The Blue Tango By Eoin McNamee

The Blue Tango

By Eoin McNamee

(Faber & Faber, £10.99)

For his second full-length novel, after the harrowing achievement of Resurrection Man in 1994 (and not forgetting his two earlier novellas, Love in History and The Last of Deeds), Eoin McNamee ventures even further into the realm of faction. As documented by Shirley Kelly in her interview with McNamee in the last issue, The Blue Tango revisits a notoriously murky murder, and its subsequent investigation and the conviction that followed, which took place in and around Belfast nearly fifty years ago.

    In the early hours of November 13th, 1952, 19-year-old Patricia Curran, daughter of Judge Lancelot Curran, Northern Ireland’s Attorney-General and later Lord Chief Justice, was found dead in the grounds of her home, The Glen, outside Whiteabbey, on the outskirts of Belfast. The body was discovered by her father and her brother Desmond, a solicitor and Moral Rearmament activist. She had been stabbed 37 times.  Her mother Doris waited in the house.

    The ensuing investigation was led by RUC Inspector Albert McConnell, but Chief Inspector Richard Pim, in his efforts to protect the family, made things difficult for McConnell from the start, denying him permission to interview any of the surviving Currans, or to search the house. Pim pointed McConnell in the direction of a maniac, and one was sure to be found, hopefully among one of the Polish Free Army units that were stationed nearby. Come January, with no firm leads established, Pim drafted in Chief Inspector John Capstick of Scotland Yard and his assistant Detective Sergeant Denis Hawkins. McNamee renders the briefing exchange between Pim and the adulterous Essex policeman thus:    

              ‘I rather thought that a foreigner might be involved.  Stabbing is

          rather a foreign modus operandi, is it not, Chief Superintendent?’

              ‘It’s a useful thought, sir. Plenty of stabbings in London during the

          war. Spaniards, Arabs and the like. Stab you soon as look at you,

          some of them.’

              ‘What about Poles?’

              ‘The temperament is there, sir, no shadow of a doubt about it.’

        

A Scottish RAF serviceman, Iain Hay Gordon, was eventually charged with the crime. A shy, nervous outsider, and acquaintance of Desmond’s who had been to dinner in The Glen, he was a vulnerable target to pin it on. He signed a confession on the understanding that Capstick would withhold from his schoolteacher mother the suspicion that her son was homosexual. The confession itself was extracted by the novel technique of Capstick putting each alleged event to Gordon as a hypothesis, and when the suspect answered ‘Yes’, writing it down as fact.

    Gordon pleaded guilty but insane, spent seven years in a mental hospital where he received no treatment because the Superintendent thought he was perfectly healthy, and was then released and given a job for life in Glasgow, with the proviso that he change his name and never talk about the case. When he took voluntary redundancy in 1993, he began a campaign to clear his name. Last year, the verdict against him was quashed.

    All the above personages appear as characters in McNamee’s narrative, along with various other figures like journalist Harry Fergusson and Catholic bookmaker Hughes, from whom Lancelot Curran borrowed money to pay gambling debts.

    As with Resurrection Man, some will complain that the characters are cardboard cut-outs, but as with that novel, depths are revealed through surfaces. Others will cavil at the indeterminate mix of fact and invention, particularly as Desmond is still alive and working as a Catholic priest in South Africa, but there are literary precedents, in Capote’s In Cold Blood and Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. It is a historical novel, as distance is needed for recollection and reconciliation.

    Again, as with his previous book, the prose style is reminiscent of the lapidary Puritan discourse of a morality play, a kind of latter-day Northern Catholic John Bunyan, which is ideally suited to the Manichean societal structures up there. Also striking is McNamee’s sensitivity to language register and its betrayal of social standing, as when some of the statements in the police records by soldiers read more like the product of a well-educated, middle-class professional hand. Like all true artists, McNamee takes nothing for granted at face value, and the nuances of the social pecking order are perfectly rendered. ‘Authority’ is one of the most frequently recurring words in the text.

    The atmosphere builds with the mounting weight of suppressed evidence against the family itself. Why were Patricia’s hat and bag found neatly stacked some distance from her remains? Why, after a wet night, were they perfectly dry? Why, if the hat was pinned and difficult to take off, did she remove it? Why did Lancelot Curran phone around her friends to find out where she was three-quarters of an hour after the body had been found? Why did Pim suppress records of these conversations? When the house was sold four years later, and a huge bloodstain discovered in an upstairs bedroom after a carpet was lifted, why did the police do nothing when they were called? There is also Gordon’s part in his own accusation and prosecution, through looking for an alibi before he was even under suspicion, and getting a fellow serviceman to lie for him. Patricia herself haunts the narrative in a ghostly fashion, a 1950’s version of Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer, another instance of the good girl/bad girl archetype. Some say she was promiscuous, married men and the like, and got no more than she deserved, while this is balanced by Hughes’ recounting of her voluntary charity work in the area, recipients of which included his own widowed mother.

    This reads like an x-rayed tabloid, a record of gossip, innuendo and scapegoating. It is a reminder of the bad old days when sex was dirty, and married and missionary was the only game in town, and you could be blackmailed and destroyed for doing anything else, and all was ‘family values’, and men spoke about ‘the ride’. Maybe some men can’t enjoy sex unless it is ‘dirty’: that’s why they invented sexual morality. But, as we’ve discovered, morality need not apply solely to sexuality, and this tale of ex-public schoolboy men-in-suits rallying around to cover-up for and protect one of their own is something that still goes on, and perhaps always will.         

    At the time of writing The Blue Tango is on the Booker long list. A book of this poetic intensity and precision would be a worthy contender on the short list, and it secures McNamee’s position among the most talented younger novelists on this island.

First published in Books Ireland

The Dancers Dancing By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

The Dancers Dancing

By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

(Blackstaff, £7.99)

The new novel from Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, which follows 1997’s excellent collection of short stories, The Inland Ice, concerns a group of girls from Dublin and Derry who go to the Donegal Gaeltacht in the summer of 1972. Their parents have sent them there, ostensibly to learn Irish, but also to ‘knock the corners off them’, and because it will give them an educational advantage over children whose parents have not bothered to send them. Also, presumably, it gives the parents a rest during the long school holidays.

Ní Dhuibhne once again displays her great gift for observing social nuances, and commenting obliquely but sardonically on the power structures which underwrite them. She also has a wonderful empathy for the manifold confusions and insecurities of early adolescence. Most of these perceptions are filtered through the mind of the central character, Orla, whose working class origins in a middle class milieu have sensitised her to the contradictions and injustices imposed through difference and division, such as those between adults and children, boys and girls, urban and rural, North and South, Irish and English. It is only in the final chapter, which looks back from the present day, that Orla writes in the first person, but it is still her point of view which informs most of the narrative.

Orla, thirteen and two months, is overweight, and in awe of her friend Aisling, twelve and a half, who has more presentable parents, whose clothes are better, who has more savior-faire. The other students in the house they are staying in are Jacqueline and Pauline, two Derry girls. This is a world of petty jealousies, casual hypocrisies and fumbling romances. The girls’ time is divided between Irish classes, ceilis and midnight feasts. The playful chapter titles include ‘What does your father do?’ and ‘The girls discuss the North of Ireland question’. The former contains the passage: ‘...somehow occupation is the defining feature as far as fathers are concerned. Nobody asks, ‘Is your father nice?’ (yes), What age is he? (don’t know), What colour are his eyes? (blue), Can he sing? (yes, and play the mouth organ), Can he tell jokes? (not really). Occasionally someone will ask, ‘Where does he come from?’ meaning what county in Ireland. The one question everyone asks is, What does your father do? What your father does is what defines your father, as far as other people are concerned. More significant, it is what defines you, if you happen to be a child. So it seems to Orla. Her father is a bricklayer. That is what he is. But Orla says, ‘He is a building contractor.’ ’ The latter subtly demonstrates how, for the young southern Irish, even in 1972, the north, with its problems, is an almost incomprehensible other country. But, most of all, this is a world where, in contrast to our more child-centred times, ‘Orla has no right to be a child. Nobody has or ever had; this is the thinking. Children are there to carry out adults’ orders, first and foremost. Their feelings, and adults do not believe they have any, simply don’t matter.’

The local detail is enviable in its exactitude: for the southern girls, Northern Ireland means Mars bars and Marathons; showbands and singers like Big Tom and The Mainliners and Roly Daniels appear at country dances.     

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s background in writing for children is evident, and given its subject matter and style, this book is equally accessible and of interest to adults and adolescents. The cover reprints a quotation of profuse approbation from this very magazine, culled from a review of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s previous volume, although the critic’s name (for it is I) has unaccountably gone missing. However, here’s another recommendation that can be extracted as a blurb: when is the world going to discover Éilís Ní Dhuibhne?

First published in Books Ireland

The Inland Ice And Other Stories By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

The Inland Ice And Other Stories

By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

(Blackstaff, £7.99)

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a wonderful writer, and this is a marvellous bunch of stories. There are fourteen of them in all, one of which, the quasi-folktale ‘The search for the lost husband’, provides a thematic touchstone which links the other thirteen together, appearing, as it does, at the beginning, then between each story, and again at the end. All the pieces deal with, in some shape or form, love triangles, lost love, and the impossibility of reconciling Eros and Agape, love and friendship, passionate feelings with domestic, quotidian, day-to-day existence, and are generally told from a woman’s point of view.  

‘Gweedore Girl’ is a deft depiction, in a deadpan, dispassionate, first-person voice, of the sexual awakening of an adolescent who is sent into service with a family in Derry in the 1920s. It ends with a reflection characteristic of the whole book, throughout which it will resonate: ‘I’d even got a new boy...His name is Seamus and he is a good boy, kind, and funnier than Elliot, and earning much more money. I know I can marry him any time I want to. It is amazing that I know that Seamus is good and kind and honest and will never mistreat me; also I will never love him. Or maybe that is not amazing at all. Maybe those two knowings are the same, two different knowings in the same shell, or one and the same knowing, bright as an egg with the sun dancing on it.’  

The heroine of ‘Love, Hate and Friendship’, thinking of her relationship with a married man, asks herself: ‘Why should it be so hard to forget all this romantic stuff, and simply accept his friendship?’ ‘Bill’s New Wife’ is a very funny fantasy of marital role reversal, highlighting real inequalities.  

In ‘Lily Marlene’ a middle-aged woman and a man who were lovers in their teens meet up again many years later, when they are both married to other people, and rekindle their affair, but it doesn’t last. This heroine speculates: ‘What I think is that life is like Doctor Zhivago up to a point – more like it than some would admit. People can have a great, passionate love. I have. Probably you have. But it doesn’t seem to survive. One way or another it gets done in, either because you stay together or you don’t. That’s what I think. If I were more loyal, or brave, or generous, perhaps it would be different. But how do you know if you are brave or just an eejit?’  

‘Hot Earth’, set in Italy, features another middle-aged woman who is, or was, involved in an extra-martial affair, an even more unsatisfactory one than in the previous stories. Still, she leaves her husband anyway, not to be with her lover, but to be by herself, returning to Italy to teach English. There is an apt invocation of the image of a statue of an elderly Etruscan couple in a museum the heroine visits with her husband, a man of whom she thinks, ‘His love was loyal and enduring, if not very passionate. Probably it is loyal and enduring for that reason.’

‘Estonia’ gracefully interweaves the narrative of a librarian-poetess and her affair with a Swedish writer she met at a conference, with that of the Estonia ferry disaster. The story also contains some apposite meditations on literary art and literary politics, like: ‘As a compensation for career mistakes, her choice of pastime was good –  better, probably, than golf or drink. Poetry consoles her in more ways than one, as it has consoled people in hospitals and in labour camps and in death camps. And she is in none of these things, but in a large, rich, gracious library.’; and, ‘You could never tell with writers from other countries. You could not distinguish between the successful and the maybes and the ones who would be very lucky to get a review, the way you could at home, where everyone in the literary community could place everyone else in the pecking order as soon as they heard their name.’  

Oddities in the collection include ‘Summer Pudding’, about a group of Irish people who go to Wales during the famine; ‘Spool of Thread’, an extremely well-written venture into the mind and methodology of your better class of serial killer; and ‘My Pet’, which is questionable in that it features the only character in the book with suicidal tendencies, who also happens to be homosexual.

One criticism of the collection is that towards the end the pace seems to flag, and some of the stories are too close for comfort in their repetition of the themes and tones of previous ones. ‘Greenland’ and ‘How Lovely The Slopes Are’, in particular, read like thinly veiled rewrites of ‘Estonia’. But there is enough here to be going on with, enough to save the suite from becoming too claustrophobic. Ní Dhuibhne does several things well. She is good on employing a folkloric underpin and an historical perspective (‘The search for the lost husband’ ‘Summer Pudding’, ‘Gweedore Girl’). She is good on social satire, putting the mores of contemporary Dublin under her microscope (the attitude of the woman in ‘Swiss Cheese’ to the North, the reference to how easy it is to get development money from the Film Board in ‘My Pet’). She is good in her healthy criticism and mistrust of male feminists (Kevin in ‘Hot Earth’, Paddy in ‘Swiss Cheese’, Michael in ‘The Woman With The Fish’).

‘What matters but the good of the story?’ says the narrator at the end of ‘The search for the lost husband’, which is the end of the book. Most of the stories here deal with well-educated and well-travelled people, although poverty has lurked in the early lives of some of them. Although so many stories about marital infidelity could become a bore, here the treatment is subtle, witty, wry. Ní Dhuibhne has a great way of mixing and merging the realistic with something otherworldly, like crossing an Alice Munro or an Anne Tyler with an Angela Carter or a Jeanette Winterson. As I said, Éilis Ní Dhuibhne is a wonderful writer, and this is a marvellous bunch of stories.

First published in The World of Hibernia

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.

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

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

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 5^th, 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

Entering The Mare by Katie Donovan / The Twelfth of Never by Ciaran Carson / O Rathaille by Michael Hartnett / C P Cavafy, Selected Poems, English Versions by Desmond O’Grady

There is little point in trying to impose some faux unifying theme or thread on these four volumes of poetry, but one can note that two comprise of translations, two are from Gallery Press, and all four are by Irish poets, even if one is made up of versions from a poet who was born in Alexandria, Egypt to Greek parents from Constantinople, and spent seven years of his childhood and early adolescence in England. Only one woman and one Northerner, so no chance of a general link in those departments. But nevertheless, here we go.

Entering The Mare

Katie Donovan

(Bloodaxe, £6.95 p/b)

Ladies first. In this, her second collection, after 1993’s debut, Watermelon Man, Katie Donovan continues to stake out her territory, which is, according to Carol Rumens, ‘the womanly erotic’. The book is divided into two parts, ‘Hunger’ and ‘Totem’, and the enabling myth of the title poem, which begins the second section and informs everything else here, is drawn from the inauguration of an Irish chieftain, as observed by Geraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales) in the 12th century. A white mare, symbolising the Goddess (is she also, as would please Robert Graves, white?) is ritually raped by him, and then he swims in the ‘soup of her flesh’, and eats her meat. He must enter, slay and swallow her, then take a ceremonial bath in her remains, as his initiation. This destruction of the female principle is pointedly contrasted with the procedure in the last poem of the first section, ‘Muse’, where the muse for a change is male, and is welcomed by the female poet as he enters her, and she finds ‘the lost music/of my throat/in the piping/of his melodies’. She wants to be entered by the muse, so that she can create, her surrender gives her power, while the Chieftain wants to enter the Goddess only to destroy, his dominance based on subjugation. Images of hunger, literal and figurative, pervade the collection, as do attempts to satisfy these longings, through bread, meat, travel, sex, even love. We are reminded incidentally in ‘Workhorse’, for example, that ‘butcher shops/sell equine steaks/on Paris streets’, while ‘Strike’ deals with hunger strikes as an ancient form of protest in Ireland, and ‘Hunger at Doolough’ with an actual episode from the Great Famine.

‘Yearn On’, ‘Sweet Woman’ and ‘Warm Hand, Cold Heart’ are spiky love poems, the ending of the first particularly effective, as the poet realises the source of her maledictions on her former lover is the distance that ‘...leaves me weeping,/and storming,/and bereft.’ ‘Making Shapes’ maintains the fallacy that all heterosexual men are suckers for big breasts, dealing as it does with the ill-effects of silicone implants. While it is commendable to see a younger female poet dealing with some of the larger issues, this poem will appeal only to those women (and men) who imagine that all men haven’t yet realised that sometimes less is more. (Personally, I’m intrigued by the variety and even, occasionally, by to whom these wonderful appendages are attached.) ‘Macha’s Curse’ and ‘Horse Sense’ are more or less straight narratives, the latter contrasting good sex and bad sex in the horsy world, its last two lines suggesting that maybe the mare, and by implication the Goddess, existed before God. ‘A Vision of Hell’ quite subtly and sexily hints at the affinities between the poet and her cat. ‘Out of Her Clay’, ‘Display’ and ‘She Whale’ show ecological concerns and are good ideas, but suffer because of their flat, prosy execution. There are also a number of family remembrances, including ‘New York City, 1947’, ‘Magic Brushes’, ‘Tenterhooks’, ‘Stitching’, ‘Grooming’ and ‘Totem’.

Only by the loosest understanding of the word could Donovan’s work here be described as lyrical, and one does tire eventually of so many poems written in short, staccato line bursts. Carol Rumens describes Donovan’s work as characterised by ‘Terseness, sharp observation and a nice sense of cadence’, and while an admirable directness of statement and simplicity of thought is evident, it is odd that at a time when many novelists are trying to imbue their work with the qualities and effects of language which are traditionally thought of as ‘poetic’, many poets seem to be striving for what are usually considered the more pejorative properties and limitations of ‘mere prose’. Because of their ease of comprehension and colloquial repetition, one suspects that many of these pieces have more force in performance than they do on the page.

There is at times an annoying earnestness about Donovan’s poetry, as though the poet, or more correctly, the poetic voice, is that of a nice woman deliberately seeking out particular experiences (usually erotic), because she thinks it is her duty, or because she wants to write about them. But even this trait is parodied nicely in ‘Sweet Woman’.

Finally, what is this thing with women and horses? Patti Smith, Katie Donovan, and now Sarah Corbett, to name only a few. Of course, Edwin Muir – a man – had a poem called ‘The Horses’ in One Foot in Eden, his final collection, an apocalyptic vision of war and destruction and of the primal grace and endurance of horses and their necessary relationship to humankind. But it’s the girls who really seem to love their ponies. Are they trying to tell us something here? Maybe we should listen to them.

The Twelfth of Never

Ciaran Carson

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

If ease of accessibility can sometimes make Donovan’s work unchallenging, downright incomprehensibility can force you to ask if Ciaran Carson’s latest offering is always worth the trouble. Although an avowed fan of much that Carson has done previously, particularly in The Irish For No, I cannot help but wonder if in his current prolific spate he is in danger of starting to seem profligate, his barrierless, boundless facility running the risk of beginning to border on making his work seem facile. (Is the style catching?) It is as though, having made the sonnet form and the Alexandrine line his own, he is dashing off poems at the slightest suggestion of every passing thought or idea flitting by, and placing them in the comforting conformity of this grid that he has mastered, until the method and its results can seem at once both a little too easy and a little too forced.

The components thrown together to make up the simmering concoction this time include: poppies; Japan; traditional Irish ballads, jigs and reels; bread; salt; tobacco; beer; the Red hand of Ulster; 1798; magic mushrooms; President Mary McAlesse; fairies; Egypt; and Paradise. These tropes recur throughout the seventy-seven sonnets (when you add each digit of this number you get fourteen, the number of lines in each poem). However, you’d be hard put to say what the diverse elements and multiple allusions amount to at the end of the day, except a vague belief that a more imaginative approach would solve all the problems in the North, by placing the situation in alternative historical circumstances, or viewing it in an overall global context.

It is difficult to sustain inspiration over a long cycle of interrelated poems, but whereas in John Berryman’s Dreamsongs, for example, there are the obvious gems which more than compensate for some of the slack, with The Twelfth of Never it is hard to select any individual poems that stand out above any others. There are bright lights everywhere, but none dazzles you more than another. With the work of Paul Muldoon, the Northern poet with whom Carson has most in common and is most often compared, the adventurousness and playfulness, the linguistic and formal experimentation, the incredible dexterity and sheer imaginative flights, still have some relationship to what is being said. Carson can become merely clever, for the sake of it. Not that I’ve anything against cleverness (unlike, say, Eileen Battersby of The Irish Times, the chief leitmotif of whose criticism is that things are ‘too clever’ - except when she’s dealing with John Banville, of course). Intelligence is just as much a part of being human as the emotions, or sexuality. Nor do I mind that so much of Carson’s work is ludic, since life itself is ludicrous. But it is only rarely here that things seem as just and right, and just right, as they do in Muldoon.

Maybe ten or twenty years hence, when all the dust has settled, we will be in a better position to go about interpreting this book. But this review has already missed its copy-date because of this very volume (perhaps over-conscientiously, I went back and read or reread all of Carson’s poetry prior to this, to see if that would help me shed some light on the matter in hand, and start making sense of it). So for the moment, when it comes to discovering what the rich ingredients of this strange stew might be distilled to mean, much less determining its value and giving a verdict on it, your guess is as good as mine.

O Rathaille

Michael Hartnett

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

My inadequacies when reviewing this volume of Michael Hartnett’s translations from the 17th and 18th century Irish of Aodhagan O Rathaille are manifest and manifold, woefully under-qualified as I am in the native tongue. Perhaps a Gaelic scholar or folklorist will write more comprehensively about Hartnett’s skills as a translator in a future issue of this magazine. In the meantime, all I can offer is the view that Hartnett’s English versions of the aislings and elegies, political and satirical poems of this great Gaelic poet have all the delicacy and finesse we associate with much of his own poetry in English, most notably that in Inchicore Haiku and Poems to Younger Women, while at the same time capturing a sense of the capacious energy available in the original metres, and giving a flavour of the rambunctious colloquial speech of the language of the originals. They are ultimately very sad, chronicling as they do personal demise, as well as that of an entire civilisation.

C P Cavafy, Selected Poems, English Versions

Desmond O’Grady

(Dedalus, £5.95)

Which, in a rather more complex and resonant way, was what Constantine Cavafy was doing in his poetry too. But with all due respects to the many fine virtues displayed by O Rathaille and his translator, and the two other poets in the preceding volumes, it is clear that when coming to deal with Cavafy we are, quite simply, moving into a kind of Super League, that of the ten or twelve most talented and original poetic voices of this century.

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’ – in contrast to Carson, perhaps?) 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.