True to the Irish spirit

Barbara Kay, National Post  Published: Wednesday, July 22, 2009

It must be the crummy weather. I seem to be on a curmudgeonly literary roll. In last week's column, I shot from the hip at an innocent Post writer for the "crime" of admiring a novelist who represents a broody branch of CanLit I'm averse to. This week-- the presenting news hook being the death on Sunday, at the age of 79, of New York-based Irish writer Frank Mc-Court --I muse on my abandonment of Irish literature.

You'll find a clue to my discontent in the following snippets from the Wikipedia biographical entry on McCourt, for whose name I have substituted an X: "Sank deeper into poverty," "X's father ... who was often without work, drank up what little money he earned ... leaving X's mother to raise four surviving children," "siblings died of diseases related to malnutrition and the squalor of their surroundings," "an entire block of houses sharing a single outhouse." Sadly, if you've read much 20th-century Irish literature, you'll know that such dark biographical details could apply to any of a dozen writers.

Frank McCourt surged to literary prominence with the 1996 memoir of his impoverished Limerick childhood, Angela's Ashes. I tried to read it, but in spite of the obvious superiority of Mc-Court's writing and his powerful distillation of anguished memory into evocative prose, I clapped the book shut after some hundred pages.

No disrespect meant to McCourt's extraordinary talent or his sad memories. It's just that when you combine the Irish people's inordinate supply of human wreckage with their astonishing gift of the gab, well, what McCourt so competently described was deja vu all over again. That neck of the literary woods had already been thoroughly mapped and its beaten paths widened to four-lane highways in fiction before he got to it in memoir.

James Joyce's 1916 novel, Portrait of the Artist, is the ur-text for alienated Irish writers. In the novel, the artistically ambitious protagonist, a thinly disguised alter ego for Joyce, becomes increasingly detached from the stultifying anti-individualism of Ireland's Catholic Church and the narrow political revanchism of his upbringing. He chooses exile from Ireland in order "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Joyce himself, sexually liberated by his lifelong lover Nora Barnacle, left Ireland as a young man, never -- except for one brief weeks-long interlude-- to return.

The example of Joyce and others, such as Samuel Beckett (he self-exiled to France and lived mainly in French), who came to artistic maturity in Joyce's ever-looming shadow, encouraged aspiring Irish artists to abandon Ireland and its culture of defeat (as it then was), with no attempt ever again to reconcile with country, family or religion.

Religion rankled in particular: Until relatively recently, an unusually dour and collectivist manifestation of the Catholic Church exercised a tenacious hold over the Irish, demanding a fealty that was anathema to creative self-expression.

But breaking with doctrine and belief had psychological consequences for Irish intellectuals we cannot even imagine here. Irish exile Brian Moore, sometimes claimed as a Canadian writer because he sojourned at a Montreal newspaper before settling in the United States where he found fame and fortune as a prolific novelist and screenwriter, startlingly said: "I stayed away because my parents were religious and I was not."

Many of those who left found liberation and untrammelled artistic opportunity abroad. Those who stayed generally buckled under to the twin tyrannies of religion and obsessive, joyless social correctness, frequently descending into poverty and alcoholism.

Irish women took the brunt of the suffering. Married women were often afflicted with the debilitating trifecta of poverty, too many children and feckless, liquor-soaked husbands. But the fate of unmarried women was arguably worse.

In this context, if there is a more compellingly sympathetic female character in Irish, or any modern literature, than Judith Hearne, the eponymous protagonist of Brian Moore's first novel, I haven't met her. Judith Hearne is a cultural avatar, a haunting indictment of a pathologically inbred society. Her (literally) malnourished, defeminized body and downward-spiralling circumstances personify the lot of Ireland's genteel spinsters clinging desperately to social respectability, victims of a rigidly sectarian, sexually repressive society. Island-bound, single Irish women were doomed to die by inches from emotional and spiritual inanition.

Moore's off-island novels are unfailingly peppy reads. But ironically enough, it was his macabre 1979 novel about an artistically insecure exile's return to Ireland, The Mangan Inheritance, a cheerless brew of disillusionment and sexual squalor, that decisively paid to further Ireland-based reading adventures for me. (I exempt anglo-Irish writing from this dirge; it's a whole other story.)

Call me half-American, which I am. I don't ask that every book I read end with a white picket fence and a chorus of "Let me call you sweetheart," but eventually one longs for a little optimism to relieve the general malaise. I know, Ireland isn't what it was, and Irish artists doubtless don't have to exile themselves any more to access the unfettered human aspiration I take for granted in British and American literature. I should take another stab at Irish literature. And I will, one of these days.

But not yet. And not without a uisce beatha (look it up) to wash it down with.

bkay@videotron.ca