https://1337x.to/user/HashMiner/ [classical music playing]
[Julia] My father, when asked to describe himself,
he would always describe himself as a market gardener.
Perhaps the most apt description of Islamic State
is to be found in Hubert Butler's The Invader Wore Slippers,
in which Butler defined Ante Pavelić's fascist Croatia as,
quote, "The extraordinary alliance of religion and crime."
[Roy] Hubert believed in a slap being a necessary thing to administer.
He writes in a way that is utterly distinctive.
You know, the maker's name is on the blade.
[Fintan] This is one of the great essayists,
you know, and not just one of the great Irish essayists.
He really is one of the great figures in the history of this form.
[Olivia] To pick up a book of essays, which was just so fresh,
it could have been written in our own day.
This man was 50 years ahead of his time.
[Christopher] Butler became international, and his time had come.
[chuckles]
It's always dangerous to speak for the dead,
but I have a hunch that Hubert Butler might agree when I say
that nationalism and religion,
so often the scourges of humanity in the past,
are in danger of blighting our young century.
[Robert] If Butler were around today,
the bumper sticker he might have on his car would be,
"Act locally, think globally."
You know, that's very much, I think, the way he tried to frame his own life.
Hubert Butler was born into very much what you might call
County Unionist Anglo-Irish society.
His parents are unquestioning, really, of the political status quo.
It's-- it is about King and Empire,
but they are also very much responsible citizens,
they look after their local community
and feel a strong commitment to Bennettsbridge,
the village where Maiden Hall was located.
And so I think he grows up, in what he remembered later,
as a blissful, kind of pastoral childhood.
And then very rudely is, in his estimation, sent off
to school in England at the age of nine.
And this is a great trauma to him as he recalled it later.
So, he's sent off to prep school at a place called Bigshotte Rayles
and then gets a scholarship to go to public school, to Charterhouse.
But this, of course, meant travelling back and forth,
taking the mail boat home.
And it was during one of these trips that he actually passed through Dublin
in the days right after the Easter Rising.
And for him, this was a sort of epiphany,
because he-he says the buildings were still smoking
as he passed through Dublin.
Of course, the Great War was going on
and he was being trained to get ready to go off to Flanders.
But he said in a way it felt like what had happened in Dublin
was much more his war.
And so, his academic career is really stellar,
and-and that leads him eventually to St. John's College in Oxford.
And at Oxford, he happens to meet some young people from the new states,
from Czechoslovakia, from Yugoslavia.
He says, at Oxford in-in-in 1918,
"There was springtime in the air."
It was about the breakup of empire and the emergence of new states,
inspired often by a kind of Republican ideal.
[Joe] His mother, particularly, Rita, she supported the union with Britain.
And she was extremely upset by Hubert's wanting to be a nationalist,
that he shouldn't want to live in Ireland and work in Ireland.
And so she had the bright idea of writing
to her cousin who, of course, was Lord Grey of Fallodon,
the British foreign secretary at that time,
who was a cousin of Hubert's mother,
hoping that she could persuade Lord Fallodon
to get Hubert into the diplomatic service.
The same man who, of course, a few years earlier had said--
and we're celebrating a hundred years of that now--
"The lights are going out all over Europe.
I-I think we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."
Hubert was wise, missed out being a diplomat and became, finally,
what he would want to be remembered as, as an Irishman,
in the mode of Wolfe Tone and Henry Flood.
"There's no barriers north and south, against the border, I am an Irishman."
That's how he wanted to be remembered,
and I think he is and will be…
without barriers.
[Robert] So there's a famous essay by Butler called The Auction,
in which he describes how his mother is very worried about him
as this adolescent who has somehow caught the infection of nationalism,
which there's this sort of extended metaphor in the essay
about it being akin to catching tuberculosis,
and his mother wants somehow to inoculate him against this.
So, he clearly becomes more and more enamoured
of possibility of being an Irish nationalist
and participating in all the change.
Tony Guthrie, who Butler meets originally as an undergraduate
at St. John's Oxford.
Tony and Hubert really become fast friends here in Oxford,
because they identify as Irishmen in Oxford.
He meets Peggy through Tony,
and there's clearly something going on there.
Tony organises a walking holiday--
Sligo, actually-- for himself and for Peggy
and for Tony's to-be wife Judy.
And the four of them spend the Easter Holiday walking together,
and that's really the beginning of the romance.
[Christopher] Peggy Butler was a trained painter.
She had been to our school in London.
And I was aware that she was interested in painting when I was a child,
but I was not aware at how good she was.
Later, when I saw her work hung at Maiden Hall,
I thought, "Wow, she could have been as famous a painter
as her brother, Tyrone Guthrie, was
an internationally famous theatrical producer."
He is clearly not interested in becoming a gentleman farmer
like his father has been.
And so he actually comes back to Ireland
to go to work for the Carnegie Library Network
under the influence of Horace Plunkett,
and he's very much clear that he wants to participate
in the building up the new-- the new nation.
But at the same time, there's this tremendous sense
that it's going to be hard to make a life as a young Irish Protestant,
given all of the challenges that that community would be facing.
So, I think it's fair to say
that there is both a certain pragmatic reason for Butler going abroad,
but there is also clearly a sense that he wants to explore the world,
and he's deeply invested in the idea that Irish people should be cosmopolitan.
Butler, always alluded to,
was that Ireland was one of the 15 or so secession states
that emerged out of the first world war, out of Versailles.
And that it, he felt,
was in a unique position to lead the kind of understanding
of what it meant to be a secession state,
to be a new state in the interwar period.
And he stayed loyal to that idea.
Yugoslavia was. Ireland was.
Czechoslovakia was. Other states in the east.
So that eastern focus preoccupied him
because he always saw himself as an inheritor
of the consciousness of a secession state.
Russia was the successor of the collapsed Czarist empire,
so it was allied.
So, what does he do?
[narrator] "The great Russian writers, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov,
were almost always more conscious of diversity of temperament
than of uniformity of needs.
Then Karl Marx and the revolution created the Economic Man,
and while this wonderfully lifelike dummy is in the shopwindow,
what hope is there for the genius that is kindled by human diversity?
I once tried to talk about these things at Goskurs
during the dangerous half-hour of free conversation,
when my pupils and I, under cover of grammar,
tried to find out what we were like.
One of them helped me out with the cliché, 'ghosts of the past,'
which quenched what I had to say,
and instead I said that Petersburg, like Alexandria and Constantinople,
had the tremendous toughness of cities
that were built around an idea, not a market.
Peter's 'window upon Europe' had been made for autocrats and bureaucrats,
but once opened it could not be shut.
Marx came through,
as well as Dickens and Byron and George Sand and Henry George
and all the strange assortment of foreign influences.
Tolstoy, no less than Dostoevsky the Slavophile, had hated Petersburg
and its Western culture,
as the oyster hates the foreign body it turns into a pearl,
but they could not ignore it.
And what they had accepted and adorned, their successors could still less ignore."
[Roy] He knew the language. He translated Russian.
He translated The Cherry Orchard for his brother-in-law, Tyrone Guthrie.
He loved Russian writers like Gogol and Lermontov
and those unpredictable, slightly wacky insights
that-that they had.
Sean O'Faolain once told him he could become an Irish Gogol
if he was dotty enough to be-to be an Irish Gogol,
which he-- [laughs] Hubert wasn't dotty,
and-and he didn't quite become that. He became something else.
He told me about Ukrainian nationalism
years and years and years before I dreamt such a thing existed.
You know, this is way, way back in-- probably in the-in the late '80s.
I hadn't realised how important those nationalisms had continued
to be in the Soviet world.
And, of course, we've all caught up with them since.
[Robert] But then he comes back to London
and starts learning what was then referred to as Serbo-Croat
at the-the School of Slavonic Studies.
And so, this really prepares him to go out to Yugoslavia
and to really explore that multiple cultures
that comprise Yugoslavia.
[classical music playing]
[Chris] "Here we are in Dalmatia, on the island of Korčula,
late April in afternoon light.
Not very many hours later
and in bright sunlight,
we saw Dalmatian women washing their clothes in the Adriatic.
Plum trees and blossom, hills covered with narcissus and wild hyacinths,
mimosa and almond flowers, already faded,
and families sitting under magnolia trees,
sipping wine and complaining of the weather.
In the meantime, I had crossed the great barrier of Karst
that separates central Yugoslavia from the Adriatic, and which accounts
for the extraordinary divergence in the climate.
Yugoslavs say the Venetians cut down the original forests
for the piles on which Venice was built
and later rains and storms washed away the soil."
That observation about the cutting down of the forest of Dalmatia in Herzegovina
by the Venetians
is a rather characteristic reflection by Butler because, of course, implicitly,
he is thinking back to Ireland where the British navy cut down,
and so the story goes, most of the forests of Ireland.
It's a very good example of how his Irish and his Yugoslav experience
cross-fertilised each other to great effect.
The cypress which appeared on all those Renaissance portraits
in the background,
the proto-green Hubert Butler would have truly loved everything
about the cultural landscape, the flora and fauna,
the Mediterranean aura that is implicit in this landscape.
In short, not at all hard to see why, for a fairly young Hubert Butler,
Croatia, at first, was an idyll.
The country parallels with Ireland,
the classical Italianates, imprint and influence,
the whole new atmosphere of the secession states,
the melding of the Slav and the Latin.
But, also because he was really, in effect,
or would become Ireland's Orwell.
He was always attuned.
He always had a fine antenna for the political.
What began as an idyll also had a dark side.
And the two things, I think,
really echoed, in many respects, Ireland itself.
Ireland is a beautiful, green country with many charming infuriating traits.
But it had-- has had a troubled, turbulent history.
[frogs croaking]
[Chris] So this whole territory of the former Yugoslavia
was, in fact, a territory of fault lines
between the two rites of Christianity,
between Islam and Christianity,
and between East and West.
It was to Split that the body of the murdered King Alexander
was returned on October 1934.
He was assassinated in Marseilles at the behest
of the Croat separatist movement led by Pavelić.
[gunshots]
Hubert Butler had just arrived in Croatia
and witnessed the mourning of the king.
More than any other event,
the assassination of King Alexander suggested to Butler and others,
the fundamental precariousness of interwar Yugoslavia.
As Butler would write…
[narrator] "During our time in Yugoslavia
the shadow of the assassination hung over the whole country.
Hitler had come to power in Germany
and Jewish refugees were flocking to the Dalmatian coast.
In Italy and Hungary,
Pavelić and his helper, Artukovitch, were training the army of the Croat rebels
who were, in 1941,
to sweep into Yugoslavia with the Nazis
and proclaim the Independent State of Croatia.
And yet my recollections are of peace and beauty.
There was almost no traffic in Jelačić Square.
Fat amethyst pigeons strutted through the market stalls
looking for pickings and panicking when the church bells rang.
The scent of mimosa and wood smoke,
holy candles and freshly tanned leather drowned the faint whiff of petrol.
On Sunday, we walked up Slijeme Mountain,
while wild cyclamen and hellebore grew through the beechwoods.
Zagreb, in the '30s, was a very cultivated little town.
It had an opera house and theatres,
and there were still remnants of an Austrianised aristocracy
in the leafy suburbs.
Dalmatia was Italianate and Belgrade was still largely Turkish in character.
When one went south and penetrated to Montenegro,
one seemed to pass from our cruel, complicated century to an earlier one,
just as cruel, where each man was responsible
to his neighbours for his crime
and where organised 20th-century barbarity had not yet emerged."
And the contrast I often think of when reading Hubert
on central and eastern Europe in-in this era
is with the much touted Patrick Leigh Fermor,
whose flowery purple prose books about travelling as a young man
through the castles of, you know, Hungary and Transylvania and these places
as a-- as a young man with a backpack but always staying in very grand houses.
And I feel that there's far less of the reality of what's happening
between people on the ground
in these incredibly complex, and interesting
and important areas, um, than, I guess, in-- in Europe.
[birds chirping]
[car approaching]
[Chris] This is Orašac,
a small, beautiful Dalmatian village not far from Dubrovnik,
where Hubert Butler met in a cafe,
sometime during his first stay in Yugoslavia,
the famous English novelist, Rebecca West.
In a letter to his mother,
he describes the afternoon as pouring down with rain
and Rebecca West as being chauffeured around the country
by her rich husband in a Roadster.
Butler asks West what she is doing here.
She responds, "I'm working on a novel on Yugoslavia,
or more precisely, Yugoslavia and me."
[narrator] "As the evening grows colder, the Strand empties
and a group of boys come out of the pinewoods,
where they had been collecting sticks, and build a bonfire on the shore.
The rest of the sand sinks back into the night
-and they are islanded in the firelight." -[fire crackling]
"As the flames burn higher, it is easier to see their keen Jewish faces.
They have not yet lost the colours of the Mediterranean,
though it may be many generations since their ancestors
travelled up from Palestine to the shores of the Baltic.
Persecution has hardened them and given them strength
to survive war and revolution
and even to profit by them and direct them.
Perhaps it is they, in the end,
who will decide the future of Riga Strand."
[fire crackling]
[Chris] Many of the Jews who got to Dalmatia,
particularly, escaped the holocaust.
What Butler saw of the looming Jewish predicament
in eastern and central Europe on Riga Strand, 1930,
what he saw of the actual Jewish persecution
at a distance in Dalmatia between 1934 and 1937,
what he gleaned from the darkening international situation in the late '30s
and, of course, from the global media
led him inevitably to one of the epicentres
of what might be called the Interwar Jewish Crisis namely Vienna,
the old imperial capital of Austria, Hungary,
from which the Yugoslav lands had only recently been detached.
-[marching band playing] -[whirring]
[narrator] …all the way here to visit a friend of his.
The name is Lime. Harry Lime.
Now Martins was broke and Lime had offered him some sort of--
I don't know, some sort of a job.
Anyway, there he was, poor chap, happy as a lark and without a cent.
[upbeat music playing]
[Fintan] It must've been a time of incredible stress.
He went to Vienna, really, as…
just an agent of conscience.
He wasn't there on behalf of anybody.
He wasn't, initially, with any organisation.
He just went because he had a sense
that something really, really terrible was about to happen to the Jews of Europe,
and he just had a-a moral sense that he had to do
as much as he possibly could to rescue as many people as possible.
There's this image of the essay writer,
you know, as someone who-- who's a bit abstracted,
who's just an observer.
But he clearly got enormous pleasure
out of the fact that he could-- he could really--
he could-- he could hustle, he could hassle,
he could manoeuvre, he could manipulate, he could get things done.
And in doing that, he-he managed to just get a lot of people
out of-- out of Vienna
who-who otherwise would've died. I mean, there's no question.
[Robert] He volunteers to work for the Quakers in Vienna
and works closely with Emma Cadbury,
a famous Quaker activist, to try to get as many Jewish people
out of Vienna as possible.
[Fintan] Butler's position was a little bit anomalous,
because he was working with the Quakers, but he wasn't one of them.
He didn't really have any kind of official position.
And I suppose he-he kind of had some of the glow
of-of-of the-- you know, the Quaker history in Vienna
where they were very highly regarded,
and they had all these-these-these contacts
particularly with Austrian-- Nazis who were Austrians.
And he was able to, you know, use his suave Anglo-Irish manners
to get himself into embassies to try to talk to people.
In the end, Butler had to break the law.
He really did have to take-take the law in his own hands to a very large extent
by simply shipping people out of Austria, getting them to England,
having his wife Peggy meet people at the station in London and take them,
pretty much illegally, to Bennettsbridge
and then try to-to get them onwards from there.
But, in fact, Butler himself draws upon various favours
from people he knows in Ireland
to house various adults and children from the group.
So, the Quaker community really steps forward.
Now whether people were turning a blind eye
or whether there was just an assumption that, you know,
if this nice man was coming across on the boat
with these respectably-dressed people,
it was probably okay, is really not clear.
You know, but-but-but it's--
What is clear is that he was operating very much on his own initiative,
and-and-and himself and Peggy were really doing this
according to their own likes.
Ireland's official community for those who are trying to get out
of Nazi-occupied Europe was the committee to aid Christian refugees.
The word "Christian" was specifically put
into the institutional support that was there.
And so you have this interesting distinction the government makes.
And of course, Butler is pretty antagonised and angry
by the Irish government's refusal to recognise the gravity of the problem.
And the thinking here was--
and this was said-- Hubert Butler reported it--
this having been said very directly to him was that,
"Well, sure, the American Jews will look after the Jews
and our job, therefore, is to look-look out for Christians.
Perhaps, Jews who have converted to Christianity would be okay,
but otherwise, they were none of our concern."
[Robert] In 1938, he attends the famous Evian Conference
where the issue of Jewish refugees is being discussed.
And he tells this story with evident frustration and anger
about the two Irish delegates at the conference
who say something to the effect of,
"Sure, nobody came to our aid when we were in trouble."
And to him, this sort of summarizes the Irish blinkered understanding
of what's at stake and just how dangerous
the condition of Jewish people is.
But there was also a deep reservoir of anti-Semitism.
There was a sense that you couldn't really be bringing
large numbers of Jews into Ireland,
because they would be an irritant in the body politic.
"They wouldn't fit in, they wouldn't be like us."
And Ireland was this
sort of beautifully homogeneous Catholic society
and we didn't need these aliens.
It's very striking that Butler described his-his time in Vienna
as the happiest time in his life, because he could do something practical.
[Robert] It's again a dilemma for Irish--
Southern Irish Protestants or Anglo-Irish Protestants,
is once the war begins,
there is this sense of loyalty.
And obviously, the British Crown
and the UK being under threat,
the question is, do they go and join the war effort and of course fight?
Fighting fascism is a value that they have, anyway, many of them.
So people like-- Louis MacNeice goes to fight fires in London.
Samuel Beckett, already in France but joins the French Resistance.
Elizabeth Bowen, her own strange tale of making war reports
to the British government.
Butler flirts briefly with joining British military intelligence,
and they're interested in him because he's a linguist, he's well-travelled,
he knows a huge amount about the European situation.
But at the end of the day, he says to himself,
"No, I have to put my efforts into Ireland."
[calming music playing]
[Christopher] I was about six
when I first met Peggy and Hubert Butler at Annaghmakerrig.
And then seven, eight, nine and ten
when we stayed from time to time at Maiden Hall.
I was very much aware of the war, because my mother kept telling us
that my father was engaged in the war, and he would soon come home.
But I really had no interest in him.
[Robert] So, life at Maiden Hall was-was a complicated situation,
I think, financially.
Obviously, Butler had inherited this 18th century mansion,
a house of the middling size.
but nonetheless, you know, not an easy property to keep going.
But because of his literary inclinations,
because of the travel he had done,
Butler had never really settled into a professional life.
So the question was, how to keep going
and how to live the kind of cultured life that he and Peggy valued?
[Christopher] Neither of-- of them had jobs
in the normal way of describing jobs, and so they took these paying guests.
We paid three pounds, five shillings a week each, I think, to stay there,
and I do not know if that actually covered the cost of our stay,
the food, the laundry and so on,
but it must have or they wouldn't have gone on doing it.
[Robert] And that's where Peggy, again, I think deserves so much credit
for making this life possible.
Because she was so creative,
she turned that creativity into making a life for the family,
making it financially viable.
She raised lots of children who came to live at Maiden Hall
when their parents were off either in the colonial service
or working abroad in tea plantations in Ceylon
or wherever it was these Anglo-Irish people had gone.
Often, it was the Butlers who they would turn to and say,
"Please look after our children during the school holidays," and so forth.
So that, obviously, was one way that they had an income,
but it's clear that the Butlers did have to struggle to-to make ends meet
even as they led this very cultivated life.
Well, I hope I'm about to turn up something really exciting.
"How much of the draft did you pay?"
House and land contents.
-Oh. -[thumps]
Yeah, I know that my parents had absolutely no money,
and my father as a market gardener didn't make very much.
And he didn't have enough land to really do more farming
than have a market garden.
And they had a large house and a single child. That was me.
So they took in children whose families were not able to have them
for one reason or another during the war or after the war.
And Joe was, of course, here.
He came when he was the youngest of all, and he was here for the longest.
I suggest that this carving suggests overweening arrogance
on my part as a child and, no doubt, now.
Oh, because no other carving was allowed. I remember.
The other children wanted to carve their names,
and I said, "No, no, no. This tree is for me.
You can go and carve your names on some other tree but not this one.
This is my tree."
[Julia] I had no problem with it, that I remember.
We just all got on very well,
and it was a big group of children who mostly got on well.
Some less well than others,
but everybody, I think, got on pretty well.
[Robert] And then of course, Butler, like not a few Anglo-Irish,
became interested in country markets
and how he could make something of a living by market gardening.
And so the orchards and gardens at Maiden Hall at their height
were quite a big operation.
[Julia] Here are the beehives. My father was very keen on bees.
These are the gardens with the rows of fruit and vegetables,
all neatly lined,
and the fruit against the wall in the Espalier apple trees.
My father, when asked, to describe himself either on a form
or to somebody or in any sense,
he would always describe himself as a market gardener.
He never considered himself that he was a writer.
And this the orchard that my grandfather planted in--
I believe it was the 1940's when he inherited--
when his father died and he inherited Maiden Hall
and the small acreage around it.
That one were-- is may be the Blenheim orange.
Or is it this tree here?
Grandpa grafted five different kinds of apple trees onto,
and it was his pride and joy because all the grafts took.
He was very proud of the King of the Tompkins.
-Which was one of the grafts… -Which was one
-one of the grafts, yes. -…of these five.
And I don't know if this is what we're eating now.
-Which is delicious! -It's absolutely delicious.
-[Suzanna] It's really delicious. -[Lynn] I know. Yeah.
[Julia] He hated driving. He was a really, really bad driver.
His driving habits were very erratic.
And if he was driving slowly and quietly and peacefully,
he was thinking about the garden and the orchard,
but if he was driving fast, and furiously and not well,
he was thinking of something like Croatia, which disturbed him and infuriated him.
[narrator] "When an incendiary sets a match to respectability,
it smoulders malodorously,
but piety, like patriotism, goes off like a rocket.
The jackboot was worn by the Croats themselves
and used so vigorously against the schismatic Serbs
that the Germans and the Italians,
who had established their little state, were amazed.
Pavelić, the regicide ruler of Croatia, was himself the epitome,
the personification of the extraordinary alliance
of religion and crime,
which for four years made Croatia the model
for all satellite states in German Europe.
He was extremely devout,
attending mass every morning with his family
in a private chapel built onto his house.
He received expressions of devoted loyalty
from the leaders of the Churches,
including the Orthodox, whose murdered metropolitan had been replaced
by a subservient nominee."
[Chris] There is, in human affairs, a kind of iron full spectrum
of how any society handles cultural diversity.
Societies can move very quickly
from what we would call multiculturalism,
that is to say celebration and incorporation of diversity,
to integration, to segregation,
to apartheid, to massacre, to genocide.
That, at least, the 20th century has taught us
and the 21st century is reteaching us.
The NDH, based on cultural and religious conflicts,
dispatched with the first six of those options
and moved directly within one month to full-scale genocide.
[Slavko speaking]
[Chris] "At the peak of the transports,
the surplus prisoners were killed in the camp itself.
Summarizing the memories of the surviving camp prisoners,
Lav vividly describes how this worked.
'Before nightfall,
Ritz would separate groups of eight to ten people from the camp
based on a list of names jotted down on a small sheet of paper.
He did this two or three times for a total of about 30 to 40 prisoners.
They were taken, unbound, along the path that led to the camp.
Whether they were tied together
once they were away from the camp was not known,
but an hour or an hour and a half after their departure,
gunshots could be heard.
It is understood that the executions were carried out
at a cave below Grga's Hill,
as indicated by the statements of the camp survivors.
The cave has not been investigated by speleologists to this day.'
I imagine my father in the Jadovno Camp, in the evening shade,
as he listens to the shooting from Grga's Hill.
He had arrived in Jadovno from Danica via Gospić
on July 17 or 18,
when the camp was already overcrowded
and the executions of the 'surplus' prisoners
had already begun.
One evening, did Ritz call out my father's name
and send him off to Grga's Hill,
or did my father lose his life in the final extermination of the camp?
I know I will never find out,
but I cannot help but think of my father's last days, last moments."
In English, two bodies of work stand out pre-eminently
for their treatment of the atrocities of the independent state of Croatia.
The first is Slavko Goldstein's magisterial work of history and memoir,
translated from the Croatian entitled,
1941: The Year That Keeps Returning.
The second is Hubert Butler's collected Balkan essays.
[narrator] "'Why not let bygones be bygones?' they say.
'If we rake these things up, we'll merely start trouble at home
and play into the hands of the Communists.
And anyway, they are always killing each other in the Balkans.'
I once heard an ambassador in Belgrade argue like that,
and indeed I have never heard a British or American official abroad
argue in any other way.
When in 1946 I went to Zagreb
and looked up the files of the wartime newspapers of Croatia
in which the whole story was to be read,
it was obvious that no foreign inquirer had handled them before,
and the library clerks regarded me with wonder and suspicion."
[whispers] Here we are in the very reading room
of the old library of the University of Zagreb
where Hubert Butler read many of the Church newspapers published
during the independence date of Croatia.
He was researching, as he put it,
what resistance, if any was made, by organised Christianity
to the ruthless militarism of Pavelić,
the Croat national leader and his German and Italian patrons.
These days in the library at Zagreb were proved decisive
for the entire course of Hubert Butler's life and work.
-Hello, Rajka. -Hello.
My pleasure.
-Nice to meet you. -Nice to meet you.
So that's five days.
-Seven-seven days. -Seven days, excuse me.
And what is the sense of that? What is the essence of that?
[Chris] This is the annual Ustasha legal code
that led to the suffering of so many people.
This book led to this book.
Reflecting on this stark juxtaposition,
I can now say that never before have I seen such a dramatic illustration
of the actual power of writing,
especially in modern societies
and perhaps especially in totalitarian societies.
This book records simply name, dates of life,
ethnicity, date and place of death.
The number of those murdered now stands at about 84,000
and they are still counting.
[Robert] Throughout the late 1940s,
Butler becomes increasingly interested in this issue
of the forced conversion campaign.
So, what was the Catholic Church's role
in what eventually seems to have been
the slaughter of about half a million Orthodox Serbs.
[Chris] The site of the camp at Jasenovac
was chosen very strategically.
At a brick works, next to a train line,
beside a river and with deep forests and marshes nearby.
The trains brought the human beings,
the deep forests and marshes took their bodies.
It was a big death camp,
the biggest outside Greater Germany, Poland and the occupied Soviet Union.
The word "Jasenovac" means "Place of the ash trees."
Rather like the German concentration camp,
Birkenau means "birch wood."
Like Auschwitz, Jasenovac was both a concentration camp and a death camp.
These very trees, these very old trees,
saw it all like living witnesses to the past.
[speaking in foreign dialogue]
[classical music playing]
[Chris] Hubert Butler wrote specifically
about what happened in this Orthodox parish in Vrlika
in his 1947 essay, Father Chok and Compulsory Conversion.
Butler cites a typical leaflet
issued by the Catholic hierarchy urging the Orthodox to convert.
Abridged, the leaflet reads,
"Our Lord Jesus Christ declared
that there should be one flock and one shepherd.
That is to say, there must be one Church and one Head of the Church,
who is the representative of Christ on Earth
and the chief priest in the Church of Christ.
Members of the Orthodox Church, we must introduce that unity into Croatia.
The bishop of Čakovec has already received thousands of citizens
into the Catholic Church.
As Catholics, you will be able to stay in your homes
and carry on your husbandry uninterrupted.
In the Catholic Church,
you will be able to save your immortal souls
according to the sacred words of our Lord, Jesus Christ."
[Slavko speaking]
Butler concludes,
"Many will say that these missives had at worst
the embarrassed connivance of the bishops,
but though the concentration camps were full with men
who opposed Pavelić's new order,
there is no record of a bishop going there for violent opposition
to the leaders' intervention in ecclesiastical affairs."
He describes a law student, a young law student,
a Catholic from Croatia who excelled in massacring Orthodox Serbs
who refused to convert to Catholicism.
And this young man slashed the throats of 1,360 Serbs,
and he won the prize for doing this.
He won a silver tea set, a gold watch and a roast suckling pig.
[Slavko speaking]
[Robert] And Butler keeps pressing the issue.
He goes back out to Yugoslavia to try to learn more,
to reconnect with some of the people he knew when he was there in the '30s,
and comes back to Ireland and finds that nobody wants to know.
Nobody's interested, because it doesn't fit with the received narrative.
[narrator] "The trial of General Kvaternik
and five other Quisling ministers of Croatia and of Siegfried Kasche,
German ambassador to the Independent State of Croatia,
which has just concluded in Zagreb
was of the highest importance,
yet as it happened at the same time as the Zagreb fair,
it excited relatively little interest.
Obviously, in Yugoslavia,
a new philosophy of justice quite different from ours is shaping.
Each trial seems more closely related to immediate needs
than to ultimate principles.
It is possible that when the need for stability becomes less urgent,
this tendency will be reversed.
In the meantime,
it must be admitted the guilt of the accused has usually been so obvious
that justice has not suffered conspicuously
by the preoccupations of the judges.
All seven prisoners were condemned to death.
It was a just sentence,
and the trial, insofar as it concerned them,
was fair enough."
[Robert] Very much the postwar narrative is, we enter the Cold War
and the Catholic Church has very much positioned itself
against the forces of Communism.
And so, when you have people like Archbishop Stepinac
and Cardinal Mindszenty
who are arrested by the Communist regimes in their respective countries,
it seems that they are portrayed as very much martyrs
to the cause of anti-Communism.
[Chris] Tito offered to suspend the trial
if Archbishop Stepinac was withdrawn to Rome, but the Vatican refused.
Amazingly, in 1951, Butler managed to gain access to Lepoglava Prison
and to interview Archbishop Stepinac in his private cell.
Butler's interview with Archbishop Stepinac here at Lepoglava
is an extraordinary moment in what might be called
the literature of actuality.
[Slavko speaking]
So when Butler starts saying things like, well, actually, some of the hierarchy--
the Catholic hierarchy knew about
at the very least and perhaps were even complicit in wartime atrocities,
this cuts right across the received narrative.
And in 1950s Ireland,
the anti-Communist narrative is the dominant narrative.
And so by 1952, Butler is becoming increasingly frustrated
that he can't get this story told,
and so that was going to lead him
into one of the great moments of his public life.
Hubert was invited to go to a meeting
with the International Affairs Association in Dublin, and he went.
And the topic of the meeting was an address by Peadar O'Curry,
who was, I think, the editor of the Catholic Standard at the time.
And O'Curry was giving a talk
on the passion of persecution in Yugoslavia.
O'Curry had set himself up, really, as a kind of intellectual policeman
looking out for Communists or proto-Communists
or-or Communist fellow travellers
as he saw them, particularly in the Irish media.
So, he'd really kind of set himself up as a kind of policeman of the Irish media,
and therefore people were very afraid of him.
O'Curry, you know, was-was using the pages of Catholic Standard
to denounce people who he thought were-were closet Communists.
We know that he was cooperating very closely
with the Irish Special Branch, with the police.
O'Curry's reports were-were on Special Branch files.
And we know, extraordinarily, that they found their way--
at least some of them, found their way from Irish Special Branch files
into CIA files, for example,
so even American intelligence was-was paying attention
to what O'Curry was saying about suspected Communists
in-in the Irish media.
And Hubert stood up at the end of the address and said,
"You can't talk about the passion of persecution in Yugoslavia
without going back to the persecution of the Orthodox Serbs
during the 1940s by the Croatian government,
who had had forced conversions to Roman Catholicism."
And he had already started on this observation,
when a dignified figure in the front of the room
and his companion, who was equally clad in black, walked out.
And the man was Archbishop O'Hara,
who was an American archbishop who was there as a nuncio in Dublin.
[Robert] But as soon as the Papal Nuncio walks out,
journalists surround Butler,
because it's thought that he has created a diplomatic row
by insulting the Papal Nuncio.
So, what emerges, essentially,
is that Butler is regarded as something of a-- an embarrassment,
really, a national embarrassment,
because the official representative of the Vatican has been seen
to be embarrassed and to have been insulted
by this Irish Protestant from Kilkenny.
And immediately, Kilkenny had heard he had been insulted,
and by a Kilkenny man, they went berserk.
And there was a very powerful campaign against Hubert,
who is blamed for insulting the nuncio.
And then, chairman of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society
Dr. Phelan, whom I knew well,
led this campaign to have him removed from the society immediately.
[Robert] He finds that he is ostracized in Kilkenny,
by those who are embarrassed about what he said
but also angry that he seems to have insulted their Church.
And yet, much to his disappointment and disillusionment,
he doesn't feel that he gets much support from his own fellow Protestants.
Who supports him? Who rallies around him?
Well, it's more other intellectuals, many of them from a Catholic background,
and many of the-the cultured and educated members
of the Kilkenny society
who he's come to know and trust.
And they're the ones who really stand up for him
in the face of what's quite a considerable personal assault
on him and on his family.
The creamery manager on Bennettsbridge was told
that they-- all the creameries cooperative
were passing a condemnation of my father.
All he had done was ask a question,
and it was perfectly legitimate
in a public meeting.
And he had no idea that the Papal Nuncio was there.
My grandfather, John O'Leary, was the president
of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society,
the first president of the Archaeological Society,
And he and Hubert Butler would've been colleagues.
Not really so much friends,
because their social position was quite different.
My grandfather was the local baker in Grange Manor.
Hubert Butler was part of, you know, the Anglo-Irish landed gentry.
But they would've worked together in that society.
And what happened was that a motion to expel Hubert Butler
from the Kilkenny Archaeological Society
was put forward as a result of the nuncio incident.
And the motion was put-- the motion was not carried,
it was defeated.
People forget that. It was defeated.
So my grandfather, as president chairing the meeting,
never had to actually cast a vote.
Now, it would've been difficult for him.
He had great admiration for Hubert Butler,
but he was an Irish Catholic.
The Church in the, you know, 1950s and to the '40s
was very much the dominant power in his world.
The Church mattered much more than the government or anybody else,
so for him to have gone against what would've seemed to be
the Church's position
would've been very, very difficult.
[Fintan] You have to remember that the Catholic Church was here
long before the State was.
So, you know, when the State was established,
the Church already had enormous control
over every aspect of cultural, social, intellectual and moral life, you know.
That-that was the terrain it sowed for itself,
and it was really pretty unchallenged in that terrain.
You know, [stammers] it was able to get the State to pass laws,
which were completely in keeping with-with Catholic theology
on all of those questions.
But perhaps even more pervasively,
it-it was just that sense that you did not take on this institution.
You know, it-it had the power to anatomise people.
If you were-if you were outside of the Catholic consensus,
you were at risk of being outside of our society, of being an outlaw.
[Robert] The big and most hurtful effects of the Papal Nuncio incident
is that he is forced out of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society,
because he's seen to have insulted the piety of-of local Catholics,
strikes him as a particularly terrible result.
Now, in retrospect, this might seem like pretty small potatoes,
but given how much he cared about the society as an emblem
not only of his passion for archaeology,
but as a sort of symbolic meeting place for Catholic and Protestant
in the local community.
[Olivia] To be Catholic was to be Irish.
There was an element of being loyal to the tribe
and the feeling that Hubert Butler had insulted a prince or chief of the tribe.
There's quite a thick file in the National Archives in Dublin,
which is simply the passport application by Hubert Butler and his wife Peggy
to have their passports renewed.
You'd think it's a kind of very standard,
ordinary piece of-of business.
It actually generates quite a substantial file in 1958, saying,
"Should we renew this man's passport?"
You know, "He's a danger to Ireland. He's a-- He has a bad reputation.
He's going around the place, and God knows what he's saying,
God knows what he is looking at."
And, actually, this-this goes all the way up
from the sort of-- the ordinary, you know, clerical officer level right up
to the head of Irish Military Intelligence,
is-is consulted whether or not the man's passport can be renewed.
I don't think Hubert Butler knew anything about this at the time,
because his passport subsequently was renewed in the end.
But on that file, there was just a very enigmatic note
saying that the Office of the President of Ireland,
who was Seán T. O'Kelly at the time,
has entered a caveat against Hubert Butler. [chuckles]
Now, it's hard to know exactly what this means,
but a caveat means "a warning."
And it seems to mean that there's a warning,
which has gone from the president
all the way down through the system to say,
"This man is not to be involved in any official engagement at all.
He's a-- he's a bad egg.
If-if you're seen with him,
if you're seen in his company or if you're photographed with him,
it's a bad thing.
So stay away from Hubert Butler
and keep Hubert Butler away from the State."
[Joe] He was thought to be a Communist already,
a Red, a danger to the body politic and the republic,
that he was sort of an advanced guard
of a-of a Communist takeover of the Republic,
and that he had binoculars in the front room of Maiden Hall
and was working out on conditions
where the Red Army would be able
to get a billet in the Club House Hotel in Kilkenny and so on.
The man who was sent down to investigate the thing,
a sergeant who lurked outside the front gate, apparently,
watching all the comings and goings, said,
"No, there was no evidence of his being a spy or a Red Communist, not at all."
But the information that he had gathered was quite-- quite clear
he was a farmer,
a market gardener, an apple grower,
who had written a few pieces
which might perhaps be considered a little left of centre,
but nothing serious, nothing serious.
[Fintan] I think the implications for-for Butler of this kind of hostility
that you find in the State files,
I mean, is that, you know, he really is persona non grata.
And the State even doesn't recognise the fact that, you know,
that there's any kind of valid role to be played by a dissident intellectual.
You know, remember, Butler was not a subversive,
he wasn't a Communist,
you know, he wasn't someone who was out to ferment revolution in Ireland.
I mean, he was engaged in no illegal activities of any kind.
And yet, here's this kind of stain on his character,
that, you know, he's a-he's a dangerous individual
and of course this means that-- that, you know,
he's-he's never going to be engaged at any public level at all.
[Chris] In those months when Butler was attending
the war crimes trials in Zagreb,
a major Croat fascist war criminal had escaped the city and Tito's justice
and was making his way to Ireland.
Butler would later make it his business
to find out how Dublin had played host to the man.
Well, we know Artukovitch was a very major figure
in-in the Croatian genocide.
He's the interior minister.
He's, you know, very much hands on in terms-in terms of mass murder.
We know that he's smuggled out of Croatia at the end of the war
through Catholic Church channels
and finds his way into Ireland,
under the protection of-of, you know, Catholic priests,
using an alias.
He's then given Irish identity papers under the new name,
which was crucial for him, because it allows him then
to enter North America as the new person that he's pretending to be,
but with Irish identity papers.
They could not have got these identity papers
without official help,
so this isn't just about these kind of right-wing Church sources
who were-who were smuggling him out.
At some point, he has to get the official stamp of the Irish State.
And Hubert Butler discovers this and begins to try to unpick it.
It-- It's a great piece of detective work
to try to find out, you know,
"How did this happen?
Where did Artukovitch live in the years that he was in Ireland?
Who was in touch with him?"
And he writes this absolutely brilliant essay,
which doesn't really answer all the questions.
And what-- you have kind of the dramatisation of Butler himself
going around, trying to follow different leads,
trying to find out who these people are, what they knew of him.
And he was finding a lot of people saying, "Oh, he was a lovely man.
He was absolutely gorgeous,
his family were lovely,
and I don't believe he could ever have done any of those nasty things."
And so in itself, it becomes a great moral essay
about people's blindness to evil.
[classical music playing]
[narrator] "I could not get it out of my head.
Artukovitch had stayed for a year in Ireland.
How had he come here? Who had sheltered him and where?
In the spring of 1966 I was in Dublin for a week and I decided to find out.
Here was a clue.
His nine-year-old son, Radoslav, had been born in Ireland.
The children had been exploited sentimentally to mask the truth,
so they could be used to rediscover it.
I went to the Customs house and after a prolonged search,
I found Radoslav Anitch's birth certificate.
He was born on the 1st of June 1948 at the Prague House Nursing Home,
28 Terenure Road East.
He was the son of Alois Anitch, professor of history,
of 6 Zion Road, Rathgar.
On the strength of this discovery,
I sent a letter to all the Dublin dailies,
explaining that I was writing an account
of the Independent State of Croatia, 1941 to '45,
and that I wished information about the former Minister of the Interior,
Andrija Artukovitch, who had lived at 6 Zion Road, Rathgar, in 1947.
Only The Irish Times printed my letter, turning him into a lady called Audrey."
[Fintan] It's not at all surprising that the Artukovitch files
remained under lock and key for so long
because, after all, I mean, here was the state effectively colluding
to allow a war criminal to escape from genocidal crimes.
Now did the state do that accidentally?
[Michael] Now, Chris, here it is.
This is the Department of External Affairs file
on Andrija Artukovitch's sojourn in Ireland 1947 to '48.
There it is in front of you, recently declassified.
[Chris] Amazing to be before this right now.
Basically, a stand or a censoring has been taken at the highest level
against Hubert Butler,
even as other officials in the Department of External Affairs
are aware of Artukovitch's criminal past,
and very likely had intimations of the Catholic Church's involvement
in the genocide during the Independent State of Croatia.
But if you go back to 1946,
there was an attempt made by a group of Croatian students in Rome
who were hiding out in the Vatican to get to Ireland.
And their mentors and their minders approached
the Irish embassy to the Holy See
and asked Ireland's ambassador to the Vatican, Tommy Kiernan,
if it would be possible to get safe passage to Ireland,
to get passage to Ireland.
And Kiernan was wily and he sends reports to Dublin saying,
"These guys are gonna make contact with you, but they're Ustasha.
They're bad lot, they've got a bad background
and we need to be aware of this before the country gets in too deep."
Now, he sends the reports to a man called Joe Walshe,
who was Ireland's top diplomat,
he was the head of the Department of External Affairs,
but Walshe was different from Kiernan in one critical way.
He was an ardent Catholic, he was a former Jesuit,
he hadn't finished his training,
but to him, the Catholic Church was the centre of the universe
and Rome, you know, was so important at its centre.
So when Walshe picks up this dispatch from Kiernan, it was perfect.
"Of course we welcome these Croats into Ireland
if they can be given the right documentation."
[Chris] This is the reference written for Artukovitch by the Delegate General,
that is to say the head of the Franciscans of Switzerland.
Now this process continues.
Kiernan actually gets recalled from the Vatican
and replaced by Walshe.
And the man who takes over there, Fred Boland,
a much more urbane, astute diplomat than-than Walshe,
he brings this idea to the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid,
who, you know, saw himself as the prince of the Church
and very much the ruler of Catholic Ireland, if you like.
And McQuaid takes one look at this correspondence,
and McQuaid wrote in a very, very succinct style, he says,
"I don't want this dumped on me," for want of a better word.
"The Vatican are trying to fob off their problems on me."
I paraphrase slightly in this, but that's the gist of it.
But I think it's McQuaid's warning is what Boland listens to.
After the trial of Archbishop Stepinac,
the mood changes in Ireland towards Croatia,
towards the Catholic Church in Croatia.
And I think that forms the background
to why the Artukovitch/Anitch and Ivandich visa applications
are looked on in a more positive light
by the Department of External Affairs and its officers in 1947.
[Robert] But what it also does point out to him
and he's very eloquent on this topic,
is how the local and the national and the international all come together,
that really, just as he is fighting
for certain principles in his own neighbourhood,
so if people had been more responsible and outspoken
in local neighbourhoods in Croatia,
perhaps the slaughter there wouldn't have taken place.
And this is such an important theme in Butler's writing,
which is that local relationships,
be they in Ireland or on the outskirts of Paris,
when Jewish children are sent to the death camps,
or be it in Croatia during the forced conversion campaign,
it's all about the eye-to-eye daily contact with your neighbours
that-that has to be maintained in the face of ideology,
of religious extremism,
and the sort of bureaucratising and dehumanising impact of modern life.
[narrator] "They spent four days without food at the Vélodrome d'Hiver,
the winter cycle racing stadium, before their mothers were taken from them,
then they were loaded three or four hundred at a time into cattle trains
at the Gare d'Austerlitz and taken to Auschwitz.
It was related at Nuremberg that an order came from Berlin
that deportees from Vichy France should be mingled discreetly with the children
to make them look like family groups.
Was this done?
It is not as though dubious legend has grown up around these children
as it has around King Herod's far smaller enterprise in Bethlehem.
The facts are bleak and few.
It should not be hard to find more and to iron out discrepancies,
but no one seems interested."
[Lara] Butler wrote in 1968,
which was the-- actually the year of the May Revolution.
At the time, people were not very focused on the Second World War.
They were not focused on the issue of collaboration.
On the contrary, basically, France had swallowed the myth
which was peddled by General Charles de Gaulle after the war
that all of France resisted.
The collaborators, the Vichy regime were not France.
They were just a tiny, tiny minority.
And it took-- Obviously, Hubert Butler realised that that was false,
and what he denounces in this wonderful essay
is the fact that people just went along with it.
They saw these-- these Jews being rounded up.
They saw the children being torn from their mothers,
being put on cattle trains at Austerlitz Station,
and they did nothing.
It took-- Actually, an American academic,
Robert Paxton, historian, in the early 1970's
published Vichy and that blew the lid off of French collaboration.
It was a very controversial book in France.
A lot of French people were really shocked to learn the extent
to which the French population accepted, indeed, in many cases, welcomed,
cooperated with, worked with Vichy
and was quite zealous in deporting Jews.
[classical music playing]
The essays are fully formed and-and it needs a particular combination,
which is somewhat contradictory, so it needs a certain kind of quietness.
You know, [stutters] it needs to sort of pull people in
and at the same time, there has to be something urgent going on.
It has to matter.
It-it needs a certain kind of exploratory feel to it.
You know, you're trying out an idea, testing it, pulling on the threads,
but if you're testing it too much, well then, you know, it falls apart.
It has to have a certain structure,
and Butler's just perfect in relation to that balance.
So when you read Butler, you get, at the same time--
and he does it miraculously in his style--
a sense of urgency, a sense that this matters,
and at the same time, a certain sense of removal, a certain sense of distance.
And it's that combination of the timely and the timeless
that really is unique in Butler.
I-I can't think of any other essayists
who has it quite to the same extent that he does.
So clearly, essays like The Children of Drancy
or The Invader Wore Slippers
are the products of a lot of thought,
and Butler arrives at a particular moment in history
or a particular concept,
and then he hangs this much larger argument on-- on the moment.
Like when the children are betrayed at Drancy
or when begins to ask the question,
"How would the Irish have responded
to an invasion by the Germans during the war?"
And this sort of sets him off on these contemplations,
which are really literally quite beautiful constructions.
And of course, you know, what he-- what he realised
and-and really wrote about brilliantly in The Invader Wore Slippers
is that you wouldn't come in, you know, to crush Catholic Ireland,
you would come in as the ally of Catholic Ireland.
You would come in and say, "We are your friends."
You know, "We're-- We're here to support you in your historic mission
to-to a fully Catholic Ireland, to shake off the British oppressor."
And what would happen in that circumstance?
How would Irish people respond?
And I don't think Butler ever said that, you know,
all Irish people would be-would be pro-fascist.
I think what he was hinting at very, very subtly
and very brilliantly in The Invader Wore Slippers
was that, you know, there were ways
in which the susceptibilities of Irish people--
their sense of oppression,
their sense of self-pity-- could have very easily been turned
by a putative Nazi invasion.
And yet, then the Nazis would've found a substantial number of people
who are quite happy to take part
in collaborating with a Nazi puppet regime.
I mean, it was-- it's a very disturbing essay
because it's-- in a way, it's a kind of a science fiction,
it's sort of counterfactual saying, "Well, what would have happened?"
But what makes it disturbing is not the counterfactual.
It's just how close it comes to what we know
about what Irish culture was like, what Irish society was like
and how that kind of rhetoric,
that kind of self-pity could have been manipulated.
And Butler was able to do this,
because he knew how these things had happened elsewhere.
[calming music playing]
[narrator] "In totalitarian war,
human nature is reduced to its simplest terms
and a skilled invader can predict with fair accuracy
the behaviour of the respectable X's, the patriotic Y's, the pious Z's.
Of course there are innumerable divagations.
But in an avalanche, it is the valleys and the riverbeds that count,
the hundred thousand cart tracks can be disregarded.
In a Zagreb newspaper of 1942,
I read that Ireland, with Croatia and Slovakia,
was to be one of the three model 'allied' states in German Europe.
In other papers too there was much of flattering intent
about the common loyalty of Croats and Irish to faith and fatherland,
our similar histories, romantic temperaments and literary gifts.
Irish plays continued to be played in Zagreb, when English were taboo.
I think the Nazi policy in regard to Ireland
would have been equally agile and ambiguous.
The Celtic nationalists would, as in Brittany,
have been regarded as a valuable tool
for undermining a non-German hegemony,
but of decidedly of less value for the reconstruction of a German one.
The nationalist would've been manoeuvred,
not kicked, out of his privileged position."
One of the great Irish writers.
I think his style is absolutely extraordinary.
And I think when I read Escape from the Anthill in 1985,
one thing that struck me besides the clarity and originality
that he was bringing to bear on many, many topics
that I had vaguely thought of, but which he made me think about again,
but the other thing that struck me was metaphors, the similes,
the slashing style that sometimes is very gentle
and-- and inferential, and then comes in slam at the end.
He says somewhere-- and in fact I used this as a title of an essay--
that he-he always admired or believed the man was right
who gave his son a good slap when he saw a salamander,
this rare beast, because then he'd remember it.
Hubert believed in a slap being a necessary thing to administer
from time to time in style.
And sometimes he comes out with a twist--
a twist of the dagger at the end of a beautifully constructed paragraph
that makes you go, "Oof!"
And that's why reading him is a continual revelation.
He writes in a way that is utterly distinctive.
You know, the makers name is on the blade.
If you read a Hubert Butler essay,
it couldn't be-- it couldn't be written by anyone else.
[narrator] "Looking for a reason,
I can only conclude that science has enormously extended
the sphere of our responsibilities,
while our consciences have remained the same size.
Parochially minded people neglect their parishes
to pronounce ignorantly about the universe,
while the universalists are so conscious of the worldwide struggles
of opposing philosophies that the rights and wrongs of any regional conflict
dwindle to insignificance against a cosmic panorama.
Like the needle of compass at the North Pole,
their moral judgment spins round and round,
overwhelming them with information
and telling them nothing at all.
They feel that truth is in some way relative to orientation,
and falsehood no more than a wrong adjustment,
so that they can never say unequivocally, 'That is a lie!'"
[Robert] You know, it's sometimes said that human beings
are almost biologically programmed not to be able to relate
to more than the equivalent of a small community of other people.
And Butler really believes that, instinctually.
we're not meant to relate to the world
in the terms that we-- that media and modern life often demand of us,
that really we can only connect meaningfully
with a relatively small group of people
who we know and who-who we are in relationship with.
And so one of his great concerns is that modern life
places moral demands on us just in terms of scale
which really lie beyond our grasp.
If Butler were around today,
the bumper sticker he might have on his car
would be, "Act locally, think globally."
You know, that's very much, I think, the way he tried to frame his own life.
And it-- it raises interesting questions about his relationship
to his European identity,
because he was a fervent European.
But he lived long enough to wonder what would be impact
of the European Union,
and how would this affect the local--
local industries and the local culture that he so highly prized.
He was deeply suspicious of centralisation.
[Roy] It's very opposite, I think, that that's where the centre, so to speak,
of Hubert's intellectual operations moved out from.
It's one of the few Irish cities that has Medieval merchant's houses,
wonderful castles in the centre, antiquities in the wider area.
It's a palimpsest of-- of Irish life, and it's also very beautiful.
[Chris] Butler was completely involved in his local world.
He stood for instance for election barely a year after the nuncio affair.
He didn't get elected but that didn't quell his activities.
When the local council planned a housing estate on the castle park,
Butler worked with others to successfully oppose it.
Many writers try to escape their roots,
often out of a need to reinvent themselves.
Beck and Joyce come to mind.
Butler nurtured those roots,
whether it was his work on the city's archives,
his archaeological activities,
or the clan gatherings of the Butler diaspora.
And let's not forget Peggy, including her own work on the archives,
the early years of the Kilkenny Arts Festival,
the arts week,
or the city's art gallery which now proudly bears their name.
[vocalising]
[Roy] But those intellectual operations-- it's rather a military metaphor
but perhaps not inappropriate- took in Northern Ireland as well,
which he was determined to throw out grappling hooks to,
and the Kilkenny debates were a very important part of that,
so is his constant interest in what's happening up there,
much more than many Southern Protestants of his era did.
So the 1954 debate, you know, just bringing Ulsterman
or Ulster Unionist down to Kilkenny
to have an open conversation about partition and about unification.
It's hard for us now to remember just how controversial
and upsetting such an idea would have been to people.
I want to say that this wafer, after it is consecrated,
the Church of Rome teaches,
is the actual body, bones,
-blood, nerves, sinews… -[laughter]
…and deity of Jesus Christ.
Hubert certainly can see Northern Protestants as anything like us,
they were-- they were scarily different,
and Hubert became interested in fundamentalism very early on.
He's writing about Paisley far earlier than a lot of other people are.
I notice this as some of the essays found for his--
his-his last collection, The Appleman and the Poet.
Of course, Peggy came from a border country,
which is I think is very important too,
and through her and through his brother-in-law Tyrone Guthrie
and through various Northern friends, he had a-- a close apprehension
of the tensions in the North, and I-I think the possibilities
and potentialities in the North,
which were denied to-to many other Southern Protestants.
The Kilkenny debates are one of the ways which he tried to infuse that knowledge.
[chicken clucking]
[priest] Anyone home?
Mrs. Cloney.
Oh! Nearly forgot. Baptismal lines.
Who would they be, Father?
Oh, just for Eileen, starting at St. Bridgit's next week.
Well, we haven't really made up our minds about the school yet.
We were in two minds.
Sorry, about what?
[Robert] So the Fethard-on-Sea boycott happens in 1957.
And again, what starts it off seems like a pretty minor thing,
but as we all know, back in the '50s,
there was the enforcement of Ne Temere,
which meant that when you had a mix marriage
between a Protestant and a Catholic,
it was expected that the marriage would take place
in the Catholic church.
And frequently also it was required
that the Protestant partner in the marriage
would agree that any children would be raised and educated
in the Catholic church.
And so you have a young farming couple called the Cloneys
in Fethard who are a mixed marriage,
and Sheila Cloney has agreed to all of these.
But as a Protestant mother,
when it comes time to educating her two young daughters,
she begins to have second thoughts.
And this very personal, familial matter quickly turns into a cause célèbre,
because the local Catholic priest is not willing to let it drop.
And so her response to this is to flee town with-- with her two--
her two children.
And in response to this,
the local Catholic community begins to boycott
the Protestant businesses in Fethard.
[priest] From now on…
all those who are against the one true Church,
will be boycotted.
[gasping]
So the local news agent, the local iron monger,
they suddenly find that they are being boycotted on sectarian grounds
because of what Mrs. Cloney has done.
And-and this raises lots of questions for Hubert Butler,
not just about the ongoing friction
between the two religious communities and the status of the minority,
but it also raises for him questions about whether Protestants
are gonna stick up for themselves.
-[man] …and if I may say… -[whimpers]
It's Butler actually who joins in an effort to--
of local Protestants from around the region
to go and buy their groceries, and their newspapers,
and their other items from the Protestant businesses
in Fethard to keep them open,
to keep them going, as well as a show of solidarity.
But again, it is very much secular progressive tolerant intellectuals
who take up the cause.
So-- oh, and Sheehy-Skeffington raises the point of the boycott in the Senate
and sort of forces the hand of Éamon de Valera
to come out and say that he considers the boycott unfortunate.
[narrator] "In the long run, remorseless truth-telling
is the best basis for ecumenical harmony.
Hitler once explained to Hermann Rauschning how he intended
to use the churches as his propagandists.
"Why should we quarrel?
They will swallow anything provided they can keep their material advantages."
Yet Hitler never succeeded in corrupting the churches
as effectively as did Pavelitch and Artukovitch,
who professed to be Christians.
We shall not be able to estimate the extent of their success
and how it might have been resisted,
while a single fact is diplomatically 'forgotten.'
It is well known that those who suppress history have to relive it."
[gun firing]
[explosion]
[Chris] If Father Chok…
and his Orthodox parish church
destroyed by the NDH policy of forcible conversion
could be called Act One,
then Act Two, we might say, is this very church,
with its relatively modern windows and its shiny door,
almost certainly destroyed during the recent war
in this part of Croatia.
Here we are at the end of day,
in Ileka village ravaged by ethnic cleansing and war.
This is the Balkan writing of Hubert Butler as prophecy.
This is what might be called the peregrination of trauma,
the way terrible historical experience goes underground for a period
and then emerges undimmed and undaunted in new historical circumstances.
[Lara] I have a hunch that Hubert Butler might agree
when I say that nationalism and religion,
so often the scourges of humanity in the past,
are in danger of blighting our young century.
So, you're publishing now in November
this very important book, Hubert Butler's Balkan Essays.
[Roy] In his 80s, when I knew him he had the most seraphic smile,
beautiful smile lit up his face,
and very charming voice, wonderful sense of humour.
And a terrific double act with his wife Peggy,
who was extremely intelligent and very, very funny.
The house slightly down at heel,
shabby books everywhere
with a kind of Eastern European feel about it, I always thought,
because some of the books were, of course, in Eastern European languages.
Overgrown meadows and rather neglected orchard
and a slight sense of something sinking into itself.
[fly buzzing]
I-I think for Ireland there was a certain tragedy
in the marginalisation of-- of Hubert Butler,
particularly when you think about the 1960s and the 1970s
when he was still incredibly active. That mind was still-- was still at work.
He knew so much. I mean, he had such deep--
not just technical expertise, which he had,
but a moral expertise.
I mean, he really understood Europe.
He understood its history in-- in very, very profound ways.
And here we were as a small nation, you know, joining Europe as we--
as we saw in ourselves, I mean, going in to the European Union,
trying to remake this kind of relationships.
And here was, you know, this extraordinary public resource
that was available to Ireland.
I mean, you have to remember Butler was an Irish patriot.
You know, he-- he really wanted to be seen as someone
who-- who was a proud Irish man.
And-- and the fact that he-- that nobody ever talk to him,
nobody ever used him, nobody ever tried to [stammers] place him in a position
where he could be that bridge between, you know,
an Ireland which had been very insular on the one side
and an Ireland which wanted to be internationalist
and European on the other side,
It-- It is really sad.
Not so much for him, I think,
because in a way I think he got over by then.
But I think it is sad for Ireland.
This is a contract with Transworld Euro Publishing done ran for us,
and I may need your signature, okay?
I was a sort of outsider within an Irish society.
Not an outsider, but I-I was sent away
to be educated in England as Hubert Butler was and…
I miss my home very much and so forth.
And I was hungry for…
an Irish identity, I suppose, being-- being a smart little public school boy.
And, he was somebody who spoke to me
in-- in a language that I thought was wonderful.
And he appreciated the divisions in Irish society
between Protestant-Catholic,
like my mother was a Protestant, my father, Catholic.
I was baptised, one way my brother's baptised another.
So, I kind of apprehended that…
bifurcated world that Butler embodied.
Myself and Frank McGuinness were…
Seamus Cashman's readers and…
I was-- We read many fiction,
but I read this collection of essays and…
I wrote a very strong report
telling Seamus that he had to publish this man.
And Seamus was very gracious, he said…
"It's Anglo-Irish stuff. This doesn't sell,
but, you know, if you wanna do something with it yourself, you're welcome."
So, I picked up the phone to Hubert Butler,
and I rang Maiden Hall.
I found the number.
And this voice answered, which was Hubert, and I said,
"Can I speak to Hubert Butler?"
And there was a pause. [chuckles]
And the voice said, "Do you mean Mr. Butler?"
I said, "Yes, of course."
And it was Hubert and…
It was very uncharacteristic.
He's-- He's the most un-pompous man you can imagine,
but it was a… poignant start to a very long relationship.
So, I went down the following weekend, and I was welcome by he and Peggy.
And it developed from there
as he showed me more and more extraordinary turn.
[Fintan] When the first collection of Hubert Butler's essays
was-- was published, Escape from the Anthill, in the mid-1980s,
I-I remember opening it up and just starting to read,
and realising this is one of the great essayists, you know.
And not just one of the great Irish essays.
It's not that, you know, this man is in our midst,
which was obviously very important.
But just as, you know, stylistically, intellectually,
morally, in terms of the essay form, in terms of what's he doing, what it says,
you know, he-he really is one of the great figures
in the history of this form.
You know, you don't find
very many essayists who have a body of work
that is as brilliant, as prescient, as well expressed,
as morally complex,
and as morally important as Butler's work is.
[John] I wish, and a few others like me wish,
that people like him had continued to contribute, that more people like him
had continued to contribute to Irish life,
because what we were left with was an Ireland
ruled by very small-minded people,
as Hubert learned later on to his cost.
I would dearly like to read Hubert on our present predicament in Ireland.
I would dearly have loved to have read him during the Celtic Tiger years.
He would have been… a wise voice.
And of course, we wouldn't have listened to him,
because we were all having such a wonderful, wild party
with all this non-existent money.
But it would have been marvellous to read Hubert on it.
He would have been so funny.
And so, you know, his--
It would have brought out the best of his wit, I think,
and the best of his-- his lamentation for the stupidity of human beings.
So, I wrote a review about 3,000 words long or something,
and this was cut savagely down to a thousand words.
And I made such a fuss about this
that the editor at The TLS read the book himself,
and then said, "This man is-- is absolute gold dust."
[Antony] So that review in The Times Literary Supplement
alerted the intellectual world, if you like, to Butler.
We then went on to publish two subsequent volumes,
The Children of Drancy
and Grandmother and Wolfe Tone in the late '80s,
again, happily during Hubert's lifetime.
And we were approached by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in-- in New York
where there was a wonderful editor called Elizabeth Sifton,
who again apprehended exactly where--
where Butler was coming from, as they say.
And she did a gathering of the essays
from our existing books and--
as Andrew Foster did the same for Penguin.
[Olivia] The wonderful thing for people of my generation
was to pick up a book of essays
which was just so fresh, it could have been written in our own day.
This man was 50 years ahead of his time.
The funny thing is somehow that maybe he escaped.
You know, the fact that he's not-- He wasn't part of the Irish world
means that we can now see him not just as, you know,
as a-- as an interesting Irish figure,
I think he-- he is a world figure,
and… that's the payback, in a sense,
for the kind of neglect that he went through for so long.
[Antony] I was rung up excitedly by a small French publisher.
I think he was called Samuel Brooksel.
He had read Hubert Butler's essay on Graham Greene
in which he, in a very quiet way, eviscerates
Greene-- Greene's moral claim to-- [chuckles] to literature.
And-- And Graham Greene is god in France.
And-- And Samuel was so thrilled,
he rang me from a phone box on the Quai d'Orsay,
saying, "I have to publish this man."
Butler became international,
and his time had come.
[Robert] He seems to have taken it in a stride.
I think one of the wonderful things about Butler is
that although he struggled often know where his place was,
he never seem to-- to lack for a kind of calm inner confidence.
He knew he was a gifted person.
He knew he had important things to say.
It was just a case of everybody else taking note.
So I think he obviously delighted in-- in getting some recognition,
but in a-- in a lot of ways, I think, he took the greatest pleasure
in knowing that Ireland itself,
in a sense, had-- had begun to ask some of the same questions
he had been asking,
and that in many ways the more open and pluralist society
that he hoped for seemed to be emerging.
[Christopher] It was a very admirable position that he took.
I think that it contributed to the fact that he has not the reputation
that he should have, both in Ireland and abroad.
I mean, he should be seen as major Irish writer,
I think, and he's not.
You know, part of the difficulty is the Anglo-Irishness.
The English think he was Irish, the Irish think he was English.
All I know was that he-- he did really believe
that the local was the important life to lead.
He always held that Ireland needed the decentred tradition,
that we needed it very badly,
and that we were suffering from being so monotheistic
in terms of this Catholic domination of-of-- of everything.
[Robert] There's this wonderful scrap of paper I came across,
in his files when researching.
And he had the receipt of his postal ballot
from the 1990 Irish presidential election.
And he and Peggy both sent in-- as quite elderly people,
sent in their votes in favour of Mary Robinson.
And by this point, of course, Butler knew that someone like me
was gonna come along and want to know more about him,
so he wrote in his rather spider-like handwriting,
"P and I voted for Mary Robinson. She got in."
And this was sort of right at the very end of his life,
and I think he felt like that was a kind of vindication
in some ways of the values that he had espoused,
you know, for the previous 50 years.
So, there is a lovely symmetry in a way to the fact that he dies
shortly after she's elected president of the Republic.
[calming music playing]
[classical music playing]