Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001. Dr. Brown Terence

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ cultural nationalism and prescriptive zeal seem to suggest that no great disservice would be done the nation if the writings of certain authors became unavailable. Other critics were earnest in their desire to see in much modern writing, especially in works by suspect Irish writers, a shallow cosmopolitanism that vitiated imaginative power. So Seorsamh O’Neill, in an article published in 1924 in the Irish Statesman characteristic of many such which appeared in various periodicals in the 1920s, lamented the tragedy of George Bernard Shaw’s imaginative aridity, asserting that “compared with men of equal or even less vitality whose minds are rooted in their national and local cultures Shaw’s mind is two-dimensional, mechanical, lacking in depth and imaginative insight.” O’Neill associated such literary rootlessness, as he concluded his essay, with the anticipated threat of television and with international culture – “the pilings round our lives of a rag-heap of odds and ends which through lack of assimilation will remain a pile of meaningless and bewildering refuse, even though it be gathered from the ends of the earth.”³⁴

      In writings of this kind the cultural exclusivism of the Irish Ireland movement helped created a climate of opinion in which authors whose work might encounter moral disapproval could also be suspected of a lack of national authenticity or will. The nation need not disturb itself over much if their writings should fall foul of a censor. In this way the thinking of the Irish Ireland movement must be associated with the conservative climate of opinion in which the Censorship Bill of 1929 was enacted and put to work even where, in individual cases, supporters of the movement may not have espoused the cause of censorship at all or as vigorously as did D. P. Moran in his Leader editorials. None of them rose to decry censorship as a reactionary offence to the revolutionary humanism that had originally generated their movement. No voice was raised to wonder if so positive an enterprise as linguistic and cultural renewal could be stimulated by so negative a practice as censorship.

      If Irish writers of the 1920s had cause to take alarm in part because of the source of the demands for censorship (the Catholic Vigilance Association and the Catholic Truth Society) and in part because of the atmosphere of national self-righteousness and cultural exclusiveness in which a censorship bill would be enacted, certain incidents also served to concentrate their minds on the kind of future which might await their work. Among these the Galway public library board putting Shaw’s works under lock and key, the stopping of trains and the burning of their cargoes of imported newspapers (which D. P. Moran thought evidence of the need to pass a censorship bill as quickly as possible), and the public demonstrations in favour of censorship were disturbing enough, but the unhappy experience of the Carnegie Libraries’ Trust in Ireland following an imprudent if scarcely pornographic publication by one of the members of its Advisory Committee must have seemed like a suspiciously nasty portent indeed.

      The Carnegie Trust had made itself responsible in 1921 for establishing and financing, with the help of a local rate, centres for the distribution of books in many parts of Ireland. The playwright Lennox Robinson was secretary and treasurer to the Advisory Committee, which included among its members Lady Gregory and George Russell (Æ). In 1924 Robinson contributed a harmless short story on a religious theme, “The Madonna of Slieve Dun,” to a literary paper which the writer Francis Stuart and his wife had begun to edit and publish with some friends. The periodical came to the attention of President Cosgrave, who, it was rumoured, intended to suppress it. The story about a young girl who imagines herself another Madonna provoked a Jesuit member of the Advisory Committee to tender his resignation and a first-rate row blew up when W. B. Yeats, who had also published his sexually adventurous poem “Leda and the Swan” in the paper To-Morrow, entered the fray on Robinson’s behalf. To no avail, however, because the unhappy outcome of the literary contretemps was the suspension of the committee and the dismissal of its secretary and treasurer, the unfortunate Robinson.³⁵

      The bill, when it eventually appeared, was apparently a much less draconian legislative tool than had been feared. The Minister for Justice was willing to make amendments to the bill when it was presented to the Dáil, and the bill itself failed to implement the Committee on Evil Literature’s recommendation that there should be recognized associations in the country charged with bringing dubious publications to the attention of the Censorship Board. What Oliver St. John Gogarty, the poet, wit, surgeon, and senator, had feared as “the most monstrous proposal that has ever been made in this country,”³⁶ since it implied that the Irish should make use of their “recently won liberty to fill every village and hamlet with little literary pimps who will be recognized,” was not to be part of the legislative process. No one at the time of the bill’s enactment foresaw that the customs would fulfil the function of public watchdog, referring books upon suspicion to the board in large numbers, thereby filling the role that the Committee on Evil Literature envisaged for the recognized associations. Even the Irish Statesman, which had waged a protracted campaign against the bill, was able to express relief that it had turned out rather better than expected. J. J. Horgan in an essay on affairs in the Irish Free State in the Round Table probably expressed the general satisfaction of those who had been disturbed by the possibilities of an Irish censorship when he wrote in March 1929, “The debates on this measure in the Dáil have been more courageous than was to be expected.” In May 1930 he reported on the earliest effects of the new legislation, recounting with relish how in some respects the act was proving counterproductive, where it was having any effect at all:

      The first result of the new Censorship of Publications Act has been the banning of seventeen books by the Minister for Justice on the advice of the Censorship Board. The only three of any importance are Mr Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, Miss Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (which has already been banned in England), and Mr Bertrand Russell’s Marriage and Morals. The remainder of the books censored are principally the works of Dr Marie Stopes and writers of her ilk on the subject of birth control. It is interesting to record that one bookseller who had six copies of Mr Huxley’s book which he could not sell, sold them all on the day the censorship of that volume was announced, and also received orders for twelve additional copies.³⁷

      The Minister for Justice, Horgan informs us, was rather concerned that lists of banned books were being published in the daily press, thus conferring upon them a certain notoriety. He also regretted, it appears, that few people were bringing objectionable works to the Censorship Board’s attention. On this latter point Horgan observed with what seemed like sage equanimity:

      The fact is that very few people in Ireland read any modern books at all, and that those who do are not likely to take the trouble of acting as literary informers to the Censorship Board. In any event, to attempt a censorship of modern literature, even in one language, is not unlike trying to drink a river.³⁸

      That for almost forty years the Censorship Board would make this epic attempt seemed in 1930 an improbability. That it was in a large part successful is a cultural fact of twentieth-century Ireland that as yet has not been comprehensively analyzed.

      Twenty years after the enactment of the bill the writer and critic Arland Ussher, who had been involved in the fight against censorship in the 1920s, managed a retrospective detachment, providing a measured assessment:

      We were wrong and over-impatient – unjust also, to the men who were re-building amid the ruins…We…concentrated our indignation on their Acts for prohibiting divorce and for prohibiting the sale of “evil literature” – measures which might have been expected from any Irish Catholic government, and which, considering the social atmosphere of Ireland, did little more than register prohibitions that would in any case have been effective, in fact if not in form.³⁹

      Other individuals who perhaps suffered more directly from the fact and the form of the prohibitions СКАЧАТЬ