– underrated by whom? – and the ontological frame of being a ‘post-holocaust poet’ is hedged in the following terms as one who ‘may yet prove to be the most durable talent of his generation. He writes not just of, but for, posterities’ [my italics]. These uncertainties suggest the wide intellectual instability when it comes to examining the cultural and literary issues of Northern Protestantism.
Longley is conscribed to history as an Irish Larkin, while Mahon exists in a futuristic critical limbo. The significance of this unease plays across the cultural and political life of Ireland. It moderates from good-humoured banter and wit, perplexity and arrogance to bewilderment and contempt, with an average mean in sorrow, bemusement and superiority complexes all around. ‘Protestants’ are considered ‘unionists’ (or, more fashionably, ‘neo unionists’) unless they publicly declare to the contrary and seek asylum in ‘Irish Literature’. Failure to do so unsettles the kind of cultural agendas that the media, publishing and academic worlds rely upon, both in Ireland and abroad.
In an interview in The Irish Times on the occasion of being awarded the Whitbread Prize for his collection Gorse Fires, Michael Longley remarked on the selection from his work in The Field Day Anthology: ‘I object to being embalmed wearing a false face, a mask. I feel diminished and travestied. I had thought of asking to be withdrawn from subsequent editions, but it seemed self-important.’
The sense of not having the freedom to be one’s self (to be considered on one’s own imaginative ground, so to speak) but inhibited instead by cultural priorities not of one’s own making, leads to all sorts of negations and misrepresentations. How could it be, though, that an anthology of this magnitude, such an extraordinary achievement in so very many ways, should end up with a call for it to be pulped and other suggestions of withdrawal? From the convicted ‘terrorist’ in a prison in the south of Ireland reciting his poems about ‘Ireland’ that sound little different from the rhetoric of the nineteen-century Young Irelanders, to the designer caricatures surrounding the term ‘Northern Protestant’, it is tempting to see all writing from Ireland as forever folkloric, underpinned by regional or national loyalties and political designs. This is folly, to quote the critic Patrick Wright, because it toys with the idea that politics can be conjured out of cultural roots at will. Should this be where we are heading, poetry had better look to its laurels.
1985–93
CHAPTER TWO
TELLING A STORY
I want to discuss a book I edited in 1985 with the literary critic Edna Longley, called Across a Roaring Hill: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland. My approach will be mostly informal, drawing upon my own personal story as someone who comes from a Belfast Protestant background and who reacted very negatively against that background until comparatively recently when I started to question, with a more constructive critical eye, what I was doing as a poet – namely, exploring my own past, and my family’s past, rooted in that specific social background. From this point of view, Across a Roaring Hill provided a critical counterpoint to an imaginative quest, both criss-crossing at the very vulnerable, crucial and even deadly intersection between ‘region’ (based, in my case, in a Protestant Belfast) and ‘nation’ (British or Irish).
Put simply, Across a Roaring Hill was, for me, a gesture to all those anonymous Protestants who saw literature as something alien to them and to what they considered to be their ‘way of life’. I wanted to establish that some of Ireland’s greatest writers in the twentieth century were, in fact, Protestant and that there was nothing inherently contradictory about such a state of affairs: a reality to which they had rarely been exposed. In having this door opened to them, the brilliant complexity of literature, might somehow be revealed, irrespective of categories of religion or definitions of place.
It would, in other words, be an ideal critical equation, paralleling what I found myself trying to do in poems: exploring the past, seeking clearly balanced moments of personal and historical tension and coincidences whereby one sees the influences, expectations and beliefs that govern one’s own self-image and, by implication, the community’s out of which one came.
To what extent was there a ‘Protestant imagination’ or, more accurately, what creative valence ran between these two terms? This was the basic question which I felt needed some kind of answer. As a poet, I was trying to relate those writers in Ireland who meant something to me with the majority of other writers, not Irish, who were also personally significant. I was thinking of ‘tradition’ and trying to sort out the question of there being a coherent ‘Protestant’ literary tradition in which I could sound out my own experience in imaginative and cultural terms.
The answer is, I am convinced, that no such tradition exists in Ireland but, rather, as stated in the introduction to Across a Roaring Hill, that there is ‘an eradicable consciousness of difference, of being defined in and against another culture’ which makes, for instance, a ‘direct descent in the Protestant line’ still discernible, as in ‘the evolution of forms and images from Yeats to MacNeice to Mahon’. Yet, like the term ‘Anglo-Irish’, the notion of a distinctly ‘Protestant’ literary tradition inevitably calls upon Yeats (or Burke or Swift) as ‘the father’ and, as W.J. McCormack correctly points out in his Ascendency and Tradition (1985): ‘Biological metaphors of this kind have an insidious effect in that they generate notions of a legitimising family tree which distinguishes the Anglo-Irish writer from a larger context instead of locating him in it.’
My own personal and social experience resisted such notions of ‘a legitimising family tree’, seeing instead the disjointed, fragmentary nature of Northern Protestantism. While this background offered people of my age the educational resources to move out into the wider community, it recoiled, for various specific historical factors, economic dependencies and religious susceptibilities, into a state of isolation – defensive and suspicious, constantly vigilant of possible betrayal and ‘sell-out’. Belonging to such a tradition was, from the start, a very mixed blessing.
‘My people, provided that I have one,’ as Franz Kafka remarked; and the ‘return’ to them is mined with anger and self-consciousness that can prove to be creatively crippling. Yet writers from such a Protestant background in Ireland are, ipso facto, more alert to the various undercurrents of meaning which one associates with terms like ‘region’ and ‘nation’, since they are never sure of their place in this system of things. They can take little for granted, except by a force of will or assumption. The community out of which they come is characterised by an obstinate silence in which trenchant dignity runs side by side with the triumphalism of the Orange Order or the noxious patronage of the Unionist Party, the twin ruling partners of the Protestant North. If these were ‘my people’, and they ‘were sinking’, as the South African novelist André Brink has written in Mapmakers: Writing in a State of Siege (1983), ‘then it was their own fault, the inevitable retribution for what they themselves had done and allowed to be done’. Coming from such a background catches the writer in a spider’s web: the more one tries to draw away, the more entangled one becomes. This is how the situation was described in the introduction to Across a Roaring Hill:
There is a heritage of guilt, repressed, formless and diffuse; and of tribal customs and binding beliefs which individuals – and writers – transgress at their peril: Calvinist cultures expel art from the city’s gates, because they fear its power to penetrate communal neurosis – aggravated by such exclusion.
It is a fairly common experience of writers who seek to come to terms with a cultural inheritance, such as this, to have great difficulty coping with its religious bigotry and the prejudice that is itself an irrational protest against the world and evidence of an inability to understand it.
What has happened in Northern Ireland is that, with such worldwide attention, the experience of ordinary people becomes contentious and can be converted easily into cliché and caricature – the processed suffering and recycled grievance, the everlasting ‘victim’ as much
