I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel - which I quite like too.

Louis MacNeice

Exporting the Poor

Sean Byrne writes: As one of the Commissioners on Mother and Baby Homes, Professor Mary Daly, is a very distinguished historian, it is surprising that the consigning of so many single mothers to Mother and Baby Homes is not linked to Ireland’s economic underdevelopment from Independence to the 1960s. The report points out that Mother and Baby Homes were not unique to Ireland and that there were few such homes prior to Independence, yet by the 1940s, Ireland had the highest number of women in such homes in the world.

Before the Famine, Ireland had one of the highest rates of marriage and one of the lowest age of marriage in Europe. By the 1950s the rate of marriage in Ireland was the lowest and the age of marriage the highest in Europe. The pre-Famine pattern of subdivision of farms among sons was replaced by ruthless primogeniture with all children, other than the inheriting son, under pressure to leave the farm or face a life of unpaid labour as a “relative assisting”. The inheriting sons often had to wait until they were middle aged to inherit and be able to marry. A daughter who became pregnant would not be marriageable and would damage the marriage prospects of sisters.

The Commission argues that the primary responsibility for the fate of single mothers lay with the fathers of their children. Few of the fathers could have supported their children even if they were willing to do so. Some fathers fled to Britain on discovering they had impregnated a girl, but many would eventually have emigrated in search of work. Given the level of enforced celibacy that Ireland’s economic underdevelopment engendered, it is not surprising that there were many extra marital pregnancies. Yet, as the report points out, the rate of extra-marital pregnancies in Ireland was low compared to other European countries but the consequences for the pregnant women were worst in Ireland.

The priorities of Ireland’s first post-independence government are shown by the fact that the first legislation enacted was a Censorship Act. The government of 1922 to 1932 believed, like most nationalist leaders and thinkers, that when the British left Ireland, all the country’s problems would be solved.  Rather than improving, living standards fell significantly between 1922 and 1932 and emigration continued on a scale unprecedented in Europe. The population of the Republic of Ireland continued to fall until the 1960s with the country losing 15 per cent of its population in the 1950s.

Having failed to develop industry until the 1960s, Ireland created instead a set of institutions which became major sources of employment. In 1926 there were more children in industrial schools in Ireland than in the whole of England and Wales, By the 1950s, Ireland had the highest proportion of its population in Europe in institutions including religious communities, mental hospitals, industrial schools, Magdalen laundries and Mother and Baby Homes.  These institutions, not industries became the main employers in many Irish towns.

The only institutions in which Ireland had relatively small numbers were prisons because many of the young men most likely to commit crimes emigrated and the district courts, until the 1970s, often gave young men who committed petty crimes, the option of a prison sentence or going to Britain. This resulted in the Irish being overrepresented in British prisons relative to their numbers in the population. But the Irish imprisoned in Britain were consoled by the surplus Irish priests and nuns despatched to minister to them and to other emigrants. The importance of institutions as employers in small towns was shown when a hospital in Castlerea closed in 1994. In response to the outcry at the loss of jobs, the government decided to locate a prison on the hospital site.

The extraordinary numbers of young Irish people becoming priests, brothers and nuns from the 1920s to the 1950s was an indicator of the lack of other job opportunities. That religious life was for many merely a job, was starkly revealed by the drying up of “vocations” and the exodus from the priesthood and from convents from the 1970s, when other jobs became available. The brutality of some of the nuns in the Mother and Baby Homes may have been an expression of their frustration at being trapped in an occupation in which they were unhappy. Similar frustrations may explain some of the physical and sexual violence of many priests and brothers towards the pupils in the schools they operated. Many young women were steered into religious orders by parents who knew they were unlikely to find employment or husbands in a stagnant economy.  The religious orders mirrored the class system of an underdeveloped country with poor girls and boys who could not bring in money, consigned to a life of domestic servitude as “lay” sisters and brothers.

Within a decade of the establishment of the Irish Free State, it was clear that independence had not brought prosperity. The leaders of the new state decided that, with the British no longer to blame, the poor and the mentally ill and unmarried mothers must be responsible for their own condition and should therefore be incarcerated. The leader of the Irish Free State for its first ten years, W. T Cosgrave when Minister for Local Government in the underground Dáil in 1921 wrote in a memo that “people reared in workhouses are no great acquisition to society” and argued that “it would be a decided advantage if they all took it into their heads to emigrate”. The attitude of Cosgrave’s government towards the least fortunate of the new state’s citizens was articulated by Minister for Industry and Commerce Patrick McGilligan, when he stated in 1924 that, while Irish people “may have to die of starvation” the state had no responsibility to keep them alive.

Irish nationalists often remind us that Ireland was the first country to break free of the British Empire. Having achieved this freedom, the “Republican” leaders abased themselves before the empire of the Bishop of Rome.  On becoming Taoiseach in 1948, Fine Gael Leader John A Costello wrote to the Pope “to repose at the feet of Your Holiness the assurance of our filial loyalty and devotion” The letter was drafted by the former leader of the IRA, Sean McBride who was Minister for External Affairs. McBride later wrote to the Catholic Archbishop of Armagh expressing eagerness to take Church direction on government policy. Instead of creating a prosperous economy and a humane society, the new state bound its future to the Catholic Church which proved more adept than Britain at oppressing Irish people. Ireland became A Republic of Shame as Caelinn Hogan entitles her searing account of the Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalen Laundries.

This blog was originally published in March 2021

 

 

Find the Author

Hiram Morgan writes: Manuscripts are the principal key to studying the history of England’s conquest and colonisation of Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These include the Irish State Papers held in the UK National Archives at Kew in London as well as several other collections in public and private archives. One of the issues with these papers is that there are a lot of important documents such as policy proposals, known as reform treatises, and intelligence reports where there is a question of authorship. Some documents have only initials; many more have no known author and there are doubts over others. For instance, until the recent discovery of new evidence from 1599, questions were raised over Edmund Spenser’s authorship of A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596). This was because, of the several contemporary manuscripts of A View, only one had his initials on it and another his name attached to it.

It has been claimed that individual authorship mattered less before the modern period. I frankly doubt this. People readily enough put their names to the letters and petitions they wrote. More likely the documents which are now anonymous were not so at the time. Simply, they circulated within groups of contemporaries who knew who had written them, but the authors’ names were since lost to history either because the documents were handed over in person in the first place or the covering letters sent with them were lost or became detached.

I found the latter to be the case when I studied Sir Francis Bacon’s views on Ireland. Once all the Bacon or supposed Bacon material relating to Ireland had been compiled, it became possible to reattach policy papers to the covering letters not only confirming authorship but also dating them, thereby contextualising and better understanding this important stateman’s developing opinions on Ireland between 1594 and 1619. The results of that study are available in my article in The Proceedings of Royal Irish Academy (2019). Indeed there is no reason why reform treatises relating to policy matters should be anonymous because, unless their purpose was somehow subversive, the parties involved needed the recognition, since they wished to benefit by making the proposals. Even secretive authors of intelligence reports – spies and informers in the provinces, known as intelligencers – would have been known at the time to their handlers and contacts in the Dublin administration, otherwise they would not have been deemed trustworthy.

In forty years of studying early modern Ireland, I have dealt with numerous anonymous documents. In the instances where I have been able to identify their authors from internal references or from the archival context, it has given more depth and nuance to my work. In some cases having the documents attributed to individuals has enabled their publication – in this way my detective work has seen hitherto neglected works by Captain Nicholas Dawtrey from 1597, Sir John Davies from 1609 and Sir James Perrot from c1622 being published for the first time in Analecta Hibernica (1995), Irish Jurist (1996) and again in Analecta Hibernica (2020). As regards Davies’s Lawes of Irelande tract, my view was confirmed when I subsequently came across its covering letter. I have since reunited both – Davies’s covering letter from the State Papers in London and the tract from Ellesmere Papers in Huntington Library, California – in an online update to the original article (//research.ucc.ie/celt/document/E610001).

Yet not all anonymous documents have sufficient internal evidence to make satisfactory judgements. Sometimes an individual’s handwriting can give extra help but the ‘secretary’ hand of the period is generally pretty standard and in any case many documents were copied by scribes. Inks and watermarks can also be investigated, but again writers themselves were not especially discriminating and used what materials they had to hand.

Title page of The Supplication of the Blood of the English tract,
British Library, Additional MS, 34,313 f.84r-f.121v. An edition was published in Analecta Hibernica by Willy Maley in 1995.

One thing though that gives potential additional heft to the identification process is the development of stylometry. This is the use of computer programs to make textual comparisons between documents. These have undergone considerable refinement since they were used on Shakespeare’s plays a generation ago. Their application to anonymous texts relating to Tudor and Stuart Ireland has been slow to take place but nevertheless offers real potential. There are challenges to be overcome in order to make this possible – the texts have first to be modernised in spelling and to be of sufficient length. Then they need to be compared against writings by known authors whose work must also be modernised and be long enough.

Hoping to ascertain the identity of the author of the 1598 Spenser-related The Supplication of the Blood of the English text, I turned to Dr James O’Sullivan in Digital Humanities at University College Cork to help me run a series of tests. James has had considerable success with eighteenth and nineteenth century text comparisons, so I was optimistic that his expertise might help solve the conundrum of one of the most anti-Irish treatises of the whole conquest period. In the stylometric tests The Supplication was compared to other texts from the period. In the event the results were not conclusive and more work was required. However, quite by accident, another anonymous text in the survey matched with one by a known author – bits of text from the late 1590s entitled Portions of a manuscript history by the Victorian-era State Paper editors had ended up aligning with The Chronicle of Ireland by conservative Welsh-born churchman Dr Meredith Hanmer (1544/5-1604). The process had therefore revealed Hanmer to have been working on a follow-up to his chronicle of pre-Norman Ireland with a more contemporary history that would have lauded his patron the Earl of Ormond while at the same time dishing the dirt on the Munster Plantation. This addition to our knowledge of the end of Elizabethan Ireland is both granular and expansive in significance and now is posted on UCC’s Irish Studies website @//research.ucc.ie/celt/document/E590002.

This serendipitous result calls for a wider literary and historical project, for which research funding will be needed. There are several important documents with no known or clearly-established author worth delving into further. Did the elusive Midlands intelligencer Hugh Collier write not only the 1599 Dialogue of Silvynne and Peregrynne by H.C. but also various other anonymous tracts of the period? Likewise it would be useful to find out more about unattributed plantation discourses both from the early days in the mid-Tudor period as well as from the Ulster Plantation under James I. After all it is not just famous influencers such as Edmund Spenser and Francis Bacon we need to find out about.

Another manuscript, whose author would be worth discovering is the State of Ireland, and Plan for its Reformation from 1515. It is the opening document of the Irish State Papers and in a sense the big daddy of all the so-called reform treatises that follow. Colleagues from history and literature will doubtless provide impetus with suggestions of other anonymous tracts needing explored. If a more extensive, systematic study can be launched, it will surely be a variegated journey of discovery with cul-de-sacs, fresh avenues and even connecting highways. The authors of some documents won’t be found at all, some will be the expected ones, and some will, like Hanmer, be quite unexpected. In the meantime the initial target document, The Supplication of the Blood of the English, has been tested against a far more extensive range of comparable texts; the results appear with my new edition of that same 1598 diatribe soon to be published by Manchester University Press under the title Spenserian Tracts.

2/5/2024

Hiram Morgan lectures in history at University College Cork and is director of CELT (Corpus of Electronic Texts of Ireland), the world’s largest Irish Studies website.

Painting Light

Ciarán O’Rourke writes: ‘Yours is the art that conveys / what the world is made of.’ So Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin writes in ‘Instructions to an Architect’, imploring her interlocutor to ‘build me a shelter’, in anticipation of a future that seems already ‘fractured from the inside’. The poet too can redeem and repair a broken world, as Ní Chuilleanáin herself has demonstrated over the course of her five-decade career. Although arguably never attaining the cultural visibility of Seamus Heaney or Eavan Boland, in recent years Ní Chuilleanáin’s work has received some of the acknowledgement it deserves.

The 2020 edition of her Collected Poems confirmed her as a vital celebrant of the poetic vocation itself, giving form to the complex rhythms and inner geographies of a life lived feelingly in time. ‘Incipit Hodie’, dedicated to her grandson, ripples the boundaries of both language and vision, in its address to a newborn who ‘fell into our language / like a fish into water’. The searching gentleness of the poem’s own gestures – reaching for a language precise and exultant enough to welcome a child into the world – leads finally to a space of trust and surety: ‘when you reach for words they will be hard like pebbles in your hand’.

One of Ní Chuilleanáin’s great gifts is her ability to bring readers, repeatedly and miraculously, to that threshold where all the intractable portals – of language, history, familial love – seem somehow ready to open again, letting in the light. So, in ‘Gloss/Clós/Glas’, the poet ventures through the rivery atmosphere of her own memories, where the ‘rags of language’ are seen ‘streaming like weathervanes, / like weeds in water they turn with the tide’, to find a scholar, her father as a younger man, as he sits ‘raking the dictionaries’ like ‘a boy in a story faced with a small locked door’.

In poem after poem, the past comes surging to the surface of Ní Chuilleanáin’s attentions, albeit usually transfigured in a new guise, ‘wrapped lightly, like the one cumulus cloud / In a perfect sky’ (as she says in ‘The Bend in the Road’). There can be a moral heft to such translations. One poem, dedicated to the memory of James Connolly, reflects sadly on ‘all the false beginnings’ of Irish political life, while in ‘Bessboro’, the speaker returns to the gates of Bessborough Mother and Baby Home, only to discover that ‘the blood that was sown here flowered / and all the seeds blew away.’ Lyric art cannot reverse such failures and betrayals, encoded into the very structure of the Irish state, but it can help us, at least, to face the history we inherit with less distortion – by giving voice to those absences previously rendered unspeakable by power. The difficult task, as she writes in ‘The Curtain’, is to discover ‘the bare words’ of honest utterance, so the ‘skewed weights’ of experience can be raised, ‘holding in their place like feathers’.

Ní Chuilleanáin’s poems often have the recollected mystery and vividness of dream-visions: eccentric fables that gleam, nevertheless, in their own clear glow, filled with ‘provisions for the day just dawning’. ‘Let their hooves print the next bit of the story,’ she urges in ‘The Horses of Meaning’, ‘release them, roughmaned / from the dark stable’ where they have been cooped up, strange, poetic creatures, yearning to be free. Similarly, throughout her acclaimed 2023 volume The Map of the World, Ní Chuilleanáin can be found – like the ‘goddess honoured on the mountain’, who ‘chose / to make her home a refuge for the fugitives’ – striking up kinship with nuns and migrants, artists and animals, whose fleet, nerve-rooted journeyings unlock her own exploratory impulses. In ‘War Time’, a convent gives sanctuary to ‘women down on their luck’, a song rising through its corridors and spanning across history, from a ‘time that’s lost’. ‘Two Paintings by Nano Reid’, from the same collection, watches layers of life crowding to a canvas, as ‘the painter’s / leaf-thin imaginings’ haunt the final image, and the ‘body’ of the original (male) model ‘retreats into / the scruffy quotidian’: a story, a vanishing, that the poem makes palpable once more.

Poetry is by nature a revelatory art, trusting that there are strangers, somewhere, who understand: people willing to share the light unlocked by the hermetic singer in their midst, ‘speaking / the many forms of connection’. Ní Chuilleanáin cleaves to the grain of such illuminations, even as she evokes the richness and solitude of writing as such. ‘For five years nobody lives beside me,’ she says, in what may be a quiet reference to the death of her husband, the poet Macdara Woods, in 2018:

My bones are bare, my spine is a tree stem
threatened with dieback.

My room on the top floor is a green cage,
Spring is here and the ash-tree is flowing …

In her effort to winnow a language of belonging from the rough chaff of experience, Ní Chuilleanáin’s urge is to reach through seasons, and across borders. It seems telling, and apt, that her ‘map of the world’ contains pieces written in Irish (as in the wryly titled ‘Loquitur Caliban’), as well as creative dialogues with the work of Ileana Mălăncioiu. ‘Fear is spreading like a weed, / spreading like fire in a meadow’, she observes in a poem dedicated to her Romanian contemporary: ‘it spreads like water over the whole earth / and Noah’s ark is still not finished.’ The portentous intuition of an epoch in political and ecological free-fall contends with the sensitivity of the poem’s own flowing – with Ní Chuilleanáin’s deft ability, indeed, to clear a space, in words, of habitable perception. At the finish, the biblical figure stands ‘staring everywhere at once / like a wild thing cornered, even though for ages / all around him there has been nothing but the flood.’ Despite the grimness of such a scenario, there is a value, we discern, in seeing the patriarchal hubris of Noah’s position without distortion.

Even as she resists the doctrinal didacticism of an overtly religious paradigm, the lingering impression in Ní Chuilleanáin’s work is of a more-than-private faith being tested and renewed by the procedures of poetic attention she hones. Few contemporary writers, in fact, possess her peculiar, and utterly instinctive, sense of the poem’s inner grace, or have access to that soft core of light her words so delicately reveal, radiating outward to infuse life with meaning. There are ‘so many stories’, she notes, ‘and not all of them / can tell us clearly what we ought to  have done.’ If the past, imagined or remembered, springs to motion among her poems’ lambent grids, the music uttered there frequently takes the shape of an active question: what is to be done? For Ní Chuilleanáin, the force that moves ‘the wheel of language’ has an ethical charge. ‘When I begin the telling the words will not be quiet,’ she murmurs, ‘I have to lie down beside them and listen.’ And what do we hear? The world we always knew inside us, coming true at last.

4/4/2024

John Barth: 1930-2024

Kevin Power writes: It was John Barth’s achievement to become a significant figure without ever becoming a major, or even really a popular novelist. It was as if he decided, early in his career, that somebody had to be American Literature’s representative postmodernist, and that that somebody might as well be him. He filled the role superbly, even if it left him, finally, with a coterie reputation and with the uncertain immortality bestowed by a place on the syllabus. Which is to say that even if Barth isn’t always much fun to read, you can’t really tell the story of post-1945 American fiction without him. He is, or was, American metafiction, and for a while he was a looming presence in the work of his ambitious juniors – David Foster Wallace out-metafictioned Barth in his early novella ‘Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way’, which rewrites, virtuosically, what is probably Barth’s best short story, ‘Lost in the Funhouse’ (1966).

Barth’s first two novels were ‘traditional’; the tradition they inhabited was slangy American naturalism, though even here rococo elements obtruded. His debut, The Floating Opera (1956), metaphorised life as an opera performed on a moving riverboat and viewed from the river’s banks: a passing spectacle, soon gone. True ambition arrived with The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), a pastiche of eighteenth century picaresque that it is safe to say very few people have ever managed to get all the way through; you could say the same about Giles Goat-Boy (1966), which famously imagines all life as an enormous university. It was a recurring criticism of Barth that he wrote in and for universities – he was, if anyone was, the Creative Writing Professor’s Novelist – and Gore Vidal, in a 1974 survey of the American postmodernists for the New York Review of Books, wrote with an audible sneer when he suggested that ‘[Giles Goat-Boy] will prove to be one of the essential American university novels and to dismiss it is to dismiss those departments of English that have made such a book possible.’

Chimera (1972) was Barth’s last brush with the mainstream. It mingled high modernism – adapting The Thousand and One Nights, the myth of Perseus and the myth of Bellerophon – with metafictional jive; if it feels old-hat now that is perhaps because artists have since tended to respond to the challenges of modernism not by borrowing its mythic structures but by resuming its assault on questions of language and representation. Is any of Barth still worth reading? His manifesto, ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, remains the definitive statement of the postmodern artist’s predicament: ‘Our century is more than two-thirds done; it is dismaying to see so many of our writers following Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy or Balzac, when the question seems to me to be how to succeed not even Joyce and Kafka, but those who succeeded Joyce and Kafka and are now in the evenings of our own careers.’ Gore Vidal was not the only critic to point out that underlying this understanding of literary development is a buried scientism, the idea that the arts progress via experimentation; but the call to Make It New is itself always news, and important news at that. Why do what’s been done before? Barth will stand, in his semi-neglected corner of the canon, as another of Modernism’s underheeded heralds: far from the worst possible fate for a writer.

He could also write beautifully. From ‘Lost in the Funhouse’: ‘This can’t go on much longer; it can go on forever. He died telling stories to himself in the dark; years later, when that vast unsuspected area of the funhouse came to light, the first expedition found his skeleton in one of its labyrinthine corridors and mistook it for part of the entertainment.’ Thus all writers; thus all people. ‘For whom is the funhouse fun?’ goes the first line of the story. The funhouse is life. It’s fun. And it’s everything else as well.

4/4/2024

Entering the Whirlpool

David Barnes writes: Succession’s Frank Vernon likes ‘to recite Prufrock internally while we check we’re GAAP-compliant’ (Season Two, Episode Six). He goes on to suggest others ‘use whatever method you prefer to numb the pain’. GAAP are Generally Accepted Accounting Principles – principles that Waystar Royco, the corporate behemoth whose story is chronicled in HBO’s Succession, bend to the point of breaking.

It is not the first time Frank, Waystar’s vice-chairman, has referred to TS Eliot’s first published poem (‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ appeared in Poetry magazine in June 1915). In the second episode of the first season, he describes himself as ‘an attendant lord, here to swell a scene or two’. Frank is quoting Prufrock as Eliot’s eponymous hero declares he is not Prince Hamlet (‘nor was meant to be’), but only a courtier hovering at the edges of the stage. That Frank at this point is talking to Kendal Roy, the tormented middle son of Waystar’s CEO, Logan Roy, is significant. It marks Kendal as the vengeful child who plots to overthrow the king; not in this case, the usurping uncle but his own cruel and malicious father.

I’m late to the Succession party, and have been watching the show in great dollops, late at night, greedy for more of the late-capitalist shit-show. Frank’s Prufrockian perambulations seem to speak to Succession’s ability to seemingly say deeper things about the state of a world wrecked by a robber class who do not even seem to be enjoying it. Some suggest that is Succession’s problem; that in presenting this disdainful 1 per cent as themselves in pain, it minimises the real destruction wreaked by companies like Waystar. This, I think, misses the point; for Frank’s references to ‘Prufrock’ locate the action in an Eliotic hellscape, where the super-rich are imprisoned in and by the sins of their own making. ‘Prufrock’’s famous epigraph (‘s’io credesse …’ etc), a passage from Dante’s Inferno, consists of lines spoken to Dante by Guido da Montefeltro, a duplicitous thirteenth century military commander. In the lines Eliot quotes, Guido tells the poet that he can talk to him freely because no one has returned alive from the abyss of hell; in other words, Guido need not fear for his reputation because Dante will never escape.

In ‘Prufrock’, a poem concerned with drawing rooms and tea, flannel trousers and tiepins, Eliot’s infernal epigraph suggests that the accoutrements of civilisation mean nothing if that civilisation is doomed. We end the poem as Prufrock drowns with the mermaids; but, if the epigraph is to be taken seriously, he may already be dead. Whilst much was made of the surprise death of Logan Roy in the third episode of Succession’s final season, the show had been predicting his death since its inception.

But it is not just Logan’s death – or foreshadowed death – that is important in the series. A turning point is Kendal Roy’s responsibility for the accidental death of a young man at the end of the first season. Kendal is driving, high as a kite, the car swerves off the road into a freezing pond, the man drowns. His death hangs over Kendal for the whole of the subsequent two seasons, haunting him as the accidental killing of Polonius haunts Hamlet. Later, in the third season, Kendal himself almost drowns in a Tuscan swimming pool in an apparent suicide attempt. These drownings echo not only the subterranean world of Prufrock and his ‘sea-girls’ but the themes of Eliot’s next major poem, The Waste Land. ‘Here is your card, the drowned Phoenician sailor’, says the clairvoyant Madame Sosostris in the first part of the poem (called, appropriately, ‘The Burial of the Dead’). Eliot’s writing, in the forms of his earlier poems at least, is concerned less with the shadow of death that awaits us than with the death that is already here: ‘we who were living are now dying’ is the way he puts it in The Waste Land. Jeremy Strong himself (who plays Kendal) seems to confirm the importance of Eliot’s vision (Strong also placed Eliot’s Four Quartets on the essential reading list he gave to GQ magazine earlier this year). On HBO’s official Succession podcast, Strong reveals that it was a line from the fourth section of The Waste Land, the significantly titled ‘Death by Water’, that Jesse Armstrong sent him as he prepared to film the final episode: ‘Entering the whirlpool’.

The images of the Manhattan skyline in the Succession opening credits seem less a picture of the peaks of power (although they are that) but snapshots of the drowned, doomed world created by late-capitalism. In another allusion to Dante, Eliot famously imagines the City of London commuters walking over London Bridge – workers in the engine-room of finance – as a crowd of dead souls at the mouth of hell: ‘I had not thought death had undone so many.’ Ultimately London Bridge is ‘falling down’, the city joining a litany of ancient and ruined civilisations in The Waste Land: ‘Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna’. Eliot might as well have added New York; he probably would have done, had his work at Lloyds Bank in the City not made him peculiarly alive to London’s precarious status. Critics note that one place can feel very much like another in Succession, a billionaire’s life one of interchangeable, transnational luxury in a soft-furnished underworld: ‘Alexandria/ Vienna London/ Unreal’.

31/3/2025

David Barnes is a lecturer in modern literature at the University of Oxford and has written/broadcast for the BBC, Lithub, London Times, The Guardian, New European, Times Higher Education and Times Literary Supplement. He recently taught a six-week course on Eliot’s The Waste Land at 100 for the City Literary Institute in London.

The Grafton Wonderland

Eoin O’Brien writes: Dublin’s Graftonia: A Very Literary Neighbourhood is the latest in a series of books by Brendan Lynch on the literary history of Dublin. It follows, in a logically progressive sequence, Parsons Bookshop: At the Heart of Bohemian Dublin (2006) and Prodigals & Geniuses: The Writers and Artists of Dublin’s Baggotonia (2011). In these books, Lynch explores the literary enclave Baggotonia, which was first given a presence by John Ryan in Remembering How We Stood in 1975, and a year later, by Tony Cronin, in Dead As Doornails.

The many talented personalities who occupied Baggotonia covered multiple fields, inclouding literature, drama, poetry, music, painting, theatre and publishing. The area was a home for many notable personalities from the mid-twentieth century, among them Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, Samuel Beckett, Brian O’Doherty and Jack Yeats, but the place also fascinated later writers. John Banville, writing in Timepieces (2016) has described the warm sanctuary  he found therein. Alan Gilsenan has endowed the area with an emotive cinematographic presence in his ‘visual poem’ Ghosts of Baggotonia (2022). I attribute my own love for Baggotonia in A Life in Medicine: From Asclepius to Becket (2023) to having spent my childhood, schoolboy and student days mingling with its inhabitants.

The small enclave of extended from the banks of the Grand Canal and its bridges at Leeson Street, Baggot Street and Mount Street, along Baggot Street with its meagre flats and studios, past the park of Fitzwilliam with its little shelter, fountain and tennis courts, and onwards via St Stephen’s Green, with its lake of ducks and swans, to Grafton Street and its side streets. This small area, dotted with pubs, cinemas, cafés, shops, businesses, was once a place of residence for some, and lest we overlook it, an Elizabethan university of structural magnificence and scholarly attainment had nestled in the heart of the area for over four centuries.

The artistic personalities of Baggotonia migrated from their hovels to the cafés and pubs of Grafton Street for evening chat and drink. Whereas we know much about life in Baggotonia, the nocturnal sallies to Grafton Street and its environs have not been much recorded. Now, Dublin’s Graftonia allows us to appreciate the rich literary ambience of the place in which the occupants of Baggotonia gathered for entertainment and, occasionally on matters of business, before retracing their steps to the notorious catacombs in the heart of Baggotonia, where their querulous spirits indulged in Rabelaisian merriment long into the night.

Lynch’s impressive research has enabled him to provide scholarly text and fascinating photographic imagery for place and person in Graftonia. He takes us via the Stein river, flowing under Grafton Street, through chapters that introduce new and revealing aspects of the lives of the area’s multiplicity of literary habitués: Bram Stoker, Hugh Lane, Saint John Henry Newman and George Bernard Shaw were associated with Harcourt Street; Samuel Lover and Thomas Moore were graduates of Samuel Whyte’s Academy; James Joyce had  much to do with Grafton Street; Le Fanu, WB Yeats, John O’Leary, Annie Horniman and Lady Gregory were progenitors of  the Irish Literary Revival; the publishing achievements of Envoy and The Bell were notable events in Dublin literature; Stephen’s Green was occupied by James Clarence Mangan, Mainie Jellet, and Cecil Salkeld; Jonah Barrington, Charles Lever, Peg Woffington and Percy Bysshe Shelly, who saw Ireland as a fitting place in which to ‘light the torch of freedom’, were notable figures in the area; Goldsmith, Berkeley, Wilde and Beckett bear testament to the scholastic progeny of Trinity College.

I gleaned this brief summary of Dublin’s Graftonia in the customary manner, that is beginning my reading on the preliminary pages and proceeding to the final notes, bibliography and references. However, having done so I realised that I would have derived greater pleasure if I had reversed my reading, by beginning with the index. Unusual books sometimes make demands on the ingenuity of the reader! This approach would have enabled me to indulge my curiosity for a particular author, personality or establishment by opening the appropriate page. By picking and choosing a writer or personality of interest in this unorthodox manner, I was able to enjoy fascinating fact and circumstance on those who walked the streets of Graftonia or on the personalities who frequented its cafés, bars and businesses. Unusual, and often previously unrecorded associations, of popular writers, such as Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Wilde and Moore, jostled with names of lesser-known personalities, not all of them writers, such as Jonah Barrington, Kathleen Behan, Philip Crampton, Annie Horniman, Hannah Lynch and Owen Walsh.

Space does not permit consideration of Brendan Lynch’s multidimensional career as author, journalist, professional cyclist, racing correspondent (who counted Ayrton Senna and Stirling Moss as friends (the latter wrote the foreword to his book Triumph of the Red Devil), or his imprisonment for his activities in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, inspired by his admiration for the philosopher Bertrand Russell. We are indebted to Brendan Lynch for the enlightenment he brings us in Dublin’s Graftonia: A Very Literary Neighbourhood, which, with his previous books on Dublin’s literary history, completes a very substantial scholarly appraisal of the city’s writers and those associated with them.

A closing note of caution. Dublin’s Graftonia adds to our understanding of what has made Dublin something of a literary phenomenon, a city with a rich literary history that shows little sign of waning. However, the process of analysis could be overdone. At the launch of the book, I heard a plaintive call for ‘Leesonotonia’, an area which was indeed once home to an illustrious literary population, but I believe that further dissection of the literary topography of the city should be resisted. Rather let us agree with David Norris, who remarked in his succinct endorsement of Dublin’s Graftonia that Dublin is ‘a city with perhaps a greater concentration of writers than any other on the planet’.

Dublin’s Graftonia: A Very Literary Neighbourhood, by Brendan Lynch, is published by Mountjoy Publishing ISBN: 978-0951366854

5/3/2024

The Irish Jew

Maurice Earls writes: The Irish Jew, a comedy by John MacDonagh, had numerous successful runs in Dublin in the early 1920s. It was extremely popular, with performances usually twice a night. Billed as ‘Ireland’s Greatest Comedy’ and described as ‘easily the most successful play presented on the Irish stage during the present generation’, it was performed in venues such as the Queen’s, the Gaiety, the Tivoli and the Olympia. These were popular theatres in the older Dublin theatrical tradition, where the tone was a good deal less earnest than that of the Abbey and where the idea of the theatre as a place of entertainment held sway. The famous entertainer Jimmy O’Dea had his stage debut as Councillor Woods in The Irish Jew.

Being outward-looking and contemporary in his thinking, MacDonagh, a nationalist and brother of the 1916 signatory Thomas MacDonagh, was not attracted to the view that writers should look to the Celtic past and peasant life for inspiration. He had himself been an officer in the Volunteers and served with his brother in Jacob’s factory during the uprising. Afterwards he was imprisoned, but unlike his brother, he was not executed. Before 1916 he had been involved in the world of stage and cinema, and among other achievements, wrote the script for DW Griffith’s The Fugitive (1910). In 1914 he was appointed first manager of The Irish Theatre Company which was set up in opposition to the Abbey, with the strict undertaking that it would not stage peasant dramas. Following his release from prison MacDonagh returned to the world of cinema but also supported the War of Independence. He filmed Michael Collins issuing republican loan bonds and was involved in other cinematic work of a nationalist character. He was also the author of many songs, including ‘Did Santa Claus come from Ireland?’.

The Irish Jew, set in Dublin before 1916, is an unsophisticated tale of municipal corruption leavened with both romance and farce. In the play the recently appointed lord mayor and hero of the piece is the Jewish Abraham (Abe) Golder, a patriotic Irishman comfortable in his Jewish identity. As lord mayor he must deal with the corrupt nationalists of the Irish Parliamentary Party who pretend to be his friends and supporters.

In the opening scene we meet Golder in the Mansion House preparing for his inaugural banquet. A portrait of Disraeli, just removed from the wall, has been replaced by one of Robert Emmet. Golder explains that Disraeli might have been a Jew but that they would have disagreed concerning Ireland. His plan is to recite Emmet’s speech from the dock in period costume during the celebratory banquet. His IPP ‘friends’ try to dissuade him, arguing that his approach is ‘too national’. Golder will have none of it and sticks to his plan. He is beginning to make enemies among the mealy-mouthed nationalists who suspect he has gone across to the ‘extremists’.

A more mercenary issue later emerges. IPP councillors are trying to engineer the purchase of a building for a picture gallery where money will be made on the side and a contract awarded to a favoured builder. Once again Golder, described by The Freeman’s Journal as ‘a Hebrew without blemish who defies and studies the guile of Christian Corporators’ and who is not ‘easily scared off’, triumphs and protects the public interest.

Golder is himself a businessman who owns a ‘Moving Picture House’ which, on the night of the banquet, is burned down by a mob alleging immoral pictures are being screened. The mob has been got up by the mayor’s political enemies. Once again Golder triumphs, he donates the site to the city for use not as a picture gallery but as a play area for all the city’s children, including those from the slums.

There is significant, albeit implied, contemporary political content in the play. MacDonagh’s script reflects approval of the achievement of an independent state. There is also an implicit preference in the play for a democratic mode of governance, conducted with a high level of probity. The script further reflects an inclusive vision of Ireland, decidedly inimical to the antisemitism common on the European mainland. (The numerous slaughters of Jews in Ukraine from 1918-21 were well known and widely reported in Ireland.)

MacDonagh was, it seems, in the well-established liberal nationalist tradition which took generalised political form under O’Connell in the early nineteenth century. The play had numerous runs through the period of the Civil War. However, that conflict has no presence in the play. MacDonagh himself, like many Republicans, appears to have sat out the dispute. If it can be said that there is a view on the matter implicit in the play, it is that the conflict was something of an inconvenience, in that it was at odds with the play’s tone of new hope.

But more telling from a historical point of view is that the politics of the play can be loosely attributed to that large section of the Dublin public which enthusiastically flocked to numerous productions of the play over the early years of the independent state. The Irish Jew it seems, reflected an optimism at that time, or perhaps it was simply a hope, that the new state would see both an end to squabbles between nationalists and, with the benefit of good governance, successfully tackle the nineteenth century legacy of demographic, cultural and economic disaster. It was an optimism which ignored the rather obvious division which had emerged among the new nationalists.

The heyday of the play’s popularity was 1922-24. There does not appear to have been a production in 1925 and it seems there was only one in 1926 which did not lead to further stagings. By then The Irish Jew had run its course. 1926 was the year de Valera led the anti-Treatyites back from the wilderness and into the democratic process. From then on politics would be chiefly between factions of the new nationalists. There would be few laughs and plenty of rancour as the massive challenges of building a new state and economy capable of supporting the population became starkly visible.

In addition to implicit attitudes found in the play, there is one important subject directly highlighted and this is the level of acceptance Jews found in Ireland.

This is a large subject, and in commenting on it the ambition of the present piece extends no further than outlining some ideas primarily arising from a consideration of attitudes and events in Ireland in the early years of Independence.

A Review of The Irish Jew in The Cork Examiner included the following:

The author’s object in giving us a picture of a Hebrew Lord Mayor who taught a lesson of straight dealing to his shifty fellow councillors is a worthy one, suggestive of a much higher and more neighbourly view of the strangers within our gates than we have been wont to take. Although the Hebrew in Ireland has never been subjected to the kind of harsh treatment he has been subjected to in some other countries, where the measure meted out to him by so-called Christians has been a voiceless repudiation of their own Christianity and its Divine lessons of toleration and brotherly love, we have constantly failed to appreciate the splendid characteristics so ordinarily to be found in the Semitic peoples. There are, as well we, know, good and bad in every race. A bad Jew is only worse than a bad Christian, because as a rule he is cleverer; and a good Jew is as good as the best. One who has known how many kind-hearted, upright, honourable men are to be found among the descendants of Abraham will always be willing and glad to acknowledge his admiration for that talented and industrious race, who are in every country they inhabit to be numbered among its most loyal citizens.

This type of positive commentary was commonplace. The suggestion that the play is more positive about Jews than was reflected in popular attitudes is probably accurate, at least for some. It is nevertheless significant that audiences had no difficulty with a play whose moral giant was Jewish. Antisemitism, of course, was far from unknown in Ireland, the Limerick boycott of 1903 being the outstanding example. However, it was not the norm.

Jewish commentators generally found their situation in Ireland to be a positive one, with negative attitudes barely registering, presumably because whatever negativity existed in Ireland was very far removed from the murderous racism experienced elsewhere. The Dublin-based Rabbi Abraham Gudansky, cantor in the Lennox Street synagogue, who is said to have helped Michael Collins hide from the Black and Tans, wrote to MacDonagh praising the positive depiction of the Jewish lord mayor.

Permit me to express to you my profound appreciation of your play, The Irish Jew, so nobly conceived, so brilliantly written and so splendidly performed. By portraying the principal characters of the play in the way you did you have proved yourself a most worthy upholder of the principles of right and justice to all which animated many of your illustrious compatriots in their struggle for freedom and liberty. You have brought home to the public at large the fact the Jew, if treated as an equal is capable of exhibiting the highest qualities of patriotism for the country of his adoption and that it is only prejudice, jealousy and falsehood which first create and then deepen the gulf separating the Jew from the Gentile. I understand that the play is about to make its appearance in the United States. It is badly needed there. May it meet with the success it so thoroughly deserves, and may it be helpful towards dispelling the miasma of anti-Semitism which has of late enveloped certain sections of the American people.

Commentary of this kind was not untypical. An attendee at the inaugural meeting of ‘The Irish Jews of America’ in 1927 spoke appreciatively of the good treatment Jews received from the people of Ireland and of the friendship of Catholic neighbours. Again, in January 1923, the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, Dr Hertz, visiting Cork, proposed a toast to the Free State. His comments were reported in the press:

even a few days in Ireland was a liberal education, and there was one thing that he liked to see – there was no discrimination of any sort against any man or any class or creed. In other words, there was justice in the Free State, and where there was justice there could not be hatred.

However, in the autumn of 1923 an event called the benign view of the Irish into question. A young Jewish civil servant, Ernest Kahn, was shot dead on Lennox Street in Dublin; his companion, who was also Jewish, was wounded. The murder caused great surprise and outrage. People, particularly Jewish citizens, wondered whether the motive was antisemitism. The Jewish Chronicle commented:

Thus, for the moment, the grim affair remains a dark mystery. It is impossible to say whether the murders were directed against Jews as such or whether it was merely accident that both victims were coreligionists, nor can it be said if the crimes were individual or the work of some organisation. But of this we can be certain, that the Free State Government will leave no stone unturned to discover the miscreants and bring them to justice, and that moreover, having regard to the character of the Irish people and their attitude towards their Jewish fellow citizens we may safely dismiss from our minds altogether any suggestion of anti-semitism as a cause for the deplorable occurrences which have shocked the people of Ireland without distinction of class or creed.

When the shock subsided, it was generally agreed among Jews and others that the incident was not indicative of a widespread antisemitism in Ireland and was probably not in itself antisemitic. Yet Kahn’s murderers were exactly the sort of people responsible for the horrific and large-scale murder of Jews in Ukraine.

The perpetrators were a heavy-drinking maverick element within the Free State Army who were unwilling to accept that the new democratic state had little use for their methods and that their day was done. In 1923 it would seem they were operating both as bandits and as a death squad targeting former Civil War enemies. The 1920s saw this element lose out to historically embedded democratic forces. However, their defeat was not complete until the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government in 1932. It was a transfer which authoritarian elements had tried to prevent, including a senior police officer who had successfully frustrated the apprehension of Kahn’s murderers, despite the state’s strong desire to bring them to justice. The failure of this element to achieve political traction was ultimately owing to the strength of the liberal nationalist tradition. But had it prevailed, Ireland in the 1930s could conceivably have seen significant antisemitism emerge as part of an authoritarian ideological ragbag.

Broadly positive commentary from the Jewish community persisted, continuing into the 1930s and beyond. In his recently published memoir of life as a Jewish youth in 1930s Dublin Theo Garb, whose wider family lost 200 members to the Holocaust, is unremittingly positive regarding Irish behaviour toward Jews and equally celebratory of his Irish identity. The title he gives to his memoir is Emerald Ark. Garb’s title is telling. Like most Irish Jews his family moved to Ireland to escape antisemitism in Europe. But there is a sense in which Jewish commentators like Garb looked at Ireland through rose-tinted glasses, generally accurate regarding levels of antisemitism but less aware of the deeper patterns of negativity and mean-spiritedness that could lie behind the friendly smiles.

The public political character of Irish life –or at least much of it – was highly agreeable to Irish Jews. Traditional Irish liberal nationalist politics rested on the idea of universal human equality, which was the type of politics underlying MacDonagh’s play. Irish Jews naturally endorsed this concept. And Jews generally also liked the Irish politics of liberty and release from bondage, echoing as it did, their own struggle.

But the deeper Irish malaise referred to was also real and existed as an embedded cultural pathology, generally outside the realm of the politically articulated. Its presence existed chiefly at the level of private life. Ulysses, published in 1922, is the great record of this phenomenon. The Dublin of Ulysses is by no means a happy or positive place. Mean-spiritedness is found throughout. It could be said Joyce’s Dublin resembled more a sinking ship than an ark.

It is hardly surprising that Jews, escaping persecution, did not adopt and interiorise the everyday Irish negativity which issued from the multiple disasters of the Irish nineteenth century, and whose most salient cause was the seemingly inescapable spiral of demographic decline and economic mediocrity. Irish Jews had, after all, their own set of historical demons with which to contend. This lacuna sometimes resulted in an overly positive depiction of the Irish.

Joyce’s Jewish hero, Leopold Bloom, doesn’t quite get the Irish malaise and embodies the – perhaps hopeless – vision of an Ireland characterised by achievement rather than stasis and by kindness rather than meanness. As Joyce explained, his hero had to be an outsider, ‘only a foreigner would do’.

On the question of antisemitism, he commented. ‘The Jews were foreigners at that time in Dublin. There was no hostility toward them, but contempt, yes, the contempt people always show for the unknown.’

Many Irish Jews who did not interiorise the national malaise and who did not look askance at positivity and energy in personal life, responded with vigour to the experience of feeling safe. This perhaps, at least in part, explains the remarkable contribution and successes of Irish Jews through the twentieth century in the areas of politics, the arts, sport, the professions and business.

But no doubt Jewish positivity and energy at times provoked an eyeroll if not a sneering response, but this was even-handed and directed at whoever exhibited unencumbered positivity and personal ambition, whether Jewish or native. Some years later Louis MacNeice commented on the general phenomenon:

I am so at home in Dublin, more than any other city, that I feel it has always been familiar to me. It took me years to see through its soft charm to its bitter prickly kernel – which I quite like too.

Joyce, like MacDonagh, was in the liberal nationalist tradition but he did not have the latter’s optimism. Asked, in connection with the Irish struggle for independence if he did not look forward to an Irish state he is reported to have responded, ‘So that I may declare myself its first enemy’.

Perhaps his many years probing the shaded aspects of the Irish soul left him with the view that the new Irish political class, no less than the old, would require committed critics. If so, it could be said he knew whereof he spoke.

12/2/2024

 

 

Liberalism goes neo

 

John Fanning writes: Twenty years ago Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, published the bestselling How Markets Work, an extended hymn of praise to global business corporations operating under free market conditions, arguing that they were the most extraordinary instrument of economic growth and individual wealth in history. He went on to say that globalisation had reduced inequality and poverty around the world in the last two centuries. Last year he published another lengthy analysis of the state of capitalism and came to radically different conclusions, aptly summarised in the title: The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.

The importance of this publication stems from the importance of the author. Martin Wolf comes from a European Jewish background. His parents emigrated to Britain in the late 1930s and many of his relatives perished in the Holocaust. An Oxford graduate, he worked for a time for the World Bank but joined the Financial Times in 1987 and has been their chief economics commentator for many years. Originally influenced by Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, he was an advocate of globalisation and free trade, but following the recession of 2008 he adopted a more Keynesian approach, arguing that public goods are the building blocks of civilisation and against overreliance on the private sector. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential economic and political commentators and in the last decade he has used his columns in the Financial Times to warn against the direction of capitalism today. In a recent review of books on the subject, he concluded: ‘These books suggests that capitalism is substantially broken. Reluctantly, I have come to the same conclusion.’

In 2023 he published his new book, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, in which, while not turning his back on either free trade or globalisation, he argues that something has gone wrong with the way the system has developed in the twenty-first century which threatens not only capitalism but the very basis of democratic society. The problems were building since the collapse of communism in 1991, leading to the exaggerated ‘end of history’ triumphalism and eventually to the Great Recession of 2008. During that period liberalism was transformed into neo-liberalism, the free market became something of a religion and markets were allowed to operate with fewer constraints than at any time in the previous century. The resulting financial instability combined with the absence of any coherent left-wing alternative and severely weakened trade unions left large sections of the population feeling angry, ignored and unrepresented. In Britain and the US, the result was Brexit and Trump, and in parts of the rest of the world a turn to extremist parties and a decline of faith in democracy.

Wolf quotes the now familiar litany of statistics showing that belief in democracy has declined significantly in Europe and particularly the US where less than 25 per cent of the population now consider it essential to live in a democracy. He then rounds up the usual suspects to explain why this might have happened: economic stagnation, rising inequality, increasing personal insecurity all resulting in a shift to an illiberal democracy, or more alarmingly ‘demagogic autocracy’. Wolf suggests that we are now close to having to make the choice offered by the great American jurist from the Roosevelt era Louis Brandeis: ‘You can either have democracy in this country or you can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few but you can’t have both.’

Wolf notes that in 1820 the average income of the richest country in the world was five times that of the poorest. In 2017 the ratio was seventy to one. This inequality has been accompanied by soaring levels of executive pay. The end of the mixed economy in the late 1970s was followed by the so-called Washington Consensus: deregulation, privatisation, lower wages and weakened trades unions, by the gig economy and the rise of the precariat. Meanwhile the left retreated into the rabbit hole of identity politics.

Wolf pins the blame on the change which took place in the capitalist system in the 1980s which liberalised the financial system and led to the so-called ‘big bang’, resulting in the financialisation of the whole economy. Although the term has been criticised for being vague and imprecise, Wolf calls it ‘a hideous but unavoidable term’ for the growing influence of finance and the fact that the financial sector was playing a much more substantial role in the economy.

Some time in the 1980s finance departments and the management consultants who advised them succeeded in a bloodless coup in many companies, resulting in a single-minded concentration on increasing shareholder value. Instead of pursuing enhanced customer service or improved product quality, businesses devoted themselves to strategies that would result in an enhanced share price. This was facilitated by ingenious financial gymnastics and wholesale disregard for the workforce. The role of finance was no longer to facilitate investment but to maximise shareholder value through whatever financial devices that could be employed – such as buying your own company’s shares to enhance its share price.

Globalisation also weakened loyalty to the country in which a business was founded, resulting in widespread tax avoidance, tax evasion and a general erosion of ethical standards. According to Wolf the result of all these developments is a rentier economy where a small proportion of the population has captured rents and uses the resources it has acquired to maximise its own wealth. Thomas Piketty explained the process ten years ago, showing how wealth grows at a faster rate than income. Owners of assets get richer more quickly than sellers of labour, causing a vicious spiral leading to a rentier economy.

Wolf argues that management now has the incentive to rig the system in its own interests, diverting money from long-term investment. Managers now spend too much time avoiding taxes and lobbying governments to cut out competition. In the US in particular the rentier economy has also resulted in this sector acquiring a dangerous level of control over the political and even legal system.

Wolf makes a brave stab at recommending action to curb some of the most egregious characteristics of detached capitalism. He cites Roosevelt on a number of occasions and it is clear that he would welcome a return of the progressive lawyers of the 1930s and 1940s, a new generation following Louis Brandeis who introduced measures to expand the government’s efforts to fight poverty, regulate business and protect the environment. Progressive lawyers viewed the US constitution at the time as a living document that could be interpreted in the light of changing lives but their conservative opponents wanted to reverse the process believing that the constitution should be interpreted in the light of its original intended meaning, the philosophy known as originalism.

They launched a well-funded campaign to effectively take over the country’s legal system. A group of law students in the Ivy League universities founded the Federalist Society, whose aim was to ‘foster the rule of law in protecting unbounded freedom and traditional values’. They succeeded: after the Trump presidency six of the nine Supreme Court judges were members of the Federalist Society. The overturning of Roe versus Wade is a direct consequence.

Wolf also advocates for much tighter control over social media platforms, whose role in undermining democracy is now clear. He challenges their assertion that they are merely platforms, when they are now self-evidently publishers. Believing that the media are too important to be left to the unmediated whims of private individuals, he advocates more public regulation of the sector, with high-powered staff hired to check the implications of social media algorithms. All of these proposals could be implemented by a determined progressive government, but the more daunting challenge is to restore the public’s faith in democracy and here the book’s recommendations are less sure-footed.

Without specifically mentioning the philosophy of Civic Republicanism Wolf is effectively arguing for much greater integration of the principles of this philosophy into civic society; actively encouraging greater civic involvement, educating all members of society in the story of who they are and how they are expected to behave. At the risk of falling into the trap of Irish exceptionalism it could be argued that we don’t do too badly from this perspective and Wolf mentions Ireland favourably in connection with our transferable voting system, which he regards as more democratic than most. Civic Republicanism is a hard sell but in view of the book’s analysis of the growing problems faced by the remaining democracies it may be well worth the effort.

Wolf has performed a valuable service in laying bare the dangers of unregulated capitalism but although he makes a brave attempt to provide some solutions one is left with the impression that he feels an overwhelming sense of betrayal by the capitalists whose cause he eloquently championed for so long and a lack of belief in the ability of the political left, the judiciary or the state to reform the system.

Bidenomics possibly offers grounds for optimism. Understandably, overshadowed by the appalling, and still escalating, wars in Gaza and Ukraine, Bidenomics has crept in under the radar but represents an extraordinarily ambitious revolution in US economic thinking, under the guise of the modestly and misleadingly titled Inflation Reduction Act. A new Financial Times film (freely available on YouTube) makes it clear that this Act involves a completely new industrial policy, trade policy and climate policy, representing a fundamental break with the core philosophy of Reaganomics which has dominated US economic policy since the end of the Cold War. Overturning the idea that the government is the problem not the solution, it is based on the premise that markets don’t necessarily know best and that governments have a critical role to play in directing industrial policy. The argument is summarised in the film by Martin Wolf: “we thought we were in an era of free market globalisation: now we’re not”. He delivers this line with evident satisfaction.

11.2.2024

The Poet Says No

Eve Patten writes: On December 10th, 1923, the poet WB Yeats addressed those gathered for the Nobel Prize ceremony banquet at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm. Speaking of the honour brought to Ireland by his award for Literature, he acknowledged a circle of fellow Irish writers who had worked to free their country from provincialism and win for it ‘European recognition’.

Such recognition was timely. The prize was widely seen as a gesture towards the drawing of Ireland into the European and wider international fold: coming as it did at the end of the civil war and coinciding with the first unsteady steps of a newly independent state, it was a peace prize too, of sorts. As The Irish Times had reported the previous month, when Yeats’s award was announced: ‘His success is a national, as well as a personal, triumph, and it constitutes a fitting sequel to the recent admission of the Free State to the membership of the League of Nations.’ For the poet’s friend Oliver St John Gogarty, who proposed a motion to send congratulations from the Irish Senate, the prize was the ‘most significant thing’ to happen in the country since the Treaty, his encomium overtly reading the literature award in a political key.

Fast forward to the same date, December 10th, but now thirteen years later in 1936, and to another Nobel Prize ceremony – this time for the Peace Prize, awarded that year (and in lieu of the suspended 1935 medal) to Carl von Ossietsky. A German journalist, Ossietsky had challenged growing antisemitism in the 1920s and helped to expose clandestine German rearmament plans that flouted the Versailles agreement. In 1932 he was briefly imprisoned for treason, and in February of 1933, with Germany under Hitler’s authority and keen to suppress resistant voices, incarcerated again, first in Spandau prison and then in Papenburg-Esterwegen concentration camp, where he endured severe physical punishment and contracted tuberculosis. Ossietsky was not present at the Nobel ceremony of 1936: the Nazi regime had forbidden him permission to travel to receive the prize, and so the chairman of the Nobel Committee spoke on his behalf.

The controversial circumstances of the award, which put intense pressure on the Nobel authorities and risked further inflaming tensions across Europe with an increasingly assertive Germany, were reported in all the major papers. Even without the publicity however, Yeats himself was already familiar with Ossietsky’s convoluted route to the honour, having been made aware of the German author’s situation almost two years earlier. In the early spring of 1935, the exiled German playwright Ernst Toller and the English author Ethel Mannin met the poet in London and asked him to endorse an accelerating international campaign to nominate Ossietsky for the Nobel, largely in the hope of it also securing his release from prison. Yeats’s response to the predicament of the German author on that occasion revisits the tricky orchestration of politics and prizes that had played in the background to his 1923 award for Literature.

The two supplicants were well placed to plead Ossietsky’s case. Ernst Toller was an internationally respected playwright who had vividly described his own experience of imprisonment – for his leadership of the short-lived revolutionary Bavarian socialist republic, in 1919– in his 1933 autobiography Eine Jugend in Deutschland, published in English a year later as I was a German. Ethel Mannin, a prolific popular novelist and socialist, was deeply influenced by Toller’s book. She met him in person in Moscow, in the summer of 1934, and subsequently made him the dedicatee of her 1935 novel Cactus, in which a middlebrow romantic saga – an Englishwoman’s love affair with a German prisoner of war – gives way to expressionist predictions of European conflict spreading from Spain across the continent. In turn this novel, feverish but prescient, had been hastily redrafted from a short story in her 1933 collection Dryad, the same volume she had presented to Yeats ‘with affection and admiration’ in the late winter of 1934 at the beginning of what she terms her ‘intimate friendship’ with the elderly poet.

A few months after their first meeting Yeats asked Mannin to call for him at the Savile Club in London so they could dine together. On her way there she stopped at a party in the Soviet embassy, where she ran into Toller, recently returned from Moscow. After several vodkas to celebrate their reunion she explained that she was ‘entertaining Yeats’, and for Toller, the opportunity was too good to miss: here was a convenient-to-hand Nobel Prize winner who might lend his name to Ossietsky’s cause. ‘He was very excited about it,’ Mannin recalls in her 1938 memoir Privileged Spectator. ‘We drank some more vodkas on the strength of the inspiration and finally left.’ At the Savile Club women were not admitted, so she and Toller took Yeats onwards, in the pouring rain, to Claridges. Mannin describes their entrance to the Mayfair hotel with a novelistic flourish: ‘surely no stranger trio crossed that stately threshold,’ she wrote, ‘Yeats, tall, silver-haired, be-cloaked, looking so exactly as a distinguished poet might be expected to look and so seldom does, Toller short, dark, wearing a picturesquely broad-brimmed hat, like something out of the pages of La Vie de Bohème, my hatless self, the three of us emerging from the rain and dripping into the brilliance of that most elegant of lounges.’ They ordered more vodka, attempted (in vain) to silence the orchestra so they could hear themselves speak, and then Mannin and Toller put their case to Yeats.

If the pitch at Claridges was made on the spur of the moment, the strategy it represented was, as historian Irwin Abrams has accounted, systematic and high-profile. Led initially by Ossietsky’s exiled friends in Paris, including Toller himself, the campaign for the Peace Prize was taken up in the international press in the summer of 1934 and sustained by a worldwide grouping of journalists, lawyers and pacifists. From the USA, the scientist Albert Einstein and the economist Otto Nathan lent their support, as did the 1931 Nobel Peace Prize awardee Jane Addams. In England the political scientist Harold Laski joined a long list of predominantly left-leaning activist writers including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Bertrand Russell and HG Wells. The cause inspired a group nomination from both houses of the British parliament and from individual politicians such as Clement Attlee and Herbert Morrison. But inevitably there was resistance too, from those concerned at the surreptitious use of the prize to challenge National Socialism or unwilling to add to the tension in current European relations. Among others, the former foreign secretary Austen Chamberlain, who had shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925, refused to endorse the campaign for Ossietsky on the grounds that it was indecorous and politically inappropriate.

And at Claridges on that rainy London night, Yeats also said no. ‘He was acutely uncomfortable about it, but he refused,’ Mannin recalls. ‘He never meddled in political matters, he said; he never had. At the urging of Maud Gonne he had signed the petition on behalf of Roger Casement, but that was all, and the Casement case was an Irish affair. He was a poet, and Irish, and had no interest in European political squabbles. His interest was Ireland, and Ireland had nothing to do with Europe politically; it was outside, apart.’

Hearing the poet’s words Toller was overcome with emotion, and then Mannin wept too, though unsure if she was upset for Ossietsky, moved by Toller’s tears, or ‘whether it was merely the vodka’; and all three sat in silent distress amid ‘elegant ladies and gentlemen in evening dress all around, and waiters and flunkeys moving about, and the orchestra playing and the chandeliers glittering’. Finally Toller walked off into the night, and Yeats said to Mannin that one day he would ‘talk politics and he would explain himself to me. But he never did.’

Biographers diverge in their readings of Yeats at this time. WJ McCormack suggests that the poet was unwilling to offend his German fan base (he had recently accepted Germany’s Goethe-Plakette award); Brenda Maddox argues that his ‘nerve-trembling was hardly the ringing denunciation of Hitler that some wish Yeats had made’; Roy Foster counters that he was simply ‘vague’ on 1930s European realpolitik but never leaned towards the Nazis. To be fair, Yeats consistently refrained from signing petitions of this kind. He was also nearly seventy and ready to disengage from public affairs. And perhaps he was understandably wary of both Toller and Mannin because of their communist associations (or ‘very near’ communist, as Mannin described herself). Perhaps too, at a more visceral level, Ossietsky’s situation triggered his unease with the politically demonstrative: think back to his 1920 poem, ‘On a Political Prisoner’, with its distaste for the embittered and populist version of the imprisoned Constance Markiewicz that had replaced the silk-kimonoed aristocrat. But whatever his reasoning for the refusal, the resulting scene was indeed, ‘acutely uncomfortable’.

In fact Yeats did explain himself to Mannin, writing from Mallorca in the spring of 1936 in response to a further attempt to gain his support for Ossietsky, and saying that he would always resist being made into a politician. ‘If the Nobel society did what you want it would seem to the majority of the German people [that] the society hated their government for its politics not because it was unhuman – this is the way their newspapers would explain it,’ he argued. After all, how many victims of the Russian government had been given the peace prize? And if the Germans were in any way like the Irish ‘the antagonism so raised would doom the prisoner you want to help, either to death or to long imprisonment.’ He recoiled with horror, he insisted, at what was happening in Europe, and requested her to look up his poem ‘The Second Coming’ to understand and appreciate his perspective. Which Mannin did, much later in the mid-1950s, recalling the poem’s line ‘the ceremony of innocence is drowned’ in the post-atomic horrorscape that the prophetic Yeats had not lived to see.

Carl von Ossietsky was released to a prison hospital in May of 1936 but died soon afterwards, in 1938, his physical condition never having recovered from the effects of his imprisonment. And Yeats died in January 1939, disappearing in ‘the dead of winter’, as Auden noted in his elegy for the poet, while all the dogs of Europe began to bark. Mannin met Toller again by chance on another wet London night, and they sheltered in the porch of a lingerie shop to exchange news, of Spain, of the coming war, and – to her dismay — of his readiness to support the call to arms. ‘We embraced and parted, hurrying our separate ways through the deluge,’ she wrote. ‘All my life I shall remember Toller standing in the doorway of the pink corset shop with that sorrow on his fine face, urging that if needs be we must fight.’ But in America, where he had gone to work for Spanish relief, Toller hanged himself in a New York apartment, his death prompting Auden to a yet more poignant elegy for the writer, ‘shadowless at last among / The other war-horses’ of a Europe now too injured to recover.

The international conversations around Ossietsky’s Nobel Prize were soon lost in the noise of the war and revisited later only in passing discussion by writers such as Hubert Butler. As the centenary celebrations of the first Irish Nobel Laureate for Literature conclude, it might be worth pausing on the unfortunate episode, not for what it says directly about Yeats’s politics, more for what it reflects of a reticence, both personal and national, to take responsibility in the international arena. If the honour bestowed on him in 1923 represented the elevation of his country to ‘European recognition’, it did not necessarily follow that Yeats – and his country – would in turn ‘recognise’ the unpalatable versions of Europe that emerged in the following decade. The connection between prizes and politics can be severed as easily as celebrated. Political commitment takes many different forms. In this context Yeats and Ethel Mannin diverged critically from each other in their beliefs, the Nobel poet lacking a degree of conviction when confronted with those ‘European political squabbles’, and the novelist, still working for German prisoner relief late into the 1940s, always burning with passionate intensity.

08/12/2023

 

Eve Patten is Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin and Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute. Her most recent book is Ireland, Revolution and the English Modernist Imagination (OUP, 2022).

 

 

From Page to Stage

Enda O’Doherty writes: John Fleming has contributed pieces to the Dublin Review of Books over a good number of years: essays, book reviews, blog posts occasioned by the deaths of friends or admired figures in the music world. A few extracts may give the flavour of the Fleming prose style and the nature of his recurring preoccupations.

On John Cooper Clarke:

Clarke likes words and uses them as imaginative brickwork to impart both anecdote and nuance. The Midas touch of his stage performance is evident in his wielding of phrases to yield a type of brutal yet dandified insight: ‘It became a cliche among the usual doom-mongers of the social-improvement industry that television “destroys the art of conversation”, as if every pre-TV family had been a hotbed of informed debate. If anything, owning a telly promoted conversation: at last we had something to talk about.’ Football was an opportunity to use ‘profane language’ unacceptable elsewhere except in the local pubs’ ‘vault’, ‘where the beer was a penny cheaper and there was no carpet on the floor’.

On rock music, ageing, fame and dying in the context of the early death of Grant McLennan of the Go-Betweens:

Behind the record sleeve is a cacophony that speaks to us, a world we subscribe to, a place where we come dangerously close to belonging. These kingdoms of culture can be durable. They can last decades if the singer continues to create in a lengthy career. We get to know and like this kingdom – we take partial refuge within its moat, within the spiralling groove of records, within the coil of tape, within whatever geometry dictates digital iterations. With music, we witness a world changing: the evolving age and maturity of the artist run in some lip-synched parallel with our own. Singer and fan both spin through the years and get older at the same rate: 16, 33, 45, 78 …

On getting to grips with Roland Barthes:

‘If myth is part of perception and objectivity is societally defined as “true” perception, then there is not only a myth of objectivity for objectivity is itself enshrouded by myth.’ This remarkable insight appears in lines on the inside back cover of my dog-eared 1980s student copy of Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. I struggle to understand what it means: behind the dubious confidence and swagger of the phrases, the sentence flounders in its attempt to distil ideas into a few short lines. Try to understand or parse it and you find some vital semantic wire is loose or missing – either in the statement or in your cognitive ability to understand. ‘“True” perception’, ‘myth of objectivity’ and ‘enshrouded by myth’: the nodes of the insight are sound; it would appear to be the connectors that are flawed. Perhaps a few prepositions are misplaced? Maybe something in the soggy construction sings of botched translation? Better still, do the sentence and its concepts sail on a watery aspect of French psycholinguistics that flounders in the Celtic or Anglo-Saxon (fill in as appropriate) mind? But a warning: this apparent quotation appears in a different font from the typeface of the rest of the book and only in one edition – in fact only in my actual copy. It is scrawled in black biro, in the arrogant hand of my twenty-year-old student self.

On the underbelly of Paris, a city in which Fleming himself lived for a number of years as a young man:

[Luc] Sante has no interest in the kings and queens and bishops and mayors, none in the higher ranks that usually monopolise the history books … His cast from across the ages includes thieves, alcoholics and whores; his history is that of the ragpickers and pickpockets, the homeless and the pimps, the entertainers and vaudevillians. While he filches the insights of intellectuals whose street wandering was weighed down by concepts, his real stars are the clochards whose bedraggled perambulations were uninformed by ideas that interfered with or framed their city.

On the Dublin music journalist George Byrne, who died in 2015:

George Byrne was the first man I heard use the word Rickenbacker. He taped albums for me on the cassette-head-tarnishing orange BASF C90 tapes I supplied. He invited me to the Ivy Rooms to see his band, AutoBop. They sang a Squeeze song, ‘Pulling Mussels from the Shell’ – this tune was not much to my liking but here was a world of imagination swirling around an otherwise grey and dour Dublin. Ideas and sounds were circling the Dandelion market. The Atrix, Chant! Chant! Chant!, a nascent Microdisney, The Blades, A Further Room, It’s A Tightrope, Meelah 18, Free Booze, The End and Amuse all plied their trade in the now long-gone Ivy Rooms, Magnet and Judge and Jury. George made claims to have played with various incarnations of several of these bands. He stoked a sense of potential and plenty.

On Cathal Coughlan, who died last year:

This was a band [Microdisney] who shared with many of their contemporaneous fans a sociology seeped in scenarios of escape – of getting out of your town, getting out of Dublin, getting out of Ireland, of fleeing your family or flatshare horror, of staying one step ahead of bedsit landlords, of simply dissolving as an outsized individual into the populous sprawl of a bigger city. To many who left Ireland in the 1980s to have a stab at a life in London, such basic simple lines, unembellished by lyricism or particular wit, spoke directly.

On the writer and critic Geoff Dyer:

There is a great chewy joy to reading Dyer – in See/Saw, cheeky stretched conceits are applied to tasty ideas as he operates surgically on the heart of a concept with an apposite quote from someone relevant or learned. He has a talent for contracting the long and insightful into the short and insightful: there is octuplet pregnancy in his pithiness […] Occasionally, I wanted more of Dyer’s essential Dyerness, which he achieves effortlessly in sentences like this one you are reading in which I am ham-fistedly attempting and (I would argue, deliberately) failing to smarten up my own alecism.

Fleming earns his crust as an editor, a trade (‘once-proud’ might be the cliché he would embrace/abhor) which in the view of the present writer is likely to have offered diminishing psychic satisfaction to most of its practitioners over recent years – or even decades – as freshness of thought and accuracy of expression have come to be valued less than visual presentation and, more destructively, the tyranny of the algorithm (‘we know what they like; give them excess of it’). A man fixated on words, wordplay, thoughtplay might have to find most of his satisfactions elsewhere.

We always knew there was ‘the writing’, a number of broadcast radio plays, short stories. A novel for a long time ‘in progress’, perhaps more than one; a film documentary about London life, Guests of Another Nation, shown on RTÉ. This year, however, has seen a quite dramatic breaking of the surface and blossoming of long subterranean stirrings as Fleming has impressively combined his musical and writerly interests in the publication of the novel The Now Now Express and the transformation into a living, breathing, pounding thing of the Prongs, a fictional postpunk band which features in its pages. The hero of The Now Now Express, Patrick, leads a somewhat squalid existence in the not so glamorous east London suburb of Walthamstow in the 1980s with his generically Irish mates Mulligan, Foley, Murphy and Neary, collectively known as ‘the Mocking Boys’, their names recalling various Dublin pubs. The boys survive on a diet of toast and honey, Red Stripe beer, mushroom-poor stirfry, crap London Guinness and French New Wave films, the expense of their prolonged and occasionally wild drinking bouts covered by ambitious schemes of benefit fraud. Early on, we get a socio-psychological summary of the Mocking Boy condition:

… we were a cheery gaggle of leering slouch adults bound together by some overdue date and linked in our avoidance of the inevitable. Content to linger too long in the interzone of caustic youth, we sneered and laughed our way out of responsibility’s call to arms. We were half-on-the-run, half-truant and half-hearted: we did things by halves and never went the whole hog. There was no focus, just the reassurance we all disliked the same things.

Leering and sneering these boys certainly are. But cheery? I don’t think so.

This generation of 1980s Irish emigrants to Britain, at least in its Mocking Boy manifestation,  is different from its 1950s or ’60s predecessors, urban, educated and with the potential to forge ‘a career’ yet deeply resistant to that path, sharing some of the self-destructive urge of its older counterparts, forced out of Ireland by poverty and maimed by the hardship of their new English lives.

The Mocking Boy handbook was based on IPC comics and multichannel TV, on gaudy sitcoms and the angry young men, on an adolescence lit up by The Fall, Joy Division and our homemade version in The Prongs. We’d formed a vanguard of late-teen resistance, and conspired into our twenties in our stereotype attack. But on St Patrick’s Day, I walked away.

On St Patrick’s Day, our hero’s twenty-fourth birthday, the Boys go on a pub crawl across Irish north London: the Samuel Pepys, the Railway Tavern, even into ‘the rotting heart of Kilburn itself’. A huge cultural divide – generational but more essentially the deep Dublin/Rest of the Country gulf – separates the young middle class, suburban city smartasses from their older compatriots from rural and small-town Clare, Kerry, Galway, Mayo and Roscommon. And yet there is a residual sympathy and affection at play in spite of the differences.

The Railway Tavern was next. It was done up with green tinsel and rosettes. “Happy St Patrick’s Day, lads,” said an unfamiliar barman as he took our order. Through the large crowd, a curly-haired man forced his way. He stuck a coin in the jukebox and sat back down, proud of his selection. The song’s maudlin lyrics bemoaned how London had lured away its listeners. A tin whistle conversed with a set of uilleann pipes and pressed all the correct buttons in the hearts of these vulnerable men poured into adult Confirmation suits. The smell of carbolic soap was everywhere and shaving cuts were common.
The hackneyed concepts in the song meant nothing to us. We had not yet done anything irreversible and our lives were free of the regret in its refrain. The song was wasted on a bunch of little pricks certain we were edging towards a future of infinity.

Patrick must eventually choose between continuing to live a life as a London-Irish Mocker and returning home, not having achieved anything except having lived off a social welfare scam, to a city and country still stuck in recession – though not for too long more – but whose streets and pubs still exert a certain attraction for him in spite of the general absence of hope and optimism. He makes what seems to be the better choice … a story, perhaps, to be continued.

The Prongs – a band mentioned several times in The Now Now Express in the same breath as The Fall and Joy Division – took flesh on stage at a gig at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin on July 8th this year. The Prongs are John Fleming on words and Niall Toner jnr (Strand, Those Handsome Devils, Dixons etc) on musical arrangement and instrumentation. At the Project they were backed by a seven-piece band comprising members of The Lee Harveys, Ultramontaines, Mighty Avon Jr and Republic of Loose. The gig attracted a full house and the reception was highly enthusiastic.

The novel The Now Now Express is officially being launched with a further Prongs gig this week (Thursday, November 16th) upstairs in Whelan’s:

https://www.whelanslive.com/event/the-prongs/

The book is available to buy at Books Upstairs, D’Olier Street, Dublin, and the book and the CD Theme from The Now Now Express at Spindizzy.

A number of stylish videos featuring individual compositions and directed by Dave Clifford can be seen on YouTube: MiddleMarch17, Fake Samuel Pepys, Kango Hammer, Map of a City etc. The Prongs page on Bandcamp (for streaming and merchandise and info) is
https://theprongs.bandcamp.com/album/theme-from-the-now-now-express

Check out the book, the videos or drop along to Whelan’s on Thursday evening.

15/11/2023

 

 

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