Small World: Ireland 1978–2018 by Seamus Deane

Abstract

Book reviews Seamus Deane, Small World: Ireland 1978 – 2018 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 364 pages This collection of Seamus Deane’s writings is not for the dilettante reader: Deane’s grasp of so many inter-locking areas of knowledge demands total focus and concentration. That said, his wide-ranging intelligence as well as his sense of humour make the volume a testament to the man whom Joe Cleary, in the book’s foreword, calls ‘[since] the 1970s, Ireland’s most notable literary critic’. Cleary might have added that Deane was also one of Ireland’s most controversial writers. During the 1970s and since, when many of Ireland’s literary figures tended to run for cover or hedge their bets in ambiguity, Deane was unapologetically nationalist. The essay ‘Civilians and Barbarians’ exemplifies this feature of his writing. The author cites Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland: ‘The Irish must be compelled to be free by a sustained policy of war followed by good governance’. Deane’s response is pithy: ‘To become free and prosperous the Irish were evidently going to have to become English’. In ‘Heroic Styles: The Tradition of an Idea’ he explores the importance of the particular tradition in which writers work, and how it affects their writing as well as the reader’s approach to their writing. Yeats, he reminds us, is stimulated in his work by being part of the Ascendancy tradition. In the poem ‘Ancestral Houses’, Yeats offers a particular view of and attitude to Ascendancy history; but to argue for or against its historical accuracy, Deane contends, is pointless, since with Yeats it is history put forward as myth. In contrast Patrick Pearse’s poem ‘The Rebel’, is ‘no more than an adjunct to political action… But ultimately we find ourselves inclined to dispossess it of history, to concede to it an autonomy which is finally defensible only on grounds of style’. Later in the same essay he questions the belief that Irish writing in English provides an injection of vitality to the mainstream of English writing. Writers such as Somerville and Ross, he believes, present to English audiences an Ireland that is ‘endearingly quaint’. In contrast, Yeats, Joyce and Pearse shared a common ambition: to restore vitality to a lost community. For Yeats it was the Ascendancy, for Joyce the family, and for Pearse the revolutionary brotherhood. Book Reviews: Winter 2021–22 Studies • volume 110 • number 440 495 In the wonderfully-titled ‘Wherever Green is Read’, the opening sentence sets the tone: ‘The Easter Rising of 1916 has been so effectively revised that its seventy-fifth anniversary is a matter of official embarrassment. ‘Such is the fear of nationalist contagion, the historical revisionists have themselves been subjected to revision and the emptiness of their claims to ‘objectivity’ exposed: ‘Conor Cruise O’Brien has declared himself to be a unionist and, in that light, his writings can be understood as a polemic in favour of that position’. Likewise the historian Roy Foster is seen as fitting into the British and unionist ‘reading’ of Irish republicanism: ‘The whole point of Foster’s representation is that the Easter Rising was an exercise in irrationalism, a word entirely congruent with nationalism (of the Irish, not the British, kind) and that it was read as such in Ulster’. ‘The Famous Seamus’ is autobiographical and intriguing. The famous one in question is, of course, Seamus Heaney; Deane himself is ‘Seamus eile’. Deane recalls seeing Heaney’s name as it appeared on examination notice boards in St Columb’s College, Derry and later in Queen’s University: ‘Seamus Justin Heaney, or Heaney, SJ.’ Deane as a dayboy escaped St Columb’s at 3.30pm each day, leaving boarders such as Heaney to mope around the walks or play football. ‘Heaney didn’t play football, either soccer or Gaelic, except when required. He would smile from the sidelines.’ Deane recreates in detail an abortive audition for a college production of The Merchant of Venice, with a wooing scene casting Heaney as Lorenzo and Deane as Jessica. Their giggling leads to their angry dismissal by the teacher. In their final year in St Columb’s, Heaney and Deane...