"The Lukewarm Conviction of Temporary Lodgers": Hubert Butler and the Anglo-Irish Sense of Exile

Hubert Butler (1900–1991) is widely recognized as one of the most accomplished and distinctive writers of nonfiction in Ireland in the last hundred years. Butler was born at Maidenhall, County Kilkenny, and graduated from Oxford University in 1922. After being recruited by Sir Horace Plunkett to work for the Irish County Libraries between the years 1922 and 1926, he later traveled extensively in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, Macadonia, and Montenegro, before working with the Quakers in Vienna expediting the escape of Jews after the Anschluss. In 1941, he inherited Maidenhall upon the death of his father and returned there with his family; the country house remained his home until his death in 1991. Although Butler worked as a translator and published one book-length text, Ten Thousand Saints: A Study in Irish and European Origins (1972), it is for his essays—written over a period of four decades, and distinguished by a remarkable cohesiveness of sensibility—that he is most known.

These essays have been collected and published in four volumes by the Lilliput Press of Dublin: Escape from the Anthill (1985); The Children of Drancy (1988); Grandmother and Wolf Tone (1990); and In the Land of Nod (1996). Also, in 1997 the American publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a nearly 600-page collection of his essays as Independent Spirit. The range of his subject matter—extending from intensely parochial archaeological concerns in Kilkenny to prewar Eastern Europe—makes Butler a notable author for specialists and general readers alike.

Yet it remains true that Butler's work has not received the critical attention it deserves. Several factors contribute to the relative neglect of Butler by critics and readers. First, the original appearances of his writings were confined almost exclusively to Irish periodicals, many of them obscure. Also, the avowedly eclectic nature of his interests renders him difficult to categorize; Butler was a literary, political, archaeological, topographical, and historical essayist. Just as important, aspects of his work have been criticized as being "effortlessly elitist" and "hopelessly patrician"—qualities anathema to the general trends of our resolutely egalitarian age. Richard Jones has also claimed that, because of Butler's position as a member of the Irish landed gentry, and because of his standing as an agnostic, liberal Protestant in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation, he was for many years, "read through a veil of resentment."¹ However, a small, but nonetheless, growing number of admirers—including such eminent scholars as Roy Foster and Edna Longley—have recently published laudatory reviews, and indeed, Chris Agee has referred to Butler as "one of the greatest essayists in English, of the twentieth century."²

Agee has defined Butler's sensibility as revealing "an ethical imagination." Recent critics have come to view Butler's work as revealing an elaborate terrain of historical, religious, and philosophical reflections. The best of Butler's essays exemplify those literary qualities that Butler himself noted, in 1950, as being revered by Chekhov: "The best of [writers] describe life as it is, but in such a way that every line is penetrated, as it were, with a juice, with the consciousness of an aim. Apart from life as it is, you feel that other life as it ought to be, and it bewitches you"³

Butler argues that, within a comparatively short historical period, the members of Protestant aristocracy who had been the original progenitors of Irish nationalism came to view themselves as exiles within their own country. Differing concepts of exile can be usefully applied to Hubert Butler's perception of the Anglo-Irish experience after the Act of Union. In particular, the ideas of such theorists of exile as Joseph Wittlin and Jan Vladeslav—notably those concepts which elucidate exilic experiences pertaining to "communal trauma" and "powerlessness"—serve to illuminate Butler's views on what he refers to as "the withdrawal of a whole historic class."

The term Anglo-Irish Ascendancy requires definition. The Anglo-Irish were descendants of people of English origin who had settled in Ireland during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, usually after receiving grants...