Fortnight Publications Ltd.

A Confusion of StrainsAuthor(s): Bruce StewartSource: Fortnight, No. 306, Supplement: Lost Fields (May, 1992), pp. 14-16Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25553463 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 08:56

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Fortnight Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Fortnight.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.31.195.50 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 08:56:09 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

H green. His peroration shames the separatists on both sides into acting with a measure of

sense:

But if you take my advice, those av ye that isn't sure

av your cows '11 just go on quietly together in the

manetime, an' let thim that has got a rale thrue-blue

baste av either persuasion just keep her milk to

themselves, and skim it in the ould-fashioned way wi' a spoon.

A trifle wistful perhaps, but marked by a

canny common sense too, and indicative of Doyle's deep contempt for

fruitless squabbling along party lines. He himself possessed the ability to see beyond such controversies to embrace a wider, more accommo

dating vision of his country, north and south. His own life and perspec tive straddled the border and, although he saw himself as primarily an

Ulsterman, it wasn't in any narrow or exclusivist sense. He was also an

Irishman and, in 1935, just after his retirement, he wrote The Spirit Of

Ireland, a celebration of the country in its entirety. The book is

presented as a travelogue, but it is more than a guide to this or that beauty

spot, encompassing a broad and generous awareness of the jumbled admixture of history, people, culture and places that is Ireland. Tracing the tortuous course of invasions and displacements that have marked

Irish history, he comments on that particular brand of English public

school, or 'Oxford', mentality that tends to regard other races?and

particularly the Irish?with disdain:

The placid assumption of being a higher species of human kind that enables an Englishman to talk across a railway carriage with great impurity of vowels

about his personal affairs is taken in Ireland as another example of the

contempt of the Anglo-Norman for the mere Irish.

Although he will be remembered mostly on account of his short stories

(he returned several times to the Ballygullion sagas), Lynn Doyle also

produced several novels and plays, as well as contributing to magazines on both sides of the Atlantic and broadcasting several of his stories on

the BBC. He drew on his experiences in banking for the semi-autobio

graphical Yesterday Morning (1943), which plots the journey from

boy to man of Nigel Berry, who overcomes the machinations of those

eager to get their hands on his late father's farm, and negotiates a series

of romantic adventures to find happiness with his childhood love, Ellie

Mearns. The novel doesn't show Doyle at his best; in places the tone is

sombre and rather stiff, with a hint of Victorian morality play. There is

no plot to speak of and the characters appear wooden, moving with a

peculiar drawing-room artificiality through situations that the author

probably conceived for the stage. He loved the theatre, revelling in the

resurgence of Irish drama in both Dublin and Belfast early this century. His own plays, such as Turncoats or Love And Land (1946) turn on his

insights into Irish rural ways, although it is generally agreed that the fine

dialogue and humorous characterisation are not matched by convincing

plot lines.

Ironically, for a tolerant and broad-minded man, Doyle was, in the

30s, briefly on the Irish Board of Literary Censors, assisting in the

safeguarding of national morality against subversion. Not surprisingly, he didn't stick long with this enterprise, retiring after a few weeks,

commenting that it was too easy to read only the marked pieces, but more

likely disgusted at the craven obscurantism of it all. More to his taste in

later life was playing golf at Malahide or frequent trips to friends around

the country, as well as the theatre and, of course, his writing. In essays and short stories, he continued to offer his uniquely lob-sided view of

Ulster life, at once homely, entertaining, sensible and touching. It is

impossible to abstract one facet of his work and say it represents the real

Lynn Doyle. His gentle vision of life permeates all he wrote, and the

Ballygullion stories merely impart a thin gloss of fiction to subjects he

treats more factually in An Ulster Childhood or Not Too Serious (1946). Whether it is the pre-cognitive properties of Major Donaldson's

green cheese, or reminiscences of banking in the serene setting of

Antrim's glens, Doyle's contribution to Irish writing has been to point to a broader, more humane appreciation of our complex society. His

works provide the best index to his character and nature, suggesting a

quiet, kindly intelligence, distrustful of the strident, mindful of the many shades in the picture. He lived out his days in Dublin, quietly and away from the public spotlight, dying peacefully in August 1961 in his 88th

year. He will probably remain relatively unknown, a fate common to many

fine northern writers?Forrest Reid, Sam Hanna Bell and St John Ervine

among others?overshadowed by the luminance that flared around

southern contemporaries. His regionalism, too, has worked against him, in the sense that regionalism is perceived as limiting, or not of the

'mainstream'. Like the Marshall brothers of Tyrone, who similarly

employed dialect and located their characters in a familiar rural setting, he is praised as 'quaint' and 'folksy', but the endorsement stops short of

admitting him and his works into the ranks of 'real' writers. But his

voice, and the concerns he touched, are those of a real writer. He looked

out from his own little piece of the world and gave it life and a degree of immortality through his stories.

WILLIAM O'KANE is publications officer with Irish World, Dungannon

A confusion of

strains

BRUCE STEWART assesses the career of Shan F Bullock, novelist?of Fermanagh, the civil service and the world

SHAN FADH BULLOCK was born in Crom, county Fermanagh, on 17 May 1865, the son of

the earl of Erne's steward who was also a

prosperous protestant farmer and a magistrate, and who features in several of Bullock's novels

as Mr Farmer (or "the Master"), an imposing

figure imbued with the values of moderate

unionism. The countryside around the Cavan

Fermanagh border had then, as now, a protes tant and catholic population "mixed like

currants in a cake". There was no doubt, how

ever, which denomination had the upper hand

or how near the surface their sectarian

antagonisms lay. As his father is heard to say in

Bullock's autobiographical memoir, After

Sixty Years (1931):

In our colony the Protestant was top dog always, and both dogs snap at the conquering Saxon's

feet.

But if the Master was critical of Orange

triumphalism?"How could there ever be peace and fellowship in the face of such folly?"?he also regarded the author of home rule, William

Gladstone, as "a ruffian only fit for hanging", in common with so many of his class.

In spite of this conservative background,

Bullock developed from early days a strong

sympathy with "the others", as he learnt to call

the catholics, changing his given-name, John

William, to that of a character in William

Carleton's Traits And Stories Of The Irish

Peasantry ('Shane Fadh's Wedding'). This is

not to say he 'turned his coat': in general, the

novels can be seen as a faithful and impas sioned picture of the respective communities as

he knew them in the last days of Irish feudal

ism, an epoch coinciding with the passage of

the land acts.

With one group only he is not in sympathy: the landlords. In his autobiography, he views

their demesnes as "the symbol [s] of lost chances

and lost power", and regards the Anglo-Irish

ascendancy itself as having "contrived its own

ruin". Yet, as the events at the turn of the

century moved inexorably towards revolution

and partition, his books came to reflect a deci

sive shift in loyalty back to the protestant community. In this sense, they exemplify a

failure in the fiction of the literary revival to

take and hold the middle ground?if there was

a 'middle ground' to take and hold.

Having failed to enter Trinity College after his schooldays at Farra, Bullock left Ireland

early and joined the civil service in London,

where he later played a prominent part in the

14

This content downloaded from 185.31.195.50 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 08:56:09 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Irish Literary Society, becoming chairman in

1912. His closest literary friend in England was

Emily Lawless, whom he befriended shortly before her death in Sussex. She was an Irish

ascendancy novelist, daughter of Lord

Cloncurry (though descended from a family of

'Wild Geese') with much the same non-politi cal amalgam of cultural patriotism as himself.

In 1913, he collaborated with her on The Race

At Castlebar?and not, as some accounts re

port, completing it when she was no longer able

to do so. Lawless had written a study of agrar ian crime in the west of Ireland in Hurrish

(1902), the novel Gladstone took as his bible on

the thorny question of why the Irish seemed so

resistant to the rule of law and order. Predict

ably, Irish nationalists hated it?and with it, her

lyric study of woman's life in Aran, Grania

(1892), a work that cries out for reprinting,

especially for its feminist viewpoint. The limitations of Lawless's perspective

were those ofthe ascendancy class to whom the

life of the peasantry inevitably seemed brutal

and (as she constantly complains) hideously devoid of romantic or aesthetic feeling. But

Bullock himself had no such inherited sense of

haut-en-bas; his literary constituency as a mem

ber of the rural middle class was very different.

It is, indeed, his continual effort to mediate

between the claims of both traditions which

provides the central interest of his books today, when sectarian divisions in the north of Ireland

are?to put it blandly?back on the agenda. The other reason why his books deserve

attention is their character as "patient, living, and sincere stud[ies] of what Ulster really is in

itself as a community of men and women", as

Horace Plunkett wrote of him. In an essay of

1950, Benedict Kiely confirmed the authentic

ity of Bullock's portrait of the part of the

country they both came from, and John Wilson

Foster has written authoritatively about Bul

lock's often unsettling combination of roman

tic melodrama and rural naturalism, in Forces

And Themes In Ulster Fiction (1974). Oddly enough, neither of these critics has attempted a

substantive account of Bullock's political out

look.

Bullock wrote a number of striking dialect

novels set in Emo, Bilboa, Gorteen, Drumhill,

Derry vad, and other townlands around the River

Trasna and Lough Erne. Some of these are

reminiscences of vivid childhood friendships

(By Trasna River, 1895; The Cubs, 1906), and introduce a cast of characters such as Jan

Farmer, the novelist's alter-ego, and Thady

Sheeran, the poteen-maker, who recur in other

novels. The mood is elegiac if not sentimental, but the harsh conditions of agrarian life in 'our

distressful country' are never far from view. He

does not disdain, either, when opportunity arises, to quote Goldsmith's lines on the destruction of

a bold peasantry. His description of economic

exigencies, and his admiration for those who

stoically endure them?catholics, more than

protestants, in the unequal nature of things? are always forthright:

Ye'11 see a ten-acre farm?mebbe more, mebbe

less, no matter?an' on that ye'll see a horse, an' two cows, an' a couple of pigs. There'll be a

couple of acres of meadow, a bit o' land in crop, an' the pratie patch. Well, ivery bit that's grew on

that land goes to feed the stock, 'cept the praties the family ate an' the bit of kale, an' mebbe a grain of wheat. An' rent and taxes an' iverything else

depends on the pigs and calves.

In such a regimen, the families were intensely vulnerable to accidents of climate and economy

acting in tandem as a sort of malignant deus ex

machina, the more ironic since their natural

environment is treated as a kind of lost paradise

... mud, rain, poverty, starvation, slavery: there was Ireland. A people downtrodden, hopeless, a

people patiently enduring their miseries and find

ing happiness amid them: there was the Irish.

This landscape is populated by a race?or

rather, two races?of resilient Ulstermen, to

whom Bullock inveterately attaches the word

"manful" as his highest form of praise. In this

they are equal in his admiration, though their

differences are no less apparent to his educated

eye. On the one hand,

... the clean-shaven Irish faces, with their keen

features and restless eyes; on the other, the beards

and whiskers [of] men with memories of England and Scotland in their looks.

The best of his novels deal with the protestant farmers. In The Loughsiders (1924), Richard Jebb returns from America and sets about woo

ing the pretty Rachel Nixon, much his junior, and is repulsed by her because of his mercenary notion of the marriage-pact. Another 'manful'

character, he is

... of the dark sallow breed which keeps the world

going: a true Northerner ... [whose] eyes had

depth and shrewdness and contriving.

He is, in other words, an admirable if less than

amiable hero; and his success in matching Rachel with a younger neighbour in order to

marry her mother and gain the family farm is

hardly the stuff of romantic fiction. An earlier

version of the same type is the more rollicking hero ofThe Squireen (1903), Martin Hynes? drawn from life?who contains "a confusion of

strains ... part Scotch, part English, the rest of

him Ulster". As a freeholder, he also puts considerations of money above those of love, turns from another Rachel, and marries the

unfortunate Jane Fallon, whose sexual and psy

chological development is the remarkable fea

ture of the novel. Hynes dies in a mad horse

ride, bringing upon himself the impending nem

esis that awaits those, in Bullock's allegorical

view, who transgress the laws of nature and the

human heart. Like Jebb, he possesses the con

siderable dialectic skills which Bullock be

lieves veil what he calls the "awful reticence"

of the Ulster protestant, "deep as their religion itself. The Squireen was staged in Belfast as

Snowdrop Jane with some success. Hetty

(1911),ataleofwomen'slivesintheshadowof a domineering Ulster father, represents a fur

ther move in the direction of feminist writing,

though Bullock generally reveres his women

characters for their passive virtues as a moder

ating and supportive influence to their men

folk.

The first of the novels to discuss political issues directly?albeit in burlesque form?

was The Awkward Squads (1893). It is set in the period of the incoming Liberal govern

ment, when "the hand of the law was relaxed

over Ireland". In that climate, squads of Fenian

and Orange militia start training for the forth

/ *

7

/ / ^<V- /

^^w / > >-^^o /

/ / ^ A.^^

/ / ~^/' / ^w / V, ^ /> /

^~-y ~-*?^( /

/A^^^\ 7/

15

This content downloaded from 185.31.195.50 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 08:56:09 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

^_______________________ commS hostilities. The novel is full of windy

^ ^Hf^^^H rhetoric on either hand, indicative of Bul

_B_^B__.______ l__^_l lock's steady apprehension that extremism is

_B________B^~^ l^_______j eclually tne failing of both sides. Neverthe

_B__________HP* ^l-_____H ^ess'tne Paro(ty ?f nationalism is more severe,

H^^^E^^^^fl or at least much funnier than that of orangeism:

m^\mmWMF^^k^mmmm\ 'Oideas are in th'air, gentlemin; from the Gi

^^^f^ A^L^?m ants' Causeway to the Cove av Cork th'air is full

^M[/ a^L^L^LM av oideas that fall on enloightened minds. We

^H? ^^^^^H are a yunited nation; we are an awakened nation;

mamam^^,^^^mmmmmmmm we have spurned the fut av the oppressor, an

risen lek the young aigle o the mornin.'

The orator here, a Mr Dooley?and Peter Finlay Dunne's Irish-Ameri

can satirist, Mr Dooley, is probably glanced at?goes on to become a

member of parliament. At the finale, after various night-frights and

retreats, the amateur armies encounter one another on a country road,

where battle is joined with sticks and stones. Bullock's tone suggests how remote the prospect of real warfare seemed to him?in the year of

the founding of the Irish Literary Society and the Gaelic League?and how close to the shenanigans of Donnybrook Fair his literary parish lay:

It was a glorious fight, worthy of the traditions of old Ireland, manfully

fought, stubbornly endured?a fight which abundantly proved that Irishmen are still able to settle their little difficulties, whether social or political, by force in their own right arms. May the Awkward Squads never meet in a worse

cause!

Ten years later, however, he issued a more anxiously prophetic work

called The Red-Leaguers (1904) in which militant Fenianism breaks out in open rebellion. The central character, James Shaw, is a "traitor"

to his religion and his party, taking the lead in the organisation of the

Armoy Commando, modelled on his experiences as a soldier in Mexico

and South Africa. Here a hint is given that Arthur Griffith, another old

Africa hand, is modelling for the portrait, while "The Man Above"

sounds very like the Fenian Head Centre, James Stephens; but Bullock's

own divided loyalties are at issue also. After much sectarian blood

letting in the ensuing rising, the rebels establish a government in Dublin,

centred on the Rotunda, of patriotic fame. Their political programme is

unappetising: "The national religion would be Catholic, the national

language, Gaelic, and so on interminably", but their executive skills are

evidently unequal to it:

Poor cynosure of a nation set in the ring of a heedless world. Poor peasants

who had led for a cause betrayed ... poor worthless leaders wrangling and

mouthing together ... Poor Republic drifting as it might towards chaos.

American help fails to arrive, and soon the British navy is seen steaming towards Ireland at Waterford?where the Normans made their first

incursion.

The novel is spoilt by the addition of a romantic plot which doubles

lamely as an invidious account of Shaw's motivation. In love with a

hillside rose called Leah?how Bullock loves those biblical names!?

who loves Jan Farmer, he abducts her during the rebellion. Eventually he sees the error of his ways, coming to appreciate that, for her, James

and Jan are "not ofthe same race", and returns her to her rightful swain, his "enemy in love". He then escapes to France. In spite of such an otiose

device, there is more iron in this novel and a more measured sense ofthe

coming cataclysm than in the others.

When Bullock addressed the Irish Literary Society about novel

writing in 1912, he remarked that the conditions had not yet developed for that genre in Ireland: until the artist is sure of the reward even of

recognition in his own country, no school of novelists can arise. In fact,

his Irish books are never more than novellas, resolving easily into the

dialect short-story form that he first espoused in the pages of Macmillan' s

Magazine. By comparison, his account of life as an exploited London

clerk in Robert Thorne (1907) and his study of Thomas Andrews (1912), Belfast architect ofthe 'Titanic'?the two urban novels in his

oeuvre?are more fully articulated, suggesting the direction that he did

not take.

The fascination of his childhood scenes held him in its grip. He

believed that he "could surely find no better characters... than the people of Ireland", and devoted most of his energy to describing their inde

structible spirit in adversity. In so doing, he was drawn to highlighting the divisions of his native community and the codes of faction that ruled

it. In spite of its considerable comic resources, The Awkward Squads? which is still the most frequent of his works to be found on bookstalls?

encapsulates the tragic condition ofthe province:

A wave of emotion passed over the [Orange Squad]; the spirit of Faction fell

upon them; with one voice they declared their loyalty to their colours, and

their detestation of 'Pope and Popery, brass money, and wooden shoes.' Thus

their souls glowed within them, and they sat in happy brotherhood.

That sense of solidarity has been bought at a high price.

BRUCE STEWART is research officer ofthe Oxford Companion To Irish Literature at the University of Ulster, Coleraine.

Hannay, humour

and heresy

BRIAN TAYLOR reflects on the 'good, bad novels' of George A Birmingham, a maverick for all seasons

IT IS, PERHAPS, not so very surprising that

the many novels of 'George A Birmingham' attract only a small, if loyal, readership nor that

they have remained for the most part unreprinted since his death in 1950. Taken together, the

novels and the life offer a case study in what

one commentator has called the "Celtic art of

contradiction".

During a long life of 85 years, he combined

the career of a Church of Ireland and, subse

quently, an Anglican clergyman, with an en

thusiastic interest and involvement in Irish life

and politics. His prolific writings comprised journalism, volumes of essays, serious works

of church history and theology, plays?two of

which were successfully staged?and over 60

of the humorous novels by which James Owen

Hannay who created both them and their pseu

donymous author, is known, if he is remem

bered at all today. Indeed, so various were his

interests, that any adequate account of such a

diverse life calls for some mastery of areas as

apparently unconnected as the theology of early Christian monasticism, the intricacies of Irish

rural politics at the turn of the century, the later

arguments for home rule and partition, the fate

of the Balkan aristocracy during the currency inflation of the 1920s and the niceties of eccle

siastical organisation and practice in English

village life. It ought also, ideally, to require

some awareness of the problems of staging a

play for appreciative London and New York

audiences but which, when presented in the

west of Ireland town where it was written, caused a riot which destroyed the set and forced

the cast to seek refuge in their hotel.

In his life, many commentators, chiefly his

detractors, noted these apparently contradic

tory achievements?the apparent paradox of

an Irish clergyman writing farcical novels un

der the guise of a seemingly English pseudo

nym, of a Belfast-born protestant involved with

the nationalist cause and, perhaps most unex

pectedly, of showing (as an early commentator

noted)

... symptoms of possessing a soul of his own, and

of exercising thought that sometimes behaves

like a bewitched blackthorn among the well

ordered crockery on the official political dresser.

It was as if Canon Hannay had managed to live

many lives in one. It is hardly surprising that

some of his readers, and most of his critics, found it difficult to believe that these contradic

tory elements were all contained within the

single life even of such a prolific and paradoxi cal man.

Hannay was born in Belfast and his back

ground?Ulster-Scots rather than Anglo

16

This content downloaded from 185.31.195.50 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 08:56:09 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions