Jim Gavin's "Middle Men": Book Review

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Joe Queenan's "One for the Books": Book Review

Following his acclaimed memoir about finding solace in reading while growing up in a 1960s Philadelphia housing project, Joe Queenan returns with a (very loosely) collected jumble of related recollections, paeans to an impressively eclectic array of authors, satires of book clubs and Amazon raters, and a recurring worry disguised as a vow that Middlemarch will prove to be the last book he ever finishes.

Mr. Queenan's records of obsessive reading confront us as Amalie Nathomb and Moacyr Scliar jostle Poe, O.J., and Stieg Larsson for name recognition. Devotees of Rimbaud, prepare for Tom Tryon. The range challenges any reader of equally catholic addiction. His humorous take on bibliomaniacs plays erudition off of enthusiasm appealingly, coming from a fellow who "looks like a cop" instead of the refined critic he proves, underneath his Irish Catholic, blue-collar--if now very suburban and silver-haired in Tarrytown on the Hudson--bluster.

Closing Time in its exploration of reading as youthful release serves as a prequel to One for the Books; both casually clichéd titles hint at deeper resignation and mortality. Both books relate familiar themes--abusive and alcoholic families there, escape through books here--but enliven them with wit, verve, and idiosyncratic prose. Still, this newer account swerves, cobbled from shorter scraps instead of structured from the ground up. As with many books he takes down a peg, his own results from his manic pursuit tend towards satisfying, rather than “astonishing”.  Narrating them, he plays with a garrulous but measured narration (mingled with poignancy) assumed by certain Irish or their American cousins, counting those not only published writers: raconteurs, autodidacts, fanatics, or otherwise employed. 

Engaging as the bemused Mr. Queenan certainly remains, he as with many such tellers features wry episodes that survive on the page better in aphoristic bursts or testy exchanges with half-wits. Mr. Queenan’s barbed, cynical style may prickle by its carefully snide or (self-)mocking tone; those outside his “clan” may shrink from what we raised inside it wink at or sneer towards as “malarkey”—depending on our relation to the self-aware, deceptively casual, tale-teller.

Mr. Queenan uses his passion for reading above all other pleasures (except perhaps his hometown Philly teams) to examine the power books deliver, not in e-book but printed form, with all their memories associated with spines, marginalia, covers, and fonts. "They are physically appealing, emotionally evocative objects that constitute a perfect delivery system."

The first chapter looks at amassing books, the next at libraries. There the likes of James Patterson have to share shelf space next to Proust; this confusion of proximity vs. merit also plagues misled buyers in bookstores and clueless denizens of book clubs. They cannot agree to choose but  potboilers, self-help twaddle, survivor narratives, earnest life lessons, or sagas with endlessly ethnic and/or annoyingly plucky protagonists. Habitues of such circles fail to savor the serendipity found sidling from one title to another in a space where books are handled, not downloaded in a click. 

Mr. Queenan dismisses the sub-literate abilities of the dilettante or those swayed into fulsome blather by covers, titles, trends, and marketing: "a book is a series of arguments between the author and the reader, none of which the reader can possibly win. This is especially true of James Joyce."  Mr. Queenan aspires for seriousness and silliness, and he shows from his thousands of purchases abundant examples of both natures happily fulfilled. This takes, naturally, a dogged devotion for him, and the third chapter invites us along to watch him reading more than one title at a time. A "Platonic book list" in endless revision occupies the mind of every true book lover calculating another thirty-five years at the task, but by his seventh decade, Joe Queenan must narrow down his stacks.

That action will close this volume, but its impact resonates back into previous sections. Bookstores in chapter four beckon, in Tarrytown, small-town Ontario, at the late Borders, and in Manhattan. He writes where he bought each title, and he cherishes the associations the artifact inscribed evokes. Out of years of accrued reminders of those among whom he enjoyed or endured his books, life deepens.

"Prepare to Be Astonished" promises excitement. Joe Queenan's quips on blurbs and their flaws and possibility--he delves deep into Latin American literature based solely on who praises what on one cover, so on and so on--wander wonderfully, if very erratically. "Life, which in my youth had been unstintingly entertaining, now felt more and more like a Smith & Wesson cocked to my head, so if I had plans to read The Decameron and Finnegans Wake before I checked out for good, I would have to start being a bit more choosy." Yet, his affection for "bad books" (many he admits foisted on him rather than chosen) reveals his less lofty ambitions, to find between the covers a lifelong affection. 

In another, even more rambling, if suitably so, section ostensibly on writers' homes, his French visits join with more mundane jaunts to Hartford and Scranton. He detours into how he stayed way ahead, initially with typically relentless concentration, to dive into Swedish crime mysteries far in advance of the current Scandinavian Whodunit Boom; he relegates The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to the pile of "voyeuristic porn". Somehow, this chapter winds up back in Paris, despite itself.

An acknowledgment nods to seven publications where parts of this collection first "appeared in different form": this book resembles a spirited cut-and-paste job. The energy of the assembler makes up in part for the rough edges of the collage. But the overall pattern, for all its varied, off-beat, and enticingly broad perspectives, does not always align as a book would if conceived as a single whole.

Yet the last two chapters combine the personal with the critical well. Mr. Queenan asks his family and friends for their reading habits and preferences, and from that questionnaire, he ponders how his own predilections do or do not reflect those with whom he lives. This topic feels much fresher--this reviewer has never found it in a similarly if never as impressively scattered life hunched over books. Joe Queenan, as a relevant aside (one of dozens, which rescue the ramshackle bits, and may repair them), recommends no more than two-hundred pages for any mystery, tops. Advice well-worth peddling. 

Preparing to move from his house when McMansions invade Tarrytown, he packs up his enormous accumulation of books. Finally, he has to figure out which to keep. Operation Winnow's intricate rationalizations for what one holds on to and what one lets go of will make sense only to those of us as meticulous as Mr. Queenan as to what books represent before, during, and after they are opened.

To nobody's surprise, the endeavor flounders. An impression of towers of books and boxes of more surrounding a beefy, feisty, but outnumbered author, who must drag himself away from reading to write to earn enough to spend on more to read (unless those volumes he gets, bad and good, for free as a reviewer, to be noted by this unremunerated reviewer with mingled envy and sympathy), lingers for the reader--and surely a fellow traveler along spine-filled canyons of high shelves--who closes these reflections.

"Reading is the way mankind delays the inevitable," he concludes. "Reading is the way we shake our fist at the sky." Closing time arrives again, with the author still at closure, sorting through his shelves. Joe Queenan meets his match, and in these pages, we glimpse the thousands of beloved or fondly despised books which, distilled into allusions, memories, and anecdotes, enrich his life and our own.
(New York Journal of Books 10-25-12)

John Banville's "Ancient Light": Book Review

This may be my favorite of the nine novels I've read of his, and the five as Benjamin Black. John Banville evokes sexual desire and adolescence with jittery energy, crossing the story of Alex Cleave (note the surname--even as with his wife Leah and their dead daughter Cass, resonances linger) as an actor in his sixties with himself as a fifteen-year-old who took on his best friend's mother as a lover. Alex recalls: "It was a confusion between the categories of the verb to know."

What results reminds me of Nabokov's "Lolita" from a tilted perspective. Both share a linguistic precision and an erotic charge, intensified by the passage of years and the narrator's inability to recover a doomed relationship. Every Banville novel provides passages that leap out, demanding to be taken in and lingered over. Here, many more pages contain them. More than any of his other works I've encountered, if still unevenly given Banville's preference for sly and determined confusion, "Ancient Light" succeeds. It combines the frisson of tension in a sexual attraction with the psychological complications and intellectual considerations that characterize Banville's erudite, oblique fiction.

For instance, to take only two examples early on, as Alex nervously wanders in Celia Gray's house, wondering what's next in an otherwise empty living room, he recalls from his later years how "quick with portent they always seem, the things in rooms that are not ours: that chintz-covered armchair braced somehow as if about to clamber angrily to its feet; that floor-lamp keeping so still and hiding its face under a coolie's hat; the upright piano, its lid greyed by an immaculate coating of dust, clenched against the wall with a neglected, rancorous mien, like a large ungainly pet the family had long ago ceased to love. Clearly from outside I could hear those lewd birds do their wolf-whistles." It's almost comic, a Disney cartoon animated in real life, but tinged with foreboding, and the hints of "grey" and lasciviousness, of pets and the end of affection, permeate this reverie.

Hints of Joyce--"tundish breasts" in a Old Masters painting being Alex's only previous glimpse of the female form--do not prepare for the sight of a middle-aged woman before a mirror, unclothed. "Instead of the shades of pink and peach that I would have expected--Rubens has a lot to answer for--her body displayed, disconcertingly, a range of muted tints from magnesium white to silver to tin, a scumbled sort of yellow, pale ochre, and even in places a faint greenishness and, in the hollows, a shadowing of mossy mauve." This appears appropriate for a time about fifty years ago, with Irish reticence ("scumbled"?) about flesh confronting its exposure, mirrored mirror that Alex passes, as he in amazement glances her way.

His emotions take over. The novel juxtaposes his near-retirement with his long ago complications with Mrs. Gray. After they first join, he cannot figure out why she puts herself in such a compromising and dangerous position. He is overwhelmed: "engrossed in what I felt for myself, I had no measure against which to match what she might feel for me. That was how it was at the start, and how it went on, to the end. That is how it is, when one discovers oneself through the other."

It's a rewarding if elevated novel which demonstrates the legacy that John Banville sustains from Irish and Continental writers working at a high level. Not that it's an easy read, but it satisfies for an aesthetic quality inherent in Banville's earlier writings, but the introspection typical to his anguished and longing protagonists here finds more of a physical release, if for a while. The momentum of Alex's adolescent adventure carries along the reader, through the more languid passages of his later life, which typify Banville's preference for a tamped-down, introspective yet restless tone. Against his hormonal outbursts, he stares down his fate in the mental prison where Banville likes to lock up his narrators.

They enter a place where the exploration of the psyche intersects with the erotic and artistic drives that pull Alex into maturity. Fittingly, these filter into Beckett after the "day of the incident," their initial coupling. "First love the cynic observes, and afterwards the reckoning."

This half-century of slow, but engagingly obsessive reckoning spans the intervening passage of time between the teenaged boy and the man in the twilight of his acting prime. This section, inspired likely by the recent filming of Banville's Booker Prize winning "The Sea," feels less controlled, more weightless. Banville shuffles satire in. It lessens the burdens of Alex's state, at least for a short while, among the power that the past, summoned up again, exacts. I've set up, to avoid spoilers, in detail only the first fifty pages.

Much later, Alex feels baffled. Ghostlier, gothic elements enter as he visits Italy, and the site (a bit too neatly) where Shelley drowned, and Cass died. This in turn flows into two novels of Banville published about a decade ago, corresponding to ten years earlier in Alex's experience. Yet, he tells us that the very man he played in the film to be, Axel, knew his daughter, Cass. Moreover, this admission comes as a casual aside long into the narration, after he finishes the role. Odd.

Banville triangulates this with "Shroud" (2003). This told of Axel Vander, the enigmatic fraud (inspired by lionized literary theorist and, much later unmasked as fascist collaborator, Paul de Man) who Cass pursues before her suicide. "Eclipse" (2001) dealt with Alex's anguished reminiscences of Cass, and his reaction to the news of her demise. Recollections in "Ancient Light" shift. Channeled through Alex, they turn less reliable as the plot unfolds, and this subtle challenge to the reliability of his tale as classical references and dream elements hover moves the second part into a milieu closer to past Banville explorations--in "The Book of Evidence," "Ghosts," and "Athena"-- into perils of trust.

This later journey into the echoes of Alex's youthful initiation into "this enigma of estrangement" as the intimacy of sex collides with the distance of autonomy continues into the present. Here, a lighter element, a send-up of the art house film scene, and Alex's opportunity to act on screen for the first time, blurs with a coming to terms with (or an avoidance of) why his daughter died. The elegant, if attenuated and uneasy, results will draw in any patient reader eager to meet Banville at his best. [As above with no hyperlinks, to PopMatters 9-28-12; on 8-21-12 slightly altered and a perfect example of why I hate ratings and stars to pin me down, to Amazon US]

"The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1941-1956": Book Review

This second volume of letters "having bearing on my work" elegantly compiles Samuel Beckett's postwar correspondence. Limited as it is by his estate to literary contexts, nonetheless, with forty percent of his total letters published in over eight-hundred carefully edited pages, this 2011 title allows readers to follow Beckett as he matures. The often pleading, imploring frustration of a struggling Irishman trying to land a publisher for his poems and tales has faded. After his tense time working as a farmhand and for the French Resistance in the countryside, Beckett returns to Paris and then goes away to Ussy-sur-Marne to confront himself--and to create his breakthrough prose and drama.

As he had done in the first volume of his letters to Thomas McGreevy, so he opens up to Georges Duthuit from his new residence. Easing if not replacing the acerbic, dyspeptic tone of his youthful letters, he blends his unease into a mellower, if no less rueful, distillation of himself. He begins the sunset of the first day of June 1949 walking back to Ussy, accompanied or nagged along the road by mayflies. "In the end I worked out they were all accompanying me towards the Marne to be eaten by the fish, after making love on the water." 

This remarkable vignette exemplifies the quality of his insights. Like the first volume, the second teems with artistic and philosophical interests. A rare talent in both the novel and the play, Beckett's decision to enter into French as his primary mode of literary creation demonstrates his command of the idiom beyond his thirty years first in Ireland and then abroad. As the edition's French translator George Craig explains, Beckett made France his milieu. 

Ireland recedes, where his older brother and his mother lingered before dying. In another moving passage, he writes to Duthuit in 1948 after he watches his fading mother's blue eyes. "Let us get there rather earlier, while there are still refusals we can make." Here you can discern the powerful mood which will grace or unsettle Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. 

His visits back to Dublin appear to have caused less contention than those in the pre-war decade, yet he rankles at the censorship there and in London. When Godot was slated to appear on the West End in 1954, the Lord Chamberlain "got going." So, "coat" replaced "fly," "backside" replaced "arse," and "guts" replaced "privates." 

Such asides speckle Beckett's writing, to one person in his letters, to the few but discerning readers of his increasingly confident fiction, or his sudden exposure with the fame that he had courted for so long with so little success. Waiting for Godot was advertised in Miami as "the laugh sensation of two continents." Socialites walked out in droves.

Dan Gunn introduces this collection by noting its "rhythm of approach and withdrawal." One wishes more had survived, and that the lacunae of the wartime years had been replaced with evidence of his life, but the silence speaks for his and bravery as an Irish citizen working against fascism and under the threat of death. Such commitment provided Beckett with more equanimity and compassion in the difficult years during and after the war as he reconstructed his own life and career in France. 

Beckett comes to terms slowly with his celebrity, granted as he nears the age of fifty. Already sensing the diminution of his physical powers, ironically he enters into his literary prime in this second volume. He, who had urged so often others to read his works and to publish them, now begins to find himself elucidating or correcting others who seek out his advice.

Despite his French allegiance, he remains Irish. Craig as a fellow countryman senses the Irish-English persistence in Beckett's phrasing, and its pitch to the breath and spoken word rather than the semicolon or period. He castigates silly critics of Godot: "Like a lot of seaside brats digging for worms people are." 

Within whichever language he chooses, Beckett finds himself agonizing over the right word, the key phrase. In the struggles documented here, he separates his voice in French, with its discipline and narrower range, from his native English, with its temptations to wander. Either way, this annotated and durable edition attests to his skill, his fluency, and his humanity. (Edited to 600 words 6-1-13 for Slugger O'Toole As above 2-17-13 to Amazon US)

"The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940": Book Review

The editors began this project around 1985. Changes in ownership of Beckett’s works, negotiations over publication of his correspondence, and the winnowing down of 15,000 letters to 2,500 to be reprinted in four volumes, along with another 5,000 from which excerpts would be used for annotations, demonstrate the care with which this endeavor has been compiled. Beckett may be the last major writer to have his correspondence extant in an entirely non-electronic form. The range of his letters, two-thirds written in English, 30% in French, and 5% in German, attests to the cosmopolitan range and erudite ambition of his determination to imagine himself, early on, into a literary life.

Fehsenfeld and Overbeck explain how they sought a middle way between the minimalist editorial approach of Richard Ellmann for James Joyce’s letters, and the maximalist approach taken by John Kelly for W.B. Yeats’s letters. Restricted to reproducing those letters that drew directly upon Beckett’s writings, the editors nevertheless seek a liberal interpretation of this control. They explain how their first examples display Beckett’s desire to connect to correspondents. He delivers less information, and more solidarity, or intimacy, as he tries to forge a literary career – and to keep his distance from one.

As Beckett’s confidence grows, and as Murphy finally gets published after nearly two years of rejections, his language takes flight. Their content and style soar like kites, above his cities. His words may relax, energize, or recoil. No wonder “rectal spasms,” as the editors note, characterize the physicality of later 1930s letters, with analogies between the act of writing and primal, raw functions within the body.

He begins with coiled frustration. “I am looking forward to pulling the balls off the critical & poetical Proustian cock” (36). His monograph on Proust he regards more as duty than pleasure. He struggles to separate himself from his fellow and elder Irishman in Paris. “Sedendo et Quiescendo” to Beckett “stinks of Joyce in spite of most earnest endeavours to endow it with my own odours” (81). He then promises an editor at Chatto & Windus a scatological comparison to the precise shape of his bowel movements.

Thomas McGreevy received many of the letters included here. They speak of Beckett’s indolence: “even if I succeeded in placing something and getting some money I don’t think I would bother my arse to move.” (158) He would rather lose the world for stout “than for Lib., Egal., and Frat., and quarts de Vittel.,” (159) he tells McGreevy in May 1933. Yet Beckett wonders why Man of Aran lacked any poteen, and soon he spends more time in London, looking toward Paris rather than Dublin for his future.

A year later, he tells Morris Sinclair of his fears, that “no relationship between suffering and feeling is to be found,” and any joy comparing his own fortune to those with less “begins to look deceptive” (204). He observes himself as if “through a keyhole,” and feels at a distance well away from his own self. “Strange, yes, and altogether unsuitable for letter writing” (205).

He finds the attitude that will infuse his mature work. In Autumn 1934, he informs McGreevy that the dehumanization and mechanical nature of the artist extends to the portraits he studies so intently: “as the individual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone & his neighbor a coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God, incapable of loving or hating anyone but himself or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself” (223).

Still, humor lurks. A spider has two “penes.” The “Kook of Bells” gets a nod. T.S. Eliot spelled backwards stands for toilet. Beckett contrasts the art, plays and concerts he views with English literature. It remains mired in “old morality typifications and simplifications. I suppose the cult of the horse has something to do with it”(250).  He tires of vices and virtues. This mood may, in Spring 1935, account for his difficulties with Murphy. After analysis with Bion, Beckett rages to McGreevy. “If the heart still bubbles it is because the puddle has not been drained, and the fact of its bubbling more fiercely than ever is perhaps open to receive consolation from the waste that splutters most, when the bath is nearly empty” (259).

Yet, he watches the old men as kite flyers at Kensington’s Round Pond that autumn, and he observes them in his letter with the same detail that will enrich his novel. He tells McGreevy of a friend’s comment: “‘You haven’t a good word to say except about the failures’. I thought that was quite the nicest thing anyone had said to me for a long time” (275).

Tedium shrouds 1936. Working for his brother back in Dublin tempts him briefly. “I am thinking of asking Frank does he want stamps licked in Clare Street. Though I fear my present saliva would burn a hole in the envelope” (320). He informs McGreevy: “I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them”(362).  Frank asks him after Murphy is turned down again:

‘Why can’t you write the way the people want’, when I replied that I could only write the one way, i.e. as best I could (not the right answer, not at all the right answer), he said it was a good thing for him he did not feel obliged to implement such a spirit in 6 Clare St. Even mother begins to look askance at me. My departure is long overdue. But complicated by owing them £10 apiece (366).

Beckett cannot please possible publishers. “Do they not understand that if the book is slightly obscure, it is because it is a compression, and that to compress it further can only result in making it slightly obscure?” (380). He vows that his next work will be “on rice paper with a spool, with a perforated line every six inches and on sale in Boots” (383).

He roams Germany, refining his fluency, in early 1937. His letter to Axel Kaun in German represents a breakthrough. “It is getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears like a veil which one has to tear apart for me to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it” (518). While this exchange is well-known, within the contexts of travel and growing unease as the Continent’s fate entangles with his own uncertain future, this letter gains resonance. In 1936 he had noted how at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, “all the lavatory men say Heil Hitler. The best pictures are in the cellar” (384). He shifts from London to Paris to Dublin, unsettled.

Recovering from the 1938 attack upon him by a Parisian assailant, Beckett contemplates an offer from Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press to translate Sade’s Les 120 Journées de Sodome. He hesitates, not wanting to do the predictably censorable work anonymously, but reluctant “to be spiked as a writer” (604). He as always needs the money, but the project fades away. His later letters document the rejections given to Murphy, and Beckett’s reluctance to stay in Ireland. “All the old people & the old places, they make me feel like an amphibian detained forcibly on dry land, very very dry land” (637).

Even in 1933 he felt an “unhandy Andy” around his family. Frank suffers his own malaise, “with the feeling all the time in the not so remote background that he is strangling his life. But who does not” (369). In 1938, Beckett learns from his brother that their mother is ailing. “I feel sorry for her often to the point of tears. That part is not analysed away, I suppose,” he tells McGreevy. From Paris, he “returned to the land of my unsuccessful abortion,” but only to “keep my mother company” before he goes back for good “to the people where the little operation is safe, legal & popular. ‘Curetage’” (647).

For Beckett’s own intimacies, this compendium remains discreet. Lucia Joyce and Peggy Guggenheim garner proper mention. Beckett stays reticent regarding his relationship with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. He introduces her to McGreevy in 1939 as “a French girl also whom I am fond of, dispassionately, who is very good to me. The hand will not be overplayed. As we both know that it will come to an end there is no knowing how long it may last” (657).

By June 1940, Beckett wonders about their fate, “provided we are staying on in Paris.” He tells Marthe Arnaud how “Suzanne seems to want to get away. I don’t. Where would we go, and with what?” (683). He concludes, c/o the painter Bram Van Velde, with a characteristically resigned, yet defiant set of images and thoughts. As those around him await the Nazi occupation, Beckett cites Murphy, and mixes his own predicament with that looming over the recipients of his final letter.

Under the blue glass Bram’s painting gives off a dark flame. Yesterday evening I could see in it Neary at the Chinese restaurant, ‘huddled in the tod of his troubles like an owl in ivy’. Today it will be something different. You think you are choosing something, and it is always yourself that you choose; a self that you did not know, if you are lucky. Unless you are a dealer (683-684).

Presciently, an advance notice about More Pricks Than Kicks in The Observer opined: “Mr. Beckett is allusive, and a future editor may have to provide notes” (210). Notes expand here. Each letter earns footnotes; profiles of recipients total fifty-seven. Works cited, an index, and George Craig’s French and Viola Westbrook’s German translation prefaces supplement the letters. Contributors credited by the editors fill thirteen pages.

This is the first of four projected volumes. The diligence of those who have assembled this compendium attests to its thoroughness. Spot-checking, I could find only one small slip, an indexed reference that lacked a referent. The immense labor of Beckett, building up his own talent, is matched by the scholars who present his early correspondence, or at least a third of what remains, to an attentive audience. 

[P.S. As above, in html/pdf in Estudios Irlandeses 6 (2010): 183-185. Edited down and then expanded again for a different crowd at  Amazon US 2-17-13.  As is my Amazon review the same day of "Volume Two: 1941-1956"]

Patrick McGinley's "That Unearthly Valley": Book Review

In Bogmail and Foggage, Patrick McGinley sent up the Irish (could he or it be otherwise?) murder mystery genre. He scooped dollops of encyclopedic wit and mordant satire into these entertainments. A later saga proved more somber and meditative, the Black and Tan War ending as The Lost Soldier's Sad Song, while The Trick of the Ga Bolga updated a mythic showdown around his native village of Glencolmcille, on the blustery coast of Donegal.

This novelist, long resident in England, left the Glen for boarding school around 1950, but he never departed from this glacially carved, prehistoric, bleak, jagged yet lovely landscape in his memory. He compares its draw to the Welsh "hiraeth," a longing for the homeland. He defines the Irish equivalent of "cumhaidh" as a "knot of emotions involving longing for a place and a people in the knowledge that the time longed for can never return." (ix)

The topography of the terrain cuts from the Atlantic into the far northwest. "For me, the Glen is a place that encircles and embraces. From it there is no going forward: it is always the end of the journey. It grips the imagination and holds it captive in a way that a place on the road to somewhere cannot." (5-6) The spare, assertive, yet calm way in which these sentences unfold mirrors Patrick McGinley's craft, and perhaps his verbal dexterity and mental formation in the last generation raised somewhat bilingually in this Donegal enclave, one of the westernmost territories where the Irish language tries to cling to a fabled settlement of Stone Age dolmens and early Christian monuments.

McGinley admits: "Strangers are more aware of this quality of antiquity than those who have lived in the Glen all their lives and for whom hill, cliff and sea are a ubiquitous backdrop to the round of common tasks." (9) Having studied Irish at Oideas Gael there, and inspired to respond myself to the Glen's quick hold over me, I can attest to the truth of his observation: "Most people who have written about Glen or portrayed it in our art see in it what they bring to it, making it into a mirror reflecting what their own personalities and preoccupations. They show us many different Glens, or rather many shadows of the same immemorial Glen." The dramatic placement of this location, deep within a wide canyon pressed in and cut out from the coast's higher land, surrounds you as you descend into it.

The looming, ruined Martello tower raised in 1810 against the fear of Napoleon's invasion overlooks the ocean, while its far more permanent counterparts of the Glen Head, Slieve League, and Screig Beefan command attention. Those born there, whom McGinley represents, may be nearly immune to these screes and slopes; yet the salty wind, the stony valleys, and the scattered houses attract every visitor's gaze. The tower may be but a tiny nub as seen looking northerly from the Glen, but nobody can resist the dominance of the massive rocky ridge, a "solid, sloping, flat-topped crag clad below with green ferns in summer that turn to reddish bracken in winter." (14)

His memoir begins set in this dramatic setting, summing up deftly the power of craic in the village pub,  the flavor of fresh fish, the lingering superstitions, and the ambiguous charisma of Fr. James McDyer, who accelerated the remote parish as if from the early 1800s to the end of the 1900s within two decades. By then, young Patrick was about to leave for Galway and a scholarship at a teacher training school, followed by studies in English and Irish literature at the university there. Stymied by the stagnant culture in the midlands and Dublin, he soon gave up the classroom for the boat to London. Yet, he admires his stolid, but wryly funny, family and neighbors of Killaned townland, and That Unearthly Valley memorializes, not with sentiment but clarity, their hold on his imagination.

McGinley observes relationships sharply. "My father never told us anything about his childhood. For all I knew he might never have had one, and at times it seemed to me that he was bent on making sure that I didn't have one either." (71) His love for this man deepens his son matures, and stacking hay or cutting turf bond the bookish boy with the practical farmer. As for Patrick's mother, the first time he kissed her was when she lay in her coffin.

People endured rather than thrived in the Glen's harshness. While Patrick did not learn about sex, he learned about death soon after his own birth. Watching at deathbeds and serving the priest at funerals, he witnessed the comforts exchanged naturally between those who had lived their whole lives isolated among few families and few surnames. "At times that death had been created solely for the well-being of the living, while sex had been created for their discomfiture and embarrassment." (119)

He regards school with mixed enthusiasm, but gradually, a few chance books on better subjects beckon him into knowledge. He admires Irish history, even if the assigned textbook after 1169 makes it "like supporting a football team that never won a match." (114) He scrutinizes the patriotic cant and discerns the deeper, less apparent meaning in a land where the authority of the Church roused peasants to boldness and futility, qualities that The Lost Soldier's Song would convey movingly.

Unsurprisingly, the tensions of mid-century Ireland that offered few opportunities for the restless thinker and assertive teacher hastened his departure for England. The second half of his account takes you through his education and the perspective that widened his insights beyond the Glen. Near his conclusion, he reflects on the inevitable change, deepened by his early awareness of mortality: "Life is a dance leading ultimately to the dance for which there is no word in English," he reasons, but in Irish there may be none either. (301) With the capitulation of parlor storytelling and the lived links to oral tradition, the craic that enlivened Bogmail and Foggage, and the lore reverberating in The Trick of the Ga Bolga, echoes across farms now given over to silage and white bungalows speckling the boreens.

"The paradise we most yearn for is the paradise we have lost, the paradise that is no longer there to receive us." (302) He finds in its seaside haunts a lasting assurance of the place's endurance, even if its few indigenous surnames have been supplanted by many who have moved there for a summer or returned there to seek silence rather than the sprawl of a city. When he goes back to Doonalt to rent a bungalow, electrical wires whine in the wind at night, drowning out the waves which once comforted him in a nearby boyhood home.

Patrick McGinley acknowledges frankly the gains and losses that the Glen's popularity as a holiday or retirement destination have brought to an electrified, globalized, and increasingly homogenized culture that has replaced the fading but lingering Irish-language heritage, its agricultural implements and recreated cabins now part of Fr. McDyer's folk museum down the road from Oideas Gael. (In shorter form as a 600-word version at Slugger O'Toole 2-17-13, also to Amazon US)

M. D. Healy's "Irish Genealogy": Kindle E-Book Review

M. D. Healy parcels out advice in helpful bits. For instance, disparity between where an infant is born and where the census records the baby's residence may be attributed to the mother's tendency to return to her own ancestral home to give birth. Naming orders for sons and daughters delineate the maddening tendency (my pedigree attests to this!) of repetition every two or three generations. In the past, the range by horse or bicycle might explain the relative proximity of a courting couple's homes. 

Looking into the Constabulary data, as well as parish baptismal records, can replace the lack of census information for many decades in the nineteenth century. Abbreviations of first names (or in parish documents, the Latin forms of them) common in data, it's good to expand searches in archives to account for these--as well as surname variants. The author also reminds us of transcription errors. (I have one clan in my family tree I've found spelled in the records three ways over two generations.)

Healy intersperses, more willy-nilly into the short sections of a few paragraphs, his own north Mayo connections and culture, place-name or local Irish lore, and application for "Citizenship by descent" guidance. (He errs when citing as "1830" the Republic of Ireland's legalization of this status; I also think that it merits mention that such a status cannot be passed on to one's own foreign-born descendants.)  You even get a distant cousin's shaggy-dog tale about the Irish genetic descent from the Basques. 

All in all, this replicates a genial long chat in a pub with a professional genealogist. However, it's a very, very brief e-book. My Kindle had no table of contents, and while a short reading list is appended, more was needed in the text about "finding your Irish ancestor's birthplace" as to the learning where the locations of "the full compliment" of records might be consulted. Some records are now coming online, but many have or will not. Knowing the difference for those who may have hit that "brick wall" in an initial online search would assist the American audience for this book.

Healy's approach rambles even within these small parameters, but the tips he shares will encourage those who now have the benefit of the Net to do what some of us--not long ago--had to do with waits for the big tomes at Dublin's Public Record Office, the tax records from the Land Valuation archive, or the microfiche lists at Irish county libraries. These, still, may be consulted with benefit, by professional or amateur genealogists. His comments here are parsed out as but a few in total, but they may point you in the right direction. (Amazon US 12-17-12)

"Rough Guide to Ireland": Book Review

I've used this before, and the newest (2011 tenth) edition edited by Paul Gray and Geoff Wallis (who also wrote the fine "Rough Guide to Irish Music") continues in the solid tradition. Rough Guide like its competitor Lonely Planet aims at the market lower than Fodor's (whose 2011 Ireland guide I also like--see my review) as to cost but up slightly from, say, Let's Go for the hostels. Maps are decent, inserts on food/drink and festivities appeal, and coverage gets the cities and small towns in, and the familiar attractions and scenic and/or fabled villages.

That being said, I did a spot-check on a few places I know better, to see if the depth was there, for places a bit off-beat. Drogheda has good maps and historical data, and while certain eateries I'd frequent are absent, it's sufficient information for a market town's advantages. For a smaller town, Downpatrick, as a test case, had the basics, and a smaller one still, Waterfoot in the Glens of Antrim, the bare bones for a little place.

Further west, Oughterard and Galway city, Roundstone and Spiddal as checked had the usual sights, pubs, craft shops, bars, hotels and b+b's. No real surprises. Glencolmkille in Donegal was missing some "practicalities" but still a note for detail was welcome: in the rain or wet weather, an alternate if longer path to the recommended hostel was suggested. But, a newer place I was wondering about pro-con was not included from there, and this makes me wonder how often the editor or his team visits the hinterlands to update the material.

Dublin, Derry, Belfast, Limerick, Cork, Waterford, the Aran Islands, the Ring of Kerry, the Boyne Valley and the like gain the expected prominence. Bigger charts as to historical districts are a plus. Everyone needs up-to-date phones, locations, URLs, and hours, and these seem present. But the nitty-gritty of the times buses (or more rarely if ever trains depending on where you are) come and go is not included within the facts for each place (unlike some other guides) for smaller burgs. It's relegated to a summary list at the end of each region, and how often a day a bus or train comes and goes. While this saves the trouble of looking at each locale's entry, it may or may not help the visitor as to a precise timing of when journeys can be arranged. For a lower-budget visitor not having a car in the middle of the country outside the large centers, this is a lack that is telling. Not every visitor may have a smartphone to check web data, and the arrival and departure can be key. Still, you can always wait it out in a pub, more likely, or heritage center, perhaps, for the day, or find a place to stay for the night!

I'd use this, however, to plan a journey. The contact information can set you up via the phone or more likely if abroad the web. Reservations and itineraries can be coordinated with a judicious use of this guide, to see what's worth it and when. It does not have the all-island or regional tour suggestions of other guides, but it's good for accommodation details.

The Irish language section is unlikely to be consulted by many readers, but I found its lists not very useful for absolute beginners, with no transliterations save elements common in some place names. Despite dialectal differences by region, some raw equivalences beyond vowel sounds and consonant charts might have encouraged the brave visitor to try out the "cúpla focail" or couple words in Gaeilge, to break the ice. Otherwise, the cultural material, enriched by fine if of course idiosyncratic musical and literary recommendations, is fine as a refresher, stimulant, or conversation starter. I'd argue half the night in a pub over certain inclusions.  (Amazon US 8-17-12)