Irish Writing London by Herron Tom;

Author:Herron, Tom; [Herron, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1094075
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

To look to seas and mountains and to turn a rhyme.

(Tynan, 1914: 40)

Images of the city’s inhabitants weighed down by work and care – ‘heavy with money-getting’ – would become a feature of her London poems for years.14

Throughout her discursive writings, too, the city is depicted as a malignant force, gradually seeping into and encroaching upon the English countryside. She tells us in her memoirs that her home in Ealing was bordered on its country-facing side by sheep pastures, but even in these spaces where the city sprawl had still to reach, these were not the ‘innocent country fields’ of her childhood (Tynan, 1916: 137). Dotted with ‘half-built or newly-built houses, as yet unoccupied’ which ‘suddenly started up in front of, behind’ her as she made her way homeward, the fields wear a sinister aspect: ‘We had heard strange stories of the creatures who sometimes dossed in those empty houses, untroubled by the police’ (Tynan, 1916: 136–7). The centre of London, in Tynan’s recollections, is more ominous still. It is a miasmal place, occluded by ‘fogs of a thick blackness … days of it sometimes when gaslight and lamplight went on all day and night’ (Tynan, 1916: 181), and where nature has been tainted by industry: ‘the blackness of the trees in their stems and branches, the blackness of the earth which seemed to have been mixed with soot; … the curious phenomenon that one could not even pluck a flower without having one’s fingers soiled’ (Tynan, 1912: 146). Describing her annual returns to Ireland, she would view her time there as a period of revivification – ‘the change that should enable us to go on living again’ (Tynan, 1912: 143).

As long as she remained outside Ireland, it remained in her imagination unchanged and unchanging: positively in its aspect, far more negatively in its attitudes. ‘The way with Ireland,’ she would write, ‘is that no sooner do you get away from her than the golden mists begin to close about her, and she lies, an Island of the Blest, something enchanted in your dreams’ (Tynan, 1912: 159). She admitted that the reality of her homeland often turned out to be very different than her visions of it from afar. So, too, would it be with the people who actually lived there. Over the course of her period of exile, she would see her work intensely scrutinized by her nationalist compatriots in particular: the ‘touchiness of my own country-people,’ she would state, ‘was always a trouble’ (Tynan, 1916: 261). By the mid–1890s, she found herself falling foul of both John B. Yeats, and her oldest and dearest literary friend, Father Matthew Russell. Defending herself against Mr. Yeats’s accusations that her work was ‘anti-Irish’, she pointed to the difficulties inherent in her position as an Irish person writing from an English location:

if you protested mildly against the many shibboleths concerning England you were told that you have become Anglicised by long residence in England, and if you hinted at an Irish fault a whole avalanche of reproaches were hurled upon you.

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