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

which appeared in the 1920s and early 1930s which employed the Big House as a metaphor that might allow the author to explore the socially disintegrated world of the Protestant Ascendancy. In 1925 Edith Somerville published The Big House of Inver, a chronicle of passion, vice, enmity, and corruption which destroy the great house of the work’s title. In the opening chapters the writer ponders the decline in the fortunes of the house as an emblem of social decay among her Anglo-Irish peers. She is tough-minded and ironic about their plight, convinced that they and their ancestors were in large measure the architects of their own downfall. The Anglo-Irish Big House had been a noble conception: “Inver House embodied one of those large gestures of the mind of the earlier Irish architects, some of which still stand to justify Ireland’s claim to be considered a civilized country.”⁶ Such defiance, she recognizes, comes too late; too many houses have been burned, destroyed before the fire took them, from within. The house that “faced unflinching the western ocean” suffered a fierce blow in the Famine of 1845, but the line of succession had been sullied before that by an act of lustful folly. From this primal sin can be traced subsequent incapacities to outface the blows of fate and history: “The glories and the greatness of Inver therewith suffered downfall. Five successive generations of mainly halfbred and wholly profligate Prendevilles rioted out their short lives, living with country women, fighting, drinking, gambling.”⁷ The Famine was only the axe that felled the dying tree:

      Many an ancient property foundered and sank in that storm, drawing down with it – as a great ship in her sinking sucks down those that trusted in her protection – not alone its owners, but also the swarming families of the people who, in those semifeudal times, looked to the Big Houses for help. The martyrdoms, and the heroisms, and the devotion, have passed into oblivion, and better so, perhaps, when it is remembered how a not extravagant exercise of political foresight might have saved the martyrdoms. As for other matters, it might only intensify the embittering of a now outcast class to be reminded of what things it suffered and sacrificed in doing what it held to be its duty.⁸

      Such stern resignation to Anglo-Ireland’s demise, with its flash of anger at wasted opportunities, was rare in the ranks of her Anglo-Irish contemporaries, but Edith Somerville bears eloquent testimony here to the bitterness and sense of social isolation many of her fellows experienced in the 1920s.

      There were those who hoped that resignation was premature, that Anglo-Ireland might have some role to play in the new Ireland even if its political power was broken. One of the most poignant expressions of this hope was the novel published in 1929 by Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September. In 1942, writing of her own ancestral home, Bowen’s Court, she reflected on the isolation which she felt was a central feature of Anglo-Ireland’s experience, made the more severe by the development of the Irish Free State and the depredations of wartime, but a constant of its history.

      Each of these family houses, with its stables and farm and gardens deep in trees at the end of long avenues, is an island – and, like an island, a world…Each of these houses, with its intense, centripetal life, is isolated by something very much more lasting than the physical fact of space: the isolation is innate; it is an affair of origin.⁹

      The Last September is set in a Big House at a moment when that innate isolation was intense, during the grim months of the War of Independence in 1920. The heroine, Lois Farquar, orphaned niece to Sir Richard Naylor of Danielstown, becomes conscious, amid the comings and goings of guests, the tennis parties and dances arranged for the British garrison, of a haunting isolation, a sense of space ready to be filled when the transitional years of adolescence are done with, when autumn achieves the definition of winter, when the war that threatens their lives has been resolved.

      Looking down, it seemed to Lois they lived in a forest; space of lawns blotted out in the pressure and dusk of trees. She wondered they were not smothered; then wondered still more that they were not afraid. Far from here, too, their isolation became apparent. The house seemed to be pressing down low in apprehension, hiding its face, as though it had her vision of where it was. It seemed to gather its trees close in fright and amazement at the wide light lovely unloving country, the unwilling bosom whereon it was set.¹⁰

      The basic metaphor of the novel is the emptiness of the spaces in the house and the space between the house and the landscape and society it has been set amidst. Early in the novel Lois walks among the laurel trees in the shrubbery and comes undetected upon a man in a trench coat:

      It must be because of Ireland he was in such a hurry; down from the mountains, making a short-cut through their demesne. Here was something else that she could not share. She could not conceive of her country emotionally: it was a way of living, abstract of several landscapes, or an oblique, frayed island moored at the north but with an air of being detached and drawn out west from the British coast.¹¹

      She recognizes that, “Conceivably she had surprised life at a significant angle in the shrubbery,” and the book suggests, in its constant metaphors of empty space, that perhaps some means can be discovered of filling them with a significance that will relate the isolated Ascendancy world of Lois Farquar to the wide, active countryside that surrounds her house. But the book’s expression of hope for such a relationship is muted and rendered plaintive by the valedictory movement of its prose and by the chilly finality of its scrupulously composed social tableaux and vistas. Written with the knowledge of 1929, the whole is contained within the final metaphor of empty spaces filled at the last by fire:

      At Danielstown, half way up the avenue under the beeches, the thin iron gate twanged (missed its latch, remained swinging aghast) as the last unlit car slid out with the executioners bland from accomplished duty. The sound of the last car widened, gave itself to the open and empty country and was demolished. Then the first wave of a silence that was to be ultimate flowed back, confident, to the steps. Above the step the door stood open hospitably upon a furnace.¹²

      It was possible, perhaps, to those less sensitive to the emotional isolation so precisely explored by an Elizabeth Bowen, to pretend that while the new order might refer to Kingstown as Dun Laoghaire, Kingstown it remained in polite society and that the National Anthem was still “God Save the King,” though Queen Victoria’s statue had vanished from the forecourt of Leinster House, former home of the Royal Dublin Society, now the seat of government.¹³ Brian Inglis, in West Briton, his witty account of Protestant society life in Malahide (a seaside town seven miles north of Dublin) in the period following independence, gives a spirited account of a contentedly vestigial world. He remembers:

      Their social world remained stable; like a prawn in aspic it gradually began to go stale, but it did not disintegrate. All around them “that other Ireland” as George Russell (Æ) had called it, was coming into its force, but they remained almost unaware of its existence.¹⁴

      Accent, social class, and religion still determined membership of the exclusive Island Golf Club. General satisfaction was expressed at the government’s impeccably orthodox economic policies. Indeed, as he recalls: “The State’s effort to impose what to us was an alien culture and, worse, an alien language, was almost the only feature of life in the Free State which compelled our attention and aroused our active resentment.”¹⁵ Sailing, dancing, hunting, and the club remained to distract Anglo-Ireland and those who felt themselves associated with it from uncomfortable developments, while the thriving condition of the Royal Dublin Society, with its lectures, concerts, and library suggested that the cultural influence of the distinctly Anglo-Irish or Protestant institutions was still strong. Membership of the society, which established itself in new premises in Ballsbridge in Dublin in 1925, increased substantially in the 1920s. In 1919 it could claim 2,221 members; by 1926 that figure had risen to 7,000, and although in 1920–21