INTRODUCTION
HUBERT BUTLER ESSAY PRIZE 2021
PROF. ROY FOSTER, CHAIR OF THE JUDGES
Visiting the impressive and lavishly-appointed Museum of Literature Ireland (MOLI) in its splendid premises on Stephen’s Green last week, I was struck by the fact that the definition of ‘literature’ seemed to be restricted to fiction and poetry (and those, overwhelmingly of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries). This gives rather short shrift to the essay form, practised with such despatch and impact by Jonathan Swift, W.E.H.Lecky, John Eglinton, George Russell, W.B.Yeats, Sean O’Faolain and above all by Hubert Butler, whose achievement this Prize celebrates. From his first volume Escape from the Anthill, collected by Lilliput Press in 1985, Butler emerged as the master of a muscular and sharp-edged style, perfectly adapted to explore large themes in an economical compass. In a landmark review of that first volume, Hugh Bredin defined the essayist’s gifts: ‘a clear strong prose, a fascination with everyday affairs and their significance sub specie aeternitatis, a readiness to generalize, the ability to digress without wandering from the point, to inform without pedantry and enlighten without condescension, to give us pleasure simply by sharing his thoughts.’ The writers who contributed introductions to subsequent volumes of Butler’s essays, such as Maurice Craig, Dervla Murphy, Neal Ascherson, Fintan O’Toole, and John Banville, epitomise these qualities too, and it is this tradition which the Butler Essay Prize exists to encourage.
Butler wrote searingly to the moment, and the topics set for previous iterations of the Prize have suggested themes that reflect this: asking on one occasion, in the shadow of Brexit, ‘Where does a citizen of the world belong?” and most recently, exploring identity politics by positing the tension that arises between communal solidarity and individual freedom. In both instances, the response was as challenging and thought-provoking as the judges could have wished. For the 2021 Prize, one issue had to dominate: the vast and worldwide bouleversement created by the pandemic, which not only created global disruption in economic, social and political terms, but drastically altered the way we live our lives day to day. The topic we chose was inspired by a line in Anthony Hecht’s poem ‘Tarantula, or The Dance of Death’, first published in 1962.
During the plague I came into my own.
It was a time of smoke-pots in the house
Against infection. The blind head of bone
Grinned its abuse
Like a good democrat at everyone.
Runes were recited daily, charms were applied.
That was the time I came into my own.
Half Europe died.………………..
That was the black winter when I came
Into my own.
Coming out of our own black winter (or so we hope), this seemed a judicious moment to call for essays asking who or what profited from this world-shaking event, and the answers offered were predictably various : international drug-companies, some murky financial combines, practitioners of political opportunism and chicanery, all featured. But there were also notes of hope and affirmation, reflecting how lockdown and the enforcement of the inward look could open up new perspectives, and the cliché of ‘small mercies’ took on a new meaning.
From time to time the search for benefits and blessings struck a sentimental of Panglossian note, but not often. In keeping with the title, the literature of plague recurred, with striking invocations and discussions of Daniel Defoe and Albert Camus. Some of the essays veered in unexpected directions to make radical or even questionable assertions; the ones that struck us most practised the Butlerian stratagem of invoking personal experience in order to open it out into an affirmation of broader, even cosmic, themes. The finalist essays were those which addressed the gains and losses of a world crisis in a clear-eyed way, and effectively argued from personal experience to universal conclusions.
Alison Williams frankly confronted the connections between privilege, vulnerability and self-sufficiency, engagingly exploring the reasons and assumptions why her own experience, and that of those around her, allowed a space to breathe- and above all, the ability to make connections with people in a new way. (The importance of electronic and digital technology at this time of crisis, and the newly crucial level of our dependence on it, is a theme that recurred in many essays.) Above all, Williams’s essay celebrates a time of paradoxical revelation.
The interpretation of the essay theme by Manus Charleton (who was also a runner-up for the Prize in 2019) confronts Hecht’s poem head-on, and explores the way Montaigne’s famous essay on approaching death philosophically took on new meanings during the pandemic. He argues for a ‘beneficial re-set’ of our attitudes towards social relations and economic interdependence, given the resources ploughed by (some) national governments into supporting their vulnerable populations, while accepting that this is far from implying a new approach to moral responsibility, and that civil liberties have inevitably been threatened. Charleton reads Camus more closely than many, and invokes the chilling sense of internal exile that comes with living under conditions of plague.
In marked contrast, Conor Matthews’s essay is unremittingly and sometimes laceratingly personal, arrestingly delineating an individual crisis in order to illuminate how the pandemic enforced a new attitude towards mortality: “If it wasn’t for Covid, I’d be dead”. The sobering experience of unemployment, alienation and uncertain mental health is re-read powerfully through the perspective of Covid and its discontents; it is an essay full of uncomfortable truths.
The same might be said of most of the reading which my fellow judges and I embarked upon this autumn. My thanks to them all- Eva Hoffman, Nicholas Grene, Catriona Crowe and Barbara Schwepcke; to our administrator and presiding genius Jeremy O’Sullivan for his passionate commitment to this Prize which he originated; to Olga and her team at Kilkenny for hosting it, and to the great sage of Bennettsbridge Hubert Butler, a hundred and twenty-one years old tomorrow, and still educating us by his inspiration, imagination and profundity of insight.
Prof. Roy Foster
Chair of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize 2021