Appendix A: Masters of Language

Masters of Language

For a small and poor nation, Ireland has produced an astonishing number of the world’s greatest writers. Many of the leading literary figures before 1900 were Irish or of Irish background: Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, George Berkeley, William Coongreve, Oscar Wilde. Then, in the next 25 years came a spectacular outburst of writing talent from Ireland that gave the English literature of the 20th century its best dramatists; George Bernard Shaw, John Millington Synge and Sean O’Casey; its best poet, William Butler Yeates; and the giant of modern novelists, James Joyce, who has been described as the greatest master of the English language since Milton. This sparkling array of Irish authors, which also included George Moore, Æ (George Russell), James Stephens, Liam O’Flaherty, Lady Augusta Gregory and Frank O’Connor, emerged suddenly to a position of leadership in the literary world of the new century because they filled a sorely felt need of their time. In the 1890’s, literature generally was divided into two extreme schools of writing. One was represented by the murky, romantic lyricism of the French poet Stephane Mallarme and the dramas of Oscar Wilde, ornate, artificial and detached from the troublesome problems of life. At the opposite, distant pole was the realism of the plays of Henrik Ibsen of Norway and the naturalism of the novels of Émile Zola of France. There was a yearning for writing that would close the wide gap between these two extremes, for the creation of poems, plays, and novels dealing with reality and real people, but in rich and colorful language.

The Irish writers were well-equipped to satisfy that need. They had poetry; they had humor; they had a hard realism. They reflected the hopes and dreams of common people because their literary movement was linked chronologically and spiritually to the rise of Irish nationalism in the rebellion against Britain. Even the writers themselves were bound up in the nationalist cause. James Joyce’s first published piece of writing, composed when he was only nine years old, was Et Tu, Healy, a diatribe against a political betrayer of Charles Stewart Parnell, the Home Rule leader. A Parnell admirer, Joyce’s father had it privately printed and proudly handed it out to his friends. William Butler Yeates wrote with deep feeling about the Easter Week uprising of 1916. Two poets prominent in the literary movement, Padraic Pearse and Joseph Mary Plunkett, were executed for their leading parts in that revolt. Sean O’Casey was one of the original organizers of the Irish Citizen Army.

Part of the nationalist movement was the Gaelic League, founded in 1893 to revive Ireland interest in the Gaelic language and the forgotten native literature of the middle ages. This patriotic effort had far-reaching effects. The unearthing of the heroic epics composed by ancient Celtic poets stirred in Yeats, the real father of the modern Irish literary revival, a new appreciation of his native country’s heritage, and turned film back to Ireland from the studies of William Blake and theosophy that he had been pursuing in London. Yeats took another look at the Sligo country, where he had spent much of his youth, and visited the bleak Aran islands off the western coast of Ireland. He became engrossed in the possibilities for literary material in the dignity, colorful language, and rough struggle for existence of the peasants in the west of Ireland. In 1896, Yeats came across Synge studying Racine and other French dramatists in Paris, the accepted course in that period for young men of literary ambitions. He convinced Synge that there was more to be gained from a study of people on the Aran islands than from reading in French libraries.

“That meeting of two Irishmen in Paris, agreeing that the life of those most remote and barren Aran Islands was the full material for literature, is a parable that marks the final stage of growth of the Irish mind,” as the author Shawn O’Faolain wrote later. “It was an entirely new thing for men to realize the full and complete dignity of the simplest life of the simplest people. Once they had acknowledged that then they were free to do anything they liked with it in literature, treat in naturalistically, fantastically, romantically, see it in any light they chose. They had conquered their material by accepting it.”

Out of this realization and acceptance came such plays as Synge’s Riders to the Sea and The Playboy of the Western World, both first produced at the Abbey Theater in Dublin. The Abbey, in which Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory were important figures, brought a fresh breath of real life to theater audiences long jakled by the fashionable comedies of Wilde, the problem plans of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, and the flashy melodramas of Dion Boucicault, an Irishman who had enjoyed success in London. The extraordinary freshness, as George Bernard Shaw pointed out approvingly, was due to Yeats and Lady Gregory’s holding ruthlessly “to my formula of making the audience believe that real things were happening to real people.”

Shaw himself, who was furiously busy in London writing plays, was no slavish follower of his own “formula.” His characters speak with a superhuman articulateness and wit, and they are sometimes more embodiments of an idea than believable human beings. But the ideas, frequently paradoxical and outrageous, flash and crackle, and the characters carom off one another with such vigor that they frequently seem more than alive. Especially in such turn-of-the-century plays as Candida, Arms and the Alan, Caesar and Cleopatra and Man and Superman, Shaw performed the extraordinary feat of turning “problem plays” — dramas designed to preach one of the author’s social doctrines — into delightful and satisfying theater. Starting with an idea, such as the notion that munitions makers do the world more good by providing employment than the Salvation Army can ever do with Christian uplift and soup kitchens, Shaw so effectively illustrated the idea with vivid characters and lively scenes in Major Barbara that he succeeded in turning propaganda into something very close to great art.

Much of the attraction of the Abbey Theater and its great early days between 1904 and the 1920s was attributed to Yeats’s stern dictum, gladly followed by such dramatists as Synge and O’Casey, that the most realistic plays should employ the magic language of poetry. Synge wrote in an introduction to The Playboy of the Western World his disapproval of the practice of Ibsen and Zola of dealing with the reality “in joyless and pallid words.” Every speech in a good play, he contended, should be as fully flavored as a nut or an apple.

To Yeats, the theater was an important medium of artistic expression, but his own main function as a writer was in lyric poetry. His technical skill and his talent for combining controversial ease of expression and noble emotion within the strict framework of rhyme and poetic form was so rare that many modern critics now consider him not only the greatest poet of the century but perhaps the greatest since Elizabethan times.

Unlike such lyric poets as John Keats or Dylan Thomas, who died young, or as Wordsworth, who faded in his middle years, Yeats improved with age. Much of his best work was written in his fifties and sixties. A woolly romanticist in his youth, he moved on to stern, symbolic realism dealing with “the chaos of the world,” full of powerful intensity and chilling images, and far more exalted than the pleasant verse with which some readers associate him:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

Such lyricism stands in strong contrast to lines like these, composed in later life:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are fall of passionate intensity.

Yeats and Synge, like Shaw, Lady Gregory and George Moore, were from upper-class Anglo-Irish protestant families. Before the turn of the century, most Catholics in Ireland were too underprivileged culturally, as well as economically and socially, to nourish an interest in the creative arts. The rise of James Joyce to literary greatness from an impoverished Catholic home in Dublin is a striking example of inborn genius triumphing over harsh and discouraging environment, almost like a rose blooming from an ash heap.

As a youngster, Joyce was not exposed with his family or at school to any intellectual stimulation that might have urged him to become a precedent-breaking experimenter in modern writing. His mother was a devoutly religious woman with no consuming interest in intellectual matters; his father was a music lover and witty raconteur. At the local Jesuit schools, Joyce was taught by conventional and dogmatic classicists. Whatever knowledge he had of contemporary writing was gained from unguided reading on his own.

Yet when he was 18 years old, an obscure student at University College Dublin, Joyce read Henrik Ibsen’s new play, When We Dead Awaken, in its original Norwegian text (he had taught himself the language just to be able to read Ibsen), and wrote a long critical essay on the play which was immediately accepted by the Fortnightly Review, the most important literary periodical in London at that time. Ibsen was so impressed by the understanding of work shown in the article — rare in the English-speaking world of 1900 — that he wrote a message of gratitude to his English translator William Archer, which Archer passed on to Joyce.

Like Shaw before him, and many young writers after him, Joyce left Ireland at an early age to spend the rest of his life in self-exile abroad. The atmosphere of Dublin 60 years ago, much more narrowly provincial and stiffly conventional than it is nowadays, was stifling to a highly individual and nonconforming artist. Explaining his own departure from Dublin at the age of 20, Shaw once wrote, “Every Irishman who felt that his business in life was on the higher planes of the cultural professions felt that he must have a metropolitan domicile and an international culture: that is, he felt that his first business was to get out of Ireland.”

Shaw’s Irish upbringing and Irish point of view is often cited, however, as a main factor behind his success as a London critic and dramatist. Joyce’s Irishness is an even more dominating force in his literary work because in all four of the books that made him famous — Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnigans Wake — he never left Ireland. Although he lived in France, Austria and Switzerland during his creative years, all of his stories and novels take place in the Dublin of his youth.

Joyce bitterly resented the banning of his books in Dublin during his lifetime, a ban that has recently expired. His first book, Dubliners, a collection of ironic and acid short stories, was rejected by Irish printers because they feared its references to living Dubliners and believed that one disrespectful mention of King Edward VII might cause legal repercussions. Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were ruled out on the grounds of immorality and  impiety. Never formally censored, Finnigans Wake was too difficult to be a popular book in Ireland or in any country. After the suppression of Dubliners, Joyce wrote a long protest in doggerel, which he called Gas From a Burner, describing Ireland as:

This lovely land that always sent
Writers and artists to banishment
And in the spirit of Irish fun
Betrayed her own leaders, one by one.
‘Twas Irish humor, wet and dry,
Flung quicklime into Parnell’s eye…
O Ireland my first and only love
Where Christ and Cesar are hand and glove!

For all his indignation, Joyce remained obsessed with Ireland until his death in Zürich in 1941; he eagerly begged for its latest news and gossip and looked back on Dublin with admiration. In a letter to his brother, Stanislaus Joyce, he once expressed regret that he had not written in Dubliners of the attractiveness of his native city. “I have not been just to its beauty,” Joyce said of Dublin, “for it is more beautiful naturally, in my opinion, than what I have seen of England, Switzerland, France, Austria and Italy.”

Joyce’s writings are often assumed to be to obscure for an average reader. Actually, the clear and hard-hitting stories in Dubliners are easier to read than much of the fiction now published in The New Yorker. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s account of his own soul-struggle as he was seeking his course in life as an independent artist, is not a difficult book. He begins to navigate more murky and puzzling depths in Ulysses when he explores the streams of his characters’ conscious thinking, and then goes into still deeper waters in Finnigans Wake, a probing of one man’s unconscious and sleeping mind.

In Ulysses, which he modeled after Homer’s Odyssey, Joyce tells a simple story of one day in the lives of two men in Dublin. The day happens to be June 16, 1904. One of the two men, Stephen Dedalus, is Joyce himself at the age of 22, after the death of his mother summoned him from a literary exile in Paris. He is at loose ends, isolated, alone, seeking a father. The other man, Leopold Blume, a Jew and therefore an alien among the Irish, is the wandering Odysseus, or Ulysses, not in search of home, as in the Odyssey, but of a son. A third prominent character is Bloom’s lusty wife, Molly. Stephen is the intellect, Blume is Everyman, both sensual and thoughtful, and Molly is the flesh and the earth.

The book follows Stephen and Bloom along their separate ways through the day, showing not only their encounters with a great gallery of other colorful, comic and tragic characters, but their innermost fleeting thoughts and impressions. Joyce divides their travels into a series of episodes, each designed after a scene in The Odyssey and each writte  in a different style. The book includes parodies, allegories, dialogues, stream of consciousness soliloquies, symbolism and catechtical questions and answers. The two men meet at night and a Dublin hospital and proceed to a brothel. Bloom takes Stephen to his home for a cup of cocoa; the son finds the father and the father finds the son. Discovering Bloom — Everyman — Stephen discovers mankind and sees and understands what he himself is going to be, a mature man, no longer imprisoned in a cell of childish ego and intellectual pride.

Unlike other novelists, Joyce does not use the passage of time to show changes and development of characters. Like a dramatist or a screenwriter, he presents his people and scenes in the present tense. The men and women in Ulysses, like the characters of Shakespeare, come before the readers fully formed and bursting with life, and the sounds, smells and feelings of the June day in the Dublin of 1904 rise from the printed pages with the reality of a color movie. Because it uses words to reproduce visual and audible as well as mental sensations, Ulysses baffles the quick and casual reader, but many students of literature agree that it is probably the greatest book of our time.

Joyce’s last work, Finnigans Wake, is harder going because it takes up where Ulysses leaves off and tries to follow a man’s mind through a night of sleep. Just as our unconscious mind makes no attempt to explain its jumbled images and thoughts, Joyce leaves the meanings of his tangled dreamworld’s words and phrases undeciphered. The title of the book itself is a play on words; one of its interpretations is “Finn Again Awake,” meaning that the heroism of Finn MaCool should return to Ireland.

For all its difficult shaded meanings and verbal puzzles, Finnigans Wake is a tour de force of psychological insight expressed in apoetic prose that continually fascinates creative writers. Thronton Wilder, the American playwright and novelist, devotes part of every day to study of the book. The famed Welsh lyric poet, Dylan Thomas, replied when asked what he thought of Finnegans Wake, “Why read anything else?”

Ireland today is no longer the center of literature that it was when Yeats, Synge and Joyce were producing a body of writing which, in the opinion of Harry Leven, the distinguished Harvard professor of comparative literature, defies comparison for intermingling of imaginative expression and closeness to familiar experience without going back to the Elizabethans. Sean O’Casey, the self-styled “Green Cow” whose Juno and the Paycock and The Plow and the Stars were among the most powerful plays produced by Yeats in the old Abbey Theatre, has been living and writing in England for many years. The best-known Irish prose writers still close to the Irish scene are Frank O’Connor in Sean O’Faolain, versatile men of letters who are both regarded as outstanding short story creators.

Courtesy of Life World Library, Ireland, Copyright 1964, Time, Inc.