Spiritual Wounds

Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War

Síobhra Aiken

• Publisher: Irish Academic Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781788551670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Irlande

This book challenges the widespread scholarly and popular belief that the Irish Civil War (1922–1923) was followed by a 'traumatic silence'. It achieves this by opening an alternative archive of published testimonies which were largely produced in the 1920s and 1930s; testimonies were written by pro- and anti-treaty men and women, in both English and Irish. Nearly all have eluded sustained scholarly attention to date. However, the act of smuggling private, painful experience into the public realm, especially when it challenged official memory making (or even forgetting), demanded the cautious deployment of self-protective narrative strategies. As a result, many testimonies from the Irish Civil War emerge in non-conventional, hybridised and fictionalised forms of life writing. This book re-introduces a number of these testimonies into public debate. It considers contemporary understandings of mental illness and how a number of veterans – both men and women – self-consciously engaged in projects of therapeutic writing as a means to 'heal' the 'spiritual wounds' of civil war. It also outlines the prevalence of literary representations of revolutionary sexual violence, challenging the assumptions that sexual violence during the Irish revolution was either 'rare' or 'hidden'.

Chapter One

‘Ridding Ourselves of the Past’:
Therapeutic Testimony

Desmond Ryan (1893–1964) lamented that the revolution had left ‘a bloody gulf of Civil War memories that hardly a generation will wipe out’.1 He responded by putting pen to paper. His 1934 memoir, Remembering Sion: A Chronicle of Storm and Quiet, documented his revolutionary experience from his political awakening as a child to his sudden departure from Ireland during the civil war. Critics were undecided. As one reviewer grumbled, ‘Looking back is a sad business. Mr. Desmond Ryan is really too young to indulge in it, and the events on which he looks back are too near and too vivid for him or for any of this generation to write of them with impartiality.’2 However, Ryan defended his personal project of remembrance. Having ‘waited some ten years’, he insisted that exorcising the ‘grimmest’ of these memories enabled him to ‘recover’ ‘good tempers’.3 This writing, he claimed, was a most rewarding endeavour:

It is not harping or brooding on the past but ridding ourselves of the past, blowing off the worst and retaining the best, and getting the picture and the experience of the past in proportion. What’s wrong with Ireland just at present is that Ireland won’t blow off steam once and for all but keeps all the Civil War and other war memories festering in her subconsciousness.4

Ryan was one of many revolutionaries whose writing was driven by what Frances Flanagan refers to as a ‘therapeutic goal’.5 Rosamond Jacob’s history The Rise of the United Irishmen 1791–94 (1937) was purportedly written as ‘an attempt to heal the wounds of the Civil War and the resulting splits in contemporary Irish life’;6 Frank O’Connor’s 1937 biography of Michael Collins, The Big Fellow – against whom he fought – is described in the foreword as ‘an act of reparation’;7 Seán O’Faoláin found that writing helped him to put his revolutionary memories ‘in their place’.8

Ryan’s interest lay not only in the personal catharsis writing could provide its author through the expression of the subconscious, but also in the narrativisation of these ‘spiritual wounds’ by others and how the sharing of testimony might cultivate mutual understanding across treaty lines. In his biography of Éamon de Valera, Unique Dictator (1936), he identified three veterans, who, like himself, had resorted to narrative as a means to grapple with the ‘fester[ing]’ ‘wounds of the Irish Civil War’:

In the pages of Peadar O’Donnell’s The Gates Flew Open [1932], in Francis Carty’s Legion of the Rearguard [1934], in Patrick Mulloy’s Jackets Green [1936], three Irish writers from different viewpoints have written from first-hand experience of the physical and spiritual ordeal through which a riven army and a sundered movement then passed, and few readers of their poignant pages, even if Ireland is to them only a name on a map, can escape the feeling that the deepest wounds of the Civil War were spiritual wounds …9

The first two testimonies selected by Ryan – who was a supporter of the treaty – are written by anti-treaty republicans, the third by a Free State army veteran. Although Peadar O’Donnell’s (1893–1986) prison memoir has a place in the revolutionary canon, the remarkable testimonies of Francis Carty (1899‒1972) and Patrick Mulloy (1903–1978) have almost totally eluded scholarly attention. Indeed, all three testimonies defy the standard conventions of autobiography: O’Donnell’s highly literary memoir builds on his depictions of civil war imprisonment in his earlier novel The Knife (1930), while Carty’s and Mulloy’s testimonies of their civil war experience take the form of novels.

This chapter interrogates the self-acknowledged therapeutic aims behind many civil war testimonies. Despite the critical neglect of such non-conventional writings, these projects of literary witnessing are of particular historical value given their foregrounding of experience effaced
from official remembrance. The blend of fiction, autobiography and memoir endorsed by O’Donnell, Carty and Mulloy – and indeed by many other veterans – is also indicative of the competing imperatives of disclosure and secrecy strongly associated with trauma-telling. These disguised divulgences were perhaps further required given that the taboo of psychological distress threatened the idealised image of heroic masculinity central to commemoration of the Rising and the ‘fight for Irish freedom’.

Spiritual Wounds?: Historicising ‘Trauma’

Ryan’s contention that ‘the deepest wounds of the Civil War were spiritual wounds’ points to the vocabulary available to articulate psychological trauma in early twentieth-century Ireland. While the metaphor of the ‘wound’ was popularly understood to hint at emotional upset, the term ‘spiritual wounds’ might reflect Ryan’s exposure to spiritual philosophy (anthroposophy) as advanced by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925).10 Steiner aimed to apply scientific thinking to human soul-life but was apprehensive of the ability of psychoanalysis – as advanced by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud – to capture the ‘spiritual reality’.11 This clash between psychoanalysis and spiritualism is very much indicative of the diversity of ideas regarding the architecture of the psyche during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.12 Revolutionaries approached psychological wounding from various – often competing – secular, spiritual, religious or even paranormal perspectives.

Ryan’s convictions regarding the possibility of ‘healing’ spiritual wounds through narrative was also shaped by his own experience as a psychiatric casualty of war. Ryan was interned in Stafford Jail, Wormwood Scrubs and Frongoch following his role in the Easter Rising alongside other staff and pupils from Patrick Pearse’s school, St Enda’s. His diaries reveal that he was held in ‘complete isolation’ and suffered ‘nerves’.13 After his release, he worked at The Freeman’s Journal, where he was tasked with reporting for the newspaper’s ‘blood column’ on the many ‘murders, reprisals, burnings [and] shootings’ of the ‘not so glorious’ years of the independence struggle.14 Although Ryan supported the treaty, he was so ‘disillusioned’ by the growing schism between the two sides that he left The Freeman’s and fled to London. In his memoir, he frankly acknowledges the psychological implications of this ‘crisis’ and recounts that he had a ‘minor nervous breakdown’ as he was swept ‘over the seas from Sion’.15

When recovering from his first bout of ‘nerves’ in 1917, Ryan had made a resolution in his diary to commit himself to ‘one definite and absorbing aim in life’: writing.16 He rewrote his prison diary and circulated it confidentially among his family.17 This decision to share his harrowing experience in written form was the beginning of a long career in chronicling the revolution. His first two books were biographies of Patrick Pearse (1919) and James Connolly (1924), whilst his next effort, The Invisible Army (1932), documented the life of Michael Collins in fictionalised form.18 These biographies were part of an outpouring of accounts written by revolutionaries detailing the lives of their deceased comrades – these writings might be referred to as ‘relational testimonies’ given that the subject’s biography is nearly always entwined with the writer’s own autobiographical experience.19 In The Invisible Army, journalist David Harding is clearly an author surrogate: the book concludes as Harding, like Ryan, takes the mailboat to England. Harding is distraught after witnessing landmines exploding and following the deaths of intimate friends, including Collins, the subject of the ‘biography’: ‘He wanted one thing only: to forget. All feeling was numbed. The beliefs of a lifetime swayed and crashed and reeled to death. Friendship had gone as the volleys of firing parties crashed and spades clanked to open gaping graves. NOTHING ON EARTH WAS WORTH IT.’20

Yet Harding’s desire to forget is offset by the author’s need to tell. If this type of fictionalised biography opened up the possibility of self-reflection and allowed Ryan to ‘banish’ the ‘grimmest’ of his memories,21 his confidence in addressing his own experience was further realised in his 1934 memoir Remembering Sion, in which, as he would later state, he ‘coughed up a good deal, or, to use a more accurate and elegant expression, I released most of the pent-up feelings of twenty-five years’.22 Despite anticipated criticism from ‘professional critics’, Ryan remained convinced that such evocations of the past were not ‘whining’ or ‘sickly sentimentality’ but rather ‘one of the most useful tasks to which any Irish writer can apply himself, and, if it helps no one else, it at least helps the writer to rid his bosom of much perilous stuff’.23

As philosopher Richard Kearney has outlined, this idea of exorcising trauma through narrative can be traced back as far as Aristotle’s theory of mythos-mimesis.24 These ideas took on greater significance in early psychotherapies based on abreaction theory (such as Freud’s and Breuer’s ‘talking cure’ advanced in 1897), which proposed that healing could be facilitated by expurgating suppressed memories through techniques such as free association, automatic writing, suggestion or hypnosis. This idea of narrative therapy remains central to psychological practice and theory. As Leigh Gilmore sums up, words provide a ‘therapeutic balm’ as the ‘unconscious language of repetition through which trauma initially speaks (flashbacks, nightmares, emotional flooding) is replaced by a conscious language that can be repeated in structured settings’.25

But while abreaction is often connected to the transference from patient to analyst in a clinical setting, Suzette A. Henke contends, in her influential study Shattered Subjects, that abreaction is essentially an experience of ‘rememory’ and thus not contingent on an analyst. Following this line of enquiry, Henke coined the term ‘scriptotherapy’ to describe ‘the process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic reenactment’.26 Indeed, it may be that ‘writing therapy’ preceded ‘talk therapy’ in early twentieth-century psychoanalysi...