Regional Modernisms 9780748669318

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Regional Modernisms

Regional Modernisms

Edited by Neal Alexander and James Moran

EDINBURGH University Press

Contents

Acknowledgements vii Notes on contributors viii Introduction: Regional Modernisms Neal Alexander and James Moran 1. ‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’ Andrew Thacker

1 22

2. The Regional Modernism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce 44 Andrew Harrison 3. J. M. Synge, Authenticity, and the Regional Patrick Lonergan

65

4. Pound, Yeats, and the Regional Repertory Theatres James Moran

83

5. Capturing the Scale of Fiction at Mid-Century David James

104

6. Regionalism and Modernity: The Case of Leo Walmsley Dominic Head

124

7. Hugh MacDiarmid’s Modernisms: Synthetic Scots and the Spectre of Robert Burns Drew Milne

142

8. Welsh Modernist Poetry: Dylan Thomas, David Jones, and Lynette Roberts John Goodby and Chris Wigginton

160

9. Between the Islands: Michael McLaverty, Late Modernism, and the Insular Turn John Brannigan

184

Acknowledgements

Thanks, first of all, to our contributors for producing a fine group of essays and working to tight deadlines. We are immensely grateful to our colleagues in the Schools of English and Geography, University of Nottingham, for their support, advice, and collegiality. Steve Daniels, Sarah Davison, Leena Kore Schröder, David Matless, Rebecca Peck, Lynda Pratt, and Julie Sanders deserve special mentions. We have also learned a great deal from our students, particularly Joe Anderton, Louise Chamberlain, and Emma Zimmerman. At Edinburgh University Press, Jackie Jones saw the potential in a rather ragged proposal right away, and Jen Daly has helped steer the project through sometimes choppy waters. We are indebted to them both, and to their team of colleagues. Maud Ellmann, Luke Gibbons, and Vic Merriman made valuable comments and lent encouragement along the way. Our families have, once again, offered us boundless support, forbearance, and love: thank you Tina and Seren Alexander, Maria, Thomas, and Joseph Moran. The editors and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint copyright material as follows: extracts from Complete Poems by Basil Bunting reprinted by permission of Bloodaxe Books © The Literary Estate of Basil Bunting; Hugh MacDiarmid’s poems ‘The Watergaw’ and ‘Empty Vessel’ are reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press; Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission; extracts from the correspondence of W. B. Yeats are published by permission of Oxford University Press and the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Notes on Contributors    ix

David James is lecturer in English at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space (2008) and Modernist Futures (2012). He is editor of The Legacies of Modernism (2011) and The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945 (2015). Patrick Lonergan is professor of drama and theatre at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He is the author of Theatre and Globalization: Irish Drama in the Celtic Tiger Era (2009), which was awarded the Theatre Book Prize, Synge and His Influences (2010), and The Theatre and Films of Martin McDonagh (2012). He is director of the J. M. Synge Summer School. Drew Milne is the Judith E. Wilson Lecturer in Drama and Poetry, University of Cambridge. He is the editor of Modern Critical Thought: An Anthology of Theorists Writing on Theorists (2003) and, with Terry Eagleton, of Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader (1996). As a poet, his publications include The Damage: New and Selected Poems (2001), Go Figure (2003), and the view from Royston cave (2012). James Moran is associate professor in drama at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Staging the Easter Rising (2005), Irish Birmingham: A History (2010), and The Theatre of Seán O’Casey (2013). He also presents the regular book review on BBC Radio Nottingham and in 2013 was awarded a mid-career fellowship by the British Academy. Andrew Thacker is professor of twentieth century literature at De Montfort University. He is the author of Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (2003) and The Imagist Poets (2011); and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (2010) and the two volumes of The Oxford Cultural and Critical History of Modernist Magazines (2009; 2012). He is currently the Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies and co-director of the Modernist Magazines Project. Chris Wigginton is assistant dean at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of Modernism from the Margins: The 1930s Poetry of Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas (2003) and co-editor (with John Goodby) of Dylan Thomas (2001).

Introduction: Regional Modernisms Neal Alexander and James Moran

Where did modernism happen? What were its important places and distinctive geographies? These are not new questions and, until relatively recently, might have been thought settled. A powerful and well-rehearsed narrative about modernism defines it as essentially metropolitan and internationalist in character, recalling that the majority of high-modernist writers and artists were exiles or émigrés, and that their texts are conspicuously polyglot, heteronomous, and fashioned from diverse cultural materials. Modernism, according to Malcolm Bradbury, was ‘an art of cities’ and the jolting energies of life in the major European capitals can be read in the fractured, discontinuous forms of modernist art. He claims that even where writers such as James Joyce or Ernest Hemingway retain an imaginative connection to particular localities, they do so only ‘from the distance of an expatriate perspective of aesthetic internationalism’.1 Modernism is, by definition, liberated from provincialism and local allegiances, caught up in an ambivalent but creatively productive relationship with the fluctuating currents of modernity and modernisation. Paris, London, Berlin, St Petersburg, New York: these are the principal centres of the modernist maelstrom in Marshall Berman’s account, and the city street is identified as ‘the medium in which the totality of modern material and spiritual forces could meet, clash, interfuse and work out their ultimate meanings and fates’.2 The great European and North American metropoles were home not only to publishing houses, galleries, and museums, but to the salons, coteries, and cafés in which writers from widely different backgrounds could meet, collaborate, and influence one another. Such settings provided cultured, highly educated audiences for the erudite and elitist products of an avant-gardist art. It was here and only here, the story goes, that a truly international modernist aesthetic could be forged. Precisely because this narrative of modernism’s formation has been so powerful, it calls for some qualification, as well as a more nuanced

2    Neal Alexander and James Moran account of the fractured, multi-scale geographies involved. Indeed, Raymond Williams, whose own description of modernism’s metropolitan perceptions has been widely influential, insists that ‘the metropolitan interpretation of its own processes as universals’ must be challenged by taking up the perspective ‘from the deprived hinterlands’.3 Certainly, too little attention has been paid to the complex interactions between internationalist sensibilities, forged in the metropolitan milieu, and those pervasive regional or local affiliations that inflect the work of so many modernist writers, particularly those from Britain and Ireland. To take just a handful of obvious examples: James Joyce’s European stature is founded upon his intense imaginative engagement with Dublin, a provincial, colonial city which could only ironically be dubbed ‘the Hibernian Metropolis’; D. H. Lawrence’s major novels find their characteristic terrains amongst the farmlands, towns, and mining country of the Nottinghamshire–Derbyshire border; Hugh MacDiarmid spearheaded the emergence of a distinctively Scottish version of modernism during the 1920s and 1930s, first from the provincial town of Montrose in Angus and later from remote Whalsay in the Shetland Isles; the young W. H. Auden displays a recurrent fascination with the industrial landscapes of the English Midlands and the North Pennine moors; Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre determinedly spurns the parochial and the monolingual whilst nonetheless incorporating the author’s fragmented memories of Foxrock, a southern suburb of the Irish capital; and Dylan Thomas’s idiosyncratic modernist poetics is energised by his responses to suburban Swansea and the Carmarthenshire coast.4 In such instances of regional modernism an internationalist or cosmopolitan sensibility arises, paradoxically, from situations and contexts that are distinctively local or provincial. Indeed, Andrew Miller argues that W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot are both engaged in a struggle against ‘cosmopolitan rootlessness’, seeking instead to establish ‘a metaphorical sense of location that will be simultaneously local and general’.5 At the same time, the modernist writer’s commitment to an aesthetic of the new also recasts ideas of regional character and identity in more flexible, porous, or relational forms. In an era of mass transport and new communications technology, modernist writers who established non-metropolitan locations, however temporary, were still able to participate in the kind of creative collaborations more usually associated with the big city. We might think of Lady Gregory and her circle at Coole Park, Co. Galway; Seán O’Casey on the telephone to the Paris-based Samuel Beckett from home in Totnes, Devon; or, most notably, Yeats and Ezra Pound spending the winters of 1913 to 1916 in Stone Cottage on the edge of Ashdown Forest, East

Introduction: Regional Modernisms    3

Sussex. It was here in Sussex, according to James Longenbach, rather than in the salons of London or Paris, that the two men ‘canonized many of the practices and (even more important) the aristocratic tone’ of Anglophone literary modernism.6 While staying at Stone Cottage, Yeats and Pound consciously appropriated and combined a number of important international influences, among them Japanese Noh theatre and the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. They did so in a part of rural Sussex that crossed provincial quietude with the disruptions of modern urban life. The cottage was surrounded by swathes of unindustrialised countryside and kept tidy by an efficient band of female housekeepers; yet, the nearby train line to London was a reminder of modernity’s accelerating rhythms, and the morning papers brought reports of mechanised warfare from Mons, Ypres, and Gallipoli. To discover modernism in the major cities, then, is to locate only one, admittedly significant, aspect of a broader and more geographically diverse phenomenon. The essays collected in Regional Modernisms add to a more general critical effort to expand and refine the parameters of literary modernism, drawing impetus from recent work in the new modernist studies and in literary geography. In particular, they explore the often-neglected regional and local attachments that provide contexts for modernist experimentation, and turn attention towards lesser-known writers or texts. Established figures such as Joyce and Lawrence, Yeats and Pound are read alongside the likes of Sylvia Townsend Warner, Basil Bunting, Leo Walmsley, and Michael McLaverty. As several of the essays here attest, regional affiliations are apparent in the work of many high modernists but are perhaps particularly pronounced in that of ‘late’ modernists writing during and after the 1930s. One of the consequences, then, of examining the regional geographies of Anglophone modernism in Britain and Ireland is the need to reconsider its conventional periodisation, and this book accordingly seeks to show that the long afterlife of regional modernism extends well into the second half of the twentieth century. The possibilities for expanding or reframing the time-space frontiers of modernism have been richly illustrated in recent years by the ‘trans­ national turn’ in the new modernist studies. Critical work in this vein challenges the Eurocentrism of older models of internationalism by attending to the imperial and post-colonial contexts for modernism, and also emphasises ‘a variety of affiliations within and across national spaces’ rather than regarding modernism as inherently deterritorialised.7 At first glance, such enthusiasm for tracing transnational exchanges appears to offer scant support for the idea of regional modernisms, and Sara Blair voices the concern that this critical approach has tended to

4    Neal Alexander and James Moran obscure modernism’s ‘life as a local phenomenon’.8 Similarly, David James warns against the dangers of a critical vogue for ‘figures of displacement’ whereby the ‘local, site-specific attachments’ of regional writing ‘remain the generic “other” against which the vitalities of global modernism are defined’.9 These are valid concerns, which the essays in this volume each seek to address in a variety of ways. Yet there is also an increasing attentiveness on the part of critics writing on literary modernism to questions of location and geographical situation within a wider context of displacements and global flows. For instance, Jahan Ramazani espouses a transnational approach to modernist poetics that is ‘alert to how such art and literature interlace localities and nationalities with one another in a globally imagined space’.10 The metaphor of ‘interlacing’ is particularly appropriate to the essays collected in this book, for the transnational turn of the new modernist studies also requires a more detailed understanding of modernism’s sub-national and intra-national dynamics, and the ways in which these local ties are intricately braided with its more cosmopolitan strands. The impression of such interlacing is further strengthened by Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s suggestive study of cosmopolitan style in modernist writing, where she argues that relatively static models of exile and expatriation should be rethought in terms of ‘more dynamic models of migration, entanglement, and mix-up’. In this way it becomes possible to examine closely the manner in which ‘modernist writers troubled the distinction between local and global’ that is so central to earlier accounts of modernist internationalism.11 Moreover, whilst the trope of transnational connections between geographically disparate events is central to her delineation of modernism’s stylistic cosmopolitanism, Walkowitz also argues that modernist texts ‘do not simply offer alternatives to national affiliation; they attempt to make national culture less homogeneous’.12 On this account, modernism simultaneously vaults beyond the bounds of national affiliation and attests to the local differences which threaten to undermine any cultural image of national integrity. The promise of such transnational critical optics lies not only in their capacity to map out the coordinates of what Andreas Huyssen calls ‘modernism at large’, breaking free of restrictive Eurocentric perspectives to discover ‘the cross-national cultural forms that emerge from the negotiations of the modern with the indigenous, the colonial and the post-colonial in the “non-Western” world’.13 This critical approach also highlights, paradoxically, a renewed sense of Anglophone modernism’s distinctively local and regional articulations, and the complex manner in which these are necessarily bound up with a shifting set of national and transnational horizons.

Introduction: Regional Modernisms    5

Ramazani and Walkowitz are both exemplary of a tendency in the new modernist studies already mentioned to expand the parameters of literary modernism temporally as well as spatially, highlighting the transnational legacies of modernism played out in texts from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Another facet of this broad trend is the critical attention paid to the distinctive features of late modernism, which are often seen to complicate the intrinsically internationalist, metropolitan profile ascribed to modernist literature as a whole.14 Jed Esty, for instance, argues that high-modernist writers such as Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and E. M. Forster, who move into the late phase of their careers in the 1930s and 1940s, tend to regard the terminal decline of British imperialism in those decades as an opportunity for the resurgence of a more circumscribed and locally situated national culture. In late-modernist texts such as Forster’s England’s Pleasant Land (1940), Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941), and Eliot’s Four Quartets (1943), Esty notes the eschewal of metropolitan perceptions in favour of ‘a new apprehension of a complete national life – an insular romance of wholeness, or at least of layered social knowability’.15 The anthropological treatment of native culture and traditions that he discovers in these texts acts a corrective to the assumption that modernism’s ‘experimental vitality’ is necessarily ‘coextensive with its internationalism’, and also has the virtue of highlighting modernism’s own historical dynamics.16 A similar thesis is advanced, albeit in a more openly celebratory manner, by Alexandra Harris, who contends that the late 1930s saw ‘a whole concerted project of national self-discovery’ on the part of English modernist artists and writers, amounting to a ‘passionate, exuberant return to tradition’.17 Of course, the imposition of such an interpretative lens risks reinforcing an already dominant politico-geographical hierarchy under the guise of ‘tradition’. As Stuart Hall notes, this critical position tends to read the particularities of the most economically prosperous part of the archipelago as providing the apparently timeless standards by which the rest of Britain and Ireland might be judged, whilst doing little to uncover or challenge the historical peculiarities of those hegemonic formations.18 Esty displays a sounder grasp of the politics informing such projects than Harris, and is more keenly aware that the ‘return’ to tradition is usually an act of invention on behalf of cultural ideology. Yet both Harris and Esty concur that an array of late-modernist texts are absorbed less with the elaboration of an international aesthetic than with English landscapes, customs, and the possibilities of reinvigorating local cultures. Esty’s and Harris’s exclusive focus on late-modernist culture in England complicates the general trend of the transnational turn further

6    Neal Alexander and James Moran by reasserting the significance of national frames during what is taken to be the end phase of Anglophone literary modernism. The work of both critics might also be seen in the context of a broader effort to devolve and particularise ‘British modernism’ in terms of its English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh expressions. This tendency has encouraged the consideration of hitherto under-examined geographical, historical, and cultural contexts for modernist writing, suggesting alternative periodisations in the process. For instance, in this volume John Goodby and Christopher Wigginton argue that, by comparison with English, Irish, and Scottish versions, Welsh modernism is a relatively recent phenomenon, arising in English-language texts during the late 1930s and Welsh-language writing perhaps a decade later.19 Dylan Thomas and David Jones are probably the most prominent figures in this fragmentary, contested tradition, though claims have also been made for lesser-known writers such as Lynette Roberts, Glyn Jones, and Caradoc Evans.20 The case for a Scottish modernism is usually founded on the literary ‘renaissance’ begun in the 1920s and continuing into the 1940s and 1950s. Driven by the nationalist internationalism of Hugh MacDiarmid, the movement also fostered the talents of several writers from the Highlands and Islands, such as Edwin Muir, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and Neil M. Gunn. Its rationale was to challenge Scotland’s ‘provincial North British status’ and ‘recover a distinctive and modern cultural identity’ using methods that were often self-consciously ‘internationalist and non-parochial’.21 Irish modernism has enjoyed a much higher profile than its Scottish and Welsh counterparts, not least because of the international reputations of Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett, though more marginal writers such as J. M. Synge, Elizabeth Bowen, and Flann O’Brien are now also discussed under that heading.22 If Irish writers have long been at the vanguard of Anglophone modernism, however, there is widespread recognition that their Irishness has been too easily overlooked, and Irish modernism itself can seem historically anomalous: a cultural efflorescence in the midst of colonial domination and chronically uneven development. Indeed, David Lloyd contends that Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) should be read not as a paradigm of modernist universals but rather as an ‘aesthetic correlative’ of the ‘multiple and often incommensurable temporalities’ animating modern Irish culture.23 At its best, critical work that understands literary modernism with reference to national frameworks is informed by a keen awareness both of motive forces beyond the nation and the various rifts or differences that traverse the nation internally. Such a dual awareness is necessary because modernist texts are typically located within, and shuttle restlessly between, multiple and overlapping spatial frames: local, regional,

Introduction: Regional Modernisms    7

national, and international. ‘Modernism looks quite different depending on where one locates oneself and when’, observes David Harvey, noting that ‘the particularities of place’ offer a crucial index to ‘the diversity of the modernist effort’.24 The point, however, is not just that modernism is geographically diverse when taken as a whole, but rather that spatial complexity is often intrinsic to the very forms and styles of individual modernist texts. In this connection, Andrew Thacker speaks of the ‘poly­topic quality of modernist writing’, whereby radically different spaces and geographical scales are brought into relation with one another, creating distinctive effects of disorientation or displacement. These in turn call for geographically attentive modes of reading and a critical practice that locates modernist texts ‘only within the movements between and across multiple sorts of space’.25 Of course, if modernism invents novel modes of geographical perception, then this can itself be regarded as an aesthetic response to large-scale structural changes in the capitalist world system. For Fredric Jameson, imperialism creates a violent ‘spatial disjunction’ between the daily life of the home country and that of the distant colonies it exploits, so that it becomes impossible ‘to grasp the way the system functions as a whole’. The ‘new spatial language’ of modernist texts, he argues, seeks an imaginary solution to this real social problem, disrupting and reconfiguring common-sense space perception in order to convey a utopian glimpse of ‘the unrepresentable totality’.26 Although his eye remains firmly on the big picture, then, Jameson also attests to the polytopic character of modernist texts, which frequently seek to coordinate between local situations and global contexts, bringing different spaces into the same imaginative orbit but rarely, if ever, making them cohere. The geographical contours of literary modernism are further described in Jon Hegglund’s recent book, World Views (2012), which contends that aesthetic experiment and geographical self-consciousness are closely bound together in texts from the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, for Hegglund, modernist fictions are not so much geographical as ‘metageographical’, offering ironic interrogations of ‘spaces that were long accepted as natural and “given” ’ so as to reveal the mechanisms whereby spaces and territories are produced.27 In particular, literary modernism’s geographically self-conscious mode of realism contests the hegemony of the nation state within the emerging world system of the twentieth century. It does so most characteristically by foregrounding tensions between different spatial scales, frequently drawing back from local, situated perspectives to provide ‘a cartographic overview that places the narrative scene in a new, disjunctive context’.28 Yet, if this suggests that modernism is defined by its capacity to transcend the merely

8    Neal Alexander and James Moran local and attain a putatively global vantage, Hegglund also argues that modernist writers turn to the concept of the region as a way of mediating between immediate human perceptions and the more expansive spatial contexts in which particular places are always enmeshed. He discusses E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910) alongside works by the Scottish geographer and urbanist Patrick Geddes, describing a mode of ‘modernist chorography’ in which the sensuous particularity of regional perception becomes ‘a catalyst for an imaginative projection of larger scales’.29 Here, then, is further evidence not only of the significance of regional spaces and sensibilities for modernist writers, but also of the ways in which modernism appropriates and adapts the geographical concept of the region for its own imaginative purposes. Our focus upon the regional affiliations of literary modernism in this book is intended as a complement to, rather than as a substitute for transnational or global perspectives, the point being to enhance critical awareness of modernism’s complex, multi-scale geographies. At the same time, Regional Modernisms aims to register the enduring fascination that local places and particular regions have for a wide range of modernist writers whose aesthetic priorities might otherwise appear deracinated. To that end, the opening lines of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1946–58), itself a kind of regional modernist epic, might be taken as emblematic: ‘To make a start/ out of particulars/ and make them general’.30 The essays in this volume identify a similar concern for the particulars of place, region, and locality in the work of writers on this side of the Atlantic. To write out of particulars, as Williams recommends, is both to take local experiences and meanings as a foundation, and to venture beyond their bounds in search of other encounters. For instance, in ‘The Tower’, W. B. Yeats’s poet-narrator stands atop the battlements and sends imagination forth into the Galway countryside, drawing ‘images and memories’, the materials for metaphysical speculation, from specific features of the regional landscape described.31 Similarly, W. H. Auden’s ‘Look, stranger, at this island now’ measures the locally particular against wider geographical and imaginative horizons, its narrator directing the reader’s attention first to ‘the small field’s ending’ and then to a harbour where distant ships are glimpsed ‘like floating seeds’, bound for ‘far off’ lands.32 Both poems might be read in terms of what Hegglund calls ‘the situated eye’, a technique of geographical representation that mediates between perception and imagination, regional landscapes and the larger territories with which they communicate.33 Accordingly, regional modernisms are rarely bound to any one place exclusively, for the particulars of geography and situation may themselves be multiple, shifting, subject to doubt and the contingencies of living.

Introduction: Regional Modernisms    9

Although the regional character of Anglophone literary modernism is often overlooked or undervalued, the essays in Regional Modernisms build upon the arguments advanced by a number of important precursors. In particular, Robert Crawford provides a novel interpretation of literary modernism’s exilic character, arguing that the decisive contributions made by ‘un-English provincials and their traditions’ render modernism a ‘crucially provincial phenomenon’.34 The American formations of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, the differently-inflected Irish identities of W. B. Yeats and James Joyce, and the Scottish antisyzygies of Hugh MacDiarmid are all adduced in support of Crawford’s thesis, which regards demotic and provincial features of modernist texts as key complements to their cosmopolitan registers. Literary modernism is thus understood to be decentred at its very core, offering a ‘provincial challenge to Anglocentric identity’ whilst simultaneously manifesting an international constituency.35 We prefer ‘regional’ to Crawford’s ‘provincial’, partly because it suffers less from pejorative connotations in ordinary usage, and partly because of its greater purchase as a geographical concept. But we follow him in seeking to examine the cultural and political investments that modernist writers make in local places and ex-centric regional identities. In their introduction to the volume Locations of Literary Modernism (2000), Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins similarly contest ‘the commonplace that modernism is a transnational or supranational entity’ by tracing the interplay between ideas of region and nation in texts by a much wider range of modernist poets from both sides of the Atlantic.36 We share their conviction that a deeper understanding of the tensions between transnational circulations and regional locations will allow for more flexible models of modernism’s complex and contradictory manifestations. However, the scope of our volume is at once more geographically focused, concentrating upon literary production in Britain and Ireland, and more generically expansive, considering poetry alongside theatre, fiction, and little magazines. We have also drawn ideas and impetus from a 2009 special issue of Modern Fiction Studies on ‘Regional Modernism’ in which Scott Herring notes the term’s currency in the discipline of architecture. Here, regional modernism is used to designate building designs that favour local differentiation over the abstraction and standardisation of the International Style propounded by Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius. By analogy, regional modernism in literature resists flattening idiosyncrasies of style, language, or theme, especially where these derive from an imaginative engagement with the particularities of place. Attending to these regional inflections, it is the critic’s responsibility to grasp ‘the importance of locality to modernism’s

10    Neal Alexander and James Moran world-imaginary’ without dismissing its international and metropolitan dimensions.37 Herring’s examples and points of reference are chiefly North American; whereas our objective is to sketch the lineaments of regional modernisms as they occur in the specific historical, geographical, and cultural contexts of Britain and Ireland. Before proceeding to that task, it may be appropriate to give our key terms – ‘region’, ‘regional’, and ‘regionalism’ – some further definition, for they are each subject to certain ambiguities of conception and meaning. ‘Region’ has proven a remarkably persistent term during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed, the frequency of the word increased in Anglophone British printed texts throughout that period, in inverse correlation to ‘nation’ (the occurrence of which – aside from times of world war – has been on a consistently downward trajectory).38

Despite its frequent usage, however, the term’s malleability creates problems of interpretation, as well as leaving it open to suspicion concerning its political inflections. Glossing ‘region’, Raymond Williams notes the tension that pertains within the word between ‘a distinct area and a definite part’, so that a region may be defined both by its delimiting boundaries and in terms of the necessary relation it has to some greater spatial unit. In the history of the word’s use, the latter definition tends to predominate, so that in the discourse of government and administration ‘region’ comes to mean ‘a subordinate part of a larger political entity’.39 Translated into cultural terms, this is the sense employed by T. S. Eliot when he extols the value of regions and regional variety in Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948). Eliot suggests that individual identities are produced through the relationships between people and place at a more intimate level than that of the nation. ‘It is important,’

Introduction: Regional Modernisms    11

he affirms, ‘that a man should feel himself to be, not merely a citizen of a particular nation, but a citizen of a particular part of his country with local loyalties’.40 Yet, such local loyalties are understood as contributing to, rather than deviating from, the character of the wider national culture that is Eliot’s real concern. This becomes clear when he describes Ireland, Scotland, and Wales as ‘satellite cultures’ dependent on England as a gravitational centre, a centre that benefits in turn from their peripheral influences. It is, he remarks, ‘of great advantage for English culture to be constantly influenced from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales’.41 Eight years later, Kenneth Tynan famously rearticulated this viewpoint, when he commented that ‘it is Ireland’s sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness’.42 Such a conception of regional affiliations is, of course, profoundly centralising, not to say condescending towards nonEnglish cultural traditions, valuing local differences only where they can be safely assimilated to the dominant paradigm. As a result of such usage, the term ‘regional’ has often been resented by those who are regarded as residing in a dependent and satellite position to a notional centre. This is particularly the case where state-sponsored ideological mappings seek to naturalise regional geographies which, in fact, serve to legitimate territorial subjugation and control, or deny competing claims to national distinctiveness. However, as Williams remarks, the cultural and literary uses of ‘regional’ also include a more positive ‘acknowledgement of a distinct place and way of life’, which in ‘regionalism’ modulates towards the valorisation of local differences as a means of resistance to centralising or homogenising forces.43 John Hewitt’s comments on cultural regionalism and the position of the Ulster writer, also made in the late 1940s, provide a useful counterpoint to Eliot. In many ways, Hewitt’s turn to regionalism is a reaction against what he regarded as the deracinated cosmopolitanism of international modernism, epitomised in texts such as Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). Hence the rhetorical excess of his insistence that the Ulster writer ‘must be a rooted man, must carry the native tang of his idiom like the native dust on his sleeve; otherwise he is an airy internationalist, thistledown, a twig in a stream’.44 The region, located somewhere between the kinship of the family and the abstractions of the nation, offers an ideal focus for communal identifications, supplying ‘an area which possesses geographical and economic coherence, which has had some sort of traditional and historical identity and which still, in some measure, demonstrates cultural and linguistic individuality’.45 This advocacy of the region as an affective ground for writer and citizen alike is clearly at odds with Eliot’s centralising imperative, yet Hewitt’s

12    Neal Alexander and James Moran definition is also problematically hazy. Not only is it hedged with vague qualifiers – ‘some sort’, ‘some measure’ – but Hewitt notably fails to specify the relation his ideal region of ‘Ulster’ bears either to the sixcounty state of Northern Ireland or the nine-county province of Ulster. Instead, his region remains deliberately nebulous; an ‘area of a size and significance we could hold in our hearts’.46 As a result, he leaves himself open to the charge that his regionalism is at best a means of evading a stark geopolitical quandary, the question of Ulster’s ‘Britishness’ or ‘Irishness’, and at worst a covert justification for Irish partition. As the examples of Hewitt and Eliot illustrate, ideas of region and regional culture had considerable appeal for writers and intellectuals during the twentieth century, often carrying hidden political subtexts. Their most extensive and nuanced elaboration, however, has taken place in the discipline of geography. Although regional geography was ‘the dominating paradigm in the discipline in the early twentieth century’, geographers disagree over the range of reference that should be given to the ‘region’, and the term’s ontological status remains open to dispute.47 For instance, one broadly Kantian tradition regards regions chiefly as mental constructs; convenient devices for organising thought about the world that do not necessarily correspond to any real, physical entity. By contrast, another broadly Marxist line of geographical thinking studies regions as material, historical entities produced as a consequence of ­capitalism’s uneven geographical development.48 Beyond these broad conceptual disagreements, a specifically cultural understanding of ‘region’ regards it in terms of ‘a specific set of cultural relations between a specific group and a particular place’, though these relations are themselves historically contingent and in process.49 More recently, particularly since the 1990s, geographers have ­challenged the assumption that regions are best understood as bounded areas of definite spatial extent, proposing relational models in which regions are porous formations within much more extensive geographical networks. Thus the region becomes ‘less a material object, a static geographic category or a taken-for-granted scale and much more a subject with identity, a strategic domain, an object of struggle and/or a site-and-scale-in-the-process-of-becoming’.50 This way of thinking, although not uncontested, makes it possible to see regions in their global context, always in process of construction, defined by their interrelations with other places, rather than forming a stable, self-contained, and ahistorical entity.51 Consequently, any region is ‘a series of open, discontinuous spaces constituted by social relationships which stretch across them in a variety of ways’.52 Regions condense or constellate processes that have their origins elsewhere, connecting with other,

Introduction: Regional Modernisms    13

proximate or distant places; and it is the convergence of these variously local and global forces in a particular location that gives the region its distinctive character. The cultural conception of regions in terms of meaningful identifications between people and place has long been important to critical accounts of regional literature. However, relational models of the region which see it as open, interconnected, and traversed by a variety of more extensive spatial relations are particularly appropriate to the polytopic qualities of modernist texts outlined above, their capacity to combine and cut across a diversity of spatial scales. For example, the Dublin of 16 June 1904 described in Ulysses can, by these lights, be seen as an event rather than a mere setting, interlaced at a particular moment in its history by a range of different geopolitical influences, including: the global reach of the Catholic Church; the debilitating effects of colonial subjugation to the British Empire; and the international (particularly transatlantic) horizons of the post-famine diaspora. Yet, Joyce’s novel also operates at a personal level, describing with disarming intimacy and candour the trajectories of various individuals as they cross paths in the crowded spaces of the city. In this way, Ulysses reveals how regional modernism mediates between local, personal concerns and impersonal, transnational contexts. Where modernist studies has tended to neglect the regional dimensions of modernist texts, the critical literature on regional writing also has little to say about modernism, as if to imply that the adjectives ‘regional’ and ‘modernist’ are fundamentally incommensurable. For instance, in her 1941 study, The English Regional Novel, Phyllis Bentley chronicles the achievements of novelists as diverse as Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, and Mary Webb, but is silent on D. H. Lawrence’s Nottinghamshire fictions. She also claims that the spread of modern transport and communications technologies – a central preoccupation of much modernist writing – is ‘tending to render the regions themselves less regional’, thereby eroding the very foundations of regional writing itself.53 K. D. M. Snell echoes Bentley’s prioritisation of empiricism over abstraction when he notes the regional novel’s defining ‘interest in the more realistic portrayal of regional topographical, economic and cultural traits’, though he also observes that verisimilitude is crossed with invention in the best examples.54 From a rather different critical perspective, Fiona Stafford argues that literature’s investment in local attachments and regional differentiations is an innovation of Romanticism, itself ‘an international movement that was also intensely local’, and finds its continuation in the work of post-Romantic poets such as Seamus Heaney.55 However, there seems little room in these accounts for modernism’s

14    Neal Alexander and James Moran experiments with language and form, least of all its conspicuous stylistic cosmopolitanism. More decisively, modernism is ignored because of its presumed alignment with metropolitan internationalism, whereas texts that qualify as authentically regional ‘belong unquestionably to a particular place; their deeply sunk roots will not allow transplantation’.56 To affirm, as the essays in Regional Modernisms do, that modernist texts often combine internationalist aesthetics with profound affiliations to particular places is to challenge the ‘rooted’ organicism that prevails in much critical discussion of regional writing. Indeed, our explorations of ‘regional modernisms’ acknowledge and seek to accommodate the critically ambivalent attitudes that many modernist texts display towards the regions and localities they depict. It is also possible to see how the idea of regional modernisms might modify and enrich understandings of ‘modernism’ and ‘modernity’ generally. One of the outcomes of the new modernist studies’ transformative engagement with post-colonial studies over the past decade or so has been a much more nuanced understanding of what modernity might mean, in both geographical and temporal terms, to diverse individuals and communities across the globe. In particular, the forceful critique of historicism advanced by the Subaltern Studies group and other scholars challenges the dominant Western model of modernisation as a unified and one-directional process that applies equally, if unevenly, to all societies and cultures. Rather, as Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar affirms, ‘modernity today is global and multiple and no longer has a governing center or master-narratives to accompany it’.57 Modernity is thus understood not simply in terms of a transition that certain cultures and nation states have yet to make, but as a problem of translation and appropriation in which colonial and post-colonial peoples demonstrate their agency. Accordingly, Dipesh Chakrabarty describes the task of ‘provincializing Europe’ as a process of critical rereading, engaging with the discourse of modernity in European thought and culture in such a way that it ‘may be renewed from and for the margins’.58 By shifting the critical focus to the ‘margins’ of the colonial world system, modernity is reconceived as a fractious constellation of competing and alternative modernities, each with its own distinctive temporal and spatial inflections.59 The essays in Regional Modernisms make another contribution to the task of provincialising Europe, by considering the significance of those marginal regions within the ‘home’ spaces of European modernity and British imperialism for the imaginations of Anglophone modernist writers. In this regard, recent work in Irish Studies on the particular valences of ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ for England’s first colony is of special

Introduction: Regional Modernisms    15

interest. Ireland’s interstitial position between the conditions of ‘first world’ and ‘third world’, imperial centre and colonial periphery, brings the contradictions of modernity into stark relief, leading Fredric Jameson to describe Irish modernism as ‘properly postcolonial’.60 The dialectics of tradition and modernity that inform so many of the major texts of the Irish Literary Revival problematise teleologies of ‘progress’ and avant-gardist valorisations of absolute novelty. Indeed, Luke Gibbons shrewdly notes that the rural ideology of the Revival, which frequently returned to idealised versions of the west of Ireland, was itself ‘the product of an urban sensibility’ projecting its own imaginative vision onto the regions.61 Yeats’s imagined rural retreat on the lake isle of Innisfree, for example, was inspired by a London window display that ‘suddenly transported him to the waters of Sligo’.62 Indeed, in the case of Yeats we recognise an Irish modernist writer who is both central to Anglophone literary modernism and who also ‘deviates from, or implicitly unsettles, any historiographical or conceptual map of modernism we might want to adopt’.63 To consider non-industrial, rural Ireland as economically ‘backward’ or pre-modern is also to ignore the decisive modernity of its colonial histories. Thus, as Joe Cleary remarks, ‘in an Irish context the term “modernity” is stripped of its semblance of obviousness’, for the process of modernisation is revealed to be neither homogeneous, universal, nor inevitable.64 If, however, the possibility of alternative geographies and temporalities of modernity is admitted, then Irish literature and culture offers a particularly rich ground for exploring such contradictions and internal variety. The historical and cultural circumstances for Irish modernism’s emergence are irreducibly specific but perhaps not entirely anomalous; and the interpretive frames of the nation and national identity need not always be granted critical pre-eminence. Indeed, local or regional affiliations often subtend the dual critique that many Irish modernists offer to both imperialist and nationalist political visions. Drawing upon the post-colonial interrogation of European modernity and the specific adaptations of that critique in the field of Irish Studies, this volume explores the idea of regional modernisms as another means of decentring the imaginative geographies of Anglophone modernism. Those who are located on the ‘margins’ or ‘periphery’ may actually be in the midst of formal and aesthetic developments, navigating a complex relationship between the notional ‘centre’ and those zones of experience relegated by the imperial world system.65 The region may at once be traversed by the forces animating capitalist modernity and act as a counter-site in which local eccentricities and alternative cultural priorities retain some purchase. Brian Short, David Gilbert, and David Matless rightly insist that

16    Neal Alexander and James Moran ‘the understanding of modern times cannot achieve sufficiency apart from the understanding of modern spaces’.66 Consequently, Regional Modernisms highlights the significance of regional spaces and places for modernist writers in Britain and Ireland, in an effort to enhance current understandings of modernism’s scale-bending geographical imaginations. The essays in this volume are ordered in a broadly chronological progression, though this narrative is complicated by a range of temporal and generic overlaps, cross-cultural conversations, and a variety of critical perspectives. The book also traces a pervasive concern with regional places and identities from the high-modernist period through the late modernism of the mid-century, and considers a number of texts that have seldom been viewed through the optic of modernist studies. In the first essay, Andrew Thacker examines the cultural geography of modernist ‘little magazines’, those independent publications that provided such a valuable outlet for modernist experimentation. Although many of these magazines depended upon a metropolitan publishing infrastructure, Thacker focuses upon Alfred Orage’s The New Age to describe a much more nuanced, polytopic situation involving writers, editors, and readers with profound links to the English regions. Several of the essays that follow examine the work of high-modernist figures, though often from unexpected perspectives. For instance, Andrew Harrison’s parallel reading of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce shows how both writers vacillate in their texts between regional locations and internationalist horizons. And James Moran’s essay traces the various ways in which Yeats’s nationalist model of theatre is taken up, and transformed by Britain’s regional repertory companies during the first decades of the twentieth century. These three essays highlight the disagreements and personal animosities that emerge between Lawrence and Joyce, between Yeats and his theatrical emulators, and between contributors to The New Age such as Pound and Edwin Muir, revealing how questions of regional identity were often a source of argument, debate, and controversy between writers. At the heart of Regional Modernisms are a group of essays that identify and appraise the regional aspects of a wide range of late-modernist texts published between the 1930s and the 1960s. The novels of Storm Jameson and Sylvia Townsend Warner are the subject of David James’s enquiry into the scale of fiction at mid-century, which notes the convergence of modernist aesthetics and regional realism in their texts. Drew Milne identifies a similar tension between regional particularity and internationalism in the very linguistic textures of Hugh MacDiarmid’s modernist poems in Scots, noting how the radical, non-standard surfaces

Introduction: Regional Modernisms    17

of MacDiarmid’s texts are underpinned by a poetic grammar and syntax that is adapted from standard English. In their essay, John Goodby and Chris Wigginton describe the delayed emergence of a distinctively Welsh variant of modernism in the work of Dylan Thomas, David Jones, and Lynette Roberts, and seek to redress the relative critical neglect these three poets have suffered. Another important late flowering of modernist poetry, Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966), is the focus of Neal Alexander’s essay, which describes the intersection of regional, national, and international contexts across the poem’s dense weave of words and images. Each of these essays reveals the extent to which modernist texts are engaged in a process of cross-cutting between distinct spatial scales, from the local to the global, and bringing different varieties of formal and linguistic experimentation to bear upon regional places, cultures, and identities. A final group of essays contributes to a wider impulse within the new modernist studies for stretching the boundaries and definitions of modernism itself, reappraising the work of writers often placed outside those bounds. J. M. Synge’s awareness of the tension between regional peripheries and the urban centre is foregrounded in Patrick Lonergan’s essay, which examines the playwright’s characteristically modern concern with questions of authenticity. Another kind of periphery is evoked in Dominic Head’s essay on Leo Walmsley’s novels of the North Yorkshire fishing coast, which contends that Walmsley’s interests in, and knowledge of modernist sculpture and art significantly inflect his brand of regional fiction. Finally, John Brannigan charts a widespread literary fascination with islands during the modernist 1930s, and goes on to read the stories and novels of Michael McLaverty not merely as paradigms of insularity but as texts aware of the web of spatial interconnections within which islands are always implicated. Of necessity, and not altogether inappropriately given our topic, Regional Modernisms does not attempt to provide a comprehensive overview of Anglophone literary modernism as a whole, but instead makes a series of local interventions. The book’s focus is limited to work produced in Britain and Ireland from the beginning of the twentieth century to the late 1960s. Within that relatively circumscribed frame, however, the contributors to this volume trace a network of relationships between the literary cultures of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, as well as between individual writers and their texts. Together, the essays in this volume sketch out some of the many ways in which literary modernism can be read in terms of its specifically regional contexts, but without obscuring the significance of its national and transnational orbits. The ongoing transnational turn has been a major catalyst for exciting new work in modernist studies, and has encouraged

18    Neal Alexander and James Moran fresh considerations of the geographies of modernist texts. Regional Modernisms contributes to this strand of critical enquiry by foregrounding the variety of spatial scales at which modernism takes place, emphasising the pervasive significance of local and regional attachments for modernist writing.

Notes   1. Malcolm Bradbury, ‘The cities of modernism’, in Modernism 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 94–104 (pp. 96, 101).  2. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), p. 316.  3. Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989), p. 47.   4. James Joyce, Ulysses: The 1922 Text, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 112.  5. Andrew Miller, Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), p. xxv.   6. James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Yeats, Pound, and Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. x.  7. Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The new modernist studies’, PMLA, 123: 3 (2008), 737–48 (pp. 738, 739).  8. Sara Blair, ‘Local modernity, global modernism: Bloomsbury and the places of the literary’, ELH, 71 (2004), 813–38 (p. 814).  9. David James, ‘Localizing late modernism: Interwar regionalism and the  genesis of the “micro novel” ’, Journal of Modern Literature 32: 4 (2009), 43–64 (p. 51). 10. Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 15. 11. Rebecca L. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism Beyond the Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 6. 12. Walkowitz, Cosmopolitan Style, pp. 20, 25. 13. Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of modernism in a globalizing world’, in Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 9. 14. As a term and concept, ‘late modernism’ is now well-established but continues to elude definitive periodisation. For some important, and contrasting, accounts see: Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); Anthony Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); David James, ‘Introduction: Mapping modernist continuities’, in The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction, ed. David James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1–20. 15. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 8.

Introduction: Regional Modernisms    19 16. Esty, A Shrinking Island, p. 217. 17. Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010), p. 10. 18. Stuart Hall, ‘Political belonging in a world of multiple identities’, in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 25–31 (pp. 28–9). 19. On Welsh-language modernism, see Daniel G. Williams, ‘Welsh modernism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 797–816. 20. See, for instance, James A. Davies, ‘Dylan Thomas and his Welsh contemporaries’, in Welsh Writing in English, ed. M. Wynn Thomas (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003), pp. 120–64; and Chris Hopkins, ‘Caradoc Evans’s Modernist Antipastoral’, in New Versions of Pastoral, ed. David James and Philip Tew (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009), pp. 107–22. 21. Margery Palmer McCullough, ‘Scottish modernism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Brooker et al., pp. 765–81 (pp. 766, 767). See also Margery Palmer McCullough, Scottish Modernism and Its Contexts 1918–1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). 22. For some useful overviews of Irish modernism, see Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis, eds, Modernism and Ireland: The Poetry of the 1930s (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995); Nicholas Allen, Modernism, Ireland and Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Carol Taafe, ‘Irish modernism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Brooker et al., pp. 782–96. 23. David Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Dublin: Field Day, 2008), p. 6. 24. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 25. 25. Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 7, 8. See also Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, ‘Introduction: Locating the modern’, in Geographies of Modernism, ed. Brooker and Thacker, pp. 1–5 (p. 4). 26. Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), pp. 157, 163. 27. Jon Hegglund, World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 6, 29. 28. Hegglund, World Views, pp. 16, 8. 29. Hegglund, World Views, p. 58. 30. William Carlos Williams, Selected Poems, ed. Charles Tomlinson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 229. 31. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1989), p. 195. 32. W. H. Auden, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic

20    Neal Alexander and James Moran Writings 1927–1939, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1978), p. 158. 33. Hegglund, World Views, pp. 58, 64–5. 34. Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 217. 35. Crawford, Devolving English Literature, p. 269. 36. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins, ‘Locating modernisms: An overview’, in Locations of Literary Modernism, ed. Davis and Jenkins, pp. 3–32 (p. 4). 37. Scott Herring, ‘Regional modernism: a reintroduction’, Modern Fiction Studies, 55:1 (2009), 1–10 (p. 3). 38. http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=region%2Cnation&y ear_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=6&smoothing=3 (accessed 14 May 2013). This Google Ngram viewer is not comprehensive but gives a good indication of overall trends, drawing on some two trillion words that Google has scanned, the contents of 11% of the books printed from 1500 to 2008. Google and the Google logo are registered trademarks of Google Inc., used with permission. 39. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, revised edition. (London: Fontana, 1988), pp. 264, 265. 40. T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (London: Faber, 1948), p. 52. 41. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture, pp. 54, 55. For a useful brief discussion of Eliot’s remarks, see Morag Shiach, ‘Nation, region, place: Devolving cultures’, in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 528–44 (pp. 529–30). 42. Kenneth Tynan, ‘The end of the noose’, Observer, 27 May 1956, p. 12. 43. Williams, Keywords, pp. 265, 266. 44. John Hewitt, Ancestral Voices: The Selected Prose of John Hewitt, ed. Tom Clyde (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1987), p. 115. 45. Hewitt, Ancestral Voices, p. 122. 46. John Hewitt cited in The Rattle of the North: An Anthology of Ulster Prose ed. Patricia Craig (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1992), p. 127. 47. John Tomaney, ‘Region’, in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, ed. Nigel Thrift and Robin Kitchin (London: Elsevier, 2009), p. 138. 48. One influential example of this approach is Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). For a brief overview of Kantian and Marxist perspectives in regional geography see Andrew Herod, Scale (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 135–6, 158–9. 49. Anssi Paasi, ‘Deconstructing regions: Notes on the scales of spatial life’, Environment and Planning A, 23 (1991), 239–54 (p. 240). 50. Andrew E. G. Jonas, ‘Pro scale: Further reflections on the “Scale Debate” in human geography’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 31: 3 (2006), 399–406 (p. 402). 51. For some criticisms of ‘relational’ models of geographical regions, see Kevin Morgan, ‘The polycentric state: new spaces of empowerment and engagement?’ Regional Studies, 41: 9 (2007), 1237–52; and J. Painter,

Introduction: Regional Modernisms    21 ‘Cartographic anxiety and the search for regionality’, Environment and Planning A, 40: 2 (2008), 342–61. 52. John Allen, Doreen Massey, and Allan Cochrane, Rethinking the Region (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 5. 53. Phyllis Bentley, The English Regional Novel (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1941), p. 12. 54. K. D. M. Snell, ‘The regional novel: Themes for interdisciplinary research’, in The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland 1800–1990, ed. K. D. M. Snell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–53 (pp. 8, 3). 55. Fiona Stafford, Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 32. 56. W. J. Keith, Regions of the Imagination: The Development of British Rural Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 13. 57. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ‘On alternative modernities’, in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 1–23 (p. 14). 58. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 16. 59. See Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 16–17; and Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Periodizing modernism: Postcolonial modernities and the space/time boundaries of modernist studies’, Modernism/Modernity, 13 (2006), 425–44. 60. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), p. 103. See also Jameson, The Modernist Papers, pp. 164–5. 61. Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (Cork: Cork University Press, 1996), p. 85. 62. R. F. Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life. I: The Apprentice Mage 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 79. 63. Anne Fogarty, ‘Yeats, Ireland and modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 126–46 (p. 126). 64. Joe Cleary, ‘Introduction: Ireland and modernity’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture, ed. Joe Cleary and Claire Connolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 1–24 (pp. 2, 9). 65. See Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991). 66. Brian Short, David Gilbert, and David Matless, ‘Historical geographies of British modernity’, in Geographies of British Modernity: Space and Society in the Twentieth Century, ed. David Gilbert, David Matless, and Brian Short (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 1–28 (pp. 3–4).

Chapter 1

‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’ Andrew Thacker

This chapter starts by posing a simple and seemingly rather foolish question: why are there so few regional examples of modernist ‘little magazines’ in Britain and Ireland? The foolishness of the question might be because we all know that modernism was an international or transnational phenomenon, a matter of metropolitan perceptions and urban innovation. In other words, it happens in Bloomsbury and not Birmingham, since ‘Art is a matter of capitals’, and ‘Provincialism the Enemy’, to quote two slogans of Ezra Pound.1 Hence, it is not surprising to discover that the vast majority of the ‘little magazines’ that from the 1880s onwards published modern work in Britain were located primarily in London: The Yellow Book of Aubrey Beardsley and co., the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis’s Blast, the mix of feminism and modernism found in The Egoist, or the critical classicism of T. S. Eliot’s The Criterion – these, and many others, were clearly located in the metropolis and embedded within a cultural infrastructure of bookshops, cafés, clubs, dining rooms, or discussion circles in central London.2 This perception seems, initially, to be confirmed by the contents of volume I of The Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: of more than eighty magazines analysed in a volume devoted to Britain and Ireland, only around a quarter were not published in London.3 In the case of strictly English magazines the dominance of London up to 1939 is even more evident. By the 1930s some ‘little magazines’ were published in the university cities of Cambridge and Oxford, often linked to undergraduate coteries (such as Cambridge Left, Experiment, and Venture in Cambridge; Bolero and Farrago in Oxford) and from the 1940s onwards we find more instances of regional publications in cities such as Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. The centrality of London as a place of publication for poetry magazines is also confirmed in the ‘Geographical Index’ of British Poetry Magazines 1914–2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’, compiled by David Miller and

‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’    23

Richard Price, in which for the period 1914–39 only six magazines in total are listed for the major regional conurbations of Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester.4 Again, it is only from the 1940s onwards that such publications begin to appear more frequently in these cities. The case of the United States represents an interesting point of comparison. Although the cities of New York and Chicago dominate at certain times, modernist magazines are located across the entire country.5 This feature is partly due to American literary regionalism, long noted as a significant feature of the culture.6 A magazine such as New Orleans’ Double Dealer, for example, was started in 1921 to counter the criticism of the New York-based editor of The Smart Set, H. L. Mencken, that the South was a literary ‘Sahara’.7 However, another important regional magazine, The Midland, begun in Iowa City in 1915, was praised by Mencken as ‘probably the most influential literary periodical ever set up in America’.8 Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich in their foundational study The Little Magazine argue that due to ‘its contribution to the development of regionalism, The Midland must be ranked alongside The Dial, The Little Review, and Poetry’.9 Such claims, however, have often been ignored by subsequent scholars of American modernism who have, until recently, gravitated to the seemingly more ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘international’ scope of magazines such as The Dial or The Little Review. Indeed, the names of periodicals such as New Mexico Quarterly, Southwest Review, or The Midland seem to refer to an identity defined primarily by regional geography rather than by the supposed ‘international’ character of modernism. Tom Lutz has argued, however, that the regionalism found in a magazine such as The Midland represents more than an attempt to represent the writers of a particular region – the tradition of ‘local colour’ fiction – whether to readers of the particular region or to those outside it. Regionally based magazines, directed by their editors, were indeed often interested in art, literature, culture, and political debate from multiple geographies. Lutz, thus, argues that The Midland, especially in the ideas of its founding editor John T. Frederick, attempted to balance ‘the particular and the general, the provincial and the cosmopolitan, the local and the global’ and demonstrates the fact that ‘literary regionalism is necessarily cosmopolitan’.10 An advert from a Southwest magazine, Morada, published in New Mexico in 1929, proclaimed it to be ‘the ONLY REVOLUTIONARY EXPERIMENTAL medium in 3 languages’.11 Such magazines indicate how, in the American case, we uncover a modernism that is not only deeply inflected by regional interests, but also one which is simultaneously engaged in dialogue with literary geographies from other areas of the United States as well as with locations way beyond its borders.

24    Andrew Thacker But to return to this side of the Atlantic and to the foolish opening question: why are there so few regional examples of modernist magazines in Britain and Ireland? Closer inspection of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales shows that there were indeed a number of important examples of ‘little magazines’ that explored modernism and modernity in these places. Among the major examples from Ireland are Yeats’s Beltaine (1899–1900) and Samhain (1901–8); Frederick Ryan’s and John Eglinton’s Dana (1901–8); then, into the 1920s and beyond, the avowedly avant-garde, The Klaxon: An Irish International Quarterly (1923), brought into being primarily to publish an appreciation of Joyce’s Ulysses; To-Morrow (1924), and later magazines such as Ireland To-Day (1936–8) and The Bell (1940–54), both of which are associated with Seán Ó Faoláin. In the North of Ireland in the early twentieth century we find Uladh (1904–5), an Arts and Crafts magazine linked to the Ulster Literary Theatre and with a strong commitment to an ‘Ulster’ identity. This was followed in the 1940s by magazines that focused more upon poetry, such as Lagan (1943–6), edited by John Boyd and Rann (1948–53), edited by Barbara Hunter and Roy McFadden.12 Prominent Welsh magazines included Wales (1937–47), published in Llangadog and later Carmarthen; and Cardiff’s The Welsh Review (1939–48), with both publications exploring Welsh cultural identity within the medium of the English language.13 From Scotland we find the Celtic arts and crafts work of Patrick Geddes’s The Evergreen (Edinburgh, 1895–7), and then a clutch of magazines associated with C. M. Grieve (‘Hugh MacDiarmid’), such as The Scottish Chapbook (Montrose, 1922–3), and The Northern Review (Edinburgh, 1924), followed by James Whyte’s The Modern Scot (Dundee, 1930–6). In many of these magazines the national question and its relationship to an emergent culture of international modernism can often be detected in both editorials and critical and creative contributions. MacDiarmid, for example, wrote in the first issue of The Scottish Chapbook that the aim of the magazine was ‘to bring Scottish Literature into closer touch with current European tendencies in technique and ideation’.14 So the opening question might be reformulated to concentrate upon why magazine modernism in England was so dominated by London, particularly given that regional newspaper and magazine publishing emerged with gusto after the abolition of newspaper tax in 1855. Indeed, some consideration of nineteenth-century print culture, and the fluctuating cultural field in which it operated, is a crucial context for understanding the emergence of the ‘little magazine’ towards the end of the century. After 1855, for example, daily papers were published for the first time in cities such as Manchester, Sheffield, and Liverpool. Other periodicals in

‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’    25

the provinces also increased: by 1873, 889 magazines of all kinds were being issued outside of London, in addition to 144 in Scotland, and 59 in Wales.15 London papers also suffered more competition from the local press after the syndication of serial fiction took off in the 1870s, when readers in the regions could enjoy famous authors without investing in a London-based magazine. In Scotland, up to 1914, there was, as Cairns Craig comments, an extensive publishing industry, with firms like Nelson’s in Edinburgh and Collins in Glasgow being international businesses, in addition to the continuation of prestige heavyweight journals such as The Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s.16 If, therefore, the print infrastructure existed for the emergence of a Scottish ‘little magazine’ culture why did it not also appear in Birmingham or Manchester or Leeds? Leeds is a good place to start to address this issue, for it was here that we can detect the origins of one of the most important magazines of modernism in Britain, Alfred Orage’s weekly, The New Age (1907–22). A closer examination of The New Age also reveals that though the magazine, like many others, was published in London, in terms of its editors, contributors, circulation, and readership, it represents a modernism inflected by multiple non-metropolitan geographies. The story of The New Age and Leeds, which the remainder of this chapter will focus upon, is thus an example of a magazine closely linked, in complex ways, to a particular regional modernism: the impetus for the cultural and social agenda of The New Age can thus be traced to its regional origins, although in terms of its actual publication it is a London-based magazine. Michael T. Saler probably overstates matters a little when he claims that in the early twentieth century Yorkshire was ‘the London art world’s brains trust’ and that ‘Leeds was arguably the modern art capital of England’, but, in terms of the visual arts and design in particular, modernism in England owed much to the cultural formation that appeared in the city of Leeds.17 As Saler notes in his account of ‘medieval modernism’, the prominent civic culture that had emerged in English provincial cities such as Leeds during the nineteenth century encouraged both ‘a celebration of local avant-gardism in industry and a reaction against the centralising tendencies of London’.18 This civic culture produced individuals such as Frank Pick and Charles Holden, who were to redesign the London Underground in the interwar period along modernist lines, or artists such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Edward Wadsworth who, in Saler’s words, ‘would embrace the cultural avant-garde that challenged the orthodoxy and social exclusivity of London’s Royal Academy’.19 One commentator in the Swindon Evening Advertiser, quoted by Saler, proclaimed that ‘there seems to be some

26    Andrew Thacker foundation to the theory that the provincial towns are more modern in their tastes than London’.20 The New Age has long been acknowledged as demonstrating some of the most ‘modern’ tastes in the milieu of ‘little magazines’, publishing early work by Katherine Mansfield and Ezra Pound, art by Walter Sickert and David Bomberg, commentary and critical debate upon the state of the modern novel and poetry, and early articles on psychoanalysis. Yet its intellectual roots in the provincial culture of Leeds have perhaps not been sufficiently noted in some critical accounts of the magazine. The two founders of The New Age, Alfred Orage (a primary school teacher from just outside Leeds), and Holbrook Jackson (a clerk from Liverpool who was working in the lace trade in Leeds), first met in a cultural institution that clearly played an important part in the dissemination of modern ideas across the regions – a bookshop. Jackson wrote in 1907 of first meeting Orage in Walker’s Bookshop in Leeds: ‘It was in a bookshop, into which we had both turned, probably to find in books that community of ideas which we were unable to find locally among men’.21 The two men discovered that they shared many intellectual interests although it was Jackson who was to introduce Orage to the work of Nietzsche, a pivotal figure in Orage’s intellectual development.22 Jackson and Orage were also soon to discern that the ‘community of ideas’ they sought in bookshops also existed in other places in the city: After a while we found others of our kind in Leeds. We discovered, much to our surprise, that hidden in various parts of the city, for the most part unknown to each other, were men and women dreaming similar dreams to ours and thinking like thoughts. Gradually we grew acquainted, and conversations grew into prolonged discussions. We turned quiet corners of local cafes into temporary forums, often extending the lunch-hour in a way quite heretical in Yorkshire.23

This incipient and ‘heretical’ café-culture, seemingly out of place in the industrial North, was to lead to the founding of the Leeds Arts Club in 1903, one of the most important regional formations in the development of modernism in England. Infused equally by socialist ideas derived from Edward Carpenter, mystical thought from theosophy, and the philosophy of Nietzsche, Orage and Jackson sought to foster a radical space to debate the ferment of modern social, political, and intellectual ideas. Dreams and conversations thus led to the more concrete space of a cultural institution and regional coterie for the consideration of modernity. Jackson’s memory of the Club indicates how one aim was to discuss the radical ideas that Orage and himself had

‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’    27

encountered in their reading, integrating these ideas into their regional location: Out of these meetings was born the Leeds Arts Club, with its contempt of pedantic philosophy and academic art, and its insistence upon the necessity of applying ideas to life. You will not have forgotten how you opened our first session with a lecture on Nietzsche and how I lectured later on Bernard Shaw. We shall never forget how our little band of members worked, and how the Club flourished; nor how respectable Leeds at first held back fearing our revolutionary ideas, and then gradually came forward reassured by the excellence of our exhibitions; and how in turn many of these good people joined the Club and actually became revolutionaries themselves.24

This, then, was a regional culture – resembling some in North America – that defined itself primarily by its spatial connection to many of the international currents of revolutionary modernist culture. Tom Steele argues, in his excellent history of the Leeds Arts Club, that the last thing the club attempted [. . .] was a celebration of Leeds or West Riding regionalism. Indeed, what they summoned up was the America of Walt Whitman, the Celtic fringe of Yeats and Synge and the Europe of Nietzsche, Ibsen and Wagner.25

Rather than sponsor a Yorkshire variant of modernist thought (whatever that might be), Orage and Jackson announced that the aspiration of the Club was to ‘reduce Leeds to Nietzscheism’.26 In addition to a series of lectures by Orage on Nietzsche, many significant guest speakers were invited to address the Club’s Saturday meetings, including Edward Carpenter, George Bernard Shaw, and W. B. Yeats. Topics such as modern art, architecture, and the state of the novel were all discussed in addition to radical social and political ideas. A particular highlight was the hosting over two evenings in April 1906 of several plays by Yeats and Synge, performed by the Irish National Theatre.27 Yeats returned again in 1910 to deliver a lecture on the ‘Modern Dramatic Movement in Ireland’. From an early point the Club held art exhibitions devoted to tendencies in ‘modern art’ and supported the development of theatre in the city by forming institutions such as the Leeds Playgoers Society. As Steele notes, central to this heady mix of Nietzschean individualism, theosophy, Fabian socialism, and the arts and crafts movement was the key word, ‘modernity’.28 In 1906 Orage and, a little later, Jackson, left Leeds for London to establish the Fabian Arts Group. With the aid of money from fellow Fabian, George Bernard Shaw, and Lewis Wallace, a merchant banker Orage had met through theosophy meetings, the two Leeds intellectuals

28    Andrew Thacker then purchased the ailing weekly magazine, The New Age, in 1907.29 In a sense, The New Age was a continuation of the interrogation of modern ‘Art and Ideas’ started in the Leeds Arts Club. Thus, we can understand the periodical as a kind of ‘representational space’, to adapt an idea from Henri Lefebvre, as The New Age functioned as a meeting place for dissident dialogue and debate on modern art and culture across the political and philosophical spectrum.30 The Leeds Arts Club, however, continued after Orage’s departure, developing a stronger interest in contemporary modern art under the influence of another member, the new vice-­ chancellor of Leeds University, Michael Sadler. Of particular note was an exhibition mounted by the Arts Club in 1913 of Post-Impressionist art organised by Sadler, along with Frank Rutter, the artist and critic who had become Director of the Leeds Art Gallery in 1912. Two years later Wyndham Lewis organised a show of ‘Cubist and Futurist’ art at the Club, showing sixty works by painters such as Cezanne and Gauguin, along with work by the Vorticists, including David Bomberg, Edward Wadsworth, Jacob Epstein, and Lewis himself.31 Interestingly, The New Age is not the only link between the cultural formation of the Leeds Arts Club and the world of metropolitan ‘little magazines’. In 1911 Sadler’s son, Michael T. H. Sadler (later Sadleir), used funds from his father to found the key modernist magazine, Rhythm, along with John Middleton Murry.32 Another Leeds Arts Club member was Mary Gawthorpe, a local school teacher and New Woman who joined the club in 1904. Gawthorpe was a militant suffragette who, in 1907, became national secretary of the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union) and then, in 1911, helped establish and co-edit The Freewoman, with Dora Marsden (also from Yorkshire), as an oppositional voice for feminism. The Freewoman later, of course, metamorphosed into The New Freewoman, and then The Egoist, an important magazine for the publication of modernist literature. By the time Joyce, Pound, and Eliot were publishing in The Egoist, Gawthorpe had long since departed the magazine: the important point, however, is that the original magazine can be viewed as another instance of a regional modernism, stimulated in Leeds and the North, and then transplanted to the metropolis.33 Gawthorpe was later to reflect, with more than a hint of regret, upon the shift from Leeds to London enacted by The New Age and then echoed in the story of The Freewoman: I have sometimes pondered the thought that the Club, founded by Orage and Jackson, had the germ of a new future, not necessarily to be matured in London, but capable of the completest enrichment of a community right on the spot.34

‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’    29

Why, then, did Orage and Jackson believe that for this ‘new future’ to materialise they had to go to London? Principally, it was because of the institutions that dominated literary culture and, in particular periodical publishing in Britain, from the late nineteenth century onwards. Orage and Jackson were ‘provincial’ figures of the type described in Arnold Bennett’s first novel, The Man from the North (1889): There grows in the North Country, a certain kind of youth of whom it may be said that he is born to be a Londoner. The metropolis, and everything that appertains to it, that comes down from it, that goes up into it, has for him, an imperious fascination. Long before schooldays are over he learns to take a doleful pleasure in watching the exit of the London train from the railway station [. . .] London is the place where newspapers are issued, books written, and plays performed. And this youth, who now sits in an office, reads all the newspapers. He knows exactly when a new work by a famous author should appear, and awaits the reviews with impatience.35

As Peter Keating notes, this passage illustrates a certain paradox inherent to regionalism in literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Combined with ‘the growth of a new kind of selfconscious regionalism in fiction’ there were often pejorative connotations ‘habitually attached to the words “regional”, “provincial”, and “local” ’.36 Regional fiction flourished at this time, argues Keating, as the buoyant fiction market offered many opportunities for ‘local’ authors: in 1898, for example, the mainstream periodical Literature devoted a leading article to the ‘current passion for local colour’ in novelists.37 This enthusiasm for the regional encompassed more than just realist forms of ‘rural’ fiction for, as Keating notes, Joyce’s Dubliners and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers were both interpreted as ‘regional’ works.38 However, regional writing was not primarily published in regional magazines but in the ‘national’ press of the metropolis, as book publishing and newspaper production became more centralised in London at the turn of the twentieth century.39 The regional print infrastructure in England as discussed above thus became a much less powerful presence.40 Asa Briggs notes that while English provincial cities burgeoned as cultural centres in the early and mid-nineteenth century, during the 1890s they underwent something of a decline. One marker of this was the ‘decay of the provincial press [. . .] implicit in the rise of a cheap national press, subsidized by advertisements’.41 Indeed, the 1880s witnessed a tremendous growth in the power and influence of London journalism, demonstrated in the so-called ‘New Journalism’ of figures such as W. T. Stead and T. P. O’Connor, increased pay for editors

30    Andrew Thacker of newspapers, the rise of mass-circulation weeklies and, soon after, dailies, such as the Daily Mail. In the 1880s London already had six morning papers and four evening papers; by 1900, according to John Stokes, a London writer had twenty-four daily papers to submit work to – and even more monthly or quarterly publications to choose between.42 Other institutions sprung up to support the profession: advice columns in magazines for budding writers; schools for journalism such as David Anderson’s London School of Journalism, formed in 1887 and located just off Fleet Street; and, finally, in 1889 a charter was granted to the Institute of Journalists, placing it on a par with professions such as law or medicine.43 It was no surprise, then, that numerous ‘men from the north’ eventually caught the London train from their regional cities to make their way as journalists and writers, many joining the various artistic coteries that emerged in the 1890s in London. Some migrants to the capital maintained strong links to their geographical homelands, shown in the founding of the Irish Literary Society, set up in 1892 by Yeats and others to debate cultural issues as well as Home Rule politics. Even the Rhymers’ Club Poets, ostensibly a London-based set of Decadent poets aping French poetic models, contained many members with links to the Celtic Revivalists.44 Another Rhymer poet from the North, the Scot John Davidson, cynically summed up this migratory trend in a newspaper article in 1893: The ever-increasing numbers, ambitious of literary distinction, who flock to London yearly, to become hacks and journalists, regard the work by which they gain a livelihood as a mere industry, a stepping-stone to higher things – alas! a stepping-stone on which the majority of them have to maintain a precarious footing all their lives.45

London literary culture in this period was, therefore, strongly marked by regional voices from many parts of the British Isles.46 Orage and Jackson were thus following in the footsteps of those regional figures from the 1890s onwards who acknowledged that the institutions of the field of cultural production in Britain, to borrow from Bourdieu, forced a migration to the metropolis.47 Did The New Age, however, voice a distinctive regional expression of modernism? Tom Steele certainly believes so, arguing that ‘elements of the cultural labours in Leeds bore fruit not only in Yorkshire but later in London’ where ‘many of the themes and concerns of the New Age’ were based ‘on debates already initiated in the north’, demonstrating how ‘metropolitan culture [has] been continually rejuvenated by the energy of regional and colonial immigration’.48

‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’    31

How accurate an assessment is this? In some ways the pattern of influence seems rather more complex and demonstrates a movement that goes back and forth, being transregional and transnational in orientation. Understanding how modernist ideas can be located spatially, drawing upon the work of Lefebvre, seems helpful in this instance. For Lefebvre, when we analyse any social space we are: confronted not by one social space but by many – indeed, by an unlimited multiplicity or uncountable set of social spaces which we refer to generically as ‘social space’. No space disappears in the course of growth and development: the worldwide does not abolish the local.49

Hence, in the case of The New Age, though its location is national space (published in London) and its focus is often upon the spaces of the international (seen, for example, in reports on foreign affairs and reviews of many overseas writers), we can detect many traces of regional spaces in its pages. Lefebvre elaborates upon this view of the plural nature of social space as follows: the local (or ‘punctual’, in the sense of ‘determined by a particular ‘point’) does not disappear, for it is never absorbed by the regional, national or even worldwide level. The national and regional levels take in innumerable ‘places’; national space embraces the regions; and world space does not merely subsume national spaces, but even [. . .] precipitates the formation of new national spaces through a remarkable process of fission. All these spaces, meanwhile, are traversed by myriad currents. The hypercomplexity of social space should by now be apparent, embracing as it does individual entities and peculiarities, relatively fixed points, movements, and flows and waves – some interpenetrating, others in conflict, and so on.50

Lefebvre’s discussion here provides a helpful way to understand how The New Age is structured by multiple spatialities, crisscrossing between the regional, the national, and the international. The Leeds Arts Club thus brought the international debate on modern ideas to its particular region, and for Orage The New Age was a place in which to continue that debate in the ‘representational space’ of a magazine, even though the magazine and its editor were pulled by economic necessities towards the vortex of London. Through an examination of a number of contributors to The New Age who were originally based outside of London we can therefore detect how the ‘myriad currents’ of local, national, and international co-exist within its pages. In other words, the spatial forms of a regional cultural formation are a significant presence in the hypercomplex space of metropolitan modernist magazines. One interesting example here is that of a ‘woman from the north’,

32    Andrew Thacker the young Storm Jameson. Jameson was born in Whitby, and studied at Leeds University between 1909–12, just after Orage had departed for London. There she became involved with various radical political discussion circles and, although it is not clear whether she attended meetings of the Arts Club, she was clearly formed intellectually by the same cultural and philosophical ethos: many of her tutors at the university, such as Arthur Grant and Frederic Moorman, were members of the Club.51 In Leeds, The New Age became almost required reading for many of the provincial intellectuals and New Women that attended the university: Jameson wrote that ‘Orage’s New Age was our Bible, the source of half our ideas’.52 When Jameson left Leeds for postgraduate study at London University in 1912 she became part of a student discussion circle called the Eikonklasts, which included other friends from Yorkshire such as Sydney and Oswald Harland. This group, another ‘community of ideas’ forged in the North, aimed to unmask ‘hypocrites, politicians, clericals, reactionaries, bigots, and dogmatists of all ages and conditions’, and may well have been inspired by Orage’s early call, in his book Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism, for ‘iconoclasts, mockers, destroyers’, the ‘race of lions’ whom at that point he considered ‘necessary for progress’ in contemporary society.53 One of the Eikonklasts, Osward Harland, submitted an account of the society to The New Age in February, 1913.54 Jameson was to publish her first piece in The New Age a month later, an essay on George Bernard Shaw, taken from her MA thesis upon ‘Modern European Drama’, a topic that shows clear affiliations with the discussions of the Leeds Arts Club. Deborah Gerrard notes how Jameson and the Eikonklasts shifted their intellectual trajectory away from the more orthodox socialist and feminist thought they had encountered in Leeds and towards a form of ‘mystical Nietzchean socialism’ (Gerrard’s phrase) that chimed well with changes in direction taken by The New Age itself, from around 1911.55 The reference to socialism in the original subtitle had long gone from the magazine, and from 1911 onwards Orage published more in the magazine that engaged with the literary modernism of Pound and T. E. Hulme. When Jameson published her first novel, The Pot Boils (1919), it was hardly surprising that it presented a fictionalised account of Orage and The New Age group of writers, presenting a critique, as Gerrard puts it, of the more ‘messianic’ tendencies within Orage’s thinking as well as the masculine character of Pound’s form of modernism.56 Herbert Read was another figure whose intellectual formation resembled that of Orage and Jameson. After WEA (Worker’s Education Association) classes, Read enrolled at Leeds University, and was there introduced by his tutors to the Leeds Arts Club in 1912. Read’s

‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’    33

intellectual education was fashioned by the same matrix as Jameson (Nietzsche, Edward Carpenter, socialist economics), and he began reading The New Age in 1912. Read, however, now encountered a Leeds Arts Club whose interests had shifted to the artistic avant-garde, under the guidance of Michael Sadler and others. It was here that Read heard lectures by Frank Rutter and met Camden Town painters such as Harold Gilman and Charles Ginner, painters also discussed in The New Age by Walter Sickert.57 It was also through his meeting with Rutter that Read was to conceive of another modernist ‘little magazine’, Art and Letters (1917–20), which Read later stated aimed to balance the interests of The New Age upon economics with a focus on aesthetics: ‘against the New Age we intend to insist upon the primacy of beauty – even in economics’.58 Read, however, continued to submit work to The New Age, even while serving at the front in the First World War. After the war, Orage, perhaps because of the Leeds connection, chose Read to take over the important ‘Readers and Writers’ column that Orage had composed for The New Age for many years. As Steele puts it, ‘a circle worthy of a medieval guild was completed’, as Read, the young apprentice who had travelled from Leeds to London, took over the editorial voice from the master, Orage, who had taken the same journey south some years earlier.59 The New Age was, of course, read in many other regional locations than that of Yorkshire. Its peak circulation, in 1908, reached 22,000, helped mainly by its coverage of socialism, later dipping to around 3–4,000.60 Without accurate subscription information it is impossible to ascertain where it was read, and so we rely upon references in published works to catch glimpses of its regional readership. From the letters pages, the origins of contributors such as Read and Jameson, and other references we can start to assemble a picture of a magazine with what appeared to be an extensive regional readership across Britain and Ireland. For example, D. H. Lawrence began reading The New Age around 1908, at the height of its popularity, shortly after joining a socialist discussion group at college in Nottingham.61 In his early autobiographical play, A Collier’s Friday Night (1909), it is interesting to see that Lawrence has the mother, Mrs Lambert, sitting by the fireside toasting some bread: the stage directions note, ‘She wears spectacles, and is reading The New Age’.62 This clearly signifies Lawrence’s view of the maternal feminine as the bearer of culture in working-class homes, although Lawrence was to publish his own first poems in another magazine, Ford Madox Ford’s The English Review, later that year. Around the same time in Scotland, Hugh MacDiarmid was also being influenced by his reading of The New

34    Andrew Thacker Age and, according to Margery Palmer McCulloch, modelled the second magazine he edited, the Scottish Nation, upon its format.63 One of MacDiarmid’s earliest published pieces was to be found in The New Age of 20 July 1911, ‘The Young Astrology’, in which he argues for the influence of astrology upon the development of mental illness and creativity. Another reader turned contributor was MacDiarmid’s fellow Scot, the Orcadian Edwin Muir, who first published in the magazine in 1913 under the pseudonym ‘Edward Moore’. As a young man Muir’s family moved to Glasgow in 1901 and, after a series of family tragedies, Muir found himself alone in the city, working in a variety of poorly paid clerical jobs in various local industries. He educated himself in literature and politics, as he put it in his autobiography, by reading The New Age from 1908 onwards, recording in his autobiography how he was introduced to the work of Lawrence and Joyce from references in articles by Pound in The New Age.64 In 1912 Muir wrote to Orage for advice upon his intellectual education and, surprisingly we might think given the duties of a busy editor, Orage replied, recommending that he study in depth one ‘great mind’.65 Less surprisingly, given Orage’s own interests and publications, Muir chose the philosopher Nietzsche for such a project. Orage’s support for (mainly male) figures such as Muir and Read also indicates another way in which the metropolitan New Age continued to register the presence of regional spatialities in its pages. Muir’s series of critical articles for The New Age, ‘We Moderns’, published between 1916–17, represents an interesting attempt to catch the cultural zeitgeist. Muir apparently composed the series surreptitiously while working as a costing clerk in a shipbuilding office.66 The articles are marked decisively by the aphoristic style of the later Nietzsche but also register the modernist need for ‘new forms’ in literature and the arts, ranging across topics such as literary style, the nature of love, and the Decadence of Oscar Wilde. Muir nowhere spells out what he means by being ‘modern’, but there is an implicit awareness of the imperative for the writer to challenge convention and develop innovative literary forms. He attacks, for example, contemporary writers who stick too closely to tradition and those who hold to ‘realism’ as a doctrine, and in one article rounds on novels with stereotypically ‘happy endings’: ‘Works of art should only end tragically, or enigmatically, as in “The Doll’s House”, or at the gateway to a new ideal as in “An Enemy of the People.” ’67 Muir’s articles were collected and published as his first book in 1918, We Moderns: Enigmas and Guesses, which was praised by Orage as ‘the reflections of a modern mind’.68 The book was a success, particularly in the USA where it was praised by H. L. Mencken who then brought Muir to the attention of Van Wyck Brooks. Brooks

‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’    35

commissioned Muir to write articles for his journal, The Freeman, and the money Brooks paid allowed Muir and his wife to travel to Europe for the first time. Encouraged by such support, Muir moved to London in 1919 and accepted Orage’s offer to be an Assistant Editor of The New Age. Orage also arranged for Muir to undergo psychoanalysis (free of charge) to treat a crisis in his life, a treatment that Muir believed helped the flowering of his poetry in the 1920s.69 Muir is almost certainly the author of a series of articles, ‘Epistles to the provincials’, in The New Age throughout 1920, composed under the pseudonym, ‘Hengist’.70 The opening article of this series offers a fascinating meditation upon the interconnections between the culture of the ‘provincial’, the cosmopolitan, the European, and the international, but commences with Muir’s rather anguished admission about the effect of migrating to the capital: When I came up here a few months ago I did not dream that one of the first effects of my change would be a violent and romantic love of my native place. Yet I had not been in London a week before this embarrassing reaction set in. I discovered for the first time that the provinces can be loved.71

Muir’s ambivalence about his own identity as a writer from the regions continues throughout the series, masked, we might say, by the adoption of the pseudonym, ‘Hengist’. These articles, however, illustrate more than Muir’s own uncertain grasp upon metropolitan literary culture and his ambivalent psychic response to his new location. For the epistles are part of an ongoing debate within the pages of The New Age on regionalism, most prominently found in two series of articles by Ezra Pound: the first entitled ‘Provincialism the Enemy’, which ran in 1917, and the second called ‘The Regional’, published during 1919.72 Critics have often noted how Orage encouraged contributors to The New Age to stage controversy, debate, and dialogue across its pages, and beyond them, creating what Ann Ardis terms a ‘dialogics of modernism’ whereby competing views rather than consensus shaped the nature of the magazine.73 The articles by Pound and Muir represent another version of this dialogic mode of address, but also demonstrate another element to the debate they stage upon the relative meanings of ‘provincial’ (or regional) and ‘metropolitan’ culture. Orage’s support for Muir and his writing can be viewed as another continuation of the intellectual space opened up for regional voices by the project of the Leeds Arts Club: though Muir’s ‘Hengist’ articles do not offer any simplistic defence of regionalism, they do offer a very different perspective upon the journey from the North to London, one that Orage of course had travelled barely ten years previously. The dialogics of the magazine are

36    Andrew Thacker thus another manifestation of the ‘community of ideas’ initiated in the Leeds Arts Club. In ‘Provincialism the Enemy’ Pound presents the metropolis as the place where key intellectual concepts, such as ‘our ideas of justice, of liberty’, as well as material wealth, have their origin.74 For Pound, provincialism is more of a state of mind than a synonym for geographical regionalism, as it consists, firstly, of an ‘ignorance of the manners, customs and nature of people living outside one’s own village, parish, or nation’ and, secondly, a ‘desire to coerce others into uniformity’.75 The cities of London and Paris, argues Pound, typify a culture and civilisation that faces outwards, rejects uniformity, and addresses the international circulation of new ideas: to this end Pound presciently supports the building of a Channel Tunnel to further enhance communication between the two cities. Pound’s agenda, then, was one that members of the Leeds Arts Club – with their discussions of Nietzsche, continental art, and modern drama, as well as the internationalism of socialist thought at the time – would not have disagreed with, although they might have suggested that they could do some of this while remaining in Leeds. Pound’s articles on ‘The Regional’ offer a rather less focused set of arguments, and were composed while Pound travelled around the south and south-west of France in 1919 after deciding to leave London for good. Pound suggests that the articles will form a ‘study in provincialism, or perhaps I should say a special and somewhat complicated variety of that trouble, Regionalism’, displaying an interesting awareness of the different nuances of these two terms.76 Unfortunately, the following articles do not interrogate this distinction in any great depth as Pound roams across a variety of topics, including upon the power of religion, the errors of decentralisation, and contemporary French writing. Finding himself in a quiet Toulouse street one evening, ‘steeped and soggy in boredom’, Pound can only surmise that Paris acts as a ‘vortex’ drawing the ‘best brains’ (and its best cheese) from such provincial cities.77 It is no surprise then that after these peregrinations Pound was to settle in Paris until 1924, judging that French regional culture displayed merely a ‘provincialism of place’.78 Muir’s articles reverse the geographical focus taken by Pound, the metropolitan intellectual travelling around the regions in search of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’, by considering the experience of a provincial who has travelled to London. Muir’s articles do not refer directly to Pound’s texts, but Orage as editor at least would have been aware of this dialogic interaction within the magazine. Muir’s first piece explores why he felt ‘as if I were in a foreign country’ in London, and then

‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’    37

ponders the possibility of internationalism, a topic which preoccupied many intellectuals after the First World War, especially those writing in ‘little magazines’ such as the transatlantic review, Coterie, or Art and Letters.79 Muir perceives that the only hope for internationalism and closer European integration lies with intellectuals, as the mass of people as typified by the London crowd display only a national consciousness. However, this politically vanguardist position, common enough amongst the Left at the time, did not derive from Muir’s experience of intellectual life in London. He complains that he has only met a couple of ‘good Europeans’ of the internationalist, intellectual variety while in London, and ponders why ‘in large centres culture should become so full of movement and so devoid of life’. The answer, Muir proposes, is due to the shallow cliques and fads of London, whose intellectual life is dominated by the power of the press.80 Muir concludes his article by turning to the category of the ‘cosmopolitan’, who might be thought to exemplify the internationalism he seeks: London in reality is not different from any other English town; it is simply the biggest of the provinces, and the most arrogant. Moreover, its provinciality is cosmopolitan, a provinciality not dictated by locality, but invented by cliques. And the cosmopolitan provincial is, of course, the ‘bad European’ par excellence [. . .] As for me, I should expect to find ‘good Europeans’ at John o’Groats or Land’s End perhaps sooner than in London. The literary men here are so fond of provinciality, I tell you, that they have created their own dialects, less rich, it must be added, than Hodge’s [. . .] The cosmopolitan is a man who loves no country, not even his own. The ‘good European’, on the other hand, is one who strives to understand every country, and who lives and speaks in such a way that every country may understand him.81

One of the most fascinating points here in this barbed critique (which partly anticipates MacDiarmid’s own views on internationalism) is the rhetorical fashion in which Muir turns the negative epithet of the ‘provincial’ from the regions around to attack metropolitan literary culture: London literary cliques operate merely as inward-looking dialects, producing an attentuated cosmopolitanism that will not produce the internationalism of the ‘good European’. It is not an argument, one might surmise, with which Pound would have much sympathy. Later articles in the series lack some of this sharp critical engagement and have a tendency to become rather more generalised pieces on ‘manners’ in the capital, or thoughts prompted by visits to the theatre; another launches a rather vague attack on novels by D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce.82 The fourth in the series, however, returns to the more personal note of the opening article, exploring the provincial’s experience of the modernity of the metropolis:

38    Andrew Thacker London impresses you more at the begining by its buildings, its streets, and its ’buses than by its people, as if the machinery by which seven millions are enable to live in the same place were more wonderful than the seven millions themselves.83

Muir’s account of urban anomie is again interesting due to its provincial focus, as he considers why London evokes ‘in the raw provincial a feeling hardly less than fear’, arguing that it is not ‘the bigness of London that makes one afraid, but its gigantic vulgarity’ where ‘the monstrous is the normal’.84 The article finishes with a rather generalised, but nonetheless illuminating, comparison of how Muir believes Londoners argue in quite different ways to that of the provincial, seeking polite agreement rather than the combatative provocations of the provincial argument. Muir’s articles, overall, show a deeply conflicted attitude towards the journey of the regional intellectual to the metropolis. Aware both of the strengths and limitations of his own cultural identity as a provincial, but also of what seems to him to be the failings of metropolitan life, Muir is nevertheless caught in something of a double bind in that the intellectual desires to locate himself within the metropolis would result in a reununciation of those very features of his provincial identity that define him. This inner turmoil is registered, one could say, in the convoluted arguments of these very articles. Perhaps the trouble (‘that trouble, Regionalism’, in Pound’s phrase) was that it was with profound difficulty that a writer such as Muir, or an editor such as Orage, could retain a regional identity yet reject the narrowness of provincialism: too often in the discourse of the time it appears as if the cultural non-space of provincialism continued to colour negatively the meanings of the geographically regional. Another way to put it would be to say that although Muir could critique the ‘cosmopolitan provincial’ that he found in London, he was unable to articulate clearly the nature of a provincial or regional internationalism (the ‘good European’ in his terms). Partly, this was due to the fact that the cultural institutions that might underpin such a discourse in England were so heavily skewed towards the capital: it is doubtful that Orage would have been able to produce The New Age in the form that he did if he had remained in Leeds, although for a member of the Arts Club such as Mary Gawthorpe it was a pity that the ‘new future’ was not essayed in the city.85 The New Age, then, can be considered properly as an instance of a transregional modernism, one rooted in the civic culture of Leeds but which was crucially informed by a deep engagement with various currents of modern European thought. Once the ‘community of ideas’ represented by the Leeds Arts Club relocated in London we can still register the presence of like-minded regional voices within the pages

‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’    39

of The New Age, in articles such as those by Muir. This demonstrates how any regional modernism partakes of multiple geographical scales, such as the national, the metropolitan, and the international. The region thus becomes, as the editors of this volume argue, something that must be seen not as a static, bounded place, but as a location that is ‘always in process of construction’ and is always engaged with other places, whether ‘proximate or distant’.86 Closer inspection of the magazine’s origins in the Leeds Arts Club, along with the regional cast of a number of its readers and contributors, demonstrates that, in Lefebvre’s words, the local does not disappear from the national in the spaces of The New Age, and that regionalism remains a troubled presence in the modernism of this magazine.

Notes   1. The first quote is from Pound’s (unrealised) prospectus for a College of the Arts, published in 1914 in The Egoist, November 1914, p. 413. The second is the title of a series of articles published in The New Age during 1917 and discussed below.  2. For more on this cultural infrastructure see Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Andrew Thacker, ‘London: Rhymers, Imagists, and Vorticists’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 687–705.  3. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).   4. See Richard Price and David Miller, British Poetry Magazines 1914–2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’ (London: British Library, 2006).   5. Further discussion of many of the magazines mentioned in the following section can be found in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume II, North America 1894–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), especially Part II.   6. Accounts of regionalism in America are legion. For a recent study see Tom Lutz, Cosmopolitan Vistas: American Regionalism and Literary Value (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). For an overview of regionalism and modernism see John Duvall, ‘Regionalism in American Modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, ed. Walter Kalaidjian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 242–60. One of the earliest discussions of magazine regionalism is that in Frederick Hoffman, Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Ulrich, The Little Magazine: A History and a Bibliography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), chapter VIII.

40    Andrew Thacker   7. See H. L. Mencken, ‘The Sahara of the Bozart’, originally published in the New York Evening Mail in November 1917, and revised and expanded in his Prejudices: Second Series (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1920).  8. H. L. Mencken, The Smart Set (July 1923), cited in Tom Lutz, ‘The cosmopolitan Midland and the academic writer’, in Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches, ed. Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 39. The Midland later moved to Chicago.   9. Hoffman et al., The Little Magazine, p. 147. All of these three magazines were, at some point, published in Chicago and New York. 10. Lutz, ‘The Cosmopolitan Midland’, p. 44; p. 46. 11. Advert for Morada, in Blues: A Magazine of the New Rhythms, 1: 2 (March 1929). 12. For further discussion of Irish magazines see Tom Clyde, Irish Literary Magazines: an Outline and Descriptive Bibliography (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2003). 13. See Chris Hopkins, ‘Wales (1937) and The Welsh Review (1939–40)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880–1955, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 14. Quoted in Margery Palmer McCulloch, ‘Scottish modernism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 767. 15. Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), p. 356 16. See Cairns Craig, ‘Modernism and national identity in Scottish magazines’, in Brooker and Thacker, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume I, p. 759. 17. Michael T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 47. The whole of chapter 3, ‘Making it new: Modernism and the north of England’, outlines how art in the North reacted against the dominant culture of the London art world. 18. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England, p. 45. 19. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England, p. 45. 20. Evening Advertiser (November 1937); cited in Saler, The Avant-Garde in Interwar England, p. 46. 21. Holbrook Jackson, Preface to George Bernard Shaw (London: Grant Richards, 1907), p. 9. 22. Orage’s first book was a guide to Nietzsche, Nietzsche in Outline and Aphorism (London: Foulis Press, 1906). 23. Jackson, George Bernard Shaw, p. 12. 24. Jackson, George Bernard Shaw, pp. 13–14. 25. Tom Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club 1893–1923 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990), p. 13. 26. Quote from Jackson, cited in Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club, p. 68.

‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’    41 27. Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club, p. 126. Roy Foster notes how Yeats’s company ‘made a particular impression in Leeds’, and that the engagement was partly due to the Golden Dawn theosophy movement with which Orage, like Yeats, was associated. See Foster, W. B. Yeats: A Life, I, The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 347. 28. Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Art Club, p. 104. 29. See Wallace Martin, ‘The New Age’ Under Orage: Chapters in English Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), p. 24 30. For the idea of a ‘representational space’ see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 39, pp. 41–3. Lefebvre’s work is discussed in Andrew Thacker, Moving Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 16–22. 31. See Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club, pp. 223–4. 32. For a detailed account of Rhythm, see Faith Binckes, Modenism, Magazines, and the British Avant-Garde: Reading Rhythm, 1910–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 33. For more on Mary Gawthorpe see her autobiography, Up Hill to Holloway (Maine: Penobscot, 1947). For a consideration of Gawthorpe and The Freewoman see Lucy Delap, The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 34. Gawthorpe, Up Hill to Holloway, p. 197. 35. Arnold Bennett, The Man from the North (London: John Lane, 1898), pp. 1–2. 36. Peter Keating, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Fontana Press, 1991), p. 330, p. 331. 37. Cited in Keating, The Haunted Study, p. 331. 38. Keating, The Haunted Study, p. 332. For an overview of the regional novel in the early twentieth century see Chris Baldick, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 10, 1910–1940: The Modern Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 170–88. 39. Keating, The Haunted Study, p. 331. 40. However, Scotland, perhaps due to national cultural traditions, continued to maintain the sort of print infrastructure that published MacDiarmid’s magazines. 41. Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 357. 42. John Stokes, In the Nineties (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), p. 17 and chapter 1 passim. 43. For details see Keating, The Haunted Study, pp. 293–303; Philip Waller, Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), ch. 10. 44. These included G. A. Greene, T. W. Rolleston, John Todhunter, and Yeats. 45. Cited in Karl Beckson, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 78. 46. In addition, of course, there were many voices in this scene from abroad, particularly those from the colonies of the British Empire, such as Katherine Mansfield or Rabindranath Tagore.

42    Andrew Thacker 47. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). 48. Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club, p. 9. 49. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 86. 50. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 88. 51. For this point, and much of my discussion of Jameson, I am indebted to Deborah Gerrard, In Dialogue with English Modernism: Storm Jameson’s Early Formation as a Writer, 1919–1931 unpublished PhD thesis (De Montfort University, 2010), p. 42. 52. Storm Jameson, Journey from the North: Autobiography of Storm Jameson (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 67. 53. Jameson, Journey from the North, p. 65. Orage, Nietzsche in Outline, p. 155. 54. Oswald Harland, ‘Iconoclasm’, The New Age, February 1913, pp. 331–2. 55. See Gerrard, In Dialogue with English Modernism, pp. 55–62 56. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between The Pot Boils and The New Age, see Gerrard, In Dialogue with English Modernism, pp. 77–94. 57. See Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club, p. 220ff. 58. Quoted in Rebecca Beasley, ‘Literature and the visual arts: Arts and Letters (1917–20) and The Apple (1920–22)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880– 1955, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 491. 59. Steele, Alfred Orage and the Leeds Arts Club, p. 231. 60. See Ann L. Ardis, ‘Democracy and modernism: The New Age under A. R. Orage (1907–22)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, Volume I, Britain and Ireland 1880–1955, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 206. 61. John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 48. 62. D. H. Lawrence, ‘A Collier’s Friday Night’, in Three Plays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 20. 63. Margery Palmer McCulloch, ‘Scottish modernism’, p. 768. 64. Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London: Hogarth Press, 1954), pp. 115–16. Muir was part of the Clarion Scout Rambling Group who formed a discussion circle devoted to writers and thinkers familiar from the pages of The New Age, such as Carpenter and Nietzsche. For more on Muir see Margery McCulloch, Edwin Muir: Poet, Critic and Novelist (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), and Alexander J. Cuthbert, ‘Edwin Muir and The New Age’, in Scottish and International Modernism, ed. Emma Dymock and Margery Palmer McCulloch (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2011). 65. See Martin, ‘The New Age’ Under Orage, p. 277. 66. Martin, ‘The New Age’ Under Orage, p. 278. 67. ‘Edward Moore’ [Edwin Muir], ‘We Moderns’, The New Age, 1 March 1917, p. 424. 68. See Martin, ‘The New Age’ Under Orage, p. 278.

‘that trouble’: Regional Modernism and ‘little magazines’    43 69. See Martin, ‘The New Age’ Under Orage, p. 279. 70. Wallace Martin thinks these are by Muir, due to the style and content; see ‘The New Age’ Under Orage, p. 279. 71. ‘Hengist’, ‘Epistles to the provincials I’, The New Age, 18 March 1920, p. 321. 72. The New Age had also published several earlier pieces on town planning and civic architecture that took regionalism as a focus, including the publication in 1910 of a symposium conducted by a key theorist of regionalism, Patrick Geddes. See Supplement to The New Age (3 November 1910). For an analysis of Geddes in the context of regional geographies of modernism see Jon Hegglund, World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 73. Ardis, ‘Democracy and modernism’, p. 225. 74. Pound, ‘Provincialism the enemy IV’, The New Age, 2 August 1917, p. 308. 75. Pound, ‘Provincialism the enemy I’, The New Age, 12 July 1917, p. 244. Pound was, of course, something of a ‘provincial’ himself, coming originally from Hailey, Idaho, in the American Midwest. 76. Pound, ‘The regional I’, The New Age, 12 June 1919, p. 26. 77. Pound, ‘The regional II’, The New Age, 26 June 1919, p. 27. 78. Pound, ‘The regional VIII’, The New Age, 28 August 1919, p. 300. 79. ‘Hengist’, ‘Epistles to the provincials I’, The New Age, 18 March 1920, p. 321. The point about internationalism is made by John Lucas in The Radical Twenties (Nottingham: Five Leaves Press, 1997), pp. 183–5. 80. ‘Hengist’, ‘Epistles to the provincials I’, p. 321. 81. ‘Hengist’, ‘Epistles to the provincials I’, p. 322. 82. See, respectively, the Epistles for 13 May, 20 May, and 3 June 1920. 83. ‘Hengist’, ‘Epistle to the provincials IV’, The New Age, 8 April 1920, p. 366. 84. ‘Hengist’, ‘Epistle to the provincials IV’, p. 367. 85. Gawthorpe, Up Hill to Holloway, p. 197. 86. Neal Alexander and James Moran, ‘Introduction: regional modernisms’: see pp. 12, 13 of this volume.

Chapter 2

The Regional Modernism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce Andrew Harrison

Any comparative study of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce is constrained at the outset to acknowledge the mutual antipathy and implicit sense of rivalry between the two writers. Even before Lawrence borrowed a copy of the ‘wildly expensive’ Shakespeare and Company edition of Ulysses from an acquaintance of his American publisher Thomas Seltzer, in autumn 1922, he suspected Joyce of being ‘a trickster’.1 On returning it to its owner on 14 November, he apologised for his failure to appreciate the novel’s experimental qualities: I am sorry, but I am one of the people who can’t read Ulysses. Only bits. But I am glad I have seen the book, since in Europe they usually mention us together – James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence – and I feel I ought to know in what company I creep to immortality. I guess Joyce would look as much askance on me as I on him. We make a choice of Paola and Francesca floating down the winds of hell.2

To Seltzer himself, Lawrence was less guarded. He declared that the book ‘wearied’ him: Joyce was, he said, ‘so like a schoolmaster with dirt and stuff in his head: sometimes good, though: but too mental’.3 He is reported to have referred to Molly Bloom’s soliloquy as ‘the dirtiest, most indecent, obscene thing ever written’.4 In ‘The Future of the Novel [Surgery for the Novel – Or a Bomb]’, an essay written between December 1922 and February 1923, Lawrence grouped Joyce with Proust and Dorothy Richardson as representatives of an extreme self-consciousness in modern fiction which effectively spelt the death of the ‘serious novel’: and in the 1923 ‘Foreword’ to Studies in Classic American Literature he celebrated the modernity of ‘Hawthorne, Poe, Dana, Melville, Whitman’ by comparing them favourably to ‘the more brittle bits of French or Marinetti or Irish production’.5 His opinion of Joyce was only confirmed in August 1928, when he read an instalment of Finnegans Wake in the summer number of the journal Transition and

The Regional Modernism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce    45

was moved to remark: ‘What a stupid olla podrida [pot-pourri] of the Bible and so forth James Joyce is: just stewed-up fragments of quotation in the sauce of a would-be-dirty mind. Such effort! Such exertion! sforzato davvero! [really excessive!]’.6 Joyce seemed to Lawrence to exhibit ‘deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness’.7 Joyce found Lawrence’s work equally unsympathetic and unreadable. In 1929, he told the Italian writer Nino Frank: ‘Cet homme écrit vraiment très mal’ [‘That man really writes very badly’].8 He wrote to Harriet Shaw Weaver on 17 December 1931 about his recent exposure to Lady Chatterley’s Lover: I read the first 2 pages of the usual sloppy English and S. G. [Stuart Gilbert] read me a lyrical bit about nudism in a wood and the end which is a piece of propaganda in favour of something which, outside of D. H. L.’s country at any rate, makes all the propaganda for itself.9

He apparently responded to Gilbert’s reading with the single word ‘Lush!’10 Such incomprehension and dismissiveness might strike us as incidental and comical were it not for the fact that the writers’ mutual animosity – by sharpening perceptions of their diametrically opposed attitudes to literary form and experience – has been influential in shaping the terms of critical engagement with the twentieth-century novel, and ultimately with literary modernism. As early as 1932, in his introduction to Lawrence’s Last Poems, Richard Aldington declared: ‘At two opposite poles of modern literature stand D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce’. He argued that Ulysses is ‘static and solid, logically planned’, while Lawrence’s work is ‘fluid [. . .] personal [. . .] imperfect’. Joyce’s conscious experimentalism was said to be founded upon a conception of ‘Being’, while Lawrence’s expressive style was concerned with ‘Becoming’.11 One can see how such a simplifying polarity might reinforce the kinds of taxonomic distinctions established through the earlier (and equally influential) disagreement between H. G. Wells and Henry James.12 F. R. Leavis famously framed the opposition in stark terms in D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955): ‘if you took Joyce for a major creative writer, then, like Mr Eliot, you had no use for Lawrence, and if you judged Lawrence a great writer, then you could hardly take a sustained interest in Joyce’.13 The full complexity of Leavis’s quarrel with T. S. Eliot over Lawrence’s cultural identity and aesthetic legacy has only recently been explored in detail.14 The long shadow cast by it has arguably led to distortions in the critical appreciation of both Joyce and Lawrence, and with the demise of Leavisite criticism it has contributed to stranding Lawrence’s works outside accounts of the emergence of the modernist novel.

46    Andrew Harrison This particular critical turn has lost much of its power since the 1980s.15 Although Lawrence continues to trouble available constructions of literary modernism, his importance as a modernist writer has long been acknowledged.16 Most recently, Michael Bell has been influential in arguing for Lawrence’s central significance to what he terms the ‘metaphysics of modernism’.17 Bell has insisted that we understand Lawrence’s treatments of artistic impersonality, identity, gender, time, history and myth in a modernist context. My own departure point in this essay is his contention that Lawrence’s fiction contains a ‘modernist awareness [. . .] of how characters and cultural communities inhabit their own “worlds” ’.18 Avoiding an approach which stresses the disagreement between Lawrence and Joyce over issues of sexuality and aesthetics, I will instead trace in their early and middle period writings a common form of engagement with regional landscapes, demonstrating how formal innovations in both writers’ works developed in response to an exploration of conflicted regional identities and a shared focus on the necessity of self-estrangement, or the value of internal exile.19

The familiar and the foreign: ‘Goose Fair’ and ‘Araby’ It is a notable irony that Lawrence and Joyce, two of the archetypal early twentieth-century émigré writers, go on generating significant levels of literary tourism in their respective birthplaces. D. H. Lawrence Heritage in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, and the James Joyce Centre in Dublin remember the writers by commemorating their tangible links with regional locations, and by establishing the connections between their writings, regional culture, and national identity.20 While this approach rightly emphasises the extent of their specific imaginative engagements with Eastwood and Dublin, it should not prevent us from recognising the fruitful ambivalence of the relationships involved. Lawrence’s first instinct was not to produce social realist works like ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ and Sons and Lovers (1913), both of which currently serve to underpin his identity as a regional author, but to write in an intensely literary fashion for a genteel middle-class readership, drawing on conventions from the romance writings in which he and his friends were immersed during their youth.21 It was only at the instigation of his first literary mentors, Ford Madox Hueffer and Edward Garnett, who had an eye to literary commerce, that Lawrence began documenting Eastwood life, and reproducing the routines, speech patterns and mannerisms of the mining community in short stories, poems, plays, and in his third novel.22 In contrast, Joyce’s relationship

The Regional Modernism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce    47

to his birthplace was shaped by his stubborn persistence in affronting middle-class values.23 Although he deliberately set out to give Dublin to the world in Dubliners (1914), his vision of this colonial capital, ‘the “second” city of the British Empire’, was hardly fond or indulgent; the stories are calculated to identify the paralysis at the heart of life in the city, and to produce a detached and critical self-scrutiny in its inhabitants.24 The complexity of their early engagements with region and identity can be gauged if we compare Lawrence’s short story ‘Goose Fair’, first published in The English Review in February 1910, with Joyce’s ‘Araby’, which he completed in October 1905 and published in Dubliners. The first version of ‘Goose Fair’ was written by Louie Burrows, Lawrence’s friend and future fiancée; its title, alluding to the popular annual fair in Nottingham, clearly foregrounds its regional focus. Yet, in drawing heavily on the genre of the historical romance, the text effectively transforms the provincial setting to emphasise its capacity to harness foreign and potentially subversive elements. The action of ‘Goose Fair’ is set against the backdrop of a decline in the lace and hosiery industry in Nottingham in the early 1870s. Importantly, the workers blame the downturn in regional trade on mysterious foreign conflicts, and specifically on the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1, which has had a detrimental effect on exports of lace for fashionable clothes and dresses in the vital French market.25 Foreign conflict enters the story through the atmosphere of class unrest established in its early pages; this conflict is explored in the troubled relationship between Lois Saxton and Will Selby, children of lace factory owners in the city. While the Saxton family is established in trade and lives in a hall close to Sneinton Church (in a south-eastern suburb of Nottingham), the Selbys are not so well connected. Will’s father, William Selby, used to be an errand boy; his factory is said to have ‘sprung up in a day’, and Saxton’s old manager, Sampson, reckons that ‘he’ll vanish in a night’, too.26 The Selbys are representative of the nouveau riche: they are wealthy, but their wealth is not associated with family tradition or property. The story uses this social background to probe the nature of the feelings which bind Lois to Will. Riven between an instinctive attraction to Will’s recklessness and an acculturated suspicion of his upstart family, Lois responds to the burning down of the Selby factory with an initial suspicion that Will has done it himself in order that his father can claim the insurance money. Yet, when a dishevelled Will returns from the fair with her brother the following morning, Lois’ attraction to him, and his embodiment of festivity and disorder, is enough to upset and overturn her reserve:

48    Andrew Harrison Curiously enough, they walked side by side as if they belonged to each other. She was his conscience-keeper. She was far from forgiving him, but she was still further from letting him go. And he walked at her side like a boy who has to be punished before he can be exonerated. He submitted. But there was a genuine bitter contempt in the curl of his lip.27

The ambivalence of the ending puts the local detail in the symbolic service of a romantic approach to individual psychology. Will’s association with the fair, and with foreign and disruptive elements conducive to the dissolution of class boundaries, replaces the notion of a stable regional identity with the unsettling spectre of an underlying chthonic self: a realist concentration on class difference as determining one’s character through social conditioning is displaced by the notion of a self which is driven by primal desire. In its disruption of regional trade, foreign conflict also manages to dislodge the established social strata of Nottingham society in the story, and the psychological implications of this process are realised in the uncanny nature of its final lines. ‘Goose Fair’ explores how regional identity is shaped by international exchange, and it demonstrates how international events infiltrate and shape both the city and the individual, altering the affective nature of even static populations. Joyce’s early stories share the same focus on the imbrication of regional and transnational identities. However, where Lawrence seems broadly to celebrate the disruptive and liberating influence of foreign conflict in ‘Goose Fair’, relating it to a burgeoning sense of adult sexual feeling and freedom in Lois, Joyce’s ‘Araby’ shows how a colonial regional identity is policed by seductive foreign powers which promise freedom of expression but actually serve to reinforce a sense of limitation and inauthenticity. The double focus of ‘Araby’ is suggested by the juxtaposition of the exotic title and its opening words, which immediately locate the story in ‘North Richmond Street’, a setting ‘off North Circular Road in the northeast quadrant of Dublin’.28 As Vincent J. Cheng has noted, the ‘blindness’ of this street (its nature as a cul-de-sac) symbolises the failure of its residents to grasp their situation as colonised subjects, or ‘their inability to see beyond their own paralysis’.29 The quietly elegiac tone of the r­ etrospective narration imbues the description of the young narrator’s yearning for Mangan’s sister with a mixture of sadness and mildly sarcastic irony. His secret voyeuristic longing for the girl becomes associated with the exciting prospect of visiting the Araby Bazaar, with its oriental romantic allure. The girl is unable to attend this bazaar because her convent school is going on a retreat, so the narrator makes it his mission to buy something there and bring it back for her; regional limitation of freedom is set against an attraction to the foreign. The narrator’s romantic feelings are

The Regional Modernism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce    49

painfully repressed during ritualised visits with his aunt to the Saturday evening markets in the city, where he hears ‘a ballad about the troubles in our native land’.30 In contrast to his everyday life, and to the messages of subjection on the streets, we are told that ‘[t]he syllables of the word Araby were called to me through the silence in which my soul luxuriated and cast an Eastern enchantment over me’.31 However, on arriving late at the bazaar, following a carefully documented walk down ‘Buckingham Street’ to take the train, and a journey beyond ‘Westland Row Station’, he is confronted by the reality of its staged travesty of foreign exoticism. The hall is almost entirely plunged in darkness; money is being counted at the extravagantly named ‘Café Chantant’, while one of the few open stalls is staffed by English people who are arguing volubly. It is a reminder that the construction of Eastern exoticism, and by inference the youthful desire of the narrator, is overseen by the colonial power through its control of commerce and consumption. Where previously the prospect of the bazaar had made the rituals of provincial life seem like ‘child’s play, ugly monotonous child’s play’, promising to fulfil a youthful desire for the proscribed, illicit and foreign, the exposure of its commercial tawdriness causes the narrator to realise his subjection: ‘Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger’.32 There is a stark contrast between the final lines of ‘Goose Fair’ and this ending to ‘Araby’: while the dire commercial consequences of foreign conflict in Lawrence’s tale cause his characters to confront the enervating strangeness of their ‘genuine’ feelings, the revelation of an imposed foreign power in Joyce’s story allows the narrator to glimpse, but not to address, the source of his self-alienation and inauthenticity. The narrator’s epiphany is deeply ambiguous because we appreciate the partial nature of his self-recognition.33

Regional and transnational identities in Sons and Lovers and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man The conflicted nature of regional and transnational identities subsequently provided the central theme of the two writers’ Künstlerromane, Sons and Lovers and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and here they begin to explore the potential of exile as a means of securing a limited form of freedom and autonomy. Sons and Lovers opens with a description not of the Morel family, but of Bestwood, the mining village in which they live; the narrative provides an account of the development of the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire

50    Andrew Harrison coalfields dating back to the time of Charles II.34 This striking gesture declares Lawrence’s new commitment to the realist mode, but it also sets in place a key concern of the novel, by anticipating the powerful and tragic influence which regional factors will exert on the characters. We are told that some sixty years ago (around 1850) the big financiers moved in to Bestwood, and Carston, Waite and Co. began industrial-scale mining in the area, sweeping away the old buildings and erecting blocks of miners’ houses, including the houses in the so-called ‘Bottoms’, inhabited by Walter Morel, his pregnant wife Gertrude, and their children, William and Annie. Already, before Paul’s birth, the Morels are shown to be subordinate to the larger movements in English history and the financial motives of the colliery owners. The sons’ individual movements outwards and upwards into a wider social world are troublingly mirrored in the family’s rather circumscribed progression from one house to the next in Bestwood: from the house owned by Walter’s mother, to the end terrace house in the Bottoms (with its extra strip of garden), to a house on the brow of the hill (commanding a view of the valley), and finally to a superior house with a big bay window at the top of an ugly street. They have the room to achieve some localised distinction, even acquiring the service of a maid in their last home, but their efforts are contained within Bestwood, and they remain bound to the incomes of father and son. Sons and Lovers explores how profoundly an individual is shaped by regional factors, and the degree to which he can break free and gain autonomy. We are given detailed descriptions of the family backgrounds of both Gertrude and Walter. She comes from a family of stout Congregationalists; her grandfather went bankrupt as a Nottingham lace-manufacturer, while her father, George Coppard, was an impoverished and embittered engineer. We are told that she ‘resembled her mother in her small build. But her temper, proud and unyielding, she had from the Coppards’.35 Walter’s family history, in contrast, is somewhat sketchy: ‘His grandfather was a French refugee who had married an English barmaid – if it had been a marriage’.36 The closing qualification, delivered in a bitterly ironic register associated with the perspective of his wife, cannot entirely suppress the positive significance of Walter’s foreign ancestry. In a novel so concerned with acquired traits, his foreign dissident blood perhaps goes some way to explaining his violent and self-destructive behaviour, and his gradual alienation within his own home. Although Paul initially despises his miner-father, Ronald Granofsky has noted how the novel’s symbolism of blackness and dirt suggests an unconscious kinship between the two comparable to the bond which initially holds between Walter and his younger son, Arthur.37 Such kinship is also realised through Paul’s reaching out to an

The Regional Modernism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce    51

internalised foreignness as a means of potential escape from the more confining aspects of regional life. William’s move to London fulfils his mother’s desire for her sons’ upward mobility, but his lonely death in the suburbs illustrates the intensity of the self-alienation which his uprooting entails. In contrast, Paul’s fascination with the foreign promises to integrate the two sides of his nature by bringing together the mother’s conventional ambition with the father’s passionate anti-authoritarianism. The ultimately doomed desire for self-integration is expressed through Paul’s troubled attraction to Miriam Leivers and Clara Dawes, both of whom start by embodying some element of the foreignness he craves. Paul’s first walk with his mother to the Leivers’ home, Willey Farm, reveals his desire to discover the foreign in the familiar: The mother and son went through the wheat and oats, over a little bridge into a wild meadow. Peewits with their white breasts glistening wheeled and screamed about them. The lake was still and blue. High overhead a heron floated. Opposite, the wood heaped on the hill, green and still. ‘It’s a wild road, mother’, said Paul. ‘Just like Canada.’38

The reference to Canada is significant, since this location features centrally as a promising destination for young emigrants from England in Lawrence’s early fiction.39 Paul clearly grasps at the idea of a New World close to Bestwood, but his attempt to secure it through his relationship with Miriam goes unrealised. A more significant attempt is made through his relationship with Clara Dawes. Paul shares a love of the French language with Clara, and his growing interest in French literature reflects a movement away from Miriam’s spirituality and love of sentimental poetry towards his father’s passion, recklessness, and rebellion: he reads Verlaine, Baudelaire, Balzac, and Alphonse Daudet’s satires. At some level Paul is obviously attempting to discover a bond with his father through his relationship to Clara; it is significant that she is the only person to whom he speaks using both received pronunciation and his father’s regional dialect.40 The co-existence of regional and international elements characterises their relationship from the outset. On their first public date, Paul takes Clara to Nottingham’s Theatre Royal to see Sarah Bernhardt in a production of La Dame aux Camélias, the stage version of the novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils. This provides an occasion for Paul to realise his passion for Clara: The drama continued. He saw it all in the distance, going on somewhere, he did not know where, but it seemed far away inside him. He was Clara’s white, heavy arms, her throat, her moving bosom. That seemed to be himself.

52    Andrew Harrison Then away somewhere the play went on, and he was identified with that also. There was no himself.41

The confusion over what is located within Paul and what is outside him seems, at moments like this, to reflect his internalised responsiveness to his father’s French roots; his sensibility is divided between critical observation of the drama on stage, and a painful empathetic immersion in its destructive passion. The conflicted nature of Paul’s regional identity, and his subjection to both social and psychological determinisms, here generates one of the most radical and challenging instances of psychological narration in the novel. The experimental form of Sons and Lovers reflects the pressures exerted upon Paul in its shift from realist description of a tangible and known regional setting to tortured passages of free-indirect discourse revealing internal self-division. Although at the end of the novel Paul is considering going abroad, this defeated gesture of a failed artist seems feeble by comparison with his earlier attempts to acknowledge the important foreign elements in his own background. In contrast, the formal development of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man describes an opposite trajectory in its central character, Stephen Dedalus. The movement in Joyce’s novel from third-person narration to the firstperson diary entries in its conclusion emphasises Stephen’s discovery of his own voice and identity as a writer through a coming to terms with the different voices and forms of authority he had earlier struggled to comprehend. The discovery of Stephen’s vocation entails the negotiation of a negative outsider’s consciousness of his own region; he is forced to recognise his own cultural conditioning as a colonial subject in order to see his region and its people through fresh eyes. The allure of the foreign for Stephen is first realised when he is recovering from a fever in the infirmary at Clongowes Wood College. He considers reading ‘a book in the library about Holland. There were lovely foreign names in it and pictures of strangelooking cities and ships. It made you feel so happy’.42 This consolatory recourse to the foreign is reproduced years later, when his struggling father has uprooted the family from Blackrock to Dublin city centre: His evenings were his own: and he pored over a ragged translation of The Count of Monte Cristo. The figure of that dark avenger stood forth in his mind for whatever he had heard or divined in childhood of the strange and terrible.43

Tellingly, Stephen begins to map the strangeness of Dumas père’s fictional landscapes onto the streets of Dublin, so that the ‘new and

The Regional Modernism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce    53

complex sensation’ they offer is tamed by being brought within the bounds of his existing imagination. Moving through the docks and quays of his new home city, his vision superimposes onto them a romantic impression of Marseilles derived from his reading: The vastness and strangeness of the life suggested to him by the bales of merchandise stocked along the walls or swung aloft out of the holds of steamers wakened again in him the unrest which had sent him wandering in the evening from garden to garden in search of Mercedes. And amid this new bustling life he might have fancied himself in another Marseilles but that he missed the bright sky and the sunwarmed trellises of the wineshops.44

Stephen’s perception of the ‘vastness’ and ‘strangeness’ of Dublin life registers his failure to respond to the city as a place of international commerce with its own material identity. At this stage, Dublin features in his imagination as a mysterious absence; it disappoints him in its failure to live up to the romantic grandeur of Dumas’ foreign setting. He experiences Dublin as a city unconducive to the literary imagination. Although Stephen’s youthful imposition of a fictional Marseilles onto Dublin is motivated by conventional fantasies of French beauty, adventure and permissiveness, his privileging of the imagined foreign city over his native land reveals a more disturbing, because unconscious, reproduction of the colonial processes to which he has been subjected. The ‘House’ system at Clongowes and its commitment to cricket stand as reminders of how Stephen’s experience has forced him to see his own country as a pale imitation of a foreign land. Through his growing self-consciousness and articulacy, the novel charts Stephen’s attempt to externalise this learnt habit of mind in order to discover an alternative national identity through this residue of colonial elements. He defiantly states: ‘This race and this country and this life produced me [. . .] I shall express myself as I am’.45 The novel explores just how difficult it is for Stephen to discover his national identity and to give expression to it, since to articulate his insights in English is to immediately encounter a feeling of inauthenticity, as he realises when speaking to the Dean of Studies at University College.46 Yet, we see the potential for him to mitigate the colonial mindset by realising Ireland’s broader connectedness to Europe. Immediately prior to the celebrated epiphanic moment in which he encounters the young girl wading into the sea, he achieves a new vision of Dublin as ‘the seventh city of christendom’: Disheartened, he raised his eyes towards the slowdrifting clouds, dappled and seaborne. They were voyaging across the deserts of the sky, a host of nomads on the march, voyaging high over Ireland, westward bound. The Europe

54    Andrew Harrison they had come from lay out there beyond the Irish Sea, Europe of strange tongues and valleyed and woodbegirt and citadelled and of entrenched and marshalled races. He heard a confused music within him as of memories and names which he was almost conscious of but could not capture even for an instant; then the music seemed to recede, to recede, to recede: and from each receding trail of nebulous music there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! Again! Again! A voice from beyond the world was calling.47

This passage manages to realise Stephen’s imaginative repositioning of Ireland as part of a mainland Europe shaped by colonial wars and divided by language, whilst simultaneously demonstrating how the English language might be creatively fractured in order to articulate this insight. These sentences – in their blending of different styles and v­ ocabularies – embody Stephen’s new perception of Dublin through the broad c­ ultural lens of diverse figures like Gerhardt Hauptmann, Newman, Guido Cavalcanti, Ibsen, Ben Jonson, Aristotle, and Aquinas.48 The attempt to redefine the relationship between regional and European elements in Ireland as contiguous rather than submissive brings the narrative close to an exploration of the ‘mythic method’ which will come to dominate in Ulysses (1922).49 The preparations for Stephen’s move abroad at the end of the novel proceed naturally from the inclusive and cosmopolitan nature of his new-found vision, which entails an explicit rejection of more narrowly nationalist conceptions of Irish identity. The contrasts in the treatment of regional and international elements in Sons and Lovers and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man help us to isolate their authors’ different approaches to wider issues of identity and belonging. While Lawrence narrates an unconscious attraction to the foreign as a fundamental part of the search for identity, and especially of adult sexual individuation, Joyce views it as an obstacle to realising a regional identity built around heterogeneity. Joyce stresses the necessity of incorporating the foreign more pragmatically into a conscious mode of perceiving the regional. This contrast in outlook deepens in their subsequent works, which may help us to account for their hostility, since Lawrence objects to the self-consciousness of Joyce’s approach, while Joyce derides Lawrence’s perceived romanticism.

Displacement and parody in The Rainbow, Women in Love and Ulysses Sons and Lovers and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were completed by their authors in self-imposed exile in Gargnano, by Lake Garda

The Regional Modernism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce    55

in the north of Italy, and Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The novels may be said, in different ways, to reflect the sense of freedom from regional constraint incident upon such uprootings. Connections with the continent are seen as underpinning the conflicted identities of both Paul Morel and Stephen Dedalus. The period of composition and publication of the writers’ subsequent novels saw the outbreak and protraction of a World War which intensified Lawrence’s feelings of alienation from, and hostility towards, England, and negotiations towards the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 following the Easter Rising of 1916 and subsequent years of bloody Anglo-Irish conflict and Civil War in Ireland. Consequently, Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920) move from an open celebration of the transformative potential of contact between regional and non-native populations to explore a more assuredly uprooted sense of identity, while Joyce’s Ulysses finds a form and language in which to articulate its complex post-colonial vision of Dublin. Although Lawrence declared that the publication of Sons and Lovers marked the end of his ‘youthful period’, it is The Rainbow which sees the culmination of his early concern with the relationship of the regional to the international, and the need to internalise the foreign.50 The novel revolves around the incorporation of Lydia Lensky’s subversive energy as a Polish refugee into the Brangwen bloodline, and especially into the female line. The story of Lydia’s first husband, Paul, and his passionate rebellion as a Polish patriot against Russian rule of his partitioned homeland, provides a vital commentary on the processes of dissatisfaction and transgression in their daughter Anna and granddaughter Ursula.51 The Rainbow has recently been read as a text which ‘consciously reflects upon its late colonial moment from within English radical culture’.52 Through its critical portrayal of Anton Skrebensky, a soldier in the Royal Engineers, and its sympathetic treatment of the refusal of Anna and Ursula to be compelled, or laid claim to, by the men in their lives, it articulates a strong critique of the colonial spirit. The crossing of borders in defiance of authority lies at the thematic heart of this novel, which develops an elaborate symbolism of thresholds, doorways and arches in order to describe the desired transition from one state to another. The opening tale of ‘How Tom Brangwen Married a Polish Lady’ establishes the terms by which the rooted, sustaining but stymied regional setting of Marsh Farm, in the Erewash Valley, on the border between Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, opens out onto the foreign and unfamiliar. The key event in Brangwen’s early life occurs over the Derbyshire border in Matlock. In 1862, when the twenty-four-year-old Tom visits

56    Andrew Harrison this Peak District town on a ‘jaunt’ with two friends, we are told that it was ‘just becoming a famous beauty-spot, visited from Manchester and from the Staffordshire towns’; by this time it was a fashionable tourist resort which also attracted international visitors, who enjoyed its thermal springs and the hydropathic cures it offered. The popularity of the town with tourists, and the beauty of its landscape, led to its being called ‘the English Switzerland’.53 It is this promising setting that gives Tom his first significant contact with the foreign within the familiar. His sexual experience with ‘a handsome, reckless girl’, whom he takes into the woods, is only surpassed by his encounter in the evening, in a hotel, with her middle-aged and aristocratic foreign partner. Brangwen instantly detects the foreignness of the man: ‘Brangwen guessed that he was a foreigner’.54 We are told that Brangwen watches the man ‘with all his eyes’, ‘too much moved and lost to know what to do’.55 Their subsequent conversation about ‘horses, and [. . .] Derbyshire, and [. . .] farming’ initiates a powerful form of disorientation in Tom which threatens to dislodge him from the safety of his region and its known world. The man’s parting shot (‘Goodnight, and bon voyage’) injects a note of glamour into an exchange which has made Brangwen conscious in a pointed way of his own idiomatic speech.56 The experience causes Tom to confront his limitations, and to realise the extent to which an outside world might challenge his internal surety: Brangwen went up to his room and lay staring out at the stars of the summer night, his whole being in a whirl. What was it all? There was a life so different from what he knew it. What was there outside his knowledge, how much? What was this that he had touched? What was he in this new influence? What did everything mean? Where was life, in that which he knew or all outside him?57

The process of internal displacement generates a startling image which directly relates Tom’s conversation with the foreigner, and his illicit encounter with the girl, to a physical sense of enforced uprooting: ‘The girl and the foreigner: he knew neither of their names. Yet they had set fire to the homestead of his nature, and he would be burned out of cover’.58 Tom becomes a psychologically displaced person who is ready to see in Lydia a kindred spirit when he encounters her four years later on the road from Nottingham to Cossethay. In this way, The Rainbow counters the pessimism of Paul Morel’s failure to integrate the regional and foreign elements in his nature by offering a vision of ‘Love Triumphant’ which rests on the transformation of the individual through the movement out from the known to the unknown, or the familiar to the foreign.59 This novel represents the high

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point of Lawrence’s belief in the communicative potential of his writing and his fullest exploration of the value of internal exile. By contrast, Women in Love inaugurates a series of novels in which the characters undergo a literal displacement from England.60 The tortuous self-reflexiveness of the latter novel reveals the impact of the prosecution of The Rainbow in November 1915, and the destructive influence of the Great War on Lawrence’s belief in England, and ultimately in Europe. In this phase of Lawrence’s career, the celebration of becoming ‘unEnglished’ through a chosen exile is complicated by the feeling that physical displacement, far from resolving tensions in one’s regional identity, simply exposes them in an altered, or even heightened, form.61 In Women in Love, Gudrun Brangwen, newly returned from a period in London, experiences her home town of Beldover in the Midlands as an uncanny site where superficial disgust at the mechanisation of the inhabitants with their ‘endless mining and political wrangling’ is mixed with a deep, but estranging, nostalgia for their voices, which ‘affected Gudrun almost to swooning’.62 Gudrun’s attraction to the ‘soiled’ and ‘sordid’ town is established as early as the opening chapter, where she describes it as ‘like a country in an underworld’: ‘it’s really marvellous – it’s really wonderful, another world’.63 The contextual ambiguity of the terms ‘marvellous’ and ‘wonderful’ here registers Gudrun’s disconcerting attraction to scenes of subjection and degradation. Her unconscious immersion in the ‘demoniacal’ energies of Beldover is replicated later in the novel, when she discovers the same connection with the stark landscape of the Austrian Tyrol and its other world of coldness, separation and deathliness. Her sister, Ursula, also senses the continuities between home and abroad, but in her case it leads not to an unconscious recognition of intensified sameness, but to a conscious awareness of how alienated she has become from the Midlands. Ursula’s journey by boat from Dover to Ostend, and by train through Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, and Switzerland to Innsbruck exposes a chasm in her life, emphasising the foreignness of her home region. At Ghent, Ursula has a flashback: Ursula saw a man with a lantern come out of a farm by the railway, and cross to the dark farm-buildings. She thought of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm-life at Cossethay. My God, how far was she projected from her childhood, how far was she still to go! [. . .] The great chasm of memory, from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of Cossethay and the Marsh Farm [. . .] was so great, that it seemed she had no identity, that the child she had been, playing in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not really herself.64

58    Andrew Harrison The passage manages to suggest the conjunction of temporal and spatial dissonance for Ursula. She experiences neither nostalgia for her early life in Cossethay, nor a feeling of liberation from it. Anticipating her departure to the continent, Ursula had seen herself as ‘something that is going to be – soon – soon – very soon’, but her negative insight that physical exile cannot resolve the strains of internal self-alienation, and in fact might actually exacerbate them, ultimately causes her to renounce the search for an ‘unrealised world ahead’ in the frozen north, prompting her retreat with Birkin to Verona and the comparative warmth of the south.65 In attempting to articulate the strange familiarity of foreign experience for Ursula and Gudrun in the Austrian Tyrol, Lawrence cuts loose from the symbolic, expressive mode of The Rainbow and employs a radically imagistic language which defamiliarises the landscape while reinforcing an underlying connection with the discordant strangeness of Beldover: And they turned home again. They saw the golden lights of the hotel glouring out in the night of snow-silence, small in the hollow, like a cluster of yellow berries. It seemed like a bunch of sun-sparks, tiny and orange in the midst of the snow-darkness. Behind, was a high shadow of a peak, blotting out the stars, like a ghost.66

We might notice here Lawrence’s repeated use of startling compound words (‘snow-silence’, ‘sun-sparks’, ‘snow-darkness’) and his recourse to a series of estranging similes in the attempt to describe the characters’ perception of their night-time surroundings. Writing like this is imbued with a strong sense of the inability of language to communicate the experience of the characters’ psychological displacement. In identifying a form of self-alienation which cannot be addressed through physical exile, or an identity for which regional and foreign aspects prove equally uncanny, Lawrence deploys an unsettling and inherently autocritical style. Lawrence’s engagement with a conflicted regional identity moves, then, from a romantic celebration of the foreign in the familiar, and the access this offers to forms of integrity, autonomy, and selfrealisation, to a despairing sense of displacement between regional and foreign landscapes. Carol Taaffe’s reference to the ‘dislocations of modernity’ seems very apt here, since the experience of forsaking a homeland is inseparable from the innovative and disjunctive form of the writing.67 The new note of self-parody in Women in Love emerges in the attempt to express displacement and alienation.68 In comparison, Joyce’s Ulysses uses parody in a more conscious, structural manner to

The Regional Modernism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce    59

articulate an estranging, post-colonial vision of Dublin which comprehensively dismantles any notion of a stable regional or national identity; the novel’s parodic modes expose and contest colonial forms of power while refusing to endorse existing or emerging nationalistic discourses. Enda Duffy has argued that, while the late colonial Dublin of Ulysses is recreated in dense detail through precise references to architectural and commercial landmarks, the scattered references to civic monuments underscore the feeling of a lack of collective or communal identity.69 He suggests that ‘Dublin in Ulysses is a city without real relations, whose history is denied it, and whose identity in its own terms is unclear’.70 In the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode, the nineteen separate narratives of movement across the city yield points of intersection, but the attention of individual citizens is focused more on the news billboards and advertising posters, or on the progress of the viceregal cavalcade, than on each other. The tragedy of a burnt steamer ship in New York and the grand spectacle of colonial rule provide welcome distractions from the personal tragedies and power games played out within and between the individuals on the streets. Joyce noted his desire when writing the novel to convey ‘the colour and tone of Dublin’ through the ‘texture’ of his words.71 The novel captures the estranging nature of the city by foregrounding parodic reading practices which dislodge consensus in order to emphasise conflict and internal division. In the twelfth episode (‘Cyclops’), the drinkers in Barney Kiernan’s pub are subjected to ironic deflation by the text’s parodic passages, while themselves appreciating the subversive potential of parody as a journalistic form. The thirty-three parodic interpolations in ‘Cyclops’ are supplemented by two inserted texts which are read by the characters in the course of their conversation: a barely literate letter from a Liverpudlian hangman to the High Sheriff of Dublin, and a ‘skit’ in the United Irishman describing the state visit of an African chief to England. These texts reflect the theme of colonial authority which is central to the discussion taking place in a pub adjacent to a court house. The reading of the ‘skit’, however, decentres the increasingly polarised terms of the debate between the Citizen (with his outspoken nationalism and bitter invective against the English) and Leopold Bloom (with his call for moderation and his creed of love). The parodic account of the Chief’s obeisance to Edward VII and his visit to the cotton factories of Manchester works by reproducing in exaggerated form the mannered terms in which colonial powers report state occasions, leaving us with a clear sense of the Chief’s subjection and the jarring patronage of the English:

60    Andrew Harrison [. . .] the reverend Ananias Praisegod Barebones, tendered his best thanks to Massa Walkup and emphasised the cordial relations existing between Abeakuta and the British Empire, stating that he treasured as one of his dearest possessions an illuminated bible, the volume of the word of God and the secret of England’s greatness, graciously presented to him by the white chief woman, the great squaw Victoria [. . .].72

This passage comically exposes the racist mindset of the colonisers, but the reading of it also underlines an absence of unanimity among the colonised. While Ned Lambert and Lenehan laugh it off, the Citizen (who has no grounds for complacency where the topic of racism is concerned) takes from it the fact that ‘Trade follows the flag’, and J. J. O’Molloy relativises the issues at stake by comparing British rule in Africa to Belgian rule in the Congo Free State, making reference to a report in the papers by Roger Casement on forced labour in rubber plantations. By 1922 Casement had been hanged for high treason after attempting to gain German support for nationalist insurrection in Ireland, so the allusion here works to demonstrate how the Irish revolutionary impulse may be linked to a broader colonial situation.73 Bloom leaves for the court house just before the satirical article on the state visit is read out, but its excessively polite manner potentially exposes Bloom’s humane liberalism as a form of collusion in colonial structures of power. Though we may be tempted to discover in the novel’s polyphonic voices the celebration of a liberating plurality, David Lloyd is surely right to stress instead ‘the adulteration of interpenetrating discourses’.74 The many parodic interpolations in ‘Cyclops’ certainly subject authoritative discourses to irony, but this does not mean that the text offers a consistent critique of colonial rule and endorses a liberal approach to issues of nationalism. Any utopian sense of a shared community and regional identity in the novel is constantly undermined by arguments around nationhood and race. Instead, in its concern with the distortions, malapropisms, creative constructions, and silences involved in the translation of different languages and historical idioms, the ‘Cyclops’ episode confronts us with a layered vision of Dublin as a place of reinscription, disagreement, and contradiction, where a physical sense of geographical familiarity is barely able to mask the underlying strangeness of the city’s history and identity. We have clearly travelled a long way from the thematic exploration of conflicted notions of the regional in the romance of ‘Araby’ and ‘Goose Fair’, and the focus on internalised foreignness and desired exile in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Sons and Lovers, to arrive at the shared formal and linguistic concern with displacement and uprooting in the later novels. In Ulysses, Joyce’s mythic method and ironic

The Regional Modernism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce    61

engagement with plural discourses invoke different types of potential structure and significance in order to stress their contingency, moving from the ‘critical practice of parody and demystification into the realm of postmodern pastiche’.75 We are allowed to appreciate the conflict, alienation, and subjection which lie behind or alongside the material signs of community, while in Women in Love Lawrence explores the displacement of a stable sense of regional and national identity through his self-reflexive use of an estranging imagistic style. The relativising modernist forms which both writers developed across their early careers reflect contradictions in their own emerging politics and attitudes to regional, national, and transnational issues and identities. To trace the emergence of these forms through their conflicted responses to the regional allows us to move beyond the critical prejudices of the writers and their more partisan critics in order to identify a shared concern with the metaphysics of ‘belonging’ and the complexities of internal exile.

Notes  1. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, 8 vols, ed. James T. Boulton et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979–2000), VIII, 56; The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, IV, 275.  2. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, IV, 340. In Dante’s Inferno, Paolo and Francesca inhabit the second circle of hell, which is reserved for carnal sinners.  3. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, IV, 345.  4. Dorothy Brett, Lawrence and Brett: A Friendship (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1933), p. 81.  5. D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 152. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 11–12.  6. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, VI, 507.  7. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, VI, 508.   8. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 615 and note.  9. Selected Letters of James Joyce, ed. Richard Ellmann (London: Faber, 1975), p. 359. Joyce had been asked by an unnamed critic to provide an opinion on Lady Chatterley’s Lover; the critic hoped to print Joyce’s response on the cover of his study of the novel. 10. Ellmann, James Joyce, p. 615 and note. 11. D. H. Lawrence, Last Poems, ed. Richard Aldington and Giuseppe Orioli (Florence: G. Orioli, 1932), p. xv. 12. See Henry James and H. G. Wells: A Record of Their Friendship, Their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and Their Quarrel, ed. Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958).

62    Andrew Harrison 13. F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (London: Chatto and Windus, 1955), p. 10. 14. Brian Crick and Michael DiSanto, ‘D. H. Lawrence, “An opportunity and a test”: the Leavis–Eliot controversy revisited’, The Cambridge Quarterly 38: 2 (2009), 130–46. 15. Contemporary critics still contrast Lawrence and Joyce, but without the distorting intensity of the earlier bias. See, for example, Tim Parks’s brief comparison of the two writers in his recent review-essay, ‘Joyce and company’, London Review of Books, 5 July 2012, pp. 12–15 (p. 15). 16. Two books published in 1990 signalled a decisive move towards reading Lawrence as a modernist author: Tony Pinkney, D. H. Lawrence (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990); and G. M. Hyde, D. H. Lawrence (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). 17. See Michael Bell, ‘The metaphysics of modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 9–32; and ‘Lawrence and modernism’, in The Cambridge Companion to D. H. Lawrence, Anne Fernihough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 179–96. 18. Michael Bell, ‘The metaphysics of modernism’, p. 24. 19. The clash between Lawrentian and Joycean sexuality/aesthetics is explored by Paul Delany, ‘“A Would-Be-Dirty Mind”: D. H. Lawrence as an enemy of Joyce’, in Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis, ed. Morris Beja and David Norris (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996), pp. 76–82; Charles Rossman, ‘Henry Miller on Joyce vs. Lawrence’, Joyce Studies Annual 3 (1992), 248–54; H. M. Daleski, ‘Life as a four-letter word: a contemporary view of Lawrence and Joyce’, in D. H. Lawrence in the Modern World, ed. Peter Hoare and Peter Preston (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 90–103; William Deakin, ‘D. H. Lawrence’s attack on Proust and Joyce’, Essays in Criticism 7 (1957), 383–403. 20. See http://www.dhlawrenceheritage.org and http://www.jamesjoyce.ie. Accessed 26 July 2012. 21. For a fascinating insight into the nature and extent of Lawrence’s early reading in nineteenth-century romance, see ET [Jessie Chambers], D. H. Lawrence: A Personal Record (London: Cape, 1935), pp. 91–123. 22. See John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years, 1885–1912 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 217–18. 23. See, for example, Joyce’s correspondence with Grant Richards over the publication of Dubliners. Letters of James Joyce, 2 vols, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann (London: Faber, 1957), I, 60–4. 24. Letters of James Joyce, II, 111. 25. D. H. Lawrence, ‘Goose Fair’, in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, ed. John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 133–42 (p. 134). 26. D. H. Lawrence, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, p. 137. 27. D. H. Lawrence, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, p. 142. 28. James Joyce, ‘Araby’, in Dubliners (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 21–8 (p. 21). Don Gifford, Joyce Annotated (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 42.

The Regional Modernism of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce    63 29. Vincent J. Cheng, Joyce, Race, and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 88. 30. James Joyce, Dubliners, p. 23. 31. James Joyce, Dubliners, p. 24. 32. James Joyce, Dubliners, pp. 24, 28. 33. See Dominic Head, The Modernist Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 50–3. 34. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 9–10. 35. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, p. 15. 36. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, p. 17. 37. Ronald Granofsky, ‘“His Father’s Dirty Digging”: recuperating the masculine in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers’, Modern Fiction Studies 55: 2 (2009), 242–64 (p. 253). 38. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, p. 153. 39. See, for instance, The White Peacock (Part II, Chapter IV), and the short stories ‘Daughters of the Vicar’ and ‘Love Among the Haystacks’. 40. See D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, pp. 355–6. 41. D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, p. 375. 42. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 25. 43. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pp. 64–5. 44. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 69. 45. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 220. 46. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 205. 47. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, pp. 181–2. 48. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, p. 190. 49. See Joyce’s essay ‘Ireland, island of saints and sages’ (1907), in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (London: Faber, 1959), 153–74. 50. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I, 551. 51. See D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 49–50. Lawrence mentions the suppression of the Polish rebellion in Movements in European History, ed. Philip Crumpton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 246. 52. Howard J. Booth, ‘The Rainbow, British Marxist Criticism of the 1930s and Colonialism’, in New D. H. Lawrence, ed. Howard J. Booth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 34–58, p. 34. 53. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, pp. 22, 499, note 22:28. 54. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 24. 55. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, pp. 24–5. 56. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 25. 57. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 25. 58. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow, p. 26. 59. The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, I, 490. 60. Women in Love (1920), The Lost Girl (1920), Mr Noon (written 1920– 21), Aaron’s Rod (1922). 61. D. H. Lawrence, Mr Noon, ed. Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge

64    Andrew Harrison University Press, 1984), p. 107. 62. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 117. 63. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 11. 64. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 390. 65. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, pp. 387, 388. 66. D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, p. 409. 67. Carol Taaffe, ‘Irish modernism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 782–96 (p. 786). 68. See, in particular, the chapter entitled ‘Gudrun in the Pompadour’, which Michael Bell describes as ‘a figure for the felt absence of common­ ality within which the novel is seeking to create its most radically new idiom’. Michael Bell, D. H. Lawrence: Language and Being (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 105. 69. See Enda Duffy, ‘Disappearing Dublin: Ulysses, postcoloniality, and the politics of space’, in Semicolonial Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge and Marjorie Howes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 49–50. 70. Enda Duffy, ‘Disappearing Dublin’, pp. 52–3. 71. Arthur Power, Conversations with James Joyce, ed. Clive Hart (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), p. 98. 72. James Joyce, Ulysses (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 434. 73. Casement was executed in 1916. See Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Notes for Joyce: An Annotation of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1974), p. 298. 74. David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Postcolonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993), p. 107. 75. Emer Nolan, James Joyce and Nationalism (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 118.

Chapter 3

J. M. Synge, Authenticity, and the Regional Patrick Lonergan

At the end of the second book of The Aran Islands, John Millington Synge goes on a train journey from Galway to Dublin. His departure occurs on the eve of a celebration in Dublin of the life of Charles Stewart Parnell, the fallen Irish political leader. Synge’s train is full of excursionists to Dublin, and many of them are in a festive mood. ‘A wild crowd was on the platform, surging round the train in every stage of intoxication’, writes Synge, who describes the scene as evidence of the ‘half-savage temperament of Connaught’.1 Synge is not altogether disapproving of the crowd’s high spirits, stating that ‘the tension of human excitement seemed greater in this insignificant crowd than anything I have felt among enormous mobs in Rome or Paris’ (122). As the train pulls away, Synge takes his seat in the third-class carriage amongst people he has come to know from the Aran Islands, and finds himself sitting beside a shy young girl. The journey proves raucous: When the train started there were wild cheers and cries on the platform, and in the train itself the noise was intense, men and women shrieking and singing and beating their sticks on the partitions. At several stations there was a rush to the bar, so the excitement progressed as we proceeded. (122)

That excitement culminates in a brawl at Ballinasloe station (the easternmost station in County Galway), when a sailor on the train has a fight with a soldier who is trying to board. ‘Peace was made’, writes Synge, but as the soldiers leave the train: a pack of their women followers thrust their bare heads and arms into the doorway, cursing and blaspheming with extraordinary rage [. . .] I looked out and caught a glimpse of the wildest heads and figures I have ever seen, shrieking and screaming and waving their naked arms in the lights of the lanterns. (124)

66    Patrick Lonergan As the journey progresses through the night, the mood calms – but Synge is unable to sleep, kept awake by the jokes of the sailor, and by the conversation in Irish of two old men sitting nearby. Gradually, the young girl sitting beside Synge loses ‘her shyness’ and engages him in conversation: [She] let me point out the features of the country that were beginning to appear through the dawn as we drew nearer Dublin. She was delighted with the shadows of the trees – trees are rare in Connaught – and with the canal, which was beginning to reflect the morning light. Every time I showed her some new shadow she cried out with naïve excitement ‘Oh it’s lovely, but I can’t see it’. This presence at my side contrasted curiously with the brutality that shook the barrier behind us. (124)

As the journey – and the narrative – concludes, Synge transforms this scene from ethnography to metaphor, writing that ‘The whole spirit of the west of Ireland, with its strange wildness and reserve, seemed moving in this single train to pay a last homage to the dead statesman of the east’. (124) This is a remarkable passage, and for many reasons. Despite acting as the conclusion to a prose account of Synge’s visit to the Aran Islands – a factual travelogue – this section of the narrative is self-evidently aestheticised, not only in its use of such literary techniques as symbolism and metaphor, but also in its allusions, and indeed in its later influences. It is difficult not to be reminded, when reading Synge’s final lines, of the paragraph that concludes Joyce’s ‘The Dead’: words that use the figure of a dead Irish male to move the reader from Dublin to the west of Ireland just as Synge moves us from the west back to Dublin in reference to the figure of Parnell, one of Joyce’s heroes. And in the strangely brutal train journey – with its combination of sexual energy, debased femininity, latent violence and brutality – there are parallels with the ‘Circe’ episode from Joyce’s Ulysses as well as with Dante’s Inferno.2 The passage works through a series of sharp contrasts, many of them operating on a symbolic as well as literal basis. To borrow a phrase from Eugene O’Neill (another writer heavily influenced by Synge), this is a long day’s journey into night – but also a journey back into the daytime. The west is associated with darkness, and in turn with a range of other negative characteristics: wildness, savagery, drunkenness, a propensity towards violence. The atmosphere is one of deterioration: this is a population that is, writes Synge, ‘half-savage’, and there is a strong sense in which the forces of civilisation are in competition with a latent brutality, as evident not only in the rage of the ‘pack’ of women but also in their nakedness and blasphemy. In contrast, the east is a place of light, and

J. M. Synge, Authenticity, and the Regional    67

Synge’s journey towards Dublin enables him to reinforce the values of civilisation by educating the young girl beside him who, with characteristically Irish logic (or civility?), tells him that the sights he shows her are ‘lovely’ even though she cannot see them. Read in isolation from the rest of The Aran Islands, this passage could be seen as implying that it is the journey towards Dublin – into the light – that saves the young Connaught girl from the savagery of the women who stay behind in Ballinasloe, their bodies ‘shrieking and screaming’ in the light of the lanterns. Yet the representation is not quite that simple or simplistic. The journey is not a straightforward passage from darkness into light, since in the west illumination is provided by lanterns while in the east the sights are visible mainly in shadows. The occasions of drunkenness and savagery that Synge witnesses are, it is worth pointing out, a result of a festival being held not in the west of Ireland but in Dublin. We might also detect in the association of Dublin with the dawn a reversal of a pattern in much of the Irish poetry of Synge’s time, whereby the west of Ireland was perpetually bathed in a mystical wispy half-light, encapsulated in Matthew Arnold’s phrase ‘the Celtic Twilight’. Similarly, there is a slight reversal of norms in Synge’s situation of the railway (associated with technological advancement) in the west rather than the metropolis. Finally, Synge makes a point of telling us that what he is presenting should be seen as a metaphor for the ‘whole spirit of the West’, drawing attention to the artificiality of what he writes while also suggesting that this scene is (despite the frequent use of words associated with animals) more ‘human’ than comparable scenes in Rome or Paris. The term ‘regional’ has taken on a range of often mutually incompatible meanings during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but for the purposes of this essay I will be treating ‘regional’ as consisting of rural areas outside the metropolitan spaces usually associated with literary modernism. Such a regional space, in Synge’s description, is more authentic – perhaps even dangerously so – than the metropolis. And, paradoxically, Synge’s audience will recognise that scene as authentic not because it seems like a factual account of real events but, on the contrary, because it is so heavily and so self-consciously aestheticised. The overall effect of the passage is thus to draw attention to the literary techniques that are used to make a particular scene seem authentic – and then to reveal the artificiality of those techniques. Synge’s passage is not just about the people of the west of Ireland; it is also about the process of writing about the people of the west of Ireland. This essay argues that the work of Synge may be used to sharpen our understanding of the relationships between the regional, modernity, and

68    Patrick Lonergan dramatic literature. In its entirety, Synge’s oeuvre achieves its power by creating a tension between the region and the metropolis or, more simply, between core and periphery. That tension is enacted in many ways, some of them evident from the passage above: artistically, aesthetically, politically, linguistically, and so on. My suggestion is that the key component in that tension is Synge’s presentation of what we might call the authentic, even if Synge himself did not use that word. Synge’s representation of the regional is firmly related to issues of authenticity: the representation of authenticity thus allows Synge to add not only to the artistic status of his work, but also to his reputation as the guarantor of that work’s credibility. This is not to suggest that Synge sought to present the authentic, but instead that his work shows a self-awareness about how literary constructions of the authentic function. And such self-awareness leads us towards bracketing his work alongside that of Irish modernists such as Joyce and the mature Yeats. Harry Harootunian, in discussing the work of Fredric Jameson, writes that modernism was enabled by ‘the spectacle of lived unevenness in both the political and sociocultural domains’.3 Synge, as I have shown, experienced and described this lived unevenness, but what makes his work particularly apt for comparison with other modernist writers is his deliberate foregrounding of questions of the authentic. Gregory Castle explains Synge’s strategy as follows: Synge [. . .] makes the traditional modern by demonstrating that both tradition and modernity suffer from the same debilitating absence of authenticity. Another way to frame this problem, which for Terry Eagleton is constitutive of Irish modernism, is to restate the distinction between tradition and modernity as a distinction between reality and representation. As The Playboy [of the Western World, premiered 1907] demonstrates, the assumption that the traditional is somehow more real or more authentic fails to consider the role of representation in the construction of tradition. In this sense, Synge reveals the modernity of tradition at the same time that he reaffirms the fundamental importance for the Celtic Revival of traditional material and themes.4

Castle is writing here specifically about The Playboy of the Western World, a text that he differentiates from The Aran Islands, but my suggestion is that the latter also sets out to blur distinctions between the traditional and the modern not (as Castle argues) by revealing the absence of authenticity – but instead by calling attention to the ways in which authenticity is represented. My argument is that Synge reveals the fundamental inauthenticity of literary representations of the authentic, and that he therefore demonstrates something of the ‘formal autoreferentiality’ that Jameson identifies in the work of the classical modernists,

J. M. Synge, Authenticity, and the Regional    69

who needed ‘to set about making a place for themselves in a world which does not contain their “idea” ’.5 In making such an argument, I might be accused of saying something that has been said (too) many times before. Synge’s international reputation is largely founded upon The Playboy of the Western World and the riots that greeted it when it premiered in 1907 at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre. As scholars such as Chris Morash and Ben Levitas have shown, those riots were provoked by a variety of tensions – not just about Irish nationalism, but also about social class, gender, regional development within Ireland, sectarianism, and so on.6 Yet one of the major complaints of protestors was that Synge’s representation of the west of Ireland was inauthentic: ‘that’s not the West’ was the rioters’ rallying call.7 Those events have been well recorded and thoroughly debated, so I do not wish to rehearse old arguments about whether Synge’s work is realistic in its depiction of Ireland and its people.8 Instead, my aim is to suggest that, for Synge, the construction of the authentic was an aesthetic strategy – one that was distinct from such considerations as realism or verisimilitude, even if he was preoccupied with those literary devices too. At this point, it is necessary to establish a working definition of authenticity, a term that means radically different things to different people. An immediate need is to differentiate between what we might call objective and subjective understandings of the authentic – two very different ways of using the same word, which are often confused with each other. One way of speaking about the authenticity of a work of art is to confirm its provenance: to state, based on objectively verifiable evidence, that a painting, manuscript, or composition is undoubtedly the work of the artist who claims to have created it. Hence, it is possible to examine a manuscript that is purportedly by Synge and to use various forms of evidence to declare it an authentic work by that author. Yet, very often, discussion of authenticity brings to mind something close to the notion of ‘being true to oneself’. Thus, when authenticity is sought in a work of art, what is demanded is a subjective experience that either enables us to feel more attuned to our ‘real selves’ or that represents the world to us in such a way as to persuade us that the artwork is not simply realistic but also more ‘pure’ and less mediated than objects or events familiar from everyday life. Thus, the key components for this subjective experience of authenticity are, almost paradoxically, recognition and unfamiliarity. To judge an artwork as authentic means that we perceive in it something that accords with our sense of personal value or truth – yet we must also perceive in it something that is outside our ordinary experience.

70    Patrick Lonergan In thinking about the authentic in these ways, I am drawing on the work of Charles Guignon, who in his book On Being Authentic critically examines what he calls our ‘self-help culture’ by providing an historical account of the development of ideas about authenticity.9 He traces the popularisation of that concept to Rousseau, who does not use the word ‘authentic’ but writes that it is: no longer a light undertaking to distinguish properly between what is original and what is artificial in the actual nature of man, or to form a true idea of a state which no longer exists, perhaps never did exist, and probably never will exist; and of which it is, nevertheless, necessary to have true ideas.10

Rousseau’s words show that the concept that we now understand as ‘authenticity’ does not always have an objective correlative; instead, the concept is applied to something that we subjectively believe to be true. Hence, a play is seen as authentic when its audience subjectively considers it to be authentic. This is probably what Marie Jones had in mind in her play Stones in his Pockets (premiered 1996), which pokes fun at Hollywood filmmakers on a west of Ireland film shoot when they complain that the local cows don’t ‘look Irish enough’.11 Underlying that joke is Jones’s suspicion that a film audience will not care whether cows really come from Ireland, but instead will demand that they look like they come from Ireland. Stones in his Pockets shows that to call a play or film ‘authentic’ is to state that it accords with the ideas we had about its subject matter or setting before we entered the theatre. To state that a film seems authentically Irish is not to say that I have learned something new about a country that is unfamiliar to me (‘I never knew that Irish cows looked like that’); it is to say that the film is exactly what I expected it to be (‘those cows look just like I thought Irish cows would look’). The authentic, thus, is on some level always a confirmation of our expectations, however deep-seated they may be. We can expand this understanding of the authentic by considering one of the best known discussions of it: that offered by Lionel Trilling in Sincerity and Authenticity. In that work he states that authenticity involves a: more strenuous moral experience than ‘sincerity’ does, a more exigent conception of the self and of what being true to it consists in, a wider reference to the universe and man’s place in it, and a less acceptant view of the social circumstances of life [. . .] [M]uch that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification [. . .] Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason.12

J. M. Synge, Authenticity, and the Regional    71

Trilling is not writing specifically about our apprehension of art, but his description can be applied to the study of drama and other forms of literature. For such writing to be considered authentic, it must, according to Trilling, create a vision of life that is separate from social convention, and which seems different from mass-produced culture. And a play can also seem to represent something authentic if it attempts to forego rationalism – through disorder, violence, or unreason, as Trilling puts it. Such definitions can readily be applied to the works of Synge, which are without exception set on the margins of societies – focusing on a pair of blind beggars who live in a perpetually uneasy relationship with a village community in The Well of the Saints (premiered 1905), or on the tramp and unfaithful wife who leave the respectability of a secure lodging for the open road in The Shadow of the Glen (premiered 1903), among other examples. Likewise, The Playboy of the Western World gains much of its moral force from Synge’s treatment of violence and the irrationalities that provoke it. A further consideration is that artistic production is itself considered a mode of authenticity. As Charles Taylor reminds us: Artistic creation becomes the paradigm mode in which people can come to self-definition. The artist becomes in some way the paradigm of the human being, an agent of original self-definition. Since about 1800, there has been a tendency to heroize the artist, to see in his or her life the essence of the human condition, and to venerate him or her as a seer, the creator of cultural value.13

Taylor’s remarks explain why, when we cannot connect authentically to the work of art, we will often seek to connect authentically to the artist himself or herself. Those connections by audiences are at root acts of self-definition: the things we recognise as valuable in the author represent the things we value in ourselves. Taylor’s statement helps us to understand the presentation (and self-representation) of Synge, but it can also readily be mapped onto Christy Mahon in Playboy, a character whose tales of parricide make him seem far more full-blooded than any other man in the west of Ireland community that he happens to enter. That is, the authenticity of artistic production, as understood by Taylor, can apply equally well to Synge as to his creations. We can also read Christy’s status by reference to Trilling’s observation that ‘much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it’ (11). Christy’s appeal to Pegeen and the other women in Playboy lies precisely in the beautified narration of his transgressions, the ‘murder’ of his father in particular.

72    Patrick Lonergan I will return to Synge’s writings in more detail below, but the thrust of these definitions is to establish ‘the authentic’ as referring to something that is perceived as being different from the everyday – even as it is seen as familiar. And a second related paradox is that the desire for authenticity in art arises from a sense that the real world has become fantastic, and from a related belief that fiction can reveal a truth. These definitions in turn determine the representation of the regional as authentic. To represent a space as ‘regional’ is immediately to mark it as outside the ordinary experiences of a metropolitan audience, and when questions of authenticity are foregrounded, that regional space is (again somewhat paradoxically) not necessarily being represented as a real place, but instead as a place that corresponds to the expectations of audiences in the metropolis.14 Hence, the regional space often becomes a representation not of the real place (the Aran Islands, Mayo, and so forth) but instead of the expectations, and indeed the desires, of the metropolitan audience. And that in turn explains why it happens that, whenever a representation of the region is dubbed authentic, we quickly see the emergence of a series of counter-claims, often coming from the region itself, that seek to assert a ‘truth’. Those truth-claims often gain currency for a time before they too lose their integrity. This dynamic of validation and counter-claim was evident from a very early stage in Synge’s career, notably in his particular association with the Aran Islands. He visited the islands five times between 1898 and 1902, gathering the material that he would publish in The Aran Islands and adapt for many of his plays. The association of Synge with Aran is so frequently drawn as to be axiomatic, but it is important to point out that Synge was certainly influenced by other places too: by Wicklow, where he spent much of his childhood; by Paris, where he spent several months each year; and indeed by Dublin. Of Synge’s seven plays, only one is set on the Aran Islands – Riders to the Sea (premiered 1904). Four of the others are located in Wicklow; one in Mayo; and the other, Deirdre of the Sorrows (premiered 1910), in the north of Ireland and in Scotland. Nevertheless, it is the Aran Islands with which Synge remains most strongly associated. The association between Synge and Aran probably owes most to W. B. Yeats’s preface to the play that Synge wrote between 1903 and 1905, The Well of the Saints, in which Yeats claims to have changed the younger man’s destiny by telling him to go west. Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.15

J. M. Synge, Authenticity, and the Regional    73

Synge, of course, did not give up Paris for Aran; in the year 1899, for instance, he spent eight months in Paris and only one on Inishmaan. Nevertheless, thanks in large part to Yeats’s subsequent ­mythologisations of Synge, it remains widely believed that Synge’s artistic breakthrough occurred when he abandoned the cosmopolitan space of Paris for the regional space of the Aran Islands. What is interesting here is how Yeats’s remarks position Synge in ­relation to the people of the Aran Islands. Synge should live not as one of the people, but as if he were one of the people, wrote Yeats – who then cast Synge not as artist but as agent: as someone who will give voice to what is already there. There is a fascinating tension between the real and the artificial in Yeats’s lines: Synge’s role is to act as if he is something that he is not – but through that performance he will reveal and express an underlying truth. Synge’s task, as conceived (retrospectively) by Yeats was to retrieve something original from the regions and to convey it in a form that can be understood in metropolitan and cosmopolitan literary centres. Yeats’s remarks have been influential, but we know that Synge himself saw his role rather differently (though he did not object to the publication of Yeats’s preface). He certainly did seek to express the voices of the Aran Islanders, but he also changed and reshaped what he found there. This reshaping of the raw materials on Aran is probably most obvious in Synge’s relationship with Pat Dirane, the ancient storyteller who can be seen as having provided the stories that inspired The Shadow of the Glen and The Playboy of the Western World. In order to consider how authenticity functions in Synge’s works, I want to discuss the story by Dirane – recounted in The Aran Islands – that was adapted for The Shadow of the Glen. In the first book of The Aran Islands Synge describes how, one day, he was sitting in a cottage on Inishmaan. Pat was present, and so were a group of local women, who were visiting the house because there was a baby there who had become ill. The child’s mother had gone to the mainland for a long visit, so some of the local women who were nursing their own children at the time came to the house to restore the baby to its ‘natural food’ as Synge puts it (70). This, as Éilís Ní Dhuibhne writes, is ‘fascinating material’: providing us with a luminous insight into the life of the island. There are not many accounts by folklorists of the detail of child-rearing, at this date or later. That women were prepared to breastfeed their neighbour’s child, on a casual basis to help the child, is not something I would have been aware of, even though I have collected a good deal of information about childbirth and the care of babies from women in Kerry.16

74    Patrick Lonergan So before Synge recounts Pat’s story, he takes a moment to include this significant ethnographic detail, and this passage is a fine example of how The Aran Islands provides a keenly observed factual account of the life of the Aran Islanders. Also notable, of course, is Synge’s concern for the welfare of the child, providing us with another example of how his Aran Islands is an act of self-representation. As Ní Dhuibhne shows, the story Pat tells is quite common in Irish folklore; versions of it have been collected throughout Ireland. Like most traditional Irish storytellers, Pat puts himself at the heart of the tale he wants to tell. He says he had been walking one night from Galway to Dublin, and had been invited into a house by a young woman. When he walked in, he saw before him the body of an old man laid out on the table – the woman’s husband, who had died earlier that day. The woman wanted to leave the house to tell her friends that the husband was dead, she said, and asked Dirane if he would sit with the corpse. To encourage him, she offered him a pipe and some whiskey – so he agreed readily enough. When she had left, the husband opened his eyes, telling Dirane not to be frightened. ‘I’ve got a bad wife,’ he said, ‘So I let on to be dead the way I’d catch her at her goings-on’.17 Half an hour later the woman returned, bringing a young man with her. She gave the young man tea and, observing that he looked tired, told him to go the bedroom and take some rest. Soon after, the woman rose herself. ‘Stranger,’ she said to Dirane, ‘I am going to get the candle out of the bedroom: the young man will be asleep by now’. She went into the bedroom, and of course she stayed there. In a little while, the dead man got up, took up a stick, handed Dirane another stick, and burst into the bedroom. According to Dirane, he ‘hit the young man with the stick so that his blood lept up and hit the gallery’. And that was the end of Dirane’s story. There are four important features of Pat’s story that I want to identify, all of which relate to his authority as the storyteller, and thus to the authenticity of his tale. The first is that he aims to give the story credibility by claiming to have been the witness of the events he recounts: rather than being an artist who is inventing – or a storyteller who is putting a personal stamp on a tale handed down to him – he is merely a witness, recounting what really occurred. Second, he aims to boost further his credibility by providing specificity of location, telling Synge that the events happened to him while he was walking to Dublin. That choice of location was almost certainly made due to Synge’s presence: Pat may have been trying to involve Synge in the story by naming Synge’s hometown, or perhaps he was trying to assert his equality with Synge by saying that he too was familiar with Ireland’s largest city. But in any case the reference to Dublin appears to be an improvisation motivated

J. M. Synge, Authenticity, and the Regional    75

by Synge’s presence. A third method of boosting his credibility is Pat’s reference to things, to material objects: the apparently irrelevant details that he supplies about the things in the cottage – the candles, the blackthorn sticks, the whiskey and bread – all aim to authenticate his story, precisely because they appear irrelevant. And the fourth and most interesting feature of Pat’s story is that his authority is immediately challenged. Synge writes that when Pat finished the story, he found himself entering into a ‘moral dispute’ with one of his listeners – perhaps one of the nursing women, perhaps someone else. Synge could not follow the debate because it was being conducted in Irish at a very fast pace, which implies that the dispute was heated. And it was a dispute, furthermore, that ‘caused immense delight to some young men who had [also] come to listen to the story’, writes Synge (70). So Synge witnessed not just the technique of the storyteller; he also witnessed the power of the story to excite debate amongst its audience – and then he saw too that this debate could further be enjoyed as a kind of spectacle. This story eventually formed the basis for The Shadow of the Glen, the one-act comedy which was staged by the Abbey Theatre’s forerunner, the Irish National Theatre Society, in Dublin’s Molesworth Hall in 1903. Synge follows Pat’s story fairly closely, but he does introduce some significant changes. Probably the most important is that rather than having the tramp help to beat the unfaithful wife, Synge instead has the wife leave her family home with the tramp. Dirane’s tale implicitly seems to approve of the violent response of the farmer to his wife’s infidelity (and this is true of most versions of the story, as Ní Dhuibhne shows), but Synge shifts the focus, and therefore the audience’s sympathies, from the farmer to his wife – and uses her forced departure from the family home to criticise the structures of rural Irish society. This alteration of Dirane’s tale, together with the fact that Synge named his heroine Nora, led many of his first audiences to make the perfectly understandable assumption that The Shadow of the Glen was inspired by Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, another play about a woman called Nora who leaves her husband. So instead of being viewed as someone who had brought a story from the west of Ireland into the metropolis, Synge was instead seen as having written an Irish version of a decadent European play. He was perceived, in other words, as being more influenced by Paris than Pat Dirane. As a result, like Ibsen, Synge found himself being attacked on moral as well as artistic grounds. The Sinn Féin leader Arthur Griffith called the play ‘decadent’ ‘corrupt’, ‘cynical’, and, worst of all, ‘no more Irish than the Decameron’.18 Griffith immediately set about writing a counterplay, called In a Real Wicklow Glen, which sought to show that no Irish

76    Patrick Lonergan woman would leave her husband, even if the marriage was loveless. So again we see here the pattern of validation and counter-claim evident in this debate over the authenticity of Synge’s presentation. One of the interesting features of this criticism is not just that Synge was accused of being inauthentic, but that this lack of authenticity was mediated through a sense of the national. For Griffith, Synge’s work was not ‘real’ because it was like The Decameron, because it was like Ibsen – and so the title of his own play emphasises not just the reality of his vision, but the geographical specificity of it – it takes place in Wicklow. Synge famously, and indeed repeatedly, was forced to defend himself against the accusation of being un-Irish or of misrepresenting Irish people, and thus he began to assert the authenticity of his source material, even as such plays as The Well of the Saints and Playboy were challenging the construction of the authentic in literature. Responding to comments from Frank Fay about The Well of the Saints, Synge stated that ‘I am quite ready to avoid hurting people’s feelings needlessly, but I will not falsify what I believe to be true for anybody’.19 Elsewhere, he made a similar point: ‘What I write of Irish country life I know to be true and I will not change a syllable of it because A, B, or C may think they know better than I do’.20 Synge’s most famous defence of himself is his preface to The Playboy of the Western World – remarks that are worth quoting here: When I was writing The Shadow of the Glen, some years ago, I got more aid than any learning could have given me from a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls in the kitchen. This matter, I think, is of importance, for in countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words, and at the same time to give the reality, which is the root of all poetry, in a comprehensive and natural form. In the modern literature of towns, however, richness is found only in sonnets, or prose poems, or in one or two elaborate books that are far away from the profound and common interests of life.21

The language of The Shadow of the Glen, he claimed, was certainly poetic, but it was a poetry rooted in what he calls very deliberately ‘the reality’ of country life, as he himself had witnessed and recorded it, listening through a chink in a floorboard. Again, he is suggesting that he is expressing something that is already there, and that image of Synge with his ear to the floor allows us to imagine him burrowing down in a fashion that positions Synge somewhere between the archaeologist and the voyeur. But what is important here is that despite the dispute between Synge and his attackers, they share a sense that the authentic comes from the regions of Ireland – that the town is less ­authentic

J. M. Synge, Authenticity, and the Regional    77

– and that to be seen as non-Irish is also to be seen as lacking in authenticity. Also interesting about the preface is that Synge is not just defending his plays, but seeking to create an image of himself. He does something similar when he repeats Pat’s tale in The Aran Islands. Just as Pat had placed himself at the centre of his own tale, so does Synge recount for his readers his own presence in the Aran Islands, hearing the story that would later become one of his plays. Just as Pat provides a specific geographical location for his story, so does Synge in The Shadow of the Glen mention countless real places: its second line refers to the Wicklow towns of Brittas and Aughrim, and we hear later of Rathvanna and Dublin and Rathdrum. And particularly notable is that the relations of those places are geographically consistent: the route from Brittas to Aughrim is long, but could conceivably be travelled on foot – something that is not so true of the route from Galway to Dublin. Then there are the validations offered by the presence of real things. Just as Pat draws attention to apparently trivial material things to boost his own credibility, so too does Synge; the ethnographic detail about communal breastfeeding has a similar impact. As with Pat’s story, there are references to such ordinary objects as food and drink; there is a turf stack, and so on. There is also the needle that the tramp asks for when Nora asks him to watch over her husband’s corpse, saying that ‘there’s great safety in a needle’. That line probably would not have made much sense to Synge’s original audience, but again is taken from Pat, who in The Aran Islands, tells Synge that placing a needle under the collar of one’s shirt can ward off ghosts. This is an example of how, as Paige Reynolds puts it, in Synge’s works, ‘things are imbued with magical powers, a quality attributable in part to long-standing spiritual beliefs’: When Pat warns Synge to put a sharp needle beneath the collar of his coat in order to protect himself from fairies, he maintains that this banal object is infused with incredible power, the authority to ward off evil (36). Like this needle, the objects in [Synge’s plays] are charged with meaning that well exceeds their actual value.22

Synge also placed actual material objects from the Aran Islands in his plays, most famously asking a friend from Inishmore to send him real pampooties for the premiere performance of Riders to the Sea. And then, finally, just as Pat found himself in a moral dispute after telling his story, so too was Synge forced to defend his art, not only from those who objected to it on moral grounds, but also from the disinterested bystanders who found themselves immensely delighted by the controversies provoked by Synge’s work.

78    Patrick Lonergan What I am drawing out here is the extent to which both Pat and Synge use precisely the same strategies to emphasise the authenticity of their outlook, even if Synge is also keen to draw attention to the artificiality of his work. For both, the authenticity is invested in authorial presence, in the reference to real places, and in the inclusion of material objects. And for both, the ability to move between core and periphery is seen as inherently valuable: whether it is Pat walking from Dublin to Galway, or Synge giving up Paris for Aran. Yet for Synge, it is always important to reveal these strategies as strategies, to show that the authentic is not to be confused with the real. As such, both storytellers can be considered in relation to Colin Graham’s explanation of the construction of authenticity during the Irish Literary Revival. Graham points out that authenticity is always something sought for rather than something definitively achieved. He also implicitly points out how individuals present themselves as authentic through various kinds of performance. One example of such performances, for Graham, is Yeats’s collection of folklore and fairytales in the Irish countryside. Graham suggests that: Yeats’s folk and fairy tales are not remarkable but typical in the way that they attempt to construct an Irishness which is from outside the social and sectarian remit of the collector, who through the act of collection, cataloguing, publishing and the accumulation of knowledge sees a potential for becoming ‘of’ what is collected.23

Authenticity, writes Graham, is ‘constituted by a rhetoric of showing, claiming and confirming, which both vindicates the colonised while implicating and elevating the collector of this authenticity in the vindication’ (143). The collector of the folk story is thus both inside and outside the story. The story’s value is enhanced by the objectivity of the collector, who is, as Graham says, outside of the social and religious structures of the storytellers’ society and thus (apparently) unbiased. But the act of naming something as authentic also boosts the authenticity of the collector himself or herself: the ability of Yeats and Synge to identify something as authentic in turn identifies each of them as having an authenticity of his own. This further explains Yeats’s preface to The Well of the Saints – Synge could act as if he was one of the people, and his ability to express their lives would in turn be used to authenticate the integrity of his own artistry. For the development of Synge’s reputation, it was crucial for him to construct a meta-critical apparatus that would help to identify him as authentic – showing him not as the disciple of Ibsen, and not as someone who lived more often in Paris than in Ireland, but as someone who seeks

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always to retrieve stories from their origins. Synge does not invent; he takes down customs that have been handed to him by people like Dirane. And then Synge brings them back to the centre, where they are validated as authentic. That dynamic might help us to understand Synge the anthropologist, but it also helps us to understand Synge the artist. Almost all of his plays function through creating a dynamic between inside and outside, between core and periphery. Synge’s task as an artist is almost always to present the hierarchical structure of a given society, and to subvert the values he finds there. Hence, the patriarch in The Shadow of the Glen is made to seem powerless and pathetic. In The Tinker’s Wedding, a society’s most respectable member – a priest – is placed in conflict with its least respected members – a family of Travellers – and although in the end it is the priest who holds the stage, the audience’s sympathies will lie firmly with the outsiders. That is true also in The Well of the Saints, and in a more complex way in The Playboy of the Western World when the arrival of someone who should be an outcast – the parricide Christy Mahon – has a transformative impact on a community, albeit for a short time. Graham’s analysis of authenticity in the Irish Literary Revival considers it as arising from a colonial context. The reason that authenticity was at issue was because nationalism sought to present a newly-realised ‘authentic Ireland’, Graham suggests. Synge may not have readily endorsed or even used these terms, but his artistic energy was boosted from entering into debates about what an authentic Ireland might look like, even as he constantly warned his audiences about the dangers that arise when an abstract idealisation (such as ‘authenticity’) is applied to everyday life. Graham goes on to present two further modes of authenticity, one achieved after Irish independence in 1922, and another arising from postmodernity. He refers to the authenticity constructed in the revival as ‘Old Authenticity’. After Irish independence, he writes: Authenticity’s ability to coexist with the market had not only enabled it to survive after decolonisation but has allowed it to become, in some circumstances [. . .] a ‘mythologised and fetishised sign’ [. . .] The tourist industry is an obvious site for the peddling of the authentic in an explicit and populist way. (144)

Synge himself became a victim of that tourist trade, even in the Aran Islands, where the cottage that he spent most of his time in was renamed Teach Synge (‘teach’ is the Irish word for ‘house’). As that ‘new authenticity’ became more frequently reproduced through tourism and mass culture, it began to lose both aura and authority, writes

80    Patrick Lonergan Graham. Eventually, Irish authenticity became ironised: presented in a fashion that suggests that there is still an original Irish identity – one which is separate from the urban – but which is also sceptical of the search for authenticity in the first place. This happened from an early stage in the development of Synge’s reputation, even as early as 1909 when Gerald MacNamara (Harry Morrow) suggested that the search for authenticity can only ever lead to a performance when he produced The Mist That Does be on the Bog. We see this phenomenon too in Martin McDonagh’s reimaginings of Synge in The Leenane Trilogy (premiered as a trilogy in 1997) and The Cripple of Inishmaan (premiered 1996). And, as Brian Singleton has shown, Synge would remain trapped within a canonical – or museumised – mode of production right up to the mid1980s, when his work was retrieved by Galway’s Druid Theatre.24 Yet these debased presentations of Synge in many ways prove the point laid out in The Aran Islands and elsewhere: the representation of the regional to a metropolitan audience will always require a negotiation of the relationship between reality and audience expectation. Synge managed that tension better than many other Irish writers of his era, not by asserting the authenticity of his narrative but instead by asserting the authenticity of his own outlook as an artist. This self-consciousness, this strategic use of a constructed version of the authentic, are examples of how we can think of Synge as a modernist writer. And they show too his ongoing relevance to our own times, when the struggle between region and metropolis has been reconstituted as a clash between the local and global.

Notes  1. J. M. Synge, Collected Works 2: Prose, ed. Alan Price (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 122. Subsequent quotations appear in the text.   2. There are many important overlaps between Joyce and Synge. They met in 1903 and Joyce would later stage an Italian translation of Riders to the Sea; Joyce also wrote about the Aran Islands in 1912 essays that, as Anne Fogarty shows, owe much to Synge’s account of those places. Anthony Roche shows how a key passage from A Portrait of the Artist was influenced by Synge, and Fogarty reminds us that one of the contexts for Joyce’s composition of The Dead in 1907 was his disquiet at the riots that greeted The Playboy of the Western World in Dublin. See Anne Fogarty, ‘Ghostly intertexts: James Joyce and the legacy of Synge’, in Synge and Edwardian Ireland, ed. Brian Cliff and Nicholas Grene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 225–44; and Anthony Roche, ‘“The Strange Light of Some New World”: Stephen’s vision in A Portrait’, James Joyce Quarterly 25: 3 (1988), 323–32.

J. M. Synge, Authenticity, and the Regional    81  3. Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. xxii.   4. Gregory Castle, Modernism and The Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 134–5.  5. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), p. 200.   6. See Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Ben Levitas, Theatre of Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).   7. Quoted in Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, p. 135.   8. The debate about the realistic nature of Synge’s depiction of Ireland was soon conducted in print: on 28 January 1907, two days after the play opened, the Freeman’s Journal printed a letter from ‘A Western Girl’ complaining that ‘I am well acquainted with the conditions of life in the West, and not only does this play not truly represent those conditions, but it portrays the people of that part of Ireland as a coarse, besotted race, without one gleam of genuine humour or one sparkle of virtue’. Freeman’s Journal, 28 January 1907, reprinted in The Playboy Riots, ed. James Kilroy (Dublin: Dolmen, 1971), p. 9.   9. Charles Guignon, On Being Authentic (London: Routledge, 2004). 10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Preface’ to On the Origin of Inequality, in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (London: Dent, 1973), p. 39. 11. Marie Jones, Stones in His Pockets: also featuring a Night in November (London: Nick Hern Books, 2000), p. 17. 12. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), p. 11. 13. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 62. 14. For further discussion of this issue, see Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). 15. J. M. Synge, Collected Works, Volume 3: Plays 1, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), p. 68. 16. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, ‘The best field worker: John Millington Synge and Irish folklore’, in Synge and His Influences, ed. Patrick Lonergan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2011), p. 98. 17. The story is summarised from Synge, Collected Works 2: Prose, pp. 70–3. 18. Arthur Clery, ‘The philosophy of an Irish theatre’, Leader, 31 October 1903, p. 155. Quoted in Irina Ruppo Malone, Ibsen and the Irish Revival (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), p. 31. 19. J. M. Synge, The Collected Letters: Volume I, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 91. Emphases appear in the original text. 20. Synge: The Collected Letters, Volume I, p. 91. 21. John Millington Synge Collected Works IV: Plays 2, ed. Ann Saddlemyer. (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), pp. 53–4. Subsequent references appear parenthetically in the text. 22. See Paige Reynolds, ‘Synge’s things: Material culture in the writings

82    Patrick Lonergan of Synge’, in Synge and His Influences, ed. Patrick Lonergan (Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2011), p. 81. 23. Colin Graham, Deconstructing Ireland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), pp. 141–2. Subsequent citations appear in the text. 24. Brian Singleton, ‘The revival revised’, in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Drama, ed. Shaun Richards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 258–70.

Chapter 4

Pound, Yeats, and the Regional Repertory Theatres James Moran

The non-existence of Ireland Ezra Pound disliked Ireland. He never visited the country, and repeatedly condemned its politics and cultural attitudes. In February 1915 he dismissed the Irish in an article in The New Age by declaring: ‘I simply cannot accept the evidence that they have any worth as a nation, or that they have any function in modern civilisation, save perhaps to decline and perish if that can be called a function’.1 He pointed out that ‘even the politics may, for all one hears to the contrary, be cooked up in England or in Germany or in my own country’.2 For Pound, Ireland not only failed to merit Home Rule, but failed to qualify as a fully realised entity at all, and he entitled his essay, ‘The non-existence of Ireland’, inadvertently anticipating D. H. Lawrence’s view of Ireland as ‘a country which doesn’t really exist’.3 When Jean Baudrillard analysed the First Gulf War he famously asked ‘event, are you there? Gulf War, are you there?’; and concluded that he had found only an ‘aporia’.4 Pound did something similar in 1915, doubting the existence of Ireland because the best Irish writers could be found in exile, from where they attempted to speak the truth about a country that had been made unreal by its physical absence from their lives. Pound expressed similarly strong, and similarly negative, opinions about the theatre. Indeed, the fact that drama has often been awkwardly incorporated into studies of literary modernism is partly a legacy of Pound’s downbeat assessments. In 1915 he read the manuscript of Joyce’s Exiles, and questioned whether a play could ever share equal status with a novel or poem. He concluded that Joyce had made a poor choice in opting to write for the playhouse, remarking: My whole habit of thinking of the stage is: that it is a gross, coarse form of art. That a play speaks to a thousand fools huddled together whereas a novel or poem can lie about in a book and find the stray persons worth finding.5

84    James Moran For Pound, the fleeting, transitory nature of performed drama meant that audience members would always be unable to concentrate on subtlety and complexity as they might with a printed text. In addition, the fact that the playhouse required large numbers of people in order to pay its way meant that the performed work would always be in thrall to the clodhopping opinions and tastes of the majority, rather than the refined few who could appreciate literary value. As he put it in 1918: A novel, to be practicable, implies only 500 to 1,000 readers. It is just barely possible to print for a public of that size. But a play, to be commercially possible on the stage, implies at least twenty-one separate audiences of 1,500 each, and demands that they assemble on twenty-one consecutive nights. As there are not 30,000 people interested either in serious literature or serious drama, it is hopeless sighing to imagine that there is going to be an interesting ‘theatre’ in our time.6

In these polemical statements, Pound had made his position clear. So it may seem surprising that in 1916 he wrote a play. Still more surprising, perhaps, is the fact that this drama revolved around Irish characters and was set in Ireland. This essay will begin by analysing how such apparent contradictions in Pound’s work might be reconciled, and will then discuss how his decision to write an Irish-themed play connects with a broader set of theatrical developments at the start of the twentieth century. Pound sought a kind of inspiration from the Irish national theatre, whilst ignoring or denigrating that venue’s national aspirations, and this impulse was shared by a broader group involved in the repertory movement during this period, whose members emulated the Abbey playhouse, but increasingly did so by foregrounding and articulating a sense of emplacement that might occlude or displace ideas about the national. This turn away from the national can be characterised as a turn towards the regional. As we know from the recent work of theorists like Andrew Jonas, who have emphasised the relational nature of the regional, the geographical space of a particular region may at some times be coterminous with the national, but may ‘not necessarily converge neatly’ with such national territories and jurisdictions.7 The repertory theatres that emerged across Britain and Ireland were often established in order to advance a mission that their founders considered akin to Yeats’s national enterprise at the Abbey, but which ended up working outside such national formations to become ‘regional’ in the sense described by George Rowell and Tony Jackson. As Rowell and Jackson emphasise, when dealing with theatre in the age of modernism, regional thinking helps to explain the affinity that individuals might feel

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not towards national entities but towards institutions that in some way speak to the concerns of those in urban centres outside the capital cities.8 Thus, although the repertory movement is seldom bracketed with high modernism – due to the mimetic nature of the drama often championed by the movement, as well as the involvement of Georgian poets such as Lascelles Abercrombie and John Drinkwater – viewing the situation through the optic of regional thought reveals an intriguing set of affinities and tensions between the repertory playhouses and the developing theatrical aesthetics of Pound and Yeats.

The Consolations of Matrimony In 1916 Pound adopted the quasi-Irish pseudonym of ‘Oge Terrence O’Cullough’, and scripted a little-known play called The Consolations of Matrimony. This short drama is set in ‘the cottage of George Brannan, in the village of Ballycurragh, Ireland’, where James Day and George Brannan sit at a table and discuss sex.9 James bemoans his youthful marriage, but at the end of the play is horrified to learn that his wife has abandoned him for Tim Healan, a local man who has just returned from the USA. Although it may appear otherwise, Pound’s script did in fact cohere with his broader views about both the theatre and about Ireland. For one thing, Pound scarcely envisioned this play being acted before the general public. He and Yeats had been seduced by second-hand reports about the aristocratic theatre of Japan, and thought they might appropriate such a performance context for themselves. Pound told his father in February 1916 that a work such as The Consolations of Matrimony would form part of a ‘new dramatic movement, plays which wont need a stage, and which wont [sic] need a thousand people for 150 nights to pay the expences [sic] of production’.10 Such work would be, as Pound put it, for ‘a theatreless stage – very noble & exclusive – his [Yeats’s] new play and a farce of mine are to be performed before an audience composed exclusively of crowned heads and divorcées’.11 In terms of national sentiment, Pound intended The Consolations of Matrimony to bolster the case that he made in ‘The non-existence of Ireland’, where he had reached a damning verdict on the country because of what he had learned about the treatment of J. M. Synge. Pound knew, through his friendship with Yeats, that when Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World had premiered at Dublin’s Abbey Theatre in 1907, a number of nationalists had rioted, the play had been condemned by Irish newspapers, and there had been fighting in the street.

86    James Moran Pound, aligning himself with a broadly imperialist attitude, felt such ill-mannered rejection of Synge meant that the country failed to show the responsibility necessary for self-government, that the most creative talents needed to migrate elsewhere, and that therefore Ireland could scarcely be considered to exist in any meaningful sense. Furthermore, Pound also knew about a later disturbance that occurred in response to Synge’s work. In November 1913, when Pound and Yeats had been staying together at Stone Cottage, Irish Catholic nationalists at the Liverpool Repertory Theatre had rioted in response to The Playboy of the Western World. Yeats felt particularly galled by this incident because, unlike in Dublin, the theatre managers in Liverpool cancelled the rest of the play’s run.12 Yeats wrote to The Times to point out Liverpool’s reaction was a ‘precedent for mob law and a menace to all playwrights who would serve their art and not their purse’.13 Pound shared Yeats’s feeling, and decided to write a play in the style of Synge in order to help combat Yeats’s ‘mob’. For readers or spectators of Synge, then, The Consolations of Matrimony contains some distinctly familiar ideas and themes. For instance, the plot about a woman abandoning her husband in rural Ireland is taken directly from The Shadow of the Glen (1903), and Pound makes a maladroit attempt at emulating Synge’s word order: ‘Ain’t it like a twist of dough round your neck she was?’ asks George at one point. Furthermore, the threat of violence that concludes Pound’s play (‘I’ll break in the top of his head’) is borrowed from Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, in which Christy Mahon repeatedly attempts to brain his father (with a ‘blow upon your head’).14 The notion of rural Ireland as a backwater dominated by occasional brutality is a hallmark of Synge’s work, and in Pound’s play we find a reimagining of Christy Mahon in the figure of Tim Healan, the rogue who returns to seduce the bored women of Ireland’s farmlands. Hence Pound used a Syngean dramatic model in order to create a script that might endorse the arguments outlined in ‘The non-existence of Ireland’. In Pound’s hands, Synge’s ideas could be used to show that nationalist ideas about the country had little connection with real life. Ireland remained simply a literary trope that could be co-opted by a writer of whatever nationality, who need not necessarily have lived in or even visited the island, and the Irish political situation therefore required little serious consideration. Here, however, Pound’s writing contrasts with the original context of Synge’s drama. Synge had, after all, been a writer for (and director of) the Abbey Theatre, a venture that had been established to promote a consciously national agenda. From the very start, Yeats intended that

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his playhouse would engage with existential questions about Ireland. In 1903 he asked the rhetorical question ‘What is a national theatre?’, and declared, ‘the rise in Ireland of a theatre that will reflect the life of Ireland’, even if that theatre would usually avoid ‘drama with an obviously patriotic intention’.15 Such a philosophy heralded the Abbey Theatre’s best-known works, those plays by Synge (and later O’Casey) that dwelt on specific Irish locations such as rural Mayo (or tenement Dublin) in ways that deliberately touched on neuralgic topics in the broader Irish cultural debate. Although Yeats based the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the playhouse always boasted national ambitions, and despite the company being founded before Ireland achieved political independence, the Abbey set about portraying (and interrogating) a set of national traditions, characteristics, and impulses. Indeed, the official name of Yeats and Gregory’s venture had tellingly changed from being the Irish Literary Theatre to the Irish National Theatre Society in 1902. In The Consolations of Matrimony Pound sought to do the opposite, to rely on elements borrowed from the Irish national theatre, but to do so in order to show that Ireland was no sort of meaningful entity but simply a kind of shorthand for various comic attitudes and scenarios. Synge’s own work is indeed bitingly satirical, but, as Patrick Lonergan has argued in Chapter 3 of this volume, it also self-consciously foregrounds the notion of authenticity, and engages seriously with a series of complex Irish issues about religion, gender, geography, and class. By contrast, Pound’s farce, although clearly inspired by Synge’s humour, reveals rather less. The character of James Day, for example, speaks of his regret at marrying too young: but in rural Ireland the real problem was quite the reverse, the average age of marriage had been rising throughout the post-famine period.16 Likewise, the character who demonstrates such devastating sexual magnetism after arriving from the USA says more about Pound’s own biases than anything else. Perhaps it was little surprise that, in the end, Yeats decided to stage his own Noh plays without the accompaniment of Pound’s work, despite all of the American’s hopes for inclusion as part of a double-bill. However, Pound’s impulse – to emulate the theatrical energies of the Abbey Theatre, whilst ignoring or dismissing the broader national ambitions of that playhouse – was shared in this period by those involved in more successful theatrical enterprises. The founders of the Abbey had deliberately set about establishing a national venture, whereas Pound had asserted the foolishness of such a national project: indeed at one point he urged Yeats to turn the venue into a cinema.17 Echoing Pound, the managers of a number of companies based outside London shared the feeling of embarking on a common venture with the Abbey

88    James Moran directorate and repeatedly looked to Yeats for advice and inspiration. Yet, like Pound, those involved in establishing the repertory movement in Britain and Ireland tended to question and undermine the kind of national imperatives associated with the Abbey, and sought instead to foreground a set of predominantly urban, regional associations and affiliations.18 Such a manoeuvre did not necessarily entail the sort of dismissive, colonialist prejudices towards Ireland exhibited by Pound, but did involve, to different extents, a conscious turn towards the plays of local writers, whose scripts often articulated a set of concerns about the regional cities in which the playhouses could be found.

The Ulster Literary Theatre The first to emulate Yeats’s theatre were Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill – two Belfast men who formed a new company in their home city in 1902 and gave inaugural performances in St Mary’s Minor Hall (with a permanent home established in Belfast’s Grand Opera House by 1909). The two men knew about the Irish Literary Theatre that Yeats had established, having watched the Dublin season of 1902, and hoped to create an Ulster branch of the same movement. Indeed, they wanted Dublin’s actors to head north in order to establish the company, and two of Yeats’s players did travel to perform with Hobson and Parkhill in Ulster later that year.19 Ideally, the Belfast theatre would therefore work as part of a federated network of the Irish Literary Theatre, which would go beyond Dublin to articulate broadly nationalist ideas in an assortment of venues, facilitating a dynamic interchange of plays, actors, and ideas. However, it became clear to those involved in this project that it might be no simple affair to translate the work of the Dublin theatre, with a self-declared ‘national’ remit, for an Ulster audience. One of the signature pieces of Yeats’s group was Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), a drama that urged a radical reconfiguration of the territorial boundaries of the state and questioned the mandate of the governing authorities. This play was performed as the opening production of the Ulster Literary Theatre in 1902, but members of the company felt that the piece singularly failed to speak to Ulster’s concerns and history. The playwright Gerald MacNamara (Harry Morrow) wrote: The Belfast public were [sic] not taken by Cathleen ni Houlihan. Ninety-nine per cent of the population had not heard of the lady – and cared less; in fact someone in the audience said that the show was going ‘rightly’ till she came on.20

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Meanwhile, when Bulmer Hobson and David Parkhill arrived in Dublin in 1902 to seek the support of Yeats and Gregory for the new Ulster theatre, Yeats remained ‘haughty and aloof’. On the return journey to Belfast, Hobson reportedly struck the arm of his seat and declared ‘Damn Yeats, we’ll write our own plays!’21 In 1904, the Dublin management formally contacted the company in Belfast to say that the cash-strapped northerners had no right to describe themselves as a branch of the Irish National Theatre Society, and that the Ulster actors should pay royalties to Dublin for the inaugural performances of Cathleen ni Houlihan.22 This hostility catalysed the Belfast group, which changed its name from the ‘Ulster Branch of the Irish Literary Theatre’ to the ‘Ulster Literary Theatre’. This move is described by Eugene McNulty as ‘crucially important’ because ‘the new name represented a more confident desire to express a distinctively “Ulster” identity, rather than to simply “import” the mythic and historical voices of the Dublin dramatic project’.23 As Richard Kirkland puts it, the group ‘was now ready to make an intervention on its own terms’, and would, as the Irish News declared, produce dramatic art ‘neither Dublin nor Munster nor English in its character and essentials, but Ulster in heart and soul’.24 The Ulster Literary Theatre went on to stage work containing words and phrases that were scarcely heard outside the urban north, as shown in the premiere of plays by writers such as Bulmer Hobson, Rutherford Mayne (Sam Waddell), and Gerald MacNamara. Such work spoke to Belfast and Ulster concerns (which are, of course, not necessarily the same) in a way that plays from elsewhere did not. For example, MacNamara’s remarkable play of 1912, Thompson in Tír-na-nÓg – about an Orangeman who finds himself in a mythological land of Gaelic heroes – toys with a particular network of local political and tribal affiliations, showing the audience that, whether spectators took their notions of tradition from the Boyne or from Cuchulain, such histories were unreal, constructed, and vulnerable to misunderstanding and manipulation. Thompson’s references – to the Belfast unionist newspaper The News Letter, to local events such as the 13 July ‘Sham Fight’ at Scarva, and to the characters of the mythological Ulster Cycle – would not have been incomprehensible to those living elsewhere, but may have proved particularly resonant for those living in the North of Ireland.25 In one edition of the Belfast theatre’s short-lived journal, Uladh, James Power wrote that ‘North is North, and South is South, irrevocably’, continuing that ‘if Ulster be true to its instincts it must necessarily have a somewhat different point of view from the rest of Ireland’.26 Although Bulmer Hobson had originally intended to make common cause with Yeats’s ‘national’ enterprise, in later years he described the

90    James Moran entire purpose of the Ulster Literary Theatre as ‘writing and producing distinctively Ulster plays, which would be a commentary on the political and social conditions in the North of Ireland’.27 Indeed, the theatre’s journal came to describe Yeats’s Dublin venture as ‘a fairly defined local school’.28 Such rhetoric shows an affinity – albeit from a different political standpoint – with the later work of Northern Irish poet John Hewitt, who in the 1940s repeatedly argued for the central importance of thinking in terms of the ‘region’ rather than any other territorial unit by emphasising the importance of an ‘area which possesses geographical and economic coherence, which has had some sort of traditional and historic identity and which still, in some measure, demonstrates cultural and linguistic individuality’.29

The Manchester Gaiety Meanwhile, the first English repertory theatre opened in Manchester during September 1907. The trial season took place at the Midland Hotel Theatre, and in the following spring the company began work at the Gaiety Theatre, funded by Annie Horniman, whose deep pockets had originally helped Yeats and Gregory to establish the Abbey. Just as in Ulster, Yeats’s fingerprints could be found all over the Manchester venture. The choice of this town was made at a meeting held at Annie Horniman’s apartment in London, attended by Ida Gildea, Ben Iden Payne, and Yeats himself. Payne had been Yeats’s young manager at the Abbey, whilst Ida Gildea was a close friend of Horniman and had helped the Abbey players by selling copies of the company’s plays during tours of England.30 Horniman later declared that the decision to base her new venture in Manchester ‘depended on which city had bought the most books when the Irish Players visited it’.31 After all, the Manchester Guardian noted the town’s enthusiasm for the kind of drama that the Abbey produced, observing that: ‘We are developing loyalty to the Abbey company in Manchester, and it is good to believe that they may count on us as a permanent enlargement of their audience’.32 However, Horniman had abandoned Dublin because she resented one major part of the Abbey’s agenda. She told Yeats of her ‘intense dislike for any manifestation of “national feeling” ’, and when at the Abbey she promised that ‘we will conquer your country, with the help of mine’, then adding, ‘not for the first time’.33 The suspicion that her hostility to ‘national feeling’ really masked a neo-colonial impulse was endorsed by her attempt to anglicise the Abbey Theatre: she wished to see professional actors from England playing starring roles, advocated

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the employment of an English director, and wished for no mention of ‘Irish’ in the company’s title.34 Yeats eventually responded by telling Horniman: I am not young enough to change my nationality – it would really amount to that. Though I wish for a universal audience, in play-writing there is always an immediate audience also. If I am to try and find the immediate audience in England I would fail through lack of understanding on my part, perhaps through lack of sympathy. I understand my own race and in all my work, lyric or dramatic, I have thought of it. If the theatre fails I may or may not write plays – but I shall write for my own people – whether in love or hate of them matters little.35

Ben Iden Payne, who arrived in Manchester as Horniman’s director, had also resigned from the Abbey in the midst of these arguments, giving as his primary reason that ‘an English manager is out of place in an Irish national theatre’.36 Instead, the Manchester Gaiety showcased the work of writers from the urban North West of England. When this theatrical venture began in 1907, Allan Monkhouse, a critic and aspiring playwright, wrote that: ‘We must not imitate the Celtic temper nor Mr Shaw’s paradoxes but tragedy and comedy may be found in Lancashire life as well as in the west of Ireland or London’.37 The playhouse consequently produced new work by what became known as the ‘Manchester school’ of playwriting, which included a 1914 version of Harold Brighouse’s Lonesome-like (premiered in Glasgow in 1911), a play about two local factory workers, an ailing old woman who dreads the workhouse, and a young woman who looks forward to being married. Brighouse set his play in a cottage in a Lancashire village, and his characters talk almost entirely in a spoken dialogue that sought to reflect that of the local working-class community: ‘’E means all reeght, poor lad. Sithee, Emma, A’ve bin a Church-goin’ woman all my days. A was browt oop to Church, an’ many’s th’ bit o’ brass they’ve ’ad out o’ me in my time’.38 Such dialogue strives for a similar local affect as that found in D. H. Lawrence’s theatrical versions of Eastwood (‘Did ter court Bill Naylor a’ th’ time as thou wert goin’ wi’ me?’) and when – six decades after the opening of Lonesome-like – the Royal Court belatedly discovered Lawrence’s plays, the Guardian critic Michael Billington hailed Lawrence’s efforts as sharing the same impetus as this Manchester school, declaring that ‘few (Brighouse and Houghton aside) painted such a vivid picture of British provincial life’.39 Such a connection might have been apparent at an earlier stage if the mother of Compton Mackenzie had succeeded in her abortive plan to turn the Grand Theatre

92    James Moran Nottingham into a repertory theatre in 1920, where she planned to produce both Lawrence’s Touch and Go (1920) and The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd (1914). In the event, Touch and Go was eventually published by Douglas Goldring, who had himself declared, ‘I should like to see the Clyde starting a theatre of its own on the lines of the Dublin Abbey Theatre’.40

The Birmingham Repertory Theatre As the repertory influence continued to spread, the actors of Manchester and Dublin triggered the formation of another playhouse, this time in the English Midlands. A Birmingham millionaire and amateur thespian, Barry Jackson, watched the Abbey’s first tour to his home city in 1907 and then saw the Manchester Gaiety performing in 1908.41 He felt filled with enthusiasm and decided to create a similar group, initially called the ‘Pilgrim Players’, and by 1913 this venture had developed into the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, a company based in the first purposebuilt repertory playhouse in England. When Jackson’s troupe initially issued a manifesto in the Birmingham press, the statement praised other towns that had refused to ‘accept the London theatre as the sole arbiter and source of supply in dramatic matters’, adding that ‘Dublin has made a distinct and valuable contribution to the modern stage with its National Irish Theatre’.42 Those involved in establishing the repertory theatre in Birmingham repeatedly wrote to Yeats, inviting him to come and watch their performances. Such a visit looked unlikely, not least because when the Abbey had first toured to Birmingham in 1907 Yeats commented: ‘There are enough slum Irish in Birmingham to stir up a row & we are not sure of any friendly audience there to help us’.43 Nevertheless, Yeats felt enthusiastic about Birmingham’s nascent repertory company producing his play The King’s Threshold in 1909, and told the actors, ‘I shall be very curious to know what you do with the King’s Threshold’.44 He later wrote to declare, ‘I have a great desire to see your Company play’, and visited the city to watch the group in April 1910, commenting: ‘I enjoyed my stay with you very much and your Measure for Measure is still sweet in memory to eye and ear’.45 He also felt delighted by the way that the players performed his prose work The Hour Glass (1903), and when he subsequently decided to redraft the piece he wrote to the Birmingham actors to acknowledge that ‘I owe to you’ the revised play because of their ‘fine performance’.46 Yeats told the Birmingham actors that ‘I shall be delighted if you revive The Hour Glass, for you gave a most excellent

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performance of it. May I make one suggestion: not to correct anything you have done, but to ask you to hide my errors’.47 Yeats even discussed the idea of the Birmingham and Abbey actors working together on a collaborative production, but then experienced the same reservations that he had felt about the prospect of a formal link with the Ulster Literary Theatre. The Abbey and the Birmingham company did share the bill at the Royal Court Theatre in 1910, when Yeats asked Birmingham’s actors to travel down and perform The King’s Threshold, and he declared, ‘later on, I would like a joint performance at Manchester because I want to create the precedent with my own people of your people working with them’.48 But Yeats’s enthusiasm dissipated when he returned to Dublin, and he wrote to the Birmingham Repertory Theatre to explain that ‘I have just heard from Lady Gregory, she thinks it will be better for your Company to play by itself’.49 Gregory had strongly opposed Annie Horniman’s earlier attempts at anglicising the Abbey, and presumably felt similarly unenthusiastic about collaborating with the Birmingham amateurs. After this, despite Yeats’s early warmth towards the Birmingham company, he sent hostile messages to the English Midlands to tell the actors that he believed their performance of his 1899 work The Countess Cathleen a ‘disaster’, that the performances lacked ‘vitality, movement, [and] external life’, and that none of the women in the Birmingham company would be good enough to act in his play Deirdre (1906).50 The Birmingham company instead decided to develop a modified style of drama, one that was still influenced by the Abbey plays but that might sidestep the kinds of national issues raised by the Irish theatre. Thus the Birmingham writer and manager of the theatre, John Drinkwater, published a number of Yeats-style verse dramas with mythological settings, such as Cophetua (1911), Rebellion (1914), The Storm (1915), The God of Quiet (1916), and X=O: A Night of the Trojan War (1917).51 The Repertory Theatre staged Drinkwater’s Rebellion in May 1914, his God of Quiet in autumn 1916, and his Cophetua the following year. Under his supervision the theatre brought other new dramas to the Birmingham stage, establishing the theatre as a home for Georgian verse-plays by premiering Lascelles Abercrombie’s The End of the World (about a village receiving untruthful news of an imminent meteor strike) in September 1914 and Gordon Bottomley’s King Lear’s Wife (a prequel to Shakespeare’s tragedy) in September 1915.52 A performance of Abercrombie’s phallocentric verse-play The Adder in 1913 did refer to ‘brummagem’, although, more generally, Birmingham did not necessarily stage plays set in the local area, but sought to develop a particular style of performance that might help identify the distinctiveness of the enterprise.53

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The Liverpool Repertory Theatre Meanwhile, Yeats’s influence could also be discerned in Liverpool, where another new repertory company had been founded in 1911 by Florence Darragh (the stage name assumed by Letitia Marion Dallas). Darragh was an Irish actor who usually worked in London, but had been coaxed by Yeats to the Abbey, where she had taken the lead role in Deirdre when the play was first performed in November 1906.54 In 1906 Yeats also cast Darragh in The Shadowy Waters (1900), and sent her copies of some of the Abbey’s plays, hoping she might help him to run the theatre. But Darragh enjoyed a close friendship with Annie Horniman, and, after a tour of the USA, instead went to join the new Manchester Gaiety, where she played leading parts in plays such as G. B. Shaw’s Candida (1898) and Granville Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance (1905).55 Yeats himself had already lectured in Liverpool in 1906, and returned shortly before the founding of the Liverpool Repertory Theatre in 1911 to address the Playgoers’ Club, a group of 600 repertory enthusiasts who often travelled to Manchester to watch shows at the Gaiety.56 In February 1911 this Playgoers’ Club, under the guidance of Darragh (along with Basil Dean, who had acted alongside the Abbey’s Sara Allgood in the opening production at the Manchester Gaiety) organised an experimental six-week season of the Liverpool Repertory Theatre at Kelly’s Theatre in Paradise Street.57 Then, in November that year, the company began performing at the Star Theatre – previously a music hall – and the organisers of the new venture felt determined to present work that would not ordinarily be toured to the city. This Liverpool theatre clearly enjoyed an affinity with both the Abbey and the Abbey’s Manchester offspring: on the opening night of the Liverpool Repertory Theatre, Annie Horniman watched from a box, and the Manchester Guardian described the inauguration of ‘her first self-governing colony’.58 The newspaper viewed the Liverpool Repertory Theatre as being at one with Dublin, and now predicted that the city ‘will become another of its [the Abbey company’s] homes’.59 However, the Liverpool Repertory Theatre soon articulated a fierce sense of independence and regional pride. In 1911 an opening verse written by John Masefield declared: ‘Tonight our city leads [. . .] when they name her they will say of her/ “Famous for ships and this her theatre” ’.60 The following year, the theatre staged the children’s Christmas play, Fifinella, co-written by Barry Jackson (of Birmingham) and Liverpool’s director, Basil Dean.61 Lascelles Abercrombie himself had been a Liverpool journalist and poet, and became a reader for the

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Liverpool Repertory Theatre by 1913, when the Liverpool theatre premiered his new, blank-verse play The Adder. The regional voice used in the drama – with terms like ‘sneck’ and ‘Methody’ providing a hint of northern dialect – anticipated the playhouse’s production of James Sexton’s new script The Riot Act the following year.62 Sexton’s work dealt, controversially, with the Liverpool strike of 1911, and local audiences undoubtedly viewed the play in the light of their own local experiences: a cheering crowd of Liverpool Dockers crowded the gallery, whilst a number of women made a protest against the play’s unflattering depiction of a suffragette.63 The working-class life of the city now appeared in dramatised form, with onstage dockers saying things such as: ‘Ye’ll get nothing from him, he’s one of the Committee. Aye, one of the knuts [showy young men]’.64 The development of such Liverpool talent meant that the playhouse managers adopted a less deferential attitude to Yeats. In November 1913, when a group of Irish spectators rioted in the venue as a response to the Abbey’s visiting production of Synge’s Playboy, the repertory theatre decided to cancel the run, and Yeats complained to The Times. After his comments had been printed, Liverpool’s theatre managers felt determined to prove their distance from Yeats, issuing their own statement in The Times that contradicted some of his comments and accused Yeats of labouring ‘under some misapprehension’.65

The Glasgow Repertory Theatre Meanwhile, yet another Yeats-inspired repertory theatre had been established, this time in Glasgow. The driving force behind the Scottish venture was Alfred Wareing, who had been in Dublin in 1906 as manager of Beerbohm-Tree’s Oliver Twist (1905), which played at the city’s Theatre Royal. During the run, Wareing wandered into the Abbey, where he met Willie Fay and Sara Allgood. He then returned to watch performances that evening and during the week, including Yeats and Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan and Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1903). Wareing felt extremely impressed by the playhouse, and, when sailing back to England, he was delighted to discover that he shared the boat with some of the Dublin players, on their way to perform in Liverpool, Manchester, and Leeds. During the journey he spoke with Synge, and ended up organising the 1907 summer tour of Britain for the Abbey players. Although some cities on this tour, such as Cardiff and Newcastle, caused the company to lose a great deal of money, the actors met with financial success in Glasgow.66

96    James Moran As a result, Wareing’s Glasgow Repertory Theatre opened on 5 April 1909, in the city’s Royalty Theatre. In this leased venue, Wareing at first attempted to emulate something of the Abbey’s nationalism by aiming: to make Glasgow independent of London West End managers and to encourage the initiation and development of a purely Scottish Drama by providing a stage and an acting Company which would be peculiarly adapted for the production of plays national in character, written by Scottish men and women of letters.67

However, this aim was hindered by Glasgow’s lack of a wealthy benefactor in the mould of Annie Horniman or Barry Jackson, and by the fact that in 1909 Scotland’s political position was scarcely analogous to that of Ireland. As Jan McDonald points out: ‘Despite occasionally styling itself as a “Scottish Repertory Theatre”, the Rep focussed its activities in Glasgow, the “Second City of the empire”, and the impetus for its founding arose from civic, rather than national, pride’.68 Consequently, in the Glasgow theatre’s programmes the company stated that it was ‘financed by Glasgow money, managed by Glasgow men, established to make Glasgow independent of London for its dramatic supplies, it is a Citizens theatre in the fullest sense of the term’.69 Part of this project included the premiere of new plays (with the theatre staging an impressive thirty new works in the first three years, despite a shoestring budget), and championing work that described life in the local area, such as the 1911 premiere of John Joy Bell’s Wee Macgregor, which would only be fully comprehensible to those who knew the city reasonably well. Wee Macgregor toys with the class associations of local places such as Sauchiehall Street and Garscube Road; uses what the author called a ‘Glesca’ dialect; and even has fun at the audience’s own expense: at one point the play’s most socially aspiring character describes how she is going to meet a friend at the Repertory Theatre.70

Conclusion By 1911 the Manchester Guardian was arguing that: ‘The repertory movement grows apace. First Dublin, then Manchester and Glasgow, and now Liverpool; one first night certifieth another, and soon in the ends of the country its voice shall be heard’.71 Yeats could scarcely have been pleased to see his national theatre bracketed as one repertory company amongst many, but he need not have been unduly concerned. By 1913, most of those other repertory companies were suffering from financial problems, with the most boldly experimental productions

Pound, Yeats, and the Regional Repertory Theatres    97

– such as Hauptmann’s sacrilegious Hannele (1893) at the Liverpool Repertory Theatre in 1913 – proving toxic at the box office. By 1914 the Glasgow Repertory had closed; the Liverpool Repertory Theatre had seen its director resign and the playhouse commit to more conservative programming; while the Manchester Gaiety appointed Douglas Gordon as manager, a traditionalist who had not shown any earlier interest in the repertory movement, and who brought back the old stars who had acted at the theatre building when it hosted touring companies.72 Barry Jackson’s philanthropy meant that the Birmingham Repertory Theatre endured beyond this period, although many of those at his theatre became distracted by wartime patriotism in 1914, with actors enlisting (Jackson joined the navy) or devoting time to making shells at the nearby aluminium works. Meanwhile, political developments in the North of Ireland meant that the Ulster Literary Theatre was placed in a particularly difficult position: the playhouse had been set up to express a distinct form of northern identity, but articulating such distinctiveness could be seen to endorse a partitionist position. The group struggled on, trying to stage plays that described the social rather than political aspects of Ulster, such as Shan Bullock’s Snowdrop Jane (1915), but the division of Ireland in 1921 dealt the death blow to a company whose founding members could scarcely endorse the idea of forming the ‘national’ theatre of Northern Ireland.73 The brief flowering of these repertory theatres offers a telling comparison with the later ‘décentralisation’ movement in France. This ‘décentralisation’, under André Malraux, aimed to generate a cultural renewal by encouraging provincial theatre companies to produce original work, instead of allowing French theatre to remain dominated by companies catering for the Parisian bourgeoisie.74 But, paradoxically, the movement towards cultural ‘décentralisation’ required strong state organisation in the capital in order to direct the changes. In the French case, then, a movement that ostensibly aimed to focus upon devolved and interdependent identities ended up reifying the centrifugal bureaucracy of the state. With the British and Irish repertory theatres, something quite different and potentially more subversive was at play. In the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’, the pan-European process of upper-middleclass state formation had been disrupted and fragmented by Ireland’s problematic colonial status, meaning that the Abbey Theatre was driven from the start by a distinctive national agenda that could not be straightforwardly replicated in other parts of Britain or in the North of Ireland. So what were the other repertory theatres copying from the Abbey? Well, in the years before the establishment of the Irish Free State,

98    James Moran Yeats’s theatre had a clear connection with the notion of Vaterland. In nationalist terms, the purpose of the Abbey was to show the absurdity of Westminster’s refusal to grant political autonomy to a nation that displayed such a thriving and distinct culture. Indeed, the first rebel to shoot dead a British soldier during the Easter Rising of 1916 was the Abbey actor Seán Connolly.75 However, the repertory managers who emulated Yeats, on the whole, admired instead a sense of Heimat in the Abbey’s work, that is, the playhouse’s ability to articulate both a sense of individuated geography and a sense of rooted belonging. Such rootedness helped to distinguish the repertory playhouses from the theatricals staged in those same cities in previous decades, which were dominated by London companies that toured to local Theatre Royals during the off-season in the capital.76 In those days, the stars of the London stage had visited locations that enjoyed little role in the creative process and were simply provided with the recycled material of the West End, sometimes toured in triplicate; and thus a degree of cultural uniformity had been imposed by this touring system, with a performance in Dublin looking much the same as a performance in Manchester. To be sure, London still provided an inspiration for the repertory movement, not least in the important work of Jacob Grein’s Independent Theatre and the Stage Society, and the Barker-Vedrenne management of the Court Theatre in 1904–7. But the Abbey showed particularly well how it might be possible to develop a low-key, naturalistic style that differed from the dominant, overblown method of the commercial stage; and to speak to the particular concerns of non-London audiences away from the restrictions imposed by the ‘star’ system and the theatrical long-run. Hence a tendency to turn away from unity and homogeneity had been built into the repertory movement from the start. It was an emphasis on local distinctiveness, rather than any nationalist agenda, that had been disseminated by Yeats to the various regional repertory companies. Thus, although Yeats often ended up quarrelling with those who had emulated his example, these managers were in fact following the kind of devolutionary logic that Yeats himself had outlined at the Abbey. A city playhouse, which spent at least some time staging plays with language and themes tailored to its particular conurbation and surrounding region, could, after all, be privileging a particular mode of allegiance. National paradigms and attachments might be displaced or realigned for spectators who were newly confirmed in, or questioning about, a Glaswegian or Mancunian identity at the end of a show. The danger for Yeats was that the Abbey had launched its critique by foregrounding an alternative idea of the national, whereas the theatres that followed him increasingly threatened to operate elsewhere on the

Pound, Yeats, and the Regional Repertory Theatres    99

scalar hierarchy, in a way that challenged the very national imperatives upon which he made his case. At times, spectators in such city-based venues might, through the heterotopic possibilities offered by the proscenium arch, develop attachments that undermined or transcended national affiliations, leaving the idea of the nation in something of a conceptual flux. In this way, just as Sonita Sarker has argued that the recent transnational turn in modernist studies might point towards a ‘transgression of national boundaries’, so a renewed focus on regional cities in Britain and Ireland may offer an alternative but complementary route to identifying such transgression.77 The theatre may not only be, as Martin Esslin asserts, a ‘place where a nation thinks in public’, but a place where the idea of nation might be disturbed, questioned, and recalibrated.78

Notes   1. Ezra Pound, ‘Affirmations: The non-existence of Ireland’, The New Age, 25 February 1915, 451–3 (452).   2. Pound, ‘Affirmations’, p. 452.   3. D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Volume 6: March 1927– November 1928, ed. James T. Boulton, Margaret H. Boulton, and Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 283.  4. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War did not take place, trans. Paul Patton (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 48.   5. Ezra Pound cited in James Longenbach, Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 207.   6. Pound, ‘A serious play’, The Future, II, II (Nov 1918), p. 287; reprinted in Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound’s Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (London: Faber, 1967), pp. 141–2.   7. Andrew E. G. Jonas, ‘Region and place: Regionalism in question’, Progress in Human Geography, 36:2 (2012), 263–72 (p. 263).  8. Rowell and Jackson, The Repertory Movement: A History of Regional Theatre in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 4.  9. Oge Terrence O’Cullough, The Consolations of Matrimony, in Ezra Pound, Plays Modelled on the Noh, ed. Donald C. Gallup (Toledo: The Friends of the University of Toledo Libraries, 1987), p. 13. This book contains a second, equally intriguing, Noh play by Pound that is set in Ireland and based on Synge, The Protagonist. 10. Ezra Pound cited in Donald C. Gallup, ‘Introduction to The Consolations of Matrimony’, in James Laughlin, ed., New Directions in Prose and Poetry 51 (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1987), pp. 123–4. 11. Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 26 February 1916, cited in R. F. Foster W. B. Yeats: A Life, II, The Arch-Poet: 1915–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 39. 12. Grace Wyndham Goldie, The Liverpool Repertory Theatre 1911–1934 (London: Hodder and Stoughton/Liverpool University Press, 1935), p. 88.

100    James Moran 13. W. B. Yeats, ‘“The Playboy” at Liverpool’, The Times, 4 December 1913, p. 12. 14. Oge Terrence O’Cullough, p. 22. J. M. Synge, Collected Plays and Poems and the Aran Islands (London: Everyman, 1996), p. 152. 15. Yeats, ‘An Irish National Theatre’, in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume VIII: The Irish Dramatic Movement, ed. Mary FitzGerald and Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 2003), pp. 32–4. 16. Janet A. Nolan, Ourselves Alone: Women’s Emigration from Ireland 1885–1920 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989), p. 74. 17. Longenbach, p. 217. 18. The name ‘repertory movement’ is itself somewhat misleading, as none of these companies established a revolving repertoire of plays in the way that, say, Shakespeare’s Lord Chamberlain’s Men did. In the early twentieth century, British and Irish theatre groups used ‘repertory’ as a self-­ description, or were associated by critics with the repertory impulse, but tended to stage short, self-produced runs of one play at a time. 19. Eugene McNulty, The Ulster Literary Theatre and the Northern Revival (Cork: Cork University Press, 2008), p. 66. 20. Gerald MacNamara cited in McNulty, p. 75. 21. Bulmer Hobson cited in McNulty, pp. 66–7. 22. Richard Kirkland, Cathal O’Byrne and the Northern Revival in Ireland, 1890–1960 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006), p. 71. 23. McNulty, The Ulster Literary Theatre, p. 72. 24. Kirkland, p. 71. ‘Native plays and players at the Grand Opera House’, Irish News, 15 May 1909, p. 4, cited in Kirkland, Cathal O’Byrne and the Northern Revival, p. 76. 25. Gerald MacNamara, Thompson in Tír-na-nÓg (Dublin: Talbot, 1912), p. 23. 26. Bulmer Hobson cited in McNulty, The Ulster Literary Theatre, p. 84. 27. Bulmer Hobson, Ireland: Yesterday and Tomorrow (Tralee: Anvil, 1968), p. 4. 28. McNulty, The Ulster Literary Theatre, p. 85. 29. John Hewitt, ‘Regionalism: The last chance’, cited in Ancestral Voices: The Selected Prose of John Hewitt, ed. Tom Clyde (Belfast: Blackstaff, 1987), p. 125. 30. J. M. Synge, Letters to Molly: John Millington Synge to Maire O’Neill, 1906–1909, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 141; W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, 1905–1907, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p. 413. 31. Rex Pogson, Miss Horniman and the Gaiety Theatre, Manchester (London: Rockliff, 1952), p. 22. 32. ‘The Irish Players in Manchester’, Manchester Guardian, 27 February 1911, p. 6. 33. Annie Horniman’s letters to W. B. Yeats, 22 September 1906 and 18 April 1906, cited in Adrian Frazier, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 180.

Pound, Yeats, and the Regional Repertory Theatres    101 34. Frazier, Behind the Scenes, p. 187. 35. W. B. Yeats, The Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), p. 500. 36. Ben Iden Payne cited in Frazier, Behind the Scenes, p. 197. 37. Sheila Gooddie, Annie Horniman: A Pioneer in the Theatre (London: Methuen, 1990), p. 144. 38. Brighouse, Lonesome-like (London: Gowans & Gray: 1914), p. 35. The play opened at the Glasgow Repertory and also played at the Liverpool Repertory. In terms of the ‘Manchester School’, the Gaiety also premiered Monkhouse’s Reaping the Whirlwind (1908), a story of a wife attempting – as in Pound’s play – to leave her husband, but with tragic consequences; William Stanley Houghton’s The Dear Departed (1908), in which a greedy family start arguing over their grandfather’s inheritance even though – as in Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen – the apparent corpse is not dead; and Brighouse’s The Doorway (1909), in which a tramp who has been working as a bricklayer’s labourer in the North of England finds himself tired and unemployed in London. Monkhouse, Four Tragedies (London: Duckworth, 1913); Houghton, Five One Act Plays (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1913); Brighouse, The Doorway (London: Joseph Williams, [1909?]). 39. D. H. Lawrence, The Merry-Go-Round, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: The Plays, Part 1, ed. Hans-Wilhelm Schwarze and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 139; Michael Billington, ‘The Merry-Go-Round at the Royal Court’, Guardian, 8 November 1973, p. 12. 40. Goldring, ‘Introduction’, The Fight for Freedom: A Play in Four Acts (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1920), p. 10. 41. Viv Gardner, ‘No flirting with philistinism: Shakespearean production at Miss Horniman’s Gaiety Theatre’, New Theatre Quarterly, 14 (1998), 220–33 (226); John Trewin, The Birmingham Repertory Theatre, 1913– 1963 (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1963), p. 11; William Fay and Catherine Carswell, The Fays of the Abbey Theatre: An Autobiographical Record (London: Rich and Cowan, 1935), p. 226. 42. ‘“The Pilgrim Players”: New Birmingham Society’, Birmingham Daily Post, 16 December 1907, p. 4. 43. Yeats, The Collected Letters, p. 664. 44. W. B. Yeats, New York Public Library (NYPL), Berg Collection, folder 940410, letter of 29 November 1909. 45. W. B. Yeats, NYPL, Berg Collection, folder 940410, letter of 31 March 1910. W. B. Yeats, NYPL, Berg Collection, folder 940411, letter of 28 April 1910. 46. W. B. Yeats, NYPL, Berg collection, folder 940413, letter of 20 October 1913. 47. W. B. Yeats, NYPL, Berg collection, folder 940413, undated letter. 48. W. B. Yeats, NYPL, Berg Collection, folder 940411, letter of 28 April 1910. 49. W. B. Yeats, NYPL, Berg Collection, folder 940411, letter of 28 April 1910. 50. W. B. Yeats, NYPL, Berg collection, folder 940412, letter of October 1913;

102    James Moran folder 940411, letter of 3 December 1911; and folder 940412, letter of 3 May 1912. 51. John Drinkwater, Collected Plays, 2 vols (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1925). Drinkwater unsuccessfully attempted to have Cophetua staged by the Abbey Theatre, but Yeats dismissed the idea and offered only lukewarm praise of the work: ‘I [. . .] enjoyed [reading] it very much. I think it should play well and make an impressive pageant, as well as climaxing as a play should’. W. B. Yeats, NYPL, Berg collection, folder 940412, letter of 3 May 1912. 52. Lascelles Abercrombie, Four Short Plays (London: Secker, 1922), pp. 121–76; Gordon Bottomley, King Lear’s Wife, The Crier by Night, The Riding to Lithend, Midsummer Eve, Laodice and Danaë (London: Constable, 1922), pp. 1, 48. 53. Abercrombie, Four Short Plays, p. 17. 54. Yeats, The Collected Letters, p. 383. 55. ‘Miss Darragh’, Manchester Guardian, 19 December 1917, p. 5. 56. Yeats, The Collected Letters, p. 355. ‘The Liverpool Repertory Theatre’, Manchester Guardian, 6 July 1911, p. 6. 57. ‘The Liverpool Playhouse’, Manchester Guardian, 10 September 1936, p. 13. 58. ‘Liverpool and the Drama’, Manchester Guardian, 21 February 1911, p. 9. 59. ‘The Irish Players in Manchester’, Manchester Guardian, 27 February 1911, p. 6. 60. Goldie, The Liverpool Repertory Theatre, p. 63. 61. Barry Jackson and Basil Dean, Fifinella, Birmingham Central Library, Sir Barry Jackson and Birmingham Repertory Theatre Archive. 62. Abercrombie, Four Short Plays, pp. 25, 45. 63. Ros Merkin, Liverpool Playhouse: A Theatre & its City (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), pp. 22, 30–1. 64. James Sexton, The Riot Act: A Play in Three Acts (London: Constable, 1914), p. 70. 65. Godfrey Edwards, ‘“The Playboy” at Liverpool’, The Times, 3 December 1913, p. 10. 66. Winifred F. E. C. Isaac, Alfred Wareing: A Biography (London: Green Bank, 1951), pp. 29–30, 32. Wareing remains central to the broader repertory developments described in this chapter. He had helped Horniman to set up her Manchester venture by securing the rental of the Gaiety Theatre. In addition, Wareing’s Glasgow theatre inspired the experimental season that launched the Liverpool Repertory Theatre in 1911. 67. Isaac, Alfred Wareing, p. 35. 68. Jan McDonald, ‘Towards national identities: Theatre in Scotland’, in The Cambridge History of British Theatre: Volume 3, Since 1895, ed. Baz Kershaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 199. 69. Goldie, The Liverpool Repertory Theatre, p. 21. 70. John Joy Bell, Wee MacGreegor, British Library, Lord Chamberlain’s Collection, 1911/35A, fol.75. See also John Joy Bell, Courtin’ Christina: A Play in One Act (London and Glasgow: Gowans and Gray, 1924), p. 21. 71. ‘Liverpool and the Drama’, Manchester Guardian, 21 February 1911, p. 9.

Pound, Yeats, and the Regional Repertory Theatres    103 72. Gardner, ‘No flirting with philistinism’, p. 232. 73. Shan Bullock’s Snowdrop Jane was published as The Squireen (London: Methuen, 1903). 74. See David Bradby, Modern French Drama 1940–1990, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 87. 75. See James Moran, Staging the Easter Rising: 1916 as Theatre (Cork: Cork University Press, 2005), p. 18. 76. Thomas C. Kemp, Birmingham Repertory Theatre: The Playhouse and the Man (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1948), p. 1. 77. Sonita Sarker, ‘Afterword: Modernisms in our image . . . always, partially’, Modernism/Modernity , 13.3 (2006), 561–6 (565, 562). 78. Martin Esslin, An Anatomy of Drama (London: Temple Smith, 1978), p. 101.

Chapter 5

Capturing the Scale of Fiction at Mid-Century David James

Writing in spring 1947, Storm Jameson – the prolific Yorkshire-born novelist and former president of the English centre of International PEN – used the occasion of an essay on the ‘situation’ of contemporary fiction to glance back two years and reflect on her visit to an indelibly-scarred northern Europe. From an aerial vantage point, Jameson adopts, at least initially and fleetingly, a disinterested and reportorial perspective. Then the standpoint shifts, and with it the diction and gesture of Jameson’s treatment of destruction. Dropping the objective pretence of reportage, she progresses into a more personalised and noticeably elegiac register of remembrance: The aeroplane that in 1945 took me from London to Berlin and Berlin to Warsaw showed me what I shall never forget. It was a clear sunny day, and we flew very low, never higher than about 1500 feet, over Europe. It was my first sight of Europe for six years. The Europe I had seen last in June 1939 was still, in spite of this and that, alive. Who would have believed than [sic] in a few short years it would be nearer dead than not? During the whole seven hours’ flight from the Dutch Coast to Warsaw, I saw only two railway-trains on the move: the roads were empty of traffic, the snapped-off ends of bridges trailed in the rivers. The curiously rotted look, from the air, of bombed cities was much less grim than this collapse of Europe into mediaeval conditions of travel. The few aeroplanes hurrying from point to point in chaos took the place of the angels a mediaeval painter might put in the top corner of his canvas. It seemed, in that first glimpse I got, that what had happened in Europe was so terrible that not only was there no forgiveness for it, but no chance of recovery.1

In contrast to what Jameson sees as the relatively inconsequential tumult of the years leading up to 1939 (summed up in a sub-clause by the unspecific pronouns of that colloquial phrase, ‘this and that’), Europe appears to her now in a state of terminal retrogression with ‘no chance of recovery’. Implicated emotionally in the pathetic scenes of damage

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she surveys, Jameson deliberately foregoes – or rather calls attention to the fact that she’s unable to sustain – the superficial sense of dispassionate omniscience afforded by the bird’s-eye view. In this shift from impartiality to involvement the language too expands, factual economy giving way to metaphorical elaboration. Morphing airplanes into angels, Jameson confronts destruction’s arresting symbolism while compromising her grasp on localised particularities: spare images of ‘snapped-off’ bridges and deserted streets pass under her aerial gaze anonymously, and the absence of place names throughout the journey condenses this landscape of destruction into a scene of deadening uniformity. Perhaps this homogeneity is not merely unavoidable – symptomatic of what an aerial perspective gains in panoramic degree but loses in localised detail. The generality of ‘bombed cities’ is also a necessary result of Jameson’s blend of analogy with actuality, as modern Europe is extrapolated within a medieval frame of reference. To anatomise the war’s impact, then, Jameson not only pictures it literally in architectural and infrastructural terms, but also reaches for analogues that convey something of what has happened to the Continent ontologically, as the ‘curiously rotted’ constitution of the land is figured in organic terms – ‘nearer dead’ than ‘alive’, and facing a poor ‘chance’ of recuperation. What is significant about Jameson’s panorama of ruin, though, is not simply her nimble way of modulating from documentary objectivity to descriptive embellishment, but also the double-frame within which she operates: a frame through which we observe the legacy of military conflict both in miniature, within particular sightings, and yet also as a metonym for the exhaustion of Europe in its entirety. Just as the noun ‘region’ can denote both part and whole, district and hemisphere, so Jameson behaves precisely like the medieval painter upon whose canvas an image of cultural paralysis emerges, when she invokes site-specific elements as emblematic of a larger picture of Europe’s irredeemable collapse. Jameson wasn’t alone, of course, in performing this kind of rhetorical manoeuvre between contrasting scales of observation and prognosis. Tracing modernist fiction’s experimental manipulation of geographic scales, Jon Hegglund has recently suggested that such writers as Forster, Joyce, and Rhys ‘continually mediate the scale of the national – which is typically the space of realism – and a perspective “outside” of the national, which yields the textual features of abstraction, defamiliarisation, and self-consciousness frequently identified with narrative modernism’.2 This argument does run the risk of reinscribing that rather unhelpful binary between the supposedly national, insular, and ­provincialised ambit of realist fiction and the kind of formally innovative

106    David James writing assumed to be synonymous with internationalism. However, the scale-crossing or even ‘scale-bending’ practices that Hegglund identifies are useful for a discussion of regional writers who, like Storm Jameson, aren’t often identified as modernist but who nonetheless occupy a nationally ‘outside’ stance, one that can ‘suspend the limits of a spatial realism by combining the face-to-face, local scale of fictional narrative with a broader, detached perception of cartographic distance’.3 In this essay, I want to bring an equally idiosyncratic writer, Sylvia Townsend Warner, into conversation with Jameson, for Warner’s fiction is similarly difficult to label or contain within the parameters of ‘late modernism’ as they are usually conceived. Together, the work of these novelists may be best situated in the era of late modernism rather than being regarded as a direct product of it. As such, Jameson and Warner align with and extend a tradition of regional realist fiction that predates the advent of modernist experimentalism, yet without setting themselves in some kind of stark Orwellian opposition to the perceived political weaknesses of modernism’s subjectivist aesthetics. For although neither Jameson nor Warner pursued linguistic or structural innovation to a pyrotechnic degree, both writers nevertheless integrated techniques of perspectival refraction and defamiliarisation that are typically associated with iconic modernists like Conrad and Woolf. And like many of their contemporary and subsequently canonical modernists, Jameson and Warner were also concerned with adopting the outsider’s position from which to observe the scale of national conflicts, either in an immediate moment or through the genre of historical fiction, as several of Warner’s narratives of revolution reveal. Both writers can enrich our retrospective view of how modernism evolved in the interwar years while also complicating accounts of late modernism as a sardonic dissolution or parody of high modernism’s quest for mastery over artistic form.4 At the same time, their novels also prove that ‘regional fiction’, as K. D. M. Snell suggests, ‘cannot be interpreted without reference to the problems or even failures arising in different periods of formulating and imposing national programmes and ideologies’. Alternating scales of perception, these fictions dramatise what Snell calls the ‘problems of regional consciousness, of incorporating diverse regional cultural traditions and political sensibilities within enveloping policies of the state, as well as the threats to regional landscapes’.5 Albeit a more militantly Marxist commentator than Jameson, Warner’s conception of the novel’s mission nonetheless shared some common ground with Jameson’s ‘materialist project’, as both writers extended the regional novel’s capacity for ‘exploring the questions of the day in the landscapes and language of their making’.6 What follows is not

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simply an exercise in literary-historical recuperation, redirecting critical attention towards two women novelists who are still relatively neglected in modernist studies.7 Analytically speaking, this essay attempts to show how Warner’s and Jameson’s formal innovations in transporting the regional novel abroad, and their accompanying quests for appropriate scales on which to apprehend both the magnitude of political crises and the misery of personal loss, contribute to recent work on modernism’s transnational ambit precisely by listening in to the regional dialogues that emerge between geography and genre in the years approaching mid-century. As both an immediate reality and a new occasion for the writer’s ethical self-scrutiny, the onset of the Second World War brought into sharp focus the geographical reach and ideological commitments of regional fiction conventionally focused on the English provinces. But what was also called into question was the very critical criteria for approaching such writing, namely the criteria for estimating – as Phyllis Bentley’s remarkable wartime study of the genre notes – ‘how far and how deeply the local colour dyes’.8 Indeed, as Bentley herself astutely anticipated, in the context of international conflict it’s not that regional writing becomes irrelevant so much that it demands, on the contrary, an adjusted vocabulary that enables critics to appreciate how writers move on that new axis between local and international concerns. She notes that if a ‘discussion of the merits and defects of the regional novel as an art form seems proper’, then it is all the more ‘tempting at the present moment, when the value of our national contribution to civilisation is being so widely canvassed, to conclude with an attempted estimate of [regional fiction’s] significance in our national culture’.9 In the vein of Bentley’s speculation here, one could say that although the localism and particularism of regional writing might seem to undermine its adequacy in the face of the representational challenges posed by international conflict, these are the very traits that ensure the mode’s efficacy at a time when air raids in effect brought the scale of that conflict into the domestic sphere. If bombing occupied the late-modernist imagination it did so because of its propensity to alter local life, including the localities of that life, irrevocably. As Leo Mellor has observed, writers such as Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, and Rose Macaulay confronted both the brute reality and figurative potential of the bomb site, such that throughout ‘works of fiction . . . it was delineated as a spatial and cultural phenomenon with extraordinary symbolic significance, and a zone from which forces would emerge to destroy society – but a space also ripe for hope of redemption and rebuilding’.10 This balance between acknowledging the totalised reach of devastation

108    David James and apprehending the localised promise of recovery tips, perhaps inevitably, towards the former in Jameson’s solemn vision of destruction in 1947. As we saw above, she tries there to fulfil her own credo of writerly ‘responsibility’ – as she would describe it towards the end of that decade – ‘to make out the meaning of the world, whatever that meaning may be, even a meaning of disaster’.11 But in the novel of provincial France that Jameson published four years earlier, the balance between those scales of seeing is more sustained, perpetuating a tension between defeat and survival, disaster and recuperation, that animates her commentary on the response of regional fortitude to international threat. A suspenseful narrative set in the spring of 1940, Cloudless May shifts between the viewpoints of villagers to track their anticipation of the Fascist invasion. Among the central cast is the Loire itself – in many respects as much a character as any other – playing a constant and consoling role in the minds of those who imagine the river connecting their province with others to form enduring bonds. This shared landscape becomes associated with national solidarity in the face of war’s inevitability. With this focus Cloudless May substantiates Bentley’s acute prediction, two years before, that the ‘economic emphasis’ of regional fiction in the 1930s, a clear reflection of ‘pressure of the slump’, would be overtaken by an emphasis instead upon the primacy of national pride and mutual cooperation. In documenting the French provinces awaiting the German advance, Jameson certainly proves Bentley’s claim that ‘the supreme interest of the day has swung from economics to politics, from industry to international struggle’. But through this reorientation, Bentley also wondered whether ‘it seems probable that regionalism in the novel may be superseded, at any rate temporarily, by fictions of national expression’.12 Worried about the fate of regional writing at a time of national camaraderie, Bentley reminds her readers that one of the distinctive features of regional fiction is its exploration of demographic differences and discrete customs that distinguish a nation’s provinces from each other. However, she avers that in 1941 it is ‘the unity rather than diversity of our country which looms large in our mind’.13 Jameson, of course, has it both ways, by giving voice to international concerns within, rather than by relinquishing, the generic framework of the regional novel. Yet, at the same time, Cloudless May offers a discernibly sceptical view of how that sense of ‘national expression’ through ideological unity can be imposed and maintained, precisely in the face of the diversity which Bentley highlights. Due to the novel’s perspectival focalisation, that scepticism is often mediated; or else readers are left to infer the presence of Jameson’s interrogative voice, as it inhabits

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the romanticising reflections of Colonel Rienne or, as in the following passage, those of his companion Bergeot: Except for a few workmen – old men, boys too young to be called up yet – Bergeot was the only person breathing an air as clear and living as a young Loire salmon. He felt a familiar joy and confidence. If only he could embrace the town, with its old houses, churches, barracks, its bridges across the Loire, its sun. He felt under his hand on the wall of the embankment the veins starting off to join it to all the other towns and villages of France and to the living wall of men on the frontier, placing between themselves and an invader their memories of just such days as this, just such houses as that one with its shabby iron balconies and narrow door, just such a light, firm, bounding, as was falling on all the rivers of the only flawlessly human country in the world.14

Such a prospect seems at best quixotic, at worst chauvinistic. Geographically discrete structures of belonging and affection, conjured from native ‘memories of just such days as this’, are stitched together across the land to form a broad tapestry of resilience on a national scale, a vision of unification through wistful ‘memories’ that seems utopian if not irresponsibly sentimental in the light of the impending German assault. Such scenes take on a critical impetus, though, if we allow that Jameson is sardonically shadowing them, bearing in mind Birkett’s contention that Jameson ‘had no nostalgic delusions about a region where isolation could easily turn into parochialism’.15 A vision of regional interconnectivity born of collective recollections of the kind Bergeot conjures here appears mawkish; yet such scenes also enable Jameson to test out an alternative scale for perceiving the relation of region to nation, and nation to world, while highlighting the ever-present dangers of wishful patriotism. In Cloudless May, then, Jameson coordinates this scale-bending process with a scepticism angled at the complacent romanticisation of regional life as a timeless spectacle. In this fashion she draws ‘insights formulated out of political need’, as Birkett notes, ‘into the scope offered by landscape to multiple forms of cultural and political allegiance’.16 How it was that figures like Jameson extended literature’s geopolitical ‘scope’ by expanding the generic coordinates of regional fiction is my key concern in what follows. I have already observed how that question of scope also becomes one of scale in Jameson’s airborne eulogy to Europe. But such scalar mediations had also informed slightly earlier, interwar debates about the very state of fiction and the responsibilities of those who mean to preserve fiction’s critical mission. For Jameson, to envision a future for the novel’s social potential, writers of the 1930s had first to deal with its immediate past, namely, the decades in which

110    David James modernism’s formal experiments loomed large. In her 1938 study, The Novel in Contemporary Life, Jameson’s reservations about the subjectivism of modernist fiction are everywhere apparent. Praise merges with uncompromising critique: Virginia Woolf, for instance, ‘has the most exquisite sensibility to sensuous impressions’, but as soon as ‘she ventures outside the range of this sensibility she seems to have no feeling for reality at all’.17 Such dismissive summaries might give us pause; but when Jameson reaches James Joyce, we realise Woolf had escaped reasonably unscathed. For in response to the serialised fragments of the Wake, Jameson doesn’t restrain her rebuke, denouncing the text’s ‘spurious monument of verbal effects’, whose ‘total effect is of stupendous dullness, like a dozen mechanical pianos playing Scriabine [sic] at once’. As a final blow she adds that: ‘One can scarcely imagine anything more like Purgatory’.18 If Jameson’s complaints against the paragons of modernist innovation had much to do with matters of style – highlighting what she saw as the drawbacks of Woolf’s sensuous yet abstract Impressionism, and berating the linguistic cacophonies of late Joyce – they were also concerned with matters of scale. That is, Jameson worried about the degree to which modernism’s preoccupation with interiority compromised the writer’s effort to ‘become more sensitive’, as she urged, ‘more susceptible to an always widening range of emotional experience’.19 This injunction might well recall, if not seem perfectly compatible with, the alertness to the emotional impact and intellectual import of sensory experience that we associate with the very Impressionism from which Jameson sought to distance herself. For susceptibility and sensitivity were also watchwords for Henry James, punctuating his 1884 proposals for the model novelist who in his mind should strive to become ‘one of the people on whom nothing is lost’.20 Such affinities may appear to contradict what, in Jameson’s work, can seem an indisputably realist project. But such is the manifold nature of her ambitions for fiction’s critical vitality that Jameson was able to extend at least part of modernism’s concern with refining subjective modes of narration without compromising her efforts elsewhere to steer the novel away from the precipice of aesthetic involution, redirecting its representational energies from the realm of mental processes to that of material transformations. For Jameson, then, following an era in which (as she saw it) the sensory plane preoccupied writers arguably at the expense of any concretely social one, fiction’s scale of reference should now be augmented. In high modernism’s wake, she implies, the novel ought to renew its attention to relations between individual and totality, private sensation

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and social milieu, thereby capturing the localised detail yet without sacrificing the panoramic view: The difficulty, the intense difficulty, of the contemporary novelist is to form an adequate conception of life at this moment when everything is changing. He must know, that is, feel so much, and on so many levels. And he must be able to draw back far enough to see the whole movement in focus, not one aspect distorted out of all proportion to the whole.21

Jameson compares the novel’s reform with the optical achievement of focus through distance, prioritising the virtue of ‘draw[ing] back far enough’ from an ‘adequate’ – because ever-changing – ‘conception of life’, over the distorting selectivity of the close-up. With this telescopic analogy, Jameson implies that fiction needs to move back and forth from its object of depiction, rather than pursue psychological depths alone. A focus on individuated mental processes is not itself sufficient to enable novelists to evoke facets of experience ‘on so many levels’. With these sentiments, Jameson anticipates her conviction, a decade later, that the novel should be ‘essentially a representation at the same time as it is an extension of experience, a deepening and sharpening of our capacity for feeling and reflection’.22 Again, her emphasis here on experience is reminiscent of James’s famous account of those states of feeling that fiction is peculiarly suited to capture, insofar as the ‘novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life’.23 Yet, ultimately, Jameson was adamant about distinguishing her prospectus for fiction’s ‘responsibility’ at a time of international upheaval from modernism’s ‘desperate stylists’, as she called them, who ‘have, all of them, the virtue of originality, to the point where it becomes, in a novelist, vice’.24 So to whom did Jameson look for writing that showcased those ‘fundamental values of the novel’, as she saw them, ‘its lasting “heartwork” ’?25 This ambassador of the regional English imaginary reached for the Continent. As Birkett notes, culture as an idea and ideal ‘for Jameson was still equally a force embedded in the landscape of everyday life and the creation of high artistic endeavour, and in France, she believed, the two could still be found’.26 However, despite the primacy she gives to France as a nation ‘to whom Europe had always turned for the renewal of heritage’, Jameson’s influences remained broadly cosmopolitan, as Birkett notes: ‘From Jean Giraudoux, from T. S. Eliot, and later from a fellow Yorkshireman, W. H. Auden (and behind them all, the French Symbolists), Jameson pieced together the techniques for evoking how, through words, the flickering intuitions of self-consciousness find embodiment in remembered space’.27 That culture might be condensed and preserved in this way through spatial recollections of quotidian

112    David James experience is a process staged time and again in Cloudless May. The Loire, as we have already seen, channels throughout the narrative the region’s role as the hub of a wider dominion of national solidarity. Yet it is a vision of collective resistance occasionally refracted through individualised forms of sentimentality that undercut the prospect of defiant unity. Magnets for that kind of sentimentalism include Colonel Rienne, who ‘looked forward to the day when he would be retired, to live out the rest of his life there, in that deep obscurity of a province’ (10). A more complex case of this region providing a space of solace rather than sentimentalism surrounds Mme de Freppel, for whom poverty has become a ‘clear image in her mind’ (41), and who finds consolation by ‘los[ing] herself in an image of the Loire, flowing in darkness at the other side of the shutters, in the night of France, offering – to the Atlantic on one side, on the other to the enemy – its valleys and high pastures, its cathedrals, old and new houses, vines, olives, walnuts, its Maginot line of thrift and freedom, and the bodies of its men and children’ (41). For Rienne, too, the countryside consoles at a time of impending peril, since whenever he ‘came back to this village where he was born he felt smaller and less real. The few and narrow streets, the ramparts, the old houses, not many of them so high as the ramparts, claimed back everything he had taken from them to fit himself for the world’ (91). One might be tempted to detect here a straightforwardly nostalgic framing of regional life in a sphere of pastoral restoration, isolated from modernity’s scale of advancement, except for the disturbing and discordant mention of the Maginot line that brings the image of fortification into the scenery of rural fortitude. Indeed, Jameson invites us to make a crucial distinction – as she does elsewhere in comparing the regional mode of H. E. Bates with that ‘faithful interpreter’ of rural Wales, Kate Roberts – a distinction between ‘romantic nostalgia’ and ‘the active presence of the past’.28 In turn, we’re led to observe the difference between ‘a single memory’ that is ‘at once more personalised and more conventional’, and the recollection of a landscape that ‘rests its strength in the heart-memory of its people’.29 Furthermore, the momentary reprieve in Cloudless May afforded by the tranquility of its remembered Loire setting is gradually exposed as just that – a temporary refuge infiltrated by psychic traces of the Great War. Rather than giving solace, such memories ultimately exacerbate the village’s grave suspense, since Rienne’s retrospection is also an anticipation of the onset of renewed conflict: There was a largeness about these May nights. They included easily everything they had to: silence, the warmth of the day, the gentle Angevin valley,

Capturing the Scale of Fiction at Mid-Century    113 the Loire with the Loiret and all her other daughters. For fully a minute Rienne lost his perpetual hidden sense of impatience. During this minute he was able to think without impatience of his idleness – held here, with German tanks ploughing the Somme battlefield. Out of all the nights he had spent on the Somme during the last war he remembered one, one only: a night when he slept soundly and woke to a sunrise of such inhuman beauty that he felt certain of its place in his memory. And forgot it at once until this second, the last, of the minute it took him to turn his back on the Loire and turn towards the barracks. (208)

Jameson praised Kate Roberts for providing ‘only the significant detail’, while at the same time refusing ‘to arrest her explorations and her sensitivity at the shallow level of direct political statement’.30 In the passage quoted above, Jameson realises her own version of this delicate rhetorical poise, shifting scales to pinpoint the details of Rienne’s fleeting yet moving memory of peace amid the horrors of the Somme, though without consigning the ramifications of that recalled moment to politicised commentary. In so doing, she refuses to marshal the implications of Rienne’s recollections for any instrumentally functional end. In the absence of authorial hints from outside the diegetic frame, and with no attempt on the part of Jameson’s spare prose to aestheticise that memorialised ‘sunrise’, the scene resonates on its own unsentimental terms. On a personal scale, the exact import of Rienne’s memory is inconclusive, cherished though it may be. However, on a regional scale – if we ‘draw back far enough to see the whole movement in focus’, as Jameson would advise – a rather different reading can be mobilised. We’re invited, that is, to take the vulnerable emergence of ‘such inhuman beauty’ at the dawn of another day of violence in the Somme and transpose it forward in history, equating that setting with the renewed vulnerability of this beguiling Loire region with its ‘gentle Angevin valley’. But, ultimately, this kind of symbolic reading is simply what the episode motivates, not what it announces, as it alternates scales from shared region to private recollection. Sylvia Vance has argued that in order to ‘explore the nature of Fascism’, Jameson had to confront ‘the necessity of entering as a writer the male-centred text of war’.31 But this imaginative confrontation with such an apparently masculinist realm hardly militated against Jameson practising her own values as a woman writing in response to the afterlives of what, at the time, would have seemed an equally masculine cadre of high modernists – adapting the regional novel precisely in order to reoccupy that ‘text’ of international warfare as her own. Indeed, her critical writings everywhere suggest that she was highly conscious of what it means for a writer to assume a particular identity, including the risks

114    David James entailed in producing art in the service of an appointed agenda. Jameson thought for instance that calling a writer ‘internationally minded’ was a ‘glib phrase’.32 Nowadays modernist scholars might take a different view. As work on modernism’s global production and reception takes the lead over other critical practices, the preference for resituating early twentieth-century innovators within international networks of influence, translation, and appropriation has become the methodological vogue.33 This critical reach beyond national paradigms might not only exemplify a new mode of literary historicism but also, according to social theorists and scholars of migration, reflect contemporary conditions of ordinary lived experience. As political scientist Steffen Mau has suggested, increasingly ‘the social life of each individual is less and less limited to the nation-state territory’ as it now ‘crosses borders and expands spatially, while integration into transnational networks becomes more and more routine’.34 But despite the attractiveness of ‘networks’ for the new modernist studies in its search for alternative interpretive vocabularies, what do we do when we confront novelists who dramatise the extent to which ‘transnationalism’, as Nyla Khan warns, ‘does not necessarily weaken nationalism . . . or a tenacious holding on to origins’?35 As my readings of Jameson have sought to demonstrate, regional fiction approaching mid-century complicates any simple or celebratory move ‘beyond’ the national, compelling us to see instead how writers in an age of late modernism maintained a dual impetus whereby international conflict is refracted by a focus on the particularities of landscapes and regions with discrete social processes. Counter-intuitive though it might seem, then, questions about trans­ nationalism’s failure to dissolve enduring bonds with national origins are actually questions that regional fiction is well equipped to answer. Tensions within communities holding fast to ideals of indigeneity in the face of cultural change often lie at the heart of the genre’s dramatic economy, tensions that often throw into relief different scales of regional consciousness by pitting perceptions of local belonging and insularity against those of transnational accommodation and reciprocity. And beyond the world of the text, such scales of perception provide the condition for important aspects of reception, insofar as ‘regional novels’, as Snell contends, ‘have changed the horizons of readers’ by revising their ‘expectations about the locality or region vis-à-vis a wider area such as the nation state’.36 To demonstrate how these dynamics play out in the hands of a writer who, like Jameson, allows us to re-plot the story of fiction’s formal evolution through – if also at some distance from – late modernism, I want now to consider the work of Sylvia Townsend Warner.

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‘Her principles were so inconsistent that to all intents and purposes she had no principles at all’.37 Such was Warner’s characterisation of the seductive Minna Lemeul in her 1936 historical novel, Summer Will Show. A bisexual Jewish orator orphaned after a Lithuanian pogrom, Minna enters the narrative when the novel switches setting to the failed 1848 revolution in Paris. But in characterising Minna’s inconsistency, Warner could legitimately have been describing her own literary practice, for she was a writer who deliberately exploited modal and thematic variations, building a career across which it is hard to trace any unifying aesthetic. With this logic, she ensured that each new novel was radically different from its predecessor, turning her commitment to self-reinvention to an advantage. Even a cursory glance at her oeuvre leading up to mid-century reveals the startling range of her spatial imagination: one could begin with the Pacific setting of Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927), a homoerotic story of a missionary who travels to the isolated island of Fanua only to lose his faith while falling under the spell of the indigenous youth he first singled out for conversion. Warner then moved to the seemingly Hardyesque, Summer Will Show, which begins on a country estate in Dorset before migrating to the Parisian uprising. Then in 1948, she counters this nomadic sensibility entirely with The Corner that Held Them, a novel that couldn’t be more different to those itinerant earlier works, as Warner chooses a scene of the most severe enclosure by enveloping her reader in the daily routines of a fourteenthcentury nunnery. In addition, then, to transgressing moral conventions through unsentimental narratives of same-sex intimacy and resistance to piety, Warner also challenged the localised, concentrated scale and focus one might expect in regional fiction by leaving provincial southern England for the world-historical events of revolution. Warner might seem, therefore, to be an ideal candidate for capitalising on the ‘transnational turn’ in modernist studies. With her sexually heterodox and spatially mobile fiction, she would appear to be a convenient fit with the critical developments surveyed recently by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio in their volume Locating Transnational Ideals (2010). To the extent that Warner’s oeuvre is chameleonic in its settings, she is undoubtedly amenable to what Goebel and Schabio identify as those ‘forms of contemporary transnational euphoria which . . . see national and ethnic paradigms as easily superseded’.38 But, at the same time, Warner resists easy theoretical appropriation; and, in what follows, I want to raise a number of meta-critical questions about whether or not transnationalism can offer an adequate framework for particularising the scales at which Warner operated. Like Jameson, Warner may well have been working in the modernist era, but she

116    David James cannot be straightforwardly identified as ‘modernist’ either in technique or affiliation. Having acknowledged this, I want to situate Warner at an aesthetic junction for the modern novel where two seemingly incompatible impulses meet. In Summer Will Show, Warner aligns herself with a heritage that leads from Hardy to T. F. Powys, while drawing upon formal devices pioneered by early modernists like Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad. In so doing, she alternates between registers, enabling her to move from episodes of domestic realism to those in which she offers what could be described as Impressionist depictions of Sophia and Minna’s ‘unexpected and immediate sexual attraction to each other’.39 Combining modes, Warner’s work has two broader consequences: firstly, for the way we understand the articulation of political commitments in fiction of the 1930s and ’40s; and secondly, for considering the role that landscapes on a regional scale could perform for writers who were recalibrating the very purpose of formal innovation. Opening in the rural estate of Blandamer, Summer Will Show would initially seem to occupy one of the most idiomatic, not to say iconic, environments for regional fiction: the Dorset countryside. Derivative as it first appears of south Wessex in bloom, though, the land around Blandamer House is dramatically counterpointed by the novel’s heroine: Sophia’s inner restlessness contrasts with her surroundings, as the bucolic charm of her estate is reinflected with the depression she feels at the prospect of maintaining the property alone. We are told that ‘her peculiar freedom, well-incomed, dishusbanded, seemed now only to increase the impotence of her life’ (47), and her despair is only intensified when, after taking her two children to visit a limekiln to cure their whooping-cough, they develop smallpox, contracted from the man tending the kiln. Devastated by their fate, Sophia resolves to go in search of another child, pursuing her husband, Frederick, to Paris with the aim of seducing him once more away from Minna. From relatively early on in the novel, then, Warner conjures circumstances in which Sophia makes a shift between two recognisable character-types and two different eras of fiction. She moves, that is, from being the sort of localised proprietress we might find in a Victorian rural estate novel to become, at least temporarily, a mobile focalising consciousness akin to Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) or to Elizabeth Bowen’s Stella Rodney in The Heat of the Day (1948), who is pictured amid the Blitz as ‘a soul astray’.40 But such affinities with other modernist innovators still deserve qualification. As Gillian Beer points out, one can’t deny the extent to which Warner deliberately ‘abuts the Modernist’, going against the grain of the art-novel as James, Woolf, and Joyce had conceived it.41 But Warner does enable us to tell

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a legitimate story of how writing that combined realist and modernist modes flourished between the wars, retaining elements of the hallmark localism of English regional fiction while offering a scale of commentary that complemented the transnational involvement of writers who, like Warner and her lover Valentine Ackland in 1935, supported the Communist campaign in Spain. As we’ll see, Warner’s response to modernism in Summer Will Show was to demonstrate how the regional novel ‘simultaneously suggests a focus on the geopolitical’, in Susan Stanford Friedman’s terms, ‘and a transcendence of the national while national paradigms and entities clearly remain influential’.42 The idea of events with transnational consequences coinciding with actions that reinvest in national values comes to the fore in Summer Will Show after Warner leaves Dorset behind and zeros in on the figure of Minna through the Parisian streets. However, in the final part of what has, by this point, become a seemingly metropolitan novel, it transpires that Minna has been left a modest farm in provincial Normandy: To Sophia it seemed that a property, however small, however worthless, was a thing to attend to. Its few acres should be walked over with thoughts of crop rotation and manure, its fences examined, its barn ascertained to be rat-proof and rain-proof. ‘If you will do nothing,’ she exclaimed, ‘I shall have to go there myself’. Minna replied by forecasting the pleasures of a first visit together, the wild flowers, the swallows building their nests, young lambs, wild strawberries, etc. While she was in this frame of mind the visit might as well be postponed. A few injudicious warblings on the beauties of nature to a tenant-farmer might set back the rent for a quarter. So she held her tongue for another few days, or only used it to supply assents to Minna’s fancy sketches of lambs bounding in the hayfield. When next she gave herself to the serious duty of looking after one’s property, she got the answer, ‘I wonder if I need go yet. You see, I have talked about it so much, that if we were to go there and find everything as dreadful as you say it will be, pigs dying and the roof falling in, it would be more than I could bear. Perhaps it would be better never to go there at all, but just to take the rent and keep it as a beautiful dream’. (279)

For Sophia, the idea of a smallholding not only ignites memories of that mix of affection and trauma that characterised her attachment to rural Blandamer. It also draws into view the more immediate prospect of a regional retreat to which she and Minna might escape the violence of the barricades. Sophia knows better than to imagine provincial life in pastoral terms, but she invokes bucolic tropes nonetheless, notating and recycling them in spite of her memories of struggling with the solitary upkeep of the Blandamer estate. For a time, to Sophia this ‘property had seemed . . . the way to safety’, and she henceforth tries ‘to encourage

118    David James Minna’s peculiar views on country life and to repress her own’ (284). The free-indirect style here reproduces Sophia’s reported speech in the form of reflections on how fabricated those ‘peculiar views’ actually are. Warner reveals how Sophia thus knowingly flaunts pastoral in its most traditional sense, that is, as a mode for conveying the picture of agrarian recuperation in a place far and away from urban strife: ‘Yes, there would be lambs bounding in the hayfields, nightingales singing in a greengage tree, a vine-shaded dairy, sheets coarse but lavendered, a gnatless willow bower by a brook. Yes, there would be beehives, and nothing is easier than taking the honey. Everything would be as in Minna’s childhood, only cleaner, greener, more fertile’ (284). The recurring affirmative (‘yes’) in the third and fourth sentences could either be a marker of self-reassurance on Sophia’s part, or else it could betray her irritation with having repeatedly to assure Minna that the farm will live up to every bucolic promise. Either way, Sophia is taking as much effort to convince herself as she is to persuade Minna to withdraw from the revolutionary frontline, for she knows that the pastoral snapshots she offers here of liberating seclusion and self-sufficiency are chimerical. By rendering regionalism as a series of idyllic abstractions, Sophia ensures that this prospect of a rural future with Minna appears even more elusive, all the more unachievable for being so idealised. Warner focalises this scene, then, in a manner that alerts us to the way Sophia knows all too well that she is romanticising the provinces and thereby making them unviable. In so doing, she moves into the territory of what Raymond Williams calls the counter-pastoral mode, a subgenre that stages, in his idiomatic terms, how ‘the observer’s position in and towards’ the possibility of ‘the community being known’ becomes especially apparent.43 By developing Sophia’s position as that observer – and a self-conscious observer at that – Warner highlights a series of comparisons between regions that Sophia either idealises or else disavows. Summer Will Show thereby saliently reminds us of the fact that ‘[a]t times, regional fiction might be said to have fulfilled an eclectic role as comparative and self-assessing dialogue between regions’.44 As the mediator of such a dialogue, Sophia finds herself in a revolutionary conflict zone from which a form of escape can be imagined only if she reinvests in a vision of provincial refuge whose sentimentality she temporarily ignores. It is in this respect that Summer Will Show offers a prescient example of what Rebecca Walkowitz has recently termed ‘comparison literature’. As Walkowitz describes, in this kind of writing, ‘[c]omparison functions’ as one of the ‘novel’s abiding ethical concerns: the text asks

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whether transnational enlargement in fact enhances – or ultimately thwarts – our capacity for social responsibility and political agency’.45 In Warner’s scheme, of course, the consequence of that ‘enlargement’ is primarily erotic rather than ethical, as this is a novel concerned less with the new social responsibilities borne by transnational encounters than with its heroine’s radical new capacity for sexual agency, a romance that counters or at least diverts Sophia’s obligation to conceive another child by her estranged husband. Pertinent though the novel is to such methodological advances and to the ongoing process of enriching the very notion of ‘regional modernism’, the novel’s wider politico-aesthetic significance is only beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Heather Love, for instance, has argued that ‘Warner’s attention in this book to dissident sexuality and to the fate of social outsiders more generally make the book an important contribution to the literature of sapphic modernity’.46 Moreover, the novel sheds light on the somewhat ‘dark effects that fuel social change’, offering a ‘narration of failed revolution’, just as Sophia has to concede that the prospect of Minna’s inherited farm is ultimately a failed version of pastoral sanctuary.47 In order to refract this comparison, through Sophia’s consciousness, Warner employs the kind of perspectival focalisation which we might expect from an Impressionist like Conrad or Woolf, registering the longing from Sophia’s perspective for a more intimate scale of self-subsistence in a rural haven with Minna. On a literal level, Warner thus adapts the regional novel as a vehicle for what Love calls the ‘unfulfilled desires’ left by the uprisings of 1848. On a more symbolic level, Warner has Sophia look back, as it were, at the provinces from the polis. It’s a gesture on Sophia’s part that’s not so much nostalgic as it is knowingly aware of the futility of idealising rural landscapes as the domain of a viable future for same-sex love.48 Resigned as this may sound, Warner in fact ‘suggests this impossibility as a resource’, as the novel provides ‘a model for an alternative form of political feeling’ – what Love terms ‘a nonutopian form of expectancy: a kind of hope without reason, without expectation of success’.49 Warner holds as complex an affiliation as Jameson with the pinnacles of modernist experimentalism, the formidable legacy of which both writers negotiated in the years approaching mid-century. Yet the fact that they do so nimbly evade categorisation furthers our understanding of what happened to regional fiction in the phase we call, however inelegantly and imperfectly, late modernism. ‘Literary histories’, as Kristen Silva Gruesz has noted, ‘whether assembled around national or ethnic communities, are always implicitly if not explicitly reflections of the most pressing needs and exigencies of the time in which they

120    David James are written, and in that sense interventionist’.50 Significantly different though their fictions were in register and in political impetus, taken together Warner and Jameson nonetheless invite us to consider how we might articulate more precisely such an ‘interventionist’ history on behalf of regional modernist literature. While modernist studies has fostered the transnational turn as one of its own ‘most pressing needs’, we should continue to test and refine that framework when engaging with regional writers who, after being recovered from relative neglect, might now suffer the ironic fate of becoming consigned to the margins of critical interest once more as the new modernist studies goes global. Indeed, as Dominic Head reminds us, when reflecting on the shifting reputation of H. E. Bates, the process of re-evaluating regional late modernism has to confront a ‘perennial problem with literary history’, which ‘is that it emphasizes change, drawing chronological lines in the sand that may be preliminary signposts, merely, requiring complication and enrichment, so that the way the history is manufactured is constantly under review’. A revisionary ethos may seem all the more urgent, therefore, when the grounds for intellectual investment in a field like modernist studies are often still contingent upon the degree to which the artwork in question challenges convention through experiment. ‘Where there are literary movements’, concludes Head, ‘that seem to generate their own contemporaneous mythology of newness this cautionary principle is especially apposite’.51 By putting modernism’s relationship to regional fiction perpetually under review in this way, we have an opportunity to move the conversation well beyond received views of distinctions between the supposedly inclusive, cosmopolitan scale of metropolitan innovators and the localised scale of provincial traditionalists. Such distinctions are easy to reinforce, of course, however inadvertently; but fortunately, they can be quickly dissolved with the help of writers such as Jameson and Warner, writers who should inspire us to tell new literary-historical stories about the geographies of novelistic experiment – unlikely though the provinces may seem as a site and source for modernism’s late flourishing. Granted, regional writing approaching mid-century is not usually accompanied by a ‘mythology of newness’ of the kind we associate with contemporaneous avant-gardes. Whichever way we choose to align them with more recognised trailblazers, novelists like Warner and Jameson will never seem as iconic; yet they were no less audacious, setting new benchmarks for what fiction could politically do. To speak critically rather than simply recuperatively about their contribution, at a time when modernist studies is globalising its analytical energies, is the real challenge. For in the course of doing so, we are compelled to ponder precisely how we

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go about attaching value to regional writing in the course of reshaping modernism from the margins.

Notes  1. Storm Jameson, ‘The writer’s situation’, in The Writer’s Situation and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1950), pp. 19–20.   2. Jon Hegglund, World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 6.   3. Hegglund, p. 6.   4. For an account of how ‘the phosphorescence of decay had illuminated the passageway to an emergence of innovative writing after modernism’, see Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 7.   5. K. D. M. Snell, ‘The regional novel: Themes for interdisciplinary research’, in The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1880–1990 ed. K. D. M. Snell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 47.  6. Jennifer Birkett, Margaret Storm Jameson: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 3.  7. Recent exceptions to this critical situation where Jameson and Warner are concerned include: Maroula Joannou, Women’s Writing, Englishness, and National and Cultural Identity: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant Voice, 1938–1962 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012); Jennifer Birkett and Chiara Briganti (eds), Storm Jameson: Writing in Dialogue (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007); David James, ‘Realism, late modernist abstraction, and Sylvia Townsend Warner’s fictions of impersonality’, Modernism/Modernity 12: 1 (January 2005), 111–31; Jacqueline Shin, ‘Lolly Willows and the Arts of Dispossession’, Modernism/Modernity 16: 4 (November 2009), 709–25; and Heather K. Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 129–45.  8. Phyllis Bentley, The English Regional Novel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1941), p. 14.   9. Bentley, pp. 13–14. 10. Leo Mellor, Reading the Ruins: Modernism, Bombsites and British Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 12. 11. Storm Jameson, ‘The form of the novel’, in The Writer’s Situation and Other Essays, p. 54. 12. Bentley, The English Regional Novel, pp. 41–2. 13. Bentley, p. 42. 14. Storm Jameson, Cloudless May (London: Macmillan, 1943), p. 27. All further references to this edition are given parenthetically in the text. 15. Birkett, Margaret Storm Jameson, p. 2. 16. Birkett, p. 214. 17. Storm Jameson, The Novel in Contemporary Life (Boston: The Writer, Inc., 1938), p. 7. 18. Jameson, The Novel in Contemporary Life, pp. 8, 9. 19. Jameson, The Novel in Contemporary Life, p. 20.

122    David James 20. Henry James, ‘The art of fiction’, in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 53. 21. Jameson, The Novel in Contemporary Life, p. 17. 22. Jameson, ‘The form of the novel’, p. 39. 23. James, ‘The art of fiction’, p. 50. 24. Jameson, ‘The form of the novel’, p. 54. 25. Jameson, ‘The form of the novel’, p. 40. 26. Birkett, Margaret Storm Jameson, p. 285. 27. Birkett, pp. 285, 287. 28. Storm Jameson, ‘A Welsh writer’ (1945), in The Writer’s Situation, p. 110. 29. Jameson, ‘A Welsh writer’, pp. 112, 111. 30. Jameson, ‘A Welsh writer’, pp. 106, 110. 31. Sylvia Vance, ‘Lorca’s mantle: The rise of fascism and the work of Storm Jameson’, in Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History ed. Maroula Joannou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 131. 32. Storm Jameson, ‘Writing in the margin: 1939’, in The Writer’s Situation, p. 119. 33. For a metacritical meditation on these matters, see Susan Stanford Friedman’s ‘Planetarity: Musing modernist studies’, Modernism/Modernity, 17: 3 (September 2010), 471–99. For more historically grounded examples of modernist scholarship informed by the transnational turn, see: Gayle Rogers, Modernism and the New Spain: Britain, Cosmopolitan Europe, and Literary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); and Matthew Hart, Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 34. Steffen Mau, Social Transnationalism: Lifeworlds Beyond the Nation-State (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 23. 35. Nyla Ali Khan, The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 14–15. 36. Snell, ‘The regional novel’, p. 42. 37. Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show (New York: NYRB, 2011), p. 237. All further references to this edition will be given parenthetically in the text. 38. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio, ‘Introduction’, in Locating Transnational Ideals ed. Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio (London: Routledge, 2010), p. 2. 39. Claire Harman, ‘Introduction’, in Warner, Summer Will Show, p. x. 40. Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 248. 41. Gillian Beer, ‘Sylvia Townsend Warner: “The Centrifugal Kick”  ’, in Women Writers of the 1930s, ed. Maroula Joannou, p. 77. 42. Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Towards a transnational turn in narrative theory: Literary narratives, traveling tropes, and the case of Virginia Woolf and Tagore’, Narrative 19: 1 (January 2011), 1–32 (24, n. 4). 43. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 165. 44. Snell, ‘The regional novel’, p. 47.

Capturing the Scale of Fiction at Mid-Century    123 45. Rebecca Walkowitz, ‘Comparison literature’, New Literary History 40: 3 (2009), 567–82 (568). 46. Heather K. Love, ‘Impossible objects: Waiting for the revolution in Summer Will Show’, in Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture ed. Laura Doan and Jane Garrity (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), p. 134. 47. Love, ‘Impossible Objects’, p. 136. 48. Love, p. 141. 49. Love, p. 143. 50. Kristen Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 209. 51. Dominic Head, ‘H. E. Bates, regionalism and late modernism’, in The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction ed. David James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 41.

Chapter 6

Regionalism and Modernity: The Case of Leo Walmsley Dominic Head

Some notable recent re-evaluations of English modernism have placed stress, not on the cosmopolitan and international aspects of high modernist expression, but on a surprising turn towards England – and ideas of Englishness – in late modernism. This line of argument, in which Jed Esty’s A Shrinking Island (2004) is a key landmark, was developed in a more popular format by Alexandra Harris in Romantic Moderns (2010), in a discussion which links literary trends with developments in the visual arts, giving the revisionist dynamic a purchase beyond academic publishing.1 In their discussions of literature, Esty and Harris detect a new emphasis on place and region in the later writing of major modernist figures such as Woolf, Eliot, and Forster. Other critics have investigated the credentials of writers whose work signals an overlap between modernism and regionalism, such as Mary Butts, Margaret Storm Jameson, and Sylvia Townsend Warner.2 But this begs a question concerning the regional writing – and especially the rural regional writing – that burgeoned in the 1920s and 1930s, and which has usually been seen as quite other to the directions taken by literary modernism: conventional in style and subject matter, and often conservative politically, where modernism is innovative, surprising, and politically radical (one way or another). This essay seeks to blur the line a little more through an analysis of a truly regional writer, Leo Walmsley (1892–1966). The son of a painter, and exposed to the avant-garde art world in his early days as a writer (he and his wife shared a house with Barbara Hepworth), Walmsley returned to the village of his youth, Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire (which he fictionalises as ‘Bramblewick’) to write his best-known works, Three Fevers (1932), Phantom Lobster (1933), and Foreigners (1935).3 These books about an isolated fishing community, in the last days of smallscale inshore fishing, would seem to epitomise the backward-looking

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and traditional focus usually associated (sometimes correctly) with the regional novel of the 1930s. That apparent contribution to a conventional strand of English heritage might seem to be confirmed by other aspects of Walmsley’s later career (as a writer of guide books).4 Yet, the Bramblewick books are more interesting than this suggests because they enact Walmsley’s own version of the ‘primitivism’ he had heard about (with some scepticism) from the avant-garde artists of his day.5 His work reveals an intriguing fusion of modernity and regionalism. The impetus of this essay, which is drawn from a larger workin-progress, follows a similar direction to David Matless’s work on landscape, specifically his argument that twentieth-century ‘ruralism’ is part of a ‘heterogeneous’ cultural field, even when it seems to invoke the ‘rural idyll’.6 Making a parallel revisionist argument in the field of twentieth-century literary history, however, involves overturning many shibboleths and preconceptions. The central difficulty in making such a claim is that it appears to contradict received wisdom about inter-war literary history; yet, what I am trying to do is expose the risk that potentially significant writers might be lumped together with mediocre writers working in a similar idiom. As a consequence, they might be condemned by the perceived marginality of the rural novel, when it is regarded as a footnote in early twentieth-century literary history, a body of work that illuminates the period rather than contributing anything new or significant to the development of the novel. The process of separating the wheat from the chaff is still more complicated because individual rural regional writers – and this true of Leo Walmsley – often produce more formulaic books in amongst the more formally challenging ones discussed below. The problem of literary–historical perception is exemplified in an important survey of rural fiction by Glen Cavaliero, who characterises his chosen novelists as ‘representative of their time’, which makes them, in a back-handed compliment, ‘even more valuable to historians than are greater artists, who are usually ahead of it’.7 More usually, not being ahead of their time, rural writers are perceived to be behind it, steeped in nostalgia for a way of life irretrievably passed. Responding to this apparently obvious fact of literary history, critics have tended to look increasingly to urban environments in their discussion of regionalism in British fiction since the Second World War. Indeed, K. D. M. Snell’s persuasive case for the continuity of the regional novel depends upon this inclusive definition.8 Walmsley is one of very many inter-war writers whose novels are rural in their orientation. These ‘rural’ novels are sometimes focused on farming, or rural labour; but I include in this definition works set

126    Dominic Head in villages or provincial market towns. However, it is a definition that excludes the move towards urban experience that is conventionally taken to dominate mainstream canonical twentieth-century fiction. The imagination of rural novelists often seems to be sparked by an escape from the metropolis (as in the case of Adrian Bell), or in an escape from the present (as in the work of H. E. Bates) to a greener past. The sense of nostalgia that inevitably accompanies this kind of sensibility raises a significant problem, since the nostalgic impulse sits unhappily with the normative model of literary history, in which development is usually determined by the demarcation between the old and the new. The central difficulty here is not (or not just) that the expression of nostalgia in the treatment of rural themes in the twentieth century can be seen as a form of lament for a way of life that has now passed. The real (and associated) stumbling block for the literary historian is that such nostalgia might also embody a lament for the loss of creative possibilities for this literary form, now seen as artistically redundant. Nostalgia is not necessarily a retrograde or backward-looking phenomenon, however. It can be a self-conscious tool used to treat the implications of social and historical change. This brings rural writing into the frame of discussion of the new modernist studies, to which I have alluded, where a turn towards England has been identified in late modernism. Alexandra Harris’s romantic modern movement, for example, is characterised as ‘a response to the fiercely experimental ethos of high modernism’, conducted through a ‘turn towards home’. Appropriately, the impetus is seen in political context, so that when war comes ‘the imaginative claiming of England took on more urgency’, and this is a decisive factor in the shift Harris detects in late Woolf and Eliot. In Between the Acts (1941), for example, she finds an emphasis on ‘a common place and inheritance’.9 In her concluding chapter, Harris gives due acknowledgement of Jed Esty’s important work A Shrinking Island, which had offered an earlier, and increasingly influential revisionist account of late English modernism, based on an ‘Anglocentric turn’ in late Eliot, Woolf, and Forster.10 The rural fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, already engaged in an Anglocentric turn of its own, suggests an anticipation of the late modernism descried by Harris and Esty. But is the connection more than superficial? In fact, as we have seen in Chapter 5, David James has already uncovered a significant strand of ‘regional late modernism’ in selected novels by Sylvia Townsend Warner and Margaret Storm Jameson, something he has also identified in the work of Rosamund Lehmann.11 If we delve deeper into the obscurities of rural regional writing, are there tendencies that might be usefully considered alongside

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the Anglocentric turn detected by Harris and Esty, and the attunement to local spaces that James has found in late modernism? One of the most significant connections between modernism and rurality emerges through a consideration of nostalgia in its most extreme form, and the manner in which it generates a form of primitive consciousness: that is, in the words of Michael Bell in his pioneering survey of primitivism in modernist literature, ‘the nostalgia of civilized man for a return to a primitive or pre-civilized condition’.12 Predictably enough, the idea of a more elemental or primitive existence recurs in twentieth-century rural fiction. This is an integral feature of the urban– rural opposition that underpins this literary mode, whether or not it is treated explicitly. Yet the rural writers’ apparently distanced evocation of the primitive contrasts with more thorough artistic assimilations of primitive ideas. In modernist art, primitivism can be deployed in such a way as to stage a radical investigation of artistic form and expression, and this is not usually the case with rural writers. However, it may be incorrect always to view their appeal to the primitive as a less intense – and quite separate – phenomenon. The distinction may be explained by different degrees of assimilation. Bell points out that the ‘modern primitivism’ of Conrad or Lawrence ‘differs crucially from [. . .] earlier manifestations’, and he includes here ‘the traditional dichotomies between art and nature or town and country’.13 That last dichotomy is a persisting presence in rural regional fiction, however much it is subjected to a revisionist handling. And yet the chief characteristics of modernist primitivism, in Bell’s anatomy of it, are detectable in much rural writing. ‘Natural piety’, ‘primitive animism’, and ‘ritual’ are the key elements of the primitive sensibility identified by Bell, all of which are present in some measure in the more significant inter-war rural writers. Ritual is the easiest to illustrate, especially the many evocations of the profound and elemental satisfactions of ploughing the land – for instance in the work of Henry Williamson and Adrian Bell – evocations which are sometimes written against pastoral conventions. Williamson and Bell both became farmers, so the suggestion of ritualism carries a particular badge of authenticity.14 Michael Bell concludes his survey with a reflection on how ‘the problems of primitivism change and endure’; and a particularly pointed aspect of this reflection, which puts his version of modernist primitivism into a clearly located historical past – before the end of empire – is the naive, and implicitly condescending projection of a redeeming primitivism onto those designated as ‘other’ to the modernist eye. In such instances, where the primitive impulse is detected in those of other nationalities, or even other classes, rather than in a putative ancient

128    Dominic Head tradition, the problem of condescension is manifest. This problem is most apparent, perhaps, in the example of the modernist painter finding something picturesque in the primitive life of the fisherman.15 The hint of modernist imperialism brings me back to Jed Esty, and his challenge to the idea that the end of empire brings with it a straightforward decline in English literature; or, more precisely, ‘the putative death of English modernism (understood as the last major phase of English literature)’. With specific reference to late works by Eliot, Woolf, and Forster, he detects ‘indirect and mediated representations of imperial contraction in the form of an “anthropological turn” ’.16 Following Perry Anderson, Esty finds a lacuna in imperial modernism, when ‘the anthropological visibility and wholeness of tribal societies in the colonial periphery drew attention away from comprehensive sociological knowledge of England itself’. Esty argues that ‘if the metaphor of lost totality is one of the central deep structures of imperialism and modernism, it follows that the end of empire might be taken to augur a basic repair or reintegration of English culture itself’, a process distinguished by ‘Anglocentric representations of meaningful time and bounded space’.17 Again, this Anglocentric and anthropological turn is often anticipated in the rural regional novel of the 1920s and 1930s, where the problem of condescension inherent in modernist primitivism is also ameliorated. Where writers sought to immerse themselves in their subject – some of them even becoming farmers, as I have observed, and often in the face of local prejudice – a different order of primitivism is apparent. The honorific treatment of country people is less problematic (or problematic in other ways) where there is this desire for the integration of self and other. A further effect of this inward turn is to complicate another piece of received wisdom, the notion that ‘pastoral nostalgia was a crucial element within imperialist rhetoric’.18 In the alternative dynamic implied here, the refiguring of nostalgia in rural writing – for example through the cult of the primitive – paves the way for the deurbanisation of Esty’s late modernism, and the associated reinvigoration of ‘national integrity restored by imperial contraction’.19 Or, perhaps, the self-conscious rural tradition merges with the late modernism it anticipates. The discussion of Leo Walmsley which follows is a preliminary investigation of this idea. It is also a partial illustration of Alastair Bonnett’s argument that a certain kind of nostalgia is ‘produced within modernity’ in response to ‘sudden and massive social change’. In Bonnett’s account, the development of primitivism in modernist art is the clearest indication of how looking backwards bespeaks ‘a desire to rebel against civilization

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and celebrate the non-bourgeois and the primal’. Avant-garde nostalgia, in this light, emerges as a form of ‘cultural transgression’ with radical potential, and so cannot be understood as ‘looking backwards’ in any simple sense.20 Leo Walmsley’s most significant regional works are not avant-garde in the unequivocal manner implied here; yet they encroach upon the same territory where their ambivalent nostalgia frames a debate about the impact of modernity on regional identity. Leo Walmsley’s work is not much discussed in academic criticism. He was, however, mentioned in passing by Phyllis Bentley, in her pioneering study of the English regional novel as one of her selected exponents of regional fiction in the 1930s, for those novels in which ‘the life of North Riding fishermen is vigorously presented’.21 In itself this is sufficient provocation for a closer investigation, especially in the light of the importance assigned by Bentley to the treatment of the labouring life in regional fiction at a time of great economic depression. Walmsley is celebrated without the academy: there is a Walmsley Society, dedicated to his writing, and to the work of his father – the painter J. Ulric Walmsley.22 The activities of a society contribute to the work of literary heritage, of course, and it is worth considering Walmsley’s significance in this connection. It may be that Walmsley is an obscure figure in the realm of literary heritage, certainly in comparison with the better-known regional writers; yet, there is a connection here to pursue. Walmsley’s breakthrough regional novel, Three Fevers (1932), was filmed as Turn of the Tide and released in 1935.23 The film is ostensibly about the rivalry of two fishing families, drawing on Walmsley’s first three books; but it is also about the demise of inshore fishing out of Robin Hood’s Bay and the migration of fishing to nearby Whitby, with larger vessels and bigger catches. Although it is presented as a successful resolution of the rivalry between the two families, the film records the way in which external forces made the self-contained village economy unsustainable. Walmsley’s account of the scenes filmed on location is emblematic, in miniature, of modernity’s disruption of the local: the actual fishermen described in his books were the ones filmed in the dangerous fishing scenes. In this way, they participated in the process by which their livelihoods were recorded as part of North Yorkshire past heritage.24 It should be acknowledged that the trends that created the tourist village that Robin Hood’s Bay has become were well established when Walmsley was writing about it in the 1930s; in turn, the film version of Turn of the Tide accelerated that trend. We should also highlight Walmsley’s own role in the popularising of the Bay and the region. Indeed, in many ways he epitomises that perennial

130    Dominic Head paradox of the regional writer, celebrating a particular place and yet acting as the agent of modernity and change as he does so. Although he made himself an ‘insider’ for several years, becoming a fisherman, Walmsley was perceived as an outsider, not fully a part of life in Robin Hood’s Bay, and this conditions his writing about ‘Bramblewick’ – as he called the Bay – and the quality of the narrative engagement with it in his fiction. His kind of separation is of a different kind to the reflective withdrawal sometimes discernible in the self-­conscious literary treatment of the rural. As outsiders in the extraordinarily insular community of Robin Hood’s Bay, he and his family were treated as ‘foreigners’, an experience vividly recreated in his novel bearing that title. (It should be pointed out that the fishermen with whom Walmsley identified most strongly were also perceived as foreigners, even though they had been working out of the Bay for many years, having moved from Bridlington.)25 The boys who dispense the brutality in Foreigners are the sons of fishermen and sailors. This makes the outsider status of the boy narrator, the Walmsley figure, intriguingly complex, as he is drawn to the life lived by those who persecute him. This paradox colours all of Walmsley’s Bramblewick writing, to a greater or lesser degree, intensifying the effect of the literary perspective on the romanticised rural existence. In fact, in Walmsley’s work this Edenic effect – the sense of perpetual banishment from the desired place – creates a unique intensity. The important influences of his youth, however, stem from his experiences in and around Robin Hood’s Bay: his passion for the coastline, for fishing, and for fossil collecting. This last passion developed into a keen interest in geology. His first publication, building on his early enthusiasm for local geology, was A Guide to the Geology of the Whitby District (1914), printed by the owners of The Whitby Gazette.26 His autobiography, So Many Loves (1944), recounts his early discovery of Charles Darwin, whose Voyage of the Beagle (1839) came into his hands despite the religious censorship of his mother and the local librarian: the title suggested another adventure novel. In his Bramblewick books, Walmsley records the extent of a strict religious environment, both in the town and at home.27 This discovery of Darwin may be historically ‘after the event’, but there is still something notable about Walmsley’s independent (and rapid) progression to an intellectual position of secular modernity, thus catapulting himself out of a nineteenth-century mindset. And it was the intense identification with this particular place, especially its geology and marine life, that pushed him towards progressive rather than reactionary thought. Walmsley’s sense of belonging generated a rejection of insularity

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rather than a cultivation of it. Indeed, there is a logic of extrapolation in his work, by which his stock of Bramblewick memories imply wider resonances. The process of extrapolation is significant and long term. Walmsley was nearly forty when his first Bramblewick book, Three Fevers, appeared, and there are many formative experiences that are relevant here.28 The phase of Walmsley’s life immediately after the First World War is especially intriguing in the process of locating him, culturally and intellectually. The effect of his first marriage on his selfperception as a writer is vividly conveyed in So Many Loves. He and his first wife Suzanne were close friends of Barbara Hepworth (whom Walmsley had previously encountered in Robin Hood’s Bay when she was a schoolgirl). They were on the fringe of the artistic circle which included Henry Moore, and in his recollections of these times Walmsley records a strong sense of scepticism about the avant-garde: With Harry [as Henry Moore was then called] as with most of the other students I felt out of my depth. They were very modern, which is to say very primitive. Their discussions were about ‘cave’ drawings, and ‘bush’ and Chinese and Thibetan and Egyptian and Assyrian and Aztec [. . .] art.29

Walmsley’s account of modernist primitivism embodies a refusal of the intellectualising of art: I could admire the technical skill of Moore’s sculpture, but it was hard to follow either his or Barbara’s critical explanation of it, but that probably was because visual art cannot be explained in words. [. . .] And yet I sometimes wondered if they were as good as they sincerely thought themselves to be.30

Walmsley’s scepticism is a reaction to the way in which this generation of young artists displays an obsessive ‘contempt for the [Royal] Academy tradition of art’. This opinion is advanced within a familiar layman’s bewilderment about artistic form and value: these artists could all ‘make amazingly accurate and life-like sculptures and drawings’, but they were after something else in their finished pieces.31 The example Walmsley considers from Hepworth’s work is her sculpture of a pair of doves. Where her drawing of the same subject reveals photographic detail, the doves in the sculpture ‘were eyeless, feetless, and had neither visible bills, nor individual feathers’.32 Grappling with Hepworth’s explanation that the sculpture has ‘significant form’, Walmsley reports his concern about the possible disjuncture between ‘inspiration’ and ‘observation’ in the work of Hepworth and her peers: ‘in their obsession for originality were these artists not, subconsciously at least, deriving from and even copying the primitive? I did not know’.33

132    Dominic Head At this stage in his writing career, Walmsley was having some success as a writer of ‘nature’ stories published by the Red Magazine, with animals as the protagonists. Yet his acquaintance with some of the avant-garde artists of the time, and his exposure to their reflections on art, gave him grave self-doubts about his own endeavour, going by the way this phase is presented in the autobiography: ‘whatever else I felt about Barbara and her friends I knew that their work was art and that they were real artists and that I was not, but only a writer of potboilers’.34 Despite Walmsley’s reservations about contemporary sculpture, the autobiography also registers this sense of his inadequacy as a writer, unable to match the growing artistic achievements of Skeaping and Hepworth. Economic recession brought a significant downturn in Walmsley’s fortunes: a general depression in the publishing world would make it difficult for him to carry on with the kind of freelance writing that had been generating an income. In January 1928, the Skeapings decided that they would move to Florence, and Suzanne went with them, signalling the end of the Walmsleys’ marriage. Shortly afterwards Walmsley was to return alone to Robin Hood’s Bay.35 This concatenation of events, abruptly reported in So Many Loves, underscores the contingent forces that were to bring Walmsley to the point of his individual regional creativity: the developing economic slump, the end of his first marriage, his ambivalence about avant-garde art (and especially modernist primitivism), and his dissatisfaction with his writing achievements to date.36 Given his later achievements, it is not hard to see why Walmsley should have been so dissatisfied with his output as a fiction writer prior to his return to Robin Hood’s Bay in 1928. He had produced a variety of undistinguished fiction, including work that we might consider to be politically naive in its embrace of colonial adventure.37 His exposure to the avant-garde art world, suspicious though he was of much of the talk of artistic form, had nevertheless created in him a sense of dissatisfaction with his own creativity to date, and planted in his mind the seed of a richer idea about the primitive. With his wartime experiences to feed on – granting him a degree of cross-cultural insight as yet not fully ­developed – he was ready for a new phase of creativity.38 Although he did not write another book until he had left Robin Hood’s Bay and settled in Cornwall in January 1931, the three years he spent in his childhood village supplied him with the substance he needed for his first major creative phase of writing. Phantom Lobster was the second of Walmsley’s Bramblewick books to be published, but it is the best place to start an analysis of these works. This autobiographical book – which Walmsley thought not a

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novel, but which has enough fictional rendering to qualify as one – is about the return of an aspiring writer to the fishing village that was his boyhood home, and where he had been treated as an outsider. It is the story of this ‘Walmsley’ and his quest for inspiration in this locale for a novel. Central to the dynamic of the book is the way in which his writing ambitions are temporarily displaced by his thorough involvement in the life of the Lunns, the fishermen also considered ‘foreigners’ in the village. In Phantom Lobster it is ‘the peculiar attitude of Bramblewick to strangers’ that is presented as the ‘vague growing point’ for the design of the novel Walmsley is planning, especially where the difficulty of subsistence demands co-operation (18). It is, however, the concern with a quest, or the pursuit of a ‘phantom’ or ‘fever’ – to the point of obsession – that generates the narrative drive in both Phantom Lobster and the earlier Three Fevers. And it is the driven quest which bridges the gulf between the author-narrator’s desire and the needs of the people he describes. The central obsession in Phantom Lobster is the protagonist’s determination to invent and put into production a collapsible steel lobster pot. Much of the book is taken up with the narrator’s development and testing of the prototype collapsible pot, and then with the pursuit of financial backing, a project that consumed Walmsley himself for nearly two years. Walmsley presents the eventual failure of the pot as due to the absence of financial backing for putting the pot into production, a failure that coincides with ‘the great depression’ (281). However, it seems probable that ‘the folding pot was not patentable’ – since neither the traditional pot on which it was based nor the hinge that comprised the variation were new inventions – and that this would have been ‘a major element in the failure to find a financial backer’.39 In Phantom Lobster, however, the episode of the failed invention emerges not as a failure, but as a period of growth and development for the author-narrator. The essential contradiction of what he is trying to achieve is registered with self-condemning irony. This is especially apparent when Walmsley’s narrator conceives himself as the saviour of ‘the moribund inshore fishing industry’, since his invention would bring prosperity back to the region, generating new industries to cope with the increased catches. (He imagines new and resurgent industries, in boat building, pot making, and lobster canning.) The further irony, of course, is that it is the development of deep-sea trawling, another ‘new and intensive method of fishing’, that is bringing about the demise of inshore fishing by generating economies of scale (120). Walmsley’s account of his experiences in Birmingham, on one of his fact-finding trips, is revealing about his attitude to the kind of industrial

134    Dominic Head modernity he would be endorsing by putting his lobster pot into fullscale production. Inside a machine factory he is astounded by the ‘devilish din’ which is ‘so intense that it actually hurt one’s ears, like heavy gun-fire’ (170). He is ‘dazed’ and ‘bewildered’ by this ‘nightmare world’: I felt that the only living things in the room were the machines. . . . There was rhythm and beauty in their lean moving pistons which glistened with oily sweat like the limbs of a straining athlete. But the women who served them were like corpses partly revived by some drug which kept their tissue fresh and gave them the power of conscious thought, or speech or hearing; insensible to pain, incapable of emotion. It was at once horrifying and fascinating. (171)

This vivid impression of industrial alienation, however, instantly gives way to a utilitarian reflection: ‘[H]ere was mass production! This, I had long ago conceived was how my pot should be made. [. . .] The whole thing could be made in a matter of minutes!’ (171) The juxtaposition of impressions signals another instance of self-ironising, the horror of the factory displaced by the single-minded pursuit of the goal. Ultimately, the reader is invited to sense the tension between the industrialisation of fishing and the true object of Walmsley’s fascination: the romanticised lot of the inshore fisherman. The explicit industrial theme is the catalyst, finally forgotten as the other elements are brought into a new conjunction. The narrator’s avowed intention at the outset, to gather the materials for the novel that would be published as Three Fevers, becomes the true focus. The narrator reminds us of the literary project at the end of Phantom Lobster, when the dream of success with the patented lobster pot is exposed as a phantom. Returning to Bramblewick to tell the Lunns of his failed mission to secure funding for the pot, he reports a moment of revelation when he sees one of the collapsible pots ‘improved’ by Marney Lunn according to their traditional methods, with the addition of side sticks, so that it will no longer fold: ‘I glanced at the pot to Henry and Marney Lunn, faithful despite all their protests of being up to date, to their old gear, to their old gods’. The incipient creative revelation follows: And in that moment it seemed that I realized the true splendour of these men whose destinies I had attempted to guide and control. I felt a deep humiliation: and at the same time there stirred in me the first movement of a new creative ecstasy . . . God – if I could only convey some of this splendour in writing. (287)

In this book of self-checking irony it is to be expected that the new enthusiasm will also be instantly undercut: ‘A book! A new phantom!’

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(288) Yet what is really being presented is a phase of life that made Three Fevers possible, through a genuine appreciation in adulthood of the life of the Lunns, and their daily toil, rather than a simple retreat into the past for inspiration.40 That is what the return to Bramblewick facilitates, as dramatised here. It is also worth noting that the ‘new phantom’ (Three Fevers) is actually published before Phantom Lobster appears, so that the self-ironising, however true to the moment of revelation, has no ultimate validity. Where Phantom Lobster is the working-through of an authorial dilemma, Three Fevers, Walmsley’s breakthrough regional novel, adopts a deliberate principle of self-effacement. It fictionalises Walmsley’s return to Bramblewick and his first-hand sea experiences; but it is written with studied impersonality, with the narrator observing dispassionately the action he also lives through. This gives Walmsley an ideal technical combination of proximity and distance to pursue his major social theme, in the manner of fictional anthropology. The purpose of this stance – the character-narrator functioning as an observer-participant, despite his convictions and sympathies – is especially apparent in the episode in which the Bramblewick lifeboat is launched on ‘a salvage job’ to aid a commercial steamer which has foundered in foggy weather (181–96). The most significant aspect of the scene is how it condenses Walmsley’s larger theme about the march of modernity. The reader is made to side with the heroic lifeboat crew, and their antiquated salvage methods, against the parasitism of the commercial tug, steaming down the coast to snatch funds from the local community. Yet the salvage job, for the Bramblewick crew, is essentially no different from the daily competition they undertake as fishermen, battling the sea for whatever rewards it can yield; and so we are made to recognise the moment at which such rewards will no longer be sufficient to sustain a community governed by traditional technology, oar and sail. There is a further historical regression in Foreigners, the third in the early trilogy of Bramblewick books. Foreigners is an autobiographical novel in the first person about Walmsley’s boyhood experiences as a ‘foreigner’ in Robin Hood’s Bay, where the unpleasant treatment meted out to the Walmsley figure (nicknamed ‘Worms’) is strongly registered. A key episode in the novel concerns the run-up to the fifth of November, or ‘Plot night’ as the local boys call it (91). A large bonfire is being assembled by the narrator’s chief persecutor, Tom or ‘Grab’ Fosdyck. Excluded from Grab’s gang, Worms has been preparing his own smaller bonfire, with some fireworks bought with money found in an old purse on the shore. The rivalry issues in the burning of the combined bonfires a day early, together with a drunken brawl between two of the colourful

136    Dominic Head villagers, who have become embroiled in the boys’ dispute. Lit by the flames of the bonfire, the boys emulate the aggression of their elders. It is a powerfully rendered scene in which the latent violence and hostility of the village erupts (85). The scene embodies a rough parable, the point of which is revealed by the fact that the money found by Worms in a washed-up purse is the instigation of the violence. Mike Regan, an Irishman and therefore another outsider, and also one of the adults fighting in the bonfire scene, is sitting for the narrator’s (Worms’s) father, aiming to produce a painting of a local character that will win the approval of the Royal Academy. Work on the painting, halted by lack of funds, resumes when Worms’s found money comes into the household and some of it is paid to Regan for sitting. This is this money that funds his drinking spree (and aggression), and the same money that pays for Worms’s fireworks, fuelling the competition with Grab. Like the fishermen, the boys look to what the sea provides, in their favourite occupation ‘scratting’ for coins and other treasures when the tide is out; and, for all, the sea’s bounty heightens tensions even while it may bring prosperity. The painting of Regan is the father’s submission for consideration by the Royal Academy, the painting he hopes will make his name if it is selected; and which will also bring financial rewards to the family. Regan resents being depicted in his old work shirt, instead of his church clothes (75). The artist’s rationale, however, has to do with the expectations of the Royal Academy. He tells Regan: ‘it wouldn’t look anything at all if I had you in your best clothes. I’d lose all the character of the subject. You wouldn’t look like a fisherman. You wouldn’t be picturesque’ (76). This obeisance to a perceived artistic convention, and the power enshrined within it, contrasts with Walmsley’s account, in his autobiography, of the ‘contempt for the Academy tradition of art’ shown by Barbara Hepworth and Harry [Henry] Moore.41 The fictional portrait of Walmsley’s father, the painter J. Ulric, presents him as self-absorbed, certainly not a role model; yet, the book shows Walmsley positioning his own constructed regionalism in relation to this debate about artistic integrity, and fashioning something that draws from the notion of the picturesque conveyed in this episode, whilst keeping in view what the avant-garde modernist might think of it. The ‘picturesque’ painting of Regan is a double-edged sword for the narrator, for he knows his mother intends to use any available cash to make a journey with him to Liverpool, and install him with an uncle to be schooled there, away from the vulgarity and myriad bad influences she associates with Bramblewick. The picture, in other words, is intended as the means by

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which the narrator will be removed from the conditions of possibility for the kind of regionalism the book establishes. The painting is a focus in all three sections or books of the novel. At the end of book two, the news breaks that it has been rejected by the Royal Academy (188). While this is a crushing blow for the father, it reveals a different underlying function for the picture. The dream of placing it with the Royal Academy does continue in the third book, but this is revealed as a true figment. When the finished painting is displayed by the father in his shop window, it attracts the bullying attention of Grab Fosdyck and his gang, who find new reason to torment the narrator (161). Their mockery is underpinned by the fact that Regan is also a ‘foreigner’, but it is intensified by the depiction of him in old clothes. Regan himself comes to protest about the display of the painting, outraged that this image of him ‘looking no better than a tramp’ is causing him ‘to be disgraced in the village’ (162). Whether it is by unsettling the boys in ways they cannot process, or by humiliating Regan, the ‘picturesque’ portrait is revealed as a sham in lacking any community engagement. Walmsley’s account of the locals’ reaction to it, in contrast, creates a vivid impression of local attitudes and values. The painting, and the disengaged artistic convention it embodies, offers a counterpoint to the more vital regionalism of the novel. Such vitality is markedly different from the perceived detachment and elitism of modernist art. The final book in the novel is governed by the appearance of a different kind of foreigner in the guise of summer visitors: a man purporting to be a well-to-do retired army major, and his son, Charley. The ‘major’ is the key to the book’s development, for he is a con man presenting himself as an art collector. He promises to buy the portrait of Regan for the considerable sum of twenty pounds (223). He also promises to assist with securing the Royal Academy’s acceptance of a proposed portrait of his son in the following year’s competition (254). The revelation that he is a fraud merely serves to underscore the point that a subservient view of convention is itself fraudulent in depriving the artist of authenticity (273). Again, there is an implicit point about regional representation, now emerging as Walmsley’s central theme. The essence of that more appropriate form of representation is hinted at in the final destination of Regan’s portrait. At the point where the major has promised to buy the painting, Regan dies, following a stroke (247). This coincidence of events sounds more symbolic in summary than it does when the novel is read; yet, it is hard not to read into it an element of symbolism about dead art. The portrait is redeemed, however, by Captain (or ‘Boozer’) Lindale, the village reprobate. He

138    Dominic Head purchases the portrait and gives it as a present to Miss Regan, Mike’s sister (277). Earlier, in trying to persuade Regan about the value of the picturesque, the artist had distinguished this portrait from the commissioned pieces he does of ‘Bramblewick people’, governed by a different kind of convention and commodification (76). There is, then, a nice irony that the Royal Academy piece is eventually reclaimed as a family portrait. Lindale had earlier commissioned three portraits of himself ‘to give to his friends as presents’, to be painted from a posed photograph in which he is depicted ‘wearing a captain’s cap, and holding a spy glass under one arm, and looking quite sober and respectable’ (156). It is an idea for a likeness equally as false as any of the other ideas about portraiture in the novel. The implicit point is that the novelistic portrait of Lindale is richer, conveying his aggression, vanity, and magnanimity. What is true of Lindale is true of the depiction of Bramblewick life in each of these three novels: there is nothing idealised about this form of regionalism, which is rugged and uneven, attractive and unpleasant in equal measure. It is a carefully constructed form of expression; yet, one which registers an insoluble problem, the author figure seeking integration, while remaining somewhere between the centre and the periphery. Here we might justifiably distinguish different degrees of response to the primitive. The appeal of the primitive life of the fisherman was one reason why artists’ colonies grew up in places like St Ives, or Staithes, in the late nineteenth century. This was the trend J. Ulric Walmsley was participating in when he moved his family to Robin Hood’s Bay in 1894, to eke out a living from the tourist trade. His was a livelihood that stood on the cusp of exoticisation and (a potentially productive) nostalgia. Leo Walmsley’s primitivism betrays the same impulses at a different level of intensity. In Three Fevers, when Marney Lunn makes the first lobster pot for the season, the narrator gives a detailed account of the craft involved in its making, and a deep aesthetic appreciation of the artefact: ‘it was beautiful, as most things made by primitive man for a primitive purpose are beautiful. It satisfied one, like an entirely successful architecture’ (71). This is not the kind of anthropological lens that embraces a primitive world view; but neither are these the condescending words of an observer, rather those of someone who has already devoted up to two years of his life in the attempt to perfect this primitive design. The technical ambivalence of Three Fevers – explicitly withdrawn, implicitly engaged – is a local instance of the ambiguous regional modernity that pervades each of these Bramblewick books. Ultimately, however, the work of father and son, J. Ulric and Leo, is bracketed by historical circumstance. The transformation of the Bay

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into a tourist centre was already under way when the Walmsleys moved there in 1894, and this transformation happened in a very few years, between the peak years of Robin Hood’s Bay as a fishing port in the 1860s, and the effects of the first major influx of Victorian tourism in the 1890s, following the opening of the Scarborough to Whitby railway in 1885. In the 1890s, therefore, there was a migration away from the old village, to the newer, better-appointed Victorian villas closer to the railway, freeing up the older houses in the Bay for holiday lets.42 Walmsley, then, recorded the final years of the old fishing community at Robin Hood’s Bay, and shared in that experience. This is the ‘blueplaque Walmsley’.43 Yet there is also the more complex and contradictory Walmsley, whose fiction, at once withdrawn and engaged, registers a sense of perpetual exclusion from the site of regional belonging. There are many parallels here with the work of major modernist writers, such as Joyce and Lawrence, in which a sense of attachment to place is expressed without sentiment, and which can register simultaneous feelings of alienation or exclusion from the local. Walmsley’s Bramblewick fiction incorporates an acute sense of personal exclusion, but this is also an historical exclusion, where the desired place has been banished by modernity. It is the tacit acknowledgement of this contradictory desire that characterises Walmsley’s regionalism – a cultivated phantom, like the prototype collapsible steel lobster pot, primitive regionalism on the margins of modernity.

Notes   1. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010).  2. See, for example: David James, ‘Localizing late modernism: Interwar regionalism and the genesis of the “Micro Novel” ’, Journal of Modern Literature 32: 4 (Summer 2009), 43–64; and Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).  3. Leo Walmsley, Three Fevers (London Collins, 1946); Phantom Lobster (Exeter: Leo Walmsley Society, 2009); Foreigners (London: Jonathan Cape, 1935). Further references to these editions will be given parenthetically in the text.   4. Walmsley wrote a title for Collins’ ‘Britain in Pictures’ series, British Ports and Harbours (London: Collins, 1942). He also wrote the ‘Portrait’ essay in Lancashire and Yorkshire (London: Collins, 1951), part of the ‘About Britain’ series published for The Festival of Britain Office.  5. See Walmsley’s own account in So Many Loves: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1945).

140    Dominic Head  6. David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), p. 17.  7. Glen Cavaliero, The Rural Tradition in the English Novel, 1900–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. ix.  8. See K. D. M. Snell, ‘The regional novel: Themes for interdisciplinary research’, in The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1990, ed. K. D. M. Snell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–2.  9. See Alexandra Harris, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames and Hudson, 2010), pp. 10, 109, 113, 114. 10. See Harris, Romantic Moderns, p. 294. 11. See David James, ‘Localizing late modernism’, 43–64. 12. Michael Bell, Primitivism (London: Methuen, 1972), p. 1. 13. Bell, Primitivism, p. 4. 14. See, for example: Henry Williamson, The Story of a Norfolk Farm (London: Faber, 1941); and Adrian Bell, Corduroy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 [1930]). 15. Or, indeed, in the avant-garde celebration of ‘primitivist’ depictions of non-urban communities, like the fishing village. I am thinking of Alfred Wallis, the Cornish artist, whose work was much vaunted by professional London artists (including Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth), but who endured a penurious old age. See Matthew Gale, Alfred Wallis (London: Tate Publishing, 2009). 16. Esty, A Shrinking Island, p. 2. 17. Esty, A Shrinking Island, p. 7. 18. Esty, A Shrinking Island, p. 26. 19. Esty, A Shrinking Island, p. 28. 20. Alastair Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (London: Continuum, 2010), pp. 19, 20, 30. 21. Phyllis Bentley, The English Regional Novel (London: Allen & Unwin, 1941), p. 40. 22. The society has republished some of Walmsley’s novels, and other relevant works, including the jointly-authored biography, Shells and Bright Stones: A Biography of Leo Walmsley, edited by Nona Stead (Otley: Smith Settle, 2001). 23. The film, directed by Norman Walker, was ‘the first production of British National Films, a company formed by Lady Yule, John Corfield and J. Arthur Rank to produce quality films accurately portraying British life, for export to the American market’. See the sleeve notes to Turn of the Tide, VHS (BFI/Connoisseur Video, CR 037, 1991). The aim of British National Films underscores the contemporaneous heritage dimension of Three Fevers. 24. For Walmsley’s account of the film, see So Many Loves: An Autobiography (London: Collins, 1945), pp. 287–319. 25. The available biographical details can be found in Walmsley’s autobio­ graphy, So Many Loves, and in the jointly-authored biography, Shells and Bright Stones. 26. Shells and Bright Stones, ed. Stead, p. 20. 27. Shells and Bright Stones, ed. Stead, p. 7.

Regionalism and Modernity: The Case of Leo Walmsley    141 28. Walmsley was born on 29 September 1892; Three Fevers was first published in January 1932, and Foreigners in January 1935: see Frederick W. Lane, Leo Walmsley: A Bibliography (Exeter: The Walmsley Society, 2004), pp. 9, 10. 29. Walmsley, So Many Loves, p. 215. 30. Walmsley, So Many Loves, p. 215. 31. Walmsley, So Many Loves, p. 215. 32. Manchester City Art Gallery has a similar sculpture made a little later – ‘Doves (Group)’, 1927 – though the pair of doves in this work clearly have eyes. 33. Walmsley, So Many Loves, p. 216. 34. Walmsley, So Many Loves, p. 231. 35. Shells and Bright Stones, ed. Stead, p. 81. 36. See Walmsley, So Many Loves, p. 267. 37. See, for example, Walmsley’s adventure story for boys, The Silver Blimp: A Story of Adventure in the Tropics (London: Thomas Nelson, n.d. [1921?]). 38. See Walmsley, So Many Loves, pp. 268, 241. Walmsley was awarded the Military Cross for his war service as a reconnaissance pilot in East Africa. See Peter Barton, ‘Passage to the Front’ and ‘Wings over Africa (1916–1918)’, in Shells and Bright Stones, ed. Stead, pp. 24–57. 39. Shells and Bright Stones, ed. Stead, pp. 100–1. 40. The Lunns and the Fosdycks, the rival fishing families depicted in Walmsley’s Bramblewick fiction, were based on two actual families, the Dukes and the Storms. See Shells and Bright Stones, ed. Stead, p. 90. 41. Walmsley, So Many Loves, p. 215. 42. I am drawing on Barrie Farnhill, A History of Robin Hood’s Bay: The Story of a Yorkshire Community (York: North York Moors National Park Authority, 1990); and on the DVD, A History of Robin Hood’s Bay, written by Norman Scholes (Bay Video Productions, 2006). 43. There is a blue plaque outside Walmsley’s childhood home in King Street, Robin Hood’s Bay.

Chapter 7

Hugh MacDiarmid’s Modernisms: Synthetic Scots and the Spectre of Robert Burns Drew Milne We base our belief in the possibility of a great Scottish Literary Renaissance, deriving its strength from the resources that lie latent and almost unsuspected in the Vernacular [. . .] We have been enormously struck by the resemblance – the moral resemblance – between Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish language and James Joyce’s Ulysses. A vis comica that has not yet been liberated lies bound by desuetude and misappreciation in the recessess of the Doric: and its potential uprising would be no less prodigious, uncontrollable, and utterly at variance with conventional morality than was Joyce’s tremendous outpouring . . . [. . .] The Scots Vernacular is a vast storehouse of just the very peculiar and subtle effects which modern European literature in general is assiduously seeking . . .1

In The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & Twentieth-Century Literature, Michael North suggests a revised sense of the linguistic paradigms in play within American and transatlantic literary modernisms.2 Hugh MacDiarmid’s work, and the question of Scots as a dialect or distinct language for modernist Scottish writing, warrants no mention in North’s account, though questions of race do throw up difficult political resonances within Scottish poetics, not least in the romanticised genealogies of race, nation, and identity that MacDiarmid often promoted. Despite North’s subtle intertwinings, the literary articulation of dialect forms is not only a question of race, but also a feature of the radical interest in non-standard English – especially as represented in and through writing – an interest that is characteristic of English-language modernism more generally. North echoes Hugh Kenner in suggesting that the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) from the 1880s onwards forms one emergent standardisation, against and through which literary modernism and literary criticism were developed.3 The OED set up standards that exclude modern dialect, and this has profound implications for the development of regional literary cultures whose linguistic cultures are thereby figured as marginal or centrifugal. The politics of dialect and

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the articulation of polite Scottish English as opposed to Braid or dialect Scots, has a longer historical reach in Scottish arguments, as is evident in the eighteenth-century writings of Sylvester Douglas.4 John Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, first published in 1808 and again in a revised four-volume form between 1879–82 offers, accordingly, a parallel linguistic resource for non-English poetics, a resource that became a critical tool for Hugh MacDiarmid’s synthetic Scots.5 North also notes that: there was a marked increase in English dialect writing at this time, including works by Hardy, Stevenson, Kipling, Barnes, and the writers of the Irish Revival, as well as writers such as Henley and Davidson, who were aggressively vernacular in style.6

John Davidson was an important and acknowledged influence on MacDiarmid, and some of the dynamics involve new poetics of the vernacular, of speech within writing.7 There is more in play here, however, than a response to dictionaries or attempts to impose standards upon spoken and written English, although resistances to the standards and standardisation of English remain socially and politically significant.8 The question of Irish English is evidently central to the modernisms of Yeats, Synge, Joyce, and Beckett, and not just as figured for revivals: MacDiarmid also shaped his Scottish literary renaissance and nationalism with reference to Irish models, perhaps in part because the significance of so much in Irish modernist poetics is both decisively regional and metropolitan, national and international.9 MacDiarmid’s own, often idiosyncratic compounds of Scottish nationalism and Leninist communism were also modulated by a deep hostility to almost all things English, except perhaps the English language. In exploring English poetics through and against Scots poetics, MacDiarmid eschews the modernist poetics of the metropolitan city. The region his writing might occupy is conflicted, beset by flamboyant protestations of nationalist, internationalist, and anti-English interests. Rather than modelling his poetics on those of Paris, London, or Dublin, or indeed on the cities of Scotland, MacDiarmid writes through an evident alienation from the life and language of the urban working class. Afflicted by modernism’s transcendental homelessness, he is somehow more at home in the borders and among the islands of Scotland.10 Different tendencies articulate romantic, nationalist, and ethnographic interests in regional, local, or non-standard forms of English. Such developments also reflect a deepening linguistic relativism and scepticism that engages literary and philosophical modernism in radical investigations into the foundations and possibilities both of English and

144    Drew Milne of language as such. The different linguistic turns in modern thought make it possible to see how apparently regional or local forms of linguistic usage can be understood as pragmatic particulars, local language games or world disclosures, but also how such usage can be understood as exemplifications of more national, international, global, or even universal structures. The glocalisation of English allows recognition of existing sociolinguistic diversity within the globalisation of Englishspeaking capitalism. MacDiarmid’s poetics develop exciting, opportunist, and eclectic negotiations of such questions, often focused on the problem of English, its politics and linguistics, without quite resolving MacDiarmid’s regional and modernist interests. The arguments offered here cut across the cultural and political questions suggested by modernism and region, by putting the problem of grammar at the centre of the dynamics of modernism and regional literary cultures. A characteristic feature of modernist writing is its resistance and scepticism in the face of Chomskyan claims for universal grammar.11 Modernist poetics, particularly as developed through the collapse of prosodic conventions and the limits of prosaic realism, opens out a whole series of adventures in radical grammatical artifice, perhaps most obviously and definitively in the writings of Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett. The project of writing through grammatical scepticism, opening out the grammar of writing into new idioms of speech and text, is embraced by avant-garde modernism in many different ways, but the implicit question goes to the heart of many forms of regionally inflected writing. How far is the grammar of English a universal, global, or imperial power that structures or overdetermines any writing that seeks to articulate a more local sense of place or power? Can the inflections of regionally motivated writing countervail the many powers already consolidated in the grammar of English? The grammar of poetry, especially perhaps modernist poetry, works through forms of historical variance, archaic differentiation, or radical artifice. Such differentiation may not quite offer convincing evidence that poetry has its own determinate grammar-making potentiality, an autonomous grammatical faculty or procedural music of syntax, but such differentiations can generate poetics of dislocation and distance from otherwise dominant forms of grammar, not least those of prose. The relocation of such differentiations within metropolitan, urban, or newly conceived paradigms of written community can make for new kinds of regional poetics. In his essay in Scotland in Theory, Gavin Miller mischievously suggests that: ‘MacDiarmid’s work is, in fact, very similar to Victorian nonsense poetry’.12 He goes on to compare MacDiarmid’s synthetic Scots with Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’ to debunk aspects of J. Derrick

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McClure’s optimistic claims for the ‘phonaesthetic’ qualities of Scots language.13 For Miller, the immediate target is the model of the romanticised nationalist claim – made by McClure and MacDiarmid – that Scots language is somehow gifted with naturally expressive, authentic, affective, or onomatopoeic qualities. The comparison of MacDiarmid’s synthetic Scots with ‘Jabberwocky’ deserves more persistent exploration. The satirical play of Carroll’s invented diction offers not nonsense but a comic challenge to conventions of linguistic and poetic expertise, a challenge that delights in nonce word invention while revealing, despite itself, a proto-Joycean, proto-surrealist delight in language games for their own sake.14 ‘Jabberwocky’ is both anti-modernist in its conservative mocking of literary critical pretensions, and yet, in ways comparable to the Ern Malley hoax, curiously suggestive as a document with negatively intended modernist sensibilities.15 ‘Jabberwocky’ scarcely needs quoting for its resonances to be remembered: that it is so memorable, despite its flaunted idiolect, suggests underlying resources of linguistic and poetic structure: ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe . . .16

The displacement effects of apparently unfamiliar lexical items are quickly contained by the conventions of poetic form, not least the stanzaic form, metre, and rhyme, but above all by the familiarity of the syntax. There is a reassuring conventionality to the repeated definite articles and conjunctions. There may be a residual, perhaps even constitutive ambiguity about the word type evoked by ‘brillig’, a type which is not resolved by Humpty Dumpty’s observation that: ‘“Brillig” means four o’clock in the afternoon, the time when you begin broiling things for dinner’.’17 Even if quickly taken as a word marking temporality, ‘brillig’ also hovers between suggesting itself as a less determinate kind of adjective, one that might combine the force of ‘brilliant’ and the Germanic adjective ‘billig’, or might sound forth a description of the weather rather than temporality. ‘Billig’ aside, even the metrically overdetermined syntax of the rest of the poem resolves itself without too much difficulty into recognisable types. In short, semantic obscurities are held in a state of critical suspension by the determinacy of prosodic and syntactic features. The reader is nevertheless thrown into some recognition of what is familiar and what is not familiar, even to the extent of replaying and replacing spellings, almost proofing the poem for

146    Drew Milne typographical mistakes, before attempting to synthesise meaning out of what the eye initially reads as aberrations. Such processes of reading, the negotiation of what might be called, after MacDiarmid, the Caledonian antisyzygy of speech and writing, are familiar to readers of different kinds of Scots poetry. Part of the Janus-faced quality of ‘Jabberwocky’, and of much Scots poetry that differentiates itself from standardised English, is the way that the appearance of phonetic representation, the use of conventions by which sounds can be read phonically, also subtends and displays its graphematicity as writing, as a literature of literal letters, so that the distanciation of natural literariness makes visible a gulf between written and spoken poetry. Such renderings of speechwriting hybrids might be understood, in general terms, as representing a sense of dislocation, a resistance to contextual accommodation within speech, and within the existing speech communities of existing polities or regions, even if suggesting too a sense of nostalgia for the experience of being at home in a natural language, as if writing were, or could again be, at one with speech, rather than offering a record of so many fractures. Compare the language games involved in ‘Jabberwocky’ with the sense of grammatical definition suggested by Hugh MacDiarmid’s early poem ‘The Watergaw’: Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle I saw yon antrin thing, A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht Ayont the on-ding; An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied Afore ye deed! There was nae reek i’ the laverock’s hoose That nicht – an’ nane i’ mine; But I hae thocht o’ that foolish licht Ever sin’ syne; An’ I think that mebbe at last I ken What your look meant then.18

Glossaries and initial commentaries on the specifics of Hugh MacDiarmid’s synthetic Scots often foreground MacDiarmid’s use of dictionaries, unpacking the more obviously unfamiliar words.19 It is frequently hard to tell whether the glosses adjoined to his poems are authorial, and, if so, no less difficult to trace the authorial provenance. MacDiarmid appears to have found and borrowed the bulk of the materials for this poem from one page of James Wilson’s Lowland Scotch.20 Without citing Wilson, MacDiarmid can be said to reiterate Wilson’s

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gloss of ‘watergaw’ as meaning ‘indistinct rainbow’; and ‘yow-trummle’, or ‘ewe-tremble’, as meaning ‘cold weather after sheep-shearing’. The way such words contain poetic distillations within themselves seems to have been one of the excitements that persuaded Christopher Murray Grieve that there were modernist resources in Scots dialect, despite his own often violent arguments to the contrary, resources that warranted the adventure of creating the alter-ego literary persona of ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ to write poems using such resources. ‘The Watergaw’ and MacDiarmid’s lyrics in synthetic Scots are almost invariably published with some kind of accompanying glossary that suggests that such words can be identified, but in doing the work for readers, marginal or appended glosses tend to obscure what might have been involved by way of lexical research into the historical and regional language forms used. The model of ‘synthetic’ Scots deliberately obscures regional and historical contexts of use to create an overarching literary Scots. The poem and its glossary paratext is somehow torn between claims for poetic autonomy and a process of lexical research. The status of what is known about such dialect materials used in a poem – whether known experientially by the poet in some context of spoken use, whether found in written materials, whether historical, part of some regional context of contemporary use, whether represented through the historical etymology of literary Scots or as a phoneticised record of spoken pronunciation, and so on – all such questions become secondary to the inclusion of the glossary as paratext within the contextual framing of the poem itself. When ‘The Watergaw’ was first published in Scottish Chapbook, Grieve himself also offered a loose English translation of the first four lines: ‘One wet afternoon (or early evening) in the cold weather in July after the sheep-shearing I saw that rare thing – an indistinct rainbow, with its shivering light, above the heavily-falling rain’.21 Grieve/MacDiarmid was quick to publicise the value of developing a modernist poetic lexicon out of historical dictionaries, offering too some suggestive arguments as to the way a word like ‘yow-trummle’ offers a self-contained imagist poem, almost a metaphorical ideogram of otherwise obscured or archaic experience: a found poem of linguistic material newly animated. Helped by glossaries, the delight of unpacking unfamiliar words gives way to more imponderable questions as to the determinacy of words that initially appear more familiar. ‘Weet’ can be understood as a dialect spelling of ‘wet’, but read as a poem using found-materials from James Wilson, it also becomes clear that ‘weet’ is Wilson’s quasi-phonetic representation of how the word is pronounced in one region of Lowland Scotland.22 The representation of ‘forenicht’ can, similarly, be puzzled out as the pre-night or early evening rather

148    Drew Milne than a dialect rendering of ‘fortnight’. But what of the opening ‘Ae’? The marginal glossary provided by The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry simply reassures readers that the first line can be resolved into: ‘one wet dusk in the ewe-tremble’.23 This anthologised version of the poem, however, aside from being less than explicit as to the status of the glosses offered, also introduces its own curious variant spelling by representing ‘Ae’ as ‘A e’. Glossary materials variously borrowed and adapted from dictionaries offer some help with the range of meanings and exclamations that might be considered in interpreting such poems, but such materials also reveal particularities of region, dialect, and colloquial context that return the question of interpretation to the poem’s own syntactic context. As anyone familiar with translating a foreign language will recognise, the awkward linguistic components that resist recognition are not those words that can be looked up, above all nouns, but those turns of differential meaning that work with the grammatical idioms of particles, such as conjunctions and prepositions, or what John Cage calls ‘empty words’.24 Such words are not much illuminated by reference to dictionaries, and even a sophisticated grammar book will rarely do more than suggest an array of alternatives to negotiate, an array that becomes constitutive of the way poems establish their own grammatical fields and contextual energies. What emerges in reading ‘The Watergaw’, once a range of plausible semantic hierarchies have been established, is that some words that seem unfamiliar are easily given a determinate context by dictionaries, whereas those words that appear to be dialect representations of Scots words with familiar analogues in standard English remain more indeterminate as exemplifications of regional grammar. What, for example, is the force of the definite article ‘the’ as it runs through this poem: ‘The Watergaw’, ‘the yow-trummle’, ‘the on-ding’, ‘the last wild look’, ‘the laverock’s hoose’? In each of these instances there is a sense of pressure, over-statement even, where what is definite is also negated or indistinct. It could be observed that the use of ‘the’ in Scots has important differences from English. David Purves notes a variety of instances in spoken Scots where the definite article is used: where the indefinite article might be preferred in English; where it might be omitted in English; before the names of conditions, days or seasons, cardinal numbers, the names of activities; in constructions where a possessive adjective might be used – Did the wyfe no tell ye ti keep the heid; and in adverbial constructions where to might be used in English – The meetin is in the Toun Haw the-morn’s forenicht.25 Critically, the knowledge of such divergences is intelligible to most Scots speakers – and to many English speakers – as intriguing divergences between English and Scots usages, and thereby

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intelligible as matters of grammatical and poetic interest, rather than being perceived as unintelligible differences. The play of definite articles in ‘The Watergaw’ does not quite mobilise differences in spoken Scots, working rather with a grammar shared by Scots and English. What, however, is the prepositional force of ‘i’’ in: ‘i’ the yow-trummle’, ‘i’ the laverock’s hoose’, ‘i’ mine’? The much contested use of apostrophes that might position ‘i’’ as an abbreviated dialect pronunciation of standard English ‘in’ can be met with the recognition that ‘in’ is also a common enough word in conventional Scots diction. The ‘i’’ version involves a different pronunciation, however, and one with poetic resonances, one that echoes the first-person ‘I’, as if in a poem by e. e. cummings, and in other ways that fold over the location of the ‘I’ voice in this poem. The drama of the modal adverb ‘mebbe’ opens out an ambiguity of the meaning of looks and the look of meaning into what becomes an imagist indeterminacy and ambiguity. And lurking in the ‘sin’ syne’ rhymed with its loosely synonymous word ‘then’ in the final line is the question of the ‘sign’. The poem too offers a syntax that is hesitantly parenthetical, as if paratactically compressed and digressive rather than confidently argued: the various possible parallelisms between the two stanzas – not least the ‘An’’ of each stanza’s penultimate line, suggest not a confident pattern, but a process of quizzical reflection on memory, a consciousness in flux that is struggling with the meaning of wild and dead looks. Various ambiguities ask to be tested against a reader’s own confidence in his/her competence to negotiate the evident similarities between Scots and English grammatical forms, and in particular the extent to which the play of grammatical forms here constitutes a grammatical argument. The resulting indeterminacy can be recognised as one that takes a mode of romantic lyric – with its compressed drama of rainbow, lark, love, and death – and reworks this into an imagist fragmentation through its synthetic diction. It is as if, moreover, the poem evokes lost pasts by way of glimpsing a synthetic future, offering an archaic retrospection on how a semantic and grammatical modernism might develop an imagined community of Scots writing, a development perhaps most notable in the synthetic texture of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair (1932–4). Whereas ‘Jabberwocky’ offers conventional poetic form and unconventional semantics, ‘The Watergaw’ opens out conventions of semantic definition into a less conventional verse form and with a more awkward synthesis of written and spoken syntax. Much of the discussion of Hugh MacDiarmid’s synthetic Scots has proceeded as though the principal interest and problem of MacDiarmid’s poetics were his use of dictionaries – what he himself referred to as the ‘dictionary-dredged character’ of his poetry – as if his synthesis of different

150    Drew Milne historical and geographical forms were primarily a lexical adventure.26 The example of ‘The Watergaw’ nevertheless suggests that questions of syntax and grammar are also critical. The problem of reading the poem could be redescribed as an exploration into the limits of poetic artifice in the articulation of poetic grammar, and as an exploration into the limits of synthetic Scots as a medium for reimagining community. Although MacDiarmid’s idiolects are distinctive, the differentiation of grammar across his work inevitably reveals deep similarities between the grammar of Scots and English language, and such deep similarities in turn suggest a distinctive poetic and modernist question, namely the extent to which English grammar is, in its deepest articulations, a question of regional context or a more transregional or international quality with a more international, almost universal grammar. Scots poetics have often stressed problems of diction, lexicon, and class stratifications articulated through register, accent, and the perception of dialect, without quite recognising the constitutive poetics of grammar in play, and the constitutive role of grammar in the speech/writing differentiations The argument suggested here is that the poetry and polemics of Hugh MacDiarmid have misdirected attention away from the question of grammar in literary and synthetic Scots. There is, rather, an unacknowledged centrality to the awkwardly conventional syntax in play amid the apparently radical or non-standard language surfaces of synthetic Scots. The success of Robert Burns in developing a synthetic Scots poetics provides the historical precedent against which MacDiarmid’s work defines itself. One key feature of the differentiation is the extent to which Burns effectively naturalised differences between Scots and English grammar, so that his synthetic Scots appears both close to the colloquial possibilities of spoken language, and yet somehow naturally embodied, a natural grammar in writing. MacDiarmid’s work, by contrast, along with its marked denaturalisation of the poetic lexicon into a variety of dialects and specialised idiolects, also denaturalises the resources of poetic grammar, even if he does so inconsistently and awkwardly across his uneven oeuvre. His emphasis on grammatical articulation is by no means as persistent or evident as it is in the work of Gertrude Stein: MacDiarmid himself more often suggests parallels in his poetics with James Joyce or Ezra Pound, but MacDiarmid never managed to sustain an inventive grammatical energy comparable to Finnegans Wake (1939) or The Cantos (published from 1925). Readers of MacDiarmid’s work often rebel against the problems posed by his specialised lexicons, perhaps most notably in resistances to MacDiarmid’s long English poems that attempt to integrate vocabularies, such as those of science, in discursive poetic forms that risk appearing unpoetic. Comparable modernist

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poetics, not least The Cantos, generate grammatical artifice and types of syntactical and prosodic energy that integrate disparate materials across traditional poetry/prose distinctions. In this light, resistance to the lexicon of MacDiarmid’s long poems is perhaps a surface recognition of a deeper loss of grammatical tension that runs through MacDiarmid’s work once ‘freed’ of traditional prosodic forms. The unacknowledged sense of grammatical inertia across MacDiarmid’s long poems may be disguised by sections of local semantic energy, but there is a persistent sense that neither the resources of Scots diction, nor the unusually extended vocabulary of his English-language materials find analogous grammatical articulation to sustain his poems beyond the juxtaposition of lyric fragments. This may in part explain why MacDiarmid’s ambitious poetic oeuvre generates grudging respect, bordering on sceptical indifference, rather than the kind of affection generated by grammatically exuberant but comparably uneven oeuvres. Readers of MacDiarmid’s English poems have often lamented the apparently arbitrary line breaks of what appears to have become no more than cut-up prose, whereas poems such as ‘The Watergaw’ generate grammatical drama out of the found materials used. The characteristic syntax of MacDiarmid’s poetry, both in Scots and in English forms, is closer, however, to the more conventional articulation of modern poetic syntax in poets whose influence MacDiarmid acknowledged – such as Walt Whitman, Gerard Manley Hopkins, D. H. Lawrence, and W. B. Yeats. Such poets, however, put unusual pressure on conventions of poetic grammar without generating denaturalisations of grammar as explicit as those of Gertrude Stein, and without the evident semantic denaturalisation provided by Scots. The example of Hopkins helps to specify the variousness of poetic modernisms that MacDiarmid sought to synthesize. A sense of the rhythmic and syntactical energies suggested by Hopkins and Yeats, not to mention Keats, can be glimpsed in the opening lines of Christopher Murray Grieve’s early 1920 poem ‘La Belle Terre Sans Merci’: Hatchments of houses multitudinous Shine starry-white, and Eden-green Glimmer the cypress groves innumerous That sit between, And many a slender spire Of silver fire Shoots heavenward.27

The lexicon here is marked by late-romantic poeticism, studiedly compounded, enjambed and stretched across an uneven line length. Particular pressure is put on the line-opening position and on ­syntactical

152    Drew Milne pivots around main verbs, such as ‘shine’, ‘glimmer’, and ‘shoots’. The balance of grammatical tension is obviously artificial and yet not so unnatural as to suggest a more argued break with the late-romantic tendencies of early twentieth-century English poetic syntax. MacDiarmid’s more evidently synthetic and unnatural Scots lexicon perhaps necessitates a relaxed approach to the denaturalisation of grammar, but the example of Burns provides for MacDiarmid a powerful illustration of the limits of natural grammar in synthetic Scots, even if he never quite understood the problem as one of poetic grammar. The problem of synthetic syntax or synthetic grammar in MacDiarmid’s poetry also points more generally to difficulties in assessing the language games of modernist poetics, especially when read against contexts of regional language use and imagined communities. What is awkward about the syntax of poems such as ‘The Watergaw’, then, is the extent to which the grammar of synthetic Scots remains indeterminately or unevenly distinct from the grammar of ‘standard’ English. The power of English poetic syntax, both as a historical literary tradition and as the power of a historically dominant language community continues to effect an unacknowledged naturalisation of the semantic artifice of synthetic Scots. While it remains possible to develop new synthetic compounds at the semantic level, syntactic and grammatical structures continue to provide a more conventional, ‘natural’-seeming framework. This tension between syntax and semantics can be seen, for example, in the radical semantic play of texts such as MacDiarmid’s ‘Water Music’ which work out of a homage to the semantic plurality of Finnegans Wake. Wheesht, wheesht, Joyce, and let me hear     Nae Anna Livvy’s lilt, But Wauchope, Esk, and Ewes again,     Each wi’ its ain rhythms till’t.         1. Archin’ here and arrachin there,    Allevolie or allemand, Whiles appliable, whiles areird,    The polysemous poem’s planned. Lively, louch, atweesh, atween,    Auchimuty or apate Threidin’ through the averins    Or bightsom in the aftergait. Or barmybrained or barritchfu’,    Or rinnin’ like an attercap,

Hugh MacDiarmid’s Modernisms    153 Or shinin’ like an Atchison,    Wi’ a blare or wi’ a blawp.28

This archaic but modernised and denaturalised lexicon asks for a play across semantic glossing and sound-patterning, a fluid music of polysemy in artificial Scots. Punning potential is nevertheless suggested amid a grammar, metre, and rhyme scheme that comes closer to that of ‘Jabberwocky’. MacDiarmid’s poem even uses the word ‘toves’, that appears in the opening line of ‘Jabberwocky’, only here with a sense of a Scots usage apparently unmarked in Carroll’s text. The grammar of ‘Water Music’ is markedly simpler than ‘The Watergaw’, more a matter of alliterative listing and parallelism than anything in Finnegans Wake. Perhaps the only grammatical tension here is in the form ‘till’t’ that concludes the italicised opening stanza. Glossed, apparently authorially, as ‘to it’, the word also suggests itself as a past tense form of the verb to till. Through the rest of ‘Water Music’ the performance of found lexical materials is mapped onto a prosody and grammar that is predominantly traditional, if not nineteenth century. This poem’s programmatic juxtaposition of the Joycean analogue with its river song of Scots suggests the exhaustion of MacDiarmid’s poetic invention within synthethic Scots. The bulk of MacDiarmid’s work thereafter develops through synthetic English. Insofar as ‘Water Music’ marks a limit in MacDiarmid’s use of Scots, it is evident that the lexical interest has parted company with any supporting modernist prosody or grammatical discovery to become an exercise in writing through found materials that is performed according to exterior rules rather than through a self-regulating process of grammatical germination. In Lucky Poet, MacDiarmid suggests that his profound interest in the structure of language is akin to that of Mallarmé and that for him, like Mallarmé, ‘the act of poetry’ is: the reverse of what it is usually thought to be; not an idea gradually shaping itself in words, but deriving entirely from words – and it was in fact (as only my friend F. G. Scott divined) in this way that I wrote all the best of my Scots poems.29

MacDiarmid might not have conceded the critical implication for his less convincing Scots poems, but the prosody and grammar in ‘Water Music’ derives not so much from the lexicon explored, as from a prior poetic architecture of syntax aligned with a Joycean jeu d’esprit. Within the poetic development of Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry from ‘The Watergaw’ to ‘Water Music’ the persistently awkward model is the poetry of Robert Burns. As Alan Bold suggests, Grieve’s creation of Hugh MacDiarmid involves a profound about turn in Grieve’s initial

154    Drew Milne hostility to vernacular or Lowland Scots poetry. Grieve, for example, attacked ‘Doric infantilism’, and the way ‘the Doric tradition serves to condone mental inertia, cloaking mental paucity with a trivial and ridiculously over-valued pawkiness!’30 Introducing Hugh MacDiarmid, Grieve was at pains to suggest the importance of ‘Stripping the unconscious form of the Vernacular of the grotesque clothes of the CannySandy cum Kirriemuire elder cum Harry Lauder cult’.31 Grieve adopted many contradictory positions, but his hostility to post-Burnsian Scots verse was intense, and all the more awkward for his adoption of the persona of Hugh MacDiarmid. As Derrick McClure has argued: When writing about Scots, he argued vigorously and repeatedly that the stupendous expressive power latent in the language could and must be liberated by the revivification of its treasure-hoard of lost lexemes and idiomatic expressions. When writing in Scots, he used a medium which never (except perhaps in Water Music) lost touch with his ancestral Border dialect and the poetic language of the post-Union tradition of which Burns is the central figure . . .32

Put differently, the grammar of synthetic Scots remained too natural, too bound to existing power structures, to support the Joycean modernism that MacDiarmid attempted to develop through synthetic Scots, while the problems of grammatical inertia are all the more palpable when the local dislocations of the semantic axis are modulated into MacDiarmid’s synthetic English poems. For all MacDiarmid’s many pronouncements and discussions of language, there is little to suggest that he developed a viable theory or poetics of the function and artifice of grammar in language and poetry. Where it is possible to glimpse his theoretical understanding of the grammar and prosody of poetry in Scots, there are inconsistencies and incoherences that suggest an interest in provocations and politics, not least the national question, rather than an interest in the linguistics of Scots writing, syntax, and prosody. Rather, as McClure suggests, MacDiarmid’s poetics claims for itself a modernism that leans rather heavily on the example of Robert Burns, understood both negatively and positively. MacDiarmid honours Burns in many ways, but remains critical of the verse traditions influenced by Burns, maintaining a strong critique of the continuation of writing in the manner of Burns. And yet, the synthetic Scots developed by MacDiarmid could be described as modernist Burns. In his more dynamic Scots lyrics and longer poems MacDiarmid prefers the resources of ballad forms and persistently offers a looser verse rhythm than the stanzaic forms preferred by Burns. Understood as a modernist synthesis of Scots diction supported by a newly awkward sense of syntax, MacDiarmid’s

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synthetic Scots modernism begins to suggest how Burns was himself a proto-modernist writer of synthetic Scots. As MacDiarmid himself acknowledged, ‘The idea of a Synthetic Scots was denounced on all hands by people who didn’t know that Burns himself didn’t write as Scots had ever been spoken or as he spoke it himself’.33 MacDiarmid was aware that the Scots language in the poetry of Burns was a synthetic compound of written and spoken languages, a compound that artfully blended archaic and vernacular Scots with more standard English language forms. MacDiarmid was fond of suggesting that Burns betrayed the traditions of Dunbar and Fergusson in Scots poetry, but the models provided by Burns – not least the strategic function of vernacular voicing and the use of glossaries within the published texts – are borrowed and reworked by MacDiarmid. Two critical risks emerge as pressing difficulties within MacDiarmid’s modernism: the possibility that Burns was himself a radical protomodernist writer, a necessary but risky analogue for MacDiarmid’s neo-modernist reworking of Burns’s legacy; and, secondly, the risk that the project to develop a post-Burnsian Scots vernacular poetics would fall back into the mire of post-Burnsian poetics. MacDiarmid was sensitive to these risks and the development of his Scots poetics through Sangschaw (1925), Penny Wheep (1926), and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) is haunted by the spectre of Robert Burns. What MacDiarmid appears not to have recognised, however, is that the qualities of modernist poetics associated with imagist condensation and free-verse syntactical innovation enabled MacDiarmid to break with the example of Burns through a modernist poetics of grammar. The grammatical drama of MacDiarmid’s more imagist Scots lyrics are recognisably both romantic and modernist, but there is a constant but unresolved pull back into Burnsian ballad styles. In this light, compare MacDiarmid’s poem ‘Empty Vessel’ with stanzas from the eighteenth-century Scots poem from which it appears to have borrowed: Empty Vessel from Jenny Nettles I met ayont the cairney A lass wi’ tousie hair Singin’ till a bairnie That was nae langer there.

I met ayont the kairney JENNY NETTLES, JENNY NETTLES Singing till her bairney ROBIN RATTLE’S bastard.

Wunds wi’ warlds to swing Dinna sing sae sweet, The licht that bends owre a’ thing Is less ta’en up wi’t.34

To flee the dool upo’ the stool And ilka ane that mocks her She round about seeks ROBIN out, To stap it in his oxter.35

156    Drew Milne MacDiarmid’s poem offers an imagist compression written through elements of an eighteenth-century shell, almost to the extent of offering a modernist manifesto for the reworking of Romantic lyric. MacDiarmid’s characteristically metaphysical wit combines conceits of death, wind, world, and light, suggesting a shift in perspective from the historical content of the eighteenth-century grief-stricken lass, into the more modernist image in the space-time relativity physics of bent light. It has been suggested that the poem offers a modernist reworking of a romantic lyric that owes something to Wordsworth, but it could also be argued that the poem is haunted by the spectre of Burns, here reworking Burnsian poetic artifice with a sense of mourning for the otherwise unmourned objects of affection in Burnsian serial love song.36 The difference between ‘singin’ till a bairnie’ and ‘singing till her bairney’ is subtle but powerful, not least in the difference here between the indefinite article – recall the poetics of definite articles in ‘The Watergaw’ – and the possessive ‘her’. Critical to ‘Empty Vessel’ is the juxtaposed difference of the poem’s title, which is anchored outside the Scots diction of the poem, and the extent to which the dialect diction allows MacDiarmid to put pressure on the word ‘wi’’ without overburdening the fragility of the poem. The ‘wi’’ of the first stanza is picked up in the first and last lines of the second stanza, echoing through the swing of winds. The shift of winds to wunds also hints at a curious absence of the ‘wi’’ from winds become wunds, that might be heard to evoke wounds. And yet, the pressure of artifice can also be read as a more natural and literary quality of ambiguity rather than a forced attention to artifice. For all the modernist energy of the argument and attention in play, something of the Burnsian prosody and naturalised artifice of grammatical lyric is reaffirmed. By way of conclusion, consider the complexity of what might be involved in attempting a grammatical description of MacDiarmid’s synthetic Scots if it were written in synthetic Scots prose: Ye need tae stand back (in ooter space?) and get the hale picter o the stanza afore it maks sense grammatically. And even then the first phrase, like a yowdendrift, had nae grammatical link tae the rest of the stanza. MacDiarmid is again deliberately challenging and unsettling wir preconceptions.37

This comes from a lively critical, prose description of MacDiarmid’s poem ‘The Eemis Stane’, written in a quasi-phonetic representation of spoken Scots. The grammar of description nevertheless reveals that the grammatical constructions in play are shared by Scots and English. Some preconceptions are indeed unsettled but partly because the grammatical indeterminacy of the synthetic Scots poetic artifice, naturalised by Burns

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and reaffirmed by MacDiarmid’s Scots lyrics, stops short of engaging more radical questions of poetic grammar. Burns, along with much of the more grammatically energetic poetry in synthetic Scots, breaks with the arguments around poetic syntax in eighteenth-century English poetry.38 Insofar as such breaks with English poetic syntax lean heavily on the poetics of speech dialects and traditional prosodies to frame new semantic syntheses, so attention is easily deflected away from the underlying questions of poetic grammar and linguistic power that are shared by English and Scots poetry. The development of syntax that is worked through in MacDiarmid’s major long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle struggles with the spectre of Burns, just as MacDiarmid’s semantic and political poetics struggle to overcome the inertia of its relatively conservative or prosaic syntactical forms. The power and artifice of syntax also becomes an unspoken question and dead weight in many of MacDiarmid’s synthetic English poems. The poetics of Burns continues to constitute an ambivalent precedent in the synthetic language projects of twentieth-century modernist Scottish poetry as it runs from Hugh MacDiarmid through to the work of poets such as W. S. Graham, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Tom Leonard. Amid conflicting claims of region, nation, and language in the development of Scots poetics, MacDiarmid’s modernisms – his work is inherently plural – remain caught on the fault lines of poetic artifice suggested by Burns, even as it is projected through the modernist poetics of Yeats, Joyce, or Pound. MacDiarmid’s poetics remains over-determined, then, by the unacknowledged centrality of conventional syntax, a conventional syntax whose formal and political power continues to motivate the different, apparently radical language surfaces of his poems. The unacknowledged powers embedded in the grammar and syntax of English, and in the literary forms of poetic and prose syntax, remain a central faultline in the writing of MacDiarmid, and, more widely, in the writing of regional modernisms.

Notes   1. Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘A theory of Scots letters’ (1923), in The Thistle Rises, ed. Alan Bold (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), pp. 125–41 (pp. 128, 129, 131).   2. Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language & TwentiethCentury Language (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).   3. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (London: Faber, 1972), pp. 94–103.   4. See Sylvester Douglas, A Treatise on the Provincial Dialect of Scotland, ed. Charles Jones (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991).   5. See Susan Rennie, Jamieson’s Dictionary of Scots: The Story of the First

158    Drew Milne Historical Dictionary of the Scots Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).   6. North, p. 19. North’s suggestive set of examples is in part explained by his citation of N. F. Blake, Non-Standard Language in English Literature (London: Deutsch, 1981); Linda C. Dowling, Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); and Tony Crowley, Standard English and the Politics of Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989).   7. For Davidson’s influence on MacDiarmid see, for example, Hazel Hynd, ‘The authority of influence: John Davidson and Hugh MacDiarmid’, Scottish Studies Review, 2: 1 (2001). See also Hazel Hynd, ‘John Davidson and the hidden legacy of Burns’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 33: 1 (2004).   8. Rena Grant, ‘Synthetic Scots: Hugh MacDiarmid’s imagined community’, Hugh MacDiarmid: Man and Poet, ed. Nancy K. Gish, pp. 191–206.   9. See, for example, Maurice Lindsay, Francis George Scott & The Scottish Renaissance (Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1980). 10. See, for example, Hugh MacDiarmid, The Islands of Scotland: Hebrides, Orkneys, and Shetlands (London: Batsford, 1939). For a critical guide to the range of MacDiarmid’s work, see Scott Lyall and Margery Palmer McCulloch (eds), The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011). 11. See, for example, Drew Milne, ‘Gotcha: The poetics of linguistic scepticism’, Scepticism: Hero and Villain, ed. Sir Roy Calne and William O’Reilly (Hauppauge, New York: Nova Science, 2012), pp. 215–27. For one, nonChomskyan model of grammar, see Michael Tomasello, Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 12. Gavin Miller, ‘“Persuade without convincing . . . represent without reasoning”: the inferiorist mythology of the Scots language’, Scotland in Theory, ed. Eleanor Bell and Gavin Miller (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), p. 203. 13. J. Derrick McClure, Language, Poetry and Nationhood: Scots as a Poetic Language from 1878 to the Present (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000). 14. Contrast the discussion offered by Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (London: Routledge, 1994). 15. For a helpful archive of Ern Malley materials, see Jacket magazine, 17 (June 2002). http://jacketmagazine.com/17/index.shtml. Accessed 27 February 2013. 16. Lewis Carroll, from ‘Jabberwocky’, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (London: Macmillan, 1872), chapter 1. 17. Through the Looking-Glass, chapter 6. 18. Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘The Watergaw’ from Sangschaw (1925), The Complete Poems, 1920–1976, ed. Michael Grieve and W. R. Aitken, 2 vols (London: Martin Brian & O’Keeffe, 1978), I, 17. 19. Kenneth Buthlay, ‘Adventuring in dictionaries’, in Hugh MacDiarmid: Man and Poet, ed. Nancy K. Gish (Orono, Maine/Edinburgh: National Poetry Foundation, University of Maine/Edinburgh University Press, 1992), pp. 147–69. See also David Murison, ‘The language problem in

Hugh MacDiarmid’s Modernisms    159 MacDiarmid’s work’, The Age of MacDiarmid, ed. P. H. Scott and A. C. Davies (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1980), pp. 83–99. 20. Sir James Wilson, Lowland Scotch as Spoken in the Lower Strathearn District of Perthshire (London: Oxford University Press, 1915), p. 169. 21. Christopher Murray Grieve, ‘Causerie’, Scottish Chapbook (October, 1922), pp. 62–3, cited from Kenneth Buthlay, Hugh MacDiarmid (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1982). 22. Wilson, Lowland Scotch, p. 169. 23. The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Poetry, ed. Douglas Dunn (London: Faber, 1992), p. 35. 24. John Cage, Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1979). 25. See, for example, David Purves, A Scots Grammar: Scots Grammar & Usage (Edinburgh: The Saltire Society, 2002), pp. 18–19. 26. Hugh MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet: A Self Study in Literature and Political Ideas (London: Methuen, 1943), p. 17. 27. MacDiarmid, Complete Poems, II, 1197 28. MacDiarmid, ‘Water Music’, in Complete Poems, I, 333–7 (p. 333). 29. MacDiarmid, Lucky Poet, p. xiii. 30. Alan Bold, MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve: A Critical Biography (London: Murray, 1988), p. 128. 31. Bold, MacDiarmid, p. 139. 32. McClure, Language, Poetry and Nationhood, p. 100. 33. Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘MacDiarmid at large’, in The Thistle Rises, p. 224. 34. MacDiarmid, Complete Poems, I, 66. 35. David Herd (ed.), Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads, &c., 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1776), II, 60. 36. The Wordsworthian dimension is emphasised by Margery Palmer McCulloch, Scottish Modernism and its Contexts 1918–1959: Literature, National Identity and Cultural Exchange (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 33. 37. ‘An Introduction tae Metrics and Grammetrics exemplified by The Eemis Stane by Hugh MacDiarmid’. http://www.scuilwab.org.uk/assets/ MetricsAndGrammetricsupdate.pdf. Accessed 27 February 2013. 38. For a neo-conservative approach, compare Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955).

Chapter 8

Welsh Modernist Poetry: Dylan Thomas, David Jones, and Lynette Roberts John Goodby and Chris Wigginton ‘Welsh modernist poetry’ would seem to be something of a category error. The term has almost no critical currency – unlike, say, Irish or Scottish modernism – and there might seem at first glance to be little need for it. Who would it include? How would it be configured? What would be its distinctive features – its equivalent of MacDiarmid’s ‘Caledonian antisyzygy’ or Joyce’s forging of ‘the uncreated conscience of my race’? So readily is Welsh writing subsumed in English or British writing that answers to these questions will not occur readily to most students of modernism. In the last ten years, however, a start has been made on assessing the impact of modernism on mid-twentieth century Anglophone Welsh poetry.1 This essay builds on that work, and its most provocative suggestion: that, of all the component parts of the archipelago comprising the United Kingdom and Ireland, Wales may have made the greatest per capita contribution to modernist poetry. Unlike Anglophone poetry in Scotland and Ireland, which can be traced back to a native Renaissance courtly culture and the Ascendancy respectively, Anglo-Welsh poetry is a very recent phenomenon, in part because it was so inhibited by the strength and prestige of Welshlanguage poetry, which has a venerable tradition stretching back to the sixth century. Anglo-Welsh poetry did not come of age until the 1930s; yet belatedness meant that it drew on long-suppressed energies and, crucially, appeared at just the moment when modernism had its greatest mainstream prestige in Britain. This makes it unique among Anglophone poetries, and these supressed energies indelibly coloured the first two decades of its existence. In turn, this ‘First Flowering’ of Anglo-Welsh poetry produced three major figures of mid-century poetic modernism: Dylan Thomas, whose 18 Poems (1934) and Twenty-five Poems (1936) reinvented the native Blakean avant-garde visionary tradition under the aegis of post-Eliotic metaphysical modernism and surrealism; David

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Jones, the author of In Parenthesis (1937), The Anathemata (1952), and The Sleeping Lord (1974), the most significant British extensions of Poundian and Eliotic poetic practice; and Lynette Roberts, whose Gods with Stainless Ears (1952; written 1941–3) makes her the most innovative avant-garde poetic stylist of the British 1940s. Around these three poets a cluster of lesser, yet significant figures constituted a mid-century efflorescence of Welsh modernist-influenced poetry, the importance of which is only now being properly assessed; they include Alun Lewis, Glyn Jones, Vernon Watkins, Brenda Chamberlain, and Keidrych Rhys. Indeed, in the 1940s, the centrality of Dylan Thomas to neo-­Romanticism, the growth of regionalism, and the renewed interest in the ‘Celtic’, made it seem as if all British poetry was Welsh-tinged. In Wales itself, activity coalesced briefly, in 1937–9 and (to a lesser degree) 1943–9, around Wales, the journal edited by Keidrych Rhys, who was married to Roberts. The metropolitan impact and cachet of the movement was testified to by Rhys’s ground-breaking Faber anthology, Modern Welsh Poetry (1944). However, Welsh neo-modernism was always a threatened bloom, and it was abruptly withered by the triple blow of Faber’s rejection of Roberts’s new collection in 1953 (leading to her poetic silencing), the onset of David Jones’ creative paralysis (unbroken from 1952 until 1974), and Dylan Thomas’s death (in 1953). In its stead, an official Welsh poetry culture, spearheaded by R. S. Thomas and stylistically indebted to the plain-style, anecdotal English mainstream tradition, established itself in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, tensions within Welsh culture, between a nationalism based on ‘community’, birth, and the Welsh language, and a more pluralistic Anglophone culture, intensified from the 1950s onwards.2 As a result, not only was the value of work by Thomas, Roberts, and Jones rendered problematic, but the extent to which it was Welsh at all was also called into question.3 The conflict between formal experiment and a nationalist demand for realist reflections of the nation is common to other marginal modernisms. Yet, the peculiarly intimate and highly impacted relationship between Wales and England, as well as the strength of the Welsh language, made nationalist resistance to modernist writing greater and more pervasive there, and has been exacerbated by the Welsh intelligentsia’s shift from socialism to forms of nationalism in the post-war period. This has profoundly shaped the discipline of Anglo-Welsh Literature (or ‘Welsh Writing in English, as it has called itself since the 1990s), particularly in the mode of what Dai Smith has called ‘linguistic culturalism’.4 This can be linked to broader developments in British culture since roughly 1990, which have made overtly anti-modern and anti-pluralistic

162    John Goodby and Chris Wigginton stances untenable; a selective use of post-colonial theory has been used to apply a radical veneer to essentialism, or at best to contain, rather than advance, a revisionist critique. Either way, experimentalism and the Englishness it is assumed to represent, are overlooked.5 Such responses have been shaped by the inauspicious circumstances under which the relationship between Anglophone modernism and Welsh language culture began. In particular, Caradoc Evans’s short story collection, My People (1915), violently rejected the communal and religious values of rural Welsh society, and combined anecdotal structure and grotesque realism in an unrelenting exposure of hypocrisy, avarice, cruelty, and sexual oppression (including incest), underpinned by Nonconformism. The tales were all the more devastating because they were written by an insider who knew his targets intimately enough to inflict real damage. Evans effectively reopened the historical wound of the brad, or treason, of the Blue Books of 1847, in which disdainful English Parliamentary investigators of the Welsh school system characterised the Welsh peasantry as stupid and licentious, and the Welsh language as an obstacle to progress. As a result, Anglo-Welsh modernism was associated in Welsh-Wales with an assault on the myth of a pure gwerin (peasant folk) living in harmony and bound together by an ancient, untainted, and innately spiritual tongue. These were the antagonisms inherited by the ‘First Flowering’ poets in the 1930s, and while they managed to close the gap between themselves and Welsh-language writers of their own generation, the older, dominant voices of Welsh-Wales dismissed them as utterly un-Welsh. Chief among the detractors was Saunders Lewis, probably the leading twentieth-century Welsh-language writer, and Wales’s most prominent nationalist activist for half a century from the 1920s. For Lewis, there were no liminal or fruitfully overlapping zones in Welsh writing: Anglophone, industrial South Wales was simply a huge, grotesque historical error and ‘Anglo-Welsh’ literature a contradiction in terms; Welsh literature could only mean literature in Welsh.6 Some of his poems are in the same vein of modernism as Pound’s Usura Canto: ‘The Deluge, 1939’, for example, pours contempt upon the ‘greasily civilized [. . .] proletariat’ of South Wales, and makes anti-Semitic asides on the ‘Hebrew nostrils’ of international financiers.7 While most Welsh nationalist critics of Anglo-Welsh literature deplore these aspects of his work, Anglophone writers of a hybrid identity who fail to narrate the nation in standard realist-symbolist terms still receive scant critical recognition, even if, like Roberts and Jones, they closely identify with Welsh historical trauma. The threat of Thomas – unignorable because his reputation makes it impossible to dislodge him from the Anglo-Welsh canon – is countered

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by reading him through his later, less challenging texts, rather than the avowedly modernist writings of 1933–41. And of course, beyond Wales, all three poets have also suffered from Anglocentrism. This was particularly notable from the mid-1970s onwards when, as part of a Little England reaction to post-imperial decline, and the emergent metropolitanism of international capitalism, 1930s British poetry was redefined in terms of the Audenesque, and 1940s poetry largely written off as ‘wartime hysteria’ and ‘rubbish’.8 The rethinking of modernism that has occurred in the last twenty years or so, challenging earlier accounts that presented it as largely the (Anglo-American) creation of the ‘Men of 1914’ in a handful of iconic locations (London, Rapallo, Trieste, Paris), allows a challenge to this dual neglect to be mounted. It is now possible to make the case for Welsh modernism as one of a plurality of competing and spatially diverse alternative modernisms, often taking place beyond Wales’s geographical borders, produced by Welsh-identifying (rather than Welshborn) writers, and drawing on such un-British experimental models as futurism and surrealism. To understand Welsh modernism we need to recognise m ­ odernism itself less as a sudden rupture, climaxing around 1922, and more as a series of traces, false starts, successive waves, the creation of a multinational set of coteries and groupings, and of authors who might subscribe only intermittently or temporarily to a radical aesthetic, or might seek to splice such an aesthetic with realist modes of writing. Welsh modernism, then, is a heterogeneous, dispersed, irregularly recurring phenomenon, defined by a lack of the attributes which usually constitute a ‘tradition’, but distinctive because Welsh location, provenance, or identification led to a highly fruitful, belated encounter between modernist techniques and ‘the matter of Wales’. Bearing the dangers of essentialising ‘Welshness’ in mind, we shall tentatively suggest that Welsh modernist poetry has certain distinct qualities. It is less cerebral, ironic, and classicist than the Anglo-American norm, with a marked trend towards the mannerist, grotesque, and even gothic.9 It has a more playfully uncertain attitude to language, stressing the radical materiality of the signifier (often approximating Welsh cynghanedd alliterative effects). It is relatively classless, prizing community (though wary of insularity) and valuing common, rather than elite, cultural deposits. It tends sharply to juxtapose technology with the organic and rural, and has a marked interest in the cybernetic interface between man and machine. It is hybrid, and much concerned with parody and (in) authenticity, embodying the hyphenated condition of Anglo-Welshness. Finally, it frequently reflects a strong Welsh pacifist and anti-imperialist tradition.

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Dylan Thomas It may seem strange today to think of Thomas as a modernist because his work is so often read through the lyrical, comic-romantic lens of later, best-known works, such as ‘Fern Hill’ (1945) and Under Milk Wood (1954). Sympathetic Welsh critics have also tended to present his career as a progress from sterile self-absorption into the humane light of community in order to embed it within Anglo-Welsh literature. The danger of this approach is that it detracts from the enduringly original phase of his work, namely his invention in 1933–4 of a response to modernism in the form of a ‘process poetic’, body-centred and gothic-grotesque, which drew on his Welsh contexts to create a form of surrealism, or surre(gion) alism. Marjorie Perloff has usefully described what she calls ‘mannerist modernism’, a style marked by artifice, parody, sudden tonal shifts, and reduced concern with formal innovation.10 Its brief historic moment spanned the period from 1930 – the year of D. H. Lawrence’s death and Eliot’s declaration of Anglican orthodoxy in Ash Wednesday, and the point at which the experimentation of Pound and Joyce became too complex and idiosyncratic to act as viable models for emerging writers – until 1932–3. Her examples are American and she deems the stylistic interregnum to have lasted until the fallout from the Depression, which induced a wholescale shift to social-realist styles. British equivalents, we would argue, include Auden’s most experimental work, The Orators (1932), and Thomas’s 18 Poems (1934). Auden soon abandoned experiment, but Thomas did not and it became the basis of his subsequent writing. His breakthrough, as Desmond Hawkins noted in 1935, reviewing 18 Poems, involved a fusion of 1920s high modernism (‘Eliot’s magical sense of the macabre’) and the social-realist revival of traditional forms (‘Auden’s textual firmness’) to forge a ‘metaphysical poetry [in] sensuous terms’.11 Revolutionary in the context of the turn to realism, Thomas’s new style also reflected British resistance to avant-garde pretensions, via the domestication of modernism as criticism. Drew Milne remarks on: the way forms of modernism which have seemed most viable, successful or popular are not those of the self-conscious avant-garde, but forms which can be read as inheritors of pre-modernist English poetry, notably in retrospective conceptions of the modernism of seventeenth century poetry.12

Hawkins’s ‘metaphysical’ was thus wholly apposite; it serves as a reminder that Thomas’s generation had somehow to ‘place’ 1920s high modernism, to deal with or reject its inordinate demands. Thomas’s

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poetry was as much a response to Eliot’s critical essays, particularly ‘The metaphysical poets’, as it is to the ‘bats with baby faces’ of The Waste Land’s ‘violet hour’, and this came courtesy of Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), the codification of Eliotic critical principles by William Empson. But while Empson’s seminal study valorised Eliot’s ‘difficulty’ as a poetic principle, Thomas pushed the extent to which this difficulty was legitimate further than Empson dared. His poems are written in a way that entices the close readers who were his first audience into a pleasurable exercise of their freshly-acquired decoding skills; but at the same time generate a surplus of polysemy and jouissance which frustrates attempts at authoritative interpretation. In this way, Thomas reasserts poetry’s autonomy and irreducibility to paraphrase in modernist style. Yet, if he exploited and violated the strategies for containing modernism, as his mocking self-description as ‘the Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive’ suggests, Thomas also had a sceptical sense of the fact that ‘the greatest [modernist] structure of all [was] the modernist myth of itself’.13 Thomas’s ‘process poetic’, named from his lyric ‘A process in the weather of the heart’, is a modernist one of cyclical recurrence, like Yeats’s gyres or Joyce’s Viconian cycles. But it has almost none of the cultural dimension of these examples, and owes more than they do to early-twentieth-century science, while having an even more acute, post-1929 sense of historical crisis. Central to Thomas’s process poetics are the 1920s explanations of Einsteinian theory by the likes of James Jeans, Arthur Eddington, and Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead’s adaptation of Einstein described the cosmos as a relativistic flux of space-time in which all events are present, either actually or in potentia, all entities are interlinked (as in quantum theory), and the linearity of time is an illusion. He called his theory a ‘process philosophy’.14 Thomas read Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World (1925), and his 1930s writing relies on a similar microcosmic-macrocosmic frame of reference, often melding together extreme states – conception, orgasm, birth and death – which define the limits of human existence and human relationship to origins and endings. It is an apocalyptic poetry in the vein of Blake, Yeats, and Lawrence, concerned with (im)mortality, which it deals with by using multiple negatives to create highly qualified assertions.15 Thus, Thomas’s breakthrough lyric of April 1933, ‘And death shall have no dominion’, seems to endorse St Paul’s promise of bodily resurrection. Yet, strictly speaking, all the poem offers is the cold comfort that our molecules will pass back into an endless cycle of cosmic change. It is important to recognise that Thomas is not concerned with either proving or disproving religious faith; rather, he is interested in

166    John Goodby and Chris Wigginton how language can produce a rhetorical structure which appears to endorse belief and disbelief simultaneously. In Thomas’s poetic universe, then, all states are always already inhabited by their dialectical opposites: the embryo of ‘Before I knocked’ smells ‘the maggot in my stool’; the neonate of ‘When once the twilight’ is suckled by a ‘galactic sea’; the corpse of ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’ feels life ‘grow through the eye’ socket.16 Moreover, as puns on ‘stool’, ‘galactic’ (galaxy/lactate) and ‘eye’/I reveal, Thomas does not simply represent process. Although language, as a symbolic system, is usually assumed to stand to one side of the object world it is used to represent, it, too, is a material part of that universe, and thus subject to its processes. This means that it can be made to enact process in its workings. Thomas does so via an astonishing concatenation of appositive clauses, metamorphosed clichés and idioms, elaborate conceits, wordplay, and, above all, puns, by which the signifier shows itself to be both utterly arbitrary and occultly motivated. Such concrete, material language resists attempts to subordinate it to abstract concepts. For Thomas, a poem had to work ‘from words’, not ‘towards’ them; words were allowed to shape, through their colour, texture, and any wordplay they might suggest, the emergent poem; they were not simply deployed as a means to an end, as servants in the realisation of a prefigured intellectual structure. The development of the process poetic was thus inseparable from a style sonically and somatically appropriate to it; emphatic in tone, rhythmically forceful, heavily alliterative, riddled with pararhyme and rhyme, and drawing on a rapidly evolving symbolic language pertaining to sleep and dream, tidal and blood flows, genesis and conception, sex, bodily growth and decline, night and day, inner and outer weathers. The human subject in such lyrics is apparently asocial, at once terrified and exalted by its ‘atone-ness’ with a universe coursed by vast, primordial forces, as in the first stanza of ‘The force that through the green fuse’: The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.17

Here, the disyllabic ‘flower’ explodes at the end of a string of monosyllables, like the flower itself (‘fuse’ is an archaic term for stem), destroying as it creates (hence the paradoxical ‘my green age’). As Thomas wrote to Trevor Hughes, ‘It is my aim as an artist to bring those wonders [of the external world] into myself, to prove beyond doubt to myself that the

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flesh that covers me is the flesh that covers the sun, that the blood in my lungs is the blood that goes up and down in a tree’. ‘My [. . .] obscurity,’ he told Glyn Jones, ‘is [. . .] based [. . .] on a preconceived symbolism, derived [. . .] from the cosmic significance of the human anatomy’.18 As well as reflecting microcosmic disquisitions in John Donne and Sir Thomas Browne, and the cosmic giants in Blake (Albion) and Joyce (Finnegan), Thomas’s emphasis on ‘flesh’ also reveals contemporary anxieties concerning the body in an age notable for the discovery of gland and hormone function and for the mass-deployment of human bodies in spectacles of power, often in conjunction with technological devices. One reflection of this is in the cybernetic compounding and doubleness of Thomas’s language: ‘fuse’ is organic, but also the electrical circuit-breaker and the bomb-timer; ‘blasts’ is high explosive as well as a lightning bolt. Such conjunctions are common: ‘chemic blood’, ‘cemented skin’, ‘milky acid’, ‘oil of tears’, ‘mechanical flesh’ are just a few examples of a process of poetic composition described in a letter of 1933 in terms which echo those applied to the assembly of Frankenstein’s monster.19 Such tropes were mediated through the gothic legacy that Thomas inherited from Welsh writing, as well as German Expressionist and Hollywood horror films such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920), The Mummy (1933), and The Old Dark House (1932). Thomas outed the Nonconformist imaginary, the monstrous products of long Calvinistic repression, by giving a grotesque, parodic twist to Welsh gothic, and 18 Poems, Twenty-Five Poems, and his early stories are crammed with ghosts, vampires, mummies, cadavers, tombs, sores, flies, cataracts, carcasses, cancers, ‘cypress lads’, skeletons, plagues, incest, hanged men, mandrakes, gallows, crosses, worms, and maggots. The charnel atmosphere is inseparable from carnal desire; in the first poem of 18 Poems, the sexually rampant ‘boys of summer’ are, at one and the same time, ‘the dark deniers’.20 Thomas’s bodily, gothic-grotesque concerns, like his precocious development, were those of a generation which, with the seizure of power by Hitler in January 1933, realised it had been born into one world war and was about to be sacrificed in another. The biomorphic dimension of his poetry is part of an insistence on the body as the one irreducible fact of our being; far from being merely a primitivist celebration of the irrational, it was an expression of creaturely rights, of opposition to positivist instrumental reason – the logic of capitalism, fascism, and Stalinism – which, from 1933 on, led inexorably to war. Yet, countering an absurd rationality, as Thomas’s recourse to double-negative forms of statement, litotes, and euphemism showed, involved deep involvement in the paradoxical and the non-rational. To some extent this has to do

168    John Goodby and Chris Wigginton with linguistic surplus; as William Walton Rowe has put it, ‘“The force that through the green fuse” makes nonsense of the common-sense idea of life as an accumulation of meaning. Life in Thomas’s poem is sheer exuberant loss’.21 But as Thomas’s taste for the ‘revolution of the word’ expounded by Eugene Jolas in the Paris-based journal transition reminds us, it also had to do with surrealism. Thomas himself denied knowing anything about surrealism, but this was for tactical reasons; he was involved with surrealist exhibitions, contributed to surrealist journals, read with and was friendly with surrealists, and referred to surrealist artworks in his poems.22 Nor can there be any doubt, given, say, the opening lines of ‘When, like a running grave’, that he exploited surrealist effects: When, like a running grave, time tracks you down, Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs, Love in her gear is slowly through the house, Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse, Hauled to the dome, Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age, Deliver me [. . .].23

These lines have the literalism of surrealism, and its strangeness: a grave which can run (but it also runs as a sore does); a scythe made from hairs (or is this Time scything the hairs from our heads?) like some surrealist sculpture – Méret Oppenheim’s furred teacup or Salvador Dalí’s lobster telephone, say; a turtle in a hearse; and scissors walking, cartoon-like. One can gloss these images, but their surrealist frisson remains; the ‘turtle’, for example, may be archaic for a turtle-dove, and symbolic of dead love, but the marine animal cannot be unimagined (and, in any case, contributes to the narrative strand attached to ‘slowly’). This is not surrealist automatism and, as with modernism more generally, Thomas guys and mimics the attributes of a European metropolitan style where it can be made to coincide with his own contexts and tactics of estrangement. His literary effects, nevertheless, are wholly in accord with what André Breton called ‘encyclopaedic’ surrealism, in which imagery is allowed to intrude from the unconscious, but is then subjected to reworking, and in which verbal play comes to the fore. As Thomas explained to Henry Treece in March 1938, ‘I make one image,—though “make” is not the word, I let, perhaps, an image be “made” emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual & critical forces I possess’.24 The hesitation between ‘make’ and ‘let be made’ reveals an oscillation between conscious control and a necessary relinquishing of that control to the visual and verbal unconscious in order to get beyond a mere

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exercise in form. This is the subject of ‘How shall my animal’, which traces an inner poetic impulse as it mutates surreally as snail, octopus, lion, horse, turtle, bird, and fish (imitating the zoomorphic transformations of the Welsh tale of Gwion and Ceridwen, which describes the birth of the ur-poet Taliesin). The transformations enact the anguished impossibility of reconciling self and word, ‘animal’ and ‘spelling wall’, but ultimately discover, in the animal’s monstrous life and death, the desolating birth of the poem. In this paradoxical mode, so typical of Thomas’s work, ‘How shall my animal’ registers both the prison house of language and the means by which it can be escaped, and it does so in Welsh-surreal terms. Surrealist monsters, manifestations of his gothicgrotesque modernism, were a means by which Thomas mediated his Welshness, while at the same time connecting to the currents of broader artistic trends. This, of course, is a major reason for his continuing importance; his work achieves its resonance through, not by avoiding, ‘difficulty’, linking the psychic configurations and the substrate of an apparently marginal Welsh experience to universal crisis precisely by avoiding the obvious strategies of personal or national identity.

David Jones David Jones’s origins were London-Welsh; from an early age he was keenly aware both of his metropolitan identity and an attraction to Welsh culture represented by his Welsh-speaking father, who was from North Wales. Jones did not publish poetry until 1937, chiefly because his first, and lifelong, professional calling was visual art; he was a leading British engraver, painter, and calligrapher throughout his adult life. But the delay also stemmed from the nature of his first work, In Parenthesis, which tackled the trauma of the Somme, a subject so painful that Jones did not begin work on it until 1927. When he did so, however, it was in accordance with a worked-out and persuasive theory of modern art, one which, like Thomas’s more ad hoc responses, had distinctly gothic roots, indebted as it was to William Blake, Samuel Palmer, John Ruskin, and William Morris, as well as living artists such as the sculptor Eric Gill, at whose Ditchling and Capel-y-ffin artistic-religious communities Jones briefly resided in the 1920s. Jones grafted Roger Fry’s idea of ‘significant form’ (which distinguishes between gratuity and utility), itself married to a theological sense of the world as an ‘order of signs’, onto Oswald Spengler’s model of the cyclical growth and decline of social formations (which distinguishes between culture and civilisation).25 For Jones, gratuitous values – realised in religious and domestic rituals, and

170    John Goodby and Chris Wigginton crafts as well as fine art – were balanced, in all societies and individuals, by utilitarian, or instrumental and pragmatic ones. Gratuitous works, which characterise culture, have innate symbolic value, whereas utile ones, which characterise civilisation, generally do not, although they may enable culture.26 In Jones’s eyes, the necessary balance between the two had ended with the industrial revolution, or ‘The Break’, since which utile, civilisational values had steadily supplanted those of gratuity and culture, resulting in a dehumanising society driven by an unbridled positivist imperative. Like Spengler, Jones drew a parallel between the consequent decline of the West – racked by finance capital, world wars, and colonial adventurism – and the late Roman Empire, another culturally sterile imperium plunging, for all its mastery of the material world, towards collapse. His definition of sterile modernity was crucially shaped by his conversion to Catholicism, which followed his scarifying experience of the First World War; the ultimate gratuitous act, for Jones, was Christ’s symbolic and actual offering of himself in the Last Supper and the crucifixion, acts constantly re-presented in the quintessentially sign-making act of the Mass. Far from leading to orthodox pieties, however, such beliefs produced poetry of great linguistic richness and Joycean verbal play, in which the matter of Wales played an increasingly vital role. Jones’s two major works, In Parenthesis and The Anathemata, develop 1920s high modernism, and are arguably the only British long poems which can stand comparison with The Cantos and The Waste Land. The Sleeping Lord, a collection of shorter pieces published in the year of his death, is one of the most powerfully impressive last outposts of high modernism. Yet, their length, and the fact that their interwoven densities involve Welsh materials little known to metropolitan critics, means they have been woefully under-recognised in critical writing on modernism. In Parenthesis, because of its subject matter, has always received more attention. It is in seven sections, and focuses chiefly on John Ball, a member of the 15th Battalion (London Welsh) of the 23rd Foot, Royal Welch Fusiliers, as the battalion is transported to and deployed at the Somme. There, in an apocalyptic offensive, the unit is all but wiped out. More than half of In Parenthesis is in prose, but of a peculiar kind; rarely straightforward, it is continually interrupted by dialogue, often with no prefatory attribution to a speaker (and even the semi-authorial voice associated with Ball switches abruptly between satire, declamation, swearing, elegy, sentimentality, pathos, comedy, and coarseness), often becoming free verse or lists, disrupted by snatches of songs, rhymes and poems, and with passages in capitals and small print. Punctuation varies from full, to dashes, to none at all. As battle

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nears the amount of poetry over prose increases, and as the battalion goes over the top the language mimics panicked and disintegrating consciousness in jabber, incoherence, and Dada and Futurist-style implosion. Readers are made to enact, in other words, the bewildering experience of the rank-and-file soldier Jones was, uncertain of his whereabouts or his fate, pushed from pillar to post, pestered by rumour, alternately resigned, bored, or anxious, and finally overcome by sheer terror. While always tautly controlled, the text is orchestrated to satisfy spatial, allusive, and musical as much as narrative-discursive criteria. The opening lines are a case in point: ’49 Wyatt, 01549 Wyatt. Coming sergeant. Pick ’em up, pick ’em up—I’ll stalk within yer chamber. Private Leg . . . sick. Private Ball . . . absent. ’01 Ball, ’01 Ball, Ball of No. 1. Where’s Ball, 255201 Ball—you corporal, Ball of your section. Movement round and about the Commanding Officer. Bugler, will you sound ‘Orderly Sergeants’.27

The strangely unsettled texture is typical of the poem as a whole. ‘49 Wyatt’ alludes to Sir Thomas Wyatt, whose Poems were published in 1549, the last four digits of the modern Wyatt’s Army number. A verbal lift from Wyatt in line three melds with the nursery rhyme ‘Goosey goosey gander’ mixing high and low, adult and child. The sick ‘Leg’ is a body part, and leads to John ‘Ball’, who turns out not to be absent but late on parade; he is the ‘eye’/I (eyeball, but also testicle) of the poem, and his name that of a leader of the Peasants’ revolt, reflecting plebeian origin and Jones’s subaltern sympathies, but also obliquely (since the ‘a’ in his name is not the ‘u’ of ‘Bull’) with Wales. The regiment is a Cockney-Welsh hybrid, and In Parenthesis is riddled with Welsh allusions and echoes; the Somme as Battle of Camlann, narrative themes from The Mabinogion and The Gododdin, the informing structural principle of the tripartite Welsh englyn form, and the legendary ravaging Boar Trwyth, unsuccessfully hunted by Arthur, as the violence of the War itself. At every point, indeed, we are made aware of Jones’s belief in ‘the Celtic cycle that lies, a subterranean influence as a deep water troubling, under every tump in the Island of Britain’.28 The poem’s greatest set piece is ‘Dai’s Boast’ in Part Four, the centre of the book, whose speaker ventriloquises from a Welsh viewpoint the common

172    John Goodby and Chris Wigginton soldier’s sense of kinship with foot soldiers through history, back to the Legions of the Wall. There is a sense, as Jones puts it, that the squaddies’ predicament is universal; war is inseparable from peace, its mechanised slaughter simply an intensified version of the degraded modern world. The Anathemata charts a further stage in the way the fate of Wales, ‘that elder element integral to our tradition’, came increasingly to foreshadow, for Jones, the ‘last phase/ of our dear West’ at the hands of the megalopolitan technocracy on the levelled ‘world-floor’.29 Framed in real time by a performance of high Mass, it consists of a series of eight historical meditations on the Celtic ‘matter of Britain’, from the Ice Ages through cultural contact with Antiquity to the Anglo-Saxon invasions and contemporary cultural crisis, and seeks – or, rather hints at ways in which it may be possible – to unify the fragments, so resisting cultural uniformity and dehistoricised atomisation.30 It non-dogmatically celebrates all gratuitous makings, these being set against the power of the battering ‘ram’ of utility, whose malign power also threads the poem. As in In Parenthesis, there is a sense in which Jones’s mysticism and yearning for the archetypal, however inclusive of cultural forms, can elide the contemporary too easily. In the opening poem of The Sleeping Lord, ‘A, a, a, Domine Deus’, the search for Christ among ‘the trivial intersections’, ‘dead forms’, and ‘inane patterns’ would seem to prejudge the modern world (although this may be a form of self-mockery). It certainly has little to say even indirectly about modern industrial Wales. On the other hand, Jones increasingly explores the implications of St Augustine’s claim that ‘robbery is coterminous with empire’. This had been forcefully impressed on Jones while visiting Jerusalem in 1934, when he had discerned parallels between the British occupation of Palestine and the Roman presence there at the time of Christ. For all its archaic utopianism, too, Jones’s Wales, unlike Saunders Lewis’s, signifies heterogeneity, ‘that hotch-potch culture which is ourselves’, not purity.31 His etymology made much of the derivation of ‘Britain’ from the Latin Pretani, ‘painted’, used to describe the woad-coloured and tattooed ancient Britons, and hence, by extension, a mottled, dappled, composite nature. His work relishes palimpsestic layerings, concrete particulars, and jostling registers too much to be subsumed by orthodox ontologies (Christian or Heideggerian), and it is this which lets us read it against the grain of its tendency to aestheticise history. There is thus a striking contrast between the unity in his work implied in Jones’s critical writings (and claimed, more boldly, by his supporters), and the strain involved in making The Anathemata, which lacks

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the narrative thread of In Parenthesis. It is revealing that The Sleeping Lord presents alternate poems expressing utile (Roman) and gratuitous (Celtic) viewpoints without pretence to an overarching structure. These were taken from a larger work Jones never finished, the drafts for which appeared posthumously in The Roman Quarry (1981). Comparison of the two texts reveals the kinds of contradictions Jones smoothed over but was too honest to eliminate entirely. For example, the original of the ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’ in The Roman Quarry is, in Drew Milne’s words, ‘wiped down with quasi-vorticist spleen’.32 And the blend of satire and pathos that concludes ‘The Narrows’ (excluded from The Sleeping Lord) suggests that, like that other Catholic-convert poet-critic of capitalism, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jones even felt something of the appeal of communist idealism: So long, Porrex, we’d best not long        be found together twice in one vigilia, or they’ll suppose we tell together       the beads of Comrade Spartacus. I wonder how the Dialectic       works far-side the Styx or if blithe Helen toes the Party Line and white Iope and the Dog       if the withering away is more remarked       than hereabouts.33

Although Jones was nothing less than devout, then, it is revealing that his stated reasons for becoming a Catholic included the unorthodox one of wanting to belong to the main current of Western history. This distances the poetry from the faith; he observed in 1952 that: Even [The Anathemata’s] ‘Welsh’ stuff is not there because I happen to be in part Welsh, but because the Welsh mythological element is an integral part of our tradition. Nor indeed is even the ‘Catholic’ element there because I happen to be a Catholic, but rather because historically speaking (and leaving aside the truth or untruth of the Christian religion) it is the Catholic thing which has determined so much of our history and conditioned the thought of us all.34

The brackets (more parentheses) do not deny the poetry’s sacramental motivations, but they do allow it the space to breathe apart from these, and in doing so to create a uniquely rich poetic meta-critique of the material history of the matter of Wales, Britain, empire, and Church.

174    John Goodby and Chris Wigginton

Lynette Roberts Lynette Roberts was, like Jones, but to a still greater degree, a hybrid and hyphenated Welsh modernist. Born in Buenos Aires to parents of Welsh descent, she moved to England to finish her education at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. In the 1930s she travelled, worked as an illustrator, and trained to be a florist, whilst moving on the fringe of literary circles which included T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis. She met and married Keidrych Rhys in 1939, not long after discovering her calling as a poet. The couple decided to embrace a Welsh way of life, and moved in 1939 to Llanstephan (and then Llanybri) in rural Carmarthenshire, where they edited Wales and established a hub of literary activity – activity based on a necessary sense of national self-assertion rather than what Rhys described in an editorial as ‘the bigotry of unintelligent fascist nationalism’.35 The move placed them in close proximity to Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, who between 1938 and 1940 were in Laugharne, across the Towy estuary; Thomas was best man at their wedding as well as godfather to their son Prydein, in 1946. However, the war soon dissipated what could have become a self-sufficient national poetic scene. Poverty drove the Thomases back to England; and, after Rhys’s call-up in 1940, Wales gradually foundered. Roberts was left alone, increasingly estranged from Rhys, to fend for herself. Remarkably, she thrived as a poet. Without wholly idealising her surroundings, Roberts, who characterised herself as ‘one of these/ Always observant and slightly obscure’, kept a diary and avidly studied the local fauna, flora, folkways, and crafts, as well as Welsh poetry and history, and forged friendships with the locals despite at one point being ostracised as a suspected spy by the inhabitants of her ‘village of lace and stone’.36 Her poetry was shaped by the New Apocalypse and neo-Romantic poetry of the early 1940s, and in the context of a wide correspondence with other poets, among them T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Alun Lewis, and Robert Graves, to whom she supplied materials for The White Goddess.37 Roberts also met David Jones, whose poetry was praised in Wales and features prominently in Modern Welsh Poetry; in May 1944, for example, she lent him books on Celtic inscriptions in Gaul.38 Both she and Jones shared links with Thomas, who, while he never met Jones, had read In Parenthesis on publication, mentioning it in a letter to Rhys of 1938.39 Thomas was one of the few contemporary poets Jones enjoyed (he was also particularly impressed by Thomas’s rendering of Dai’s Boast in a BBC adaptation of In Parenthesis).40 If Jones and Roberts were reclusive by comparison with Thomas, and

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there was little direct contact between them, each was aware of the work of the other two and conscious of belonging, at least implicitly, to a group of poets dealing with Wales in a modernist way. Many poems in Roberts’ first collection, Poems, published by Faber in 1944, concern her attempts to relate to Llanybri, its surroundings and inhabitants. The book’s short lyrics have attracted most attention until recently; indeed, the opening ‘Poem from Llanybri’ has become a staple of Welsh poetry anthologies: If you come my way that is … Between now and then I will offer you A fist full of rock cress fresh from the bank The valley tips of garlic red with dew Cooler than shallots, a breath you can swank [. . .]. Can you come? – send an ode or elegy In the old way and raise our heritage.41

‘Poem from Llanybri’, in fact, became a way of not looking at Lynette Roberts’s work for many years, exhibited by those keen to establish a Welsh equivalent to the English plain-style, empirical tradition stemming from Hardy, which might conceal Anglo-Welsh poetry’s embarrassing modernist origins.42 Even in this fairly orthodox lyric, however, the calculated awkwardness, the unusual use of ‘swank’, and the way the deployment of Welsh terms and quote marks all serve a knowing naivety of address, betray Roberts’s modernist allegiances. Elsewhere in Poems, ‘Plasnewydd’, incorporates unglossed Welsh expressions; ‘Raw Salt on Eye’ shows a level of lexical, alliterative, syntactic, and imagistic excess disruptive of mainstream norms; while ‘Rainshiver’ harks back to Apollinaire’s Alcools by virtuosically accumulating l-containing words in order to represent a Welsh downpour (the plethora of ls almost constituting a bilingual pun given the distinct status of ll in the Welsh alphabet). More important, the last poem in Poems, ‘Cwmcelyn’, is written in a poetic language so strange as to be at odds with everything else in the book. This, it would transpire, was because it was the final section of a long work, Gods With Stainless Ears, which Roberts had just completed in 1943, but felt needed separate publication. Gods, subtitled ‘An Heroic Poem’, appeared in 1951. It comprises five sections, totalling 137 five-line stanzas (two incomplete), written in approximate pentameters, with sporadic end-rhyme. Part I describes the impact of war on ‘Saint Cadoc’s/ Estuary’ and Llanybri; the billeting of soldiers, war industries, militarisation of life, clash between English and Welsh rural cultures, the

176    John Goodby and Chris Wigginton poet’s announcement of her pregnancy in a letter to her husband, and the shooting down of a fighter pilot. Part II is an appeal to humanity to overcome the war’s destruction, linked to the renewing powers of the natural world. Part III features the Swansea Blitz of February 1941, the pains of separation from Rhys, and doubts about his faithfulness. Part IV opens with memories of a miscarriage in 1940, which, with Rhys’s present unfaithfulness, constitute a ‘double hurt’.43 Part V sees Roberts and Rhys reunited; in a visionary tour de force, they rise on an escalator to a cloud in a ‘fourth dimensional state’ in the outer atmosphere of the earth, where they briefly find harmony before being brought back to earth by the war.44 Ambiguously, while the ‘Argument’ tells us that Rhys is interned in a ‘Mental Home for Poets’, the poem itself ends with him expressing a defiant ‘resolv[e] to free the dragon’ whilst ‘[t]he girl turns away: towards a hard and new chemical dawn breaking up the traditional skyline’.45 There are running themes which strengthen the thread of continuity between sections, such as a nationalist awareness of the friction created by soldiers and evacuees, mainly English and indifferent at best to Welsh culture, billeted on a small community. There are also interwoven observations on botanical, ornithological, and insect life which amount to an unassertive sense of solidarity with, and renewal through the natural world. Roberts’s poem displays a practising artist’s sense of colour and the chemistry of colour; a politically-informed folklorist and anthropologist’s awareness of the routines of farming and of local culture and customs; and a participant’s perspective on the life of the local community. There is also a more general interest in the technology of war and industry intersecting with the rural zone. The ‘dawn’ Roberts turns towards in the last lines is the post-war world. Begun in 1941, a year of unbroken defeats, by 1943 the poem reflects the awareness that war had turned in the favour of the Allies, and imagines what might follow an Allied victory. The poem is presented as an exemplary modernist text. Each section is preceded by a passage in Welsh (from a poem, hymn, or the Bible) and an ‘Argument’; and the whole work is bookended by an introductory inscription in Welsh verse, a Preface, and concluding notes and translations. The macaronic nature of the frame extends to the poem itself, which not only contains Welsh and English, but a jostling mixture of arcane and everyday lexis: Roberts is fond of coinages and inkhornisms, among them ‘manurial’, ‘palea’, ‘oölite’, ‘cyprine’, ‘slimerot’, ‘ligustrum’, ‘xantheine’, and ‘xerophilous’, any one of which is enough to send a reader running for a dictionary.46 The syntax, too, is strange (often paratactic or broken), with awkward elisions. The resistance

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to readerly consumption is increased by typographical unorthodoxy: serial numbers suddenly interjected (‘XEBO 7011 camouflaged in naval oilskin’), passages in capitals, a question mark in parentheses ‘(?)’, and so on.47 A sampling of the openings of four sections suggests the range of timbres and textures: a) I, 1–6. Today the same tide leans back, blue rinsing bay, With new beaks scissoring the air, a care-away Cadence of sight and sound, poets and men Rediscovering them. Saline mud Siltering, wet with marshpinks, fresh as lime stud Whitening fields, gulls and stones attending them [. . .].48 b) II, 1–5. We must upprise O my people. Though Secretly trenched in sorrel, we must Upshine, outshine the day’s sun. And day Intensified by the falling haggard Of rain shall carve our smile with straw.49 c) IV, 1–7 I, rimmeled, awake before the dressing sun: Alone I, pent up incinerator, serf of satellite gloom Cower around my cradled self; find crape-plume In a work-basket cast into swaddling clothes Forcipated from my mind after the foetal fall: Rising ashly, challenge blood to curb – compose – Martial mortal, face a red mourning alone.50 d) V, 1–5. Air white with cold. Cycloid wind prevails. On ichnolithic plain where no step stirs And winter hardens into plate of ice: Shoots an anthracite glitter of death From their eyes, – these men shine darkly.51

Many of Roberts’s characteristic traits are found here. In a), scenic clarity is enhanced by the oddness of collocations; ‘leans’, ‘rinsing’, birds/military aircraft which ‘scissor’ the air with their ‘beaks’; a weave of ‘s’, ‘t’, and short ‘i’ sounds to render the vividness of the marsh-pinks and the lime being spread on the fields. Part II, b), opens in hortatory mode – this is both a nationalist appeal, and a general appeal to humanity to resist destruction – but we also remark the double ‘p’ of ‘upprise’ (no misprint, since it is repeated elsewhere), which suggests ‘apprise’, learn, and ‘appraise’, judge or value, as well as prise/prize, all of which subtly and intelligently modify the basic sense. Equally, ‘sorrel’ seems

178    John Goodby and Chris Wigginton primarily to refer to one of the edible wild plants Roberts often notes (like wild garlic in ‘Poem from Llanybri’), but the sense of the similarsounding ‘sorrow’ is inescapable: sorrow as common as sorrel, and as emblematic of Welsh rural poverty. In both cases the point is being made by oblique verbal means. ‘Rimmeled’, in c), is a verb from a cosmetics brand (Rimmel), and perhaps the speaker’s dark-eyed, woeful state following the loss of her baby, whose ‘foetal’ (fatal) fall is ‘forcipated’ (as with forceps) from her memory again, lonely in the ‘red mourning’ morning. Finally, in d), a winter landscape is described in an appropriately chilling vocabulary: ‘cycloid’ is the curve traced in space by a point in the circumference of a circle as it moves along a straight line – so, the spiralling wind of a cyclonic Arctic weather system traversing Wales – and ‘ichnolithic’ recalls ‘ichnothology’ (the study of fossils), but splices it onto ‘lithic’ (stone) and ‘ichthus’ (fish) to give the sense of the ‘plain’ of the fish-filled sea frozen like stone. ‘Anthracite’ is high-quality shiny Welsh coal, appropriate to the black glare of the eyes of men training for battle. Like Thomas and Jones, Roberts’s word-music approximates to cynghanedd, although her use of this Welsh-identifying device is even more foregrounded and radical than theirs. All of the examples given above contain instances of what Andrew Duncan has called ‘anglohanedd’, a tendency to pattern vowel and consonant sounds, often with half-lines repeating or mirroring each other; thus, ‘Alone I, pent up incinerator, serf of satellite gloom’.52 At the same time, this ‘primitive’ effect, recalling earlier Welsh (and Anglo-Saxon) poetry is thematically counterpointed by the work’s fascination with science and technology. Part V, where this is most marked, has the lovers existing in a ‘radium activity’, and enjoying a vision of ‘Chinese blocks of uranium’ being transported across the globe in the post-war world of ‘commerce and competitive air-lines’.53 This is one clue to understanding the polysemic title: ‘gods with stainless ears’ are the gods whose ears are too pure to hear the tribulations of the modern world, but also aircraft, whose large ear-shaped wings can use stainless steel, and give men godlike powers. Like Thomas, but more so, Roberts used the cyborg splicing of organic to inorganic terms (‘acetated minds’, ‘gillette veins’, ‘sprockets of kale’, ‘petroleum sky’); although her anxiety with regard to technology is less about its subsuming of humans than about the centralising statist ideologies driving research (unlike Thomas, she abhorred the proposals for a Welfare State).54 Technology itself is seen as neutral; in a 1945 article on coracles, for example, she does not fetishise traditional materials, unperturbedly envisaging a future in which the vessels are ‘machine-sprayed with ICI plastics’.55 Roberts’s attitude to technology resembles Hart

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Crane’s futuristic modernism, which opposed the New World and the transfigurative potentials of technology to the savage nostalgia of Eliot’s and Pound’s modernism, seeking to incorporate the machine within poetry. If it is also more ostensibly modest than Crane’s ambitious epic The Bridge (1930), it nevertheless reaches into areas – female, domestic, romantic – ignored by male modernist poets, and with an intense, tonic sense of the positive possibilities of the world being ushered into existence by conflict.

Conclusion As we have argued in this chapter, Welsh modernist poetry constitutes a distinct and valuable strand of the modernist tapestry. Dylan Thomas, David Jones, and Lynette Roberts turned the disadvantages of midcentury Welsh location and identification into sources of imaginative strength. By responding primarily at the level of language to ex-centricity and historical abjection, they were able to avoid poetic reportage and do justice to their own hyphenated, hybrid identities, as well as that of Anglophone Wales. But the nature of their response has made Jones and Roberts poets’ poets, at best, and meant neglect of the most interesting work of Thomas. There are signs, however, that in a Wales which has begun to permit more various ways of constructing Welsh identity following devolution in 1997, they are slowly being given their critical due. What the growing stature of these ‘hotch-potch’, pretani poets suggests is that the Anglo-Welsh canon needs to adjust in order to accommodate them, rather than vice versa. Their examples also suggest that critics need to reassess the British mid-century response to modernism more generally. If a good deal of what we have called ‘Welsh modernism’ did not occur in Wales, this should suggest affinities with a contemporary cultural scene which is increasingly characterised by a yearning for identity and, at the same time, migration, transnationalism, axiality, and daring eclecticism, whether this is volitional or enforced. Moreover, to a degree greater than elsewhere, in (and often outside) Wales recognisably modernist modes still account for most of the best poetry written today, including as it does that of Peter Finch, Wendy Mulford, John James, Paul Evans, David Greenslade, and David Annwn.56 That four of these six poets make or made their living outside Wales in no way diminishes the ‘Welshness’ of their work. Similarly, poets of English and other provenance show that Wales, as place, concept, condition or possibility, continues to enable poetry which escapes blood-and-soil

180    John Goodby and Chris Wigginton belongingness on the one (Welsh) hand, and post-imperial complacency on the (English) other. From Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts (1966) to John Wilkinson’s Sarn Helen (1997), Richard Caddel’s For the Fallen (2000), Peter Riley’s The Llyˆn Writings (2007), and Geoffrey Hill’s Oraclau/ Oracles (2010), English poets have been remaking themselves (and hence ‘English’ poetry), even if critics have been slow to see it. All of which suggests that to get beyond the marginalisation of modernist poetry created by regional and national identification in the past (MacDiarmid as ‘just’ Scottish, Bunting as ‘only’ Northumbrian – and therefore tangential, however praiseworthy, to English poetry) it may now be time to devise a way of accommodating it through a more radically inclusive and protean sense of Britishness.

Notes   1. For ease of reference, and with no other meaning than ‘Welsh Anglophone’, the term ‘Anglo-Welsh’ will be used in what follows. Among Welsh critics, only Tony Conran has attempted to define Welsh modernist poetry: a moving spirit behind a special Lynette Roberts issue of Poetry Wales in 1983, he also deals with David Jones, Dylan Thomas, Glyn Jones and Roberts in Frontiers in Anglo-Welsh Poetry (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997). Recent work on post-1960s Welsh poetic modernism, which Conran ignores, appears in Andrew Duncan’s pioneering studies The Failure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (Cambridge: Salt Press, 2003) and Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005). Duncan also co-edited, with John Goodby, Angel Exhaust 21 (Summer 2010), a special issue on the Welsh poetic avant-garde and underground, which includes a detailed timeline, a general survey essay, and an essay on Lynette Roberts.  2. Tony Bianchi’s description of the resurgent Welsh-speaking middle class of the post-WWII period notes ‘a hostility to science and urban life as unWelsh; an elevation of rural values; an essentialist or ahistorical notion of nationalism, based on a selective view of the past and notions of an organic tradition; a belief in the importance of an elite in defending this ideal, of which the Welsh language is the embodiment; a view of the English-speaking Welsh as alienated and needing to align themselves with these values [. . .]; and above all, the elevation of culture, literature and even “taste” as a surrogate religion which informs these convictions’. See Tony Bianchi, ‘R. S. Thomas and his readers’, Wales: The Imagined Nation, ed. Tony Curtis (Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1986), p. 84.  3. It is significant, for example, that no Welsh publisher tried to republish Gods with Stainless Ears until the mid-1990s; when it did reappear, in 2005, it was with the Manchester-based press Carcanet.   4. In the half century before 1920, Wales was ruled by a Liberal-Nonconformist alliance; as Andrew Duncan claims, this means that a major strand in contemporary Welsh nationalism is ‘not a creative and modernizing and

Welsh Modernist Poetry    181 self-conscious formation [but] a disenfranchised former ruling class’ previously in charge of ‘a single-party country’. The post-WWI collapse in religious belief meant that the Welsh language became the core value of its successor, Plaid Cymru, replacing religion as the transcendental principle at the heart of Welsh identity for some nationalists. ‘Linguistic culturalism’ is Smith’s term for its distortion of cultural and historical discourse (his main target is the attempt to erase a ‘British’ dimension from Raymond Williams). See Duncan, Centre and Periphery in Modern British Poetry, p. 227; Dai Smith, in debate with Daniel G. Williams, ‘Textual tales and true life stories’, Planet, 116 (June 1996), 104.  5. See, for instance, M. Wynn Thomas, Corresponding Cultures: The Two Literatures of Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999); Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2004).  6. As Plaid’s leader from 1925–45, Saunders Lewis asserted that Welsh nationalists ‘cannot [. . .] aim at anything less than to annihilate English in Wales [. . .]. It must be deleted from the land called Wales: delenda est Carthago’. See Gwyn A. Williams, When Was Wales?: A History of the Welsh (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 281.  7. Saunders Lewis, ‘The Deluge, 1939’, Welsh Verse, ed. Tony Conran (Bridgend: Seren, 2003), pp. 275, 276.   8. See Ian Hamilton, ‘The forties’, A Poetry Chronicle: Essays and Reviews (London: Faber, 1973), p. 55. The Audenesque makeover of the 1930s occurred in studies such as Samuel Hynes’s The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (London: Bodley Head, 1976) and Valentine Cunningham’s British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).   9. On Welsh modernism and the grotesque, see Conran, Frontiers in AngloWelsh Poetry, p. 113. 10. Marjorie Perloff, Poetry On & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 53–4. 11. Desmond Hawkins, ‘Poetry’, Time and Tide, XVI: 6 (9 February 1935), 204, 206. 12. Drew Milne, ‘Modernist poetry in the British Isles’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 153, 154. 13. Dylan Thomas, The Collected Letters, ed. Paul Ferris (London: Dent, 2000), p. 548; Rainer Emig, Modernism in Poetry: Motivations, Structures and Limits (London: Longman, 1995), p. 124. 14. Whitehead’s ‘process philosophy’ was so named in The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920) and further developed in Science and the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925). 15. James Keery, ‘The burning baby and the bathwater: 7’, PN Review 154, 3: 2 (November–December 2003), 28. 16. Dylan Thomas, Collected Poems 1934–1953, ed. Walford Davies and Ralph Maud (London: Dent, 1988), pp. 12, 9, 24. 17. Thomas, Collected Poems 1934–1953, p. 13. 18. Thomas, The Collected Letters, pp. 108, 122.

182    John Goodby and Chris Wigginton 19. Thomas, Collected Poems 1934–1953, pp. 19, 20, 23. See also Thomas, The Collected Letters, p. 89. 20. Thomas, Collected Poems 1934–1953, p. 7. 21. William Walton Rowe, Three Lyric Poets: Harwood, Torrance, MacSweeney (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2009), p. 7. 22. Thus, ‘I, in my intricate image’ refers to the notorious moment when a woman’s eyeball is sliced open with a razor in Dalí’s and Buñuel’s 1929 surrealist film Un Chien Andalou: ‘Death instrumental/ Splitting the long eye open’. Thomas, Collected Poems: 1934–1953, p. 34. 23. Thomas, Collected Poems: 1934–1953, p. 19. 24. Thomas, The Collected Letters, p. 328. 25. See Neil Corcoran, The Song of Deeds: A Study of The Anathemata of David Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1982), pp. 1–24. 26. For details of Jones’s cultural theories, see his essays ‘Art and sacrament’ in Epoch and Artist (London: Faber, 1959) and ‘An Introduction to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings, ed. Harman Grisewood (London: Faber, 1978). 27. David Jones, In Parenthesis (London: Faber, 1987), p. 1. 28. Jones, In Parenthesis, p. xi. 29. Jones, In Parenthesis, p. xiii; David Jones, ‘Angle-Land’, The Anathemata (London: Faber, 1979), p. 115; David Jones, ‘The Tribune’s Visitation’, The Sleeping Lord (London: Faber, 1974), p. 50. 30. For a succinct and highly insightful assessment of The Anathemata and The Sleeping Lord, see Neil Corcoran, English Poetry since 1940 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 26–36. 31. Jones, In Parenthesis, p. xiii. 32. Drew Milne, introduction to a selection from David Jones, in The Conductors of Chaos, ed. Iain Sinclair (London: Picador, 1996), p. 261. 33. David Jones, The Roman Quarry, ed. Harman Grisewood and René Hague (London: Agenda Editions, 1981), pp. 62–3. 34. David Jones, Dai Great-Coat, ed. René Hague (London: Faber, 1980), pp. 155–6. 35. Keidrych Rhys, ‘Editorial’, Wales, 1 (Summer 1937), back cover. 36. Lynette Roberts, Collected Poems, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2005), p. 8. 37. Roberts corresponded for nine years with Graves: he acknowledges her in the ‘Foreword’ to The White Goddess, and told her ‘you’re largely responsible for my writing that book’. Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (London: Faber, 1961), p. 111. See also ‘The Correspondence between Lynette Roberts and Robert Graves’, ed. Joanna Lloyd, in Poetry Wales 19: 2 (1983), 51–124. 38. See the Introductions to Roberts, Collected Poems and Lynette Roberts, Diaries, Letters and Recollections, ed. Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2008). 39. Thomas, Collected Letters, p. 318. 40. Thomas Dilworth, Reading David Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008), p. 56. 41. Roberts, Collected Poems, p. 3. 42. During a 2009 BBC TV programme dedicated to Roberts’s work, the main-

Welsh Modernist Poetry    183 stream poet Owen Sheers read ‘Poem from Llanybri’, but seemed unwilling even to utter the name of her masterpiece, referring in passing only to her authorship of a ‘difficult long poem’. Roberts’s poetry was omitted entirely from The lilting house: An anthology of Anglo-Welsh poetry 1917–67, ed. John Stuart Williams and Meic Stephens (London: Dent, 1969), and represented solely by ‘Poem from Llanybri’ in Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480–1990, ed. Raymond Garlick and Roland Mathias (Bridgend: Seren Books, 1982). Welsh Women’s Poetry 1460–2001: An Anthology, ed. Catherine Brennan and Katie Gramich (Dinas Powys: Honno, 2003) includes five poems by Roberts, including ‘Poem from Llanybri’, but no extract from Gods. It is also telling that the first extended discussion of Gods was by an English critic; see Nigel Wheale, ‘Lynette Roberts: legend and form in the 1940s’, Critical Quarterly, 36: 3 (1994). The chapter on Roberts by her main champion in Wales, Tony Conran, in his study of Anglo-Welsh poetry discusses only the less challenging lyrics. See Conran, Frontiers in AngloWelsh Poetry, pp. 163–76. 43. Roberts, Collected Poems, p. 61. 44. Roberts, Collected Poems, p. 64. 45. Roberts, Collected Poems, p. 69. 46. Roberts, Collected Poems, pp. 49, 69, 67, 44, 68, 45, 46, 67. 47. Roberts, Collected Poems, pp. 54, 46, 46. 48. Roberts, Collected Poems, p. 44. 49. Roberts, Collected Poems, p. 53. 50. Roberts, Collected Poems, p. 60. 51. Roberts, Collected Poems, p. 64. 52. Andrew Duncan, ‘An approach to the poetry of Lynette Roberts’, Angel Exhaust 21 (2010), 116–20. 53. Roberts, Collected Poems, p. 65. 54. Roberts, Collected Poems, pp. 45, 46, 47, 51. 55. Roberts, ‘Coracles of the Towy’, Diaries, Letters and Recollections, p. 136. 56. For details of recent and contemporary manifestations of Welsh poetic modernism, see Matthew Jarvis, ‘An absent art? “Alternative” poetry since the Second Flowering’, Poetry Wales 44: 1 (Summer 2008), 8–14; John Goodby, ‘“Deflected forces of currents”: Welsh modernist poetry’, Poetry Wales 46: 1 (Summer 2010), 52–8. The most recent collection of critical essays on Anglo-Welsh poetry does not mention Dylan Thomas, David Jones or Lynette Roberts as founders of Anglo-Welsh poetry, preferring the worthy but limited plain-style work of Idris Davies; it refers to ‘John James [. . .] and others’ only in passing, compounding the critical neglect of post1960s modernist poetry. See ‘Introduction’, in Slanderous Tongues: Essays on Welsh Poetry in English 1970–2005, ed. Daniel G. Williams (Bridgend: Seren Books, 2010).

Chapter 9

Between the Islands: Michael McLaverty, Late Modernism, and the Insular Turn John Brannigan The island, that’s all the earth I know. Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

Vanishing islands In June 1939, The Times reported the disappearance of the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, when a flying boat called the Guba, which was seeking to establish a route from Britain to Australia that did not involve crossing the Mediterranean, failed to find the islands.1 The islands were found again the following day, when the Guba reported less cloud cover, but the momentary disappearance sparked an editorial and a string of letters in the following days about the peculiar tendencies of islands. ‘Continents at least stay, for practical purposes, where they are’, declared the Times editorial, ‘no matter with what commotions man may distract their surfaces; but there is no counting on islands’.2 The editorial goes on to recount renowned instances of mythological and imaginary islands, and to remark upon some of the many literary uses of island settings, such as Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), J.  M.  Barrie’s Mary Rose (1920), and Charles Morgan’s popular but now largely forgotten play, The Flashing Stream (1938). The editorial also mentions the case of Thompson Island in the South Atlantic, which recent maritime expeditions had repeatedly failed to find. Thompson Island was declared non-existent in 1943, yet as recently as 1928 the British government had sold export licences to Norwegian whalers to trade in whale oil and guano from the island, and later that year consented to a diplomatic agreement which ceded British sovereignty of the island over to Norway. An essay in The Geographical Journal of 1928 included the sketches and maps produced by Captain Norris from his voyage of the region in 1825 which had laid the foundation of British

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territorial claims over Thompson and Bouvet Islands, and argued that ‘There seemed no ground for questioning its existence, though there was some degree of uncertainty in its position’.3 In the same year, a retired naval commander, Rupert Gould, in a chapter of his book devoted to ‘doubtful islands’, held fast to the belief that there were unexplored areas around the South Atlantic seas in which Thompson Island may yet be found.4 ‘Thompson Island had better realize it has been warned’, scolded The Times editorial in June 1939, ‘no island can expect to be recognized as existing unless it turns up now and then’.5 The response to these vanishing islands in the 1920s and 1930s illustrates an important paradox in the cultural significance of islands. On the one hand, as Godfrey Baldacchino argues, ‘islands have occupied such a powerful place in modern Western imagination’, from Ithaca and Atlantis, to Avalon and Tir na nÓg, ‘that they lend themselves to sophisticated fantasy and mythology’.6 On the other hand, islands have long been useful as laboratories in the study of biological and cultural processes, from Charles Darwin’s use of the Galapagos islands in The Origin of Species (1859), and Alfred Russel Wallace’s contemporaneous bio-geographical work in the Malay archipelago, through to the birth of modern anthropology with the island-based studies of Alfred Cort Haddon, Margaret Mead, and Bronislaw Malinowski in the early twentieth century. Islands are therefore both ‘hard-edged’ microcosms of continental or mainland life, and they are alternative spaces, utopian or dystopian, in the imperial and national imagination, from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The problem in all of this, as Pete Hay argues, is the absence of the physicality and the phenomenology of islands themselves, an absence for which Hay holds the metaphorical and abstracting tendencies of literary and cultural studies responsible, and makes a case for their omission from island studies altogether, like Plato’s case for the banishment of poets from the polis.7 Yet, Hay’s wish for a way of seeing islands ‘in themselves’, outside of the means of cultural representation, is itself, of course, a mythical abstraction, an illusion upon which every island fantasy depends. It might be argued that the literature of the 1930s, especially as reputed in the work of the Auden generation, represented precisely this turn away from the metaphorical and abstracting tendencies of high modernism, to forms of documentary realism, or even what we might call a ‘revisionary’ modernism, which were capable of precisely such materialist and phenomenological perspectives. Whereas Joyce’s version of Ithaca, Woolf’s famously displaced vision of the Hebrides, or Yeats’s escapist fantasy of Innisfree, might give Hay’s case against literature

186    John Brannigan some support, what Jed Esty describes as ‘the anthropological turn’ in the late modernism of the thirties made possible a renewed sense of the cultural particularity and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness of specific places and regions.8 Indeed, Kristin Bluemel suggests that the generation of writers she calls ‘intermodernist’ were explicitly concerned to recuperate the validity of the ‘provincial, countryside or regional landscape as site of origins or identity’, in contrast to the metropolitanising tendencies of modernism.9 The extent to which this ‘demetropolitanization’, to use Esty’s unlovely word, manifested itself not just in an ‘insular turn’ towards national or regional cultures, but in a rather more literal ‘insular turn’ towards islands, is a notable feature of the writings of the late 1920s and the 1930s throughout the British and Irish Isles. Yet, in contrast to nationalist appropriations of islands as cultural and racial repositories of pre-modern ‘purity’, and imperialist figures of islands as symbolic origins, the literature of islands in the 1930s, I would suggest, is inherently connective, relational, and material.10 One of the best-known examples of the period’s fascination with islands is a collaboration between an English and an Irish poet, W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland (1937), a playful mockery of the contemporary penchant for literary reportage from peripheral regions. MacNeice followed this with I Crossed the Minch (1938), a book purporting to record the poet’s tour around the Western isles of Scotland, but which is extraordinarily deconstructive of the travel genre, and of any apparent Celtic connections which justified MacNeice’s decision to visit. As Edna Longley observes, this was also ‘the decade of two influential island poems: Louis MacNeice’s “The Hebrides” and Hugh MacDiarmid’s “Island Funeral” ’, as well as MacDiarmid’s The Islands of Scotland (1939), a text that is part manifesto, part travelogue.11 It was the decade in which Compton Mackenzie made his home in Barra, identifying himself conspicuously with Scottish nationalism, although his islomanic tendencies from his earlier sojourns in the Mediterranean had already been satirised in D. H. Lawrence’s story, ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’ (1927). The period is known for the proliferation of island literature in Gaelic, most notably from the Blasket Islands, off the south-west coast of Ireland, and among which the most celebrated works are Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An tOileánach (The Islandman) (1929), Muiris Ó Súileabháin’s Fiche Blian ag Fás (Twenty Years-a-Growing) (1933), and Peig Sayers’ autobiography, Peig (1936).12 Of these, Ó Criomhthain’s work was encouraged, edited and translated by a Yorkshireman, Robin Flower, who fell in love with the Blaskets in the course of his research on medieval Irish manuscripts; whilst Ó Súileabháin’s book was influenced, edited, and translated

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by a Londoner, George Thomson, a classical scholar and committed Marxist, who saw island life as a close approximation of Homeric Greece. It was also, rather strangely, introduced by E. M. Forster, who described Twenty Years A-Growing as ‘an account of neolithic civilization from the inside’, where ‘it has itself become vocal, and addressed modernity’.13 Forster specifically cites J. M. Synge as an exemplar of the modernist appropriation of islands as spaces ‘outside’ of modernity, and infers an argument which Jill Frank makes meticulously in her study, Islands and the Modernists (2006).14 This flurry of archipelagic literature, then, is characterised by the circulation of people and ideas between the islands, and is certainly marked by the perception that the islands on the western edge, be they the Blaskets, the Arans, or the Hebrides, represent peripheral extremes of mainland society. As was evident in one of the ur-texts of the genre, Synge’s The Aran Islands (1907), the islands seemed to offer a sense of rootedness, even timelessness, but they also represented the extremes of social change, particularly in the case of rapid depopulation and emigration. Pete Hay suggests one of the key reasons for social and cultural obsession with islands: Perhaps the most contested faultline within island studies is whether islands are characterised by vulnerability or resilience; whether they are victims of change, economically dependent, and at the mercy of unscrupulous neocolonial manipulation, or whether they are uniquely resourceful in the face of such threats.15

This, I would argue, was a question of particular urgency throughout the British and Irish Isles, in the 1920s and 1930s, when the very notion of the ‘wholeness’ of ‘Britain’, ‘England’, or the ‘United Kingdom’, was undermined politically and culturally by the emergent sovereignty of the Irish Free State (1922) and its constitutional claim to the ‘whole island of Ireland’ (1937); by the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s; by the formation of Plaid Cymru (1925) and the Scottish National Party (1934); and by the palpable decline of British imperial power across the globe.16 George Orwell argued that if the empire disintegrated, England would be reduced to ‘a cold and unimportant island where we all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes’.17 Although he would spend some of his final years living on Jura, subsisting on just such a diet, Orwell’s point was that England, or more properly Britain, as an island, could not sustain its prosperity from its own natural resources. In reply to Orwell’s prospect of a Britain returned to its own shores, Hugh MacDiarmid in The Islands of Scotland, living then on Whalsay in the Shetlands, looked forward to such a fate, holding fast to

188    John Brannigan the belief that ‘all that is still greatest in literature and art and philosophy was created [. . .] in places as lonely and bare as these islands are’.18 What did ‘islandness’ mean to such writers in the 1930s? Did it entail insularity, a word which connotes both security and isolation? Did it appeal to this generation of late-modernist writers as an idea of remoteness, primitivism, and subsistence free of the ideological and ethical compromises of metropolitan prosperity? Did ‘islandness’ promise to restore a material sense of location, of place, to ideas of regional, or even national, identity through the association of islands with rootedness? Or did ‘islandness’ promise not just a corrective, but an alternative to, the dominant conceptions of identity and belonging of the past? Was this ‘islomania’, in other words, a phase rife with devolutionary potential, with the potential to imagine post-imperial and post-metropolitan forms of community and citizenship?

Island ecologies Michael McLaverty’s fictional representations of Rathlin are exemplary of what might be characterised tentatively as an emergent archipelagic consciousness in the literature of the British and Irish Isles in the i­nterwar period. McLaverty’s island is a ‘laboratory for the study of ­cultural process’, in the words of J. D. Evans, particularly of then current c­ ultural concerns about island sustainability, degeneration, and cultural purity.19 At the same time, it is a distinctive habitat, a locality, interconnected with, and interdependent upon, other configurations of social and cultural belonging. McLaverty spent long periods of his childhood on Rathlin island, located between the North Antrim coast and the Mull of Kintyre, and it is a setting to which he returns again and again in his fictional writings. It is the location for some of his best-known stories, such as ‘The Wild Duck’s Nest’ (1934, 1947), ‘The Prophet’ (1936), and ‘Stone’ (1939), as well as the first part of his first novel, Call My Brother Back (1939), and the whole of Truth in the Night (1951). For Sophia Hillan King, Rathlin is most clearly associated with McLaverty’s emergent phase as a writer in the 1930s, where the island is a ‘superficially idyllic setting’, associated with childhood joy and innocence, but ultimately also with loss and decay.20 That sense of loss is biographical, King argues, reflecting his own sense of longing for the island which was partly his childhood home, but it is also more philosophical. McLaverty’s island writings are characterised, King writes, by a ‘note of regret, almost of grief at the passing of a kind of prelapsarian purity’, fuelled by a sense of Rathlin’s distinctiveness from the modernity of the

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mainland, and by an equally keen awareness of the decline of the island population and the demise of its cultural peculiarities.21 Concerns about population decline abound in the early stories and in Call My Brother Back. At the end of the first chapter of Call My Brother Back, the child protagonist, Colm, learns that in his great-grandfather’s time ‘[t]here were three schools in the island [. . .] and now there’s only one with forty wee childer in it’. More pointedly, his father pronounces that: ‘The people’s not the same as they used to be; there’s a softness in them’. Another islander summarises the problem: ‘All the young are goin’ away, the ould people are dyin’ and there’s nobody marryin’’.22 Despite their crudity, these statements are broadly in line with McLaverty’s characterisations of island life, which are preoccupied with the leaving of the young, the dying of the old, and the difficulty of finding marital partners. More particularly here, the ‘wee-ness’ of the ‘childer’, and the ‘softness’ of the people, implies that the depopulation of the island is not simply caused by famine and emigration – that is, not simply the result of economic and political factors – but is also the consequence of inherent, degenerative factors within the people themselves. Such echoes of eugenic concerns about degeneration, heredity, and sustainability are by no means rare, of course, in the literature of late modernism, and in Irish writings of the period are most clearly associated with the late Yeats of Purgatory (1939) and On the Boiler (1939). The affinity of literary and anthropological interests in the early twentieth century has been a significant point of exploration in the new modernist studies, and in recent studies of the Irish Revival.23 Rathlin Island was not subject to the same degree of scientific and cultural interest as the Arans, Blaskets, or Hebrides, all of which were the bases for a flurry of ethnographic, linguistic, and literary publications in the first half of the twentieth century.24 As an island between islands, compared to islands on the periphery, or ‘islands beyond islands’, perhaps Rathlin was not sufficiently remote, or not sufficiently liminal, to lend itself to the cultural and scientific imagination. It was, however, the subject of one of the first physical anthropological surveys of racial types to be completed in Ireland. Michael A. MacConaill, a graduate of the Department of Anatomy in Queen’s University Belfast, made a study of male islanders in July 1923, the results of which he published in the Proceedings of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society. MacConaill surveyed twenty men, photographing them as well as taking twenty measurements and several observations on physical attributes such as weight, height, cephalic index, naso-mental, bizygomatic, and bigonial facial measurements, hair form and colour, and eye colour. These were the indices of racial identity for the trained physical anthropologist, and

190    John Brannigan in a manner interestingly replicated in the recent mapping of the Irish human genome, are only meaningful in relation to the subject’s selfreported ancestry.25 All of MacConaill’s subjects, except one, were born on the island, and their fathers were born on the island, although seven of the twenty had mothers who were born in the neighbouring counties of Antrim and Derry. This in itself is an interesting finding, although MacConaill doesn’t comment upon it, of the statistical prevalence of marriage between island men and non-island women, but not, it seems, the other way round. The more likely emigration of women from the island probably accounts for this tendency. MacConaill’s measurements confirm his impression of the racial commonality of the men of Rathlin: The people are distinctly fair-skinned . . . The skin is smooth and rather matt in texture. The eyes are light in colour . . . The form of the hair is slightly waved; in only three of the men could it be classed as straight . . . The face is long . . . with high cheek bones . . . and a well developed lower jaw . . . The nose is prominent with well developed alae.26

The common technique of physical anthropologists of the time was to aggregate the measurements of their study to arrive at such a description as if of one individual who serves as racial archetype for the group. The results confirm for MacConaill that the men of Rathlin belong to ‘a well-defined race-group, the Gall-Ghaedhil or Norse-Irish’, and that they share kinship with the southern parts of the west of Scotland. They remain distinct as islanders, however, despite their intercourse with Antrim and south west Scotland. MacConaill quotes from a 1786 description of the islanders by the Rev. William Hamilton, that ‘want of intercourse with strangers has preserved many peculiarities’, which MacConaill writes is ‘true today’, while also observing the dwindling of the population as a result of famine and emigration, and the dwindling too of the Gaelic language in the island.27 For MacConaill, then, Rathlin is of interest because of the qualities most commonly associated with island ecologies: the ‘isolation’ and ‘boundedness’ which R. J. Berry argues gives them their peculiar genetic and cultural traits, and the fragility of their biological systems, which places them constantly at risk of extinction.28 As such, then, for anthropologists as well as some prominent late-modernist writers, islands were exemplary sites of both eugenic and ecological anxieties, distinctively local, and yet bound up with intrinsically internationalist perspectives on the human race and its planetary habits.29 McLaverty’s writings are exemplary of this anthropological turn in late modernism, and for their preoccupation with the relationship between material space and subjective perspectives. McLaverty’s first

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published story, ‘The Green Field’ (1932), is set on a fictional version of Rathlin, called Innisdall island, and the story works hard in its opening paragraphs to fix an image of the coastal geometries of the island in relation to the sea and the mainland. Three times in the opening ten lines of the story, the narrator describes Maura Murphy’s view from the island school in which she teaches, of ‘the sea and the mainland’, ‘the blue sea and the grey land’, and ‘the sea and the dark mountains of the mainland’. McLaverty also uses island metaphors for parts of the island landscape: patches of corn are described as ‘green islets in a grey sea’, and the eponymous green field is described as an ‘oasis’.30 The story concerns the farmer-fisherman who owns the green field, Frank King, who looks to Maura for companionship and love, but whose hopes are dashed when she asks him to sell her the field so that she can marry a teacher from the mainland and settle on the island. There is clearly an ethnological concern underlying the story, about the sustainability of island life, as it is evident that Maura is Frank’s only hope of a marriage partner. Frank’s forty-year-old unmarried sister, with whom he bickers, particularly about strangers to the island, embodies the unrelieved and ‘inexpressible loneliness’ which he faces without Maura.31 The green field, an obvious symbol of fertility amidst the greyness of rock and seascape, is itself lost to the island through Frank’s consent to Maura’s wishes, since it will pass from useful agricultural land to the aesthetically pleasing site of Maura’s home with her husband, whose labour is intellectual rather than manual. The story is not mature work: it wears its symbolism too heavily, and makes too much of the pathetic fallacy, in which the weather matches the mood of the characters. However, it does make clear the interdependence of human with other life forms on the island, and the slow encroachment of mainland customs and economies upon island ecologies. The transition of the island from a worked, material landscape to an aesthetic landscape is also figured in the story, with no sense of resentment, but in pairing the proximate words ‘loveliness’ and ‘loneliness’ in his descriptions of the characters’ feelings about the island, McLaverty shows that there are casualties in this transition.32 The fragility of island ecologies, human and non-human, is also the concern of ‘The Wild Duck’s Nest’, published originally in 1934, and revised in 1947. In it, a young boy named Colm discovers the nest of a wild duck, handles the egg before replacing it, and then is tortured by the thought that the duck will forsake the egg. In the original version, McLaverty concludes on a dark note: Colm returns to the nest to allay his fears, but in doing so he disturbs the duck, who in flapping away from Colm, drops the egg which smashes against the rocks below.33 Colm’s anxiety is that in handling the egg he has ‘sinned’, but McLaverty’s

192    John Brannigan focus is not just on the boy’s moral dilemma. Rather, it is on the fragile co-existence and interdependence of human and non-human life forms. McLaverty is charting the anxious, delicate relationship between human and animal worlds: Colm is located within a physical landscape described with a naturalist’s precision, with a ‘western limestone headland’, a lake fringed with ‘bulrushes, wild irises and sedge’, and where the differences between a wild duck and a tame duck, and between the eggs of a duck and a gull, are matters of intimate knowledge. It is clear in the story that the wild duck is a rare sighting, and its nest is an untidily built, fragile assembly of rushes, straw and feathers on a tidy islet of grass in a lake. Here, then, are the precarious beginnings of life on the island, an image not simply symbolic of, but fully implicated in, Colm’s own island childhood. In ‘The Prophet’ (1936), another young boy growing up on the island, Brendan, longs to have the gift, for which his grandfather was renowned, of ‘telling the weather’. His grandfather’s rheumatism, it is implied, is the likely source of his gift, yet Brendan wishes it to be a hereditary intuition. Brendan fails to intuit the weather, however, and attempts to read the signs of changing weather in the landscape and sky around the island: ‘the Mull of Kintyre was smothered in fog; and turning round he saw a tonsure of mist on Knocklayde. He smiled at the prospect of more rain’.34 Partly, the story is concerned with inexperience, and a child’s longing for authority and wisdom; and partly too, the story is about weather forecasting as an especially valuable island skill, one prized by a young boy keen to follow in the traditions of his family. His grandfather’s gift is symbolic of a sense of harmony with the ecology and climate of the island, whereas Brendan’s attempts to read the signs of nature fail. A darker side to island society is also suggested by the story, since his grandfather’s prophecies earned him a reputation as a ‘quare ould fella’ and ‘an old witch’, and Brendan’s attempts to tell the weather are received with the same sense of scorn.35 McLaverty’s Rathlin is not depicted as a site of alternative superstitions and myths, glorious in its differences from the mainland, but rather a society pressed harder by material circumstances into insularity and suspicion. In several of McLaverty’s stories, the weather figures significantly in highlighting the fragility of human and non-human life on the island, and in levelling differences within island society. This is especially evident in ‘Stone’ (1939), in which Jamesy Heaney, ‘the last of the Heaneys left on the island’, tired of local taunts about his childlessness, sets his mind foolishly upon buying the tallest headstone possible for his own grave so that his name will outlive that of his neighbours. However, his hopes for posterity are dashed when he witnesses the power of a storm to

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smash graveyard stones to pieces.36 The storm also devastates his shed, tears up his tree, and wreaks havoc with his thatched roof. The obvious reading suggests the vulnerability of human society to the power of nature, and McLaverty’s Rathlin fictions abound with reminders of the powers of sea and wind to destroy human life and habitation, powers which may indeed be read allegorically for the effects of modernity upon a community associated with long traditions of subsistence fishing and farming. Set against this, the story nonetheless suggests a common resilience among the islanders in their diverse attempts to impose meaning upon the ‘rocky desert’ which the island would be without them.37 For the men who taunt Jamesy, ‘family’ and ‘stock’ are the only meaningful signs of human endurance, while for Jamesy ‘stone’ is the language of posterity. Yet, at the heart of the story is a question about the nature of this relationship between human signification, or meaning-making, and the materiality of place. In the era of empires, reichs, and nations, McLaverty’s fictions reflect on the ways in which material place, the specific sense of locality shaped by sea, land, and climate, defines and makes the identities of the people who inhabit it, not the other way around. Jamesy is left at the end of the story with the cold realisation that the island has made its mark upon him, but that his claims upon the island are as tenuous as ‘the withered heather clinging for life to the barren rocks’ which he sees on his way to the graveyard.38

Rathlin and the archipelago Although all of the short stories set on Rathlin include specific geographical details, noting its topography, climate, and habitation, none of them locate the island in relation to the world beyond. In the short stories, the island is conceived as a world, complete in its sense of itself as a society, if not self-sufficient economically. In McLaverty’s first novel, Call My Brother Back (1939), however, it is clear that the island is both connected with, and dependent upon, a wider network of places and communities. The swans are understood to have come from Scotland. Fish and potatoes are sold in Ballycastle, where the islanders buy meat, clothes and shoes, and obtain medical services. The young hero of the novel, Colm, can only become a teacher in Belfast, where he already has an older sister and brother; otherwise, his future, the novel implies, consists of dwindling expectations of a land hard to work, and from which it is harder to make a living. Wider geographies are suggested too, by the steam ship wrecked on the island shoreline, from the holds of which the islanders salvage much needed shoes, clothes, furniture, and other

194    John Brannigan supplies, and by Colm’s Uncle Robert, tattooed and worldly-wise, who has stokered ships to India. The sea is understood as a means of passage, communication, and connection, rather than as an insulating boundary, in Call My Brother Back.39 The difference between the geography of the short stories and the geography of the novel might simply be accounted for in formal terms: novels, we might suggest, lend themselves to more capacious spatial frameworks than short stories, and may even need the broader canvas against which to unfold their more expansive plots and distribute their more numerous characters. However, this would place too much stress upon the form dictating the geography. A comparison of the short stories with Call My Brother Back makes clear a key distinction between them: the short stories succeed in representing the island only as an island. It appears to be any island, or indeed even a metaphorical island, as McLaverty’s first published story, ‘The Green Field’, suggests in its title, and in adopting islandness as a metaphor. The novel is far more successful in articulating the particularity of the island, but it does so within an expanded geography, in which the island may be seen from outside, and as a locality in relation to other localities, as well as within wider regional, national, and international contexts. In this way, the geography shapes literary form, or as Franco Moretti argues, ‘each space determines, or at least encourages, its own kind of story’.40 This is most obvious in the contrast between the first part of the novel, set on Rathlin, and the second part, set in Belfast. Indeed, it is Colm’s older brother, Alec, who later dies a violent death in Belfast as an IRA gunman, who articulates the particular sense of ‘between-ness’ which characterises the island, when he tells Colm: ‘Times I wonder whether we’re Irish at all sitting here between Ireland and Scotland; nobody’s darling and nobody wantin’ us’.41 The novel frequently alludes to the Scottish coastline and hills which can be seen from Rathlin, as well as Knocklayde mountain and Ballycastle in Antrim; allusions which further underline the island’s characteristic ‘between-ness’. McLaverty may even suggest a critique of the insularity of his earlier work in the ways in which the ‘island-bound’ narrative of the first part of the novel sees the island as a kind of womb-figure: Colm is depicted on two occasions in foetal positions, and the island is associated as the maternal body in several images, such as ‘the shoulder of the island’, ‘rock-face’, the ‘lap’ of a hill, and, perhaps most pointedly, in the description of the shore ‘where black rocks nippled by limpets breasted the sea’.42 In contrast, in the second part of the novel, in which he has moved to Belfast, Colm sees the island as a material space, a space of objects along a shoreline:

Between the Islands    195 He put his hand in his pocket for a pencil and his fingers touched a green marble pebble which Jamesy had given him the day he left the island. He took it out and looked at it in the palm of his hand. It was polished from rubbing against the things in his pocket; he turned it over admiring its tiny vein of white and its freckles of brown; and as he looked at it a shore took shape in his mind: grey stones in a curve, and down by the edge of the tide the pebbles rattling as the waves came slashing in, farther back dry sticks eaten by sea lice, a frayed piece of rope, whitened limpet shells that crackled under the feet, and a bicycle tyre with rusted rims [. . .]43

This is not the aesthetically idealised landscape of ‘The Green Field’, nor the immutable rock of ‘The Prophet’; instead, Colm is drawn to what Rachel Carson called ‘the marginal world’ of the shoreline, a topography ever-changing, and ever-connective, in which ‘one creature is linked with another, and each with its surroundings’.44 The pebble which Colm carries in his pocket bears quite different connotations, therefore, from the fabled tradition of carrying native soil, and indeed from the figure of epistemological and ontological obscurity which preoccupies Robert Frost in his more famous literary articulation of the pebble in ‘For Once, Then, Something’.45 It is only in Belfast that the significance of Rathlin’s particularity as an island between islands becomes apparent. The violence and alienation associated with Belfast are inseparable from the symbolism of its street names, ‘Oxford Street, Victoria Street, Cromac Street, Durham Street, Townshend Street, Carlisle Circus’, the markers of a failed colonial geography.46 When Colm is drawn towards memories of Rathlin, as he frequently is, it is as an island between Knocklayde and Kintyre, an island comprised of sea, wind, and a restless shoreline. Even its names, which he recalls as ‘words full of music’, ‘Lagavristeevore, Killaney, Crocnacreeva, Carnasheeran, Crocaharna’, are hybrid, adapted names.47 Colm’s acceptance, and even celebration, of this topography of betweenness, is evidently also opposed to his brother’s advocacy of violent nationalism, with its inability to conceive of the island as a place in which other places merge and mingle. In contrast to Esty’s notion of late modernism as restoring cultural integrity as ‘a second-order universalism’, McLaverty’s insular fictions come to dispense with the ‘romance of wholeness’, or the ‘ambiguous embrace of national identity’, and instead describe islands in connective, hybrid, and liminal terms.48 In a typically late-modernist turn, McLaverty’s writings highlight the materiality and phenomenology of the islands as physical and social spaces, at the same time as they insist upon a complex figurative economy in which islands are relational, transformative nodes. If, as Pete Hay argues, islands are ‘special places, paradigmatic

196    John Brannigan places, topographies of meaning in which the qualities that construct place are dramatically distilled’, then they warrant particular study in an age popularly characterised as one in which the specificities of place are eroded by the homogenising processes of globalisation.49 All of the island writings of the 1930s express anxiety about the erosion of island particularity as a result of commerce and migration, including McLaverty’s fictions. Nostalgia for an inferred, pre-modern insularity is certainly a persistent feature of such writings. Yet, it is clearly not the only sentiment, nor even the dominant sentiment, in McLaverty’s writings. If McLaverty began by depicting islands as singular, bounded places, defined by anthropological and materialist concerns about the sustainability of island ecologies, human and non-human, he showed in his novel at the end of the decade that the vulnerability of the island to contact with other places was also its strength, that its ‘between-ness’ made it more, not less, exemplary as a model of archipelagic identities and relations. Like the vanishing islands with which I began, the more visible and exposed they were, the less likely they were to disappear, and the more their island particularities would become manifest. Perhaps that is what ‘islandness’ could mean in a devolved archipelago.

Notes   1. ‘Indian Ocean flight delayed’, The Times, 6 June 1939, p. 13.   2. ‘Islands lost and found’, The Times, 9 June 1939, p. 17.   3. ‘Bouvet Island’, The Geographical Journal, 72.6 (December 1928), 537.  4. Rupert T. Gould, Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1928), pp. 24–162.   5. ‘Islands lost and found’, The Times, 9 June 1939, p. 17.  6. Godfrey Baldacchino, ‘Editorial: Islands – objects of representation’, Geografiska Annaler: Series B – Human Geography, 87:4 (2005), 247–51 (247–8).  7. Pete Hay, ‘A phenomenology of islands’, Island Studies Journal, 1:1 (2006), 19–42 (26, 29).   8. Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 1–22.   9. Kristin Bluemel, ‘Introduction: What is intermodernism?’, in Intermodernism: Literary Culture in Mid-Twentieth-Century Britain ed. Kristin Bluemel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 1–18. 10. The present essay draws upon archipelagic paradigms for critical study of the British and Irish Isles, as defined and extended in: J. G. A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Christopher Harvie, A Floating Commonwealth: Politics, Culture,

Between the Islands    197 and Technology on Britain’s Atlantic Coast, 1860–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 11. Edna Longley, ‘Irish and Scottish “Island Poems” ’, in Northern Lights, Northern Words. Selected Papers from the FRLSU Conference, Kirkwall 2009 ed. Robert McColl Millar (Aberdeen: Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ireland, 2010), pp. 143–61. 12. See Tomás Ó Criomhthain, An tOileánach: Scéal a Bheathadh Féin (Baile Átha Cliath: Clólucht an Tálbóidigh, 1929) [published in translation as Tomás Ó Crohan, The Islandman trans. Robin Flower (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1934)]; Muiris Ó Súileabháin, Fiche Blian ag Fás (Baile Átha Cliath: Clólucht an Tálbóidigh, 1933) [published in translation as Maurice O’Sullivan, Twenty Years A-Growing: Rendered from the Original Irish by Moya Llewelyn Davies and George Thomson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938)]; and Peig Sayers, Peig: A Scéal Féin (Baile Átha Cliath: Clólucht an Tálbóidigh, 1936) [published in translation as Peig Sayers, Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island trans. Bryan MacMahon (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1973)]. 13. E. M. Forster, ‘Introductory note’, in Maurice O’Sullivan, Twenty Years A-Growing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. v–vi. 14. Jill Frank, Islands and the Modernists: The Lure of Isolation in Art, Literature, and Science (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006). 15. Hay, ‘A phenomenology of islands’, p. 21. 16. See Michael Gardiner in The Cultural Roots of British Devolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); and Raphael Samuel in Island Stories: Unravelling Britain – Theatres of Memory, Vol. II (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 41–73. 17. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962 [1937]), p. 140. 18. Hugh MacDiarmid, The Islands of Scotland (London: B. T. Batsford, 1939), pp. x–xi. 19. J. D. Evans, ‘Islands as laboratories for the study of cultural process’, in The Explanation of Culture Change: Models in Prehistory ed. A. C. Renfrew (London: Duckworth, 1973), pp. 517–20. 20. Sophia Hillan King, The Silken Twine: A Study of the Works of Michael McLaverty (Dublin: Poolbeg, 1992), pp. 29–48. 21. Sophia Hillan King, ‘The note of exile: Michael McLaverty’s Rathlin Island’, The Poet’s Place: Ulster Literature and Society, Essays in Honour of John Hewitt, 1907–1987 ed. Gerald Dawe and John Wilson Foster (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1991), pp. 182–3. 22. Michael McLaverty, Call My Brother Back (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2003), p. 10. 23. In new modernist studies, see: Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Jeremy MacClancy, ‘Anthropology: “The Latest Form of Evening Entertainment” ’, in A Concise Companion to Modernism ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 75–94; Marc Manganaro, ‘Modernist studies and anthropology: reflections on the

198    John Brannigan past, present, and possible futures’, in Disciplining Modernism ed. Pamela L. Caughie (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), pp. 210–20; and Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush (eds), Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). On the Irish Revival, see: Mary Burke, ‘Evolutionary theory and the search for lost innocence in the writings of J. M. Synge’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 30:1 (Spring 2004), 48–54; Gregory Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Sinéad Garrigan Mattar, Primitivism, Science, and the Irish Revival (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 24. For examples, in relation to Aran, see: A. C. Haddon and C. R. Browne, ‘The ethnography of the Aran Islands, County Galway’, Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy (1889–1901) Vol. 2 (1891–1893), 768–830; and J. M. Synge, The Aran Islands (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). In relation to the Blaskets, see the auto-ethnographical works cited in note 12 above; and in relation to the Hebrides, and the Atlantic coastal regions more widely, see Seton Gordon, Islands of the West (London: Cassell, 1933). 25. Pin Tong, James G. D. Prendergast, Amanda J. Lohan, Susan M. Farrington, Simon Cronin, Nial Friel, Dan G. Bradley, Orla Hardiman, Alex Evans, James F. Wilson, and Brendan Loftus, ‘Sequencing and analysis of an Irish human genome’, Genome Biology, 11:R91 (2010), 1–14. http:// www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/gb-2010–11–9–r91.pdf (accessed 4 January 2013). 26. Michael A. MacConaill, ‘The men of Rachrai’, in Proceedings and Reports of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society for the Session 1922–1923 (Belfast: The Northern Whig, 1924), p. 6. 27. MacConaill, ‘The men of Rachrai’, pp. 5–6. 28. R. J. Berry, Islands (London: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 49. 29. A revival of such interest in islands and biological and genetic questions might also be traced in recent studies of genetic ancestry in Ireland, Britain, and the eastern Atlantic seaboard. See, for examples: Brian McEvoy, Martin Richards, Peter Forster, and Daniel G. Bradley, ‘The longue durée of genetic ancestry: multiple genetic marker systems and Celtic origins on the Atlantic facade of Europe’, American Journal of Human Genetics 75 (2004), 693–701; and Colm T. O’Dushlaine, D. Morris., V. Moskvina, G. Kirov, International Schizophrenia Consortium, M. Gill, A. Corvin, J. F. Wilson, and G. L. Cavalleri, ‘Population structure and genome-wide patterns of variation in Ireland and Britain’, European Journal of Human Genetics 18 (2010), 1248–54. 30. Michael McLaverty, ‘The green field’, The Irish Monthly 60 (August 1932), 497. 31. McLaverty, ‘The green field’, 502. 32. McLaverty, ‘The green field’, 502. 33. Michael McLaverty, ‘The wild duck’s nest’, The Irish Monthly 62 (April 1934), 236–40. 34. Michael McLaverty, ‘The prophet’, The Irish Monthly 64 (February 1936), 95. 35. McLaverty, ‘The prophet’, p. 100.

Between the Islands    199 36. Michael McLaverty, ‘Stone’, in Collected Short Stories (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2002), pp. 32–42. 37. McLaverty, ‘Stone’, p. 39. 38. McLaverty, ‘Stone’, p. 42. 39. Here, it is worth noting the turn to maritime studies in recent literary criticism. See, for instance: Cesare Casarino, Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris (eds), Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009); Margaret Cohen, The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); and the special issue of PMLA devoted to ‘Oceanic Studies’, 125:3 (May 2010). 40. Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 70. 41. Michael McLaverty, Call My Brother Back (Belfast: Blackstaff, 2003 [1939]), p. 46. 42. McLaverty, Call My Brother Back, pp. 1, 4, 24. 43. McLaverty, Call My Brother Back, p. 57. 44. Rachel Carson, The Edge of the Sea (Boston: Mariner Books, 1998 [1955]), pp. 1–2. 45. Robert Frost, ‘For once, then, something’, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 225. 46. McLaverty, Call My Brother Back, p. 65. 47. McLaverty, Call My Brother Back, p. 65. 48. Esty, A Shrinking Island, pp. 8–9. 49. Hay, ‘A phenomenology of islands’, p. 31.

Chapter 10

The Idea of North: Basil Bunting and Regional Modernism Neal Alexander

There is no doubting the importance of ideas of place in Basil Bunting’s poetry, particularly in his major work, Briggflatts (1966), where Northumbria emerges as a luminous and multi-faceted affective terrain. Bunting’s representations of place are also complex and multi-layered, issuing from a geographical imagination that thrives on contradictions. His regional modernism is characterised both by the imaginative centrality of northern landscapes and cultural paradigms to his writing, and by the refraction of such local and regional attachments through a self-consciously international modernist poetics. Briggflatts explores its themes of dislocation and homecoming through an intense imaginative engagement with the landscapes, history, and linguistic textures of the north-east of England. However, Bunting’s poem is also a deliberately eccentric poetic autobiography that both essays and suspends the expression of a securely ‘northern’ regional identity through its formal disjunctions and dense collage of incommensurable spaces and times. If the poem can be regarded as celebrating locality and belonging in a cherished regional landscape, it also attests to experiences of displacement and encounters with otherness, foregrounding vagrancy as a characteristically modern mode of being-in-the-world. This essay will examine the advantages and limitations of considering Bunting’s poetry in terms of its distinctively regional characteristics and sensibility. In doing so, it will seek to demonstrate the extent to which regional, national, and international horizons are articulated together in his poetics of place, with particular reference to Briggflatts as a paradigmatic example of regional modernism. Modernism has had an uneven career in British poetry, in part because of the persistence of anti-modernist attitudes in both critical discourse and ‘mainstream’ poetic practice during the twentieth century. Nonetheless, as Peter Howarth observes, it is clear that ‘British poetry has been irrevocably changed by modernism’ and this is true both for the

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contemporary avant-garde and also for the line of poets that descends from Thomas Hardy through Philip Larkin to Andrew Motion and beyond.1 But how, if at all, did British poets change modernism? One distinctive feature of the British modernism of Bunting, David Jones, Hugh MacDiarmid, and others is its emphasis upon the particularities of place, apparently grounding the transcultural or exilic aesthetic of high modernism in specific and intimately described landscapes.2 For instance, Neil Corcoran notes that Bunting and Jones both cultivate difference through their respective affirmations of locality and regional culture, demonstrating in their work ‘how an English national culture was only one among many in the British Isles’.3 Similarly, Robert Crawford shows how MacDiarmid’s assertive and self-conscious internationalism was complicated, but never compromised, by ‘an interaction with the minutely local’.4 To varying degrees, all three writers eschew the dominant national frameworks for identity, conjoining the local, the regional, and the international in a manner that exposes the variegated plurality underlying the very idea of a unified ‘British’ culture. Indeed, as William Wootten remarks, ‘British modernism tends to be most characteristically British when it is at its most resistant to dominant notions of Britishness or the British State’.5 This paradoxical formulation certainly accords with Bunting’s agonistic sense of Northumbria’s social, cultural, and linguistic distinctiveness, as well as his abhorrence of centralised authority. There is, however, a danger that by emphasising the regional or national characteristics of modernist poetry from Britain a form of domestication may be effected, and the singularity or eccentricity of these writers’ texts assimilated to the values of the dominant culture. For example, Donald Davie places Bunting’s text at the centre of the canon of post-war British poetry, commending what he sees as ‘the deeply ingrained Englishness of Briggflatts’ over and above its superficially cosmopolitan tendencies.6 In this way, Bunting’s errant modernism is underplayed so that he can be made a pillar of the English poetic tradition. Against such strategies of recuperation and appropriation, Drew Milne argues that the work of British modernist poets should be understood in terms of its ‘possible cosmopolitan solidarities’ rather than its espousal of familiar geopolitical identities.7 In Bunting’s case, such cosmopolitan solidarities would include his friendships and correspondence with, among others, Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, and Lorine Niedecker as well as the extensive influence of precursors such as Horace, Firdusi, Manuchehri, Dante, Villon, and Malherbe upon his poetry. Milne’s reservations are well-founded: there is indeed a danger of restricting the range and invention of Bunting’s

202    Neal Alexander modernist poetics by prioritising his local and regional attachments.8 Yet, those attachments are also a significant component of his work’s imaginative texture and should not be dismissed or ignored. What is needed is a more dialectical understanding of the way in which local and international concerns interanimate in Bunting’s poetry, beginning with a circumspect appraisal of the respective claims made for both his regional roots and his cosmopolitan modernism. Bunting has played his own part in confusing the issue. Late in life, he liked to play the resolute Man of the North, affirming that: ‘A poet is just a poet, but I am a Northumbrian man. It has always been my home, even when I’ve been living elsewhere’.9 Such assertions of regional pride are common and apparently heartfelt, but can mislead readers by implying that his texts posit a more straightforward set of relations between ‘home’ and ‘elsewhere’ than is actually the case. Indeed, critics who are zealous to commend Bunting’s espousal of a marginal cultural identity at odds with the hegemony of the metropolitan centre often fail to acknowledge sufficiently the complexity of his poetic representations of place. This is especially the case when they have recourse to the organicist rhetoric of ‘roots’ and ‘rootedness’. Eric Falci, for instance, describes Briggflatts as ‘an intensely rooted poem’; and for Richard Caddel and Anthony Flowers Bunting’s poem is significant primarily because it is ‘deeply rooted in the North of England’.10 At first glance, these seem fairly innocuous remarks, doing little more than stating what is obvious. However, by foregrounding permanence and continuity as essential to the experience of place, each obscures the importance of travelling, wandering, and exile to the thematic concerns and symbolic forms of Briggflatts, a poem that does not simply hymn its homeland but, crucially, traces the intersecting arcs of several departures and returns. As an autobiography of sorts, Briggflatts draws upon the itinerant trajectory of Bunting’s own life, which took him from Scotswood to Hexham by way of London, Paris, Rapallo, Berlin, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Teheran, and Isfahan.11 To speak of roots is to risk neglecting the importance of these elsewheres for Bunting’s conception of ‘home’, and to underplay the significance of the various ‘cosmopolitan solidarities’ that inform his aesthetic. Falci is certainly right to note the ‘geological’ layering of histories, linguistic registers, and literary allusions in Briggflatts, which he aptly describes as a ‘sedimented epic’.12 Yet, it is equally important to recognise that the poem registers an array of horizontal and transverse connections, bringing disparate places, landscapes, and topographies into focus through a meshwork of spatial relations. A key problem for any critical reading of Briggflatts, then, is the question of how the poem’s regional and international affiliations interrelate.

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Is Bunting a regionalist who adapts the techniques of international modernism to his subject matter? Or a modernist who happens upon regional topics because of his biographical circumstances? Could there be some deeper implication of the two whereby form and content also fundamentally correspond? The answers to such questions remain unclear even in the work of those critics who acknowledge the centrality of this tension in Bunting’s work. For example, Keith Tuma contends that Bunting gives Poundian modernism ‘a Northumbrian signature’; but he also goes on to describe how the ‘Northumbrian core’ of Briggflatts is ‘set in a field of international influences and traditions’.13 In Tuma’s first reading, then, a regional ‘signature’ inflects but does not fundamentally transform Bunting’s recognisably modernist aesthetic; in his second, regionality provides the irreducible ‘core’ of the poem, which resonates decisively among more cosmopolitan influences and contexts. Such critical equivocation is perhaps symptomatic of the way in which Bunting’s focus shifts restlessly between local, regional, and international horizons, which are intricately coordinated but rarely cohere in a single representational frame. The geographer John Tomaney registers something of this complex situation when he observes that Bunting’s representations of Northumbria are ‘rooted in a sense of place that is both territorial and open to the world’.14 Tomaney’s emphasis, however, falls more heavily on rootedness and territoriality than openness to larger historical and geographical contexts, and he argues that Briggflatts is principally concerned with the thematics of dwelling, and with depicting ‘a spiritual and poetic homeland’.15 As I have already suggested, such an emphasis upon dwelling may oversimplify the involved interplay between home and elsewhere, the local and the international in Bunting’s poem. If, as Martin Heidegger remarks, to dwell is ‘to remain, to stay in place’ then how are we to account for the text’s foregrounding of journeys in time and space, or the profound ambivalence that attends its narrative of return and remembrance?16 Bunting’s Chomei at Toyama (1932) is at least as concerned with themes of dwelling, homemaking, and self-scrutiny as Briggflatts, describing the pastoral hermitage of an elderly Japanese poet in the late twelfth century. Yet, the poet’s mountain hut is explicitly described as ‘a lodging not a dwelling’ and his wry contentment is contrasted with the devastation caused by a series of natural disasters in Kyoto, events that render the transience of human settlements apparent: ‘This is the unstable world and/ we in it and our houses’.17 In these lines turbulence is posited as an existential condition, and Briggflatts will reprise and amplify this sense of fundamental instability in a variety of ways. To inhabit place is to live amidst uncertainty, for it always entails

204    Neal Alexander taking place. As Edward Casey describes it, ‘place is not entitative – as a foundation has to be – but eventmental, something in process, something unconfinable to a thing. Or to a simple location’.18 Tomaney, by contrast, takes place to be entitative, foundational, and he accordingly reads Briggflatts as disclosing an image of Northumbria that is bounded, stable, and distinct: a place apart. In doing so, he advocates particularity over what he calls ‘the relational region’, a conception of place that emphasises the region’s implication in a network of spatial relations that reach far beyond its boundaries.19 According to this perspective, regions comprise ‘a series of open, discontinuous spaces constituted by social relationships which stretch across them in various ways’.20 Far from being enclosed and self-sufficient, then, the region is to be understood as a point of intersection or convergence for an array of social, historical, and economic processes. Or, as Doreen Massey argues, places are always meeting places, ‘articulations within the wider power-geometries of space’.21 Tomaney’s concern is that such an emphasis upon networks and spatial relations will subordinate local particularity and the scale of lived experience to the alienated transactions of global flows, but this need not necessarily be the case. For Henri Lefebvre, the experience of place always partakes of what he calls the ‘hypercomplexity of social space’, whereby spaces and places interpenetrate one another at a range of scales from the local to the global: Consequently the local (or ‘punctual’, in the sense of ‘determined by a particular “point” ’) does not disappear, for it is never absorbed by the regional, national or even worldwide level. The national and regional levels take in innumerable ‘places’; national space embraces the regions; and world space does not merely subsume national spaces, but even (for the time being at least) precipitates the formation of new national spaces through a remarkable process of fission. All these spaces, meanwhile, are traversed by myriad currents.22

Social spaces are folded and intercalated, superimposed and implicated in one another, maintaining a semi-autonomous existence but also sharing in an ambiguous continuity. In such circumstances, the local and the regional, the national and the international ineluctably overlap without ever simply being reduced one to the other. Lefebvre’s account of spatial hypercomplexity therefore provides a useful framework for understanding the interrelation of regional and international concerns in Bunting’s poetry because of the way it suggests particularity and implication might be coordinated in the representation of place. The distinctive ‘northernness’ of much of Bunting’s work is widely attested but nonetheless remains an elusive quality, begging several

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questions. Is Bunting’s north the modern region of Northumberland or the ancient kingdom of Northumbria, which stretched from the Humber to the Firth of Forth and west to Cumbria and the Clyde? Can it be restricted to the north, or north-east, of England, or is it fundamentally separate from any English polity? Where do its borders begin and end? For Peter Davidson, north names the direction of an idea as much as it designates a geographical location, and both location and idea partake of a fundamental ambiguity. ‘As a descriptor of place,’ he contends, ‘“north” is shifting and elusive, yet, paradoxically, it is a term that evokes a precise – even passionate – response in most people’.23 Similarly, Katharine Cockin notes that the north, as both space and representational paradigm, ‘is not fixed, but is rather still forming or becoming’, a creative process that is particularly visible in literary texts.24 The north of England is frequently defined in opposition to ‘the south’ – itself an idea that subsumes a host of local and regional differences – but the boundary separating the two is difficult to draw with any confidence.25 Historians and geographers disagree as to whether the north should be regarded as beginning at the Humber, the Don, the Trent, or at an imaginary line drawn between the Severn and the Wash. At times little more than a synonym for Yorkshire, ‘the north’ can expand to include as many as eleven English counties.26 These ambiguities are not resolved by focusing upon Bunting’s version of his native Northumbria, in which the cultural and historical associations of an autonomous seventh- and eighth-century kingdom are superimposed upon a modern British region.27 In a lecture on the Codex Lindisfarnensis (The Book of Lindisfarne), Bunting entertains the hope that contemporary artworks produced in the north-east might preserve and develop ‘the impulse of Northumbrian culture’, but he also notes that he is referring to ‘a fusion of cultures’ in which Anglian, Celtic, and Norse elements combine.28 So, whilst he articulates a desire for cultural continuity, Bunting also conceives of Northumbria as a site of intersection and cultural encounter; it is the unique mixture of different traditions that combine in Northumbrian culture that make it distinctive. Such openness and hybridity aptly reflects Northumbria’s historic ‘position at the crossroads of northern Europe’, the Humber and the Clyde each serving as ‘highways to wider worlds’.29 The north is perhaps best understood as a meeting place, embodying the hypercomplexity of social space: its location and extent are elusive or at best ill-defined; its borders are porous and shifting; and its culture is a fusion of heterogeneous elements. The aesthetic required to represent such a place adequately must combine a focus on the particular with an awareness of manifold spatial relations. Bunting’s treatment of

206    Neal Alexander place is informed by his conviction that art should attend to complexity and particularity, resisting wherever possible the temptations of generalisation or abstraction. In a 1932 essay he writes: ‘Simultaneity, interdependence, continuous self-references and absence of simplification are characteristic of all fact, whether physical or mental or emotional’.30 It is striking that he should find an appropriate formal model for representing such complexity and interdependence – which is historical and personal as much as spatial – in the ‘utterly abstract’ visual art of the Codex Lindisfarnensis, an art that is ‘complex to an extraordinary degree, without ever losing its unity and its proportion’. In the ‘perpetual crisscross of lines’ decorating the carpet pages of its illuminated Gospels Bunting perceives a mode of formal patterning that might encompass both microcosmic and macrocosmic perspectives, demonstrating the mutual implication of things in a compressed and stylised manner.31 Interestingly, he recognises something similar in the structural forms of Pound’s Cantos, which elaborate ‘an extraordinarily complex system of related images, changing as fluidly as the data of life and thought themselves’.32 Dark Age latticework and modernist kaleidoscope: these formal structures provide the templates for Bunting’s articulation of local, regional, and international concerns in Briggflatts, and inform the poem’s imagery through the repeated trope of the woven fabric, the text of the world. As Peter Makin notes: ‘“Weave” may perhaps be Briggflatts’s main image for the cosmos’.33 Briggflatts is a poem immersed in the intricacies of the material world, attending to the interplay of history and topography, human cultures and natural environments, ‘excepting nothing that is’ (75). Subtitled ‘An Autobiography’, it nonetheless maintains a characteristically modernist impersonality, deferring the use of first-person pronouns until Part II and employing them sparingly thereafter, usually in contexts that involve some form of self-questioning or doubt. Indeed, as Matthew Hart observes, the poem’s fragmented account of the growth of a poet’s mind also opens onto a more far-reaching ‘biography of a place and a language’.34 Accordingly, Briggflatts begins by describing a northern landscape transfigured by the arrival of spring: Brag, sweet tenor bull, descant on Rawthey’s madrigal, each pebble its part for the fells’ late spring. (61)

This initial conjunction of poetry, place, and music sets the tone for much of what follows. Bunting thought of Briggflatts and several of his other long poems as ‘sonatas’, texts that rework a common theme across

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several movements, each with their own shifting patterns of sound and sense.35 In these opening lines, the bull’s tenor voice is heard against the polyphonic trickling and gushing of the river, and the whole landscape is made to sing. The conceit is repeated and varied many times throughout the poem, providing a thread that links different places, times, and ecosystems. On the high moors of Stainmore ‘becks ring on limestone,/ whisper to peat’ and Eric Bloodaxe, last king of Northumbria, is recalled through ‘Baltic plainsong speech’ (62); a rock pool pulses to music by William Byrd; the wildlife of the Persian desert ‘figures sudden flight of the descant/ on a madrigal by Monteverdi’; even the lowly rat, sometime alter-ego of the poet, ‘has daring/ to thread, lithe and alert, Schoenberg’s maze’ (69). Ian Gregson has remarked on Briggflatts’s importance as a ‘nature poem’, demonstrating that ‘experience can best be understood through detailed examination of the physical world’, but what is particularly striking in these examples is the merging of nature and culture that occurs in the music of place.36 In fact, Briggflatts transforms the ironic hymn to ‘the green world’ (31) essayed in Attis: Or, Something Missing (1931) into a celebration of natural rhythms and aesthetic achievement. The slowworm’s song which closes the poem’s central movement is repeated by ‘every bough’ of the surrounding woodland (74); and the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti echo in ‘stars and lakes’, while ‘the copse drums out his measure’ (76). In Part V, a full orchestra accompanies the appearance of the first constellations in the northern sky (79). All of which takes us a long way from Bunting’s bull, bellowing and dancing on the fellside; but the point is that such musical analogies emphasise the inherent connectedness of things, and their coexistence in places that remain distinct but are nonetheless implicated in one another. For Bunting, poetry is first and foremost a pattern of sounds, whether harmonious or dissonant. In the preface to his Collected Poems (1968), he writes: ‘With sleights learned from others and an ear open to melodic analogies I have set down words as a musician pricks his score, not to be read in silence, but to trace in the air a pattern of sound that may sometimes, I hope, be pleasing’ (21). Accordingly, the language of Briggflatts is dense with texture and emphasis, full of clotted rhythms and ringing alliteration, hard consonants, open vowels, off-kilter rhymes. Extensive use of elision gives an impression of terseness and compressed power that is enhanced by the text’s modern recasting of Anglo-Saxon kennings and Welsh cynghanedd.37 Although not written in dialect, Briggflatts employs a distinctively ‘northern’ vernacular that comes to the fore when the poem names domestic items (skillet, girdle, settle), plants and animals (may, peewit, spuggies, gentles), and topographical features (fells, saltings, skerry). In one of his half-serious, half-mocking notes to

208    Neal Alexander the text, Bunting pointedly observes: ‘We have burns in the east, becks in the west, but no brooks or creeks’ (226). Language, then, is both a marker of identity – to say ‘burn’ or ‘beck’ is to connote northernness, even as an east-west divide is acknowledged – and the medium through which the meanings of place are construed. Expanding further on the relationship between language and place, Peter Quartermain argues that the distinctive sound-patterns of Bunting’s poetry ‘combine to suggest something of the Northumbrian landscape’.38 This is an attractive idea, but one that is difficult to illustrate conclusively given the looseness of the analogy, not to mention the variety of sounds and landscapes in question. However, it is notable that the language of Briggflatts tends to become more thickly textured when the writing of place is an explicit preoccupation, as in the lament for a drowned Viking warrior in Part II: Wind writes in foam on the sea: Who sang, sea takes, brawn brine, bone grit. Keener the kittiwake. Fells forget him. Fathoms dull the dale, gulfweed voices . . . (66)

The dead man is commemorated in these lines through a word-music that combines the sounds of waves, wind, and gulls, human and submarine voices. The use of paired double stresses, consonantal alliteration, internal and slant rhymes in combination with strenuously condensed syntax creates an initial impression of turbulence that gradually ebbs and subsides towards the concluding ellipsis. As often happens in Briggflatts, sound is foregrounded over meaning: in a sense the sound is the meaning of these lines. Victoria Forde notes the degree to which Bunting’s poetry exemplifies what Pound called melopoeia, ‘wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning’.39 But that ellipsis, which graphically denotes silence, an absence of sound as voices fade out of hearing, should also remind the reader of the poem’s essentially written, and writerly, character. For, an ellipsis leaves a mark without making any sound. If in these lines writing is figured as ephemeral, little more than the traces of wind on water, then those traces are not negligible; in fact, they constitute much of the poem’s substance. Bunting’s phonocentrism frequently leads him to stress the priority of speech and song, the importance of ‘laying the tune frankly on the air’ (62), and to assume that sound is essential to the being of poetry. In

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conversation with Eric Mottram, he explains: ‘I’ve never said that poetry consists only of sound. I said again and again that the essential thing is the sound. Without the sound there isn’t any poetry’.40 Yet Briggflatts implies that poetry is also unavoidably textual, bound up with an economy of writing and inscription. Indeed, Hart contends that the ‘key synthetic vernacular irony of Briggflatts lies in the fissure between its nostalgia for a “musical” past and the undeniable literariness of its media and method’.41 The poem incorporates this very ‘fissure’ between song and writing into one of its central networks of imagery, conjoining the symbolic figures of the mason and the lark in an equivocal allegory of poetic labour: A mason times his mallet to a lark’s twitter, listening while the marble rests, lays his rule at a letter’s edge, fingertips checking, till the stone spells a name naming none, a man abolished. Painful lark, labouring to rise! The solemn mallet says: In the grave’s slot he lies. We rot. (61)

Briggflatts continues and extends an association of writing with death that has informed Bunting’s poetry since Villon (1925), where ‘DEATH is written over all’ (26). Linked to the materiality of rocks and earth, and involving both craft and physical labour, the mason’s inscriptions contrast sharply with the apparent freedom of the lark’s sky-borne melodies, in which vitality and transcendental aspiration seem to combine. At least initially, there is also a lyrical prioritisation of sound in these lines, for the mason’s mallet strikes are synchronised with the rhythms of the bird’s song, implying that nature calls the tune for cultural labour. Indeed, it is the lark that ‘labours’ to rise and the mason is pictured listening for the resonance of the stone he carves. However, as the lark’s singing becomes ‘painful’ the transience and insubstantiality of such ‘twittering’ is contrasted with the relative permanence of the mason’s art. The headstone he is making will bear the name of ‘a man abolished’, thereby ‘naming none’, its chiselled letters persisting in the absence of the mortal being whose finite existence they record as a name and a date. As the mason subsequently exclaims: ‘Words!/ Pens are too light./ Take a chisel to write’ (63). Paradoxically, writing aspires to a permanent

210    Neal Alexander record of impermanence, just as the emphatic full rhyme of the stanza’s final couplet underlines the inevitability of decay and disintegration, the loss of integrity. But, of course, neither song nor writing is immune from the erosive effects of time to which both respond: ‘Name and date/ split in soft slate/ a few months obliterate’ (64). With the bull’s tenor voice and the River Rawthey’s madrigal, the lark’s twitter belongs to network of motifs in Briggflatts concerned with what I have called the music of place. Yet, Bunting also elaborates upon the metaphors of carving and inscription associated with the memorial mason’s labour throughout the poem, as if creating a writerly counterpoint to the text’s foregrounding of music and song. Thus, when the mood of Part I modulates from one of adolescent sensuality and fulfilment to that of loss and bitter self-reproach the private catastrophe is figured in terms of a failure of writing and making as ‘shame deflects the pen’ or ‘jogs the draftsman’s elbow’ (64). Similarly, the failure of language to assuage traumatic experience is imagined in terms of sculpting and carving words themselves: ‘Brief words are hard to find,/ shapes to carve and discard’ (64). The same metaphor recurs in extended form in Part II, when the poet-protagonist has left Northumbria for Italy, where he wanders stone-yards and cemeteries and comes to think of himself as a poet-mason undergoing a difficult apprenticeship: No worn tool   whittles stone; but a reproached   uneasy mason shaping evasive  ornament litters his yard   with flawed fragments. (68)

The loss of creative power described in these lines hinges on the ‘evasion’ and ‘reproach’ that attend his Italian exile, for the protagonist has forsaken both his young lover and his homeland in the north of England. Yet, the obvious self-reflexivity of the passage also encourages the reader to recognise something of the poem she reads in these ‘flawed fragments’. Indeed, whilst Briggflatts strives for completion and fullness it also repeatedly registers its own textual insufficiency: It looks well on the page, but never well enough. Something is lost when wind, sun, sea upbraid justly an unconvinced deserter. (67)

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Death, desertion, loss, and failure: the connotations of writing in Briggflatts are predominantly negative, corresponding with Bunting’s explicitly phonocentric bias.42 Nonetheless, it is worth noting that the poem also, particularly in its later sections, deploys the metaphors of carving and inscription more positively to describe natural processes. For instance, in Part IV violence is perpetrated in disregard for ‘the text carved by waves/ on the skerry’ (75); and in Part V the Northumbrian coastline is again textualised, blades of surf ‘shaping the shore as a mason/ fondles and shapes his stone’ (79). Whatever its shortcomings, then, writing is part of the texture of place in Briggflatts, just as sound and song convey the patterns of its meanings. The threads of image and metaphor that I have been tracing are braided and knotted together over the course of the poem, and the formal structure of plaiting or weaving is essential to its conjunction of incommensurable times and places. As Andrew Duncan argues, the symbolic structure of Briggflatts is ‘shimmering, persistently evading resolution’, and this formal irresolution is reflected in the poem’s unsettled and unsettling representations of place.43 Indeed, in a characteristically reflexive passage, Bunting foregrounds the challenge that the woven fabric of reality poses for interpretation:     Can you trace shuttles thrown like drops from a fountain, spray, mist of spiderlines bearing the rainbow, quoits round the draped moon; shuttles like random dust desert whirlwinds hoy at their tormenting sun? Follow the clue patiently and you will understand nothing. (75)

The restless sliding of metaphor into metaphor in these lines and the rapid shifts in focus and scale, from spiderlines and water droplets to celestial bodies, illustrates the complexity of material relations whilst acknowledging the limitations of poetic representation and human knowledge. As Bunting has it, Briggflatts registers ‘the loveliness of things overlooked or despised’ but maintains an attitude of humility towards the world, knowing that ‘we know neither where we are nor why’.44 Such uncertainty regarding location is related to the text’s acute sense of the implications of place, whereby meaning resides not in spaces but in spatial relations, which are perennially subject to historical change. Through its elaboration of musical motifs, Briggflatts rhymes the sounds of a Cumbrian fellside with Baltic plainsong and hears Monteverdi in a Persian desert. Similarly, whilst walking in the Italian countryside its Northumbrian protagonist translates sound into writing, present into past, imagining the surrounding landscape illustrated in ‘a text whose initial,/ lost in Lindisfarne plaited lines,/ stands for discarded love’ (68).

212    Neal Alexander By invoking the bards Aneurin and Taliesin, Bunting reveals historical, cultural, and linguistic ties between Northumbria and the ancient poetry of Wales. The saints Aidan, Cuthbert, Columba, and Columbanus attest to the north-east’s significance within the archipelagic culture of early Christianity. Bloodaxe’s symbolic prominence emphasises the region’s Viking heritage, and his status as ‘king of York,/ king of Dublin, king of Orkney’ (64) insists upon the network of spatial relations that inform the particularities of place. In all of these ways, Tony Lopez remarks, Briggflatts ‘contests the definitions of “English” culture’ whilst remaining ‘anchored in the cultures of the British Isles’.45 Perhaps ‘anchored’ is too strong a metaphor here, especially given the importance of sea voyages in Bunting’s poem, and Briggflatts might be regarded as challenging the validity of ‘British’ as well as ‘English’ frameworks. If, as Raphael Samuel contends, ‘British’ is ‘a term which seems to reaffirm the historic and geographical unity of the British archipelago’ then it sits ill with Bunting’s sharp sense of regional particularity and refusal of centralised homogeneity.46 Indeed, Briggflatts is a product of the period characterised by what Tom Nairn calls the break-up of Britain, driven by ‘the slow foundering of the British state’, and Bunting himself anticipated that foundering with some relish.47 But if the poem does to an extent embody devolutionary energies through its emphasis on regional distinctiveness, then such break-up or fragmentation is also paralleled by an intuition of the broader Atlantic and Northern European contexts through which such distinctiveness must inevitably be understood. As Fiona Stafford observes, the affirmation of local work ‘depends, paradoxically, on encounters that take place far from home’.48 Bunting’s protagonist can only recognise the value of his northern home by first experiencing the ‘squalor’ and inauthenticity of London’s Tottenham Court Road (65) and by ‘sweat[ing] in the south’ during his Italian sojourn (66). So, whilst Burton Hatlen is right to say that ‘it is the very intensity of Bunting’s engagement with Northumbria that makes him an international poet’, the opposite is also true: it is the intensity of his international engagements that makes Bunting a Northumbrian poet.49 Briggflatts takes its name from a hamlet in the Rawthey valley on the Cumbrian edge of the Yorkshire Dales where Bunting spent vacations as a boy, pursuing an adolescent romance that forms a central strand of the poem’s narrative. It is also the location of a seventeenth-century Quaker meeting house where, according to the agnostic Bunting, the silence of the meeting allows those present to ‘detect the pulse of God’s blood in our veins, more persuasive than words, more demonstrative than a diagram’.50 Brigflatts is a meeting place, a space that affords

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opportunities for personal relations, romantic union, and spiritual communion. The place name itself reinforces this notion, for ‘Brigflatts’ derives from the Old English ‘brycg’, meaning ‘bridge’, and ‘fleˉot’, meaning ‘inlet’ or ‘river’: it is a ford, causeway, or crossing place.51 This remote regional location, which falls outside the modern region of Northumberland but within the ancient kingdom of Northumbria, serves as a focal point for the text’s proliferating itineraries, linked to a whole network of regional, national, and international places: the fells of Garsdale and Lunedale; Redesdale and Coquetdale further north; the Northumbrian seaboard and the holy island of Lindisfarne; the North Sea with its trade routes to Scandinavia and the Scottish Northern Isles; Ireland and Wales; Italy, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. Brigflatts thereby becomes an unlikely but symbolically potent centre for the tracery of routes, relations, and interdependencies that Bunting’s poem elaborates. Journeys of various kinds and extents recur throughout Briggflatts, emphasising the contiguities of place through travel. When we first encounter the young lovers in Part I they are embracing on the mason’s wagon as it begins its journey eastwards to Wensleydale: ‘In Garsdale, dawn;/ at Hawes, tea from the can’ (62). At the opening of Part II, the protagonist is already in London attempting to discover lyricism in traffic noise, counting ‘beat against beat, bus conductor/ against engine against wheels against/ the pedal’ (65). And in the first of the two dream sequences that make up Part III of Briggflatts, Alexander leads his men to the ends of the earth, where ‘bevelled downs, grey marshes’ and pestilential ‘saltings’ feature in a nightmarish parody of Northumbrian landscapes (72). Alexander’s hubris provides a mythological parallel for the poet-protagonist’s own ambition and vagrancy, and in part his return trajectory shares the impulse of Alexander’s men who, weary and homesick, pine for the ‘rocky meadows’ of Macedonia, desiring only to ‘end in our place by our own wars’ (72). Makin elaborates on these parallels to argue that the poem’s central plot elements of departure and return hinge on the affective polarity of ‘north’ and ‘south’: ‘What is clear in Briggflatts is that the abandoning of the girl belongs also with the abandoning of the North for the South, which is also the abandoning of a hard field for an easy one’.52 According to this reading, the protagonist’s return to Northumbria entails the assumption of mature responsibilities as well as providing familiar comforts. Yet, whilst his homecoming in Part IV is heralded by the sun rising ‘on an acknowledged land’ the accompanying images of ease and sated desire are soon dispersed and this part of the poem concludes as its anti-hero steers ‘towards a taciturn lodging amongst strangers’ (76). Moreover,

214    Neal Alexander the poem’s enigmatic Coda ensures that Briggflatts ends on a note of inconclusion and uncertainty, forsaking land once more to embark on a sea voyage into the unknown: ‘Blind, we follow/ rain slant, spray flick/ to fields we do not know’ (81). As a result, place emerges in Bunting’s text not as a stable point of origin grounding lyric expression but as a field of often conflicting associations and identifications, a space that is at once bounded and porous, traversed by human and historical trajectories. Thus far I have focused on the conjunction of diverse spatial contexts and relations in Bunting’s poetry, especially where regional and international affiliations intersect. But Briggflatts is also a text much preoccupied with questions of time and memory, and its modernism is perhaps most readily apparent in the way it engages with ‘notions of temporality which overlap, collide, and register their own incompletion’.53 In fact, there is already something anachronistic in its status as a ‘late modernist’ text, one that extends modernist preoccupations with form, linguistic experiment, and impersonality well beyond their heyday into the postwar era.54 Bunting’s work is often informed by disjunct temporalities, paying special attention to those temporary continuities or recurrences that manifest themselves amidst the general condition of flux and change. Briggflatts superimposes the history and culture of Dark Age Northumbria on that of the modern, twentieth-century region and imaginatively dissolves the fifty years that separate its poet-­protagonist’s present from his remembered past. As Wootten observes, the poem favours synchronic over diachronic time, creating collage effects through ‘temporal juxtapositioning’ and ‘anachronisms which allow different periods to co-exist’.55 Thus, the mason’s ‘copper-wire moustache’ and ‘sea-reflecting eyes’ identify him as an avatar of Bloodaxe, the ninthcentury Viking king (62); and the ‘clear Cymric voices’ of Aneurin and Taliesin lamenting the fallen at Catraeth and Argoed Lwyfain ring out across contemporary Teesdale and Wensleydale (75). At its climax in Part V, as winter burgeons into spring and the seasonal cycle is completed, the poem’s various pasts and presents coalesce in the here-andnow of a Northumbrian pastoral, as ‘shepherds follow the links’ leading ‘demure dogs/ from Tweed and Till and Teviotdale’: The ewes are heavy with lamb. Snow lies bright on Hedgehope and tacky mud about Till where the fells have stepped aside and the river praises itself, silence by silence sits and Then is diffused in Now. (79)

The Idea of North: Basil Bunting and Regional Modernism    215

Echoes abound in these lines, for Till’s song of self-praise inevitably recalls Rawthey’s madrigal in the poem’s opening lines and the fells’ pregnant silence reprises the moment when ‘all sounds fall still’ (62) on the uplands of Stainmore in Part I. These correspondences are crucial to the poem’s construction of an epiphanic present, which, Andrew Lawson argues, seeks to cancel temporal distance in a manner that ‘magnifies time into space, uses not the timeless but more time’.56 Yet, ultimately, the self-reflexivity of the text’s autobiographical register places any such diffusion or repletion under erasure as history returns and the partiality of memory is acknowledged. The temporal coincidence of ‘Then’ and ‘Now’, past and present, in Briggflatts is contingent upon the vagaries of memory, which also play a significant role in the poem’s depiction of place. As Hatlen observes, the dominant theme in Bunting’s poem ‘is, in a word, memory – or, since it is not the faculty but the process that is at issue, perhaps I should say “remembering” ’.57 Certainly, remembering is a central concern in Briggflatts, but it is also acknowledged to be painful and difficult, at times almost impossible: ‘It is easier to die than to remember’ (64) claims the narrator in Part I. Perhaps this difficulty of remembering, as much as Bunting’s ostensible commitment to a modernist poetics of impersonality, accounts for the text’s deliberate refraction of autobiographical experience through a third-person narrative perspective. Hatlen is also right to stress that the process of remembering, which is both fallible and necessarily open-ended, is foregrounded in the poem. According to Walter Benjamin, ‘the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced, but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection’.58 I have already noted that the metaphor of weaving is crucial both to the thematics and the form of Bunting’s poem, and the complex, reiterative structures of the text might be thought to mimic the shuttling rhythms of memory as process. The intricacies of past experience retain their fascination for the poet-protagonist even in moments of regret and self-reproach, for they encode the possibility of reparation and reconciliation in the future. Memory in Briggflatts is also intrinsically articulated with the ‘mosaic’ (64) of places that the text composes in tracing the trajectory of an individual life and the history of a region. Paul Ricoeur describes the relation of memory and place in terms that are relevant to Bunting’s text. ‘It is on the surface of the habitable earth,’ he writes, ‘that we remember having travelled and visited memorable sites. In this way, the “things” remembered are intrinsically associated with places. And it is not by chance that we say of what has occurred that it took place’.59 Briggflatts is emphatically a poem of what ‘took place’ in Ricoeur’s

216    Neal Alexander sense, repeatedly connecting powerful personal memories with highly specific, intimately realised places. The tender and unabashed adolescent sexuality that provides the focus of Part I is informed by its geographical context, an uplands northern landscape where ‘stone white as cheese/ jeers at the dale’ (63), and it is on a bed of local stone that the girl and boy first embrace. Similarly, the ‘unconvinced deserter’ of Part II indulges his senses ‘where the ramparts cuddle Lucca’ and composes poetry aloud, in Yeatsian mode, ‘on the ridge/ between marine olives and hillside/ blue figs, under the breeze fresh/ with pollen of Apennine sage’ (67). In both these examples, and many others, richly sensuous memories of past experience are situated exactly and deliberately in their proper places, which thereby become ‘memorable sites’. Yet, if the Penelope work of recollection in Briggflatts weaves time and space together, in doing so it serves to bring out their multifariousness rather than their essential unity, admitting the co-presence of radically different places and temporalities. In a typically terse note to Briggflatts Bunting warns the unwary reader that his text is: ‘An autobiography, but not a record of fact. The first movement is no more a chronicle than the third. The truth of the poem is of another kind’ (226). The ‘truth’ of autobiographical memory, then, is acknowledged to be at odds with the record of fact. Consequently, like much else in the poem, the reconciliation between ‘Then’ and ‘Now’ is to be understood as an artistic fiction, and one that recognises its own provisionality. It must be weighed against the retrospective anguish that dominates the last stanzas of Part I, where ‘amputated years ache’ and the breach between present and past appears absolute: ‘No hope of going back’ (64). Moreover, the full presence of the remembered past is called into question in Bunting’s complex metaphor of navigating by the light of dead stars in Part V: Each spark trills on a tone beyond chronological compass, yet in a sextant’s bubble present and firm places a surveyor’s stone or steadies a tiller. Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone, its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane [. . .] (80)

The light and music of the stars is beyond any human capacity for temporal measurement, yet these shifting constellations nonetheless provide a means of orientation in space, whether on land or at sea. Delayed travelling across the void, starlight unites past and present in the moment of its visual perception, much as the practice of life writing conveys an immediate apprehension of past experience only by way of ‘the autobiographer’s present judgement “Now” ’.60 Immediacy is

The Idea of North: Basil Bunting and Regional Modernism    217

mediated; presence is represented. What is more, ‘the star you steer by is gone’ and so too is the reality of the past, which lives on only as an afterglow threaded into the woven fabric of present experience, as something ‘tremulous’ and evanescent. Just as its elaborate sonata form complicates and cuts across the unfolding of autobiographical narrative, in Briggflatts time does not flow in an orderly, linear fashion. But nor is it absolutely frozen in synchronic stasis. Rather, for Bunting, human experience is ‘polychronic, multitemporal, revealing a time that is gathered together, with multiple pleats’.61 So time passes and does not pass; continuity and transience coexist in temporal experience; the past is present and absent all at once. This involved coordination of different times – personal and cosmological, historical and mythical, linear and cyclical – is, as I have suggested, closely connected with the text’s poetics of place. Briggflatts attends fastidiously to the particularities of regional identity and culture but is also committed to the idea of Northumbria as a crossroads or meeting place in which a multiplicity of spatial trajectories, historical experiences, and geographical relations are knotted together. To speak of the poem’s ‘rootedness’ in place is therefore to neglect its grasp of the dynamism of place itself, its manifestation of change in the hereand-now, and to underestimate the entanglement of regional, national, and international affiliations in its representational forms. Indeed, Briggflatts eschews the rhetoric of rootedness and dwelling for metaphors of weaving, braiding, and ravelling through which the networks of association and implication that make locations humanly meaningful might be intuited. In Part V, flocking shorebirds create shifting, everchanging patterns in the air and ‘sinews ripple the weave,/ threads flex, slew, hues meeting,/ parting in whey-blue haze’ (78). In these lines, the experience of place is figured in terms of meeting and parting, binding and unbinding, a restless process of inter-animation that also plays itself out in the text’s carefully orchestrated form. In this way, Bunting imparts a sense of the hypercomplexity of social spaces, whereby disparate spatial scales ranging from the local to the global overlap. It is not just that his late-modernist aesthetics are grounded in the specificities of a familiar regional locale, for the regionality of Briggflatts only comes into focus through a range of international or cosmopolitan points of reference. The archetypal modernist dichotomy of dwelling and exile is clearly invoked by the structure of departure and return that the poem elaborates. Yet, it is also suspended or ironised by the trope of restless displacement that plays within the very modes of inhabiting and being that the text depicts. Thus, in the final lines of the Coda, profound epistemological uncertainties centre on the poem’s twin concerns of place

218    Neal Alexander and identity, asking ‘where’ and ‘who’ in the absence of any ultimate destination: ‘Who,/ swinging his axe/ to fell kings, guesses/ where we go?’ (81).

Notes  1. Peter Howarth, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 3.  2. The combination of modernist aesthetics with a profound affinity for regional landscapes might also be traced in the work of younger poets such as W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Lynette Roberts, Dylan Thomas, W. S. Graham, and Charles Tomlinson.   3. Neil Corcoran, English Poetry Since 1940 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 26, 27.  4. Robert Crawford, ‘MacDiarmid in Montrose’, in Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in British and American Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 33–56 (p. 33).   5. William Wootten, ‘Basil Bunting, British modernism and the time of the nation’, in The Star You Steer By: Basil Bunting and British Modernism, ed. James McGonigal and Richard Price (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 17–34 (p. 18).  6. Donald Davie, Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain 1960–1988 (Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), p. 41.  7. Drew Milne, ‘Modernist poetry in the British Isles’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry, ed. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 147–62 (p. 153).   8. A similar concern is voiced by Dennis Brown, ‘Basil Bunting: Briggflatts’, in British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art, ed. Gary Day and Brian Docherty (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 23–32 (p. 30).  9. Bunting, cited in Richard Caddel, ‘Bunting and Welsh’, in Locations of Literary Modernism, ed. Davis and Jenkins, pp. 57–66 (p. 60). 10. Eric Falci, ‘Place, space, and landscape’, in A Concise Companion to Postwar British and Irish Poetry, ed. Nigel Alderman and C. D. Blanton (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 200–20 (p. 208); Richard Caddel and Anthony Flowers, Basil Bunting: A Northern Life (Newcastle upon Tyne: Newcastle Libraries & Information Centre, 1997), p. 48. 11. For a variety of perspectives on Bunting’s eventful life, see Victoria Forde, The Poetry of Basil Bunting (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991), pp. 15–69; Caddel and Flowers, Basil Bunting: A Northern Life; Keith Aldritt, The Poet as Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting (London: Aurum Press, 1998). 12. Falci, ‘Space, place, and landscape’, p. 208. 13. Keith Tuma, Fishing by Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 167, 168. 14. John Tomaney, ‘Keeping a beat in the dark: Narratives of regional identity

The Idea of North: Basil Bunting and Regional Modernism    219 in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25 (2007), 355–75 (p. 369). 15. Tomaney, ‘Keeping a beat in the dark’, pp. 370, 371. 16. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial, 2001), p. 144. 17. Basil Bunting, Complete Poems, ed. Richard Caddel (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 2000), pp. 89, 88. All further references to this volume will be given parenthetically in the text. 18. Edward S. Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 337. 19. Tomaney, ‘Keeping a Beat in the Dark’, p. 370. 20. John Allen, Doreen Massey, and Allan Cochrane, Rethinking the Region (London; New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 5. 21. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), p. 130. See also Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), pp. 154–5. 22. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 88. 23. Peter Davidson, The Idea of North (London: Reaktion, 2005), p. 20. 24. Katharine Cockin, ‘Introducing the literary north’, in The Literary North, ed. Katharine Cockin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 1–21 (p. 3). 25. Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 208–15. 26. See Stuart Rawnsley, ‘Constructing “The North”: Space and a sense of place’, in Northern Identities: Historical Interpretations of ‘The North’ and ‘Northernness’, ed. Neville Kirk (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 3–22; and Dave Russell, Looking North: Northern England and the National Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 14–44. 27. Robert Colls regards Bunting’s Briggflatts as belatedly embodying the ‘credo’ of the New Northumbrians, a loose group of antiquarians and cultural revivalists active in the second half of the nineteenth century who took the independent Anglian kingdom of Northumbria as their model for a rejuvenated modern region. Robert Colls, ‘The new Northumbrians’, in Northumbria: History and Identity 547–2000, ed. Robert Colls (Chichester: Phillimore, 2007), pp. 151–77 (p. 177). 28. Basil Bunting, Basil Bunting on Poetry, ed. Peter Makin (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1999), p. 16. 29. Frank Musgrove, The North of England: A History from Roman Times to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 45. See also Robert Colls, ‘When was Northumbria?’, in Colls, Northumbria: History and Identity 547–2000, pp. ix–xii. 30. Bunting cited in Andrew Lawson, ‘Basil Bunting and English modernism’, Sagetrieb, 9:1/2 (1990), 95–121 (p. 108). 31. Bunting, Basil Bunting on Poetry, pp. 5, 10. 32. Bunting, Basil Bunting on Poetry, p. 137. 33. Peter Makin, Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 149. 34. Matthew Hart, Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism,

220    Neal Alexander Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 83. 35. For a thorough and informative account of Bunting’s musical influences, see Makin, Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse, pp. 239–65. 36. Ian Gregson, ‘“Adult Male of a Merciless Species”: Basil Bunting’s rueful masculinity’, in McGonigal and Price, The Star You Steer By, pp. 109–22 (p. 115). 37. On the affinities between Briggflatts and certain aspects of Anglo-Saxon and Welsh poetry, see Nick Everett, ‘Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts’, in Colls, Northumbria: History and Identity 547–2000, pp. 325–8; Caddel, ‘Bunting and Welsh’, pp. 57–66; and Makin, Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse, pp. 160–89. 38. Peter Quartermain, Basil Bunting: Poet of the North (Durham: Basil Bunting Poetry Archive, 1990), p. 16. 39. Forde, The Poetry of Basil Bunting, pp. 79–80; Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1985), p. 25. 40. Basil Bunting, ‘Three other comments’, in Basil Bunting, Briggflatts (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2009), p. 44. Jacques Derrida defines phonocentrism as a regime of sense that upholds the primacy of speech over writing by affirming the ‘absolute proximity of voice and being, of voice and the meaning of being, of voice and the ideality of meaning’. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 11–12. 41. Hart, Nations of Nothing But Poetry, p. 96. 42. Such connotations plainly accord with Derrida’s argument that ‘writing, the letter, the sensible inscription, has always been considered by Western tradition as the body and matter external to the spirit, to breath, to speech, and to the logos’. Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 35. 43. Andrew Duncan, Origins of the Underground: British Poetry between Apocryphon and Incident Light, 1933–79 (Cambridge: Salt, 2008), p. 53. 44. Basil Bunting, ‘A note on Briggflatts’, in Basil Bunting, Briggflatts, p. 40. 45. Tony Lopez, Meaning Performance: Essays on Poetry (Cambridge: Salt, 2006), p. 154. 46. Raphael Samuel, Island Stories: Unravelling Britain: Theatres of Memory, Volume II (London: Verso, 1998), p. 49. 47. Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 1981), p. 71. In a letter to Jonathan Williams dated 5 November 1984 Bunting wrote: ‘If England goes to hell via Thatcherian economics, as it may, we might eventually escape, and Hugh MacDiarmid and I will share a bottle of celestial malt to celebrate the break-up of Great Britain into a new heptarchy’. Jonathan Williams, ‘Some jazz from the Baz: The Bunting-Williams letters’, in McGonigal and Price, The Star You Steer By, pp. 253–88 (p. 282). 48. Fiona Stafford, Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 5. 49. Burton Hatlen, ‘Regionalism and internationalism in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts’, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 13:1 (2000). 49–66 (p. 61). 50. Bunting, ‘A Note to Briggflatts’, p. 41. 51. The place name is usually spelled ‘Brigflatts’ but Bunting always renders

The Idea of North: Basil Bunting and Regional Modernism    221 it as ‘Briggflatts’. This may either be personal idiosyncrasy or a deliberate technique of fictionalisation. 52. Makin, Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse, p. 134. 53. Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), p. 9. 54. I follow Anthony Mellors’s use of ‘late modernism’ to mean ‘the continuation of modernist writing into the war years and until at least the end of the 1970s’. Mellors names Briggflatts alongside J. H. Prynne’s The White Stones (1968) as an example of British late modernist poetry. Anthony Mellors, Late Modernist Poetics: From Pound to Prynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 19, 3. 55. Wootten, ‘Basil Bunting, British modernism and the time of the nation’, p. 28. 56. Lawson, ‘Basil Bunting and English modernism’, p. 117. 57. Hatlen, ‘Regionalism and internationalism in Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts’, p. 52. 58. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 198. 59. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 41. 60. Forde, The Poetry of Basil Bunting, p. 239. 61. Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 60.

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Select Bibliography    223 Esty, Jed, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Feigel, Lara, and Alexandra Harris (eds), Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009). Frank, Jill, Islands and the Modernists: The Lure of Isolation in Art, Literature, and Science (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006). Friedman, Susan Stanford, ‘Periodizing modernism: Postcolonial modernities and the space/time boundaries of modernist studies’, Modernism/Modernity 13: 3 (2006), 425–44. Friedman, Susan Stanford, ‘Planetarity: Musing modernist studies’, Modernism/ Modernity 17: 3 (2010), 471–99. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar (ed.), Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Gardiner, Michael, The Cultural Roots of British Devolution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004). Gilbert, David, David Matless and Brian Short (eds), Geographies of British Modernity: Space and Society in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Goodby, John, ‘“Deflected forces of currents”: Welsh modernist poetry’, Poetry Wales 46:1 (2010), 52–8. Harris, Alexandra, Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper (London: Thames & Hudson, 2010). Hart, Matthew, Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989). Hegglund, Jon, World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Herod, Andrew, Scale (London: Routledge, 2011). Herring, Scott, ‘Regional modernism: A reintroduction’, Modern Fiction Studies 55:1 (2009), 1–10. Hewitt, John, Ancestral Voices: The Selected Prose of John Hewitt, ed. Tom Clyde (Belfast: The Blackstaff Press, 1987). Howarth, Peter, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Huyssen, Andreas, ‘Geographies of modernism in a globalizing world’, in Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (eds), Geographies of Modernism: Literatures, Cultures, Spaces (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 6–18. James, David, ‘Localizing late modernism: Interwar regionalism and the genesis of the “Micro Novel” ’, Journal of Modern Literature 32: 4 (2009), 43–64. James, David (ed.), The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Jameson, Fredric, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007). Joannou, Maroula, Women’s Writing, Englishness, and National and Cultural Identity: The Mobile Woman and the Migrant Voice, 1938–1962 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012).

224    Select Bibliography Jonas, Andrew E. G., ‘Region and place: regionalism in question’, Progress in Human Geography 36:2 (2012), 263–72. Keating, Peter, The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel 1875–1914 (London: Fontana Press, 1991). Keith, W. J., Regions of the Imagination: The Development of British Rural Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). Lloyd, David, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Dublin: Field Day, 2008). Longenbach, James, Stone Cottage: Yeats, Pound, and Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, ‘The new modernist studies’, PMLA, 123:3 (2008), 737–48. Matless, David, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998). McCullough, Margery Palmer, ‘Scottish modernism’, in Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 765–81. Mellors, Anthony, Late Modernist Poetics from Pound to Prynne (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). Miller, Andrew, Modernism and the Crisis of Sovereignty (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008). Miller, Tyrus, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Milne, Drew, ‘Modernist poetry in the British Isles’, in Alex Davis and Lee Jenkins (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 147–62. Paasi, Anssi, ‘Deconstructing regions: Notes on the scales of spatial life’, Environment and Planning A, 23 (1991), 239–54. Ramazani, Jahan, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Saler, Michael T., The Avant-Garde in Interwar England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). Sarker, Sonita, ‘Afterword: Modernisms in our image . . . always, partially’, Modernism/Modernity 13: 3 (2006), 561–6. Shiach, Morag, ‘Nation, region, place: Devolving cultures’, in Laura Marcus and  Peter Nicholls (eds), The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 528–44. Shields, Rob, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991). Snell, K. D. M. (ed.), The Regional Novel in Britain and Ireland 1800–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Stafford, Fiona, Local Attachments: The Province of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Taafe, Carol, ‘Irish modernism’, in Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 782–96. Thacker, Andrew, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).

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Index

Abercrombie, Lascelles, 85, 94–5 The Adder, 93, 95 The End of the World, 93 Ackland, Valentine, 117 Aidan, 212 Aldington, Richard, 45 Alexander, 213 Alexander, Neal, 17 Allen, Charles Albert, 23 Allgood, Sara, 94, 95 Anderson, David, 30 Anderson, Perry, 128 Aneurin, 171, 212, 214 The Gododdin, 171 Angevin, 112, 113 Angus, 2 Annwn, David, 179 Antrim, 188, 190, 194 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 175 Alcools, 175 Aquinas, Thomas, 54 Aran Islands, 65, 66, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 187, 189 Ardis, Ann, 35 Aristotle, 54 Arnold, Matthew, 67 Art and Letters, 33, 37 Ashdown Forest, 2 Auden, W. H., 2, 8, 111, 163, 164, 185, 186 Letters from Iceland, 186 ‘Look, stranger, at this island now’, 8

The Orators, 164 Aughrim, 77 Augustine, 172 Australia, 184 Austria, 57, 58 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 55 Baldacchino, Godfrey, 185 Ballinasloe, 65, 67 Ballycastle, 193, 194 Balzac, Honoré de, 51 Barnes, William, 143 Barra, 186 Barrie, J. M., 184 Mary Rose, 184 Bates, H. E., 112, 120, 126 Baudelaire, Charles, 51 Baudrillard, Jean, 83 Beardsley, Aubrey, 22 Beckett, Samuel, 2, 6, 143, 144, 184 Beer, Gillian, 116 Belfast, 88, 89, 189, 193, 194–5 Belgium, 57, 60 Bell, Adrian, 126, 127 Bell, John Joy, 96 Wee Macgregor, 96 Bell, Michael, 46, 127 Beltaine, 24 Benjamin, Walter, 215 Bennett, Arnold, 13, 29 The Man from the North, 29 Bentley, Phyllis, 13, 107, 108, 129 Berlin, 1, 104, 202

Index    227 Berman, Marshall, 1 Bernhardt, Sarah, 51 Berry, R. J., 190 Billington, Michael, 91 Birkett, Jennifer, 109, 111 Birmingham, 22, 23, 25, 92, 93, 94, 97, 133 Blackrock, 52 Blackwood’s Magazine, 25 Blair, Sara, 3–4 Blake, William, 160, 165, 167, 169 Blasket Islands, 187, 189 Blast, 22 Bloodaxe, Eric, 207, 212, 214 Bloomsbury, 22 Bluemel, Kristin, 186 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 75 The Decameron, 75 Bold, Alan, 153–4 Bolero, 22 Bomberg, David, 26, 28 Bonnett, Alastair, 128–9 Bottomley, Gordon, 93 King Lear’s Wife, 93 Bourdieu, Pierre, 30 Bowen, Elizabeth, 6, 107, 116 The Heat of the Day, 116 Boyd, John, 24 Bradbury, Malcolm, 1 Brannigan, John, 17 Breton, André, 168 Bridlington, 130 Brigflatts, 212–13 Briggs, Asa, 29 Brighouse, Harold, 91 Lonesome-like, 91 Britain, 160, 171, 172, 173, 184, 187, 212 British Empire, 13, 14, 15, 47, 60, 173 Brittas, 77 Brooks, Van Wyck, 34–5 Browne, Thomas, 167 Buenos Aires, 174 Bullock, Shan, 97 Snowdrop Jane, 97 Bunting, Basil, 3, 17, 180, 200–18

Attis: Or, Something Missing, 207 Briggflatts, 17, 180, 200–18 Chomei at Toyama, 203 Collected Poems, 207 Villon, 209 Burns, Robert, 150, 152, 153, 154–5, 156, 157 Burrows, Louie, 47 Butts, Mary, 124 Byrd, William, 207 Caddel, Richard, 180, 202 For the Fallen, 180 Cage, John, 148 Cambridge, 22 Cambridge Left, 22 Camden Town, 33 Canada, 51 Capel-y-ffin, 169 Cardiff, 24, 95 Carmarthen/shire, 2, 24, 174 Carpenter, Edward, 26, 27, 33 Carroll, Lewis, 144, 145–6 ‘Jabberwocky’, 144, 145–6, 153 Carson, Rachel, 195 Casement, Roger, 60 Casey, Edward, 204 Castle, Gregory, 68 Cavalcanti, Guido, 54 Cavaliero, Glen, 125 Cezanne, Paul, 28 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 14 Chamberlain, Brenda, 161 Cheng, Vincent J., 48 Chicago, 23 Chomsky, Noam, 144 Cleary, Joe, 15 Cockin, Katherine, 205 Cocos Islands, 184 Codex Lindisfarnensis, 205, 206 Columba, 212 Columbanus, 212 Congo Free State, 60 Connaught, 65, 66, 67 Connolly, Seán, 98 Conrad, Joseph, 106, 116, 119, 127 Coole Park, 2

228    Index Coquetdale, 213 Corcoran, Neil, 201 Cornwall, 132 Coterie, 37 Craig, Cairns, 25 Crane, Hart, 178–9 The Bridge, 179 Crawford, Robert, 9, 201 Cumbria, 205, 211, 212 Cuthbert, 212 Daily Mail, 30 Dalí, Salvador, 168 Dana, 24 Dana, Richard Henry, 44 Dante, 66, 201 Inferno, 66 Darragh, Florence, 94 Darwin, Charles, 130, 185 The Origin of the Species, 185 Voyage of the Beagle, 130 Daudet, Alphonse, 51 Davidson, John, 30, 143 Davidson, Peter, 205 Davie, Donald, 201 Davis, Alex, 9 Dean, Basil, 94 Fifinella, 94 Derbyshire, 2, 49, 55, 56 Derry, 190 Devon, 2 Dickens, Charles, 95 Oliver Twist, 95 Dirane, Pat, 73–5, 77, 78, 79 Ditchley, 169 Donne, John, 167 Dorset, 115, 116, 117 Double Dealer, 23 Douglas, Sylvester, 143 Dover, 57 Drinkwater, John, 85, 93 Cophetua, 93 Rebellion, 93 The God of Quiet, 93 The Storm, 93 X=O: A Night of the Trojan War, 93

Dublin, 2, 13, 46–8, 52–5, 59–60, 65–7, 69, 72, 74–5, 77–8, 85, 87–90, 92–3, 95–6, 98, 143, 212 Duffy, Enda, 59 Dumas, Alexandre (fils), 51 La Dame aux Camélias, 51 Dumas, Alexandre (père), 52, 53 The Count of Monte Cristo, 52, 53 Dunbar, William, 155 Duncan, Andrew, 178, 211 Dundee, 24 Dunn, Douglas, 148 The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Poetry, 148 Eagleton, Terry, 68 Eastwood, 46, 91 Eddington, Arthur, 165 Edinburgh, 24, 25 Eglinton, John, 24 Einstein, Albert, 165 Eliot, T.S., 2, 5, 9, 10–11, 12, 22, 28, 45, 111, 124, 126, 128, 160, 161, 164, 165, 174, 179 Ash Wednesday, 164 Four Quartets, 5 Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 10–11 The Waste Land, 11, 165, 170 Empson, William, 165 Seven Types of Ambiguity, 165 England, 11, 24, 38, 55, 57, 115, 124, 126, 128, 161, 163, 174, 187, 200, 202, 205, 210 Epstein, Jacob, 28 Erewash Valley, 55 Esslin, Martin, 99 Esty, Jed, 5, 124, 126, 127, 128, 186, 195 A Shrinking Island, 124, 126 Evans, Caradoc, 6, 162 My People, 162 Evans, J. D., 188 Evans, Paul, 179 Experiment, 22

Index    229 Falci, Eric, 202 Farrago, 22 Fay, Willie, 95 Fergusson, Robert, 155 Finch, Peter, 179 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 157 Firdusi, 201 Flower, Robin, 186 Flowers, Anthony, 202 Ford, Ford Madox, 33, 46, 116 Forde, Victoria, 208 Forster, E. M., 5, 8, 105, 124, 126, 128, 187 England’s Pleasant Land, 5 Howard’s End, 8 Foxrock, 2 France, 36, 47, 50, 51, 52, 57, 97, 108, 109, 111, 112 Frank, Jill, 187 Islands and the Modernists, 187 Frank, Nino, 45 Frederick, John T., 23 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 117 Frost, Robert, 195 ‘For Once, Then, Something’, 195 Fry, Roger, 169 Galapagos Islands, 185 Gallipoli, 3 Galway, 2, 8, 65, 74, 77, 78, 80 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar, 14 Garda, 55 Gargnano, 54 Garnett, Edward, 46 Garsdale, 213 Gauguin, Paul, 28 Gawthorpe, Mary, 28, 38 Geddes, Patrick, 8, 24 Germany, 57, 60, 83 Gerrard, Deborah, 32 Ghent, 57 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic, 6, 149 A Scots Quair, 149 Gibbons, Luke, 15 Gilbert, David, 15–16 Gilbert, Stuart, 45 Gildea, Ida, 90

Gill, Eric, 169 Gilman, Harold, 33 Ginner, Charles, 33 Giraudoux, Jean, 111 Glasgow, 25, 34, 91, 92, 95, 96, 97 Goebel, Walter, 115 Locating Transnational Ideals, 115 Goldring, Douglas, 92 Goodby, John, 6, 17 Gordon, Douglas, 97 Gould, Rupert, 185 Graham, Colin, 78, 79, 80 Graham, W. S., 157 Grant, Arthur, 32 Granville-Barker, Harley, 94, 98 The Voysey Inheritance, 94 Graves, Robert, 174 The White Goddess, 174 Greece, 187 Greene, Graham, 107 Greenslade, David, 179 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 2, 87, 90, 93, 95 Cathleen ni Houlihan, 88, 89, 95 Gregson, Ian, 207 Grein, Jacob, 98 Griffith, Arthur, 75–6 In a Real Wicklow Glen, 75–6 Gropius, Walter, 9 Gruesz, Kristin Silva, 119–20 Guardian, 91 Guignon, Charles, 70 Gunn, Neil M., 6 Haddon, Alfred Cort, 185 Hall, Stuart, 5 Hamilton, William, 190 Hardy, Thomas, 13, 115, 116, 143, 175, 201 Harland, Oswald, 32 Harland, Sydney, 32 Harootunian, Harry, 68 Harris, Alexandra, 5, 124, 126, 127 Romantic Moderns, 124 Harrison, Andrew, 16 Hart, Matthew, 206, 209 Harvey, David, 7

230    Index Hatlen, Burton, 212, 215 Hauptmann, Gerhardt, 54, 97 Hannele, 97 Hawes, 213 Hawkins, Desmond, 164 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 44 Hay, Pete, 185, 187, 195–6 Head, Dominic, 17, 120 Heaney, Seamus, 13 Hebrides, 185, 187, 189 Hegglund, Jon, 7–8, 105, 106 Heidegger, Martin, 172, 203 Hemingway, Ernest, 1 Henley, W. E., 143 Hepworth, Barbara, 25, 124, 131, 132, 136 Herring, Scott, 9 Hewitt, John, 11–12, 90 Hexham, 202 Hill, Geoffrey, 180 Oraclau/Oracles, 180 Hitler, Adolf, 167 Hobson, Bulmer, 88, 89 Hoffman, Frederick John, 23 Holden, Charles, 25 Holland, 52 Hollywood, 70 Homer, 187 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 151, 173 Horace, 201 Horniman, Annie, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96 Houghton, Stanley, 91 Howarth, Peter, 200 Hueffer, Ford Madox see Ford Madox Ford Hughes, Tevor, 166 Hulme, T. E., 32 Hunter, Barbara, 24 Huyssen, Andreas, 4 Ibsen, Henrik, 27, 34, 54, 75, 76, 78 A Doll’s House, 34, 75 An Enemy of the People, 34 Iceland, 186 India, 194 Inishmaan, 73

Innsbruck, 57 Iowa, 23 Ireland, 6, 11, 12, 14–15, 24, 55, 74, 79, 83–7, 97–8, 160, 187, 194, 213 Ireland To-Day, 24 Irish News, 89 Isfahan, 202 Italy, 55, 210, 213 Ithaca, 185 Jackson, Barry, 92, 94, 96, 97 Fifinella, 94 Jackson, Holbrook, 26–30 Jackson, Tony, 84 James, David, 4, 16, 126, 127 James, Henry, 45, 110, 111, 116 James, John, 179 Jameson, Fredric, 7, 15, 68–9 Jameson, Storm, 16, 32–3, 104–14, 115, 119, 120, 124, 126 Cloudless May, 108–9, 112–13 The Novel in Contemporary Life, 110 The Pot Boils, 32 Jamieson, John, 142, 143 Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, 142, 143 Japan, 3, 85 Jeans, James, 165 Jenkins, Lee M., 9 Jerusalem, 172 John o’Groats, 37 Jolas, Eugene, 168 Jones, David, 6, 17, 160–1, 162, 169–73, 174, 178, 179, 201 ‘A, a, a, Domine Deus’, 172 In Parenthesis, 161, 169, 170–2, 173, 174 The Anathemata, 161, 170, 172, 173 ‘The Book of Balaam’s Ass’, 173 ‘The Narrows’, 173 The Roman Quarry, 173 The Sleeping Lord, 161, 170, 172, 173 Jones, Glyn, 6, 161, 167

Index    231 Jones, Marie, 70 Stones in his Pockets, 70 Jonson, Ben, 54 Joyce, James, 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 11, 16, 24, 28, 29, 34, 37, 44–61, 68, 83, 105, 110, 116, 139, 142, 143, 145, 150, 153, 154, 157, 160, 164, 165, 167, 170, 185 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 49, 52–5, 60 Dubliners, 29, 47, 48–9, 60, 66 Exiles, 83 Finnegans Wake, 11, 44–5, 110, 150, 152, 153 Ulysses, 6, 13, 24, 44, 45, 54, 55, 59–60, 66, 142 Jura, 187 Kant, Immanuel, 12 Keating, Peter, 29 Keats, John, 151 Kenner, Hugh, 142 Kerry, 73 Khan, Nyla, 114 King, Sophia Hillan, 188 Kintyre, 188, 195 Kipling, Rudyard, 143 Kirkland, Richard, 89 Kyoto, 203 Lagan, 24 Lancashire, 91 Land’s End, 37 Larkin, Philip, 201 Laugharne, 174 Lawrence, D. H., 2, 3, 13, 16, 29, 33, 34, 37, 44–61, 83, 91, 92, 127, 139, 151, 164, 165, 186 A Collier’s Friday Night, 33 ‘Goose Fair’, 47–9, 60 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 45 Last Poems, 45 ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’, 46 Sons and Lovers, 29, 46, 49–54, 60 ‘The Man Who Loved Islands’, 186 The Merry-Go-Round, 91 The Rainbow, 54–8

The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyd, 92 Touch and Go, 92 Women in Love, 54, 55, 57, 58, 61 Lawson, Andrew, 215 Le Corbusier, 9 Leavis, F. R., 45 Leeds, 22, 23, 25–33, 35–6, 38, 39, 95 Lefebvre, Henri, 28, 31, 39, 204 Lehmann, Rosamund, 126 Leonard, Tom, 157 Levitas, Ben, 69 Lewis, Alun, 161, 174 Lewis, Saunders, 162, 172 Lewis, Wyndham, 22, 28, 174 Lindisfarne, 205, 211, 213 Literature, 29 Lithuania, 115 Liverpool, 24, 26, 86, 94, 95, 96, 97, 136 Llangadog, 24 Llanstephan, 174 Llanybri, 174, 175 Lloyd, David, 6, 60 Loire, 108, 109, 112, 113 London, 1, 3, 22, 24–33, 35–8, 51, 90–2, 94, 96, 98, 104, 143, 163, 169, 174, 187, 202, 212, 213 Lonergan, Patrick, 17, 87 Longenbach, James, 3 Longley, Edna, 186 Lopez, Tony, 212 Love, Heather, 119 Lucca, 216 Lunedale, 213 Lutz, Tom, 23 Luxembourg, 57 Macaulay, Rose, 107 McClure, J. Derrick, 144–5, 154 MacConaill, Michael A., 189–90 McCulloch, Margery Palmer, 34 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 2, 6, 9, 16–17, 24, 33–4, 37, 142–57, 160, 180, 187–8, 201

232    Index MacDiarmid, Hugh (cont.) A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, 155, 157 ‘Empty Vessel’, 155–6 ‘Island Funeral’, 186 ‘La Belle Terre Sans Merci’, 151–2 Lucky Poet, 153 Penny Wheep, 155 Sangschaw, 155 ‘The Eemis Stane’, 156 The Islands of Scotland, 186, 187–8 ‘The Watergaw’, 146–9, 150, 151, 152, 153, 156 ‘Water Music’, 152–3, 154 McDonagh, Martin, 80 The Leenane Trilogy, 80 The Cripple of Inishmaan, 80 McDonald, Jan, 96 Macedonia, 213 McFadden, Roy, 24 Mackenzie, Compton, 91, 186 McLaverty, Michael, 3, 17, 184, 188–96 Call My Brother Back, 188, 189, 193–5 ‘Stone’, 188, 191–2 ‘The Green Field’, 190, 194, 195 ‘The Prophet’, 188, 191, 195 ‘The Wild Duck’s Nest’, 188, 190–1 Truth in the Night, 188 MacNamara, Gerald, 80, 88, 89 The Mist That Does be on the Bog, 80 Thompson in Tír-na-nÓg, 89 MacNeice, Louis, 186 I Crossed the Minch, 186 Letters from Iceland, 186 ‘The Hebrides’, 186 McNulty, Eugene, 89 Makin, Peter, 206, 213 Malay archipelago, 185 Malherbe, François de, 201 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 185 Mallarmé, Stephane, 153

Malley, Ern, 145 Malraux, André, 97 Manchester, 22, 23, 24, 25, 56, 59, 90–8 Manchester Guardian, 90, 96 Mansfield, Katherine, 26 Manuchehri, 201 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 44 Marsden, Dora, 28 Marseilles, 53 Marx, Karl, 12 Masefield, John, 94 Massey, Doreen, 204 Matless, David, 15–16, 125 Matlock, 55–6 Mau, Steffen, 114 Mayne, Rutherford, 89 Mayo, 72, 87 Mead, Margaret, 185 Mellor, Leo, 107 Melville, Herman, 44 Mencken, H. L., 23, 34 Miller, Andrew, 2 Miller, David, 22 Miller, Gavin, 144–5 Milne, Drew, 16–17, 164, 173, 201 Modern Fiction Studies, 9 Monkhouse, Allan, 91 Mons, 3 Monteverdi, Claudio, 207, 211 Montrose, 2, 24 Moore, Henry, 25, 131, 136 Moorman, Frederic, 32 Morada, 23 Moran, James, 16 Morash, Christopher, 69 More, Thomas, 185 Utopia, 185 Moretti, Franco, 194 Morgan, Charles, 184 The Flashing Stream, 184 Morris, William, 169 Motion, Andrew, 201 Mottram, Eric, 209 Muir, Edwin, 6, 16, 34–9 We Moderns, 34 Mulford, Wendy, 179

Index    233 Munster, 89 Murry, John Middleton, 28 Nairn, Tom, 212 New Mexico Quarterly, 23 New Orleans, 23 New York, 1, 23, 59 Newcastle, 95 Newman, John Henry, 54 Ní Dhuibhne, Éilís, 73, 74, 75 Niedecker, Lorine, 201 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 26, 27, 32, 33, 34, 36 Normandy, 117 North, Michael, 142 The Dialect of Modernism, 142 Northern Ireland, 12 Northumbria, 180, 200–5, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 217 Norway, 184 Nottingham/shire, 2, 13, 33, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56, 92 O’Brien, Flann, 6 O’Casey, Seán, 2, 87 O’Connor, T. P., 29 Ó Criomhthain, Tomás, 186 An tOileánach, 186 Ó Faoláin, Seán, 24 O’Neill, Eugene, 66 Ó Súileabháin, Muiris, 186 Fiche Blian ag Fás, 186 Oppenheim, Méret, 168 Orage, Alfred, 16, 25–36, 38 Orkney, 212 Orwell, George, 106, 185, 187 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 185 Ostend, 57 Oxford, 22 Oxford English Dictionary, 142 Palestine, 172 Palmer, Samuel, 169 Paris, 1, 2, 3, 36, 65, 67, 72, 73, 75, 78, 97, 115, 116, 117, 143, 163, 168, 202 Parkhill, David, 88, 89

Parnell, Charles Stewart, 65, 66 Payne, Ben Iden, 90, 91 Peak District, 56 Pennines, 2 Perloff, Marjorie, 164 Persia, 207, 211 Pick, Frank, 25 Plato, 185 Poe, Edgar Allan, 44 Poetry, 23 Poland, 55 Pound, Ezra, 2, 3, 9, 16, 22, 26, 28, 32, 34–8, 83–8, 150, 157, 161, 162, 164, 179, 201, 203, 206, 208 The Cantos, 150, 151, 162, 170, 206 The Consolations of Matrimony, 85–7 Power, James, 89 Powys, T. F., 116 Price, Richard, 23 Proceedings of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, 189 Proust, Marcel, 44 Purves, David, 148 Quartermain, Peter, 208 Racine, Jean, 72 Ramazani, Jahan, 4, 5 Rann, 24 Rapallo, 163, 202 Rathdrum, 77 Rathlin, 188–95 Rathvanna, 77 Read, Herbert, 32–4 Red Magazine, 132 Redesdale, 213 Reynolds, Paige, 77 Rhys, Jean, 105 Rhys, Keidrich, 161, 174, 176 Modern Welsh Poetry, 161, 174 Rhythm, 28 Richardson, Dorothy, 44 Ricoeur, Paul, 215–16

234    Index Riley, Peter, 180 The Llyˆn Writings, 180 Rimbaud, Arthur, 165 Roberts, Kate, 112, 113 Roberts, Lynette, 6, 17, 161, 162, 174–9 ‘Cwmcelyn’, 175 Gods with Stainless Ears, 161, 175–8 ‘Plasnewydd’, 175 ‘Poem from Llanybri’, 175, 178 Poems, 175 ‘Rainshiver’, 175 ‘Raw Salt on Eye’, 175 Robin Hood’s Bay, 124, 129, 130, 131, 132, 135, 138, 139 Roman Empire, 170, 172, 173 Rome, 65, 67 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 70 Rowe, William Walton, 168 Rowell, George, 84 Ruskin, John, 169 Russia, 55 Rutter, Frank, 28 Ryan, Frederick, 24, 33 Sadler, Michael, 28, 33 Sadler [Sadlier], Michael T. H., 28 St Ives, 138 St Petersburg, 1 Saler, Michael T., 25 Samhain, 24 Samuels, Raphael, 212 Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 202 Sarker, Sonita, 99 Sayers, Peig, 186 Peig, 186 Scandinavia, 213 Scarborough, 139 Scarlatti, Domenico, 207 Scarva, 89 Schabio, Saskia, 115 Schoenberg, Arnold, 207 Scotland, 6, 11, 24, 25, 72, 96, 143, 160, 186, 190, 193, 194, 213 Scotswood, 202 Scott, F. G., 153

Scottish Nation, 34 Scriabin, Alexander, 110 Seltzer, Thomas, 44 Sexton, James, 95 The Riot Act, 95 Shaw, George Bernard, 27, 32, 91, 94 Candida, 94 Sheffield, 24 Shetland Isles, 2 Short, Brian, 15–16 Sickert, Walter, 26, 33 Singleton, Brian, 80 Sitwell, Edith, 174 Skeaping, John, 132 Smith, Dai, 161 Sneinton, 47 Snell, K. D. M., 13, 106, 114, 125 Somme, 113, 169, 170, 171 Southwest Review, 23 Spain, 117 Spengler, Oswald, 169, 170 Stafford, Fiona, 13, 212 Staffordshire, 56 Stainmore, 207, 215 Staithes, 138 Stead, W. T., 29 Steele, Tom, 27, 30 Stein, Gertrude, 144, 150, 151 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 143, 184 Treasure Island, 184 Stokes, John, 30 Stone Cottage, 2, 3, 86 Sussex, 3 Swansea, 2, 176 Swindon, 25–6 Switzerland, 56, 57 Symons, Arthur, 72 Synge, J. M., 6, 17, 27, 65–80, 85–7, 95, 143, 187 Deirdre of the Sorrows, 72 Riders to the Sea, 72, 77, 95 The Aran Islands, 65–8, 72, 73, 74, 77, 80, 187 The Playboy of the Western World, 68, 69, 71, 73, 76, 79, 85, 86, 95

Index    235 The Shadow of the Glen, 71, 73–7, 79, 86 The Tinker’s Wedding, 79 The Well of the Saints, 71, 72, 76, 78, 79 Taaffe, Carol, 58 Tagore, Rabindranath, 3 Taliesin, 169, 212, 214 Taylor, Charles, 71 Teesdale, 214 Teheran, 202 Teviotdale, 214 Thacker, Andrew, 7, 16 The Bell, 24 The Criterion, 22 The Dial, 23 The Edinburgh Review, 25 The Egoist, 22 The English Review, 33, 47 The Evergreen, 24 The Freeman, 35 The Freewoman, 28 The Geographical Journal, 184 The Klaxon, 24 The Little Review, 23 The Mabinogion, 171 The Midland, 23 The Modern Scot, 24 The New Age, 16, 25, 26, 28, 30–5, 38–9, 83 The New Freewoman, 28 The News Letter, 89 The Northern Review, 24 The Scottish Chapbook, 24, 147 The Smart Set, 23 The Times, 86, 95, 184, 185 the transatlantic review, 37 The Welsh Review, 24 The Whitby Gazette, 130 The Yellow Book, 22 Thomas, Caitlin, 174 Thomas, Dylan, 2, 6, 17, 160, 161, 162–3, 164–9, 174, 178, 179 ‘And death shall have no dominion’, 165 ‘Before I knocked’, 166



18 Poems, 160, 164, 167 ‘Fern Hill’, 164 ‘How shall my animal’, 169 ‘Light breaks where no sun shines’, 166 ‘The force that through the green fuse’, 166–7 Twenty-five Poems, 160, 167 Under Milk Wood, 164 ‘When, like a running grave’, 168 ‘When once the twilight’, 166 Thomas, R. S., 161 Thomson, George, 187 Tomaney, John, 203, 204 To-Morrow, 24 Totnes, 2 Toulouse, 36 Transition, 44, 168 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm, 95 Treece, Henry, 168 Trieste, 55, 163 Trilling, Lionel, 70, 71 Tuma, Keith, 203 Tynan, Kenneth, 11 Uladh, 24, 89 Ulrich, Carolyn F., 23 Ulster, 11–12, 24, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 97 United Irishman, 59 United Kingdom, 160, 187 Vance, Sylvia, 113 Venture, 22 Verdrenne, J. E., 98 Verlaine, Paul, 51 Verona, 58 Villon, François, 201 Wadsworth, Edward, 25, 28 Wagner, Richard, 27 Wales, 6, 11, 17, 24, 25, 112, 160, 161, 162, 163, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 179, 212, 213 Wales, 24, 174 Walkowitz, Rebecca L., 4, 5, 118–19

236    Index Wallace, Alfred Russel, 185 Wallace, Lewis, 27 Walmsley, J. Ulric, 129, 136, 138 Walmsley, Leo, 3, 17, 124–39 A Guide to the Geology of the Whitby District, 130 Foreigners, 124, 130, 135–8 Phantom Lobster, 124, 132–5 So Many Loves, 130, 132 Three Fevers, 124, 129, 131, 133, 134, 135, 138 Wareing, Alfred, 95, 96 Warner, Sylvia Townsend, 3, 16, 106, 107, 114, 115–19, 120, 124, 126 Mr Fortune’s Maggot, 115 Summer Will Show, 115–19 The Corner that Held Them, 115 Warsaw, 104 Watkins, Vernon, 161 Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 45 Webb, Mary, 13 Wells, H. G., 45 Wensleydale, 213, 214 Whalsay, 2, 187 Whitby, 32, 129, 139 Whitehead, Alfred North, 165 Science and the Modern World, 165 Whitman, Walt, 27, 44, 151 Whyte, James, 24 Wicklow, 72, 75, 76, 77 Wigginton, Christopher, 6, 17 Wilde, Oscar, 34 Wilkinson, John, 180 Sarn Helen, 180

Williams, Raymond, 2, 10, 11, 118 Williams, William Carlos, 8, 201 Paterson, 8 Williamson, Henry, 127 Wilson, James, 146–7 Lowland Scotch, 146 Woolf, Virginia, 5, 106, 110, 116, 119, 124, 126, 128, 185 Between the Acts, 5, 126 Mrs Dalloway, 116 Wootten, William, 201, 214 Wordsworth, William, 156 Wyatt, Thomas, 171 Poems, 171 Yeats, W. B., 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 15, 16, 24, 27, 30, 68, 72, 73, 78, 84–96, 98, 143, 151, 157, 165, 185, 189, 216 Cathleen ni Houlihan, 88, 89, 95 Deirdre, 93 On the Boiler, 189 Purgatory, 189 The Countess Cathleen, 93 The Hour Glass, 92–3 The King’s Threshold, 92, 93 ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, 15 The Shadowy Waters, 94 ‘The Tower’, 8 York, 212 Yorkshire, 17, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 32, 33, 104, 111, 124, 129, 186, 205, 212 Ypres, 3 Zukofsky, Louis, 201