Séamus Deane’s early professional career unfolded in turbulent times. Leaving behind a teaching post at the University of California at Berkeley – amidst the ferment of the American Civil Rights movement, anti-Vietnam War and student protests in the United States – he settled with his family in Dublin just as Ireland too entered an acute period of turmoil.
Northern Ireland came to its own crisis when the brutal repression of the Civil Rights movement led to the outbreak of paramilitary conflict, and this in turn to the imposition of British troops and direct rule from Westminster. In the South, the 1970s brought the women’s movement and other campaigns for social reform in a climate marked by economic recession and soaring inflation.
Deane absorbed these tangled conflicts into the bloodstream of his writing and scholarship, and they stamped a permanent imprint on the distressed but distinguished career that followed.
A friend of Seamus Heaney, with whom he had studied in St Columb’s and Queens, and Derek Mahon, Deane’s writing career began as a poet. Published volumes include Gradual Wars in 1972, Rumours in 1977, History Lessons in 1983 and Selected Poems in 1988. The poetry expresses deep-rooted personal experiences mediated by a restlessly unsettled internationalist imagination.
However, Deane made his strongest impact as literary critic. The publication of three books – Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880-1980 in 1985, A Short History of Irish Literature in 1987 and The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England, 1789-1832 in 1988 – established him as a critic of startling originality.
In Celtic Revivals, the compressed studies – extending from Arnold and Burke through Yeats and Joyce, on to the generation of Kinsella, Mahon, Montague and Friel – displayed a balletic prose and penetrating insight.
Synoptic authority
The Short History revealed Deane’s synoptic authority. It surveyed Irish writing from Gaelic Ireland to the contemporary moment and covered poetry, fiction and drama and writers canonical and minor. The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England was formative to Deane’s lifelong fascination with Edmund Burke and to later critical studies. His variety of talents was without match in Irish criticism.
Equally matchless was Deane’s determination that criticism should frontally engage Irish society. Before his association with Field Day in the early 1980s, he was an editor of the literary-political journal Atlantis and contributor to Threshold and The Crane Bag. Nevertheless, it was as general director of the Field Day Theatre Company that he became a senior public figure. Formed in 1980 by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea, the company combined artists from Catholic and Protestant backgrounds to imagine how people, north and south, might overcome the conflict and cant that confined them. Intellect and imagination, critique and constructive collaboration, Field Day held, were equally indispensable to that task.
Under Deane’s stewardship, the company became what Catriona Crowe has termed “the most important intellectual force in Ireland in the 1980s”. In that period, Field Day members produced a memorable body of drama, poetry, pamphlets and criticism. Deane was its guiding intellectual influence. The Field Day Pamphlet series comprised five sets each of three pamphlets and engaged topics that included policing and prisons, the language question and cultural matters. Some were collected in book form, including Ireland’s Field Day in 1985 and Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature in 1990, in which Deane introduced articles by Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said. By now, Field Day was making an impact internationally, with Said in particular expressing regret that nothing of similar collaborative ambition was under way in Palestine.
Furore
Deane’s most ambitious – and ultimately controversial – project in these years was his general editorship of The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Volumes I-III, published in 1991. On publication, the anthology raised a furore from unionists, revisionists and, most consequentially, feminists. Most of the section editors were male, as were all of the Field Day Theatre Company members, and the representation of women’s writings was inadequate. Revisionist and unionist critics felt the anthology reflected an “assimilationist” nationalist agenda, a belated cultural relay of the earlier Dublin-based New Ireland Forum.
Deane immediately conceded the project’s deficiencies on the question of women’s writing and raised funding for a further two volumes. This latter venture was published in two volumes as The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Irish Women’s Writing and Traditions (2002). It remains the most monumental collection of Irish women’s writing ever assembled. A number of its leading editors, Clair Wills and Gerardine Meaney among them, have acknowledged Deane’s ongoing support for this major undertaking throughout its production.
Séamus Deane was born in the Bogside in Derry on February 9th, 1940, the fourth of Frank Deane and Winnie Doherty’s eight children (the first, Mary, died in infancy). He attended St Columb’s College, Derry, and then studied at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he received BA and MA degrees between 1957 and 1963. From there, he went to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the reception of the French Enlightenment and Revolution in early 19th-century English letters. Afterwards, Deane, with his wife Marion and young family, moved to the United States where he assumed teaching positions in Reed College, Oregon (1966-67), and the University of California at Berkeley (1967-68). In 1969, he returned to Ireland to teach at University College Dublin (UCD). He was professor of modern English and American literature in UCD from 1980-1993.
Distinguished
Deane left UCD in 1993 to become the Keough professor of Irish studies at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Notre Dame’s Irish Studies centre, located in South Bend and Dublin, was soon widely considered the most distinguished in the US. Despite the administrative demands, Deane published Reading in the Dark in 1996, which won several international awards, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and has been translated into over 20 languages. It is one of the most remarkable novels of the Troubles era.
Two later critical works followed: Strange Country: Ireland, Modernity and Nationhood 1790-1970 in 1997 and Foreign Affections: Essays on Edmund Burke in 2005. While teaching fall semesters in South Bend and spring semesters in Dublin, Deane also worked as general editor of Critical Conditions: Field Day Essays and Monographs, and edited the annual Field Day Review (2005-2015).
That an internationally celebrated talent of his calibre should devote so much of his career to working collaboratively with others and editing and promoting their works was just one measure of Deane’s exceptional intellectual drive and generosity. His last book, Small World: Ireland, 1798-2018, is due to appear from Cambridge University Press in the coming weeks. Produced in conditions of failing health and global pandemic, and including new work on Elizabeth Bowen, Mary Lavin and others, it is testimony to Deane’s “un-ageing intellect” and undimmed commitment to the essay form, critical thinking and Irish writing.
Presences like Séamus Deane’s appear in Irish letters only once every few generations. In inspirational and organisational terms, his contribution compares well with that of Yeats or Seán Ó Faolain in earlier eras. He grew up in an Ireland where, to cite Séamus Heaney, people were enjoined, “whatever you say, say nothing”, a watchword for peaceable neighbourliness and comfortable careers. Flouting quietest tact, Deane brought an unapologetically eloquent tongue to bear on Irish letters and politics. Given the history of the Bogside, Northern politics were naturally a formative and abiding interest, but never restrictively so. His friendship with Edward Said contributed to vocal support for the cause of Palestinian self-determination and made him an outspoken critic of American foreign policy.
Will to knowledge
People interested in the persona behind the public figure might begin with the poetry and Reading in the Dark. Motivated by a stubborn will to knowledge, though increasingly aware of the trouble to himself and those he most loves that enlightenment must bring, the novel’s protagonist presses on relentlessly. Each unravelled secret augments torment. Enlightenment brings understanding purchased at the price of a new awareness of how deep the frailties of his forebears, how deep-stained their sufferings, how crippling if humanly comprehensible his community’s conspiracies of silences. Lines from Guerillas, collected in History Lessons, express the novel’s complex atmosphere: “Real life was so impure/ We savoured its poisons as forbidden/ Fruit and, desolate with knowledge,/ Grew beyond redemption.”
Still, in Deane’s epigrammatic prose, scintillating insight supporting surprising assessment, readers may glimpse a different Séamus. No matter how unflinching his gaze on human suffering, this never inhibited the Séamus who loved football, Italian opera, comic storytelling, Proustian and Adornian sentences, reading Hannah Arendt or Simone Weil, conversation, horse-racing, fine wines, planting flower bulbs, Walter Benjamin, singing, his children and grandchildren, trips to the West of Ireland and Europe.
Séamus Deane died on May 12th, 2021. People who value creative writing and courageous critical thinking will miss him. His partner, Emer Nolan, wife of many years Marion, children Conor, Ciarán, Émer, Cormac and Iseult, and his surviving siblings Liam, Eamonn, Una and Deirdre will most feel his profound loss.