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In the second part of this Module, as we turn
to Poetry and Contemporary Fiction, we discussed the phenomena
of Regionalism and Nationalism in modern Irish writing, with some
emphasis on the Ulster movement from the 1940s. To illustrate
the kind of thinking involved, I brought your attention to a discourse
of Regionalism which had been developed and - somewhat falteringly
- fostered by John
Boyd in the journal Lagan, and later by John
Hewitt in the journal Threshold.
Boyd can be said to have set the ball rolling
by pronouncing in the Editorial of the first issue:
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‘In the past there has been a tendency
for writers to leave Ulster … An Ulsterman is not an Englishman,
no matter how hard he tries to be … I believe that none
of the Ulster writers who have tried this grafting process
has succeeded in producing a great body of work, a consistent
and integrated oeuvre. … what about such a deraciné as
St. John Ervine? (Lagan: Collection of Ulster Writings,
1943, p.4.)
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In this he was claiming a greater measure of
independence for the region than one might expect during time
of war; but, paradoxically (to all appearances), it was precisely
in time of war that regional pride within the United Kingdom,
was most likely to find expression. Only then, perhaps, could
be expressed without any taint of political separatism which
had coloured the regional impulse in Dublin-based cultural nationalism
of the early twentieth-century Ireland.
Boyd goes on to definite the branch of English
literature he is thinking of in distinctly rhapsodic tones as:
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‘An Ulster literary tradition that is
capable of developing and enriching itself must spring
out of the life and speech of the province; and an Ulster
writer cannot evade his problems by adopting either a
super-imposed English or a sentimental Gaelic outlook.
His outlook must be that of an Ulster man. He must, therefore,
train his ears to catch the unique swing of our speech;
train his eyes to note the natural beauty of our towns:
above all, he must study the psychology of our people.’
(Ibid., p.6).
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And, ten years later, the poet and curator
John Hewitt - a renegade Unionist-turned-socialist who afterwards
removed himself to Coventry before eventually returning to Northern
Ireland - carried on the theme:
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‘If writers in an isolated group or
in individual segregation are for too long disassociated
from the social matrix their work will inevitably grown
thin and tenuous, more and more conerned with form rather
than content, heading for marvellous feats of empty virtuosity
[...]. We must have ancestors. Not just of the blood,
but of the emotions, of the quality and slant of mind
[...].’ (‘"Bitter Gourd": Some Problems for the Ulster
Writer’, in Lagan, No. 3 (1945), pp.93-105.)
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And he added:
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‘The Ulster writer must, if he is not
to be satisfied in remaining "one of the big fish in the
little pond", seek to secure some recognition outside
his native place. But the English language is the speech
of millions. There is no limit to its potential audience.
Yet I believe this had better not be achieved by his choosing
materialism and subjects outside or beyond those presented
by his native environment. He must be must be a rooted
man, must carry the native tang of his idiom like the
native dust on his sleeve; otherwise he is an airy internationalist,
thistle-down, a twig on a stream. Tolstoy sat at no Monmartre
café. Even Yeats came back to climb his lonely tower.
An artist certainly in literature, must have a native
place, pinpointed on a map, even if it is only to run
away from, like Joyce to his Trieste boarding house, and
when his roots snapped, we got Finnegans Wake.’
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Oddly enough, by this date John Boyd had abandoned
the regionalist cause - whether or not Hewitt’s advocacy
of his old theme discouraged him or not it is impossible to
say. He now wrote in answer:
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‘As the regional idea is fashionable
again I should like to comment on it. Regionalism stresses
the fact that a writer should be a “rooted”
man; he should feel that he “belongs”, should
recognise ancestors of blood and mind. This idea has been
applied to cultural activities in Ulster, and it has been
asserted that we can contribute to modern regionalist
movements in literature, painting, and the other arts
and crafts.’ (Ulster in Prose’, in Sam Hanna Bell,
Nesca A. Robb, and John Hewitt, eds., The Arts in Ulster,
London: Harrap 1951, p.116.)
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To this he offered an answer which may be quoted
at some length: ‘This theorising on regionalism is merely
a restatement of the obvious ...’.
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‘A serious writer writes about
what he knows best. And sure it is natural for a writer
to write about his native countryside and people. It is
also natural for a writer to wish to experiment, to enlarge
the range of his art so that it may be consonant with
his changing experience of his. This question of deracination
has been thrashed out more than once before. [...] I am
of the opinion that the whole argument both for and against
“rootedness” or “uprootedness” is
academic, because a writer follows the course that he
himself dictates or that is dictated by circumstances.
St John Ervine, Helen Waddell and Joyce Cary are three
examples of our older writers who have transplanted themselves
and all of them are writers of great vitality and adaptability.
To wonder what creative work they would have done if they
had remained in Northern Ireland is hardly a useful pursuit.
Better accept the fact that a certain number of writers
- as of other people - successfully transplant themselves,
and their work is done in two or more contexts. (Idem.)
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And he concluded:
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‘I am of the opinion that the whole
argument both for and against “rootedness” or
“uprootedness” is academic, because a writer
follows the course that he himself dictates or that is
dictated by circumstances. St John Ervine, Helen Waddell
and Joyce Cary are three examples of our older writers
who have transplanted themselves and all of them are writers
of great vitality and adaptability. To wonder what creative
work they would have done if they had remained in Northern
Ireland is hardly a useful pursuit. Better accept the
fact that a certain number of writers - as of other people
- successfully transplant themselves, and their work is
done in two or more contexts. (Ibid., p.117.)
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It is especially significant, in the context
of our studies, that the poet Derek Mahon - who talked with
Hewitt in latter years - had this to say about his rural animadversions
against the international writer:
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‘This is a bit tough on thistledown;
and, speaking as a twig in a stream, I feel there’s a
certain harshness, a dogmatism, at work there. What of
the free-floating imagination, Keats’s “negative
capability”, Yeats’s “lonely impulse of delight”?
Literature, surely, is more than a branch of ethics. [...]
Besides, what is all this about “the Ulster writer”.
What about the Munster writer, the East Anglian writer,
the Scottish writer?’ (Review of Tom Clyde, Ancestral
Voices: Selected Prose of John Hewitt [1988], rep.
in Journalism: Selected Prose 1970-1995, Dublin:
Gallery Press 1996, p.94.)
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Mahon ends with some wittily ad hominem
remarks addressed to Hewitt, the lost leader of Ulster writing:
‘[…] I fail to see why his chosen region should have been
Ulster rather than Ireland as a whole: a point on which we stuck
more than once, myself sitting forward in my chair, himself
puffing pugnaciously at his pipe. […&c.]’ (Idem.)
It is therefore possible to identify in Ulster
writing a counter-tradition that refuses too close identification
with the province - or, rather, with the identitarian needs
of the province. And this makes it the more ironic that, when
Seamus Heaney began to write, he contributed a little history
of the Ulster journal to a teacher-training college magazine
called Trench.
In it he offered the following asservations
about Hewitt’s literary flagship:‘Threshold has
been an excellent publication [...] Yet Threshold has
not taken over where the other magazines left of.’ ‘Why?’,
asks the budding poet - who would later come to epitomise Irish
writing on the international scene rather than the Ulster tradition
for which he rather oddly prosletyses in these pages:
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‘Because it is not essentially
a northern magazine. It might as well be published in
Dublin. In fact put a copy of Threshold inside
a Kilkenny Magazine cover and very few people could tell
the difference. Moreover, it relies on established reputations.’
(Trench, St. Joseph’s TTC, Belfast, April 1964 [1st iss.],
21pp.; pp.3-4; copy held in John Hewitt Collection of
University of Ulster Library].
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This gives rise to some further speculation
about Ulster writers and their proper forum: ‘Why could Patrick
Boyle, Brian Friel, Stuart Love, Roy MacFadden and Denis Ireland
not come together between limp quarterly covers and create a
true artistic unity in diversity?’ And, though the poet
concedes that it is perhaps a product of ‘mere economics’,
he concludes with some reflections on the revolutionary spirit
of the United Irishmen in an earlier age:
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‘The Northern idealists of 1798 made
their point in a forcible and unforgettable manner.
| We men of Ulster had a word
to say
And we said it then on our own dour way
And we spoke out loud and clear [...] |
‘I only hope that their descendants
of the 1960s follow their example - with the pen which
is so much mightier than the pike’. (Trench, St. Joseph’s
TTC, Belfast, April 1964 [1st iss.], 21pp.; pp.3-4;
copy held in John Hewitt Collection of University of
Ulster Library].
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Rousing stuff, but very little like the actual
trajectory of Seamus Heaney’s career after he discovered
modern Irish poetry in an anthology compiled by Robin Skelton
in 1967. Since then, not Ulster writing by Irish writing has
been the central focus of his critical attention.
Indeed, it was to be Heaney himself who would
formulate the dominant theory of literary Irishness in the course
of a lecture of 1977 (given in the Ulster Museum, Belfast) where
he pronounced the idea that its defining element was the ‘sense
of place’ - itself a term itself derived from John Barrell’s
writings on the English poet John Clare.
Some idea of the broad thrust of his argument,
and especially its reliance on the idea that the Irish landscape
is imbued with a natural - or native - significance deriving
from its habitation by a Gaelic-speaking people may be taken
from the following extracts. For brevity’s sake, I simply
draw your attention to the way that the ideas of landscape,
sacrament, marriage,
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[brief extracts]: ‘We have to retrieve
the underlay of Gaelic legend in order to read the full
meaning of the name and to flesh out the topographical
record with its human accretions. The whole of the Irish
landscape, in John Montague’s words, is a manuscript which
we have lost the skill to read. ‘The Sense of Place’,
in Preoccupations (London: Faber 1980, p.132.)
[...]
‘It is this feeling, assenting, equable marriage between
the geographical country and the country of the mind,
whether that country of the mind takes its tone unconsciously
from a shared oral inherited culture, or from a consciously
savoured literary culture, or from both, it is this marriage
that constitutes the sense of place in its richest possible
manifestation’ (Idem.)
[...]
‘The landscape was sacramental, instinct with signs, implying
a system of reality beyond the visible realities. Only
thirties years ago, and thirty miles from Belfast, I think
I experienced this kind of world vestigially and as a
result may have retained some vestigial sense of place
as it was experience in the older dispensation.’ (Idem.)
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Speaking more specifically of the poetry of
Patrick Kavanagh whose engagement with Hiberno-English vernacular
Heaney
considers especially beneficial to the literary (and perhaps
the living) nation, he concludes:
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‘[E]mpowered within its own horizons,
it looks out but does not necessarily look up to the metropolitan
centres. Its impulses and possibilities abound within
its boundaries but are not limited by them. It is self-sufficient
but not self-absorbed, capable of thought, undaunted,
pristine, spontaneous, a corrective to the inflations
of nationalism, and the cringe of provincialism.’ (Idem.)
[See further.]
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It is no wonder, then, that meditating John Hewitt’s
contribution to literature at a later date, when giving the
Oxford Poetry Lecture, Seamus Heaney wrote in final summary
of the matter, with incidental lights on the social and political
involved in it:
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‘Hewitt’s Regionalism suited the feeling
of possession and independence of the empowered Protestants
with their own Parliament and fail-safe majority at Stormont
more than it could ever suit the sense of dispossession
and political marginalisation of the Catholics. The poet
was personally a man of the deepest tolerance and sympathy,
principled in his sense of diversity, passionate for social
justice, but in his imaginings he could not include the
Irish dimension in anything other than in an underprivileged
way. The pre-eminence, as he saw it, of the British intellectual
tradition, the obscurantism as he saw it, of the Roman
Catholic church and the logic of his colonial trope which
naturally validated the culture of the colonising power
over that of the native – all this meant that he stood
his ground in the North as a resolute democrat, with a
vision of the just society based on regional loyalties,
but a vision that was slightly Nelson-eyed, as it were,
more capable of seeing over the water than over the border.’
(‘The Frontiers of Writing’, Bullan, Vol. 1, Issue
I, Spring 1994, pp. 1-16. |
It might be hard to guess from that pointed commentary
that Seamus Heaney
had earlier castigated the editor of Threshold for
not being Ulster enough and for opening the pages of
his journal to the writers of the south of Ireland. Such, perhaps,
are the merely indirections by which Irish writers find directions
out. |