Independent Spirit

The other day I was trying to pin down something I’d read about Chekhov, someone’s renegade but essential insight into his unfamiliar role as an indignant writer, morally outraged but in no way political – a rarity in our world and even rarer in 19th-century Russia. The source eluded me so I dropped it. From experience, I know that’s the only way I would ever recover the reference and, sure enough, it bubbled up this afternoon: Hubert Butler, the great Irish essayist, in his 1948 essay “Materialism Without Marx: A Study of Chekhov.”

Do you know Butler? I first learned of him 10 years ago, when Philip Lopate included several pieces by him in an anthology of essays. The prose was crystalline and the tone was calm, assured, faintly patrician. This was a writer, I sensed, who had earned the privilege of writing with authority and could earn our trust. His range of subject was vast – Irish and family history, archaeology, Russia, the Balkans, the literatures of many nations. He often wrote out of personal experience, but his essays were never cloyingly self-referential like those written by so many contemporary Americans.

Butler was born into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family in Kilkenny, in 1900, and died there in 1991. He traveled widely as a young man – the Soviet Union, the Baltic and Balkan countries, the United States, China – but returned to his ancestral home in Kilkenny and remained there. For half a century, he published widely in newspapers and journals, mostly in Ireland. His first book of essays, Escape from the Anthill, was published by Antony Farrell of The Lilliput Press, in 1985. Farrell also brought out The Children of Drancy (1988); Grandmother and Wolf Tone (1990); and, posthumously, In the Land of Nod (1996). Butler was not published in the U.S. until 1996, when Farrar, Straus and Giroux brought out Independent Spirit, which was drawn from the four Irish volumes and which I immediately bought.

Butler has had his admirers: Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky, Scottish journalist Neal Ascherson and R.F. Foster, the great biographer of William Butler Yeats – all estimable writers. But his reputation in the U.S. seems wispy at best, in part, I think, because his voice is so reasonable, so rigorously devoted to the ethical heft of his subjects without turning preachy. Elizabeth Sifton, the editor of the American collection, put it this way in her introduction: “The melodious clarity of prose, his intellectual virtuosity, the large nature of his concerns about the human condition encourage us to appreciate him as a truly international writer.” Butler was quietly sui generis, owing no allegiance to Left or Right. In the Irish context, he espoused, in Sifton’s words, “an Irish republicanism that was hardly congenial to most people in his Anglo-Irish world, and he lived his robust Irish Protestantism throughout a lifetime in fiercely Roman Catholic Eire.” He makes no concessions to non-Irish readers expecting a histrionic stage Irishman. His equipoise, I imagine, must enrage the dogmatic and hysterical of all persuasions. I would love to read his biography.

I haven’t done Butler the justice he deserves. Please, find his books. The Lilliput Press editions, which I have borrowed from several libraries, are elegant works of bookmaking, a pleasure to hold and touch and read. And what was the recalcitrant reference to Chekhov? The entire essay, really, but these sentences will do:

“His book Sakhalin Island, the result of this journey, has only recently been translated, because it is in conflict with the accepted Chekhov legend. It is not wistful, resigned and full of subdued melancholy. It is blazing with certainty and indignation, and because of that, in spite of its tragic contents it is perhaps the most hopeful and optimistic of all his writings. He believed that it was worthwhile to be passionately indignant about remediable injustice and that to remedy injustice was not the task of the statistician, the trained welfare officer, the experienced committeeman, it was the task of every man of sensibility and integrity.”