Preoccupations/Acts of Union

...ACTS OF ONION REPORTS ON IRELAND 1973-1979 Anthony Bailey Random House, $8.95, 211 pp...

...They have appeared in magazines both here and in Great Britain over the last seven years...

...Heaney's explorations, both in prose and poetry, of the tangled and mingled roots of his culture is in sharp contrast to the kind of primitivism associated with Gary Snyder in America and Ted Hughes in England...

...In Preoccupations Heaney uses a sexual metaphor to express the tension between his Irish-Gaelic heritage and his English-based education: . . . the feminine element for me involves the matter of Ireland and the masculine strain is drawn from the involvement with English literature...

...When confronted by ' the large families in the Catholic slums, where unemployment has always been rife, he ponders . . . "does having nothing to do lead to more babies...

...By being Irish the poet has already to a certain extent defined himself against the pressure of an outside, alien force...

...Jack Holland THE AMERICAN poet Gary Snyder wrote in 1956 that a modern poet was faced with the alternatives of either embracing "his people, history, tradition . . . folding himself in a wealth of persons and pasts . . ."or stepping beyond "into horrors and angels, possible transcendence...

...In any case, they are imagini-tively satisfying and rich for the poet and this in the end must be the measure of their usefulness...

...While well aware that, as a possible explanation of the Northern Ireland problem, this is rather too quaint, Heaney points out that it is "not remote from the psychology of the Irishmen and Ulster-men who do the killing...

...The creative endeavors of Irish poets and writers have often the urgency of a rescue operation for a colonized people - an attempt to salvage and then establish a sense of identity out of the wreckage of generations of war and upheaval...

...Such attitudes are common enough among the English, who masquerade them in cliches about quaintness, though-as Acts of Union clearly reveals in places-the underlying condescension keeps showing through.ension keeps showing through...

...Heaney's lack of self-consciousness about the poet's role, or his relationship to society, is again connected with the Irish situation...

...What we have is the tail-end of a struggle in a province between territorial piety and imperial power...

...His book is replete with such questions, phrased in language as banal and limp as the questions are irrevelant and obtuse...

...Unfortunately, it turns out in the end not to be a very productive way of looking at the Irish crisis...

...His themes are those for which, at another level, people are still killing and dying in the back streets of Belfast slums, and in the narrow roadways of his own parish...

...In the first section of the book, he relates how such piety informs his poetry...

...The work of Seamus Heaney, whom some critics regard as the finest poet since Yeats, has been created against a background of contemporary horrors in his native Ulster...

...Territorial piety" is the homage Heaney' s poems pay to his homeland and its dialect...

...in section two, Heaney broadens his scope to consider the creative processes of such poets as Hopkins, Wordsworth, and Yeats, as well as dealing with the importance of a sense of place, crucial source of nourishment for the poet...

...There is also one chapter devoted to a Derry Catholic ghetto and the myriad problems faced by welfare workers there...

...Bailey's way of breaking into the "vicious circle" is to examine the lives of Irishmen and women who have crossed the sectarian divide in some sense...

...He poses what he calls the "basic Irish question" in these terms: "Did frequent invaders and alien settlement make the Irish the sometimes violent people they are, as the President [of Ireland] believes, or did the essentially savage Irish bring out the worst in their conquerors...

...For better or for worse they are still a vital part of Ireland's historical experience...

...Two chapters are deyoted to Seamus Heaney, whose metaphors for the current crisis Bailey tends to mistake for explanations...

...In spite of the well-known struggle that Irish writers have had with the narrow norms of their homeland - a struggle which has often led to exile - none of them expresses the kind of alienation that is a characteristic of much modern poetry...

...Even in Next issue: SPRING BOOKS exile the poet carries Ireland with him and is able through its complex experience to illuminate his own...

...I speak and write in English, but do not altogether share the preoccupations and perspectives of an Englishman...

...Prompted by a large dollop of Irish blood and by a feeling that what was happening in Ireland was the most important 'story' a writer could examine at this time, in Great Britain and Ireland, I set about looking for ways of breaking into what, in one of these reports, I call a vicious circle of interlocked problems...

...Had they been addressed to, say, the condition of poor black Americans, there would have been outraged reaction - and it would have been deserved...

...I teach English literature, I publish in London but the English tradition is not ultimately home...

...In Acts of Union Bailey writes that the Irish have a "savage virus" in their blood...

...Behind these notions are some disturbing assumptions...

...there is nothing cerebral about it...

...And in a sense he is right: these pieties do supply emotive images and symbols for the Irish struggle...

...Irish writers have, with varying degrees of success, spent their creative lives grappling with both...

...There is an article on a Protestant headmaster who runs a school on the border of a Catholic ghetto, an interview with Erskine Childer, the late President of Ireland who was a Protestant, a consideration of the difficulties a young Protestant man and his Catholic girlfriend must face because of the different backgrounds...

...so a sense of alienation from Irish society or Ireland itself does not become a primary issue...

...Bailey's attitudes towards Ireland and the Irish are sometimes revealed as colonial, racist, and quite uncomprehending of the political and historical roots of the so-called "Irish" problem...

...The Irish are unique in Western Europe in being the only nation to experience prolonged and cruel colonialization akin to that which oppressed Third World nations...

...Without taking this seriously into account, Bailey's considerations of why the crisis arose rests heavily on the wearisome notion (beloved by the English liberal intelligentsia and their Anglophilic American counterparts) that the Irish are colorfully irrational, harboring rustic poets and fanatical gunmen, a people in a muddle of ancient passions...

...The historical experience of Ireland is full of "horrors and angels...

...Since when did a mother of ten children have nothing to do...

...So Anthony Bailey, staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, states in the foreword to his collection of articles about Ireland, Acts of Union...

...There is an indigenous territorial nu-men, a tutelar of the whole island, call her Mother Ireland, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the poor old woman, the Shan Van Vocht, whatever, and her sovereignty has been temporarily usurped or infringed by a new male cult whose founding fathers were Cromwell, William of Orange, and Edward Carson and whose godhead is incarnate in a rex or caesar resident in a palace in London...

...Perhaps part of the reason why Irish literature in this century has been so rich and complex is that this implied dichotomy does not exist for Irish artists...

...There is no straining for effect...

...The third and final section contains essays and reviews, including one on Robert Lowell, a poet whom he admires, and Theodore Roethke...

...In his review of Roethke's Collected Poems Heaney rebukes an un-named American poet for being too self-conscious about his relationship to a literary tradition and his role as a poet...

...In an essay based on a lecture he gave to the Royal Society of Literature he elaborates on this metaphor as a way of looking at the current violence in Northern Ireland: To some extent the enmity can be viewed as a struggle between the cults and devotees of a god and a goddess...

...Perhaps this is because the Catholic/Protestant dichotomy is only the symptom of a deeper problem which Bailey does not really address, concerning the historical role of succeeding British governments, and their responsibility for the creation and support of Northern Ireland with all its inherent inequalities...

...In his poetry, and now in Preoccupations, his first prose collection, he reminds us that the cultural situation facing the Irish poet is still different from that confronted by his American and English colleagues, but in ways which seem to nourish the creative resources of the English language...