The late Bob Welch was a man of many parts: a poet, novelist and playwright, an editor, but above all an academic, professor of English at the University of Ulster in Coleraine for over twenty-five years, head of department, and dean of the Arts Faculty for eight years. He was pre-eminently a man of books, interested in the history of the book as well as in writing them. A much-published author himself, Welch had a mind with an historical as well as a poetical cast; he was author of A history of verse translations from the Irish, 1789–1897 (Colin Smythe, 1988), as well as of a history of the Abbey Theatre (Oxford, 1999), while his Oxford companion to Irish literature (1996), edited with Bruce Stewart, clearly shows his wide interests in all periods of that field. Therefore, while this posthumous book is a bit of a surprise in some ways (the Early Irish chapter, the mythopoetic element all through) it is firmly based on a lifetime interest in Gaelic as well as Irish writing in English across many centuries. He was well equipped to undertake such a survey.

The title of the present book is enigmatic, and the word ‘approach’ in the subtitle is by way of apology. The title refers to the Hag of Béara, and it is this figure Welch uses as a key to his interpretations of Irish writing, both in Gaelic and in English. She is a multi-faceted figure with correspondences to ambivalent figures in other cultures and mythologies, a force of nature and yet supernatural, benevolent and also destructive, a kind of White Goddess but a kind of magna dea also; in the end she is a figure of Irish folklore whose lament in old age sums up the joys of sex and of nature in the light of the inevitability of death. She permits Welch to begin his history in the appropriately Celtic mists of time, and to select his narrative with a certain bias. He enters into this ‘approach’ determinedly, with eyes wide open, and so must the reader, for this is a highly original kind of history, not, I think, to be judged by conventional standards of historiography (which I shall not attempt to define).

The book has fifteen chapters, plus an introduction in which Welch goes to some pains to clarify that the germ of the book originated in his term as visiting professor at the University of Sassari in Sardinia. Here he taught a course in Irish literature to students to whom his subject was unknown except in some elementary form and whose grasp of English was such that Welch had regularly to pause in his discourse to allow his host to translate it into Italian, paragraph by paragraph. Many of his readers of this book will recognise what constraints such a procedure puts a visiting speaker under. But to Bob Welch the exercise was inspirational, first because he saw that his project must be to write a history which would in some sense be a kind of translation, a moving across boundaries to translate for himself what is, he decided, a divided culture, into terms meaningful to – as it were – foreigners, those unfamiliar with Gaelic literature and those unfamiliar with cultural nuances necessary for the understanding of a history constantly in flux because of religious, class and colonialist differences. This explains one aspect of Welch’s approach. To pursue it, however, he has quickly to abandon the spoon-feeding idea gained from his experience as visiting professor. What that means we may leave aside for a moment. The other feature of the book predicated upon his Sardinian experience has to do with, I shall call, ‘keeping faith’. Just as Welch felt morally obliged to keep faith with his host in Sardinia by cooperating with the somewhat demeaning process of having his lectures translated as he went along, and by beginning his book as if bound to replicate that complex form of address, so too in the book as a whole he believes he is obliged to keep faith with old allegiances, old friends and teachers, old models such as Daniel Corkery’s The hidden Ireland or Frank O’Connor’s A backward look. Likewise, what in another writer, especially a historian of literature (or the editor of an anthology), might appear as untenable favouritism, Welch feels he must stay true to what he thinks best in the whole range of Irish literature. This constraint gives him some anxiety, and while deciding (as in Sardinia) to limit himself to ‘a smallish number of texts’ for close examination in each chapter, he apologises in his introduction for the necessary omissions (especially in the modern period), and actually lists fourteen poets, ten novelists and four playwrights who get ‘short shrift’. In the event it is less short shrift than cold shoulder. It is a dilemma Welch faced, of course, but, really, no excuse holds for the neglect here of writers of the stature of Michael Longley, Eavan Boland (who does not even make the apology list) Sebastian Barry (ditto) and Tom Murphy. But Welch’s approach is posited on the freedom to concentrate on ‘themes, issues, and large patterns, rather than on dry [sic] chronology’. He wanted, he says, ‘to choose living authors whose work would reveal connections with, or sharp disjunctions from, the traditions of Irish literary experience as outlined in this book’.

And yet this selection process allows Welch to include Gaelic poets from the sixteenth century on, and in the twentieth century to give equal time to Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtín Ó Cadhain (strangely omitted from the index), Nuala Ní Dhomnaill and Alan Titley as he does to the likes of Thomas Kinsella, Flann O’Brien and (shall we say) Anthony Cronin. (Contemporary Irish drama counts for little here, apart from Friel and, strategically, for a brief and unwarranted ‘coda’, Marina Carr, whose Abbey play By the bog of cats … supplies the striking dust-jacket photograph.) Welch must keep faith with the literature written in Irish. This is no bad thing, but I would have wished for a debate on the matter. Is ÓRíordáin really to be compared with T. S. Eliot or Ó Direáin with Joyce, as claimed here? It is merely a rhetorical gesture to claim so without debate. Indeed, Welch does not enter into literary debates at all in his book. Time and again the opportunity arises to cross swords with some critic or interpreter of a major Irish writer and he does not take up the challenge. It may be said that what he does instead is far better, far more useful, that is, he provides quite brilliant readings of all the writers he focuses on, in particular his readings (for his purpose) of Spenser, Swift, Tom Moore, Carleton, Yeats, O’Casey, Beckett, Friel, Heaney and Banville. Any reader interested in literature will gain from these inspired and inspiring sections. And yet, going to the notes she/he will probably be disappointed that (for the earlier authors in particular) Welch provides only references to outdated editions and secondary sources. That seems odd.

At the same time, being as much an ars poetica, a statement of ideas on the nature of creative literature passionately held and historically contextualised, as it is a history of Irish literature, this book has no fellow, It is idiosyncratic but it is also very well written, quite a joy to read, in fact. Although I do not find the argument entirely coherent, perhaps because it is tied to a strict chronological method, I do find it fascinating. The ‘spoon-feeding’ business I referred to earlier is developed as the book progresses into something far more complex: a series of essays which accumulate to show how fissured, how fragmented and how discontinuous the ‘tradition’ (in quotes here because the concept is dual) Welch seeks to define actually is. It is in the chapter on the Great Famine that he decides how central anger and hate are to Irish writing in English. He is on to something here, derived from colonialism and its unresolved legacy, that Yeats, and Joyce perhaps to a lesser extent, and certainly O’Casey and Tom Murphy, were fully aware of and wrestled with in their conflicted writings. In his conclusion Welch neatly summarises what is implies as ‘a desire to obey, to say the thing you think might please your auditors; but there is also a longing to throw over the traces altogether, and blow your opponents out of the water, or into the air. Rage is a speciality of Irish writing.’ So, in the end, Welch sees ‘division’ as the single powerful factor within Irish writing which fuels both its energy and its reckless articulacy. The politics of such a view are republican, which Welch tempers throughout with characteristic humaneness while coping with the central question, whether history as a force is servant to or master over the expression of Ireland’s long and abiding relationship (often comic) with sorrow and despair. The result is a history which deserves to be widely read and fully debated.