Kate O’Brien’s Farewell Spain and Mairin Mitchell’s Storm over Spain were published in 1937 while the Spanish Civil War was still in progress. This essay considers these travel writings in their wider European and Irish context and in the context of the lives and times of their authors. Close contemporaries, Mitchell and O’Brien were first published in the years during which Ireland – or at least the greater part of the island – progressed from being a territory of the United Kingdom to a fully independent state. Throughout the lifetimes of both authors, Catholicism was a fundamental and defining aspect of Irish national identity alongside an official, secular culture based on language revivalism, traditional music and sport, literature and the visual arts. Both O’Brien and Mitchell were active in this culture, albeit critically so and without ever succumbing to insularity. On the contrary, both are European in focus, seeing in Europe a place where Irish people might, as in the past, come to express both their distinctiveness from Britain and the anglosphere, and their commonality with the mainly Catholic or post-Catholic national states of the continent – O’Brien urges that Ireland catch onto Europe, Mitchell suggests that Ireland was never more independent than when it was engaged with Europe. The recommendation is complicated by the fact that the Europe onto which they wish Ireland to catch was bitterly divided.
This article examines the ways Hubert Butler conceived of the link between respectability and the most baleful aspects of twentieth-century Croatian and Irish experiences. Butler maintained that nationalism and religion could provide ethical approaches to living in society, but only when they informed concrete actions in limited, local, contexts. However, since the nineteenth century, religion and nationalism have, to a considerable extent, been employed as instruments of respectability, as they increasingly became ideas that emanated and were organised from a centre and, more or less, uniformly diffused over large areas. For Butler, this was a pernicious development as it fractured established neighbourly bonds and replaced them with essentially abstract ways of living in society. Butler believed that smaller communities, like Ireland and Croatia, offered a defence against this sort of abstraction, even if his experiences in both countries showed how powerful the pull exerted by religious, cultural and imperial centres was on these more peripheral societies, and how metropolitan modes of respectability were copied there, often to disastrous effect. Respectability, therefore, lay at the heart of Butler’s ethical perspective on society, and functions as a lens through which the transnational linkages he worked to establish between Croatian and Irish experience become apparent.
Maurice Leitch was a Northern Irish writer whose fiction is marked by a distinctive exploration of identity, displacement and the psychological legacy of political conflict. His early novels The Liberty Lad (1965) and Poor Lazarus (1969), as well as the later Silver’s City (1981), are set in Ulster and portray life in a region shaped by frustrations, sectarian division and historical tension. Through understated yet powerful narratives, Leitch reflects on the enduring impact of Ireland’s troubled past, frequently exploring themes of exile, memory and silence. While his final novel, Gone to Earth (2019), departs geographically by setting its story in postwar Spain, it continues to resonate with the concerns of Leitch’s Irish fiction, subtly refracting themes of loss, violence, dislocation and historical reckoning through a foreign landscape. The novel’s Spanish setting becomes a mirror for the Irish experience, with its suppressed histories and unresolved legacies of violence. Drawing on concepts from trauma and memory studies, this article examines how Leitch constructs a narrative of transnational reflection, in which Ireland’s own conflicts and silences are reimagined through the remnants of Spain’s civil war and Franco’s regime.
This paper traces some of the connections between the canonical Samuel Beckett (1906-89) and the almost-forgotten Blanaid Salkeld (1880-1958). Both were involved with the Irish literary scene, had mutual friends, and moved in the same social and creative circles. During the 1930s, the second decade of the Irish Free State, while Beckett travelled between Ireland and other European countries, Salkeld remained living and immersed in Dublin’s artistic activities. In August 1934, under the pseudonym Andrew Belis,[1] Beckett’s opinion piece “Recent Irish Poetry” was published in The Bookman. Here, Beckett distinguishes between the “antiquarians”, poets invested in Ireland’s past and who then dominated the Irish poetry scene, and “others” who display more modern tendencies in their verse (1934: 235). Nestled within Beckett’s polemic, which is predominantly focused on male poets, is his views on Salkeld’s debut collection, Hello! Eternity (1933). Explored here are Beckett’s cross-generational friendships with the Salkeld family, his perspective on Blanaid Salkeld’s poetry as well as his intended contribution to her successful broadsheet series: Dublin Poets & Artists (circa. 1939–43). Intertwined in this examination are associations with three small, private presses: the Europa Press, which was founded by their mutual friend George Reavey, the Cuala Press, which was set up by Elizabeth “Lolly” Yeats and Susan “Lily” Yeats, and Salkeld’s Gayfield Press, which she co-founded with her son, Cecil, in 1937. Also informing this examination are new findings from this author’s discovery and ongoing analysis of Blanaid Salkeld’s private literary archive. Notes [1] Belis was the (slightly misspelled) surname of Beckett’s maternal grandmother, Anne (née Belas).
The convulsive European context of 1937 produced a variety of travel books related to the Spanish Civil War that were published simultaneously. Together with politically engaged works by authors such as Peadar O’Donnell, Kate O’Brien, or Arnold Lunn, two significant authors of Irish descent recorded retrospectively the prelude and beginning of the Spanish conflict, offering in their travelling accounts the perception of a Europe in crisis and their committed responses to international politics. This study explores the convergence of London-Irish journalist Mairin Mitchell’s Storm over Spain (1937) and Irish-American Ursuline Sister Monica Maginnis’ And Then the Storm (1937), and of their portraits of Spanish life before the Civil War started. The comparative analysis brings up two perceptions of the prelude within the European and international context, and proves the useful contribution of their travel books, as cultural and historical documents, in exposing features of the conflict. Mitchell and Maginnis, in their efforts to grasp Spain’s imminent tragedy, prove the transformation of the genre and their divergent Catholic perspectives of a conflict in Europe.
