In the spring of 1973 I was sent by my teachers at Trinity to an interview for a scholarship at Oxford. The session there went well enough, but came to a sudden stop on my indication of a firm wish to write a dissertation on an Irish topic. "We have no expert in that area", the Master of Linacre informed me with a sigh: "We should, but we don't".
Returned to the civilian life of a tourist, I prepared for a pleasant weekend walking through the city of dreaming spires and perspiring dreams, "the home of lost causes". On my second evening, strolling down St Giles, I spotted a face that seemed vaguely familiar, a cross between Sargeant Bilko and Henry Kissinger. "Excuse me, but are you Richard Ellman?" He agreed that he was. "They just told me they have no expert on Irish literature in Oxford", I informed him in scandalised tones. "Oh, well", he chuckled indulgently: "they probably associate me with Modernism". We both had a good laugh at that and he signed me up on Monday morning.
It was only years later that I came to understand how such a mix-up could have occurred. In each of Ellmann's brilliant studies of Yeats, Joyce, Wilde and Beckett, there is an underlying narrative which proposes that the writer made himself modern to the extent that he transcended mere Irishness. "When Yeats wrote A Vision", wrote Ellman in one of his essays, "he forgot that he was an Irishman. And while he calls the fairies by their Irish name of Sidhe, I suspect that they too are internationalists". So there it was - the little people as secret subscribers to the Fourth International. No wonder the Master of Linacre - a next-door neighbour of the Ellmanns - had been so confused.
As the century ends, Dick Ellmann stands as the supreme interpreter of the great Irish modernists. It is easy to see how an American humanist of his Jewish background might have been attracted by James Joyce and by his Ulysses with its tender celebration of Leopold Bloom. Given that Ellman was a member of the American forces which helped to liberate Europe from the Nazis in 1944, it would even be possible to see his literary career as an attempt to repair the damaged reputation of European Modernism after the holocaust and to do that by recruiting the Irish into the pantheon. It was a noble project, but for me it posed a problem: Ireland, in Ellmann's schema, was portrayed as a backward, narrow and intolerant place which drove its free spirits into exile.
In conversation I often tried to convince Ellmann that my country was nothing like as backward as he seemed to think. It was unfortunate that he had come first as a student in 1946, a time of censorship and introversion: but the Ireland of the revival, like the land of my early manhood, was a very different place: open, generous, vibrant. Moreover the national condition, I tried to convince him, was supremely modern. After all, ever since the 1840s our people had been suffering from that most contemporary of ailments: a homeless mind. Some were uprooted from neolithic villages in the west to end their days in Hammersmith or Hell's Kitchen; others at home had changed languages and cultures with the result that they felt and behaved like strangers in their own land. Such broken lives and disrupted archives could only be rendered in the jagged, experimental forms of a radical new kind of literature. The Irish may not have chosen modernity, but the experience had been forced on them. By the 1880s, Wilde could rightly say that "it is the Celt who leads in art".
When I returned from my time at Oxford, my father often quizzed me closely about Dick Ellmann, for he had read and enjoyed all his books. He greatly admired their lucid elegance, puckish humour, unshowy learning and, most of all, the kindness of their author's judgment of persons. "But", my father would say wistfully, "even though he likes Irish people, he doesn't really like Ireland, now does he?"
I finally put all these reservations to Dick during a conversation in Sligo in 1984. He listened carefully and then said: "Write a big book about it. Put them all in it, writers, critics, Jakes McCarthy and all" So I did. It took almost 11 years and I enjoyed every moment of it, feeling a strange sense of desolation when the work was done. You couldn't ask for a more colourful cast than that provided by the story of Irish literature over the past century, nor better jokes, nor more amusing moments. Yet in the midst of all the hilarity and intermittent tragedy, it often struck me that many of our great writers had a social vision that was far richer than that of any political theorist or practical leader in the same period.
Shaw's essays on Anglo-Irish relations may yet be shown to contain the beginnings of a solution to the "troubles" - so, for that matter, may Wilde's. The idea of Yeats, Lady Gregory and Douglas Hyde on decolonisation were way ahead of their time. Joyce was one of the first to predict partition and also one of the earliest to define what pluralism might entail. The insights of Elizabeth Bowen or Hanna Sheehy Skeffington into the role of women in the emerging Ireland are scintillating. Most of the challenges posed by these people have yet to be answered. I sometimes think that historians may have underestimated the contribution of writers to the shaping of modern Ireland. President Robinson, who was forever quoting these artists, seems to have been on surer lines.
In the book I tried to combine close readings of texts with more general commentary, attending both to movements in popular culture (the Gaelic League, GAA, feminism, the plays of Behan) as well as to the "high" art of Yeats or Joyce. Because we were the first English-speaking people to decolonise in this century, it seemed wise to draw on post-colonial theories which are genuinely illuminating. These theories are often couched in a barbarous academic jargon, so I tried to phrase them in a clear style which might draw the wider reading public into a debate that had grown a little introverted.
Throughout the years of writing, I was often jocularly asked by my father "Are you on holidays now?" i.e. is the college's teaching term over? Every academic knows this ritual humiliation: people think you are dossing when you are doing your hardest work - writing. Sometimes my father (who had never been near a university) would try to wind me up by asking "What do you actually do in the college all day?" "Inventing Ireland", I used to joke in reply. The book was to be my "answer" to him: and I wrote every page of it with him in my mind as a sort of Ideal Reader. Sadly, he died three months before its publication. My other "father", Dick Ellmann, died long before his due time in 1987, when I was still only buckling down to the task. They were the two kindest and gentlest men I've known and, though neither lived to see the book, I couldn't have written it without them.
