Books Ireland (Feb. 2002): Review

Shirley Kelly, ‘The Writing keeps the cattle in high style’, interview with John McGahern, in Books Ireland (Feb. 2002), p.5-6. Quotes: ‘I think the glorification of writers is a dangerous thing. One writes because one needs to write. I didn’t need to, I wouldn’t It’s as if I can’t know what I’m thinking until I write it down. And sometimes I might have an idea in my head for a long time, and when I write it down it disappears. A lot of nonsense is written about themes and subjects and the whole writing process. People imagine that it’s all very deliberate and planned out, that you choose your theme and then proceed from there. In fact, most writers don’t choose their themes at all, the theme chooses them. That’s certainly the case with my writing.’ Amongst Women won Irish Times Award and GPA Award (£50,000); shortlisted for Booker; made into a 4-part TV series with Tony Doyle. The Rising Sun view a close-knit farming community through the eyes of Joe Ruttledge, a native returned from London with his American wife. Quotes: ‘I’ve always thought that one of the functions of the writer is to celebrate and to praise. Maybe that doesn’t come across in my earlier work, but all the writer can do is write what he has to write at the time. Of course one’s vision of life changes. There’d be something wrong with a person if he didn’t change at all.’ Further, ‘It wasn’t a vocation as such. Even at that time, university education belonged for the most part to the middle class, but if you were good at school the state would pay for you to train as a teacher and give you a job at the end of it. So I went to St. Patrick’s, and UCD, and got a job teaching seven to eight year olds in a north Dublin school. I was very fond of them and I enjoyed teaching. And school finished at two o’clock, so there was plenty of time for reading and writing.’ On the banning of The Dark (1965): ‘The banning of the book wasn’t a big deal, really. People who read and talked about books all thought that the Censorship Board was a joke, Most of the books that were banned, like most that are published, weren’t worth reading, and it wasn’t difficult to get hold of those that were. But the fact that I was sacked from my job caused a bit of a stir. It was raised in the Dáil. A member of the Labour Party asked Jack Lynch , who was then minister for education, why the stated trained and paid teachers but appeared to have no say in their hiring or firing. Lynch gave [5] a typically evasive civil servant’s answer. “When the Church decides to fire someone”, he said, “they usually have a good reason”.’ McGahern took part-time teaching work at Reading: ‘A very nice man, who liked my work and was professor of English at Reading, gave me a job teaching the students. He said, “Teach them anything you like. I have been teaching them for the last twenty-eight years and they have not understood one word I’ve said. And you can take my word for it that they won’t understand anything you teach them either, so teach them what you want!”’. Moved to Spain, then France; returned to London; invited to teach at Colgate Univ., USA; m. Madeleine, from New York; worked intermittently at Colgate up to 1974; received British Council award, covering two years to 1974; settled in Leitrim with Madeleine; ‘the writing keeps the cattle in high style!’; ‘I like travelling, and being abroad can be very pleasurable, simply because one has no responsibility for what’s going on. But I’ve never written much about other places. I think one can pick up the nuances of one’s own society, but not of a foreign society, I don’t thing the writing would ring true. / As for the rural setting, I don’t think of myself as belonging either to the country or the city. I think one’s sense of place is in one’s mind. Each person has a private world that others cannot see, and my private world is made up of trees and water. It’s that private world that we read with, and the difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer can dramatise that world. But a book doesn’t come alive until it’s been read.’ McGahern tells of a Sligo fan who writes that Moran is very like her father - seeming matches for his eight daughters (‘and if you say what he brought in that was attached to the land,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t wonder why we’re all in England!’).

Mark Patrick Hederman, ‘Artists Must be Our Prophets’ [interviewed by Shirley Kelly], in Books Ireland (Feb. 2002), p.7.

Henry Hudson, author of Beyond Pulditch Gates (Dublin: Wolfhound Press 2001), interviewed in Books Ireland, Feb. 2002, p.9. ESB worker; his story ‘Thoughts on a close-down’ won the Heinrich Bohl award, judged by Jennifer Johnston and others; encouraged by Johnston to turn it into a novel; sold to Wolfhound by Darley Anderson (London) at Frankfurt Fair; his play The Witness concerns a rape case for which he was a juror, winner of Listowel Playwrights award, 1999; third year English student at TCD; imagination fired by Abbey plays.

Robert Greacen, ‘Sixty Years On’, review article on Antoinette Quinn, Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 2001; in Books Ireland, Feb. 2002, p.17 [full-page]. Greacen was invited by Cyril Connolly to review The Great Hunger for Horizon, giving rise to Kavanagh’s calling him a ‘Protestant bastard’ afterwards. Rumoured that the Leader profile was written by Valentine Iremonger.

Christopher Ricks remarks ‘an absence’ in his Oxford Book of English Verse where Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger” should be, because ‘the estate of Patrick Kavanagh and his brother are at odds as to who has the right be be credited.’

Note: Addis includes ed. remarks to the effect that the review copy of the biography was not forthcoming and that’ the publisher in question no longer supports BI or aids our readers by advertising, but we regularly list and review his books - when we get them.’ (p.17.)

Fred Johnston, review of Paul Durcan, Cries of an Irish Caveman: New Poems (2001), in Books Ireland, Feb. 2002. The critic fulminates against a self-appointed critical consensus and offers strictures: ‘Middleing and often bad literary work has been allotted high critical ground by strands and amalgams of this consensus. One might be forgiven for thinking that, at times, Paul Durcan’s work has been buoyed up outrageously when it should have been deflated by well-wishers who, as writers, should have known better. Such well0wishing hasn’t done the work good. / But it must be said tha this latest collection shows sparkings of a return to the kind of writing which made him notable in his early daus, the days of his best and truest work.’ (p.20.) Disconcerted by elements of complicity in between reviewer and reviewed Anthony Cronin’s notice of the book for the Sunday Independent; expresses the hope that the poet is being sarcastic in characterising the subject of a poem dedicated to Tracey Emin as ‘the T. S. Eliot de nos jours’; quotes the title poem, ending with ‘weird gravitas’: ‘If my end is to be whooping it up/in the Alzhemer’s disco/It’ll be for you I’ll be whooping/- the lady that’s known as Cita.’ Comments on a pure homage to Kavanagh in the form of parody, and remarks that ‘Durcan’s transmigration from outsider to fully imprimatured Establishment figure is explained in the refrain of “The Black Cow of the Family”: ‘I am the black cow of the family/Although/I’ve a bit of white in me too.’ Johnston wonders what Durcan’s poetry would be like if, ‘it had, like Michael Hartnett’s, to survive in an essentially rural and linguistic hinterland, without benefit of often unmerited but, from some quarters, assured critical acclaim’; he ends with a reproof: ‘Dublin is not Ireland’.

Donagh MacDonagh was criticised by Beckett.

Mary Trotter, Ireland’s National Theaters: Political Performance and the Origins of the Irish Dramatic Movement (Syracuse UP 2001), 232pp.

Desmond Traynor, review of Mohn McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), in Books Ireland, Feb. 2002, p.23: […] The impeccable gift he has for orchestraiting conversation between people is perhaps his greatest conversational resource. For, what’s finally important in fiction, far more important than ideas or wit or style or knowledge or theories, and just as important as vision, are moments of emotional truth. […] McGahern pulls it off, every time, without a false note or jarring moment. This is especially noticeable in scenes like the laying out of Johnny, who dies suddenly while home on holiday from England; or in the digging of his grave, which gives the book its title.The pagan is older than the Christian, and he must be buried with his head to the west, so that he may face the rising sun in the east.’ Quotes final sentence: ‘At the porch, before entering the house, they both [Joe and Kate] turned to look back across the lake, even though they knew that both Jamesie and Mary had long since disappeared from the sky.’ Characters are: Jamesie and Mary, the Ruttledges’ neighbours; the Shah, Ruttledge’s rich, single, teetotal entrepreneurial uncle; Frank Dolan, the employee with who he has a strange uncommunicative relationship; Monica, the Shah’s widowed sister; loquacious, libidinous and ultimately viciously misogynist John Quinn; Johnny, Jamesie’s brother who emigrated to London to follow hopeless love and wound up a rootless bachelor at Ford’s in Dageham; Jimmy Joe McKiernan, auctioneer, undertaker and IRA ringleader; Patrick Ryan, asexual jack of all trades; brutalised Bill Evans, victim of system of hiring orphans as cheap labour; Fr. Conroy, the decent parish priest; Jim, the civil service son of Jamesie and Mary, and his self-important wife Lucy and their children [~].

Dan Collins, Cannibals (London: Jonathan Cape 2001), 168pp.

Bridget O’Toole, review of The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely (Methuen), 780pp., in Books Ireland, Feb. 2002: remarks that each story intrigues, ‘not because the plots are made of tricks and turns … it’s that Kiely’s subject is finally the mysteriousness of human beings. We are drawn in by a voice that is intimate, all-knowing and yet very slightly disbelieving, and we learn that people do not behave as we would expect. / We trust the story-teller’s low-key tone of certainty and respond sensuously to the world he creates. “Recreates” is important since he makes us believe it was alwys there. / The best story is “God’s Own Country” […].’ (p.24.)

J. Ardle McArdle, review of Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquestion in Early Modern Ireland [… &c.] (Cambridge UP): aims to redress the imbanalce created by history drawn from monoplane reords where the conquerors speak and the conquered are doomed to silence; remarks, ‘as early as the 1570s, Brian Ó Gnimh captured the desolation of the poet adrift on a rising tide of English which reduced his words to the lonely call of seabirds: I am the guillemot, the English the sea. The long ebb of the Irish language had begun. But the rising tide of English came freighted with a complex cargo from the wreckage of the Gaelic world. . But the rising tide of English came freighted with a complex cargo from the wreckage of the Gaelic world.

Patrick Magee, Gangsters or Guerrillas?: Representation of Irish Republicans in Troubles Fiction, (Belfast: Beyond the Pale 2001), foreword by Danny Morrison slams Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence as ‘preposterous’; author graduand of Long Kesh; study begins with John Broderick, The Fugitives (1962).

First Flush notice of Daire Keogh & Kevin Whelan, Acts of Union: The Causes, Contexts and Consequences of the Act of Union (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2001), refers to Castle Rackrent: ‘The metaphor of a bad marriage [...] is relfect in the text and on the cover. For instance in one essay the domineering patriarch is discussed with relation to Maria Edgeworth and her father. Her revenge is seen as being Castle Rackrent and Ennui that depict characters Kit and Jessica, Isabella and Condy, Glenthorn and Geraldine who are as mismatched in their unions as oil and vinegar. (Books Ireland, Feb. 2002, p.33.)

Tim Pat Coogan, 1916: The Easter Rising (London: Cassell 2002), 192pp.; recruitment poster for Volunteers says: ‘Emmet died to free Ireland. What are YOU doing towards this glorious object?’

[Copied to Datasets 22/02/02 BS]