This journal is produced with the assistance of the Arts Council of Ireland, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the Allied Irish Banks. It is printed by Folens Co. Ltd., Airton Road, Tallaght, County Dublin.

Special Editor Seamus Deane

Editors: Mark Patrick Hederman Richard Kearney

Editorial Board:

Consultative Patrick Masterson (U.C.D.) Dorothy Walker (Art Critic) John Macnamara (McGill University) Ronan Sheehan (Irish Writers Co-op.) Garrett Barden (U.C.C.) Tim Lynch (Queens University) Peter Mew (T.C.D.) Andrew Finan (Maynooth) Christopher Stevens (U.C.G.)

Subscription Information One year's subscription: Home £4, foreign $10

Executive Christine Nulty Timothy Kearney Richard Ruth Eugene O'Flynn William Kelly Barre Fitzpatrick Clodagh O'Reilly Dermot Moran Aidan Mathews

Orders with enclosed cheque (payable to The Crane Bag) should be sent to:

The Editors The Crane Bag Holmsdale Grey stones Co. Wicklow. (01)874270

America & Canada Longship Press,

RFDl, Box 124, Brooks

Maine 04912 U.S.A.

Phone: 207-722-3344

ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE: PERSPECTIVES

CONTENTS

Page Part I

7 Post-Traditional English Literature: A Polemic:

19 Anglo-Irish Playwrights and Comic Tradition

28 Some Reflections on the Irish Classical Tradition

33 Yeats' 'Purgatory': A Play and a Tradition

45 The Poetry of the North: A Post-Modernist Perspective

54 Stars and Horses, Pigs and Trees

61 Seamus Heaney, The Reluctant Poet

71 Those Masterful Images 82 An Ireland/The Poets have

Imagined

Part II Response: 88 Aidan Mathews: A Question of

Covenants: Modern Irish Poetry 92 Postscript

Sean Golden

Thomas Kilroy

John Dillon

W .J. McCormack

Timothy Kearney Edna Longley

Mark Patrick Hederman Richard Kearney

Robert Tracy

Gerald Dawe Seamus Deane

Sean Golden

Thomas Kilroy John Dillon W.J. MacCormack

Timothy Kearney Edna Longley

Robert Tracy

Gerald Dawe

Notes on Contributors

Teaches at Notre Dame. Has published several essays on Anglo-Irish literature. Professor of English at UCG. Novelist, playwright and critic. Professor of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. Teaches in the English Department at the University of Leeds. His book on Sheridan LeFanu is to be published shortly by the Clarendon Press. His third volume of poetry is due from Dolmen in 1980. Postgraduate student at UCD. Teaches in the English Department at Queen's University, Belfast. Scholar and critic, she writes with special authority on modem and contemporary poetry. Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Visiting Professor in the Department of Russian, Wellesley College, U.S.A. Has translated the poetry of Russian poet Ofit Mandelstam, and has published a book on Trollope's Later Novels. Research Student at U.C.G., English Department. Published Sheltering Places, a volume of poetry, last year.

Design on cover: Inside cover: Frontispiece: Endpiece:

Louis le Brocquy Benedict Tutty 'Room' by Robert Ballagh 'Day and Night' by Robert Ballagh

POST-TRADITIONAL ENGLISH LITERATURE:

SEAN GOLDEN

In his discussion of Hugh Selwyn Mauberly as Ezra Pound's epitaph for the English literary tradition, Donald Davie, referring to the poem's "Envoi" writes that

It is impossible to read this, if one is an Englishman, without real distress. Only Lawrence, in letters written about this time, registers the death of England as a live cultural tradition with such sorrow and with the added poignancy of being English. I

The literary tradition native to England to which I will refer in this essay is Davie's; it is that which many contemporary English writers (e.g. con­tributors to PN Review) wish to canonise as the only legitimate English literary tradition. Their attempts to rewrite modern literary history are symptomatic of the post-imperial condition of contemporary English culture. They are high­brow Little Englanders. The term 'native', once condescendingly assigned to the colonised, is now clung to and honoured by English writers in their steeply declining present circumstances. There is also, of course, another tradition of English literature, or of literature written in English. This second tradition has come to dominate twentieth century writing in the English language. Its exponents are colonial or, at least, not English. I would suggest that the invocation of the native English tradition, so loudly voiced today, is essentially nostalgic, is an anti-Modernism disguised as traditionalism and constitutes a reactionary trend. Nowadays English writers face the same problems of insular self-definition in the face of developed and formerly colonial literatures which English imperialism and cultural oppression formerly imposed on much of the rest of the world.

Thus it is not coincidental that the demise of the native tradition as a live cultural tradi­tion occurs contemporaneously with what literary critics have been calling Modernism, nor that the great Modernist masters do not in fact belong, as natives, to the native tradition. The great prose masters were James Joyce, a

A POLEMIC

native Catholic Irishman, Joseph Conrad, natively Polish, and D.H. Lawrence, a coal­miner's son, and if not totally proletarian, cer­tainly non-U, or at least non-Bloomsbury. Ford Madox Ford modelled his prose on French masters (John Rodker called The Good Soldier the best French novel in the English language). This pattern holds true in poetry as well. W.B. Yeats was Irish, Pound and T.S. Eliot American. Oscar Wilde, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Synge, and Sean O'Casey were Irish masters of modern "British" drama. Historically, the advent of Modernism as a literary trend characterized by radical formal innovation coincides with the beginning of the end of the British Empire. This is not insig­nificant. The non-English, or formerly colonial, Modernists consistently lacked the vested emo­tional interest in a native English literary tradi­tion which hamstrung (and hamstrings) native English writers, for that tradition represents far more than literary conventions or styles, and a vested interest in its conventions and styles reflects a vested interest in its more extensive and pervasive cultural and socioeconomic connotations.

The English literary tradition developed con­temporaneously with England's establishment, first of nationhood, then of empire, and is necessarily implicated in the ramifications of this historical process. Non-native literature in the English language developed under different historical circumstances in the colonies, and ref­lects those facts. Colonials and former colonials had (and have) a different stance, a more detached, objective one, toward the native English tradition than native English writers. With this detached stance comes a different perspective, and freedom in handling the tradition not available to native English writers. The development of twentieth century writing in English and the shift of its creative centers away from England proper to America and the Celtic countries are symptoms of this process.

I will interweave descriptions of the native English tradition and colonial reactions to it in order to develop a portrait of the issue. Stanislaus Joyce indicated what being Irish

7

meant in terms of his brother's art.

In A Portrait of the Artist, Dedalus speaks of a certain disadvantage at which Irish writers find themselves in using the English language. The very slight differences in the shades of mean­ing which English words may have for Englishmen can give pause, I fancy, only to Irishmen like Yeats or my brother, whose sensibility to words applies ex­treme tests .... In Ireland, a country which has seen revolutions in every generation, there is properly speaking no national tradition. Nothing is stable in the country; nothing is stable in the minds of the people. When the Irish writer begins to write, he has to create his moral world from chaos by himself, for himself. Yet, though this is an enor­mous disadvantage for a host of writers of average talent, it proves to be an enor­mous advantage for men of original genius, such as Shaw, Yeats or my brother .... When an English writer - Wells or Galsworthy or Huxley or Aldington -deals with social, religious, or intellectual problems, one has the impression that even though the problems are real and the writer is striving to be sincere, the life that produced him is in general stable and balanced. It has been lived for centuries against a Constable background. And if he poses as an extremist, it is merely a picturesque attitude like Count Tolstoy's donning of his Russian smock-frock, over trousers cut by the most expensive tailor in Petersburg, to play at being a peasant saint. The characters whom these writers create to voice conflicts of opinion are people of ease and culture . . . . Their brilliant chatter gives the impression of purely academic after-dinner discussions. In Ireland, on the other hand, the dinner itself is often lacking, and in consequence the discussions assume a different tone. The bread and butter test is not irrelevant. For my brother life was not an interestin~ subject for discussion; it was a passion.

I would extend Stanislaus Joyce's depiction of particular English writers and a particular tone in their work to the native English tradition in

8

general: its literature is an extension of the generally stable and balanced life lived against a Constable background which represents in some way the English ideal. Not they but the wind that blows through them. This is natural enough. Cultures reflect and are informed by hegemonies of social ideas and ideals, though the concrete particulars which constitute cul­tural expression vary according to time and place. The instability of the Modern period disrupted and displaced that generally stable and balanced life permanently.

One of the many peculiarities of the English imperial adventure and its aftermath is Ireland's anomalous role. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States are all English­speaking former colonies where English and other European settlers totally overwhelmed and replaced the native population. Ireland/ Eire, Rhodesia/ Zimbabwe, and South Africa are English-speaking former colonies where the settlers did not replace the native population, and they remain a minority. This is less obvious in the case of Ireland, which was the only European country to undergo total coloniza­tion on the English model, but it is a funda­mental fact of Irish life and culture. Literature written in English outside of the native English tradition falls into three categories as a result: the literature of settlers who took over com­pletely (America for instance), literature of colonized natives (like Joyce), and the literature of minority control. Concrete particulars will change, but this fundamentally colonial relation­ship between native English literature and other literatures in English has a major structural im­pact on twentieth century writing in English.

Early critical reactions to Joyce's Portrait reveal how deeply the imperial/colonial element was felt on all sides. From the native Irish side John Eglinton (W .K. Magee) wrote:

Joyce is ... a champion spirit in the new national situation. In him, for the first time, the mind of Catholic Ireland triumphs over the Anglicism of the English language, and expatiates freely in the element of a universal language: an important achievement, for what has driven Catholic Ireland back upon the Irish language is the ascendancy in the English language of English literature,

which, as a Catholic clergyman once truly asserted, is 'saturated with Pro­testantism.' In Joyce, perhaps for the first time in an Irish writer, there is no faintest trace of Protestantism, that is, of the English spirit .... We are obliged to ad­mit that in Joyce literature has reached for the first time in Ireland a complete emancipation from Anglo-Saxon ideals.3

H.G. Wells, on the other hand (or opposite side), sounded the alarm:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce ... is a book to buy and read and lock up ... of immense sig­nificance is the fact that everyone in this Dublin story, every human being, accepts as a matter of course, as a thing in nature like the sky and the sea, that the English are to be hated. There is no discrimina­tion in that hatred, there is no gleam of recognition that a considerable number of Englishmen have displayed a very earnest disposition to put matters right with Ireland, there is an absolute absence of any idea of a discussed settlement, any notion of helping the slow-witted English­man in his three-cornered puzzle between North and South. It is just hate, a cant cultivated to the pitch of monomania, an ungenerous violent direction of the mind. That is the political atmosphere in which Stephen Dedalus grows up, and in which his essentially responsive mind orients it­self .... [The extreme Irish "patriot"] will play into the hands of the Tories by threatening an outbreak and providing the excuse for a militarist reaction in England .... No reason in that why England should not do justice to Ireland, but excellent reason for bearing in mind that these bright-green young people across the Channel are something quite different from the liberal English in train­ing and tradition, and absolutely set against helping them. No single book has ever shown how different they are ... 4

Wells also comments on the Catholicism of the book, and the poverty of the world it depicts, though from exactly those Protestant and s.table perspectives noticed by Eglinton and Stamslaus

Joyce. The horror and incomprehension of the English liberal evident in Wells' review is repro­foced in Joyce's portrayal of the character Haines in Ulysses, whom Stephen rejects as totally as any Irishman he rejects in the course of eluding his nets.

James Joyce was quite clear about his per­sonal stance toward the English tradition. "And in spite of everything, Ireland remains the brain of the United Kingdom. The English,judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the overstuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget -the water closet. The Irish, condemned to ex­press themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature."5 He told Arthur Power, "It is my revolt against the English conventions, literary and otherwise that is the main source of my talent."6 And he told Padraic and Mary Colum, "I have great difficulty in coming to any understanding with the English. I don't understand them no more than they understand me."7 ~'But I don't write in English," he used to say.)

I think Joyce represents the first great attempt by a colonized native culture to break through the cultural oppression and internaliza­tion of the oppressor's culture to produce a native statement free of the trappings and prevalent ideological assumptions of the colon­izer and that his Portrait illustrates vividly the problem a colonized writer faces when he seeks to express himself in the language and tradition which have supplanted his own. ("The advent of an overcoming power may be attested by the crippled diction, or by the complete disuse of the original tongue, save in solitary dear phrases, spontaneous in grief or gladness," he wrote in an undergraduate essay, "The Study of l.anguages.")9 American writers also (and earlier) freed themselves from the yoke of the Mother Country's tongue and traditions, but as conquerors themselves, not as colonized natives. Joyce grew up amid the revolutionary ferment Wells singled out in his review (a prescient one as it turned out - the Easter Rising occurred the same year). Writers like Wilde and Shaw (from the Protestant tradition of the settler minority) infiltrated the English tradition and made their careers in England. Douglas Hyde and others atavistically advocated the de-

9

Anglicization of Ireland and a return to th_e pre­colonial native culture. Yeats was consciously attempting to fashion an Irish literary tradition in English ("Nor may I less be counted one/ With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson").

I could not endure ... an international art, picking stories and symbols where it pleased. Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some new Prometheus Unbound; Patrick or Columbkil, Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus' stead; and, instead of Caucasus, Cro­Patric or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology that marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes ... and at last, it might be, so deepen the political passion of the nation that all, artist and poet, craftsman and day-labourer would accept a common design?lO

Joyce and his comperes had many alternatives to choose from. In the Portrait he puts Stephen through the full range, taking great pains to illustrate the difficulty which the English language and literary tradition represented for the Irish writer-to-be. A proper understanding of this dilemma is crucial. It centers on Stephen's love of Elizabethan songs and literature, ele­ments of the native English tradition associated historically with both the fulfillment of the English Renaissance (the Shakespearean apo­theosis of the tradition) and the first success­ful imposition of the English language on Ireland (with a consequent perpetuation of Elizabe~han terminology and pronunciation in Irish -English).

Stephen waits in an empty classroom, remembering a story told him by Davin, a native Irish speaker, a close friend, the only character who calls Dedalus by his christian name, whom Stephen admires for his quaint turns of Eliza­bethan speech, a story in response to Stephen's lyrical effusions which Davin cannot under­stand, which disturb him.

10

His nurse had taught him Irish and shaped his rude imagination by the broken lights of Irish myth. He stood

towards this myth upon which no indi­vidual mind had ever drawn out a line of beauty and to its unwieldy tales that divided themselves as they moved down the cycles in the same attitude as towards the Roman catholic religion, the attitude of a dullwitted loyal serf. Whatsoever of thought or feeling came to him from England or by way of English culture his mind stood armed against in obedience to a password ... (P 181)

Yet Davin tells a story, a very Irish story, in Joyce 's meticulously accurate Irish-EnglisI:, which is more powerful for Stephen than his own quasi-Elizabethan lyrics. Stephen cannot share the older native culture and will not artificially cultivate it, a still unconscious cul­ture. He turns toward English literary culture. Stephen has arrived at the classroom afte: a walk through Dublin in which he quotes to him­self a line of Ben Jonson's and notes, in passing, the statue of Tom Moore, "the droll statue of the national poet of Ireland," poised approp­riately, between Trinity College and what had been Grattan's Parliament: twin bastions of Irish Ascendancy culture. He imagines the statue covered in symbolic vermin, charac­terizing it as "a Firbolg in the borrowed cloak of a Milesian," i.e., as a native adopting the manner of his conqueror. Moore diluted songs from the Irish language into English drawing room ditties, and made his bid for fame and fortune within the English tradition (though his English words for Irish airs introduced a new, non-English prosody), symbolizing ~art of the colonized writer's dilemma. Davm 's story provides an authentic but unconscious instance of the native culture. Stephen then engages in a discussion with the dean of studies, an English convert to Catholicism, like John Henry Cardinal Newman, whom Stephen quotes to illustrate a point about language usage.

- One difficulty, said Stephen, in esthetic discussion is to know whether words are being used according to the literary tradi­tion or according to the tradition of the marketplace. I remember a sentence of Newman's in which he says of the Blessed Virgin that she was detained in the full company of the saints. The use of the word in the marketplace is quite different.

I hope I am not detaining you. - Not in the least, said the dean politely. - No, no, said Stephen, smiling, I mean ... - Yes, yes: I see, said the dean quickly, I quite catch the point: detain. He thrust forward his underjaw and uttered a dry short cough. (P 188)

The dean attempts to regain his composure by instructing Stephen in the lighting of a lamp (Stephen had used the lamp metaphorically in his discussion, the dean literalized it).

- To return to the lamp,he said, the feed­ing of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be care­ful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold. - What funnel? asked Stephen. - The funnel through which you pour the oil into the lamp. - That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish? - What is a tundish? - That. The ... the funnel. - Is that called a funnel in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life. - It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen laughing, where they speak the best English. - A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must. (P 188)

This is a crucial passage in the Portrait. Besides illustrating Stephen's point about literary and marketplace word usage, it also brings to a head the mutual attitudes and relationships between the English language and literary tradition and the Irish use of them. Stephen, who prides him­self on his literary knowledge, has been caught not knowing a common English word. The dean has never heard the word still commonly used in Ireland. (Later Stephen looks it up. "13 April: That tundish has been on my mind for a long time. I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel. What did he

come here for to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other!"(!' 251) (When he looked it up, Stephen would have found a reference to Measure for Measure where an act of fornication is described as filling a bottle with a tundish). Funnel is a loan word from Old French (founil) carrying overtones of the Norman invasion. Tundish is an Elizabethan word which illustrates the archaicism of some aspects of the Irish-English language and recalls the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland. To complicate things further, tun derives from a Gaelic word, and tundish is a loan word in English from Irish. Stephen is forced to use the dean's vocabulary to define the Irish-English word. The quaint Elizabethan turns of phrase which Stephen admires in Davin's speech, and the Elizabethan literature he loves, are bound up in the Elizabethan con­quest, a little emphasized sidelight of the English literary tradition. Stephen's affection for that tradition complicates his feelings about the historical relationship between colonized and colonizer. This episode begins to crystallize his understanding of that point.

The little word seemed to have turned a rapier point of his sensitiveness against this courteous and vigilant foe. He felt with a smart of dejection that the man to whom he was speaking was a countryman of Ben Jonson. He thought:

- The language in which we are speak­ing is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language. (P 189)

What holds true of the language holds true also of its literary tradition and conventions and styles. Stephen's fascination with them is at least as inappropriate for him as any attempt to recover or rehabilitate the native Irish tradition. Davin speaks Elizabethan English naturally, but unconsciously, which is to say as a consequence of being a "dullwitted serf," as the result of the

11

Elizabethan conquest. Stephen artificially cul­tivates Elizabethan poetic conventions and dic­tion. What position does that put him in? Joyce makes this clear in a related incident. Stephen's quondam love interest passes by.

She had passed through the dusk. And therefore the air was silent save for one soft hiss that fell. And therefore the tongues about him had ceased their babble. Darkness was falling.

Darkness falls from the air. A trembling joy, lambent as a faint

light, played like a fairy host around him. But why? Her passage through the darken­ing air or the verse with its black vowels and its opening sound, rich and lutelike? (P 232-233)

Stephen frames his thoughts and words in Elizabethan lines, though a fairy host sneaks in from the Celict twilight. He believes he is remembering a line by Thomas Nash. But he is stuck in the rhetoric of an archaic style and its qualities of sound. This inspires a reverie. He

12

allowed his mind to summon back to itself the age of Dowland and Byrd and Nash.

Eyes, opening from the darkness of desire, eyes that dimmed the breaking east. What was their languid grace but the softness of chambering? And what was their shimmer but the shimmer of the scum that mantled the cesspool of the court of a slobbering Stuart? And he tasted in the language of memory ambered wines, dying falls of sweet airs, the proud pa van: and saw in the eyes of memory kind gentlewomen in Covent Garden wooing from their balconies with sucking mouths and the poxfouled wenches of the taverns and young wives that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clipped and clipped again.

The images he had summoned gave him no pleasure. They were secret and inflaming but her image was not entangled by them. That was not the way to think of her. It was not even the way in which he thought of her. Could his mind then not trust itself? (P 233)

Stephen's Elizabethan/Jacobean reverie is in­

appropriate for his Irish girl. He structures his imaginative world according to a version of English but it does not work. This inapprop­riateness is further emphasized when, while trying to imagine the scent of her skin, a louse crawls across the nape of Stephen's neck and he catches it.

He rolled its body, tender yet brittle as a grain of rice, between thumb and fore­finger for an instant before he let it fall from him and wondered would it live or die ... The life of his body, illclad, illfed, louseeaten, made him close his eyelids in a sudden spasm of despair: and in the darkness he saw the brittle bright bodies of lice falling from the air and turning often as they fell. Yes; and it was not darkness that fell from the air. It was brightness.

Brightness falls from the air. He had not even remembered rightly

Nash's line. All the images it had awakened were false. His mind bred vermin. His thoughts were lice born of the sweat of sloth. (P 234)

Stephen has suddenly become like Tom Moore, a Fir Bolg in the borrowed cloak of a milesian, with vermin crawling all over the cloak. His fascination with Elizabethan England is as inappropriate for him as Moore's for Byronic England. Not only does he misremember Nash's line (itself the product of a printer's error: dropping the h of hair, leaving air), he ignores the context of the line he quotes: a description of the symptoms of the plague.

Stephen cannot divorce the literary tradition from its historical and cultural context, nor can he ignore his own context as an Irishman and its historical relationship to the historical con­text of English literature. If he is to be a writer he must forge a new way to write, and he wrestles symbolically at the end of the book, not with an angel, but with an old man from the west of Ireland: the recalcitrant, stubborn, stunted and maimed native tradition he has inherited.11 And this is the dilemma of the colonized writer. Yeats and the other Ascen­dancy writers found themselves in the peculiar position of being neither native Irish nor native

English, but heirs to an Anglo-Irish experience and tradition (Congreve, Farquhar, Swift, Sterne, Burke, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Davis, Mangan, Ferguson). They came from minority settler stock and held sway over the native majority and found themselves caught some­where in limbo between mother country and colony. The native Irish writer was traditionless in the English language, had to create his own tradition. The native Irish culture never de­veloped those monuments of unageing intellect manifest in the English literary tradition precisely because that same English tradition destroyed the Irish cultural tradition before it had a chance to develop such monuments. There is inherent in this dilemma a painful alienation and disaffection which can also liberate: like Joyce or Beckett, the colonized or colonial writer is free of tradition, free to create as he pleases, choosing the language and form he pleases since he has none of his own (though contemporary Irish writers inherit the tradition of Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, et al.). One natural consequence of this will be freedom in handling the language and forms of the tradition of literature in English, a freedom far more manifest in the work of colonial writers than in the work of native English writers who manipulate their tradition subtly, sophisticatedly, but within its bonds.

Part of the pain of this dilemma is the realiza­tion that the English tradition has produced monuments of unageing intellect worthy of emulation, but not only have they been achieved at the expense of other cultures, their very authors have wrought the destruction of other cultures. Herein lies a key example of how the colonized views the colonizer. England fought to make itself a nation. Having suffered invasions and the impositions of several lan­guages that nation developed a tradition in English, an English enriched by loan words and forms from Continental and Celtic sources, but a native language and tradition nonetheless, literally invented, coalescing as a coherent national tradition during the Tudor-Elizabethan period. In Framlingham, against a Constable background, lie vivid examples of what this means. The tradition which developed con­currently with England's political and socio­economic development is preserved there in examples of its early adolescence and its

present senescence. The shell of a Tudor castle wall shelters a bare Elizabethan almshouse. Both attract tourists who can walk the castle ~alls, view the almshouse and the Constable background. In the shadow of the castle wall there is a plain church with an historic organ and Surrey's tomb surmounted by a sixteenth century simulacrum of the poet and a twentieth century plaque of his sonnet on the death of Thomas Clere. Aptly enough, the Church, like the castle, solicits tourist funds to maintain what the economy no longer sustains in the manner which originally built them. Equally aptly, one single line in Surrey's sonnet enumerates three battles he fought in with Clere. England's Renaissance poets were mercenaries. The architecture runs with blood. The ruins of Boyle Abbey are another example. What remains indicates splendour and dignity. The Abbey had been given to Sir Henry King, who promptly destroyed it. King had a son named Edward, better known to the rest of the world as Lycidas, but in that part of Ireland the name King recalls Boyle Abbey, not Milton. Cromwell's name is still a curse in Ireland, whatever his role as a Republican hero in English eyes, and Milton was his propagandist. While Spenser wrote The Faerie Queene, an unageing monument, on a confiscated estate in Kilcolman, he also wrote A View of the Present State of Ireland, advocating genocide as official state policy to subdue the Irish, whose country he would depopulate more easily to appropriate "his" landscape. Modern critics may question Pound's Fascism, treason, and anti-Semitism, or the authoritarian tendencies of Yeats, Eliot or Lawrence, but the genocidal Spenser? Royalist Shakespeare? Milton's praise of Cromwell's Irish massacres? Pound at least remained a poet, not a politician. Yeats became an ineffectual Seanador. Spenser and Raleigh were the Queen's agents, actively subduing and colonizing Ireland. The native Irish look upon Spenser's work with a remnant of the reserva­tions about his worth which may have smouldered in the eyes of Red Hugh's guerillas as they burned him out of Kilcolman, chasing him away from his spare time literary activities. Raleigh crucified a priest and slaughtered five hundred Spaniards who surrendered to him at Dun an Oir. Examples accumulate. The Irish writer casts a cold eye on all the monuments of

13

the English tradition or their remains. The point is that the colonized native cannot have the same relationship with the English tradition that the native Englishmanhas (without deluding himself into thinking he is English). The English tradition is more than its masterworks, it is also the context which produced them, a context which differs when you are on the receiving end of colonization, not one who benefits. If the colonized bear scars, the colonizer bears a burden of guilt.

When the colonized writer attempts to deal impartially with the colonizer's tradition, prob­lems develop. Having no native culture left, he internalizes the culture of his oppressor. Often the process goes no further. But once his consciousness is raised to see this process of internalization he cannot remain totally im­partial. Stephen Dedalus has to learn this. So, in another time, in another part of the empire, in more obvious ways, but within the same structure, does Obi Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe's No Longer At Ease, which portrays the dilemma of the native African writer who has learned English, been schooled in English schools, trained in the English literary tradition, only to discover, when he tries to write himself, how inimical to his circumstances is the English tradition he has acquired. So too, Yeats, in his essay on Spenser, tries to avoid the implications of Spenser's political work in Ireland, but finally cannot, and must comment on the relationship between the man's life and his work.

14

Like Sidney, whose charm, it may be, led many into slavery, he persuaded himself that we enjoy Virgil because of the virtues of Aeneas, and so planned out his immense poem that it would be set before the imagination of citizens, in whom there would soon be no great energy, in­numerable blameless Aeneases. He had learned to put the State, which desires all the abundance for itself, in the place of the Church, and he found it possible to be moved by expedient emotions, merely because they were expedient, and to think serviceable thoughts with no self­contempt. He loved his Queen a little because she was the protectress of poets and an image of that old Anglo-French

nation that lay a-dying, but a great deaf because she was the image of the State which had taken possession of his con­science ... When Spenser wrote of Ireland he wrote as .an official, and out of thoughts and emotions that had been organized by the State. He was the first of many Englishmen to see nothing but what he was desired to see. Could he have gone there as a poet merely, he might have found among its poets more won­derful imaginations than even those islands of Phaedria and Acrasia. He would have found among wandering story­tellers, not indeed his own power of rich, sustained description, for that belongs to lettered ease, but certainly all the kingdom of Faery, still unfaded, of which his own poetry was often but a troubled image. He would have found men doing by swift strokes of the imagination much that he was doing with painful intellect, with that imaginative reason that soon was to drive out imagination altogether and for a long time ... Spenser, the first poet struck with remorse, the first poet to give his heart to the State, saw nothing but dis­order, where the mouths that have spoken all the fables of the poets had not yet become silent. All about him were shepherds and shepherdesses still living the life that made Theocritus and Virgil think of shepherd and poet as the one thing; but though he dreamed of Virgil's shepherd he wrote a book to advise, among many like things, the harrying of all that followed flocks upon the hills, and of all the 'wandering companies that keep the wood.'12

What is true of individual writers' lives and their work is also true of a cultural tradition and its works. I need not rehearse the history of the development of English nationhood and Empire, but I will re-emphasize that its literary tradition developed simultaneously and is implicated in all the ramifications of that development. Assessment of the~e ramifications will differ in England and in the colonies, but the tradition is now an historic fact, and any stance toward the tradition is also a stance toward English history, requiring equally a sifting of what is

valid from what is not. I have offered Joyce as an example of the colonized native's response to the English tradition, and Yeats as the colonizing minority settler's response to both the native English and native colonial traditions. The colonizers who totally replaced the colonized natives had also to reassess their relationship to the native English tradition and to develop one of their own, based on their own experience in a new and foreign environ­ment, and bearing in mind the implications of genocide inherit in their adventure. Naturally enough here too the stance toward the native English tradition will be different.

The American writer was at first simply a transplanted English writer working in the provinces rather than the metropolitan center, in exile as it were, dealing with new circum­stances in the same old way.

They saw birds with rusty breasts and called them robins. Thus, from the start, an America of which they could have no ink­ling drove the first settlers upon their past. They retreated for warmth and reassurance to something previously familiar. But at a cost. For what they saw were not robins. They were thrushes only vaguely resem­bling the rosy, daintier English bird. Larger, stronger, and in the evening of a wilder, lovelier song, actually here was something the newcomers had never in their lives before encountered. Blur. Confusion. A bird that beats with his wings and slows himself with his tail when landing.

The example is slight but enough properly to incline the understanding. Strange and difficult, the new continent induced a torsion in the spirits of the first settlers, tearing them between the old and the new. And at once a split occurred in that impetus which should have carried them forward as one into the dangerous realities of the future.

They found that they had not only left England but that they had arrived somewhere else: at a place whose pressing reality demanded not only a tremendous bodily devotion but as well, and more importunately, great powers of adapt­ability, a complete reconstruction of their

most intimate cultural make-up, to accord with the new conditions. The most of them hesitated and turned back in their hearts_ at the first glance.

Meanwhile, nostaligically, erroneously, a robin. 13

They did worse, and for perhaps the same reasons.

Was not their precious new world reared on the destruction of the innocent, on rape and plunder and torture and devas­tation? Both continents had been violated; both continents had been stripped and plundered of all that was precious - in things. No greater humiliation, it seems to me, was meted out to any man than to Montezuma; no race was ever more ruth­lessly wiped out than the American Indian; no land was ever raped in the foul and bloody way that California was raped by the gold diggers. I blush to think of our origins - our hands are steeped in blood and crime. And there is no letup to the slaughter and the pillage, as I discovered at first hand traveling throughout the length and breadth of the land. Down to the closest friend every man is a potential murderer.14

The American adventure has its dark side and this is a potent element in American literature - the return of Leslie Fiedler's vanishing American. The plunder of land which might have yielded new possibilities, the imposition of old ways of thought on novel circumstances underlies the American experience.

Why are they afraid? They live upon a burial ground: Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Teuton, Celt and Jew avert their eyes, afraid to look around and see ghosts of Navaho, Cheyenne and

Sioux. They chained the land and pulled her

down and nailed her to the sea with towns. She lies on her back, her belly cut in

fields of red and yellow earth. She does not

yield,

15

she is not theirs. She does not love this race . 15

Once America established itself and its indepen­dence and began to consolidate a nationhood and tradition of its own in this ambivalent way, writers began to question their relations to the native English tradition they seemed to be a weak offshoot of. They began to experience a dilemma in understanding what their own tradition was, had, in fact, to create one, to distinguish themselves from English writers Gust as the American nation had to distinguish itself from England on its own merits). Walt Whitman sounded the note of emancipation here. Twentieth century writers crystallized the problem. Eliot and Pound abandoned America for England and its tradition. Eliot espoused the tradition, defined and explained it to the English, became more English than the English, and established canons of critical taste. Pound espoused, then abandoned the English tradition he thought dead for a more cosmopolitan idea of tradition.' He too handled the tradition as an object viewed from the outside rather than a worldview defining the horizon of the native writer. William Carlos Williams voyaged to Pagany but returned to America, argued for an American tradition (resenting Eliot's defection), an American vernacular, an American way of breathing, and helped found a counter-tradition.

The emergence of non-native writers in English in the Modernist period of the first quarter century as the major literary figures of the period signals the end of the native English literary tradition as the major force in writing in English. Non-English writers used the native tradition and its forms in new ways and integrated them with cosmopolitan traditions precisely because it was an object to them, not a vested interest. Once the tradition was recog­nized as a ''tradition", once it was capable of definition, it became historical, not living, so that any "return" to it is reactionary, de­liberately atavistic, a conscious choice, not an unconscious working of the same vein but the reopening of a closed mine, a deliberate anti­Modernism. The key here is the idea of an historical period earlier in the century which is post traditional English literature. Modernism is one of its symptoms. The poetry of the trenches is another. The fundamental changes in English

16

society which accompany the demise of the Empire and the working classes' acquisition of literacy and education fundamentally change the literature England produces. World War I changed things utterly. Mauberley registers the death of England as a live cultural tradition. What remains? Fossil? Skeleton? Wounded fisher king? The Irish, Americans, and others writing in English forge their own traditions, increasingly independent of England's. English writers are faced with developing a post­traditional English literature, no longer metropolitan and tolerant of provincial, i.e. colonial, upstart crows, but itself provincial, measuring and defining itself in light of American and other literatures. What now is the state of contemporary writing in English? The attempt to be contemporary versus the attempt to be traditional.

Philip Larkin and Donald Davie have pro­moted Thomas Hardy to the stature of major poet, the major poet of the native English tradition, and perhaps he is, of the native English tradition. Hardy's attitude toward Modernism seems to characterize the attitude of contemporary anti-Modernists, though it suits him better. He told Robert Graves, ' ''vers libre" could come to nothing in England. All we can do is to write on the old themes in the old styles, but try to do a little better than those who went before us.'16 Samuel Beckett, on the other hand, radically differs on the same point: tradition. Rejecting the "plane of the feasible," he speaks of "an art turning from it in disgust, weary of its puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able, of being able, of doing a little better the same old thin~, of going a little further along a dreary road." 7 This differing attitude leads to a different esthetic approach toward form, to formal innovation rather than tired formalism. Beckett's attitude is con­sistent with the Modernist tradition, and has affinities with Joyce's. From the American point of view, Gertrude Stein has outlined how historical development creates a different literary tradition.

And so America is at the present moment the oldest country in the world because she had her twentieth century birthday in the eighteen eighties, long before any other country had their

twentieth century birthday. There is one thing one has to re­

member about America, it had a certain difficulty in proving itself American which no other nation has ever had.

After all anybody is as their land and air is. Anybody is as the sky is low or high. Anybody is as there is wind or no wind there. This is what makes a people, makes their kind of looks, their kind of thinking, their subtlety and their stupidity, and their eating and their drinking and their language.

I was much taken with what one American soldier said when he was in England. He said we did not get along at all with the English until they finally did get it into their heads that we were not cousins, but foreigners, once they really got that, there was no more trouble.

The trouble of course is or was that by the time America became itself everybody or very nearly everybody could read and write and so the language which would naturally have changed as Latin languages changed to suit each country, French, Italian and Spanish, Saxon countries England and Germany, Slav countries etcetera, America as everybody knew how to read and write the language instead of changing as it did in countries where nobody knew how to read and write while the language was being formed, the American language instead of changing remained English long after the Americans in their nature their habits their feelings their pleasures and their pains had nothing to do with England.

So the only way the Americans could change their language was by choosing words which they liked better than other words, by putting words next to each other in a different way than the English way, by shoving the language around until at last now the job is done, we use the same words as the English do but the words say an entirely different thing.18

So America has developed its tradition in­creasingly oblivious to native English literature, while English writers try to cultivate their own tradition without becoming Americanized. This

has been leading to the tyranny of the wellmade poem which Seamus Heaney has characterized as a particularly English convention of the moment. Basil Bunting stands apart as the only English Modernist and Geoffrey Hill courts the Celtic fringe worked so well by David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid. Anti-Modernism seems to be a deliberate self-limitation, or else a failure of nerve. It represents the reassertion of the individual talent and a retreat from the larger risks of Modernist work, or from the implica­tions of democratization (often castigated as the rise of the masses), into the roots of an earlier era. Is contemporary English writing rooted in a hoary tradition or stumped, sending out stray shoots? American writers are moving in many directions. Irish writers are increasingly turning to A.'llerica for models (as in the cases of Tom Kinsella and John Montague), or creating their own personal tradition, like Richard Murphy, or liberating themselves and Irish verse from the English mode through ironic traditionalism, ironic Irish manipulations of the well made poem which turn that tradition inside out, and here Derek Mahon is paramount, or writing naturally and unselfconsciously as Irish poets, like Paul Muldoon or John Ennis or Eilean Ni Chuilleanain, or as novelists, like Dermot Healy, Neil Jordon, John Banville, John McGahern or Aidan Higgins, or saying farewell to English and writing in Irish, like Michael Hartnett, or reconstructing literary history and criticism like Seamus Deane. But Ireland now has the advantage of being small and unpretentious and, free of vested interests, free to choose without fear of losing identity. Our traumas still lie in heaps about us but we no longer go into exile: as Kinsella has said, we only commute.

NOTES

Donald Davie, "Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley," The Modern Age, ed. Boris Ford. Hammondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961, p. 326.

2 Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper. New York: Viking Press, 1958, pp. 185-186.

3 Cf. Robert H. Deming, ed. James Joyce: The Critical Heritage. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970, Vol. ii, p. 459.

4 Cf. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes. New York: Viking Press, 1968, pp. 329-333.

17

5 Cf. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 226.

6 Cf. Ulick O'Connor, ed. The James Joyce We Knew. Cork: Mercier Press, 1967.

7 Padraic & Mary Colum,Our Friend James Joyce. New York: Doubleday, 1958, p. 18.

8 Ibid. 9 James Joyce, "The Study of Languages'',

Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason & Richard Ellmann. New York: Viking Press, 1959, p. 28.

10 W.B. Yeats, The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats. New York: Collier, 1965,p.131.

11 The issue of Stephen's relationship to the English tradition is treated more complexly and at greater length in the "Scylla and Charybdis" chapter of Ulysses, where Stephen sees himself steering a dangerous path between the "Saxon smile" and the "barbaric yawp" ~-i.e. between the English and American literary traditions.

12 W.B. Yeats, "From Edmund Spenser", Selected Criticism, ed. A. Norman Jeffraes. London: Macmillan, 1964, pp. 111-114.

13 William Carlos Williams, "The American Back­ground'', Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1969, p. 134.

14 Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn. New York: Grove Paess, 1961, p. 287.

15 Michael Hartnett, "USA", A Farewell to English, ed. Peter Fallon. Dublin: Gallery Press, 1978, p. 47.

16 Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That. Ham­mondsworth: Penguin, 1960, p. 251; quoted in Bernard Bergonzi, "The Advent of Modernism 1900-1920'', The Twenteith Century, ed. B. Bergonzi, London: Sphere, 1970, p. 44.

17 Samuel Beckett, Three Dialogues (with Georges Duthuit). Quoted in Hugh Kenner, A Reader's Guide to Samuel Beckett, New York: Noonday, 1973, p. 186.

18 Gertrude Stein, "The Coming of the Americans", Selected Writings, ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage, 1972, pp. 705-706.

18