Cultural History:A fascinating and brilliant cultural and social history of Ireland during the second World War.
The second World War involved many Irish writers in decisions that put their lives at risk and challenged them to test their principles in the crucible of action. Samuel Beckett's preference for France at war to Ireland at peace brought him to service in the resistance that almost made him a victim of the Gestapo. Louis MacNeice, who returned to London from a neutral United States lest he miss history, was to witness one of the worst bombings of the blitz (from the roof of St Paul's Cathedral), that might well have taken his life.
Francis Stuart, who removed to Germany in 1940, would witness the collapse of the Third Reich as Germany faced defeat and he possible arraignment as a Nazi collaborator.
Denis Johnston became a war correspondent, taking the BBC microphone to the military front. Elizabeth Bowen skirted the dangerous borders of espionage as she travelled between Britain and Ireland providing reports on Irish attitudes to neutrality and the British war effort to the Dominions Office and the Ministry of Information in London.
Brendan Behan's and Máirtín Ó Cadhain's republican activities meant they spent some war years in the hyper-isolation of the Curragh internment camp.
Even Sean O'Faolain's decision to found a literary/cultural periodical in Ireland was a matter of real risk. For in the first editorial of The Bell in October 1940, when a German invasion of the country was still imaginable, O'Faolain bravely announced, in his desire for inclusiveness: "Whosoever you are then, O reader, Gentile or Jew, Protestant or Catholic, priest or layman, Big House or Small House - THE BELL is yours." He must have known that such a sentiment in respect of a putative Jewish readership would in the event of Nazi occupation have marked him out for liquidation.
What is most striking about this set of decisions is their remarkable variety, starkly highlighted if we think of Beckett, MacNeice and Stuart, all in Ireland when war was declared in Britain in September 1939, all finding themselves not so very much later in Paris, London and Berlin respectively. Indeed the decisions taken by the many writers for whom the war represented a call to self-definition of one kind or another can be seen to bespeak the complexities of loyalty, commitment, uncertainty (for a time in 1939, for example, MacNeice thought he might remain in Ireland for the duration) and range of individual responses that were present in the nation at large during the Emergency.
So it seems right that Clair Wills, in this fascinating, brilliant cultural history of Ireland during the second World War, That Neutral Island (the designation is a variant on a phrase in a bitter poem by MacNeice), should choose to "allot a distinctive role to cultural and artistic expression in a broad sense, and in particular to poetry fiction and drama", not only because "many of Ireland's writers of the period have left us explicit and moving reflections of their own responses to neutrality" but because their variegated wartime careers reflected the variety of Irish reactions to war and neutrality in a fraught time. As a result of this there are very thoughtful accounts of literary texts in this volume, as for example the reading of Kavanagh's The Great Hunger as a poem of neutral, not simply Free State, Ireland or the account of Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille as a graveyard recreation of the deadening conditions of a marooned internment camp.
However, this declared authorial methodology belies somewhat what for this reader is one of the book's great strengths: its capacity to situate ideas and feelings about neutrality shared by individuals and social groups alike in the context of a richly detailed description of social realities in an Ireland that was undergoing significant change in a period so often characterised as one marked by stagnation. For this is a social as well as a cultural history.
Clair Wills, indeed, as a social historian has extended her researches beyond literary texts and cultural periodicals, memoirs and collections of literary letters, official documents and public statements to the provincial press and to such things as advertisements and trade journals. The result is a picture of social conditions and developments in neutral Ireland more detailed and revelatory than anything we have had before. A haunting, unforgettable chapter deals with how local communities on the western seaboard dealt both bureaucratically and humanly with the strange harvest of corpses that washed up on its rocks and beaches as the battle of the Atlantic raged near Irish shores (later in the war one of these might have been that of MacNeice's friend Graham Shephard, for whom he wrote that poignant elegy, The Casualty, with its debts to Yeats's In Memory of Major Robert Gregory).
WE LEARN OF the battle of the airwaves and the cinema screens, as well, and get a sense of how as the theatre of war shifted around the world's continents, as the Soviet Union, the US and Japan entered the hostilities, Irish attitudes altered. The depredations experienced in a country both in and not in the war are detailed, with telling statistics about the rise in tuberculosis and reports of typhus and typhoid revisiting a country where some travellers enjoyed bountiful menus in city hotels, while parts of rural Ireland were close to starvation. We hear of smuggling along a porous border with Northern Ireland, of government attempts to raise civilian morale as life threatened to grind to a halt when fuel stocks ran out, of the draconian censorship, of the vanishing populations of the west as Irish men and women left for factory jobs in the the UK ("During the Emergency around a sixth of Ireland's working population left for England"). We are informed about the drive for frugality which gave confidence to women's organisations but note that there were few roles for women in the Irish Defence Forces, and that the church worried about the sexual risks Irish womanhood faced in England.
All of which makes for a very good book indeed; but what raises it to the exceptional is its complex meta-narrative, which involves the author in presenting social and cultural analysis based on research while also addressing such difficult issues as how neutrality affected Ireland at various stages of the war, how neutrality was viewed abroad - especially in the United Kingdom and in the United States - and how these often intemperate international perspectives bore on Ireland's sense of itself.
IN ALL OF this Wills manages to be judicious and insightful without deviating at any point from a central implied conviction (which, incidently, I share) that, whatever the costs to the country (and there were costs, which Wills considers in a final chapter, "Paying for Neutrality"), the Irish State, so recently established in 1922, had no choice but to declare and defend neutrality in 1939 and maintain that stance until the end of hostilities (it was an armed neutrality, it should be remembered, however inadequate some of the armaments might have proved in combat).
In this way she might be said, if I read her right, to be following, in a sense, the example of de Valera himself, who never wavered in his determination to hold the neutral line. Indeed I came away from this book with renewed respect for the way de Valera kept his nerve, when the fate of the country was an uncertain one and when he had great powers lined up against him, while wondering whether a certain lack of imagination allowed him that sangfroid in face of the horrors total war had unleashed. Perhaps such an enabling limitation accounts for his notorious visit to the German envoy in Dublin to express his condolences on the death of Hitler (a crucial incident Wills deals with fully); for it may be that de Valera was able to guide the Irish ship of state through the waves of war because he did not fully grasp how truly terrible were the forces that had raised the storm.
Terence Brown is professor of Anglo-Irish literature at Trinity College Dublin
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That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland in the Second World War By Clair Wills Faber and Faber, 502pp. £14.99