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

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

 

 

The Dark Side – 50 Years On

Martin Tyrrell writes: Half a century has passed since Pink Floyd released their game-changing album The Dark Side of the Moon. I first caught up with it some five years after the event, by which time it was already deeply unfashionable. Pink Floyd were the definitive progressive rock band – arthouse film soundtracks, an abortive collaboration with Roland Pettit on a ballet based on Proust – and Dark Side of the Moon, with its Hipgnosis sleeve, the quintessential prog album. Now, though, progress was out of favour. I bought it anyway and enjoyed it like a guilty pleasure.

The sound effects became tiresome after the second or third listen, not so much the various voices that fade in and out – Henry McCullough, then with Wings, and the doorman from Abbey Road studios – or the heartbeat motif, but most definitely those clocks that tick and chime interminably at the start of ‘Time’ or the cash registers that lead into ‘Money’. They got in the way of the songs, and the songs were the thing here. This was the first Floyd record with a lyric sheet, and the first where the lyrics – all by Roger Waters, though this was not stated at the time – gave the album a thematic unity its immediate predecessors had lacked. Suddenly Pink Floyd were no longer the band that sang about reaching for peaches in Saint Tropez, and Seamus the dog, and whatever, but the heavy stuff –war, poverty, procrastination and mortality. Also mental illness and anxiety. These lyrics, with their fondness for the chiding second person singular, are earnest and at times inelegant. Far from poetry, they are all the same distinctive and arresting.

Pink Floyd were a sixties band, even if their great acclaim did not come until the next decade. A blues band taken in hand by art student Syd Barrett, who moved them into psychedelia and whimsy before succumbing to one bad trip too many. Their 1967 debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn – the only Floyd album to enjoy enduring credibility – is of this era. The Dark Side of the Moon completes rather than contradicts it, Experience to its Innocence.

Two aspects of The Dark Side of the Moon are, I think, with hindsight interesting. The first is how much it stands out from the band’s previous output. There is little in the half dozen or so Pink Floyd albums that came before it that even hint at what is on the way. A trace of it, perhaps, on the extended piece ‘Echoes’ from Meddle and some thematic foreshadowing on ‘If’ from Atom Heart Mother but otherwise, en bloc, the Floyd albums, pre-Dark Side, sound almost as if each one is the work of a different band. But for The Dark Side of the Moon, those previous albums would be footnotes by now. All except Piper at the Gates of Dawn which, if not literally the work of a different band, is the work of a band that was working to a fundamentally different vision – Syd Barrett’s not Roger Waters’s. Only with Dark Side was an alternative vision and, indeed, sound obtained.

Which brings me to the second thing – The Dark Side of the Moon is a band effort, developed collaboratively in rehearsals and live performances in the year or so before recording and eventual release. The songwriting credits reflect this. All four members are recognised as having contributed creatively and, in a fine egalitarian gesture, the collage of sounds that opens the record was designated a track in its own right, entitled ‘Speak to Me’ and attributed exclusively to drummer Nick Mason. Never such democracy again. (And even at the time, it was strictly rationed. Clare Torry, who improvised the melodic vocal over Rick Wright’s chords to make ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ had to wait until the next century before her achievement was properly acknowledged.)

Roger Waters had allegedly wanted a sparser sound for Dark Side of the Moon, along the lines of Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, but the others had successfully pressed for something more elaborate. This meant an album that played to their collective strengths. David Gilmour and Rick Wright could sing, Gilmour especially. And Gilmour had a nice line in plaintiff, melodic guitar. This pairing – his voice and his guitar – would become the Pink Floyd sound to such an extent that he could revive the band a few years after Waters had tired of it, take it on the road and sound authentic.

The Dark Side of the Moon, Nick Mason later said, was the band’s ‘last willing collaboration. After that everything … was like drawing teeth; ten years of hanging on to a married name and not having the courage to get divorced.’ The Floyd albums that followed, from Wish You Were Here in 1975 to The Final Cut in 1983 are shorter on collaboration, edging ever closer to a Lennonesque outpouring, with, to my ears, diminishing returns.

Writing of Pink Floyd in his 2003 anthology The People’s Music, Ian MacDonald commented: ‘The popularity of their work, in all its disconsolate cheerlessness, is one of the most remarkable cultural facts of late twentieth century British life.’ Had he lived, MacDonald would have seen the classic Floyd line-up (Waters, Gilmour, Wright and Mason) reformed for one last show at Live 8 in 2005 and the joyous reception they got for a powerful and note-perfect performance. ‘Pigs Have Flown’ reads the hopeful, homemade banner one couple holds. The camera lingers on them as they smile and sing together what MacDonald calls those ‘intrinsically depressive utterances’ – songs about the inexorable passage of time, the friends and family lost on the way, the ebbing of childhood hopes. Life, in fact.

Roger Waters cuts the strangest figure at that final concert. I had imagined him dour and melancholic but at Live 8 he came across as downright cheerful, sixty-something and looking well on it, dressed in a light-coloured shirt, bizarrely miming the words as Gilmour sang them, playing his Fender bass like he is all of a sudden living his best life. (The earlier Live Aid, in 1985, had likewise caught him in good humour, prompting him to an uncharacteristic and – as it inevitably turned out – disappointed romanticism in the song ‘The Tide is Turning’). At Live 8, after the band had gathered a tad unwillingly for a group hug, it was Gilmour who brought things back to reality. This was a one-off. There would be no comeback tour or anticlimactic album. Nor has there been. Nor will there be, Rick Wright having died in 2008.

The Dark Side of the Moon has had a relatively low-key commemoration of its half century – a live version from 1974 has been belatedly reissued and, more interesting, a reimagining by Waters, the album remade in full with something like the Plastic Ono Band minimalism he had wanted at the time. ‘Free Four’, a track from the 1972 soundtrack album Obscured by Clouds that sounds in the original positively jaunty, is revisited here, the lyrics of it recited by way of introduction. Stripped of their cheery melody, they darken and grow poignant – ‘You get your chance to try, in the twinkling of an eye, eighty years with luck or even less.’ Roger Waters, of course, turned eighty this year and the two remaining members of the band are there or thereabouts. See also the Beatles and the Rolling Stones who are of the same vintage and who, this year, have returned for what must surely be among their final outings. Enjoy them while you can. The sixties and the people who helped make that decade the peak of (mild) postwar optimism are fading fast.

9/11/2023

 

 

 

 

Dunsany’s Careless Abundance

Robin Wilkinson writes: Whenever I came over from London to visit my cousins in Co Meath, long before the M3 cut a swathe through the Boyne Valley, I’d catch the Dublin to Kells bus and have the driver let me off at the turning to Tara. That meant moving up to the front at Ross Cross, where a sign points left to Dunsany. We sometimes took that road when driving over to Trim, and my cousin Mary would slow down slightly to point out a field between two woods, once a cricket ground where Lord Dunsany’s XI played against Clontarf and Phoenix Park and wandering sides with grand names like I Zingari (‘The Gypsies’) or Na Shuler (‘The Rovers’).

Before and after the Great War, my grandfather and his father played for Dunsany’s team, so my early impression of Edward Plunkett (1878-1957) was that of a keen cricketer, an unstinting host, and a titled captain who welcomed all sorts into his eleven. In years to come, I learned that he was also an international chess player, a soldier who had fought at the Somme, a friend of WB Yeats, AE (George Russell) and Bernard Shaw, and above all, a rare master of prose poetry. His more than sixty books encompassed plays and poems, travel tales and memoirs, as well as ‘the most remarkable body of fantasy literature that the twentieth century can claim’ (ST Joshi), admired by writers from JRR Tolkien and Jorge Luis Borges to Michael Moorcock.

Although Dunsany had created his own pantheon of gods dwelling in the mythical land of Pegāna, Yeats still hoped that his contemporary could be drawn toward ‘the old Irish legendary world instead of those magic lands of his with their vague Eastern air’. In 1912 WB edited a Selection from the Writings of Lord Dunsany at the Cuala Press, and in the introduction he praises a poet who has imagined ‘colours, ceremonies and incredible processions that never passed before the eyes of Edgar Allen Poe or de Quincey’. He adds that not all of Dunsany’s ‘moods’ appeal to him for ‘he writes out of a careless abundance’ – a far-sighted remark because at the time Dunsany had written only a fraction of his oeuvre, and because some critics believe, quite simply, that he wrote too much.

In the first decades of the century, Dunsany won plaudits in Ireland and England, but it was in America that his star shone most brightly. Broadway once had five of his plays running simultaneously, film studios offered lucrative contracts, and between October 1919 and January 1920 he embarked upon a highly successful American lecture tour which saw him lionised like a latter-day Dickens. In Dublin, recognition was measured, even churlish. When his Tales of Wonder appeared, The Irish Times warned of ‘the risks incurred by those who are seized in the generous but indiscriminating arms of Transatlantic popularity’.

As an Irish lord and a British soldier, Dunsany was more than an Anglo-Irishman with unionist sympathies; he was English on his mother’s side and Irish on his father’s, in an age when politics compelled so many of his kind to choose between England and Ireland, cricket and hurling, the Haymarket and the Abbey. When dreaming up Pegāna or basking in transatlantic acclaim, he could escape the dilemma of his dual identity. In a poem called ‘Ode to a Dublin Critic’, he composed a sharp answer to those who saw his works as the idle imaginings of a titled dilettante:

From little fountain-pens they wring
The last wee drop of inky spite:
‘We do not like the kind of thing
That lords,’ they say, ‘most likely write.’

That poem would have been written with one of the goose feather quills that Dunsany used for all his writing, be it personal correspondence or theatre, poetry or prose. His many manuscripts, like those today of John Banville, are indeed sights to behold and admire for their penmanship of another age. Out of step with his time and country, Dunsany may have seen something of himself in the sorcerer of his Charwoman’s Shadow (1926) – a master of magic and writing who agrees to demonstrate the latter art to the narrator of the tale: ‘And this the magician did, withdrawing a cork from a horn that hung from his girdle and that was filled with ink, and taking a goose-quill and writing there in the wood upon a little scroll that he took from a satchel.’

In his fantastical short stories, Dunsany often wondered at the tricks of time and ironies of fate, telling of the demise of gods and civilisations once held to be eternal, hinting too at the vagaries of his own situation as a poet and playwright whose star waxed or waned when new genres and media (film, radio, paperback fiction) gained sway on either side of the Atlantic. As so many of his books went into and out of print, he became acutely aware of transient fame and doubtful posterity. His collection of Fifty-one Tales (1915) includes ‘The Assignation’, a prose poem whose style and stately rhythms owe much to the author’s boyhood familiarity with the King James Bible:

Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid adventurers, passed the poet by. And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song, to deck her forehead in the courts of Time: and still she wore instead the worthless garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made out of perishable things.
And after a while whenever these garlands died the poet came to her with his chaplets of song; and still she laughed at him and wore the worthless wreaths, though they always died at evening.
And one day in his bitterness the poet rebuked her, and said to her: ‘Lovely Fame, even in the highways and the byways you have not forborne to laugh and shout and jest with worthless men; and I have toiled for you and dreamed of you and you mock me and pass me by.’
And Fame turned her back on him and walked away, but in departing she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him as she had not smiled before, and, almost speaking in a whisper, said:
‘I will meet you in the graveyard at the back of the Workhouse in a hundred years.’

When Fifty-one Tales appeared, Dunsany had just served as an army captain ‘in the deserts of the Somme’, but ‘The Assignation’ leaves the battlefield to lament another aspect of human mortality – second-rate entertainers finding public favour while poets go unrecognised, with posthumous acclaim no more than an enticing promise. Having experienced some neglect as well as the American Dunsany craze, the writer might have seen his reflection in either mirror. He certainly feared that his finest work might be missed for many years, and could hardly have imagined the resurgence of interest brought about by internet communication and online publishing.

Nearly half a century after Dunsany’s death, I was living in France and happened to spend a Christmas holiday in the Gard department, west of Avignon. One afternoon I visited the medieval city of Uzès with a friend who was shopping for Provençal fabric: hence my relief in finding a second-hand bookshop. I began to browse and noticed a top shelf with an assortment of odd books in English, one of which caught my eye – a dark green hardback entitled The Curse of the Wise Woman, which I knew to be an out-of-print novel by Lord Dunsany. Pasted inside the front cover was a hand-written letter on blue headed note-paper, dated November 21st, 1956.

Dear Mrs Harvey,
Here is one of the last available copies of the book in which my late publishers seem to have lost interest. And I am throwing in as a makeweight a book of which I have several copies, in case it might amuse you.
Yours sincerely,
Dunsany.

The italics hardly do justice to Dunsany’s idiosyncratic handwriting. The inside cover was also signed by the author, and Mrs Harvey had added her own name, very neatly, in pencil. I closed the book and took it to a monsieur busy reading a newspaper and smoking at the back of the shop.

Had the work been signed by a French author with a famous name and an ordinary fountain pen, the seller would doubtless have been more attentive, and priced the book rather differently, but thanks to the goose’s quill and Dunsany’s antique script, I landed his 1933 novel for the price of a plat du jour.

Another of the Fifty-one Tales likens writers worth their salt to sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships. Against the backdrop of World War One, the image of cities and empires sinking into oblivion was much more than a literary conceit, but the author of ‘The Assignation’ and ‘The Raft-Builders’ was suggesting, I think, that poets and artists are especially vulnerable to fashions that fade ‘in the courts of Time’. Notwithstanding the lukewarm support of its first publisher, The Curse of the Wise Woman (recently re-edited in America) is perhaps the most seaworthy of Dunsany’s many rafts. The novel was actually undertaken in direct response to Yeats’s decision to exclude Dunsany from his newly founded Irish Academy of Letters. Instead, he was invited to become an associate member, like TE Lawrence and Eugene O’Neill, even though no one disputed his standing as a writer or his Irish ancestry. After all, he and his forebears had lived at Dunsany Castle, on the edge of the Pale, since the twelfth century.

He was not invited to join the Academy, Yeats explained, because he had never written about Ireland. As he withdrew from otherworld fantasy, Dunsany achieved great success, beginning in 1931, with successive collections of short stories in which he drew upon his global travels to compose the tall tales of ‘a whiskey-cadging old man called Joseph Jorkens, with a reputation at his [London] club of being by far its greatest liar’. Did Yeats suppose that the Irish poet had packed his bags for good? In any event, Dunsany was piqued and wrote his first Irish novel in a few busy months.

Its title seems to announce a return to the fantasy genre, and the narrator loses no time in introducing the Wise Woman. Charles has returned from boarding school in England to spend the summer holidays on the family estate in Tipperary. At every opportunity he escapes his father’s supervision to range the countryside and indulge his passion for shooting wildfowl. He is initiated into the secrets of nature by Marlin, his father’s bog-keeper, who lives with his old mother on the edge of the heathery wilderness. Marlin confides to Charles that his mother is a ‘Wise Woman’:

The accent was equally on the word Wise and on the first syllable of Woman. It was not that he said that the woman was clever. It was nothing less than a warning that his mother was a practising witch.

The nature of the wise woman’s curse remains obscure until late in the story, when English workers from the Peat Development Syndicate arrive with their machines and their detailed plans for draining and civilising the bog. A dramatic climax sees Mrs Marlin brave a fearsome storm to call down her curse, but in the end both Charles and the readers are left wondering whether the ensuing havoc is caused by supernatural forces or a simple twist of fate. The fantastic dimension is reduced to a vanishing point. Interestingly, Dunsany reveals in the second volume of his memoirs (The Sirens Wake, 1945) that it was only when his story was nearing completion, and after attending a performance of Beethoven’s stupendous Ninth Symphony, that he realised ‘what the novel was all about, the thread that ran through the whole of it, and what the title must be’. I take that thread to be not so much the uncanny as the need to halt, even reverse, the encroaching spread of industrial progress.

The Curse of the Wise Woman has as many layers of meaning as the bog has strata. For the first time in his fiction, Dunsany engages with Irish politics and the past. Charles James Peridore and his father, James Charles, share Jacobite forenames and a heritage stretching back generations; like Dunsany’s own family, they can best be described as Anglo-Catholic. The fateful opening scene is set in the 1880s, when Charles is about sixteen. On a winter evening, father and son are sitting in the library, quite late, when ‘four dark men from the other side of the bog’ find their way into the shuttered house. Following his father’s carefully rehearsed instructions, Charles turns his back to the room and gazes at a Dutch painting near the door – just as his father vanishes, inexplicably, and the four strangers enter. (Dunsany uses a clever variant of the ‘locked room paradigm’ that Poe introduced in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’.) Questioned by the armed intruders, Charles understands that they are political enemies of his father, whom they have come to execute. He hears the faint sounds of a horse being led out of the stables and over the grass, so he speaks loudly and attempts to stall the gunmen: he fetches a ‘piece of the true Cross’ known to be kept at High Gaunt, and swears that his father is still inside the house. Politics and history, murder and devotion, high drama and wry irony compose a scene that echoes the not so distant Irish past.

All the characters of the novel have their quirks and complexities. The strangers cover Charles with their pistols as they kneel before the holy relic. Their leader gives him a parting tip about how to bring down a wild goose, and the same ‘man in a long black coat’ later becomes the benefactor of the boy whose father he planned to murder. The illiterate Marlin, who reads the bog and the skies like a book, fears that his dreams of Tir-nan-Og will keep him from going to heaven. And Charles is as passionate about nature as he is about shooting snipe and woodcock and curlew.

Living out his days somewhere on the Continent, Charles calls to mind his most vivid memories of ‘an Ireland that they tell me is quite gone’, and he wonders about the local girl that he might have married:

We were engaged for several years. But Laura, who is a Protestant, would not give up what after all is only a heresy. She was never asked to give it up for herself, but only for possible children. God help me, and all the blessed saints help me, I believed that in spite of all Laura would go to Heaven. And, God help me, I believe it yet.

Star-crossed lovers, blighted souls, beset with the contradictions of the age. And yet, Dunsany’s Irish novel has no real villains of any creed or confession, not even the gunmen who came to kill a blameless man.

There are many obvious parallels between Dunsany’s own world and that of his central character – the English-Irish background and education, the passion for shooting and fox-hunting, the early loss of a father, even the cricket ground at High Gaunt. Dunsany maintained that his novel was not in any deliberate sense autobiographical, but he does use his narrator to play occasional peek-a-boo through the curtains of the fiction. Nearing the end of his reminiscence, Charles mentions two particular men of whom he cannot write – because each of them ‘belongs to another writer’. One is his uncle, who belongs to Jerome K Jerome, and the other is Pecksniff, who (truly) belongs to Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. Dunsany was the nephew of Sir Horace Plunkett, who did indeed figure in one of Jerome K Jerome’s satirical tales, so Dunsany seems to be suggesting that his lately departed Uncle Horace was something of a Pecksniff.

That little red herring aside, there remains more to Dunsany’s double identity than meets the eye. If Charles James is the mirror image of James Charles, both father and son reflect the duality of Lord Dunsany, quintessentially English and unmistakably Irish, for as bilinguals and binationals know, identity is not a zero sum game – more of one need not mean less of the other. Throughout his life, it seems, Dunsany saw double, not because he shared Jorkens’s fondness for whiskey, but because he was constantly faced with the doubleness of his own experience. In his life as in his writing, he moved between London and Dublin, Kent and Meath, Dunstall and Dunsany, the English fens and the Irish bog, although only the latter inspired him to write at his enchanting best.

In his autobiographical Patches of Sunlight (1938), Dunsany recalls the day he discovered the tales of Edgar Allan Poe in the school library, and straightway read them all, enthralled by ‘the haunted desolation and weird gloom of the misty mid-region of Weir’. He salutes his American cousin once again in The Curse of the Wise Woman, which includes Poe’s description of ‘soulless dissipation’ at Eton, the English boarding school that Poe himself did not attend, although as it happens both Charles and Dunsany did. The passage he quotes is taken from William Wilson, Poe’s doppelgänger tale of a young man of noble ancestry haunted by his unrelated twin, a second self who follows him everywhere, much as Charles follows in the footsteps of his creator.

By the time he composed the finest of his four novels about Ireland, Dunsany’s writing blends the early King James style with an Irish musicality, reaching new heights as he sketches the changing skies and abiding landscapes, or captures in flight the teeming birdlife of the bogland:

And at last I heard those notes that a golden flute might play, in the hands of an elf or anything small or anything small and magical, and the white shapes of the green golden plover flashed by on their pointed wings, going out of sight at a hedge, rising and pouring over it like a wave over rows of rocks.

In case anyone imagines that Dunsany’s ‘careless abundance’ led him to dash off titles without so much as a backward glance, I indicate the place in my book, the copy found in Uzès, where the author has used his quill pen to correct an erratum, a minor one except that mistaking one variety of plover or lapwing for another would have certainly irked such a keen ornithologist.

Either in spite of or because of his passion for hunting and shooting, Dunsany was, in his own way, an ardent environmentalist who might well commend the nature reserve now established at Dunsany as well as the bold project undertaken by the current bearer of the title, Randal Plunkett, to re-wild large parts of the estate. Just a stone’s throw from its edge is ‘the spot from which one can see most of Ireland’. Dunsany begins and ends My Ireland (1937) – a book whose title would apply equally well to The Curse of the Wise Woman – on the Hill of Tara, because that timeless site stands in the centre of Irish history, and because its proximity surely played a part in nurturing his own fascination with myth and fantasy in the land of Time:

When I came to Tara and looked over the plain of Meath there was a storm like a little lost thing, in the West, going before a South wind with the sunlight chasing it. Green fields turned silvery under it as it came. The skirts of the rain went before it, and intensely bright fields flashed where the storm had not yet come. It shadowed a county, with silvery-green parishes standing out here and there, and went away to the North, where hills were gleaming in sunlight; for storms over this plain seem to pass like travellers, like dark men walking rarely along a wide road that forgets them.

1/11/2023

 

 

 

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