The Gentle Island & Give Me Your Answer, Do! By Brian Friel

Having seen each of these plays, the texts of which are now being published, performed at some time or other over the years, this reviewer would appear to be in an ideal position to launch into a discussion of, and a reflection upon, the comparisons and contrasts between a document and how it works as drama, a play and how it works in production, a script and how it works on stage, a text and how it works as theatre. But every production of a play is different, so why use the one I saw as a yardstick? And every performance of a production is different, so why use the night I was there as a yardstick? Theatre, like film or television, is essentially a collaborative process, and the playwright, unlike the poet or novelist, cannot hope for that much autonomy. Despite the sometimes extraordinary lengths to which some playwrights have gone and will go to safeguard their work from deviating from their vision, (e.g. Beckett insisting on no changes from the original text when giving permission for his plays to be performed, Friel directing Give Me Your Answer, Do!), or the phenomenon of the auteur director in cinema, this will always be the case. There are directors, actors, set designers, lighting and sound personnel, all of whom contribute to the overall package which is finally presented before the audience. Then there’s the audience itself, but that’s another story. So much for pure intentionality. But how do the scripts, in this case Friel’s, which are the starting point for all that follows, stand up?

The Gentle Island

By Brian Friel

(The Gallery Press, hb £10.95, pb £5.95)

It is not my intention here to write an appraisal of Brian Friel’s long career, but merely to address the plays under review. One crude division that can be applied to Friel’s work is between the plays which are predominantly private monologues and those which are public ensemble pieces. Both The Gentle Island and Give Me Your Answer, Do!, with their large casts, fall into the latter category. Also, neither displays much evidence of one of the most striking facets of Friel’s work, his concern with form, which has given rise to his dramaturgical innovations.

The ironically titled The Gentle Island concerns a small rural community on the island of Inishkeen, off the west coast of Co Donegal, with the time given as ‘the present’, (the play was first produced in November, 1971). Everyone, with the exception of Manus Sweeney and his family - his sons Philly and Joe, and Philly’s wife Sarah - is emigrating, to London, Manchester or Glasgow, since the island can no longer support its population. Manus is now ‘King of Inishkeen, King of nothing’, as Joe puts it. On the day of the mass exodus, just after the departure, Philly returns from fishing to announce that he has caught a hundred and thirty salmon, ‘Nothing under five pounds’. But it is clear from subsequent conversations that the Sweeneys, like all the islanders, have been living off the pickings taken from crashed aeroplanes and floundered ships, which have accumulated over the years. There is an implied criticism of Sarah by Manus, because she and Philly have failed to produce offspring.

Into this fraught atmosphere come middle-aged Peter, and his companion Shane, twenty years his junior, Dubliners who are touring on a camping holiday. It gradually emerges (to the audience, not to the Sweeneys) that they are lovers, Peter looking for a commitment from Shane, ‘a modest permanence’ as he calls it, Shane being more subversive, both of their relationship and of the islanders’ way of life. Sarah gets around to propositioning Shane, since Philly is ‘no good to me’, and is playfully and politely refused. Sarah subsequently sees Philly and Shane in flagrante delicto, ‘doing for the tramp what he couldn’t do for me’, and, in an act weirdly reminiscent of Pegeen Mike’s turning on Christy in Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, shoots Shane, when Manus lacks the courage to do so. ‘Even if he lives he’ll never walk again,’ Joe tells us.

This was probably a brave play for its time, but things have changed considerably in the past twenty-six years, or even in the past six. The love that dare not speak its name now shouts its name from every rooftop, and gay culture is now so much part of the mainstream that a play about its clash with tradition is perhaps not as ground-breaking or relevant as it once was. The theme has also been explored in much more detail in some of the plays of Frank McGuinness. The Gentle Island is one of the more minor works in the Friel canon, since its doesn’t ascend to the mythic scale of the major plays. However, Gallery are to be complimented on providing a useful service in making the texts of all the plays not already published by Faber & Faber available, since they are a resource for both the general reader and the research student.

Give Me Your Answer, Do!

By Brian Friel

(The Gallery Press, hb £12.95, pb £6.95)

Such is the respect and reverence for Friel among his peers that the burden of audience expectation must weigh heavily on him. It is becoming increasingly difficult for him to better his own best, to reinvent himself and his art anew with each new production, and to avoid repetition. With this latest piece, he has given us a timely meditation on the nature and function of art, the validity of aesthetic judgement which is inevitably influenced by the demands of the marketplace, and the personal costs to be paid by the artist and those close to him for his work. Who better to do this than an acknowledged master?

Tom Connolly is a serious but materially unsuccessful novelist, counterpointed with his friend and fellow-novelist Garret Fitzmaurice, whose work is popular but bland. They are criticised and judged, supported and loved, by their respective wives, Daisy and Grainne. Jack and Maggie, Daisy’s parents, are another couple fraught with foibles. The dramatis personae are completed by David Knight, a literary agent deciding whether the Texas university he is representing will buy Tom’s manuscripts for its Irish archive (he has already secured a handsome sum for Garret’s papers); and Bridget, the Connellys’ silent and mentally disturbed daughter, incarcerated in an asylum, whom Tom regales loquaciously, at the beginning and the end, with fantastic stories, which are extrapolated surreally from actual events at home. Tom is waiting for an answer from these last two, just as he is waiting for an answer from Daisy, and ultimately from himself.

Criticisms of an otherwise brave play are that it does tend to hinge on a false dichotomy: the choice between taking the money and selling out, or refusing it and keeping one’s integrity. This is simplistically black and white. Why not accept the offer but not let it impinge on one’s notion of self-worth? And even if and when the Texas university does buy Tom’s archive, does that automatically mean that ‘the work has value - yes, yes, yes! Here is the substantial confirmation, the tangible evidence! The work must be good!’, as Daisy says in her final speech? I think not. After all, it has already taken Garret’s work.

It is hinted that Tom may have sexually abused Bridget and that this is responsible for her nervous collapse, (otherwise why does Tom call two unpublished novels he wrote immediately after she got sick ‘pornographic’?), but this angle is never developed, so that it slipped by every other reviewer without a mention when the play premiered.

There are also a few too many heavily sign-posted speeches, particularly from Daisy, and the Fitzmaurices, where subtle implication would have been preferable. Characters tell rather than show, bare their souls verbally for all to hear, and discuss and analyse in private conversations they’ve just had in public. While talking to each other, they are telling the audience the reasons they have just acted as they have. This is at its most obvious and banal when Garret declares: ‘I’m such a shit, Grainne. Who knows that better than I?’ These segments are undramatic, and while they may read well on the page, they make poor theatre. Perhaps this would have been ameliorated on stage if Friel had left the direction of his script to someone else.

But these comments should not cloud what is an impressive work. The radical scepticism Friel has brought to bear on language, (Translations, The Communication Cord), memory (Faith Healer) and history (Making History), is here employed on art. This is writing questioning itself. ‘Audiences impose limits on us,’ says Grainne to Garret at one point, referring to how they behave towards each other in public, but maybe in his play’s title Friel is addressing we who are watching his work, or even himself, just as his central character is. Wittgenstein’s famous formulation, ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent’, is another quotation invoked here, and towards the end Daisy says: ‘Uncertainty is necessary...Because there can be no verdicts, no answers. Indeed there must be no verdicts. Because being alive is the postponement of verdicts, isn’t it?’ It is, but perhaps one shouldn’t pay too much attention to the verdicts of Texan universities. Or, for that matter, of Books Ireland reviewers.

“Traduzioni” E Altri Drammi

a cura di Carla de Petris

(Bulzoni Editore, L 48,000)

Signora de Petris lectures in Anglo-Irish Literature in Rome University, and has written a thesis on Brendan Behan, edited the second and third volumes of Joyce Studies in Italy, where she examined Joyce’s influence on the next generation of writers, edited a new Italian edition of Joyce’s play Exiles, and contributed an essay on Dante and Seamus Heaney to Critical Essays on Heaney (New York, 1995), edited by Robert F Garratt. Here she provides good, readable Italian translations of Faith Healer, Translations and Dancing at Lughnasa, plus a knowledgeable and scholarly introductory essay, which places Friel in the grand tradition of Yeats, Synge, O’Casey and Beckett. She highlights the theme of the difficulties of communication in Friel, not only between the public and private selves, but also between cultures that colonialism has arbitrarily put in contact, and suggests that the reappropriation of a pure physical language, the dance, is the way of overcoming the discomfort of being prisoners of history and of contemporary society.

One could indulge in metaphysical speculation about a translation of Translations, a play whose central conceit is that the characters who are supposed to be speaking in Irish are actually speaking in English on stage, a comment perhaps on the decline of Irish-speaking in Ireland, where it is paid official lip-service, but very few people actually speak it with any degree of fluency, and therefore the piece could not be understood if it actually was in Irish, unless it actually was translated. But one won’t.

Again, Bulzoni are providing a useful service in making these plays available for Italian readers, and Signora de Petria is to be congratulated on her endeavours.

An Age of Innocence (Irish Culture 1930-1960) By Brian Fallon

An Age of Innocence (Irish Culture 1930-1960)

By Brian Fallon

(Gill & Macmillian)

Brian Fallon, the semi-retired former chief critic of The Irish Times, has produced a book of cultural counter-revisionism, the central thesis of which is that the thirties, forties and fifties in Ireland were not nearly as bad as is universally accepted today, and that the country was not the cultural backwater or desert that everyone now seems to suppose.

Aside from cataloguing the literary, artistic and intellectual activity of these years, he also argues that the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. He sets about putting us right by focusing on three main areas. Firstly, there was the power and authority of the Catholic Church during these years, and the unquestioning obedience of the majority to it. He makes the point that, ‘Unthinking clericalism has simply given way to unthinking anti-clericalism; the coin has been flipped to come down heads instead of tails - but it remains the same well-worn coin.’ Secondly, referring to the monomaniacal nationalism of the era, and contrasting it with the cosmopolitan image of itself Ireland is obsessed with creating today, he asks, ‘Yet is not a large part of this frenzied internationalism at heart inverted provincialism, the product of an unsure, partly-fledged culture lacking the courage to be wholeheartedly itself? Where once we looked to and deferred to Britain in so many fields, we now look to the EU to tell us what we should be thinking and doing.’ Thirdly, there was the notorious literary censorship of the period, but he finds its present day corollary in the all-pervasive phenomenon of Political Correctness, opining that, ‘Political Correctness indeed appears to be the official cant of out time - the contemporary equivalent of Victorian hypocrisy, or of the socio-religious conformity of a large section of the Irish public forty or fifty years ago.’ He also maintains that things were just as bad internationally as they were here. Indeed, this is this trump card again and again, and he refers to the hostile treatment meted out to D H Lawrence in England, and the Hayes rules which operated in Hollywood and the general atmosphere under McCarthyism in America. Joyce’s Ulysses was never actually banned in Ireland, as many people believe (it was just not readily available), while it was proscribed in England and America for some years.

While he admits that, ‘It goes without saying that all these accusations have a solid core of truth; the historical evidence is sometimes overwhelming, and it has been spelt out ad nauseam’, and there is no doubting his bona fides, since as he writes in the introductory chapter ‘In Perspective’, ‘How much more intelligent, and more constructive, it is to come to terms creatively with the past than to manipulate it like a diseased limb, or put it under interdict!’ However it does seem to this reader that in trying to redress an admittedly skewed balance, and provide a much needed corrective, he himself goes too far in the opposite direction.

First published in The World of Hibernia

My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead – Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro Edited by Jeffrey Eugenides

My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead – Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro

Edited by Jeffrey Eugenides

(HarperPress, £12.99stg hardback)

This wide-ranging and eclectic anthology of twenty-six short stories on the theme of love embraces its subject in many of its various forms: romantic, erotic, impossible, unrequited, undying and exhausted. However, conspicuous by their omission are happy love stories, or at least those with happy endings.

As editor Jeffery Eugendies, author of the wonderful The Virgin Suicides and the even more brilliant Middlesex, taking his cue from the Latin love poet Catullus, writes in his playful introduction in response to his own writerly recasting of Cole Porter’s famous question, ‘What is this thing called a love story?’: ‘…my subject here isn’t love. My subject is the love story…When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims – these are lucky eventualities but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name.’ Or, as Catullus, ‘…the first poet in the ancient world to write about a personal love affair in an extended way’ would have had it, given the brief trajectory outlined from poem II to poem III of the many he penned in honour of or frustration with his mistress Lesbia, in each of the stories here ‘…either there is a sparrow or the sparrow is dead.’ In other words, as far as eros or desire is concerned, we generally proceed from voyeuristic longing to disenchanted entanglement. It is only in agape or friendship, Eugenides seems to suggest, ‘When the body is no longer desired, when beauty has faded, when possessiveness has been relinquished, (that) real love shows its face.’

Our editor indulges himself in a rather ropey two sentence history of western philosophy to arrive at this insight. Personally, I can find little evidence of ‘...the earthiness of Judaism, a sense of the body and its sexual appetites as inherently good’ in Leviticus, for example, and his declaration: ‘Asceticism, abstinence, monasticism – you can blame it all on the Greeks’ is fatally compromised by blaming Plato for Neoplatonism. Let’s not even start on what that zealous revisionist, St. Paul, did to Christianity. Rather than looking for those culpable for perpetrating the excesses of the mind/body duality, maybe there is a more fundamental reason why there are no happy love stories: love is hard because life is.

Eugenides is on far surer ground as a literary critic. Having gone through all the stories gathered here, from classics of the genre like Chekhov’s delightfully ambivalent ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ and Maupassant’s ‘Mouche’ to rather more gritty contemporary fare like Raymond Carver’s arbitrarily inconclusive ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’ and Denis Johnson’s ‘Dirty Wedding’, via contributions from Milan Kundera, Robert Musil, Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Lorrie Moore and Richard Ford, plus our own William Trevor and two from Harold Brodkey (the only writer so favoured), it is hard for this reader not to agree with this judicious anthologist’s equally bold assertion, ‘…rereading ‘Spring in Fialta’ reminded me how much better Nabokov is than everybody else.’ The lush lyricism seduces, the pencil is in hand to mark those incomparable phrases that will be savoured again. But however much the aesthete may propound his doctrine of art for art’s sake, the showiness is never for its own sake: a heartbreaking narrative of loss is unfolded here.

Not every entry is a hit: Gilbert Sorrentino’s ‘The Moon in its Flight’, which manages to be both retro and postmodern in its depiction of a pair of teenagers constantly thwarted by fully-clothed sex, is too annoyingly telegramatic in style to be truly affecting. Similarly, Eileen Chang’s ‘Red Rose, White Rose’, despite its length, is too telegraphed and simplistic to ever really get inside its central character’s motivations. That said, as with any anthology, this is hardly for reading from cover to cover, but is best dipped into from time to time, to discover a new voice, or revisit an old one. 

This assemblage is being marketed as the perfect St. Valentine’s Day gift, and it is indeed an elegant package, replete with dedication box inside the flyleaf. Caveat emptor, however, for the irony is that these often tortuous and sometimes tragic tales are as far from the fluffily reassuring, cosy complacencies of ‘chick lit’ or ‘rom-com’ as it is possible to imagine. The guy rarely gets his girl, or the woman her man, or if they do, it doesn’t work out quite as they thought it would. Just so you know…

First published in the Sunday Independent

What Are You Like? By Anne Enright

What Are You Like?

By Anne Enright

(Jonathan Cape, p/b, £10)

The colloquial, jokey inquiry, usually delivered when someone has done something unbelievable stupid, takes on a more sinister undertow in the title of Anne Enright’s fine new novel, as do many other casual phrases and situations we tend to take for granted in the everyday world. But then doubling, or a second thought bifurcating out of a first one, giving two thoughts at the same time (which is what a pun is), is integral to this work, no more so than in the fact that we have twin heroines, Maria and Rose, separated at birth and unaware of each other’s existence. The story alternates between Maria in New York, Rose in London, stopping off now and then at the home of their father Berts and his second wife Evelyn in Dublin, their mother having died when they were born, until the denouement, when all comes together.    

If shifting constructs of identity, and its ultimately arbitrary nature, are what preoccupy Mary Morrissy in The Pretender, so too do they intrigue Enright, and both women’s vision operates in a more personal, and therefore more universal way than the irritatingly narrow focus on post-colonial Irish identity we hear so much about from the Irish Studies Departments of universities, in their study of Irish literature (i.e. literature made by people who were born or live in Ireland). Indeed, the only place where Enright’s formally fluid and capacious book goes a little awry is in a section called ‘The Abortionist’s Restaurant’, where Rose ponders on her Irish identity, or lack of it. This reads like a graft that didn’t quite take, as though included as a sop to the academies, and is the only time when Enright’s cleverness and imagination become a trifle heavy-handed, instead of being both light and profound. When we read Gabriel Garcia Marquez, are we worrying about Columbian national identity?

The twin motif has long appealed to the more metaphysical of minds, providing as it does an image of a lost self, or future, uncreated self, so that the self is not quite whole, or is not the whole self, which amounts to almost the same thing. Mistaken identities, and their resolution, often across class and gender lines, are a staple of Boccaccio and Chaucer, and were often filched wholesale by Shakespeare. Nabokov delights in it, and it is central to Banville’s Birchwood and Mephisto. Scottish writer Ali Smith covered recognisably similar philosophical territory, although concerning friends rather than twins, in her novel entitled, with succinct appropriateness, Like. But similarity is not identity.

Although not plot driven, what happens is that when Maria turns twenty, she falls in love, in the wrong city, with the wrong sort of man. Going through his things, she finds a photo of herself when she was twelve years old. She has the same smile, but she is wearing clothes she never had: she is the same, only different. Stepping through the mirror to tell the story of two women, both haunted by their missing selves, both unable to settle in their first choice vocations of engineering and musicianship, What Are You Like? is a deftly written disquisition on families and - dread word - identity. In its choice of topos, it takes on an almost mythic resonance. Coincidentally, again like Morrissy, it includes a revealing passage from a dead woman in her grave.

Perhaps the quirky, incongruous, oblique style favoured by Enright, and her Irish contemporary Aidan Mathews, is more suited to shorter forms, rather than full-length novels, just as they were more successful vehicles for someone who must surely be one of their mentors, Donald Barthelme, than were some of his longer prose works. What Are You Like? marks an advance on Enright’s somewhat airy 1995 novel, The Wig My Father Wore, but the eloquently laconic voice of the stories in the 1991 Rooney Prize winning collection The Portable Virgin still rings true with most assurance. But it’s novels that matter these days, apparently. However, writers from Lawrence Sterne to Flann O’Brien have shown that straight ahead narrative is not the only game in town when it comes to longer forms, and this is a noble tradition which it is to be sincerely hoped that Enright has the courage to persist in pursuing. It certainly makes a change from ninety percent of the material which passes for challenging new Irish fiction at the present time.

First published in Books Ireland

Crazy John and the Bishop By Terry Eagleton

Crazy John and the Bishop

By Terry Eagleton

(University of Notre Dame Press in association with Field Day, No Price Given)

Ever since he burst on to the scene some thirty years ago with Marxism and Literary Criticism, Terry Eagleton, now Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, has been both prolific and polemical, his mixture of literary scholarship, critical acuity, and social concern having the incendiary force of a hand grenade tossed into the stuffy, fuddy-duddy sherry party milieu of English academia back then, some of whose staid attributes and attitudes remain entrenched even today. Crazy John and the Bishop, following on from 1996’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, and his play Saint Oscar, continues Eagleton’s interest and inquiry into Irish cultural history, often confronting the vexed relationship between the Irish and the English.

Crazy John and the Bishop is made up of ten essays which stretch from the eighteenth century to the present day. Topics range from Augustan satire and sentimentalism to the modern Irish novel, from the carnivalesque in early nineteenth century Cork to the philosophy of John Toland and Bishop Berkeley. Eagleton also moves between well-known, even celebrated writers to less familiar, even neglected ones.  

The opening essay aims for a close critical dissection of the little remembered eighteenth-century poet William Dunkin, calling him ‘at least as fine a poet as many of his English counterparts who have found their assured niche in the eighteenth-century canon’. There are also studies of Thomas Moore, W B Yeats and Samuel Beckett, the latter piece brilliantly illuminating some of the darker paradoxes that lie at the heart of Beckett’s work, and dealing with the problems it presents for traditional liberal humanist criticism. The title essay focuses on John Toland and Bishop Berkeley, and examines Irish eighteenth-century history of ideas in general. ‘The Good-Natured Gael’ explores concepts of ‘benevolence’ and ‘sensibility’, and includes a long segment on Oliver Goldsmith, as well as some wonderful insights on Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, one of this reviewer’s favourite novels. ‘Cork and the Carnivalesque’ looks at notions of parody, comedy and plagiarism in relation to Irish writing, with particular reference to Frances Mahony (‘Father Prout’) and William McGinn. The theme of the Irish ‘internal émigré’ is featured in ‘Home and Away’, and discusses the work of a broad span of novelists including Maria Edgeworth, Kate O’Brien and Francis Stuart. The cultural and political stance of the book emerges most clearly in the pieces on the largely forgotten Irish socialist Frederick Ryan, ‘The Ryan Line’, and the concluding examination of the revisionist controversy, ‘Revisionism Revisited’. In this essay, full of ingenious juxtapositions, he argues that the debate between traditionalists and revisionists, or conservatives and liberals, is redundant, since what is being proposed is as good or as bad as what went before, and the impasse can only be solved by a radical alternative. ‘There seems little point in replacing the myth of the Celt with the myth of Europe’ he writes, while acknowledging that, ‘There is not much point in trying to convince a Dublin advertising executive that modernity can be every bit as emotionally devastating and spiritually mutilating as lounging unemployed and sexually guilt-ridden at the country crossroads’.

If there is a criticism to be made of this bravura performance, it is that perhaps Eagleton writes too fast. He is rich in ideas, but these are sometimes thrown out at the expense of style. But then again, he would probably have his own rather jaundiced view of essayists who have a reputation for fine writing, and find themselves dubbed stylists, the noun often preceded by the qualifying adjective ‘mere’.

This book is another fine contribution to ‘Critical Conditions’, the Field Day series of books of essays and monographs, whose general editor is Seamus Deane. It adds to Field Day’s reputation as one of the most worthwhile ventures in modern Irish intellectual life.

First published in The World of Hibernia

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi By Geoff Dyer

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

By Geoff Dyer

(Canongate, £12.99stg p/b)

Geoff Dyer’s new work is very much a book of two halves. Indeed, he was going to subtitle it ‘a diptych’, until his inner editor prevailed in its judgment of such a move as pretentious. Still, the structure of the new novel may prove disconcerting to some, reading more like two novellas than one novel.

The first ‘Jeff in Venice’ half is familiar Dyer territory: it features a third-person male narrator, Jeff, who is much the same age and height as Geoff, and works as a freelance arts journalist just like Geoff. ‘Junket Jeff’ goes to Venice for the 2003 Biennale, gets wasted on bellinis, grass and cocaine, and clicks with a very attractive, younger Californian gallery worker, Laura, with who he has an intensely carnal, hedonistic fling.

So, for the second ‘Death in Varanasi’ sequence, you are set up to expect some kind of continuation of Jeff and Laura's relationship elsewhere. Instead, you get a first-person narrative from an unnamed narrator, who may or may not be Jeff (it’s never made explicit, though you tend to assume they are one and the same) who accepts a travel writing gig to the holy city of Varanasi at the mouth of the Ganges in India. It’s not even clear whether the second half chronologically follows the first. By the time you realise that ‘love interest’ Laura isn't going to reappear, that she’s been abandoned mid-book, it’s hard not to feel a little disappointed. 

Dyer has explicated his methodology, rather fancifully, thus: ‘Just as everyone is an avatar of someone else in Hindu myth, so the characters are different incarnations of each other.’ Whatever; what is certainly clear is that what we have here is an attempt to write prose fiction that is not narrative-driven, that favours the byways of digression over a well-planned, or well-plotted, journey.

Consequently, although the slacker laureate, as he has been dubbed (it is surely something of a misnomer, since few ‘slackers’ are as prolific as he) has this time produced a work of what is ostensibly billed as fiction, his fourth to date, don’t be fooled: classification is always tricky with Dyer, as he is as adept at critical essay, reportage and travelogue as he is at fiction (if not more so), but happiest when fashioning them all into something entirely his own. This assertion, coupled with the diversity of his interests, is evidenced across a back catalogue which includes titles which range from: Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger; The Missing of the Somme; Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence; What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney; The Ongoing Moment, an idiosyncratic history of photography; and But Beautiful, an astoundingly wonderful synthesis of fact and fiction, with a penetrating critical essay as a coda, described by Keith Jarrett as, ‘The only book about jazz I have recommended to my friends.’ The downside of this magpie-mindedness, if there is one, is that because non-fiction for him is just another location on the fiction continuum, his fiction proper (forgive the crude categorisation) can feel a bit samey and lightweight. Again, Dyer on Dyer: ‘I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.’

In his defense it might be argued, with reference to writers who are connoisseurs of their own consciousness from Montaigne to Barthes: why bother trying to make stuff up, when your own preoccupations and obsessions, and what you make of them, are so riveting? Besides, no one actually believes in the elaborate fictive worlds created by the likes of Henry James anymore. (Jeff in Venice at one point compares himself ironically to ‘…some sad fuck in a Henry James’ novel.’) Novels are so over: read Geoff (Jeff) Dyer.

What we have here, I suppose, is a superior sort of Bloke Fiction, a male equivalent of the better Chick Lit. Thus, if Jeff is a bit like Geoff, he is also a bit like me. Jeff on freelancing: ‘If it were a proper job, I’d pack it in and do something else, but freelancing is the something else that you do after you’ve packed in your job so my options are kind of limited. It’s that or retirement – from which it is at times pretty much indistinguishable.’ Hey, I can identify with that. This being the Biennale, there is also some fun and penetrating contemporary art criticism. Even in Varanasi, the lack of Laura is compensated for by the excellent travel writing, and the new friends made. Hinduism is ‘the Disney of world religions’, and there follows a disquisition on the superiority of polytheism to monotheism. ‘There is no God but God, says the one place. There are millions of them, says the other.’ By the time our charming narrator starts losing it spectacularly, it is hard not to feel some sympathy for him, whoever he is.

Lots of guys who scribble would give their right arms to be Martin Amis, or some other supposedly serious great mind grappling with the weighty issues of our time.  Me, I wouldn’t mind being Geoff Dyer. With his deft insight and lightness of touch, he makes the self-important overachievers look rather foolishly earnest. What a great travelling companion – if we weren’t all lonesome travellers.

Whatever Happened to Margo? By Margaret Durrell

Whatever Happened to Margo?

By Margaret Durrell

(Warner Books)

Sister of the more famous and, it has to be said, more talented Gerald and Lawrence, Margaret Durrell’s memoir of her career as a landlady in Bournemouth in 1947, discovered by the author’s granddaughter 30 years after it was written, is a light and airy concoction. Margo is probably best known to readers through Gerald’s autobiography, My Family and Other Animals. Returning home after extensive travels in Greece and Africa, she found herself, divorced and with two young sons to support, in need of financial security. So she took the advice of her domineering maiden aunt Patience, and started a boarding house in the respectable seaside town.

But her snobby aunt’s vision of reputable, middle-class boarders was never to be fulfilled. Her first tenant was Edward Feather, a painter of nudes, and his voluptuous model wife. There followed Mrs Williams, a battered wife, and her precocious, over- weight son, Nelson, and a chauvinist bricklayer, Mr Budden, and his long-suffering wife. Then there were Blanche and Judy, student nurses; Gordon, a nervous bachelor who eventually comes into some money; jazz musicians Roger and Andy, the latter of whom Margo embarks on an affair with; and Jane, a prim ex-nurse, lusting after bohemia in revealing black negligees. Add to this mayhem the irregular visits of brother Gerald, who brings a posse of monkeys and a six-foot python into the human menagerie.

The claustrophobic atmosphere of the time, long before Philip Larkin’s annus mirabilis of 1963, is captured well, with two pence looking down on a penny, and nosy neighbours trying to rule people’s lives. Alas for the culture vultures, there is little mention of, and no appearance by, Lawrence. Margo comes across as a generous spirit, free of the pettiness so prevalent then, and with an appreciation of the comic side of life. But one still wonders if the adventures related here really merited a whole book to themselves. Nevertheless, she has produced a not too taxing confection of anecdote and incident, which should pleasurably pass a few hours.

Commissioned for Image magazine

A Star Called Henry By Roddy Doyle

A Star Called Henry                                                

By Roddy Doyle

(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)

Well, it’s a long way from Barrytown. Or maybe not as far as you might think, since Henry Smart, the rumbustious hero of Roddy Doyle’s new novel, a man born in 1901 whose life therefore runs concurrently with that of the century, could well be the grandfather of one of those kids in The Commitments. But he is even more disenfranchised than they, and the poverty of his childhood makes the world of Angela’s Ashes look like sheer bloody luxury by comparison. In one particularly memorable scene, the young Henry and his younger brother Victor catch rats by smearing their arms and hands with soup made from boiling baby rats, and then sell them on to betting men. These punters: 

          ... paid me extra to put my hands into the sack. I always did it but

          I wouldn’t let Victor risk his fingers. I loved watching the faces

          of the men around the pit; I read their contempt, pity and admiration.

          I stared at the rich ones, the ones I knew already felt guilty about 

          being there, with the worst of the scum of the slums; I’d stare at 

          them as I sank my hand into the sack and felt the fury in the rats’

          backs and the men would look away. I’d let them see the little boy

          being asked to maim himself for their entertainment.

As you can gather, while the Barrytown trilogy presented a somewhat sentimental view of urban working class life, which in this reviewer’s opinion often seemed little more than an updated version of the ‘rare ol’ times’ codology, here we get the real thing, and any mawkishness is quickly undercut by another kick in the teeth. Not that there aren’t huge swathes of humour running through A Star Called Henry, but the hue is decidedly blacker than before. In effect, what we have here is a judicious blend of light and shade, The Snapper crossed with The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, or The Van with Family, and delivered all in one.

Henry’s father, also Henry, was a doorman at Dolly Oblong’s brothel, and also settled scores for her partner, the mysterious Alfie Gandon. He obligingly bumped off Gandon’s enemies, preferably with a good clout from his wooden leg, and then got rid of the bodies piece by piece in the rivers, streams and canals around Dublin. His mother, Melody, was married at sixteen and had succumbed to consumption and alcoholism by her early twenties. When she became too sick to look after her children, they took to the streets. One day Henry goes back to check on her, but she’s moved on. He never sees her again. Then there’s Granny Nash, an omnivorous reader of female fiction, and repository of family secrets. The depiction of childhood here excels that in Doyle’s best previous novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.

But it is in its radical beyond revisionist expose of the shibboleths of the 1916 Rebellion, the War of Independence and the Civil War, that the book stands out.  Henry is present in the GPO on Easter Monday (like all the best people), but as a member of the Irish Citizen Army rather than as a Volunteer.  

          Jesus, I hated the Volunteers. The poets and the farm boys, the 

          fuckin’ shopkeepers. They detested the slummers - the accents

          and the dirt, the Dubliness of them. 

His mentors are Jim Larkin and James Connelly (who teaches him how to read and write). He also manages to lose his virginity in the GPO, with his ex-primary school teacher (he went for two days) and future wife, Cumann Na Ban member Miss O’Shea. This puts a whole new perspective on the Easter, ahem, Rising.

On a serious note, here is a novel that shows how 1916 was, like the French Revolution, ultimately a bourgeois affair, since very little changed for those who had nothing to begin with. Towards the end a former rebel leader presents Henry with his death warrant:

          -Why?

          - Well, he said.  - If you’re not with us you’re against us. That’s the 

          thinking. And there are those who reckon that you’re always going

          to be against us. And they’re probably right. You’ve no stake in the

          country, man. Never had, never will. We needed trouble-makers and

          very soon now we’ll have to be rid of them. And that, Henry, is all you

          are and ever were.         

In this reading of events, and in its acknowledgement of the often forgotten number of Irishmen who joined the British army, A Star Called Henry echoes Sebastian Barry’s The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, although perhaps it is with Sean O’Casey’s jaundiced treatments of the time, and his use of the demotic, that Doyle has most in common.

There are a couple of technical quibbles, such as why aren’t we told how old Henry is and where is he when writing the book, and how does he know so much about his parents’ courtship, if he wasn’t there at the time and nobody told him about it? But the best way to cope with these minor irritations is to close one’s eyes and be swept along, since the ride is well worth it.

 This is the work of a man who knows a thing or two about human nature, and also about how the world works, and is using that knowledge as a force for good. With his early books he captured a wide audience, many of whom would not be regular readers. In a sense they have grown up with him, and I sincerely hope he keeps them. The blurb calls this, correctly for once, ‘a vastly more ambitious book than any he has written before’, and at the end of the day it is that very ambition which is what is most  impressive about it. It is, after all, only the first instalment of a projected trilogy, The Last Round Up, and Henry is still only twenty when it concludes, and Liverpool bound. I can’t wait for Volume Two. With its wonderfully well integrated and unshowy use of historical research, and its wealth of detail and marvellous descriptive passages, its anger and exuberance, this is one of the most important novels written by an Irish writer in the past thirty or forty years, a major achievement and an instant classic.

Nice one, Doyler. Or, as they used to say in Barrytown, ‘Deadly’.

First published in Books Ireland

Point Omega By Don DeLillo

Point Omega                                                                                  

By Don DeLillo

(Picador, £14.99stg hardback)

Since 1997’s epic tome Underworld, and in contrast to the solidly built, medium-sized, middle-period novels which consolidated his reputation, The Names, White Noise and Libra, Don DeLillo has worked on considerably smaller canvasses, with novella-length fictions The Body Artist, Cosmopolis and Falling Man. Point Omega continues this minimalist, or should that be miniaturist, trend, prompting comparisons with the late stylistic shifts of master practitioners as diverse as Hemingway and Beckett, if not in terms of the actual realised signature styles themselves, which are as individually traceable as DNA samples, then at least in terms of approach and intent. For DeLillo, like these illustrious exemplars, is one of those rare writers who has remade language in his own image, and so also has given us, almost as a seemingly incidental by-product, a unique worldview.

This is achieved in part by the highly stylised, call-and-response dialogue, more incantatory than ordinary conversation, which cries out to be called hypnotic, or hyper-real: ‘ “You need an answer. Is that what you’re saying?” “I need an answer.” “You have a life back there.” … “A life. That may be too strong a word.” … “You’re not married, am I right?” “Separated. We separated,” I said. “Separated. How familiar that sounds.” ’ But it’s also a question of thematics, and how these themes are subsumed into and altered by the style, the filtration process yielding new meanings. Death; dread; paranoia; mediation; perception and the nature of reality: all the old warhorses don’t look quite the same after being pressed into and passed through the refined language blender, condenser, purifier.

The title comes from the Jesuit priest-philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who posited an evolutionary belief that there is a point of perfection which the universe, or consciousness, will eventually achieve, which in DeLillo’s spin thereon may well be coterminous with extinction thereof. ‘ “Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.” ’

Teilhard is here being referred to by Richard Elster, an ageing ‘defense intellectual’ who has written a journal article on the etymology and possible meanings of the word ‘rendition’ and who, like Paul Wolfowitz and his ilk, was brought out from under his academic rock by the Bush administration to lend an air of respectability and justification to the pro-war policies of the most appalling regime in American history, and obligingly told his patrons everything they wanted to hear. The ‘blat and stammer of Iraq’, he ruefully recalls assuring them, would be ‘a Haiku war, a war in three lines’.

Elster is conversing with our narrator Jim Finley, a documentary filmmaker who is trying to persuade Elster to take part in a film he wants to make where the older man will talk about his two years at the Pentagon, and anything else that pops into his brilliant mind. But Elster is resisting, prevaricating, suggesting that what Finley wants is ‘ “…a public confession…A deathbed conversion….The foolishness, the vanity of the intellectual. The blind vanity, the worship of power. Forgive me, absolve me.” ’ They end up in California’s Sonoran Desert, in Elster’s crumbling rural retreat, mainly sitting on the deck, drinking and shooting that otherworldly, but instantly identifiable, DeLillo breeze.

They are joined by Elster’s mid-20s daughter Jessie, packed off from New York by her overbearing mother, in fear of a ‘persistent’ boyfriend. For a time things are companionable, then Jessie disappears. Searches ensue, to no avail. Elster disintegrates in grief. We never find out what became of her.

The desert scenes are framed by a brief prologue and epilogue, Anonymity and Anonymity 2, dated September 3 and 4 2006 respectively, which take place in New York’s Museum Of Modern Art, where Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s 1993 video installation, 24 Hour Psycho, is showing. A man stands fascinated by this piece, in which the 109-¬minute Hitchcock original is slowed so that it takes a full day and night to roll by. Visual and verbal clues intimate that the man witnesses Elster and Finley enter the first day, Jessie the second day. The set-piece provides an excuse for ruminations on the nature of film, perception and time. Why 24 frames per second? Why not 2 frames per second?

Criticisms of this book will include that it is inconclusive, and that it contains no sustained analysis of what led Elster, and by implication, his real-life counterparts, to get involved with the Grand Old Party hacks. But maybe DeLillo is at a point in his writing life when he prefers to suggest things, rather than fully explore them. Might I suggest that, behind all the vague metaphysical speculation, Point Omega could be about such a quaintly old-fashioned concept as retribution? A man sells his sociopolitical soul for worldly recognition, and suffers a searing domestic tragedy at home. Of course, there is no direct causal link, or even verifiable connection, between the two events, but how could there be, in this post-theistic universe, where there is no controlling principle? Retribution it may be, but it sure ain’t divine.

The critic D.T. Max, in a New Yorker essay, quotes a 1997 letter written by DeLillo to fellow novelist David Foster Wallace: ‘I realised that precision can be a kind of poetry, and the more precise . . . then the better my chances of creating a deeper and more beautiful language.’ Consider, then, these random psycholinguistic observations from his powerful new fiction: ‘The true life is not reducible to words spoken or written, not by anyone, ever.’ ‘He had a good vocabulary except when he was talking to someone.’ Pairing back. Winding down. Leaving out. Turning off. Perhaps Don DeLillo has reached a Point Omega of his own.

First published in The Sunday Independent.

Cannibals By Dan Collins

Cannibals

By Dan Collins

(Jonathan Cape, £10)

This book is, like the proverbial curate’s egg, good in places. Unfortunately, it is also very bad in other places, and the whole is rather less than the sum of its parts. ‘…Cannibals is a novel consisting of eighty-eight compelling bulletins that reveal the fractured essence of our age’ the blurb tells us, and ‘We enter the characters’ lives through seemingly disconnected fragments…’ That ‘seemingly’ is excessive, since a name repeated very occasionally here and there is hardly sufficient to lend integrity (in the literal sense of the word) or narrative thread (to say nothing of thrust) to a randomly assembled bunch of monologues and scenes. The ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses, the splintered technique of which was made valuable use of more recently in Don DeLillo’s Underworld, certainly disturbs the solidity of the space/time continuum, but the sightings of two separate characters’ contrary journeys provides a linking device for those that see them. With Cannibals, the sequencing is entirely arbitrary. Not that I am suggesting that hoary old humanist notions of agency, causality and consciousness are appropriate to the material in hand, since the aleatoric presentation is probably completely intentional and indeed the whole point of the exercise. But, as Thomas Pynchon has written in the introduction to the collection of his early short stories, Slow Learner, with regard to the influence of surrealism: ‘What I had to learn later on was the necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill: any old combination of details will not do. Spike Jones, Jr., whose father’s orchestral recordings had a deep and indelible effect on me as a child, said once in an interview, “One of the things that people don’t realise about Dad’s kind of music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot or it sounds awful.” ’

The titles of each snippet are arranged alphabetically, examples of which include: ‘A Thing About Hotels’; ‘Before We Were Married’; ‘Being Stalked’; ‘Catwalker’; ‘Fucking Bicycles’; ‘His Bergman Phase’; ‘Jellied Eels’; ‘Novelty Knickers’; ‘Pigpoo’; ‘Sex With My Husband’; ‘Tracking Rory’ etc. A couple of the more successful ones are the extramarital and political satire of the section with the same title as the book, and the domestic betrayal and resignation of ‘Snakeproof’.

There are bound to be problems unifying a plotless text with no characters who could remotely be described as three dimensional or central. David Foster Wallace managed it in his Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, but that was through the zanily delicious irony of the underlying ideas, and the exactness of register in the rendering of each disparate interviewee’s use of language. Each piece worked as a stand alone, but taken together, they provided valuable counterpoint for each other. Then again, Foster didn’t call that book a novel. There’s nothing novel about the bad sex, emotional betrayal, blatant careerism and vacuous consumerism on display here, and the glib, shallowly cynical tone, simultaneously callow and world weary, in which it’s delivered. Then again, maybe it’s this very tone that’s supposed to make the slapped together segments some sort of single entity, but paradoxically it’s the lack of variety in world view that makes it ultimately unsatisfying. Like the recent spate of American movies about how messed up the world is (Very Bad Things, Happiness, Magnolia, Your Friends and Neighbours), it’s the absence of light and shade that drains any tragedy of potential significance (which is, I suppose, a tragedy in itself).

There is a deal of writing from a female point of view, some of which seems quite authentic (to this boy, at least), some of which seems merely misogynistic, or at least comes off as a woman talking with a man’s voice. Still, there are lots of different kinds of women out there. There’s also a good dollop of the Brett Easton Ellis multiple designer labels trick.

This is a debut novel, and there are things here that could be developed and built on, but for the moment this writer isn’t telling the hippest of us (presumably the audience it’s aimed at) anything we don’t already know.

First published in Books Ireland

The ‘Priest’, They Called Him: The Life and Legacy of William S Burroughs By Graham Caveney

The ‘Priest’, They Called Him: The Life and Legacy of William S Burroughs

By Graham Caveney

(Bloomsbury, £20)

The problem for any biographer of William Burroughs, as for any devotee of his writing, is that, as Caveney puts it his introduction: ‘He is a signifier of the terminally hip, a name dropped so frequently that it resurfaces with a (lack of) identity all of its own...Fans of Burroughs become so before they have read him (often without bothering to do so) - the very idea of him is as exciting as his work.’ The life has made a greater contribution to the myth than has the work, thus obscuring it, to the extent that Burroughs may well have wished that he’d stayed home in St Louis, with slippers by the fireside, instead of trailing around the world indulging in high times, often seeming to be engaged on a personal mission to disprove the then current laws of medical science. There again, Philip Larkin, who contrived to lead as boring - if not as conventional - a life as possible, was still the subject of a warts and all biography by Andrew Motion, and J D Salinger’s extreme reclusivity did not protect him from Ian Hamilton’s effort at rooting out his secrets. (What price a Pynchon biography, sometime soon?) Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, would appear to be the message, when it comes to the publicity game.

The irony of this extravagantly designed and lavishly illustrated book is that it can only further exacerbate this quandary. Caveney admits that what is on offer is ‘a chronology of the Burroughs phenomenon’, rather than an attempt to uncover his ‘authentic personality’, but for any long-time Burroughs admirer there is nothing new here, either biographically or critically.

The bare facts of the life are already common currency: born in 1914 into a bourgeois mid-western family; a dull childhood; an indifferent English degree from Harvard, an experience which left him with a lifelong disdain and distrust of the dead hand of academia; friendship with Kerouac, Corso, Ginsberg - the Beats - and his affair with the latter; the shooting dead during a drunken William Tell act of his common law wife, Joan Vollmer, in Mexico City in 1951, an event that has provoked much speculation in the accidental/intentional department, and which Burroughs has pinpointed as the defining moment of his life, the resultant trauma shocking him into taking himself seriously as a writer, and informing much of his writing (Burroughs, incidentally, provides great solace for all of life’s late-starters, becoming a first-time novelist aged 42, and a first-time home buyer aged 70); protracted periods of residence in Tangier, Paris, London and New York; and old age in Lawrence, Kansas.

To be fair, Caveney does go further than merely presenting the usual ‘junkie, queer, rebel’ image, to highlighting how the novels represent a thorough-going interrogation of the fear and attraction of imprisoning systems of control, from drugs, desire and religion to language itself. He hints at, if never explores, how Burroughs, unlike his contemporaries, was ‘less interested in side-stepping systems of control than in exploding them from within...The Beats produced alternative ideologies; Burroughs looked at how we are produced by them’. Caveney is also good at enumerating Burroughs’ various filmic and musical collaborations, and discusses the shotgun paintings. But again, this is all common knowledge for any fan, and the newcomer would be better off reading some of the novels than swallowing this glossy pabulum. From the early succes de scandale of Naked Lunch to the maturity of The Western Lands, it is amazing how Burroughs continued to reinvent himself and improve as a writer, the latter text being a virtual blueprint for immortality.    

In many ways, this artefact exemplifies the idiocy of the ‘90s: a coffee table book about Burroughs, featuring the writer as lifestyle accessory. The hagiographic tone is all the odder, in a tome from a major London publisher, since so much of Burroughs’ work is at variance with the domestic realism currently enjoying a hegemony there. Or maybe not so odd at all, given the market-driven, consumerist ethos of publishing these days. One wonders what would become of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet or Burroughs if they were looking for a start today, and John Calder is to be commended for having given a platform to these highly idiosyncratic talents. Of course, we are no slouches ourselves when it comes to posthumously exploiting the reputations of our more subversive writers, usually to boost the tourism industry, most especially the ones who found it impossible to live here when they were alive. Marketing will be the death of us all.  

‘Now we are left with the career novelists’ lamented J G Ballard, in his obituary of Burroughs last August. But Burroughs is probably not losing too much sleep over this hoopla, wherever he is, for like other cultural icons of our time - Beckett and Warhol - the more ubiquitous his image, the more enigmatic he becomes. With his amalgamation of mandarin intellect with hipster cool, he remains one of the most important writers of the century.

First published in The Sunday Tribune 

C P Cavafy, Selected Poems, English Versions by Desmond O’Grady

C P Cavafy, Selected Poems, English Versions

Desmond O’Grady

(Dedalus, £5.95)

When coming to deal with Cavafy it is clear that we are, quite simply, moving into a kind of Super League, that of the ten or twelve most talented and original poetic voices of the twentieth century, chronicling as he does personal desire and demise, as well as that of an entire civilisation.

Born in 1863, dying in 1933, his canon consists of 220 poems, 33 of which are rendered here. He never published a collection in his lifetime, but circulated pamphlets and broadsheets privately to close friends, earning his living initially as a part-time journalist and broker on the Egyptian Stock Exchange, then at twenty-nine getting his first full-time job as a temporary clerk at the Department of Irrigation (Third Circle) in the Ministry of Public Works, which turned out to be pretty permanent, since he held it for the next thirty years. He remained a Greek citizen living in Alexandria, with his mother who died in 1899, and after that living alone until his own death from cancer of the larynx, thirty-four years later.  

Like most of the greatest poets, according to Auden (the Romantics who outlived their inspiration proving an obvious exception), he got better as he got older, and Joseph Brodsky would have us believe that Cavafy really only found his voice and his theme when he had turned forty. The phrase ‘...his stylized diffidence/conservative decadence’ occurs in O’Grady’s poem ‘Cavafy in Alexandria’ which prefaces the translations, as a description of the poet, but it could equally apply to his poetry. As O’Grady tells us in his Afterward:

          Cavafy’s epiphany had been to see that the squalid, by-passed, declining, 

          historical Alexandria of his own day was the stage on which to present

          his perception of Alexandria during the last three centuries B.C. and the 

          first four centuries A.D. (with a cast familiar to the educated world) in 

          demotic, or spoken, Greek with some purist, or refined, and Byzantine 

          Greek inset when it served his purpose - the history of his language.

          He saw how to record in poems his personal (actual and imagined) life

          in historic Alexandria for like-minded other persons, including his own

          ‘other person’.  Ten years later, between 1903-7 James Joyce, knowing

          nothing of Cavafy, saw this possibility for prose while writing certain

          stories of Dubliners and expanded it in his Ulysses.

O’Grady goes on to draw a parallel between what Cavafy did for poetry, and what Picasso, Schoenberg and Brancusi, not to mention Einstein, Freud and Jung, did in their respective fields. But what is really remarkable, as O’Grady writes elsewhere, in the short biography of Cavafy at the beginning of the book, is that: ‘His sophisticated modernity is all the more astonishing because it appeared so early, before most European ‘moderns’ and seemingly from nowhere, as though by instinct.’     

Whatever about Brodsky’s contention that Cavafy’s poetic life began at forty, his output before 1903 still includes some of his better known poems, for example ‘Ithaka’ and ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ (here ‘Expecting the Barbarians’). These poems work on many levels, naturalistically, symbolically, metaphorically, historically and mythically, forming a kind of archaeology of society.  But after the turn of the century his work became both more personal and psychological, but at the same time more objective and dispassionate, and he also began to strip his poems of all poetic paraphernalia, such as rich imagery, similes, metric flamboyance and rhyme, becoming almost lapidary or, as we would say these days, minimalist. Brodsky calls this ‘the economy of maturity’, and says of Cavafy’s use of deliberately ‘poor’ adjectives (using words in their primary meanings, like calling emeralds ‘green’ and describing bodies as ‘young and beautiful’) that it ‘creates the unexpected effect of establishing a certain mental tautology, which loosens the reader’s imagination, whereas more elaborate images or similes would capture that imagination or confine it to their accomplishments’.

The poems also became intensely erotic, but it is a retrospective eroticism, a nostalgia of the physical. ‘Ninety percent of the best lyric poetry is written post-coitum, as was Cavafy’s.  ...  More often than not, the protagonist of these lyric poems is a solitary, aging person who despises his own features, which have been disfigured by that very time which has altered so many other things that were central to his existence.’ (Brodsky again). Like Proust, the sex was for his art, although he didn’t know it at the time, as much as for pleasure, since memory itself is his theme, as much as it is his means of trying to regain lost time and make sense of experience, and the most forceful memories are those of desire, since the body remembers as much as the mind. Aesthetic pleasure is not so much substituted for, as made equivalent to, the sexual variety, out of sheer necessity, and there are few more simultaneously heartbreaking but pleasing paradoxes than that of someone remembering what happened to them before they even knew what it is to have a memory, much less what it means. Again like Proust, he was gay, and according to Brodsky: 

          In a way, homosexuality is a form of sensual maximalism which

          absorbs and consumes both the rational and the emotional faculties

          of a person so completely that T. S. Eliot’s old friend, “felt thought”,

          is likely to be the result. The homosexual’s notion of life might, in

          the end, have more facets than that of his heterosexual counterpart.            

  but:

          What matter in art are not one’s sexual affiliations, of course, but

          what is made of them. Only a superficial or partisan critic would 

          label Cavafy’s poems simply “homosexual”, or reduce them to

          examples of his “hedonistic bias”.

But what it takes Proust a volume of orotund phrases and serpentine sentences to achieve, Cavafy does in five or ten deceptively simple lines. The pleasures of ‘I Went’, ‘He Swears’ and ‘One Night’ are immense.  In ‘Rites of Passage’ a schoolboy’s forbidden pleasures while cruising town give an intimation of ‘the Sublime World of Poetry’, while ‘Remember, Body’ goes to the nub of the matter. ‘Tomb of Iasis’ could be read as an AIDS poem avant le lettre, never mind the malady, worthy of anything in Thom Gunn’s The Man With Night Sweats. In ‘That House’, youthful indulgence provides the basis for a transforming beatific vision in the present, while in ‘Since Nine O’Clock’ the remembered young body becomes the direct source of both comfort and elegy.   

The essay by Joseph Brodsky which has been threatening to engulf this review is entitled ‘Pendulum’s Song’, and is available in Less Than One. It should be read by anyone interested in understanding more about Cavafy’s work and his world, since it explores his art with greater acuity than I could muster. In it Brodsky characterises Cavafy as swinging between the pagan Hellenistic world and the Roman Christian one. To quote one last time:

          The only instrument that a human being has at his disposal for coping

          with time is memory, and it is his unique, sensual historical memory 

          that makes Cavafy so distinctive. The mechanics of love imply some

          sort of bridge between the sensual and the spiritual, sometimes to the 

          point of deification; the notion of an afterlife is implicit not only in our

          couplings but also in our separations. Paradoxically enough, Cavafy’s

          poems, in dealing with that Hellenic “special love”, and touching en

          passant upon conventional broodings and longings, are attempts - or

          rather recognised failures - to resurrect once-loved shadows.  Or: 

          photographs.

              Criticism of Cavafy tends to domesticate his perspective, taking his

          hopelessness for detachment, his absurdity for irony. Cavafy’s love

          poetry is not “tragic” but terrifying, for while tragedy deals with the 

          fait accompli, terror is the product of the imagination (no matter where

          it is directed, toward the future or toward the past). His sense of loss is

          much more acute than his sense of gain simply because separation is a

          more lasting experience than being together. It almost looks as though

          Cavafy was more sensual on paper than in reality, where guilt and 

          inhibitions alone provide strong restraints. Poems like ‘Before Time

          Altered Them’ or ‘Hidden Things’ represent a complete reversal of 

          Susan Sontag’s formula ‘Life is a movie; death is a photograph’. To

          put it another way, Cavafy’s hedonistic bias, if such it is, is biased

          itself by his historical sense, since history, among other things, implies 

          irreversibility. Alternatively, if Cavafy’s historical poems had not been

          hedonistically slanted, they would have turned into mere anecdotes.

  

Since my ancient Greek was always rudimentary and is now very rusty, and my modern Greek is limited to a few words for greeting and getting things done, I am in no position to comment on the quality of the translations. But O’Grady is the first Irish poet to translate Cavafy, with whom, after two years spent teaching at Alexandria University, he obviously feels a special affinity, and he is to be congratulated on the undertaking.  

‘What is poetry?’ the critic asks, and can usually only provide the most makeshift of working answers. Perhaps poetry is that which uniquely gifted individuals like Constantine Cavafy were born to write.

First published in Books Ireland