The consciousness of decline.

Dillon, Brian

ELIZABETH GRUBGELD Anglo-Irish Autobiography: Class, Gender, and the Forms of Narrative Syracuse University Press, 2004, $19.95.

ELIZABETH GRUBGELD EXAMINES numerous late-nineteenth and twentieth-century autobiographies, many little known, in an effort to identify patterns that distinguish Anglo-Irish life-writing and to determine why such patterns developed and persisted. Elizabeth Bowen, Louis MacNeice, Lady Gregory, George Moore, and W.B. Yeats produced autobiographical prose that has received significant critical attention (including Grubgeld's own previous award-winning book on Moore). Grubgeld also relies upon the life-writing of Joan de Vere, Shane Leslie, Katherine Everett, Enid Starkie, and others whose work is not well known.

Grubgeld summarizes concisely and vividly illustrative examples from her sources, and throughout her book maintains an admirable clarity of expression as she details the evidence--and sometimes counter-evidence--for her interpretive positions. This is apparent from the opening pages, which attempt to define the complex parameters for categorizing works as Anglo-Irish. Certainly, Frank O'Connor and Frank McCourt fall outside those boundaries. Most of the writers Grubgeld considers were affiliated with the Church of Ireland. The 2000 census indicates that in the Republic of Ireland merely 2.5 percent of the population claims "an affiliation with the Church of Ireland (in contrast to the 91.6 percent who identify themselves as Roman Catholic)" (124). Consequently, the writers dealt with in this study represent voices of diminishing power in Irish history. Some of Grubgeld's primary sources, including Moore and Starkie, "were Catholic in upbringing, but their social circles and their professional expectations mirrored with minor variance those of their Protestant fellows" (xv). Class tends to distinguish the Anglo-Irish from the majority Irish population. Most of the writers Grubgeld considers "drew income from rural properties, although others were dependent on earnings from their professions. Some, but not all, were wealthy or belonged to previously wealthy families" (3).

The private self intersects with the public (cultural) context in autobiographies, and the primary perspective for Anglo-Irish life-writers is the sense of loss of the public context of their childhood and their ancestors. "The consciousness of decline has shaped the plot of almost every Anglo-Irish autobiography" (124). The structural frame-work of the family history serves as a kind of template with variations for these autobiographies: the authors are preoccupied "with family houses, the specific topographies of childhood, and a narrative movement toward familial and cultural extinction that threatens the writer with increasing intensity as chapters move forward in time" (4). Elizabeth Bowen, for example, traces her ancestry to the first Henry Bowen to settle outside Cork in Cromwell's time; she depicts the landscape there as a formative influence on her family over three centuries (in Bowen's Court). Bowen was the last of her family--she had no siblings and no children--and sold her land. Many other Anglo-Irish autobiographies link genealogy with land. The loss of that land operates as well as a thematic concern structuring these narratives. "The books, animals, trees, and statuary" of the house and grounds of Lady Gregory's Coole Park were all to be abandoned at the time of her publication of her memoirs: "Although her stoic reserve prohibits her from overt lament, the identification forged between her house and her own being impels her story into the apocalyptic mode" (25). Exiled to England in her old age, Emily Lawless designed a garden there with comers devoted to the Burren, West Galway, Kerry, and Kildare, to remind her of the County Clare of her younger years.

In a number of chapters, Grubgeld focuses on issues in the writings of female autobiographers, including "the daughter and her patrimony" (the female descendant's curious relationship to her ancestry), and "matrophobia" (the lack of attention to mothers and, when the author is herself a mother, the lack of attention to the author's own children). In regard to the former, Lady Gregory's early versions of her autobiographical Seventy Years depicted her first twenty-eight years at the estate owned by her family since the late 1600s as unhappy, the atmosphere for her "oppressive, even humiliating," and the changes she made in her text may be attributed to her desire to suppress her private emotional life and promote the concept of the ancestral estate as an Irish cultural centerpiece. After occupying Coole for decades as a widow, Lady Gregory presents it textually in "a totalizing vision ... a place from which the world emanates in concentric circles." But Lady Gregory is a crucial exception to the pattern found in other Anglo-Irish autobiographies by women, who are far more likely to represent the landed estate in terms of "the monotony and entrapment (or, conversely, instability and exile)" which they experienced there (35). "To Katherine Everett [Bricks and Flowers 1949], Daisy Fingall [Seventy Years Young 1939], Hannah Lynch [Autobiography of a Child 1899], Edith Gordon [The Winds of Time 1934], and numerous others, the ancestral house is a troublesome reminder of their own inadequate status as trespassers on the property of their husbands, fathers, brothers, or uncles; their identity as Anglo-Irish is bound up in the behavioral restrictions that each feels compelled to challenge" (40-41). Consequently, the tone of these latter autobiographies towards the lost masculine space tends to be derisive, while Lady Gregory, Bowen, and the "eminent Yeatsian" T.R. Henn write of the death of masculine Anglo-Irish authority linked to land in a respectful, somber tone.

Frank O'Connor, Christy Brown, Frank McCourt, and other non-Anglo-Irish autobiographers feature the author's mother in their narrative plots. Yet conspicuously absent from Anglo-Irish autobiographies is the depiction of the mother as an important figure. (Bowen is a rare exception in her accounts in Seven Winters and Pictures and Conversations of her childhood spent with her mother while her absent father was ill. Bowen's mother died when the author was just thirteen.) Grubgeld attributes this absence to a reserve regarding the deeply personal. Furthermore, "the discourse of motherhood appears to have been perceived as inferior to the story of vocation and unrelated to the larger historical events in which lives were most frequently cast" (68). Though in her letters and diaries Lady Gregory expresses extreme affection for her son Robert and anguish over his death in the First World War, her autobiography adopts a "socially constructed" voice to present her deceased son as an emblem of the ideology attached to the Anglo-Irish gentleman, rather than an intimate, personal, maternal voice to present him as a private individual. To her credit, Grubgeld empathizes with Lady Gregory's conflicted authorial stance: "Some may have laughed at her public persona of cultural dowager and literary midwife, but such criticisms were the result of conflicting and generally negative images of mothers, older women, women of the landed classes, and above all a woman who dared to author plays and manage one of the most important and influential theatrical companies of the twentieth century" (73).

The mother figure as "domestic tyrant"--sexually repressed or voracious, wielding extraordinary power, ruining her children's lives--appears frequently in Anglo-Irish novels written by women: Maria Edgeworth, Somerville and Ross, Molly Keane, and Jennifer Johnston, for example. Novelists, she suspects, express "a prevailing cultural anxiety about the decline of Anglo-Irish masculine power and the domestic trauma" that was the consequence (85). But why don't female Anglo-Irish autobiographers who are subjected to the same anxiety shape their response in a similar manner? Fiction writers may deflect scrutiny of the real life origins of their characters, a convenience not available to autobiographers. Also, in cases where the author's mother may have been some version of a domestic tyrant, the autobiographers appear willing to absolve them of their guilt: "Although writers may treat the mother with the cautious silence of Lady Gregory, the undisguised distaste of Katherine Everett, or the lingering hurt of Enid Starkie, a longing for identification and intimacy with her runs as a subterranean current through their stories" (87).

Few genuine Anglo-Irish spiritual autobiographies have been written; there is no Anglo-Irish narrative of "deconversion" that even loosely parallels Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist. Anglo-Irish autobiographies avoid detailing such an intense interior life. Instead, and this will come as no surprise to readers alert to the "historical alliance of Anglicanism and unionist politics," religion as presented in these autobiographies is aligned with external features, "as a formative influence allied with class, education, and political ideology" (103, 97). Bowen mocked Catholics' proclivity for frequent prayer and criticized the Psalms as a "'chanted airing of troubles'" (105). She relied upon her faith for the personal stability and "social cohesion" it provided. John Synge replaced his Protestant beliefs with an elevated view of cultural nationalism that he found in Catholic peasant communities. As Synge wrote, "'soon after I had relinquished the Kingdom of God I began to take a real interest in the kingdom of Ireland'" (110). MacNeice also abandoned his Protestant beliefs, the faith of his father, an Anglican Bishop. Grubgeld precisely defines MacNeice's sentiments in the context of his description of his father's church: "the conflict implicit in its architecture between a theology of humility and its origins in conquest, its self-perpetuated isolation from the communion of the poor, and the cold formality of the marble statues commemorating their 'portion' both heavenly and material" (119).

The discussion of MacNeice somewhat awkwardly moves from his unfinished book-length prose autobiography to his poetry. Synge wrote autobiographical prose sketches, which were left unrevised and gathered together in an edited essay-length document. Grubgeld issues a warning regarding Shaw's autobiographical writings, which were compiled from prose units at times as brief as a single paragraph and in loose thematic sequence. Grubgeld wonders as well at the editorial reconfiguring by W.B. Yeats upon his own father's autobiography. Though Grubgeld successfully exposes various "forms of narrative" of Anglo-Irish autobiographies, as her subtitle promises, she also acknowledges the frequent generic instability of the primary sources she examines.

Conventional plotting strategies are avoided in most Anglo-Irish autobiographies--the deliberate progress towards a spiritual goal or self-improvement, the focus on inner development. Subjects of Anglo-Irish autobiographies tend to be more static than dynamic, to make decisions carelessly, to suffer through unplanned consequences, all of which are depicted with a comic outlook. Figures of self-importance, including the author, are punctured. Grubgeld identifies four motives for such a recurrent narrative pattern, including "the unmistakable incongruities of the Anglo-Irish position in Ireland" (128) and discusses each with vivid illustrations from the primary sources and an openness towards contrary points of view. In a field where even the label "Anglo-Irish" connotes slippage, Grubgeld convincingly demonstrates her sure-footedness in maneuvering through the complexities associated with Anglo-Irish autobiographies.

--Montana State University-Billings

They Wrote It

In her column of July 24, 2005 (New York Times), Maureen Dowd wrote a memoriam piece about the death of her mother, Peggy Dowd, at the age of 97, "the daughter of a manager of an Irish bar named Meenehan's, with a side entrance marked Ladies' Only." Ms. Dowd wrote:

 She loved Ronald Reagan and when
 he landed in a firestorm, she'd write to
 tell him to buck up. She also appreciated
 Bill Clinton--his sunny style, his self-wounding
 insecurity and his work on the
 Ireland peace process--and would write
 to compliment him as well. (Literally
 catholic, she liked both Monica and
 Hillary.)

 She wrote to any member of Congress
 who made what she considered the
 cardinal sin of referring to Edmund Burke
 as a British, rather than Irish, statesman....

 She had a column, "Under the Capitol
 Dome," in the National Hibernian
 Digest. In 1972, she chronicled her debut,
 at 63, as a protester.

 After Bloody Sunday, when British
 soldiers fired on a Catholic demonstration
 in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, killing
 13 people, Mom went to the Kennedy
 Center in Washington to picket the
 British ambassador, who was going to a
 performance of the Royal Scots Guards.
 She proudly wore her green Irish tweed
 cape and waved a placard reading, "Stop
 killing innocent civilians."

"The triumph of the evening," she wrote in her column, "was when the British ambassador had to be taken in through a basement door."

* In April 2005, The Observer, an independent newspaper "serving Notre Dame and Saint Mary's," noted that "Tryouts begin for new Irish mascot," heralded as a "prestigious and highly-scrutinized position." Out of the original fourteen students "who strove for the magical pot of gold" six remained at their press time. "For the finale of the physical tests," noted the writer, "the six candidates will come to the floor to do pushups and the Irish Jig."