ireland

May 5, 2016

Ireland Rises Again!

It has been 100 years since Ireland’s Easter Rising, a fascinating, tragic episode that blended literature and liberation, defeat and victory, national reverence and remorse, and, in William Butler Yeats‘s high poetic oxymoron of “Easter, 1916“, ...

It has been 100 years since Ireland’s Easter Rising, a fascinating, tragic episode that blended literature and liberation, defeat and victory, national reverence and remorse, and, in William Butler Yeats‘s high poetic oxymoron of “Easter, 1916“, beauty and terror.

The Rising was led by a schoolteacher obsessed with death (Patrick Pearse), a veteran Fenian dynamiter (Tom Clarke), and a committed Marxist (James Connolly)—though women, volunteers, and farmers shared in the planning.

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The rebels seized Dublin’s General Post Office, held it for six days, and proclaimed an independent Irish republic, optimistically, “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”—that meant women and men, Catholics, Protestants, and others.

It was a brief period of insurrection: for example, Enniscorthy—hometown of our guest Colm Toíbín—was seized for a period of days; hundreds of British soldiers and Irish civilians were injured and killed. But after just a week, the rebels had been routed; Dublin had been shelled. When the leaders were captured, fifteen were executed and buried in quicklime without a funeral, setting off a permanent alienation of the Irish people from British occupiers.

A hundred years on, the history of the Easter Rising—and of the Irish republic that rose from it—is, like all histories, a mixed bag. Along the way: civil war, partition of the island (north and south), and emigration. In the 1990s the “Celtic Tiger” of tech and speculation romped through Ireland, but in the ‘08 melt-down the Tiger emigrated, too.

But suddenly another uprising—an emphatic vote for gay marriage, a pushback to the domination of Irish culture by the Catholic Church, and an emotional attack on structures of injustice—all expressed at the level of sentences, Tweets, performances, and songs.

We rely on a handful of charming and incisive writers to dissect the global dynamics of this exciting Irish moment, from Toíbín to Belinda McKeon and Mary O’Donoghue and the dark-minded Westerners, Colin Barrett and Lisa McInerney.  

You can hear the full version of Tom French’s poem, “1916,” below:

By the Way • November 25, 2015

Colm Tóibín’s Working on his Sentences

This is provincial Ireland, a place of long winters but not freezing winters. There’s drizzle as much as there’s rain. You’re trying to find a style just to bring things down to size, maybe bring ...

This is provincial Ireland, a place of long winters but not freezing winters. There’s drizzle as much as there’s rain. You’re trying to find a style just to bring things down to size, maybe bring the melody down to a minor key, as though you’re making drawings instead of paintings. You’re attempting a sort of insistent rhythm which might make its way into the reader’s nervous system… You’re working really with a sort of muted music arising from pain, from things that are difficult, arising from loss. And in that world of small holdings, small houses, small hopes, people are good at leaving things out, not saying them.

Colm Tóibín in conversation with Chris Lydon in Boston, November 2015.

Of course you want to put Colm Tóibín to music — his literary prose in novels like Brooklyn and Nora Webster. Also his gab, as here. Perhaps the hot / traditional Irish band The Gloaming is called for. That bewitching Irish volubility, including his own, Tóibín says, is rooted in a love of silence. It’s a point of his connection with the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, whom he’s reading aloud here, to stunning effect. Tóibín in the southeastern Wexford County, Ireland and Bishop in Nova Scotia seem both to have taken to language as a device to constrain or “restrain” experience. “I have a close relationship with silence,” he says. “With things withheld, with things known and not said. I think there is an impression abroad that Irish people are very garrulous — that there’s an awful lot of talking in Ireland. This may be the case but it’s often there to mask things that nobody wants to talk about.”

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Colm Tóibín’s great teachers are Henry James — of whom he’s written and spoken volumes; and James Joyce, especially in Dubliners (1914) — for the melancholy realism, the “scrupulous meanness,” as Joyce put it to a publisher; but also the lyrical pulse of poetic rhythm that has a force of its own.

Joyce charged defiantly into exile, self-consciously a breaker of convention, drawing a bead on “history” as the “nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” Colm Tóibín casts himself differently — not a conservative exactly, but as the man who observes continuity under the easy impression of rupture in Ireland a century after the Easter Rising of 1916. Ireland is in broad and deep turmoil again — the Celtic Tiger economy still in shambles after the meltdown, its government discredited, church rule overthrown by the same-sex marriage rules enacted by an overwhelming referendum last Spring. But Tóibín is remarking on traditions being extended in Ireland — in the best-read young writers like Eimear McBride in A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing; or Colin Barrett in the stories of Young Skins; also by Martin Hayes and other rock-star musicians in the fiddle tradition; and most specially in the gay-marriage vote:

“The great example was Mary McAleese, a former president of Ireland. She was able to say: ‘I have twins, and one of them is gay. Who is to tell me that child of mine is to be discriminated against in this country.’ The campaign was studiously about presenting people as Irish and family members before being gay. It was not about a marginalized group looking for rights. It was about making Ireland seem a traditional place — with a tradition of including people.”

Podcast • July 29, 2015

New Ireland Says “Yes”

In today’s Ireland, yes means no. A democratic yes to same-sex marriage signaled no! to patriarchal priests and cane-wielding nuns; no to the bankers who led the country into a devastating crash; and no to the supposed ...

In today’s Ireland, yes means no. A democratic yes to same-sex marriage signaled no! to patriarchal priests and cane-wielding nuns; no to the bankers who led the country into a devastating crash; and no to the supposed glamour of “showband” music, the goofy rock soundtrack of all old Ireland.

The country’s young artists, of all gender and sexual identities, have set themselves James Joyce’s task. They’re casting off the old and saying yes — Joyce called it “that female word” — to the new. And they’re forging new selves, a new national conscience, along the way.

You can see the change in Irish writing, vibrant again: from the traumatized modernism of Eimear McBride and the expressive, depressive stories of Colin Barrett. And in music with Snowpoet’s accompanied spoken word and the haunting harmonies of Twin Headed Wolf drawing on Gaelic roots without the traditional styles’ limited worldview.

This summer Chris went to Dublin’s National College of Art and Design for a lunchroom chat with the painters, chefs, and musicians leading the charge. He was wondering what the “Yes” vote to marriage equality meant, really, and what’s next for Ireland.

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All music used in this piece is composed, performed, or produced by Irish artists. 

Podcast • March 17, 2014

Edna O’Brien: Literature Against Loneliness

In celebration of Saint Patrick's Day: Edna O'Brien is my fair embodiment of a writer's gifts and the pleasures of reading. Her prose, as Philip Roth once remarked, is "like a piece of fine meshwork, a net of perfectly observed sensuous details that enables you to contain all the longing and pain and remorse that surge through the fiction."

We sat in the jeep because, as he said, we were in no hurry to get home. We didn’t talk about family things, his wife or my ex-husband, my mother or his mother, possibly fearing that it would open up old wounds. There had been so many differences between the two families — over greyhounds, over horses, over some rotten bag of seed potatoes — and always with money at the root of it. My father, in his wild tempers, would claim that my mother’s father had not paid her dowry and would go to his house in the dead of night, shouting up at a window to demand it. Instead we talked of dogs.

From the story “Old Wounds,” by Enda O’Brien, in her new collection, Saints and Sinners.

Edna O’Brien is my fair embodiment of a writer’s gifts and the pleasures of reading. She is a lyrical realist, never far from the melancholy of Irish drinkers and suffering survivors of Irish pasts. Her eye and ear miss nothing, but they are not unforgiving. Her prose, as Philip Roth once remarked, is “like a piece of fine meshwork, a net of perfectly observed sensuous details that enables you to contain all the longing and pain and remorse that surge through the fiction.” Her air in conversation seems to say: no palaver, but we can talk about anything.

Edna O’Brien made her reputation detailing the rueful fates of women, in love and life, and not just in the rural West of Ireland, where she grew up. In Saints and Sinners the most memorably sympathetic figures are menfolk of her generation — like Rafferty in the story “Shovel Kings.” He has been digging “the blue clay of London” for electrical cables — and drinking a bit at Biddy Mullugan’s pub in North London — through the half century that Edna O’Brien, too, has been living in exile in England. “Biddy’s was popular,” Rafferty explains, “because they gave five millimeters extra on a small whiskey or vodka. Pondering this for a moment, he said that with drink the possibilities were endless, you could do anything, or thought you could. Moreover, time got swallowed up, or more accurately, as he put it, got lost.” Rafferty becomes a composite picture of the brutal wear and tear on Irish manhood in Edna O’Brien’s time.

‘Mind yourself.’ Those were the last words Rafferty said to me. He did not shake hands, and, as on the first morning, he raised his calloused right hand in a valediction that bespoke courtesy and finality. He had cut me out, the way he had cut his mother out, and those few who were dear to him, not from a hardness of heart, but from a heart that was immeasurably broken.

Under the pavement were the lines of cable that linked the lights of the great streets and the lesser streets of London, as far distant as Kent. I thought of the Shovel Kings, and their names suddenly materialized before me, as in a litany — Haulie, Murphy, Moleskin Muggavin, Turnip O’Mara, Whiskey Tipp, Oranmore Joe, Teaboy Teddy, Paddy Pancake, Accordion Bill, Rafferty, and countless others, gone to dust.

From “Shovel Kings,” in Saints and Sinners.

President Obama was in Ireland, tipping a jar of Guiness, when Edna O’Brien and I recorded our gab in the Boston Athenaeum. Her conversation is at once spontaneous and considered. She is one of those people who likes to interview the interviewer. I’m mystified by the memory of the last time I saw her: after our radio gig, Edna O’Brien in a taxicab got me to sing a Christian communion song that I’d learned to love at the Twelfth Baptist Church in Boston. The refrain is “One day when I was lost, He died upon the cross. I know it was the blood for me.” What I cannot remember is how or why she provoked me to sing, but it sounded right to her — not least because “I love to hear people sing.”

I am curious about people. That’s why I don’t like social life so much. Social life, people put on masks, it’s hypocrisy, it’s not like a real conversation, like used to happen in Russian fiction, in trains: a man would meet a person in a train and they would talk. I like to hear about people’s lives, not just because I want to write about it, which has to be confessed, but because it’s lonely on earth, really, and two things make it less lonely. One is literature, which we have to try and save in this wicked and worried and crazy world. The other is meeting or talking with someone who actually, even for an hour, kind of enchants you. I don’t even mind if people tell me total lies. So long as there is that connectedness, with the imagination, and with the heart, and with what’s deepest in people. You don’t get that much. You get this regularized language, everything is so uniform. The individuality is getting lost.

Edna O’Brien with Chris Lydon at the Boston Athenaeum, May 24, 2011.

Podcast • March 8, 2011

Anthony Burgess: Language as Music, and Vice Versa

Paul Phillips is leading us here in a long digression — a step into yet another alternate universe of the odd genius who wrote A Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess thought his famous tale (and movie!) ...

Paul Phillips is leading us here in a long digression — a step into yet another alternate universe of the odd genius who wrote A Clockwork Orange.

Anthony Burgess thought his famous tale (and movie!) of mindless mayhem was perhaps the least of his efforts, but what he really wanted apart from his endless book production — essays, plays, criticism, and novels of all sizes and styles — was to be understood for the music he wrote. The bet here is that the Burgess symphonies, songs and chamber music that Paul Phillips is sharing will not make the world forget Burgess’ Enderby series of novels, or his fantasy on Shakespeare’s sex life, Nothing like the Sun, or his all-encompassing “life” of a 20th Century expatriate English writer, Earthly Powers. But let’s hope anyway that surprise and delight are reason enough to digress on multiple senses and gifts — reason enough to grant Anthony Burgess’s heart’s desire. “I wish,” he said, “people would think of me as a musician who writes novels, instead of a novelist who writes music on the side.”

Anthony Burgess never forgot being stricken by music as a tot — by “a quite incredible flute solo” he heard on the radio, “sinuous, exotic, erotic.” It turned out to be Debussy’s “Afternoon of a Faun.” It was a “psychedelic moment… a recognition of verbally inexpressible spiritual realities,” and it triggered Burgess’s self-education at the piano, then in composition and orchestration. His family persuaded him that there was no money in music, but his artistic life became a synesthetic web of words and music — much as Thomas Mann rendered the experience of Adrian Leverkühn in Doctor Faustus: “… music and language, he insisted, belonged together, were fundamentally one. Language was music, music a language, and when separated, each always recalled the other, imitated the other, made use of the other means, always to be understood as the substitute for the other.”

Anthony Burgess by David Levine, from The New York Review of Books

I agree that the musico-literary analogies can be pretty tenuous, but in the widest possible formal sense — sonata form, opera, and so on — we’ve hardly begun to explore the possibilities. The Napoleon novel I’m writing apes the Eroica formally: irritable, quick, swiftly transitional in the first movement (up to Napoleon’s coronation); slow, very leisurely, with a binding beat suggesting a funeral march for the second… As for the reader having to know about music, it doesn’t really matter much. In one novel I wrote, “The orchestra lunged into a loud chord of twelve notes, all of them different.” Musicians hear the discord, non-musicians don’t, but there’s nothing there to baffle them and prevent them reading on. I don’t understand baseball terms, but I can still enjoy Malamud’s The Natural. I don’t play bridge, but I find the bridge game in Fleming’s Moonraker absorbing. It’s the emotions conveyed that matter, not what the players are doing with their hands.

… I still play jazz, chiefly on a four-octave electric organ, and I prefer this to listening to it. I don’t think jazz is for listening but for playing. I’d like to write a novel about a jazz pianist or, better, about a pub pianist, which I once was, like my father before me. I don’t think rock leads on to a liking for jazz. The kids are depressingly static in their tastes. They do so want words, and jazz gets along very nicely without words.

… I enjoy writing music precisely because one is divorced from “human” considerations like belief, conduct. Pure form, nothing more. But then I tend to despise music just because it is so mindless. I’ve been writing a string quartet based on a musical theme that Shakespeare throws at us, in sol-fa notation, in Love’s Labour’s Lost (the theme is CDGAEF), and it’s been pure, bliss. I’ve been thoroughly absorbed by it, on planes, in hotel bedrooms, anywhere where I had nothing else to do and there was no bloody Muzak playing. (Don’t the Muzak purveyors ever think of the people who actually have to write music?) Now I’m a little ashamed that the music engages nothing but purely formal problems. So I oscillate between a hankering after pure form and a realization that literature is probably valuable because it says things.

Anthony Burgess with John Cullinan, from the Paris Review Interview, Spring 1973

Composer-Conductor Paul Phillips, Senior Lecturer in Music at Brown University, is leading the Brown Symphony Orchestra in Anthony Burgess’ “Mr. W. S.” this winter. With the Manchester University Press and Macmillan, he has just published A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess.

Podcast • December 1, 2010

Mark Blyth on Ireland: The Circle will not be Squared

Mark Blyth, of Austerity fame and the Watson Institute, has a Scot’s vernacular gift for clarifying economics. Is the situation explosive? “You’ve got 300 million Americans and 500 million handguns. And 72 percent of Americans ...

Mark Blyth, of Austerity fame and the Watson Institute, has a Scot’s vernacular gift for clarifying economics. Is the situation explosive? “You’ve got 300 million Americans and 500 million handguns. And 72 percent of Americans that live paycheck to paycheck. Do the math!”

We’re talking in particular about the Euro crisis spreading out of Ireland. Short form: tiny country, continental meltdown in the offing.

It was never a “Celtic Tiger,” in the first place, in the Blyth telling. “It was a small ocelot with a roar.” A population the size of Brooklyn, NY, producing about 2 percent of the European GDP. And now, in deep pain of cuts in education and health services, it’s having an utterly illusory shouting match, not so unlike ours in the US of A.

“People want to say: look at those profligate governments, spending all that money. We’ve got to restore fiscal sanity. But it wasn’t fiscal insanity that got us here. It was private-sector leverage and the insanity of banking that brought us to this point. So the bankers put it on the state, and the state turned around it put it on the taxpayer. It’s the biggest bait-and-switch in human history.”

As the Euro bankers try to transfer risk and responsibility for their crisis back and forth from private to “sovereign” public debt, I’m asking Mark Blyth — using Ireland as a manageably small example — to find the point where justice could be said to meet necessity. It turns out, he says, that there’s no such point. Not in sight yet, anyway.

The just thing is that the banks should pay. No question. You made the mess. Clean it up. It’s a pretty simple rule. But the basic line is this: if you let the banks fail, there’s nothing coming back. So if you’re Ireland, the Celtic Tiger, and over 10 percent of your GDP is in the financial sector, that’s where you make a lot of money, bankers’ salaries and all that. So let’s say you decide to blow up 10 percent of the economy. What’s your next trick? We can try to reflate it. We can hope that it comes back. We can hope to raise the patient from the dead basically. In order to do that you need to have a growing economy. So obviously hacking away at austerity politics is not going to bring back the bankers’ balance sheets. But on the other hand, it’s not clear what else you do with them. They don’t have any money to pay back, unless you bring the corpse back to life.

Now the only way you can do that is by having growth-enhancing policies, and that’s why austerity is not one of them. But there’s another short-run way you can do this. If you had to take all the debt off the banks and put it on the public balance sheet, thereby making the bondholders of sovereign bonds concerned about the value of their holdings, those sovereign bondholders are going to go to the EU and Germany, and remind the bankers in those countries about all the different bonds they’re holding in all these peripheral and non-peripheral countries, and say: do you want a bank run on this?

Because here’s the deal: if the Irish decide that they’re going to put it on the banks, and the banks can’t pay it — if they say: Screw it, we’re not going to take austerity politics anymore. Hell with it, we’re not going to do this! — okay, what’s your next trick, Ireland? Well, we’re going to default, we’re going to back out of the Euro! Oh, really? The minute I know that, I’m going to dump every Irish bond I can, and the minute I do that I’m going to look at my holdings in bonds and I’m going to say: there’s other guys out there. They can default, too, and probably the Spanish are going to go as well. So then I start dumping the Spanish and then the Portugese. And then everybody’s dumping all these bonds together. You’ve got a massive run that wipes out not just 2 percent of Europe’s GDP, Ireland. It basically takes out the European banking system.

So from the point of view of Europe and the Germans in particular, they’re saying to the Irish: You’re not going anywhere, Ireland. And you’re taking this austerity, and you’re going to like it! The only problem is: they’re not going to. There’s a democracy in Ireland. They’re going to vote the rascals out. And when they vote them out they’re going to get a government that says: maybe the banks should pay for this. And then you’re back to your problem: the banks don’t have any money left. So how are you going to do it? You can’t square a circle!

Mark Blyth with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, Brown University, November 30, 2010

October 13, 2006

Edna O’Brien

Edna O'Brien's new novel The Light of Evening incorporates real letters that her own driving, contentious mother wrote to her from the Irish village where O'Brien's scandalous early work had been literally burned in the chapel yard. So the lyrical fiction here recapitulates the passions of a lifetime: the literary exile, in the grand modern tradition of Joyce and Beckett, and the fierce tension of estrangement and attachment to O'Brien's Irish and family roots.

 

Such is the wrath of the mothers, such is the cry of the mothers, such is the lamentation of the mothers, on and on until the last day, the last bluish tinge, the pismires, the gloaming, and the dying dust.

Edna O’Brien, The Light of Evening

ednaEdna O’Brien’s new novel The Light of Evening incorporates real letters that her own driving, contentious mother wrote to her from the Irish village where O’Brien’s scandalous early work had been literally burned in the chapel yard.

So the lyrical fiction here recapitulates the passions of a lifetime: the literary exile, in the grand modern tradition of Joyce and Beckett, and the fierce tension of estrangement and attachment to O’Brien’s Irish and family roots. Much of the story is imagined in the fevered musings of Delia, the mother known as Dilly:

But her daughter, as she says, is trapped in a life of vice, beyond in England, her young sons in a Quaker school that Dilly was not consulted about, and her books that have scandalized the country, though as Sister is quick to say and the priest remarked to her, the nature sections so beautiful, so enraptured, if only she had excised the flagrant bits.

Edna O’Brien, The Light of Evening

The Light of Evening puts a seal on the conflicts that empowered O’Brien’s rebellion, starting with the famous breakthrough candor of The Country Girls, long banned in Ireland. And surely the music in this 20th book from Edna O’Brien puts the seal of immortality on one of the most admired, most productive literary lives in the English language today. From his Olympus at Yale, Harold Bloom has blessed both the life and the new book with a personal letter to O’Brien. “Joyce I think is your mother, in this book,” Professor Bloom wrote, “and the Joyce-infuenced Faulkner, your father.”

There is vindication here also of Philip Roth’s encomium: “The great Colette’s mantle has fallen to Edna O’Brien–a darker writer, more full of conflict, O’Brien nonetheless shares the earthiness, the rawness, the chiseled prose, the scars of maturity. she is a consummate stylist and, to my mind, the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English.”

We mean to talk with Edna O’Brien not only about mothers and daughters, about exile and The Light of Evening, but about Ireland then and now, and about the United States that Dilly, in the novel, sampled in the 1920’s and rejected. The Irish through the centuries have honed their backstage wits on the observation of Britain’s imperious weight in the world. What do we want this striking green-eyed sage to tell us about ourselves, our writers and politicians, our American performance at home and on the wider stage of this young global century?

Edna O’Brien

Irish novelist

Author, most recently, The Light of Evening

Rebecca Pelan

Lecturer, School of English and Drama, University College Dublin
Extra Credit Reading
John Freeman, Talking with Edna O’Brien, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, September 29th, 2006: “My mother hated, went to her grave, shocked, outraged, that I was a writer,” O’Brien says. “She saw that I had some gifts. She resented it and yet wanted us to be bound together. And that’s very unnerving. Rather than bury this tension, O’Brien has given her mother her wish.”Frank Wilson, blogger at books, inq and book editor for The Philadelphia Inquirier, October 15, 2006: “The greatest storytellers are those who best discern the interior dramas that human beings suffer and inflict in silence – “hearts contracting day by day,” people “visiting little malices on one another in lieu of their missed happiness.” It’s territory that Irish author Edna O’Brien knows as well as any writer alive, something abundantly demonstrated in her masterful new novel.”

Salon, Interview with Edna O’Brien, Salon.com, October 2006:

“Q:Is it better or easier to write about Ireland from outside?

A: I don’t rule out living some of the time in Ireland, but it would be in a remote place, where I would have silence and privacy. It’s important when writing to feel free, answerable to no one. The minute you feel you are answerable, you’re throttled. You can’t do it.”

Claire Dederer, The Mother Load: Edna O’Brien’s Dark Look at the Mother Daughter Bond, Slate, October 11, 2006: “Her admirers–who include Frank McCourt and Alice Munro–urge us to go slowly, to savor her writing. It’s dazzling, they say. Also, radiant. But that’s not why it took me an hour. It took me an hour because I was bored, and it was hard.”