Category: Irish Writers book group

Read for Irish Writers – a joint hybrid meeting with a similar group in Castlebar, County Mayo, which was delightful. Very good but alas I’m blogging this three years later (the quotes were marked in an old Nook and I thought they were lost!) so I don’t remember much, except that it was very dark and realistic. Also the novel has many Plymouth Brethren (the sect into which my dad was born), so that was of interest to me.

• “[Christ] had not forgiven, because she could not forgive herself”
• “‘It is always a woman’s fault, ma’am'” – but Waters shows that not to be true
• “Esther looked at the poor wizened features [of the infant], twitched with pain, and the far-off cry of doom, a tiny tinkle from the verge, shivered in the ear with a strange pathos.”
• “religion is easy enough at times, but there is other times when it don’t seem to fit in with one’s duty”

So the flood of gold continued to roll into the little town, decrepit and colourless by its high shingle beach and long reaches of muddy river. The dear gold jingled merrily in the pockets, quickening the steps, lightening the heart, curling lips with smiles, opening lips with laughter. The dear gold came falling softly, sweetly as rain, soothing the hard lives of working folk. Lives pressed with toil lifted up and began to dream again. The dear gold was like an opiate; it wiped away memories of hardship and sorrow, it showed life in a lighter and merrier guise, and the folk laughed at their fears for the morrow and wondered how they could have thought life so hard and relentless. The dear gold was pleasing as a bird on the branch, as a flower on the stem; the tune it sang was sweet, the colour it flaunted was bright.

Irish Writers selection, but alas I missed the discussion. Once again didn’t have post-it flags with me for most of it, and it’s a long book—too long by half and soap-opera-ish, but I loved the beginning. What struck me the most was Charles Arrowby’s love of food and focus on his little meals and treats, which I 90% identify with (not 100% because I get synergistic pleasure from reading while eating):

I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.

It was early evident to me that my uncle was more loved and fortunate than my father. How does a child perceive such things, or rather how is it that they are so perceptible, so obvious, to a child, who perhaps, like a dog, reads signs which have become invisible amid the conventions of the grown-up world, and are thus overlooked in the adult campaign of deceit?

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

I also took up acting … because I wanted to have fun myself and to procure some for my father. I doubt if he possessed the concept, or ever managed to acquire it later under my eager guidance. In having fun myself I have throughout my life been fairly consistently successful.

This interesting Paris Review essay comments that Arrowby’s food is not as good as it sounds to him, indicative of his self-deception about his character, but also that Iris Murdoch herself loved and ate similar dishes.

Irish Writers selection. I was hooked on the first page, Mahoney’s story of working for Lillian Hellman one summer: “I was as ornery at seventeen as Lillian Hellman was at seventy-three.” A very well-written book but ultimately somewhat infuriating to read (the topic, not the book itself).

In this book I learned about

• Barney and Beaney, cartoon mascots for Batchelor’s beans
• Burren National Park and its remarkable wildflowers
• The poet Eavan Boland
• The “Wellingtonia Gigantea” in Phoenix Park, which led me to this great list of named trees of Ireland

[Francis MacNamara’s] speech was slow and drawling, and there was a great sense of confidentiality in everything he said, for he spoke with his head inclined toward his listener, and often, when shifting the direction of his ideas, he said softly and urgently, “But come here to me,” which was the Irish was of saying, ‘Listen carefully and keep this between us.” Francis sighed heavily when he spoke, as though he had been too long deprived of fresh air.

The conversational competition [in the pub] was fierce and reached far beyond that evening. It was a matter of intellectual hierarchy, who fit where, who was sharpest and most knowledgeable, and who, therefore, deserved the greatest share of attention.

It delighted me that a lone woman could stand at the side of the road and put out her thumb without trepidation. To me, hitching was a bygone freedom, and that I was able to do it here contributed to my feeling that Ireland lay just beyond the corrupting reach of the modern world.

There seemed to be no conventional concept of time here, no concept of having made a promise or a commitment, and they showed not the slightest embarrassment or remorse over their tardiness. Too, the Irish were always delighted to put things off to a later date, even the most pleasurable things—vacations, parties, picnics. Procrastination, indecision, and stalling were symptoms of a chronic national disease that seemed related to a deeper fear of allowing themselves any expectations at all, and I thought it was as a result of this fear that the Irish appeared so deceptively supple and easygoing.

“Sigh sios agus do scith a ligean! Nil aon tintean mar do thintean fhein! La bhrea buiochas le Dia!” Sit down and rest yourself! There’s no fireplace like your own fireplace! It’s a fine day, thank God! These were the platitudinous sayings that people flung out with bold authority when their Irish was rusty or incomplete. The habit was known as the cupla focail, the few words.

Rosemary volunteers with teenagers and is asked her age. She’s already said “thirty” three times before this exchange:

“Rose! I’m askin’ ya how old are ya?”
“I’m thirty, Una,” I said.
Una brought her face around to look at mine again. She was utterly puzzled. Abandoning all pretense at a whisper, she screeched, “What are ya sayin’ to me, Rose?”
Karen, two seats away, saw the problem. “She said she’s torty, Una. Are ya feckin’ deaf?”
“Torty!” Una exclaimed. “Shite! Older dan me mudder.”

“Are you from Dorchester, Massachusets?”
“Very close,” I said and kept walking.
“I have friends and relatives in Dorchester,” he said, following behind me.
“I know,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Every Irish person has friends and relatives in Dorchester.”
At this the man laughed loudly and gave me a friendly slug on the arm. The ease with which Irish people laid their hands on strangers always impressed me.

Subsequent encounter with another guy:

He spoke as though he had known me for years—the way many Irish people speak to strangers with an ease born of a presupposed universal understanding, as though we were all passing through life together, as though my plight couldn’t possibly be any better or worse than his and therefore I couldn’t possibly reject him.

Though fundamentally at odds, religion and superstition served the same ordering, protecting purpose, and in Ireland the two seemed particularly intertwined.

I saw then that … as a foreigner I was beyond his rural purview. That was what [Mick Pat] and the other villagers appreciated about me: I didn’t have to obey their rules, didn’t have to be watched or reined in. I could live alone in a creepy castle without annoying local sensibilities and without being termed mad or brash. Mick Pat had never asked me whether I had a husband or children. I had come from across the ocean and so was exempt from the question.

As I made my way back into the castle I had a powerful feeling of déjà vu. The evening’s familiar display [of shouting conflict] had recalled an entire habit of existence, a vehement, mistrustful, precipitate way of relating that I had witnessed in Ireland but that I had also grown up with and was part of whether I liked it or not.

Greeted with “Lovely morning” on a cool, drizzly day:

I checked his face to see if he was kidding, though I should have known he wasn’t. The Irish always thought this sort of day was beautiful. As long as there was no wind, the rain wasn’t too hard, and the temperature wasn’t too low, the day was beautiful.

Irish Writers selection. A short novel that I found remarkable, both for capturing many different voices in brief chapters, and for the technical brilliance of weaving them together in a narrative without revisiting any. It would have helped me to take notes along the way—I might re-read it at some point.

Most of the inhabitants of this small Irish town, post financial collapse, are miserable. Bobby, the first narrator and effectively the hero, has a father so bitter about his fate that he “trains himself to become a drinker.”

I can forgive him for turning piles of money into piss … I’ll never forgive him for the sulking, though, and the killing sting of his tongue. He ruined every day of our lives with it. Drunk, he was leering and silent and mostly asleep. Sober, he was a watcher, a horror of a man who missed nothing and commented on everything. Nothing was ever done right or cooked right or said right or bought right or handed to him properly or ironed straight or finished off fully with him. We couldn’t breathe right in a room with him. We couldn’t talk freely or easily.

Lily, who sleeps around unashamed and has five children who all leave her, says, “Isn’t that a fright, after a life spent blackening my soul for him, for all of them? Yerra what about it, sure wasn’t I at least the author of my own tale? And if you can say that as you depart this world, you can say a lot.”

Vasya loves to look at water:

The evening sun turns it to a glistening, dazzling thing that has no place on this dull earth except in that short time before sunset. That light is a trick: if I were to swim to it or row out to put my hand upon it, it would be gone as I approached and there would be only dark, cold water in its place.

Bridie, mourning her drowned son:

I came to a little church with a lovely name: Star of the Sea. I went in and knelt down and blessed myself and bowed my head and anyone looking on would have thought I was praying to God for my lost son. I wasn’t, I was cursing Him. You bastard, I was saying, you bastard, just because your son was killed, have we all to suffer forever? Have you not had enough revenge? And your boy only stayed dead three days. Will my boy be back on Sunday, the way yours was?

There’s also a reference to the Pixies’ Black Francis, extra-cool because he lives around here!

Irish Writers selection. I first read Dubliners in college and have re-read “The Dead” several times since—love it, as many do—but I don’t think I’d revisited the other stories, and this edition provided so many interesting details that it took me a long time to get through it! Each story has a sidebar of dozens/hundreds of references explained (sometimes dwarfing the original text in total length), plus there are pages of commentary, alternate versions, and wonderful supporting photos and reproductions. Here are some great little tidbits I learned:

• “jerry hat” in “Encounters” is explained as a “hard round hat, popular in the mid-nineteenth century” but then the footnote elaborates that the full name was “Tom and Jerry hat,” after Corinthian Tom and Jerry Hawthorn, characters in Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821). A play called Tom and Jerry was adapted from it in 1822, which a) must be the original of the cartoon names and b) was advertised as an “entirely new classic, comic, operatic, didactic, moralistic, Aristophanic, localic, analytic, terpsichoric, panoramic, camera-obscura-ic extravaganza burletta of fun, frolic, fashion and flash.” Whoa!
• “Araby” references “The Arab’s Farewell to His Steed” [sic–actually it’s Horse] which I recited over-dramatically in character as part of a skit celebrating the Susquehanna County Historical Society & Free Library Association‘s 100th anniversary.
• Hugh Kenner’s “Uncle Charles Principle“—how Joyce subtly uses a character’s idiom in what appears to be objective narration
• The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent, Exposed: ILLUSTRATED . Wikipedia quotes Richard Hofstader claiming it was “[p]robably the most widely read contemporary book in the United States before Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”
• the Yankee Rubber Baby
• Joyce’s satirical poems “The Holy Office” and “Gas from a Burner,” with the great couplet “I printed poets, sad, silly and solemn; I printed Patrick What–do-you-Colm”
• “Among Joyce’s books was an 1893 copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s Novel Notes, with the telling inscription ‘Stolen from Stanislaus Joyce by the present owner.’ Either brother might have written it.”
• About “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” Stanislaus commented, “My brother was never in a committee-room in his life.”

Quotes

• “Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money.”
• “[he was] conscious of the labor latent in money”
• Poor Little Chandler in “Little Cloud” starts thinking about maybe writing poetry, and jumps right to “invent[ing] sentences and phrases from the notices which his book would get” and planning what version of his name would look best
• Mrs. Kearney “respected her husband in the same way as she respected the General Post Office, as something large, secure and fixed.”
• “At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had gathered in clumps to watch the cars careering homeward and through this channel of poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry. Now and again the clumps of people raised the cheer of the gratefully oppressed.”