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

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СКАЧАТЬ boots, and wide-awake hats, all one model, had made up the stock-in-trade. The day had nearly drawn blood that put twenty pounds in the safe. And, suddenly, there was this new era of readymades, artificial silks, general fancies, and light footwear.⁸

      The traders who sought respectability discouraged haggling over prices and warily eyed their competitors as they dispensed credit to the farm community that could not have existed without it. A concern with social class absorbed their excess energies directing the better-off traders to ally with members of the various professions to found tennis and golf clubs, establishing these as the symbols of polite social improvement. Life for the successful shopkeepers and the professional classes was comfortable if unadventurous. Income tax was low at three shillings in the pound in the 1920s, as were costs in general. Domestic help was readily available. Indeed, the census of 1926 reveals that nearly two-thirds of girls between thirteen and fifteen years of age who did not take up agricultural employment became domestic servants, helping to create a total of 87,000 such persons in the state as a whole. It was easy for well-placed, relatively prosperous people to ignore the social inequalities and problems of a society where the proportion of boys of sixteen and seventeen years who had no gainful employment was 28 percent, three times the proportion of such people in Scotland, England, and Wales, and the very large numbers of people, single women in particular, who were dependent on the productive work of others as they devoted themselves to the care of relatives. Of 899,000 females of twenty years and over recorded in the 1926 census, no less than 233,000, or over one-quarter, were widowed or single and without gainful employment. It allowed them to ignore a society where the number of orphans, widows, and aged persons was abnormally high, particularly in the west of the country. It allowed them also to feel a sense of class superiority to the landless labourers they saw in the marketplaces of their towns on hiring days.

      Those Irish writers, painters, and polemicists therefore who chose to identify and celebrate an ancient rural national tradition in Ireland were required to ignore much of contemporary Irish social reality – the existence even in country districts of professional men and women for example (the 1926 census recorded 55,441, including 14,145 professed clergymen and nuns, 2,051 medical doctors, 16,202 teachers, 5,341 sick nurses in the state as a whole) or the increasingly modernized countryside that was reducing the numbers of farm labourers through redundancy – directing attention by contrast wholly to the tiny regions in the west of the country, where they could affirm that a vestige of ancient Gaelic aristocracy remained:

      The racial strength of a Gaelic aristocratic mind – with its vigorous colouring and hard emotion – is easily recognized in Irish poetry, by those acquainted with the literature of our own people. Like our Gaelic stock, its poetry is sun-bred…Not with dreams – but with fire in the mind, the eyes of Gaelic poetry reflect a richness of life and the intensity of a dark people, still part of our landscape.⁹

      There was something poignant in fact about the way in which so many Irish imaginations in the early twentieth century were absorbed by the Irish west, almost as if from the anglicized rather mediocre social actuality with its manifest problems, its stagnant towns and villages, they sought inspiration for vision in extremities of geography and experience. They looked to the edge of things for imaginative sustenance.

      The 1920s saw the confirmation of the west, of the Gaeltacht, and particularly of the western island as the main locus of Irish cultural aspiration. John Wilson Foster has argued cogently that the image of the western island in pre-revolutionary Ireland had served as:

      …a new creation myth for an imminent order…as the Gaelic Revival and new nationalism gained momentum, especially after the founding of the Gaelic League in 1893, western islands such as the Arans and Blaskets focused the place of impending awakening, providing a symbolic and it was hoped actual site where Ireland would be born again…The western island came to represent Ireland’s mythic unity before the chaos of conquest: there at once were the vestige and symbolic entirety of an undivided nation.¹⁰

      After the War of Independence and the Civil War in a politically divided island with a border truncating the country, the image of the creative unity of the west, the vision of heroic rural life in the Gaeltacht or on a western island served as a metaphor of social cohesion and an earnest of a cultural unity that transcended class politics and history. Islands of Gaelic-speaking people in a sea of anglicization, the Gaeltacht and the western island represented that ideal unity which nationalist ideologues had envisaged and prophesied, but which reality had failed to provide. Douglas Hyde advised an audience at a heady meeting in Dublin’s Mansion House in 1926, after the publication of the Gaeltacht Commission’s report:

      Remember that the best of our people were driven by Cromwell to hell or Connacht. Many of our race are living on the seaboard where Cromwell drove them. They are men and women of the toughest fibre. They have been for generations fighting with the sea, fighting with the weather, fighting with the mountains. They are indeed the survival of the fittest. Give them but half a chance and they are the seeds of a great race…it will save the historical Irish Nation for it will preserve for all time the fountain-source from which future generations can draw for ever.¹¹

      Before the 1920s most literary studies of the Irish-speaking districts and of the west had been cast as voyages of discovery. John Millington Synge’s classic The Aran Islands (1907) is both representative and apogee of the tradition. In such treatments the structural movement of the work is a journey from the bourgeois world of self to an almost prelapsarian innocence and community which the writer can enter or, as in John Synge’s work, employ to highlight his own Romantic, melancholic alienation. In 1941 Seán O’Faoláin remembered his own introduction to the western island in 1918 in terms that powerfully evoke the imaginative attraction of this region to generations of Irish men and women. It was a release from self into community, and escape from prose to poetry, from complexity to simplicity:

      It was like taking off one’s clothes for a swim naked in some mountain-pool. Nobody who has not had this sensation of suddenly “belonging” somewhere – of finding the lap of the lost mother – can understand what a release the discovery of Gaelic Ireland meant to modern Ireland. I know that not for years and years did I get free of this heavenly bond of an ancient, lyrical, permanent, continuous immemorial self, symbolized by the lonely mountains, the virginal lakes, the traditional language, the simple, certain, uncomplex modes of life, that world of the lost childhood of my race where I, too, became for a while eternally young.¹²

      Recollecting such bliss, the writer admitted to a “terrible nostalgia for that old content, that old symbolism, that sense of being as woven into a pattern of life as a grain of dust in a piece of homespun.”¹³

      In the 1920s a number of literary works were published which attempted a more realistic treatment of the western island and the Gaeltacht, in a tradition that had begun with the short stories of the Irish-language writer Pádraic Ó Conaire and of Seumas O’Kelly. These were works of fictional realism written by men who know the Gaeltacht intimately. Novels such as Peadar O’Donnell’s Islanders (1928) and Adrigoole (1929) and Liam O’Flaherty’s Thy Neighbour’s Wife (1923) are works therefore not of romantic discovery but essays in rural naturalism and social criticism. What is striking about the work of both these writers, who wrote their novels with a vigorous socialist concern to unmask social injustice in the Irish countryside through literary realism, is that they both seem tempted by the vision of an Irish rural world that exists beyond political reality. At moments the Irish rural scene in both their works is allowed to occupy the same primal, essentially mythic territory as it does in the conceptions of purely nationalist ideologues. In both O’Donnell’s and O’Flaherty’s writings there are passages of epic writing therefore СКАЧАТЬ