Often overshadowed by his elder, Nobel laureate, brother W.B., Jack Butler Yeats occupies an exalted position among Irish painters. ‘Jack B. Yeats: Painting & Memory’ is a new exhibition in the National Gallery commemorating the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the painter’s birth, and exploring a stylistic evolution that draws on both Irish and British scenes.
Jack was born on August 29th, 1871 into a marriage of two Irish Protestant families, the Yeatses and the Pollexfens. Whereas the Dublin Yeatses embodied a faded aristocracy, priding themselves on genealogically questionable claims of descent from the Dukes of Ormonde, the Pollexfens were of a more recent vintage, having come to Ireland in the eighteenth century, finding prosperity through their shipping interests.
Each of the surviving children of moderately successful portrait painter John Butler Yeats and Susan Pollexfen made significant marks in their respective fields, perhaps compensating for their father’s relative obscurity, and profligacy.
W.B. emerged as an illustrious poet, anointed by John O’Leary to lead the Celtic Revival, while Jack B. became a successful illustrator and painter from his early twenties, while their sisters, Lilly and Lolly, set up the Cuala Press and were leading lights in the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. All must be counted as important figures in what was an Irish Renaissance of sorts that sought, partly to distinguish and partly to create, an Irish cultural identity distinct from that of England’s.
Jack’s career sailed independently of his siblings, a state of affairs conditioned by his childhood. The historian R.F. Foster writes that Yeats’s ‘childhood was disrupted by his removal for eight years to Sligo, where he was brought up in close proximity to his grandparents. This probably conditioned his artistic development; it also conferred a certain distance from the rest of the family, particularly his brother.’ (R.F. Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, p. 14).
Later in life, Jack diverged sharply from his brother’s political opinions, holding to an anti-Treaty stance in the Civil War, in contrast to W.B. ‘s support of the 1922 Treaty, and later service to the state as a Senator.
There is already a room devoted to Jack B. Yeats in the Milltown wing of the National Gallery, available to view with a free general admission ticket. Here, twenty of his paintings are on permanent display.
The new exhibition features a much larger selection of eighty-four paintings, many of which are on loan from private collections or galleries overseas. As such, it offers a rare chance to view many works that have not been on display in Ireland for some time.
I had the opportunity to speak with Donal Maguire, co-curator (along with Brendan Rooney) of the exhibition. Donal revealed the rationale for the exhibition’s lay out, including the decision to focus exclusively on his oil paintings, and Jack B. Yeats’s role in forging a national Irish identity in the early twentieth century.
After rejoining his family as a young adult, Jack enrolled in a number of art schools. The skills he acquired as a draughtsman, allied to natural ability, earned him a decent living through contributions to a number of London magazines.
At this time the majority of his output was in drawing and watercolour, often depicting the colourful side of everyday life. Country races, market fairs, and circuses feature, depicted predominantly in a realist style. His first exhibition in 1897 won him immediate acclaim from sketches and watercolours, depicting bucolic ‘scenes of racing, boxing, fairgrounds, cider-making, children, and animals.’ (Bruce Arnold, Yeats, Jack Butler, Dictionary of Irish Biography).
Near the turn of the century, Jack married Mary Cottenham White, who he had met while at art school. The young couple eventually chose to settled down in Ireland. Unfortunately, depictions of equivalent scenes from Irish rural life did not meet with similar success. It was not until the 1920s, after Ireland’s independence brought a greater appetite for articulations of Irish life and characters, that Jack’s career took off.
Jack began to take a serious interest in oils only after settling down in Ireland. After adopting the medium, however, it became his dominant artistic language. From the 1920s onward, his manner of painting became increasingly tactile and expressionistic, inspired by the Modernist movement. By the end of his life, he was producing vast canvases in oil in a highly idiosyncratic style, with increasing recourse to esoteric subjects from folklore and mythology.
With such a clearly definable narrative arc to his career, it is common for Jack B. Yeats’s work to be exhibited in a manner that emphasises his development from sketches, to watercolours, through to increasingly expressionist oil paintings. With this exhibition, however, Maguire and Rooney saw an opportunity to take a different tack
“We decided very early on that the show wouldn’t be hung chronologically”, Donal Maguire informed me. “Exhibitions give you the opportunity to look across a practice and see connections that are twenty, thirty, or forty years apart,” he said.
The theme of memory was chosen as the central focus of the exhibition. Oil was the material Jack B. Yeats painted with during the final half of his career, and paintings commonly feature scenes drawn from earlier periods in his life, particularly the experience of growing up in Sligo.
A non-chronological approach to laying out the paintings serves to emphasise the associative, non-linear quality of memory.
“Memory isn’t a linear thing,” Maguire observed. “It’s relational. You connect things from across different periods of your life. Certain things pop out, or are remembered more strongly than others.”
In each of the five rooms of the exhibition, works from different decades of Yeats’s life engage in a fascinating conversation with one another. The most striking example is the sequencing of ‘The Barrel Man’ (1912) and ‘Humanity’s Alibi’ (1946). Without the earlier, realist depiction of a rural festivity, involving a man fighting off sticks being aimed at him from the safety of a barrel, the origin of the expressionistic painting of the 1940s, with the headscratcher of a title, would be difficult to fathom.
The remarkable ‘The Public Letter Writer’(1953) appears to be an example of what Maguire means by certain memories standing out more than others . He notes that this painting was “painted from a memory fifty years earlier that he never sketched. It was a memory of seeing this person on the street in New York, and fifty years later he decided to return to it.”
The vagueness of memory is conveyed by the hazy, almost hallucinatory character of the painting. The figure is less a real person than a character from a nightmare. Whereas the expressive depiction of the figure in ‘Humanity’s Alibi’ suggests a memory that has been mulled over beyond the point of reason – overloaded with metaphorical possibilities – the manner of ‘The Public Letter Writer’ is for Maguire suggestive of “a memory which isn’t fully formed.”
This is achieved through a particular technique according to Maguire:
He painted with thick paint, but also with very thin paint. It’s the contrast of the two that gives it this interesting effect. You have very thin brushstrokes, or dry brushstrokes, and then suddenly a very thickly applied stroke over it. There’s interesting layers of paint there, that seem very fragile at times, or without much structure, but they’re all held together by an overall picture.
Exhibitions of this sort require years of preparation. Ideally, Maguire told me, a three year lead in is required. It is thus difficult to read topical applications into its staging.
Before the interview, I had wondered if the exhibition of a quitessentially Irish artist was related to a drop off in foreign visitors to Dublin since the COVID-19 pandemic. As it happens, it is fortuitous that the National Gallery is giving Irish people a chance for introspection.
While the theme of memory reflects the preoccupation of the subject in Jack B. Yeats’s paintings, it also provokes us to interrogate what role the painter occupies in our cultural memory.
Jack, B. Yeats now occupies a rarefied position in Irish culture. His works are on the Leaving Cert Art curriculum, just as you’ll find his brother on the English curriculum. This stature was not self-evident in his own lifetime, however.
Bruce Arnold writes bluntly of Yeats’s career in the 1910s: ‘His work did not sell. From a professional point of view his and Cottie’s decision to settle in Ireland had not been a success.’ Even after critical acclaim in the 1920s, ‘the resources to buy [artwork] were thinly spread in Irish society at the time, particularly those interested in modernism, and Yeats’s work did not sell at all well. His output, substantial during the 1920s, fell off in the following decade, and in a mood of self-doubt he turned to writing.’
It wasn’t until a successful 1942 exhibition that he came to be regarded as a great Irish artist. Even then, his reputation declined after his death in 1957, until it was revived by a significant National Gallery exhibition in 1971.
Fifty years on, the artist is still celebrated, but for perhaps different reasons than in the 1940s. We may still appreciate his ground-breaking work that reacted against sentimental nineteenth century depictions of rural life. But attention to curiosities of rural life might still be considered distasteful, even kitsch. Therefore, rather than being charmed by what may now be considered benignly nationalistic, it is the ambiguities within the oeuvre that still speak to us. Here we find the hallucinogenic letter writers; the sinister boatmen who stare the viewer down; the master of ceremonies chalky in the spotlight; an odd cast of characters that seem to stand with one foot in the thick of everyday life, and one foot in the most whimsical of dreams. Insofar as they are alien to us, these figures still have something to say.
Maguire explains Yeats’s enduring appeal to contemporary Ireland: “People enjoy the expression and experimentation and risk taking that’s in it.”
It might be this numinous quality that will ensure their longevity. “Yeats allows you to develop your own interpretation, through your own imagination, of what these pictures are about.” Maguire comments.
In many of Jack B. Yeats’s paintings, “He doesn’t give you a lot of information,” Maguire said, providing only enough information to pique your curiosity. Although “there are little clues to lead you in a particular direction, like with the title, a particular figure, or element in the picture. But there always seems to be some sort of secret there, or something that’s not being fully revealed.”
Even among those of us with visual cortexes fried by twenty-first century technologies, Jack B. Yeats’ works allow access to powerful imaginative vistas.
The use of colour at times astonishes, the character studies are fascinating, and the focus on everyday scenes allows for surprisingly personal moments of connection.
Maguire urges anyone going to avoid getting:
too distracted by the imagery of what he’s making, but allow yourself to appreciate how the painting is made as well. Not to be frustrated by, but to enjoy the technique and the brushwork, and the experimentation with the medium. How fragile it can seem, but at the same time very bold and expressive. It’s that material quality that people should really take time to enjoy in his work, because you can really lose yourself in it.
The exhibition runs until February 6th, 2022. Tickets range in price from €5 up to €17 for an adult weekend ticket. Discounted prices are available for students, jobseekers and pensioners. Tickets are significantly cheaper during the week than on weekends, and there’s even a chance to see the exhibition for free on Mondays between 11am and 2pm, if you can manage to book a slot during that period.
In Ireland literary deities hover over us like U.S. Presidents carved into Mount Rushmore. It is a stirring thought that it isn’t philosophers, engineers, scientists, painters or even composers that summoned the Irish nation and gave us international renown, but poets, novelists and playwrights. Yet conversely these looming presences barely register in contemporary discussions; just as most contemporary Florentines scurry below Brunelleschi’s dome, with precious few looking to the sky in awe.
Poets build bridges of a more indeterminate kind than engineers. As W.H. Auden writes in a poem occasioned by the death of Yeats in 1939: ‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. / Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, / For poetry makes nothing happen.’
Auden goes too far with that dismissal of poetry – whatever about his contemptuous view of Ireland – but corrects this by acknowledging a few lines later: ‘it survives / a way of happening, a mouth.’ This ‘way of happening’ is in the realm of quantum uncertainty where the extraordinary occurs: coincidences beyond logic, or the ill-defined emotion generated by a sight of great beauty. Poetry does not fit with empirical renderings of reality, the routines of life and the seemingly static laws of nature are defied. It is unsurprising that poets then – Yeats foremost – should dabble in mysticism, scouring every system of thought for explanations for the mysteries they encounter.
June 13th 2020 is the 155th anniversary of the birth of William Butler Yeats. Born in Sandymount on the Ballsbridge side of the DART tracks he spent much of his adult life in London, before moving permanently to Ireland after the War of Independence, purchasing a former tower house Thoor Ballylee in Co. Galway where he ‘paced upon the battlements and stared’ at the birth pangs of the Irish state.
Thoor Ballylee
County Sligo
Yeats will always be identified with County Sligo, the home of many of his ancestors. Innisfree on Lough Gill, Lissadell, ‘far off Rosses’, Knocknarea and Ben Bulben under which he is buried, form the mythical backdrop to his Romantic musing. The stunning landscape triggered romantic verse perhaps unsurpassed in the English language during the twentieth century: ‘Come away oh human child / To the waters and the wild / With a fairy hand in hand / For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.’ The enchanting surroundings engendered Yeats’ poetry but simultaneously he bestowed poetry on that landscape.
When we view stunning Ben Bulben we are, to some extent at least, honouring the Songlines that brought its majesty into being. But for all his evocations of that county, in his descriptions the people are more ethereal than real, moulded in the fairy-realm of his imagination. A far cry from the gritty characters in Joyce’s Dubliners.
Image (c) Daniele Idini
Staying Put
Like rebellious children questioning the authority of a cruel parent, most of the Irish literary pantheon have had a difficult relationship with their homeland, often preferring exile and ruminating on it from afar. Samuel Beckett went so far to write in French to escape the excesses of Irish speech. But Yeats stayed and grew embittered that the nation did not accord him the accolades he felt his due. Politics is the art of the possible, its grubby affairs a torment to the idealist.
Long before independence Yeats was bemoaning a Romantic Ireland dead and gone and castigating those that fumbled in their greasy tills. But the lofty aspiration he had for the nation were always doomed to failure, like his enduring affection for Maud Gonne that he finally consummated in later life before proposing to her daughter soon afterwards. Independent Ireland could never match his expectations, as a relationship based entirely on romance has failure encoded in its DNA.
Crucially Yeats came from the Protestant Ascendancy ‘the men of Burke and of Grattan’ and to many among the ascendant Catholic nation who inherited the independent state his claim to being Irish were shallow. This separation worked both ways as the poet who initially embraced and breathed life into Irish nationalism through the cultural revival and plays such as Cathleen Ni Houlihan, later identified himself with an aristocracy that he saw as a natural leadership for a Creole nation.
Here he fought a losing battle against the enduring tradition of republicanism that rejected aristocracy and prized equality and democracy. He also contended with the powerful force of sectarianism. Many would have considered it unacceptable for someone of Yeats’s background to be in a position of authority. For many hard-bitten Catholics who retained a collective memory of the privations of the Penal Laws and the Famine, independence was an opportunity to build a Catholic state for a Catholic people.
Fascist Leanings
The inter-war period (1918-39) were terrible years of fear, poverty and continued conflict in Europe that foreshadowed the cataclysm of World War II. In the immediate aftermath of World War I Yeats wrote prophetically: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,’. In the end, in response to what he perceived as the failings of democracy, he chose a reactionary Right as opposed to a levelling left which – as he saw it – would brutally sweep aside an aristocratic elect and usher in a doomed era of materialism. This made Yeats sympathetic to fascism and perhaps even Nazism.
In his exploration of what is the ill-defined ideology of fascism the historian Roger Eatwell writes:
Fascism has become a latter-day symbol of evil, like the Devil in the Middle Ages. Demonising all aspects of fascism, a founding form of Political Correctness, has its uses. But dismissing anyone associated with fascism leanings in the 1930s makes it impossible for us to understand how fascism still attracts a significant following.
We might therefore talk of fascisms, and see it in historical context: a reaction to the chaos unleashed by the Great War and the responsibility of rampant capitalism for the Great Depression, as well as the shocking excesses of triumphant Marxism in Russia.
To many inter-war intellectuals democracy was on the brink of collapse and there existed a stark choice between fascism and Communism, which had just as little respect for human rights. Also, in its early stages, it should not be conflated with anti-Semitism, especially the genocidal character this assumed, which had a far longer history and was not initially a feature of Mussolini’s approach in Italy.
One recent biography of Yeats Blood Kindred: W.B. Yeats, The Life, The Death, The Politics by W.J. McCormack outlines aspects of Yeats’s fascist sympathies. He provides details of Yeats’s letter of thanks to Freidrich Krebs, Oberburgmeister of Frankfurt, acknowledging receipt of an award in 1934, his public approval of Nazi legislation depriving Jews of their property in 1938, and other aspects of his anti-Semitism. McCormack concludes that Yeats was a fellow traveller: ‘on occasion. He did not travel early, and he did not travel often’ but he ‘gave comfort to democracy’s enemies, to decency’s enemies.’
Yeats can justifiably be excoriated for this, but he shouldn’t be judged on what happened subsequently, but instead on the Europe of the 1930s, where he saw a stark choice between the extremes of right and left.
Benito Mussolini, Rome, 1939.
Orwell’s Assessment
There were other intellectuals such as George Orwell who rejected the extremes of both. It is instructive to consider his views on Yeats, which we find contained in a review of an early biography written in 1943, at the height of the war.
Orwell is surprisingly unimpressed by Yeats’s poetry, and we hear similar anti-Irish prejudices to those found in Auden’s writing. He says that ‘one seldom comes on six consecutive lines of his verse in which there is not an archaism or an affected turn of speech’.
This criticism may be attributed to Orwell’s affection for sparse, attenuated language which he expresses in his seminal essay The Politics of the English Language. The attitude is encapsulated in his evaluation of one poem that: ‘It would probably have been deadlier if it had been neater.’
Nonetheless, even Orwell swoons at some poems: ‘Yeats gets away with it, and if his straining after effect is often irritating, it can also produce phrases (“the chill, footless years”, “the mackerel-crowded seas”) which suddenly overwhelm one like a girl’s face seen across a room.’
Not surprisingly, Orwell lambasts Yeats’s occult dabbling: ‘As soon as we begin to read about the so-called system we are in the middle of a hocus-pocus of Great Wheels, gyres, cycles of the moon, reincarnation, disembodied spirits, astrology and what not.’ These he links to reactionary leanings: ‘if everything is indeed cyclical then the kind of society based on equality and democracy that Orwell prized was in some sense Sisyphean, a doomed effort. Orwell concludes that ‘Yeats’s tendency is fascist.’
A poem has a life of its own
For any devotee of Yeats it is difficult to confront the fairly compelling body of evidence for this tendency, but as has been stressed these sympathies came at a time when the horror of Nazism was not apparent; when Communism might have seemed more contemptuous of human life, and when the few surviving democracies at the time were in the grip of the Great Depression. Yeats was wedded to archaic notions of aristocracy and fascism appeared to fit with his prescriptions. He failed to recognise the genocidal evil that lurked there.
He was never, however, implicated politically in any fascist movement. In fact the political campaigns that Yeats became involved in during his lifetime: the Irish Cultural Revival in the early 1900s and the campaign to retain divorce in the Irish Free State of the 1920s were progressive in character.
We find a flawed character in W.B. Yeats, like Orwell himself who informed on his associates, but one who produced verse perhaps unsurpassed in the English language in the twentieth century. His political leanings do not diminish the greatness of his poetry. We may still bask in his words without subscribing to his fluctuating political ideas.
Once a poem is written, the chord attaching it to the author is broken, and it assumes a life of its own.
Fifty years ago a politician published a manifesto which, if implemented, would have changed the nature of Irish society, would have defied the ethos of contemporary political culture and would have spared us so much of the misery caused by the recent crisis. (Vincent Browne ‘Remembering when Fine Gael flirted with a left-wing agenda’, Irish Times, February 12th, 2014)
As a young man I was an admirer of the former President of the High Court, Attorney General and architect of Fine Gael’s Just Society, Declan Costello. I was then privileged to engage with him on an informal basis, appearing before him in court on a number of occasions. He was a complex and often divisive figure, and I disagree profoundly with many of his judgments, but there is no doubting the profundity of the intellect.
He was one of the most impressive public speakers I have seen in action. It was a marriage of content and rhetoric abetted by a dry – very dry – sense of humour, albeit his diction was marred by a faintly detectable lisp. He was a remarkably civilized human being – a petite mannequin – whose pristine intellect was ill-suited to the rough and tumble of Irish politics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuHZlTBgSSk
Born into a Fine Gael dynasty – as the eldest son of Taoiseach and barrister John A. Costello – he seems to have cut a dash as a young man. According to one story, Jackie Beauvoir (future Kennedy-Onassis) became infatuated with what would have been a slightly frail young man – he recovered from a bout of tuberculosis in his teens – after they met on her visit to Ireland in 1950.
An unlikely match.
I suspect she would not have had to worry about a husband having affairs with the likes of Marilyn Monroe if the match with Declan had borne fruit.
The curse of hereditary connection is a disease that afflicts Ireland. A privileged few families have dominated power and patronage throughout the history of the state, with the GPO in 1916 Rising acting as an Irish Mayfair. W.B. Yeats presciently described his fellow Senators in the 1920s in the following terms: ‘hot and vague, always disturbed always hating something or other … [they] had … signed the death warrant[s] of their dearest friend[s] … Yet their descendants, if they grow rich enough for the travel and leisure that make a finished man, will constitute our ruling class, and date their origin from the Post Office as American families date theirs from the Mayflower.’
Reference to an Irish ruling class recall a remark that Aneurin Bevin made of Anthony Eden that for all his apparent sophistication, he had the unplayable stupidities of his class and type. The charge of stupidity could not be levelled against Declan Costello, who, despite his flaws, sought to remould Ireland along Christian Socialist lines. Sadly, despite being one of the richest countries in Europe, almost three quarters of a million Irish people were still living in poverty in 2019, a figure that seems likely to rise in the months and years to come.
I remember Paddy McEntee once referring to him once as a cold fish. I am not so sure. Dispassionate might be a better description. Anyway I’d be more inclined to trust someone with Declan Costello’s detachment than the kind of avuncular, back-slapping figure that one often encounters in Ireland.
Declan Costello was legendary for his work ethic, which perhaps compensated for an obvious social awkwardness. His practised remoteness even seemed to extend to his fellow judges at social gatherings.
‘Fine Gael: Social Democratic Party’
Declan Costello will always be associated with the authorship of the Just Society document in 1966 that set out the ideals of the Christian Socialist movement which he promoted within the party.
Despite being clearly at variance with the current neo-liberal hegemony this tradition occasionally crops up in debates within Fine Gael. Notably, during the leadership debates in 2017 Simon Coveney implausibly differentiated himself from Leo Varadkar by claiming to represent it.
The documentspeaks of ‘the very wide areas in our society where great poverty exists, poverty which is degrading and capable of remedy, to appalling social conditions.’
And, ‘We are not living in a just society. This fact must be understood and complacency must be dispelled and enthusiasm created to remedy the social injustices in our midst.’
Fine Gael, it was said, sought ‘office to work towards a society in which freedom and equality are not concepts from an academic textbook but are expressed in real and tangible conditions which all our people can enjoy.’
However, in February 1967, having served as T.D. for Dublin North-West, Declan Costello announced his retirement from the rough and tumble of politics. But the ideals of the Just Society were carried on by ideological fellow travellers such as his brother-in-law Alexis FitGerald, Michael Sweetman, Jim Dooge and Garret Fitzgerald.
FitzGerald went on to become an unsatisfactory two-term Taoiseach in the 1980s. During this period a new kind of party crystallised, influenced by the Progressive Democrats, with figures like John Bruton coming to the fore, that adopted a laissez faire approach at variance with the Keynesianism of the previous generation.
Remarkably, the Fine Gael party was on the brink of changing its name to ‘Fine Gael: Social Democratic Party’ at the 1968 Árd Fheis. Apparently the majority in attendance were in favour of the motion but the coup was resisted on a technicality by the old guard.[i]
I was one of those beguiled by that at the time, believing that a right-wing party, such as Fine Gael, could be hijacked by a left agenda and be transformed via a procedural, albeit unintended, ambush. The ambush occurred at a time when Fine Gael felt self-conscious about standing for nothing and offering no alternative to a resurgent Fianna Fáil led by Seán Lemass.
Since then the conservative faction of large farmer and comfortable professionals serving multinational corporations has assumed pre-eminence. The party now led by Leo Varadkar is distinctly neo-liberal, with concessions to individual rights. The pole opposite of Declan Costello’s political credo.
Yet senior members of the party do continue to claim allegiance to the Just Society. The current Minister for Finance Paschal Donohoe, who has been elected to the same constituency as Declan Costello seat, claimed in 2017 that he possessed a copy of the document and that ‘he [Leo Varadkar] values the just society as much as I do and places its spirit in a modern, outward-looking and dynamic Ireland.’
Judicial Appointment
Like many of his contemporaries Declan Costello was a devout Catholic, which informed the noblesse oblige of the Just Society. Under Garret Fitzgerald and beyond, however, Fine Gael diverged from Costello’s ideals, embracing a socially liberal approach on issues such as contraception, marriage equality, and finally abortion, but an increasingly non-interventionist approach to the economy. This was anathema to Declan Costello’s moral outlook. His religion foregrounded a Christian Socialism that presaged John Rawls’s theory of justice as fairness, but also brought an overly moralistic approach to the private lives of individuals.
Former Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.
The conversion of Fine Gael from authoritarian conservatives to social liberals has, however, been cosmetic, even under Garret Fitzgerald. It is clear that a neo-liberal consensus began to emerge in the wake of Fianna Fail’s landslide election victory in 1979, and individual rights gradually took the place of social supports as policy planks.
Declan Costello was appointed a High Court judge in 1977 having served as Attorney General under Liam Cosgrave. Owing to the tribalism bedevilling Irish politics successive Fianna Fail administrations. ignored his undoubted abilities as a jurist, passing him over for appointment to the Supreme Court.
This diminished his opportunities for progressive judicial leadership. Only towards the end of his career was he appointed to the largely administrative position of President of The High Court. But by that stage, frankly, the arteries had hardened and the reforming zeal that marked his earlier life had ebbed away.
Socio-Economic Rights
Costello’s judicial record on socio-economic questions is in marked contrast to his political career. The case of O’Reilly v. Limerick Corporation 1989 ILRM 181 suggests he had caved into a prevailing neo-liberal mindset of laissez faire. He claimed the Courts had no business allocating or redistributing resources, which was, he argued, a matter for the Dáil in Leister House alone.
The plaintiff Travellers sought a properly serviced halting site in order to vindicate their constitutional rights under Articles 40.3 and 41.2. Costello refused to grant it on the basis that such an order would involve:
[T]he imposition by the Court of its view that there has been an unfair distribution of national resources. To arrive at such a conclusion, it would have to make an assessment of the validity of the many competing claims on those resources, the correct priority to be given to them and the financial implications of the plaintiffs’ claim.
This appears to contradict his stated view that the Irish Constitution was informed by natural law, which in the Thomistic tradition encompasses fundamental socio-economic rights. Importantly, he recanted the O’Reilly decision a few years later in the case of O’Brien v Wicklow UDC 1994.
But damage had been done with his introduction of a neat Aristotelian distinction between commutative and distributive justice. This absolves the courts from any role in ensuring that elected representatives maintain basic standards of living – so elegantly articulated in the Just Society and also expressed in Article 45 of the Constitution – which underpins any true republic.
This argument was seized on by the libertarian Adrian Hardiman in the case of Sinnott v. Minister for Education 2001 IESC 63, to dismiss the claims of the intellectually disabled plaintiff to an ongoing education. Since then fundamental rights to housing or a living wage have been dismissed by the courts on grounds of non-justiciability.
Authoritarian Streak
Declan Costello became an enforcer of a dominant Catholic morality that pervaded the country until the 1990s. The disgraceful decision to uphold Eileen Kelly’s sacking from her position as a secondary school teacher after she became pregnant during an extra-marital affair was perhaps a nadir.
On due process he displayed equally authoritarian tendencies. Thus in O’Leary v. Attorney General 1995 1 IR 254 he determined that possession of an incriminating document provided sufficient proof that a person was a member of an illegal organisation. The documents in question amounted to thirty-seven posters of a man holding a rifle, with the words ‘IRA calls the shots’ printed on them. Costello determined that the provision was consistent with the presumption of innocence and benefitted from a presumption of constitutionality.
Growing up in a privileged family, he perhaps assumed that the police force could do little wrong, and counted on their probity in executing public function. One wonders what he would make of the case of Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe, and the dirty tricks campaign against him and others. The litany of Garda abuses is well attested to in Adrian Hardiman’s ferocious dissenting judgment in D.P.P. v J.C. 2015 IESC 31.
Thus, after doing the state some service in displaying authoritarian tendencies Declan Costello saw out his career as an occasionally despotic President of The High Court. I appeared before him in the inception of the Gilligan Litigation, which, in fairness, he handled with even-handedness; at one point booting out a certain barrister of ill-repute, who had appeared unauthorized in private proceedings. It was an intellectual thrill to appear before him.
In my view his most disgraceful, and certainly his most notorious, decision was in Attorney General v. X 1992 1 IR 1. In that case, the facts of which are well known, Costello granted an injunction preventing a fourteen-year-old rape victim from leaving the State for nine months (with the purpose of preventing her from going to the U.K. to obtain an abortion), a decision that was overturned in the Supreme Court, which decided that abortion was permitted where there was a real and substantial risk to the life of the mother, including suicide.
Place in History
Adrian Hardiman.
Alongside Adrian Hardiman, Declan Costello was the finest Irish judge since the halcyon days of judicial activism in the 1960s and 1970s. Alas figures of that calibre are not evident on the judicial benches today. I fear the intellectual decline is irreversible, which represents a threat to decent governance of the state.
We are all products of our time and looking back on history we enjoy the benefit of hindsight. Declan Costello was a great man, with flaws. He had a quiet charm and displayed a courtly graciousness towards others. His brilliant mind was activated by a concern for social justice and, crucially, he possessed a sense of humour.
Within the establishment his intellectual calibre was a form of subversion, meaning he was always the Man Who Would Be King, but never the king. There was nevertheless a certain contradiction between his progressive, even transgressive, instincts as a politician and the reactionary tendencies he displayed as a judge.
The Just Society document stands unsurpassed as one of the last political statements of substance on social reform in Irish history. It displays a coherent vision for a better Ireland that politicians would do well to take off their book shelves today.
[i] Ciara Kelly, ‘Michael Sweetman and the Just Society’, from The Widest Circle: Remembering Michael Sweetman, Edited by Barbara Sweetman-FitzGerald, A&A Farmar, 2011 p.69
In a powerful 1997 essay, Seamus Deane suggested that the twin forces that beset modern Irish writers such as W.B. Yeats and James Joyce were those of Apocalypse and Boredom.[1] Both the culture in which the writers lived and the art-works they produced are marked by phasic interruptions into colonial despondency of revelatory dramas and epiphanies:
In Yeats’s work–plays and essays, we may feel at times that a little boredom might be something of a relief from the constant appropriation of almost everything that happened in his lifetime to a visionary apocalypse in which all that is ‘past, or passing or to come’ flashes up in a conflagration that consumes time and exposes eternity. What I want to suggest here is the natural alliance between Joycean boredom and Yeatsian apocalypse in relation to temporality and therefore to history.[2]
Deane’s proposal reflects something of the deadlock of revisionist and radical criticism in Irish Studies in the 1990s – a political deadlock which has largely passed into desuetude in the post-Good Friday atmosphere. If revisionism proposed a certain constitutional conservatism and was a bit of a bore, the radical cultural critics wielded a language which was apocalyptically difficult to understand in its more post-post-structuralist modes. And what was lost in the debate was something of the craic of ordinary people, and the points of cracked reality in ordinary life which do not succumb easily to academic enquiry.
Methodologically, of course, we find ourselves these days stretched across wide and strange territories of discourse and discipline, and at a very late stage in the drama of literary criticism from Leavis to Baudrillard. Contemporary criticism has a surfeit of entry points and elaborations, resembling a quantum field in its complexity. I could, whilst sticking only to a psychological theme, find many feminist responses to one essay in late Lacan. Or I could argue for yet another return to a missed aspect of a deconstructed Freud. I would prefer though to draw simple and broad brush-strokes which would not incite the total indignation of a casual reader. My psychological terms are broadly popular (the aesthetic terms are more or less commonly known in academia since Bakhtin). And the argument is willingly simple: that ‘Apocalypse and Boredom’ as a binary needs a mediating term (Crack) which turns out to be dizzyingly deconstructive in its implications. Modern scholars cannot either manoeuvre round or simply ignore this post-structuralist facet of a text but must, as Terry Eagleton has suggested, go through theory and out the other side. And wisdom is to be found in many places including the most demotic and the most abstruse. Our common language in the end must be the structures of wisdom, and Derrida has as much a claim to them as does the greatest ‘realist’ of a pub in Grafton Street. [3]
Deane’s broad historical binary can be broadened to include a psychological dimension and also an aesthetic principle for the detailed analysis of culture, society and art. The psychological dimension appropriate to Irish modernism, I shall argue, is manic-depressive in structure. The corresponding aesthetic principle is a principle of carnival-nihilism where the hyphen suggests an affinity with the related manic-depressive psychology. The hyphen should suggest that the prior term in each case (mania, carnival) is not necessarily adjectival but has also an intimate link with its sister terms depression and nihilism. Adding these terms to Deane’s we might produce a more complex matrix for the discussion of Irish modernism for there are fascinating dialogical correspondences between manic, carnivalistic and apocalyptic phenomena, as indeed there are between depressing, nihilistic and boring colonial experiences. In the process of thus broadening the terms of reference, we will discover the emergence of that third term which ironises the solemnities of apocalypse and boredom: the term known to our common culture as crack.
It is a question of corollaries of structure. Manic-depression is episodic and interruptive of quotidian life in the same way that apocalyptic and boring experiences can be said to be episodic diversions from the ‘normal’ functioning of a happy democratic culture. Mania wrecks routine, and depression makes us incapable of routine. The terms carnival and nihilism are not new, but in an internal relationship with each other they form an aesthetic principle which deforms the more staid genre of tragi-comedy which is often taken by older critics to represent an aesthetic ‘norm’ for representing the human condition.[4] Carnival, like mania, achieves a disruption of normal boundaries, hierarchies and empirical states of mind. Depression and nihilism can kill our sense of the value of the ordinary. Christian apocalypse disrupts boundaries (‘ye shall be as gods’), hierarchies (‘I am the Alpha and Omega’) and forms of empiricism ( ‘they shall see the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory’). But it is also true that boredom can at its extreme give us an extremely interesting sense of what eternity might be like. In a Derridean sense each of these terms when pushed to its limit can turn into its opposite: there is nothing more boring than an over-long carnival, and nothing more likely to reveal ‘the hidden’ than a night of nihilistic visions.
The dialogical inter-action of these terms furnishes us with both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ opportunities if we imagine the structure thus:
Apocalypse Boredom (Socio-cultural level).
Mania Depression (Psychological level)
Carnival Nihilism (Aesthetic level).
Taken together as a matrix of six terms we can begin to be experimental, and the advantage of adding psychological and aesthetic terms is to furnish us with a complex language for discussing the contingencies of modernist culture: what, for instance, might a manic-nihilism resemble, say in the early Nietzschean plays of W.B. Yeats such as Where there is Nothing? Could we consider the possibility of a carnival of boredom in Joyce’s Dubliners or Brendan Behan’s The Hostage? How might a sense of apocalyptic depression inform Sean O’Casey’s TheSilver Tassie? The terms are reversible, too, and this adds a further level of vocabulary to our exploration of forms: what is the function, for instance, of a depressive carnivalism in the plays of Samuel Beckett, a nihilistic apocalypse at the end of O’Casey’s Purple Dust and a boring mania in the work of Denis Johnston and Spike Milligan? I will now explore some of these terms more categorically and then go on to demonstrate how their presence can best be detected in the work of Sean O’Casey, a writer placed in the ‘minor’ category of modernists behind Joyce and Yeats, but who may come into his majority when seen as the first realist of crack.
In 1921, at the height of European modernism, the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin described manic depression for the first time as involving ‘a heightened distractibility’, a ‘tendency to diffusiveness’, and ‘a spinning out the circle of ideas stimulated and jumping off to others’. [5] In 1924 the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler concurred and drew a parallel with artistic production:
The thinking of the manic is flighty. He jumps by by-paths from one subject to another, and cannot adhere to anything. With this the ideas run along very easily and involuntarily, even so freely that it may be felt as unpleasant by the patient….
Because of the more rapid flow of ideas, and especially because of the falling off of inhibitions, artistic activities are facilitated even though something worth while is produced only in very mild cases and when the patient is otherwise talented in this direction. The heightened sensibilities naturally have the effect of furthering this.[6]
We should notice the stress here upon the ‘heightened’ sensibility of the maniac for this reminds us of the heightened sensibility required to experience epiphany and revelation. We should also note the ‘falling off of inhibitions’ for this is a feature we will observe in our analysis of carnivalesque activity. The rapid flow and spinning of ideas also reminds us of some of the features we associate with modernist texts such as Ulysses. In short, the phenomenon of mania touches upon both frenetic literary activity and apocalyptic or transformative experience.
Depression.
Seamus Deane refers in his essay to the ‘marks of boredom’ he detects in Joyce, Beckett and Kafka. They include:
– ‘dinginess of physical circumstance and dress’,
– ‘extreme routinization of action and speech’,
– ‘an individual eloquence that derives from consensual banalities’,
Let us contrast this list with a list of depressive symptoms described by Irish psychiatrist Anthony Clare:
‘-Feelings of guilt or worthlessness
– Loss of concentration
– Loss of energy and noticeable tiredness of fatigue
-Suicidal thoughts …
-Agitation or marked slowing down (retardation’).[8]
Sean O’Casey, Image by Reginald Gray.
It is clear from these lists that clinical depression and cultural boredom are intimately related. As we shall see in the work of Sean O’Casey, the subject feels that he has been broken into pieces. It is an experience of extreme boredom as a form of disintegration which results, paradoxically, in a form of apocalyptic fear:
[The depressive] feels solitary, indescribably unhappy, as ‘a creature disinherited of fate’; he is sceptical about God, and with a certain dull submission, which shuts out every comfort and every gleam of light, he drags himself with difficulty from one day to another. Everything has become disagreeable to him; everything wearies him … he thinks he is superfluous in the world, he cannot restrain himself any longer: the thought occurs to him to take his life without his knowing why. He has a feeling as if something had cracked in him, he fears that he may become crazy, insane, paralytic, the end is coming near. (Italics inserted).[9]
Colonial depression is a much more disintegrative experience than the term ‘boredom’ allows. The depressive is opened up to extraordinarily painful inner confusion and despair as he ‘cracks’ under the strain of living a false life. The only redemptive feature of the experience lies in the fact that extreme depression can become a form of revelation of capitalism’s utter inner monotony. The depressive subject can become aware of his extreme oppression through his consciousness of his fractured personal moods. There is , also, as we shall see, something redemptive and ironical about that ‘crack’.
Carnival.
So much has been written about carnival in recent decades that the term has sadly been recuperated as a ‘boring’ academic category. We can crack open the term however when we inflect it with an analysis of its relationship with mania and nihilism. The classic description of the function of carnivalism belongs to Mikhail Bakhtin:
The laws, prohibitions, and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during carnival…. All distance between people is suspended, and a special carnival category goes into effect: free and familiar contact among people.[10]
It is a characteristic feature of mania that the patient demonstrates a ‘loss of inhibitions, particularly sexual and social’ and displays an ‘infectious mood – humorous, jocose, euphoric.’[11] The maniac also enjoys breaking the boundaries of propriety- talking to people familiarly on the street, entering private property without permission, cocking a snook at policemen and authority figures. In a sense, we might think of carnival as a form of collective mania licensed by its social contract. The maniac is stigmatised because of his solitude- his actions are not very different from those of the carnival clown. ‘The basic principle of grotesque or Carnival realism’, writes Michael Bristol, ‘is to represent everything socially and spiritually exalted on the material, bodily level. This includes cursing, abusive and irreverent speech, symbolic and actual thrashing’ and so on.[12] The patient in a manic phase often dresses bizarrely, curses abusively and irreverently, thrashes around and confuses his own body with that of a god. Mania is, in a sense, a one-man carnival.
‘Carnival’, writes Bakhtin, ‘celebrates the shift itself, the very process of replaceability, and not the precise item that is replaced, Carnival is, so to speak, functional and not substantive. It absolutizes nothing, but rather proclaims the joyful relativity of everything.’[13] The maniac, remember, is identified by his infectious mood, flights of ideas, pressurised speech with fast punning and rhyming, loss of judgement and inhibition. The maniac, too, proclaims the joyful relativity of all relationships, concepts and objects. There are clear structural connections, then, between the forms of apocalypse, mania and carnival, and I would suggest that mania is the mediating element between the two apparently unconnected forms of apocalypse and carnivalism. In one grotesque twist, the Christian apocalypse is all about the burning flesh of men, and carnival too (L. carne) concerns the destiny of the flesh. We might indeed view the Last Judgement through one grotesque optic as a kind of carnival of revelation.
Nihilism.
Nihilism is the rationalisation of boredom and depression. It is, as it were, the ideology of melancholy. Where people merely act bored or depressed, as in, say, Joyce’s Dubliners , there is at least hope that some relief might come from the pain of their condition. These characters are not committed ideologically to the notion that life is meaningless but are merely acting out the paralysis of a cycle of colonial history. Nihilism, however, perceives the permanent negation of teleology, divinity and broadly socio-spiritual meaning. It searches for the lethal nothingness at the heart of any project and proclaims this as its secret truth. In conjunction with carnivalism as part of the couplet carnival-nihilism, nihilism acts as a corollary to the depression in manic-depression though with an even greater sense of finality. Where the maniac is reduced, in time, to the horrible vacuousness at the heart of his euphoria, the carnival subject, too, comes to understand that his destruction of all actually existing social forms conceals a secret and permanent nihilism. Carnival cocks a snook at authority but conceals from itself the secret vacuousness of its activity. It is a good thing to place a king’s crown on an ass’s head but it is also a gesture of hatred towards norms. Nihilism is thus the darkest of the six terms with which we are approaching Irish modernism because it emerges from the very heart of parodic action. But, in a final redemptive twist, we shall see that nihilism can be dialogised by the comical. Too much nihilism is, simply, funny, as James Joyce illustrates in his ironic parody of Catholic hell in APortrait of the Artist as a Young Man and as Samuel Beckett discovered in Waiting for Godot. [14] Several pages of doom and gloom can become amusingly intense. As we shudder at the crack of doom, we cannot help but be reminded of the craic.
‘I cannot enter the social order except as a vagabond.’ – James Joyce, 1904
The Crack.
To be cracked can mean, as we have seen, to be depressed to the point of madness, but to ‘have the crack’ can mean the opposite: to be infected with carnivalistic joy. A crack can be a fault-line from which revelation might arise (literally ‘a seismic event’ as Deane has it) or a blow inducing paralysis. [15] It is an ambivalent term which mediates between our six analytical terms thus:
Apocalypse Boredom
Mania Crack Depression
Carnival Nihilism.
Crack is the deconstructive term which mediates the transition from one side of the grid to the other. When apocalypse turns into boredom there must be a point at which a position is neither apocalyptic nor boring and I would suggest that the subject here acts like a manic-depressive. When mania begins to turn into depression the patient feels that he is cracking up in the manner described by Emil Kraepelin:
He has a feeling as if something had cracked in him, he fears that he may become crazy, insane, paralytic, the end is coming near. [16]
A post-apocalyptic culture can feel that the old moulds have been cracked but this can induce a morose fear for the future that can induce an anxious boredom. Contrarily, when a culture experiences the onset of an apocalypse it encounters heightened, euphoric feelings as in the 1916 rebellion where millennial fever gripped sections of the population of Dublin. As it becomes hypomanic society can have an almighty craic before its euphoria reaches its peak of revelation and collapses back into self-hatred and paralysis. Crack is therefore something of a pharmakon. A good night out in Temple Bar can be a ‘cure’ for depression, but the booze leaves us with a poisonous headache. A crack on the head from an Irish Brother can give us a poisonous hatred of authority, but can also cure us of all our idealism. Crack is undecided in its effects: both violent and creative, fun and pain, a break and a mould. It is a very archetype indeed of deconstruction, for what could be more ambivalent than a textual crack: a point where the text roars and collapses, enjoys and splits, surges and cleaves. At the very point where Beckett reaches his cracked vision of futility, we can’t help but begin to crack up. There is no craic where there is no crack. And there is no crack where there is no craic. In fact, the term is not just a pharmakon, but the very possibility of there being a pharmakon because there could not be a limit which could not crack, crack being the condition of its hymenicity.
Crack is a transitive term then but one which cannot sustain itself either as a form or a limit. We crack under pressure but then crack away at a solution. A crack in a cup is a pain but great craic if it causes our landlord to drop tea on his trousers. Ireland itself is cracked along its Ulster border, but the border itself is ‘crackers’. A crack cannot be a thing, by definition: but is certainly something. The crack may be Ninety in the Isle of Man, but the crackdown in the Dublin of 1916 was terrible.
Sean O’Casey and The End of the Beginning.
In the work of Sean O’Casey, nihilism is articulated as it emerges from the scandalous pranks of his exuberantly carnivalesque Dublin slum-dwellers. [17] As his work progresses through the years of modernism and civil war, his vision becomes increasingly bleak, so bleak, in fact that it becomes, in an ironic twist, comical. O’Casey’s work hovers in the space of ambiguity created by the word ‘crack’ which can represent both a fault or interruption in the smoothness of a quotidian continuum and a sense of comical social play (craic). ‘Mr O’Casey’, wrote Samuel Beckett, ‘is the master of knockabout in this very serious and honourable sense- that he discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities, and activates it to their explosion.’[18] O’Casey’s wilful destruction of empirical solidities impressed Beckett philosophically (it was entropic) but also because, to use a contemporary phrase, it cracked him up. O’Casey was at his most amusing when he was being nihilistic and achieved his greatest spasms of laughter from his creation of ‘spasms of dislocation’ in the art-work.[19] In his 1934 play The End of the Beginning, two characters, Darry Berrill and Barry Derrill set about the destruction of an Irish country house with great relish and, in the process, wreck themselves:
Darry falls down the chimney … there’ll be a nice panorama of ruin … nothin’ done but damage … I’m after nearly destroyin’ meself! [20]
The country house should be read as symbolic of an emerging De Valeran pastoralism which both O’Casey and Conor Cruise O’Brien took to be a disappointment.[21] ‘Our generation’, wrote O’Brien, ‘grew into the chilling knowledge that we had failed, that our history had turned into rubbish, our past to a “trouble of fools.”‘[22] O’Casey’s country house is an objective correlative of post- Free State Ireland’s paralysis in which his comedic pair stumble blindly about in a void:
Darry (shouting madly). Barry, Barry, come here quick, man! I turned the key of the tap too much, ‘n it slipped out of me hand into a heap of rubbish ‘n I can’t turn off the cock, ‘n I can’t find the key in the dark. (p. 41.)
O’Casey and O’Brien could agree upon the ‘heap of rubbish’ that Irish history had become. Typically, however, O’Casey intensifies the nihilism in the sub-text of the play until its atmosphere becomes apocalyptic:
I can’t do anything … I don’t know what to do …What in the Name of God has happened? … can you do nothin’ right! … God grant that it won’t be the end … Is the clock stopped? For God’s sake, touch nothing … It’s as dark as pitch in there … (pp. 21-30).
At the centre of Free State Ireland, O’Casey surmised, there lay a metaphysical darkness and his play establishes an atmosphere of cosmic doom throughout. Strangely, though the effect of the treatment is comical because his pair of clots are so endearing, reminding us of Laurel and Hardy as they crash into furniture, disappear up and down chimneys and knock cracks in the walls of the de Valeran dream. We cannot tell whether the apocalypse of nihilism is serious or part of the craic. ‘Can’t you find anything?’ asks Darry. ‘I can see nothing’ replies Barry, as the play reaches its climax (p. 24), but again, the effect is amusing in the manner of a cartoon where all the lights go out and we see just the cartoon rabbit’s eyes glowing in the dark. O’Casey is attempting a serious critique of his country’s post-apocalyptic (Easter 1916) boredom, but he discovers that boredom holds a potential energy within it which can explode into epiphanies of entropy, at which point he cannot decide whether to laugh or go mad. His culture is exhausted (‘not a drop left in it, not a single drop! What’re we goin’ to do n– …’) but hysterically explosive: ‘… He lets go of the rope, and runs over to the oil drum. Darry disappears up the chimney‘ (p. 33). For O’Casey, De Valeran Ireland is literally ‘cracked’, deformed in a vortex of nihilism and farce:
He turns and sees that Darry has disappeared.
Lizzie (speaking outside in a voice of horror). The heifer, the heifer!
Darry (calling out). Lizzie, Lizzie!
Lizzie rushes in as Darry falls down the chimney…. (p.33.)
The terms Apocalypse and Boredom are not adequate in their singularity to capture such ambivalencies. Boredom taken too far can rebound as a form of apocalyptic emptiness as in O’Casey’s work from 1923-34 where we encounter darknesses which take us beyond the merely paralytic state of Joyce’s Dubliners towards Beckettian nihilism. Apocalypse, too, can be strangely boring as we can note from my opening quotation where Seamus Deane speaks of the relief that we seek from Yeats’s constant revelations. We must seek mediating terms for the movement between Deane’s twin poles of analysis for, in the end, the terms begin to deconstruct one another. The first step in moving towards a more complex analysis is to introduce more specific psychological and aesthetic terms. The second step is to seek a mediating term for the deconstructive activity of this more complex matrix. In the term ‘crack’ we have a term which mediates the ambiguities of the deconstructive inter-actions of apocalypse, mania and carnival, boredom, depression and nihilism. Yeats and Joyce may have wanted Ireland to aspire to being an Attic culture, but I would wish to install Crack within Seamus Deane’s paradigm to remind us that Ireland was always, already, a very Antic country.[23]
[1] Seamus Deane, ‘Boredom and Apocalypse: A National Paradigm’ in Strange Country: Modernity and Nationhood in Irish Writing since 1970 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1997).
[2] Deane, Strange Country, p. 171. For a discussion of manic-depressive activity in the life of W.B. Yeats, see my ‘”Down Hysterica Passio”: The Mood Structures of W.B. Yeats’, Irish University Review vol. xxviii, no. 2, Autumn/Winter 1998, pp. 272-80.
[4] See, for instance, David Krause, Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work (London, MacMillan, 1960), pp. 86-89 and passim. ‘Carnival’ and ‘nihilism’ should be thought of as standing to the extreme left and right, as it were, of the traditional terms ‘comedy’ and ‘tragedy’. Where tragi-comedy suggests an organic genre in which its terms are nevertheless discrete, carnival-nihilism should suggest an aesthetic that is in creative contradiction with itself. For further discussion of the principle of carnival-nihilism, see my (unpublished) M. Litt. thesis, Ideology and Dramatic Form in the Plays of Sean O’Casey, 1922-46 (Oxford, Bodleian library, 1994).
[5] Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia , trans. R.M. Barclay, ed. G.M. Robertson (Edinburgh, E&S Livingstone, 1921) in Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York , Simon and Schuster: Free Press, 1994), pp. 107-8. We might consider manic depression to be a ‘modernist’ illness in the way that some writers have conceived schizophrenia to be a ‘post-modern’ illness (see, for example, Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review, 146, pp. 53-92.) Where the schizophrenic patient loses touch with structures of space and time permanently, the manic-depressive experiences episodic disorientation. He is able to recuperate his identity, albeit tentatively, and thus retains a sense of ironic detachment from a self in crisis which a schizophrenic patient cannot since his very sense of self has collapsed into a permanent ‘flow’ of disorder.
[6] Eugen Bleuler, Textbook of Psychiatry, English ed. A.A. Brill (London, Macmillan, 1924) in Jamison, Touched with Fire, p 108. The reader is referred to Jamison, Touched with Fire, pp. 262-3 (Appendix A) for the fuller Diagnostic Criteria of Mania.
[8] Spike Milligan and Anthony Clare, Depression, p. 35.
[9] Emil Kraepelin in Milligan and Clare, Depression, pp. 23-4.
[10] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Theory and History of Literature, Vol. 8, trans., ed., C. Emerson (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 122-3.
[11] Milligan and Clare, Depression, p. 38.
[12] Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theatre: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York, Methuen, 1985), p. 22.
[13] Bakhtin, Problems, p. 125.
[14] See, for example, James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London, Minerva, 1992), pp.130-40 and Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (London, Faber and Faber, 1965), pp.11-15.
[16] Emil Kraepelin in Milligan and Clare, Depression, pp. 23-4.
[17] See, for instance, Sean O’Casey, ‘The Silver Tassie’, Collected Works vol. ii (London, MacMillan, 1967) where a carnivalesque opening of great joy mutates into a despairing nihilism: The sound of a concertina playing in the street outside has been heard, and the noise of a marching crowd…. Shouts are heard– ‘Up the Avondales!‘ ; ‘Up Harry Heegan and the Avondales!’ Then steps are heard coming up the stairs, and first Simon Norton enters, holding the door ceremoniously wide open to allow Harry to enter … carrying a silver cup joyously…. (p. 25).
cf.:
Teddy: Strain as you may, it stretches from the throne of God to the end of the hearth of hell.
Simon. What?
Teddy. The darkness. (p. 89).
[18] Samuel Beckett writing about The End of the Beginning in ‘The Essential and the Incidental’, Thomas Kilroy, ed., Sean O’Casey: Twentieth Century Views (London, MacMillan ,1975), p. 167.
[19] Beckett, ‘The Essential and the Incidental’, p. 168.
[20] Sean O’Casey, ‘The End of the Beginning’, Five One Act Plays (MacMillan, 1990), p. 33. Further references to this play can be found in the text.
[21] This pastoralism would later produce the De Valeran vision of a countryside ‘bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of maidens; whose firesides would be the forums of the wisdom of serene old age.’ (Eamon De Valera quoted in David Krause, intro., Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (London, MacMillan, 1991), pp. 15-16. In Cock-a-Doodle Dandy , O’Casey developed the point made in The End of the Beginning– that the boredom of pastoralism concealed an apocalyptic force (the cock) which could rip its pretensions apart.
[22] Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘The Embers of Easter’, O.D. Edwards and F. Pyle, ed.s, 1916: The Easter Rising (London, MacMillan, 1968), p. 231.
[23] For an interesting essay on the relationship between antics and melancholy, see Harry Levin, ‘The Antic Disposition’, Hamlet: A Selection of Critical Essays, ed. John Jump (London, MacMillan, 1968), 122-36. The word antic derives etymologically from the Italian antico (antique) which gives the phrase ‘Antic country’ a satisfyingly Yeatsian accent.
In these times it is perhaps inevitable that people will want to write poems about climate change, or Twitter and politics. But poetry knows in its heart, what has already ended inside your consciousness, to which you and the world are gradually catching up.
In the greatest poems I have read, an old man or great lady has already died, to be reborn inside my imagination at the dawn of a new reality. That essentially linguistic act, or border experience, at the heart of poetry, means that this art is perennially relevant, or always ahead of its time.
The poems to which a few will continue to return must be in some way about the experience of being able to write to them from out of eternity, which is always to be found in the future.
And it is in times like these that we need to listen to a still small voice that speaks from that revelatory moment when poetry completes the eternal act of creation in its own last judgement. Like the ancient scripture of different traditions, the poet knows we are living in an iron age, or Kali Yuga, and in his or her work, we come to withstand the day or night when the son of man is revealed.
As W.B. Yeats declared in The Tower (1928), ‘Death and life were not | Till man made up the whole, | Made lock, stock and barrel |Out of his bitter soul’; the world can only end were we to vanish from it; ‘And further add to that | That, being dead, we rise, | Dream and so create | Translunar Paradise.’
Thoor Ballylee in County Galway, Ireland: Yeats’s ‘Tower.’
New Year
At the beginning of 2020, I’d still stand by those high-sounding words, but I would like to add that we have plans to make recordings of the poems we publish.
Poetry may well be all that I have said it is, but it is also a deeply compelling, sometimes scandalously illogical, thing that exists in the ear as much as on the page.
A revelatory moment for me in my twenties was listening to W. B. Yeats read ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and other poems on a 1930s radio broadcast. The slightly cantankerous old poet said that he would begin with this poem from his youth ‘because if you know anything about me, you will expect me to begin with it.’
One senses here a Yeatsian slight disdain for a modern radio audience. Or could he have felt as George Orwell imagined the poet feels ‘On the air’: ‘that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something’? Surely, Yeats cannot have hoped that his ideal reader or audience would be listening, that freckled fisherman in grey Connemara cloth whom he imagined in ‘The Fisherman’(1919): ‘A man who does not exist, | A man who is but a dream’.
What struck me most about Yeats’s reading was its incantatory style. Before he started, he was careful to explain: ‘I am going to read my poems with great emphasis on their rhythm and that may seem strange if you are not used to it….It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse, the poems that I am going to read and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.’
I can’t imagine that many poets today would read with quite Yeats’s emphasis on the rhythm, and even a hundred years before Yeats’s reading, William Hazlitt in 1823 could express suspicion of ‘a chaunt in the recitation both of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which acts as a spell upon the hearer, and disarms the judgment. Perhaps they have deceived themselves by making habitual use of this ambiguous accompaniment.’
That said, I was at first somewhat disappointed when I heard Seamus Heaney read out his poems in such a casual, almost faltering, manner, at a literary festival to which I was once taken in my youth. It didn’t quite match my expectations from the work I had read alone to myself, and it was certainly nothing like the crackly elevated recordings I had heard of Wallace Stevens, or even Tennyson and Browning, which retain something of that still, small voice I seem to hear in the poems I love.
It was also something of a revelation working with Paul Curran a couple of years ago, making a recording of him reading out some poems of mine for a radio documentary. As we sat under duvets in the improvised studio of a back bedroom of the producer’s house, I was taken aback by the care with which Paul was able to draw out nuances of meaning during repeated takes of the same poem. I knew I would have to smarten up my act at future poetry readings.
But, then, Paul Curran is an actor as well as a poet. You should be able to hear him read a couple of his poems on the Cassandra Voices website soon.
To be honest, I am slightly suspicious of the strongly performative element of a lot of contemporary poetry. Poetry is not quite rap or folk song. And why get some actor to read out your poems, when it’s so endlessly fascinating to hear the poet herself read her work?
I would say that my work’s shape on the page is as important as its shape in my ear as I mumble it out during the often-long hours of composition. Its heritage is, after all, a literate and courtly one, when manuscripts might be passed around a small readership, to be read aloud perhaps in coterie groups. Of course the roots of that tradition are ultimately in folk song and ancient incantation.
All poems are complimented by compelling imagery, mostly from the photographic library of Arts Editor Daniele Idini, and I am looking forward to hearing many of these poems, hopefully, read out or recited by their poets so that we can make audio files available for you too.
Edward Clarke is Poetry Editor of Cassandra Voices. To submit a poem for consideration e-mail Edward@cassandravoices.com
