Angela Bourkereviews Daniel Corkery's Cultural Criticism: Selected Writings, Edited and with an introduction by Heather Laird, Cork University Press, 292pp, ¤39

Sometimes, if the design is good enough and the title well enough chosen, you can judge a book by its cover. Gerard Dillon’s painting Evening Star, now in the Crawford Collection in Cork, is on the cover of Daniel Corkery’s Cultural Criticism: Selected Writings. An outdoor scene in the west of Ireland, it shows whitewashed cottages with a sea inlet in blues and purples behind. In the foreground, three white hens peck in front of a stone wall where a man leans, in cap and braces, his face and hands reddened by the setting sun.

Dillon’s vivid colours and trademark bold patterning tell us that this book will explore the territory of what it means to be Irish, but we understand too that it won’t be the land of the John Hinde postcard.

Much is familiar, certainly. A nationalist refrain runs through Corkery’s writings, often condescendingly sectarian or sexist. Yet these pieces, mostly in English, with just a couple of reviews in Irish, are so cranky and unapologetic, so energetic and opinionated, that it’s hard not to take them on their own terms, and surprisingly easy to admire them.

Daniel Corkery (1878-1964), scarcely a household name these days, is likely to be more talked about as this decade of centenaries progresses. He wrote plays and short stories, reviews and polemic; became a national-school teacher, counting Frank O’Connor and sculptor Seamus Murphy among his pupils; taught art and woodwork for the Co Cork Technical Instruction Committee (his forefathers were carpenters), and ended up as a professor of English at University College Cork. Corkery mentored O’Connor, Murphy and others, including Seán Ó Faoláin as they built their careers, and his best-known work, The Hidden Ireland (1924), about the Irish-language high culture that survived in 18th-century Munster, was a sort of nationalist bible until revisionism made it the book the chattering classes loved to disdain.

Generation gap

O’Connor and Ó Faoláin were among the first to move beyond Corkery’s kind of argument, which Ó Faoláin characterised as espousing a “national tradition” that was “narrow fearful always for its own safety”. He and O’Connor, he argued in 1926, “coming out of an Ireland of fight and conquest”, imagined something larger, less chauvinistic. The generation gap was strewn with wrecked memories of 1916, the Treaty and the Civil War. Corkery became increasingly prescriptive, and his disciples became his most bitter critics. As scholars sneered at his view of history, his name became a byword, not quite fairly, for bigotry and insularity.

Heather Laird’s title flags a radical reassessment of Corkery’s considerable nonfiction output and a recovery of his standing as a radical, influential thinker. “Cultural criticism” and “postcolonial” are terms he probably never encountered, much less used, but Laird’s elegant introduction, ‘Daniel Corkery as Postcolonial Critic’, does not disappoint. “In the one-paragraph dismissals of Corkery that are to be found in so many post-1960s studies of Irish history, literature and culture,” Laird writes, “Corkery’s analysis and the questions that he posed tend to be disregarded in favour of the solutions that he offered.” While acknowledging the trenchant criticisms levelled at him by 20th-century writers in both Irish and English, Laird carefully situates Corkery’s writings among the kinds of international resistance to colonial mind games that have made the French-Algerian Frantz Fanon, the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Indian Homi K Bhabha stellar names in critical theory since the 1950s, 1970s and 1990s respectively.

Her selection of his writings bears out her argument, as he homes in on received wisdom, new writing, new plays, new paintings, and sometimes muses, self-deprecatingly, on where he finds himself among the intellectual currents of his time.

For all the stultification attributed to him, his tone throughout is positive, even buoyant, and Laird tells us that a one-man show of his paintings was held in Dublin when he was 76.

Corkery’s earliest essays appeared in the Leader, DP Moran’s hard-hitting nationalist weekly, the first one (not included here) on 14 September 14th, 1901, when he was 23. He continued to write and publish for more than 50 years.

This collection is organised thematically, however, rather than chronologically.

Part one, The Irish Language and Gaelic Culture, is by far the longest. It starts with Russian Models for Irish Litterateurs (1916), includes 50 pages from The Hidden Ireland and ends with reviews and other writing from the 1950s.

Part two, Representing Ireland, begins and ends with the Yeats family, from a testy piece about a lecture in Cork by WB in 1905 to a wide-ranging review of Jack B’s retrospective exhibition in Dublin 40 years later. In between are Corkery’s views on work by John Millington Synge and Liam O’Flaherty and on The Colonial Branch of Anglo-Irish Literature.

Part Three, just 20 pages on The Nation and the State, includes The Story of Two Indians, a short, vivid piece from the Irish Press almost 60 years ago, which neatly illustrates part of Laird’s argument.

Laird’s part four, Contemporary Reception, adds much to the value of the writing samples that precede it, for here we find what Corkery’s fans and his detractors had to say about his work as it appeared. Frank O’Connor’s furious letter of June 25th, 1926, to the editor of the now-defunct Irish Tribune, in response to a rather flowery Corkery essay called A Landscape in the West, was followed by another from Seán Ó Faoláin, and Laird’s inclusion of all three documents gives a flavour of the urgency and animation of cultural debate in the early Free State.

Picking through the endnotes

The whole offering would be more easily appreciated, however, if text headings included information about who wrote which piece (in the case of part four) and when, and whether we are dealing with a book review, a newspaper article or a chapter from a book. Some of this information is given in the table of contents, which a happy reader rarely consults, but too often, to get to grips with what is being discussed, we have to pick our way among the endnotes, which is a pity, because this book is otherwise an excellent, illuminating read.

A useful chronology of Corkery’s life and times occupies 11 pages after the preface. From it, we learn that he was one year old when Patrick Pearse was born and the National Land League was founded, and that he died the year after President John F Kennedy visited Ireland and John McGahern published The Barracks.