The figure of the Irish in English literary and popular culture has never been simple or straightforward.
From the simian savages of the 19th-century Punch magazine cartoons to Bob Hoskins’ ominous revelation of ‘the Irish’ at the end of the 1980 film The Long Good Friday, we have always been an unsettling and disruptive presence.
And yet our cultural and geographical proximity to, not to mention large physical presence in, England has generated a relationship that is both intimate and estranged.
The Irish are rarely the central subject of English political or cultural discourse. When not framed with the usual suffix of ‘question’ or ‘problem’ we are, in Eve Patten’s phrase, a “parenthetical aside”.
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Her latest book, Ireland, Revolution and the English Modernist Imagination, explores this parenthetical position of Irish characters in English modernist novels of the 1920, 30s and 40s.
Patten’s interest is not in how the Irish are characterised in these works of fiction. Rather she wants to explore what the use of the Irish says about English culture and its sense of self.
The starting point is the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence. Through the characters of Jim Brickland in DH Lawrence’s Aarons Road and Dan Boyle in Wyndham Lewis’s Apes of God, the Irish revolution is presented as a portent of things to come.
Both authors are grappling with what they perceive as English cultural decline. Though their response to that decline is different – Lawrence retreating into nostalgia; Lewis propelling into a Fascist future – both writers see the Irish as a “subversive presence in English civic life”.
Indeed, their discomfort with Irish violence and distaste of Irish cultural forms and manners represent what Patten terms “England’s last stand against the internal other”.
This theme of cultural decline is continued in a chapter on the novels, letters and travels of Virginia Woolf.
The doyenne of Bloomsbury modernism, Woolf’s knowledge of Ireland, its politics and culture, is much deeper than Lawrence’s and Lewis’. Through her friendship with writer Elizabeth Bowen, she clearly has an empathy the other authors lack.
Yet, just like the anti-imperialist Delia Pargiter in Woolf’s last novel The Years, her characterisation of the Irish is, according to Patten, “riven with colonialist assumptions and inherited stereotypes”.
Delia’s post-Parnellite melancholy is, for Patten, less about Ireland and more about the imminent demise of Woolf’s own English liberalism.
In contrast to conservative and liberal authors, who used the figure of the Irish as a cipher for disruption, loss and decline, writers from England’s literary left took a more positive view.
Patten’s chapter on the works of Ethel Mannin and George Thomson take us into the world of English socialism and its mobilisation of the Irish in the service of what she calls a “Marxist utopian dreamtime”.
Thomson and Mannin are intriguing figures; committed activists, prodigious writers and both with an intimate knowledge of Ireland.
Born to Irish parents in London, Thomson learned Irish and, after spending time on the Blasket Islands, befriend the famed storyteller Muiris Ó Súilleabháin. He went on to translate the native’s memoir, Twenty Years A-Growing.
For Thomson, Ireland fulfilled a function similar to St Ives in Cornwall for the generation of postwar Modernist English painters. According to Patten, his attraction was to an “authentic remnant of a primitive past”, a place untainted by the corrupting influence of metropolitan industrial capitalism.
If Thomson’s use of Ireland is one of retreat from the dark side of modernity, Mannin mobilises Irish primitivism in order to comment on the frailties of English socialist culture.
Her 1945 novel Comrade O Comrade features as its central character Larry Lannigan, a west of Ireland fisherman brought to London by the communist Peter Inglass for political education.
Lannigan’s Celtic primitivism is used as a prism through which Mannin views the factional and self-obsessed “salon culture of 1930s English socialist literati”. Unable to keep up with the differing positions of the alphabet soup of communist, socialist and labour parties, Lannigan’s time in London is less an education and more an affirmation of the authenticity of simple rural Irish life.
Though the figure of the Irish is less negative in the work of these left-wing writers, it is not without problems. Ultimately however, like their liberal and conservative counterparts, they are not writing about Ireland. According to Patten, we function as “signifiers of an imperilled English political hegemon” irrespective of where on the ideological spectrum the writer is located.
Ireland, Revolution and the English Modernist Imagination is a fascinating and engaging read. Patten explores and exposes the contradictory position of the Irish in English modernist literature as at once both peripheral and central. Maybe it is a function of what Patten, quoting Fredric Jameson, terms “distant family likeness”. Intimate and yet estranged indeed.
