Why did the Kilkenny-born writer Francis Hackett emigrate so soon after finishing his secondary education at Clongowes in 1900? Why did he not go on to UCD? Why, despite working briefly for the leading Irish-American figure, lawyer and patron of the arts John Quinn, did he not settle into the Irish-American cultural milieu like his older brothers? How did he manage to make a name for himself as literary editor of The New Republic, the leading progressive American journal of his day? Why did he step back from the world of American journalism by returning to Europe and, during the revolutionary years, becoming a reporter on and interpreter of Ireland for an American audience? Why, though he reviewed and recognised the merits of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist on its publication, was he stylistically and formally untouched by Joyce and advanced modernism in his own writings? Why did he not seek to play a larger role in Irish journalistic life after settling here in the mid-twenties? Why was The Green Lion, his own portrait of the artist as a young man, banned so quickly? Why or how did he end up in Denmark? Can he be added to the increasingly long list of figures who, it is claimed, have been written out of history? This essay will address some of these questions, will only glancingly address others, will avow its lack of comprehensive biographical detail and will indulge in some – grounded, I hope – reflection and speculation on what particularly interests its author in the Hackett story.
I first heard of Francis Hackett decades ago from a friend, Mark O’Neill, who was in the process of shifting from a projected MA in history at UCC to the emerging area of museum studies. Hackett was one of a few, mostly Cork-based, writers Mark had come across during his preliminary reading. He thought I might find them worth investigating. As a result, I casually and unsystematically read the indirectly autobiographical Green Lion (interesting enough, I thought), began reading but did not get far into That Nice Young Couple (less than gripping, I thought, but I may have been influenced by the fact that I was dealing with an awkward-sized mimeographed copy), and over subsequent years picked up Horizons, one of the collections of Hackett’s American journalism – noting, as any Irish reader would, the review of Joyce’s Portrait, the article about Synge, and some other nuggets – and Ireland: a study in nationalism and The Story of the Irish Nation. I even read his books about Henry VIII and Francis 1 (colourful studies of the interplay between personality, authority within states and the competition between states, I seem to recall). Later again, I signed up to write an essay on Hackett for a projected but never realised collection.
Though my active interest faded at that point, I retained a certain affection for Hackett as a writer. Now and then, I registered mentions of him or of those close to him. Lis Pihl’s article ‘Literary Links: Five letters from Lady Gregory to Francis Hackett and Signe Toksvig’ in the Irish University Review provided a glimpse of an aspect of Hackett that I hadn’t known about. A randomly encountered copy of the Kilkenny Magazine containing an affectionate tribute to Florence Hackett, Francis’s sister and lifelong confidante, filled in some of the family background. Lis Pihl’s edition of the Irish diaries of Hackett’s wife, the Danish-American writer Signe Toksvig, published by Lilliput Press in 1994, opened a window on the couple’s domestic life in the later Irish years. (What lingers in my mind from the diaries – apologies to those involved for any misremembering – is Toksvig’s exasperation at the difficulty of finding and keeping reliable servants in Ireland.)
A decade or more ago, in a Crumlin charity shop, I noticed an old paperback of a book I had never heard of, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann and the Progressive Era, 1900-1925. Flicking through it, I found that it focused on The New Republic – which I vaguely remembered as a journal associated with Hackett. I checked the index: Francis Hackett’s name was scattered seven or eight times though the text. Not only might this book fill in my very limited knowledge of Hackett’s American life, but it might also offer insight into an area I was then becoming curious about, the way in which, long after it achieved political independence, the United States finally came to assert itself as a cultural centre in its own right, and no longer as a mere adjunct of the London-centred British cultural sphere. The book sat, disregarded but not discarded, in various corners and boxes until recently, when I allowed myself to be distracted from other pressing concerns and went through these references more thoroughly. At last, I caught glimmerings of the underlying logic or set of values that explained Hackett’s literary, intellectual and personal peregrinations and affiliations, particularly in the crucial decade between 1916 and 1926.
His early years can be briefly summarised. He grew up in a middle class, strongly Parnellite family and, like his older brothers, attended Clongowes – though the family finances became strained when the Jesuits, who had quietly given the older Hackett brothers an almost free education, began to demand full fees after the Split. We can speculate as to how much this factor weighed in Hackett’s personal anti-clericalism – as against the general Parnellite variety, his personal experience of a Jesuit-run college, or his reading in history. The fact is that, in his adult life, he never deviated from his disapproval of state subservience to religious authority in any country. Through stays with his mother’s family, possibly designed to reduce any cockiness induced by being the junior member of the mischief-making band of Hackett brothers in the streets of Kilkenny, he also got to know the Irish countryside and its ways. Though he emigrated to the United States immediately after his secondary education, he did not follow some of his brothers into the standard Irish-American clericalist milieu but, striking out for Chicago on his own, scrambled from job to job until he eventually worked his way from muck-raking (or scandal-exposing) popular newspapers to the upper reaches of intellectual progressive journalism – becoming literary editor of, and an influential figure in, the prestigious New Republic in the 1910s after making a name for himself in Chicago journalism.
The bright, intellectually independent young man who landed in the USA already knew politics as an all-consuming national drama whose outcome could be inflected or even decisively shaped by individual and collective effort. He also knew about being on the losing side, and how high the stakes could be. His record as a literary editor had drawn the attention of the New Republic circle. In The Crossroads of Liberalism, Forcey puts it thus:
With the choice of Weyl and Lippmann as editors late in 1913, Croly’s stellar rockets were at hand. Croly realized, however, that the 25,000 words planned each week for the New Republic would require more writers. His literary editor, Francis Hackett, could help. A well-educated Irishman who had come to America thirteen years before, Hackett had settled in Chicago, where he edited for the Evening Post one of the most distinguished literary supplements of the day. The strongest political voice on the board beyond the dominant trio, he too had cheered Roosevelt and the New Nationalism in 1912.
Elsewhere Forcey sketches the class background of most of the New Republic circle, and indicates how Weyl and Hackett differed from the others:
By birth, marriage, or attainment all of the men Croly had gathered belonged to America’s upper-middle class, that narrow stratum of society where men have often ample means, and often ample talent, but not the peculiar power of long-held wealth. All of the native-born among them except Alvin had come through “Ivy League” colleges, institutions often as efficient in perpetuating the privilege of class as in education. They could move easily in the genteel air of the Harvard or Players Clubs, where many of the magazine’s early meetings were held, while only Weyl and Hackett could feel at ease at a Socialist party convention or a union strike meeting.
In any case, Hackett was not shy about taking positions on debates about American social and foreign policy. The last decades of the nineteenth century had been marked by a politics in which a proclaimed individualism and belief in minimal state intervention masked a brutal pursuit of wealth and the crushing of attempts to organise labour or even to create a sense of social or communal solidarity. Without losing ourselves in the detail of the post-1900 era, we could say that sectors of society at least pushed for reform and more regulated governance after the brash winner-takes-all money-making and political corruption of the Gilded Age. A passage in Donald M Miller’s City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America reveals how the mechanisms of power and competing interests could operate:
The rural-dominated Illinois legislature put tight restrictions on Chicago’s ability to raise taxes or float bond-issues, and township tax assessors kept property assessments ridiculously low in order to stay in office or to please big interests, which kept the assessors in their pay. In 1893 the total assessed value of all Chicago property was actually less than it was in 1871, even though the city had more than quadrupled in size; and the average assessment of real estate was only a little more than 10 percent of its actual value.
If Progressivists were already impeded in such ways from advancing social reforms, matters were complicated by the fact that the United States had to decide how its expanding economic power should find expression. Should the country uninhibitedly embrace its role among the longer-established empires? Should it put itself at the service of the corporations and businesspeople who were seeking to open up, or force their way into, new markets and to grab whatever resources they could lay hands on anywhere in the world? Should it confine itself to defending its declared sphere of influence? These debates were fought out on the national stage of national politics; they were also played out intensely in newspapers and magazines.
H Wayne Morgan’s Unity and Culture quotes a private report by William J Calhoun to President McKinley in 1897. In a way that recalls the famous passage in Spenser about the Munster wars and famine, Calhoun describes the weakening Spanish empire brutally trying to maintain control over Cuba:
I travelled by rail from Havana to Matanzas. The country outside of the military posts was practically depopulated. Every house had been burned, banana trees cut down, cane fields swept with fire, and everything in the shape of food destroyed. It was as fair a landscape as mortal eye looked upon; but I did not see a house, man, woman, or child, a horse, mule, or cow, nor even a dog. I did not see a sign of life, except an occasional vulture or buzzard sailing through the air. The country was wrapped in the stillness of death and the silence of desolation.
American intervention in such a context could be painted as a mission to spread good government and civilisation. An American journalist lauded ‘the establishment in a little over three years, in a Latin military colony, in one of the most unhealthy countries of the world, of a republic modelled closely upon the lines of our own great Anglo-Saxon Republic’. Theodore Roosevelt could define America’s mission in similar moral terms: ‘America’s duty towards the people living in barbarism is to see that they are freed from their chains and we can free them only by destroying barbarism itself.’
Before he eventually committed the US to the Allied side in the Great War, President Woodrow Wilson’s vision of the US as detached from European wars between old empires was more attractive to Hackett – and this was the bridge that he would cross as he became more resolutely anti-imperial and more fully engrossed in Irish affairs.
In keeping with his generally progressive positions, Hackett actively supported women’s rights and suffrage, as testified by ‘Where Women Disagree: The battle for the female vote’, an article he wrote for The New Republic in 1915. There he reports at length on the positions of the two largest organisations within the women’s suffrage movement. His marriage to Signe Toksvig, a strongly feminist Danish-American writer also on the magazine staff, meant that the issue would remain at the centre of the couple’s lives.
Forcey highlights another aspect of Hackett’s American involvement. In section vi of ‘Chapter VI Nationalism and the New Freedom’, under the title ‘A national Renaissance’, he describes the stirrings in the world of art that prefigured the coming wave of innovation. Again, we glimpse Hackett’s place in this world. After mentions of Robert Frost’s poetry, the Armoury Show, Vachel Lindsay, Ezra Pound, Isidora Duncan, Amy Lowell and Willa Cather, Forcey writes:
And in all the arts, new critics seemed bent on hastening the renaissance – men like Hiram K. Motherwell and Paul Rosenfeld in music, Francis Hackett, Van Wyck Brooks, H.L. Mencken, and Floyd Dell in literature, and Lee Simonson and Leo Stein in art.
Hackett could hardly be unaware of the renaissance that was taking place at this time in Ireland. Here, we must leap to the preface to Ireland: a study in nationalism, conceived in 1913, published in 1918 but revised in light of subsequent developments. At first sight, we seem to have stepped back into the constructive but limited reformist vision of a figure like Horace Plunkett:
To Ellen Countess Dowager of Desart, Aut Even, Kilkenny, Ireland
Dear Lady Desart,
It was through your great kindness in 1913 that I was enabled to begin this book. I had most in mind, at that time, the direct upbuilding of which you and Captain Cuffe had given such models in Kilkenny – the woollen mills and the woodwork and tobacco culture. When I came back to the United States, as I wrote you, I was thinking almost altogether of the needless disorganizations of Irish life, and I believed there were corresponding organizations of American life which could be adapted to Ireland. An American might not easily imagine the salient educative facts that would strike an Irishman, but I was convinced that we could apply to ourselves much that had been quietly developing in the ways of equipping and directing and cultivating American citizenship. In spite of Ulster and Sir Edward Carson, national and imperial issues were scarcely in my mind at all, until August, 1914.
The Hackett of 1913 could accommodate himself to, and think of himself as injecting some new American thinking into, the benevolent patrician philanthropy that might be said to underlie Lady Desart’s initiatives in 1913. From a Home Rule perspective – which did, after all, involve working within a UK framework – accepting the fruits of Constructive Unionism made sense. But, as Hackett himself explains, the outbreak of the Great War induced a change in his thinking. The leisurely rhythm and meandering discursiveness that characterise sections of Ireland: A Study reflect Hackett’s gradualist political position at the time as well as (we may surmise) the stylistic effect of working in a journalistic milieu where churning out thousands of words a week was a necessity. When Lady Desart initially offered Hackett help and encouragement, he saw himself as bringing to the Irish question some advanced American thinking that could benefit Ireland. There was no special urgency about the matter. His early intention was, we can assume, to address the educated social sectors that, like the readers of The New Republic, were dedicated to non-revolutionary social improvement. But this approach no longer seemed appropriate as the Great War broke out in Europe and as Hackett began to feel that his understanding of Ireland, the prism through which he viewed other larger struggles between empires, was creating a gulf between himself and some of his fellow-editors.
Since August, 1914, we have seen Ireland grow more and more uneasy in the powerful currents that are sweeping through the world. With the coming of the war I confess that I lost hold on my first intentions and have never been able to take them up again. Ireland has remained in my mind, but much less as a country relentlessly determined by the will of Ulster and England, and much more as a country with free will and a large opportunity to make that will effective.
The combative pro-Parnellism off his early years may have faded somewhat, and perhaps an element of the visiting emigrant’s self-satisfaction had softened his radicalism in relation to Ireland, but the dramatic developments there and in Europe would call him and Signe away from America – first as correspondents for The New Republic and later as freelances. The prefatory letter continues:
The national will of Ireland has emerged as a great reality for me, and in this book I am much more occupied with this reality than with reconstruction and reclamation. Ireland is too near a new arrangement of public authority not to make everything else subordinate, especially when its claims are so largely misrepresented and misunderstood.
We might say that the American Francis Hackett had developed into a progressive liberal individualist, but as his engagement with Ireland deepened, he had to grapple with the colonial and imperial dimension of Irish history.
In explaining Ireland to an American audience, he was also explaining and justifying his own political evolution. Hackett did not lay out an entirely new language and philosophy to address nationalism and political communities. This may be why we find him translating the language of individual will into the sphere of the collective.
The last paragraph of the letter to Lady Desart underlines his genuine commitment to dialogue and to imagining, with respect where possible, the world as seen by those with whom he disagrees.
Apart from the love of Ireland which we both share, I believe that our convictions are often dissimilar, and I am sure that you will disagree with much that I have written. But I write with John Morley’s words before me, “The important thing is not that two people should be inspired by the same convictions, but that each of them should hold his and her own convictions in a high and worthy spirit. Harmony of aim, not identity of conclusion is the secret …
The language here is high-toned – and Hackett takes care to apply it more to Lady Desart than to himself – but the value of seeing the world as opponents see it will enrich his political and historical analysis and also makes it easier to conceive how, within a few years, he accomplished the transition to fiction and biography.
Hackett, it is vital to underline, has not converted to an exclusive nationalism; good governance should be the entitlement of all nations. The right to self-determination of the Philippines and Mexico is asserted in the opening chapter of Ireland: a Study, as well as this internationalist statement of principle:
To attempt a lesser statesmanship for Ireland is to baulk the Irishman and to afflict the world. […] This is a world of interwoven histories, multiple relationships, complex purposes. […] But when infringements on democracy and liberty are written into the government of a people, then the fountain-head itself is the nurse of pollution, and nothing can heal its waters save drastic change. Without such correction, relationships all through the world are infected and purposes distorted. It is impossible to disguise so tragic a presence, to close one’s eyes to destructive injustice so stubbornly unredeemed.
Ireland: a Study was intended to help Americans to understand Ireland in an era of clashing empires, so the mention of countries where the USA had intervened or was in danger of taking on too interventionist a role was a teaching tool, as it were, but one that reflected the teacher’s own fundamental values.
As the best of Hackett’s political writing sits amid lengthy parables and excursuses, the process of revaluation runs the risk of reducing itself to the production of a mini-anthology. Briefly, therefore, we must point out that, where Hackett addresses American history, society and politics, he explicitly opposes injustice to Jews and Native Americans and deplores the continuing oppression of the post-Emancipation black population. In a way that has since become commonplace in historical and postcolonial studies, he also draws attention to the genocidal and exterminationist thinking and behaviour manifested in both Ireland and North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Regarding Ireland, he quotes himself in his Home Rule phase already questioning what right the British state had to ask Irish nationalists to risk their lives for the empire when, by choosing to listen only to Ulster unionists and by suspending Home Rule the state had undermined its stated attachment to democratic values and justice in Ireland. He sees the British upper class’s baulking at adult suffrage – Lord Curzon expressing horror at the prospect that ‘all the ladies’-maids, and the shop-keepers’ girls, and the charwomen’ should be among the future rulers of the British empire – as signifying that they could not be trusted on Home Rule. ‘But the word state,’ he writes, ‘is largely a facade for the ruling class. One must remember, and keep remembering, that behind every form of government there is a whole people, sovereign yet not enthroned, potent yet not in power, accountable yet not decisive.’
Hackett acknowledges that the sillier aspects of patriotism are ‘universal and preposterous’ and that to ‘be emancipated from the crasser group-opinion is necessary to anyone who wants to think freely’. Nonethless, he thinks it best to acknowledge that complete detachment from one’s group is unusual:
Independent intellectual experience is the salt of human conduct. But there is more in life than independent intellectual experience and in a crisis one fails to be a cosmopolite. A man discovers himself to be on the side of his group.[…] It is only by that process of ratiocination from inside the patriotic impulse, indeed, that the whole necessary patriotic process can be redeemed.
The Story of the Irish Nation, as its title suggests, is a narrative, not a reflective, work. Primarily addressed to a non-specialist American public, it attempts to encapsulate events from early pre-Christian Ireland to the Treaty debates – before the outbreak of civil war, therefore. Its final pages express disappointment at Britain’s inability to accede to the clearly expressed will of the Irish majority for independence:
The policy on which Britain now embarked was to repress the Irish Republic. Denying the Irish an opportunity to present their case before the Peace Conference at Versailles, the British sought to coerce the Irish in a fashion which they themselves had reprobated in the case of Northeast Ulster. The Irish Republicans, however, had useful armed forces.
He catalogues the means by which the British had pressurised republican Ireland into accepting, by a bare majority, a status within the empire positively desired by none of the Irish negotiators. Hackett has been described as an Anglophobe, but even here, in these pages written just after the War of Independence, he acknowledges that the just-concluded war had not been carried out with the total ruthlessness of the colonial wars of conquest or the repression of the ’98 rebellion. ‘[The wise Irishman],’ he states, ‘also knows that many peoples have lost everything they desired because they could not read their fate.’
He summarises the issues facing Ireland:
The Irish nation has suffered. It can blame conquest, theft, tyranny, for much of its sufferings, But in this world of half-savage, half-reasonable, wholly human beings it can only expect its absolute rights if it forgets its own humanity.
As Ireland purges itself of the war-spirit, understanding its enemies as well as fighting them, it will see its way to accepting or rejecting the imperfect measures which its human agents have wrought.
In the Story of the Irish Nation, Hackett’s sentences are short, the pace fast, character and conflict quickly sketched. But he is ever-aware of the economic and material manifestations of power and counter-power. No matter what the period, he is not a Gaelic sentimentalist:
The conquest of the Firbolg by the Gael is now viewed with equanimity by all Irish historians. Yet historically speaking, the Gael was a ruthless oppressor. He belittled and misrepresented the people whom he conquered. It is a pity we do not possess a Firbolg history of the Gael.
Hackett always sees Ireland within the play of power across Europe. With his respect for established fact, he frequently quotes from Lecky – a historian operating in a different mode and with different political opinions, but who does his best to account for what is knowable in his day without conscious distortion. It is no surprise that, a few years later, Hackett was able to take on the task of writing a biography of Henry VIII. He was well-practised in viewing the political world as a kind of colourful theatre.
Let us return briefly to the notion, quoted earlier, of thinking from within the patriotic impulse. Apart from pointing to what may be realistically expected of intellectuals in relation to their social group or community of origin, this passage may also help to frame Hackett’s particular choices in later years. Though he had lived for a substantial period in the United States, he had felt personally called to participate in whatever way his talents and connections could be useful in the drama of Ireland’s rejection of a subordinate role within the United Kingdom and its search to define itself and shape its own future. By the time he and Toksvig were ready to bring an end to their wandering lives as European correspondents, Ireland had been partitioned. The Irish Free State, it was becoming clear, was not the pluralist, secular thirty-two-county republic to which Hackett had hoped to contribute; but it offered the prospect of some kind of role for an intellectual who had chosen to think from within the patriotic impulse,
Hackett was now in his forties, and he and Toksvig made the practical choice to try their hands at fiction and biography. With his biography of Henry VIII, Hackett struck it lucky. The book’s international success ensured – subject to good management – a degree of financial security for the rest of his life. Toksvig too had some success. It was only when the banning of The Green Lion in 1936 was followed by the more predictable banning in 1937 of Eve’s Doctor, Toksvig’s novel centred on the obstetric department of a Dublin hospital, that the couple decided to up sticks in protest and settle in Denmark. (Hackett wrote an article denouncing Irish censorship and then a book, I Chose Denmark.) Unfortunately, Adolf Hitler had his own plans for Denmark, and it was only after another enforced American interlude and the end of the Second World War that the couple could settle down in the country, where they would spend the rest of their lives.
While not entirely modelled on Hackett’s own early life, The Green Lion draws on his experience from his childhood up to his departure for the United States. Without being ostentatiously provocative, Hackett, it seems to me, as a mature adult wishes to give a full, uncramped account of human experience. It is entirely consistent with the values he established for himself in his earlier writings that the book is a frank depiction of the growth of a sensitive, intelligent boy born outside of marriage. It does not skirt around the harsh effects of the Split on Kilkenny society, the harsh effects of poverty, or the harsh effects of the oppressive Clongowes regime on a boy undergoing a spiritual crisis while also discovering his own sexuality. Ultimately, however, The Green Lion is a clear-eyed and generous book.
To describe Hackett as a modernist simply because he reviewed Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man positively would be a mistake. There was every reason for Hackett to be impressed by a novel written by an Irish author who had attended Clongowes just a few years before his own time there. What struck him particularly was Joyce’s ‘candour’ – effectively, a fearlessness before the facts. Fifty, sixty, seventy years after the publication of Joyce’s Portrait, Irish teenagers of Catholic upbringing were still experiencing the book as a positively shocking revelation of the confused adolescent as hero. Only on later rereading would some of them realise what a tricky customer – no naive validator of adolescent arrogance – Joyce was. Hackett’s endless curiosity and his respect for the variety of social, political, artistic and personal struggle and achievement is itself worthy of respect and doesn’t require that we force him into the modernist box.
Note: In the RTÉ Documentary On One online archive, one can find I Choose Denmark, produced in 1983 by Kieran Sheedy. Hackett’s life is depicted engagingly through interviews with a number of those who knew him or were close to him. It also features an interview conducted with Hackett not long before his death in Denmark in 1962. He comes across as good company – relaxed, content and bemused rather than embittered by some of the obstacles that he had encountered in his life.
1/10/2024
Barra Ó Seaghdha has contributed essays, reviews, interviews and other writings in the fields of cultural and intellectual history, music, politics and poetry to a wide variety of publications.
