Читать книгу The Wrong Country - Gerald Dawe - Страница 12

CHAPTER FOUR

FROM THE GINGER MAN TO KITTY STOBLING

The 1950s represent the end of a way of life and the beginning of the world we live in today. The industrial civilisation of the British imperial project finally started to run aground in the 1950s: a culture that had spanned the globe and had produced an extraordinary legacy – of great modernising achievement on the one hand, yet on the other a battleground of colonialism. Post-war, these two powerful forces would clash in localised struggles in various parts of the remaining British Empire or countries under British influence. ‘When [Harold] Macmillan became Prime Minister in 1957,’ writes the social historian Dominic Sandbrook, ‘no fewer that forty-five different countries were still governed by the Colonial Office, but during the next seven years Ghana, Malaya, Cyprus, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Western Samoa, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Zanzibar and Kenya were all granted their independence.’1

These struggles would form the political and ultimately the social backdrop to a generation of young men and women who, in the 50s, were starting to break free from the conventional and prescribed ways of living and working: the context to much of the best in English fiction of the period such as John Braine’s Room at the Top, David Storey’s This Sporting Life, and Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners, as well as in the writing of poets such as Philip Larkin.

In Britain, the welfare state and the democratic opening up of educational possibilities created the foundations for a new kind of society that would finally emerge in the 1960s. The transformation of England, in particular, into a consumerist society, provided Ireland with the safety valve that the truly conservative nature of the Irish state and the fragility of its traditional economy obviously needed. Emigration to England, and farther afield, was both a forced and elegiac comment on the failure of de Valera’s nationalism. It was also an opportunity to see the wider world and play some part in the cultural and economic changes that were taking place, although how this would have been viewed at the time is clearly a matter of perspective and of how individuals fared in their new lives ‘across the water’.

The following statistic is a stark reminder of how things were: ‘Of every 100 girls in Connacht aged 15–19 in 1946, 42 had left by 1951.’2 To what kind of life and loving one wonders. Indeed, the statistics become a story in themselves: ‘About 400,000 souls left in ten years for Britain, and to a lesser extent, for Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand.’3 During post-war reconstruction in Britain, 634,000 Irish men and women settled in the UK; but if one stretches this cohort to include the period 1931–61, ‘Irish-born’ residents in Britain increased from 505,000 to 951,000 which, if one considers the numbers of those who returned to Ireland during the Second World War, is really quite staggering.

On a wider front, though, 1950s America and the momentum that was building up throughout that society, as well as the first mass moves towards civil rights and an end to racial segregation in the States, would politicise the English-speaking world by the end of the decade. The example of the civil rights movement in the United States would create an unstoppable cultural dynamic towards equality of races and religions with the separation of church and state.

In Ireland, the 1950s was probably the last decade in which both parts of the island, the ruling political parties and the pre-eminent role of the churches, could withstand this shifting of power in the western world. Fifties’ Ireland was the beginning of the end for that unhealthy relationship, while the literature and drama of the period mark a threshold between the short-lived past of an independent Catholic Ireland and the emergence of a more modernising free state or republic that simply had to reconnect with Europe and, more pressingly, with its British neighbours, if it (‘Ireland’) was to survive. This is exactly what started to happen under the strategic shifts of economic policy initiated by T.K. Whitaker and others within the Department of Finance and in the mostly Dublin-based intellectual and political elite.4 (A process poetically dramatized a few years later in Thomas Kinsella’s long poem ‘Nightwalker’.)5

In Northern Ireland, in a landscape still scarred by Nazi bombs, as I well remember growing up there, and its after-effects (Belfast had been blitzed in 1941 with the loss of approximately 1,000 people),6 the momentary possibility of opening up and producing an egalitarian civic society (notwithstanding the abortive IRA campaign, Operation Harvest, during the 1950s) stuttered and stumbled into the mid-sixties before the hope of a just society was snuffed out with the eruption of the Troubles.

There are two parts to the Irish story of the 1950s – a Northern and Southern dual-narrative which sometimes interconnects but more often diverges – and it is a story that has not really been told. In 1950s Belfast, many enjoyed and prospered in the stability and quality of life provided by good schools, functioning well-run hospitals, and proliferating new roads that led into blossoming suburbs; diversifying new ‘tech’ factories sat alongside the traditional heavy industries of shipbuilding, aircraft manufacture, tobacco, mills and suchlike.7 However, these industries, we now know, were becoming increasingly untenable and in a couple of decades would be extinct. A completely traditional way of industrial life, with its customs, work practices, housing and expectations was eliminated, and along with this disappearance the exposure, at almost exactly the same time, of a bigoted and repressive system of government that was blind to the poverty and inequality in its treatment of its Catholic minority and the urban poor of both religions.

The political world was redefining the power blocs of the Cold War – in Korea, in Suez, and in what became known as the Iron Curtain, behind which previously autonomous states had been colonised by the Soviet Union and would remain so for fifty years, despite brave attempts at liberation in Hungary which were ruthlessly repressed.

On the island of Ireland, the old wounding partition aside, the ingrained grievances of poverty, injustice and the dreadful inner-city housing conditions in both capitals seemed beyond the ability of either church or state to remedy. Ireland’s difficulty became Britain’s opportunity and, as we know, emigration flourished into a way of life. The statistics say it all.

On the cultural front, however, much was happening in Ireland and to Irish writers based abroad. Alongside the list Brian Fallon provides in his essential portrait, An Age of Innocence: Irish Culture 1930–1960,8 one can add the achievements of Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin and Kate O’Brien. According to Terence Brown’s study Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2002, the early fiction of Edna O’Brien, in The Country Girls (1960) and The Lonely Girl (1962), charts an emerging pattern of ‘a brief idyll of youthful discovery followed by disillusionment before sending them [O’Brien’s country girls] on to the more exotic attractions of London, but the young woman or man from a rural background who sought to establish a family in the city was confronted there by adjustment to the novel ways of urban family life’.9 Brown goes on to point out that by the 1950s, ‘despite the slow rate of economic growth in the country as a whole, Dublin has been transformed from the elegant, colourful, and decaying colonial centre of English rule in Ireland into a modern if rather dull administrative and commercial capital’.10

This change would work its way into the livelihoods of many but it would also push others towards a kind of subculture: a halfway house between the past and the emerging present, and the setting for such ‘hesitancy and uncertainty’ was the public house. This subculture for writers has been explored with intimate detail and knowledge in memoirs such as John Ryan’s Remembering How We Stood,11 the excellent Dead as Doornails by Anthony Cronin,12 and in Eoin O’Brien’s The Weight of Compassion & Other Essays.13 The local rows, gossip and personality clashes between Dublin-based writers, such as Patrick Kavanagh and the younger Brendan Behan, was more often than not drink-related.

Drink became the arbiter of authenticity; a counter-cultural shelter, a public house for private lives, with its holy hours, after hours, Sunday closings and other licensing controls creating a lifestyle all its own, and lasting mythologies: Such and such is a terrible man. (Footage of a drunken Flann O’Brien being interviewed one Bloomsday bears the marks of an embittered and caustic self-parody that is itself tragic-comic.) Alcoholism, an affliction of the fifties, was as much a feature of the time as the polio epidemic of 1956 or the political collapse some years earlier of Noel Browne’s Mother & Child Scheme in 1951.

Brendan Behan’s success in the fifties – indeed the 1950s was very much his decade, with The Quare Fellow (1956), Borstal Boy (1958) and The Hostage (1958) – was based upon an ebullient verbal art that seemed to challenge the official sentiments of the time – in Ireland but also in Britain and the United States. As his Borstal Boy hit the note of 1950s’ break-through, shared in novels of the period, or in a play such as Look Back in Anger (1956) by John Osborne, Borstal Boy turned the tide on English complacency and through the sheer energetic verve of his language, Behan manages to sound like a Beat poet in full flow – one minute irreverent, aggressive, the next meditative and accepting, while mocking conventional wisdom in an almost Wildean play of grievance and entitlement:

Jesus, if they’d only let me sit there and sew away, I could be looking down at the canvas and watching my stitches and seeing them four to an inch, and passing the time myself by thinking about Ireland and forgetting even where I was, and, Jesus, wasn’t that little enough to ask? What harm would I be doing them? If any of them was in Mountjoy, say, and I was there with a crowd of Dublin fellows, I wouldn’t mess them about, honest to Jesus Christ I wouldn’t, no matter what they were in for. And that James, that was a proper white-livered whore’s melt.14

If the fifties were Behan’s, as a one-time militant republican, jailed in England at age sixteen in the late 1930s, he came to understand England and condemn much of what was hypocritical in the Irish. His death in 1964 in his early forties makes its own telling point about the traps that were on offer in the unfolding decade of television and mass-produced popular magazines.

For, like Dylan Thomas, who had died as a result of alcoholism before Behan in 1953, and Elvis Presley, who died after him, Behan had become that most modern phenomenon: a celebrity. In the infamous live interview with Malcom Muggeridge on the BBC’s Panorama television programme in 1956, cursing and swearing and obviously the worse for drink, and in his brawling, binge-fuelled lifestyle, Behan was bizarrely anticipating his rock-star fate. Even though it was his ‘Irish’ stereotype that probably fitted in with ‘English’ prejudice and American expectation: ‘The English hoard words like misers,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan in his review of Behan’s The Quare Fellow in The Observer; ‘the Irish spend them like sailors and in Brendan Behan’s tremendous new play language is out on a spree, ribald, dauntless and spoiling for a fight. It is Ireland’s sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness.’15 Shaped in such ‘national’ terms, it is precious wonder that Behan’s death as a result of diabetes and alcoholism was viewed almost as a semi-state funeral. But in a curious way, too, one of the leading roles offered to the Irish writer of the time as a ‘character’ was buried with him; few serious writers since Behan would follow in his footsteps.

Behan had been memorialised before his death, however, in J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (1955). Behan and the Catacombs16 feature in this richly cruel comedy of manners set in drink-besotted 1950s Dublin, as the reek and customs of the period are relentlessly exposed in Donleavy’s unstoppable saga of the life of Sebastian Dangerfield and his student days at Trinity College. This is how Behan turns up at one of the gatherings of the time:

There was suddenly a crash at the door, the centre boards giving way and a huge head came through singing.

Mary Maloney’s beautiful arse

Is a sweet apple of sin.

Give me Mary’s beautiful arse

And a full bottle of gin.

A man, his hair congealed by stout and human grease, a red chest blazing from his black coat, stumpy fists rotating around his rocky skull, plunged into the room of tortured souls with a flood of song.17

As with Borstal Boy and Behan’s plays, Donleavy’s prose catches the absurdly mischievous, mocking, feckless playing with reality as his main characters brazen their way through the life of the capital. It is a novel seeping with a Dublin that has long since disappeared.

It is interesting, therefore, to consider how, in looking back at his own experience of living in 1950s Dublin, John McGahern interprets the scene in the posthumously published collection of his autobiographical essays, Love of the World: Essays (2009).18 In speaking of his own generation of young aspiring writers, born in the provincial 1930s (the three Toms come to mind – Murphy, Kilroy, Mac Intyre) and who by the fifties were based in Dublin, McGahern is unambiguous: ‘The two living writers who meant most to us were Samuel Beckett and Patrick Kavanagh.’ These two ‘living writers’ were hugely influential, as McGahern recounts:

They belonged to no establishment, and some of their best work was appearing in the little magazines that could be found at the Eblana Bookshop on Grafton Street. Beckett was in Paris. The large, hatted figure of Kavanagh was an inescapable sight around Grafton Street, his hands often clasped behind his back, muttering hoarsely to himself as he passed. Both, through their work, were living, exciting presences in the city.19

Patrick Kavanagh would become a significant figure in McGahern’s own fiction, as we shall see, while Beckett’s influence on another writer who emerged out of the 1950s, Brian Friel, is important to note here. Brian Friel’s early drama, such as Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), has Beckettian undertones in the play’s view of language and memory – such as the father’s inability to recall details that matter to the departing (emigrating) son, the 25-year-old Gar. Friel’s play also embraces the increasing allure of American popular culture: ‘I’ll come home when I make my first million,’ Gar protests, ‘driving a Cadillac and smoking cigars and taking movie films’,20 as well as conveying the sense of ‘having to’ leave Ireland because of its claustrophobic provincialism.21 As Gar puts it, picking up terms he has heard earlier from his drunken old schoolmaster:

All this bloody yap about father and son and all this sentimental rubbish about ‘homeland’ and ‘birthplace’ – yap! Bloody yap! Impermanence – anonymity – that’s what I’m looking for; a vast restless place that doesn’t give a damn about the past. To hell with Ballybeg, that’s what I say!22

In his short story, ‘High Ground’, set in the 1950s but published in 1982 and collected in High Ground (1985), John McGahern puts in the mouths of his timber workers a complex web of self-recognition and ironic delusion as they sup their pints with another alcoholic old schoolmaster after hours in Ryan’s Pub. The young Moran (a literary brother to Gar in Philadelphia) pauses outside by the church, having gone to the well for spring water, the pressure of having been offered his old teacher’s job pressing upon his mind and he overhears the pub conversation:

‘Ye were toppers, now. Ye were all toppers,’ the Master said diplomatically.

‘One thing sure is that you made a great job of us, Master. You were a powerful teacher. I remember to this day everything you told us about the Orinoco River.’

‘It was no trouble. Ye had the brains. There are people in this part of the country digging ditches who could have been engineers or doctors or judges or philosophers had they been given the opportunity. But the opportunity was lacking …’ The Master spoke again with great authority.23

Patrick Kavanagh could well have been one of those voices. Indeed, in some of his poems he seems to be deliberately improvising the innocent circumspection similar to these characters’ knowledge, intimacy and understanding.

After years of hard dedication to his craft, that would produce one of the mid-century Irish ‘classics’ in The Great Hunger (1942), and having fought against what he saw as the establishment in Dublin (and elsewhere), Kavanagh’s health, like Behan’s before him, gave out. But out of his illness – lung cancer and the complications of an unsteady lifestyle based around the pub – Kavanagh’s rebirth took place in the mid-1950s, as he was to remake his writing life by the Grand Canal:

So it was that on the banks of the Grand Canal between Baggot and Leeson Street bridges in the warm summer of 1955, I lay and watched the green waters of the canal. […] I was born in or about nineteen fifty-five, the place of my birth being the banks of the Grand Canal.24

Come Dance with Kitty Stobling,25 which was finally published in 1960 after Kavanagh’s arduous search for a publisher, is addressed to his muse and contains a great lyrical lightness of touch, surrounded by some scars of struggle, as health and moral freedom are restored. It is a great book, as important in its way as, say, W.B. Yeats’s magnificent volume of 1928, The Tower. Come Dance with Kitty Stobling is a hymn to rebirth but it is also a remarkable poetic testament to the resilience of the imagination and the ability of Kavanagh to transcend the demeaning, niggardly and cramped atmosphere that had contaminated so much of the Irish literary scene by the 1950s.

As the Northern Irish, London-based poet Louis MacNiece remarked of the Dublin of a decade and a half beforehand, in 1939 just as the Second World War is declared:

I was alone with the catastrophe, spent Saturday drinking in a bar with the Dublin literati; they hardly mentioned the war but debated the correct versions of Dublin street songs. Sunday morning the hotel man woke me (I was sleeping late and sodden), said, ‘England has declared war’.26

Kavanagh’s Kitty Stobling takes on what remains of this ‘literary world’ post-war in ‘The Paddiad; or, The Devil as a Patron of Irish Letters’, while caustically pointing his finger at those who promote its fading glories outside the country. This is the prefacing note to the poem:

This satire is based on the sad notion with which my youth was infected that Ireland was a spiritual entity. I had a good deal to do with putting an end to this foolishness, for as soon as I found out I reported the news widely. It is now only propagated by the BBC in England and in the Bronx in New York and the departments of Irish literature at Princeton, Yale, Harvard and New York universities.

I have included this satire but wish to warn the reader that it is based on the above-mentioned false and ridiculous premises.

A timely warning for those today uncritically advancing the notion that Ireland is a unique ‘cultural nirvana’. But the poems kick free of this kind of polemic and become ‘spiritualized’ – airy contemplations on the meaning of being; a cumbersome phrase for what is, in Kavanagh’s idiomatic English, so deceptively easy on the ear.

The sonnets, opening with ‘Canal Bank Walk’ and ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’ continue throughout the collection with ‘October’, ‘Dear Folks’, ‘Yellow Vestment’, ‘Come Dance with Kitty Stobling’, ‘Miss Universe’, ‘Epic’, ‘Winter’, ‘Question to Life’, ‘Peace’, ‘Nineteen Fifty-Four’ and ‘The Hospital’. They form the poetic core of the collection. And in this re-centred world of his imagination, Kavanagh created what, in John McGahern’s words, was a lasting vision, one of the great legacies of the period.

‘[Kavanagh had] in The Great Hunger,’ McGahern remarks,27 ‘brought a world of his own vividly to life. The dumb world of de Valera’s dream had been given a true voice.’ McGahern continues: Kavanagh ‘had an individual vision, a vigorous gift for catching the rhythms of ordinary speech, and he was able to bring the images that move us into the light without patronage and on an equal footing with any great work’.

Patrick Kavanagh’s is a truly pitch-perfect, Irish-inflected voice, talking away to itself in these sonnets and is no longer troubled by the literary business of reputation and/or recognition. It is a wonderful achievement which Kavanagh would bequeath to a generation of poets coming behind, who would, unlike him, achieve international acknowledgement. Alongside the early books of Thomas Kinsella and John Montague, and the breakthrough of Austin Clarke’s Ancient Lights (1955), Come Dance with Kitty Stobling set a high watermark for Irish poetry, particularly when placed alongside the achievements of, say, Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived (1955) or Robert Lowell’s masterful, shape-changing volume, Life Studies (1959). In poems such as ‘The Hospital’ or ‘Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin’, Kavanagh’s imagination declares a revelation earned and honoured through hard-won experience:

And look! a barge comes bringing from Athy

And other far-flung towns mythologies.

O commemorate me with no hero-courageous

Tomb – just a canal-bank seat for the passer-by.28

Though published in the first year of the 1960s, Come Dance with Kitty Stobling ponders the past decade from its mid-point, and in ‘Nineteen Fifty-Four’ secures a most potent image of the time. We should recall that Kavanagh had been through a lot personally – he had lost a court case for libel against the Leinster Leader newspaper, experienced increasing ill-health, and cancer would be later diagnosed. He was fifty at the time, a relatively young man to our way of thinking; yet, in a poignant sense, ‘Nineteen Fifty-Four’ is a reflection, as is much else in Come Dance with Kitty Stobling, on Kavanagh’s surviving his own life and times. The last line, both as realisation and freedom, carries a powerful resonance to this very day;

But tonight I cannot sleep;

Two hours ago I heard the late homing dancers.

O Nineteen Fifty Four you leave and will not listen,

And do not care whether I curse or weep.29

Whether to ‘curse or weep’ as time passes is a perennial question, but perhaps Brian Fallon has defined best the cultural legacy of the 1950s:

Yet many still remember the Fifties as a grim, grey, rather bitter decade, which no doubting some respects they were. Internationally the Cold War had reached a stage of permafrost, and the mushroom-shadow of the Atomic Bomb hung over Europe, though there was still real faith in the capacity of the United Nations [Ireland was admitted in 1955] to maintain an international balance of power. Money was short, so too were jobs, and writers and artists in particular were badly paid; it was a period when many of them had to take casual employment of all kinds to tide them over until better times, and a number emigrated temporarily to London … Yet underneath it all there was in fact a considerable life force.30

The 1950s are a kind of alter-image of today31 when what we now know was happening was not exposed publicly or challenged politically – the sexual abuse of children in the care of the Catholic Church; the appalling conditions that young women were condemned to work under in the Magdalene laundries; the narrow-minded complacency of the ruling elite. Lessons are rarely learnt from history, but the 1950s certainly show how best to counter the understandable anger and rage about political and moral failure of both church and state in the Ireland of that time.

In 1950s Ireland we can see our younger selves reflected as an age of innocence but also one full of dark secrets and wrongs. This proves the incontestable point that we neither need to go, nor should even consider going, backwards to realise that a soft-centred, remodelled nationalism – the very thing that Patrick Kavanagh railed against – is not what is needed today to rectify Ireland’s problems, simply because it does not work, any more than a refashioned imperial nostalgia works for Britain. If the 1950s prove anything in Ireland, it is by way of a rebuke and an inspiration; about the political need for a level-headed Mark II of the Whitaker generation who will coolly and calmly focus upon the historical fault-lines and fissures in Irish society in an effort to work through and plan how best to fix these while, at the same time, realistically appraising Ireland’s future standing in the eyes of its own citizens, as well as in the rest of the world.