TWO DUBLIN SNAPSHOTS

This piece first appeared on the website of Boston Irish Magazine, March 2020

Moving as easily between color and black and white as he moved from analog to digital when that technology shift came, Dublin photographer Fionán O’Connell has snapped literally tens of thousands of photos over a career, amateur and professional, now spanning more than four decades.  His stunning recent work can be sampled on his nicely-maintained website: www.fionanoconnell.com

But not long ago I happened upon a cache of fifty or so of his older photos dating back to the 1990s, all of them analog, all of them black and white, most of them printed on 6.5 x 8.5-inch semi-matte paper.  Flicking through them, I found myself coming back, over and over again, to an observation, or an assertion, made by iconic American photographer Walker Evans: “Fine photography is literature, and it should be.”

I assume that what Evans meant by that was akin to the well-worn saws that “every picture tells a story” and “a picture is worth a thousand words.”  But much deeper.  As I riffled through those old photos, two of them in particular rose from the cache, like trick cards in a magician’s deck, as if to prove Evans’s point.

One, dated 1998 and captioned “Belvedere College, S.J.,” is intrinsically “literary” in my eyes thanks to Belvedere’s most celebrated alumnus, James Joyce.  The famous author’s relationship with Belvedere has been explored both at length and in depth by Joyce scholars (most notably by Kevin Sullivan in his book Joyce Among the Jesuits and by Bruce Bradley, S.J. in his book James Joyce’s Schooldays), yet O’Connell’s photo engages not with “Joyce’s Belvedere” per se: as an alumnus himself, and as a former teacher at the school and the father of a recent graduate, O’Connell has his own claim on Belvedere.

In fact, focusing on a seemingly innocuous detail of the College’s physical space—a wooden sash cord pull and a chain mechanism illuminated by natural light from a round-arched window—his photo registers a spirit of place that not just Joyce but truly anyone who has haunted the hallowed hallways and the classrooms of the College might have experienced and absorbed: a subliminal yet indelible imprinting of Belvedere as physical space.  (Incidentally, other alumni of distinction include poets and writers Austin Clarke, Denis Devlin, Liam O’Flaherty and Mervyn Wall, historians Tim Pat Coogan and Owen Dudley Edwards, artist Harry Clarke and iconic photographer Fr. Francis Browne, celebrated classical pianist John O’Conor, Abbey Theatre co-founder William Fay, nationalist heroes Kevin Barry, Cathal Brugha, and Joseph Mary Plunkett, businessman and rugby star Tony O’Reilly, and former Taoiseach of Ireland Garret Fitzgerald.)  

What makes this shot so interesting to me is first of all that it represents a variation on what I call O’Connell’s “peripheral vision”—his method of registering with his camera lens essentially what an individual might glimpse, fleetingly and subconsciously, out of the corner of his/her eye.  Set at the edge of a dark background but also centered in the left half of the photo, that lathe-turned cord pull becomes the memorable focal point of the overall image: it enters the viewer’s consciousness just as subtly yet also just as certainly as it would enter the consciousness of a typical Belvedere schoolboy.  A masterful photograph can guide the viewer’s eye just that way.

But what compounds my interest is, of course, the Joycean element: in an intriguing (yet also coincidental) way, O’Connell’s photographic art shares certain aspects of Joyce’s narrative technique of “stream of consciousness”—“interior monologue” without authorial filtering—that he employs at times in Ulysses.  Add to this the fact that Belvedere College is the setting for most of Chapters II, III, and IV of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . . . and that in Chapter IV Joyce has the eye of his character Stephen Dedalus drawn to a different sort of window cord during his consequential interview with the director of vocations at Belvedere: “The director stood in the embrasure of the window, his back to the light, leaning an elbow on the brown crossblind, and, as he spoke and smiled, slowly dangling and looping the cord of the other blind, Stephen stood before him, following for a moment with his eyes the waning of the long summer daylight above the roofs or the slow deft movements of the priestly fingers.  The priest’s face was in total shadow, but the waning daylight from behind him touched the deeply grooved temples and the curves of the skull.” Obviously, my reading of that photo through a Joycean lens takes very literally Walker Evans’s notion of photography as “literature.”  

The other photo that caught my eye has its own story to tell.  Titled on the back “My Parents’ Bedroom,” it is a simple domestic interior—spartan, really—comprising three basic elements: the headboard of a bed, two splashes of sunlight thrown on the wall through an awning-style window (note the shadows cast by its levers), and a crucifix.  As with the Belvedere photograph, the art of this one is determined by O’Connell’s utilization of what photographers call “available light” to direct the viewer’s eye within the frame of the photo: already made conspicuous by being located off-center in the shot, the crucifix is made even more eye-catching by being half-shadowed, in effect bisected by the streaming sunlight.  As the ultimate focus of the entire image, it is also the crux (as it were) of the “story”—the “literary” dimension—implicit in the photo.

And that story involves that most intimate space—the bedroom—of O’Connell’s parents.  Ernest Hemingway has famously described one of his writing practices in terms that seem to apply here: “If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show.”  A symbolic expression of private religious belief, the crucifix in the photo is, in literary lingo, a synecdoche—a part of the photographer’s parents’ shared intimacy that represents the whole of that intimacy.  Another iconic American photographer, Diane Arbus, once remarked: “A photograph is a secret about a secret.  The more it tells you the less you know.”  As in a Hemingway narrative, much is left to the viewer’s inference or intuition.

A FRENCH CONNECTION: FRÉDÉRIC JACQUES TEMPLE À DUBLIN

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 29, Number 8 (August 2018), 5.

“You flew.  Whereto?  Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger.”  So James Joyce, in Ulysses, has his character Stephen Dedalus recollect one leg of the journey he took from Dear Dirty Dublin to La Ville Lumière—Paris, the City of Light.  Joyce made that journey himself, as early as 1902, and eventually, beginning in 1920, spent most of the last two decades of his life in Paris.  He completed Ulyssesthere and wrote Finnegans Wake there too.

But Joyce is just one of many Irish writers who lived famously in Paris.  Other household names include Oscar Wilde, John Millington Synge, Samuel Beckett and Brendan Behan.  James Stephens, who maintained an apartment in Paris for more than thirty years, reportedly misplaced (briefly, fortunately) the manuscript for his novel The Demi-Godswhile living there.  Poets Brian Coffey and Thomas McGreevy also found inspiration there during extended sojourns in the city.

The number of French writers sojourning in Dublin is considerably smaller, but recently I happened upon one who not only visited but actually sketched out in verse the outline of his time there.  In fact, for Frédéric Jacques Temple, Dublin seems to have been a place of pilgrimage.  He reflects on this in a little remembrance he wrote about meeting Thomas McGreevy, sometime in the 1950s, in Montpellier, France, at the home of a mutual friend, transplanted British man-of-letters Richard Aldington.  According to that remembrance, Temple, moved by his subsequent epistolary friendship with McGreevy, visited Dublin twice—both times, though, after the Irish poet’s death in 1967.  The first time, he was invited by the Alliance Française in Dublin and gave a talk on McGreevy, titled “An Irishman in Paris or the Key Witness,” that drew an audience of nearly 200 people to Bewley’s Oriental Café on Grafton Street.  His second visit, at the invitation of Roger Little, a noted Trinity College professor of French, led to his writing a series of eight very short poems.

There is not a lot to say about them as poems per se (except that I found them pretty easy to translate).  In their brevity, their slightness, they seem to aspire toward satori, the Japanese equivalent of Joycean “epiphany” associated with a poetic form like haiku; but they never quite achieve that level of illumination.  Perhaps they are best thought of as vignettes: a literary term, vignettemeans “little vine” in French and derives from the tendril-like decorations that nineteenth-century printers would add to title pages of books and the first page of chapters.  Gathered under the title “À Dublin” (“In Dublin”), these vignettes—sort of calligraphic pen strokes, not much more substantial than monkish marginalia—are part of a larger gathering of poems that Temple titled Périples(Journeys).  Reflecting the poet’s self-consciousness as a visitor, that context actually lends his Dublin verses resonance beyond their substance.

Indeed, beginning with the first poem, Temple inscribes a sort of touristic connect-the-dots map of Dublin with literary and nationalistic shadings:

We will go tomorrow

to lay flowers on the tomb

of Maud Gonne

in Glasnevin Cemetery.

Immortalized in poems by her ardent admirer W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne, a fervent nationalist, became in 1902 the literal embodiment of “Mother Ireland” thanks to her acting the title role in Cathleen ni Houlihan, a play co-written by Yeats and Lady Augusta Gregory for the Irish National Dramatic Company.  Late in his life, Yeats would ask rhetorically: “Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?”  

Perhaps that specific association prompted the second poem in the sequence:

Remember

Cathleen ni Houlihan

who sparked the powder 

to dislodge Albion.

Interestingly, Temple’s use of Albion, an ancient name for Great Britain (dating at least to the fourth century B.C.), may also implicate James Joyce, who has his character “the citizen,” a diehard Irish nationalist, deploy the phrase “perfidious Albion” in a rant against the French in the “Cyclops” episode of Ulysses.  Joyce probably knew that the phrase had great currency in France, especially among journalists, during the nineteenth century.  He may even have known that the phrase was first coined by French poet and playwright Augustin Louis de Ximémès in a poem titled “L’Ère des Français” in 1793: “Attaquons dans ses eaux la perfide Albion.” Temple too may have known that earliest reference. 

There may be a Joycean element in the third poem as well:

If you are wise

you will see

in the mist of the Liffey

the phantoms of Chapelizod.

Named for its association with the Irish princess Iseult (or Isolde) in the Arthurian Legend of Tristan and Isolde, the Liffey-side village of Chapelizod figures prominently in Joyce’s final work, Finnegans Wake, as the home of his central character Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, his wife Anna Livia Plurabelle, and their children Shaun, Shem, and Issy. But Temple’s reference to “phantoms” may also invoke the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu, whose novel The House by the Churchyard(1863) and tale “Ghost Stories of Chapelizod” (1851) are both set in the village.

Joyce definitely factors in the next two vignettes.  The first, a tribute to Temple’s old pen friend, obviously involves a visit to the Martello tower where, like his character Stephen Dedalus in the opening episode of Ulysses, Joyce once lived:

In Sandycove I enter

James Joyce’s tower

and doff my cap

to salute the shade

of Tom McGreevy.

The next one returns the reader to Finnegans Wake:

At Mulligan’s Bar

in Poolbeg Street

we hoist a solemn toast

to the memory of Anna Livia.

In Irish, the name for the River Liffey is Abhainn na Life, from which Joyce derived the name of his character Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is the embodiment of the river in Finnegans Wake.

By the evidence of the next poem, Temple had drink on his mind more than once during his Dublin visit:

I am going to Bewley’s

to drain three pints of stout.

Molly Malone

sings her tune

at the foot of Grafton Street:

<<coques et moules fraîches,

mussels and cockles, oh! oh!>>

Temple’s transcription of how he misheard the lyrics of the popular ballad “Molly Malone” may be endearing, but he would have been disappointed in his quest for Guinness, as Bewley’s does not serve alcohol—only tea and coffee!

Undaunted, however, he continues his literary tour by taking his reader down Grafton Street to College Green and through the arched gateway of Trinity College.  Did Temple personally know Samuel Beckett, the TCD alumnus who spent the last fifty years of his life living and writing in Paris?  The poem offers no hint; but it does seem to suggest that Temple was housed on campus during his Dublin visit hosted by Professor Little:

In Beckett’s lodgings

at Trinity College

I caress in a dream

the 340 vellum pages

of the Book of Kells,

a wonder of the world.

The series ends on Duke Street, not far from Trinity and that famous illuminated manuscript (which dates to around 800 A.D.), at another drinking establishment with another Joycean association:

It is winter,

let’s duck into Davy Byrne’s

and take on for ballast

a feed of coddle.

That venue is immortalized in the “Lestrygonians” episode of Ulysseswhen Leopold Bloom slips in for a bite to eat: “He entered Davy Byrne’s.  Moral pub.” Bloom orders a gorgonzola cheese sandwich and a glass of burgundy for his lunch.  Temple opts for a more robust dish with a particular Dublin flavor (as it were): sometimes simmered in Guinness, coddle usually includes pork sausages and rashers of bacon mixed with chunks of potatoes and sliced onions then seasoned with salt and pepper and maybe a sprig of parsley.  Ballast, indeed!

Born in 1921, Frédéric Jacques Temple is now 97 years old and apparently still living in Montpellier where he met Thomas McGreevy more than sixty years ago.  His poetic record of his time “à Dublin” lives on too.

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.”