1916, inscribing his 1902 Cathleen ni Houlihan (‘that play’) into the narrative of what had happened after the Rising and its immediate aftermath; a kind of ‘get the commemoration in first’ ploy, not unknown in Irish political circles to this day. The story continues with the sighting of the hearse itself:
a very bright coffin, the largest I have ever seen, half-covered by the Irish flag, next, followed on foot, by the Mayor of Sligo, public representatives, cabinet ministers, men from Galway university [the frigate bearing Yeats’s coffin had docked in Galway harbour] capped and gowned in their degree … [and then] a long file of creeping cars, with, here and there, a profile behind glass and its passing reflections, that I could recognize.9
Hewitt goes through the choreography of the event with the crowds, the ceremony outside Sligo Town Hall where Irish defence forces stand ‘with bowed heads and arms reversed in a guard of honour’, before the ‘whole cortege moved slowly to Drumcliff’. Hewitt spots ‘de Valera, head and shoulders above the rest’, and runs into Austin Clarke again who ‘inquired if one might smoke at a Protestant funeral’.10 As an observer, maybe even with the hint of being the outsider, Hewitt ‘could only look around’ and, as he recounts, ‘peer up at the tower which seemed too high for the Church, and watch men with a movie-camera recording the scene, look at the rain, slanting through the trees, and find names celebrated in twentieth-century Ireland for the backs – and the backs of heads, the actor, the poet, the man of letters, the politicians.’11
Yeats’s reburial was an act of repatriation. It was also, crucially, a statement of the shortly renamed Republic’s efforts to identify Yeats, the internationally renowned poet, Nobel laureate and one-time Irish senator, with the relatively young state’s being open and, in some form or other, inclusive of its Protestant minority, personified by the First Inter-Party government minister’s attendance. It was a commemorative act, one can say, although in the years immediately after his death, Yeats’s legacy was hotly debated in Ireland and became ensnared in some dreadful invective and, as Roy Foster notes in his biography, ‘predictably violent attacks by the Catholic Bulletin and – from an incensed Aodh de Blácam [a journalist and political activist who supported Franco] – in the Irish Monthly, describing [Yeats] as satanic, atheistical and, above all, unIrish.’12 ‘I could hear the sound of spaded earth,’ Hewitt concludes, as ‘the mourners round the grave dispersed and others pushed forward to look. There was a general loosening of tension, an easy standing around.’
According to Foster’s account, ‘the [Yeats] family held out against a state funeral’ and, though Frank O’Connor had been asked by them to ‘make a graveside oration … this was vetoed by Jack [B. Yeats, the poet’s artist brother] who disapproved of O’Connor’s politics’. So Reverend James Wilson, the local rector, conducted the Church of Ireland service, though Bishop Hughes (Bishop of Kilmore, Elphin and Armagh) privately ‘felt a little doubtful as to Yeats’s claim to Christian burial’.13
What happens next is astonishing. In Hewitt’s account, written fifteen years later in 1963–4, fellow poet and diplomat Valentin Iremonger ‘came over and said that Seán MacBride would like to meet me’.14 In 1948 Hewitt was in his early forties (born in 1907), roughly the same age, give or take a few years, as Seán MacBride (born in 1904 in Paris). Hewitt was about to see in print No Rebel Word, his first substantial single collection of poetry, published in November 1948 by Frederick Muller in London. Hewitt had been politically active as a left-winger throughout the 1930s and during the Second World War and into the post-war era of the divided states of Ireland, north and south. As W.J. McCormack’s study of Hewitt makes abundantly clear, both John Hewitt and his wife, Roberta, were no strangers to the arts and literary world of the Irish state, and kept themselves well informed on social and political developments south of the border too. In the soon-to-be-looming crisis over the ‘Mother and Child’ welfare project of 1951, Roberta’s journal of 12 April 1951 notes ‘the great stir’ when the Catholic Church ‘denounced’ the Noel Browne-inspired scheme of health care. According to McCormack, ‘She and John thought the Minister [Browne] “very courageous”, and felt that his party leader, Seán MacBride, had been shown up as a bogus radical. “I am becoming more and more afraid of the R.C. Church”.’15
But back barely three years to that encounter in the thronged Church of Ireland churchyard in County Sligo, as ‘small boys and girls threaded through the groups, autograph books open and pens tilted forward butt foremost’. This is how Hewitt retells what happens next:
I was introduced to the Minister, a pale intense man with light hair, son of Maud Gonne, he had a right to be there. But while I was explaining that the only hope for a united country was in federation with firm guarantees for the north in regard to censorship, divorce, birth control and the place of organised religion in the constitution, I could see a few feet away Micheál Mac Liammóir, the actor, walking past …
The scene closes, neatly enough, with ‘people gathering or making small circles round us, other folk who wished obviously to shake the Minister’s hand, so we drifted to the waiting cars.
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliffe Churchyard Yeats is laid.’16
Let us pause here and rewind this scene. Hewitt is standing in the churchyard of a small, somewhat remote Church of Ireland church and, undoubtedly tactfully but nevertheless, forthrightly, identifying four key matters that the Irish Republic should rectify before the possibility of a ‘federal’ Ireland could be considered! It is 1948, remember. Debate and schism has been ongoing regarding the constitutional changes to the Irish state, which would leave the Commonwealth of Nations and declare itself a Republic in 1949. So this conversation was wedded to current hot-wired political realities and issues. Look at the wish list Hewitt ‘shares’ with the pale and intense young(ish) Minister for External Affairs: censorship, divorce, birth control and the special place of the Catholic Church in the new Constitution.
It may be relevant here to note that censorship was officially still in place in one form or another until the late 1980s; divorce, originally prohibited by the 1937 Constitution, was legalised in 1995 in spite of huge opposition, after an earlier failed referendum in 1986; birth control, officially illegal in the Irish Free State and subsequent Republic from 1935 until 1980 and a series of legal reforms and challenges up to 1992, while the special place of the Church in the Irish Constitution remained until 1973 and the overwhelming support (85 per cent) of the vote in favour of deleting Article 44.
So the list John Hewitt brought to that brief encounter with the Irish government minister remained elusive for almost half a century, from that churchyard ceremonial re-interment of W.B. Yeats in September 1948 to April 1998 and the Good Friday Agreement which, in a sense, left a possible, virtual federal Ireland such as Hewitt’s on the table, with the collective support of the people – 71 per cent in the North and almost 95 per cent in the Republic.
John Hewitt died in 1987 before this important civic statement of cultural inclusiveness came about, and what has happened in the twenty years since 1998 is well beyond the scope of this chapter. But the business of legacy, guilt, political ideals and their human cost, alongside the meaning of the past, are centre stage for those with an emotional investment in the future of the country. What we do know is that the last fifteen or so years of Hewitt’s life, after he returned from Coventry in 1972 to live in Belfast, were marked by the enduring tragedy of political violence reminiscent of that which had attended the birth of the two states on the island and the partition that had underpinned the division of the country; reminiscent but much worse and lasting for far longer. Hewitt’s intellectual and cultural engagement with the Irish Free State and its successor, the Republic, was very much in keeping with his generation of Northern writers and, particularly, Northern artists whose work he did so much to promote at home and abroad. The divided island did not mean a divided culture, as younger scholars such as Guy Woodward17 are showing in ever greater detail.
From quite an
