The debate, controversy, and social analysis that marked intellectual life in the Irish Republic in the 1960s and ’70s were rooted, as we saw, in a sense that Ireland was undergoing a period of rapid change set in motion by the economic decisions of the late 1950s (a similar sense was to re-emerge in the 1990s, when once again an economic crisis was followed by a period of economic resurgence). It was widely sensed in the 1960s and ’70s that the country was altering in radical ways (the degree of change achieved and the degree still necessary were constant topics of conversation, newspaper article, seminar, and conference), and the question as to how much Ireland’s traditional identity could be retained in the new circumstances was a major preoccupation of social commentators. The belief that the country was undergoing a fundamental transition was given sustenance by the fact that writers and artists, those antennae sensitive to social and cultural change, experienced a period when their relationship with Irish society underwent striking alteration.
It will have been clear from much that has engaged our attention so far that the Irish artists and writers who in the early decades of independence chose to remain in Ireland had two roles available to them. They could furnish the new order with an art, which, whether in its self-conscious nativism or idyllic celebration of the rural folk tradition, would nourish the dominant essentialist ideology of the state; or, disgusted with the unreality of such programmatic artistic endeavours, they might seek to define artistic identity in terms of opposition and dissent. Both choices, however different they were in experience, had in common the fact that the artistic life involved some measurable relationship with society which either welcomed or rejected the artifacts that individuals produced. For the minor writers and artists, content to exploit conventional literary and artistic properties that did not disturb a conservative public taste, Irish society had offered a snugly comfortable provincial milieu where a complacent regionalism could be critically hailed as a national mode. For the writer prepared to employ literature and the profession of letters as weapons of dissent, social obloquy – expressed most often in the crude decisions of the Censorship Board of Publications – involved him or her, until at least the 1940s, in a certain heroism. And writers and artists under pressure can at least persuade themselves that their works count for something.
The economic and social changes of the 1960s and ’70s interfered with both kinds of relationship. Obviously for the writer or artist who felt that his or her work bore intimately on traditional Irish ways of life that in indirect ways justified the existence of a separatist Irish state and which that state through its linguistic policy and cultural bias was directly committed to fostering, the period was necessarily dispiriting. It would be difficult to imagine an art that could easily be identified with the central concerns of a society energetically dedicated to economic growth; and many writers and artists, not only those who chose, or would have chosen to celebrate the old order, lamented that social change had dealt a fatal blow to a traditional Ireland that enshrined many irreplaceable values. A writer in Christus Rex in 1968 identified that Ireland, as he warned of the assaults it would endure when the country became more prosperous and industrialized.
It was
things like wedding-sets in country kitchens, of the high-spirited straw-boys at Kerry wren-dances, of the disturbing and primal response to the throb of the West Limerick tambourine.…I think of the domestic excitement and the subsequent festivities associated with the annual visit of the priest for the station with everybody sticking to varnish everywhere: of the ritualistic holy-water blessing of the stock on May eve; of the colourful folk-tales once told over rural fires. I think of the thrust and parry of local country conversation, the appreciation of local characters, the haggling over buying and selling and all that makes a happy arabesque in country life…For me, culture means the full, variegated, multi-coloured fabric that is indigenous Irish life.1
As the kinds of changes we have discussed earlier took hold of Irish society in the 1960s and ’70s, it became less and less possible for writers and artists to celebrate such things as “indigenous Irish life” without evasion or sentimentality. Rather, the new Irish reality was ambiguous, transitional, increasingly urban or suburban, disturbingly at variance with the cultural aspirations of the revolutionaries who had given birth to the state. And if the new Ireland made a naive, conventional folk art impossible, it also put paid to the artist as cultural hero. For instead of a climate of opinion which allowed the artist to project himself (as Seán O’Faoláin had done, almost as a one-man opposition party in a monolithic state), the new Ireland of debate and controversy made more commonplace the kinds of critique writers almost alone had attempted in earlier years. Furthermore, the increasingly secular, modernized Irish society no longer so readily seemed to provide the dissenting artist with those manifestations of Irish purity, puritanism, and repression that had provided the angry novelist and playwright with distinctive material for the inconoclastic realism which had once found a curious readership abroad. As Irish life seemed to become more and more like urban and suburban life everywhere else in the developed world, both the pressures on artists and the uniqueness of their subject matter lessened in ways which rendered their role more complex.
Certainly the 1960s and ’70s saw changes which writers and artists in Ireland could not but welcome. Among such changes were the recognition that the state must patronize the arts (however niggardly that patronage in fact was) and that literature in English (as well as in Irish) by Irish men and women is an indigenous Irish literature, worthy of support. This latter acknowledgement had been made public in the government White Paper on the Irish language in 1965 when it was stated that “competent knowledge of English will be needed even in a predominantly Irish-speaking Ireland” because English provides access to “the large body of Irish literature written in English and to the prose, poetry, songs and speeches in which Irish national aspirations have to a large extent been expressed.”2 In 1968 the then Minister for Finance, Charles Haughey, announced that he was considering a major reorganization of the Arts Council. Although the Arts Council was not in fact restructured until 1973, it was in 1969 that the same minister was responsible for the enactment of legislation that permitted writers and artists to avoid paying income tax on royalties earned from their creative work. The Arts Council between 1951 and 1973 had concerned itself largely with the performing and plastic arts, but after the legislation of 1973 (which permitted the council to establish a number of sub-committees and to appoint new officers), literature attracted greater financial support. In 1975 the council provided bursaries for the first time to four writers,3 apportioning £7,500 between them, and in 1978 seven writers were awarded bursaries from a total of £20,000. When, however, it is realized that of an overall budget of £1.5 million for the arts in 1978 only £43,853 was spent on literature, it can be seen that the Irish state’s support for its writers remained at a fairly minimal level. Nevertheless, support of any kind made a welcome change from earlier years when literature was scarcely acknowledged. In 1977 the Arts Council in an imaginative enterprise began a programme to allow writers to visit secondary, vocational, and comprehensive schools in counties Clare, Limerick, and North Tipperary. The following year the plan was extended, in cooperation with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, to cover schools in the island as a whole. Over 140 writers in Irish and English declared their willingness, in the Directory of Writers, 1978/9, to pay school visits to read from their work and to discuss it with pupils. Again this was a highly welcome development of a kind that could not have taken place in earlier years, when a wrong-headed censorship made most writers highly suspect in the eyes of those charged with the education of the young.
Other changes improved the lot of the Irish writer. In part supported by Arts Council subvention and very much the result of energetic commitment by individuals, a small Irish publishing industry established itself. Liam Miller, who founded the Dolmen Press in 1951, showed the way and in his high standards of design and production, together with his commitment to Irish poets such as Austin Clarke, John Montague, and Thomas Kinsella, revived a tradition that had died with the closure of the Maunsel and Roberts publishing house in 1926 (Austin Clarke had published with Maunsel). In the 1960s and ’70s Miller was joined by such individuals as Peter Fallon (whose Gallery Press became the foremost publisher of poetry in the country), Michael Smith and John F. Deane. Publication of fiction and criticism was also being undertaken by a variety of new and established imprints which in the early 1970s began to make their way in the world of letters. CLÉ, the Irish Publishers’ Association, in 1979 numbered sixty members (including members from Northern Ireland), and the activities of Irish publishers were reported on in a lively monthly periodical, Books Ireland. Amazingly, Peter Fallon showed that an Irish publisher can stay in business while principally publishing poetry. In the 1970s he published over seventy volumes of poems, plays and stories. Perhaps equally remarkable were the exploits of Philip McDermott and David Marcus of Poolbeg Press, who demonstrated that there was a market for Irish fiction, particularly for collections of short stories. It was also David Marcus, as literary editor of the daily newspaper the Irish Press, who in 1968 began to edit the weekly page of new Irish writing in that broadsheet which, since that date, gave many new, as well as established, writers an opportunity to present their work to an Irish readership. All this activity meant that for the first time since the heyday of the Literary Revival, an Irish writer had a choice of whether to seek publication in Ireland or abroad, though severe problems in the international distribution of poetry and fiction remained if he or she chose an Irish imprint.
Not only had a burgeoning publishing industry provided opportunities to Irish writers which even ten years earlier had not existed, but events like the Yeats International Summer School, mounted in Sligo each summer since 1960, the Listowel Writers Week, held each summer in County Kerry, and the Merriman Summer School held each August in County Clare and dedicated to the Gaelic literary and cultural tradition, all allowed writers the opportunity to read their works in public and gave literature a publicity, even if of a superficial kind, not enjoyed in the immediate past. Furthermore, as we noted earlier, contemporary literature played its part in schoolroom and university, and current Irish writers had their work represented in school anthologies and discussed in the academic journals. There were also more bookshops in the country. Indeed, many medium-sized towns now boasted a bookshop in which works by Irish authors received well-advertised shelf space.4 Small literary magazines, often the work of groups of young people, sprang up and lived for a few editions as in other parts of the English-speaking world, indicating that a good deal of literary ambition existed.
Nevertheless, for the writer the period was essentially problematic. The public roles which had stimulated the most serious writers in the post revolutionary period, compact of isolation or exile and heroic dissent, seemed no longer appropriate or indeed possible. Nor was a public art of any kind (whether critical or celebratory), for the writer most often experienced a sense of dissociation from the ways in which society presently defined itself. His or her own private obsessions and the social world he or she inhabited were oddly at variance, and no ideology or coherently enabling Irish literary tradition offered modes of thought and feeling to bridge the gap. And he or she could neither achieve the sane sceptical balance of Austin Clarke’s mature social analysis nor the sense of individual liberation in a provincial society which was the essence of Patrick Kavanagh’s late achievement. Accordingly the predominant poetic form in the 1960s and ’70s was the lyric of personal, often painful, psychic exploration, in which the poet sought significance in immediacy of the self rather than in mediated political and historical experience or in any kind of coherent philosophy. The poet Thomas Kinsella, writing in 1966, defined the mood which he thought was general in postwar Europe:
The most sensitive individuals have been shaken loose from society into disorder, conscious of a numbness and dullness in themselves, a pain of dislocation and loss…Everywhere in modern writing the stress is on personal visions of the world…The detailed exploration of private miseries is an expedition into the interior to find out what may guide us in the future. It is out of ourselves and our wills that the chaos comes, and out of ourselves that some order must be constructed.5
Private life was the primary concern of novelists in the period too. Following the decades when Irish novelists felt themselves peculiarly bound to employ the novel and the short story as the tools of surgical analysis of an apparently diseased Irish reality, and when that reality provided them with a ready if narrowly intense subject matter, the 1960s and ’70s, with their more liberal and even indifferent climate and their more varied social scene, allowed novelists to reflect on individual human experience rather than on the distinctive oddities of Irish life. While their new circumstances necessarily reduced their sense of immediate social significance, the retreat to privacy in Irish fiction, in which the local environment could be taken for granted (inasmuch as recent social changes had reduced its uniqueness), bore fruit in work of a more variegated emotional and psychic weather than was the case in earlier years. That familiar figure of twentieth-century Irish fiction, the adolescent young man discovering the all-encompassing nets of religion, nation, and family and seeking to escape the oppressive constraints of Irish society still appeared, but with less frequency. Other, more interesting characters now peopled the pages of current Irish fiction. And in these pages, as the critic Maurice Harmon remarked, “the emphasis [was] not so much on the nature of the environment as on the private graph of feeling within the individual person.”6
The Irish dramatist in an even more obvious fashion than the poet or novelist benefited from the improved economic climate. The new Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which was completed in 1966, was fairly well supported by state funds and from 1971 onward a revivified Gate Theatre also attracted state support.7 Theatres like the Focus and the theatre associated with the Dublin Project Arts Centre could also depend on public support, as could the annual Dublin Theatre Festival. The 1970s were notable therefore as the period when Irish theatre attracted a greater degree of public financial support than it had ever done before.
Like the poet and novelist, Irish dramatists found the new context both an opportunity and a challenge. Granted indirect support for creative work in a way that was unthinkable until then, they nevertheless felt their role to be much less clear than it had been in the past. Indeed the 1940s and ’50s in Ireland had been years when Irish drama, despite some signs of life, had been conventional to a degree that even the realistic novel and short story had not been. In those years various Irish dramatists had satisfied a public taste at the Abbey Theatre for kitchen comedies and well-made plays of small-town Irish life. One critic designated those decades as the period when “formula triumphed over talent,”8 and the playwright Hugh Leonard in a caustic phrase dismissed them as the era of “parish-pump Ibsenism” when “Irish theatre…concerned itself with Irishmen first and men later.”9 What characterized many of these plays was an underlying complacency shared by playwrights and audience alike that the society depicted, despite the frequent grotesqueries of action they presented, was fundamentally sound. By the late 1960s and ’70s it was obvious that such conventional drama, with its complacent message for a complacent audience was, not before time, entirely moribund.
In its place came an effort on the part of such dramatists as Brian Friel, Thomas Murphy, and Thomas Kilroy to discover new themes and to exploit new theatrical techniques. Christopher Murray in his thoughtful essay, “Irish Drama in Transition 1966–1978,” identified four aspects in which drama in this period in Ireland broke new ground: sexual themes were treated with explicit frankness; religion was explored “radically, as a metaphysical rather than as a socially conservative question”;10 an embryonic working-class theatre brought political commitment on to the Irish stage; and the explosive issue of Irish republicanism and the Northern conflict charged some Irish plays with immediate and painful contemporaneity. Dramatists were attentive to the development of modern European and American theatre in their efforts to renew Irish drama. A “rather restless search after innovation”11 in fact characterized theatrical life, particularly in the 1970s.
Painters and sculptors enjoyed a new if often superficial regard amid the comparative affluence of the period. The work of the Irish Living Art Exhibitions from the 1940s onward had created a small body of private patrons, willing to collect Irish paintings in the modern mode. The Exhibitions displayed the work of Irish artists alongside that of their European contemporaries, thereby playing a critical educational role. The fruits of this were that when a new affluent middle class, in the 1960s and ’70s, chose to express its social dominance and self-esteem through the purchase and possession of art works, the modern idiom in which most Irish artists to one degree or another wished to work had become widely acceptable (in a way which was not the case with literature and drama) and had indeed been touched by the gloss of fashion. Commercial art galleries were established in city and suburb; exhibition openings were attended by politicians and a public anxious for cultural respectability, and amid much crass commercialism, individuals and institutions (among them the Arts Council, Trinity College, Dublin, the banks, and the cigarette manufacturers, P. J. Carroll Ltd.) assembled carefully selected collections of contemporary Irish painting. For the individual artists, this new public awareness of their activities meant that, although it remained desperately hard to make any kind of decent living solely through painting or sculpting in Ireland,12 at least there was the chance that their work would be purchased and might indeed be exhibited in Ireland.
What the collections of Irish paintings in the period revealed was that since the 1930s, and particularly since the early 1940s, Irish art had been notable for a range, diversity, and energy that became fully clear only when such collections were assembled and when art critics and historians began the novel and difficult task of assessment and explanation.13 This work of assembly and of criticism of recent or current art (which we detected in embryo in the periodical Envoy) established the general, historical outlines of a flourishing modern Irish art in which many individual artists who began work in the 1930s and ’40s were joined in the late 1960s and ’70s by a further generation of younger painters and sculptors. But no clear-cut school or national mode emerged despite the efforts of some critics to discern such.
Most of this new work, however, did not make an impact beyond Irish shores. For modern art in Ireland lacked both critical mass and the kind of institutional presence that would have allowed Irish painters and sculptors to have seen their work exhibited as of right alongside that of their international contemporaries in the galleries of London, Paris and New York. The Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin largely rested on the laurels it had gained with the Lane bequest and lacked the will to raise the profile of Irish modern art beyond Irish shores. It was the Rosc (Irish for “the poetry of vision”) exhibitions in Dublin which by the end of the period had begun to place art in Ireland on the kind of international stage Irish literature in English had enjoyed since the era of Joyce and Yeats (in the 1960s and ’70s the flood of Joyce and Yeats criticism, particularly in North America, was in full spate). For these exhibitions managed to attract international publicity and attention to the practice of art in Ireland in a way that had scarcely occurred before in the century.
Initially the Rosc exhibitions – brainchild of the architect Michael Scott – did not include modern Irish artists, but the presentation of the work of internationally renowned artists alongside artifacts from Irish antiquity was enormously inspiring for many younger artists in the country and exciting for visiting critics and viewers alike. The first Rosc exhibition, which ran from October 1967 until January 1968 in a large space in the Royal Dublin Society in Ballsbridge in Dublin and in the National Museum, attracted large numbers of visitors to see work by “the most famous living artists of the time.”14 A second Rosc was mounted in 1971 to critical acclaim as a rhythm of about four-yearly events was set in motion. In 1980 Irish artists took a substantial place for the first time in the exhibition of that year, which meant that their work came to the attention of international critics who visited Dublin for the Congress of the International Association of Art Critics meeting in Dublin at the time of the exhibition.
The changed relationship of Irish writers and artists with their society which we have been examining, did therefore seem to suggest that real social changes were afoot in the country. No longer did artists and writers find themselves able or willing to work in anything like a distinctive national mode, nor did they feel themselves able to mount a social criticism of a society with clearly defined targets for attack.
Paradoxically, this disinclination on the part of artists and writers to fulfil clearly defined social and national roles coexisted with demands that they do so. As Irish people began to sense their changing circumstances, and as the Northern crisis challenged much that they had taken for granted about the national life, it was the artist and particularly the writer who was often expected to provide some kind of guidance as to the way forward. Writers were therefore asked to reflect quite specifically on their intuitive sense of the substance of Irish identity and on how that bore on the struggle in the North. But with very few exceptions, most writers were wholly resistant to the demand that they provide anything like answers to the kinds of questions which were (as we saw) debated so strenuously. Rather, they resolutely continued to explore the private worlds of their own obsessions, regarding their work in the context of modern literature as a whole, and at most offered experimental works (the sequence of poems of John Montague and Thomas Kinsella, The Rough Field and Nightwalker; the experimental novels of Francis Stuart, Memorial and A Hole in the Head, the plays of Brian Friel, are all examples) which suggested the complex, variegated, transitional nature of Irish experience.
So if, as Thomas Kilroy remarked, Irish writing had as a recurrent theme “not so much the experience of participating in modern life as the anguished process of adapting to it, given a quite dissimilar and distant starting-point,”15 it was only inasmuch as private life was marked by that anguish. And in admitting this theme to their work, most writers had little desire to attempt any new full-scale restatement of Irish national life which would relate private experience to public definitions of identity, despite hopes that they would do so. In fact some of them vigorously rejected that possibility. “Let us be rid at last,” wrote the poet Eavan Boland, for example,
…of any longing for cultural unity, in a country whose most precious contribution may be precisely its insight into the anguish of disunity; let us be rid of any longing for imaginative collective dignity in a land whose final and only dignity is individuality.
For there is, and at last I recognize it, no unity whatsoever in this culture of ours. And even more important, I recognize that there is no need whatsoever for such unity. If we search for it we will, at a critical moment, be mutilating with fantasy once again the very force we should be liberating with reality.’16
If therefore Irish writers and artists fought shy of attempting any too explicit exploration of the theme of national identity in the 1960s and ‘70s, a concern with the relationship of the arts and the social order by contrast characterized much literary and cultural discussion. Indeed, from the 1960s onwards critics frequently pondered whether or not current writing and art reflected the changing, increasingly urban facts of Irish experience and if any traditional or novel form of national identity could be discerned as a unifying influence on the variegated artistic productions of the period. The critic Seamus Deane (who provided some of the most stimulating analyses of the relationship of literature and society in this period)17 cast a cold eye on these possibly self-indulgent and certainly repetitive cultural dialectics. He did so in terms which might easily have been extended to include all the kinds of issues – social, political, and religious – that we touched on in the preceding chapter, as well as those that have concerned us in this one. Reflecting on a series of articles in two issues of a recently founded critical periodical, in which a succession of young critics and scholars had addressed themselves to the problem of tradition and identity in Irish literature, Deane felt himself driven to a reductive questioning of such preoccupations. Perhaps they were merely a reactionary response (though sometimes couched in the rhetoric of radicalism) to the all too real social and ideological difficulties which arose when an oversimplified anachronistic conception of Irish identity and history was found no longer to fit experience in an Ireland confronted by the Northern crisis and by “the problem of adjusting a hard-won, single-minded version of Irish identity to the complex realities of modern Europe.”18 They may have been over-literary forms of consolation, evasions, refusals to face Ireland’s actual problems and revolutionary needs. “We may,” suggested Deane, “be defending a new status quo in the delusion that we are radically revising an old tradition.”19 Debates about literary and artistic culture could be, he argued, forms of nostalgia for a period when it seemed literature and art had explicit roles in defining Irish identity itself or in heroically resisting suppression, before rapid social change forced writers and artists to the periphery of society.
Perhaps, however, as Deane himself allowed, the matter was not so depressingly simple. For it is possible to read such discussions about Irish identity, conducted in literary and artistic terms, as merely particular expressions of a more general intellectual current that only began to flow with any real vigour in Ireland in the 1970s. This I take to be a steadily increasing urge toward an informed Irish self-understanding, a critical concern for origins and for contemporary fact and a desire to comprehend and accept modern Ireland in its fullness which marked Irish intellectual life in the latter four decades of the century. It was in the 1960s and ’70s, as we noted, that the historiographical revolution, begun in the 1930s, bore its real harvest. Economic and social history began to be added to constitutional and political history as foci of historical concern. In social anthropology and social geography, the pioneering work of Arensberg and Kimball was being followed by further studies of Irish social patterns. The artistic and literary traditions attracted increasing numbers of Irish historians and critics. The study of religion admitted sociology as a tool and the literary imagination as a guide. At a popular level, books and pamphlets about Irish craftwork, folklore, music, design, architecture, shop fronts, town planning, and natural history raised Irish self-awareness to an informed level it had not possessed in the early decades of independence. In a country that remained small and intimate in scale, there was a new openness to the inheritance of the past which had rejected much of the prejudice and many of the entrenched attitudes so characteristic of earlier decades. A healthy eclecticism was characteristic of the contemporary cultural scene, and a youthful enthusiasm remained a principal feature of the social atmosphere in a country that still reckoned itself one of the ex-colonial nations at the beginning of its life. With a confidence bred of twenty years of economic improvement, large numbers of young people were expectant of a worthwhile future and dismissive of the ideological constraints that in more hesitant years had inhibited cultural and social experiment.
So, when Seamus Deane wrote in 1979 that “there is no emergent, systematic and organic reformulation either of Irish tradition, Irish dilemmas, or Irish problems,”20 he was underestimating, I think, the significance of much activity in various humanistic fields of study in the 1960s and ’70s. The body of work which would in the 1980s and ’90s allow the concept of Irish Studies to gain national and international academic credibility was beginning to be published (by the 1990s the literature on Ireland’s cultural and historical inheritance had increased exponentially). This was characterized by a new sense of proportion, bred of an awareness of historical and archaeological time, a sense of duration (this has been especially true of the human geographers) and by comparative perspectives and a disinclination to adapt findings to any immediate national imperative.
The change in consciousness of Irish identity that such work represented gave expression indeed to a kind of practical pluralism, in which a deepening knowledge of the country’s diverse and complex past and present could act as a sustaining resource amid the challenges that lay ahead.