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PARTISAN REVIEW
Friedrich Nietzsche-cases where the memory yields-there did not
appear to be anything I could do. But there were also things
I
would
have preferred to forget, but remembered with remorse, and might have
been tempted to refrain from alluding to. One of these was an extremely
complex-and devastatingly humiliating and painful-personal experi–
ence of an excruciating interaction between religion and nationalism.
The area on which this impinged was that of my marriage. Having had
a cruel early experience of the oppressive power of the Catholic Church,
I felt then that I could not marry a practicing Catholic. But in recoiling
from Catholicism, I felt in my youth that it was all the more important
to cling to the basic nationalism to which all my family adhered. A per–
son born into an Irish Catholic family who rejected
both
Catholicism
and
nationa Iism wou Id, as it were, disa ppca r existenria lIy. There wou Id
be nothing left of him. Having rejected Catholicism, an Irish person
born a Catholic was as it were living on one lung.
If
he rejected nation–
alism
also,
the remaining lung was gone.
As most Catholics were Nationalists, and the great majority of
Protestants were Unionists, it did not look as if I were likely to find an
acceptable spouse. But as it happened, Christine foster, who became my
first wife, fitted the requirement or appeared
to
fit it. During the First
World War, my uncle, Tom Kettle, and Christine's uncle, Robert Lynd,
had been friends. Both were then moderate Nationalists favoring Home
Rule, without a total break with Britain. Most Irish Nationalists were
like that, before
1916.
So Lynds and Shechys-my mother's people–
could get on very nicely, in the period before
1916.
I
had been attracted to Christine, on non-ideological grounds, before
I
discovered, through the Kettle-Lynd link, that we were also ideologi–
cally compatible. So we were married, and both families, at first,
appeared to approve the marriage.
Unfortunately there was one case, and that a critically important one,
on which the approval was based on a misunderstanding. After
19
[6,
and especially after the
19.8
election leading
to
the dominance of Sinn
Fein in the Republic, the prevailing form of Iri sh nationalism had
become a much more radical affair than it had been before
19J6.
The
Kettle form of nationalism was now out of favor. Now my aunt
Hanna-Hanna Sheehy-SkeFfington-was one of the most radical and
extreme of Irish republican Nationalists. She seems to have assumed ini–
tially-rather improbably-that Christine's family were nationalists, as
she understood nationalism. So Hanna not mcrely approved the mar–
riage, she also offered us an apartment in her house at a favorable rate-
