Warrenpoint
By Denis Donoghue
Knopf, 193 pages, $19.95
Denis Donoghue, the Irish literary critic who holds the Henry James Chair of English and American Literature at New York University, is not only one of ”our” most distinguished and resourceful critics, he is also one of the few whose work maintains a vivid and sinuous sense of self, subject and audience. At ease with the most heavily armed and bristling literary theories of the moment, he himself remains strongly and gracefully humane, aware constantly that literature is a human enterprise, bearing a moral and passionate life and having moral and passionate consequences. Donoghue`s present book, which his publishers describe as an ”intellectual
autobiography,” sheds light upon his specific virtues as a scholar of literature, although in a characteristically oblique manner, as much by tone and stance as by statement.
Although he has most often written about English and American literature and about turns of the contemporary European mind and sensibility, he has always somehow contrived to make it clear that he does not merely ”happen”
to be Irish, that he responds to literature as a citizen of the world who carries a green passport.
In 1986, when he gathered together the chief of his essays specifically on Irish literature and society, he used as title the phrase ”We Irish.” It derives immediately from Yeats, who, in a swaggering late poem spoke of ”We Irish, born into that ancient sect” and, more remotely, from the 18th-Century Protestant Berkeley, who had the charming habit of dismissing Newtonian logic with the phrase ”We Irish think otherwise.”
The title essay in that book makes clear that Donoghue is not entirely happy to be in that company. When the Anglo-Irish Berkeley speaks of ”we Irish” he is playing with words, and in Yeats`s ringing words, Donoghue finds more clangor than sense. His own view is more stoical. He prefers Leopold Bloom`s explanation of why he is Irish. ”`Ireland,` said Bloom, `I was born here. Ireland.”` Donoghue comments: ”Maybe it is the sensible way: to be born here, and take the consequences, without whining.”
”Warrenpoint” is, in part, Donoghue`s account of what it was like to grow up not in a generalized romantic or realistic Ireland, but in a very particular one, and one with its untypical aspects. Warrenpoint is a seafront town in Northern Ireland, in which his father, also named Denis, served as Sergeant in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The Donoghues lived in one half,
”the married quarters,” of the police barracks, the other half being given over to the Day Room, two cells, a small room which held revolvers, rifles, hand-grenades and tear gas cannisters. What is unusual is that Sgt. Donoghue had under his command seven or eight men and a like number of the dreaded B-Specials, Protestants and Loyalists to a man, yet himself was a Roman Catholic.
Like thousands of other ambitious young southern Catholics in the days before the onset of the Anglo-Irish war of 1916-22, the Kerry-born Donoghue had joined the island-wide Royal Irish Constabulary. When the island was partitioned, they were given the right to move to the newly created statelet of Northern Ireland and take up rank in the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
”The fact that my father was one of the few Catholics who joined the force is easily explained,” Donoghue writes. ”(H)e had no choice, no other job was available, and the RUC could not reject his application.”
Take the consequences, without whining, as it were. The fact remains, however, that ”the RUC was obviously a Protestant organization, its chief aim to keep Catholics in check.” Within these formidable restraints, Sgt. Donoghue emerges from his son`s pages as a man of extraordinary integrity, decency and taciturn chivalry. In this he was doubtless aided by the fact that Warrenpoint was then divided between a thousand Catholics and a thousand Protestants.
”There was no enmity between them: it was necessary only to keep your distance.” As the son puts it: ”The ability to tell a Protestant from a Catholic is not a skill I`m proud of, but it was a social necessity in those years. Necessary more now that ever.”
To be northern, or even to have traveled a bit in the North, is to recognize the subtle, obvious, manifold truth of this. The North is Seamus Heaney`s world of ”passport, handgrip, wink and nod.” But Sgt. Donoghue had a formula more alert, more haunting, than those of poet and critic:
”My father, not given to phrase-making, told me that my dealings with other people should be `civil, but strange.”` The phrase impressed the son, as well it might, and it is possible that he has carried it forward into his dealings with words, texts, meanings, poems, cultures.
The chapters that move forward from Donoghue`s outer world to his worlds of words and feelings are remarkable in their anticipation of several of his characteristic strengths as critic and essayist.
”I was a good reader,” he writes, ”or at worst an energetic one. But I see now that my reading was opportunistic: not in the sense of reading one book in preference to another, but in my way of reading. I can`t recall a time when I read disinterestedly; I always had a pen and notebook at hand. If I found something interesting, I`d want to make a note of it. But interesting isn`t the truth. I went through books looking for whatever I needed. I was never free of purpose. A phrase or a sentence might come in handy for an essay I was writing, some clinching quotation which I could almost fancy, while quoting it, that I had written. If I was not imaginative, I was notionally in the company of those who were: writers, poets especially.”
Despite its light coating of irony, that passage testifies to a quality of mind, a habit of attentiveness, which, enlarged and made complex, testing, exploratory, has become a hallmark of Donoghue`s mind. To read him about letters or life is to be impressed not by the range of what he has read (for that is a requirement of his profession) but rather by his ability to bring almost casually into play precisely the resonant, improbable, illuminating quotation.
Remembering his father, he remembers a letter from Kafka to his very different father. His father`s precise, expressive silences call to mind a phrase in Elias Canetti`s ”Crowds and Power.” The task of writing a memorable sentence puts him in quick mind of Kenneth Burke, Italo Svevo, Primo Levi. Sentences matter to Donoghue and are parts of his ongoing discussion with literature and the world because, I think, he sees that what we say to ourselves and what others say memorably to us are parts of an ongoing conversation with existence, time, meaning.
Some of his skills and powers of mind are built upon training given him in a Christian Brothers School in the North of Ireland. The others are the products of a strong, resilient and independent mind, judging, weighing, confident of its own powers. The kind of mind that might have been inherited from a Kerry-born sergeant uprooted from the South and compelled to maintain a measure of decency and order in the dark, tangled North.
