Each spring, the Times of London has letters about the first cuckoo. Here in The Irish Times, at around the same time of year, we have letters questioning the Irishness of Elizabeth Bowen. The subjects tell us a great deal about the priorities of the respective readerships, writes Kevin Myers.
The English, who notionally have four seasons, are interested in the weather. The Irish, who - up until recently, anyway - had just one season entitled a grand soft day thank God, are more interested in identity.
Actually, I had come to believe that the issue of "Irishness" was as old hat as James Bond's pork pie, but clearly not. A recent letter from David Alvey, publisher of the Irish Political Review, declared that in political terms, it makes no sense to celebrate Elizabeth Bowen as an Irish writer, because she spied against Ireland for the British. So Irishness is not a matter of where you're from, but how you think. This presumably means that Irish unionists, north and south, who were in favour of Ireland entering the second World War, were less Irish than Irish nationalists.
Ah. So did the leaders of the IRA, who actively sought a Nazi victory, cease to be Irish because of it? Did Paddy Devlin, later of the SDLP, whose IRA unit shone lights to guide Luftwaffe bombers onto Belfast - a far more heinous deed than anything Elizabeth Bowen did - thus cease to be Irish? And what about France? What about the collaborationist milice, many of whom ended the war with a Gauloise and a wall? Did they cease to be French because they served Germany? Did the Scandinavians of Das Viking SS Division forfeit their national identities merely because of a single decision they had taken?
Conversely, was Willie Brandt, who served with the Norwegian resistance during the war, a lesser German because of it? And what about all those brave men who conspired against Hitler, and wanted an Allied victory? Were they accordingly less German than the Austrian whom they were trying to kill?
David Alvey declared that designating Bowen as an Irish writer is like describing "the English novelist Joseph Conrad, who was born in Poland, as a Polish writer". An interesting observation. Has he ever tried telling a Pole that? Any Poles I have spoken to are, properly, very proud of Conrad. He wrote in English, to be sure, but it is a strange English; and the mind at work behind those curiously though magically assembled words is clearly not an English mind. He was as much English as James Joyce was Swiss, or better still, Samuel Beckett was French.
Moreover, Conrad personifies the ambiguities of identity. He described himself as Polish, though he was from the Ukraine, which is both a geographical entity, and a tribal one: ethnic Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Jews, Moldovans all live there. Moreover, there are "Ukrainians" in Poland and the Czech Republic - the latter being the only example that comes to mind where the country is not defined by the land itself, as in Ireland, France, Germany, but by the tribal polity which resides there. And perhaps appropriately, for its capital was the birthplace of Kafka, the Jewish-Czech-German who wrote in the language of the country that gave the world the Third Reich, and which had a theory or two about what constituted nationality.
All of which doesn't tell us a great deal, save this: the association of land with political, national or tribal identity is of relatively recent origin over most of Europe, and the sort of simple loyalty which romantic nationalists embrace is quite beyond the capacity - or better still, the breadth of vision - of many. Which makes nonsense of Ernest Augustus Boyd's suggestion, quoted approvingly by David Alvey, that "to designate anglicised writers such as Swift, Berkeley, Sheridan, Goldsmith, and even Shaw and Wilde as Irish was to debase the idea of a national Irish literature". It debases nothing, but merely makes the definition of Irishness more catholic and complex. For empires invariably create anomalies.
Albert Camus played soccer for Algeria, but was not Algerian; yet neither was he French. Swift and Goldsmith were not English, but were products of institutions that were both peculiar, and peculiarly Irish, long before the notion of a fully separate Irish national polity had emerged. To make their Irishness contingent upon a modern definition of identity, one which would have made no sense to them, is simply anachronous.
They located their narratives in England because of its cultural eminence amongst writers in English, and because England was where money and respect lay. As a matter of course, Sheridan often used the word "English" when he meant British.
The Irish journalist Russell, writing from Crimea, regularly spoke of "English troops" when he clearly meant Scottish or Irish. Arthur Conan Doyle set his novels not in Edinburgh, where he first mastered the arts of deductive reasoning, but London, and with English heroes.
Was he less Scottish because of this? And was Elizabeth Bowen less Irish because she would have seen this country occupied by the Allies in preference to a Nazi victory, with the concomitant ruin of Christian civilisation across the world? And is that what Irishness means: that the defence of national sovereignty in the darkest hour in world history must take precedence over the protection of all civilisation, even if such a defence ends both that civilisation and Irishness itself?
In truth, the argument is circular. "Is Elizabeth Bowen Irish?" is a uniquely Irish question.
Even to ask it means the answer is Yes.