Mist and matins
Aidan Carl Mathews
Celtic Dawn: A Portrait of the Irish Literary Renaissance Ulick O'Connor (Hamish Hamilton £12.95)
Yeats liked to think of his cronies as Olympians, not least because a man's best known by the company he keeps. Ulick O'Connor's Celtic Dawn does likewise, though the view it takes of the Irish pan- theon tends, at its most outlandish, to be neither Greek nor Roman but Judaeo- Christian. As Maud Gonne toiled among the dispossessed peasants of the Western seaboard, we learn that they 'reached out to touch the hem of her coat'; a bird-brain tenant of Lady Gregory deems his benefac- tress to be 'plain and simple as the Mother of God'; and George Moore steals everyone's thunder (it was a lifelong hobby) by writing to young Willie Yeats as one Baptist to another Messiah.
This book's title is enough to invoke a quasi-religious nimbus, an atmosphere of mist and matins. Perhaps that explains why the author's prose-style, pert and frisky for the most part, slips its moorings from time to time and mounts up into dactylic altitudes where the air gets very thin indeed. Among the other warmed-over assumptions to which the book rises excitedly are the odd notion of a 'national being', and that silliest of contrasts, the one which opposes Celtic dash to Saxon plod. Worst of all, almost everybody's eyes get a mention: Parnell's are 'magnetic', O'Grady's `roguish', Lady Gregory's 'limpid', and so on. At least none of them flash fire.
Reverence isn't the whole story; roguery creeps in too. For Celtic Dawn isn't just the aide-memoire of a doting secretary; it's also the serial expose of a sacked groundsman, a glimpse of the Big House from the gate- lodge. The book breeds anecdote with an almost indecent fecundity.
O'Connor doesn't have to strain his powers of invention. A lot of the work's been done for him already. Those demi- gods of the Irish Literary Renaissance seem to have been massproducing punchlines. O'Connor adores this kind of fare, the heated (and sometimes reheated) repartee of wits and wags.
Alas, he hasn't yet learned to distinguish between a deathless canard and vital infor- mation, with the result that Celtic Dawn is everywhere densely factual and nowhere profoundly true. It may be that O'Connor takes his subject too seriously, or not seriously enough; the problem may even be that he does both at the same time. At any rate, he transforms the avatars into a riot of Titans and scallywags, instead of seeing them as the scratch-cast of a cultural drama. In the process, they become larger than life and therefore less than human. Poor George Moore ends up as a cross bet- ween the Three Musketeers and the Marx Brothers. Every surface feature is remark- ed; but the deep current is missed.
O'Connor has neither a philosophy of history nor a sociology of culture (and why should he?). He must therefore depend upon vital statistics and funny-sad stories to provide his book with a narrative structure. But anecdotes about the illustrious are beside the point. Yeats wasn't human because he cheated at croquet, snubbed the parvenu, or milked his patrons. He was human because he wrote The Tower.
The tyranny of the anecdote acknowledges one law, that of diminishing returns. The trouble is, O'Connor has nothing to put in its place. A Jungian vapour fumigates Celtic Dawn, but it never quite condenses into either a method of analysis or a model of analogy. To be sure, much psychologising is often, at heart, jealousy of another man's good name, but it is necessary to ask searching questions of the Irish Literary Revivalists, and this O'Connor won't do. Why did Yeats pro- strate himself at the feet of a heartless nar- cissist? What explains George Moore's shuttlecocking between cultures? How could a humanitarian like A.E. devote his choicest energies to the occult when he lived in a city that had Europe's highest infant mortality rate?
O'Connor isn't saying. More to the point, he isn't even asking. Faced with the most fertile of conundrums — a Revival which recruited heavily from the very class it sought to expunge, a posture of rebellion which never matured into a revolutionary stance — he prefers instead to stalk the next bon mot. Whether he reverences or ridicules his subjects doesn't really matter. From first to last they remain divine presences, a logjam of totem poles. O'Con- nor has forgotten to remember — or remembered to forget — that the artist is extraordinary only because he is more, not less, ordinary than the rest of us.
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