Geoffrey Keating and the national language of Ireland

Geoffrey Keating and the national language of Ireland

Macaulay, reviewing Ranke’s History of the Popes, in 1840, said “It cannot be doubted that since the sixteenth century Protestant nations have made greater progress than their Catholic neighbours. […] whoever knows what Florence and Edinburgh were in the generation preceding the Reformation, and what they are now, will acknowledge that some great cause, during the last three centuries, operated to raise one part of the European family and depress the other.”

This is emotionally unacceptable but since Macaulay was the greatest historian of the 19th century it is not easy to claim that he was wrong. Of course the “shift of the leading sector” occurred more than once and the decline of the South was not yet happening in 1540. He did not mention Ireland. Actually, he did not mention France, the classic case of a Catholic country which was at the forefront in every sector of development.

Aidan Doyle, in his history of the Irish language, reports pupils in the 1880s having to study for the newly created exams in Irish and being obliged to study Geoffrey Keating as the source of a standard, even though it had no connection with the language they spoke at home. Keating's History of Ireland (Foras Feasa ar Eirinn) was completed in about 1632. My impression is that he wrote a very clear prose, in fact that although his register was slightly archaic it resembled modern Latin in being easy to read and that he had Modern Latin in mind in choosing his means. The question is why his work had not been replaced by more contemporary work between then and 1880, or alternatively why the Church had not created more works using it as a prose standard, so that the pupils of 1880 would not have found it so puzzling. The early 17^th century saw three clearly classic and even monumental works in the Irish language, being Keating's Foras, the lives of the Irish saints, and the Annals of the Four Masters (a compilation of the whole body of original Irish annals). All of these were funded by the Church, and the scholars involved were Catholic clerics linked to Irish-oriented institutes on the continent. The notional date of 1540 for “the decline of the South” is utterly misleading here, and the force of the Counter-Reformation is unmistakable. The question is why the impulse halted, why did the Church give up on this project, why was there no more classic prose after 1640.

First, we have to ask whether Irish prose really ground to a halt after 1640. This is a taboo subject, but it may be that I have missed key texts and am grasping at a phenomenon that is not really there. Gearoid Denvir says about the Revival of the early 20th century "The tradition which they came into possession of, however, if it wasn't broken forever, was in danger of being extinguished. No prose worthy of discussion had been written since Geoffrey Keating's Foras Feasa ar Eirinn in the seventeenth century."[Denvir p. 35] (As an aside, this means that he is discounting oral narratives, collected in great quantities under the Republic, fairy-tales and so on. This is prose, but it does not offer linguistic forms which you could ask students to learn.) 

The development of Irish writing in Ireland in the period after the Conquest (An Concas), and especially after about 1650, was difficult for reasons connected with the colonist and overlord. Subject of much fantasy, projection, and exaggeration, there were also “Irelands over the sea”, in particular the friaries, colleges, and seminaries of the Catholic Church in Western Europe (Salamanca, Paris, Louvain, etc.); the Irish Brigades of various Catholic monarchs, silently intended as the professional nucleus of an Irish army which would one day expel the English; and the communities around exiled nobles, the Stuart Court naturally the most prominent of them after 1689, but not the only one (so that we have an account, Turas na dTaoiseach, of the exile of the Earls in 1607 and their journey to Italy during 1608). The manuscripts written for or within these groups are precious and voluminous. As a colony of Gaeldom outside the country, they were all deeply disappointing, and Irish speech disappeared rapidly as the exiles made their way in the host society. Political success depended on the ability to shine in the local language, to demonstrate the qualities of nobles or priests in speech and in social encounters. The Gaelic manuscripts were an asset of unmeasurable but perhaps minimal worth. Irish people were in North America (and later the Caribbean islands) from the 17^th C on, but I have yet to hear of even one Irish manuscript being written in the colonial New World. However many Irishmen died fighting for the Stuarts, their court (or anti-court) was not likely to invest in Gaelic, as favouring the Irish was the best way to persuade the English and the Scots that no Stuart would make a good king of Britain. Loyalty did not buy loyalty.

The attitude of the Irish Church towards the Irish language is probably a key factor which changed. The Church had, arguably up until 1945 or even the Second Vatican Council, an unconscious identification with the landowners as its primary link with the secular world. Because it owned so much land, this sympathy was deep-seated. The handover of most Catholic-held land to Protestants under Cromwell (not reversed, or scantly and scarcely, by Charles II) meant that the Catholic church in Ireland lost psychological sympathy with the speakers of Irish (and acquired a passive, gradually increasing, sympathy with the English landowners). People always expect to find linguistic nationalism in the mind-set of the Church hierarchy, and are astonished when it isn’t there. Maynooth, the Catholic seminary set up in 1793 when the British reversed one of the many oppressive anti-Catholic laws, was not a Gaelic institution, and is often used as a term of abuse among nationalists. Doyle reproduces very interesting examples of priests pretending not to know Irish, when it is obvious that they did: it was a low-prestige language. So this may be why we no longer find monuments of Gaelic scholarship coming from the ranks of the Church. Keating, O’Cleary, etc., may have been from the last generation of a gentry class which spoke a natural and fluent Gaelic. Within the Church, Irish obviously lost ground to Latin, and a Keating born a century later might have written in Latin. An interesting book (of lectures given at Maynooth, in fact) discusses Irish sermons of early modern times, and prints a few from the 19^th C which are partly in English spelling – the priests could speak Irish perfectly well but they didn’t have the formal education to use the Irish spelling system. So the educated were far from cultivating the language in this period.

Spanish and Italian visual art is no longer pre-eminent in the European scene of the 17th and 18th Cs. This is the most visible element of the “decline of the South”. But the Church undertook the conversion of its ignorant parishioners – so that it won, in Ireland, retaining the loyalty of the parishes and imparting the catechism, occasionally even literacy, to its flock. Despite every advantage, the English clearly lost the struggle on the ground, the struggle to control the poor, numerous, immobile, and culturally conservative. Secondly, the Church undertook overseas missions. This was world-historical, and a clear victory, again. The vigour of the Catholic church in the 20^th C is the sequel of its success over the previous three centuries. Looking at a declining current of grand, showy, art, in painting and architecture may give us the wrong story – the Church redeployed its forces to a different front. (The ecclesiastical architecture of Latin America and the Philippines may be the grand achievement of Catholic art in the relevant centuries.)

Vincent Morley’s book From Keating to Raftery (O Cheitinn go Raiftearai) is a work on the line of Irish history written in Gaelic from 1650 to 1850. It is about how people attempted to recall a past which was already slipping away - the prehistory of modern nationalism, in a sense. It records the history of national self-awareness in Gaelic Ireland, essentially to refute the thesis that there was no “public realm” in the habermasian sense in Ireland. He undertook a heroic census of Irish manuscripts to find out about texts recounting history which might have been read aloud or memorised, apart from being read, in Gaelic Ireland. His results are very striking, but one depressing comment for us is that Keating manuscripts are less common than some simpler accounts of history. He counted 144 manuscripts of Keating. There is a noticeable dip in their number in the early 18th C. This is the point when the language changed, and scholars count this as the boundary where "early modern Irish" gives way to "late modern Irish". However, this shift did not give rise to a new standard language: instead, the new way of speaking was broken up into dialects. Morley concludes that he was decreasingly influential in the development of Irish public opinion, and that his style was too ornate and archaic to reach wide circulation through oral recitation. Morley says "If Keating's Gaelic was easy to follow in comparison with the Gaelic of Michael O'Cleary, all the same there was a trace of the classical language in his prose. The archaic forms of lexicon, grammar, and discourse which he used did not surprise his contemporaries - if we suppose that, a reformed version of his history would have been arranged sooner or later - but the result is that a long text written in a prose under the inspiration of classical Gaelic would not appeal to everyone." In an illiterate population, poems did better because they lent themselves to memorisation; Keating’s prose was not able to be stored and reproduced in this way. As he stopped in AD 1169, he did not answer the key political questions. Of course, Keating's clear but archaising style provided a link with the past - this was exactly why nationalists clung to his work, even after 1900, that link with a pre-English past was the very thing they dreamed of. (O'Cleary was the "team leader" of the four scholars who compiled the Annals of the Four Masters.)
The Gaelic Irish did not need newspapers and coffee-houses in order to take part in large-scale rebellions against the government - Morley has surely won this argument. Habermas was thinking about modern societies with supine and subdued media industries, not peasant societies with near-universal illiteracy. He is not really relevant to Ireland during its crisis, say 1530 to 1921.

What happened after 1880? We have to say first that there was a line which wanted school Irish to be based on Keating, i.e. recording in spelling a set of common sounds which had disappeared since 1640, which appear (I suspect) in the majority of all Irish words. They lost. Secondly, that there was a revolution in Ireland and the people who carried it out were willing to face the most intractable problems, and created a modern Irish which broke with the past, and even with nostalgic nationalists, and which a huge number of people now read and write. As a result, books like Keating look exotic and difficult – like 17^th C texts in other European languages, of course. Conservatives were aware that Irish literary production between, say, 1640 and 1920 was wan and unimpressive. This was a stimulus to forging a link with something much more culturally credible, so 17^th C prose to begin with and hopefully bardic verse for the advanced pupils. This was one reason why pupils were being asked to study the way Keating wrote, although it meant learning forms which were confusing because they were too similar to the spoken language and too different at the same time. This was not a benign situation for schoolchildren. Success came by accepting that the living link had been broken and immersing in the present day – even though this meant accepting that the English had won. The reformist torrent also changed the type-face, abandoning a font based on an Irish manuscript hand and moving on to one which resembles the fonts used by every country which uses the Latin alphabet. This was happening during the 1940s, I don’t have details but I can see that the folk-lore magazine Bealoideas was quite hesitant to take it on, as no doubt its public were all keen to maintain attachments to the past. My interest, obviously, is in trying to gauge what the character of the standard language is, thus qualifying what I win in learning it.

If you spend a day in a Flemish museum, you will notice that Flemish painting ceased to be the best in Europe. This decline is fascinating, rather than attractive, and there has to be an explanation of some kind. It is a process like any other historical process.

Emmanuel Todd says that the key factor differentiating regions was literacy. Areas with high literacy as at, say, 1500 to 1550, were bound to be the most economically modern in the period, say, 1550 to 1700. Such areas became Protestant because literacy promoted Protestantism, the priesthood simply could not deal with literate laymen and their intellectual curiosity. But, after the Counter-Reformation, literacy no longer led inevitably to Protestantism, so regions could become developed and rich without becoming Protestant on the way. There was a wave of increasing wealth both helped by literacy and massively facilitating it, but this was not a sequel of Protestantism.

Todd discusses the “leading sector” effect and says, if I am not mistaken, that by 1780 the Protestant nations were falling behind, as they did not secularise at the same speed as Catholic countries; thus France was evidently the dominant country in Europe between, say, 1760 and 1870, but Protestantism (in Alsace and Languedoc) played a tiny and, arguably, ignorable role in this. The key zone at this stage was of people who were no longer interested in the Church, as the key project of a society or a family, and were better qualified to deal with wholly secular ideas, and to exploit the new world which secular study opened up. He is fascinated by the whole “leading sector”, lead and lag, phenomenon, taking it to an extent which some other historians find unconvincing. I think the "lead and lag" approach is one of the most productive for European history, but it has 99 chapters rather than just two or three.

Denvir remarks that the foundation of Irish-language radio meant that speakers became familiar with other dialects, reducing divisions, so that there was effectively a way of communicating, although people did not for that reason abandon their dialect. This radio service (Raidio na Gaeltachta) was founded in 1972. As he says in his 1984 essay, "a man from Donegal can understand a woman of Kerry a good bit now, something you would not have believed in 1972 when the Raidio was founded." Of course there had been a standard Gaelic taught in the schools since the 1920s, but the relationship between this and the organically spoken language is complicated. The absence of a higher level of the language, of literacy and literati, had led to a greater richness of folk-lore and dialect speech. (The essay is Nualitriocht na Gaeilge agus an traidisiun.)

Gearoid Denvir, Litriocht agus Pobal, 1997.

Aidan Doyle, A history of the Irish language: from the Norman Invasion to independence,

 2015

In the soil of a Gaulish wood

Out of the woods

Excited by the report of a find of a hoard of objects of which three bear the inscribed name COBANNOS, from the 4th C AD, all found in 1977 by a detectorist in a wood named Couan. Of course the guess is that the name of the wood (in the Nivernais) continues the name COBANNOS (the smith god). The statues are now in two New York collections (illegal export), but have been published. The statues are about 20, and three have hammers and are quite probably of the smith, whose name is known in some form from inscriptions in Gaul and Britain, more thoroughly from the common noun, in Welsh gof, in Irish gobhan, in Breton goff. They were probably buried to avoid destruction by Christians rather than as votive deposits. There are god names too, in Irish Goibniu, in Gaul or Britain Gobannos.

The transition from a bilabial plosive to a semivowel is not well known in Gaulish, but is familiar in Irish, hence the name MacGowan, ‘smith’. The resemblance of Couan and Gowan is hard to explain. We can posit a deep-seated tendency to shift the realisation of a labial from a plosive to a semi-vowel, embedded in Celtic phonology, in some way, but I can’t immediately think of a way to account for this. (See a suggestion, later on.)

The short form gob or similar alternates with one with a nasal extension, of which Gobannion (place-name meaning 'smith place', now Abergavenny) is an example.

The bit about k- replacing g- doesn't taste very good. I haven't checked but I don't recall this in Gaulish. It is familiar from Cisalpine Gaulish (in Italy). There are Cisalpine Gaulish patronymics in -ikno/a-. So we have a bilingual inscription to Ateknati trutikni where the Latin version has ‘Ategnatus’ and ‘Druti f’. [the f.means 'son of'] Surely the Ateknati is pronounced ‘ategnati’ and the trutikni is pronounced ‘Drutigni’. This does not really give us a k sound as support. Trutikni occurs twice because the stele was erected by Ategnatus’ brother, also son of Drutus. Stifter also quotes nimonikna, tanotaliknoi.
Interestingly, the Larzac curse tablet, in the Gaulish language, includes several examples of the -icnos formative.It has been suggested that the relationship described is not biologcial but that of a witch to the "mother" who initiated her. this is quite an unusual gaulish slate.

Why would a wood be named after a smith? If you want to work iron, you need either coal or charcoal, to get the heat, so the latter might well come from a wood. The map of the Nivernais countryside as it is today is eloquent, and I wish I was there now. It shows several small discrete woods in the area, each with a name. Unfortunately, landscapes change over time, and it is quite possible that 1000 years ago there was a large continuous forest. Thus, if there was no entity of Couan Wood, there was no need for it to have a name, and the absent entity could not transmit a Gaulish name. Cynical as it may sound, I would want information about the history of the woodland in the area before accepting that the name “Couan” is ancient. Maybe Cobannos was the name of the whole forest in 400 AD, and maybe not. Couan Wood is on a hill and has evidently avoided clearance partly because it is too steep to plough.If the name "Couan" refers to the hill, and the wood is named after the hill, that would allow for continuity – the hill has not moved over historic time.

The Cobannos: Couan equation is beautiful and yet fills me with doubt. As the w in Couan is an obligatory glide sound following a labial vowel and before another vowel, it is not necessarily true that it reflects anything old, including a Gaulish b sound. The article on the Net about the Couan find includes a section on language by P-Y Lambert, who suggests that Cobannos is not the same as gobannos, thereby evading some problems.

Let me add the shift which means that the town we know as Inverness is now pronounced, in Gaelic, as Inwirnish – having shifted post-borrowing. The shift is late in time and a long way from the river Nievre. The word leabhar is book, from Latin liber. The word leabhar is now pronounced lyuur, with the labial realised as a vowel – in the singular; in the plural, leabhrichean, it is still a plosive consonant. This alternation suggests a possible reason why widely separated languages could apparently go through the same sound shifts. If we suppose an ancient alternation conditioned by context, it could persist in languages like Gaulish and Gaelic; if the speech community generalised one of these variants, levelling the others, a sound shift would occur which would look like an inherited but latent sound shift.

The Web (article by the local tourist board or syndicat d'initiatif) describes the adventures of the statues as rocambolesque. This refers to an 19th C adventure serial about one Rocambole (published 1867-70 as Les drames de Paris), which was so lurid and unrealistic that it gave rise to an adjective. I’m not sure that I count antiquities smuggling as complicated or unlikely! I can think of a few rocambolesque etymologies, though. Rocambole was perhaps the founder of Celtic Studies.

Harlequin’s tunic of patches

Harlequin’s tunic of patches

This is a note on something which interested or agitated me some 30 years ago, and which I have something worth posting, even if I never got to where I wanted to get to with it.

The website of theWeltmuseum Wien discusses one of their holdings, a hirqa:

>>In the twenty-first century a Sufi wears completely normal daily clothing and is, therefore, not externally distinguishable from his surroundings. Once upon a time, an individual who wanted to lead the life of a mystic and had renounced the world donned a robe of rough wool and was identified as a Sufi, derived from the Arabic word for wool, ṣūf. Admission into a brotherhood took place by means of a particular ceremony, at the end of which the novice was dressed in the clothing of a dervish, the hirqa; these are differentiated by colour and style from brotherhood to brotherhood. Often this garment was stitched together out of numerous patches. And it is also related that such patched robes were preferably sewn out of rags that the Sufis had torn out of their garments in ecstasy. The tattered clothing of the Sufis expresses poverty. Yet it is somehow also reminiscent of the colourful costume of a harlequin, with his vivid lozenge-shaped stripes. It seems as if the rambling fool of God in the Commedia dell'arte had slipped into the role of the half-clownish, half-demonic prankster, in order to expose the structures and mechanisms of society, attracting ridicule and disdain upon himself. Spirituality and humour are not mutually exclusive. Both can be understood as effective attempts to reveal the complex and paradox situations of which real life is so full. <<

Everyone agrees that the harlequin costume is a stylised version of a robe of patches, evidently deriving from clothes which have disintegrated, and that this is the start even though actual stage costumes were robust, specially made and not at all likely to fall apart in mid-performance. The interesting question is whether the harlequin costume was directly borrowed from Islam, referring to the Eastern links of Venice and Genoa and of course to the Ottoman culture, bringing the East right to the borders or shores of Italy. The Viennese ethnographic museum does not make this claim, and the likely extent of borrowing is the costume; dervishes might dance, but they were not stage figures and did not “become” Harlequin.

More light is shed on this by Geo Widengren, Harlekintracht und Monchskütte. Clownhut and Derwischmütze. (1953; in: Orientalia Suecana). In this cross-cultural essay, the Swedish scholar records a Syrian book on saints’ lives which records religious rebels going around the country wearing clothes of rags. The book was by John of Ephesus and was written around 550 AD. It is in Syriac. It seems likely that this practice inspired the Sufis. I don’t have detailed references on radical Christian groups in the Near East which would be closer in time to Sufism. It seems likely that this practice inspired the Sufis, at least if it was continued over later centuries. I don’t have detailed references on radical Christian groups in the Near East which would be closer in time to Sufism.;“It is likely that Sufiism, as it developed from the ninth century onwards, itself owed much to certain Christian mystical sects in the East.”- Norman O. Cohn. A robe of patches is a convenient garb which refers back to the “rags” without actually being rags. Widengren clouds the picture by describing a robe of rags called a centunculus worn by mimunculi, a kind of stage performer of the (early Byzantine) time. The Syrian ascetic was certainly referring back to this familiar figure and was in fact going round the villages preaching while dressed as a clown. Saint Afrem, the most revered figure of the Syrian Church, is recorded as having a worn a “coat of many colours”, made of rags, and acted like a madman in pursuit of humility. (known as Ephraim the Syrian in English texts)

At the time, I wanted to associate Widengren with a story from Central Asia, that shamans would wear a robe inherited from a deceased teacher, so that they would go around in several layers of old and worn clothes, looking like a patchwork. This was probably irrelevant.The holy vagrants whom John of Ephesus describes were a girl dressed as a prostitute and a young man dressed as a clown. That is, they were hippies. Widengren couldn't know this in 1953, but that kind of dropping out, idealism, setting aside of social codes on dress and display, etc., was going to become very big after 1965. As he pointed out, wearing these clothes was a form of asceticism, making yourself ridiculous and abandoning prestige were acts resembling going without food or sleep. He describes the regulations of the wandering monks of Syria, limiting their consumption and requiring them to wear contemptible clothes. This is at a date considerably before the invention of friars in Europe. They were not allowed a home, slept by preference in barns or sheepcotes, etc. They deliberately feigned ignorance and stupidity in order to avoid the honour and respect afforded by other humans to someone who speaks wisely and in an educated way. They became closer to clowns, and so the adoption of clowns’ dress was consistent and not crazy.

Widengren rejects an earlier view by which the mimunculi directly passed on their distinctive stage costume to the harlequins. This view relies on a thousand-year gap during which no evidence has been preserved. (He quotes Sacheverell Sitwell rejecting this theory of continuity.) However, at p.109 he quotes Bieber’s history of Greek and Roman theatre approvingly, suggesting that learned men were also involved in theatre, and could have re-created the centunculus working from Latin texts like Apuleius, and that this could have been copied by the popular theatre and also Commedia dell’Arte. He does not, in the end, say that the diamond tatters of Harlequin are borrowed from the Sufis. I do not know of a serious writer describing how this could have come about. In contrast, he seems quite interested in how the original of the “mesnie Hellequin” could have been processions of young men impersonating Odin’s Wild Hunt, appearing especially on Shrove Tuesday (Fastnacht), and evolving through ribaldry into pure comedy, in which beatings and theft are simply elements of farce.
Widengren’s paper is now available on the internet, a bootleg I suppose, but this is actually one of the most interesting academic papers ever published. His interest in Dumezil’s theories seems to have led him astray, the pursuit of dumezilian patterns in his paper takes him far away from the main idea and is not convincing in the end.
At the time, I wanted to associate the “ragged coat” idea with a story from Central Asia, that shamans would wear a robe inherited from a deceased teacher, so that they would go around in several layers of old and worn clothes, looking like a patchwork. This was probably irrelevant.
When I was a student, I read that Ephraim the Syrian had invented rhyme. I was very excited by this. My attempts to find out about Eastern Christianity in the college library were not very energetic. However, sources I stumbled on more recently state convincingly that this is not the case. Hebrew songs called piyyut are earlier and anyway his hymns don’t rhyme with any consistency. Wikipedia:
>>Rhyme became a permanent - even obligatory - feature of poetry in Hebrew language, around the 4th century CE. It is found in the Jewish liturgical poetry written in the Byzantine empire era. This was realized by scholars only recently, thanks to the thousands of piyyuts that have been discovered in the Cairo Geniza. It is assumed that the principle of rhyme was transferred from Hebrew liturgical poetry to the poetry of the Syriac Christianity (written in Aramaic), and through this mediation introduced into Latin poetry and then into all other languages of Europe.<<
Most of my favourite facts when I was an undergraduate weren’t actually facts.

Patrick Anderson and endlessly Canadian writing

Problems of Adjustment: Patrick Anderson (1915-79)

The birth date of 1915 fits right into the middle of the generation who became New Romantic poets, born generally between 1910 and 1920. As you know, many of them also vocally ceased to be New Romantic Writers as the climate changed.

I never wrote about Anderson, which is now a source of guilt. My work on modern British poetry starts in 1960, and I don't think he wrote any significant poems after 1960. I tended to leave Commonwealth poets alone and he had spent much of his life in Canada (although he lived in England up to his early twenties, usually taken to be the most influenceable part of your life). I am looking at successive versions of Jim Keery’s Apocalypse. An Anthology, not yet published but sure to be a thing that changes the landscape of memory, and I have noticed that Anderson was in the earlier, 500-page, version but not in the clipped, 300-page version. It was this poem:

‘My Bird-Wrung Youth’

My bird-wrung youth began with the quick naked

voice in the morning, the crooked calling,

and closed in the quiet wave of the falling

wing, dropping down like an eyelid –

O syringing liquid

song on the bough of flight and at night, light failing,

the nested

kiss of the breasted

ones floating out to sleep in a cup of colours:

wren’s flit and dimple, the shadowy wing of the curlew

spent between stone and fern in the hollow,

the barn-raftered swallow and far at sea the rider

gull on the billow

all night, all night kept sleep till steeply

the pillow

threw morning cockcrow

up in a column of straw and blood. In childhood

days opened like that, whistled and winked away,

but now with a harsher cry birds bury

my stolen heart deep in the wild orchard,

and whether they prettily

play with the plucked bud here or marry

a cloud, I

am lost, am emptied

between two sizes of success. For, clocking

past ceiling and dream sailing, they drop down

to pick apart in a nimble and needed rain

my limbs in love with longing, yet till I long

for my twin in the sun

they rise, they almost form, to be born

with a song

in a seventh heaven!

And I alone in the ambivalence

of April’s green and evil see them still

colonizing the intricately small

or flashing off into a wishing distance –

their nearer syllables

peck through the webs of every loosening sense

and in their tall

flight’s my betrayal.

This omission is a moment of alarm and I want to say something about Anderson now. (Surinx is primarily a musical pipe, so syringing means piping.) Surely he was one of the good New Romantics and his evolution in the early Fifties is significant as a way out of a position which had become tired and needed to metamorphose. Take this stanza:

I remember the day when the world rolled over

and the mist of the blizzard was the outfit of the wave:

the sun was soft as blubber that day,

through blindman's buff of fathoms he blew his haze

and rolled his bulk, and summer was never

stronger than that, was never in sea or hay

a lovelier weather.

(‘Soft Blizzard’)

The yokings of words are continually surprising (cf. past ceiling and dream sailing), and this is the New Romantic element, where we can’t really discount either surrealism or metaphysical poetry as a source. They are surprising rather than paradoxical and anti-rational.

There is a memoir by Robert Druce which contains the key information, largely private or secret during the poet’s lifetime (in The Rhetoric of Canadian Writing). At Oxford he was president of the Conservative Association; he went to America in 1938, became a pacifist, married an American communist, moved to Montreal, where he edited the retrospectively vital magazine Preview. In around 1950, he moved again, to a job in Singapore (for two years). He then spent twenty years or so in England, retiring in 1973 to concentrate on writing.

I read a book (can’t now remember which one, it was probably (can’t now remember which one, it was probably The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition, by Brian Trehearne) ) which indicated that Anderson had been a significant part of a breakthrough generation in 1940s Canada, but had been written out of the historical record because he was gay and the chronicler or chroniclers felt that a poet had to be macho and dealt with the rugged adversities of untamed Nature. The report also suggested that he was torn between gay life and marriage, that he had written excellent poetry while struggling with marriage, but when he became consistently gay he became happy and lost the vital chemicals, of struggle, ambiguity, and so on, and ceased writing interesting poetry. The problem may also have been that the history was written by poets from a magazine which was a bitter rival of Preview and they felt themselves to have been overshadowed and out-gunned by Anderson and P.K. Page. No-one is going to record that fairly in their myth-making retrospect. He impressed me by writing a book which was a history or anthology of intense male friendship, evidently a gallery of wonderful gay relationships, and a predecessor of Higgins’ Queer Reader. This was Eros. An anthology of male friendship, 1961. This was about as openly gay as you could get in 1961. There was a copy in the local second hand bookshop (in Mansfield Road) but I failed to buy it, the contents looked a bit familiar to me. But, what do I know. I was impressed that someone in Nottingham at the end of the 1950s had been well-informed enough to buy such a book – aimed at a fairly specialised, although large, market. (It is possible that the 1961 edition was just “friendship” and a 1963 edition expanded this to “male friendship”.) There is a 1991 article (for ECW) by Robert K. Martin, “Sex and Politics in Wartime Canada: The Attack on Patrick Anderson”, which describes a 1943 anti-gay attack on Anderson in a rival magazine. A review comments “Critic and poet John Sutherland initiated the long tradition of attacks on Anderson's poetry as lacking honesty or manliness. Anderson's poetry was critiqued as being (femininely) un-Canadian, which turns the poet into "other" or foreigner.” The review was of Queer is Here, a 1999 book about problems with Canadian tradition by Peter Dickinson.  

The book I actually own is The Colour as Naked, 1953. I would like to own n  The White Centre (1946) but it is a rare book and people ask high prices. Naked is really good. A description could involve saying that the poems are based on concrete scenes closely observed, but that they also want to vault over that into pure subjectivity, or freedom, and that the poet possibly regards that as winning. This double impulse allows him to renew his energies with each poem. Some asymmetrical couplings of words link him to the New Romantics, without that becoming his main thrust. Negatives are easier to define – the communist phase seems to have evaporated, he is neither using the devices of Left poetry nor expressing repentance and views on why “history isn’t as simple as that”. No more is he writing about the end of his first marriage or the start of his long-term relationship with another man. The pictures of ordinary people and crowds may be a continuation of Left themes, asserting the relationship between the poet and everybody else. There are two sestinas. This form played a symbolic role, during the 1950s, in asserting a living link between the academics teaching Eng Lit, and writing poems, and the literature they taught. It was visibly difficult and showed ease. It was even meritocratic. These poems show Anderson moving organically into a new era where political commitment was seen as simplification, and formalism as a way into the mysteries of language. (Discussion on this form in Edward Brunner’s Cold War Poetry.) He was good at everything, and it is almost unbelievable that he stopped soon after The Colour as Naked. I like this passage from a poem about the ‘Hand’:

Flag from a cradle, with a thumb to suck

whose wit transcends the ape, this pares and feels,

selects and holds

and is the wonder of habitual trick

to thrust and break the being out

for act and handshake, levers of a world.

This is so close to physical reality and yet so rich in ideas.

Comments have been made, by Trehearne for one, about the poet’s self dissolving and losing shape. This is happening in ‘Bird-Wrung Youth’, a poem initially about birds, where the poet (rather traditionally) becomes a bird and the bird is flying around, defying gravity. The poems are perhaps trying to reach this condition. But the poems in Naked are full of concrete details and mostly start with concrete scenes. The poet is perhaps like a camera moving across a scene full of people – this is apparently a Leftist programme although it is like the mobility of the bird. The poems are at least part-way documentaries. Perhaps the thing dissolving is the sound of the bird – sound has to dissolve and never was solid. And poems are made of sounds.

An email has arrived to clarify that: &gt;&gt;"syrinx" is also the vocal organ of birds, functionally similar to our vocal cords but quite different in operation. &lt;&lt; So this word probably also contains "ringing" and "siren" and is an occluded echo of 'liquid'. If we imagine the present tense as “syrings” then the past tense is 'sywrung' and this is possibly audible in the title. So a syrinx is a thing that squirts twitters? O syringing liquid
song on the bough of flight and at night. Also, in the book it is immediately followed by a poem called 'The Strange Bird' which is almost certainly part of the same meaning-complex. This second poem is mystifying, full of dream imagery, and the most Barker-like of the poems in the book. It is the closest to utter freedom and also the most laden with fixated images from childhood and the past.In 'Bird-wrung Youth', lying in bed listening to birdsong has something to do with the idea of sexual freedom. The speaker's body image flutters, kicks, takes off into the skies. In the column of straw and blood, the straw is in the pillow and the column is an early morning erection, coinciding with cock-crow.

I do feel sad about his leaving Canada, and also that he went for 23 years without producing a volume of poems. But even poets have the right to a biography. He seems to have been very happy with his life partner, Orlando Gearing. There were some more poems in the mid-50s, after Colour as Naked. Anderson produced two different selections of his poems in 1976 and 1977 – A Visiting Distance and Return to Canada. Because of the literary climate, neither is reliable for his 1940s work, which to be honest is what really interests me. There does not seem to be a Collected. He never published a volume of poetry in Britain – most of his books seem to have come out from McClelland and Stewart, in Toronto.

There is a very good essay on Anderson by Patricia Whitney, available on the Internet. Whitney has drawn on Anderson’s Journal and on some letters from him and his wife to Pat Page (P.K. Page, as a poet), in a Canadian archive. The record shows that Anderson spent much of his time in Canada hanging out with the Labour Progressive Party, who were Moscow-line communists. The Canadian Communist Party were banned in 1940 under the War Measures Act, hence the new party. His so-called autobiography does refer to this but does not describe political enthusiasm, only the eccentricities of his fellow comrades. (One of his close friends is arrested in the flap after the defection of Igor Gouzenko, an event exploited to close down communist activities far beyond any espionage involvement.) A certain amount of subterfuge was involved in several aspects of Anderson’s position.

A seller’s blurb for First Steps in Greece reads “An endearing travelogue of Greece and it's islands in the late 1950's before the advent of mass tourism. Made colourful by the characters he met and his wonderful style of writing, a wonderful read.” So you think it was all more ‘colourful’ before the advent of mass tourism, but you are reading thr working-class people to have holidays in the Mediterranean area. What had been a luxury for a luxury-living class became much more normal. During the rise of the package holiday, Anderson published three travel books. He abandoned literary poetry for rather informal and entertaining prose. This was part of class differences eroding. The wave of popularisation may actually connect to cultural Communism and to the simplicity demanded from communist writers. The travel genre is quite important for the cultural evolution of the 1950s; at one level it is made up of guide-books and deals with high culture, such as painting, architecture, the lives of great writers; at another level it connects to holidays and is consciously serene and cheerful.

I acquired his 1957 autobiography, Search Me. I wasn’t expecting much, but on examination this is a major work and a significant moment in the thin history of Fifties writing in Britain. The jacket describes also a radio play, A Case of Identity; it was broadcast on the Third Programme, which was only listened to by a few thousand intellectuals. Outside that enclave, the 1950s were not a good time for serious writing, while broadcasting and prose resembling broadcasting chatter were making all the running. Let us remember the films of the Rank Organisation, something which Younger Readers may not have heard of. They typified a certain phase of cheerful, unpretentious, anti-intellectual, ordinary but middle class, humour in the face of pretty ordinary adversity, which reliably satisfied a recurring wish for undemanding entertainment. Anderson published nine prose books in fifteen years. They must have done pretty well for the publishers to keep coming back. Certainly, they fit in at the higher end of the holiday reading market. Search Me could be a film with Donald Sinden as the hero. It makes me think of An Alligator Named Daisy or No Kidding (1960). I am musing on the Great Rampage section of Search Me as a light-hearted comedy starring Leslie Phillips and Geraldine McEwan. Britain became a different place when Rank stopped producing films. Search Me does tend to feature comic mishaps and larger than life eccentrics. It is genuinely unpredictable; thus, when you are thinking that he is having an easy ride on anecdotes, he says “But anecdotes have their suspect side; you framed and laughed at what you really wanted to be compelled by and enjoy.” The section on a ‘model village’ with provision for Maladjusted Children and a new hope for England, at Great Rampage, is comic but is also a forerunner of what ten years later would be called the counter-culture.

“You’ll only get an occasional whiff of the moral atmosphere...

“Which is?” I probed at once.

‘Oh well, love, or fraternity, the lost revolutionary virtue. And Merrie England. And bits of Martin Buber. And the wise darkness of the world, which I suppose would be close to Jung.’

On the strength of this I bought him another tomato juice. ‘With lemon’, he cautioned me. ‘Of course everyone has his own philosophy’ he went on. ‘It’s Schweitzer and Kathleen Ferrier when the teachers come, and FS Smythe and Sir John Hunt for the Scouts, and the weavers and potters are all for functionalism and the nature of the material, and the dancers relate themselves spontaneously to space. They did an Age of Anxiety ballet recently. Hefty village girls, carrying on a muscular flirtation with the Atom Bomb… Much criticised afterwards as insufficiently positive – it lacked organic context.’

(Smythe was a mountaineer and author of The Kangchenjunga Adventure, and Hunt was the leader of the successful Everest expedition of 1953.) The last third of the book is completely different, dealing with bisexuality in the shape of a Canadian painter who comes to live in Spain with his wife. It reads like a novel. One has to guess that the painter is really an avatar of Anderson (but maybe there were two people in Montreal whose marriages suffered from bisexual temptations). Key to Search Me is this lack of guilt, for example about the failure of a marriage, and the lack of assertion of a rigid identity, so that the speaker is always changing in changing situations. If the central theme of 20th C poetry was the assertion and recording of a character, Anderson was suspicious about Character and was moving towards the idea of personality as a process. Whereas both communism's view of History and romantic fiction's view of marriage see a final transition to a static and exalted state, Anderson sees both marriage and social life as a continuous series of adjustments; like someone seeing an object a thousand times and gradually grasping its real dimensions and shape. In the end, I felt that the theme of the book is that, once one has abolished guilt and obligation, a new version of 20th C life opens up, where the inability of social roles to fit the urgings of pleasure is abiding – not moving towards a resolution, but swept along on a shimmering tide of incidents. That is, it is reminiscent of Nigel Dennis’ Cards of Identity. Both books centre on the need for adjustment, but find that process mysterious and comic. They are at least amenable to the idea that both advertisements and magazines, and even films, may serve to adjust the consumer to society (and commodities to the consumer), and even that this is a long-term function of culture. Could this be the end of alienation?
I feel obliged to quote a poem from the book, as it is possibly otherwise unrecorded. This is “a description of my return to England in 1947”:

I

At evening the rocks, the fissures,

the slanted knife-shape like a gull tilting

and the cave becoming an arch and the arch crumbling

hold blue-white light over gravel,

startle like falling of plaster but do not fall:

westward the headlands veil and swell,

the mountain humps over the cooling beaches,

the cars start up, the picnic is dismantled,

a trifling litter swings and fills

with the flooding tide, the spine of the conger.

The dogfish egg floats in the darkness.

The dried-out tissue of the sea-pink trembles.

2

Excitement

blesses the objects. Form can give

security. One hides in the attractive

sense of an island. But tonight

by the oil lamp in the parlour

or changing my shoes on the cold linoleum

by the light of a candle, running out the sand,

or turning into the sea-dark at the doorway,

vague, warm, the moth in the wind

damp on the privet and fuchsia,

the honeysuckle swing with a tendril

and the ivy clipped to the rock and the heather

wired to its peaty soil,

I shall be ashamed of alliteration

and the obvious delight. I shall be ashamed

of rootless sensuality that pumps

the blood-red flower and impacts the stone,

for the poem behind the poem is inconsolable.

I shall want to cry with my own voice:

‘I have come back. It is after ten years.

How does one learn to live?’ and the question,

hidden behind the question, once again,

will rise in its unconscionable boyhood

to be the gunman of another twilight.

(possibly running out on the sand?)

The realisation that one cannot compete with Anderson as a commentator on his own poems is modified by the fact that in Search Me he is describing poems later than The Colour as Naked, or ones he has not written yet. He is so creative that the ideas of a few years before hardly crop up in this prose book.

I also feel that the sheer flow of ideas could not have been contained in poems, and this is why he moved into the less constrained, or organised, medium of prose. I think the scene is less Anderson as someone in internal exile, hiding behind entertainment, than someone gregarious and amusing who was genuinely like the people who wrote and staged Rank films, who knew all the reasons for not being abstract and demanding. So I don’t see Anderson's career as tragic.

PS. genuinely obscure Anderson fact. In 1948, a poem of his was published in Poetry Quarterly but attributed to GS Fraser, because Wrey Gardiner had mixed the sheets up.
PPS An interested scholar (JEK) has advised that the poem was attributed to WS Graham - Wrey Gardiner's correction note itself contained an error. ‘he dies daily writing his doom’s diary/ while body’s queer career is his carrier/ in time across a plain of life and paper’ – a touch of Graham there, I guess.
There are three vital essays on Anderson in ECW (originally Essays in Canadian Writing but after expansion Extremely Canadian Writing or possibly Endlessly Canadian Writing), volumes for 1991 and 1997, which really get with the homophobia and the psychological blocks of the time.
JEK has also pointed out how similar Anderson's poetry is to P.K.Page. A poem like the "return" one sounds as if he had been talking to painters a lot, probably his wife and Canadian painters she hung out with. That might link to writing poems about the body, which is part of the link to Page. cf.:

... and if you became lost, say, on the lawn,

unable to distinguish left from right

and that strange longitude that divides the body

sharply in half – that line that separates

so that one hand could never be the other –

dissolved and both your hands were one,

then in the garden though birds

and on the ground

flowers wrote their signatures in coloured ink –

would you call help like a woman assaulted,

cry to be found?

- which is Page but sounds like a series of Anderson passages, in prose or verse (see the poem about the Hand, quoted above).