Fitzpatrick Solitary and Wild

Frederick MacNeice and the Salvation of Ireland
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-84351-314-8
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 436 Seiten

For lovers of the often dark and troubled poetry of Louis MacNeice, his father is a reassuring presence: solid, sober, pious yet tolerant, a Church of Ireland clergyman who was not afraid to reject the Ulster Covenant of 1912, denounce sectarianism, and even espouse Irish nationalism. This book originated in the discovery of one inconvenient fact. Frederick MacNeice (1866-1942) was not a Home Ruler but an all-Ireland Unionist, who for many years was an enthusiastic Orangeman in Dublin and then Ulster. In later life, especially as Bishop of Down after 1934, he set aside these connections in order to pursue intercommunal peace and tolerance in Belfast and beyond. Louis colluded with his father in reinterpreting his earlier career, as part of a process of personal reconciliation which profoundly affected his later poetry and autobiographical writings. The relationship between father and son is discussed in two chapters, and several well-known poems are reinterpreted in the light of fresh evidence. Above all, this is the biography of a visionary who never despaired of spreading salvation through the often derided Church of Ireland. Using unfamiliar archives and local newspapes as well as the writings of both father and son, this book reconstructs the disparate worlds in which Frederick MacNeice lived and worked. It also explores his muted responses to the suffering of his parents and siblings, the early death of his deeply depressed first wife, the benefits resulting from his second marriage and its consequences for his children. The figure that emerges is complex, guarded, astute, and remarkably effective in using religion to spread enlightenment. His life demonstrates that salvation deserves to be taken seriously as a motive force in modern Irish history.

DAVID FITZPATRICK is Professor of Modern History at Trinity College, Dublin. His works include Politics and Irish Life, 1913-1921, Provincial Experience of War and Revolution; The Two Irelands, 1912-1939; and Harry Boland's Irish Revolution. His edited collection of essays by members of the Trinity History Workshop, Terror in Ireland, 1916- 1923, was published by Lilliput Press.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fitzpatrick, David

Leseproben

1. His Son’s Father

I

‘Just another bourgeois liberal, I would have said. Although he was a great Home Ruler, in his day.’ Nick laughed. ‘Not a popular position for a Protestant clergyman, surely?’ ‘Carson hated him. Tried to stop him being made bishop.’ ‘There you are: a fighter.’1

This exchange appears in John Banville’s melodrama The Untouchable (1997), where Victor Maskell (Anthony Blunt’s world-weary double agent, incongruously grafted on to Louis MacNeice’s Irish roots) discusses his father with Nick, another hybrid figure who turns out to be the Fifth or Sixth Man. Banville’s account, though a travesty of what scholars have written about Frederick MacNeice, demonstrates the pervasiveness of his posthumous reputation as an heroic outsider within the ‘Black North’. Critics and biographers concur that Louis MacNeice’s attitudes towards religion, morality, politics, and above all Ireland, were profoundly influenced by those of his clergyman father. Louis was both attracted and repelled by the unity and humanity of his father’s world view, sustained by his serene faith in Christ as peacemaker and reconciler. The rector (later bishop) is almost universally portrayed as a tolerant if puritanical southerner, courageously opposing all forms of sectarianism and violence, abhorring both revolutionary republicanism and Ulster unionism, and supporting Home Rule.2 Admittedly, Frederick MacNeice’s early association with the Society for Irish Church Missions to the Roman Catholics, notorious for its ‘aggressive’ campaign of proselytism in both Connemara and Dublin, casts some doubt upon his liberal and non-sectarian credentials. However, it has been surmised that his parents’ bruising experience of sectarian conflict while missionary teachers on Omey Island, culminating in the family’s fabled flight in 1879, left Frederick (then thirteen years old) with a lifelong detestation of sectarian confrontation and intolerance.3 His mental world as an adult was that of a liberal Protestant nationalist, fundamentally at odds with the political outlook of his congregations and neighbours in Belfast and Carrickfergus.

Louis MacNeice’s supposed childhood experience of alienation within Protestant Ulster is often cited in explaining his youthful repudiation of its values and symbols, his romantic identification with the West of Ireland, and his sympathy with non-violent nationalist and anti-imperialist movements. By this account, while rejecting his father’s religion and morality, Louis paradoxically embraced much of his outlook on Ireland and Irish politics. The rector’s presumed support for Home Rule is crucial to this widely held analysis of the poet’s Irishness and political vision. Yet the supporting evidence is remarkably threadbare, being restricted to assertions by Louis himself, ambiguous utterances by his father in later life, and academic inferences based on possibly misleading extracts from published sermons and addresses. This book will assess the credibility of such interpretations, present fresh evidence indicating a very different political viewpoint, suggest reasons for the subsequent disregard of such evidence, and assess the consequences for our understanding of the poet’s Irishness and for our reading of some of his most celebrated works.

The most authoritative testimony to Frederick’s nationalism is that of his son, whose imaginative and finely embroidered autobiographical writings have been so widely accepted at face value as a reliable factual source: ‘My father was one of the very few Church of Ireland clergymen to be a Home Ruler. This was another reason for despising Co. Antrim and regarding myself as a displaced person. Sometimes this feeling caused an inner conflict in me.’4 Another passage implies that Frederick’s reputation as a Home Ruler was established before 1917, when his second wife was thought ‘very daring’ for having gone ‘so far afield as my father – especially as he was a Home Ruler’.5 These recollections were written in 1940, two decades after Home Rule had ceased to be a practical option (except for six counties of Ulster), and they reflect the 33-year-old poet’s renewed respect for his father and for many aspects of both southern Ireland and Ulster.

It is notable that Louis’s numerous evocations of his boyhood give no particular illustrations of his father’s nationalism, and that (according to Stallworthy) ‘neither his letters home [from preparatory school] nor his parents’ letters to him mention the worsening situation in Ireland’.6 When at home, he appears to have paid little attention to political conversations, for his older sister Elizabeth recalled that ‘there was so much talk in the house about Carson and the covenant that he must have heard it though he never in later years seemed to have memory of doing so. Of course, he heard the history of it later on.’ In his autobiography, Louis vaguely recalled having ‘heard political arguments’ before the Great War, which ‘were all about Orangemen and Home Rulers’. Elizabeth’s punctilious recollections of her parents and brother stop short of attributing nationalism to Frederick, while stating that ‘his political opinions differed widely’ from those of ‘the Northern people whom he served’.7 Louis was surely a less reliable witness to his father’s views. As a child and youth, he was strikingly incurious about most aspects of his father’s career and background. At the age of nineteen, when seeking a passport, he knew so little that he had to ask his stepmother (not, significantly, his father) for ‘the date and locality of Daddie’s birth’.8 It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Louis’s account of his father’s supposed nationalism was based on adult surmise rather than childhood observation.

It is a curious fact that Frederick MacNeice himself never advocated or endorsed Home Rule in his many published booklets and sermons. As Fauske has guardedly averred, ‘MacNeice had gone to Carrickfergus with a reputation as a Home Ruler, a reputation bolstered by his stance against the Covenant, but of his politics he actually said nothing in public throughout his life.’9 Though not strictly accurate, as we shall show, this assessment highlights the difficulty of defining the political stance of one whose politics were avowedly non-partisan. The only text that has been cited as a direct affirmation of nationalism, as distinct from a disavowal of party politics, is Frederick’s historical sketch of Carrickfergus (1928). In retrospect, he considered that ‘the extension of the franchise in 1884 made inevitable some form of Home Rule for Ireland’, and that subsequent elections ‘surely’ constituted ‘a writing on the wall’. MacNeice went on to dismiss Carson’s initial confidence that resistance in Ulster ‘could defeat, and not simply delay, the whole Home Rule policy’, and to deplore the growing acceptance of partition as the Ulster leaders themselves ‘began to think along Nationalist lines’.10 On the face of it, this analysis demonstrates that Frederick was not merely an opponent of partition, but a pragmatist who accepted, however reluctantly, the necessity for Home Rule. We shall return to the question of whether as a younger man he had indeed, like the prophet Daniel, accurately divined the ominous writing on the wall of Belshazzar’s palace, ‘mene, mene, tekel, upharsin’: ‘MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and brought it to an end. TEKEL; thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. PERES; thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and the Persians’ (Dan. 5: 25–8).

The practical proof of Frederick’s nationalism, liberalism and non-sectarianism, as expounded by a distinguished procession of MacNeicians, relates mainly to four episodes: his public repudiation of the Ulster Covenant in September 1912, his espousal of an ecumenical ‘League of Prayer for Ireland’ between 1920 and 1924, his initiation of a similar campaign in 1935–6 in response to renewed sectarian conflict in Belfast, and his successful resistance in the same period to the government’s proposal that the union flag should officiate perpetually over Carson’s tomb in St Anne’s Cathedral.11 In each case, scholars have drawn inferences from Frederick’s words and actions that are by no means self-evident. Opposition to the Ulster Covenant implied rejection of the threat of violence as a political tool, but not approval of any particular political programme. Collaboration with other Protestant clergymen, in two ecumenical and non-partisan campaigns for reconciliation, was likewise consistent with unionism as well as nationalism. Finally, Frederick’s refusal to sanctify Carson’s legacy in the form of a flag raises the issue of which aspect of Carson’s political career gave offence to his fellow southerner. In order to test the implications of these episodes for our understanding of Frederick MacNeice’s politics, we must first re-examine the historical record.

II

The chapters that follow reveal a more complex, equivocal, and formidable figure than the father evoked by his son’s writings, and hence by the scholars whom those writings have influenced. In his life’s journey from a remote schoolhouse in Connemara to a bishop’s...