Books Ireland (March 2000): Review

Edna O’Brien, James Joyce (Weidenfeld & Nicholson), 190pp.

Jeremy Addis, ‘Goodbye Gutenberg: Jeremy Addis has seen the future – and it’s digital’, Books Ireland, March 2000, p.57.

Fred Johnston, ‘Guid as Gold’, review of Patricia Craig, The Belfast Anthology, Blackstaff 2000), in BI, March 2000, pp.61-62; incls. account of his own purchase of a ‘first typewriter for seven quid’ at P. J. Kavanagh’s I Buy Anything store.

Martyn, asked for funds in 1901: ‘Henceforth I will pay for nobody’s plays but my own’. Anne Horniman wrote to Yeats: ‘every bitter thing I have said about Ireland has been put into my mind by my experiences among your people.’ Joseph Holloway’s 221 vols.

Tomas Mac Anna dir. Behan’s Borstal Boy at the Abbey in 1967, followed by MacNeice’s One for the Grave, Kavanagh’s Tarry Flynn, and Friel’s The Loves of Cass Maguire; Hugh Hunt dir. Tom Murphy’s The Morning After Optimism;

The story of the development of Newman’s Catholic University into the modern University College Dublin is one of the most complex and fascinating chapters in the history of modern Ireland. At every stage the work of the College has been intimately linked with the slow but inexorable recovery of the national strength’. (Quoted in Maurice Harmon, review of Donal McCartney, A National Idea: The History of University College, Dublin, Gill & Macmillan, in Books Ireland, p.69.

JC McQuaid discovered his natural flair for networking while Dean of Blackrock Coll.; forbade women’s participation in athletics for reason of dress.

O’Connor, Rory, Gander at the Gates (Lilliput/Hodder Headline 2000), 240pp. b. Knocknagoshel, 1928; ‘How were things in Knocknagashel?’, feature article, Books Ireland, May 2000, pp.131-32; ed. Rockwell, College; worked for Irish Press; ness ed. of Sunday Press; worked iwth Rory O’Hanlon, High Court Judge and for RTE;; joined RTE newsroom, 1961; son of Seamus O’Connor, author of Tomorrow was Another Day (Anvil 1970; reiss. 1987)

Anthony Jordan, The Yeats-MacBride-Gonne Triangle (Westport Books 2000); MacBride remained with Fred Allan from 1914 to 1916; Allan family retained the papers; Gonne confided to O’Leary that in marrying MacBride she felt she was marrying Ireland; Gonne commenced writing to her former lover Millevoye and also to Yeats, placing their photos round the house; honeymooed in Spain; sought comfort in drink; financially dependent on her; b. Seaghan, 1904; charge of alleged assault on Iseult raised by defence at trial as being omitted from Maud’s statement; Maud wrote on his execution: ‘He has entered Eternity by the great door of sacrifice which Christ opened, and has therefore atoned for all, so that in praying for him I can also ask for his prayers.’ .

John Trolan, ‘How To Turn Your Life Around’, feature interview, Books Ireland, May 2000, pp.135: b. Ballsbridge tenement, 1960; Leaving Cert. from Ballymun Comprehensive; emig. London, mid. 1980s; settled Peckham Tower Blocks; rehab. centre in Birmingham after his wife and children fled back to Dublin; sent Any Other Time to Mick O’Brien in Dublin, who died during editing; attended university; creative writing program; wrote second novel Slow Puncture in Crete; published by Brandon, 1999; Any Other Time then published by Brandon; living in Stroud; studying for Master’s degree.

Augustus Young, ‘Dram, Duggan and Love Darcy’, in Books Ireland, New Writing, pp.148-49.

Colum McCann, ‘The Moral Complexity of Life in the North’, interview in Books Ireland (Summer 2000), pp.165-66. Tells of This Side of Brightness that ‘it was sparked off by a story I heard at a party about a how one of the construction workers was filled when he was sucked through a hole in a tunnel. I started to go down into the tunnels and discovered all these people living there. I made friends with a couple of them and I still go down there now and then.’ (p.165). On his new collection: ‘It’s stange. You never initially know why certain voices or certain textures appear in your work. Sometimes it’s better not to be too acutely conscious. It’s only afterwards, when the stories are written, finished, that you hce to take a sort of intellectual stock. ... I work in a sort of emotional blizzard. Nothing is mapped out and I try to move forward, sometimes blindly.’ Discusses the use of the ‘voices of children’ in the novella “Hunger Strike” dealing with a young boy who flees to Galway with his mother as his uncle succombs in the Strike.

Desmond Traynor, review of McCann, Everything in this Country Must, remarks that his story ‘As if there were trees’ appeared in Shenanigans anthology.

‘Taking Readers Where they Can’t Go on Holidays’, interview with Emma Donoghue in Books Ireland, Sept. 2000, p.209. Sammerkin (Virago) is the story of Mary Saunders, a prostitute from 13, who becomes involved with a hired killer, based on a brief reference to a teenage girl who killed a woman in Monmouth in 19763 which she found in an encyclopaedia of Welsh women’s history. ‘The fact that the historical swources were so minimal was very liberating to the imagination [...]’. Spent 8 yrs on PhD in Cambrdige; Comments, ‘So much of women’s history will never be uearthed now- the hard evidence never having been gathered or being long lost p- that it seems to me fictional forms may offer the best hope of bringing the hidden past to life in all its fulness and contradiction.’ (p.209).

Appeared on Late Late Show after publication of Stir Fry (1993); also Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801 (1993); also I Know My Own Heart (1993), a play, based on secret diaries of a woman in the 1820s. Hood (1995), won US Library Assoc. Gay and Lesbian Book Award. Kissing the Witch (1997), fairy tales; What Sappho Would Have Said, poetry anthology (1997); We Are Michael Field, biog. of two women sharing a pseud.; her radio plays, Histories of Nothing BBC 4), 2000; Kissing the Witch, adapted for stage in SF; lives with a Canadian.

‘The Poison from the Past’: Shirley Kelly interviews Carlo Gébler, Books Ireland, 2000 Sept., pp.211-12; Father and I (Little, Brown; Sept 2000); contrib. to My Generation (Lilliput); writer in residence in Maghaberry; sold his father’s house in Dalkey when the latter was revealed to have Alzheimer’s after a fall; found Aladdin’s cave of diaries back to the 1940s; Ernest’s father Adolf, a Hungarian immigrant and clarinetist, had taught John Carroll and stinged his own son; Ernest previously m. to Leatrice Gilbert following his early sucess with The Plymouth Adventure: Voayge of the Mayflower (1950), which was made into a movie; a son, John Karl; met Edna while she was studying pharmacy in Dublin; m. 12 July 1954; Carlo b. 21 Aug.; called Karl (later Carlo); moved to London, 1958; lived in Putney with his mother, who secured custody; Ernest settled with new partner, Jane; Ernest d. 1998.

Mark Tierney, Bless Columba Marmion (Columba 2000), 248pp.

The Life of Sir Denis Henry, Catholic Unionist (Historical Found. [2000]), 160pp. Henry was elected MP for Derry in May 1916 and was appt. Solicitor-General of Irland in 1918, and Att. Gen. in 1919. First Northern Irish Lord Chief Justice to 1925. b. Cahore, Draperstown, Co. Derry, 1864; son of prosperous Catholic business family; ed. locally and QUB (Law); stood for parl. in N. Tyrone, 1906 & 1907; opposed Home Rule in 1886;

SH: ‘History says don’t hope/On this side of the grave./But then, once in a lifetime/The longed for tidal wave/Of justice can rise up/And hope and history rhyme.’

Joseph Johnston, Civil war in Ulster (UCD Press), 224pp.; became Prof. of Applied Economics, TCD;

Hopper, Glenn, & Leon Litvak, Ireland in the Nineteenth Century: Regional Identity. Four Courts [2000]), incls. Brian Caraher’, Edgeworth, Wilde and Joyce: Reading Irihs Regionalism through the “Cracked Looking-glass” of a Servant’s Art’; Michael McAteer, ‘Ireland and the Hour: Paternalism and Nationality in Standish James O’Grady’s Toryism and Tory Democracy’; quotes Sean Ryder: ‘Regionalism is never politically innocent’.

Brendan Clifford, The Nation: Selections 1842-1844, Vol. 1 (Aubane Hist. Soc. [2000]), 205pp.

Roy Foster: ‘Young Ireland’s ideology bore a superficial resemblance ot European romantic nationalism ... Irish circumstances made adoption of European-style nationalism impossible: for one thing, Young Ireland could not define their Irishness linguistically, though Davis tried.’; Further ‘Young Ireland’s series of popular history published in “The Library of Ireland”, stressed the romance of violent resistance to English oppression, so long as it was safely in the past. Along with the example of William Tell and the “men of ‘‘82”, the “the sword” was deified in Davis’s ballads and the rhetoric of T. G. Meagher.” Quoted in Carla King, review of Litvack, op. cit., Books Ireland, p.228.

James Mullin, The Story of A Toiler’s Life (UCD Press 2000), 253pp.; b. Catholic; Fenian in 1865; contrib. to The Irishman; worked as carpenter; studied at Cookstown Academy; schol. to QUB; practised med. from 1880; autobiog. published posthum. in 1921;

Grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented (GUBU), became Conor Cruise O’Brien’s name for the Haughey ethos and the title of a collection of satirical poems by W. J. McCormack.

McCormack: His whipping posts are the Irish Prime Minister, Charles J. Haughey, the Ireland he created and not least Northern Ireland of the big woes and savage endurance; characterises the founder of Aosdana as Antonio Cronino, amid a standing army of poets and their Al Capone patron, CJH; depicts Michael Smurfit purchasing a Jack B. Yeats;

Polly Devlin, The Far Side of the Lough (O’Brien [2000]), 110pp.

Sean MacMahon, Sam Hanna Bell: A Biography (Belfast: Blackstaff [2000]), 238pp.; self-educated; worked as watchmen, lanbourer, potato grader; lab technician; booking-clerk; BBC 1932-46 under ‘the bleak regime of George Marshall who saw it as his mission in life to give aid and comfort to the Unionist establishment’ (Maurice Craig).

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, afterword to Jan de Fouw, Amergin (Dublin: Wolfhound Press 2000), 40pp.; foreword by Micheal O’Siadhail.

Meehan, Paula, Pillow Talk (Gallery Press 1994; rep. 2000), 72pp.; after which she won th Martin Toonder Award.

Tim Pat Coogan, ‘The Diaspora - with the Heroics’, in Books Ireland (Oct. 2000), pp.261, 264.

Siofra O’Donovan, Malinski (Lilliput 2000), ‘From Poland to Tibet: A novelist displaced’, interview in Books Ireland (Oct. 2000), pp.263-64; novel based on encounters in Cracow as language-teacher incl. meeting with Zbidniew Preisner; prev. wrote unpublished Finella, working in a big house in Enniskerry, moving afterwards to the toolshed in the garden of same..

Roddy Doyle, The Giggler Treatment (Scolastic 2000), ill. Brian Ahjar, a childhood book ‘celebrat[ing] the sheer volume of poo on Dublin street’s’; Books Ireland interview, Oct. 2000, p.265.

Kate Fearon, Women’s Work: The Story of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (Belfast: Blackstaff 2000), 192pp. includes remarks on Mary Beckett’s Give them Stones concerning the maturition of one woman from a nationalist background who comes to realise that women focus on the material conditions of their families because of they are excluded from gender-based politics. (See Books Ireland, Oct. 2000, p.281.)

Maeve Binchy sold 1,000,000 copies of Tara Road; current novel, said to be her last, Scarlet Feather, concerns the relationship of Cathy Scarlet and Tom Feather.

Murphy, Judy May, That Girl from Happy (Dublin: Wolfhound Press 2000); dg. doctors; b. Dublin; raised in London; b. 1968; ed. Trinity; formed Theatre Actile at TCD; winner os ISDA best director Award for Embers; wrote plays, Circusdances; It’s kme or the Piano Swami B; MA at TCD; ‘I think that, world-wide, The Girl From Happy could make a lot of money.’; worked as go-go dancer in NY cult show Bitch Dyke Fag-Hag; chaperone to child actors in Dublin; travelled to India, 1997;

reprints: Henry Green, Loving (Vintage 2000); Knocknagow (Woodstock 2000); Portrait of an Artist (OUP 2000); Dubliners (OUP 2000);

John Wilson Croker denounces The Nation as being full of ‘the deadliest rancour, the most audacious falsehoods, and the most incendiary provocation to war’. (Quoted in Charles Gavan Duffy, Thomas Davis; cited in review of Aubane Hist. Soc. rep. edn., reviewed in Books Ireland, Nov. 2000, p.322.)

Eunan O’Halpin, Defending Ireland: The Irish State and its Enemies Since 1922 (OUP [1999]), 398pp.

Kennedy, Michael, & Skelly, Joseph Morrison, Irish Foreign Policy Irish 1919-1966: From Independence to Internationalism (Dublin: Four Courts [1999]), 350pp.

McGarry, Fergal, Irish Politics and the Spanish Civil War (Cork UP 2000), 336pp.

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Regan, John M., The Irish Counter-revolution 1921-1936 (Gill & Macmillan [1999], 491pp.

Adrian Frazier, Behind the Scenes: Yeats, Horniman and the Struggle for the Abbey Theatre (1990).

John C. Ryan, The Broken Place (Cromwell Publ. 2000), 212pp., novel by man born in Carrick on Suir, 1932.

Dermot Healy has played the lead in Nicola Bruce’s fikm of Irish emigrant life in London, I Could Read the Sky; also dir. Beckett’s Footfalls; and ed. Force 10.

Harry Clifton, On the Spine of Italy (1999), memoir;

Barry Desmond, Finally and In Conclusion: A Political Memoir (New Island 2000), 411pp., 16pp. photos.

Nuala O’Faolain, interview with Shirley Kelly, Books Ireland, Feb. 2001, pp.7-8; success of Are You Somebody? (1996) based on 200pp. autobiographical essay at front which overshadowed The Irish Times-column pieces inside; editor Anthony Glavin; ‘one of the most poignant and candid pirces of autobiography ever to appear in Ireland’; took leave from Irish times, 1998; settled in Greenwich Village to write novel, My Dream of You.

Kieran Allen, Bust to Boom? The Irish Experience of Growth and Inequality (IPA [2000]).

Gordon Thomas, Gideon’s Spies (1999), best-seller conspiracy theory concerning Mossad involvement in death of Princess Diana; in dispute with Sunday Independent in 1993 over mendacious ‘interview’ with Bishop Casey in S. America; former Daily Express correspondent; settled in Ireland in the late 1960s.

Fintan Cullen, ed., Sources in Irish Art: A Reader (Cork UP 2000), contains Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry; Samuel Madden; Lady Morgan’s Life of Salvator Rosa; David Wilke’s letter frm Ireland; Thomas Davis; Geroge petrie; W. B. Yeats; Elizabeth Thompons, Mainie Jellet , and others.

Arlen House founded by Catherine Rose and revived by Alan Hayes is the topic of an article (‘The Reborn Feminist’) in Books Ireland, March 2001.

Reading the Future: Irish Writers in Conversation with Mike Murphy (Dublin: Lilliput 2000), contains interviews with John Banville, Marina Carr, Brian Friel, Semaus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Longley, John McGahern, Derek Mahon, Tom Murphy, Nuala Ní Dhomnhnaill, Edna O’Brien, and William Trevor [RTE, 18 Nov. 2000 to 10 February 2001]

Desmond Traynor, reviewing same in Books Ireland (March 2001), quotes Declan Kiberd’s introduction: ‘It is just possible that “Irish writing” will, in the next five or six decades., be subsumed back into the general fiction category from which it so recently and so precariously emerged. If a novelist such as John Banville or a poet such as Patrick Kavanagh had their wish, that is precisely what would happen.’ (BI, p.57.)

Bewley spent the war in Italy and wrote a novel there; later he published a biography of Hermann Goering.

Blake, Northern Ireland in the Second World War, first pub. 1956; commissioned by Stormont in 1951; airbrushes contrib. of Irish Fire Brigade in Blitz.

Anthony Clare, On Men and Masculinity (London: Chatto & Windus [2001]), 270pp.

Wilde signed letters to Oxford friends as Oscar F. O’F. Wilde

Feargal Cochrane, Unionist Politics and the Politics of Unionism since the Anglo-Irish Agreement [2nd edn.] (Cork UP 2001).

Thomas J., Morrissey, SJ., William J. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin 1841-1921 (Four Courts 2000), 416pp. £IR30; Books Ireland review, April 2001, p.105; Walsh succeeded Cullen who was held to be too cosy with the British Govt. by many Irish priests; Walsh presided over Maynooth; Cardinal’s hat; admired Cardinal Manning; skille dnegotiator in industrial disputes; presided over funeral of Willie Redmond, 1917; opposed conscription; appeared at funeral of Thomas Ash, hunger striker; d. 1921.

Donnchadh O Corrain, James Hogan [1898-1963]: Revolutionary, Historian and Political Scientist,. Four Courts£31.50 Papers of comm. conference of 1998 at centenary of IRB man who became Dir. of Intelligence of the National Army in the Civil War; contrib. Maurice Manning, Margaret MacCurtain, John A. Murphy, Dermot Keogh.

Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life (OUP 2001), 512pp.

Tony Curtis, ed., The Art of Seamus Heaney (Wolfhound 2000), £IR15. [updated and enl. rep. of l1982; incl. Helen Vendler, Ciaraon Carson, Anne Stevenson, Douglas Dunne, Bernard O’Donoghue]

Kirkpatrick, Kathyrn, Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities (Dublin: Wolfhound Press 2000), incl. Medbd McGuckian, ‘Women are Trousers’, an excerpt from her diary.]

Note that William Allingham’s Night and Day Songs was cover ill. by William Morris.

Roger Derham,, The Simurgh and the Nightingale, Collins Press 2001, concerns a female doctor Certherine who is kidnapped by Algerian pirates in the seventeenth century and becomes invlved in a knight-errant quest to Constantinople and beyond. Purportedly based on true events.

Benedict Kiely, Writer and Saoi’, feature article, Books Ireland (Summer 2001), pp.157-58. Quotes Colum McCann’s preface to the Collected Stories (Methuen): ‘The manner in wich Ben Kiely has been treated should be a point of anger among anyone concerned with contemporary Irish literature since the truth is that as much as any other writer in the past fifty years he has made the past durable and the present possible.’ His partner Frances; b. Dromore, 1919; raised Omagh; ed. Christian Brothers; novitiate in Jesuits; contrib. Father Mathew Record; entered UCD 1940; worked on Catholic Standard; Radio Eireann; leader writer, Irish Independent; moved to Irish Press as lit. editor; m. 1944; four children; met Frances after he succeeded MacManus at Irish Press; accom. him to Virginia, Oregon and Atlanta in 1964; sought leave of absence from Irish Press and refused; contrib. to New Yorker; Letter from America to Irish Times; returned to Ireland, 1968; Saoi in 1996.

Leitch, The Eggman’s Apprentice (2001), narrated in first person of Hugo Dinsmore in the 1950s; orphaned and plunged into tough world of country relatives; cousins

Kathleen Coyle, Liv concerns a young Norwegian woman who travels to Paris to meet her disgraced aunt Sonja on the verge of her marriage to Hald Christensen; she learns that ‘we are never ourselves until we go away’ from the man she falls in love with in Paris.

Colfer, Eoin, Artemis Fowl (Viking 2001), concerns a 12-year old boy protagonist and anti-hero; uses computer skills to conduct a surveillance operation on fairies at Fowl Manor in an attempt to get their fairy gold; previously issued Ed’s Bed (O’Brien Press)

Ross, Ian Campbell, Laurence Sterne: A Life (OUP 2001), 512pp.; Sterne’s mother had an embroidery school in Dublin; Byron damaged his reputation by calling him an miserly and undutiful son; Thackeray wrote of ‘foul satyr’s eyes’ staring out of his prose; Leavis called Tristram Shandy nasty and trifling; his father badly injured in duel;

Tom Kinsella set up shop to sell the Peppercanister Poems from 47 Percy Lane. The Familiar (No. 20); Godhead (No. 21); Citizen of the World (No. 22); :Littlebody (No.23.)

Ed. notes the The Hole was modelled on school experiences of the director, a grad. of Campbell college.

Alan Harrison, on John Toland (1994).