A new anthology of the literary magazine ‘The Everyman’, later known as ‘Aquarius’, paints a portrait of Ireland between 1968 and 1974, with all the questions and politics that characterised that turbulent period
IN 1973, HILTON EDWARDS saw Ireland and the Irish people as being in something of a fix. “I say we made a fatal mistake of going into the Common Market,” he told the literary magazine Aquarius. “Instead of being this unique, quiet island which had something lovely, gentle and – don’t laugh – tranquil to offer the world. Very soon we are going to be in the position of being inefficient marketeers, unless we do something the Irish have proved very capable of doing in America – become bigger crooks than the rest of Europe.” He saw Ireland, Edwards added, as “having a great capacity in this latter capacity”, but as a failure at “being honest and pushed around”.
Edwards didn’t seem to imagine of his tranquil little idyll that it might excel both at being crooked and at being pushed around, with honesty becoming almost as laughable a quality as tranquillity, but no matter. Like much of the material gathered in Creative Commotion, a new anthology of pieces from Aquarius (which was known for the first three years of its short existence as Everyman), his reflections on the Irish mind and the Irish eye comprise a rich and fascinating portrait of the atmosphere of that period, when the religious order of the Servites based in Benburb, Co Tyrone, published an annual literary review. Everyman/Aquarius brought together a compelling mix of writers and thinkers, asking them, in essence, to roll their sleeves up and get stuck into the questions of the country in which they found themselves; questions of art, of culture, of politics, of religion, of identity.
“There was no neat agenda,” writes the anthology’s editor, Michael J Farrell (himself a former Servite), “just an urge to stir things up.” As a religious order active in the intellectual life of its community at a time when the official Catholic Church was still shell-shocked by the reforms of Vatican II, the Servites were, Farrell argues, in a good position to try things out.
They were also in an interesting position geographically – and socially, and culturally. Published as it was in Northern Ireland, and published as it was during the years 1968 to 1974, it also became an important delving-into and a documentation of the turmoil and the tragedy that was building and then erupting outside the walls of the Servite Priory. That delving was sometimes philosophical: Plato, Camus and Solzhenitsyn were among those recruited by contributors striving to make sense of what was happening. It was sometimes pragmatic: the then-deputy editor of the Belfast Telegraph, Martin Wallace, analysed that newspaper’s landmark 1968 survey of opinions in the North and discovered, right on the threshold of the Troubles, a startling openness across the divides to compromise and community. It was often, too, very personal: some of the most valuable pieces in Creative Commotion are the self-portraits written by Northern writers including Brian Friel, Eugene McCabe, John Hewitt and Benedict Kiely as they traversed the contested terrain they called home.
Edwards, in his interview with Farrell, puts his finger on the value of self-portraits like this; as head of drama at RTÉ, Edwards had created similar fragments of autobiography with writers such as Frank O’Connor and Padraic Colum.
“I wanted archives,” says Edwards. “I thought, how wonderful it would be had we got such a programme of WB Yeats or Lennox Robinson or Synge.” Then Edwards left RTÉ, and somebody wiped the tapes.
It’s one of the pleasures of Creative Commotion to discover that so many of the Aquarius tapes, so to speak, are still intact; to follow someone like Friel or Kiely along the trajectories of memory and understanding.
Friel, in one of two vivid and forceful pieces in the anthology, looks back on “that bizarre process called my education”, a relentless grind of memorisation and regurgitation which might sound familiar to the class of 2009, and finds that he is “slightly resentful”, that he cannot help but hold a grudge against those men who taught “the literature of Rome and Greece and England and Ireland as if they were pieces of intricate machinery, created for no reason and designed for no purpose”. He and his classmates could never hope to understand, says Friel, that these texts “were the testimony of sad, happy, assured, confused people like ourselves”.
Wandering through the rural landscape of his earliest childhood, Kiely listens to the haranguing rooks and reads the crumbling headstones and thinks of fishing in Loch a’bhradain and of the “black folklore” of the sectarian murders at Dromore in 1920. He thinks, too, of his own “guilelessly optimistic” words in 1969, when he wrote of his hope that “such unhappy things” belonged only to the past. But even now, he says, writing in 1972, the landscape of the place is so beautiful and unspoiled – so tranquil, perhaps – “that it is often easy to think that we live in peace.”
Kiely was not alone in his earlier hopefulness about the North, guileless or otherwise, as other items from the Aquarius archives show; as well as the Martin Wallace survey, the anthology includes a long-winded foray into optimism by theatre director Ernest Blythe, and several essays on Northern Irish politics, religion and culture. But it’s the pieces that come at these subjects, and indeed at any subject, less directly – that take a sideways approach to thinking about culture, or art, or identity – which are the most compelling, avoiding as they do anything like that “neat agenda” alluded to by Farrell in his introduction.
Eugene McCabe begins his Playwright’s Notebook in 1969 by confessing that he barely knows what to write in response to Farrell’s request for a piece called I the Writer; he’ll jot down “anything to do with writing and theatre” that occurs to him, he says, and he hopes it will do. The result gives us a tantalising glimpse of McCabe’s imaginative processes, of his thoughts on writing and the writing life, of his colleagues and acquaintances in the worlds of theatre and literature, of a bizarre night of boozing with John Montague, of McCabe’s unease at what was happening on his doorstep in the North. “Have never written of it,” he says. “Am not indifferent but have never experienced religious bitterness ‘in depth’.”
Friel, too, touches on the matter of that responsibility, or imposed responsibility, for the Northern Irish writer. “As if,” he says, “this is what writing is about – take the do-it-yourself kit up to your study and assemble the pieces according to the enclosed leaflet.”
And another Northern writer for whom this question of writing and responsibility would very soon become a vexed one wrote for Everyman in 1968, in a commission which now looks truly inspired; the young Seamus Heaney was sent to interview Micheál MacLíammóir about the state of the arts in Ireland (a previously unpublished Heaney poem, Yank, is also included in the anthology, along with poems by Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Eithne Strong and others, as well as stories by Mary Lavin and Bryan MacMahon).
HEANEY’S QUESTIONS TO MacLíammóir are careful, thorough, and concerned with the notion of characteristics, of whether there is a “specifically Irish thing” at work on the Irish stage, or in Irish literature or visual art or music. MacLiammoir’s responses put art itself before nationality, and lament the loss of the Irish language, and make hay of a particularly “Irish trick“: the tendency to think “that certain things that are in fact international are peculiar to ourselves”. But it’s when Heaney asks whether the art of acting is somehow a characteristically Irish one that MacLiammoir’s own characteristic – his precise and ruthless wit – is unlocked to wonderful effect; it’s not that acting is an Irish art, he says, so much as that the Irish are “instinctive” actors off-stage. Onstage, though, and faced with the hard work of rehearsal, of learning lines, of turning up and going on night after night, that instinct grows fatigued: “They have a feeling for it but the moment it becomes serious they grow weary of it. No people on earth are so swiftly exhausted by life or labour.”
Brian Friel has rather more praise for the actor in his 1972 Self-Portrait. “All the things that people most dislike in them I find fascinating,” he writes, as he praises the actors with whom he worked in the first years of his career as a playwright. Friel’s earlier piece in the anthology, meanwhile, is a spirited and provocative reflection on theatre and the arts which – like Christopher Fitz-Simon’s commentary on culture in rural Ireland – seems in many ways as fresh today as it must have seemed four decades ago.
Take, for example, Friel’s caution against “our most persistent and pernicious illusion about the arts . . . that they follow a pattern, that they have boom times and recession times that follow one another according to some unspecified law”. The arts don’t obey the law, says Friel; they “grow and wither and expand and contract erratically and sporadically”.
The arts keep searching, they keep striving. And, crucially, when they find themselves being accepted by an establishment, they move on.“Flux is their only constant,” says Friel, “the crossroads their only home; impermanence their only yardstick.” It’s something, of course, about which the editors of Everyman/Aquarius know plenty, this impermanence. But this new anthology bears witness to the fact that, where the creative impulse is concerned, impermanence and extinction are by no means the same thing.
Everyman/Aquarius is published by The Liffey Press
