Failing Better
Brian Friel: Beginnings, by Kelly Matthews, Four Courts Press, 216 pp, €26.95, ISBN: 978-1801511407
The decade after the death of an acclaimed dramatist generally sees a rise or fall in their fortunes, and the deciding of a reputation. Brian Friel would seem to be an exception to this rule. He died in 2015, not quite ten years ago, and in that time his progress would appear to have continued unabated. There are still regular productions of his plays in both the Irish and English national theatres. As Kelly Matthews puts it, ‘Friel’s plays still resonate. Translations played to sold-out crowds...
Friel’s father was headmaster of a three-room school near Omagh in Co Tyrone, which Brian attended until he was ten. A new teaching post brought the family to Derry. Brian, like his two sisters, later also became a teacher. Interestingly enough, his subject was maths rather than English or languages. Derry during the war years was crammed with American soldiers: ‘the troops […] reached 40,000, a number equal to the city’s entire pre-war population’. His lifelong interest in America may well have begun at this point.
Keynes in Dublin
John Maynard Keynes said that he had been brought up to regard Free Trade not just as an economic doctrine but almost as part of the moral law. When he started to publicly doubt its universal applicability in all circumstances, Virginia Woolf and his close friends were horrified. ‘Maynard has become a Protectionist,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘which horrified me so that I promptly fainted.’
The Gunman’s Shadow
Winston Churchill famously said that negotiation – ‘meeting jaw to jaw’ – was better than war. Two recently performed Irish plays recreate pivotal moments in Irish history when an attempt was made to shift politics from the gun to the ballot paper. The first, the Dáil debate on the Anglo-Irish Treaty, broke down and led to civil war, while the second, the negotiation of the Belfast Agreement, was ultimately successful.
A Progressive Abroad
In keeping with his generally progressive positions, Francis 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. 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.
Getting Away
Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, by Harriet Baker, Allen Lane, 384 pp, £25, ISBN: 978-0241540510
‘This place is exquisite,’ Sylvia Townsend Warner exclaimed in a letter to David Garnett in June 1932. The place was East Chaldon in Dorset, and ‘the fields, hay-cutting has only just begun, are so full of flowers that in the evening they smell exactly like the breath of cows’. And a bit later, ‘I have never lived with trees before.’
At the same time, Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House, Rodmell in Sussex, was playing bowls with visitors...
Lehmann had envisaged a life at the cottage for herself and the writer Goronwy Rees. The two had met at Bowen’s Court when Elizabeth Bowen had earmarked Rees for herself, but he made off with the younger and more attractive Lehmann. When she learned of her lover’s forthcoming marriage to someone else, there followed an episode of emotional unrestraint: ‘beating of head, lying senseless on the floor, calling for brandy, screams and cries’. But she pulled herself together, having no alternative.
Saving the Enlightenment
Like it or not we are stuck with the Enlightenment. That much spoken of phenomenon and reactions to it comprise the greater part of our active political and intellectual heritage. Personally, I never much cared for the term. It has a grandiose and born-again evangelical tone, which strikes me as excessively self-important and fundamentally ahistorical. And yet the work of Enlightenment philosophers, Descartes, Locke, Smith, Rousseau, Hobbes, Diderot, Kant, Voltaire and others, undoubtedly constituted a significant shift in philosophical and political thought. The general view, as one historian put it, is that ‘The Enlightenment and its aftermath saw the...
If some of the valuable heritage of the Enlightenment is to be salvaged this would surely involve jettisoning the notion of progress as an irresistible force. It would also require an understanding of personal freedom which recognised that virtually all personal enterprise is dependent on society, whose interests should predominate. Finally, we need a more modest approach to the power of reason, a healthy scepticism towards overarching explanations of life, an acceptance that ignorance remains our dominant condition and that we are but one life form among many.
It’s My Party
On the wall near my home in Berlin, someone has sprayed a thoughtful observation: ‘Machen ist wie wollen, nur krasser’ – Doing is like wanting, just crazier. That could be the new political motto of Sahra Wagenknecht, Germany’s most polarising politician of the left. Wagenknecht entered politics in 1990 and now, at fifty-five, is German democracy’s longest-serving matron of honour.
For more than three decades, long before telemedicine was a thing, Dr Wagenknecht has diagnosed modern Germany’s ills from the safe distance of the Bundestag opposition bench and talk show studios. But now it seems that she wants more: actively...
As the party that one-time communist Sahra Wagenknecht has named after herself puts down roots in German politics, its rivals are unsettled. How do you tackle an opaque, populist rival with generous – but unclear – sources of funding? ‘If the despots of this world understand that you can build a papier-mâché party in the largest EU member state with a few million,’ Kevin Kühnert, the social democrats’ general secretary warns, ‘then we are facing a development that could put our liberal democracy under great pressure.’