The Wrong Country. Gerald Dawe

CHAPTER THREE

      BORDER CROSSINGS

      In John Hewitt’s A North Light, his memoir of twenty-five years in a municipal art gallery,1 there is a wonderfully revealing moment when he recalls attending, as a delegate from Northern PEN, the re-interment of W.B. Yeats’s remains in Drumcliff cemetery in County Sligo on 17 September 1948. Yeats had died on 28 January 1939 in south-eastern France and had been buried there, according to his own wishes: ‘If I die here bury me up there [at Roquebrune] and then in a year’s time when the newspapers have forgotten me, dig me up and plant me in Sligo.’2 The delay was attributable to the intervening war.

      Behind the scenes, various Irish writers, including Thomas MacGreevy, diplomats and Yeats’s family and friends, were involved in arranging the re-interment and the occasion itself was by all accounts a neatly staged, poignant and dignified one, attended by many of the leading figures of the time, including Louis MacNeice, Austin Clarke (‘that scrupulous poet’ as Hewitt calls him),3 Frank O’Connor, Lennox Robinson, Maurice James Craig and Maud Gonne’s son, Seán MacBride. Maud Gonne, Yeats’s muse light, was absent, ‘afflicted with arthritis’ and ‘remained in Dublin’, according to Roy Foster.4 Seán MacBride was the Irish government’s Minister for External Affairs, and one-time Chief of Staff of the IRA.

      Hewitt’s setting of the scene shows a keen eye for detail and also a sense of uncertainty about what to expect as the cortege approaches Sligo town on its short journey to the Church of Ireland burial ground, five miles north-west of the city so much identified with Yeats, his poetry and his family connections:

      Newspapers were folded away, like two waves of breaking foam, as the feeling of an approach ran down the street. Children were hoisted on shoulders. In the stillness, for the first time, I could hear far away the cry of pipes, wild and sad, and the slow distant thump of drums. Soon they rounded the corner and came down the hill towards us.5

      Ever-vigilant for the telling moment or hint of tension in the air, or possible indiscretion, Hewitt remarks on the accompanying music as ‘the pipe band of local lads in their blue serge Sunday suits, tense and tall with dignity … came forward slowly step by step, the drums crepe-wrapped and anonymous’. The choice of ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’, in spite of ‘what Yeats had written of Tom Moore’ [‘merely an incarnate social ambition’ and ‘never a poet of the people’]6 is praised by Hewitt, along with the band: ‘it seemed’, he writes, ‘decorous and just, a tune we could all share’.7 So the sense of community underpinning the commemorative moment is in Hewitt’s mind as Yeats is finally laid to rest in his own home. Hewitt’s gloss on the occasion is worth quoting in full:

      And somehow, I was glad that it was the local civilian band and not the brass and braided uniforms of the state. It was enough that the old poet’s body had been brought back from the Mediterranean sunshine in an Irish gunboat called Macha, for he had been, maybe chief among them who had made that gesture possible.

      Hewitt then quotes the (in)famous lines from Yeats’s poem, ‘Man and the Echo’ (1938): ‘Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?’8 reflecting Yeats’s extended obsession with 1916, inscribing his 1902 Cathleen ni Houlihan (‘that play’) into the narrative of what had happened after the Rising and its immediate aftermath; a kind of ‘get the commemoration in first’ ploy, not unknown in Irish political circles to this day. The story continues with the sighting of the hearse itself:

      a very bright coffin, the largest I have ever seen, half-covered by the Irish flag, next, followed on foot, by the Mayor of Sligo, public representatives, cabinet ministers, men from Galway university [the frigate bearing Yeats’s coffin had docked in Galway harbour] capped and gowned in their degree … [and then] a long file of creeping cars, with, here and there, a profile behind glass and its passing reflections, that I could recognize.9

      Hewitt goes through the choreography of the event with the crowds, the ceremony outside Sligo Town Hall where Irish defence forces stand ‘with bowed heads and arms reversed in a guard of honour’, before the ‘whole cortege moved slowly to Drumcliff’. Hewitt spots ‘de Valera, head and shoulders above the rest’, and runs into Austin Clarke again who ‘inquired if one might smoke at a Protestant funeral’.10 As an observer, maybe even with the hint of being the outsider, Hewitt ‘could only look around’ and, as he recounts, ‘peer up at the tower which seemed too high for the Church, and watch men with a movie-camera recording the scene, look at the rain, slanting through the trees, and find names celebrated in twentieth-century Ireland for the backs – and the backs of heads, the actor, the poet, the man of letters, the politicians.’11

      Yeats’s reburial was an act of repatriation. It was also, crucially, a statement of the shortly renamed Republic’s efforts to identify Yeats, the internationally renowned poet, Nobel laureate and one-time Irish senator, with the relatively young state’s being open and, in some form or other, inclusive of its Protestant minority, personified by the First Inter-Party government minister’s attendance. It was a commemorative act, one can say, although in the years immediately after his death, Yeats’s legacy was hotly debated in Ireland and became ensnared in some dreadful invective and, as Roy Foster notes in his biography, ‘predictably violent attacks by the Catholic Bulletin and – from an incensed Aodh de Blácam [a journalist and political activist who supported Franco] – in the Irish Monthly, describing [Yeats] as satanic, atheistical and, above all, unIrish.’12 ‘I could hear the sound of spaded earth,’ Hewitt concludes, as ‘the mourners round the grave dispersed and others pushed forward to look. There was a general loosening of tension, an easy standing around.’

      According to Foster’s account, ‘the [Yeats] family held out against a state funeral’ and, though Frank O’Connor had been asked by them to ‘make a graveside oration … this was vetoed by Jack [B. Yeats, the poet’s artist brother] who disapproved of O’Connor’s politics’. So Reverend James Wilson, the local rector, conducted the Church of Ireland service, though Bishop Hughes (Bishop of Kilmore, Elphin and Armagh) privately ‘felt a little doubtful as to Yeats’s claim to Christian burial’.13

      What happens next is astonishing. In Hewitt’s account, written fifteen years later in 1963–4, fellow poet and diplomat Valentin Iremonger ‘came over and said that Seán MacBride would like to meet me’.14 In 1948 Hewitt was in his early forties (born in 1907), roughly the same age, give or take a few years, as Seán MacBride (born in 1904 in Paris). Hewitt was about to see in print No Rebel Word, his first substantial single collection of poetry, published in November 1948 by Frederick Muller in London. Hewitt had been politically active as a left-winger throughout the 1930s and during the Second World War and into the post-war era of the divided states of Ireland, north and south. As W.J. McCormack’s study of Hewitt makes abundantly clear, both John Hewitt and his wife, Roberta, were no strangers to the arts and literary world of the Irish state, and kept themselves well informed on social and political developments south of the border too. In the soon-to-be-looming crisis over the ‘Mother and Child’ welfare project of 1951, Roberta’s journal of 12 April 1951 notes ‘the great stir’ when the Catholic Church ‘denounced’ the Noel Browne-inspired scheme of health care. According to McCormack, ‘She and John thought the Minister [Browne] “very courageous”, and felt that his party leader, Seán MacBride, had been shown up as a bogus radical. “I am becoming more and more afraid of the R.C. Church”.’15

      But back barely three