Editors’ Notes:
Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
Like Wallace Stevens in his Hartford insurance office, poet Dennis
O’Driscoll makes his signal contribution to Irish letters—as the author of
seven collections of poetry, as a past editor ofPoetry Ireland, and as
a widely published critic—all the while maintaining a busy life as an Irish
civil servant. In a talk originally presented at the Dublin “Reading
Lives/Writing Lives” conference in 2004, and expanded for our readers,
O’Driscoll recounts his lifelong romance with books and reading. Starting with
the bookish associations of the hidden places of his childhood in Thurles—a
makeshift reading chair in an old tea chest, or the dreamy work of
date-stamping books in a school library—O’Driscoll’s memoir goes on to
ruminate on the centrality of reading in any humane education. At a deeper
level, O’Driscoll probes here the inseparability of reading from an experience
of time: both literature’s capacity to improve our time on earth, and the
pressures and preciousness of time itself.
A longstanding joke in Ireland holds that, because one must
walk past the front doors of the National Museum and National Gallery to enter
the Seannad and Dáil, government service in Ireland requires that you turn
your back on culture. Not necessarily, as Albert De Giocomo and Jonas Friddle
show here in the conclusion of their study of Senator Frank J. Hugh O’Donnell,
the first part of which appeared in our previous issue. Although his own
youthful attempts at playwrighting amounted to little, O’Donnell’s career as a
public servant and arts activist led to practical measures to advance the
arts. Such fixtures in the Irish cultural world as play competitions, schools
of writing, and very idea of a cabinet-level ministry devoted to the arts can
be traced to O’Donnell’s initiative. Whatever his proposals, O’Donnell’s first
purpose was always to “sell the Irish mind.”
Irish readers have had the good fortune to follow Gerard
Fanning’s poetry for three decades since the lateIrish Press and the
kind David Marcus began to publish his work. John F. Deane’s Dedalus Press has
published three collections of Fanning’s poems: the award-winning Easter
Snow (1992), the nicely titledWorking for the Government (1999);
and his latest collection, Water & Power (2004). American readers new
to the unadvertised art of Fanning’s poetry will find in his lines a formal
reticence, and in his diction an avoidance of obvious “Irishry.” Ever able to
evoke sharply the realities of Ireland’s urbanization, Fanning’s stanzas
display a firm resolution to find in any setting—a crowded streetscape, a
suburban yard, or a windy dune—a resolving and unexpectedly assuaging detail.
In Fanning’s poems, the modernities that distract and disconcert us rarely
prove disheartening.
Historical archaeology can be especially helpful in retrieving
the history of the poor and the disenfranchised, as Dr. Charles Orser has
shown in his ongoing excavations near Strokestown, County Roscommon. So-called
“abandoned” sites, left behind abruptly when death, eviction, or forced
emigration caused a sudden departure, often yield rich evidence of the lives
and fortunes of the vanished inhabitants. A case in point is the remains of
the Nary family cabin of Ballykilcline, where the tenants were evicted and the
walls “tumbled” by the authorities sometime during the winter of 1847–48, and
which Dr. Orser excavated from 1998 to 2002.Nearly 8,000 artifacts were found
among the stones of the former cabin. Some are mere shards of pottery, while
others bear touchingly human associations: a child’s plate, a pair of sewing
scissors, a small brass thimble. The founding editor of the International
Journal of Historical Archaeology, Charles Orser’s many books include Race
and Practice in Archaeological Interpretation (2004).
Moya Cannon has emerged in recent years as one of Ireland’s
most intriguing poets, and, despite a relative paucity of critical discussion
concerning her work, Cannon has lately won such honors as the Lawrence
O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry in 2001, and election to Aosdána, the Irish
academy of arts and letters, in 2004. In such poems as “Taom,” “Hills,” and
“Isolde’s Tower, Essex Quay,” Cannon invites a sympathetic ecocritical
analysis, which Dr. Christine Cusick provides here. Cusick finds that by
blending scrupulous attention to nature with a profound concern about the
means and limitations of human knowing, Cannon’s poetry “enacts an ethic of
humility with the natural world.” Central to the poet’s careful appreciation
of the nonhuman world, she asserts, is Cannon’s sense of the mystery and
multilayered resonance of language. Christine Cusick has lately presented
papers on Cannon, Tim Robinson, and Eavan Boland at meetings of the American
Conference for Irish Studies and of the Association for the Study of
Literature and the Environment.
Few would dispute that fiction can be illuminated by a
familiarity with the events of history (as, indeed, Eva Roa White’s article in
this very issue argues). Sometimes the process
is reversed, and fiction overtakes the historical record. That, says Philip
Fennell, is precisely what has happened to the story of theCatalpa
rescue of 1876, when Irish republicans in America planned and executed the
liberation of six political prisoners held in a prison camp in Western
Australia. As the story has been reworked by journalists, novelists, and
songwriters, basic errors in fact have become unchallenged parts of the
record. Persons who were never involved have been identified as central to the
rescue effort, and conversations that never happened have been set down as
gospel. An assiduous student of theCatalpa
rescue, Philip Fennell has edited, with Marie King, the prison memoirs of
Thomas McCarthy Fennell, Voyage of the Hougoumont and Life at Fremantle:
The Story of an Irish Rebel (2004).
Over the past several decades,
such historians as Maureen Murphy, Janet Nolan, and Hasia Diner have
reconsidered the received history of Irish immigration to the United States,
and written the stories of women immigrants—numerically dominant in the
immigrant pool, but for a long time all but invisible in the standard
works—back into the record. Yet the Irish immigrant girl was readily found in
American fiction of the nineteenth century, as Dr. Eva Roa White notes. Novels
by such long-forgotten writers as Harvey O’Higgins, Peter McCorry, and Bernard
O’Reilly, and short stories by the New England-born writer Sarah Orne Jewett
prominently figure young Irish women.White finds that these fictional
accounts—sometimes cautionary, often conventional— nonetheless reflect the
opportunity and expansiveness of the immigrant experience. Eva Roa White is
the author ofA Case Study of Ireland and Galicia’s Parallel Paths to
Nationhood (2004).
The six novels of J. G.
Farrell—and particularly his “Empire Trilogy” that opened with his tale of the
Anglo-Irish War, Troubles (1970)—have attracted increasing attention
since the author’s death a quarter-century ago. In this issue, Dr.Crane takes
note of a number of affinities between Farrell and Samuel Beckett. In addition
to certain biographical overlaps (both writers were athletic young men who
felt oppressed by Protestant, suburban Dublin, for example). Farrell is known
to have read and admired the older writer. Crane concedes that the presence of
the older novelist is often more a matter of mood that of specific allusion.
His early novels suggest particularly Beckettian traits: a sense of life’s
bleakness, a taste for the grotesque, and a feeling for waiting as a symbol of
the human condition. Ralph Crane is the co-author of Troubled Pleasures:
The Fiction of J. G. Farrell (1997), as well as of numerous books and
articles on Indian fiction. Editors’ Notes: Nótaí na nEagarthóirí
Life in Ireland during the
years of the “Great Emergency” of World War II has been nostalgically praised
and satirically pilloried, but nowhere has the moral shrug of neutrality been
better protested than in the poem “Aifreann na Marbh” by Eoghan Ó Tuairisc.As
the poet and journalist James McCabe reveals here, Ó Tuairisc’s long poem from
1964 envisions sleepy Dublin in the 1940s as if it had been Hiroshima moments
before and moments after the dropping of the bomb. “Aifreann na Marbh” is
little known to English readers, who are more familiar with The Week-End of
Dermot and Grace (1964), published under the name Eugene Watters.Now
living and working in Germany, James McCabe toured the United States in 1998
with his Finnegans Wake program. His collection
The White Battlefield of Silence was published by Dedalus Press
in 1999.
Roddy Doyle’s novels have drawn
wide praise for a supposed hard-edged urban realism that provides a backdrop
for the adventures of the Rabitte family and their often hilarious neighbors.
Many say Doyle’s fiction both expresses and celebrates a new post-national,
post-Catholic Ireland. In this issue, Dr. Mary McGlynn takes a close look at
The Snapper (1990) and finds the fluidity of social mores in Barrytown
to be a bit superficial. She notes that “in Doyle’s Barrytown, there is almost
no such thing as the private sphere,” and as a result, the characters fall
back on conventional expressions of self and social roles. Further,McGlynn
argues, the putative sensitivity of the heroine’s father in the face of her
out-of-wedlock pregnancy actually sustains a patriarchal mindset, and even
Doyle’s adroit handling of speech and dialect is tinged with a conventional
class consciousness.Mary McGlynn has previously published articles on Doyle in
Studies in the Novel and LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory.
).
Back to New Hibernia Review
