The Oxford Book of Ireland edited by Patricia Craig OUP 514pp, £19.99 in UK
This book is a massive compendium, not a thesis or a survey, and at the very least it offers a very handy selection of quotable quotes. Patricia Craig has trawled with a big net, dredging up material from poets, novelists, diarists, travellers, dramatists, historians, journalists. To say that no overall pattern or picture emerges from all this almost is to state the obvious; Ireland, its history and its people(s) are traditionally contradictory and full of ingrained oddities. The Irish, as they themselves admit, rarely agree on anything - at least, the thinking sector of the nation, which is also the literate one. As much of the material comes from the 19th century, there is a strong emphasis on the theme of the Most Distressful Country, backward and impoverished, which still somehow managed to attract the interest of eminent foreigners. These include Cavour, who might have been expected to sound censorious but instead is rather sympathetic; by contrast, Bismarck's alleged remark, "Put the Dutch in Ireland and they would feed all Europe, put the Irish in Holland and they would drown", is not given.
The 19th century in Europe was above all the age of material progress and belief in the triumphant work ethic, and when judged from this standpoint Ireland cut a wretched figure. Yet many of these comments by foreigners are surprisingly humane and even friendly; the Romantic Age had a keen awareness of the past, and Ireland's ancient culture was known and remembered. Also, Ireland's was rather a picturesque poverty, in spite of the Dublin slums, the dirt and rags and the mud-roofed bohauns.
It is curious to note how many of the themes and attitudes which contemporary critics and journalists consider peculiar to our own age are in fact cyclical and recurrent. For instance, the reaction against literary ruralism and the cult of the Irish countryman has a long history - here is James Stephens, writing in 1910: "I deplore and reprobate the present glorification of the peasant. I am very sick of peasants. The Abbey Theatre has given us three or four years of undiluted peasant, so has the Theatre of Ireland, so have our journals. We are beginning to wear our peasantry as consciously as we do our ancient greatness and our heroes. It is ridiculous every man of us marching about with a countryman pinned in his hat." A Sixties revisionist would have put it less picturesquely, but the sentiments would have been identical. Similarly, the reaction against the stage props of the Literary Revival goes back many decades, and one of its regular and obvious targets is Synge. Myles na Gopaleen is predictably anti: "The trouble probably began with Lever and Lover. But I always think that in Synge we have the virus isolated and recognisable. Here is stuff that anybody who knows the Ireland referred to simply will not have. It is not that Synge made people less worthy or nastier, or even better than they are, but he brought forward with the utmost solemnity amusing clowns talking a sub-language of their own and bade us take them very seriously." The tone is familiar, though the language may change. Anglo-Ireland is well represented, though it seems unbalanced to include a mere two quotations from Somerville and Ross against fifteen from Elizabeth Bowen - who is currently very fashionable and, in my own opinion, rather overpraised. Shaw is only quoted once, which is particularly hard to understand, whereas O'Faolain and O'Connor turn up again and again, both in their capacity as national pundits and as high-class travelogue writers. Each of them had many axes to grind, some of which seem no longer relevant while others are almost painfully so. For instance, Here is O'Connor writing in Irish Miles (1947):
"On every road there were ruined cottages, by every ford and gap was a ruined house, in every village the ruins of a Georgian Big House and a church of any century from the tenth to the nineteenth. Protestant and Catholic, we are as decent a race as you are likely to find, but without the black of your nail of any instinct for conserving things."
What would he have said about the present-day Bungalow Blight, or the manner in which JCBs and other heavy machinery are eroding traditional rural landmarks and changing the entire character of the Irish landscape? In view of the recent wave of Big House nostalgia, it is salutary to read the commonsense words of Elizabeth Bowen: "New democratic Ireland no longer denounces the big house, but seems to marvel at it. Why fight to maintain life in a draughty barrack, in a demesne shorn of most of its other land, a demesne in which one can hardly keep down the thistles, far from neighbours, golf links, tennis clubs, cinemas, buses, railways, shops? `What do you do all day? Isn't it very lonely? Do servants stay with you? Can you keep warm in winter? Isn't it very ghostly? How do you do your shopping?' " Bowen's Court, of course, was eventually sold off, though Bowen can hardly have foreseen the speed with which the buyer pulled the big, rather ugly but historic mansion to the ground.
Attacks on literary censorship, too, have a long history, as is proved by an extract from Denis Ireland's still readable From the Irish Shore (1936) vis a vis those public and private nuisances, the Legion of Mary: "With such selfless devotion at work in our midst, lengthening nightdresses, reading the writing on the walls of lavatories in order to erase it, removing the words `privy' and `water-closet' from the pages of our national literature, and providing locks for all bathroom and lavatory doors, who can doubt that the moral tone of the island of saints and scholars will be raised to unprecedented heights, to the greater glory of God and the delight of the sellers of smutty second-hand novels?"
There is relatively little about the Irish language - not a single quotation from Sean O Riordain, and just one from Mairtin O Cadhain; Breandan O hEithir, a great journalist both in Irish and English, is entirely ignored. Among the various mentions of religion, Conrad Arensberg's comment (made in 1937) could be studied profitably today both by clerics and fashionable anti-clerics: "To many of us, perhaps a paradox lies here. Fierce love of political liberty goes hand in hand with a deep devotion to the most authoritarian of Christian creeds." A Pole or a Spaniard would understand that seeming contradiction perfectly, an Anglo-American almost would almost certainly be baffled or repelled.
Inevitably the poets figure prominently, though Yeats has a mere four entries, Thomas Kinsella only two, and Padraic Fallon and Patrick MacDonogh none at all. MacNeice turns up repeatedly, and justifiably, but I sense a certain (probably unconscious) Northern bias here and there - even if Brian Friel is only quoted once. Even at that, he fares better than other good playwrights such as T.C. Murray, George Fitzmaurice and Hugh Leonard, who do not appear at all; Brendan Behan is restricted to a mere two entries, which seems odd since he is always "copy", even posthumously. Another bad miss is Seamus Murphy's classic little book Stone Mad, which recreates a unique and vanished chapter of Irish life.
However, it is easy to be captious about what is, in general, a volume crammed with readable, relevant and sometimes unfamiliar matter. Patricia Craig has not edited an anthology or a literary survey, she has produced a kaleidoscopic collection in which the very disparate parts somehow or other add up to a very vigorous though rambling whole. This is a book to put on the shelf, but not to leave there for long periods; you will find yourself consulting it at regular or irregular intervals.