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www.celtic-connection.com
NOVEMBER 2008
THE LITERARY LIONS OF IRELAND
TRAVEL DIARY
BRENDAN BEHAN
/ £ IF you're a young writer in Dublin today, you can get anything you want. People will look at you in the street with wonder," says Colm Toibin one of Ireland's most popular writers." (www.colmtoibin .com)
By DAVE ABBOTT
An author of 15 books, including the award-winning novel The Master, and lately a GQ model for Harry Rosen, his observation was true even in the Fifties and Sixties.
As a student in Dublin, to be an aspiring writer was a higher calling than a doctor, a lawyer or even a priest. To be a writer was to distinguish oneself, to be elevated to a level that transcended the normal. Being a writer placed one above the fray, away from an ordinary humdrum existence.
If there is one attribute distinctively and universally Irish, it is love of the written (and spoken) word.
Conventional people could not be writers parents or immediate relatives could never be writers. They were too ordinary. As for my parents' friends, I was convinced they couldn't write and never read Camus, Behan, Hemingway and certainly not Beckett.
A conversation with them compelled me to leave the room, although most likely the gap was generational rather than literary. To be a writer then, was simple although certain essentials had to be in place.
Suffering was at the top of the list. A tortured existence was necessary for success. A serious disease, like consumption, or a mental aberration like dementia, complete with visions or nightmares or dreams, seemed mandatory.
Borderline poverty was also essential. To be recognized as a starving artist was a mark of distinction. Being constantly hungry was essential for the calling. Bread, jam and tea were allowed. One also needed a "garret" similar to those of a Parisian artist, not that there was such a thing in Dublin's Georgian houses, which were mostly slums.
In Lower Baggot Street basements, or in Upper Lesson Street flats, intense hollow-eyed young men held animated arguments about Irish fiction full of love stories, ill-fated lovers, religion, politics and death.
Death was a common theme, one that continues to play even today a major role both in life and literature. Dead fathers and mothers and dead children seem to populate many novels along with the killing of women. Fire is another obsession that engaged Irish writers.
In Naramata, B.C., I recall meeting Captain Bowen Colthurst, who in a drunken rage had murdered pacifist Sheehy Skeffington at Dublin Castle. The great fire that the IRA set at the family seat in County Cork has him transfixed.
But it took the genius of James
Joyce to alter the course of Irish fiction by inventing a tone that reflected the Irish heritage of poor realities and grand dreams.
Dublin's streets seemed to teem with writers, poets, dramatists, actors and visionaries.
Brendan Behan could be found frequently staggering out of Davey Byrnes pub. "I liked your Borstal Boy," I shouted one day as he rounded into Duke Street on his way to the pub. "Aah jayzus another paying customer" he responded.
Then there was the iconic poet Patrick Kavanagh who I'd find idling around the bookstores off Dawson Street. He always looked like an unmade bed. He was approachable but lived a life of degradation and was unintelligible between the drink and his country brogue.
As for actors, the twosome of Hilton Fdwards (The Gate Theatre) and the theatrical Micheal MacLiammoir (The Abbey), wearing more eye shadow than Maureen O'Hara, basked in the admiration of fellow Dubliners as they minced along O'Connell Street.
Flann O'Brien (aka The Irish Times columnist Myles na Gopaleen) held forth at Neary's and was worth the price of a pint to be within range of his voice.
Carol O'Connor (All In The Family), cousin of my mate Ulick, attended Trinity at the same time as J.P. Donleavy (The Ginger Man), now an 80-year-old cult figure living in isolation on his farm outside Mullingar.
From this cruicible later came some notable storytellers like Irish Times columnist Maeve Binchy, (www.maevebinchy.com), a much loved figure whose portrait hangs in the National Art Gallery.
Other Dublin writers include Roddy Doyle (The Snapper/Barrytown Trilogy), a former schoolteacher, who lives in a Dublin suburb, as does Neil Jordan (A Night in Tunisia), a film director and fine writer.
There is also Patrick McCabe (The Butcher Boy), and Joseph O'Connor (Cowboys and Indians) who shares the limelight with his famous musical sister Sinead O'Connor. And the much admired Nuala O'Faolian who recently died of cancer.
The genesis of these memories was last month's International Writers & Readers Festival on Vancouver's Granville Island at which I met new Irish writer John Connolly (www.johnconnollybooks.com).
Ireland, unlike Canada, doesn't begrudge its artists. The land of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett has an official policy of showing off its
culture to the world. It offers the visitor a wide range of opportunities for would-be writers including Creative Writers Workshops (history and heritage) and Anam Cara Writers and Artists Retreat. If you're interested in learning more, check
RODDY DOYLE
it out at: ireland.com.
www. discover
Dave Abbott is a frustrated novelist,
COLM TOIBIN
travel writer and broadcaster. For more information, visit: www.irish laughter.ca, or e-mail: abbottl (5)shaw.ca.
Oscar Wilde: A Colourful Life Before a Tragic Downfall
OSCAR WILDE was born in Dublin in 1854, entering a family of esteem and privilege.
His father was a renowned eye surgeon, and his mother was a prominent poet and Irish nationalist.
The parents were also social butterflies, and the young Wilde grew up in a house often teeming with colourful visitors.
Once a grown boy, he immersed himself in classical study - first at Trinity College, then at Oxford, where he began to dabble in verse and wear felt stockings.
Although some may consider such pursuits effeminate, the proud Irish lad displayed some manly vigor when he split the jaw of a peer who mocked one of his first sonnets.
Upon concluding his studies, Wilde returned to Dublin, where he found romance with the dashing Florence Balcombe, who eventually left him for Dracula author Bram Stoker.
A bit disappointed about the split, Wilde went to London, where he published several short works and built a reputation on both his extravagant getup and extravagant persona.
Maligned and caricatured as much as he was quoted, he soon became the foremost figure of the Aesthetic Movement, which preached a life centered on art and beauty.
Having reveled in the media hoopla, the ostentatious character then embarked on an American lecture tour.
Upon arriving at port in New York with "nothing to declare but genius," the confident Celt went throughout the country - lecturing to Mormons, coal miners, and cowboys, among others who came to behold the unprecedented spectacle.
Although audiences did not know what to make of the flower pinned to his fur coat or the matching scarf and knee socks, most everyone was entertained, and at some of the more rowdy venues, the worldly aesthete gained admirers with his drinking prowess.
Back in London from the Yankee lecture circuit, Wilde married, spawned and, more importantly for literature, set down to penning The Picture of Dorian Gray - in which a snazzy young chap named Dorian
THE CELTIC SCRIBE
OSCAR WILDE
exchanges his soul for eternal beauty.
Having listened to the doctrine of a "new hedonism" set forth by one enigmatic Lord Henry, the impressionable young Dorian learns such valuable lessons as: "Conscience and cowardice are the same," and that, "Only the sacred things are worth touching."
As the cultivated Dorian becomes more callous, he also becomes more endearing as a character study -there is something so horribly fascinating about a fellow who goes to the Opera the night after causing his lover to swallow poison.
Never before has vice seemed so refined. This eloquently decadent novel will leave a reader craving more Oscar, just as Dorian had craved more opium those frantic nights when he'd sneak off to some unspeakable Fast London den.
At the time of the book's release, many maintained that the esoterically sinister Lord Henry was Wilde's thinly veiled autobiographical character.
Now more than a century past the writer's demise, one could perhaps make a tenable argument that he was a mix of both Lord Henry and Dorian, in that he ultimately became his own corruptor - duped by a charmingly decadent philosophy.
On a pursuit for elaborate sensations, Wilde would often venture to strange places - risky, no doubt, for one of such status, and especially ill-advised during the stricdy enforced (though not always practiced) moral rigidity of Victorian London.
When Wilde aroused the antipathy of a man with connections, his downfall was only a matter of time.
Insults were hurled, vanities were injured, and accusations were made. Soon the matter was resolved in court - not favorably for Wilde, though.
The flamboyant writer had more detractors than friends, and the majority exulted (some of them even dancing in the streets a la Bastille Day) in his hard-labour sentence to Redding Gaol prison - a place bereft of all but misery.
Wilde's unfortunate stay there was the genesis for his deepest and most celebrated poem, The Ballad of Redding Gaol, in which a condemned prisoner is led to the gallows, where he "falls feet foremost through the floor into an empty space."
Two years later, Wilde sauntered out of prison with his back sunken and the mark of Cain upon his face. Wandering about in destitute infamy. His final years were ones of scant creative production.
Among other hardships, he was soon compelled to endure that monstrous inflammation of brain known as cerebral meningitis.
Having no place to call home, the jaded spirit checked into a one-star hotel, accompanied by a few recently-acquired "friends" who'd find their 15 minutes on Wilde's unkempt deathbed.
The Protestant-born writer was visited by a priest and converted to Catholicism soon before falling asleep forever.
His 46-year-old body was taken to the outskirts of Paris and buried beneath a headstone bearing the epitaph, "outcasts always mourn."