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Can you separate a work of literature from the political beliefs of the author?
When a person does something that can be interpreted in several ways, it is problematic. When a person ‘of note’ does something that can be interpreted in several ways, it is considered newsworthy and therefore, rightful quarry for newspaper opinion writers, panellists on television and radio discussion programmes, and of course free for all commentary on Twitter and other social media platforms. Three Irish writers behaved in ways that continue to attract comment and attention from scholars and journalists, and they are dealt with here in ascending order of seriousness. The first is likely a non-runner, but the speculation surrounding it makes for a good detective story. The second does have more substance, but it is probably more of a philosophical journey gone wrong than a shocking exposé. The third is unfortunately a disappointing aspect of an otherwise stellar career.
The first case is that of my hero, Flann O’Brien, whose trip, or trips, depending on who you believe, to Germany in the 1930s, have aroused a combination of academic enquiry, urban myth, incredulity and hilarity. Most people who have written about this episode in O’Brien’s life, agree that it is cloaked in mystery and unsubstantiated evidence. Some wonder would the appearance of more evidence in relation to his German ‘adventure’ give the said adventure more significance. In No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien, Anthony Cronin does not give the episode much quarter, but he does carefully consider the conflicting evidence available to him purporting that O’Brien spent the first half of 1934 in Germany, apparently to do ‘linguistic research’ in Cologne University. But there is no record in UCD of him obtaining a travelling studentship and no record in Cologne University of O’Brien having ever been a student there; he would not have had the money to finance such a trip himself. Cronin also says that O’Brien’s family believe that the trip lasted just a few weeks. Either way, O’Brien had surprisingly little to say about his impressions of Germany to family and friends on his return, unusual when you consider the hotbed of activity the Weimar Republic was at this very time with Hitler becoming Chancellor, the university purges, and the Night of the Long Knives, not to mention the overt and violent state sanctioned, anti-Semitism that could not be missed by even the most casual of observers. Even ritual book burnings had become a thing. Arriving in Germany in 1933/34 was like arriving in Chile in 1973 after Pinochet took over; not a good time for a tourist to visit.
Yes, it’s true that German was one of Flann O’Brien’s undergraduate subjects in UCD, but Cronin does not rate O’Brien’s German abilities as anything approaching fluent. So, before we get too serious about the German connection, it might be wise to step back and remember that we are talking about a satirical genius who revelled in the tall story. It was on this [apparently] first prolonged trip that O’Brien says he married the eighteen-year-old Clara Ungerland, the violin-playing daughter of a Cologne basket-weaver, but there is no marriage record at Cologne. The urban myth aspects of his German trip gained traction in 1943 in a Time magazine article about O’Brien by Stanford Lee Cooper who wrote: ‘There he went to study the language, [and] managed to get himself beaten up and bounced out of a beer hall for uncomplimentary references to Adolf Hitler’. Of his beer hall expulsion, he told Cooper: ‘They got me all wrong in that pub.’ O’Brien’s friends assumed the Time magazine article was a joke and that he had made a fool of an impressionable Stanford Lee Cooper. This is the first they had heard of Clara Ungerland. Like any reader of his work, they would have had to suspend disbelief and laugh at the absurdity of it; and wasn’t O’Brien the master of absurdity after all?
In 1960, O’Brien had another go at remembering what happened on that first trip to Germany, or maybe another go at remembering what he told Time magazine’s Stanford Lee Cooper. The recounting was increasing in melodrama - he and Clara were married by the Captain of a Rhineland steamer, and Clara died of ‘galloping consumption’ within the month. Years later, in Cruiskeen Lawn[1], O’Brien ridiculed his Time magazine interview with Cooper: ‘I am not the worst at inventing tall and impossible stories, but what I produced on this occasion was a superb heap of twaddle that would deceive nobody of 10 years of age.’[2]
Anthony Cronin does not dismiss the idea that something happened on that trip that stayed with O’Brien for the rest of his life. But he is of the opinion that O’Brien’s German adventure was one trip lasting a few weeks and was probably the only foreign trip he ever made. And for those who wonder why O’Brien did not use the opportunity to rail against Nazi Germany? Cronin, as well as Peter Costello and Peter Van de Kamp in Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography all agree that Flann O’Brien was no political animal, and even if he was, censorship rules in neutral Ireland during World War ll prevented any journalists from making such condemnations. And as Anthony Cronin is at pains to remind us: ‘Myles was against racism or doctrines of ethnic purity in all their forms and even kept a lookout for their local manifestations in the guise of Gaelicism.’ But Costello and Van de Kamp get another impression from John Ryan who was prominent in Irish public life at the time: ‘Brian O’Nolan never condemned the Nazis: like many Irishmen he was ambiguous in his feelings for Britain’s enemies, perhaps imagining that they might be Ireland’s friends’. All are agreed then that O’Brien was politically naïve.
But Costello and Van de Kamp agree with Cronin that the German episode is a mysterious one. Both books mention the short biographical note for an American publication which O’Brien wrote shortly before his death in 1966 and in which he makes significant reference to his feelings about Germany: ‘In later years I got to know Berlin very well and had a deep interest in the German people.’ Interestingly, Costello and Van de Kamp say that O’Brien, being an Irish Catholic, was naturally more attracted to Catholic southern Germany than to the Protestant north; a strange assumption, I think. While for Cronin, the German episode was a one-trip affair, Costello and Van de Kamp believe there was a series of trips. They believe he returned for fortnightly summer holidays up until 1938. In his column for the Leinster Nationalist O’Brien admitted that he knew the Rhineland better than he knew the Vale of Avoca. So, it would seem to have been more than a fleeting acquaintance or a tall story then. To strengthen their case, Costello and Van de Kamp refer to O’Brien’s younger brother Michael who recalled his older brother’s mysterious holidays ‘for which little explanation was given.’
But Germany in the 1930s not being an ideal return destination, Costello and Van de Kamp speculate that O’Brien may have had ‘some deep personal connection’ to bring him there. They also go further than Cronin, believing that on careful examination, everything written in the Time article by Cooper is true: ‘That Cooper was accurate about what can be checked, inspires confidence in believing him about what cannot.’ This approach goes against everything I was taught as a UCD undergraduate of History and English, but then I guess if you have a learned hunch based on a process of elimination, who am I to argue with you? What seemed to challenge O’Brien’s Dublin friends the most was his marriage to Clara Ungerland: ‘To his friends in Dublin, familiar from college on with O’Nolan as an ascetic misogynist the thought of him marrying at all was a joke, let alone him marrying the blonde, violin-playing daughter of a Köln basket weaver. That had to be a joke.’ But the absence of a marriage record in Cologne is not final proof for Costello and Van de Kamp that a marriage or a relationship did not happen. If it did happen, they say: ‘…it would explain the hold that Germany had on O’Nolan, and which he underlined in such an odd manner shortly before he died.’
Whatever hold Germany had on Flann O’Brien will remain a mystery. I am inclined to agree with Anthony Cronin whose response to the mystery is: ‘All this would be of little importance except that some commentators seem anxious that he should have had an intimate and prolonged acquaintance with Nazi Germany in order to make it seem the more extraordinary that he did not condemn Nazism in his column or elsewhere.’ So that’s our non-starter dealt with. Now it’s time to move things up a notch.
In an Irish Times article some years ago, Philosophy and a little passion: Roy Foster on WB Yeats and politics[3], Foster begins by reminding us that commentators can read an awful lot into a seemingly innocent action. The action in this case was Yeats’s acceptance of a Goethe Medal from the Nazi-controlled city of Frankfurt in 1934, resulting in some people branding him a Nazi sympathiser. But that same regime later put him on a list of forbidden authors, a far better gift for your reputation one might think, than a Nazi proffered Goethe medal. But then Yeats refused to sign a petition against the Reichstag Fire[4] tribunal proceedings organised by English writers; a refusal explained by Foster as Yeats’s suspicion that it was a ‘Communist ploy’. In Foster’s opinion though, Yeats’s acceptance of the medal merely reflected his admiration for Goethe, nothing more and nothing less, unlike, Foster adds, Maud Gonne,[5] Irish revolutionary and Yeats’s unrequited love, who was ‘both pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic’. Yeats was neither, and there is no hint of him ever being either.
Let’s look at the stages in Yeats’s political journey; he was after all around for a lot of the exciting episodes in Ireland’s history and his views certainly wavered between radical and moderate. His one steadfast belief though was in the rights of an aristocracy, or perhaps more accurately, an educated upper class who should hold the reins of power due to their innate wisdom. Some people might call this good old-fashioned snobbery, but there is no doubting he was an elitist. In the 1890s Yeats supported Fenianism and was in 1898 an enthusiastic participant in the centenary commemorations of the 1798 Rebellion. In 1914 he supported the Redmondite Home Rule Bill, but between 1916 and 1922 he increasingly supported the rebel cause for an Irish republic but finally nailed his colours to the mast with his support of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Irish Free State. But his opinions on fascism leave the reader more than a bit punch drunk.
Maybe Yeats spread himself too thinly in an effort to engage in the most pressing social and political issues of the day. You can’t blame him for trying to understand the world around him, even if at times the result merely reflected his political naivete and his privileged distance from most people. If you are going to expostulate on big ideas [good or bad] you need to be fully conversant with the nuanced details, because nothing is ever that straightforward. As Foster says in that Irish Times article: ‘Yeats’s beliefs that Mussolini represented “the rise of the individual man against the anti-human part machine” and that German legislation in 1934 was intended to allow old families to continue living in their ancestral places (rather than to expropriate Jews) suggest that his contact with the reality of fascism was shaky in the extreme’. And isn’t it interesting that people are still doubtful about the whole eugenics’ affair? as in, was Yeats a supporter of eugenics? Perhaps in some instances Yeats was misunderstood, or was the victim of lazy critics, whose research involved picking and choosing what suited them to make a story. Again, as Foster says in that same article: ‘although his ominous interest in eugenics grew throughout the 1930s, and is reflected in many of his writings, he used these arguments to argue against the social policies of fascist countries'.[6]
The 1930s was one of the most unsettling decades in modern history. Mussolini reigned supreme in Italy, Hitler came to power in Germany, and Stalin kept the Soviet Union in abject terror. Other countries showed their cards for good or for evil or were invaded; and all of this was bookended by the Second World War. Everybody was afraid of something, ‘reds under the bed’, the ‘great yellow peril’, Fascism, Nazism, the unfortunate Jewish race. So, what was Yeats afraid of? In 1932 Eamon De Valera, former freedom fighter, was now President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State and Minister for External Affairs. Fianna Fáil, the anti-Treaty party, was now in power. In The Arch-Poet, the second part of Foster’s biography of W. B. Yeats, he paints the lingering background fears. ‘But to supporters of Cosgrave’s conservative regime, who by now included imperially minded ex-Unionists as well as supporters of the Treaty, the new president of the Executive Council seemed like a Kerensky[7] figure who would shortly be eclipsed by the shadowy forces behind him.’ The gallery of rogues was gathering in the ‘moth hour of eve’; Bolsheviks, republicans, and the communist organisation Saor Éire which was linked to the IRA. For some observers it looked like the slippery slope, so much so, that leadership models, like that offered by Mussolini, seemed like acceptable alternatives. Add to this an army and a police force that were not quite settled in after the Civil War, consisting as they did of former pro and anti-Treaty soldiers whose opinions hadn’t changed all that much. Indeed, a large proportion of the rank and file trusted neither Cumann na nGaedheal or Fianna Fáil. For them it was a case of ‘a plague on both your houses’ and they formed themselves into the Army Comrades Association. And then there were the big farmers, whose demands were always entertained by Cumann na nGaedheal, and who were now reeling from De Valera’s economic war with Britain.
Enter stage left, General Eoin O’Duffy, anti Fianna Fáil campaigner who was convinced that party would lead the country to anarchy or communism. O’Duffy was only too ready to lead the fascist ‘Blueshirts’ organisation after De Valera sacked him from his post as commissioner of An Garda Síochána in 1933. Between army malcontents and disaffected big farmers, O’Duffy had enough support in his corner to cause a rumpus. Several of Yeats’s pro-Treaty friends or associates - Desmond Fitzgerald, Ernest Blythe and Dermott MacManus - were fiercely anti-Communist, and quite enamoured with the Blueshirt brand of fascism, indeed the latter two were involved with the Blueshirts. Strange bedfellows, you might think, but then I guess for Yeats at any rate, it was more of an intellectual experiment or phase. Yeats himself feared the spread of Communism following the Russian Revolution, and wondered if your common or garden democratic government could prevent it, but yet he did not regard De Valera as the bringer of misrule and anarchy; he rather liked Dev in fact, and considered him quite the intellectual, even though they disagreed about most things. Furthermore, Yeats also had a soft spot for Peader O’Donnell, the republican Communist. It is probably true to say that Yeats was politically naïve, and not as driven as his more conservative Catholic friend, Desmond FitzGerald, who based his fears on an austere form of Thomist doctrine pioneered by Pope Pius Xl, which was also heavy on censorship especially where sex was concerned.
True, his head was turned by authoritarian rule, but the oligarchic Yeats never became embroiled in the Blueshirt[8] movement. O’Duffy’s Blueshirt movement was a ‘mini me’ Blackshirt movement with copies of all the outward trappings generously sprinkled with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, of the Christian sort, of course. In relation to the Blueshirt movement, Foster sees the label of ‘para-Facism’ as being more accurate. Yeats and FitzGerald exchanged philosophical ideas around Fascism. In one letter, Yeats wrote: ‘What I think most important is to preserve the dynamic element of Fascism, the clear picture of something to be worked for. We have to take everything we legitimately can from our opponents.’ So, he clearly understood that Fascism had sinister elements.
Yeats was no supporter of O’Duffy’s anti-Communist, fervent Catholic, farmer centred movement. As O’Duffy strode to prominence, there is no doubting that a head of steam was building up, but at this stage it was hard to predict whether it would gather its forces into a volcano or simply dissipate. Yeats still saw rule by an educated aristocracy as the only solution to a well-ordered society; this hierarchical notion was more harmless than incendiary, and the notion that such a development was happening in Mussolini’s Italy was hopelessly naïve. Yeats’s ‘Genealogical Tree of Revolution’ with it left-hand branch ‘crushing the past’ and ‘justifying hatred’ and its right-hand branch in which ‘the past is honoured, hatred is condemned, the state is above the party, and Facism is “the final aim”’ again portrays his higher-order thinking on the matter, which veers very far from Mussolini’s line in 1933. As his friend MacManus put it: ‘Yeats was not a Fascist, but he was an authoritarian.’ Furthermore, he was prepared to write songs for the movement, or, as Foster surmises, ‘perhaps, to hope that the stirring of political excitement might stimulate him to write poetry again.’
The song cycle episode between 1933 and 1934 was quite an embarrassing sideshow. Yeats wrote three songs to fit the Blueshirt theme-tune, O’Donnell Abu mortifyingly re-named as Blueshirts Abu. Suffice to say, they are not his finest work. But let’s consider this in light of the times and in Yeats’s stage of creativity. Foster tells us: ‘WBY’S excitement about an Irish fascist movement in 1933 should be seen in the light of his own creative stasis, and his fear that the loss of Coole[9] a year before had meant the loss of his inspiration. As always, he was prepared ruthlessly to search out themes in unlikely places, and work up his own poetic energies through a willing suspension of incredulity.’
Incredibly, as Foster points out, Yeats’s disillusionment with the Blueshirt brand of Fascism was that their commitment to his understanding of it did not go far enough. They went down the road of ‘Catholic zealotry, nationalist exclusiveness, and rural agitation’ while Yeats longed for an intellectually elitist autocracy. Luckily, the head of steam did dissipate, and Yeats embarked on his final creative phase of poetry. On the other hand, George Bernard Shaw’s last twenty-five years were not the most creatively productive, and perhaps that is why he turned his attention to politics. He waded in far deeper than Yeats and came to some disturbing conclusions.
Shaw was also caught in what American historian and biographer Stanley Weintraub[10] describes as that ‘between-the-wars malaise, when governments that had failed to prevent the First World War were in disorderly regression towards a second war.’ Weintraub says that Shaw was ‘en route from textbook socialism to a vague authoritarianism.’
In Shaw’s 1929 play, The Apple Cart, the words of King Magnus of Britain are telling. Having won a war of wits against a prime minister and his cabinet of fools, Magnus says: ‘I do not want the old governing class back. It governed so selfishly that the people would have perished if democracy had not swept it out of politics. But evil as [the ruling class] was in many ways, at least it stood above the tyranny of popular ignorance . . . . Today only the king stands above that tyranny.’ Magnus, says Weintraub, represented Shaw’s ideal. How close is this to Yeats’s ideal?[11]
Shaw’s controversial letter about Mussolini to the Editor of the London Daily News received the strapline ‘Bernard Shaw on Mussolini: A Defence’, a much more overt stance then, than Yeats, but like Yeats, his head was turned by the seeming success and return to order achieved by Mussolini. Interestingly, the Italian Fascist, Carlo Basile, who convinced Shaw that Mussolini had ‘brought competence and discipline to a feeble government[12]’ would be prosecuted as a war criminal in 1945.
Fintan O’Toole in his book Judging Shaw, says that Shaw’s real failure was ‘not that he prefigured the use of political mass murder in the twentieth century but that he was unable to recognise it when it happened.’ O’Toole says that Shaw failed to see the true nature of Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism. ‘The great sceptic allowed himself to believe just what he wanted to believe, that the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin were rough harbingers of real progress and true democracy’. While Shaw initially condemned Mussolini’s bombing of Corfu in 1923, his attitude would soften towards Il Duce as that braggart’s window dressing that passed for a reinvigorated Italy gained publicity. In doing so, Shaw displayed a disappointing political naïvety and lack of judgement from one who should have known better. His eight-week stay in Italy was blinkered by his luxurious hotel and hobnobbing with the better class of Fascist; strange for a socialist and working-class hero. So how can his behaviour be explained? O’Toole says that ‘Shaw imagined Fascism as an incomplete and underdeveloped version of his own communism and saw Mussolini’s persecution of left-wing parties, not as part of the essence of Fascism, but merely as a mistake’.
Shaw’s head was also turned by Stalin on a visit to Russia, making his motely collection of heroes all the more confusing. O’Toole reminds us that there were photographs of both Stalin and Mahatma Gandhi beside Shaw’s deathbed; go figure. Again, as O’Toole explains, Shaw’s disappointing appraisal of Nazism was that he saw the anti-Semitic part of it as its one fault, preventing it from attaining its full noble stature. ‘What Shaw seemed incapable of grasping,’ says O’Toole, ‘was that anti-Semitism was not a stain on the otherwise pure cloth of Nazism, it was Hitler’s primary colour.’ While he rejected the anti-Semitism, Shaw continued to entertain a good Nazism, straddling two impossible beliefs and looking ridiculous for doing so. He praised Hitler’s annexation of Austria while criticising the exiling of Albert Einstein. Even after the revelation of the scale of the Holocaust, Shaw still clung to the idea that Nazism also had its good side. As O’Toole explains: ‘Shaw was incapable of understanding that the extermination of the Jews was not an aberration from the goals of Nazism. He persisted in trying to understand the death camps as essentially the accidental results of incompetence.’
Shaw’s flirtation with eugenics was far bolder than Yeats’s. He did not advocate the mass killing of certain groups of people, but he did suggest a ‘eugenic politics’ of which the following is a flavour: ‘A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them. / A man should be allowed to commit a certain number of crimes just as we allow him to have a certain number of illnesses.’ That said, everything must be understood in a context, and in relation to his use of the term ‘lethal chamber’ as O’Toole reminds us: ‘The exaggerated notion of Shaw as a precursor to the mass exterminations of the 1930s and 1940s serves largely to distract from his real failure.’
Sometimes it’s hard to separate the writer’s works from the writer’s beliefs; Ezra Pound’s poetry from his Fascist sympathies, Henry James’s novels from his misogyny, Wagner’s music from his anti-Semitic writings, Shaw’s plays from his skewed interpretation of Fascism and Nazism. But to return to Stanley Weintraub’s[13] ‘between-the-wars malaise’, Joyce and Beckett also lived through these troubled times, and they weren’t swayed or captivated in any sense by this class of elitist fascism. We can leave Flann O’Brien alone and give Yeats the benefit of the doubt, but George Bernard Shaw has some explaining to do.
[1] His Irish Times newspaper column written under the name Myles na gCopaleen
[2] Myles na Gopaleen. C. L. April 13th 1960
[3] https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/philosophy-and-a-little-passion-roy-foster-on-wb-yeats-and-politics-1.2241504
[4] On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building burned down. The Nazi leadership and its coalition partners used the fire to claim that Communists were planning a violent uprising. They claimed that emergency legislation was needed to prevent this. The resulting act, commonly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree, abolished a number of constitutional protections and paved the way for Nazi dictatorship. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-reichstag-fire
[5] Foster, R.F. W.B. Yeats: A Life. ll The Arch Poet. Chapter 12. ‘Gonne, years after the post-war revelations of genocide, was still saying that if she had been German, the only thing that would have stopped her becoming a Nazi was their exclusion of women from positions of power; she also boasted of telling Richard Ellman (‘a young American Jew’) that, compared to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hitler’s death-camps were ‘quite small affairs’.
[6] https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/philosophy-and-a-little-passion-roy-foster-on-wb-yeats-and-politics-1.2241504
[7] One of the key political figures between March and October 1917, when he was a minister and later Prime Minister of the Russian Provisional Government. After the attempted Bolshevik rising of July, Kerensky was the only moderate prepared to take on the responsibility of heading Russia, and faced criticism from across the political spectrum when he was unable to avert the Bolshevik seizure of power and subsequent descent into civil war.
[8] Blueshirt, popular name for a member of the Army Comrades Association (ACA), who wore blue shirts in imitation of the European fascist movements that had adopted coloured shirts as their uniforms. O’Duffy served briefly as its leader. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Blueshirt
[9] Formerly the home of Lady Gregory, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre with Yeats and Edward Martyn. In the early 20th century Coole was the centre of the Irish literary revival. Yeats, Shaw, Synge and O’Casey frequented Coole Park.
[10] https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/george-bernard-shaw-and-the-despots/
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
[13] https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/george-bernard-shaw-and-the-despots/
Can you separate a work of literature from the political beliefs of the author?
When a person does something that can be interpreted in several ways, it is problematic. When a person ‘of note’ does something that can be interpreted in several ways, it is considered newsworthy and therefore, rightful quarry for newspaper opinion writers, panellists on television and radio discussion programmes, and of course free for all commentary on Twitter and other social media platforms. Three Irish writers behaved in ways that continue to attract comment and attention from scholars and journalists, and they are dealt with here in ascending order of seriousness. The first is likely a non-runner, but the speculation surrounding it makes for a good detective story. The second does have more substance, but it is probably more of a philosophical journey gone wrong than a shocking exposé. The third is unfortunately a disappointing aspect of an otherwise stellar career.
The first case is that of my hero, Flann O’Brien, whose trip, or trips, depending on who you believe, to Germany in the 1930s, have aroused a combination of academic enquiry, urban myth, incredulity and hilarity. Most people who have written about this episode in O’Brien’s life, agree that it is cloaked in mystery and unsubstantiated evidence. Some wonder would the appearance of more evidence in relation to his German ‘adventure’ give the said adventure more significance. In No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O’Brien, Anthony Cronin does not give the episode much quarter, but he does carefully consider the conflicting evidence available to him purporting that O’Brien spent the first half of 1934 in Germany, apparently to do ‘linguistic research’ in Cologne University. But there is no record in UCD of him obtaining a travelling studentship and no record in Cologne University of O’Brien having ever been a student there; he would not have had the money to finance such a trip himself. Cronin also says that O’Brien’s family believe that the trip lasted just a few weeks. Either way, O’Brien had surprisingly little to say about his impressions of Germany to family and friends on his return, unusual when you consider the hotbed of activity the Weimar Republic was at this very time with Hitler becoming Chancellor, the university purges, and the Night of the Long Knives, not to mention the overt and violent state sanctioned, anti-Semitism that could not be missed by even the most casual of observers. Even ritual book burnings had become a thing. Arriving in Germany in 1933/34 was like arriving in Chile in 1973 after Pinochet took over; not a good time for a tourist to visit.
Yes, it’s true that German was one of Flann O’Brien’s undergraduate subjects in UCD, but Cronin does not rate O’Brien’s German abilities as anything approaching fluent. So, before we get too serious about the German connection, it might be wise to step back and remember that we are talking about a satirical genius who revelled in the tall story. It was on this [apparently] first prolonged trip that O’Brien says he married the eighteen-year-old Clara Ungerland, the violin-playing daughter of a Cologne basket-weaver, but there is no marriage record at Cologne. The urban myth aspects of his German trip gained traction in 1943 in a Time magazine article about O’Brien by Stanford Lee Cooper who wrote: ‘There he went to study the language, [and] managed to get himself beaten up and bounced out of a beer hall for uncomplimentary references to Adolf Hitler’. Of his beer hall expulsion, he told Cooper: ‘They got me all wrong in that pub.’ O’Brien’s friends assumed the Time magazine article was a joke and that he had made a fool of an impressionable Stanford Lee Cooper. This is the first they had heard of Clara Ungerland. Like any reader of his work, they would have had to suspend disbelief and laugh at the absurdity of it; and wasn’t O’Brien the master of absurdity after all?
In 1960, O’Brien had another go at remembering what happened on that first trip to Germany, or maybe another go at remembering what he told Time magazine’s Stanford Lee Cooper. The recounting was increasing in melodrama - he and Clara were married by the Captain of a Rhineland steamer, and Clara died of ‘galloping consumption’ within the month. Years later, in Cruiskeen Lawn[1], O’Brien ridiculed his Time magazine interview with Cooper: ‘I am not the worst at inventing tall and impossible stories, but what I produced on this occasion was a superb heap of twaddle that would deceive nobody of 10 years of age.’[2]
Anthony Cronin does not dismiss the idea that something happened on that trip that stayed with O’Brien for the rest of his life. But he is of the opinion that O’Brien’s German adventure was one trip lasting a few weeks and was probably the only foreign trip he ever made. And for those who wonder why O’Brien did not use the opportunity to rail against Nazi Germany? Cronin, as well as Peter Costello and Peter Van de Kamp in Flann O’Brien: An Illustrated Biography all agree that Flann O’Brien was no political animal, and even if he was, censorship rules in neutral Ireland during World War ll prevented any journalists from making such condemnations. And as Anthony Cronin is at pains to remind us: ‘Myles was against racism or doctrines of ethnic purity in all their forms and even kept a lookout for their local manifestations in the guise of Gaelicism.’ But Costello and Van de Kamp get another impression from John Ryan who was prominent in Irish public life at the time: ‘Brian O’Nolan never condemned the Nazis: like many Irishmen he was ambiguous in his feelings for Britain’s enemies, perhaps imagining that they might be Ireland’s friends’. All are agreed then that O’Brien was politically naïve.
But Costello and Van de Kamp agree with Cronin that the German episode is a mysterious one. Both books mention the short biographical note for an American publication which O’Brien wrote shortly before his death in 1966 and in which he makes significant reference to his feelings about Germany: ‘In later years I got to know Berlin very well and had a deep interest in the German people.’ Interestingly, Costello and Van de Kamp say that O’Brien, being an Irish Catholic, was naturally more attracted to Catholic southern Germany than to the Protestant north; a strange assumption, I think. While for Cronin, the German episode was a one-trip affair, Costello and Van de Kamp believe there was a series of trips. They believe he returned for fortnightly summer holidays up until 1938. In his column for the Leinster Nationalist O’Brien admitted that he knew the Rhineland better than he knew the Vale of Avoca. So, it would seem to have been more than a fleeting acquaintance or a tall story then. To strengthen their case, Costello and Van de Kamp refer to O’Brien’s younger brother Michael who recalled his older brother’s mysterious holidays ‘for which little explanation was given.’
But Germany in the 1930s not being an ideal return destination, Costello and Van de Kamp speculate that O’Brien may have had ‘some deep personal connection’ to bring him there. They also go further than Cronin, believing that on careful examination, everything written in the Time article by Cooper is true: ‘That Cooper was accurate about what can be checked, inspires confidence in believing him about what cannot.’ This approach goes against everything I was taught as a UCD undergraduate of History and English, but then I guess if you have a learned hunch based on a process of elimination, who am I to argue with you? What seemed to challenge O’Brien’s Dublin friends the most was his marriage to Clara Ungerland: ‘To his friends in Dublin, familiar from college on with O’Nolan as an ascetic misogynist the thought of him marrying at all was a joke, let alone him marrying the blonde, violin-playing daughter of a Köln basket weaver. That had to be a joke.’ But the absence of a marriage record in Cologne is not final proof for Costello and Van de Kamp that a marriage or a relationship did not happen. If it did happen, they say: ‘…it would explain the hold that Germany had on O’Nolan, and which he underlined in such an odd manner shortly before he died.’
Whatever hold Germany had on Flann O’Brien will remain a mystery. I am inclined to agree with Anthony Cronin whose response to the mystery is: ‘All this would be of little importance except that some commentators seem anxious that he should have had an intimate and prolonged acquaintance with Nazi Germany in order to make it seem the more extraordinary that he did not condemn Nazism in his column or elsewhere.’ So that’s our non-starter dealt with. Now it’s time to move things up a notch.
In an Irish Times article some years ago, Philosophy and a little passion: Roy Foster on WB Yeats and politics[3], Foster begins by reminding us that commentators can read an awful lot into a seemingly innocent action. The action in this case was Yeats’s acceptance of a Goethe Medal from the Nazi-controlled city of Frankfurt in 1934, resulting in some people branding him a Nazi sympathiser. But that same regime later put him on a list of forbidden authors, a far better gift for your reputation one might think, than a Nazi proffered Goethe medal. But then Yeats refused to sign a petition against the Reichstag Fire[4] tribunal proceedings organised by English writers; a refusal explained by Foster as Yeats’s suspicion that it was a ‘Communist ploy’. In Foster’s opinion though, Yeats’s acceptance of the medal merely reflected his admiration for Goethe, nothing more and nothing less, unlike, Foster adds, Maud Gonne,[5] Irish revolutionary and Yeats’s unrequited love, who was ‘both pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic’. Yeats was neither, and there is no hint of him ever being either.
Let’s look at the stages in Yeats’s political journey; he was after all around for a lot of the exciting episodes in Ireland’s history and his views certainly wavered between radical and moderate. His one steadfast belief though was in the rights of an aristocracy, or perhaps more accurately, an educated upper class who should hold the reins of power due to their innate wisdom. Some people might call this good old-fashioned snobbery, but there is no doubting he was an elitist. In the 1890s Yeats supported Fenianism and was in 1898 an enthusiastic participant in the centenary commemorations of the 1798 Rebellion. In 1914 he supported the Redmondite Home Rule Bill, but between 1916 and 1922 he increasingly supported the rebel cause for an Irish republic but finally nailed his colours to the mast with his support of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Irish Free State. But his opinions on fascism leave the reader more than a bit punch drunk.
Maybe Yeats spread himself too thinly in an effort to engage in the most pressing social and political issues of the day. You can’t blame him for trying to understand the world around him, even if at times the result merely reflected his political naivete and his privileged distance from most people. If you are going to expostulate on big ideas [good or bad] you need to be fully conversant with the nuanced details, because nothing is ever that straightforward. As Foster says in that Irish Times article: ‘Yeats’s beliefs that Mussolini represented “the rise of the individual man against the anti-human part machine” and that German legislation in 1934 was intended to allow old families to continue living in their ancestral places (rather than to expropriate Jews) suggest that his contact with the reality of fascism was shaky in the extreme’. And isn’t it interesting that people are still doubtful about the whole eugenics’ affair? as in, was Yeats a supporter of eugenics? Perhaps in some instances Yeats was misunderstood, or was the victim of lazy critics, whose research involved picking and choosing what suited them to make a story. Again, as Foster says in that same article: ‘although his ominous interest in eugenics grew throughout the 1930s, and is reflected in many of his writings, he used these arguments to argue against the social policies of fascist countries'.[6]
The 1930s was one of the most unsettling decades in modern history. Mussolini reigned supreme in Italy, Hitler came to power in Germany, and Stalin kept the Soviet Union in abject terror. Other countries showed their cards for good or for evil or were invaded; and all of this was bookended by the Second World War. Everybody was afraid of something, ‘reds under the bed’, the ‘great yellow peril’, Fascism, Nazism, the unfortunate Jewish race. So, what was Yeats afraid of? In 1932 Eamon De Valera, former freedom fighter, was now President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State and Minister for External Affairs. Fianna Fáil, the anti-Treaty party, was now in power. In The Arch-Poet, the second part of Foster’s biography of W. B. Yeats, he paints the lingering background fears. ‘But to supporters of Cosgrave’s conservative regime, who by now included imperially minded ex-Unionists as well as supporters of the Treaty, the new president of the Executive Council seemed like a Kerensky[7] figure who would shortly be eclipsed by the shadowy forces behind him.’ The gallery of rogues was gathering in the ‘moth hour of eve’; Bolsheviks, republicans, and the communist organisation Saor Éire which was linked to the IRA. For some observers it looked like the slippery slope, so much so, that leadership models, like that offered by Mussolini, seemed like acceptable alternatives. Add to this an army and a police force that were not quite settled in after the Civil War, consisting as they did of former pro and anti-Treaty soldiers whose opinions hadn’t changed all that much. Indeed, a large proportion of the rank and file trusted neither Cumann na nGaedheal or Fianna Fáil. For them it was a case of ‘a plague on both your houses’ and they formed themselves into the Army Comrades Association. And then there were the big farmers, whose demands were always entertained by Cumann na nGaedheal, and who were now reeling from De Valera’s economic war with Britain.
Enter stage left, General Eoin O’Duffy, anti Fianna Fáil campaigner who was convinced that party would lead the country to anarchy or communism. O’Duffy was only too ready to lead the fascist ‘Blueshirts’ organisation after De Valera sacked him from his post as commissioner of An Garda Síochána in 1933. Between army malcontents and disaffected big farmers, O’Duffy had enough support in his corner to cause a rumpus. Several of Yeats’s pro-Treaty friends or associates - Desmond Fitzgerald, Ernest Blythe and Dermott MacManus - were fiercely anti-Communist, and quite enamoured with the Blueshirt brand of fascism, indeed the latter two were involved with the Blueshirts. Strange bedfellows, you might think, but then I guess for Yeats at any rate, it was more of an intellectual experiment or phase. Yeats himself feared the spread of Communism following the Russian Revolution, and wondered if your common or garden democratic government could prevent it, but yet he did not regard De Valera as the bringer of misrule and anarchy; he rather liked Dev in fact, and considered him quite the intellectual, even though they disagreed about most things. Furthermore, Yeats also had a soft spot for Peader O’Donnell, the republican Communist. It is probably true to say that Yeats was politically naïve, and not as driven as his more conservative Catholic friend, Desmond FitzGerald, who based his fears on an austere form of Thomist doctrine pioneered by Pope Pius Xl, which was also heavy on censorship especially where sex was concerned.
True, his head was turned by authoritarian rule, but the oligarchic Yeats never became embroiled in the Blueshirt[8] movement. O’Duffy’s Blueshirt movement was a ‘mini me’ Blackshirt movement with copies of all the outward trappings generously sprinkled with xenophobia and anti-Semitism, of the Christian sort, of course. In relation to the Blueshirt movement, Foster sees the label of ‘para-Facism’ as being more accurate. Yeats and FitzGerald exchanged philosophical ideas around Fascism. In one letter, Yeats wrote: ‘What I think most important is to preserve the dynamic element of Fascism, the clear picture of something to be worked for. We have to take everything we legitimately can from our opponents.’ So, he clearly understood that Fascism had sinister elements.
Yeats was no supporter of O’Duffy’s anti-Communist, fervent Catholic, farmer centred movement. As O’Duffy strode to prominence, there is no doubting that a head of steam was building up, but at this stage it was hard to predict whether it would gather its forces into a volcano or simply dissipate. Yeats still saw rule by an educated aristocracy as the only solution to a well-ordered society; this hierarchical notion was more harmless than incendiary, and the notion that such a development was happening in Mussolini’s Italy was hopelessly naïve. Yeats’s ‘Genealogical Tree of Revolution’ with it left-hand branch ‘crushing the past’ and ‘justifying hatred’ and its right-hand branch in which ‘the past is honoured, hatred is condemned, the state is above the party, and Facism is “the final aim”’ again portrays his higher-order thinking on the matter, which veers very far from Mussolini’s line in 1933. As his friend MacManus put it: ‘Yeats was not a Fascist, but he was an authoritarian.’ Furthermore, he was prepared to write songs for the movement, or, as Foster surmises, ‘perhaps, to hope that the stirring of political excitement might stimulate him to write poetry again.’
The song cycle episode between 1933 and 1934 was quite an embarrassing sideshow. Yeats wrote three songs to fit the Blueshirt theme-tune, O’Donnell Abu mortifyingly re-named as Blueshirts Abu. Suffice to say, they are not his finest work. But let’s consider this in light of the times and in Yeats’s stage of creativity. Foster tells us: ‘WBY’S excitement about an Irish fascist movement in 1933 should be seen in the light of his own creative stasis, and his fear that the loss of Coole[9] a year before had meant the loss of his inspiration. As always, he was prepared ruthlessly to search out themes in unlikely places, and work up his own poetic energies through a willing suspension of incredulity.’
Incredibly, as Foster points out, Yeats’s disillusionment with the Blueshirt brand of Fascism was that their commitment to his understanding of it did not go far enough. They went down the road of ‘Catholic zealotry, nationalist exclusiveness, and rural agitation’ while Yeats longed for an intellectually elitist autocracy. Luckily, the head of steam did dissipate, and Yeats embarked on his final creative phase of poetry. On the other hand, George Bernard Shaw’s last twenty-five years were not the most creatively productive, and perhaps that is why he turned his attention to politics. He waded in far deeper than Yeats and came to some disturbing conclusions.
Shaw was also caught in what American historian and biographer Stanley Weintraub[10] describes as that ‘between-the-wars malaise, when governments that had failed to prevent the First World War were in disorderly regression towards a second war.’ Weintraub says that Shaw was ‘en route from textbook socialism to a vague authoritarianism.’
In Shaw’s 1929 play, The Apple Cart, the words of King Magnus of Britain are telling. Having won a war of wits against a prime minister and his cabinet of fools, Magnus says: ‘I do not want the old governing class back. It governed so selfishly that the people would have perished if democracy had not swept it out of politics. But evil as [the ruling class] was in many ways, at least it stood above the tyranny of popular ignorance . . . . Today only the king stands above that tyranny.’ Magnus, says Weintraub, represented Shaw’s ideal. How close is this to Yeats’s ideal?[11]
Shaw’s controversial letter about Mussolini to the Editor of the London Daily News received the strapline ‘Bernard Shaw on Mussolini: A Defence’, a much more overt stance then, than Yeats, but like Yeats, his head was turned by the seeming success and return to order achieved by Mussolini. Interestingly, the Italian Fascist, Carlo Basile, who convinced Shaw that Mussolini had ‘brought competence and discipline to a feeble government[12]’ would be prosecuted as a war criminal in 1945.
Fintan O’Toole in his book Judging Shaw, says that Shaw’s real failure was ‘not that he prefigured the use of political mass murder in the twentieth century but that he was unable to recognise it when it happened.’ O’Toole says that Shaw failed to see the true nature of Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism. ‘The great sceptic allowed himself to believe just what he wanted to believe, that the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin were rough harbingers of real progress and true democracy’. While Shaw initially condemned Mussolini’s bombing of Corfu in 1923, his attitude would soften towards Il Duce as that braggart’s window dressing that passed for a reinvigorated Italy gained publicity. In doing so, Shaw displayed a disappointing political naïvety and lack of judgement from one who should have known better. His eight-week stay in Italy was blinkered by his luxurious hotel and hobnobbing with the better class of Fascist; strange for a socialist and working-class hero. So how can his behaviour be explained? O’Toole says that ‘Shaw imagined Fascism as an incomplete and underdeveloped version of his own communism and saw Mussolini’s persecution of left-wing parties, not as part of the essence of Fascism, but merely as a mistake’.
Shaw’s head was also turned by Stalin on a visit to Russia, making his motely collection of heroes all the more confusing. O’Toole reminds us that there were photographs of both Stalin and Mahatma Gandhi beside Shaw’s deathbed; go figure. Again, as O’Toole explains, Shaw’s disappointing appraisal of Nazism was that he saw the anti-Semitic part of it as its one fault, preventing it from attaining its full noble stature. ‘What Shaw seemed incapable of grasping,’ says O’Toole, ‘was that anti-Semitism was not a stain on the otherwise pure cloth of Nazism, it was Hitler’s primary colour.’ While he rejected the anti-Semitism, Shaw continued to entertain a good Nazism, straddling two impossible beliefs and looking ridiculous for doing so. He praised Hitler’s annexation of Austria while criticising the exiling of Albert Einstein. Even after the revelation of the scale of the Holocaust, Shaw still clung to the idea that Nazism also had its good side. As O’Toole explains: ‘Shaw was incapable of understanding that the extermination of the Jews was not an aberration from the goals of Nazism. He persisted in trying to understand the death camps as essentially the accidental results of incompetence.’
Shaw’s flirtation with eugenics was far bolder than Yeats’s. He did not advocate the mass killing of certain groups of people, but he did suggest a ‘eugenic politics’ of which the following is a flavour: ‘A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them. / A man should be allowed to commit a certain number of crimes just as we allow him to have a certain number of illnesses.’ That said, everything must be understood in a context, and in relation to his use of the term ‘lethal chamber’ as O’Toole reminds us: ‘The exaggerated notion of Shaw as a precursor to the mass exterminations of the 1930s and 1940s serves largely to distract from his real failure.’
Sometimes it’s hard to separate the writer’s works from the writer’s beliefs; Ezra Pound’s poetry from his Fascist sympathies, Henry James’s novels from his misogyny, Wagner’s music from his anti-Semitic writings, Shaw’s plays from his skewed interpretation of Fascism and Nazism. But to return to Stanley Weintraub’s[13] ‘between-the-wars malaise’, Joyce and Beckett also lived through these troubled times, and they weren’t swayed or captivated in any sense by this class of elitist fascism. We can leave Flann O’Brien alone and give Yeats the benefit of the doubt, but George Bernard Shaw has some explaining to do.
[1] His Irish Times newspaper column written under the name Myles na gCopaleen
[2] Myles na Gopaleen. C. L. April 13th 1960
[3] https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/philosophy-and-a-little-passion-roy-foster-on-wb-yeats-and-politics-1.2241504
[4] On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag building burned down. The Nazi leadership and its coalition partners used the fire to claim that Communists were planning a violent uprising. They claimed that emergency legislation was needed to prevent this. The resulting act, commonly known as the Reichstag Fire Decree, abolished a number of constitutional protections and paved the way for Nazi dictatorship. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-reichstag-fire
[5] Foster, R.F. W.B. Yeats: A Life. ll The Arch Poet. Chapter 12. ‘Gonne, years after the post-war revelations of genocide, was still saying that if she had been German, the only thing that would have stopped her becoming a Nazi was their exclusion of women from positions of power; she also boasted of telling Richard Ellman (‘a young American Jew’) that, compared to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Hitler’s death-camps were ‘quite small affairs’.
[6] https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/philosophy-and-a-little-passion-roy-foster-on-wb-yeats-and-politics-1.2241504
[7] One of the key political figures between March and October 1917, when he was a minister and later Prime Minister of the Russian Provisional Government. After the attempted Bolshevik rising of July, Kerensky was the only moderate prepared to take on the responsibility of heading Russia, and faced criticism from across the political spectrum when he was unable to avert the Bolshevik seizure of power and subsequent descent into civil war.
[8] Blueshirt, popular name for a member of the Army Comrades Association (ACA), who wore blue shirts in imitation of the European fascist movements that had adopted coloured shirts as their uniforms. O’Duffy served briefly as its leader. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Blueshirt
[9] Formerly the home of Lady Gregory, co-founder of the Abbey Theatre with Yeats and Edward Martyn. In the early 20th century Coole was the centre of the Irish literary revival. Yeats, Shaw, Synge and O’Casey frequented Coole Park.
[10] https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/george-bernard-shaw-and-the-despots/
[11] Ibid
[12] Ibid
[13] https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/george-bernard-shaw-and-the-despots/
