DEEP IN THE HEART OF DERRY

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 22, Number 3 (March 2011), 30.

“The schoolmen were schoolboys first.” So James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus muse in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses. These words would have made an apt epigraph for The Boys of St. Columb’s (The Liffey Press, 2010), Maurice Fitzpatrick’s book of commentary and interviews published as a companion piece to the film of the same name that he co-wrote and co-produced: both book and film focus on one of the most momentous events in the history of modern Northern Ireland. Generally overshadowed by the outbreak of sectarian violence in the late 1960s that defined the last three decades of the twentieth century in the North, this event is the passage, in 1947, of the Education Act which made secondary education free for any student who passed the auxiliary test known as Eleven Plus. Essentially, in the film and the book, Fitzpatrick sets out to prove a thesis: that the implementation of this act gave rise in a single generation to a professional class of Catholics who would provide visionary leadership in reshaping the social and political culture of Northern Ireland in the last half of the century. His testing ground for this thesis is very specific: St. Columb’s College, a diocesan-run Catholic boys school in the heart of the city of Derry.

For some readers of the book and viewers of the film (available on DVD), the first attraction may be the new insight that Fitzpatrick’s focus offers into two of the best-known and most distinguished alumni of St. Columb’s—Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney and scholar, critic and novelist Seamus Deane. Indeed, these two writers—and the relationship between those two “schoolmen” who were once schoolboys together—figure prominently in Fitzpatrick’s project. Yet they are still just part of a larger ensemble comprising a cross-section of graduates from diverse backgrounds and with diverse interests and talents who went on to become household names in one field or another: musicians Paul Brady and Phil Coulter; politician and Nobel Peace Prize recipient John Hume; well-traveled ambassador James Sharkey; political activist Eamonn McCann, one of the founders of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s; and Edward Daly, Bishop of Derry from 1974 to 1993 (the heart of the so-called “Troubles”) who as Fr. Daly had become known worldwide through the image of him waving a blood-stained white handkerchief while ministering to a mortally wounded victim of the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972.

While some of these men knew each other during their years at St. Columb’s (mostly during the late 1940s and the 1950s) and while most have in later life crossed orbital paths with each other, what they really have as their first common denominator is the experience of attending St. Columb’s. That in itself proves fascinating for the viewer of the film and the reader of the book, as each of the eight men featured has a unique recollection of and a unique set of reflections on that experience. For instance, the experience of attending the school was vastly different—in some cases for better, in some cases for worse—for boarders and for day students. It was also vastly different depending on personal domestic circumstances and individual sensibility. For some of Fitzpatrick’s subjects, their time at the college was transformative in a mostly affirming way. Phil Coulter, for example, asserts: “I would have no doubt that whatever combination of talent, tenacity, temperament and work ethic I have, I would owe that to St. Columb’s.” Likewise, James Sharkey remembers his final two years as “really a preparation for something extraordinary”: “No matter how much you were a rebel and rejected education, you were always aware that there were teachers of a certain sophistication with whom you empathised. . . . I owe those people a special debt of gratitude.”

For others, however, the St. Columb’s experience was utterly traumatic. A day student from the lower-class Bogside area of Derry, Eamonn McCann remembers being treated as “an interloper” and remembers also that “The regime at St. Columb’s was quite brutal and was run by fear”: “It was run by a lot of brutality—not just slaps but the use of fists. I was knocked unconscious in an Irish class once for something very, very trivial.” Paul Brady is even more emphatic as he summons up his earliest memories of the school as experienced by a sensitive bespectacled boy from the town of Strabane, Co. Tyrone: “Shock, horror, awe, shock. I had no experience that was going to prepare me for going into a boarding school. Being in a monocultural, monosex kind of atmosphere was quite a shock to me, and it took me a long time to get accustomed to it. I didn’t have any experience of other parts of Northern Ireland, say east of the Sperrin Mountains which is a whole different vibe altogether, with strange accents, which now I know to be only south Derry accents and Antrim accents. But at the time they might have been from Timbuktu to me.” Of the eight alumni of St. Columb’s interviewed by Maurice Fitzpatrick, Brady seems to have suffered the most from the concomitant cultures of violence and of conformity imposed equally by the priests and the lay teachers at the school and either resigned to or absorbed as the norm by the vast majority of the students. His interview is particularly poignant.

Not surprisingly, not one of Fitzpatrick’s subjects is unequivocally nostalgic about his experience at St. Columb’s. But of all the interviewees, Seamus Deane is most detailed—and uncompromisingly so—in his analysis of the ministry of fear (as it were) that defined life at the college. Perceiving the institution of the Catholic Church as “a system of authority that was changing itself into a system of power, and doing that mistakenly under the aegis of the Socialist Government’s Education Act,” Deane parses with riveting rigor the complex implications of the dynamic that played out at St. Columb’s: “They couldn’t handle the effect of that legislation. The Roman Catholic Church couldn’t remain what it had been: once they had to teach the working classes, their class prejudice revealed itself. Every one of them was anxious nevertheless to exert authority, reproducing the structures of domination that the state had used; mass education exposed a church that had won respect from being oppressed. The myth of the priest could not survive his becoming a teacher in a strenuous situation. So it was sort of a melancholy place in that respect, made the more so by the excellence of some of the very good teachers.”

Yet the prevailing theme of The Boys of St. Columb’s remains that articulated by Seamus Heaney in response to Maurice Fitzpatrick’s question about the enduring “impact” of the 1947 Education Act. Appreciating how “people with merit, with intelligence, were given the scholarship, so that talent brought forward a whole new set of people,” Heaney elaborates: “That arrival into the adult population, eventually, of educated people from the working class, from farming backgrounds, brought a new kind of critical intelligence, a new kind of appetite for excellence into play. They had a sense of adventure, a sense of themselves as a generation with some sense of possibility and advantage and renewal. They were aware of the people who hadn’t got the advantages in their family and among their neighbours. They were political in that they had a strong sense of being responsible.”

And in that regard the resonance—and thus the importance—of The Boys of St. Columb’s as a documentary record extends far beyond even the engaging “tales told out of school,” about school, by an octet of men as candid as they are articulate. One way in which their personal stories resonates is as evidence of the value of education in the particular context of Northern Ireland: as Fitzpatrick asserts in his Introduction to the book, behind the stock images of the Northern predicament and the sectarian conflict—first the media shots of posturing politicians and then the literal shots and explosions heard ’round the world—there was “history to be understood.” Perhaps just as important is the broader message that the film sends out about education as the great liberator because it is first the great equalizer. The Boys of St. Columb’s is thus a sort of parable for how education—not arms or armies—can be the vehicle for change not just in one particular context but globally.

HEANEY'S TOLLUND MAN REVISITED

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 21, Number 6 (June 2010), p.18.

Recently, I happened upon an interview with Seamus Heaney published more than thirty years ago in the literary journal Ploughshares. Having read countless other interviews with Heaney over the decades, most of them involving variations on the thematic territory of his poetry’s relationship to the political and sectarian divide in his native Northern Ireland, I wondered if I would find much new in this one. True to form, Heaney is thoughtful, thorough, and articulate in responding to the questions posed by interviewer James Randall—and some of his answers have a conversational freshness suggesting that in 1979, still a relatively early point in his lengthily illustrious career, he had not proffered them literally “countless” times already.

One of the answers that I found particularly intriguing, in part because Heaney has his defensive hackles up, involves the poet’s reaction to the skepticism that some critics expressed toward his engagement, in his landmark volume North (1975), with the photographs, reproduced in P. V. Glob’s book The Bog People, of unearthed bodies that had been buried sacrificially in Scandinavian bogs during the Iron Age. “I’m very angry,” Heaney admitted, “with a couple of snotty remarks by people who don’t know what they are talking about and speak as if the bog images were picked up for convenience instead of being, as I’m trying to take this opportunity to say, a deeply felt part of my own life, a revelation to me.” The most notorious critique of Heaney’s focus on Glob’s images was yet to come: David Lloyd’s essay “‘Pap for the Dispossessed’: Seamus Heaney and the Poetics of Identity.” Published in 1985, this provocative piece took Heaney severely to task for a general romanticizing of Irish culture, including the culture of violence, that culminated in the bog-centered poems in North. “This is effectively to reduce Irish history to myth,” Lloyd wrote, “furnishing an aesthetic resolution to conflicts constituted in quite specific historical junctures by rendering disparate events as symbolic moments expressive of an underlying continuity of identity.”

In “Feeling Into Words,” a lecture presented to the Royal Society of Literature in 1974, Heaney recounted how he happened upon Glob’s book at the very time that he was casting about for some way by which his poetry might have a voice in the conversation and debate related to Northern Ireland’s political predicament. Invoking Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65, which asks what force might withstand the ravages of time—“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?”—Heaney, like Shakespeare (who answered his own question with “in black ink my love may still shine bright”), put his faith in words, hoping that “befitting emblems of adversity” (a phrase he borrowed from Yeats’s poem “Meditations in Time of Civil War”) might help to illuminate the nature of the predicament. That is, those “befitting emblems” might help his community to recognize that the conflict is more “archetypal” than the mere religious differences, themselves emblematizing social and economic bigotry, between Catholics and Protestants. For Heaney reflecting on this matter in 1974, “the religious intensity of the violence” was more complex than a simple Catholic Nationalist / Protestant Unionist “sectarian division”: it was “a struggle between the cults and devotees of a god and a goddess”—a struggle between the “territorial piety” of those loyal to a tutelary goddess (Ireland conventionally feminized) and the “imperial power” (embodied in the British monarch) of those who have “temporarily usurped her sovereignty.” For critics like David Lloyd, Heaney’s engagement with Glob resulted in mere “pap,” a verbal stirabout cooked up for an audience content with being spoon-fed vague sentiment and watered-down rhetoric.

Yet, while Heaney might have been merely disappointed in the failure of certain readers to appreciate what Robert Frost refers to as the inherent “ulteriority” of poetry—poetry as “metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another”—he seems to have taken altogether personally the stance of those skeptics (including Lloyd, eventually) who discredited his immediate reaction, literally visceral, when he first looked into The Bog People. Describing in “Feeling Into Words” how “the unforgettable photographs of these victims blended in my mind with the photographs of atrocities, past and present, in the long rites of Irish political and religious struggles,” Heaney adds that when he wrote “The Tollund Man,” the first of his poems to engage directly with Glob’s book, “I had a completely new sensation, one of fear.” For Lloyd, this fear that Heaney felt in imagining a personal pilgrimage to Aarhaus in Denmark to view the most famous of the exhumed bog bodies—“Out there in Jutland / In the old man-killing parishes / I will feel lost, / Unhappy and at home”—gets reduced by its “metaphoric frame” to “a writing whose dangers have been defused into pathos.”

But in dismissing Heaney’s engagement with The Bog People as a matter of “convenience,” do Lloyd and company actually underestimate—or fail entirely to understand—the very manner in which, as Heaney explains in his interview with Randall, the images in Glob’s book were “a revelation” to him not just as poet but as person? I think so, especially in light of the extent to which Heaney’s initial response to the photographs in Glob’s book might be understood in terms articulated by philosopher and cultural critic Roland Barthes in his book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Iconoclastic when first published in French in 1980, Barthes’ study has become iconic, and his terms studium and punctum, used to describe how certain photographs catch the eye of the viewer, have become widely accepted in photography circles.

In fact, Heaney’s account in the Ploughshares interview of how he was captivated specifically by the first photo in the book, a close-up of the head of the Tollund Man, resonates fully with Barthes’ defining of punctum as an element of a photograph that “rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” (In contrast, a photograph’s studium involves simply the basic subject matter, not the impact of the image on an individual viewer.) Remarking how the head of the Tollund Man “has had an enormous effect on anybody who ever looked at it,” Heaney admits outright the poignant connection he felt with the shriveled but remarkably well-preserved two thousand-year-old figure excavated from the Danish bog: “The Tollund Man seemed to me like an ancestor almost, one of my old uncles, one of those mustached archaic faces you used to see all over the Irish countryside. I just felt very close to this.”

That is not to say that Heaney’s discovery of The Bog People was pure accident: no doubt he was drawn to Glob’s book by his deep-rooted fascination with his native Irish bog—his “genuine obsession,” as he put it to interviewer Randall—whose sensuous mystery he had expressed in “Bogland,” the concluding poem of his volume Door Into the Dark, in 1969: “The wet centre is bottomless.” But his turning the page to the photograph of the Tollund Man seems truly to have involved what Roland Barthes calls “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” Recalling his initial response to the images in The Bog People, Heaney tells interviewer James Randall: “This wasn’t thought out. It began with a genuinely magnetic, almost entranced, relationship with those heads.” Indeed, a first line of defense against charges that Heaney’s “bog poems” were part of some cynically conceived program proffering the “pap” of “aesthetic resolution” to his “dispossessed” readers might be the fact that his punctum-prompted poem “The Tollund Man” was included utterly inconspicuously in the middle of his volume Wintering Out (1972).

In an interview with Seamus Deane in 1977, Heaney described how the poems in North “arose out of a necessity to shape and give palpable linguistic form” to the “urgency” he felt regarding Northern Ireland’s political complexity in the mid-1970s. Inspired (or “wounded,” as Barthes would say) by the literal lens that preserved on film the bodies preserved in the Scandinavian bogs, Heaney offered in his poems not a “resolution”—aesthetic or otherwise—to that complexity but rather an alternative lens (as it were) through which his readers might view its “religious intensity”: this was the lens of poetic “ulteriority”—of “saying one thing in terms of another.”