May 24, 2010
Picturing Dorian Gray
A riveting analysis of representations of Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray through the years, from illustrated versions of the book, to the recent Marvel edition. Aubrey Beardsley freaks me out. Always has, always will.
It appears that it will be a nine-part essay, and there are only five parts so far. Looking forward to the rest.
Here's a piece I wrote on Oscar Wilde, after completing the Richard Ellmann biography. Some people go through Wildean phases. Mine, so far, has lasted decades. It comes and goes in waves, but it's always there.
Go read the whole piece (it can be a bit confusing to find the next "part" of each essay, but it's all there, one through five.)
May 3, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Louis MacNeice
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Born in Belfast in 1907, Louis MacNeice went to public school, and then attended Oxford. When you read reviews of MacNeice's stuff from other poets, it's wildly divergent in its opinions. Some are annoyed, some are enthusiastic - there does not seem to be a consensus. He was a brilliant scholar of the classics, and did many translations - his background was public-school all the way, and Oxford really set him free. He then went on to work for the BBC, producing radio plays that he often wrote. In fact, this job would end up being the cause of his death. He was producing a radio play and recording it in a damp cave (for proper sound effects, I suppose? Not sure why). He caught pneumonia and died.
Louis MacNeice had many stages as a poet. He experimented. His experiments did not always go over well. People didn't like him, misunderstood him, whatever - and I have a feeling that MacNeice died thinking he still had a lot more to do, that he was only at the middle of his career, so much more development of his art to come ... So what he probably thought were his "middle" poems are now his "last" poems. There is a bit of the journalist in MacNeice, and an unwillingness to "take sides". This separates him from his generation in a huge way.
Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets
Temperamentally he was engaged by facts rather than programs; solving orthodoxies made no sense to him. Auden moved across the political spectrum, but MacNeice stayed politically "between," not passionately, like George Orwell, but quizzically. "Between" is a favorite word and stance in the early poems, different from Auden's connective "between". In MacNeice it signifies suspension: "In a between world, a world of amber" one poem begins. In "Epitaph for Liberal Poets" it is clear that he is not even able to conform to liberal humanism. He acknowledges the approach of the "tight-lipped technocratic Conquistadors"; his stance is Mark Antony's, lamenting in acceptance the inevitable triumph of Caesar, hoping the poems will survive to thaw out in another age.
His generation - and his contemporaries - particularly Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis - (poets he loved and wrote about a lot, and knew personally) - had to deal with the giants of the generation immediately preceding it. Imitate? Influence? Define yourself against them? How do you deal with a Yeats? Or an Eliot? The next generation all had different answers to these questions, and everyone struggled in a different way. But the struggle is apparent in all of them. MacNeice wrote, on this score:
Yeats proposed to turn his back on desire and hatred; Eliot sat back and watched other peoples' emotions with ennui and an ironical self-pity ... The whole poetry, on the other hand, of Auden, Spender, and Day-Lewis implies that they have desires and hatreds of their own and, further, that they think some things ought to be desired and others hated ... My own prejudice ... is in favour of poets whose worlds are not too esoteric. I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.
MacNeice lived most of his life in London. He supported Home Rule for Ireland. I don't think he ever thought of moving back there. But he never felt truly English, and I think that separateness he felt was exciting for him. He loved living in London. But he was very proud of his Irish roots. The "between" state of the exile. And his poems feel very Irish to me. He takes on Irish subjects, and speaks of Ireland repeatedly. It was a source of inspiration. But he was a realist, too. There was no Golden Age for MacNeice - no glorious time in the past when everything was awesome. I suppose nobody knows this better than classical scholars who spend years studying the ancients. Same shit going on as going on now. His nostalgia was tempered by realistic expectations - it makes for an interesting mix.
Here's one of his poems I love. It doesn't transcend (in my opinion) the particulars ... you can feel the journalistic drive here, just the facts, ma'am, and so maybe it isn't a great poem - but I do love it, and the world he describes, which comes to life.
Carrickfergus
I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:
Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim
Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams
The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses
But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.
The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,
The yarn-milled called its funeral cry at noon;
Our lights looked over the Lough to the lights of Bangor
Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.
The Norman walled this town against the country
To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave
And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting
The List of Christ on the cross, in the angle of the nave.
I was the rector's son, born to the Anglican order,
Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;
The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept
With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.
The war came and a huge camp of soldiers
Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long
Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice
And the sentry's challenge echoing all day long.
I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents
Contracted into a puppet world of sons
Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt mines
And the soldiers with their guns.
May 2, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Patrick Kavanagh
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Patrick Kavanagh, great and titanically angry Irish poet, was born in 1904, and while the Celtic Renaissance was still going on as he came of age, he thought it was all a bunch of balderdash. That is not a direct quote. He was much more profane about it. He grew up poor and Catholic, and so had a huge scorn for the Anglo-Irish tradition (of which Yeats was the biggest star), which he felt was, despite all the Gaelic frippery, English in sensibility. What did those rich Protestants know about what it meant to be Irish? His first major poem, an epic, really, was called "The Great Hunger", about the famine in 1847 - and it's a giant work. He later disavowed it (he was big on that - he didn't really stand by his own work, he would look back on stuff in later years and say, "Wow, that sucked.") But it remains a very influential poem, and many Irish poets of today (Seamus Heaney being the main one), consider Kavanagh to be their greatest influence. Kavanagh was brutal in his critiques, which got him into trouble with the Irish censors. He did not mince words. He went after the British, yes, but he went after the Catholic church, and the vested interest it had in keeping the populace submissive and sex-phobic. James Joyce covered this territory as well. Is there any reason for a perfectly fit man to go through his life a virgin, as Patrick Maguire, the lead character in "The Great Hunger" does? What on earth is the good in that? Kavanagh raged against the prudish restrictions of his society, and tackled the famine on all its fronts. The helplessness of the people was terrible, but much of the helplessness was self-chosen. They had been GROOMED by their culture and their priests to be submissive. This is something Kavanagh could not forgive.
With lines like:
He was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread,
When girls laughed; when they screamed he knew that meant
The cry of fillies in season. He could not walk
The easy road to his destiny. He dreamt
The innocence of young brambles to hooked treachery.
O the grip, O the grip of irregular fields! No man escapes.
It could not be that back of the hills love was free
And ditches straight.
No monster hand lifted up children and put down apes
As here.
you can feel the power of "The Great Hunger", why he ruffled feathers.
Kavanagh is a major major voice in 20th century Irish literature.
Michael Schmidt, in his Lives of the Poets
The rich measured achievement of his early poems is betrayed by the prolixity and unbridled anger of his later satires. Beginning with rural poems about real peasants (he was a countryman), Kavanagh left this world for Dublin, rejected much of his early verse and prose, and in indignation and self-pity marked his exclusion from a world that at once attracted and repelled him. A heavy drinker, he concedes that his excesses marred his later career. And yet at the end of it, he produced some of his best work.
A man with a typically Irish tragic outlook, Kavanagh also felt (and this is also truly Irish) that "comedy is the abundance of life". He consigned himself to oblivion, often with middle finger in the air towards the world that rejected him (he felt).
"My purpose in life was to have no purpose," he said in 1964.
He felt that the poet's vocation should be to: "name and name and name the obscure places, people, or events" - and that he did. He was furious that Yeats had the place that he did, that Yeats appointed himself the arbiter of that which was Irish poetry. He wanted to carve out another space.
Schmidt writes:
His is an easier poetry to get hold of, more conventional in its forms and in what it expects of readers than [Austin] Clarke's verse. [my excerpt of Clarke's stuff here.] It is not surprising that from Kavanagh stems much of the popular Irish poetry of recent decades. But not necessarily from The Great Hunger, which is inimitable, an invention, like a sturdy plough at the edge of an abandoned field.
While much of his stuff is the epitome of rage, political, social, sexual, and otherwise, thought I would anthologize a poem that cuts me to my very core. It shows the depth of feeling that Kavanagh is capable of, how personal his work always is. The poem is killer, just a warning.
In Memory of My Mother
I do not think of you lying in the wet clay
Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see
You walking down a lane among the poplars
On your way to the station, or happily
Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday -
You meet me and you say:
'Don't forget to see about the cattle - '
Among your earthiest words the angels stray.
And I think of you walking along a headland
Of green oats in June,
So full of repose, so rich with life -
And I see us meeting at the end of a town
On a fair day by accident, after
The bargains are all made and we can walk
Together through the shops and stalls and markets
Free in the oriental streets of thought.
O you are not lying in the wet clay,
For it is a harvest evening now and we
Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight
And you smile up at us - eternally.
April 14, 2010
Belfast: Directions from Carrie
"Take a right when you see the chicks with the guns."
What on earth could she be talking about?
Oh.
April 10, 2010
"What you get with Banville is the result of concentration. What you get with Black is the result of spontaneity."
Yet another great article about John Banville and his alter ego Benjamin Black. I just can't get enough of this guy, and I am especially taken by when he discusses his alter ego (and himself) in the third person. "Banville would never be able to do what Black does ..." You can sense the fun he has, mixing it up, creating serious craftsman-like novels as John Banville, and atmospheric tense noir thrillers as Benjamin Black. He's obviously a great interview. I read everything about the man I can get my hands on, and I have not read a boring interview with him yet. He's a detailed thinker, obviously, but with a sense of humor I love. He's so Irish, and so honest about being Irish (his Benjamin Black novels are about many of the dirty little secrets of the Emerald Isle, collective guilt, collective shame), and I get the sense that the fact that he is writing under a pseudonym, even though everyone knows it is him, gives him a sense of freedom that he DOESN'T have as Banville - he is quite honest about this, and I love him for it. I love him for having fun, open FUN, as a writer, even as he tackles terrible subjects.)
In the interview, he talks about atmosphere:
"I can only write here.” He points through the window to a rain-filled, platinum sky. “Isn’t that absolutely beautiful. That’s the colour inside my mind.”
He alternates books. A Banville book, then a Black book - and I anticipate all of them eagerly. I am quite behind in my Banville/Black reading, due to 2009 being a total wash, in terms of reading. Lorrie Moore, one of my favorite living writers, came out with a new novel
One of the other things I love about Banville is he directly attacks (just through being himself, AND being Benjamin Black) the notion that serious literature is somehow elitist, and popular literature is somehow "easy". He resists all of those labels. I don't happen to think "elitist" is an insult, anyway. At least not in the way it is thrown about now by the sneering hordes, when they use it to mean "well-read, has a good vocabulary, includes references that I might need to look up". "Elitist", when said by the anti-intellectuals, is something I cop to gladly. Naturally, I don't like it when it is meant "exclusive", like a country club that doesn't allow women, Jews, minorities, or artificial barriers between people meant to keep a certain class or group OUT - but a good vocabulary is elitist? We've come to that? Really? Well, alrighty then, I'm an elitist. At least I'm in good company.
Banville is a perfectionist, famously so. His sentences are crafted within an inch of their lives, and that does not come easily. He works at it. But as Benjamin Black, he lets it all go. I read the Benjamin Black books with great delight - they are awesome Irish who-dun-its, with dark terrible underbellies of corruption and decay - but the prose is easy, free, confident. I love how much Banville understands what Black has done for him, how openly he talks about it. No other writer today is so open and honest about the craft of writing. Perhaps he felt a bit trapped by "Banville the great artist" and had to create "Black, the crime thriller writer" to take the edge off. Seems that way. But still: the Benjamin Black books are not what I would call "easy". They just have a totally different feel and energy to them, with well-drawn characters you can't forget, and plots that ache to be told.
Banville, again, seems to rub people the wrong way - (the interview I link to is all about that) - but for me, the reasons he rubs people the wrong way (like, duh, maybe you should pick up a dictionary from time to time) is the reason I love him. Being smart is fun. Knowing words for things is fun. I was called "elitist" once on my blog for using the word "epistolary". I use it a lot. It happens to be one of my favorite words, just to say, I love the sound of it, and then also: I love it because it is accurate. I could certainly say "letter-writing relationship", or "relationship based on writing letters" - but those are three and four words when there is actually ONE word that will suit: EPISTOLARY. I love that. If that makes me elitist, then I sure am guilty as charged, and happy about it. I would be sad if I didn't know the word "epistolary", and I also would be sad if I encountered words I didn't understand and felt ANGRY and RESENTFUL about it, instead of thinking, "Holy shit, what the hell is that word, let me look that up."
Banville says in the interview, answering to the charge that sometimes he is an "intellectual bully" in his writing (ie: you're gonna sit there, and you're gonna take what I dish out):
“Well, sometimes it’s good to be bullied like that. What I’ve always tried to do is give my prose the same denseness and weight of poetry, and you cannot read a poem and do your knitting at the same time, or think about sex, or what you’re going to have for dinner. You have to read a poem or not read a poem. I want my books to be the same. You read them, or you don’t. If you don’t, that’s fine.”
Love him for his honesty. He is a breath of fresh air. I still have not read The Infinities
I love how this experiment/project (writing as two separate writers) seems to be continuing. He's committed to it. He's into it. He hasn't dropped it, it's not a pose. I read Christine Falls: A Novel
Once again: Interview with John Banville about Benjamin Black and other topics.
More of my posts about Banville/Black:
More on The Sea, by John Banville
"My goodness, these are very deep questions you're asking ..."
April 9, 2010
The Books: "The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry" - Austin Clarke
Next book on my poetry shelf:
The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry
In case you are wondering, the Norton Anthology is organized chronologically, by birth date of poet. I am not including every poet that shows up here, because many I am either not familiar with, OR I have separate volumes devoted only to that poet - and I'll do excerpts from those books, rather than this one.
Austin Clarke was a poet Dublin-born, and is the leading Irish poet in the generation after W.B. Yeats. John Montague (another poet I love) called Clarke "the first completely Irish poet to write in English." He was born in 1896, and had similar journeys to other Irishmen at that time. 1916 radicalized him (he was in college at the time), although the pump was already primed, his parents being nationalists. He went to University College, Dublin - and I think ended up teaching there. He is a very Irish poet, his topics are Irish, his language and phrasing recognizably Irish - but it just goes to show you that there are a million ways to be Irish. He sounds nothing like Yeats - at least not once he found his own way. He imitated him quite a bit in the beginning, before setting himself free. Yeats has a grand and mystical lyricism, which Clarke doesn't share at all. He is much more grim. Thomas Kinsella, who was a great supporter and advocate of Clarke wrote:
The diction of his last poems is a vivid, particular voice, rich and supple; nothing is unsayable. But it is no natural voice.
He liked limitations. He used assonance a lot. He wrote:
Assonance is more elaborate in Gaelic than in Spanish poetry. In the simplest forms the tonic word at the end of the line is supported by an assonance in the middle of the next line. The use of internal pattern of assonance in English, though more limited in its possible range, changes the pivotal movement of the lyric stanza. In some forms of the early syllabic Gaelic metres only one part of a double syllable is used in assonance ... and this can be a guide to experiment in partial rhyming or assonance and muting. For example, rhyme or assonance on or off accent, stopped rhyme (e.g. window: thin: horn: morning), harmonic rhyme (e/g/ hero: window), cross-rhyme, in which the separate syllables are in assonance or rhyme. The use, therefore, of polysyllabic words at the end of the lyric line makes capable a movement common in continental languages such as Italian or Spanish.
Michael Schmidt (my go-to guy for additional context) in Lives of the Poets
Yeats cast a long shadow. The endless debate about what constitutes Irishness in art and literature, continued, as it had for Joyce in his self-imposed exile and for Samuel Beckett. Readers were reluctant, given the achievement of Yeats and Patrick Kavanagh's accessibility, to accept Clarke on his own terms. It can't have been easy, as he emerged, to reconcile personal vocation, deep learning, a time of historic change, and an indifferent or hostile milieu.
He wrote a lot. He wrote plays, editorials, book reviews (he could be quite caustic) - and also novels. He got into trouble repeatedly with the censors in Ireland, a powerful force. He had a nervous breakdown later in life, and in the 60s published a book of verse about it.
Schmidt writes (and this is very interesting to me):
He gains much from being rooted in Ireland in ways Yeats was unable to be. Impoverishment comes from having to acknowledge and define that rootedness, to manifest it in prose and verse. History would not allow him to take his country of origin for granted. Tomlinson insists that Clarke's nationalism is not "the inertia of chauvinism, but a labour of recovery". Clarke adapted elements from a tradition alien to the English, working toward a separate Irish, not Anglo-Irish, poetry. It was for him a project, a required labor added on to his primary vocation, and it is responsible for peaks and troughs in his work. Yeats assimilates the Irish struggle into a preexistent rhetorical tradition. Clarke introduces the struggle, preserved in a language long suppressed, into the rhetoric itself, to forge a new poetic idiom.
I love his stuff, as I love most Irish literature, in all its complexity and diversity. His is another kind of voice, contemporary to the great early 20th century giants, but somehow still managing to do his own thing.
Schmidt writes about his "place" in Irish literature:
The uncompromising force of his best satires, the vividness of his love lyrics and visions, and the cool candor of his "confessions" set him apart. He cleared a non-Yeatsian space in which an Irish poet might build a confident poetry in English for which the term "Anglo-Irish" is meaningless.
That is a big big deal.
Here is one from 1928. I love it because you can feel an oral tradition in it ("They say ... Men that had seen her ...") You can feel the gossip of small towns, and also the long memories of a people who have lived in the same place for generations. The Norton Anthology has a footnote to the poem which I will include, since it's by Austin Clarke himself, his own note to this haunting poem. It's a footnote that gives really important context to what we are reading here. The language is simple, but as with a lot of Irish stuff, there are buried meanings and symbols that everyone there at that time would get - but are lost to us now.
The Planter's Daughter1
When night stirred at sea
And the fire brought a crowd in,
They say that her beauty
Was music in mouth
And few in the candlelight
Thought her too proud,
For the house of the planter
Is known by the trees.
Men that had seen her
Drank deep and were silent,
The women were speaking
Wherever she went -
As a bell that is rung
Or a wonder told shyly,
And O she was the Sunday
In every week.
1 "In barren Donegal, trees around a farmstead still denote an owner of Planter stock [that is, a Protestant], for in the past no native could improve his stone's-throw of land" [Clarke's note].
March 30, 2010
Happy birthday, Seán O'Casey
Irish playwright Seán O'Casey was born on this day, in 1880. He was the first major Irish playwright to deal with slum life, the reality of the Dublin poor.
I have a wonderful anecdote right here about O'Casey - this from his colleague Gabriel Fallon - who wrote (among other things) a book about Seán O'Casey. Here is his goose-bump-inducing description of the rehearsal process (at first rather confusing for all involved, since the play was most definitely "something new") for Juno and the Paycock
We could make nothing of the reading of Juno and the Paycock as it was called. It seemed to be a strange baffling mixture of comedy and tragedy; and none of us could say, with any certainty, whether or not it would stand up on the stage.The dress rehearsal would be held at 5 p.m. on March 2, Sunday. I arrived at the theatre at 4:30 p.m., and found the author there before me looking rather glum and wondering if a rehearsal would take place ... Gradually the players filed in and went to their dressing-rooms. Lennox Robinson arrived shortly before 5 o'clock and was followed by Yeats and Lady Gregory. The curtain rose about 5:36 p.m. so far as I could see and hear while waiting for my cue in the wings the rehearsal seemed to be proceeding smoothly. As soon as I had finished my part of Bentham at the end of the second act I went down into the stalls and sat two seats behind the author. Here for the first time I had an opportunity of seeing something of the play from an objective point of view. I was stunned by the tragic quality of the third act which the magnificent playing of Sara Allgood made almost unbearable. But it was the blistering irony of the final scene which convinced me that this man sitting two seats in front of me was a dramatist of genius, one destined to be spoken of far beyond the confines of the Abbey Theatre ...
We watched the act move on, the furniture removers come and go, the ominous entry of the IRA men, the dragging of Johnny to summary execution, the stilted scene between Jerry Devine and Mary Boyle, and then as with the ensnaring slow impetus of a ninth great wave Allgood's tragic genius rose to an unforgettable climax and drowned the stage in sorrow. How surely was the very butt and sea-mark of tragedy! But suddenly the curtain rises again: are Fitzgerald and McCormick fooling, letting off steam after the strain of rehearsal? Nothing of the kind; for we in the stalls are suddenly made to freeze in our seats as a note beyond tragedy, a blistering flannel-mouthed irony sears its maudlin way across the stage and slowly drops an exhausted curtain on a world disintegrating in 'chassis'.
I sat there stunned. So, indeed, as far as I could see, did Robinson, Yeats, and Lady Gregory. Then Yeats ventured an opinion. He said that the play, particularly in the final scene, reminded him of a Dostoevsky novel. Lady Gregory turned to him and said, "You know, Willie, you never read a novel by Dostoevsky." And she promised to amend this deficiency by sending him a copy of The Idiot. I turned to O'Casey and found I could only say to him, "Magnificent, Seán, magnificent."
The image of Lady Gregory basically cutting "Willie" down to size is so funny to me, but I love the whole anecdote.
Excerpted from Gabriel Fallon's memoir: SEAN O'CASEY: The Man I Knew
March 28, 2010
My advice to a friend, about to take her first trip to Ireland:
"If you travel to Ireland, and you do NOT make out with a couple of random Irishmen, then you really need to look within to find the problem."
March 17, 2010
March 12, 2010
"I think putting Yeats to rock'n'roll and doing it for 20 songs is radical."
Wonderful piece about setting poems from famous poets to music, in particular Yeats. The focus of the piece is on The Waterboys (especially Mike Scott) who has been determined to put Yeats's stuff to music, and has been doing so for years.
I own Fisherman's Blues (an album by the Waterboys) which has the haunting version of Yeats's "The Stolen Child" on it - a poem I will always have great affection for because we went to that spot in Ireland, as kids, with the little waterfall in the woods, and "The Stolen Child" on a plaque right there - and there was something about it: the setting, plus the poem - that just made it come alive to me. Not to mention the haunting refrain:
For the world's more feel of weeping than you can understand.
There I was, in Ireland, as a 14 year old pudgy teenager, and I feverishly copied down the entire poem, standing there in the woods, as my family wandered around, because I knew I wanted to have it with me. I NEEDED to have it with me. There was no Google. Naturally, with a father like mine, there were multiple copies of said poem back home - and while it is certainly not considered Yeats's greatest, it had a real impact on me back then, and I respect it for that. I entered into the poem. And to this day, I can never read that poem without picturing that spot in Ireland, the green woods, the small path, and the tall thin eerie waterfall. They are inextricably linked.
The Waterboys put "The Stolen Child" to music (audio clip below the jump). And it was years after my expereince in the woods in Ireland when I heard their version of the Yeats poem, but to me: it captures what it feels like there, and what the poem feels like, its tremendous sadness, loss, grief, and also an eerie quality - like the Pied Piper leading the children away forever from their homeland. I love the recording.
Back to The Waterboys. Read the article above. Mike Scott, frontman for The Waterboys is I guess what you would call a "Yeats geek" (he calls himself an "archivist")- and he is now working on a larger project, more extended, and they're doing a concert at the Abbey Theatre (that Yeats helped form back in the day), and it's all very exciting. There will be a new album of all of these live concerts - called Appointment with Mr. Yeats. Very exciting.
Funny: his last comment in the article sort of dovetails with my thoughts on "intimidation" that I've been bandying about lately. Writers who intimidate. The ones you love above all else. The ones who make you feel it's useless to even write at all. Here is Mike Scott wrestling with that influence, as a way to honor him, but also as a way to re-contextualize the work of a poet who died in 1939. It's beautiful. Scott states, "I can't be intimidated."
I really look forward to An Appointment with Mr. Yeats.
THE STOLEN CHILD (by WB Yeats - and covered by The Waterboys on Fisherman's Blues)
WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.
February 26, 2010
"My goodness, these are very deep questions you’re asking me. Why don’t you ask me what my favorite color is, or my favorite pop group?"
Wonderful thoughtful interview with John Banville about his new book The Infinities
I love his writing (the Banville books, as well as the Benjamin Black books), and I love the connections I have with him and my father - he was probably my father's favorite living author - and I love that Banville seems to see his art as something that is, well, fun. Even though if you read something like his Booker-award winning novel The Sea
I also feel that his pseudonym Benjamin Black, the writer who writes Dublin noir-style crime stories, has set him free, although I don't think he sees his Banville books as drudgery. It's almost like a great tragic actor deciding to do Importance of Being Earnest in summer stock, before going back to play Macbeth in Stratford the following fall. It's all the same actor, same commitment, but there is a certain feeling of release that seems to come when you don't feel the need to rip your guts out. It's a BREAK, a necessary palate cleanser. Banville talks about this quite openly. A new Benjamin Black is coming out and Banville says about it:
I have a new novel coming out shortly under Benjamin Black’s name. It’s a completely different discipline. I like doing it, it’s an inglorious craftwork that I enjoy immensely. And yes, I’ll keep doing it. It’s an adventure I’ve embarked on, and whether I’m making a mistake or otherwise, I don’t know.
If you go back and read all of the MOUNTAINS of press that Christine Falls
You can feel how much FUN he has with this crazy gift he has been given, this writing gift.
For example:
What kills art is solemnity. Art is always serious but never, never solemn. Good art recognizes, as I say, our peculiar predicament in the world, that we’re suspended in this extraordinary place, we don’t know what it’s for or why we’re here. We know vaguely, but there is no answer to it. It’s simply that by just some chance of evolution we evolved beyond the animals, we got consciousness of death, which goes back to the beginning of our conversation, gives all life its flavor. This is peculiar to us, so far as we know. Who knows, the animals may know that they’re dying but it doesn’t shape their lives in the way that consciousness of death shapes ours. But art, as I say, has to be light, it has to be frivolous, and it has to be superficial in the best sense of these words. Nietzsche says upon the surface, that’s where the real depth is, and I think that’s true. I never speculate, I never psychologize, I just present, so far as I can, the evidence—this is what one sees, this is how the world looks, this is how it tastes and smells. In other words, I don’t know how to answer your question.
hahahaha
I do love that: Art is serious but never solemn.
You get that from his books.
Banville has been very eloquent on Joyce. He is an Irish writer, after all. You're gonna be asked about Joyce. Banville is probably the most successful and renowned Irish writer today (although it is, as usual, a crowded field), and yet his philosophy (although he does not call it that) is similar to that of Joyce's. Joyce famously said about Ulysses, "on my honour as a gentleman, there is not one serious word in it." I believe him, as I have said before. A book can be serious without taking itself seriously and without being serious in and of itself. I enjoy things that are not top-heavy, tipping over with their meaning. It's one of the reasons why I loved Then We Came to the End
So there is something fun about Banville's approach to his work that I find very liberating, and fun to read about.
There’s no message. I constantly say one of my absolute mottos is from Kafka, where he says the artist is the man who has nothing to say. I have nothing to say. I have no opinions about anything. I don’t care about physical, moral, social issues of the day. I just want to recreate the sense of what life feels like, what it tastes like, what it smells like. That’s what art should do. I feel it should be absolutely gloriously useless.
Obviously, when you read something like The Sea, or his earlier books - the one on Kepler
Portrait of the Artist is one of the angriest books in the English language, but it is Joyce's stance as an artist that seems to change the way I perceive it. His desire was not to stick it to the British through literature. Many people did that, and while they may have made a splash in their day, their books would not stand the test of time. Joyce's desire was to capture, in language, what life feels like. He could only write about what he knows (he is the classic example of that - I don't think you always have to "write what you know" - that's balderdash - but Joyce ONLY wrote from personal experience - he didn't create characters, or create plots, nothing writerly whatsoever). Joyce wrote what life feels like. And that included things like listening to sermons and thinking about hell and masturbating and overhearing conversations about Parnell, and all of these highly explosive topics. But if you've read the book, then you know that it is not a polemic, a pamphlet, and the meaning is hidden, if there is one.
Once I got that Joyce didn't care about meaning, I was able to click into his stuff with the greatest of ease.
I love Banville's thoughts on that. Love it to death, as I work hard on my own writing, sitting and staring at the blank page.
I also love the section in the interview about naming characters and how important it is to find the right name. For him, once he gets the names, all else follows.
Ah, what can I say, love this man so much, and the interview is a good one. The interviewer had done her homework, and gave him some very thought-provoking questions (which Banville commented on a couple of times). She got some really great responses.
February 9, 2010
Today in history, February 9, 1923
Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in. -- Brendan Behan
Brendan Behan, Irish playwright and terrorist, was born on this day, in Dublin, in 1923. He led a life of poverty, violence, controversy, and seemingly aimless wandering. He spent time in jail as a teenager, for being part of a plot to blow up a bridge (he had the bombs in his bag). Then he was involved in the attempted murder of two detectives, and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. While in prison, he (like so many other convicts) spent that enforced solitude writing. He wrote memoirs, confessions, poetry. He was still only 23 years old. His IRA activities ceased after that time, although he remained connected and friendly with most of its members (naturally - his whole family was involved). While in prison, he learned the Irish language. He drank like a fish. He had trouble getting published in Ireland (so he was in a grand continuum of other Irish writers who faced similar censorship issues). Behan was raised in a staunchly Republican family. His father was involved in the Easter uprising. Behan was Catholic (of course) - but not by name only. He was a true believer.
In the 1950s, he left Ireland (again, in a grand continuum of Irish writers who feel they must leave in order to be an artist) and moved to Paris. He wanted to be free, to write, to publish, to live life the way he wanted to live it.
I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
When we were in Ireland as a family, my dad took us to the writer's museum in Dublin. It's like going to the Vatican of artists. Nobody is more dominant in the written word than Irish writers. Who knows why that is, it doesn't even matter why. The museum is great. Even as a kid I appreciated it, especially because I grew up being surrounded by these old Irish authors, on my dad's bookshelves. I hadn't READ any of the books, but people like Flann O'Brien and Brendan Behan and Francis Stewart and WB Yeats were a part of the warp and weft of our family. We had a big picture of Brendan Behan in our living room - actually, we still do: it was a drawing of Behan's big bloated meaty face - and it was all done in one line, with the pen never lifting from the page. You can see it on the wall over the television in this photo here. I still remember our visit to the museum and seeing Behan's battered typewriter under glass (you can see images of it on the museum's link). I didn't even know who he was, as a writer - I just knew his books were all over our house, and I just knew that he was on our living room wall. So he was omnipresent. And even as a young teenager, I was into "objects", the same way I am now. Like seeing Alexander Hamilton's DESK at the New York Historical Society and literally having to walk away from the display because I didn't trust myself to not reach out and touch the damn thing. Behan's typewriter is one of the few things I remember from that trip to the museum. I think perhaps it is because I had a battered typewriter of my own - given to me on my 10th birthday - and it lasted me pretty much until I went to college. Old-fashioned, where I had to buy ink ribbons on spools, and where certain letters came out quirky, no matter what you did. I loved my typewriter, and I wish I still had it. Even just as a curio. Behan's typewriter looked kind of like mine, which was strange to me ... I was a teenager living in the early 1980s ... Behan seemed like a man from ancient Rome to me, yet his typewriter was like mine!
"I am a drinker with writing problems."
His cynicism about the Irish and Ireland borders on the psychotic at times (but if you know the Irish, you know that cynicism about themselves appears to be built in to the national character - part of why they are so charming and so much fun. They ARE serious, but they don't take themSELVES seriously.)
If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.
But he also said:
It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.
In my opinion it is his cynicsm that makes his work so exciting to read. It palpitates on the page. His feelings and judgments tremble before you. He lives in his words. He is unforgiving. Yet also so so funny. A typically Irish combination. If you just have the unforgiving attitude, you'll be a rather humorless writer, a propagandist. But Behan was a riot.
Never throw stones at your mother,
You'll be sorry for it when she's dead,
Never throw stones at your mother,
Throw bricks at your father instead.
-- Brendan Behan, "The Hostage", 1958
It doesn't surprise me at all that he and Jackie Gleason were best friends. Of course they were. They both had the same dead-eyed response to absurdity, the same intolerance for stupidity and silliness, the same potential for explosive rage and explosive tragedy, and also the same huge humor.
They had become friends because of a notorious drunken appearance by Behan on a television talk show, where Gleason was also a guest. Behan was wasted, it was shocking to many - but Gleason saw a kindred spirit.
So happy birthday, to a wonderful Irish writer, a man I grew up with, a character in my childhood lexicon. He was not outside our family at all, he was inner circle, like Flann OBrien (one of his friends) and Yeats and Joyce and Synge. Behan was on our wall. He was one of us. As an adult, I finally read all of his plays and realized what the fuss was all about.
1954's The Quare Fellow, about his time in prison, ran for a short time in Dublin, and was a modest hit. The prison language is meaty, funny, and shows Behan's gift for satire. There's a Pinter-esque quality in some of it (strange as that may sound if you are familiar with Pinter) - in that a lot of times the events that happen OFFstage take on far more importance than what is happening ON. So that adds to the audience's feeling of imbalance, or wanting to peek around corners to get the whole story. "The Quare Fellow" is never seen in the play, although he is referenced constantly. Now enters Joan Littlefield and her Theatre Workshop into the picture. We really can thank her for the fact that Brendan Behan is so famous today. I am not sure that fame was a done deal for someone like Behan - in the same way that it was for someone like Joyce, who seems destined to be a singular star. Behan was more on the fringe, more of a scrabbler. But Littlefield, a theatre director and producer, took The Quare Fellow over to England where it was a smashing success. Eventually the play moved to Broadway, bringing Behan worldwide fame.
My dad wrote me a note about The Hostage (another one of Behan's plays):
Dearest: I saw the play done once in the 70s: it seemed like John Cleese [or some other Python] had adapted Frank O'Connor's Guests of the Nation for the stage. I believe that it owes most of its success to the director [Joan Littlefield?]. love, dad
My father's comment reflects the general consensus that seems to be out there: that it was Joan Littlefield who took Behan's work, wrestled it into a theatrical form, produced it so that its strengths could shine through, hiding its weaknesses - and that any collaboration that Behan had afterwards suffers in comparison. Behan owed much to Littlefield. Perhaps that is why they had such a testy relationship, notoriously difficult.
The Hostage
Interestingly enough, my copy of the book, given to me by my father, was an early edition, 1959, and in the biographical sketch on the back it says: "Brendan Behan, the son of a house painter, left school at thirteen, and three years later served his first prison term for political reasons. As an IRA terrorist he has spent eight years of his life in various jails ..." The use of the word 'terrorist' really stood out for me. So often now, regardless of whether the person is actually a terrorist or not, the word is surrounded by little quotation marks. Or it's just not used at all. They're "insurgents", they're "rebels", they're "militants", "freedom fighters", etc. That little bio of Behan is quite a time-traveler, from an earlier decade when people weren't so hesitant to call a spade a spade.
Yeah, he was a terrorist. He blew shit up. He went to jail.
He also was a writer.
I appreciate the clarity and openness of that biographical sketch, and miss that kind of forthrightness (without the huge chip on its shoulder, too) today.
The Hostage was an enormous theatrical success in London, Paris, and New York. I love the play. It's laugh-out-loud funny at times, but also angry, pointedly political, sad ... with certain Keystone Cops slapstick elements. In my opinion, it should be played like a bat out of hell. You should only "pause" when Behan tells you to pause. Other than that, let it fly, keep the speed up, ba-dum-ching! Otherwise, the thing could be in danger of taking itself seriously. The points made are awesome and difficult and prickly - still relevant today ... but points such as those must not be underlined for the audience. God, I wish every director - for stage, TV, and film - would LEARN NOT TO UNDERLINE (with music, dialogue, closeups, repetitive language in the script to make sure we all "get it") what is already obvious.
Behan's work exists in a fiery world of high stakes, humor, and denial. If you pause, if you slow it down, its power unravels.
The Hostage takes place in a brothel in Dublin which is owned by a former IRA commander. The cast of characters is a motley array of whores and night-owls and other fringe-dwellers. It's a fast-moving theatrical work, very Irish - full of wise cracks, and jokes. It seems that NOTHING is taken seriously. But that's so very Irish. When the play opens, we eventually learn that the following day an 18 year old IRA member is to be hanged. He was accused of killing an Ulster policeman. This is on everybody's minds. Lots of talk and chatter about the IRA, and 1916, and martyrdom, and Ireland ... A young Cockney soldier, Leslie Williams, is held hostage in the brothel, in the hopes that somehow this might stave off the execution ... When the IRA member is hanged the following day, the British police eventually attack the brothel, and Leslie ends up getting killed by gunfire.
The Hostage was Behan's last major success.
Critic Kenneth Tynan said:
While other writers horde words like misers, Behan sends them out on a spree, ribald, flushed, and spoiling for a fight.
Here is an excerpt from The Hostage - a play that is well worth looking into if you are not familiar with it. Don't forget, despite the IRA themes and the title: this is a comedy.
Notice in the excerpt below that a "pause" is written into the script. And, hysterically, the Officer shouts "SILENCE!" after the pause. If you're in a production that is floppy, in terms of cue pickups, with pauses left and right, people stopping to think, or ponder - then that moment would be lost, the timing would not be right, you need to be able to "hear" the joke that Behan has written into the thing. It needs to be rat-a-tat dialogue all along, no pauses between lines, so then that sudden "Pause" will really have an effect ... and the fact that the Officer shouts "Silence" after the ONE pause in the script so far - is hysterical, and says worlds about that character. (This, too, is very Pinter-esque. In terms of "Pinter's pauses" - follow them like you would a musical score. Do not add more. Do not subtract any. Just DO WHAT HE SAYS ... and almost by default, the script will take on an ominous almost unbearably tense feeling. Example here of what a Pinter script looks like. Those "silences" are deliberate, written into the thing by Pinter. This is not always the case with such "directorial" additions to a script - sometimes they are added from production notes, and are not BY the playwright. But in Pinter's case, he wrote those "silences" in. They are much a part of the dialogue as the things actually spoken. It's not up to the actor to muck with that stuff, to decide when to pause - at least not with Pinter. With Pinter, you do what he says. Believe me, it will help.)
So happy birthday to Brendan Behan.
You make me think, basically, of my whole damn life. You were given to me, by my father, like so much else. It was through osmosis, rather than anything more deliberate.
Wherever I look, you are there.
EXCERPT FROM The Hostage
OFFICER: Now your rent books, please, or a list of the tenants.
PAT. I can give you that easy. There's Bobo, Ropeen, Colette, the Mouse, Pigseye, Mulleady, Princess Grace, Rio Rita, Meg, the new girl, and myself.
OFFICER. [PAT fetches his notebook] I'll tell you the truth, if it was my doings there'd be no such thing as us coming here. I'd have nothing to do with the place, and the bad reputation it has all over the city.
PAT. Isn't it good enough for your prisoner?
OFFICER. It's not good enough for the Irish Republican Army.
PAT. Isn't it now?
OFFICER. Patrick Pearse said "To serve a cause which is splendid and holy, men must themselves be splendid and holy."
PAT. Are you splendid, or just holy? Haven't I seen you somewhere before? It couldn't be you that was after coming here one Saturday night ...
OFFICER. It could not.
PAT. It could have been your brother, for he was the spitting image of you.
OFFICER. If any of us were caught here now or at any time, it's shamed before the world we'd be. Still, I see their reasons for choosing it too.
PAT. The place is so hot, it's cold.
OFFICERE. The police wouldn't believe we'd touch it.
PAT. If we're all caught here, it's not the opinion of the world or the police will be upsetting us, but the opinion of the Military Court. But then I suppose it's all the same to you; you'll be a hero, will you not?
OFFICER. I hope that I could never betray my trust.
PAT. Ah yes, of course, you've not yet been in Mountjoy or the Curragh glasshouse.
OFFICER. I have not.
PAT. That's easily seen in you.
OFFICER. I assure you, my friend, I'm not afraid of Redcaps.
PAT. Take it from me, they're not the worst [to audience] though they're bastards anywhere and everywhere. No, your real trouble when you go to prison as a patriot, do you know what it will be?
OFFICER. The loss of liberty.
PAT. No, the other Irish patriots, in along with you. Which branch of the IRA are you in?
OFFICER. There is only one branch of the Irish Republican Army.
PAT. I was in the IRA in 1916, and in 1925 H.Q. sent me from Dublin to the County Kerry because the agricultural labourers were after taking over five thousand acres of an estate from Lord Trales. They had it all divided very nice and fair among themselves, and were ploughing and planting in great style. G.H.Q. gave orders that they were to get off the land, that the social question would be settled when we got the thirty-county Republic. The Kerrymen said they weren't greedy like. They didn't want the whole thirty-two counties to begin with, and their five thousand acres would do them for a start.
OFFICER. Those men were wrong on the social question.
PAT. Faith and I don't think it was questions they were interested in, at all, but answers. Anyway I agreed with them, and stopped there for six months training the local unit to take on the IRA, the Free State Army, aye, or the British Navy if it had come to it.
OFFICER. That was mutiny.
PAT. I know. When I came back to Dublin, I was court-martialled in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
Pause.
OFFICER. Silence!
PAT. Sir!
OFFICER. i was sent here to do certain business. I would like to conclude that business.
PAT. Let us proceed, shall we, sir? When may we expect the prisoner?
OFFICER. Today.
PAT. What time?
OFFICER. Between nine and twelve.
PAT. Where is he now?
OFFICER. We haven't got him yet.
PAT. You haven't got a prisoner? Are you going down to Woolworths to buy one then?
OFFICER. I have no business telling you any more than has already been communicated to you.
PAT. Sure, I know that.
OFFICER. The arrangements are made for his reception. I will be here.
PAT. Well, the usual terms, rent in advance, please.
OFFICER. Is it looking for money you are?
PAT. What else? We're not a charity. Rent in advance.
OFFICER. I might have known what to expect. I know your reputation.
PAT. How did you hear of our little convent?
OFFICER. I do social work for the St. Vincent de Paul Society.
PAT. I always thought they were all ex-policement. In the old days we wouldn't go near them.
OFFICER. In the old days there were Communists in the IRA.
PAT. There were, faith, and plenty of them. What of it?
OFFICER. The man that is most loyal to his faith is the one that will prove most loyal to the cause.
PAT. Have you your initials mixed up? Is it the FBI or the IRA that you are in?
OFFICER. If I didn't know that you were out in 1916 I'd think you were highly suspect.
PAT. Sir?
OFFICER. Well, at least you can't be an informer.
PAT. Ah, you're a shocking decent person. Could you give me a testimonial I could use in my election address if I wanted to get into the coroporation? The rent, please!
February 4, 2010
Mrs. Robinson, Northern Ireland style
An absolutely fascinating account of the brou-haha surrounding Iris Robinson, wife of Peter Robinson, First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly. A recent BBC documentary about the scandal has got everybody talking. The piece is by Anne Enright, recent winner of The Booker Prize for The Gathering
I also am in love with Anne Enright as an interview subject. She certainly gives good interview. Her thoughts on Ireland, and Irish writing, and Joyce, and John McGahern, and the whole canon of them (mostly male) is fascinating. I always prick up my ears when I see an interview with her, I know it's going to be good stuff. She's a bit wild. A bit un-pin-down-able. Very funny, too, which you would never know from the mostly humorless The Gathering.
And her account here of Iris Robinson, a 60 year old politicians' wife, who has had an affair with a 19-year-old boy, which involved a siphoning off of funds from the Castelereagh Borough Council to give to him, and now her hospitalization, her psychiatric issues (long-standing), and the whole crazy terrain of Northern Irish politics is amazing - I couldn't stop reading it. Here's a brief excerpt that certainly shows the Anne Enright tang and tartness, but you should really read the whole thing:
In a statement made before the documentary aired, Iris said that ‘severe bouts of depression’ altered her mood and personality. ‘During this period of serious mental illness, I lost control of my life and did the worst thing that I have ever done.’ Her mental state is a matter of some political significance. ‘She is presently receiving treatment from a psychiatrist,’ her husband said at a post-revelation press conference and ‘the solicitor was unable to take instruction from her because of her illness.’ He seems to imply that Iris is in some quasi-legal sense insane.Being mad in Northern Ireland is different from being mad in any other place. The Robinsons come from a community in which people talk to God and He talks right back to them. ‘I have forgiven her,’ said Peter Robinson. ‘More important, I know that she has sought and received God’s forgiveness.’ These communications from God can be fairly abstract, they can be politically convenient, they seldom involve what the rest of the world call auditory hallucinations, but there is no doubt that the sense of conviction they carry can be overwhelming.
There is also a particular flavour to Northern Irish paranoia. A system of spies, counterspies and informers was in place in the province from the 1970s; British intelligence listened, watched, misinformed. They checked sheets for sperm or explosives with the help of the Four Square Laundry van. Annoyed at long-standing rumours that her husband beat her, Iris has said that ‘this malicious lie was started by the [British] government in an attempt to blacken Peter’s name when he was protesting at the Anglo-Irish Agreement. It took root because I was in hospital 17 times during that period with gynaecological problems.’ This is a lot to unpack. It may all even be true. Slightly more strange is her claim that Peter’s steak was laced with rat poison when they ate in a restaurant on the outskirts of Belfast which had ‘a very nationalist staff’. But then, who’s to say? The loyalist community could trust neither their Catholic neighbours nor the British government to whose queen they professed such shouting, undying and possibly unwanted loyalty.
It is interesting in this context to look at the DUP’s obsession with sodomy, not the activity perhaps so much as the word; one that is to be said out loud, without fear; one that should be repeated, shouted, written down for all to see. Paisley was always a great man for naming and shaming. ‘I denounce you as the Antichrist,’ he shouted, in the European Parliament, at Pope John Paul II. ‘Harlot’ was also a favourite, but this was rarely applied to an actual woman, being reserved for the Church of Rome. The same applied to ‘whore’, as in, ‘of Babylon’. The purity, in this uncracked patriarchy, of their own women, was a given; what they had to guard against were the sins of men. In 1977 Paisley added to the gaiety of several nations when he was shown on the news walking around with a placard that said ‘Save Ulster from Sodomy’. His campaign was a response to the liberalising laws of Westminster, which were threatening to leave this entrenched culture behind. Sodomy, in 1977, symbolised everything. Betrayal. Isolation. The future.
Iris Robinson may not have been in full health when she made her peculiar statements about homosexuality, but if they are evidence that she was unwell, then so are the other members of her party. The radio interview which lost her the sympathy, not just of the wider world, but also, crucially, of Selwyn Black, happened on 6 June 2008. By midsummer, she and Kirk McCambley were lovers. Whatever was happening to her in those weeks, it wasn’t that grey old beast, depression. Indeed, looking at the way she led her life, you might conclude that Iris was more often up than down.
January 13, 2010
"Strike me if I shriek."
A letter from Maud Gonne to WB Yeats, in December 1908. Yeats had come to visit Gonne where she was living in Paris. After years and years of friendship (not to mention what they called their "spiritual marriage"), it is believed that the two finally consummated their long unrequited affair on this particular visit. Yeats had not yet married at this point, but the later Mrs. Yeats (a formidable woman in her own right) believes as well that this was an important visit for the two old friends, and that something sexual had finally occurred. Gonne had already had two children out of wedlock with a French revolutionary (one child died when he was only one years old), and then had married (disastrously) to another revolutionary, an Irish one this time, James MacBride. The marriage didn't even last a year, although a child did come out of it (Sean - or Seghan, as it was spelled). Seghan ended up joining the IRA as a young man in the wake of the Easter Rising and living a life on the run. No surprise.
Regardless: Through the tempest of Gonne's personal life (and she always found the personal life to be annoying - it needed to come second to her life as an activist and politician), Yeats had remained loyal, although he did have a couple of affairs (mainly to let off the sexual tension he felt by loving the distant Gonne for so long). They are quite open about all of this in their letters to one another. Gonne cautioned him against marriage (she wasn't really "for" it in general), but she also cautioned him to not keep too large a space for her in his heart. She seemed to realize the sadness she caused him, and yet their bond was too strong to walk away from it altogether.
Whatever happened in December 1908, no one will ever really know, but here is the letter Gonne wrote to Yeats after he left. Having read all of her correspondence, (to him and to others) this letter stands out in tone and raw emotion. She often spent six hours a day on her voluminous correspondence, so her letters are quick, dashed off, to the point, and sometimes full of non sequitirs, like most letters between intimates. She lived primarily in France yet remained active in Ireland on all kinds of committees (committees she herself had formed) - so her correspondence was massive, and she employed no secretary.
Gonne usually addressed Yeats as "My dear Willie", and sometimes (echoing Abigail Adams) "My dearest friend". But here, in this letter, she starts with "Dearest", a greeting that cuts me to the core for various reasons, so familiar is it, so unbelievably missed.
This letter hurts me to read. I think she has a point. I am grateful (in many ways) that she did not return his love - because the very unfulfilled nature of his love for her helped create some of his best work. She is everywhere in his poetry. Would that high-flung transcendent love have survived in the everyday domestic world? Or would it have been ruined? Was it not distance itself that created such a burning need? I can never know, and it is not for me to know ... but her influence on him is paramount. The references to her cannot be counted. Yeats married quite late - I believe he was almost 50. He had a horror of growing old (he even proposed to Gonne's daughter Iseult - when she was 18, 19 years old! - Incredible!) - and was also quite sad at being along so late in life, when he should have been having grandkids already.
But it took him that long to crush down the longing for another, and to accept the situation. He was "old and gray and full of sleep" by that time. That struggle took a lifetime.
She also was quite open with him about the fact that she had a "horror of physical love" (meaning: sex) - and only believed it was necessary for procreation. She knew that he needed "physical love", and so wanted him, desperately, to "let her go", to torment himself no longer for a woman who could never satisfy him. She was not a prude in any way (obviously). But sex was horrifying to her. She could not bear it, and didn't want it in her life at all. She knew that this would be a problem for Yeats, although perhaps he insisted that it all would be all right once they got started with it. Or perhaps he said it didn't matter to HIM either, and she was wise enough to disbelieve him. Sadly, only her letters remain (or most of them), because of a police raid that destroyed her apartment and most of her papers. Only a couple of his letters to her still exist. So we just have her side. But make no mistake: this is a true dialogue. One that spans decades of life. Until Yeats passed away in 1939.
They were dear dear friends. These letters are amazing.
Back to the letter. It is December 1908. Yeats has just left Paris. It is quite likely they finally slept together during this particular visit. When she speaks of "going to him", she is referring to going to him in her mind. They communicated, long-distance, through shared visions and dreams, and made "dates" to meet up on the astral plane and then compare notes on what they both saw. Much of their letters has to do with this sort of new-age communication (this was what they meant when they said "spiritual marriage"). They experimented with it for years.
Maud wrote to him:
13 Rue de Passy
Paris
Friday [December 1908]Dearest
It was hard leaving you yesterday but I knew it would be just as hard today if I had waited. Life is so good when we are together & we are together so little - !
Did you know it I went to you last night? about 12 or 2 o'clock I don't exactly know the time. I think you knew. It was as it was when you made me see with the golden light on Wednesday. I shall go to you again often but not quite in that way, I shall try to make strong & well for your work for dear one you must work or I shall begin tormenting myself thinking perhaps I help to make you idle & then I would soon feel we ought not to meet at all, & that would be O so dreary! -
You asked me yesterday if I am not a little sad that things are as they are between us - I am sorry & I am glad. It is hard being away from each other so much there are moments when I am dreadfully lonely & long to be with you, - one of these moments is on me now - but beloved I am glad & proud beyond measure of your love, & that it is strong enough & high enough to accept the spiritual love & union I offer -
I have prayed so hard to have all earthly desire taken from my love for you & dearest, loving you as I do, I have prayed & I am praying still that the bodily desire for me may be taken from you too. I know how hard & rare a thing it is for a man to hold spiritual love when the bodily desire is gone & I have not made these prayers without a terrible struggle a struggle that shook my life though I do not speak much of it & generally manage to laugh.
That struggle is over & I have found peace. I think today I could let you marry another without losing it - for I know the spiritual union between us will outlive this life, even if we never see each other in this world again.
Write to me soon.
YoursMaud
Yeats, when he was in his 60s, nearing the end, wrote the following poem. Many scholars believe it makes reference to this visit in Paris in 1908, especially the evocative raw line "Strike me if I shriek". Whatever it means, it is fierce and intimate.
A Man Young and Old
by William Butler Yeats
I
First Love
THOUGH nurtured like the sailing moon
In beauty's murderous brood,
She walked awhile and blushed awhile
And on my pathway stood
Until I thought her body bore
A heart of flesh and blood.
But since I laid a hand thereon
And found a heart of stone
I have attempted many things
And not a thing is done,
For every hand is lunatic
That travels on the moon.
She smiled and that transfigured me
And left me but a lout,
Maundering here, and maundering there,
Emptier of thought
Than the heavenly circuit of its stars
When the moon sails out.
II
Human Dignity
Like the moon her kindness is,
If kindness I may call
What has no comprehension in't,
But is the same for all
As though my sorrow were a scene
Upon a painted wall.
So like a bit of stone I lie
Under a broken tree.
I could recover if I shrieked
My heart's agony
To passing bird, but I am dumb
From human dignity.
III
The Mermaid
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.
IV
The Death of the Hare
I have pointed out the yelling pack,
The hare leap to the wood,
And when I pass a compliment
Rejoice as lover should
At the drooping of an eye,
At the mantling of the blood.
Then' suddenly my heart is wrung
By her distracted air
And I remember wildness lost
And after, swept from there,
Am set down standing in the wood
At the death of the hare.
V
The Empty Cup
A crazy man that found a cup,
When all but dead of thirst,
Hardly dared to wet his mouth
Imagining, moon-accursed,
That another mouthful
And his beating heart would burst.
October last I found it too
But found it dry as bone,
And for that reason am I crazed
And my sleep is gone.
VI
His Memories
We should be hidden from their eyes,
Being but holy shows
And bodies broken like a thorn
Whereon the bleak north blows,
To think of buried Hector
And that none living knows.
The women take so little stock
In what I do or say
They'd sooner leave their cosseting
To hear a jackass bray;
My arms are like the twisted thorn
And yet there beauty lay;
The first of all the tribe lay there
And did such pleasure take --
She who had brought great Hector down
And put all Troy to wreck --
That she cried into this ear,
'Strike me if I shriek.'
VII
The Friends of his Youth
Laughter not time destroyed my voice
And put that crack in it,
And when the moon's pot-bellied
I get a laughing fit,
For that old Madge comes down the lane,
A stone upon her breast,
And a cloak wrapped about the stone,
And she can get no rest
With singing hush and hush-a-bye;
She that has been wild
And barren as a breaking wave
Thinks that the stone's a child.
And Peter that had great affairs
And was a pushing man
Shrieks, 'I am King of the Peacocks,'
And perches on a stone;
And then I laugh till tears run down
And the heart thumps at my side,
Remembering that her shriek was love
And that he shrieks from pride.
VIII
Summer and Spring
We sat under an old thorn-tree
And talked away the night,
Told all that had been said or done
Since first we saw the light,
And when we talked of growing up
Knew that we'd halved a soul
And fell the one in t'other's arms
That we might make it whole;
Then peter had a murdering look,
For it seemed that he and she
Had spoken of their childish days
Under that very tree.
O what a bursting out there was,
And what a blossoming,
When we had all the summer-time
And she had all the spring!
IX
The Secrets of the Old
I have old women's sectets now
That had those of the young;
Madge tells me what I dared not think
When my blood was strong,
And what had drowned a lover once
Sounds like an old song.
Though Margery is stricken dumb
If thrown in Madge's way,
We three make up a solitude;
For none alive to-day
Can know the stories that we know
Or say the things we say:
How such a man pleased women most
Of all that are gone,
How such a pair loved many years
And such a pair but one,
Stories of the bed of straw
Or the bed of down.
X
His Wildness
O bid me mount and sail up there
Amid the cloudy wrack,
For peg and Meg and Paris' love
That had so straight a back,
Are gone away, and some that stay
Have changed their silk for sack.
Were I but there and none to hear
I'd have a peacock cry,
For that is natural to a man
That lives in memory,
Being all alone I'd nurse a stone
And sing it lullaby.
XI
From 'Oedipus at Colonus'
Endure what life God gives and ask no longer span;
Cease to remember the delights of youth, travel-wearied aged man;
Delight becomes death-longing if all longing else be vain.
Even from that delight memory treasures so,
Death, despair, division of families, all entanglements of mankind grow,
As that old wandering beggar and these God-hated children know.
In the long echoing street the laughing dancers throng,
The bride is catried to the bridegroom's chamber
through torchlight and tumultuous song;
I celebrate the silent kiss that ends short life or long.
Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have
looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.
January 9, 2010
Entire worlds
I love books where entire worlds open up in the footnotes. I have often followed the trail of footnotes and found books that have become ultimate favorites of all time, because of the mention in a footnote. The footnotes to the letters of Maud Gonne and WB Yeats are spectacular, but again, the person I would want to talk about all of this with is no longer here, so I feel a bit stopped up when I read a paragraph about this or that person and don't know where to turn. Please be careful in how you comment (unless, that is, you are my family or my friends who actually know me). Maud Gonne wrote in a letter to Yeats, nervous about advice she had given him:
I fear it seems like uncalledfor advice (which is a thing I have in horror!)
As do I. Seriously, unless I ask, don't give. Many thanks.
I want to talk to him and say, "So tell me more about John O'Leary" or "John O'Mahoney", or pretty much anyone, and he would not hesitate. He would not say, "Never heard of him", not to anyone appearing in THESE pages anyway.
My point here is: check out just ONE of the footnotes in this collection of letters (below). This is just ONE, and they are ALL like that.
Now I would like to point out that many of these people are not unknown to me, due to the family I grew up in, and my influences growing up, etc. I need no introduction to Patrick Pearse or Wolfe Tone or all the rest. It's these OTHER people, just as fascinating, who make these brief cameo appearances - but I want to follow every trail.
Here is just one example of a footnote that blew my mind:
Florence Farr (1869-1917) was an actress; she married Edward Emery, an actor, in 1884 and they were divorced in 1894. Also in 1894 she acted in WBY's play The Land of Heart's Desire at the Avenue Theatre, which was sponsored by Annie Horniman. She joined the Order of the Golden Dawn in 1890, becoming praemonstratrix in 1895. After disagreements with WBY and Annie Horniman she left the Order in 1902. In the first decade of the twentieth century she collaborated with WBY in his experiments with verse speaking to the psaltery. In Dublin she appeared as Aleel in the first production of WBY's The Countess Cathleen in 1899 nand recited to the psaltery at the Antient Concert Rooms in 1902. In 1912 she went to Ceylon to become the headmistress of a girls' school; she died there of cancer.
Florence Farr was an important person in Yeats' life, a name well-known to any Yeats fanatic - I barely knew anything about her except her intersection with him, and I still don't feel I know anything, but Jesus, just reading that short biography makes me want to know EVERYTHING. And while surely you could just Google her (as I most certainly will) - there is something lovely about sitting in the not-knowing for a bit, and contemplating that evocative footnote, full of an entire life. Even just that one footnote brings up a million questions for me. And do not ruin my fun by providing me with a Wikipedia page that I could just as easily find myself, like looking something up on IMDB or something!!
What a footnote like that means to me is an entire world has opened up in my mind. What was with her divorce? It must have been a scandal, but what was really going on there? And Ceylon? Really now! I would love to know how that choice came about.
Wikipedia might provide answers but they are colorless compared to the answers I used to receive, the perceptive hands pulling a book down off the shelf where he could point to this or that passage, coloring in the edges for me about people. The gravelly voice saying, immediately, upon my question, "Well, she was born in County Donegal to Anglo-Irish aristocrats..." or what have you.
That is what I miss. That is what I long for. That is what those footnotes make me think of.
Here's another one:
Sarah Purser (1848-1943), a Dublin artist, was a friend of the Yeats family. WBY described her as 'so clever a woman that people found it impossible to believe she was a bad painter.' He recorded her comments on MG: 'Maud Gonne talks politics in Paris, and literature to you, and at the Horse Show she would talk of a clinking brood mare.' He had earlier disliked one of her portraits of MG, and she had met him 'with the sentence, "so Maud Gonne is dying in the South of France and her portrait is on sale," and went on to tell how she had lunched with Maud Gonne in Paris and there was a very tall Frenchman there [probably Mellevoye] - and I thought she dwelt upon his presence for my sake - and the doctor had said to her "They will both be dead in six months"'. As a founder member of the Friends of the National Collection in 1924, she was instrumental in securing Charlemount House as the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, where the Lane Collection was housed when it came to Dublin.
A world. A whole world.
January 7, 2010
Gonne and Yeats: a fragment
Ella Young wrote in her autobiography Flowering Dusk of her glimpses of Maud Gonne and WB Yeats:
I see her standing with WB Yeats, the poet, in front of Whistler's Miss Alexander in the Dublin gallery where some pictures by Whistler are astonishing a select few. These two people delight the bystanders more than the pictures. Everyone stops looking at canvas and manoeuvres himself or herself into a position to watch these two. They are almost of equal height. Yeats has a dark, romantic cloak about him; Maud Gonne has a dress that changes colour as she moves. They pay no attention to the stir they are creating; they stand there discussing the picture.I catch sight of them again in the reading room of the National Library. They have a pile of books between them and are consulting the books and each other. No one else is consulting a book. Everyone is conscious of those two as the denizens of a woodland lake might be conscious of a flamingo, or of a Japanese heron, if it suddenly descended among them.
Later, in the narrow curve of Grafton Street, I notice people are stopping and turning their heads. It is Maud Gonne and the poet. She has a radiance as of sunlight. Yeats, that leopard of the moon, holds back in a leash a huge lion-coloured Great Dane - Maud Gonne's dog, Dagda.
I am glad THEY were able to find Grafton Street.
I just love reading about the two of them. It makes me feel lonely, but it connects me to something deep and continuous as well.
December 30, 2009
The magic Irish Apple
I went to the Apple store today in Chelsea to buy a new MacBook. My current MacBook is literally falling apart at the seams, and I am about to go off on my writing sabbatical, and need new hard (and soft) ware. I was meeting Jeremiah at 3, so I didn't have a ton of time, but I had enough time to comparison shop and chat and get what I needed. The first Apple store employee who came up to me in the cavernous echoey space was lovely, and actually talked me DOWN (pricewise) from my first choice. "If all you need it to do is this this and this, then you might as well get this ..." which was significantly lower. Yes. I do not need major bells and whistles. I need mega-space for all my writing, and mega-space for all my photos. He recommended the MacBook that I had originally been thinking of, and then we chatted for a bit about my cray-cray backup system, and he was awesome and helpful. I cannot remember his name. Forgive me, kind Apple store employee.
He then passed me off to another Apple guy, whose job it was to close the sale.
And here is where the magic comes in.
A word about magic. I do believe that it is all around us, at all times. You just have to be primed to recognize it while it is happening. It is tough to live in that space. Nearly impossible for me. Because if I accept the magic while it is happening, then that would mean that all of life, ALL of it, is a GIFT, right? Every single second ... is a gift from God ... and if I am so wrapped up in self and I miss it, then that is my fault, and I would just have to admit that in that moment I am rejecting God. And who needs that shit. It is hard to live in that space, is all I'm saying. It requires a constant awareness of the presence of God. If you say you always live there, then bully for you, but I find it challenging. But today ... after a rough ROUGH couple of days ... in the Apple store in Chelsea, I was primed. I was open, ready with questions, excited about my sabbatical, and (this is key) - I have already had a good experience (many times over) with Apple employees, so I was prepared to be open and receptive to their help. I am a loyal Mac user. I'm IN.
Brian had bright blue eyes and sandy hair, and a nice thick unmistakable Dublin accent. I didn't mention it right away, though. We launched right into our Mac conversation. Here is my challenge with Time Machine. Oh, well have you tried this, this might help. No, I haven't, I will. Thank you.
I told him what I needed. He was helpful and sweet. He was patient with my lack of technological know-how and made me feel like I could do and handle anything.
We discussed the backup system extensively. I told him I was about to go out of town for a bit, and wanted to get this handled before I left. Eventually he asked, "Where are you going?"
Our conversation went as follows:
"I'm going out to an island in the Atlantic Ocean for the month of January."
"Really!"
"Totally. For a writing sabbatical of sorts."
"Really!" (His eyes glowed. You know. The Irish and writers.)
"Yes!"
"Where, if I may ask?"
"It's a place called Block Island - it's off the coast of Rhode Island. It will be bleak and wintry"
"So you're doin' a sort of Samuel Beckett stark and isolated thing."
I guffawed. Happy as I could be. "Yes! Exactly!"
"So is it like a workshop with other artists or ..."
"Nope. Just me."
"How long are you goin' for?"
"30 days."
"That's enough time for a novel then, isn't it."
"Yes! That's the plan."
"Or a novella!"
By this point, we were laughing hysterically. "I must write a novella while I'm out there, you are quite right."
"Will there be other people or ..."
(Brian was very concerned.)
"There are year-round residents, yes. There's also a pub at the end of the block."
He lit up. "Well, now, that's all right."
"Exactly. I just hope I emerge from this month with my sanity intact."
With the Irish gift for keeping the conversational ball in the air, he said, "Maybe you'll write something like The Shining."
I burst out laughing. "Totally. I'll send home some pages and people will be like, 'Uhm, should we rescue Sheila or ... because these stories are effed up."
"I'm jealous of ya. It sounds wonderful."
All of this said as we waited for my MacBook (and accessories) to be brought up from the Willy Wonka bowels of the joint.
I decided to "go there". In my world, that means "trust in God". I knew what the result would be, I just needed to take the leap and accept the magic.
I said, "You're Irish."
"Yes. Dublin, born and raised."
"How long have you been here?"
"About two years."
I changed the subject, looking around at the sparsely populated (for Apple) store. "So the Christmas rush is done, ey?"
"You know, Sheila, to be honest with you ... I know the economy is supposed to be in the tank and everything ... but seriously, business has never been better.:
"Really?"
"I suppose people freaked out for a bit, but now ... you'd never know the difference. Thank God for short memories, right?"
"Really."
Again, pushing it into the personal. "Well, you guys have had a real economic boom, now, haven't you?" (by "you guys" I meant "the Irish", and I knew he would get it. The Irish always "get it". You never have to explain yourself twice to them. They listen on the level that I find satisfying. They understand conversation on a cellular level.)
He said, "Oh, yes. There was a great boom."
"I was there during the boom."
"Yes, but it's certainly tanked now."
"I've heard! You had people marching on government buildings and the like!"
"The problem was is that people just weren't prudent. They went crazy with the money."
"That's what I sensed the last time I was there."
"Yes - everyone had to have two cars - everyone had to have a vacation home in Eastern Europe somewhere ... and when the bottom dropped out, it was not pretty."
"Of course not!"
"I have had friends say to me, 'How did you have the foresight ...'"
I started laughing. "You got out!"
Brian said, "The funny thing is - is that I lived in Italy for four years - "
"Really!"
"Yes - so I really haven't lived in Ireland for quite some time ..."
"Well, I suppose the Irish do have a long history of living in exile."
"Well, you really have to, don't you?"
"True, true."
"So I never really participated in Ireland's boom - but I heard stories - everyone got so materialistic suddenly -"
"Yes, I really felt that the last time I was there ..."
"And of course the ones who were the least prudent were those in the government..."
"Naturally."
"Which is where all of those protests came from."
"Oh Jesus, of course."
Then Brian and I veered off into an in-depth and emotionally connected conversation about the AppleCare program, and all the benefits thereof.
Slight pause.
Me: (determined to commune with magic) "So you lived in Italy?"
"Yes, for four years."
"What was that like?"
"Oh God, I loved it. I really miss it. I speak Italian - and it was so hard for me to learn the language, but I did it, and I finally could relax with it ..."
"That is so awesome."
"I think that's what I miss most, speaking Italian every day. But the good thing is is that I am a designated Italian speaker --" (he showed me his badge, that had his name on it, and then below it it said "Benvenuto/Welcome".)
"That is so cool!"
"Yes!"
"So if someone comes here speaking only Italian --"
"I can help."
"But of course everyone speaks English here."
(again, with the ease and flow of Irish conversation, no struggling for power or right-ness): "Of course. It's New York, everyone speaks English here."
"Where did you live in Italy?"
"I lived in Milan for a year, which is ugly, but at least things work there."
"Meaning ..."
"The trams, the bureaucracy - things work there ... then I moved to Rome ..."
(remembering vaguely something about Italy): "Are there piles of garbage everywhere?"
"No, that's Naples."
"Oh, okay."
"Rome is so beautiful, the people are so nice, but nothing works."
"Explain."
"The bureaucracy is so annoying, it takes forever to get anything done ..."
"Oh, I see."
"To get your papers, to get permission to do anything ... and then ... just things like bus schedules, tram schedules ... nothing works ..."
"Yuk."
"But the way they live!!"
"I've heard!"
"They just don't care about working. It's so laidback, so casual ... everything is so relaxed ..."
"Marvelous."
"And to spend, like, every weekend at the beach ..."
"Glorious."
"Totally. The Italians know how to live."
At some point during this, all of my purchases arrived from the Willy Wonka bowels, and he went to enter all of my information in his offical Mac-store iPhone-thing they have, which basically means you don't need a damn cashier there, which is so freakin' awesome. I was spelling out my name for him, and he started laughing.
"Irish much?"
"Middle name is Kathleen."
"Oh, Jesus. Have you been there much?"
"A ton. My parents took us there as kids, and we basically lived like gypsies for a month."
"Ya did NOT."
"We did!"
"Where did you go?"
"Oh, all over the West mostly. It was nuts. Recently I went to Belfast for the first time."
He (typing in all my information): "What did ya think of it?"
"It was really interesting. I have a friend who lives there and she took me to the Starbucks. At first I didn't realize what a big deal it was that there was a Starbucks in Belfast - so I was like, 'Uhm, we're going to Starbucks??'" (he laughed - totally getting it) "... but when she explained it to me ..."
He started laughing. "Yes. You have to just go along with it. It's sweet. It's meaningful."
"Exactly. Knowing the MEANING of the Starbucks was very important - so we went there, and posed for pictures outside of it -" (he started laughing) "Totally proud that there was now a Starbucks in Belfast and what it meant. It was great. I loved Belfast."
My packages were all ready. I paid. I resisted the urge to propose marriage to Brian (I had been struggling with the urge since the Samuel Beckett comment); and the urge was 100% more intense when the following event occurred:
Brian handed me all of my packages.
"Thank you so much!"
"You are so welcome!"
"You have been SO helpful!"
"And like I said, with your One to One package, you can come in and get one on one tutorials and really sit with someone, go deep into these issues, to figure out what you need ..."
"I can't wait."
I was all set with my packages. I held out my hand to him.
"Brian. Thank you."
And Brian, my magic Irish Apple employee, took my hand, and said, in almost a declamatory manner (like: he took his moment): "Well, Sheila, as the Irish say, 'Go raibh an ghaoth go brách ag do chúl. Go lonrai an ghrian go te ar d'aghaidh.'"
I felt my breath catch in my throat. He is speaking Irish to me? And I actually understand it? What the hell is happening? I'm in the Apple store!! Suddenly there was too much magic. Too much abundance. I couldn't capture any of it in my hands. It was here only for a minute, hold on to it, hold on to it, remember it, because it is about to be gone ... It is your responsibility to recognize it while it is happening. If you miss it, that's YOUR bad. But here. Here is the gift. Catch it if you can. That's God.
I knew what he had said, but didn't say a word, just grasped his hand tight - and Brian said, "That means, 'May the wind be always at your back, and may the sun shine warm upon your face.'"
Out of nowhere, I was in tears. I thought I might fall apart, and was horrified, but he saw my emotion and held my hand tighter.
"Best of luck to you with your writing sabbatical."
"Thank you, thank you ..."
I walked outside into the freezing sunshine, ready to walk cross-town to meet Jeremiah, and I felt like my heart had wings. It was too much. Too intense.
At that very moment, a raggedy dude with only three teeth in his head, wearing a huge beatup parka walked by me, through the throngs on that crowded sidewalk, and called out to me, specifically - and pointedly - he almost stopped in his tracks and said, right at me: "You beautiful!"
Thank you, sir.
I do not think the two events are unconnected.
It is almost the last day of this terrible year. Brian was a gift. From God.
Brian, if you're out there, if you can hear me:
Go n-éiri an bóther leat.
Go raibh an ghaoth go brách ag do chúl.
Go lonrai an ghrian go te ar d'aghaidh.
Go dtite an bhtháisteach go min ar do phtháirceanna.
Agus go mbuailimid le chthéile aris, go gcoinni Dia i mbos A ltháimhe thú.
December 20, 2009
Happy birthday, Maud Gonne
Maud Gonne, Irish revolutionary, feminist, radical, and lifelong poetic muse of William Butler Yeats, was born on this day in history in 1865. She married John MacBride (after a couple of notorious affairs and illegitimate children). John MacBride was an Irish nationalist who participated in the Easter Rising of 1916 and was executed by firing squad. Although Gonne and MacBride had apparently separated by the time of the Easter Rising, she wore mourning garb for the rest of her life. She was wedded to Irish nationalism. There was a bit of the death-cult about her.
Conor Cruise O'Brien writes in his memoir about Maud Gonne McBride:
When the husband, whom she loathed, was shot by a British firing squad after the Easter Rising, Madame MacBride - as she now came to be known - attired herself from head to toe in the most spectacular set of widow's weeds ever seen in Dublin, to which she returned from Paris in 1917. Her mourning for Major John MacBride was so intense that it lasted all the remaining years of her life (nearly forty of them), as far as outward appearances were concerned. I still remember her as I first saw her in that garb, about ten years later in Leinster Road, Rathmines. With her great height and noble carriage, her pale beaked gaunt face, and large lustrous eyes, and gliding along in that great flapping cloud of black, she seemed like the Angel of Death: or more precisely, like the crow-like bird, the Morrigu, that heralds death in the Gaelic sagas. That is how I think of that vision in retrospect; at the time I just thought: 'spooky'!
But of course, we know "of" Maud Gonne not because of these events (and she already would have earned her place in history as an extraordinary woman in her own right) - but because of W.B. Yeats' immortalizing of her in poem ... after poem .... after poem .... after poem .... after poem .... after poem .....
It's one of the greatest unrequited love affairs of all time. Great, merely because of the art it inspired.
Seamus Heaney writes about the mystical connection W.B. Yeats shared with Maud Gonne (a connection that he had all his life):
And all the while, of course, there was Maud Gonne, "high and solitary and most stern" according to one of the poems about her, "foremost among those I would hear praised" according to another, and "the troubling of my life" according to a famous sentence in his Autobiographies. The passion she inspired - and as readers we experience it more as creative power than erotic need - made her a figure of primary poetic radiance, a Dublin Beatrice, an archetype as much as a daily presence. Nevertheless, Yeats's poetry, his politics and his involvement with the occult received an extra charge of intensity from her day to day reality in his life, and when she appeared in the title role of his subversive play Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), another kind of maturity was achieved.
They never married, although Yeats asked her multiple times. Later on in life, he even considered asking Gonne's daughter to marry him.
Yeats and Gonne met in 1889 and he would say later that that was the year that "the troubling of my life began". Oh man.
Maud Gonne, of course, makes me think of Dad. On my father's shelf in his study is a big hardcover book with MAUD GONNE on the spine. It has been there always. I have memorized my dad's bookshelves, and know the spines of most of them, the ones that have been there since childhood. I own that MAUD GONNE book too (it is by Samuel Levenson).
Samuel Levenson writes:
No one who knew her in the days of her glory is now alive. But many Irish men and women recall her in her later years as one of Dublin's most extraordinary personalities - part eccentric, part heroine. They remember her as a tall, gaunt woman in black robes speaking on Dublin street corners about her current political or economic obsession. And they have not forgotten the stories they heard from their elders about her unconventional life in Paris, her constant cigarette smoking, the dogs and birds with which she surrounded herself, her affair with a French politician, her illegitimate children, her marriage to Irish patriot John MacBride, and the scandal of her separation from him.Some remember Maud Gonne's activities to house evicted tenant farmers, feed school children, aid political prisoners, find homes for Catholic refugees from Northern Ireland, establish a fully independent Irish Republic, and end partition between Northern and Southern Ireland. Few recall the names of the women's organizations and publications she founded, or the number of times she went to prison. And some confuse her with another tall Ascendancy woman who took up the Irish cause after a fling in Paris - the Gore-Booth girl, who came back with a Polish count named Markievicz. But they all know that the word "maudgonning" means agitating for a cause in a reckless flamboyant fashion.
Maud herself wished to be thought of as an Irish patriot. She was hailed in her lifetime as an Irish Joan of Arc, and would have been happy to be remembered as such for all time. A quarter of a century after her death, controversy surrounds the importance of her contributions to the Irish nation and its people. The scandal that still hovers around her name has grown dim. But it is neither her activities in Ireland's behalf, her unconventionality, nor her striking beauty that give her a place in history. It is, rather, the obsessive pursuit of her by the greatest poet of the era, William Butler Yeats. Her steadfast rejection of his proposals bit so deeply into his soul that he never ceased to fashion glorious poetry about her beauty, her talents, and the mystery of her personality. She was to Yeats what Beatrice was to Dante. And thus, Yeats made her a permanent figure of romance and myth throughout the English-speaking world.
Here is another of Yeats' "Gonne poems":
Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
by William Butler Yeats
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
On January 31, 1889, Yeats wrote to his friend John O'Leary, after having dinner with Maud:
"She is not only very handsome but very clever. Though her politics in European matters be a little sensational ... It was pleasant however to hear her attacking a young military man from India who was there, on English rule in India. She is very Irish, a kind of 'Diana of the Crossways.' Her pet monkey was making, much of the time, little melancholy cries at the hearthrug ... It was you, was it not, who converted Miss Gonne to her Irish opinions. She herself will make many converts."
On February 3, he wrote to Ellen O'Leary:
"Did I tell you how much I admire Maud Gonne? ... If she said the world was flat or the moon an old caubeen tossed up into the sky I would be proud to be of her party."
And so it began.
"The Arrow", one of the many poems Yeats wrote for Gonne, goes:
I THOUGHT of your beauty, and this arrow,
Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.
There's no man may look upon her, no man,
As when newly grown to be a woman,
Tall and noble but with face and bosom
Delicate in colour as apple blossom.
This beauty's kinder, yet for a reason
I could weep that the old is out of season.
Yeats mythologized her. Not just her beauty, but her essence, her soul. Gonne was right. It was a "spiritual union".
Gonne didn't have as clear a memory of their first meeting. At that point, she was far more formidable than he was. He was 23 years old, a young poet, a nobody. She had already lived in Paris, had become notorious, was at the forefront of the new movement that Yeats would eventually help champion.
Gonne's impressions of Yeats in that first meeting:
" ... a tall lanky boy with deep-set dark eyes behind glasses, over which a lock of dark hair was constantly falling, to be pushed back impatiently by long sensitive fingers, often stained with paint - dressed in shabby clothes ..."
They were never not in touch, through their long lives. They wrote long letters to one another, describing their dreams - wondering if the other had dreamt the same thing. Kindred spirits. In 1908, Gonne wrote to Yeats from Paris:
"I had such a wonderful experience last night that I must know at once if it affected you & how? At a quarter of 11 last night I put on this body & thought strongly of you & desired to go to you.”
Connection across the space-time continuum? They would experiment with it, wondering if the connection could be felt. I often think that unrequited love is far better for art than anything that works out in a normal or domesticated fashion. If Gonne had married Yeats, would he have written all of those poems? If he had ready access to her over the breakfast table, in the marriage bed ... would she have been elevated to such a poetic height in his consciousness? Perhaps Gonne sensed this herself. After one of his many proposals, she wrote to him:
"You would not be happy with me. ... You make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry."
She very well may have been wiser than he.
Her commitment to his work was paramount. Marriage or no, they would always have that. She seemed to understand where much of it came from (his love of her), and not only encouraged it, but pushed him even further. She wrote to him in 1911:
"Our children were your poems of which I was the father sowing the unrest & storm which made them possible & you the mother who brought them forth in suffering & in the highest beauty."
Love the gender flip-flop there. She as father, he as mother.
25 years after that first meeting, Yeats would write:
I was twenty-three years old when the troubling of my life began. I had heard from time to time in letters from Miss O'Leary, John O'Leary's old sister, of a beautiful girl who had left the society of the Viceregal Court for Dublin nationalism. In after years I persuaded myself that I felt premonnitory excitement at the first reading of her name. Presently she drove up to our house in Bedford Park ... I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the blossom of apples, and yet face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great that she seemed of a divine race. Her movements were worthy of her form, and I understood at last why the poet of antiquity, where we would but speak of face and form, sings, loving some lady, that she paces like a goddess.
Samuel Levenson writes:
In his recollections, Yeats thought that there was, even at their first meetings, something in Maud's manner that was declamatory, "Latin in a bad sense," and possibly unscrupulous. She seemed to desire power for its own sake, to win elections for the sake of winning. Her goals were unselfish, he recalled, but, unlike the Indian sage who said, "Only the means can justify the end," Maud was ready to adopt any means that promised to be successful.He made two observations, which doubtless owe something to discoveries he made as their relationship progressed:
We were seeking different things: she, some memorable action for final consecration of her youth, and I, after all, but to discover and communicate a state of being ... Her two and twenty years had taken some color, I thought, from French Boulangist adventurers and journlist arrivistes of whom she had seen too much.Yeats remembered Maud Gonne as the herald of the movement to revive Celtic culture. "I have seen the enchanted day / And heard the morning bugles blow," he wrote in his manuscript book.
Jim Dwyer wrote in a recent New York Times article:
Until nearly the end of his days he and Gonne kept an eye on each other. In 1938 he wrote “A Bronze Head” about her frequent appearances at political funerals, a “dark tomb-haunter,” so transformed from the light, gentle woman of his memory.Almost from the beginning she had been a figure of memory. In the opening pages of the 1908 notebook he looked backward: “She said something that blotted away the recent past & brought all back to the spiritual marriage of 1898. She believed that this bond is to be recreated & to be the means of spiritual illumination between us. It is to be a bond of the spirit only.”
A Bronze Head
HERE at right of the entrance this bronze head,
Human, superhuman, a bird's round eye,
Everything else withered and mummy-dead.
What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky
(Something may linger there though all else die;)
And finds there nothing to make its tetror less
i{Hysterica passio} of its own emptiness?
No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full
As though with magnanimity of light,
Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell
Which of her forms has shown her substance right?
Or maybe substance can be composite,
profound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath
A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.
But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
I saw the wildness in her and I thought
A vision of terror that it must live through
Had shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought
Imagiation to that pitch where it casts out
All that is not itself: I had grown wild
And wandered murmuring everywhere, 'My child, my
child! '
Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall;
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,
And wondered what was left for massacre to save.
Here is, perhaps, the most famous poem Yeats wrote for her. It is impossible for me to read this without tears coming to my eyes.
When You are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Happy birthday to this fierce complex "pilgrim soul", she who is so much a part of the warp and weft of my entire life.
December 6, 2009
"all fecund with its nuttiness"
An hysterical short film by Bórd Scannán na hEireann of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett playing pitch 'n putt and ... waiting ... for ... someone. Joyce is in a perpetual rage. Beckett is impenetrable. I laughed the whole way through. I love these actors. Like, Joyce: chill OUT. "all blood-red something ..." Non-stop rageful improvisation.
Thanks to Carrie for the link.
October 16, 2009
"I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china."
So said Oscar Wilde, whose birthday it is today.
His mother, Jane Speranza Francesca Wilde (aka Lady Wilde, aka "Speranza") was an incredible woman, in the canon of Irish literary history certainly, not to mention its politics and social upheaval. My father knew a lot about Speranza, of course. She was a poet, a radical, a political firebrand, in many ways. In 1864, a new edition of her poems came out, and she dedicated it to her two sons:
Dedicated to my sons Willie and Oscar Wilde'I made them indeed
Speak plain the word country. I taught them, no doubt,
That country's a thing one should die for at need'
That gives you a taste of the feeling of the household Wilde grew up in. He was certainly his mother's son. His father was a fascinating man, a physician who specialized in the eye and ear, to this day there are procedures referred to as "Wilde's incision", for example, or "Wilde's cone of light", dating back to the mid-1860s, when William Wilde was practicing in Ireland. He was an extraordinary man. He was also a writer, and published books on all kinds of things - one of his main interests was the archeology in Ireland, and he published a catalog of antiquities from one particular archeological site, and the book now sits in the National Museum of Ireland. He also published books on folklore, legends, wives' tales - all of the things that his patients told him, their own received history and "cures" for their ills.
Oscar Wilde's parents were, frankly, powerhouses.
Speranza was "inflammatory", the word comes up all the time, a true patriot, willing to say what needed to be said about the English situation in Ireland.
Wilde grew up in a household of artists and politicians and surgeons and revolutionaries. It had to have been heady stuff for the small sensitive brilliant boy.
He went to Oxford, starting in the year he was 20 years old. Oxford was his beginning. The beginning, certainly, of his notoreity (he said the "blue china" line while at Oxford, and it caused quite a stir). He consciously lost his Irish accent, and while, yes, much of what he did at Oxford was about the appearance of things (he wore formal wear, he was obsessed with decorating his room, he had an "outfit" for everything) - Wilde never did anything by a whim. He was testing the boundaries, he was interested in aesthetics - and what that might have to do not only with art but also character, how a man lived. Not to mention his studies. Wilde distinguished himself at Oxford. He encountered many of the writers and philosophers that would make the deepest imprint on him, and leave him forever changed. One of the things I love about Wilde is how suggestible he was. I suppose that doesn't sound like a compliment, but I mean "suggestible" as: openness, receptivity. He took everything on, tried it out for a bit, and then was willing to put it aside if it didn't work for him. Or, if he realized, "That worked for me when I was 20, but now that I am older, it doesn't have the same impact." He really wrestled with his influences. He argued with them in his papers at Oxford, he took them on, examined the implications, and tried to see what he could take from it for his own work (which was still in its infant stage at that point). Pater, Swinburne - these were major influences. Walt Whitman, of course, but he really wrestled with that one. Many of his influences were highly controversial at the time, the New Romantics, the aesthetes, not seen as particularly Christian, as a matter of fact, they were seen as pretty demonic, living only for pleasure. Wilde, while obviously a funny man who liked hanging out with friends, and was always the life of the party, was not really a decadent aesthete (as many of his 'buddies" were - a pox on their houses, they were so quick to drop him like a hot potato when he got into trouble - he actually LIVED it and was willing to take the fall - they were just posers - I'm still mad at all those guys, and I know it's ridiculous, it has nothing to do with me, but whatever; I read biographies of Wilde and tears fill my eyes when I imagine how he was abandoned at the end, by people who were life-long friends). Anyway, my point is: Wilde was not "decadent". He enjoyed art and beauty and the surface of things, but he was too hard a worker, too intelligent and rigorous with his work ethic, to be a true decadent. That is why HE had to take the fall. Who cares if some nobody poet-wannabe gets convicted of sodomy? Nobody cares about that. But Oscar Wilde? That'll stick it to 'em.
Wilde, granted, was extremely careless at the end, and he allowed into his life the Marquess of Queensberry (who, I'm sorry, I know this is a cliche - but I read about this gentleman, and what happened to all of his sons, not to mention his own awful personality - and I can't help but think: Dude? Look. You're totally gay, mkay? Just admit it. Nobody is THAT angry without having some tendencies. You're gay, Marquess. Totally gay. AND you have raised sons who are gay, and this you cannot stand, this was your greatest failure: NOT because you are disappointed for your sons that they are "different" - but because YOUR homosexuality will now be revealed - it will be seen as a reflection of YOU and this you could not abide, because you've got something to hide. Uhm, am I actually bitch-slapping the Marquess of Queensberry on my blog? 100 plus years after the fact? Well, yes, I am. It felt good.) Wilde, in love with the Marquess' son, could not perceive the danger, could not understand what exactly he was inviting in to his life. When we're in love, we obviously aren't always careful. But you read the slow clang of events in Wilde's life, and you can feel the increasing danger at that point, you can feel how much they are going to 'get' him - and does the punishment fit the crime? Awful. Just awful. Wilde bears some responsibility for that, of course, he was not just a victim - but my God, what a punishment for being careless. He lost his freedom, his heart was broken - and I believe he died of that broken heart. Lord Douglas (the Marquess' son, and Oscar Wilde's great love) was no great shakes himself, and basically saw a way to "stick it to dear old Dad", through his notorious famous lover Oscar.
Reading the timeline of events, I just want to take Oscar aside and tell him to get the hell out of dodge for a while, escape - it WON'T be worth it.
But alas, it happened.
Wilde wrote about his passage to prison:
On November 13th 1895 I was brought down here from London. From two o'clock till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress and handcuffed, for the world to look at ... When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing could exceed their amusement. That was of course before they knew who I was. As soon as they had been informed, they laughed still more. For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob. For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour and for the same space of time.
In the 1895 trial, Charles Gill, the prosecutor, asked Wilde about the "love that dare not speak its name", a quote which came from a poem by Lord Douglas. Wilde, a broken man already by this point, answered:
The 'Love that dare not speak its name' in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a young man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michaelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michaelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may described as the 'Love that dare not speak its name,' and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
Max Beerbohm, an old friend of Wilde's (fascinating man himself, a writer, drama critic, and caricaturist) was there that day and wrote to a friend afterwards:
Oscar has been quite superb. His speech about the Love that dares not tell his name was simply wonderful and carried the whole court right away, quite a tremendous burst of applause. Here was this man, who had been for a month in prison, and loaded with insults and crushed and buffeted, perfectly self-possessed, dominating the Old Bailey with his fine presence and musical voice. He has never had so great a triumph, I am sure, as when the gallery burst into applause - I am sure it affected the jury.
It did not.
Caricature of Oscar Wilde, by Max Beerbohm
On today, Oscar Wilde's birthday, a man who has given me so much pleasure, has made me laugh until my stomach hurts, I didn't mean to write about all his pain and suffering, but I found I couldn't help it. His suffering was acute, it had an air of sacrificial lamb about it. It was excessive. He did not last long once he was released from prison. He had lost everything. Most of his friends, his entire library, his social standing, his health. He moved to a small village in France, had a couple of visitors now and then, reconnected with Lord Douglas, but by that point, Wilde was on his way out. Life had broken him. He converted to Catholicism on his death-bed, something he had been tormented by for years. His father had not let him convert, back then, Catholicism was way beyond the pale, but Wilde never got over yearning for it. His yearnings were often aesthetic (naturally), there was something in the ceremony itself that struck deep chords within him (I can relate), but whatever it was, and it's not for me to say, a local Catholic priest was found in the middle of the night, and baptized Oscar Wilde on his death bed.
There's so much more to say about this man - I haven't even touched on his plays!! Those epigrams! His genius - it is quite unsettling what he does, and it is easy to understand why the powers-that-be found him disturbing. His epigrams are NOT just clever. That is the greatest misunderstanding about Wilde. His epigrams have, as their goal, to up-end the status quo. You think you're going one way, it feels good and right that you are going THIS way, and then the second half of the epigram up-ends your expectations. Leaves you in a state of chaos. Wilde required his audience to be "suggestible" as well. To not just dismiss something out of hand, but to take it on, try it on for size, see what you think about it. Hopefully you're laughing, throughout, as well, that's the beauty of Wilde, he is not a scold - and many people did laugh - but, sadly, many people did not. Who was this Irish fairy, wearing velvet suits with flowers in his buttonhole, who was he and who was HE to tell us the status quo needed to not just be up-ended, but laughed at in the process? He's got a nerve.
Yes, he did.
Thank God.
Some quotes from (and about) Wilde below.
And happy birthday, to Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde.
Mankind has been continually entering the prisons of Puritanism, Philistinism, Sensualism, Fanaticism, and turning the key on his own spirit: But after a time there is an enormous desire for higher freedom - for self-preservation.
_____________
The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
_____________
To win back my youth ... there is nothing I wouldn't do - except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.
_____________
Miss Morris is the greatest actress I ever saw, if it be fair to form an opinion of her from her rendition of this one role. We have no such powerfully intense actress in England. She is a great artist, in my sense of the word, because all she does, all she says, in the manner of the doing and the saying, constantly evoke the imagination to supplement it. That is what I mean by art.
_____________
To disagree with three-fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity.
_____________
from a letter Wilde wrote to Walt Whitman:
Tennyson's rank is too well fixed and we love him too much. But he has not allowed himself to be a part of the living world and of the great currents of interest and action. He is of priceless value and yet he lives apart from his time. He lives in a dream of the unreal. We, on the other hand, move in the very heart of today.
_____________
Wilde on Walt Whitman:
He is the grandest man I have ever seen, the simplest, most natural, and strongest character I have ever met in my life. I regard him as one of those wonderful, large, entire men who might have lived in any age and is not peculiar to any people. Strong, true, and perfectly sane: the closest approach to the Greek we have yet had in modern times.
_____________
To be either a Puritan, a prig or a preacher is a bad thing. To be all three at once reminds me of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.
_____________
The most graceful thing I ever beheld was a miner in a Colorado silver mine driving a new shaft with a hammer; at any moment he might have been transformed into marble or bronze and become noble in art forever.
_____________
Praise makes me humble. But when I am abused I know I have touched the stars.
_____________
1883, letter of Oscar Wilde to Marie Prescott:
All the great men of France were cuckolds. Haven't you observed this? All! In every period. By their wives or their mistresses. Villon, Moliere, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Victor Hugo, Musset, Balzac, kings, generals, poets! Those I mention, a thousand more that I could name, were all cuckolds. Do you know what that means? I will tell you. Great men, in France, have loved women too much. Women don't like that. They take advantage of this weakness. In England, great men love nothing, neither art, nor wealth, nor glory ... nor women. It's an advantage, you can be sure.
_____________
1883, letter of Oscar Wilde to Marie Prescott:
Now, one of the facts of physiology is the desire of any very intensified emotion to be relieved by some emotion that is its opposite. Nature's example of dramatic effect is the laughter of hysteria or the tears of joy. So I cannot cut my comedy lines. Besides, the essence of good dialogue is interruption.
_____________
1885, letter of Oscar Wilde to Marillier
There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.
_____________
1885, letter of Oscar Wilde to James Whistler
Be warned in time, James; and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.
_____________
To be at one with the elements seems to be Mr. Swinburne's aim. He seeks to speak with the breath of wind and wave ... He is the first lyric poet who has tried to make an absolute surrender of his personality, and he has succeeded. We have the song, but we never know the singer ... Out of the thunder and splendour of words, he himself says nothing. We have often heard man's interpretation of Nature; now we know Nature's interpretation of man, and she has curiously little to say. Force and Freedom form her vague message. She deafens us with her clangours.
_____________
As for George Meredith, who could hope to reproduce him? His style is chaos illumined by brilliant flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything, except language; as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story.
_____________
The amount of pleasure one gets out of dialect is a matter entirely of temperament. To say "mither" instead of "mother" seems to many the acme of romance. There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of provincialism.
_____________
We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.
_____________
letter of Oscar Wilde to W.B. Maxwell
You mustn't take a story that I told you of a man and a picture. No, absolutely, I want that for myself. I fully mean to write it, and I should be terribly upset if I were forestalled.
_____________
Anyone can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature - it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist to sympathise with a friend's success.
_____________
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.
_____________
Mallarme is a poet, a true poet. But I prefer him when he writes in French, because in that language he is incomprehensible, while in English, unfortunately, he is not. Incomprehensibility is a gift, not everyone has it.
_____________
1891 letter from Stephen Mallarme to James Whistler
No O.W. ---! just like him! He pushes ingratitude to the point of indecency, then? -- And all the old chestnuts -- he dares offer them in Paris like new ones! -- the tales of the sunflower -- his walks with the lily -- his knee breeches -- his rose-colored stiff shirts -- and all that! -- And then 'Art' here -- 'Art' there -- It's really obscene -- and will come to a bad end -- As we shall see -- and you will tell me how it happens --
_____________
I detest nature where man has not intervened with his artifice.
_____________
1891 letter of Oscar Wilde to Edmond de Goncourt
One can adore a language without speaking it well, as one can love a woman without understanding her. French by sympathy, I am Irish by race, and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare.
_____________
I have equally recognised that humility is for the hypocrite, modesty for the incompetent.
_____________
1891, letter of Andre Gide to Paul Valery
Forgive my being silent: after Wilde I only exist a little.
_____________
"Know thyself!" was written over the portal of the ancient world ... the message of Christ to man was simply, "Be thyself."
_____________
I can see they are servants by their perfect manners.
_____________
For do you know, all my life I have been looking for twelve men who didn't believe in me .... and so far I have only found eleven.
September 10, 2009
"We don't know anything about other people. We can only know them from the outside. This is one of the great joys of life."
So says Irish writer John Banville in this awesome recent interview about his new book that has set my mind spinning. There's so much in it. So much to think about.
There are only a couple of writers today where I wait for their latest to come out with baited breath. I scour Amazon and Google to make sure I haven't missed anything. Like the good old days when I pored over TV Guide on a weekly basis to make sure that if Orphan Train was on repeat on some channel, even at 3 in the morning, I would know about it! Some authors (like Nancy Lemann) require much patience because she's only written five books in the last 20 years. For the most part there is silence from her - and she's just one of my favorites, ever. But I will not forget. I remain loyal. There are others, a short list:
A.S. Byatt (you write a book like Possession, and I don't care, I'll read your grocery list. But then there are her short story collections with masterpieces like this - she just excites me tremendously - can't wait to read her latest - Booker-nominated, naturally)
Katherine Dunn (talk about patience. Sheesh, lady!)
Michael Chabon (even his genre stuff, which I don't think is as good. Posts here, here, here, and here.)
Annie Proulx (still haven't read her latest collection, but I am very excited to. Posts here, here, here, here).
Nancy Lemann (Yes, dear gentle Southern comic writer ... you may not have had a giant world-wide hit, but seriously, you got it going on. I will read whatever you write. Posts here, here, here, here, here. You want a lovely read? Pick up Nancy Lemann.)
John Irving (I've been reading this guy since I was 16 years old. He still excites me. Posts here, here, and here.)
Mary Gaitskill (She scares me, unlike any other writer. She's off the charts. She has a new one out too. I just can't read fiction right now. Posts here, here, here, here - and this - my favorite story of hers. Ouch.)
Cormac McCarthy (naturally. If you're not already reading this man, I don't know what to say to you! Posts here, and here).
Lorrie Moore (whose latest book is now taking up all the airwaves at the moment and I am so excited about it - and also avoiding all reviews like the plague - not easy to do, since they are EVERYWHERE - until I am able to read fiction again myself - her latest book is the first on my list when I get back on my feet. Posts about her here, here)
Then we've got the non-fiction people, people who are always on my radar for their latest:
Joan Didion (excerpt here - hm, strangely I haven't written much about her. She is huge to me.)
Robert Kaplan (posts about this wonderful writer here, here, here - there are also his columns in The Atlantic Monthly, which I never miss)
Joseph Ellis (a couple posts here, and here)
A. Scott Berg (posts here, here, and here)
Fouad Ajami (marvelous writer, he's pretty much everywhere - post about one of his books here)
And John Banville - what can I say about John Banville that others haven't said? It's kind of a bittersweet thing for me. John Banville makes me lonely now. I see articles and interviews, and it makes me feel lonely, because I can't share it. His latest is coming out, and so the press begins, because why wouldn't it. As far as I'm concerned, he stands alone - not just in his gift as a writer, but in his fluidity with that gift. There's something CRANKY about him that reminds me a little bit about Dean Stockwell, unafraid to talk about the bad side of the business, never comes off as "whining" (my least favorite word, used by my least favorite people), but as an honest observer of the trials and tribulations of his own chosen field. Stockwell didn't find peace and happiness in acting until he was almost 50. The dude made his debut at age 7. So imagine. He HAPPENED to be good at something (acting), but that didn't amount to much. He tried other things, other careers, but it kept drawing him back. Then, late 40s, he started having some FUN, and the fun has never stopped. Not that Banville was just enduring his writing career until his creation of his pseudonym Benjamin Black (more on that here) - of course not. Banville's a heavy-hitter as he is. His books matter. Everyone talks about them. He's at the top of the heap. But if you read all of Banville's stuff (in order, preferably), and then - you read Christine Falls (by Benjamin Black), it's like: where the hell did THAT come from, and the only appropriate response, really, is to just bow down in awe before the maestro. I don't want to paint this with too wide a brush - but another one of my favorite writers, Michael Chabon, also publishes "genre" books, in an attempt to "rescue" genres from being sidelined. A lovely impulse, but perhaps best reserved for fan-fic. It feels like potboilers to me. Like Chabon, having exhausted himself with Kavalier and Clay (and seriously, I'm exhausted just THINKING about even TRYING to write a book as amazing as that) - wants to just relax. And more power to him. I'll just wait around, as he scribbles away, amusing himself ... but there's a sense (and I know I may be in the minority here) that he's just messing around until he gets back to REAL work. Rather ironic, when you consider that Chabon is a huge champion of genre fiction (mysteries, science fiction, fantasy.) To me, his "genre" stuff just doesn't come off. His latest, about the Yiddish Policeman's Union, is supposed to be a Philip Marlowe gumshoe type book, and in interviews he talks about how fun it was to do that hard-boiled Dashiell Hammett prose, and Brendan and I were laughing about how much he DOESN'T do in the book what he said he did. His sentences are more intricate in that book than in any other of his works. His fantasy of himself as a writer, in that book anyway, was that he was being hard-boiled and blunt, but the reality is that he was wordy and flowery and descriptive as always. Again, I don't begrudge him his experiments, and there is always something to love about ANY Michael Chabon book, but it feels like just that, an experiment.
Whereas John Banville (or should I say Benjamin Black) appears to have so immersed himself in the world of a 1950s alcoholic Dublin detective that you would barely know it was by the same writer. There are certain Banville touches, he's good no matter what he does, but Christine Falls is the work of a great chameleon. It's Meryl Streep submerging herself in accents and homework so that she can then let it all go when the camera is rolling. A.S. Byatt has a similar thing, only she does it in a more "meta" way, by weaving in different types of narrative (letters, scholarly papers, scrapbooks) into the more traditional linear narrative. Banville sticks with the straight story, but you hold Christine Falls up next to The Sea, and it just astonishing the difference. There is nothing in Christine Falls that feels ironic, arch, or experimental. He has submerged himself completely.
Christine Falls is one of the best books I read last year (I read it in one sitting), and the interviews with John Banville during that time are beyond illuminating. I remember my dad saying, "It sounds like he's having so much fun."
Banville's other works (the ones written by "him") are unrelentingly sad (at least I find them so). (Here's a post I wrote about The Sea.)
Here's a link, again, to the interview with Banville that set my mind spinning. I suppose I, too, like the interviewer, "feel like I am in At Swim-two-Birds". What a slicing intelligence he has, what integrity. He's cranky, but he is not unkind. He is precise. He is also emotional. He refers to his writing as his "succubus". This gives you some idea. He contradicts himself, which is the best part. He says one thing in one thought, and then another in another context. His response to all of this is rather amusing, and in a small way I relate - by those who do not seem to understand (or respect) "context". These are the people who try to play "gotcha" with comments you have made, ignoring the contexts. "But you said THIS here, how could you say THIS now??" All one can say in response (in my opinion) is either:
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds", which pretty much ends the conversation - that's why I use it -
OR
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" That about says it all.
There will be those who will never understand that.
There will be those who don't understand Banville's "experiment" with Benjamin Black, thinking that this might somehow lessen his serious reputation.
There will be those who will never understand context. Nuance. Also, you know, that little human quality known as "changing one's mind".
I very much enjoy watching Banville dodge labels and classifications here, without being overly surly or contemptuous. But he will resist the noose. That is his right, as a man certainly, but also as an artist. I don't think it can be under-estimated either, the length of the shadow cast by James Joyce, and how Irish authors, unlike American authors, struggle with that. Anne Enright is very funny on this topic as well. Blessing and a curse, you know. Almost every single interview with a contemporary Irish author brings up James Joyce. Imagine. There really is no equivalent in American literature. He is omnipresent. Annoying. Yet something that has to be dealt with, incorporated somehow.
I am working on a project right now that is taking up all of my intellectual time. If I have a slow moment, my mind circles back to it. I'm in the thick of it now. It has been read by some, I am editing and creating as I go, and there are things I am working on. There are problems that need to be solved.
The quote that I chose to put in the title of this post really sliced to the heart of the matter:
"We don't know anything about other people. We can only know them from the outside. This is one of the great joys of life."
It seems to me that that is the thing. That is THE THING that I am trying to get at. But to write about it, to capture that ... and not just the sense of alienation and separation - but also (so Irish!) - that last bit: that "this is one of the great joys of life" - Ouch, what a complex and beautiful thought. It has been with me all day.
I think that's what I need to think about. I mean, I have been, that is exactly what I have been working on in this project - but it had been a bit muddy. I was reaching out in the dark for it, and there it is, boiled down - into the beautiful Banville clarity - bleak and yet somehow redemptive.
Can't wait to read his latest.
I'm just glad he's out there. Makes me feel happy. Yes, lonely too. But I love him.
Two things can exist at the same time.
June 14, 2009
Happy (belated) birthday, William Butler Yeats
William Butler Yeats was born yesterday, in 1865. Yeats is a great poet and all that, but I grew up pretty much "over" him because he was kind of omnipresent in our household. We were made to memorize his epitaph in order to receive 25 cents for our allowance. ("Cast a cold eye / On life on death / Horseman pass by"). We knew his "Host of the Air" by heart, because it was on the Clancy Brothers at Carnegie Hall album. He was everywhere. It's not that we had a reverence for him - just the opposite. I knew what he looked like, in the same way I knew what George Washington looked like, because he was on our currency. Yeats? Oh, HIM again? Cast a cold eye ... yeah, I know, I know.
Yeats makes me think of my father. My first published piece in The Sewanee Review was about the Yeats-dad continuum.
From memory now!
THE HOST OF THE AIR
O'Driscoll drove with a song
The wild duck and the drake
From the tall and the tufted reeds
Of the drear Heart Lake.
And he saw how the reeds grew dark
At the coming of night-tide,
And dreamed of the long dim hair
Of Bridget his bride.
He heard while he sang and dreamed
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.
And he saw young men and young girls
Who danced on a level place,
And Bridget his bride among them,
With a sad and a gay face.
The dancers crowded about him
And many a sweet thing said,
And a young man brought him red wine
And a young girl white bread.
But Bridget drew him by the sleeve
Away from the merry bands,
To old men playing at cards
With a twinkling of ancient hands.
The bread and the wine had a doom,
For these were the host of the air;
He sat and played in a dream
Of her long dim hair.
He played with the merry old men
And thought not of evil chance,
Until one bore Bridget his bride
Away from the merry dance.
He bore her away in his arms,
The handsomest young man there,
And his neck and his breast and his arms
Were drowned in her long dim hair.
O'Driscoll scattered the cards
And out of his dream awoke:
Old men and young men and young girls
Were gone like a drifting smoke;
But he heard high up in the air
A piper piping away,
And never was piping so sad,
And never was piping so gay.
To those of you who know that Clancy Brothers album - you'll know the special-ness of that recording.
When we visited his grave in Ireland, as kids, we all felt kind of amazed that ... it was REAL. That the epitaph we had been rattling off since we were toddlers actually existed out in the world, and had some meaning beyond the 25 cents in our pockets.
A couple years ago, I read his complete works in chronological order. It was a fascinating experience - I know many of his big poems almost by heart, the famous ones - but it's nothing compared to reading his work - from beginning to end. You watch an artist burst forth at a certain point - almost fully formed. You've read his younger work, you've seen its beauty (but also its sentimentality - its Celtic twilight "twee" lament ... it's actually quite awful in a way... and so nothing - NOTHING - can prepare you for the poet who would eventually write "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Among Schoolchildren" Where the hell did THAT come from?)
Yeats, as a poet, has always been one of my favorites (even with the "cloud-pale eyelids" balderdash of his early stuff), but what really inspires me is his work in Irish theatre, and the creation of the Abbey. An amazing story. His Nobel lecture was on the Irish Dramatic Movement. I wrote a big long post about his nurturing of John Synge, author of The Playboy of the Western World
Gabriel Fallon, an actor at the Abbey, describes the dress rehearsal of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock
in his book Sean Ocasey the Man I Knew
We could make nothing of the reading of Juno and the Paycock as it was called. It seemed to be a strange baffling mixture of comedy and tragedy; and none of us could say, with any certainty, whether or not it would stand up on the stage.The dress rehearsal would be held at 5 p.m. on March 2, Sunday. I arrived at the theatre at 4:30 p.m., and found the author there before me looking rather glum and wondering if a rehearsal would take place ... Gradually the players filed in and went to their dressing-rooms. Lennox Robinson arrived shortly before 5 o'clock and was followed by Yeats and Lady Gregory. The curtain rose about 5:36 p.m. so far as I could see and hear while waiting for my cue in the wings the rehearsal seemed to be proceeding smoothly. As soon as I had finished my part of Bentham at the end of the second act I went down into the stalls and sat two seats behind the author. Here for the first time I had an opportunity of seeing something of the play from an objective point of view. I was stunned by the tragic quality of the third act which the magnificent playing of Sara Allgood made almost unbearable. But it was the blistering irony of the final scene which convinced me that this man sitting two seats in front of me was a dramatist of genius, one destined to be spoken of far beyond the confines of the Abbey Theatre ...
We watched the act move on, the furniture removers come and go, the ominous entry of the IRA men, the dragging of Johnny to summary execution, the stilted scene between Jerry Devine and Mary Boyle, and then as with the ensnaring slow impetus of a ninth great wave Allgood's tragic genius rose to an unforgettable climax and drowned the stage in sorrow. How surely was the very butt and sea-mark of tragedy! But suddenly the curtain rises again: are Fitzgerald and McCormick fooling, letting off steam after the strain of rehearsal? Nothing of the kind; for we in the stalls are suddenly made to freeze in our seats as a note beyond tragedy, a blistering flannel-mouthed irony sears its maudlin way across the stage and slowly drops an exhausted curtain on a world disintegrating in 'chassis'.
I sat there stunned. So, indeed, as far as I could see, did Robinson, Yeats, and Lady Gregory. Then Yeats ventured an opinion. He said that the play, particularly in the final scene, reminded him of a Dostoevsky novel. Lady Gregory turned to him and said, "You know, Willie, you never read a novel by Dostoevsky." And she promised to amend this deficiency by sending him a copy of The Idiot. I turned to O'Casey and found I could only say to him, "Magnificent, Sean, magnificent."
"The Second Coming" is quoted (and mis-appropriated, more often than not) and quoted again ... by people who want to use it for their own ends. It's a dark ominous crystal ball. The best "use" of it, to my mind, is in the deleted scene in Nixon, with Sam Waterston playing Dick Helms, director of the CIA. Written in 1919 - when the world had already become familiar with horror - a horror of a kind never before seen on earth - the poem predicts the chaos of the 20th century. Try to disentangle it from all of the movies (and Sopranos episodes) that has used it ... and just read it, clear and simple, as a poem. On its own. It's one of the greatest poems of the 20th century.
"The Second Coming"
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Seamus Heaney wrote a marvelous essay on Yeats a while back (the link no longer works, but I have the hard copy) - in which he wrote:
Conquest, difficulty, labour: these terms indicate the nature of Yeats's creative disposition. From the start, he was enamoured of Blake's conviction that energy is eternal delight, yet the development of his own thought brought him more and more to the conclusion that conflict was the inescapable condition of being human. So, as his art matured and the articulation of his beliefs became more clarified and forceful, Yeats's poems typically conveyed a sensation of certitude achieved by great effort and of contradictions quelled. Poems in which the defiant self is pitted against hostile or disabling conditions - "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death", "September 1913", "Meditations in Time of Civil War"- are complemented by poems that read like discharges of pure, self-possessed energy, poems from which the accidental circumstances have been excluded so that all that remains is the melody and stamina of resurgent spirit - "The Cold Heaven", "Byzantium", "Long-legged Fly".
Of course, there is also the Maud Gonne factor that must be considered. Here's a post I wrote about her. What do you wanta bet that Maud Gonne had "cloud-pale eyelids"? Anne wrote a wonderful post about Maud Gonne MacBride. Fascinating woman. Poor Yeats. But at least she was his muse, and he got 100s of poems out of his unrequited love for her.
Never give all the heart
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy. Kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
Heaney writes, in that same essay:
And all the while, of course, there was Maud Gonne, "high and solitary and most stern" according to one of the poems about her, "foremost among those I would hear praised" according to another, and "the troubling of my life" according to a famous sentence in his Autobiographies. The passion she inspired - and as readers we experience it more as creative power than erotic need - made her a figure of primary poetic radiance, a Dublin Beatrice, an archetype as much as a daily presence. Nevertheless, Yeats's poetry, his politics and his involvement with the occult received an extra charge of intensity from her day to day reality in his life, and when she appeared in the title role of his subversive play Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), another kind of maturity was achieved.
Yeats is one of those poets who was not a solitary creature, writing in isolation. He wanted to start a "movement", and he did. He helped a young James Joyce in the beginning of HIS career. He advised Synge. He headed up the Abbey Theatre. He really looked at his own country - an insular priest-ridden culture at that time - and sensed a need, tried to create something different. It's hard to look with clear eyes on your own home, your own nation. Joyce did it, but that's only because he LEFT. Yeats, at first, went back into the Irish past in his work - and some of his early stuff is so quaint that it might as well be cross-stitched and hanging on the door of some Kountry Kraft Shoppe. I suppose it was his way of re-claiming the Irish past, its true inheritance. It was a phase, his beginning phase as a writer - how he found his "voice". And he was concerned about the rest of his countrymen, calling out to them:
"Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top."
Yeats was Anglo-Irish, but his feelings were that Irish-ness was a cultural thing, not a religious thing (forgive me for boiling it down so awkwardly) - and that the Irish could be united, regardless of religion - through writing, myths, poetry. He was a true nationalist.
I also love love LOVE his poem to fellow Irishman Jonathan Swift where he writes: "Imitate him if you dare."
Swift's Epitaph
Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.
WH Auden wrote, in his unbelievable poem to Yeats:
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
And lastly, a poem that has great personal meaning for me:
The wild swans at Coole
The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty Swans.
The nineteenth autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All's changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water,
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake's edge or pool
Delight men's eyes when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?
SOME QUOTES
"My poetry is generally written out of despair. Like Balzac, I see increasing commonness everywhere, and like Balzac I know no one who shares the premises from which I work." -- Yeats
"On the third night Yeats addressed the audience before the curtain rose. If anyone had anything to say against the piece they would be welcomed at a debate which he would be glad to arrange in the theatre at some other time. He was interrupted several times. He asked the interrupters to at least listen to the play so that they would know what it was they were objecting to." -- Maire Nic Shiubhlaigh's description of Yeats trying to handle the riots that were happening in response to Synge's "Playboy of the Western World" - a play being put on at the Abbey Theatre
"In 1875 Yeats entered the Godolphin School in Hammersmith and visited Ireland during the longer school vacations, when he stayed with the Pollexfens in County Sligo. An early poetic impulse was to change the name of his toy yacht from Sunbeam to Moonbeam. It was a decisive act." -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"
"I thought we might bring the halves together if we had a national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had been freed of provincialism by an exacting criticism, a European pose." -- Yeats
"This is not the huge competence of Auden, at play in the toy shop of poetic form, but mastery, the possession of a unique rhetoric for use on a real but limited range of themes. It is a mastery so complete that it can occlude the genuinely problematic, ride over the potholes of nonsense without even sensing them. Late in life he recognizes the evasiveness of his symbols, the tendency of his verse to turn away or inward, and in the concentrated intensity of the late poems he tries to remedy this. But he has an imperfect sense of generality; he is willing to plump out a truism as truth. As his mastery increases, his art becomes less truthful. But his main concern is not - until the later poems, and even there in an attenuated spirit - truth, but the house of myth and legend, where he can become a principal tenant, where it is his voice we hear casting the spell, and where real men are reduced - or, in his mind, enlarged - to masks, figures and types useful to myth, regardless of the human reality they had." -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets
"All literature created out of a conscious political aim in the long run crates weakness by creating a habit of unthinking obedience. Literature created for its own sake, for some eternal spiritual need, can be used for politics. Dante is said to have unified Italy. The more unconscious the creation, the more powerful." -- Yeats
"Sex and death are the only things that can interest a serious mind." -- Yeats
"His mastery seems almost excessive." -- Richard Ellmann
"... a strained and unworkable allegory about a young man and a sphinx on a rock in the sea (how did they get there? what did they eat? and so on; people think such criticisms very prosaic, but common-sense is never out of place anywhere ...) but still containing fine lines and vivid imagery." - Gerard Manley Hopkins, after reading some of Yeats' first published verses
"Yeats's 'The Second Coming' has gained in prophetic power with each decade of the twentieth and now twenty-first century, from the rise of fascism and nuclear warfare to the proliferation of international terrorism. It expresses the melancholy realizatino that man, yearningly drawn to the divine, will never fully escape his bestial ancestry. The poem is modernistically unrhymed, though the first stanza plays with shadowy off-rhymes: 'gyre' / 'falconer' / 'everywhere'; 'hold' / 'world' / 'drowned'. It is structured instead by dramatic visuals and emblematic choreography. There are two main movements: a huge, expanding circle (the ascending falcon) and an arrowlike, linear track (the beast bound for Bethlehem). Then two smaller ones: a pendulum arc (the rocking cradle) and an exploding pinwheel (the reeling desert birds). Ideas have become design, starkly juxtaposed with the murky turbulence of elemental forces - storm, flood, drought. Hence the poem, with its horror movie finale, is as hybrid as the sphinx, who represents our buried impulses, vestiges of a past that keeps turning into the future." -- Camille Paglia, "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems
"The heavy voluptuous splendour of much of his work has yet a ghostliness as of the palace made magically of leaves. Even his heroes and beautiful women are aware of this ... He never leaves us, any more than Crashaw, content with the glory alone. It calls our attention to a spirit behind and beyond, heaping high lovely, invisible things that it may show the greater beauty that can survive their crumbling into dust." -- Edward Thomas, 1909
"The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober." -- Yeats
"In London he was active in literature and politics. One particular event in 1889 proved crucial: he met and fell in love with the fiery Republican who haunted him for the rest of his days, Maud Gonne. His biography, from 1889 until Maud Gonne's marriage, is punctuated by the statement, 'Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne.'" -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets
"Words are always getting conventionalized to some secondary meaning. It is one of the works of poetry to take the truants in custody and bring them back to their right senses." -- Yeats
" 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity': these famous lines are Yeats's anguished formulation of what seems to be an eternal principle of politics (7-8). When 'the center cannot hold,' neither consensus nor compromise is possible. Public debate shifts to the extremes or is overtaken by violence, which blocks incremental movement toward reciprocity and conciliation. Moderate views are 'drowned' out (as by the bloody tide) in strident partisanship or fanaticism. The phrase 'passionate intensity' suggests that, for the late Romantic Yeats, eros diverted from the personal to the political turns into a distorted lust for power. The second stanza opens in doubt and confusion: 'Surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand. / The Second Coming!'' (9-11). We are hearing either one voice echoing its own shocked phrases or many voices in public tumult. The book of Revelation lists the dreadful omens heralding doomsday, when Jesus will return and unlock the secrets of history. But in Yeats's poem, Christ's promised glory is overshadowed by a monstrous apparition from antiquity. The poet is seized by an electrifying vision: 'a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi / Troubles my sight'. It's a collective memory, crystallizing from the repository of world myths (12-13). ("Spiritus Mundi" is Yeats's mystical term for "soul of the universe".) We witness the resurrection of the pagan era, whose barbarism mirrors that of the war-torn twentieth century. Yeats sees no evidence of moral evolution over two millennia of Christianity." -- Camille Paglia, "Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems
"I once got Yeats down to bed-rock on these subjects and we talked for hours. He had been talking rather wildly about the after life. Finally I asked him: 'What do you believe happens to us immediately after death?' He replied, 'After a person dies, he does not realize that he is dead.' I: 'In what state is he?' W.B.Y.: 'In some half-conscious state.' I said: 'Like the period between waking and sleeping?' W.B.Y.: 'Yes.' I: 'How long does this state last?' W.B.Y.: 'Perhaps some twenty years.' 'And after that,' I asked, 'what happens next?' He replied, 'Again a period which is Purgaotry. The length of that period depends upon the sins of the man when he was upon this earth.' And then again I asked: 'And after that?' I do not remember his actual words, but he spoke of the return of the soul to God. I said, 'Well, it seems to me that you are hurrying us back into the great arms of the Roman Catholic Church.' He was of course an Irish Protestant. I was bold to ask him, but his only retort was his splendid laugh." -- Lady Dorothy Wellesley
"It is an entirely new thing -- neither what they eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time." -- Yeats on James Joyce's "Ulysses
"For Yeats, there was something both enviable and exemplary about the enlargement of vision and the consequent histrionic equanimity which Shakespeare's heroes and heroines attain at the moment of their death, 'carried beyond feeling into the aboriginal ice.' He wanted people in real life to emulate or at least to internalize the fortitude and defiance thus manifested in tragic art." -- Seamus Heaney, 1990
"Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Arran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression." -- Yeats's advice to John Synge
Cast a cold eye
On life on death
Horseman pass by
-- Yeats's epitaph
Imitate him if you dare.
May 9, 2009
Some gems from (and about) Oscar Wilde
Mankind has been continually entering the prisons of Puritanism, Philistinism, Sensualism, Fanaticism, and turning the key on his own spirit: But after a time there is an enormous desire for higher freedom - for self-preservation.
_____________
I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.
_____________
The mind of a thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.
_____________
To win back my youth ... there is nothing I wouldn't do - except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.
_____________
Miss Morris is the greatest actress I ever saw, if it be fair to form an opinion of her from her rendition of this one role. We have no such powerfully intense actress in England. She is a great artist, in my sense of the word, because all she does, all she says, in the manner of the doing and the saying, constantly evoke the imagination to supplement it. That is what I mean by art.
_____________
To disagree with three-fourths of the British public on all points is one of the first elements of sanity.
_____________
from a letter Wilde wrote to Walt Whitman:
Tennyson's rank is too well fixed and we love him too much. But he has not allowed himself to be a part of the living world and of the great currents of interest and action. He is of priceless value and yet he lives apart from his time. He lives in a dream of the unreal. We, on the other hand, move in the very heart of today.
_____________
Wilde on Walt Whitman:
He is the grandest man I have ever seen, the simplest, most natural, and strongest character I have ever met in my life. I regard him as one of those wonderful, large, entire men who might have lived in any age and is not peculiar to any people. Strong, true, and perfectly sane: the closest approach to the Greek we have yet had in modern times.
_____________
To be either a Puritan, a prig or a preacher is a bad thing. To be all three at once reminds me of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.
_____________
The most graceful thing I ever beheld was a miner in a Colorado silver mine driving a new shaft with a hammer; at any moment he might have been transformed into marble or bronze and become noble in art forever.
_____________
Praise makes me humble. But when I am abused I know I have touched the stars.
_____________
1883, letter of Oscar Wilde to Marie Prescott:
All the great men of France were cuckolds. Haven't you observed this? All! In every period. By their wives or their mistresses. Villon, Moliere, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Victor Hugo, Musset, Balzac, kings, generals, poets! Those I mention, a thousand more that I could name, were all cuckolds. Do you know what that means? I will tell you. Great men, in France, have loved women too much. Women don't like that. They take advantage of this weakness. In England, great men love nothing, neither art, nor wealth, nor glory ... nor women. It's an advantage, you can be sure.
_____________
1883, letter of Oscar Wilde to Marie Prescott:
Now, one of the facts of physiology is the desire of any very intensified emotion to be relieved by some emotion that is its opposite. Nature's example of dramatic effect is the laughter of hysteria or the tears of joy. So I cannot cut my comedy lines. Besides, the essence of good dialogue is interruption.
_____________
1885, letter of Oscar Wilde to Marillier
There is an unknown land full of strange flowers and subtle perfumes, a land of which it is joy of all joys to dream, a land where all things are perfect and poisonous.
_____________
1885, letter of Oscar Wilde to James Whistler
Be warned in time, James; and remain, as I do, incomprehensible: to be great is to be misunderstood.
_____________
To be at one with the elements seems to be Mr. Swinburne's aim. He seeks to speak with the breath of wind and wave ... He is the first lyric poet who has tried to make an absolute surrender of his personality, and he has succeeded. We have the song, but we never know the singer ... Out of the thunder and splendour of words, he himself says nothing. We have often heard man's interpretation of Nature; now we know Nature's interpretation of man, and she has curiously little to say. Force and Freedom form her vague message. She deafens us with her clangours.
_____________
As for George Meredith, who could hope to reproduce him? His style is chaos illumined by brilliant flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything, except language; as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story.
_____________
The amount of pleasure one gets out of dialect is a matter entirely of temperament. To say "mither" instead of "mother" seems to many the acme of romance. There are others who are not quite so ready to believe in the pathos of provincialism.
_____________
We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.
_____________
letter of Oscar Wilde to W.B. Maxwell
You mustn't take a story that I told you of a man and a picture. No, absolutely, I want that for myself. I fully mean to write it, and I should be terribly upset if I were forestalled.
_____________
Anyone can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature - it requires, in fact, the nature of a true Individualist to sympathise with a friend's success.
_____________
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.
_____________
Mallarme is a poet, a true poet. But I prefer him when he writes in French, because in that language he is incomprehensible, while in English, unfortunately, he is not. Incomprehensibility is a gift, not everyone has it.
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1891 letter from Stephen Mallarme to James Whistler
No O.W. ---! just like him! He pushes ingratitude to the point of indecency, then? -- And all the old chestnuts -- he dares offer them in Paris like new ones! -- the tales of the sunflower -- his walks with the lily -- his knee breeches -- his rose-colored stiff shirts -- and all that! -- And then 'Art' here -- 'Art' there -- It's really obscene -- and will come to a bad end -- As we shall see -- and you will tell me how it happens --
_____________
I detest nature where man has not intervened with his artifice.
_____________
1891 letter of Oscar Wilde to Edmond de Goncourt
One can adore a language without speaking it well, as one can love a woman without understanding her. French by sympathy, I am Irish by race, and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare.
_____________
I have equally recognised that humility is for the hypocrite, modesty for the incompetent.
_____________
1891, letter of Andre Gide to Paul Valery
Forgive my being silent: after Wilde I only exist a little.
_____________
"Know thyself!" was written over the portal of the ancient world ... the message of Christ to man was simply, "Be thyself."
_____________
I can see they are servants by their perfect manners.
_____________
For do you know, all my life I have been looking for twelve men who didn't believe in me .... and so far I have only found eleven.
April 20, 2009
From Cork to Kinsale, or: The best directions ever given
I have written before about Allison and me trying to get from Cork to Kinsale, and we were under time constraints, and then receiving the best most detailed directions in my life, from basically a group of people at a gas station in Cork. Here's the piece.
In going through a shoebox of photos, I actually found the kick-ass written directions that that woman wrote out for us.
I love how the "hairy roundabout" she warns us of really does look truly HAIRY in her drawing of it.
April 18, 2009
Carrie said, when giving us directions in Belfast:
"So keep an eye out for the chicks with guns - then take a right."
In other cities, you are told to look for the Starbucks, or the Mobile station, or the crumbling Druid ruin or the third stoplight. In Belfast, it's "chicks with guns".
Chicks with guns, then take a right? No problem. We'll be there in 10 minutes.
April 13, 2009
Happy birthday, Seamus Heaney
I went to hear him read at NYU about 10 years ago. We sat in the auditorium at NYU, and the laughter never stopped - it was completely due to his own commentary, his own way. He recited his own poems with no notes, no papers, all memorized, the beautiful lilt of his voice ... and after he finished reciting one of his poems, he would immediately start to talk about it, in the most prosaic and amusing way. His personality was what impressed itself upon me. I could fall in love with such a man.
And so, it is his birthday today. For more information on this amazing artist, check out his biography here (that's on the Nobel Prize site). He won the Nobel Prize in 1995.
His Nobel lecture (also included in his book The Redress of Poetry is astonishing. It's quite long, but so worth it. I read it years ago, and immediately had to print it out to put into my 'commonplace book'. It's beautiful, heartfelt, political, and evocative.
I was brought up with Seamus Heaney's poems. My dad loved his work, and for Christmas would usually give me one of Heaney's books - either of his poetry, or of his criticism (which is also phenomenal).
I remember Jean and I returning from Ireland from visiting Siobhan (this was in the late 1990s) and telling my dad about our stop at Clonmacnoise. We had gone there as a family way back when, and we had wanted to see it again. We had pulled off the highway on our way back to Dublin from Galway to walk around Clonmacnoise, and it was great because it was November, so nobody was there, and we shared memories of our first time there, when we all were kids.
The moment Jean and I said the word "Clonmacnoise" to my dad, my dad stood up, walked over to the bookshelf, pulled down a book and read out loud Seamus Heaney's goosebump-inducing poem about the legend of Clonmacnoise (This is my favorite of Heaney's poems and whenever I read it silently, I hear it in my dad's gravelly voice):
The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.
The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
'This man can't bear our life here and will drown,'
The abbot said, 'unless we help him.' So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.
Ahhh. God, it never fails to get me. "Out of the marvellous as he had known it." A strangely sad poem. At least I find it sad. I have had my own experiences of "climbing back out of the marvellous" and it's always a bit sad.
(I wrote about the Clonmacnoise legend a bit here. But the poem pretty much tells the whole story. I'll just repeat what I said before: for me, the entirety of Seamus Heaney's power and magic as a poet is in the last line of that poem. It's simply breathtaking.)
And lastly, I am going to post his poem "Digging". It is one of his earlier efforts, but he refers to it often as the moment he really became a poet. It is a poem I have gone to often in the last couple of years, as I have struggled with the drudgery of my manuscript, or the work I need to do to get the damn thing done.
The subject of the poem is a cliche: Son will choose a different path from father - perhaps this choice will not be understood - but son knows he must go his own way. You can feel how young he is in the poem.
But oh, what a lovely and moving poem it is. Yes, Mr. Heaney, you do dig with your pen. You do. And for that I am very grateful.
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground.
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
March 18, 2009
Tá m'árthach foluaineach lán d'eascainn, baby!
Really, what more can one say.
Actually, here was one of the other quotes from the night. At one point I turned to Jen and said, totally enthusiastically, with no self-hatred whatsoever, "GOD, I just LOVE it when I don't act like myself! It is so awesome!"
Joe Hurley's Irish Rock Revue last night was a fantastic show. It was a five-hour-long extravaganza. "Come on, Eileen" was played to roaring success, which gives you some idea of the feel of the event. Not to mention "Raglan Road" which brought me to tears.
I need to Google the cast of thousands who performed although I am familiar with some of them (especially the writers - Colum McCann!) but for now, some photos.
Thanks, Joe, for being a warm and wonderful MC. Great night. A perfect St. Patty's Day fest. Meaning no:
-- amateur messy drunks
-- green beer
-- flashing shamrock antennae
-- people who seem to feel that being "Irish" means "acting like a complete douchebag on Bleecker Street"
It wasn't a precious event or twee in any way, but it wasn't "cool" either, which was one of the best things about it. Try to remain "cool" when "Come on Eileen" is being played. I dare you. The place went nuts. There were Irish fiddlers (one girl in particular was really fantastic, with a shiny green ribbon in her hair, she made me cry), and people flew in from Ireland, from Chicago, from elsewhere - just to perform one song. Really moving. Also, I know I'm in the right place when raffle tickets are sold and the prizes are a year-long subscription to The Irish Echo and signed copies of McCann's latest novel. It's also clear I am in the right place when Joe Hurley, as MC, interspersed the entire evening with quotes from Oscar Wilde. I mean, honestly. I love these people. To paraphrase Anne Sexton, they are my kind.
Some of the photos below are blurry - I was experimenting with how much I could get away with, using no flash. The results are iffy, but I think a lot of them do capture the FEEL of the night.
March 17, 2009
Reminder: Joe Hurley's Irish Rock Revue tonight!
I know the poster says March 14th - but there's a show tonight - March 17th as well. I know for a fact there are still tix available.
Show at La Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street. Doors open at 6 p.m.
Buy tickets for the March 17th show here.
Joe Hurley has been hosting the Irish Rock Revue (with a cast of thousands) in New York for years now, and this coming year will be the 10th annual event.
I've seen Joe Hurley perform (at the Losers Lounge Queen Tribute, where he rocked the house with "Fat Bottomed Girls" as though he were to the Freddie-Mercury-born) and I've also had the pleasure of singing a medley of songs with him from Oliver in the middle of the day outside a Wall Street Bar on Bloomsday in 2002. Impromptu. One of my favorite New York memories.
His voice is a mix of Tom Waits and, well, Ron Moody, of course. Mixed in with a little Joe Strummer. Boy is a force of nature. Not to be missed.
His band, The Gents, have been together for years now - an emotional and jagged mixture of punk and Irish traditional music (and yeah, with a little "oom pah pah" mixed in there - Joe Hurley is obsessed with the musical Oliver, and why shouldn't he be, I ask you?) - and you can keep up to date with all of their shenanigans at their website.
Proceeds of the Irish Rock Revue go to a couple of good causes (Gilda's Club and the Humane Society), and it looks to be a couple of massive parties. He has guest artists come and sing, people from Broadway, Irish novelists who live in town, poets, performance artists ... I can't wait!
I'll be there, screaming "Oom PAH PAH" from my seat like the nerd that I am.
It's St. Patrick's Day but I don't really care about that. With my name, why would I give a shite about St. Patrick's Day? Seems a bit redundant, don't you think?
DETAILS
Date: March 17, 2009
Where: La Poisson Rouge, 158 Bleecker Street.
Time: Doors open at 6 p.m.
Buy tickets for the March 17th show here.
Here's Joe, from last year's Irish Rock Revue. And more photos here.
Cheers. Beannacht. Erin go bra-less.
Sláinte .
February 9, 2009
Happy birthday to Brendan Behan
Thank you, Therese, for the sweet reminder - and also your wonderful post about Behan.
Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in. -- Brendan Behan
Brendan Behan, Irish playwright, Irish terrorist, was born on this day, in Dublin, in 1923. He led a life of poverty, violence, controversy, and seemingly aimless wandering. He spent time in jail as a teenager, for being part of a plot to blow up a bridge (he had the bombs in his bag). Then he was involved in the attempted murder of two detectives, and was sentenced to 14 years in prison. While in prison, he (like so many other convicts) spent that enforced solitude writing. He wrote memoirs, confessions, poetry. He was still only 23 years old. His IRA activities ceased after that time, although he remained connected and friendly with most of its members (naturally - his whole family was involved). While in prison, he learned the Irish language. He drank like a fish. He had trouble getting published in Ireland (so he was in a grand continuum of other Irish writers who faced similar censorship issues). Behan was raised in a staunchly Republican family. His father was involved in the Easter uprising. Behan was Catholic (of course) - but not by name only. He was a true believer.
In the 1950s, he left Ireland (again, in a grand continuum of Irish writers who feel they must leave in order to be an artist) and moved to Paris. He wanted to be free, to write, to publish, to live life the way he wanted to live it.
I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
When we were in Ireland as a family, my dad took us to the writer's museum in Dublin. It's like going to the Vatican of artists. Nobody is more dominant in the written word than Irish writers. Who knows why that is - but it doesn't even matter why. The museum is great. Even as a kid I appreciated it, especially because I grew up being surrounded by these old Irish authors, on my dad's bookshelves. I hadn't READ any of the books, but people like Flann O'Brien and Brendan Behan and Francis Stewart and WB Yeats were a part of the warp and weft of our family. We had a big picture of Brendan Behan in our living room - actually, we still do: it was a drawing of Behan's big bloated meaty face - and it was all done in one line, with the pen never lifting from the page. You can see it on the wall over the television in this photo here. I still remember our visit to the museum and seeing Behan's battered typewriter under glass (you can see images of it on the museum's link). I didn't even know who he was, as a writer - I just knew his books were all over our house, and I just knew that he was on our living room wall. So he was omnipresent. And even as a young teenager, I was into "objects", the same way I am now. Like seeing Alexander Hamilton's DESK at the New York Historical Society and literally having to walk away from the display because I didn't trust myself to not reach out and touch the damn thing. Behan's typewriter is one of the few things I remember from that trip to the museum. I think perhaps it is because I had a battered typewriter of my own - given to me on my 10th birthday - and it lasted me pretty much until I went to college. Old-fashioned, where had to buy ink ribbons on spools, and where certain letters came out quirky, no matter what you did. I loved my typewriter, and I wish I still had it. Even just as a curio. Behan's typewriter looked kind of like mine, which was strange to me ... I was a teenager living in the early 1980s ... Behan seemed like a man from ancient Rome to me, yet his typewriter was like mine!
"I am a drinker with writing problems."
His cynicism about the Irish and Ireland borders on the psychotic at times (but if you know the Irish, you know that cynicism about themselves appears to be built in to the national character - part of why they are so charming and so much fun. They ARE serious, but they don't take themSELVES seriously.)
"If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks."
But he also said:
"It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody."
In my opinion it is his cynicsm that makes his work so exciting to read. It palpitates on the page. His feelings and judgments tremble before you. He lives in his words. He is unforgiving. Yet also so so funny. A typically Irish combination. If you just have the unforgiving attitude, you'll be a rather humorless writer, a propagandist. But Behan was a riot.
"Never throw stones at your mother,
You'll be sorry for it when she's dead,
Never throw stones at your mother,
Throw bricks at your father instead."
-- Brendan Behan, "The Hostage", 1958
It doesn't surprise me at all that he and Jackie Gleason were best friends. Of course they were. They both had the same dead-eyed response to absurdity, the same intolerance for stupidity and silliness, the same potential for explosive rage and explosive tragedy, and also the same huge humor.
They had become friends because of a notorious drunken appearance by Behan on a television talk show, where Gleason was also a guest. Behan was wasted, it was shocking to many - but Gleason saw a kindred spirit.
So happy birthday, to a wonderful Irish writer, a man I grew up with, a character in my childhood lexicon. He was not outside our family at all, he was inner circle, like Flann OBrien (one of his friends) and Yeats and Joyce and Synge. Behan was on our wall. He was one of us. As an adult, I finally read all of his plays and realized what the fuss was all about. He's fantastic.
1954's The Quare Fellow, about his time in prison, ran for a short time in Dublin, and was a modest hit. The prison language is meaty, funny, and shows Behan's gift for satire. There's a Pinter-esque quality in some of it (strange as that may sound if you are familiar with Pinter) - in that a lot of times the events that happen OFFstage take on far more importance than what is happening ON. So that adds to the audience's feeling of imbalance, or wanting to peek around corners to get the whole story. "The Quare Fellow" is never seen in the play, although he is referenced constantly. Now enters Joan Littlefield and her Theatre Workshop into the picture. We really can thank her for the fact that Brendan Behan is so famous today. I am not sure that fame was a done deal for someone like Behan - in the same way that it was for someone like Joyce, who seems destined to be a singular star. Behan was more on the fringe, more of a scrabbler. But Littlefield, a theatre director and producer, took The Quare Fellow over to England where it was a smashing success. Eventually the play moved to Broadway, bringing Behan worldwide fame.
My dad wrote me a note about The Hostage (another one of Behan's plays):
Dearest: I saw the play done once in the 70s: it seemed like John Cleese [or some other Python] had adapted Frank O'Connor's Guests of the Nation for the stage. I believe that it owes most of its success to the director [Joan Littlefield?]. love, dad
My father's comment reflects the general consensus that seems to be out there: that it was Joan Littlefield who took Behan's work, wrestled it into a theatrical form, produced it so that its strengths could shine through, hiding its weaknesses - and that any collaboration that Behan had afterwards suffers in comparison. Behan owed much to Littlefield. Perhaps that is why they had such a testy relationship, notoriously difficult.
The Hostage
Interestingly enough, my copy of the book, given to me by my father, was an early edition, 1959, and in the biographical sketch on the back it says: "Brendan Behan, the son of a house painter, left school at thirteen, and three years later served his first prison term for political reasons. As an IRA terrorist he has spent eight years of his life in various jails ..." The use of the word 'terrorist' really stood out for me. So often now, regardless of whether the person is actually a terrorist or not, the word is surrounded by little quotation marks. Or it's just not used at all. They're "insurgents", they're "rebels", they're "militants", "freedom fighters", etc. That little bio of Behan is quite a time-traveler, from an earlier decade when people weren't so hesitant to call a spade a spade.
Yeah, he was a terrorist. He blew shit up. He went to jail.
He also was a writer.
I appreciate the clarity and openness of that biographical sketch, and miss that kind of forthrightness (without the huge chip on its shoulder, too) today.
The Hostage was an enormous theatrical success in London, Paris, and New York. I love the play. It's laugh-out-loud funny at times, but also angry, pointedly political, sad ... with certain Keystone Cops slapstick elements. In my opinion, it should be played like a bat out of hell. You should only "pause" when Behan tells you to pause. Other than that, let it fly, keep the speed up, ba-dum-ching! Otherwise, the thing could be in danger of taking itself seriously. The points made are awesome and difficult and prickly - still relevant today ... but points such as those must not be underlined for the audience. God, I wish every director - for stage, TV, and film - would fucking LEARN NOT TO UNDERLINE (with music, dialogue, closeups, repetitive language in the script to make sure we all "get it") what is already obvious.
Behan's work exists in a fiery world of high stakes, humor, and denial. If you pause, if you slow it down, its power unravels.
The Hostage takes place in a brothel in Dublin which is owned by a former IRA commander. The cast of characters is a motley array of whores and night-owls and other fringe-dwellers. It's a fast-moving theatrical work, very Irish - full of wise cracks, and jokes. It seems that NOTHING is taken seriously. But that's so very Irish. When the play opens, we eventually learn that the following day an 18 year old IRA member is to be hanged. He was accused of killing an Ulster policeman. This is on everybody's minds. Lots of talk and chatter about the IRA, and 1916, and martyrdom, and Ireland ... A young Cockney soldier, Leslie Williams, is held hostage in the brothel, in the hopes that somehow this might stave off the execution ... When the IRA member is hanged the following day, the British police eventually attack the brothel, and Leslie ends up getting killed by gunfire.
The Hostage was Behan's last major success.
Literary critic Kenneth Tynan said:
"While other writers horde words like misers, Behan sends them out on a spree, ribald, flushed, and spoiling for a fight."
Amen.
Here is an excerpt from The Hostage - a play that is well worth looking into if you are not familiar with it. Don't forget, despite the IRA themes and the title: this is a comedy.
Notice in the excerpt below that a "pause" is written into the script. And, hysterically, the Officer shouts "SILENCE!" after the pause. If you're in a production that is floppy, in terms of cue pickups, with pauses left and right, people stopping to think, or ponder - then that moment would be lost, the timing would not be right, you need to be able to "hear" the joke that Behan has written into the thing. It needs to be rat-a-tat dialogue all along, no pauses between lines, so then that sudden "Pause" will really have an effect ... and the fact that the Officer shouts "Silence" after the ONE pause in the script so far - is hysterical, and says worlds about that character. (This, too, is very Pinter-esque. In terms of "Pinter's pauses" - follow them like you would a musical score. Do not add more. Do not subtract any. Just DO WHAT HE SAYS ... and almost by default, the script will take on an ominous almost unbearably tense feeling. Example here of what a Pinter script looks like. Those "silences" are deliberate, written into the thing by Pinter. This is not always the case with such "directorial" additions to a script - sometimes they are added from production notes, and are not BY the playwright. But in Pinter's case, he wrote those "silences" in. They are much a part of the dialogue as the things actually spoken. It's not up to the actor to muck with that stuff, to decide when to pause - at least not with Pinter. With Pinter, you do what he says. Believe me, it will help.)
So happy birthday to Brendan Behan.
You make me think, basically, of my whole damn life. You were given to me, by my father, like he gave me so much else. It was through osmosis, rather than anything more deliberate.
Wherever I look, you are there.
EXCERPT FROM The Hostage
OFFICER: Now your rent books, please, or a list of the tenants.
PAT. I can give you that easy. There's Bobo, Ropeen, Colette, the Mouse, Pigseye, Mulleady, Princess Grace, Rio Rita, Meg, the new girl, and myself.
OFFICER. [PAT fetches his notebook] I'll tell you the truth, if it was my doings there'd be no such thing as us coming here. I'd have nothing to do with the place, and the bad reputation it has all over the city.
PAT. Isn't it good enough for your prisoner?
OFFICER. It's not good enough for the Irish Republican Army.
PAT. Isn't it now?
OFFICER. Patrick Pearse said "To serve a cause which is splendid and holy, men must themselves be splendid and holy."
PAT. Are you splendid, or just holy? Haven't I seen you somewhere before? It couldn't be you that was after coming here one Saturday night ...
OFFICER. It could not.
PAT. It could have been your brother, for he was the spitting image of you.
OFFICER. If any of us were caught here now or at any time, it's shamed before the world we'd be. Still, I see their reasons for choosing it too.
PAT. The place is so hot, it's cold.
OFFICERE. The police wouldn't believe we'd touch it.
PAT. If we're all caught here, it's not the opinion of the world or the police will be upsetting us, but the opinion of the Military Court. But then I suppose it's all the same to you; you'll be a hero, will you not?
OFFICER. I hope that I could never betray my trust.
PAT. Ah yes, of course, you've not yet been in Mountjoy or the Curragh glasshouse.
OFFICER. I have not.
PAT. That's easily seen in you.
OFFICER. I assure you, my friend, I'm not afraid of Redcaps.
PAT. Take it from me, they're not the worst [to audience] though they're bastards anywhere and everywhere. No, your real trouble when you go to prison as a patriot, do you know what it will be?
OFFICER. The loss of liberty.
PAT. No, the other Irish patriots, in along with you. Which branch of the IRA are you in?
OFFICER. There is only one branch of the Irish Republican Army.
PAT. I was in the IRA in 1916, and in 1925 H.Q. sent me from Dublin to the County Kerry because the agricultural labourers were after taking over five thousand acres of an estate from Lord Trales. They had it all divided very nice and fair among themselves, and were ploughing and planting in great style. G.H.Q. gave orders that they were to get off the land, that the social question would be settled when we got the thirty-county Republic. The Kerrymen said they weren't greedy like. They didn't want the whole thirty-two counties to begin with, and their five thousand acres would do them for a start.
OFFICER. Those men were wrong on the social question.
PAT. Faith and I don't think it was questions they were interested in, at all, but answers. Anyway I agreed with them, and stopped there for six months training the local unit to take on the IRA, the Free State Army, aye, or the British Navy if it had come to it.
OFFICER. That was mutiny.
PAT. I know. When I came back to Dublin, I was court-martialled in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
Pause.
OFFICER. Silence!
PAT. Sir!
OFFICER. i was sent here to do certain business. I would like to conclude that business.
PAT. Let us proceed, shall we, sir? When may we expect the prisoner?
OFFICER. Today.
PAT. What time?
OFFICER. Between nine and twelve.
PAT. Where is he now?
OFFICER. We haven't got him yet.
PAT. You haven't got a prisoner? Are you going down to Woolworths to buy one then?
OFFICER. I have no business telling you any more than has already been communicated to you.
PAT. Sure, I know that.
OFFICER. The arrangements are made for his reception. I will be here.
PAT. Well, the usual terms, rent in advance, please.
OFFICER. Is it looking for money you are?
PAT. What else? We're not a charity. Rent in advance.
OFFICER. I might have known what to expect. I know your reputation.
PAT. How did you hear of our little convent?
OFFICER. I do social work for the St. Vincent de Paul Society.
PAT. I always thought they were all ex-policement. In the old days we wouldn't go near them.
OFFICER. In the old days there were Communists in the IRA.
PAT. There were, faith, and plenty of them. What of it?
OFFICER. The man that is most loyal to his faith is the one that will prove most loyal to the cause.
PAT. Have you your initials mixed up? Is it the FBI or the IRA that you are in?
OFFICER. If I didn't know that you were out in 1916 I'd think you were highly suspect.
PAT. Sir?
OFFICER. Well, at least you can't be an informer.
PAT. Ah, you're a shocking decent person. Could you give me a testimonial I could use in my election address if I wanted to get into the coroporation? The rent, please!
February 2, 2009
More Joyce
In my web wanderings today, I came across this wonderful post - a man tracking down Joyce's birthplace in Rathgar. With photos and commentary. He braved "the apocalyptic snows of Leinster to find the truth."
And thanks for the link, Ernie. You've been sending all kinds of fascinating people my way.
Today in history: February 2nd
Two things happened on today in history:
February 2, 1882: James Joyce was born in Rathgar.
February 2, 1922: Joyce's Ulysses
James Joyce had already written a collection of short stories (Dubliners
It took James Joyce seven years to write Ulysses. Later, he would joke, when faced with criticism that the book was just too damn big - "I spent seven years writing it. People could at least spend seven years reading it."
His next book was Finnegans Wake (excerpt here) and that took him seventeen years to write.
Boy marched to the beat of his own drummer.
The history of the publication of Ulysses is a book in and of itself.
James Joyce had fled Ireland, leaving a wake of debt and scandal behind him, back in 1904. Joyce got a job teaching English at a Berlitz school in first Zurich (that didn't work out), and then Trieste. He convinced his new-found love, Nora Barnacle, a wild girl from Galway, to run away with him. He had known her for only a couple of months. They had met on June 16, 1904 - the day that he would choose to set the entirety of Ulysses on, the ultimate tribute to what she gave him. James and Nora lived in Trieste for 10 years, having children (two of them), not getting married just to spite tradition - although they referred to one another as "husband" and "wife" (the two would eventually marry in the 1930s) ... and living below the poverty line. Meanwhile, Joyce was working on Dubliners, which was quite a struggle. He could not find anyone willing to publish it. Dubliners was eventually published in 1914. He had already been working on it for years. Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man was published (in serial form) in 1914 and finally brought out as a book in 1916. It had been serialized in the highly influential The Egoist. Around this time, James Joyce was taken under the wing of Ezra Pound (what a shock. Pound was everywhere).
James Joyce had been interested in the plight of the Jews for a long time. Especially as a man living in perpetual exile, country-less, yet always looking "homeward". He felt that there was an affinity between the Jews and the Irish, and he thought it was something to explore. He had considered writing a story along these lines for Dubliners but it didn't end up happening. However, the idea percolated. It ended up being one of the main ideas in the book Ulysses, based, of course, on Homer's epic, but Joyce, with his obsessive tendencies, was the kind of man who saw connections everywhere. Exile, journey, what does "home" mean, where is it? These were questions of great relevance to the Jews, but also to himself, who felt he could never live in Ireland again (and he never did). Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of Ulysses is a Jew, living in Ireland. Stephen Dedalus (Joyce's alter ego, the "star" of Portrait of the Artist as well) is one of the aimless men Ireland is so fond of creating, a man looking for a father figure, a guide. Through their mutual wanderings through the city of Dublin, on June 16, 1904, they eventually cross paths. It is not that a kindred spirit is revealed, not really. They do not connect, or heal, or grow, or become empowered. None of those pat concepts are at work in Ulysses. It is more that it is a meeting of the minds. A realization of the connection between them, but also that such connection is transitory. At the end of the book they go their separate ways.
Joyce wrote:
Ulysses is the epic of two races (Israel - Ireland) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). The character of Ulysses always fascinated me ever since boyhood. I started writing it as a short story for Dubliners fifteen years ago but gave it up. For seven years I have been working at this book-- blast it!
What was such a big deal about Ulysses? A book where nothing, let's be honest, really happens?
Much of the brou-haha (at least in the literary set) was about the writing itself, a deepening and broadening of the landscape he had explored in Portrait: what is existence really like? What is it like to live, moment to moment?
James Joyce wrote once:
"Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?"
Joyce did not delve into the psychologies of his characters so much, although we get to know Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus better than we even know our best friends through reading Ulysses. Joyce goes behind closed doors. He goes inside the body. Circulation, digestion, sex drive, the splitting of cells ... all of that is going on in his writing, because the book - as well as being an homage to Homer's Odyssey - as well as being set up in a complicated structure, mirroring Homer's work - as well as having colors associated with each episode, and a different writing style for each episode ... it is also, chapter by chapter, a dissection of the human body. One chapter (the Cyclops chapter, naturally) is the "eye" chapter. One chapter is the stomach chapter. One chapter is the sex organs chapter. And etc. None of this is explicit. There is no guide. You have to know what you're looking for. You have to get into HIS mode when reading the book, and let your OWN mode go. This is why many people were (and are) annoyed by Joyce. But geniuses have always annoyed people. As William Blake famously wrote:
The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.
Ouch. Crows don't like that when you point it out. But eagles, in general, shouldn't worry about the response of crows to their superiority. They need to just keep being eagles.
But James Joyce wouldn't have thought of it like that. His defenders (like myself) say stuff like that all the time, but Joyce (perhaps disingenuously) really didn't see what the big deal was. He wrote what he wrote because it amused and fascinated him. He wrote only what he could write. He wasn't going for an effect, he wasn't trying to be clever. He loved puns and language and hidden connections. He wrote from that stance. He realized that he was ahead of his time, he really did, but he wasn't precocious, he wasn't self-conscious about it. (Actually, he was - but I'll touch on that in a bit.) The thing to get about Joyce (and this is where he is truly an eagle) is that he wrote Ulysses not to make a big splash, not to stick it to the censors, not to show lesser writers how it's REALLY done (although all of these things were results) ... he wrote it because he liked it. He found it funny. Engaging.
He said (and this may be perhaps my favorite Joyce quote, and it is something to keep in mind should you pick up Ulysses for the first time - it's a clue in HOW to read it):
The pity is that the public will demand and find a moral in my book, or worse they may take it in some serious way, and on the honour of a gentleman, there is not one single serious word in it.
I believe him. Certainly there were serious ideas in the book, it's a revolution, really ... but looked at in another light, in Joyce's light, there is "not one single serious word in it". It's a joke, a maze, a puzzle, an examination of ridiculous coincidences and connections. What does it "mean"? That's the stupidest question of all to concern yourself with. It means nothing.
Samuel Beckett's wonderful quote in regards to Finnegans Wake is also applicable to Ulysses:
You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.
And THAT is why Joyce is such a big deal. THAT is why the book went off like a bomb throughout the literary world. THAT is why people like T.S. freakin' Eliot, no slouch himself, said, "I wish, for my own sake, that I had not read it." James Joyce lived in a world of giants. Hemingway, Proust, Virginia Woolf, Pound, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot ... the modernists. He was part of his time, but he went so much further than any of his contemporaries that many of them never quite recovered from the Ulysses juggernaut. The comments of other writers about Ulysses are absolutely marvelous, because they all recognized what has come. They all realized what had happened. The 20th century had arrived. They had all been working towards it, trying to wrestle the 19th century out of existence, bringing new forms to light. And it's not that any of these people failed. But Ulysses was the "star". Ulysses was the real death-knell.
T.S. Eliot said that Ulysses "killed the 19th century".
James Joyce hadn't set out to "kill the 19th century", but his sensibility - contrarian, sensitive, angry, loving - led him to a form that couldn't help but do so.
Now let me talk about the actual publication of the book.
Into our story now steps Sylvia Beach. Born in Maryland, as an adult she became a major force in the literary ex-pat community in Paris. She served in World War I with the Red Cross in Serbia, and after the war settled in Paris, where she opened up a bookshop - the enormously influential Shakespeare & Co.. Shakespeare & Co. became the hub-bub, the vortex of them all. Oh, for a time machine, to go hang out at that place in the 1920s, where Hemingway would stop by, Fitzgerald would browse, Joyce would sneak in and out, Gertrude Stein would bitch and moan (haha) ... and Pound would negotiate with all of them, trying to help them all out and promote his favorites ... they ALL were there.
I love this - here is a cartoon of Joyce sitting at a table with all of his friends (try to find Joyce - isn't that hysterical?? He doesn't even have a body! That was how he was seen - just a big floating brain with enormous glasses!).
Who was the cartoonist?
F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In this vibrant world of literary rivals and giants struggling for the stage, Sylvia Beach played an important role. She had good taste, first of all, she liked the "good" ones, and didn't waste her time with the crows. She also had courage (as we shall see).
When Beach met James Joyce, he had already written Ulysses, and it was a finished manuscript by that point (or as finished as any Joycean manuscript ever would be) - but essentially unpublishable, due to its being deemed "obscene". You have to get into the mindset of the censors, as unpleasant an experience as that is. What on earth is "obscene" about Ulysses? Ultimately, the book expresses love. You cannot deny it, you cannot escape from it. It is love. Leopold Bloom, throughout his long long day, is only thinking about his wife Molly, and how much he loves her, and how afraid he is that she is being unfaithful. There is only one woman for him. In the same way that there was only one woman for Joyce. Love, it is love that drags us home after our long journey. Only love. But Joyce did not shy away from the more unsavory aspects of life (and let's remember his comment about the "mystery of the conscious" - that's so so important: he did not, as Proust did, or Woolf did, or some of the other modern writers - delve into psychology and the workings of the subconscious. He did not look at motivations and childhood repression. Let's not forget the huge influence of Freud at this time. A revolution in the understanding of the workings of humanity. Whether or not you agree with Freud, and whether or not you think Freud is over-rated is irrelevant. I am talking about the time and place from which Joyce wrote. Freud - and Jung - were hugely influential to writers like Joyce and Proust.) But Joyce, unlike Proust, did not explore how memory works, and how the senses trigger thoughts and feelings and entire narratives from our lives ... He was much more prosaic. Blunt. He presented man in the most honest manner possible. Leopold Bloom takes a dump, for example. He sits on the toilet after breakfast, and thinks about things, worrying about things, as he goes to the bathroom. Now, this is one of the most human of experiences. Anyone who says they haven't sat on the toilet, pondering their day, and what they are worried about, is lying. But to put that in a book?? What are you, cracked?
There are those who feel that while such things may be 'real', they have no place in literature. Now we're getting into the realm of the censors, who wanted to control what could be shown. It's the same as people nowadays who seem to feel that saying "TMI" is the be-all and end-all of human interaction. You complain that you stubbed your toe that morning, and certain people will say, "TMI!" Someday I'll write a post on how much I despise the "TMI" trend, and how I think it is actually indicative of so much that is effed up ... "TMI" is nothing new. There have always been those who really DON'T want to know you, who really DON'T want the truth when they ask "How are you?" It's just that now that we have "TMI" to say, it's way over-used. If I never hear the phrase "TMI" again, I will fall asleep a happy woman. Sure, there's such a thing as "over-sharing", but I'm not really talking about that. I am talking about something far more insidious. Something that is not in any way, shape or form new - it's been going on forever, as long as human beings have been in contact with one another. There is a shying away from real experience of one another. Of course. Because if you allow yourself to experience what it is like for another person, then that might mean you might have compassion for them, or empathy, or you might have a sense of recognition, an awareness of the universal: "Yes, I do that, too!" Many people do not want to be shaken out of their selves like that. I include myself, by the way, although you will never ever catch me saying "TMI"! I am all ABOUT "TMI"! But the first response for many, to some demand for connection, or understanding, is to batton down the hatches, draw the line in the sand, and say, "Nope. Nope. That's YOU, that's not ME."
Joyce cuts right to the core of that very human experience. He will not let the reader off the hook. If you insist on insisting, "That's YOU, not ME", then Ulysses will be a terribly confronting book. Joyce, above all else, was a humanist, although his cynicism and rage were titanic. That's what The Dead, with its final revelation of connection to all in the last four paragraphs, is all about. Gabriel realizes, as he watches his wife sleep, that he loves her, and yet that he has never really known her. And in that realization, his consciousness rises up and up, until he is looking down on the snowy landscape, on all of Ireland ... and he, for the first time, feels connected to life, because of his experience of heartbreak. He feels connected not just to all mankind, but also to all of the "shades", all of those people who have gone before.
To walk around saying "TMI, TMI" whenever anyone reveals anything about themselves is to exclude yourself from the human family.
The irony of all of this is that Joyce was one of the most isolated of beings, although not melancholy or a downer or any of that. It's just that he was rather old-fashioned, believe it or not, a family man, who had dinner every night with Nora and his kids and that was that. There is no scandal about Joyce. He didn't sleep with every woman in Paris. He didn't experiment with free love. Yes, he lived in sin for 30 years before tying the knot, but he was faithful to Nora. He wasn't a big socializer. He was a big drinker, but everyone was then. He wasn't dancing in fountains like F. Scott Fitzgerald was, and cheering as his wife did a jig on the table. He was rather conventional, rather bourgeois.
Additionally, there is a tremendous self-consciousness in his books (which I mentioned earlier). He can ONLY write from his own life. He was not an "inventor". He did not make up characters, and devise complicated plots. He did not write one standard novel. It was all self self self self self. I truly believe that you MUST be a genius in order to only focus on self. The memoir-trend in publishing today proves that, in my mind. There are very few good ones out there, very few stories worth telling ... the thing that elevates one memoir over another is, of course, the writing style ... If you're not a good writer then nobody cares that your mama locked you in a closet and your papa couldn't put down the whiskey. Angela's Ashes was such a phenomenal success because of McCourt's writing. You write that same story without McCourt's voice and you'd want to vomit. I know that there are folks in Limerick, especially, who already want to vomit when reading McCourt's book - but that just goes to show you that you can never please everybody.
Ulysses picked up where Portrait left off. As Portrait comes to a close, the traditional narrative voice breaks down, leaving us only with Stephen Dedalus' journal entries. There is no more voice outside the "I". Joyce has abandoned the traditional narrator. Dedalus will now take over. We are inside experience, as opposed to looking on. In the third episode in Ulysses Stephen Dedalus takes a walk on the beach. We learned in the first chapter that he had broken his glasses. This fact is mentioned only once in the entire 800 page book, but we are meant to remember it. In the third chapter, during his walk on the beach, sans glasses ... the experiences come at him through a vague impression of colors and sounds. If you somehow missed that he has no glasses, and this episode is told from the perspective of someone who can't see, then you might not know what the hell is going on. At one point:
The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back again.
As someone who needs her glasses, I can say that that is just just right. When I have been stranded without glasses, it is as though sounds "run towards" me ... It is not the DOG running at Dedalus, it is its BARK.
Perhaps now it seems obvious, or perhaps now it seems like everyone tries to write in this subjective manner. But that's only because Joyce did it first.
All of this made Ulysses a tough sell to publishers, not even counting the bowel movements, and penises, and the evening in "Nighttown" (Dublin's red-light district) and Molly Bloom's long 40 page run-on sentence that closes the book, full of farts and menstruation and masturbation. But also, please, let us not forget, that it is some of the most beautiful writing in the English language ... and her image of embracing her husband as they lie among the rhododendrons is some of the most romantic language of all time:
the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said I was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a womans body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldnt answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didnt know of Mulvey and Mr Stanhope and Hester and father and old captain Groves and the sailors playing all birds fly and I say stoop and washing up dishes they called it on the pier and the sentry in front of the governors house with the thing round his white helmet poor devil half roasted and the Spanish girls laughing in their shawls and their tall combs and the auctions in the morning the Greeks and the jews and the Arabs and the devil knows who else from all the ends of Europe and Duke street and the fowl market all clucking outside Larby Sharons and the poor donkeys slipping half asleep and the vague fellows in the cloaks asleep in the shade on the steps and the big wheels of the carts of the bulls and the old castle thousands of years old yes and those handsome Moors all in white and turbans like kings asking you to sit down in their little bit of a shop and Ronda with the old windows of the posadas glancing eyes a lattice hid for her lover to kiss the iron and the wineshops half open at night and the castanets and the night we missed the boat at Algeciras the watchman going about serene with his lamp and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
Brings me to tears every time.
The book was a bomb waiting to go off. No one would touch it. Pound had arranged for some excerpts to be published and that was the start of it. Writers, in general, were itching to get their paws on the book ... what the hell is that crazy Joyce working on now?? ... people felt competitive, nervous ... he helped them up their own game ... but in terms of the business side of things, the controversy had started before the book had even been published.
But Sylvia Beach - who had never published a book before - took a risk and said that Shakespeare & Co. would put out the book. She would publish it herself. She knew what she was doing, and she knew what the repercussions could be. It was an act of courage. Perhaps she went into it recklessly, thinking that giving a space for genius would be its own reward - perhaps she went into it knowing the eventual fallout that would crash down upon her head - But whatever her interior process, she published it. On February 2, 1922.
I was on the platform, my heart going like the locomotive, as the train from Dijon came slowly to a standstill and I saw the conductor getting off, holding a parcel and looking around for someone -- me. In a few minutes, I was ringing the doorbell at the Joyces' and handing them Copy No. 1 of Ulysses. It was February 2, 1922. -- Sylvia Beach
And the shit hit the fan.
Nora Tully describes it thus:
The response to Ulysses was immediate and extreme. Writer and literary critic Malcolm Cowley described it using the metaphor of a stone dropped into water: there was a moment of silence, the stone was dropped, "then all the frogs who inhabited the pool began to talk at once".
Once it was published, the obscenity controversies heated up, the book was banned everywhere - Ireland, America - everybody was talking about it, but who had actually read it? The first edition was only 1000 copies! You couldn't get the book anywhere. Additionally, you could be arrested for trying to smuggle it into certain countries - so there were a couple of years where the only place on the planet that you could get a copy of Ulysses was at Beach's bookshop in Paris. And so the orders flew in from folks around the world. People who were book readers, other writers, people who were collectors, people who sensed the historic moment and just wanted a copy.
Here is a copy of Peggy Guggenheim's urgent order-form, sent to Sylvia Beach:
Imagine you are dying to read the book. Imagine you can't get it anywhere. Imagine that it is illegal to smuggle it back into the United States. Imagine the frenzy. You can see it in Guggeinheim's writing, can't you?
Harriet Shaw Weaver, who had supported Joyce financially for years (at Pound's insistence) also arranged for another edition to be published by The Egoist press. She also arranged for them to be shipped to the United States, but they were seized by the customs officials. In 1923, John Rodker, through The Egoist again, arranged for a small printing of the book, but these were burned by English customs officials. In 1924, Shakespeare & Co., a small outfit really, and not set up to handle the demand, brought out another small printing.
Extraordinary.
Eventually, as the controversy died down, Joyce ended up going with another publisher, which really left Beach bereft financially. She already had suffered as a consequence of taking the risk to publish Ulysses. She was hounded by the police, by the censors ... so although Joyce really did need to move on, to a publisher who could handle his stardom, Beach was the first. Beach was the pioneer. Amazing woman.
Meanwhile, the comments from people who had actually read it were pouring in. This went on for years. You could read it in Europe, but America had declared it obscene, and would not allow it to arrive on its shores.
Finally, on August 7, 1934, over 10 years after its first publication by little Sylvia Beach and her little Shakespeare & Co. - a far-seeing and open-minded US Court of appeals judge, Judge Woolsey, declared that Ulysses was NOT obscene and could be admitted into the United States. It was a ground-breaking moment, a true historical watershed - and his decision reads almost like an insightful and intuitive literary review. Not to be missed. Go, Judge Woolsey!
The comments of other great writers on this book are of great interest to me. I can't get enough. I have compiled them all in a notebook. I love to read through them. The responses run the gamut from disgust, elation, despair, awe, humility ... He made other writers feel like putting down their pens. He enraged those who felt that THEY deserved HIS accolades (phone call for Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, phone call) ... but whatever the response, the only emotion you will NOT find is indifference.
Joyce had made his mark.
Yeats (an early champion of Joyce) had this as his first response on reading Ulysses: "A mad book!"
Then later, as he let the book percolate, Yeats corrected himself: "I have made a terrible mistake. It is a work perhaps of genius. I now perceive its coherence ... It is an entirely new thing -- neither what the eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."
Hart Crane said: "I feel like shouting EUREKA! Easily the epic of the age."
George Bernard Shaw was disturbed by Ulysses, he took it personally, he did not like what it revealed - about man, about Irish men, about the life of Ireland, but he grappled with the implications in an honest way: "If a man holds up a mirror to your nature and shows you that it needs washing -- not whitewashing -- it is no use breaking the mirror. Go for soap and water."
T.S. Eliot was especially devastated by the book, and his comments on it are numerous. Examples: "How could anyone write again after achieving the immense prodigy of the last chapter?"
T.S. Eliot again: "I hold Ulysses to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape."
Edmund Wilson wrote of it:
The more we read Ulysses, the more we are convinced of its psychological truth, and the more we are amazed at Joyce's genius in mastering and in presenting, not through analysis or generalization, but by the complete recreation of life in the process of being lived, the relations of human beings to their environment and to each other; the nature of their perception of what goes on about them and of what goes on within themselves; and the interdependence of their intellectual, their physical, their professional and their emotional lives. To have traced all these interdependences, to have given each of these elements its value, yet never to have lost sight of the moral through preoccuptation with the physical, nor to have forgotten the general in the particular; to have exhibited ordinary humanity without either satirizing it or sentimentalizing it - this would already have been sufficiently remarkable; but to have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time.
Wilson also wrote:
Yet for all its appalling longeurs, Ulysses is a work of high genius. Its importance seems to me to lie, not so much in its opening new doors to knowledge -- unless in setting an example to Anglo-Saxon writers of putting down everything without compunction -- or in inventing new literary forms -- Joyce's formula is really, as I have indicated, nearly seventy-five years old -- as in its once more setting the standard of the novel so high that it need not be ashamed to take its place beside poetry and drama. Ulysses has the effect at once of making everything else look brassy."
Carl Jung read the book and wrote Joyce a letter:
Dear Sir, Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I'm profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don't know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn't help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil's grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn't.
Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.
With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully,
C.G. Jung
Joyce was very proud of this letter and would read it out loud to guests in his house. Nora would snort at the end, "Jimmy knows nothin' about women!"
Katherine Mansfield wrote in a letter:
"Joyce was rather ... difficile. I had no idea until then of his view of Ulysses -- no idea how closely it was modelled on the Greek story, how absolutely necessary it was to know the one through and through to be able to discuss the other. I've read the Odyssey and am more or less familiar with it but Murry [Mansfield's husband] and Joyce simply sailed out of my depth. I felt almost stupefied. It's absolutely impossible that other people should understand Ulysses as Joyce understands it. It's almost revolting to hear him discuss its difficulties. It contains code words that must be picked up in each paragraph and so on. The Question and Answer part can be read astronomically or from the geologic standpoint or -- oh, I don't know!"
The most humorous part of this is that Joyce said, after meeting Katherine and her husband:
"Mrs. Murry understood the book better than her husband."
Hilarious.
George Moore, another Irish writer, wrote:
"Ulysses is hopeless; it is absurd to imagine that any good end can be served by trying to record every single thought and sensation of any human being. That's not art, it's like trying to copy the London Directory."
Hemingway wrote in a letter to Sherwood Anderson:
"Joyce has a most goddamn wonderful book. It'll probably reach you in time. Meantime the report is that he and all his family are starving but you can find the whole celtic crew of them every night in Michaud's where Binney and I can only afford to go about once a week...The damned Irish, they have to moan about something or other..."
Gertrude Stein wrote:
"Joyce is good. He is a good writer. People like him because he is incomprehensible and anybody can understand him. But who came first, Gertrude Stein or James Joyce? Do not forget that my first great book, Three Lives, was published in 1908. That was long before Ulysses. But Joyce has done something. His influence, however, is local. Like Synge, another Irish writer, he has had his day."
Joyce heard what Stein wrote, thought about it, and said, "I hate intellectual women."
George Bernard Shaw again:
"I have read several fragments of Ulysses ... It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization; but it is a truthful one; and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it; and ask them whether on reflection they could see anything amusing in all that foul mouthed foul minded derision and obscenity...It is, however, some consolation to find that at last somebody has felt deeply enough about it to face the horror of writing it all down and using his literary genius to force people to face it. In Ireland they try to make a cat cleanly by rubbing its nose in its own filth. Mr. Joyce has tried the same treatment on the human subject."
Ezra Pound said:
"Joyce -- pleasing; after the first shell of cantankerous Irishman, I got the impression that the real man is the author of Chamber Music, the sensitive. The rest is the genius; the registration of realities on the temperament, the delicate temperament of the early poems. A concentration and absorption passing Yeats' -- Yeats has never taken on anything requiring the condensation of Ulysses."
Yeats wrote:
"It is an entirely new thing -- neither what they eye sees nor the ear hears, but what the rambling mind thinks and imagines from moment to moment. He has certainly surpassed in intensity any novelist of our time."
William Carlos Williams wrote (echoing what many of Joyce's contemporaries felt):
"Joyce is too near for me to want to do less than he did in Ulysses, in looseness of spirit, and honesty of heart -- at least."
E.M. Forster wrote:
"Perhaps the most interesting literary experiment of our day."
Dr. Joseph Collins reviewed "Ulysses" in The New York Times and wrote:
Ulysses will immortalize its author with the same certainty that Gargantua and Pantagruel immortalized Rabelais and The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky ... It comes nearer to being the perfect revelation of a personality than any book in existence.
Hart Crane, who had totally lost his head about the book, wrote:
"The sharp beauty and sensitivity of the thing! The matchless details! His book is steeped in the Elizabethans, his early love, and Latin Church, and some Greek ... It is my opinion that some fanatic will kill Joyce sometime soon for the wonderful things said in Ulysses."
Ford Madox Ford wrote:
"For myself then, the pleasure -- the very great pleasure -- that I get from going through the sentences of Mr. Joyce is that given me simply by the cadence of his prose, and I fancy that the greatest and highest enjoyment that can be got from any writing is simply that given by the cadence of the prose."
William Faulkner wrote:
You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.
Vladimir Nabokov wrote:
Ulysses, of course, is a divine work of art and will live on despite the academic nonentities who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once gave a student a C-minus, or perhaps a D-plus, just for applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from Homer while not even noticing the comings and goings of the man in the brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the brown mackintosh was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is pat ball to Joyce's champion game.
That's a drawing by Guy Davenport, entitled "Joyce Writing a Sentence".
Last year, at around this time - almost exactly a year now - my father gave me his treasured and rare copy of Ulysses - part of the 1924 printing of Shakespeare & Co. The book is falling apart. The pages are thin and rustly, and little bits of them drop off if you pick it up. It is enclosed in a box, to protect it - which has on the spine: ULYSSES - PARIS, 1924.
I have been unable to look at it over the past year. I brought it home with me, put it on a special shelf, and stayed the hell away from it. It seemed to mean something ominous, something final. I didn't want to pick it up, and be casual about it. Even just looking at the book gives me a chill down my spine.
This morning I took it out and spent an hour with it, treating it as carefully as a glass figurine. Every page has something of interest on it. There is a sticker on the first page - stamped with the personal imprint of the couple who had bought the book (my father, naturally, knew everything about them). The copyright page is amazing. First of all, it lists all of the controversial editions that had gone before ... 500 copies burned, etc. And to see the legendary "Shakespeare & Co.", in print, signing its name, so to speak, to the book, bravely putting it out again, knowing what will happen to their small operation ... It's just something that makes me feel humble, awed, and proud that I am aware that such people existed.
My copy of the book is not one that I will take out and read. It is too fragile.
But it is now my most prized possession. I spent some time with it this morning. 4 a.m. to 5 a.m. In honor of the man who gave it to me, and in honor of the birthday of this book that means so much to me, that connects me to something so deep, so powerful - that I can barely speak to it.
I took some photos of this gift from my father. They are below.
The last photo has a framed picture of my dad in the background, standing by Yeats' grave. That was not deliberate. I did not consciously place the framed photo in the frame. It's just that everywhere in my apartment that you look you will see evidence of my heritage, my family, my inheritance. My father taught us well.
Happy birthday to Jimmy Joyce and to his masterpiece.
January 26, 2009
Today in history: January 26, 1907
Until I get my words back for real, blogging will continue to be photo-oriented, a Facebook version of my blog. I cannot write right now. I am not myself.
But today is an important anniversary and one that has family-connections for me -a story I heard as a child, one that seemed so real that I felt like I must have been there myself - and so I must commemorate it. This is something I post every year on this day, because it's such a great story, so here it is again.
On this day in history, John Millington Synge's The Playboy of the Western World
Playboy is now in the history books, not only for being a wonderful play, and part of the theatrical revolution going on in Ireland at the time (the creation of the Abbey Theatre, etc.) - but also because of the riots that broke out when it opened on this day in history (they are now known as "The Playboy Riots"). Things got so out of hand that a police squad had to stand along the edge of the stage during the performance, so that the actors wouldn't get hurt or mobbed. If I had a time machine, I would LOVE to go back and be there on the opening night of that play. It's on my top 5 theatrical events I would like to see.
Synge wrote:
Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent, and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten, and the harvest is a memory only, and the straw has been turned into bricks.
The formidable Lady Gregory, dear friend of Yeats, and his partner in creating the Abbey Theatre sent Yeats two telegrams during the premiere of Playboy of the Western World.
The first one, sent at the close of the first act, read:
Play a great success.
At the end of the third act, she sent a second telegram:
Play broke up in disorder at the word 'shift'.
"Shift" as in "underwear". There is some controversy as to what Synge meant by the word "shift". Did he mean "chemise"? Or was it the more controversial meaning - as in "underwear"?? The audience thought it was the latter, and they went ballistic.
Oh, for a time machine.
Some background.
Synge's time out on the Aran Islands, off the wild west coast of Ireland, gave him the nuggets of inspiration for many of his plays. Out there the "native language" was still spoken, out there he could encounter the real Ireland.
Synge had spent a lot of time in Europe, taking courses in French literature, immersing himself in different cultures, reading Baudelaire, writing poems, chasing girls. He remained interested in his own country, but there wasn't really a place for him there. (it's hard to imagine Ireland without Synge, but he had to TAKE that ground, he had to claim it - it didn't exist before he came along.) Yeats' nationalistic literary (and theatrical) movement (in broader terms - the Irish literary revival) drew Synge back to his home country - the Abbey Theatre was formed - things were HAPPENING in Ireland. In retrospect, it all seems inevitable. Of course Synge would not only come back to be part of that movement, but he would end up defining that movement.
Yeats gave Synge a piece of now legendary advice:
Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Arran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression.
In the middle of what was, essentially, an Irish cultural revival, Yeats (having been out to the Aran Islands) recognized that there was something untouched out there, a primitive life, Irish language still spoken, the culture not corrupted. Yet. It was a race against time. A sentimental attitude, yes, but my God, the art that came out of it. Not just people who subscribed to the Irish revival (Yeats, Synge, O'Casey) - but those who rebelled against it (a little-known author named James Joyce). Without the Irish cultural explosion of the early 20th century, Joyce would not have been possible. He had to define himself against something, contrarian that he was.
The leaders of the cultural movement in Ireland at that time all had the same idea: Inspiration lay in the West of Ireland. Go west. Go west to find the real Ireland. (Interesting, to think of the final paragraphs of Joyce's The Dead (excerpt here ... even with his European inclinations, his desire to get OUT of Ireland - he finished that story with a spiritual journey westwards).
So Synge took Yeats' advice and went west.
The story of his four trips out to the Islands make up his book The Aran Islands
Not surprising, then, that Playboy of the Western World would cause such an uproar.
Here is an excerpt from Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh's marvelous book The Splendid Years: Recollections of Máire Shiubhlaigh as told to Edwa
Máire was an actress, highly involved with the cultural revival of the time, and a member of the Abbey Theatre. Her memories of Synge (and also her memories of the "Playboy riots") are fascinating. Here she speaks of Synge:
John M. Synge who came to us with his play direct from the Aran Islands, where the material for most of his later works was gathered, was born near Dublin in 1871, graduated at Trinity College, and shortly afterwards left Ireland for the Continent, living alternately in Germany and France, where he made a rather precarious livelihood as a violinist and contributor to literary magazines. Yeats had discovered him in Paris in about 1897 and, recognizing the quality of his writings, had brought him back to Ireland, where he introduced him to Aran, prophesying that in the beautiful lyrical prose of the western peasant he would find an original vehicle for dramatic composition. He was right. Synge went to Aran for a month, and stayed there, on and off, for a matter of years. He drew his inspiration from the hearths of the tiny whitewashed cabins and the harsh rocks of the western seaboard, gathering tales and expressions from the old and the young of the most picturesque portion of Ireland. In a short life -- he died at the early age of 38 -- he wove them into sombre dramatic tapestries, embroidered with the rhythmic language of the Irish peasant. His prose, highly musical and enriched with flashes of the most beautiful poetry, he devised simply by transcribing direct from the Gaelic of the islands. It is most difficult for an actor to master; most effective if delivered correctly.
She's got that right. I did a scene from Playboy in a class in graduate school, and while my scene partner and I had a hell of a lot of fun working on it, it was damn difficult to get that language right. Not just the language, but the rhythm, the tone. It doesn't matter if you get the words all correct, and remember all your lines, if you say them in the wrong rhythm. Rhythm is everything. It was a great challenge.
Máire wrote of Synge himself:
He was a gentle fellow, shy, with that deep sense of humour that is sometimes found in the quietest people. His bulky figure and heavy black moustache gave him a rather austere appearance -- an impression quickly dispelled when he spoke. His voice was mellow, low; he seldom raised it. But for his quiet personality he might have passed unnoticed at any gathering. During rehearsals of his play, he would sit quietly in the background, endlessly rolling cigarettes. This was a typical gesture, born more of habit than of any desire for tobacco -- he gave away more cigarettes than he smoked. At the first opportunity, he would lever his huge frame out of a chair and come up on to the stage, a half-rolled cigarette in eaach hand. Then he would look enquiringly round and thrust the little paper cylinders forward towards whoever was going to smoke them. In later years he became the terror of fire-conscious Abbey stage-managers. He used to sit timidly in the wings during plays, rolling cigarettes and handing them to the players as they made their exits.
He didn't set out to revolutionize Irish theatre. He just wrote down what he knew, with humor, wit and anger. That was the only way this guy could write. It turned everything upside down.
Here is Máire's description of some of the objections to Shadow, just to give you an idea of what was going on, and to also set the stage for the "Playboy riots". Synge was, indeed, ahead of his time. The world is rarely kind to those born ahead of their time.
The piece was "un-Irish" wrote some reviewers, an "insult" in fact to the peasant women of Ireland whom Nora Burke was taken to typify. There was an immense verbal furore about it. A number of writers claiming that Synge was slyly attacking the institution known as the "made marriage", and attributing it solely to Ireland, raised all sorts of objections. Others wrote of the character of Nora Burke: "Nora Burke is a lie". Of the play they said: "It is no more Irish than the Decameron. It is a staging of the old-world libel on womankind -- the Widow of Ephesus."Now, I do not propose to analyse the extraordinary attitude adopted towards the play. Indeed, the attacks were launched so suddenly that few of us were even able to gather what they were all about. Perhaps it was that the Irish play-going public of that time was so used to the "genteel" comedy of the established theatre which I mentioned earlier -- the entertaining but not very realistic stuff that was time and again put before it -- that it couldn't swallow a credible satire. In those days if an actress played an unpleasant part, then it followed that she was an unpleasant person. Similarly, if a dramatist wrote a nasty play he was a nasty fellow. Then, of course, there was the fact that Ireland was on the threshold of a renaissance. Everybody, writer, politician, artist, was at pains to eulogise over the beauty of the Irish character. The advent of a comparatively unknown writer who painted an unpleasant if realistic picture of the peasantry at such a time was, to say the least, unwelcome. The Dubliners who raised the loudest objections could not accept In the Shadow of the Glen as a play. They refused to be entertained.
In 1907, the Abbey Theatre produced Playboy of the Western World. Máire, who was there, writes:
The "Playboy Riots", as they came to be known, indicate very clearly some of the difficulties that the Abbey was called upon to face during its first years -- and they show how the theatre, under Yeats, managed to surmount them. When this play is produced in Dublin now it is recognised and enjoyed as a work of art. In 1907 it drove a number of people into such a frenzy that they nearly wrecked the Abbey. I am in rather a good position to describe the riots because I was in the audience during some of them. Curiosity had taken me into the theatre, as it had taken many another person that week.It was about the end of 1906 that Synge finished the Playboy ... Yeats later mentioned that Synge took considerable trouble over the piece and scrapped a number of earlier versions before he fixed on the one which was eventually produced...Yeats never tired of recounting the care which Synge lavished on the piece. This, indeed, may have been indirectly responsible for the reception accorded the play by some sections of the public, whose main argument against it was that it was "a slander on the peasantry of Ireland". As in the case of The Shadow of the Glen, its realism gave offence. The only differnce between it and any other play that did not take was that the public, instead of showing its lack of interest in the accepted way -- by its non-attendance -- displayed its disapproval by rioting in the theatre throughout the play's run. The most unusual feature of the affair was that although the players appeared on the stage and acted their parts for a whole week, the uproar caused by the audience was so great that the play was never really heard on any night but the first, and those who took part in the demonstrations on subsequent occasions were dependent on opinions of the firstnight audience and a few rather hysterical newspaper reports. As the week progressed, the trouble instead of lessening, increased, and before the run of the play was half over, the management felt compelled to call for the assistance of the police to preserve order.
The explanations put forward by the rioters during the week were many and varied and it is worth remarking that no two people appeared to base their objections on exactly the same thing. Some objected to the piece because "it made a hero out of a murderer" (the play deals in part with the welcome accorded by a West of Ireland village to a weak-willed boy who believes he has just killed his father); others claimed that the language used was too strong; more contented themselves by saying that the play was "vicious, untrue, and uncalled for" -- a "hideous caricature" in fact; while a considerable number based their objections on the assumption that the piece was a deliberate attack by Synge on Ireland in retaliation for the manner in which The Shadow of the Glen and The Well of the Saints had been received.
(All of this makes me think of what Joyce said, when it became apparent that no Irish publisher would go near The Dubliners and he would have to look outside his own country for a publisher: "It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass." )
Máire describes what it was like in the theatre, on the opening night of Playboy of the Western World, January 26, 1907.
The first act went well. There was laughter at the right places and the correct degree of solemnity was maintained when it was demanded. But during the second act I began to feel a tenseness in the air around me -- I was sitting in the pit -- and there were murmurs from the stalls and parts of the gallery. Before the curtain fell it was obvious that there was going to be some sort of trouble. Faint calls and ejaculations like "Oh, no! Take it off!" came from various parts of the house and the atmosphere gradually grew taut. In the third act things really came to a head and those around began to stamp the floor and shout towards the stage, the noise gradually increasing until the voices of the players were drowned. People stood up in their seats and demanded the withdrawal of the play, and when it became clear that the cast was determined to see the thing out to the end, tempers began to fray. The auditorium became a mass of people pulling and pushing in all directions. By the time the curtain fell on the last act, the crowd was arguing and fighting with itself. People in front leaned over the back of seats and demanded quiet -- a lot of people seemed to be doing this -- and those at the back responded by shouting and hissing loudly. The crowd which eventually emerged into the street was in an ugly mood.
Despite vicious and hysterical reviews the play went on. One of the objections was that the word "shift" appeared in the play: Christy - the lead character in the play - says - in what is now acknowledged to be a fine piece of dramatic literature, and one of the classic monologues of the stage:
"It's Pegeen I'm seeking only, and what'd I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself, maybe, from this place to the eastern world?"
This was seen as a shock and an outrage.
The Press and the public called for the play to be closed, the hysteria mounted, but the Abbey refused to capitulate. Obviously, Synge had struck a nerve. But things were getting out of hand, it was a violent atmosphere in the audience ... and so Yeats tried to quell this fire. Máire describes:
On the third night Yeats addressed the audience before the curtain rose. If anyone had anything to say against the piece they would be welcomed at a debate which he would be glad to arrange in the theatre at some other time. He was interrupted several times. He asked the interrupters to at least listen to the play so that they would know what it was they were objecting to.
It is just like those idiots who protested Scorsese's Last Temptation without even seeing it.
Such people have always existed. Their complaints are always the same. As a matter of fact, without the idiots, there would have been no such thing as "The Playboy Riots" - which catapulted Irish theatre onto an international stage. So I suppose we should be grateful in a way! Nothing like someone screaming, "NO ONE SHOULD SEE THIS" to make something into a giant hit.
Back to the Playboy Riots:
As on the first night, the opening passages were listened to quietly, and even evoked a little laughter. Halfway through the second act, however, a murmur arose in the pit and a man a few rows away stood up and, without any apparent reason, hit the person beside him. A gasp ran around the whole house and the lights went up. All around him the crowd was breaking into disorder.Within minutes, the audience in the pit and stalls was completely disorganised, and the crowd in thte back and side galleries was almost as bad. Almost everyone was standing. The noise was deafening. Yeats appeared on the stage and pleaded with the sensible members of the audience to remain quiet. His voice was drowned by catcalls, cheers, much stamping of feet, and from somewhere at the back ,the notes of a toy trumpet which came from the centre of a group of young men who looked like university students. He continued to speak, but his words were apparently objected to by those in front, for a howl of protest went up from the stalls and parts of the side gallery, which increased in volume as those behind joined in or tried to cheer the protest down. On the stage the players stood in little knots, discussing the occurrences amongst themselves.
As the noise increased and several arguments broke out around the theatre, Yeats left his place on the stage. A few minutes later the doors into the auditorium opened and to the horror and surprise of most of those present, a body of police entered. At the same time the curtain came down and a semblance of order was restored -- partly due to the sight of the uniforms ...
After a brief speech by Yeats, and the ejection of the more truculent members of the audience, peace was partially restored, and everyone sat down again. At this stage it would have been impossible for anyone to get out. After everyone had been quietened and the greater part of the audience reseated, it would have been dangerous for anyone to stand up. Those who did so were immediately surrounded by hefty policement and shepherded, not too gently, in the direction of the vestibule.
Meanwhile, the orchestra, a recent addition to the theatre, began to play. The music seemed to help matters somewhat, and things almost returned to what they were before the play began. There was much discussion and gesticulation going on however. The affair was still far from settled.
After some time the orchestra retired, the lights were lowered and the curtain went up. Almost immediately the audience reverted to what it had been before the arrival of the police. Not a word of the play could be heard. The cast eventually gave up speaking altogether and went through the piece in pantomime. As the play progressed the noise increased. Men and women stamped the floor, banged the backs of their seats with their fists, shouted and sang alternately. On the stairs from the stalls a man stood, dramatically addressing no one in particular.
The players courageously went through the whole piece. During this time several arrests were made and the police were kept busy operating between the doors and the hall. Just before the play ended I saw an opportunity to escape and took it. Almost everyone in the row where I had been sitting had vanished. I was able to make a dash for the door at the rear of the pit while the police were busy in the front of the house. My last impression of the scene was the sight of a figure standing on a seat somewhere about the centre of the stalls and the sound of a few bars of God Save the King, which were quickly stifled as someone pulled the singer down.
The play continued to be performed, and continued to generate riots and protests, garnering the attention of the world.
Synge died an early death, in 1909, but he left an indelible mark - not only on Ireland, but on theatre as a whole.
I'll end this post now, with a quote from Synge's beautiful book The Aran Islands (and I will post a photo, too, of Synge staring out into the Atlantic, from one of the Islands).
In the following excerpt, he describes leaving the Arans after a couple months' stay ... and returning to the bustle of Galway:
I have come out of an hotel full of tourists and commercial travellers, to stroll along the edge of Galway Bay, and look out in the direction of the islands. The sort of yearning I feel towards those lonely rocks is indescribably acute. This town, that is usually so full of wild human interest, seems in my present mood a tawdry medley of all that is crudest in modern life. The nullity of the rich and the squalor of the poor give me the same pang of wondering disgust; yet the islands are fading already and I can hardly realize that the smell of the seaweed and the drone of the Atlantic are still moving round them.
Happy birthday to Playboy of the Western World. This was bittersweet for me. I post stuff like this for one person in particular. And I do so still.
January 23, 2009
Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people
A couple years ago, my father told me to read this poem. It was one of his favorites.
Like Dolmens Round My Childhood, The Old People
by John Montague
Like dolmens round my childhood, the old people.
Jamie MacCrystal sang to himself,
A broken song without tune, without words;
He tipped me a penny every pension day,
Fed kindly crusts to winter birds.
When he died his cottage was robbed,
Mattress and money box torn and searched.
Only the corpse they didn't disturb.
Maggie Owens was surrounded by animals,
A mongrel bitch and shivering pups,
Even in her bedroom a she-goat cried.
She was a well of gossip defiled,
Fanged chronicler of a whole countryside:
Reputed a witch, all I could find
Was her lonely need to deride.
The Nialls lived along a mountain lane
Where heather bells bloomed, clumps of foxglove.
All were blind, with Blind Pension and Wireless,
Dead eyes serpent-flicked as one entered
To shelter from a downpour of mountain rain.
Crickets chirped under the rocking hearthstone
Until the muddy sun shone out again.
Mary Moore lived in a crumbling gatehouse,
Famous as Pisa for its leaning gable.
Bag-apron and boots, she tramped the fields
Driving lean cattle from a miry stable.
A by-word for fierceness, she fell asleep
Over love stories, Red Star and Red Circle,
Dreamed of gypsy love rites, by firelight sealed.
Wild Billy Eagleson married a Catholic servant girl
When all his Loyal family passed on:
We danced round him shouting "To Hell with King Billy,"
And dodged from the arc of his flailing blackthorn.
Forsaken by both creeds, he showed little concern
Until the Orange drums banged past in the summer
And bowler and sash aggressively shone.
Curate and doctor trudged to attend them,
Through knee-deep snow, through summer heat,
From main road to lane to broken path,
Gulping the mountain air with painful breath.
Sometimes they were found by neighbours,
Silent keepers of a smokeless hearth,
Suddenly cast in the mould of death.
January 20, 2009
"Having Confessed"
Having Confessed
by Patrick Kavanagh
Having confessed he feels
That he should go down on his knees and pray
For forgiveness for his pride, for having
Dared to view his soul from the outside.
Lie at the heart of the emotion, time
Has its own work to do. We must not anticipate
Or awaken for a moment. God cannot catch us
Unless we stay in the unconscious room
Of our hearts. We must be nothing,
Nothing that God may make us something.
We must not touch the immortal material
We must not daydream to-morrow's judgment—
God must be allowed to surprise us.
We have sinned, sinned like Lucifer
By this anticipation. Let us lie down again
Deep in anonymous humility and God
May find us worthy material for His hand.
January 17, 2009
Things I bought online in a fugue state on December 29
They are all arriving now, and it feels, already, like visitations from a ghost of the long-distant past.
-- The letters of Maud Gonne and WB Yeats
-- Maud Gonne's autobiography
-- Shane Leslie's memoirs
-- Conor Cruise O'Brien's memoirs
-- a collection of John Montague's poetry
-- the letters of James Joyce - an old copy from BEFORE the revelation of the "dirty letters". The preface seems cheerfully and unbelievably naive. There's almost a defensive quality to the writing, because you know the "dirty letters" were already known about, so the tone of the editor reeks of the man doth protesting too much. It was published right after Joyce's death.
-- Black List Section 8 by Francis Stuart
January 16, 2009
Scanning Friday
My boyfriend and I saw this as we drove through the Black Hills of South Dakota at dusk. We always regretted that we didn't stop in for a drink or a sandwich, but we were nervous about finding our campsite in those hills once we lost the light of day.
Seeing something like that in the middle of nowhere reminds me of the funny story Frank McCourt tells in 'Tis, his followup to Angela's Ashes. He is just off the boat, Irish, a young man in New York City ... and he wanders the streets ... looking for shamrocks. Of course they are everywhere, because Irish pubs are everywhere ... but any time he saw a shamrock, he knew he could enter and feel welcome. I do not have that immigrant experience but it's in my blood somehow, because even though I'm not into that whole kitschy Irish shamrock thing (I never wear green on St. Patrick's Day - my father drummed that rule into our collective skulls) - I do have an emotional response to it. It's welcoming. I know what it means.
I still love this picture. Glad we captured it. What a random joint. And NOTHING was around it. Just hills and trees and winding treacherous roads. I'd love to try and find it again. (And please. Don't ruin the magic by Googling and giving me the address or informing me that it has been demolished or that there's a Starbucks now, or whatever the case may be. That would ruin it. Only exception: If you actually live in the Black Hills and can tell me a personal story about that place, I would LOVE to hear it!)
But I think it would be best to just trip over it again ... randomly ... find it again, as if by accident, and you can bet that this time, whatever the hour of day, I would not pass on by. I would pull up my car, and stop in to have a cup of coffee and chat up the locals.
In any case, I like to imagine it is still there.
January 13, 2009
Cast a cold eye ...
... On life, on death
Horseman pass by
-- WB Yeats's epitaph
When we were small children, our dad made us memorize the epitaph in order to get part of our allowance (which was all of 75 cents). So all of us, ages 12 to 2, would stand there and chant in unison:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death
Horseman pass by!
You would KNOW this story, by the way, if you had read my essay in Sewanee Review, my first published piece - where I detail the entire allowance ritual set up by my father.
Not even a nuclear blast could knock Yeats's epitaph out of my brain.
This photo below is framed and on my desk.
December 30, 2008
Happy birthday to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Dubliners
But it was Portrait of the Artist which really firmed up his reputation as a writer. Portrait, a book broken up into five long chapters, details Stephen Dedalus' journey from unknowing unthinking participant of life to artist. In order for Stephen Dedalus to put on the wings of Icarus, so to speak, he had to divorce himself from his influences: family, politics, church, language, and country. James Joyce himself wrote:
I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning. ... I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.
Portrait is one of the most self-involved books of all time. Fatherland needed to be jettisoned. So did family. So did church.
It ends with the famous lines:
April 27 Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
It is that word - "artificer" - that is the clue to the book's power. What is art but artifice? This is not a bad thing in Joyce's lexicon. As a matter of fact, it is the whole point. It is the other things, the things we receive passively but without questioning (nationality, religion, our place in our own families) that are the true artificial entities ... Only art is real.
Then, naturally, 1922 brought the world Ulysses
Portrait is a huge accomplishment in and of itself, and it is best to look at it outside of the influence of Ulysses - because Ulysses is one of those things that casts such a long shadow in every direction - it's hard to see anything clearly. It's like trying to appreciate the other playwrights during Shakespeare's time (everyone besides Marlowe, I mean, who is great enough to be appreciated on his own). How does one get Shakespeare out of the way in order to appreciate the lesser accomplishments of his contemporaries? It's very difficult.
Kinda like that great quote from Bing Crosby, no slouch himself, on his contemporary rival Frank Sinatra: "Frank [Sinatra] is a singer who comes along once in a lifetime, but why did he have to come along in mine?"
Ulysses has the same effect - not just on Joyce's other writing, but on all other writers writing at that time (and they all knew it AS it was happening. Ulysses came out and it was like a bomb went off - the reverberations felt the world around).
I love Portrait of the Artist. I have read it many times, and each time I come to it I find something new. It's one of those books you can grow up with. At times in my life I find Stephen Dedalus frustrating. At other times I find him exciting, illuminating. It seems like the book changes with me. I also feel like I will never get to the bottom of the book. It's much more of a straight narrative than Ulysses (excerpt here) or Finnegans Wake (excerpt here) - but it still has a lot of mystery in it. It's not nonsensical - it's not mysterious for the sake of being mysterious - it's just that it's a deep deep pool. Joyce was beginning his internal journey, the one where he, as a writer, would try to break down what life actually felt like, moment to moment to moment ... For example, in the third chapter of Ulysses (excerpt here), Stephen Dedalus (again the protagonist) goes for a walk on the beach. We have learned in chapter one (excerpt here) that Dedalus has broken his glasses. Joyce does not remind us of this fact in chapter three. As a matter of fact, it never comes up again in the entire 800 page book. He mentions it just once. But in that walk on the beach, all of the sensations come to Dedalus as either blurry images or sound, just the way they would if you had lost your glasses. But Joyce doesn't spell it out, he does not say, "Having lost his glasses, Dedalus saw the world as blurry." Instead, he shows us this, he tries to put us inside that experience with lines like:
The dog's bark ran towards him, stopped, ran back again.
Brilliant. The dog itself is not seen clearly or perceived. But the dog's bark runs towards him, stops, and runs back again.
Ineluctable modality of the visible.
Joyce complained once:
"Why all this fuss and bother about the mystery of the unconscious? What about the mystery of the conscious? What do they know about that?"
Trying to describe and experience "the mystery of the conscious" was what Joyce's life-work was all about.
Here is an excerpt from the masterful Richard Ellman biography of Joyce
:
To write A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce plunged back into his own past, mainly to justify, but also to expose it. The book's pattern, as he explained to Stanislaus, is that we are what we were; our maturity is an extension of our childhood, and the courageous boy is father of the arrogant young man. But in searching for a way to convert the episodic Stephen Hero into A Portrait of the Artist, Joyce hit upon a principle of structure which reflected his habits of mind as extremely as he could wish. The work of art, like a mother's love, must be achieved over the greatest obstacles, and Joyce, who had been dissatisfied with his earlier work as too easily done, now found the obstacles in the form of a most complicated pattern.This is hinted at in his image of the creative process. As far back as his paper on Mangan, Joyce said that the poet takes into the vital center of his life "the life that surrounds it, flinging it abroad again amid planetary music." He repeated this image in Stephen Hero, then in Portrait of the Artist developed it more fully. Stephen refers to the making of literature as "the phenomenon of artistic conception, artistic gestation and artistic reproduction," and then describes the progression from lyrical to epical and to dramatic art:
The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the center of an epical event and this form progresses till the center of emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea ... The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life ... The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished.This creator is not only male but female; Joyce goes on to borrow an image of Flaubert by calling him a "god", but he is also a goddess. Within his womb creatures come to life. Gabriel the seraph comes to the Virgin's chamber and, as Stephen says, "In the virgin womb of the imagination, the word is made flesh."
Ellman goes on to discuss Joyce's structural choices for this book - much of it tied up with the fact that Nora (his wife) was pregnant at the time of writing:
His brother records that in the first draft of Portrait, Joyce thought of a man's character as developing "from an embryo" with constant traits. Joyce acted upon this theory with characteristic thoroughness, and his subsequent interest in the process of gestation, as conveyed to Stanislaus during Nora's first pregnancy, expressed a concern that was literary as well as anatomical. His decision to rewrite Stephen Hero as Portrait in five chapters occurred appropriately just after Lucia's birth. For A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is in fact the gestation of a soul, and in the metaphor Joyce found his new principle of order. The book begins with Stephen's father and, just before the ending, it depicts the hero's severance from his mother. From the start the soul is surrounded by liquids, urine, slime, seawater, amniotic tides, "drops of water" (as Joyce says at the end of the first chapter) "falling softly in the brimming bowl." The atmosphere of biological struggle is necessarily dark and melancholy until the light of life is glimpsed. In the first chapter the foetal soul is for a few pages only slightly individualized, the organism responds only to the most primitive sensory impressions, then the heart forms and musters its affections, the being struggles towards some unspecified, uncomprehended culmination, it is flooded in ways it cannot understand or control, it gropes wordlessly toward sexual differentiation. In the third chapter shame floods Stephen's whole body as conscience develops; the lower bestial nature is put by. Then at the end of the fourth chapter the soul discovers the goal towards which it has been mysteriously proceeding -- the goal of life. It must swim no more but emerge into air, the new metaphor being flight. The final chapter shows the soul, already fully developed, fattening itself for its journey until at last it is ready to leave. In the last few pages of the book, Stephen's diary, the soul is released from its confinement, its individuality is complete, and the style shifts with savage abruptness.
If you go back and read the book again (or if you haven't read it - and are reading it for the first time), keep in mind the underlying structure. It's subtle - it's all done through metaphor, imagery, and language - but it's there. The development of the soul is never described - it is experienced through Joyce's language choices. This is Joyce's main contribution to literature as we know it. No other writer even comes close to accomplishing what he did - although many imitate him. Many probably imitate him without even realizing who it is they are imitating, that is the level of Joyce's influence. But Joyce was imitating no one. He had many influences - his sense of the tide of literature is encyclopedic - but he knew he was breaking with the past. He didn't break with the past just to be a rebel, or because he thought the past was worthless. On the contrary. He wrote the best way he knew how. He said later, "With me, the thought is always simple." And this is true in the stories of Dubliners, and it's true in the "gibberish" of Finnegans Wake
Remember: Joyce was an Irishman. The Irish language had been stomped out by British imperialism. Whatever language he wrote in, and he wrote in English, he knew that it was not really his own. Joyce wrote:
"Ireland remains the brain of the United Kingdom. The British, judiciously practical and ponderous, furnish the over-stuffed stomach of humanity with a perfect gadget -- the water closet. The Irish, condemned to express themselves in a language not their own, have stamped on it the mark of their own genius and compete for glory with the civilized nations. This is then called English literature."
Joyce also said:
"I'd like a language which is above all languages, a language to which all will do service. I cannot express myself in English without enclosing myself in a tradition."
Portrait, without becoming polemical, without turning itself into Irish nationalistic propaganda (something Joyce had contempt for), describes one Irishman's journey to divorce himself from that tradition. Joyce wrote his books about Ireland, but they were not really FOR Ireland. The funny thing is: Joyce lived most of his life outside of Ireland. But he could not write about anything else. He had a lot of anger towards Ireland. My words there are not really appropriate. Anger? Try rage. The provincial nature of the culture, the priest-ridden social life (Joyce said, "In Ireland, Catholicism is black magic"), the inability of its inhabitants to live freely, to "touch one another" (not just sexually, altlhough he meant that as well) ... He knew he offended his countrymen by telling the truth about what really went on in Ireland, but he didn't care. First of all, he came to the realization at some point that "I can't write without offending people", and he also realized:
"It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass.
Rage.
Joyce got in there WITH the language - and made it do what he needed it to do. He said that he would like a language that is "above all other languages". And so he set out to create it. Shakespeare did the same thing. Chaucer did the same thing. This is the level we're at here: Writers who didn't just accept language as it is. Writers who, through their own work, catapulted language to another level. We cannot think about the English language without talking about Shakespeare. Or Chaucer. Joyce, with his status as an Irishman, had a lot of feelings about all of this - because the English language was imposed upon his country. It wasn't imposed on him personally - he grew up speaking English - but it was imposed on his ancestors, and he had internalized that cultural disconnect. This is one of the reasons why he felt that the Celtic revival of his time, and all of the Irish language classes that started popping up again, were so ridiculous. Why would Ireland want to go backwards? Religion and language were the things that were holding Ireland back in the first place. He, unlike Yeats, unlike Synge, unlike the other big writers of that time, had no interest in cavorting with the peasantry in the west of Ireland. Joyce was a city boy, first of all, strictly urban ... and his gaze was turned permanently towards Europe. His first big influence was Ibsen. Dubliners is filled with stories where the characters yearn to get out, to flee ... they stare at the boats in the quays (excerpt here), boats from places like Norway and Argentina (excerpt here), and they know that getting out is their only chance of soul-survival.
Most writers who come from countries who were colonized have these feelings about language - it's a very interesting dialogue. If he COULD express himself fully - it would have to be in some OTHER kind of language (which is where Finnegans Wake came from.) Language ITSELF needed an overhaul. Again - you can count the writers on one hand who actually have this sense about language - and who are actually genius enough to pull it off. Joyce rebelled against that tradition of language, but unlike lesser talents, he didn't rebel against it by ignoring or belittling Shakespeare, or the King James Bible, or Chaucer, all of the great influences on the English language. No. He accepted that tradition, and he took from it what he felt would help him, propel him ... He loved language, and puns, and derivations ... He felt there was a deeper meaning to all of it, something that was quite universal. By retreating into the Irish language, Joyce felt that the Irish were damning themselves to irrelevance.
But he never forgot that English was NOT, in fact, his "native" language. It propelled him forward. It helped him be free of his influences (but not without a struggle), it helped him write from the inside, as opposed to narrate from the outside. This is one of the reasons why you can tell, just by looking at the page, that something is by James Joyce. His stuff doesn't LOOK like other people's stuff. It is instantly recognizable, not just by sound, but by sight as well.
The first chapter of Portrait is told from the point of view of Stephen Dedalus as a small child. Instead of either making the child precocious and able to narrate his own tale (like most writers do when writing from the point of view of children), or just deciding, "what the hell, he's a child, but he will speak with MY voice" ... Joyce opens the book with a cascade of senses, sound, sounds, colors, random comments, strange connections, nursery rhymes ... He was writing AS a child. What it might be like to BE a child. It is an act of ventriloquism.
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckooHis father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
O, the wild rose blossoms
On the little green place.
He sang that song. That was his song.O, the green wothe botheth.
When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oilsheet. That had the queer smell.His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailor's hornpipe for him to dance. He danced:
Tralala lala,
Tralala tralaladdy,
Tralala lala,
Tralala lala.
Uncle Charles and Dante clapped. They were older than his father and mother but uncle Charles was older than Dante.Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Michael Davitt and the brush with the green velvet back was for Parnell. Dante gave him a cachou every time he brought her a piece of tissue paper.
The Vances lived in number seven. They had a different father and mother. They were Eileen's father and mother. When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen. He hid under the table. His mother said:
-- O, Stephen will apologize.
Dante said:
-- O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.--
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize,
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes.
Apologize,
Pull out his eyes,
Pull out his eyes,
Apologize.
This type of writing is par for the course now. Joyce's influence was as wide-spread as Marlon Brando's was in the world of acting. If you watch Streetcar now, it may not seem as revolutionary, because that is the style of acting practiced by pretty much everyone now (although without as much talent!). But that is only because of Brando's power and range in those early roles. He set the standard. There were others, of course, but his name will always be attached to that revolution in acting. Joyce's contemporaries - Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and others - were also working in the same vein as Joyce. This was not a singular journey, it was part and parcel of the mood of the time (same with Brando's new naturalistic style of acting).
As the book moves on, Stephen leaves childhood behind, and begins to open his eyes to the world around him. He is not immediately a rebel. On the contrary. He does not know yet that he is an artist. He is still a "young man". He wanders the streets of Dublin arguing about aesthetics and Aquinas with his friends. He resists, for some reason, signing petitions supporting Irish nationalism. The group will never be "for" Stephen Dedalus. Even before he knows who he is, he remains solitary, uncommitted. He will not be a joiner. Although he flirts with it. He becomes deeply religious in one chapter, terrified of the fires of hell (mainly because of his lustful thoughts and his masturbation). The pendulum swings to one side, and Dedalus feels he cannot keep up with his own sinning ... not enough praying in the world will make that sin vanish. The pendulum then swings back, and after the fire of religious piety fades, you get the sense it will never return. Dedalus has left it behind, shedding that self along his journey. He will now be free.
Language must also be jettisoned.
This is clearly shown in the "tundish scene", the most famous episode in the book. It is also (in my opinion) the most overtly angry, although you have to really pay attention ... Joyce requires you, the reader, to do some work here.
-- To return to the lamp, he said, the feeding of it is also a nice problem. You must choose the pure oil and you must be careful when you pour it in not to overflow it, not to pour in more than the funnel can hold.-- What funnel? asked Stephen.
-- The funnel through which you pour the oil into your lamp.
-- That? said Stephen. Is that called a funnel? Is it not a tundish?
-- What is a tundish?
-- That. The funnel.
-- Is that called a tundish in Ireland? asked the dean. I never heard the word in my life.
-- It is called a tundish in Lower Drumcondra, said Stephen, laughing, where they speak the best English.
-- A tundish, said the dean reflectively. That is a most interesting word. I must look that word up. Upon my word I must.
On the surface, that might seem like a benign moment. An intellectual moment. A moment of appreciating the difference of the languages and cultures. But that is a mistake with Joyce. If you take only the surface of it, you will never understand "what the big deal is" about this writer. Seen in its context, the "tundish scene" is one of the angriest moments in all of Irish literature, hell - all of literature, period. So yes, with Joyce, the "thought is always simple". In that scene, the English priest is unaware of the language of the country he actually lives in. It has never occurred to him that there might be another word for the "funnel", and he is fascinated by that prospect. But seen from the other side of the fence, the Irish side, the priest's ignorance of what his own culture has done to the culture it now sits upon, to know that a very fine word, "tundish", has been stomped out of existence ... and to have the priest be unaware of that fact, and also curious about it in mainly an intellectual way ...
It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Back to Ellman's analysis of the development of Portrait:
The sense of the soul's development as like that of an embryo not only helped Joyce to the book's imagery, but also encouraged him to work and rework the original elements in the process of gestation. Stephen's growth proceeds in waves, in accretions of flesh, in particularization of needs and desires, around and around but always ultimately forward. The episodic framework of Stephen Hero was renounced in favor of a group of scenes radiating backwards and forwards.1 In the new first chapter Joyce had three clusters of sensations: his earliest memories of infancy, his sickness at Clongowes (probably indebted like the ending of "The Dead" to rheumatic fever in Trieste), and his pandying at Father Daly's hands. Under these he subsumed chains of related mometns, with the effect of three fleshings in time rather than of a linear succession of events. The sequence became primarily one of layers rather than of years.In this process other human beings are not allowed much existence except as influences upon the soul's development or features of it. The same figures appear and reappear, the schoolboy Heron for example, each time in an altered way to suggest growth in the soul's view of them. E--- C---, a partner in childhood games, becomes the object of Stephen's adolescent love poems; the master at Clongowes reappears as the preacher of the sermons at Belvedere.2 The same words, "Apologise", "admit", "maroon", "green", "cold", "warm," "wet", and the like, keep recurring with new implications. The book moves from rudimentary meanings to more complex ones, as in the conceptions of the call and the fall. Stephen, in the first chapter fascinated by unformed images, is next summoned by the flesh and then by the church, the second chapter ending with a prostitute's lingual kiss, the third with his reception of the Host upon his tongue. The soul that has been enraptured by body in the second chapter and by spirit in the third (both depicted in sensory images) then hears the call of art and life, which encompass both without bowing before either, in the fourth chapter; the process is virtually compete. Similarly the fall into sin, at first a terror, gradually becomes an essential part of the discovery of self and life.
Now Stephen, his character still recomposing the same elements, leaves the Catholic priesthood behind him to become "a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everlasting life." Having listened to sermons on ugliness in the third chapter, he makes his own sermons on beauty in the last. The Virgin is transformed into the girl wading on the strand, symbolizing a more tangible reality. In the last two chapters, to suit his new structure, Joyce minimizes Stephen's physical life to show the dominance of his mind, which has accepted but subordinated physical things. The soul is ready now, it throws off its sense of imprisonment, its melancholy, its no longer tolerable conditions of lower existence, to be born.
1 It is a technique which William Faulkner was to carry even further in the opening section of The Sound and the Fury, where the extreme disconnection finds its justification, not, as in Joyce, in the haze of childhood memory, but in the blur of an idiot's mind. Faulkner, when he wrote his book, had read Dubliners and A Portrait; he did not read Ulysses until a year later, in 1930, but he knew about it from excerpts and from the conversation of friends. He has said that he considered himself the heir of Joyce in his methods in The Sound and the Fury. Among the legacies may be mentioned the stopped clock in the last chapter of A Portrait and in the Quentin section.
2 In both these instances Joyce changed the actual events. His freedom of recomposition is displayed also in the scene in the physics classroom in Portrait, where he telescopes two lectures, one on electricity and one on mechanics, which as Professor Felix Hackett remembers, took place months apart. Moynihan's whispered remark, inspired by the lecturer's discussion of ellipsoidal balls, "Chase me, ladies, I'm in the cavalry!" was in fact made by a young man named Kinahan on one of these occasions. In the same way, as JF Byrne points out in Silent Years, the long scene with the deean of studies in A Portrait happened not to Joyce but to him; he told it to Joyce and was later displeased to discover how his innocent description of Father Darlington lighting a fire had been converted into a reflection of Stephen's strained relations with the church.
The end of Portrait fractures. The narrative voice has left us. The story fragments into Dedalus' journal entries. He is now free from family, church, the pull of Ireland ... he is now free to go inward and see where his soul wants to go. The wings of Icarus. It has not been an easy journey. Becoming free never is. But Dedalus now sees that he is an artist, he does not know what that means - he hasn't even created anything yet ... but he is ready ... ready ... for whatever what will come next.
Portrait of the Artist is the launching-off point.
For Ulysses.
Here are the excerpts I posted from each chapter of Portrait:
Happy birthday, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. As with most other things, this book is so full of my father for me - that I can't tell where the book ends and my dad begins. He is woven into it. He taught me how to read it. He was there to talk with me about it when I wanted to talk, or ask questions. He showed me how to see.
Joyce, old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.
December 21, 2008
Maud Gonne: "the pilgrim soul"
Maud Gonne, Irish revolutionary, feminist, radical, and lifelong poetic muse of William Butler Yeats, was born yesterday in 1865. She married John MacBride (after a couple of notorious affairs and illegitimate children). John MacBride was an Irish nationalist who participated in the Easter Rising of 1916 and was executed by firing squad. Although Gonne and MacBride had apparently separated by the time of the Easter Rising, she wore mourning for the rest of her life. She was wedded to Irish nationalism. There was a bit of the death-cult about her.
Conor Cruise O'Brien writes in his memoir about Maud Gonne McBride:
When the husband, whom she loathed, was shot by a British firing squad after the Easter Rising, Madame MacBride - as she now came to be known - attired herself from head to toe in the most spectacular set of widow's weeds ever seen in Dublin, to which she returned from Paris in 1917. Her mourning for Major John MacBride was so intense that it lasted all the remaining years of her life (nearly forty of them), as far as outward appearances were concerned. I still remember her as I first saw her in that garb, about ten years later in Leinster Road, Rathmines. With her great height and noble carriage, her pale beaked gaunt face, and large lustrous eyes, and gliding along in that great flapping cloud of black, she seemed like the Angel of Death: or more precisely, like the crow-like bird, the Morrigu, that heralds death in the Gaelic sagas. That is how I think of that vision in retrospect; at the time I just thought: 'spooky'!
Seamus Heaney writes about the mystical connection W.B. Yeats shared with Maud Gonne (a connection that he had all his life):
And all the while, of course, there was Maud Gonne, "high and solitary and most stern" according to one of the poems about her, "foremost among those I would hear praised" according to another, and "the troubling of my life" according to a famous sentence in his Autobiographies. The passion she inspired - and as readers we experience it more as creative power than erotic need - made her a figure of primary poetic radiance, a Dublin Beatrice, an archetype as much as a daily presence. Nevertheless, Yeats's poetry, his politics and his involvement with the occult received an extra charge of intensity from her day to day reality in his life, and when she appeared in the title role of his subversive play Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), another kind of maturity was achieved.
They never married, although Yeats asked her multiple times. Later on in life, he even considered asking Gonne's daughter to marry him.
Yeats and Gonne met in 1889 and he would say later that that was the year that "the troubling of my life began". Yeats wrote 100s of poems for Maud Gonne.
While mainly remembered now as the eternal beloved of Yeats, she had a fascinating life in her own right. It was her birthday yesterday. On my father's shelf in his study is a thick book called MAUD GONNE and I pull it out this morning, snow outside the windows, in honor of her - and, by association, in honor of my father, who used to tell me stories about Yeats and Gonne. He knows everything about these people and when he tells their stories, they come alive. And I find that I have memorized his bookshelves in my mind. "Now wait a minute ... where is that Maud Gonne book??"
Samuel Levenson writes in his book:
No one who knew her in the days of her glory is now alive. But many Irish men and women recall her in her later years as one of Dublin's most extraordinary personalities - part eccentric, part heroine. They remember her as a tall, gaunt woman in black robes speaking on Dublin street corners about her current political or economic obsession. And they have not forgotten the stories they heard from their elders about her unconventional life in Paris, her constant cigarette smoking, the dogs and birds with which she surrounded herself, her affair with a French politician, her illegitimate children, her marriage to Irish patriot John MacBride, and the scandal of her separation from him.Some remember Maud Gonne's activities to house evicted tenant farmers, feed school children, aid political prisoners, find homes for Catholic refugees from Northern Ireland, establish a fully independent Irish Republic, and end partition between Northern and Southern Ireland. Few recall the names of the women's organizations and publications she founded, or the number of times she went to prison. And some confuse her with another tall Ascendancy woman who took up the Irish cause after a fling in Paris - the Gore-Booth girl, who came back with a Polish count named Markievicz. But they all know that the word "maudgonning" means agitating for a cause in a reckless flamboyant fashion.
Maud herself wished to be thought of as an Irish patriot. She was hailed in her lifetime as an Irish Joan of Arc, and would have been happy to be remembered as such for all time. A quarter of a century after her death, controversy surrounds the importance of her contributions to the Irish nation and its people. The scandal that still hovers around her name has grown dim. But it is neither her activities in Ireland's behalf, her unconventionality, nor her striking beauty that give her a place in history. It is, rather, the obsessive pursuit of her by the greatest poet of the era, William Butler Yeats. Her steadfast rejection of his proposals bit so deeply into his soul that he never ceased to fashion glorious poetry about her beauty, her talents, and the mystery of her personality. She was to Yeats what Beatrice was to Dante. And thus, Yeats made her a permanent figure of romance and myth throughout the English-speaking world.
Here is another of Yeats' "Gonne poems":
Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
by William Butler Yeats
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
On January 31, 1889, Yeats wrote to his friend John O'Leary, after having dinner with Maud:
"She is not only very handsome but very clever. Though her politics in European matters be a little sensational ... It was pleasant however to hear her attacking a young military man from India who was there, on English rule in India. She is very Irish, a kind of 'Diana of the Crossways.' Her pet monkey was making, much of the time, little melancholy cries at the hearthrug ... It was you, was it not, who converted Miss Gonne to her Irish opinions. She herself will make many converts."
On February 3, he wrote to Ellen O'Leary:
"Did I tell you how much I admire Maud Gonne? ... If she said the world was flat or the moon an old caubeen tossed up into the sky I would be proud to be of her party."
And so it began.
"The Arrow", one of the many poems Yeats wrote for Gonne, goes:
I THOUGHT of your beauty, and this arrow,
Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.
There's no man may look upon her, no man,
As when newly grown to be a woman,
Tall and noble but with face and bosom
Delicate in colour as apple blossom.
This beauty's kinder, yet for a reason
I could weep that the old is out of season.
Yeats mythologized her. Not just her beauty, but her essence, her soul. Gonne was right. It was a "spiritual union".
Gonne didn't have as clear a memory of their first meeting. At that point, she was far more formidable than he was. He was 23 years old, a young poet, a nobody. She had already lived in Paris, had become notorious, was at the forefront of the new movement that Yeats would eventually help champion.
Gonne's impressions of Yeats in that first meeting:
" ... a tall lanky boy with deep-set dark eyes behind glasses, over which a lock of dark hair was constantly falling, to be pushed back impatiently by long sensitive fingers, often stained with paint - dressed in shabby clothes ..."
They were never not in touch, through their long lives. They wrote long letters to one another, describing their dreams - wondering if the other had dreamt the same thing. In 1908, Gonne wrote to Yeats from Paris:
"I had such a wonderful experience last night that I must know at once if it affected you & how? At a quarter of 11 last night I put on this body & thought strongly of you & desired to go to you.”
Connection across the space-time continuum? They would experiment with it, wondering if the connection could be felt. I often think that unrequited love is far better for art than anything that works out. If Gonne had married Yeats, would he have written all of those poems? If he had ready access to her in a domesticated fashion ... would she have been elevated to such a poetic height? Perhaps Gonne sensed this herself. I don't know. It's not for me to know. All we have is their letters, and his poems.
25 years after that first meeting, Yeats would write:
I was twenty-three years old when the troubling of my life began. I had heard from time to time in letters from Miss O'Leary, John O'Leary's old sister, of a beautiful girl who had left the society of the Viceregal Court for Dublin nationalism. In after years I persuaded myself that I felt premonnitory excitement at the first reading of her name. Presently she drove up to our house in Bedford Park ... I had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty. It belonged to famous pictures, to poetry, to some legendary past. A complexion like the blossom of apples, and yet face and body had the beauty of lineaments which Blake calls the highest beauty because it changes least from youth to age, and a stature so great that she seemed of a divine race. Her movements were worthy of her form, and I understood at last why the poet of antiquity, where we would but speak of face and form, sings, loving some lady, that she paces like a goddess.
Samuel Levenson writes:
In his recollections, Yeats thought that there was, even at their first meetings, something in Maud's manner that was declamatory, "Latin in a bad sense," and possibly unscrupulous. She seemed to desire power for its own sake, to win elections for the sake of winning. Her goals were unselfish, he recalled, but, unlike the Indian sage who said, "Only the means can justify the end," Maud was ready to adopt any means that promised to be successful.He made two observations, which doubtless owe something to discoveries he made as their relationship progressed:
We were seeking different things: she, some memorable action for final consecration of her youth, and I, after all, but to discover and communicate a state of being ... Her two and twenty years had taken some color, I thought, from French Boulangist adventurers and journlist arrivistes of whom she had seen too much.Yeats remembered Maud Gonne as the herald of the movement to revive Celtic culture. "I have seen the enchanted day / And heard the morning bugles blow," he wrote in his manuscript book.
Jim Dwyer wrote in a recent New York Times article:
Until nearly the end of his days he and Gonne kept an eye on each other. In 1938 he wrote “A Bronze Head” about her frequent appearances at political funerals, a “dark tomb-haunter,” so transformed from the light, gentle woman of his memory.Almost from the beginning she had been a figure of memory. In the opening pages of the 1908 notebook he looked backward: “She said something that blotted away the recent past & brought all back to the spiritual marriage of 1898. She believed that this bond is to be recreated & to be the means of spiritual illumination between us. It is to be a bond of the spirit only.”
A Bronze Head
HERE at right of the entrance this bronze head,
Human, superhuman, a bird's round eye,
Everything else withered and mummy-dead.
What great tomb-haunter sweeps the distant sky
(Something may linger there though all else die;)
And finds there nothing to make its tetror less
i{Hysterica passio} of its own emptiness?
No dark tomb-haunter once; her form all full
As though with magnanimity of light,
Yet a most gentle woman; who can tell
Which of her forms has shown her substance right?
Or maybe substance can be composite,
profound McTaggart thought so, and in a breath
A mouthful held the extreme of life and death.
But even at the starting-post, all sleek and new,
I saw the wildness in her and I thought
A vision of terror that it must live through
Had shattered her soul. Propinquity had brought
Imagiation to that pitch where it casts out
All that is not itself: I had grown wild
And wandered murmuring everywhere, 'My child, my
child! '
Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall;
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave,
And wondered what was left for massacre to save.
Here is, perhaps, the most famous poem Yeats wrote for her. It is impossible for me to read this without tears coming to my eyes.
When You are Old
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
More on the fascinating Maud Gonne here.
December 9, 2008
Interviewing Benjamin Black
I cannot get enough of the John Banville / Benjamin Black thing. It makes me think of my father. Banville is one of his favorite writers. He turned me on to him.
Here is Part 1 of a 4-part interview with Benjamin Black. Not John Banville. Benjamin Black.
And here is Part 2.
I love how much FUN he's having. It really shows in those books.
"If you want to write noir fiction, Dublin in the 1950s is just the place for it.” says Benjamin Black.
Here are some of my other posts on Banville / Black:
John Banville / Benjamin Black
December 8, 2008
Speaking of Joyce:
A very interesting article about hearing writers read their own work, and the shock that can come hearing the actual voice.
The British Library has released a CD series of the recordings they have in their archives. Here's an article about it that makes me drool. That National Post article above made me think that Joyce had been included which made me think: "Huh. I have just one question. James Joyce was British? You're opening up a whole can of worms there, boyo. Kinda like the Russian Film Society inviting Jack Palance, a Ukrainian, to one of their awards shows. Not a good idea." But no - this is a collection of American and English writers, reading their own work, being interviewed, etc. Marvelous.
James Joyce has a brawling lilting Dublin voice that seems straight out of a book of stereotypes. Interesting: that the man lived the majority of his life outside Ireland, and yet the brogue remained thick as butter. Not surprising.
(I've put a clip of him reading from Finnegans Wake below the jump. It's TO DIE FOR.)
Here's a post I wrote about Finnegans Wake for anyone who is interested.
Happy birthday, Mary Gordon
Best-selling author Mary Gordon has her birthday today. I am particularly taken by Gordon's essay on James Joyce's "The Dead", which I post here.
Mary Gordon on James Joyce's "The Dead"It begins with a slap in the face. "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet."
Well, and did you fall for that one? Literally? Don't you know the difference between literally and figuratively? You're no better than Lily herself, are you? Or perhaps you're not Lily, but the garrulous speaker of the second paragraph, the platitude-spouting fool. "It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan's annual dance ... Never once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in splendid style as long as anyone could remember ... Though their life was modest they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the best bottled stout."
"The Dead" is built around a party, and for most of its duration we, like partygoers, swim in a clamor of voices, not only Gabriel's and the omniscient narrator's. Even Gabriel has many voices. There is the self-conscious Gabriel, the prissy Gabriel, the pompous Gabriel, the affectionate Gabriel, the lustful Gabriel. But many others speak: Miss Ivors, the political nettler; Mr. Browne with his forced jokes; Freddy Malins, who's just a little bit "screwed"; his mother, who tells us everything is "beautiful", including the fish her son-in-law caught in Scotland and had boiled for their dinner by the innkeeper. There is the novelettish voice of such sentences as "Aunt Kate was making frank use of her handkerchief," and the society-page gabble of "the acclamation which followed was taken up beyond the door of the supper-room by many of the other guests and renewed time after time." There is Aunt Julia's voice singing "Arrayed for the Bridal" and Bartell D'Arcy's singing "The Lass of Aughrim." There is the voice of Patrick Morkan, Gabriel's grandfather, imitated by Gabriel: the very model of a stuffy twit when his horse makes a fool of him by walking round and round the statue of the King: "Go on, sir! What do you mean, sir? ... Most extraordinary conduct! Can't understand the horse!"
To add to the tumult, Joyce offers us a series of lists, giving us information we have no need of: things that are only there for the pleasure of their naming. Guests are introduced briefly, for the sound of their names: Mr. Bergin, Mr. Kerrigan, Miss Power, Miss Furlong, Miss Daly. There are the secondhand booksellers on the Dublin quays: Hickey's on Bachelor's Walk, Webb's and Massey's on Aston's Quay, O'Clohissey's in the by-street. And, most important, the meal spread out before us, like Homer's catalogue of ships. Followed by dessert, the sweetmeats joined together by their jumpy integument of "and's".
This is the hubbub of realism, the buzz and Babel of the nineteenth century. Words, words, words, talk talk talk, and in so many voices, such an abundance that of course there must be misunderstandings and mistakes. "The Dead" is chock full of mistakes, beginning with Gabriel's ill-considered joshing of Lily about her beau, to which she replies, "The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you." Twice, Aunt Julia misunderstands: she doesn't know what galoshes are and doesn't get Gabriel's reference to the Three Graces. Browne repeatedly calls Freddy Malins Teddy and embarrasses the young ladies by telling the kind of joke they don't like. Errors of tone abound. Gabriel takes the wrong tone in responding to Miss Ivors's political challenge, and he mistakes the pressure of her hand for a conciliatory gesture, when it is really a prelude to her standing on tiptoe to whisper into his ear: "West Briton." Aunt Kate offers an ill-considered criticism of the pope's decision to banish women from choirs in favor of young boys, and she is chastised for doing this in the presence of Mr. Browne, who is of "the other persuasion". A conversation about monks sleeping in their coffin is dropped because it is too "lugubrious". And Freddy is ready to pick a fight in defense of a black opera singer whom no one, in fact, has criticized. "And why couldn't he have a voice too? Is it because he's only a black?"
The mistakes and misunderstandings seem to be smoothed over by Gabriel's speech in praise of his aunts and cousin, whom he compliments for their hospitality, their harmoniousness. There is the bustle of leave-taking, when Freddy Malins and Mr. Browne can't make the cabdriver understand them, and everyone shouts directions from the door, only adding to the confusion. Finally, the cab takes off, and upstairs there is the sound of music.
In the quiet surrounded by music, Gabriel sees his wife standing on the stairs. "There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of."
We usually think of mistakes as affairs of language, a by-blow of the very separateness that causes us to wish to communicate with one another. But what Gabriel perceives and tries to create in silence -- a woman who is a symbol -- constitutes the central mistake both of his life and of the story. He assumes that the light in her eyes and the color on her cheeks have to do with him, as he will later assume that she has understood his desire for her and shared it. In his silent creation of Gretta -- a creation brought about without a word from her -- Gabriel has misconstrued the woman he has lived beside. Just as the narrator refers to Gretta only as Mrs. Conroy or Gabriel's wife, Gabriel assumes that Gretta's whole identity is connected to him. It is only after she speaks what is in her heart, after she tells her story, that the vision which both takes in and transcends separateness can occur.
She tells him of a boy she knew as a young girl in the West Country, a boy who died for love of her. Afterward, she sleeps. And in this silence, the silence which comes after true speech, Gabriel is transformed from petty if dutiful pedant to a man of vision.
The process happens in stages. He is dully angry, and this anger rekindles his lust. He is jealous. He is ironic. He feels humiliated, seeing himself as far less than the boy who died for her. When he speaks, his voice is "humble and indifferent," the humility and indifference Joyce thought to be the necessary conditions of the true artist. Then he is terrfied at the "impalpable and vindictive being ... coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world." He notes that Gretta's not as young as she used to be and feels disgust for the reality of her body, represented by her petticoat string and the limp upper of her boot.
He thinks of his Aunt Julia's impending death, and this thought, born of benevolence, leads him to understand that to be alive is to be in the process of becoming a shade. Tears fill his eyes, and his blurred physical vision allows him to imagine the dead boy -- a shade, to be sure, but standing near, under a dripping tree. Gabriel loses himself, that distinct and separate self by which he has been able to be named. He is among the dead.
"His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world in itself which these had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling." What a strange word, the word "reared". What does it imply? That the dead have nurtured the world we think of as the real one as parents "rear" a child, feeding it, sheltering it, educating it, until it is ready to leave them?
Gabriel's vision takes him to the graveyard where the boy is buried. The snow is falling. In the extraordinary last paragraph of "The Dead", the word "falling" is repeated seven times: seven, the theologically magic number, the number of the seven deadly sins, the seven moral virtues, the seven corporal and spiritual works of mercy.
The vagueness of the flickering shades subsides. Gabriel sees the snow on "the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns," those singular sharp things asserting, inexorably, their individuality, their separateness from their fellows. But the snow that is falling generally falls on them all alike and muffles their sharpness, their distinctness. "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
Consider the daring of Joyce's final repetitions and reversals: "falling faintly, faintly falling" -- a triumph of pure sound, of language as music. No one has ever equaled it; it makes those who have come after him pause for a minute, in awed gratitude, in discouragement. How can any of us come up to it? Only, perhaps, humbly, indifferently, in its honor and its name, to try.
And he did it all when he was twenty-five. The bastard.
Brilliant. My dad loved that last line, too.
November 29, 2008
Exeunt
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
-- King Lear, Shakespeare (spoken by Albany or by Edgar, depending on the version you read. They are the final lines of the play)
My father and I share a love of marginalia. I suppose I inherited it from him. He would pull down one of his books from the shelf and point out to me the markings that so-and-so had made, and what it might mean. At a certain level, marginalia becomes not an annoyance, an intrusion from a bossy reader - but something that makes the book priceless. Like Thomas Jefferson's cross-outs and markings on his draft of the Declaration of Independence.
This morning, at about 5:30, he asked me to look for a book for him. "It'll be on the top shelf. It's a Shane Leslie book." I stared at the shelf, scared that I wouldn't be able to find it. Dad said, "They're all Shane Leslie books up there." Oh, okay, so that makes it a bit simpler. I pulled down the first five books from the shelf. "Open them to the title page and let me see," said Dad. I opened the first one, he took one glance, "Nope, that's not it." Hysterical. He could tell in a second. I opened the second one. Nope. Third one. Nope. Fourth one. Nope. Fifth one ... BINGO.
On the title page of this book (The Passing Chapter) was a quote from King Lear, the one above. Dad showed me how on the page before there was a stamp - someone had stamped the book to show ownership. It was from a Jesuit house (in Ireland) called St. Ignatius (naturally). Okay, so I'm oriented as to what I am looking at. The book was published in 1934, and a Jesuit house obviously had the book in their library.
Now back to the title page.
The quote from Lear sat there beneath the title, in smaller typeface. But it read like this:
The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel and what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.
Instead of "comma NOT what we ought to say" - the typo made it all one thought, as though one part of the sentence agreed with the other (when it does not, in the original). The original is a sentence of diametrical opposites, it pits one way of being against another. That is the point of the "comma not". But the typo took away the comma and replaced "not" with "and". The typo completely negates the sentiment.
But here is what my dad wanted to show me:
The Jesuit had crossed out the word "and" and had put the word "not" over to the side - in pencil. He hadn't even made it into the book itself before the typo had immediately become apparent to the learned Jesuit, and he had to correct it.
I love that man.
There were markings in pencil through the rest of the book, and my dad (who has given papers on Shane Leslie, and also bibliography and marginalia) had put on the blank first page a list of page numbers where the markings occurred. We looked through those as well. These were more your standard markings - paragraphs marked with an X, sentences underlined (all in pencil) - but it is the stunning correction of a typo and what it all signifies that interests my father, and interests me.
Dad said, "Here's this Jesuit - he hasn't even gotten into the book yet - and he notices a typo on the title page ..."
And not just a typo, but a word-change which totally alters and irons out the original meaning.
It MUST be "not", it cannot be "and". If it is "and" then it becomes a benign toothless saying on a cross-stitch wall-hanging. Nothing threatening, nothing really profound, the equivalent of "I'm okay, you're okay." If it is "not" then it has teeth, it has life, it is a difficult profundity - full of grace and tragedy, and it makes demands on you the reader (or, listener, as Shakespeare would have thought of it). It is a command. It indicts those who feel they must speak "what they ought to say" in hard moments, when the "weight of sad times" buries them. If you speak what you feel "you ought to say" in those moments, then no, you are not "obeying" the weight of sad times. It is when you have the courage to "speak what you feel" in such moments that you can come close to touching divinity, to the eternal. There is much we can never understand, especially those of us who are young, who "shall never see so much", but at least we can decide to not be "polite" in sad times and speak only the accepted words. Even if we are young, we can decide to speak what we feel. And that is what it means to truly "obey".
The Jesuit's note of correction has all of that in it.
It makes my dad's copy of the book an important one.
November 17, 2008
From Cork to Kinsale
I was working on a piece yesterday that reminded me of something I had written on the blog a couple of years ago, after Allison and I came back from our trip to Ireland. Thought I would post it again with a couple of wee edits.
We were headed for Kinsale. We were very close, only 20 or so miles away. We knew our way to Cork, and after that, all we knew was: we needed to head almost directly south. And there would be Kinsale.
In our dreams.
I was Driver at this point, and Allison was Navigator. It was dark now. It was about 6:00 pm, and I had promised Jimmy at the B&B in Kinsale that we would be there by 7, because he had to leave at 7. Cork, obviously, is a city, and I find that driving in the city is far more stressful than a long inter-county roadway, even with all the roundabouts. So we pretty much promptly got lost. We didn't know where we were, or how to get where we were going, etc. I also had to pee. So I did one of those highly dreaded RIGHT HAND TURNS and we pulled into a gas station.
Allison asked a young guy pumping gas for directions. (One thing: I found, in my experience over there, that the Irish are incapable of giving bad directions. We got absolutely awesome directions from no matter who we asked, but this particular time was particularly good)
The young guy started telling Allison where she needed to go to get to Kinsale, and then almost immediately stopped himself. "My mother's inside - we should wait for her to come out. She's great at directions."
Boy, was she ever.
Allison and I LOVED these people.
This mother was so unbelievably generous with us, she gave us sterling directions, and we didn't realize how sterling they were until we were on the road again, and at every single point when we COULD have got confused, then there would come the landmark she had told us about, with tips on what to do and how to handle it.
"Wait - where are we?"
"Oh ... there's the river and the trees ... she told us we'd see that when we came round the bend ... this is the right way ..."
She even got into our heads, in anticipation of what we might be thinking at any certain point. "Now, you're probably gonna think that you should bear to the left, but that is not the case. Keep goin' straight. Stay firm."
She drew us an awesome map. Her son hung around with us, too, validating his mother. "Yeah, that's right ... then you go through the Tunnel ... right ..."
Oh, and a sidenote about Americans driving in Ireland: a couple weeks before we arrived, two Americans were driving along somewhere in Ireland, blithely on the wrong side of the road, and crashed head-on into a car coming the other way. This is probably not noteworthy at all, as Americans are always driving on the wrong freakin' side of the road all over Europe (there were stickers placed throughout the car reminding us in panicky huge letters to "DRIVE LEFT"), but what made this one kind of funny (and it was mentioned to us time and time again during our travels) was that the car they crashed into was being driven by a Minister of Parliament. Everyone kind of cackled with glee over that one. "Did ya hear about those Americans who crashed into the Minister of Parliament??" Again, it's not funny because the two Americans (in their tiny car) were badly hurt while the Minister of Parliament, in his enormous official car, was untouched. I believe the Americans are still in the hospital.
So the lady we met at the gas pump in Cork was the first person on our journey to tell us about the Americans crashing into the Minister of Parliament. She would not be the last.
We stood by the gas pumps, as she drew her map, all of us chatting up a storm: how did we find it driving on the other side of the road, where have we been, what our plans were. "Oh, you'll love Kinsale. It is very sweet indeed." We also chatted quite a bit about something that she called "the hairy roundabout", which was basically between Cork and Kinsale. She gave us profuse warnings about this "hairy roundabout", and put the fear of God into us. It was south of Cork, and apparently many many many cars have crashed there, it is a notoriously dangerous roundabout, famous all over Ireland, and she made it sound like a shrieking chaos of hell. She reiterated to us endlessly: We had to get ourselves into a certain lane, otherwise we would get stuck in the roundabout forever.
And we followed her instructions to the letter, and lo and behold, we were in Kinsale at 7:01. With poor Jimmy waiting for us at the door. Not too shabby!
As we stood around the car, and she walked us through the directions, another car drove up. She glanced up and waved. Informed us, "That's my husband."
Then another car pulled up to one of the other pumps, she waved to the driver of that car, and informed us, "If I weren't married to my husband, I'd be married to him."
And one by one, all of these various people - her husband, and the guy she'd be married to if she wasn't married to her husband, joined our little coterie and looked at the map, and gave us suggestions, adding detail and contrast to what was already there. We were a small jovial party by Gas Pump # 2.
Our ring-leader woman would introduce us to every new arrival: "These two American girls are trying to get to Kinsale ..."
Every new arrival informed us of the "Americans crashing into the Minister of Parliament". And every new arrival put the fear of God into us about "the hairy roundabout".
More suggestions came in, adding, clarifying, until we had the most specific set of directions EVER GIVEN for a 20 mile drive. She even gave us emotional directions for "the hairy roundabout":
"Just stay calm ... stay calm ... get yourselves in the right lane, and stay calm ..."
Allison and I drove off waving hail and farewell (or should I say Ave atque vale) to all of our new-found friends at the gas station in Cork.
After making our way successfully through the "hairy roundabout" (we did yoga breathing to stay calm, and yes, it was just as bad as she had warned), we started to see signs, finally, for Kinsale. Our destination. We had time constraints. Jimmy needed to go somewhere at 7, and so we needed to reach the B&B before then.
Allison drove us to Kinsale. The road was a two-way road, and yet by US standards, the road was only big enough to for one car. Thankfully, everyone still pretty much drives very small cars over there because an SUV on this road would be an utter disaster. The headlights shrieked up at us through the dark, the road was winding, it was night-time, there were no street lamps, and a line of cars stretched out behind us because we were driving so slowly (Allison: "I'm sorry, I just can't drive any faster than this." Me: "You do what you need to do. They can just wait.") we were a bit stressed.
The "hairy roundabout" had chafed our nerves tremendously.
But then, at last, Kinsale. I could smell the salt air when I rolled down the window, so I knew we were very close. We still needed to find our way to Jimmy's B&B, but from our street map of Kinsale the Town, it seemed like a pretty wee place, not too difficult to navigate.
It was now 6:50.
We immediately found ourselves in the middle of town, which was so adorable that it made my heart ache. I mean, we had heard about the quaintness and the beauty of Kinsale, and I had been there as a young girl, only retained no memory of it, but the reports of its beauty were almost under-played. It is one of the sweetest prettiest places I have ever seen. However, we could not ogle the sights, or the harbor, because we had to find Jimmy. Time was running out.
Randomly, we took a left-hand turn, and as we both glanced to our right, we saw an odd sight. We saw a line of people stretching down the sidewalk, there had to be hundreds of people (not an exaggeration) clustered along the street, all standing in line. But for what?
Allison wondered, "Is that a night-club or something?"
But ... it was only 6:51? A line into a nightclub at 6:51? In Kinsale?
We left that mystery behind us, drove around for a bit, on streets that were teeny, lined with shops, sudden curves, sudden hills, all adorable, but confusing, with no street signs.
At last, we asked a couple of people for directions. True to form, they gave us awesome directions. Directly to Jimmy's door. They knew Jimmy. Of course they did. "Give 'im my best, won't you girls?"
The B&B was right next to a massive Catholic church, and we parked in the church parking lot. It was 7:01. I could see a man standing in the golden glow of lamplight coming out of the open door of the B&B, and cried, "That's Jimmy!" There was a wintry breath in the air, the bite of the nearby water, a different feeling in the air than the windy mountainous energy of Wicklow. The moon was high, and waxing. Beautiful. Soaring above the church.
Allison and I left our bags in the car and ran up the steps of the B&B, apologizing. "I am so sorry - we truly thought we would be here at 7!"
Jimmy, of course, was lovely, kind, understanding. "I know how it is ... time when you're traveling and all that ..."
He said to us, "There's a funeral next door tonight at 7 ... A local guy died, so I'm going to go over to go to the funeral, and I'll be back in about half an hour..."
Good Lord, I felt like an ass. I had assumed he was maybe going out with friends. Instead, he had to go to a funeral. Jesus.
I said, "God, I am so sorry."
"Oh, no problem, Sheila, no problem ... You're fine parked where you are. Why don't you bring your bags in now, so that you won't have to walk through the procession ..."
I wasn't sure what he was talking about, but Allison and I went back to our car, shivering in the night-cold, to grab our bags.
And then came the procession he had told us about.
The "procession" was the huge crowd of people we had seen in the center of town.
We found out later that what happened was: they all gathered at the funeral home, almost the entire town, down on Market Street, and then walked, as a group (hundreds and hundreds of people) up to the church.
Allison and I didn't feel right walking through the funeral procession with our bags, so we stood back, in the shadows, and just watched.
It was cold enough to see everyone's breaths. The hearse had led the way, and then stopped outside the church. The procession, which filled the street in front of the B&B, and then curved away out of sight and down the hill, the procession must have been half-a-mile long, stood quietly, stamping in the cold, hands in pockets, clouds of frosty breath in the air. There were old people, little children, there were couples holding hands, there were teenagers with their parents. Everyone was there. Holding rosary beads, mass cards.
The coffin was lifted out of the hearse, and the pall-bearers lifted it up over their heads, so that it appeared to float through the air, and then they walked it up the long ramp into the lit-up brick church.
The procession didn't move, they had all halted as one to stand watch as the coffin was carried into the church. I could hear prayers being murmured, people crossed themselves. Everything trembled with silence and intensity. Allison and I were frozen to the spot.
We had come across a private moment. The private moment of a small community. Not for outsiders. The inner life of the small town revealed to us, observers. A rarity indeed. We didn't want to intrude, or break it up, or ignore it. We just watched.
When the gleaming coffin had floated its way into the church, the procession started to move. And that's when we really saw how many people there were. The line just kept coming from around the corner, as everyone walked up the steps and into the church for the funeral. More people just kept coming, silently, respectfully, maybe you would hear the chatter of a child here and there, but for the most part ... silence.
Jimmy later told me all about the man who had died. He was only 62, he was a musician, and played with a number of local bands. He knew everyone in town. He hadn't even been sick, but apparently he fell down over the summer, and X-rays revealed that he was riddled with cancer. Nothing to be done at that point, really, and he died in November.
Allison and I kept coming back to it, over the rest of our journey. "Member the funeral in Kinsale?" We felt that we had witnessed something very special, very private. I felt honored to be there, but also a little bit like it wasn't something for us to witness. All we could do was stand back, and be quiet and still. It was a town mourning its dead. With throngs and throngs and throngs of quiet chilly people coming up the hill, around the corner, up the hill, around the corner, up the hill ... in an endless flood.
November 14, 2008
"Forgive my being silent: after Wilde, I only exist a little."
So wrote André Gide in a letter to Paul Valéry in 1891, after meeting Oscar Wilde in Paris.
The effect Wilde had on Gide, a young man of about 20 at the time, was tremendous and could, ultimately, have destroyed Gide. Wilde's effect was so unbalancing that it took away Gide's voice. He could not write, he could barely think anymore. He trusted nothing, all of the things he thought were true he now saw were not. He did not know which end was up. He had a nervous breakdown, I suppose, although he eventually recovered (obviously. He won the Nobel Prize in 1947) Gide remained a friend of Wilde - although a distant cautious one - until the end. Whatever his tendencies were already (Gide's), they were not 'set' and neither, of course, were Wilde's, who delighted in contradictions. To someone who is a bit more rigid, perhaps, or who is looking for the answer - (not to mention living in a society that requires, expressly, that you not be who you really are) to meet someone who "delights in contradictions" can be a ruinous event. It nearly was for Gide.
Oscar Wilde's epigrams are wonderful, cutting, funny - still surprising - and his plays are still sell-outs over a century after he first wrote them - but I think in many ways we all 'only exist a little" after Wilde, there is still something so brilliant about him that it is hard to get my mind around it. It's inconsistent, at times, and there's some balderdash (the opening paragraph of Dorian Gray for example) - but the body of the work is extraordinary, and the willingness to delve deep into the contradictions of his age (and, of course, of future ages, of our age) and let two things co-exist at the same time STILL strikes me as a bit dangerous. There is STILL something truly subversive about him. (To me, "subversive" is a compliment.) His goal is to upend convention. That's all fun and good when it means curling your hair when everyone else wears it straight ... but how far will one go? How far will society let you take it?
In his contradictions, in the way he closes his epigrams with exactly the OPPOSITE of what you would expect, lies the assumption that all of society's rules and morals are up for interpretation. You can believe in that crap as "true" if you want, but Wilde will stand there, shrugging his shoulders at you languidly, and go on doing what he wants to do, and that could cause outrage in conventional people - because it wasn't so much that he flouted convention, it was that he refused to believe in the reality of those conventions in the first place. Subversive stuff. An example of his epigrams and how they start out one way, and set you up - the reader - into thinking, "Oh yes, I know where we're going" - and then he pulls the rug out, but elegantly, smoothly. Not to mention the fact that the sentiment itself is slightly unbalancing, unsettling ...
To win back my youth ... there is nothing I wouldn't do - except take exercise, get up early, or be a useful member of the community.
If all of society behaved in the way he described here, we would all be lost. But that was part of his point. And that was part of why Gide felt so silenced after meeting him for the first time.
But - on the other hand - there is a kindness in Wilde which cannot be denied. I think people often characterize him as a shallow dandy who was "brought down" into the muck, but I don't find that to be accurate. Yes, he was the promoter of the aesthetic movement, and counseled people on what books to read and how to dress and interior decorate, but it was always for a deeper purpose. Also, anyone that funny could not be shallow. His kindness is not there so much in his early plays, and certainly not there in Salomé, but as a person - he was generous, patient, and unbelievably strong in the face of relentless viciousness. He handled the insults with good humor, skewering his opponents - until he finally came across someone (the damned 9th Marquess of Queensberry, a pox on his soul) who could not be stopped, who had a chip on his shoulder the size of the entire British Isles, and who was determined to "save" his fairy son from further corruption. (Meanwhile, and this I had not known - one of the Marquess' OTHER sons had also been caught in a compromising relationship with another male, and had killed himself - right around the time that Queensberry started harassing Oscar Wilde. So. Imagine. This short angry little man - who, I'm sorry, probably had some "tendencies" himself, his response is so vicious, so out of proportion - had two gay sons, both of whom were living in an openly gay manner, in 1895. TWO sons? Unthinkable! It had to have pushed all this guy's buttons. Not to mention the fact that also right around this time, his second wife had divorced him, claiming publicly that his penis was too small for effective intercourse, and also that he was impotent, that the marriage had remained unconsummated. So. Make of that what you will. His unresolved issues ruined another man's life - a man whose writing I happen to cherish, so I've got zero sympathy for the guy.)
And so Wilde found himself a pawn in a fiery family struggle between father (Marquess of Queensberry) and son (Lord Alfred Douglas). Lord Douglas was no shrinking violet in this, Lord Douglas was the main instigator, pushing Wilde further and further into it, forcing the confrontation, glorying in the fact that his famous lover was "sticking it to dear old Dad". Wilde, too, who had two pretty extraordinary people as parents (look them up. Amazing people.) just did not approve of how the Douglas family treated one another. Lord Douglas would send telegrams to his father, saying stuff like, "You are a silly stupid man" and Wilde would just shake his head and remark, "You shouldn't talk to a parent like that." Imagine the generosity of this. Here he is talking about a man who is threatening to ruin him, who leaves notes under his front door calling him a "sodomite" and every other nasty name in the book, who stages protests outside productions of plays Wilde has written - who is doing everything possible to make Wilde miserable - and here Wilde is, chiding the son for talking to his father in a disrespectful manner. He had class, that's why.
He, a man of exquisite manners and taste, who loved his parents and remained close to his mother all the days of his life (his father passed away much earlier) found himself embroiled in a brou-haha that would ruin him completely. Fate, doom, whatever you want to call it. Wilde was not an innocent bystander in any way... he had invited Lord Douglas into his life and, therefore, by proxy, invited the Marquess into his life who would ruin everything ... but Wilde (unlike Douglas) was not a vindictive person. Wilde knew Douglas could ruin him. Perhaps that was part of the thrill. The beautiful dangerous boy and all that. In reading about Wilde, in reading about all of the literary spats he got into, all of the verbal sparring with current authors of the day - I never feel that he is vindictive. Or cruel. He is clever, and intelligent - and yes, often merciless - but never needlessly cruel.
So to see the cruelty that was heaped upon him at the end ... it's just awful.
It's very rare that a biography can bring me to tears. Patricia Bosworth's biography of Montgomery Clift
I just finished Richard Ellmann's biography of Oscar Wilde 
Now, the last 5 years of Oscar Wilde's life are horrifying enough to make a person tremble and cross herself in fervent thanks that none of it happened to her, but it is Ellmann's deep compassion (not to mention intelligent piecing-together of events, through letters and diary entries) that brought it so vividly before my eyes that I found tears streaming down my face. I know the story of his downfall, I know the series of truly unfortunate events, but not to the detailed extent I do now. The court transcripts are included in the book, the letters written from prison ...
It's one of the most moving books I've ever read.
Ellmann is spectacular (as I already know - since I've read his biography of James Joyce
But more than anything right now, I'm left really sad. Sad for the suffering of a fellow human being in 1897, 1898. I cannot even imagine his torment, and I have tears in my eyes now as I type this out.
So forgive my being silent: after Wilde, I only exist a little.
"...you aren't so much trying to describe it as trying to locate it."
Wonderful interview of Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll.
One of my favorite excerpts from the interview:
I had no particular gift for writing what were called "compositions", and no particular enjoyment of it. But I do remember a moment, early on at St Columb's, when the topic was "A Day at the Seaside" and I made a connection between the performative student in me and a more inward creature, the writer-in-waiting, if you like. In the middle of the list of usual, expected activities such as diving and swimming, neither of which I could do, I wrote about going into an amusement arcade to escape from a shower and being depressed by the wet footprints on the floor and the cold, wet atmosphere created by people in their rained-on summer clothes. This had actually happened to me, so the image and the recording of it had a different feel. Something in me knew that I was on the right, intimate track - but it took me years to follow up.
And I love his bit about trying to locate it.
A new book is coming out, a compilation of interviews with Seamus Heaney (and he's a wonderful interview, juicy, intelligent - always leaves you with something to chew on). I've seen him read a couple of times, once in a nearly empty classroom at NYU in the middle of the afternoon ... and he's wonderful "live". Just wonderful. Funny, mischievous, and sharp.
November 8, 2008
Speaking of Mickey Rourke and the Irish:
Oh were we? Yes, we were. Where were YOU?
In this post about Laurette Taylor and her comeback, MrG and I start to discuss Mickey Rourke in the comments, and the possibility of his giant comeback - which seriously, if it actually happens, will be like a man resurrecting himself from the dead. But we started to talk about what roles would be wonderful - in a perfect world - for him (we were thinking of the stage, primarily). I was leaning towards Tennessee Williams (mainly because of the Laurette Taylor connection) - but MrG brought up O'Neill, which struck me as really insightful - he'd be wonderful in any of O'Neill's rough "plays of the sea", where the characters are rough around the edges, tormented, macho, tender ... all that crap that Rourke has going on in spades, but I have now decided that 10 years from now Mickey Rourke must play James Tyrone in Long Days Journey Into Night - BEAR WITH ME - (excerpt here) - just try to picture it, try to see it, and you will see how brilliant the idea is. Anyway, I'm going to fantasize about it with or without your permission. He couldn't do it now, he needs to be in his 60s ... but the thought of him playing that ruined bear of an actor, a man who sold out his divine talent to perform in TRASH only for the money, a man in denial about his own pain and his own contributions to his family's pain ... a man who can't even deal with the fact that he 'coulda been a contendah' in the theatre, if he had just had the courage to not sell out ... not to mention the man's staunch Irish Catholicism, which Rourke also shares, and the battle with alcoholism ... it's all there.
Well, frankly, it must happen, that's all.
I'm on it.
How else do you get things done in this universe except by putting the idea out there?? (Of course it would be wonderful if I could also do that for my OWN life, as opposed to focusing on what Mickey Rourke should be doing 10 years from now ... but that's besides the point. We all need our fantasies to get us through the dark moments, and I'm going to be fantasizing about an aging Mickey Rourke playing the bitter failed Irish patriarch if that's all right with you.)
November 7, 2008
Ludicrous (and not so ludicrous) things about Prayer For the Dying
This was the film where Mickey Rourke played an IRA terrorist, haunted by an explosion gone awry, who now wants out of the terror business - but oh, it won't be that easy, will he? There is just one more job for him to complete, and then he will be granted a Visa and a passage to America, and a whole new life. He is tormented, he is torn - but what can he do??
This was also the film that Rourke famously disowned after it came out, saying he had wanted to make a serious movie about "the Troubles" and the director had fucked it all up. Way to make friends, Mickey. But Rourke was never in this thing to make friends. He might be NOW, but that's because he has been deeply chastened and punished by the business that once celebrated him so highly. At the time of Prayer for the Dying, he was at the top of his game. The movie flopped (not a surprise) and Rourke went off on the powers that be. You can almost hear all of the doors shut on him.
So. Onto business.
LUDICROUS THINGS
-- The first shot of the film is of rolling green fields with a lonely grey road snaking through. Then comes a title, and it says: NORTHERN IRELAND. Now, look. That would be like showing a scene of autumn leaves and putting the words NEW ENGLAND up on the screen. Or showing a humid scene of vines twining around trees by a river and putting the words THE SOUTH on the screen. Can you please be more specific? Northern Ireland is a big place. Is it Belfast? Derry? Or - if you don't want to nail it down to a specific town, could you at least choose a county?? There are six counties. Choose one. I beg you. NEW ENGLAND is a big place, you can't just show a road and some trees and say it's NEW ENGLAND, you have to say MASSACHUSETTS (at least! although I'm still not happy with that) - or RHODE ISLAND ... So when I see that it takes place in NORTHERN IRELAND, a place that covers almost 5,500 square miles, I am suspicious. NORTHERN IRELAND is not real in Prayer For the Dying. It's not a real place with distinguishing characteristics like any large region. It's a symbol, it's a code for the ignorant American audience who will nod sagely and say to each other, "Yes, this takes place in NORTHERN IRELAND ... there's a war going on there, you know."
-- Mickey Rourke's hair is not red. He should not have dyed his hair. Plenty of Irish people have brown hair. Go with that. The dye job is distracting. It looks like he didn't rinse properly. And believe me, I know from red hair.
-- What the HELL was going on with Bob Hoskin's character? He does a fine acting job but his character was merely a cog in the creaky plot, with no inner life (except what Hoskins brought to it), no reality - and the dilemma he finds himself in is totally phony and set up by the filmmakers as another code, a symbol ... and then, randomly, in one scene - he beats the SHIT out of this one guy. Now it has been set up that he was in the army, and he's no pacifist priest. The priests in NORTHERN IRELAND are, of course, another breed altogether - more along the lines of Karl Malden in On the Waterfront than a beatific smiling man hearing confession in the light of Jesus. These guys are in the muck, they are political, they take sides. So that's fine. But out of nowhere, Bob Hoskins starts whaling on this one guy with a garbage can cover and - I'm not sure - but it seems like he keeps going until he kills the guy. Bob Hoskins has not been set up as a loose cannon. He obviously has a sense of indignation and a fierce sense of protection towards his church - but ... If you can see that one more blow with the garbage can will clearly KILL a man, wouldn't you stop? He does not. But ... it makes NO SENSE in light of what we know about the guy, and THEN - even more ludicrous - it is never referenced again. Will charges be brought up? Is he wanted for murder? The movie drops the plot like a hot potato and I wonder if there was more that was cut - stuff that would, you know, make that moment make sense!! It also didn't horrify me, or shock me, or make me think deep thoughts like, "My God, the violence we all have in us." No, it made me go, "What the hell was that moment? That was so fake."
-- Alan Bates plays a sneering villain, an undertaker - who is so ruthless he will have his men stab a traitor through the hand with a screwdriver, and smirk to himself as he hears the scream. I don't know. I have friends in Northern Ireland. I know people who are actually affected by events there. There aren't smirking chortling villains. There are some bad and violent dudes of course - but to turn the adversary into a cartoon villain really does the entire situation a disservice. Mickey Rourke, the terrorist, gets to be conflicted and haunted and disgusted. That's good. It's the story of his character and his journey. But in a movie such as this - that is supposedly NOT just a thriller with "bad guys" - having a villain like Bates just makes the whole thing seem dumb.
-- And so I realize very early on: Oh. This actually isn't about NORTHERN IRELAND ... this has nothing to do with The Troubles. This isn't Cal or Some Mother's Son or Name of the Father. This is a stupid Hollywood thriller using the Troubles as its bid to be taken more seriously - and THAT kind of cynicism I can't abide. I remember laughing once with Mitchell about that movie Swing Time, about the jitterbug dance club in Nazi Germany. I hadn't seen it yet. Mitchell has a big problem with movies that use the Holocaust as a plot point, a shorthand ... Like: no. Don't do that. It's too big a world event, it needs to be the center of the movie or don't use it. Mitchell was laughing about Swing Time and he said, "It's basically a heartwarming story about a bunch of German kids who manage to have some fun during the Holocaust." hahahahaha Anyway, this is what I get from Prayer for the Dying. By the final confrontation, which involves a leering ferris wheel, a weeping blind girl, an empty elevator, and an actual countdown until the bomb goes off, I was so over the whole thing. I had given up, obviously - and had issues from the first moment (NORTHERN IRELAND) - but I did hope that there would be SOME dealing with the issues of Northern Ireland - but nope, it's just a starkly drawn stupid thriller all building up to the big "standoff" at the end. But ... but ... this is The Troubles, peeps ... this is an actual real thing happening, with tragic consequences to actual people ... don't make it a SIDELINE. And if you're going to make Rourke a terrorist with a conscience, then REALLY deal with that. REALLY do it. Don't give him a couple of lines like, "I can't sleep at night" or "I hear the screams of children in my dreams" and expect that I will just accept that!!
-- There's a ludicrous moment when Alan Bates, for no apparent reason whatsoever, shows Mickey Rourke how to cremate someone. What do you want to bet that that information will come in useful later in the film??? LUDICROUS.
-- The blind organ player, Bob Hoskins' niece, is a bit much. She's a lamb for the slaughter. I think making her blind was a bit overkill. Again, it seemed like overheated script doctors cooking all of this up. (I know it was based on a novel, but that's neither here nor there.)
-- What the hell was going on with the tiny character Siobhan? She's barely in the film, but she has a moment late in the film - and she has had all of 2 lines (I am not exaggerating) up to that point, and suddenly she does something that totally tips the movie off-balance. Again, maybe she had a larger storyline that was cut - she did seem a bit TOO MUCH with the little she had to do in the film ... and I found myself thinking: what the hell is HER deal? Why is she scowling? What's she got in this thing? What's her angle? Then - BOOM - she shoots someone through the head, but again, I was more caught up in: what the hell is going on? You need to SET UP a moment like that. An audience needs a PAYOFF. If you're going to have a tiny character who has 2 lines shoot her own husband through the head, you need to GIVE ME a little somethin' somethin' to make that moment horrifying. Same as Bob Hoskins killing a man in an alley. What? Where did THAT come from? I'm not saying you have to spell things out, or pander ... but come on, we're talking about character development here. There is NONE in this film. Any character development that was done was done on the actors' own time - and Mickey Rourke, Bob Hoskins and Sammi Davis (as the blind girl) all create real and believable characters - who act and behave BETWEEN the lines ... which is essential because this is the kind of movie that IS its plot.
-- One of my biggest pet peeves about any movie is if it feels like it IS its plot. So boring. I can see the ending a mile away.
NOT SO LUDICROUS THINGS
-- I have read criticism of Mickey Rourke's accent. I totally disagree. "His Irish accent is not good ..." is the general consensus. I think this comes about because the idea we have of a "typical" Irish accent is the southern Irish accent, with its mellifluous lilt and downward-slant on the ending of the line. Now you get different variations in different areas and there are parts in Galway where I almost can't understand what people are saying the accent is so thick. And Dublin has a harder edge than the softer Southern accent - a little bit more hardscrabble, a little bit rougher and clipped ... but all of that is recognizably SOUTHERN Irish accents. Northern Ireland is completely different, and I think Mickey Rourke nailed it. It is as good as it needs to be. The accent is not a fetish, he doesn't make it precious - but to me it sounds very much like a Belfast-area accent - which is very very different from what you hear in the South. In the South, the inflection at the end of a sentence goes down. If you know an Irish person from the South of Ireland, just think about it, and you'll see it's true. It goes down. In the North, the inflection goes up, and kind of hovers there at the end of the sentences - it's like the voice bobs up a notch, and trembles there, staying on the same pitch or higher. It's a subtle difference, I guess, but it's really night and day and when you are in Ireland it is immediately apparent who is from "the South" and who is from "the North". You would NEVER mistake the accents for each other. Mickey Rourke is doing a solid Northern Irish accent - with the kind of coiled sound in the vowels - the dropping off of "th" (listen to how he says "Father" - it's almost like "Fa-her") - what else ... and his voice hovers at the end of a sentence, bobbing on the same pitch or higher as what came before. In the South, you float your voice down, in the North you lob your voice up. (Can you tell I've studied this? I've played more Irish people onstage than I've played American, so sorry for all the technical talk.) I am here to DEFEND MICKEY ROURKE'S ACCENT from the naysayers. They have ONE sound of Irish accents in their head, and his doesn't cut the mustard. Well, like I mentioned earlier, Ireland is a big place - and North is North and South is South and never the twain shall meet - and to my ear, Rourke's accent is SOLIDLY in the North. I think he did a great job.
-- Despite the silliness of the NORTHERN IRELAND title, the opening scene is the masterpiece of the film. It is truly awful, and filmed in a way where you can see the horror unfolding from a distance and you can feel the helplessness of the situation, that something BAD is going to happen you cannot do anything about it.
-- Mickey Rourke is captivating. But then, he can't help it. He's so good, and such a natural, that all he really needs to do is "show up" and you want to watch him. Other actors show their work. Either because their egos are somehow involved, or because they just flat out are not as talented and so their efforts are apparent. You never see Mickey Rourke work. In the ridiculous movies he made in the 90s, where the material is terrible, you still don't see him "working". It's almost worse what you see. You see a man who just doesn't care, who is in it for the money, who has contempt for the project he is in, and can't wait to get home that night and have a drink and fuck his girlfriend. He's lazy. Being that good at something can make you lazy. If you are not challenged, if you are not asked to rise to the occasion, acting can become a huge bore. I am not absolving him - because look, he has a gift, and he threw it away. It makes me sad to see him in those bad movies. But still: even here, in the middle of a dumb thriller, you cannot take your eyes off of him. And he manages to suggest, in BETWEEN the lines, how dangerous this guy is.
-- There are some lovely scenes between him and a prostitute, a bleached-blonde British bimbo who is in charge of keeping an eye on him. In true Mickey Rourke fashion, he treats her with interest and respect - asking her at one point, "Why do you do this?" He doesn't ask in a judgmental way. He's just curious. And when she comes on to him, he pushes her hand away, gently, almost regretfully ... Nope. He cannot have sex with this damaged woman who is a prostitute just so she can support her young daughter. It wouldn't be right. All of this is dreadfully cliche, naturally, but Rourke fills it up, makes it real and interesting.
-- The scene where Sammi Davis, the blind girl, is attacked at night by one of Alan Bates' goons - is truly terrifying. She can't see, she lies in bed in a white slip, Mickey Rourke has just left, she's just had sex for the first time (with him) - and it was tender and sweet ... and suddenly this goombah we've seen earlier in the movie sneaks into her room. He wants to know what it is like to have sex with a blind girl. (Of course we know this because the script pounds us over the head with it, foreshadowing the inevitable confrontation from minute one - YAWN). But her terror is palpable, her eyes flit around wildly - and he's in the room but she doesn't know where - and yes, it's all kind of dumb, and once again - a moment of terror for one of the characters is basically just an EXCUSE for Mickey Rourke to barge back in at the last second and kick some ass, gratifying the stupid popcorn-fed audience - but still: it's a good moment.
-- And whaddya know, after all this, the very last moment of the film brought me to tears. I knew I was being manipulated, and I knew how it would end from very early on in the film ... but it worked anyway. This is mainly because of Bob Hoskins' commitment to his dumb lines, making them real, and Mickey Rourke's unbreakable sense of reality and truth.
So no, I shed no tears for NORTHERN IRELAND during Prayer for the Dying because the filmmakers did not earn that response from me. But Bob Hoskins crying and clutching at Rourke as Rourke lies there with a shining soft light on his face ... Yeah. I'll cry. You got me, ya feckin' bastards.
All Mickey Rourke stuff here
October 23, 2008
The Books: "'Tis Herself: A Memoir" (Maureen O'Hara)
Next book on my "entertainment biography" shelf:
'Tis Herself: A Memoir
Maureen O'Hara was one of those "old" movie stars that I grew up knowing about because of the yearly showing of Miracle on 34th Street on television, as well as my absolute obsession with Parent Trap. God, how I loved that movie. I wanted to be in it, I wanted to live it, I wanted to go to that camp, I wanted a British accent, and I wanted to wear little yellow sunsuits. Maureen O'Hara, with her flaming red hair and SLAMMING body (so soft and voluptuous in the early 50s - in Parent Trap transformed into a veritable zigzag of curves accentuated by bullet bras that would put your eye out), was so much fun in that movie, and I, as a little kid watching it on TV, thought: "Oh, it is so OBVIOUS that she still loves her husband!!" I liked her temper tantrums, her sort of self-righteous attitude - because it was so obvious that underneath it she was as soft and vulnerable as anyone. That was, unbeknownst to me at the time, the major element of O'Hara's appeal (well, that and the red hair, green eyes, and slamming body): the temper-y hothead, untameable, a shrew, a wild lion ... but what all of that is hiding is a soft womanly heart. If you could tap into it, and access it, you'd be the luckiest man alive. The other reason she was an actress who was familiar to me was because of, of course, The Quiet Man. Beloved by many, but beloved in particular by Irish Americans (as evidenced by my conversation with Eamonn at the Ice Bar in Dublin). When I saw ET, I felt like the smartest person in the world because I recognized that clip of the kiss in the wind from Quiet Man: that wasn't just some old movie, it was a movie I knew by heart! I loved one of my father's comments about Quiet Man, and he said this, oh, 20 years ago, but for some reason I remember the jist of it perfectly: "It has the best fight scene I've ever seen, and when I first saw it I really thought it was about 20 minutes long. It involves the whole town and goes over the fields ... and when every time I see it, it feels like the fight scene gets shorter and shorter. But I still remember the first time I saw it and I couldn't believe how long that fight scene was!" I am sure you all know the fight scene I mean. It makes me laugh just thinking about it.
In the years to come, I would watch many more of Maureen O'Hara's pictures - filling in all of the many blanks (she made 5 films with John Ford - and a bunch with John Wayne - she has said, "He [Wayne] was my best friend for 40 years.") - and had her struggles with Hollywood, like most successful actresses did. She felt she was not considered for really dramatic parts, and that they were trying to pigeonhole her. Of course that was true - and her role in The Quiet Man is the ultimate pigeonhole - fiery untamed Irish lassie - but she found a way to work the system, and be okay with it. She really was a "fiery" woman. I love the stories about her battles with John Ford - who, obviously, felt very strongly about his own Irish-ness.
O'Hara would sashay onto the set, and they'd basically do "Irish schtick" together, for the crew - and it was Ford's way of asserting, "I'M IRISH, I'M IRISH, LOOK HOW IRISH I AM, I CAN GO TOE TO TOE WITH MAUREEN" - and O'Hara knew that that was what he was doing, and that was what was expected of her - but at the same time, when he pissed her off she would let him have it. A fascinating relationship.
But she was one of those people who fought to hold her ground, who did contractual battles, and battles with studio execs - she wasn't a cringing violet, who felt lucky to just be working. For example, when she signed on to do Parent Trap, it was in her contract that she would have top billing. She was the leading lady of the picture and a huge star. When she eventually saw the poster, it said:
Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills
in
THE PARENT TRAP
Starring MAUREEN O'HARA and BRIAN KEITH
O'Hara went ballistic. She knew that Walt Disney had decided to ignore her contract and promote Hayley in the double role (basically calling attention to the revolutionary split-screen filming that they had done to make her appear as twins). O'Hara complained - and it started moving up the chain of command - 'take it to this person', 'take it to SAG' ... and to actually take on Disney was not (then or now) a pleasing prospect. Is this the hill you want to die on? O'Hara never worked for Disney again. Which is a shame, because I think she was the perfect Disney leading lady. But that was who she was. Do NOT take advantage of her, and more than that: don't betray her. That ad campaign for Parent Trap put Disney in breach of Maureen's contract - but they obviously knew that they held all the cards and whatever fight she wanted, she would not win.
Her autobiography is full of great anecdotes like that. She was a canny businesswoman - protective of herself and her interests ... and eager to show all that she could do, even if Hollywood wanted to pin her down. Her stories of battling the studios (and hell, I love crap like that - I love the stories of Bette Davis and Marilyn Monroe - and all of those people who really stood up for themselves in that environment) are fasciating - a real glimpse into a world that no longer exists, but with much relevance to young actresses today.
Maureen O'Hara was born into an eccentric arts-loving family who lived in Ranelagh, a suburb on the outskirts of Dublin. (My last trip to Dublin I stayed in Ranelagh.) Her mother also was a crazy redhead, and O'Hara grew up surrounded by jokes, laughter - an Irish cliche, basically. But she remembers it all as warm, beautiful, and joyous - a wonderful beginning for life. Her parents were into opera, football, fashion (her mother was, apparently, a clotheshorse - and brought the young Maureen shopping with her) - her mother was also an actress and a singer. Maureen knew quite early that acting was what she wanted to do - and she got some jobs on the radio, and what amounts to summer stock - she was only 13, 14 years old ... but finally, she got serious enough to begin studying for real. At 14, she auditioned for the famous Abbey Theatre in Dublin and was accepted - it was there that she really began to learn how to be an actress. Things were on fast-forward for her, when you read about it. Everything seems to proceed in a logical fashion. Of course she would be approrached to do a screen test. Of course she would resist at first - what about being a stage actress? Then of course she would come to her senses and go to London for the screen test. And of course Charles Laughton would see the screentest and be struck dumb by her eyes, he was so struck by her that he put her under his own personal contract. And the rest is history. Maureen O'Hara was one of the most successful stage actresses in Ireland (winning prizes left and right) by the time she was 15 years old, and when she went to Hollywood, under the wing of Charles Laughton, started off playing leads. Pretty incredible. No working her way up the ladder. Her book details that journey in humorous prose. You really like her. She seems very personable, with a temper you admire, and a seriousness about the work that is undeniable. Her desire to be a good actress is supreme.
She was an actress MADE for the invention of Technicolor. She's a gorgeous woman, even in black and white ... but what sets her apart from other gorgeous women? Her coloring. The red hair, pale skin, and green eyes ... It's almost like Technicolor was developed FOR her. That first glimpse of her in Quiet Man depends on the colors.
Maureen O'Hara retired from acting in the70s and in many way her post-acting career has almost been more interesting. She married a pilot - Charles Blair- who was killed in a plane crash in 1978. He had a long history with Pan Am, and in his wake, she managed his company - Antilles Airboats, traveling the world, promoting the excitement and possibilities of aviation. She eventually became President and CEO of the company (the first female CEO of an airline) - and lives, to this day, down in the Virgin Islands. She is one of those go-to gals for aviation fanatics around the world, because of the history she has seen in that industry. She supports and promotes aviation museums, the restoration of air boats and other classic aircraft, and the keeping of that history. She donated her husband's Sikorsky VS-44A plane (nicknamed "Queen of the Skies") to the New England Air Museum - and a friend of mine who is a freak about all things aviation gave me a postcard of the plane which is on my bulletin board. A Spruce Goose, indeed. She's done a couple of films in the 90s - coming out of retirement - and she is a very old woman now. Almost 90. She maintains her connections with all the different worlds she inhabited - Irish, filmmaking, aviation ... a truly interesting woman.
Oh, and let's not forget the groundbreaking moment when O'Hara became an American citizen (while maintaining her Irish citizenship) in 1946 and she put up a stink about being referred to as a "British subject":
There must have been a thousand questions on their standard questionnaire. After I completed it, I went and took the exam. I must have passed because I was then sent before a woman, ann officer of the court, who instructed me to raise my right hand and forswear my allegiance to Great Britian. FULL STOP!Forswear my allegiance to Britain? I didn't know what she was talking about. I told her, "Miss, I'm very sorry, but I cannot forswear an allegiance that I do not have. I am Irish and my allegiance is to Ireland." She looked at me with consternation for a moment and then said, "Well, then you better read these papers." She handed me back the stack of papers I had filled out before my exam. I perused them and was stunned to see that on every page where I had written "Irish" as my former nationality, they had crossed it out with a pen and written "English".
I told the woman, "I'm terribly sorry, but I can't accept this. It's impossible for me to do. I am Irish. I was born in Ireland and will only do this if I am referred to as an Irish citizen." She seemed perturbed that I would break the routine of the allegiance ceremony, and said, "I can't do that. You'll have to go to court to obtain the order for me to do it."
"Fine," I said. "When shall I go back to court?" I didn't have to come back. I did it right then and was taken straight to the courtroom. No attorneys were allowed in the courtroom with me, only my two witnesses. I stood in front of the judge, whose name I can't remember, and listened as the clerk explained why I was there before the court. Then I told the judge, "I am Irish. I will not forswear allegiance to Great Britain because I owe no allegiance to Great Britain. I was born in Dublin, Ireland."
The judge and I then went into a very long discussion of all of Irish history. He challenged my assertions. We kept going over it and over it, back and forth, but I wouldn't give an inch. I couldn't. Finally he said, "We're going to have to find out what Washington thinks." He instructed the clerk, "Check Washington and see what they consider a person like Miss O'Hara." The clerk left the courtroom and returned shortly after that. He told the judge, "Washington says she is a British subject." I was furious and told the judge, "I am not responsible for your antiquated records in Washington, D.C." He promptly ruled against me.
I had no choice but to thank him and tell the court, "Under those circumstances, I cannot accept nor do I want to become an American citizen." I turned to walk out of that courtroom, but having the kind of personality that I do, thought I couldn't give up without taking one last crack at him. I was halfway out of the courtroom when I turned back to him and said, "Your Honor, have you thought for one moment about what you are trying to force upon and take away from my child and my unborn children and my unborn grandchildren?" He sat back and listened intently as I went on, "You are trying to take away from them their right to boast and brag about their wonderful and famous Irish mother and grandmother. I just can't accept that."
He'd had enough. The judge threw his hands up and explained, "Get this woman out of here! Give her anything on her papers that she wants, but get her out of here!" The clerk moved in my direction and I simply said, "Thank you, Your Honor."
I didn't know at that time that my certificate of naturalization had already been created, and that they had listed my former nationality as English. Sometime between that date and the date when I was called to be sworn in as an American citizen, they changed my certificate in accordance with the order of the court. Where my former nationality was printed, they had erased "English" and typed over it "Irish". On the back of this document it states that "the erasure made on this certificate as to Former Nationality 'Irish' was made before issuance, to conform to petition. Name changed by order of the court." It is signed by the U.S. District Court.
This was the first time in the history of the United States of America that the American government recognized an Irish person as being Irish. It was one hell of a victory for me because otherwise I would have had to turn down my American citizenship. I could not have accepted it with my former nationality being anything other than Irish, because no other nationality in the world was my own.
A scandal arose in the wake of this, when incorrect reports came out that she had challenged the court during the ceremony in which the oath of allegiance was taken. Judges across the land wrote terrible things about Miss O'Hara, and the federal judge who had presided over that particular allegiance ceremony said that Miss O'Hara was a liar, and that the incident never happened.
He was correct that the event did not happen in his courtroom, but very wrong that it didn't happen at all.
The implications of the decision to list Maureen O'Hara as "Irish" were widespread - and crossed the Atlantic. O'Hara writes:
Apparently, the Irish government was unaware that its citizens were being classified as subjects of Great Britain. On January 29, Prime Minister Eamon De Valera issued the following statement:We are today an independent republic. We acknowledge no sovereignty except that of our own people. A fact that our attitude during the recent war should have amply demonstrated. Miss O'Hara was right when she asserted she owed no allegiance to Britain and therefore had none which she could renounce.
The prime minister then dispatched his envoys to Washington, D.C., where the Republic of Ireland formally requested that this policy be changed. The policy was changed, and my stand had paved the way for every Irish immigrant to the United States, including my own brothers and sisters, to be legally recognized as Irish from that day forward.
Pretty amazing.
Her autobiography (written with a little bit of help) is lovely. It came out in 2004, which is exciting - because what a long life she has lived! What scope - so you can really get a sense of it in her book. You can hear her voice. There are times when it seems she is leaning towards you, the reader, to whisper a secret. It is not a distant voice, or a cold voice. It's chatty and argumentative (still - I love that - she's like, "I know that everyone SAID I had an affair with John Ford, but I am here to tell you I did not, and all of you boys are barking up the wrong tree." You tell 'em, Maureen!) - charming, passionate, logical, and funny.
I highly recommend it. I recommend it for aviation fans, too. Some good anecdotes here about Howard Hughes, not to mention her later years when she devoted her life to aviation.
The excerpt I chose today just HAD to be about The Quiet Man because you know what? I can't resist.
Watch her smarts as an actress here, in the following excerpt. Not just smart about acting, but smart about script analysis: how she knew what the most important scene in the picture was, and if she nailed THAT, the rest of the picture would flow. That's important - an important mark of a good actress - to not just be worried about her closeups, and her crying scenes - but about the STORY being told. Watch how she goes back to the source material, to look for clues on how to play that scene. Love that.
I also love her version of the famous "whisper" at the end of Quiet Man - what did she whisper? (I wrote about that moment here). In the last shot, the two of them stand together, waving out at the road, laughing, beautiful - and she leans over and whispers something to him. Watch Wayne's reaction. Ha!!! The whisper obviously gets a rise (literally) out of Wayne because in response he chases her back to the house, and, presumably, to bed at the end of the picture. What did she say??
EXCERPT FROM 'Tis Herself: A Memoir
The single day that it did rai was just when Mr. Ford needed it. Right after the scene where Duke and I kiss in the windy cottage and I hit him, there is the sequence in which I run from the cottage, cross a stream, and then fall as the rain and wind storm about me. That was real rain in the scene. The rest of the rain in the picture came from rain machines. The wind actually blew me down in that scene, but I kept going because Mr. Ford always made it clear to his actors that "You do not stop acting no matter what happens in a scene until I say cut. I am the director,"
I loved Mary Kate Danaher. I loved the hell and fire in her. She was a terrific dame, tough, and didn't let herself get walked on. As I readied to begin playing her, I believed that my most important scene in the picture, the one that I had to get just right, was when Mary Kate is in the field herding the sheep and Sean Thornton sees her for the very first time. There is no dialogue between them. It's a moment captured in time, and it's love at first sight. I felt very strongly that if the audience believed it was love at first sight, then we would have lightning in a bottle. But if they didn't, we would have just another lovely romantic comedy on our hands. It had to be perfect, and the script provided me with a little inspiration, but not enough. Sean's line to Michaeleen - "Hey, is that real? She couldn't be" - didn't quite give me what I needed. I found a passage in Walsh's story that hit the mark, and I used it as motivation for how I would play the scene:
And there leaning on a wall was the woman. No ghost woman. Flesh and blood or I have no eyes to see. The sun shining o nher red hair and her scarf green as grass on her shoulders. She was not looking at me. She was looking over my head on the far side of the pool. I only saw her over my shoulder but she was fit to sit with the Mona Lisa amongst the rocks. More beautiful by fire and no less wicked. A woman I never saw before, yet a woman strangely familiar.
The scene comes off so beautifully. Mr. Ford brilliantly kept the camera stationary and had me walk slowly down and out of the frame instead of following me as I walked away. It's one of my favorite shots in the movie, and, if you have never noticed it before, it's worth watching the movie again just to see it.
Of course, the scene that everyone always asks me about is the scene with Duke and me in the cemetery. Most of the Quiet Maniacs, those who keep the film in its cult-classic status, tell me that this is their favorite scene. It's the sequence on the bicycle when Sean and Mary Kate escape Michaeleen's watchful eye. We run into the cemetery and it begins to rain. As thunder chases me under the arch, Duke takes his coat off and wraps it around me to keep me dry and warm. The rain drenches us and his white shirt clings to his body and becomes translucent. In that moment, we are truly together in each other's arms, and we kiss. It is sensual, passionate, and more than any other scene we ever did together displays the on-screen eroticism of the Wayne and O'Hara combination.
There were two parts to that scene. The first part we had to get in one take or Mr. Ford would have strung us up by our toes. It's everything that happens right up to the embrace and kiss. We had to get it in one take because our clothes were sopping wet when we finished. If we missed it, then our costumes would have to be cleaned, dried, and ironed. Our hair would have to be washed, dried, and reset. Makeup would have to be reapplied. These things take hours and hours and cost thousands and thousands of dollars for each take. We got it in one.
Once we were drenched and part one was in the can, we could focus on the kiss. But Mr. Ford rarely allowed more than a couple of takes, and I think we got that one in two. Why is the scene so erotic? Why were Duke and I so electric in our love scenes together? I was the only leading lady big enough and tough enough for John Wayne. Duke's presence was so strong that when audiences saw him finally meet a woman of equal hell and fire, it was exciting and thrilling. Other actresses looked as though they would cower and break if Duke raised a hand or even hollered. Not me. I always gave as good as I got, and it was believable. So during those moments of tenderness, when the lovemaking was about to begin, audiences saw for a half second that he had finally tamed me - but only for that half second.
Mr. Ford did not make Duke perform the kiss over and over, as I've read. The suggestion has been that Mr. Ford was living, through Duke, the experience of kissing me. Not in this scene, although I do believe John Ford longed to be every hero he ever b