Up From Irish Purity

This year’s Los Angeles Times Book Prize program honors two writers who, driven into exile, have seen their works banned and themselves reviled in their native countries. One is Czeslaw Milosz. The other is Edna O’Brien.

During the years of the Cold War, Ireland was counted, generally, as a part of the “Free World.” It may come as a surprise, then, to some American readers to discover how severely freedom of speech has been restricted in that country. “Banned in Ireland: Censorship & the Irish Writer” (University of Georgia Press), is a collection of interviews done by Julia Carlson for Article 19, an international human-rights organization. The interviews--with Irish writers Benedict Kiely, John Broderick, John McGahern, Edna O’Brien, Lee Dunne, Maurice Leitch and Brian Moore--make grimly fascinating reading.

Starting in 1929, Carlson explains in her introduction, Ireland empowered a censorship board to examine material brought to its attention by customs officials or the public. Since Ireland had very little in the way of a domestic publishing industry, the link between the customs officials and the Censorship Board provided an effective choke point for the control of nearly every English-language book in print. And since the Censorship Board operated in virtual secrecy, most of the Irish public never knew that the works of Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur Koestler and scores of others had all been stopped at the shore. Ireland didn’t know what it was missing, and that’s just the way much of the Irish leadership--clerical and lay--wanted it.

Old as a nation, 20th-Century Ireland was young and uncertain of herself as a political entity. She didn’t know, yet, what she wanted to be, only what she didn’t want to be: She didn’t want to be England. Unfortunately, as two of the interviews explicitly suggest, the ideal of Irish purity became intertwined with that of sexual purity, with disastrous consequences for Irish readers.

Carlson quotes Eamon de Valera:

“That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit; a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with sounds of industry, the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens; whose firesides would be the forums of the wisdom of serene old age.”

The ideal Ireland, in short, was to be a land of pious peasants. Samuel Beckett singed the air with his counter-formulation: “Paradise peopled with virgins, and the earth with decorticated multiparas.”

That kind of despair would come later, however. At the start, there was hope and indeed a concerted effort by Irish writers and intellectuals, including Beckett, to prevent the passage of the Censorship of Publications Act.

Shaw wrote at that time that if Ireland, “having broken England’s grip of her . . . slops back into the Atlantic as a little grass patch in which a few million moral cowards are not allowed to call their souls their own by a handful of morbid Catholics, mad with heresyphobia, unnaturally combining with a handful of Calvinists mad with sexphobia . . . then the world will let ‘these Irish’ go their own way into insignificance without the smallest concern.”

His words were prophetic. Commenting on the fact that the Act defined the word indecent as “calculated to incite sexual passion,” Shaw asked, “By the way, what is to be done with the National Gallery under the Act?” He received his answer within a few years when all the nudes were removed from the gallery. As the years passed, the world did indeed let the Irish go their own way into insignificance. On the list of burning world questions, free speech in Ireland scarcely made the bottom quarter.

By 1960, Carlson says, most of Ireland’s leading writers, the generation represented by those she had interviewed, all of them once banned in Ireland, published their work in Britain or America and let Ireland be damned, more often than not leaving the country altogether.

Fortunately, there were a few exceptions. Carlson honors Edna O’Brien as “one of the few writers of her generation to protest against censorship in Ireland. She spoke at public meetings and publicly brought her books into the country across the border from Northern Ireland.” But the public outrage over her 1964 “Girls in Their Married Bliss” was exceeded in 1965 by the unprecedented furor over John McGahern’s “The Dark.” McGahern’s story frames Ireland’s own between then and now.

McGahern was the Philip Roth of Ireland to the extent that “The Dark,” like “Portnoy’s Complaint,” became a scandal because of masturbation scenes, while its author became, overnight, not just a household word but also a kind of national dirty joke. But “Portnoy’s Complaint” did not cost Roth his livelihood; “The Dark” did cost McGahern his. Hiring and firing in Ireland’s public schools was and is in the hands of the Catholic church, and the church invited McGahern not to return to his teaching job.

Doggedly, and in the full glare of hostile publicity, McGahern fought his dismissal every step of the way, only to lose in the end and take refuge in London. “I stayed in London for several years after that,” he tells Carlson; “I just had to make a living. One was very lucky that one actually could go to England and that one’s books sold in England.” His answer to her next question, however, speaks volumes:

“What kind of effect did the banning of ‘The Dark’ have on your writing?”

“I didn’t manage to write for three or four years after the business.”

In the long run, however, the banning of “The Dark” affected Ireland more than it affected McGahern, for as a dissident, he was not easily quarantined. He was a rumpled village schoolteacher, the very image of the country simplicity that official Ireland celebrated. Moreover, he had won, with his first novel, “The Barracks,” both of what were then Ireland’s only two literary awards, the AE Award and the Macauley. He tells Carlson: “In a way I was almost an official writer when ‘The Dark’ was banned.”

Two years after McGahern’s departure, the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act was liberalized: The term of any book’s banning was set at 12 years unless renewed, with the consequence that thousands of titles were unbanned in that very year. More unbannings followed until, in 1988, the very last banned book by an Irish writer, Lee Dunne’s “The Cabfather,” was unbanned. Ireland, which with its low average age was advertising itself on the Continent as the home of “the young Europeans,” seemed at last to be permitting itself a full-strength European cultural life.

It is, in the long run, the cultural change that will count for most. The Censorship of Publications Act has not been revoked, and several foreign titles--including “The Joy of Sex” and “The Erotic Art of India”--remain banned. But this year, the Irish Literature prize of the splendidly run Irish Times-Aer Lingus literary awards has gone to McGahern’s new novel, “Amongst Women” (Viking). In the long struggle between Ireland and Ireland’s writers, it may be cautiously announced that the writers have won.

And how do they feel about their victory? According to the Irish Times, McGahern told a recent Irish arts festival, “only half in jest, that ‘there’s no difference between the Censorship Board and the Booker Committee,’ ” the latter being the committee that awards the major British literary prize. The experience of censorship may lend a writer ironic distance on honor as well as on dishonor.

A writer with an attitude toward celebrity like McGahern’s may be dangerous and should be watched. A country with a few writers like him and like the incorrigible Edna O’Brien may have more than one liberation under way. Slainte!