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In a strikingly similar fashion [to Pyper in McGuinness’s Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Off to War ..] Sebastian Barry’s 1995 play, The Steward of Christendom, charts the efforts of Thomas Dunne to pick through his memory shards in search of consolation for the anguish of his old age. Like Observe the Sons, Barry’s drama concerns a man at the margins of history, a former Chief Superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. The DMP was a British-controlled, Irish police force which (most infamously) clashed with Irish workers and nationalists during the Dublin Lock-Out of 1913 and the Easter Rising of 1916. After the establishment of the Irish Free State, former members of the DMP were vilified by their fellow Irishmen for what was perceived as their traitorous collaboration with imperialist rule. The play’s present-tense action is located in 1932, and is set in a county care home where the nearly senile Thomas Dunne is now confined. At the same time the play transports us to various moments in the former Chief Superintendent’s {224} past life, as he strives to recapture the orderliness and perfect joy he associates with his personal past and with the Ireland of his youth. For Dunne the pivotal moment of change was 1922, when a nation which was ‘shipshape as a ship’ detached itself from Britain and swiftly became overrun by ‘savagery and ruin’. [6]
Yet woven through Dunne’s memories of a serene Ireland, basking in the glow of benign British rule, are constant reminders of how brutal and vulnerable to chaos were the systems of order on which his nostalgia feeds. Indeed, the self-deceiving nature of his memories is underlined by the very manner in which Barry dramatizes them. Just as the grief-stricken old man is on the verge of embracing a precious moment or a lost child, darkness intrudes, the memory vanishes, and Dunne is left to roar ‘with pain and confusion’ as he finds himself alone again with his regret and loss (20). The sum effect of the string of gapped memories is the recognition, for us if not for Dunne, that there is no past, pure and simple unto itself, which has not always been contaminated by the tendency towards disorder which defines the personal and the political spheres. As Dunne gropes for constancy his daughter Annie confronts him with the implacable fact that dooms his efforts: ‘Papa,’ she says, ‘we’ve all to grow old’ (37).
The Steward of Christendom draws our attention immediately to the gruesome gap between idyllic childhood and dismal old age. The play opens in 1932 in the ‘bare room’ of the care home, where the furnishings are spare and even the morning light is ‘poor’. Dunne’s opening lines, which echo the opening of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, show him taking refuge from his surroundings in a serene recollection of childhood: ‘Da Da, Ma Ma ... Clover, clover in my mouth ... and Ma Ma’s soft breast when she opens her floating blouse, and Da Da’s bright boots in the grasses, amid the wild clover’ (3). Almost instantly this lyrical evocation is undercut by images which encapsulate much of what will follow: ‘and me the Ba Ba set in the waving grasses ... and the farmhands going away like an army of redcoats but without the coats, up away up the headland with their scythes’. As through metaphor the farmhands are turned into ‘an army of redcoats but without the coats’, the tranquil scene darkens (though Dunne fails to notice) into an anticipation of his beloved son’s death in the trenches of World War One. [7] More than that, the image suggests that order is typically maintained through force and is always on the verge of collapsing into chaos. Dunne’s Da Da, lovingly recalled in the first monologue, reappears moments later as a more threatening figure: ‘When little Tom no sleepy sleep, big stick comes in and hitting Tom Tommy ... and all is silence ... except the tread of the Da Da, ... except the fall of the big stick’ (4). {225}
Add to this Dunne’s later evocation of himself in the role of policeman, keeping Dublin ‘orderly and safe’ with the aid of 300 men (9), and one begins to see how Barry works to undermine the nostalgia for a lost world where ‘order was everywhere’ because everyone knew his place. Though Dunne marks 1922 as the year when order gave way to a ‘tide of ruin’, it is clearly his view that things began to fray from the very moment when Victoria no longer held the British throne. Under her exquisite reign, according to Dunne:
All the harbours of the earth were trim with their granite piers ... and her mark was everywhere, Ireland, Africa, the Canadas, every blessed place. And men like me were there to make everything peaceable, to keep order in her kingdoms ... She loved her Prince. I loved my wife. The world was a wedding of loyalty, of steward to Queen, she was the very flower and perfecter of Christendom (14).
Presiding over a perfect chain of being, Queen Victoria functioned as the principle of order which the rest of the world could gladly imitate. In Dunne’s mythic reconstruction he strives to link himself into a network of coherence and permanence guaranteed by Victoria, the great mother who worked to web the world into a comprehensible, fixed and peaceful system.
As it happens, Dunne’s nostalgia for empire is less political than it is personal or, at least, the two realms are inextricably intertwined. As he chooses to remember those years, they provided a guarantee of his own patriarchal authority, and they are associated with a cherished period of family stability which rapidly disintegrated and which in some ways never really existed. This ‘Lear in long johns’, as Jack Kroll has described him, was not a king but merely a lowly servant of kings; 8] yet Dunne recalls himself as the proud regent of a shipshape domain which mirrored the example set by prince and queen. Married to a woman of whom the king himself approved (‘King Edward himself praised her hair,’ says Dunne, ‘when we were presented in nineteen-three’ 25), he was free to perform his role as Chief Superintendent with warmly paternal efficiency. Meanwhile, at home, ‘Dolly my daughter ... polished my policeman’s boots, and Annie and Maud brought me my clothes brushed and starched in the morning’ (11).
Yet this image of a beneficently harmonic hierarchy is never really credible. For one thing, we learn early on of Dunne’s fervent longing, in his old age, for a suit flecked with gold. The source of this longing is his failure to reach the rank of Commissioner, the reward for which would have been a gold-laced uniform. He never rose to that rank because, he explains, ‘that wasn’t a task for a Catholic, ... in the way of things, in those days’ (9). Dunne rose as high as a Catholic could in a police force which was a largely powerless puppet of {226} the British army. Despite dogged attempts at self-glorification, he is fleetingly aware of his marginalized status in Victoria’s empire, which disqualified him from attaining the kind of success which might have dissipated his haunting sense of failure.
That sense of failure was engendered by the father with the big stick, who upbraided him for failing at his schooling and held him in contempt for joining the police force. Much of Dunne’s action in the play can be understood as an attempt to become the man his father assured him he was not. Thus he embraces a political system and a social role which seem to affirm his paternal authority, and also seem to promise to stem the erosion of self and family. But the old man’s fragmented memories confront him with nagging evidence of his helpless inability to hold back the ‘tide of ruin’ which engulfed his family. When his son appears dressed in army uniform to say, ‘It’s cold in the mud,’ he can reply only, ‘I know, child. I’m sorry’ (17). In another memory-fragment his daughter Annie slips to his bedside to ask why she was afflicted with polio, which has left her back so bent that she despairs of marrying. In response to her plaintive, ‘Why, Papa?’, Dunne must again confess ignorance: ‘Because it afflicts some and leaves others clear. I don’t know’ (21). As for his adored daughter Dolly, she leaves Ireland for Ohio, because she can no longer endure the scorn her father’s former position with the DMP brings upon her.
In fact, Dunne’s devotion to the mirage of stability which he associates with empire plays a direct role in the disintegration of his family. Though he might have taken heed of the Cordelia-like Dolly’s wise words (‘Hats’, she says, ‘are more dependable than countries’ 49), he is determined that the country should be served. Hence he is dismayed when Willie turns out to be too short to become a policeman. When Willie joins the British army as the next-best way to fulfil his father’s aspirations for him, he dies in the mud of France. ‘All I got back was your uniform,’ Dunne laments, ‘with the mud only half-washed out of it’ (47). But his relentless desire for a gold uniform of his own displays his unflagging faith in the trappings of power, which can do nothing to compensate for the loss of a child, or to resist the chaos to which order must always eventually yield.
It is increasingly apparent that Dunne’s passion for order has its roots in a vexed familial drama whose most striking features are conflict and loss. On the day he watches the reins of power pass from British to Irish hands, he is surprised by the surge of loyalty he feels towards Michael Collins. Though that surge is quickly suppressed, it lays bare the deeper psychological needs which his romance with empire has sought to fulfil. Speaking of the day that Collins took possession of the keys to Dublin Castle, Dunne says:
I could scarce get over the sight of him ... He would have made a tremendous policeman ... I would have been proud to have him as my son ... I felt rough near him, that cold morning ... There never was enough gold in that uniform, never. I thought too as I looked at him of my father, as if Collins could have been my son and could have been my father. I had risen as high as a Catholic could go, and there wasn’t enough braid, in the upshot. I remembered my father’s anger when I failed at my schooling, and how he said he’d put me into the police, with the other fools of Ireland (50). {227}
In Dunne’s imagination Collins flexibly performs the role of father and son, while also underlining Dunne’s acute sense of deficiency. Struck by Collins’s glamour, he is dismayed by his own uniform, which lacks sufficient gold because he could never be the son his father wanted him to be, any more than he could be a real ‘son’ to a British government which used him as a pawn, just as it used his son Willie as cannon fodder.
The other half of the family dynamic, the maternal one, is equally troubled for Dunne. Early in Act 1] he tenderly recalls a morning when he went in search of newly laid eggs which he carried back proudly to his adoring Ma Ma. Later the same image recurs more disturbingly when he recalls a terrible fight between ‘my Ma Ma and me’ (46). On this occasion he was caught playing roughly with a hidden Christmas toy. In a rage, his mother tossed the toy into a pile of dung, and he retaliated by torturing her favourite hen so that it never laid eggs again. Thus the movement of Dunne’s memory (from fresh warm eggs to broken eggs on a dung heap) works against him, unearthing the more turbulent experiences which undermine his cherished memory of benign matriarchs in a world once ‘loyal, united, and true’ (61).
The story about Dunne and his mother’s ‘black time’ is also resonant because it culminates with a hen whose ‘wits go astray’ thanks to his abuse of it. This is suggestive of what happens to Dunne himself and to the generation of Irish people with whom he identifies. ‘All of them’, he says, ‘lost their wits and died’ (45), or ended up confined with him in the home. The care home, which he repeatedly describes as a madhouse, is a perfect emblem for the world which he both exalted and feared, the world of order restraining the chaos battering at its gates. The madhouse’s inmates, like Dunne, linger on in a state of shrivelled bewilderment, ‘crying and imagining’ because they cannot make sense of what he calls ‘the gap between the two things’ (16): what was and what is, what they were and what they are. These mad folks are watched over by a man named Smith who, not incidentally, is an orderly who carries a ‘pacifier’ (or billy club) which he does not hesitate to use. Smith, in short, bluntly embodies the figures of parental and civic authority which haunt Dunne’s imagination, and whose methods of preserving order now take the distinct form of a ‘pacifier’; the very term neatly blends the tenderly {228} parental with the brutally oppressive. As for Dunne (who, as an old man in the home, is stripped naked, unceremoniously bathed, and occasionally whipped), he is now clearly the infantilized subject of the authorities which, in reality, he always was.
Thus the madhouse becomes a kind of nightmarish wish-fulfilment where the order Dunne so obsessively desired is finally brought to bear on him. It was the news of Collins’s murder which precipitated the emotional breakdown which landed him in the home, and he recalls this event shortly before the play’s end. Forced to confront his inability to resist the ‘to-do and ... turmoil’ which descended on his family and nation (62), Dunne asks Annie to slay him with his ceremonial sword. Instead she has him committed. But his memory of his breakdown seems cleansing, as it is followed by the merciful gift of a vision. Like Lear imagining Cordelia’s breath on the looking-glass, Dunne is granted the illusion of life in a dead child: Willie appears to him, his ‘uniform flecked with gold’ (63). As his son helps him to his feet, Dunne utters the words which are inscribed on Jim Larkin’s statue on O’Connell Street: ‘The great appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise.’ Seemingly embracing the wisdom of his former political enemy, Dunne appears to repudiate the colonial mindset which so debilitated his life. As he admits to his child, ‘It’s all topsy-turvy, Willie’ (63).
Yet even as he seems to embrace Larkin’s egalitarian wisdom, his vision of Willie in a gold-flecked uniform cannot help but remind us of the delusions which killed the child, which shattered Dunne’s life, and which have not been relinquished entirely. Willie can console his father only when he is garbed in the gold in which Dunne sought to envelop his life, and which Barry persistently associates with delusion. ‘Da Da is golden, golden,’ Dunne says early in the play, ‘nothing that Da Da do takes away the sheen of gold’ (4). As Dunne drifts into sleep, Willie lies in close to him and sleeps, too: the lost child is retrieved. Yet, for all its consoling power, this final tableau remains devastatingly sad. Unlike Lear, who is mercifully freed in death, Dunne (according to the play’s last stage direction) only sleeps; and the child who is ‘not to be lived without’ remains irretrievably gone. |