Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001. Dr. Brown Terence

brush.³¹

      Here cultural protectionism of the Irish Ireland kind is proposed, but the cultural impulses coexist with a particular vision of morality embodied in the one word “healthy.” The Reverend M. H. MacInerny, OP, editor of the Dominican magazine The Irish Rosary and an active member of the Vigilance Association since 1912, in a comment on Father Devane’s suggestion clearly grasped the twin impulses, moral and cultural, that fired Father Devane’s demand for tariffs as well as censorship. Agreeing with “every word” in Father Devane’s article, he continued:

      By all means let legislative effect be given, without undue delay, to the unanimous recommendation of the Commission on Evil Literature; this will at once bar out a great mass of prurient and demoralizing publications. For economic, national and cultural reasons of the highest moment, the Oireachtas ought to pass a resolution imposing a heavy tariff on the remainder of what Father Devane calls the “popular” class of imported publications.³²

      That such individuals represented public opinion on the matter, inasmuch as the public interested itself in literary and cultural affairs at all, there can be little doubt. The only outspoken opposition to such thinking came from writers themselves and had little effect. Indeed, there were those in the country who, far from attending to the writers’ criticisms of the proposed bill, merely thought they deserved to be silenced and that they were understandably fearful of the just deserts that awaited them. Such, certainly, was the attitude of the Catholic Bulletin, which had long waged a battle against Irish writers on the grounds of their alien immorality and pagan un-Irish philosophy. Indeed that periodical, in an even more obvious fashion than Father Devane’s article, suggests that a good deal of Irish Ireland enthusiasm in the period was generated less by idealistic cultural imperatives than by a desire to advance Catholic power and social policy in the country through the defeat of Protestant Ireland and the anglicized culture associated with it, in ideological warfare. For the periodical, edited until 1922 by Seán Ua Ceallaigh, who was president of the Gaelic League between 1919 and 1923 and thereafter by Patrick Keohane with Professor Timothy Corcoran as a guiding spirit, combines much anti-Protestant invective and hatred of Freemasonry with a celebration of an Irish Ireland life that comprises staunch Catholic as well as Gaelic elements. With an almost entertaining virulence of phrase, the Bulletin had excoriated the work of Yeats, Russell, Joyce, and Gogarty as the machinations of a new Ascendancy exploiting Ireland for squalid foreign gold. The periodical greeted W. B. Yeats’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923 with that xenophobia which characterized its attitudes to most Irish writing in English and which fueled the fires of its demand for censorship.

      The Nobel Prize in Literature is the occasion. Senator Gogarty directs attention to the fact that on this issue there was recently a tussle between the English colony in Ireland and the English of England, for the substantial sum provided by a deceased anti-Christian manufacturer of dynamite. It is common knowledge that the line of recipients of the Nobel Prize shows that a reputation for paganism in thought and word is a very considerable advantage in the sordid annual race for money, engineered as it always is, by clubs, coteries, salons, and cliques. Paganism in prose or in poetry has, it seems, its solid cash value: and if a poet does not write tawdry verse to make his purse heavier, he can be brought by his admirers to where the money is, whether in the form of an English pension, or in extracts from the Irish taxpayer’s pocket, or in the Stockholm dole.³³

      The Bulletin was, of course, an organ of extremist propaganda but its attitudes were not unknown in other areas of Irish society, if their expression was customarily rather less inflamed. People like those who had denounced Synge’s treatment of Ireland in The Playboy of the Western World could still be found ready to object to any unflattering literary portrait of their country.

      D. P. Moran in the Leader added his eloquent Irish Ireland voice to the demand for a firm censorship policy, and critics at a rather more theoretical level were at work on studies that might provide ideological ammunition for cultural protectionism. The writings of Daniel Corkery, in The Hidden Ireland, and later in his study of Synge, where he made residence in Ireland a union card in a closed shop of Irish letters, did nothing to encourage an openness to foreign literary and cultural influences. Rather, Corkery’s cultural nationalism and prescriptive zeal seem to suggest that no great disservice would be done the nation if the writings of certain authors became unavailable. Other critics were earnest in their desire to see in much modern writing, especially in works by suspect Irish writers, a shallow cosmopolitanism that vitiated imaginative power. So Seorsamh O’Neill, in an article published in 1924 in the Irish Statesman characteristic of many such which appeared in various periodicals in the 1920s, lamented the tragedy of George Bernard Shaw’s imaginative aridity, asserting that “compared with men of equal or even less vitality whose minds are rooted in their national and local cultures Shaw’s mind is two-dimensional, mechanical, lacking in depth and imaginative insight.” O’Neill associated such literary rootlessness, as he concluded his essay, with the anticipated threat of television and with international culture – “the pilings round our lives of a rag-heap of odds and ends which through lack of assimilation will remain a pile of meaningless and bewildering refuse, even though it be gathered from the ends of the earth.”³⁴

      In writings of this kind the cultural exclusivism of the Irish Ireland movement helped created a climate of opinion in which authors whose work might encounter moral disapproval could also be suspected of a lack of national authenticity or will. The nation need not disturb itself over much if their writings should fall foul of a censor. In this way the thinking of the Irish Ireland movement must be associated with the conservative climate of opinion in which the Censorship Bill of 1929 was enacted and put to work even where, in individual cases, supporters of the movement may not have espoused the cause of censorship at all or as vigorously as did D. P. Moran in his Leader editorials. None of them rose to decry censorship as a reactionary offence to the revolutionary humanism that had originally generated their movement. No voice was raised to wonder if so positive an enterprise as linguistic and cultural renewal could be stimulated by so negative a practice as censorship.

      If Irish writers of the 1920s had cause to take alarm in part because of the source of the demands for censorship (the Catholic Vigilance Association and the Catholic Truth Society) and in part because of the atmosphere of national self-righteousness and cultural exclusiveness in which a censorship bill would be enacted, certain incidents also served to concentrate their minds on the kind of future which might await their work. Among these the Galway public library board putting Shaw’s works under lock and key, the stopping of trains and the burning of their cargoes of imported newspapers (which D. P. Moran thought evidence of the need to pass a censorship bill as quickly as possible), and the public demonstrations in favour of censorship were disturbing enough, but the unhappy experience of the Carnegie Libraries’ Trust in Ireland following an imprudent if scarcely pornographic publication by one of the members of its Advisory Committee must have seemed like a suspiciously nasty portent indeed.

      The Carnegie Trust had made itself responsible in 1921 for establishing and financing, with the help of a local rate, centres for the distribution of books in many parts of Ireland. The playwright Lennox Robinson was secretary and treasurer to the Advisory Committee, which included among its members Lady Gregory and George Russell (Æ). In 1924 Robinson contributed a harmless short story on a religious theme, “The Madonna of Slieve Dun,” to a literary paper which the writer Francis Stuart and his wife had begun to edit and publish with some friends. The periodical came to the attention of President Cosgrave, who, it was rumoured, intended to suppress it. The story about a young girl who imagines herself another Madonna provoked a Jesuit member of the Advisory Committee to tender his resignation and a first-rate row blew up when W. B. Yeats, who had also published his sexually adventurous poem “Leda and the Swan” in the paper To-Morrow, entered the fray on Robinson’s behalf. To no avail, however, because the unhappy outcome of the literary contretemps was the suspension of the committee and the dismissal of its secretary and treasurer, the unfortunate Robinson.³⁵