I was introduced to the Minister, a pale intense man with light hair, son of Maud Gonne, he had a right to be there. But while I was explaining that the only hope for a united country was in federation with firm guarantees for the north in regard to censorship, divorce, birth control and the place of organised religion in the constitution, I could see a few feet away Micheál Mac Liammóir, the actor, walking past …
The scene closes, neatly enough, with ‘people gathering or making small circles round us, other folk who wished obviously to shake the Minister’s hand, so we drifted to the waiting cars.
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliffe Churchyard Yeats is laid.’16
Let us pause here and rewind this scene. Hewitt is standing in the churchyard of a small, somewhat remote Church of Ireland church and, undoubtedly tactfully but nevertheless, forthrightly, identifying four key matters that the Irish Republic should rectify before the possibility of a ‘federal’ Ireland could be considered! It is 1948, remember. Debate and schism has been ongoing regarding the constitutional changes to the Irish state, which would leave the Commonwealth of Nations and declare itself a Republic in 1949. So this conversation was wedded to current hot-wired political realities and issues. Look at the wish list Hewitt ‘shares’ with the pale and intense young(ish) Minister for External Affairs: censorship, divorce, birth control and the special place of the Catholic Church in the new Constitution.
It may be relevant here to note that censorship was officially still in place in one form or another until the late 1980s; divorce, originally prohibited by the 1937 Constitution, was legalised in 1995 in spite of huge opposition, after an earlier failed referendum in 1986; birth control, officially illegal in the Irish Free State and subsequent Republic from 1935 until 1980 and a series of legal reforms and challenges up to 1992, while the special place of the Church in the Irish Constitution remained until 1973 and the overwhelming support (85 per cent) of the vote in favour of deleting Article 44.
So the list John Hewitt brought to that brief encounter with the Irish government minister remained elusive for almost half a century, from that churchyard ceremonial re-interment of W.B. Yeats in September 1948 to April 1998 and the Good Friday Agreement which, in a sense, left a possible, virtual federal Ireland such as Hewitt’s on the table, with the collective support of the people – 71 per cent in the North and almost 95 per cent in the Republic.
John Hewitt died in 1987 before this important civic statement of cultural inclusiveness came about, and what has happened in the twenty years since 1998 is well beyond the scope of this chapter. But the business of legacy, guilt, political ideals and their human cost, alongside the meaning of the past, are centre stage for those with an emotional investment in the future of the country. What we do know is that the last fifteen or so years of Hewitt’s life, after he returned from Coventry in 1972 to live in Belfast, were marked by the enduring tragedy of political violence reminiscent of that which had attended the birth of the two states on the island and the partition that had underpinned the division of the country; reminiscent but much worse and lasting for far longer. Hewitt’s intellectual and cultural engagement with the Irish Free State and its successor, the Republic, was very much in keeping with his generation of Northern writers and, particularly, Northern artists whose work he did so much to promote at home and abroad. The divided island did not mean a divided culture, as younger scholars such as Guy Woodward17 are showing in ever greater detail.
From quite an early age, Hewitt wrote poems (and prose) about his sense of Ireland’s history and mythology, even though it was his restless probing of ideas about regionalism with which he would become much more identified. His discomfort with the Northern state is well charted ground, and his critical sense of not making contact with a readership in Northern Ireland pained him, or maybe frustrated is a better word. ‘I am not speaking to my people,’ he was to remark in an interview in 1980 about this fracture in communication between poet and his community, ‘it is inescapable. But linked with it is the important fact of the total lack of literary interest amongst unionists of the north, the lack of any fixed literary tradition.’18
Hewitt’s verse from Conacre (1943) and No Rebel Word (1948) all the way through to the final collections such as Kites in Spring: A Belfast Boyhood (1980) and Loose Ends (1983)19 are inflected with a deepening consciousness of the damage done by the political exploitation of division as much as by a nostalgia for a different past, often embodied in the personae of his father, for instance in his poem, ‘Going Up to Dublin’ as delegate to a teachers’ conference:
When, with Partition, Protestants hived off,
he stayed in loyally to all his kind,
that they were teachers was to him enough,
to sect and party singularly blind.20
His sketches of local life lived under the shadows of violence have a resonance for all involved in the, at times, sanitised revisiting of Irish history, particularly in this decade of commemorations, as in ‘The Troubles 1922’.
With Curfew tense,
each evening when that quiet hour was due,
I never ventured far from where I knew
I could reach home in safety. At the door
I’d sometimes stand, till with oncoming roar,
the wire-cage Crossley tenders swept in view.21
Even his youthful enthusiasm for James Connolly finds its expression in an elegy published in 1928,22 as well as in an unpublished sonnet, identified by Frank Ormsby in his editing of the Collected Poems of John Hewitt with the title, ‘To the Memory of James Connolly, patriot and martyr, murdered by British soldiers, May 10th 1916’,23 though, as Ormsby reminds us, Connolly was actually executed by firing squad in Kilmainham Gaol on 12 May:
When I was six years old I heard
Connolly address a Labour Crowd –
I cannot recollect a word
Yet I am very proud[.]
Alongside these simple poetic samples one can place so many much finer and more complex Hewitt poems whose concern ranges from the Great War and the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War and its bloody aftermath, both for the victorious Allies and for the cities of defeated Nazi Germany. It seems that at a very early stage of his development, John Hewitt’s cultural bearings were earthed by the 1930s excitement with politics, as W.J. McCormack’s Northman biography describes in regard to Hewitt’s contact with leading figures of the Irish Republican Congress, such as Peadar O’Donnell and Frank Ryan, and writing under the pseudonym (Richard Telford) for The Irish Democrat and much else. Hewitt was regularly back and forth across the border to Dublin and elsewhere, as much as he was visiting in London and all the other very many different places in Europe both he and Roberta vacationed in throughout their lives together.
On 16 December 1949, just a year after that conversation with Seán MacBride in Sligo, the Hewitts were on the move again, on the ‘Enterprise’ train ostensibly bound for a dinner organised by the PEN Club in Dublin. ‘Complex feelings of resentment, relief, guilt, and confusion shuttled across the border,’ McCormack remarks, as the Hewitts temporarily left behind post-war (and blitzed) Belfast for a brief stay in post-Emergency and neutral Dublin:
On board the ‘Enterprise’ they met friends, including the painter Daniel O’Neill; the journey passed quickly. They had booked into Jury’s [sic] Hotel – ‘posh’ by their standards. On Saturday evening, Hewitt was surprised and pleased by Roger McHugh’s knowledge of his work, less impressed by Professor H.O. White’s pretences. Kenneth Reddin, a minor literary figure and a judge,24 brought them to the Hermitage, near Rathfarnham, an eighteenth-century mansion where Patrick Pearse had conducted a school. Roberta was moved by the romantic history of the place – it had been the home of Robert Emmet’s beloved [Sarah]; somebody had been hanged there. ‘I became a bit of an Irish Republican in the atmosphere’ [she records in her Journal].25
But