My 2019 Reading I. Beeing Irish: Beckett, Banville, Bowen and O'Brien

My 2019 Irish reading began with Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938). It was pure coincidence that the year’s Irish authors’ names all alliterate on B—Beckett, Banville, Bowen, and O’Brien.

            Murphy begins and ends in his rocking chair seeking oblivion, trying to exclude sensation and thought. Unlike Celia Kelly’s grandfather, whose chair, though a wheelchair, is a movable one and takes him to the sensual pleasure of flying a kite, Murphy’s chair rocks without going anywhere—and Murphy is asensual—he “never took a drop,” for instance—and wants to simplify right out of human existence, and finally does.

            The book begins flying false colors as comedy and Irish blather, with characters given to logorrhea, wordplay, and word invention, usually bawdy: volte-face turns into volte-fesse and Murphy tries to ignore Neary’s knee-humping that he calls genustupration. But it’s really tragedy from the get-go. Neary’s peculiar talent is being able to stop his heart. Celia wants only to be with Murphy and off the street, but this requires Murphy to work, and as he tells her, he is a perpetual emeritus. The depressing chain of x who loves y who loves z who loves x described near the beginning is actually less depressing than the facts: Miss Counihan loves love and Murphy, Celia doesn’t love love but loves Murphy, and Murphy is in love with oblivion.

The Sea (2005) is the first John Banville novel I have read, and it convinced me he has earned his honors as a novelist. He practices a concentration on the individual scene that is exact and clinical, with startling but apt similes. He shows perhaps less of a concentration on structure and transitions, though this may not be fair—see below.

            Max Morden—his mother always insisted that is not his real name, but we never learn what it might be—after his rich wife Anna’s death of cancer, returns to the seaside town of “Ballyless”—down the road from Ballymore—where he first fell in love with Chloe Grace, after a brief infatuation with her mother.

            The three emotional settings of the book are tightly linked, and the transitions from one to the other are not hard to follow. As it turns out, the episode with the Grace family ends as horribly as Max’s wife’s illness. And the return to The Cedars, the house where the Graces lived that is now a boarding house, is motivated by more than the associations of the house, though we don’t find out until the very end that the housekeeper, Miss Vavasour, is the Rose who was nanny to the twins, Myles and Chloe. Also not revealed until the end is the infatuation that Rose confesses to Connie Grace, imperfectly overheard by Max in a tree above them, which he assumes was for Carlo Grace but was actually for Connie.

            Max admits that memory is a suspicious informant about the past, and quirky in its manifestations: “memory dislikes motion,” Max says at one point, and prefers tableaux. This is one of many aphoristic pronouncements in The Sea, and my favorite is “Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.”

            Banville’s books remind some people of Nabokov, and there is a love of words and a generally disdainful attitude that Max shares with some of Nabokov’s characters, but Nabokov’s narrators are not tormented self-haters. There are nearer literary cousins in Beckett and Joyce, Proust and James. 

Elizabeth Bowen was a remarkable novelist, but her true talent may have been for the shorter form. If you read The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen, collected in 1981 and introduced by Angus Wilson, you can make up your own mind. I came to the short stories after having read one novel, The House in Paris.

Behind Bowen’s horror story “The Demon Lover” is an experience that must have been repeated thousands of times in every war. Here, it starts in the “first war”—World War I—as a young girl promises her soldier fiancé she will wait for him. He is soon reported missing and presumed killed. She marries, goes on with her life. So far a common enough tale. But now, in another war, she finds in the London house her family has deserted for the safety of the country, when she has briefly returned to pick up a few items, a letter purportedly from her fiancé of twenty-five years ago, saying he will meet her at “the hour arranged.” Even she admits but does not wish to think about the “supernatural side” of the letter’s appearance. She imagines she has escaped when she finds an empty taxi. The driver turns and they stare at each other for a long minute through the glass that divides a London taxi driver from his passengers. Then she screams and tries to get out as he drives away. This is possibly her most famous story, and has been often anthologized.

            Bowen is not afraid of the supernatural, had, in fact, an “apparent total acceptance of ghosts, of the occult,” according to Angus Wilson in the introduction to this collection. His point is apparent not only in “The Demon Lover,” but in other stories such as “The Happy Autumn Fields.” When half her house in London is destroyed by a bomb, Mary goes back to it to collect what can be salvaged, but she just wants to sleep. She dreams (so vividly she is not convinced her waking life is the real one) that she is one—or both—of a pair of twin sisters in the remote past, at a country house with parents, brothers, an older sister, and a fiancé—hers or her twin’s. This, too, is a ghost story in its way, like “The Demon Lover,” but Bowen’s unique take is that the quotidian and the eldritch often share an address.

Angus Wilson, introducing this volume, says Bowen has affinities with Aldous Huxley, Saki, Ivy Compton Burnett and Virginia Woolf, but that she is never satiric like the early Huxley, or academic like Woolf.  She is good with children, writes Wilson, a point that is made forcefully by A. S. Byatt in her introduction to the novel The House in Paris, which Byatt read at the age of eleven. Byatt says she was convinced then and later that Bowen got the eleven-year-old girl right. Byatt goes further to say that Bowen is better at getting the child right than is Henry James in What Maisie Knew.

            The description of London and of houses reminds me at times of Chesterton, where the city and its buildings are given poetic import and portent. Houses contain and evoke the mystery of their inhabitants. The architecture alters according to mood. In “Ivy Gripped the Steps,” Gavin enters to the detested Admiral and his beloved Mrs. Nicholson, whom he has just heard calling him “poor little funny Gavin,” and Bowen writes “The room, as can happen, had elongated. Like figures at the end of a telescope [we infer the wrong end] the Admiral and Mrs. Nicholson were to be seen….”

            “Mysterious Kôr” conveys effects of the war on ordinary people through two working girls who room together and the soldier boyfriend of one of them. Pepita and Arthur are unable to be intimate since they have no place to go and end up at the girls’ flat, where Arthur sleeps on the sofa.  Early in the story, the city in full moonlight is compared to the deserted city of Kôr described in Rider Haggard’s She and in the Andrew Lang poem that prefaces later editions, a poem the girl quotes to her lover. The London where these people live is an alien and dangerous place to them, and Pepita reacts by withdrawing from people into her imagination. Bowen admitted in a BBC radio program that reading She as a teenager gave her the first sense of dangerous power in literature. Afterward, she said “I was prepared to handle any book like a bomb.”

            In the astonishing “Summer Night,” Bowen inhabits in turn all of its characters, from Emma, speeding stockingless through the night from her indifferent, emotionless husband (“the Major”) to her emotionless lover Robinson (from Jones or Smith to Robinson?). Emma is reflected in her older daughter Vivie, who flits throughout the house like a pixie, paints her naked body with chalks like an ancient Pict, and shares her mother’s longing for love that is active and openly expressed. Aunt Fran is sure she is being lied to by being told nothing. She wants what is behind the words. Justin, on the other hand, would be happy with just the words, just extended conversation; he is one of Robinson’s two guests turned out when Emma arrives. The other is Queenie, Justin’s deaf sister, who may be the only one in the story who is nearly whole, who feels and connects with others even though she cannot hear them.

            In one of the earliest stories here, Miss Murcheson (like so many composition teachers before and since) wants to get her pupils to see things for themselves, to feel something new, and to think. But they won’t take her daffodils: “Miss Murcheson has never really lived,” they tell each other complacently, as they leave her house (“Daffodils”).

            The rich but retarded (the narrator’s coy/kind phrase is “detained in childhood”) Miss Cuffe, in “Her Table Spread,” expects romance to come at her like a proffered box of candy; she speculates which officer she’ll marry from the destroyer so conspicuously anchored in the bay below her Irish castle. It won’t be Mr. Alban, the pompous and effete concert pianist who’s come to have a look at the heiress—“he was not handsome,” thinks Miss Cuffe. Whoever it is, her Aunt Treye and Miss Carbin, as dependents, will be affected. Mr. Alban has already been affected: when Valeria Cuffe mistakes him for one of the officers come at her behest (she’s been out waving a lantern) and Alban sees her laughing “like a princess,” and the three women’s expectant faces, he has an epiphany, feeling what it is like to be a man who is loved.  

            In “Sunday Afternoon,” Henry Russel takes a break from his war office London job and recovering from the bombing of his flat to spend an afternoon with his friends in the Irish countryside and a life he knew before the war. When his hostess, “Mrs. Vesey,” is mentioned in the first line, the name should signal to us we are in Henry James territory; the Henry James influence, according to Wilson, “sometimes seems superficially too apparent” in Bowen. Henry tries to tell Mrs. Vesey’s niece Maria, who is “rather pert” and cynical, that these people around her whom she despises make her what she is, define her identity, and cannot be rejected without great loss to it. “You don’t expect me to understand you, do you?” she replies. Like the children in “Daffodils,” she doesn’t think those around her have really lived.

            “The Disinherited” is another story in which Bowen inhabits her characters completely, most eerily getting into the mind of a chauffeur who writes and burns each night a long letter to the woman he murdered, recounting his state of mind when he smothered her and arguing his present indifference—until his letter breaks into an anguished confession of sorrow and love and longing for her. More amazing is the fact that his is not the story. A disaffected housewife, Marianne, married to a man retired from the Civil Service and fifteen years older than she, teams up with a young woman, Davina, living nearby with her aunt. Davina went through her own fortune and now finds herself dependent on her aunt for room and board while she sells minor intimacies to the chauffeur for pocket money. Marianne and Davina go out for an unsatisfactory night on the town with Davina’s friends, all with her own kind of unhappiness, affectlessness, and detachment from reality. The setting is the suburb of a college town where new housing is being built apart from shops or any amenities, and as often in Bowen, the landscape reflects the bleakness and despair of the characters.

            The stories can be dismal, but they are lived life as it is experienced, moment by moment, while these characters get through their days, hoping for, experiencing, or remembering passion, coping with war and other strains, and all the while, like Miss Murcheson and Russel, trying to get the young to realize that this is what it is to be alive.

The last of my Irish reads in 2019 was At Swim-Two Birds. Flann O’Brien was one of the many names and pseudonyms of Brian O’Nolan, or as he sometimes spelled it in a more Irish way, Brian Ó Nualláin. He was a columnist for the Irish Times as Myles na Gopaleen. He wrote At Swim-Two-Birds in 1939. The novel’s narrator is a Dublin college student who would rather stay in bed than go to class; rather than read for exams, he prefers to write about his mythical Irish hero Finn Mac Cool, the Pooka Fergus MacPhellimy (“a member of the devil class”), or the superprecocious—that is, born full-grown (O’Brien would surely have used the word had the biological category been named in his time)—John Furriskey. He soon introduces another writer, Dermot Trellis, also a slugabed, who keeps all of his fictional characters in his boarding house. An interpolated western, complete with a buckboard, six-shooters, the Circle-N, “the most venerable of Dublin’s older ranches,” and the enlistment of the Metropolitan Police as posse to recover stolen steers, seems to be inspired by the death of William Tracy, a Dublin writer of American westerns, who is then recruited as a character by the narrator. Characters who interact with their author, rewriting their own narrative and his are metafictional features, as is the general self-consciousness and reflexivity of writing about writing and about storytelling. O’Brien adds to this examination of the process of writing the critique and parody of style, incorporating heroic narrative and its parody, western palaver, and a dozen other styles he tries out in the book.

            Dermot Trellis’s character Finn Mac Cool, in a bedroom in Trellis’s house, tells a tale of the madness of King Sweeny, caused by St. Ronan Finn. All the other characters in the room are impatiently tolerant, but Shanahan interrupts from time to time to talk about a doggerel verse poet named Casey and Irish long-jumpers. Ronan has turned Sweeny into a bird in Finn’s tale, which seems to end with Sweeny’s death, though Sweeny turns up later in our narrative. Mostly Finn’s story is full of mouth-stopping Irish place names, one of which is the ford on the Shannon, Snámh-dá-én, which means Swim-Two-Birds.

            Trellis’s characters have come up with the expedient of drugging him so he sleeps all the time and they can get on with their lives. At one point on a dockside pub crawl, several of them meet two Greeks named Timothy Danaos and Dona Ferentes.

            The Pooka MacPhellimey, married to a witch who flies on a broomstick, at one point has a conversation with a bodiless Good Fairy, who wants to take him to the birth of the child of Trellis and Sheila Lamont, over whom the two forces of evil and good will struggle for sovereignty. They eventually find Orlick Trellis, whom Trellis fathered when he assaulted Sheila after he had invented her as a character and then was overcome by her beauty. Orlick is another superprecocious birth, already a young man. He goes for an apprenticeship with the Pooka, because the Good Fairy lost his chance for sovereignty over the boy in a card game with the Pooka. The problem was the Good Fairy claimed to have money when he did not, so he not only lies but, unlike the smooth substantiality of the devil Macphellimey, the Good Fairy lacks anything of the substantial—no money, no pockets to put it in, no body. We should note here that the book Trellis is supposedly writing is about the consequences of evil acts.

            Orlick is commissioned by several of Trellis’s characters to write a story with Trellis as a character, “to turn the tables (as it were).” His style is too “high up” for his listeners, and then Orlick puts the Pooka in the narrative. The Pooka pulls Trellis out of bed, throws him out the window, and beats him nearly to death. Then he puts Trellis on trial, with his characters at the “bar” –they’re all drinking stout during the proceedings—as judges and jurymen both. They sentence him to death, and Orlick voices some concern about what happens to all of them if Trellis dies. But meanwhile, just as our narrator comes him in triumph after passing his exams and his uncle gives him a watch in celebration—this is the same uncle who throughout the book keeps asking the narrator, “Do you ever open a book at all?—just at that moment the maid in Trellis’s bedroom throws loose papers—the novel he is writing—into the fire in the grate, and Trellis comes home, still in his nightshirt, tired, but otherwise unharmed, and free from the persecution of his characters.

            At Swim-Two-Birds is juvenile work that O’Brien himself scorned later, and it has all the marks of Irish literary juvenility such as digressions and catalogues and interpolations of extraneous stuff, some of it original but a lot simply lifted from elsewhere, such as the two-page summary of a narrative poem that delays the ending. Some of the catalogues are entertaining, such as Finn Mac Cool’s list of all the birds whose song pleases him: choughs and jays and guillemots and so on, but also various “pilibeens” or plovers, and including “the crúiskeen lawn,” which is not a bird at all, but means a brimming little jug and is the name of O’Brien’s column in the Irish Times that he wrote for years under the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen, or Myles of the little horses—he was apparently a pony-player.

           

            As you may surmise from the amount of space given to each author above, it was Bowen who most impressed me, with Banville a close second. A Bowen story can go anywhere, and do it convincingly, often frighteningly. Were I to try to generalize about what all these Irish authors have in common, it would be that they all are attracted to language like the caricature Irishman is to drink. O’Brien and, occasionally, Beckett, are drunk on the stuff of language. Banville is a little buzzed but under control. Bowen never seems the least tipsy, while savoring every vintage, every drop.