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CHAPTER ONE

FALSE FACES

In her Irish Times review of Seamus Heaney’s poem-pamphlet An Open Letter (1983), Eavan Boland seems both cautious and uncertain about what it and the other Field Day pamphlets stand for:

A new Ulster nationalism is not my idea of what Irish poetry needs, but I would be quite willing to lay aside this prejudice if the new nationalism contained all the voices, all the fragments, all the dualities and ambiguities of reference; but it doesn’t. Judging by the ... pamphlets here in front of me, this is green nationalism and divided culture. ‘Whatever we mean by the Irish situation,’ writes Derek Mahon, ‘the shipyards of Belfast are no less a part of it than a country town in the Gaeltacht.’ Would that this were true; or, at least, would that it were real.

An influential member of Field Day’s board, Seamus Deane, is clearly conscious of this absent voice when he talks about breaking down stereotypes:

by making people have the confidence that each of us has a culture that’s not going to disappear if it comes in contact with the other. But it’s a kind of confidence severely lacking in Unionists, which is why they’re so neurotically defensive. That’s the problem with Field Day. It’s no good just performing our plays and selling pamphlets to people we know. There’s no point in continuing unless we can get through to Unionists.

But there is another important point to be made here. It is unclear what this absent voice ‘is’ and whether there is, in realisable terms, a culture that can be defined as ‘Protestant’ and unionist. It depends, of course, on how one defines culture but, taking that term in its widest sense, it is fair to say that the Protestant/unionist sense of self derives its meaning (and is ‘neurotically defensive’ for this very reason) from the fact of its being undefined, imaginatively and historically.

The famed inarticulateness, the Ulster that says No!, is, after all, a perfectly legitimate right to silence. In a way, the Protestant/unionist culture has no image of itself and consequently accepts those stereotypes which have been created for political purposes, be that within Northern Ireland or from London or Dublin. Stereotypes that are believed in. An important step would therefore be to begin a process of critical definition, if only to reveal the illegitimacy of those terms of reference and to establish new, imaginative ones.

Yet, in dealing with ‘Anglo-lrish attitudes’, Declan Kiberd addresses himself variously to ‘British liberals’, ‘British writers’ and ‘English liberals’, the very dependency that the Fifth Province justifiably challenges; as he does elsewhere in his pamphlet when he criticises those, such as F.S.L. Lyons, who have received ‘praises and prizes’ from the English. However, it ‘is certainly time’, writes Kiberd, ‘that British intellectuals applied themselves to a critical analysis of unionism, what it represents, and what it is doing to Britain as a whole’. ‘British writers’ must ‘apply themselves to the study of Ulster Unionism’; English intellectuals have also virtually excluded ‘any informed assessment of the deeper meanings of Ulster Unionism’.

Writers and critics in Ireland should indeed consider the ‘deeper meanings’, not simply of Ulster unionism, but of the entirety of ‘Protestant’ experience in the North and the common ground Northerners share, irrespective of religion, as Northerners. But if, as Declan Kiberd suggests, ‘in modern Ulster men’s emotions have been ruled not so much by culture as by cash’, then the solution will lie in that direction and the ‘full understanding of the situation in Ireland today’ resolved on that score, whatever about the current intellectual fuss.

But the unverifiability of so much talk about ‘identity’ springs from a severance from common experience and its established terms of negative feeling – hatred, anger, insecurity, bigotry and fear – being sympathetically and imaginatively absorbed. These feelings are fed by particularly virulent forms of supremacy which are themselves reliant upon political and social power-structures throughout the entire country. Only in the North have these become a matter of life and death and they pervade every aspect of contention. It is these terms and their institutionalised structures that will have to be transformed, from the inside, while the dependencies they ritualise will have to be understood and rewritten, before the simple human and ideological barriers to unity are breached in a positive and lasting way.

One notes an implicit interpretation of history as if it were a machine (or monster) which, partially of its own making, but mainly of English making, conscribes ‘the Irish’ to a world of thought detached from independent action (or creation). ‘History’ is populated by brutalised marionettes who continue to dominate the way we think and the way we imagine we feel. But the creative and critical dislocation that takes place as a result of the situation does not illuminate the emotional and subjective bonds that keep both sides in the Northern community locked in what has been described by Thomas Kilroy as ‘a struggle for the irretrievable’. It is this struggle which has most often been dealt with at the level of self-fulfilling ideas; otherwise, as Richard Kearney remarks in Myth and Motherland, it is feared that ‘we capitulate to the mindless conformism of fact’. But facts are not mindless and they dominate only when we perceive them abstractly; cascading into vicious cycles, they are seen as unfit for our solving preconceptions. Up close, fixed in the imagination and in historical reason, they have all the energy, often destructive, of life, its power struggles and their moral and political consequences.

History is not to ‘blame’, but people, and the way the two have drifted apart into exclusive orthodoxies. That is the problem: the human complexity. But when ideas get caught up with only themselves and loosen their moorings in personal experience and historical reality, despite the intention of their being addressed to present social and political conditions, then that critical dialectic has been broken and it is the intellectual process that fossilises, not the world these ideas are intended to change.

There is a conviction which influences much of the discussion about ‘identity’ that a fundamental unity actually underlies Irish culture if only the people could (or would) see it. Whatever about the political manipulation of this ideal and the conflicting forms it takes, it must be time for writers and critics to explore all the shades of its creative viability.

In saying this, I am not suggesting, as some may, imitating Johnson’s anti-Berkeleyan boot against the boulder, that on the rock of one million Protestants thy dreams will perish. Such attitudes betray intolerance and a fear of change. Rather, I am saying that a radical shift of attention is needed. For, in a way, the Protestants of Northern Ireland are peripheral since the critical focus of definition does not involve them. They are, and have always been, a belligerent and beleaguered third party, reacting to the various realignments that have taken place between the dominant two of ‘Ireland’ and ‘England’ so that, no matter what ‘solution’ is arrived at they will, more than likely, remain outside it, against the current. They are, though, symbols of a much deeper malaise in the entire island since it no longer has (if it ever had) a cultural unity.

By their very existence, along with so much else of contemporary and historical experience which is either left out of the picture or modishly caricatured, they threaten such ideals. As a result, they are portrayed as dull, dour and pragmatic – the usual epithets that say as much about ‘Northern Protestants’ as similar glosses say about the Republic.

Some take glum satisfaction in this situation; others see Northern Protestant intransigence as one example of those historical facts and cultural conditions that need imaginative exploration, not exploitation. This exploitation has led to the oppressive edifice of the Northern Irish state while permitting the deceit of nationalism (and superficial reactions against it) to make fools or victims of us all.

There is no prescriptive answer here. For the response of the individual imagination is born of a need to get through as best it can to whomever cares to listen. The mediating role of the print and broadcasting world is crucial. For example, take The Irish Reporter, an important left-of-centre journal, published in Dublin. In a recent issue, there are photographs of ‘Protestants at play’. In one of them a woman, doing a knees-up, shows off her knickers; in the background is an Orange band.

Side on, the title declares, the protestants. The facing page carries a statement from Sinn Féin on its struggle to improve the quality of life of Irish people. There are other articles dealing with post-colonialism but, stuck there in the back pages, is that unrepentant Protestant woman, having a good time.

Subtextually, she is irredeemable in terms of visual messages. The photograph is a covert sign of an intellectual distaste; for this is no folk session – not in the acceptable sense of either word. This is beyond the pale of cultural and political credibility. Like her people, she is as incorrect as the Twelfth bonfire in Tiger’s Bay. But change the context to an Irish emigrant centre in Manchester and one can imagine the justifiable anger at this anti-feminist, racist exploitation.

Over recent years, intellectual and cultural attitudes have hardened towards Northern Protestants and, particularly, to those who consider the union with Britain to be a personal and emotional lifeline separate from the perceived introversions and hypocrisies of the Catholic country to the south and west.

This hardening or dismissiveness is a reflection of a general switch-off in the Republic to the North itself. The place seems stuck in a groove few in the Republic have much private time for, even if the old historical business of fighting the British has the strange afterlife of graffiti. Similarly, the once assumed dominance of Northern writing – or writers from the North – has meant that southern writers – or writers based in the Republic – have become much less sensitive to what goes on north of the border. Attitudes vary between truculence, indifference, and fatigue about what precisely a writer’s attitude should be to the events there and to the nature of the achievement of the writing that has come from writers born there. The reaction to the initial three volumes of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing was in part a reaction against the Northern-ness of its declared political and cultural concerns, primarily with national identity.

Sensibilities were already geared to attack Field Day and the protracted gestation of its anthological statement on Irish writing. Field Day had, by the end of the 1980s, started to look out of step with cultural and political issues in the Republic – questions about private morality and public corruption, the scandals of emigration and commercial greed – and, as we all now know, the fundamental sea change that took place in the self-perception of women in Irish society.

Yet it is a curious feature of the anthology itself that it shares a ‘pan-Irish’ uncertainty when addressing the work, within its own political ambit, of writers from the Northern Protestant background. It is a feature on which Damian Smyth jumped in his condemnation of what he saw as the monolithic dogmatism of Field Day’s nationalism: ‘What cannot be totalised is left out, and the intellectual ethnic-cleansing which sees the absence of the Rhyming Weavers is only slightly less crude in the treatment of the user-friendly Prods of the nationalist discourse’.

Whether or not the absence of the Rhyming Weavers constitutes a capital offence artistically is open to question, but on historical grounds the omission is regrettable. The failure to select a just sample of women’s writing was, however, inexcusable. As for the ‘user-friendly Prods’, it is instructive to see the manner in which two of them are described in the anthology.

It has to be said that the headnotes in the anthology vary from the almost apocalyptic eagerness with which John Montague casts himself ‘at times’ – ‘unashamedly in the bardic role of spokesperson for the tribe’ – to the subdued etiquette of Michael Longley’s ‘self-effacing courtesy, his dry good humour’. Longley is, however, inexplicably defined in terms of the ‘semi-detached suburban muse of Philip Larkin and ... British post-modernism, as is manifest in his homage to L.S. Lowry’. There is in this summary absolutely no accounting for the surreal, the love lyrics, the bizarre and the classical in Longley, all of which coalesce to make a poetry constitutionally different from the despairing symbolism of Philip Larkin. Longley is also paired with Mahon in a Siamese-twinning of cultural aspiration whereby both poets are taken to represent ‘a strand of Ulster that identifies itself as British and asserts its rights to the English lyric’.

Mahon is ‘The most underrated Irish poet of the century’ – underrated by whom? – and the ontological frame of being a ‘post-holocaust poet’ is hedged in the following terms as one who ‘may yet prove to be the most durable talent of his generation. He writes not just of, but for, posterities’ [my italics]. These uncertainties suggest the wide intellectual instability when it comes to examining the cultural and literary issues of Northern Protestantism.

Longley is conscribed to history as an Irish Larkin, while Mahon exists in a futuristic critical limbo. The significance of this unease plays across the cultural and political life of Ireland. It moderates from good-humoured banter and wit, perplexity and arrogance to bewilderment and contempt, with an average mean in sorrow, bemusement and superiority complexes all around. ‘Protestants’ are considered ‘unionists’ (or, more fashionably, ‘neo unionists’) unless they publicly declare to the contrary and seek asylum in ‘Irish Literature’. Failure to do so unsettles the kind of cultural agendas that the media, publishing and academic worlds rely upon, both in Ireland and abroad.

In an interview in The Irish Times on the occasion of being awarded the Whitbread Prize for his collection Gorse Fires, Michael Longley remarked on the selection from his work in The Field Day Anthology: ‘I object to being embalmed wearing a false face, a mask. I feel diminished and travestied. I had thought of asking to be withdrawn from subsequent editions, but it seemed self-important.’

The sense of not having the freedom to be one’s self (to be considered on one’s own imaginative ground, so to speak) but inhibited instead by cultural priorities not of one’s own making, leads to all sorts of negations and misrepresentations. How could it be, though, that an anthology of this magnitude, such an extraordinary achievement in so very many ways, should end up with a call for it to be pulped and other suggestions of withdrawal? From the convicted ‘terrorist’ in a prison in the south of Ireland reciting his poems about ‘Ireland’ that sound little different from the rhetoric of the nineteen-century Young Irelanders, to the designer caricatures surrounding the term ‘Northern Protestant’, it is tempting to see all writing from Ireland as forever folkloric, underpinned by regional or national loyalties and political designs. This is folly, to quote the critic Patrick Wright, because it toys with the idea that politics can be conjured out of cultural roots at will. Should this be where we are heading, poetry had better look to its laurels.

1985–93