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CHAPTER THREE

BORDER CROSSINGS

In John Hewitt’s A North Light, his memoir of twenty-five years in a municipal art gallery,1 there is a wonderfully revealing moment when he recalls attending, as a delegate from Northern PEN, the re-interment of W.B. Yeats’s remains in Drumcliff cemetery in County Sligo on 17 September 1948. Yeats had died on 28 January 1939 in south-eastern France and had been buried there, according to his own wishes: ‘If I die here bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo.’2 The delay was attributable to the intervening war.

Behind the scenes, various Irish writers, including Thomas MacGreevy, diplomats and Yeats’s family and friends, were involved in arranging the re-interment and the occasion itself was by all accounts a neatly staged, poignant and dignified one, attended by many of the leading figures of the time, including Louis MacNeice, Austin Clarke (‘that scrupulous poet’ as Hewitt calls him),3 Frank O’Connor, Lennox Robinson, Maurice James Craig and Maud Gonne’s son, Seán MacBride. Maud Gonne, Yeats’s muse light, was absent, ‘afflicted with arthritis’ and ‘remained in Dublin’, according to Roy Foster.4 Seán MacBride was the Irish government’s Minister for External Affairs, and one-time Chief of Staff of the IRA.

Hewitt’s setting of the scene shows a keen eye for detail and also a sense of uncertainty about what to expect as the cortege approaches Sligo town on its short journey to the Church of Ireland burial ground, five miles north-west of the city so much identified with Yeats, his poetry and his family connections:

Newspapers were folded away, like two waves of breaking foam, as the feeling of an approach ran down the street. Children were hoisted on shoulders. In the stillness, for the first time, I could hear far away the cry of pipes, wild and sad, and the slow distant thump of drums. Soon they rounded the corner and came down the hill towards us.5

Ever-vigilant for the telling moment or hint of tension in the air, or possible indiscretion, Hewitt remarks on the accompanying music as ‘the pipe band of local lads in their blue serge Sunday suits, tense and tall with dignity … came forward slowly step by step, the drums crepe-wrapped and anonymous’. The choice of ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’, in spite of ‘what Yeats had written of Tom Moore’ [‘merely an incarnate social ambition’ and ‘never a poet of the people’]6 is praised by Hewitt, along with the band: ‘it seemed’, he writes, ‘decorous and just, a tune we could all share’.7 So the sense of community underpinning the commemorative moment is in Hewitt’s mind as Yeats is finally laid to rest in his own home. Hewitt’s gloss on the occasion is worth quoting in full:

And somehow, I was glad that it was the local civilian band and not the brass and braided uniforms of the state. It was enough that the old poet’s body had been brought back from the Mediterranean sunshine in an Irish gunboat called Macha, for he had been, maybe chief among them who had made that gesture possible.

Hewitt then quotes the (in)famous lines from Yeats’s poem, ‘Man and the Echo’ (1938): ‘Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?’8 reflecting Yeats’s extended obsession with 1916, inscribing his 1902 Cathleen ni Houlihan (‘that play’) into the narrative of what had happened after the Rising and its immediate aftermath; a kind of ‘get the commemoration in first’ ploy, not unknown in Irish political circles to this day. The story continues with the sighting of the hearse itself:

a very bright coffin, the largest I have ever seen, half-covered by the Irish flag, next, followed on foot, by the Mayor of Sligo, public representatives, cabinet ministers, men from Galway university [the frigate bearing Yeats’s coffin had docked in Galway harbour] capped and gowned in their degree … [and then] a long file of creeping cars, with, here and there, a profile behind glass and its passing reflections, that I could recognize.9

Hewitt goes through the choreography of the event with the crowds, the ceremony outside Sligo Town Hall where Irish defence forces stand ‘with bowed heads and arms reversed in a guard of honour’, before the ‘whole cortege moved slowly to Drumcliff’. Hewitt spots ‘de Valera, head and shoulders above the rest’, and runs into Austin Clarke again who ‘inquired if one might smoke at a Protestant funeral’.10 As an observer, maybe even with the hint of being the outsider, Hewitt ‘could only look around’ and, as he recounts, ‘peer up at the tower which seemed too high for the Church, and watch men with a movie-camera recording the scene, look at the rain, slanting through the trees, and find names celebrated in twentieth-century Ireland for the backs – and the backs of heads, the actor, the poet, the man of letters, the politicians.’11

Yeats’s reburial was an act of repatriation. It was also, crucially, a statement of the shortly renamed Republic’s efforts to identify Yeats, the internationally renowned poet, Nobel laureate and one-time Irish senator, with the relatively young state’s being open and, in some form or other, inclusive of its Protestant minority, personified by the First Inter-Party government minister’s attendance. It was a commemorative act, one can say, although in the years immediately after his death, Yeats’s legacy was hotly debated in Ireland and became ensnared in some dreadful invective and, as Roy Foster notes in his biography, ‘predictably violent attacks by the Catholic Bulletin and – from an incensed Aodh de Blácam [a journalist and political activist who supported Franco] – in the Irish Monthly, describing [Yeats] as satanic, atheistical and, above all, unIrish.’12 ‘I could hear the sound of spaded earth,’ Hewitt concludes, as ‘the mourners round the grave dispersed and others pushed forward to look. There was a general loosening of tension, an easy standing around.’

According to Foster’s account, ‘the [Yeats] family held out against a state funeral’ and, though Frank O’Connor had been asked by them to ‘make a graveside oration … this was vetoed by Jack [B. Yeats, the poet’s artist brother] who disapproved of O’Connor’s politics’. So Reverend James Wilson, the local rector, conducted the Church of Ireland service, though Bishop Hughes (Bishop of Kilmore, Elphin and Armagh) privately ‘felt a little doubtful as to Yeats’s claim to Christian burial’.13

What happens next is astonishing. In Hewitt’s account, written fifteen years later in 1963–4, fellow poet and diplomat Valentin Iremonger ‘came over and said that Seán MacBride would like to meet me’.14 In 1948 Hewitt was in his early forties (born in 1907), roughly the same age, give or take a few years, as Seán MacBride (born in 1904 in Paris). Hewitt was about to see in print No Rebel Word, his first substantial single collection of poetry, published in November 1948 by Frederick Muller in London. Hewitt had been politically active as a left-winger throughout the 1930s and during the Second World War and into the post-war era of the divided states of Ireland, north and south. As W.J. McCormack’s study of Hewitt makes abundantly clear, both John Hewitt and his wife, Roberta, were no strangers to the arts and literary world of the Irish state, and kept themselves well informed on social and political developments south of the border too. In the soon-to-be-looming crisis over the ‘Mother and Child’ welfare project of 1951, Roberta’s journal of 12 April 1951 notes ‘the great stir’ when the Catholic Church ‘denounced’ the Noel Browne-inspired scheme of health care. According to McCormack, ‘She and John thought the Minister [Browne] “very courageous”, and felt that his party leader, Seán MacBride, had been shown up as a bogus radical. “I am becoming more and more afraid of the R.C. Church”.’15

But back barely three years to that encounter in the thronged Church of Ireland churchyard in County Sligo, as ‘small boys and girls threaded through the groups, autograph books open and pens tilted forward butt foremost’. This is how Hewitt retells what happens next:

I was introduced to the Minister, a pale intense man with light hair, son of Maud Gonne, he had a right to be there. But while I was explaining that the only hope for a united country was in federation with firm guarantees for the north in regard to censorship, divorce, birth control and the place of organised religion in the constitution, I could see a few feet away Micheál Mac Liammóir, the actor, walking past …

The scene closes, neatly enough, with ‘people gathering or making small circles round us, other folk who wished obviously to shake the Minister’s hand, so we drifted to the waiting cars.

Under bare Ben Bulben’s head

In Drumcliffe Churchyard Yeats is laid.’16

Let us pause here and rewind this scene. Hewitt is standing in the churchyard of a small, somewhat remote Church of Ireland church and, undoubtedly tactfully but nevertheless, forthrightly, identifying four key matters that the Irish Republic should rectify before the possibility of a ‘federal’ Ireland could be considered! It is 1948, remember. Debate and schism has been ongoing regarding the constitutional changes to the Irish state, which would leave the Commonwealth of Nations and declare itself a Republic in 1949. So this conversation was wedded to current hot-wired political realities and issues. Look at the wish list Hewitt ‘shares’ with the pale and intense young(ish) Minister for External Affairs: censorship, divorce, birth control and the special place of the Catholic Church in the new Constitution.

It may be relevant here to note that censorship was officially still in place in one form or another until the late 1980s; divorce, originally prohibited by the 1937 Constitution, was legalised in 1995 in spite of huge opposition, after an earlier failed referendum in 1986; birth control, officially illegal in the Irish Free State and subsequent Republic from 1935 until 1980 and a series of legal reforms and challenges up to 1992, while the special place of the Church in the Irish Constitution remained until 1973 and the overwhelming support (85 per cent) of the vote in favour of deleting Article 44.

So the list John Hewitt brought to that brief encounter with the Irish government minister remained elusive for almost half a century, from that churchyard ceremonial re-interment of W.B. Yeats in September 1948 to April 1998 and the Good Friday Agreement which, in a sense, left a possible, virtual federal Ireland such as Hewitt’s on the table, with the collective support of the people – 71 per cent in the North and almost 95 per cent in the Republic.

John Hewitt died in 1987 before this important civic statement of cultural inclusiveness came about, and what has happened in the twenty years since 1998 is well beyond the scope of this chapter. But the business of legacy, guilt, political ideals and their human cost, alongside the meaning of the past, are centre stage for those with an emotional investment in the future of the country. What we do know is that the last fifteen or so years of Hewitt’s life, after he returned from Coventry in 1972 to live in Belfast, were marked by the enduring tragedy of political violence reminiscent of that which had attended the birth of the two states on the island and the partition that had underpinned the division of the country; reminiscent but much worse and lasting for far longer. Hewitt’s intellectual and cultural engagement with the Irish Free State and its successor, the Republic, was very much in keeping with his generation of Northern writers and, particularly, Northern artists whose work he did so much to promote at home and abroad. The divided island did not mean a divided culture, as younger scholars such as Guy Woodward17 are showing in ever greater detail.

From quite an early age, Hewitt wrote poems (and prose) about his sense of Ireland’s history and mythology, even though it was his restless probing of ideas about regionalism with which he would become much more identified. His discomfort with the Northern state is well charted ground, and his critical sense of not making contact with a readership in Northern Ireland pained him, or maybe frustrated is a better word. ‘I am not speaking to my people,’ he was to remark in an interview in 1980 about this fracture in communication between poet and his community, ‘it is inescapable. But linked with it is the important fact of the total lack of literary interest amongst unionists of the north, the lack of any fixed literary tradition.’18

Hewitt’s verse from Conacre (1943) and No Rebel Word (1948) all the way through to the final collections such as Kites in Spring: A Belfast Boyhood (1980) and Loose Ends (1983)19 are inflected with a deepening consciousness of the damage done by the political exploitation of division as much as by a nostalgia for a different past, often embodied in the personae of his father, for instance in his poem, ‘Going Up to Dublin’ as delegate to a teachers’ conference:

When, with Partition, Protestants hived off,

he stayed in loyally to all his kind,

that they were teachers was to him enough,

to sect and party singularly blind.20

His sketches of local life lived under the shadows of violence have a resonance for all involved in the, at times, sanitised revisiting of Irish history, particularly in this decade of commemorations, as in ‘The Troubles 1922’.

With Curfew tense,

each evening when that quiet hour was due,

I never ventured far from where I knew

I could reach home in safety. At the door

I’d sometimes stand, till with oncoming roar,

the wire-cage Crossley tenders swept in view.21

Even his youthful enthusiasm for James Connolly finds its expression in an elegy published in 1928,22 as well as in an unpublished sonnet, identified by Frank Ormsby in his editing of the Collected Poems of John Hewitt with the title, ‘To the Memory of James Connolly, patriot and martyr, murdered by British soldiers, May 10th 1916’,23 though, as Ormsby reminds us, Connolly was actually executed by firing squad in Kilmainham Gaol on 12 May:

When I was six years old I heard

Connolly address a Labour Crowd –

I cannot recollect a word

Yet I am very proud[.]

Alongside these simple poetic samples one can place so many much finer and more complex Hewitt poems whose concern ranges from the Great War and the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War and its bloody aftermath, both for the victorious Allies and for the cities of defeated Nazi Germany. It seems that at a very early stage of his development, John Hewitt’s cultural bearings were earthed by the 1930s excitement with politics, as W.J. McCormack’s Northman biography describes in regard to Hewitt’s contact with leading figures of the Irish Republican Congress, such as Peadar O’Donnell and Frank Ryan, and writing under the pseudonym (Richard Telford) for The Irish Democrat and much else. Hewitt was regularly back and forth across the border to Dublin and elsewhere, as much as he was visiting in London and all the other very many different places in Europe both he and Roberta vacationed in throughout their lives together.

On 16 December 1949, just a year after that conversation with Seán MacBride in Sligo, the Hewitts were on the move again, on the ‘Enterprise’ train ostensibly bound for a dinner organised by the PEN Club in Dublin. ‘Complex feelings of resentment, relief, guilt, and confusion shuttled across the border,’ McCormack remarks, as the Hewitts temporarily left behind post-war (and blitzed) Belfast for a brief stay in post-Emergency and neutral Dublin:

On board the ‘Enterprise’ they met friends, including the painter Daniel O’Neill; the journey passed quickly. They had booked into Jury’s [sic] Hotel – ‘posh’ by their standards. On Saturday evening, Hewitt was surprised and pleased by Roger McHugh’s knowledge of his work, less impressed by Professor H.O. White’s pretences. Kenneth Reddin, a minor literary figure and a judge,24 brought them to the Hermitage, near Rathfarnham, an eighteenth-century mansion where Patrick Pearse had conducted a school. Roberta was moved by the romantic history of the place – it had been the home of Robert Emmet’s beloved [Sarah]; somebody had been hanged there. ‘I became a bit of an Irish Republican in the atmosphere’ [she records in her Journal].25

But the other reason for visiting Dublin was ‘to buy goods still scarce inside the United Kingdom, several pairs of nylon stockings which Roberta smuggled inside her corset’, we are told. On New Year’s Eve that year (1949), the Hewitts ‘again attended Mass with neighbours’26 in the Glens of Antrim and John Hewitt would compose perhaps his best-known and most controversial poem, ‘The Colony’, a poem that revisits the earful Seán MacBride received the previous year. The poem’s straight-talking (and, for many, offensive) persona who asks uncomfortable questions for the time: ‘to be redeemed/if they themselves rise up against the spells/and fears their celibates surround them with.’27

Maybe it is too much of a leap of imagination (or faith) to suggest that the overshadowing of this uncomfortably independent Northern voice, which John and Roberta Hewitt and their like personified in the critical founding years of the Irish Free State of the 30s and 40s, is a story yet to be told. Told, that is, for its own sake, yes, but also for the sake of being just to all Irish histories and not only to those which are either more fashionable or closer to home and thereby more worthy of commemoration.