08

Now is the messy season, when cadaverous leaves lay scattered everywhere and it seems as if one is walking on death, the autumnal death of summer. Soon the trees will be stripped bare by the ravishing onslaughts of vicious winds, but their nudity will not appeal to us. No artist could make an aesthetic case for such trees. They are woebegone and must needs stoically endure the ensuing winter's inclemency before having any prospect of recovering their dignity with the birth of new leaves.

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Have been reading Mary Kenny's 'revised and updated' biography of William Joyce, the definitive Lord Haw-Haw, entitled Germany Calling, and was much impressed by her scholarly patience in thoroughgoing research, if less so by the number of typographic and related technical errors which, as is all too often the case with modern books in paperback, somewhat detracted from one's appreciation of her work and made one contemptuous, not for the first time, of the extents to which an author is at the mercy of people ostensibly there to facilitate the process of publishing print books who simply don't or can't weed out such errors in the first place, either from incompetence or, not being the author themselves, indifference if not, at times, something altogether more sinister that makes one grateful for the fact that one is not dependent for publication on more than one person, namely oneself.

Be that as it may, William Joyce was evidently an interesting man, though not one I would have much in common with, other than a Galway heritage (unlike him, I was actually born there) and a Germanophile disposition which usually leads to an immersion in German history, culture, and language, not to mention certain geographical factors, like the layout and attributes of various cities and the relative disposition of the states and lands. What I manifestly don't have in common with him, however, is a pro-British Empire stance, even given the fact that, these days, the British Empire is much less evident or, if that sounds a little too facile in relation to the intensely cosmopolitan character of London and other British cities, less significant than it was in the early twentieth century, at a time when Joyce was evidently enamoured of it.

I suppose, like him, I do have some Orange blood in me, compliments of my maternal grandfather (who nominally 'converted' from Presbyterianism to Catholicism when he married my maternal grandmother), but not to the extent that I would identify with Unionists at the expense of Republicans, since I have always been both pro-Irish independence and pro-United Ireland, if less in republican terms, these days, than in relation to Social Theocracy, my own ideological philosophy which tends to eclipse both my Roman Catholic Galway heritage and subsequent post-Aldershot Protestant upbringing in Surrey where, having been put into care by my mother following the death of her mother (my protective Catholic grandmother), I was obliged to attend a Baptist church and go to a State (Church of England) school, neither of which I greatly relished.

As a self-professed Social Theocrat, I have no interest whatsoever, these days, in identifying either with Catholicism, from which I was wrenched at the tender age of ten after about seven years in Aldershot, or with Protestantism, that false imposition in Carshalton Beeches which I rather disrespectfully tended to treat as a kind of joke, both inside and outside the local church, and I always resent being identified with one or the other when, to my way of thinking, both are 'old hat' and of no relevance to my life as a free-lance intellectual of radically metaphysical persuasion. The last thing I can see myself doing is going along to a Christian church and pretending to have respect for what I ideologically and intellectually despise. In that, I believe I have something else in common with William Joyce, although not to any great extent, insofar as I consider myself to be more removed from both Catholicism and Protestantism than ever he was, even if I happen to regard Social Theocracy as the logical axial successor to Roman Catholicism, as though it were entitled to overhaul Catholicism in the interests of metaphysical independence of metachemistry in relation to 'Kingdom Come' or, at any rate, to my concept thereof, which happens to be logically credible and, I trust, morally viable.

Anyhow, William Joyce, who had gravitated from Catholicism to Anglicanism, died unrepentant, hanged for high treason in early 1946 for having aided and abetted Britain's wartime enemy, Nazi Germany, via a series of radio broadcasts from Berlin during 1939-41 (though he continued to broadcast up until 1945), the period preceding his acquirement of German citizenship when, although born in America to a naturalized American father, he was still technically a British subject, having formally obtained British citizenship while living and working in England on the basis that Southern Ireland, where he had spent most of his childhood and subsequent youth, was still part of the United Kingdom during his upbringing in Galway and that he was therefore entitled to British citizenship.

It was even alleged that Joyce was so pro-British that he had not merely sympathized but actually sided with the Black 'n' Tans against Irish freedom fighters, and generally got himself a bad reputation with Republicans, so much so that, as a marked man, it became to his advantage to leave Ireland – and thus the fledgling Irish Free State – for Britain and enrol with the British Army in England, one of those decisions of his with which I would have scant sympathy, even with British Army connections on my mother's side of the family, compliments of her father which, having spent most of my childhood in Aldershot, I have always regarded with some dismay and not a little embarrassment!

However, in Joyce's case, being accepted into the British Army was a confirmation of his Britishness and something of which he was immensely proud – until, that is, he was discharged within six months for unbecoming conduct and obliged to seek alternative employment, including, after a period at college and some private teaching, the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley and, when he was kicked out of that, his own National Socialist League, which never went anywhere either, although, of course, he did, finding his true vocation, it would appear, working as an English-language broadcaster in National Socialist Germany.

The rest, as they say, is history, and Joyce was to pay the price for his treachery, which only goes to prove that he may have been more of an Irishman than he thought, and that it took Nazi Germany to make him aware of the fact, to disabuse him of some of his British pretensions and to enable him to wreak vengeance on a country which had not loved him half as much as he had apparently loved it. A salutary lesson perhaps, though evidently difficult for a man like him, who would not have been popular in Ireland, to swallow.

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Unlike William Joyce, I have never been particularly pro-British, even if, as an Irish citizen, I am not particularly proud to be Irish in view of what transpired between my mother and father in Galway, the latter of whom I never knew, so that I feel tainted by what I suspect was my father's rejection of aspects of my mother which probably struck him as not merely pro-British but, in view of her army connections (I can recall an aunt informing me during one of my occasional visits to Galway that my mother was known in the family as Mary Aldershot), actually British and therefore unworthy of a Galway Catholic like himself, a man who was not simply Irish but Connaught Irish, born, I believe, in Cashel, Connemara, in true West of Ireland fashion.

Yet, for all that, I am still technically Irish, even if my mother happened to be born in England (in Aldershot of Irish-born parents), and have never felt the slightest desire to become a British citizen with a British passport, the kind of passport that my mother would have … compliments, I would guess, of her second husband, who happened to be a British citizen of West Indian extraction. I am still Irish in spite of her, and even if I may sometimes regret or even resent it, it is nonetheless a fact that I cannot do anything about, since I usually act and think like an Irishman, not a Briton, and certainly not as an Englishman, much as I may have spent most of my life in England – in fact, all but the first two-and-a-half years of it. If there is one thing worse, for me, than not being regarded as Irish by Irishmen, it is being regarded as English by Englishmen, since, in a very real sense, I am no more English than Wellington was Irish, even granted that he was born in Ireland.

I am, let us say, a reluctant Irishman, an Irishman accustomed to long solitary and celibate exile who, on the few occasions he has managed to visit Ireland, including Galway, feels somewhat out-of-place in what is technically his native land but, conversely, has no love of the land or, more precisely, of the state-hegemonic/church-subordinate criteria, ruled over by an Anglican monarch, characterizing the land in which it has been his fate to live, a lone outsider with no desire to identify with Britain either politically or religiously, much less economically or scientifically.

Therefore, unlike William Joyce, I could never be pro-British Empire, never mind distinctly pro-British and, hence, partial to a political structure, in both monarchy and parliament, that derives its justification from Protestant criteria. I may not be pro-Irish Republican, but I am not anti-Irish either, and certainly not anti-republican from a unionist standpoint! Simply pro-Social Theocratic, and that, for me, has always been intended, above all, for Ireland and for countries, like the Republic of Ireland/Eire, with a mainly Roman Catholic tradition that suggests to me the right axial preconditions, as it were, for subsequent 'stepping up', or revolutionary overhaul, as noted above.

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