Inventing Ireland (10 page)

It would appear, therefore, that Broadbent is merely playing the
stage Englishman in Ireland, the better to get the villagers off guard and into his pocket. Now and then, he lets his mask of joviality slip, as when he says that there are only two sorts in the world, the efficient and the inefficient, and that Matt Haffigan is worked out. To Keegan's protest at this ruthlessness, Larry Doyle says that Haffigan doesn't matter, at which point Broadbent replaces his mask of bonhomie by saying "O, it's hard on Haffigan".
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When Keegan thereupon offers his devastating prophecy of what will happen to the landless labourers under the syndicate, Broadbent gives the hypocrite's tell-tale start of recognition. But is Keegan any less of a hypocrite? After all, he says at once that he may even vote for Broadbent and his plans.

Is Larry Doyle any better? He himself seems unsure as to whether his partner is a conscious or unconscious hypocrite. His accusation that Broadbent keeps conflicting ideas in sealed watertight compartments seems the sketch of a
conscious
rogue: but later he calls Broadbent a romantic duffer, who doesn't even realize when the Irish are mocking him. So he is not at all clear as to the nature of the man whom he knows best Nonetheless, Larry is a rather impressive diagnostician with a keen analytic brain. At the level of instinct, however, Broadbent may be more assured, as when a sixth sense tells him that Larry's reluctance to return to Ireland may be connected with some unfinished business with a woman. Does Broadbent want Nora because he needs a political wife, or because he is genuinely moved by her Irish charm (as moved as Larry is by the "animated beefsteaks" whom he meets in London breadshops)? Or is Broadbent fascinated by Nora because he suspects, deep down, that Larry still loves her?

Larry remains a rather confusing guide on all these matters. The stage directions which introduce Nora describe her from the viewpoint of Larry in England. At the age of thirty-six, with a paltry income and no prospects, she is an eighteenth-century figure, a diluted version of the
aisling
heroine, a Cathleen ní Houlihan gone pallid and limp: "useless, sexless, an invalid without the excuse of a disease, an incarnation of everything in Ireland that drove him out".
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Compared with Shaw's manly heroines, she seems vapid and weak; and non-existent compared with the Cathleen ní Houlihan, whom Yeats celebrated in an Abbey play of two years earlier. If she is Ireland, this woman has been awaiting the return of her lover, or the courtship of any man, for a long time. Yet no sooner does Larry set foot in Ireland than he is once again
embroiled in all the old complexities of the courtship. He wants her, but something self-defeating in his temperament prevents him from having her. This is the Larry of whom his English partner has observed that he has no capacity for enjoyment and could never make any woman happy. In truth, the play seems to suggest that Larry Doyle cares more for Broadbent and owes more to him, than he cares for or owes to any Irish person:

Don't you understand that I'm Irish, he's English. He wants you and he grabs you. I want you and I quarrel with you and have to go on wanting you.
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All this would seem to ratify the stereotype, of the ineffectual Celt, who shows a disinclination to submit to duty or (if Nora epitomizes Ireland) to the discipline of self-government, and who actually prefers to pass such disagreeable chores on to the more skilled English.

It would be possible to interpret the plot not only as a proof of English hypocrisy but also, more surprisingly, of Irish cunning. It can certainly be argued that it is the Irish who, at all key moments, are the true manipulators of the situation. They have a rooted disrespect for parliamentary democracy and don't wish to waste their money or their personnel on its empty rituals: and so it pleases their sense of irony to send an Englishman to represent them at so meaningless a convocation. All the better if he takes a local spinster with him, and reinvests some of his private means in the decaying village. Larry might even be seen as the arch-conspirator here – "allowing" his pal to win the woman and seat which he never really wanted anyway, and using Broadbent as the flak-catcher and front for an exploitative syndicate of which he himself is the evil genius. True enough, it is Broadbent who takes the brunt of Keegan's closing diatribe against industrial capitalism, while Doyle escapes relatively unscathed, even though he repeatedly uses the word "we" to describe the syndicate.

Whether the ultimate cynicism is imputed to Broadbent or to Doyle, the ending is pure
Celticism, a ratification of the cliché of the efficient English administrator and the impractical Irish doomed by their complexity of mind to hopeless incompetence in the world of affairs. Both sides exemplify contradictory thinking, but the Englishman can keep the compartments of his thought separate in the manner of a professional specialist, while the Irish are victims of what Parnell once called "the cursed versatility of the Celt".

Such a surrender to the stereotype comes most strangely in a play
which set itself to dismantle just that kind of thinking, and which has done so up to a point, poking bitter fun at the extent to which the Irish revival was really a farce got up for English tourists. That revivalist moment would, decades later, be described by Franc Fanon as a classic ploy of the occupier, who decides to mummify and exhibit the colonial culture at just the moment when the natives have determined to modernize it. Shaw, in his essays, repeatedly warned English tourists that modern Ireland was "in full reaction against both servility and the stage Irishman", adding that so determined were the natives to resist English illusions of them that "it is a point of honour with the modern Irishman to have no sense of humour"
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– but the play itself more despondently suggests that there will be no escape from mummification. Indeed, with his plans for golf clubs and polytechnic schools, the occupier can even cast this transformation of a native culture into tourist kitsch under the guise of
modernization. Keegan concludes his bleak, almost Marxian diagnosis, with a demonstration that this "dream of efficiency" is no better than the futile dreaming derided by Larry Doyle early in the play. But then he, as we have seen, is coopted by Broadbent, who considers him a dead ringer for an Irish Ruskin. Clearly, Broadbent's greatest intellectual achievement is to have converted half the villagers into literary material.

Yet there is in Keegan's climactic speeches at least the makings of an alternative to the Anglo-Irish antithesis epitomized by Doyle and Broadbent. Keegan's dream is of a place or state of grace where such slot-rolling categories are transcended, a place where the state is the church because the church is the people, three in one and one in three, a Utopia where work is play because play is life. His diagnosis is clearer than Doyle's: the Englishman is clever in his foolishness, the Irishman foolish in his cleverness. Liberation is possible only to those who surmount those categories and who reject that specialization of roles to be found wherever the left side of the brain doesn't know what the right side is doing. Shaw's repeated critiques of the professions – which he compared to prostitution in
Mrs. Warren's Profession –
are based on his conviction that the specialist is a mere barbarian and that only a fully integrated personality can restore a sane society. Keegan is a Blakean visionary who senses that, having lost contact with his feminine instincts, man has lost half his political wisdom and compassion: without these attributes, his own gifts are no longer a source of strength but a liability, since reason untouched by emotion tends to the vices of specialization and exploitation.

Again and again, Larry Doyle regrets the division of his Irish world
into two halves: a world of brutal fact and unreal dream, the one never mitigating the other but both completely compartmentalized. However, he cannot move beyond this diagnosis. Alone among the characters on stage, Keegan can see that the perception of such a choice may itself be a product of the
imperial mission. It was, after all, a contradiction within the English mind which led it to project inconsistent attributes onto the
Irish, who were held to be at once dreamy and spiritual, scheming and sinister. Arnold, as has been shown, sought to combine Celtic dreaming and Saxon pragmatism in a single, renovated British personality – but the insistence that facts are always brutal and dreams invariably unreal is a very English mode of thought; and Shaw saw no reason why the Irish should accept it.

Many postcolonial writers have pursued in art a
magic realism which reconciles poetry and fact in such a way that they become indistinguishable: and this, in the play, is Keegan's intent. He sees Ireland as holy ground, a blessed place where Utopia might yet be found, but he also fears that it may be turning into a little England. His loose, easygoing priesthood recalls the early Christian Ireland of wandering scholars, even as his three-in-one symbology recalls
St. Patrick. Compared with ail that richness, he finds the modern world a grim exercise in
anglicization and gradgrindery:

... a place where children are scourged and enslaved in the name of parental duty and education; where the weak in body are poisoned and mutilated in the name of healing, and the weak in character put to the horrible torture of imprisonment.. . It's a place where the hardest toil is a welcome refuge from the horror and tedium of pleasure, where charity and good works are done only for hire to ransom the souls of the spoiler and sybarite . . .
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– and the truly lost are those, like Broadbent and Doyle, who seem happy in such a hell. Keegan's mission is to save them, as Ireland must save England, not by repairing the flaws of an industrial civilization but by transcending it altogether. To Broadbent's promise that the tourists will bring money from England to Ireland, Keegan scoffs: "As they brought money from Ireland to England. Has that saved England from a poverty and degradation more horrible than we have ever dreamed of?"
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In restoring Ireland, Keegan would hope to reinvent a better England for Broadbent to return to as well.

In the final analysis, however, for all his wonderful talk, Keegan is hard put to save himself. He must assume an antic disposition simply
to survive as licensed jester and unofficial guru to the villagers: already, indeed, an Irish Ruskin. The price of his extensive knowledge and versatile intellect is incapacity. His diagnosis may be sharper than Doyle's and his vision more probing, but his plight is even more circumscribed. However bravely he may have tried to transcend the Celtic categories, his last state perfectly exemplifies the problem of one defeated by his very own superiority of spirit.

This was, of course, Shaw's problem too: his increasing tendency, after the turn of the century, to create in his plays a
visionary figure whose insights, though always as practical as they were idealistic, were not negotiable in any currencies known to mis world. The consequence is a repeated frustration among audiences at the apparent failure of his plays to match their devastating diagnoses with something approaching a workable prescription. Instead, they seem to veer off into inconclusive reverie and, in doing so, sometimes surrender to the already-discredited opening categories. So a play which begins as a plea for sexual freedom may end as a paean to monogamy; a call for a Superman may lapse into a programme for Emersonian self-help; a vindication of St. Joan may turn out to be a justification of her accusers; and a dismantling of the Anglo-Irish antithesis may conclude with an unexpected reassertion of its veracity.

It is no accident mat the British Prime Minister
Arthur Balfour should have attended
John Bull's Other Island
with cabinet colleagues
on four separate occasions, or that King
Edward VII should have broken his chair while laughing at the production. After all, the play gratified English vanity, by managing at once to criticize the old stereotype and at the same time to suggest that it was true in a deeper and subtler way than many suspected. English audiences not only found their ancient prejudices confirmed by a witty Irish playwright, but could leave the theatre with unexpected and sophisticated evidence in support of their ancient bias. It was all too fitting that Shaw should have described himself as a faithful servant of the English people. There is a real sense in which his own play is an artistic casualty of the vice of compartmentalization which he satirizes. The plot issues in an emphatic victory for the efficient and romantic Englishman, while all the subversive witticisms have been uttered by the cynical but inactive Irishman.

This was the selfsame dualism which Shaw detected in the plays of Wilde, each of which contains some scathing aphorisms at the expense of a classbound society, but whose power to disturb is disarmed by the reassuringly conventional nature of Wilde's plots. In such plots, the
aristocratic society always seems to win out: in
The Importance of Being Earnest
Lady Bracknell can, finally, marry Gwendolen off to a young man of her own exalted class. Both Wilde and Shaw are ultimately English writers in the strict terms of Shaw's own definition of English-ness as a talent for keeping ideas separate in distinct zones. If the right side of the brain doesn't know what the left doeth, the plots of these plays are entirely at variance with the subversive one-liners and jokes. All of which is a measure of the artistic constraints
on any radical dramatist who sought a career on the London stage at the time.

Shaw was, however, always able to justify his continuing residency in England. "I could have been a poet like Yeats and Synge", he boasted in the preface to
John Bull's Other Island,
"but I prided myself on dunking clearly and therefore could not stay. . . Whenever I took a problem, I always pursued it to its logical conclusion and inevitably it resolved itself into a comedy. . . England had conquered Ireland, so there was nothing for it but to come over and conquer England".
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In casting himself as a faithful servant of his adopted country, Shaw did not mean to under-rate the subversive potential of all servant classes, that honourable Jeeves-like tradition of helping their masters out of the scrapes in which they have landed themselves. And not just the masters. Having studied Marx, Shaw knew that he was also honour-bound to emancipate the English proletariat, a group far more in need of leadership, he felt, than the Irish peasantry.