Revisionism

Revisionism

I am reading Sean O’Tuama’s Fili faoi sceimhle, which means “poets in terror” (literally under, but I think this is just an idiom where the languages differ). He writes about two poets whom he regards as being the most significant to write in the Gaelic language since the 17th century, Egan O’Rahilly (c. 1670-1729) and Sean O Riordain. This is an opportunity to talk about the topic of revisionism in Irish history, not something I have deep knowledge of but which interests me a great deal. I am reading his book because I have a negligible knowledge of Irish Gaelic and well-organised, rational prose is something that doesn’t stretch my abilities beyond their limit.

Revisionism is something that started in the 1930s, which is when the professional training of Irish historians started. The values of historians, as an academic and international profession, included sobriety, preference for objectivity in the sense of not taking sides in the politics of the past, preoccupation with source analysis, preference for exposing the biases of source texts over identifying with their standpoints, and a wish to judge events in terms of how they appeared to participants rather than of how their eventual consequences, perhaps centuries later. Because the teleological bias of previous generations of historians had been nationalism, the new academics made a habit of squeezing nationalist bias out of the stories and looking at how it all appeared after you had done that. Indeed, rewriting stories to leave out the nationalist message, and finding new interpretations with apparent ease and as a rapid result of doing that, was the bread and butter of European historians over several decades. I say “European” because the nationalist emotion was very attractive to historians from other regions, in just those decades, and it is surely a problem to write the history of decolonisation without accepting nationalism as the direction of travel of most regions (becoming, after difficulty, “nations”) in what were, as at 1940, European overseas empires. In 1940, there were quite a few books around which told the story of Ireland in nationalist terms. These were mostly not written by professional historians. Some of them wanted to judge all Irish people, since 1169 AD or so, in terms of their attitude to English rule, and how far they had given up all other interests in life in favour of anti-imperial struggle. This preconception was spread into things other than books, for example songs, poems, speeches, and newspaper articles took them for granted, and presented the conclusions without re-examining the basic narratives. After the foundation of the Free State, these conclusions were part of the public universe of speech. The “revisionists” were simply historians who were interested in the processes of source analysis, and of reconstructing the past, rather than in nationalist piety. They also very much improved the factual basis of Irish history, by reading the source documents and recovering new facts.
As I understand it, the argument about revisionism entered a new phase in the 1970s. The activities of the Provisional IRA were unacceptable, after a certaian point, to the majority of academic historians in the Republic. They became aware that their acceptance of a nationalist view of Irish history (from, let’s say, 1532 up to 1923) coincided with the PIRA’s instrumental use of the past, however much blurred. This forced a reappraisal of their own work. A version of collective history in which the Protestants weren’t all bad, and acquired the right to be Irish after, well, a hundred years or so, and in which getting over shared tragedy was the healthiest reaction to it, became more attractive to them, as a group. But, in writing new work which engaged with that, they either lost view of the centrality of land forfeiture, dispossession, and famine, or at least induced mighty anxiety in other historians that they might do so. This anxiety gave rise to the debate on revisionism. This is described in two books of essays, Interpreting Irish history, edited Ciaran Brady, and The making of modern Irish history, edited D. George Boyce and Alan O’Day. I think it is fair to say that the debate was at its peak a generation ago.

There is another group of historians we have to consider, and that is ones who sympathised with either the British government or the Protestant Ascendancy and are not minded to analyse the Gaelic viewpoint on affairs because their social commitment prohibits that. A variant on this is people who write about Irish history without knowing Gaelic – I feel that, as Vincent Morley (for one) has pointed out recently, writing Irish history without reading the Gaelic documents is an exercise in fiction. This is not revisionism as I understand the term, but the virulence of the debate was partly due to the presence of some quite dubious publications with which the genuine revisionists could, unfairly, be associated. If the proposal was, in reaction against PIRA massacres and torture schools, to rewrite Irish history from a pro-British point of view, then one could be wholeheartedly against it. But, this was not actually the game that people were playing.

O’Tuama remarks that one McCarthy friendly to O'Rahilly rented part of his former family land from its new owner, but that the high rent was disadvantageous for him, and that showiness (scléip) of lifestyle was no longer available to him. This also meant that he could not patronise a house poet or poet in the way which Gaelic landowners had done since the early Middle Ages, if not before. The question of high rent repays our attention. The conquest of Ireland in Tudor times was driven by the need to acquire land; new settlers arrived, in several counties, and expelled the native Irish from their land. The settlers were productive, in some ways, but were also producing for sale or export. They removed their land from the supply of the nutritional needs of the native population. Colonisation meant land shortage, which got worse with time. The shortage of land kept rents high. The rural people outbid each other to get land, as tenants, and this meant that they could not also build up reserves – cash, possessions, stores of food, stocks of animals. As modern economists have shown, the people who die in a famine are the ones who lack funds; there is always a market in food for those who can afford the high prices which follow shortages. So a countryside of households with no reserves is set up for famine. The famine of 1741 was just a rehearsal for the more appalling events of 1845 to 1850. Now, it is generally agreed that the solidarity of the (Catholic) Irish population in wanting Home Rule and the expulsion of the English, around 1900 to 1923, was a consequence of Famine in the 1840s. This was a mass death event, it was not just a collective memory but the dominant one. But if you track back the whole series of Irish famines, going back to Munster in the 1580s, it seems that the land shortages and high rents were direct consequences of the original Tudor re-taking and settlement. The collapse of British rule followed logically from flaws in the land regime set up by the Tudors. While apparently solid, it was a fragile settlement of affairs and the pattern of rural poverty, distrust of the government, uprisings, and famines which began under Elizabeth persisted thereafter. So the “grand narrative” which links the establishment of English rule (outside the district around Dublin) to its eventual breakdown and the establishment of the Free State (later the Republic) exists in reality and is the most natural pattern which disengages itself from the sources. It is not a projection of intellectually biased politicians of the 1940s, or any other time.
If you superimpose the nationalist vision on the deeps of history, you conclude that people who weren’t agitating for independence were wasting their lives. But, as independence did not come until 1923 (arguably, 1948, when far-reaching constitutional changes were enacted and the link to the Crown was severed), you also conclude that even the people who sought freedom were up until that point, wasting their time – ending in frustration. This does not work as a view of history. People certainly led their lives, and achieved at least some of their goals, even when they couldn't vote. You can’t write history from a functional standpoint, based on the end goal, in which you ignore what people did in their lives and what they wanted to do. This is a way of making history vanish. And anyway, life isn’t simply a waste of time.
O’Tuama points out that O’Rahilly drew on poems by Godfrey O’Daly from the 14th C (he died in 1387), as part of the local (aristocratic) culture which he had internalised, just as it was drawing to an end. And Sorley MacLean draws on O'Rahilly in his long sequence of poems Dain do Eimhir, written in the 1930s. So the question whether Gaelic cultural memory was interrupted can be answered directly, just by looking at those three poets.
I do not find revisionism sympathetic. But, I have seen a few of the older books, and it is clear to me that the scholarly style of history which began, or at least took off, in the 1930s has been endlessly productive of new stories and new facts, and so clearer understanding. In fact, if you grasp the nationalist interpretation in 6th form, as I did for some reason, then fifty (!) years later you definitely want new interpretations, to avoid simple staleness and repetition. You read books to acquire new information, not to re-chew the knowledge you already have.
O’Tuama describes the history of the land-owning families in the district of Kerry where O'Rahilly came from. As he observes, the poet gives descriptions of members of the McCarthy family whom he could not possibly (ni moide) have known. He carries out the ancient bardic role of legitimating land-owners, but his voice is raised for a pattern of overlordship which had ceased to be while he was still in his youth. Just as he writes in an archaic poetic language, a standard which people were moving away from, so also he deals with significant political change by recording cultural memory of the system before it changed. His poems are notably conservative and critical. The story of his district is largely that of the decay of the McCarthy family. In 1688, Parliament had legalised the change of dynasty whereby William of Orange became king and James II Stewart ceased to be king. This followed a coup d’etat which was successful in England but barely so in Scotland and Ireland. So full-scale war followed in Ireland, the so-called War of Two Kings. The theory of feudal land-holding was that the king owned all the land, outright, and that he distributed it to his subjects on the basis of loyal service. If they failed in that service, for example by armed uprising, subversion, treason, he could straightforwardly take the land back – they had forfeited it. The War of the Two Kings saw the McCarthys collectively come out for King James and fight as Jacobites. The defeat of James saw them forfeit their estates. The Great McCarthy was in prison and then in exile, and many other branches of the family lost their land held as tenants, as they were expelled or simply unable to pay the rent demanded of them. Nearby, the arrangement was that Nicholas Browne, the Jacobite landowner, should not benefit from his estates during his lifetime, but that his daughter should keep them – and she was married to an MP and banker named John Asgill, an Englishman: “in 1703 he bought the forfeited estates of Sir Nicholas Browne (2nd Viscount Kenmare in the Jacobite peerage), who was living abroad in exile, for the term of Kenmare’s life. He himself had married Kenmare’s eldest daughter, who had been brought up as a Protestant.” (History of Parliament, on-line) Their offspring would inherit the land. This obviously resembles the arrangement whereby William of Orange, closely related to the Stewarts, would become king, reigning with his wife (and cousin), who was the daughter of the previous Stewart king. O'Rahilly, put simply, records the time when Brownes and McCarthys were in power over the whole district, and discusses every change as a loss and a deterioration. He wrote a prose satire on two characters, Tadhg Dubh O Croinin and Muircheartach O Griofa, who were the land agents (aidhbheardaithi) put in over the Browne lands. O’Tuama records them as being sued by Asgill for £1000 in rents which they had collected and not passed on to him. He uses the word faslaigh, upstarts, to record O’Rahilly’s view of them. It looks as if the beneficiaries of the shift of power were these two figures, local godfathers, who exploited the unsteady conditions of the time and throve in them. We could write the history of the district with them as the heroes and events interpreted from their point of view. This is the line of modern history – shifting viewpoint to find a new story. O’Rahilly sees it as his duty to praise the wealth and power which was present at 1680 – and refuses to give credit to the wealth and power of those in possession as at 1720. This is inconsistent – if you follow wealth and power, it is irrational to scorn the New Men. In fact, it is not rational to praise inherited wealth and to detest acquired wealth. This amounts to invalidating and even repressing a key historical process. O'Rahilly had a formidable knowledge of genealogy, mainly McCarthy genealogy – this qualification and sanctified knowledge may have steered him away from accurate political perception. Naturally the two godfathers had no genealogy, or none that bards were willing to take cognizance of.
O’Tuama records that one Lord of Muskerry (another McCarthy) went to live on an island in the Elbe, near Hamburg, and lived by selling the timber of ships that were wrecked there. One could retell this story from the aspect of his success in a new profession, inquiring into his marketing methods, his clients, the kinds of wood he salvaged, and so forth, but really this is perverse. The story of his life is one of exile and dispossession, the loss of the society which he grew up in, and he must have been aware of this. Not everybody saw the world in nationalist terms, or even in political terms, but when we see so many people either losing their land or fleeing the country altogether, and the role which the government and the laws played in that, we can be sure that those individuals knew what they had lost and knew that the British government had been the agent which brought the loss about.
O’Rahilly seems barely to have left a small area in South Munster during his life, but he wrote aislings, dream poems in which a beautiful woman appears to him who is Erin and who speaks for the woes which Erin is suffering. These poems rise above the praising of local nobles and of their wealth and feats, which bardic poetry recounted so many times, they are about the fate of Ireland, and it would be perverse not to call them nationalist poems. (They are also Jacobite poems, but O'Rahilly had Erin in mind more than James III.) The Tudor conquest forced Irish people to see their country as a whole, as its condition was so much affected by the incursions of the English; and as a result we have people writing nationalist poems. World views shift, but there is a natural link between a nationalist around 1720 and a nationalist in 1921, or in 2021 for that matter.
I find it problematic that O’Rahilly was lamenting, not just the situation he had lived in, but the situation prevailing before his birth – he was fixing memory in verse, and had acquired memories fixed in verse by his predecessors, certainly not from print but either from manuscripts or from oral recitation. But, to be honest, this thriving of memory beyond the personal is necessary to society, and makes it possible to reflect – to capture the process of change, and so, it follows, to think about politics. He was patronised by the Brownes, Jacobites in defeat, but they had arrived as English land-takers in the Elizabethan colonisation, and their vast lands had been, around 1550 or 1560, lands of the McCarthys. When he remarks that the land of one Browne inheritor had once belonged to the McCarthys (“o shiuil Sir Val i gceart na gCarthach gcaoin’), he is referring to a state of affairs prior to 1588, i.e. a hundred years before his own birth. That is, he is summoning a kind of historical awareness similar to what we might claim, today, about O’Rahilly who lived three hundred years ago. I think the key is formal language: wrenching a moment into poetic form makes it permanent, and then the use of writing makes it possible to bring that moment back. The form is literally rigid, but we could also use the word ‘stable’. O'Rahilly was learned in collective memory rather than simply conservative. The decline of the McCarthys was thus a long-term event, and it is more accurate to take the long view than just one moment of dispossession. Because the land-holding system of an older Ireland saw everyone as the retainers of the local great family, either as tenants or as household members such as bards, the destruction of the great family meant the destruction of the niches in which everyone else lived. A whole new society came along. O’Rahilly is not just recording the economic annihilation of the McCarthys and of O’Rahilly, but a much larger social process in the history of Kerry.

I had difficulty with the word aidhbheardaithi. I think this may be a Latin word, “adverted” as in “inadvertent”. A land agent is advertent of the owner’s interests just as an attorney is “attourned” towards them. Just learn another 5000 words, I tell myself, and you can actually read this language. Someone from Munster is Muimhneach, in the plural Muimhneachan. So 'Moynihan' means 'person from Munster'.

Audrey Beecham

I was reading a novel which I picked up by chance in an Oxfam shop and stumbled across more references to the Western European colony in Tangiers and Fez, and found this might shed more light on Audrey Beecham’s 1957 poem ‘The Cruel Coast of Barbary’:

I am tired land and poor
[...]
I am the pattern to which the winds have rubbed me
My nails are sharpened by the sea to knives:
I know not ships – though their forests have known me-
Nor the softening fleshes of long-lost lives.

Piracy has played beneath my skylit eyeholes.
Men were enslaved to pass their lives in pain.
Monkey tribesmen clustered on my shoulders
Many times enriched my dust with richest rain.
(‘The Cruel Coast of Barbary’)

The “Barbary coast” is originally simply a coast where Berber is spoken. (Tangiers is on the Atlantic.) The "enslaved" part refers to the staple of the corsair economy, that is slave-raiding; their ships were propelled by oars manned by slaves, usually (or in legend) European. The corsairs had their homes in Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers. In a previous post, I discussed this poem (the title poem of her 1957 book The Coast of Barbary) and speculated that it might refer to (female) homosexuality, and that the locale might be a reference to a fairly dense group of gay exiles, in 1957 but also ten years later and for a few years before 1957, in Morocco and what was at one time the “international zone”. Beecham published only two volumes of poetry, the one mentioned and one in 1979 (re-issued 1980) called A Different Weather. This is the background against which we can propose that Beecham set a poem, about the curse of being gay and about being alienated and dissociated from a social role generally, in a real place, and that “Coast of Barbary” refers to the expat colony on the coast of Morocco (and, doubtfully, in other Mediterranean cities). "The Coast of Barbary” is the title of a section of 14 poems in the book. The linking theme is likely to be the image of a coast as the ego, in the guise of a welcoming terrain where the proposed lover would make landfall and choose to linger. The poet is like a bay welcoming ships in and offering them fruit and sweet water. A poem about the Fortunate Isles makes this image sharp: these islands are found in the western Mediterranean, or past the Strait but close by. Yet we do not seem to have reached them. Instead, the poet offers a hostile shore, defined by captivity and infertility; and this is the Barbary Shore. This is how that phrase can be extended to all fourteen poems. The novel is A Smell of Burning, 1963, by Margaret Lane (although I rapidly went on to read Lane’s 1968 novel The Day of the Feast, also set in Tangiers and Fez). Lane says there were lots of Europeans living in Tangiers, and refers, briefly but rather pungently, to the prevalence of gays in their number – she remarks that the third question asked about any new arrival was whether they were gay. She also shows one of her characters being accosted by a ten year-old male prostitute in Tangiers, although this scene takes place in French, to shelter the susceptibilities of English readers. This confirms what one would glean from books by William Burroughs and Rupert Croft-Cooke, that there was a group of expats living there, numerous enough to provide interesting society for each other, and that some portion of this little group were gay and had either been prosecuted for related activities back in Britain or had simply chosen to live in a city where the police were not much interested in policing the morals of European residents.
A tourist website lists these artists as having lived in Tangiers: 'Matisse, Emily Keene, William Burroughs, Paul et Jane Bowles, Bernardo Bertolucci, Josep Tapiro, Antoni Gaudí, Camille Saint-Saëns, Eugène Delacroix, Mohamed Choukri, Federico García Lorca, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Pierre Loti, Roland Barthes, Jean Genet, Mick Jagger, Jack Kerouac, Paul Morand, Alexandre Dumas, Mark Twain, Daniel Defoe, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett... Tous ont vécu à Tanger. De coeur ou de naissance, tous sont des enfants du pays.' This leaves out Juan Goytisolo.
Tangiers was under international control because in an era of collective hysteria European powers had been very keen to prevent any single power from controlling the strait between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Another site I stumbled on describes many Republicans as having fled to Tangiers, a zone under international control, to evade Franco, as the new dictator of Spain. However, it points out that Franco occupied the Zone from 1940 to 1945, presumably to inhibit the political activity of these inherently anti-Franco individuals. This may be the source of the literary colony in Tangiers and it may not. I am also curious about the equally hedonistic expat colony on Ibiza, which was there in the 1930s and also had problems with Franco. John Harlan Hughes remarks “At the time of the novel, there were roughly 60,000 inhabitants: half European, half Moroccan Muslims and Jews.” (That is, his novel, set in 1942.) I understand the correct term is Tangerino (to say "Tanjawi" is more pretentious). The “international zone” reverted to Moroccan control in 1956, the year of Moroccan independence. The Europeans will have been mainly Spanish and French nationals and engaged in trade or in government posts; the western European dilettanti or sexual outlaws were just a smattering. But the police were still tolerant – surely the law did not allow someone to pick up a ten year-old boy, or the boy to solicit clients, but in practice this might rarely lead to an arrest. A character in one of Lane’s novels gives as reasons for living in Morocco the lack of income tax, the servants, the climate. By “servants” we understand that incomes derived from Western Europe had a high purchasing power in Morocco, due to exchange rate anomalies and also low wages. The character does not mention “tolerance for gay sex”.
Up to 1956, Tangiers was a boom town, possibly because the international control commission was lax, exchange controls were absent, and there was a low tax regime as well as a "clean" administration. Also because of smuggling into Spain, which had steep import duties as part of the Fascist policy of autarky and import substitution. There was a construction boom in the 1950s. It was not a low-rent town and was not the classic "town in decline" where drop-outs go to live in crumbling properties for minimal rents. It was full of businessmen. (Ibiza, at least in the 1950s, was a very cheap place to live.) As a prosperous town on the edge of extensive rural poverty and under-employment, its prosperity could also be accompanied by a large group of people without money – the classic "high rent, low wages" town. It was a European town in which half the inhabitants belonged to the Third World. After 1956, the "free port" privileges were abolished; Spain moved away from the policy of autarky after 1960; anyone who had capital left to set up somewhere else. But, the Northern European colony in Tangiers were not doing much business – they lived on remittances from the home country. As a group, they lacked the work ethic – so that problems of how to occupy leisure were unusually prominent. Croft-Cooke, in contrast, worked incredibly hard as a writer living off his royalties, but he still enjoyed an abundant social life, as he describes. (His memoir of the time is The Caves of Hercules.) He lived in Tangiers for fifteen years – after coming out of prison in England.
It has been claimed that Croft-Cooke was the first writer in England who actually went into print asserting that he was homosexual. There might then be a history of homosexuality as a status, separate from people simply living out their wishes and being with and for others. A tiny part of this history is also within the history of poetry... I feel bad that I haven't written that history. You can't take writing which is secretive and ambiguous and reduce it to documentary.
Beecham presents the Coast of Barbary as a curse. But is this Tangiers? against this idea, we have to say that the sources do not mention gay female expats as a feature and they were not doing anything illegal in Britain, so that exile would not seem to be an imperative need. Further, the tolerance which someone like Croft-Cooke found would make Tangiers a benign place to live, if you were gay and cultured, where you could attend gay parties and act out a gay sensibility without worrying who would disapprove. It was a way of being true to yourself. This “Barbary shore” was hardly an accursed place to be, and people would not have gone to live there if it had been. But, on balance, I find it likely that her poem refers to exile in Tangiers and is about the curse of being born gay. It is personal symbolism and we have to accept that the personal symbolism of a 1957 poem may have vanished over the edge of what intelligence can recover sixty years later.
Lane’s novels (which I found compelling reading) also describe the arrival of what, in 1963, was a new social group – the drop-outs. A review of her describes them as “derelicts and dilettanti”, although she is always less judgemental. These people were already there when the Rolling Stones visited Morocco. Lane portrays a whole ecology of people who had no purpose in life – they have no ambitions (although meeting similar people in cafes was always a priority). Their characters are invisible because they are so inactive. They are like the “new society” of students except that they are not willing to study anything. They are connected to the rise of a “counter culture”, although that involves a level of effort which is alien to them. The role of drugs and sexual freedom was also influential. They are anti-Western almost by default. The hippy lifestyle is not based simply on dislike of English life but also on immersion in a concrete alternative on Ibiza and in Morocco. And this is all an anticipation of the new poetry. Being “non-Western” in British poetry is linked to Camden Lock market and its stalls where people returning from Morocco sold Moroccan artefacts as a way of funding their next trip to the Strait. The abandonment of a work ethic allows artistic endeavour to take centre stage. It leaves a negligent serenity in which any surviving attention is given only to details either of subjective perception or of verbal style. It was a counter-balance to the academic influence: simply describing ideas produced something which was not poetry. The poems had to have human beings at their heart, and those humans could not simply be preoccupied with commuting, office life, and the mortgage.
The connection between the middle-class expats and the “drop-outs” is intriguing, even if Lane as usual shows us a fascinating contact zone without descending into mere reportage. We can contrast Beecham’s flat-out hysteria with the blank apathy of the Tangiers hippies. Beecham represents the frustration they were saying No to. They refused to start the chase.