Essays: All serious discussions of Hubert Butler's life and work must invoke that legendary Dublin moment in 1952. During the height of the cold war, at a Foreign Affairs Association lecture about President Tito's persecution and imprisonment of Catholic prelates, Butler spoke out about the Croatian Church's role in the forced conversions and murders of close to a million Orthodox Serbs in 1941, writes Vera Kreilkamp.
(He subsequently described that episode as "the most bloodthirsty religio-racial crusade in history, far surpassing anything achieved by Cromwell or the Spanish Inquisitors".) A descendant of one of Ireland's oldest Anglo-Irish families, Butler was a staunch defender of what he insistently identified as an independent "Protestant" tradition of dissent against the tendencies of nationalisms based, not on a shared locality, tradition, and neighbourliness, but on race and religion.
In an insular Catholic nation, Butler's remarks about the Croatian hierarchy's collaboration with a murderous state led to years of isolation. He was accused of insulting the Papal Nuncio, who left that now infamous Dublin meeting upon hearing Butler revise the accepted cold war narrative about a victimised Yugoslavian Christendom.
Reviled as a trouble-making outsider, Butler was forced to resign from many committees, including the local Kilkenny Archaeological Society which he had himself revived. Nevertheless, he persisted in his investigations of an area of Europe he knew well from earlier travels and recent archival research in Zagreb. By 1971, he had implicated Ireland directly in the narrative of eastern European atrocities. In his essay The Artukovitch File, Butler's sleuthing exposes a Franciscan hierarchy's post-war role in sheltering a Croatian "desk murderer" of more than a million Serbs and Jews. With the aid of well-meaning local Franciscans, Butler discovers, the former Croatian Minister of the Interior, Artukovitch, was smuggled to a comfortable life in America, his year's sanctuary at an Irish safe- house helping him to escape prosecution as a war criminal.
The most astounding contribution to Unfinished Ireland - a collection of reminiscences and essays emerging from a 2000 centenary celebration of Butler's birth - is the text of a solemn public apology delivered by Kilkenny's mayor at that event. Mayor Paul Cuddihy offers his community's mea culpa for a church- dominated society's behaviour toward one of its neighbours almost 50 years earlier. Unfinished Ireland records what one contributor describes as the "rescue and commemoration" of a once neglected writer; it offers accolades to a formerly marginalised critic of an inward-looking nation, to a moral gadfly who is fast becoming, as Roy Foster observes, a "cultural icon and secular saint" in a more pluralistic Ireland.
The acknowledgement of Hubert Butler's literary and moral achievements, first in Ireland, but increasingly throughout Britain, Europe, and America, began only five years before his death at 91. In 1985, Anthony Farrell at Lilliput Press published the septuagenarian author's Escape from the Anthill, the first of six collections of essays. Seeking to produce a "founding" document for the study of Butler's work and life, Unfinished Ireland's editor, Chris Agee, provides a range of affectionate biographical memoirs and some pointed intellectual contexts for subsequent investigation. The volume's substantial bibliography includes not only a full listing of Butler's published pieces (most originally appearing in obscure journals), but a growing record of responses to his work. This is a welcome and much needed resource for Butler's growing audiences.
The reminiscences of local friends, family, editor, biographer and devoted admirers in Unfinished Ireland create, virtually, a Butler hagiography. Many contributors respond to Butler's early decision to live among his neighbours, in the house and on the land of his ancestors in Co Kilkenny, to resist joining an academic or publishing profession. (He wrote "market gardener" on forms inquiring about his vocation.) Butler's steady perspective arises from his devotion to his locality, as well as from his role as a fiercely independent scholar. Such choices were undoubtedly supported by the privileges, certainties, and security which many of his fellow citizens and certainly those in Eastern Europe, to whose terrible fate he bore witness, lacked. On some level he acknowledged he was no typical product of his background; we might celebrate that his Anglo-Irish identity, a source of tattered privilege even in the post- Independence society of his adulthood, led him where it did, rather than to those preoccupations with self-protective political quietism and golf club memberships, which he increasingly deplored in others of his own caste.
Butler was deeply involved in specifically national and local matters - through, for example, his professed relationship to a secular Protestant tradition of dissent, his ahistorical (and Yeatsian) deification of 18th-century Ireland, his active interest in his family history, or his eccentric investigation of the lives of the Irish saints (explored in an essay by Tim Robinson). But Unfinished Ireland seems most compelling in its celebration of this man of letters when it moves beyond specifically Irish geographies and concerns. Several contributors investigate Butler's early preoccupation with other small nations, created, like the Free State, in the wake of imperial dissolution. Terence Brown and Chris Agee, especially, insist on the formative role of the Yugoslav experience on Butler's moral and aesthetic development as a writer; for Agee, "the Croatian genocide is firmly at the centre of his corpus; it is not so much a limb as a backbone".
The range of personal and intellectual contexts of this volume indicate, however, that there are many Hubert Butlers available to would-be readers. Roy Foster and Edna Longley, for example, would claim his writing to defend their own agendas of revising Ireland's nationalist narrative, on occasion appropriating his voice directly into local culture wars. Thus Foster, in his version of the Irish story, assumes that Butler would have shared his own dismay at the "binge" of national commemorations in the 1990s; Longley enlists Butler as a guardian of the Literary Revival, pitting his essays against those recent critics who would undermine the intentions of Protestant Anglo-Irish revivalists.
But in the epilogue for this volume, a piece reprinted from Lilliput's collection In the Land of Nod (1996), the former Nobel Laureate Joseph Brodsky selects the essays about Mitteleuropa as Butler's central achievement. This poet's personal knowledge of the Russian Gulag and a genocidal 20th century surely authorized him to make powerful claims for a prose writer whose integrity he identifies as more fundamental than any narrow political or sectarian stance: "no Nazi-hunter or Protestant crusader against the Vatican: he was a dishonesty hunter".
Vera Kreilkamp is a Professor at Pine Manor College, US, and co-edits Éire-Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies. She has written The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House, published by Syracuse UP in 1998 and this year edited the catalogue Éire/Land, for an exhibition of Irish landscapes at the McMullen Gallery, Boston College
Unfinished Ireland: Essays on Hubert Butler. Edited by Chris Agee
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