I carry Neanderthal DNA in my body. I am one of the modern humans, homo sapiens sapiens, who are descended from hybrid cross-hominid fertilisation that likely occurred somewhen during the overlap of populations in paelolithic Europe.
Of course, that side of the family died out a long time ago, leaving my sapiens ancestors to colonise Europe and indeed everywhere else on the planet.
I often wonder what we lost when we lost our hominid relatives – the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, the hobbit-like Homo Floriensis and so on. What might a world of multiple hominid species be like? How might we have accommodated our stronger, carnivorous and less gracile Neanderthal population? What might our tiny cousin with grapefruit-sized heads, the Floriensis hobbits, have contributed to our world?
Anyhow, the more I ponder the roads not taken, the less impressed I have become with our own boastful claims and achievements. Not simply because human achievement increasingly has come at the expense of all other species (initially the large mammals, then our fellow hominids, and now basically everything else). But also because even those achievements, it seems to me, may not really be ours to claim.
Air flight, modern medicine, computers? For sure. We made those. But let’s go back upstream to the origins of civilisation to see whose civilisation is it really?
Neanderthals used fire. Indeed, probably homo erectus, the ur-granddaddy of hominids used fire. Fire is a major issue. No other animal uses it. Most run terrified from it. But hominids tamed it, and found ways to use it for cooking and heat. If there’s one development which most explains why hairless apes like us and not, say, the gorillas or big cats rule this world, it is probably the taming of fire.
Neanderthals also buried their dead. This is a sobering thought really. In some senses so do elephants, and other species also demonstrate evidence of mourning, loss and grief. We may feel that grief is one of the things which makes us human, but it’s not an exclusively human sentiment. Even taking it to the point of ritual behaviour – burial – is not exclusive to us.
But what of the other foundational components of human culture and society? What about clothing, art, science, religion?
Well, Neanderthals made jewellery from seashells and animal teeth. Neanderthals created artwork on cave walls. Neanderthals invented musical instruments, specifically bone flutes. We can presume they knew how to beat on drums or rocks rhythmically too. After all, they also had hand axes, which would have been made and used with such rhythmical hitting. Neanderthals built stone shrines, and where there are shrines, it is highly likely that ritualistic behaviour took place.
Neanderthals used lissoirs, and hence invented hide preparation, and hence clothing. They invented glue and string and throwing spears which they used to hunt large game. These hunts required collective action and collaboration. Recent evidence suggests that Neanderthals may even have learnt to count and actually recorded their counting by notching scratches on bones.
So perhaps this isn’t OUR civilisation at all, when you think about it. Perhaps we are thieves living in someone else’s house, whom we murdered, looking at their achievements and claiming them as our own.
Legally, we are already in the posthumanist era. Corporations have long been considered persons in certain jurisdictions, despite not facing the same potential limitations on their freedom as actual people. A couple of years ago, a stretch of the Magpie river in Canada was also granted legal standing as a person, as part of an attempt to provide it with environmental protection.
Don’t feed the cocaine hippos – even though they’re people now.
Ordinarily we understand posthumanism to be some sort of utopian merging of man and machine, but perhaps it might also, and better, be understood as a way of treating non-human entities with the same respect generally extended to humans.
Of course, I feel that implementing human rights (and responsibilities) for all humans might be required as a priority. We’re at risk of stratifying the world into a place where non-humans have more rights than some humans.
Which is the fundamental problem with posthumanism as a utopian ethos. Like all utopian ideals, it is utterly blind to the stratification it ushers into being, even while denying it is doing so.
I had some travelling to do so I picked up a cheap copy of Martin Amis’s somewhat recent Inside Story. I like Amis, but it’s hard to conceive that he’s now over 70, the aged enfant terrible, the bad boy turned pensioner, the literary equivalent of the long superannuated Johnny Rotten. Or is that too unfair?
In short, it’s a good book, but much too long, and somewhat shapeless. It’s also, despite his repeated protestations (and contra his heavily credentialled track record), NOT A NOVEL. He comes close to conceding this on numerous occasions, only to backtrack at the last minute. It’s life-writing, autofiction, self-faction, call it what you will. It’s one of those careful hybrids – mostly autobiography but with added caution – a fake name here, a relocated event there, lots of invented conversations which may (or may not) fairly capture his interlocuters in those (often long-distant) conversations.
We meet real people, who might be voicing other people’s opinions. We read conversations that are recollections of a flurry of electronic exchanges. This is real life with a cartoon edge, a rotoscoped biography, simultaneously animated by Amis’s drive to – well, what exactly? Confess? – and by the utter dominance of his point of view. Amis becomes the unreliable narrator of his own life herein. This is the postmodernist sequel to the superb Experience, which he wrote, chillingly, over two decades past. As the earlier book primarily dealt with the death of his father Kingsley Amis, the current text is a similar in memoriam for his lesser fathers, Philip Larkin and Saul Bellow, for his soul mate and brother-in-arms Christopher Hitchens, and for a mostly made up crazy ex-girlfriend.
Before I lay the boot in properly, let me pause to enumerate some of the very good things about Inside Story. Firstly, it’s very readable. Amis Jr has long been the consummate Anglophone stylist. That’s his sin and his salvation really. You’ll race through the 500 pages in no time, as I did. Secondly, the title isn’t lying. It really is the inside story, a tale told affectively, interpreted through Amis’s own preconceptions, reinterpretations, and anxieties, which are addendumed by the actual documented facts.
Some of this is familiar turf of course. We have gallopped these pastures before, cantering alongside the magic pixie dream girl antagonist who embodies sexual heat and puritan rejection simultaneously. We have trotted past the name dropping so many times in his non-fiction (and this kind of counts as non-fiction) that after a few pages it no longer rankles or startles, and he at least has the good grace to apologise in advance. Some of these bridle paths are no less enjoyable for being familiar, in fact may even be moreso for avid fans.
(Less appealing than the fact Amis has famous friends is the fact that he has rich ones. This is a highly moneyed memoir, full of jets and soirees and fashionistas, holiday homes in Florida, and impromptu relocations to NYC, or Uruguay. Poverty, or deprivation, don’t live herein. They’re like tramps seen from the window of a passing limo. Amis does point them out, but within a paragraph they’re gone, because they were never really there, in the affluent reality of his later years, if indeed they were ever there at all.)
But all that does bring us to why this is not a novel and why it is not a fully functioning text, whether taken as fiction, autobiography, life writing, or some strange chimaera of all three (strongly laced too with bouts of astute literary criticism, and occasional forays into advice for wannabe writers.) (Amis is the master of measured digression, often in parentheses, and it is infectious, sorry.)
Death stalks the book, a hand perhaps on Amis’s own shoulder as he wrote it. We get ringside seats for the death rattles of Hitchens and Bellow, as well as reportage of the demise of Larkin, and a final, deathbed-like attendance to the aforemention fake ex, who is morbidly (literally and metaphorically, not to mention medically) obese. This is the enfant terrible in old age, ticking off his elders and his peers one by one as they pass, but also feeling it. That’s why it’s not a novel. For all its contrived ambiguity and deliberate fictionalising, this may be his most honest book yet.
This is Amis visiting hospitals, Amis the gentle caregiver, graveside Amis, Amis in his widow’s weeds, Amis in mourning. It’s ultimately life-affirming, especially in its loyal defence of the acerbic and divisive Hitchens. But also, and less predictably, in its curious weaving of fictions and personal preconceptions around Larkin, whose shuffling off this mortal coil is depicted ultimately as a good thing, despite Amis’s somewhat unalloyed affection, due to the fact that Larkin’s life was basically shit from start to finish.
Inside Story won’t win Amis any new readers. He’s not looking for them anyway. He is, one suspects, approaching the kind of tailing off that many writers experience in old age, the kind of thing that made Philip Roth (another of Amis’s pseudodaddies) give up entirely and retire. You need to already know the outside story, you see. You need to know a little of his own works, and those of Bellow and Larkin, and of Hitchens, though he does assist the reader by judiciously quoting from and critiquing all three. Amis was always an excellent reader, and the lit crit component of this book is by far the best of its many ill-fitting alloyed components, if one is able to isolate and enjoy it.
Perhaps more broadly useful however, are the testimonies from within the tabernacle, from where the miracle of fictionalising takes place. Amis in turn describes his own creative method, and its variants over time, and offers multiple entire chapters of advice to aspirants. Much of this is on the level of style, as one might expect from him, and the importance of euphoniousness and elegance in prose. Much of it too is practical. One can only hear of so many successful writers (Kingsley, Bellow, the Hitch, Elizabeth Jane Howard) religiously writing a thousand words daily to become convinced that, pace Martin himself, this is probably the best habit for wannabes to procure.
Certainly, they don’t want to procure the tobacco habits of the protagonists, all of whom smoke prodigiously and many of whom die as a direct result therefrom. Oesophageal cancer makes a number of special guest starring appearances. They probably don’t want to procure the sexual habits either. Here we have a septuagenarian looking back on the roistering and rogering of his carefree youth, which sounds appalling of course, and at times it is, especially since he appears to be making quite a bit of it up (as people do in novels, admittedly). But Amis is too good a writer to offer boastful braggadocio or bedpost notch counts, even though there is no doubt that his conversations with the dying Hitch probably went down that route more than a few times.
(An aside: has anyone ever previously noted the astonishing resemblance that Amis’s second wife, Isobel Fonseca, bears to his stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard? In the portraits of the two herein, only a handful of pages apart, they are of approximately the same age and look almost identical.)
All of Amis’s curious obsessions are here too, of course. He just can’t help returning again and again to the Nazis and the holocaust, despite multiple books already under his belt on this sensitive and well-explored theme. This obviously connects to Amis’s own Judeophilia, which manifests in terms both familiar (his marriage to a Jewish wife; his relationship with Bellow) and not (his love of Israel; his repeated climbing of Masada; his implicit envy at Hitch discovering his own Jewish background.) For Amis, the 20th century novel was primarily the Jewish-American novel. Once this is grasped, his adulation of Bellow comes more sharply into focus, as do aspects of his own work.
But it’s not just the holocaust he remains worrying away at. The sexual revolution and its darker ramifications again loom large here, perhaps as large as in any book of his since The Pregnant Widow. We get, partly mediated by Hitch, the Gulf War and 9/11. And from outside, as if stood alongside the tramps looking in on the soirees, the repartee, the canapes, we get tantalising glimpses of how Amis’s Rat Pack ran in the Seventies and Eighties. Prodigious smoking and drinking and bedhopping, of course. But it’s not far from there to get to Keith Talent or Lionel Asbo, to name his most and least successful fictional protagonists.
So all the familiar elements are there, from both his journalism and his fiction. But the manner of glueing the parts together seems badly awry. Amis relates how he previously tried to write this same book a decade earlier under the title Life: A Novel, but found that it failed. One wonders how much of that book ended up in this one, and whether Amis’s florid bow and stride offstage at this book’s conclusion reflects more of an enforced retirement than a choice to ease back on the throttle.
The last autobio I read was that of Brian Aldiss, who, more honest than most, and also wiser than most, both admitted to having affairs during his marriage and avoided discussing it for more than a paragraph or two out of 500 pages. Is that honest? Not entirely, no. One presumes that some of those affairs actually mattered to him. But writing from the end of his long life and career, Aldiss knew that to dwell on such things is not merely offensive to those who were not jettisoned along the way (Mrs Aldiss for starters), but also a form of self-indulgence akin to masturbation.
There is, in short, a decorum about Aldiss’s memoir that’s missing from Inside Story. Decorum about things like sexual fidelity of course, but also the decorum required of an autobiography structurally. Aldiss begins with his childhood, moves through his wartime experiences into life in Oxford, the first science fiction publications, marriage, divorce, remarriage, children, and eventually we come to the end, which naturally is not quite the real end, since Aldiss was still alive to write the book.
By contrast, Inside Story lacks all such decorum. Amis does skirt over his own first marriage failure, which he wrote about previously elsewhere, but is otherwise indiscreet (and disloyal?) enough to leave readers frowning at the behaviour of Kingsley for hundreds of pages, not to mention including a proper character assassination, a hit job performed on Monica Jones, Philip Larkin’s long-suffering amour. Note, I’m not critiquing this on its content. We expect Martin Amis to be indiscreet, unusually honest, and highly opinionated. I’m criticising the baggy shape of its presentation – the trademark Amis time displacements here failing, despite his careful marshalling of decades-striding metaphors and comparisons, to resonate at all.
Towards the end, after writing highly movingly about Hitch and Bellow, Amis seems spent entirely. He throws his hands up in the air, abandons all pretext that he’s writing a novel, and begins inserting entire how-to-write sections, as if to offer some tangible useful didactics to make up for the failure to generate a coherent plot out of his life. Perhaps he saw this coming, or perhaps he edited afterwards. But this is where and how the book opens, with Amis saying that “life is dead”, meaning that its shape is not conducive to arresting fiction.
If this really is it, if he fully intends to follow his Jewish-American pseudodaddies into retirement, then it’s a somewhat a missed target. Amis has been remiss. Amis has produced a bit of a mess, in fact, stylistically and structurally (though probably not personally, despite the outrage of Antonella Gambotto-Burke.) But even at his weakest (and there are parts herein which are among his best prose yet) he’s still one of England’s most compelling writers. And of course, we will always have Money and Success. Whereas Amis himself has money and success (see here, look through the window, fellow hobo, at his townhouses, his transatlantic shuttling, his fabulous friends…)
He is stone cold correct about one thing, though. Younger people often consider that having children is a trap, he tells us by way of telling Hitch. (Or perhaps the other way around; Amis often struggles in dialogue herein to distinguish his own voice from Hitchens’, tellingly.) But in fact, as he or Hitch or Amis-Hitch confirms, not having children is the trap. The trap poor miserable Larkin fell into, but not Hitchens (three kids) or Bellow (four kids) and certainly not Amis himself (five kids, two grandkids). Inside Story comes to read like a counterblast to Larkin’s (in)famous poem “This be the Verse”, in which the old curmudgeon concluded:
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
Amis’s inside story seems to be: we are all going to die, and before we die we will mourn for others and grieve, and these things are all best done – the grieving, the mourning but especially the dying – with family close by. It mightn’t be the end note one expected from the author of The Rachel Papers, but it’s reasonable.
I still have no idea why he invented the crazy ex-gf plot, though.
There was for a time (it is always only for a time) a funny meme which skewered the ubiquity of Harry Potter references among a certain cohort of society, sometimes identified generationally as millennials, other times identified by political affiliation, as liberals. (Neither of these identifications in truth map very well, incidentally.)
The meme responded to such referencing by demanding that the referencer “READ ANOTHER BOOK.” It’s funny, or at least it was way back when, not because it suggested that referencers had only read Harry Potter and nothing else. In terms of quotation and convoluted metaphors and linkages, both the Collected Shakespeare and the Bible have generated many single-book citers in their time.
No, it’s funny because, unlike Shakespeare or the Bible, the limited remit of a children’s book series about a schoolboy wizard has to undergo often significant semantic stretching to accommodate some of the parallels that were suggested. It’s never ideal to explain jokes, so let me illustrate:
Generally these parallels are political. And in fairness, the Potterverse is not without its own politicking, from the formal politics of the Ministry of Magic, the geopolitics of ‘Fantastic Beasts…’, and the fascist implications of Voldemort rule, to personal politics like Dumbledore’s closeted queerness or the construction of non-nuclear families. The books at times were very long. They’re not entirely without content, even political content.
But the parallels became so common, so ubiquitous on social media, and also to be honest, at times so risible, that even the esteemed Washington Post felt obliged to add its weight to the ‘read another book’ school of thought.
It was perhaps inevitable, given that the graduate student essay has now become almost as common a mode of expression for some of the Harry Potter generation as a half-thought out tweet, that eventually this mode of analysing world events through the prism of Harry Potter fandom would emerge.
It has not disappointed, I would argue. The one that led me down this particular line of pondering was entitled “Wizards First: The Muggle and Mudblood Crisis Reflecting the Rohingya Crisis”. I may not be alone in questioning the taste, if not the sincerity, of such an extended parallel. It comes from a sub-genre of Potter-political academic analysis of which the exemplary is surely “Voldemort Politics“.
In short, this is such a prevalent mode of cultural analysis, that I am somewhat surprised that Potter as Critical Lens does not yet have a name. In which spirit of helpfulness, I propose – Potternism.
There is to be an odd little celebration this month, in Folkestone of all places, to commemorate its visitation by, and subsequent nuptials therein of, Samuel Beckett.
Beckett married his long-term partner, as we now know due to a series of excellent biographies, in curious circumstances. He was embroiled in a serious relationship with a BBC producer at the time.
Beckett with Mme Beckett
Ostensibly, marrying Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil in March 1961 was intended to achieve the aim of ensuring her inheritance of his copyrights. As it happened, she ended up dying about six months before him, in 1989.
The curiosity pertains to Beckett’s decision to marry after nearly three decades of relationship, at the very moment when he was most involved in a separate relationship with an entirely different woman.
The organisers of the festival in Folkestone aim to give voice to those surrounding the events of the marriage, including the perspective of a journalist thrown off the scent, and a witness to the wedding itself.
It’s fun, original and embedded theatre, doing what theatre can do best, which is dramatise our stories back to ourselves. Samuel Beckett’s mysterious marriage took place in Folkestone, and it is great that they can now include this odd intrusion from the world of absurdist theatre and continenal intellectuals as one of their own stories, for it is that too.
I have no nostalgia for the 1980s. The music was poor and got worse as the decade went on. The fashion likewise. The politics of the era – yuppies, conspicuous consumption, haves and have nots kicking off towards the huge disparities we still see today – was especially egregious.
I spent almost all of that decade in Belfast, a city at the centre of a slow-burning civil war in those days. Watching TV at night could be interrupted at any time, and often was, with a police warning for shopkeepers to return to their premises and check for bombs. Fun times.
One of the ironies of the era personally was that I was much, much more scared about the possibility of getting nuked than the very tangible daily probability that I might fall foul of Belfast’s sectarian violence and terrorism. For this particular fear, I partly blame Threads, a docu-style drama from the BBC which aired in 1984 and depicted a not so Orwellian but definitely dystopian near future in which the city of Sheffield experiences the aftermath of nuclear war.
We’ve kind of forgotten about nuclear anxiety since then. The fall of the hyperpower duopoly at the end of the Eighties definitely played a role in that. Somehow we overlooked the proliferation of nuclear weapons since, and the fact that there were more complications, more possibility for a war by error.
And other events took centre stage. We got a whole new kind of threat to worry about post-9-11, and especially in the last few years, as black swans mounted up to the extent that it began to seem like we were living in an alternative reality, the prospect of good old-fashioned Cold War-era nuclear destruction seems to have fallen off our collective radars.
It shouldn’t have.
United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM, for short) is a somewhat fuzzy entity and likely does not loom large in most people’s psyches. It’s an arm of the US Military, charged with a range of responsibilities, which includes those exquisitely banal euphemisms “strategic deterrence,” and “global strike”. In short, if the US ever comes under nuclear attack, or deems a nuclear attack to be necessary, USSTRATCOM will be centrally involved.
“Peace”, they say, “is our profession”, but one always nervously ponders the Orwellian inversion potential in such mottos. “War is peace”, after all, was the motto of Minipax, Oceania’s War Ministry.
All the more concerning then to notice a tweet from said USSTRATCOM, as they look forward to the year ahead, and find oneself plunged back into the nuclear anxieties of the Eighties:
#USSTRATCOM Posture Statement Preview: The spectrum of conflict today is neither linear nor predictable. We must account for the possibility of conflict leading to conditions which could very rapidly drive an adversary to consider nuclear use as their least bad option. pic.twitter.com/4Oe7xkl05L
In an increasingly multipolar world, and one where hostilities are apparently growing daily, there is an ever-multiplying list of potential flashpoints which could lead to nuclear escalation. No longer is it simply a case of America and Russia: rogue nation North Korea and its murky and paranoid leadership has a nuclear capacity; angry neighbours India and Pakistan now possess nuclear arsenals; so does Israel, surrounded as it is by states hostile to its existence; its sworn enemy Iran is desperately trying to become a nuclear power; and the internal politics of Britain and France, the other two overtly nuclear states, have almost never been as fractious as now.
I don’t wish for my son to experience a version of my nuclear anxiety from the Eighties on steroids. Even moreso, I worry that we may be closer now to a nuclear event than we ever were then. We need to take that USSTRATCOM warning very seriously. We need to find a way to rid the planet of nuclear weapons.
We’re only one mistake, one terror act, one escalation of belligerence away, in Kashmir, in Israel, in Korea, in Taiwan, in the Arctic, in the Ukraine, in so many potential flashpoints, from annihilation. The doomsday clock has crept up to 100 seconds to midnight, closer than it ever was during the Cold War.
I feel like I should be styling my hair in a mullet and wearing my ‘Frankie Says… War! Hide Yourself!” t-shirt even saying this, but as I said, I’m not nostalgic for the Eighties.
Happy World Poetry Day. Even in the stasis of global lockdowns, poetry still transports anyone to any time or place, real or imagined, should they only ask. This poem terminates at Lalibela, Ethiopia, sometime in early 2011.
Tej
The dancers shrug off the world. Everything that moves here
moves from the shoulders down. We drink tej and compare with
Fanta Orange. Then dance with the dancers, clumsy, white with brown.
A thousand years past, faith slammed into the rock and kept
slamming. Mountains bore churches. More people came and keep
coming, flecking the hills with fires, life seeking purchase.
We drink tej in the smoke-filled hall and clap to drums,
our sore legs throbbing. Round the fire, dancers shrug off the world.
We drink more tej. They beckon to us, brown shoulders bobbing.
This alternative history was written at the time of the 90th anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin, which had led ultimately to both Irish independence, and partition.
It was published in the 16th April 2006 edition of the Irish Mail on Sunday newspaper, where I was a staff journalist. I expect they might hold the copyright, but I wrote it and I think it’s fair of me to reproduce it here as I suspect they’re unlikely to reprint it anytime soon.
THE TRIALS of the trenches seemed a long time ago now. On Sackville Street, in glorious June sunshine, Prime Minister John Dillon and his guest, David Lloyd George, led the cheering thousands who saluted the returning Irish troops who had defended their nation and empire so valiantly against the Germans. It was a time of celebration, even if the seditious activities of the once-respected lawyer, Edward Carson, were beginning to cause unrest in the north of the island.
And for the joyous crowd, their Union Jacks held proudly aloft, it was the achievement of the soldiers in the trenches that had helped bring about Home Rule. There might always be the odd crank for whom self-determination was never enough, like the wild-eyed MP for East Clare, Mr de Valera. But the vast majority of the Irish citizenry as the recent landslide election victory for Dillon’s Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) had indicated were delighted to have their own parliament and saw no need to reject the monarchy or sever the brotherly bond with Britain.
Of course, things could have been so different, as one Rathgar schoolteacher noted sullenly. Had the Irish Volunteers’ chief of staff, Eoin MacNeill, not learned of their plans to strike for Irish independence three years earlier and immediately countermanded them, then PH Pearse and his comrades in the Irish Republican Brotherhood might well have obtained complete independence for Ireland while England was embroiled in a foreign war.
Or so he believed. But the arrest of the former diplomat, Roger Casement, and the scuttling of the shipful of arms he was bringing to Ireland had made their plans for an uprising pointless, as Mr MacNeill had argued. The rising had evaporated before it had even begun.
By 1919, Mr MacNeill was prominent on the opposition benches in the House of Commons on College Green. Sinn Féin, led by the irascible Arthur Griffith, still argued for absolute independence but its minority status in parliament proved that desire was not shared by the people in general. Casement still languished in Kilmainham, and the IRB had withered away to an irrelevant handful of dissidents. With Home Rule now a fact, their role seemed increasingly defunct.
After decades of trying, the late John Redmond had finally secured Home Rule from Britain as a reward for sending the National Volunteers to the trenches. The humourless poet, Pearse, had returned to teaching Irish to sour-faced lads and dreaming of fomenting revolution. The radical Scot, James Connolly, was still preaching the gospel of socialism from his trade union headquarters in Liberty Hall. But few listened to them.
Instead, the general election held in late December 1918, while many of Dublin’s tenement poor were wracked with Spanish flu, was heavily influenced by two factors. One was David Lloyd George’s firm commitment to Irish Home Rule, made in his Armistice speech only weeks earlier. ‘This is no time for words,’ he had declared. ‘Our hearts are too full of gratitude to which no tongue can give adequate expression. We especially pay tribute to our Irish brethren, in return for whose valiance long-promised Home Rule is the least reward we may grant them.’
The other factor that swung the election so forcefully in the IPP’s favour was the introduction of universal suffrage. The radical Countess Markievicz was elected to represent Sinn Féin but most Irish women who voted for the first time were much more conservative and rallied to Dillon’s paternal leadership. A State visit in 1921 by King George V helped to shore up the popularity of the monarchy but, throughout the ’20s, the popularity of Sinn Féin seemed inexorably to rise.
Sinn Féin, led by a younger generation than the increasingly tired IPP, by now renamed the Irish National Party (INP), were making huge inroads into the working class vote. Sinn Féin’s charismatic young leader, the Corkonian Michael Collins, made a series of angry speeches in Dublin’s House of Commons calling on the government to deal with the increased sectarian rioting in Belfast.
Unionist Party leader Edward Carson, by now deputy prime minister in the ruling coalition with the INP, denounced the activities of his former colleague, James Craig, a stockbroker turned terrorist. In 1926, under pressure from Sinn Féin, the INP pressed to have Ireland included in the declaration made by the Earl of Balfour at that year’s Imperial Conference. Prime Minister Kevin O’Higgins triumphantly returned from London to an Ireland now officially considered independent within the British Empire, sharing only a monarchy with Britain.
After the Wall Street Crash of 1929, left wing governments swept to power in Britain and Ireland. With the support of Jim Larkin’s Labour Party, Sinn Féin at last made it into power, despite the recent split in their ranks (Eamon de Valera had formed his own party, named Fianna Fáil, after a bitter row with Michael Collins over devolution for Ulster).
The following decade was a dark one for the nation. While membership of the British Commonwealth continued to encourage trade and helped to grow Ireland’s economy, the dark spectre of fascism was spreading across Europe. General Eoin O’Duffy attracted many disaffected soldiers to his quasi-fascist National Guard movement quickly named the Blueshirts in recognition of the traits they shared with Mosley’s Blackshirts in Britain.
By 1933, the fascist salute could be seen in every town and village in the royal dominion of Ireland. Clashes between O’Duffy’s paramilitary organisation and the RIC became a weekly, almost daily occurrence. O’Duffy announced a major rally for Dublin in August 1933, to be held in the Phoenix Park. Fearing a coup, since O’Duffy carried much support in the Irish battalions, Prime Minister Collins banned it and announced martial law. The Irish civil war had begun.
Troops loyal to the House of Commons moved to secure the capital, while O’Duffy’s men marched through Cork, Belfast, Londonderry and Limerick. James Craig’s Ulster Volunteer Force, a heavily armed terrorist organisation responsible for sporadic bombings and murders in the north of Ireland, declared its own ‘war’ for independence in Ulster.
Collins moved quickly against O’Duffy and Craig. With the help of troops provided by Ramsay McDonald’s national government in Britain, both rebellions were quickly suppressed and their leaderships interned in The Curragh army camp. Before restoring democratic government, Collins approved the executions of O’Duffy and Craig. He told Deputy Prime Minister Jim Larkin later that day: ‘Early this morning, I signed my own death warrant.’
However, Collins’s decisiveness contrasted with Britain’s dithering. Westminster moved to ban the fascist Blackshirts only in 1937 but, by then, the world was lurching towards another world war. The first had brought Ireland Home Rule; the second would prove devastating. Accused of dictatorship by the leader of the opposition, Eamon de Valera, Collins formed a government of national unity on the eve of German hostilities breaking out. Only William Cosgrave’s Irish National Party, where many former blueshirts had found a political home, refused to take part, arguing instead for peace at any price.
Once again, British troops flooded into Ireland, and were stationed on the Allies’ westernmost border. After Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Collins used Radio Eireann to inform the people that little Ireland was at war with Nazi Germany. The western seaboard was prowled by ‘ wolfpacks’ of U-boats and patrolled by the Royal Irish Air Force. German nationals were interred in The Curragh camp recently vacated by O’Duffy’s and Craig’s followers. Rationing began. Dublin and Belfast were devastated in the Blitz. Carpet bombing reduced many historical buildings to rubble. The key ports of Derry and Queenstown, where convoys from the United States came to dock, were blockaded by U-boats.
In 1941, as the dogfights of the Battle of the British Isles raged, a plot was uncovered. William Joyce, like his party leader, Eamon De Valera, was an American of Irish heritage. It soon emerged that he was in secret negotiations with the Nazi regime to provide a ‘backdoor to the British Isles’. Together with some extremist republicans, who espoused an independent Eire free from the monarchy, he planned to smuggle Nazi troops into the largely unguarded southwest of the country.
De Valera, who personally espoused neutrality in the war though he sat in Cabinet, was appalled at the treachery and exposed it to Collins. Not for the first time, Prime Minister Collins was forced to sign execution orders. Hundreds of thousands of Irish troops fought valiantly on the African front under Allied General Richard Mulcahy, who later played a major role in the D-Day landings. For many Irishmen who had been conflicted by their republican sentiment, the discovery of the Nazi death camps seemed to vindicate the decision by de Valera to expose Joyce’s treachery.
In the post-war elections, Fianna Fáil swept to power, backed in coalition by William O’Brien’s Irish Labour Party. Collins’s Sinn Féin was reduced to a fraction of its former power. Basil Brooke’s Unionist Party boycotted the Commons in protest and again called for a regional parliament for Ulster. Returning soldiers in the North were dismayed by this lurch towards republicanism, and the Ulster Volunteer Force attracted many of them into its fold.
The assassination of Collins by an unknown UVF man while driving through remote north Antrim in 1952 is believed by many to have sparked the so-called ‘Troubles’ in Ulster. Collins had never been forgiven for ordering the execution of William Craig. Collins’s State funeral was the biggest ever seen in Ireland. It was attended by dignitaries from around the world including US President Harry Truman and the heir to the throne, Princess Elizabeth. Prime Minister de Valera gave a valedictory speech, in which he said: ‘History will record the greatness of Michael Collins.’
By the late 1950s, an economic revival was under way. As the population edged towards seven million, Ireland joined other European countries in inviting foreign workers to its shores. The first wave of ethnic immigrants, from the Caribbean, docked in Queenstown in 1958, and black faces were soon commonplace in Ireland’s major cities. The call also went out to Irish descendants in Australia, North America and even Argentina to return to help build up the economy of the motherland.
By the mid-60s, the so-called ‘Celtic Boom’ economy was in full swing. Ireland and Britain were invited to join the EEC. But Catholic Archbishop John Charles McQuaid was appalled by the loose morals and drug-taking of young Irish people in the swinging ’60s. In 1969, firebrand Ulster preacher Ian Paisley, whose fringe political party, the DUP, had been linked by some to the ongoing UVF terror campaign, helped to negotiate a Unionist ceasefire and the ‘Troubles’ finally came to an end.
Se·n Lemass’s Sinn Féin government agreed to devolved government for the nine counties of Ulster, within a federal Ireland. The oil crisis of the following decade led to years of stagnation, and Sinn Féin finance minister Charles Haughey famously warned the people to tighten their belts. The ’80s was a period of unstable coalitions. Haughey-led Sinn Féin twice entered coalition with Gerry Adams’s Fianna Fáil. In between came the so-called ‘rainbow government’, in which INP Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald led four parties, including Dick Spring’s Labour Party and David Trimble’s Unionists.
But in 1996, following the election of Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin again, the radical government called for a referendum on an Irish republic within the British commonwealth. The proposal was passed by a narrow margin and, in the subsequent presidential election, INP veteran John Hume became the Irish Republic’s first president, 80 years after an abortive rebellion in Dublin now almost forgotten by the history books.
Timeline:
1926: Irish PM Kevin O’Higgins gains Dominion status
1933: Michael Collins tells Jim Larkin ‘I’ve signed my death warrant’
1945: U-boats fight the Royal Irish Air Force off Queenstown
1958: first shipload of Caribbean migrant workers arrives in Ireland
Cardiff even has an entire square dedicated to Roald Dahl.
But Manchester to date has not recognised its greatest author. Manchester City Council has launched a new consultation exercise on the future of statues and monuments in the city. You can see the questionnaire by clicking here.
There is an opportunity to propose new subjects for monuments. Perhaps you might consider filling it in and proposing that they rectify their egregious lack of an Anthony Burgess statue?
While researching my forthcoming book on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, I came across mention of Molodoy, a shortlived Sheffield punk band of quasi-fascist tendencies whose schtick was that they appeared in full droog regalia on stage.
Molodoy is the Nadsat term for young, though it is barely used in the novel. Burgess did however use it extensively in one of his many revisits to the world of Alex, when he conducted an interview with his own creation entitled “A Malenky Govoreet about the Molodoy” in 1987, which can be found in the 2012 Corrected Edition of the novel as edited by Professor Andrew Biswell, or online here for now.
Judging by the information in this article on Dangerous Minds, the band Molodoy sound like they were right charmers. Some members later went on to form the disturbingly named Dachau Choir. Anyhow, their cover of ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’ does strike one as a note of sour and deranged genius.
Molodoy were far from the only band to derive inspiration from Burgess’s novel. In fact a large host of musical artists have either named themselves after aspects of the novel, or else written songs inspired by it.
But for Burgess, we might never have had Moloko, Moloko Knives, The Devotchkas, The Droogs, Campag Vellocet or Korova (which refers to both a band and a record label). And of the ten fictional bands mentioned within the work, at least five have had their names appropriated by real-life groups: Heaven 17, Johnny Zhivago, The Humpers, The Sparks and The Legend.
Molodoy may have been mentioned at the Kingston University conference on A Clockwork Orangea couple of years back, I seem to remember. Perhaps they’ll also feature in the forthcoming essay collection being edited by Matt Melia.
