Margaret Skinnider is one of the minor figures of Ireland’s Easter Rising, but she is also one of its most interesting and daring personalities. Born Margaret Skinnider is one of the minor figures of Ireland’s Easter Rising, but she is also one of its most interesting and daring personalities. Born and raised in Scotland, this passionate young Irish lass—and dedicated feminist—quit her job as a mathematics instructor and moved to Dublin to take part in the coming revolution. There she met Countess Markievicz, and soon “the Red Countess” had Margaret smuggling detonators through customs under her hat, spying on British caches of ammunition, and testing dynamite in the Wicklow Mountains nearby.
During the Easter Rising, Margaret—dressed as a boy—worked principally as a bike messenger, communicating between St. Stephen’s Green and the headquarters located in the General Post Office. But later in the conflict, when British snipers fired upon the Green and the rebel-occupied College of Surgeons, Margaret—who was a crack shot—convinced her unwilling commander Michael Mallin to let her be a sniper too, telling him the she and other women “had the same right to risk our lives as the men. She did indeed risk her life: she was grievously wounded, and spent two weeks in hospital.
This very short autobiography, published in 1917 in America—shorter than it looks, as it is padded with revolutionary songs—is a to-the-point, no-nonsense account of a dedicated woman who tells her story straight. I bet it was a great fund-raising tool for the war to come, and it is a stirring read even today.
Since Margaret was a modest woman, I will end with an account, not of her own exploits, but of a story she heard of a triple shooting while she was confined to the hospital:
There were three women in the ward who had all been struck by the same bullet: a mother, her daughter, and a cousin. They had been friendly to the British soldiers, had fed them because, as the mother told me, her husband and son were in the trenches fighting for Great Britain. These three women had been at their window, looking with curiosity into the street, when the very soldier they had just fed turned suddenly and shot them. One had her jawbone broken, the second her arm pierced, and the third was struck in the breast. They were all serious wounds which kept them in bed. While I was still in the ward, the two men of this family came back from Flanders on leave, only to find no one at home. The neighbors directed them to the hospital. I hate to think how those men looked when they learned why their women wore bandages. They told me that during Easter Week the Germans put up opposite the trenches of the Irish Brigade a placard that read:
"The military are shooting down your wives and children in Dublin."
But the Irish soldiers had not believed it ...
When the day came for them to return to the front, the father wanted to desert, dangerous as that would be, while the son was eager to go back to the trenches.
"This time," he said to me, "we'll not be killing Germans!"
When rumors came later of a mutiny in the Irish regiment, I wondered to myself if these two men were at the bottom of it.
The Celtic Twilight (1902) is a book of encounters. The encounters Yeats writes of are the meetings between the Irish people and the faeries, but equa The Celtic Twilight (1902) is a book of encounters. The encounters Yeats writes of are the meetings between the Irish people and the faeries, but equally interesting are those other encounters: the meetings between the young Protestant poet and the Catholic Irish who tell him their ancient stories so that he can write them down in this book.
Although Yeats’ poetry—even the early, overly precious stuff—is always filled with beauties to admire, his prose can sometimes be pedantic and rather dry. In Celtic Twilight, though, Yeats' every utterance is informed by the richness of Irish speech, and the result is a balanced, lively prose, filled with vivid images and revealing asides.
Two things struck me during my reading of this book. The first was how much I love the Irish conception of the faeries, for they are neither minor demons like the Scots variety nor good little souls like the treacly British type. No, Irish faeries are neither malevolent nor particularly merciful. Instead, they are mischievous to the core, with unquenchable appetites for confusion. But they may just as easily do you a good turn as a bad one. It all depends on the nature of the performance.
Secondly, I was struck with the emotional intensity in some of the tales of beautiful women in the book. Yeats met Maude Gonne in 1889—thirteen years before the publication of Celtic Twilight. It was then, as Yeats has said, that “the troubling of my life began,” and you can see the signs of the continual troubling here:
There is the old square castle, Ballylee, inhabited by a farmer and his wife, and a cottage where their daughter and their son-in-law live, and a little mill with an old miller, and old ash-trees throwing green shadows upon a little river and great stepping-stones. I went there two or three times last year to talk to the miller . . . . I have been there this summer, and I shall be there again before it is autumn, because Mary Hynes, a beautiful woman whose name is still a wonder by turf fires, died there sixty years ago; for our feet would linger where beauty has lived its life of sorrow to make us understand that it is not of the world.
An old man brought me a little way from the mill and the castle, and down a long, narrow boreen that was nearly lost in brambles and sloe bushes, and he said, ‘. . . . They say she was the handsomest girl in Ireland, her skin was like dribbled snow’ - he meant driven snow, perhaps, - ‘and she had blushes in her cheeks.” . . . .
An old weaver, whose son is supposed to go away among the Sidhe (the faeries) at night, says, ‘Mary Hynes was the most beautiful thing ever made. My mother used to tell me about her, for she’d be at every hurling, and wherever she was she was dressed in white. As many as eleven men asked her in marriage in one day, but she wouldn’ t have any of them. There was a lot of men up beyond Kilbecanty one night, sitting together drinking, and talking of her, and one of them got up and set out to go to Ballylee and see her; but Cloon Bog was open then, and when he came to it he fell into the water, and they found him dead there in the morning. She died of the fever that was before the famine.’ . . . .
There is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge hills, a vast desolate place . . . . She says, ‘The sun and the moon never shone on anybody so handsome, and her skin was so white that it looked blue, and she had two little blushes on her cheeks.’ . . . .
But a man by the shore at Kinvara, who is too young to remember Mary Hynes, says, ‘Everybody says there is no one at all to be seen now so handsome; it is said she had beautiful hair, the colour of gold. She was poor, but her clothes every day were the same as Sunday, she had such neatness. And if she went to any kind of a meeting, they would all be killing one another for a sight of her, and there was a great many in love with her, but she died young. It is said that no one that has a song made about them will ever live long.’ She died young because the gods loved her . . . .
These poor countrymen and countrywomen in their beliefs, and in their emotions, are many years nearer to that old Greek world, that set beauty beside the fountain of things, than are our men of learning. She ‘had seen too much of the world’ ; but these old men and women, when they tell of her, blame another and not her, and though they can be hard, they grow gentle as the old men of Troy grew gentle when Helen passed by on the walls.
If that “old square castle, Ballylee” sounds familiar, it should. Yeats bought it fourteen years after Celtic Twilight was published, and lived their during the summer. (They call it “Yeat’s Tower” now.)
Even if Yeat couldn’t be close to the beautiful Maud Gonne, he could be close to the ghost of Mary Hynes instead....more
Shaw’s one-act play about Napoleon, The Man of Destiny (1897). is memorable for at least four reasons: 1) it gives us a glimpse of an indisputably gre Shaw’s one-act play about Napoleon, The Man of Destiny (1897). is memorable for at least four reasons: 1) it gives us a glimpse of an indisputably great man at the point when he begins to realize his greatness, 2) it presents us with a battle of minds and wills between that great man and an equally resourceful woman, 3) it is filled with witty, diverting dialogue, and 4) it allows G.B.S.--through the mouth of Napoleon—to deliver a devastating assessment of the character of the English people.
The play takes place at a Northern Italian inn where Napoleon has set up his temporary headquarters. It is two days after the battle of Lodi, a battle which—though indecisive in its outcome—helped convince Napoleon he was indeed a “man of destiny,” more gifted than his fellow generals. The general is determined to retrieve a packet of stolen dispatches and letters which—he suspects—are now in the possession of an attractive Englishwoman who is staying at the inn. The search for this packet—and the contents of one particular letter—are at the center of this absorbing and entertaining play.
Here follows an excerpt of Napoleon’s assessment of the English character (which I believe could—with a few minor alterations--be equally well applied to the American people):
No Englishman is too low to have scruples: no Englishman is high enough to be free from their tyranny. But every Englishman is born with a certain miraculous power that makes him master of the world. When he wants a thing, he never tells himself that he wants it. He waits patiently until there comes into his mind, no one knows how, a burning conviction that it is his moral and religious duty to conquer those who have got the thing he wants. Then he becomes irresistible….He is never at a loss for an effective moral attitude. As the great champion of freedom and national independence, he conquers and annexes half the world, and calls it Colonization. When he wants a new market for his adulterated Manchester goods, he sends a missionary to teach the natives the gospel of peace. The natives kill the missionary: he flies to arms in defence of Christianity; fights for it; conquers for it; and takes the market as a reward from heaven. In defence of his island shores, he puts a chaplain on board his ship; nails a flag with a cross on it to his top-gallant mast; and sails to the ends of the earth, sinking, burning and destroying all who dispute the empire of the seas with him. He boasts that a slave is free the moment his foot touches British soil; and he sells the children of his poor at six years of age to work under the lash in his factories for sixteen hours a day.
Yeats published his first collection, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), when he was twenty-five, and some of the poems contained within Yeats published his first collection, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (1889), when he was twenty-five, and some of the poems contained within it were almost five years old at the time. With a few exceptions, most of them are derivative and undistinguished, but the title work, Yeats' first and only sustained narrative poem, is both haunting and memorable.
Most of the shorter poems are clearly the work of a young man learning his craft through imitation, primarily of English models. Their language is pre-Raphaelite, their attitude Symbolist, and the Romantic heart beating inside each of them beats with the rhythm of Shelley’s. The exotic locations Yeats chooses—India, Arcady, 15th Century Spain—are seldom convincing, and the frequent poems about fairies—with one exception—are not memorable individually, and grow tedious in number. That exception is “The Stolen Child”, remembered for its haunting refrain:
Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
"The Stolen Child” succeeds because it captures the mournful, slightly sinister feeling of Irish fairy lore, something far removed from English nursery fairies which inhabit the rest of young Yeats’ “fey” verse. Indeed, whenever Yeats treats seriously Irish folk tradition—as in the folk song imitation “Down by the Salley Gardens” or the dramatic monologue of the blind, mad monarch “King Goll”—he creates enduring and original work.
The best thing about the book, however, is the lengthy narrative poem of the title. Yeat’s critics have largely ignored or panned it, but Harold Bloom likes it, and I like it a lot too. It is a thoughtful reworking of Irish legend that has something to say, not only about the growth and temptations of the young artist, but also about the challenges facing the Irish in the coming revolutionary age.
The Wanderings of Oisin tells the tale of how the Irish bard Oisin (pronounced “O’Sheen”), hunting with the Fenian heroes, is enticed away by Naimh, daughter of the King of the Young. She spirits him away to a series of three islands, where he lingers for three hundred years. On the first island he hunts and fishes with those forever young, on the second he battles a demon who holds a princess captive, and on the third he rests and dreams surrounded by the sleeping giants of old.
In the following passage, Oisin tells of a song he sang to the young immortals, and of their reaction:
And once a lady by my side Gave me a harp, and bid me sing, And touch the laughing silver string; But when I sang of human joy A sorrow wrapped each merry face, And, patrick! by your beard, they wept, Until one came, a tearful boy; ‘A sadder creature never stept Than this strange human bard,’ he cried; And caught the silver harp away, And, weeping over the white strings, hurled It down in a leaf-hid, hollow place That kept dim waters from the sky; And each one said, with a long, long sigh, ‘O saddest harp in all the world, Sleep there till the moon and the stars die!’
At the end of the three hundred he wakes, returning to Ireland only to discover that all his comrades are dead, that Christianity holds sway, and that the warlike pagan spirit is no more. St. Patrick offers Oisin a rosary (“the chain of small stones”) and bids him pray for his sins and avoid the fires of Hell, but Oisin replies:
Ah me! to be Shaken with coughing and broken with old age and pain, Without laughter, a show unto children, alone with remembrance and fear; All emptied of purple hours as a beggar’s cloak in the rain, As a hay-cock out on the flood, or a wolf sucked under a weir. It were sad to gaze on the blessed and no man I loved of old there; I throw down the chain of small stones! when life in my body has ceased, I will go to Caoilte, and Conan, and Bran, Sceolan, Lomair, And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or at feast.
Arms and the Man is Bernard Shaw’s first great play. It is filled with witty and amusing dialogue, a diverting and well-constructed plot, and charming Arms and the Man is Bernard Shaw’s first great play. It is filled with witty and amusing dialogue, a diverting and well-constructed plot, and charming, well differentiated characters. A perfect light comedy designed to amuse the most jaded audience, it is also a deadly serious play that launches a fierce attack on one of the most destructive beliefs of Shaw’s (and any other) time: that war is heroic and magnificent, and that the gallant soldier is the supreme icon of manhood, something to be esteemed and admired.
The play, set during the Serbian-Bulgarian War of 1885, is the story of the encounter between Raina, a Bulgarian maiden engaged to the young officer Sergius, and the veteran Captain Buntschli, a Swiss mercenary in the pay of the Serbians, who escapes capture after a battle by hiding out in Raina’s bedroom. Frightened at first, Raina soon views the captain with contempt, compared to her brave fiancee, for he seems fearful and not at all professional: for example, he carries chocolate in his ammunition bag. (“You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes.” Buntschli says. “The young ones carry pistols and cartridges ; the old ones, grub.”) Soon the Swiss captain rejoins his regiment, Sergius returns from the war, and then—following Captain Buntschli’s unexpected return—Raina begins to realize that perhaps her “chocolate soldier” (as she fondly calls him) may be the best man after all.
I’ll end with two passages from the first act. In the first, Raina’s mother Catherine describes Sergius’ heroic charge of the enemy battery. In the second, Captain Buntschli describes the same event from the enemy point of view.
CATHARINE:”Sergius is the hero of the hour, the idol of the regiment...You cant guess how splendid it is. A cavalry charge ! think of that ! He defied our Russian commanders, acted without orders, led a charge on his own responsibility headed it himself, was the first man to sweep through their guns. Cant you see it, Raina : our gallant splendid Bulgarians with their swords and eyes flashing, thundering down like an avalanche and scattering the wretched Servians and their dandified Austrian officers like chaff...Oh, if you have a drop of Bulgarian blood in your veins, you will worship him when he comes back.”
CAPTAIN BUNTSCHLI: “He did it like an operatic tenor, a regular handsome fellow, with flashing eyes and lovely moustache, shouting his war-cry and charging like Don Quixote at the windmills. We nearly burst with laughter at him; but when the sergeant ran up as white as a sheet, and told us theyd sent us the wrong cartridges, and that we couldn’t fire a shot for the next ten minutes, we laughed at the other side of our mouths. I never felt so sick in my life; though Ive been in one or two very tight places. And I hadnt even a revolver cartridge, nothing but chocolate. We'd no bayonets, nothing. Of course, they just cut us to bits. And there was Don Quixote flourishing like a drum major, thinking he'd done the cleverest thing ever known, whereas he ought to be courtmartialled for it. Of all the fools ever let loose on a field of battle, that man must be the very maddest. He and his regiment simply committed suicide only the pistol missed fire: that’s all.”
I read Troubles because it is an esteemed historical novel, known for its richness of comic incident and irony, a novel which treats a place and perio I read Troubles because it is an esteemed historical novel, known for its richness of comic incident and irony, a novel which treats a place and period I find fascinating (Ireland during the “War of Independence”), but I ended up loving it for very different reasons: I found it to be--in spite of (or because of?) its dark humor--one of the finest romantic Gothics I have encountered. It is redolent with ironies, of course, but they are ironies darkened by tragic waste.
It begins in 1919, when British Major Brendan Archer, still a bit shell-shocked from the war, travels to the fictional east coast town of Kilnalough to visit a woman he is almost sure he is engaged to (although he has no memory of proposing). This woman, Angela Spencer, resides in her father’s seaside hotel near Kilnalough, and the historical interest of the book comes from the Major's observations—on and off, during the next two years—of the changes in the atmosphere of the hotel and the town as the Irish desire for independence intensifies, particularly as it affects the decaying Anglo-Irish Protestant gentry, like the Spencer family itself.
Just as interesting as the history, however, is the ghost of the gothic which envelops the book. In my gothic interpretation, the sex of the protagonist is reversed, with Major Archer in the role of Jane Eyre or the second Mrs. de Winter: he is intelligent, capable, but a bit damaged, and rather unsure of his position in this unfamiliar world.. Angela, who greets her “fiancee” ambiguously and then disappears somewhere into the upper rooms, suggests the crazy lady in the Rochester attic or the ghost of Rebecca de Winter: could she--and her cryptic letters--hold the key to the secrets of the old Majestic Hotel?
The Majestic Hotel! Just like the Rochester mansion or Manderley itself, this old, decrepit three-hundred room hotel is full of gothic terror and delight. Its very structure defeats the explorer, for it is filled with corridors that end inconclusively, stairs that don’t connect where they should. Besides, it is long past its heyday, and—as its future grows perilous and the staff neglectful, the building itself goes to seed. Tropical foliage overruns the “The Palm Court,” thick branches bulge and break through the sitting room walls, and dry rot bores holes in the floor. Odd smells and strange objects may be discovered in the individual apartments (a sheep’s head in a chamber pot, for example), and, throughout the upper reaches of the hotel, and even downstairs, in the old “Imperial Bar,” an army of feral cats—orange, with green eyes, like an Irish flag—are taking over.
Yes, the decaying hotel is a metaphor for the dying British Empire itself. And Farrell’s book is continually, sardonically amusing as it reveals its eccentric Anglo-Irish characters continually besieged by unavoidable entropy and casual hostility: the book’s aging, half-mad Rochester, hotel owner Edward Spencer; his vague, mysterious elder daughter Angela; his selfish, idle son Ripon; his teenage daughters, the malevolent and beautiful twins Faith and Charity; the dozen superannuated maiden lady hotel guests; and an old blind grandmother who packs a revolver.
Farrell is a fine writer. Here is a passage I love: it is an account of the declining days of Edward's favorite dog Rover, which manages to be darkly funny, genuinely poignant, and richly symbolic of the Anglo-Irish situation—all in brisk, straightforward prose:
Like the Major, Rover had always enjoyed trotting from one room to another, prowling the corridors on this floor or that. But now, whenever he ventured upstairs to nose around the upper stories, as likely as not he would be set upon by a horde of cats and chased up and down the corridors to the brink of exhaustion. More than once the Major found him, wheezing and spent, tumbling in terror down a flight of stairs from some shadowy menace on the landing above. Soon he got into the habit of growling whenever he saw a shadow...then, as the shadows gathered with his progressively failing sight, he would rouse himself and bark fiercely even in the broadest of daylight, gripped by remorseless nightmares. Day by day, no matter how wide he opened his eyes, the cat-filled darkness continued to creep a little closer.
Five years after O’Casey took up residence in England, Within the Gates (1934) made is debut on the English Stage. It is a drama that attempts to pres Five years after O’Casey took up residence in England, Within the Gates (1934) made is debut on the English Stage. It is a drama that attempts to present the whole chaotic world within the context of the daily debates and encounters in a city park, featuring preachers, atheists, gardeners, old men on park benches, babies and nursemaids, a poet, a girl “no better than she should be,” her drunken mother, and an elderly bishop who may (or may not) be her father.
It has four acts, each set in a different season, each beginning with an appropriate seasonal song. It is frankly expressionist, but that is how O’Casey now wanted drama to be, for he had his fill of realism: “Let real birds fly through the air; real animals roam through the jungle, real fish swim in the sea, but let us have art in the theater.”
I have no problem with expressionistic drama, nor with the use of a large “slice of life” cast. The real problem I have with Within the Gates is its language. Here, for the first time, Casey deliberately shuns Irish speech and adopts its English equivalent.
And when Irish speech was driven from O’Casey’s stage, she took most of the poetry with her....more
The Irish dearly love a good story, and the story goes that O’Casey was so offended by Yeats’ refusal to allow The Silver Tassie (1928) to be produced The Irish dearly love a good story, and the story goes that O’Casey was so offended by Yeats’ refusal to allow The Silver Tassie (1928) to be produced at the Abbey Theatre that he packed up his belongings and moved to England, never to return to his native soil. It is true that he left Ireland, but he was already living in England when the row with Yeats occurred. O’Casey had been lured there by the film industry, including Alfred Hitchcock (who would soon direct a film of Juno and the Paycock): everybody knew the talkies were coming, and they needed all the first class dialogue writers they could find.
In The Silver Tassie O’Casey indeed shows once again his mastery of dialogue. The language burrows and soars, wounds and cries out in despair, giving an heroic dimension to the lives of the Dublin slum dwellers who speak it and live out their lives on its stage. It tells the story of young Harry Heegan, who, at the beginning of the first act, has just won a football trophy (the tassie) for his local club and is preparing to march off to the Great War, as if it too were some sort of athletic contest. In the fourth act, we see Harry again--in a wheelchair now, at a football club party—ignored (and betrayed) by former lovers and friends. The second act jars us with a boldly expressionistic evocation of trench warfare, and the third act prepares us for the play’s conclusion with a half-expressionistic, half realistic depiction of a veteran’s hospital.
It is a fiercely anti-war play which stretches the limits of realism—something I suspect did not worry O’Casey at all. (“The beauty, fire and poetry of drama.” he later wrote, “have perished in a storm of fake realisms.”) Still, Yeats had a point when he remarked that “I don’t think the mixture of the two manners – the realism of the first act and the unrealism of the second – succeeds”. What really offended O’Casey, however, was that Yeats also told him that “you are not interested in the Great War; you never stood on its battlefields, never walked in its hospitals, and so write out of your opinions,” and that as a consequence the second act “obtrudes upon the stage as so much dead wood.” But O’Casey cared very much about the war. In 1915, entering St. Vincent’s Hospital for an operation to remove a growth on his neck, he was placed in a ward filled with wounded soldiers and never forgot the suffering he saw there. I think, though, that what Yeats meant by his inartful comments was that O’Casey was not interested in the experience of war itself as a poet; the dialogue of Act II is mostly heated rhetoric, the real poetry only returning in Act III (the scene in a hospital ward, no doubt inspired by O’Casey’s own experiences).
The two poets eventually patched things up, and O’Casey returned seven years later to attend the Irish premiere of The Silver Tassie staged at the Abbey Theatre. But apparently Ireland was not yet ready for O’Casey. De Valera’s “neutral” Ireland was still uneasy about its British army dead, newspaper reviewers were largely hostile, and the priests from their pulpits denounced the The Silver Tassie for its blasphemies.
The play closed after only five nights, due to controversy. O’Casey again left Ireland, this time never to return....more
As paradoxical as it may seem, the least autobiographical of literary works are often the most personally revealing. A change in circumstance, the ado As paradoxical as it may seem, the least autobiographical of literary works are often the most personally revealing. A change in circumstance, the adoption of a mask, allows emotion to flow freely, to be more precisely transformed into truth. So it is with William Butler Yeats’ The Countess Cathleen (1912).
Based on what Yeats believed was an Irish folktale, The Countess Cathleen tells of an Irish noblewoman who, during a time of famine, sells her soul to devils so that her people might have bread. The play is pro-nationalist, of course, and anti-landlord too (the merchants, buyers of souls, seem a lot like the landlords), but above all it is an expression of love and concern for the beautiful, self-denying countess, who represented for Yeats’ his great unrequited love Maud Gonne. who frequently exhausted her energies in devotion to Ireland’s cause.
It is not a great play, but a good play, and it has many passages of good poetry in it. The ones that stand out most, however, are the utterances of the poet Aleel, who worries continually about the Countess' health and fate, and the Countess' tender—though reserved--replies to his concerns.
My favorite is the following passage. The poet Aleel, whose hand has been wounded in the Countess' service, has just just been dismissed from her presence, as she Prepares for her great sacrifice. He asks to remain, raising his hands in supplication:
CATHLEEN. Do not hold out to me beseeching hands. This heart shall never waken on earth. I have sworn, By her whose heart the seven sorrows have pierced, To pray before this altar until my heart Has grown to Heaven like a tree, and there Rustled its leaves, till Heaven has saved my people.
ALEEL. (who has risen) When one so great has spoken of love to one So little as I, though to deny him love, What can he but hold out beseeching hands, Then let them fall beside him, knowing how greatly They have overdared?
(He goes towards the door of the hall. The COUNTESS CATHLEEN takes a few steps towards him.)
CATHLEEN. If the old tales are true, Queens have wed shepherds and kings beggar-maids; God's procreant waters flowing about your mind Have made you more than kings or queens; and not you But I am the empty pitcher.
ALEEL. Being silent, I have said all, yet let me stay beside you.
CATHLEEN.No, no, not while my heart is shaken. No, But you shall hear wind cry and water cry, And curlews cry, and have the peace I longed for.
ALEEL. Give me your hand to kiss.
CATHLEEN. I kiss your forehead. And yet I send you from me. Do not speak; There have been women that bid men to rob Crowns from the Country-under-Wave or apples Upon a dragon-guarded hill, and all That they might sift men's hearts and wills, And trembled as they bid it, as I tremble That lay a hard task on you, that you go, And silently, and do not turn your head; Goodbye; but do not turn your head and look; Above all else, I would not have you look.
(ALEEL goes.)
I never spoke to him of his wounded hand, And now he is gone.
This book about the President of the ill-fated Irish Republic declared in 1916 is the last book published in O’Brien Press’ series “16 Lives,” a cente This book about the President of the ill-fated Irish Republic declared in 1916 is the last book published in O’Brien Press’ series “16 Lives,” a centenary commemoration of the martyred rebels of “The Easter Rising.” It is a valuable, informative series. Pity it didn’t end with a better book.
Oh, the book itself isn’t bad, not really. It just didn’t tell me what I wanted to know.
I was familiar with the shy, intense schoolmaster Padraig Pearse, founder and head of St. Enda’s, a secondary school promoting Irish language and culture. I knew he was a fiery nationalist orator and a fanatical believer in “blood sacrifice” who nevertheless treated his students with gentleness and tolerance. I knew he was devoted to his mother and his brother Willie, and was painfully shy around women. I knew he had been chosen by the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood as the “front man” for the revolution, while Thomas Clarke and Sean MacDiarmada quietly organized behind the scenes.
The book taught me many things I did not know. I was not aware that St. Enda’s itself was a hub of revolutionary preparations, including bomb-making, and that its alumni—and a few of its older students too--were active participants in its terrorist activities. I also learned that Pearse was more than the Dublin figurehead I thought he might be. Author O’Donnell does an excellent job painstakingly documenting his travels throughout Ireland on speaking engagements and his clandestine correspondents with the revolutionaries in the West.
What O’Donnell did not do, however, was create a life-like portrait of Pearse the man, In other volumes of the “16 Lives” series—particularly in the biographies of brother Willie and Padraig’s friend and fellow teacher McDonagh—I caught glimpses of his painful shyness, his attachment to family and friends, his fondness for poetry and his fierce revolutionary devotion. I was looking for more of that here, for I wanted to know the man better. Unfortunately for me—and the book—I did not find it....more
No playwright ever learned more from Shakespeare than Sean O’Casey, and the most profound lesson he learned from the master was how comic figures, fla No playwright ever learned more from Shakespeare than Sean O’Casey, and the most profound lesson he learned from the master was how comic figures, flawed but filled with life—Mercutio, Polonius, Falstaff, Enobarbus—can be smashed to pieces by “mighty opposites” in feuds and broils greater than themselves.
In Juno and the Paycock, perhaps his greatest play, O’Casey introduces us to the four Boyles, a family from the Dublin slums tailor-made for a comedy filled with good-humored satire and human warmth. The play’s great comic figure is "The Paycock” (peacock), “Captain” Boyle. A patriarch who excels in useless eloquence, he is addicted to drink and allergic to work. His nemesis is his (not quite) long-suffering wife Juno, capable of demolishing an argument or deflating a pomposity with a good one-liner or two. She is the sole support of the family: her Marxist daughter Mary is on strike, her revolutionary son Johnny is disabled (hip maimed in “The Rising,” arm shattered to the War for Independence), and the “The Captain” can’t work of course because...because he has pains in his legs. (Although the pains never keep him from scurrying ‘round to the pubs with his worthless toady Joxer Daly.)
And then, the good news! The Boyle family has come into a large inheritance!
Sounds like a sit-com, doesn’t it? Perhaps an Irish version of The Honeymooners plus The Beverly Hillbillies? But O’Casey is too good a playwright—and the world is too cruel—for the Boyles to be blessed with a sit-com existence.
No forgiveness here, no mitigation of fate. And every deed darkened by the fog of Civil War.
Here’s a fine comic passage from Act I, in which “The Captain” romanticizes (and embellishes) his brief period as a merchant sailor, with his “butty” Joker acting as chorus. (Notice how reality intrudes even here, how the street vendor, in answer to the Captain's poetic question “What is the stars?” gives him a harsh, reductive answer):
BOYLE: Them was days, Joxer, them was days. Nothin' was too hot or too heavy for me then. Sailin' from the Gulf o' Mexico to the Antanartic Ocean. I seen things, I seen things, Joxer, that no mortal man should speak about that knows his Catechism. Ofen, an' ofen, when I was fixed to the wheel with a marlinspike, an' the wins blowin' fierce an' the waves lashin' an' lashin', till you'd think every minute was goin' to be your last, an' it blowed, an' blowed — blew is the right word, Joxer, but blowed is what the sailors use. . . .
JOXER. Aw, it's a darlin' word, a daarlin' word.
BOYLE. An', as it blowed an' blowed, I ofen looked up at the sky an' assed meself the question — what is the stars, what is the stars?
VOICE OF COAL VENDOR. Any blocks, coal-blocks;' blocks, coal-blocks !
JOXER, Ah, that's the question, that's the question — what is the stars?
BOYLE. An' then, I'd have another look, an' I'd ass meself — what is the moon?
JOXER. Ah, that's the question — what is the moon, what is the moon?....more
This is the fifth play O’Casey wrote, but the first to be performed. It is set in 1920, during the Irish War for Independence, and tells the story of This is the fifth play O’Casey wrote, but the first to be performed. It is set in 1920, during the Irish War for Independence, and tells the story of thirty-year-old poet and tenement dweller Donal Devoren. His fellow tenants have decided he is an IRA gunman in hiding, they treat him with respect and ask for certain favors, and Donal rather enjoys living under the gunman’s "shadow," for he is a bit of Romantic. “His struggle through life has been a hard one,” O’Casey tells us, “and his efforts have been handicapped by an inherited and self-developed devotion to the might of design, the mystery of colour, and the belief in the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting.” More than anything else, however, he delights in the devotion of Minnie Powell, a pretty young thing who lives in his building and considers him a hero of the revolution.
O’Casey is still learning his craft here, and Gunman’s structure isn’t equal to that of his two subsequent masterpieces, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars. Still it is a suspenseful and moving work, filled with eloquent Irish speech, a wealth of spot-on working class humor (both Catholic and Protestant), and a tragic conclusion that fills the viewer with a horror of violence and pity for the random losses of war.
On the subject of those losses, I would like to quote from the words of the pedlar Seamus Shields to his friend Donal Devoren:
It’s the civilians that suffer; when there’s an ambush they don’t know where to run. Shot in the back to save the British Empire, an’ shot in the breast to save the soul of Ireland. I’m a Nationalist meself, right enough—a Nationalist right enough, but all the same—I’m a Nationalist right enough; I believe in the freedom of Ireland, an’ that England has no right to be here, but I draw the line when I hear the gunmen blowin’ about dyin’ for the people, when it’s the people that are dyin’ for the gunmen! With all due respect to the gunmen, I don’t want them to die for me.
Tim Pat Coogan is a patriot. He admires the ideals set forth in the proclamation of the 1916 republic, and believes that Ireland, now emerging from a Tim Pat Coogan is a patriot. He admires the ideals set forth in the proclamation of the 1916 republic, and believes that Ireland, now emerging from a wrenching period of economic and social crisis, should look honestly at the Irish nation, reflect upon her history, and discern how great a gap remains between those ideals and reality. From the steps of the GPO, Padraig Pearse proclaimed a republic that would “guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally.” What has happen in the last hundred years to keep Ireland so far from those guarantees, that resolve?
Coogan has many answers to this question: the wounds of civil war; De Valera’s destructive combination of machiavellianism, intransigence, economic neglect, and ecclesiastical ring-kissing; the troubles; the Catholic church’s reactionary treatment of women and sexual matters in general, but particularly the disgraceful pedophilia cover-up which alienated a large percentage of the Irish population; the institutional abuse of children and other young persons in both Catholic and Protestant institutions; the corruption of civic institutions, particularly in—but not limited to—the era of the Celtic Tiger; and the neglect of real human suffering in the subsequent period of austerity, in which the “EU has turned into a debt-collecting agency for the Germans.”
Although there is much history and many illuminating anecdotes—both amusing and horrific—in these three hundred pages, neither Coogan’s profound knowledge of his subject nor his considerable story-telling skills deflect him from his central theme: the many ways in which “all the children of the nation” have not been “cherished”—and certainly not “equally”—in the course of the last hundred years....more
If you decided to play the “One of These Things is not Like the Others” game with the fifteen Easter Rising rebels executed on Irish soil, the answer If you decided to play the “One of These Things is not Like the Others” game with the fifteen Easter Rising rebels executed on Irish soil, the answer would certainly be “Thomas Kent.” Considered by many as the “forgotten martyr” of 1916, he fought not in Dublin but in County Cork, his act of resistance not a street battle but a vigorous defense of a home by an aged mother and her sons, and it occurred not on Monday of Easter Week but on Tuesday of the next. Indeed, it had more to do with the Land League protests and their aftermath than with the revolutionary ferment in Dublin, and, as such, it provides a bridge which links the die-hard Republican families of the West with the Rising, and points to the War of Independence and the flying columns to come.
Because of his unique and prophetic position in Irish revolutionary history, Thomas Kent deserves an excellent biography. Unfortunately, this attempt of Meda Ryan’s falls considerably short of excellence.
This partial failure is not entirely Ryan’s fault, for any biographer of Kent is faced with two considerable difficulties: 1) much of the Kent family’s history of resistance (essential to Thomas’ story) occurred while he was in Boston promoting Irish language education, 2) Kent’s collected letters from America, as well as his mother’s and brothers’ replies together Thomas’ unpublished poetry and other writings, were confiscated and presumably destroyed by the British after the siege of May 2nd in an attempt (only temporarily successful) to keep his name from the list of martyrs. Because of this, any person who tells Kent’s story is in danger of 1) losing track of his individual deeds in the narrative of family events, and 2) failing to reveal his inner life, since so little evidence remains of his writings and conversations.
Instead of being content with a much shorter biography—which I believe would have been a wiser choice—Ryan crams her 340 pages of text full of tangential family doings and the tedious transcripts of court cases (one of these, involving a boycott in which a man is prevented from buying livestock, is supposed to be amusing, but I did not find it so.).
Still, when Ryan gets to the meat of her book—the account of the dramatic siege of the Kent family home, which looks more like an American gangster shootout from the 20’s than the Easter Rising—she does an able job of bringing the book to an exciting conclusion.
If you love Irish history, as I do, I would give Ryan’s book a try. (Do yourself a favor though, and skim all that legal banter, particularly all the stuff about the cows and the pigs.)...more
Michael O’Hanrahan is one of the lesser known Easter Rising martyrs, but this has nothing to do with his importance to the Rising or to Irish National Michael O’Hanrahan is one of the lesser known Easter Rising martyrs, but this has nothing to do with his importance to the Rising or to Irish Nationalism itself. It may be partially due to the fact that he was more of a work horse than a show horse, but the principal reason is that he (like Tom Clarke) was the most close-mouthed and self-effacing of revolutionaries. This was not due to modesty—although O’Hanrahan was modest—but because his responsibility as Quartermaster General required absolute secrecy.
O’Hanrahan, a cork-cutter from Carlow, came from a Fenian family. He was an excellent student, fascinated with language (he would later write two adventure novels), and joined the Gaelic League when he was twenty one. He soon was an enthusiastic teacher of Irish, founding a local Gaelic League Branch at Carlow (the first person of the working class to do so). By the age of twenty-six he was in Dublin, working with Maud Gonne and Arthur Griffith against the King’s visit to Ireland. Soon he was a member of Sinn Fein and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In his middle thirties (1913), he joined the Irish Volunteers.
O’Hanrahan was an able writer, but his principal strengths were his organizational skills, his self-discipline, his attention to detail, and his complete trustworthiness. As Quartermaster General his task was to store the supplies for the Rising—rifles, pistols, and bombs of course, but also boots, rations, medical supplies, etc.—secretly and securely. He was also an able second to Thomas McDonagh at Jacob’s Biscuit Factory during the Rising, but it is as a careful quartermaster adept at clandestine practices that O’Hanrahan should be best remembered.
Kostick does a good job of presenting the facts and creating a convincing portrait of the man. He is particularly good at describing his subject's duties as quartermaster and the conscientiousness with which he accomplished them. One flaw is that Kostick devotes too much time to a consideration of O’Hanrahan’s novels which--if the excerpts presented are a guide--he overrates in quality. But this is a minor quibble. This is an effective and absorbing biography....more
The Playboy of the Western World (1907) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), both great Irish plays, each sparked a riot at the Abbey Theatre. Could t The Playboy of the Western World (1907) and The Plough and the Stars (1926), both great Irish plays, each sparked a riot at the Abbey Theatre. Could this be more than coincidence? William Butler Yeats seems to think so. Yeats, who had summoned the police for riot #1, thus admonished the rowdies of riot #2: "You have disgraced yourselves again; is this to be the recurring celebration of the arrival of Irish genius?"
Although it is difficult today to understand “The Playboy Riots,” the “Plough” riot still makes perfect sense. Three years after the end of the polarizing Civil War, six weeks before the tenth anniversary of the Easter Rising, Sean O’Casey presented a dark and dispirited view of the 1916 rebellion. He shows us how the denizens of a Dublin tenement—the “shabby genteel” and the laborers, the socialist agitators and the ne’er-do-wells—are affected by the chaos of Easter Monday 1916. The consequences range from the mere disruptive to the tragic, and—except for an excellent opportunity for looting—no benefits come to the average slum-dweller from all this revolutionizing. The fine nationalist rhetoric spouted by “The Man in the Window” (a pastiche of speeches by Padraig Pearse) seems hollow in comparison with the suffering we see these average Dubliners endure.
O’Casey knew about tenement woes, for, although he was born of a ‘good” Protestant family, it was a genteel family of the shabby kind: he was one of thirteen children, and his father died when he was six. He worked at various jobs--as newsboy, railway worker—and later became a secretary of Larkin's Irish Citizen Army. He did not begin writing seriously until his middle thirties, when he was prompted by the death of William Ashe, a hunger striker. The Plough and the Stars debuted when O’Casey was forty six.
This play has much in common with with its “riot buddy” The Playboy of the Western World: like its elder sibling, it possesses a poetic language rooted in everyday speech and the ability to shift—fluidly, seamlessly—from the sentimental to the comic to the tragic. To these valuable qualities O'Casey adds--at least in Plough—a variety of tonal effects, a scope and a structure worthy of the mature Shakespeare. In its historical sophistication and comprehensive humanity, it merits comparison with that great epic Henry IV....more
This second play by Shaw (written in 1883 but not performed until 1902, when censorship permitted) is a daring effort for its time. Indeed, it might e This second play by Shaw (written in 1883 but not performed until 1902, when censorship permitted) is a daring effort for its time. Indeed, it might even by considered to have contemporary relevance, for it deals—among other matters—with sexual politics and animal testing (or, as the Victorians would have put it, Ibsenism and vivisection.) Unfortunately, though, it seems more like a curiosity than successful social criticism. Shaw had not yet found his voice, and the dramatic structure of the play is not sound enough, its witticisms not sharp enough, to carry Shaw’s ambitious messages.
The plot is so complicated that I am already starting to forget it. I do remember, though, that it revolves around Leonard Charteris (the “philanderer” of the title) who wishes to break off with his long time lover Julia and begin a dalliance—and perhaps a courtship—with his new love Grace. What might otherwise be a conventional comedy is complicated by the fact that Charteris and most of the other characters are members of the “Ibsen Club” (named for the author of A Doll’s House), a forward-looking organization which challenges conventional sexual roles and refuses to admit as members men who are too “manly” or women who are too “womanly.” How then, must a proper devotee of “Ibsenism” meet the challenge of an explosive emotional triangle?
The question is indeed interesting. More interesting, I think, than the play. Still, anyone willing to explore the workings of Shaw’s first-rate and unconventional mind will find much here to engage them....more
Roger Casement is the most enigmatic martyr of the Rising, his life full of ambiguities, his biography crowded with questions. He kept secrets: he con Roger Casement is the most enigmatic martyr of the Rising, his life full of ambiguities, his biography crowded with questions. He kept secrets: he concealed his work for British intelligence from his corporate employers, his investigations into human rights abuses from the government of the Congo, his commitment to Irish freedom by revolutionary means from his British masters, and his active homosexuality from almost everybody. The result? He was distrusted by everyone, from the British political establishment to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The knighthood he received for human rights activism in Peru was stripped from him, his loyalty to the Irish cause called into question, and his reputation tarnished by a sexually explicit “private diary” (almost certainly—in the opinion of our author Angus Mitchell—a forgery.)
Still, amid the swirl of ambiguities, a vivid picture emerges. Casement was a man who loved Ireland deeply, and, as he investigated thoroughly the human rights abuses of the age, he came to feel, with profound conviction, that the exploitation of indigenous peoples by foreign empires was pre-figured—with indisputable clarity—in Britain’s treatment of the Irish nation. Roger Casement—universally acknowledged as a champion of human rights and a pioneer in the development of NGO’s (non-governmental organizations dedicated to universal justice)--sacrificed his life without ambiguity for sake of the Irish people.
Because of the problematic nature of Casement’s life, this biography of Mitchell’s is really more of a meta-biography, an exploration of the questions which inevitably arise in the examination of Casement’s life. Mitchell is an excellent writer, in full command of his subject, and has produced an enlightening and informative book on the life of this admirable, complicated man....more
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