,‟
1297
O‟Brien declared: „I wish to
attempt an analysis of this unique character and I shall endeavour from time to time to discover his
more pronounced characteristics. These are embedded in the language he speaks, for he may be
studied phrase by phrase.‟1298 Although At Swim Two Birds was written in English, O‟Brien‟s use
of language in the novel reflected his upbringing in Irish: „Like the Gael always, as compared to the
Anglo-Gael, his speech is hard and direct without any wisps of Celtic mist floating around his
words.‟ 1299 The various urban locales contained in these mimetic and expressive representations
suggest that „the very geography of Dublin, with its fiercely independent villages and suburbs,‟1300
provided O‟Brien with a series of chronotopic spaces of representation, associated with that of the
threshold, through which he could depict the various social and material transformations that the
city experienced during the 1930s.
10.4.3. Salon and Parlour: The Palace Bar
Revisiting the prose fiction landscapes of Kavanagh‟s The Green Fool and McLaverty‟s
short stories and 1939 novel Call My Brother Back, one can trace an affective dimension of the
rural migrant‟s lifepath to the city during the 1930s. Both writers emigrated from County Monaghan
during different periods in their lives. Consequently the horizons of their lifeworlds shifted from the
rural to the alien streetscapes and cityscapes of the urban milieu. Kavanagh‟s depictions of the
B. Robinson, „Some Fragmented Forms of Space‟ in Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, Vol. 67, No. 4, December 1977, p. 550.
1296
Anthony Cronin, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O‘Brien , 40.
1297
Ibid., 118.
1298
Ibid.
1299
C. Ó Nualláin, The Early Years of Brian O‘Nolan / Flann O‘Brien / Myles na gCopaleen, 108.
1300
Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics, 514.
1295
237
„pagan cities‟ present him as an eternal outsider, a peasant pilgrim who only finds half-measured
comfort in the chronotopic space of the Palace Bar on Dublin‟s Fleet Street. Kavanagh‟s
recollection of the atmosphere occupying this public house was characteristically acerbic: „As soon
as a new ‗writer‘ (none of these men was known to have written anything except undergraduate
stuff in a college magazine and they were living on the strength of it) came in the door every one of
these men who like the company of writers gave him the wink and arranged a place at their tables
for him.‟1301
Dublin‟s lifeworld of the period contained „a large impoverished population
devastated by years of civil war and demoralized by the unemployment always endemic in Dublin
but worsened by the world wide depression. Served by an insular and isolated intelligentsia either
tied to an old myth of Celtic renewal or hitching their ambitions to the might and sway of the
powerful Church hierarchy, this hermetic world was the social and intellectual reality that was
waiting for Kavanagh in the 1930s.‟ 1302
10.4.4. Spaces of Peripherality: Belfast/London
McLaverty‟s representation of west Belfast in Call My Brother Back expressed various
affective dimensions of the lifeworld that greeted the rural Catholic emigrant on their arrival to the
partioned city.
His characters move from the chronotopic space of an island to a chronotopic
dimension of time and place containing „a cyclical, natural or static time-warp, forgotten by history,
bypassed by history.‟1303 On Rathlin Island, the human landscape was often in conflict with the
natural. In Belfast, the human landscape is in conflict with itself, its lifeworlds held ransom by the
vested interests of urban politics, property and sectarianism: „It was a strange city, he thought, to be
living two lives, whereas on Rathlin Catholics and Protestants mixed and talked and danced
together.‟1304
McLaverty‟s short stories contained separate lifeworld slices of the emigrant‟s
experience. As December snow falls on a Belfast neighbourhood, McLaverty contrasts the comfort
and refuge of the spaces within a Church and bedroom, with the modern accoutrements of electric
tramlines and telephone wires. In a second piece, an ill-fated gamecock symbolically flees down a
deserted early morning streetscape of Belfast. In a third story, the dark tide of the Troubles touches
fatally upon a vulnerable family home in the impoverished, but religiously mixed milieu of the Falls
Road.
Drawing upon their own experiences, Kavanagh and McLaverty fleshed out the affective
dimensions of migration experienced by over 26,000 men and women in a country of three million
by the year 1937. Their experiences were largely characterised by a population‟s shift from reliance
1301
Patrick Kavanagh, Lapped Furrows, 47.
Norma Jenckes, „The Rocky Road to Dublin‟ in Man and Poet, 380.
1303
J. Leersson, „The Western Mirage: On Celtic Chronotope in the European Imagination,‟ in (ed.) Timothy
Collins, Decoding the Landscape, (Galway: Centre for Landscape Studies, 1994) p. 4.
1304
McLaverty, Call my brother,124.
1302
238
on a rural subsistence economy, to proscribed roles as members of the urban proletariat. In The
Green Fool Kavanagh drew faces upon the rural Irish tide that flowed to the boroughs of London
Town during the period: „Many Irish boys made Rowton House, Camden Town, first stop from
Mayo. The soft voices of Mayo and Galway sounding in that gaunt impersonal place like warm rain
on the arid patches of my imagination. These boys were true peasants [. . . ] I had seen too much of
them in Ireland. Their characters, impressionable as wax, were soon to wear the impress of common
vulgarity.‟1305 In a symbolic scene in Call My Brother Back McLaverty depicted the lingering
feeling of an emigrant as he travelled back into Belfast, after a solitary visit in the countryside of
Ulster: „Everything was quiet. But as the tram moved off towards the centre of the city, down from
the big houses to the long narrow streets, a vague fear came over him, fear of shots ringing out and
splintering glass.‟1306 In the prose landscapes of Kavanagh and McLaverty, rural migrants were
depicted as emotional refugees stranded in alien urban geographies coloured by nostalgia, loneliness
and the brutality of the economic and political violence, that existed in the independent and
partitioned landscapes of 1930s Ireland.
10.5 Conclusion
The prose fiction landscapes discussed in the previous sections represent a spectrum of
distinct experiences and perceptions of places on the Irish island during the late 1920s and in the
1930s. The various prose landscapes represented in the novels and other writings seem to reflect the
idiosyncratic dimensions of each writer‟s personality, as strongly as they reflect the „personalities
of the place,‟ they are meant to depict.
Collectively these writers captured a „sense of place,‟ of
Ireland during the 1930s that is alternatively intimate, emotionally scarred, fragmented and
parochial, but which contains a balance of beauty and ruin, that seems touched by the, odd
momentary glimmer of genius loci.
Though these writers‟ depictions of period and place seem vastly different in some respects,
comprehensively these writer‟s collected works of prose provide an impressionistic mosaic of place
experience, that intimates the ambience and atmosphere of a seminal period in Irish history. The
intimations revealed in this study are the result of its hermeneutic interpretation of
English
language novels by 1930s Irish writers. The merits and demerits of this approach and other
methodological considerations will be discussed next, followed by a few final remarks.
10.5.1. Methodological Considerations
The general aims of this study were to explore the different subjective and affective
dimensions of „the personality of place‟ represented in English language novels written by Irish
novelists in the 1930s. A hermeneutic methodology involving five theoretical lenses was developed
1305
1306
Kavanagh, Green Fool, 254.
McLaverty, Call My Brother Back, 190.
239
specifically for this purpose. The hermeneutic method of this study is based in a long standing
intellectual tradition associated with research approaches in the social sciences and the humanities.
A benefit of the hermeneutic technique is its flexibility and scope. It allows knowledge and
information to be gathered through various means and examined from a variety of perspectives.
The particular methodology developed in this study, can be applied to the analysis of imaginative
literature by writers from other time frames and geographical locations. This methodology may be
of use to historians, anthropologists, sociologists and other researchers who engage with
imaginative literature as a source material.
However, there were several problematic issues and concerns with the methodology of this
study. Firstly, one of the major drawbacks of the hermeneutic approach, is that the knowledge,
information and meaning uncovered in its analysis is derived from a closed interpretation of various
texts. In the case of this study, these texts were related to nine Irish writers of the 1930s, whose
perspectives, no matter how insightful, prescient and descriptive cannot be taken as a comprehensive
representation of the general public‟s experience of places in Ireland during the decade. The
novels, biographies and other pieces of literature associated with these nine writers examined in this
study were interpreted in a disciplined, but ultimately subjective manner. Secondly, the parameters
established and the five theoretical lenses crafted for this interpretation of Irish novels of the 1930s
attempted to bridge the disciplines of humanistic geography and literary criticism. One wonders at
times that this was perhaps a „bridge too far.‟ The lenses were perhaps over theorised in places and,
the research aims appear to have fallen in some instances, between two stools, located neither in
geography, or the study of literature.
Another weakness tied to this second concern was the
creation of a historical and cultural perspective of 1930s Ireland in the study from secondary source
materials. Perhaps a specific focus on one or two particular writers, and in-depth archival research
might have tightened the empirical and theoretical elements of the research, and illustrated the
truism of the aphorism that „in the particular lies the universal.‟
Thirdly, though geographers such as Porteous, Daniels and Rycroft, have argued that the
novel is the best literary scale for geographers to engage with literature, the Irish context of this
study makes the choice of this scale slightly problematic. Ireland is an island with long standing
tradition of oral culture. This tradition was reflected in the centuries old Gaelic „lore of place-names‟
known as dinnseanchas, and in the verses crafted by the „Rhyming Weavers‟ of Ulster in the
seventeenth and eighteenth century. In both these traditions, sites and places on the island were
widely celebrated in poetry and song. Therefore the choice of the novel as the primary literary scale
to conduct a study of the subjective experience of place in an Irish milieu, may overshadow the more
subtle and esoteric representations of place experience, descended from the oral traditions of these
two heritages. Accordingly there is a strong argument to make that any further explorations of the
240
subjective experience and representation of landscape, identity and sense of place in Ireland in
should incorporate literary scales which are rooted in these heritages. Genres associated with these
two traditions include the short-story, the poem and the song-sheet, which reflect rhythms, structures
and themes associated with the various oral cultures that have historically inhabited the Irish island.
10.5.2 Final Remarks
In conclusion, the methodology employed in this study attempted to address a primary area
of concern to researchers in historical and cultural geography, expressed in 1940 by Carl Sauer:
The historical geographer must therefore be a regional specialist [. . .] one might
say he need the ability to see the land with the eyes of its former occupants, from
the standpoint of their needs and capacities. This is about the most difficult task in
all human geography, to evaluate site and situation
[. . . ] to place one‟s self in
the position of member of the cultural group and time being studied.1307
By examining a selection of the prose fiction landscapes represented by Irish writers in English
language novels published between 1929 and 1939,
this study has attempted to intimate the
affective and subjective dimensions of the various and distinctive „personalities of place‟ that were
experienced and perceived in the various regions of the Irish island during the 1930s.
Carl Sauer, „Foreward to Historical Geography,‟ Annals of the Association of Geographers 31.1 (1941)
p. 10
1307
241
242
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
Beckett, Samuel.
Proust and Three Dialogues by Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit (London: Calder & Boyars,
1970;1931).
More Pricks than Kicks (New York: Grove Press, 1972;1934).
Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (ed.) Ruby Cohn, (London: Calder,
1983).
Dream of Fair to Middling Women (London: Calder, 1993).
Bowen, Elizabeth.
The Last September (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942;1929).
Bowen‘s Court & Seven Winters: Memories of a Dublin Childhood,
(London: Virago, 1984;1942)
Collected Impressions (London/New York: Longsmans Green, 1950.).
Afterthought: Pieces About Writing (London: Longmans, 1962).
Pictures and Conversations (London: Allen Lane, 1975).
Kavanagh, Patrick.
The Green Fool (London: Penguin, 2001;1938).
„The Flight from the Land,‟ The Irish Times, 15 April 1939.
„Twenty-Three Tons of Accumulated Folklore: Is it any use?‟ Irish Times, 18 April, 1939.
„Diary‟ in Envoy, March 1950.
Lapped Furrows: Correspondence 1933-1967 Between Patrick and Peter Kavanagh, With Other
Documents (ed.) Peter Kavanagh ( New York: The Peter Kavanagh Hand Press, 1969).
„Ploughman,‟
in Collected Poems (Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 1972;1930) p.1.
„Dark Ireland,‟ in Collected Poems (Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 1972;1933) pp. 9-10.
„Gay Cities,‟ in Collected Poems, (Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 1972;1933) p. 11.
„Inniskeen Road: July Evening,‟ in Collected Poems (Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 1972;1935) p.
19.
„Peasant‟ in Collected Poems (Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 1972;1936) p.30.
243
„Shanconduff‟ in Collected Poems, (Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 1972;1937) p.13.
„The Seed and the Soil,‟ in Collected Poems (Newbridge: Goldsmith Press, 1972;1938) p. 52.
Patrick Kavanagh: Man and Poet, (ed.) Peter Kavanagh, (Maine: National Poetry Foundation,
University of Maine at Orono, 1986).
Keane, Molly (M.J. Farrell).
Mad Puppetstown (London: Virago Press, 1985;1931).
Devoted Ladies (London: Virago 1984;1934).
Full House (London: Virago 1986;1935).
McLaverty, Michael.
„Pigeons,‟ in Collected Short Stories: Michael McLaverty , (ed.) Sophia Hillan (Belfast: The
Blackstaff Press, 2002) pp. 8-17.
„Stone,‟ in Collected Short Stories: Michael McLaverty , (ed.) Sophia Hillan (Belfast: The
Blackstaff Press, 2002) pp. 32-42.
„The Game Cock,‟ in Collected Short Stories: Michael McLaverty , (ed.) Sophia Hillan (Belfast:
The Blackstaff Press, 2002) pp. 77-87.
„Evening in Winter‟ in Collected Short Stories: Michael McLaverty , (ed.) Sophia Hillan (Belfast:
The Blackstaff Press, 2002) pp. 125-130.
Call My Brother Back (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2003;1939).
O’Brien, Flann.
At Swim Two Birds (London: Penguin, 2001;1939).
O’Brien, Kate.
Without My Cloak (London: Virago, 1986;1931).
Pray for the Wanderer (London: Heinemann, 1938).
My Ireland (London: Batsford, 1962).
O’Donnell, Peadar.
Adrigoole (London-Toronto: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1929).
The Knife (Dublin: Irish Humanities Centre, 1980;1930).
The Gates Flew Open (London-Toronto: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1932).
244
Wrack (London-Toronto: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1933).
On The Edge Of The Stream (London/Toronto: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1934).
Salud! An Irishman in Spain (London : Methuan, 1937).
There Will Be Another Day (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1963).
Reid, Forrest.
Apostate (London: Faber & Faber, 1947;1926).
Uncle Stephen (London: GMP, 1988;1931).
The Retreat, or the Machinations of Henry (Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1978;1936).
SECONDARY SOURCES
Abbot, H. P. The Fiction of Samuel Beckett: Form and Effect (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1973).
Andrews, E. The Art of Brian Friel (London: St. Martin‟s Press, 1985).
Andrews, H. F. „Nineteenth-century St. Petersburg: Work points for an Exploration of Image and
Place,‟ Humanistic Geography and Literature Essays on the Experience of Place (New Jersey:
Barnes & Nobel Books, 1981) pp. 173-189.
Augusteijn, J. Ireland in the 1930s: New Perspectives (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999).
Bachelard, G. The Poetics of Space (trans.) Maria Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1964).
Bair, D. Samuel Beckett: A Biography (London: Vintage, 1990).
Bair, D. „No Man‟s Land, Hellespont or vacuum: Samuel Beckett‟s Irishness,‟ in (eds.) Mark
Patrick Hederman and Richard Kearney, Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies: 1977-1981 (Dublin:
Blackwater Press, 1982) pp. 101-106.
Baker, A. Geography and History: Bridging the Divide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
Bakhtin, M. M. Problems of Dostoevsky‘s Poetics (ed. & trans.) Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press, 1984)
Bakhtin, M.M. Rabelais and His World, (trans.) Helene Iswolky (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1984)
Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination : Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, Trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin and London : University of Texas Press, 1981).
Barnes T. and Duncan, J. Writing Worlds: Discourse, Texts and Metaphor in the Representation of
Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992 ).
245
Barrington, T. J. „Public Administration 1927-1936‟ in (ed.) Francis MacManus, The Years of the
Great Test: 1926-39 (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1967) pp. 80-91.
Barry, T. Guerilla Days in Ireland: A Personal Account of the Anglo-Irish War (Boulder: Robert
Rinehart)
Bell, I. A. Reviews „The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland 1800-1990,‟ Journal of Historical
Geography 27.2 (2001) p. 283.
Berger, J. A Fortunate Man (London: Writers and Readers, 1976)
Blackwood, C. „Afterword‟ in Full House (London: Virago 1986 [1935]).
Boland, E. „Continuing the Encounter‟, Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O‘Brien (Cork:
Cork University Press, 1993).
Boland, E. „The Legacy of Kate O‟Brien‟, in (ed.) John Logan, With Warmest Love: Lectures for
Kate O‘Brien, 1984-1993 (Limerick: Mellick Press, 1994) pp. 1-14.
Bourdieu, P. Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998)
Bowen, C. „A Historical Inventory of the Dindshenchas‘ Studia Celtica 10/11, (1975/76) pp. 113137.
Brennan, T. „The national longing for form,‟ in (ed.) Homi Bhabha, Nation and Narration (London:
Routledge, 1990) pp. 44-70.
Brousseau, M. „Geography‟s Literature‟ in Progress in Human Geography, 18.3 (1994) pp. 333353.
Brousseau, M. „The City in Textual Form: Manhattan Transfer‘s New York,‟ Ecumene, 2.1 (1995)
pp. 89-114.
Brown, T. Ireland: A Social and Cultural History, 1922-1985 (London: Fontana, 1985).
Brown, T. Ireland‘s Literature: Selected Essays (Dublin, 1988).
Brink, A. Mapmakers: Writing in a State of Siege (London: Faber & Faber, 1983).
Buckland, P. The Factory of Grievances: Devolved Government in Northern Ireland 1921-39
(Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1979)
Butler, J. „Foreward‟ in Maurice Nathason, The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) pp. ix-xvi.
Buttimer, A. „Grasping the Dynamism of Lifeworld‟ in Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, 66: 2 (1976) pp. 277-292.
Buttimer, A. The Practice of Geography (London: Longman, 1983)
Byrne, K. Pearse Street D2, A Study of the Past/A Vision for the Future (Dublin: Argus Press,
2001).
246
Cahalan, J. The Irish Novel: A Critical History (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd., 1988).
Carlson, J. Banned in Ireland: Censorship and the Irish Writer (London: Routledge, 1990 [1932] ).
Carlstein, T., Parks D. and Thrift, N. Human Activity and Time Geography: Vol. 2 (London:
Edward Arnold, 1978).
Clissman, A. Flann O‘Brien: A critical introduction to his writings –The Story-Teller‘s Book –Web
(Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1975).
Cobb, E. „The ecology of imagination in childhood,‟ in (eds.) P. Shepard, D. McKinley The
Subversive Science (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970) pp. 121-132.
Cohn, R. „Foreward‟ in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, (ed) Ruby
Cohn ( London: Calder, 1983).
Connolly, C. Horizon, V (January 25, 1942)
Cook, I. „Consciousness and the Novel: Fact or Fiction in the works of D. H. Lawrence,‟
Humanistic Geography and Literature Essays on the Experience of Place (New Jersey: Barnes &
Nobel Books, 1981) pp. 66-84.
Corkery, D. Synge and Anglo Irish Literature (Oxford: Cork University Press, 1947 [1931]).
Cosgrove, D. Social Formation and the Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom-Helm, 1984).
Cosgrove, D. „Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea‟ in, Transactions 10
(1985).
Cosgrove, D. The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and Its Cultural Representation in
Sixteenth-Century Italy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
Crang, M., Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, 1998).
Cronin, A. No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O‘Brien (London: Paladin, 1990).
Cronin, A. „Squalid Exegis,‟ in Conjuring Complexities: Essays on Flann O‘Brien (ed) Anne
Clune and Tess Hurson (Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen‟s University, 1997)
pp. 37-48.
Dainotto, R. Place in Literature: Regions, Cultures, Communities (Ithica/London: Cornell
University Press, 2000).
Daniels, S. and Cosgrove, D. „Introduction: Iconography and Landscape‟ in The Iconography of
Landscape: Essays on Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past
Environments,(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Daniels, S. and Nash, C. „Lifepaths: geography and biography,‟ Journal of Historical Geography
30 (2004) pp. 449-458.
247
Darby, H. C. „The Regional Geography of Thomas Hardy‟s Wessex‟ in Geographical Review 38
(1948).
De Beauvoir, Simone, The Coming of Age (New York: Putnam, 1972)
De Micheaux, R. „An Ulster Novelist : Michael McLaverty‟ unpublished thesis presented to
Université de Lyon for Diplôme d‟Études Supérieures (1960)
Devlin, P. „Introduction‟ in M.J. Farrell (Molly Keane) The Rising Tide (London: Virago Press,
1984).
Devlin, P. „Introduction‟ in M.J. Farrell (Molly Keane) Mad Puppetstown (London: Virago Press,
1985[1931]).
Donoghue, E. „ “Out of Order” Kate O‟Brien‟s Lesbian Fictions‟, Ordinary People Dancing :
Essays on Kate O‘Brien (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993) pp. 36-58.
Duggan, J. P. A history of the Irish Army (Dublin, Gill and MacMillan, 1991)
Duffy, P.J. „Carleton, Kavanagh and the South Ulster Landscape c. 1800-1950‟ in Irish Geography,
Vol. 18 (1985) pp. 25-37.
Duffy, P. J. „Literary Reflections on Irish Migration in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries‟ in
(eds.) R. King, J. Connell and P. White, Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration
(London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 20-38.
Duffy, P. J. „Writing Ireland: Literature and Art in the Representation of Irish Place‟ in (ed.)Brian
Graham, In Search of Ireland: A Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, 1997) pp. 64-84.
Duncan J. and Ley, S. Place/culture/representation (London: Routledge, 1993).
Elden, S. Mapping The Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History
(London/NY: Continuum, 2001)
Eliade, M. The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Prager Publishers, 1957).
Ellman, M. Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2003).
Evans, E. Estyn. The Personality of Ireland (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1992 [1973]).
Farrington, A. „The Islandman‟ in Irish Geography, Vol. II, No. 3 (1951).
Ferriter, D. The Transformation of Ireland: 1900-2000 (London: Profile, 2004).
Fisk, R. In Time of War, Ulster and the Price of Neutrality 1939-45 (London: Deutsch, 1983).
Folch-Serra, M. „Place, voice, space: Mikhail Bakhtin‟s dialogical landscape.‟ Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space , 8 (1990) p. 258.
Foster, J.W. „McLaverty‟s People,‟ Eire-Ireland IV (1971) pp. 92-105.
248
Foster, J. W. Fictions of the Irish Literary Revival (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1987).
Foster, R. Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 (London: Penguin, 1989).
Foucault, M. The Archaeology of Knowledge (trans.) A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1972 [1969]).
Foucault, M. Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, (London: Penguin, 1977 [1975] ).
Foucault, M. „The Birth of the Asylum‟ in Paul Rabinow ed., The Foucault Reader: An
Introduction to Foucault‘s Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1991) pp. 141-168.
Foucault, M. „The Means of Correct Training‟ in The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to
Foucault‘s Thought (London: Penguin Books, 1991) pp. 108-205.
Freyer, G. Peadar O‘Donnell (Lewisburg: Bucknell University, 1973).
Gordon, L. The World of Samuel Beckett: 1906-1946 (New Haven & London: Yale University
Press, 1996).
Gramsci, A. Selections from the Prison Notebooks, (ed. & trans.) Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998).
Greacen, R.„Writing in Wartime Belfast,‟ The Irish Times, 16 March 1976.
Green, M. J. Celtic Myths (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993)
Gibbons, L. Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996).
Giddens, A. New rules of sociological method (London: Hutchinson, 1976)
Gilmartin, M. „The Irish Travels of Asenath Nicholson in 1844-45,‟ in (eds.) Anne Buttimer,
Stanley D. Brunn and Ute Wardenga, Text and Image: Social Construction of Regional
Knowledges, 49 Institut für Länderkunde Leipzig, (1999) pp.248-255.
Hägerstrand, T. „Survival and Arena: On the life-history of individuals in relation to their
geographical environment‟ in (eds.) Tommy Carlstein, Don Parks & Nigel Thrift, Human
Activity and Time Geography: Vol. 2 (London: Edward Arnold, 1978) pp.122-145.
Harmon, M. The Irish Writer and the City (Gerrard‟s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1984).
Hart, Peter „The Protestant Experience of Revolution in Southern Ireland,‟ in (eds.) R. English and
G. Walker, Unionism in Modern Ireland: New Perspectives on Culture and Politics
(Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1996) pp. 81-98.
Harvey, L. Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970).
Hassett, J. „Flann O‟Brien and the Idea of the City‟ in (ed) Maurice Harmon, The Irish Writer and
the City (Gerrard‟s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1984) pp. 115-124.
Heaney, S. Preoccupations: selected prose 1968-1978 (London: Faber, 1980).
249
Heaney, S. „Introduction‟ Collected Short Stories: Michael McLaverty , (ed.) Sophia Hillan
(Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 2002).
Hegarty, P. Peadar O‘Donnell (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1999).
Herbert, D. „Place and Society in Jane Austen‟s England‟ Geography 76 (1991) pp. 193-208.
Hobsbawm, E. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991, (London: Abacus,
2001).
Hoehn, The Rev Martin, OSB. Catholic Authors; Contemporary Biographical Sketches (First
Series), 1930-47, (Newark, 1947).
Hogan, J.J. The Round Table, vol XX, no. 80 (September 1930)
Hone, J. W. B. Yeats: 1865-1939 (London: MacMillan & Co., 1942)
Horner, A. „From City to City-Region, Dublin from the 1930s to the 1990s,‟ in (eds.) F.H.A. Aalen
and Kevin Whelan, Dublin -City and County: From Pre-history to Present, Studies in Honour of
J. H. Andrews (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1992).
Ireland, D. Ulster To-day and To-morrow, her part in a Gaelic civilization: a study in political
revolution (London: Hogarth Press, 1931).
Jenckes, N. „The Rocky Road to Dublin‟ in Patrick Kavanagh: Man and Poet, (ed.) Peter
Kavanagh, (Maine: National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine at Orono, 1986) pp. 371381.
Johnston, R.J. Gregory, D. and Smith, D. M. The Dictionary of Human Geography, 3rd. Ed.
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
Johnston, R.J. Geography and Geographers: Anglo-American Geography since 1945 (London:
Arnold, 1997).
Johnson, N. Ireland, The Great War and the Geography of Remembrance, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
Jordan, H. B. How will the Heart Endure (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992).
Joye, L. „ “Aiken‟s slugs” : the Reserve of the Irish Army under Fianna Fáil,‟ in (ed.) Joost
Augusteijn, Ireland in the 1930s: New Perspectives (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999) pp. 143142.
Junker, M. Beckett: The Irish Dimension, (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1995).
Kavanagh, P. Sacred Keeper: A Biography of Patrick Kavanagh (Orono: National Poetry
Foundation, 1984).
Kearney, R. „Beckett: The End of the Story‟ in Transitions (Manchester: Manchester University
Press: 1988) pp. 58-82.
250
Kelly, A. „The Irish language revival and the education system,‟ in (ed.) Joost Augusteijn, Ireland
in the 1930s: New Perspectives (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999) pp.29-46.
Kennedy, D. „Catholics in Northern Ireland, 1926-1939‟ in (ed.) Francis MacManus, The Years of
the Great Test: 1926-39 (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1967) pp. 138-149.
Kiberd, D. Inventing Ireland, (London: Vintage, 1996).
Kiberd, D. Irish Classics (London: Granta, 2001).
King, S. H. „The Note of Exile: Michael McLaverty‟s Rathlin Island‟ in (eds.) Gerald Dawe and
John W. Foster, The Poet‘s Place: Ulster Literature and Society, Essays in Honour of John
Hewitt, 1907-1987 (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991).
King, S. H. The Silken Twine: A Study of the Works of Michael McLaverty (Dublin: Poolbeg,
1992).
Knowlson, J. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London: Bloomsbury, 1996).
Kostik, C. Revolution in Ireland: Popular Militancy 1917 to 1923 (London/Chicago: Pluto Press,
1996).
Kundera, M. The Art of the Novel (London: Faber & Faber, 1988).
Laterns, J. Unauthorised Versions: Irish Menippean Satire, 1919-1952 (Washington: The Catholic
University of America, 2000).
Lee, J. J. Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
Leersson, J. „The Western Mirage: On Celtic Chronotope in the European Imagination,‟ in (ed.)
Timothy Collins, Decoding the Landscape, (Galway: Centre for Landscape Studies, 1994) pp. 111.
Lewis, P. „Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene‟ in (ed.) D.W.
Meinig, The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (New York; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1979) pp. 11-32.
Ley, D. and Samuels, M.S. Humanistic Geography –Prospects and Problems (Chicago: Maarouffa
Press, 1978 ).
Logan, J. „Family and Fortune in Kate O‟Brien‟s Limerick‟ in With Warmest Love: Lectures for
Kate O‘Brien, 1984-1993 (Limerick: Mellick Press, 1994) pp. 105-130.
Longley, E. The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism In Ireland (Belfast:
Bloodaxe, 1994)
Lowenthal, D.„Geography, experience and imagination: towards a geographical epistemology‟ in
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 51:3 (1961) pp. 241-260.
Lowenthal, D. „Age and artifact: dilemmas of appreciation‟ in (ed) D.W. Meinig, The
interpretation of landscape: geographical essays (New York; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979)
pp. 103-128.
251
Lyons, F.S. „The Minority Problem in the 26 Counties‟ in (ed.) Francis MacManus, The Years of
the Great Test: 1926-39 (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1967) pp. 92-103.
Macey, D. The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin, 2001).
MacManus, F. The Years of the Great Test: 1926-39 (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1967).
MacManus, R. Dublin, 1910-1940: Shaping the City & Suburbs (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002).
Mannheim, K. Essays on the Sociology of Culture, (London: Routledge, 1992 [1952] )
Manning, M. „Mostly in Memoriam: A Letter from Dublin by Mary Manning,‟ The Saturday
Review of Literature, 16 February 1935.
Mayhew, R. J. Geography and literature in Historical Context: Samuel Johnson and EighteenthCentury English Conceptions of Geography (Oxford: School of Geography, 1997 ).
McCabe, A. ‗The Stormy Petrel of the Transport Workers‘: Peadar O‟Donnell, Trade Unionist,
1917-1920 (Dublin: Elso Press, 2000).
McInerny, M. Peadar O‘Donnell: Irish Social Rebel (Dublin: The O‟Brien Press, 1974).
Meinig, D. W. The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (ed.) D.W.
Meinig, (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) pp. 11-32.
Meinig, D. W. „The Beholding Eye,‟ (ed.) D.W. Meinig, The Interpretation of Ordinary
Landscapes: Geographical Essays (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) pp. 3348.
Meinig, D. W. „Geography as an art‟ Transactions, N.S. 8, (1983) pp. 314-28.
Mitchell, D. Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
Moynihan, M. Speeches and Statements by Eamon De Valera: 1917-73, (Dublin: Gill and
MacMillan, 1980)
Nemo, J. Patrick Kavanagh (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979).
Nolan, W. „ “In the mind‟s eye” : Francis MacManus and Kilkenny‘ in John Kirwan (ed.) Kilkenny:
Studies in Honour of Margaret M. Phelan (Kilkenny : Kilkenny Archaeological Society, 1997)
pp. 1-50.
O‟Brien, E. The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett‘s Ireland, (Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1986).
O‟Byrne, R. „Films and fish oil feature in Academy‟s “antient” history,‟ The Irish Times, 22
February, 2001.
Ó Catháin, S. „Education in the New Ireland,‟ in (ed.) Francis MacManus, The Years of the Great
Test: 1926-39 (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1967) pp. 104-114.
O‟Connor, E. A Labour History of Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1992).
252
O‟Connor, F. An Only Child, (London: MacMillan, 1961)
Ó Drisceoil, D. Peadar O‘Donnell (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001)
O‟Faoláin, S. The Finest Stories of Sean O‘Faolain (London: Bantam Books, 1959).
O‟Flaherty, L. „The Irish Censorship‟ in (ed.) Julia Carlson Banned in Ireland: Censorship and the
Irish Writer (London: Routledge, 1990 [1932] ) pp. 139-141.
Olsson, G. „On Yearning for Home: An Epistemological View of Ontological Transformations,‟ in
Humanistic Geography and Literature Essays on the Experience of Place (New Jersey: Barnes &
Nobel Books, 1981) pp. 121-129.
Ó Nualláin C. The Early Years of Brian O‘Nolan / Flann O‘Brien / Myles na gCopaleen,
Translated from the Irish by Roisin Ni Nuallain, Edited by Niall O‟Nolan (Dublin: The Lilliput
Press, 1998).
Peet, R. Modern Geographical Thought (Blackwell: Oxford, 1998).
Philo, C. „The Birth of the Clinic: an unknown work of medical geography,‟ Area, 32-1 (2000) pp.
11-19.
Pierce, D. Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Reader (Cork: Cork University Press, 2000).
Plunkett, E. M. M. Seventy Years Young: Memories of Elizabeth, Countess of Fingall; as told to
Pamela Hinkson (London: Collins, 1937).
Pocock, D. Humanistic Geography and Literature: Essays on the Experience of Place (New Jersey:
Barnes & Nobel Books, 1981).
Pocock, D. Geography and literature, in Progress in Human Geography 12 (1988)
pp. 87-102.
Porteous, D. J. „Literature and Humanist Geography‟ in Area 17.2 (1985).
Pritchett, V.S. Midnight Oil, in Paul Arthur, „John Hewitt‟s Hierarchy of Values,‟ in (eds.) Gerald
Dawe & John W. Foster, The Poet‘s Place (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991) pp. 273-284.
Proulx, A. Dangerous Ground: Landscape in American Fiction, (2004) pp. 1-16.
Quinn, A. Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 2001).
Rauchbauer, O. „The Big House and Irish History: An Introduction‟ in Ancestral Voices: The Big
House in Anglo-Irish Literature- A Collection of Interpretations (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1992)
pp. 1-7.
Relph, E. Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976).
Reynolds, L. Kate O‘Brien: A Literary Portrait (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1987).
253
Reynolds, L. „Kate O‟Brien: Artist and Feminist‟ , With Warmest Love: Lectures for Kate O‘Brien,
1984-1993 (Limerick: Mellick Press, 1994) pp. 51-62.
Richter, D. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 2nd Ed. (Boston:
Bedford Books, 1998).
Richter, D. „Cultural Studies: The World as Social text,‟ in (ed) David Richter, The Critical
Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, 2nd Ed. (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998) pp.
1206-1208.
Robinson, B. „Some Fragmented Forms of Space‟ in Annals of the Association of American
Geographers, 67/4 (December, 1977) pp. 549-563.
Rockett, K. „1930s Fictions‟ in (eds.) Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and
Ireland (London: Routledge, 1998) pp. 51-70.
Rockett, K. „The Silent Period‟ in (eds.) Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill, Cinema and
Ireland (London: Routledge, 1998) pp. 3-38.
Rockett, K. „(Mis-) Representing the Irish Urban Landscape‟, in (eds.) M. Shiel & T. Fitzmaurice,
Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001)
pp. 217-228.
Rockett, K. Irish Film Censorship: A Cultural Journey from Silent Cinema to Internet Pornography
(Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004).
Romm, J. S. The Edges of the Earth in Ancient Thought: Geography, Exploration, and Fiction
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
Russell, AE. Letters from AE (ed.) Alan Denson, (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1961)
Russell, E. „Holy crosses, guns and roses: themes in popular reading material‟, in (ed.) Joost
Augusteijn, Ireland in the 1930s: New Perspectives (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999) pp. 1728.
Ryan, J. „Class and Creed in Kate O‟Brien‟ in (ed) Maurice Harmon, The Irish Writer and the City,
(Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1984) pp. 125-135.
Said, E. Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993)
Samuels, M. S. „The biography of landscape: cause and culpability,‟ in (ed.) D. W. Meinig, The
Interpretation of Ordinary Landscape: Geographical Essays (New York; Oxford: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1979) pp. 51-88.
Sandberg, L. and Marsh, J. „Focus: Literary Landscapes –Geography and the Future‟ in The
Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe Canadien, 32.3 (1988) pp. 266-276.
Sauer, C. „Foreward to Historical Geography,‟ Annals of the Association of American Geographers
31.1 (1941) pp. 1-24.
Sauer, C. „The Education of a Geographer,‟ Address to the Association of American Geographers
52nd Annual Meeting, Montreal, Canada (1956).
254
Schama, S. Landscapes and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1995).
Schleiermacher, F. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, trans. J. Duke and J. Forstman
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1977).
Seamon, D. „Newcomers, existential outsiders and insiders: their portrayal in two books by Doris
Lessing,‟ Humanistic Geography and Literature:Essays on the Experience of Place (New
Jersey: Barnes & Nobel Books, 1981) pp. 85-100.
Sheeran, P. „The Road, The House, and the Grave: A Poetics of Galway Space, 1900-1970,‟ in
(eds.) Gerald Moran, Raymond Gillespie and William Nolan, Galway History & Society
Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin: Geography Publications,
1996)
Shortridge, J. R. „The Concept of Place -Defining Novel in American Popular Culture,‟ in
Professional Geographer, 43 (3), 1991, pp. 280-291.
Singer, B. „Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism,‟ in (eds.) Leo
Charney and Vanessa R. Schwartz, Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life (Berkely:
University of California Press, 1995) pp. 72-102.
Singh, R. P. B. The Spirit and Power of Place: Human Environment and Sacrality, National
Geographic Journal of India, Vol. 40, 1994. pp. 5-10.
Soja, E. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).
Spivak, G. C. The Post-Colonial Critic : Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, (ed) Sarah Harasym
(New York: Routledge, 1990).
Stephens, E. M. „The Constitution,‟ in (ed.) Bulmer Hobson, Saorstat Eireann: The Free State
Official Handbook (London: Ernest Benn, 1932) pp. 72-79.
Stevens, J. A. The Irish Landscape in Somerville and Ross‘s Fiction and Illustrations 1890-1915.
Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, (University of Dublin Trinity College, October 2000).
Taylor, B. The Green Avenue: The life and writings of Forrest Reid, 1875-1947, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980).
Taylor B. „Some Themes in the Novels of Forrest Reid,‟ in (eds.) Paul Goldman and Brian Taylor,
Retrospective Adventures: Forrest Reid: Author and Collector (Hampshire: Scolar Press, 1998)
pp. 1-4.
Titley, A. „The City of Words,‟ in (eds.) James Kelly and Uáitér Mac Gearailt, Dublin and
Dubliners: Essays in the history and literature of Dublin City (Dublin: Grehan Print Limited,
1990) pp. 127-146.
Titley, E.B. Church, State and the Control of Schooling in Ireland 1900-1944 (Dublin 1983).
„Tragic Story of Want in West Cork‟, Irish Independent, 30 March, 1927.
255
Travis, C. „The Fifth Province: Seamus Heaney and the Reinterpretation of the Cultural
Morphology of Border County Ireland,‟ The California Geographer, Vol. XLI (2001) pp. 15-32.
Tuan, Y. F. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Englewood
Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974)
Tuan, Y.F. „Humanistic Geography‟ in Annals of the Association of American Geographers ,66
(1976) pp. 266-276.
Tuan, Y. F. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London: Arnold, 1977)
Tuan, Y. F. „Literature and Geography: Implications for Research‘ in (eds.) David Ley and
Marwyn Samuels Humanistic geography: prospects and problems (London: Croom Helm, 1978)
pp. 194-206.
Tuan, Y. F. Landscapes of Fear (London: Basil Blackwell, 1979)
Warner, A. Clay is the Word (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1973)
Warner, M. „Literary Studies and the History of the Book,‟ The Book 12 (1987) pp.
5-10.
Williams, D.T. „Conclusion,‟in (ed.) Francis MacManus, The Years of the Great Test: 1926-39
(Dublin: Mercier Press, 1967) pp. 173-183.
Whelan, K. „Settlement and society in eighteenth-century Ireland‟ in Dawe Foster, eds., Poets
Place, p. 61., referenced in, Brian J. Graham, „No Place of the Mind: Contested Protestant
Representations of Ulster‟ Ecumene 1994 1 (3)
pp. 257-281.
Whelan, K. „Reading the Ruins: the Presence of Absence in the Irish Landscape,‟ in (eds.) Howard
B. Clarke, Jacinta Prunty, Mark Hennessy, Surveying Ireland‘s Past: Multidisciplinary Essays in
Honour of Anngret Simms
(Dublin: Geography Publications, 2004) pp. 297-322.
Whelan, Y. Reinventing Modern Dublin: Streetscape, iconography and the politics of identity
(Dublin: UCD Press, 2003).
White, P. „Geography, Literature and Migration,‟ in (eds.) R. King, J. Connell and P. White,
Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration (London: Routledge, 1995) pp. 1-19.
Wright, J. K. „Departments: Human Geography‟ in Geographical Review Vol. XIV(1924) pp. 659660.
Wright, J.K., „Terrae Incognitae: The Place of Imagination in Geography‟ in Annals of the
Association of American Geographers, 37 (1947) pp. 1-14.
Wright, J.K. Human Nature in Geography (Cambridge: Harvard Press, 1996).
256
OFFICIAL PUBLICATIONS
Bunreacht Na hÉireann / Constitution of Ireland (Dublin: Government Publications, 2000 [1937] )
„Censorship of Publications Act, 1929/Achtum Scrúdóireacht Fhoillseachán, 1929,‟ Public Statutes
of the Oireachtas/ Reachtanna Puiblí an Oireachtas (Dublin/ Baile Atha Cliath: Stationary
Office/Oifig an tSoláThair D‟ Fhoillsigh, 1930)
Saorstát Éireann: The Free State Official Handbook (ed.) Bulmer Hobson (London: Ernest Benn,
1932).
257