Thursday, 13 February 2025

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 





Wednesday, 12 February 2025

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




Monday, 10 February 2025

To Heaven by Water By Justin Cartwright

To Heaven by Water 

By Justin Cartwright

(Bloomsbury, £16.99 stg, H/B)

It can sometimes be salutary to read books which lie outside the comfort zone of one’s usual ambit of taste. Justin Cartwright’s tenth novel, after the uncharacteristic departure of 2007’s The Song Before It Is Sung, a re-telling of the Von Stauffenberg plot to kill Hitler, finds him firmly ensconced back in his comfort zone: dissecting the low-level existential angst of upper-middle class Londoners. As this is not a milieu I personally have much experience of or interest in, I place my findings on the table with the faint air of disinterested speculation usually associated with an anthropologist presenting the findings of research he has been conducting on the social rituals surrounding birth, coupling and death among some isolated, self-contained but vanishing tribe from the Amazon rainforest. But then again, as a South African transported to London, perhaps Cartwright also brings something of the anatomising outsider’s eye to the ethnic group he is cataloguing.

Sixty-something David Cross is eleven months a widower after the death from cancer of his wife of thirty-odd years, Nancy. He is also recently retired from his job as a news anchor at Global Television. He has a guilty secret he cannot tell his children, Ed, a thirty-two year old lawyer, and Lucy, a twenty-six year old early Christian coin cataloguer (someone, apparently, has to do it), to whit: as well as finding retirement agreeable, he is not exactly grief-stricken by bereavement either. In fact, ‘…to his own mind he is more himself than he has been for nearly forty years…’

He has taken to the treadmill and rowing machine at the gym, and become worryingly thin, to the extent that Lucy thinks he is on the lookout for a replacement for Mom. His t-shirts, shorts, Masai bracelets and leopard-skin trainers only further emphasise that he has fully shed whatever gravitas he once possessed. Lucy, meanwhile, is being stalked by a deranged ex-boyfriend, and worries that she doesn’t have a ‘real self’. Ed has been made a junior partner at his firm by his self-regarding boss Robin, an old buddy of Daddy’s, which connection helped him get taken on in the first place. But all is not so rosy on the domestic front, as he is coming under sustained pressure from his increasingly fraught wife Rosalie, a nervy and brittle presence intent on sublimating her failed attempts to become a prima ballerina into career motherhood. Indeed, so grimly oppressive has their ‘trying for a baby’ become, that Ed finds an outlet for good old-fashioned carefree sex with a conveniently self-centred trainee at the office. Another significant character is David’s dying elder brother Guy, who has spent his adult life in the Kalahari Desert researching Bushmen and their paintings, whom David goes to visit when it becomes expedient that he get out of London. Then there’s his circle of old chums, the Noodle Club, with gatherings of which the book begins and ends.

The prose is deceptively conventional and gentle, to the point of seeming stilted, but then suddenly shifts point-of-view with alarming lurches from ‘He’ to ‘’I’, a technique Saul Bellow adopted from James Joyce. Cartwright is also fond of using the present tense to narrate past events, in an effort to lend them more immediacy. He has a definite tin ear when it comes to dialogue though, with most of the characters sounding the same, reaching its nadir particularly with the jolly-old-hockey-sticks exchanges between Ed and Lucy, an example of how an old guy imagines young folks speak to each other.

Thematically, the novel keeps returning to the notion of ‘how the world works’, the people who think they know and the people who really do. Aligned to this is the idea ‘…that successful people in the law and in corporations have an urge to acquire a philosophy, which conveniently explains why they are entitled to such a large portion of the world’s riches.’ The compromises of ‘self’ (if there ever was one in the first place) involved in making a life and getting ahead haunt all of the central characters. 

What makes the book worth reading is the observational detail, both of contemporary London life, and of the Crosses’ shifting moods and perspectives, although we could do without the occasional sententious platitudes of the order of ‘We all believe we could have led other lives.’ Talk about stating the bloody obvious.

On finishing this book, its implausible surprises can seem a little contrived (although admittedly all novels depend on their own contrivances). It emanates the whiff of a Richard and Judy chattering classes construct, the kind of thing beloved of women of a certain age who turn up at book readings and signings in Jaeger suits, earnestly intent on self-improvement achieved by hanging out with arty types. But strangely, there is something that keeps you reading, even if it’s only that field research. Ultimately, the novel promises more than it delivers. A bit like life, in the Cartwright worldview.


First published in The Sunday Independent





Thursday, 6 February 2025

Theft: A Love Story By Peter Carey

Theft: A Love Story

By Peter Carey

(Faber & Faber, £16.99stg hardback)

Two-time Booker-winner Peter Carey’s tenth novel, set in 1980s Australia, Tokyo and New York, concerns 35-year-old painter Michael Boone, more commonly known as Butcher Bones, since he hails –  like Carey himself –  from the small town of Bacchus Marsh, near Melbourne, where his family ran the local butcher’s shop. Butcher’s narration of an elaborate art fraud, to which he has been an unwitting accomplice, is interspersed sporadically with the contributions of Hugh, nicknamed ‘Slow Bones’, Butcher’s ‘damaged two hundred and twenty pound brother’, a sort of idiot savant in the mode of Benjy in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and just as affecting. Having lost practically everything else, Butcher is still lumbered with looking after Hugh as his charge.

For Butcher has been having a rather hard time of it lately. Recently divorced, he has lost not only his house and studio in Sydney, but also custody of his much-loved 8-year-old son, to his ex-wife, whom he terms ‘the alimony whore’. On top of all that, he has served time in prison (an experience not much explored in the book), for trying to retrieve some of his most cherished paintings, which also went to his former spouse when they were declared ‘marital assets’.

So it is that, as Butcher tells us, ‘Emerging from Long Bay Prison in the bleak spring of 1980, I learned I was to be rushed immediately to northern New South Wales where, although I would have almost no money to spend on myself, it was thought that I might, if I could only cut down on my drinking, afford to paint small works and care for Hugh…  My lawyers, dealers, collectors had all come together to save me.’

With only Hugh for company, the formerly famous artist is reduced to being a caretaker for his biggest collector, the unscrupulous Jean-Paul, who has made his money running dodgy nursing homes. But, deviously resourceful as ever, Butcher is soon getting his hands on proper paint and materials, and charging them to Jean Paul’s account at the local store.

  Then, out of nowhere, the mysterious Marlene turns up one stormy night, clad in a pair of Manolo Blahniks. Claiming that the brothers’ friend and neighbour, Dozy Boylan, owns what may be an original Jacques Liebovitz, she ropes Butcher into her grander schemes. For the deceased Liebovitz is a painter much admired by Butcher, and a formative influence on him, and Marlene just happens to be his daughter-in-law. This means that her husband Olivier exercises the droit moral, or right of verifying his father’s paintings, although he knows absolutely nothing about visual art. This prerogative he inherited from his mother, who in her turn was none too choosy about the work she allowed to be attributed to her estranged husband, if the price was right.

It turns out that Marlene is from the same neck of the woods as Butcher; they hit it off and embark on a passionate affair. An art agent herself, with ‘an eye’ for what’s good, she gets him an exhibition in Tokyo, and sets about restoring his reputation. The plot gets progressively convoluted after that, but the purport is that the art world is crawling with dealers who would better be described as con artists, grifters scamming their way to whatever they can make. In this they prey on the greed of buyers, who view art as nothing more than a long-term investment. ‘How do you know how much to pay if you don’t know what it’s worth?’ is an apposite refrain throughout the book. Marlene, it transpires, is not above suspicion in these matters either.

There has been much brouhaha about this novel as a roman a clef, to the extent that in some quarters it seems that no clef is needed, the immediate presumption being that it is about Carey’s ex-wife. Such readings are grossly simple-minded. More serious criticisms are that the narrative does tend to reinforce the Australian stereotype of loutish machismo. The idealised presentation of Marlene is perfunctorily clichéd, Carey not bothering to get beyond the ‘blonde in heels’ he presumes any man will fall for. It doesn’t help that we never get to see things from her point-of-view. Similarly, the ex-wife never gets a word in.

There is also a problem with visualising what exactly Butcher’s paintings look like. Too often, when a writer wants to explore the creative process, but doesn’t want to write a book about a writer writing a book, he comes at the theme obliquely via art or music. But maybe the expertise of an inside job is actually what’s required.

Other cavils are that it is difficult to believe that a mid-career artist can go from fame to obscurity quite so quickly. Also, a raft of unaccredited Bob Dylan references towards the end, courtesy of Olivier, fails as an enjoyable in-joke, seeming merely gratuitous.

On the plus side, what the novel does really well is to show how, for all the venality of the world, the power of art can transform forever the lives of disadvantaged, rural, working class people, with no background in it, if their love for it is strong enough. There’s no accounting for talent.

But the fact remains that there are better thrillers around than this story, and better literary fiction as well, and Carey may have fallen between two stools here. He has also written better fiction himself, so Theft is probably not the novel to grant him an unprecedented third Booker win.

  

First published in The Sunday Independent



Tuesday, 4 February 2025

Music and Madness By Ivor Browne

Music and Madness

By Ivor Browne

(Cork University Press, €25, Hardback)

This Apologia Pro Vita Sua by the well-known maverick Irish psychiatrist is a memoir in the tradition of his namesake and fellow specialist practitioner Noel’s Against The Tide. By opting to pursue his profession in Ireland from the early ’60s to the present in an unconventional, innovative and unorthodox manner (and despite lucrative and stimulating job offers abroad), Ivor has inevitably led a certain recognisable kind of radical Irish life.

Medicine, however, much less mind-doctoring, was not his original vocation. As the title may suggest, music was his first love, and all through adolescence and on into college, he harboured ambitions to become a jazz trumpeter. Indeed, he seems to be something of an accidental psychiatrist, having stumbled into medicine, and by extension psychiatry, almost by default. One is struck by how relatively easy it was to get into medical school in the late ’40s, or into the College of Surgeons at least, as long as your family possessed the wherewithal to put you through. Having left Blackrock College at 14, because his overriding obsession with music and lack of interest in schoolwork meant he was in the ignored and despised lowest stream, Browne never sat, let alone passed, the Intermediate or Leaving Certificates. Instead, he took the separate entrance exam for Surgeons, and was accepted on the second attempt – only to then fail pre-med first time around and have to repeat it too.

Tuberculosis, the battle against which is something else Ivor has in common with Noel, finally put pay to his musical aspirations. Practicing the trumpet, and subsequently the uilleann pipes, led to recurrences of the disease, and he had to pack it in. He writes: ‘It was a big shock to have to acknowledge that my hopes of a career as a jazz musician would have to come to an end. In hindsight, though, it was probably the best thing that could have happened, because the kind of traditional jazz I was interested in at the time was already going nowhere.’ TB also interrupted his medical studies for two years, but this cloud too was not without a silver lining. As a child he had been seen as gauche, introverted and ‘not the full shilling’: ‘On one occasion, my friends became so concerned at my apparent lack of contact with reality, and dreamy state, that they came as a deputation to my father saying that something should be done about me, and that they felt I should be seen by someone…Fortunately for me, my father was too involved in his own struggle to maintain his sanity to do anything about it, otherwise I might have been defined as a patient and been led towards psychiatric illness.’ Having always considered himself ‘a mistake and a potential failure’ and socially maladroit, after his period of illness and recuperation he vowed to try things out and open himself to new experiences, even if he failed and was the object of ridicule. He also made an effort to be friendlier and more socially integrated. This led to an interest in traditional music, and summers spent tramping the roads of Ireland, from Puck Fair to the Galway Races to various fleadh. In lieu of the trumpet, he took up the guitar and tin whistle, and became quite the bohemian, busking his way around the country.

Stints working and studying in England and the U.S. followed qualification, and he acquired an M.Sc in Hygiene (Community Mental Health) from Harvard, for a thesis designing a comprehensive district community mental health service, which eliminated the old-style mental hospital from the picture entirely.

Homesickness brought him back to Dublin in 1962, and a job in St Brendan’s, or Grangegorman as it was then known. Browne takes the opportunity to settle a few old scores, most notably against his then boss, Dr John Dunne. As Chief RMS, Dunne was in charge of not only St. Brendan’s, but St. Ita’s and St. Loman’s as well. He ran them with the minimum of effort, according to Browne, who relates the following anecdote: ‘He came to the hospital pretty regularly every day but never arrived before noon. He would stay for about an hour, unless he had a discharge board to perform, and then would depart to play golf. One day a bank manager who was one of his golfing partners said to him, ‘How is it, John, that, with the enormous responsibility you have running these hospitals, you are able to spend so much time on the golf course?’ John Dunne replied, confidentially, ‘You know if I was to spend too much time in there I’d be as bad as the rest of them.’’ Dunne was the classic ‘psychiatrist as custodian’, since his discharge boards amounted to, ‘…going through a patient’s notes meticulously, and if he found any past evidence of attempted suicide or dangerous aggression, he would say, ‘I think we’d better defer his discharge for some time.’’ This grew increasingly frustrating for Browne, who had assisted patients and built up their hopes of getting out. He came to see Dunne’s behaviour as motivated by nothing more than protecting his own reputation. Dunne eventually retired in 1965, two years later than he should have. A veteran of the War of Independence, he was a personal friend of then Taoiseach Sean Lemass, to whom he appealed personally for an extension when he reached retirement age, so that he could extend his sinecure. Naturally, it was granted.

Dunne’s duties under the Mental Treatment Act 1945 still have relevance today. On November 5th, 2007 Dr. Siobhan Barry, PRO of the Irish Psychiatric Association (an organisation so sinisterly uncommunicative it has failed to respond to numerous communications from this writer) was given airtime on the This Week radio programme, to voice her reservations about the implementation of the Mental Health Act 2001, in relation to the greater protection it afforded to patients held against their will, by having their cases brought before independent review panels within 21 days of their detention. Barry lamented the fact that psychiatrists would now have to spend six to seven hours per involuntary patient during those 21 days, preparing for mental health tribunals, which was not therapeutic time, and which also took time away from voluntary patients. The interviewer did not challenge her about the fact that of her estimated ‘490 patients’, only ‘three to five’ were involuntary. But the richest irony of all was how Dr Barry finds the time for her extensive media work, when she is so hard-pressed to fit in and fulfil her psychiatric obligations. Protecting the rights of vulnerable patients may be eating into her clinical practice, but it hasn’t impacted on her availability for TV and radio appearances, or newspaper and magazine comment.

Music and Madness goes on to chronicle Browne’s increasing involvement in psychiatric administration. He became Chief Psychiatrist of the Eastern Health Board, effectively taking over Dunne’s old job, and also gained the Chair of Psychiatry at UCD, both apparently by default, as a compromise candidate. It also details his setting up of the Irish Foundation for Human Development, and its invaluable community work in Ballyfermot and Derry during the ’70s. Throughout his career, Browne has frequently been sabotaged, by both colleagues and administrators, in his efforts to change fundamentally the way psychiatric services operate in this country. He states that, in his experience, ‘…the administrators of a health board are not primarily interested in the therapeutic outcome and welfare of the patients. Rather, they are concerned with running a service that is financially economical and causes them as little trouble and disruption as possible.’ Since his retirement in 1994, he has practiced privately as a psycho-therapist.

Browne differs from the psychiatric establishment in rejecting the biological basis of psychosis. For him, most mental illness, or emotional disturbance, is caused by past, repressed traumas, which have to be worked through and integrated. Thus, in contrast to conventional psychiatrists, he believes that psychotics – to say nothing of common or garden neurotics – do benefit from psychotherapy. He gives clinical examples to demonstrate his conviction that schizophrenia and the institutionalisation which follows it is largely iatrogenic, and goes so far as to characterise the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry as a cosy ‘closed delusional system’. For him, ‘the current psychiatric view of what constitutes psychotherapy is too narrow’.

All of this questing innovation took place – and still does – against the backdrop of a cautious, hidebound and often callous conservatism, as exemplified by the Irish Psychiatric Association, which seeks to deflect all debate about advances in psychiatric care into a narrow focus on availability of beds and use of resources, rather than a theoretical re-examination of methodologies and practices. (See, for example, on-line interviews with and lectures by the organisation’s PRO, Dr. Siobhan Barry, at http://www.irishhealth.com/video_interview.html# and http://www.dcu.ie/health4life/conferences/2007/Siobhan_Barry.shtml.) As long as self-serving groups such as this one are allowed to control the terms and parameters of all discussion on the topic, unchallenged by a supine and often gullible media, there can be no real progress in the care of mentally ill people, and they will be allowed to continue blaming ‘the system’, not themselves. If they can get us asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.

Finally, it is gratifying to come across a senior medic who openly acknowledges his enthusiasm for that useful substance, cannabis, and the ‘…lovely relaxed feeling of smoking grass while listening to jazz.’ The public expression of such views has landed him in hot water in the past, as has his espousal of the therapeutic value of LSD. Once again, all this while members of the psychiatric establishment are still busy taking taxpayers’ money into their already amply filed pockets to help produce government reports which continue to rehash the traditional 1950s American McCarthyite ‘reefer madness’ paranoia and peddle the clichéd 1960s anti-countercultural dogmas about cannabis being a gateway drug, and a contributory cause of mental illness, and so should therefore remain illegal and carry stiff penalties for possession, even for personal use. (See the tenth report of the Joint Committee on Arts, Sport and Tourism, ‘What Everyone should know about Cannabis’, July 2006. In her foreword to the report on ‘this truly noxious weed’, Committee Chairman Cecilia Keaveney, a Fianna Fail Senator and former T.D., accepts that ‘…mental illness is managed rather than cured’. Consultants for the report included Dr. Siobhán Barry and Professor Mary Cannon.) This is akin to arguing that because some people get very sick when they eat a lot of chocolate, chocolate should therefore be banned; or, more pertinently, that just because a certain percentage of the population have a predisposition towards alcoholism, that prohibition should be introduced – a ‘noble experiment’ that fostered more social problems than it sought to solve when it was tried in 1920s America.

In the Arts Lives documentary about him, poet Paul Durcan recalled how, during one of his hospitalisations, a psychiatrist told him, “Paul, you are one of the most evil people I have ever met.” Not surprisingly, perhaps, Durcan opined that the pseudo-profession contains some of the most casually hypocritical and viciously cynical people he has ever encountered. While he may not be a saint, it is difficult to imagine a public figure less inclined towards evil than Paul Durcan. At the same time, it is hard to think of any other special interest group who have done, and continue to do – with almost complete unaccountability and lack of transparency – more hurt and harm to the lives of ordinary, vulnerable people than psychiatrists. On the evidence of this book, even if it is from the horse’s mouth, Ivor Browne is an exception, in being one of the very few good guys to have made his life’s work in this den of iniquity, where our supposed arbiters of sanity are often crazier than their patients, or else of ruthlessly sound mind in their exploitation of them.




First published in Magill, June/July 2008

Sunday, 2 February 2025

Tales From The Poorhouse By Eugene McCabe / The Banyan Tree By Christopher Nolan

What these two strange and extreme fictions have in common is that they each, in their own way, stand apart from, and head and shoulders above, so much of the dross that passes for contemporary literature, Irish or otherwise.


Tales From The Poorhouse

By Eugene McCabe

(Gallery Press, £13.95 h/b, £7.95, p/b)


This new book from Eugene McCabe consists of a quartet of separate but inter-linked monologues, which subtly chronicle the devastating cost of the Great Irish Famine in terms of the real, unremitting, everyday human suffering it visited on the lives of ordinary – and not so ordinary – people, both those it pauperised, and those in more privileged positions.

The four tales are titled, respectively: ‘The Orphan’, ‘The Master’, ‘The Landlord’ and ‘The Mother’, the orphan of the first being the daughter of the mother of the last, indicating the eventual fate of that mother, the master being the man in charge of the poorhouse they both have no choice but to enter, while the landlord is the ex-army landowner whose tenants they formerly were before being evicted, who is himself obliged to sell his house and estate because of the British government policy of making Irish landlords, rather than the British treasury, support evicted tenants.

Roisin Brady is the first speaker, a young girl who tells of the failed marriage between her proud mother and her drunken tailor father, and her short-lived attempt with her more delicate twin sister Grace to get some sort of enjoyment out of their youth, against a backdrop of increasing poverty and starvation. When Grace becomes pregnant, the mother chains her to a wall in the loft, for fear of what the neighbours will say, and it is implied that she strangles her granddaughter at birth.

Reggie Murphy, the next speaker, is the master of the workhouse, and he describes how he failed to receive an inheritance he thought would come to him, an event he uses to justify his present employment, although he is not above exploiting his position for sexual favours from the young women, Roisin included, in his care: if they sleep with him they get more food, and maybe even their passage money to America. His piece ends with his devastating betrayal of his long lost sister and her son, a last compromising of integrity which robs him not only of what remains of his humanity, but also of his sanity.

The third tale is told by Skinner, or Lord Clonroy as he is now, caught between wanting to do something for his tenants and the indifference of the British authorities, and also facing a difficult family situation with a snobbish, social-climbing wife, and a homosexual, Catholic-convert son who will not take over the estate from him.

The fourth narrator is Mary Brady, Roisin’s mother, who speaks from the idiot ward of the poorhouse, where she was committed after the death of her other daughter, Grace, in childbirth. There is a vivid portrait of her own family background and childhood, and an attempt to vindicate herself of Roisin’s accusation that she murdered Grace’s new born baby.

While each of the successive narrators relates his or her story in a strikingly individual voice, each piece has a reflexive relationship with the others, so that characters and incidents are recounted from different angles, and the book becomes much more than the sum of its constituent parts. What is brought home most forcibly is how rough life was back then, with grinding poverty and casual cruelty an everyday way of life for most of the population, and not just because of the Hard Hunger, but also because of impossibly large families and routine domestic violence.

Like John McGahern, McCabe deals with horrendous experiences, which many in late 1990s Ireland would prefer not to be reminded of, in a deceptively simple way, and can walk a tightrope which threatens to plunge him into mere sentimentality, but manages by a quiet intensity and dignity to avoid that pitfall.

Some Irish writers are plain underrated, or perhaps they are just modest. Aidan Mathews is one example that springs to mind, and Eugene McCabe is another. The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature called him ‘a gifted, if reluctant, writer’, and although well into his sixties now, one hopes he will prove the truth of George Eliot’s remark that: ‘It’s never to late to be what you might have been.’ Of course, it is quality that counts above quantity, but if he continues producing work of this high a standard, to put alongside his novel Death and Nightingales, and his short stories ‘Victims’, ‘Heritage’, ‘Cancer’ and ‘Heaven Lies Around Us’, it is surely only a matter of time before his work reaches the wider audience it so palpably deserves.

RTE and TnaG are to be congratulated for commissioning these fictions, which were televised in Irish and English versions, for at a time when it is an unrewarding effort to read many newly published novels once, here is a book that you can return to again and again. It is a mesmerising work, which merits that much abused because overused term, masterpiece.


The Banyan Tree

By Christopher Nolan

(Phoenix House, £???)


In 1981 the literary world was stunned by the publication of a book of poems, Dam-Burst of Dreams, by a fifteen-year-old Dublin boy, Christopher Nolan. The subsequent arrival of his autobiography, Under the Eye of the Clock, six years later, confirmed his reputation as one of the most strikingly original and innovative stylists in contemporary letters. Unfortunately, as well as focusing on his relative youth, too much of the brouhaha which surrounded the appearance of these books centred on the fact that Nolan is severely disabled by cerebral palsy, nearly dying at birth from asphyxiation, but surviving, imprisoned by his mute and paralysed body, to write with the aid of a unicorn-like typing stick attached to his head. I say ‘unfortunately’ because, regardless of whether or not he was disabled, Nolan would have been recognised and succeeded as a writer on talent alone, although it is of course apposite to speculate as to what extent his atypical use of language is the result of the extreme interiority imposed by his handicap.

Now we have, after twelve years in the making, Nolan’s triumphant return with this, his first novel. It tells the simple story of Minnie O’Brien, a woman whose life span parallels that of this century, until her death in her mid-eighties. She marries Peter in 1922, and they farm a small holding of five fields in Westmeath, near the tiny village of Drumhollow. They have three children: Brendan, who goes for the priesthood, and winds up a bishop in New York; Shelia, who trains as a nurse in London, before settling down to comfortable but unhappy affluence in the largely well-to-do Dublin suburb of Blackrock; and Frankie, the youngest, who wanders the world, doing a bit of this and a bit of that. Minnie loses her husband early, but endures through her long, lonely widowhood into old age, sustained by the hope that one day Frankie will reappear. When he finally does make his way back home, he is ten minutes too late to see his mother alive for the last time.

So, ostensibly, not much happens, but that is because the book is not so much driven by plot, as by its very language, and its primary concern is linguistic, not sociological. In an age when a sizeable proportion of novels published are little more than thinly disguised journalism, with even so-called ‘literary’ fictions falling into the category of throwaway page-turners, it is heartening to see a young writer taking such huge risks with the written word. Although it may not always quite come off, it is not difficult to see why Nolan’s work has prompted comparisons with that of James Joyce and Dylan Thomas. It is also a relief to read something that has obviously not been dashed off and churned out on a word processor. Every real writer knows the effort of concentration and force of will required to do good work. One can only marvel at the additional laboriousness of the process Nolan had to go through and overcome to achieve his vision. But there is also a sense in which the slowness imposed by this means of production may have actually improved the quality of his prose. This guy really pays attention, and he demands that we do, too.

Some unkind commentators, probably motivated by jealousy rather than pursuit of the truth, have gone so far as to claim that Nolan doesn’t write the stuff at all, but that his mother Bernadette, who holds his head while he propels himself against the typewriter keys, is really responsible. Such accusations should be treated with the contempt they deserve. Of course, no one wants to give Christopher Nolan a bad review, but neither does he need any special pleading. He has done what any writer worthy of the name, able-bodied or otherwise, should always be striving to do: he has made the language his own, by reinventing and extending it, and so altered our view of the world, by a supreme act of the imagination.