Vivid Faces

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Author

Anne Cunningham
January 19, 2024

If you are reading this, I have successfully migrated to a different platform. I have decided to view the occasion of moving sites as an opportunity, changing the focus of the newsletter. I want to bring any posts or essays I write here in line with the reading I’m doing for a longer writing project. They will touch on some of the same themes as the older version of this newsletter—literature, history, crime fiction, and so on—but it will not be quite so focused on Scandinavia. I originally borrowed the title of this newsletter from Hugh Kenner’s study of modern Irish writers, so it feels like it still fits.

I am revising a story I wrote a while ago, part of which is set in Ireland. I won’t go into too many details so as not to box myself into anything—I’m actively trying to unbox at the moment—but suffice it to say that the (Irish) main character is fascinated by her father’s youth and the revolutionary generation. I’m rereading R.F. Foster’s Vivid Faces, which is about that extraordinary group. Foster traces the biographical details of a wide range of participants in the movement, and how they contributed to the radical break from the constitutional nationalism of the previous generation.

The title is taken from the first lines of the famous W.B. Yeats poem, “Easter, 1916”: “I have met them at close of day/Coming with vivid faces.” Foster analyzes the text:

[Yeats’] poem ‘Easter 1916’ recalled that anti-heroic mood before the insurrection, when people lived ‘where motley is worn’, denoting the style of the clown in commedia dell’arte: a world of exaggeration where no one really means what they say. But the people invoked in the poem, the makers of revolution, turn out to inhabit a different, internal world, expressed in their ‘vivid faces’. As it happens, Yeats knew many of them, some since his Dublin youth twenty years before. He debated with them in the Arts Club, quarrelled with them in the columns of the nationalist press, even been involved in a jealous love-triangle with one of the leaders, John MacBride. Several of the leading revolutionaries were middle-class intellectuals like himself, at home in the slightly Bohemian circles of Dublin’s literary and theatrical world. The fact of the attempted revolution, for which the leaders paid with their lives, had changed them utterly; but Yeats was as astonished as most moderate nationalists that it had come to this.

As Foster explains, the poem includes “thumbnail sketches” of several revolutionaries of Yeats’ acquaintance: Constance Markievicz, Thomas MacDonagh, Patrick Pearse, and John MacBride. Markievicz is the woman whose “days were spent/In ignorant good-will/Her nights in argument.” Pearse is the one who “kept a school” and Thomas MacDonagh “his helper and friend.” John MacBride is the “drunken, vainglorious lout” involved in the love-triangle. The three men from these sketches, including MacBride, were executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol for their part in the Easter Rising. Markievicz was condemned to death, but shown mercy because she was a woman.

Foster shows less interest in the rebellion or revolution itself than in the pre-revolution, the animating ideas bringing people into the movement, which may or may not have come to fruition. I was pleased to note that the revolutionaries often met at one of the two vegetarian restaurants in Edwardian Dublin (the one in Westland Row), as well as places like the Gaelic League or Maud Gonne’s radical women’s organization in North Great Georges Street. A number of revolutionaries belonged to the Vegetarian Society, and were anti-vivisectionists. More than a few spent time abroad or went to art school, which acted as a gateway to radical ideas. Foster notes that many of the “renegade aristocrats” who joined the movement were women, equally drawn to the cause of suffrage. One can’t help but wonder what such women would have thought about the heavily Catholic republic the revolution created, where divorce did not become fully legal until 1996.

Some rebels had socialist ideals, which sat uncomfortably with nationalist ones. George Bernard Shaw chided his former assistant, Mabel Fitzgerald, for bringing up her child to hate the English when she should “make him understand that the English are far more oppressed than any folk he has ever seen in Ireland by the same forces that have oppressed Ireland in the past.” This echoes Marx, who pointed out that the ruling class teach the English lower classes to hate the Irish so that they see them as competition, rather than as potential comrades. Bernard Shaw was responding to Fitzgerald’s letters from the Irish countryside, the gauzy pastoralism of which caused him to accuse her of being “an educated woman trying to live the life of a peasant.”

When I first read Vivid Faces, shortly after it came out, I wondered why Foster—whose Modern Ireland is known for its “revisionist” view of Irish history—would be drawn to these ultra-nationalists. It seems to me now that the view he presents of them subverts their typical images, hinging as the portraits do on the contradictions and failures in their yearning. What sort of Ireland did they truly want to create? Did the state of the 1920s and 30s live up to their expectations? Would some of them been sorely disappointed, had they lived to see it?