De Valera's Irelands by Dermot Keogh, Keogh Doherty Read Free Book Online

soon – and at bloody cost at that – I’ll have to let down me drawers before the night is out’. And there was the tiny Astor on the quays where I first saw Casque d’Dor , Rules of the Game and Children of Paradise .
    Much has been written about the collusion of Church and State to bring about an Irish society that was insular, repressive and sectarian. This is partly true, but because of the long emphasis on the local and the individual in a society that never found any true cohesion, it was only superficially successful.
    I think that women fared worst of all within this paternalistic mish­mash, but to men with intellectual interests it had at the time, I believe, some advantage. Granted, we were young and had very little to lose, but the system was so blatantly foolish in so many of its manifestations that it could only provoke the defence of laughter, though never, then, in pub­lic. What developed was a Freemasonry of the intellect with a vigor­ous underground life of its own that paid scant regard to Church or State. Even an obscene book, we would argue, could not be immoral if it was truly written. Most of the books that were banned, like most books pub­lished, were not worth reading, and those that were worth reading could be easily found and quickly passed around. There is no taste so sharp as that of forbidden fruit.
    This climate also served to cut out a lot of the pious humbug that often afflicts the arts. Literature was not considered ‘good’. There was no easy profit. People who need to read, who need to think and see, will al­ways find a way around a foolish system, and difficulty will only make that instinct stronger, as it serves in another sphere to increase desire. In no way can this clownish system be recommended wholeheartedly, but it was the way it was and we were young and socially unambitious and we managed.
    The more we read of other literatures, and the more they were dis­cussed, the more clearly it emerged that not only was Yeats a very great poet but that almost single-handedly he had, amazingly, laid down a whole framework in which the indigenous literature could establish traditions and grow. His proud words ‘The knowledge of reality is a secret know­ledge; it is a kind of death’, was for us, socially as well as metaphorically, true.
    The two living writers who meant most to us were Samuel Beckett and Patrick Kavanagh. They belonged to no establishment, and some of their best work was appearing in the little magazines that could be found at the Eblana Bookshop on Grafton Street. Beckett was in Paris. The large, hatted figure of Kavanagh was an inescapable sight around Grafton Street, his hands often clasped behind his back, muttering hoarse­ly to himself as he passed. Both, through their work, were living, exciting presences in the city. I wish I could open a magazine now with the same excitement with which I once opened Nimbus : ‘Ignore Power’s schisma­tic sect,/Lovers alone lovers protect’. (The same poet could also rhyme catharsis with arses, but even his wild swing was like no other).
    When I began to write, and it was in those Dublin years, it was with­out any thought of publication. In many ways, it was an extension of reading as well as a kind of play. Words had been physical presences for me for a long time before, each word with its own weight, colour, shape, relationship, extending out into a world without end. Change any word in a single sentence and immediately all the other words demand to be rearranged. By writing and rewriting sentences, by moving their words endlessly around, I found that scenes or pictures and echoes and shapes began to emerge that reflected obscurely a world that had found its first expression and recognition through reading. I don’t know how long that first excitement lasted – for a few years, I think – before it changed to work, though that first sense of play