8/19/2019 Being Irish Together
1/6
Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Sewanee Review.
http://www.jstor.org
Being Irish TogetherAuthor(s): Denis DonoghueSource: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Winter, 1976), pp. 129-133Published by: Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27543064Accessed: 28-12-2015 20:38 UTC
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 of contentin a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
This content downloaded from 150.214.156.17 on Mon, 28 Dec 2015 20:38:40 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/http://www.jstor.org/publisher/jhuphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/27543064http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/27543064http://www.jstor.org/publisher/jhuphttp://www.jstor.org/
8/19/2019 Being Irish Together
2/6
THE
STATE
OF
LETTERS
BEING
IRISH TOGETHER
DENIS DONOGHUE
Most
of the towns
and
villages
in
Ireland
are
as
peaceful
as
Rupert
Brooke's
Grantchester.
Derry
is
safe
at
the
moment,
but
it
is
not in its
nature
to
be
quiet
for
long.
Belfast
is
ugly
with
fear
and
hatred,
though
it is
still
possible
to
live
an
unmolested
life
there,
as
Oliver
Edwards
does,
pursuing
an
interest
in
the
relation
between
Yeats
and
the
German
poet
Dautendey.
The
professor
of
Italian
at
Queen's
Uni
versity,
Belfast,
has
just
published
an
important
translation
of M?n
tale:
it is
a
consolation
to
think of
him
pondering
a
crux
of
diction
while the
bombs
wreck
a
bar
and
one
assassin
shoots,
perhaps,
another.
There
is
a
small
district
in
South
Armagh
where
the
English
queen's
writ does
not
run
and
a
British soldier
is
everyone's
natural
enemy.
Yesterday
(December 5,
1975)
the
secretary
of state for northern
Ireland announced
the end
of
detention,
formerly
called
internment
without
trial. This
morning
the
Irish
Times
carried
a
photograph
of
a
young
man
released
from
Long
Kesh,
taking
his
child
by
the
hand
and
walking
off into
freedom:
a
charming
picture
if
we
could be
as
sured that
in
a
few
days
he
will
not
take
up
a
gun
or
make
a
bomb
which
will
kill
without
prejudice
men,
women,
Catholics,
Protestants,
or
a
child of the
same
age
as
his
own.
The Irish Times
shows
a
decent
interest
in
the end
of
detention,
but like
nearly
everybody
it
has be
come
weary
of
the
theme and
turns,
with
undisguised
relief,
to
the
country's
economic
problems,
the
high
incidence of
unemployment,
and
current
legislation designed
to
prevent
the Irish
banks from
award
ing
to
their
employees
an
increase of
salary higher
than
the
terms
of the
National
Pay
Agreement.
Meanwhile
men
and
women
in
Ireland
write
verses,
novels,
short
stories,
paint
pictures,
sculpt,
and
compose
string
quartets.
I
have
done
none
of these
things
and
therefore
speak
of
them
with
impunity:
I
am
not in
a
competitive
trade.
It
may
be
said
that
the
troubles
in
northern
Ireland
since
1968 have
been
bad
for
human
life but
good
for
literatureT
they
have
gained
for
young
poets
an
audience
which
would
not
normally
be
willing
to
attend,
and
they
have
provided
themes and occasions more
demandingly
intense than those which
generally
emerge
from
a
comfortable
society.
A
few
poets,
including
This content downloaded from 150.214.156.17 on Mon, 28 Dec 2015 20:38:40 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
8/19/2019 Being Irish Together
3/6
130
THE STATE OF LETTERS
Thomas Kinsella
and
John
Montague,
have
responded
to
these
occa
sions
directly, getting
the
horror of
it
hot;
but
the resultant
poems
are
hysterical
rather than
impassioned:
it is
better
for
a
poet
to
let
such
occasions wait in
silence for
a
while. Seamus
Heaney
has
been wiser
in
his
economy,
approaching
these
violent
themes
indirectly,
as
if his
poems
composed
not
a
politics
but
an
anthropology
of
feeling?start
ing
well back
and
deep
down.
One
of these
days
the
poets
from
the
North will
have
to
be
read with
an
interest
not
chiefly
topical.
A
reading
in
that
spirit
is
perhaps premature,
but
I
hope
its
day
will
come
soon,
and
that
Kinsella,
Heaney,
Mahon,
Deane,
Montague,
and
the
rest
will
be
read
in
the
critically
disinterested
spirit
we
bring
to,
say,
Geoffrey
Hill,
Roy
Fisher,
Charles
Tomlinson,
A. R.
Ammons,
John
Ashbery,
Philip
Larkin,
Ted
Hughes.
It
is true
that
Irish
writers
work
under
special
difficulties
and that
they
deserve
the
advantages
of
a
compellingly
ill
wind. When
Larkin
writes
the
poems
in
High
Windows
he
knows
what
he
is
doing,
es
tablishing
his
language
in
relation
to
the
general
body
of the
English
language
as
a
secure
possession,
mediated
by
Hardy,
Auden,
and
other
poets.
Larkin
s
general body
of
reference
is
contemporary
English
so
ciety,
dismal
in
many
respects
but
well
understood
in
terms
of
class
and the
preoccupations
of class.
As
an
economist
of
poetry
he
knows
what
he
needs,
judges
precisely
the moment
at
which
his
art
tempts
itself
to
archness
or
extravagance.
Most
of what
he knows
he
has
been
told
by
his
masters.
But the Irish
writers
find
it
peculiarly
difficult
to
know
what
they
are
doing:
they
live
upon
a
fractured
rather
than
an
integral
tradition;
they
do
not
know
which
voice
is
to
be
trusted.
Most
of
them
speak
English,
but
they
have
a
sense,
just barely
acknowl
edged,
that the
true
voice
of
feeling
speaks
in
Irish,
not
a
dead lan
guage
like
Latin
but
a
banished
language,
a
voice
in
exile.
English,
Irish: Protestant, Catholic: Anglo-Irish, Gael: in Ireland today we do
not
know what
to
do with
these
fractures. Conor
Cruise
O'Brien
urges
us
to
accept
our
experience
as
mixed
and
plural
and
to
live
accord
ingly
in
a
spirit
of
tolerance.
We
are
to
repudiate
the
spirit
of
Repub
licanism
which
insists
upon
defining
the
essential
Irish
experience
as
that
of
driving
out
the
English
and
spilling
blood
in
this noble
cause.
His
arguments
may
be found
victorious
at
the end
of
the
day,
but
meanwhile
the
spirit
of
acceptance
which
he
espouses
is
attractive
mainly
to
people
who
are
disgusted
with
the
Irish
question
and
want
to
be rid of
it;
or
to
people
who
are
weary,
indifferent,
interested
only
in
getting
on
in
the world.
O'Brien
words
are
not
only
despised
by
every
nationalist
and
republican,
but
they
are
rejected
by
anyone
whose
sense
of
life
demands
that
life
be lived
in
conflict
and
stress.
There
are men
and
women
who
despise
the
concept
of
a
plural
so
This content downloaded from 150.214.156.17 on Mon, 28 Dec 2015 20:38:40 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
8/19/2019 Being Irish Together
4/6
THE STATE OF LETTERS
131
ciety
and
who
are
ready
to
kill
and
be killed
for the
sake of
national
purity.
O'Brien
does
not
understand
such
people,
or
the
aboriginal
loyalties
which
mean
far
more
to
them
than
a
contemptible
liberal
peace.
He
answers
that his
policy
will
not
cause
a
single
death:
it
is
true.
But
a
Republican
will
assert
that
there
are
things
more
glorious
than
liberal tolerance?a
martyr's
death,
for instance.
So
the
old
rhe
torical
battle
starts
up
again.
The real
trouble
in
Ireland
is
that
our
national
experience
has
been
too
limited
to
be
true.
Since
the
Plantation
of Ulster there
has
been
one
story
and
one
story
only
in
Irish
feeling:
the
English,
how
to
get
rid of
them,
or,
failing
that,
to
circumvent
them,
cajole
them,
twist
their
tails.
Our
categories
of
feeling
are
therefore
flagrantly
limited;
our
history
has
been
at
once
intense
and
monotonous.
We have
had
no
industrial
revolution,
no
factory
acts,
no
trade
union
movement:
hence
the
frail
basis
upon
which
our
Labour
Party
exists,
by
contrast
with
the
two
major
parties
which
still
define
themselves
in
terms
of
our
civil
war.
A
limited
history,
a
correspondingly
intimidating
my
thology,
a
fractured
language,
a
literature
of fits and
starts
and
ges
tures:
no
continuity
from
one
age
to
the
next.
Irish
novelists,
the
few
who
survive,
feel the
anxiety
of influence but not the incitement or
the
challenge
of
a
tradition.
The
nineteenth-century
writers
whom
Thomas
Flanagan
studied
in
The
Irish
Novelists do
not amount to
a
tradition;
there
are
novelists but
there
is
no
tradition
of the
novel,
the
force of
vision,
technique,
and
precedence
available
to,
say,
Angus
Wilson
when
he reads
George
Eliot and writes
Anglo-Saxon
Attitudes.
The
contemporary
Irish
novelist looks for
a
tradition
capable
of tell
ing
him
what
has
been done
and how
he
ought
to
proceed:
instead
he finds
Joyce,
an
overbearing
presence.
Take the
story
by James
Plunkett in the
present
issue
of the
Sewanee
Review: I have
no
in
formation
on
the
circumstances
in
which
Plunkett
wrote
the
story
or
the difficulties he
met
in
writing
it,
but
I
am
sure
his
main
difficulty
was
the
inescapable
presence
of
Joyce's
Portrait
of
the
Artist
as a
Young
Man.
The
price
we
pay
for Yeats
and
Joyce
is
that
each
in his
way gave
Irish
experience
a
memorable but
narrow
definition;
they
established
it
not
as
the
ordinary
but
as
a
special
case
of the
ordinary,
Synge
and
the minor
writers of
the Irish
literary
revival
were
not
strong
enough
to
counter
Yeats's
incantatory
rhetoric:
no
writer
in
Ireland
has been
strong
enough
to
modify
Joyce's
sense
of Irish
ex
perience
in fiction.
As
a
result
the writers
we
particularly
revere
are
those
who encountered
Yeats
and
Joyce
and
contrived
to
preserve
minds and arts of their own. I think of Flann O'Brien who somehow
deflected
the blow of
Joyce
sufficiently
to
write
At-Swim-Two-Birds
and The Third
Policeman,
books
which
could
not
have
been
written
This content downloaded from 150.214.156.17 on Mon, 28 Dec 2015 20:38:40 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
8/19/2019 Being Irish Together
5/6
132
THE STATE OF LETTERS
without
Joyce's
example
but which
could
not
have
taken their
defini
tive
form if
Flann
O'Brien had allowed
himself
to
be
intimidated
by
that
example.
I
think
also of
Austin
Clarke's later
poems,
the work
of
a
poet
who
languished
in
Yeats's
shadow
until,
late and
not
a
moment
too
soon,
he
swerved
away
from
the shadow
and struck
out
for him
self.
T.
S.
Eliot has
maintained
in
What
Is
a
Classic?
that
every
su
preme
poet,
classic
or
not,
tends
to
exhaust
the
ground
he
cultivates,
so that it must, after yielding a diminishing crop, finally be left in
fallow for
some
generations.
I
find
this
an
ambiguous
idea,
but noth
ing
in
it is
more
significant
than Eliot's
assumption
that
we
have
world
enough
and time.
Certainly
there
are
cultures
of which
we
feel
that the
question
of
time
is
not
the
main
problem:
it
is
possible
to
think
of
the
cultures of
France,
England,
and Greece
as
providing
a
cadence
of
feeling
which
allows
for
historical
change
and
continuity.
To think
of
Shakespeare
and Milton
exhausting
the
ground
they
cul
tivate is
to
respond
once
again
to
the
plenitude
of
a
literary
culture
in
which
that
ground
may
be
allowed
to
remain in
fallow for
some
generations.
But
it
also exacerbates
our sense
of the
vulnerability
of
those
societies
which
cannot
afford fallow
years
or
generations.
Modern Ireland
as
a
state
rather
than
as
a
province
of
England
is
only fifty
years
old.
The
separation
of North and
South
is
arbitrary,
a
politician's
device.
We have
had
to concentrate
in
one
generation
the
experience
which
more
fortunate
countries
have been
able
to
de
velop
in
several;
and
we
have
largely
been
prevented
from
doing
so
by
the
exorbitance
of rival
mythologies.
So
we
have had
to
live from
day
to
day
and hand
to
mouth.
I mention these
facts
to
explain
the
impression
of
spasmodic
achievement
in
Irish literature:
our
experi
ence
has
not
been
sufficiently
diverse,
and
we
have
had
not
enoug?h
time, to produce
an
adequate literature. Our writers are, for the most
part,
solitary
workersY
they
do
not
find themselves
as
participants
in
an
enterprise,
a
common
pursuit.
Henry
James
said of
the
solitary
worker
that,
apt
to
make awkward
experiments,
he
is in
the
nature
of
the
case
more
or
less of
an
empiric.
I
take
it
that
empiricism
is
work
from
hand
to
mouth.
It
is
remarkable,
and
a
joy,
that work
as
fine
as
Clarke's
Ancient
Lights
has
been
produced
in
Ireland
by
such
an
un
concerted
method.
It
is
probably
idle
to
posit
the
conditions
in
which
good
work
is
done.
Was
it
necessary
for
Brian
Moore
to
leave Belfast
and
go
to
Canada,
then
to
California,
for
the
sake of
writing
Catholics? Would
Michael
McLaverty
have
developed
a more
complete
art
by
resorting
to the
same
itinerary?
It
is
common
to
have the
experience
and
miss
the
meaning.
Who
knows?
Who
knows
enough?
Anyway
it
is
my
im
This content downloaded from 150.214.156.17 on Mon, 28 Dec 2015 20:38:40 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
8/19/2019 Being Irish Together
6/6
THE STATE OF LETTERS
133
pression
that
Irish
writers
sense a
rift between
experience
and
mean
ing,
but
in
reverse:
the
meaning
is
premature,
already
inscribed
by
a
mythology they
have
no
choice but
to
inherit,
and the
experience
is
too
narrow
to
be
entirely
natural
and
representative.
THE
JOURNAL
OF
STEPHEN
MacKENNA
ROGER
ROSENBLATT
Where
everyone
else
could
see one
side of
an
issue,
MacKenna
saw
two;
where
everyone
saw
two
sides,
he
saw
three;
where
all
sides
could
be
tolerated,
he
saw
one.
He
was
as
capable
of
serene
per
spective
as
of
fanaticism,
and
often
showed
both
on
the
same
subject.
He
wanted to
write
fiction;
he
wrote
theory.
He wanted
to
write
poems;
he filled letters with comic
doggerel,
and the
only
serious
poem
he
ever
finished
was
a
translation from the
Irish
of
Aoghan
OUahilly's
The
Merchant's
Son. He
had
contempt
for
journalists,
with
whom he
spent
most
of his
time,
and
contempt
for
journalism,
which
was
the
way
he
made his
living.
For
fifteen
years
he
practiced
on
musical instruments
that
he
couldn't
play.
His
house
was
head
quarters
for the
Gaelic
League,
much of
whose work he
despised.
He
called talk
benumbing
but
was
known
as
the
greatest
talker in
a
circle
that included
James
Stephens,
Yeats,
and
George
Russell. He
loved
the
company
of
friends,
and
passed
his
final
ten
years
in
seclusion
in
England, where he refused nomination to the Royal Irish Academy
because
it
was
English.
Infinitely
generous,
he
was
responsible
for
getting
Austin
Clarke's
first
poem
into
print.
When Clarke
came
to
him with
a
second,
MacKenna
asked,
What
am
I,
your
errand
boy?
As
a
critic
he
could be
brilliant
or
blind?and blind
intentionally.
His
capacity
for
stoicism
was
equalled only by
his
capacity
for
self-pity.
He
used
the
last
energy
of
his life
translating
a
philosophy
in
which
he
no
longer
believed.
Modesty
was
his
one
consistency.
He
would
have been
bewildered
by
someone
wanting
to
write
about
him.
I had
never
heard of
MacKenna before
reading
The
lournal
and
Letters
of
Stephen
MacKenna
(1936),
edited
by
E.
R.
Dodds,
Regius
professor
of Greek at Oxford. I wrote Dodds when I was
living
in
Dublin
in
1965. He
responded
by
lending
me
all
the
MacKenna
papers
in
his
possession,
including
MacKenna's
notebooks,
his
letters
to
James
This content downloaded from 150.214.156.17 on Mon, 28 Dec 2015 20:38:40 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp