“An Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination.”
[I’m publishing tomorrow’s blog post a wee bit earlier to nudge it under the wire for St. Paddy’s Day. We are faced with foreign policy disasters in the Middle East and tragic disaster in Japan, so perhaps a little Irish cheer is in order. The following is an edited repeat from last year. Ireland has been hit hard by the rot of the financial sector that spread round the world in 2008-2009, so she deserves a toast…raise a mug of green beer to old Eire.]
The title quote is by George Bernard Shaw. Today is St. Patrick’s Day so I thought it was a perfect day to set the record straight: many great writers in the English language that you may have heard about are not English but Irish. Shaw was one of them. His plays and other writings poked fun at the English establishment, a commendable thing to do even today. His biting wit transferred easily into words on the page and probably embarrassed everyone from royalty on down. On the other hand, the endurance of his work over the years is proof of its quality—it is classic literature in the English language written by an Irishman.
I prefer and admire the Irish satirists. It is devilishly difficult to write satire and not recommended for writers that don’t have a world of experience behind them and a mastery of the trade. I’m not good at it, although the readers of this blog know I try. To be certain, my novels have satirical elements—for example, the Wall Street economics expert John Galt in The Midas Bomb—but I’m not bold enough to write an entire satirical book or play. Shaw was so bold. So was Jonathan Swift. His stories about the travels of Gulliver poke fun at many of society’s conventions, not to mention British royalty and militarism.
Swift was probably an alien being, not Irish; if so, he certainly adopted Ireland. I claim he was alien because in his description of Mars he creates two tiny Martian moons, in effect, predicting the existence of Deimos and Phobos before anyone on Earth could see them by telescope. How did he do that? Coincidence? I think not. He said, “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”
Another satirist of different stripes is Oscar Wilde. His plays have seen a recent resurgence (The Importance of Being Ernest is again on Broadway), even in film, but this man suffered greatly at the hands of the British. He died in prison for being a homosexual. Considering that our American fundamentalist preachers were in Uganda fomenting support for a law that would make homosexuality a crime punishable by death, I guess I cannot be too hard on those British of the 19th Century Victorian era. Following the lead of their Queen prude, homophobia was probably the in-thing to do at the time. (I don’t know what the excuse was for the preachers in Uganda. Discomfort with their own sexuality?)
Irish poets, satirists or otherwise, are probably better known to American high school and college students. While other writers are set aside, probably for their critical writings, poets seem to be more acceptable to our conservative school boards. I read W. B. Yeats “Leda and the Swan” in high school and knew immediately the poet was talking about a rape, but somehow that got by the censors. Yeats was not without his satire. Reportedly “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (the place name is pronounced Innishfree) was written because the poet was miffed that Thoreau’s Walden was so bad that it put him to sleep. Since these sentiments about Walden are also mine, I’m inclined to believe the report. How our environmental movement can hold Thoreau up as a hero is beyond me—he almost singlehandedly burned down Walden woods.
Yeats gets fame for something beyond writing too: he was instrumental in the creation of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. This theater is still active. When I was in Dublin I went to see a play there. Always known for avant garde plays since its creation, the play I saw would not have made it past the pseudo-liberal but Puritan-spirited crowds that frequent the Broadway and off-Broadway playhouses in New York City. If I remember correctly, it was set in 12th century northern Ireland and was the story of one king’s (read tribal chieftain’s) duplicity in conquering another, including rape and incest. The crowd seemed to take it in stride but the woman at the ticket office warned us beforehand, and she was right. So much for Irish Catholic conservatism.
Let me continue the list of great Irish writers people often confuse with English: John Millington Synge, Flann O’Brien, Oliver Goldsmith, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, James Joyce, Sean O’Casey—this list is only partial. Knowing a thing or two about Irish names, it’s amusing that some of these are confused for English, but there you have it. (If I’m missing your favorite writer, mention him in a comment to this post.) James Joyce is probably the most famous one of these. I’ll have to admit I’ve started but never finished Ulysses. Everyone says he’s a genius—I just can’t get through it. Whip me with a copy of Pygmalion.
Many great works of literature are banned from our high school reading lists—Irish writers have especially been hit hard by this because their works are often critical or satirical exposes of society’s foibles. That’s too bad because they write in a language that translates well (satire intended). Fortunately, years of violent history under the jackboots of the British hegemony did not stop from writing.
One of our great American writers, Sinclair Lewis, said it best: “It is impossible to discourage the real writers—they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.” I don’t know if Lewis was of English or Irish heritage, but he sums up what writers, especially Irish writers, have known for centuries: the pen really is mightier than the sword.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
