Postwar Literature
Ireland in the late 1940s and 1950s suffered severe economic recession and another wave of emigration began. Added to this, the people had in 1937 passed a constitution - still operational today - which enshrined the Catholic Church's teachings in the laws of the land. Intolerance and xenophobia were bolstered by an economic war against Britain and a campaign of state censorship which was truly Stalinist in its vigour. Books which had never been read were snipped, shredded and scorched by committees of pious civil servants. No history of postwar Irish literature would be complete without at least a mention of The Bell , a highly influential but now defunct literacy magazine. In its two runs, between 1940 and 1948 and 1950 and 1954, it was a forum for writers like Frank O'Connor (1903-66), Sean O Faolain (1900-91) and Liam O'Flaherty (1897-1984), all of whom were veterans of the independence war, and all of whom became outstanding short-story writers. They chronicled the raging betrayal they felt at state censorship and social intolerance - O'Connor's Guests of the Nation (1931) is perhaps the most eloquent epitaph for Ireland's revolutionary generation, a terrifying tale of the execution of two British soldiers by the IRA that influenced Brendan Behan's The Hostage (1958) enormously. The Bell also opened its pages to writers like Peadar O'Donnell (1893-1985), a radical socialist who, only six months before he died, publicly burned his honorary degree from the National University of Ireland on the occasion of a similar honour being conferred on Ronald Reagan. In an infamous speech President Eamonn de Valera envisaged a new rural Ireland full of "comely maidens dancing at the crossroads and the laughter of athletic youths". But writers such as Denis Devlin (1908-59), Francis Stuart (1902-90), Mary Lavin (1912-96) and Brian Moore (1921-99) took up the fight for truth against propaganda. Their youths and maidens didin't dance. They were too busy packing their bags, or wandering in bewilderment across the desolate pages of an Ireland that had failed to live up to its possibilities. In their poetry Austin Clarke (1896-1974) and Thomas Kinsella (b. 1928) mourned the passing of hope into despair and fragmentation. Patrick Kavanagh (1906-67) was an exception to all the rules. His poetry is almost entirely parochial, celebrating what he called "the spirit-shocking wonder of a black slanting Ulster hill", and his contemplative celebrations of the ordinary made him perhaps Ireland's best-loved poet. But as time went on, the harshness of relaity began to press in on his work. His long poem The Great Hunger (1942) portrays rural Ireland - the same Ireland he had formerly extolled - as physically barren, with the blasted landscape an incisive metaphor for sexual repression. Its publication was widely condemned and the writer was even questioned by the police, an event he discussed with customary venom in his own short-lived journal, Kavanagh's weekly . The forces of reaction were again about to wage war on Irish literature. O'Casey's anti-clerical play The Drums of Father Ned was produced in Dublin in 1955 and received aggressive reviews. Three years later there was a proposal to revive it for the new Dubin Theatre Festival. The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, insisted that the plans be dropped, and when the trade unions stepped into the fray on his behalf, he succeeded. The year before, the young director Alan Simpson had been arrested and his entire cast threatened with imprisonment for indecency following the first night in Dublin of Tennessee Williams's play The Rose Tattoo . The important novelist John McGahern (b. 1935) lost his teaching job in a Catholic school in 1966 following the publication of his second book, The Dark (1965), which was immediately banned. It's a marvellous novel, dealing tenderly with adolescence and clerical celibacy. A more celebrated literary victim-in this case a self-destructive one-was Brendan Behan , who died in 1964, only six years after the publication of his first book, Borstal Boy . He spent the last years of his life as a minor celebrity, reciting his books into tape recorders in Dublin pubs, drunk and surrounded by equally drunk admirers, some of whom sobered up for long enough to try and save him from becoming the victim of his own myth.
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