George Russell (1867-1935) was born in Lurgan, the third child of a Methodist bookkeeper in a cambric manufacturers, and died in Bournemouth, but the centre of his life's activity was Plunkett House on Merrion Square, Dublin, where he became a "conduit" for the new doctrines that shaped, or tried to shape, the emerging Irish state.
"AE" - his pen name became the name he went by - attributed what happened to him to the agencies of the spirit world, but his regional and religious background certainly mattered. Lurgan stuck to him, if he did not stick to it. His prose is biblical in its diction, prophetic in its claims of the inner light, and like a Protestant Sunday sermon in its hammering tedium. His poems are like those of Blake's that most resemble hymns.
In 1933, AE contributed to the 32 per cent decline over 15 years in the Protestant population of the Free State. From Bournemouth, he angrily brayed his pride in being Anglo-Irish, "the most virile and intelligent people in Ireland". Who finally would remain in the country? "Two or three thousand pure Gaels . . . mostly half-wits," he wrote in a letter to The Irish Times, "the kind of people we meet in the West, their minds a clotted mass of superstition". This was a bitter turnaround for a man who spent decades celebrating the pure Gael and painting hundreds of "visionary" pictures of faeries and Celtic deities.
In 1940, Frank O'Connor, reviewing AE's writings and paintings, concluded that the "light, quick, gay, and spontaneous" character (with "just a little malice") that he loved, did not transpire at all in the works that remained. "Somebody in a hundred years' time will wonder why we thought him a great man". Those who have since written about AE have too often tried to show he was great because he was kind, good, profound, lovable or tolerant, leaving out the malice. The saint that results is rather a bore.
But Nicholas Allen has learned to make sense of AE's mind. The story he has to tell is a fascinating retrieval of cultural debate in the crucial years of the founding of the State. In this important new book, AE appears primarily not as painter, poet, or bicycling organiser of rural cooperatives, but as the brilliant editor of the Irish Homestead (1905-23) and the Irish Statesman (1923-30). Alongside first publication of works by Joyce, Kavanagh, O'Casey, O'Connor, Ó Faoláin, O'Flaherty, Shaw, Stuart and Yeats, the editor propagandised on behalf of a remarkable sequence of causes, from co-operative creameries and collective banks, to the Shannon hydroelectric scheme and the commercial potential of an international airport in Ireland.
AE was, Allen shows, an avid follower of the anarchist Kropotkin in 1912. A colonised people made a fetish of the State, so AE preached that self-help and mutual aid were the real way to self-respect; Sinn Féin applauded. From 1913, AE became a fellow-traveller of James Connolly, not liking socialism, but wanting to link his farmer co-operatives with urban workers in a non-sectarian challenge to the alliance of capitalism and the church.
Caught unawares by 1916, AE offered an alternative future in The national being. He now wanted to constrain a rebellious and fractious people to a single corporate will. "Co-operation" became a code word for subordination to guidance by an intellectual elite, people like Horace Plunkett who employed AE, and Yeats who domineered over him. He wanted the Irish majority to believe that this group was not a leftover of colonial Ireland, but a vanguard of a new one, "sentinels and frontiersmen thrown out before . . . the races yet to come into being".
AE's The interpreters (1922) has always needed an interpreter - John Eglinton gave up, concluding, "it is an attempt to grapple with problems which do not exist". In Allen's account, this Platonic seminar among men awaiting execution signals AE's shift away from the labour movement and toward Irish capitalists, who, once instructed by the intellectual elite, should take hold of fractured, impoverished Ireland and run the damn place their own way.
For such top-down debates on the future of Ireland, AE got a weekly platform courtesy of Horace Plunkett, US investors, and, curiously, G. B. Shaw. They funded a version of the Fabian New Statesman in Dublin called The Irish Statesman (1923-30). Shaw bought heavily into the paper, it appears, because he wanted AE to be his cat's paw in a critique of Irish separatism (the de Valera faction) and in praise of individual freedom, internationalism, and industry. AE then followed the old Fabian strategy: rather than organising a political party, he tried to infiltrate the new government with ideas that would shape the country.
Strangely, these ideas are sometimes those of Italian fascism. But his contributors Shaw, Yeats, and Walter Starkie all admired Mussolini, and so did AE. Given the image of AE as a benevolently smiling yogi, it is surprising that AE had no objection to the use of force by Cumann na nGaedheal to bring about an "efficient organisation" of democracy. When Sinn Féin internees went on hunger strike, AE derided them as an egomaniacal group with "only an abnormal and inherited capacity for suffering". Democracy was not working, AE somewhat prematurely concluded, so "give bureaucracy or autocracy its chance".
One can see why the Sinn Féin paper failed to see the statesmanship of the Irish Statesman. When the Censorship Bill was debated, he was less concerned with censorship, in principle, than with who was doing it to whom.
AE was a key to the Literary Revival in its role as an inventor of Ireland. Yet the prophet was shocked when the thing came to life. The rising of 1916, the Anglo-Irish War, the Civil War, the birth of Fianna Fáil, the Censorship Bill, each came as a dreadful, surprising turn of events - surprising to him, but understandable to readers of Nicholas Allen's book. In this impressive début, he gives us an AE who is a fully engaged intellectual, intervening, time and again, in a struggle to get control of the "national being".
Adrian Frazier is the guest-editor of the current issue of The Irish Review, and directs the MA programmes in Writing and Drama and Theatre Studies at NUI, Galway
George Russell (AE) and the New Ireland, 1905-30. B y Nicholas Allen. Four Courts Press, 267 pp. €45