Kevin Kiely's "Francis Stuart": Book Review

Kevin Kiely. Francis Stuart: Artist and Outcast. (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2007) €22.95; paper. vii. 365 pp.
Review for Etudes Irlandaises 35-1(2010):195-6 published in shorter form.

A quarter-century of a friendship between a student and an elderly author frames this authorized biography of Stuart. His marriage to Maud Gonne’s daughter Iseult, contentious relationship with Yeats, and imprisonment for anti-Treaty gunrunning earned this troubled young poet attention even before his stint in WWII Berlin. His broadcasts from the Nazi capital gained him infamy, his alleged collaboration and purported antisemitism continued to rile critics a half-century later, and he remained to the end of his long life, as Kiely’s subtitle situates Stuart, opposed to conformity.

All the while, he wrote, over twenty-five works. Most of his novels– often written in haste, for money, and under stress-- remain out-of-print, often deservedly; on the few in print, notably his autobiographical fiction Black List, Section H (1971), his vexed reputation rests. As an outsider committed to relegation to the margins as his portal into truth, aesthetically and personally, his stubborn refusal can annoy. Much of Kiely’s thorough account finds his patient biographer struggling to explain Stuart’s mind-set. As prickly as his prose-style can be in its hesitant, awkward, and determined expression of moral confusion, spiritual longing, and social malaise, Stuart’s ambiguous frankness permeates his best writings.

Kiely unravels what earlier studies, a short 1974 monograph by Jerry Natterstad and a basic 1990 life by Geoffrey Elborn, could not have revealed. With access to previously closed Department of Foreign Affairs files on Stuart copied from originals (destroyed in Berlin) by the Irish Legation who tracked him, and with intimate knowledge from long conversations over the decades, Kiely depicts a respectful, never fawning or ingratiating, portrait of enigmatic Stuart. Although lacking lengthy analysis of his fiction and other writings, it replaces Anne McCartney’s erratic 2000 thesis for a spare survey of Stuart’s literary production over nearly eight decades. Perhaps after Kiely’s arrangement of first-hand reporting building upon previous criticism and archival records, in-depth investigation into Stuart’s fiction may progress more confidently.

After introducing Kiely’s relationship with Stuart, the book moves chronologically. Thirty-three chapters divide up a life beginning in 1902, when his father, a struggling emigrant from Antrim to Australia, committed suicide. Stuart’s mother took him back to Co Meath; he was raised in British boarding schools. He dropped out of Rugby, and early on displayed an inability to settle down. Before he was eighteen, he courted Iseult Gonne, who already at twenty-five had fended off two of Yeats’s marriage proposals and had been a lover of Ezra Pound.

Kiely glosses over, oddly given his subject’s iconoclasm, Stuart’s sudden conversion before eighteen to Catholicism; his father was of Ulster Presbyterian stock and his mother from a British Loyalist military family. Sexually inexperienced, spiritually yearning, Stuart sought Iseult’s glamour even as he recoiled from Yeats’s grasp. Before nineteen, Stuart fathered a daughter, Kay; he was off at Maud’s Glenmalure cottage "trying to write and awaiting a permit for his motorcycle when he received the news by telegram" of her birth. (50)

His fecklessness repeated with his hesitant role in the Civil War; he supported De Valera while rejecting his Catholic-Gaelic vision. Jailed for fifteen months, he emerged from the Curragh with his poetry already published. Thanks to the patronage of Yeats, who had just won the Nobel Prize, Stuart emerged into a limelight he fled. Overwhelmed by Maud, Yeats, and Iseult with new son Ian, Stuart retreated to Wicklow’s Laragh Castle, bought by Maud for the family. He travelled to Paris, meeting briefly Joyce, but Stuart preferred the Dublin company of Liam O’Flaherty, Beckett, Con Leventhal, and Arland Ussher. His novels began to be published, garnering mixed reviews as they appeared in rapid succession. "As a writer, he eventually became dubious about ‘art’ and fine writing; and used language with expert suspicion as if it were borrowed, flawed and brittle. His mature writing style is reluctant and dissenting." (27)

His publisher, Victor Gollancz, characterized Stuart as more a "poet-philosopher" than a novelist. Pigeon Irish and The Coloured Dome (both 1932) revealed his mystical, utopian, restless spirit bent on apocalypse, purgation, and renewal. Try the Sky merged his initial Fitzgerald-Hemingway influences into the first Irish fiction about the Nazis, based on a Vienna visit. Glory deepened his fascination with dictators and fascists. This attraction influenced The Angel of Pity (1935) as nihilism contended against esotericism. His later 1930s novels about adultery, fraud, and horse racing reflected his fancies, but he needed a cause.

Kiely asserts that the "core events of Stuart’s life" began only after the death of Yeats. Iseult suggested her unhappy husband travel to Berlin on an academic exchange program in April 1939. His biographer reiterates how Maud and Iseult "can be accurately portrayed as typical of a minority of Irish people who were also pro-German because they were anti-British." (119) Kiely carefully cites Stuart’s distaste for Hitler. Kiely sets a context for Stuart’s opinion formed then that fifty years later would spark outrage: "if there was a Jewish idea, which was surely a contradiction, it was a hidden, unheroic, and critical one, a worm that could get into a lot of fine-looking fruit." (qtd. 121) Kiely relates this aspersion to Stuart’s distrust of romantic Iseult’s proud abstraction, as opposed to the subversive Jewish reliance upon the sensually concrete.

Stuart’s German years have been documented extensively, but Kiely adds details from copies of wartime files kept by the Irish government. (He makes a minor error with the "Republic of Ireland" [124] opposing at the outbreak of WWII the British seizure of ports; the de facto Republic was not declared officially until 1948.) The complications of Iseult’s affair with a doomed German spy while Stuart took a mistress, and while he commenced radio talks transmitted to Ireland, challenge elucidation. Kiely accepts that those charging Stuart with Nazi support can be justified, but Kiely rejects an equation with "sympathizer" for Stuart. "The issue of collaborator and traitor is another matter." (137) Such diplomacy permeates this biography.

A hanger-on among Irish and British disaffected expatriates, Stuart distanced himself from propagandist Lord Haw-Haw. Stuart imagined escaping Berlin for Moscow with a young student, Gertrude Meissner. Renaming her Madeleine, they commenced a relationship that would endure until her death in 1986. Interrogated by the Gestapo, an apolitical intellectual revolutionary disenchanted with collectivism or capitalism, Stuart sought dissension. The Irish Legation refused to help him as Germany’s defeat neared. The couple roamed as refugees until they were interned for eight months after the war in French-occupied Austria.

Seán MacBride, now seeking political power, disdained his sister’s unfaithful husband. Unable to divorce, fearing that her former lover Ezra Pound’s insanity brought on by his arrest as another fascist abetter would repeat with Stuart, and not knowing the full extent of Madeleine’s relationship, Iseult waited with Kay and Ian for Stuart’s peacetime repatriation. He, trying to create fact out of his fiction, insisted that his ménage à trois be imported into Laragh Castle.
Resisting deportation from Paris, Stuart welcomed Irish exile. "He had an instinct that his poetic destiny involved social ostracism." (qtd. 176) This self-appraisal from Black List energized his postwar novels. The Pillar of Cloud, Redemption, and The Flowering Cross, written in Freiburg, Austria, present the artist as outcast. As the titles promise, religious symbolism mixes with bohemian misfits grappling with evil in a war-ravaged Europe unable to understand their aesthetic communism and moral defiance.

Returning from Paris to Laragh, Stuart found Iseult finally resigned to her husband’s infidelity. After Iseult’s death in 1954, Madeleine and "Grim" settled in London. On the night-shift as a museum guard, Stuart labored in near-poverty while continuing, as always, to publish novels. In 1958, the married couple moved to Co Meath. Victors and Vanquished, with its Berlin Jewish family facing the Holocaust, previewed what in1961-62 became Black List, with Stuart assuming the role of "H." "Whether H is an outcast or traitor, as for Stuart, it is up to each reader to decide for themselves."(149) This stance sums up Kiely’s steady reaction to Stuart’s elusive convictions.

Stuart’s masterwork lacks sustained analysis here for its halting style. Its eerily transparent prose evokes an evasive teller’s attempt, in autobiographical fiction, to testify to his past. Kiely, although underplaying this unsettling impact of Black List, provides as he intends the details of its production, and Stuart’s decade-long effort to find a publisher.

The return of the Troubles, with one who had fought in them the first time, revived protest, first for Stuart’s well-titled play Who Fears to Speak (1970), and then his experimental novels Memorial and A Hole in the Head. Kiely finds that these two "dare go as close to deranged prose as composition will bear." (269) The 1970s found Stuart returning to Dublin and attention. (A small addition: Stuart translated then from French an account by Christian de la Mazière of his service with the Waffen SS, Le Rêveur Casqué, issued in Britain as Ashes of Honour; Kiely omits that an American printing appeared in 1974 as The Captive Dreamer.)

The new assembly Aósdana invited Stuart, and eager for the pension, he accepted despite his often-stated disdain for artists who glean honors. While he parodied it in his innovative The High Consistory, this and Faillandia, also preoccupied with alternative visions of an satirized Ireland, kept Stuart’s 1980s novels appealing to a small readership. A Compendium of Lovers presented another farrago of cosmic speculation, theological musings, and autobiographical fancy. Determined to defy expectations, fêted by Haughey while protesting Reagan, Stuart’s last decades would draw him back into public debate.

Kiely avers that Stuart lacked "a definitively prescriptive morality." (285) At 85, marrying Finola Graham, an artist born in 1945, Stuart upended expectations. He searched within "apparent failure" a reason to endure. Intrigued by Edward Schillebeeckx’s presentation of a human Jesus left behind on the Cross, Stuart in the puzzling polemic The Abandoned Snail Shell attempted to explain his understanding of the Risen Christ as one who in defeat found triumph.

The death of Kay was followed by a Channel 4 documentary about the Holocaust. His interviewer implied that Stuart’s residence in Berlin was antisemitic. This airing resurrected fury. In late 1996, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, wife of Conor Cruise O’Brien, rallied for Stuart’s resignation from Aósdana. The motion fizzled when few of his peers supported Stuart’s expulsion; Mhac an tSaoi herself left the guild. Many in the liberal media supported Stuart’s critics, others defended him. "A suitably penitent Stuart," after over a year of media frenzy, publicly repudiated any "imputed tendencies to anti-Semitism," Kiely remarks, "in his person or his writings." (312)

Stuart later won a libel suit against Kevin Myers of The Irish Times, but this affair took its toll on a very old man. Cared for by Ian, he went to Laragh, His son intervened as his father ripped up Iseult’s diary. Harboring guilt, Stuart appears never to have resolved his relationship with her. His final work, the novella King David Dances, explores the impact of Heidegger, typically combined with its protagonist’s search for his lost cat.

Back with Finola on the coast of Co Clare, Stuart looked out over Galway Bay. He fantasized sailing off to Aran with a cat and a crate of sherry. Nearly 98, after coming down with a Christmas flu, he died in 2002 in an Ennis hospital; "just on his last breath he opened his eyes so wide, as if at last he had seen something revelatory." (326-27) Kiely reports that The Irish Times reported his place of death as his flat at Fanore, another case of printed invention ending this author’s long tussle with unequivocal fact.

Declan Kiberd's "Ulysses & Us": Book Review

A critic strives to reconnnect ordinary readers with a book meant for, and about, the rest of us. His colleagues strangle "Ulysses" in theoretical nets; average folks often fear, mock or abandon it. Unfairly, Kiberd insists; Joyce teaches us how to understand his narrative.

Kiberd rues: "A book which set out to celebrate the common man and woman endured the sad fate of never being read by most of them. Was this a case of bad faith or bohemian hypocrisy in a work which idealised just the sort of simple souls who could never hope to read it?" (7) This guide and commentary-- unlike his own handy Penguin 1992 Student's Annotated Student's Edition (never available in the US and enmeshed in the copyright battles over the Joyce estate abroad; based on the Bodley Head 1960 printing)-- does not seek a line-by-line commentary. However, it'd be a welcome primer. As with David Pierce's similarly themed, recent "Reading Joyce" (see my Amazon review), Kiberd blows away dust. Neither book might be the very first to consult when taking up this novel, but they'd come early on in one's supplemental instruction. Both scholars show us how a century ago readers came to face this work, and how, after nearly another century, aided by scholarship, we can restore the wonder of this dazzling narrative.

Bohemia may have inspired early Joyce, but "Ulysses" determines to be less Stephen Dedalus and more Leopold & Molly Bloom: it's a bourgeois setting. It celebrates the mundane and tells how to recapture the awe in the everyday moment "In that context, Ulysses exists like a blasted road sign in a war zone, pointing at a future that is exhilarating to precisely the extent that it is uncertain and open." (21)

This work promotes an engaged Everyman, but the failure of the 20th century it heralded shows that its "world so lost turns out to have been far better than that which replaced it." We lack middle-class culture that modernism, social democracy, and the text sought to place within our grasp. Instead, "mass entertainment" reduces "all the oppositional forces of modernism" to supplant them with "only the identikit shopping mall, the ubiquitous security camera and the celebrity biography." Our train conductor will not regale us with a quote from Shakespeare as we alight in Limerick; "overpaid experts and underpaid service providers" replaced the sidewalk flaneur and public character on the street with us, scurrying towards our locked cars "from one private moment to another." (24)

The next chapter on the novel's ties back to the Irish past and its revival promises an emphasis, for once, on Irish-language predecessors. This subject could display Kiberd's bilingual expertise. Yet, beyond typically provocative asides such as how the novel might be reconfigured as "a central text of the Gaelic revival," this theme languishes in far too brief a section. (36)

Eighteen chapters follow. It would have helped to have a preface to this book explaining Kiberd's overall aims. Kiberd gives over the bulk of his necessarily brisk explication; by titling each of his chapter commentaries on "Ulysses" with a verb he neatly remind us of its predominant action: "Waking; Learning; Thinking; Walking; Praying; Dying; Reporting; Eating; Reading; Wandering; Singing; Drinking; Ogling; Birthing; Dreaming; Parenting; Teaching; Loving."

Stephen keeps the British confused; his rebellion's neither as lackey nor terrorist. "He refuses to be easily decoded. So in truth does Joyce's book." (49) The novel rescues one day from dullness. On 16 July 1904 when not much happened historically, a lot gets recorded imaginatively. This frees its Irish characters.

Shifting from Stephen with Deasy's conversation, via Sandymount strand, then to Bloom's monologue, Kiberd links them with an easily overlooked motif. His observant eye assists experienced readers to recall images and associations rewarding repeated visits to the text. While "Deasy valued shells" for what they were as objects, "and not for the life which they contained," young Dedalus "seeks their inner meaning, the soul which animates their exterior form." (64) Bloom will soon praise the first man bold enough to eat an oyster; later Kiberd muses about Bloom's attraction for Molly as "Sirens" ends: "The rhythm of sex, like the rise and fall of the sea-tides, produces desire and then forgiveness, a sound to be heard in the seashell thrown up on the beach (though what is heard is really the pulsing of the listener's own blood)." (177-78)

Like "Ulysses," Kiberd's focus rapidly may alter. The chapters move quickly as their source-text does. The pace of both author and critic demands attention to details. A Latin Quarter hat, Plumtree's Potted Meat, the "U.P." postcard message, Bloom's defecation all earn scrutiny. The first three episodes present "a version of the problem to which Bloom might be the answer." (80-81) Styles alter every chapter, Kiberd suggests, to further the reader's education as much as Stephen's, as the bohemian pose of the student with the hat weakens under the force of the bourgeois life examined scrupulously-- by a newspaper ad, a rumor, the body's demands-- so as to release wonder from daily routine.

A critic may, after immersion, adapt the text so long cited into his or her own prose. Kiberd begins "Dying": "At funerals people formally mourn the dead person, while privately experiencing an even deeper sadness for those who remain in the world." (100) The chapter on another theme starts: "Reading was often the last thing on Joyce's mind when he visited the National Library. Like many Dublin libraries, it was used more for talk than study." (157) Kiberd remarks about the city he shares with Joyce: "In Dublin there are only two kinds of joke-- those that were once funny, and those that were never funny." (104) The avuncularity of these comments shadows their sharpness, in true civic register.

The difficulty of keeping a tone, for author, emerges for this critic early on in the interior monologues. Even by the newspaper visit, the insertion of headlines shows the dangers of misleading a reader, as a sub-editor often has not studied the articles themselves under pressure of deadlines. Kiberd uses this example to illustrate Joyce's risk-taking. Unsure of his own tonal perfection, Joyce warns of language churned out mechanically, formulaically "Joycean." So, the author as a clever modernist keeps updating his art, with no version staying "final" or "official." Similarly, as this editor knows, he and his colleagues add to the textual indeterminacy of never one "authorized" text of "Ulysses."

Instability in "Cyclops" widens the gaps as the narrative continues. Bloom's monologue goes missing. Interior richness fades at Barney Kiernan's. The Gaelic literary tradition's oral culture's "shreds and radiant fragments" break the chapter's juxtapositions into banal barstool dialogue. Not even Joyce, Kiberd holds, could sustain the "density" of earlier chapters, and gaps open up to allow other voices to enter the novel.

Similarly, as Bloom's watch stops at the time of the assignation of Blazes Boylan with Molly at 4 p.m., so the narrative skips and hastens. What in "Nausikaa" alternated between Bloom and Gerty and then merged briefly increases in "Oxen of the Sun" as Joyce takes on all of English literature (with as Kiberd notes the exceptions of Chaucer and Shakespeare) as the author determines to escape any system able to hold him down. Kiberd emphasizes the novelty of "Ulysses": "its strategies changed as it was written, by way of the writer's reaction to the reception of earlier episodes, and with no clear sense of the total conception until the final phase was written." (225) The pace quickens and the prose often thickens, until, in Nighttown, it leaves chronology behind for "the timeless zones of the unconscious."

We learn in "Ithaca" much about Stephen and Bloom that monologues could not tell us. Their conversations in "Eumaeus" remained wayward, warm if tentative. These sections, often discouraging readers, regain their worth in Kiberd's interpretation. A combination of the parental role of Bloom in the former and the catechetical mode of the latter chapter shows how the intellectual may reclaim the ordinary. After Stephen leaves, thoughts of a psalm of liberation accompany him. Left behind, Bloom goes to bed. There the novel was supposed to have ended.

Yet, "as Molly counter-signed her husband's passport to eternity," surprises await. (259) Masturbation, uniting solitary spouses that day, found both Blooms soon thinking of each other. This subversive action, Kiberd holds, represents a satisfaction that neither the glimpse of Gerty or the embrace of Blazes could. As for the often contradictory sections of Molly's revelations, Kiberd proposes that she be treated not "as a definite person," but "'the voice of the book,' a voice that breaks out of gender confines and individual identity." (272) As for her husband, so for Molly; they can be seen "moving out of time and into the infinite."

Five chapters of this study close with literary antecedents. The influence of the "Odyssey" moves Kiberd to regard Homer's epic as anticipating "many features of the lives of the civic bourgeoisie," while Joyce's response laments "bourgeois virtues that were fast disappearing." (282) Prophetic modes in the Old Testament fulfilled in the New play off of latent powers unleashed in "Ulysses." Lacking any quotation marks within, this novel encompasses all voices that predicted it.

Dante and "Hamlet" offer two examples of how masters may guide followers through danger, on pilgrimage and in coming-of-age. These essays recall Erich Auerbach's comparative perspectives, and roam as widely. Throughout, Kiberd grounds most of "Ulysses" in its quotidian, even modest, assertions of the mundane as magical. The interpreter of the past strives to recover a fidelity that the present can never match. Yet, in this dismantling of the original, a new text responds and renews it.

Response and renewal, by ingesting earlier texts and cannibalizing his own, characterize Joyce's process to resist incorporation and parody by his literary heirs. Kiberd reiterates the contents of "Ulysses" that emerge once its scaffolding falls away, its veils drop. As wisdom literature no less than the Torah: "Everything was in the holy book, including all that had been known to predecessors." (301) The Irish epic binds the sacred to the mundane. Bloom's humility corrects Stephen's aestheticism. The body, as both Blooms show, can soothe the overexcited mind. Intellect need not be divorced from experience, as the sacramental transformation in "Ulysses" emerges by "an almost tantric sense of delayed gratification." (353) In a world far busier than Joyce's, Kiberd urges readers-- in this helpful guide by another textual master-- to reclaim the magic within not only this great story's telling, but in our own relationships, objects, thoughts, and words.

P.S. I caught three minor slips in this work that relies on a wealth of knowledge as vast as its inspiration. "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha" Kiberd attributes on pg. 191 to the Buddha, but this koan conventionally has been credited to the founder of the Zen Rinzai sect, Linji. "St. Theresa" should be Teresa, as "of Avila"-- not Therese of Lisieux-- part of one of "saintly couples" on pg. 275, here aligned with St. John of the Cross. The "famous NASA photograph of the earth" was not "taken from the moon in 1969." (327) It was sent as "Earthrise" from the lunar orbiter Apollo 8 on Christmas Eve 1968.

(P.P.S. Again in the transatlantic publishing battle, those Brits beat us Yanks. So, is copyright [as with so much in the Joyce industry] to blame? Why Eve Arnold's ca. 1952 snap of Marilyn Monroe graces the Faber cover while we're peddled Norton's duller shot of the early edition of this big fat tome by duller comparison beats me.) (A somewhat briefer review appeared on Amazon US 12-15-09.)

Tony Bailie's "The Lost Chord": Book Review

Phil Lynott's swagger combined with Rory Gallagher's blues: while Gino Morgan's story's filed under fiction, it reads like fact. Not a novel so much as one of those rock-star biographies penned not by the star, but by one who knew him or her back when. And now, when the money's low and the fame's dimmed for the groupie, the sidekick, or in this case the rhythm guitarist, it's time to cash in what memories can be resurrected from the drug-addled informant. This novel reads as if such a true-- taken with the proverbial grains of coke-- story of life on the road with one more famous than one's self, often penned by a ghostwriter if not written entirely by a journalist or a hack, out of the taped transcripts and the press kit clippings and the bleary pub crawls.

An Irish journalist, Bailie provides an intriguing framework for this milieu. Manus Brennan alternates, as the novel begins, his current fate, literally washed-up on the shore, looking for wrack to light the fire that keeps his boozy body warm. He had joined Duil, a hard-rock Irish band who reminds me of Thin Lizzy's hard rock with a dash of Horslips' progressive folk. Seven years after the band's dissolution, Manus begins to narrate his tale, blended with his reply to what the few who bother with asking him anything really want to know: where's Gino?

This attendant status, Manus admits, makes him "a second-rate guitarist in a first-rate rock band." Nobody cares much about him, actually. Anyone interviewing him wants to know what he knew about Gino, six-foot-five, swarthy, sexy, and shapeshifting. While eager biographers already have published books on what might have happened to Gino-- who at the peak of debauchery vanished on tour in Germany-- the mystery of his disappearance fuels only improbable rumors that remain uncorroborated.

Into this miasma, Martina Lucas, a Californian with an "expensive" accent (as a less-affluent native of the Golden State myself I'm still pondering this adjective), enters Manus' aimless existence. His wife's left him, he's practically a recluse, and any music he tries to make with a band after Gino comes with an inevitable tag: "Manus Brennan (ex-Duil) on lead guitar." Even when he tries to establish his own talent, he's only hired for his past brush with fame, in the figure of Gino. Gino's fate fuels gossip among fans and tabloids. Martina's own interest in Manus appears only another manipulation of the servant who once waited on the fabled lord.

Speculation draws Manus towards Martina, who in turn seeks to use Manus to draw out the other members of Duil. She's keen on promoting her own tale to peddle to the press about Gino. Perhaps Martina's scamming the band, as her appearance's timed with Duil releasing old tapes and passing them off with their manager's connivance as Gino's contributions mailed in after his vanishing act seven years before. The mythmaking process enchants not only fans but the press and Duil's other members, who silently collude in their own desperate attempts to pay their debts and live off of their only meal ticket, Gino, after he goes missing. If he's not there, his mystique must do. Bills need to be paid. Complicating this state of Duil's predicament after Gino left them with their creditors calling, Martina suspects that Gino arranged his own departure, and that his junkie chic comedown was more a pose than an affliction. Her theory of monastic intrigue impels a doubting Manus to follow. He wonders if her search will be better substantiated than the earlier reports purporting to solve Gino's fate.

Bailie explores the experiences of a type of protagonist little attended to in fiction. Adding to its interest, the novel enters a place once and long relegated to the margins of British popular music. There's no overt time period to betray the immediacy of the action, but Bailie, by keeping the plot clean of any real-life band comparisons, wisely allows us to think of this quest occurring within a time less linked to a particular trend or era, pixellating magnification capabilities aside.

The island's rock scene itself gains little overt attention, although the clash of Irish trad with arena power provides quite an appealing subplot. It's an Irish novel more in its matter-of-fact presentation of traditional musicians, brief snatches of scenery, or the passing observation.

"The evening is heavy with rain as we leave the sodium lit distortion of Belfast behind us and climb up to where the city peters out in the foothills of the Black Mountain. Bundles of houses appear now and again, separate from the suburban sprawl but with no real identity of their own. The road I drive is narrow and twisting and made dangerous by the floods of rain that pound it." (171)

The precision of the detail, sparely given, echoes Bailie's poetry. He's a local, who gives us what we need, and moves on.

A non-Irish writer would have likely ladled in more garish color. Mercifully free of whimsy, light on the emotions, and efficiently paced, the story moves with more direction if as much economy as its feckless teller. We get the backstory of Gino and his bandmates through the straightforward, more serviceable than striking prose style that fits its speaker, an observant but not unconvincingly eloquent man down on his luck whose only way back into fortune is his link to his former semi-celebrity days.

I'm not sure if this was Bailie's intention, but reading this I found a tonal harmony. Parts of Manus' narrative fall into that rather stolid evocation of one who recollects in tranquility one's barnburning days. Less as a prime mover and more as a rolling stone, Manus found himself with an offer he could not refuse. He joined Duil when they were already famous, and he after a concert of theirs.

The dutiful details emerge parallel here in fiction to how many rock-star stories are told in fact. It blurs and bores a bit at times, as Manus seeks to align his wavering existence against the energy of the magnetic personality, Gino. Manus was recruited by him at 19; now 33, he already feels as if he'll be living in the past, the few years with Gino will be Manus' only success in the decades to come. This verisimilitude makes sense. Manus lacks the charisma of the lead singer. It's always Gino's tale the hearer wants; Manus must endure as a means to this end.

The supporting character to the star never grabs, of course, the spotlight. Yet, Bailie's oblique strategy allows us to witness fame at this slight but persistent remove. Gnosticism, the appeal of the resurrected hero, and the veneration of idols all enter this book lightly, but offer a thoughtful gloss on the rock-star milieu that perceives its legends emerging, if we entered another dark age, via oral transmission. Two thousand years from now, what saints might elicit our prayers? We invent deities no less than the early Christians, seeking to recover the light that Sufis, rabbis, and lamas saw. This meditated perspective, at a half-turn from one who first worshiped the band as a fan before joining Duil, gives us a Gino less mundane than Manus witnessed in his first incarnation. "His gaunt craggy face could twist into the grimaces of a thousand agonies before settling into the smile of benign sainthood." (15)

Therefore, in Gino's after-life or half-life as attested to by those who were his eyewitness apostles and those who report on the messiah second-hand, the novel gently shifts gears into in an energy more mysterious. Perhaps Gino's appeal lay not only in his riffs or his songs, but in his aura? How, exactly, can one explain a celebrity's charisma-- perhaps in the root meaning of that word? In this evangelical register, unlike its earlier emulation of the many rock-star biographies written by others who knew so-and-so, "loyal acolyte" Manus' tale betters so many half-awed, half-jaded accounts of gods made flesh on stage. Duil, which is a word never defined (perhaps as this home-grown novel comes from Belfast's Lagan Press), means "desire," that strong lure that pulls you along. You may not realize you're hooked.

Available directly from: The Lagan Press, Belfast. Posted belatedly to British Amazon 11-8-09 and cross-posted 6-6-08 to "Blogtrotter".

Michael Parker's "Northern Irish Literature: 1956-2006": Book Review

I paste below the entirety of my review from this issue: Estudios Irlandeses 4 (2009): 139-42. Also on Amazon US.

Michael Parker. Northern Irish Literature: The Imprint of History. 1956-2006. (Basingstoke, Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Northern Irish Literature, 1975-2006 (Volume 1) 357 pp. + xx & Northern Irish Literature, 1975-2006 (Volume 2) 334 pp. + xix.

Reviewer: John L. Murphy.

“Each gives the other’s lines a twist,” claimed Michael Longley about his fellow poets in their northern statelet who conversed and contended with each other (qtd. 1: xviii). The twists, and the contortions, of Northern Ireland entangled themselves into its intricate poetry, drama, fiction, and criticism over the past fifty years. Michael Parker straightens out their creators' mutual connections, and tracks their deviations from each other's lines. His narrative of the long escalation and gradual easing of the Troubles, historically analysed and politically amplified, accompanies his two-volume critique of selected literary productions from the province.

Parker, professor at the University of Central Lancashire, compiled The Hurt World, an anthology of short stories about the Troubles, along with an examination of Heaney; he co-edited essay collections, one on postcolonialism, and another on contemporary Irish fiction. His qualifications show his familiarity with an abundance of authors, famous and otherwise, worthy of inclusion. Nearly free of jargon— although “verfremdungseffekt” leaps out of a Mahon critique— and accessible to those outside the academy, these paired volumes were eleven years in preparation.

They combine close readings-- from lesser known and more familiar poets, playwrights, and short story writers, and novelists-- with a detailed history of political conflicts in the province from the implementation of both British decolonisation and IRA’s Operation Harvest through the decommissioning of the IRA and the recent institution of power sharing.

Rather than endlessly reciting texts and dates, Parker analyses fewer authors. He selects representative works from men and women, unionists and nationalists. By a chronological presentation, he tallies a half-century’s responses to violence and its cessation. Exploring instability, he addresses the “twist” of “the other’s lines” drawn on paper—or sketched as boundaries sundered by invasion, subversion, or imposition. Each chapter opens with an historical description, interspersed with microscopically close readings of one text. Literary criticism, journalism (both contemporary and retrospective reports), and interviews enrich contexts within which writers respond to escalating disruptions.

Addressing Sam Thompson’s Over the Bridge, Parker reveals his strategy. First performed in 1960, this play “anticipates the apprehensiveness of many subsequent ‘Troubles’ writers over direct representations of violence” (1:7). The oblique, or detached, preference that Ronan Bennett has argued dominates many Northern Irish writers’ responses does not jibe with Parker’s alignment of those who may hesitate, but who do not beg off their engagement with the tensions that trap them alongside their neighbours. Sifting through material that has been refined by previous investigators, Parker’s careful recovery of artifacts may overwhelm a casual observer. For example, volume one lists over 1250 notes for about 260 pages of text. Maps, timelines, and bibliographies follow. Yet, Parker’s diligence reveals determination to present honestly actions blurred by revision.

Summarising NICRA’s August 1968 march takes a long paragraph. Six citations move from Communist organiser Betty Sinclair to Marxist Anthony Coughlan’s clash with NICRA back to Sinclair before quoting Gerry Fitt, Bernadette Devlin, and an historian on the IRA. In one endnote, Parker substantiates Coughlan’s claim with a paper now in Roy Johnston’s collection; Parker locates an error from a leader interviewed by historians in their Dungannon account which relied upon this reference. Parker then quotes from Johnston’s letter to him in support of his own correction.

These superscripted numbers add up to hundreds per chapter, but by this diligence Parker accumulates a comprehensive evaluation of primary and secondary sources from participants as well as commentators or critics. Furthermore, Parker remembers the telling detail. At the much-mythologised Dungannon where NICRA faced an RUC police cordon and “1500 counter-demonstrators from Paisley’s UPV,” that NICRA contingent heard Sinclair, perhaps cannily given the media’s presence, exhort two-and-a-half thousand marchers to join her in “We Shall Overcome” (1: 75). Most had never heard of it. They reverted soon to “A Nation Once Again.”

Reacting to the August 1969 riots that overcame such civil rights protests, John Hewitt struggled with what many of his peers would face: how to transfer words and thoughts from the private domain into a larger political narrative that demanded articulation? Parker recovers Hewitt’s An Ulster Reckoning along with works such as Heaney’s “The Tollund Man” or “Punishment” which cloaked Irish struggles within earlier sacrifices. Parker quotes Heaney’s self-scrutiny regarding linguistic failure to do justice to local atrocities. “Now there is of course something terrible in that, but somehow language, words didn’t live in the way I think they have to live in a poem when they were hovering over that kind of horror and pity. They became, they just became inert, strangely, for me anyway” (qtd. 1: 176). Heaney’s own hesitation emerges in his stumbling account of his own contortions which would be preserved by his bog-buried victims from Iron Age Scandinavia in Wintering Out and North.

Yet, Parker reminds how poets could overreach. Auschwitz cannot be compared with Belfast. The lingering gaze of Heaney over the body of the young girl condemned for her dalliance unsettles Parker. When authors succeed in capturing the difficulties of poetically conveying their responses to their provincial horror, Parker acknowledges their triumph. If they stumble, he proportionately corrects their fall.
“Punishment,” as Parker limns Heaney’s attempt to “understand the exact/ and tribal, intimate revenge,” integrates Heaney’s expression of nationalist fears in the early 1970s that Catholics faced assault from both loyalists and “security forces.” Parker warns, however: “yet to comprehend the motives of others is not necessarily to endorse their actions, or to be free of one’s own conflicting allegiances” (1: 245). The voyeurism, the lingering scrutiny, the helplessness of the aroused but impotent onlooker dramatised by Heaney, Parker explains, remains unsettling. It implicates “all those reading the poem” and reminds them of the Northern predicament, and its inextricable complexity for those witnessing the Troubles— as spectators.

The second volume, after the murders and attacks by 1975 appeared to have perhaps reached that infamously assessed level of “acceptable violence,” looks beyond verse and drama. As the conflict protracted, novelists and story creators entered the fray. They tended towards more nuance through sympathetic characters as flummoxed as their creators in attempting to understand what they told—perhaps to an international audience. Heaney’s success spurred Muldoon; Montague sparked Medbh McGuckian.

For fiction, fewer predecessors guided. Volume one dissects no fiction; Volume two examines eight novels or stories out of thirty-four exemplary texts. Benedict Kiely’s novella “Proxopera,” Jennifer Johnston’s Shadows on Our Skin, or Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal, all of which gained an international readership, nevertheless betray how the Troubles defied complete success in narratives as well as in many staged or versified versions. Parker accurately pinpoints the failures in this trio to avoid stereotyping, simplification, caricature, or sentiment. By comparison, Parker’s enthusiastic introductions to writers left out of the canon invite readers to rescue abandoned texts. Una Woods’ The Dark Hole Days, judging from his praise, deserves much more elaboration; Anne Devlin’s “Naming the Names” benefits from its shorter length, for Parker can better interpret its intricacies within the chapter’s limits allotted to early 1980’s fiction.

Similarly, as with volume one’s unfortunate lack of space devoted to Pádraic Fiacc’s marginalised, markedly angrier verse, and his once critically castigated “Troubles poetry” anthology The Wearing of the Black, certain texts promoted for display languish too shadowed. Sineád Morrissey’s verse earns its showcase; Eilish Martin’s poetry collected as “slitting the tongues of jackdaws” merited a longer run. Gary Mitchell’s play The Force of Change with its look into UDA interrogations by the police at Castlereagh prison gains welcome elaboration; Michael Longley’s sensitive verse in The Echo Gate also deserved sustained accompaniment.

Such compression may prove a slight weakness inherent in any editorial construction, joining a detailed provincial history with textual analyses, within so few pages. Parker deserves not blame but praise for alerting audiences to many of the forgotten selections he recovers. With care and precision, he directs the reader towards in-depth encounters with poetics, symbolism, and dramaturgy; simultaneously he balances his examinations with wide-ranging perspectives on an immense amount of interviews in print, on television, or the radio, blended with political and social events throughout the North over five decades.

Despite his ambitious project, Parker never loses sight of the reader unfamiliar with this genre. Readers studying these two books will find fresh texts to pursue. Those familiar with politics may be less so with lesser-known poets; those expert on drama may encounter a novel previously ignored. Parker, steadily arranging a well-ordered sample of reactions to unrest, keeps his prose direct, intelligent, and respectful of the human costs involved-- rather than a routine slog through statistics, acronyms, or slogans.

Muldoon’s sequence concluding Quoof sums up 1980s despair at hatred’s routine. Parker proposes “The More a Man Has, the More a Man Wants” registers “the near-complete desensitisation of a culture and a people. Its narrator’s deadpan delivery is symptomatic of this virulent condition, which at times seems to number compassion, art and meaning alongside its many individual casualties” (2: 97).

As the survey nears the millennium, the outlook brightens. A “postmodernist distrust of grand narratives” as attention shifts from an insular redoubt to global geopolitical change encourages Northern Irish writers to examine domestic and family concerns (2: 225). National identity retreats as a preoccupation of poet, playwright, or storyteller; the Good Friday Agreement offers them and their fellow residents a chance to tick “both/and” and not “either/or.”

However, intimate dimensions of identity, Parker corrects, emerged earlier. Nick Laird’s nimble, clipped, and quirky verse captures the Northern demotic. Often warped into exaggeration or derision, Laird’s charged syntax speaks for many of his counterparts as he restores a visual, raw, and daringly compassionate delivery into figures consigned to cartoonish roles as thugs, terrorists, or tramps. Those men assembled in To a Fault, Parker reflects, exemplify “Edna Longley’s contention that ‘the speech or eloquent silence of the father’ is one of the most important, recurring motifs in Northern Irish poetry” (2: 230). Their shared experience of enduring the Troubles, Parker continues, “intensified solidarity between generations, as well as within communities.” Today’s churches, paramilitaries, and police have all been reduced. They dominate fewer enclaves of sectarian adherents. Laird, and many of his peers, turn now away from these superstructures. They portray rather those who lived under them, within the rubble, who rebuild, resist, and revive.

Alan Gillis’ “Progress” from Somebody, Somewhere (2004) ends Parker’s second volume. Gillis shares Laird’s conversational and lyrical shifts. Gillis shapes an image that in clumsier hands “so easily might have descended into embarrassing and tasteless whimsy” (2: 238). “Progress” deserves citing in full as an expression of an aspiration Parker brings his study towards.

They say that for years Belfast was backwards
and it's great now to see some progress.
So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes
from the earth. I guess that ambulances
will leave the dying back amidst the rubble
to be explosively healed. Given time,
one hundred thousand particles of glass
will create impossible patterns in the air
before coalescing into the clarity
of a window. Through which, a reassembled head
will look out and admire the shy young man
taking his bomb from the building and driving home.

Among younger generations of Northern poets, literature may provide-- after long agony from many of its creators at its passivity amidst destructive acts-- a source of healing now in its lineaments. Parker’s coupled volumes thoroughly excavate literature from the six counties’ political ruins. Writers refill the social gaps with home-grown speech. “Progress” arranges a young Belfast poet-critic’s final “twist” of lines into a municipally healing shape, after fifty years of provincial contortion.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
John L. Murphy coordinates the Humanities sequence at DeVry University in Long Beach, California. He reviews widely in print and on line. His research interests include republicanism in Irish literary culture, and the representation of the Irish language in English-language texts.