engleski

Hubert Butler ‘In Europe’s Debatable Lands’

At some point in 1936 or 1937 two Anglo-Irish writers took a car trip together in the pouring rain from Dubrovnik. One was Rebecca West, who recorded the excursion in her monumental Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: she and her husband gave ‘an Irish friend’ a lift to his lodgings, some fifteen miles along the coast from Dubrovnik. This friend insisted on them getting out into the rain to do some sight-seeing, after which West was happy to stop in his modest lodgings to warm up and meet his landlady, with whom he conversed.1 This unnamed friend was Hubert Butler, as Robert Tobin has confirmed in his recent biography of Butler, adding also his note to his wife about the encounter: West, Butler commented waspishly, ‘like so many others, is writing a book about Jugoslavia, or rather she says “Me in Jugoslavia”’.2 It is possible to sense the contrast between the two writers in this vignette. Whereas West and her banker husband were frequently accompanied by of ficial guides in their excursions through Yugoslavia, Butler’s time in the region seems to have been much more improvised, facilitated by the fact that he could speak the language. West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which amalgamates her three trips to the area between 1936 and ’38, is driven by her indefatigable sense of purpose: an almost 1, 200-page-long book that she managed to write and get published by 1941. The article looks at the lesser known writing by Butler on Yugoslavia and examines its relevance for the country's representations in Ireland.

Hubert Butler, Croatia, Ireland, travel writing, Yugoslavia

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