Inventing Ireland (36 page)

The Punjab was then in a state of tension and the killings at Amritsar were fresh in the popular memory. At the end of June, there were three hundred and ninety Irish mutineers by official estimate, and though they refused to file in on command from one of their British officers, they responded with discipline to the instructions of
James Daly, who had stepped forward to assert that he was now in charge of the detachment. They were subsequently removed, bedraggled but defiant, in bullock carts, carrying with them all their possessions in boxes, on which perched their pet monkey, cockatoos and parrots. Told that they could have no effect on policy and that their persistence would ruin their careers, they took pause, but Daly assured them that what they had done would be reported in every newspaper and emulated by the other Irish regiments in the army. An attempt to detach and execute the ringleaders was prevented by an elderly Roman Catholic priest who interposed himself, beseeching the general to hold fire. Later, however, after a courtmartial, five were condemned to death, two to life and two to twenty years' imprisonment, one for fifteen years, and so on. Some of the death sentences were commuted, but Daly was shot. "What harm?" he wrote home to his Westmeath mother in a last letter on 19 February 1921: "it is all for Ireland". He refused a morphine injection and an eye-bandage, telling his firing-squad that "some day the men in the cells over there may be free". Thirteen bullets cut him to bits, so that fragments of
his flesh and bone stuck into the wall behind; but Hawes and the others reassembled the body as best they could for burial.

It seems that none of these men had any contact with Indian nationalists, and the mutineers who survived said that they had never thought to make any: but word soon got through. A Poona journal, praising these patriotic soldiers, contrasted them with the Indian troops who had "shot down their innocent countrymen and children at the order of General Dyer". A Delhi paper commented approvingly that "the Irish people can preserve their honour, defy the orders of the Government, and defeat its unjust aims".
¹⁴
The British intelligence network thought it likely that de Valera's speech in New York urging Indian-Irish collaboration might have motivated the men, but it seems unlikely that newspapers carrying this speech could have come into their possession.

It must also be remembered that, as British soldiers who had taken an
oath of allegiance to the crown, the mutineers were in the strange position
of
being seen as "legitimate targets" by Irish republican gunmen, who actually killed dozens of ex-servicemen in the year after the mutiny. Some of the convicted mutineers, from their prisons back in England, appealed for leniency and early release, so that they might join the Free State army and assist the fight against de Valera's republicans in the Civil War. Not all who returned joined the army, or were even asked to do so. Cynics wondered if these men were patriots at all or merely disorderly crown recruits, but their subsequent tales of the brutality which they endured in English jails confirmed their status as folk heroes.

After the Civil War of 1922–3, the republicans tried to organize further contacts with other nationalist movements. In 1924,
Sean T. O'Kelly told the Friends of the Freedom of India in New York that if the great empires found it advantageous to keep in touch with one another, their victims should too. As a representative of the Irish Republic in Paris during the
World Peace Conference, he had tried "to form some kind of association" involving Ireland, India, Egypt and others,
¹⁵
but had received little support from any but the Egyptians. One reason, O'Kelly added sarcastically, was that India was represented by British officials and "a tamed Indian Prince or two in their train just to add a little dash of appropriate colour to the delegation". He was equally scathing about English administrators, dressed in Mohammedan garments for the purpose of convincing a gullible public that they represented the Arab peoples: "it was most humiliating to any honest person to see how all these great peoples of the East were treated". Even more distressing to O'Kelly was the refusal of the tamed Indian
delegation "to risk being tarnished by even momentary association with an Irish rebel".

In a tone of high irony, O'Kelly went on to praise England's self-sacrificing mission in Ireland and India, and to mock the claim of their poor benighted peoples that "they had a highly developed educational system of their own and a distinct culture with a written as well as an oral literature of their own, thousands of years before the English". With robust sarcasm, he parodied the official theory: "it was for our good that England decried our language and our ancient literature and Anglicized or banned our schools and our colleges and our universities". He hoped that it would not take the Indians or the Egyptians as long as it had taken the Irish to learn the necessary lessons of such treatment, and so he quoted Tagore:

To hold India forever is an impossibility,
It is against the law of the universe.
Even the tree has to part with its fruits . . .

and again:

Brother, do not be discouraged for God slumbers not nor sleeps.
The tighter the knot the shorter will be your period of bondage . . .

O'Kelly apologized to Indians and Egyptians for those of Irish background who had assisted in their oppression and "formed the backbone of the invading and destroying armies".
¹⁶
He promised to make amends for wrongs done by English regiments bearing such names as Connaught Rangers, Munster Fuseliers, Dublin Fuseliers, Inniskillens and so on. He also regretted the collaboration in the British administration of India by Irishmen who lacked the excuse of most soldiers that "what they did they did in ignorance, not in malice". Many soldiers, he conceded, had joined up as an alternative to starvation, only to find themselves used against their fellow-countrymen. He asked why India, "with a cultural history second to that of no nation in the world", should submit to mere military might; and he recalled for them the words of Terence MacSwiney, whose message, he believed, was taken up by Tagore:

If you expect to live and to command respect in this world,
First be prepared to give your lives for your mother . . .

The notion was most famously developed by
Mahatma Gandhi, who wrote of Ireland in 1921: "I would like the reader to believe with me that it is not the blood that the Irishmen have taken which has given them what appears to be their liberty. But it is the gallons of blood they have willingly given themselves. It is not the fear of losing more lives that has compelled a reluctant offer from England, but it is the shame of any further imposition of agony upon a people that loves its liberty above everything else. It is the magnitude of the Irish sacrifice which has been the deciding factor".
¹⁷

In his concluding remarks to the Friends of the Freedom of India, O'Kelly warned that the British loved to foster internal divisions in order to weaken the emerging nation: so
Mohammedan,
Hindu and Christian must sink their differences in the common name of Indian (a deliberate echo, there, of Wolfe Tone). Even more important was the moral and spiritual revolution then being led by Gandhi, he averred: "the soldiers who are engaged in the intellectual battle must lead and mark out the way for the army engaged in the physical conflict with the enemy".
¹⁸
And he ended his address as de Valera had commenced his, by placing both movements under the auspices of the American Revolution: as
Thomas Jefferson had invented America, they were now about the work of inventing India and Ireland.

Despite these manifold contacts with Indian nationalists, it would be unwise to infer that a united anti-imperial front was ever a serious possibility. The vast distance between Ireland and India militated against it – it is significant that many of the contacts were made on US soil and publicized before largely American audiences. The evidence all suggests that the Indians were far more likely to proclaim their solidarity with the Irish than
vice versa.
De Valera and O'Kelly were uncomfortably aware that within the tradition of Irish nationalism was a strain of white triumphalism, which ran from John Mitchel to Arthur Griffith and which would never countenance such a solidarity. Even more depressing was the fact that an otherwise advanced thinker such as James Connolly did not develop a generalized anti-racist or anti-imperialist philosophy. Immediate realities in Scotland and Ireland were just too pressing.

All of which may help to explain why many Irish leaders and artists, having glimpsed the potentials of a global alliance with other emerging peoples, could so easily forget them in the drive to Europeanize the emerging Irish state.
¹⁹

Kevin O'Higgins, Minister for Justice in the first government of the Free State, described his colleagues as probably the most conservative revolutionaries in history. They were autocratic in the way that military men often are. They were anxious not only to secure the state against internal attack but also to demonstrate to the British and the wider world that they could govern with discipline and authority. Just how conservative they were may be seen in their suppression of the Dáil Courts which had been set up during the War of Independence in 1920. Though the work of the courts was dangerous, complex and ill-rewarded, the lawyers and clerks who risked all to do it were seldom thanked by the militarists. Even if the republican side had won the Civil War, there is reason to doubt whether they would have treated the courts more tenderly than did Cumann na nGaedheal. Well before the Treaty,
Cathal Brugha, that most stern of republican leaders, had no doubt that through the medium of the courts power was passing into the hands of ordinary people from the military élite: and he thoroughly disapproved of the development. Here was a graphic example of the kind of distorted and undemocratic thinking possible only to those who had fetishized the use of arms and neglected to consider the important cultural aspects of the campaign for freedom.
¹

This neglect would in time permit the politicians of the Free State government to retain as much power as possible for themselves by winding up the Dáil Courts. The "retreat from revolution" had already begun. Soon judges and lawyers would once again be donning the gowns and wigs of the British system; and the newly-liberated people would be employing the unmodified devices of the old regime upon themselves. War and civil war appeared to have drained all energy and imagination away: there was precious little left with which to reimagine the national condition.

There was, if anything, less freedom in post-independence Ireland, for the reason that the previous attempt to arraign the enemy without gave way to a new campaign against the heretic within. The censorship of films
(1923) and of publications (1929) was a symptom of a wider censorious-ness, of a kind which would be found in many infant states as they sought to outlaw the impure and to keep their culture unadulterated by "corrupt" foreign influences. Among the first books to appear on the lists under ban were
Aldous Huxley's
Point Counter Point, Family Limitation
by
Margaret Sanger,
Wise Parenthood
by Marie Stopes and
The Intimate Journals of
Paul Gauguin.
They would soon be joined by works from the pens of the foremost contemporary Irish writers, for whom it became a perverse badge of honour (as well as a guarantee of reduced income) to be given a
censorship number. The red-light districts of Dublin, so raucously celebrated in the writings of James Joyce and
Oliver St. John Gogarty, were closed down by religious campaigners: at one of their final soirées, a famous harlot whirled and danced before the company like a dervish, her skirts rising higher and higher until they revealed a pair of knickers beneath, in the defiant green-white-and-orange of the tricolour of the mythical Irish republic.

By the end of the 1920s many artists and intellectuals had come to the bleak conclusion that Ireland was no longer an interesting place in which to live: now they left.
Stephen MacKenna, the friend of Synge, sometime editor of An
Claidheamh Soluis
and translator of Plotinus, was one lost in this way; George Russell, collaborator with Yeats, mystic poet and inspirer of the agricultural cooperative movement, was another. But there were dozens: in the notorious opening chapter of his book on
Synge and Anglo-Irish Literature
(1931),
Daniel Corkery listed them all, as if their exile and expatriation constituted some kind of dereliction of national duty; yet he was also honest enough to admit that most had gone because they could not earn a living wage by pursuing the life of the mind in Ireland George Russell had doubted "whether a single literary man in Ireland could make the income of an agricultural labourer by royalties on sales of his books among his own countrymen, however famous he may be".
²
Until he was awarded the
Nobel Prize in 1923, Yeats had never earned more than £200 a year: on hearing the great news from an editor of The
Irish Times,
he could not restrain himself from brutally interrupting the long-winded speech of tribute with a question: "How much is it, man, how much is it worth?"
³
When he and his wife decided to eat a celebratory meal, they could find nothing better in their larder than sausages.
⁴

All of which is not to say that writers went without honour in the new Ireland. Indeed, some politicians paid writers the ultimate tribute of persecuting them and calling for their heads; other more enlightened leaders simply harnessed the international prestige of artists for good domestic purposes. Thus Yeats soon found himself chairing the committee mandated
to redesign the national coinage, a committee which came up with beautiful designs based on
Irish animals: the Paudeens who now fumbled in greasy tills did so looking for coins that bore his seal of approval However, the pillar-boxes in which Paudeen posted his letters still bore the insignia of the British monarch under a light coating of green paint and the state apparatus went largely unmodified A few streets and stations were renamed for national heroes, mostly drawn from the safer, more remote past, since current politics had proved so divisive; and the teaching of Irish was made the major activity in the nation's schools.

By then the language had been standardized along the lines demanded by Professor Atkinson, and a new internal imperialism,
Gaeilgc Chaighdeá-nach
(Standard Irish), sought to erase dialectal differences. Children who failed Irish tests were deemed to have failed their entire state examinations. Whereas in the nineteenth century many had been caned for speaking Irish, many were now punished for not speaking it properly or for not speaking it at all Generations of children came to see it not as a gift but as a threat, and were hardly consoled by the thought that if they wrote their algebraic symbols in Gaelic lettering they could score ten per cent extra marks in the examinations. Families in the Gaeltacht areas who spoke Irish were rewarded with government grants, a policy which provoked
Dublin Opinion to describe Ireland as "the land which lost the leprechaun but found the pot of gold".

Irish was taught in schools as a dead language, like
Latin, full of complex grammatical rules and irregular verbs. It was taken from its wider cultural context of dances, sports and folk ways. Moreover, the texts written in the period were too patently designed for the classroom, or for what one angry writer called an audience of credulous schoolchildren and pre-con-ciliar nuns.
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The whole burden of language revival was placed on hard-pressed schoolteachers, in the innocent belief that the substitution of Irish for English in the youthful mind would be enough to deanglicize Ireland The ingenious device of national parallelism did not work on this occasion. Meanwhile, the Gaeltacht continued on its drastic social decline, losing 50,000 speakers in the first two decades of the state's existence.

Observing all this from his fastness in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, James Joyce pronounced himself disappointed. He told
Arthur Power, an Irish painter in Paris, that there had actually been more freedom when he was a youth in Ireland, because the English had been in governance then and the people, unfettered by any sense of social responsibility, said what they pleased: now that they were responsible for their own fate, they appeared to have gone all cautious and middle-aged. As one exile after another – from Tom MacGreevy to Arthur Power, from
Mary Colum to Samuel Beckett – confirmed the tightness of that diagnosis, Joyce might
have been forgiven for concluding that he had made the right option in choosing exile in 1904. Insofar as men and women of his generation were to renovate the Irish consciousness, this was being achieved in the free zones of art rather than in the far-from-free state.

Yet there was perhaps a sense in which the artists, with their acute antennae, had warned of and anticipated the problem of living in a post-heroic age. Yeats in
On Baile's Strand
had shown how
self-defeating a commodity heroism can be, and how absurd it can seem when it has outlived its usefulness. That lesson might have sunk in were it not for the Great War, which
devalued the quotidian as the banal and which reasserted the power of the exceptional in human experience. One way in which Irish modernism marked itself off as very different from the European modernism of
Joseph Conrad and
Thomas Mann was in its respect for the great middle range of human emotion and destiny. Gide spoke for most European modernists when he said "Families, je vous haïes": but Joyce in
Ulysses
had no compunction about celebrating family values. The ordinary was the proper domain of the artist, he joked, and the extraordinary could safely be left to journalists. So his great book is not only a protest against the militarism of the war and a celebration of the human body which that war did much to humiliate; it is also an attempt to recapture for modern literature the middle range of human experience from artists who felt that no living was possible unless conducted in zones of high ecstasy or utter depravity

A further feature notable in Irish modernism was its rawness, its sense of formal immediacy, its refusal of a knowing self-consciousness. The hero and heroine of
Robert Musil's
The Man Without Qualities
knowingly re-enact the his and Osiris myth in their own lives, and this is very different from the case of Leopold Bloom, whose re-enactment of the wanderings of Odysseus is quite unconscious. Joyce may wish to indicate that a true heroism is never conscious of itself as such; but this adage may also be applied to the practice of his own art, where there is no illusion of easy control, no cool command of material Rather the situation appears to be one in which the plot has the author well in hand Hence the awesome jaggedness and seeming formlessness of so many masterpieces of Irish modernism, whether
Ulysses,
the trilogy of Beckett, or Flann O'Brien's
At Swim-Two-Birds.
By contrast, the masterworks of European modernism, such as
Heart of Darkness, Women in Love
or
The Magic Mountain
appear strangely traditional in form, as if the anxieties of life in the twentieth century have been poured back into the vessels of the nineteenth.

All of which is to say that Wilde was perfectly right when he said that it was the
Celt who led in art. Joyce never forgot that challenge. He did not
become modern to the extent that he ceased to be Irish; rather he began from the premise that to be Irish was to be modern anyway. Yet he saw his art as a patriotic contribution to "the moral history of my country"; and he believed that he had done more than any politician to liberate Irish consciousness into a profound freedom of form. In this, as in so much else, he was accurate. It was the politicians who, in cleaving to tired, inherited forms, failed to be modern and so ceased being Irish in any meaningful sense.