Inventing Ireland (35 page)

In later work still, O'Casey would further explore the possibility that a man or woman can take control of destiny. This search for a sort of Protestant self-election explains the visionary quality of
Purple Dust
and
Red Roses For Me,
in which he develops a fully-fledged Christian socialism of a kind lacking in the Dublin trilogy. In
Red Roses For Me,
he finally
summons
the courage to imagine Dublin not as the city is but as he would want it to be: the inference is that man will only transform the world through socialism after he has been first transformed by religious belief. Neither religion nor socialism alone was enough for O'Casey: religion had shown him the hollowness of life, and then life went and spoiled everything by demonstrating the hollowness of religion. Only a vision encompassing both could satisfy him in the end, and that vision was achieved for the first time in his portrayal of the battle-fields of Europe in
The Silver lassie.

That achievement is of a rare order in modern European writing, and almost unexampled in the dramatic form. It may have seemed churlish to criticize him for evasions, when he also confronted so much that other artists swiftly pass by.

War, after all, is the ultimate desolation of reality, a fantastic intensification of all that is noble and base in civil society. Writers, by tradition, use art to intensify reality, but war does this for them, unasked. Instead of the more usual task of making the everyday seem exceptional, it demands that the artist make the exceptional available in terms of the familiar. War writing is traditionally imagined as coming from the front-line back to the society in whose name battles are waged. It is seldom, if ever, imagined as written by combatants for other combatants. It is, in fact, rarely written by combatants at all, for they are too busy fighting. Some exceptions there have been in the thick of battle – Owen,
Sassoon and the poets of World War One – but the
Georgian traditions which they inherited proved quite inadequate to meet the technical challenge posed by the trenches. Their attempt, though never likely to convince, seemed all the more necessary in the face of the cover-up by officialdom: throughout the hostilities in the Great War, not a single paper, British or German, published a photograph of a single maimed body. The myth of the individual was still too strong.

In consequence, soldiers home on leave could find no words for their experience, and some found it hard to believe that they had been caught up in the hostilities hours before. Even on the battle-fields a sense of unreality seemed to pervade. Unable to see the enemy whom they were killing for days on end, soldiers sometimes resorted to theatrical gestures: a famous German gunner would stand by his machine above the trenches, fire a round, step gravely back, doff his helmet, and with a ridiculously excessive gesture, bow to the enemy infantry. Perhaps he was hoping to prove that an audience was indeed out there, or maybe he was just hoping to be killed.
¹⁷
Those generals who would later use the term "theatre" for the zones of battle were merely ratifying a notion which had struck Yeats and others at the start of the century. There was indeed a sense in which the 1916 insurgents were as real a presence in the poetry of Yeats as they ever were in their uniforms in the Post Office. The crisis of representation which dogged the neo-Georgians in the trenches also afflicted them.

Faced with these difficulties, a poet like
Wilfred Owen could only "warn", but the public proved unresponsive. Reared on fables of heroism, it thought the whole thing a bracing game. The poets were on a hiding to nothing. The Great
War was, in Scott Fitzgerald's words, the last great love battle, fought for all the old, high abstractions:
¹⁸
and so was Easter 1916. In England, those few soldier-poets who demanded a more honest language were silenced or put in mental hospitals. Yeats, when he came to edit
The
Oxford Book of Modern Verse,
notoriously excluded their work: Owen, he complained, was "all blood and dirt and sucked sugar-stick".
¹⁹
This was, of course, the same Yeats who had denied a high degree of reality to the Great War, and who refused to write a poem about it on request.

One major reason for the widespread reluctance of people to engage imaginatively with the war was the fact that its mass-graves so clearly discredited the meliorism of the late nineteenth century. In "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" Yeats could admit that the "pretty toys" of youth were gone, but it was hard to give them up completely, a prospect which
Henry James found "too tragic for any words".
²⁰
He predicted that
literature would remain silent on the topic, chastened by its own inarticulacy: and so, largely, it turned out. It was as if an entire generation's energy had been used up in the fighting, with little left to depict it afterwards. Even to attempt this seemed, to some sensitive souls, a betrayal of dead comrades left on the battle-field, an outrageous pretence of being able to communicate the immensity of their suffering. Some things resisted even literature. The fact that O'Casey had not
been in the trenches may thus be more easily forgiven: had he been there, he would never in all likelihood have attempted
The Silver Tassie.
He had, after all, walked across a real Dublin battle-field in 1916, and, perhaps as a result, it had never found direct representation in his plays.

From this distance in time, the myths surrounding 1916 and the Somme seem almost identical. In Ireland it was soon put about that the most creative and promising intellects had been lost in the Rising by a small country that could ill afford such a reckless expenditure of young talent. "Easter 1916" was a primary sponsor of this myth, since it mourned not just Pearse but MacDonagh, the "helper and friend" who "might have won fame in the end". That was the Irish version of the English tale of a lost generation of brilliant officers cut down in their prime at the Somme. Both narratives had equally little basis in fact. Though British losses in the officer corps were heavy, most who served came home to become political and social leaders. Similarly, most of the intellectuals of the Irish Renaissance survived the experience of war and counter-revolution. In the case of England, it has been argued that "the myth of the rising generation provided an important self-image for the survivors" and "a means of accounting for the disappointments of the present".
²¹
James Connolly's sad prediction came true: the worship of the past really was a way of reconciling people to the mediocrity of the present. Moreover, the myth reflected the survivors' guilt at being alive while so many comrades were dead, along with the conviction that it might still be possible to show that the sacrifices had not all been in vain.

Yeats was simply the first major literary intellectual of the century to lead his followers in darkness down the now-familiar road of
decolonization: many would be the writers of emergent nations across the world who would come after him . . . Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, Ashis Nandy and so on. Ireland differed from other countries in several important ways, some of which increased the
difficulties facing Irish leaders, others of which assisted them in their efforts.

Most obvious, perhaps, was the sheer duration of the colonial occupation, which lasted more than seven centuries. Set against that, however, was the close proximity of Ireland to England: affinities of climate, temperament and culture made it hard for the English to treat the Irish consistently as their absolute Other and led to attempts, such as the Act of Union in 1800, to assimilate the occupied land into a united kingdom. To some this seemed a benign offer of membership in one of the greatest organizations in human history: to many others it was the most insidious of all oppressive tactics. However one looked at them, the enforced intimacies of Anglo-Irish relations "created bom bitterness and tolerances of unusual refinement".
¹
It was a measure of the challenge faced by Hyde and Yeats that the Anglicization which they countered had penetrated every layer of Irish life, a situation rather different from that to be encountered in Africa or Asia, whose emerging peoples were generally not so deeply permeated by the culture of the colonizer. Ireland was so thoroughly penetrated that, apart from a few scattered areas of the western seaboard, it had ceased to exist as an "elsewhere" to the English mind.

These differences apart, there were many striking analogies between the arguments and experiences of the leaders of the Irish Revival and those in the wider world who would eventually follow them. The analogies were unclear to many Irish at the start of this century, for
the simple reason that what they were doing seemed almost without parallel: they were the first English-speaking people in this century to win political and cultural freedom from a power which had not been defeated in war. The more acute minds, of course, could make their own comparisons: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the lover of Lady Gregory, was struck by the similarities between the causes of Arab and Irish independence, for both of which he worked . . . and a few years before the Easter Rising, Joseph
Plunkett visited Egypt. Yeats sensed acutely enough that just as he and Russell looked to Whitman and Poe as exemplars of the democratic muse, so future Indian and African
writers might look to them.

So he provided the Abbey Theatre in 1913 as a venue for a production of Rabindranath Tagore's
The Post Office,
a popular Indian play which suggested that redemption would not come from any parliament but only from a supernatural king: the proceeds of the production were in aid of
St. Enda's, the school run on Gaelic principles by Patrick Pearse. Throughout his life, Yeats was keen to maintain contacts with Indian writers and intellectuals, sometimes supporting agitations for their defence against British courts. Rabindranath Tagore, for his part, was a serious student not just of Yeats but of other Irish authors: when asked by English administrators if they had not secured his individual freedom, he reminded them that people who had political freedom were not necessarily free in the expressive sense, merely powerful in worldly terms – an argument gleaned from Shaw's
criticisms of the English in
Man and Superman
(1903).

"Until the Battle of the Boyne", wrote Yeats,
"Ireland belonged to Asia".
²
By this he meant to imply a common racial and linguistic link between Indo-European peoples: a theory which, however far-fetched, was widely endorsed by leading Indian writers such as
Lokmanya Tilak. Undeniably, many of those Irish who went to India had seemed to strike a profound chord with its peoples:
Margaret Noble from Dungannon arrived in 1902 and rapidly emerged as an inspiring spiritual teacher and nationalist leader, who at her early death just eight years later was hailed by Tagore as "Mother of the Indian People". Mrs.
Annie Besant, whom Yeats had come to know in theosophical circles in London, had a lasting impact on both Irish and Indian cultures, and was elected president of the Indian National Congress in 1917: she is credited by many commentators with the successful application of Irish methods of political agitation in the campaigns waged by Indian separatists.
³

If the political influences flowed mostly from west to east, the cultural and spiritual traffic was as likely to move in the opposite
direction. Both W. B. Yeats and George Russell
studied
eastern wisdom: early and late, Yeats proclaimed himself a follower of such spiritual teachers as
Mohini Chatterjee and Sri Purohit Swami, with whom he worked on the
Upanishads.
The poet had hoped to visit India and to meditate there on a holy mountain, emptying himself of all earthly desire. However, the Steinach operation, which seems to have reactivated his sexual urge, put paid to that: literary Dublin, on hearing that monkey glands had been implanted, scoffed that this was like equipping a worn-out Ford with the engine of a Rolls Royce. Yeats did, however, receive a deputation of Indian writers and intellectuals, who asked him why he did not write in Irish. "No man can think or write with music and vigour except in his mother tongue", he told them; "I could no more have written in Gaelic than can those Indians write in English; Gaelic is my native language, but it is not my mother tongue".
⁴

His hybrid predicament was not at all untypical of persons in the English colonies: and the analogies between the Irish and Indians were explored in this context by such leading contemporary novelists as
Rudyard Kipling, who created in
Kim
(1901) a hero who should have been Irish, but whose father abandoned him in India to a fate which leaves him neither English nor Indian. Kim becomes, in consequence, the cross-dresser
par excellence,
skilled at imitating everyone else whenever that is necessary, but unclear as to how he could play the part that is truly his own. His ambivalence leaves him in one sense a recognizably Irish figure, at once an exponent of imperialism
and
one of its victims. He has, however, the unqualified sympathy which Kipling reserved for those who served the British Empire but did not personally benefit from that service. Though Kipling could see the potential of the Irish-Indian analogy in the promotion of empire, it did not seem to strike him that this was also being invoked by militant opponents of the idea in both countries.

Those opponents often found themselves sharing common ground and platforms in the United States, where exiled Irish nationalists were heartened by the support of Indians who studied their methods. The Home Rule agitation mounted by
Shyamaji in India in 1905 followed the Irish example, and from that year onwards the
Gaelic American
and
Clan na Gael
journals carried extensive coverage of India. In 1907, the Irish Parliamentary Party rejected a British offer of severely limited autonomy.
Aurobindo Ghosh, a radical leader of the Indian National Congress and editor of
Bande Mataram,
praised the party's refusal to be bought: "Instead of a separate nationality with its own culture, language, government, the Irish would have ended up by becoming a big
English county governed by a magnified and glorified parish council".
⁵
He urged his fellow-Indians to follow this unappeasable policy. Some of those who took his advice journeyed to England, in order to organize Indian militants: when a number of these were jailed, Maud Gonne and Sinn Féin advised their comrades on the logistics of mounting a rescue operation. The coaching cannot have been very thorough, since the van attacked by the Indians proved quite empty.

These alliances grew even stronger in the heady years of 1919 and 1920. Irish and Indians shared platforms across the United States, protesting against the deportation of Indian nationalists. The
Ghadar Party – an organization of Indian workers in the US which wished by armed force to destroy the
British Raj – presented Éamon de
Valera with an engraved sword and an Irish flag: and on 28 February 1920 de Valera delivered a trenchant speech in New York at a meeting of Friends of the Freedom of India. Taking courage from the American example, he reminded his audience of Washington's message to the patriots of Ireland: "your cause is identical with mine", adding the inflection "Patriots of India, your cause is identical with ours".
⁶
He hoped that the ties which by then bound Ireland and America would soon bind Ireland to India; and, though the different conditions might call forth a variation in tactics, he urged immediate revolt: "We in Ireland, comparatively small in numbers, close to the heart of Britain's imperial power, have never despaired. You, people of India, remote from her, a continent in yourselves, seventy times as numerous as we are, surely you will not despair!"

De Valera scoffed at arguments that England went to Ireland or India "to teach them the way of prosperity and civilization". "When or where", he asked, "has the British Empire shown such altruism?" Rather these colonies were drained of wealth and food: the famines which plagued India in consequence might be unimaginable to Americans but were well understood in Ireland; and the massacre of unarmed civilians by
General Dyer at
Amritsar in 1919 "is nothing new to us". No Irishman needed a book to tell him what went on in India: he had only to consider the history of his native land, he said, to know that famine was the weapon used to kill off a people whose burgeoning population struck fear into the hearts of imperial administrators. Those who attributed poverty to native laziness had tried the same device on Ireland and had fooled nobody. De Valera pronounced himself unimpressed by claims, such as those advanced by Bernard Shaw, that it was only the British upper-class which was to blame. "The common citizen's vote it is that maintains his government in power", he averred,
and if they fail to change their rulers, "they are guilty with the others", whatever their protestations of democratic government.

Americans should put pressure on trade union leaders, for "the rule of the people by a foreign despot is a terrible thing, but the rule of a people by a foreign democracy is the worst of all, for it is the most irresponsible of all". He commended a study of the Irish revival to his Indian friends: the lesson was that moral force alone would never convince the British unless backed up by physical force. He ended ringingly: "we swear friendship tonight; and we send our common greetings and our pledges to our brothers in Egypt and in Persia, and tell them also that their cause is our cause".
⁷

The following month, a large party of Indian Hindus in native dress walked in the St. Patrick's Day parades of New York: and Irish sailors on the high seas carried messages and intelligence between Indian nationalists at home and abroad.
⁸
In the years that followed, groups like the
Women's Irish Education League of San Francisco, founded after a visit by Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, led boycotts of British ships and organized meetings for Indian speakers. There was a mixture of idealism and pragmatism in these alliances: many Irish were still convinced that British rule in India was the obstacle to the freedom of other colonial peoples, including themselves. Not all Irish nationalists were happy with this: though radicals like
Liam Mellows sought to develop contacts, others (according to a British intelligence report) had "a poor opinion of the Indian extremists and decline to work with them".
⁹

If many – perhaps a majority of– Irish writers and nationalists were slow to identify with movements elsewhere, this was because their minds were unresponsive to the
comparative method, having been attuned to the revivalist idea that the Irish were unique, "like no other race on earth". The British authorities, of course, were under no such illusions and cabinet minutes from 1919 onwards recorded fears that if the Irish case were conceded, the flames of revolt would be fanned in India and elsewhere. Moreover, certain members of the cabinet, notably
H. A. L. Fisher, grew frustrated by Lloyd George's obsession with Ireland in 1921 and lamented that the Prime Minister was neglecting the case of Egypt, during the negotiations late in that year of the
Anglo-Irish Treaty.
¹⁰
After the Treaty had been secured,
The
Round Table
predicted that the Egyptians and Indians now had every excuse for thinking that the English would concede to persistent clamour; and it warned that unless the English closed their ears, they would lose the empire and deserve to lose it.
¹¹
During the previous summer, in private
sessions of the Dáil debates in Dublin, Sean T. O'Kelly reported messages of congratulation from Poland, Turkey, India and Egypt: the Indians and Egyptians, in particular, accompanied their message with requests for advice on methods.
¹²

Those Indian overtures came hard upon the mutiny of a group of Irish soldiers in the Connaught Rangers during June of the previous year, 1920, at the Wellington Barracks, Jullundur. News of the burning of rural Irish towns and proscription of hurling matches prompted one soldier,
Joe Hawes, to tell his comrades that "we were doing in India what the British forces were doing in Ireland".
¹³
Refusing to parade, about thirty members of "C" company shouted "up the rebels!" Their tearful commanding officer reminded them in an eloquent speech of their great reputation, won over thirty-three years; but Hawes stepped forward to say that while those exploits had been done for England, this latest one for Ireland would be counted the greatest honour of all. They said they would soldier no more "until all British troops had been removed from Ireland" and they flew a makeshift tricolour. The authorities were fearful that Indian nationalists, on hearing of this turn of events, might be emboldened to attack the British.