Maps

Northern Impressions Map

Northern Ireland landscapes and Belfast cityscapes depicted  in Forrest  Reid’s  The Retreat, of the Machinations of Henry  (1936)  and Michael McLaverty’s  Call My Brother Back  (1939), confirm Humanist Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s observation that ‘the visitor’s evaluation of environment is essentially aesthetic, it is an outsider’s view. The outsider judges by appearance, by some formal canon of beauty.’ (1) Despite being brought up in different religious traditions, both writers shared a middle-class urban sensibility, but the rural landscapes and cityscapes  represented in their respective works  contrasted significantly.  Reid was the son of a middle-class Presbyterian merchant and English-born mother, and attended Cambridge University. He consequently created a  fictional tapestry rich with mythological, neo-classic and pagan motifs upon the topography of the Ulster countryside. His depictions were based upon an ‘amalgam of Ireland and Ancient Greece, ’ (2) and his writing mapped place with a distinct and aesthetic touch:

The primary impulse of the artist springs, I fancy, from discontent, and his art is a kind of crying for Elysium . . . It is a country whose image was stamped upon our soul before we opened our eyes on earth, and all our life is little more than a trying to get back there, our art a mapping of its mountains and streams.

Apostate (1926)

Despite the fantastical narratives and the placid panoramas depicted within his prose, there is an solid element of historical awareness and accordingly, his landscapes can be read as palimpsests, and repositories of relics, artefacts and historical and cultural memory. Upon these landscapes Reid imprinted his mystical leitmotif  of  ‘ghostly houses -and ghostly small boys.’ (3) The presence of graveyards and gardens, manor houses and ruined abbeys act as narrative spaces in Reid’s prose, signifying generational cycles of death and re-birth.  Young Tom Barber,  the hero of   The Retreat, or the Machinations  of Henry (1936) visits a castle and village, located near Glenagiveney Bay in Donegal:

The castle had been built in 1313, Daddy said, and little remained of it now except the lower walls, and here and there the fragments of a spiral staircase [. . . ] he knew very few ruins - Inch, Greyabbey, Bonmargy, Dunluce - he could remember no others. And then suddenly he knew that it wasn’t a real place at all he was thinking of, but only a place in a dream.

The Retreat, (Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1978 [1936]) 208-208

The novel contains a  dreamscape sequence  which juxtaposes the rational domesticity of the Protestant middle-class, against the numinous coastlines of County Donegal. For instance, Tom Barber explores Glenagivney Bay, with a local old man named Danny McCoy who: ‘lived alone in a thatched cottage at the end of the village, and the country people said he was odd because he had been “away” when a boy. This meant [. . .] that he had been taken away by the fairies.’ As he rows the boys across the bay:

The shore glided slowly past: the Manor House glided past; the Fort was gliding past, when Danny rested his oars and gazed at it [. . .] ‘Strange things do be on the sea at night,’ Danny pronounced slowly, ‘and strange things on the land. I’ve seen a light rising out of the sea like a thousand holy burning candles, and I’ve climbed the hill to Glenagivney and seen a glory of saints and angels in the sky.

The Retreat, (Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1978 [1936]) 284; 288

Tom lives in a big house located at Ballysheen in south Belfast. His father, a Professor and his mother, a home-maker represent the Unionist  bourgeois of the period, and Reid’s description of the household’s servants illustrates the class system in place at the time which included members from both religious traditions in the North: ‘Phemie and Mary were sisters though you never would have guessed this to look at them [. . . ] Both were Roman Catholics, while William was a Protestant and an Orangeman, and walked with an orange-and-purple sash over his shoulder on the twelfth of July.’ The house’s location and underlying ruins containing artefacts from a vanished rural landscape, illustrates Reid’s representation of place as a palimpsest of historical relic and memory:

All this district was Ballysheen, and Doctor Macrory said there had once been a church near the graveyard, though nothing was left of it at present except a few stones. And even the loose stones had nearly all been carted away at one time or another to build walls and byres and cottages.

The Retreat, (Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1978 [1936]) 19

Reid’s  numinous ‘visions of boyhood’ were grounded in a pre-Christian,  Greco-Roman pagan sense of place, which he transposed in prose upon the rural topographies of his native Ulster: ‘Very early I perceived that one’s mind was swarming with ghosts; very early I became convinced that one had thoughts that were not one’s own thoughts, that one remembered things one had never been told.’ (4)  In the novel Brian Westby (1934) Reid depicts  a  boy in symbiosis with the seascape of the north-Antrim seaside town of Ballycastle:

He gave Linton the impression of being part of his surroundings - of the sun-bleached sand-dunes, the deserted shore, the blue tumbling waves, the open sky. He gave him the impression of being more in nature than anyone he had ever before met. He looked as if the cleanness of the sea-wind was in his blood; he looked as if something of the impersonal beauty of sea and sky and shore had passed into him and become human. And suddenly Linton found himself thinking of the young horsemen on the Parthenon frieze, riding by in proud humility.

Brian Westby (London: Faber and Faber,1934) p. 27

In contrast, emigration and personal tragedy were not alien to  Michael McLaverty, and would influence his depiction of character and setting.  He  attended Queen’s University,  and St. Mary’s in London, before commencing a teaching career in Belfast  at St. John’s Primary School in 1929. McLaverty began writing fiction during the early 1930s and published short stories in Ireland Today, the Irish Monthly, the Catholic World and the Capuchin Annual.  Many of these early stories were set in the hinterlands of Rathlin Island and captured a sense of place, that possessed the intuitive and ambient tone of poetry, reinforced with a pedantic attention to detail. The sketches of island life that emerged in McLaverty’s short stories of the 1930s perhaps became linked subconsciously to his daily life in Belfast.  In Call My Brother Back (1939) both the island and the city act as narrative spaces in which McLaverty portrays the emigration of the  MacNeill family from their stone cottage on Rathlin, to a red-brick row house in west Belfast. McLaverty opens the first section of the novel by depicting thirteen year old Colm MacNeill’s bond with the natural features and climatic atmosphere of the island:

The cloud was now drifting towards the Mull of Kintyre; to the right an arc of rainbow hugged the land, its curve increasing as the rain thinned. The evening sun shook itself free from its cage of clouds and a whin-gold light winged slowly across the fields. Suddenly the colours of the rainbow flamed and burst in liquid brilliance; and looking at it the boy’s heart ached with a sweet, yearning sadness.

Call My Brother Back (1939) p. 2

The second section of the novel tells the story the MacNeill family as they adjust to their new life on the Falls Road. McLaverty paints a panoramic view,  as Colm  and his brother Alec gaze down upon the divided cityscape of Belfast:

The numerous spires of the Protestant churches were everywhere. Then there was the Falls Park and they could see people walking about in it, and below it Celtic Football ground with its oval field and one grand stand, and farther to the right Linfield ground with its tin advertisements for cigarettes. ‘Wouldn’t you think now to see all the churches,’ smiled Alec, ‘and all the factories and playgrounds that it was a Christian town?

Call My Brother Back (1939) p. 162-163

McLaverty’s novel conveys the institutionalised sectarianism between Protestant and Catholic communities which is alien to Colm:

It was a strange city, he thought, to be living two lives, whereas on Rathlin Catholics and Protestants mixed and talked and danced together.

Call My Brother Back (1939) p. 65

His brother Alec joins the IRA to protect the neighbourhood,  and Colm watches as the various urban topographies of the ‘Troubles’ manifest themselves upon the streetscapes of the Shankill and Falls Road:

[he]  saw the twisted life of the city: the fighting at football matches between Catholics and Protestants; the paintings on the gable-ends of King William on a white horse, his sword raised to the sky, and printed underneath: REMEMBER 1690 . . . NO POPE HERE. And in the Catholic quarters, the green-white-and-gold flag of Ireland painted on the walls with UP THE REPUBLIC.’

Call My Brother Back (1939) p. 123-124

In conclusion, both Reid’s and McLaverty’s rural  landscapes are perceived in their prose largely  by boys on the cusp of adolescence. Reid’s pre-pubescent male character Tom seems developmentally arrested on the borderlands of  boyhood and adolescence, trapped in an Elysium of the mind. In the case of McLaverty’s main character Colm, we see a boy exiled from the islandscape of his childhood, due to socio-economic conditions beyond his control.

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