WHEN IN PARIS . . . WITH OSCAR WILDE

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 24, Number 5 (May 2013).  
[It was written during my time as a Visiting Scholar at the American University of Paris.]

I am sitting in a café/bar called Le Comptoir des Saints-Pères in the area of the so-called Left Bank of Paris known as Saint-Germain-des-Prés.  I am keeping an eye out for the spirit of James Joyce who, according to Ernest Hemingway, ate regularly at this address in the 1920s when it was a bit more fashionable and when it was known as Michaud’s.  Hemingway sets the scene in his memoiresque narrative A Moveable Feast: “It was where Joyce ate with his family then, he and his wife against the wall, Joyce peering at the menu through his thick glasses holding the menu up in one hand; Nora by him, a hearty but delicate eater; Giorgio thin, foppish, sleek-headed from the back; Lucia with heavy curly hair, a girl not quite yet grown; all of them talking Italian.”

Les Deux Magots

The Paris of Joyce and Hemingway has been thoroughly documented by scholars and tour guides, and devoted readers of those literary giants can follow them virtually step by step through the streets of their adopted city.  In fact, in the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, named after Sylvia Beach’s bookshop that published Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, I recently picked up a copy of The Paris of Joyce & Beckett by Brian O’Shea and Sean Donlon and also a copy of Walks in Hemingway’s Paris by Noel Riley Fitch.  I have visited many of the locations identified and mapped in those books, including rue Cardinal Lemoine, the remarkably unremarkable street where Joyce lived in 1921 while completing Ulysses and where Hemingway also took an apartment shortly after he first arrived in Paris in December of 1921.  Not long after the publication of Ulysses, the paths of those two masters crossed and their lives overlapped, and in A Moveable Feast Hemingway describes a chance encounter with Joyce on Boulevard Saint-Germain: “He asked me to have a drink with him and we went to the Deux-Magots and ordered dry sherry although you will always read that he drank only Swiss white wine.”  Les Deux Magots is still a going concern.  I had a café allongé there a couple of days ago.

Given all the attention paid to Joyce and Hemingway by devotees and fanatics, I am a bit surprised that there is no equivalent book-length “Guide to Oscar Wilde’s Paris.”  Born in Dublin in 1854, Wilde visited Paris frequently during his lifetime and died here in 1900.  Unlike Joyce and Hemingway, he is buried here.  (So is Samuel Beckett.)

Back in 2005, I attended a performance at Dublin’s renowned Abbey Theatre of a critically-acclaimed production of Wilde’s dramatic masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest.  The production, which featured an all-male cast, included a prologue that is not part of the original play script.  It involved an actor (the brilliant Alan Stanford) playing the part of Oscar Wilde himself, abject and adrift in Paris, being asked to devise an entertainment for his friends there.  So this framing device was plausible enough—and it also had a bit of magic to it, as suddenly, with just a slight adjustment of costume and coiffure, the character of Wilde morphed into the character of Lady Bracknell.  And so the play proper began.

But that prologue continued to lend flavor to the production, as it cast Wilde as an artist whose sheer and unabashed wit in his writing, and also in conversation, ultimately can be seen as a mask for his true self—a lonely and conflicted figure, even a lost soul.  And that is the version of Wilde that I have been thinking about as I have been walking the streets of Paris, tracking the last dark days of his life in the City of Light.

The best account of that life is Richard Ellmann’s biography, published in 1987.  So, having re-read the last couple of chapters of that book, I found myself standing on rue des Beaux-Arts, a narrow street, now lined with high-end art galleries, that runs between the École nationale supériere des Beaux Arts on rue Bonaparte to rue de Seine, which leads to the left bank of the river that glides through the center of Paris like the Liffey through Dublin.  Wilde died in l’Hôtel Alsace on that street.  Aptly enough, given that Wilde reportedly declared during his final weeks that “I am dying beyond my means,” the Alsace is now a four-star luxury accommodation known simply as L’Hôtel.  Wilde’s connection to the place is acknowledged by a medallion next to the front door and, higher up on the front wall, by a stone plaque mentioning that he died on the premises.  (There is also a plaque recognizing that renowned Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges lived in the hotel for an extended period in the 1970s and ’80s).

Wilde’s death, from cerebral meningitis according to Ellmann, was slow and painful.  Bedridden for most of his final two months, he managed a stroll one evening that gave him occasion to utter to an acquaintance these famous not-quite-last words: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death.  One or the other of us has to go.”  That same evening he imbibed absinthe, his longtime drink of choice, which exacerbated his condition.  He would die a month later, on November 30th, but not without further drama in the form of a deathbed conversion to Catholicism.  Much earlier in his life, Wilde had declared: “Catholicism is the only religion to die in.”  Summoned to his bedside twenty-four hours before he expired, Rev. Cuthbert Dunne, an Irish-born member of the Passionist order of priests based at St. Joseph’s, the only English-language church in Paris, baptized Wilde “conditionally” and administered the sacrament of Extreme Unction.

On December 3rd, Fr. Cuthbert officiated at Wilde’s funeral mass in nearby Église de Saint-Germain-des-Prés.  The interior of that church, dimly lit and austere yet also a serene place to sit and reflect, seems to fit with the end of a life summarized thus by Richard Ellmann: “During the first period he was a scapegrace, during the second a scapegoat.”  (Probably Wilde would appreciate that today a small garden next to the church holds a sculpture by Pablo Picasso honoring the memory of Guillaume Apollinaire, a short-lived poet who dominated the Parisian literary scene just a decade or so after Wilde’s death.  Philosopher René Descartes, famous for his declaration of Cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”—is interred inside the church.)  Wilde’s funeral was attended by a small group of friends who exited the side door of the church to follow the hearse to his first burial place, the Cimetière de Bagneux in Montrouge, Hauts-de-Seine, in south suburban Paris.

But in 1909 his remains were re-interred in Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, the largest burial ground within the city limits of Paris.  He keeps distinguished company there: legendary lovers Abelard and Heloïse, beloved chanteuse Édith Piaf and jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli, novelist Marcel Proust and the aforementioned poet Guillaume Apollinaire, American authors Richard Wright and Gertrude Stein, Polish composer Frédéric Chopin and Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani . . . and of course Jim Morrison, iconic singer of the American rock band The Doors.  Morrison’s gravesite may be the only rival to Wilde’s as a place of essential pilgrimage for the hundreds of thousands of visitors that Père-Lachaise draws annually.  No doubt, the lines from Wilde’s poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” cut as an epitaph into the back of his tombstone, prophesy the nature of some of those who pause at his final resting place:

And alien tears will fill for him

Pity’s long-broken urn,

For his mourners will be outcast men,

And outcasts always mourn.

Carved from a twenty-ton block of stone by celebrated sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, the tombstone—a nude “flying demon-angel,” as Epstein described it—was initially deemed indecent by French authorities and covered with a tarpaulin.  Over the past century it has been vandalized, and in recent years it has been defaced by admirers of Wilde leaving lipsticked kiss marks on its surface.  In 2011, officials at the cemetery constructed a glass case around the gravesite: now the glass is smeared with kisses.  In death, just as in life, peace has not come easily for Oscar Wilde.

WHEN IN PARIS . . . WITH BRENDAN BEHAN

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 24, Number 4 (April 2013), 5.  

[It was written during my time as a Visiting Scholar at the American University of Paris.]

Today I walked along rue St. André des Arts in Paris, searching for an Arab tavern.  I was following the footsteps of legendary Dublin-born man-of-letters Brendan Behan, or at least following their imprint in a poem he wrote—in Irish—in the Latin Quarter of Paris in 1949.  Like many Irish writers before and after him—most famously Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett—Behan was drawn irresistibly to La Ville-Lumière (The City of Light): it was the absolute antithesis of “dear dirty Dublin.”  Beginning in 1948 and continuing almost until his death in 1964, he had several extended sojourns in Paris and numerous visits—all of which generated tales of adventures and misadventures as colorful as those that fueled his public persona as a hard-drinking “character” not only back home in Dublin but also in New York, London, and virtually every other city where he set foot during his meteoric rise to fame as playwright and memoirist during the latter half of the 1950s.

Behan’s earliest Parisian days and nights are reconstructed and recounted by Ulick O’Connor in his biography of the artist, titled simply Brendan, first published in 1970.  Just released from a month in Mountjoy prison for being drunk and disorderly and assaulting a police officer, Behan felt the need for a fresh start outside Dublin but was barred from entering England because of his extensive record of incarceration for militant republican activities—two years of juvenile detention in England, fours years in prison in Ireland, and then another four months in an English jail in 1947.  He thus took his chances even in passing through England while coincidentally retracing the very route to Paris that Joyce gave his character Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses: “Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger.”

Ever gregarious, once he crossed the English Channel, Behan quickly insinuated himself into various corners of Parisian life.  Over time his acquaintances included fellow Dubliner Samuel Beckett, iconic French existentialist Albert Camus (who shared Behan’s passion for soccer), and American expatriate novelist James Baldwin.  According to O’Connor, Behan lived mostly hand to mouth, though occasionally he sold a piece of writing—like the short story “After the Wake,” published in the avant-garde literary magazine Points—and occasionally he resorted to his family trade of housepainting.  He also claimed to have operated as a “ponce” for prostitutes, soliciting business from deep-pocketed American tourists visiting the landmark Harry’s New York Bar (which, I can attest, is still a going concern today at the same address, 5 rue Daunou).  Generally penniless, however, and an unabashed chancer, Behan relied heavily on American ex-G.I.s living comfortably on their education grants to provide him with food, drink, and a floor to sleep on at night.

In fact, Behan’s poem that drew me to rue St. André des Arts reads as a sort of emblem both of his makeshift life in Paris and of his emerging literary ambition.  First appearing in the Irish-language journal Comhar in August of 1949, “Buíochas le Joyce” was partly a byproduct of Behan’s time spent in prison during the mid-1940s for attempting to murder a police detective after the annual Easter 1916 commemoration at Glasnevin Cemetery in 1942.  Sentenced to fourteen years of penal servitude, Behan was released after only four years thanks to a general amnesty for political prisoners in 1946.  But during his time first at Mountjoy Prison, then at Arbour Hill, and finally at the internment camp at The Curragh in County Kildare, he became a serious student of the Irish language.  In his biography of Behan, O’Connor quotes his Irish-language tutor and fellow Mountjoy internee, County Kerry schoolteacher Sean O’Briain, who recalls that “Brendan truly loved the language and the literature”: “He had a great gradh (love) for the Cuirt (The Midnight Court), and also for An tOileannach (The Island Man) and the stories of Sean-Phadraig O Conaire.  He went far deeper into the subject than his gaiety would suggest, and he loved to talk and learn about life in the Blaskets, Dun Chaoin and Ballyferriter.”  At The Curragh, Behan studied under the mentorship of novelist and short story writer Máirtín Ó Cadhain.

O’Connor notes that Behan was influenced by various styles of Irish-language poetry; however, the body of work that he left behind—only a dozen poems all told—is too small a sample to prove either influence by or confluence with the specific 17th- and 18th-century poets whom O’Connor cites.  Indeed, the inclusion of a couple of his poems in the important anthology Nuabhéarsaíocht (1950) aligns his writing much more closely with what scholar Louis de Paor describes as “the emergence of a Modernist poetics” among non-native speakers that marked “the accelerated development of the modern lyric mode in Irish away from the vigorous tradition of folk or community poetry that continues to be the dominant form of poetry in Gaeltacht areas.”  While its irreverent tone may be consistent with the poetic practices glanced at by O’Connor, both the formal and the stylistic attributes of “Buíochas le Joyce” suggest a more complex literary lineage.

For starters, Behan’s poem is a sonnet—a form inextricably associated with the British poetic tradition by way of Wyatt and Surrey, Spenser and Shakespeare, Milton and Donne, Wordsworth and Keats.  Was Behan’s appropriation of this form thus one more act of diehard Irish nationalism on his part?  If that was his intention, then the effect is just mildly subversive, as its fourteen lines are arranged in the Petrarchan variant of the form—an octave and a sestet separated by a double line break—rather than the Shakespearean.  Or was Behan drawn to the sonnet through acquaintance with some of the French masters of the form—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé?  One way or the other, he shows little interest in the “craft” of the sonnet—he seems either oblivious to or indifferent to the conventions of consistent line-length and predictable end-rhyme.

Yet, as Ulick O’Connor puts on display in “Gratitude to James Joyce,” his translation of “Buíochas le Joyce,” the rhetorical structure of the poem’s subject matter falls naturally into the Petrarchan formal structure.  The first four lines establish the basic circumstances of Behan’s direct address to the spirit of Joyce (who had died in 1941):

Here in the rue St. André des Arts,

Plastered in an Arab Tavern,

I explain you to an eager Frenchman,

Ex-G.I.’s, and a drunken Russian.

The next four lines make clear the relationship between the speaker’s state of intoxication and the company he is keeping.  Presumably, at least the Frenchman and the Americans are students (the latter sponsored in Paris by the G.I. Bill), and in their eagerness to learn about Joyce from his fellow Dubliner, they are willing to ply the self-styled expert ex-pat Irishman with lashings of French alcohol, including the anise-based liqueur that replaced the wormwood-infused absinthe spirits (outlawed in 1915) that Oscar Wilde had favored and the trademark apple brandy of the Basse-Normandie region of France:

Of all you wrote I explain each part,

Drinking Pernod in France because of your art.

As a writer we’re proud of you—

And thanks for the Calvados we gain through you.

Then, in typical Petrarchan fashion, the double line break announces the sonnet’s volta (or “turn”), a pronounced shift in its emphasis—in this case to Behan’s rationalization of his exploitation of Joyce’s name and reputation for the sake of a free booze-up.  Would Joyce begrudge his fellow Irish transplant the chance to quench his thirst through such a ploy?  Essentially, Behan imagines reversing roles with his venerated literary precursor, and in the process transforms his scheme into a conspiratorial wink between two Dublinmen notoriously fond of their drink.  In short, he invites the departed Joyce to put himself literally in his shoes, tanked up on brandy and making his way from Les Halles, the vast and teeming marketplace known as “the belly of Paris,” across the Seine to the bohemian Left Bank:

If I were you

And you were me,

Coming from Les Halles

Roaring, with a load of cognac,

Belly full, on the tipple,

A verse or two in my honour you’d scribble.

So, is “Buíochas le Joyce” just, as Behan scholar Colbert Kearney suggests, “a casual jeu d’esprit”?  And is Behan just suffering from delusions of grandeur in imagining Joyce composing verses of gratitude to him?  About a decade later, Behan would describe himself in a letter as a typical Irish writer: “you know that we have no proper view of our own work—we think we’re James Joyces one minute and plain gobshites the next.”  Around the same time, asked in an interview why he first wrote his play The Hostage in Irish (An Giall), he explained: “Irish is more direct than English, more bitter.  It’s a fine muscular thing, the most expressive language in Europe.”  Obviously, the poem is an apprentice piece—Behan’s poetic “career” was short-lived, and his most enduring works are his compelling plays The Quare Fellow and The Hostage and his memoir-esque narrative Borstal Boy.  Still, “Buíochas le Joyce” effectively evokes a specific time in a specific place where Behan might still feel at home more than sixty years later: the Arab tavern may be long gone, but walking today along rue St. André des Arts, I could not help but notice the Guinness sign over Corcoran’s Irish Pub.

ENSHRINING PATRICK KAVANAGH

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 24, Number 3 (March 2013), 25.

Recently, but not for the first time, I paid a visit to a roadside shrine (as it were) that remembers one of the iconic figures of so-called Bohemian Dublin of the 1940s and ’50s.  Actually, the “shrine”—commemorating poet Patrick Kavanagh—has two separate but related parts.  The earlier part is a bench dedicated by his friends on St. Patrick’s Day of 1968, the year after his death, fulfilling a wish Kavanagh had made a decade earlier in a poem titled “Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin.”  Sitting on a bench erected to the memory of Mrs. Dermot O’Brien (the wife of a well-known Dublin painter of landscapes and portraits), Kavanagh wrote a sonnet requesting the same for himself: “O commemorate me where there is water, / Canal water preferably, so stilly / Greeny at the heart of summer.”  He got his wish, and forty-five years after its dedication, that “canal-bank seat for the passer-by” remains “Where by a lock niagarously roars / The falls for those who sit in the tremendous silence / Of mid-July.”  Located on the south bank of the Grand Canal along Mespil Road, that bench, which has the poem inscribed on one of its granite trestles, is about a ten-minute walk from St. Stephen’s Green in the heart of Dublin. 

And so is another bench, the second part of the Kavanagh shrine—but this one, on the north bank along Wilton Road, has incorporated onto it a life-size bronze sculpture, created by John Coll and unveiled in June of 1991, of the poet seated in a reflective pose as if he were composing the poem that prompted the first bench.  Or perhaps Coll imagined Kavanagh drafting “Canal Bank Walk,” another sonnet inspired by that slow-moving man-made waterway—a remarkable feat of engineering that took most of the last half of the eighteenth century to complete—that ultimately linked the River Liffey in Dublin with the River Shannon in Co. Offaly.  Written in 1958 in the aftermath of his recovery from lung cancer, and also from legal difficulties, “Canal Bank Walk” represented a sort of manifesto of renewal for Kavanagh, who by 1939 had transplanted himself more or less permanently from rural County Monaghan to Ireland’s mostly unwelcoming literary hub: “Leafy-with-love banks and the green waters of the canal / Pouring redemption for me, that I do / The will of God, wallow in the habitual, the banal, / Grow with nature again as before I grew.”

If those two benches comprise a shrine to Kavanagh, an essential place of pilgrimage for his devoted readers, then surely some of the pubs that he frequented during his quarter-century or so in Dublin might be thought of as chapels.  I have paid visits to some of those too—again, recently and not for the first time.  Aptly enough, one of them, McDaid’s on Harry Street (just off Grafton Street, the city’s central shopping thoroughfare), was in a previous life a literal chapel of the Moravian Church, a Protestant denomination from eastern Europe that made inroads in Ireland in the eighteenth century.  Still a going concern today, in the 1940s and ’50s McDaid’s was what James Joyce might have called the omphalos—the very center of Ireland’s literary world dominated by Kavanagh, his urban archrival and nemesis Brendan Behan, and the multi-monikered Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien/Myles na Gopaleen. 

Before McDaid’s, the omphalos would have been another public house sacred to the memory of Kavanagh and company, The Palace Bar on Fleet Street.  The watering hole of choice for most of the leading literary and artistic figures in Dublin during Kavanagh’s early years in the city, The Palace was presided over by R. M. “Bertie” Smyllie, the larger-than-life (both physically and in personality) editor of The Irish Times and in that capacity a frequent benefactor providing journalistic piecework to hungry (or thirsty) poets and other literary types.  In 1940, New Zealand cartoonist Alan Reeve published in The Irish Times a now-famous sketch of the back room of The Palace.  Titled “Dublin Culture,” the drawing caricatures upwards of forty regular denizens of the bar, including Francis McManus, Maurice Walsh, Austin Clarke, Padraic Fallon, F. R. Higgins, Flann O’Brien, Brinsley MacNamara, Harry Kernoff, and Seán O’Sullivan.  Kavanagh too is in the picture, but as a newcomer to the Dublin literary scene he looks a bit uncomfortable and appears ready to leave the others to their heavy imbibing and their barbed-wit gossiping.

Located just off Westmoreland Street at the edge of the once decrepit but now hip Temple Bar area of Dublin, The Palace seems to have changed hardly an iota in more than seventy years: like McDaid’s, it remains an inviting and hospitable oasis in “the heart of the Hibernian metropolis” (Joyce’s phrase) and an essential port of call for devotees of Kavanagh.

But the enduringness of pubs like McDaid’s and The Palace only accentuates the loss of another “house of worship”—perhaps the cathedral to those mere chapels—associated with Kavanagh: that is, Parsons Bookshop, which used to be located in a building known as the Bridge House, on Baggot Street Bridge that spans the Grand Canal just a minute’s stroll from the two Kavanagh benches.  During my student days in Dublin in the late 1970s, I visited Parsons a number of times, usually in search of books missing from the shelves of the bigger bookshops in the city center.  I recall specifically picking up the Millington editions of Benedict Kiely’s The Cards of the Gambler and Mervyn Wall’s Leaves for the Burning and the Helicon edition of Wall’s The Unfortunate Fursey. 

As it turns out, Kiely and Wall were both regular visitors to Parsons Bookshop—but apparently no one was as regular as Patrick Kavanagh.  In his engaging and illuminating book Parsons Bookshop: At the Heart of Bohemian Dublin, 1949-1989 (The Liffey Press, 2006), Brendan Lynch tells the story of the shop in entertaining and enlightening detail, much of it gleaned from interviews with the shop’s founder and owner, Miss May O’Flaherty, and her longtime assistant, Mary King.  Early in the book, Miss O’Flaherty recalls that author Mary Lavin once exclaimed: “Parsons, where one met as many interesting writers on the floor of the shop as on the shelves!”  In Lynch’s narrative, no one was more “interesting” than Patrick Kavanagh.

Recounting the shop’s evolution from a local hardware store to the magnetic center of a literary community, Miss O’Flaherty remembers that “it was Patrick Kavanagh who provided the greatest encouragement when I was starting off.”  When the shop opened in 1949, Kavanagh lived nearby on Pembroke Road and, as Miss O’Flaherty explains, quickly became a fixture: “Soon he was part of the furniture and if he ever missed a morning, customers would ask ‘Where’s Patrick today?’”  Legendary for his cantankerousness, Kavanagh had a particularly toxic relationship with playwright and memoirist Brendan Behan, another regular visitor to the shop.  Yet, according to Miss O’Flaherty, their personal animosity never intruded on the sacred space of the shop: “Though Patrick sometimes got in people’s way while sitting in the door, particularly in the good weather, I think we kept him on the straight and narrow.  Even though Brendan Behan called a few times while he was here, Patrick never said anything untoward.  I think the only time I saw him cross was when he observed a book he didn’t like in the window.  ‘I’ll never darken this door again,’ he growled.  But he was back looking for his stool the following morning as usual.”

Asked by Brendan Lynch about Kavanagh’s death in 1967, Mary King remembered his funeral entourage winding its way through Ballsbridge en route toward Monaghan: “they brought Patrick on a final lap of his favourite stomping ground, past Parsons to Pembroke, Raglan, and Waterloo Roads.  The morning was miserable and dark, grief seemed to overhang the canal, but it was heartwarming that so many people turned out along the street to see him off to Inniskeen.”

In 2004, the centenary of Kavanagh’s birth, the Monaghan Association of Dublin mounted a plaque on the wall of the Bridge House recognizing the poet’s lengthy and deep connection with Parsons Bookshop.  The shop outlasted Kavanagh by twenty-two years.  But recently, pausing beneath that plaque, I realized that, as in most matters, Kavanagh himself had the last word in the form of a ballad he wrote in 1953: “If ever you go to Dublin town / In a hundred years or so / Inquire for me in Baggot Street / And what I was like to know.”

JOYCE’S DUBLIN: GONE WITH THE WIND?

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 24, Number 2 (February 2013), 19.

Punctuated with headlines to mark its being set in conjoined newspaper offices, the seventh episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Aeolus,” itself punctuates the novel, announcing by way of its sudden typographical shift—and indeed by its first headline—that both the characters and the reader are now located IN THE HEART OF THE HIBERNIAN METROPOLIS. 

Specifically, most of the activity in the episode takes place in the vicinity of Sackville Street (renamed O’Connell Street in 1924), the main thoroughfare of Dublin both in 1904, when Ulysses is set, and now.  Anticipating the buffeting flurry of busyness that Joyce’s characters Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus will experience inside the figuratively blustery newspaper offices nearby, the episode begins amidst hubbub in the literal center of that street, the hub of the Dublin United Tramway Company: “Before Nelson’s pillar trams slowed, shunted, changed trolley, started for Blackrock, Kingstown and Dalkey, Clonskea, Rathgar and Terenure, Palmerston Park and upper Rathmines, Sandymount Green, Rathmines, Ringsend and Sandymount Tower, Harold’s Cross.”

Famously, while writing Ulysses, Joyce declared to a friend, “I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”  Joyce’s intention continues to resonate for readers of the novel in our time, and Joyceans—both professionals (mostly academics like yours truly) and amateurs (devotees of the written word)—continue to walk literally in the literary footprints of Joyce’s memorable cast of characters.  But as I can personally attest, more and more of those footprints have disappeared—have gone as if blown away by Aeolus, the god of wind whom Joyce evokes in Ulysses—as the city has morphed inevitably and continually during the century-plus since Joyce began inscribing it on the page.  More and more that reconstruction has to be undertaken in the mind’s eye of the reader-turned-daytripper.

To that end, I have been browsing around recently in a book about Dublin’s trams, those clanging conveyors of the citizenry of the “metropolis” during Joyce’s time.  Published in 2000, Michael Corcoran’s Through Streets Broad and Narrow: A History of Dublin Trams, actually engages closely with Joyce’s Dublin, as the tramway system was approaching a high point in its evolution at the time of the single day immortalized by Joyce in Ulysses—June 16, 1904: as Corcoran explains, a major extension had been completed the previous autumn, and October of 1904 would see the introduction of the DUTC’s first top-covered trams.  While citing “four apparent errors, one of them perhaps intentional,” Corcoran nonetheless gives Joyce high marks for his depiction of the system at various points in Ulysses, and many of the basic facts in Corcoran’s narrative illuminate just how imaginatively Joyce took the geography that lay literally beneath his feet and reworked it in his fiction.

Writing specifically about the opening of the “Aeolus” episode, Corcoran notes: “The four tracks coming past the Abbey Street junction became six between there and the Pillar, the four inner ones going through a series of crossovers to form four terminal stubs right in front of the Pillar’s entrance door.  From these stubs began the journeys to all but one of the southside destinations listed by Joyce.”  How fitting that an episode defined by verbal bluster and physical bustle and shunting about inside the newspaper offices should begin in the center of Sackville Street; as Corcoran notes further: “It has been calculated that a tram could make upwards of 60 different movements between O’Connell Bridge and Rutland (Parnell) Square.”

Gradually superseded by buses, taxis and private automobiles, the tramway system in Dublin had run its course by 1949; so only the earliest of “Joyceans”—professional or amateur—would have had firsthand experience of the DUTC as Joyce knew it.  In a sense, then, the trams, which actually appear in numerous episodes of Ulysses, embody the theme of “Gone with the wind” (a phrase spoken by a character in “Aeolus”) that latter-day daytrippers have to come to terms with in trying to reconstruct Joyce’s Dublin.

I was thinking that specifically last summer as I paused before a Joycean landmark that has withstood time’s tax and toll: the statue of “Ireland’s national poet,” Thomas Moore (1779-1852), that stands on a traffic island next to Trinity College in the center of Dublin.  Renowned for his “Irish Melodies”—mostly sentimental ballads set to traditional Irish airs—Moore figures frequently in Joyce’s writing, beginning with several references and allusions in Dubliners and continuing through Finnegans Wake.  But in “Lestrygonians,” the episode of Ulysses immediately following “Aeolus,” the reference is especially complex and thus especially revealing of just how Joyce engaged in his imagination with what he once referred to as “the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture.”

Writing with Leopold Bloom as the episode’s center of narrative consciousness, Joyce packs a lot into just the first two sentences registering Bloom’s passing glance at Moore’s statue: “He crossed under Tommy Moore’s roguish finger.  They did right to put him up over a urinal: meeting of the waters.”  Even a casual viewer of the statue today will notice that Moore is represented in a “poetical” pose, with a book in his left hand and the index finger of his right hand conspicuously raised as if to emphasize a particular point.  But most casual readers of Ulysses will not recognize that the word “roguish” alludes to an elaborate hoax perpetrated in the London periodical Fraser’s Magazine in 1835 by a literary Irish priest, Father Francis Mahony (1804-66).  Having created a fictional counterpart named Father Prout and also Oliver Yorke, the editor of The Reliques of Father Prout, a collection of his purported literary and cultural musings, Mahony had Father Prout set out to prove, in an essay titled “The Rogueries of Tom Moore,” that a number of Moore’s poetic verses are plagiarisms of verses first written in French, Latin or Greek—and as proof he presented the originals . . . which Mahony himself had written.  Evidently, in Joyce’s mind Mahony’s own “roguery” would still be familiar in 1904 to even an ordinary Dubliner like Bloom.

Likewise, Joyce allows Bloom plausible familiarity with one of Moore’s most popular ballads, “The Meeting of the Waters,” which evokes the “sweet vale of Avoca” in County Wicklow where the rivers Avon and Avoca converge.  While this reference may still resonate today for readers with an ear for Irish music, fewer and fewer Joyceans will know firsthand that, at least until the late 1970s, the traffic island which is home to Moore’s statue was also home to a public men’s lavatory.  Yet that essential bit of knowledge illuminates not only Bloom’s (and Joyce’s) irreverent humor at Moore’s expense but also the next sentence in the episode: “Ought to be places for women.”  As Bloom’s throwaway musing reflects, Dublin Corporation, in a manifestation of lingering Victorian prudery, in effect denied the fact of female bodily functions by affording no public accommodations for those functions.

All of which, remarkably, eventually loops back to the Dublin United Tramway Company at the turn of the twentieth century.  For just as Bloom’s glance at Moore’s statue transports the Joycean reader all the way back to Father Mahony’s “Rogueries” in 1835, so does Bloom’s sensitivity to women’s needs carry the reader forward to 1961 and the publication of The Hard Life by Flann O’Brien, one of the preeminent Irish novelists in the generation immediately following Joyce.  Set essentially in “Joyce’s Dublin” (the narrative action takes place between 1890 and 1910), this darkly comic novel has as a subplot a scheme by one Mr. Collopy to outfit tramcars to provide the discreet accommodations for women that Bloom sees lacking.  Mr. Collopy explains his plan to his friend, a German Jesuit named Father Kurt Fahrt: “Let us say the a lady and a gentleman are walking down the street and have a mind to go for a stroll in the Phoenix Park.  Fair enough.  But first one thing has to be attended to.  They wait at a tram stop.  Lo and behold, along comes the Black Tram.  The lady steps on board and away she goes on her own.  And the whole beauty of the plan is this: she can get an ordinary tram back to rejoin her waiting friend.”

Obviously, Mr. Collopy’s scheme is ludicrous.  But O’Brien’s linking it with Dublin’s trams underscores the centrality of the tramway system to Dublin life a century and more ago, and in the process underscores how a book like Corcoran’s Through Streets Broad and Narrow can be so helpful for the latter-day reader committed to “reconstructing” the heart of the Joycean metropolis.  Aptly enough, my browsing through that book conveyed me not only deep into DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN (another headline from “Aeolus”) but also backward and forward in Ireland’s rich literary history.

A CLASSIC MODERN NOVEL FROM FERDIA MAC ANNA

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 23, Number 8 (August 2012), 13.

Understandably, a casual reader of Ferdia Mac Anna’s recently reissued first novel, The Last of the High Kings, might think of it in Joycean terms.  Originally published in 1991, this novel of youthful development seems, on the surface, to share some essential thematic territory with the spirit of non serviam articulated famously by James Joyce’s quasi-autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church.”

Yet, even aside from the fact that he is not cast in the role of “the artist”—that is, in the mold of the self-consciously sensitive individual committed, in his struggle against the values of a repressive society, to deploying the Joycean strategy of “silence, exile and cunning”—Mac Anna’s protagonist Frankie Griffin emerges as much more, or at least much other, than a late-twentieth century variation on Joyce’s Stephen.  Set in the north-of-Dublin community of Howth in the summer of 1977, Mac Anna’s novel is ultimately very much a product of its own place and time and is infused with a comic spirit that distances it both tonally and stylistically from Joyce’s signature ironic treatment of his Dublin-centered creation.

Not unusually for a first novel (and in that regard not unlike Joyce’s Portrait), The Last of the High Kings is also infused with many details drawn from the author’s own life.  As Mac Anna registers his childhood and his adolescence in The Last of the Bald Heads, his memoir published in 2004, these details include not only Howth as setting but also essential elements that propel the narrative of the novel: a domineering and eccentric mother, a frequently absent father, a male youth longing for individual identity in a community and culture (social, scholastic, political) demanding blind conformity to established codes of conduct.  As Mac Anna acknowledges in recounting the family’s move from Killiney to Howth, even the novel’s title derives from a refrain that he endured throughout his growing-up years: “On the first day, the local kids came around to check us out.  ‘Where are you from?’ one asked.  ‘We come from the High Kings of Ireland,’ I replied, repeating what Mother had told me to say.  The kids were not impressed.  A girl said that she was going to ask around about us.  She reckoned we were from Cabra.”

In fact, one of the central tensions of the novel involves Frankie’s mother’s designating him for greatness from a very young age: “At home, Ma told him he was a special boy, descended from the ancient Celtic warriors and High Kings.  She said there was powerful blood in his veins because he was the firstborn son.  Someday he’d be a great man, she promised; he’d be a professor of history, then President of Ireland.  That kind of talk made him feel great.  Every time Ma leaned over him, he felt warm and secure and lightheaded.  It was like being bathed in his own personal spotlight.”  But by the time Frankie reaches his teenage years, such puerile gratification has been replaced by his interest in girls, drink, and rock ’n’ roll: “At home Ma gave out to him about everything.  She said his hair was a disgrace.  She didn’t like his clothes or his habits or his friends.”  Clearly, Frankie has trouble living up to his mother’s expectations for a descendent of “the High Kings of Tara” whose “bloodline is one of the most revered in Europe.”

Ultimately, the tension between Frankie and his mother centers on her “politics”: a diehard nationalist and a local activist in the Fianna Fáil party, she actively despises any and all Irish Protestants, whom she labels sweepingly as “Brits.”  Indeed, the climactic confrontation of the novel involves Frankie being accosted by his mother for his burgeoning romantic (and sexual) relationship with a local Protestant beauty, Jayne Wayne, whose mother happens to be from Belfast and whose father happens to be from Essex in England.  “No Brit bitch is going to come between an Irish Celtic warrior mother and her eldest son,” she launches her verbal assault on Frankie: “Who would have thought that my own flesh and blood would have turned out to be a dirty Brit-lover.  You’re as bad as the dirty Black and Tans.  What about the 1916 Rising when Jayne’s father’s countrymen shot dead thousands of innocent Irish revolutionaries?  What about Father Murphy’s glorious Rising of 1798?  What about Wolfe Tone and poor old Robert Emmet?  Look what they did to Parnell.”  She then proceeds to assault Frankie physically, pelting him with whatever she finds close at hand, starting with a bronze bust of Cuchulainn from the mantelpiece.  Frankie retreats out the front door and down the drive: “When he looked back, he saw Ma in the light from the open doorway, darting in and out of the house, hurling objects out into the darkness after him.  A book clunked onto the tarmac.  Then a picture frame smashed on the path.  His brand new Stranglers album went gliding over his head into Figgis’s garden.  Within moments, every album he owned seemed to be flying through the air.  He recognized the sleeve of ‘The Allman Brothers Live at the Fillmore East’ just before it thudded into the telegraph pole above his head and went spiraling off into the blackness.”

Tellingly, of course, the mother’s passionate nationalism reflects the spirit of the place and the time that Mac Anna chooses for his novel’s setting.  Born in 1955, Mac Anna sees both himself and his younger protagonist as products, or victims, of the nearly six-decade domination of the Irish political and economic landscapes—and thus of the social and cultural landscapes as well—by Éamon de Valera, nationalist rebel, later Prime Minister, and later still President of Ireland.  Founded by de Valera in 1926, Frankie’s mother’s beloved Fianna Fáil party set the tone of social conservatism and lingering republican nationalism that defined the heart of the twentieth century in Ireland.  Frankie’s resistance to his mother’s political bent thus represents, even in this novel characterized by hilariously comical scenes and dialogue, a serious indictment by Mac Anna of the spiritually dreary times that he himself grew up in and that continued to characterize both Dublin and the countryside up until the economic boom of the 1990s known as “the Celtic Tiger.”

The Last of the High Kings was adapted by Gabriel Byrne and David Keating as a film, directed by Keating, with the same title in 1996.  While featuring cameo appearances by Byrne, Stephen Rea, and Colm Meaney, the film version—blandly re-titled Summer Fling when released in North America—has mostly a North American cast playing Irish roles, including Jared Leto as Frankie and Catherine O’Hara as his mother.  It falls short of being a cinematic must-see.

But reissued by New Island Books as part of their “Modern Irish Classics” series, The Last of the High Kings definitely belongs in the “classic” category.  Its update of the Irish coming-of-age novel etched so indelibly by Joyce in A Portrait rings as utterly true as Joyce’s to the period of Irish life that it responds to and reflects and refracts.  Setting the novel in his native Howth, a fishing village located on a promontory nosing into the Irish Sea nine miles north of Dublin’s city center, Mac Anna absolves himself of writing in the long literary shadow cast by “Joyce’s Dublin,” a favorite playground of casual readers and Joyce scholars alike.  He also absolves himself of having to engage with the more complex social and cultural landscape of “the heart of the Hibernian metropolis,” allowing him to focus on Frankie’s particular domestic situation as the window opening onto the larger world of modern Ireland. 

At the end of A Portrait, Joyce has his protagonist reject his literal father to embrace his mythic father, the Greek inventor Dædalus: “Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”  True to the prevailing comic temper of his novel, Ferdia Mac Anna ends The Last of the High Kings with Frankie Griffin reconciled, at least for now, with his mother, and he even joins her and his siblings in greeting their prodigal father returning from one of his long absences: “‘Wave, everybody, wave,’ Ma said, her face shining.  ‘Show your father what a great family he has.’  Everyone waved.”

DEEP IN THE HEART OF DERRY

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 22, Number 3 (March 2011), 30.

“The schoolmen were schoolboys first.” So James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus muse in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses. These words would have made an apt epigraph for The Boys of St. Columb’s (The Liffey Press, 2010), Maurice Fitzpatrick’s book of commentary and interviews published as a companion piece to the film of the same name that he co-wrote and co-produced: both book and film focus on one of the most momentous events in the history of modern Northern Ireland. Generally overshadowed by the outbreak of sectarian violence in the late 1960s that defined the last three decades of the twentieth century in the North, this event is the passage, in 1947, of the Education Act which made secondary education free for any student who passed the auxiliary test known as Eleven Plus. Essentially, in the film and the book, Fitzpatrick sets out to prove a thesis: that the implementation of this act gave rise in a single generation to a professional class of Catholics who would provide visionary leadership in reshaping the social and political culture of Northern Ireland in the last half of the century. His testing ground for this thesis is very specific: St. Columb’s College, a diocesan-run Catholic boys school in the heart of the city of Derry.

For some readers of the book and viewers of the film (available on DVD), the first attraction may be the new insight that Fitzpatrick’s focus offers into two of the best-known and most distinguished alumni of St. Columb’s—Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney and scholar, critic and novelist Seamus Deane. Indeed, these two writers—and the relationship between those two “schoolmen” who were once schoolboys together—figure prominently in Fitzpatrick’s project. Yet they are still just part of a larger ensemble comprising a cross-section of graduates from diverse backgrounds and with diverse interests and talents who went on to become household names in one field or another: musicians Paul Brady and Phil Coulter; politician and Nobel Peace Prize recipient John Hume; well-traveled ambassador James Sharkey; political activist Eamonn McCann, one of the founders of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s; and Edward Daly, Bishop of Derry from 1974 to 1993 (the heart of the so-called “Troubles”) who as Fr. Daly had become known worldwide through the image of him waving a blood-stained white handkerchief while ministering to a mortally wounded victim of the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972.

While some of these men knew each other during their years at St. Columb’s (mostly during the late 1940s and the 1950s) and while most have in later life crossed orbital paths with each other, what they really have as their first common denominator is the experience of attending St. Columb’s. That in itself proves fascinating for the viewer of the film and the reader of the book, as each of the eight men featured has a unique recollection of and a unique set of reflections on that experience. For instance, the experience of attending the school was vastly different—in some cases for better, in some cases for worse—for boarders and for day students. It was also vastly different depending on personal domestic circumstances and individual sensibility. For some of Fitzpatrick’s subjects, their time at the college was transformative in a mostly affirming way. Phil Coulter, for example, asserts: “I would have no doubt that whatever combination of talent, tenacity, temperament and work ethic I have, I would owe that to St. Columb’s.” Likewise, James Sharkey remembers his final two years as “really a preparation for something extraordinary”: “No matter how much you were a rebel and rejected education, you were always aware that there were teachers of a certain sophistication with whom you empathised. . . . I owe those people a special debt of gratitude.”

For others, however, the St. Columb’s experience was utterly traumatic. A day student from the lower-class Bogside area of Derry, Eamonn McCann remembers being treated as “an interloper” and remembers also that “The regime at St. Columb’s was quite brutal and was run by fear”: “It was run by a lot of brutality—not just slaps but the use of fists. I was knocked unconscious in an Irish class once for something very, very trivial.” Paul Brady is even more emphatic as he summons up his earliest memories of the school as experienced by a sensitive bespectacled boy from the town of Strabane, Co. Tyrone: “Shock, horror, awe, shock. I had no experience that was going to prepare me for going into a boarding school. Being in a monocultural, monosex kind of atmosphere was quite a shock to me, and it took me a long time to get accustomed to it. I didn’t have any experience of other parts of Northern Ireland, say east of the Sperrin Mountains which is a whole different vibe altogether, with strange accents, which now I know to be only south Derry accents and Antrim accents. But at the time they might have been from Timbuktu to me.” Of the eight alumni of St. Columb’s interviewed by Maurice Fitzpatrick, Brady seems to have suffered the most from the concomitant cultures of violence and of conformity imposed equally by the priests and the lay teachers at the school and either resigned to or absorbed as the norm by the vast majority of the students. His interview is particularly poignant.

Not surprisingly, not one of Fitzpatrick’s subjects is unequivocally nostalgic about his experience at St. Columb’s. But of all the interviewees, Seamus Deane is most detailed—and uncompromisingly so—in his analysis of the ministry of fear (as it were) that defined life at the college. Perceiving the institution of the Catholic Church as “a system of authority that was changing itself into a system of power, and doing that mistakenly under the aegis of the Socialist Government’s Education Act,” Deane parses with riveting rigor the complex implications of the dynamic that played out at St. Columb’s: “They couldn’t handle the effect of that legislation. The Roman Catholic Church couldn’t remain what it had been: once they had to teach the working classes, their class prejudice revealed itself. Every one of them was anxious nevertheless to exert authority, reproducing the structures of domination that the state had used; mass education exposed a church that had won respect from being oppressed. The myth of the priest could not survive his becoming a teacher in a strenuous situation. So it was sort of a melancholy place in that respect, made the more so by the excellence of some of the very good teachers.”

Yet the prevailing theme of The Boys of St. Columb’s remains that articulated by Seamus Heaney in response to Maurice Fitzpatrick’s question about the enduring “impact” of the 1947 Education Act. Appreciating how “people with merit, with intelligence, were given the scholarship, so that talent brought forward a whole new set of people,” Heaney elaborates: “That arrival into the adult population, eventually, of educated people from the working class, from farming backgrounds, brought a new kind of critical intelligence, a new kind of appetite for excellence into play. They had a sense of adventure, a sense of themselves as a generation with some sense of possibility and advantage and renewal. They were aware of the people who hadn’t got the advantages in their family and among their neighbours. They were political in that they had a strong sense of being responsible.”

And in that regard the resonance—and thus the importance—of The Boys of St. Columb’s as a documentary record extends far beyond even the engaging “tales told out of school,” about school, by an octet of men as candid as they are articulate. One way in which their personal stories resonates is as evidence of the value of education in the particular context of Northern Ireland: as Fitzpatrick asserts in his Introduction to the book, behind the stock images of the Northern predicament and the sectarian conflict—first the media shots of posturing politicians and then the literal shots and explosions heard ’round the world—there was “history to be understood.” Perhaps just as important is the broader message that the film sends out about education as the great liberator because it is first the great equalizer. The Boys of St. Columb’s is thus a sort of parable for how education—not arms or armies—can be the vehicle for change not just in one particular context but globally.

POETRY AND GRIEF: JAMES JOYCE'S "TILLY"

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 21, Number 10 (October 2010), 18.

For the past few weeks, for one reason or another, I have been thinking about poetry and grief—or more specifically, about poems which register and express grief over the loss of a loved one. I have been especially attuned to lyric poems—concise and precise articulations of the emotions involving loss that provide what Robert Frost once called “a momentary stay against confusion.” (Incidentally, Frost also once observed: “Poetry is about the grief. Politics is about the grievance.”) The Irish may not have the market cornered on this sort of poem, but Irish writers have certainly turned out their fair share.

One obvious example, frequently anthologized, is Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break,” an early poem in which he recalls the death of a younger brother struck and killed by a car while the future poet, still just a boy himself, is away at boarding school. The poem leads the reader through the whole experience—from the news reaching young Seamus at school, through his being driven home by neighbors, then seeing his father in tears and being embarrassed by “old men standing up to shake my hand // And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble.’” What stays with the reader, however, is neither the glimpse of the poet’s distraught mother coughing out “angry tearless sighs” nor even the arresting image of his little brother in the first two lines of the final tercet—“Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple, / He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.” Rather, reinforced by full rhyme with the penultimate line of the poem (“No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear”), the recognition etched in the standalone final line is also etched indelibly in the reader’s memory: “A four foot box, a foot for every year.” In his essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” poet T. S. Eliot describes the challenge faced by the artist attempting to convey a complex and subtle emotion: “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” Acknowledging the almost unspeakable sadness of a child’s death, the equation that Heaney draws between his brother’s life cut short and the miniature coffin he lies in reads as a classic example of Eliot’s idea.

The objective correlative may not be the only way to express publicly an emotion as private as grief, but it certainly works in “Reo” by Seán Ó Ríordáin, considered by many readers and scholars the preeminent Irish-language poet of the twentieth century. In an essay on Ó Ríordáin in his book Repossessions: Selected Essays on the Irish Literary Heritage, Professor Seán Ó Tuama observes that in this poem “Ó Ríordáin consciously or unconsciously reverses and transforms one of the oldest European love-formulas, that of the poet walking out one leafy summer morning and meeting a fair lady. Here it is a winter morning, frost in the air, the boughs bare and he encounters not love but death. . . . This is quite probably . . . [a] lament for his mother, beautiful, unique, and absolutely in the Irish as well as in the European tradition.” Translated as “Frozen” by Valentine Iremonger, in its matter-of-factness “Reo” requires no paraphrase:

On a frosty morning I went out
And a frozen handkerchief faced me on a bush.
I reached to put it in my pocket
But it slid from me for it was frozen.
No living cloth jumped from my grasp
But a thing that died last night on a bush,
And I went searching in my mind
Till I found its real equivalent:
The day I kissed a woman of my kindred
And she in the coffin, frozen, stretched.

Interestingly, in his recent translation of “Reo,” Greg Delanty substitutes for “equivalent” the word “correlative”—a telling nod toward T. S. Eliot in this poem in which the disconcerting frozenness of the handkerchief transmits to the reader the disconcerting personal loss that is the poem’s true subject.

For both Patrick Kavanagh and James Joyce, the loss of a beloved father likewise demands an expression of grief more crystallized than discursive. In “Memory of My Father,” Kavanagh invites the reader to see the personal in the same way that he does—relative to the universal:

Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.

For Kavanagh, the absence of his father (who died in 1929, ten years before this poem was written) is accentuated poignantly by various paternal avatars whom the poet encounters randomly: “That man I saw in Gardiner Street / Stumble on the kerb,” “the musician / Faltering over his fiddle / In Bayswater, London.” Paradoxically, his father becomes an enduring presence by way of the familiar figure cut by these men.

For Joyce, the objective correlative resides in a different sort of universal—in the cycle of generational death and birth illuminated for him by the birth of his grandson Stephen shortly after the death of John Joyce, the author’s father. In a letter written in Paris on January 1st, 1932 (coincidentally, to T. S. Eliot), Joyce explained how his sorrow over his father’s death two days earlier was compounded by guilt over his rigid adherence to self-imposed exile from Ireland: “He had an intense love for me and it adds anew to my grief and remorse that I did not go to Dublin to see him for so many years. I kept him constantly under the illusion that I would come and was always in correspondence with him but an instinct which I believed in held me back from going, much as I longed to.” Six weeks later, on the day his grandson was born, February 15th, Joyce captured in the concluding quatrain of his succinct four-stanza poem “Ecce Puer” (Latin for “behold the boy-child”) the essence of filial grief:

A child is sleeping:
An old man gone.
O, father forsaken,
Forgive your son!

But the poem of Joyce’s that I keep returning to with regard to the expression of grief is one that he wrote in 1904, in response to the death of his mother, Mary Jane (“May”) Murray Joyce, in August of 1903. Joyce originally titled the poem “Cabra,” after the northside Dublin community where the family was living (at 7 St. Peter’s Terrace) at the time of Mrs. Joyce’s passing, and originally intended to include it in his volume Chamber Music, published in 1907. But feeling that its sober tone did not fit with the rest of that gathering, he withdrew it and withheld it from publication until 1927, when he placed it, re-titled “Tilly,” at the opening of his 13-poem chapbook Pomes Penyeach. (The word “tilly” means “a little bit extra”—which seems to be how Joyce thought of this poem relative to the others in the volume, which were all written between 1912 and 1924 in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris.)

Comprising three free-verse quatrains, “Tilly” begins with a two-stanza depiction of a cattle drover written from the perspective that Joyce has his character Stephen Dedalus describe in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man as the “dramatic form”—the literary point of view in which “The personality of the artist . . . refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak”:

He travels after a winter sun,
Urging the cattle along a cold red road,
Calling to them, a voice they know,
He drives his beasts above Cabra.

The voice tells them home is warm.
They moo and make brute music with their hoofs.
He drives them with a flowering branch before him,
Smoke pluming their foreheads.

Crucially, though, the third stanza represents a shift in perspective to what Stephen Dedalus calls “the lyrical form”—“the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself”—as the introduction of the first-person point of view (the “I” in the third line) reflects Joyce’s acknowledgement of a profound personal investment in the poem’s subject matter:

Boor, bond of the herd,
Tonight stretch full by the fire!
I bleed by the black stream
For my torn bough!

In effect, the broken-off branch used by the drover as a switch to steer the cattle homeward becomes for the speaker in the poem (ostensibly Joyce himself) what Stephen Dedalus calls “the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of emotion”—the emblem of what has been irreparably broken in the life of the speaker: it becomes what the alert reader might recognize in other words as an objective correlative for irreversible loss. Read this way, this “tilly” of a poem written in 1904 stands not only as a subtle lyric poem in its own right but also an intriguing companion piece to the “Telemachus” episode of Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses, set on the morning of June 16th, 1904, which focuses in large part on Stephen Dedalus’ unresolved feelings of grief—like Joyce’s own—regarding the death of his mother almost a year earlier.

(AP)PRAISING MICHAEL HARTNETT

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 21, Number 8 (August 2010), 22.

One of the many wonderful scenes in Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds has Jem Casey, “the Poet of the Pick and the Bard of Booterstown,” kneeling to assist the injured King Sweeny, a man of words in his own right: “poet on poet, a bard unthorning a fellow-bard,” O’Brien inscribes that moment. Almost inevitably I thought of that scene when I finally sat down with Notes from His Contemporaries: A Tribute to Michael Hartnett, a substantial book of poems and prose that landed on my doorstep around a year ago. A poet of remarkable range and depth who is yet generally overlooked, and thus underestimated, by readers and critics alike, Michael Hartnett died in 1999 at the young age of 58. Commemorating one of Ireland’s most intriguing poets of the last half of the twentieth century, this large-format softcover—compiled and privately published by his son Niall—is aptly titled, as it invokes a series of engaging poems, “Notes on My Contemporaries,” that Hartnett composed in the late 1960s praising and appraising a number of his fellow Irish poets, some of whom return the favor here. Poet on poet and bard on bard, indeed.

Hartnett may be best known for his early poem “A Small Farm,” which opens memorably: “All the perversions of the soul / I learnt on a small farm. . . .” He is also legendary for his decision in the mid-1970s to abandon (temporarily, as it turns out) the English language to write only in Irish; he made his intention known in a powerful poem titled “A Farewell to English”:

I have made my choice
and leave with little weeping:
I have come with meagre voice
to court the language of my people.

Yet his output was prodigious and included not only his own poems in English and in Irish but also indispensable translations of seventeenth-century Irish-language poets Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and Pádraigín Haicéad and early eighteenth-century poet Aodhagán Ó Rathaille. Tellingly, though, every time I browse around in the sampler of his work gathered in his Collected Poems, published in 2001 by Gallery Press, I end up contemplating one knotty line, in his “Note” on contemporary Thomas Kinsella, that seems to sum up Hartnett’s own poetic vision: “To poets peace poetry never yields.”

And that is certainly an essential theme that emerges, with multiple variations and permutations, from the memories of and tributes to Hartnett gathered in Notes from His Contemporaries. Remembering a period of particular darkness in her own life, short story writer Emma Cooke recalls picking up the telephone and hearing Hartnett’s voice reciting to her a line from one of his early poems: “Sad singing in darkness is our burden.” As many of the contributors observe, Hartnett’s poetic introspection probed the darkness of both the inner self and the world outside the self, and his poetry may have been the saving grace in a life frequently destabilized by the poet’s weakness for drink and by shaky health. The final stanza of Gabriel Fitzmaurice’s poem written in memory of Hartnett—“So What If There’s No Happy Ending?”—indeed suggests as much:

Open the door into darkness,
There’s nothing at all to fear—
Just the black dogs barking, barking
As the moon and stars appear.

In “End,” a poem as brief and yet also as expressive as a calligraphic brushstroke, Peter Fallon, Hartnett’s publisher at Gallery Press, sums up his life in similar terms:

End of sureness, end of doubt—

when the darkness
like a light
went out.

Yet most contributors also emphasize the remarkable resiliency of Hartnett’s spirit, as well as his hospitality and generosity and the good companionship he provided whether in a pub, in a country kitchen, or on a long car ride. One of the stories attached to the poet is that when he was a young boy, a flock of wrens landed and perched on his shoulders—“a necklace of wrens,” Hartnett himself referred to this event in the title poem of a dual-language edition of a selection of his poems written originally in Irish. (At the time of the incident, Hartnett was living with his grandmother on a farm just outside Newcastle West in Co. Limerick: she interpreted this phenomenon as evidence that he would become a poet.) Thus, as his friend Pat O’Brien observes, when he died, many of his acquaintances and admirers naturally thought of the essence of Hartnett in avian terms: “everyone one spoke with . . . would resort to images of birds. Sometimes to try to express the lyric sweetness of his poetry even when its note was ominous about the world and its brutality against people and nature and culture. Sometimes to hold the man in a worthy metaphor. He walked the country lanes, or the city streets with the grace of heights. He would always seem ready to take flight, to leave the heaviness of the earth, the concerns of the day, the gravity of his health for clearer skies.” Michael Coady casts him specifically as a wren:

You were a wren in your ways and shapes,
King of the birds that could roost in the holly,
Land on the leaf or dart to the light,
Drop out betimes and go into hiding . . .

Organized alphabetically by contributor—from Leland Bardwell to Macdara Woods— Notes from His Contemporaries stands as a monument of words to Hartnett the poet and the man. Clearly, Niall Hartnett had no trouble lining up a Who’s Who of contemporary Irish poetry to help remember his father: John Montague, Seamus Heaney, and Eavan Boland, Paula Meehan, Pat Boran, and Greg Delanty, Paul Durcan, Liam Ó Muirthile, and Gabriel Rosenstock. (Moreover, he managed to capture most of the contributors in handsome black-and-white photographic portraits that add to the appeal of this book.) While the poems testify, at times touchingly, to Hartnett’s place of high esteem among his peers, several of the prose pieces offer valuable insight into the mind of the man and the poet. One of these is an interview from 1987 conducted by fellow poet Dennis O’Driscoll, whose wide-ranging questions prompt engaged and engaging responses. Asked about his readiness to employ “rhetorical language” in his writing, Hartnett acknowledges the influence of 18th-century Irish-language poets (and fellow Limerick men) Seán Ó Tuama and Andrias MacCraith: “When I was quite young, I became very conscious of these poets and, so, read them very closely indeed. Through them, without going into their elaborate syntax, I became unafraid of rhetoric as such.” On whether Irish or English is his default language, he replies: “I’ve got over the notion of having intellectual schizophrenia about it. There was a period, especially in the beginning, when one line would come out in English and the next in Irish. ‘The Retreat of Ita Cagney,’ for example, almost broke my heart and indeed my mind to write, because both languages became so intermeshed. One is not a translation of the other. They are two versions of the same poem; but what the original language is I don’t know.”

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s account of how Hartnett came to write his poem “Foighne Chrainn” (“Patience of a Tree”) is likewise illuminating. She tells how the poem was inspired by her encounter with a malevolent female spirit known to haunt the Bearna Gap in the vicinity of Templeglantine, Co. Limerick, where Hartnett lived at one point. The folklore involving Spiorad na Bearnan centers on her being imprisoned in a tree that was then burned down by seven local young men. After six of them “came to a bad end” for their shared misdeed, the seventh fled to London, but according to Hartnett’s poem, he still could not escape his fate: “Bhí an scian roimh ann / ’s cé gur miotal í an lann / snoíodh an fheirc as díoltas crann” (“The knife was waiting there / and though metal formed the blade / from a tree’s revenge / the hilt was made”).

Perhaps someday Michael Hartnett will find his deserved expanded readership. Notes from His Contemporaries can only help in that regard, as making my way through the poems and the anecdotes, the praise and the appraisals, I found myself drawn irresistibly to the Collected Poems, which must ultimately be his claim to enduring recognition. His son recognizes that too in the simple dedication of the volume he conceived and compiled: “For the Poet.”

WHEN IN PARIS . . .

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 21, Number 7 (July 2010), 14.

A particularly satisfying moment in James Joyce’s Ulysses occurs in the third episode of the novel, when Stephen Dedalus, unhappily sharing living quarters in a Martello tower in Sandycove with the irreverent Buck Mulligan and miserably holding down a teaching position in a private boys’ school in nearby Dalkey, recalls his sojourn in Paris cut short by a summons to his dying mother’s bedside back in Dublin almost a full year earlier: “My Latin quarter hat. God, we simply must dress the character. I want puce gloves. You were a student, weren’t you? Of what in the other devil’s name? Paysayenn. P.C.N., you know: physiques, chimiques et naturelles. Aha. Eating your groatsworth of mou en civet, fleshpots of Egypt, elbowed by belching cabmen. Just say in the most natural tone: when I was in Paris, boul’ Mich’, I used to.” In light of Stephen’s self-inflating assertion at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—“I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”—this self-deprecating musing on the bohemian pose he struck in Paris is truly refreshing, as he finally shows a capacity to look at himself with a healthy measure of the irony with which Joyce (the artist as an older man) viewed his quasi-autobiographical character in A Portrait.

I was thinking of that moment, among others in Ulysses, during a recent visit to Paris in which I walked a few miles in the footsteps of both the fictional Stephen Dedalus and the real-life expatriate Joyce himself. Probably the best account of Joyce’s several periods of living in “The City of Light” is Richard Ellmann’s magisterial biography of Joyce first published in 1959 and revised in 1982. He devotes parts of two early chapters to Joyce’s first two visits to Paris, several weeks in December of 1902 and then a period from January to April of 1903 which ended abruptly when the artist as a young man received a dismaying telegram from his father: “MOTHER DYING COME HOME FATHER.” These visits provided Joyce with the raw material for Stephen’s recollection of his quickly aborted career as a French medical student as well as for Stephen’s obviously inauspicious start as an expatriate artist.

Introducing Joyce’s next extended visit to Paris, which began in July of 1920, Ellmann writes matter-of-factly: “He came to Paris to stay a week and remained for twenty years.” (Between 1904 and 1920, Joyce had lived variously in Pola, Rome, Trieste, and Zurich.) And that is the point where I really began to trace a few of the steps taken by Joyce—in particular the steps he took relative to the publication, in 1922, of what he called his “damned monster novel”: Ulysses. Specifically, I became intrigued by the story of how Ulysses came to be published by a small bookshop in Paris, Shakespeare and Company, owned by one Sylvia Beach.

Miss Beach (as Joyce always referred to her) has told the tale herself, with simple elegance, in a memoir titled Shakespeare and Company (1959). American born and bred, Beach opened her English-language bookstore and lending library (supported by patron subscription) in 1919 in a former laundry at 8 rue Dupuytren in the heart of Paris’s Left Bank district. In 1921, she relocated to a larger space nearby at 12 rue de l’Odéon. At that address she became the center of a literary and artistic coterie that included expatriate American writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, photographer Man Ray, and pianist-composer George Antheil. (The dynamic within this circle of friends and acquaintances has been engagingly detailed by Noel Riley Fitch in her book Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties.) But for Beach herself, the history of her bookstore revolves around her relationship with James Joyce, her literary idol before she met him and the focus of much of her energies after she approached him timidly at a dinner gathering hosted by mutual friends: “Trembling, I asked: ‘Is this the great James Joyce?’ ‘James Joyce,’ he replied. We shook hands; that is, he put his limp, boneless hand in my tough little paw—if you can call that a handshake.”

Beach’s account of her friendship and interaction with Joyce is rich in detail: “Joyce’s voice, with its sweet tones pitched like a tenor’s, charmed me. His enunciation was exceptionally clear. His pronunciation of certain words such as ‘book’ (bōō-k) and ‘look’ (lōō-k) and those beginning with ‘th’ was Irish, and the voice particularly was Irish.” Just as rich is her account of her bold offer to publish Ulysses on the speculation that she would sell a sufficient number of advance subscriptions to book collectors and devoted readers to warrant the printing of 1000 copies of the first edition. William Butler Yeats was foremost among Irish writers to order a copy; George Bernard Shaw declined to do so, concluding a very witty letter by explaining, “I am an elderly Irish gentleman, and if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for such a book, you little know my countrymen.” With its many twists and turns of plot, subplot and counterplot, Beach’s telling of how she managed to see Ulysses into print—months later than promised to her subscribers but still in time for an advance copy to be delivered to Joyce’s flat on the morning of his 40th birthday, February 2, 1922—testifies not only to her determination and her ingenuity but even more to her unflagging belief in James Joyce as literary artist.

For me, then, 12 rue de l’Odéon, the address of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop that Joyce frequented on almost a daily basis in the early 1920s, was an essential site of pilgrimage during my visit to Paris. The site is currently marked by a simple plaque that reads: “En 1922, dans cette maison, Melle Sylvia BEACH publia ‘ULYSSES’ de James JOYCE.” While the façade of the shop has changed dramatically, Joyce himself might be pleased, and amused, that the space is now a women’s clothing shop; after all, in the eighth episode of Ulysses, he has Leopold Bloom dally admiringly before a display of women’s silks in the windows of Brown Thomas on Grafton Street in Dublin: “Perfume of embraces all him assailed. With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.”

Sylvia Beach managed to maintain the Shakespeare and Company bookshop until 1941, coincidentally the year of Joyce’s death in Zurich, where he had returned at the outbreak of World War II. Ultimately, the shop was forced to close during the German occupation of Paris, with the decisive moment being Beach’s rejection of a German officer’s request to purchase her last copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which had been published in 1939. Her memoir concludes with the liberation of Paris by American troops and specifically with Ernest Hemingway, “in battle dress, grimy and bloody,” overseeing the elimination of German rooftop snipers from rue de l’Odéon.

And yet Shakespeare and Company lives on in Paris in the name of another bookshop of legendary stature. This one is located on the Left Bank of the Seine almost directly across the river from le Cathédrale de Notre Dame. Owner George Whitman, another American expatriate, opened it as Le Mistral in 1951 but changed the name to honor Sylvia Beach’s memory and legacy after her death in 1962. In large part because of the Joycean association (albeit once-removed), it too has become a place of pilgrimage for literary-minded visitors to Paris. But it also has a unique history and character and charm of its own (including a dozen or so stations where travelers may bed down at night for the price of an hour’s work in the shop). I enjoyed a sojourn in its restful second-floor reading room, reacquainting myself with We’ll to the Woods No More, Stuart Gilbert’s translation of Edouard Dujardin’s novel Les Lauriers Sont Coupés, which Joyce credited as the precursor for the narrative technique of “interior monologue” that he employs in much of Ulysses. But that is a story for another time.