Daniel Corkery: Commentary

[ top ]

Aodh De Blacam, A First Book of Irish Literature (1934), ‘[...] True to his principles, he is devoted to his native Munster and labours a small field intensively; yet he has an admiration for the Russians which it is hard to reconcile with Irish traditionalism. He lacks humour and joy, and therefore, works creatively in only one side of life. Yet, with all his limitations, he has influenced rising Ireland more considerably than any other modern writer, and our survey closes with his doctrine’ (q.source; p.227.)

Seán O’Faoláin objected that Hidden Ireland it was ‘an arrangement of facts, and of half-facts, and of pious beliefs, by a man with inadequate knowledge of Irish history’; further, ‘To us, Ireland is beginning, where to Corkery it is continuing. We have a sense of time, of background, we know the value of the Gaelic tongue to extend our vision of Irish life, to deepen it and enrich it, we know that an old cromlech in a field can dilate our imaginations with a sense of what was, what might have been, and what is not. (‘Daniel Corkery’, Dublin Magazine, No. 12 [sic] Vol. 2, 1936; quoted in John Harrington, Beckett, 1990, p. 53.)

Michael MacLaverty (on Threshold of Quiet): ‘It has atmosphere, the atmosphere of autumn: firelight leaping at the windows; water hens creasing the lake; amber skies; and man himself, with his own thoughts – quiet perhaps, but with a growing note of desperation.’ (Hillan King, In Quiet Places: The Uncollected Stories, Letters and Critical Prose of Michael MacLaverty, pp.67-68; quoted in Ivor Faulker, “Realism in the Short Fiction of John McGahern”, UU MA Diss., 2007.)

Donald Torchiana, W. B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland (Northwestern UP 1966): ‘The diatribes of Corkery are representative because they centre on the so-called alien position of the Anglo-Irish as regards antive Irish religion, nationalism and soil. If not identified with Gaelic, Catholic peasant stock one was not Irish.’ (Torchiana p.109.)

Peter Costello, The Heart Grown Brutal: the Irish Revolution in Literature from Parnell to the Death of Yeats, 1891-1939 (Gill & Macmillan 1977), pp.243-44, commenting that Corkery was conditioned by the Irish revival and drew his ideas from Dineen whose standard edns. of the Munster poets he used, seeing the ‘themes of nationality, religion, and rebellion’ [sic; and cf. same under Stopford Brooke, infra], which dominated his own life as the chief features of the poets of the earlier period’, and collapsing their very different identity with his vision of them as oppressed peasants speaking out against British rule; cites L. M. Cullen’s ‘The Hidden Ireland: A Reappraisal of a Concept’ (Studia Hibernica, Vol. 9, 1969, pp.7-47), remarking that the Jacobite poets were a group of prosperous Catholic landowners and ‘ranchers’, very much more of the ilk of the Anglo-Irish ‘hard riding country gentleman’ than the peasant, and backward looking royalists: ‘His Hidden Ireland simplifies Irish History [history], putting it in a simple context of land resettlement, oppression and resentment with the predictable and stereotyped relationships and situations flowing from it. It also impoverished Irish nationality and the sense of identity, seeing it in the context of settlement and oppression and not in the rich, complex and varied stream of identity and racial consciousness heightened in the course of centuries of Anglo-Irish relations.’ (Cullen, p.48; Costello, pp.244-45.) Costello elaborates the case against Corkery: ‘Corkery was a racist. His theories of Irish history and literature depend on the notion that there is an identifiable and purely Irish stock, “the Irish of history”, that that there was also an Anglo-Irish stock. He mistakes what were really class divisions for race divisions. [...] for Corkery racial purity was synonymous with spiritual purity.’ (p.245). Further: ‘in the election of 1932 de Valera represented to the people an ideal which had lain behind the ideas of other leaders of his generation. When Daniel Corkery wrote the book which appeared in 1931 as Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, he was writing a cultural polemic on behalf of that ideal. He was defending what his young protegés were by then abandoning, disillusioned as they were by the Civil War.’ (Ibid., pp.142-43.)

[ top ]

George J. Watson, ‘Celticism and the Annulment of History’, [Eire Ireland] (Winter 1994/5), quotes: ‘‘this Irish boy found in the Irish books I had to read was just as alienating as the educational experience of Corkery’s hypothetical boy reading English books’. (pp.2-6.)

David Norris, ‘Imaginative Response versus Authority: A Theme of the Anglo-Irish Short Story’, in Terence Brown & Patrick Rafroidi, eds., The Irish Short Story (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979): ‘Daniel Corkery, a man of cultivated taste and the mentor of O’Faolain and O’Connor, can seem limited and artificial if contraste with the earthy vigour of such writing [i.e., O’Flaherty’s, et al.]. (Compare, for example, “The Spancelled” with O’Kelly’s “Weaver’s Grave”). This feeling of narrowness is reinforced by many of the stories of A Munster Twilight, his best known collection, whose title suggests a provincial variation of what Joyce called a The Cultic Twalette. He had, furthermore, a penchant for Irish Gothick, and his attempts to create a suitably twilit ambience call to mind opera or melodrama - the curtains part to disclose the last rays of the sun as they strike romantically the noble ruins of a deserted abbey. Is the stage set for Benedict, Boucicault, Corkery perhaps? Paradoxically enough, of the two best stories in the book, one is about an opera company, the other is an eighteenth century romance. / In “The Breath of Life” [A Munster Twilight], Ignatius O’Byrne, a retired violinist is resurrected from the back street of a provincial town to play with the orchestra of a visiting opera company. An individualist not only in his intuitive approach to music, but also [54] in his faulty execution, his flat playing brings him into conflict with the structure of the orchestra until, despite the cover provided by the narrator’s musicianship, he is detected and dismissed by the conductor. When the spirit of poetic justice strikes this man down with rheumatism disaster threatens, tin Ignatius seizes the baton and with some inspired gesture unlocks all the hidden richness of the orchestra. Nevertheless, when the opera company passes on to new engagements the old violinist is left behind - the orchestra is a commercial outfit and inspiration is a dangerously undependable commodity. / Almost a prose version of the Aisling, “Solace” [ A Munster Twilight ] is a powerful depiction of poetic nobility rising beyond the restrictions of social and historical circumstances. The poet, Eoghan Mor Ó Donovan, feels his little world of toil well lost in the gaining of a poem that trancends and immortalizes the sufferings of himself, his family and his race. His ecstasy of creation seems to echo Horace’s - “Exegi monumentum aere perennius” - and he literally and improvidently kills his fatted calf to provide feasting in celebration of his art. In a coda we are provided with the perspective of the master race, with a view of the poet’s hosting from an “enlightened”, English traveller. He pokes among the cinders of a culture he cannot understand, lamenting the impracticality of the Irish while we who have witnessed the joy of an artist’s refusal to be merely a peon, recall the warmth and brave flame of the Bardic fire. [...] / Even in summary these two stories epitomize the struggle of the creative mind to escape the constraints of conventional response. Corkery is of course also of consequence to us in providing a convenient bridge to his two most famous protégés , who while offering interesting possibilities of contrast and comparison - O’Connor intuitive and discursive where O’Faolain is intellectual and formal - continue with the treatment of this subject in their different ways.’ (pp.54-55.)

Declan Kiberd, ‘Writers in Quarantine?: The Case for Irish Studies’, in Crane Bag, 3, 1 (1979), pp.9-21 rep. in Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (Dublin: Blackwater Press 1982); pp.341-53, cites Corkery’s demand for three specific notes, ‘(i) Nationality (ii) Religion (Catholic, of course), and (iii) the Land. By these rigid criteria, Yeats and his colleagues were written off as mere interlopers. It will not have escaped the alert reader of Joyce’s Portrait that Corkery’s three notes were the very forces which had driven Stephen Dedalus into exile. […] “You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly those nets.”’ (348); ‘It must be added that the influence of Corkery was more often healthy than harmful for, like many strident dogmatists before him, he tended to flout his worst theories by his best practices.’ [348-349.]

Declan Kiberd, review of The Popular Mind in Eighteenth-century Ireland in The Irish Times (18 June 2017): ‘Vincent Morley’s book is one of the most radical remappings of Irish Studies to appear in the past 30 years’ [banner]; ‘[...] It would be hard to imagine French people paying much heed to a history of their country written by someone with no working knowledge of its language; but they do (or did) these things differently in Ireland. And the study of mentalities was also retarded by another factor: the narrowly linguistic focus of many in Irish departments that did understand and study Gaelic texts. / This situation was already deplored by Daniel Corkery in the introduction he wrote to The Hidden Ireland (1924), which was hugely influential in the early decades of the Free State and can still be read as a vigorous account of the world that produced Aogán Ó Rathaille, Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin and Brian Merriman. It is also an act of profound literary criticism, discriminating between the outraged bardic hauteur of Ó Rathaille, the tinkling musicality of Ó Súilleabháin and the homely downrightness of Merriman. But it was written by a man who soon became a professor in an English department. In those days, people in Irish or History didn’t do that sort of thing.’ (Available at the Irish Times - online; accessed 18.06.2017.)

[ top ]

Terence Brown, Ireland, A Social & Cultural History 1922-79 (London: Fontana 1981): ‘The work of Daniel Corkery in the twenties and early thirties supplies a fascinating example of how the humanistic ideal of Irish Ireland could be swamped by a conservative’s vision of the nation’s life in just the way I am suggesting. &c’ [See op. cit., 63-67, & passim.)

Seán Ó Riordáin: ‘Corkery told me once not to write a single line that wasn’t based on a line of the old [Irish language] poetry. But what can one do when things outside the tradition have gone into you - when the person is wider than the tradition? It’s okay staying within the understanding of Irish but it’s something else to leave some of yourself out of the equation. Nativeness [“an dúchas”] must be broadened however danger that is. [...]’ (Quoted in Sean Ó Coilean, Seán Ó Riordáin: Beatha agus Saor, 1982, p.210; cited in Frank Sewell, ‘James Joyce’s Influence on Writers in Irish’, in The Reception of James Joyce in Europe, ed. Geert Lernout, et al., Thoemmes/Continuum 2004, p.477; for further, see under Ó Riordáin, infra.)

Patrick J. Corish: ‘it has been convincingly shown that Daniel Corkery’s “hidden Ireland” of the big house in a sea of undifferentiated poverty is quite unreal.’ (‘The Catholic Community in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Helicon Press, 1981, p.98; cited in Andrew Carpenter, ‘Changing Views of Irish Musical and Literary Culture in Eighteenth-centry Anglo-Irish Literature’, Michael Kenneally, ed., Irish Literature and Culture, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992, p.10; also cites Cullen, ‘Catholics under the Penal Laws’, in Eighteenth-century Ireland, 1, 1986, pp.23-26.)

Anthony Cronin, Heritage Now: Irish Literature in English (Brandon 1982), compares the ‘overtly racialist Corkery’, whose attitudes are ‘embodied in his sense of the term Anglo-Irish’, with the much less pejorative sense employed of that term by Thomas MacDonagh. (p.12.)

James Cahalan, Great Hatred, Little Room: The Irish Historical Novel (Gill & Macmillan 1983), notes that Corkery championed Synge as the first great Irish lyrical realist in Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931) (p.122.)

Louis Cullen, The Hidden Ireland, Reassessment of a Concept [ETCH Series] (Mullingar: Lilliput 1988), writes: ‘in a period when so many of the surviving Catholic Landlords conformed, conversion to Protestantism was free from the abhorrence it often arroused in the nineteenth [century]’ (n.p.; quoted in Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Great Melody (1992), p.5.) Further: ‘Corkery was imposing a pattern rather than describing it.’ Further: ‘Corkery’s concept of a Hidden Ireland [...] seems to impoverish Irish nationality and the sense of identity, seeing it in the context of settlement and oppression, and not in the rich, complex and varied stream of identity and racial consciousness heightened in the course of centuries of Anglo-Irish relations.’ (Louis Cullen, ‘The Hidden Ireland, re-assessment of a concept’, formerly as Studia Hibernica, Vol. 9, 1969, pp.7-47; p.47; also cited in Costello, supra). Note: Cullen’s argument is summarised in Maureen Murphy in a review of Robert James Scally, The End of Hidden Ireland (OUP 1995), as follows: ‘Cullen criticised Corkery for basing his hidden Ireland on a poetry whose language of dairy, dowry and diversified diet reflected a relatively well-to-do culture, a culture that looked for restoration not for revolution. [...].’ Further: ‘In his reassessment of Corkery, Cullen objected to the assumption that there was a likeness of mind in Gaelic Ireland that united the Irish against the coloniser.’ (Murphy, Irish Literary Supplement, Spring 1996, p.7).

[ top ]

Sean Ó Tuama, ‘Daniel Corkery, Cultural Philosopher, Literary Critic: A Memoir’, in Repossessions: Selected Essays on Irish Literary Heritage (Cork UP 1995), pp.234-47 [prev. pub. 1988]: ‘[...] As a teacher perhaps his greatest gift was to motivate his students to ask themselves the right questions. In the lecture room he was gentle, courteous, almost Victorian in his correctness; but one felt - I did at any rate - that the lid of one’s mind was being gradually prised open by the manner in which he posed his questions and, more significantly, by the manner in which he got us to pose our questions. Finally, I ended up expressing ideas and perceptions about Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley, Eliot, that I felt had always been my own - not his. In this way his influence could be, perhaps, too strong, and had to be guarded against. He rarely talked about anything else, however, but literary texts in his classes. I do not remember - and this will surprise people who imagine him to have been a consummate nationalist propagandist - that he ever talked in class about national/cultural or Irish language affairs. Indeed he scarcely ever gave a formal lecture on anything, except perhaps an introductory talk he would give in first year on ’What is Art’ His thesis was - as one would expect - that the primary function of art was to create precise moods or feelings or perceptions about various facets of life. He never seemed to think of literature as teaching anything in a doctrinaire sense.’ [Cont.]

Sean Ó Tuama (‘Daniel Corkery, Cultural Philosopher, Literary Critic: A Memoir’, in Repossessions, 1995): ‘[...] This division I perceived between Corkery the [?litterateur], and Corkery the cultural philosopher is I think crucial for an understanding of Corkery’s critical opus in general. He was not doctrinarie (as has been claimed) in matters which had to do with literature or literary theory, but he was (or at least became doctrinaire) in matters having to do with cultural philosophy. / The cultural philosophy espoused by Daniel Corkery was basically the traditional philosophy of the Gaelic League, as enunciated and developed by people such as Douglas Hyde, Eoin Mac Néill, Padraig Pearce. A central tenet in this was that the Irish language would have to become again the predominantly written and spoken language of Ireland; the people of Ireland would then preserve and develop their own identity in a way they could not if the English language were to remain the major language of the country. The cultural conquest of the country by English colonial forces would cease; the Irish personality would flourish again. This was the kind of doctrine profoundly believed in by those who were centrally engaged in the fight for Irish freedom (1916-1922). Corkery in his writings would quote people like Mac Néill on these issues. Some ten years after his controversial book on Synge he quoted with approval what Mac Néill had written in 1909: “In Ireland there is no possible foundation for a national culture except the national language. It can easily be shown that an attempt to base Irish culture on the English language can only result in provincializing Irish life.” Corkery remarks: “That position is invulnerable.” / Nowadays many of us concerned with Irish language policy have moved away somewhat from that “invulnerable” position, by espousing a policy of flexible bilingualism rather than of monolithic monolingualism, and by proposing to offer people (somewhat optimistically some will say) a choice of either of the two languages as their main preferred one. Yet we today have no certainty that such a bilingual policy, or indeed any policy, will finally preserve the special cultural identity of the Irish people. It may [236] well be that the Macn Néill-Corkery position will be judged to have been the right one. Only time will tell. [...]’

Sean Ó Tuama (‘Daniel Corkery, Cultural Philosopher, Literary Critic: A Memoir’, in Repossessions, 1995): ‘[...] Corkery was surely right that there are many things more important in life than literature; but he was surely wrong if he expected people such as O’Connor or Ó Faoláin to give adherence to a rather doctrinaire long-term cultural programme for the country in a way which would compromise their own immediate personal positions as creative writers in the English language. / At the same time I feel that Corkery’s main argument in Synge - even given that it is doctrinaire - has been misrepresented (sometimes wilfully so). The grounds on which he made his distinction between writers in English who were truly Irish; and those who were not so, proved particularly irksome. Corkery, following Stopford Brooke, pointed to three basic elements in the Irish consciousness which he would expect to find reflected in any Irish literature calling itself a national literature, and by this criterion found many Irish writers, both contemporary writers of his and writers of the past, to have been colonial Ascendancy-type artists who did not “belong”. / Whether Corkery was right in his identification of these basic elements - religion, nationality, land - in traditional Irish consciousness is, of course, debatable. Expert studies in the field of cultural anthropology may in the future help us here by giving us a clearer picture of our value-system. I feel from looking at traditional literature in Irish that Corkery was probably right in thinking that our value-system revolves to a great extent around these elements; but it is clear that a very flexible and sensitive interpretation of what is meant by these concepts, and how they operate, is needed before any attempt is made to apply them in any way. Corkery himself was quite wrong, I feel, in his own finding that Synge did not reflect traditional Irish religious values.’

Sean Ó Tuama (‘Daniel Corkery, Cultural Philosopher, Literary Critic: A Memoir’, in Repossessions, 1995): ‘Many commentators find that particular criticism of Synge by Corkery [viz., his remoteness from Irish Catholicism] to be typical of one who would stipulate that all Irish liteature should be Catholic (as well as Gaelic). All I will say here in that regad is that there was grave doubt in the minds of some of his friends as to whether he was in any real sense a Catholic himself. [...] I see no evidence, however, in anything he wrote or said that he personally wished Irish literature to be overwhelmingly Catholic in the future. What he did obvviously personally wish is that there should be, as in all cultural matters, continuity and development in the Irish religious and ethical tradition - whatever it was.’ (p.242.) ‘Daniel Corkery was not endoowed with enormous mental agility or brilliance; he was rather an original meditative highly-perceptive man. In addition, he had an extraordinarily refined and wide-ranging flair for artistic work of various kinds. ... a water-colourist of distinction ... a musician who could play Mozart on the violin, a woodworker [...] I am not convinced that this many-sided unique man has yet receivec half the attention he deserved. I the last few decades, in particular, he has become an undeserving casualty of ideological warfare.’ (p.247; end.)

[ top ]

J. S. Lee: ‘Corkery’s virulent political partisanship made him anathema to apostles of the new faith [i.e., Moody’s “new” Irish history]. But in rightly rejecting his bias, IHS [Irish Historical Society] devotees also neglected the potential of individuals and collectivities, his fascination with societry rather than with the state …’ (Ireland 1912-1985, p.590; quoted in Thomas C. Hofheinz, Joyce and the Inventions of Irish History: Finnegans Wake in Context, Cambridge UP 1995, p.60.)

[ top ]

David Cairns & Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture (Manchester UP 1988): Corkery co-founded Cork Dramatic Society with Terence MacSwiney [108]; Corkery, effective laureate of the new State, gave [much] attention to erecting a critique of their literature [the Anglo-Irish ascendancy; elected Prof. of English at UCD in early 1930s, expounded an exclusive notion of Irishness based on religion, nationalism, and the land, in Hidden Ireland (1924) and Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931). [~] In The Hidden Ireland, he sought to establish that despite conquests, plantations, confiscations and famines, eighteenth century Ireland had witnessed the survival of the essentials of Gaelic culture which had been preserved in the few remaining Catholic gentry houses and the peasants’ hovels, forming a major part of the ‘unity of mind between the [Catholic gentry] Big House and the cabin’ (1979 ed., p.64ff); This unity of culture was propagated, argued Corkery, by bardic schools [...]’ (Cont.)

Cairns & Richards (Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, 1988) - cont.: ‘The schools, Corkery acknowledged, died out at the latest by the beginning of the eighteenth century (p.75), but in a character-istic argument he maintained, ‘If a great literary tradition did not result, so widespread that in course of time it must have touched every active, every unclouded mind in the community - if this did not result, then the whole endeavour was but an expense of spirit in a waste of shame - a thought that is unthinkable’ (p.94) [...] Corkery sought to put inverted commas around the word Irish as applied to writers like Berkeley, Swift, and Burke, and to assert that if the eighteenth century was to be studied, the truly Irish of the century were the poets and bards of [...] the Ireland of ‘the Gael’. / Both Seán O’Faoláin in 1936 and L. M. Cullen in 1969 revealed that the success of Corkery’s argument depended more on assertion than documentation. The former demonstrated that the nationalistic premisses of the argument led to rejection of ‘Anglo-Irish literature’ because ‘it is not an adequate interpretation of Irish life’ (“Daniel Corkery”, in Dublin Magazine, Vol. XI, No. 2, 1936, pp.49-61). [Cont.]

Cairns & Richards (Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, 1988) - cont.: ’Faoláin points out that this argument is fully developed in Synge &c, which seeks to classify Anglo-Irish literature as the product of ‘writers who, sprung from the Ascendancy, have never shared the Irish national memory, and are therefore just as un-Irish as it is possible to be’ (Corkery, Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature, 1931, p.15). Corkery identified three forms of literature currently circulating in Ireland, English, Anglo-Irish, and Irish (i.e. in the Irish language). By stating that literature written for an English readership was incompatible with the needs of Irish readers, and that [which] was written in Irish, particularly for the young, ‘was not worth taking account of’ (ibid., p.14.) Corkery admitted a vital role for Anglo-Irish literature, defined as ‘literature written in English by Irishmen’ (ibid., p.1). Corkery maintained that all ‘Anglo-Irish literature, including what is being written today, may be divided into two kinds - the literature of the Ascendancy writer and that of the writer for the Irish people. Roughly, the first kind includes all the literature that lives by foreign suffrage; the second all that lives by native suffrage’ (pp.22-23). [Cont.]

Cairns & Richards (Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, 1988) - cont.: For Corkery it was necessary to develop critical techniques [to distinguish] what was written for ‘an alien market’ (p.4) from ‘normal, national literature’ (p.2); the test was three forces which, ‘working for long in the Irish national being, have made it so different from the English national being [...] (1) The Religious Consciousness of the People; (2) Irish Nationalism; and (3) The Land’ (p.19). [...] Corkery argued that ‘We know that genuine Anglo-Irish literature has come into being when at every hand’s turn [...] religious consciousness breaks in upon it, no matter what the subject’ (p.20). While Corkery acknowledges Synge’s Irish nationalism and his firm grasp of the Irish language, application of the religious test shows that despite his ‘true and deep’ sympathy with the people Synge nevertheless ‘failed to give us a true reading of the people’ (p.79) because he was ‘cold to the spiritual’ (p.80) [Cont.]

Cairns & Richards (Writing Ireland: Colonialism, Nationalism and Culture, 1988) - cont.: Synge is held to be unaware of the extent to which religious consciousness has been internalised, ‘for him it was no easy thing to come upon the islanders’ unspoken thoughts [...] The lament Synge was aware of but not the unceasing and intensely earnest praying that did not declare itself.’ (p.136). Corkery regretted that Synge had not in the end written true Anglo-Irish Literature, which should in fact be regarded as ‘a [...] particularly branch of Catholic literature’ (p.136). O’Faoláin commented, ‘He does, I think, influence our political evangels considerably, all that is behind our system of education in the modern Ireland, much that enthuses and supports all our more fervent politics, has come out of his books and his lecturings.’ (O’Faoláin, ‘Daniel Corkery’, in op. cit., p.61). In providing a pedigree for the modern peasant as successor of the Gaelic aristocracy, O’Faoláin argued, Corkery provides an impeccable academic validation for the primacy of the country over the city. Cairns and Richards conclude, Corkery’s works were centrally important in establishing forms of writing and criticism which marginalised a) the dwindling Anglo-Irish, and be, the urban working class [...] and so countered the position expressed by James Connolly [...] [125-27]. Further, new orthodoxy of which Corkery was the ideologue, 131; idealisation and exclusivity, 133.

[ top ]

Benedict Kiely, ‘Joyce’s Legacy,’ in James Joyce: The Artist and the Labyrinth, ed. Augustine Martin (Ryan 1990), ‘Corkery had seen his people and accepted them, their lives and their beliefs and, on occasion, even their petty meannesses, and the mountains and the city that make up the background of their lives [...] the people who move through his stories and of the revolution that for a few years gave a new tempo to their lives implied also a definite denial of much of the past and present of the life of Ireland.’ (p.50).

Roy Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch (London: Allen Lane 1993), where, after citing Irish novels by Trollope, Moore, and Somerville and Ross, he writes, ‘can it be a coincidence that all these texts were banished from the supposeedly authetic canon of Irish literature by the exclusivist version of Irish culture peddled by Daniel Corkery. But their credentials as Irish literature have now been reasserted and so must the Irishness of the kind of subcultures they portray.’ (p.29). See also remarks on Corkery’s ‘exclusion’ of Irish novelilsts from Banim to Somerville & Ross from his canon of Irish literature, in Foster, ‘Varieties of Irishness’, in Maurna Crozier, ed., Cultural Traditions in Northern Ireland: Varieties of Irishness, [Proceedings of the Cultural Traditions Group Conference (Belfast: IIS 1989), p.12. See also remarks on Corkery in Roy Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1988), ‘Economy, Society, and the Hidden Irelands’ [Chp. 9].

Edna Longley, ‘From Cathleen to Anorexia’, in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe 1994), pp.173-95: ‘As for Corkery, Tom Garvin argues that Munster, ‘in many ways the most self-sufficient, insulated, and self-assured part of nationalist Ireland’, and remote from both Ulster communities, played a disproportionate part in fuelling and theorising the revolution.’ (Garvin, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland, 1987, p.51, see also pp.7-8, 92-94; Longley, p.183.)

John Harrington, The Irish Beckett (Syracuse UP 1991), contains Lengthy discussion of Daniel Corkery’s Hidden Ireland, and reactions thereto, on the pretext that it exemplifies the nationalist ethos at the time when de Valera was consolidating Catholic Gaelic Ireland. The quotations from O’Faolain and Louis Cullen suggest that Corkery’s vision is based on limited information. Harrington goes on: ‘Even these dissenters to the argument admit, however, that Corkery’s Irish Ireland campaign occurred at an opportune time when Irish nationalism needed revitalization [...] More Pricks than Kicks would dissent too, to a narrow view of Irish identity, it does not endorse Cullen’s equation of complexity and richness. That is an early indication that incorporation by revisionism of Beckett into the national literary canon may require a reading as selective as the reading that once excluded Beckett from it.’ (p.50.) Further, ‘The relevance of Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature to Beckett, and in particular to More Pricks than Kicks, is not that Beckett refutes Corkery; it is, rather, that Corkery and his own formidable opponents together constitute a cultural impasse that is the social milieu of More Pricks than Kicks and its case study of modern Irish indolence, Belacqua.’ (p.52.)

[ top ]

Patrick Walsh, Daniel Corkery (D.Phil. UUC [Coleraine] 1993): Cites papers from the Corkery Archive at UUC [edited Cork], including passages taken from the handwritten MS of a 1950s RTE radio talk, ‘Looking Back’ [n.d.]; it tells us that Threshold was begun and in fact substantially finished before the collection of short stories. Walsh also quotes directly, ‘I remember distinctly asking myself what accounted for the fundamental differences between life in Ireland and life in England and answering the question with one word - religion as I can say that up to that self-query I can never have looked at English literature as it should be looked at by an Irish Catholic and would be looked at if that culture as it is in its very self was not here even still a sort of exotic.’ Further from the same talk and notes, ‘Since I had become convinced that the life of Cork City, inasmuch as it is a life apart from what is Irish, is rootless and shallow, I have since never felt any desire to explore it further. It is true that I have here and there placed it in a short story, but a short story doesn’t require a sense of background, rootage and growth, and all literature - that is creative literature - to me now and for many years back is simply nothing if it does not impress one’s mind as being [?mainly] a matter of impulse playing on rootage and growth.’ In a handwritten MS for a lecture on the short story, date 20/1/1917 - also in the Archive - Corkery writes: ‘This is my idea of what a short story should be. It is not a novel since it stresses character as preparation for the incident that emerges or accompanies it, whereas the novel stresses incident and develops character by its aid. The short story is akin to the last act in a play where the characters are ripened to the falling point. The active principle in a short story is character but in some short stories such as Poe’s we find this active principle transferred to inanimate nature or to abstract ideas.’ Further, ‘Now all that I have written I lay humbly at the feet of the Gaelic League [...] to link up with your roots is to come on some sense of reality [...] I would either never have written anything only for the Gaelic League and [...] if I had written at all the nature of such wirting must have been of a very different nature [...] The Gaelic League then drew me home almost without my knowing it.’ (Quoted MS of RTÉ talk, ‘Looking Back’, in the 1950s, held in Cork Archive; Walsh, p.9.)

Patrick Walsh (D.Phil. UUC 1993) - cont.: quotes Corkery’s article in The Leader on the eve of the Rising [as infra], p.134.) Comments on plays: King and Hermit (prod. 1909), set in early Christian Ireland, and later published in The Yellow Bittern and Other Plays (1920) The Yellow Bittern, prod. 1917, concerns Cathal Bui Na Giolla Ghunna (1680-1756), characterised by Frank O’Connor as ‘a one act miracle play’ and ‘the only play - apart from his friend’s [Synge’s] that [Yeats] accepted as part of the Abbey canon.’ (The Backward Look, p.170) Corkery used his own translation instead of Thomas MacDonagh’s since, as he says in the introduction, ‘verse in drama must be quite straighforward’ (p.71), as follows: ‘Not for the thrushes my lament gushes/Nor any herons nor ousels nor all that crew,/But my bittern yellow, a hearty fellow,/Like me in habits, like me in hue.’ (p.87). At the opening of the play, two old men argue the merits of ‘An Bonnan Bui’ against ‘Gile na Gile’. Ironically, the play disparages the Munter poets in these jocose terms, [Of ‘Bonnan Bui’] ‘Tis a true song! And that’s a thing can’t be said for the songs brought into us from Munster with their fairy women and their goddesses from Greece’ (p.73-74). The dying poet calls at the door seeking rest; the household turns him away in fear because of the curse the priest laid on him; the priest visits to know who was the woman of the house where he administered to the poet at his death. The play ends with the miraculous appearance of the Virgin on stage before the final curtain. [21-23]. Clan Falvey is the third of the plays, performed in Cork in 1920 and published with the others. The mainspring of the plot is the poembook of the O’Falvey’s which links the peasant family back to the hightide of Gaelic civilisation. A further play, The Labour Leader, was published separately (Dublin: Talbot 1920), dealing with his socialist background. The Labour Leader (1920), written in 1919, deals with a dock-strike in Cork, and centres on David Lombar - Danvo - clearly modelled on Pearse. Davno struggles for control of the labour movement against Phil Kennedy - Ferdia to his Cuchulain - who is encouraged to oppose his attempt to free a captured socialist in a raid on a police van by the conservative members of the union. After a stand-up boxing fight which the hero wins, he leaves to start the strike with the men following. Davno’s revolutionary politics are thus, ‘It is all for the future I work [...] the gold age is [...] in the future [...] only the violent bear it away [...] only violence will unlock the future . .violence alone, continued day after day, will make society get rid of that mass of uneducated violence that is in its midst. See, I’m as conservative as a priest who has a good parish. I will bring in the age of law and order. I will force society to bring it in by blowing up society.’ (p.115.) The play includes diatribes against the life of the city, ‘‘Tis always against us. [...] the unjust employer [...] filthy alleys [...] filthy tenements [...] The City!’ (p.59; Walsh, p.31).

Patrick Walsh (D.Phil. UUC 1993): Frank O’Connor engaged in an exchange of fire with Corkery in The Irish Tribune, arising from Corkery’s article on a liberal Protestant of Gaelic stock cut off from Irishness because of his refusal to embrace the religion of the real people. (‘What did the Spirit of the Nation really require of him? That he should re-establish contact with the mind of his race. That, and no less’: 18 June 1926,) O’Connor rushed into print, ‘I do not believe it. [...] I do not believe that the spirit of the nation, any more than the spirit of the Catholic religion is a permanent and unchanging thing [...] A nation sir, is only a nation while it is absorbing life into itself ...’ 25 June 1926.) Corkery replied, ‘... How could they so soon have forgotten the experience of the last ten years.’ 2 July 1926.) O’Faolain supported O’Connor: ‘Mr Corkery is quite correct in saying that any country is richer and more stable for having and recognising its national tradition, but he does not appear to realise that the national tradition of A may not be the national tradition of B [...]’. He goes on to cite the ‘hard work of men like Horace Plunkett and AE, the gunman-ing of Michael Collins and Rory O’Connor, the visions of W. B. Yeats, and the idealism of Mr de Valera,’ as well as Siemens-Schuckert [...] He further accuses Corkery of ‘having come out of a memory of an Ireland of long defeat [with] a narrow tradition fearful always for its safety’ (13 July 1926; Walsh, p.91.) Aodh de Blacam’s letter, cited above, intervened here, Aodh de Blacam retorted (The Irish Tribune, 30 July 1926, pp.16, 18): ‘Only when one knows a living language fairly thoroughly can on proceed successfully in the study of its literary and antique forms [...] From plentiful and leisurely reading of contemporary writers, surely the road towards an understanding of Irish literature leads next to the eighteenth century [...] Is he not unduly impatient. [T]hese poets on whom so much attention is concentrated today are part of an unbroken evolution - their verbal art was an expression of the tendencies of long growth. To described as decadence that which evolved naturally and enlarged the scope of the language is paradox.’ [63]. Corkery’s stance on Synge was that he was the only Abbey dramatist that ‘the old Gael would have accepted - almost without reservation.’ (‘Drama, Internation or National?’ - prepared in response to a debate between Yeats and Lennox Robinson; UCC Archive). [77] In The Hidden Ireland, he went on the argue the case for ‘Synge’s conversion to Irish nationalism’ (p.87) [83] In spite of brilliant critical lights - noted by Ó Tuama - this involved his playing down the plays in which Catholic spirituality could not be educed, viz, Riders, Shadow, Playboy. [83; citation from Ó Tuama not referenced, but see ref. to An Duanaire/Poems of the Dispossesed (1981)].

Patrick Walsh (D.Phil. UUC 1993) - Bibliography: ‘Ourselves and the Literary Market, 1 - The Bookshop’ (22 Nov. 1930, The Standard; held in UUC Corkery Archive among a series of otherwise undated articles. O’Faolain returns to the fray: ‘... Irish Ireland has come to that stage at which it realises its own nakedness, realises that beside the mature art of the Synges and the Russells and the Yeatses have produced, its O’Laoghaires and O’Conaires are the most insignificant scribblers, for this reason it will invent standards, invent anything that will restore its complacency.’ (13 Aug. 1926.) Corkery followed with a letter ignoring O’Faolain and nitpicking O’Connor on a point about medieval writers. O’Faolain later assaults Corkery in his article on him (Dublin Magazine, 1936), in which he claims that Corkery ‘slobbers over [...] a non-popular, aristocratic, effete world’; and that he makes the writer ‘laugh outright’ at his ‘perfervid gullibility’ and ‘a priori ideas about life and literature’, a ‘preconceived approach that tended to falsify all he wrote.’ (pp.50, 60, 53). Of The Hidden Ireland, ‘it has had and will continue to have a profound effect on modern Irish (uncritical) thought.’ (p.59) [93] O’Connor chose a lectern in the Abbey in 1938 to launch an attack on Corkery’s book on Synge, characterising Corkery’s view of the artist as a ‘parliamentary deputy of literature’ whereas in fact ‘an artist is representative of nothing’. The language is astringent, but also elegiac and warm, says Walsh. The lecture is contained in The Irish Theatre, ed. Lennox Robinson, circa p.30-50. [98-100] O’Faolain wrote, finally, in Vive Moi, ‘I owe one very precious thing to Dan Corkery, he had the highest literary standards and imposed them on us constantly.’ (p.134; Walsh, pp. 95-96.)

[ top ]

Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Irish Nationalism (London: Routledge 1995): ‘Daniel Corkery, the leading nationalist critic, seemed more concerned with politics than aesthetics in his dismissive treatment of Anglo-Irish literature, which had been largely the creation of the Protestant minority: for Corkery, questions of literary value were apparently less important than legitimating the newly created, confessional state. But many writers and critics, among them the novelist Sean O’Faolain, promoted a countering image of the free-thinking, dissenting artist, and campaigned against cultural provincialism and government censorship. Given the terms of the dispute, it has always seemed obvious to later commentators that, in ireland, the literary imagination, ideally unconstrainted by social or political ends, falls naturally and irresistibly on the side of the “cosmopolitan” - espeically if that is the only word you know for the condition of being free of Irish laws and religion. With the literary anti-nationalists, we evidentally find all the major Irish writers [...; &c.]’ (p.15; the tone is ironic here since Joyce is shown as deeply concerned with Irish nationality.)

Maurice Harmon (Irish Literary Supplement, Spring 1994): writing from Boston College, Harmon gives an account of a letter from Terence MacSwiney to his friend Daniel Corkery on reading the manuscript of The Threshold of Quiet. In it MacSwiney is generally favorable, but critical of the tendency to use individual words and phrases instead of sentences, and also advises Corkery to avoid the use of Hiberno-English (‘I’m better be going’, and ‘against he reached home’); further, disapproves of foreign words and too-literary references; has reservations about the novel’s two love stories and more generally the handling of the plot. Harmon offers a plot summary in which the central unsettling event is the suicide of Frank Bresnan who, drowns himself, tired of life; his sister Lily is haunted by the knowledge that he cried out ‘Help’ the night before he drowned; a fellow salesman likewise heard the cry during a train journey; Harmon comments that Corkery was unable to trust life-weariness as sufficient reason for suicide and adds the unnecessary element of disappointed love, or rather Bresnan’s realisation that he had become engaged to ‘a good, simple, stupid girl’. (ILS, p.22.) Harmon also supplies various instances of Corkery’s use of the phrase ‘quiet desperation’: viz., Stevie Galvin wanders the city streets in ‘quiet desperation’; Minnie Ryan is known to be suffering; ‘quiet desperation’ enters Martin Coyne’s soul when he realises that Lily is destined to become a nun.

Gerry Smyth, Decolonisation and Criticism: The Construction of Irish Literature (London: Pluto Press 1998), pp.186 et passim: ‘By postulating an organic link between culture and politics, between poetry and the people, Corkery’s discourse works in a different way from that of Knott, although substantially towards the same end: towards, that is, the confirmation of a continuous cultural tradtion founded on a distinct, unique Irish identity. […] Corkery “covers” the primary “real” relationship between Irish language and life with his own “unreal” secondary discourse. At the same time the fact that he must argue these truths in a written form is an argument aginast natural convergence between language and life in Ireland, past and present. (p.186.)

Martin Mansergh, review of History and the Public Sphere: Essays in Honour of John A Murphy, introduced by Conor Cruise O’Brien (Cork UP 2005), in The Irish Times (27 Aug. 2005), Weekend: ‘Tom Dunne shows the flaws in Daniel Corkery’s Hidden Ireland, in particular his misunderstanding of the strength of Irish Jacobite loyalties.’

Lawrence Osborne, ‘Dreaming Shamrocks: The Use of Being Irish’, in The Village Voice (3 June 2008): ‘The prime exponent of such thinking [ie.., the linking of Land to national soul] in Ireland - on a creditably intelligent level - was Corkery . His Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature (1931) has become somewhat notorious as a kind of pamphlet for Irish cultural nationalism, and his earlier books, A Munster Twilight (1916 and The Threshold of Quiet (1917), set out to describe Herder’s mystic Volk in their Irish guise. / Like countless German propagandists of the same time, Corkery complains that the current mentality of his homeland is “not national, not normal, not natural.” By this he means that folk there speak English and not Caelic. And what does he mean by “normal” and “natural” if not “faithful to ancient racial traits”? He talks endlessly of “other nations”, as if those other nations, simply by virtue of being non-Irish, had something universal in common with each other. / Corkery champions the writers of the Irish Land, Seamus O’Kelly, Padraic Colum, T.C. Murray and Darrell Figgis, contrasting them with the crowd of rootless ex-pats who have lost their “normalness “ - the miserably impoverished and diminished James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett. This is like German nationalists declaring Thomas Mann to be “abnormal” because he refuses to paint pictures of Bavarian villages and lederhosen-clad swineherds. Finally, Corkery declares that “normal and national are synonymous in literary criticism”, a statement that is surely true only in the worst possible scenarios. It does not occur to him that the displacement of Irish writers from their homeland is their greatest advantage. Not belonging is a more critical state of being than the passive state of belonging.’ [Cont.]

Lawrence Osborne, ‘Dreaming Shamrocks: The Use of Being Irish’, in The Village Voice (3 June 2008) - cont.: ‘Corkery’s fiction, too, is rich in contrived ethnic-rustic colour. In “A Munster Twilight” we find a landscape of gloomy Kerry glens, “oldtime” Gaelic families, and “out-of-the-world cooms” inhabited by ancient fossil-like life-forms like Old Diarmuid in the story Vanity and his son Michael, who spends his day “chopping furze as food to give to their poor sorry nag.” Diarmuid harangues his son with tirades like this: “Don’t be hard, Michael, boy, there’s a good time coming; you won’t have to face what I had to face, the struggling with landlords, and the law - the law, that would leave a rich man poor and a poor man broken.” / Shoemakers, a Blind Man, one Maggie Maw, farmers, gossips, all speak their dialect with many a “ ‘twould that”, a “ ‘tis this,” and a “ ‘tis something else” to keep the flavour of the “old-time ebb-andflow” alive, while the themes of Land, Nationality and Religion thrum loud and clear throughout. Corkery himself, the disciple of Ruskin, declared of these stories, “I had come upon a reality. I had discovered where my own roots could find comfort ... [in] a sense of the past.” / Corkery championed Gaelic intensely, but saw his hopes for it dashed utterly. The Irish, mysteriously, just did not seem to want to speak it. He came to see all Irish literature written in English, including his own, as an abortion, a judgement that no-one would second relative to the brilliant and roving Euro-Irishmen. In the end, Corkery’s phrase “The Hidden lreland”, his 1924 book on the poetry of Gaelic Munster, has become the name of an association of Irish tourist hotels modeled on country houses, The Hidden Ireland Ltd. That “Ltd.”, of course, tells us everything we need to know about the gap between nationalist fantasy and national reality.’ (Quoted in Lawrence Osborne, ‘Dreaming Shamrocks: The Use of Being Irish’, in The Village Voice, 3 June 2008; available online - accessed 29.03.2011.)

[ top ]