WAS there such a thing (definitely the past tense) as an Anglo Irish sensibility? Yeats, famously, thought so and he made his lists of exemplary figures Burke, Berkeley, Swift, Parnell and the rest in a sort of rage, knowing that it was becoming extinct even as he wrote.
Hubert Butler was not only sure of what it was, his essays (of which this is the fourth and final volume) are both marvellous illustrations of how it worked and a record of what happened to it in Ireland in this century. He died in 1991. I wonder what he would make of us now, struggling to put together a secular, social morality for a pluralist state and trying to finally settle, if it is ever possible, the relationship between Anglo and Irish, deconstructing, as it were, that uniting/dividing hyphen? Perhaps the Ireland that Butler dreamed of can only come into existence when the term Anglo Irish becomes redundant and the values of independent thought which he stood for become commonplace.
The book, like its predecessors, has essays on Ireland, Irish literature and hagiographies (of one kind or another), European literature, biblical studies and, of course, Mitteleuropa, more particularly that dark area once known as Yugoslavia. It also includes two memorable pieces by Neal Acheson and the late Joseph Brodsky which make it clear why Butler, so splendidly served in his final years by Lilliput Press, is now so widely read outside Ireland.
He begins at the local and ends with a comprehension of this total, terrible century of European history, now coming to an end. To move from Kilkenny County Council to Croatian pogroms is but a side step for him, the moral centre remaining absolute, the issue the same, that of personal freedom, whatever the difference in the scale of repression. Chekhov is here, which brings back one of the too few conversations I had with Hubert Butler. Brodsky says he's the best English translator of The Cherry Orchard. But this is the Chekhov of Saldialin, the penal island, gulag Chekhov, somehow retaining all his expansive humanity as he accurately records the inhumane and the start up of the monstrous engine of our modernity.
The Anglo Irish essays here include Kilkenny theatre during the Napoleonic Wars, the 18th century patriot Henry Flood, the Huguenots of Gowran, and a number of personal testaments, the most significant being "Wolfe Tone and the Common Name of Irishman", and a piece on Shaw which first appeared in this newspaper in 1947. Butler the intellectual is a model of the Anglo Irish kind, a figure in suspension between two seemingly irreconcilable cultures, the parent English and the native Irish, a see saw condition which involved ingenious strategies of the imagination and intelligence, producing, in the process, that extraordinary literature over two and a half centuries.
Yeats understood this condition as a form of freedom, a cool remove from the subject matter whether it be Anglo or Irish, a creative distancing which drew upon the reserves of control, intellectual passion and consciousness of form within Anglo Irish culture itself. Butler exemplifies all this to a high degree.
There is also the humour, impish, ironic, a joy in the inexhaustible surprises of life. Here an essay on the unlikely subject of puns in the Bible begins "The Christian Science Reading Room in Philadelphia is a pleasant place to relax in between Greyhound buses, and once I spent an hour there." But, beware this is a tough writer who has stern things to say about the country which we put together here in the South after Independence. The question is, can we absorb his values now that he and his culture have passed away?