definite place where the writer has an important role to play, as André Brink suggests, ‘of fighting to assert the most positive and creative aspects of his heritage’. And we should not forget all those who, over the years, to quote Christopher Hitchens, have challenged ‘their own tribes with criticism, opposition and argument from within’. It is important to add here that this imaginative struggle is, as Brink says, also often against those who ‘can afford to clash with authority because they are basically protected by it’.
If there is, as I believe there to be, a world of difference between the experience of Protestant families in the North, their feelings, fears, hopes and ambitions (the stuff one hears so much pious talk about in the Republic) and the political use made of them, then the crucial discrimination must be made and maintained between the two sets of experiences and the various economic, social and cultural bonds that keep them bound together.
If this effort at understanding be dubbed ‘Unionist’, we will have missed another chance to expose the invidious forms of falsehood and violence which oppress people on the small island of Ireland; and have done so because of fashionable intellectual posturing, not out of serious political commitment and work. For it is an effort of knowing the past which requires us, as Peter Gay well knew on the truly horrendous scale of his native Germany, to ‘mobilize historical understanding and to make discriminations [which do] not mean to deny or to prettify what has happened’.
Across a Roaring Hill was just a small part of the process whereby prevailing mythologies and the ways they are, in turn, transformed into art, are opened up and brought into the light of day. It is a first step: exploratory and, within its limits, diverse and speculative. As this process comes under an imaginatively sustained criticism, everything is up for grabs – not just a monolithic ‘Irish’ literary tradition, but the very notion of ‘tradition’ itself, the language used to discuss these things and our working through the inherited ways of seeing them both. This is the truly radical challenge that the present offers; not painting ourselves back into a corner which so often seems to be the case in Ireland.
The relationship between a ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’, ‘nationalist’ or ‘unionist’ experience is only one, if presently dominant, cultural and political distinction. Like all labels, they bear the marks of prejudice from which few are free. One has to take into account, however, entire tracks of historical and contemporary experience that are of vital significance in Ireland today – ‘loyalty’ and the question of ‘belonging’, such as that considered in Thomas Kilroy’s play Double Cross, or the force field of community and the individual’s own complicated place within it which John McGahern has explored to such telling effect in, for example, High Ground – to say nothing about the explosion of women’s writing in Ireland in recent times.
These are issues that come readily to my own mind since I have an abiding interest in them as a writer, but they underpin the present and are bound to have serious implications for the kind of literature (and politics) that many want to see taking over from the current conventions and official dogmas. I think this is the point behind Seamus Deane’s close reading of Across a Roaring Hill when, in singling out Bridget O’Toole’s essay on Jennifer Johnston, Elizabeth Bowen and Molly Keane, he writes:
a sentence from Elizabeth Bowen ... might have been this volume’s epigraph and ... has its application, economic and cultural, for Protestants and Catholics: ‘We have everything to dread from the dispossessed’. It is in dispossession that the hurt, Protestant and Catholic, lies.
Material deprivation and cultural dispossession are indeed fundamental ‘themes’, since they are the common inheritance of so many Irish men and women. It would be a shame if this fact was lost sight of and turned, on the lathe of dogma, into an obligatory truth from which those who actually live it out can find no real imaginative release or critical yet sympathetic distance. As Terence Brown eloquently put it in his Field Day pamphlet, The Whole Protestant Community: The Making of a Historical Myth:
A people who have known resistance as well as dissent, rebellion, dispute, religious enthusiasm in the midst of rural and urban deprivation, have an interesting story to tell themselves – one of essential homelessness, dependency, anxiety, obdurate fantasising, sacrifices in the name of liberty, villainous political opportunism, moments of idealistic aspiration. And in the telling of it they may come to realise at last where they are most at home and with whom they share that home.
The colloquial ‘Tell us a story’ goes far beyond a child’s need for reassurance – it opens out the ground of imaginative possibility as well. What we are seeing in Ireland today is a clash between the traditional ways of perceiving these possibilities and the need to bypass the politics which stunts them. The writer is caught – appropriately enough – in the middle.
1986
CHAPTER THREE
Armies of the Night
I
When Mrs Thatcher, the then prime minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, met two Irish clerics, Cardinal Ó Fiaich and Bishop James Lennon, on 1 July 1981 at Downing Street, she was, according to David Beresford,
waiting for them at the top of the stairs, on the first-floor landing, and gushed a welcome … They started with the usual pleasantries, but quickly moved onto the prison issue.
‘Will someone please tell me why they are on hunger strike?’ asked the Prime Minister. ‘I have asked so many people. Is it to prove their virility?’
Two months earlier, following the death of Bobby Sands, Francis Hughes had died on hunger strike, and in the month of August Tom McIlwee was also to die. Hughes and McIlwee were cousins, in their mid-twenties, born within a year of each other (1956 and 1957), from Bellaghy, County Derry. They were buried together, ‘in a new section of the cemetery at St. Mary’s Church’:
Their tombstone is inscribed in Irish which Tom – battling to learn the language even as he was dying – would have particularly appreciated. And Frank would have liked the wording: ‘Among the warriors of the Gael may his soul rest’.
David Beresford’s Ten Men Dead is full of such chilling contrasts. How is it possible, one asks, for two islands so physically, economically, culturally and socially close as Britain and Ireland, to be so grotesquely divided. History and language?
In his collection of essays, Less Than One, Joseph Brodsky often returns to the inextricable mesh of expression and experience. Discussing Andrei Platonov, he sees the Russian novelist as ‘a millenarian writer if only because he attacks the very carrier of millenarian sensibility in Russian society: the language itself – or, to put it in a more graspable fashion, the revolutionary eschatology embedded in the language’. Brodsky goes on to define the roots of Russian millenarianism in the following terms:
On the mental horizon of every millenarian movement there is always a version of a New Jerusalem, the proximity to which is determined by the intensity of sentiment. The idea of God’s city being within reach is in direct proportion to the religious fervour in which the entire journey originates. The variations on this theme include also a change of the entire world order, and a vague, but all the more appealing because of that, notion of a new time, in terms of both chronology and quality. (Naturally, transgressions committed in the name of getting to a New Jerusalem fast are justified by the beauty of the destination.) When such a movement succeeds, it results in a new creed. If it fails, then, with the passage of time and the spread of literacy, it degenerates into utopias, to peter out completely in the dry sands of political science and the pages of science fiction. However, there are several things that may somewhat rekindle soot-covered embers. It’s either severe oppression of the population, a real, most likely military peril, a sweeping epidemic, or some substantial chronological event, like the end of a millennium or
