ROBERT HOGAN'S Dictionary of Irish Literature is now more than a decade all old, so a new literary guide was probably needed to mirror changing critical and historical perspectives and, of course, to list new talents which have emerged in the interim. Does this more ambitious volume, then, supersede its predecessor? In my opinion, no it is best to have both, since each has its special strengths. And both also have their weaknesses, though with the present volume these presumably can be amended with time.
The recent Field Day Anthology filled many yawning gaps, but it is not an encyclopaedia, does not claim to list every Irish writer of even minor talent, and such was not its brief. Leaving such unhelpful comparisons aside, this new Oxford guide is a wide ranging volume presumably intended for reviewers, for academics and literary researchers, for writers themselves, and for that slightly mysterious entity the "educated" reader. A formidable list of contributors is given at the beginning, but the entries themselves are not signed.
Sensibly, these are not restricted to writers there are notes on historical figures as diverse as St Patrick, Cromwell, Elizabeth I, Parnell, Carson, Collins and de Valera, and on key historical events such as the Famine. Without some elementary grounding in these, much of Irish literature (even in the case of Yeats) is robbed of a great deal of its factual relevance, since it is often unavoidably national and racial (not racist) and mirrors contemporary socio political events which had their roots in deep, even irreconcilable political, religious and class antagonisms.
To state the obvious, late Gaelic poets such as O Rathaille are hardly comprehensible without this background. They represent the overthrow of an entire culture and way of life, and its forcible supplanting by another, largely alien one which eventually became naturalised in its turn. (The Cromwellian "Black Protestant" over the centuries turned into that most Irish of figures, Somerville & Ross's Flurry Knox, dedicated to the native religion of the horse).
One entry bravely tackles the issue of so called "Anglo Irish literature", but does not reach a final definition, and perhaps there is none to be found. It seems to be a term which cannot be dispensed with yet cannot be defined, and connotes something different to each successive generation. As for "Gaelic" literature, it is a term surely best confined to literature written in the Gaelic language men like D.P. Moran, who sincerely believed they were reviving Gaelic values, knew relatively little of the old literature at first hand, and in many or most respects were essentially late Victorians of a rather provincial dyed in the wool, irredentist type. Gaelic poets are adequately dealt with in this volume, from the great Bardic figures down to Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill incidentally, the entry on Sean O Riordain, a complex slightly thorny man and a writer not at all easy to place or grasp in the round, is well conceived and equally well written. With him, surely, a new era of writing in Irish begins.
The book is at its best in dealing with a cultural hot potato such as Carleton, who is probably more written about than read. There is a useful note on George Moore, another test of critical objectivity, while the one on MacNeice indicates his virtually official, though belated, acceptance into the Irish pantheon. I would have liked rather more on Kate O'Brien, who is of considerable autobiographical as well as literary interest, and rather less on the uninteresting Shan Bullock.
It goes almost without saying that Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, O'Casey, Clarke, Kavanagh, all get more or less their critical due, and O'Casey's problematic late plays are neither overrated (as was fashionable for a time with American academics) nor written off as simple miscarriages. The same is true of the classic "Anglo Irish" writers, Swift, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Burke, Berkeley, etc. Heaney and other leading Moderns are also dealt with sensibly and sensitively, for the most part, and the ageing dogmas of Revisionism are not overmuch in evidence.
However, a number of contemporary names are missing, including those of several recently emerged novelists, as noted by John Boland in these pages a few weeks ago. A theatre minded colleague also points to several, inadequacies, in the section on Field Day (Brian Friel's resignation, for instance, is not mentioned, though the piece may have been written before that), and the overview of the Abbey Theatre in recent years is unbecomingly bland all those Directors, coming and going, can hardly be considered a guarantee of good health and continuity.
A number of factual slips and oddities should also be noted. The entry for Elizabeth gives the family name of the Earl of Essex as Robert Dudley, which was actually the name of the Queen's old favourite the Earl of Leicester (the note on Hugh O'Neil sets the record straight by naming Essex as Robert Devereux). George Fitzmaurice's play The Moonlighters is described as a "peasant comedy" as I remember, it is a melodrama with a violent ending. The note on "Moira O'Neill" identifies her daughter as the actress Molly Keane" when she is, of course, a well known novelist, as the entry under her own name makes clear.
In the Mangan entry, the name of the German poet Freiligrath is misspelt "Freiligarth" Patrick Campbell's hugely popular spell as the first Quidnunc" of this paper is not mentioned, although his column was thought good enough to be reprinted in book form. There is no mention of Father Senan and his Capuchin Annual, which published many of the best Irish writers back in the 1940s, nor of the gallant Kilkenny Magazine, not long deceased. An obvious misprint turns Monk Gibbon's birth date into 1876 instead of 1896, and a sympathetic note on my father, Padraic Fallon, gives his as 1906 instead of 1905. No closing dates are given for the novelist Gerald Hanley and the journalist Honor Tracy, who died in 1992 and 1989 respectively. Small points, no doubt yet they weaken the book's overall authority.
I am puzzled, in the entry for the short lived clergyman poet Charles Wolfe to read that his anthology piece on the death of Sir John Moore was "an elegiac response to a much commemorated event in Canada that he did not witness". Can it be that "Canada" is an unlikely misprint for Corunna (La Coruna) where Moore was fatally wounded by a French sharpshooter while embarking the remnants of his army? And the statement (under "Catholicism") that de Valeras' "special position" clause (repealed in 1972) on the Catholic Church in his 1937 Constitution was "tantamount to de facto recognition of its status as a State Church" is highly debatable, to say the least. In fact, it was a typical de Valera sidestep, and the wording seems to have been suggested originally by the Protestant Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Gregg, whom he had consulted on the matter.
Sir Arnold Bax, the hibernophile composer, is included mainly because of his earlier persona "Dermot O'Byrne", under which nom de plume he wrote undistinguished verse and stories in the stock Irish Revival style. This entry mentions "the symphony Tintagel" as the "most Celtic" of his scores in fact it is a tone poem, not a symphony, and Bax composed works with a much closer Celtic and Irish provenance, notably The Garden of Fand (incidentally, one of his early symphonies has been linked to the death of Michael Collins).
These are all errors which no doubt can, and will, be righted in later editions. On the credit side, a huge number of names have been included many of them unfamiliar (at least, unfamiliar to me), though inevitably, space pressures and/or involuntary oversights have held some people out. Apart from the younger contemporaries mentioned, there is nothing on E.R. Dodds, MacNeice's literary executor, classical scholar, and a poet in his own right, nor on Frank Gallagher, first editor of the Irish Press and the author of a remarkable hunger strike journal, Dais of Fear. And Bruce Arnold surely rates an entry, both as a novelist and as the author of a tine biography of William Orpen?