Living under a hen

Alice Taylor’s Quench the Lamp is a warm and funny memoir of her childhood in rural Cork in the 1940s, full of anecdotes and observations on farm activities, family dramas, eccentric neighbours, and Irish life before and after electrification.

A chapter on thrift and the “art of making do” shows how objects’ versatility was engineered and enhanced. Pot lids warmed beds, goose wings dusted cobwebs, turf dust was deployed when the cat did “what he must where he shouldn’t”. Bags and boxes were strategically repurposed once emptied of their original cargo.

Newspaper served a multitude of roles, some of them still current even in urban lifestyles:

Our newspaper, the Cork Examiner, was a multi-purpose item. It cleaned and polished windows and it covered bare timber floors before the first lino or tarpaulin went down, thus providing underlay and insulation. Placed in layers on top of wire bed-springs, it eased the wear on the horsehair mattress; cut into the right shape, it became insoles in heavy leather boots and shoes and, later, in wellingtons when they became part of our lives. Even though it could never be described as baby soft, it was the forerunner of the multi-million-pound industry that subsequently provided soft solutions in the toilet-paper business. Rolled into balls it was a firelight, its effectiveness improved by a sprinkling of paraffin oil. Ned [a local shop owner] shaped it into funnels and filled it with sweets to make a tóimhsín, as he called it. At home it lined drawers and was considered mothproof and, when nothing else was available, it was used as a dustpan. One of our more industrious neighbours regularly covered her potato stalks with newspaper at night and this protected them from frost.

Taylor says those who excelled in the frugal art ran the risk of being considered thrifty to a fault – it would be said of them that they “could live under a hen”. Or you might say someone “could live in your ear and rent out the other one without you knowing it”.

A tóimhsín or tomhaisín /’t̪oːʃiːn/, by the way, is Irish for a small measure or amount, or in this case a cone-shaped paper bag or poke, often used for holding sweets. It comes from tomhais “measure, weigh”, and is sometimes anglicised as tosheen, to-sheen, or toisheen.

Irish Folk Furniture, a stop-motion documentary

Irish Folk Furniture is a stop-motion documentary, 8½ minutes long, that won an award for animation at the Sundance Film Festival last month. Director Tony Donoghue thought it might be too specialist to appeal widely, but it has charmed its way around the festival circuit. I recommend it warmly.

The film celebrates the tradition and use of farmhouse furniture in Ireland, with 16 items restored to a functional state. This is furniture not usually seen as beautiful – or starring in a film – but whose appeal lies in its very ordinariness and utility, and in the history it amasses over generations of use.

It’s a quiet gem in both form and content: as if Jan Švankmajer had rambled down a boreen in Tipperary. Dressers and flour bins wheel around the countryside while their owners chat away. The film is gently funny, beautifully shot, and features some lovely rural Irish accents and syntax, e.g. done as preterite in “we done a good bit on ’em”.

I wanted to link to the original on Donoghue’s YouTube page, but that video has since been set to private, so here it is from another page:

Edit: I’ve removed the video after seeing a comment on YouTube from Tony Donoghue saying his film was only meant to be online for the two weeks of Sundance, and that its continued online presence may undermine its film festival run.

If it reappears legitimately, I’ll reinstate it here.

Ancient people names in Ireland

Gearóid Mac Niocaill’s book Ireland before the Vikings (Gill and Macmillan, 1972) has an interesting passage on the names adopted on the island during the 4th, 5th and early 6th centuries. He refers to “a mosaic of peoples” who are “dimly perceptible” amid the settlements and political changes he has been discussing, and whose names appear in various forms:

ending in -raige (‘the people of’), or as Dál (‘the share of’) or Corco (perhaps ‘seed’) plus a second element, or as a collective noun ending in -ne. Some contain animal names, such as Artraige ‘bear-people’, Osraige ‘deer-people’, Grecraige ‘horse-people’, Dartraige ‘calf-people’, Sordraige ‘boar-people’; others, such as the Ciarraige, the Dubraige and Odraige, have a colour (ciar ‘black’, dub also ‘black’, odor ‘dun’) as the first element; others, such as the Cerdraige, seem to have an occupational term as the first element.

Gogarty’s Liffey swans

Irish writer Oliver St. John Gogarty was kidnapped at gunpoint by the IRA on a cold winter night in 1923, during the country’s Civil War. His escape is the stuff of modern romantic legend. W. B. Yeats — who thought Gogarty “one of the great lyric poets of his age” — gives the following account of events:

Oliver Gogarty was captured by his enemies, imprisoned in a deserted house on the edge of the Liffey with every prospect of death. Pleading a natural necessity he got into the garden, plunged under a shower of revolver bullets and as he swam the ice-cold December stream promised it, should it land him in safety, two swans. I was present when he fulfilled that vow.

[from the Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes]

George Moore called Gogarty “author of all the jokes that enable us to live in Dublin”. Even during the abduction his tongue was unstill: on arrival at the house, he is said to have asked his captors whether he should tip the driver. Conduct was for Gogarty “a series of larks”, in Ellmann’s phrase; little wonder there was soon a popular ballad celebrating his Liffey adventure.

But the gift of swans is what I like most about the story, the gesture showing both Gogarty’s poetic sensibility and his talent for myth-making. The Liffey was not just a means of escape but an entity to be honoured with a ceremonial offering of further life (though the swans seemingly took some persuasion to make the river their home).

Who knows, maybe they’re ancestors of the one that nibbled my hand on the other side of the Shannon some decades later.

Bookmarking the pope’s visit

This improvised bookmark was left in a second-hand paperback I picked up recently. It’s a Córas Iompair Éireann (CIÉ) rail ticket to see Pope John Paul II on his visit to the Phoenix Park in Dublin in autumn 1979.

Whoever owned the ticket probably kept it as a memento of what became a milestone in modern Irish history — in some ways a turning point in our sense of ourselves. More than half of Ireland’s population attended a papal appearance during the historic three-day tour; it’s estimated that over a third went to see the pope in the Phoenix Park. Some places, such as Knock, came to a temporary standstill.

Such reverence is unimaginable today for many reasons. One stands out. A great many children in the care of the Catholic church were not exactly given return tickets to the park. Systematic abuse, its subsequent denial, and the reneging of responsibility, accountability, and basic humanity, revealed to the previously unaware a deep dark void where the moral centre of the institution ought to be.

Ireland’s complex relationship with the church is, for better and worse, part of our cultural and psychological heritage. In the midst of evil acts perpetrated by the powerful on the vulnerable, silence was ever complicit. Ours is a nation famed for its talkativeness, but we have a lesser known talent for leaving things unsaid. The pope’s last words before boarding at Shannon Airport were: “Ireland — semper fidelis, always faithful.” I think that was part of the problem.

Joyce, Shaw, Pound and pence

In the early 1920s, when the soulful and fearless Sylvia Beach was preparing to publish Ulysses at Shakespeare and Company, she sought subscriptions from potential readers, and received among the replies a mighty refusal from George Bernard Shaw. Shaw had read part of Joyce’s book in serial form, and in his letter to Beach he described it memorably as “a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilisation; but . . . a truthful one”. His letter finished as follows:

I must add, as the prospectus implies an invitation to purchase, that I am an elderly Irish gentleman, and that if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for a book, you little know my countrymen.

Shaw said elsewhere that he wouldn’t pay three guineas for the book. Joyce, meanwhile, had a bet on with Sylvia Beach that Shaw would not subscribe. Losing the bet meant giving his patron a silk handkerchief; winning it meant receiving a box of Voltigeurs, his favourite cigars. He loved Shaw’s letter to Beach, and sent copies to several friends — including Ezra Pound, to whom he wrote:

if you imagine that the elderly Irish gentleman who wrote it (the letter not the book) has not subscribed anonymously for a copy of the revolting record through a bookseller you little know my countrymen.

Pound was far from satisfied, though, and exchanged about a dozen letters with Shaw on the matter. In March 1921 he grumbled to H. L. Mencken: “Shaw now writes to me twice a week complaining of the high price of Ulysses.” The correspondence ended with Shaw quipping: “I take care of the pence because the Pounds won’t take care of themselves” (also reported as: “I take care of the pence and let the Pounds take care of themselves”).

L–R: Ezra Pound, John Quinn, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce. In Pound's rooms in Paris, 1923. Photograph from Cornell University.

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Last year I said I had never taken part in Bloomsday — not in any official events anyway. This year is no different, but like Leopold Bloom I’ll be walking around taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the city (Nora’s Galway, not James’s Dublin). I might bring a Joyce-related book. That will do. If you’re on Twitter, you’ll find me making occasional Joyce-related tweets.

In a tradition I beganagain last year, I’ll finish with a poem — this time a Limerick from the pen of Pound:

There was once a young writer named Joyce
Whose diction was ribidly choice,
And all his friends’ woes
Were deduced from his prose
Which never filled anyone’s purse.

(Pound told Joyce that choice and purse would rhyme perfectly in certain parts of New York.)

Saints, censors and satire

This post has little directly to do with the English language, except that it uses it, and that it’s about the freedom of expression. If you came for grammar and English usage, you will find some further down, or in your preferred category on the right-hand side.

Most Irish writers and artists — i.e. most of the country — are well aware of the state’s history of censorship, be it the banning of books, the cutting of films, or the more generalised self-censorship that accompanied our passage from paganism through earthy Christianity to a starker form of Catholicism. Lately the repressive spirit pounced on a couple of nude portraits of the Taoiseach (head of government) Brian Cowen, which were briefly and unofficially hung in the National Gallery and the Royal Hibernian Academy.  It is not my aim to recount the story, since it has been done well and exhaustively elsewhere; for background on the “Cowengate” (or “picturegate”) farce, you will find links at the end of this post, or go here if you use Twitter. However, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to some historical matters – because they interest me, and because I’m not on Twitter. [Edit: I am now.]

Saint Columbanus (540–615), an Irish missionary, wrote letters to popes in which he expressed devotion, offered constructive criticism, and made light-hearted jokes about the popes’ names. In How the Irish Saved Civilization, historian Thomas Cahill writes that “to Columbanus, the pope was one of the brothers, a father abbot worthy of respect, by all means — but also in need, like any man, of an occasional jab in the ribs.” According to Cahill, the popes did not deign to respond to Columbanus’s jabs. In the same era, the scribe who added Ireland’s early vernacular masterpiece Táin Bó Cúailnge to the Book of Leinster took the trouble to register his distaste – but he still wrote the epic down, and his personal feelings about it were but a footnote.

Skip to late March 2009, when the Irish Taoiseach received a jab in the ribs in the form of the aforementioned nude portraits. Rather than maintain an inscrutable silence, or express disapproval and carry on with more important matters, the government reacted so vigorously that the curious little incident quickly reached Father Ted levels of absurdity, and was reported as far afield as the New York Times and the China Daily. There was intimidation, a criminal investigation, confiscation of art, and a grovelling apology by the state broadcaster for daring to report the news. It is instructive to compare this attitude with that of the dutiful Christian scribes, who overcame their aesthetic qualms for the general good, and with Columbanus, whose saintliness accommodated a healthy irreverence for authority.

In 2007 the Irish Times reported the popularity of Casablanca among most of the major political parties in Ireland — with the exceptions of Fianna Fail and the Green Party (both currently in government). I would not read too much into this, but it is worth considering that Casablanca was initially banned in Ireland, for political reasons, then cut for puritanical reasons; neither news of war nor implications of adultery were tolerated in neutral, prudish Ireland. A comedy called I Want a Divorce was renamed The Tragedy of Divorce. There’s a tragedy there all right, but it has nothing to do with divorce.

My beloved Ireland and its misguided moral guardians! Ireland, whose censors banned works by James Joyce, Frank O’Connor, George Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey, Austin Clarke, Brendan Behan, Sean O’Faolain, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Oliver St John Gogarty, Walter Macken, John McGahern, and J P Donleavy, among others. Ireland, whose cultural nannies banned or cut films by Eisenstein, Fellini, Ford, Hitchcock, Bergman, Ophuls, Polanski, Welles, Antonioni, and Kubrick, among others. C. S. Lewis said that “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” More recently, John McGahern wrote that the Censorship Board was regarded as a joke and that the banned books worth reading “could easily be found”.

Just as easily found, nowadays, is evidence of public displeasure and disgust with the way Ireland is being run. Dissent and satire are democratic imperatives and will keep the government on the back foot for a while. But the best form of defence is attack, and who better to attack than a teacher who paints pictures? The repressive urge, which the government made sharply manifest, reveals deep insecurity about what other people are or are not capable of processing with good sense, judgement and intelligence — including the government’s behaviour.

But whatever the government’s reasons for its actions, the nature of censorship has changed drastically. Nothing on the internet ever quite disappears, and sometimes a shush begets a shout. Efforts to clamp down on discomfiting material result not in frustrated acquiescence but in renewed assaults on the self-importance that lies behind knee-jerk censorial action. Already there are t-shirts, a photoshop extravaganza, and a forthcoming exhibition, to name just a few spin-offs in the immediate wake of the fiasco.

In short, the Irish online community had a field day. Political criticism and satire are in evident good health in Ireland. While the original paintings struck me as fond, if unflattering, some of the subsequent material, both visual and textual, has been merciless, even cruel — but with good reason. If Irish citizens stood back and indulged the government’s precious fragility, what would we swallow next? And if a pope can withstand the satire of a saint, what hope is there for a government that cannot endure a gentle caricature?

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A small sample of related blog and media coverage: Eoin O’Dell, Suzy Byrne, Tuppenceworth, Bock, Damien Mulley, Alexia Golez, Twenty Major, Caricatures Ireland, Irish Times, The Tribune, The Guardian, The Times, the Ray D’Arcy Show (mp3), and the aggregated reports on IrishBlogs.ie.

Image sources: Columbanus; Casablanca; Cowen (with thanks to the artist).