Ireland and the Problem of Information: Irish Writing, Radio, Late Modernist Communication 9780271065656

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IRELAND AND THE PROBLEM OF INFORMATION

IRELAND AND THE PROBLEM OF INFORMATION IRISH WRITING, RADIO, L AT E   M O D E R N I S T C O M M U N I C AT I O N

DAMIEN

KEANE

The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Permission to quote Louis MacNeice’s poem “The Unoccupied Zone” has been granted by the Estate of Louis MacNeice and David Higham Associates. Permission to cite the Princeton Listening Center Records has been granted by the Princeton University Library. Thanks to the deputy keeper of the records at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland for help with the records of the Northern Ireland Cabinet. An earlier version of part of chapter 1 appeared in “De Valera, Du Bois, and the Ethiopian Crisis,” Foilsiú 5, no. 1 (2006): 1–11. An earlier version of part of chapter 4 appeared in “Francis Stuart to America, 9 June 1940,” Dublin Review 14 (Spring 2004): 53–56. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-​Publication Data Keane, Damien, 1973–  , author. Ireland and the problem of information : Irish writing, radio, late modernist communication / Damien Keane. pages  cm—(Refiguring modernism) Summary: “A series of studies examining literary modernism in Ireland. Explores how cultural work assumed new meaning amid the strategic imperatives of the mid-​twentieth century, and demonstrates how the late modernist field became today’s information age”—​Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-271-06412-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Modernism (Literature)—Ireland— History—20th century. 2. English literature—​Irish authors— 20th century—​History and criticism. 3. Radio broadcasting—Ireland—History—20th century. 4. World War, 1939–1945—​Radio broadcasting and the war. I. Title. II. Series: Refiguring modernism. pr8755.k427 2014 820.9’11209415—​dc23 2014015839 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-​free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—​Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. This book is printed on paper that contains 30% post-consumer waste.

FOR

my mother

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  | 

ix

Introduction: The Problem of Information  |  1 The Remediation of Waves  |  2 Dirty Work in New York  |  3 The Irish Free Zone  |  4 Radio Pages  | 

15

44

71

108

Conclusion: Compression and Cross-​Fade  | 

Notes  | 

155

Bibliography  |  Index  | 

183

1

171

141

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Among other things, this book is about relations, and it makes me happy finally to be in the position to offer public thanks to the people who have enabled me to get here. This project began at the University of Pennsylvania, where Jean-​Michel Rabaté guided its progress with remarkable patience and superb insight; following the direction of his comment (“important: need more information”) on a dissertation footnote led me circuitously, and ultimately, to this book. Vicki Mahaffey has been serially perceptive not only of the project’s aims, but of what lies behind it. Jim English was an early advocate of my work, although I only recognized much later how fundamental his influence has been to its formation. For their support and counsel, I also wish to thank Margreta de Grazia, Elaine Freedgood, Heather Love, and Jo Park. At Queen’s University, Belfast, the sharp eyes and good ears of Eamonn Hughes, Edna Longley, and the late Michael Allen continue to motivate my sense of critical engagement. All these years on, what I learned at Vassar College from Wendy Graham, Eamon Grennan, and Richard Severo remains central to my research and teaching, and I am especially

grateful to them for encouraging me to see possibilities both near and distant. To good friends made in Philadelphia, thanks for all the reasons I do not articulate often enough: Tim Albro, Jeff Allred, Hester Blum, Rachel Buurma, Matt Hart, Laura Heffernan, Rayna Kalas, Carolyn and Tommaso Lesnick, John Lessard, Matt Merlino, Cindy Port, Martha Schoolman, Kathy Lou Schultz, Hannah Wells, and Caitlin Wood. Since arriving at Buffalo, I have been lucky in finding myself among a buoying and brilliant group of colleagues and friends: Jamie Currie, Molly Hutton, Michael Sayeau, Bill Solomon, Scott Stevens, Joe Valente, and Hershini Bhana Young. My students have been a persistent source of happiness, in particular Beth Blum, Stephen Boyd, J. C. Cloutier, Ronan Crowley, Julianna Crumlish, Amanda Duncan, Megan Faragher, John Hyland, Maura Pellettieri, and Alex Porco, from all of whom I have learned so much. I would be disgracefully remiss not to offer deepest thanks to the staff of the English Department, notably Wendy Belz, Sophia Canavos, and Nicole Lazaro, who make it all happen while also making me laugh.

Acknowledgments

My work would be impossible without the expertise and dedication of librarians, catalogers, archivists, and other library staff. In particular, I would like to thank Michael Basinski, Austin Booth, James Maynard, and Laura Taddeo of the University Libraries at the State University of New York at Buffalo. More recently, I have been fortunate in meeting and working with new colleagues in a variety of forums, their acute responses to papers or presentations always offered in welcoming and intellectually enriching fashion. In particular, I would like to acknowledge the generosity of Paul Saint-​Amour and Debra Rae Cohen, who, by their kindness and patience, have reminded me of important things I am prone to forget. My two greatest intellectual experiences have come from being a part of collective endeavors: as a member of the Mods Group at Penn and as a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. My year at Cornell was restorative and inspiring, due in large measure to the graciousness of the staff of the Society, its director Tim Murray, and the other fellows. I am especially indebted to Duane Corpis, Sarah Ensor, Tom McEnaney, and Jennifer Stoever. I owe special and heartfelt thanks to Jeremy Braddock and Jon Eburne: their humor and dedication, their alacrity and hard work, have been sustaining me for years. This book owes a great deal to their intellectual fellowship, but I owe much more to their friendship. An only child, I am very grateful to be a part of a large extended family, for whom I

have the deepest respect and greatest love. I admire Tim Bowles for his humane perspective and profound belief in fairness. For their unstinting hospitality, sense of the world, and caustic humor, Rosemary Keane and Lisa Hogarty are wonderful, the sisters I never had. I simply marvel at my grandparents, Rose and Robert Keane and Frank Falcone, and their sense of history lies close to the heart of this book. It makes me sad that my father, Michael, did not live to see this book. While we did not always see eye to eye, I hear echoes of his voice in its pages, just as I have heard his voice at some point during every day since his passing. Even so, I miss him terribly. This book is dedicated to my mother, Donna, because of what she has taught me about dignity. As a single mother, she had to go through changes of which I was only dimly aware, but my strongest impression of growing up is of how much fun we had together. All my life she has made me know and feel that her love for me, her belief in me, are constant because of who I am. An honest Calabrese proverb (cui cerca trova e cui dorma si sonni) reminds me of her, among other reasons because it was she who provided that I sleep and thereby enabled me to dream. My respect for her is unbounded, and I love her because of who she is. And, finally, to Gabriela Zoller, the loveliest person I know, for her very goodness in the world.

x

Introduction The Problem of Information

Just after the end of the Second World War, a small, plain booklet titled Ireland’s Stand was published in Dublin collecting a selection of speeches delivered by Eamon de Valera, the Irish Taoiseach, during the six years of conflict. Drawn from press interviews, statements made in Dáil sessions, and radio broadcasts, the speeches outline the evolving rationale for the state’s wartime policy of neutrality. As its title suggests, the booklet as a whole was also meant to defend the policy in the postwar world, in which the niceties of national self-​ preservation, practiced and articulated seemingly without regard for larger ideological or geopolitical alignments, were receiving an even less welcome hearing than they had in the decade before the war. Indeed, for many officials and opinion makers in the victorious Allied nations, Irish neutrality remained all but synonymous with collaboration. While not an official government publication, Ireland’s Stand was nevertheless produced within the ambit of the Government Publications Office and distributed—​especially

to interested foreign readers—​through the Government Information Bureau.1 With its cream-​colored cover, the booklet can thus be rightly viewed as a form of off-​white propaganda, poised between openly announcing and quietly dampening its source. The opening paragraph of its anonymous introduction manifests this affiliation: “The years 1939 to 1945 were years of national tension in Ireland. They brought forward in their most acute form questions of international relationship, defense, supplies and food production. Happily, the Irish people and the Irish Government were at one in these grave matters, and by that unity and the discipline and self-​sacrifice of the community as a whole the many perils in the situation were avoided and Irish neutrality was maintained.”2 Balancing the peril, gravity, and tension of the war years against the communal self-​determination both secured and represented by neutrality, the rhetoric of the passage underscores what had already become the familiar official image of “Ireland’s stand”: that of singular

Ireland and the Problem with Information

perseverance amid exceptionally dangerous impositions on the state’s independence. As propaganda, the passage provides an effective set of strong terms and associations with which to inform the meaning of neutrality. Because of the familiarity of this image, it is fundamental to note the peculiar idiom of the passage, which on its own seems to clash with the conventional harmonics of Irish neutrality. Between grim poles of global devastation and national preservation, the passage turns on the word “happily,” a mediating term meant to convey grateful and fortunate relief, but also carrying the sense of secure and appropriate contentment. Given that the war years in Ireland have since become characterized by their unremitting claustrophobia and horizonless isolation, this turn is at best odd. Yet it chimes with what is perhaps the most famous Irish statement of the war years, a speech made by de Valera that is not, however, collected in Ireland’s Stand: his St. Patrick’s Day broadcast of 1943. Delivered on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Gaelic League, the speech has come to exemplify the insular vision of Irish life, its second paragraph alone standing as the regressive essence of what passes for “de Valera’s Ireland”:

countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens, whose firesides would be the forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires that man should live.3

The devotion paid by later critics to this single paragraph of a single broadcast, as though de Valera never uttered another word into a microphone, is almost touching. With some justification, de Valera has been taken to task for flattening the diversity of Irish experience in articulating a traditionally sanctioned, rurally based conception of society, one apparently unable to comprehend happiness outside the confines of field, family, church, and language. But this reading comes at the cost of ignoring the broadcast’s attention to the risks of increasing stratification amid scarcity, to the possibility of concentrating privilege with those already possessing it. Its vision of self-​sufficient contentment based on shared commitments to health, welfare, and respect is indeed all the more plangent for its conditionality.4 Hardly the outline of a program of national redistribution, the speech nonetheless understands the “ideal Ireland that we would have” by recognizing the very real constraints on its achievement. These constraints are spelled out in the other fourteen paragraphs of the broadcast, in which the ongoing pursuit of an ideal self-​determination is rhetorically couched among the all-too-​real challenges to Irish independence. The speech explicitly identifies

Acutely conscious though we all are of the misery and desolation in which the greater part of the world is plunged, let us turn aside for a moment to that ideal Ireland that we would have. That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit—​a land whose

2

Introduction

the latter as the material conditions of the war, what the second paragraph names as the “misery and desolation in which the greater part of the world is plunged.” Closing the speech in Irish, de Valera again sounds this note in its final paragraph, contrasting the “calamity” (anachain) and “misfortune” (mí-ádh) brought by the war with the “protection” (scáth) and “shelter” (dídean) afforded by non-​belligerence.5 Within this frame, the “Ireland which we dreamed of ” represents not the idealist renunciation of the realities of the world, but a momentary inward “turn” toward alternative possibilities that is itself necessitated by those realities. Taken in its entirety, the speech insists on this relationship, and the point becomes even sharper when the speech is read in the context of the policy statements collected in Ireland’s Stand. Nowhere in the text of the St. Patrick’s Day broadcast does the word “neutrality” appear, and this fact might account for why it was not included in a booklet partly aimed at foreign readers; yet in the speech, neutrality everywhere serves as the term mediating between “misery and desolation” close at hand and the possibility of future contentment. In response to the German invasion of the neutral Low Countries in May 1940, de Valera made this very point: “You know that we have declared our neutrality and proclaimed our desire and intention to save our people from the horrors of this war. Small countries like ours had the same desire. Some of these small countries had no greater wish than not to be involved in the war. They have been involved against their will, not having done anything as far as we can see to deserve what has happened them. The fact that we

want to keep out of this war may not be sufficient to save us.”6 As a real and dynamic practice, neutrality—​and not the invocation of an ideal Ireland—​embodied the response to wartime constraints on independence. In this moment, safeguarding Irish autonomy thus hinged on the acute consciousness of the wider crises of self-​preservation ushered in by the war. One marker of these crises can be gleaned from the radiophonic origin of the speech. In its first paragraph, de Valera notes that “before the present war began I was accustomed on St Patrick’s Day to speak to our kinsfolk in foreign lands, particularly those in the United States,” whereas he now speaks to a primarily domestic audience.7 This note refers to the severely curtailed Irish shortwave service, whose operation during the war was compromised by electricity shortages and the inability to obtain more powerful transmitting equipment from abroad.8 Rather than understanding global communications as the harbinger of a McLuhanite “global village,” with its giddy faith in universal connectivity, the broadcast’s awareness of material impingements on transmission and reception is more akin to Raymond Williams’s diagnosis of a later phase of such communication networks: The new technologies of cable and satellite, because they can be represented as socially new and therefore as creating a new political situation, are in their commonly foreseen forms essentially paranational. Existing societies will be urged, under the excuse of technical reasons, to relax or abolish virtually all their internal regulatory powers. If the price includes a few unproblematic legalities, or gestures to “community” interests, it will be

3

Ireland and the Problem with Information

he instead invokes “happy maidens.” This recording may not be a transcription recording of the live broadcast, but rather a version of the speech pressed to gramophone disc for release in the Irish diaspora.11 Whether of the live broadcast or not, this recording nonetheless represents an important “turn” outward and, like Ireland’s Stand, suggests an alertness to modern channels of dissemination that runs counter to received images of cloistered otherworldliness. The monumentalization of the St. Patrick’s Day speech not only ignores this historical context, but also bases itself on the presumed singularity of what circulated in multiple forms. It is therefore precisely the discrepancy among the intermedial iterations of the speech that demonstrates the precariousness of Ireland’s position in the world. The agility of the state’s neutrality policy here finds its ground. In place, then, of the singular hallmark reliant on the misrecognition of an isolated paragraph for an auratic voice, the St. Patrick’s Day speech discloses a field of mediation. Produced by how people live as they do and the reasons why they live as they must, this field has as its unlikely keyword, at times rendered all but inaudible, the word “happy.”

paid. . . . The real costs, meanwhile, will be paid elsewhere. The social costs and consequences of the penetration of any society and its economy by the high-​flying paranational system will be left to be paid or to be defaulted on by surviving national political entities.9

Turned necessarily inward, the broadcast manifests in its material conditions of production and reception an early, if inchoate, instance of the coercive stratification identified by Williams. As a matter of transmission and reception, that is, the broadcast objectifies conditions of uneven access that were particularly acute during the war, but have since become naturalized as the structure of technological modernity itself. A final word remains in order about the St. Patrick’s Day broadcast. Much of the subsequent criticism directed at its invocation of an ideal Ireland has centered on the depiction of “comely maidens.” The locution was already timeworn in 1943, but still testified in all its mustiness to the deeply conservative role assigned to women in the 1937 Constitution. While indefensible, the word “comely” has become critical shorthand for the repressive denial of women’s lived experience in “de Valera’s Ireland,” a monolithic tag used to convey the outline of a paleolithic social environment. In this, the specification of the many privations endured by Irish women is not well served by appealing to a heuristic device drawn from a single phrase in a single broadcast.10 In the present context, this idealizing compression is especially noteworthy, since the word “comely” seems to appear only in the printed text of the broadcast. In de Valera’s recording of the speech,

With its anxieties and supplications couched only as the touchstones of an era gratefully superseded, de Valera’s homely vision may seem an odd place to begin a study of the problem of information. Yet this problem names the practical contradiction born of the scarcity of information coupled with its overabundance; and in this way, it opens on to a much more pervasive quandary at work in the circulation of the speech and

4

Introduction

in its subsequent reception. As such, the opening set piece anticipates the questions of transmission and reception that animate the chapters of this book, in the final pages of which the charged implications of the keyword “happy” will be explicitly addressed. With its center located in the global ideological contests of the Second World War, this book argues that Irish cultural production of the period cannot be understood outside the conflict’s mediating relations, but instead must be approached as having been actively constituted by their realization. The problem of information is therefore understood to be an international predicament that has specific manifestations in Irish contexts. At the same time, the book does not assume the congruence of cultural field and national or geographical territory. Already effected by emigration and partition, this dissociation was dramatically extended and retempered by the emergence of an international media economy increasingly premised on the national consequences of extra- and paranational forces. The rise of intercontinental shortwave broadcasting, the twinned refinements of propaganda technique and analysis, the growth of and competition among press services and news agencies, and the work of disparate networks of translation and dissemination all had a transformative impact not only on diplomacy and statecraft, but also on everyday practical senses of worldly engagement, cosmopolitan style, national allegiance, and communal security. While attention to these changing relations helps to historicize this moment, Ireland and the Problem of Information nevertheless considers as the stakes of its investigation the effort, in the words of

Terry Eagleton, “to grasp history as structured material struggle,” in order that the political continuities of this earlier moment with our own “information age” become less mystified.12 To that end, the purpose of this introduction will be to explain the methodological choices and critical decisions underwriting the book. In its selection of primary materials, this book builds on the recent work of historians, archivists, and librarians to challenge the received and complementary narratives of Irish inwardness and Irish exceptionalism that for decades have formed the governing perceptions of Ireland in the war years. This hard-​won access to a wide array of government files has provided a more complicated understanding not only of the rhetoric of “Ireland’s stand,” but of the political forces shaping its articulation. In advocating for progressive policies of inquiry and access, these researchers helped instigate what has been called the “Irish freedom of information ‘revolution,’ ” which culminated in the passage of the National Archives Act (1986) and ultimately the Freedom of Information Act (1997).13 Since its founding in 1922, the Irish government had practiced a closed system of administration, sacrificing its citizens’ right to know to euphemistic “matters of state” and denying any relation between the two. In its slow reform, Irish policy was not unique, but echoed international standards of openness and restriction, as Dermot Keogh summarizes: The Irish State, a bastion of classical bureaucratic conservatism for most of the twentieth century, could not have avoided being affected by such

5

Ireland and the Problem with Information

dramatic international changes [in policies of

prohibitions issued by politicians and officials

access to government documentation]. The

to applicant-​researchers, even to the end of the

Westminster model of closed government was

1960s, there reverberated the central statement

applied in an extreme and unreformed way by the

that the people of Ireland were not yet ready for

early generations of politicians and civil servants

too thorough a presentation of the past.16

in the new state. The civil war divide made little

Driven by the persistence of “applicant-​ researchers,” a younger generation of civil servants led the reform of closed archives, bringing Irish policy into line with North American, Australian, and (eventually) European access protocols. In doing so, this generation undermined a foundational relationship: “Many of the civil servants who made that freedom of information revolution possible ‘subverted’ the system from within. Many of their predecessors would not have been best pleased. But the democratic institutions of the state are stronger for the ultimate ‘betrayal’ of the imported Westminster model of administration.”17 Rather than return to some authentic “Irish” model, this subversion instead instituted new conditions of openness to Ireland’s historical record, one potent effect of which has indeed been a destabilization of the compatible narratives of Irish inwardness and Irish exceptionalism. As a national “revolution,” that is, this betrayal of the “imported Westminster model of administration” in favor of international alignment adduces a critical fact about the Irish habitus: that the specificity of Irish national self-​determination takes form only in relation to international, “worldly” engagement. There is no reason to regard international alignment as uniformly positive or as a relation founded in equality of power or transparency of motivation: a dense and growing record of evidence suggests otherwise. This

difference to the philosophy of bureaucratic politics shared by Cumann na nGaedheal/Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. The British model, despite earlier intellectual interest during the War of Independence between 1919 and 1921 with the US and the Swiss, prevailed. Paradoxically, that was as much the case in departments that were inherited by the new state from the British period as it was for the newly established departments like External Affairs and Defence.14

While this administrative legacy was evidence of an incorporative transfer, it also reflected and confirmed a culture of secrecy that characterized many powerful institutions of national life, from the Catholic Church and national army to journalism and the medical professions.15 As Gerard O’Brien notes, this ethos was especially marked among the state’s founding political generation: Much of the reluctance of such men and of their civil service advisers (some of them of the same age) to confront the need for archival reform related to their ambiguous attitude to their personal past. Evidence has emerged, though slowly, that the alternating bumptuousness and self-​confident serenity of many veterans sometimes concealed a sense of guilt over horrors perpetrated or connived at by them, or simply because they had survived where other less fortunate comrades had perished. . . . Through all the warnings and

6

Introduction

point is acutely important to note in the midst of modernism’s “transnational” turn. For all of their startlingly expansive effects, many of the more recent conceptions of “globalism” or “worldliness” in modernist studies have a propensity to the paranational, in assuming or announcing the (beneficial) supersession of nation- or state-​centered models by more fluid recognitions of global interpenetration. In its reliance on a notion of supersession, however, this recent turn risks embodying the paranational in Williams’s sense, as that “represented as socially new and therefore as creating a new political situation.” Greater access to Irish archives has indeed provided a more complex sense of Irish cultural production in its widest scope at midcentury, one realized perhaps most fully in a number of historiographical studies that have confronted long-​standing perceptions. By graphically intensifying the contests between nationalism and internationalism that defined Ireland’s relationship to the world, the Second World War upended the modern Irish cultural field. As a result, struggles between nationalism and internationalism can now in much finer detail be understood in tandem with the forces structuring nationalism and internationalism as alternate modes of aligning Ireland with the world, as competing poles of worldly engagement. While they were often still communicated as opposed stances taken in regard to the qualities of Irish life, nationalism and internationalism were increasingly and knowingly mobilized on institutional footings that no longer recognized this opposition. If nationalism and internationalism could serve as ideological markers of Ireland’s place in the world

order, it was because there were now specific institutional possibilities for their realization: as matters of strategic positioning, they were operationalized by Irish and non-​Irish players alike. Nationalist poetry could function as the vehicle for cosmopolitan connection; lucid comprehension of global diplomacy could justify protective withdrawal; broadcast appeals to Ireland’s history could be made to sanction any postwar settlement: specific prerogatives such as these were foundational to the Irish field because they were necessitated by its oscillating practical conditions. These relations are absolutely political, but they skew—​sometimes severely—​any tidy or desired sense of political correspondence, in producing disquieting alliances articulated through unexpectedly common vocabulary. Whereas the work of Irish writers has been paramount in conventional accounts of literary modernism, Ireland itself only rarely occupies a meaningful position in accounts of modernism’s historical trajectory. By 1940, Irish writing appeared at once to recede from its high modernist apogee and to fall back on a worn set of insular precepts: what had once been a fitting place to renounce or flee could not, after Yeats and Joyce, seem to offer even these hopes to its writers. In order to begin to redress this situation, Ireland and the Problem of Information examines the pivotal mediations through which social knowledge was produced in the mid-​twentieth century. It considers how the meaning of cultural work assumed new weight amid wartime strategic imperatives, as the manipulation and redirection of literary expression came to reflect not only the immense totality of total war, but also literature’s increasingly explicit

7

Ireland and the Problem with Information

position among—​rather than above or apart from—​technological media of transmission and reception. In doing so, the book queries the privileged place still frequently accorded to isolated, individual authors, works, and “voices” in both modernist and Irish studies. For this reason, the motivated crossing of borders—​between states and nations, cultural and social fields, institutions and formations, media and formats—​serves as the governing current running through each chapter. Transcription, recording, collation, redaction, translation, rediffusion: this mediating practice took many forms. Even as the forces behind them were misrecognized (and often remain categorized) as distinctly non- or extraliterary forms of agency, they were transforming the contours and coordinates of the late modernist field into those recognized in today’s “information age.” These border crossings were not only motivated by specific and identifiable interests, but carried out under the aegis of particular agencies elided by subsequent reports of the volitionless “unfolding” and spread of global networks. Precisely because of its “national” focus, the book argues that these motivated border crossings significantly alter relations within and among national fields, but in no way obviate the necessity of these “inter-​national” relations for understanding broader, more “global” circuits of transmission and reception. Far from happening somewhere between chance and fate whenever someone opens a book, these worldly mediations underscore the formative labor of classification in the literary, cultural, and political configurations of the late modernist period. This signal moment in the history of the Irish cultural field is indeed

an early indicator of the antagonistic cooperation that has since come more generally to structure the cultural field of the “information age.” Because Irish literary expression was believed to evince a singular national identity having both aesthetic value and political utility, modern Irish writing was forged and continually animated by controversies over literary autonomy versus political intervention, pedagogy versus propaganda, and the ideal virtues of art versus the practical effects of direct social engagement, as D. George Boyce notes: “It was these problems and possibilities that quickly destroyed any neat symmetry of political decline paralleled by cultural revival: for, just as the political crisis of 1891 [the Parnell split] gave an impetus to the literary movement, so the literary movement helped shape and release new political forces that threatened Yeats’ hope of an imaginative Irish literature tailored for a critical yet appreciative audience, that would enable Ireland to make a distinctive contribution to the common European cultural heritage.”18 Caught between calls for a national literature free of external constraints and demands for a didactic literature of political utility, Irish writing came to manifest a truly stereophonic relationship to and for its audiences. Without ever locating a stable or final balance, it began dynamically to pan between coterie groupings and mass movements, domestic and foreign expectations, and national and international readerships. Exacerbating these controversies was the concurrent recognition that Ireland was what Christopher Morash terms “an informational field,” an entity determined not by geographical borders, but by the

8

Introduction

circulation of newspapers, crisscrossing telegraph wires, and radio waves.19 In establishing the basis on which modern Irish writing was instituted, these controversies were conducted as material practices of circulation and reception, carried out by agents who recognized themselves to be engaging in their activities as position-​takings within a zone of positions constituting this “informational field.” This is to say that every move made, every stance taken by particular agents acknowledged those made by other agents in the field, while realizing specific possibilities for movement opened up by the field itself. As Pierre Bourdieu has written, “The network of objective relations between positions subtends and orients the strategies which the occupants of the different positions implement in their struggles to defend or improve their positions (i.e., their position-​takings), strategies which depend for their force and form on the position each agent occupies in the power relations [of the field].”20 In Ireland, with its especially close and mutually determinative relationship of literary and political activity, these relational contests were most intensely waged around the very classification of “literary” versus “political” communication, for this porous and shifting boundary was what was at stake in the emergent and evolving structure of the “informational field.” For Bourdieu, “the most disputed frontier of all is the one which separates the field of cultural production and the field of power,” an insight that articulates this study’s primary point of departure in approaching the Second World War.21 As a global conflagration, the war allowed a novel set of stands to be taken to the extent that it produced a novel set

of stations to be occupied, a new series of “opportunities” to be realized. Rather than as an instance of military determinism, this relationship should be understood as a historical determination of forces and interactions along this “most disputed frontier” between fields, at the precise moment of its deepest crisis. Reconfigured by diverse systems of translation and propagation, broadcasting services, the dictates of ministries of information, and the institutions governing these emerging forms of mediation, this boundary was both highly mutable and durable, as it was practically instantiated and experienced. A critical distinction helps bear out this point. As will explicitly be seen in its second chapter and conclusion, this book draws on the notion of “Irish literary space” described in Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters, which presents the Literary Revival as a “paradigm” for the alliances, rivalries, and subversions incumbent to competing for literary recognition and preeminence on a world scale. She understands literary works to exist in an international field, a “world” in which value is assessed and measured according to the works’ relational distance to the centers of literary authority. In this “world literary space,” Paris stands as the center of centers, the most prestigious seat of legitimating authority and the point around which the structures that determine and classify literariness are organized. Naming this classifying function the “Greenwich meridian of literature,” Casanova sees it as the capacity to define both literary space and literary time, both the aesthetic distance of all other locations from the center and the aesthetic remove from the modernity, the “present,”

9

Ireland and the Problem with Information

of the center.22 Imagined as “an enchanted world, a kingdom of pure creation, the best of all possible worlds where universality reigns through liberty and equality,” this republic of letters is rather a zone of incessant antagonism, where domination is exercised though the mechanism of universality itself.23 Without being either entranced by metropolitan norms or stunted by peripheral underdevelopment, modern Irish literature is for her exemplary, having broken free of purely national literary space without yielding to purely international literary space. However compelling and generative this model is, Ireland and the Problem of Information nevertheless treats it as a specific field of actions and values within what Armand Mattelart calls “world communication,” or the “internationalization of a mode of communication that has progressively become a way of organizing the world.”24 Eschewing the ideological identification of “communication” solely with modern mass media, Mattelart concentrates instead on the practical activities of exchange (such as migration, broadcasting, intelligence analysis, international treaties, mercantile relations) that constitute the “world” as a “contradictory system made up all at once of interdependencies and interconnections, of schisms, fragmentations, and exclusions.”25 Both geographical and symbolic entity, this world arises through the imposition of universal modes, rather than in their inexorable systemic reproduction. This focus is embodied in a methodological recognition:

immured in the ghetto of the “local.” In succumbing to this danger, one risks subscribing to a determinist conception in which the international is converted into the imperative—​just as, at the opposite pole, the exclusive withdrawal into the local perimeter is the shortest way to relativism. There is overestimation of the international dimension on one side, underestimation on the other. All these levels of reality, however—​international, local, regional, and national—​are meaningless unless they are articulated with each other, unless one points out their interactions, and unless one refuses to set up false dilemmas and polarities but instead tries to seek out the connections, mediations, and negotiations operating among these dimensions, without at the same time neglecting the very real existence of power relations among them.26

In this regard, the present study is less a comparative project, one that presupposes the stability or givenness of the entities it compares, than an examination of the constitutive instability of literary, medial, and political relations as they inform one another. By presenting modal case studies of the problem of information, each chapter that follows reads expressive works as mediated by their total communicative context—​that is, at the disputed boundary between cultural production and social power. In specifying the parameters of this total communicative context, this book is most acutely concerned with radio broadcasting. Ernest Mandel has written that “if World War II was the conveyor-​belt and motorised war, it was also the radio war. In no previous conflict had warring governments enjoyed the possibility of directly reaching so many millions of men and women with their

There is the danger of allowing oneself to be enclosed within the “international,” just as some, at the other end of the spectrum, risk becoming

10

Introduction

attempts at indoctrination and ideological manipulation.”27 Given radio’s disregard of grounded borders, listeners in any one place could tune in domestic and foreign stations that addressed them as particular audiences and targeted them as members of particular publics. For state authorities, this amplified relationship led almost simultaneously to ways of understanding broadcasting that relied equally on qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis, in which hermeneutic “close readings” of individual segments enriched and were located within patterns discerned through more systematic “content analysis” of transmitted programming. Because typed pages could be cataloged for duplication or redaction, these methodological innovations depended on transcripts produced by monitoring agencies, which is to say that transcripts offered the only practical means of maintaining an accessible archive of wartime broadcasts. Like this intermedial procedure, analytical methods were inherently heteronomous in responding to wartime contingencies. In this, they were manifestations of the new possibilities created at the disputed boundary between cultural production and social power. Rather than isolate qualitative and quantitative analysis, this provisional accommodation in turn offers an ambivalent point of reference for today’s institutional struggles waged over similar potentials. Because of this historical relationship, Ireland and the Problem of Information refuses any prior categorical denomination of what were being formed, de-​formed, and reconstituted by volatile interactions, for reasons that can be clarified in reference to the

strongest recent analysis of related concerns. In Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, Mark Wollaeger examines the relationship of modernism to propaganda, like the marketplace, one of the “others” against which literary modernism has been conventionally defined. Tracing this relation of aesthetics and politics through close readings of works by six canonical figures, Wollaeger argues that “both modernism and propaganda provided mechanisms for coping with information flows that had begun to outstrip the processing capacity of the mind; both fabricated new forms of coherence in response to new experiences of chaos.”28 By situating mainstays of modernist critical discourse (for example, fragmentation, formal recalcitrance, discontinuous temporality, and subjective impressionism) within a British media environment rapidly expanding under military and imperial contingencies, he understands modernism and propaganda as homologous modes of organizing modern experience, as “incipient languages of the new information age.”29 In his account, modernism and propaganda deviate recognizably in their respective orientations toward autonomy and integration, a differentiation occurring in “a kind of psychosocial contact zone defined at one extreme by subjectivity construed as a sanctuary for being, and at the other by propaganda as an encompassing array of manipulative discourses.”30 In staging this distinction as a question of means and ends, the book’s close readings present various coeval mechanisms of understanding produced “in response to new experiences of chaos,” but assume the priority (in both senses of the word) of the categorical difference of modernism and propaganda. While the readings

11

Ireland and the Problem with Information

are nuanced in locating texts within what he calls the “information-​propaganda matrix,” or the continuum of “psychosocial” states between sanctuary and manipulation, it is nonetheless the case that, in distinguishing modernist narrative and propagandistic technique, their categorical difference both precedes and outweighs any homologous likeness or continuity. Wollaeger’s literary objects possess a given categorical priority by virtue of their canonicity—​that is, by an end that sanctions the means of its recognition. As such, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda deals less with informative interactions than with confirmative distinctions. The most substantial effect of this classification appears in the complete identification of “new experiences of chaos” with information overload. In totalizing this “literary” understanding of a grossly uneven field, Wollaeger misses the dialectical relation of overload and privation. It is a short step to information overload from subjectivity under siege by impinging “discourses,” but one that evades accompanying conditions of scarcity, restriction, and unequal access: “chaos” certainly results as often (and more devastatingly) from access to too little as from exposure to too much. More to the point, “chaos” names the structure of feeling produced by simultaneous overabundance and scarcity, the structural contradiction that is second nature, a “new form of coherence,” in the so-​called information age. One canonical dramatization of this stratified condition is the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which information inundates the reader while ultimately providing little qualitative increase to what is known

of the day’s events. On a smaller, sharper scale, this condition similarly animates the chance encounter in “Wandering Rocks” of Stephen Dedalus and his younger sister Dilly, just after she purchases a French primer at a secondhand bookstall. Looking into her blue eyes, he fears for Dilly as he fears her, believing that one or both of them will be drowned in the undertow of their family’s dissolution. Caught between compassion and self-​preservation, Stephen thinks “Misery! Misery!,” a narrative repetition that specifies the objective destitution and subjective distress characterizing the familial situation.31 By demonstrating how trickles no less than torrents constitute “flows,” both examples challenge the adequacy of this metaphoric notion, which, like “overload,” has assumed a lopsided heuristic power in proportion to its ability to euphemize objective relations of uneven distribution.32 While finding in the fluvial “channels” and “currents” terms more specifically appropriate to the circulatory processes it examines, Ireland and the Problem of Information altogether avoids the figurative language of “flows,” choosing instead simply to attend to particular media or formats in their practical materiality. Beyond methodological considerations, this decision represents an attempt to sound out a peculiarly Irish dynamic, in which knowing only too much is reflexively predicated on knowing very little.33 A last point about “flows” indicates why this decision is not the gnomic putdown it might seem, but, like Joyce’s doubled “misery,” a critical acknowledgment of unevenness. Where the problem of information designates the coupling of lack and surfeit,

12

Introduction

the necessary corollary is the act of putting in formation what Lisa Gitelman calls the “data of culture.”34 Rather than define information as a thing or quantity available prior to or beyond its use, it is crucial to recognize this practical work of formally organizing and structuring units or items for their access. This recognition in turn locates access not as a value-​free condition, but as the function of administration and control, a distinction especially important in a moment enthralled by “raw data,” yet periodically unnerved by reminders of its collection and storage as “big data.” In this regard, Wollaeger states a fundamental epistemological relationship, in noting how the “complex entangling of modernism, new media, and propaganda” inheres in the interplay of details (whether “fragments” or “facts”) and “larger systems of meaning that invest them with significance.”35 Yet this “investment” cannot be fully understood when presented as a self-​realizing action, an event that happens of its own being. By allowing categorical presuppositions leveraged through a metaphoric language of “flows” to stand in for determining motivation in both transmission and reception, actual agents and their real investments evaporate. Already possessing an object in hand, this dominant analytical method, so common to both modernist and new media scholarship, thus misses the stakes of its investigation. This connection becomes clearer through Raymond Williams’s account of watching television programs intercut with commercials and previews: “The notion of ‘interruption,’ while it still has some residual force from an older model, has become inadequate. What is being

offered is not, in older terms, a programme of discrete units with particular insertions, but a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real ‘broadcasting.’ ”36 This passage specifies the essence of the process of putting items “in formation,” particularly as they are received and experienced at the point of access. In Williams’s sense of composite sequences of cross-​fading items, Ireland and the Problem of Information finds justification for its emphasis on noncanonical and ephemeral works less for what they indicate about the modernist literary canon than what they demonstrate and make concrete about practical acts of formation. Information is not indeterminate because its dispositions or forms cannot be described, but, as Douglas Raber notes, because it can be described and mobilized in so many contradictory ways.37 Over and over again in what follows, this books tracks figures who possess some kind of authoritative expertise or professional specialization that is hidden, denied, displaced, repurposed, or misrecognized, in service to new or alternative forms of agency. What they mobilize is less properly information than their access—​to the data of culture, to disseminating institutions and networks, to reception communities, and to their own specific forms of authority. As an interaction of autonomy and heteronomy, this practical mobilization is decisive. For even in its most cautionary guises, such access represents a possibility for communication that is otherwise silenced, whether through

13

Ireland and the Problem with Information

epistemological neglect, planned obsolescence, or critical abnegation. With the instantiation of information as the defining term of contemporary existence, it has become easy to forget the primary mediating work of giving form to content, of articulating relations and contradictions, and of rendering this work “in formation”; and, moreover, to abstract this work into infinitely sequential acts of “storage” and “retrieval” that promise a condition of access devoid of mediation. This forgetfulness is a generalized example of what Timothy Brennan indeed names in a more specialized sense as “flow”: “not simply influence but the air of inevitability that surrounds certain concepts traveling through the intellectual market, where the borrowing of ideas is concealed in order to replay a theatrical act of discovery of what is already hegemonic, so that the predominant can continue to enjoy the status of the emergent.”38 Among

its other effects, this maneuver casts processes that were once, and often still are, fiercely contested strategies of forming and working-​ through as transhistorical categories or transcendental objects. Recognizing this structure helps lay bare the question of access, while also serving to objectify failings or denials of access. In a glancing comment, Bourdieu once remarked that cultural capital “should in fact [be called] informational capital to give the notion its full generality.”39 What this gloss suggests, then, is that information is legitimated simultaneously in specific formations and as a condition of its accessibility. For this reason, this study declines in advance of its investigation to substantialize “information” as an abstract economic, philosophical, or technological category. This book is not a work of ontology. Information does not exist outside of its classification: hence the problem of information.

14

1 The Remediation of Waves

In early August 1935, the government of the Irish Free State lodged an official protest with J. H. Thomas, the British secretary of state for the Dominions, over a detail included in an imperial report on conditions in the Horn of Africa. Signed by Eamon de Valera, who was acting in his capacity as the Irish minister for external affairs, the protest took the form of a short note. Although conveyed in the stilted niceties of procedural communications, it registers with particular force the dismay felt in the Irish diplomatic service at the appearance of an unfortunately familiar figure:

sharpens his spear and begins to think of blood-​



Possessing an administrative demeanor that was “lazy to the point of inertia,” Thomas was perhaps not the best mediator in this dispute, and it is unclear how, or even whether, he officially responded to the protest.2 The invocation of this figure belonging to “another age” could not have failed to conjure for the Irish the repertory of Victorian anti-​Irish caricature, from capering stage Irishmen to menacing simian grotesques,

I have the honour to refer to the Annual Report

on the Social and Economic Progress of the people of Somaliland, 1934, (Colonial Report No. 1707) printed and published by H.M. Stationery Office.

2. On page 26 of this report, in the second

paragraph, the following two sentences occur: “In this condition the Somali may be compared with the traditional Irishman when well primed with the liquor of his country. The latter brandishes his shillelagh and looks for heads to crack; the Somali

feuds to settle and flocks to loot.”

3. My Government feel obliged to protest that

such an example of extreme bad taste and mean racial propaganda in relation to this country should have been allowed to appear in an official British report.

4. The Government of Saorstát Éireann had

believed that the attitude revealed by this quotation belonged to another age, and they hope that the Government of the United Kingdom will take steps to discourage the spirit of which the offending sentences are a manifestation.1

Ireland and the Problem with Information

while unambiguously demonstrating the residual power of past relations still operative in the present.3 Even so, the offending item had an all-too-​contemporary referent, one that inspired political misgivings in the Irish beyond any ethnic sensitivity. In a newly pressurized international context, the recrudescence of “mean racial propaganda” was not the idle residue of another age, but an exacerbating and intensified factor in reemergent antagonisms. Far from manifesting an exceptionalist sense of grievance, the Irish were protesting something more than the latest entry to the catalog of British “extreme bad taste.” At a moment when the great European powers were ready to return to outright military competition for colonial and strategic advantage, nowhere more dramatically than in East Africa, the force of the protest could not be fully registered within the strictly bilateral frame of Anglo-​ Irish relations. If racial or ethnic propaganda remained dangerously vibrant, the conditions animating its production and circulation outstripped the representational continuities of its images. In miniature, the Irish note marks the complex position of postindependence Ireland in a world of uneven development, rival ideological appeals, and renewed imperial antagonism. This chapter examines the political dynamics driving both the intensification of “mean racial propaganda” and the Irish response to its deployment by attending to how they became manifest during the crisis provoked by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. As the juncture at which a number of disparate forces coalesced, the Ethiopian

crisis was a stark turning point during the interwar years, representing not only an early confrontation with fascist aggression but a truly global conflict conducted among various publics organized and mobilized through international media services. Although the Spanish Civil War attracted greater attention from European observers (a fact reflected in modernist scholarship), the Ethiopian crisis constituted on a much wider scale the confluence of political, ideological, and technological pressures that later swelled in the Second World War. As a war of colonial conquest, the Italian invasion was a belated and noxious finale to the “scramble for Africa” unleashed by the Berlin Conference in 1885, nominally orchestrated to advance civilization in every corner of the globe. Yet Ethiopia was a member of the League of Nations, its sovereignty guaranteed by the collective security policy instituted in the League Covenant. Italian designs on the East African state were thus also an attack on the protocols of international arbitration fashioned in the wake of the First World War. With its unilateral resort to overwhelming military force (including the use of poison gas) to vanquish local resistance, the fascist state flouted international conventions and public opinion in a manner that was genuinely innovative. Whereas Italian belligerence could appear as the residue of “another age,” it was in retrospect the harbinger of a more recognizably modern phase of imperial aggression. For many at the time, these Janus-​faced lineaments were simply the gauge of common sense, an attitude most famously articulated for English readers by Evelyn Waugh:

16

The Remediation of Waves

of domestic critics castigated these democratic policies as outmoded and archaic, instead endorsing the image of the fascist state as the modernizing force that could fully and finally realize national freedom. Against this background of internal dissatisfaction, the growing confidence of fascist agitation and surging appeal of dictatorial leadership around the world could not be dismissed by the Irish government as “nonnational” affairs. Even as it became clearer that the League could not quash the ambitions of great powers bent at once on escalation and containment, Geneva nonetheless remained a post crucial to Irish autonomy. When the League proved unable to safeguard, by whatever means available, the integrity of one member state against attack by another, the Irish government lost what lingering faith it had in the ability of collective security to uphold national sovereignty, as Michael Kennedy notes: “Before the failure of sanctions on Italy, de Valera had decided that Ireland would de-​prioritise Geneva if the League could not effectively solve the Abyssinian crisis. Abyssinia was not a turning point in itself[;] the decision had been reached sometime beforehand. It was a testing ground. The League’s failure in Africa turned de Valera away from the League as an institution that could provide for Ireland’s security.”5 With the acquiescence of Britain and France to Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, the League ceased to represent in any real sense the political aspirations and practical stance of the Irish state. Only through the Ethiopian crisis did the Irish state come to base its foreign policy on absolute self-​preservation, a bearing most acutely registered in the neutrality

It was evident, within six years of [the Italo-​ Ethiopian Treaty of 1928] having been made, that the Abyssinians had no intention of maintaining the spirit of that treaty. Italy had expected tangible commercial advantages. Her ambitions were clear and, judged by the international morality of America, Japan or any of the League Powers, legitimate. Abyssinia could not claim recognition on equal terms by the civilised nations and at the same time maintain her barbarous isolation; she must put her natural resources at the disposal of the world; since she was obviously unable to develop them herself, it must be done for her, to their mutual benefit, by a more advanced Power. By the 1928 Treaty, Italy believed that she had been chosen for this office.4

In its conflicted mix of residual and emergent forces, then, the crisis was a signally modernist event. For the Irish Free State, the crisis marked a definitive shift in its orientation toward the world. Since admission to the League in 1924, it had used the forum to work and “align” with the bloc of small nations in advocating for international relations based on judicial equality among states and diplomatic negotiation in matters of communal disagreement. Particularly after de Valera’s election as prime minister in 1932, national self-​determination was linked to international cooperation, a relationship most expressly practiced through firm support for the League’s (stated) policy of collective security, which was believed to offer a mechanism for protecting national independence. Spurred in part by mounting postcolonial disenchantment with the conditions of Irish life, a vocal collection

17

Ireland and the Problem with Information

policy made legal in the 1937 Constitution and strictly enacted during the Second World War. If neutrality is still frequently regarded as the expression of an inward-​looking, exceptionalist propensity characterizing Irish independence, it is important to appreciate how it was in fact a rational response to the state’s precarious position in a world all too prone to misrecognize belligerence for necessity. In its three-​part organization, this chapter aligns a series of instances in which national trials were actively mediated through international exchanges. In doing so, it follows the circulatory networks of printed propaganda, diplomatic communications, and radio transmissions along an itinerary ranging from Dublin and Addis Ababa to Geneva and Rome. Its first section outlines several interlocking crises of internationalism that materialized with particular force as Italy launched its campaign to justify the annexation of Ethiopia. By aligning geopolitical strategic rivalries, newly viable possibilities for long-​range radio broadcasting, and the institutional workings of the League of Nations, the section establishes the political context for the remainder of the chapter, which explores two divergent Irish conceptions of the singular voice made manifest in the disquiet of international hostilities. The second section attends to the work of the Irish delegation at Geneva during the Ethiopian crisis, when de Valera emerged as an especially strong critic of the abandonment of the East African state in favor of balances of power. While long presented as the sole voice of Irish politics in these years, de Valera acted on the canny advice of the civil servants permanently stationed in Geneva,

a relationship evinced through comparison of internal diplomatic documents and his formidable speeches during the crisis made in the League Assembly and on the radio. Rather than the caricature of a neurotic strongman, de Valera’s leadership as it played out in front of the microphone demonstrates a resolute commitment to democratic process. In its final section, the chapter reads Walter Starkie’s Waveless Plain, an autobiographical travelogue in which he presents fascist Italy as the harmonious realization of individual freedom and social organization. In conjuring a state of unalienated immediacy predicated on Mussolini’s personality, Starkie mystifies the institutional remediation underwriting his validation of the dictator’s voice. Unlike an item belonging to “another age,” this mystification of institutional formations instead exhibits an emergent tendency. The Crisis of Internationalism In 1935, Ethiopia was one of the few areas on the continent of Africa not under direct or nominal control by European powers. Located at the intersection of Near Eastern, North African, and Equatorial African spheres of interest, the kingdom occupied a geographical location that made it especially attractive to outsiders in the first decades of the century. Surrounded by British, French, and Italian territories, Ethiopia was a diffuse polity that had only recently centralized its governmental administration, though it was still largely dependent on international cooperation for material and technological assistance. Despite being denied access to the sea by its imperial neighbors, the nation

18

The Remediation of Waves

was largely understood in relation to water. With its strategic proximity to the sea route between Europe and Asia, Ethiopia was drawn into the geopolitical rivalries that structured political and economic relations from the Straits of Gibraltar through the Suez Canal and Red Sea into the Indian Ocean. Sitting atop the headwaters of the Nile at Lake Tana, it was further pulled into the orbit of Mediterranean tensions because of British interests in Egyptian cotton production. During the mid-​twenties, in fact, Britain, France, and Italy had agreed to divide Ethiopia into spheres of economic influence, a move determined at least in part to dissuade Japan from continuing to invest in the kingdom’s development and modernization. If nothing else, this maneuvering was a sign of growing unease at challenges to the balance of power established at the end of the First World War, a relationship that was apparent even as it was playing out:

exercise it alone; but it could not be exercised at all without her active co-​operation.6

For many contemporary observers, including the one just quoted, the truly “exceptional” fact of Ethiopia’s position was its continuing independence. Given the drift of international relations in the early thirties, trouble was not long in coming. For the Italian government, changes to the balance of power were merely overdue recognition of Italy’s claims to the colonial spoils the British and French had promised it in return for joining the Allied nations in World War I. The consolidation of Italian East Africa was viewed as a means to enhance Italy’s prestige among world powers, while imperial expansion would help to fulfill the promise of the fascist regime. Directed toward both domestic and foreign audiences, this message portentously announced Mussolini’s designs for an empire in the greater Mediterranean region, which would alleviate Italy’s chronic problems of underdevelopment and emigration by securing the geopolitical platform on which to stage the nation’s renascent power. However rosy its alignment of political desires and practical realities might be, this thrust effectively linked fascist ideological policy to the regime’s strategic objectives, and in doing so provided a unified rhetorical focus to its multifarious propaganda campaigns. The implementation of this policy was decisive in hardening the politics of the decade’s second half:

Under post-​war conditions too, as resulting from the change in the balance of sea-​power and the Washington and London Treaties, the position of Abyssinia is exceptional. Supremacy in the oceans of the world has come to be divided between the United States, Japan and the British Empire, the United States controlling the Western Atlantic and the Eastern Pacific, Japan the Western Pacific and Great Britain the Eastern Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. Supremacy in the waterways that connect these oceans naturally forms part of this scheme. Thus Abyssinia lies within a region where the police-​power of the League [of Nations] would, in the event of trouble, naturally fall to be exercised

Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in October 1935 threw

mainly by Great Britain. In accordance with the

British and French Mediterranean policy into disar-

spirit of the collective system she would not wish to

ray and compelled the two democracies, as well

19

Ireland and the Problem with Information

and medium wave signals to broadcast within circumscribed geographical areas, offering programming that addressed national or regional audiences in much the same way that daily newspapers addressed and cultivated particular domestic readerships. Although the potential for international broadcasting had been recognized, radio in its first decade of widespread civilian use was mostly directed at national communities of listeners, and states and their broadcasting authorities asserted a monopoly of address within their jurisdictions, free of internal dissent and external critique. Whereas newspapers, books, and films were subject to customs regulation and seizure, and thus could be denied entry to one state from another, radio waves did not respect geopolitical borders. In their earliest manifestation, radio hostilities centered on frontier stations built along national cleavages in order to transmit to audiences straddling the demarcations between states. At times, these stations broadcast domestic programs that foreign listeners, by their proximity, could pick up; at others, they expressly broadcast to listeners across the frontier. Civilian radio service might have been new, but it was enfolded without difficulty into the fluctuating political equilibrium of the postwar world. In their next phase of escalation, radio hostilities again centered on national frontiers, if from another, newer set of stations. In a widely cited article of the time, the American broadcaster César Saerchinger described this definitive step: “Since 1933 border warfare by radio has gone out of date, [and] this is not because the nations have abandoned the most modern of all weapons, but because the

as Nazi Germany, to reconsider their views of Fascist Italy. What is often dismissed as “the Abyssinian diversion” actually started the chain of events that brought Italy into armed conflict with Britain and France in June 1940. Beginning in 1936 Germany and Italy developed the basis for a mutually advantageous partnership, which encouraged Italy to engage in proxy wars with France in Spain and East Africa. Yet the British government firmly believed it could entice Mussolini away from ever-​ closer ties to Hitler. That diplomacy only created friction between London and Paris, while Fascist Italy took what it could from the British and continued to strengthen its ties to Nazi Germany.7

Although the Italians offered diplomatic, legal, and moral grounds for their actions against Ethiopia, the final justification for conquest was simply, and blatantly, that Italy was in urgent need of colonial expansion. This “watery” strategic context to the Ethiopian crisis had its medial equivalent in the ideological struggles of the international airwaves. One of the major developments in international relations during the interwar period was the advent of national radio services designed for foreign listeners. While some cross-​border reception of domestic programming was unavoidable among the densely packed nations of Europe, economic and political tensions encouraged the use of radio as an offensive instrument, with deliberate transmission across national frontiers increasingly employed as a central implement of ideological competition. As technological advances in transmission and reception made during the First World War were adapted to civilian use in the twenties, national and commercial radio services relied primarily on long

20

The Remediation of Waves

advent of the super-​power station has made frontier stations superfluous.”8 As electrical phenomena, long and medium wave radio signals are disturbed by natural and artificial environmental features, such as mountain ranges, meteorological conditions, and infrastructure, which can markedly delimit the range of their effective reception. To mitigate interference, powerful transmitters were used to boost signals, although the cost of building such immense transmission facilities initially impeded the proliferation of high-​powered stations. In the first half of the thirties, ideological and political considerations began to trump these economic constraints—​ Saerchinger notes that in 1930 there were no 100-​kilowatt transmitters in operation, while seven years later there were seventy stations transmitting at this strength or higher. Here was an “arms race” measured in kilowatts, rather than ships or guns.9 These powerful transmitters covered huge territories, at once consolidating the ability of national services to monopolize their hold on domestic listeners while extending the capacity to address listeners far outside national boundaries. This contradiction was at the heart of radio hostilities, as transmitting power made it harder to maintain a clean distinction between domestic and foreign programming or to regulate the difference between national and international broadcasting services. A final stage of interwar radio hostilities both confirmed and shifted their course: this was the rise of shortwave broadcasting, which “turned a European into a world problem.”10 Whereas all transmitters emit two kinds of signals, what are called “surface waves” and “sky waves,” long and medium wave

broadcasts travel on the former, moving from the point of transmission to receivers on a straight line along a horizontal axis. Traveling on sky waves, shortwave transmissions reach the point of reception at a diagonal angle, after having ricocheted across great distances between earth and ionosphere and back to earth. With improvements to directional antennas, this property allowed engineers to aim shortwave programming at relatively specific areas around the world, but with far less transmitting power than was required for medium wave broadcasting: “The effectiveness of [directional] antennas is illustrated by the fact that a 5-​kilowatt station with a highly directive antenna will put as strong a signal into England from the east coast of the United States as a 130-​kilowatt station operating without directional antennas. Thus the analogy of waves undulating in widening concentric circles, used to describe long- and medium-​wave transmission, should be replaced for short-​wave transmission by one of ripples of radio energy that proceed outward and upward—​in only one segment of the circle.”11 By the mid-​thirties, long-​range broadcasting had therefore become a feasible enterprise. Yet the potential of shortwave broadcasting was not solely realized by the great powers, as the technical requirements for shortwave transmissions allowed even the smallest, remotest, or poorest nations to broadcast to the world. Ethiopia was, in fact, a prime example of this new opportunity: The Abyssinians’ little short-​wave station near Addis Ababa—​at an altitude of some nine thousand feet—​operating on the ridiculously low power of one kilowatt, had made itself heard throughout the

21

Ireland and the Problem with Information

enabled the establishment of empire broadcasting in France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom; the introduction of “diasporic” services from Italy, Japan, and Germany; and the opening of international airwaves to small nations such as the Irish Free State and Ethiopia. International broadcasters, such as the stations operated by the Vatican and the League of Nations, vied with the stridently internationalist programming of the Soviet Union, while the construction of mammoth medium wave transmitters capable of blanketing vast geographical areas created zones of ideological conflict conducted simultaneously through medium and shortwave transmissions. One of the most dramatic of these centered on the Mediterranean and Near East, where the Italians and British (and soon the Germans and French) jostled for influence in several languages. Indeed, the British Foreign Office requested that the BBC begin monitoring English-​ language news bulletins broadcast by foreign stations during the Ethiopian crisis, in order to gauge international opinion and keep abreast of developments that might affect diplomatic and strategic planning.13 In one of the first surveys of international political broadcasting, Thomas Grandin could already look back from 1938 at the role played by radio hostilities in the decade’s tumultuous course:

western world. Here was a romance of engineering, indeed. The Italians, who years ago built this station for the Abyssinians merely as a commercial telegraph terminus, little suspected that it would one day be used against them by their dusky enemies. It had no speech panel and no speech-​input amplifier, though for some remote contingency there was an old-​fashioned carbon microphone lying about. With this meagre equipment a Swedish engineer named Ernst Hammar, employed as director of communications by Emperor Haile Selassie, managed to rig up something that could actually make itself heard, first in London and then in New York.12

With cooperation from American networks, the station in Addis Ababa eventually became the source not only of Ethiopian broadcasts, but eventually of eyewitness reports from the nation by the Western press. This use of the station was one of the first instances of what quickly became a familiar wartime use of the medium. On a new scale, a “world” scale, radio waves could now be directed at specific groups of listeners. While each of these phases of radio hostilities was distinct in its elaboration, the initiation of a “new” phase did not end or supersede the last, but instead represented an added dimension to the decade’s tensions as they were played out over the question of reaching listeners. A quick catalog of developments gives some indication of the additive nature of this escalation. Far from being outmoded, border stations remained especially potent in localized points of friction, many of which were located along the frontiers of Germany, from France to Austria to Czechoslovakia to Poland. Shortwave broadcasting

Our planet, potentially, has become an open forum, where a frank exchange of ideas could take place, on a scale never known before.

The plain fact, however, is that broadcasting,

instead of developing into an agency for peace and better international understanding, serves

22

The Remediation of Waves

of international concern. However compromised its power was by the entrenched national self-​interest of its most powerful members, the League was a crucial site at which interwar crises of internationalism were registered and debated. Susan Pedersen gives a useful account of this “Geneva-​centered world”: “Other cities between the wars were much more polyglot and cosmopolitan: it was in Geneva, however, that internationalism was enacted, institutionalized, and performed. That internationalism had its holy text (the [League] Covenant); it had its high priests and prophets. . . . There was an annual pilgrimage each September, when a polyglot collection of national delegates, claimants, lobbyists, and journalists descended on this once-​placid bourgeois town. But for all its religious overtones, interwar internationalism depended more on structure than on faith: a genuinely transnational officialdom, and not visionaries or even statesmen, was its beating heart.”16 That the League was ultimately unable to contain or overcome the conflicts between rival blocs should not diminish attention to what it represented during the contentious years of its existence. By specifying a convergence point of governmental claims and a variety of forms of mobilized public opinion (disarmament lobbies, nascent anticolonial formations, anti-​ trafficking and labor societies), the League presents a cross-​section of the dilemmas faced in these decades. As a forum of “enacted” internationalism in the interwar years, the League at least has the virtue of marking a failed promise, rather than the habitually repeated false promise of a technologically determined global village.

often to incite hatred throughout the world, and is often used, for motives which obviously are not disinterested, and by men in conflict, to dominate, rather than to enlighten, the public mind. Science once again has made a gigantic stride forward, with the result that relations between nations are becoming more embittered.14

In a world of motivation, interest, and unashamed displays of power, here, in fact, was the dissolution of a “romance of engineering.” Rather than alleviate or counteract the connivances and brutalities of mundane political circumstances, technological advances in the field of communications had instead amplified them. As a potentially “open forum” of exchange, the international airwaves existed only insofar as they were produced in the interaction of grounded transmitters and receivers, a situation less of celestial intercession than embedded realization. As an institution driven by the “particular blend of pragmatism and hope that became known as the ‘spirit of Geneva,’ ” the League of Nations embodied an entirely unique forum in which issues of national competition and international cooperation, remote disputes and disparate publics, could coalesce in “frank exchange.”15 While still now largely discredited as an idealist association prone to bureaucratic stalemate and appeasement, the League nevertheless offered a setting for national agency and international arbitration where none had previously existed. For small or powerless states in particular, it provided the opportunity to form alignments outside the orbit of powerful states, while participating as judicial equals in confronting issues

23

Ireland and the Problem with Information

Both the Irish Free State and Ethiopia had been admitted to the League during its Fourth Assembly, which sat in session between September 1923 and August 1924. While each country ultimately received unanimous votes, neither case was without contention, for they embodied distinct forms of uneven development. The Irish faced questions about the size of the Free State Army, which was considered to be large relative to the state’s population and therefore to pose a threat to stability. The Irish government responded that the Civil War had ended only months earlier and that mass demobilization without adequate employment represented a greater threat to stability.17 Like the Irish, who saw the League as a forum in which to exercise national autonomy and a guarantor of small nations’ rights, the Ethiopians believed that “in the League of Nations there existed a body that could throw a cloak of protection over the smaller states, and might therefore be a useful aid to Ethiopia against her three powerful neighbors, who had already given evidence that they would not be averse to absorbing Ethiopia into their own territories, or at least into their spheres of influence when the time was ripe.”18 They were met with far stronger opposition, particularly from the British, than were the Irish. The most serious objection raised to Ethiopia’s candidacy involved the issue of slavery, as F. P. Walters, the former deputy secretary general, noted: “For the last two years a League Committee had been engaged in accumulating information concerning the survival of slavery, in various forms and in various countries. The reports on Ethiopia were appalling, in regard not only to

the institution of domestic slavery but also to slave-​raiding and the slave-​trade.”19 This matter was hotly debated both in the Assembly and in the western European press, where vocal anti-​slavery activists advocated that the nation become a mandated territory overseen by an imperial power. In response, the Ethiopian government declared that it was in no position immediately to free every domestic slave without an adequate employment infrastructure in place, but that League membership would foster these structural changes. It further noted that slave trading was an international problem: the largest markets for slaves were on the Arabian Peninsula, across the Red Sea from Africa; yet Italian, French, and British colonial territories denied Ethiopia access to the sea. Only international cooperation, it concluded, would eradicate the practice.20 Ethiopia pledged to abolish slavery and eliminate slave trading within its borders, and the government created a department—​with the man who translated Uncle Tom’s Cabin into Amharic as its head—​ to administer its efforts.21 Domestic slavery remained a contentious issue at the League throughout the twenties and into the thirties, when it was increasingly handled within the ambit of labor commissions. For the great European powers, skepticism and self-​interest dominated perceptions of Ethiopia and its sovereignty. As it was, slavery offered the pretense for Italian aggression in late 1934. Decrying slave-​ raiding incursions across the indistinct border between Ethiopia and Italian Somaliland, the Italians mounted an all-​out propaganda campaign to justify its territorial ambitions in East Africa. Citing the Ethiopians’ slow

24

The Remediation of Waves

progress in confronting slavery, the fascist regime labeled Ethiopia an anachronism, a feudal leftover in the modern world. It presented its own imperial designs as a crusade to liberate the Ethiopian people from the barbarism of their rulers, drawing on antislavery discourses to argue that occupation was a necessary and progressive step toward modernization.22 That Ethiopia was a member of the League due the rights and obligations afforded by the Covenant only highlighted its inability to function as a civilized nation, as one Italian pamphlet explained:

humanitarianism: slaves, lepers, wastelands, and desolate villages stand opposite smiling natives, caring medical workers, cultivated fields, and planned cities. This disparity is, in the words of the pamphlet’s title, “what Geneva does not want to see.” Each photograph is accompanied by a caption printed in six languages (Italian, French, English, German, Spanish, and Portuguese), as though the photographic arrangement were not plain enough.24 A third pamphlet branded Ethiopia “the last stronghold of slavery,” a corrupt, premodern vestige whose reform was a moral duty of civilized nations. Even its ancient Christianity was identified as ludicrously archaic: “But who can take seriously the Christianity of the Abyssinians? It is a coarse mixture of primitive superstitions, ritual Judaic [giudaiche] practices, and superficial and beggared Christian assimilations.”25 Whereas the Ethiopians have been pandered to even while continuing to squander their land’s natural richness, the Italians have made the most of “a country which is naturally poor”: “The Italian people, who have given such a formidable contribution to western civilisation and progress, have a general standard of living unworthy of their past and of the position they have gradually acquired in the modern world through science, art, culture and social reform.”26 By insisting on Italy’s unequivocal right to colonial expansion as a vital matter of national self-​ determination, Mussolini’s regime announces itself without apology:

Ethiopia’s admission to the League of Nations was a political act, inspired by confidence that the country could be led to make the efforts required gradually to attain the level of civilisation of other nations belonging to the League, by participating in the system of international cooperation established by the Covenant. The assumption that the League of Nations in itself is a system for the promotion of progress of member nations, does not correspond with reality, unless the essential [capacity] for admission to the League be the capacity of a country to develop its own civilisation.

All countries do not possess this capacity in

equal degree. The League of Nations should take this into due consideration. Ethiopia has shown that she is unable to find in her membership the impulse to make a voluntary effort to raise herself to the level of other civilised countries.23

In another pamphlet, the Italians portrayed the League as abetting Ethiopian backwardness in the name of misguided idealism. Juxtaposing photographs of Ethiopia and the Italian East African colonies, the images create a narrative of brutality opposed by

Those who oppose Italian expansion are hardly loyal to the cause of peace nor do they favour political balance of Europe [sic]. There can be

25

Ireland and the Problem with Information

guarded for centuries against incursion, offered a symbol of the future, its continuing self-​determination a principal coordinate of racial internationalism. When it became clear that the nation was only a “pawn in European diplomacy,” the implications of the crisis could no longer be sequestered as a peripheral affair, as Ernest Work, an African American educational adviser in Ethiopia, powerfully declared: “Evidently Ethiopia is to be sacrificed in an effort to maintain the peace of Europe. If such is the case the sacrifice is too great and instead of securing the peace of Europe this utterly unrighteous bartering of a weaker brother among the nations of Europe may easily prove to be the rock of offense upon which Europe herself shall be broken.”31 Work’s bitterly unambiguous reference to chattel slavery was in turn echoed by W. E. B. Du Bois in “Inter-​Racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis: A Negro View,” a stinging and cautionary analysis published by Foreign Affairs in October 1935. Examining the “changes through which the color problem has passed” in the preceding two decades, Du Bois sees the crisis as a regression to prewar conditions of racial domination.32 Without qualification and with only the barest rhetorical finesse, Italy has announced its intention to subjugate Ethiopia because it has the power to do so. It is a lesson he knows will not go unnoticed: “The results on the minds and actions of great groups and nations of oppressed peoples, peoples with a grievance real or fancied, whose sorest spot, their most sensitive feelings, is brutally attacked, can only be awaited. The world, or any part of it, seems unable to do anything to prevent the impending blow, the

no peace or political balance without justice. Economic penetration, concessions, spheres of influence, are inadequate means to solve such far reaching problems as those entailing the whole future of a people. No enterprise, especially colonial, is either lasting or safe, unless it is protected by the national flag.

New Italy refuses to submit to impositions such

as mortified and humiliated the Italy of old, which had not acquired full consciousness of its value and position among independent and united nations.27

In this imperial guise, the fascist was cast in the role of modernizer. This propaganda campaign met with mixed success. More candidly than others, one European delegate at Geneva stated, “The Italians want us to eat shit. All right. We will eat it. But they also want us to declare it is rose jam. That is a bit much.”28 More characteristic of diplomatic opinion was John Maffey’s report for the British Foreign Office on British interests in Ethiopia, which in June 1935 saw Italian conquest as inevitable (a year before it was accomplished), but reasoned that Ethiopian independence offered little that Italian control took away.29 The Last Stronghold of Slavery shrewdly quoted Maffey’s report to support its claims, and the pamphlet had an especially large distribution in Britain. In addition to copies printed in Rome, at least fifty thousand were printed in London at the height of the crisis, and the text was highly influential among Mussolini’s admirers in the liberal democracies.30 The most concerted resistance to Italian aggression came from the black diaspora, for whom Ethiopia’s ancient sovereignty,

26

The Remediation of Waves

only excuse for which is that other nations have done exactly what Italy is doing.”33 For Du Bois, the aggression against Ethiopia and the seemingly inevitable assent of the white world to imperial domination are the latest, and gravest, manifestations of a long-​standing relation of oppression to rationalization.

years: new voices in new media, old forms reinvented as new configurations, new articulations of old relations. Against this background, de Valera’s performance remains no less impressive, insofar as it records a specifically Irish variation on the decade’s themes. At the same time, however, this variation reveals dynamics within the larger context of international tensions that are otherwise inaudible. De Valera’s election as prime minister in 1932 coincided with the start of Ireland’s term in the rotating presidency of the League’s Council. This coincidence disquieted the great powers, which feared he would use the position to denounce Britain and thereby disturb the body’s procedural equilibrium. Regarding him as an intransigent revolutionary and anticolonial firebrand, the British worried that de Valera would be unwilling to cut off discussion of imperialism and instead be too inclined to favor pointed talk of historical grievance and present inequality. At some level, there was truth behind this worry, in that Ireland used its membership to articulate an independent foreign policy derived as much from its postcolonial identity as from its weak position within Europe; indeed, this conjunction was the essence of its anomalous place in the League. The worry was misplaced in its obsession with de Valera as demagogue, the fanatical strongman leading a phalanx of disciples. As Brian Farrell memorably characterized it, “De Valera’s style of chairmanship, in government and party alike, was provokingly patient with opposition, agonisingly tolerant of the irrelevant, overwhelmingly understanding of the stupid. He used exhaustion rather than coercion to

Ensemble and Microphone Within the more delimited sphere of Irish foreign relations, “the spirit of Geneva” is almost exclusively associated with the figure of Eamon de Valera, whose highly visible participation in the League during the thirties marks a definitive turn in Irish politics between independence and the Second World War. While the validity of this association is unquestionable, the singularity of its focus misrecognizes not only the institutional character of the League, but the extent to which de Valera relied on the canny insight of the Irish delegation at Geneva. As Michael Kennedy argues, “[De Valera’s one-man-​ show] might not have been an ensemble piece on stage, but behind the scenes the solo performer was prepared, advised and initially supervised by the staff of the Department of External Affairs. De Valera was certainly not their mouthpiece, but neither was he performing all his own work. A solid base to work from, de Valera’s inspiration and the Department of External Affairs[’] perspiration and expertise, were the significant factors behind Ireland’s position in the League in the 1930s.”34 As the foregoing section outlined, internationalism was at once encouraged and challenged by the vertiginous rise of competing forums of exchange during the interwar

27

Ireland and the Problem with Information

secure maximum consent to, and preferably unanimity in, decision-​making.”35 In Geneva, where he could only sporadically be present, de Valera relied on the civil servants of the Irish delegation, whose reports from the city demonstrate an astute sense of the machinations and compromises driving outward shows of diplomacy and cooperation.36 If de Valera’s strong speeches during the Ethiopian crisis display his own qualities of ethical appeal, they would have been impossible without the Irish delegation. Its skill made Geneva into “Dublin’s continent-​wide European listening-​post.”37 In the present context, this aural dimension to the leader’s skill and power is fundamental, even when it was clearly the product of tightly managed techniques of presentation. While most easily understood in relation to the figure of the dictator, this auditory quality could be readily personified in any charismatic authority. Hitler’s screaming and Mussolini’s verbal swagger, both counterpointed by fevered crowds, represent the extremes of this practice, new in its deployment and critically dependent on the broadcasting microphone. Some radio professionals recognized this relationship at the time, and their explanations are instructive. In Saerchinger’s Hello America! a book detailing his work in transatlantic radio during the thirties, personality is framed as “giv[ing] content to an otherwise soulless machine.”38 As Saerchinger is quick to point out, however, radio does not always give back. In examining the “old-​fashioned demagogue, the political rabble-​rouser of pre-​war days, whose technique is that of the stump,” he offers David Lloyd George as a prominent

example of a speaker not served by the microphone: “Unsurrounded by his admirers, with nothing but his voice to convey the workings of his agile mind, Lloyd George’s eloquence simply does not come off. . . . On the ether, all his charm seems to evaporate: of all the speeches that woo the coy citizen sitting at his loud-​speaker at election times, Lloyd George’s are the dullest and least effective, because the histrionics—​the winning smile, the half-​closed eyes, the clenched fist, and the hands toying with the golden spectacles—​are simply of no use.”39 In contrast, Saerchinger presents de Valera as both an intransigent and a democrat, a combination he discerns in the latter’s use of the microphone. Saerchinger had facilitated de Valera’s first broadcast to the United States in 1932, which was relayed by NBC from the Radio Éireann studio in Dublin’s General Post Office. Having walked in “as though he were going to buy a stamp,” de Valera faced “an incredibly primitive-​ looking microphone contraption” to address his foreign listeners: “His delivery, in his faint and attractive brogue, was quiet and matter of fact, almost casual, seeking to convince by the strength of argument alone. . . . He was fully aware of the value of talking to America . . . but he refused to make any emotional appeal, just as he refused to abandon that ‘obligatory’ opening paragraph in laboriously perfected Gaelic, no matter how many thousands of listeners, with American impatience, might tune out.”40 If the dictator depends on mastery of the crowd, and the demagogue on “histrionic” intimacies, de Valera occupies neither of these positions. Hitler and Mussolini were rarely heard apart from a chorus of supporters, a relationship that was visualized

28

The Remediation of Waves

in the leader’s commanding position over the masses. In the most common image of de Valera during these years, he is the public servant alone at his desk, soberly attending to the people’s business. While many domestic and foreign commentators, for a variety of reasons, had an interest in labeling him as a “unique dictator,” the mechanisms of his leadership ran contrary to this perception.41 Like his vocal delivery, his authority was formal and precise. This relationship was paramount in the Irish response to the Ethiopian crisis. At the beginning of tensions, a memo circulated within the Department of External Affairs diagnosed the growing influence of fascism at the League, but nonetheless discerned a potential brake on its progress: “Fascism as a rule of organization for international society is impossible for a very good reason. The element common, and indeed essential, to all the internal regimes based on Fascist principles is the confidence reposed in the leader, and the willing obedience accorded him in consequence. That essential element is conspicuously lacking, for very good reasons, as between the smaller states and the Great Powers.”42 In this passage, the spread of fascism is linked to its appeal, but additionally to the willingness among non-​fascist states to appease fascist demands in the interest of maintaining the balance of power. As a weak state, Ireland recognized this problem as one inhering not with fascism per se, but with a more pervasive question of material inequality. The civil service memo argued therefore that judicial equality among states within the League represented more than simply an effective check on fascism’s spread, for the

League Covenant provided a mechanism to redress the material conditions driving military escalation the world over: With all its defects, the Covenant has this virtue that it put an end to international feudalism, and initiated the era of international democracy and international government with the consent of the governed. The Saorstát, like all the other smaller members of the League, has a vote and a veto at Geneva. It may be hard to get the League to take positive action in cases in which it should do so; but at least the Covenant enables the smaller and weaker states, by using their veto, to prevent unjust action being clothed with the mantle of legality, and to put states which follow certain courses in the position of violators of the law and rebels against the international order.43

Sensing the drift toward a tiered League governed by a “might makes right” ethos, the memo is terse about the future: “Certainly the Saorstát would leave the League rather than pledge itself to abide by the decisions of a body composed exclusively of Great Powers.”44 Written at some point in 1935, this document provides the blueprint, or score, for de Valera’s subsequent actions during the crisis. As they played out, events steadily eroded the ideals of international cooperation and arbitration that had given rise to the League. Already evident in the External Affairs memo, this loss of faith is the crescendoing note in de Valera’s speeches during the Ethiopian crisis, as developments slid from outrage to disgrace. In a broadcast to the United States on September 12, 1935, over Radio-​Nations, the League’s shortwave station, de Valera

29

Ireland and the Problem with Information

stressed the danger of unchecked aggression by one member against another: “The theory of the absolute sovereignty of States, interpreted to mean that a State is above all law, must be abandoned. In a community, if the individual held himself free at every moment to act as his selfish interests might prompt, irrespective of the rights and interests of his neighbour, it is clear that order within such a community and peace would be impossible. So are peace and order impossible within the world community of States if States may hold that self-​interest is for them the supreme law, and that they are subject to no other control.”45 Arguing that the Covenant must become more flexible in order to address the increasing militarization of politics, he sees the League as an imperfect, but significant, effort to “order international affairs by reason and justice instead of by force.” To ignore reform is to abdicate the possibility of a collectively secured future: “To destroy [the League] now would be a crime against humanity. To maintain it we must live up to its obligations. . . . The alternative, so far as Europe is concerned, is a return to the law of the jungle. What philosophy of life can make us believe that man is necessarily condemned to such a fate?”46 This statement is a stern rebuke not only to militarism but also to Italian fascism, a political ideology cloaked in the mantle of a “philosophy of life.” In turn, it upends Italian claims that Ethiopia must be liberated from barbarism, by denying the equation of technological superiority with the realization of justice. In that radio address, de Valera had called for “some means” by which the League’s principles could be enforced against states

in violation of them.47 When Ethiopia was invaded on October 2, it took a week for the League to impose economic sanctions on Italy. In the interim, de Valera broadcast the government’s reaction to the outbreak of war on Radio Éireann, explaining that, as a member state, the Irish Free State would fulfill its obligations if sanctions were to be mandated; should “more rigorous measures” become necessary, he continued, the matter would be brought to the Dáil. While wary of being drawn into armed conflict, he nevertheless states that the “difficulty with the League, then, is not that the obligations it imposes are too strict, but that they are not strict enough to be effective.”48 In treading this delicate line between national self-​determination and international commitment, de Valera adeptly used the radio to frame Ethiopia’s plight as linked to Ireland’s place in the world, as Cian McMahon has noted: “His speeches and radio addresses during the conflict in Abyssinia largely set the tone of discussion amongst the Irish population—​a tone that was reflected in the newspapers. The tenor of these addresses was based very strongly on the context of membership in an international community founded on justice.”49 By tracking the coverage garnered in a number of Irish newspapers, McMahon identifies this moment as an important point, when public discourse “transcended partisan political divisions and clerical influence during the crisis to envisage the Free State not as a passive or outside observer, but, rather, as an active player in the global community.” As articulated in de Valera’s addresses, the League served for the Irish public as “an alternative source of moral authority,” distinct from both

30

The Remediation of Waves

the Catholic Church and traditional nationalism: “Far from insularity, the Abyssinian crisis highlights a surprising level of interest amongst the Irish reading public in the wider world.”50 That radio broadcasting was central to the constitution of this reading public cannot be underestimated. Because of this worldliness, the termination of the crisis was especially bitter. When the Italians announced military victory in May 1936, it came after the League’s stance had been definitively undermined by the French and British, who were by now focused on German rearmament. In an address to the League Assembly on July 2, facing the prospect that sanctions were about to be dropped (as, indeed, they were), de Valera directly connected Irish self-​determination to Ethiopia’s troubles: “Perhaps, as representatives of a small nation that has itself had experience of aggression and dismemberment, the members of the Irish delegation may be more sensitive than others to the plight of Ethiopia. But is there any small nation represented here which does not feel the truth of the warning that what is Ethiopia’s fate to-​day may well be its own fate to-​morrow, should the greed or the ambition of some powerful neighbour prompt its destruction?”51 This linkage is not simply a gesture of solidarity, nor is it an example of rhetorical overstatement; it instead articulates a correlation born of shared fear. Whereas Du Bois had been concerned with the interracial implications of the crisis, de Valera remains fixated on its international implications, which he finds similarly unwelcoming and unavoidable. When Haile Selassie had addressed the Assembly three days earlier, it was in part through de Valera’s

intercession. Advocating for the emperor’s right to speak under the Covenant, de Valera listened to his appeal on behalf of his people: I ask the fifty nations who have given the Ethiopian people a promise to help them in their resistance to the aggressor. What are they willing to do for Ethiopia?

I ask the great Powers, who have promised the

guarantee of collective security to small states—​ those small states over whom hangs the threat that they may one day suffer the fate of Ethiopia: What measures do they intend to take?

Representatives of the world, I came to Geneva

to discharge in your midst the most painful of the duties of the head of State. What answer am I to take back to my people?52

In its futile attempts to control aggression, the League answered by announcing its ineffectiveness as an institution. For de Valera, the conclusion to draw was that small nations, including Ethiopia, would never receive justice from the great powers and must instead act toward their own protection. What made this conclusion notably galling was the fact that such action would not be collectively and democratically achieved, but compelled by atomized, defensive, and increasingly acute necessity. What collective action that remained, de Valera pointedly observed, was an astringent one: “Over fifty nations, we have now to confess publicly that we must abandon the victim to his fate.”53 This represented a decisive turn from mutual cooperation toward individual self-​preservation, a shift de Valera specifies at the end of his address of July 2: “Despite our juridical equality here, in matters such as

31

Ireland and the Problem with Information

European peace the small States are powerless. As I have already said, peace is dependent upon the will of the great States. All the small States can do, if the statesmen of the greater States fail in their duty, is resolutely to determine that they will not become the tools of any great Power, and that they will resist with whatever means they may possess every attempt to force them into a war against their will.”54 Although now contracted to include only Europe, this stage represents the potential “to-​morrow” to Ethiopia’s “to-​day.” De Valera had already deliberately echoed Haile Selassie in his tabulation of League members, but this invocation of “to-​day” and “to-​morrow” was for all intents a direct quotation of the emperor, who had icily muttered in front of the Assembly, “It is us today; it will be you tomorrow.”55 With the League’s ultimate failure to confront or counter Italian aggression, and the recognition by most member states of Ethiopia as an Italian colony, the Irish Free State lost what remained of its faith in collective security. It instead began to formulate the policy of neutrality that would soon be enshrined in the 1937 Constitution and strictly practiced during the Second World War.56 After the shattering of trust in the League’s ability to safeguard its independence, the only choice left to the Irish Free State was that which was no longer available to Ethiopia: self-​preservation.

made the Italians; sanctions united Italy.” Explaining that his “visit to Abyssinia had been made, not so much for the purpose of visiting that strange, Oriental country, as for studying the task achieved by 14 years of Fascist Rome,” Starkie validates his anonymous interlocutor’s epochal sense of the conquest as the final stage in Italian national destiny initiated with the Risorgimento and completed by the fascist revolution.57 Rather than break Italian will, League sanctions had occasioned the overcoming of the last impediment to national renewal. To combat sanctions, women donated their wedding rings to the regime and turned to largely vegetarian “Sanctions cooking,” men put aside regional loyalties to enlist in the armed forces, scientists made clothing and flags from a milk-​based wool substitute called Lanital: these actions give Starkie “a curious feeling of the continuity of history” and embody a modern vision of “the ancient Rome of the Republic.”58 While presented as his firsthand impressions, these spectacles of struggle and renewal are essentially copped, like his unnamed friend’s slogan, straight from the fascist regime’s propaganda campaigns. By never mentioning, for example, that the mass exchange of gold wedding rings for steel was the centerpiece of the Giornata della Fede (Day of Faith) organized on December 18, 1935, or that references to local and regional attachment (including dialect) were banned from the fascist mass media, Starkie can stage these events as both spontaneous and preordained, as the unplanned expressions of collective unanimity.59 In presenting Musso­ lini’s Italy as the paradigm of self-​determined national development, The Waveless Plain is

Auratic Listener and Fascist Violin In his autobiographical travelogue The Waveless Plain, Walter Starkie quotes a remark made to him by an unnamed “Italian friend” in Ethiopia: “Cavour made Italy; Mussolini

32

The Remediation of Waves

much more than a crass narrativization of administrative dictates, reading instead as a cultural anthropology of fascist charisma. This is most evident in Starkie’s authorial position, particularly when he faces the radio. Starkie was born into a distinguished Catholic Anglo-​Irish family in County Dublin in 1894, and became a professor in Romance languages at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1926; one of the students with whom he worked was Samuel Beckett.60 Shortly after this appointment, he was made a member of the Abbey Theatre’s board of directors, a position he would hold until 1942. These professional activities were balanced by a lifelong love of music, and Starkie, a trained violinist, maintained an abiding interest in the social role of traditional music in Ireland and on the continent. With its mix of credentialization and passion, professional rationalization and romantic abandonment, Starkie’s scholastic devotion to languages and music formed a foundational productive tension throughout his life. At one level, Starkie was a throwback to the Anglo-​Irish antiquarians of the previous century, a man of leisure invested in the cultural preservation of traditional or premodern forms; at another, he was an international cosmopolitan, able to move with ease between Ireland, Britain, the United States, and the continent. As a member of Dublin’s cultural administration, Starkie gravitated toward its dominant, and decidedly right-​wing, poles, combining a belief in cultural nationalism with a desire for the importation of continental strands of political authoritarianism. In 1927, he became a founding member of the Centre International d’Études sur le Fascisme, based in

Lausanne, Switzerland; and the following year wrote an essay for its inaugural Survey of Fascism on the appropriateness of corporatist social policy for Ireland.61 While not exactly describing the emergence of the fascist new man, Starkie claimed that corporatist fraternal associations would eliminate the remaining vestiges of colonial servility and free individuals to enter into closer harmony with the national spirit. Yet this process could not be an insular or purely “national” endeavor. Having married an Italian woman, Starkie returned to Italy every summer to visit her family outside Genoa. As described in The Waveless Plain, it is his violin that facilitates mutual understanding between him and Italians, the tunes he plays never failing to draw around him an enthusiastic crowd of passionate listeners. As much as he is prone to attribute this relationship to an innate Italian or Mediterranean sensibility, it is important to recognize these scenes as indicative of the book’s explanation of Mussolini’s Italy. In bringing together a group of listeners who are bound by their recognition of his expert playing, Starkie presents an organic polity achieved through and organized by sound. Although it is not yet possible to specify its radiophonic features, the relationship of sound and social organization is central to The Waveless Plain. During the Ethiopian crisis, Starkie published a handful of admiring articles about Mussolini’s Italy, which represented the dictatorship as an attractive model of modern national renewal for the Irish Free State. In the early phase of the crisis, he argued that League sanctions might induce the regime’s fall, thus removing the strongest barrier to a communist Italy; in its later

33

Ireland and the Problem with Information

phase, he contended that international pressure on Italy’s colonial expansion would only drive the nation toward alliance with Hitler.62 Published in the Fine Gael–aligned Irish Independent, these articles reflect the contradictory elements at work in Irish right-of-​center politics, from pro–​British Ascendancy conservatives to extreme Catholic chauvinists to right-​revolutionary fellow travelers, all united only in their opposition to de Valera. Flipping the terms of the government’s stance, Starkie characterizes the Covenant as an apparatus “based not on right or justice, but on force,” an instrument designed to serve the status quo by denying national progress.63 While these articles made little headway with Irish readers, the Italian government nevertheless commissioned Starkie to write a book justifying its case.64 By the time The Waveless Plain appeared in 1938, it was 504 pages long and hardly delivered the kind of propaganda coup initially envisioned by the Italians, who by this time were no longer interested in vindicating decisions made years earlier. Even with the bungled circumstances of its publication, Starkie’s idiosyncratic travelogue is an important index to the appeal of fascism. In its closing pages, he stares at the Palazzo del Littorio (Palace of the Lictors), the newly built headquarters of the Fascist Party in Rome, finding it “a fitting symbol of the modern idea which must harmonize with its ancient surroundings.”65 Throughout the book, it is the realization of this “harmony,” as an orchestration of unity and difference, which commands his attention. In order to convey the various notes comp0sing this “harmony,” Starkie outwardly makes little of his professional credentials in

the travelogue, instead presenting himself as a worldly amateur. This posture is central to the book’s authorial address, for it establishes a rhetorical position from which to offer observations of Italian society and the international rivalries underpinning the text’s composition.66 Although Starkie is not shy about mentioning official negotiations and diplomatic intrigue, these matters are often refracted through images of himself as a distanced and passive consumer of media reports, gotten from either newspapers or radio broadcasts. In this, he demonstrates his removal, even his alienation, from events as they are happening, a condition of simultaneous dispersion and massification created by liberal democratic institutions. His shorthand for this condition is “public opinion.” In contrast to this combination of atomization and aggregation, he narrates international differences through “localized,” face-to-​face scenes of conversation, in the participatory exchanges to which his amateur status grants him access. This authorial pose takes two related forms, depending on his interlocutors. When moving within British circles, Starkie plays the role of patient intermediary, explaining to those too caught up in their own prejudices the nuances of Italian society and fascist policy. These exchanges work most often by showing him being dismissed or ridiculed as a dilettante: “Carefully I tried to explain to those [British] arm-​chair critics that even if they were correct in their sweeping judgment of Italy in 1918, she had changed considerably since that date: but they pooh-​poohed my remarks, saying that I was led astray by my affection for Italian singing, art and beauty.”67 Such staged encounters reinforce

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The Remediation of Waves

the importance of this “affection,” which is sharply distinguished from the aggressive provincialism and skeptical condescension of his British counterparts. As an amateur, Starkie functions as a knowledgeable and worldly guide, rather than as lecturing pedagogue. This guise takes a slightly different form when he engages Italians of all social backgrounds, casting himself as a figure in equal measures straight man and buffone. Entering into conversation, Starkie becomes the foreign naïf, whose misapprehensions and misunderstandings are genially corrected by firsthand testimony to the lived truth of Mussolini’s Italy. When he raises British or League objections to Italian maneuvering in East Africa, these arguments are handily rebuffed and become the occasions for reminders of unreciprocated Italian goodwill toward Britain. Starkie never makes it seem that he has been treated unfairly in these exchanges, which inevitably end in smiles all around and a rededication to mutual understanding. Unlike the opinionated belligerence of the British, the Italians’ passionate devotion to a self-​determined life is collective, inclusive, and inspiring. These two seemingly antithetical authorial poses are resolved by a third identity Starkie assumes, in which patient interlocutor and shambolic buffone are joined in the figure of the wandering minstrel. As an embodiment of itinerant autonomy, Starkie’s third authorial identity is less dependent on Irish (or Celtic) antecedents than on tropes of the spirited “Gypsy” always on the move along the edges of modern civilization. Reflecting Starkie’s lifelong fascination with (and genuine advocacy of ) the Romany people, their cultural traditions, and their rights, this

self-​figuration was nonetheless something of a calling card for him, a persona glimpsed in Micheál MacLiammóir’s remarkable description of a chance encounter with Starkie on Malta in the late thirties: One day while we were rehearsing on the stage somebody announced that “Doctor Estarka from Dublin” wanted to see us, and into the stalls with a fiddle under his arm, a stick in his hand, and a knapsack on his back, a plump and smiling troubadour, walked Walter Starkie. Was he returning from Barbary or on his way to Spain? Was he searching for gypsies or flying from the gilded fleshpots of Carthage? We could not tell: with Don Gypsy Starkie of Trinity College, Lansdowne Road, and the Albaicín, everything is possible, everything is improbable, everything is majestically unreal. Would he produce a bottle of the wine of Samothrace from his wallet, or a pack of cards painted with the images of Fate and Change and Adventure from his pocket, or a rabbit from his hat, or merely a sheaf of Cooke’s travel cheques?68

Starkie’s performative display should not distract from the work it accomplishes. Janet Lyon has noted how representations of “Gypsy” lawlessness and poverty were the flipside to those deploying the “Gypsy” as “emblem of natural liberty, unencumbered mobility, communal loyalty and harmony, admirably impervious to manipulation by the state and everywhere subverting the disciplinarity of evolving modern institutions.”69 In The Waveless Plain, Starkie recounts in several chapters how he learned the value of the “roving life” among the “Gypsies” of Calabria and Puglia just after the First World War. In this encounter with a form of

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Ireland and the Problem with Information

communality endowed with age-​old knowledge and spiritual youthfulness, Starkie first discovers what he later finds incarnated in Mussolini’s Italy.70 While not unrelated to the Yeatsian vision of hard-​riding aristocrat and stumblebum peasant-​vagrant standing equally (or harmoniously) in opposition to bourgeois mediocrity, Starkie’s connection of “Gypsy” and fascist speaks directly to a desired immediacy between individual freedom and social organization. Against the alienation endemic to liberalism, Starkie finds an authentic sociality animated by personality, a “system” of living that is a philosophy of life. As “Don Gypsy Starkie of Trinity College,” the wandering minstrel with his traveler’s checks, Starkie is thus the perfect intermediary between the unalienated immediacy of Italy and the rationalized, dissociating systems of northern Europe. Serving in one sense as a rebuke to British “arm-​chair critics,” this guise is the positive embodiment of being “led astray by [his] affection for Italian singing, art and beauty.” In another, however, the wandering minstrel is a constitutive element in Starkie’s projection of the prelapsarian social world first encountered twenty years earlier:

bread and ricotta (a cream cheese of Calabria), which satisfied the appetite. As for wine, there was always plenty—​delicious, fragrant Calabrian wine full of sunshine and memories. In the evenings I would go to this or that café in the villages and pull out my fiddle. The host would be glad to see me, for in the South of Italy all life is full of song.71

Earning the necessities of life by the scrape of his bow, Starkie imagines a world of organic relations, in which every juggler and clown has a place in the harmonious order of things. In this non-​fragmented social order, he is not alienated from his labor—​his brow never sweats “in the cool of olive trees”—​because his life is vibrant and imbued with passion. Given the chronic misery of the Italian South, his equation of ricotta and wine, however good they might be, with the good life full stop is telling. By the time Starkie was writing of his youthful tramping, the fascist government had outlawed discussion of the “southern question,” asserting that the regime’s modernization programs had answered it once and for all.72 Although social conditions in the Mezzogiorno had actually worsened since 1922, the regime’s propaganda relentlessly closed the gap between assertion and reality. In 1933, the government founded Ente Radio Rurale in response to complaints from rural teachers that “children in their paesi had never even heard Mussolini’s voice; consequently for many young people Fascism and its leaders lacked immediate appeal.” This agency distributed radios to schools and libraries and installed loudspeakers in town halls and cafes to encourage collective listening, aiming “to expose systematically the inhabitants of Italy’s traditionally isolated

One of my good friends was a juggler called Delco with whom I had, before demobilization, performed on many an occasion in the Camp Coliseum. Delco introduced me to many singers, acrobats, and clowns of every variety, who earn their living roaming from Taranto to Reggio. Most of the time, however, I led the life of a lonely minstrel, trudging for miles along the dusty roads, and halting in the cool of olive trees during the heat of the day. At cottages by the way I would buy some

36

The Remediation of Waves

rural masses to Fascist propaganda.”73 The year before Starkie’s book appeared, the government had begun producing and selling the Radio Balilla, an inexpensive receiver set designed to put a radio in every home: as a “machine of attention,” the radio would not only inform, but persuade.74 For the South, the regime equated radio with modernization itself. Starkie never mentions these developments, for they are the bureaucratic means behind the enchanting ends to which his attention is drawn. As a place of manufactured immediacy, Mussolini’s Italy confirms his social desire for integration with no accompanying loss of autonomy. In framing this world of unalienated social interactions as the ground for a true individualism, Starkie thus universalizes not his own position in that world, but his projection of that position—​namely, as the wandering minstrel. Nostalgically celebrating his ability to cast off all ties to “humdrum life” and move among “a heap of disreputable friends—​street arabs, beggars, hobos,” he nevertheless recognizes in retrospect the element of slumming in this period of his life. Significantly, it is this recognition that reminds him of Ireland: “Now there followed days of real freedom. As soon as I got out in the open country I changed my personality, for my thoughts travelled back to those days in Ireland when I used to go about from fair to fair with old blind fiddlers in Dowras Bay and Cushendun. I remembered the day when one of the Coffeys of Killorglin put a tinker’s curse on me, saying in his wrath: ‘May you tramp the roads till the feet wear off you, and may they find you dead in a ditch.’ ”75 It only becomes clear much later in his text,

and then only implicitly, that Starkie believes this curse has come true, but as its inversion: no longer able to wander the roads earning his living with a violin, he now finds himself immobilized and “dead” in the faculty of Romance languages at Trinity. However ostentatious this disavowal of his professional life is, it serves to cue a distinction implied by his comparison of Ireland to Italy. Rather than the depersonalizing parliamentary democracy of the former, where the majority (or the “many”) rules, Italy is where organic social relations still exist, precisely because the dictatorship is committed to this “real freedom.” While once he could change his personality in Ireland, this liberty is now only fully possible in Italy. Whereas Ireland has all but lost its chance to revive itself through the commanding personality of a leader, Italy has modernized the traditional social order through Mussolini’s totalizing charisma. For Starkie, Mussolini’s voice functions as the index to this charisma. This relationship is most evident in the twenty-​ninth chapter of The Waveless Plain, in which Starkie recounts an interview with the Duce he conducted in the summer of 1927. He first heard Mussolini’s voice “blaring through the loud-​speakers of the piazzas” in 1919, but offers a quick panorama of visual “impressions” to encapsulate the leader’s subsequent triumphs: “I had watched his gestures of defiance when he was dramatizing a crisis, and I had seen him in the distance winnowing the wheat or ploughing the boundary of yet another Pontine city.”76 However, these “impressions” come from some of the regime’s most conspicuous propaganda campaigns. Beginning in the mid-​twenties, live transmissions of sporting

37

Ireland and the Problem with Information

events, with the sound of impassioned crowds picked up by mobile microphones, had attracted the attention of fascist propagandists: “The regime quickly recognized the effectiveness of the technique in arousing listener interest, and it was an easy matter to transfer microphones to mass rallies from where enthusiastic cheers of the spectators could be heard by radio audiences.”77 This aural technique was matched by the visual spectacle of Mussolini plumping in front of crowds, with the camera, like the microphone, capturing his ability to give shape to the masses. The visions of Mussolini harvesting wheat and marking reclaimed land are nothing more than stock images of the Battaglia del Grano (Battle of Wheat) and of bonifica integrale (the reclamation of pestilential land for development), two of the regime’s most notable demonstrations of modernizing self-​sufficiency.78 By presenting these highly mediated “impressions” as scenes witnessed firsthand, Starkie is able to raise a pressing matter:

circle and thus beyond his influence. In my own country I lived at a slower tempo and the characteristic Mussolinian rhetoric at times jarred on me because it was so different to the Anglo-​Irish habit of understatement.79

In staging this doubled perspective, Starkie can begin to explain why Mussolini does not translate into British, or northern European, society: quite simply, the peaks of his dynamic range are too high, and he goes too fast. Although Starkie identifies this “tempo” with Mussolini himself, he assigns blame for its failure to reach fully into the Anglophone world with the official propagandists who translate the speeches into English. By providing literal renderings of his words, they give false impressions, for the translations fail to convey the speaker’s “magnetic personality” into the context of their foreign reception. They offer only the rhetorical force of his words, at the expense of their formal power. For his part, Starkie wishes he could translate Mussolini’s words: these would be specially prepared for the inclination of Anglophone minds, “in order that the Leader’s message might arouse sympathy among the slow-​ moving, slow-​acting Britons who refuse to consider Life as a series of dramatic crises to be overcome.”80 What the official translations do not capture, then, is the aesthetic dimension of his charisma. This failure is in turn compounded by what Starkie calls the “distortion” caused by hostile reception conditions in Britain. Again, the ability to counterpoise “northern” and “southern” experiences permits him to identify with the object of critique in order precisely to amplify his critique. If official

My impressions [of Mussolini] group themselves in two-​fold series. I saw him beneath the Italian sky, and his personality swept into my view at repeated intervals when I was beneath the sky of England or Ireland. It was difficult at times to balance my Italian with my British impressions. It is said that distance lends enchantment to the view, but the reverse was true of my memories, for whereas in Italy I would feel myself swept along by the Duce’s magnetic personality and his rhythmic mastery of the crowd, when in Dublin, London or Edinburgh my Anglo-​Irish caution and watchful prudence would assert themselves. In Northern Europe I was conscious of being outside the wizard’s magic

38

The Remediation of Waves

translations of Mussolini’s speeches fail to consider the competencies and biases of their intended audience, this failure is as equally determined by the fact that these factors are moving targets. Raising the specter of British manipulation, Starkie suggests that the distance between Italy and the British Isles is produced not simply by geography and temperament, but also by motivated intervention: “In England, as a result of the distortion caused by ceaseless propaganda directed against the Dictator in newspapers, books, cinema and radio, his personality, as seen so clearly under the blue sky of the South, became in the North obscured, even obliterated by a mass of excrescences.”81 In other words, Italian propaganda cannot receive a fair hearing in the British Isles because of the intervening presence of British propaganda. The statement’s absurdity is mitigated somewhat by noting the implied correspondence between the “wizard’s magic circle” and the democrat’s invisible net, the former operating openly through the immediacies of personal experience, the latter disguising and legitimizing itself in the social relations of a depersonalized culture: the dictator’s personality is lost to a “mass of excrescences.” With exquisite pacing, Starkie here reintroduces the subject of Ireland. The night before his interview with Mussolini, Starkie learns that Kevin O’Higgins, the increasingly authoritarian minister of justice of the Irish Free State, has been assassinated by the IRA: “I, like many of my countrymen, saw in him the strong leader of the future, for Kevin O’Higgins was only in his early thirties. His short career had been full of promise. I recalled the incisive quality of his speeches, his mordant

sarcasm, his moments of passionate seriousness, his flashes of malicious wit. I visualized him standing before the crowd, dominating them by his lucid mind and slow, precise voice.”82 This assassination served for many on the Irish right as a bleak reminder of the state’s instability and lack of programmatic commitment to dramatic reform. Particularly in retrospect, O’Higgins represents for Starkie the alternative to de Valera. In this reverie of O’Higgins’s “promise,” Starkie thus locates Ireland between Italy and Britain, a third entity drifting inexorably, though not yet finally, away from the leader’s unifying personality toward destructive atomization. This Yeatsian vision of O’Higgins’s power leads immediately to the description of entering into Mussolini’s presence, which now reads like something more appropriate to the final chapters of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. Brought by an usher to the threshold of Mussolini’s chamber, Starkie feels himself shrink in the face of authority: “At first I thought the room was empty, but then in the far distance, seated behind a diminutive table, I saw a small man gazing at me. As I advanced towards the table I felt myself grow smaller and smaller and the man behind the desk grow larger and larger, for his eyes gazed straight through me as I walked timidly towards him. Before I reached the table Mussolini rose and came forward and extended his hand.”83 Yet in this testimony to Mussolini’s unimpeachable, larger-than-​life presence, Starkie’s own authority is better apprehended by way of O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-​Birds, for reasons that Saerchinger’s contemporaneous account of interviewing the dictator makes plain: “The usual routine, which has been

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Ireland and the Problem with Information

frequently described by others, now followed. The smiling flunky opens the door; you perceive the Duce at the other end of the enormously long, dusky room, sitting behind a massive, cornered desk, dressed in a morning coat, gray trousers, and the conventional wing collar and gray tie—​a stocky man of rather less than medium height, of swarthy complexion and earnest, almost weary mien. He rises, greets you with outstretched arm, and holds it till you are near enough to shake hands; then you sit down, opposite him at the desk.”84 It is now difficult to gauge how recognizable such generic “borrowing” would have been to common readers, but, like the “personalizing” of stock propaganda images, this technique serves Starkie’s purpose of explaining Mussolini’s appeal. Dressed for their interview in a blue serge suit, Mussolini charms Starkie not as the snarling prophet of “Life,” but as an intellectual. Neither “arm-​ chair critic” nor jaded pressman, Starkie is, in turn, the sympathetic listener, from whom the movements and “tempo” of Mussolini’s voice receive a fair hearing. Although the Duce offers to conduct the interview in Italian, French, or English, they speak Italian, in order that Starkie may catch the “spontaneity of [Mussolini’s] native expression” while delivering a comprehensive roll call of achievements. More than “impressions,” the disquisition is narrated as a deep contextualization of Mussolini’s philosophy, with Starkie marveling at the dictator’s unification of theory and practice: he discourses about Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Sorel; he works studiously and tirelessly to overcome historical impediments; he loves architecture. Silently

reintroduced, Starkie’s professional credentials enable him to legitimize Mussolini’s program of national development as more than mere policy—​as, indeed, a philosophy. The bare-​ chested drainer of swampland becomes no manual laborer, but the thoughtful architect of national destiny. This scene of face-to-​face immediacy transforms Starkie as well: no longer the alienated and distanced consumer of mediated “distortion,” no longer the passionless, desiccated intellectual, he becomes a communicant, at once receiving the dictator’s voice and imparting its “spontaneity” and “tempo” to readers. As a unified “personality,” he becomes an auratic listener. In the context of the face-to-​face interview, this transformation occurs in the immediacy of Mussolini’s presence. What is therefore especially striking is how Starkie’s sense of the Duce’s commanding personality is narrated through an invocation of radio transmission and reception. Sitting across from Mussolini in the dark room, Starkie seems instead to face a receiver set, its dials glowing as the intervening space fills with the dictator’s voice: “To-​day I was hypnotized by his large dark eyes which sparkled when his voice became animated. That voice had still a trace of metallic harshness and the words poured out in jerky, rapid sentences which jabbed at my sluggish mind. . . . His dark, vivacious eyes seemed to light up his face as he spoke. There was harmony in his face and movement, as though the thoughts in his mind set up an unending rhythm which sent numerous tiny electric currents of luminous strength through his frame.”85 As a catalog of keywords (voice, harmony, rhythm) meant to correlate Mussolini’s technique to social

40

The Remediation of Waves

organization, this extended figuration of the dictator as radio set is crucial to Starkie’s address to his readers, yet the implications of this writerly sleight of hand are deferred at this point in the text. In keeping with the “waveless” immediacy that characterizes his presentation of fascist Italy, Starkie gives a distinctly tactile and more recognizably aesthetic impression of Mussolini’s authority:

listeners. Whereas fascist propaganda often portrayed Mussolini as a sculptor shaping the unformed masses into a unified people, Starkie offers in this passage an aural equivalent: at once expert amateur and impassioned maestro, Mussolini is the “wild violinist” playing to “his public.” With its natural, powerful resonance, this vibratory sympathy belongs to what Douglas Kahn has called “a vibrational scheme found throughout modernism, whereby communication occurs through the correspondence of internal and external vibrations, the sympathetic identifications of different vessels, often bridging different perceptual registers and always attempting to elude cultural mediation.”87 On a totalized scale, then, Starkie’s depiction of Mussolini as violinist, playing on his people’s sympathies, presents an organic polity achieved through and organized by sound. It is notably in the context of this virtuosity that The Waveless Plain first broaches the re-​creation of Rome as an imperial center. Given the unpleasant colloquial associations of fiddling Roman emperors, it is perhaps wise that Starkie focuses his text at this point on the dictator’s radiophonic presence. Having been commissioned to write the book in the heat of the Ethiopian crisis, Starkie uses the East African war to explicate the “numerous tiny electric currents” of Mussolini’s personality, by facing the radio at this decisive moment. In his description of Mussolini’s announcement of the invasion, Starkie quotes three passages from the speech, one of which pointedly echoes his sense of the Duce’s virtuosity:

He possesses the power of adapting himself to other men. He knows their moods, and being a virtuoso he knows how to play upon them, awaken them, and extract their inner thoughts. It is part of his greatness that he feels an intense interest in other men, no matter how humble they may be. His knowledge of life has not been derived from books but from living personalities, both those with whom he can sympathize and those against whom he can sharpen his tusks in battle. I then recalled the early story which he had written describing the wild violinist who raises his public up to an orgy of excitement—​a significant story, when we remember that he himself is a violinist. As I looked at his broad white hands with well-​padded fingers I said to myself that he had the touch of the violinist, the natural vibrato, which is a source of power when added to his supreme mastery of rhythms.86

Rather than manipulation, with its ideological connotations of lost autonomy and sinister depersonalization, Mussolini’s “hands-​on” sympathy releases potential in “other men” that is otherwise latent or unrealized. Always live, this performance of mutual cooperation is made total in the “touch of the violinist,” the manual feel combining “natural vibrato” and rhythmic mastery that draws listeners to the virtuoso by first transforming them into

Black Shirts of the Revolution! Men and women of all Italy! Italians scattered throughout the world

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Ireland and the Problem with Information

energy through the domination of sonic content. The immediacy of Mussolini’s “natural vibrato,” his sympathetic handling of latent “moods,” would not seem applicable to long-​ distance reception; yet this “source of power” is silently incorporated into Starkie’s text by transferring this mystified manual dexterity to the auratic listener. By this writerly sleight of hand, Starkie relocates Mussolini’s tactile virtuosity to the front of the receiver set, where the dial’s interface becomes the counterpart to face-to-​face exchange.90 Replacing the “touch of the violinist” with the touch of the dialer, Starkie tunes in the broadcast of the dictator’s voice, but receives it as though listening to a point-to-​point transmission. In contrast to broadcasting’s dispersion, this singularized process of transmission and reception, occurring simultaneously millions of times over, is the realization of harmony. As a combination of aural, visual, and tactile practices, this synesthetic event locates Starkie in ideological space less by his choice of station than in mystifying the regulated world of allocated frequencies as the resonating harmony of sympathetic vibrations. While Marshall McLuhan would later infamously characterize radio as a regressive “tribal drum” possessing the “power to turn the psyche and society into a single echo chamber,”91 Starkie presents the medium as a fascist violin, the vast resonator that brings together passion and specialization, wildness and expertise. In doing so, he misrecognizes intellectual liberty for political autonomy, a relationship made concrete in the emblem that appears on the front cover, spine, and title page of The Waveless Plain: a violin wreathed in laurels. To ask whether these are the laurels

and beyond the seas: listen! . . . For many months past the wheel of destiny, driven by our calm, determined purpose, has been moving towards the goal: in these hours its rhythm is more rapid and henceforth its course cannot be checked. Not only is an army marching toward its objective, but forty million Italians are marching in unison with this army. They are united because there is an attempt to commit against them the blackest of all injustices, to rob them of a place in the sun.88

This excerpt is the ideological center of the book, so readily do its rhetorical notes chime with Starkie’s entire presentation of his impressions of modern Italy: everything else in his travelogue functions as an explanatory gloss for these words. It is at this point in the text that the deferred consequences of figuring Mussolini as receiver set become manifest, for Starkie does not witness the dictator speaking from the balcony of the Piazza Venezia in Rome, but listens to him on the radio in Dublin. Where Ireland had once been beyond the “wizard’s magic circle” in the textual realm of bad translations and intervening political “excrescences,” the expansion of medium wave service and the advent of shortwave broadcasting have now broadened the “magic circle,” allowing for the long-​distance reception of the sound of the dictator’s voice. Starkie’s account of listening to the broadcast stresses this new possibility: “Sometimes the sound faded and sometimes it blared on my ear, mingled with atmospherics and the sound of cheering. Then I heard the inexorable voice continue.”89 As a description of dynamics, pacing, and tempo, Starkie’s report demonstrates the unimpeded power of rhythmic mastery, the ability to organize affective

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The Remediation of Waves

of learning, poetry, or martial victory is to misunderstand harmony. In the aftermath of the Second World War, which he spent in Madrid as the British Council representative to Spain, Starkie recanted his support for Mussolini, stating that a fear of communism had caused his admiration for the dictator. Writing in the second volume of an autobiography left unfinished at the time of his death in 1976, he treats this misplaced attention as a condition of auditory overload: “The Abyssinian War monopolised our attention and my ears were deafened by the slogans shouted by militarists and war-​mongers. Instead of the Red Star, the Hammer and the Sickle, and the Communist slogans of Red Revolution my ears were deafened by cries of Duce! Duce!”92 When the first volume of this autobiography had appeared in 1963 as Scholars and Gypsies, it covered, all but identically, many of the same events first presented in The Waveless Plain, although it concludes with Starkie’s engagement just before the March on Rome. The signal difference between these texts, however, is Starkie’s replacement of Mussolini with Gabriele D’Annunzio, the “poet-​condottiere” whose magnetism and

technique would later be appropriated by his less capable rival: “The voice of the poet rose sharper in tone in continual crescendo. He played upon the emotions of the crowd as a violinist upon a Stradivarius. The eyes of the thousands were fixed upon him, as though hypnotized by his power, and his voice, like that of a shanachie, bewitched their ears.”93 As a textual revision, this image hardly constitutes a reconsideration of listening either as a critical faculty or (with the insertion of the seanchaí, the traditional Irish storyteller) as an essential aspect of transmission and reception: indeed, an identical laurel-​wreathed violin emblazons Scholars and Gypsies. Representing the revision of conditions that had been realized with particular force during the thirties, its reappearance visualizes an ideal remediation and has implications extending beyond Starkie’s case. Now absent its martial note and figuring only the relations of learning and poetry, this emblem is instead a meeting point of Cold War anticommunism and the postwar normalization of the literary field, a compression effected alongside the canonization of literary modernism.

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2 Dirty Work in New York

Cosmopolitanism has long been associated with modernism, the two terms often forming a closed circuit in which the sense of one feeds into and affirms that of the other. Speaking equally to literary modernism’s international sites of production and its later disciplinary institutionalization, this circuit is a remarkably durable feature of the modernist field. Like the practice of close reading, the concept of cosmopolitanism has many varieties and inflections; it has similarly remained foundational through a series of transformations and reconfigurations (including the recent “transnational” turn) of the field itself. Whereas close reading seeks to isolate formal features as a means of discovering unique structures of literary knowledge, cosmopolitanism seeks to isolate the effects of “sustained intercultural exposure” as a way of discovering innovative forms of affiliation.1 Each mode is invested in procedures of isolation. In defining the immediacy of their objects, both depend on the categorical detachment from “parochial” constraints—​of biography,

local association, and temporal situation, to name three. While there can be eminently good and practical reasons for such procedures, the implications of this categorical detachment are by no means uniquely positive. In perhaps the strongest recent critique of cosmopolitanism, Timothy Brennan brings out the stakes of this linkage through careful deployment of New Critical terminology: “Judgment of cosmopolitanism’s value or desirability . . . is affected by whose cosmopolitanism or patriotism one is talking about—​whose definitions of prejudice, knowledge, or open-​mindedness one is referring to. Cosmopolitanism is local while denying its local character. This denial is an intrinsic feature of cosmopolitanism and inherent to its appeal.”2 In a pithy summary of his argument, Janet Lyon in turn amplifies this relation: “The very concept [of cosmopolitanism] marks an uneven playing field, which, a priori, awards hermeneutic power to the formulator.”3 In the present context, this “hermeneutic power” serves as an index

Dirty Work in New York

to categorical detachment by specifying the normative textualist mode of analysis common to both close reading and cosmopolitanism. By examining semiotic isolation against a field of motivated dissemination, this chapter will seem to have little to do with radiophonic production and reception. Yet its closing pages demonstrate how the mediated relations between hermeneutics and dissemination it considers provided the footing on which the distinction of literary transmission from radio broadcasting was to be staked. In The World Republic of Letters, Pascale Casanova describes the networks of “cosmopolitan intermediaries” who conduct literary exchanges, an account especially useful in grasping the historically slippery relations of modern Irish writing within the field of literary modernism:

that their effects are very often elided and, in this way, misrecognized. This possibility for misrecognition is especially prevalent in the second instance of her three-​part typology of strategies (assimilation, rebellion, revolution) used by writers from peripheral areas to enter the world republic of letters. Casanova’s principal example of “rebellion” is W. B. Yeats, whose partial rejection of metropolitan standards aimed to reorder Irish national literary space. In selectively combining local and cosmopolitan aesthetic techniques, literary rebels regenerate national literature by revising local categories of evaluation and recognition. These local categories are expanded beyond, and thus partly freed from, the necessity of responding to purely national demands, in this way achieving some measure of aesthetic autonomy. With Yeats as its figurehead, the Irish Literary Revival stands for her as the preeminent illustration of literary rebellion. Evident from its being the second of a three-​ part typology, however, this strategy can be problematic. Not the “denial of difference” characterizing “Parisianization,” this Yeatsian rebellion asserts difference, even as the categories through which difference is identified are diversified and repositioned. This project refuses to forswear either national or “universal” affiliations, to deny either its local or cosmopolitan aspirations. This is to say, its “cosmopolitan intermediaries” are uniquely liable to misrecognize the stakes of their activities, because they are uniquely positioned to define these stakes. While true of all cosmopolitan projects, it is a risk with specific ramifications for literary rebellion. In place of literary authors, however, Casanova argues that the most important agents

[The] power to evaluate and transmute a text into literature . . . involves two things that are inseparably linked: celebration and annexation. Together they form a perfect example of what might be called Parisianization, or universalization through denial of difference. . . . As a result, the history of literary celebration amounts to a long series of misunderstandings and misinterpretations that have their roots in the ethnocentrism of the dominant authorities (notably those in Paris) and in the mechanism of annexation (by which works from outlying areas are subordinated to the aesthetic, historical, political, and formal categories of the center) that operates through the very act of literary recognition.4

Although one might object that real differences exist between universalization and cosmopolitanism, one might equally observe

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Ireland and the Problem with Information

shaping this world are “cosmopolitan intermediaries.” This stratum of “publishers, editors, critics, and especially translators” serves as the “foreign exchange brokers, responsible for exporting from one territory to another texts whose literary value they determine by virtue of this very activity.”5 By placing considerable weight on the role of these “cosmopolitan intermediaries,” Casanova maintains that they are largely responsible for determining the literariness of particular works. Rather than as an expressive quality inherent to certain languages and lacking in others, literariness for her is the product of the intermediaries whose work guarantees the movement of texts into and out of a language, thereby connecting the peripheries to the center of the literary world. It is this relationship that is easily obscured in the reckoning of literary greatness, either by hypostasizing linguistic features (or “language” itself ) as the determinant quality or by directly linking prestige to the number of writers and readers a language has.6 Each of these misapprehensions bears an affinity to the symbolic and economic forces underpinning aesthetic value (the “upside-​down” or restricted field of the avant-​garde versus the market-​based benchmarks of print runs and sales figures in the general economy), but the analytical virtue of Casanova’s model rests in its attention to the relative autonomy of these procedures for allocating value. Without discounting the very real political machinations at work in the movement of texts in the world of literature, she nevertheless demonstrates how literary space does not ultimately map out according to political or economic geography. That is, economic or political subordination need not

imply an equivalent literary subordination, while political power or economic might does not necessarily bring with it literary excellence. At the same time, however, she refuses to grant cosmopolitan intermediaries the satisfaction of their own privilege, the “worldliness” gotten at the expense of mundane, indeed worldly, horizons: “These great intermediaries are naively committed to a pure, dehistoricized, denationalized, and depoliticized conception of literature; more than anyone in the world of letters, they are firmly convinced of the universality of the aesthetic categories in terms of which they evaluate individual works.”7 This, for her, is the essence of literary belief, the sustaining faith in the value derived from successfully competing in world literary space. This chapter examines cosmopolitan risk as it was manifested not in Dublin (or Paris), but in New York, by reconstructing the publishing trajectory of Shaemas O’Sheel from its beginning just before World War I to 1940. An Irish American poet now known, if at all, as the author of a single poem, “They Went Forth to Battle but They Always Fell,” O’Sheel exemplifies a distinctly modernist capacity to realize opportunities afforded by access to networks of affiliation and dissemination. In this, he is a “cosmopolitan intermediary” less through posture or style than position. As a contact point of “local” and “worldly” forces, New York gave him the chance to express Irish exceptionalism through the very channels of cosmopolitan encounter and exchange symbolized by the city. Born in New York, O’Sheel is thus not a literary-​intellectual émigré, but a diasporic figure, whose sense of Irishness

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Dirty Work in New York

provided a reflective distance from dominant, mainstream American society. Even as Irish identity in America was being transformed by events in Ireland (independence and partition) and the United States (changing racial relations, nativist backlash in the twenties, immigration restrictions, the Depression),8 O’Sheel maintained an unchanging sense of Irishness, one enabling his competition in the publishing marketplace. This sense was as much an aesthetic as a political production: it was the idealized autonomy that allowed his participation in worldly politics. The first section of the chapter explores and complicates Casanova’s designation of New York as the “fourth point” of Irish literary space, in addition to Dublin, London, and Paris. It argues that New York, with its long history as a center of Irish political agitation, reveals the constitutive interpenetration of literary and political networks. This relationship is taken up in the next section, in which O’Sheel’s publishing activities as poet and propagandist instantiate the interplay of aesthetics and politics, opportunity and value, available in New York. The chapter concludes with a reading of Seven Periods of Irish History (1940), in which O’Sheel contends that Ireland’s colonial history is a decisive justification for American isolationism and nonintervention in World War II. Published by a Nazi propaganda front, the text is nonetheless a distinct product of the “fourth point” of Irish literary space. By the thirties, O’Sheel was a staunch communist sympathizer, describing himself as “practically vermillion!”9 As this chapter demonstrates, a more appropriate description of his position is “rose,” although with one modification.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, little Stephen Dedalus wonders whether a green rose might exist: “But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.”10 O’Sheel’s trajectory indicates that one such place is New York. The Fourth Point The suggestiveness of The World Republic of Letters may reside in an analytical flexibility that the book itself does not entirely manifest. Hardly a failing, this conceptual potential is the source of its openhanded invitation. While providing a substantial reconceptualization of literary modernism, its circulatory networks, and the “cosmopolitan intermediaries” who helped enable it, the under-​acknowledged suppositions informing Casanova’s model present serious impediments. Critics have noted the absence of a full analysis of colonialism in its account of literary space, arguing that it ends up reinscribing metropolitan dominance by aligning literary autonomy with a break from national demands and local allegiances. In particular, her tripartite typology of literary strategies (assimilation, rebellion, and revolution) has been taken to recapitulate the narrative of “international modernism.” Through her attachment to Paris as the “capital of the literary world, the city endowed with the greatest literary prestige on earth,” she is read as succumbing to the operations of denationalization and universalization she aims to diagnose.11 For her critics, this attachment to Paris sanctions the willful detachment from all other places often said to be at the heart of cosmopolitanism.12 In a brilliantly

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Ireland and the Problem with Information

turned review of The World Republic of Letters, Joe Cleary observes how Casanova (perhaps unintentionally) allows a hierarchical sense of value to attach to her three strategic modes:

the years after 1930 as the fourth point of the Dublin-London-​Paris triangle, one that “represents at once an alternative to London in the English-​speaking world and a powerful pole of consecration in its own right.” Yet the attraction of this pole she ultimately derives from the “presence [in New York] of a sizable Irish-​American community.”14 Leaving partly aside the issue of ethnic determinism, it is the case that the buttonholing ward heeler wielded a kind of power not convertible into the power of literary recognition: Irish New York remained symbolized more by the Five Points than as the “fourth point.” Her point is nonetheless instructive, for what Casanova here couches in demographic truism reveals the constitutive imbrications of political and literary realms in Irish New York, a space at once local, national, diasporic, and international. Constructed amid the long history of Irish political agitation centered in and routed through New York, this space was structured by the development of contiguous and at times overlapping political and literary fields. At all levels of the literary field—​from the “highest” (meaning that which appears most autonomous or divorced from nationalist demands) to the “lowest” (meaning that which seems most didactic, melodramatic, or naïve)—​one finds agents and activities that demonstrate a foundational reliance on political networks. Three examples manifest this relationship. While they could be said to conform at some level to Casanova’s three-​part typology of writers in literary space, it is important to emphasize that none of the three figures was a literary author, but each served in different,

Its manner of presentation in The World Republic of Letters suggests that the assimilated, the rebels and the revolutionaries constitute third-, second- and first-​rate talents and levels of literary accomplishment. But is this the case? Without ever—curiously—​dealing with modernism as a historical phenomenon in its own right, doesn’t Casanova actually smuggle a French metropolitan modernist-​formalist value-​system into her schema? And doesn’t she, in so doing, also uncritically endorse a fetishization of the literary-​intellectual émigré, common not only to formalist-​modernist aesthetics but also to much contemporary postcolonial theory? Are the literary achievements, say, of “rebels” who work to establish new national literatures or cultural capitals invariably less accomplished, or even less world-​significant, than those of “revolutionary” dissidents?13

These questions are crucial to what follows, specifically for the way they distinguish the inextricable relations of locality and world, of attachment and detachment, constituting not only literary space but also the utility of literariness itself. To this end, the roles played by “cosmopolitan intermediaries” are fundamental. This qualification is necessary in relation to the historical and political parameters of the “Irish paradigm,” her foundational case study of worldly aesthetic competition. In her account of “Irish literary space,” Casanova notes that New York comes to function in

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Dirty Work in New York

if congruent, ways as a “cosmopolitan intermediary” in New York. The first is Ernest Boyd, the Irish-​born critic best known today as the author of Ireland’s Literary Renaissance, published in 1916 and revised in 1922, and for his dispute with Valéry Larbaud over the significance of realism and symbolism in Ulysses. Casanova briefly describes the latter, contending that it was one of the “very rare direct encounters . . . between the national view of literature and the dehistoricizing impulse” of universalizing annexation, but she makes little more of this episode.15 At the time of the quarrel in 1922, Boyd had been resident in New York for almost two years. He had first come to the United States in 1913, serving for three years as an official at the British consulate in Baltimore, before his dismissal for suspected pro–Sinn Féin sympathies in the aftermath of the Easter Rising. Returned to Dublin, Boyd lived as a literary and sometimes political journalist and as a reader at the Talbot Press. After moving to New York in 1920, he worked as a literary journalist and critic, while publishing over the next ten years a number of translations, mostly of late nineteenth-​century French fiction. This work was part of a prolonged rearguard action against what today is called high modernism, which Boyd disliked precisely because of its apparent stance of denationalized and detached cosmopolitanism. At the same time, he savaged postwar nativist literary critics in the United States, whose chauvinistic moralism he condemned as “Ku Klux Kriticism.”16 In both cases, Boyd strategically deployed his Irishness against what he understood to be related phobias, each the result of an inability

to countenance the political and literary demands of emergent social formations.17 This indictment was evident in Boyd’s campaign against the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose successful efforts to recommend the prosecution of obscene literature he found to be contrary to the possibilities afforded by the city’s diverse populace. In 1924 during a public debate with John Sumner, the executive secretary of the Society, Boyd mobilized his Irishness in order to define his position on the censorship of literature. Announcing his beliefs with the flat declaration that “literature is not interested in the least in morals,” Boyd continued by questioning how a debate could be resolved when the two sides argued from incompatible views, one in defense of morality and the other in defense of literature.18 It was at this seeming impasse that Boyd invoked his Irishness: If ever a man came from a country full of social gloom and degeneracy, it is myself (laughter), for I emerged from the Celtic twilight, where the gloom is both atmospheric and temperamental. . . .

Yet, the curious thing about that is that coming

from this degenerate and socially gloomy country, Ireland, I have to report that, if anything, in Ireland, we are more obscenely puerile than almost anybody I have ever seen in any other country. I won’t be geographically specific, but I assure you that our desire for purity in Ireland is at such a point that every now and then, when patriotism is at its height, people go down to the steamers and they destroy the English newspapers, on the grounds that they report divorce proceedings—​ there being no divorce in Ireland. As to the purity

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Ireland and the Problem with Information

nationalism, aggressive anti-​intellectualism, and moral bigotry actively working to pervert the dynamism of American society. Sumner has none of this: “I don’t claim to know anything about literature. I don’t claim to know anything about literature from an ethical standpoint. I do claim to know what is good Americanism.”21 While it appears Boyd “won” the debate, in that it was resolved that censorship was detrimental to advancing American literature, the Society for the Suppression of Vice continued recommending texts for prosecution until the 1950s. The larger point to underscore is the tacit agreement by both men that literature and morality are ultimately incompatible, even as the debate makes obvious how these formations are bound to each other, as well as to larger questions of national allegiance and belonging. This relationship becomes clearer in the context of Irishness and New York through the second and third examples of “cosmopolitan intermediaries,” John Quinn and John Devoy. A second-​generation Irish American, Quinn was a successful corporate attorney in New York.22 As patron and agent, Quinn became the preeminent collector of modernist manuscripts, first editions, and art in the United States before his death in 1924: to be sure, Boyd was only able to write Ireland’s Literary Renaissance while in the country because of his access to Quinn’s library of Revivalist volumes.23 Alongside this deep engagement with modernist art, Quinn maintained a constant, if conflicted, involvement in Irish nationalist politics, both in Ireland and in New York. Through these circles, he had frequent (and often caustic) dealings with John Devoy, the exiled Fenian

in Irish life, where there is no divorce, you will find statistics in the Encyclopedia Brittanica [sic], under the heading of “Prostitution,” where the figures for Dublin are given.19

As an Irishman born in Ireland, Boyd asserts firsthand knowledge of the social effects of moral suppression, particularly when brandished as an implement of extreme national sentiment. As a societal gloss on Joyce’s fiction, Boyd argues that repression leads to the very conditions it seeks to deny, a mechanism with severe repercussions when transposed into the realm of national politics. As an immigrant Irishman in New York, however, Boyd turns his own originary “gloom and degeneracy” against Sumner’s claim that American literature must reflect the “American spirit”: “Now, that phrase is the beginning of all ambiguities that hang around this charming subject. What on earth is the American spirit? Is Mr. Cabell a Hindu or is he an American? Is ‘Jurgen’ an American book, or is it not? Is a book American when it doesn’t have to be censored and un-​American when it has? Is a book that has been suppressed by Mr. Sumner’s organization, like ‘Jurgen,’ un-​American while it has been suppressed and does it become American when it is restored to sale again?”20 In making his case, Boyd deftly exposes the nativist grounds beneath Sumner’s moral posture, insisting that they are naturalized through the commercial validation of properly “American” works. Boyd certainly takes a cosmopolitan position here, but does so by drawing on his experience of and attachment to a particular locality. This locality is New York, where he sees a pernicious confluence of reactionary

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Dirty Work in New York

leader whose final six decades were spent in New York as head of Clan na Gael, the secret republican brotherhood. From his base as the editor of the Gaelic American, Devoy raised funds for political (including armed) struggle in Ireland, organized American support for Irish freedom, and found much to be desired in the political ramifications of the Literary Revival. When John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World opened at the Abbey Theatre in 1907 to violent disagreements over its characterization of Irish social habits, Devoy took to reprinting Dublin accounts of the controversy and penning articles that excoriated the play—​which he had not seen—​as a vicious blasphemy on Ireland. Quinn found this publicity campaign to be an appalling manifestation of Irish parochialism, but tried to convince Devoy of the play’s merits by loaning him the text. When Devoy remained unconvinced, Quinn privately raged, seeing in this attitude an entitled sense of victimization backed by an arrogant disdain for the unfamiliar: “I don’t recognize his credentials as a dramatic or literary critic.”24 No less than Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan could later take Quinn’s response to Devoy as an illustration of a more generalized truth about the Irish in America: “This [contempt for intelligence and learning] was painfully manifest in the Irish-​American response to the extraordinary flowering of Irish literature in the late nineteenth century. The emigrant Irish may have brought with them a certain peasant respect for learning—‘Isle of Saints and Scholars’—​ but two generations in the slums of New York killed it, if it ever existed. Instead of embracing and glorying in the new literature, the

New York Irish either ignored it, or if they were respectable enough, turned on the Irish authors, accusing them of using bad language!”25 Quinn the open-​minded cosmopolitan able to “embrace and glory in” aesthetic achievement, Devoy the dourly truculent philistine incapable of seeing beyond his own vulgar politics: the alignment would seem to be unquestionable.26 Yet Devoy’s position need not be defended in order to suggest that what appears as brute philistinism might express a questioning of authority and of the legitimacy of “credentials.” While his reaction to Synge’s play corresponds at one level to Sumner’s censorious morality—​and this is exactly the point emphasized by Glazer and Moynihan—​the correspondence holds true only when viewed from a purely aestheticized perspective. More pointedly phrased, the correspondence makes sense only when the conflation of authority and “learning” peculiar to the aesthetic field is universalized to encompass all social perspectives. The epilogue to the Quinn-​Devoy disparity illustrates the point. When the Abbey Theatre company toured The Playboy of the Western World in the United States in 1911, the play encountered similar protests and denunciations to those it had garnered in Dublin. During a performance in New York, John Butler Yeats famously overheard Devoy croak, “Son of a bitch, that’s not Ireland.”27 This oath is an index to something more than poor “reading,” of somehow not getting or “glorying in” the play between representation and reality. If nothing else, it tersely announces that literary representations have consequences in other fields, in part because they are animated by and mediated

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Ireland and the Problem with Information

in relation to those fields. More generally, the anecdote and these three disparate figures highlight how individuals occupied positions that were themselves constituted by the dissonant claims of distinct arenas, a relation as liable to result in misrecognition as in validation of complexity or ambiguity. Returning to Casanova, then, one should think of Boyd, Quinn, and Devoy as “cosmopolitan intermediaries” within “Irish literary space,” so long as this designation rests not on the fact of their Irishness, however construed, but instead on the conjunctions, discrepancies, and oppositions enabled by New York. A final, albeit negative, turn demonstrates the stakes of this relation and the consequences of its misrecognition, in addition to introducing the issues specific to the remainder of the chapter. In “Ireland—​England’s Unconscious?” the first of the italicized interchapters of Inventing Ireland, Declan Kiberd sketches the literary, cultural, and political effects of Celticism as crystallized by Matthew Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867). With its imagery of Celtic sentimentality, romantic imperviousness to modern rationality, and the dreamy incapacity for self-​governance, Arnoldian Celticism functions for Kiberd as the beneficent corollary to the maintenance of British control in Ireland, a formation through which the “recalcitrant complexities” of Irish conditions could be “converted back into a more familiar terminology in a tyranny of books over facts.”28 Reversing Arnold’s famous line that the Celt struggles against the despotism of fact, Kiberd contends that the realities of Irish social life were not so much observed and interpreted by those who came to Ireland in the wake of

Arnold’s book, as annexed to discursive models sanctioned by national-​racial typologies and imperial administration. With the “tyranny of books” standing in for the production of social knowledge, Kiberd’s argument evacuates what John Guillory has described as the “vast epistemic realm between fact and knowledge we now call information.”29 Because Kiberd leaves in place, by simply inverting, the relationship of “books” and facts he finds representative of British colonialism in Ireland, he misses the dynamism inherent to the relationship. This dynamism can be substantiated not only in transmission and storage, but also in processing and control—​that is, in the mechanisms by which information is classified and mobilized as information. By taking facts as transparently self-​contained and “books” as emblems of a totalized discursive projection, Kiberd makes Irish history into a distended zero-​sum game of inverted representational correspondence. This is to say that there are no intermediary positions or relations in Kiberd’s paradigm. More to the point, it has no sense of mediation, whether as transmission or processing. This absence is evident in a specific relation among books: “In a famous poem of the period, it was said of the Celts that ‘they went forth to battle and they always fell’: the lament is for an heroic distant past and for the sense of failure in every subsequent challenge to empire. These laments, and the allied myth of a golden age, were allowed by the imperialists, and sometimes even encouraged when, as in Shaemas O’Sheel’s much-​ anthologized poem, they were uttered in the occupier’s language.”30 Although Kiberd’s overall claim is in some sense well taken, the

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textual history of the phrase “they went forth to battle and they always fell” scrambles its representational correspondence to a transhistorical discursive apparatus. Kiberd lists the source of O’Sheel’s “They Went Forth to Battle but They Always Fell” as Jealous of Dead Leaves, a book published in New York in 1928.31 While the poem appears in this volume, it had originally been published in O’Sheel’s first collection, The Blossomy Bough (1911). O’Sheel had gotten the poem’s titular phrase from Yeats, who had used it in The Rose (1893) as the title of a poem subsequently revised as “The Rose of Battle.” Yeats had, in turn, adapted the phrase from the epigraph to Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature: “They went forth to the war, but they always fell.” As his source, Arnold cites “Ossian.”32 And there is a version of the phrase in the second section of Cath-​loda (1765): “they came forth to war, but they always fell.”33 James Macpherson’s source remains famously a matter of debate. This line of adaptive quotation evinces something other than veneration or desecration of originary genius, something more than timeless discursive correspondence. The repeated appearance of the phrase, its history of motivated borrowings in a series of distinct moments and places, instead specifies a problem inhering between circulation and utility, one of mediation rather than correspondence. In his discussion of information, Guillory argues that the “difference between information and fact is based on value in transmission”: “Fact becomes information when it is, so to speak, value-​added. Information demands to be transmitted because it has a shelf life, a momentary value that drives the

development of our information technologies in their quest to speed up, economize, and maximize the effectiveness of transmission. Missing the right moment of transmission, information must be stored to await its next opportunity.”34 Put in formation as an allusive quotation, the phrase substantiates, in each of its appearances, the serial unification of “momentary value” and “opportunity” that characterizes the “effectiveness of transmission.” It is in this specific relation among books that Kiberd misses the problem of information. This is because he mistakes formats of transmission (books, poems) for the value, desirability, and advantage of transmission, and, in doing so, misrecognizes objects for the relations among objects, materiality for materialism. Another way of stating this point is to say that Kiberd locates O’Sheel in “Irish literary space” without accounting for New York. Going Forth At first glance, it seems absurd to invoke the disconsolate fogs of Celticist verse as a means to approach questions of information. As the foregoing discussion has shown, however, “timeless” materials cannot be divorced from practical issues of “momentary value” and “opportunity” at work in their circulation. This relationship structures the strange trajectory of Shaemas O’Sheel, whose work as poet and propagandist in New York during both world wars demonstrates with troubling force the propensity for ostensibly solid oppositions between radical and reactionary positions to go periodically rotten. Were this tendency merely the product of individual calculation

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Ireland and the Problem with Information

or bad faith, it might be sequestered as a cautionary footnote about aesthetics and politics. His strategies of address instead point to the modernist concern with an absent public, with the problematic relationship between mass audiences and minority or specialized reception communities. In his account of the debates among German Marxists over realism and modernism in the thirties, Fredric Jameson observes that the “dominant ideology of modernism” was founded on a faith in “the vocation of art to alter and renew perception as such,” a formalist belief in a transformative power internal to literary works. In bypassing “analysis of the concrete historical and cultural conjuncture” of concepts (such as nature) and formal modes, criticism too often confirmed ideological judgments through formal evaluation of artworks, and in doing so delimited the horizons of materialist criticism. Jameson arrives at this point by noting the revolutionary possibilities Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin discerned in emergent media technologies, principally film and radio, even as they grasped the communicative ends to which fascist regimes were employing them.35 Crucial as it is, this recognition keeps literary art apart from technical media, by leaving in place an already presupposed literariness. The effect is a failure to account for the many forms of textual production that possess neither the imprimatur of “literature” nor a technological medial identity, but that partake in both literary and nonliterary communicative strategies. Politically multivalent and formally diverse, these strategies all have a definitive end: they seek a readership. This material conjuncture underpins O’Sheel’s activities in New York.

Born James Shields in New York on September 19, 1886, O’Sheel grew up in a moderately secure household, emerging simultaneously in the first decade of the century as the author of somewhat outmoded aestheticist poems and as a political functionary. Throughout his life, O’Sheel’s admirers drew attention to his partiality for underdogs and lost causes, while O’Sheel believed his poetry offered a compensatory balm for the bad breaks and compromises of mundane experience. Appearing in the teens, his first two volumes of poetry were self-​published, visually austere books whose design and layout are at odds with their languorous verse. The Blossomy Bough is graced by a frontispiece that reproduces a sketch of the author by John Butler Yeats, in which O’Sheel is rendered not unlike William Butler Yeats is in similar sketches done twenty years earlier. This resemblance is perhaps intentional, given that the book’s twilight-​enshrouded poems are indebted to Yeats’s rose poems of the nineties. This influence is evident in their titles alone, five of which suffice: “The Poet Desires His Lady Because She Is Both the White Rose and the Red,” “The Lover Tells His Dreams of His Lady,” “The Poet Tells Why He Sends His Lady Some Crushed Flowers,” “The Lover Tells His Lady Who Has Grown Cold to Him Why Love Still Lives,” and “The Lover Tells How Love Must Always Grow.” The poems brim with candles, flowers, coming dawns, and languid verbal ejaculations—“ah” feels like one of the book’s most common words—​and thematically cluster into three main groups: the speaker’s relationship with his lady; heroic settings taken from Celtic mythology; and the cityscape of New York.

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All of the poems hinge on intimations of prophetic vision, on glimpses of an ideal reality beyond social circumstances. As deep interiority, this immediate experience tragically, because fleetingly, rectifies the vicissitudes of material being. Even at the level of its self-​ publication, The Blossomy Bough reveals a profound investment in Romantic authorship. Apart from its thematic clusters, the volume has several distinct sections, each one a modulation of the sad play between reality and ideality. Near the center of the volume is a section titled “Berries of Wisdom,” in which “They Went Forth to Battle but They Always Fell” is placed:

Their wreaths are willows and their tribute, tears; Their names are old sad stories in men’s ears; Yet they will scatter the red hordes of Hell, Who went to battle forth and always fell.36

Reading the poem, it is hard not to feel Kiberd’s pain. While its protest against the stereotype of Irish belligerence is not without appeal, the turgidly rhyming expression of a ruinous, albeit finally redemptive, sensory receptivity falls quickly without going very far. Contrasting the doomed instant when the fighters hear the heart-​piercing “word,” the “secret music” amplified beyond even considerations of self-​preservation, the speaker’s time is animated by its relation to the “sad scrolls” and “old sad stories in men’s ears.” It is a scene of transmission and reception that, while not hearing the “word,” recognizes its auratic power. By presenting itself as both within and outside bardic, antiquarian, and oral modes of transmission, “They Went Forth” can thus claim, as a poem, its own auratic power. In a canny reading, John Kelleher notes that, in its artistic adaptation of more traditional modes of transmission, the poem has “a smooth facility Yeats might have envied twenty years before.” His gloss of the second stanza is sharp:

They went forth to battle but they always fell; Their eyes were fixed above the sullen shields; Nobly they fought and bravely, but not well, And sank heart-​wounded by a subtle spell. They knew not fear that to the foeman yields, They were not weak, as one who vainly wields A futile weapon; yet the sad scrolls tell How on the hard-​fought field they always fell. It was a secret music that they heard, A sad sweet plea for pity and for peace; And that which pierced the heart was but a word, Tho the white breast was red-​lipped where the sword Pressed a fierce cruel kiss, to put surcease On its hot thirst, but drank a hot increase.

Here then is the new view of Irish history which

Ah, they by some strange troubling doubt were

explains defeat and removes its sting. It suggests

stirred,

that [the] Irish were beaten not because they were

And died for hearing what no foeman heard.

divided, or badly led, or armed with obsolete

They went forth to battle but they always fell;

weapons, or even seriously outnumbered, but

Their might was not the might of lifted spears;

because they were distracted by more import-

Over the battle-​clamor came a spell

ant, if less pressing, matters: matters indeed so

Of troubling music, and they fought not well.

profound that only a Celt could understand them

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of authorial and readerly autonomy in the creation of a shared, and new, perception of the world. At another, more critical level, this representation depends on the exploitation of readerly autonomy, by framing confirmation of already held opinions as openness to cooperative, interpretative exchange. The first of the pamphlets is a sixteen-​page booklet that appeared several months after the war began. Titled The Catechism of Balaam, Jr., the text does not carry O’Sheel’s name, giving its author simply as “An Irish-​American.” Under the heading “Authorship and Authorities,” this front is darkly explained: “The author of this pamphlet must remain anonymous till the end of the War. At that time anyone can learn his name from the publisher.” This paranoid mystification of authorial identity is then rationalized in the list of “authorities” that serves as bibliography and guide to further reading.39 By only gesturing to the reasons why the author’s identity “must” remain hidden, but presenting itself as the product of a collective endeavor to uncover truth, the pamphlet has the tone of conspiratorial anti-​conspiracy, of the secret brotherhood working under enormous threat to expose the machinations of an invisible government of dissemblers and string pullers. The pamphlet’s reader is meanwhile presented with a deliberative freedom that ultimately depends on readerly competence: “It will be remembered that the prophet Balaam rode an ass which persisted in testifying to the Truth while Balaam was doing his best in behalf of the Lie. Let us imagine a modern Balaam and his ass answering, with more or less irregular alteration, certain questions about the present war. The reader is left to guess which answers

or even be aware of them, and then only when he was not attending to business. They were beaten because, in other words, they were fey, doomed to their own spiritual sensitivity. One notes that the music or the word that did the dirty work was inaudible to the crass but competent enemy.37

Rather than negating continuity, this “new view” allegorizes continuity in its form of poetic address. The poem stages its originality as heightened and specialized receptivity, which represents not ideological cooptation, but aesthetic transmission: “We need note [the poem] here only as the ultimate expression of the train of ideas Arnold had so carefully, so moderately, set going, in a different age, on a different theme.”38 Not yet outright borrowing or direct citation, this expressive relation of value and opportunity would become ever more central to O’Sheel’s authorial practice. Its centrality is more easily seen in two propaganda pamphlets he wrote during the war. While his poetry could already feel hackneyed and backward-​looking at the moment of its appearance, the pamphlets are formally innovative and employ styles of address that are abruptly contemporary. They also embody an entirely different conception of authorship, one no less invested in the guiding presence of original authorship than the romantic mode of the poetry, but now harnessed to entreating the participatory sensibilities of readers. This statement might seem to reinvent the wheel of propaganda, but it is worth pausing on the fact that this “author function” is in one way less authoritarian than its romantic counterpart, insofar as it represents the collaborative meeting

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are given by the recreant prophet and which by the ass inspired by God.”40 In the twelve pages of questions and answers that follow this opening, the “subject-​positions” of “Q” and “A” are highly mutable, shifting between the views articulated by the modern Balaam and his ass according to no logic other than their anonymous author’s style. Left to guess at the correspondences, the reader is asked either to work through this difficulty in order to learn something of the world, or to enjoy the formal play he or she already knows how to read because he or she already agrees with the author’s views. While this seems like a stark choice admitting no ambiguity, some topics leave Balaam and his ass speaking in one voice:

uplifted from savagery, furthermore, by the inspiring knowledge that they were fighting for their own freedom; and they were under the command of calm American officers who had more sorrow than hatred in their hearts. The negro troops in the American army to-​day are men long in contact with white American civilization in all its phases. But the black men in the French army are savages; knowing white civilization only thru its brutal military organization; transported to Europe as mere mercenaries and turned loose on a foe whom their white officers have been taught to hate venomously for forty years.41 Although it is possible to assign the requisite subjects to most of these lines, some of the statements—“There are some things too serious to be facetious about”—​remain impossible to classify according to the “subject-​positions” laid out in the introductory statement. In other words, they adduce a textual indeterminacy, an open-​ended “undecidability,” that speaks to a horizon of expectations beyond the text. In seeking to persuade by playing on tacit agreement, the pamphlet depends on the knowing recognition of the value of its form of address. This is the horizon of readerly autonomy. O’Sheel published his second wartime pamphlet the following year. A Trip Through Headline Land is an even more disjunctive text than The Catechism of Balaam, Jr., but serving to model the same indeterminate unity as the earlier booklet. Headline Land is also an anonymous text, identifying its author as “The Author of ‘The Catechism

Q. Are there any more savages who could possibly be brought into Europe to fight for freedom, civilization and democracy against the German barbarians? A. If there are, the Allies will find them and bring them to Europe. Q. All this augurs well for the future of European civilization and the dominance of the White Race, does it not? A. There are some things too serious to be facetious about. ... Q. Can the use of negro and half-​negro troops by France be compared with the use of American negro regiments by the United States? A. Not at all. The negroes in the Union Army in the Civil War had been meliorated and advanced toward civilization by contact with Southern civilization at its best as well as its worst. They were

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of Balaam, Jr.’ ” Twice as long as the first pamphlet, it is divided into two parts, the first of which is a triangulated discussion of the war held by “Man-in-the-​Street,” “Man-who-​Knows,” and “Stranger,” respectively the ill-​informed jingo who reads only headlines, the detached and demystifying intellectual who reads everything, and the objectifying outsider (here, from Saturn). “Man-in-the-​Street” is quickly revealed as the dupe of his own reading habits, which even “Stranger,” who has been observing the war’s course from afar, sees as having led him to form opinions that are contrary to the facts. At the discussion’s close, “Man-in-the-​Street” vows to rethink his position on the war and its causes by reading something more than headlines. This conversion is performed by the scorchingly impartial “Man-who-​Knows,” whose ability to debunk and persuade derives from an overwhelming comprehension of world events acquired through his dedication to reading. Spurred by the earnestly unbiased questions of “Stranger” (“Precisely what is an atrocity?”), “Man-who-​Knows” cuts through mediated cant:

and children were mercilessly done to death in English prison-​hells. But could Americans really believe these things about Germans—​Germans whom they knew so well? Man-who-Knows—​They did at first, for the headlines said so. Slowly, they have come to realize that such things could not be done by Germans, while they have on the other hand seen that Russians have really committed dreadful acts which almost make the name of humanity a by-​word; and they have realized, perhaps, that only German success in keeping the Allies on the West, out of Germany has prevented dreadful deeds on that side, seeing that a large part of the Allied army consists of ferocious brown Hindus and savage black Africans.42 In this passage, O’Sheel is able to have it both ways, denying atrocity propaganda by marshaling countervailing examples of the form. This is an effect of the discussion format, for it allows him both to disburse and to frame information through the “subject-​positions” of the speakers. In the booklet’s second section, this tactic is again used, but through the juxtaposition of text and image. The final thirteen pages of the pamphlet comprise seven photographic plates showing montage-​ like assortments of newspaper headlines, each plate accompanied by a polemical interpretation on the facing page. The images are striking, in one case reproducing twenty different clippings of varying sizes that offer no clue as to their relative import within its visual field. Others assemble a number of screaming headlines that engulf smaller clippings in the

Stranger—​You do not mention stories of soldiers tossing children on their bayonets or spears, or ripping embryonic babes from their living mother’s wombs. These were favorite pastimes of Cromwell’s Englishmen in Ireland. You do not mention charges of murdering women and children by famine and disease in concentration camps; doubtless such tales would have called too vividly to mind the fact that only a dozen short years ago more than twenty thousand Boer women

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bottom corners. Each of these visual arrangements is meant to mimic the experience of seeing daily editions arranged at a newsstand. In the commentaries, O’Sheel teaches his reader to interpret the plates, arguing that a newspaper’s design—​the size and placement of headlines; the number of words given to some stories versus others; the burying of reports that contradict headlines on anterior pages—​shapes the news as much as reporting does. By learning to read the plates, the reader will be able to read the newspaper. In this pedagogical scene, authority moves in only one direction. A list on the back cover gives the names of other titles available in the “Fair Play Library.” This “Fair Play Library” provides a clue to the linkage of momentary value and opportunity, readerly autonomy and authorial manipulation, that structures O’Sheel’s trajectory. Far from being a lonely visionary bravely smiling through tears of resignation, O’Sheel, like Yeats, was an institutional player. Whereas Yeats was an institution builder, O’Sheel expertly turned necessity into virtue, one foot spryly changing position while the other remained frozen in place. By insisting on an idealist separation of political and literary writing, O’Sheel freed himself from acknowledging their practical reliance on a common repertory of communicative strategies. This freedom he understood to inhere in his Irishness, a quality that allowed him to know “secret music” without falling and to go forth addressing readers. This “Irish” capacity was the product of New York, however, an idealist separation achieved in the overlapping spheres of his political and literary writing. This relationship has already

been implicitly broached in the seemingly irreconcilable authorial stances embodied in his poetry and propaganda: the poet as originary creator, the propagandist as dissembling magpie. At the same time, O’Sheel’s poetry graphically (even pictorially) displayed its literary indebtedness, while his propaganda banked on charismatic pedagogical mastery. O’Sheel’s authority depended, that is, on the functional amalgamation of the techniques of literary defamiliarization and nonliterary recognition, on renewing perception through the already known.43 These outwardly crossed signals were unified in his address to an absent public, but realized in his textual production, most demonstrably in the realm of publishing. As an institution serving public needs through access to borrowed materials, the “library” offers a model for his practice. This mix of defamiliarization and recognition can be identified in O’Sheel’s revised version of “They Went Forth.” In 1928, Boni and Liveright published Jealous of Dead Leaves, a hardcover selection of poems from his two collections. The house was at the forefront of transformations in the publishing field during the twenties, a position indicated not only by its list, but also by its book design and marketing. Carefully nurtured relationships with well-​placed critics, inexpensive editions of classic and controversial works, and eye-​catching print ads were all used to cultivate and expand the readership for its titles.44 These changes are an indicator of larger forces at work in the book industry in this moment, as the genteel laissez-​faire attitude inherited from the late nineteenth-​century book trade was yielding to the modern rationalization of production,

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distribution, and accounting.45 Within the context of such changes, O’Sheel’s book reads as a peculiar kind of self-​quotation. Reflecting a belated acknowledgment of imagism, he silently revised the poems, modifying their mood of drooping melancholy for more direct expression of observed particulars. Removal of ornate punctuation and altered words give his verse a flatter tone of emotiveness, a “harder” declarative mode. In “They Went Forth,” the most baroque flourishes of the first version are streamlined, each line set flush at the left margin with periods replacing colons and semicolons at their ends. Specific changes provide the revision with a tighter thematic focus: “sad sweet plea for pity and peace” becomes the “murmurous voice of pity and of peace,” the “strange troubling doubt” now “an unwarlike troubling doubt.” The undermining alliteration of “sad scrolls” is lost in favor of the blunt “old tales,” but the music or word still does its dirty work.46 The revisions to the linguistic code are accompanied by the book’s entirely new bibliographic code, from its larger, blockier typeface to the image of intercut leaves on the dust jacket’s cover and the list of Boni and Liveright titles printed on its flaps.47 Such material-​textual features are hallmarks of transformations to book production and marketing, but they also reflect changes in the wider field of textual transmission since the war. Edward Bernays’s Propaganda, another Liveright title published in 1928, attempted to rescue the word “propaganda” from its postwar associations with manipulation and double-​dealing, advising that it should instead be understood to name a necessary means to organize the chaos of modern life. He considered this

function, honed in part while he worked at Boni and Liveright immediately after the war, to be indistinguishable from what he called public relations.48 The modernist concern with an absent public was thus at the center of broader efforts to address a mass of readers in such a way that it could become a functional public. Combining techniques of defamiliarization and recognition, these efforts characterize the literary world of New York at this moment. In his commitment to publicity, Bernays was doubled by George Sylvester Viereck, a man with whom O’Sheel had long-​standing literary and nonliterary connections. He and O’Sheel had first come together through poetry in the years before 1914, each admiring the other’s verse and sharing a Parnassian detachment from social mores; when war broke out in Europe, they also discovered a shared interest in American isolationism, one that encompassed a variety of pro-​ German, pro-​Irish, and anti-​British elements in the firm declaration of a common pro-​ Americanism. During the war, Viereck was the most successful agent of German publicity in the United States, running a number of publishing ventures (including the “Fair Play Library”) that were substantially bankrolled by the German Foreign Office. After his links to the German government were exposed in August 1915, Viereck continued his publicity work, but under the motto “America First and America Only.”49 At the end of the war, the Justice Department had investigated Viereck’s wartime activities, while the Senate identified both Viereck and O’Sheel as prominent propagandists during hearings on the manipulation of domestic

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public opinion by foreign governments. Each man managed to avoid official censure or prosecution, but in the aftermath of these events both were forced to adjust their public personas.50 As what he called an “interviewer de luxe,” Viereck reinvented himself as a witness to “great men,” channeling their charismatic genius to the public through magazine profiles. In this journalistic guise, he cast himself as the necessary intermediary between the nebulous world of power and his readers. Throughout his career, Viereck advocated for what Paul Saint-​Amour has described as “an aestheticized, knowing surrender to the totalitarian personality.”51 While his belief represents the metastasized extreme of O’Sheel’s “secret music,” the continuity of their attitudes to authority is undeniable. At the turn of the thirties, however, this continuity appeared to have been disrupted in the polarized atmosphere of the Depression, but each man’s accommodation to new conditions of textual production and public reception helps set up the final section of this chapter. In 1931, O’Sheel had printed 499 copies of Antigone: A New Redaction in the American Language by Shaemas O’Sheel, as well as a small folio that doubled as an announcement and order form. The latter was sent to potential subscribers, noting that the “book [is] pleasant to read and handle, and eminently suitable for a gift.” Reproducing several testimonials, including one from Lennox Robinson, who was at this time on the Abbey Theatre’s board of directors, the announcement links the aims of O’Sheel’s “redaction” to Yeats’s recent translations of Sophocles: “The greatest of living poets, William Butler Yeats, has shown in his

king oedipus and oedipus at collonus [sic] how the vividly human dramas that stirred ancient Athens can be brought effectively to the modern reader and the modern stage, by putting them into simple prose, with the choruses in simple verse. An Amrican [sic] writer has now done a similar service for the antigone.”52 While O’Sheel clearly hoped to benefit from the adventitious association with Yeats, the point made here about the formal address of a modern audience identifies the lineaments of a modernist project that included both the aesthetic realization of contemporary versions of the classics, and publishing ventures such as the Modern Library. This relationship is again asserted, in slightly more detail, in “This Book,” O’Sheel’s introduction to the “redaction”: Upon the advice of the eminent typographer, Mr. S. A. Jacobs, for whose help I am forever grateful, I have had the book set in Vogue type. This is a very modern face, and some who have seen it used, as it is chiefly, in the setting of advertisements, will dislike it, and think I should have used Caslon or some other older type. But Vogue is not nearly as new, in comparison with Caslon, as Caslon is in comparison with Athenian tragedy, and I have been glad to act on the perception of Mr. Jacobs that the straight and simple lines of Vogue carry a certain suggestion of the angularity of Greek letters which makes it more appropriate to the matter of this book than even the most graceful of the older fonts.53

O’Sheel’s tone and diction in this passage are strikingly Yeatsian, an instance of ventriloquism especially noticeable in the imagined protests over authorial insouciance and in

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phrases such as “Caslon or some other older type.” At a material level, this ventriloquism is both a more blatant and a more complicated instance of textual borrowing, for the otherwise enigmatic choice of Caslon as the counterexample to Vogue was another direct reference to Yeats: a popular typeface in the eighteenth-​century Dublin printing trade, Caslon was the font used exclusively at the Cuala Press, which regularly published volumes of Yeats’s poems and plays and was run by his sisters. Like Yeats, for whom Caslon could help make manifest a link between his works and the apex of Anglo-​Irish power (or civilization) in Ireland that he was by now deeply invested in mythologizing, O’Sheel appeals to Vogue as the graphic marker of a connection to the past. But while Yeats’s aestheticized link with the past at least had a referent, O’Sheel’s aestheticization is absolute, a fact underscored by his dismissal of Vogue’s commercial origin and use. If belatedly resorting to the deluxe edition and subscription seems to be a further attempt to resist the commercialization of aesthetic production, O’Sheel’s experience with publication fifteen years earlier, in the fields of both poetry and propaganda, presents a more immediate analogue to his artistic practices in 1931. His referent was less the Greek alphabet, that is, than modern textual circulation.54 Viereck’s response to the changing relations of textual production and public reception likewise looked back to an earlier moment, but he explicitly trained his attention on the war years. In the summer of 1929, he wrote a five-​part series for the conservative Saturday Evening Post on the wartime activities of propagandists in the United

States. Published anonymously, it was candid about Viereck’s own efforts, including his successes, as well as about the various schemes to influence government policy O’Sheel had undertaken in Washington. The series was quite successful with readers and received very favorable attention from academics and intellectuals, who were becoming conspicuously anxious about the malleability of public opinion. It was precisely during these years that this influential group began to grow less worried about the dictator’s enchanting charisma and more concerned with the susceptibility of unformed mass audiences to mediated engineering. For many, the unregulated American public sphere appeared especially prone to manipulation, with an unsophisticated and disparate populace being subjected to conflicting messages it was unprepared to understand fully, let alone contest. It was this inability to resist persuasion that increasingly dominated American perceptions of European dictatorships: “Over the course of the 1930s, this portrayal of fascism [as a top-​down affair] came to be less and less tenable for many Americans. The absence of any strong domestic opposition in Germany or Italy . . . persuaded more and more U.S. observers that these regimes were based not in the singular authority of a dictator and his henchmen but rather in the often irrational desires of the masses.”55 American authorities reacted in distinct ways to fears of public vulnerability. Conservative commentators believed that this situation reflected poorly on democratic institutions and advocated stronger censorship measures designed to root out political agitation (or “subversion”). Liberals also thought democratic institutions were not

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effectively serving the people, but instead called for their strengthening and expansion as matters of public education. When Liveright collected Viereck’s articles as Spreading the Germs of Hate and published them under his name in 1930, the introduction addressed these fears: “Propaganda is the primary weapon of the world’s invisible government. The microbes it scatters infect humanity like a plague. My book is an attempt to administer an antidote or a serum against this scourge by inculcating Propaganda Resistance. No one can escape the propagandist. But if we become propaganda-​conscious, we may in time develop a measurable degree of immunity. With this object in view, I narrate here, for the first time, the part played by propaganda in the United States during and after the War.”56 Viereck here promises an insider’s look at motivated transmission, the dissemination of “infectious” materials by propagandists. In doing so, however, he shifts the point of emphasis from the singular propagandist and his “microbes” to the “propaganda-​consciousness” will of the populace. In promoting his work as an attempt to inspire “Propaganda Resistance,” Viereck might be said to anticipate the view taken in the late thirties, and institutionalized during the Second World War, by New Deal liberals. By suggesting that the public could be taught to recognize propaganda and thereby counteract it, Viereck indeed sounds like a precursor to Archibald MacLeish, who would become Librarian of Congress at the end of the decade. Propaganda could be resisted by fortifying readers’ competence. These developments have their odd denouement in an appreciation of Viereck

written by O’Sheel and published in the New York World in April 1930. In “The Return of George S. Viereck,” O’Sheel provides the final twist to their obsession with authorial originality and readerly autonomy: One of the happy evidences that the war is over is Viereck’s re-​emergence upon the literary scene. From 1908 to 1914, he was the Puck of American letters—​an impudent, irreverent, irrepressible boy, tickling the solemn donkey of puritanic ideals, shocking all good folks by teaching the Muse to sing shamelessly of things that proper people would not even whisper. The importance of the aesthetic ideas which he advanced with such dashing perversity was apparent to serious minds, where merely solemn minds could only shake their heads. . . . The outbreak of the War diverted this advancing genius to courageous and exceedingly brilliant journalistic service in a losing cause; a mild and ingratiating youth was transmogrified in popular imagination into a horned and hoofed Hun.

Thus a younger generation has grown up which

is unaware of its debt to George Sylvester Viereck. It is true that American poetry, as to form and technique, has developed along quite other lines than those proposed, but it is also true that for its liberation from ethical preoccupations, its enfranchisement in aesthetic freedom, American poetry has George Sylvester Viereck to thank more than anyone else, with the possible exception of Ezra Pound.57

While it is unclear exactly to what, if any, event O’Sheel is referring, the passage is remarkable for the way it understands literary reemergence as signaling the end of the war’s political divisions. In this “liberation from

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ethical preoccupations,” O’Sheel hits on the very real difference between liberal efforts to reinforce democratic institutions in service to public education and the libertarian fetishization of individual will underwriting Viereck’s stance. In praising Viereck as the unacknowledged patron of a younger generation of writers, O’Sheel asserts that they owe their “enfranchisement in aesthetic freedom” to the recognition of a form of authority whose source nonetheless remains unknown. In this scenario, a process of formation is instead presented as the state of expressive liberty, as the sense of freedom granted by received knowledge. Like hearing and yielding to the “secret music” of dirty work, this battle for autonomy was won by falling for authority. The consequences of this lesson point to the next and final stage of the two men’s collaboration in the world of books.

anti-​Semitism. Even as the correlation of these policies became harder to deny, Viereck never wavered in his service. O’Sheel was meanwhile increasingly involved in far-​left political work, primarily as a member of the communist-​dominated League of American Writers. He refrained from joining the party because of disagreements over Soviet foreign policy, which, while never specified, can be inferred to have stemmed from the question of nationalism. This difference is evident in his article “It’s Happening in Ireland,” published in the New Masses on April 2, 1940. Defending the Irish Republican Army’s mainland bombing campaign instigated the previous summer, O’Sheel argues that placing bombs in “mailboxes and baggage rooms, in washrooms and shop windows” is proof not of bad strategy or retrograde thinking, but of the fact that the IRA “lack[s] the means to do more.”58 He locates the current campaign with nineteenth-​century Fenian militancy, stating that now the IRA must strike the British mainland because the southern part of Ireland is ruled by an Irish government and to attack it directly would mean civil war. Hardly mentioning the Irish Civil War, O’Sheel accuses de Valera of having betrayed the republic by leaving open the question of “external association” with the British crown in the 1937 Constitution. With the bombing campaign “happening” in England, his title instead names O’Sheel’s main argument: the IRA is a vanguard force uniting political and class demands for an equitable and complete Irish independence. He ends the piece with “Lenin’s Colonial Theory,” a two-​paragraph section in which he implies that Irish resistance to British

Books of the Hour Although Viereck and O’Sheel parted company in their commitments to political enfranchisement in the thirties, their reunion during the decade’s final months represents a convergence of “momentary value” and “opportunity” and resulted in the conversion of facts into information. When Viereck published O’Sheel’s Seven Periods of Irish History in 1940, the book was the realization of the right moment of transmission. Nothing seemed less likely in the mid-​thirties to happen than this last collaboration. Soon after Hitler took power in 1933, Viereck became an advocate for the Nazi regime, letting his avid support for its program of national regeneration override his qualms about its

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imperialism is the leading edge of the British Empire’s destruction. Published six months into the Second World War, this goal represents for him the war’s decisive struggle. The layout of the article’s second page graphically manifests the political disagreement over nationalism. In a centrally placed box, the editors of the New Masses printed a disavowal of O’Sheel’s views. While stressing their “long, warm friendship and high regard for the author,” they reject his “tolerance of the individual violence inherent in the present activities of the Irish Republican Army,” believing the flawed bombing campaign to be an unavoidable result of the “lack of systematic contact with the bread-and-​butter problems of the Irish people.” Taking explicit exception to O’Sheel’s use of Lenin’s understanding of the Easter Rising to explain the current situation, they note the IRA’s failure to engage the “social elements,” meaning class factions, determined by “Ireland’s historic battle” against British imperialism: the editors see no figure comparable to James Connolly in its leadership. The editors’ note concludes with a familiar, but no less powerful, left critique of Irish nationalism:

victory is possible only if the full lessons of Ireland’s past are learned in a fundamental way. Shaemas O’Sheel would probably agree to that last sentence.59

There is no doubt that he agreed with their penultimate sentence, with one caveat: O’Sheel envisioned himself more as a teacher of the “full lessons of Ireland’s past,” with American readers as his students. A sign of this relationship can be found at the end of his negative review of John Kennedy’s Why England Slept, published six months later in the New Masses: “If anyone who having just lost a rich uncle has $2 to spend for a good book will send me his name and address, I will be glad to suggest some dozens of books more worth his money.”60 This exchange points to Seven Periods of Irish History. The full background to its genesis became clear after the war. In the summer of 1946, the Public Opinion Quarterly published the transcript of an interrogation conducted by the War Crimes Commission of the United States. With its strong editorial interest in public opinion research and propaganda analysis, the journal was keen to print the testimony of Heribert von Strempel, who, as first secretary of the German embassy in Washington, D.C., had overseen “cultural relations” for the German government before the Americans expelled its diplomatic missions in June 1941. From this post, he had begun his work by extending invitations to American academics to visit German universities, but soon focused on disseminating propaganda in the form of printed matter (books, pamphlets, journals, newsletters, news service bulletins). Most of this material was produced

Ireland’s social problems cannot fully be solved until genuine national independence has liberated her political life from toadies and traitors; but national independence without a genuine social basis degenerates into individual acts of violence which eventually frustrate the noblest hopes, and waste the deepest passions. The movement of Irish masses for unification and genuine national liberty will grow, we are convinced, and reach toward victory. The IRA may emblazon dramatic chapters in that struggle. But complete and permanent

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by or funneled through the German Library of Information, a sponsored public relations bureau established in 1937 to distribute anti-​ British propaganda.61 From its headquarters at 17 Battery Place in Manhattan, the Library of Information published the newsletter Facts in Review, which purported to give “the other side of the story.” By 1941, its circulation reached one hundred thousand copies. Typical issues consisted of official statements, glowing profiles of life in the Reich, historical outlines of Anglo-​American friction, and the schedule of German shortwave broadcasts for North America. The Library of Information made all of its materials available through German consular offices, industrial and business associations, specialty bookstores, and tourist agencies; it also sent publications specifically to academic and public libraries, various “opinion makers,” and private citizens. Strempel’s job was to disburse payments to fund these “cultural relations.” As a paid public relations consultant and editor of Facts in Review, Viereck was their most enterprising agent. Along with Facts in Review, Viereck’s most successful venture was Flanders Hall, a publishing house based in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. (As if hiding in plain sight, its address was 1800 Front Street.) Presenting itself as an isolationist and pro-​American organization, Flanders Hall issued paperback books itemizing the long history of British imperial aggression and its causal effects on contemporary international hostilities.62 Its principal imprint was the “Book-of-the-​ Hour” series, whose title promised up-to-the-​ minute analyses and immediate relevance. In projecting its time-​sensitive nature, the

series was positioned to compete with the daily press and radio broadcasting, but with the added value that its “breaking news” compensated for the pro-​British slant of the American media establishment. The books offered freely available facts retrieved from history books, public statements, and speeches, but rendered them as information through the form of their transmission: not just books, but books of the hour. Advertised to those wishing to be fully informed about international relations, the series marshaled this information at the moment of its highest demand. This publishing strategy was its opportunity, as Strempel notes: Q: Exactly what did Flanders Hall do? A: The manuscripts of certain books came from the Foreign Office in Berlin in the diplomatic pouch or otherwise, and then went to the German Library of Information. Viereck selected from those manuscripts those which he thought might criticize and unmask British propaganda and egoistic British foreign policy, and which could easily be sold in the United States. Q: Then what happened? A: Viereck would publish these books at Flanders Hall. If he thought a financial risk was involved, he would contact me and say that the costs would amount to $5,000 or sometimes even $10,000.63 There is nothing necessarily unusual about using the diplomatic pouch to ferry material covertly across wartime borders: the same tactic allowed information to pass, for example, between Vichy France and Switzerland on behalf of the French Resistance.

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What is notable here is its role. As with any publishing venture, the business of selecting manuscripts for publication involved evaluation of “intrinsic” value, appeal to readers, and calculation of potential costs and returns. Viereck chose manuscripts he believed would sanction isolationism by appealing to a desire for detachment, both from the parochial biases of other sources of information and from the “localized” sense of the world these sources produced and enforced. Flanders Hall titles do not hide their polemical intent—​on their covers, a clock ominously ticks down to midnight—​but they depend on the appearance of autonomy, the freedom to make known what is otherwise inaccessible or suppressed. While concealing their ideological and financial backing, the titles’ subterfuge rests not in presenting information as intrinsically neutral, but rather in presenting access to information as intrinsically value-​ free. In this, the diplomatic pouch becomes a synecdoche for the Nazi Foreign Office, the patron whose patronage remains unknown. Working between the diplomatic pouch and American readers, between the vanishing mediator and the absent public, was the cosmopolitan intermediary.64 The interrogation transcript returns repeatedly to the question of access, for it signaled the practical hinge between addressing readers and creating a readership. Framed in terms of means and ends, this line of questioning revolves around the brokering function of the intermediary:

A. I remember Lothian versus Lothian, English Policy in India, English Policy in Ireland, English Policy in Palestine, and Britain’s 100 Families by the German author, G. Wirsing. The manuscripts of these books had come originally from Berlin, and were then published by Viereck after I had advanced funds to him. Q. Did the publication of each of these books entail a loss? A. I don’t know. I don’t believe so. Books about Ireland sold easily.65 The book named by Strempel as English Policy in Ireland was Werner Schaeffer’s Englands Gewaltherrschaft in Irland, the fifth title in the series “England ohne Maske” published by the Deutsche Informationsstelle in Berlin.66 Translated into several languages, the series appeared in English as “Britain Unmasked”; its fifth title was Schaeffer’s England’s Oppression of Ireland, which the Library of Information distributed in the United States.67 Variously obscuring their German origin with new authorial bylines, Flanders Hall issued the remaining “England ohne Maske” titles in English. In place of England’s Oppression of Ireland, however, Flanders Hall published O’Sheel’s Seven Periods of Irish History as the seventh title in the “Book-of-the-​Hour” series. This circumstance complicates the relationship of means to ends, of disseminating printed matter for the purpose of swaying readers, at stake in the government interrogation,68 but in doing so raises an important issue. The publication of O’Sheel’s book shifts the question of access from being posed solely as a matter of provenance (or production)

Q. Do you recall the names of the books that you and the Foreign Office approved, and whose publications by Flanders Hall you directly financed?

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and places it within a much wider communicative and epistemological field, to reveal the enabling contradiction generated by the momentary value of information and the illusion of value-​free access. What this kink in the redistribution network discloses is not the ideological tyranny of books over facts, but the necessarily political character of information as an articulation of the fundamentally political conditions of access. O’Sheel’s text is distinct from Schaeffer’s in notable ways, despite bearing some striking material affinities to the German work. Laying out in four chapters the eight centuries of English conquest and misrule in Ireland between 1150 and the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign, Schaeffer presents a continuous narrative history. It includes six plates, and its prose is generously peppered with quotations from primary sources, a list of which is provided in a concluding bibliography. O’Sheel’s book contains only four plates, but three of them are identical to images in Schaeffer’s text, while, with one exception, every source given in Schaeffer’s bibliography is included in O’Sheel’s expanded bibliography. If the relationship between these two texts skews the notion of original authorship, it is further thrown into relief by their principal difference. After an introductory chapter in which O’Sheel recounts eight hundred years of British domination in Ireland, the next seven chapters consist only of block quotations of other texts. These items are drawn from among the works of—​and this list is selective—​Oliver Cromwell, Jonathan Swift, Karl Marx, John Devoy, Alice Stopford Green, Maud Gonne MacBride, Roger McHugh, and Helen Landreth. These seven

chapters are arranged through accumulative juxtaposition to construct a unified document, framing its parts as raw data, but aggregating them as fragments of timeless truth. Like a textbook, this anthology aims to impart the “full lessons of Ireland’s past.” In the ninth and final chapter, O’Sheel narrates the recent past, situating the British war effort as the latest stage in Britain’s imperial ambition, of which hundreds of years of misdeeds in Ireland stand as its starkest reminder. It ends with a quotation from Patrick Pearse’s verse, prophesying the collapse of the British Empire. That such a sentiment possessed ideological overtones in 1940 it could not have in 1915 is left unspoken, but does its dirty work.69 Seven Periods demonstrates not only “the fact that texts outlive the conditions of their production, and continue to have meaning and value in radically altered conditions,”70 but also the functional merger of the originary creator and dissembling magpie in the role of the cosmopolitan intermediary. In making known through “annexation” what is otherwise inaccessible, the book embodies the idealized autonomy of access. This last point is exposed by the use of a text in Seven Periods that O’Sheel does not quote. When Ernie O’Malley’s memoir On Another Man’s Wound was published in London in 1936, several graphic pages recounting his torture while under interrogation by two British Auxiliary officers during the War of Independence were excised from the text. This passage was included in the American edition, published the following year as Army Without Banners. As Rebellen in Irland, a German translation of the British edition followed in 1938, through an

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intermediary connection later uncovered by O’Malley’s son:

does not appear among the six copyrighted titles from which he had permission to reprint excerpts, it stands to reason that O’Sheel was forced to paraphrase O’Malley’s passage because he had been refused permission to quote it. Among its consequences, this denial underscores the fact that access to information is never value-​free. The possibilities available in New York had created O’Sheel’s autonomy as an author and intermediary, and as such this constraint could be imposed in no other place. With O’Sheel’s leftist political associations, the publication of Seven Periods of Irish History was determined in a real way by the Nazi-​Soviet nonaggression pact, as the path of his subsequent career suggests.74 At the same time, the implications of O’Sheel’s rebellion in Irish literary space cannot be fully isolated from his inert sense of Irishness, for its seemingly innate value enabled him repeatedly to enter the publishing marketplace as both poet and propagandist.75 One of eight million stories in New York, O’Sheel’s case is nevertheless a potent example of misrecognizing the claims of attachment and detachment. Writing after the war of the potential benefits of attending to poetic sound patterns with the same intensity as patterns of poetic meaning, Northrop Frye intimates why:

As a young man on his first foreign assignment in late 1936, [the German publisher’s son] had attended the League of Nations in Geneva while Eamon de Valera was presiding. After the session, he asked de Valera if he would recommend any books for his liberal publishing firm, which had already published Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and other Indian independence authors. De Valera . . . recommended [On Another Man’s Wound] highly, and so the young man returned to his father with a new title to publish. The publisher’s hope was to provide liberal Germans with further evidence of how a people can oppose oppression.

During the war, the German publisher sought permission to issue two further printings, which was granted only after he had “persuaded the Nazi authorities that the book was a propaganda book against the British.”71 This persuasion may have been redundant. When Schaeffer’s Englands Gewaltherrschaft in Irland appeared, it included a translation of the full passage deleted from the British edition, perhaps in advance of these later German editions or as the product of material sent to Berlin from the embassy in Washington.72 Its bibliography lists the book’s provenance as “London, 1938,” and this item is carried over without change to O’Sheel’s bibliography. In his final chapter, however, O’Sheel only paraphrases the interrogation passage, citing it as a scene from Army Without Banners.73 Given that the front matter to Seven Periods contains an acknowledgment of copyright permissions, but that Army Without Banners

The study of complex meaning, or ambiguity, has enriched our appreciation of poetry, and at the same time, in the form of semantics, it has helped us to see through the illegitimate use of ambiguity in rhetoric, the employing of weasel words with a strong emotional impact and a shifting meaning. Similarly, the study of the sound-​patterns of poetry and drama would both increase our understanding

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less among propaganda analysts than literary specialists, a procedure of isolation that could in turn be institutionalized as one index to professional autonomy. While there is considerable virtue to Frye’s position here as close reader (and, indeed, close listener), this relationship should not drown out acknowledgment of historical contingency and critical belief, as the necessities conditioning intermediary practice. As it is, Frye’s position represents the allure of literary cosmopolitanism in the age of technical media. The next chapter examines how these relations of contingency and belief, propaganda and poetry, media and freedom, were both transformed and preserved during the wartime mobilization of culture.

of literature and help us to take a more clinical view of the hee-​hawing of demagoguery, whether evangelical or political. In any case it would help to prevent poetry from becoming bogged down in books, and would do much to restore to it its primitive gift of charm.76

In imagining aurality once again freed from books, Frye recognizes the value of a form of transmission, and it is not radio broadcasting. By referring to “evangelical” and “political” demagoguery, he invokes the modern history of propaganda, but presupposes its categorical detachment from poetry, even as poetry’s intrinsic attachment to sound patterns allows it to serve as a powerful debunker of affective duplicity. This was an article of faith

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3 The Irish Free Zone

On April 4, 1940, just as the Phoney War was about to end, monitors at the Princeton Listening Center in New Jersey picked up a shortwave transmission from Paris Mondial, the French overseas service.1 At this time, radio analysts had begun to praise certain innovations introduced by French broadcasters, but remained critical of the overall performance of French transmissions aimed at both domestic and foreign listeners. Lax administrative oversight and haphazard programming coordination had left French broadcasting with the reputation for being the most consistently mediocre among the services of the European powers. Technical faults and weak transmissions at times rendered programs all but inaudible, while at other times listeners could discern only too much. The transcript made in Princeton of the April broadcast graphically illustrates the point. Designed for North American audiences, the program “This Is Paris” consists of an old woman called “Madame Titanya” and an anonymous young girl describing conditions in the city:

T: One loses contact with people one loves and to whom one writes. . . . . . . Girl: (English) It’s (terrible) the first month of separation. You see one has so much to say to one another. And then if you don’t get an answer, (time stretches and stretches. . . . ?) Mme. T: One must make an effort to. . . . (inaudible) I am saying that for the benefit of our American listeners and for everyone. With a wave of the hand. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I, who have always travelled, don’t move from Paris now. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the war is a . . . prison. Girl: A prison where one gets all the news of the world. Real news. . . . . . . . Thoughts, wishes, memories, opinions. T: Everyone complains of the lack of news. But there has never been so much. But people can never have enough. I begin to wonder what the public would demand next if it were supplied with a daily ration of. . . . . . (inaudible.)

Ireland and the Problem with Information

As a typographic representation of what the program sounded like at its point of reception, the transcript is startling. Defined by separation, loneliness, and confinement, life in Paris is at once atomized and collective, as “everyone” clamors for news amid the din of competing, if somehow empty and not fully trustworthy, voices. The text’s ellipses and parenthetical hesitations magnify the sense of anomie expressed by the two speakers, as though the transcript were a cutting from Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight. The program is almost riveting on the page, but on air it was useless. Beneath the transcribed words, a monitor’s brusque capitals render this judgment: “verbatim transcription impossible. the elder speaker has a terrible radio voice. both of them interrupt each other continually . . . the two speakers talk melodramatically about the ‘solitude’ of this second world war.”2 The moving silence of the page here founders against the squeals of transmission. This sonic chaos would soon enough become grossly aggravated in the transmissions sent out as France fell to the Germans. In the week between June 13 and June 21, the staff of Paris Mondial, along with millions of others, was forced to flee south in advance of the oncoming invaders; eventually reaching Bordeaux, the service veered between recordings of military marches and panicked appeals for guns, tanks, and planes. On the fourteenth, the service made no broadcasts; on the fifteenth, it was announced, “This is Paris Mondial speaking from somewhere in France.” For the next three days, programs of varying lengths were transmitted, but at a

strength that made reception very difficult. On the nineteenth, the station went silent.3 French domestic stations were even less reliable, repeating news from the front both stale and vague: “To a nation frantic for the least scrap of real news they had nothing to offer—​except gramophone records!”4 The shocking collapse of France in a matter of weeks quickly came to be known simply as la débâcle or le désastre. With the Germans occupying the northern two-​thirds of the country and an authoritarian French state established in the remaining unoccupied zone, the extent to which France remained an autonomous political entity or how the nation now existed in relation to the war was unclear. Ensconced in a “rococo cure center for liverish bourgeois,”5 the Vichy government set about decrying the decadence of the Third Republic, charging that France had precipitously degenerated in recent decades and instituting a series of laws meant to revive the traditional bases of society. The republican virtues of liberté, égalité, and fraternité were recast as travail, famille, and patrie (work, family, fatherland), and a stunning transformation appeared complete by summer’s end. Under the terms of the armistice, the nation’s broadcasting infrastructure was handed over to the Germans, who began transmitting programs for domestic and international listeners from within France. Like the nation itself, French radio faded into silence. With associations extending from outright collaboration to passive quietism to engaged resistance, silence would become one of the most powerfully freighted tropes of wartime France. In the weeks following the surrender, silence descended on the French people in

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many forms, animating daily life and enveloping thoughts of the future with misgiving. Yet this condition of silence was not one always devoid of sound. In his journal of life in Paris under occupation, the leftist schoolteacher Jean Guéhenno aptly registers this lived condition, in an entry dated June 27: “What silence. More than the newspapers. All the French radio stations [postes] are silent. We enter into servitude without knowing exactly what will be. It was only by listening to the German radio last night that I could learn of the twenty-​four articles [points] of the [armistice] treaty. The whole of continental Europe spoke German.”6 This chapter centers on Louis Aragon’s “Zone Libre,” a poem about overcoming silence. It tracks the poem’s dissemination through the wartime settings of France, Britain, and Ireland, the last two by way of translations made by Louis MacNeice and Patrick Browne. In each instance, the circulation of the poem articulates the pressures of wartime cultural mobilization as they were felt in Paris, London, and Dublin. Examining the relationship between publication and collaboration, propaganda and aesthetic autonomy, print and broadcasting, and neutrality and cultural nationalism, the chapter demonstrates how the appearance of the poem or translation in response to these heteronomous conditions was additionally a site of new possibilities for autonomy. This is to say, each instantiation of “Zone Libre” represents not only a position-​taking by its creator, but also exemplifies a position opened in the wartime field. In negotiating the political demands on literary expression made in fallen France, embattled Britain, and neutral Ireland, the movement of “Zone Libre” specifies

the practical stakes of wartime mediation in each place. The three versions therefore suggest how a “free zone” is achieved by actively engaging the production and reception, the keeping and displacing, of wartime silence. Silence Before the appearance of Le Crève-​Coeur in 1941, Louis Aragon had last published a volume of poetry in 1934, having devoted the years since his acrimonious break with the Surrealists to political organizing, editing the communist newspaper Ce Soir, and writing novels and polemics. This work had signaled a turn toward more direct intervention into the political struggles of the thirties, but one made in response to changes in the relations linking authors and audiences brought about in the twenties. Unlike the contemporaneous generation of engaged poets in Britain, who expressed political commitment through deliberate revisions to high modernist style, Aragon left poetry altogether in favor of what he believed were more widely accessible, and politically effective, forms of writing. After the First World War, when literary institutions were held to have been implicated in its useless carnage, an intense reinvestment in literary autonomy offered writers the possibility of avoiding political collusion by establishing alternative modes of recognition and distinction. Writers did not abandon politics as much as refuse, once again, to accede to conventional categories of moral and social judgment. While this refusal was often driven by liberating energy, it shared with concurrent forms of populism an ambidextrous potential, an “openness” or dissidence that

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often failed to differentiate among the many emergent manifestations of authoritarianism, autocratic charisma, and outright bullying. In an ideological climate permeated by competing political demands and wracked by social unrest, Aragon came to see the role of literary intellectual as constitutively and undeniably heteronomous. Perhaps the most prominent marker of this change was his decision to stop publishing poetry. Given that Aragon’s reputation in the Anglophone world now rests almost exclusively on the association with poetry (or poetics), his decision to break his poetic silence with the coming of the Second World War has thus been doubly eclipsed, at once overshadowed by his surrealist writings and obscured by his turn away from the literary avant-​garde. It is as though Aragon simply disappeared into the ideological shadows thrown by the “low dishonest decade” of the thirties.7 A related sense of Aragon’s trajectory existed in the Anglophone world just after the liberation of France, with one significant difference: the war allowed him, as a poet, to reemerge into the light. Writing as the war is coming to an end, Malcolm Cowley conjures this born-​again figure: “More than anyone else, Louis Aragon is the poet of this war, as it was lost and won in western Europe. He is by no means the only war poet . . . but most of them have written about the struggle in relation to themselves; in war as in peace, they have continued taking their spiritual pulses. Aragon forgot himself in the struggle; he spoke for his invaded country. He is the one poet who has left a complete record of the wartime emotions that were felt in common, from the first shock of mobilization

to the joy of liberated Paris.”8 By these terms, Aragon’s wartime poetry becomes a kind of documentary realism of collective inner mood, poised between high modernist attention to registering subjective sensation and late modernist concern with social reportage. Announcing that “it was the war that made Aragon a poet again,” Cowley does not mention why he had “stopped” being a poet a decade before.9 He instead places Aragon’s wartime poetry in an Anglophone literary genealogy stretching from “the old Scotch ballads” (he calls Aragon the “Border minstrel of this war”) through Walt Whitman’s Drum-​ Taps.10 For Cowley, Aragon is a returned exile: “The war gave back to Aragon the world in which words have a real meaning, even the tritest of the words that describe human experience. He was like a traveler returning after years to his own countryside, in which everything is familiar and yet has a different value, being seen with different eyes.”11 When he’s at home, in other words, he’s a poet. Diffused through a “world” made synonymous with an audience, yet still beyond it, Cowley’s Aragon is returned less to a place than a position, less a “countryside” than a field. By ignoring unresolved tensions between authorial stance and readerly reception that had assumed particular force in the thirties, this restoration enacts a revision of the social history of modernism. While played here for aesthetic stakes, this revision at the war’s end was the product of the Allied war effort, in which cultural autonomy had been mobilized to distinguish democracy from fascism. If Aragon chose more popular and forthright forms of address in response to demands in the thirties,

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thereby willingly relinquishing a measure of aesthetic autonomy, the ramifications of his decision were transformed by the national collapse. Already engaged in national political struggles, Aragon returned to poetry not out of sudden commitment, even less so out of renewed dedication to literary expression, but as a complex reaction to specific pressures unleashed by the war. As Gisèle Sapiro writes in La Guerre des Écrivains, her superb analysis of the French wartime literary field, “The question of the conduct of writers in the années noires exceeds that of engagement. The conditions of the writer’s profession abruptly changed during this period, and the social meaning of individual and collective practices was, in fact, transformed. The very logic [sens] of professional practices and of aesthetic options—​from art for art’s sake to invective—​was at stake in the contests among individuals, groups, and institutions.”12 While never free of sharp and oftentimes corrosive divergences of opinion, the grounds on which writers had assumed the roles of spokesperson, witness, and representative voice were undermined by the crisis. These roles continued to be claimed and disputed, but the conditions to which they owed their specificity, if not necessarily their power, were undone: “The dual system put in place by the Nazi occupation forces and the Vichy regime to control cultural production caused an obvious loss of autonomy and a true de-​structuring of the literary field. Repression, proscriptions, censorship, control of the means of production (notably through the distribution of paper), propaganda: French literature had never known such constraints. . . . The loss of autonomy also

resulted in the subordination of literary stakes to political stakes: to publish or not to publish under the boot became a political issue [enjeu]. The most apolitical attitudes henceforth took on political significance.”13 In this “de-​structured” field, the jagged continuity of modes of reception was as critically at stake as the perseverance, elaboration, or rediscovery of particular ways of writing. Under these restrictions, silence became deeply conflicted both as a variable in everyday life and as a dilemma specific to wartime writers. For those already highly invested in the prewar structure of the literary field, the months following the armistice were dedicated to normalizing literary life in the divided country, with the resumption of publishing activities seemingly as they had been before the collapse. In some instances, such as at the publishing firm Gallimard, this recommencement appeared to be quite seamless; in others, such as the ascension of the reactionary Pierre Drieu de la Rochelle as director of the Nouvelle Revue Française in September 1940, normalization explicitly revealed its dependence on the new political order.14 At the same time, many French writers abstained from publishing altogether, believing that any public return to writing constituted an act of what was coming to be known as collaboration. With its “popular” analogue in the acts of noncooperation practiced in the occupied zone (pretending not to understand German or French spoken by Germans, maintaining a studied silence in the presence of Germans), this literary refusal was born of numerous motivations. In this early phase of the war, the “silence” to which writers resorted was a purposeful defense of

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autonomy against the political impositions on literary production that followed the defeat. Rather than participate in a milieu whose parameters were dictated by the occupying forces, or instrumentalize their work as anti-​ Nazi or anti-​Vichy propaganda, the “deliberate non-​use of language by its professional practitioners” offered a means of remaining faithful to a literary vocation without sacrificing either political allegiances or aesthetic beliefs.15 What could be interpreted as resignation in the aftermath of the collapse instead served to buttress and sustain an attitude of independence then under severe assault. This relatively compact alignment of forces was short-​lived, owing to both literary and political qualifications. The paradigmatic emblem of these developments is the novella Le Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea). Written by Jean Bruller, a Parisian illustrator who adopted the pseudonym Vercors, it tells of a Francophile German officer billeted with an elderly French man and his niece. Although the officer expresses his deep love of French culture and shows his hosts every courtesy, the French couple keeps a determined silence, until he transfers to the Eastern Front.16 Bruller had written the novella while a proponent of abstention, working as a carpenter’s assistant in order to avoid cooperating with the German-​controlled press. As German occupation policy evolved toward open displays of brutality, he began to feel that professional silence could no longer be justified; at a practical level, it was becoming more difficult to distinguish keeping silent from attentisme, the posture of “wait and see.”17 In response, Bruller and the editor Pierre de Lescure founded Éditions

de Minuit, an underground publishing house whose titles would aim to foment resistance to the occupation and division of France: the first of these was Le Silence de la Mer. By the time of the liberation, the house had published twenty-​four titles and become the most influential clandestine press in the nation.18 Even with its avowedly political motivations, Minuit nonetheless disavowed the sense that its aims compromised its literary credentials. The editorial statement included in the first printings of Bruller’s novella tersely declared, “Propaganda is not our field. We mean to preserve our interior life and freely serve our art.”19 Breaking silence with a text about silence thus functioned as the materialization of a new form of heteronomy in the literary field, one in which the defense of autonomy was renewed, but only after first recognizing (rather than rejecting) the political exigencies affecting literary production. Freely serving art was to be achieved by having art freely serve the cause of resistance and national liberation. If all autonomy is ultimately relative autonomy, forged amid and against external constraints and prohibitions, these circumstances duly underscore the relationship. Aragon’s emergence as the most celebrated wartime poet in France is both indicative of and at odds with the dynamism of the field, less a singular exemplar than a distinctive example of the requirements and fortuities that foster literary recognition. The genesis of his wartime literary distinction lay with his nonliterary activities, which provided the means to reposition his literary work through successive moments of dramatic fluctuation. In the wake of the Nazi-​Soviet nonaggression pact in late August 1939, the

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French government had banned the communist press and begun jailing party members and sympathizers; out of a job and fearing detention, Aragon took refuge in the Chilean embassy at the urging of Pablo Neruda, until called up for military service on September 3.20 Although a decorated veteran of the First World War, he was assigned as a medical auxiliary to a “labour regiment composed of Czech and Spanish anti-​fascist refugees, people who were not to be trusted to bear arms but considered fit merely to dig trenches.”21 In this capacity, he spent the next eight months sitting through the drôle de guerre (or Phoney War), waiting, like everyone else, for combat to begin. Between the German offensive into the Low Countries and France in May and the armistice in June, Aragon’s division witnessed each compressed phase of the fighting, and he was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Militaire. His military service neatly bookends the turn of the thirties to the forties and marks his return to writing and publishing poetry. What makes Aragon’s literary trajectory both anomalous and representative is that, with the armistice and the demobilization of the French armed forces, he never outwardly considered adopting a posture of professional silence. In advance of the majority of the peers who would later join him in the intellectual resistance, Aragon became a resistance poet, by first incurring the possible taint of collaboration for his decision to keep publishing. There were substantial differences between legal and clandestine publication throughout the war. When this distinction has not been overlooked, the latter has tended to dominate

postwar accounts of the intellectual resistance, on the one hand because of the central role it assumed in the final years of the war and on the other because it did not carry associations of connivance at official censorship. Even as it points to the social effects of clandestine publication, this later account dissolves the complexity of the early years of the occupation, as H. R. Kedward has noted: “All [clandestine] publication, by groups or by individuals, in the first two years after the defeat were comparatively small and isolated events in the wider context of the occupation. But they were events, with the effect of crystallizing attitudes and creating structures. Their contents did not in every case set out an alternative course of action for citizens to follow, but they did, in every case, set out alternative information, which was not available to French people through the official Vichy press and radio.”22 Having practical antecedents in trade union networks, refugee organizations, and little magazine circulation, this counter-​public sphere was not improvised on nothing, yet it remained outside the zone of official controls. Legal publication occupied a much grayer space, since publication in an aboveground forum had to clear the censor. In this context, guilt by association had real consequences. Whatever the wartime necessities for keeping these spheres starkly opposed—​and there were many—​ their polarity was increasingly subjected to a broader range of militating forces. Kedward continues, By 1942 the Vichy media and the clandestine press made up two completely separate and contradictory sources of information, with the

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journals and presses) and in its recourse to less open forms of address. This motivated use of the “literary” was the substance of what Aragon called “contraband” writing, an “allusive language that obliquely referred to the circumstances of its composition.”24 Employing conventional poetic forms, traditional and popular song structures, and coded, allegorical figurations, contraband writing was designed to elude the censor but inspire its readers, by the indirection of its language. Aragon famously likened this kind of writing to the “closed art” of the troubadour, who could sing the praises of his lady while in the court of his lord.25 A variation on speaking truth to power, this tactical use of ambiguity nevertheless insisted on its own categories of reception and valuation; with its appearance of respectability, it sought to create an audience by outwitting official censure. Its double-​edged authority derived from its being patriotic without being reactionary, from its being literary without being complacent or professionally silent. Its propagandistic value derived from its very literariness. If the exigencies of the occupation required Aragon (and others) increasingly to rely on underground publication as the war progressed, it is important to underscore that clandestine and contraband writing, as two useful modes of address and reception, represented equal sides of his wartime cultural production.26 In several programmatic statements, Aragon made the case for contraband writing, contending that a return to French literary tradition need not constitute a fall into formal or political reaction. Instead, the heritage of French culture offered writers and readers potent ways of understanding

German media in the occupied zone constituting a third, and the BBC gaining an increasingly dominant position as the fourth. When the Germans occupied the southern zone in November 1942, considerable numbers of people were exposed to all four, and to these were added a regular listening to the Swiss radio, and eventually tracts and leaflets dropped by the British air force. Some radios could also be tuned to Radio Moscow, or to de Gaulle’s transmitters first in Brazzaville and later in Algiers.23

Kedward’s earlier notion of “crystallization” might therefore be extended beyond the sense of giving definite form to the inchoate, to include the sense of being multifaceted. What is worth pinpointing is how this proliferation of the means to reach an audience, and of being reached as an audience, has its own antecedents in the very opposition of clandestine and legal publication. Le Crève-​Coeur, the first volume of Aragon’s wartime poetry, is essential in this regard. Clandestine texts were often flagrant polemics against the Germans, and their French accomplices, that obliged their authors to take pseudonyms and, if already famous, to eliminate stylistic traits or idiosyncrasies that might betray their source. (Aragon, for example, published clandestinely as François de Colère and Le Témoin des Martyrs.) The virtues of these texts lay in open and unguarded expression, their powerful affective appeal made concrete through illicit production and distribution. When resorted to by resistant writers, legal publication entailed an entirely different set of procedures, one more recognizably “literary” both in its means of appearance (with established

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and contextualizing their present condition, by providing alternative formations to those given shape in the Vichyite National Revolution and Nazi New Order. In a divided France, Aragon could invoke the marriage of northern and Occitan traditions that had formed a united French linguistic habitus in the twelfth century, which in turn became a guiding light throughout Europe with the rise of autonomous, but conversant, vernacular literary cultures. In making this controversial argument, Aragon was specifically concerned with the writer’s role in the fight for national liberation (as opposed to the partisan’s military role), and how it would evolve from a literary practice defined equally by its intrinsic qualities and its position within an emergent field of reception. In late 1941, he became a leader of the Comité National des Écrivains, a coalition of writers, editors, and publishers dedicated to coordinating resistant literary activity in both parts of France; by making strategic alliances with resistant writers holding various allegiances (communists, socialists, Jews, Catholics), the group challenged the legitimacy of the established organs of literary consecration and would eventually alter the structure of the wartime literary field.27 While beyond the present context, this activity suggests one end point for Aragon’s return to poetry in 1939. More to the point at hand, it underlines the part played by contraband writing in the evolution of his political poetics. In “La Rime en 1940,” the first of his critical statements on the condition of poetry in the new decade, Aragon sets out the terms by which he envisioned, and put into practice, the task of engaged verse writing. First

published in Pierre Seghers’s journal Poètes Casqués 40 in April, and later included at the end of Le Crève-​Coeur,28 the essay charts a poetic revival, one that could respond to immediate circumstances, but from within a long, vibrant tradition of literary innovation. Rejecting the elision of free verse with freedom itself, Aragon maintains that the limitations imposed by traditional formal patterns provide the means of a reinvigorated practice: “The freedom whose name is usurped by vers libre today takes back its rights, not in carelessness, but in the work of invention.”29 Far from being simple cover for political commentary, this call necessitates fresh attention to all the resources of the language as a fully historical entity. Drawing on medieval verse, French romanticism, folk and popular song, and the formal expansiveness of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire, Aragon advances rhyme as the device crucial to this contemporary process of historicization, for it enables poets to direct verbal design to the ear and spoken French rather than to the eye and the written conventions of classical French prosody.30 In this way, poetry will again be invested with the demotic possibilities of social expression: “Rhyme is the key, the true guardian of popular pronunciation.”31 In turn, poetry will find new rhymes in the contemporary spoken language, modernizing itself through the linguistic facts of vocabulary, usage patterns, and dissonance that have been realized in the living practice of speakers. In an oratorical passage, Aragon proclaims the stakes of this gambit: We are in 1940. I raise my voice and say that it is not true that there are no new rhymes, when it is

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of legal publication—​and, by April 1941, of association with Drieu la Rochelle—​the first edition sold out within months. With a popularity that belied its limited availability, the book soon symbolized the poetry of resistance. In depicting successive moments of heartbreak, the twenty-​two poems of Le Crève-​Coeur document roughly the first year of the war, from the initial declaration of war through the drôle de guerre to the final agonies of capitulation and occupation. The opening poems express a mixture of anger, dismay, and longing, as the French government’s romantic sloganeering counterpoints the emotional separation caused by mobilization. Written after the armistice, the second half attempts to fathom the trauma of surrender and reclaim national consciousness from despair. By exploring affective states of abandonment, bewilderment, and desolation through a verse form pitched toward spoken French, the poems render a physical sense of aural memory, as place names, fragments of song, and remembered voices are patterned by rhyme. While this heightened aurality is often positive, especially toward the end of the volume, it also represents a site of ideological numbness and administrative domination, most notably in the figure of the radio. Announced by the masculine rhyme of idiot and radio in “Vingt Ans Après” (“Twenty Years Later”), the first poem of the collection, wireless transmission and reception serve throughout as an ambivalent index to the war’s course. In the first phase of the conflict, a combination of distance and waiting pervaded Aragon’s experience, as his physical separation from his wife, Elsa Triolet, is measured by the time spent waiting

a new world. Who has brought into French poetry the language of the TSF [transmission sans fil, or wireless transmission] or that of non-​Euclidean geometry? Almost everything we confront in this strange war, which is the landscape of a strange and terrible poetry, is new to the language and still unfamiliar to poetry. We reach the universe, unknowable by the present means of science, through words, by this system of knowledge called poetry, and so overcome years and years of inhumanity [des années et des années sur le temps ennemi des hommes]. Thus rhyme takes back its dignity, because it conveys new things into the ancient and high language that is its own end, and that is named poetry. Thus rhyme ceases to be a thing of derision, because it participates in the needs of the real world, because it is the link that ties things to song and that makes things sing.32

With social engagement keyed to this auditory gain, poetry becomes, for Aragon, the means to achieve and sustain a dissident consciousness in touch with the realities of disaster. Not without some notable dissention both in and beyond France, Aragon’s call proved to be a rallying cry. At the time of its inclusion in Le Crève-​ Coeur, this call might have seemed a cry of distress. Collecting poems written between September 1939 and October 1940, Le Crève-​ Coeur is the only volume of Aragon’s wartime poetry to have been legally published in France, in April 1941.33 While several poems had first appeared in journals in France (Nouvelle Revue Française, Poètes Casqués 40) and Algeria (Fontaine), the volume was issued in Paris, with a run of two thousand copies in the Nouvelle Revue Française imprint at Gallimard. Despite the uncertain stigma

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for her letters from Paris. This condition of stalled time is most evident in “J’attends sa Lettre au Crépuscule” (“I Wait for Her Letter at Dusk”), the book’s second poem, in which the receipt of a letter from home momentarily closes the distance between them. Against this figure of communicative union, listening to radio broadcasts represents the dangerous reification of communication. In the three-​ part “Petite Suite Sans Fil” (“Little Wireless Suite”), Aragon indicts radio broadcasting for its stupefying potential, tuning in station after station and receiving only easy entreaties: “Ô / Silence l’insultant pot-​pourri qu’il rabâche” (“O / Silence the insulting medley that it [the idiotic speaker] repeats”). For soldiers and civilians alike, above all those too young to remember the last war, radio offers nothing but a string of false promises and illusions of confidence. The final tercet of the suite’s first part indeed reads like an echo of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, exiled in New York and formulating their critique of the culture industry: “Et leur espoir le bon vieil espoir d’autrefois / Interroge l’éther qui lui donne pour reste / Les petites pilules Carter pour le foie” (“And their hope the good old hope of past days / Questions the ether that gives as glimmers / Carter’s little liver pills”).34 Even amid this welter of debilitating jingles and narcotic advertisements, radio epitomizes the modern condition of aural transmission and reception that Aragon was seeking to rehabilitate with Le Crève-​Coeur. As a powerful medium of communication, radio could not be ignored or refused. Like the mode of contraband writing, with its subversive infiltration of official channels of dissemination, this

instrumentalization of the negative capacity of radio to fashion and inform an audience held out the possibility of being put to good use.35 The various notes of the foregoing discussion—​the turn of the thirties to the forties, the position of the writer amid charged political atmospherics, the interaction of literary forms and forums with technical media in a total communicative situation—​all sound in Aragon’s “Zone Libre.” Placed toward the end of Le Crève-​Coeur, it tells of possibility wrested from emotional desolation. Indeed, from its opening word to its concluding stanza, “Zone Libre” thematizes the potential of sadness to overcome silence: Fading de la tristesse oubli Le bruit du coeur brisé faiblit Et la cendre blanchit la braise J’ai bu l’été comme un vin doux J’ai rêvé pendant ce mois d’août Dans un château rose en Corrèze Qu’était-​ce qui faisait soudain Un sanglot lourd dans le jardin Un sourd reproche dans la brise Ah ne m’éveillez pas trop tôt Rien qu’un instant de bel canto Le désespoir démobilise Il m’avait un instant semblé Entendre au milieu des blés Confusément le bruit des armes D’où me venait ce grand chagrin Ni l’oeillet ni le romarin N’ont gardé le parfum des larmes J’ai perdu je ne sais comment Le noir secret de mon tourment

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its political etiology has been silenced. It is only in the final sestet, when a murmured song is heard from outside (Au-​dehors), that this sickness regains consciousness of itself as a political condition (Mon mal enfin s’est reconnu), as the old song agitates (troubla) the placid surface of despondency. The fading of sadness into emptiness at the poem’s opening begins to fade back into sadness by its close. The silence imposed by defeat and demobilization is thus revealed to have been not the absence of sound, but the ideological effect of the incapacity to recognize the old song’s call to the present. By articulating the history of this present, the song becomes, for Aragon, the call to resist. As an allegorical declaration of the necessity of expression resistant to official censorship, collaborationist “noise,” and voluntary self-​silencing, the poem strikes a number of targets through the very form of contraband writing. At first glance, “Zone Libre” might appear to confirm or flatter the national patriotism embodied by the Vichy regime, whose nominal freedom in the “free zone” of southern France symbolically rested on its reactionary appropriation of the spirit of the nation. This possibility enabled the poem to pass the censor and, in turn, to circulate in the officially delimited literary field of wartime France: it is the gamble of contraband writing. Through the twelfth-​century Provençal rime couée (aabccb), Aragon voices love of country in the face of occupation and partition, singing the praises of an unbowed France in the press of the nation’s wrongful guardians. The poem’s concluding and operative rhyme of France and silence links the two words precisely in order to insist

À son tour l’ombre se démembre Je cherchais à n’en plus finir Cette douleur sans souvenir Quand parut l’aube de septembre Mon amour j’étais dans tes bras Au-​dehors quelqu’un murmura Une vieille chanson de France Mon mal enfin s’est reconnu Et son refrain comme un pied nu Troubla l’eau verte du silence36

The first word immediately announces the poem’s communicative stakes. Borrowed from English and specific to wireless transmission, fading is defined as the diminution and distortion of a signal, as the temporary “fading effect” marking a brief lapse in reception; by analogy, the word names a short-​term condition of being blocked or stalled.37 With fading as the poem’s first word, radio becomes the aural agent of the forgetful oblivion (oubli) that overwhelmed Aragon, and France, upon surrender to the Germans and the demobilization of the French army. His broken heart (coeur brisé) leads to despair, which in turn causes him to lose all sense of love for country; worse than the call-​down from the army, this blank despair makes him unable to remember why he despairs and, in this way, completes the work of demobilization (Le désespoir démobilise). As the internalization of national demobilization, despair is known here—​in Corrèze, where Aragon and Triolet first went in the unoccupied zone—​as the emotional inability to respond to the old songs of France, as a stagnant grief without memory (douleur sans souvenir), and as a depression whose consciousness of

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on their difference. By formally disrupting the equivocal collapse of professional codes of refusal and abstention into the political circumstances of the fallen nation, the rhyme communicates a new practice of engaged writing and reception. Unlike the musique first claimed by symbolist poetry, Aragon’s chanson has a definite referent. In openly exploring the usurpation of poetic freedom by vers libre, but without discounting the historical reality of the spoken language, Aragon stages a concealed denunciation of the political freedom usurped by the zone libre. This move surely relied on a brisk flattening of the literary positions available to writers in the early years of the war, but its consequences were unmistakable in the wider context of wartime France, as Kedward observes: “The poetry of Le Crève-​Coeur had the same effect on its readers in 1941 as the ‘vieille chanson de France’ [had] on Aragon himself, disturbing the silence and questioning the inertia of the southern zone.”38 At the end of the occupation, Jean-​Paul Sartre prominently declared that it had given rise to a “Republic of Silence,” an embodiment of the existential freedom on which the future of France was to be staked. It is worth noting how, in the first phases of the années noires, contraband writing played a central and specific role in defining the actual terms and practices of this freedom, through the literary positioning of its political intervention. By troubling the conditions of its own autonomy, that is, contraband writing not only recognized the heteronomous demands on its production, but also realized the communicative possibilities of its reception. It created a zone libre in the ruins of debacle.

Stillness Compressing cultural autonomy into cultural unity, the Allied war effort could not afford such discriminations: keeping certain silences was necessary to the projection of virtue. Yet the mobilization of cultural production instead indicated the dire circumstances of total warfare. The evacuation from Dunkirk and the fall of France submerged Britain in an unnerving trough from which it would not begin to emerge until the Battle of El Alamein in October 1942. If France under occupation was often likened to prison, Britain during these years was seen as being under siege, defensively withdrawn from the continent and facing continual threat of invasion. Despite officially generated narratives of the firm resolve and common purpose of the British people, the steady onslaught of aerial bombardment, shipping losses, and crowing propaganda enforced the feeling of isolation. For the British, France became a distinctly ambiguous entity, neither fully friend nor foe and unable to be either fully trusted or written off. As Tim Brooks argues, this ambivalence only sharpened strategic calculations related to France’s wartime status: The British remained at war with Germany and therefore with Germans stationed in France. In practice this meant that, de facto, a state of war existed with France, and particularly with the Occupied Zone, where British bombing soon began. To most Britons, France was now a base for German bombers and a probable invasion. Even after Hitler postponed the invasion, German aircraft continued to bomb Great Britain from French aerodromes and German warships sailed

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credible only presented another challenge: information could not simply be transmitted to France, but had to arrive in Britain. Receiving word of “the spirit of resistance” became a vital gauge and implement of the British war effort. It was good for morale and useful as propaganda. Against the smothering and apocalyptic brutality of the Nazi New Order, the British characterized themselves as guardians of the habits, values, and institutions of democratic culture. Patrick Deer has observed that “British war culture indeed claimed to represent the high point of civilization under siege; yet, ironically, the defense of civilization necessitated the use of devastating military violence, manipulative propaganda, pervasive censorship, and secrecy.”41 Rather than irony and its suggestion of an otherwise unbridgeable gap between ends and means, the operative trope under which this move proceeded is perhaps better classified as metonymy. Employing censorship in service of defending free speech, for example, might have been a paradox or rhetorical sleight of wartime culture, but it was not a structural or practical contradiction. Instead, the contested and highly divisive meanings of “civilization” could be made concrete in more tangible and accessible figures, in objects whose qualities projected the outline of a wider and more capacious web of relations. In this respect, evidence of resistant French literary activities, made in the name of an unwavering commitment to free expression, could offer basic and irrefutable proof of the ultimate stakes of the war against fascism. It was in this context that Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur was published in Britain. A copy of the book had been sent from

from French ports to attack British oceanic supply lines. French production and resources, some from French colonies remaining loyal to Vichy, became part of the German war effort. Defeating Germany meant invading Europe, almost certainly through France.39

With little possibility of reopening a front in Europe, British strategy came to turn on the combined intensification of naval blockades, aerial bombing campaigns, and political warfare, the last a euphemism that covered a range of propaganda activities. The suddenly expanded population of French evacuees in London presented both opportunities and complications: propaganda work could draw on skilled candidates, but had to be negotiated among competing allegiances and jurisdictions. Public displays and pronouncements of cooperation, of the very existence of a unified Allied war effort, were thus fashioned atop a colder sense of necessity. One of the first and most pressing challenges was remaining in communication with the French people. De Gaulle’s London broadcast of June 18, in which he implored the French to continue fighting in the name of France, suggested the power of the BBC’s transmitters to counteract Pétain’s calls from Vichy to accept the terms of the armistice. In early July 1940, a directive in the BBC’s European News Service urged the corporation to stress “our moral and material fitness to keep alive in conquered Europe the spirit of resistance to conquest by brute force and eventually lead to a great uprising of the peoples against a morally and spiritually bankrupt tyranny whose actual material strength is waning.”40 Yet making this policy

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France to Raymond Mortimer, an editor at the New Statesman who worked for the Ministry of Information as a liaison between the BBC’s French Service and de Gaulle’s Free French Forces in London. Its sender was the anonymous author of the two “Letters from France” published, without her knowledge, in Cyril Connolly’s journal Horizon in 1941.42 Her diligence was rewarded with the announcement in August 1942 of a forthcoming edition of Le Crève-​Coeur, to be published jointly by Horizon and La France Libre, a monthly French-​language journal in London.43 In a coordinated campaign to publicize its release, three poems—​including “Zone Libre”—​were included the August issue of Horizon,44 in which Connolly stated that advance orders “taken in rotation” were now being accepted.45 By October, Connolly could announce, “At the end of this month the Horizon-​La France Libre edition of Le Crève-​Coeur will be out, with a foreword and introduction by the two editors. This limited edition of seven hundred and fifty copies is already largely subscribed, but copies can still be obtained by writing to Horizon or La France Libre.”46 The London edition was followed by both limited and general editions published in New York.47 In the eighteen months since its original publication in Paris, Le Crève-​Coeur had been disseminated throughout the Allied nations. Its international reception depended not only on wide distribution, but also on the promotion of an untranslated book in the Anglophone literary marketplace. Indeed, the later claims made in Britain (and the United States) on Aragon’s behalf—​that he was the foremost poet of France’s specific wartime predicament

and of the overall experience of the war—​can be traced to this international reception of Le Crève-​Coeur.48 This publication and reception history has obvious affinities to the prewar institutions of high modernism, but should not be taken as evidence of either simple continuity or decline. The dissemination of Aragon’s wartime poetry in the Anglophone countries of the United Nations lays bare the urgent strategic need to spread word that the French, though down, were not out; in return, the patriotic national allegories of Le Crève-​Coeur secured the Allied narrative of a war fought for the right to a free and unbounded cultural life. At the same time, the literary arena in which Aragon’s poems were circulated policed its own domain, even as its borders were shifting under wartime demands. Here Aragon’s poems represented an aesthetic resolution to the quarrels and dilemmas of the thirties, a guide to what Auden, looking back on the decade, described as its uninviting choice “between Agit-​prop and Mallarmé.”49 Put forward to its Anglophone readers not as the fossilized residuum of autonomous imagination, but as its substantiation in the present moment of historical crisis, Le Crève-​Coeur demonstrated how the problematic divide between politics and aesthetics could be managed in the sphere of wartime publishing.50 While it perhaps suggests too much to imply that Mallarmé had become the stuff of agitprop, the point to underscore is that the ability to make, and the possibility of making, an aesthetic choice of Mallarméan “escapism” was now transformed into effective propaganda. Such a choice might be considered unsound, extravagant, or irresponsible, but the freedoms at stake

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included the freedom to make bad, unpopular, and “individualistic” decisions. Like many other liberal democratic principles, however, this belief in unfettered expressive liberty hung on a fine, but tightening, line. This situation indicates less about Aragon than it does about the material and ideological circumstances underpinning the wartime existence of Horizon. Sean Latham locates the journal as “the last of the self-​consciously modernist ‘little magazines’ ” and a conflicted emblem of the “end of modernism,” arguing that its complex blend of aesthetic angst and dilating scope exemplifies the moment of its production.51 Founded by Connolly, Peter Watson, and Stephen Spender in late 1939, the journal was conceived as the cultural inheritor to The Little Review, The Dial, and The Criterion (the last having just ceased publication), even going so far as to mimic their Spartan design in order to distinguish its literary authority from the flashier layout of more popular magazines.52 In the very first issue, published four months into the war, Connolly had declared the journal’s credo: “Our standards are aesthetic, and our politics in abeyance.”53 Almost fifteen years later, writing after the journal had folded, he only moderately softened this stance: “At the beginning of the last war [Horizon] served as a rallying point where writers might clear their minds and pool their experiences.”54 For the first several months of its existence, Horizon resolutely held to this embattled position, turning its back on the mass media and devoting itself to the defense of good taste and autonomous evaluation against the cultural pressures of mobilization. As if on cue, this starched editorial posture began to sag with the disastrous

course of Nazi victories across the Channel during the summer months of 1940. Faced with a very different specter of totalization, Connolly acknowledged that “the labour of imagination necessary for creative writing, the freedom to print it, the backing to publish it, the leisure and curiosity to read it, depend in the last analysis on the British fleet, and now that that extraordinary fact has been brought home to us we cannot afford the airy detachment of earlier numbers.”55 This remarkable admission played out most dramatically in relation to maintaining Horizon’s paper ration. Britain’s supply of wood pulp had been all but eliminated with the German invasion of Norway in April, which led to restrictions on paper allotments and an outright ban on new publications after May. For Connolly, this situation was not without promise: “The paper shortage, which will rid us of the books not worth publishing and the news not worth printing, may bring publisher and reader back to poetry, which is now the only kind of writing so concentrated as to be economically justified.”56 Yet the surest way for the journal to tank would be withdrawal of its allotment. During the next three years, Horizon’s viability was often questionable, as its paper ration came to rest on demonstrating to the government that it received favorable publicity, especially in the United States.57 Rather than economic justification, Horizon’s existence finally depended on the positive assessment of its propaganda value by the Ministry of Information, for it was this evaluation that justified the journal’s paper supply. Driven by this dual-​edged impetus to maintain both aesthetic and political

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standards, Horizon embarked on what Connolly later identified as its second moment of “historical importance,” in an attempt to meet these competing demands: “In the next phase we undertook a stock-​taking of Western culture under pressure . . . , and the magazine came genuinely to represent Western Literature, past and present, and so was able to carry abroad an international humanist warmth and curiosity in the wake of the invading armies. This was the second historical moment [of the journal’s existence]. Thus, Occupied France had always been something of an obsession.”58 With its mixture of reflexivity and non sequitur, this passage sums up the editorial mandate of this moment and, in its way, charts the course of the Allied war effort. Having weathered the early years of war behind the protective flank of the Royal Navy, the journal could now assume a position in equal measure avant-​garde and rear echelon. But why “thus” France? With evidence of resistant cultural activity under the occupation steadily, if erratically, arriving in London—​Connolly notes that Horizon “obtained some of the first accounts of the underground movements,” as though its own agents had parachuted behind enemy lines59—​France could offer him renewed justification for aesthetic autonomy. Here was verification of the “labour of imagination” that was emphatically not dependent on the British fleet, that was occurring under conditions at absolute odds with the freedom, patronage, and leisure that had sustained the high modernist spirit to which Connolly remained committed. Resistant French writing expressed creative liberty, but without the risk of detachment; more contentiously,

it promised through the modes of its circulation the reunification of literary producers and audience, of “serious” and “popular” literature, of aesthetic and political standards. Because dissemination transformed all those involved into partisans, no one could be disinterested under the occupation. Connolly’s maneuver was to internationalize this existential transformation, to broaden its scope beyond the borders of France. In place of a republic of silence, this was a United Nations of engagement. Among the many problems with this formulation, the most egregious was the wholesale transposition of specific French circumstances to the literary culture of wartime Britain, an example of what Adam Piette, quoting Connolly himself, identifies as an “insular lack of imagination.”60 There is no better indication of this insularity masquerading as internationalism, of local appropriation launched in the name of cosmopolitanism, than Connolly’s introduction to the British edition of Le Crève-​Coeur, in which he doubles back on his own circular construal of the relations between aesthetics and politics. After briefly describing the details of its arrival in London, he still mystifies the book’s circulation: “The journey of this little paper book to where it can reproduce itself becomes as miraculous as the pollination of an orchid or the flight of a winged seed to the clearing where it can take root. Art knows no frontiers, and in this roundabout way England has received its first war-​poet.”61 Horticultural imagery aside, it is curious to invoke art’s ignorance of frontiers in the introduction to a book obsessed with the borders and border crossings that had determined its poems’

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genesis and realization. While “Zone Libre” in particular suggests that, prior to liberation, the “free zone” of France exists only as an aesthetic ideal, the collection is nevertheless pointedly aware that this imaginary field is historically contingent on the war’s course, just as the means of its instantiation—​in the press, as a collection, by word of mouth—​ are directly contingent on the conditions of occupation and resistance. Pronouncing Aragon “the first poet of the United Nations to make music out of the war,” Connolly instead asks readers to expunge the actual reproduction of the book in Britain from evaluation of the poetry’s significance, even as he narrates its literal movement across frontiers. Unlike a self-​reproducing “winged seed,” the book was disseminated by institutional networks organized to direct the movement of wartime information.62 By reasserting “miraculous” aesthetic autonomy, the introduction authorizes the war as the defense of unencumbered creative liberty. In Connolly’s telling, the mediated exchange of a book that has been reified as wartime information must instead go misrecognized as the unifying embodiment of autonomy. The metonymy behind this telling is bared when Connolly drafts Aragon as England’s “first war-​poet,” but stages it as voluntary enlistment. Why this cloaked induction is an example of metonymy, and not synecdoche, is an effect of the real difference between the literary field and the wider field of power. If Horizon had initially been imagined as a haven, a clearing (at least of the mind), in which aesthetic ideals might flourish amid political calls for artistic accountability, this second phase of Connolly’s literary war internalized

the rhetoric of cultural unanimity, but as the return to a state of unmediated access to cultural value. In other words, it promoted cultural unanimity not as an expanding and leveling diversification, but as the naturalized universality of a selective cultural heritage.63 Given the haunting meditation on political internalization in “Zone Libre,” the introduction’s alignment of sacrosanct imaginative interiority and static, borderless truths is a noticeably dubious plug for the book’s consequence. Yet it was decisive. Faced with a quickly receding sense of cultural equipoise, Connolly fashions an Aragon who is the antithesis of dynamism, change, and movement, and then uses him to assail the aesthetic paralysis of British wartime poets: Considered in relation to the war, Auden is an oracle in a cave, and Eliot a philosopher on a dark mountain. Aragon, at first, neither a pacifist nor a patriot, yet obtained inspiration from the crass stupidity of war, and then from the apathy of defeat. Why should only he be the singer of that heat-​wave when France fell, he alone of the men at Dunkirk write a good poem about it? To answer that one must ask deep and disturbing questions about the structure of literary life in England, where our poets have wings but lack the power to make themselves airborne.

Whether Connolly thinks this “flightless” condition denotes a subspecies of chicken, grouse, or ostrich is left unclear, but his closing admonition that British poets learn their trade is blatant: “The defeat of [Aragon’s] country bestowed on him the privacy and leisure without which he could never create. There is no mystery about the process which

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led up to these poems. Now let our poets give us, from their own design, a music as lucid, as moving, and as largely conceived.”64 However unlikely it could appear, Aragon’s poetry was asked to embody the autonomous culture of privacy and leisure, precisely because it was created outside the demands imposed by the war. Rather than as an expressive part of his politics, Aragon’s aesthetics are rendered contiguous to them and, as such, can be made to stand in for them. High modernist detachment thus returns to the literary arena, from which it had been displaced by a decade of infighting about commitments. Less a reassessment of modernism than a partial (in every sense of the word) normalization of the wartime literary field, Connolly’s judgment demonstrates how the terms of earlier decades haunted a moment not yet fully in possession of its own. It was in this vacated milieu that occupied France could become the strange bearer of a redemptive culturalist program founded on the return of high modernist aesthetic autonomy: hence Connolly’s “obsession” with the literary work of its encircled writers. Not surprisingly, Connolly’s introduction to Le Crève-​Coeur set the terms by which Aragon’s volume was positioned in Britain, although its reception was by no means uniformly affirmative.65 The two most sustained attacks came from Arthur Koestler, who objected altogether to the notion of literary patriotism, and from a faction of surrealists in Britain, who called into question both Aragon’s aesthetic procedures and his loyalty to France; yet it is significant that each remained firmly within the charmed aesthetic circle mapped out in Connolly’s introduction. First

published in the Tribune in late November 1943 as “Literary Idolatry,” Koestler’s unrevised piece later appeared in The Yogi and the Commissar retitled as “The French ’Flu,” after its central diagnosis of the illness afflicting the British field. The first paragraph says almost everything: The people who administer literature in this country—​literary editors, critics, essayists: the managerial class on Parnassus—​have lately been affected by a new outbreak of that recurrent epidemic, the French ’Flu. Its symptoms are that the patient, ordinarily a balanced, cautious, sceptical man, is lured into unconditional surrender of his critical faculties when a line of French poetry or prose falls under his eyes. Just as in the case of hay-​fever one whiff is sufficient to release the attack, thus a single word like “bouillabaisse,” “crève-​coeur,” “patrie” or “midinette” is enough to produce the most violent spasms: his eyes water, his heart contracts in bitter-​sweet convulsions, his ductless glands swamp the bloodstream with adolescent raptures. If an English poet dares to use words like “my fatherland,” “my soul,” “my heart,” etc., he is done for; if a French one dispenses musical platitudes about la Patrie, la France, mon coeur and mon âme, the patient begins to quiver with admiration.66

Whatever the merits of Koestler’s reading, its brusque and distasteful masculinism is hard to take. Training his ire on Aragon, Gide, and Vercors, Koestler asserts that their writings in no way warrant the praises they have garnered in Britain and that their reception bespeaks “a black market in literature, on which human sacrifice, struggle and despair are commercialized, and the spirit is turned into

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hooch.”67 Aragon is singled out for belatedly turning to the technical language of radio and geometry, and his use of rhyme is dismissed as little more than a sentimental contrivance. Without ever identifying Le Crève-​Coeur as propagandistic, this is the principal finding of Koestler’s summary judgment. In short, he condemns Aragon’s poetry for presenting a façade of literariness in service to political ends.68 Perhaps more interesting, but no less contemptuous, was the critique initiated by the surrealists.69 The most accomplished example was the four-​page pamphlet Idolatry and Confusion by Jacques Brunius and E. L. T. Mesens, published in late 1944. A Belgian visual artist and poet who had lived in London since 1936, Mesens worked during the war as a musician at the BBC, contributing to broadcasts for France and Belgium; Brunius was a French scriptwriter, whose winning on-​air presence had made him a major talent at the BBC’s French Service. Each had long-​ standing ties to the surrealist movement.70 An overview of the controversy, Idolatry and Confusion nevertheless sets out “to oppose all the opinions already expressed.”71 Stating that only “a writer, French in expression and formation, could throw much light on this subject,” they excoriate the British reception of French war poetry, arguing that a “lack of sense of values” has made it all too easy for intellectuals to close the “long step from war-​ propaganda to poetry.” Instead of a voice of resistance, Aragon is characterized as being in step with the Vichy regime’s resentful, Anglophobic patriotism.72 Indeed, the poetry of the Resistance is a desecration of the total resistance to all conventions, including

patriotism, espoused by the surrealists. For them, it is conducive only of conformity and bad faith. In this, they advance an undiluted expression of professional silence: wartime writing is charged by a fierce polarity between écrivains du silence and collaboration. The pamphlet closes with a call to action: “It is astounding to measure to what extent writers and artists have allowed themselves to be overwhelmed by isolationism and confused by equivocal propaganda, to what extent they have tolerated the erection of customs barriers between two cultures which used to be so close to each other. How long will it be before we reach an intellectual free trade? In this respect not only are we no more advanced than we were in the XVIII century, we have since beaten a retreat: it is high time that critics, publishers, and above all translators got to work.”73 This spirit of cosmopolitan internationalism is distinct from Connolly’s not in kind, but in degree. Like him, Brunius and Mesens rely on a static dedication to aesthetic autonomy, with the signal difference that they make absolute what in practice Connolly was forced tortuously to justify. Uniting all disputants to the controversy, however, was an idealist faith in the power of aesthetic procedure to affect the public while remaining detached from public demands. This is to say the exact point of modernism’s contemporary crisis—​the mediating relations between artist and public—​is misrecognized according to the terms of a past moment. Pulling slightly back from the controversy, it is possible to discern an index to this crisis in the categorical divide maintained by Brunius and Mesens between their radio work and their aesthetic vocation. Holding to this

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strict divorce was to take a specific position in the cultural field and to respond to a specific demand generated within the cultural field. For this reason, the specificity of the stance, its historicity, should not be taken as an absolute or final reckoning of the strains of wartime cultural production, but as a particular reaction to new forms and conditions of heteronomy imposed by the circumstances of the war. At this conjuncture of forces—​aesthetics, politics, translation, radio, audience, wartime contingencies—​Louis MacNeice’s translation of “Zone Libre” is especially compelling. First published in John Lehmann’s journal New Writing and Daylight in June 1943, the translation is a reflexive demonstration of the necessary compromises and possibilities of resistance—​of the work of mediation—​ manifested in the stress of this moment. With its editorial mandate to foster communicative exchange between writers and readers, New Writing and Daylight was an apt forum. It was not Lehmann’s ambition to provide asylum to embattled authors, as Connolly had proposed for Horizon, but to help define the social role of writers in an “intimate and dignified form of dialogue with [their] readers.”74 In doing so, the journal stressed its intermediary function, but not without also recognizing that it was not alone in serving this purpose in wartime Britain. A precise example of this crowded field can be found in the issue in which MacNeice’s translation appeared, on the back flap of its paper cover, in a notice titled “Britain Calls the World”:

of Europe. They do so because they have learned that the British broadcasts tell the truth.

All over the world, and in many languages,

you can listen to the truth from London. The British radio sticks to the facts—​giving the latest, most authentic news as soon as it is known.

In addition to news, the BBC brings you every

night its world-​famous “Radio Newsreel.” It brings you talks from leaders of the Allies, stories from people in every walk of life, from war workers, from men in the forces at Home and Overseas; and programmes of music and entertainment.

Full details of all programmes in English are

broadcast from London in Morse every Sunday, and are made available to the Press, almost everywhere, a week in advance. If you cannot find them in your own paper, enquire about them. Many items are rebroadcast, too, by stations all over the world. The wavelengths and times of broadcasts from Britain in all other languages, are available from your local British authorities or your own radio stations.

from london comes



the voice of britain

...

the voice of freedom.

75

An ad for radio services on the jacket of a literary journal dedicated to communication: this provides a graphic instantiation of the particular challenges and prospects of this moment. Whereas Aragon’s poem is a meditation on internalization and demobilization, Mac­ Neice’s translation recasts it as an examination of externalization and mobilization. Adapting the poem’s situation away from the circumstances of fallen France toward an analysis of the place of cultural autonomy in British explanations of the war, the translation

Men, women, and even children, risk imprisonment and death to hear broadcasts from London. They are the inhabitants of the occupied countries

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animates the point at which the political aesthetics of the thirties fall under the pressures of total national mobilization. It achieves this critical transformation through four distinct departures from Aragon’s original. The first of these—​its title—​gives some indication of the stakes involved. Called “The Unoccupied Zone,” MacNeice’s translation renders zone libre into English via the German Unbesetztes Gebiet, which had been the Nazi designation for the southern zone of France prior to the occupation of the entire country in November 1942. In removing the word “free” from the ambit of the poem, MacNeice questions the transcendent inviolability of imagination by directly responding to historical conditions, quite simply by being up to date. At the same time, “The Unoccupied Zone” names the space of communication that had opened between practices of address and reception, suggesting not capitulation to an increasingly noisy public sphere, but its latent and half-​manifested potential. The poem is skeptically alive to the hazards of this position: as with the numerous images of gambling, roulette wheels, and thrown dice in MacNeice’s work of the late thirties, this zone entails risk. Yet it was risk that could only be realized and played out in practice. MacNeice had been employed since 1941 in the BBC’s Features Department, where his work had achieved considerable distinction. He considered writing for wartime radio to be propagandistic, but also gratifying and necessary.76 His radio work had moreover begun to have implications for his poetry and his sense of the poet’s social role. In his poetry of the late thirties and into The Last Ditch (1940), radio is a reported detail of its

surface, while MacNeice’s poetry after starting at the BBC, from Springboard (1944) onward, exhibits and explores more complex situations of address and response, manifesting what he called parable.77 It was a shift from a writerly stance of observation to the recognition of an expanded field of reception. The second deviation from Aragon’s original makes concrete these changes: Cross-​fade of grief to nothingness, The beat of the crushed heart grew less, The coals grew white and lost their gleam; Drinking the wine of summer’s haze In a rose-​castle in Corrèze I changed this August into dream. What could it be that of a sudden Brought an aching sob in the garden, A voice of low reproach in the air? Ah not so soon, ah do not wake me; This merest snatch of song must take me Out of the barracks of despair. I thought for a moment that I heard In the middle of the corn a blurred Noise of arms—​a theme that sears. Whence did this theme return to me? Not carnations nor rosemary Had thus retained the scent of tears. By hook or crook I had got relief From the dark secret of my grief When lo—​the shadows redivide; My eyes were only on the track Of apathy that looks not back When September dawned outside. My love, within your arms I lay When someone hummed across the way An ancient song of France; my illness

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BBC work, MacNeice learned broadcasting production techniques, and this specialized knowledge informs the choice to begin with “cross-​fade.”81 Unlike Aragon’s fading, whose diminishing signal is familiar from the experience of listening, “cross-​fade” is a technical term for fading out one sound source as another is faded in. For the writer and producer of programs that required mixing live and recorded sound, the term names a practical technique. It is also specifies its moment, a relation apprehended by way of MacNeice’s introduction to two of his radio plays, published twenty years later in another media economy:

At last came clear to me for good— That phrase of song like a naked foot Rippled the green waters of stillness.78

In the first two lines of the fourth stanza, MacNeice directly, and honestly, confronts the demands for artistic participation in the war effort. Where Aragon had written “J’ai perdu je ne sais comment / Le noir secret de mon tourment” (“I lost I know not how / The dark secret of my agony”), MacNeice’s characteristically demotic idiom reverses the lines’ volitional direction, presenting a situation in which the speaker has actively sought, by any means necessary, to escape the burdens of anguish. For the catatonic unknowing of internalization, the translation offers the repressed forgetting of displacement. MacNeice had spent the first full year of the war lecturing at Cornell, appearing, as did Auden and Isherwood, to have abandoned political commitment.79 In “Evening in Connecticut,” written while he awaited return to London, MacNeice describes the same moment in 1940 that Aragon does in “Zone Libre.” As the “the scissory noise” of cicadas gives way to turning leaves, the arrival of autumn is noted by the ominous use of the American “fall.” A sense of transcendent, frozen “Equipoise” yields in a line twice repeated: “Only the shadows longer and longer.”80 This repetition prefigures what, in “The Unoccupied Zone,” is the transitive “the shadows redivide,” the object of which is decisive: political misery comes clear and is distinguished from personal despair. This second departure from Aragon mediates the remaining two, found in the translation’s first and last words. As part of his

Obsolescent or not, sound radio, in Britain at least, is not the mass medium it used to be, television having stolen most of its public though it cannot take over most of its territory. Sound radio can do things no other medium can and if “sound” dies, those things will not be done. So I offer [The Mad Islands and The Administrator] in print not only as readable pieces (or so I hope) in their own right but also as specimens of a peculiar genus which may soon become a historical curiosity. In getting these pieces ready for print I have not altered the dialogue but have cut out the technical radio directions (the “slow cross-​fades,” the “hold behinds,” etc.), and have substituted more intelligible signposts.82

Connolly used fading to exemplify the “doubtful wisdom” behind some of Aragon’s poetic innovations, for reasons that become apparent from MacNeice’s postdated account of this moment: the transformative effects of mass diffusion.83 While Aragon’s fading establishes radio reception in an analogical relation

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to its subject matter, MacNeice’s “cross-​fade” makes “The Unoccupied Zone” into a radio feature meant to inform an Anglophone audience of fallen France. The translator is the radio producer and vice versa. Rather than serving the ends of elite preservation, technical expertise here functions as the means through which to reach a mass audience.84 This functional duality is again expressed, now by inversion, in the translation’s final word. Here MacNeice converts Aragon’s silence into “stillness,” a choice set up by its rhyme with “illness.” As recently as 1938, “stillness” had in fact harmonized for MacNeice with the poet’s social role: “The world no doubt needs propaganda, but propaganda (unless you use the term, as many do, very loosely indeed) is not the poet’s job. He is not the loudspeaker of society, but something more like its still, small voice.”85 What had been a nice pun on “loudspeaker” was five years later challenged in stark terms. By recognizing the changed conditions of reception for both poetry and propaganda, “The Unoccupied Zone” concludes that an absolute and ultimate faith in poetry’s “stillness” is an “illness,” a willful forgetting of its own historicity and therefore an abandonment of the source of its potential. The “still, small voice” becomes not a loudspeaker, but a radio producer at work, creating for broadcast. Silence must become “stillness,” for the mass medium of radio fails (or “dies”) when it is silent, when it broadcasts “dead air.” This translational deviation is thus determined by the fact that the medium of poetry fails when it is still. This position is defined by the necessity to transmit, in critical recognition of the full social dynamism of the cultural field.

This matter can be pressed by noting one final divergence in MacNeice’s translation of “Zone Libre.” Perhaps the single most famous instance of the literary use of the English word “fading” comes in Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, when he writes of imaginative inspiration that “the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness.”86 The choice of “cross-​fade” might obviate this echo, were it not for MacNeice’s parallel decision in the third line of “The Unoccupied Zone” to render Aragon’s cendre not as “ash” or “cinders,” but as “coals.” In making plural what for Shelley had been singular, MacNeice disputes the idealization of authority and instead confirms the dialectical sociality of poetic transmission. In Modern Poetry, another statement of 1938, MacNeice had opened his study with a “plea for impure poetry, that is, for poetry conditioned by the poet’s life and the world around him,” and ended it with a definition of the poet’s social role: “The poet is a blend of the entertainer and the critic or informer; he is not a legislator, however unacknowledged, nor yet, essentially, a photographic or scientific informer, but more like the ‘informer,’ in the derogatory sense.”87 Owing precisely to the advocacy of impurity, the derogatory political overtones of “informer” cannot be isolated. That is, the dissenting allusion to Shelley’s final statement in A Defence—“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World”88—​ insists on the derogatory literary overtones of “informer,” namely, that poets act as intermediaries of mere information. Herein is the seed of the position taken five years later in “The Unoccupied Zone,” a poem that

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examines the production and reception of information, even as it questions the categorical distinction holding poetry separate from information. Without illusion, MacNeice defends poetry as a medium of access through the worldly mediation put into practice on the radio.

Terence Brown has noted that “the Literary Revival in Ireland in its symbiosis with Irish nationalism (which was in part responsible for the foundation of the Irish Free State in which modernism apparently foundered) shared many of the attributes more generally associated with the presumably internationalist artistic movement.”89 Often in response to “non-​Irish” demands, this “symbiosis” became only more pronounced after independence. As Alan Gillis has written of the thirties,

Secrets The wartime intensification and realignment of standing debates about aesthetics and politics, about artistic autonomy and public commitments, might easily enough explain the transposition of Aragon’s “Zone Libre” from France under occupation to Britain under siege. But how was the poem’s meditation on demobilization and internalization transposed to Éire, with its official wartime climate governed by an all-​encompassing mobilization for neutrality? While the struggles for the autonomization of the literary fields in France and Britain were conducted against the incursions of nonliterary social regulation, this same process in Ireland was skewed in significant ways by the legacy of the island’s colonial past and the unresolved (or unanswered) question of national self-​determination. Irish writing of this period has conventionally been classified between absolute extremes of domestic isolation and worldly participation. Inherited in part from later conceptualizations of (high) modernism as an internationalist phenomenon actively at odds with national politics, this separation ignores how, in the years after 1890, literary and linguistic movements in Ireland were never without political potential, however much it might be couched in less strident, cultural terms.

[It] would be absurd to underplay the way in which Irish historical experience, throughout the decade, was distinct from Britain’s. But, at the same time, Irish culture does not exist in isolation, and the historical forces that rampaged across the globe could not but be felt in Ireland, albeit in modified forms. Thus, without denigrating the specificity of Irish history, it seems clear that Irish culture can and should be perceived as part of the broader historical environment: a starkly conflictual arena in which pressures borne from drives towards socialism, capitalism, ethnic essentialism, democracy, and despotism mangled and collided.90

During the war years, Ireland continued to be shaped by the impositions of this “arena.” Although many domestic and foreign critics found both the Irish state and the state of Irish writing wanting against a number of benchmarks, this diagnosis misrecognizes the relative quality of Éire’s autonomy, a lapse enabled in equal measure by the practices and perceptions of the state’s wartime neutrality. If twin ambitions of protectionism and “looking to the world” had animated the Irish thirties, the war immediately provided

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additional layers of significance to each, sometimes greatly at odds with the common sense and cultural pieties of earlier years. It is within this matrix of contending forces that Patrick Browne’s translation of “Zone Libre” appeared in neutral Éire. With the outbreak of war, the Irish state enacted a series of harsh security measures designed to safeguard the nation’s precarious independence, ranging from severe encroachments on civil liberties to the introduction of military tribunals and internment. While these extraordinary powers provoked some dissent, notably among members of the press, they were given careful support by the state’s citizens, for whom wartime restrictions were of a piece with earlier Irish legislation aimed at defusing Republican activities and with the coercive measures imposed under the British Defence of the Realm Act during the First World War. Eunan O’Halpin has stressed that “this battery of repressive laws, some new and some dusted off, marked the revival, not the creation, of a draconian domestic legal regime.”91 As part of the Emergency Powers Act (1939), the Irish government instigated a sweeping censorship policy, which was to remain in monolithic effect for almost the exact duration of the war in Europe, or what was known in Éire as the Emergency.92 Under these exacting conditions, the democratic institutions of state were compromised less by the neutrality policy than the necessities of wartime power, which encouraged drastic reversals of the political foundations of Irish self-​determination.93 Especially in the early war years, when fears of a German invasion were at their height, censorship was believed to be an essential implement in guaranteeing

that Irish media did not become sources of military information or outlets of foreign propaganda: an icy façade of impartiality would offer no pretense for attack. The censorship also provided the government with an instrument of internal security, by ensuring that domestic agitation was checked before becoming an outright challenge to the state’s legitimacy. In turn, however, it allowed the government to conceal the fact that neutrality was in practice much closer to nonbelligerent alignment with Britain. Knowing that Irish sovereignty ultimately depended on British forbearance, the Irish state therefore had to demonstrate the tactical benefits of its neutral status to the war effort: “A small neutral nation like Ireland, which from 1940 cooperated very closely with Britain on both counterespionage and Sigint [signals intelligence, or code breaking] despite a publicly acrimonious relationship, would scarcely wish to antagonize a powerful neighbour further by betraying intelligence confidences. The mutual trust of British and Irish intelligence officers was consequently underpinned by the reality of British power.”94 This level of cooperation was diametrically at odds with the public rationale for neutrality. With no other option presenting itself, the Irish managed this disjunction by playing a “double game.”95 Caught between a public stance of principled integrity and bleak wartime contingencies, the government wielded its censorship powers as a means to dampen and manipulate public opinion, in order to maintain stability in the militarily defenseless and politically divided nation. This restriction of political debate resulted in what Donal Ó Drisceoil has called an “information vacuum,” in which moral

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triumphalism and know-​nothing inflexibility could become the dominant tenor of official life in the state.96 As O’Halpin concludes, “Ireland preserved its neutrality in the Second World War only by the partial abandonment of the key democratic presuppositions underlying its constitution. But, as events since 1922 had demonstrated, that was nothing new.”97 Indeed, the mobilization for neutrality newly aggravated cultural debates that had first been articulated in the early days of the Literary Revival. Already thoroughly conjoined in the Irish field, the terms of political and aesthetic aspiration took on overtones during the war heretofore unimagined, but frequently remained audible only in the tonalities of the past. This problem did not solely afflict Irish ears. Six months before Aragon’s poems appeared in Horizon, Connolly had devoted an entire issue to the situation of Ireland. In the editorial “Comment” that opens the number, he lays out a broad overview of Irish attitudes to the war, Britain, and neutrality, attempting to show their value to the British in comprehending, or at least abiding, the Irish policy. Without softening his belief in the war effort, Connolly takes great pains to explain Éire’s stance, even as his own attitude slips more than once into benevolent condescension. On the whole, he is generous in his summary: “In presenting an Irish number, Horizon is concerned not with propaganda but with giving a truthful picture of contemporary Eire as it is seen by Irish writers. But in one way this number is propaganda. I met with some anti-​British feeling in Ireland, where it was the expression of a sense of past injustice. I have met with far more prejudice, ignorance and impatience

since returning [to London], and if this number dispels a little of the boredom and incomprehension with which the Irish problem is regarded, then the picture will have been not only true but useful.”98 Connolly’s visit to Dublin had been arranged by John Betjeman, the future British poet laureate who served during the war’s first years as press attaché to Sir John Maffey, the UK representative in Éire.99 Betjeman’s posting was nominal cover for work on behalf of the Ministry of Information, which charged him with fostering good cultural relations between the two nations. This task often involved toning down or mitigating British dismissals of neutrality. Along with helping sponsor reading and speaking tours in Ireland, one of his more effective means of meeting the Ministry’s directives was in brokering traffic between British and Irish literary journals, Horizon, New Writing and Daylight, and The Bell among them.100 Given the official British line on propaganda that, unlike the Germans, they told the truth, Connolly’s opening distinction between propaganda and truth chases its own tail, with the admission that “in one way this number is propaganda” only changing direction from clockwise to counterclockwise. The crucial business was directing information in useful ways. The main point of Connolly’s “Comment” is that Ireland is “the lovely island of 1938,” brooding over its recent fight for self-​determination and unable to adapt its bearings to the political challenges ushered in with the events of 1939.101 Although he worries about this inability to face the times, he detects a positive side to what might otherwise seem to lack one:

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M. J. MacManus makes this forceful point in “Eire and the World Crisis,” his contribution to the issue. As literary editor of the Irish Press, MacManus had a close relationship with Betjeman and was personally sympathetic to the British war effort, but his essay frankly contends that what Connolly identifies as the “fundamental democracy of the empire” does not translate for the majority of Irish people into an ideal worth fighting for. Like Connolly, he believes the legacy of British outrages in Ireland plays a central part in explaining the overwhelming popular support for neutrality; where MacManus differs from him is in his actual understanding of the neutrality policy and its basis in the Irish experience of international relations during the thirties. MacManus reminds his readers that while the British had appeased fascist aggression in the interest of maintaining the balance of power, the Irish had stood for the democratic ethos of collective security at the League of Nations. They had attempted to defend the rights of small nations when it was still possible to do so:

The fact that we [in Britain] have been able to treat our neutral neighbour with tact and geniality in spite of the harassing effect of war is not only a cause of better relations but a proof of the fundamental democracy of the empire, of a spirit utterly different and superior to that of Fascism. We fight a total war and we must employ total weapons, but we use them as a doctor makes use of a dangerous drug, by keeping a check on the poison bottle and without letting himself become an addict. Our temptation is to lose all patience with the Irish, to ride roughshod over the small, obstinate, intransigent nation with its head still buried in 1938. . . . While we respect Eire’s nationality we can respect ourselves, its existence is the show-​piece of the Empire’s freedom.102

It is difficult to imagine how this Jekyll-​ besting-​Hyde narrative—​let alone the co-optation of neutrality as the crowing emblem of imperial evenhandedness—​was expected to go over with Irish readers. Invoking the “seven centuries of cruelty, injustice, intolerance and exploitation, with a few vacillating intervals of weakness and appeasement,” that characterized British rule in Ireland, Connolly acknowledges, seemingly without qualification, a basic source of Irish grievance.103 Yet this is conciliation with an edge. While “appeasement” carried loaded associations of Munich in 1938 (and here casts the Irish as Hitler demanding the Sudetenland), his account of Anglo-​Irish relations is nevertheless stalled at the end of the Anglo-​ Irish War, as though the twenty years since partition and independence had passed in no meaningful way. Connolly, in other words, is only able to avow a vision of the British Isles circa 1921.

Englishmen have probably forgotten de Valera’s part in those episodes, episodes which have had such disastrous consequences for the world. But Irishmen have not forgotten them, and if they are told that they should be fighting in “a war for democracy” they may be pardoned if they look back to a time—​less than ten years ago—​when “democracy,” firmly planted in the saddle, showed scant respect for democratic principles at Geneva. The word democracy, in fact, has lost much of its potency in Ireland. When they hear it used, the people of Eire are apt to turn their gaze to the north-​east corner of their island, where, in a

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canonical works of twentieth-​century Irish writing were banned in an attitude of insular probity. Because the government steadfastly presented neutrality—​and, by extension, its expanded censorship—​as the sacred defense of the nation’s culture, the conflation of specifically wartime developments with established administrative procedures already seemed to possess a uniform institutional footing, at least at the crucial level of perception. This official idiom of sacred defense made it possible for neutrality to be publicly framed in the terms of an ongoing, morally superior program of mobilized cultural nationalism. It was indeed this rhetoric of protectionism that appeared to replicate in the political sphere many of the worst reflexes of Irish cultural policy and the chauvinisms it subtended: the pious, conservative, rural vision of Irish society; the positive invocation of tradition as antithesis to modernity; and a menacing suspicion toward all forms of modernist novelty. Liberal critics grouped around the Irish Times and The Bell decried the situation, finding the intellectual climate even more barren than the most arid years of the previous two decades, but to little avail. The unbending wartime censorship served only to exacerbate their contempt for the cultural demeanor of the state, which now seemed poised to achieve by overt political suppression what it could not through moral coercion alone. This clash of political and intellectual authority was certainly not unique to the Irish field, but the peculiar conditions regulating this struggle help to expose the very real practical differences between authority and autonomy in wartime Ireland. Coming to a point at the question

territory smaller than Yorkshire, ruled from Whitehall [sic], the investigations of the British Council of Civil Liberties found freedom and democratic rule almost non-​existent.104

In flourishing the matter of partition, MacManus restates the public justification for neutrality made by the Irish government, and his essay is a dry run for the quasi-​official biography of de Valera he would publish in 1944.105 At a moment when a rogues’ gallery of Irish factions was committed to undermining or jettisoning the democratic institutions of state, MacManus perhaps indicates more than was intended by asserting that democracy had “lost much of its old potency in Ireland.” However admirable it might have been in the context of Connolly’s superior tone, the essay’s corrective political skepticism was readily amenable to dubious moral generalization and to becoming an article of unchallenged faith in Irish vigilance and rectitude. Its danger lay precisely in the risk of abstraction that it aimed to critique. As it was, the public atmosphere of neutrality presented an ideal milieu for such abstraction. In this, the war provided an extreme background against which to reanimate lingering antagonisms over Ireland’s cultural disposition and its competing modes of worldly engagement and native renascence. At once familiar and innovative, the wartime censorship complicated the specificity of these cultural disputes by amplifying their political stakes. Much of the warranted hostility it inspired was caused by seeing it as the simple continuation on a wider scale of the Censorship of Publications Act (1929), under which many of what would become the

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of censorship, this duality is, in fact, an early ideological manifestation of the subsequent course of Ireland’s independence. As will eventually be seen, the circulation of Patrick Browne’s translation of “Zone Libre” in the “information vacuum” of neutral Éire presents a concrete example of the workings of this duality. Before reaching an analysis of that point, it is first necessary to attend to the specific configurations through which the abstractions of neutrality were disseminated. Ó Drisceoil’s phrase does not mean that information somehow ceased to exist in wartime Ireland, but instead suggests that stringent controls manipulated or impeded its access. Despite the brute fact that censorship was the shared means of their realization, it is important to underscore the distinct institutional motivations guiding these controls. The fortunes of the Irish number of Horizon can make the case, in that the Irish authorities banned its importation into the state.106 Their decision was made not because it had been determined that the issue questioned or might undercut Irish neutrality, but because it contained Patrick Kavanagh’s “Old Peasant,” an excerpt from The Great Hunger that was charged with sexually impugning the teachings of the Catholic Church. In other words, the issue was censored in the name of cultural protectionism, rather than state security. While it might seem a fine discrimination to make about a blunt instrument, the distinction rests precisely on the difference between literary and political censorship as they were practiced (or meted out) during the Emergency. Literary censorship involved a direct assault on the autonomy of the literary field, for it constrained the ability of literary

professionals (writers, editors, critics) to conduct their own disputes and challenged their right to adjudicate them. As an external limit to aesthetic autonomy, it was a habitual constituent of the Irish writer’s vocation that had been legally regularized by the Censorship of Publications Act. Political censorship was a more indirect incursion on literary autonomy, achieved primarily through mass media controls and travel restrictions that reduced (or altogether denied) writers’ access to sources of additional income in Britain. Notwithstanding the chronically tight literary marketplace in Ireland, this imposition was a novel wartime development: it demonstrated the state’s authority to define and sanction proper expression purely for matters of state security and prior to any concern with “national” protection. That the former was publicly couched in terms of the latter should not obscure their difference, for this translation was a strategic calculation intimately determined by the wartime “double game.” Cold realpolitik thus publicly mobilized the warm assurance of an inherited nationalism, in order to legitimize both at home and abroad the state’s stake in international affairs. This move involved reiterating diplomatic stances taken in the thirties on the sovereign rights of small nations, but now even more heavily overlaid with the bromides of cultural protectionism, as national culture was thematized as cover for the interests of state. Political censorship was a vital element in executing this rhetorical sleight.107 By gesturing at the conditions of heteronomy brought into being by the Emergency, these transformations find their counterpart in the relative autonomy of the literary

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field. In her memoir The Same Age as the State, Máire Cruise O’Brien narrates how the war’s impact was registered in quotidian life under neutrality. Of note here is the account of a formative moment of political awakening occasioned by access to a literary text: “I cannot remember at any stage dwelling deeply on the realities of death and pain—​not, at any rate, until after the fall of Paris. At that time it was the poems of Louis Aragon, clandestinely published and smuggled out of France, that, when they reached Ireland, alerted me to the complexities and heartbreak of defeat.”108 In the present context, this encounter is significant for two particular reasons. O’Brien’s use of the word “heartbreak” suggests that she read Le Crève-​ Coeur, since it is the most familiar English rendering of crève-​coeur. From her brief testimony, it is impossible to determine what versions reached Dublin, whether they were in French in Horizon, in English through MacNeice’s translations in New Writing and Daylight, in French or in Irish (as we will see) in The Bell, or indeed in French in an edition published by Horizon/La France Libre. What is decisive is that these poems of wartime France, circulating beyond France as propaganda for the Allied war effort, reached her in neutral Ireland. With the state’s acute anxieties over the influence of partisan information on Irish public opinion, and in turn over its own appearance of strict impartiality, it would seem the work of an avowed communist could not pass the censorship authorities. How then did Aragon’s poems reach O’Brien? Again, she does not indicate her source, but it stands to reason that it was her maternal uncle Patrick Browne.

At the center of a densely overlapping array of familial, scholarly, literary, political, and institutional networks, Browne is an intriguing figure.109 Born into a staunchly nationalist family in County Tipperary in 1889, he was the second of four siblings. His older brother David taught at the Dominican College in Rome (and would later become master general of the order and eventually be made a cardinal), while his younger brother Maurice was a parish priest and sometime novelist. His sister Margaret was a teacher, from the mid-​thirties onward as a lecturer in modern Irish at University College, Dublin. Her husband was Seán MacEntee, who served in every Fianna Fáil cabinet, including that of the Emergency, over the course of four decades. Their daughter is Máire Cruise O’Brien, the Irish-​language poet and scholar better known as Máire Mhac an tSaoi. Known for his capacious intelligence, Browne showed tremendous scholastic ability from an early age. Having been taught mathematics as a teenager by de Valera, who would remain his friend and benefactor, Browne received advanced mathematical training at the Sorbonne and Göttingen; he also completed theological studies and was ordained at the Irish College, Paris, in 1913. With the outbreak of the First World War, he returned to Ireland and became a professor of mathematics and mathematical physics at Maynooth, a position he would hold until 1945.110 During the first ten years of his academic career, Browne was at times out of favor with his superiors for his republican sympathies, which led to a brief spell in jail for possession of seditious printed matter in the Civil War. At the end of that conflict, he settled into

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his scholarly pursuits but retained strong political convictions. In addition to his teaching duties, Browne was chairman of the council of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies from its founding in 1940, as well as a member of the governing board of its School of Celtic Studies.111 After the war, he spent nearly all his remaining years as president of University College, Galway. Browne died in 1960, but not before publishing a treatise in Irish on non-​Euclidean geometry.112 This last item indicates his great devotion to the Irish language and offers an important index to institutional changes within post-​ independence Ireland. Having learned Irish as a child and mastered it during extended visits to western Gaeltacht areas, Browne became a prominent figure in the language movement during the mid-​twenties. As a progressive Revivalist, he contended that translation of non-​English European works into Irish would encourage the development of a fully contemporary literature in Irish, at once expanding the language from a closed reliance on traditional vocabulary and counteracting the provincialism caused by centuries of enforced and passive Anglicization. In this way, Irish would be revitalized through the studied introduction of foreign ideas, attitudes, and attributes.113 To this end, he produced a remarkable body of translations: works by Sophocles, Euripides, and Plutarch; Racine, Corneille, and Shakespeare; the Odyssey, the Iliad, and The Divine Comedy; a life of St. Patrick for children and a life of Jesus based on the Greek gospels. A contemporaneous review of his translation of Oedipus at Colonus (1929) offers a gauge to his work’s reception: “Why is it that Dr. Browne’s work

of infusing new ideas into Gaelic literature has not been acclaimed as a much-​needed service nobly done? The reason, I think, is that while the service itself was long overdue, the brilliant manner in which it was rendered was far in advance of what we in our day could have hoped for or expected. The fact is that Dr. Browne is far ahead of his time.”114 In this conjoining of avant-​garde and traditional, classical and contemporary, all firmly centered on the matter of Ireland, Browne can be constructively compared to both Joyce and Yeats, as a distinctly postcolonial modernist whose worldly engagement in literary production sprang from a deep investment in national politics.115 Yet Browne’s views on language policy in the state were overshadowed in the thirties by the competing and increasingly proscriptive beliefs of Daniel Corkery, who insisted that unregulated translation would lead to corruption and deracination and instead advocated a nativist program of linguistic and cultural protectionism. This difference found paradigmatic expression in an exchange in the short-​lived journal Humanitas in 1929 and 1930. There Browne announced his belief that the European Renaissance had passed by Ireland as an effect of colonialism, arguing that the societal consequences of this historical condition could be overcome by recreating Renaissance humanism in modern Ireland through the direct infusion of classical learning into Irish vernacular culture. In response, Corkery denounced the Renaissance as the moment when the Irish first began to be severed from their native traditions, countering that what was needed was a concentrated return to insular forms and models. Lawrence William

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White observes that “the controversy became a cause célèbre within the language movement, with Corkery’s disciples in the ascendant.”116 Browne continued to translate for the rest of his life, but after this exchange was often unable to find publishers willing to take his work. These divergent positions on translation and linguistic-cum-​national preservation are a specific instantiation of the wider conflict that had dominated Irish life since the nineteenth century, but assumed new urgency in the process of state formation. While it is therefore tempting to see in this quarrel a tableau of enlightened receptivity sacrificed to benighted introversion, such a vision misrecognizes the field of contention. To be sure, Browne and Corkery shared the commonly held belief—​one often finding expression in terms of “spirit” and “being”—​that literature played an essential pedagogical role in fostering the social imagination of national life. But their dispute was conducted in the context of much larger, although not yet fully articulated, debates over the educational function of the state, a mandate instituted in everything from compulsory Irish and state sponsorship of Irish-​language publishing houses to the small provision for public service broadcasting and the literary censorship policy. In establishing a novel and frequently assertive stratum of cultural intermediaries, the state had encroached on the traditional domain of intellectuals, leading many to prophesy a coming Ireland of diminished standards, commercialized leveling, and pervasive mediocrity. Such fears were widespread, and seemed almost customary, in a number of countries throughout the thirties;

like their foreign counterparts, Irish responses did not align with ready political allegiances, but cut across the political spectrum from right-​wing dread of a democratically empowered populace to left-​libertarian unease at limitations on creative liberty. This relation to the state undergirds the emergent conditions of heteronomy faced by the intelligentsia in the Irish state. Without fundamentally altering the internal grounds of intellectual competition, it was evident not so much in what was outwardly expressed than in what could be left unsaid. Instead of engaging with emergent forces, quarrels remained fixed within inherited modes of opposition to an already receding world. In short, the situation exposed a transformation in the conditions of social mediation. At stake in this conundrum was the legitimacy of the state’s authority—​which is to say the basis for, and the extent of, the recognition of its power. Perhaps the most notable feature of the war years was the emergence of an institutionalized conception of intellectual opposition to the state that nonetheless envisioned intellectual opposition as a full participant in the life of the state. Growing out of disenchantment with the perceived (and very real) failures of independence, this antagonism became undeniably manifest at the moment when official tolerance of dissent was in its fullest eclipse—​although it is crucial to recall the much darker circumstances facing dissidents elsewhere at this time, as a comparative measure of the Irish eclipse itself. Wartime literary journalism is an important locus for this emergent critical formation, for it makes evident in concrete form the unsaid dynamics of intellectual competition.

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In this respect, The Bell and the Irish Times are particularly illuminating. Modeled on Horizon, The Bell was founded in late 1940 by the writer Seán O’Faoláin, who envisioned its role as distinctly critical. Through a vigorous reckoning of Irish realities as they had developed since independence, the journal aimed to foster alternative ways of imagining Ireland. Its stress on realism corresponded to O’Faoláin’s belief that the aesthetic problem confronting Irish writers lay in fashioning forms of documentation adequate to contemporary conditions.117 Entering into its ninth decade in 1940, the Irish Times under the editorship of R. M. Smyllie was reinventing itself into “a distinctively Irish voice of opposition.”118 In seeking to balance support for the Allies, belief in Irish neutrality, and resistance to government interference with reporting, the newspaper had by far the most litigious relations with state censorship of any Irish publication.119 The literary page was its one section to receive little attention from the censorship, remaining a popular and “neutral” fixture of the Saturday edition throughout the Emergency, even as paper rationing limited daily issues to one sheet (or four pages).120 For both The Bell and the Irish Times, the gap between reporting Irish “realities” and participating in the life of the state was the crux of wartime operation. Browne’s involvement with Aragon surfaces in these two venues. Given his usual translation work, it is noticeably odd that he was asked to mediate contemporary poetry to the Irish public. In his review of Le Crève-​ Coeur published in The Bell in August 1943, Browne admits as much, observing that, under normal circumstances, he would be

“uneasy about judging a book of poems of this age of mechanisation”: “And yet, here comes a thin book of twenty-​two poems from France, the earlier ones full of the ominousness of the crazy months of waiting, and the later ones rising with clear authentic melody from the heartbreak of swift and incomprehensible débacle [sic], and it seems to me that no one who loves the poetry of any time and place in the European scene can fail to be moved.”121 This reference to the volume’s subject matter is the extent of Browne’s direct acknowledgment of the war, as the majority of the review compares the prosodic theory of “La Rime en 1940” with its practical manifestation in the verse. While not especially taken with some of Aragon’s choices, Browne sees in his attempts the possibility of an invigorating example for Irish-​language poetry, in which the rules of assonance could be adapted along the expansive lines suggested by Aragon for rhyme.122 This aesthetic linkage between contemporary France and Ireland obliquely serves, however, to re-​instantiate the war as the context for this necessary worldly connection: “France alone of the European countries can give the tormented world an abundance of such poetic riches.”123 This statement certainly echoes Browne’s overshadowed position on translation in the life of the state, and its aesthetic internationalism would have pleased O’Faoláin, who was particularly hostile toward Corkery. Perhaps more decisively, Browne’s declaration runs specifically counter to the official line espoused and enforced by the state: that neutral Ireland stood virtuously apart from a world gone mad. The premier symbol of engaged wartime writing instead becomes a model for Irish reconnection and

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reinvention. Like Aragon’s notion of contraband writing, here was a coded affirmation of the Allied war effort published in the open. To put this relationship another way, the praise of a communist poet by a republican Catholic clergyman, in recognition of common cause, is a practical transposition to neutral Ireland of French resistance. Here at last it is possible to turn to Browne’s translation of “Zone Libre.” Aragon’s original had appeared in the same issue of The Bell as Browne’s review, in which he claimed that the poem was “not to be praised in words nor to be conveyed by fragmentary quotation.” Instead, Browne produced an English translation, which was published in the Irish Times on September 25, 1943, and included the following year in Poems from Ireland, an anthology of poems culled from the newspaper’s literary page. In the newspaper, Browne’s translation appeared as “Zone Libre” just as Dublin was filled with rumors that the Vichy legation was about to turn its allegiance toward de Gaulle’s Comité Française de la Libération Nationale.124 In English, it reached the widest readership, one that included non-​ Irish nationals in Dublin who had no Irish. When the translation was included in Poems from Ireland, this decision was couched in the safer terms of Ireland’s linguistic heritage. Its editor, Donagh MacDonagh, saw the anthology as a necessary addendum to Lennox Robinson’s Golden Treasury of Irish Verse (1925), one that gave “readers here and abroad an idea of what is happening in Irish poetry.”125 Offering a gloss on Ireland’s vernacular condition, MacDonagh hears in the anthology a continuous “native quality” within the Irish poets’ English that foretells

a revitalized and non-​English culture.126 For him, this unifying “Irish mode” names the context in which to locate Poems from Ireland. In contrast, Smyllie’s preface positions the anthology as a proud testament to the newspaper’s “unique war-​time record.”127 Having as much to do with paper rationing as censorship, this seemingly inscrutable statement insists that the pressures and constraints on wartime publishing backlight the appearance of the anthology. Browne’s translation bridges these editorial stances: Grief fading out Oblivion I heard this heart break Time has run Ashes are white where roared the blaze Like new wine’s taste has summer been Then August gave my lazy dream A rose-​red mansion in Correze What mournful sob came up to me Out of the garden suddenly Why was the breeze like memory’s sting Ah! do not waken me too soon Pass me by singer with your tune Despair sets free from soldiering Dimly a moment and afar I seemed to hear the noise of war Moving among the harvest ears Whence came this blackest gloom to me Carnation can’t nor rosemary Have kept so long the tang of tears I’ve lost it how I cannot guess The dark receipt of my distress Shadow dissolves as once the day I asked myself time and again What caused that unremembering pain Until September’s dawning ray

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Your arms my darling held me close When came that voice to break repose Humming outside an old French air What ailed me then at last I knew As though a bare foot stirred anew Green secrets of a lonesome weir128

Browne’s translation reads as an estrangement of its linguistic medium, faithfully rendering Aragon’s lack of punctuation to produce English that is oddly non-​English. Rather than as the product of a subterranean Irish mode, this non-​English quality results from decisive attention to the original’s French. By translating Aragon’s fading as “fading,” Browne’s first line adapts Aragon’s metaphoric use of blocked reception into a metaphoric evocation of a vacuum: grief does not fade into oblivion, but simply fades out, grief-as-​signal having been lost to dead air and the “Oblivion” that names the speaker’s location. In turn, a numbly knowing logic of self-​preservation transforms the speaker from an active subject to a passively receptive object, one to whom things come, but who is rarely active: “me” comes to outbalance “I” as the pronoun appropriate to this persona. In place of the internalized demobilization brought about by despair in Aragon’s original, despair here “sets free from soldiering,” a form of neutrality that guarantees freedom, but a desolate, crepuscular freedom. Not so much manufactured consent as manufactured security, this zone libre acts as the ideological emblem of enforced isolation. This “blackest gloom” begins to brighten, however dimly, in the final two stanzas, a change indicated by two departures from Aragon’s original. In place of noir secret,

Browne’s “dark receipt” materializes this secret in the form of an absent or misplaced acknowledgment of some act of reception. Without this “receipt,” the speaker can only fail, and knowingly fail, to comprehend the state of “unremembering pain.” This dilemma is overcome in the final stanza, when “that voice” penetrates with “an old French air” the vacuum in which the speaker reposes. In place of Aragon’s agitated “green water of silence,” Browne provides “Green secrets of a lonesome weir,” a departure that introduces a stereotypically Irish note into the French air. The replacement of silence with “a lonesome weir” seems deliberately performative, in transforming a practical condition into a spatial location. Yet a weir represents an instituted practice, in being a dam used to regulate the flow of water in a specific direction for a particular purpose: it creates a channel. As such, attention turns to what it directs, the “green secrets” for which there is only a “dark receipt.” In its final line, the translation considers this problem: because the flow of information is controlled, what appears as freely accessible at the point of reception has instead arrived there through a process of manipulation. Keeping these “green secrets,” however, need not imply their total acceptance. As a translation with an untranslated title, a poem of resistant France in neutral Ireland, a poem from France in Poems from Ireland, Browne’s translation critically broaches the unrecognized mediation of self-​preservation. In this regard, the Emergency constitutes the definitive moment when the institutional challenges of the first decades of independence begin to mutate into the contradictory

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alignments that would structure the footing of a distinctively southern Irish society. A final feature of the translation demonstrates this point. In rendering the penultimate line of the second stanza as “Pass me by singer with your tune,” Browne strongly, if mordantly, alludes to Yeats’s concluding injunction in “Under Ben Bulben”: “Cast a cold eye / On life, and death. / Horseman, pass by!” This ambivalent allusion is linked to the “unremembering pain” that afflicts the speaker, suggesting at once the temptations and dangers of singing the secrets of the “indomitable Irishry.” The neologism “unremembering” itself is taken from the fifth section of “Under Ben Bulben,” in which Yeats enjoins Irish poets to learn their trade and scorn the badly formed generations of modern Ireland. These Yeatsian echoes would have been readily apparent to readers of Poems from Ireland, where “Under Ben Bulben” is its final poem.129 When O’Faoláin resigned as editor of The Bell in 1946, his final editorial was titled “Signing Off,” its radiophonic heading meant to give some lightness to what was otherwise an expression of regret.130 Until its

demise eight years later, he remained a contributor, publishing the essay “Ireland After Yeats” in 1953, in which he posed a series of questions about Irish oblivion: “Whatever the cause, Irish writers, still tuning-​in, as writers always do, to the intellectual stations of the world do so now almost like men in an occupied country listening to forbidden voices. The writer who has the feel of the world rises up from his grapevine excited by the sense of the world and turns to his page to write as he feels. But with what? With whom? What characters will act and speak for him, in his poem, play, or novel?”131 It is difficult to read this passage without wondering if he had forgotten Browne’s translation of “Zone Libre.” The telling detail of the “unremembering” limits to O’Faoláin’s sense of possibility is that Ireland must be transformed into a country under occupation, an inherited line of dissent that gratefully fails to recall the conditions of wartime neutrality. The next chapter will explore the implications of this contest of disinterestedness and participation, of passing singers and annotating listeners.

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4 Radio Pages

At a stretch, Francis Stuart could be read as an écrivain du silence, an author who chose to forego literary publication for the duration of the Second World War in order to avoid compromising his aesthetic vocation to the moral demands of total allegiance. The war marks a pause in his publishing career, which began just after the Irish Civil War and lasted into the final decade of the century; over its course, he produced more than twenty novels, two collections of poetry, numerous essays, and several works of nonfiction. Throughout his long life, Stuart consistently held to a romantic image of the artist as visionary dissident, while also continuously provoking debates over the possibility of being an outsider to an increasingly totalizing society. In framing his view of the artist, Stuart insisted on the necessary communion of quasi-​sacred imaginative energies with extreme libertarian individualism, a form of liminal sociality beyond normative complacencies, but still subject to, and even dependent on, the moral condemnation of

the secure. The true artist was ostracized and reviled, a loser among losers who could act as the voice of counter-​authority. Particularly in his novels that reimagine the war and its immediate aftermath—​The Pillar of Cloud (1948), Redemption (1949), The Flowering Cross (1950), Victors and Vanquished (1958), and Black List, Section H (1971)—​Stuart explores questions of belonging and recognition through the affective bonds of two or three outcast figures. United by social dishonor and prophetic mysticism, these micro-​social units function as modern equivalents to the medieval hermitage, lone outposts of true vision amid earthly darkness. As harbingers of a new era, these small groupings prefigure a new order of human relations. The novels are all, in some fashion, deeply autobiographical fictions, their stark blend of reality and imagination conveying the “utterance of a corrosively unregulated, permanently restless sensibility.”1 By the time of his death, Stuart was recognized as perhaps the oddest voice in modern Irish writing.

Radio Pages

This relationship of wartime silence and writerly voice is complicated by the fact that Stuart spent the war lecturing on fiction at Berlin University and working as a translator and broadcaster at the Irland-​Redaktion, the Nazi propaganda service for Ireland. At the time, Stuart explained his decision to go to Berlin in 1940 as the prerogative of a citizen of a neutral country; after the war, he used it to distance himself from the state’s policy and instead to position himself in opposition to the neutral Irish as a participatory witness to the conflict. Rather than remain safe in Ireland, Stuart incurred wartime deprivation and precariousness, as well as postwar denunciation, by his choice of the Third Reich. He made his decision on literary, not political, grounds, and his postwar novels confirmed him in this. As Stuart explained almost fifty years after the war’s end, “I saw myself as some kind of recorder, not a recording angel, far from it, but with some of the flair and inspiration of a prophet, as have all those—​the Old Testament ones among them—​who approach reality at a time of wish-​legend.”2 Such provocations had fueled a decades-​long controversy over the relation (or non-​relation) of the wartime broadcasts to the postwar fiction, which oscillated between defenses of a crudely construed aesthetic autonomy and charges of political malevolence. Like the mingling of messianism and autobiography, Stuart’s postwar fiction was read as the writing of existential uncertainty and historical circumstance, as a metaphysical quest for inner sensitivity set amid daily life in wartime Germany. It was this attenuated return to the quarrels over modernism waged in the thirties, now denuded of their political

stakes and conducted in the terms of an aestheticized authenticity, which enabled Stuart to position himself as a participatory witness. Speaking into the microphone had allowed him, as it were, to see. Given that no sound recordings of Stuart’s broadcasts are extant, the replication in the critical field of this determinative shift from ear to eye makes a kind of blunt sense. Stuart would later claim that he spoke almost exclusively on literary matters, and moreover that no one had listened to his broadcasts, a dual-​edged assertion that proved to be remarkably durable in critical accounts of his career. With its unspoken reliance on the distinction of passive ear and active eye, Stuart’s claim was easily converted to a fight over the line dividing political propaganda from literary commentary, one sanctioned in the absence of sound recordings by the presumed ephemerality of radio voices.3 Yet Stuart’s broadcasts are largely extant as monitoring transcripts, a textual format that makes plain the self-​perpetuating discrimination between “literary” and “political” content. Totaling forty-​five thousand words and documenting between two-​thirds and three-​quarters of Stuart’s broadcasts for the Irland-​Redaktion,4 the monitoring transcripts are a complex formation, at once determined by the material conditions of their production and the institutional situation of their reception. The routine consensus that transcripts are a simple through station to the radiophonic speaker has retrospectively determined the reception of these pages—​not, as might be supposed, by highlighting the sound of the broadcasts they can be said to remediate, but instead by restructuring the terms for apprehending

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them as pages. In place of a materialist consideration of the transcripts as historical instantiations of widely disparate relations, the documents have been subjected to the aesthetic protocols of the literary field, most notably a delimited understanding of the conditions linking producers and audiences. To read these pages only for what they indicate about transmission is to prefer the intentionality of what is taken to be the “author,” “creator,” or “producer”—​in this case, the radiophonic speaker—​and already constitutes the misrecognition of the technological realities of broadcasting. Even more acutely, this presupposition discounts the intermediary position of the monitor, the anonymous figure who stands in for the institutional disposition of these pages. Reading in this manner is thus to lose a very literal instance of what George Bornstein calls, in a contiguous context, the “politics of the page.”5 As “political pages,” however, this grouping is more properly classified as a reading formation, or what Tony Bennett defines as “a set of discursive and inter-​textual determinations which organise and animate the practice of reading, connecting texts and readers in specific relations to one another in constituting readers as reading subjects of particular types and texts as objects-to-be-​read in particular ways. This entails arguing that texts have and can have no existence independently of such reading formations, that there is no place independent of, anterior to or above the varying reading formations through which their historical life is variantly modulated, within which texts can be constituted as objects of knowledge.”6 The implications of understanding the monitoring transcripts as a reading

formation are substantial, for it is through this recognition that it is possible to attend fully to their relation to the radiophonic speaker and the ideological stakes of the broadcasts. At base, the linking agent between texts and readers in this reading formation is the practice of monitoring. When the condition of “transmission” is reduced to the radiophonic transmission of Stuart’s voice, it is, in fact, the condition of reception that is evacuated, becoming a matter of hearsay and, as such, ephemeral. As radio pages, the transcripts forestall this collapse and its effects, by making legible a broader sense of the talks’ reception in their remediated circulation among readers. In Stuart’s case, this second instance of transmission and reception has been all but ignored, the reading formation of transcripts having been displaced by the reading formation of his postwar novels, for reasons having as much to do with structures of literary belief as with conditions of archival access. In “connecting texts and readers in specific relations to one another,” the radio pages counter the authorial vision of Stuart as the singular and privileged “recorder” of his own voice. This is to say that the intentionality of the radiophonic speaker exists not as a kind of mechanical causality for which the transcripts serve as either objects of immediate verification or dismissal, but rather as the articulation of the total field of communication as mediated by the transcript pages.7 For this reason, this chapter examines the production and circulation of radio pages by monitoring agencies in three different countries. In doing so, it seeks not only to demonstrate how transcripts point “back” to the site of transmission, but also how they point

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“forward” to their use in the place of reception: it is this interaction of reproduced sound and typed page that determined and amplified the strategic loop of the propaganda front. The chapter begins in the United States with a single transcript made at the Princeton Listening Center, where the monitors neither knew nor cared who Stuart was beyond the fact that he was billed as an “Irish novelist.” They were instead interested in how the themes and style of his broadcast, while pitched to an intellectual audience, corresponded to those of recent programming on German stations. It then turns to the body of transcripts made in Dublin by G2, the intelligence directorate of the Irish Army. The Irish monitors knew exactly who Stuart was and kept close tabs on his broadcasts—​not only to follow his remarks on neutrality as they might reflect on the state’s policy, but also as part of their surveillance of destabilizing elements in Ireland, with whom Stuart had close connections.8 It concludes by considering the uses to which BBC monitoring transcripts were put by the government in Northern Ireland in its efforts to distinguish the “British” North, as an engaged participant in the war, from neutral Éire. Stuart’s claims to being a participatory witness to the conflict thus find their parallel form in the redirection of the radio pages in Belfast. In each case, the interactions of writer and silence, voice and recorder, listener and reader, disclose a field of relations that cannot be assessed by measuring one author’s collaboration or achievement. On the Page In January 1940, Francis Stuart arrived in Germany to take up a position as lecturer

in English, Irish, and American literature at Berlin University, which had been offered to him by Walter Schirmer, the chair of the university’s English department and a deputy director of the German Foreign Office’s foreign-​language broadcasting section.9 Stuart had spent the previous spring and summer months on a reading tour of Germany jointly coordinated by the German Academic Exchange Service in Dublin and the Deutsche Akademie in Berlin; upon its completion, the offer of the lectureship had first been made. Using a falsified medical certificate, Stuart was allowed for matters of health to travel to Switzerland, where he collected the necessary visas at the German embassy in Bern and crossed the frontier. Once in Berlin, he established contacts with Nazi officials, acting as a liaison between a faction of the Irish Republican Army and Abwehr II, the military intelligence division that sought contacts among discontented minorities and nationalist separatists in targeted countries. In a not unrelated vein, Stuart provided his hosts with an English-​language typescript that soon appeared as Der Fall Casement (1940), a book retailing the common nationalist argument that the British Secret Intelligence Service had forged Roger Casement’s “black diaries,” but ending with an innovative reverie of vindication about to materialize with the coming German victory.10 In the war’s first months, the Germans were eager to instrumentalize the lingering controversy surrounding Casement’s execution for treason—​their efforts, for example, are mentioned twice in diplomatic reports sent to Dublin from the Irish legation in Berlin11—​and Stuart’s ability so efficiently to deliver on this point certainly

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spoke to his value as a collaborator. Despite these extracurricular activities, he continued to meet his obligations at the university’s English seminar. Yet Stuart’s most important early patron in Germany was Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda. At its radio bureau, he wrote copy for William Joyce and translated items for English-​language news services. While this regular association with Joyce did not last, he continued providing translations, in one form or another, until mid-1944. He also began to broadcast his own talks for the Irland-​Redaktion, once it was revamped and expanded under Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office. At least since the publication of Robert Fisk’s In Time of War,12 the first study to examine transcripts of the broadcasts, it has been agreed that Stuart’s career behind the microphone began on St. Patrick’s Day, 1942,13 when his voice was first heard and transcribed by monitors in Ireland and Britain, and that all of his own talks were made for the Irland-​ Redaktion. In later years, Stuart maintained that he had spoken on air only to his own people and almost entirely on literary matters, opposing the talks written for Joyce and those written for himself: The first few talks, which I wrote for William Joyce, were counteracting, as I believed, the moralism of the British propaganda. It always seemed to me inherent in certain British official attitudes that they were the moral saviors. To counteract that, I recalled some of the historic instances of British empire building in Ireland, South Africa, and India. . . . Well then, quite a time later, I was asked to broadcast to Ireland, which I did. These broadcasts didn’t usually deal with politics; they

dealt very often with literature, both English and Irish, and even with other literature. When they were political, they concentrated on the internal situation in Ireland.14

A brief quantitative analysis of his talks dispels this retrospective account. In the published transcripts of his talks to Ireland, the literary figures whom Stuart names are Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O’Neill, Liam O’Flaherty, Peadar O’Donnell, W. B. Yeats, and John Steinbeck: each is mentioned exactly once, and none warrants much more than a passing reference. Although it is possible to talk about literature without discussing specific writers or works, this does not happen in Stuart’s broadcasts. Rather than adopt a generalist’s stance, Stuart addresses specific issues through particular, if fleeting, examples. This concretizing method is reminiscent both of the literary artist’s craft and the propagandist’s technique, and it is apparent in the broadcasts’ demonstrably “political” references. Three examples can here suffice: Subhas Chandra Bose, the pro-​Axis Indian nationalist who made propaganda broadcasts from Berlin and whose Free India force fought with the Japanese, is mentioned three times; the League of Nations is named six times; and Franklin Roosevelt is referred to twenty-​two times, often dismissively and as part of longer discussions of the detriments of Anglo-​American liberalism. In no way are the broadcasts predominantly literary discussions only occasionally touching on political topics. They are resolutely concerned with the ramifications of neutrality and partition and with describing the benefits for Ireland as a whole of German (and “European”) supremacy.

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An anomalous transcript exemplifies the point. In June 2003, new evidence of the trajectory of Stuart’s broadcasting career was discovered by the present author in the holdings of the Princeton Listening Center at Princeton University, in the form of a single transcript of a ten-​minute broadcast to the United States made on the night of June 9, 1940.15 This transcript predates the earliest of those in Irish and British archives by nearly two years. The Princeton Listening Center had begun its work in November 1939 with a mandate to develop a formalized understanding of wireless propaganda techniques, rather than gather news or intelligence; it was the first organization in the United States solely dedicated to the systematic monitoring and analysis of foreign shortwave propaganda.16 Transcribed from a cylinder recording made on an Ediphone dictation machine, the transcript is a verbatim account of the talk as it was received that night in Princeton. Its headnote indicates that the transmission was affected by “Some Rapid Fade,” which accounts for occasional gaps in the text. Despite this circumstance, the substance of Stuart’s talk is clear.17 Unlike his subsequent broadcasts to Ireland, this talk deals with literature, and it is probable that it originated as a lecture Stuart had given to his students. While distinct from Stuart’s later broadcasts, the talk is not opposed to them. Like the transcripts of later broadcasts, this transcript makes manifest the talk’s modes of transmission and reception, which is to say the institutional conditions of propaganda broadcasting and propaganda monitoring. It is only within the abstracted category of “Francis Stuart’s broadcasts” that the talk

appears quantitatively and qualitatively as an outlier. Indeed, to abstract “Francis Stuart’s broadcasts” from the monitoring transcripts forgets that the broadcasts are available to be known at all because monitors had transcribed them. The misrecognition of this fact is secured by banking on the symbolic capital of Stuart’s literary vocation and its attendant view of authority, a perception that has internalized the very specific mobilization of the cultural capital of Stuart’s literary credentials in the field of political broadcasting.18 Stuart spoke into a German microphone as a literary author and could not have done otherwise, yet he was in front of the microphone for no other reason. In turn, his words were transcribed because the microphone had transduced his voice in order that it could be sent out over the airwaves as the voice of a literary author. It follows that his broadcasts are structured by this communicative field no less in their form than in their content. Taking them as anything other than productively mediated by this field is to have bought in, however unwittingly, to the specific logic of German radio propaganda. Titled “The Modern Novel and Society” and attributed by the Princeton monitors to “Frances Stewart, Irish novelist,” the talk addresses an American audience, a populace for whom Stuart in his broadcasts to Ireland—​made after the United States had entered the war and billeted troops in Northern Ireland—​had little regard.19 On June 9, 1940, as France was being overrun by Nazi divisions and the airwaves carried triumphal, hysterical, and ominous reports of their advance, Stuart’s voice reached a nation still recovering from the Great Depression, wary

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of entanglement in European wars, and officially neutral. At the time, each major belligerent was making propaganda broadcasts in hopes of swaying American public opinion. Widely varied in style and often purposefully contradictory in content, Nazi efforts at this stage of the war sought to amplify differences between British and American interests, global ambitions, and national characters. In “The Modern Novel and Society,” Stuart’s rhetoric is of a recognizable piece with his writings of the 1930s and with the content of his later “Irish” broadcasts, as well as with the directives of the Nazi propaganda agencies. It was the latter affinity that caught the attention of the Listening Center staff, who cataloged its rhetorical similarities to other German broadcasts aimed at North American listeners at this moment: (Note: The following quote is interesting bec. it echoes more seriously the passage from a Jim and Johnny broadcast attacking the idea of money.) “For the past few years it has become apparent that the great new war which was about to take place, which was already taking place in some parts of the world, was not primarily a war between nations, or even, strictly speaking between classes, it was

men against money.

It is in Germany . . . that men have freed them-

selves from the tyranny of money.[”] (Frances Stewart, Irish Novelist, The Modern Novel & Society.)20

Elsewhere, in an overview of six weeks of broadcasts on Germany’s North American Service (May 1–June 15, 1940), Listening Center staff again noted that the talk’s message—“attack on money, this time for intellectual audience, by Irish Novelist”—​fit

within a thematic pattern in recent programming.21 In identifying continuities with other transmissions, both of these items are nevertheless precise in noting Stuart’s distinction as a broadcaster. This was quite literally announced on air, when he was presented, and then spoke, as an Irish novelist. The talk begins with an account of the competing forces underlying the war, a struggle that Stuart asserts is being waged between money and humanity. The conflict is not an effect of opposed political ideologies or class antagonism, but of the need to defend spiritual life from the encroachments of modern financial organization, what Stuart in his later broadcasts to Ireland would cast at the financialization of human relations. Novelists trade in truth: why, he asks, have so few protested against this monetary order? Surveying contemporary Anglophone fiction, Stuart faults English novelists for the sociological bent of their work, finding that it reflects detachment from the daily troubles of ordinary people. Because this writing is shorn of human emotion, it will consequently never inspire resistance to money. In contrast, he commends his own generation of Irish novelists, who fought and came of age in the Irish Revolution and Civil War and are guided by the spirit of Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, and James Connolly, three of the leaders of the Easter Rising executed by the British for their part in the insurrection. Although artists of this generation suffer financial hardship and personal deprivation, they continue to struggle for life. In this, they are animated by the vital energy of the revolutionary period and its vision of national spirit, which remain as charged in 1940 as

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they had been twenty years earlier. And this energy remains vivifying for exactly the same reason: it augurs the reestablishment of a national community whose members are linked by spiritual, cultural, and habitual ties, rather than by the financial obligations and legal responsibilities on which liberal democracy is founded. This prophetic communion with spiritual life is the task of the contemporary novelist. Alluding to the work of Liam O’Flaherty and Peadar O’Donnell and explicitly citing his own novels Pigeon Irish (1932) and Glory (1933), Stuart declares that life’s authentic elements can be rendered in artworks only by the writer who has himself witnessed their debasement and despoliation by the monetary order. These works thus represent the leading edge in the revolt against financial tyranny. Inspired by the fighter, the writer redeems. At a time when more and more of the European continent was falling under Nazi occupation, Stuart states that the novel will be revived as a form only if novelists assume their position within the new social and spiritual order being created in Europe. This, he announces, is why he has come to Germany. For the remainder of the talk, Stuart explicitly addresses his American listeners with a discussion of The Grapes of Wrath (1939), John Steinbeck’s best-​selling novel about migrant workers in California. While he does not consider it a great work of art, he extols the passion with which the novel depicts its protagonists’ trials, while praising its reanimation of the facts of life—​birth, love, and death—​cheapened and dulled in commercial society. Stuart is especially taken with the naturalistic details of Steinbeck’s

narrative, singling out the scene in which the Joad family struggles with a dying engine: no one who has taken a wrench to an automobile’s underside can fail to recognize its tactile and emotional truth. This scene and the many of its kind in the novel illustrate the growing resistance to money in the United States. This burgeoning consciousness, he concludes, is the counterpart to the new order emerging on the European continent.22 On the Air Stuart spoke into the broadcasting microphone as a literary author, and his words were transcribed by monitoring services because they had been spoken into the microphone of a radio bureau. At a literal technological level, this latter relationship is self-​evident. At the same time, it suggests how the medium of transmission was itself considered to be integral to the “meaning” of Stuart’s words upon reception, not only in the sense of having conveyed them from Germany, but as an immanent feature of their articulation. Almost as soon as the Irland-​Redaktion began to broadcast talks to Ireland, the intelligence directorate of the Irish Army, known as G2, had started to monitor them, apprehensive lest this direct address to the Irish people be used to relay information to German operatives and sympathetic malcontents on the island.23 When the Irland-​Redaktion had been reorganized under the Foreign Office in early 1941, it was placed on a systematic political footing that emphasized thematic coherence around this point: “The programmes are supposed to appeal to the independent national identity of the Irish

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around the world, to strengthen the neutral position of the country spiritually and to encourage reform into a non-​belligerent stance, while the line can be maintained that upkeep of this neutrality is not only in their own interest but also in the interest of world reconstruction after the war. Elimination of the Ulster injustice is a basic demand of all Irishmen; it serves the economic future of the country, as well as the satisfaction against England and support for a new, better world order.”24 By the time G2 monitors began to receive and had identified Stuart’s voice on German wavelengths, the agency had established a strong, if officially guarded, working relationship with British intelligence services, notably MI5. This cooperation was part of a comprehensive series of measures designed to safeguard Éire’s neutrality, as well as to demonstrate Ireland’s “friendly neutrality” or “non-​belligerence” toward the Allies. This relationship was extremely delicate and necessarily kept secret. Because the Irish state’s neutrality was the central focus of propaganda broadcasting to Ireland, the work of the monitoring service was an essential aspect of the state’s formulation of a political response to the forces seeking to exploit or weaken the maintenance of the policy. Having been produced within this institutional frame, the G2 monitoring transcripts thus evince the acute play of interests coalescing around practices of neutrality in the context of total war. In his excellent introduction to the published transcripts of the wartime broadcasts, Brendan Barrington argues that, despite Stuart’s continual disavowals that he was engaged in making propaganda, the transmission of

his voice over German radio undercuts this claim to a neutral stance in the ideological field of the war: Stuart vigorously supported Irish neutrality, but this was not a “neutral” position, nor, coming from the airwaves of the Third Reich, could it have been. . . . Éire’s continuing neutrality was the raison d’être of the Irland-​Redaktion; in this context, for Stuart to call himself “a neutral” . . . was a largely meaningless formulation. Similarly, while Stuart’s denial of propagandistic intent seems to have been heartfelt in some confused way, it only muddies the water. What Stuart was making, in these broadcasts, was propaganda, and while the significance of the broadcasts is not limited to their status as such, we cannot begin to understand them unless we recognize that this is what they were.25

Leaving aside for the moment the issue of whether Stuart’s other activities in Germany were propagandistic, this recognition demonstrates how the category of “propaganda,” like that of “neutrality,” was subject to a contested range of definitions and connotations during the war and, perhaps even more definitively for Stuart, in its aftermath. Much of the energy that fueled the postwar controversy in the Irish literary field surrounding Stuart’s broadcasts was generated by the compression of their significance into longer-​standing disputes about aesthetic autonomy and political affiliation, which were foundational to the structure of the field itself.26 Not without reason, these disputes complemented Stuart’s own distinction between the “literary” and “political” content of his talks, for they relied

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on the same forceful dichotomy separating disinterestedness from motivation. It is worth stressing that however scalding these debates may have been, their antagonists were in tacit agreement over the abstracted object of dispute—​namely, Stuart’s broadcasts. In constructing their object, these antagonists proceeded from the same set of questions about the broadcasts, finding confirmation of and justification for their own presuppositions about the talks. The debate about Stuart’s broadcasts thus functioned as a reckoning with neutrality, but one conducted according to the values of aesthetic disinterestedness. Yet this displacement only works when the object of inquiry is Stuart’s broadcasts, rather than the monitoring transcripts. Because their conditions of production and circulation provide a vastly different sense of the practices of neutrality, the monitoring transcripts hinder the elision of neutrality with disinterestedness that has been central to the controversies over Stuart’s career behind the microphone. An example of this relationship to neutrality can be gauged from the transcript of a talk made not long after Stuart had begun broadcasting for the Irland-​Redaktion, in which he revisits themes first broached in “The Modern Novel and Society” two years earlier. On May 25, 1942, Stuart spoke about the stakes of the present war, arguing that they could be discerned by recalling the effects of the First World War. He maintains that the last war ended with the triumph of “the professional politicians and financiers,” which left in place the crushing influence of money and therefore guaranteed that the ensuing interwar years would be ones

of deprivation and false promise. As a battle being waged against their values, the current war holds out the true promise of destroying the financial order and reestablishing the spiritual kinship of the European continent: “It is easier for me than for you at home to realise what a great thing it is that up till now, Ireland has not been caught in the war; but because we have been able to preserve our neutrality, it is no reason for looking at the war as a passing storm, after which all will be as it was before. The world will never be the same again. In the new world it will not merely be a matter of regaining our lost territory. The peace must bring a change of outlook.”27 He admits that this fight for a new civilization might seem odd to a nation still overcoming the effects of its colonial past, but contends that Ireland’s struggle for self-​determination (“saving ourselves from the influence of an alien system”) is a vital adjunct to the ongoing war. In its present phase, this struggle is embodied in neutrality. England is “a civilisation so spiritually and culturally dead that we could have no possible communion with it,” and Ireland’s destiny rightly lies with the renascent forces of European civilization being defended by Germany. Neutrality is the key, then, to realizing this destiny. Where this talk differs from its precursor is in its attitude toward the United States, particularly toward American literature as representative of the nation. Delivered after the United States had ended its neutrality and entered the war on the side of the Allies, the talk unabashedly forswears the notion of any special connection between Ireland

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and America, a country whose materialism is at fundamental odds with the spirit of the Irish nation. For Stuart, it is the American literary marketplace that brings forward this difference: At one time we hoped for a vital contact with America, but that never materialised. The closer America came in her outlook to England, the more impossible it became for Ireland to reach an understanding with her. True, Irish writers, myself among them, had a certain public in America, but our books were read as curiosities, rather than from any feeling of sympathy or kinship. I myself and many Irishmen felt the same about American literature. Sinclair Lewis, with his Main Streets and Babbits, was alien and sinister. We had some sympathy with Eugene O’Neill, because we felt he had something to say which was of real value. This was probably due to his Irish origin.28

It is safe to assume that Stuart was not a careful reader of Lewis’s satires of American social life. As a best-​selling author and a winner of the Nobel Prize, Lewis was both well known and prestigious, a conjunction that would have recommended him to Stuart as an apt target.29 Although the differences between the United States and Ireland are a manifestation of the financial divide underpinning the war, they are best glimpsed in each nation’s literary culture. The debased character of American society is revealed not only in the acclaim accorded Lewis’s novels, but also in the reception—​beyond “a certain public”—​ given to Irish authors by American readers. Sinclair Lewis becomes the representative figure of the “alien and sinister” because his novels are so widely read among Americans

and because this commercial success serves as the measure of their value. While Stuart likely means for this criticism to demonstrate the lack of spiritual harmony between the two nations, it flatly euphemizes the stance of disinterestedness. In the two years since he had celebrated the emotional truths of Steinbeck’s fiction, little about the American literary marketplace had changed. What had changed was the relationship of the United States to neutrality and, as a consequence, the conditions determining Stuart’s success as a commentator for the German radio service. As the desultory appeal to Eugene O’Neill’s Irish heritage attests, Stuart could not ignore the presence of the Irish diaspora, spread overwhelmingly throughout the Allied nations, in the spiritual balance of the war.30 While specific references to the Irish abroad are not common in his talks, the circumstances behind Irish emigration are nevertheless a central element in his explanation of his own presence behind the microphone in Berlin. In the next broadcast for which there is a transcript, Stuart addressed his motives for leaving Ireland and offered two causes for his departure: “To begin with, it was not the chances of war that brought me to Germany; I came during the war of my own free will, incredible as that may seem to the more unadventurous of you—​so thank God I don’t think there are many of you like that at home. My main reason was the very same one that has driven millions of other Irishmen to leave their native land: the necessity of earning a living. I had, unfortunately, little chance of doing that at home during the war.”31 Stuart here frames his “main reason” for leaving Ireland within an archetypal

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narrative of Irish modernity, which casts his “own free will” as an effect of the emblematic Irish experiences of poverty and emigration. In doing so, he can inductively proceed to the “second reason” for his journey to Berlin: My second reason is that, like I daresay a good many others of us, I was heartily sick and disgusted with the old order under which we’ve been existing and which had come to us from the great financial powers in whose shadow we lived. If there had to be a war then I wanted to be among those people who had also had enough of the old system and who moreover claimed that they had a new and a better one—​about all that I shall try to speak in later talks. I had begun to see that no internal policy for Ireland could ever be completely successful unless joined to an external one that re-​established our ancient links with Europe and European culture.32

In the logic of the talk, this subordinate, if more overtly political, “second reason” is presented as a naturalized outcome of the first, with the trope of emigration underwriting his motivation for leaving Ireland. Yet emigration itself is construed as a by-​product of Ireland’s place in the “old system” of the “great financial powers,” which is so at odds with the spiritual ideals of the Irish nation and of European culture more generally. For the Irish, then, emigration cannot be understood as merely a historical consequence of Ireland’s tortured relations with Britain (as an “internal” condition), but as an ongoing effect of its present position within the financial order. With his disavowal of a purely “internal policy for Ireland,” Stuart thus advocates a kind of self-​determination that is

more than just sinn féin, more than an expedient use of particular military conditions to advance Ireland’s cause.33 Unlike the millions of Irish emigrants in the Allied nations, who must live with the continual risk of becoming denuded of their nationality, Stuart has discovered a fuller and truer sense of Irishness in Berlin, where he has been received in sympathy. Again, it is the operation of the literary field that heralds this relation: “It may interest you to hear that at the present moment there are two Irish novels being serialized in papers here: Liam O’Flaherty’s great novel Famine in the Frankfurter Zeitung and one of my own in a Berlin weekly.”34 This account of Stuart’s hospitable welcome in Germany neatly complements his portrayal of his displacement from Ireland. Having stated that he had come to Berlin of his own accord enabled Stuart to mute his disenchantment with a postindependence Ireland that differed markedly from what he believed the revolutionary years had promised. Stuart had little stomach for Éire’s political culture, but no compunction about appropriating the state’s neutrality as his own. As the varieties of neutrality adopted by states during the war demonstrate, the wartime stances permitted by a declaration of neutrality were widely divergent in motivation, outlook, and effect, and were strongly determined by proximity to powerful belligerents.35 Stuart is not concerned with this geopolitical reality as such and instead couches his neutrality in the more familiar terms of pedagogic encounter. In this, his neutrality becomes cognate not so much with his Irishness but with his lectureship at Berlin University, as he announced on air: “I not

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only want to bring something of Germany and German ideas to you but I also try, in the Berlin University and elsewhere, to make people here and especially young Germans conscious of Ireland and interested in her problems and outlook.”36 By characterizing himself as a mediator between Germany and Ireland, Stuart could therefore marshal powerful associations of free encounter and disinterested exchange against any suggestion of motivated engagement: I don’t want you to think that my only efforts are speaking to you about Germany. Indeed you might well call me a poor patriot if that was so, and you might even accuse me of being a propagandist after all, but that is not so: although I speak to you every week for five or six minutes, and though some of these talks are about Germany, on the other hand I speak to a lecture room full of German students for an hour every week about Ireland. . . . I naturally feel a good deal of responsibility in trying to give these young Germans a picture of modern Ireland and I try to say only those things which I believe you who listen to these radio talks would agree to.37

Far from using his lectureship as an alibi, Stuart believed that it was a medium of bilateral encounter.38 He felt genuine responsibility in his position, as a debt owed for the hospitality shown him in Germany. Stuart’s broadcasts must be apprehended in this context, for it makes evident the extent to which the talks are embedded within a more complicated field of forces than is often ascribed to the propagandist’s impulse. Reconciling his disgust for the democratic Irish government and the culture he believes it

fosters, with an espousal of German war aims and the rhetoric used to propagate them, Stuart typifies one version of the postindependence intellectual recoiling from the fallout of revolution; but he also exemplifies one form of the cosmopolitan intellectual, dedicated to cross-​cultural encounter and institutionally positioned to recognize its benefits and reap its rewards. Common to these seemingly opposed figures is an aspiration toward freedom, but, like “neutrality” and “propaganda,” “freedom” was an emphatically and bitterly contested term during the war. From this complex, the troubling rationale for Stuart’s broadcasts to Ireland emerges: “No, there is not the slightest chance for anyone to speak anywhere today with the least freedom, excepting here in Germany or perhaps from the broadcasting systems of some of her allies. From here one is not expected to adopt the righteous tone as though with one of the chosen people in a world of barbarians.”39 The moralism of Allied rhetoric, what Stuart felt was a perversion of Christian values,40 holds a special place in the broadcasts, for it exposes the mechanism by which the “old order” of financial inequality perpetuates itself. Being in Germany has allowed Stuart to see the war for what it really is, as he noted in an earlier talk: “This war is in the nature of a world revolution and we [Irish] must see to it that although we hope to escape its horrors we’ve also a share in its benefits.”41 Poverty and hunger remain all too familiar to the social life of Ireland because the nation remains unable to sever its ties with the financial system, owing at once to partition and to the imaginative failures of nationalism: “Irish nationalists must see that Ireland does not become

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another of these little republics [Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia] in which the old order reproduces itself. It is of no importance at all that the Tricolour should fly from the City Hall in Belfast instead of the Union Jack if Belfast workers are to find it as hard to live and support their families as before. Such freedom is merely illusion and such nationalism a farce and a danger.”42 Although Germany is “not a wealthy country and [has] too little living space for her population,”43 it has freed its people from want and reconstituted its national life. These achievements, Stuart always maintained, embody the benefits of the war. Throughout his talks, Stuart lauds German social welfare policies and the effects he sees them having on the national community, even after mounting defeats and punishing bombing raids had caused drastic shortages in daily life. As Peter Fritzsche has argued, however, Nazi social policy can never be wholly separated from Nazi racial policy.44 While Stuart never overtly endorses (or even comments on) this most heinous directive of the regime, he had no problem with a comprehensive modernization aimed at forging a national Volksgemeinschaft, or people’s community. Stuart’s critique of liberalism was anti-​bourgeois, aimed at complacency rather than capitalism.45 The freedom he envisioned thus lay in the quintessential modern freedom of experiment and its premise of a new order. The freedom that Stuart found in Germany was the freedom he was given. Offered a platform from which to gain access to an audience, Stuart accepted the terms of the offer to air his beliefs not out of an easy sense of mechanical collaboration, but because

he felt it provided an opportunity that was otherwise denied him. This situation is a concise expression of the harmony of order and experiment, of structure and improvisation. As an instituted position, his role at the radio bureau allowed him both to universalize his views of the war and to euphemize the specific form of authority (or cultural capital) that enabled him to speak into the microphone. Especially in the aftermath of the Battle of Stalingrad, with the war going increasingly against the Axis powers, Stuart’s talks bring out this relation: “I came here to Germany in 1940 because I saw it was essential that at least one or two Irishmen should be here in Germany while there were thousands in England and America, but I am certainly not sorry that I came. Here in Germany I can say what no Irishman would be allowed to say anywhere else, neither in England, America, nor Ireland itself. I can speak to you here from Germany and tell you the truth about this war.”46 While now reading like the forerunner of conservative demands for equal time in public broadcasting, it is necessary to appreciate its particular appeal to truth. Rather than as reporter, observer, or propagandist, Stuart presents himself as a witness. This move would pay unique dividends in the postwar literary field, after the meaning of “witness” had taken on a much graver set of overtones; but during the war, it was a posture that simultaneously derived from and explained his professions of neutrality. If his work for the radio service was his job, he was not, however, a professional, as he repeatedly noted on air.47 Precisely because of this fact, radio broadcasting enabled him to announce himself as a witness

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to radical transformation being actively concealed from the Irish: I have not the slightest doubt that I can at any given time give you a far truer picture of the situation than you can get from most of the other sources available to you, which are unfortunately largely Anglo-​Saxon sources of information. If you were in a position to hear all sides and see newspapers from the various belligerent countries, my task in these talks would be a different one to what it now is; but as long as English newspapers come into Ireland to the exclusion of all others, and as long as our own papers are dependent on English and American news-​agencies, we here in Germany who speak to you must above all try to give you as much of the true situation as we can, and this is what I do and always shall do.48

As an intermediary between Ireland and Germany, Stuart was not only a displaced person bringing information about his country of origin to that of his disembarkation by dint of the physical relocation of his body, but had the additional power to bring information about his country of disembarkation to that of his origin. This second capacity was determined by the electrical transmission of his voice back to Ireland. Stuart thus owed his position speaking to Ireland from Germany to what he calls in the same broadcast “the hospitality of the German wireless.” It is straightforward enough to grasp how this notion of hospitality functioned for Stuart as a radiophonic speaker, but it was as equally important to the manner in which he located his listeners. Radio propaganda was feared because it was imagined to enter silently into intimate domestic spaces, where

it would manifest itself as sound and envelope listeners in an ideological fog. This anxiety quickly became a point on which to inveigle listeners, to the extent that they were not hectored, browbeaten, or rhetorically worked over, but addressed as though engaged in (an admittedly one-​sided) conversation. At the beginning of the thirties, Walter Benjamin had located the unrealized promise of broadcasting in this dilemma: “The radio listener, unlike every other kind of audience, welcomes the human voice into his house like a visitor. Moreover, he will usually judge that voice just as quickly and sharply as he would a visitor. Yet no one tells it what is expected of it, what the listener will be grateful for or will find unforgivable, and so on. . . . Not that it would be an easy task to describe the way the voice relates to the language used—​for this is what is involved.”49 Barring the creation of a new “expert” listener able to respond critically to the technological setting of the radiophonic voice, Benjamin foresaw an audience subjected to an endless and unrecognized series of home invasions. And to be sure, a G2 monitor identified just such an appeal to misapprehended immediacy in one of the first broadcasts made for the Irland-​ Redaktion in December 1939: “In good Irish, a mixture of Kerry and Western dialects, Mühlhausen said it was a pleasure to talk over the air to his Irish friends, imagining himself seated ‘cois na tine agus boladh na móna im’ shrón’ [by the fire and the smell of the turf in my nose]. He characterised as lies, statements about the persecution by the Germans of Czechoslovakian and Polish Catholics, and reminded his listeners of the atrocities committed in Ireland by the Black and Tans

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and the Auxiliaries.”50 As a kind of fireside chat as Gaeilge, this talk presents the radiophonic speaker as a guest transmitted into the homes of his listeners. The speaker’s gambit is to advance a novel interpretation of events, but on a footing already naturalized by his audience, thereby mobilizing a set of associations at once conscious and unconscious as the vehicle of his ideological intentions. In its propagandistic design, the talk conforms to widespread contemporaneous understandings of the activity of the radio demagogue, whose verbal dissimulations were held to work their potent magic on an unaware and impressionable public through this exact mechanism of rhetorical displacement. Stuart certainly makes frequent use of this mechanism in his own talks, yet the particular freedom engendered by his self-​arrogated neutrality allowed him to skew its directionality in a striking fashion. In contrast to the impression of the radiophonic voice being displaced during reception into the space of listeners, Stuart reverses the social coordinates of this interaction: “I ought to remind you that I’m no politician and I speak about what is most in my thoughts such as I would if you were neighbours who happened to drop in for a talk in the evening.”51 In describing the radiophonic encounter in terms of a céilí—​ or “a friendly visit to a neighbour’s house, usually in the evening”52—​it is notable that listeners to the talk are positioned as guests, invited by the terms of customary practice to partake in the benefits of hospitality. As a traditional form of sociability particularly in the northern counties of Ireland, the céilí would have been a readily available referent for listeners to Stuart’s construal of his

on-​air presence. By 1943, moreover, the céilí had become associated with social dances first organized by the London Gaelic League in the late 1890s, as an aspect of the wider revival (and reinvention) of traditional forms that marked the inauguration of the modern Irish cultural field. Such gatherings had become staple occasions of sociality in Irish communities throughout Britain, the United States, and Ireland, where the distinctive and “modernized” version of traditional music played there was prominently featured on Radio Éireann throughout the war and into the fifties.53 What therefore makes Stuart’s invocation of the céilí so provocative is how listening in is cast not as tuning in a radio station or passively “overhearing” a radio voice, but as his listeners willingly coming over to the place of his disembarkation in order to be themselves. In this way, the transmission of Irish listeners to Germany evokes an entire lived history of Irish modernity—​from habitual practices of sociality to the displacement of emigration to the reconstruction of those practices in the diaspora—​but framed as the deliberate participation in a modern Volksgemeinschaft sustained by the hospitality of the German wireless. In this, Stuart universalizes his own decisions in the ears of his listeners. In doing so, Stuart conjures Irish national life as a knowable community, in which belonging is equated with understanding, allegiance with organic accord. By asserting that political consensus inheres in strong—​ and positive—​feeling for the nation, Stuart can offer a coherent vision of Irish national life that expresses a deeply held, though not entirely conscious, agreement about the

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course of Ireland’s self-​determination. Yet this consensus is merely the internalized by-​ product of fate, toward which the Irish people must be led by the vanguard of national life. The imperative here recalls the theme of “The Modern Novel and Society”: that writer and fighter are animated by the same energy in the struggle to realize the destiny of the Irish nation. For Stuart, this correspondence is the primary tenet of the conjunction of nationalism, aesthetics, and politics, a circular relation in which author and rebel most decisively express the national spirit because they are themselves its highest expression: “I believe that the spirit of a nation is best summed up in its soldiers and poets and if these are understood then one has gone a long way to understanding the spirit of that nation.”54 Only now, these progeny of Pearse, MacDonagh, and Connolly are collaborators in the global fight for the New Order. In a talk commemorating the Easter Rising, broadcast on April 5, 1942, Stuart bluntly delineates this essential continuity: For us Irish there is only one reality, our own life on our own soil free from the tyranny of money. I hope and believe that the end of this war will give us back our national unity and that the struggle which began its latter phase on that Easter morning in Dublin will then be, at last, at an end. Then will begin a new phase in our life. The intense national isolation into which we have been forced must give way to our taking our place, not in some artificial form invented by politicians like the League of Nations but in the great organic European family.55

Rather than as freedom from Anglo-​ American domination, Irish national destiny

is here represented as spiritually and materially linked to the battle being waged by the Third Reich. The scenario of transmission—​one might even say of transference—​to Stuart’s side is the most explicit articulation in his broadcasts of his status as an intellectual at large, of the mutually reinforcing dispositions of pedagogue and demagogue at work in the talks. This relationship is especially and oddly clear in retrospect. After the war, Stuart claimed his broadcasts were unimportant because they had had little, if any, effect on his audience: “I hardly ever met anyone who heard me. I don’t think that anyone really listened.”56 While this contention leaves unclear whether the talks’ inconsequence obtained in their speaker’s inept choices or their listeners’ inability to fathom the import of their message, its most striking feature is decidedly unambiguous: it fully evades the matter of the talks. In fact, this evasion amplifies their significance, for they become endowed with an autonomous authority external to Stuart and his audience. In Stuart’s postwar telling, then, the talks are made to function as a mystified set text to a scene of pedagogic encounter, but one in which he serves as a bad teacher and his listeners as bad students. Rather than broadcasts, the format of exchange is made akin to the lecture, as described by Erving Goffman: “It is as if the speaker here functioned as a broker of his own statements, a mediator between text and audience, a resource capable of picking up on the nonverbally conveyed concerns of the listeners and responding to them in the light of the text and everything else known and experienced by the speaker.”57 Goffman here

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describes what he calls “text parenthetical remarks,” or the asides and elaborations a lecturer makes while delivering a paper, usually in order to qualify the nature of the claims being advanced. In Stuart’s case, his postwar “parenthetical” remark about the inadequacy of his broadcasts refers to his performance as the “broker of his own statements” and to his listeners’ aptitude as receptive participants, but studiously avoids any direct comment on the arguments of his “text.” While his actions behind the microphone and his listeners’ response in front of their radio sets are evaluated according to a metric of impact, the talks themselves are exempted from such worldly relations and left to float clear of questions of utility or effect. By denying his own effectiveness as speaker and his listeners’ competence as listeners, Stuart is thereby freed from renouncing the arguments made in his radio talks. This move disambiguates the talks from their delivery in two senses, each one resting on an unstated assumption about their subsequent reception in relation to Stuart’s vocation as a literary author. The first holds that the arguments advanced in the radio broadcasts were delivered in the wrong forum, where finer insight into the spiritual condition of Irish society was lost amid the propagandistic chatter of the German service and would only find adequate expression in the postwar novels in which Stuart could fully explore the redundancies of moral judgment. In a letter written in May 1971, Stuart offered this “literary” explanation of his time in Berlin: It has never seemed to me that anyone of imagination and psychic complexity could be a Fascist.

To accuse somebody, a writer, who has, even to some degree, these characteristics is either malicious or stupid. At the same time there were certain very fine writers, Montherlant and Genet for instance, for whom Fascism was no more irrelevant, ridiculous (as a way of life) and criminal than the opposing ideologies and ways of life. The difference being that the latter had the added nastiness of self-​righteousness. . . .

One further thought: the isolation I was forced

into because of my war attitude and experiences has been so immensely valuable to me as a writer that to attempt to defend myself from these critics would be like trying to have it both ways.58

As a construal of literary autonomy, it is certainly not incorrect to refuse to defend his fiction against moral condemnation; it is having it “both ways” to invoke literary autonomy after the fact, when “literariness” had steadfastly been the category through which the political import of the broadcasts had been realized. Of course, Stuart was not the “broker of his own statements,” having delivered his talks within a multifarious field of interests and motivations. The effect of this sublation is to leave unexamined the very authority with which Stuart spoke into the broadcasting microphone, by negating the mediations through which this authority was given voice. The second disambiguation follows from the first by ignoring the fact that Stuart’s broadcasts were not sonic evanescence, mystified set text, or raw material for art, but circulated among readers in the form of monitoring transcripts. As radio pages, they could be interpreted and classified in ways unforeseen by Stuart. In a different, though suggestive, form, this relationship of listener and reader

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within a communicative field was identified in the official handbook of German broadcasting at the beginning of the war: “While the political radio broadcasts, based on the power of the spoken word, give the li[s]tener the sensation of being actually present at an event, the press has [the] most to offer in the form of comments and summaries. ([P]apers permit us to go over the events that have been once more, and they offer written documents that may serve later periods as information.)”59 This parenthetical is the logic of wartime monitoring services. Ethical or routine associations aside, why has the self-​anointed witness been granted preeminence over the professionally anonymous monitor? This question is profoundly troubling, for reasons that Goffman’s analysis of the lecture pinpoints: “Those who remain to speak must claim some kind of intellectual authority in speaking; and however valid or invalid their claim to a specialized authority, their speaking presupposes and supports the notion of intellectual authority in general: that through the statements of a lecturer we can be informed about the world. Give some thought to the possibility that this shared presupposition is only that, and that after a speech, the speaker and the audience rightfully return to the flickering, cross-​purposed, messy irresolution of their unknowable circumstances.”60 Blurring the line between disinterestedness and participation, this “cross-​purposed, messy irresolution” was precisely the ideological terrain G2’s monitoring service was charged with surveying, because it was precisely the ideological terrain on which Éire’s neutrality was both managed and threatened. A wartime gamble against “unknowable circumstance,”

this operation hinged on the talks’ remediated circulation as transcripts, their readers crucially engaged through the ear. As the next section will explore, Stuart’s postwar position-​ taking as participatory witness has its counterpart in the wartime stance of the government of Northern Ireland, where a different reading formation of radio pages enabled a distinct connection of readers and texts at the line between disinterestedness and participation. On the Line A file of monitoring transcripts is held in the papers of the Northern Irish Cabinet at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland in Belfast.61 These pages were not produced in the North, but in England, by the BBC’s Monitoring Division, which forwarded to the Northern government any transcripts mentioning the island of Ireland. Although they had begun listening in to foreign broadcasts in the run-​up to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, the British did not create a division specifically charged with monitoring transmissions until March 1939, in response to hostile wireless propaganda occasioned by the German annexation of Czechoslovakia. Asa Briggs gives a sense of the enormity of the task immediately facing the agency, when he notes that its work was done “on a three-​shift basis for twenty-​four hours a day.”62 However improvisatory this work initially had to be, its method was quickly regularized, as Charles Rolo’s near-​contemporaneous description of an evening at the listening post attests: The listener or “monitor,” sits in front of a powerful receiver, earphones clamped to his ears, a pad

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and pencil ready to hand. He is covering, say, Berlin’s “North American” service. Fred Kaltenbach’s Iowa drawl floats in over the air waves. “Click” goes a switch, setting in motion a recording machine connected up with the transmitter. A shiny black wax cylinder begins to revolve slowly, gathering a gray coating of fluff as the steel needle traces the speaker’s words on its surface. While the program is being recorded, the monitor makes pencil notes of its salient points. This double coverage, which calls for intense concentration and some high-​speed scribbling, is part of the routine of any streamlined monitoring service. The business of transcribing verbatim a whole recorded program takes an experienced operator the best part of forty-​five minutes. If anything of immediate importance comes over the air, the monitor’s notes enable him to submit the item to a “Flash Supervisor,” who decides whether to send it to London.63

This considerable, if almost entirely overlooked, labor is remarkable. In their oral history of the division’s early years, Olive Renier and Vladimir Rubinstein note that, by May 1940, staff members were transcribing thirty thousand words a day.64 This number jumped to almost a million words the following year—​the German services alone, for example, were broadcasting in fifty-​four languages to every part of the world. The Ediphone dictation machine was central to this task, since its cylinders could be “shaved” after their contents had been transcribed and reused for recording broadcasts. As the only practical medium of storing the massive output of the world’s transmitters, however, typed pages were the sole means of building and maintaining an archive of wireless propaganda. Flashes aside, most transcripts were

condensed into daily summaries, which were then copied and distributed to government departments. Employing 550 people by mid1942, the Monitoring Division was considered indispensable by both the Ministry of Information and the Political Warfare Executive, with Briggs describing it as “a linchpin of the whole BBC wartime organization.”65 Typed on onionskin paper, transcripts were sent to the BBC station in Belfast, where they were then passed to the Northern Ireland cabinet, as much out of politesse as out of security concerns. While the production of these specially tailored logs for the Northern government was a tiny part of the overall labor of the Monitoring Division, the work of retrieving and collating requisite transcripts from its ever-​expanding mass of typescripts and carbon copies was no small task, and the fact that the logs could be produced at all demonstrates that transcripts were being effectively cataloged. Along with the reports, the file in Belfast contains correspondence between BBC officials and cabinet secretaries and internal memoranda circulated within the Northern Irish civil service. It is clear from these documents that the transcripts were taken very seriously at Stormont. Throughout the war, the Northern government was publicly keen both to defend the province from any attack, whether against its territory or its reputation, and to exhibit Ulster’s commitment as an integral part of the United Kingdom to the war effort. As often as not, these modes became distorted echoes of each other, with their distinct characteristics filtered through the obsession of wartime Unionist administrations to differentiate “British” Northern Ireland from “neutral Ireland.” Both

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modes of political performance frequently shaded into bald and mutually reinforcing assertions of Ulster’s exceptional integrity, as a territorial entity and as an engaged participant in the war. As a reading formation, the monitoring transcripts sent to Belfast offered a novel platform for this performance. The alpha and omega of these maneuvers can be found in John Blake’s Northern Ireland in the Second World War, the official history of the war effort in Ulster. Although not published until 1956, plans for an officially sanctioned narrative had begun circulating within the Northern Irish government in late 1941, when, as Gillian McIntosh has written, staff members at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland were first asked to begin collecting and collating material for the work.66 As published, the book is both fascinating and depressing in its repetitive detailing of the movement of Northern Irish soldiers and products (ships, planes, textiles, agricultural goods) to theaters of combat, as well as in the simmering righteousness of its presentation. Akin to the morale-​building pamphlets commissioned and published by the Ministry of Information, the work is nevertheless distinct in its scope and tenor, both of which tend to the monumental. It was, moreover, a collaborative undertaking, although nothing in the front matter or text communicates this fact. From archival records of the book’s composition, McIntosh notes that it “was based not only on the research of Stormont’s civil servants and regimental historians, but its foundations lay in draft mini-​histories of the various government departments which [had been] written by the government’s own officials.”67 While it was

recognized that such a history might come off as special pleading, or worse, the book was determined to give the perspective of the war “from Belfast and not London, well aware how issues relatively unimportant to Whitehall might become significant when viewed from Stormont.”68 The Northern government produced a work that “was intended to represent the Northern Irish state’s part in the war in the way in which the Unionist government wished it to be remembered.”69 This circumstance would be unremarkable, were it not for its proleptic account of Ulster’s role in the war. What lends the prolepsis its bite, however, is its appeal to the founding myths of the state. Announced in the second paragraph of the first chapter of the book, its coordinates are unmistakable, as the political alignments brought into being by partition are made to prophesy the war’s existential stakes: The result of 1939 was that in the struggle against Germany the Government of Eire preferred to observe a policy of neutrality, a position which was maintained throughout the Second World War. In Ulster, however, the old loyalties prevailed. If to most of those living in the South neutrality was a rational policy, to their neighbours in the North it was an evasion of duty. That philosophy, which formerly had sustained Ulstermen in their dour opposition to home rule, now underlined their conviction that political destiny and material advantage lay in the preservation of the British connection. Northern Ireland, composed of six of the old nine counties of Ulster, conceiving that war against Germany was a righteous cause, was, as in the old days, again prepared to fight and to believe herself right.70

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This phrasing intimates more than a simple differentiation of north and south. Paraphrasing the slogan—“Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right”—​coined by Randolph Churchill during the first Home Rule crisis in 1886, the passage draws an unbroken line between the integrity of Ulster’s self-​ conception, its loyalty to empire, and the ideological positions of the war. Marshaling the tropes of manliness that had been fashioned in the Home Rule crises and become mythic after the First World War, Blake presents these distinctive traits as having been instituted in the infrastructure of the Northern state-​formation. While the line is unbroken, it is now routed through Northern Ireland’s devolved autonomy within the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland in the Second World War is itself evidence of this relation. What had once been the spiritual characteristics of the “Ulsterman” could now, after partition, be quantified and held up as proof of the state’s unique contribution to the empire in its time of utmost peril. Unlike the southern Irish, who abandoned the empire and stood ready to aid its enemies, the Northern Irish state embodied the ideal of duty in its functioning as a state. The defense of Northern Ireland was thus the defense of the war effort itself. Yet these assertions raised the issue of the relative quality of the state’s autonomy. Northern Ireland had been created by the Government of Ireland Act (1920), which granted to the Northern Irish parliament the authority to legislate within the province; but the act reserved for the British parliament the power to declare and wage war. In broad terms, the distinction of jurisdictions was

between “domestic” and “foreign” policy. In the context of total mobilization, however, the powers excepted from the devolution of authority were becoming increasingly difficult to map along the domestic-​foreign axis, which had itself been subsumed by more overarching matters of defense planning and preparation. Jurisdiction over communications infrastructure (shipping beacons, underwater cables, wireless signaling, telegraphy) had been reserved, but sectors under domestic control that had assumed strategic military importance, such as industrial and agricultural production, were cast into a gray zone. Blake’s history brings out this tension with force: “Defense of the realm” may therefore cover all of these [aspects of civilian life] and much more; indeed, it is arguable that in modern warfare there is virtually nothing in the life of the community that is not a “matter arising from a state of war.” These limits to the powers of the Government of Northern Ireland might, then, conceivably create much ambiguity in the event of war, and could restrict extensively the activities of both the legislature and the executive. As war threatened and more attention was paid to “defense” and “matters arising,” realisation came that in time of war it might be wholly impossible to preserve the existing line of demarcation between the powers of the Government of Northern Ireland and those of the United Kingdom. “Defense of the realm” might entail a wholesale invasion of the peacetime area of administrative jurisdiction of the Northern Ireland Government.71

Since this passage was revised, and perhaps written, in the knowledge that London had not stripped the Northern Ireland

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government of its domestic authority, its language of “invasion” and occupation is especially severe. While the note about wartime alterations to the balance of powers is not incorrect (and resonates with more general apprehensions about warfare and civil society during the interwar years),72 its timbre nevertheless demonstrates the unease felt by Unionist administrations about the limits to their mandate. It was evident that the view from Whitehall of the defense of the realm did not necessarily align with the view from Stormont of domestic security, and this divergence might therefore serve as the catalyst for substantial adjustments to Northern Ireland’s autonomy. Defense could thus be understood as invasion not because of the militarization of civilian life—​Ulster’s policing authority had already achieved this on its own—​but because it represented the sundering of the “line of demarcation” between jurisdictions. And if one side of the Government of Ireland Act (devolution) was open to amendment or nullification, what was to say that the other side (partition) was not similarly available to revision or negation? Beneath this logic, then, ran the landed border between Northern Ireland and Éire.73 To these concerns, the transcripts gave a special edge. The government was less concerned with the realities of wartime radio than with maintaining perceptions of the province’s fundamental soundness, and Unionist officials remained singularly convinced that the most pressing dangers facing them lay in treason by Northern nationalists, agitation sponsored by Éire, and betrayal by Britain. Yet the transcripts exposed discrepancies between the sense of Ulster at war the government

wished to project and the actual conditions of reception. Perhaps as their most disturbing effect, the monitoring reports raised a primary figure of anxiety in Unionist symbology: the indistinct border. Whereas print media and films could be checked through postal controls and mitigated by censorship, radio broadcasting achieved a continual transversal of the border and, as such, represented the practical loosening of the bounds of the state. The monitoring reports made it undeniably clear that there was ample opportunity for Northern listeners to hear what the government did not want them to hear. That radio waves crossed the border did not mean that it ceased to have meaning as a border, only that it could not serve as the essential ground of security, reliability, and knowability. For Northern Ireland, with its absolute need for a ritualized understanding of partition, the consequences of this changed relation were grave. As McIntosh notes, The BBC in Northern Ireland (BBC NI) played a significant role in creating an image of the state as a “knowable community,” as well as shaping an image of that society as a unified homogenous unit through the medium of broadcasting. By providing listeners with access to music, drama, and other cultural resources, BBC NI helped to create the impression of a common, though not unproblematic, culture within the state and with the rest of the United Kingdom. Broadcasting contributed to the creation of the “we-​feeling” in the state but this was often not an inclusive “we” but an exclusive one from which many felt alienated.74

In setting wartime broadcasting policy for the entire United Kingdom, the BBC appealed to

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a commonly shared “British character” located in the past as a means to deflect attention from social antagonisms and conflicts of interest in the present. During the war, this function of the corporation’s mandate served the cause of national unity. For this reason, the BBC suspended its regional services during the war, in favor of national programming controlled from London.75 This decision did not sit well at Stormont. Conjured up most obviously by the meaning of the border, Northern Ireland’s divisions were not easily addressed by this policy objective, for the past was as fractious as the present: “Access for programmes made in Northern Ireland to the Home and Forces programmes during the war was so limited that close attention was focussed on the content of those which were transmitted. The argument about content highlighted Northern Ireland’s cultural problems more sharply than in pre-​war years.”76 With foreign broadcasting explicitly aimed at cleavages within Northern Ireland that “home” broadcasting sought to massage or deny, this policy of forging knowability was severely tested. As the “fourth front” of modern warfare,77 radio broadcasting was at once global and local, extraterritorial and delimited. Even with the BBC’s Monitoring Division, there was never any possibility of transcribing, let alone of listening to, every broadcast on the airwaves. An unknowable number of transmissions therefore had no institutional or official record—​and there was no way to rebut or counteract what may have been heard, but which had not been transcribed by monitors. In this way, what assurance the transcripts promised was ceaselessly undercut by the abiding insecurity they could never fully allay.

This impinging insecurity took many forms. Class antagonism was one of the social divisions most stringently suppressed in the interests of national cohesion by wartime broadcasting policy. The BBC worked to counteract the idea that the war was being fought for the benefit of the powerful and at the expense of the working class, who were being asked to endure hardship at home and risk death abroad in service to a system that had given them nothing. As a vulnerable point in British unity, this disparity was seized on in German broadcasts, at times directly through denunciations of the influence of international financiers and plutocrats (a barely coded form of anti-​Semitism) and more covertly at others. In July 1940, the Germans began operating a medium wave secret station called Workers’ Challenge that claimed to emanate from within England. Inveighing against the war as a capitalist scheme to destroy the working class, the station called on workers to withhold their labor in order to bring an end to hostilities. Listener surveys conducted by the BBC showed that this message was not entirely ineffective, although most respondents tended to stress that they tuned in because of the frank language used, especially when savaging government officials.78 Another report observed that listeners found the station to be a welcome and entertaining respite from the BBC accent.79 The main force behind Workers’ Challenge was William Joyce, who wrote the majority of the talks used and helped to recruit broadcasters from among British prisoners of war. After the United States entered the war, Workers’ Challenge began

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to play to a particular kind of British patriotism, by maintaining that the Americans were allowing the British to assume the brunt of the war effort in order to achieve global hegemony. This was a war of imperialist aggression being waged against Britain, one in which Ulster was playing an unexpected walk-​on part: Well, workers, there’s great news for us today. The Yankees have come. Now we’re on the hog’s back. All we have to do is cheer like hell. . . . But it seems that not many Yankees have come after all, and by just a sort of funny misunderstanding, they haven’t gone on to Europe. They aren’t in France yet. In fact, they’re in Northern Ireland, just a few of them [ . . .] to show that the good old Stars and Stripes are doing something. Stick them in Ulster. Against who? Good Lord, surely they don’t think that Ulster needs defending against the Southern Irishmen today! It’s all very queer. They seem to have gone to a place where there isn’t any war going on. Now that’s a remarkable thing, because in most wars the great and wise generals like to send their troops where they can meet the enemy. But, perhaps cunning politicians like Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt don’t. . . . Anyhow, don’t be taken in with any propaganda about the Yanks who are in Northern Ireland. Roosevelt didn’t mean them to be soldiers. He meant them to be tallymen, to make sure we pay as we can to the American capitalists.80

This transcript was sent to Belfast, where the Northern cabinet read it with displeasure. The rhetoric of the broadcast was held to be extremely dangerous in its defamation not of the British or Allied war effort, but of the hazards faced by Ulster as part of the United

Kingdom. The notion that neutral Éire posed no threat to British Ulster was anathema, while the implication that Northern Ireland was a place “where there [wasn’t] any war going on” openly invited resentment of the province for its relative safety from the prolonged suffering of the war. Most ominously, the broadcast’s alignment of the axes of wartime engagement and peril reversed partition, by setting the burlesque relationship of Ulster and Éire against the mortal struggle of Britain and Germany (and, in another register, the United States). That this broadcast could have been plausibly heard as a transmission originating in England only exacerbated the official unrest caused by radio’s traversal of the border. This fundamental skewing of geopolitical lines was the primary effect of radio warfare. Dissonant alignments of loyalty and participation, of allegiance and interest, could be announced and exploited with numbing regularity. It was a propagandistic technique that relied on destabilizing the assumed identity of information about a particular territory with that territory itself. If dominant political narratives never exist outside their contested relations to a variety of nondominant narratives of sociality and belonging, then it is important to recognize how at this moment the specific conditions of wartime radio—​ both transmission and reception—​immensely pressurized this fact of geopolitical existence. A slew of radio broadcasts were not simply secondary reports of preexistent geopolitical realities, but actively intervened in the shifting perception of the forces animating their development and perpetuation. Lines of division could be drawn between allies (Britain

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and the United States) as easily as lines of connection could be drawn between adversaries (Northern Ireland and Éire). By undermining the correspondence of information and territory that was metonymically licensed by landed borders, wartime radio had the power to expose bounded territory as a site of instability and uncertainty, rather than as one of security. These fears about information and territory first become evident in an internal memorandum dated April 13, 1940. Sent to Robert Gransden, the secretary to the cabinet, from F. M. Adams, the head of Stormont’s publicity committee, the memo gives vent to the frustration of Unionist officials with the institutional autonomy of the BBC. With the backing of the British government, the BBC looked with disfavor on requests by Northern officials to broadcast rebuttals to items hostile to Ulster. Despite sympathetic treatment by George Marshall, the director of the Belfast station, the government was dubious about the commitment of the BBC to defending Ulster’s integrity. The tone of the memo is sharp: The question arises—​Did the B.B.C. take steps to reply specifically to any of these broadcasts? See particularly the record of the Hamburg broadcast on [March 5, 1940], with quotation from the “Irish Press” containing complete misrepresentations of matters affecting Ulster. The arrangement discussed some time ago, and mentioned by me to Mr. Ogilvie when I saw him in London in January, under which it was suggested that the B.B.C. monitoring system should refer such points as these to the Northern Ireland Government with a view to rebuttal, has apparently not been put into effect.



Moreover, the Rome broadcast on Easter

Monday last, containing allegations of firing by the police on Nationalist gatherings in Belfast and Londonderry and the “blowing up” of the Craigavon Bridge at Londonderry, was not picked up and recorded by the B.B.C., according to a statement made to me by Mr. Marshall on the phone. Yet it was heard in Belfast and Dublin, and a refutation by the Minister of Home Affairs was published in the “Daily Express” on the following day as a result of a phone message to me on Easter Monday by . . . the “Express” Belfast representative. (See Press cutting file.)

See also Hamburg broadcasts on [March 23,

1940] and [March 25, 1940]. Here were matters that ought to have been referred to the N.I. Government at the time so that the facts could have been broadcast in reply.81

Easter Monday was an uneasy day for Unionist officials worried about internal order and external—​meaning southern Irish—​agitation, as nationalists commemorated the Easter Rising on this day. The specific apprehension underlying the memo surfaces in the assertion that “it was heard in Belfast and Dublin,” which crystallizes the anxieties provoked by the porousness of landed borders in the age of radio transmission. Advancing from the unvoiced premise that broadcasts received simultaneously on both sides of the border are inherently nefarious in motivation, Adams makes the causal leap that this radiophonic event represents an attack on Ulster’s territorial integrity. Without monitoring transcripts, the broadcasts could in turn take on the most sinister connotations of unknown infiltration, particularly when augmented by the revelation that items originating south

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of the border—​in the de Valera–owned Irish Press, no less—​had come across to the North via Axis transmitters. In this intensely mediated scenario, the medium of radio occupies a determinate position in official anxieties about the control and meaning of the border, insofar as it was embedded within already established political relationships based on the circulation of printed matter—​ namely, newspapers and, on slightly different grounds, the monitoring transcripts. What radio portended, then, was the alteration of these relationships and all that underwrote them. Two days after receiving the memo, Gransden used the occasion of thanking Marshall for sending the transcripts to offer a cool reminder of the agreement to allow Northern officials to counter hostile transmissions with broadcasts of their own: “Thank you very much for letting me see the references to Ulster which have been made from Hamburg during the past two months. I have shown them to the Prime Minister, who is much obliged to you for giving him the opportunity of learning the type of material which is broadcast against Ulster. We should like, of course, as previously arranged, to have an opportunity to rebut any serious misrepresentations and no doubt the B.B.C. will get into touch with us when these assume such proportions or are of such a character as to demand a prompt reply.”82 This demeanor is absent from his reply of the same day to Adams, written by hand at the bottom of the memo: Although this arrangement [to broadcast refutations] was made I doubt whether the B.B.C. or

Minister of Information will bring these “allegations” to our notice in time for a reply to be made unless they are likely to make bad propaganda from the Allied/British point of view. Moreover the “Irish Press” would only continue their attacks with still more venom if they found we were getting a reply over [and] wd. be a continuance “ad nauseam” of the arguments from Eire of which we heard so much. I think we shd. keep an eye on developments, bring these matters again to the P.M.’s notice if concerted action is thought to be necessary to rebut Eire propaganda.83

This grim addendum takes the measure of the war effort in Northern Ireland. With no context, it would seem that Ulster was engaged in hostilities with Éire and had acrimonious dealings with Britain, for suspicion of duplicity is provoked by British connivance at “Eire propaganda,” rather than German and Italian propaganda. At some level, this reading of Gransden’s addendum is valid. On this footing, the war serves only as an intensification of prewar political conditions, a palpable heightening of tensions and dangers that had existed since partition and the devolution of power by the imperial administration to an independent south and an autonomous north.84 A month after the exchange between Adams and Gransden, the Ministry of Information in London issued a directive to the BBC about references to partition and the political associations resulting from it: “It is generally inadvisable to engage in controversy or propaganda about the Partition of Ireland. If, however, there is important Irish news which makes it inevitable that the question will be raised, the point to be consistently

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made is that Partition is a problem for the Irish themselves to solve: the British Government would be ready to accept any agreement reached by the different sections of the Irish people. In other words, the agitation against the British Government and people on this point is made at the wrong address.”85 While the British government sought accommodation with the Irish government at this point in the war, the Northern government held these efforts to be nothing other than the distended continuation of appeasement. Over the course of the following year, from mid-1940 to mid-1941, as the BBC produced special Irish programs in tandem with Radio Éireann, the Northern government repeatedly and bitterly protested that these ventures undid partition and recognized a united Ireland quite literally over its head via the airwaves. This action it characterized as “shaking hands with murder.”86 If Éire’s neutrality was a complicated response to independence tempered by international relations in the second half of the thirties, then Britain’s apparent willingness to reenvision the political settlement created by the Government of Ireland Act similarly responded to events beyond the traditional footing of Anglo-​Irish relations. What Northern officials had internalized as the given contexts of political alignment were now subject to the undeniable encroachment of other registers of political necessity. With a diminishing sense of their own agency in the unfolding of this situation, Northern officials felt increasingly abandoned to the fate they most feared. Because radio could bring information across any border—​whether between nations at war, belligerents and neutrals, public and private

realms, allegiance and sedition—​the belief in its potency as an instrument for undermining morale and encouraging dissention could be readily endowed with mythic powers. Against a growing body of technical analysis and audience research, which provided a less extreme perception of the effects of propaganda, the Northern cabinet remained prone to an occult understanding of motivated broadcasting, due in large part to the absolute polarity of loyalty and betrayal that framed its understanding of political life.87 Even seemingly banal items, bereft of obvious malevolence, could be treated with alarm and misgiving: Budapest 549.5m In Hungarian for Hungary 21.40 16.6.41

irish german exchange of notes

Berlin: An exchange of notes has taken place between Germany and Ireland. The contents of the notes has not been divulged. Radio Rumania . . . 1875m In Rumanian for Rumania 22.30 16.6.41

irish german exchange of notes.

Competent Ber-

lin circles declare that an exchange of notes has taken place between Germany and Ireland. The notes contained a final solution of the problems dealt with.88

These items are both marked with blue pencil, the same one used to notate the top of the transcript, “sent P.M. 26.6.41.” It seems perverse to imagine that anything could have been made of these items. Yet merely to chalk up the blue notations to Unionist paranoia or self-​importance, however demonstrative these attributes may be, is to miss what they

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indicate about the institutional field in which the cabinet read the pages. Given the identical “headlines” and similar transmission times, the Axis stations got their information from the same source, and this linkage alone was enough to warrant attention at Stormont. In October 1942, Gransden addressed this matter in a letter to the BBC in London: You remember our talk regarding the possible leakage of information to the enemy through Eire. . . . I have been looking into a number of enemy broadcasts with a view of ascertaining the interval of time between their issue and the incidents referred to. I find that where factual material is given the German Station quotes a number of News Agencies as the authority, for instance “The British News Service,” “Reuter,” also London correspondents of, for example, Norwegian newspapers.

In addition we get this sort of indication as

to the origin of the message “Flash from Belfast”: “A Dublin report states.”

I have no information, of course, whether some

of the statements issued over the enemy network might not have been picked up from the Eire Broadcasting Station [Radio Éireann], and I am afraid that I have no evidence whether the information or reports relating to Northern Ireland matters emanate from enemy or non-​official sources in Eire.

I think you might have a look at the

B.B.C. Monitoring Reports as with your wide knowledge of the ramifications of “security” problems you will be in a better position than I am to judge whether there is evidence of leakage through Eire.89

A few days later, Gransden received an officious response to his conjectures. It indicated

that his sense of the “possible leakage of information to the enemy through Eire” was “generally consistent with our belief that Press channels are the source from which the enemy usually derive their wireless news about events in Ireland.”90 Gransden’s letter, it promised, would nonetheless be forwarded to security officials in the monitoring service. Quite tellingly, the implication behind the darkly glowing center of Gransden’s letter—​ the single line about breaking news in Belfast being reported from Dublin—​was either missed or ignored in London. While giving Gransden’s request professional concern, the BBC was clearly operating with a different sense of, and from a different set of presuppositions about, what the monitoring reports suggested for strategic interests and security controls. Its more nuanced understanding of the circulation of information became inscrutable, and thus potentially duplicitous, when read in light of the absolute polarity of loyalty and betrayal that charges Gransden’s letter. A month later, a summary of the findings of the Monitoring Division arrived in Belfast, again demonstrating its organizational capacity to accommodate requests for specific information. Its conclusion is brisk and to the point: “According to B.B.C. information, the bulk of enemy broadcasts is available in transcript form and over a period of the last three years there have been very few occasions on which items of news incorporated in the German broadcasts could not be traced to normal channels of information, e.g., press agents, newspapers, wireless, etc. There has been no occasion on which information has been included in the German broadcasts when it was possible to establish the source

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Radio Pages

as an enemy agent.”91 As a mode of reading transcripts, this summary is the product of a rationalized analysis of what they contain and of what they indicate. It stands in marked contrast to how the pages were read in Northern Ireland, where they could only substantiate what they were missing or lacked. That the transcripts did not provide evidence of collusion or conspiracy was simply taken to mean it had not been found—​and, indeed, this failure might itself be evidence of some more baleful machinations. These incommensurable interpretations of the transcripts were the product of incommensurate conceptions of the war itself, a point noticeable in the notes’ competing inflections of “enemy.” While the BBC unmistakably means “enemy” as a synonym for “Axis,” Gransden’s phrase “enemy or non-​official sources in Eire” is both ambiguous and leading, since it gestures to the presence of Axis diplomatic legations in Dublin, but also suggests that the southern Irish should be regarded as abetting the Axis powers and even as enemies themselves. Gransden derives Irish complicity with the Axis powers from Axis stations broadcasting items gleaned from listening to Radio Éireann. By assuming the absolute identity of information control and territorial security, he conflates the circulation of information with the crossing of ideological borders. While the BBC maintained strategic flexibility regarding these issues as a matter of operational procedure, the Northern government was instead fundamentally invested in the zero-​sum stakes of this elision. Yet the monitoring transcripts revealed a new space in this field. By providing a material record of transmissions, the transcripts

enabled the Northern cabinet to instrumentalize the relationship of information and territory for its own benefit. Where once Northern officials pleaded to intervene in the circuit of transmission by broadcasting rebuttals to hostile items, they now sought actively to redirect the circulation of information by mobilizing the transcripts. It was exactly the issue of domestic security that could be manipulated and repositioned. In framing the war when viewed from Stormont, a passage in Blake’s Northern Ireland in the Second World War represents the fruition of this redirection: In point of fact, the danger of information being disclosed to the enemy arose, not so much from the presence of enemy agents in Northern Ireland, but rather from the presence in Eire of the German Minister to that country and his staff. To this the Northern Ireland Government was very much alive, and urgent representations were made from time to time to the United Kingdom Government about the ease with which information could be carried across the frontier of Northern Ireland into Eire territory. Had Eire declared war upon Germany, this difficulty would not have arisen. But her preference for neutrality complicated the general problem of security, not least because the advance preparations of the security authorities in London had not been fully adjusted to meet this contingency.92

Rather than standing as an outlier to the conflict, Northern Ireland—​as a territorial entity and as a state—​is here redeployed to the front line of the war. In advance of “security authorities in London” still practicing appeasement, the Northern government had identified the supreme importance of

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information control and recognized the South’s declaration of neutrality as paramount to a declaration of war. In order then to reaffirm and underscore the geopolitical border—​and all that it subtended—​between Éire and Northern Ireland, the border between neutrality and belligerence had to be rendered indistinct, even to the point of nonexistence. Marking off Northern Ireland’s difference depended on the contrast. In this respect, the appearance in Belfast of the transcript of what has subsequently become known as Francis Stuart’s “mutiny” broadcast stands as a pivotal moment between Gransden’s vicious despair and Blake’s triumphalism, when a definitive alteration to the reading formation in which the radio pages were apprehended becomes evident.93 On May 15, 1943, monitors transcribed Stuart’s voice, although they did not identify him. The transcript begins with the note “(Beginning missed),” suggesting that the announcement of Stuart’s talk—​during which he would have been named as the speaker—​had been lost in reception.94 In the transcript’s heading, the talk is labeled “Talk: N. Ireland: German Officer if Conscription Comes.” Throughout the war, the unwillingness of the British government to institute the draft in Northern Ireland had been a source of embarrassment for Unionist officials, who lobbied unsuccessfully to have conscription introduced in the province. Fearing that the introduction of the draft would jeopardize intelligence cooperation and stanch the flow of recruits and labor from Éire, London repeatedly denied their requests. James Loughlin has pointed out that the self-​ interest motivating the Northern lobbying

campaign was not “un-​British or unusual” in its conception of national interest and wartime commitment, but was instead the expression of these ideals refracted through local imperatives and constraints.95 It was, however, precisely this local dimension that was repositioned at the front line, such that “Ulster will fight, and Ulster will be right” could become the war’s crux. Addressing the latest call to introduce conscription to Northern Ireland, Stuart warns nationalists in the North that its implementation is nothing more than a tactic devised by the Stormont regime to squelch the “growing strength of Nationalism amongst you and . . . to precipitate the battle before your strength grows even greater.” Northern nationalists should keep faith with the commanders of the IRA (“men among you equal to the great Ulster leaders of old”), who will “not be forced into anything against their judgment” in determining the proper moment to take up arms against the government. If conscription should be introduced before this decision is made, he advises any nationalist who finds himself in the British armed forces to desert: It is impossible to make you fight their battles for them. They cannot make you fight for the continued occupation of your own corner of Ireland, for that is what any military success for the British and U.S. Forces means. Therefore, if the worst should come to the worst and any of you be conscripted, you have only to wait for a suitable opportunity and go over to the Germans. That has been proved to be not very difficult in the latest form of warfare, where there are no very determined lines and where there is rapid movement. As I say, you have simply to wait patiently until you are actually

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Radio Pages

at the Front and the[n], having arranged a suitable plan amongst yourselves, even if you only happen to be two or three, for you will probably be split up among different regiments, you can go over to the Germans or the Italians. And I can promise you that you will be received as friends as soon as you have explained who you are, for the case of the Six Counties is well known in Germany.

David O’Donoghue has argued that this naïveté is hard to credit, finding it “uncharacteristic” of Stuart’s other broadcasts and asking if this line was forced on him by superiors at the Irland-​Redaktion.96 On the face of it, there is a preposterousness verging on ugliness about Stuart’s advice: any Northern Irish soldiers making it across the battlefield frontier, Stuart readily acknowledges, will be sent to prisoner of war camps for the remainder of the war (and however “long after it as you would have to remain away from your homes”). Like their promised reception “as friends” at the front, he assures them that they “will be treated with every consideration” by their captors. While this advice is no more dubious than most of Stuart’s on-​air commentary, what makes it provocative here is the question posed to the readers of the transcript. At the time of the broadcast, there was no second front in Europe outside the Eastern front in the Soviet Union, as the invasion of Italy still lay two months in the future. Where, and how, was the advice to be heeded? Its conditional tense signals the answer, in that the call for “mutiny” should be understood within the operations being carried out along the “fourth front.” Stuart announces as much himself, when he links mutiny to the “latest

form of warfare, where there are no very determined lines.” Stuart here suggests that the foremost consequences of the introduction of conscription to Northern Ireland would be domestic in nature. Stripped of the conditional tense, these words echoed the very sense of the war held by the government. If the Northern government staked its claim to full membership in the United Kingdom on holding the line against disloyalty and sedition, then Stuart’s broadcast only confirmed its belief in the rightness of this stance by insisting on the vulnerability of this line. This point was amplified when Stuart ends his talk by insinuating that conscription will not bring the war home because it is already being fought at home: “Your leaders [in the IRA] will decide how far [conscription] is to be resisted and even if they should decide against open resistance at the moment, and should conscription be enforced, you still have the power to do as much harm to those who coerce you as by actual fighting in the streets of Belfast. And this you can do simply by not fighting at all.” This is indeed total war, in which “no very determined lines” can exist between fighting and not fighting. In this way, Stuart’s call represents an intervention into the war effort as it was experienced in official Ulster. It is therefore not surprising that the transcript received special attention within the Northern cabinet, for its clear (and congruent) presentation of the dangers confronting the government also articulated an opportunity. On a separate scrap of paper in the Public Record Office file, there is a note, dated July 6, 1943, that reads, “Conscription in N.I. Note reference at A for P.M.’s use

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Ireland and the Problem with Information

at appropriate occasion.”97 In blue ink, this “A” appears in the margin of the transcript page alongside Stuart’s “mutiny” broadcast.98 It did not matter that the speaker’s identity was unknown (or wrongly identified as a “German officer”), for his words had been made available as text for later use. This radio page linked the speaker and its readers in the process of being constituted as an object of knowledge within a reading formation. Determined by institutional practices of transmission and reception, of mediation in its fullest sense, this reading formation in turn enabled the redirection of the radio page, as a particular piece of information, by altering the perception of its potential field of deployment. In its remediated form, the radio page articulates the total field of communication. Jonathan Sterne has noted that “sound is always defined by the shifting

borders that it shares with the vast world of non-​sound phenomena,” a recognition that specifies the mechanism of antagonistic cooperation at work in this reading formation.99 Participation in the war could thus be understood as struggle along these “shifting borders” or lines, precisely because they formed a loop. Was this transcript of Stuart’s “mutiny” broadcast ever “used” by the prime minister “at [the] appropriate occasion”? There is no way to know. Yet is that question the correct one to ask? Friedrich Kittler famously suggested that “cybernetics, the theory of self-​guidance and feedback loops, is a theory of the Second World War.”100 This reading formation along the fourth front embodies the practical, even manual, form of this theory, not as a technologically determining condition but as a characteristically modern possibility.

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Conclusion Compression and Cross-​Fade

The only recorded instance of Samuel Beckett participating in (beyond directing) a performance of his works is not a spoken or vocal event, but consists of eight separate gong hits heard on MacGowran Speaking Beckett, a program of extracts from Beckett’s texts (Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Endgame among them) read by the Irish actor Jack MacGowran. Recorded in London and released by the Dublin-​based Claddagh Records in 1966, the album coincided with Beckett’s sixtieth birthday, although its extracts draw from the repertory of pieces selected and adapted for public performance that had been in the making for at least a decade. In August 1956, Barney Rosset had approached him about suggesting suitable texts for a public reading sponsored by the Grove Press to be held in New York; Beckett endorsed the plan by sending a list of possibilities and an offer to participate from Paris: “I play with the idea of doing a short text in English and another in French myself. I think I’ll have at least a shot at it, and then

withhold it if too awful. It was all very well for Joyce with his fine trained voice, but when you have a gasp-​croak like mine you hesitate. No difficulty about the actual recording, on a tape-​recorder, [Roger] Blin and [Jean] Martin know all about that.”1 As it was, Beckett’s recordings did not come off. This possibility was realized ten years later on the gong, despite the fact that Beckett’s eight strokes are not strictly part of the readings recorded for MacGowran Speaking Beckett. They have usually been described as forming part the musical setting that accompanies them, a selection from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” adapted for flute and harmonium, played respectively by Beckett’s nephew Edward and his cousin John. As James Knowlson writes, “As far as we know, this is Beckett’s only recorded musical performance.”2 Listening carefully to the album, however, one can hear Beckett’s gong more often sounding alone between readings than it is at the conclusion of musical breaks, and it is clear that tape splices distinguish the readings, musical

Ireland and the Problem with Information

interludes, and gong hits. MacGowran’s voice was recorded very close to the microphone, and the absence of ambient room reverberations gives it an especially claustrophobic presence in the album’s monaural field. While the sonic articulation of the recorded voice is bright and up front, the endings of the musical interludes are subjected to severe edits, leaving them at times drastically cut off and, as sound, chillingly ended. For almost every one of Beckett’s eight notes, the sound manifest in the recording is not the attack, the projective act of striking the gong, but only the decay, the gong’s lessening reverberations in the aftermath of the strike. Allowed simply to fade out, the decaying gong is tonally indistinct, muted, and low in the mix. This is the sound of Beckett’s recorded performance. What is the relation between the “gasp-​ croak” and gong hits? As an object of audition, the formal unity of the album is a composite of tape splices, a “total” program produced at the mastering desk by editing together discrete recordings into the sequence of tracks that make up MacGowran Speaking Beckett. As an album, this formal unity is achieved only during playback, as the stylus moves without distinction or deviation along vinyl grooves. Rather than as interruptions, the decaying reverberations of Beckett’s gong function as informational cues related to the album’s other recorded sounds, by aurally mediating between distinct cuts or bands. While the record spins, the sounds of the gong thus orient listeners within the audio field of the album. With Beckett banging the gong and the “gasp-​croak” made by MacGowran speaking Beckett’s words, this sonic

relationship is nevertheless liable to wrong-​ foot listeners seeking the auratic presence of the author in dramatic, sforzando projections of attack. This possibility seems to have been one deliberately risked, for reasons articulated by Morton Feldman the year before the album’s release. In explaining his attempts to circumvent the “unchanging aural plane created by the constant element of projection, of attack,” he described how “in my own music I am so involved with the decay of each sound, and try to make its attack sourceless. The attack of a sound is not its character. Actually, what we hear is the attack and not the sound. Decay, however, this departing landscape, this expresses where the sound exists in our hearing—​leaving us rather than coming toward us.”3 By holding to the mediating function of the “sourceless” and decaying gong, this conclusion re-​sounds many of the notes struck in preceding chapters, but here as aspects of a “departing landscape” of relations. In doing so, it rebuts the classifying notions of obsolescence and supersession that began “coming toward us” with such omnipotent and overdetermined ferocity during modernism’s heyday, instead suggesting how communicative decay in fact expresses conditions of persistence. Able to embody perseverance and perpetuation, tenacity and diffusion, persistence is, of course, politically ambivalent in tendency; yet theatrically routine invocations of newness should not be allowed to drown out the formative potential of persistent conditions. In a “departing landscape” of relations that is decidedly not nowhere, “sourceless” must therefore not designate an agent-​less possibility.

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Conclusion

Texts for Something

troops, their position, everything that concerned

. . . a new question, the most ancient of all, the question were things always so. —​Samuel Beckett, Texts for Nothing 8 (1951)

the occupying forces. They would bring this information to me on various bits, scraps of paper. . . . It was a huge group. It was the boy-​scouts! They brought it all in to me. I would type it all out

When France was overrun in June 1940, Beckett’s world was at first turned upside down, before returning to an upsetting regularity in the occupation’s first months. After the war, Beckett maintained that he had joined the Resistance because of his horror at the treatment meted out on his friends, famously saying that he “simply couldn’t stand by with [his] arms folded.”4 As a citizen of a neutral country, he was allowed to stay in Paris, where his friend Alfred Péron recruited him for the Resistance. Though Beckett’s work while in hiding in southern France later in the war was akin to more usual conceptions of covert maneuvers—​stashing guns, acts of sabotage, reconnaissance activities—​his work in Paris consisted entirely of paperwork. There Beckett was a member of Gloria SMH, an information cell charged with gathering open-​ source intelligence about the movement of people and matériel. This sort of information is by far the most common variety collected by intelligence services, as it can be picked up in the course of an informant’s otherwise unremarkable quotidian rounds, through street-​level observation, media sources, public notices, and professional contacts. Beckett’s responsibility was to collate and summarize the information that reached him, as he recalled several weeks before his death: Information came in from all over France about German military movements, about movements of

clean. Put it in order and type it out, on one sheet of paper as far as was possible. Then I would bring it to a Greek who was part of the group. He [ . . .] would take photographs. And my sheets would be reduced to the size of a match-​box. All the information. Probably unreadable but it could be magnified. And then he would give them to Madame Picabia, the [former] wife of Picabia, the painter. She was a very respectable old lady; nothing could be less like a Resistance agent. And she could get over to the other zone, the so-​called unoccupied zone, without any difficulty. And so it was sent back to England.5

The risks attending to this operation were immense, most immediately at the literal level of needing to remain undercover, undetected, and beyond suspicion. The consequences of discovery were perfectly clear: only thirty of its roughly eighty members survived the war, after an informer betrayed the cell in 1942.6 For Beckett, these risks were compounded by a more specialized challenge, one evident beneath his characteristic self-​deprecation in the description of his paperwork. Rather than simply type out the handwritten bits in the order in which he received them, Beckett had to rationalize the scraps, to sort what was brought to him, classify their contents, and create a hierarchy of information. He was required to organize incongruent data for compression into an intelligible and transmissible form, providing as much content, with

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as little redundancy or ambiguity, as possible. Necessitated by the subsequent remedial transfer to microfilm, this formal compression was realized in the “clean” format of a typed page. In processing informants’ undifferentiated notations, Beckett aimed for accuracy and reduction, precision and concision, in producing transcriptions. For reasons that will soon become evident, this “scene of writing” sits uncomfortably between two governing poles, the “on” and “off” positions, of Beckett criticism: medium specificity and mechanical failure. Functionally merging abstraction and action, this binary circuit is most familiar through totalizing invocations of “language,” subject at once to proliferation and destitution and completely efficient in its inoperativeness, a steamroller gloriously in quicksand. In order then to address the uncomfortable disposition of this scene, it is useful to recognize in Beckett’s wartime paperwork the emergent practical interplay between transcription and ventriloquism that would become so prevalent in his literary works written after 1942. Neither of these entirely conforms to medium specificity and mechanical failure, and more to the point, Beckett’s wartime paperwork remains outside this critical circuit, as a mundane, communicative, utilitarian form of writing. Having been made to forego literary publication during the war, Beckett was surely an écrivain du silence, and this fact indeed mediates the seeming impasse. In one way, this line of inquiry was broached by Hugh Kenner, who was among the first critics to open Beckett’s authorial trajectory to his wartime experiences: “The occupation experience was absolutely critical, and he has

never stopped going back to it and drawing on it. . . . From that time on, you get this obsessive concern with people undergoing interrogation, people talking when they don’t want to talk, people wondering when it’s safe to stop talking, people talking in order to satisfy some mysterious interrogator who will never tell you what will satisfy him.”7 In the present context, this point can be refined by stating that Beckett never stopped going back to his Resistance paperwork in the writing done after his flight from Paris. As a pairing of transcription and ventriloquism, this “return” is often openly manifest in the texts Beckett wrote during the next decade, from the summary lists and groaning cockatoo of Mercier and Camier to Molloy’s pages blackened with notated “murmurs” to the scribes and voices of Texts for Nothing. In its consternation about the distance between accurate inscription and legitimate voices, this pairing embodies what Kenner elsewhere calls Beckett’s “aesthetic of ultra-​compression.”8 As a communicative possibility—“probably unreadable but it could be magnified”—​this aesthetic was crucially informed by the wartime paperwork. Begun and finished in Paris, but substantially composed in the unoccupied zone, Watt provides an especially potent example of this relationship. The novel is the story of its eponymous protagonist related by a narrator called Sam, who meets Watt in a pavilion of the asylum that is (perhaps) the novel’s terminus. In its third section, Sam writes of his efforts to transcribe what Watt, with difficulty, recounts, in this way offering one possible method for the compilation of the novel’s other three sections. As Watt’s talk

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Conclusion

increasingly deforms syntax and mechanics, Sam’s transcription comes more and more to narrate its own diminishing sense of reliability: For Watt’s sense of chronology was strong, in a way, and his dislike of battology was very strong. Often my hands left his shoulders, to make a note in their little notebook. But his never left mine, unless I detached them personally.

But soon I grew used to these sounds, and then

I understood as well as before, that is to say a great part of what I heard.

So all went well until Watt began to invert,

no longer the order of the words in the sentence, but that of the letters in the word.

This further modification Watt carried through

with all his usual discretion and sense of what was acceptable to the ear, and aesthetic judgement. Nevertheless to one, such as me, desirous above all of information, the change was not a little disconcerting.9

This exchange is only the second instance in a series of alterations and accommodations that continues through eight distinct stages and ends only when Sam begins to lose his hearing. Watt’s concern with chronology and redundancy is here matched by Sam’s with accessibility, an expressive relationship that forms the basis for the subsequent distinction between “aesthetic judgement” and “information.” Rather than as categorical oppositions, these paired series instead register a possibility of communication, one produced in the social relations of Watt and Sam, but indicating some point of reception beyond them. The difficulty of Watt’s communicative reliability is therefore not only a problem of

Watt the ventriloquist’s inability to tell his story through another, but equally of Sam the transcriber’s ability to make his story readable. These are old questions of transmission and reception, but this is no reason not to ask them. In not specifying the point of reception beyond the social interactions of Watt and Sam, Watt’s narrative proper seems locked into a struggle between its lacunae and its permutations, its non-​referential openness and its descriptive motivation. One notable effect of this circumstance has been to read the novel as solely concerned with transmission, a situation in which “aesthetic judgement” and “information” serve as its final and mutually exclusive poles, a contest that is ultimately no contest. In her influential account of Watt and the war, Marjorie Perloff, for example, understands the novel as a triumph of the “resistance of language,” which, like the attack of a blown horn, is contrasted with the “language of resistance.”10 By compressing the latter into a synonym for cryptography, she retrospectively delimits a textual field that was knowingly obsessed with the socially mediated dynamism of “aesthetic judgement” and “information.” As the previous chapters of this book have demonstrated, this practical obsession understood transmission in relation to reception, to possibilities of “in-forming” that could never be discounted. In Watt, this relationship is made concrete by the addenda that come after the narrative proper: a footnote informs the reader that “the following precious and illuminating material should be studied carefully. Only fatigue and disgust prevented its incorporation.”11 In this gloss of the novel’s problem of information,

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Ireland and the Problem with Information

material beyond the “aesthetic” treatment of narrative content must be indexed as somehow informing that content. While the two subject-​positions offered by the footnote—​ the carefully studious reader and the appalled compiler—​remain unnamed as such, their availability as identities, such as they are, registers the communicative relations of reception and transmission. As a parallelism of form to those of Watt and Sam, these interactions between reader and compiler likewise point to a possibility of contact outside their circuit. In this way, then, Watt’s dilemma mediates a specifically wartime condition of communication that did not end for Beckett with the war. In a famous comment made after the war, he named this condition by way of distinguishing his work from that of Franz Kafka: “Kafka’s form is classic, it goes on like a steamroller—​almost serene. It seems to be threatened the whole time—​but the consternation is in the form. In my work there is consternation behind the form, not in the form.”12 Rather than the failure of reliability, the social distance between the work’s form and its “behind” instead measures the success of unreliability, a problem of information remaining even after the moment of its seeming or desired temporal eclipse.13 Vinyl for Nothing . . . they do not help to explain why things are as they are and remain as they are. —​Pierre Bourdieu, “Men and Machines” (1981)

To even the most seasoned readers of Watt, the foregoing may seem almost hopelessly abstract. Indeed, when Beckett read the novel in 1951 while preparing an extract of its

third section for publication in the journal Irish Writing, he admitted to Marie Péron, Alfred’s widow, to feeling at a similar loss: “I re-​read almost all of that odd work and was able to establish, to my satisfaction, that I can make no sense of any of it any more.”14 As an informational cue, this confession nevertheless serves to reintroduce the pairing of ventriloquism and transcription in its specifically Beckettian guise, as the marker of his position within Irish literary space. In order to track this circulatory formation, however, it is necessary to move beyond Watt itself and into the world of relations that forms Beckett’s trajectory. This shift is in fact hinted at in a discussion of the novel’s language and its implications for readers, in which Etienne Rabaté uses an evocative simile to describe Watt’s verbal surface: “Language is caught between delirium and aphasia, inextricably bound: missing words, hesitations, repetitions, like a scratch on a record, never enough sense, always too many words.”15 The mechanical figure of the “broken record” is certainly a common referent for descriptions of nonstandard or unconventional language, and up to a point it is an adequate illustration of the experience of reading the novel. While the recognition of the dialectical interplay of scarcity and overload here is salutary, the resort to a mechanical figure signals an elision of a central issue of mediation, as both an awareness of the media of circulation and a perception of the social character of communication. The conflation of the verbal surface of the text with the inscribed surface of the record mistakes the real differences in production and reception between the two media, not only in their ability to reproduce “voice,”

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Conclusion

but in the social history of the value assigned to their reproductions of “voice.” Quite contrary to the direction implied by the simile, this short circuit actually serves to render the record’s surface like the text’s surface, therein embodying a mechanical causality of another order. Because the text’s surface is already accepted as the point of access to language itself, the figure and its logic of causality in turn reproduces a given world of social relations. Another way to put this relationship is that the figure of the “broken record” signposts the universalization of a point of audition. A quick return to Pascale Casanova’s description of Irish literary space helps to designate the stakes of this compression. For Casanova, Beckett stands not only as the exemplar of Irish literary space, but “as an iconoclast in the strict sense: he fought against literary academicism by producing an anti-​literary literature.” As a revolutionary figure, Casanova’s Beckett freed himself from the demands of representation, establishing the autonomy of his works through persistent struggle against the “literary” and conducted in the name of the “literature of the unword.”16 By undermining literature through literary means, Beckett thus became the apotheosis of literary modernity. Bracing as it is, Casanova’s anatomy of Beckett’s career, as the quest for the “literature of the unword,” remains fundamentally within the circuit of medium specificity and mechanical failure. In this respect, it is important to note a distinction she draws between Beckett’s prose and theatrical works: “While painting served as a model for his exploration of narration and narrative, music, symmetrically, was

probably his aid in constructing his dramatic project.”17 Rather than rehearse the debates over aesthetic procedure among the “sister arts” stretching from Horace and Lessing to Pater, Verlaine, and Greenberg, it is more useful to locate Casanova’s distinction along the four points of Irish literary space. In doing so, an occluded structure that continues to hold immense sway in the critical reception of Beckett’s works becomes manifest. If critical writing on Beckett’s drama has often been attuned to the London–New York axis within the entire field because of its interest in issues such as theater companies, performance histories, licensing rights, and the like, critical writing on the prose has tended to mute this axis in favor of the Dublin-​Paris axis, along which the works are held to exist solely and hermetically within their own formal constraints. Without insisting on its overall explanatory value, the schematic quality of positioning Beckett’s critical reception along two axes exposes the lineaments of an equally obvious problem in Beckett studies. Understood as artifacts of the isolated, non-​worldly author, as writing at heart mediating itself, the prose works are cast as opaquely immediate. This effect depends on the substitution of Beckett’s “life-​story” for his trajectory, a switch that, like the “broken record,” is a signpost of universalization.18 In order to materialize these considerations, these final pages will reconstruct the itinerary of the eighth of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, culminating with the release of a recorded reading on flexi disc in 1967. As an object positioned within Irish literary space, this flexi disc bears an entire history in its thin vinyl grooves and, in this way, forms

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a link back to the point at which this book began. Before reaching that intersection, however, the movement of the text must first be described. Beckett’s composition notebooks indicate that “Text 8” was written in French between June 25 and July 10, 1951, at precisely the same moment when he was redacting Watt for publication in Ireland: along with the same letter to Marie Péron about his return to the novel, Beckett, in fact, enclosed the eighth text. All thirteen texts were published in the collection Nouvelles et Textes pour Rien in 1955. Although Beckett had completed a translation in 1952, the texts did not appear in English until 1967 (in Stories and Texts for Nothing in the United States and No’s Knife in the United Kingdom). As a stand-​alone piece in English, the flexi disc marks the first appearance (or utterance) of “Text 8” on its own; as a recording made in London and released in New York, it moreover divulges the London–New York axis. It was not the first appearance of the text to be directed to an Anglophone audience, however, for it had been included, in French, in the anthology Monologues de Minuit published in New York in 1965. Bringing together several short works from the stable of Éditions de Minuit authors (Beckett, Alain Robbe-​Grillet, Claude Simon, Robert Pinget, Michel Butor, and Nathalie Sarraute), the collection prints each work along with an explanatory introduction (in English) and translations and annotations of particularly difficult or idiomatic constructions. In addition, it includes a vocabulary list at the back of the book—​the first two entries of which are abattoir and abimer, “slaughterhouse” and “to ruin.” This pedagogical apparatus

demonstrates that the collection was intended as a kind of textbook for an audience of advanced learners, and, as such, the book raises a number of issues clustered around conditions of mediation and access. Two particular glosses illustrate this point, one by its absence and one by its presence, both of them working in relation to La Dernière Bande, Beckett’s translation of Krapp’s Last Tape. The first centers on the editorial choice not to annotate the French title of the play—​literally “the last tape,” but also “the final erection”—​ an omission occasioned, presumably, out of concern for youthful sensibilities, slaughterhouses and ruin notwithstanding. The second involves the size of Krapp’s white boots. Given as “du 48 au moins” in the text, this detail is translated as “size 10 at least” in the note, which goes on to state parenthetically that “shoe sizes run differently in France.”19 Taken together, this annotated primer complicates the conventional sense of Beckett still often handed down, as a figure whose works are removed from the world of vocabulary lists, public libraries, or flexi discs. It does so precisely because of its orientation toward a particular audience, one requiring a specific form of address meant to enable access. As a point along Beckett’s trajectory, Monologues de Minuit might best be figured by its vocabulary list’s third entry: abord, translated as “access, approach.” This set of relations comes into play with the flexi disc. It was released in Aspen: The Magazine in a Box, in a double issue devoted to minimalism published in late 1967.20 A self-​described “three-​dimensional magazine,” Aspen existed for seven years (1965–71), publishing only ten issues in that

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time, but achieving a prominence that belied its irregular appearance. Despite its name and initial aim of promoting the Aspen lifestyle, the magazine was published in New York. Its founding editor, Phyllis Johnson, was committed to presenting a magazine that was something more than simply “a bunch of pages stapled together,” as she put it in her editorial to the first issue; to that end, each issue came in a box that contained printed matter (essays, poems, musical scores, diagrams, advertisements), cardboard sculptures, Super 8 films, and flexi discs, its packaging as much a statement of the issue’s theme as were its contents. In this respect, the minimalism double issue is the most celebrated of the magazine’s run, its guest editor, Brian O’Doherty, describing its contents as “1 box 1 book 4 films 5 records 8 boards 10 printed data” or “28 = 1 + 4 + 5 + 8 + 10.”21 Dedicated to Mallarmé, it came in a white box eight inches high, eight inches wide, and two inches deep, split at the middle so that it became two identical halves when open. O’Doherty arranged the items in the box as though in a filing cabinet, its numbered contents listed by title and artist, genre, and format; it also included a final section in which advertisements were located.22 In addition to Beckett’s flexi disc, the issue included works by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, Alain Robbe-​Grillet, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Sol LeWitt, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, and Merce Cunningham, among others. Appearing at the height of raging debates over modernism, minimalism, and aesthetic autonomy—​Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” his scalding assault

on minimalism, had been published several months earlier—​Aspen 5+6 instantiated in its very form an insistence on the liberating instability of aesthetic judgment.23 This insistence did not necessarily sync up with access. As a format, Beckett’s flexi disc exemplifies this potential disjunction. Read by MacGowran at Beckett’s request, “Text 8” was recorded in order to coincide with the publication of the English translation of Texts for Nothing. At one level, then, the Aspen flexi disc functioned in the much the same way that most flexi discs did: as inexpensively produced promotional “extras” or enticements, circulated primarily as inserts to fanzines and popular music magazines. As very thin sheets of vinyl, they were prone to begin degrading after fifty or so plays, a relationship falling somewhere between ephemerality and planned obsolescence. At the same time, the Aspen flexi disc is distinctly odd by the format conventions of the day, even as it gestures at them. Like the other flexi discs in the double issue, it is an eight-​inch disc. Whereas most seven-​inches of the time had large spindle holes (so that they could be played in self-​loading jukeboxes), it has a small spindle hole, giving it the look of an EP or LP, although the lack of any textual apparatus (such as liner notes) makes it more akin to a single. Unlike the other flexi discs in the double issue, the most remarkable feature of Beckett’s flexi disc is that it was made to be played at 16⅔ rpm. Deemed unsuitable for the high-​fidelity reproduction of music, this speed was used for literary readings and other spoken performances made for the visually impaired, since the slower rate of rotation meant that more content could be included

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on a disc, as a matter of physical compression.24 While the speed was an option on turntables made into the seventies for use in schools and libraries, it was increasingly unavailable on models marketed for home listening. Did many of Aspen’s subscribers thus listen to the flexi disc at 33 rpm, at double speed? Did they bring it to a local library in order to hear the recorded voice at its proper speed on a public turntable? In an early review of the double issue, these practical concerns were at the fore: “I, for instance, had to arrange a film showing in my school in order to see the films. . . . I had to borrow a phonograph with extra-​slow time speed in order to hear Gabo reading his manifesto [on the flip side of the Beckett flexi disc] and Duchamp reading his prescription for an anti–Bouvard and Pécuchet dictionary. And I had to wrap up the essays and ‘data’ (as the work by the visual ‘artists’ in the box is called) and take them on a train to read.”25 Other subscribers just as surely did not—​because they could not—​listen. Deriving from the place of the media object and its users within a world of relations, these alternating possibilities are the consternation behind the format. In this text, the speaker broods over the relationship of words and silence and its impact on his own present, opening with a concise report of the experience of this condition: “Only the words break the silence, all other sounds have ceased. If I were silent I’d hear nothing. But if I were silent the other sounds would start again, those to which the words have made me deaf, or which have really ceased.”26 Leading the speaker to ask questions of where he is and how he arrived there, this auditory conundrum is visualized

as a manipulation of voice and a displacement in space: “Now is here and here there is no frankness, all I say will be false and to begin with not said by me, here I’m a ventriloquist’s dummy, I feel nothing, say nothing, he holds me in his arms and moves my lips with a string, with a fish-​hook, no, no need of lips, all is dark, there is no one, what’s the matter with my head, I must have left it in Ireland, in a saloon, it must be there still, lying on the bar, it’s all it deserved.”27 As a ventriloquist’s dummy, this speaker imagines himself only as a thrown voice, a voice projected beyond its proper time and place, to “here.” Steven Connor has written that ventriloquism is “associated with prophecy, or the breaking in of one time upon another, the sundering together of times,” even as it “also names a failed promise, the imposture of false prophecy, which we, whoever the we may be at the time, are no longer likely to fall for.”28 In questioning his head, this speaker dismisses ventriloquism as the loss of vocal control, but without disavowing the promise of cross-​fading times. This ambivalence is amplified when he hits upon the figure partly corresponding to the head left behind in Ireland: But what is this I see, and how, a white stick and an ear-​trumpet, where, Place de la République, at pernod time, let me look closer at this, it’s perhaps me at last. The trumpet sailing on at ear level, suddenly resembles a steam-​whistle, of the kind thanks to which my steamers forge forcefully through the fog. . . . I can also just discern, with a final effort of will, a bowler hat which seems to my sorrow a sardonic synthesis of all those that never fitted me and, at the other extremity, similarly

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suspicious, a complete pair of brown boots lacerated and gaping. . . . The level of the hat, and consequently of the trumpet, hold out some hope for me as a dying dwarf or at least a hunchback.29

Upon closer inspection, this Parisian beggar proves, however, to be as inaccurate a figure or embodiment of the speaker as the ventriloquist’s dummy, even as “Text 8” ends with the speaker affirming that he knows only that he must continue to beg “another alm” in “another dark.”30 The conclusion of “Text 8” nevertheless leaves unresolved the matter of the head abandoned in Ireland, which, unlike the conjectural embodiments of the speaker, is not discounted as a purely fictive projection. It is worth considering, then, how the flexi disc might suggest a possible response to this seeming impasse. With its references to Ireland and France, to the left behind and the begging, the text bears an arresting relation to “The Capital of Ruins,” a script Beckett had written for Radio Éireann in 1946. Although it seems never to have been broadcast, the talk recounts his observations of the Irish Red Cross Hospital in Saint-​Lô, where he served as quartermaster and translator between August 1945 and the summer of 1946.31 In it, Beckett juxtaposes the utter devastation of the French town and “the Irish bringing gifts,” alluding to the difficulties of encounter and understanding that existed between local residents and hospital staff: “I suspect that our pains were those inherent in the simple and necessary and yet so unattainable proposition that their way of being we, was not our way and that our way of being they, was not their way.”32 With the impediments

to cultural understanding represented here through the impediments to identifying with pronominal designations, this description is certainly of a piece with the dilemma faced by the speaker of “Text 8.” More to the point, however, it articulates a set of social interactions then moving into a new phase. This transitional moment is the moment in which the possibility of mutual exchange can be recognized, in which the things and conditions left behind nonetheless remain not only residually operative, but also fundamentally informing. The talk ends with this sense of transition: [The Irish Hospital] will continue to discharge its function long after the Irish are gone and their names forgotten. But I think that to the end of its hospital days it will be called the Irish Hospital, and after that the huts, when they have been turned into dwellings, the Irish huts. I mention this possibility, in the hope that it will give general satisfaction. And having done so I may perhaps venture to mention another, more remote but perhaps of greater import in certain quarters, I mean the possibility that some of those [Irish] who were in Saint-​Lô will come home realising that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and sense of a time-​honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again. These will have been in France.33

Despite the possibility that the talk was never broadcast and the fact that Beckett claimed in the early eighties to have no memory of the script, it is critical to recognize that his trajectory as an author passed through this point.

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As a consequence, the recorded reading of “Text 8” can be heard to give voice to this moment twenty years later, not as the projection, or attack, of recorded vocalization, but as its decay. Upon playback of a flexi disc issued in New York whose grooves bear a recording made in London, an Irish voice is produced that narrates the effects of a residual Ireland on an imagined scene in Paris. While this condition is liable to be understood as simply a representation of Beckett’s biography, the flexi disc itself, as a specific sonic format, broaches the question of mediation. For in the departing landscape of relations it articulates, a critical link once again becomes audible. When de Valera’s speeches at the League of Nations were published as Peace and War in 1944, the booklet’s title page printed this notice: “By direction of Mr. de Valera all royalties from the sales of this book are to be paid to the Irish Red Cross Society, Cumann Croise Deirge na hEireann.”34 If it is too much to say that de Valera served as Beckett’s patron, this connection between them does underscore how distinctly Irish political experiences of worldliness, through intensely mediated channels, informed the character of Irish literary space even in its most autonomous zones. More emphatically, this link affirms the communicative function of social relations, what de Valera had named as “dream” in the St. Patrick’s Day broadcast and Beckett twice named as “possibility” in “The Capital of Ruins.” A great gap certainly exists between “cosy homesteads” and “humanity in ruins,” but each formulation speaks in opposition to a world of appalling disquiet. For this reason, the cross-​fade of their shared frequencies

should not be compressed into nothingness. This recognition is crucial, as John Guillory notes: Let us refrain from the temptation to make this question [of the difference between representation and mediation] disappear by resorting to the high theoretical move of reducing mediation to the process of signification, conceived yet again as the undoing of representation or reference. Grasping the nature of mediation depends in my view rather on affirming the communicative function in social relations, that is, the possibility of communication. The assertion of the possible rejects its alternative, the actual, in recognition of the inherent difficulty of communication and the diversity of its strategies and modes. The proper theoretical context for conceptualizing mediation is therefore the process of communication. In that context, the enabling condition of mediation is the interposition of distance (spatial, temporal, or even notional) between the terminal poles of the communicative process (these can be persons but also now machines, even persons and machines). Distanciation is another way of looking at the operation of transmission.35

In moving through evacuated fields, unoccupied zones, and departing landscapes, this book has followed from a great distance the objects of its study, convinced of the need to attend to actual conditions of communication in all their frequently grim variety. In one way, this effort is an act of reception, one speaking to its own position of access and the world of relations in which it is embedded. As a series of case studies on the formation of “received knowledge,” this book has underscored some of the lines connecting the priorities and exigencies of an earlier moment

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to what now too often goes unquestioned. In another, perhaps more important way, the book refuses to allow its position to obviate the questions its objects pose about access and to render archaic or obsolete the problem

of information for which they are a receipt. The possibility of happiness is the flip side of the difficulty of communication. To be “unremembering” of this relationship is to have lost track of your head.

153

NOTES

Introduction 1. My own secondhand copy of this book came with a typed note, dated August 1947, tucked inside its cover: on Government Information Bureau stationery, the note is from Frank Gallagher, the agency’s director, to W. Harold Dalgliesh, professor of history and political science at the University of Utah, acknowledging an unspecified request for “regular publications.” Dalgliesh was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 2. De Valera, Ireland’s Stand, iii. 3. De Valera, Speeches and Statements, 466. 4. Reconsideration of this sense of the speech has accelerated in the wake of the Irish economy’s implosion; see Ferriter, Judging Dev. 5. De Valera, Speeches and Statements, 469. 6. De Valera, Ireland’s Stand, 21. 7. De Valera, Speeches and Statements, 469. 8. Gorham, Forty Years of Irish Broadcasting, 123. 9. Williams, Politics of Modernism, 128. 10. For a powerful elucidation of this position, see Clear, “Women in de Valera’s Ireland.” 11. Morash, History of the Media in Ireland, 150. 12. Eagleton, Against the Grain, 73. 13. Keogh, “Citizenship,” 59. For an overview of this law and some of the restrictive amendments quickly attached to it, see McDonagh, “Freedom of Information in Ireland.” In addition, see Komito, Information Revolution and Ireland, 85–88. 14. Keogh, “Citizenship,” 62. 15. Ibid., 63–64. 16. O’Brien, Irish Governments and the Guardianship of Historical Records, 12, 14–15. 17. Keogh, “Citizenship,” 71. 18. Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland, 235. 19. Morash, History of the Media in Ireland, 96.

20. Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, 30. 21. Ibid., 43. 22. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 87–88. 23. Ibid., 12. In a savvy reading of Casanova’s “paradigm” as an invitation to Irish criticism, Michael Malouf argues that its strength lies in suggesting new possibilities for Irish comparativism: “It is in this suspension of knowability of what is ‘Irish’ about Irish literature that marks the promise of what we might gather from a renewed Irish comparativism. Thus, rather than returning us to a ‘revised’ form of canonical knowledge, a new comparative methodology should put that knowledge into the world, even if it is at the risk of defamiliarizing those national identities they help sustain.” This suggests an admirable goal, so long as it is accompanied by a suspension of knowability about what is “literature.” See Malouf, “Problem with Paradigms,” 66. 24. Mattelart, Mapping World Communication, viii. 25. Ibid., ix. 26. Ibid., 241–42. 27. Mandel, Meaning of the Second World War, 85. 28. Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, xiii. 29. Ibid., 10. 30. Ibid. 31. Joyce, Ulysses, 200. 32. For a useful, if somewhat credulous, survey of this elision, see Gleick, The Information, 398–412. 33. At some level, this difference corresponds to Fritz Machlup’s “double meaning” of information, as a “state of knowing” (socially shared meaning) and as “that which is known” (discrete items), although an Irish inflection renders these conditions in more ambivalent terms. See Machlup, Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, vi, 13–15.

Notes to Pages 13–26

34. Gitelman, Always Already New, 12. 35. Wollaeger, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, 26, 24. 36. Williams, Television, 90. Elsewhere, he writes, “New technology is itself a product of a particular social system, and will be developed as an apparently autonomous process of innovation only to the extent that we fail to identify and challenge its real agencies” (135). 37. Raber, Problem of Information, 19. 38. Brennan, Wars of Position, 301n52. 39. Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 119.

Chapter 1 1. Crowe et al., Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, 4:352. 2. McMahon, Republicans and Imperialists, 32. Several years earlier, Thomas had referred to de Valera as “the Spanish onion in the Irish stew,” a quip that suggests his predisposition in such matters. 3. The founding study is Curtis, Apes and Angels; a more recent survey can be found in de Nie, Eternal Paddy. In the present context, the latter reproduces a suggestive cartoon titled “Natural Allies,” published in January 1868 during the aftermath of Fenian bombings in England. It shows the deviously grinning figures of “Abyssinia” and “Irish Republic” standing arm-in-​arm, each gesturing over his respective shoulder: “Abyssinia” points to a scene of rampaging natives, “Irish Republic” to a heap of smoldering ruins labeled “Clerkenwell” (150). 4. Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia, 40–41. 5. Kennedy, Ireland and the League of Nations, 225. 6. Zimmern, League of Nations, 431–32. These treaties regulated the size of national navies; the United States, Britain, Japan, France, and Italy were signatories. 7. Salerno, Vital Crossroads, 213. 8. Saerchinger, “Radio as a Political Weapon,” 253. 9. Ibid., 253–54. 10. Ibid., 254. 11. Rolo, Radio Goes to War, 234. Medium wave signals behave in the same manner as shortwave signals at night, but still require much stronger transmitters to cover comparable distances. 12. Saerchinger, Hello America! 218. As a pretense for invasion, the Italians would protest the absence of Italian technical advisers, including radio engineers,

employed in Ethiopia: “Even the Marconigram station built by the Ansaldo firm . . . was entrusted, when completed, to foreign engineers, a Frenchman and a Swede.” See Memorandum of the Italian Government, 11–12n1. This station figures in Waugh’s list of Ethiopian betrayals of Italian generosity: “The construction of a wireless station at Addis Ababa was undertaken by an Italian company, heavily subsidised by the Italian government, but on completion was handed over to the management of a Swede and a Frenchman.” See Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia, 41. 13. Briggs, Golden Age of Wireless, 403. 14. Grandin, Political Use of the Radio, 7. 15. Pedersen, “Back to the League of Nations,” 1113. 16. Ibid., 1112. 17. Kennedy, Ireland and the League of Nations, 35–36. 18. Sandford, Lion of Judah Hath Prevailed, 49. 19. Walters, History of the League of Nations, 258. 20. Sandford, Lion of Judah Hath Prevailed, 50. 21. Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century, 177, 239. 22. On this discourse and its resurgence in the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, see Hogg, African Slave Trade and Its Suppression, xi. Liberating the Irish people from the barbarism of their leaders was, of course, among the prime justifications for early English incursions into Ireland. 23. Italo-​Ethiopian Dispute, 24. 24. Ciò che Ginevra non vuol vedere, n.p. 25. Baravelli, L’Ultimo Baluardo, 28–29. An English translation was published as The Last Stronghold of Slavery: What Abyssinia Is. These texts differ mostly in tone: the English translation slightly moderates the blunt Italian version. 26. Baravelli, Last Stronghold of Slavery, 64–65. 27. Ibid., 70. In the Italian version, this “New Italy” is directly specified as “Mussolini’s Italy.” It concludes with a strident final sentence absent from the English text: “The six hundred thousand dead of the Great War and the fallen [caduti] of the fascist Revolution authorize it [Mussolini’s Italy] to be the only judge of its rights and duties.” See Baravelli, L’Ultimo Baluardo, 78. 28. Qtd. in Bendiner, Time for Angels, 372. 29. For the Maffey Report, see Medlicott, Dakin, and Lambert, Documents of British Foreign Policy, 743–77. Maffey would later serve as the UK representative to Éire during the Second World War. 30. Waley, British Public Opinion, 118. 31. Work, Ethiopia, 340.

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Notes to Pages 26–42

32. Du Bois, “Inter-​Racial Implications,” 83. 33. Ibid., 92. 34. Kennedy, Ireland and the League of Nations, 223. 35. Farrell, “De Valera,” 43. 36. During these years, the Irish delegation was headed first by Sean Lester, then by Francis Cremins; among its other members, the poet Denis Devlin served in Geneva during the Ethiopia crisis. For a personnel listing, see Kennedy, Ireland and the League of Nations, 267–70. 37. Crowe et al., Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, 4:xv. 38. Saerchinger, Hello America! ix. 39. Ibid., 91–92. 40. Ibid., 100. 41. For example, see Ryan, Unique Dictator, 9–10: “Circumstances and virtues of his have made him a dictator, and one of the best of present-​day dictators in his personality, ideals and methods.” 42. Crowe et al., Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, 4:328. 43. Ibid., 329. 44. Ibid. 45. De Valera, Peace and War, 41–42. 46. Ibid., 43. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 52–53. De Valera would pledge Irish support for and participation in military sanctions, and perhaps even action, undertaken by the League to enforce the stand against Italy. See O’Halpin, Defending Ireland, 135. Even earlier, he had offered a contingent of Irish soldiers to aid in League-​mandated oversight of the Saar Plebiscite in January 1935. See Kennedy, “Prologue to Peacekeeping.” 49. McMahon, “Irish Free State Newspapers,” 376. 50. Ibid., 370. 51. De Valera, Peace and War, 55. 52. Qtd. in Chukumba, Big Powers Against Ethiopia, 433. This source quotes the English translation of the speech published by the League. 53. De Valera, Peace and War, 54. 54. Ibid., 59. 55. Qtd. in Barker, Civilizing Mission, 296. 56. Kennedy, Ireland and the League of Nations, 202–25. 57. Starkie, Waveless Plain, 496–97. 58. Ibid., 443–45. 59. On the Giornata della fede, see Falasca-​ Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 180–81; for the directive banning local (campanilismo), provincial, and regional

affiliations, see Cannistraro, La Fabbrica del Consenso, 441. 60. Biographical information is drawn from Sagarra, “Starkie, Walter,” 22. 61. Starkie, “Whither is Ireland Heading”; Wills, That Neutral Island, 347–48. 62. McMahon, “Irish Free State Newspapers,” 380–81. 63. Qtd. in ibid., 380. 64. Keogh, Ireland and Europe, 58. 65. Starkie, Waveless Plain, 502. 66. At the same time, his professional credentials are crucial to the book’s apparatus of authority: most notably, Starkie is listed on its title page as “Walter Starkie, Litt.D.” 67. Starkie, Waveless Plain, 436. 68. MacLiammóir, All for Hecuba, 274. 69. Lyon, “Gadze Modernism,” 518. 70. Not all forms or manifestations of “traditional” communality meet this standard: for example, he dismisses the Mafia, which Mussolini had decreed a remnant of disunity and backwardness. See Starkie, Waveless Plain, 251–67. 71. Ibid., 156–57. 72. Duggan, Concise History of Italy, 217–18. 73. Cannistraro, “Radio in Fascist Italy,” 135–36. See also Monticone, Fascismo al Microfono, 87–117. 74. Monteleone, Storia della Radio, 53. 75. Starkie, Waveless Plain, 157. 76. Ibid., 387. 77. Cannistraro, “Radio in Fascist Italy,” 132. 78. On these mediated campaigns, see Falasca-​ Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 148–82; and Ben-​Ghiat, Fascist Modernities. Cannistraro notes that “Mussolini’s greatest triumph of radio oratory in those years was his ‘Battle of Grain’ speech of 10 October 1926, heard simultaneously all over the nation.” See “Radio in Fascist Italy,” 131. 79. Starkie, Waveless Plain, 387–88. 80. Ibid., 388. 81. Ibid. 82. Ibid., 390–91. 83. Ibid., 391. 84. Saerchinger, Hello America! 81. 85. Starkie, Waveless Plain, 392–93. 86. Ibid., 393. 87. Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat, 353. 88. Qtd. in Starkie, Waveless Plain, 440–41. For the complete speech, see Mussolini, Opera Omnia, 158–60. 89. Starkie, Waveless Plain, 441. 90. On the radio interface, see Fickers, “Visibly Audible.”

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Notes to Pages 43–53

91. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 299. 92. Qtd. in McCormack, Blood Kindred, 454n23. 93. Starkie, Scholars and Gypsies, 263. On the relation of D’Annunzio and Mussolini in a wider ambit, see Campbell, Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi, 31–66.

Chapter 2 1. On close reading, see English, “Literary Studies,” 129–31. On cosmopolitanism, see Lyon, “Cosmopolitanism and Modernism.” 2. Brennan, Wars of Position, 205. This deployment is especially apparent in following a description of cosmopolitanism as a “fundamentally ambivalent”—​rather than ambiguous—“phenomenon.” 3. Lyon, “Cosmopolitanism and Modernism,” 408n7. 4. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 154. 5. Ibid., 21. 6. Ibid., 20–21. 7. Ibid., 23. 8. From a vast literature on this topic, I have found particularly useful Baynor and Meagher, New York Irish; and O’Brien, “Transatlantic Connections.” 9. Qtd. in Filreis, Counter-​Revolution of the Word, 22. 10. Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, 10. 11. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 24. 12. See Agnani, “On the Purported Death of Paris.” In an essay published after The World Republic of Letters, Casanova is more explicit about her engagement with postcolonial criticism, which she sees as too ready to abandon literary specificity to political necessity: “Post-​colonialism posits a direct link between the two supposedly incommensurate domains. From this, it moves to an external criticism that runs the risk of reducing the literary to the political, imposing a series of annexations and short-​circuits, and often passing in silence over the actual aesthetic, formal or stylistic characteristics that actually ‘make’ literature.” Casanova, “Literature as a World,” 71. 13. Cleary, “World Literary System,” 208–9. In this context, a point Cleary makes elsewhere is worth noting: “Where both [revisionist scholarship and the most poststructuralist versions of postcolonial theory] converge, despite methodological differences, is in their tendency to regard nearly all forms of Irish nationalism as inherently reactionary.” See Cleary, Outrageous Fortune, 3n2. 14. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 318.

15. Ibid., 154–55. 16. Boyd, “Ku Klux Kriticism.” The essay ends by suggesting that an ethnically and racially varied readership is the best resource for American writers: “It may well be that precisely between this new literature and this new generation [of non-Anglo-​Saxon, Protestant Americans] there exists that relation based upon mutual interpretation and comprehension which is the only possible relation between the artist and the community” (320). 17. On Boyd’s career, see Kiely, “Go-​Between.” 18. Boyd and Sumner, Debate, 18. 19. Ibid., 20–21. 20. Ibid., 21. James Branch Cabell’s satiric novel Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice (1919) was prosecuted (unsuccessfully) for obscenity, on the recommendation of the Society. 21. Ibid., 42. Sumner goes on: “Now, the fault is not with the American writer, where there is fault, but with certain translators, publishers and book sellers. You will find that probably eighty per cent of the books which have ever received attention under this law have been books of foreign origin. Very recent cases uphold that proposition” (43). 22. His legal career is now known for his unsuccessful defense of the Little Review in 1920, when the Society for the Suppression of Vice urged its prosecution for obscenity for publishing the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses. 23. Quinn’s most institutionalized modernist legacy is in the field of visual art. When his collection was auctioned, pieces he first collected became centerpieces at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Albright-​Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. See Reid, Man from New York; and Braddock, Collecting as Modernist Practice. 24. Qtd. in Tansill, America and the Fight for Irish Freedom, 127. For reasons that will be clearer later in this chapter, it is noteworthy that Tansill thanks George Viereck in his preface (xi). 25. Glazer and Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot, 247–48. Their next paragraph recounts the disagreement between Quinn and Devoy over Synge’s play, although they mistake its Dublin and New York openings. 26. In light of this sort of judgment, Quinn’s acid anti-​Semitism cannot go unnoted. 27. Qtd. in Brown, Politics of Irish Literature, 364. 28. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 31. 29. Guillory, “Memo and Modernity,” 109. 30. Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 31. 31. Ibid., 656n4.

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Notes to Pages 53–69

32. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, xix. 33. Macpherson, Poems of Ossian, 314. 34. Guillory, “Memo and Modernity,” 110. 35. Jameson, “Reflections in Conclusion,” 206–8. 36. O’Sheel, Blossomy Bough, 61. 37. Kelleher, “Matthew Arnold and the Celtic Revival,” 216–17. 38. Ibid., 217. 39. [O’Sheel], Catechism of Balaam, Jr., 2. 40. Ibid., 3. 41. Ibid., 13. 42. [O’Sheel], Trip Through Headline Land, 8–9. 43. On this distinction, see Bennett, Formalism and Marxism, 129–31. 44. On Boni and Liveright, see Egleston, House of Boni and Liveright. 45. Travis, “Books as Weapons,” 354–55. 46. O’Sheel, Jealous of Dead Leaves, 12. His autograph revisions are reproduced in Winchell, “Shaemas O’Sheel,” 4. 47. “Linguistic code” refers to words on the page, while “bibliographic code” denotes the physical characteristics of the book’s pages and of the book itself. See McGann, Textual Condition, 56–62. 48. Bernays ends this book with an echo of T. S. Eliot’s description five years earlier of the “mythical method”: “Propaganda will never die. Intelligent men must realize that propaganda is the modern instrument by which they can fight for productive ends and help bring order out of chaos.” Bernays, Propaganda, 159. 49. On Viereck’s biography here, see Johnson, George Sylvester Viereck, 21–63. 50. Ibid., 68–69. For O’Sheel’s involvement in anti-​British publishing activities in the United States during World War I, see Carroll, American Opinion and the Irish Question. 51. Saint-​Amour, Copywrights, 132. 52. O’Sheel, announcement and order form for The Antigone of Sophokles, n.p. A copy of this text is held in the Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, State University of New York at Buffalo. 53. Sophokles, Antigone, xi–xii. When the play was collected in a posthumous selection of O’Sheel’s works, this paragraph was silently left out of the introduction, which is otherwise reproduced in full. Since this later edition was not printed in Vogue, this editorial decision makes practical sense; but the fact that it was not printed in Vogue also points to the historical importance of the use of the typeface in the production of the privately printed first edition. See O’Sheel, Antigone, and Selected Poems.

54. Elsewhere in his introduction to the “redaction,” O’Sheel notes that every major publisher to whom he sent the manuscript turned it down, forcing him to settle on private publication. Similarly, he mentions some of the other writing he was engaged in as he worked on his version of Antigone: “Being a free-​ lance hack writer at the time, I did the antigone just after completing a book setting forth how the world’s greatest life insurance agent wrote sixteen million dollars worth of business in a year, and just before starting the first draft for a Code of American Industry to be sponsored by a committee of the Taylor Society.” Sophokles, Antigone, viii–ix. 55. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture, 11. See also Sproule, Propaganda and Democracy; and Gary, Nervous Liberals. 56. Viereck, Spreading the Germs of Hate, xii–xiii. 57. Qtd. in Viereck, My Flesh and Blood, 3–4. 58. O’Sheel, “It’s Happening in Ireland,” 13. 59. “Editors’ Note,” 13. 60. O’Sheel, “Joe’s Son John,” 19. 61. On the German Library of Information, see Lavine and Wechsler, War Propaganda and the United States; and Rogge, Official German Report. Rogge’s study is an expanded version of his report to the Department of Justice in 1946. 62. See Carlson, Under Cover, 123–27. In order to expose the house’s motivations and workings, Carlson posed as an isolationist and was hired as its New York sales representative. 63. Strempel, “Confessions,” 219–20. 64. Elaborating on Weber’s account of modern disenchantment, Jameson defines the “vanishing mediator” as fundamental to rationalization: “All social institutions describe a fatal trajectory from the traditional to the rationalized, passing through a crucial transitional stage which is the moment—​the vanishing mediation—​of so-​ called charisma.” Jameson, Political Unconscious, 249. In addition, see his “Vanishing Mediator.” 65. Strempel, “Confessions,” 220. 66. Schaeffer, Englands Gewaltherrschaft. 67. For a comparative survey of these series that examines their bibliographic relations as a feature of their dissemination, see Taube, “Publishing Activities.” Taube worked at the Library of Congress. 68. Here, Viereck furnishes an example: when Flanders Hall was exposed, he was tried and convicted in 1942 for failing to register as the principal of a foreign government, and spent seven years in prison. 69. O’Sheel, Seven Periods of Irish History. 70. Mulhern, “Ideology and Literary Form,” 85n5. 71. O’Malley, “Publishing History,” 138.

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Notes to Pages 69–79

72. Schaeffer, Englands Gewaltherrschaft, 40–48. 73. O’Sheel, Seven Periods of Irish History, 107–8. 74. O’Sheel was centrally involved, for example, in preparing two notable left-​wing wartime poetry collections: Joy Davidman’s War Poems of the United Nations and Thomas Yoseloff’s Seven Poets in Search of an Answer. In his introduction to the latter, O’Sheel wrote, “What more is needed? These things, I think: to stand less on the defensive, to attack more and on more fronts; to postpone the threnody and sound the clarion-​call; to learn to move men to anger and action, even at the sacrifice of analysis; and to find ways to cooperate as a phalanx where now each poet fights as a lone partisan” (n.p.). 75. When he died in 1954, O’Sheel seems to have been writing a history of the Irish in the United States; see Winchell, “Shaemas O’Sheel,” 4. His published statements on this topic are sour attacks on the Scotch-​ Irish; see O’Sheel, “Irish in America,” 501; and Adamic, Nation of Nations, 308–11. 76. Frye, “Introduction,” xxvii.

Chapter 3 1. The Phoney War was the name given to the first months of the Second World War, between the declaration of war in September 1939 and the German offensive against France and the Low Countries in May 1940. The French called this period the drôle de guerre, while the Germans referred to it as the Sitzkrieg. 2. Princeton Listening Center Records, box 15, Princeton University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library (hereafter PLCR). 3. PLCR, box 19. 4. Rolo, Radio Goes to War, 89. 5. Paxton, Vichy France, 18. 6. Guéhenno, Journal des Années Noires, 15. Between June 26 and July 4, 1940, the Germans forbade broadcasting by French stations unless under direct control of the occupying forces. See Brooks, British Propaganda to France, 125. 7. Auden, English Auden, 245. 8. Cowley, “Poet of this War,” 3. This collection was published in 1946 by Pilot Press of London as Aragon: Poet of Resurgent France. 9. Ibid., 8. 10. Ibid., 15, 7. 11. Ibid., 6–7. Cowley would publish the revised edition of Exile’s Return in 1951. There he makes similar arguments about repatriated American modernists,

recasting from a postwar vantage point the meaning of the thirties within literary modernism. See Filreis, Counter-​Revolution, 88–93. 12. Sapiro, Guerre des Écrivains, 9. 13. Ibid., 22. 14. See King, “Language and Silence,” 227–38; and Riding, And the Show Went On. 15. King, “Language and Silence,” 229. 16. For a bilingual edition, see Vercors, Silence of the Sea. The translation was made in 1944 by Cyril Connolly. For Bruller’s later reflections, see Vercors, Battle of Silence. 17. On this general shift, see Riding, And the Show Went On, esp. chap. 6. 18. See Simonin, Éditions de Minuit. 19. Qtd. in ibid., 393. 20. The most concise and reliable source for biographical information is Olivier Barbarant’s excellent critical material (introduction, chronology, and notes) in Aragon, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes. In addition, see Adereth, Aragon. 21. Macanulty, “On the Pact,” 71. 22. Kedward, Occupied France, 53. 23. Ibid., 53–54. 24. Olivier Barbarant, notes to Le Crève-​Coeur, in Aragon, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes, 1431. 25. This description comes in the essay “La Leçon de Ribérac,” which was appended to Les Yeux d’Elsa (1942), Aragon’s second wartime volume; see Aragon, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes, 821. Such linguistic resistance was not, it should be stressed, solely the province of poets or writers. One everyday example was a student demonstration in Paris in November 1940, in which each protestor carried two poles, or deux gaules, thereby declaring support for de Gaulle’s call for the French to continue fighting; see King, “Language and Silence,” 227. 26. As will be seen in the next section, this mode of writing was not always well received in Britain, where some felt that it romanticized the war. This sense of the war as mediated by the figure of the troubadour’s obscure art provides a specific referent for the traitor Robert’s objection that “this is not a troubadours’ war” in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day. See Bowen, Heat of the Day, 310. 27. See Sapiro, Guerre des Écrivains, chaps. 7 and 8. 28. The essay did not appear in its first edition, but, at Aragon’s insistence, was included in the second. See Aragon, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes, 1455. In the many varying editions published outside France during the war, the essay is frequently absent.

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Notes to Pages 79–86

29. Ibid., 730. 30. Following Apollinaire, Aragon employed a revised distinction between masculine and feminine rhymes, so that their poetic value lay in their sounding qualities irrespective of their spelling. As such, he can rhyme repose with roses (feminine) and joues with Anjou (masculine) in “Les Lilas et Les Roses.” For helpful explanation and discussion, see Adereth, Aragon, 53–70; and Higgins, Anthology, 31–44. 31. Aragon, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes, 729. 32. Ibid., 729–30. 33. During the war, Aragon published six volumes of poems, as well as essays and stories. 34. Ibid., 701. 35. Written later and published underground, Aragon’s short story “The Good Neighbors” dramatizes the necessity of listening to the BBC French service. 36. Aragon, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes, 720–21. Written in Carcassonne in the unoccupied zone in September 1940, the poem had first appeared with three other poems in Fontaine in the spring of 1941. 37. See Aragon, Oeuvres Poétiques Complètes, 1450n1. In a figurative register, the word can be used to describe a “blocked thought” or “stalled engine.” 38. Kedward, Resistance in Vichy France, 193. 39. Brooks, British Propaganda to France, 4. 40. Qtd. in Briggs, War of Words, 235. Within the Overseas Division, the European Service (including the French section) was subject to more direct government supervision than was broadcasting to the Empire. See Potter, Broadcasting Empire, 117. 41. Deer, Culture in Camouflage, 7. 42. Connolly, “Introduction,” Le Crève-​Coeur, 11. For the two letters, see “Letter from France”; and “Letter from France—​II.” 43. For a wartime publication, this journal had immense print runs, reaching into the tens of thousands; see Flood, “André Labarthe and Raymond Aron.” It was also reproduced as miniaturized leaflets by the Political Warfare Executive and dropped into France, where it circulated through Resistance networks. Drawing on surviving PWE documents, Brooks suggests that “at least 26,000 copies” were distributed in France; see Brooks, British Propaganda to France, 135–41. 44. Aragon, “Three Poems from ‘Crève-​Coeur.’ ” The three poems are “Le Temps des Mots Croisés,” “Les Lilas et les Roses,” and “Zone Libre.” 45. Connolly, “Comment,” 77 (August 1942). Part of “Zone Libre” had appeared in Horizon in June, when the journal published the second installment of the translation of André Gide’s “Imaginary Interviews”:

it quotes the final nine lines, which are given in French. See Gide, “Imaginary Interviews (Concluded),” 405. In turn, Gide’s pieces were discussed by Harold Nicolson later that month in The Spectator: he quotes the final five lines of “Zone Libre” in French, but seems to attribute them to Gide. Connolly’s friend, Nicolson was on the BBC’s board of directors, having just come from the Ministry of Information. See Nicolson, “Marginal Comment,” 601. 46. Connolly, “Comment,” 225 (October 1942). 47. See Aragon, Crève-​Coeur (London, 1942); Aragon, Crève-​Coeur (New York, 1942[?]); and Aragon, Crève-​Coeur (New York, 1943). For full publication information, see the bibliography. By 1944, editions were published in London and New York that packaged Le Crève-​Coeur with Les Yeux d’Elsa in a single volume. 48. This argument is made especially evident by a wartime impression of Le Crève-​Coeur printed in Montreal. Whereas the other versions of Aragon’s book are distinct, re-​set texts, the Canadian text directly reproduces the Paris edition (including its cover and front and back matter) and looks like a pirated edition. Its existence raises questions about intended reception communities and editorial framing, about addressing la francophonie versus an international readership for untranslated work. See Aragon, Crève-​Coeur (Montreal, 1943), which reprints Aragon, Crève-​Coeur (1941). Given that Vichy radio had begun broadcasting polemical talks for French Canadians by 1943, it is possible this publication was meant, in some fashion, to counteract the broadcasts’ appeal to linguistic patriotism or grievance. 49. Qtd. in McDiarmid, Saving Civilization, 62. In “Imaginary Interviews (Concluded),” Gide had similarly positioned Le Crève-​Coeur: “But as admirable as the successes of cerebral poetry have been in France, I now expect our renaissance to come from direct poetry, from that kind which inspires the poems of Le Crève-​Coeur by Aragon” (404–5). 50. A measure of this relation is found in Nancy Cunard’s anthology Poems for France, in which Aragon figures by name or echo in several poems, including Ewart Milne’s “July 14, 1942” and Patrick Gardiner’s “Le Crêve-​Coeur” [sic]. 51. Latham, “Cyril Connolly’s Horizon,” 873. 52. Ibid., 859. 53. Connolly, “Comment,” 5 (January 1940). 54. Connolly, “Introduction,” Golden Horizon, ix. This book is an anthology of poems first published in the journal, including Aragon’s “Zone Libre” (22). 55. Connolly, “Comment,” 534 (July 1940).

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Notes to Pages 86–93

56. Connolly, “Comment,” 392 (June 1940). 57. On this relationship, see Shelden, Friends of Promise, 85–87. Managing this demand was made harder by Nicolson’s move to the BBC from the Ministry of Information. Ministry officials worried that Horizon’s readership was too elite, although several well-​placed profiles in the United States helped mitigate this opinion. 58. Connolly, “Introduction,” Golden Horizon, x. 59. Ibid. 60. Piette, Imagination at War, 189. 61. Connolly, “Introduction,” Le Crève-​Coeur, 11. Jean Bruller provides a different glimpse of such journeys: “Going into the garden early in the morning, still in pyjamas, I found in the meadow a miniature booklet on bible paper, still damp with dew. It was one of the millions dropped by the RAF all over France on certain nights, and this one was a reprint of [Le Silence de la Mer]. With a printer’s error on the title page!” See Vercors, Battle of Silence, 230. 62. How green was Connolly’s thumb? Self-​ reproduction is more suggestive of the airborne spore than the winged seed, thereby conjuring not the victory garden, but the mold bloom. 63. In doing so, Connolly elides distinct meanings of “culture”: as a rarified field of aesthetic endeavor separate from popular life and as the disputed and cross-​grained habitus of a people. On this elision in wartime Britain, see Miller, “1941”; and Deer, Culture in Camouflage, 106–50. 64. Connolly, “Introduction,” Le Crève-​Coeur, 14. 65. For the most comprehensive account of Aragon’s wartime reception in Britain, see Bennett, “Aragon and England”; and Bennett, Aragon, Londres et la France Libre. 66. Koestler, Yogi and the Commissar, 21. 67. Ibid., 27. 68. Koestler half-​heartedly softened this criticism for the French edition: “It is certain that later, in the Resistance, Aragon did his duty like many others. It would be stupid to reproach Aragon for not having been tortured or shot by the Gestapo during the war, but it is equally stupid to try to sensationalize acts that were merely fulfilling a duty, imposed in our time on thousands of unknowns, and that is what was done by the English admirers of Aragon, and it is against them that I raise my voice.” Koestler, Yogi et Le Commissaire, 35n1. 69. Bennett provides a minutely detailed account of these controversies, suggesting, but finally not substantiating, that many of the attacks had the backing of André Breton, who by this point in the war was in

New York. See Bennett, Aragon, Londres et la France Libre, esp. 128–33, 164–66, and 205–11. 70. On these men, see Ray, Surrealist Movement in England; and Bennett, Aragon, Londres et la France Libre. For Mesens, see Geurts-​Krauss, E. L. T. Mesens. For Brunius, see Briggs, War of Words, 227, 405. 71. Brunius and Mesens, Idolatry and Confusion, n.p. 72. Serious as this charge was, it is not the most extreme of the denunciations bandied about. This distinction is held by Toni del Renzio, who accused Aragon of signing a manifesto with Marcel Déat, a virulent fascist and collaborator; see “The Light That Will Cease to Fail.” Brunius and Mesens deplored del Renzio, but for presenting himself as a legitimate surrealist. 73. In this, Idolatry and Confusion is a precursor to Benjamin Péret’s seminal, incendiary Le Déshonneur des Poètes, written in Mexico and published in 1945. For an English translation, see Death to the Pigs, and Other Writings, ed. Stella, 200–206. 74. Bort, “New Prose,” 687. Deer summarizes Lehmann’s position: “The practice of writers during the Second World War was far more complex and fluid than the dominant culture would suggest. The public debate over the arts in wartime frequently mirrored the Manichean visions of British propaganda: the result was a misleading and polarized culture war.” See Culture in Camouflage, 211. 75. In this same issue, Raymond Mortimer describes Aragon and Le Crève-​Coeur in not dissimilar terms: “It appeared here thanks to the combined efforts of Horizon and La France Libre. Aragon had been inspired by the war to a large, direct and human lyricism, reminding one not only Guillaume Apollinaire but of the great French Romantic tradition. These poems speak better than any others not only for the unbroken spirit of France, but for all men in every country who fight for liberty.” Mortimer, “French Writers,” 33. 76. Coulton, Louis MacNeice in the BBC, 50–76. 77. MacNeice was not alone among writers in using this term, although his use (of the term and in practice) was distinct. For his later thoughts, see MacNeice, Varieties of Parable. On parable and radio in the thirties, against which MacNeice might be contrasted, see Cohen, “Annexing the Oracular Voice,” 147–50. 78. Aragon, “Two Poems of Defeat,” 23. “The Unoccupied Zone” appears with “The Lilacs and the Roses.” It was widely republished: in the Sewanee Review (Autumn 1945), which is the basis for Josephson’s and Cowley’s Aragon; in John Lehmann’s Poems from New Writing, 1936–46 (1946); and, mistitled

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Notes to Pages 93–99

as “Zone Libre,” in Cecily Mackworth’s Mirror for French Poetry, 1840–1940: French Poems with Translations by English Poets (1947). Lastly, it was included in MacNeice’s posthumous Collected Poems, edited by E. R. Dodds. 79. On this phase of MacNeice’s career, see Longley, Louis MacNeice, 77–94; McDonald, Louis MacNeice, chap. 4; and Brown, “Louis MacNeice and the Second World War.” 80. MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. McDonald, 201–2. 81. Briggs notes that MacNeice was among the first staff members (another being William Empson) to attend orientation lectures by the Staff Training Department at the BBC. In addition to technical instruction, they covered administrative structures, overseas broadcasting, and intelligence activities; see War of Words, 496. 82. MacNeice, Selected Plays, 305. 83. Connolly, “Introduction,” Le Crève-​Coeur, 14. 84. For a terrific discussion of radio features along these lines, see Deer, Culture in Camouflage, 141–43. 85. MacNeice, Selected Literary Criticism, 98. MacNeice’s allusion is to Elijah’s description of the voice of God (in the King James version). 86. Shelley, Defence of Poetry, 531. 87. MacNeice, Modern Poetry, 197. The plea appears in the unpaginated preface. 88. Shelley, Defence of Poetry, 535. 89. Brown, “Ireland, Modernism, and the 1930s,” 31–32. 90. Gillis, Irish Poetry, 2. 91. O’Halpin, Defending Ireland, 203. 92. The wartime censorship lasted from September 3, 1939, to May 11, 1945. Donal Ó Drisceoil has observed that the Emergency Powers Act was modeled largely on the British Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, but notes two key differences between them: “The British [censorship] system involved an elaborate pre-​ censorship of information [and] achieved its aims by co-​operation rather than confrontation with the press.” Under this system, British authorities restricted and censored news at its source, rather than at the point of publication or broadcast, and thereby controlled the information that reached the press. At the same time, editors were given the impression of a voluntary practice of (self-)censorship at the point of publication and, in general, of being “far freer than they actually were.” Ó Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland, 285. 93. Fisk, In Time of War, 475. 94. O’Halpin, “Small States and Big Secrets,” 2. 95. Lee, Ireland, 244. He continues: “[De Valera] rigidly maintained the formality of Irish neutrality

right to the end, even to the extent of raising a storm of indignant Allied protest when conveying his condolences to Hempel [the head of the German Legation in Dublin] on the death of Hitler. But he simultaneously took care to cooperate sufficiently with Britain, and later with the United States, to ensure that they did not feel provoked into aggressive action against Irish interests. He had to ensure that Britain could not acquire by conquest much more than she gained through cooperation. He could not, and did not, keep Ireland strictly neutral during the war. He kept Ireland benevolently neutral for Britain.” It is indicative of the Irish situation that, unlike figures in the Vichy regime who after the war claimed to have played a double game in favor of the Allies, de Valera remained silent about these matters—​despite having played an actual double game in favor of the Allies. 96. Ó Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland, 301. Even after repeal, the consequences of wartime censorship continued to deform the Irish public sphere. This became apparent almost immediately, in reaction to the liberation of concentration camps. With suddenly unrestricted access to reports, photographs, and newsreel footage of the extent of the Final Solution, many Irish viewed them as little more than atrocity propaganda meant to justify the Allied war effort. See Ó Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland, 124–29; and Wills, That Neutral Island, 393–401. 97. O’Halpin, Defending Ireland, 253. 98. Connolly, “Comment,” 3 (January 1942). 99. Wills, That Neutral Island, 185. See also Cole, “Good Relations.” 100. See, for example, his letter to John Lehmann on February 12, 1941. Addressed to “Sean Lehmann” (and signed “Sean O’Betjeman”), it accompanies an issue of The Bell, in hopes that something in it might be suitable for republication in New Writing, and encourages Lehmann to be in touch with Seán O’Faoláin, editor of the Irish journal. But Betjeman’s role in this exchange is not to come up: “There is no need to mention that I put you on to the idea or I will be accused of doing propaganda and I do not think that the accusation would be justified. . . . They are all very fearful of British propaganda here. I don’t blame them. This will all be merely cultural exchange, old boy.” See Betjeman, Letters, 279. 101. Connolly, “Comment,” 11 (January 1942). 102. Ibid., 3–4. 103. Ibid., 3. 104. MacManus, “Eire and the World Crisis,” 20. In crucial ways, MacManus fails to register the effects of the devolution of administrative powers to the Northern Ireland government in these years. This

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Notes to Pages 99–105

tension between rule from Whitehall and rule from Stormont is taken up in the next chapter. 105. The essay is incorporated with little revision into MacManus, Eamon de Valera, 278–81. 106. Ó Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland, 212. 107. These operative decisions by the Irish government responded, in very large part, to being backed into an exceptionally difficult corner by the British, particularly after Churchill became prime minister in 1940. The neutrality policy was anything but the crowning achievement of imperial evenhandedness, as O’Halpin argues: “Ireland was quite unlike the other long-​term European neutrals with which Britain dealt during the war, both because of contiguity and because of recent history. This was reflected not only in the intricacies of the Anglo-​Irish security understanding, but in the attitude taken at the political level. Churchill nursed a personal grievance against Ireland, as a back-​stabbing dominion and former British possession, which he did not have against any other European neutral. . . . Ireland he regarded, like Iraq, Persia, Egypt, and Afghanistan, as scarcely a sovereign state at all but a begrudging former colony or protectorate, which should be browbeaten into cooperation. It is in the intelligence, security, and wider strategic problems posed by those states for British interests, and their wartime experience at British hands, that the closest parallels with Ireland can be found.” O’Halpin, Spying on Ireland, 304–5. 108. O’Brien, Same Age as the State, 155. 109. Although Browne published almost exclusively as Pádraig de Brún, I consistently refer to him as Patrick Browne, under which his translation of “Zone Libre” appeared. As necessary, bibliographic information in the notes gives the form of his name used in publication. 110. During his preparatory visit for Horizon’s Irish number, Connolly met Browne: “I lunched with the priests [at Maynooth] who taught English literature, and who were learned in Auden and Spender, and heard Father Browne, who is also an eminent physicist [sic], read Yeats’s Easter Week poem in his beautiful voice.” Connolly, “Comment,” 9–10 (January 1942). 111. It was at Browne’s instigation that the Irish government invited Erwin Schrödinger to Dublin, where he chaired the Institute’s School for Theoretical Physics. 112. Biographical details are drawn primarily from White, “Pádraig de Brún”; and O’Brien, Same Age as the State. 113. It is worth mentioning that in Seán O’Sullivan’s map of the world as seen from Corkadoragha

that accompanies Myles na gCopaleen’s An Béal Bocht (1941), Browne’s house in Dunquin, Co. Kerry, is notated as “P. de B.” 114. Qtd. in O’Leary, Gaelic Prose in the Irish Free State, 383. 115. In relation to Yeats, Declan Kiberd makes a version of this point, albeit negatively, through MacNeice: “Even the fluctuations between tender love and outright repulsion in [MacNeice’s] attitude to Ireland were something he had in common with his predecessor [Yeats]—​a bardic willingness to praise or to condemn as the occasion demanded. Although Yeats had no formal training in the classics, he too was capable of looking at the west of Ireland and seeing—​ Greece. This tendency was shared with such writers as Stephen McKenna, George Thomson and Pádraig de Brún.” See Kiberd, Irish Classics, 553. Browne also had admiring and mentoring friendships with Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, and Brendan Behan; see O’Brien, Same Age as the State, 100–101. 116. White, “Pádraig de Brún,” 130. While not mentioning the exchange, essential background is provided in O’Leary, Gaelic Prose in the Irish Free State, chap. 6. 117. See Shovlin, Irish Literary Periodical, chap. 4. 118. Richardson, “Transforming Anglo-​Ireland,” 33. On this shift from the inside, see Inglis, West Briton. 119. For (frequently humorous) details, see Ó Drisceoil, Censorship in Ireland, 95–283. 120. Ibid., 160. 121. De Brún, rev. of Le Crève-​Coeur, 438. 122. Browne would publish several Irish-​language translations of Aragon’s poems over the next year: De Brún, “Riseárd a Dó Bhlian a Dachad” (translation of “Richard II Quarante”); “Thar Lóire ó Dheas 1940” (translation of “C”); and “Trua Bhoithreoireacht na Fraince, 1940” (translation of “Complainte pour l’Orgue de la Nouvelle Barbarie”). For full publication information, see the bibliography. 123. De Brún, rev. of Le Crève-​Coeur, 441. 124. Patterson, “Ireland, Vichy and Post-​Liberation France,” 107–9. 125. MacDonagh, Poems from Ireland, 1. In 1958, MacDonagh and Robinson collaborated on The Oxford Book of Irish Verse, which included a number of the poems first collected in Poems from Ireland. Browne’s “Zone Libre” is replaced by his “Green Autumn Stubble,” a translation of “Coinnleach Glas na Fhómhair,” that allegorically relates the displacement of Irish by English; its final couplet reads, “And I spoke tripping Gaelic, and merry songs I’ve sung, / But now my

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Notes to Pages 105–114

wits are crazy and leaden is my tongue.” MacDonagh and Robinson, Oxford Book of Irish Verse, 210. 126. This “Irish mode” was first described by Thomas MacDonagh, Donagh’s father, who had been executed after the Easter Rising; see his Literature in Ireland, 4–5, 52–56. 127. Smyllie, “Preface,” n.p. 128. Browne, “Zone Libre,” 6. 129. Yeats, “Under Ben Bulben,” 89–91. 130. O’Faoláin, “Signing Off.” 131. O’Faoláin, “Ireland After Yeats,” 47.

Chapter 4 1. Corcoran, After Yeats and Joyce, 111. 2. Stuart, “Afterword,” 251. 3. These dynamics replicate some foundational presuppositions about the relation of radio and print media; see Cohen, “Intermediality and the Problem of the Listener.” 4. Barrington, Wartime Transcripts, 4. 5. This phrase is the subtitle to his Material Modernism. 6. Bennett, “Texts in History,” 70–71. 7. My thoughts here are guided by two probing studies concerning the long history of the question of media: Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept”; and Kalas, Frame, Glass, Verse, esp. its brilliant preface. 8. Although estranged, Stuart was married to Iseult Gonne, daughter of Maud Gonne MacBride and sister to Seán MacBride. Aligned with the pro-​Nazi faction of the Irish Republican Army, which believed that a German defeat of Britain would benefit Ireland, the family was dubious about the government’s neutrality. 9. O’Donoghue, Hitler’s Irish Voices, 41. See also Elborn, Francis Stuart. 10. This book is discussed in Barrington, Wartime Transcripts, 36–37. Stuart’s English typescript having been lost or destroyed, the text is extant only in German translation. As such, responsibility for the final paragraph has been deflected to Ruth Weiland, the translator: indeed, Stuart claimed to have been the victim of a forgery perpetrated by Weiland and her superiors. In fact, Stuart appears to have been denied permission to translate The Forged Casement Diaries (1936), W. J. Maloney’s influential refutation of British charges against Casement. 11. The two references occur in dispatches sent in October 1939, the second of which frankly notes, “At the present moment everything anti-​English is grist to the propaganda mill. . . . I understand that the

Propaganda Ministry is keen on having Dr. Maloney’s book on the forged Casement diaries translated and published.” Crowe et al., Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, vol. 6, 64–65, 77–78. 12. Fisk, In Time of War, chap. 10. 13. A script dated February 9, 1942, and attributed to Stuart exists in Foreign Ministry records in Berlin. It is notable, but anomalous, for its explicit anti-​Semitism, a characteristic absent from Stuart’s subsequent talks. Given this discrepancy, and the fact that no monitoring services transcribed the talk, its exact nature—​whether Stuart wrote it or whether it was broadcast—​is uncertain. See Roth, “Francis Stuart’s Broadcasts from Germany.” The script is reproduced and discussed in Barrington, Wartime Transcripts, 201–4. 14. Natterstad, “An Interview,” 27. 15. PLCR, box 11. 16. For an overview of the Princeton Listening Center, see Keane, “Ear Toward Security.” 17. Though provided a copy of the transcript by the literary estate of Francis Stuart, I was refused permission to reproduce it. 18. “To these [three species of capital (economic, cultural, and social)] we must add symbolic capital, which is the form that one or another of these species takes when it is grasped through categories of perception that recognize its specific logic or, if you prefer, misrecognize the arbitrariness of its possession and accumulation.” See Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 119. For more general discussion, see Bourdieu, “Forms of Capital.” See also Guillory, “Bourdieu’s Refusal.” 19. Horst Bergmeier and Rainer Lotz deduce that Stuart was involved in a radio play titled Lightning Action from the fact that one of its parts was taken by “Henry Stuart”: Henry was Stuart’s first name, Francis his middle name. The play would have been broadcast to the United States, but they note only that it was recorded on April 5, 1941, and do not cite their source. Given their extensive use of German archives (i.e., archives in the place of transmission, rather than of reception), it is thus unclear whether the play was actually broadcast, let alone if Stuart had any role in it. See Bergmeier and Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves, 49. 20. PLCR, box 11. “Jim and Johnny” was a program on the German North American Service that took the form of dialogue between a befuddled innocent and an authoritative truth-​teller. Jim and Johnny were two Canadians, the latter a rube and the former an especially worldly milkman, whose deliveries included lessons of geopolitical import.

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Notes to Pages 114–120

21. PLCR, box 19. 22. What Stuart could not have known as he spoke these words into the regime’s microphone was that Steinbeck had contacted members of the American government to propose a radio service for the Western Hemisphere, in order to counter German broadcasts to Latin America. In September 1940, Steinbeck met with Roosevelt, this time with a proposal to destabilize the Nazi economy by distributing counterfeit reichsmarks in occupied Europe. In fact, what were later dropped in occupied countries were copies of Steinbeck’s novel The Moon Is Down (1942), written for this purpose. For Steinbeck’s account of this counterfeiting scheme, see “The Secret Weapon We Were Afraid to Use,” 9–13. 23. For G2’s institutional dynamics, Eunan O’Halpin’s work is unsurpassed; see Defending Ireland, Spying on Ireland, and MI5 and Ireland. 24. O’Donoghue, Hitler’s Irish Voices, 189. This “blueprint” for the service was written by Adolf Mahr, an Austrian who had worked at the National Museum of Ireland between 1927 and 1939; in this capacity, he contributed the essay on archeology to Saorstát Eireann: Irish Free State Official Handbook (1932). He also headed the Irish branch of the Auslandorganisation, the German agency overseeing Germans in foreign countries. 25. Barrington, Wartime Transcripts, 39. 26. Barrington gives the best account of the controversies surrounding Stuart: “A mythology of Stuart as ostracized because of his German sojourn ignores the fact that his immediate post-​war novels were published by Victor Gollancz in London and by leading houses, including Gallimard, in Paris: if there was any blacklist, as has been claimed, it wasn’t terribly effective. In the post-​war years Stuart struggled with low sales and, in Ireland, with censorship—​just as he had before the war, and just as almost every serious Irish writer of the era did. . . . Overall, despite the difficulty Stuart had in publishing Black List, it would be closer to the truth to say that he lived a charmed literary existence after the war than to call him an ‘outcast,’ as many have done. . . . But reading over the corpus of literary-​critical and journalistic writing on Stuart over the past three decades leaves one with the sense that there is something about him—​or about H [the semi-​autobiographical protagonist of Black List, Section H]—​that actually makes us feel quite comfortable indeed. Stuart has become a synecdoche for art, and for all of the romantic-cum-​modernist clichés that artists in weak moments spin around themselves: the artist as outcast, the artist as sufferer, the artist as witness.

Of course, artists can be, and have been, all of these things; but in an age when Irish writers are blandly revered, and blessedly (if modestly) subsidized by state and super-​state, the idea that we had still among us a writer who had been ostracized, black-​listed, reviled, was strangely reassuring.” Ibid., 54–55, 58. 27. Ibid., 75. This broadcast could not be transcribed in Ireland owing to very poor reception, but was transcribed by BBC monitors, whose transcript is included in the published talks. 28. Ibid., 76. 29. It is also worth noting that, early in the war, the Germans considered Babbitt (and The Grapes of Wrath) to be sufficiently anti-​American not to prohibit their circulation in occupied nations. See Hench, Books as Weapons, 29. 30. In the following paragraphs, I draw on Darko Suvin’s discussion of the various connotations of displacement that arise with modernity, which he schematizes into three types, moving from literal to metaphoric: being physically displaced; being or feeling alien and out of place; and carrying meanings across borders of sense and of place. Stuart’s broadcasting career partakes of all three, in both recognizable and less straightforward ways. See Suvin, “Displaced Persons.” 31. Barrington, Wartime Transcripts, 77. This talk was broadcast on August 5, 1942. 32. Ibid., 77–78. Perhaps not surprisingly, Stuart never mentions his faltering marriage as a reason for leaving Ireland. Marital strain was surely a cause of his departure, though it does not explain his destination. 33. On one level, Stuart here advances the traditional political belief that “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” through the implied correspondence of his situation to Ireland’s; on another, the correspondence indicates the specific political character of Stuart’s talk. In a broadcast made a month later, he returned to this topic, quoting one of Bose’s talks on India: “By standing for full collaboration with the tripartite [Axis] powers in the external sphere I stand for absolute self-​determination for India where her national affairs are concerned.” Singling out the skeptical leftist republican Peadar O’Donnell, Stuart says, “I have friends in Ireland to whom I would like to stress this passage.” Ibid., 87. 34. Ibid., 78. 35. For this variety and its implications, see Wylie, European Neutrals and Non-​Belligerents. 36. Barrington, Wartime Transcripts, 78. 37. Ibid., 113. This talk was broadcast on February 6, 1943.

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Notes to Pages 120–130

38. As it was, Stuart’s role as IRA liaison had already established him as just such a conduit. 39. Ibid., 148. This talk was broadcast on September 7, 1943. 40. As Stuart said in an interview half a century later, “I know horrors which were committed by this ‘Christian crusade’ as it was called; and then the dropping of the atom bomb and what not. . . . The Allies took themselves to be saviours. I remember reports at the time of how Churchill would sing ‘Onward Christian Soldiers.’ It’s not just the violence—​the violence is horrible, but the worst horror is this awful hypocrisy, that you’re fighting the cause of the gospels.” See Lazenbatt, “Conversation with Francis Stuart,” 7. 41. Barrington, Wartime Transcripts, 106. This talk was broadcast on January 6, 1943. 42. Ibid., 192. This talk was broadcast on January 8, 1944. 43. Ibid., 107. 44. Fritzsche, “Nazi Modern,” 4–9. This argument is elaborated in his Life and Death in the Third Reich, chap. 2. 45. With different emphasis, Terry Eagleton makes this point about Stuart’s novels in Crazy John, 246–47. 46. Barrington, Wartime Transcripts, 164. This talk was broadcast on October 16, 1943. Tellingly enough, it was made just after the Irland-​Redaktion had relocated to Luxembourg because of damage to Broadcasting House caused by bombing raids on Berlin. For matters of strategy, broadcasters continued to speak as though still in Berlin. See O’Donoghue, Hitler’s Irish Voices, 131–33. 47. As in this same broadcast: “I have no special love of broadcasting. I am neither a professional propagandist nor a professional politician, but as long as I feel subjected to all that the Anglo-​American propagandists can do to make you believe that Anglo-​ American imperialism will create a world in which you will be happy and secure, then I feel that I must avail myself of the opportunity I have of putting another point of view before you.” Barrington, Wartime Transcripts, 164–65. 48. Ibid., 142. This talk was broadcast on August 14, 1943. 49. Benjamin, “Reflections on Radio,” 392. 50. Qtd. in O’Donoghue, Hitler’s Irish Voices, 34. A Celtic philologist by training, Ludwig Mühlhausen was the Irland-​Redaktion’s first director. 51. Barrington, Wartime Transcripts, 111. This talk was broadcast on January 30, 1943. 52. Macafee, Concise Ulster Dictionary, 58.

53. On the céilí and the rise of céilí bands, see Vallely, Companion to Irish Traditional Music, 60–61; Cleary, Outrageous Fortune, 269–70; and Pine, 2RN and the Origins of Irish Radio, 172–75. 54. Barrington, Wartime Transcripts, 114. This talk was broadcast on February 6, 1943. 55. Ibid., 74–75. 56. Qtd. in Fisk, In Time of War, 351. 57. Goffman, Forms of Talk, 177. 58. Stuart, “Letters to J. H. Natterstad,” 106. 59. Harry Teichert, “Political Broadcasts,” in Handbuch des Deutschen Rundfunk, 1939–40. A translation of this document was made at the Princeton Listening Center. See PLCR, box 19. 60. Goffman, Forms of Talk, 195. 61. From 1921 until 1972, Northern Ireland was a devolved state within the United Kingdom, with its own parliament and executive responsible for domestic affairs, and functioned as a one-​party sectarian entity. 62. Briggs, Golden Age of Wireless, 653. 63. Rolo, Radio Goes to War, 261. 64. Renier and Rubinstein, Assigned to Listen, 41. 65. Briggs, War of Words, 440. 66. McIntosh, Force of Culture, 160. 67. Ibid., 156. 68. Blake, Northern Ireland, xiv. The quotation comes from the book’s foreword by D. Lindsay Keir and G. O. Sayles, successive heads of the advisory committee appointed by the Northern government to oversee the work. 69. McIntosh, Force of Culture, 157. 70. Blake, Northern Ireland, 2. 71. Ibid., 16–17. 72. On these apprehensions, see Saint-​Amour, “Air War Prophecy”; and Fritzsche, “Machine Dreams.” Although focused on aerial warfare and its effects on the distinction of civilian and combatant, each essay contains tantalizing allusions to how the rise of international radio broadcasting was considered within this ambit. 73. This relationship is made unambiguous by the protests of the Northern Irish government over the decision of British authorities to impose controls on travel between the islands of Great Britain and Ireland—​in other words, along a maritime border that undid partition. Blake is dyspeptic: “This system, if it effectively protected the war secrets of Great Britain, involved virtually no restriction upon the movement of individuals between Northern Ireland and Eire. Wartime activities in Northern Ireland were thus not properly isolated from the prying gaze of the enemy with his legation staff in Dublin, and this was the cause of

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Notes to Pages 130–145

much heartburning in Northern Ireland. . . . It was the anomaly of an open frontier which so irritated men and women in Northern Ireland, who themselves had to submit to the permit system.” Northern Ireland, 83–84, 171–73. 74. McIntosh, Force of Culture, 69. 75. This national system was split between Home and Forces Services. See Briggs, War of Words, 114–28. 76. Cathcart, Most Contrary Region, 132. 77. Many added broadcasting—​frequently as a synonym for propaganda—​to the military, diplomatic, and economic fronts of battle. 78. On Workers’ Challenge (and other German black stations), see Doherty, Nazi Wireless Propaganda. He quotes the testimony of a BBC official at the postwar court-​martial of one of the station’s broadcasters: “It was foul language here and there, foul words particularly when speaking of personalities. . . . The word ‘bugger’ was one of the most frequent, with ‘bastard’ and ‘sod’ and things like that” (23–24). 79. Ibid., 140. On wartime listener surveys, see Silvey, Who’s Listening? 87–119. 80. Papers of the Northern Ireland Government Cabinet, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (hereafter PRONI), CAB/9/CD/207/1, added ellipsis in brackets. This talk was broadcast on January 27, 1942. 81. Ibid. Transcripts of the broadcasts referred to in the memo are not contained in this file. F. W. Ogilvie was the director-​general of the BBC. Prior to assuming this position, he served as vice chancellor of Queen’s University, Belfast, and was therefore familiar with the Unionist government’s internal concerns. 82. Ibid. The “Prime Minister” or “P.M.” referred to here and in subsequent quotations from the PRONI file is the prime minister of Northern Ireland, not of the United Kingdom. 83. Ibid. A short discussion of this exchange appears in Fisk, In Time of War, 346. 84. The British offered at least twice to end partition in exchange for Éire’s entry into the war, once in June 1940 with the fall of France and again in December 1941 with the entry of the United States. See Lee, Ireland, 248–50; O’Halpin, Defending Ireland, 175, 181–82; and Fisk, In Time of War, 177–82, 447–48. 85. Qtd. in Cathcart, Most Contrary Region, 112. 86. Qtd. in ibid., 115. 87. This attitude was not helped by the initial exclusion of Northern Ireland from the BBC’s listener survey. See Silvey, Who’s Listening? 95. 88. PRONI, CAB/9/CD/207/1. 89. Letter to Ronald Wells from Robert Gransden, ibid.

90. Letter to Robert Gransden from Ronald Wells, October 6, 1942, ibid. 91. Letter to Robert Gransden from Ronald Wells, November 5, 1942, ibid. 92. Blake, Northern Ireland, 83. 93. O’Donoghue uses this term in “Berlin’s Irish Radio War,” 105. 94. PRONI, CAB/9/CD/207/1. G2 monitors identified Stuart, although neither the British nor the Northern Irish cabinet knew of this fact. For the verbatim transcript produced by G2, which differs slightly from the BBC transcript, see Barrington, Wartime Transcripts, 127–29. The present discussion refers to the BBC transcript in the PRONI file, to which cabinet officials had access. 95. Loughlin, Ulster Unionism, 134. 96. O’Donoghue, Hitler’s Irish Voices, 121. 97. PRONI, CAB/9/CD/207/1. 98. Calling this mark a cross, Fisk identifies Gransden as its author. Although this conjecture is certainly plausible, and most likely correct, it ultimately remains as conjecture; see Fisk, In Time of War, 345. 99. Sterne, Audible Past, 343. 100. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 259.

Conclusion 1. Beckett, Letters of Samuel Beckett, 642. 2. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 479. 3. Feldman, “Anxiety of Art,” 90. Though not published until 1973, this essay was written in 1965. 4. For biographical details in this context, see Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 273–308; and Gordon, World of Samuel Beckett, 140–203. 5. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 282, ellipsis and brackets in original, added ellipsis in brackets. 6. Alfred Péron, for one, died in the care of the Swiss Red Cross less than two weeks after the liberation of Buchenwald. 7. Waiting for Beckett. 8. Kenner, Samuel Beckett, 207. Kenner here refers specifically to Beckett’s short works “in various media” made in the mid-​sixties; although he does not mention this text, this interplay of transcriptions and ventriloquism is perhaps most evident in Rough for Radio II, written in the early sixties. The relation between stages of Beckett’s trajectory will be addressed later in this conclusion. 9. Beckett, Watt, 165. 10. Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 115–43. 11. Beckett, Watt, 247.

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Notes to Pages 146–152

12. Qtd. in Shenker, “Moody Man of Letters.” 13. A similar conclusion is reached in McNaughton, “Beckett’s ‘Brilliant Obscurantics.’ ” In this important essay, McNaughton nonetheless relies on an ultimately unsustainable opposition of propaganda and literature, arguing that the former (defined as the process by which “material familiar from another and important context is reframed for a different ideological end”) obscures its methods, while the latter lays bare its procedures. This point seems more appropriate as a starting point for analysis, rather than its conclusion. One consequence of leaving this opposition in place is to enable the analogical comparison of Ireland’s wartime neutrality with “individual responsibility”: in the equation of these incommensurable stances, the former inevitably comes off badly. 14. Beckett, Letters of Samuel Beckett, 277. 15. Rabaté, “Watt à l’Ombre de Plume,” 179. 16. Casanova, Samuel Beckett, 105, 106. 17. Ibid., 99. 18. Bourdieu glosses this distinction between “life-​story” and trajectory through the experience of riding the subway: it is the difference between understanding a journey from one stop to another versus taking into account the matrix of stops and the intersections of different lines. See Bourdieu, Rules of Art, 258–61; and Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 207–8n169. 19. Beckett, Dernière Bande, 15. This translation is, in fact, a back-​translation, since the boots are “size ten at least” in Beckett’s English text.

20. Beckett, “Text for Nothing #8.” 21. O’Doherty, front matter, n.p. 22. On the minimalism double issue, see Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 49–58; Alberro, “Inside the White Box”; and Walsh, “Labyrinth in a Box.” The entire run of Aspen has been digitized and is available through UbuWeb. It is worth noting that the focal theme of Aspen 8 was “Art/​Information/​Science.” 23. For the best account of these debates in relation to Aspen, see Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 43–67. 24. The recording of “Text 8” is twelve minutes and forty-​five seconds long. For comparison’s sake, it is worth recalling that, two years earlier, Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” at about half that length, was split into two parts in order to be released on a 45 rpm seven-​inch single intended for radio stations and jukeboxes. 25. Qtd. in Allen, Artists’ Magazines, 54. 26. Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 131. 27. Ibid., 133. 28. Connor, Dumbstruck, 416. 29. Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 134. 30. Ibid., 135. 31. For a thorough account of the hospital, see Gaffney, Healing amid the Ruins. 32. Beckett, Complete Short Prose, 276, 277. 33. Ibid., 278. 34. De Valera, Peace and War, n.p. 35. Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” 357.

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181

INDEX

Abbey Theatre, 33, 51 absent public, 54, 59, 60, 67 Abwehr II, 111 Abyssinian crisis. See Ethiopian crisis Adams, F. M., 133–34 Addis Ababa, shortwave broadcasting from, 21–22 Adorno, Theodor, 81 Africa, competition for colonies in, 16. See also Ethiopian crisis African Americans. See black Americans Allied nations. See also specific countries Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur disseminated in, 85 on neutrality of Ireland, 1 Stuart on Christianity in rhetoric of, 120, 167 n. 40 American Civil War, 57 Antigone: A New Redaction (O’Sheel), 61–62, 159 nn. 53–54 anti-​Semitism of Quinn, 158 n. 26 and Stuart, 165 n. 13 appeasement, 98 Aragon, Louis, 73–107. See also Crève-​Coeur; “Zone Libre” break from and return to poetry by, 73–75, 77, 79 clandestine writing by, 78, 80 in Comité National des Écrivains, 79 on contraband writing, 78–79, 105 contraband writing by, 78–79, 80, 82–83 “The Good Neighbors,” 161 n. 35 military service of, 77 origins of literary recognition of, 76–77 pseudonyms of, 78 and use of rhymes, 79–80, 82–83, 90, 161 n. 30 archives, government, opening of access to, 5–6 Army, Free State, and League of Nations membership, 24 Army, Irish, monitoring transcripts of Stuart by, 111, 112, 115–26

Army Without Banners (O’Malley), 68–69 Arnold, Matthew, On the Study of Celtic Literature, 52, 53 art in ideology of modernism, 54 Quinn’s collection of modernist, 50, 158 n. 23 “Art and Objecthood” (Fried), 149 artist, as dissident, Stuart’s view of, 108 Aspen: The Magazine in a Box, 148–50, 169 n. 22 assimilation, in Casanova’s typology of writers’ strategies, 45, 47–48 Auden, W. H., 85, 88, 93 audience. See also specific works of de Valera’s St. Patrick’s Day speeches, 3 of national radio services, 20 of O’Sheel’s propaganda pamphlets, 56–57, 59 of shortwave broadcasting, 21–23 authorship conception of, in O’Sheel’s propaganda and poetry, 56, 59 poses of, in Starkie’s The Waveless Plain, 33–37 autonomy through Aragon’s “Zone Libre,” 73 Irish, League of Nations in, 17, 24 literary, Casanova on, 45, 46, 47 readerly, in O’Sheel’s propaganda, 56–57, 59, 63 in Vichy France, 75–76 Babbitt (Lewis), 166 n. 29 balance of power, in Ethiopian crisis, 18, 19 Barrington, Brendan, 116, 166 n. 26 “Battle of Grain” speech (Mussolini), 157 n. 78 BBC de Gaulle’s 1940 broadcast on, 84 European News Service of, 84, 161 n. 40 foreign stations monitored by, 22, 126–27 MacNeice’s work at, 92, 93, 163 n. 81 monitoring transcripts by, in Northern Ireland, 111, 126–27, 130–37

Index

Beckett, Samuel, 141–52 “The Capital of Ruins,” 151–52 La Dernière Bande, 148, 169 n. 19 in French resistance, 143–44 in Irish literary space, 146–47 in MacGowran Speaking Beckett, 141–42 Mercier and Camier, 144 Rough for Radio II, 168 n. 8 Starkie in education of, 33 Texts for Nothing, 143, 144, 147–52, 169 n. 24 voice recordings of, lack of, 141 Watt, 144–46 Bell, The (journal), 97, 99, 104–5, 107, 163 n. 100 Benjamin, Walter, 54, 122 Bennett, John, 162 n. 69 Bennett, Tony, 110 Bergmeier, Horst, 165 n. 19 Berlin, Stuart’s move to, 109, 111, 118–19 Berlin Conference (1885), 16 Berlin University, Stuart at, 109, 111, 112, 119–20 Bernays, Edward, Propaganda, 60, 159 n. 48 Betjeman, John, 97, 98, 163 n. 100 bibliographic code, 60, 159 n. 47 black Americans in American Civil War, 57 on Ethiopian crisis, 26–27, 31 Blake, John, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, 128–30, 137, 167 n. 68, 167 n. 73 Blossomy Bough, The (O’Sheel), 53, 54–56 Boni and Liveright, 59, 60, 63 border radio stations, 20, 22 borders, of Ireland, 130–35 Bornstein, George, 110, 165 n. 5 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 112, 166 n. 33 Bourdieu, Pierre, 9, 14, 169 n. 18 “Men and Machines,” 146 Boyce, D. George, 8 Boyd, Ernest, 49–50 Ireland’s Literary Renaissance, 49, 50 “Ku Klux Kriticism,” 49, 158 n. 16 Brecht, Bertolt, 54 Brennan, Timothy, 14, 44 Breton, André, 162 n. 69 Briggs, Asa, 126, 127, 163 n. 81 Britain Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur published in, 73, 84–95, 161 n. 47 censorship in, 163 n. 92 on de Valera as president of League’s Council, 27 in Ethiopian crisis, 19–20, 26, 31 Ethiopian spheres of influence established by, 19 on Ethiopia’s membership in League, 24



fall of France in, impact of, 83–84 foreign stations monitored by, 22 Irish neutrality as alignment with, 96–97, 116, 163 n. 95 monitoring transcripts of, 111, 112, 126–40 racial and ethnic propaganda of, 15–16 reception of Italian propaganda in, 38–39 travel restrictions in, 167 n. 73 wartime culture of, 84 wartime poetry of, vs. France, 87–91 British colonialism in Ireland justifications for, 156 n. 22 legacy of, 95, 98 resistance to, 64–65 British Foreign Office, 22, 26 British Ministry of Information, 85, 86, 97, 134–35 British parliament, 129 broadcasting. See radio broadcasting Brooks, Tim, 83–84, 161 n. 43 Brown, Terence, 95 Browne, David, 101 Browne, Maurice, 101 Browne, Patrick (Pádraig de Brún) Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur reviewed by, 104–5 Aragon’s “Zone Libre” translated by, 73, 96, 100, 101, 105–7 in Irish language movement, 102–3 life and career of, 101–2 name used by, 164 n. 109 Bruller, Jean (Vercors) Koestler on, 89 Le Silence de la Mer, 76, 160 n. 16, 162 n. 61 Brunius, Jacques, Idolatry and Confusion, 90–91, 162 n. 73 Cabell, James Branch, Jurgen, 50, 158 n. 20 Canada, Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur published in, 161 n. 48 Cannistraro, Philip V., 157 n. 78 capital cultural, 113, 165 n. 18 symbolic, 165 n. 18 “Capital of Ruins, The “ (Beckett), 151–52 Carlson, John Roy, 159 n. 62 Casanova, Pascale. See also World Republic of Letters, The on postcolonialism, 158 n. 12 Casement, Roger, 111–12, 165 nn. 10–11 Caslon typeface, 61–62 Catechism of Balaam, Jr., The (O’Sheel), 56–58 céilí, 123 censorship Boyd’s opposition to, 49–50 in Britain, 163 n. 92 eluding in contraband writing, 78

184

Index

in France, 77, 78 in Germany, 166 n. 29 in Ireland, 96–97, 99–100, 163 n. 92, 163 n. 96 literary vs. political, 100 Censorship of Publications Act (Ireland), 99, 100 Centre International d’Études sur le Fascisme, 33 Ce Soir (newspaper), 73 chaos, information overload and, 11–12 charisma, of Mussolini, 28, 33, 37–41 Christianity in Allied rhetoric, Stuart on, 120, 167 n. 40 in Ethiopia, 25 Churchill, Randolph, 129 Churchill, Winston, 164 n. 107 civil servants, Irish in Ethiopian crisis, 18, 27–29, 157 n. 36 in opening of government archives, 6 Civil War, American, 57 Civil War, Irish, 24, 64 Civil War, Spanish, 16 Claddagh Records, 141 clandestine writing vs. contraband writing, 78 in wartime France, 76–78, 80 Clan na Gael, 51 class antagonism, in broadcasting, 131–32 Cleary, Joe, 48, 158 n. 13 close reading, 44–45 collaboration with Nazi Germany, writing as, 75–76, 77 colonialism. See also British colonialism in literary space, 47–48 as motivation for Ethiopian crisis, 16, 19, 20, 25–26 post-, 47–48, 158 n. 12 Comité National des Écrivains, 79 comparativism, Irish, 155 n. 23 concentration camps, 163 n. 96 Connolly, Cyril, 85–89 Browne (Patrick) and, 164 n. 110 introduction to Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur by, 87–89, 90, 162 nn. 62–63 on Irish war policies, 97–98 in publication of Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur, 85, 87 translation of Bruller’s Le Silence de la Mer by, 160 n. 16 on wartime challenges of publishing Horizon, 86–87 Connolly, James, 65, 114 Connor, Steven, 150 conscription, in Northern Ireland, 138–40 Constitution of 1937, Irish on neutrality, 18 O’Sheel on, 64 on women’s role, 4

contraband writing by Aragon, 78–79, 80, 82–83 Aragon on, 78–79, 105 vs. clandestine writing, 78 Corkery, Daniel, 102–3, 104 cosmopolitanism close reading compared to, 44–45 intermediaries of, 45–46, 48–52, 67–69 local nature of, 44–45 modernism associated with, 44 Council on Foreign Relations, 155 n. 1 Cowley, Malcolm, 74, 160 n. 11 Cremins, Francis, 157 n. 36 Crève-​Coeur, Le (Aragon), 73–107. See also “Zone Libre” Connolly’s introduction to British edition of, 87–89, 90, 162 nn. 62–63 as contraband writing, 78, 80, 82–83 international reception of, 85, 89–91, 104–5 “J’attends sa Lettre au Crépuscule,” 81 motivations for writing, 75 “Petite Suite Sans Fil,” 81 publication in Britain, 73, 84–95, 161 n. 47 publication in France, 73, 80 publication in Ireland, 73, 95–107 publication in New York, 85, 161 n. 47 “La Rime en 1940,” 79–80, 104, 160 n. 28 scope and subjects of poems of, 80 transmission and reception in, 80–82, 92–95, 106 “Vingt Ans Après,” 80–81 Criterion, The (magazine), 86 cross-​fade, in translation of Aragon’s “Zone Libre,” 92–94 Cuala Press, 62 cultural capital, 113, 165 n. 18 cultural protectionism, 100, 102 culture British wartime, 84 Connolly on unanimity in, 88, 162 n. 63 elision of meanings of, 162 n. 63 of secrecy, 6 Cunard, Nancy, Poems for France, 161 n. 50 Dalgliesh, W. Harold, 155 n. 1 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 43 Davidman, Joy, War Poems of the United Nations, 160 n. 74 Déat, Marcel, 162 n. 72 de Brún, Pádraig. See Browne, Patrick decay, of sound, 142 Deer, Patrick, 84, 162 n. 74 defamiliarization, and recognition, 59–60 Defence of Poetry (Shelley), 94

185

Index

Defence of the Realm Act (Britain), 96 de Gaulle, Charles, London broadcast of 1940 by, 84 del Renzio, Toni, 162 n. 72 demobilization, in Aragon’s “Zone Libre,” 82, 91, 106 democracy, national security measures and, 98–99 de Nie, Michael, 156 n. 3 Dernière Bande, La (Beckett), 148, 169 n. 19 Déshonneur des Poètes, Le (Péret), 162 n. 73 de Valera, Eamon broadcasts to U.S. by, 28, 29–30 Browne (Patrick) and, 101 on deprioritization of League, 17 election as prime minister (1932), 17, 27 in Ethiopian crisis, 18, 27–32, 157 n. 48 on ideal Irish society, 2–4 Ireland’s Stand, 1–5 leadership style of, 27–29 on need for reform of League, 30 on neutrality, rationale for, 1–3, 99, 163 n. 95 on O’Malley’s On Another Man’s Wound, 69 O’Sheel on betrayal by, 64 Peace and War, 152 perceived as dictator, 29, 157 n. 41 as president of League’s Council, 27–28 public speaking skills of, 28–29 St. Patrick’s Day broadcast of 1943 by, 2–4, 152 Devlin, Denis, 157 n. 36 Devoy, John, 50–52, 158 n. 25 Dial, The (magazine), 86 displacement in Stuart’s broadcasts, 118–19, 122, 123, 166 n. 30 types of, 166 n. 30 Doherty, M. A., 168 n. 78 double game, 96, 100, 163 n. 95 draft, military, in Northern Ireland, 138–40 Drieu de la Rochelle, Pierre, 75, 80 Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 102 Du Bois, W. E. B., “Inter-​Racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis,” 26–27, 31 Dylan, Bob, “Like a Rolling Stone,” 169 n. 24

Emergency Powers Act (Ireland), 96, 163 n. 92 Empson, William, 163 n. 81 “England ohne Maske” series, 67 England’s Oppression of Ireland (Schaeffer), 67, 68, 69 Ente Radio Rurale, 36–37 Ethiopia European spheres of influence in, 19 in Italo-​Ethiopian Treaty of 1928, 17 as League of Nations member, 16, 24–25 location of, 18–19 shortwave broadcasting from, 21–22, 156 n. 12 slavery in, 24–25 sovereignty of, 16, 24–25 Ethiopian crisis (1935–1936), 16–43 black Americans on, 26–27, 31 colonial expansion as motivation for, 16, 19, 20, 25–26 crises of internationalism in, 18–27 de Valera in, 18, 27–32, 157 n. 48 end of, 31–32 failure of League in, 16, 17, 31–32 international radio broadcasting in, 21–23, 156 n. 12 Irish delegation to League in, 18, 27–32, 157 n. 36 Irish neutrality policy based on, 17–18, 32 Italian invasion of 1935 as start of, 16, 19–20 Italian justifications for, 18, 20, 24–26 Italian propaganda campaign in, 24–26 League sanctions on Italy in, 17, 30–34, 157 n. 48 Starkie’s Waveless Plain on, 18, 32–34, 41–43 as turning point in interwar years, 16 ethnic propaganda, British, 15–16 European News Service of BBC, 84, 161 n. 40 European Renaissance, 102 “Evening in Connecticut” (MacNeice), 93 exceptionalism, Irish, 5, 6, 18 External Affairs, Department of, 27, 29 externalization, in Aragon’s “Zone Libre,” 91

Eagleton, Terry, 5 Easter Monday, 133 Easter Rising, 65, 114, 124, 133, 165 n. 126 Éditions de Minuit, 76, 148 Éire. See Ireland “Eire and the World Crisis” (MacManus), 98–99, 163–64 nn. 104–105 El Alamein, Battle of (1942), 83 Eliot, T. S., 88, 159 n. 48 Emergency, the, use of term, 96 Emergency Powers Act (Britain), 163 n. 92

fact conversion into information, 64, 66 vs. information, 53 Facts in Review (newsletter), 66 fading, use of term in Aragon’s “Zone Libre,” 81–82, 93–94, 106 Fall Casement, Der, 111, 165 n. 10 Famine (O’Flaherty), 119 Farrell, Brian, 27–28 fascism. See also Italian fascism influence in League, 29 and Irish national freedom, 17 rise of, 16–17 Feldman, Morton, 142, 168 n. 3

186

Index

Fisk, Robert, In Time of War, 112, 168 n. 98 Flanders Hall, 66–69, 159 n. 62, 159 n. 68 flexi disc, of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, 147–52, 169 n. 24 Fontaine (journal), 161 n. 36 Foreign Affairs (journal), 26 foreign policy, Irish, self-​preservation as basis of, 17–18, 32. See also neutrality Forged Casement Diaries, The (Maloney), 165 nn. 10–11 France Beckett in, 143 in Ethiopian crisis, 19–20, 31 Ethiopian spheres of influence established by, 19 fall of, 72–73 shortwave broadcasting from, 71–72 Vichy (see Vichy France) wartime poetry of, vs. Britain, 87–91 France Libre, La (journal), 85, 161 n. 43 freedom, Stuart’s broadcasts on, 120–21 Freedom of Information Act of 1997, 5 freedom of information revolution, 5–6 Free State Army, and League of Nations membership, 24 “French ’Flu, The” (Koestler), 89–90 French resistance Aragon in, 77 BBC and, 84 Beckett in, 143–44 Comité National des Écrivains in, 79 Éditions de Minuit in, 76 Horizon and, 87 Irish neutrality and, 105 linguistic strategies of, 78, 160 n. 25 Fried, Michael, “Art and Objecthood,” 149 Fritzsche, Peter, 121 Frye, Northrop, 69–70 Gaelic American (newspaper), 51 Gallimard, 75, 80 Gardiner, Patrick, 161 n. 50 Gaulle, Charles de, London broadcast of 1940 by, 84 Geneva. See League of Nations geopolitical rivalries, in Ethiopian crisis, 18, 19 German Foreign Office, Irland-​Redaktion under, 111, 112, 115 German Library of Information, 66 German Ministry of Propaganda, 112 Germany, Nazi. See Nazi Germany Gide, André “Imaginary Interviews,” 161 n. 45, 161 n. 49 Koestler on, 89 Gillis, Alan, 95 Gitelman, Lisa, 13 Glazer, Nathan, 51, 158 n. 25

Gloria SMH, 143 Glory (Stuart), 115 Goffman, Erving, 124–25, 126 Golden Treasury of Irish Verse (Robinson), 105 gong, in MacGowran Speaking Beckett, 141–42 Gonne, Iseult, 165 n. 8 “Good Neighbors, The” (Aragon), 161 n. 35 government archives, opening of access to, 5–6 Government Information Bureau, 1, 155 n. 1 Government of Ireland Act of 1920, 129, 130, 135 Government Publications Office, 1 Grandin, Thomas, 22–23 Gransden, Robert, 133–34, 136–37, 138, 168 n. 98 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 115, 166 n. 29 Grove Press, 141 G2, monitoring transcripts of Stuart by, 111, 112, 115–26, 168 n. 94 Guéhenno, Jean, 73 Guerre des Écrivains, La (Sapiro), 75 Guillory, John, 52, 53, 152 Gypsies, 35–36 Haile Selassie, 31, 32 Hammar, Ernst, 22 “happy,” de Valera’s use of term, 1, 2, 4, 5 Hello America! (Saerchinger), 28 high modernism, 49, 73, 74, 85, 87, 89 Hitler, Adolf, public speaking skills of, 28–29 Home Rule crises, 128–29 Horizon (journal), 85–87 establishment of, 86 Gide’s “Imaginary Interviews” in, 161 n. 45 Irish ban on, 100 on Irish war policies, 97–99 “Letters from France” in, 85 poems from Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur in, 85, 161 nn. 44–45 in publication of Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur, 85, 87 second historical moment of, 87, 88 wartime challenges of publishing, 86–87, 162 n. 57 Horkheimer, Max, 81 Humanitas (journal), 102 ideality, in O’Sheel’s The Blossomy Bough, 55 ideal society, Irish, de Valera on, 2–4 identity, Irish of Boyd, 49–50 in literature, 8 of O’Sheel, 46–47, 69 Idolatry and Confusion (Brunius and Mesens), 90–91, 162 n. 73 “Imaginary Interviews” (Gide), 161 n. 45, 161 n. 49

187

Index

imperialism. See colonialism independence, Irish League of Nations and, 17, 24 neutrality and, 18 wartime constraints on, 2–3 India, 112, 166 n. 33 information conversion of facts into, 64, 66 vs. fact, 53 revolution in freedom of, 5–6 value-​free access to, 68–69 information overload chaos of, 11–12 relationship between information privation and, 12 information privation, relationship between information overload and, 12 intelligence services G2, 111, 112, 115–26, 168 n. 94 MI5, 116 intelligence transcripts, Beckett’s creation of, 143–44 internalization, in Aragon’s “Zone Libre,” 82, 88, 91, 106 international engagement and cooperation, self-​ determination linked to, 6, 17, 30–31 internationalism crises of, in Ethiopian crisis, 18–27 League of Nations as forum for, 23–24 struggles between nationalism and, 7 international modernism, 47 international radio broadcasting escalation of hostilities in, 20–23 in Ethiopian crisis, 21–23, 156 n. 12 as fourth front of modern warfare, 131, 139–40, 168 n. 77 in Northern Ireland, 130–35 as offensive instrument, 20 rise of, 20–21 “Inter-​Racial Implications of the Ethiopian Crisis” (Du Bois), 26–27, 31 In Time of War (Fisk), 112, 168 n. 98 Inventing Ireland (Kiberd), 52–53 inwardness, Irish, 3, 5, 6, 18 IRA. See Irish Republican Army Ireland. See also Irish Free State; Northern Ireland Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur published in, 73, 95–107 borders of, 130–35 British colonialism in (see British colonialism) censorship in, 96–97, 99–100, 163 n. 92, 163 n. 96 Home Rule crises in, 128–29 intellectual opposition to state of, 103–4 travel restrictions in, 167 n. 73 “Ireland After Yeats” (O’Faoláin), 107 Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (Boyd), 49, 50

Ireland’s Stand (de Valera), 1–5 Irish Americans, in New York, in Irish literary space, 47, 48–52. See also specific people Irish Army, monitoring transcripts of Stuart by, 111, 112, 115–26 Irish Civil War, 24, 64 Irish Free State Army of, 24 influence of Ethiopian crisis on, 17, 31–32 as League of Nations member, 17, 24, 29 Irish Independent (newspaper), 34 Irish language movement, Browne (Patrick) in, 102–3 Irish Literary Revival, 9, 45, 50, 51, 95 Irish mode, 105, 165 n. 126 Irishness of Boyd, 49–50 of O’Sheel, 46–47, 69 Irish people, compared to Somalis by Britain, 15–16 Irish Press (newspaper), 98, 134 Irish Republican Army (IRA) assassinations by, 39 O’Sheel’s defense of bombing campaign of, 64–65 Stuart’s connections to, 111, 165 n. 8, 167 n. 38 Irish Times (newspaper), 99, 104, 105 Irish Writing (journal), 146 Irland-​Redaktion under German Foreign Office, 111, 112, 115 relocation of, 167 n. 46 Stuart’s broadcasts at (see Stuart, Francis) Isherwood, Christopher, 93 isolationism, U.S. Irish colonial history in, 47 Viereck and O’Sheel’s interest in, 60 Italian fascism colonial expansion in, 19–20 de Valera’s critique of, 30 as force for modernization of Ethiopia, 17, 25–26 international conventions broken by, 16 radio broadcasting of, 36–37 Starkie’s Waveless Plain on, 32–43 Italo–Ethiopian Treaty of 1928, 17 Italy British reception of propaganda of, 38–39 Ethiopia invaded by (see Ethiopian crisis) Ethiopian radio station built by, 22, 156 n. 12 Ethiopian spheres of influence established by, 19 in Italo–Ethiopian Treaty of 1928, 17 origins of German partnership with, 20 radio broadcasting in rural areas of, 36–37 shortwave broadcasting from, 42 Starkie’s Waveless Plain on propaganda of, 32, 37–39 “It’s Happening in Ireland” (O’Sheel), 64–65

188

Index

Jacobs, S. A., 61 Jameson, Fredric, 54, 159 n. 64 Japan, investment in Ethiopia by, 19 “J’attends sa Lettre au Crépuscule” (Aragon), 81 Jealous of Dead Leaves (O’Sheel), 53, 59–60 “Jim and Johnny” radio program, 114, 165 n. 20 Johnson, Phyllis, 149 Joyce, James Boyd on, 49, 50 Browne (Patrick) compared to, 102 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 47 Ulysses, 12, 49, 158 n. 22 Joyce, William, 112, 131 Jurgen (Cabell), 50, 158 n. 20 Kafka, Franz, 146 Kahn, Douglas, 41 Kavanagh, Patrick, “Old Peasant,” 100 Kedward, H. R., 77–78, 83 Keir, D. Lindsay, 167 n. 68 Kelleher, John, 55–56 Kennedy, John, Why England Slept, 65 Kennedy, Michael, 17, 27 Kenner, Hugh, 144, 168 n. 8 Keogh, Dermot, 5–6 Kiberd, Declan on Browne (Patrick), 164 n. 115 Inventing Ireland, 52–53 on O’Sheel, 52–53, 55 Kittler, Friedrich, 140 Knowlson, James, 141 Koestler, Arthur on Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur, 89–90, 162 n. 68 The Yogi and the Commissar, 89–90 “Ku Klux Kriticism” (Boyd), 49, 158 n. 16 Larbaud, Valéry, 49 Last Ditch, The (MacNeice), 92 Last Stronghold of Slavery, The (pamphlet), 25–26, 156 n. 25, 156 n. 27 Latham, Sean, 86 League of American Writers, 64 League of Nations collective security through, 17, 31, 98 Covenant of, 16, 23, 25, 29, 30, 31, 34 de Valera as president of Council of, 27–28 de Valera on reforms needed in, 30 Ethiopia as member of, 16, 24–25 in Ethiopian crisis (see Ethiopian crisis) fascism’s influence at, 29 Fourth Assembly of, 24 in Irish autonomy, 17, 24

Irish deprioritization of, 17 Irish Free State as member of, 17, 24, 29 radio station of, 29 small states in, 17, 23, 24, 29, 31–32 as source of moral authority, 30–31 in Stuart’s broadcasts, 112 as unique forum for international dialogue, 23–24 leftist associations, of O’Sheel, 47, 69, 160 n. 74 Lehmann, John, 91, 163 n. 100 Lenin, Vladimir, 64, 65 Lescure, Pierre de, 76 Lester, Sean, 157 n. 36 “Letters from France” (anonymous), 85 Lewis, Sinclair, 118 Babbitt, 166 n. 29 Lightning Action (radio play), 165 n. 19 “Like a Rolling Stone” (Dylan), 169 n. 24 linguistic code, 60, 159 n. 47 linguistic protectionism, 102, 103 literary censorship, vs. political censorship, 100 “Literary Idolatry” (Koestler), 89 literary modernism Beckett in, 147 international sites of production of, 44 Ireland vs. Irish writing in, 7–9 Literary Revival, Irish, 9, 45, 50, 51, 95 literary space, Irish Beckett in, 146–47 Casanova on, 9–10, 47–52, 147 New York as fourth point of, 47–53 literary space, world, 9–10, 47 literary writing, vs. political writing, of O’Sheel, 59 literature and morality, incompatibility of, 49–50 vs. propaganda, 169 n. 13 literature, Irish. See also specific authors censorship of, 99–100 controversies of, 8–9 in modernism, 7–9 national identity expressed in, 8 Little Review (magazine), 86, 158 n. 22 Lloyd George, David, 28 London de Gaulle’s 1940 broadcast from, 84 French refugees in, 84 London Naval Treaty, 19, 156 n. 6 long wave broadcasting, 20–21 Lotz, Rainer, 165 n. 19 Loughlin, James, 138 Lyon, Janet, 35, 44 MacBride, Maud Gonne, 165 n. 8

189

Index

MacBride, Seán, 165 n. 8 MacDonagh, Donagh The Oxford Book of Irish Verse, 164 n. 125 Poems from Ireland, 105, 106, 107, 164 n. 125 MacDonagh, Thomas, 114, 165 n. 126 MacEntee, Margaret Browne, 101 MacEntee, Seán, 101 MacGowran, Jack, 141–42, 149 MacGowran Speaking Beckett program, 141–42 Machlup, Fritz, 155 n. 33 MacLeish, Archibald, 63 MacLiammóir, Micheál, 35 MacManus, M. J. biography of de Valera by, 99 “Eire and the World Crisis,” 98–99, 163–64 nn. 104–105 MacNeice, Louis Aragon’s “Zone Libre” translated by, 73, 91–95, 162 n. 78 at BBC, 92, 93, 163 n. 81 “Evening in Connecticut,” 93 The Last Ditch, 92 Modern Poetry, 94 on parable, 92, 162 n. 77 radio plays by, 93 Springboard, 92 Macpherson, James, 53 Maffey, John, 26, 97, 156 n. 29 Mafia, 157 n. 70 Mahr, Adolf, 166 n. 24 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 85 Maloney, W. J., The Forged Casement Diaries, 165 nn. 10–11 Malouf, Michael, 155 n. 23 Mandel, Ernest, 10–11 Marshall, George, 133, 134 Mattelart, Armand, 10 McIntosh, Gillian, 128, 130 McLuhan, Marshall, 42 McMahon, Cian, 30–31 McNaughton, James, 169 n. 13 mediation, vanishing, 67, 159 n. 64 medium wave broadcasting, 20–21, 22, 156 n. 11 “Men and Machines” (Bourdieu), 146 Mercier and Camier (Beckett), 144 Mesens, E. L. T., Idolatry and Confusion, 90–91, 162 n. 73 metonymy, 84, 88 MI5, 116 “might makes right” ethos, 29 militarism, in League, de Valera’s wariness of, 30 military draft, in Northern Ireland, 138–40

Milne, Ewart, 161 n. 50 minimalism, 148–49 mobilization, in Aragon’s “Zone Libre,” 91–92 modernism art in ideology of, 54 Beckett in, 147 high, 49, 73, 74, 85, 87, 89 international, 47 Ireland vs. Irish writing in, 7–9 relationship of cosmopolitanism to, 44 relationship of propaganda to, 11–12, 13 transnational turn in, 7, 44 Modernism, Media, and Propaganda (Wollaeger), 11, 13 modernist art, Quinn’s collection of, 50, 158 n. 23 modernization, of Ethiopia, fascist Italy as force for, 17, 25–26 “Modern Novel and Society, The” (Stuart), 113–15, 117, 124 Modern Poetry (MacNeice), 94 momentary value, and opportunity, 53, 56, 59, 64 money, Stuart’s broadcasts on, 114–15, 120, 124 monitoring transcripts approaches to understanding, 109–10 British, 111, 126–40 Irish Army, 111, 112, 115–26 of Stuart’s broadcasts (see Stuart, Francis) U.S., 111, 113–15 Monologues de Minuit (anthology), 148 Montreal, Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur published in, 161 n. 48 Moon Is Down, The (Steinbeck), 166 n. 22 moral authority, League of Nations as source of, 30–31 morality, and literature, incompatibility of, 49–50 Morash, Christopher, 8–9 Mortimer, Raymond, 85, 162 n. 75 Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, 51, 158 n. 25 Mühlhausen, Ludwig, 122–23, 167 n. 50 Mussolini, Benito charisma of, 28, 33, 37–41 colonialist motivations of, 19, 25–26 personality of, 18, 38–41 public speaking skills of, 28–29, 38, 42, 157 n. 78 Starkie’s Waveless Plain on, 18, 32–43 voice of, 37, 40, 42 “mutiny” broadcast, of Stuart, 138–40 National Archives Act of 1986, 5 national identity, Irish. See identity, Irish nationalism, Irish disagreements over, 65 and Literary Revival, 95 struggles between internationalism and, 7

190

Index

national radio services, designed for foreign audiences, 20 national security collective, through League of Nations, 17, 31, 98 Irish measures taken for, 96–100 “Natural Allies” (cartoon), 156 n. 3 navies, national, treaties on size of, 19, 156 n. 6 Nazi Germany censorship in, 166 n. 29 concentration camps in, 163 n. 96 Ethiopian crisis and, 20 origins of Italian partnership with, 20 propaganda of, in U.S., 65–66, 113–14, 131–32 radio broadcasting in Vichy France, 72–73, 80–81, 160 n. 6 Stuart’s move to, 109, 111, 118–19 Viereck’s support for, 64 writing as collaboration with, 75–76, 77 NBC, 28 Neruda, Pablo, 77 neutrality, Irish alignment with Britain in, 96–97, 116, 163 n. 95 Allied critics of, 1 censorship and, 96–97, 99–100 Churchill and, 164 n. 107 Constitution of 1937 on, 18 de Valera on rationale for, 1–3, 99, 163 n. 95 Ethiopian crisis in origins of, 17–18, 32 French resistance and, 105 MacManus on rationale for, 98–99 national security measures and, 96–97 Northern Ireland on, 135, 137–38 self-​preservation in, 17–18, 32 Stuart’s broadcasts on, 116–17 New Masses (magazine), 64–65 newspapers. See also specific papers coverage of Ethiopian crisis in, 30–31 O’Sheel on propaganda in, 58–59 New Statesman (magazine), 85 New Writing and Daylight (journal), 91, 97, 163 n. 100 New York Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur published in, 85, 161 n. 47 as fourth point of Irish literary space, 47–53 Irish political agitation in, 47, 48, 50–51 O’Sheel in, 46–47, 53–64 New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, 49–50, 158 n. 22 New York World (newspaper), 63–64 Nicolson, Harold, 161 n. 45, 162 n. 57 Northern Ireland Blake’s history of war effort in, 128–30, 137 border between Éire and, 130–35 conscription in, 138–40

founding myths of, 128–29 government of, 129–30, 167 n. 61 monitoring transcripts in, 111, 126–40 Stuart’s broadcasts in, 111, 112, 138–40 travel restrictions in, 167 n. 73 Northern Ireland in the Second World War (Blake), 128–30, 137, 167 n. 68, 167 n. 73 Northern Irish parliament, 129 Nouvelle Revue Française, 75, 80 O’Brien, Flann, 39 O’Brien, Gerard, 6 O’Brien, Máire Cruise, The Same Age as the State, 101 O’Doherty, Brian, 149 O’Donnell, Peadar, 115, 166 n. 33 O’Donoghue, David, 139 Ó Drisceoil, Donal, 96, 100, 163 n. 92 Oedipus at Colonus, 102 O’Faoláin, Seán, 104, 107, 163 n. 100 “Ireland After Yeats,” 107 O’Flaherty, Liam, 115 Famine, 119 Ogilvie, F. W., 133, 168 n. 81 O’Halpin, Eunan, 96, 97, 164 n. 107 O’Higgins, Kevin, 39 “Old Peasant” (Kavanagh), 100 O’Malley, Ernie, On Another Man’s Wound, 68–69 On Another Man’s Wound (O’Malley), 68–69 O’Neill, Eugene, 118 On the Study of Celtic Literature (Arnold), 52, 53 opportunity, and momentary value, 53, 56, 59, 64 O’Sheel, Shaemas, 46–47, 53–70 Antigone: A New Redaction, 61–62, 159 nn. 53–54 authorial stance of, 56, 59 The Blossomy Bough, 53, 54–56 The Catechism of Balaam, Jr., 56–58 compared to Yeats, 54, 59, 61–62 as cosmopolitan intermediary, 46, 68 death of, 160 n. 75 on IRA bombing campaigns, 64–65 Irishness of, 46–47, 69 “It’s Happening in Ireland,” 64–65 Jealous of Dead Leaves, 53, 59–60 Kiberd on, 52–53, 55 leftist associations of, 47, 69, 160 n. 74 life and career in, 46–47, 54 propaganda pamphlets by, 56–59 “The Return of George S. Viereck,” 63–64 revised versions of poetry of, 59–60 Seven Periods of Irish History, 47, 64–70 “They Went Forth to Battle but They Always Fell,” 46, 52–53, 55–56, 59–60

191

Index

O’Sheel, Shaemas (cont’d ) A Trip Through Headline Land, 57–59 Viereck and, 60–67 O’Sullivan, Seán, 164 n. 113 Oxford Book of Irish Verse, The (MacDonagh and Robinson), 164 n. 125 paper rationing, 86, 104, 105 parable, MacNeice on, 92, 162 n. 77 paranationalism, 3–4, 7 Paris Beckett in, 143 as capital of world literary space, 9, 47 shortwave broadcasting from, 71–72 Paris Mondial, 71–72 parliament, British, 129 parliament, Northern Irish, 129 Peace and War (de Valera), 152 Pearse, Patrick, 68, 114 Pedersen, Susan, 23 Péret, Benjamin, Le Déshonneur des Poètes, 162 n. 73 Perloff, Marjorie, 145 Péron, Alfred, 143, 168 n. 6 Péron, Marie, 146, 148 personality, of Mussolini, 18, 38–41 Pétain, Philippe, 84 “Petite Suite Sans Fil” (Aragon), 81 Phoney War, 71, 77, 160 n. 1 Piette, Adam, 87 Pigeon Irish (Stuart), 115 Playboy of the Western World, The (Synge), 51–52, 158 n. 25 Poems for France (Cunard), 161 n. 50 Poems from Ireland (MacDonagh), 105, 106, 107, 164 n. 125 Poètes Casqués 40 (journal), 79 poetry. See also specific works and writers French vs. British wartime, 87–91 rhymes in, 79–80, 82–83, 90, 161 n. 30 poison gas, in Ethiopian crisis, 16 political censorship, vs. literary censorship, 100 political writing, vs. literary writing, of O’Sheel, 59 politicians, in opening of government archives, 6 politics, Irish in New York, 47, 48, 50–51 right-​wing, 33–34 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, A (Joyce), 47 postcolonialism, 47–48, 158 n. 12 press, and Irish censorship, 96, 163 n. 92. See also newspapers; specific publications Princeton Listening Center establishment of, 113 mission of, 113 monitoring transcripts of Stuart at, 111, 113–15

“This Is Paris” picked up by, 71 propaganda. See also specific authors, countries, and works vs. literature, 169 n. 13 postwar revision of meaning of, 60, 116 vs. public relations, 60 racial or ethnic, 15–16 relationship of modernism to, 11–12, 13 resistance to, 63 Propaganda (Bernays), 60, 159 n. 48 protectionism, 95, 99–100, 102, 103 public, absent, 54, 59, 60, 67 public opinion on Ethiopian crisis, 30–31 influence of propaganda on, 62–63, 122–23 Public Opinion Quarterly, 65–66 public relations, vs. propaganda, 60 publishing industry, in wartime France, 75–78. See also specific publications and publishers purity Irish desire for, 49–50 in poetry, MacNeice on, 94 Quinn, John, 50–52, 158 nn. 22–23, 158 nn. 25–26 Rabaté, Etienne, 146 Raber, Douglas, 13 racial domination, in Ethiopian crisis, 26–27 racial propaganda, British, 15–16 radio broadcasting. See also specific countries and people cross-​border (see international radio broadcasting) escalation of hostilities in, 20–23 as fourth front of modern warfare, 131, 139–40, 168 n. 77 impact on World War II, 10–11 in Italian fascism, 36–37 long and medium wave, 20–21, 22, 156 n. 11 shortwave (see shortwave broadcasting) of sporting events, 37–38 Radio Éireann, 28, 30, 135, 137, 151 Radio-​Nations, 29 radio stations. See also specific stations border, 20, 22 League of Nations, 29 readers, of O’Sheel’s pamphlets, autonomy of, 56–57, 59, 63. See also audience reading, close, 44–45 reading formations, 110 reality, in O’Sheel’s The Blossomy Bough, 55 rebellion, in Casanova’s typology of writers’ strategies, 45, 47–48 reception. See also radio broadcasting in Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur, 80–82, 92–95, 106

192

Index

in Beckett’s Watt, 145–46 in O’Sheel’s “They Went Forth to Battle,” 55–56 recognition, and defamiliarization, 59–60 records (phonograph) of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, 147–52, 169 n. 24 broken, 146–47 of MacGowran Speaking Beckett program, 141–42 Renaissance, European, 102 Renier, Olive, 127 “Return of George S. Viereck, The” (O’Sheel), 63–64 revolution, in Casanova’s typology of writers’ strategies, 45, 47–48 rhymes Aragon on, 79–80 in Aragon’s poetry, 82–83, 90, 161 n. 30 right-​wing politics, 33–34 “Rime en 1940, La” (Aragon), 79–80, 104, 160 n. 28 Robinson, Lennox, 61 Golden Treasury of Irish Verse, 105 The Oxford Book of Irish Verse, 164 n. 125 Rolo, Charles, 126–27 Romany people, 35–36 Roosevelt, Franklin, 112, 132, 166 n. 22 Rose, The (Yeats), 53 “Rose of Battle, The” (Yeats), 53 Rosset, Barney, 141 Rough for Radio II (Beckett), 168 n. 8 Rubinstein, Vladimir, 127 Ryan, Desmond, 157 n. 41 Saar Plebiscite, 157 n. 48 Saerchinger, César, 20–21, 39–40 Hello America!, 28 Saint-​Amour, Paul, 61 Same Age as the State, The (O’Brien), 101 Saorstát. See Irish Free State Sapiro, Gisèle, La Guerre des Écrivains, 75 Sartre, Jean-​Paul, 83 Saturday Evening Post (newspaper), 62 Sayles, G. O., 167 n. 68 Schaeffer, Werner, England’s Oppression of Ireland, 67, 68, 69 Schirmer, Walter, 111 Scholars and Gypsies (Starkie), 43 Schrödinger, Erwin, 164 n. 111 secrecy, culture of, 6 Seghers, Pierre, 79 self-​determination de Valera on, 1–2 international engagement and cooperation linked to, 6, 17, 30–31 wartime national security and, 96

self-​preservation, as basis for Irish foreign policy, 17–18, 32 Seven Periods of Irish History (O’Sheel), 47, 64–70 Seven Poets in Search of an Answer (Yoseloff), 160 n. 74 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Defence of Poetry, 94 shortwave broadcasting from Ethiopia, 21–22, 156 n. 12 from France, 71–72 from Italy, 42 mechanisms of, 21 rise of, 21 wartime challenges of, 3 silence in Aragon’s “Petite Suite Sans Fil,” 81 in Aragon’s “Zone Libre,” 73, 81–83, 94, 106 in Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, 150 in wartime France, 72–73, 75–83 Silence de la Mer, Le (Bruller), 76, 160 n. 16, 162 n. 61 sky waves, 21 slavery, in Ethiopia, 24–25 Smyllie, R. M., 104, 105 society, Irish, de Valera on ideal, 2–4 Somalis, British government comparing Irish to, 15–16 Sophocles, 61 sound, decay of, 142 Spanish Civil War, 16 Spectator, The (magazine), 161 n. 45 Spender, Stephen, 86 spheres of influence, in Ethiopia, 19 sporting events, radio broadcasting of, 37–38 Spreading the Germs of Hate (Viereck), 63 Springboard (MacNeice), 92 Starkie, Walter. See also Waveless Plain, The career of, 33, 34, 157 n. 66 political beliefs of, 33–34 Scholars and Gypsies, 43 Steinbeck, John, 166 n. 22 The Grapes of Wrath, 115, 166 n. 29 The Moon Is Down, 166 n. 22 Sterne, Jonathan, 140 stillness, in translation of Aragon’s “Zone Libre,” 94 St. Patrick’s Day speeches of de Valera, 2–4, 152 Strempel, Heribert von, 65–67 Stuart, Francis, 108–40 on artist as dissident, 108 British monitoring transcripts of, 111, 112, 138–40 career of, 108–9 Casement and, 111–12, 165 n. 10 family of, 165 n. 8, 166 n. 32 IRA connections of, 111, 165 n. 8, 167 n. 38 Irish Army monitoring transcripts of, 111, 112, 115–26 literary vs. political subjects of broadcasts by, 109, 112, 116–17

193

Index

Stuart, Francis (cont’d ) “The Modern Novel and Society,” 113–15, 117, 124 move to Berlin, 109, 111, 118–19 “mutiny” broadcast of, 138–40 novels of, 108, 109, 115, 166 n. 26 origins of Irland-​Redaktion broadcasts by, 109, 112, 165 n. 13 as participatory witness, 109, 111, 121–22 postwar controversy surrounding, 116–17, 166 n. 26 significance of monitoring transcripts of, 109–11 sound recordings of, lack of, 109 U.S. monitoring transcripts of, 111, 113–15 wartime publication by, lack of, 108 Sumner, John, 49–50, 158 n. 21 surface waves, 21 surrealists, on Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur, 89, 90–91 Survey of Fascism, A, 33 Suvin, Darko, 166 n. 30 symbolic capital, 165 n. 18 Synge, John Millington, The Playboy of the Western World, 51–52, 158 n. 25 Tansil, Charles Callan, 158 n. 24 television programs, interruptions in, 13 Texts for Nothing (Beckett), 143, 144, 147–52, 169 n. 24 “They Went Forth to Battle but They Always Fell” (O’Sheel), 46, 52–53, 55–56, 59–60 “This Is Paris” radio program, 71–72 Thomas, J. H., 15, 156 n. 2 transcription intelligence, Beckett’s wartime work on, 143–44 monitoring (see monitoring transcripts) and ventriloquism, in Beckett’s writing, 144–46, 168 n. 8 transmission. See also radio broadcasting in Aragon’s Le Crève-​Coeur, 80–82, 92–95, 106 in Beckett’s Watt, 145–46 of information vs. fact, 53 in O’Sheel’s “They Went Forth to Battle,” 55–56 transmitters long and medium wave vs. shortwave, 21, 156 n. 11 rise of high-​powered, 21 transnational turn, in modernism, 7, 44 travel restrictions, between Britain and Ireland, 167 n. 73 Tribune, 89 Triolet, Elsa, 80–81, 82 Trip Through Headline Land, A (O’Sheel), 57–59 troubadours, 78, 160 n. 26 typeface, of O’Sheel’s Antigone, 61–62, 159 n. 53 Ulster. See Northern Ireland Ulysses (Joyce), 12, 49, 158 n. 22

“Under Ben Bulben” (Yeats), 107 United Kingdom. See Britain United States de Valera’s broadcasts to, 28, 29–30 entry into war by, 117–18, 131–32 German propaganda in, 65–66, 113–14, 131–32 isolationism of, 47, 60 propaganda’s influence on public opinion in, 62–63 Stuart’s broadcasts to, monitoring transcripts of, 111, 113–15 universalization, and cosmopolitanism, 45 value, of information vs. fact, 53 vanishing mediation, 67, 159 n. 64 ventriloquism in Beckett’s writing, 144–46, 150–51, 168 n. 8 in O’Sheel’s writing, 61–62 Vercors. See Bruller, Jean Vichy France autonomy in, 75–76 British reactions to, 83–84 contraband writing in, 78–79, 80, 82–83 de Gaulle’s 1940 broadcast to, 84 establishment of, 72 German broadcasting in, 72–73, 80–81, 160 n. 6 publishing industry in, 75–78 resistance to (see French resistance) silence in, 72–73, 75–83 Viereck, George Sylvester, 60–67 in Facts in Review, 66 in Flanders Hall, 66–67, 159 n. 68 Nazi regime supported by, 64 O’Sheel and, 60–67 on propaganda, 62–64 as propagandist, 60–61 Spreading the Germs of Hate, 63 Tansil on, 158 n. 24 “Vingt Ans Après” (Aragon), 80–81 violin, in Starkie’s The Waveless Plain, 33, 36, 41, 42–43 Vogue typeface, 61–62, 159 n. 53 Walters, F. P., 24 War Crimes Commission, U.S., 65–67 War Poems of the United Nations (Davidman), 160 n. 74 Washington Naval Treaty, 19, 156 n. 6 waterways, in Ethiopian crisis, 19 Watson, Peter, 86 Watt (Beckett), 144–46 Waugh, Evelyn, 16–17, 156 n. 12 Waveless Plain, The (Starkie), 18, 32–43 authorial poses in, 33–37 on charisma of Mussolini, 33, 37–41

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Index

on Ethiopian crisis, 18, 32–34, 41–43 as index to appeal of fascism, 34 on personality of Mussolini, 18, 38–41 professional credentials of author in, 34, 157 n. 66 publication of, 34 on social interactions in Italy, 36–37 violin in, 33, 36, 41, 42–43 Weber, Max, 159 n. 64 Weiland, Ruth, 165 n. 10 White, Lawrence William, 102–3 Why England Slept (Kennedy), 65 Williams, Raymond, 3–4, 7, 13, 156 n. 36 Wirsing, G., 67 Wollaeger, Mark, Modernism, Media, and Propaganda, 11, 13 women, Irish Constitution on role of, 4 Work, Ernest, 26 Workers’ Challenge radio station, 131–32, 168 n. 78 working class, broadcasts aimed at, 131–32 “world communication,” 10 World Republic of Letters, The (Casanova) Cleary’s review of, 48 on cosmopolitan intermediaries, 45–46, 48–50 and Irish comparativism, 155 n. 23 on Irish literary space, 9–10, 47–52, 147 on literary autonomy, 45, 46, 47 on typology of writers’ strategies, 45, 47–48 on world literary space, 9–10 World War I balance of power established at end of, 19 Stuart on effects of, 117 World War II. See also Nazi Germany; Vichy France British vs. French poetry during, 87–91



Ethiopian crisis in origins of, 20 fall of France in, 72–73 French radio broadcasting in, 71–72 Italian-​German partnership in, 20 neutrality of Ireland in (see neutrality) Phoney War phase of, 71, 77, 160 n. 1 radio broadcasting’s role in, 10–11 U.S. entry into, 117–18, 131–32

Yeats, John Butler, 51, 54 Yeats, William Butler (W. B.) Browne (Patrick) compared to, 102, 164 n. 115 as literary rebel, 45 O’Sheel compared to, 54, 59, 61–62 The Rose, 53 “The Rose of Battle,” 53 translations of Sophocles by, 61 “Under Ben Bulben,” 107 Yogi and the Commissar, The (Koestler), 89–90 Yoseloff, Thomas, Seven Poets in Search of an Answer, 160 n. 74 “Zone Libre” (Aragon), 73–107 Browne’s translation of, 73, 96, 100, 101, 105–7 as contraband writing, 82–83 MacNeice’s translation of, 73, 91–95, 162 n. 78 publication in Britain, 73, 85, 161 nn. 44–45 publication in France, 73, 81–83 publication in Ireland, 73, 95–96, 100, 105 silence in, 73, 81–83, 94, 106 time and location of writing of, 161 n. 36 use of term “fading” in, 81–82, 93–94, 106

195