Good-Bye, Twilight: Ireland, Spain, and the Ballad Resurgence

Alan Gillis argues that the stereotypical image of Irish culture in the 1930s as stale and insular fails to comprehend how “Ireland continued to be a conflictual arena of competing ideologies” in which radically different political visions for the Free State clashed (13). As the beleaguered safeguards of national sovereignty and economic stability collapsed, dissidents on the far right and left of the political spectrum sought alternatives to what they perceived as Fianna Fáil’s reactionary centrism.¹ For these dissidents the question was not simply whether a nationalist or an internationalist stance should be assumed, but how the relation between those stances should be reconfigured in response to the deepening global crisis.

This quandary is crucial for understanding the Irish republican involvement in the Spanish Civil War as well as the literature it occasioned. Having ostensibly reached its nadir by the early 1930s, Irish left-wing republicanism was reanimated by Franco’s rebellion against Spain’s Second Republic in July 1936. Rather than understanding this republican resurgence as motivated by the substitution of national concerns for international aspirations, this essay argues that a little-known anthology of Irish leftist writing, Good-Bye, Twilight: Songs of the Struggle in Ireland, indexes a profound uncertainty as to how national and international commitments should be realigned. This uncertainty is most evident in the competing articulations of republican socialism appearing in the anthology as well as in additional writing by authors included in the volume. On the one hand, that ideological movement indicates an effort to transcend internal animosities by urging united participation in the international Popular Front. On the other, republican socialism might be understood as resuming the unfinished project of liberating Ireland, particularly by disaffected republicans who viewed the Spanish Civil War as a reincarnation of the Irish Civil War of 1922–23. Simultaneously attuned to domestic politics in Ireland, ideological fissures, and geopolitical struggles developing abroad, Good-Bye, Twilight exemplifies Gillis’s “conflictual arena” not only of “competing ideologies” but also of the contested terms of their articulation and alignment.

If the long-standing assumption that Irish modernist writing entails a total rupture from nationalist confinement has been, by now, decisively overturned, considerably less attention has been paid to the converse: how traditional literary forms were shaped by and responsive to global political conjunctures. One of the more surprising features about Good-Bye, Twilight is the anthology’s concern with the Irish ballad genre. With its connotation of pastoral minstrelsy, that literary form seems an odd mouthpiece for vocalizing affiliation to a leftist vanguard intervening in the Spanish conflict. Yet at this historical moment the ballad’s resurgence owed less to its expression of a bardic idyll and more to its function as a site of contestation whereby the Irish national tradition could be interrogated and revised. In mediating between the competing pulls of national tradition and international realignment, the ballad was equally a means to redefining those categories as well as reconfiguring the relation between them.

Good-Bye, Twilight and the Popular Front

Although not explicitly referenced by Leslie Daiken in his introduction to Good-Bye, Twilight, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was the impetus behind the anthology’s publication in 1936.² Comprised of both original and formerly published songs, poems, memorials, and ballads, the volume was issued by the London-based company Lawrence & Wishart, a merger of Martin Lawrence’s press, which served the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Wishart Ltd., a liberal, antifascist publisher. The merger reflected the Popular Front ethos of the moment, during which a range of leftist and social- democratic parties united in a broad coalition to stem the rapid spread of fascism. Lawrence & Wishart immediately began publishing working-class history, Marxist political economy, and leftist poetry and drama. Particularly influential was the anthology New Writing, which included early works by Christopher Isherwood, Ralph Fox, W. H. Auden, and Cecil Day-Lewis. Good-Bye, Twilight, then, was a distinctly Irish contribution to the Popular Front culture burgeoning in London.

Indeed, Daiken was already involved in this...