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Commentary
Horace Plunkett, Preface to Thomas Andrews, Shipbuilder (1912): ‘[Bullock] is an Ulsterman, a writer of tales of Ulster life, distinguished among other Irish books by their sincerity and unequalled understanding of the Ulster character. while other Irish writers of imagination and genius have used Irish life to express their own temperament, Shan Bullock has devoted his great literary ability almost entirely to the patient, living and since study of what Ulster is in itself as a community of men and women.’ (p.8).

E. E. R. Green, ‘Shan Bullock’, in Dublin Magazine, XXV, 2 (April-June 1950), ‘Novel after novel represents his attempts to work out the subconscious conflict with his Father and to prove himself that there could be no return to the old life’ (p.15-16); ‘Shan stood alone, and that means that unless a writer is of gigantic stature he will be easily forgotten. Neither literary revival nor language revival claimed him. He was a novelist in a generation of poets and dramatists, he was an Ulsterman and above the feuds of Ulstermen, he was pessimistic at a time of national regeneration (p.18); ‘The Defects in his work sprang from his inability ever to face his Father and the biblical farmers on equal terms’ (p.19).

Benedict Kiely, Modern Irish Fiction: A Critique (Dublin: Golden Eagle Books 1950), attributes to him ‘a charitable weakness for attributing to the Catholic peasant a detachment from material things that other Irish [writers] who dealt exclusively with the Catholic peasant have been unable to discover’. (All cited in Richard Mills, UUC Diss., 1995).

J. W. Foster, Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1974), ‘[Bullock employs] opposing psychology’s of planter and native Irish ... ‘Protestant land is not merely better land but has the Protestant will stamped upon it’ (p.33); ‘Perhaps such confusion reflect Bullock’s own kind of “hubris”, for like his hubristic characters he became separated from the land and saw his Loughsiders through the eyes of an outsider. But perhaps they are the price local naturalists pay for creating an allegorical world in which they cannot totally participate and which is not in any case a particularly lovely or pleasant world. The truth is that none of the local naturalists create wholly sympathetic characters, though Bullock’s are probably the least likeable’ (p.36). Note: In his article ‘Shan Bullock’, in Dictionary of Irish Literature, ed. Robert Hogan (Conn: Greenwood 1979), Fostern remarks that Bullock’s combination of ‘romantic melodrama’ and ‘rural naturalism’ can be unsettling.

A. N. Jeffares, Anglo-Irish Literature (London: Macmillan 1982) [q.p.], remarks: ‘In addition to over a dozen novels (with generally unattractive characters) Bullock wrote poems and stories and several autobiographies, the best known being Thomas Andrews, Shipbuilder (of the Titanic) (1912).’

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References
Frank Ormsby, ed., Northern Windows, an anthology of Ulster autobiography (Belfast: Blackstaff 1987), pp.26-30, contains extract from After Sixty Years; calls Bullock the son of a bailiff [sic] to the Earl of Erne.

Brian M. Walker, et al. eds., Faces of Ireland (Belfast: Appletree 1992), selects extract on mowing from Irish Pastorals (London 1901), pp.84-85, and notes work on secretariat of Irish Convention, 1917, and MBE awarded for same.

John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Longmans 1988; rep. 1989), notes that Bullock was particularly drawn to borderland Fermanagh area between Protestant North and Catholic South; lacks narrative coherence and comes across as rather wispy gatherings of Irish sketches rich in quiet comedy, pathos and dialect, which were classified as Hibernian Kailyard; his best novel is generally taken to be the very late The Loughsiders; friend of C. K. Shorter with whom he shared enthusiasm for things Celtic; autobiography deals with childhood in the ‘autocracy’ of Anglo-Ireland.

Seamus Deane, gen. ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 2, selects the “A State Official” and calls it a story of ‘tribal retribution’ unhappily prophetic of the modern troubles (Augustine Martin, ed.; p.1066).

Belfast Public Library holds After 60 Years [1931]; The Awkward Squads (1893), By Thrasna River (1895) and eight other titles including Master John; Red-Leaguers; Squireen; Awkward Squads and other stories first published in Macmillan’s Magazine (1893); The Cubs [1947]; Ring o’ the Rushes; Hetty [1911] is ded. Horace Plunkett, ‘that good Irishman’.

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Quotations

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By Trasna River: The Story of a Townland (1895) [ill.]; its to Dublin ye’ll go first, to stand for a scholarship?; sees David Copperfield at the Theatre in Dublin; Rose Daly, rhapsody on [163]; dashing person and unaffected frankness; Emo; Leemore Lake; Trasna River; weather, even in Ireland at its worst is not forlorn [169]; Henry Thomson, surely could find no better characters for an Irish drama than the people of Ireland; ‘The Rival Swains’, Henry and James; ‘Thady’s Deliverance’, Thady Sheeran, poteen maker; Thady, on emigration, ‘I’m sorry to lave ye all, but I can’t say I’m sorry to lave the country, it’s gone to ruin, so it is! - man’s agen it an’ God’s deserted it; You are dead now, poor fellow, and your bones lie [in America]; Chp XXI ‘Our Distressful Country’ [See comment in Brown, Ireland in Fiction; gales havoc ... year of the Big Wind; ‘Ye’ll 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 be a couple of acres of meadow, a but o’ land in crop an’ the pratie patch. Well, iviery 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. Ivery year they sell 2 pigs; quotes Goldsmith, ‘Ill fares the Land ...’.

The Red Leaguers (1904); set in Emo, Bilboa, Deryvad, Drumhill, Garvagh, Louth Castle, and Rhamus Castle; operations of Armoy commando from papers of James Shaw (Jamie), Ist person narrator. Shaw has been in Cuba, sighting the Spaniards; and in South Africa, with the Boers - ‘a trifle like ourselves, hunted like the hares on the hill.’; Men at home and abroad ... capable leaders ... a huge confederacy ... plan ... perfect ... I had come to Ireland on the stroke of her supreme hour ... shake off the Saxon yoke ... ; Christy’s napoleonic self; Jan Farmer, the master’s son, and my enemy in love; fall of the landlords ... the land acts [28]; Shaw, to Leah: ‘He won’t have you! I’ll make you! I’ll have you yet!’ He takes Leah prisoner. The Protestants under Farmer Snr. take refuge in Rhamus Castle. Shaw taken hostage; parley (The crops are ruined); A truce; Songs, ‘The Boys of Wexford’, and ‘The Protestant Boys’ (Blacker); ‘mud, rain, poverty, starvation, slavery, there was Ireland. A people downtrodden, hopeless, a people patiently enduring their miseries and finding happiness amid them, there was the Irish’ [8]; propaganda officer, Michael Slane, schoolteacher, with a `rasping brogue’; ‘The national religion would be Catholic, the national language, Gaelic, and so on interminably’; ‘England may soon taste bitterness near home’; ‘Fenians, through Ireland raised a huge confederacy ... the Saxon was at bay ... the world was crouched, and Ireland had her chance’; ‘a Boer rising for Ireland ... they’d cut our throats tomorrow ... unity was only skin deep’; ‘word from The Man Above to prepare; cell system [Fenian - James Stephens]’ ; a tragic reckoning; ‘renegade, traitor, murderer, we scorn and hate you,’ the faces said’; on the Marquis [of Enniskillen], I pitied the man in him a little, the landlord nothing ... they had contrived their own fate; ‘Life under the Republic much the same as under the old Govt. ... Freedom was good but was not everything ... soon, he supposed, the tax collector would be calling again’; ‘in sight of the metropolis we saw a man tired who had taken possession of a Protestant farm ... sentenced to a ducking’; ‘Rathmines a wilderness, harbours shut, promised ships from America never sighted’; ‘Poor lonely orphan. Poor cynosure of a nation set in the ring of a heedless world. Poor peasants who had led for a cause betrayed ... poor worthless aleaders wrangling and mouthing together ... Poor Republic drifting as it might towards chaos ...’ [302]; Assembly at Rotunda ... walls draped with banners [305, a set piece]; Jamie unites the lovers, Jan and Leah, at the end and escapes to France.

Dan the Dollar (1906), ‘Protestant land is not merely better land but has Protestant will stamped upon it’; ‘Now Bilbao, Armoy, and Drumhill are big and bare, and these regions are Catholic, but Gorteen is small and fruitful, and this is Protestant. Enter its confines, by way of these, where and when you will, and at once you have signs of change. You seem to have stepped into a new country ... Pigs keep their styes; goats and donkeys are missed from the wayside ... An air of prosperity is abroad, of industry and rude comfort, of independence also and a more rigid rule of life. The country seems blessed of God, slavery and terror banished from its confines. Even the hills look free; you stand and gaze within the borders of a new country; nor can you fail to see that you are in the midst of a new race. Altogether different are these good folk - these men you meet, these women you see - from the unfortunates who dwell without. They are better clothed and better fed, bolder of eye and hearing; bigger, harder, coarser, tighter of lip, stronger in hand and body; more prosaic also, narrower in mind, and less variously gifted. The men are sturdy, stern and broad of feature; the women big in bone, and nor renowned for comeliness.[...] As hagglers in fair or marker, poachers, litigants, their fame is great. They speak a slow and orly dialect, part Irish and part Scotch, have some gifts of humour and a talent for religion and politics. Sons of freedom, they call themselves, stern upholders of Protestantism and sworn enemies of Pope and Popery. In every sense garden Orange lilies flourish; a Bible lies on every parlour table. For Queen and Country, Self and pelf, God and Church, these are watchwords in Gorteen. Also they are hospitable there, kind and warm-hearted.[ top ]

Loughsiders (1924) ‘The lough lay amid low hills, ranking back from a margin of flat meadow and pasture land away to a horizon broken by woods, mountains, hills again. It was oval shaped, about a mile in length, fringed with reeds and bulrushes, and its shallow water, even in September sunshine, had that melancholy aspect so characteristic of Irish lakes and rivers. It was so very still, very empty, not a fowl upon it, not a fish rising anywhere, the one sound above it a great turmoil of midges, engaged in heaven knows what prodigious labours. This brooding peace pervaded also the encircling countryside, cut it into its thousands of little green fields by th[r]oughs of tall green hedges, dotted with its white houses standing often in the shelter of poplars and orchards. beautiful always in sun or rain because of its wide undulating greenness lying there beneath its soft Irish sky. To shout seemed an outrage in such a place, to strive and cry and thing impossible. Wherefore it may be that the Loughsiders in their daily habitudes are smooth and soft-spoken, easy-going in their ways, philosophic, neighbourly. Even those grim men in Protestant Gorteen are like that. Ah, but rouse them with drum taps or the name of the Pope!’ [from quoted in Sophia Hillen King, ‘The Millstone and the Star, Regionalism as Strength’, in Linen Hall Review (Autumn 1994), pp.9.] See also summary in Notes, infra.]

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After Sixty Years (1931); Preface by Horace Plunkett, claiming that the work ‘[has] documentary value of faithful record of a phase of Irish life ... since pasted into history ... shores of Lough Erne; ... In one small corner of Ireland, by a hundred touches and suggestion, Mr Bullock has epitomised Ireland as a whole ... How many of Ireland’s problems – social, political, racial, economic, religious, presented on the narrow stage set by his on the shores of Lough Erne! ... patient, living, and sincere study of what Ulster really is in itself as a community of men and women. ... his partiality was always given to those whom he learnt to talk of as “the others”, the mere Irish.’ TEXT, ‘We little Protestants were, I suppose, always better clad and fed, certainly we had the rightful air of superiority becoming [to] an ascendant class; this is not withstanding, it would always be the barefooted, ragged Catholic, with his hair through his cap and only a bit of oaten bread in his pocket, that I was drawn to for play or company. He was of another breed than ours, had softer ways and speech, better manners somehow, knew more about the country and its life and the things that mattered ... (p.32-33); ‘[F]ather thought Gladstone a ruffian who ought to be hanged, but protests against flaunting of Orange victory, `How could there ever be peace and fellowship in the face of such folly?’; Phoenix Park murders; ‘In our colony the Protestant was top dog always, and both dogs could snap at the conquering Saxon’s feet’ [45]; childhood, a feast of private reading (incl. Macauley, Disraeli, Milton, Byron, Machievelli, Pitt; religions ‘mixed like currants in a cake’; the feudal system ... imposed on Ireland, and maintained to the last gasp; Thady’s emigration, and Martin Hyne’s gateway; the estate and demesne of Lord Fermanagh, symbol of lost chances and lost power’; incls. account of landlords’ unfeeling way with tenants [166f.; as infra.]. Further, ‘Well, the influence is done. The old autocrat, God rest him, is lying yonder on the hillside, powerless at least, happily unaware or not caring. The drudges everywhere are free. The State now is their only lord. Like a throne without a kingdom the demesne ist here, still splendid, perhaps to some dreamer more desirable now than it ever was; but a centre no more, something now in and for itself,a symbol of lost chance and lost power.’ cited by Benedict Kiely, in ‘Orange Lily in a Green Garden’, A Raid into Dark Corners, Cork UP, 1999, p.223.)

“North and South”, ‘hard unlovely is the North, / Dour, uncouth its rain-sopped moors / It values a thing at money’s worth, / Hides its heart and chastens yours; / But brain and soul are quick and sound, / Women are fair and men full men; / Deep in the north is treasure found, / And the murk veils beauty now and then. / Soft is the south as a Woman’s touch, / Shining gay and tender eyed; / Mellow of speech and ways, nor much / Agley at waste of time and Tide, / And I love the south [...]’. (Gleanings, 1926).

Address to the Irish Literary Society on the Irish Novel: ‘[Bullock] concluded by considering the status of the novel in Ireland, finding that it was not worthy of the country and its people. We had the material and the writers; but somehow we never got beyond the parochial and the racial, and only in The Real Charlotte has we attained a glimpse of the universal as it is attained by the great masters. he deplored this and said it was caused by the indifference of the Irish reading public and the tendency of the Irish Literary Movement to develop entirely in the direction of drama and poetry. ... It is a tremendous pity that whilst elsewhere nationalities are being voiced in fiction, Ireland is being voiced only by politicians and a school of dramatists which often distorts. But until the artist is sure of the reward even of recognition in his own country no school of novelists can arise.’ (Reported in The Irish Book Lover, April 1912, pp.146-47.) See also, John Cronin, The Anglo-Irish Novel, Pt. 2 (Belfast: Appletree Press 1992) , quoting from the same report: ‘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.’ (Cronin, op. cit., p.15).

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Notes
The Loughsiders (Harrap, 1924) Richard Jebb, returned from USA, looking after brother Seth (‘a death to life among ghosts days that were no more’); The Master draws Richard out; Jebb, a true Loughsider ... skilfully ... manfully [54]; Bullock has retreated into his own territory with Protestants and Loyalists; Rachel ‘is not for sale’ [responding to Richard’s inept proposal]; Her father Henry Nixon dies intestate. Richard arranges marriage between James and Rachel, in shot by Jim, her resentful brother, whom he packs off the America on recovery [unlike Hurrish, who packs him off before his death] marries Ruth, Mrs. Henry Nixon; Old Connolly, those poor Johnstons in their fine house, nothing but sickness and loss and torment; sentimental about Irish houses , ‘door always open’; Richard Jebb ‘was of the dark sallow breed which keeps the world going, a true Northerner ... a Protestant of standing and character. His eyes had depth and shrewdness and contriving; The novel lacks tension, and the motivation of its central character remains obscure.’ The novel is dedicated ‘to my brother Willie ... this story of the Ireland we remember and love and hope to see again.’

William Carleton: ‘Shane Fadh’, from whom Bullock took his nom de plume, is a character in Carleton’s Traits and Stories.

Brendan Behan: Behan read works by Bullock in prison: ‘But it was a great delight in [?] here, in this cold kip. The book was short stories called Ring of the Rushes and was all about North of Ireland. The other book when I got it was called not the Life of Savers but the Loughsiders.’ (See Bostral Boy, Corgi Edn. 1961, p.70 [copyright 1958]). He makes no comment on either work.

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