Chapter One
âRidding Ourselves of the Pastâ:
Therapeutic Testimony
Desmond Ryan (1893â1964) lamented that the revolution had left âa bloody gulf of Civil War memories that hardly a generation will wipe outâ.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, âLooking 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.â2 However, Ryan defended his personal project of remembrance. Having âwaited some ten yearsâ, he insisted that exorcising the âgrimmestâ of these memories enabled him to ârecoverâ âgood tempersâ.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. Whatâs wrong with Ireland just at present is that Ireland wonât 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 âtherapeutic goalâ.5 Rosamond Jacobâs history The Rise of the United Irishmen 1791â94 (1937) was purportedly written as âan attempt to heal the wounds of the Civil War and the resulting splits in contemporary Irish lifeâ;6 Frank OâConnorâs 1937 biography of Michael Collins, The Big Fellow â against whom he fought â is described in the foreword as âan act of reparationâ;7 SeĂĄn OâFaolĂĄin found that writing helped him to put his revolutionary memories âin their placeâ.8
Ryanâs 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 âspiritual woundsâ by others and how the sharing of testimony might cultivate mutual understanding across treaty lines. In his biography of Ăamon de Valera, Unique Dictator (1936), he identified three veterans, who, like himself, had resorted to narrative as a means to grapple with the âfester[ing]â âwounds of the Irish Civil Warâ:
In the pages of Peadar OâDonnellâs The Gates Flew Open [1932], in Francis Cartyâs Legion of the Rearguard [1934], in Patrick Mulloyâs 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 âŠ9
The first two testimonies selected by Ryan â who was a supporter of the treaty â are written by anti-treaty republicans, the third by a Free State army veteran. Although Peadar OâDonnellâs (1893â1986) prison memoir has a place in the revolutionary canon, the remarkable testimonies of Francis Carty (1899â1972) and Patrick Mulloy (1903â1978) have almost totally eluded scholarly attention. Indeed, all three testimonies defy the standard conventions of autobiography: OâDonnellâs highly literary memoir builds on his depictions of civil war imprisonment in his earlier novel The Knife (1930), while Cartyâs and Mulloyâs 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 OâDonnell, Carty and Mulloy â and indeed by many other veterans â 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 âfight for Irish freedomâ.
Spiritual Wounds?: Historicising âTraumaâ
Ryanâs contention that âthe deepest wounds of the Civil War were spiritual woundsâ points to the vocabulary available to articulate psychological trauma in early twentieth-century Ireland. While the metaphor of the âwoundâ was popularly understood to hint at emotional upset, the term âspiritual woundsâ might reflect Ryanâs exposure to spiritual philosophy (anthroposophy) as advanced by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861â1925).10 Steiner aimed to apply scientific thinking to human soul-life but was apprehensive of the ability of psychoanalysis â as advanced by Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud â to capture the âspiritual realityâ.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 â often competing â secular, spiritual, religious or even paranormal perspectives.
Ryanâs convictions regarding the possibility of âhealingâ 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 Pearseâs school, St Endaâs. His diaries reveal that he was held in âcomplete isolationâ and suffered ânervesâ.13 After his release, he worked at The Freemanâs Journal, where he was tasked with reporting for the newspaperâs âblood columnâ on the many âmurders, reprisals, burnings [and] shootingsâ of the ânot so gloriousâ years of the independence struggle.14 Although Ryan supported the treaty, he was so âdisillusionedâ by the growing schism between the two sides that he left The Freemanâs and fled to London. In his memoir, he frankly acknowledges the psychological implications of this âcrisisâ and recounts that he had a âminor nervous breakdownâ as he was swept âover the seas from Sionâ.15
When recovering from his first bout of ânervesâ in 1917, Ryan had made a resolution in his diary to commit himself to âone definite and absorbing aim in lifeâ: 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 â these writings might be referred to as ârelational testimoniesâ given that the subjectâs biography is nearly always entwined with the writerâs 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 âbiographyâ: âHe 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.â20
Yet Hardingâs desire to forget is offset by the authorâs need to tell. If this type of fictionalised biography opened up the possibility of self-reflection and allowed Ryan to âbanishâ the âgrimmestâ 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 âcoughed up a good deal, or, to use a more accurate and elegant expression, I released most of the pent-up feelings of twenty-five yearsâ.22 Despite anticipated criticism from âprofessional criticsâ, Ryan remained convinced that such evocations of the past were not âwhiningâ or âsickly sentimentalityâ but rather âone 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 stuffâ.23
As philosopher Richard Kearney has outlined, this idea of exorcising trauma through narrative can be traced back as far as Aristotleâs theory of mythos-mimesis.24 These ideas took on greater significance in early psychotherapies based on abreaction theory (such as Freudâs and Breuerâs âtalking cureâ 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 âtherapeutic balmâ as the âunconscious language of repetition through which trauma initially speaks (flashbacks, nightmares, emotional flooding) is replaced by a conscious language that can be repeated in structured settingsâ.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 ârememoryâ and thus not contingent on an analyst. Following this line of enquiry, Henke coined the term âscriptotherapyâ to describe âthe process of writing out and writing through traumatic experience in the mode of therapeutic reenactmentâ.26 Indeed, it may be that âwriting therapyâ preceded âtalk therapyâ in early twentieth-century psychoanalysi...