MICHAEL Collins may still dominate American film screens, dispensing what one teenage cinema goer described to me as "history lite", but another remarkable Irishman has captured the imagination of a more discerning and influential public here. Hubert Butler is being hailed as the real thing by a publishing industry more accustomed to creating than discovering that phenomenon.
The recent launch at Glucksman Ireland House in New York of a selection of Butler's essays - Independent Spirit published by Farrar Straus and Giroux - provided one of those rare moments" when an habitually jaded literary world conceded that it had been surprised. "We did not know of this marvellous body of work until Joseph Brodsky brought it to our attention after Butler's death", editor Elisabeth Sifton admitted in her opening remarks. "And we won't be publishing anything else by this writer."
Unlikely Celebrity
Sifton's was an extraordinary statement in a restless city dedicated to the marketing principle of the Next Big Thing. And nobody would have appreciated the peculiarity of the situation more than Hubert Butler, an unlikely celebrity, and Joseph Brodsky, an inveterate debunker.
These troublesome ghosts set the tone of the proceedings - Brodsky dedicated to exploding pomposity, Butler to collapsing it with delicate pin pricks. And that disruptive spirit infected the great who were in attendance, among them Denis Donoghue, Thomas Hanagan, Edna O'Brien, Patrick McGrath, National Book Award winner John Casey, Bill Buford, poet Mark Strand, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham, Roger Straus of Farrar Straus and Giroux, Kate Houghton of Houghton Mifflin, Bill Avery of Time Warner.
As a result the usual net working and status scanning was replaced by genuine delight in a writer who sneaked up on the literary establishment posthumously and who still eludes categorisation.
The odds against this Butler triumph in the US were substantial. Even fervent admirers could not have predicted favourable reviews in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times by Thomas Flanagan and Richard Eder respectively.
Even to self described intellectuals, the Anglo Irish gentleman is an ill defined creature here. He is imagined as part Colonel Blimp, part Bertie Wooster, with the added ability to read and tendency to brood. Witness Peggy O'Brien's recent review in the Boston Globe which described Butler's views as "at best quixotic, at worst bigoted", while condemning his "snobbishness... confessed arrogance ... and grandiose martyr complex" - proof that crude stereotype can still overpower subtle reality.
Ms O'Brien's analysis is nothing new and Hubert Butlers gracefully demolished it many times during his 91 years, not only by ridiculing the stereotype in print but by contradicting it in his life. He was not, in his words .... the Protestant gentleman, growling out the General Confessional but thinking all the time of his neglected fencing . . . still able to give the same old lecture on Burma to bored inferiors". Nor was his lifelong commitment to international matters of conscience a form of showing off "a barely disguised way of scoring hits at home by brandishing his cultural superiority", as Ms O'Brien has it.
True Rarity
The attempt to deconstruct and label Butler is understandably tempting to an American academic. And Butler's ability to confound such attempts is precisely what makes him so attractive to the American reader and to critics like Mr Flanagan and Mr Eder. Independent Spirit is a true rarity in a sophisticated literary market - "serious literature" that speaks plainly and directly to the reader instead of relying on the interpretive services of intellectual middlemen. "A lot of people can say nothing with charm and authority and he totally lacked whatever it takes to do that", Butler's widow, Peggy, recalled in 1991. New Yorkers put it differently - what you see is what you get.
Joseph Brodsky recognised such directness and delighted in the discovery of a writer as gloriously inconvenient as himself. He praised Hubert Butler as, above all, "an enemy of dishonesty ... with an extraordinarily keen eye and ear for every shade and whisper of demagoguery", someone compelled to record as well as to resist injustice. "The events he happened to witness left him no choice if he wanted to retain his sanity and self esteem."
Hubert Butler was, as the Chinese proverb has it, condemned to live in interesting, times. In April 1916, the 15 year old on his way to England for officer training walked through a Dublin that was still literally smouldering after the Easter Rising. Twenty two years later, in 1938, he witnessed a more menacing form of devastation as he walked along the Prater Strasse in Vienna, past the looted shops of Jewish merchants, their surviving window panes daubed with the message: "Gone for a rest cure to Dachau".
Remembering the young Irish writer who helped his family and hundreds of others to escape the concentration camps, Erwin Strunz told me over four decades later that he "was amazed that an outsider could so perfectly plot the subtle psychological tentacles of Nazism".
Distinctive Reflections
Butler also lived in Leningrad in 1931 on the eve of Stalin's purges and in Yugoslavia from 1934 to 1937 watching the rise of native fascism. Yet this essayist's most distinctive reflections emanated not from Warsaw, Prague or even Dublin, but from Bennetsbridge, Co Kilkenny, a backwater by every standard except Butler's own.
"The post to which I am tethered still holds firm and I have grazed around it in a sufficiently wide circle", he wrote in 1985. "Close cropped grass comes up again fresh and sweet and whoever comes along next may find my patch slightly improved." The metaphor was entirely in character. "If he had to fill in a form he always put down market gardener as his occupation," Peggy Butler explained the year after his death. "What he detested above everything else was humbug."
Hubert Butler knew his place - literally and intellectually - too well to allow either his allies or his enemies to assign him one. It is to the credit of Glucksman Ireland House, the exemplary centre for Irish studies at New York University, that it provided gracious accommodation for an inconvenient Irishman. During that one evening, a small country house called Maidenhall became the centre of Manhattan. Hubert Butler would have like that idea.