Bearing Witness: Essays on Anglo-Irish Literature by Augustine Martin, ed. Anthony Roche, UCD Press, 259pp, £26.95/£16.95
NEVER met Gus Martin or attended one of his lectures when he was Professor of Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin, from 1979 to 1995. Yet he had an influence on the way I and an entire generation read literature. As editor of the Leaving Certificate poetry anthology, Soundings, he to some degree dictated what our first experiences as serious readers of poetry would be. Gus Martin defined the parameters of our early reading, and further reading in subsequent years often bore out his judgments.
Bearing Witness is the first publication from the new UCD Press and it is a worthy monument to this critic and scholar, with essays written between 1963 and 1994. There are none of the inspired leaps of faith of Declan Kiberd or the verbal brilliance of Seamus Deane in this volume. Martin saw himself as an educator and communicator, and was always careful not to put himself between the reader and the text.
He was very much a critic of the old school and seemed uneasy with the new wave of criticism which now dominates literary discourse. The essay "Yeats Remembered" contains an uncharacteristic dig at "leftist, political - and largely polemical - criticism", with Messrs Deane, Kiberd and Eagleton coming in for a sideswipe.
This belief in the more traditional forms of criticism can sometimes be frustrating in this volume. A fine essay on "Fable and Fantasy" concludes that "We still have access to a unique body of fiction in the dark and the light fantastic to remind us of what we once had the impudence to imagine". One of the post-colonial critics he seems so uncomfortable with might well have compared the works of Flann O'Brien, Eimar O'Duffy and Mervyn Wall to that of the Magic Realists in the developing countries rather than stressing their supposed uniqueness.
When Martin was good, he was very, very good. The piece on The Crock of Gold is superb in capturing the strangeness and subtlety of that most neglected novel. The total engagement of the author with the subject is obvious, as it is in his famous essay, "Inherited Dissent", from 1965.
This is Martin as polemicist, and it is certainly not a museum piece. His plea to young Irish writers to take their view of Irish society from their own experiences rather than from their reading of Joyce and O'Faolain is as relevant as ever, when many are still detailing a world of Catholic guilt and repression culled from the novels of John McGahern rather than from their own lives.
He comments, aptly, that "There is neglect of that great provincial hinterland represented by Mullingar, Roscrea, Kilkenny and Athlone where the real dynamism of change and development is cent red. When our city writers go down the country they invariably head for exotic and exceptional places like Ballyferriter and Achill, bypassing a whole provincial ethos in a blur of alternating grey and green." Urban life outside Dublin remains relatively unexamined in Irish fiction.
Mary Lavin is one writer whom Martin picks out as an exemplary chronicler of that Ireland, and his essay, "A Skeleton Key to the Stories of Mary Lavin", is as much a heartfelt plea for her elevation to a proper place in the canon as a piece of criticism. His essay on Austin Clarke is similar. It is ironic that in this piece, written in 1965, he says that "Ten years ago Kavanagh was regarded as Ireland's leading poet just as surely as Clarke is now considered to have taken the place." That verdict has certainly been reversed in the meantime, a process Martin aided; as Anthony Roche says in a fine introduction to this volume, Martin changed the view of Kavanagh from "someone to avoid on the streets of Dublin to a gifted poet illuminated by a sense of wonder".
There is much to enjoy in this book. It includes a twenty-page extract from a projected major biography of Kavanagh which Martin was still working on at the time of his death last year, and a review of Death of a Naturalist from 1966 which presciently asserts that Seamus Heaney is "such a marvellous poet that only fools can fail to heed him".
Gus Martin was often right and sometimes wrong in his literary judgments, but what this fine book shows is that he always cared. Q.D. Leavis, another critic of the old school, was once asked if a book was worth arguing about. Her reply that nothing but a book was worth arguing about might very well sum up the credo of this most humane and sincere of critics.