Paull Holme Sands, with Egret

Samuel Beckett, 'An Badhbh'

ag streachaíl a ocrais trí spéir
mo chloiginn blaosc an spéir ’s an chré

á umhlaidh féin do na bacaigh a bheas orthu
tromán na beatha a árdú is siúil leis

iad ina gceap magaidh ag an gcolainn
go n-iompóidh ocras cré agus spéir ina ndramhaíl

Henri Michaux, Labyrinth

Life the labyrinth, the labyrinth death,
labyrinth without end, says the Master of Ho.

Everything caves in, nothing sets free.
The suicide is reborn to new pain.

The prison opens onto a prison,
one corridor opens on another:

he who thinks he’s unrolling the scroll of life
is unrolling nothing.

Nothing leads anywhere.
The centuries too live underground, says the Master of Ho.

Secret Beach, Flamborough Head

Days of the Brindled Cow/Tell Us a Joke

Always read the footnotes. Or so I was reminded when skimming through Donna Wong’s essay on ‘Literature and the Oral Tradition’ in the Cambridge History of Irish Literature and I came across this:

Modern Irish dictionaries often quote proverbs, and as Tomás Ó Cathasaigh has observed, Father Dinneen’s Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla (1927; 2nd edn Dublin: Irish Texts Society: 1934) ‘is the only dictionary in the world with a folktale in it.’ I hand him laurels for referring me to Dinneen’s marvellous entry for riabhach, which concludes ‘laethanta na riabhche, the days of the brindled cow, .i. March; the legend is that the brindled cow complained at the dawn of April of the harshness of March, whereupon March borrowed a few days from April and these were so wet and stormy that the bó riabhach was drowned, hence March has a day more than April, and the borrowed days are called laethanta na riaibhche’, p. 893.’

This story reminds me of the joke about the surveyor working on the Polish-Russian border after the First World War who meets an old farmer and offers him the chance of deciding which of the two countries he wants to be in. He thinks about it for a while and chooses Poland since, as he says, ‘I don't think I'd be able for the Russian winters’.

And since I’m telling jokes, I wonder if anyone else noticed the story in the Guardian feature on comedy a few days back in which a comedian described reading a children’s book to a bunch of six year olds in the library, one of whom raised his hand and asked ‘Does this get good soon?’ Is it too late to change the title of this blog, to change my name to ‘Does this get good soon?’

And since not everyone reading will have seen Mock the Week last Sunday, here’s another joke, from that show. A bored teenager is sitting in a classroom whacking her malfunctioning calculator against the desk. ‘Linda! Stop that!’, her teacher shouts. ‘How would you like it if I banged you against a desk?’

Sea Stack, Cormorants, Flamborough Head

Puffins, Flamborough Head

Aillte Shliabh Liag

Irishness Now Among Leading Causes of Innumeracy

I was pondering just the other day the nature of my objections to the business of Irishness and Irish Studies when along came Stephen Watt’s Irishness and Contemporary Writing (CUP) to remind me what I mean. In a comparison of Beckett and Derek Mahon on p. 142 I see the author misspells, twice, the word ‘fouillis’ from Beckett’s mirlitonnade on Arthur Keyser as ‘foullis’, not to mention ‘coeur’ as ‘couer’ and ‘minuscule’ as ‘miniscule’, but on the following page we read this:

Then there is the burble concerning the memorial to Caroline Hay Taylor at St André’s cemetery. Mahon’s burble follows Beckett’s poem closely in most respects (...) Each depicts Taylor as remaining ‘true to her belief’ (fidèle à sa philosophie) that ‘there is hope while there is life’ (qu’espoir il y a tant qu’il y a vie), and each mentions that she escaped Ireland with this view intact. But Beckett dates this flight as occurring ‘en août mil neuf cent trente-deux’, which Mahon ‘translates’ as ‘in August nineteen-twenty-two’. Why makes this revision? Did Mahon’s considerable facility with French fail him at this moment? Probably not.

{Ends}

The reason, Watt goes on to suggest, for Mahon’s mistake is that he has moved her death back ten years to coincide with the Irish Civil War, thus underlining the dead woman’s ability to retain her ‘unflagging optimism at a historical moment least hospitable to the cultivation of hope’, with the ghost of a premonition of the Northern Irish Troubles thrown in too. She ‘remained forward-looking in circumstances least likely to cultivate hope or affirmation; by contrast, 1932 in Beckett’s original exercises a far more restricted connotation.’

For a start, I can’t believe that was anything other than a mistake on Mahon’s part. But if not, to suggest that the fact of the Irish Civil War in 1922, with all its opportunities for ready-to-hand poetic significance, should trump the bald fact the woman died in 1932 – this embodies perfectly, for me, my objections to the unearned exceptionalism of Irish Studies. She died in 1932, not 1922. Some pointless Irish civil war is not a good enough reason for assuming to yourself the power to alter this fact. Mahon made a mistake, and I defy anyone to convince me otherwise, or explain why that otherwise can be anything other than a species of wish-fulfilment.

Photo shows an old stomping ground of mine, Misery Hill on the south bank of the Liffey. I hadn’t been back for a decade or so. Someone had stencilled ‘I’m Nobody? Who Are You?’ on a hoarding on the other side of the street.

Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Málainn Bhig le hÉanlaith Ní hEol Dom Cad Iad

Teach Tábhairne Uí Robhartaigh

Aingeal, Leac Uaighe

Gleann Cholm Cille

Laochra Gaeil

I don’t have a copy of The Best of Myles to hand, but fondly remember his rejection of the suggestion that, while the average English user had a basic vocabulary of 400 words that average Irish speaker used 4000. The real figure is in fact closer to 400,000, he declares, while in Donegal there are some Irish speakers so rich in Gaelicness that they pride themselves on never using the same word twice in their lives. I was reminded of this more than once during this last week in Donegal, as during a presentation on the 89-year old who was commended to us as the possessor of the richest Irish in the county. Irish-speakers will frequently use the patronymic system, e.g. Tom Phaidí Sheáin, but this man had no fewer than ten components in the family tree of a full name he carries around with him, tracing his lineage all the way back to the 1730s. If he isn’t in the Book of Leviticus too he obviously should be.

I’ve been to the Donegal Gaeltacht before (Gortahork, Falcarragh), but one of the things that makes Glencolumbkille distinctive is that those places, remote as they are, are at least, or can be, on the route to somewhere else. Glencolumbkille is at the end of the line and 26km from the nearest sizable town (and ATM), Killybegs. It appears to be a Garda-free zone too, with all the delightful implications this has for pub opening hours. The pubs are full of music, just about every evening. I was most disappointed to learn that the great Glen fiddler James Byrne had died last November, but I got to see his widow and daughters play in Roarty’s, several times, as well as the legendary Tommy Peoples and, down from Glenties, Peter and Jimmy Campbell. Oideas Gael, where I was taking my Irish language course, has one of the few surviving examples of the tin fiddles endemic to this part of the world, as occasionally played by the greatest of all modern Donegal fiddlers, John Doherty. Donegal fiddling, to start repeating myself from the last post, appeals to me in its relentless eschewal of vibrato and unapologetic scratchiness, its horde of eldritch eighteenth-century Scottish crossovers, and utter singularity to its own place and nowhere else.

But as for the language itself: I found the experience of speaking Irish for a week (well, parts of that week at least) entirely pleasurable. During the week our host, Liam Ó Cuinneagáin, circulated copies of a journalistic turd dropped by brain-donor reject Kevin Myers in the Irish Independent rehashing his very familiar desire for the Irish language to disappear off the face of the earth. Even if every remaining speaker of Irish was prompted by this article to jump off the cliffs of Slieve League, all 1972 feet of them, learning and speaking Irish would be just as worthwhile and admirable an endeavour. One of the things I debated up there with my fellow student Saerbhreatach was what if anything makes Ireland any different anymore from Britain, and while we had somewhat responses to that (S. has written, in response to a critique of his position by Barra Ó Seaghdha that ‘I wished to inquire whether a work can be Irish yet not be in that language. I ultimately don’t think that it meaningfully can be, and that it forms a kind of sub-section of Anglophone poetry, which is not identical to English or British poetry’; I can’t link to the original article by BOS as the page appears to be currently off-line), what was I saying here? that like S. I strongly feel, and for entirely un-nationalist reasons, that to have any kind of professional involvement in Irish Studies, as that subject is studied in universities, is impossible without a working knowledge of Irish, and that what goes by the name of Irish Studies in the absence of such a knowledge is a dereliction of scholarly duty, a kind of fraud, even. But then there is that question of nationalism and the caduceus-like coils in which it has traditionally wrapped the language. Neither S. (see soundbite above) nor I is any kind of card-carrying Irish nationalist, and both find e.g. Thomas Kinsella’s fondness for seeing his involvement with the Irish language as a species of nationally mandated one-man crusade as, well, meaningless to us. But this leaves what? Is the Irish language just so much material, in the way that Icelandic or Swahili would be, a holiday destination for our anthropological field trips? Perhaps this is a question for which I should provide a snappy answer, if only to avoid ever having to dwell on it again, but while I for one don’t fancy being called some manner of neo-Unionist by Barra Ó Seaghdha, and am perfectly familiar with the parochialism of would-be post-nationalist platitudes (see Kevin Myers passim), I was happier to spend the week pondering facts about Irish such as these:

the Irish for jellyfish, smugairle róin, means ‘seal snot’.

the Irish proverb Is fad ó bhaile a labhraíonn an pilibín (‘it is far from home that the lapwing sings’) refers to the lapwing’s habit of leaving its nest to sing, to mislead predators as to the location of its eggs. This I did not know.

that the first of the list of seven times’ seven words that end in ‘óg’, birds, goes like this: druideog, fáinleog, faoileog, fuiseog, glasóg, riabhóg and spideog. The other six refer to trees, martime things, parts of the body, plants, things around the house, and women, and I will happily burn a CD of Donegal fiddle music for the first person who tells me what they are.

Photo (not by me, own pictures to follow) shows the awesomely remote abandoned village of Port, over the hill from the Glen.

And to everyone I met there, from the barmaid leaning out the window watching the Glen v. Carrick GAA match through binoculars, to the fiddlers, to everyone who spoke even one word of Irish I say: Mór sibh a laochra Gaeil!

The Cat that Kittled in Jamesie's Wig

A marvellous image of fiddle-playing brothers Francie and Mickey Byrne from Kilcar in Donegal. I’ve always loved Donegal fiddle music, the scratchy, cat’s gut rasp of it (seem to be having a Seamus Heaney moment here), and was thrilled on a trip to Donegal a few years ago to put some musicians in Gortahork to the test by asking if they knew ‘The Cat That Kittled in Jamesie’s Wig’, as played on the 1987 Claddagh album The Brass Fiddle by Francie Byrne (I think Mickey had died by then), and yes indeed they did, striking up its yawping descending ninth.

This by way of saying I’m taking off to Glencolumbkille in south-west Donegal for a week to brush up on my Irish and annoy the locals with requests for obscure John Doherty reels.

Felicity Afire

An Australian poet I was most happy to rediscover down under last year is Robert Adamson, whose new Bloodaxe collection The Kingfisher’s Soul I review (in brief) in today’s TLS. But as they’ve snipped the last sentence off I’d like to log it here: ‘Like Amy Clampitt’s kingfisher, these poems are flushed with “the color /of felicity afire.”’ And since I can hardly leave it at that, here’s the end of his poem ‘Creon’s Dream’ by way of illustration.

I sleep in broken snatches and dream nothing.
Mosquitoes suck at my cheeks and empty bottles
clutter the verandah, the books are in darkness

but the sandy whimbrels finger the pages, words
dissolve, waves of the dead arrive in dreams.
Out there the black finger points to the mouth

of the river, where the dead are heading, they
move over the window glass. The extinct fins move
the fingers of my grandfather, mending nets,

the dead friends sing from invisible books. The heron
picks the blood-shot eye from my father’s terrible
work in the kilns and darkness is complete.

Miracle in Limerick as Limerick People Confound Skeptics with Proof That Yes It Is Possible to Be That Dumb

Story here.

Gatto di Trieste

Literate Graffiti

Trieste is the Hull of Italy. Each city is a port out on an eastern limb, often overlooked by the rest of their respective countries and... there the comparison breaks down. Oh, and both cities have a disproportionate literary tradition (Stendhal was French consul in Trieste, and then there’s Svevo, Joyce, Umberto Saba and Magris, for starters). I mean, it says something about Trieste that Philip Larkin should have chosen to spend that crucial formative decade there rather than in Florence, Milan or Venice: a strangely neglected period of his life, I find. And consider that Triestine graffito, a pleasant change for me from the endless bits of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg you see sprayed on gable-ends round the place here in East Yorkshire. Ungaretti served at the battle of Caparetto, I did not know before my latest trip to Trieste, though his later enthusiastic fascism all through the Mussolini years takes any dulce et decorum est edge off that fantastic two-liner of his, above. He shared the irredentistism of his fellow Futurists, who sent a Volunteer Bicycle Brigade to the northern front, which must have come in handy among the tanks and mountains of that savage theatre. The Italians lost 1000 men a day for two years; there is still a street in Trieste named after the walrus-faced old idiot who masterminded this hecatomb. On the subject of statues, I heard from John McCourt (author of the most excellent biographical study of the Triestine Joyce The Years of Bloom and a fine singer too, let me add) that all manner of Austrian statues are being re-erected there too, who knows why, or why now. And still on the war, Marinetti, I learned, spent his war years digging latrines, while Wittgenstein too saw action on the Italian-Austrian front, serving as a private in his war-long but ultimately quixotic attempt to get himself killed. I didn’t encounter any contemporary irredentists casting surly glances over the border at Koper (Capodistria) or Rijeka (Fiume, site of D’Annunzio’s finest inglorious hour), but given the tendency of these towns to change name under a new flag, I hope the Italians leave well enough alone in the nearby Slovene district of Arse.

Why Joyce, who used to hide from thunderstorms in the cupboard, ever agreed to live in Trieste I don’t know, given that copious thunderstorms cascaded down just about every single day I was there.

Ah Trieste, ah Trieste, ate I my liver!

Gatto di Roma, Protestant Cemetery

Gatto di Trieste

Svevo and I

Catching Up

I have returned from Italy, my thoughts on which anon (the secret ingredient for submarine paint is nun’s sweat), but first some items of note fished from the pizza menus and ads for patio salesmen cluttering up my porch.

The lapwing above is in honour of Michael Longley, knowing as I do that it is his favourite bird. Longley is seventy, an occasion marked by Enitharmon’s Love Poet, Carpenter: Michael Longley at Seventy. Contributors include his belaurelled contemporaries and several generations of juniors, including my own. Michael Longley was writer in residence in Trinity in the early 90s, a period I’m pleased to see described here, though my own account of it will have to wait for my forthcoming memoir Cappuccinos I Have Known. That fine poet Peter McDonald’s contribution, ‘Weather’, ends:

The sunshine makes red virulent
and yellows vibrant with decay;
it’s not surprise, more like assent
when they fall, when I let them fall,
to what is fated, in its way,
of which this rain-cleared light makes little,
meaning the day can gleam, can glow:
and not a bad day, as days go.

Another contributor is Ciaran Carson, whose On the Night Watch (Gallery Press) I see is also out. I wrote a long essay here about the turn in Carson’s style in Breaking News, and am pleased to see him continue to inject a belated bacillus of Objectivism into Northern Irish poetry. The leitmotivic obsessions of For All We Know are still much in evidence, as is the wrong-note line-break, sending the reader’s eye scrolling up and down as it registers a whole series of split-second semantic adjustments as the first word of the next line retrospectively adjusts what you thought the last line meant. Many poems heighten this effect by describing the passage of time. ‘If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness,’ Wittgenstein wrote, ‘then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.’ Here is Carson’s (a run-on title, this) ‘Of Yesterday’:

says St Augustine
what

is there to say
the past is not

as is the future
as for now

it flits from
split to split

into the next
so what

is there to fear
from time

when now
is forever

The latest issue of that fine Dublin journal The Stinging Fly features a comprehensive and provocative review of Paula Meehan’s latest, Painting Rain. One thing I like about the review is how it takes and acknowledges the whole context and background of Meehan’s work then, in the nicest possible sense, ignores it. It will not have been so important to how we read her, in the end, that Meehan spent a lot of time giving poetry workshops rather than working in life insurance, whether the ‘I’ in her work is identical with its author, resembles her closely, or even not at all, given the secret life we have now established for her a life-insurance saleswoman.

Fryatt also begins by mentioning class. Having got my feelings about Eavan Boland off my chest in a long article a few years back I feel that’s a subject I never need to revisit, but it has always puzzled me how easily gender trumps class in the grievance queue, where recent Irish poetry has been concerned. Meaning, I’ve always felt there was a mismatch between the amount of time Boland spends investigating Irish gender politics and the amount of time (none that I can see) that she devotes to class, but also how seldom she gets picked up on this issue. Fryatt concludes (to get around to quoting from the review at last): ‘Meehan, like many contemporary poets, maintains a Romantic emphasis on subjectivity while neglecting the duty that accompanies it: that of ensuring the versified soul earns her privilege through linguistic concentration. That neglect makes of social conscience mere worthiness, and of protest mere protestation of virtue.’

Speaking of fine Dublin journals, I mentioned, a long time ago now, an upcoming piece of mine on Beckett’s letters. It can be found (in the print copy only, I mean) here.

The summer conceptual/flarf issue of Poetry (that makes it sound like an annual event) features a brief note on Michael Hartnett by the ever-waggish Conor O’Callaghan, including this anecdote:

Sometime in the nineties an Irish Studies conference was hosted by the University of Limerick. The local laureate gave a plenary reading. The speaker immediately preceding had used an old-fashioned overhead projector that Hartnett, not big on technology, mistook for his lectern and microphone. He laid his pages on the magnifying glass panel and spoke his poems into the projector’s lamp. A combination of its bulk and his diminutive stature meant that not only was the plenary reader mostly inaudible, but he was mostly invisible as well. Whenever it came to lines of importance or of particular emotional intensity, he would lean into the projector’s bulb and whisper. A collective giggle began murmuring around the audience. Eventually Hartnett peered from behind the apparatus and asked rhetorically of the darkened auditorium, “What the fuck are you laughing at?”

And finally, some lyrics from the new Tinariwen album Imidiwan. From a track called ‘Tenhert’:

The doe of Azuzawa is so radiant
She was leaving Tin Ardjan before the rains
Following the Tashalghé river westwards, towards some striking camels
Who came from the Awaji family, more beautiful than nine fawns
Bolting to the top of the hill where the rock pools are green

I learn from the sleeve notes that the Touareg never use that word to refer to themselves, given its Arabic provenance, and should in fact be referred to as the ‘Inazaghen’, the people of Adagh, which is almost a town in Co. Louth but, luckily for the Touareg, isn’t quite.

I recommend this album, and the various magazines and books listed above.

The Balcony

It was child's play choking
to nothing the space that had opened
before me, to a tedious vacillation
your incendiary absolutes.

So today I belatedly pitch
my self-belief into that void
for whose sake the rigours of waiting
for you alive keep

their bloodthirsty edge. This life
telegraphing its sparks is the only
one you acknowledge. You lean

towards it out of a balcony window
that stays in the dark.

(after Montale)

Submarine Paint

Submarine paint. That was the secret of Italo Svevo’s wife’s family business, and based on a secret recipe too. Since I notice my submarine could do with a lick of paint, I thought I’d saunter over to Friulia and see about tracking the recipe down myself.

Back anon.

At Sally Gap

Sally Gap has long been a sacred place to me. So this by way of a salute to it.

The placeless place
find it incline
to the back roads’

slant invitation
a colour code
rainbow away

on the map
primary secondary
third class

other the signs
in neither kilo-
metres nor miles

the Irish spelling
a qualm of variants
snagged on

a barbed-wire fence
through which
incurious

lours a sheep’s
colour-of-ditch-
water face

this long-ago
Sunday after-
mass drive

revisited
the gearbox
consumptive

the windscreen
in tears and who
remains

for the Redcoats
to chase laying
the military road

as they go
and their heads
on their barracks’

stone pillows
the misspelt
patriot the lost

German soldiers
memorialized
out of memory

here where God
becomes Featherbed
Mountain

the monstrous
pylons striding
ahead and sunk

in the infant
Liffey’s
breaking waters

turf-cutter
tramper and twitcher
dodging

the heather spikes
on the sheep trails
and sparing

a glance as we pass
the corrie’s
inverted dunce-

cap plumbing
the lacustrine
depths

and if there were
houses there are
no houses

the rundown
national school
and struggling pub

cease to be
of concern where
the joyriders

burn out their cars
and walk home
and the radio mast

tears open
the sky on a sinkhole
draining

upwards and out
of everywhere
from the overrun

seaboard the hereby
declared notional
city beyond

the helplessly
fertile midlands
and upstart

bustle of derelict
Glendalough
we rise

without trace
the any-day-now
impassable roads

all too open
to your forecast
of issueless

whiteout
that does not come
but have we not

been here before
pulling over
might I not

merely
for once delight
in the sheep droppings

the beer cans
and facing four ways
choose all or none

knowing well
dusk will find us
at sea-

level the mountains
stacked
asleep again

behind the last
estate’s teatime
lights all that

cosy apocalypse
savoured
stood down

and hardly
not this time
the end of the world

Chat-Up Line, Overheard

‘Ah ehn’t got no diseases or owt.’

Puffins

Excuse me if I vomit from my freshwater and my saltwater stomachs (vomiting is a sign of joy in my species), but now the puffins are back (here) I’ve made the highly gratifying discovery that they sound just like Futurama’s Dr Zoidberg (scroll down a bit, ‘Atlantic puffin’).

Exequy

Not to endure like a needy old man,
ears full of hair and shouting

at the bare-chested boys
to get off your lawn.

Not to hang on like the wheezing
old woman who proves

such an annoyance clambering
onto the bus. To die

as you’ve lived,
a yellow-bellied dog,

stomach full of sawdust and scraps,
between the security fence

and the flyover, thoughtfully,
out of harm’s way.

Air Street

Randolph Healy, Rattling the Bars

There are plenty of oystercatchers along the river Humber, at Blacktoft, Sunk Island, Keyingham, Paull and other places of avian rendezvous, but the closest I can come to a picture of these birds I took myself is the above, taken in Mayo last December. The oystercatchers would be the near-imperceptible smudges in the middle distance.

My occasion for this being the publication by Oystercatcher Press of Randolph Healy’s pamphlet Rattling the Bars. Living in my ancestral spawning ground of Bray, Randolph knows all about the practically green (non-eco, radioactive sense) sea washing up on its shores, and devotes much of these poems to his thoughts on radioactive and other forms of pollution, sometimes as filtered through his signature anagram randomizer (‘we pronuclear /now recap lure /of new purer coal //unclear power’). ‘Peel Me a Fruit Bat’ sounds like an out-take from Trout Mask Replica, while another title ponders ‘The Om in Remote the Not in Control’. But the stand-out poem for me is ‘Out-Takes’, which I read as a response to Heaney’s North, that most over-autopsied of Heaney’s books. The Grauballe man wept the ‘tar river of himself’, but even Heaney didn’t think of a self-inwoven simile as arresting as shitting oneself in the sense his near homonym Healy has in mind here:

One must be limp a long time
not to mob the tanned and maimed.

Surround the de-nippled torso
arms out as if no one was more willing
unworked hands judged beautiful,
whorls spiralling beyond naming

then rubberneck a neck-wrung ex-sixteen-year-old,
Munch-gape made of meconium
as if she had shit her self,
or someone sat on her while still warm.

{Ends}

I’ve always liked Randolph Healey’s poetry and am delighted to see it more of it in print.

Old Hull

Mr Evil

The Path Taken

Naziwatch

Being a devotedly disillusioned fan of democracy, that worst possible system of government as Winston Churchill called it (until you consider the alternatives), I defer to the right of my fellow citizens, subjects or whatever they are right to vote for whoever they want – even if that someone is, get this, a career Nazi, former member of the National Socialist Movement (a wingnut groupuscule with a taste for fire-bombing Jewish property and synagogues in the 60s), and a swastika badge-wearing, rights-for-white-defending former chairman of the National Front. This person is now, can you believe it, one of my MEPs. And I defer to people’s right to vote for him. But as for the 67.5 per cent of you who couldn’t get off your ‘Yorkshire and the Humber Region’ arses to vote for a pig in a hat, a passing lugworm, or a piece of shit on a stick – a piece of shit on a stick would do fine – shame on you. Shame shame shame, you shower of absolute good-for-nothings!

Ulysses and Us

Where was I hiding, I wonder, in the thirty years I lived in Ireland, to prevent me ever hearing the phrase ‘Feast of Saint Jam Juice’ applied to that annual festival of Edwardian tomfoolery better known as Bloomsday. Perhaps I was living in some alternative reality from Declan Kiberd, who reassures me in Ulysses And Us that that is how Bloomsday is ‘jocularly’ known in Dublin. Google hasn’t heard of it either.

Someone has been spoiling Kiberd’s fun. Specifically, Ulysses critics. They have wrenched the text away from the common reader and made it a prize specimen of ‘specialist knowledge’ rather than the ‘property of all who shared in a common culture.’ And yet this is strangely at odds with the actual evidence offered by Kiberd. There are ‘dozens of taxi drivers’ who ‘know the main characters but haven’t got too far into it yet’ (this story, I feel, is a whisker away from the hardy old perennial about the man at the unveiling of a plaque who remembers living down the road from Leopold Bloom, and what a decent old skin he was.) Kiberd senior loved Ulysses, but on attempting to sit through a Joyce symposium at Trinity College, Dublin, was scared off by a paper on ‘The Consciousness of Stephen’. Kiberd fails to offer readings, or even the names of these academic baddies – in fact the book appears to quote no Joyce scholarship of the last few decades, one passing reference aside to a book published in 2004; otherwise nothing – and when it does make a gesture in that direction weakly mutters of ‘specialists prepared to devote years to the study of [Ulysses’] secret codes – parallax, indeterminacy, consciousness-time being among the buzz words.’ This is unreadable jargon? Holy contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality! But then again, on the subject of unreadability, Kiberd reminds us that Joyce’s great defender Hemingway couldn’t be bothered finishing Ulysses and that Roddy Doyle too thinks it’s full of boring longueurs. Maybe Kiberd doesn’t actually want us to read it all the way through?

The last time I was in Hodges & Figgis the shelves were packed with guides to Ulysses, reader’s guides, beginner’s guides, and walking guides of Joyce’s Dublin. Acknowledging their existence might come between Kiberd and his mission in this book, which is a deeply Arnoldian one. Joyce, it quickly emerges, is the central exhibit and weapon in a culture war Kiberd is waging singlehanded on the cosmopolitan dross of the modern world with its ‘corporate’ university elitists and their contempt for ‘national culture’. Kiberd appears to believe every bit as much as old mutton chops in ‘national cultures’ and the genetically imprinted national characters that accompany them. He also believes in the mission of art not just to civilise but, in effect, to save us, tut-tutting at Shakespeare critics’ weakness for treating the plays as ‘technical performances’ rather than ‘guides to a fulfilled life’. And also like Arnold, he believes the bourgeoisie (with a little help from the kindly literary critic) are on a mission to save civilisation. I don’t quite grasp his class theory, I confess. He believes Ulysses is the epic of the ‘civic bourgeoisie’, a group now replaced by the ‘consumerist’ ‘middle class’. Joyce ‘hated being called a middle-class writer. For him this was the greatest of all insults, to which he responded jocosely [‘jocularly’ a minute ago, now ‘jocosely’] by saying that “nobody in my books has any money.”’ This aversion to social-climbing chimes with Kiberd’s distaste for what a Christian brother might have called ‘company-keeping’: ‘[Joyce] had little truck with bohemians, preferring to stress the practical value of art for a full life.’ (Instead, Ulysses ‘respects’ the masses by showing how ‘admirable’ they are.) Nor does the moralizing stop there. Joyce may have used swear words in his fiction but, strait-laced type that he was, he would ‘on no account utter them’. And woe unto his readers ‘intent on proving how free they [are]’, who have ‘confused art and life’, and go around effing and blinding. Not in front of the women and children, please.

E.M. Forster had his man on the Clapham Omnibus and Kiberd’s equivalent would have to be a man on the Clontarf Dart, membership papers of the Plain People of Ireland at the ready. Kiberd is the most relentlessly anecdotal of writers, and many of these anecdotes are designed to remind us, as though we could ever be reminded enough, of what a wonderful bunch of people we Irish are. ‘This was the era when democracy meant that anyone could enjoy Shakespeare. When a group of travelling players asked a porter in Limerick railway station whether they had reached their destination, the man raised his cap in mock-salute and said, “Why, sirs, this is Illyria.”’ Even for a dog bites man story, Man in Non-Academic Job Not Total Illiterate doesn’t exactly have teeth. Why is it so pass-remarkable to Kiberd that a railway porter might know Shakespeare? Who is he trying to impress or prove a point to here? On the one hand, the Fall Narrative of a vanished common culture has to be rehashed over and over again (‘The middle decades of the twentieth century were the years in which the idea of a common culture was abandoned’) yet on the other here he is, Declan Kiberd, expounding, nay embodying this common culture, and being hyperbolically feted for doing so (‘the most exciting book I know on the most exciting novel ever written’, gushes Joseph O’Connor). So where is the problem, really?

I am deeply skeptical of the rhetorical assumptions that underpin Ulysses And Us is what I’m saying here, in other words, the comfortable moral high ground of its elitist-bashing populism, and its dewy-eyed love affair with the tedious old business of Ireland and Irishness, which may still interest some of those over-specialised academics Kiberd talks about but, apologies for the mild swearing here, bores the arse off me.

(Declan Kiberd, Ulysses And Us, Faber and Faber, £14.99)

Exit Strategy

rhapsody on a theme of Jean du Chas

Saperlipopette! I trip over
the concierge’s mongrel again.
An imbecile of genius
with a lazy eye, it watches me
come as I go and go as I come.
While the lift remains broken
I will be sadly unbearable.

Consider life a series of
connecting rooms between corridors.
In corridor and on landing
I am a yo-yo dangled
from an upstairs broom cupboard
as the chambermaid rearranges
my dust. Perspectives dizzy
and the banister takes my supporting arm.

Always and everywhere
someone is watching and when
she nods off over a tisane,
le concierge, c’est moi,
shooing the street urchins off
in between reading your postcards.

M. Machintruc, half past eight,
don’t like that tie.
Addresses and posts
a croque-monsieur to his mouth
at the café bar on the corner
and scans the paper for news
of the Greenland campaign.
It lies in ruins.
And so to work.

The line of a trilby hat
passes the frosted glass
by my head at eye-level.
My life is a broken-
backed roman policier
on a two-second time-lag
to the past historic tense,
sleazy yet classical:
Maigret and the Concierge or,
The Dead Man Left
No Forwarding Address.

The postman, rodent-faced
brute, in-out, nine ten.
The full stops of dust motes
he trails huddle slowly
into a will-less drift of ellipses.

Madame Balai, tripping over
her broom: ‘God blows
his nose and woe betide us
when the hanky descends.’

M. Putanesco, nine twenty,
the weight of the world’s
street-walkers’ perfume
lagging behind him, loitering
fugitively on the stairs.

Mme Balai, sweeping herself
back onto her feet: ‘I remember
my mother as a young girl,
always scraping her knees.’

M. Ningún, travelling
salesman in nothing,
nine thirty, an empty
bag full of samples.

You exit therefore you are.
When you exit, I see you.
You are no one before that
and no one then too,
but certified so.

As you slink in past the sleeping
lazy-eyed dog in the evening
the very wallpaper knows
where you’ve been.

I who am nothing know all.
Madame le concierge stirs
in her sleep and I make myself
scarce up a drain.

The dead Uruguayan
lay in his room a fortnight.
Page after page his manuscripts
proved themselves more than equal
to the parakeet’s guano.

Skim-reading as I threw them away
I knew myself in the presence of genius.

Typo Department

All my life I have carried around a mental store of typos, on whose memory I regularly impale myself, and to which I equally regularly add. In my piece on Beckett’s letters, in the new Dublin Review, I notice I refer to Beckett’s wife Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumensil as Suzanne ‘Dechevaux’-Dumesnil, which I suppose is one step above calling her ‘Deuxchevaux’-Dumesnil, but is still fairly lousy. Or so I thought until (the ever-reliable) wikipedia alerted me to the fact that the woman herself spelt it my wrong way, which is to say the right way. It’s how it’s spelt on her gravestone. Serendipity.

But since I’m on a typo roll here, I may as well point with an inverted sursum corda the note for Krapp’s Last Tape in the new Krapp’s Last Tape and Shorter Plays which records Krapp as having been played by Patrick Magee while ‘Henry was played by Jack MacGowran’. Jack MacGowran played Henry in the first production of Embers. And equally, in Dirk van Hulle’s Compnay etc we are told that Stirrings Still was published in The Guardian on 3 March 1989 and then again in The Manchester Guardian on 19 1989. Let me atone for the pettiness of even noticing these things but posting a poem straight away to wash that nasty taste away.

Teary Old Greek, Hoarse Old Florentine

from y to z
95.1%
to the dearest decimal dead
incalescent

That’s a ‘Poetic Miscalculation’ written by Beckett in a group of ‘Worstward Poems’ at the back of the first manuscript of Worstward Ho. I keep harping on about Beckett’s dodgy arithmetic, and if that percentage is meant to indicate one twenty-sixth of the alphabet the figure should be 3.8, not 4.9%. Tsk! ‘Incalescent’ means warming up, and for anyone else on the trail of the ideal shelf-ful of corrected Beckett texts, Dirk van Hulle’s new edition of Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, from which I take the above, would suggest we’re getting warmer.

Reading ‘The Way’, with its figure of eight and infinity sign, our editor reminds us of the ‘drink graph’ in Dream of Fair to Middling Women (an infinity sign is perhaps a figure of eight on its ear): ‘if you had got what you were looking for on the way up you got it again on the way down. The bumless eight of the drink figure. You did not end up where you started, but coming down you met yourself going up.’ A Heraclitean maxim if ever there was one (‘The way up and the way down [are] one and the same (...) And these two ways are forever being traversed in opposite directions at once’, as that teary old Greek put it.)

Also in attendance here is ‘Ceiling’, last seen in Fulcrum 6, and introduced there by Christopher Ricks. Van Hulle reminds us of its genesis in a wispy 1981 poem of the same name:

lid eye bid
byebye

And here’s a pleasing factoid to have on the record. The last of the three sections of Stirrings Still invokes a word the narrator cannot distinguish: ‘on how and here a word he could not catch it were to end where never till then’. The word was ‘faint’, originally, in the right-hand margin. This reminded Beckett of the Italian phrase ‘per lungo silenzio fioco’, his translation of which could not bring itself to choose between ‘faint’ and ‘hoarse’ for fioco, though in the end he used neither. The line originates in Virgil’s first appearance to Dante in Inferno I.

The edition also features ‘what is the word’, a text which will also be featuring in the edition of his poems due later this year. ‘Keep ! for end’, as Beckett wrote on the top of that poem in manuscript.

An exemplary ‘addition to company’ and a steal at a tenner.

(Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho, Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk van Hulle, Faber and Faber, £9.99)

Ian Hamilton in Hull

I mentioned Ian Hamilton’s Hull connection last week. He was one of a series of Compton visiting poets who came here in the early 70s, the others being Cecil Day-Lewis, Peter Porter, Richard Murphy and Douglas Dunn who, yes I know, was already here anyway. Here’s Hamilton speaking to Dan Jacobson of his none too successful stint:

I was supposed to sit in an office in [Larkin’s] library, waiting for these young poets to bring me their work so I could appraise it. I think about two people came in the course of the year, with what looked to me like the lyrics of pop songs. And one you pronounced that these weren’t quite up to what they could be, you never saw them again. So there was that side to it. On the other side there was the English Department, which couldn’t understand why money was being spent on somebody sitting around in the library doing next to nothing. [...] The place seemed to be full of time-servers and charlatans of one sort of another, and I just didn’t get on with it, and retreated to my office and waited for the next non-poet to arrive – who never did. In the end I went back to the TLS and wrote an article about it, and made myself even more...

(Jacobson:) Eminent.

Even more eminent – certainly in Hull. ‘Enemies’ was the word I had in mind.

{Ends}

I’ve tried and failed to track this article down. A little bibliographical ferreting turns up four TLS articles for this period, all called ‘Viewpoint’, and none of them the piece described here. But I now realize I may have misunderstood him to have meant the article as well as its author was in the TLS (Hamilton was working there at the time). Back to the bibliography then. But offers of help also gratefully received.