Dreaming of Home

Preface

Dreaming of Home is not a conventional academic study. There is no central thesis being set out, nor for that matter am I interested in proving an intellectual argument with a review of previous criticism, as is the case with most contemporary scholarly monographs. In keeping with the originals of these chapters, based on public lectures for a general audience which included hundreds of Irish Leaving Certificate students and their teachers, my intention is to convey as clearly and coherently as possible a ‘way in’ to the varied and, at times, complicated achievements of several Irish writers.

Ranging from the canonical status of Sean O’Casey and W. B. Yeats, the lectures – delivered over a span of fifteen and more years – were designed to encourage class participation, with discussion forming a lively and dynamic conclusion to the formal business of the lecture. So the reader should, to begin with, bear in mind the oral nature of these chapters, written as they were to be spoken. I have, however, tried to convert the sometimes repetitive shape of a lecture – rehearsing ground, privileging clarity, generalisation and conclusions – into the necessary priorities of interlinked chapters.

That said, I should point out that there is an underlying pattern in Dreaming of Home, though unforced and secondary to each of the individual studies. For the ‘home’ here is both an actual place, a physical house, a neighbourhood, a region as much as it is an imagined place, somewhere ‘dreamed’ about and either revered or contested and damaged as a result. What happens when these places – in this instance, a room in a Dublin tenement in the early decades of the twentieth century – is assailed by soldiers of an Irish revolutionary army? Fast forward fifty or sixty years and move to the north-west of the island, to Colette Bryce’s Derry, and another ‘conflict situation’ involving civilians under attack this time by a (British) state army. Or move east and the violation of a family porch as a young family witness the brutal murder of their father in Gail McConnell’s 1980s Belfast. These extremes of history bracket Dreaming of Home and ←xi | xii→within them life carries on as best it can. Yeats’s fantasy of Miltonic splendour in Thoor Ballylee; Patrick Kavanagh’s influential journey from the borderlands of Monaghan to Dublin in the early 1930s; John Montague’s painful return from his boyhood family in New York to Garvaghey in County Tyrone, Derek Mahon’s poems, these all muse on the very human desire for a place to call ‘home’.

Acknowledgements

Earlier drafts of Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7 were delivered as public lectures in the Evening Lecture Series at Trinity College Dublin. Sections of Chapter 2 were included in a lecture given at ‘Maud Gonne: The Muse of W. B. Yeats’ Festival, Rossnaree, County Meath. Chapter 3 was given as an address at the Patrick Kavanagh Weekend in Inniskeen, County Monaghan and Chapters 6 and 7 were part of an extra-mural lecture series planned for 2020 but which did not take place due to the pandemic. All the material is unpublished and has been extensively rewritten for inclusion in Dreaming of Home.

The author would like to thank the organisers of the above lecture programmes, particularly Stephen Matterson, Lilian Foley, the late Ciaran Foley and Nicholas Grene (at TCD) and Brian Lynch (Patrick Kavanagh Weekend). A special thanks, too, to Conor Linnie for all his help with this and other publications.