Yeats once encouraged Standish O'Grady in his excoriation of the Protestant Ascendancy's lethargy by telling O'Grady that he was the "best fighter" around for the purpose. Readers of this newspaper may be tickled to know that Yeats characterised this "Death" as one "which has already turned our intelligent gentry into readers of The Irish Times".
If this makes O'Grady seem like a mere stormtrooper in one of Yeats's many ill-tempered cultural battles, Michael McAteer's book will go some way to rescuing O'Grady from his denigrated status as yet another minor figure at the beginning of the Irish literary revival.
O'Grady's writings are hardly inviting. His three-volume History of Ireland may be his greatest work, but it is also a daunting prospect for even the most patient of readers. It is much to McAteer's credit that, in devoting successive chapters of his book to each volume of this history, he convincingly shows that O'Grady's achievement in History of Ireland is in allowing his writing to reverberate to a well known dilemma; where does objective history end and the imaginative and literary take over? McAteer suggests that this fraught historiography places O'Grady (and subsequently the revival itself) in a broad European intellectual context at the end of the 19th century. In McAteer's argument, O'Grady becomes a Nietzsche without the heightened sense of irony, an admirer of Thomas Carlyle, with a bark but without Carlyle's vicious bite. If this doesn't quite make O'Grady a serious thinker, it does tell us that there are serious things going on in his writing, beyond the airing and dusting off of a musty antiquarianism, or the desire to make Cúchulain and Queen Maeve the Victorian heroes Ireland had apparently been calling out for.
O'Grady's writings, McAteer argues, were certainly influential on Yeats and AE.
O'Grady's real value, however, lies in his capacity to include paradox and contradiction without always trying to smooth out his thought into a polished and coherent unity. This way of understanding O'Grady in turn allows McAteer to say more than anyone previously has about O'Grady's role as supposed "Father" of the literary revival. Forgoing coverage of O'Grady's biographical details, and staying clear of the entertaining but often distractingly gossipy personal relations which persisted between Revival figures, McAteer is more interested in broad structures of thought and the ways in which ideas, and the possibilities for generating new ideas, are passed on from O'Grady to Yeats and George Russell. McAteer shows that O'Grady's politics (described by Yeats in a letter to Lady Gregory as "Fenian Unionism") laid the ambiguous foundations which explain Yeats's often aristocratic form of nationalism. Similarly, George Russell's involvement in the co-operative movement has a new light shed on its anti-urban view of Ireland's future and its laudable but failed desire to marry practical economics with spiritual idealism.
Standish O'Grady, AE and Yeats is an impressively ambitious book. It is written with intellectual rigour and a commitment to see in O'Grady's work an ideology being painfully born. O'Grady's writings are continually, sometimes disconcertingly, placed in the context of contemporary post-Marxist thought (for example, the rejection of need as the basic economic drive, or a belief that radical change need not only come from the working classes), and O'Grady's Fenian Unionism becomes a properly described point of origin for revival thought for the first time. Michael McAteer's account allows O'Grady to be understood free from the image made for him by Yeats.
Now maybe, at last, he can do something about those contemptible readers of The Irish Times.
Standish O'Grady, AE and Yeats: History, Politics, Culture. Michael McAteer. Irish Academic Press, 224 pp. €45