Literary Criticism: The UCD Aesthetic is no ordinary collection of essays about fine literature. It is also an advertisement for a brand. The two formats, one hesitant and humanist, the other assertive and proprietary, do not sit easily together.
The university is proud to trace its origins back to the Catholic University in 1854, to the Royal University in 1879, and to the Jesuit-run University College in 1882, before the emergence of UCD proper as one part of the National University of Ireland in 1908.
Therefore, the volume includes among its UCD writers John Henry Newman as the founding genius of the Catholic University, and Gerald Manley Hopkins as an unhappy Jesuit teacher at University College, both graduates of the University of Oxford.
Besides these special cases, that kick start the national process, all the writers included in this volume are Irish. They represent the largely Catholic and middle-class intake of UCD over its long history.
Negotiating with Catholicism, with its subtle philosophies and aesthetics no less than with its pervasive social control, is a determining element for many of the writers in this volume. So too is their negotiating with the emergent, middle-class State that both enables and disables their ambition. The demands of a new national history and an old national religion are emphasized here as key elements in the making of Denis Devlin, Kate O'Brien, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Aidan Carl Mathews, and many others who graduated from a university that defines itself, in the words of its historian Donal McCarthy, as A National Idea.
The volume divides into three chronological sections that chime with that national idea. Under the rubric of 'The Early Years, 1854-1916' Thomas McDonagh, James Joyce and Mary Colum complete an initial grouping (with Newman and Hopkins). Austin Clarke, Denis Devlin, Mary Lavin and John Montague, with others, span two or three generations that find themselves 'In A New State, 1916-1959'. John McGahern, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Joseph O'Connor and Emma Donoghue enjoy with Marina Carr and Roddy Doyle the 'Decades of Diversity, 1959-2004'. The volume is one part of the celebration by UCD of 150 years that have witnessed, in its own words, its "unequalled influence on the literary, economic, social, political, scientific, academic and legal development of Ireland". There is little room nowadays for understatement in the marketing of universities. The volume boasts 28 writers who exemplify this influence, no matter what anxieties they may have felt about it. No architects, visual artists, engineers or musicians find space within this notion of the aesthetic.
The national habit of accounting literature the sum total of the civic arts persists. It is not the purpose of this volume to question: its purpose is to consolidate and to describe. The absence of an index and of running heads leaves the reader at a loss to investigate connections.
Some authors appear twice, by virtue of the elegant decision of the editor to ask, for example, Colm Tóibín to write about Anthony Cronin, and John McCourt to write about Colm Tóibín. Several excellent essays are included. Catriona Clutterbuck writes movingly about the hesitations and successes of teaching Thomas Kinsella to large undergraduate audiences. Gerardine Meaney highlights Kate O'Brien's defence of her university as "a place of argument, of silence, of perplexity", a phrase that quietly combats the volume's advertising thrust of "galaxy", "brilliant generation", and "dazzling achievements".
Several of the portraits are intimate and informative, such as that by Caroline Walsh on her mother, Mary Lavin. Others are sensitive to the milieu of the young writer amongst university friends, such as that by Christopher Murray on Thomas Kilroy. Others again are exquisitely balanced and analytic, such as that by JCC Mays on Brian Coffey and the brief turbulent period of six weeks early in 1938, when Coffey in Paris supplanted Samuel Beckett as the lover of Peggy Guggenheim and defined suddenly his own poetic method. Taura Napier is fascinating on the international reputation achieved by Mary Colum as literary critic and translator, and the peculiar logic by which her work is constrained. Colum derided "tightly-knit artistic circles" that the public could not understand and who cared nothing for the public's aesthetic needs. She was pleased to express herself about "everything under the sky" and was determined to make herself accessible to an increasingly diverse readership. At the same time, paradoxically, she was scornful of "popular" literature (airport novels, for example) that appeared to be too close to the values of the marketplace.
This double-bind of the university writer and essayist perhaps explains the awkward omissions from this volume. There is little recognition here of extraordinary graduate writers fallen from public visibility: Mervyn Wall, John Jordan, Patrick Sheeran, Des Hogan. There is little recognition of UCD associated writers whose publications are overwhelmed by history: Pádraig Pearse, Ernie O'Malley. And most remarkable of all, there is no recognition of the UCD author whose aesthetic ensures that she outsells each year all the writers that are included in The UCD Aesthetic: Maeve Binchy. Indeed, Binchy is read more widely, globally, than all 28 writers taken together. But she remains outside that circle of friends.
To enumerate the insiders is also to throw into relief those on the outside. When called to account, it is remarkable how many Irish writers did not attend UCD, or indeed did not go to university at all.
Figures of national importance, such as WB Yeats, Sean O'Casey, George Bernard Shaw and Patrick Kavanagh, did not make it to third level. The Dubliner Paul Durcan travelled from Dartmouth Square to UCC. Seamus Heaney went to Queen's University Belfast, and Brian Friel to Maynooth. JM Synge from Wicklow, Thomas MacGreevy from Kerry, and Samuel Beckett from Foxrock, chose Trinity. Máirtín Ó Cadhain from beyond Spiddal went to St Pat's, Drumcondra. The County Galway catholic Edward Martyn and the Belfast protestant Louis MacNeice arrived at the Oxford of Newman and Hopkins.
The mingling of graduates of different universities and of non-university authors is perhaps most visibly contagious and productive in the fact that Beckett was the ideal reader of Joyce, Coffey the ideal reader of Beckett, Kinsella the ideal reader of Yeats, and Marina Carr of Synge. Without their disregard for brand names, without their immersion in each other and their re-writing of each other, there would have been no dynamic aesthetic or perplexity in the literatures of modern Ireland.
Kevin Barry is professor of English literature at NUI, Galway
The UCD Aesthetic: Celebrating 150 Years of UCD Writers Edited by Anthony Roche New Island, 298pp. €20