Living by the sweat of his brow had proved to be beyond White, and, in a phrase as elegant as it is eloquent, he said that as regards ‘free love’ anyone ‘not by birth an aristocrat or gypsy lack[ed] the right balance of confidence or nonchalance’.27 (It was not to be his only deliberation on free love; there is a report of a lady turning down his offer in the twenties to stay in a republican free love commune. Her response was that she had no objection to the latter, but felt that the former meant living in Ireland, something she could not accept.) He concluded:
I had tried out Tolstoy. Doing so had convinced me that if Tolstoy had tried himself out as a younger man, instead of breaking away to his tragic death at the last, he’d have seen the snag he left people like Sedlak and me to find out for him. He sent his mind out on adventures and left his body with his wife and that convenient cook.28
‘From this Tolstoyan anarchist colony of Whiteway’ White turned from a pursuit of inner peace for his turbulent mind to a searching outside for social justice, which, as he said, took him into the ‘thick of the fight in Ireland’.29
White emerges from this time as someone who is desperately seeking some personal form of fulfilment but also with an awareness of himself that insists he must have a role to play in the grand scheme of things. Although a quarter of a century would elapse before he openly acknowledged his beliefs to be that of an anarchist, his demeanour was already of a nature that resisted centralised authority and was robustly sceptical of all grand narratives. Despite being married to a Roman Catholic, White opposed that body vigorously and in particular because of its centrally authoritarian structure. On the other hand, he had little patience for social constructs or ideologies that boiled down to a lot of ‘–isms’, whether it was Catholicism, nationalism, or the sectarianism that polluted both sides of the political divide in Ireland.
Home
In the spring of 1912 Sir George White ‘caught a chill at a flower show in the [Royal Chelsea] Hospital grounds, and became seriously ill’. He died on 24 June of that year and it is a mark of his prestige that while he lay seriously ill he had a visit from the king and queen, ‘who had both come in person to express to his wife their sympathy in her trouble’.30
At the beginning of 1912 Jack White was still at the Whiteway Colony. A letter he wrote to some of the Irish papers in Belfast, dated 15 April 1912, gives his address as c/o Francis Sedlak, Whiteway, Nr Stroud, Gloucestershire.31 Probably since his return from Canada, but certainly during his time in Whiteway, Ireland had begun to play a part in his thinking. He did at that time express a hope ‘to return to Ireland shortly’.32 Having spent holidays in Whitehall when young, with all the attendant attractions and, as importantly, securities of childhood memories, it would have represented for him somewhere he could find his bearings or at least gain some peace. The fact that at this stage his father’s ‘health had failed, and in the general breakdown he had been attacked by some form of that mysterious malady, aphasia’ (a disorder of speech and writing), 33 would have indicated to White that the time was imminent when he would have to take over as head of family and the duties of care for the White estate at Correen, outside Ballymena. Although the Whites were not exactly well off by ascendancy standards – Sir George having taken the Chelsea Hospital governorship ‘because he was not a rich man, and he felt that a comfortable house and an extra £500 a year were not to be thrown away’ 34 – Whitehall and its revenues would still have represented alleviation from the penury he and Dollie were enduring.
In those days, White, if his perspective of twenty years later is to be accepted, believed that he was inspired in some way. He wrote, ‘I had been dowered with liqueur sensation which freed me from the necessity to stop my processes in order to examine them.’ 35 He felt that this inspiration manifested itself in a power that assisted him in carrying out whatever his ‘sensation’ indicated to him. Convinced by his success in persuading Dollie from afar to marry him, he believed that ‘such a power’ at his disposal ‘could not stop at these long distance amorous assignations’.36 Identifying it with sexuality of a sort, he wondered that his
deepening and widening amorousness might hit on the exact time and place, say, to cut a country out from under the batons of twenty thousand policemen, or a church out from under a Pope, or a class out from under a carefully-nourished lie. I would be led to meet the men who would co-operate with me as surely as I had been led to meet Dollie.37
He postulates that ‘if action was no good without intelligence, intelligence was even less good without action’,38 and recollects his feeling of being ‘very much alive, and [I] suspected that my life impulse was derived from a highly intelligent Person, who was also alive’. Unnervingly he then states that ‘I decided more and more to trust my half formed wishes.’ 39
It is at this time that he addresses the Irish problem for the first time and in typical idiosyncratic fashion identifies it as ‘the sex problem writ large’. He sees the two ‘warring creeds and races’ as partners in an unstable marriage where ‘Ascendancy, male dominance, must disappear and with it the submissive, irresponsible, or the nagging, hysterical woman. Comradeship must take the place of male dominance or female emotional hysteria’.40 Reminiscent of Arnold’s gendering of the Celt and Anglo-Saxon, White’s analysis was not original, but it demonstrated both an objectivity and a precocity for its time: ‘Obviously they [the warring creeds] could not meet, while one partner was attached to a foreign king and the other to a foreign pope.’ 41
Political Debut
As both an outsider born and educated in England and someone whose roots were in Antrim, White was positioned to contribute substantially to resolving the ‘Irish Question’. As in the case of James Larkin and James Connolly, White represented the return of the diaspora but from a different tradition. The only evidence of his first foray into the Irish political scene comes from his own report of his speech delivered at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street, London, a well-known venue for political debate. The Times reported the meeting on 6 December 1912 but despite the lengthy list of speakers on the platform there is no mention of White. The Manchester Guardian, 3 December 1912, gave advance notice of the meeting, mentions White’s name and, interestingly, Yeats’s, but there was no follow-up report. Certainly, George Bernard Shaw, Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen Gwynn were present, and Shaw’s speech is reported in brief. It was an addition to the initial resolution of the meeting of the Irish Protestant Home Rule Committee which
expressed its abhorrence of the methods employed by Ulster Unionists, and wishes to assure the British electorate that the grant of self government so far from endangering Protestantism in Ireland, will further the spread of mutual toleration and trust among all creeds in the country.
Shaw, in typical fashion, reworked the old saw that England was nominally supposed to govern Ireland, but ‘that was a fiction’. He went on to say that
the fact he was an Irishman filled him with a wild and inextinguishable pride. He was assured that as a Protestant he would be protected by Englishmen. He would sooner be burnt at the stake (Cheers). He did not want religion banished from politics, particularly from Irish politics; but he wanted to banish much that was called ‘religion’.42
Conan Doyle, by then Sir Arthur, (whose origins were Irish), said that the Catholic Church in Ireland had never been a persecuting one, conveniently ignoring its singular lack of opportunity.43 White’s own speech, which was not reported, was a fine one but displayed some of the kind of independent thinking that earned him a reputation