An Irishman's Diary: a reading from the book of nemesis

Strolling the leafy back roads of the National Library one night recently, I chanced upon an extraordinary book published in London in 1935. The author was a certain Tom Penhaligon, a name that meant nothing except to suggest Cornish origins. What caught my eye was the book's title, The Impossible Irish. And what really hooked me was the "dedication", worth quoting almost in full: "This book is flung in the face of the Irish – a fighting race who never won a battle, a race of politicians who cannot govern themselves, a race of writers without a great one of native strain, an island race who have yet to man a fleet for war, for commerce or for the fishing banks [...], a pious race excelling in blasphemy, who feel most wronged by those they have first injured, who sing of love and practise fratricide, preach freedom and enact suppression, a race of democrats who sweat the poor, have a harp for an emblem and no musicians, rebelled on foreign gold and cringed without it, whose earlier history is myth and murder, whose later, murder, whose tongue is silver and whose heart is black, a race skilled in idleness, talented in hate, inventive only in slander, whose land is a breeding ground of modern reaction and the cradle of western crime".

Phew. There are polemics and there are polemics, but there surely can’t be many books that have squeezed so much vitriol into a “dedication” – the part most authors reserve for a single-line tribute to a loved one. Unspent in this preliminary outburst, however, the author proceeds to elaborate on his theme, over 216 pages. So doing, he lends a few hostages to fortune. Allowing, for example, that Ireland may have bred two notable writers of “native strain” (“strain” is a key word, allowing him to claim other Irish-born writers like Swift and Goldsmith as “English to the core”), namely Burke and Carleton, he appears not to consider James Joyce of any importance, even in 1935.

Hugh O’Neill’s career also seems to have escaped him, given his assertion that the Irish “never won a battle” and were “rabbits in the face of force, all through their history”. But those and other omissions are mere details.

Vast, sweeping generalisations are Penhaligon’s thing, as in what may be his clinching argument – that, whenever the Irish have a choice (after emigration usually), they never “marry among themselves”.

Irishwomen, he insists, will choose “an Englishman, a German, a Russian, a Jew, a Dutchman, Hottentot, or even a detested Scot” before wedding one of their own. And for Irishmen, the feeling is mutual. In this, if nothing else, Penhaligon agrees, both are entirely right. In consequence, and accepting it as a sort of white man’s burden, the author declares himself against any crackdown on Irish emigration to Britain. The emigrants are essentially harmless, he argues, especially the militant republicans. And besides, interbreeding with other strains can only improve them.

There is much more in this vein – on religion, censorship, inherent criminality, etc. So much so that, while reading this work, I assumed it must have caused quite a stir in Ireland at that time. We're still sensitive enough now to criticism, God knows. But this was barely a decade after independence, in the middle of economic war, when Eamon de Valera was urging people to "burn everything English except their coal" (actually Swift's phrase, from 200 years earlier). Presumably crowds in Dublin had warmed their hands over bonfires of the book? Well, no, it seems. In this newspaper's archive, I can see no mention of The Impossible Irish, or its author. It doesn't appear on the list of banned publications either, apparently. Nor does Mr Penhaligon feature in biographical dictionaries. The only contemporary review I can find is from the Spectator magazine, which slaughtered the book, occasioning a follow-up exchange of letters between the author (who gave an address c/o the publishers) and the reviewer, Derek Verschoyle.

Penhaligon was especially upset by a phrase of Verschoyle’s suggesting that if the author were a person of “any public importance”, his book would have demanded “something sterner” than mere literary criticism. In his reply, the reviewer clarified that he wasn’t suggesting “recriminative violence”. But he repeated that since the phrase would only have applied to someone of stature, the author could rest assured it had “no reference to him”. Ouch. And with that, the book appears to have sunk unnoticed into the libraries of Britain and Ireland, where it remains, like an unexploded grenade.

@frankmcnallyIT