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CHAPTER TWO

TELLING A STORY

I want to discuss a book I edited in 1985 with the literary critic Edna Longley, called Across a Roaring Hill: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland. My approach will be mostly informal, drawing upon my own personal story as someone who comes from a Belfast Protestant background and who reacted very negatively against that background until comparatively recently when I started to question, with a more constructive critical eye, what I was doing as a poet – namely, exploring my own past, and my family’s past, rooted in that specific social background. From this point of view, Across a Roaring Hill provided a critical counterpoint to an imaginative quest, both criss-crossing at the very vulnerable, crucial and even deadly intersection between ‘region’ (based, in my case, in a Protestant Belfast) and ‘nation’ (British or Irish).

Put simply, Across a Roaring Hill was, for me, a gesture to all those anonymous Protestants who saw literature as something alien to them and to what they considered to be their ‘way of life’. I wanted to establish that some of Ireland’s greatest writers in the twentieth century were, in fact, Protestant and that there was nothing inherently contradictory about such a state of affairs: a reality to which they had rarely been exposed. In having this door opened to them, the brilliant complexity of literature, might somehow be revealed, irrespective of categories of religion or definitions of place.

It would, in other words, be an ideal critical equation, paralleling what I found myself trying to do in poems: exploring the past, seeking clearly balanced moments of personal and historical tension and coincidences whereby one sees the influences, expectations and beliefs that govern one’s own self-image and, by implication, the community’s out of which one came.

To what extent was there a ‘Protestant imagination’ or, more accurately, what creative valence ran between these two terms? This was the basic question which I felt needed some kind of answer. As a poet, I was trying to relate those writers in Ireland who meant something to me with the majority of other writers, not Irish, who were also personally significant. I was thinking of ‘tradition’ and trying to sort out the question of there being a coherent ‘Protestant’ literary tradition in which I could sound out my own experience in imaginative and cultural terms.

The answer is, I am convinced, that no such tradition exists in Ireland but, rather, as stated in the introduction to Across a Roaring Hill, that there is ‘an eradicable consciousness of difference, of being defined in and against another culture’ which makes, for instance, a ‘direct descent in the Protestant line’ still discernible, as in ‘the evolution of forms and images from Yeats to MacNeice to Mahon’. Yet, like the term ‘Anglo-Irish’, the notion of a distinctly ‘Protestant’ literary tradition inevitably calls upon Yeats (or Burke or Swift) as ‘the father’ and, as W.J. McCormack correctly points out in his Ascendency and Tradition (1985): ‘Biological metaphors of this kind have an insidious effect in that they generate notions of a legitimising family tree which distinguishes the Anglo-Irish writer from a larger context instead of locating him in it.’

My own personal and social experience resisted such notions of ‘a legitimising family tree’, seeing instead the disjointed, fragmentary nature of Northern Protestantism. While this background offered people of my age the educational resources to move out into the wider community, it recoiled, for various specific historical factors, economic dependencies and religious susceptibilities, into a state of isolation – defensive and suspicious, constantly vigilant of possible betrayal and ‘sell-out’. Belonging to such a tradition was, from the start, a very mixed blessing.

‘My people, provided that I have one,’ as Franz Kafka remarked; and the ‘return’ to them is mined with anger and self-consciousness that can prove to be creatively crippling. Yet writers from such a Protestant background in Ireland are, ipso facto, more alert to the various undercurrents of meaning which one associates with terms like ‘region’ and ‘nation’, since they are never sure of their place in this system of things. They can take little for granted, except by a force of will or assumption. The community out of which they come is characterised by an obstinate silence in which trenchant dignity runs side by side with the triumphalism of the Orange Order or the noxious patronage of the Unionist Party, the twin ruling partners of the Protestant North. If these were ‘my people’, and they ‘were sinking’, as the South African novelist André Brink has written in Mapmakers: Writing in a State of Siege (1983), ‘then it was their own fault, the inevitable retribution for what they themselves had done and allowed to be done’. Coming from such a background catches the writer in a spider’s web: the more one tries to draw away, the more entangled one becomes. This is how the situation was described in the introduction to Across a Roaring Hill:

There is a heritage of guilt, repressed, formless and diffuse; and of tribal customs and binding beliefs which individuals – and writers – transgress at their peril: Calvinist cultures expel art from the city’s gates, because they fear its power to penetrate communal neurosis – aggravated by such exclusion.

It is a fairly common experience of writers who seek to come to terms with a cultural inheritance, such as this, to have great difficulty coping with its religious bigotry and the prejudice that is itself an irrational protest against the world and evidence of an inability to understand it.

What has happened in Northern Ireland is that, with such worldwide attention, the experience of ordinary people becomes contentious and can be converted easily into cliché and caricature – the processed suffering and recycled grievance, the everlasting ‘victim’ as much as the deluded superiority of insularity and bigotry. This places an added burden upon the writer and critic to ensure that what he or she writes is meticulously weighed against the political use to which it can be put.

Albert Camus’ remark about the ‘reserve’ of the Breton writer Louis Guilloux, whom he greatly admired, is relevant here since Camus saw this artistic virtue as a way of preventing the writer from ‘permitting the misery of others ... to offer a picturesque subject for which the artist alone will not have to pay’. On another level, too, this reserve is an act of fidelity which establishes a self-critical distance rather than a falsely modest style of understatement. It relates not only to one’s own politically grounded experience but also to the notion of ‘tradition’ itself: in my case, to a sanctified corpus of Irish literature in English that stretches from the eighteenth century to the present.

How could such a mythical continuum actually exist, given the profound economic, social, political and cultural changes that have happened on this island and, specifically, in that part of it in which I had grown up? It is a contradiction ‘between tradition and its material’ or, stated crudely, between the past and the present. To call upon W.J. McCormack’s excellent Ascendency and Tradition again, this contradiction is ‘a further statement of the disjunction between an Irish local literature and the European culture into which it cries out for reinsertion’.

In an atmosphere of great uncertainty and frustration, bitterness and hatred, when people turn to literature among other things – as a means of overcoming religious and political divisions – it is difficult to take up that responsibility without, at the same time, running the risk of burdensome self-consciousness or, more importantly, of limiting, by definition, the way literature undermines every kind of division, from the ‘regional’ to the ‘national’. On this Jacob’s ladder, which rung does one start on? Yet with various poetic voices of ‘History’ and ‘Prophets of the People’ being called for, to speak directly out of personal experience appears to be a mute, almost tame, exercise in the flux of what is clearly a time of great tension and change. As the main character, Hans, says in The Clown, Heinrich Böll’s novel about life in post-war Germany: ‘the secret of the terror lay in the little things. To regret big things is child’s play – political errors, adultery, murder, anti-Semitism – but who forgives, who understands the little things?’ Sticking to a vigorous and exacting sense of what one knows and experiences assumes a kind of austere radicalism but, as so often happens with personal experience, when it becomes representative through the prism of literature, it can slide imperceptibly from being treated objectively towards being seen as picturesque and – in due course – imperilled by easy nostalgia.

To give an extreme example of this process: the dwindling battalions of bowler-hatted Orangemen on 12 July are first seen strictly in their native setting but, once they are taken out of that context, they are invariably considered as quaint remnants of a formidably decayed tradition, which are then held up, no longer to ridicule, but to a patronising curiosity. The fate of the theme park. The danger in all this, and one to which I trust Across a Roaring Hill was keenly alert, is suggested most cogently by Salman Rushdie in his essay ‘Outside the Whale’ (1984):

there can be little doubt that in Britain today, the refurbishment of the Empire’s tarnished image is under way. The continuing decline, the growing poverty, and the meanness of spirit of much of Thatcherite Britain, encourages many Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence.

It is, of course, the Protestants of ‘Northern Ireland’, ‘Ulster’, ‘the North’ and the ‘Six Counties’, who are so visibly trapped in the ‘lost hour of their precedence’, while unemployment grows under the Tory ministers who directly rule the North. This is, then, the immediate social world that Across a Roaring Hill came out of and, ironically, returned to when it was launched in Belfast at the International Association for the Study of Anglo-Irish Literature conference of 1985, which included a trip to Stormont – the delegates being greeted by a Yeatsian anecdote from the then Deputy Secretary of State, Rhodes Boyson.

Given such meshing of literature, culture and politics, it is hardly surprising that, as Brian Friel remarked, ‘everything is immediately perceived as political and the artist is burdened instantly with politicisation’. How to deal with politicisation is a question for the individual artist, but what kind of politics? is something we could all do with questioning. The trouble is that very often these two distinct, if not separate, issues get mixed up. For instance, in an insightful discussion of the Field Day Company, Joseph McMinn interprets the various critical responses to it as ‘concealed political objections’ to their ‘dissemination of nationalist views of culture’: ‘Arguing for an apolitical analysis of Irish culture which will be sensible, moderate, rational, unemotional, dispassionate, is to take up a political position without naming it. It is an extension of unionist political values into the cultural area.’

It is unclear precisely who is arguing for an apolitical analysis of Irish culture but of all the Heinz varieties of unionism, I have not met one that fits the bill here – sensible, moderate, detached and so on. The only political values that unionism has expressed are immoderation and an entrenched inability to be detached in any sense. (Nor, it should be said, is this the sole prerogative of unionism, as anyone will know who witnessed the moral debates in the Republic of Ireland on abortion and divorce.)

Confronting the historical impasse which a region called ‘the North’ is in, where unionism, whether it is liked or not, is the political voice of a substantial majority of the people who live there (and who do not want, and will probably violently resist, belonging to a nation called ‘Ireland’), there is an obvious imaginative and critical need to explore the experience of this people, their reasons for seeing life as they do and of placing this in the wider context (political, cultural and literary) of the whole country. In other words, to probe and possibly restore the shattered bonds of ‘region’ and ‘nation’ at an imaginative level which defines them both, bearing in mind the fact that the so-called question of ‘the North’ has no reality in isolation but is a part of, and a major critical influence upon, the ‘Irish/British’ question. It would be ironic, though, if such an aspiration was interpreted politically as propping up unionism, although what point there would be in such an exercise I cannot for the life of me imagine.

Considering this relationship of ‘region’ to be an acknowledgement of diversity and difference within the ambit of ‘nation’, Seamus Deane, in his Irish Times review of Across a Roaring Hill, wrote:

Ireland must give its deference to difference and defer its ‘unitary’ ambitions. I find this interesting, but would like to have it identified more precisely. Is it a defence of Unionism cast in cultural terms? Or is it a plea for the recognition of a diversity which is in danger of being ignored?

The answer is an emphatic Yes to the second question, as everyone engaged in these issues of ‘region’ and ‘nation’ must surely accept and support, or else we lurch towards some covert or doctrinaire concept of authoritarian statehood. But against this reason, Enoch Powell, in his review of the book in The Times (15 August 1985), saw Across a Roaring Hill as one in a line of work ‘much petted and encouraged by those, in Great Britain and elsewhere, who want to bully the Northern Ireland electorate out of their settled conviction to remain within the United Kingdom’. Rather than being a putative defence of unionism, the book is seen as attacking it.

One can see at this stage where the burden of politicisation, of which Brian Friel speaks, slides into gyres of rhetoric. The complex ways that human feeling is enmeshed with cultural affiliation evaporate and the actual manipulators of political identity (who, after all, control and embody power) get off the hook. What is more, it treats the experience of others (Northern Protestants, in this instance) to a further illustration of the kind of fashionable disdain they have come to expect and denies that very diversity in Irish life which demands recognition, if the relationship between ‘region’ and ‘nation’ is ever going to be unbloody.

To define and elucidate these different kinds of experience and ideas is, I think, an essential obligation if we are ever going to understand adequately the state Ireland is in, never mind realising the one that many of us hope it will become. This is one definite place where the writer has an important role to play, as André Brink suggests, ‘of fighting to assert the most positive and creative aspects of his heritage’. And we should not forget all those who, over the years, to quote Christopher Hitchens, have challenged ‘their own tribes with criticism, opposition and argument from within’. It is important to add here that this imaginative struggle is, as Brink says, also often against those who ‘can afford to clash with authority because they are basically protected by it’.

If there is, as I believe there to be, a world of difference between the experience of Protestant families in the North, their feelings, fears, hopes and ambitions (the stuff one hears so much pious talk about in the Republic) and the political use made of them, then the crucial discrimination must be made and maintained between the two sets of experiences and the various economic, social and cultural bonds that keep them bound together.

If this effort at understanding be dubbed ‘Unionist’, we will have missed another chance to expose the invidious forms of falsehood and violence which oppress people on the small island of Ireland; and have done so because of fashionable intellectual posturing, not out of serious political commitment and work. For it is an effort of knowing the past which requires us, as Peter Gay well knew on the truly horrendous scale of his native Germany, to ‘mobilize historical understanding and to make discriminations [which do] not mean to deny or to prettify what has happened’.

Across a Roaring Hill was just a small part of the process whereby prevailing mythologies and the ways they are, in turn, transformed into art, are opened up and brought into the light of day. It is a first step: exploratory and, within its limits, diverse and speculative. As this process comes under an imaginatively sustained criticism, everything is up for grabs – not just a monolithic ‘Irish’ literary tradition, but the very notion of ‘tradition’ itself, the language used to discuss these things and our working through the inherited ways of seeing them both. This is the truly radical challenge that the present offers; not painting ourselves back into a corner which so often seems to be the case in Ireland.

The relationship between a ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’, ‘nationalist’ or ‘unionist’ experience is only one, if presently dominant, cultural and political distinction. Like all labels, they bear the marks of prejudice from which few are free. One has to take into account, however, entire tracks of historical and contemporary experience that are of vital significance in Ireland today – ‘loyalty’ and the question of ‘belonging’, such as that considered in Thomas Kilroy’s play Double Cross, or the force field of community and the individual’s own complicated place within it which John McGahern has explored to such telling effect in, for example, High Ground – to say nothing about the explosion of women’s writing in Ireland in recent times.

These are issues that come readily to my own mind since I have an abiding interest in them as a writer, but they underpin the present and are bound to have serious implications for the kind of literature (and politics) that many want to see taking over from the current conventions and official dogmas. I think this is the point behind Seamus Deane’s close reading of Across a Roaring Hill when, in singling out Bridget O’Toole’s essay on Jennifer Johnston, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane, he writes:

a sentence from Elizabeth Bowen ... might have been this volume’s epigraph and ... has its application, economic and cultural, for Protestants and Catholics: ‘We have everything to dread from the dispossessed’. It is in dispossession that the hurt, Protestant and Catholic, lies.

Material deprivation and cultural dispossession are indeed fundamental ‘themes’, since they are the common inheritance of so many Irish men and women. It would be a shame if this fact was lost sight of and turned, on the lathe of dogma, into an obligatory truth from which those who actually live it out can find no real imaginative release or critical yet sympathetic distance. As Terence Brown eloquently put it in his Field Day pamphlet, The Whole Protestant Community: The Making of a Historical Myth:

A people who have known resistance as well as dissent, rebellion, dispute, religious enthusiasm in the midst of rural and urban deprivation, have an interesting story to tell themselves – one of essential homelessness, dependency, anxiety, obdurate fantasising, sacrifices in the name of liberty, villainous political opportunism, moments of idealistic aspiration. And in the telling of it they may come to realise at last where they are most at home and with whom they share that home.

The colloquial ‘Tell us a story’ goes far beyond a child’s need for reassurance – it opens out the ground of imaginative possibility as well. What we are seeing in Ireland today is a clash between the traditional ways of perceiving these possibilities and the need to bypass the politics which stunts them. The writer is caught – appropriately enough – in the middle.

1986