I SUSPECT that being a writer in Ireland is very much like being a writer in any tight community. We do not remember often enough that whether we live in Winesburg or in Reykjavik, in Dublin or in Catania, we are a world fraternity, growling the same growls, enjoying the same compensations, subject to the same local pressures, breathing much the same sort of reconditioned air like a dehydrater gush from a subway on a hot day. 

Listening to them at it in the Cafe Canova, or the Greco in Rome, one might imagine oneself back in the Pearl Bar or Mooney's in Dublin; surrounded by the same sort of community with tender corns, vulner- able pieties, touchy pride, precious loyalties, inflated patriotism, provincial prejudices. It is like living with the family, whose love also begs for silence, blunts frankness, exacerbates honesty until it all ends up in schizophrenia and double-think—secret reservations of the truth, public asseverations of subterfugal sentimentalities. 

If the writer speaks out the community will tear him to pieces; if he does not he will rend himself; if he braves the results he will meet other dangers he did not foresee—anger, bitterness, hate, cynicism. Ibsen said he left Norway because he found friendship too expensive. One can hear them saying it: "Oh, come now, be a good chap! You can't put that character into a play. Everybody will say at once, 'Why, that's Bjornson!' Please—dear Henrik!" 

The obvious solution is exile, but it isn't really. The problem solves itself otherwise, usually by driving the writer much further from the unbearable, literal reality than he had ever meant to go. Joyce's practical exile was to Paris, Rome, Trieste, Zurich; his literary exile was into symbolism, and he ended up lost in the tropical jungle of Finnegans Wake. Hawthorne, who could not exile his body, took up quarters in the same sublimatory refuge from the compressions of Salem. Hardy dilated man into myth, his peasants, who were doubtless as boring as all peasants, into a Greek chorus. For many of the so-called realists are not realists—they are disguised mystics. Graham Greene followed the same route. 

There are scarcely more than fifty pages in all Hemingway to suggest that he ever had a father, a mother, a childhood or a home. To fill this void of intimate life that l:fis heart must know so well, and which, for reasons best known to his heart he has denied, he has invented two subjects—Death and Heroism—and scoured the world for figures to act them out. 

Kafka, Malraux, Mauriac, Faulkner, Silone—the examples of internal flight are many. You cannot jump off your own shadow. The farther you go from your sun the longer your shadow gets. There is, apparently, only one thing to do with the damned thing: eat it. 

I suppose no Irish writer thought he had jumped off his shadow more effectively than Shaw. A naturalized Londoner almost in his teens, aggressively socialist when it was unfashionable, resolutely rationalist, a dealer in political and economic theory, an absorbed social satirist of English life, he said explicitly that he had to go to London for the same reason as his father went to the Corn Exchange—because his business was there. 

I do not believe a word of it. It sounds like a post factum rationalization. The key to his heart is his resolute anti-romanticism, bred in him by the terrifying sight of Dublin's dreamers, drunkards and gabblers. "Not me!"—and a single ticket for Euston. 

Nothing that Shaw wrote, one play apart, might thereafter seem even remotely indebted to or affected oy that legendary Aeaea whose circean cobwebs he so angrily tore from his eyes. Yet, I believe that some of the best things he ever did were written by the light and heat of that mythical sun, his shadow-maker, melting his cold intellect to let a bit of the poetry of life blossom through—Joan, Candida, Captain Shotover: people behaving as they always do in real life according to entirely irrational and mysterious urges by no means unknown to the Irishman Shaw, but hated, feared and perpetually mocked at by the anglicized, socialized, intellectualized, deromanticized, Fabianized, Londonized Shavian changeling. If only he had the courage not to have been so terrified of his emotions——if only he had even got drunk once in awhile—he might not have been so witty but he might have been a more human writer. 

ONE agrees that modern Irish life is not very inspiring. Indeed, leav- ing aside its many rich compensations which we all know about and gratefully enjoy, and bearing in mind that these compensations are on the level of the homme moyen sensuel rather than of the intellectual or the artist, one might be forgiven for finding modern Ireland depressing to the point—at which many soon arrive—of strong drink. A one-class society of petty-bourgeois businessmen. not exactly cultivated; a rather puritanical church, not strikingly famous for its contribution to Christian thought, or indeed any thought; a hard bunch of old-time politicians still thinking, or whatever they call it, in the vein of the first World War—it is not a very gay picture. The air is dry. A generation of isolationism and obscurantism has changed a lively nationalism into a cantankerous provincialism. The strings are about as hoarse as an unkeyed double-bass on a damp day. But, surely, as far as writers are concerned it is all a matter of digestion. This is their material; there is no other that they know. 

I have no patience with young would-be writers anywhere who say: "But it is all so dreary, there is no- thing to write about!" One thinks of Gogol, thinking also that he would spend his life recording romantic life, the Saga of the Caucasian cossacks, and then writing two masterpieces about two types that one might meet any day in the back-streets of Dublin or Winesburg, the civil servant of The Cloak and the engaging spiv of Dead Souls. 

It has happened that the drearier the life the better the writing. I have never been to Silone's native village in the Abruzzi, but I suppose it is not much more exciting to look at than Carlo Levi's Eboli, or those desolate Sicilian uplands that flame and smoulder in Vittorini's Conversation in Sicily! Serradifalco! Acquaviva! I can assure any young man complaining about the frustration of his Ballybehindbeyond that it is a Paris Plage compared to those woebegotten hamlets. 

The answer to "What is there to write about? anywhere is in the title of Silone's novel The Seed Be-neath the Snow. No writer has the right to blame his material for his own failure to integrate the little lives he knows with the universal life of man. A writer may, like a spider, have to spin his web out of his bowels, but if he is a writer at all he is an epical spider shooting his fragile threads from his dusty corner to span the world.

ONE particular failure in modern Irish writing is striking: the failure in comedy, strange in a people notoriously supposed to have a special gift for comedy. A couple of weeks ago, in reviewing Evelyn Waugh's new book, Cyril Connolly said a very shrewd thing about satire, using this very image of digestion—what I call the writer eating up his own shadow: "An author must digest his own stomach so completely that his anger and loyalties, indignations and regrets"—How well one knows those indignations and regrets!—"are invisible to the naked eye. One trace of emotion and the illusion will vanish, the magician in his tails is gone, and an embittered old schoolmaster is in his place." 

How many writers of satire could read that without feeling their withers being wrung? Shaw certainly could not have heard it unmoved. I have been told, but I have never been able to locate it in print, that when he saw Chekov for the first time, he threw up his hands in despair. (But, then, Chekov had said: "If the old tarry rope is put into your hand you must pull it.") 

Could Aldous Huxley pass Mr. Connolly's test? Or the later O'Casey? Maugham does, and Gide, in Les Caves du Vatican, and what makes Waugh one of the great comic writers of English literature is that in all his best work he has with great human sympathy surmounted an evident natural weakness to cavil with what the gods sent him. There are these great writers of social comedy in the Irish literature of our time, George Moore, in his famous trilogy, and Somerville and Ross. Since their day bitterness has set in. The shadows have eaten up the writers who should have eaten them. 

IT is easy enough to write like this, of course; in practice the business of absorption is the trickiest thing in the world. All sorts of booby traps lie in wait: melodrama, sentimentality, burlesque, moonshine, rank egregiousness. They lie in wait for every writer, one agrees, but they have a special lure for the provincial who so easily imagines that by walking into them he is emancipating himself from them: as when the satirist who thinks he is a rebel against folly fails into a burlesque which is a greater folly. I think your often-excellent satirist Erskine Caldwell had often fallen into this trap. Has Saroyan escaped sentimentality always; and at his best, though I know few Americans will agree with me, he is one of your finest short-story writers? 

All American novelists are continually falling into the trap of melodrama, not excluding the very finest, such as Hemingway, or John O'Hara. And, then, the very urge for honesty, the social conscience (those "indignations and regrets")—what has this not done to Upton Sinclair? For although this problem of stomaching, of digesting one's material is more obviously urgent in the small country, in the tight community, it is a universal problem. Since this article is appearing in a Catholic magazine it is pertinent to point out that the problem is particularly important for writers dealing with Catholic communities. The Mauriac of later years has time and again failed to keep his detachment; the later Greene, as in his new play "The Living Room," has sometimes fallen into the most banal, and vulgar cliches. 

Perhaps it is all a question of perspective, and I have always advised young Irishmen, following my own practice, to get out of Ireland as often as possible in order to keep their sense of perspective; and, contrary to my own foolish practice, to avoid controversy. But was there ever a writer who couldn't give good advice and not stick to it himself?

One takes comfort from Yeats's lines: "All things can distract me from this art of verse . . . . The seeming needs of my fool-driven l a n d . . . ," and so on. One can love too much. One can pity too much. Yeats's epitaph was, Look with a cold eye on life, on death . . . . Bless his heart, he never did. 

Really, there is only one rule for a writer that is worth a curse. Despise the crowd, and—again it is so very easy to say it—be yourself. We, said Simone Weil, is of the devil; but I is of God. Certainly, for a writer, all organizations (My goodness, the number I have belonged to in my salad days!), all political loyalties are ruin and disaster. 

That is where Ireland is always catching us: the ties of family, the sense of responsibility, the ancient blood-bond, all the choking tendrils of the heart. I can sympathize with Shaw. Think of what might have happened to him if he had remained in Ireland! He would either have been shot in 1916 or—dreadful and pitiable thought!—he might have become a minister of state.