The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making it up in Ireland (review)

In twelve thoughtful, exceptionally well-written, at times witty and occasionally caustic essays, R.F. Foster examines and exposes myths, falsifications, narrow ideologies, and hypocrisies that have distorted Irish history and Irish cultural identities. In profiles of William Butler Yeats, Elizabeth Bowen, and Hubert Butler, he persuasively argues that being Irish is much more inclusive than many Catholic nationalists and their intellectual mentors, such as D. P. Moran and Daniel Corkery, have insisted. Although Bowen spent much of her time in England, her roots in and identity with County Cork and the tutelage of her lover Sean O'Faolain, enveloped her in the diversity of Ireland and ensured that in content and style her writing was truly Irish. Butler, an Irish nationalist, dared to challenge non-liberal, Catholic authoritarian influences in post-Treaty Ireland, and criticized other Anglo-Irish Protestants who remained silent or did not stay to fight the good fight.

Three of Foster's chapters analyze the evolution of Yeats's views on Irish nationalism. In his 1880s Fenian days, he rejected his Anglo-Irish heritage, accepting Catholicism as essentially Irish. From that perspective, Yeats decided that William Carleton was the most accurate expositor of his country's heart and mind, and denied that his hero ever culturally or spiritually left Catholicism for an alien Protestantism. As Yeats matured, he became ambiguous about Irish nationalism—even in the much-quoted poem, "Easter 1916"—but the Anglo-Irish War brought him firmly back into the nationalist camp. The narrow, Catholic and Gaelic Free State environment that followed stimulated Yeats's identification with, and admiration of, his Anglo-Irish background; still, he never rejected Irishness, insisting that it was broader and deeper than Catholic and Gaelic. Yeats battled to expand the frontiers of Irish identity, and despite his fascist tendencies he fought for artistic and intellectual freedom against restrictive chauvinistic and Catholic pressures.

Foster includes Anthony Trollope in his tapestry of literary figures. A failure in England, while working for the post office in 1840s and 1850s Ireland, he found the inspiration that launched a successful, productive literary career. Trollope enjoyed Ireland and the Irish of all classes and creeds, but had little sympathy for famine victims. Instead, he endorsed the coldhearted, laissez-faire approach of the Whig government. Later, in the novel Castle Richmond, Trollope was more sympathetic, but he still preferred to blame the Famine on Providence rather than on British politicians at Whitehall. Returning to Ireland in the 1880s, Trollope fell out of love with the country and its Catholics, and came to despise their lack of deference, membership in the Land League, and support for Home Rule. Trollope blamed much of the conduct that disturbed him, and anti-Unionism in general, on Irish-American influences.

Among contemporary authors, Foster rejects the authenticity of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and of Gerry Adams's Before the Dawn. He considers the former a boring and repetitive exaggeration of McCourt's Limerick childhood and youth, and the latter a subterfuge that camouflages the reality of Adams's IRA connections. According to Foster, Angela's Ashes sold well because it advanced the greed of the Irish tourist business and fit American stereotypes of the drunken, irresponsible Irish. He has little use for the sequel 'Tis: A Memoir and even less for Malachy McCourt's A Monk Swimming. To Foster, Gerry Adams exemplifies an Irish nationalism that lives in the past, failing and not wanting to understand such changes in the Six Counties and the Republic after the 1960s as reform in the North, modernism, pluralism, and secularism in the South.

Foster's critique of Gerry Adams is well deserved; after 9/11, Irish Americans enraptured with Adams should recognize that he too participated in and encouraged terrorism that took the lives of innocent people. Foster's comments on Angela...