Stimulus of Sin : Selected Writings of John Broderick

REVIEWS

HISTORY AND POLITICS

A copper farthing: Sir William Petty and his times, 1623–1687, by Thomas E. Jordan,

Sunderland, University of Sunderland Press, 2007, 218 pp., £12.95 (paperback), ISBN 978

1 873757 26 0

Because of the astonishing range of Sir William Petty’s interests – statistics, demography,

map making, surveying, boat design, speculation (both intellectual and financial) and

experiment – he has long attracted attention. A pioneer of quantification, advocate of

greater state intervention in the economy and education, prescient formulator of several

economic theories, apparently a religious sceptic, author of the mid-seventeenth-century

land settlement for Ireland, a vigorous if vain writer: his career suggests how talent and

application could bring impressive rewards. Moreover, his legacy, whether in the

acquisition of vast estates continuing long in the ownership of his descendants, formula-

ting theories of labour and value or in making English policy for Ireland, has proved

durable. His responsibility for now discredited measures has ensured a controversial

reputation, especially in Ireland. The acquisition of the remnant of his archive by the

British Library in 1993 and the subsequent re-cataloguing of the materials have revived

interest in his activities. Meticulous investigations by Frances Harris, Tony

Aspromourgos, Ted McCormick and Adam Fox are starting to show just how innovative

Petty’s ideas were. He urged the state, of which he was an employee, to gather data and

then apply it to the more profitable exploitation of human and inanimate resources.

In addition, fresh approaches to scientific enquiry in the seventeenth century, led by

Charles Webster, J.H. Andrews, Theo Hoppen and Michael Hunter, have clarified (and

complicated) the contexts in which Petty operated. Also, understanding of the Ireland into

which Petty irrupted after 1652 has improved, so that both the novelty and conventionality

of his thinking can be better evaluated.

Several of Petty’s acquaintances – John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren

and William Molyneux – have had their lives written recently. Yet for a comprehensive

account of Petty the curious have to search either for E. Strauss’s study of 1954 or the

useful if adulatory life of 1895 by his descendant, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice.

A convincing intellectual biography of Petty poses a formidable challenge, thanks to the

bulk and variety of his surviving papers (and his execrable handwriting) and to the range

of his contributions. Professor Jordan attempts nothing of this kind, but instead provides

an idiosyncratic and intermittently illuminating appraisal. He selects eclectically, even

eccentrically, from the proliferating secondary literature. Indulgent asides on the

publication of Shakespeare’s plays, translations of the Bible or sociological theory

simply distract from the principal subject. Yet a non-specialist such as Professor Jordan

can highlight unexpected features in the scientific, political and Irish scenes of the mid-

seventeenth century. The undoubted oddities, utopianism and arrogance in Petty are

amply covered. So, too, are the mixed results of Petty’s engagement with Ireland:

ISSN 0967-0882 print/ISSN 1469-9303 online

DOI: 10.1080/09670880802033329

http://www.informaworld.com

Irish Studies Review

Vol. 16, No. 2, May 2008, 195–228

personal enrichment and the familiar prejudices of the English. Those unfamiliar with the

outline of Petty’s extraordinary career may find Professor Jordan’s study revealing.

However, Petty still awaits a biographer who, by setting him assuredly in his intellectual

and social contexts, can explain the originality of this dogmatic believer that confusing

detail should (and could) be reduced to the abstractions of ‘number, weight and

measure’.

Toby Barnard

Hertford College, Oxford

[email protected]

q 2008, Toby Barnard

The Irish general: Thomas Francis Meagher, by Paul R. Wylie, Oklahoma, University

of Oklahoma Press, 2007, 404 pp., $29.95 (hardback), ISBN 978 0 8061 3847 3

Born into a prominent Waterford family which had prospered in the transatlantic provision

trade (Meagher’s father had been born in Newfoundland), and educated by the Jesuits at

their famous Stoneyhurst College, Lancashire, the young Thomas Francis Meagher

rocketed to fame because of his eloquent ‘Sword Speech’ delivered in Conciliation Hall,

Dublin, on 28 July 1846. Interpreted, often mistakenly, as an uncomplicated and

uncompromising call to arms, the speech led to the rupture between Young Ireland and the

more conservative Repeal Association of Daniel O’Connell. His involvement in the

Young Ireland revolt of 1848, his famous speech from the dock, political exile, and

dramatic escape from Van Diemen’s Land in 1852, only increased Meagher’s fame

amongst his contemporaries. Yet Meagher was more than just a speech, a young Irish

rebel, or even the inventor of the Irish tricolour, the present flag of the Irish Republic.

He was only 29 at the time of his escape, and following the ecstatic welcome by the Irish in

New York City Meagher became a leading ethnic spokesman, decided to become an

American citizen, to fight for the preservation of the Union during the American Civil

War, acted as de facto governor of the Montana territory and finally, perhaps because of

his early and mysterious death, became something of the tragic hero so beloved by the

Victorians and, so it seems, modern historians.

Eulogised by five earlier Victorian biographers, Meagher was rescued from near

obscurity in Ireland by no less a figure than Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein,

whose 1915 work on Meagher’s Irish speeches portrayed him as one of the great

nineteenth-century Irish orators. This theme – Meagher as an Irish national hero –

underscores this new biography, the fourth such biographical treatment of Meagher since

2004. Also Meagher was the subject of two dashing romantic novels since 2003; two

earlier nineteenth-century biographies were also republished in 2007. In 2004, the City

of Waterford itself dedicated a fine new equestrian statue to its native son. The figure of

Meagher also made a brief, if unfavourable, appearance in Ted Turner’s would be epic

2003 film Gods and Generals. If ever a future Hollywood Meagher blockbuster is

planned – ‘Meagher of the Sword!’ perhaps – this rattling good narrative written by a

retired Montana lawyer who considers his work ‘the definite story of Meagher’s life’ (10),

could well form the basis of its future screenplay.

This biography falls into three almost equal sections; the young idealistic rebel, his

trial, exile and escape to New York City; his career in the USA through to the end of the

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American Civil War; and his western adventure in Montana from August 1865 to his

unexplained death by drowning in July 1867. Generally, The Irish General is well

researched, handsomely presented and well illustrated; it is copiously, if not always

informatively, footnoted and contains a useful bibliography. The images and photographs

of Meagher tell their own story, from the engraved dandy of 1848, to the photograph of the

weary and disillusioned, if not dissolute, ex-soldier of 1865 just before his Montana

adventure. Throughout his life Meagher continued to be a figure of controversy, and Wylie

correctly asserts that by the time of his death ‘Drink, recklessness and politics had

seemingly brought him to a dead end’ (305).

Meagher, perhaps like General Custer, had hoped that the West could regenerate his

career after the Civil War, and his western adventure is dealt with fairly well in this new

biography. New archival research has been undertaken, and the reader is often offered a

new interpretation on such subjects as Meagher’s relationship with the territorial

legislature, the treacherous dynamics of Montana politics, the unfortunate Daniel’s affair,

and the whole issue as to whether or not the northern tribes constituted a serious threat to

the territory. Wylie dismisses General Sherman’s belief that the whole Indian question was

a stampede, a bogus issue exaggerated by Meagher to resurrect his military reputation,

without convincingly stating why or, for that matter, for what reasons Sherman disliked

Meagher so much. Nativism is hinted at, yet Sherman was raised Catholic and his wife

remained devout, so, perhaps, other issues were at work?

The strength of his last section of The Irish General, however, cannot excuse the

mistakes, both small and major, which litter the last two sections of the text.

Stoneyhurst, for example, is not in Yorkshire, Meagher did not fight as a colonel at

First Bull Run (5), nor was he wounded at Fredericksburg (175). Little understanding is

displayed regarding Meagher’s actual family, for his father was not known as Thomas

Francis Meagher Sr., the Henry Meagher who visited New York City in 1853 was not

Meagher’s uncle (who had died in 1838), but his younger brother, and Meagher’s

second son, Thomas Bennett Meagher, did not simply disappear after he left West Point

in 1873 (327), but married and moved to California where his, and General Meagher’s,

descendants still reside. The fact that Meagher seemingly abandoned not only his first

wife but also his two sons, whom he never saw, raises interesting but unanswered

questions about Meagher; he was clearly not the staunch son of the Church as

suggested here by Wylie.

One should also question the author’s belief that Meagher was a strong Fenian or that

his commitment to Fenianism underwrote Meagher’s decision to serve as a Union soldier

during the American Civil War. There remains little surviving evidence to support this

hypothesis. It was Meagher’s commitment to the preservation of the American republican

experiment, as evident in many of his preserved speeches, that motivated his decision to

fight to preserve the American Constitution and the Federal Union it represented. His early

death, unfortunately, prevents us from really knowing what Meagher would have made of

the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell, but one suspects that Meagher would have supported

Parnell’s parliamentary approach to secure Irish Home Rule.

The Meagher of The Irish General is something of a one-dimensional figure. He was

far from this as, indeed, there were numerous Thomas Francis Meaghers. With each new

direction his career took, often by necessity, sometimes by personal ambition, there was an

accompanying new redefinition of Meagher himself. Meagher became one of the most

assimilated Young Ireland exiled leaders in the USA, and his story is not just one of the

Irish in America, but the growing duality of what it meant to be an Irish-American in the

nineteenth century. Until a biographer grasps this concept, that Meagher often himself

Irish Studies Review 197

came to represent the protean spirit of the nature of the Irish diaspora itself, he will await a

definitive biography. If there is much to recommend The Irish General, there is also much

to disappoint the avid reader of the growing corpus of work that has appeared in the last

few years.

Rory T. Cornish

Winthrop University

[email protected]

q 2008, Rory T. Cornish

Irish, Catholic and Scouse: the history of the Liverpool-Irish, 1800–1939, by John

Belchem, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2007, xii þ364 pp., £14.95 (paperback),

ISBN 978 1 846311 08 6

It seems remarkable that the Liverpool Irish have not until now been subject to a sustained

book-length treatment. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Liverpool’s Irish

community grew to such an extent that in 1871 the only cities (outside the home country)

with larger populations born in Ireland were New York and Philadelphia. In fairness to

historians, there have been important works on aspects of the Irish in Liverpool: Frank

Neal’s pioneering study of sectarianism in the city; Philip Waller’s monumental book on

Liverpool’s socio-political life; W.J. Lowe’s study of the Irish in Victorian Lancashire;

and several path-breaking theses and articles by the historical geographers Colin Pooley

and J.D. Papworth. Moreover, Belchem himself has written a book, Merseypride: Essays

in Liverpool Exceptionalism, and several articles, and has edited two collections in which

the Liverpool Irish feature prominently. But, as a study of the evolution, experiences and

development of an ethnic community, the present study stands alone in that no previous

study has achieved the sustained range of Irish, Catholic and Scouse, which traces the Irish

story in Liverpool from the eighteenth century to the Second World War.

If the study itself was sorely needed, the execution is both deft and detailed. In a series of

tightly focused, elegantly written chapters which draw upon a prodigious quantity of

primary sources and contemporary writings, Belchem takes a combined chronological and

thematic approach. Charting the rise of Liverpool’s Irish connection from modest

beginnings in the eighteenth century, this approach is extremely effective. Each period is

emblemised by key individuals and events. In doing this, Belchem has written what is, by

some considerable distance, the best book on the Irish in Britain, a benchmark, we might

hope, for future studies on Glasgow, Newcastle, Birmingham or London. For only then will

the Irish in Britain have sustained the sort of scholarly attention which the American Irish

have enjoyed since before the Second World War when Oscar Handlin wrote The Uprooted.

It is pertinent to mention the American Irish in the same breath as their Liverpool-

based brethren, for a striking and persistent theme in this book is the connection between

the Atlantic port city and the cities and cultures of the east coast of the USA.

Demographically, Liverpool and New York were entwined because so many Irish who

went to America first passed through the Merseyside port. The connection was, however,

deeper and more enduring than that. It was expressed through revolutionary politics in the

confederate phase – political connections that were still notable between Fenianism in

the 1860s to the years of the Irish Revolution. Many of the American personnel of the

nationalist struggle passed through Liverpool to further Ireland’s cause; money, guns and

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ideas did the same. Cultural exchanges were also apparent. In a quite captivating

discussion of black-faced minstrelsy in Liverpool, Belchem shows how Liverpool, as the

landfall of American popular culture, was the first place to pick up on new forms of

entertainment and music, thus creating an enduringly different popular culture. Indeed,

this connection in culture continued way beyond the period that is Belchem’s remit and

helps to explain why The Beatles and Merseybeat emerged as the vital English response to

American popular music in the post-war period.

Liverpool’s Irish, though they lived across the city and penetrated the social hierarchy,

also forged a ghetto-like community – what Belchem calls the Liverpool Irish enclave.

Whilst poor and, especially during the famine, outcast to a horrific degree, the enclave was

resourceful and durable. The way Belchem gets inside this culture is one of the book’s great

fascinations. For instance, during the Famine, when the commercial assurance companies

abandoned the enclave because of risks brought about by disease and high death-rates, the

Irish in Liverpool formed their own death benefit clubs to pay for a good ‘buster’ and a

decent burial. The enclave nurtured schools, clubs, priests, and all the paraphernalia of both

class and ethnicity in the Victorian world. They created a political edifice which outmatched

anything built by the Irish in the other cities of Victorian Britain. Liverpool’s Ribbon

societies, with their passwords assiduously imported from Ulster, were unmatched

elsewhere in Britain. Large numbers of pubs and publicans exuded more than a hint of green

politics and entwined sociability and nationalism for the Liverpool working class. But most

remarkable of all the political occurrences, however, was the development of T.P. ‘Tay Pay’

O’Connor’s constitutional nationalist political machine which stood as a powerful

counterpoint to the Protestant–Orange–Tory edifice of local Liverpool boss politicians,

such as the brewer Archibald Salvidge. From this loam sprung important, lesser politicos

such as John Denvir, Dr Andrew Commins and P.J. Kelly. The result was a power base for

both the Liverpool Irish and the Irish in Britain. O’Connor’s astounding fiefdom was such

that Liverpool’s Scotland Road parliamentary division returned him as Britain’s only

nationalist MP for a remarkable forty-odd years (1885–1929). The changing political scene

of the years 1916–23 – which saw the emergence of the Irish Self-Determination League,

the strengthening of Sinn Fein, and direct action by local IRA activists – was not enough to

sweep O’Connor away. His constitutionalist bloc may have begun to crumble at this time,

but it was his death, in 1929, which caused the Victorian Home Rule edifice finally to fall.

The inter-war years were ones of transition, change and consolidation for the Liverpool

Irish. They had long since achieved representative electoral power through local councils

and, of course, enjoyed the kingship of O’Connor, who kept them under a very particular

sort of Irish political umbrella. The structure of the Liverpool (and by extension Irish)

economy in Liverpool ensured that most of the Irish would remain resolutely working class,

though there was some social improvement and suburbanisation. Liverpool lacked a major

industrial base; its shipbuilding had long since shifted across the Mersey to Birkenhead

(a very different sort of town). Whilst the Irish remained economically poor, they also

maintained communal strength. Having controlled great swathes of the waterfront labour

trade (just like their New York cousins), the Irish were able to protect their children’s

interests with a natural flow of work from one generation to another. But even in the 1920s

and 1930s, as the Depression began to bite, the Irish in the ghetto had become the Irish in the

slum, and the opprobrious language of the famine-generation social commentators gave

way to the equally unflattering language of the social scientists who laced reports of

investigations of the conditions of the urban poor with the new language of eugenic racism.

Moreover, the vehemently populist anti-Catholicism which had shadowed their every move

since the 1830s was renascent in these years of political extremism. At the same time, the


story was about more than external forces pressuring the Irish. As Belchem expertly

explains, the Irish at this time also seized their own heritage with the manufacture of the

typical working-class stereotype, ‘the Scotty Road Scousers’, the traditional ‘Irish

slummy’. The image of poor Liverpool was thus being redrawn in a peculiarly Irish style.

The Protestant Irish are omitted from this work as a result of a conscious decision by

the author. And so their communities in Liverpool still remain one of the most important

but unstudied elements of the Irish diaspora. For years, it had been assumed the Orange–

Tory bloc which buffered the Irish Catholic population was an English (and Welsh)

phenomenon, an instance of nativist anti-Irishness. Yet the earliest no-popery tub-

thumpers in the city, men like Hugh McNeile, were Irish Protestants and it seems likely

that the Orange Order in the city was a genuine fusion of English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh

forms of evangelical anti-Catholicism, though no one has yet studied this

demographically. The omission of the Protestants from Belchem’s book does not so

much weaken this study as increase the need for a parallel work to sit alongside it. For that

is how, as Colin Pooley and Lydia Letford showed us, the Irish Catholics and Irish

Protestants lived: side-by-side, but apart. It would perhaps be ironic, but fitting, if a

complementary study to this path-breaking book by Belchem could be brought to fruition.

Liverpool University Press is to be applauded for producing such a lovely looking

book in a reasonably priced paperback. Its timing is also good – 2008 is Liverpool’s year

as European Capital of Culture. Over the coming months there will doubtless be countless

exegeses on what constitutes Liverpool’s unique culture. Whatever it is, we can be sure

that from a highly distinctive dialect to its never-say-die attitude and black humour,

Liverpool and its culture are intimately entwined with Ireland. Belchem’s book

demonstrates lucidly and with great authority why and how this came to be.

Donald M. MacRaild

University of Ulster

[email protected]

q 2008, Donald M. MacRaild

Maternity and child welfare in Dublin 1922–60, by Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Manchester,

Manchester University Press, 2007, 244 pp., £50.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 0 719074 74 5

Lindsey Earner-Byrne’s discussion of maternity and child welfare in Dublin between

1922 and 1960 is meticulously researched and lucidly written, with intensive and

exhaustive discussion of the various maternal and infant health initiatives in Dublin in the

1930s and 1940s. ‘Irish mothers belonged to the family, the society, the medical

profession, and the Church but not to the state’, Earner-Byrne points out, but it was not

just fear of the overweening power of the modern welfare state which motivated powerful

Catholics in their attempts to control mothers. This book shows that the Catholic Social

Services Conference set up by Archbishop McQuaid, and often cited as the only

redeeming feature of his episcopacy, actually competed with (and sometimes replaced)

existing services, such as St John’s Ambulance, which were not under Church control.

The book also shows that mothers, if they were not allowed to belong to the state, were

not allowed to belong to themselves either; not only were they condemned to pregnancy

after pregnancy in poor health but they were also (quite intentionally) denied basic

knowledge about how their bodies worked. The book is at its best when it showcases this

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combination of control and neglect, this abuse (there is no gentler word for it) perpetrated

by many doctors, churchmen, civil servants and politicians on women’s bodies. Babies

didn’t fare too well either; the infant mortality rate in Ireland, one of the lowest in Europe

at the end of the First World War, was higher than that of many belligerent countries in

the middle of the Second. And neglected though legitimate babies were, those born to

unmarried mothers suffered disproportionate mortality which almost amounted to

institutional infanticide. There was, in fairness, genuine and widespread concern about

this and about maternal and infant mortality in general in the 1940s, and Earner-Byrne

discusses the various initiatives and debates about how best to remedy this situation.

The debates about family allowances, the setting up of a Department of Health and the

mother-and-child debate are all discussed deftly and in great detail, with additional

material that has not been seen before.

The focus of the book is Dublin, and the lens holds steady while Earner-Byrne looks at

services for mothers and babies in the capital. Sometimes the picture shifts without

warning. The chapter on illegitimate motherhood, for example, moves between the

country as a whole and Dublin in particular without making it clear why Dublin is

different from the rest of the country, or whether it is. Earner-Byrne reminds us of the

bigger Irish picture every so often, with comparisons of neonatal and maternal mortality

for example, but she doesn’t follow it through to a conclusion. Preventable neonatal

deaths of babies were happening outside of Dublin (even in middle-class, urban Ireland)

up to the mid-1950s for want of the kind of diagnostic facilities available in Dublin

hospitals in the late 1940s; Dublin mothers and babies of all classes were obviously, as far

as survival was concerned, the most privileged in the country. Was there any price paid by

mothers themselves for this privilege? And although the Dublin Catholic archdiocese

certainly wasted time, expertise and resources duplicating existing services, is there a

chance that the poor women of Dublin benefited from such duplication and even

competition? Did they integrate all these services into their strategies for survival, making

out reasonably well in the process? Were they better off than their equivalents in, say,

Limerick or Cork?

We don’t know, because what is missing from this book is the experiential dimension.

The author comments that there was very little effort made by any of the agencies throughout

this period to find out what ‘poor Catholic mothers’ felt about the services available or about

‘the ties of home life’, but she doesn’t enlighten us either. There are still many Dublin

women alive who could have been asked about this and the author wouldn’t have had to

travel far to talk to them. Such oral evidence would have amplified the very rich personal

testimony contained in over 3500 mothers’ letters to Archbishop Byrne in the 1930s. Earner-

Byrne uses these letters to argue that Catholic mothers ‘bartered souls for sustenance’; the

glimpses of the letters which she showed us in this by far the most interesting and original

part of the book gave this reader a tantalising flash of insight into resourceful mothers of

families whose deference to the Church had very definite limits. This line of enquiry was not

followed up. The book’s conclusion would have benefited from a unifying theme like

experience. One hopes that the author, with her encyclopaedic knowledge of the service

providers, organisations and personalities, will now go on to find out what it was actually like

to be someone availing themselves of those services in Dublin in the years in question.

Caitriona Clear

NUI, Galway

[email protected]

q 2008, Caitriona Clear


A provisional dictator: James Stephens and the Fenian movement, by Marta Ramon,

Dublin, University College Dublin Press, 2007, xi þ317 pp., £42.00, ISBN 978 1 904558

65 1

A new biography of James Stephens, the founder of the Fenian movement, is long

overdue. The last, Desmond Ryan’s The Fenian Chief, appeared in 1967, and forty years is

clearly too long to have waited for its successor. Nevertheless, the wait has been

worthwhile because Marta Ramon has produced a fine scholarly study that joins the select

body of work on the Fenians that can be described as indispensable.

Why the years of neglect? Certainly one of the reasons is the failure of the Fenians to

mount an effective challenge to British rule. Their attempted rising misfired. Whereas the

United Irish rebellion and the Easter Rising and subsequent War of Independence force

themselves on our attention, the Fenian affair has never been able to insist on the same

degree of urgency. It is still rather surprising, however, that John Mitchel, arguably the

ideological inspiration for modern Irish republicanism, lacks a modern biography, and that

of the Fenian leaders only Charles Kickham has received his proper due. What of Ramon’s

A Provisional Dictator?

She successfully establishes the events of 1848 and 1849 as the beginnings of modern

Irish republicanism. While the confederate movement failed to mount any sort of serious

challenge to British rule, nevertheless it gave a ‘democratic’ dimension to Irish politics,

involving large numbers of labourers, artisans and shop assistants in an attempted

revolution. While Stephens himself was among those who escaped abroad in the aftermath

of the 1848 fiasco, another attempt was to be made the following year. The neglected 1849

effort was important because it was the work of a secret underground organisation rather

than of an open organisation such as the Irish Confederation. The model of organisation

provided by the 1849 conspirators was to inform the Fenian movement that was launched

towards the end of the 1850s. Ramon is sceptical both of the extent to which Stephens was

involved in secret societies during his Continental exile and of the influence such societies

might have had on the Fenians.

Stephens’ claim to fame is in the building of the Fenian organisation in Ireland, the

effective challenge it mounted to constitutional nationalism, its withstanding of clerical

censure and its surviving British repression. His own escape from prison gave him a heroic

Robin Hood status at the time. He failed to stage a credible, let alone successful, rising,

however. Ramon provides excellent accounts of the Macmanus funeral, of the Irish People

newspaper, of Stephens’ troubled relations with the American wing of the movement, of his

refusal to launch a premature (as far as he was concerned) rising and his subsequent overthrow

by more determined men. It is the manner of his overthrow and his removal from the scene

before the attempted 1867 Rising that has limited interest in the man. He was not there when

the organisation he had built up actually made its move, however unsuccessful it was to be.

While acknowledging Stephens’ authoritarian control of the Fenian movement,

Ramon also brings out the extent to which it was a ‘democratic’ (she uses the word

‘egalitarian’) movement, if not in its organisation, then in its composition. This is an

important point. The Fenians were committed to bolstering ‘working class self-esteem’

and urged the abandoning of the traditional reliance on a middle-class leadership. They

‘aspired to social and political, rather than economic equality, but the idea of the republic

was also accompanied by an implicit promise of advancement’.

The one criticism that this reader has of the book is that it would have been extremely

useful to have had Fenianism put into a wider context. Ramon is very good on the

American connection, but more consideration of Fenianism as one of a number

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of European revolutionary movements would have been interesting. Fenian antipathy to

Garibaldi is well known, but they attempted an alliance with British radicals and even

appointed the French revolutionary Gustave Cluseret to command the Fenian army. This

dimension of the movement’s history would have benefited from further exploration.

John Newsinger

Bath Spa University

[email protected]

q 2008, John Newsinger

The Orange Order: a contemporary Northern Irish history, by Eric P. Kaufmann,

Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007, 373 pp., £30.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 0 199208

48 7

In March 2005, almost exactly one hundred years after the formation of the Ulster Unionist

Council, the Orange Order severed its formal ties with the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP).

In this impressive and insightful book, Canadian scholar Eric Kaufmann describes this

moment as ‘truly the beginning of a new era for Orange politics’ (313). Indeed, the simple

fact that this book could be written at all, drawing as it does on unprecedented co-operation

from the Order itself, is a sign of some of the far-reaching changes that have occurred

within the Orange movement since the early 1960s.

Kaufmann claims, not without some justification, to have produced the ‘first modern

history and social analysis of the Orange Order’, based on a ‘treasure-trove’ of internal

official documents never previously made available to a non-Orange audience (1). This

provides the foundation for eleven chapters that discuss the main issues faced by the Order

over the past fifty years, including its policies on political reform after the abolition of

Stormont (which effectively removed its insider influence on government policy), the

disputes over major initiatives such as the Anglo-Irish and Belfast Agreements, and its

stances on security and the always controversial parading issue. The overall approach is

chronological and historical, and while this generally works, at times it sits uneasily with

sections in which the author attempts to develop a socio-economic analysis of membership

and to assess trends in political preferences. Accounts of internal debates and meetings are

often rather clunky, and there are several annoying factual errors. The ‘field’ at Finaghy,

for example, is placed in North Belfast rather than South, Roy Bradford (rather than the

Revd Robert) is said to die at the hands of the IRA, the New Ireland Forum Report is

attributed to Jim Prior, Clifford Forsythe is given as MP for South Down rather than South

Antrim, and Lansdowne Road – the home of Irish rugby – is referred to as a race-track in

Dublin! Perhaps, however, this is a small price to pay for an assessment of the Orange

Order that is dispassionate and objective, and avoids the temptation to knee-jerk criticism.

A central strength of the book lies in its deconstruction of the image of the Order as a

monolithic institution characterised by parades of ‘mysterious bowler-hatted men wearing

Orange sashes accompanied by hard-thumping marching bands’ (1). Instead, Kaufmann

situates the Irish movement within its wider context – making some insightful

comparisons with Canada, for example – and draws attention to all the nuances and

fissures within the organisation, to its internal power relations and socio-economic make-

up. As well as politics and parading, for example, there have always been important

divisions over issues such as attendance at Catholic services, ecumenism, and about

whether alcohol should be permitted in Orange halls. Another important internal value


relates to the preference for ‘respectability’, discipline and law and order. However, this

co-exists uneasily with a ‘rough’ populist element and those occasions when the Order has

supported pan-unionist movements such as Vanguard (in which the participation of

loyalist paramilitary groups was evident), and especially with the support for violent

action that surrounded the Drumcree parades in the late 1990s.

Many of these issues are characterised by a ‘great divide’ between what Kaufmann

terms ‘traditionalists’ and ‘rebels’, the former stronger in the border counties with a

predominance of members from the Church of Ireland, the latter in Antrim and Belfast

where there is a more nonconformist streak. This cleavage manifested itself in the

internal divisions over parading. So in 1995 a group of militants banded together in the

‘Spirit of Drumcree’ (SOD) to demand stronger action against the re-routing of

parades, no negotiations with nationalist residents’ groups, an end to the link with the

UUP, and internal structural reforms to strengthen further the influence of the

grassroots. In this it was opposed by clergy-led traditionalists in the Education

Committee who adopted a more pragmatic approach and worked to improve the

Order’s external image. Although relatively short lived, SOD was the harbinger of

important structural changes, and also played a crucial role in stiffening the sinews of

the Order against compromise with either nationalists or the British government in the

wake of the Belfast Agreement.

A core element of Kaufmann’s thesis is that general trends promoting the modernisation

of society have had a crucial impact on the Orange Order. He argues, for example, that major

social changes have contributed to a levelling of status hierarchies, manifested initially in

the emergence of popular challenges to a dominant elite closely linked to traditional

political unionism – not only from outsider figures such as Paisley but also with the

accession of ‘populists’ such as James Molyneaux and the Revd Martin Smyth to positions

of authority within the Order. Crucially important is Kaufmann’s grounding of the Orange

Order within an organisational framework that sees it as an ‘agent of “bonding” social

capital’ (7). Drawing on the work of Robert Putnam and others – indeed it is instructive that

the Grand Lodge invited Putnam to address it in 2005 – he develops the important argument

that the Order is an association like any other, a dynamic entity that must compete with other

outlets for leisure time and social interaction. In this context the most pressing concern is a

long-term trend decline in membership from around 70,000 in the late 1950s, albeit

punctuated by upsurges at times of political crisis. For Kaufmann, however, the explanation

has more to do with social change than politics. This is highlighted in the fascinating claim

that the most important correlate of Orange membership decline is the expansion of the road

network rather than traditional variables such as class and employment. Indeed, ‘whatever

way the data are sliced, the most important determinants of membership are anchored in less

sexy socio-economic trends related to geographic mobility and changing cultural practices’

(284). So there is a notable urban/rural divide, with urbanites more likely to leave the Order

than those in rural areas where there are fewer alternative opportunities for social

engagement.

Although essentially a conservative body, the Order has had to adapt in the face of

such social change; indeed, Kaufmann argues that the story of the Order in the second half

of the twentieth century is one of ‘continuity and adaptation’ (314). Prompted by the crisis

around Drumcree, it has paid greater attention to its public image and also has begun to re-

articulate its preferences in the language of equality, multiculturalism and human rights

rather than tradition. Indeed, media training, PR, cultural exhibits and tourist promotion

are ‘increasingly part of the Orange lexicon’ (314). This, of course, raises the fundamental

question: what is the future for the Orange Order? In the final pages of the book, Kaufmann

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speculates that even if the political situation normalises, the Order ‘will continue to have a

cultural role as custodian of the Ulster Protestant collective memory’ (319). However,

given that he accurately locates the Orange Order as a core pillar of ‘no’ unionism, it is

unfortunate that the seismic shift that saw the DUP and Sinn Fein agree to form a power-

sharing executive came too late for inclusion in this book. What does this mean for the

future of the Order, and for its role as the voice of ‘no’ unionism?

Alan Greer

University of the West of England

[email protected]

q 2008, Alan Greer

Ireland: the politics of enmity, 1789–2006, by Paul Bew, Oxford, Oxford University

Press, 2007, 613 pp., £35.00, ISBN 978 0 198205 55 5

Paul Bew’s major narrative account of the modern political history of Ireland lives up to

any expectations enhanced by the considerable reputation of its author. It cannot be

regarded as comprising a comprehensive history of Ireland since the French Revolution,

but it does survey the terrain of political debate and initiative in an Irish context over this

period. In this, in itself a daunting task, and in focusing the implications of much of the

author’s work of the last three decades, it is an exemplary and welcome publication.

The core thesis and assumption that conflict should be examined in an all-Ireland context

is, however, highly controversial.

The evidence offered by Bew is dazzling, a testimony to years of endeavour. But his

presentation of data, characteristic of us political and intellectual historians, invites the

reader to enter a self-consistent world bounded by its own casual empiricism. Richard

English has suggested that the gradual disappearance of overt Marxist influence from

successive editions of the classic The State in Northern Ireland, co-authored by Bew, may

be taken as an indication of wider academic acceptance of the inability of Marxism to

explain the sources of conflict in Northern Ireland. But the nature of Bew’s sources in the

reviewed text is suggestive of still more fundamental methodological choices. Socio-

economic data are offered, but ultimately are drowned out by the voices of government

officials and supporters, and party leaders. Political history composed in these terms

embodies a perfectly respectable historiographical tradition, but one in which issues of

representation and selection can be endlessly debated. If Bew’s intention was to discuss

the personalities and factions of Irish history according to their political significance, it is

questionable why Stephen Gwynn is given as much exposure as Arthur Griffith.

The perspectives, interactions and experiences reflected and analysed emanate

predominantly from those in relatively comfortable circumstances. On Bew’s reading,

conservative Figs. (nationalist and unionist) reviled in radical iconography, such as Viscount

Castlereagh and (of course) John Redmond, are revealed as statesmanlike, engaged with

building a more sound foundation for conciliation and community in Ireland. However,

‘consistency is an overrated virtue in Irish politics’ (123), where sectarian tendencies, rhetoric,

emotion and spin, not strategy and principle, predominate. Radical nationalists, meanwhile,

full of passionate intensity, are unreliable, inflammatory, and, notably, corruptible.

The project of writing a political history of modern Ireland presupposes that Ireland is

a ‘natural’ political unit of analysis. Ironically, this is a criticism which has been more

usually levelled at nationalists; but here it leads to a presentation of Irish political history


in terms of a sequence of missed (and apparently ongoing) opportunities for political and

moral reunion, involving contentious assumptions regarding the nature of reconciliation,

as to the existence of opportunities, and as to how willing actors inside and outside of

Ireland were to permit them. Here, as elsewhere in Bew’s work, the emphasis of the

symbolic significance of the question of compulsory language in alienating Ulster

Protestants in the early twentieth century is interesting, but controversial. Notwithstanding

Bew’s periodic emphasis of the ‘brutal’ (85), ‘sectarian’ (95) realities of Irish society, his

insistence on the potency of such missed opportunities logically suggests that there is a

strong and consistently residual element within unionist Ireland which could be won over

to political unification, and which therefore possesses only a contingent commitment to

unionism’s core ideological values. One cannot imagine that this view would find much

considered political endorsement in Northern Ireland unionism today or in any period over

the last century. Other limits of this all-Ireland perspective are suggested in Bew’s

insistence that ‘it has to be acknowledged that the self-referential culture of Irish

nationalism was ill equipped to rise to the moral challenges of [the second] world war’

(473). In fact it is only analysis bound by a ‘self-referential’ nature, rather than a global

context, which could suggest that any ideology emerged with glory from the challenges

associated with that morally desolating conflict.

Cognately, the justification for taking 1789 as the point of departure is not made

particularly clear. There is surely a case for suggesting that a ‘politics of enmity’ in Ireland

began earlier, for instance with the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Taking the French

Revolution as the point of origin for sectarian animosity certainly magnifies the relevance

of the influence of Edmund Burke to British establishment positions, and coheres, on

Bew’s understanding, to representations of the British state as a relatively benign and

distant influence on the course of Irish history, itself reinforcing the focus on conflict and

political opportunity specifically within Ireland. Thus we are told, for instance, that ‘in

mainstream British political life, Home Rule as such did not provoke any serious concerns

about strategic issues’ (570), a judgement which at best incorporates some playful

definitions of terms. Similar judgements unsurprisingly become still more contentious the

closer Bew gets to the present day, and he revisits the argument made in his journalism

(reproduced in The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement) that the course

of the Northern Ireland conflict reveals a weak, appeasing strain in Western democracies

in dealing with terrorism. On Bew’s reading the ‘Stormontgate’ affair of 2002 shows the

threat posed by republican infiltration to any Northern Ireland security apparatus

unprotected by Protestant discrimination (579–81). Subsequent revelations that it was the

British who had an informer at a high level of the republican movement suggest that Bew

considerably understates the strength (and ruthlessness) of the Western state, and suggest a

somewhat different perspective on the corruptibility of radicals. A theme of modern Irish

history is thus the resourcefulness which establishment forces (in any given jurisdiction)

could use to co-opt potential supposed trouble-makers. Bew’s methodology (and, one

senses, conviction) does not facilitate the assessment of this dimension here.

In spite of these limitations, however, this book merits the attention of all students and

scholars of modern Irish history and politics. In such overpopulated fields, this represents a

considerable recommendation.

G.K. Peatling

University of Plymouth

[email protected]

q 2008, G.K. Peatling

Reviews206

Artist of Wonderland: the life, political cartoons, and illustrations of Tenniel, by

Frankie Morris, Cambridge, Lutterworth Press, 2007 (first published by arrangement with

the University of Virginia Press, 2005), 405 pp., £35.00 (hardback), ISBN 0 71 883056 3

If John Tenniel is most remembered today among art historians as the illustrator of Lewis

Carroll’s Alice books, he would interest Irish Studies as a leading political cartoonist of the

Victorian period. Over a period of fifty years, Tenniel created 2300 cartoons for Punch

magazine. He was the leading political cartoonist of his time, illuminating the pages of

Punch, described by one journalist as ‘the most serious comic paper in the world’.

The American journalist George W. Smalley described his critical role as ‘to make a

picture of other people’s thoughts’ (262).

Frankie Morris has written a comprehensive biography, fully illustrated and supported by

intelligent commentary. It focuses on his life, his methods and earlier book illustrations, the

Alice pictures, and the numerous cartoons. This review, while looking most closely at the

controversial Irish cartoons, follows the author’s argument that they should be understood in a

broader trawl through Tenniel’s cartoons on the English working classes, and his general use

of stereotype figures drawn from contemporary literature and stage characterisation.

This raises the question of Tenniel’s politics and the political stance of Punch

magazine. Morris argues that Punch declared itself as a non-partisan journal and gives

examples where it bucked the Conservative party line. For instance, Punch and Tenniel

supported Gladstone’s Liberal bill to disestablish the Irish Church in 1869. She also

explains that cartoons were approved and amended in a cartoon-by-committee system that

allowed input from staffers who represented the full political spectrum. The magazine

gained support from both political parties and Tenniel’s knighthood, originally suggested

under Salisbury’s government, was awarded by Gladstone’s ministry. This is less than

convincing in the light of the substantive argument that Punch and Tenniel took a

consistently Tory line in resisting the movement for widening the franchise and depicted

trades union leaders in the most pejorative fashion. This political stance has important

echoes of Tenniel’s depiction of Paddy as a simian stereotype.

In an interesting chapter, entitled King Demos, Morris identifies Tenniel’s cartoons

reflecting the views and images of contemporary novelists Dickens, Gaskell and Kingsley,

that cast trades union leaders in highly negative terms. Following the ‘Sheffield outrages’

and the Fenian rescue of prisoners in Manchester in 1867, Punch compared the two incidents

as dual monsters to be resisted. In response, labour leader George Potter commented: ‘To be

a trades Unionist now was as bad as being a Fenian’ (268). In addition to severe attacks on

labour leaders, characterised as acting against the interests of working men, Tenniel

employed stock images that represented the ‘rough’ working class, drawing on the many

examples supplied by Dickens, such as the stunted and bow-legged artful dodger to

Mayhew’s petty thieves, ‘all more or less distinguished for their high cheekbones and

protruding jaws’ (279). Morris makes a convincing case that Tenniel’s use of numerous

parolees, garroters, footpads and wife-beaters were invoked to deny genuine social unrest.

The presence of such rough characters at reform riots or scenes of disorder served to

discredit the political aspirations of the working classes. As Morris concedes, this political

propaganda pandered to the prejudices of Conservative, affluent middle-class readers who

preferred the demonising of the working classes as a means of preserving the status quo.

This background informs the discussion of Tenniel’s treatment of Irish questions and the

contribution of the transatlantic debate on Irish Victorian caricature, initiated by L. Perry

Curtis and involving Roy Foster and Sheridan Gilley as major players. Curtis interpreted the


ape-like caricatures of Irish figures as evidence of a blatant English racism that categorised

Paddy as an Irish Frankenstein or Devilfish, certainly as sub-human. Foster has pointed to the

shift in policy with regard to Ireland over a generation, moving from sympathy for the plight of

Irish peasants in the 1840s to hostility to Fenian violence during the 1860s. Gilley has argued

for a set of ambivalent attitudes held by the English, some positive and some negative, that

changed with circumstances. Morris argues that the controversial, simian images of Tenniel’s

Irish cartoons drew on stock images in earlier cartoons by Leech, the writings of Thackeray

and Carlyle, and the well-known figure of the stage Irishman. The controversial ‘Paddy’

images related to Fenian ‘outrages’ continued into the period of the Land League in the 1880s.

Tenniel’s Irish cartoons brought protests from the Irish and American press, but also from

English papers like the Pall Mall Gazette in 1881: ‘If anyone wonders why the Irish should not

love England, let him look at the comic papers just now. Hatred and contempt glisten in every

line of these caricatures of the national type’ (301). The reply from Punch was that the

inclusion of fair Hibernia, the symbol of the virtuous Irish, often protected by Britannia from

the ruffianly, violent Irish, proved that this was not a case of a slur against the Irish as a race but

rather a demonising of reckless violence and murder. As further proof, the ‘loyal Irish’,

volunteering to assist as special constables against Irish bombers, were represented as

handsome and virtuous. Simian Paddy, Morris concludes, was depicted as a supporter of the

Fenians, the Land League or Home Rule for Ireland. It will not be lost on readers that here

there are uncanny echoes of the current demonising of Islamic extremist terrorists in Britain.

Morris takes the argument further in portraying Irish stereotyping in the New York

papers Harper’s Weekly and Puck as more acrimonious than those featured in Punch.

The hostility shown to the immigrant Irish, Catholicism, Tammany Hall and the Democratic

Party involved the bestialised Irish. For instance, notoriously ape-like figures dominated

Nast’s cartoon of St Patrick’s Day celebrations which resulted in the savage beatings dealt

out by the New York police. Moreover, the charge of English racism is countered by the Irish

press depicting the figure of Saxon John Bull belonging to a race of bloodthirsty murderers,

liars and oppressors. The polarisation of Saxon and Celt formed part of the common

discourse of the time and lent substance to the nationalist case for Irish independence.

A convincing case is made that Tenniel personified Irish resistance to British rule by

various mutations of the stage Irishman Paddy. His concept of the two Irelands was ‘one

faithful to England, the other a fractious and demagogue-driven minority, helped to justify

the union between the countries’ (312). Not the most fashionable stance to take in the

present time, but not without its rationale in the Victorian period.

Graham Davis

Bath Spa University

[email protected]

q 2008, Graham Davis

LITERATURE AND CULTURE

The life and times of Edward Martyn: an aristocratic bohemian, by Madeleine

Humphreys, Dublin/Portland, OR, Irish Academic Press, 2007, 286 pp., £35.00/e45.00,

ISBN 978 0 716529 23 1

Edward Martyn is remembered in modern Ireland as a result of the name having been

dropped into memoirs, journals, diaries, letters and the numerous historical surveys of the

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Irish Cultural Revival. For most of the academic chroniclers of what has come to be

regarded as W.B. Yeats’s revival, interest in Martyn has amounted to little more than a

passing curiosity in him as one of the founders of the Irish Literary Theatre, a self-

promotional backer of other people’s cultural projects, and a target for caricature as one of

the very minor writers in the whole movement. The most quoted opinions are probably

George Moore’s mocking depiction of the antics of ‘dear Edward’ in his autobiography,

and Yeats’s brutal demolition of Martyn’s life and work in a great bloody phrase ‘the

sterility of the mule’. Since his death in 1923, books about Martyn in his own right have

been few and have tended to deal with his roles as a Catholic landlord patron of the arts in

Ireland, especially in the fields of the theatre and Church art; as the author of a satirical and

romantic novel (now unread); and of plays written under the influence of Ibsen’s

symbolism (now unperformed). Madeleine Humphreys’s biography, then, deserves to be

saluted as the first book which sets down a chronological account of Martyn’s life story

which she has compiled from a considerable range of unpublished and published sources

and which she has illustrated with about forty interesting archival items. Humphreys’

account renders Martyn’s life as a readable, if sentimental, tale of a sad man who, for all

his journalistic battling with his contemporaries, proved to be a good friend to all in

the end.

Too little scholarly attention has been paid to the fact that Martyn trod unusual paths

in his rite of passage from Unionist Landlord to Irish Revivalist once he was left as the

master of Tulira Castle after his mother’s death in 1898. The first path, begun in the

Greece of Joachim Winckelmann and St. John Chrysostom, was chronicled in his novel

Morgante the Lesser. Humphreys intensely dislikes the novel. Her view of Agathopolis,

the isle of uncloistered monks dedicated to the ways of learning and holiness, produces a

judgement like this: ‘It is clear that Agathopolis is some kind of Garden of Eden where

there is no original sin . . . It is confused; maybe it is even heresy.’ A closer reading

would have revealed Martyn’s deep need to create a symbolical enclave in a time zone of

light and wonder beyond the reach of the iconoclastic devotees of the Wind Prophet who

must be kept at bay by wielding weaponry associated with Rabelais and Swift. At the

stage of his writing Morgante, Martyn had little inkling of how seeds from Agathopolis

would take root in his future plans for the Irish Cultural Revival for which he would be

arguing later in his sustained support of the Gaelic League and during his presidency of

the Sinn Fein Movement when the latter was purely a cultural movement, and not yet the

revolutionary political party which brought about a political version of Irish

independence in 1921. Again, Morgante can be fruitfully interpreted as allegorised

autobiography up to the age of thirty, and if Humphreys had studied it in this way she

might have grasped more fully the mind of the young Edward Martyn, especially on the

question of the role of women which she trivialises by dubbing it as ‘misogamy’.

The second path began for Martyn in Sweden alongside Henrik Ibsen, whose symbolist

plays provided Martyn with the inspiration and the dramaturgy to bring home to Tulira

his approach of allegorised autobiography in the three plays The Heather Field, Maeve

and An Enchanted Sea, each of which explored tellingly aspects of his vision of Ireland.

Humphreys gives a fair account of the first reception of these and other plays but cannot

resist the accusing finger: ‘It is difficult to argue with the notion that Edward Martyn

wrote his plays for himself, and “inflicted” them on others.’

Humphreys touches too briefly on the betrayals during the 1920s which contributed to

Martyn’s subsequent neglect, namely the fate of his bequests to the National Gallery of

Ireland and to the Carmelites at St Teresa’s, Clarendon Street, Dublin. The most shocking

aspect of the bequest is that out of the forty-six items of Martyn’s listed Art Collection,


only sixteen are traceable at the present time. Humphreys mentions the ‘mislaid’ Martyn

Papers in the safekeeping of Father Cyril Ryan, Carmelite Provincial, but then simply sets

off a story coursing in the manner of George Moore’s drollery: ‘It is possible that Ryan

destroyed the papers, that that may well have revealed the complexity of Edward’s sexual

nature, or even his latent paganism.’

Recently there have been a few encouraging signs to suggest the stirrings of an Irish

public revaluation of Martyn’s distinctive place in Irish history as the one who advocated the

cultural path which was not taken by the fledging nation. Tulira Castle and its grounds have

been magnificently restored over the last decade by its present owners, Ruud and Femmy

Bolmeijer. During 2003 there were two reported Martyn celebratory events. First, there was

the Palestrina Choir marking the centenary of its foundation by Martyn with a Mass of

Thanksgiving in the Pro-Cathedral, a reception in Dublin Castle with an address about

Martyn, and the visit of the Palestrina Choir as guests at Tulira Castle where they performed

for the very first time. Then there were the centenary celebrations of the consecration of St

Brendan’s Cathedral Loughrea, which included a fine tribute to the cathedral’s first

visionary patron of their own Irish Revival Church art. Nothing of this seems to interest

Humphreys. Will there be a re-publication of Morgante the Lesser, hopefully with

illustrations by a brilliant artist, and experimental performances of Martyn’s three major

plays by 2009 to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth? Could Lady Gregory’s diary entry

description of Martyn as ‘a bridge between the old and new Ireland’, which is quoted by

Humphreys, actually belatedly happen? Unfortunately there is little in this book, with the

tell-tale subtitle ‘An Aristocratic Bohemian’, to inform and enthuse anybody to argue

strongly for the contemporary relevance of the neglected works of the great outsider of the

Irish Cultural Revival who was Edward Martyn.

Jerry Nolan

Independent Scholar, London

[email protected]

q 2008, Jerry Nolan

Emily Lawless 1845–1913: writing the interspace, by Heidi Hansson, Cork, Cork

University Press, 2007, viii þ234 pp., e49.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 1 859184 13 4

This excellent work is the first critical book on Emily Lawless – an author so popular in

her time that she was praised by Prime Minister Gladstone, yet one who was subsequently

ignored throughout most of the twentieth century. However, Lawless has undergone a

revival that began with 1980s articles in the old Eire-Ireland (now the New Hibernian

Review) by Betty Web Brewer and Elizabeth Grubgeld, and then in the (now defunct)

Colby Quarterly in the 1990s by such critics as Bridget Matthews-Kane and Gerardine

Meaney. Full disclosure seems necessary here: I myself published a 1991 article in Colby

that celebrated Lawless, particularly her novel Grania and her biography Maria

Edgeworth, as ‘protofeminist’. Heidi Hansson has done her homework: she cites all of

these previous works on Lawless, as well as seemingly everything that Lawless ever

published, as listed in her very thorough bibliography. She is kind in her citations of her

critical predecessors. She generously cites my focus on the ‘protofeminist’ Lawless, for

example, even though her book problematises such an emphasis. Hansson develops a

highly nuanced case for Lawless as a ‘double-voiced’ author and person – sometimes

critical, for example, of patriarchy, yet opposed to women’s suffrage, and a writer who

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sought to open up Ireland to readers, especially English readers, but at the same time an

Anglo-Irishwoman who supported the Union. This is to cite just two ‘double-voiced’

examples, perhaps the two most prominent ones in her life and work. Lawless ‘viewed

Ireland as an interspace, a place between and beyond recognisable paradigms’ (56). It may

be that rather than anticipate feminism in general, Lawless anticipated contemporary

feminist critiques of ‘essentialism’.

Yeats dismissed Lawless as in ‘imperfect sympathy with the Celtic nature’, and

Synge criticised her for spending too little time on Inis Meain and not knowing Gaelic –

even though in Grania (1893) she had treated that Aran island eleven years before

Synge’s one-act masterpiece ‘Riders to the Sea ‘ (1904). Yet much as King George III

had felt, ironically enough, that he finally understood his Irish subjects after reading

Castle Rackrent (1800), Gladstone appreciated Lawless’ novel Hurrish (1886) – the

book that most provoked attacks on her for creating stereotyped Irish characters –

because it effectively exposed and explained ‘the estrangement of the people of Ireland

from the law’ (69).

Hansson’s sixteen-page, modestly titled chapter ‘Family and Friends’ offers just

enough biographical background on Lawless to whet one’s appetite for a full biography –

the next book that we need about her. Here we read about how she grew up within an

aristocratic world, near Dublin, while also spending summers with her mother’s family

outside Galway. Hansson shows how Lawless came from a world so strongly unionist that

to become an Irish nationalist would have been an act of rejection of everything her family

and friends stood for. Remaining unmarried, after her parents’ deaths Lawless moved

permanently in the mid-1890s to Surrey, though she visited Ireland every year until 1911,

two years before her death. We also pick up such factual nuggets as the fact that earlier in

her life, her sister Rose had been found drowned in a pool, with rumours of suicide

following her death. One is left wondering if the saintly character of Honor in Grania –

who dies while her sister Grania drowns while heroically trying to make it to the

neighbouring big island to get a doctor for Honor – involved a psychological working out

of Lawless’ loss of Rose, in this novel that ends with the thought that the two sisters might

meet in heaven.

A biography of Lawless also seems especially called for not only because information

about her life remains scattered and incomplete but also because she was a biographer

herself. Maria Edgeworth (1904) examined her chief predecessor as another double-

voiced Anglo-Irishwoman. Hansson argues that, in this biography, Lawless does not

organise or control her subject but rather ‘allows Maria Edgeworth to speak for herself’

through generous quotations. Similarly, the style of her 1887 history Ireland ‘resembles

fiction’ (6), blurring the line between her non-fiction and her historical novels such as With

Essex in Ireland (1890) and Maelcho (1894), both of which even Yeats included on his

published list of the ‘Best Irish Books’. Hansson goes so far as to claim that Lawless’

‘persistent representation of the implications of the past as elusive and indeterminate

prefigures the insights of New-Historicism and the realisation that history is always also a

matter of story-telling’.

Lawless countered ‘the establishment of an authoritative voice’ as advocated by Sir

Leslie Stephen, the leading nineteenth-century model of male-dominated biographical

research, who ‘conceived of the biographer as the expert and the biographee as the

Object’. To the contrary, Lawless related to Edgeworth not as a detached ‘object’ but as a

kindred spirit, a sister or a grandmother, and like many others she saw Edgeworth’s father

as having a ‘negative impact on his daughter’s work as a matter of patriarchal oppression’

(113), a view seen by later critics and biographers of Edgeworth as simplistic. Just when


Lawless seems to be truly protofeminist here, however, she ends her biography by

championing Edgeworth’s ‘conventionally masculine accomplishments as a writer and

employer and her feminine roles as daughter and sister’ (113). Edgeworth ran her family’s

large estates after her father’s death, but of course she did not have the vote. Yet Lawless

had signed an 1899 ‘Appeal Against Women’s Suffrage’ (31). In this regard it would have

been worth comparing and contrasting Lawless with Somerville and Ross, that dynamic

female writing duo and Lawless’ contemporaries. Hansson mentions ‘Ross’ (Violet

Martin) in passing, but she does not mention her cousin Edith Somerville, who served as

president of the Munster Women’s Franchise League, and outlived both her cousin and

Lawless long enough to see women finally get the vote.

Order Writing the Interspace for your library. To really hold onto Lawless – always

trying to make her way between women’s old roles and new ones, and amidst male-

dominated unionism and nationalism – get your own copy.

James M. Cahalan

Indiana University of Pennsylvania

[email protected]

q 2008, James M. Cahalan

Henry James, Oscar Wilde and aesthetic culture, by Michele Mendelssohn, Edinburgh,

Edinburgh University Press, 2007, 310 pp., £65.00, ISBN 978 0 748623 85 3

In her engaging and accessible study Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture,

Michele Mendelssohn recuperates the literary and personal encounters that took place

between James and Wilde in order to revise and expand upon earlier readings of this

relationship produced by Richard Ellmann, Jonathan Freedman, Hugh Stevens, Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick and others. By reviewing this keynote literary relationship,

Mendelssohn’s book, the first monograph to come out of Edinburgh University Press’s

‘Studies in Transatlantic Literature’ series, finds itself addressing the central questions that

shaped Aestheticism (authenticity, originality, camp, and consumerism) in a transatlantic

context. Her suggestion that the book is a ‘parable about two cultures in conflict that

stridently externalised their concerns about one another and themselves while quietly

internalising each other’s values in print [and] exercising their ideas so that they could

strengthen their respective cultures’ is one that is sustained successfully throughout by the

use of close careful readings of ‘works, letters and conversations in which the authors refer

to each other’ (4, 10). Although the relative paucity of material in which Wilde referred,

implicitly or explicitly, to James might suggest that the feelings of ‘puerility, esteem,

contempt, admiration, frustration, jealousy, mockery, sympathy, flirtation, fascination,

Schadenfreude, concern and care’ that Mendelssohn identifies were more on James’s side

than Wilde’s, the book nonetheless offers a series of insightful and suggestive readings of

how the lines of influence between the two writers manifest themselves in essays such as

‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889) and in novels such as The Spoils of Poynton (1897) (10).

That the study grounds its discussion of the developing relationship between Wilde

and James and, as Mendelssohn suggests, the evolution of Aestheticism that it entailed in

specific places – Boston, where Wilde first met James in 1882, the Grosvenor Gallery, St

James’s Theatre and Clouds, the home of the Wyndham family and putative inspiration for

the fictional ‘Poynton’ – evocatively brings to life the interconnections between the two

writers. Indeed, the significance that the same locales held (roughly) contemporaneously

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for both writers allows her to adduce a more nuanced narrative of the various encounters

between them than the attitude of homosexual panic that has previously been accorded to

James in his response to Wilde by Ellmann and others (8–9). (However, although

Mendelssohn regrets the tendency of queer theory towards ‘a conspicuous aversion to

imagining pleasure in James’ she, herself, does not provide instances of it in his writing

(12).) The first encounter between James and Wilde that she reconstructs is on the latter’s

American Lecture Tour of 1882 where, according to her, while the ingenue Wilde saw his

image hawked in advertising for products that ranged from ice-cream to hosiery, James

contemporaneously was busying himself with challenging contemporary British

Aestheticism’s claim to originality in short fiction such as ‘A Bundle of Letters’ (1879)

and ‘An International Episode’ (1879). In this respect, Mendelssohn’s reading of George

Du Maurier’s illustrations for Washington Square (1880), a novel set in the 1850s and

1860s, is particularly persuasive in its discussion of James’s attempt to construct a

genealogy of American Aestheticism which pre-dated its British counterpart. The ensuing

chapter returns to the Grosvenor Gallery and assesses the dual influence that both Henry

James and James McNeill Whistler exercised over the construction of Wilde’s emergent

aesthetic. With her fresh reading of ‘The Decay of Lying’, a dialogue in which she argues

that Wilde disingenuously castigates James as an anachronistic realist, Mendelssohn

gauges the impact that the Wilde–James association had on Wilde’s literary art. And in the

deft reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890 and 1891) that follows, she both reads

the fictional Lord Henry’s dissection of character as directly resulting from James’s

novelistic method and expands convincingly upon Ellmann’s suggestion that the fictional

Basil Hallward is Wilde’s version of Whistler.1

The analytical force and sharp close readings marking these early chapters unravel

somewhat in Mendelssohn’s comparison of James’s commercially unsuccessful play Guy

Domville (1895) to its immediate and devastatingly more successful successor at St

James’s Theatre, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). While there is some useful

material deployed here to illustrate James’s anxiety about the reception of his play,

coming on the back of highly influential readings of Earnest by Alan Sinfield and Joseph

Bristow, Mendelssohn’s central argument that the plays challenge a monologic view of

identity feels a little tired.2 However, this is not to say that students would not find the

reading of both plays’ articulation of identity politics to be clear and insightful. James’s

response to Wilde’s prosecution is also handled sensitively and Mendelssohn is

unflinching in her account of James’s desire to protect and distance himself from Wilde in

the spring of 1895. Famously, James refused to sign a petition for Wilde’s release from

prison because, according to the petition’s author, James said that ‘the document would

only exist as a manifesto of personal loyalty to Oscar by his friends, of which he was

never one’ (210). Finally, the closing chapter reads The Turn of the Screw (1898) and De

Profundis (1905) as both authors’ retrospective summing-up of Aestheticism as refracted

through the figure of the child (respectively, the fictional Flora and Miles and the all-too-

real Bosie Douglas). Although readers may find Mendelssohn’s reading of Decadence

reductive (‘a mouldy overpowering scent of depravity that had irrevocably infused itself

into Aestheticism’s delicately perfumed pages’), her vision of the child’s ‘unusual and

conspicuous lack of innocence and moral values’ as a figure for the collapse of a

movement that was both enthralled by youth and committed to unyoking art and morality

is compelling (243). Thus, this lively and assured study successfully illuminates the

dialectical relationship that existed between James and Wilde and reads it as symptomatic

of the cultural oppositions that shaped Aestheticism in the transatlantic context in the

closing decades of the nineteenth century. Mendelssohn’s book will certainly lead readers


to re-evaluate the history of the Aesthetic Movement and, in this, Henry James, Oscar

Wilde and Aesthetic Culture emblematises the best kind of work being undertaken in the

field of comparative literature today.

Notes

1. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 261.2. Sinfield, The Wilde Century, vi; Bristow, ‘A Complex and Multiform Creature’, 197.

Bibliography

Bristow, Joseph. ‘A Complex and Multiform Creature: Wilde’s Sexual Identities’. In The Cambridge Companionto Oscar Wilde, ed. Peter Raby, 195–218. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988.Sinfield, Alan. The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1994.

Sondeep Kandola

University of Leeds

[email protected]

q 2008, Sondeep Kandola

Four Irish rebel plays, by James Moran, Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2007, 296 pp.,

e19.95 (paperback), ISBN 978 0 716528 53 1; e55.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 0 716528 52 4

James Moran’s Four Irish Rebel Plays is a useful resource for readers unable to access the

classic Maunsel editions of Tomas MacDonagh’s When the Dawn is Come (1908), Padraig

Pearse’s The Master (1917) and Terence MacSwiney’s The Revolutionist (1914). Moran’s

book is particularly valuable for the inclusion of James Connolly’s Under Which Flag?, the

typescript and manuscript drafts of which are held in the National Library of Ireland and

have not previously been published. While Four Irish Rebel Plays lacks the character of

the Maunsel editions, the inclusion of the four plays in one volume contributes to an

understanding of the way in which drama functioned as a popular form for the dissemination

of political ideas during a formative period in Ireland’s history.

Moran’s introduction provides a concise history of the Irish Revolution and the roles that

the four ‘literary-minded rebels’ played (5). However, his reading of the plays in relation to

political events implies that the texts were anticipations of the Easter Rising rather than part of

a dramatic tradition that portrayed past rebellions and looked hopefully to the future as a

means of asserting a separate identity and bolstering national morale. His reading is

particularly problematic with regard to MacDonagh’s When the Dawn is Come and Pearse’s

The Master. Moran elides the textual history of The Master in order to portray a closer

proximity between the play’s composition and the events of 1916: ‘the version of The Master

that Pearse staged four times at the Irish Theatre in May 1915 was the final play he wrote and

produced before his death’ (9). While a footnote clarifies that The Singer was the last play that

Pearse wrote and is his ‘most openly rebellious play’ (and thus arguably a better choice for

inclusion in this edition), the reader is not provided with any information regarding the

evolution of the text that makes the 1915 version so poignant. Moran briefly discusses

revisions that MacDonagh made to When the Dawn is Come between its debut at the Abbey

Theatre in 1908 and 1916, and he suggests that these changes mark important political

developments in the years leading up to the Rising. However, these revisions are not addressed

Reviews214

in any detail, nor are they illustrated in the text of the play. Similarly, discrepancies – ‘minor

gaps and errors’ – between the typescript and manuscript drafts of Connolly’s play are silently

edited ‘to regularise’ the text; again, whether alterations to the text might provide clues to

Connolly’s development as a playwright or changes in his political thought remains

ambiguous. In this way, Moran’s book falls short of a scholarly edition and is better regarded

as a source for plays that are not widely available.

Connolly’s Under Which Flag? most effectively fulfils Moran’s tactic of reading the

plays in direct relation to the Irish Revolution. The play debuted on 16 March 1916 at

Liberty Hall and was a direct response to the British recruitment campaign; as Moran

writes: ‘the two flags of Connolly’s title are those of Britain and Ireland’ (23). While the

title of the play certainly refers directly to the character Frank’s dilemma over whether to

take the Saxon shilling or to join the Volunteers, the eponymous question has a further

significance that Moran ignores: Connolly’s decision to replace the Starry Plough with

the green flag of the Volunteers. Moran emphasises the way in which Connolly

incorporated his socialist doctrine in Under Which Flag? (For example, there is no

dowry for the prospective bride as there is in Kathleen ni Houlihan, and Connolly’s Mary

plays a central role opposed to Yeats’s passive Delia.) But Connolly’s text speaks for

itself; nationalism dominates socialist concerns. Shortly after the play’s debut, Connolly

announced in the Worker’s Republic that the flag of the Irish Volunteers would be flown

over Liberty Hall as a symbol of the alliance between nationalism and socialism.

Moran’s discussion of Sean O’Casey’s critique of Connolly’s political position as an

impetus for writing The Plough and the Stars is enlightening, and it would be enriched

by a more complex reading of the contemporary debates over socialist support of the

nationalist programme.

Moran’s notes to the texts provide essential background on the origins of the titles

of the plays as well as thorough glosses on the significance of character names for

readers with varying degrees of acquaintance with Irish history – from MacDonagh’s

Thurlough (a seventeenth-century harpist) to MacSwiney’s Hugh O’Neill (the Earl of

Tyrone who rebelled against the Crown during the Elizabethan wars). The notes for

When the Dawn is Come are important for clarifying Thurlough’s enigmatic allusion to

the fate of ‘a monk’ when he is plotting rebellion with his council. Moran explains that

this is a reference to the fifteenth-century Savonarola, who condemned the Medici

family’s destructive hedonistic rule and was denounced by the Vatican and condemned

to death. This is useful information with regard to Thurlough’s anxieties in the play, but

Moran forges a connection between the Pope’s neutral stance in the fictional text (1908)

and the neutral position of the Pope with regard to the 1916 Rising that is anachronistic

at best.

The epilogue, ‘The Disappearance of the Plays’, attributes the lack of productions of the

‘rebel’ texts in recent decades to the outbreak of the Troubles and subsequent

historiographical trends. Moran argues that The Master has been neglected due to the

equation of ‘Pearse’s brand of nationalism’ with sectarian violence, and ‘revisionist critics

[who] started demolishing the once dominant characterisation of Pearse as a saint by focusing

their attention on the vagaries of his sex life’ (274). Similarly, he writes, ‘The Troubles put

Connolly in the dock along with the other rebels’ (277). While Moran admits that the lack of

‘political immediacy’ revealed the flaws in MacSwiney’s The Revolutionist, he is not content

to blame the lack of the plays’ currency on their failure to achieve a dramatic standard that

transcends particular political events. This contradicts his admission in the introduction that

the plays contain ‘tortuous plots, obscure dialogue, and ham-fisted love scenes’ (2). While

Four Irish Rebel Plays begins promisingly, its conclusion belies an essential confusion;


it is unclear whether the book is a rebellious work of hagiography in response to ‘revisionist

critics’ or an attempt at a critical analysis of four plays that deserve to be considered in light of

the dramatic and political development of their playwrights.

Lauren Arrington

St Hilda’s College, Oxford

[email protected]

q 2008, Lauren Arrington

Beckett and Badiou: the pathos of intermittency, by Andrew Gibson, Oxford and

New York, Oxford University Press, 2006, xiv þ322 pp., £53.00, ISBN 0 19 920775 5

‘The danger’, as the young Sam said, ‘is in the neatness of identifications’. But one has to

start somewhere. In English Beckett studies there are currently two main streams, which

we’ll call Reading Beckett and London Beckett. Reading University houses the Beckett

International Foundation, with its rich store of archival materials. It can be thought of as

the centre of ‘genetic’ Beckett, that is, the study of mostly unpublished manuscript

material, notebooks, journals and letters. London Beckett, centred on a long-running

seminar at Birkbeck College, is theory-Beckett, and the theory is usually Parisian. Andrew

Gibson’s formidable, wide-ranging study is emphatically London Beckett.

Gibson does not assume the reader’s prior knowledge of Alain Badiou, the philosopher

who stimulates his perspective on Beckett. The book’s first two chapters (seventy-five

pages in total) are devoted to an exposition of Badiou on Being, Event, Subject, Truth,

Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics. Gibson moves on to consider Badiou’s own readings of

Beckett with reference to those of theoretical critics (Connor, Hill, Trezise, Katz,

Locatelli), before giving his own accounts, in successive chapters, of the two early novels,

Murphy and Watt; The Unnamable; some of the later prose (from the 1970s and 1980s)

and, in a summary chapter, all the plays. The long (forty-six-page) conclusion is vital to

the large argumentative arc of the book. The manner is everywhere confident, the grasp

(both local and general) reassuringly firm and the style lucid.

Badiou and Beckett are paired as ‘vestigial or melancholic modernists in that each

commits himself to truth and value, in spite of their occasional and unpredictable character’

(40). In so far as Gibson’s larger concern is to articulate Beckett’s relation to modernity, he

brushes against another current hot topic: Beckett’s relation to Romanticism. For Badiou is

insistently anti-Romantic – anti-Hegel, anti-Heidegger. The framework of his thinking,

especially his ontology, is provided by Platonic mathematics. Being is multiple, and

singularity is appearance, ‘unnatural’ and an effect of structure. (‘We know Being only

locally’, through localised appearance.) Central to his thinking is the Event: this initiates the

arduous ‘truth-procedure’ of subjectification, Badiou’s account of which bears an evident

and acknowledged debt to Lacan. Knowledge, the doxa of received wisdom, is opposed to

Truth, which emerges only during the ‘subtractive’ experience of subjectification.

Subjectification involves both a ‘scission’ and the experience of impotence. Taking place

on the edge of the void, the process necessitates an ethics (and implicitly a politics) of

fidelity – to the Event, and to the labour of the truth-procedure, which necessarily rejects

plenitude.

Badiou’s Event rings Beckettian bells: in Proust (1931), Beckett opposes the

prevailing ‘boredom of living’ (assured by Habit) to the blessedly rare ‘suffering of being’

(‘the free play of every faculty’). Gibson cites this passage, but makes surprisingly little

Reviews216

of it, remarking that it is ‘coloured by the young writer’s romantic subjectivism’ (176), and

is therefore unBadiouian. For Badiou, philosophy is affirmative. That which is not the

Event is not worthy of thought. Yet the Event is as rare as it is difficult. What Beckett

called Habit (‘the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit’), the familiar terrain of his later

work, is the Badouian ‘remainder’.

Gibson is not an acolyte of Badiou. In fact the chief interest of his book is not in its

exposition of Badiou or in its account of the philosopher’s readings of Beckett but in

Gibson’s engagement with the perceived inadequacy of these readings and what this tells us

about Beckett, Badiou and modernity. The subtitle points to the crux: The Pathos of

Intermittency. Badiou’s emphasis on the Event as the ‘sole source of value’ leaves ‘le reste’,

the ‘historical residue’ which ‘comprises and must comprise the larger part of historical

experience’ (18) – an experience rather than a time, but nonetheless (in T.S. Eliot’s words)

the ‘waste sad time / Stretching before and after’. Events are by definition intermittent, and

‘the intermittency of truths is the banally self-evident condition of the philosophical

affirmation’ (105). Badiou’s affirmative view of philosophy means that the ‘remainder’ is of

minimal interest to him; and the combination of his anti-Romanticism and the old Maoist’s

‘traditional left pathophobia’ (as Gibson characterises it (261)) ensures that he does not

recognise the pathos which attaches itself to artistic engagements with it – even when the

artists are taken to be exemplary. Gibson identifies this pathos not just in Beckett but in

Badiou’s other favoured writers – Celan, Mandelstam, Rimbaud and above all Mallarme.

Thus while Gibson finds Badiou’s philosophy vital in the approach to Beckett, he finds

Badiou’s own approach to Beckett to be skewed: ‘What primarily commands the

philosopher’s attention [ . . . ] is not a condition of existential deprivation. It is the evidence of

labour, unremitting effort, and, above all, thought’ (117). In general, Gibson writes, ‘Badiou

is committed to an unrelentingly affirmative vision of philosophy, and therefore indifferent

to aspects of aesthetic experience that might point in a different direction’ (116), and ‘the

trouble with Badiou’s reading of the plays is that it is more consistent with his philosophy

than with the plays themselves’ (233). While in Badiou the remainder ‘is effectively of no

account’, ‘so much in Beckett’s work serves as a figure for it’ (235). Badiou advocates the

‘de-suturing’ of the domains of truth, believing that art is ‘irreducible to philosophy’ (102),

embodying as it does its own forms of thought. But, as Gibson repeatedly points out, he finds

‘de-suturing’ difficult to practise. He ‘cannot see how far Beckett shades or nuances his

thought’ (226, emphasis in original).

Beckett is by now so closely identified with an ‘art of failure’ that Gibson is taking a

risk when, after 284 pages, he declares that: ‘What Badiou cannot help us understand is the

Beckett who very explicitly claimed to be “working with impotence”.’ ‘He refuses even to

countenance the possibility that Beckett might be very much concerned with inertia’

(226). In fact the risk comes off, because Gibson has, in his long conclusion (though not

only there) supplemented his account of Badiou with the ideas of Jacques Ranciere,

Giorgio Agamben and, most interestingly, Francoise Proust, all of them more tolerant of

forms of pathos. These philosophers are shown to ‘shed an important light on a dimension

of Beckett’s work that Badiou conspicuously neglects’ (284). Beckett is finally read by

Gibson, most successfully through the late prose and the plays (where ‘the event appears

chiefly in the form of the encounter’ (232)), as an artist of the threshold, producing limit-

figures, and registering the ‘awesome inertia’ (290) of the Badiouian remainder while at

the same time arduously rethinking possibility and potentiality through nuance and trace.

‘Beckett’s work’, he says, ‘insists on thinking the event or the possibility of the event in

relation to its remainder, rather than apart from it’ (86). Badiou’s skewed readings are seen

as responses to the challenge presented by an artistic logic which his philosophy cannot


accommodate. The strength and importance of Gibson’s book are in its recognition and

articulation of that challenge, and not just in its determination to introduce a Badouian

perspective on Beckett.

Three further notes. Firstly, Rockaby gains a final –e throughout. Secondly,

The Unnamable takes on an extra e when it rubs up against the Badiouian ‘unnameable’.

Thirdly, a ‘provisional list of eleven categories’ (242–3) into which Gibson organises

Beckett’s plays turns out to be so provisional as to contain, as far as one can see, only ten.

Perhaps this is a Beckettian joke (like Murphy’s scarves). But as it comes in a book concerned

with the cardinal numbers of set theory, it might be the secret revenge of ordinal numbers.

Paul Lawley

University of Plymouth

[email protected]

q 2008, Paul Lawley

Stimulus of sin: selected writings of John Broderick, edited by Madeline Kingston with

a foreword by Colm Toibın, Dublin, Lilliput Press, 2007, 228 pp., £16.99, ISBN 978 1

843510 96 3

John Broderick (1924–89) once stated in an interview that he didn’t think his books would be

generally discussed in Ireland until he was dead.1 It would be interesting to know whether he

spoke these words in defiance or simple resignation. This collection of criticism, social

commentary and unpublished writing from the Athlone author is as much a curio as the man

himself – a compendium of astonishingly original criticism offset by some rather dubious

asides on whatever took his fancy, from the modernisation of the Church (which was bad

enough) to the rise of women’s liberation (which was even worse in his eyes).

The editor, Madeline Kingston, has been somewhat selective in her choice of material

here and she has overlooked some of his more outre pronouncements. His essay titled

‘The English’ (Irish Times, 26 October, 1985) which describes that race as, ‘the best liars

I have ever encountered’, ‘pagan’, ‘permissive’, ‘will do anything for money’, ‘no

tradition of hospitality’ and ‘lazy and complacent’ is not included. His repeated attacks

upon Edna O’Brien are also excluded and attack is the correct word, for his criticism of

O’Brien the younger became personal, vicious and unjustly vindictive. A good editor is,

above everything else, impartial and I cannot help but feel that this is a book created with

an agenda in mind. It must also be said that his best criticism has been judiciously selected,

while some truly mediocre pieces (such as his radio play The Enemies of Rome) have been

disregarded and this can only be commended.

It is divided into three sections, namely ‘reviews’, ‘general journalism’ and

‘unpublished short fiction’. The latter can be written off as padding, though the piece

‘Untitled’ is of interest for those who wish to gain a greater understanding of Broderick’s

complex religious plerophory. The first section which covers his reviews almost justifies

the price of publication alone. True, his view of writers such as Liam O’Flaherty, Francois

Mauriac and Kate O’Brien are almost heliographic. He is correct in claiming Famine as a

‘national glory’ but to assert that it is the ‘greatest Irish novel in the mainstream tradition

written this century’ is a tad excessive. O’Flaherty was a fine writer but he also had his

limitations, limitations which Broderick blithely overlooks.

Reviews218

However, there are four reviews, one after another, which show Broderick at the peak

of his powers: those being Francis Stuart’s Black List, Section H, Michael Farrell’s

Thy Tears Might Cease, John Banville’s Birchwood and a piece entitled ‘The Labelling of

Lee Dunne’. He helped create an audience for these works, and his review of Stuart’s

novel demonstrates the prescience and startling originality which he could conjure up from

time to time, describing it as ‘a true poetic pilgrimage of the soul that could quite easily be

damned’. These reviews represent a masterclass in critical writing and his defence of Lee

Dunne’s work is particularly courageous, almost poignant, if one realised that it was the

booze which helped decimate Broderick’s own nascent talent – ‘The real worth of the

book (Paddy Maguire is Dead) can, I suppose, only be appreciated by those who have

themselves been through this hell.’

But on other occasions he was far too cavalier in his denunciations. His view of Oscar

Wilde, ‘On the whole he was a very bad writer indeed; and to read his books today is an

embarrassment’, probably caused more than one academic to splutter over the sherry, but

as he was supposed to be reviewing H. Montgomery Hyde’s biography of Wilde, not the

works of Wilde himself, such a statement is therefore not just redundant, it is almost

irresponsible. Broderick appeared to have a virulent anti-academic streak in him and this

caused him to be dismissive of too many great writers such as Yeats, Joyce, Flann O’Brien,

Brendan Behan. It is difficult to take him seriously at times and this is a shame – as both

writer and reviewer I feel he sold himself terribly short.

The second section concerns Broderick’s ‘general journalism’, which was somewhat

haphazard. His ‘An Immodest Proposal’ is a novel take on both Swift and O’Flaherty’s

A Tourist’s Guide to Ireland. It is writing like this which helped sink his reputation – for

those of us who were struck by the creative intensity of his early novels it makes for grim

reading. ‘A Curate’s Egg at Easter’ is more structured at least, and concerns his

disillusionment with the changes which were sweeping through the Church post-Vatican II

– ‘We are told that pop Masses appeal to the young, which is like saying that Barbara

Cartland should be encouraged because she appeals to more readers than Jane Austen.’ This

is an interesting assessment, for in that same interview which I quoted from at the

beginning of this review, the author railed against the ‘the zealots, the narrow-minded Opus

Dei, Legion of Mary people’ who assumed control after independence.2 Which would he

prefer? An open society or a closed mind? In a piece on Pope John XXIII, he naturally

assumes how the pontiff would have reacted to the wholesale changes that swept the

Church – badly, of course! – but this doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny. The collapse of the

Catholic Church in Ireland occurred not because of any such liberalising trends but through

its sheer intransigence.

It would appear that the author hankered after some idealised notion of Ireland, a

whimsical Victoriana of morally upright and industrious citizens. From his articles, his dislike

of change is palpable. But without change, there would have been no end to censorship or

exposure of the Church’s hypocrisy, which he evidently despised. What we are left with, then,

is a confusing manifesto: yet even if some of the material in this book is at times capricious,

patronising or merely superfluous, there is probably enough here for the casual reader to enjoy.

Like the eponymous curate’s egg, good in parts if not wholly appealing.

Notes

1. Carlson, Banned in Ireland, 46.2. Ibid., 48.


Bibliography

Carlson, Julia. Banned in Ireland – Censorship & the Irish Writer. London: Routledge, 1990.

Peter Guy

ITT Dublin (Tallaght)

[email protected]

q 2008, Peter Guy

Versions of Ireland: empire, modernity and resistance in Irish culture, by Eoin

Flannery, Cambridge, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006, 201 pp., £34.99 (hardback), ISBN

1 84 718050 7

According to the 2001 ‘Globalisation Index’ of Foreign Policy, the influential US current

affairs magazine, the Republic of Ireland was the most globalised state in the world for the

third year in succession. From finance to travel, personal communications to trade, Ireland

was no longer peripheral to the action as its ‘strong pro-business policies’ had propelled it

into the heart of the global economy. And, outperforming the old colonial master, the Irish

were now buying high-rent properties on London streets where, in the 1950s and 1960s,

their presence was essentially subterranean; the hidden subalterns whose role was to

maintain the system, not benefit from it, let alone own it.

The paradox of Irish criticism in this same period is that while the economy was

forging ahead and defining ever higher performance norms in which Ireland was the most

successful member of the EU, the dominant academic focus was on ‘postcolonialism’,

whose concern with subalternity and marginalisation was an uneasy fit with the

experiences of many of the contemporary Irish who were more likely to be buying

apartments in Krakow than being dispossessed from cottages in Kerry. While critics such

as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Masao Miyoshi have claimed that the concern with

postcoloniality is actually a form of secret nostalgia, fixated on ‘a condition in history

which is safely distant and inert’, and so a means of ignoring contemporary inequalities,

Irish cultural critics, principally Luke Gibbons and David Lloyd, sought to engage with the

contemporary precisely through elided moments of the past: what Lloyd describes as ‘an

incommensurable set of cultural formations historically occluded from, yet never actually

disengaged with, modernity’. These ‘incommensurable’ elements are what Homi Bhabha

referred to as the ‘stubborn chunks’ which resisted erasure and so formed ‘the basis of

cultural identifications’. This is clearly an agenda which is engage in the sense of

resistance to an enemy seen, by Gibbons, as a global capitalism which is ‘liquidating any

genuine sense of the specific’. Eoin Flannery’s new book is clearly working within this

critical context and he shares Lloyd’s and Gibbons’s interest in the Indian Subaltern

Studies Group’s engagement with those whose interests and experiences do not fit neatly

within a progressive national narrative. His concern, then, is to ‘foreground the

rebelliousness of Irish forms of local, or alternative modernity’ and this is a study which is

rigorously committed to a cultural-political position whose opposition to what he terms

‘the political, cultural and economic ideologies of neo-imperialism’ stands out starkly

against an Irish state self-defined as ‘progressive, future-focused, and Ahead of the Curve’.

While the book’s chapters range widely in both time and topic, embracing the gothic,

nineteenth-century photography, early tourism adverts, Belfast gable-end murals and the

poetry of Michael Hartnett, in addition to several more explicitly ‘theoretical’ chapters, the

Reviews220

dominant sense is of a past-oriented preoccupation with those moments when the current

consolidation of capitalism had not occurred. And even the more contemporary issues are

engaged with precisely because they share a sense of resistance, a stubborn refusal to be

incorporated. The Belfast republican murals are reminders of ‘the breadth of modernity’s

failure to alleviate oppression’ while Hartnett’s poetry is ‘part of an alternative subaltern,

circulatory system of counter-modern memories’. Across the chapters the tone is of

unremitting opposition to ‘neo-imperialism’, ‘modernity’, ‘the ideological machinations

of both the imperial state and the market economy’, ‘the politically expedient simplicities

of tourism’s narratives’ and, especially, a ‘liberal historiographical consensus through

which the nebulous, recondite and strange are represented or elided’. The objective, then,

is to discover and ‘liberate subsumed fragmentary histories’ from their ‘liberal

museumisation in the present’ and release them as provocative political agents in the

present acting, much as David Lloyd suggested, as ‘possibilities that have persisted outside

the mainstream of developmental history’ and which stand, therefore, as stark reminders

of the perpetual presence of alternative modes of being.

Flannery is clearly completely conversant with his theoretical reference points, but

several decades on from ‘the theory wars’ the critical language deployed frequently

sounds as if it too is one of the subsumed practices resurrected into the present. As the

chapter on Hartnett shows in particular, Flannery is an acute critic capable of making clear,

culturally relevant observations, but too often there is the sense of relying on rather

formulaic expressions as a means of establishing his theoretical credentials. There is much

of interest here, both in terms of the analysis of individual cultural practices and not least

as a continuing engagement with the Gibbons/Lloyd agenda. But what I do not sense is any

formulation of a new position; rather, we have a series of efficient analyses within a once-

radical but now perhaps rather established critical paradigm; the rallying call for resistance

to modernity is being repeated rather than newly minted.

Above all, though, what is striking is the extent to which modernity exists as an off-

stage abstraction; a self-evident negative rather than a phenomenon in need of specific

examination within the Irish context. That issue, an Ireland which is ‘Ahead of the

Curve’, is not addressed. The polemic is strong but the actual target remains at a

distance, present in name alone and finally untouched and untroubled by the examination

of cultural expressions which fall far outside its domain. Despite the demand for a

culturally and politically progressive critical practice, one with real-world relevance, the

overall sense here is of an engagement which is far more academic than practical, its

backward look not finally able to establish its relevance and resonance within the

contemporary moment.

Shaun Richards

Staffordshire University

[email protected]

q 2008, Shaun Richards

Making theatre in Northern Ireland: through and beyond the Troubles, by Tom

Maguire, Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2006, 221 pp., £16.00, ISBN 0 85 989739 7

Tom Maguire’s fine study of Northern Irish theatre produced during its drawn-out period

of crisis will find a receptive readership amongst students (and academics) seeking to

begin researching and thinking about the relationship between theatre practice and


Northern Ireland’s fraught late twentieth century. The publisher’s blurb suggests that this

‘is the first study of the theatre of Northern Ireland in the second half of the twentieth

century to provide a distinctively Irish perspective’; while it is difficult to assess whether

this is a wholly sustainable claim, there is little doubt that Maguire’s text takes the reader

on a knowing inside tour of the forces, hopes, desires and fears that have shaped the

experience not only of those on stage but those in the auditorium of Northern Ireland’s

theatres. It is clear that Maguire has been actively engaged in this process and not simply

observing its development; given the nature of the material under consideration here, this

seems somehow more important than would usually be the case. Clearly shaped by that

engagement, this text is a well-conceived and executed exercise in contextualised

performance studies. The reader is guided through a series of themed chapters, each of

which examines not only representative plays but the kinds of critical approaches useful

for unpacking their performative dynamic. Topics and themes covered in this process

include: the direct representation of political violence; approaches to history;

performance and myth; staging gender; and community theatre. The book concludes

with a provocative final chapter on the challenges facing theatre-makers in the ‘post-

conflict’ context. Each of these chapters is structured round a movement from theoretical

perspectives through performance contexts to focused studies of individual plays in

performance. It is here that the real strength of this book lies. Maguire is driven by the

importance of performance; resisting the usual emphasis within Irish Studies to

backward engineer theatre towards its source text, Maguire valuably insists on theatre

history as made up of spatial/temporal-specific performances. Just as importantly,

Maguire is keenly attentive to the ways in which performance involves not just those on

stage but the audience, the physical environment created by the performance space, and

the larger contexts that make certain representations possible and/or licit. Given the at-

times difficult circumstances under which engaged theatre was made during the North’s

‘Troubles’ phase, this emphasis on the production/reception dialectic seems particularly

useful and necessary. Maguire ably guides his readers through the complex web of

processes through which theatre is not simply produced and then received but in which

possible receptions have already been addressed in the act of creation. The real success

of this approach is most evident in those chapters that deal with community theatre

(‘theatre of the people’ rather than ‘theatre for the people’). The performances produced

by such initiatives are rescued from the margins to become the real focal point of

Maguire’s theatre history. In particular, this book’s approach provides a welcome

corrective to the normative critical reception of some of the productions to emerge out of

community projects. In his discussion of JustUs and DubbelJoint’s co-production Binlids

(1997), for example, Maguire counters normative readings of this play as bluntly

propagandist with a more nuanced understanding of the social context from which it

emerged and which it sought to represent, speak for and address. On a related point,

Making Theatre in Northern Ireland is also notable for its focus on class issues and the

role of governmental power in shaping the North’s recent experiences. In making this

structural shift the book manages to escape the rather hackneyed territory of the Northern

Irish Troubles as the product of divided essentialist communities and separate traditions

– a reading of the North that has often allowed the role of external powerbrokers and

capital stakeholders to remain less commented upon. In this regard Maguire draws on a

complex reading of theoretical positions to illuminate the forces that have propelled

these plays into existence; but, importantly given the nature of this study, these readings

are presented with a clarity that means the text retains its accessible feel. The readers of

this text will find plenty that is new and provocative on familiar works – Maguire pays

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suitable attention to the North’s impressive theatrical canon (Friel, McGuiness, Jones,

et al.) and produces contextual readings that remind us not just why such writers have

become canonical but why theatre more broadly is of vital importance to understanding

Northern Ireland’s identity labyrinth. But what makes this work especially welcome and

rewarding is its insistence on the merit and importance of plays and companies that may

not be so easily recognised by those new to the area (in all senses of that phrase).

On several occasions, for example, Making Theatre in Northern Ireland provides the

reader with a fascinating account and critical discussion of a performance piece for

which no source text exists – the vitality of such performances to a proper theatre history

is part of the point of this study. This is a difficult trick – to re-encode through text the

primacy of non-textual performance – but Maguire pulls it off with some aplomb. This

is, then, an excellent introduction to Northern Ireland’s recent theatrical history, and will

be invaluable to the broad readership it will attract.

Eugene McNulty

University of Portsmouth

[email protected]

q 2008, Eugene McNulty

Global Ireland, edited by Ondrej Pilny and Clare Wallace, Prague, Litteraria Pragensia,

2006, 241 pp., £7.50/e12.00 (hardback), ISBN 8 07 308103 2

Global Ireland is a selection of papers from the 2005 IASIL conference in Prague.

The editors introduce the book by noting Ireland’s unique position as a nation late to

modernity but early to globalisation, then declare the book’s purpose to understand the ‘Irish

global village’, which ‘turns upon the connotations of the village, positioned somewhere

between the cosmopolitan concerns of the city and the traditional values of the rural; a local,

communal space that has become displaced and is no longer anchored within the boundaries

of the nation’ (1). For the editors, globalisation has both positive and negative effects, and

involves ‘a different set of coordinates, a still more complicated set of relations – of links,

rhizomatic connections, disjunctions and deterritorialisations’ (2). This type of de- and

re-structuring evokes issues of migration (specifically in the shift from emigration to

immigration seen in Ireland) and media, including the literary arts and technology. Central

to both the conference and the book are the ‘open questions’ of ‘how globalisation affects

the realm of literary and cultural studies and what happens to a literature and culture, so

heavily defined by the national, in an arguably “postnational” era’ (4).

Three unresolved tensions pervade the book. The first appears in the editors’ reference

to the ‘realm of literary and cultural studies’, where the broad cultural concept of global

Ireland is associated incongruously with the narrow field of Irish literary studies.

The conference was a global event, diverse in terms of nationalities and languages, and so

reflected a broad global interest in Ireland. The book, however, promises to address an

economic and cultural phenomenon using only literature as its archive. The project thus

fails to confront explicitly the questions of whether art is reflective or generative in relation

to tangible issues in Ireland, and what kinds of cultural questions can effectively be posed

and answered by looking at literary representations.

A second tension exists between concepts of diversity and globalism; the linguistic and

national diversity of the contributors and the authors they discuss cannot legitimately


substitute for making an explicit connection between that which is literary and that which

is global. As a result, the book lacks cohesion. An additional by-product of that linguistic

diversity is unevenness of academic tone and, at times, inaccurate use of the English

language. Some contributors’ essays are not just stylistically jarring but actually unclear.

While the editors should be responsible for eliminating errors and clarifying meaning,

their own introduction is riddled with grammatical errors and awkward phrases.

A third tension surfaces when concepts such as globalisation and interculturalism are

insufficiently distinguished. The book is organised into four groups, the first of which is

called ‘Globalisation in Theory & Practice’ and means to ‘discuss the very concepts of

globalisation and interculturalism based on their operation in the discourse of Irish poetry,

and in the theory and practice of Irish theatre’ (4). The editors refer to both concepts but do

not address their differences to clarify the theoretical parameters of the book. Furthermore,

the essays’ shared intention – to discuss these concepts in terms of literary genre – should

be the aim of the entire collection. Instead, only the first and last groups match their

characterisation in the introduction, while the middle of the book sags; the editors’ account

of the second and third groupings do not connect well to the topic of global Ireland.

The three essays in the first group indeed discuss globalisation. Thomas Docherty’s

essay on Irish poetry presents a theory-rich approach to the relationship between

globalisation and nationalism at a political level and in relation to place and poetic language.

Jose Lanters’ and Jason King’s essays both address the role of the contemporary stage in

conceptualising a globalised Ireland. Lanters’ essay is less an argument than a thorough

review of contemporary plays, critical conversations, and the themes that preoccupy them

(such as Irishness). King uses the term ‘interculturalism’ rather than globalisation and draws

attention to the irony that the actors in one theatre company portray the most positive ideals

of an intercultural Ireland, only to be mistreated and even deported off-stage. Lanters and

King both demonstrate how discussions of theatre can bridge the gap between on-the-

ground global/cultural concerns and literary/theoretical representations.

The fourth group, ‘Canonical Writers & Intercultural Links’, includes some of the

best-written essays, but their general approach – to ‘strive to broaden the understanding of

major canonical authors by examining specific intercultural links that have influenced

their work’ (8) – is neither new nor global. The tendency to read writers such as Joyce,

Beckett and Kafka in intertextual terms, drawing attention to their intercultural links,

emerged long before globalisation captured critical interest; or perhaps global Ireland has

been a preoccupation of literary studies for longer than we thought. The essays are

nevertheless interesting as literary analysis. Richard Kearney’s contribution on Joyce, one

of the conference plenaries, discusses the biographical, textual and critical resonances of

epiphany. Karl Chircop’s, Jeremy Parrott’s and Emilie Morin’s essays all address what

might be better referred to as ‘cosmopolitanism’. Chircop traces the metaphorical

similarities between works by Joyce and Luigi Pirandello. Parrott and Morin each conduct

biographical detective work about Beckett, exploring his relationship to Kafka’s work

(Parrott) and the relationship between Beckett’s self-translation, cultural and national

roots, and absurdity (Morin). The highlight of this group of essays is Mairın Nic Eoin’s

well-written piece on Kafka’s influences on Irish language literature. Nic Eoin’s

discussion of the politics of minority literatures could apply to the different language

communities proliferating in Ireland today. Overall, this fourth group is marginal to the

issue of global Ireland but strong in composition and theme.

The book is weak in the middle not just because some of the essays could be better written

but also because of the unsatisfactory justification (in the book’s introduction) for the

groupings. In ‘Postmodernity, Exile & Home’, the essays ‘investigate a set of concepts

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inherently bound with globalised Ireland: postmodernity as modernism’s exile, the re-

negotiations of “home” that globalisation inevitably triggers, and the essential role that

writing from exile has had on the contemporary reality’ (6). The incorrect choice of

preposition in the latter half of the sentence suggests that it was written hastily and never

revised: something cannot have a role on reality. Furthermore, the description assumes an

obvious link between postmodernity, exile, and the re-negotiation of home, though the editors

never explain the link or demonstrate how these concepts are ‘inherently bound’ with

globalised Ireland. Although one can imagine, for example, how literary postmodernity (in

Rajeev Patke’s essay) might be analogous to a contemporary experience of globalisation,

neither the editors nor Patke make the connection explicit. Instead, Patke outlines what

‘postmodernity’ means and how Paul Muldoon’s poem qualifies; the introduction errs in

saying Patke sets up ‘postmodernity as modernism’s exile’. Unfortunately, Patke offers too

brief a treatment of any one idea in Muldoon’s poem and fails to connect it with a globalised

Ireland. Kinga Olszewska’s compare-and-contrast essay about Irish and Polish experiences of

exile provides a rich reading of Polish exile but a superficial and unsubstantiated

understanding of Irish exile. Gerold Sedlmayr and Honor O’Connor address how the poem

can represent and generate a shared global experience in the poetry of Paul Durcan and Dennis

O’Driscoll, respectively. Sedlmayr’s close reading of one Durcan poem addresses boundary

crossing and the role of technology in creating an ‘imagined community’ centred on televised

sports, affecting a new perspective on home. O’Connor’s essay reads in O’Driscoll’s poetry

the experience and representation of Ireland as a global village, reflecting economic effects on

universal themes of life, death, loss, and nature.

Of all the introductory accounts, that of group three (‘Place, Gender & The Body’) most

inaccurately characterises its essays, describing them as ‘three essays [that] revolve around

the need for a constant re-examination of the notions of identity, home and nationality as

called for in the work of prominent fiction writers’ (7). Here, the editors lump together such

buzzwords as place, home, nationality, gender, body, and identity as concepts under

‘constant re-examination’, without articulating clearly their connection to Ireland.

Ironically, the three essays fit well together, but because of different thematic similarity.

The group would be better characterised as essays about works of contemporary Irish fiction

that provide a model for challenging both rigidly fixed roles and the drive for absolute

knowledge that undergirds them. Monica Facchinello writes about two John Banville

novels, drawing an analogy between the protagonists’ desire for objective knowledge of the

real and an Irish revisionist belief in the superiority of objectivity. The novels celebrate

uncertainty and privilege the re-examination of consolidated narratives and definitions.

Harvey O’Brien’s close reading of several Neil Jordan novels argues that, in a postfeminist

world, the privileging of reason over body is upset, leaving male characters to realise that

masculinity is not a fixed but rather an evolving identity. Jordan’s fictional exploration of

transgression and transformation provides a template for reconciling the global with the

local in the making of identity. Susan Cahill’s essay on Anne Enright’s What Are You Like?

is an astute, wholly text-centred close reading of maternity and doubling that reflects

Enright’s challenge to a traditional treatment of maternity.

Global Ireland provides a service by disseminating the conference papers to a broader

audience, bringing together many voices – on multiple genres – that attest to the lively critical

work taking place internationally in Irish literary studies. Unfortunately, the collection suffers

from a pervasive lack of cohesion. The question is whether the editors failed to integrate and

smooth out the material, especially in the introduction, or whether coherence was impossible

because the topic of globalisation was itself too unwieldy. I am inclined to think that

the contributors’ divergent approaches are not themselves troublesome; rather, the lack


of synthesising framework leaves the collection adrift thematically. The essay summaries in

the introduction are comprised merely of cut-and-pasted excerpts from each piece rather than

a descriptive synthesis that explains the editors’ organisational decisions and points to the

book’s overarching narrative. In addition, the editors do not provide any concluding remarks

to the introduction, and could more carefully have edited both the introduction and the rougher

essays to make them more comprehensible. Nevertheless, the collection emerges at a time

when conversations about literature and globalisation in Ireland are just catching up with rapid

economic and cultural changes, and it would be fair to guess that the editors were eager to rush

the book’s publication to keep up with those trends. In its timely approach to the subject, the

book testifies to and participates in critical conversations, and Global Ireland is therefore

recommended reading.

Sian White

University of Notre Dame

[email protected]

q 2008, Sian White

Reading Michael Longley, by Fran Brearton, Tarset, Bloodaxe, 2006, 320 pp., £12.00

(paperback), ISBN 1 85 224683 9

Because of the phenomenon of Seamus Heaney, the work of many major poets from

Ireland and Northern Ireland has been relatively neglected over the last few decades.

Belfast-born Michael Longley is one of these poets. A lyric poet of the first order, Longley

writes in an astonishing variety of forms – from the couplet to the sonnet to the periodic

sentence – and takes as his themes the First World War, the Holocaust, the natural world

of Counties Mayo and Clare, love, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, among others.

A contemporary of Heaney in Philip Hobsbaum’s vaunted Belfast Group of writers from

1963 to 1966, Longley’s joint commitment to artistic integrity and ecumenism, if not his

particular poetic aesthetic, was strengthened by his time spent in the Belfast Group, as it

was during his tenure with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1970 to 1991.

Unprepossessing, passionate, and an upholder of both poetry’s and life’s ceremonies as a

bulwark against the fragmentation and chaos of the modern world, Longley can stake a

claim to being one of the major poets in English writing after the Second World War; he is

already Ireland’s ‘foremost Nature poet in the twentieth century’, as Terence Brown has

observed. Fran Brearton’s monograph, the first full-length critical study of Longley’s

poetry and prose, strengthens that claim, subtly showing, through a series of nuanced and

persuasive readings of individual poems in the context both of their placement in

particular volumes and their publication during certain key moments in the political and

cultural life of Northern Ireland during the 1960s and onward, that Longley is a poet whose

work repays close reading of the most demanding sort.

This study boldly and often persuasively reassesses Longley’s place in the critical debates

ongoing in Irish Studies but is also occasionally prone to critical overreaching: in Brearton’s

opening salvo, for instance, she claims that Longley’s forms mark him more as an

experimental, postmodern poet, who should be linked more with younger poets such as Paul

Muldoon, rather than viewed as a formally conservative one who is often grouped with

Heaney and Derek Mahon (9). But Brearton fails to employ anything resembling postmodern

theory to prove her argument that Longley is a postmodern, resorting instead to repeated

insistences that his poems ‘destabilise’, for example, both ‘the well-made poem’ (9) and

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traditional, bifurcated categories of identity in Ireland (elsewhere, she also cites a very early

statement by Derrida in 1968 and a remark from Patricia Waugh’s 1984 classic Metafiction as

evidence for Longley’s alleged postmodernism, but these are more asides than part of an

overarching theory). Indeed, the frequent appearance of variations on ‘destabilise’ throughout

this outstanding study is irritating. Writing daunting, difficult poetry and dwelling in multiple

identities do not a postmodernist make: see Shakespeare, Yeats, et al. Longley is instead a

fascinating mixture of a thoroughgoing traditionalist in his reverence for classical poets, the

Metaphysical poets, and form generally, and a more modern, but not postmodern humanist

who laments man’s inhumanity to man in his poems about war yet believes strongly that

human dialogue, delight and wonder in the natural world, and human kindness can prepare the

ground for an imagined Northern Ireland of the future.

Brearton’s urge to make Longley subversive and postmodern is the one nagging

problem with a study that is otherwise consistently illuminating in helping us understand

Longley’s poetry better by drawing upon archival sources, such as letters, drafts of poems,

and unpublished prose, and employing techniques of close reading, which, unlike

postmodernism, will never go out of fashion. Brearton’s prose style, while unfortunately

sometimes rendered limpid by an inclination to an academic passivity of voice that inhibits

the drive and energy of her observations, remains refreshingly free of obtuse, theoretical

jargon, which allows her to focus fully on Longley and his extraordinary poetry.

Brearton is particularly good at recovering neglected aspects of Longley. For instance,

she correctly locates Longley as a poetic inheritor of Yeats (the usual procedure is to

simply invoke Heaney as Yeats’s successor, following Robert Lowell’s oft-repeated

statement that Heaney was the ‘most important Irish poet since Yeats’): to wit, ‘Longley is

the often unrecognised inheritor of Yeats’s extraordinary formal and generic diversity’

(10). She consistently and rightly points out Longley’s rich cultural heritage drawn from

his English parents, suburban Belfast childhood, and adopted area of County Mayo in

western Ireland. Also, she displays a knack for reading the early work as delineating the

contours of Longley’s entire oeuvre, as, for example, when she notes in her fine reading of

Longley’s first major poem, ‘Epithilamion’, collected in his first full-length volume of

poetry, No Continuing City (1969): ‘Longley’s first major love poem stands as archetype

for the two modes for which he is perhaps now most celebrated – love poems and elegies’

(14). Finally, she is to be commended for devoting, as she notes in her ‘Preface’, ‘slightly

more space in this study to the poetry written in the earlier period’ (11) because of the

paucity of criticism on Longley’s poetry before the second half of his career beginning

with the publication of Gorse Fires in 1991.

One of Brearton’s most striking critical gifts is her balance, a quality that allows her to

attend with great care to the delicate equipoise between hope and grim reality of such

major Longley poems as the well-known sonnet ‘Cease-Fire’, published by the poet in the

run-up to the IRA’s first ceasefire in 1994. Although it is tempting, as she notes, to read the

poem as marking a definitive conclusion to a quarter-century of violence in the province,

she notes, as other commentators have, that the context of the poem, set as it is in the

context of King Priam’s encounter with Achilles in Book 24 of The Iliad, suggests that

these moments in which the fighting stops are fleeting and that more fighting follows; more

intriguingly, she observes that Longley’s own misgivings about the poem’s public

reception led him to write a sort of accompanying poem, ‘All of These People’, a supra-

elegy for various victims of the Troubles that he felt commemorated the great losses in the

provinces and lamented the ongoing ‘punishment beatings’ (212).

Successive chapters of the study, each focusing on close, contextualised readings of

each of Longley’s full volumes of poetry, are unerring in their aim to reveal Longley’s


evolving concerns with the intersection of style and content even as they reveal continuities

across the decades of his writing. For example, Longley’s various elegies (not nearly as

celebrated as Heaney’s fine elegies) are elucidated in terms of both his early stylistic

fascination with the couplet and his later interest in the long, periodic sentence, just as their

subjects range from the murdered citizens of Northern Ireland to the fleeting flowers of the

Burren (a karst limestone area in County Clare) and dead animals near the cottage at which

he often stays in Carrigskeewaun in County Mayo. At times, these two worlds collide, as in

Longley’s ‘The Ice-cream Man’ from Gorse Fires, which Brearton reads as oscillating

between two interpretations offered by Longley himself (182–4): that the flower names

from the Burren recited by the poet for his child function as an intricate wreath of flowers

that metaphorically adorn the man’s grave while the poet nonetheless recognises that the

catalogue of flowers is virtually infinite and thus, inconsolable. It is this ‘hovering’ quality of

Longley’s work, the way in which such subtle poems as ‘The Ice-cream Man’ invite two

simultaneously opposite readings of themselves, which Brearton articulates repeatedly as a

hallmark of the poet. I have long been convinced of this characteristic of Longley’s work

and it is salutary to see this tendency explained at such length and in such detail across a

variety of poems. This tension is not postmodern or unique to Longley, the former of which

Brearton sometimes suggests, but the varying modes in which he achieves such a dialectic

are remarkable for their precision in syntax, diction, and form, as she often shows. Brearton

also persuasively shows how, for Longley, the trip itself is more important than actually

arriving at any destination, a complementary attitude to his penchant for oscillation.

As she concludes her discussion of Longley’s 2004 collection Snow Water (and of the

study itself), ‘this volume is itself unresolved in the best possible way, another stopping-

place on a journey whose arrivals are also departures. [ . . . ] [I]t is not the final destination

so much as the journey towards it that matters’ (258).

As with any work of criticism that attempts to cover so much ground, there are omissions

that would have strengthened this outstanding study. For example, Brearton barely mentions

Longley’s great affinity for jazz and blues, which emerges in a suite of such poems in both No

Continuing City and An Exploded View (1973), and in his elegy for Philip Larkin, ‘Jug Band’,

from Gorse Fires. Longley is fascinated by the jazz and blues artists he celebrates in such early

poems and clearly explores their identities in order to create a temporary, alternative, exotic

space for himself – what Brearton identifies in other poems as his desire to create imaginative

‘elsewheres’. I have two more minor quibbles with this stirring study.

First, Brearton does not cite page numbers for any of the Longley poems she quotes,

although she does note the volume in which a given poem appears and is scrupulous about

citing from his prose essays, interviews with him, and from unpublished work. Second, while

the selected bibliography helpfully lists all of Longley’s volumes of poetry, his poetry

recordings, his edited collections, major interviews, and some of his prose writings, the

section entitled ‘Reviews and Critical Writings about Michael Longley’ is woefully

inadequate even for a selection of criticism on the poet and strangely breaks off after the ‘p’s’.

Overall, though, if Reading Michael Longley successfully convinces us that this great

poet’s wonderfully wrought work is well worth returning to time and again, it also

compellingly makes the case for Fran Brearton as an essential guide through Longley’s

oeuvre.

Richard Rankin Russell

Baylor University

[email protected]

q 2008, Richard Rankin Russell

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Stimulus of Sin : Selected Writings of John Broderick

Documents

Transcript of Stimulus of Sin : Selected Writings of John Broderick