MICHEL DÉON CASTS A COOL FRENCH EYE

This piece first appeared in the Irish Literary Supplement, Volume 38, Number 1 (Fall 2018), 12-13.

The primary claim to fame of Michel Déon as an “Irish” writer rests on a novel set in Ireland that he published in French in 1973.  Never translated into English, Un Taxi Mauve, which received the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, was adapted to the big screen in English in 1977 as The Purple Taxi.  (It did not receive rave reviews.)  Born in Paris in 1919, Déon was a prolific author in French beginning in the 1940s and the recipient of major literary honors, including membership in l’Académie française. After first settling on the Greek island of Spetsai in the Aegean Sea, Déon and his wife and their two children relocated to Ireland, specifically to south County Galway, in 1968.  He died in Galway in December of 2016 at the age of 97.

Reportedly, Déon lived just long enough to see in print an advance copy of Horseman, pass by!, a gathering of his nonfiction writing about Ireland translated by Clíona Ní Ríordáin, a professor of English at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, where she teaches literature and translation studies.  Originally published as Cavalier, passé ton chemin! by Gallimard in 2005, this book comprises a dozen chapters populated by a cast of characters mostly local to his adopted and adoptive village of Tynagh, by the ghost of William Butler Yeats, and by a couple of fellow literary figures whose renown both precedes and exceeds Déon’s sketches of them.  Those two figures are Ulick O’Connor and John McGahern.

Remarkably, given Déon’s initial impression of the mercurial O’Connor, the two men developed an “episodic” friendship and even collaborated casually.  Déon’s first encounter with O’Connor, at the Shelburne Hotel in Dublin in the company of a dozen writers, was hardly auspicious, the pugnacious Dubliner having just given the boot to a British writer in the entourage: “I’m going to kick that hoor of an Englishman up the arse, if he doesn’t leave this instant.  What is he doing in my country?”  But eventually Déon came to appreciate him in all his motley complexity: “In our far-west Irish retreat his coming always leaves a mixed impression.  No one could fail to be impressed by his moral standards, his hard-hitting intelligence, and his rich poetic memory.  He arrives in the garb of a city-dweller, elegant after his own fashion, that is to say a mixture of a dandy and a tramp—with clothes half-ragged, half-chic—a large felt hat pulled down over one ear, and a purple cashmere scarf hiding part of the collar of a much-worn black overcoat whose mix and match buttons I can imagine him choosing just to add to the composition of his character.  Isn’t he already a character?  No, I think he just has an aristocratic disdain for the distasteful tasks of everyday life that bore him stiff.”

Déon’s friendship with McGahern was both thinner and murkier.  Centered around a lunch at the famous Moran’s Oyster Cottage in Kilcolgan, the chapter on their acquaintance focuses mostly on McGahern’s writing, most specifically on his final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun.  Déon’s estimation of that work illuminates his own perspective on his adopted world: “Nothing so profoundly human and so unvarnishedly honest has ever been written about rural Irish society.  It rises above the blackness with which Irish literature usually speaks about its world, about its love-hate relationship with the Catholic Church and about the suffering it cultivates irremediably with such masochism.”  But McGahern the person remained a cipher to him, even after Déon visited him on his farm in County Leitrim: “I scarcely found out anything else about that deeply reserved man.  It was true that the shelves in his house in Foxfield were weighed down with books, but the names and the titles were difficult to make out.  The room where he worked was a monk’s cell of two by four metres.  The desk was a simple table made of light-wood, facing the wall.  McGahern doesn’t allow the landscape to disturb him.” (That single visit took place in January of 2005; McGahern died a little more than a year later.)

Coolly candid in his vignettes of O’Connor and McGahern, Déon casts a cold eye indeed not only on Yeats the poet but even more so on his commodified presence in the countryside in the general vicinity of Tynagh.  Dismayed by “the frenetic advance of cultural tourism” centered on Yeats, Déon courts consternation at every step he takes on a self-guided tour of the indelibly inscribed territory of Thoor Ballylee and Lady Gregory’s Coole Park.  First he visits Ballylee: “the entrance to the tower is now via a thatched cottage where all the inevitable horrors are arrayed—things like green scarves, green caps, green shields adorned with shamrocks.” He is even more appalled by the preserved schoolhouse originally underwritten by Lady Gregory at Kiltartan Cross: “The school, which has been converted into a museum, is a masterpiece of bad taste, even by Irish standards where the competition is fierce.  It could be taken for a train station in a coal-mining outpost. The charming lady who sells tickets at the desk—no tacky souvenirs there—will look like Lady Gregory in a couple of years.  With the exception of three important letters, the exhibition is of no interest: newspaper cuttings, photos, posters, a few books and, in the back room, a recreated classroom.  It’s got everything: inkwells, exercise books, pens, a blackboard, desks, and, at the front of the room, in a long skirt, a mannequin of a pretty school teacher that looks as if it might fly off like Mary Poppins.”

But Déon reserves his most righteous irreverence for Sligo Town and environs—Rosses Point, Benbulben, Drumcliff, all with obvious Yeatsian associations—which he describes visiting for the first time in decades.  And it is in this section of his chapter on Yeats that the reader might recognize that the overarching theme of Horseman, pass by!involves the myriad changes rural Ireland experienced in the economic boom of the late twentieth century.  Complaining about small-town traffic congestion, the shuttering of second-hand bookshops, the EU-mandated construction of roadways that have eliminated cattle- and sheep-clogged trunk roads as well as “the hedgerows of hawthorn, brambles and fuchsia,” the proliferation of “new buildings that spring up chaotically like poisonous mushrooms,” Déon asks: “Oh my dears, what are you doing to one of the most poetic countries in Europe?”  Musing on all of this as a self-sure octogenarian, Déon is unabashedly nostalgic for “the aristocratic Sligo” of the 1960s.  Fortunately, the severity of his judgment is generally mitigated by the richness of his writing—the distinctive wit, the smartly observed detail, the pleasing turn of phrase.

Ironically enough, Déon’s assessment of Ireland at the turn of the new century and of the new millennium—his nostalgia-infused disquiet about the country’s future—actually resonates with the perspective of Yeats’s Byzantine gilded bird perched on its bough and singing “Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”  Clearly, first with the flourishing and then with the waning of the so-called Celtic Tiger, many of Déon’s fears about what might get lost in transition have been, for better or for worse, irreversibly realized over the dozen years since the original publication of Cavalier, passé ton chemin!  But his most telling gauge of change and loss registers not in his mordant measuring of Sligo but in his series of wistful sketches of mostly anonymous individuals grounded in the physical and social landscape of south Galway.  These include members of the Galway Blazers, a fox-hunting crowd who invited his wife, a serious horsewoman, to join their circle.  One of this crowd, the superannuated Lady H who rides side-saddle while sporting a tricorne hat, ultimately becomes, in her physical and mental decline, an emblem for Déon of her social class in its decline. Ditto for Derek T, “the last gentleman of leisure in our part of the west of Ireland.”  The third husband of the mistress of Woodlawn, a decaying estate near Kilcolgan, Derek represents “the end of his race”: “He was the perfect symbol of the middle English aristocracy, who had arrived in Ireland centuries earlier as conquerors following in Cromwell’s footsteps. Ireland had slowly destroyed them, taking their virtues and distilling in them the slow poison of its laziness in a curious seesaw movement.”  Willfully obliviousness to the social and economic changes of latter-day Ireland and their effect on the Anglo-Irish ascendancy, Derek finally engineers his own abrupt end.

Most of the characters drawn by Déon are truly the likes of whom will not be seen again (that old refrain).  One of these is the bicycle-riding postman from Ballindereen, in the vicinity where the author and his family lived when they first moved to Ireland.  Remembering him in “his big postman’s cap and trussed up in his black Sunday suit, with his trouser legs stuffed into his bicycle clips to reveal huge clodhopper shoes,” Déon writes: “Tim was like Prometheus when, standing upright on the pedals, he climbed the slight incline that led to us.” Reflecting on him decades later, he wonders: “Would he have liked the changes in his country?  . . . Would he shed a tear in memory of the poky little shop-cum-post office, the road that flooded under the slightest downpour, the freezing church, and the petrol pump that the shopkeeper manoeuvred with a fierce energy one could only dream of?”

Other cameos include a handyman named Pat-Jo Smith whom Déon admired for his embodiment of “the very Irish privilege of being at ease everywhere, being uncomfortable in no situation, an exemplary absence of barriers between people, a social fabric with no class divisions.”  And there is Sarah, who took to the roads after burying the last of her six children. She is a timeless figure: “For centuries, she had been walking the roads of Donegal, Mayo and Connemara, miming an imaginary conversation with the dead with expressive gestures, swinging the bundle she was carrying filled with a few rags, cans of beer, and potatoes cooked in ashes, her only food.”  Another figure in the landscape is an elderly local named Ciaron Barnett.  Displaced from his farm by his son after suffering a heart attack, he slipped away from his ever-vigilant wife and hitched a ride with Déon to Galway City; he returned home three days later, “grinning from ear to ear, delighted with his adventure”: “He’d bought a calf and a horse along the way, leaving what could be deemed a down payment of honour, fifty pence, for each of them.  The rest of the sum was to be completed when his eldest son went to collect them with his cattle truck.”

Unified by Michel Déon’s sharp eye and winning voice, Horseman, pass by!is truly engaging from start to finish.  It is also candidly illuminating of the author’s specific time and place: rural Ireland during a period of many rapid changes.  Subtitled Irish pages, it might remind some readers of Heinrich Böll’s Irish Journal published in German in 1957, just shy of a half-century before Cavalier, passé ton chemin!  Those same readers might recall Böll’s gently ironic disclaimer: “This Ireland exists: but whoever goes there and fails to find it has no claim on the author.”

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.

PLANTING THE POTATOES WITH HARTNETT AND YEATS

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 29, Number 7 (July 2018), 5.

Some years ago, I shared with a friend a poem by Michael Hartnett that I had recently happened upon.  Published in Hartnett’s bilingual volume A Necklace of Wrens (Gallery Books, 1987), “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” is deceptively simple.  Comprising fourteen short lines arranged in two quatrains and a sestet, the poem is self-evidently a sonnet variant.  As such, it might be read as fundamentally subversive—as Hartnett’s covert staking of a claim in the territory of a form intrinsically associated with the British poetic tradition: Wyatt, Surrey, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Wordsworth.  In fact, in that regard the poem is doubly subversive—not only written in the Irish language, it also deconstructs via its curtal lines the more-British-than-the-British iambic pentameter meter widely associated with the sonnet.  Add to that the more-Irish-than-the-Irish subject matter of the potato—that tuber that became inextricably associated with the country’s history after being introduced to the hospitable soil and the temperate climate of Ireland from the New World in the late 1500s—and “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” is a pretty full plate of subversion, indeed.

But the friend I shared the poem with, himself an Irish poet of considerable repute, read “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” much differently.  Perhaps suffering from his own anxiety of influence, he wondered frankly how Hartnett had managed, or dared, to write a poem about potatoes on the mud-caked heels of Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s preeminent poetic voice of the past half-century.  Heaney had staked a bold claim on potato fields very early in his career, most famously in “Digging,” the opening poem in his first volume of poems, Death of a Naturalist, published in 1966.  He remembered with both visual and tactile precision the sensation of working the potato drills behind his father on the family farm in County Derry:

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands. 

Yet as Heaney acknowledged implicitly in “At a Potato Digging,” a poem written around the same time and filled with the imagery of crows and crow-black fields and lines of potato pickers moving between hedges and headlands that echoes the opening lines of Patrick Kavanagh’s “The Great Hunger,” Kavanagh had already turned over that ground a generation earlier, both in that famous long poem and in various other poems such as “Ploughman,” “The Man After the Harrow,” and “Spraying the Potatoes.”

No doubt Hartnett too would have recognized Kavanagh as a poetic precursor.  Presumably, however, he also knew of an earlier—much earlier—poetic reference to potatoes, in the work of 17th-century Irish-language poet Dáibhí Ó Bruadair. Hartnett discovered Ó Bruadair in the early 1950s in the three-volume Irish Texts Society edition of his poems (published between 1910 and 1917) and eventually translated a selection in a volume titled O Bruadair (1985).  A committed student of that poet’s rich body of work, he would not likely have missed the ITS editor’s glossing of the word potáta, from a poem dated 1674-75, as “one of the earliest, if not the very earliest, occurrences of the word in Irish.”  Arguably, then, the relationship between Hartnett’s dan práta and Heaney’s “potato poems”—and, for that matter, Kavanagh’s poems harvested from the “stony grey soil” of his native County Monaghan—is mostly, perhaps totally, incidental.

But its relationship to a poem by William Butler Yeats may be less incidental and may in fact make “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” not just doubly but triply subversive.  In Hartnett’s own translation, the two quatrains that open the poem make transparent the poet’s deployment of metaphor, his indulgence in what Robert Frost calls “the pleasure of ulteriority”—“saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another”:

Today I planted poems—

dung, knife, seed:

a field my page,

my pen a spade.

Green nipples will come

one by one,

white flowers, their centres

like spits from the sun.

But as Paul Fussell observes in his book Poetic Meter and Poetic Form, a sonnet operates on a “principle of imbalance,” and when Hartnett’s fourteen-liner makes its “volta,” or “turn,” into its sestet after those opening eight lines, the poem changes direction in just the way that Heaney described so appositely in an essay titled “The Makings of a Music”: “‘Verse’ comes from the Latin versuswhich could mean a line of poetry but could also mean the turn that a ploughman made at the head of the field as he finished the furrow and faced back into another.”  Irish poet Eavan Boland elaborates on this effect in an anthology she co-edited titled The Making of a Sonnet: “The octave sets out the problems, the perceptions, the wishes of the poet.  The sestet does something different: it makes a swift, wonderfully compact turn on the hidden meanings of butand yetand wait for a moment.  The sestet answers the octave, but neither politely nor smoothly.  And this simple engine of proposition and rebuttal has allowed the sonnet over centuries, in the hands of very different poets, to replicate over and over again the magic of inner argument.”

In Hartnett’s hands, the “answer” is announced in the abrupt shift from the matter-of-factness of the two preceding quatrains to the decidedly imperative tone of the first line of the sestet:

Learners—no longer idle,

but gather your implements

for all of Ireland’s poets

replough the Irish earth

and you will be bereft

of potatoes and verse.

But that imperative also announces not only its engagement with but also its speaking back to probably the most famous imperative in all of Irish literature, Yeats’s exhortation—essentially his last will and testament directed to his poetic successors—in the penultimate section of his valedictory poem “Under Ben Bulben” written in 1938, the year before he died: “Irish poets, learn your trade / Sing whatever is well made . . .”  In effect, Yeats is imposing his will on the next generation of Irish poets, placing on them a geis, a moral obligation to continue inscribing his particular, and particularly romanticized, vision of Ireland: “Sing the peasantry, and then / Hard-riding country gentlemen, / The holiness of monks, and after / Porter-drinkers’ randy laughter . . .”

In 1966, John Montague, the senior poet of Hartnett’s generation, responded to Yeats in a little essay titled “Living Under Ben Bulben”: “There are times when I wonder if that passage was not composed with malice aforethought.  A friend told me once of interrupting two old men near Belmullet, in order to ask the way, and being shown a path that led onto a sea cliff: is that what Yeats meant by bequeathing us a catalogue of subjects that can now only be legitimately treated in parody?”  Less than a decade later, in his iconic declaration of poetic intention, “A Farewell to English,” Hartnett would add his voice to this complaint, rejecting specifically the influence of “our bugbear Mr. Yeats / who forced us into exile / on islands of bad verse.” 

In “Dán Práta / Potato Poem” Hartnett's response is more oblique but no less dismissive of Yeats’s authority.  Matching imperative with imperative, this poem is an act not just of subversion but also of reclamation of poetic territory.  It is Hartnett’s exhortation to each future generation of Ireland’s poets to replough—and, implicitly, to replant and thus to claim as their own—the metaphorical “crow-black fields” and “stony grey soil” of their precursors.

FEAR ITSELF: GABRIEL CHEVALLIER, PATRICK MacGILL, AND THE GREAT WAR

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 26, Number 1 (January 2015), 13.

Just in time for the centenary of the Great War of 1914-18 (World War I), the publication in English of Gabriel Chevallier’s novel Le Peur (1930) is drawing deserved attention.  Translated by Malcolm Imrie as Fear and available in the handsome New York Review of Books Classics series, the novel is clearly infused with Chevallier’s personal experience as an infantryman in the French Army during the Great War.  Presenting the life of a soldier through extended passages inscribing equally the physical and the psychological trauma not just of combat but also of waiting for combat, it is a novel of unblinking witness.

Unlike Chevallier himself, who was “called up” to service, his protagonist, Jean Dartemont, enlisted in the army “against all my convictions, but still of my own free will—not to fight but out of curiosity: to see.”  Dartemont is an educated young man, an intellectual for whom war is initially a phenomenon to study.  About a third of the way through the novel, however, after he has been hospitalized with shrapnel wounds, his capacity to contemplate the nature of and the implications of his experience in the trenches, the dugouts, and the battlefields leads to a public admission that is also a pivot point for the “meaning” of the overall narrative.  At the hospital, he is provoked by the nurses who insistently ask him what he did at the front line: “I marched day and night without knowing where I was going.  I did exercises, I had inspections, I dug trenches, I carried barbed wire, I carried sandbags, did look-out duty. . . .”  When prodded by the nurses to elaborate, he clarifies: “Yes, that’s all . . .  Or rather, no, that’s nothing.  Would you like to know the chief occupation of war, the only one that matters: I WAS AFRAID.” 

For the willfully self-deluding nurses, Dartemont speaks utter blasphemy, but the patent truthfulness of his admission colors the rest of the novel after he returns to combat duty.  Eventually, he realizes that the only way to conquer his own cowardice is to expose himself wantonly to the inevitability of dying in this transparently futile war.

Reading Chevallier’s novel recently, I inevitably thought of an earlier novel of the Great War by Donegal-born man-of-letters Patrick MacGill (who happens to be buried in Fall River, Massachusetts).  MacGill’s most enduring contribution to the literature of the Great War may well be his three autobiographical narratives—The Amateur Army (1915), The Red Horizon (1916), and The Great Push (1916)—written in the very midst of his experience as a Rifleman (that is, a Private) in the London Irish Rifles regiment.  But he also published two Great War-centered novels—The Brown Brethren (1917) and Fear! (1920)—after his military service ended when he was wounded in the Battle of Loos in September of 1915.

Unlike most of MacGill’s fiction, Fear! is not an “Irish” novel per se: the narrator-protagonist is Henry Ryder, a barber from a nondescript English village who is conscripted into an unnamed regiment of the British Expeditionary Force and shipped out to France as the War continues to decimate the population of able-bodied Englishmen.  While the novel obviously borrows from MacGill’s own experience on the Western Front, it is really much more generic than specific in its detailed descriptions of night raids and marches, trenches and dugouts and billets, coarse camaraderie and lonely despair.

As historian David Taylor rightly recognizes in Memory, Narrative and the Great War (2013), MacGill’s autobiographical trilogy traces an arc of “disillusionment” with war.  This arc continues through Fear! and the frontispiece to the novel includes a note headed “What This Story is About”: “Patrick MacGill has been able to write about war as war actually is. . . . [T]he realism of ‘Fear’ will bring home to all the conviction that such things must never be allowed to happen again.”  While MacGill depicts many aspects of war in the novel, the exclamatory title foretells that its central subject will involve his extended revisiting of a motif he had introduced in the opening chapter of The Red Horizon, set on the ship transporting him and his fellow London Irish Rifles across the English channel early in 1915: “What will it be like, but above all, how shall I conduct myself in the trenches?  Maybe I shall be afraid—cowardly.  But no!”  This question becomes an obsession for Private Henry Ryder.

As a novel, Fear! contains a lot of filler.  Chapters and long passages detailing basic training at Salisbury Plain, sketching the various “characters” who populate the rank and file of Ryder’s company and section, dramatizing life behind the lines in estaminets and billets, and inscribing the abrupt shift from enervating tedium to frenetic action read more like vignettes than as contributing elements to a distilled storyline.  What emerges from the baggy plot, however, is a compelling meditation—Henry Ryder’s, but really Patrick MacGill’s—on fear.

Not surprisingly, MacGill’s Ryder experiences an “epiphany” strikingly similar to that of Chevallier’s Dartemont regarding the short odds of dying in combat.  But Ryder’s perspective is complicated by a story told by one of his seasoned section mates of the execution by firing squad of a deserter: “I felt as if I were the guilty man myself, that I was guilty of the failing for which L___ died.”  For all of their similarities—and there are many, underscoring the universality of the experience of the Great War not just for British and French soldiers but, implicitly, for those on the other side of the barbed wire divide as well, the Germans—MacGill’s and Chevallier’s novels diverge on the basis of this incident, resulting in very different narrative resolutions.

Chevallier’s Dartemont actually survives his wanton rush to combat and he survives the War altogether, which allows him by way of his memoiresque narrative to bear unvarnished witness to the brutal reality of war.  The final chapter of Henry Ryder’s story is “Written by Another Hand”—a coda-like conclusion by which MacGill allows the reader to infer Ryder’s fate after, as he puts it matter-of-factly, “I have run away from the battle.”  Earlier, Ryder had parsed fear into three categories.  The first is “jelly fear,” which “slackens the guts, numbs the brain and takes the stuffing from the spine.”  The second is “reckless fear”: “What the devil does it matter now?  You don’t care!  You stop at nothing!  Forward! and let me get at them!  Six inches cold steel, six feet cold clay!  Bullets fly, shells burst!  Let them!”  The third category is “calculating fear”: “you are quite calm, a normal being, weighing the pros and cons of the occasion.  Able to fit your movements to your mood, you advance, consider, take cover, study your environment and obey orders.  But this moment is not lasting.”  Clearly, Ryder has succumbed to that first fear in the manner foreshadowed by his section mate’s story of the executed deserter.

Yet, finding himself in the ruins of an old church, Ryder looks to a damaged crucifix for guidance to resolve his dilemma.  Left at a loss—Christ at least had a mission “to die for the sins of men”—he arrives at a simple understanding of how his cowardice relates to the overall devaluing of life and humanity that, as an increasingly transparent “war of attrition,” the Great War clearly amounted to: “It matters not—nothing matters.  I’ll die, anyway.  Who fires the bullet doesn’t matter.  I’m going back to the firing line. . . .  I’m going back.”

Ultimately, that devaluing—or its implied opposite, a revaluing of life and humanity—is at the heart of both Patrick MacGill’s Fear! and Gabriel Chevallier’s Fear: “such things must never be allowed to happen again,” indeed.  In the midst of reading these two relentlessly bleak novels, I happened also to pick up The Missing of the Somme (1994), a meditation on remembrance by Geoff Dyer.  He too engages with the issues of fear and cowardice, musing that “Perhaps the real heroes of 1914-18 . . . are those who refused to obey and to fight, who actively rejected the passivity forced upon them by the war, who reasserted their right not to suffer, not to have things done to them.”  He then goes on to describe how the family of one Private A. Ingham of the Manchester Regiment, who died on 1^st December 1916, had believed for years that he had simply “died of wounds.”  But when his father was finally informed that he had been executed for desertion or cowardice, he insisted on this inscription being added to the military headstone marking his grave in the French village of Bailleulmont:

SHOT AT DAWN

ONE OF THE FIRST TO ENLIST

A WORTHY SON

OF HIS FATHER

I believe that both MacGill and Chevallier would salute that gesture.

A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY . . . OR TO SLANE

This piece first appeared in The Boston Irish Reporter, Volume 25, Number 2 (February 2014), 13.

For the past few weeks, I have been thumbing back and forth through a massive hot-off-the-press coffee table book, The Great War: a Photographic Narrative.  A project of Great Britain’s Imperial War Museums, the book offers a starkly candid photographic record of the horrific reality of life in the various “theatres” that constituted World War I: the trenches and the battlefields of the Western Front, of course, but also the beaches and the slopes of Gallipoli, the Zeppelin-bombed streets of England, the deserts of the Middle East, and the high seas.  For the most part, this gathering of images is not for the faint of heart.

Obviously, the publication of this book anticipates the centenary of The Great War—1914-1918.  It thus holds intrinsic interest for anyone invested in Irish matters: more than 200,000 Irishmen enlisted in the British forces and more than 30,000 died in combat.  No doubt the next four years will see this under-written chapter of Irish history given its long overdue attention—and appropriate commemoration—by scholars, by the Irish government, and by the general public.

I must admit that I have a personal investment in all of this: my Irish-born paternal grandfather enlisted in the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment in September of 1914 and served in France and Belgium from July of 1915 until the end of the war in November of 1918.  After he was demobbed in 1919, he relocated to New York City where he married his Irish sweetheart, who had emigrated before the War.  An Irishman to the core, for the rest of his life he remained proud of his British military service and of the decorations he earned—a Victory Medal and a British War Medal, each recognizing general service during the Great War, and a 1914/1915 Star recognizing specifically his service in France in 1915.

As a private in the 12^th (Service) Battalion of the King’s (Liverpool) Regiment, my grandfather was involved in many of the major engagements on the Western Front: both Battles of the Somme (1916 and 1918), the Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) in 1917, and the Final Advance in Picardy in 1918.  Each of these is represented in The Great War: a Photographic Narrative.

But of all the photos in the book, one in particular caught my eye immediately—and continues to hold my focus—as an indelible “emblem” not just of my grandfather’s experience but more broadly of “the Irish experience” on the Western Front.  The photo, taken in Flanders, appears on page 373 of the book.  Snapped by Lieutenant John Warwick Brooke, an official British Army photographer, it is captioned matter-of-factly: “Stretcher-bearers of the Field Ambulance Corps carry a wounded man through deep mud, near Boesinghe, Ypres Salient, Belgium, 1 August 1917.”  The day that photo was taken, my grandfather’s battalion was in the immediate vicinity, on march from a training camp about 10 miles away in Proven to bivouacs in Elverdinghe, about a mile short of Boesinghe, en route to what would be known as the Battle of Langemarck in mid-August.

I visited Boesinghe (now spelled Boezinge) and environs last year and was immediately struck by the distinctive character of the landscape there: just as the photo records, it is unrelentingly flat, stretching out as far as the eye can see, punctuated only occasionally by small clusters of farm buildings.  Standing in the midst of that vast expanse almost a century after my grandfather, I tried to imagine how he “experienced” it.  Born in Borrisokane, Co. Tipperary, he grew up in Clara, Co. Offaly: thus, like the large majority of Irishmen of rural, village, or small-town stock who served in the British Army, he would have been accustomed to a much more textured and contoured landscape—white-washed thatch-roofed cottages in rolling fields enclosed by tumble-down stone walls, twisty roads and lanes overarched by rich leafage, meandering rivers and brooks, perhaps furzy mountains rising in the distance.  The description of Flanders proffered by historian John Keegan in his book The First World War underscores the contrast: “There is one of the dreariest landscapes in Western Europe, a sodden plain of wide, unfenced fields, pasture and plough intermixed, overlying a water table that floods on excavation more than a few spadefuls deep.  There are patches of woodland scattered between the villages and isolated farmsteads and a few points of high ground that loom in the distance behind the ancient walled city of Ypres.  The pervading impression, however, is of long unimpeded fields of view, too mournful to be called vistas, interrupted only by the occasional church steeple and leading in all directions to distant, hazy horizons which promise nothing but the region’s copious and frequent rainfall.”  Obviously, the emptiness my grandfather saw all around him in Flanders would have felt truly foreign and utterly disorienting.

It would have felt utterly hostile as well.  As Mark Holborn observes in his Editorial Note to The Great War: a Photographic Narrative, the heavy bombardment of the countryside by both German and Allied artillery, a distinguishing feature of the War itself, altered the already spare landscape: “Landmarks were eradicated and trees vanished.”  In the summer of 1917, nature too conspired to make the area even more inhospitable, as weeks of rain combined with the high water table to create the absolute quagmire captured in the photograph—some of the stretcher-bearers are up to their knees in mud.  According to some accounts, thousands of soldiers actually drowned in the mud of Flanders, which in places was ten feet deep.  For my grandfather and his fellow displaced Irishmen serving on the Western Front, trudging toward battle through those unspeakably miserable fields of Flanders would have given very literal meaning to that popular marching song of the day, “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary . . .”

But there is no need to take just my word on that.  While my grandfather left behind no written account of his time on the Western Front and while the stories he told my father and his siblings have become blurry over time, the sensation of alienation—and of homesickness—that I imagined for him as I stood there in Boezinge last year has been registered by others, including celebrated poet Francis Ledwidge.  Born in 1887, Ledwidge grew up and was educated in Janesville, an area on the outskirts of Slane, Co. Meath.  (His boyhood cottage is now a museum honoring his memory.)  In 1914, he enlisted in the 5^th Battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and saw action as a Lance Corporal first at the Dardanelles in 1915 and then in Serbia (where he injured his back).  In December of 1916, he returned to active duty, this time in the border area of France and Belgium with the 1^st Battalion of the Royal Inniskillings.

A prolific poet since his mid-teens, the 29-year-old soldier continued to send verses home to his literary patron, Lord Dunsany, who oversaw their publication in book form both during Ledwidge’s lifetime and after his death.  Written on February 3^rd, 1917, shortly after he arrived at the Western Front, “In France” typifies how Ledwidge’s poems emphasize the bucolic and the romantic, keeping at literary arm’s length the horrific realities of battlefields and trench warfare:

The silence of maternal hills

Is round me in my evening dreams;

And round me music-making bills

And mingling waves of pastoral streams.

Whatever way I turn I find

The path is old unto me still.

The hills of home are in my mind,

And there I wander as I will.

Clearly, the memory of those hills around Slane afforded Ledwidge consolation in the midst of the alien landscape and the lethal environment of the Western Front.  In fact, in “Spring,” a poem dated March 8^th, 1917, he allows a flight of imagination to transport him back to Meath—to a rural landscape noisy with larks and magpies and wood-doves and kingfishers and bursting with primroses and daffodils and water-lilies and daises—until the final two lines bring him back to the here and the now of the War: “And peace wraps all those hills of mine / Safe in dearest memory.”

But the poem of Ledwidge’s that speaks most poignantly to me as I picture my grandfather passing through Boesinghe in early August of 1917 is titled simply “Home.”  Like “Spring,” it catalogues pastoral life in Ireland, but in this case the memories of home are awakened by the singing of a bird in war-ravaged Belgium:

This is a song a robin sang

This morning on a broken tree,

It was about the little fields

That call across the world to me.

Written in July of 1917, “Home” was one of Francis Ledwidge’s last poems.  The poet was killed at Carrefour Rose, a crossroads in Boesinghe, in a German shrapnel attack on July 31^st, 1917, the day before Lieutenant Brooke took that memorable photograph of the stretcher-bearers in that same forbidding countryside.  A memorial to Ledwidge stands at the very spot where he was killed.  He is buried a quarter mile away in Artillery Wood Cemetery.  I visited both of those sites last year and paid my respects to the poet.  I remembered my grandfather too.