Pritchett on Cary's Irish irony

V.S. Pritchett, from his 1981 (?) introduction to the Time Reading Program Special Edition of Mister Johnson:

"One of the great contributions of the Irish to our enlightenment is their tenderness for rogues.  It enlivens all the Irish novels from Lever to Beckett.  It runs through the novels of the Anglo-Irish Joyce Cary.  And in the best of Cary's novels, Mister Johnson, it attains those heights at which the rogue turns into the poet and takes on a sort of sublimity.  A novel which is as breathlessly comic and endlessly ingenious as anything Cary ever wrote ends by making us weep and look at Africa with new eyes.  Or so it did when it was first published shortly after World War II.  The question is, after all that has happened to Africa since then, do we still feel the same about Clerk Johnson? [...] Is he a white colonial fancy -- "the natives are children" -- or has he more solid roots?

"Cary was not a boring talker.  He did not inform.  He did not lose himself in anecdotes.  His talk created an alternative world.  It was a form of life for the moment -- light, but serious.  This seriousness has its bearing on Mister Johnson and on all his novels.  He had lived a serious life.  Cary represented the dutiful strain in the Anglo-Irish character: low church Protestantism, intellectuality, social responsibility.  Before 1914, as a young man he had joined Sir Horace Plunkett's co-operative movement to raise the standards of Irish agriculture.  Afterward he turned to painting.

The man who eventually went out to Nigeria as an official was an artist at heart.  He not only brought with him the artist's insights into the minds of native peoples, but -- with Ireland's history and irony behind him -- he perceived that the whites were just as much 'natives' as the Africans, with superstitions, tribal customs, fantasies and delinquencies matching the African's, item by item.

"To the young Nigerian, one can well imagine, Mister Johnson will seem out of date and a distortion, just as in the doctrinaire days of Sinn Fein the critics accused the authors of Reminiscences of an Irish R.M. of perpetuating the idea of the stage Irishman.

We must grant that Cary's novel is set in the peace of 40 years ago and that, even for that time, the scene is placed in a remote and even derelict part of the country. [...]

But Cary did not set out to write an historical or problem novel.  He had his own mania: timelessness."  (xi-xv)

Achebe takes on Cary

Even as Nigerians were not inclined to be unanimous about anything, this colonial classroom was as one in their negative reaction to the book [Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson]. By providing two extracts from Mister Johnson, Achebe illustrates what he describes as "the contagion of distaste, hatred, and mockery" that permeates the description of Africa and Africans and betrays Cary's strong aversion to the people and places he is presenting to the reader.

Quoted from "Home and Exile" by Chinua Achebe, published in the magazine The African Business, June, 2003 (in an interview with Michael Thelwell Achebe is also quoted as writing Things Fall Apart in response to Cary -- his novel went on to be perhaps the most widely read of all 20th century African literature).

Double-Distilled Melancholia

James Cousins may be a poet and playwright rather than a fiction writer, but he's a fantastic letter writer and letters are most certainly prose. Maybe we could do something with letter-writing as a genre? That might be a good way to include cool manuscript material and show what terrible penmanship most of these crazy people had. I'm sure we have other letters like this one that uses such vivid and fantastic imagery to describe the process of inspiration and creation.

Letter from James Henry Cousins to ? 4.27.1899:

• “Did not I tell you I’d go raving mad after the (2) ecstasy of that ramble. I promptly developed a fit of thoroughbred double-distilled melancholia! This is dear mother nature’s usual plan of making me pay up for excess of enjoyment; but, like laughing, it’s nothing when one’s accustomed to it. And it is usually in such periods of gloom that some idea gets into my cranium, like the pain of sand in the oyster, around which the succulent bivalve casts a garb of pulp that only becomes a pearl to shine on my lady’s brow." (1-2)

• "Ah! how happy this poor old world would be if only people followed a star; a real, substantial, honest star, instead of the wills-o’-the-wisp that are so plentiful! That star has got into my imagination: I am still following it: I hope I (and the person who glorified its shining by (4) an apt thought) may find like the shepherd’s of old, if not the young child, at least the spirit of purity, truth, and wisdom which he came to show forth." (3-4)

• "I want to scale Killiney on Saturday, if weather permits. You know the way: will you act as my 'guide, philosopher, and friend'—chum, purely platinum!" (4)

Bowen's Christmas card

This passage from Bowen's short essay "The Light in the Dark" describes her ideal Christmas card, which to me is striking in its strange combination of nostalgia and forboding. Although its image of a woodman's cottage is wholly at odds with the Big House with which we associate her, Bowen's description nonetheless captures the same haunting loneliness that I associate with The Last September--despite its idealism and nostalgia, her picture nonetheless seems to see the cottage as a symbol of the isolation towards which that other, bigger world always moves.

I'm not entirely sure where this could be included--it's from a lovely gift edition of the essay--but if we do something about Christmas, or Anglo-Irish views of the "simple life," or simply something about the imagination, it could be useful.

• "Each of us, probably, has in mind one ideal and absolute of the Christmas card, as received in childhood. My own taste (date around 1910) is this—I behold a cottage gable in deep, dusky silhouette against an inspiring gleam of sunset, one window lit; smoke goes up from the chimney. To this, a woodman returning, footprint by footprint, across the foreground snow; all around stretch white wastes, the bare trees are dark. How it glows and glows through that one small window—core of the world, magnet to man, the home! Towards it, the coach lurches among the drifts, the cravatted rider whips up his horse, the red-mittened children drag their laden sledge, the spotted dog lollops, the cat leads her train of kittens, the crinolined lady picks her delicate way. All Christmas-card-land creatures have the same destination. My woodman’s cottage, crouched in smouldering evening, remains for me forever the symbol-scene—no better picture, before or since, has so fixed for me that light in the falling dark; or, by contrast, the elemental and daunting loneliness of Elsewhere. That sense of the Elsewhere, and of those straying in it, can but encircle Christmas, if one has any heart."
  

Elizabeth Bowen Goes to London

Elizabeth Bowen has a fantastic short essay in a 1957 collection called Coming to London (ed. John Lehman) in which she describes her impressions of London as an Anglo-Irish 4-yr-old. She then goes on to describe the way London evolved for her into the place where writers seem to come from. My favorite parts of the essay are at the beginning, but I've also included a lovely quote where Bowen talks about her memory being dominated by visual rather than aural impressions.

• All through my childhood, London had a fictitious existence for me. It loomed darkly somewhere at the other side of the water; I thought of it (when at all) as an entity, at once magnetic and dangerous. It was, from all I heard, a city into which no one ventured alone, and which was to be entered only after preparation and wary forethought. It stood for the adult, and so much so that there should be children in London seemed unimaginable—in fact that there should be people of any kind was only a secondary idea: I pictured the thing as a mass of building, a somehow impious extreme of bulk and height in whose interstices was fog. I first crossed the city when I first crossed the sea, when I was 4: it must have been winter, we arrived after dark and were driven as hurriedly as possible from Euston to some other terminus in a cab. The street lamps, seeming dimmer than Dublin’s, showed us to be in the continuous bottom of the chasm, among movement conveying a sense of trouble, and which one suspected rather than saw. My mother, for a minute put down a window, saying, as though in extenuation, “London has a smell of its own.” But this, like all else given off, was nonhuman (74)

• If I had been an American child instead of an Anglo-Irish one, it is possible that London, from being farther in the distance, would have been more clear-cut as an idea: I should have had some rational notion of it, instead of being infested by it imaginatively. As it was, it was like a hand too near my eyes. Nobody ever told me about London, or explained to me what it was—I was assumed, I suppose, to have been born knowing. This must have come from the Anglo-Irish ambivalence as to all things English, a blend of impatience and evasiveness, a reluctance to be pinned down to a relationship—one which, all the same, nobody could have conceived of a life without. So for what seems a long time London remained partly a not quite convincing fiction, partly a symbol of ambiguity, partly an overcast physical fact. (75)

• I found myself in the same room as Edith Sitwell, Walter de la Mare, Aldous Huxley; and I know there were others. I remember almost unearthly electric light broken on brocade-angular folds of one poet’s dress, and her benevolence (she was talking about something lost under a sofa) and the graven face and shining cavern eyes of the other. Of Aldous Huxley I was most nearly frightened, through no fault of his. But alas these images, and se many since, cast themselves on the screen as a silent film: I have a wonderful visual memory but a poor verbal one. I recall little or anything that has been at any time said—the sense and atmosphere of a conversation, yes, but the words, no. And all things considered, this is a tragedy. (79)

Mirrors open up a room

To be printed on a mirror in the gallery?:

"If a man stands before a mirror and sees in it his reflection, what he sees is not a true reproduciton of himself but a picture of himself when he was a younger man.  De Selby's explanation of this phenomenon is quite simple.  Light, as he points out truly enough, has an ascertained and finite rate of travel.  Hence before the reflection of any object in a mirror can be said to be accomplished, it is necessary that rays of light should first strike the object and subsequently impinge on the glass, to be thrown back again to the object -- to the eyes of man, for instance.  There is therefore an appreciable and calcuable interval of time between the throwing by a man of a glance at his own face in a mirror and the registration of the reflected image in his eye."

-- Flann O'Brien.  The Third Policeman.  p. 64.  --> a novel that is plotted like a trip to the science museum.  Much of the book is taken up with a series of episodes in which the police exhibit various physical phenomena to the narrator's growing wonder and fear.

More Moore, briefly noted

Some great blog posts on Brian Moore at Asylum.

Moore wrote the screenplay for Hitchcock's film Torn Curtain (1966).

The Catholic Counter-Revolution Will Not Be Televised (or maybe)

I finished Brian Moore's 1972 novella Catholics on the train to NY this weekend:  it's quick and worth a look.  The plot, set vaguely in the near-future, concerns an American priest sent by Papal authorities to a small island off the west coast of Ireland, where Abbot Tomas and the other monks are refusing to follow dispensation of "Vatican IV," which has abolished Latin Mass, private confession, and has opened talks about a merger of the Catholic Church with Buddhism.  But of course the book is really a debate with itself over the effects of Vatican II, seven years earlier, and an interesting disquisition on globalizing Ireland and the tourism industry.

Abbot Tomas gives a speech in which he maintains the old order:  "And the Mass was said in Latin because Latin was the language of the church and the church was one and universal and a Catholic could go into any church in the world, here or in Timbuktu, or in China and hear the same Mass, the only Mass there was, the Latin Mass.  And if the Mass was in Latin and people did not speak Latin, that was part of the mystery of it, for the Mass was not talking to your neighbor, it was talking to God" (57).  This form of linguistic universalism describes a global culture explicitely set against the globalism of the pervasive "human interest" eye of the BBC and American television, who have brought scads of tourists to the small, "authentic" community by broadcasting Muck Abbey's local enclave to the world:

"Ah, for goodness sake don't you know that's a helicopter, it could not fly all the way from Rome.  Ah, so you came in a bigger airplane, did you?  I see.  From Amsterdam to Shannon and then from Shannon by car.  And the helicopter was only because of Padraig.  So that was the way of it.  Do you know, Father Kinsella, I hear tell there is not a village in Ireland that does not have some class of airfield nearby.  Isn't that amazing.  Yes, yes."  (70-71)

"'The idea of Catholics confessing their sins in private to a priest has been distasteful to other groups within the Ecumen brotherhood.  Now that the easier form has been sanctioned by Vatican IV -- you have read the debates, surely?'

'I have, indeed,' the abbot said, 'I know that I am not in step, in the matter of confessions.  But, remember, I tried to limit the confessions to people from our parish.  It was all part of the same thing.  We did not want to disturb the faith of the local people.  Still...'  The abbot paused and looked searchingly at his visitor.  'You said yourself that Rome did not know about the private confessions, You were not sent here because of that?'

'No.'

'Why were you sent, Father Kinsella?  What, in particular, caused this -- ?'  The abbot picked pu father general's letter.

'American television is planning to do a special one-hour program on what has happened here.  Did you know that?'

'So that's it!'  The abbot made a fist of his right hand and hit the top of his desk.  'The damned television!  I did not want television here.  I will ban them.  I was dead against it from the start.'

'Even the president of the United States can't ban American television.  If the networks want to televise what's going on here, it will be done.  And it will be seen all over the world.'

'I warned our monks and I told the merchants at Cahirciveen the selfsame thing, I said don't have anything to do with those telly people, just tell them it's none of their concern.  I refused them permission for any filming on church property.'

'It didn't do much good, did it?  Don't you see that even your action in refusing to let these ceremonies be filmed can lend a significance to them that you never intended?'"  (80-81)

-->  One thing to do will be to look for TV reports on such local communities:  BBC in particular.

Sean O'Faolain gets adjusted

"Anyway, by the time I had more or less adjusted myself to the life about me, it suddenly broke in on me that Ireland had not adjusted herself to the life about her in the least little bit.  Irishmen in general were still thinking about themselves, or rather, in their usual way, double-thinking or squint-thinking about themselves, in terms of dawns, and ands, and buts, and onwards, and dew, and dusk, while at the same time making a lot of good, hard cash to the evocative vocabulary of tariff, tax, protection, quota, levy, duties or subsidies, meanwhile carefully compiling a third and wholly different literary style (pious, holy, prudent, sterling, gorsoons, lassies, maidens, sacred, traditional, forefathers, mothers, grandmothers, ancestors, deep-rooted, olden, venerable, traditions, Gaelic, timeworn and immemorial) to dodge more awkward social, moral and political problems than any country might, with considerable courage, hope to solve in a century of ruthless thinking.  This ambivalence, once perceived, demanded a totally new approach.  I have been trying to define it ever since.  For, as long as we were all in a splendidly romantic-idealist fervour about Ireland we could all write romantically, or idealistically, about Ireland, as Sean O'Casey did.  (He is sometimes called and probably thinks himself a realist but he is actually the biggest old romantic we ever produced.)  Or if we were being realistic we could write in the realist tradition.  But for any kind of realist to write about people with romantic souls is a most tricky and difficult business [.]

"[...]  [W]hen it comes to writing about people who, like the Irish of our day, combine beautiful, palpitating tea-rose souls with hard, coolly calculating heads, there does not seem to be any way at all of writing about them except satirically or angrily.  Once a writer's eye gets chilly about their beautiful souls he becomes like the only sober man at a drunken party, and the only decent thing for him to do then is either to get blind drunk with the rest of the boys (all singing in chorus, 'I'll take you home again, Kathl-ee-eeen') or else to go home and scrub himself clean in a raging satire on the whole boiling lot of them."

--  Sean O'Faolain, from "Foreword."  Selected Stories of Sean O'Faolain.  Penguin 1970.  p.11-12.

The Feast of Lupercal by Brian Moore (1957), p.11

Moore is apparently famous for writing about Belfast.
"And at last, the last bell rang. Mr. Devine, as always, was the first master to catch the bus which took them from the suburb of Glengormley to the center of Belfast. He lived midway between the school and the city, in a quiet avenue once prosperous, now failing. Its small front gardens had a naked, communal look, occasioned by the wartime removal of their iron railings for us in making tanks. The railing had not been replaced, the avenue had not recovered. Dusty squares of lawn, enclosed by low stone parapets, lay like neglected empty pools in front of the houses. It was an avenue whose first owners had moved to new areas, making way for widows with annuities, salesmen on commission and policemen pensioned off. Most of the houses took in boarders and some have converted their basements into flats for single gentlemen."

Please post a photograph of Belfast, either from your own store or elsewhere. I'll follow up in what's been written about Moore when I can get back to Firestone.

Bowen's Jingling Syntax

“When her editor questioned some of the contortions, Bowen replied: ‘I’d rather keep the jars, “jingles” and awkwardnesses – e.g. “seemed unseemly,” “felt to falter”.  They do to my mind express something.  In some cases I want the rhythm to jerk or jar – to an extent, even, which may displease the reader.’”  (from Maud Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page, 166, note 57: Letter to Daniel George, 2 June 1948, HRHRC)

Mss letter to Daniel George, in Princeton "Milberg Misc. Mss." file, 18.4.49:  “I wondered if I’d been a bit harsh of Angus Wilson, but I hate noisy “strong” writing, and also still more writing that’s a discharge of decaying matter from the system.  I felt A.W. was intelligent enough to merit a rap.  And that Sean O’F., who to my mind as a reviewer resembles an old nanny-goat teetering over a rock garden, just as much as he’s an eagle, at his best, in stories and novels, more than makes up to A.W. for my deficiencies.”

The relevant passages from The Heat of the Day:

à  Pg. 11:  “Lest this be too subtle, his tone was unkind enough to drive at least his will to unkindness home – it did: she withdrew from the pocket her other hand in order to, self-protectively, fold her arms.  She could be felt to falter behind the barricade; and the programme, let go of by her as though incriminated, fluttered to the ground.”  (passage at concert, goes on to musicians’ “black, seated bodies had fastened to them the faces and hands of ghosts”

à  Pg. 236:  But this evening for Louie had rung the knell of Harrison, man of mystery, as a subject…It seemed unseemly, even, that his companion should have claimed for him the prerogative of pain: Louie simultaneously felt he could never suffer and wished he might.”

A Hireling's Job

Elizabeth Bowen letter 15 Oct. 1965:  “I absolutely loathe cooking, and never do anything but grill sausages or scramble or boil eggs – for which, I think, there is no particular receipe?  I think, if I may say so, that this present obsession with cooking is rather awful:  I’m convinced that many people loathe it as much as I do, but haven’t got the nerve to say so.  It’s a hireling’s job, and if one is put to it (I mean, if one is having a party) one can usually find a hireling to do it for one:  otherwise, one eats out.”

Orwell on Birmingham

Orwell, in his essay “Good Bad Books” (2 Nov. 1945), writes, “A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth centuries, is what Chesterton called the ‘good bad book’: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished….But apart from thrillers, there were the minor humorous writers of the period.  For example, Pett Ridge – but I admit his full-length books no longer seem readable – E. Nesbit (The Treasure Seekers), George Birmingham, who was good so long as he kept off politics…” (in All Art is Propaganda: Critical Essays, pg. 248-49)