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.

BORDER CROSSING: JAMES JOYCE IN MEXICO

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 30, Number 5 (May 2019), p. 5.

Several years ago, I used as the epigraph on the syllabus of my Recent Irish Writing course this wonderful observation by Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes: “The English language has always been alive and kicking, and if it ever becomes drowsy, there will always be an Irishman.” I thought of that quotation recently as I read Pedro Páramo, a short novel by another Mexican writer, Juan Rulfo (1918-1986).  My interest in the novel, first published in Spanish in 1955, was piqued in part by my understanding that it may have been influenced by Rulfo’s reading of James Joyce.  Reading Rulfo, I was definitely on the lookout for affinities between Pedro Páramo and Joyce’s “damned monster novel” (as he described it)—Ulysses.

I read the text of Rulfo’s novel before I read Susan Sontag’s Foreword to the translation by Margaret Sayers Peden.  When I did read Sontag, I was struck by how closely her description of the novel’s central concern resonated with the Joycean affinities I had scribbled down in my readerly notetaking: “The novel’s premise—a dead mother sending her son out into the world, a son’s quest for his father—mutates into a multivoiced sojourn in hell.”  As readers of Joyce know, the opening episode of 

Ulysses, “Telemachus,” reintroduces Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of Joyce’s earlier novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  Having returned to Dublin from a brief sojourn in Paris to keep vigil at his dying mother’s bedside, Stephen remains conflicted almost a year later by the memory of his mother: “Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that had bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes.”  Just pages later, the character Haines attempts to engage Stephen in an interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “The Son striving to be atoned with the Father.”

Of course, each of these references could be read simply as a common literary motif or trope.  But the further I read in Pedro Páramo the more I was reminded of an admission made by Stephen in “Nestor,” the second episode of Ulysses. Remembering Haines’s casual remark that “It seems history is to blame” for political friction between Ireland and Britain, Stephen explains himself to the officious headmaster of the school where he teaches: “History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”  As the novel unfolds, the reader discovers that for Stephen—and likewise for his co-protagonist, Leopold Bloom—“history” is not just general (political, economic, social, cultural, and so on) but personal.  Ditto for Juan Preciado, the protagonist of Pedro Páramo.  Late in Rulfo’s novel, the reader recognizes that some of the action channels La Cristiada, the Cristero Rebellion of 1926-29, as well as the earlier Mexican Revolution of 1910-20.  But much of the novel focuses not on those events but on Juan’s “personal” history relative to his mother, his father, and the lost world—the ghost town—of Comala.  And it is really in Rulfo’s inscription of Juan Preciado’s search for his father that Pedro Páramo resonates most meaningfully with Joyce’s Ulysses.

The theme of “the nightmare of history” permeates Ulysses, but two episodes in particular speak tellingly to Rulfo’s narrative.  The first of these is the sixth episode, “Hades,” in which Leopold Bloom, attending the burial of his friend Paddy Dignam in Glasnevin Cemetery, effectively makes the same descent into the underworld that Odysseus makes in Homer’s The Odyssey, the text that provides Joyce with the elaborate scaffolding for his narrative.  Tracing the route of Dignam’s funeral cortège across Dublin, Joyce invites the alert reader to recognize that the various statues and monuments commemorating Irish political figures that line the city’s thoroughfares—Sir Philip Crampton, William Smith O’Brien, Daniel O’Connell, Sir John Gray, Lord Nelson, Charles Stewart Parnell—represent not just a sampling from “the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture” (a fine phrase Joyce coined in Stephen Hero, a rough draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) but a manifestation of how history—the past, memory of the past—constantly infiltrates the mind and the imagination of the individual.  (In the Homeric parallel, these figures also have their counterparts in The Odyssey.)

Obviously, Joyce continues this conceit within the grounds of the cemetery itself, referring overtly to O’Connell’s grave and Parnell’s grave.  Relative to Rulfo, however, the more significant passages in “Hades” are those describing first the stonecutter’s yard and then Prospect Cemetery that the cortège passes en route to Glasnevin: 

The stonecutter’s yard on the right. . . .  Crowded on the spit of land silent shapes appeared, white, sorrowful, holding out calm hands, knelt in grief, pointing.  Fragments of shapes, hewn.  In white silence: appealing.

The high railings of Prospect rippled past their gaze.  Dark poplars, rare white forms.  Forms more frequent, white shapes thronged amid the trees, white forms and fragments streaming by mutely, sustaining vain gestures on the air.

In her Foreword to Pedro Páramo, Susan Sontag quotes Rulfo as saying that the structure of his novel is “made of silences, of hanging threads, of cut scenes, where everything occurs in a simultaneous time which is a no-time.”  In Leopold Bloom’s case, the public memory associated with the statues and the monuments eventually gives way to his private memory of his father who committed suicide and his son Rudy who died in infancy.  In Juan Preciado’s case, countlessfigures from the past, their names mere whispers, populate the ghost town that his dead father still presides over.

And that brings me to the other episode of Ulysses that I believe informs Pedro Páramo both thematically and structurally: that is the fifteenth episode, “Circe.”  Fortunately for his boundless legion of readers, Joyce shared with three friends—Carlos Linati, Herbert Gorman, and Stuart Gilbert—complementary versions of a schema in which he labels the episode’s “Technic” as “Vision animated to bursting point” or, more simply, “Hallucination.”  Many Joyce scholars agree that the term “phantasmagoria” is also apt to describe the effect of “Circe.”  While Rulfo’s novel does not resemble “Circe” stylistically (Joyce’s text is written on the page in the form of an expressionistic drama, as if intended to be performed on stage), it nonetheless shares with this climactic episode of Ulysses the idea that the individual carries within himself or herself an elaborate personal “nightmare of history” that needs to be awakened from.  No less than the vast cast of characters encountered by Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom in “Circe,” the elusive and spectral figures encountered by Juan Preciado in Pedro Páramo represent forces—some in his consciousness, some in his subconscious—that he must engage with, confront, and subdue.

For Stephen Dedalus the awakening from the nightmare is dramatic and emphatic, taking place when, rejecting the phantasmagoric specter of his mother, he declares: “The intellectual imagination!  With me all or not at all.  Non serviam!”  He then punctuates his declaration by smashing a chandelier with his ashplant.  For Bloom the awakening is poignant, coming in his vision of his son as a changeling—a fairy child—fulfilling his father’s dream in an alternative world.  For Juan Preciado, whose return to Comala has led him into the collective unconscious of a community ravaged and then decimated by the sins of his father, the awakening occurs in the last sentence of Pedro Páramo, in his vision of his father brought low by his inability to escape “the nights that filled the darkness with phantoms” of his deplorable past: “He fell to the ground with a thud, and lay there, collapsed like a pile of rocks.”

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.”

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.

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.