Read all about Ireland's rebel writers

IN THE lexicon of the English language, words and phrases such as Yahoo, Swiftian Satire, Stream of Consciousness and Borstal Boy are commonly used. However, what is less well known about these everyday terms is that they were coined and popularised by Irish writers. Johnathan Swift, James Joyce and Brendan Behan not only gave cultural currency to these phrases but the books which made them common usage were also deemed to be so controversial that they were banned.

Swiftian satire

The most unlikely of these great observers of the human condition which the authorities viewed as being so dangerous that they sought to censor his work was an Irish clergyman. The satirist and author of Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin in 1667. Swift was a child prodigy who was reading Latin by the age of six and by fourteen had entered Trinity College Dublin to study for a degree in Theology. His subsequent ordination as a Church of Ireland priest earned him the title Dean Swift which he would be known as for the rest of his life.

The political troubles in Ireland surrounding the Glorious Revolution of 1688 forced Protestant Swift to temporarily leave for England. His political skills soon caught the attention of the monarchy and within three years of his arrival in England, Swift was advising William of Orange to agree to the Meeting of Parliament Act (1694). This law meant that parliament met annually and held elections every three years. Not only had Swift become an Anglican priest and political counsel to King Billy but was instrumental in shaping future British parliamentary democracy and all before the age of 30. Swift’s meteoric ecclesiastical and political rise to prominence was about to be eclipsed when he returned to his homeland to begin his literary career.

In 1700, Swift returned to Erin to begin his literary career and to work on what was to become his masterpiece, Gulliver’s Travels. Swift wrote the book whilst staying at Woodbrook House County Laois and it was published 1726. Although in its abridged and sanitised form it often thought of as a children’s book, it is a sophisticated satire of human nature based on Swift’s social observations. Each of the four books recounts the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver to fictional countries. Every book had a different theme, but all were attempts to puncture holes in human hubris. In his maiden voyage he is shipwrecked and washed ashore in the Land of Lilliput. Gulliver encounters the Lilliputians who are six inches tall reflecting the small mindedness of their worldview. When there is a fire in the Royal Palace, Gulliver duly put it out in by urinating on it. This was a metaphor for what he thought of the underhand political behaviour of Tory politicians. Alas, some things never change.

In book four, when Gulliver voyages to the country of the Houyhnhnms, he encounters a society made up of rational, calm horses. However, when he ventures further inland, he meets the human like creatures the Yahoos, who have filthy unpleasant habits and are obsessed with ‘pretty stones’ that they find digging in the mud and are consumed by greed and are prone to violent and selfish behaviour. Gulliver concludes that the rational and intelligent Houyhnhnms are much more to his liking. Swift coined the word Yahoo meaning a crude and selfish person, a word that 300 years later, still has cultural currency.

Gulliver’s Travels satires distasteful materialism and the ignorant elitism of Georgian Britain. It was initially thought to be too frightening for children to read and was censored in many parts of Europe and had to be smuggled into Ireland where it was banned for being ‘wicked and obscene.’ Indeed, it was deemed to be so controversial that Dean Swift published it under the pseudonym of Lemuel Gulliver as he feared a backlash from political and religious leaders, all of whom he was scathing.

The Irish clergyman who had risen to the heights of political and social influence in Georgian Britain, cast a satirical eye on its grotesque mores and was critical of an elite which he viewed as being rotten to its core. His ability to develop his Swiftian Satirical writing was in essence because he was simultaneously able to view Georgian society’s social machinations as a Protestant clergyman, whilst having enough distance as an Irishman to smell the stench which was disguised by the perfume of privilege. Dean Swift, although a man of God, was explicit in his use of excrement and body odours as metaphors for depravity and never shied away from shining a light on the human condition.

Joyce’s genius

In the rich tradition of writing about life’s complexity is arguably what is the greatest of all Irish novels, James Joyce’s Ulysses. Although more referenced than read, Ulysses is seen as one of the best novels of the 20th century. First published in 1922, Ulysses takes place over a single day in Dublin, June 16, 1904. The date was chosen by Joyce to honour the day he first met his wife Nora Barnacle and is commemorated in Ireland as Bloomsday, a day of life affirming celebration which is one of the novel’s many themes.

The book follows the activities of three main characters—Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom who is of Jewish ancestry, and Molly Bloom—through various episodes that loosely parallel Homer’s The Odyssey. Whilst Odysseus takes 20 years to get back from Troy to his faithful wife Penelope, Bloom takes only a day to travel across Dublin to return to his unfaithful wife Molly, who is having an affair with Blazes Bollan.

During Bloom’s odyssey he visits pubs, brothels and is subject to antisemitism which he challenges by using reasoned arguments and compassion for his fellow man.

Bloom, although a flawed hero, repeatedly seeks to cross boundaries, eroding gender, national and cultural divisions. Dublin itself is not merely a backdrop but a character, as Joyce weaves the city’s landmarks into the fabric of his novel. Ulysses captures the essence of turn of the century Dublin, painting a picture of the city’s socio-economic and cultural landscape in all its flawed beauty.

Upon its release Ulysses was banned in Britain and the United States, but not in Ireland. The book was deemed to be obscene for daring to address issues such as prostitution and infidelity. However, those who sought to ban his work failed to fully understand why the Irish genius was using stream of consciousness writing techniques. This experimental modernist approach allowed for the novel’s characters to have internal monologues to explore the intricacies of everyday life—including sexuality—whilst addressing the broader concerns of antisemitism in Ireland.

Indeed, many aspects of Joyce’s life mirrored his flawed hero Leopold Bloom. In October 1904, four months after meeting Nora, the unmarried couple left Ireland for good and set up home in Trieste in Austria-Hungary. Their unwed status caused a scandal in Edwardian Dublin. Joyce’s critics deemed him to be personally and professionally immoral. However, throughout his life, when it mattered, the Dubliner displayed courage and compassion offering refuge in his Parisian home to Jews who were fleeing Nazi Germany. When issues of importance arose and people needed his help, whether it be providing lodgings to his protégé Samuel Beckett or giving refuge, Joyce was true to ending words of his life affirming masterpiece: “Yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Behan’s brilliance

Whilst Joyce’s rebel light was waning in Paris in 1940, another Irish rebel was getting himself arrested for his IRA activities.

Brendan Francis Aidan Behan could have been literary character himself judging by the life he led. Not content at getting arrested for his attempts to singlehandedly start a bombing campaign in Britain during World War Two, at age 16, his book Borstal Boy, which recounted his time in a British youth prison, was subsequently banned for its frank description of the grim prison life. There was a certain amount of inevitability that Behan would lead a brief but riotous life, dying of alcoholism in New York in 1964 aged just 41. Born into a staunchly Republican family, his mother was a personal friend of Michael Collins, and his uncle Peadar Kearney wrote The Soldier’s Song, the young Brendan displayed his literary talents by writing a lament to Collins, The Laughing Boy, at the tender age of 13. The title was derived from the affectionate name that his mother Kathleen gave to her close friend Collins.

In 1940, at age 16, Behan joined the IRA and embarked on an unauthorised solo mission to England to set off a bomb. When he was arrested his prosecutors tried to persuade him to testify against his IRA superiors by offering him his freedom and a new identity in Canada. When the young Behan refused to be turned, he was sentenced to three years borstal. Prison was central to Behan’s literary development where he found time to write plays, poems and novels. By aged 23 his prison days and IRA ways were over, and he embarked on a professional writing career. Throughout his literary life he would rise at seven, write until noon when the pubs opened and then join the rest of his literacy bedfellows in the local for a drinking session.

During the 1950s the literary culture of Ireland was also a drinking culture, and his pub pals included literary greats Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and JP Donleavy. Initially Behan was able to combine heavy drinking with his literary output which included writing the remarkable play A Quare Fellow, which is a prison term for a person who is to be hanged. The drama chronicled prison life leading up to the execution of a fellow prisoner who we never see. Like Oscar Wilde, Behan was able to turn the moral darkness of the gallows into literature with a view of shining a light on the cruelty of the death penalty. The play gave us the longing prison lament, The Auld Triangle, which Behan drunkenly sang on stage on Broadway to mark his arrival in the States.

America brought Behan international recognition and drinking partners including Ernest Hemmingway. In terms of fame the US was good for Behan, with rising stars, such as Bob Dylan, courting the Irishman’s company. However, it was not good for his literary output, or his liver and Behan died in 1964 aged just 41. How Behan would live his brief life is best the summed up on the first page of his banned seminal work Borstal Boy: "I grabbed my suitcase… gelignite, detonators, electrical and ignition and the rest of my Sinn Féin conjuror’s outfit and carried it to the window. Then the gentlemen arrived."

The rest of the course Behan’s riotous life is echoed in the chime of his melancholy prison lament: “And the auld triangle went jingle, bloody jangle, all along the banks of the royal canal.”

Rebel writers and freedom of speech

Ireland’s rebel writers have caused such controversy in their own times that censors sought to ban what they had to say. But whilst grey politicians and moralists are but footnotes in history, the books that they tried to ban are revered and have shaped cultural landscape of the world that we live in. At their heart, these novels sought to observe the human condition in all its uncomfortable complexity. It was these rebel Irish writers who bravely sought to recount human complexity in their literature and refused to be silenced by the Yahoos.

Dr David McKinstry is a teacher and poet whose poems are widely published and broadcast across Ireland and in the UK. If any readers wish to share their literary output with him, they can contact him at: davmick38h@yahoo.co.uk