BIOGRAPHY: DECLAN KIBERDreviews Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural RevivalBy Catherine Morris Four Courts Press, 342pp. ¤49.50
‘THE BEST NATIONS, like the best women, have no history.” So said George Eliot in a famous adage, but Alice Milligan would not have agreed. She believed that the greatest sin a people could commit was to bring the work of the dead to nothing. Her lifelong project, in novels, poems, plays, journalism and tableaux, was to liberate the still-unused energies buried in the Irish past and to demonstrate their rich potential for her generation.
The image of Red Hugh O’Donnell escaping from Dublin Castle became, in her incendiary imagination, a prophecy of de Valera breaking out of Lincoln prison. History could always repeat itself, but never as farce; always as a mode of challenge and danger. Milligan’s friend James Connolly had warned that in Ireland a worship of the past might become a way of avoiding or excusing the mediocrity of the present, but Milligan saw in the revolutionary legacy of the United Irishmen and Irishwomen the ultimate critique of current torpor.
Hence, for her, the importance of “the memory of the dead” kept forever green in song, story, gardens of remembrance and that ultimate repository of all that is recalled by the underlings of history, “tradition” (or the passing down of felt experience in oral lore). Hence, also, the desire among the winners of past battles to inscribe their triumph in an official written “history” that overlaid and erased all traces of that oral handover. In her call for a centenary commemoration of 1798 Milligan anticipated by decades Walter Benjamin’s notion that even the buried dead can never be fully safe from an enemy who wins. Her own family grave would eventually be attacked by unionists (who disliked her republicanism) and by nationalists (who despised her family’s loyalism).
The fate of her writings after her death, in 1953, is an even bleaker illustration of the ways in which authors can join the ranks of the disappeared. Although artists as distinguished as Brian Friel and Benedict Kiely and politicians from Eamon de Valera to Seán MacBride have celebrated her writing, most of it was journalism and is no longer of easy access. If journalism is the first draft of history, it is seldom the last, and Milligan has lost out in consequence. Yet Catherine Morris has challenged this neglect, sifting through hundreds of archives to narrate the astonishing life of a gifted woman who was arguably one of the greatest of all inventors of modern Ireland.
Milligan came from a family of Methodist unionists, advanced enough to encourage her education, her study of Irish and her involvement in field naturalists’ clubs. (It was through an intense study of the national landscape that many Protestants of her generation impatriated themselves to the point at which they wished also to study Irish history.) She remained on good terms with her siblings, even though Morris, whom I advised on this project, inclines to the opinion that she was recruited eventually into the Irish Republican Brotherhood. (In 1919 she told Sinéad de Valera she had been “sworn in”.)
For a short period as a young intellectual she had written stories and poems reflecting her unionist formation, but the fall and funeral of Parnell and the experience of Irish-language classes in Dublin soon converted her into a republican. With her Catholic friend Anna Johnston, she edited a paper, the Shan Van Vocht, that had a truly global distribution and that gave an early publishing opportunity to many soon-to-be-famous Irish revivalists.
Morris reminds us that it was in ordinary journals, pamphlets and newspapers – rather than in more expensive arts-and-crafts volumes of high modernism – that the agenda of the Irish revival was carried forward. Milligan far preferred it that way, even publishing her own playscripts in such ephemeral outlets, which is the main reason why some now seem to be lost. Yet in its day her play The Last Feast of the Fiannawas a game-changer; without it there might have been no national theatre as we know it. Looking back in 1926 George Russell found something momentous as well as mysterious about it all: "Thirty years ago there did not seem a people in Europe less visited by the creative fire. Then a girl of genius, Miss Milligan, began to have premonitions . . ."
She did far more. She offered each of her plays for translation into Irish by the Gaelic League, of which she was a keen supporter. And she toured small towns and parish halls with her lantern slides and her tableaux depicting what might be termed “moments of latency” in the Irish past: the return of Oisín, the springing of Red Hugh, the exploits of Queen Maeve. Such tableaux had been employed widely by the French in the years after 1789, but they had a particular appeal for a young, marginalised but ardent woman, sometimes reduced to silence by sexist males in the nationalist or unionist elites but adept at mastering “non-textual forms of cultural production” that struck the popular imagination. The resources needed for these tableaux did not include major actors or expensive costumes, but even semiliterate members of the audience (often more radical than the merely well-read) could infer a wider revolutionary meaning from the scenes depicted.
The silent tableau into which Brian Friel's great play Dancing at Lughnasaresolves itself may owe a debt to Milligan, who concentrated many of her own productions across the northern counties. The Field Day tradition of touring regional centres is another link in that apostolic succession. But before any of that there were the founding playwrights of the early Abbey Theatre, who learned from such example to call for a pictorial "stillness" in the company's acting style, a style to be purged of all unnecessary movement. Yeats became so insistent on the point that at one stage he threatened to confine overmobile actors in barrels, a threat finally delivered on when many years later Samuel Beckett made it the basic situation of his Play.
Despite such stellar associations and affinities, Morris prefers to emphasise the collaborative, creative and popular nature of Milligan's productions. Participants themselves were enthusiastic amateurs who built meaning as well as sets, sourced materials as well as dialogue. Her method is described in a brilliant phrase as "antithetical to documentation", for she saw herself less as named author than as practical facilitator of scripts open to negotiation and change. It would be tempting to find another anticipatory illumination in all this, a prophecy of the working methods adopted by Joan Littlewood and Brendan Behan during the staging of The Hostageat the Theatre Workshop in Stratford East.
Milligan was a genuine republican, self-reliant and keen to promote self-reliance in others. She believed that names such as Emmet and Parnell indicated that “the cause of Ireland is no longer merely the Catholic cause”. Yet when members of her own family suffered prolonged illness in the later decades of her life, she selflessly returned north to nurse them. This entailed living as a kind of “internee” (her word) in a state whose very existence embarrassed and disappointed her, but she provided care and comfort with the same love, practicality and imagination that characterised everything she did. She was one of those rare souls who can embrace radical politics without ever lapsing into fanaticism or intolerance.
In the end her complex identity represents a challenge to all received categories of thought, nationalist as well as unionist, republican as well as loyalist, feminist as well as Fabian. Like all who have a gift for explanation rather than simplification, she felt finally at home “nowhere”, dying without possessions or fanfare. Yet she did more than most of her brilliant generation to expand the expressive freedom of citizens, and even in today’s Ireland we are still learning how to be her contemporaries.
Morris’s book is a feat of astonishing research, at once an act of historical rehabilitation and of audacious interpretation. At a time when the making of books about such immortals as Yeats and Joyce continues apace, it is a reminder that there may be other figures from their period, such as William Rooney, Anna Johnston, John Eglinton and Susan Mitchell, in need of a similarly detailed study.
Declan Kiberd is Donald and Marilyn Keough professor of Irish studies at the University of Notre Dame, in the US. His most recent book, Ulysses and Us, has just been published in a Japanese translation by Futoshi Sakauchi at Shensei House, Tokyo
