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PARTISAN REVIEW
Valera was a sinister figure, a murderous angel. He was a devout Catholic,
something of a scholar, a teacher, a leader, ardent in the cause of the Irish
language and the unity of Ireland. But he was also spiritually constricted,
such that he determined to express his love of Ireland even if it entailed
repressing its citizens. It was hard to feel alive and at ease in the country he
governed. Not surprisingly, many Irish writers deplored the narrowness of
de Valera's Ireland, its joylessness. I have in mind Sean O'Faolain, Frank
O'Connor, Austin Clarke, Flann O'Brien, Elizabeth Bowen, and Kate
O'Brien. But a state is always disappointing, especially one that has issued
from a high rhetoric of race and nation. It is bound to incur the sardonic
note of disillusion. Think of the state of Israel, the grand hopes of its set–
ting forth in the years before and after 1948, the heartbreak of its racial
history, and now the degree to which Netanyahu's Israel is a state like any
other. Ireland, too: the discrepancy between the race divined through its
myths, the nation it was summoned and supposed to become, and the state
it became is hard to be patient with, subject to the consideration that at
least it is independent in part and a decent place, on the whole, in which
to live. It does not own any nuclear or hydrogen bombs or germ weapons.
That's something worth making a note of. But it could have been an even
better country. In "Parnell's Funeral" (1933) Yeats wrote:
The rest I pass, one sentence I unsay.
Had de Valera eaten Parnell's heart
No loose-lipped demagogue had won the day,
No civil rancour torn the land apart.
Had Cosgrave eaten Parnell's heart, the land's
Imagination had been satisfied,
Or lacking that, government in such hands,
O'Higgins its sole statesman had not died.
Had even O'DuffY-but I name no more–
Their school a crowd, his master solitude;
Through Jonathan Swift's dark grove he passed, and there
Plucked bitter wisdom that enriched his blood.
I don't recognize de Valera as a loose-lipped demagogue: he was tight–
lipped to a fault. But I am bound to respond to Yeats's motif according to
which one eats the heart of a dead man to acquire his qualities. No Irish
leader has eaten Parnell's heart or imagined what form a politics that
remembered Swift and Parnell would take.
