Peter CostelloThe Easter Rising was at heart an act of the imagination, mixing themes from Irish history, religion and social vision.
The poet Padraic Colum – a close friend of many of those involved in the Rising but exiled from them in America – emphasised to the New York Times in a long interview that the insurrection was “a poets’ rebellion”, the work largely of intellectuals of different kinds.
Yeats asked after the event, “Did that play of mine send out certain men the English shot?” He was referring to his play dominated by Maud Gonne, Kathleen Ni Houlihan which had caught the imagination of so many in 1912, and which by chance the Abbey mounted again for Easter Week 1916.
Certainly Yeats’ work, along with that of many other poets and dreamers went into the mix. The political and the social outcome may well have not been what they all envisaged; that is for historians to discuss. But for those of us who want to understand the inwardness of the event have to begin with the literature. In these pages I would like to pass some books from that literature briefly in review.
Books about the Easter Rising fall into three categories: those by people associated with the Rising, those who wrote from personal experience of what happened and historical appraisals. At the moment the shops are filled with books about 1916, but these new works draw to a very great extent on these earlier works in ways often not appreciated.
A poets’ rebellion
The shooting had barely ceased, the fires in the city centre were barely quenched, when publishers began to bring out new editions of the works of some of the leaders and a few of their followers.
Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Mary Plunkett as poets all wrote single poems that lived on in the memory; but none had in their lives the time to perfect what gifts they had. Their sense of dedication, of vocation, was diverted into another channel. But from time to time the best of their poetry has been revived in anthologies and collections.
Given the outcomes of their lives many of the poems, especially those of Pearse and Plunkett, read almost prophetically. Men of Catholic culture by rearing, education and often inclination, their poetry invokes, too images of Christ’s passion and the triumph of the Resurrection, appropriate it seemed to many for an insurrection at Easter.
The imagined nature of the Rising is clear. These writers, as a contemporary report from the city at the time claimed, “Went into battle with a revolver in one hand and a copy of Sophocles in the other”.
If one were to seek an intellectual core to what led some into the Rising one can find it in the writing of James Connolly: Labour In Irish History (General Books, £17.64) particularly. Connolly, the editor of The Irish Worker, was a man of the left. He believed that the answer to all of the country’s problems lay in a socialist future.
Others in the Rising would not have agreed. Some saw the future in the past, as Pearse did. But nationalisation of the land, the state command of industry, even the dictatorship of the proletariat, those were notions whose day would never come in Ireland. Lip service is often paid to Connolly as a patriot, but you can be sure he was the last man a great many in Ireland would not have wanted to command the nation.
His notions would have been resisted by others in the movement: in that lay the germ of the Civil War and many later political developments of Ireland.
Much of the nationalist activity of the day went into journalism, as did the life of Arthur Griffith. But again like so many journalists the production of a finished work of art was not what Griffith aimed at. It is the man and his character that influences people. Not the nature of his writing.
But there seems to have been no systematic work done on what this free Ireland would be like, who it would stand with and how it would be ruled in detail. All that was left to later, and so inevitably the pattern of government administration built up in Ireland since 1801 was simply taken over in time by the new administration.
One of the immediate books of the Rising that does survive, and still reads most movingly today, is James Stephens’ The Insurrection in Dublin (Dublin & London: Maunsell and Co., 1916). James Stephens, who at the time acting as Registrar of the National Gallery of Ireland, was as his novels The Charwomen’s Daughter and The Crock of Gold had revealed, a genuine writer with knowledge of how the poor in Dublin lived.
He was the ideal witness to events in Dublin, how it affected the ordinary people, and how it affected those like himself who had been intimate with many of the leaders such as Pearse and Thomas MacDonagh. The book was not mere journalism, but was an evocation of terror and death visited upon a European capital far from the battle fields of the Continent such as Verdun.
Sleeping on other men’s wounds
The immediate aftermath of the Rising and the executions was to cause a swing in public opinion. There was perhaps some chance of political outcome to the claims made in the Rising, but the resistance of the British government, the antagonism of the North, and eventually the outcome of the election in November 1918 at the war’s end, sealed the making of a revolution.
The armed struggle that broke out in January 1919, just as the democratically elected members of Sinn Féin were gathering in Dublin to create the first national assembly, ensured that war rather than talk would be the burden of Ireland for some eight years to come.
It was only in 1926, that many people embittered by the outcome of the Civil War, in which the so-called die-hards were defeated, that the 10th anniversary of the Rising evoked a sentimental reaction.
But if one looks for a literary response one might in these years single out Piaras Béaslaí’s biography Michael Collins (1937), Padraic Colum’s book on Arthur Griffith (1959), and a memoir of the period such as Ernie O’Malley’s On Another Man’s Wound (1936). But the memory of the Easter Rising had become entangled in later memories of the war of the IRA with the British and the Free State’s war with the Republicans.
To this theme the romantic novelist and playwright Dorothy Macardle devoted many years creating The Irish Republic (London, Victor Gollancz, 1937) which canonised Eamon de Valera.
But of literary value and interest there was also Remembering Sion: A Chronicle of storm and quiet, by Desmond Ryan (London: Arthur Barker, 1934), which recounts his time at St Enda’s, and carried a story of personal engagement through the Rising. This is a memoir which remains as readable as when it was written.
One to read for its insightful recollections of the period is Mary’s Colum’s Life and the Dream (Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1947).
A backward look
In time the Rising became the subject of historical inquiry, especially as the 50th anniversary approached. The first of these was Edgar Holt’s Protest in Arms (London: Putnam, 1960), the work of a British military historian, which told the story, but seemed to readers then to be unengaged. The work of Ulster writer Max Caulfield, then a London journalist, The Easter Rebellion (London: Muller, 1963) managed to grasp the politics, the events and the nature of the personalities and the city involved.
The actual anniversary of the Rising in 1966 certainly called forth a great wave of journalism from many writers. But an important book of the time was Tim Pat Coogan’s Ireland since the Rising (London: Pall Mall Press, 1966) which for a generation managed to frame with nuanced reflection what had become of the free Ireland the poets and patriots of Easter Week had dreamed of.
This was the work of, it should be noted, an influential journalist rather than a historian. As yet academics held back from treating modern events such as the Rising; for them that was politics not history.
Now when historians write so much about the modern period perhaps they have really ceased to be historians and become themselves politicians, but politicians without the responsibility of action. In a strange way academics, rather than philosophers, have become the moral arbiters of our times.
But even as writers evoked the past, and spoke of the better relation between North and South, one of the new style Sunday colour magazines ran an illustrated article on the IRA in training. Ominous sounds were being heard in the North about civil rights.
Three years later what came to be “the Northern troubles” broke out, and in the decades of war that followed the whole island went through a process of re-education in what rebellion, warfare and terrorism actually meant.
This all led to a reappraisal of what had happened in Ireland in earlier periods, and a more critical approach by historians and writers in general to what was said to have happened by the participants.
This came to be called derisively “revisionism”, those who used that term quite forgetting that all historical writing is a process of constant revision, and always has been.
The literature of the Irish revival which was intricately wound up with the Irish revolution was undergoing reappraisal too.
The first book in this genre was Dublin, Easter 1916: A Study of an Ideological Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), by William Irwin Thompson, an emerging New Age philosopher of Irish-American origin. This was not what the English departments with an interest in Irish studies wanted.
Patrick Pearse and the Politics of Redemption by Sean Farrell Moran (Catholic University Press of America, 1994, $19.95) was perhaps more what some academics desired, but which was too academic to find many ordinary readers.
My own critical study, The Heart Grown Brutal: The Irish Revolution in Literature from Parnell to the death of Yeats (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1977) attempted to provide both an academic approach with a style open to a general readership. In covering films and other cultural elements it broke into territory which is still under exploration.
By beginning with the death of Parnell, the book emphasised the interaction of democratic and anti-democratic forces at work in the course of the revolution – if that is what it can truly be called.
We speak of the Civil War and the events down to the murder of Kevin O’Higgins in 1927 as a departure from what had been hoped for. Yet if one looks back to the first decade of the century, and to the Rising in Ireland, we can see already some six or seven social elements were struggling for authority in the emerging estate.
A civil war began with the founding of the Ulster Volunteers, which in effect only ended with the recent Peace Process – if even then. In the signatures to the Proclamation itself one can see the seeds of civil strife between Irish factions; for example, how was revolutionary socialism to be reconciled in a new state with Catholic reaction?
Some six or seven of these were striving for authority in the emerging states (for we must include the North in any overview of the times), one of which was certainly the Catholic Church. We are by no means finished with the course of revisionism. And there are already many who look forward with dread to next year’s celebrations.
But speaking from my own experience, a long acquaintance with the events of the revolutionary era in Ireland is a disillusioning one, which still leaves me troubled.
It seems to me that the excesses of the period have been glossed over, that leaders were of more interest than the experiences of the common man.
Executed heroes were more than balanced by young men, and not so young men, left for dead down back alleys or buried in bogs.
If the Rising was a creation of Catholic imagination, which it certainly was, Catholic consciences should still be well troubled by the consequences.
Some of the recently published 1916 books
The shops are filled with an avalanche of 1916 books of all shapes and sizes and kinds. The best of these will be discussed in a later article in April 2016. But among them a few titles stand out.
One of these for his magnificent illustrations is Courage Boys, We are Winning; an illustrated history of the Easter Rising, by Michael Barry (Andalus press, €24.99). This is a twin with his earlier book about the troubles, The Green Divide: an illustrated History of the Civil War (Andalus Press, €24.99) and quite the best of the illustrated books that have come out.
Children of the Rising by Joe Duffy (Hachette Books Ireland, €19.99) dealing with the young people who were among the casualties of the Rising opens up an area which has been for too long overshadowed by a concentration on the leaders and their fate.
Easter Widows, by Sinead McCoole (Doubleday Ireland, £14.99) deals again with a group of people, the widows of the martyred leaders, many of them persons of strong character and great courage, people who because they were female were overshadowed by the men and the events.
The GAA was an essential vehicle for the IRB to penetrate the social organisations of Irish nationalism throughout the country and provided the seed ground from which the later IRA activities grew. The GAA & Revolution in Ireland 1913-1923, by distinguished historian Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh (Collins Press, €29.99) draws together the evidence for the background activity and its later consequences.
Also breaking new ground is According to their Lights, by Neil Richardson (Collins Press, €19.99), which relates the experiences of a variety of Irish men in the British military service who fought in Dublin in 1916. A very varied group indeed, but men whose Irish identity is undeniable. This presents the other side of the story so to speak in an objective way.
Finally, against this tide of books, can we detect the beginning of a run the other way in the coming year in Sean O’Callaghan’s James Connolly: My Search For the Man, the Myth and His Legacy (Cornerstone Publishing £18.99), which culminates in an examination of “the true believer”, those willing to die for the cause and destroy the world around them.
The author O’Callaghan is not popular, to say the least, in some Irish circles. A book to be read therefore with caution, though it may in part carry an unpalatable truth. Is it a political squib or the beginning of a trend? We shall see.