Thomas Macgreevy, Sean O'faolain and Samuel Beckett in the 1930S. Moss, Rhiannon Sarah
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Irish modernism in an international frame: Thomas MacGreevy, Sean O'Faolain and Samuel Beckett in the 1930s. Moss, Rhiannon Sarah The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author For additional information about this publication click this link. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/jspui/handle/123456789/1592 Information about this research object was correct at the time of download; we occasionally make corrections to records, please therefore check the published record when citing. For more information contact [email protected] 1 Irish Modernism in an International Frame: Thomas MacGreevv, Sean Q'Faolain and Samuel Beckett in the 1930s by Rhiannon Sarah Moss Submitted for PhD Examination Queen Mary, University of London September 2009 2 Abstract In 1930s Ireland, modernist writing developed at a conjuncture of national and international influences. The second generation of Irish modernism responded to national culture in the context of international debates about literary form. The purpose of this thesis is to present a nuanced understanding of the relationship between Irish and European literary discourse in the work of Thomas MacGreevy, Sean O'Faolain and Samuel Beckett: three writers who formulated Irish writing within a self-consciously international frame. Drawing on recent critical approaches to modern Irish writing and on contemporary theories of modernism, this thesis argues that Irish writing in the 1930s reflected many of the debates and tensions in international modernism. In the first decades of independence, attitudes to literary form, to cultural nationalism, and to the role of the writer in the public sphere were being reshaped. These attitudes formed the basis of alternative formulations of Irish modernism. The three writers considered here approached the relationship between Ireland and Europe from different perspectives, and figured the possibilities of international influence on national literary culture in diverse ways. Consideration of the national and international networks of influence underlying the aesthetic projects of MacGreevy, O'Faolain and Beckett illuminates their 1930s writing, and has broader implications for the understanding of Irish literary culture. The first chapter argues that MacGreevy's critical writing formulated a national version of conservative modernism. MacGreevy combined Catholic and republican attitudes with a high modernist approach to the role of art in mass democracy. The second chapter focuses on O'Faolain's realist aesthetic in relation to contemporary debates about modernism and realism. O'Faolain's attitude to national culture developed from a conflict between artistic integrity and social responsibility which reflected tensions in both national and international literary discourse. The third chapter contextualises Beckett's 1930s fiction in the avant gardist elements of Irish literary culture, and argues that his aesthetic developed as a specifically national manifestation of late modernism. 3 Contents Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 5 1. Thomas MacGreevy: Modernism. Catholicism and Nationalism 34 1.1 MacGreevy's 'cultural republic': Ireland and Europe 46 1.2 Richard Aldington: Anglicisation and mass culture 57 1.3 James Joyce and T.S. Eliot: Modernism and Catholicism 75 1.4 W.B. Yeats and Jack B. Yeats: Modernism and cultural nationalism 95 2. Sean O'Faolain: Realism and the Public Intellectual 108 2.1 Realism and national culture 118 2.2 Ireland TO-Day: The role of the public intellectual 133 2.3 The realist novel 154 2.4 O'Faolain and modernism 176 3. Samuel Beckett and the Irish avant garde 181 3.1 Modernist fiction and national identity 191 3.2 Beckett's Dublin 208 3.3 The Gate Theatre: the modernist institution and national culture 229 3.4 Mary Manning, Denis Johnston and Beckett's late modernism 243 Conclusion 258 Bibliography 266 4 Acknowledgements This research has been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to whom I am immensely grateful. I would also like to thank the University of London Central Research Fund and Queen Mary, University of London, for additional financial support. I am grateful to the British Library, the National Library of Ireland, Trinity College Library Manuscript Department and the University of Reading for access to their collections and for the assistance of librarians and archivists. My primary thanks go to Professor Clair Wills for her inspirational supervision and inexhaustible patience. Bill Schwartz and Dr Ben Levitas have also provided invaluable guidance on sections of this thesis. I would like to thank the academic and administrative staff at Queen Mary, University of London, for their assistance and support. I am also grateful to the organisers and participants of the London Irish Seminar and of the Irish Seminar at the Keough Naughton Institute of Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame. Among the family and friends who have contributed in innumerable ways to this project, special thanks go to my parents Peter and Marilyn Moss, and to Neil Robinson. 5 Introduction Modernist writing in 1930s Ireland has been the subject of much recent critical interest. Implicit in the debate about the significance of modernism in Irish culture is the extent to which Irish writing was related to contemporary developments in international literary discourse. The pressures of cultural nationalism in the decades following independence have been seen to have isolated Ireland from the debates surrounding aesthetics and politics which shaped 1930s writing in Britain and Europe. I contend that Irish writing in the 1930s developed in relation to both national and international frames of reference. The tensions, perspectives, and preoccupations which dominated plural formulations of modernism internationally operated distinctively in the context of Irish literary culture. The three writers considered here developed alternative conceptions of literary form in relation to national culture and to international aesthetic discourse. Thomas MacGreevy, Sean Q'Faolain and Samuel Beckett understood national culture in conscious relation to Europe. Their diverse expressions of the nature of Irish literary culture reflected international debates about aesthetic autonomy and literary responsibility. The aesthetic projects of all three represent the ways in which Irish writing engaged with developments in literary culture internationally. Analysis of their 1930s careers reveals the range of interactions between Ireland and Europe, and renders more complex the nature of a national culture often defined by its isolation. Irish writing in the 1930s is often studied in relation to a conservative, repressive national culture. Joe Cleary has described the "iconic version of what is now called 'de Valera's Ireland'," in which the whole post-independence epoch before the lemassian turn has become practically a byword for a soul-killing Catholic nationalist traditionalism and in the parlance of much contemporary cultural debate 'de Valera's Ireland' now serves as a reflex shorthand for everything from 6 economic austerity to sexual Puritanism, from cultural philistinism to the abuse of women and children. 1 In literary terms, disillusionment with the conservative state which succeeded independence, the consolidation of the social power of the Church, puritanical morality and increasing distance between literary discourse and public attitudes have been seen to create an environment uniquely hostile to any literary engagement which did not confirm to dominant narratives of cultural nationalism. Such an environment has been seen to have distorted literary culture, resulting in a limited range of options available to the Irish writer. The conservative, insular nature of independent Ireland has been a defining narrative of cultural development between the wars. Alternatives to backward looking cultural nationalism have been recognised in the work of various writers. However, Ireland's cultural sphere is frequently defined by division. Not only is Irish public discourse seen as hostile to any but the most conservative representations of national culture, but those writers who formulated alternative cultural programmes are also divided into two separate strands. Realism has been discussed as the primary oppositional discourse in Irish writing, in which writers engaged with national culture used naturalistic portrayals of Irish society to challenge the distortions of repressive cultural nationalism. Realism was a dominant strand of Irish literary culture, but its critique of 'de Valera's Ireland' is itself usually considered as formally conservative, if not reactionary, and isolated from international literary discourse. While the congruencies between modernism and nationalism in the Revival period have received increasing critical recognition, Irish modernist writers in the 1930s have been defined by their alienation from national culture. Modernist poets have been seen as turning to Europe as an alternative to Ireland, and to the exploration of subjectivity as an alternative to social engagement. 1 Joe Cleary, Outrageous Fortune: Capital and Culture in Modern Ireland (Dublin: Field Day, 2007), p.7. 7 These lines of division encompass various dimensions of Irish literary culture in the 1930s. Consideration of Irish writing in the light of critical enquiries into international modernism allows a more complex picture to emerge. Modernism,