Feckers (4 page)

Because he was such an easy target, he made the assault on pre-existing values much easier than it might otherwise have been. Everything he brought within his embrace – the land, frugality, community, even the family – became fair game in the ideological war that would dominate Irish culture for the last three decades of the twentieth century. By paying them homage in one speech, de Valera ensured that they too became easy targets for those who, inspired by the sibling revolution that had swept European universities in the late 1960s, had decided to kick Ireland into a new shape.

5
Rev. R. S. Devane S.J.

F
airly typical of the thinking that was to impel Ireland in a cultural direction contrary to its everyday reality was a once well-known Jesuit called R. S. Devane. Father Devane had an obsession with capturing and defining the essence of the Irish personality. He curiously (for a Catholic priest) seemed to be possessed of – or by – a characteristic that Patrick Kavanagh would elsewhere define as a ‘Protestant’ affliction: the curse of those who, ‘doubting that their Irishness would ooze, have put it on from the outside’. This outlook, declared the poet, ‘is similar to the sentimental patriotism which takes pride – or pretends to take pride – in the Irishness of a horse that has won the Grand National, with the emphasis on the beast’s Irishness instead of its horsiness’.

In 1950, Fr Devane produced a pamphlet, ostensibly about the pernicious influence of the British media, entitled ‘The Imported Press’. He bemoaned the rising tide of British cultural forms – books, magazines, newspapers – ‘appealing to children, to youth, to our women, to all classes, supplying to them the same mental pabulum as is supplied to the “Great British Public”, now unfortunately so largely dechristianized as to need reconversion’.

The condescension of hindsight aside, Fr Devane’s diatribe enables us to observe in clear form the nature of the cultural misunderstandings that beset our still young nation in the absence of clear thinkers with a complex awareness of how human cultures develop.

Devane seemed to take it for granted that there was some shimmering quantity of indigenous Irish culture which, if it could be corralled and purged of all alien influences, would initiate some magnificent resuscitation of the Irish mind. He appeared to have no sense whatever of the fact that, once changed by external influences, a culture has as much chance of returning to its prior state as a bell of being unrung.

In the most famous passage in ‘The Imported Press’, Fr Devane declared: ‘A factor of deep significance in the recent evolution of our country has been the establishment of the Gaelic League in 1893. Only those of the older generation can adequately appreciate the dynamic influence of that movement in the first decade of this century. The soul of the nation was then deeply stirred by it. A mystic idealism spread throughout the land. A national messianism, the feeling that the nation had a sacred mission, took possession of the people. Ireland was on the point of realizing the long-dreamt hope of being “a nation once again”. The widespread revival of Irish music, song and dance, and the language revival, gave ample proof of the dawning of a new day. The nation was one in ideal and in action.

‘It is now sad to look back on those halcyon days, and to see the blight of the Civil War and the fratricidal strife that followed in its wake. Gone is the idealism; gone the mysticism; gone the messianism. They have been replaced by cynicism, fatalism and pessimism. Native music and song have given way to jazz, crooning and the dances of African primitives.’

In those paragraphs is contained a succinct summary of the thinking that was to result in far greater damage to the fabric of Irish culture than anything inflicted in the 800 years of invader sabotage. The Devane approach, which was identical to that which governed most official thinking about culture in the first half-century of independence, takes for granted that culture is to be located in the concrete evidence of an artefact, a dance step, an arpeggio, a sentence or a brushstroke. But of course the spirit of a culture derives not from objects, marks, movements or sounds, but from the life of a people. It is organic and spontaneous and is ‘authentic’ only when it reflects the life being lived at the moment of its generation. A correct analysis of Irish culture would have apprehended it as a complex, variegated organism comprising many diverse elements – some native, some English, some hybridized exoticisms that, by virtue of the uniqueness of the crucible of their formation, were capable of bestowing a new richness and self-understanding on the people.

Devane’s error was to confuse tradition with traditionalism. For him the sum of Ireland’s authentic, intrinsic identities could be captured by a process of purification. By harking backwards to some ‘remembered’ excellence that had existed prior to contamination by the ‘alien’, he believed the essence of Ireland could be rediscovered and rehabilitated. In this he was typical of a generation that considered itself to be adhering to the guidance of Padraig Pearse, while actually utterly misreading him. For not only was ‘de-Anglicization’ an impossible project: it was also a complete misunderstanding of how culture works. Pearse had never suggested that, in order to rediscover what was authentically ‘Irish’, it was necessary to cleanse it of elements that were ‘unIrish’ or ‘not Irish’. On the contrary, he had insisted that the existence of any number of externally derived elements in the culture did not disqualify that culture from being understood as ‘Irish’, or even ‘Gaelic’. His view of nationhood was based on that of Thomas Davis, the Protestant ideologue of the Young Ireland movement, who held that nationality was a spirituality, a power alive in the land, by which all those who lived in that land could become connected.

The defining problem with an arrested culture is that it has no way of growing organically, or even of imagining how this might have happened if the interruption to its growth had not occurred. A superficial understanding suggests just two ways of responding: fossilization, or a process of lurching forward in jumps and starts, reacting neurotically to developments elsewhere, imitating, rejecting and trying to unbecome what you have been given as a self-description.

Some post-colonial nations cope with these conditions better than others. Some simply throw their hats at the past, and move on to create its antithesis. Neither course is healthy, and either is doomed to provoke a backlash in the other direction.

The correct course requires a subtle understanding of the relationship between tradition and freedom. Tradition is merely the inherited hypothesis, which, being tested all the time, creates a tentative, provisional understanding of meaning. It is never definitive, never more than an ironic attempt at comprehension. And each attempt is alive only when the emotional reality that created it remains present also, and is free to interrogate tradition and reject it if necessary. Tradition should be respected but not revered to the point where it becomes the only consideration. Also to be considered is the freedom to re-create in the new conditions of the ‘now’. In the absence of these conditions, art and culture become dead things, and the core misunderstandings set off a prolonged cultural reaction in which attempts at retrenchment are followed by outright repudiation. This phenomenon is at the core of the failure of independent Ireland. A crude choice was proffered: either the authentically pure or the uncomplicated other. Things could be ‘Irish’ or ‘not Irish’ but there could be no point of convergence. Thus, the process that should have led to self-understanding simply set off a series of reactions and counter-reactions in the cultural arena, while the authentic life of the re-emerging nation followed a course that, more and more, was not recognized as ‘culture’ at all.

6
Brendan Behan

B
rendan Behan is one of Ireland’s most famous writers, although he wrote only one good book and, by many accounts, had a minor role in a couple of plays that were to bear his authorial credit. Perhaps more to the point, his face adorns beer mats and brewers’ crests in the ‘literary’ pubs of Dublin, alongside the Great Masters like Joyce, Beckett, Kavanagh and Yeats. His name brings a smile to the faces of tourists seeking to get in touch with the soul of Ireland.

Borstal Boy
is a moderately good book. It is funny and touching and displays to good effect the author’s sharp ear for dialogue. It offers the promise of a talent yet to flower but scant evidence to support the myth of Brendan Behan, which has endured for half a century while the works of better and far more prolific writers have faded from memory.

Had Behan not been a hellraiser, a drunk, a boor and a bollox, it is doubtful if anyone would remember him now.
Borstal Boy
would occasionally turn up in bargain bins. On the other hand, had he not been a hellraiser, a drunk, a boor and a bollox, he might well have written many more good books, even perhaps a few great ones. He was, by some accounts, a sensitive man, who could speak, it is said, French. But Patrick Kavanagh, who managed to combine a lifestyle of dissolution with the creation of a body of work that ranks alongside that of the greatest writers Ireland has produced, described Behan as ‘evil incarnate’.

Behan’s influence on Irish literature has been almost entirely negative. The myth of Brendan Behan suggests that drinking and literature go hand in hand – indeed, that they are the same thing. In no other country in the world would Behan be remembered as a great writer. People might reflect on the tragedy of his life, and the scandal of a promising talent gone to seed, but nobody would regard a book and a couple of middling plays as a sufficient oeuvre to justify claims of genius and greatness. In Ireland Behan is remembered not merely as a literary genius but also as a scintillating wit, who, it seems, was wont to deliver himself of lines like ‘Fuck the begrudgers!’ with effortless facility and aplomb.

In his book
In My Own Time: Inside Irish Politics and Society
, James Downey described the Behan he knew in the Dublin of the 1950s. Though an admirer of his published writing, he wrote, it was difficult to admire Behan as a human being. Downey described Behan as: ‘a gurrier unwashed, violent, delighting in every kind of misbehaviour, lazy, an abuser of his marvellous talents, and, worst, mean-spirited.’ He recalled the literary collossus in his final days swaggering from pub to pub, accompanied by hangers-on, ignoring his old friends, flaunting cheques from American publications for writings into which he had put minimum effort.

In Downey’s portrait it is possible to perceive something of the truth about Behan, including an explanation for his failure as a writer and success as a literary legend. According to Downey, Behan’s hugely successful play
The Hostage
was written chiefly by Joan Littlewood.
The Quare Fellow
was rewritten from the beginning by Carolyn Swift ‘from what amounted to no more than raw material supplied to her by Behan’. Swift staged the play at the Pike theatre, which she ran with her husband, Alan Simpson. Downey recalled that, when the play was eventually produced at the Abbey, Behan went on stage afterwards and made a drunken curtain speech in which he said that the Abbey production was the definitive version, making no mention of Swift and all the work she had done. ‘I thought that unforgivable,’ Downey concluded.

Much worse, however, is the legacy Behan bequeathed Irish society concerning the very idea of The Writer. Out of his flimsy catalogue of works there developed a myth that grows all the while. The myth of Behan created the literary bore to be found in landmark Dublin pubs like Davy Byrne’s and McDaids, a wet-brained, dandruffed species whose garrets might be imagined to strain at the seams with works of genius that nobody has the courage to publish. These inheritors of Behan seem not to have understood that, in order to qualify as a ‘writer’, it is somewhat important to have written and published books. Nor does it occur to any of these prodigies that anything of merit that their hero ever produced was conceived, if not actually written, while he was banged up for his activities as a ‘patriot’, or that the liberated Behan was a pretentious and self-aggrandizing writer, who worked only when the pubs were shut.

Yet these inheritors of the mantle of Brendan Behan remain unfazed and unapologetic about the dearth of evidence concerning their own ‘genius’. All it takes, they tell themselves, is one great book. Behan is their inspiration and their patron saint, the validation they need for a lifestyle with not even the remotest connection to literary endeavour. They sit glowering over their pints, complaining about the begrudgers who seek to do them down, dropping references to their ‘forthcoming’ novels for the benefit of gullible tourists who wet themselves to be in the company of these successors to the great ‘Broth of a Boy’. It is all unspeakably tedious, and lethal to any sense of the true purpose of writing, and further proof that the most reactionary institution in Ireland is neither a political party nor a church, but the public house, in which failure begets failure and erects plinths to the sources of its inspiration.