Editors’ Notes:
Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
No Irish child of the twentieth century could grow up without
encountering the influence and the enigma of the Catholic priesthood, and
certainly not George O’Brien, who has recounted his childhood in Lismore,
County Waterford, in three volumes of autobiography beginning with
Dancehall Days (1988). Grim accounts of church–run industrial schools have
become a staple of recent Irish fiction and memoir, among them Paddy Doyle’s
The God Squad (1988) and Patrick Touher’s Fear of the Collar
(1991). In this issue, O’Brien introduces the all-too-human figure of Father
Willy, a priest in his village who had been removed from an industrial school.
O’Brien reimagines for us a system that dehumanized both students and teachers
alike, while in no way excusing the cruelty of such institutions. The stolen
childhoods of which O’Brien writes confirm the Yeatsian allusion in the
piece’s title: “the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”
Contemporary critics have come to think of the genre of
autobiography as in many ways just as fictional as the novel. Certainly, every
autobiographer is engaged in “editing reality.” Yet first-person accounts
arising out of marginalized communities, like the Irish Travelling People,
still hold the promise of a much-needed veracity. Here, Dr. José Lanters
examines the accounts of Sean Maher, Nan Joyce, Betsy Whyte, and other
Traveller life stories collected in recent years, and finds that in these
autobiographies the question of how the self is represented becomes especially
vexed. Not only are the Travellers habitually defined as outsiders, but many
are compelled by illiteracy to have their own stories written down by others.
Many Traveller stories, she finds, are deeply ambiguous—doubting both their
own legitimacy and the ability of the “settled” people to understand. The
president-elect of the American Conference for Irish Studies, José Lanters is
the author of Unauthorized Versions: Irish Menippean Satire, 1919-1952
(2000).
Born in Athlone in 1921, the poet Moira Bailis has lived in
New Jersey for many decades, and reading her poems in this issue’s “Filíocht
Nua”section—poems arising from places in both Ireland and the United States—we
see clearly how Bailis’s transatlantic backgrounds inform her deceptively
simple lines. Often, these poems hone in on moments when other presences make
themselves felt, as when a museum visit in North Carolina raises the ghost of
the immigrant experience, or when a goshawk in “Allta” becomes an avatar of
lost wildness. In other poems, the presences are literary: her childhood
reading burbles through as a plane touches down at a Midwestern airport, and,
in “Memento” she perceives the example of William Carlos Williams in the
simplest of moments on an ordinary road.Moira Bailis’s poems have previously
appeared in such journals as Parnassus and Contemporary Review,
and she hosts a monthly poetry show on Farleigh Dickinson University radio.
As Dr. Joseph Heininger notes, one of the most enduring of
Seamus Heaney’s literary affinities has been his fascination with Dante, seen
in his translations of cantos from the Inferno and the use of models
from Dante in the pilgrimage sequences of Station Island (1984). Just
as important,Heaney has also embraced such Dantean forms as the tercet. Here,
Heininger looks closely at the first major indication of the poet’s engagement
with Dante, “Ugolino,” the closing poem of Station Island (1984). In
the figure of the damned Count Ugolino, Heaney alludes to the persisting
political violence of his native Ulster,“in which the sins of the fathers are
visited upon the heads of the children, and the cycles of social and familial
violence continue.” This Dantean thread continues in “The Flight Path,” a long
poem in the 1996 collection The Spirit Level. Joseph Heininger’s
articles on Irish literature have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies
and the James Joyce Quarterly.
In the early years of the twentieth century, the post of under
secretary for Ireland was among the most demanding and conflict-ridden jobs in
the British government. When Balfour’s Conservative government appointed the
Catholic, Irish-born Liberal Sir Antony MacDonnell—fresh from an accomplished
career in the colonial administration of India—to the job in 1902, the
selection had about it something of the air of a celebrity CEO today. On
MacDonnell’s arrival, M. L. Brillman notes, the Irish knew “they were about to
receive a stern and competent man, who had been used to unfettered
administrative control.” In this study of MacDonnell’s short but crucial
administration, Brillman shows that MacDonnell proved a pragmatic official—one
who upheld the Union while steering policy toward eventual devolution, and one
who laid the administrative groundwork for land reform. M. L. Brillman has
presented his research on Sir Antony MacDonnell at Irish Studies conferences
at Princeton and NUI-Galway.
Yeats famously asserted that the Anglo-Irish were “no petty
people.” Indeed not; yet, in the eyes of the world, their star has been
descending for more than two centuries. Perhaps, then, only a writer
profoundly out of synch with the zeitgeist could fully appreciate the
Anglo-Irish inheritance and the sadness of its deliquescence, and Kilkenny’s
Hubert Butler was just such a writer. Here, Dr. Billy Gray looks closely at
the circumstances surrounding the Act of Union of 1801, and finds that a
vivid, if sometimes elegiac, memory of this axial event and the emotional and
physical withdrawal that it engendered in the Anglo-Irish, can be traced
throughout Butler’s work. Gray argues that this dislocation was so profound
that it can be best understood as a form of internal exile, as theorized by
Jan Vladislav. A frequent presenter at IASIL and other Irish Studies
conferences in Europe, Dr. Gray’s researches on the Irish essay are
complemented by his publications on Islamic mysticism.
The public fury that followed the 1999 vandalism to the statue
of Padraic Ó Conaire in Galway’s Eyre Square (now expertly restored, unlike
Eyre Square itself) was hardly surprising, given the wantonness of the act and
the affection that Galwegians felt for the monument.And perhaps there were
deeper roots to the indignation, as well—for as Dr. Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch
notes here in her appreciation of sculptor Albert Power, the Ó Conaire
sculpture also embodies the cultural nationalism on which the modern Irish
nation was founded. In his choice of subjects, his use of Irish materials, and
his skilled reworking of Irish motifs, Power embraced the image of the nation
as a sort of rural, Gaelic utopia. Power’s insistence that Irish religious art
could match that of any European nation likewise reflected his nationalist
convictions. Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch is curator of Irish art at the National
Gallery of Ireland, and the author of numerous books and articles on
nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Irish painting and sculpture.
Often thought of as a “writer of place” for his fictions of
rural Donegal, Peadar O’Donnell wrote novels that, though steeped in
traditional life, were in fact anything but quaintly rustic. As Dr. William
Kerwin notes in his readings of O’Donnell’s early novel Islanders
(1927) and the masterful The Big Windows (1955), the novelist returned,
again and again, to moments when communities engaged in negotiations with new
technologies and new mores. Kerwin is especially alert to the rhythmical
quality of village life found in O’Donnell’s fictions, where the new usually
arrives by way of an assertive individual—but where lasting transformation can
only come about through community assent. Tellingly, it is often the women in
O’Donnell’s villages who effect the change.A scholar of the English
Renaissance, William Kerwin is also the editor of A
Casebook on Brian Friel (1997) and
author of Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English
Renaissance Drama (2005).
Most of John McGahern’s
fiction, too, is set in rural Ireland—but unlike Peadar O’Donnell, his fiction
has never been subject to the charge of being charming or old-fashioned.
Indeed,McGahern’s early novels The Barracks (1963) and The Dark
(1965) portray Irish homes and institutions that are repressive and often
abusive—exercises in truth-telling that cost the young novelist his job and
landed his books on the censored lists. Here, Dr. Eamon Maher tracks the
trajectory ofMcGahern’s relationship with his Irish readers over a forty-year
span, during which time the novelist went from reviled outsider to revered man
of letters. As Ireland itself became a more open country, and more willing to
examine its own mythologies, the Irish readership has inevitably come to
appreciate the humane and steady witness of McGahern’s fiction. Eamon Maher is
the author of John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal (2003).
The author of The Irish
Language in the United States: A Historical, Sociolinguistic, and Applied
Linguistic Survey (1994), Dr. Thomas Ihde has lately been contributing to
the ongoing “Publishing in Irish America, 1820-1922” project hosted by the
Institute for Irish-American Studies—and one fruit of his research is the
survey of Irish-language textbooks presented here. In surveying the texts
produced by John O’Daly, Ulick Bourke, and others, Ihde finds that while
enthusiasm for Gaeilge has a long history among North American language
learners, students in the nineteenth century were poorly served by the
available textbooks. Many texts treated Irish more as an antiquarian’s
interest than as a living language. Others were too preoccupied with
grammatical correctness to be of use to beginning students, or insisted upon
on an unhelpful “grammar-translation” pedagogy. Ihde does find much to admire
in the methodology of Simple Lessons in Irish (1902) by Fr. Eugene
O’Growney, who had learned the language as an adult.
Back to New Hibernia Review
