Colm Tóibín
Brooklyn
Viking, 2009
252 Pages
£17.99
ISBN 978-0670918126

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Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn is well and humbly crafted, though hardly magisterial. It is experimental neither in form nor in content, devoting a taut 252 pages to the progress of a young Irish woman, Eilis Lacey, who is delicately but inexorably coerced into leaving her beloved County Wexford in order to find work in Brooklyn, New York in the early 1950s. Eilis is careful, thoughtful, and polite to a fault, a combination that wins her a circle of admirers, bullies, and bullying admirers. She falls in love with an Italian-American named Tony, but with so many competing claims on her loyalty and kindness, Eilis must ultimately decide whom to please and whom to disappoint.

The trouble with trying to evaluate Brooklyn is that it is an exactly acceptable novel, a fine example of what John Banville, in a recent Paris Review interview, witheringly dubbed “middlebrow fiction”. I prefer a slightly less castigating label: “adequate fiction”. There are no obvious fumbles in Brooklyn, but, at the same time, it provides nothing new either for the craft of writing or for the average contemporary reader’s understanding of the psychological and historical terrain Tóibín covers—the experience of young single women, or of Irish immigrants, or of Brooklynites in the 50s. It is difficult even to find sentences to quote for particular praise or blame; most drive straight down the middle of the road. The characters’ speech is often interesting, particularly in the countless tiny idiomatic particularities of Eilis’s Enniscorthy home—“you’re best to go” or “it’s great gas”—but I assume that what sounds like neologising is simply an accurate rendition of Wexford English. Nothing about Brooklyn suggests that Tóibín had a single ambitious or reckless impulse during its composition.

Perhaps the bigger challenge for the reviewer, having arrived at this conclusion, is whether and how to judge “adequate fiction”. Tóibín is already the author of five other novels, a collection of stories, several nonfiction books, and countless essays, with no sign of slowing down. Brooklyn, a book with considerably less lustre than his previous two works of fiction (The Master, 2004, and Mothers and Sons, 2006) might signal the need to take the long view. Nearly all prolific writers produce work that varies in quality; the great ones are those who use their less enthralling literary offspring as occasions to learn something new—a technique, a psychological insight—which, reborn in some as yet unwritten book, acquires a honed force absent in its first incarnation. Few are in a better position to understand this than Tóibín, whose long fascination with Henry James (which culminated in the biographical novel The Master) focused on five years in the author’s life that were devoid of masterpieces. From 1895 to 1899, James took stock of his earlier career and struggled to achieve the breakthrough in style that would result in a new voice and, arguably, his best work, at the dawn of the 20th century.

Time will tell what Tóibín will glean from Brooklyn for future novels, but for now we can posit a few hypotheses. Brooklyn’s author seems interested in using conventional, almost prefabricated plot outlines: a young person from Europe comes to America, finds it scary but ultimately exciting, falls in love and in the process begins transforming into an adult and an American. The grooves of this well-worn narrative path are perhaps Tóibín’s way of trying to borrow for his fiction what he professes to admire in poetry, the flint edges of form against which the writer’s voice can spark and ignite. In an interview posted on his website, Tóibín says that as a teenager he had hoped to be a poet, and that even now he reads and learns from the genre, particularly from “poets who take an inordinate interest in form”. When a fiction writer uses a plot “form”, though, the sturdy predictability of its structure should allow the manner of its telling to be more daring. The writer must challenge or rework the fixed form, or at the very least, explode it with innovation or depth. The stereotyped plot of Brooklyn, though, is only rarely ignited by linguistic imagination.

Besides trying to work within the constraints of an established plot type, another kind of self-education that Tóibín pursues in the course of Brooklyn is an oblique examination of the writer’s  profession. Although Eilis is gifted at maths, she sometimes appears to be a stand-in for the novelist, adopting the words and personalities of others:

She found herself thanking him in a tone that Rose might have used, a tone warm and private but also slightly distant though not shy either, a tone used by a woman in full possession of herself.

As Eilis realises, this new voice she relishes is not quite her own but a persona. And, again like a novelist, her watchful gaze upon other characters is usually unreturned. No-one around her, not even her eventual fiancé, comes to know her more than superficially. Yet she takes in their words and gestures hungrily:

Tony, Eilis saw, had ceased to have any interest in her at all…. He spoke at some length to the people behind him and conveyed what they had told him to Frank, ignoring her completely as he leaned over her to be heard…. Out of the side of her eye and sometimes directly she started to watch him, noticing how funny he was, how alive, how graceful, how alert to things. She did not mind, indeed, she almost enjoyed the fact that he was paying her no attention.

As Tóibín’s The Master has demonstrated, the novel can be a powerful medium for explicitly depicting the novelist. In Brooklyn, Tóibín seems to be attempting a more veiled portrait of his profession, though again the bland diction and the lack of material detail (what does Tony say that’s so “funny”? what does his voice sound like when he speaks “at length”?) makes the scene fall flat.

“Flat” describes much of the novel’s language as well as its three geographic landscapes: Enniscorthy, the sea, and Brooklyn. It also describes the fallow field that Brooklyn seems to mark in Tóibín’s career. Raised in an agricultural county in Ireland, Tóibín would understand that describing a field as “fallow”—that is, left temporarily unproductive so that the soil can yield a better crop in years to come—is less an insult than a recognition of the pause that often precedes a regenerative change.  Compared with earlier efforts, Brooklyn does not show Tóibín to be wrestling with a difficult or innovative subject matter or style.  Nonetheless, it still reveals a writer thinking carefully about the work of the novelist and about the resources and lessons available to him from the idea of form.

Laura Kolbe is an MPhil student at Jesus College, Cambridge, where she is studying American Literature.

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University Challenge (Primary School Edition)… Young contestants with remarkable memories in high-pressure, high-stakes, televised tournaments? In the footsteps of Gail Trimble, Slumdog Millionaire and Nupur Lala (of Spellbound fame) comes an even younger, even cuter cast of competitors (ranging in age from seven to eleven), and they’re coming to a theatre near you. The Sheldonian Theatre, that is. The Sunday Times previews “Off the Heart”, the competitive poetry recital scheduled for the last day of this year’s Oxford Literary Festival (5 April 2009). The Times and the BBC sponsored contests in 1,500 schools across the UK and have winnowed the field down to a dozen declaimers. A ten-year-old boy from Iran who spent two years inside a refugee camp will recite TS Eliot’s “Macavity: The Mystery Cat.” Evidently, criminal animals are all the rage. The most oft-recited poem was Roald Dahl’s “The Pig”, which tells the story of a swine who eats a hog farmer for lunch.

Hog Farmers Are Being Eaten Alive… not by their pigs, but by competitive pressures. Chef Jamie Oliver  says that UK pork farmers are an endangered species. So it’s a surprise to see that hog farmers are well-represented on the books pages of British newspapers this weekend. The Guardian reviews Solace of the Road, the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who lifts a ride from a hog farmer and heads westward along the A40. It is the second posthumous publication by Siobhan Dowd, a writer of young-adult fiction who died of cancer in 2007.

Posthumous Literature is the Life of the Book World… so far in 2009. Last week, we reported that the posthumous publication of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel was generating controversy in critics’ circles. This week, Roberto Bolaño’s posthumously published novel 2666 wins the (US) National Book Critics Circle award for fiction. (The best biography award goes to Patrick French for The World Is What It Was: The Authorized Biography of VS Naipaul—which the Oxonian Review’s Jonathan Gharraie assessed last spring.)

Roberto Bolaño once said that the word “posthumous” sounded like a Roman gladiator. With the late Heath Ledger winning an Oscar for Dark Night, and with works by Nabokov and Kerouac on the way, it’s a word we’re hearing often. Indeed, too often for footballer Eddie Turnbull, who won a posthumous award from a church in Leith, Scotland earlier this year. Turnbull is alive—and upset that he was not invited to the ceremony: “I would have been there but, because I was dead, obviously no one told me about it.”

An Irish Wake… Until 1962, if a dead body was carried through the door of a pub in Ireland, the proprietor was legally required to store it in his cellar alongside his beer kegs until the coroner could hold an inquest. Today, pub owners in Ireland are pleased to see anybody coming through their doors—even if the body has no pulse. This week, the New York Times raises its glass to writer Bill Barich and his new book A Pint of Plain: Tradition, Change, and the Fate of the Irish Pub. As the Times notes, the nation of Nigeria now drinks more stout than Ireland (though as the Times fails to note, Nigeria also has thirty-three times as many people. While the “Celtic Tiger” economy roared ahead, the Irish retreated into their homes: they went from drinking 70 percent of their alcohol in pubs at the beginning of the decade to 47 percent in 2007. Barich chalks up the change to—among other factors—tougher drunk-driving laws…Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, County Cork native William Birdthistle proposes that the pub in Ireland may not be as doomed as these statistics suggest. Ending his review on a note as bittersweet as a pint of Murphy’s, Birdthistle writes: “With the wings of Ireland’s economy so badly singed, one wonders whether the treasured pub will return with poverty as it fled with wealth….”

One Irish-style pub that will not survive is Oxford’s own Rosie O’Grady’s on Park End Street. The Oxford Mail reports this week that the pub’s new owner, a native of County Down, is “completely gutting it” and “turning it back into a traditional English pub format”. He tells the Mail: “the days of Irish bars have passed”.

The Best Bar Near Naples is at the rail station in Pompeii, says Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, who in this week’s Guardian takes us on a tour of the city where she spent a decade researching her new book. Harvard University Press has “sexed up” the title for American audiences: it was called Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town when it appeared in the UK last year; now it’s The Fires of Vesuvius. This week, the New York Times hails it as “engrossingly mischievous“. Beard meanders through the lurid, louche life of the Latins (”There seem to be phalluses everywhere”). There seem to be pubs everywhere too: by one estimate, Pompeii was home to 158 bars—in a city with a total population of 12,000 to 15,000.

A Posthumous Pub Crawl…Speaking of hog farms, and posthumous publications, and perishing pubs, the Times republishes George Orwell’s 1946 essay on the “ten qualities that the perfect pub should have“. Elsewhere, the Times worries that at the current rate of closure, the last pub in Britain will close in 2037.

“Some People Are More Equal than Others”… We would be thinner, healthier, and happier if incomes were distributed more equally. That’s the (paraphrased) argument of Snowball in Orwell’s Animal Farm—and of epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson (University of Nottingham) and Kate Pickett (University of York). In a new book, The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett argue that the social ills of the UK and US can largely be attributed to income inequality. Consistent with the egalitarian ethos of their argument, Wilkinson and Pickett have posted their evidence for all to see—for free—on their website, EqualityTrust.org.uk. The Guardian and the New Statesman (unsurprisingly) are convinced; the Economist (unsurprisingly) is not. Admittedly, the charts and graphs are compelling—although the argument brings to mind a popular cartoon about correlation and causation. Is it possible that in countries where mental illness and drug abuse are endemic, efforts to improve the lives of the lower classes are less likely to succeed? France, for example, has higher tax rates than any of the Scandinavian nations, but it also has higher inequality—and more social problems. Wilkinson and Pickett suggest that inequality is a cause of social ills, but could it instead be a consequence?

A Period Is Not Just a Punctuation Mark… In April 2006, the book world went wild after it was revealed that a second-year student at Harvard had published a novel that plagiarised passages from bestselling chick-lit writer Megan McCafferty. Now, a soon-to-be first-year at Yale is reprinting McCafferty’s writing word-for-word! The twist: she has McCafferty’s permission. McCafferty is one of 92 female writers who have shared stories of their first menstrual experiences in My Little Red Book, an anthology edited by 18 year-old Rachel Kauder Nalebuff. Nalebuff says she “wanted to evoke Mao’s Little Red Book, the manifesto distributed to all Chinese citizens during the Cultural Revolution”. We’re not so sure about the allusion: menstruation may be traumatic, but the Cultural Revolution (20 million dead) was rather worse. Still, the Chicago Tribune calls it “charming”, and the New York Times loves it so much that it reviews the book twice. The first review is more fawning (Abigail Zuger predicts that the book will “sell briskly for centuries to come”) but the second review has a better title: “There Will Be Blood”.

M.D. Fehsenfeld, L.M. Overbeck, D. Gunn and G. Craig (eds.)
The Letters of Samuel Beckett (1929-1940), vol. 1
Cambridge University Press, 2009
782 pages
£30.00
ISBN 978-0521867931

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On the night of 6 January 1938, Samuel Beckett was stabbed in the chest by a French pimp named Robert-Jules Prudent while walking home with friends. Narrowly missing his left lung and heart, the blow confined him to a Paris hospital for over two weeks. When Beckett later met the improbably named Prudent in court and asked why he had attacked, the Frenchman responded wryly: “Je ne sais pas, monsieur. Je m’excuse (I don’t know why, sir. I’m sorry).” In hindsight, it all seems like an episode out of one of Beckett’s own plays, highlighting as it does the absurd contingency of life, the untoward and irrational behaviour of the down-and-out.

Amused by his assailant’s response and ever wary of guarding his privacy, Beckett chose not to press charges. In a gesture of qualified compassion, he had already written from the hospital to his friend Thomas McGreevy that he found his assailant “more cretinous than malicious”. Because Beckett never divulged his inner feelings about the episode, we can only surmise the extent to which it coloured his imagination and might have prompted the composition of later masterpieces of human dejection like Waiting for Godot (1953) and Endgame (1957).

Had Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) not survived his stabbing, he would be largely forgotten today. His legacy would comprise a few poems, short stories and a novel, Murphy, the proofs of which he corrected while convalescing from his stabbing. Yet, as James Knowlson indicates in the title of his 1996 biography, Beckett was “damned to fame”, living to the age of 83 and writing some of the most important plays and novels of the 20th century, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969. His wife, Suzanne, called the prize “a catastrophe” for the intensely private Beckett.

But for Beckett’s fans, the nitty-gritty facts of his private life have always held great interest. Now, with the arrival of the long-awaited Letters of Samuel Beckett (1929-1940), the first in a projected four-volume collection of Beckett’s correspondence, interest in Beckett “the man” only promises to increase. This is not a bad thing at all, as the letters will likely draw readers to Beckett’s more neglected early works, like the superb Murphy.

Letters concerned with the more intimate and potentially scurrilous details of Beckett’s early life, particularly his numerous romantic involvements, have been culled for the most part by the editors, owing more to the enormous mass of letters (over 15,000) in the Beckett archive than to any prudish censorial agenda. We are not spared, however, intimate details of the various ailments Beckett suffered during this period, from “sebaceous cysts” and “lumps between the wind and the water” to “heart palpitations” that seem to have put a provisional fear of God in him. The letters suggest that Beckett was either uncomfortable all the time or a pathological hypochondriac.

For the most part, though, the letters document Beckett’s alternately joyous and miserable youthful peregrinations through Ireland, France, England and Germany as a student, lecturer, tutor, fledgling writer and exquisite loafer. We find him straining to discipline himself as a writer and undertaking a rigorous programme of self-education in the arts and humanities, ranging from European literature and philosophy to music, foreign language, theatre, visual art and even film.

Fittingly, the first two entries in the volume—short, factual notes—are addressed to James Joyce, whom Beckett affectionately dubs “Shem” or “the Penman” in his letters to friends. Beckett was Joyce’s most gifted disciple, working as one of his research assistants for “Work in Progress” (later titled Finnegans Wake) and publishing essays in support of Joyce’s experimental style. He met Joyce in Paris in 1928 through his close friend, confidante and fellow writer, Thomas McGreevy, who is, incidentally, the most frequent addressee in this collection.

Beckett laboured under Joyce’s shadow early on, writing to his friend Samuel Putnam in 1932: “I vow I will get over J.J. before I die. Yessir.” But even more pressing than Beckett’s anxiety of Joycean influence was his concern to overcome the inherited limitations of his own style and mother tongue, namely, the unavoidable stylishness and obtuseness of his English writing. A 1937 letter to Beckett’s acquaintance Axel Kaun illuminates this point:

It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. . . . To drill one hole after another into it until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through—I cannot imagine a higher goal for today’s writer.

The letter is noteworthy not only because it captures the stylistic underpinnings of his later work, but because it was originally written in German. Indeed, Beckett wrote letters both in passable German and in impeccable French, with snatches of Italian and Latin scattered throughout. Fortunately for non-readers of German, French, Latin and Italian (to name just the major languages that appear), the editors have translated every foreign-language letter, phrase and free-standing word into English.

Beckett’s linguistic brilliance must not be overlooked, particularly because it is so much at odds with his impulse toward linguistic minimalism. How did he balance these opposing qualities in himself? Simply put, he did not, but grappled with stylistic questions his whole career, paring his voice down again and again. Reading the passage above, we come to understand Beckett’s motives for composing much of his post-World War II work in French, notably Waiting for Godot, Endgame and the novel “trilogy” Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951) and The Unnamable (1953). For Beckett, writing in French satisfied an artistic imperative to lay bare the “something or nothing” lurking behind language, an imperative that writing in English seemed to preclude. He aspired to a style-less style that, in its linguistic impoverishment, would raise ideas of negation, impotence and nothingness to a kind of sublime.

Of course, Beckett’s artistic interests extended far beyond literature. In early 1936, Beckett wrote to Sergei Eisenstein, a film director in Moscow, asking to be taken on as his assistant. While Beckett admitted to having no experience of studio work, he wrote, rather clunkily: “It is because I realise that the script is function of its means of realisation that I am anxious to make contact with your mastery of [scenario and editing work].” Although Beckett never heard back from Eisenstein, the letter gestures toward Beckett’s later commitment to drama, the medium for which he is now best known. Beckett went on to write and direct several short films.

We also find him keen to register his opinions about music. In a letter to his cousin, Morris Sinclair, he confesses an inability to make peace with Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, into which the composer “poured everything that was vulgar, facile and childish in him”. Beckett does speak glowingly, however, of Beethoven’s last String Quartet in F (opus 135), which he saw performed in 1934; Beckett was particularly gripped by the epigraph of the final movement: “Der schwer gefasste Entschluss / Muss es sein? Es muss sein! Es muss sein! (The heart-wrenching decision / Must it be? / It must be! / It must be!”) One is reminded of the final lines of Beckett’s 1953 novel, The Unnamable: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

One could go on listing for pages and pages Beckett’s meditations on art (“I like that crouching brooding quality in Keats—squatting on the moss, crushing a petal, licking his lips & rubbing his hands”), politics (“Germany is horrible”, written on 13 December 1936) and life (“It is so much simpler to be hurt than to hurt”). But that would spoil the fun of perusing this volume and finding for oneself such “shining agates of negation”, to appropriate one of Beckett’s phrases in an early letter. At nearly 800 pages and bulwarked with extensive introductory and biographical material, this first volume is a formidable work of scholarship, destined to assume its rightful place beside The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats and the Letters of James Joyce as essential reading of 20th century Anglophone literature.

The iconic image of Beckett as a wizened, austere prophet of the barrenness and inhuman desolation of the modern world is dispelled, or at least qualified, on nearly every page of this epistolary portrait of a prodigiously gifted, neurotic, humane, and, malgré lui, ineluctably human writer. As he writes in the last letter in the volume (in French) to Marthe Arnaud: “You think you are choosing something, and it is always yourself that you choose; a self that you did not know, if you are lucky.”

Stephen Ross is reading for an MSt in English Literature at St John’s College, Oxford.

Like their masters, British mandarins come in all shapes and sizes. Dexterity and adaptability are, after all, tools of their ancient trade. A quick gallop through Peter Hennessy’s unctuous tome Whitehall brings us in proximity to the four main variants of the breed. Firstly, there are the load-bearers, like Sir William Armstrong, then head of the home civil service who fainted at a meeting of permanent secretaries in 1974 convened amidst the collapsing scenery of the Heath regime.

Secondly, there are the indulgent. Bernard Donoghue’s riveting memoir of his spell as Harold Wilson’s policy chief in Downing Street from 1974-1976 suggests that he leads the way here. One of his diary entries for 1976 records that Wilson put no less than four large brandies down the prime ministerial hatch prior to a rough session in the Commons. A silent Donoghue passed him the bottle and Wilson duly knocked Mrs. Thatcher into a cocked hat. (Asquith, eat your heart out.)

Thirdly, there are the empathetic amongst the hordes of the permanent government. One thinks here of Cabinet Secretary Burke Trend in 1969 who, after observing that President Nixon had managed to cover his hands and pants with the contents of an ink well in the cabinet room, reached manfully for a jug of cream and doused himself as well. In honour of the special relationship, one assumes.

And finally, the heroic must get their due. Hugh Dalton’s reign of terror at the pauperised Treasury from 1945 to 1947 proved quite a nursery for this breed of civil servant. His many enemies dined out for years on the story of the private-secretary-who-was-pushed-too-far. Legend had it that Dalton, whose manners verged on the porcine for the most part, once propelled a messenger into the toilets to fetch one of his assistants for an emergency consultation about the UK’s chronic dollar shortage.

The chap in question was in a closed cubicle. Fearing the wrath of the Chancellor, Dalton’s messenger slipped a mortified note under the door. Seconds later, the note was pushed back out, bearing the exquisite retort: ‘Kindly tell the C.Ex that I shall be with him shortly. I can only deal with one shit at a time.’ The excremental, it seems, holds no fear for the best of HM’s panjandrums. On the strength of his recent memoir from his time as Tony Blair’s chief-of-staff, it seems that Jonathan Powell shovelled quite a lot of said material while holding the Northern Ireland brief from 1997 to 2007. His vapid, predictable memoir ensures that any sympathy we may harbour for the dirtier aspects of this job perishes in short order.

I

The ‘peace process’ in Northern Ireland during the nineties left rather a lot of sententiousness and self-pity in its shuddering wake. All of the major memoirs in this genre might have been written by the same hand. Everybody wants to ‘give peace a chance’, for the children you understand. Huddling under the gloom of the midnight oil, principles are invariably defended, friendships forged ‘across the divide’, and the hand of history gently caresses all and sundry. The village toughs and meanies nearly always morph into the firm friends of their interlocutors. While it would be quite impossible to have them down to one’s club, quite impossible you understand, the British mandarinate have always harboured a rather creepy soft spot for the rugged integrity of ‘the men of violence’. Powell ticks all these boxes in his book, but one reads on if only because of the prime ministerial frisson that remains the chief attraction of all books like this.

He dealt with quite a parade of horribles in his time, people whose lives seemed a trifle too rackety for many of his predecessors. In his portraiture he can be mildly entertaining. We meet the Rev. Paisley in these pages, a second-rate shake-down artist and theological grotesque still vituperating against the Council of Trent. Like the selectively deaf curate, Powell assures us that he can assume human form when he wants to. Powell had reason to pay close attention to the leaders of the Provisional IRA, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. He saw McGuinness as the more emollient of the two, whereas Adams was either at his feet or his throat, as plaintive or enraged as a toddler, albeit one with an awesome proficiency in the deployment of high grade explosives.

Their combined CVs, to which Powell gives but a nodding glance, suggest that he was rather casually feasting with panthers for most of the last decade. Between them, Adams and McGuinness can claim the following achievements: the torture and abduction of women and teenage civilians, the bombing of pensioners on parade, the murder of unionist academics with contrary opinions, the formalisation of tactical alliances with the drug lords who run Colombia’s FARC outfit and with ETA whom they mentored in the art of targeted assassination of elected officials. Between them, they organised the deaths of more civilians in Northern Ireland than all the UK security forces combined. Powell seemed to enjoy their gallows humour, but was wise in his wish to cultivate a wider and more congenial circle. Bertie Ahern, the long-serving Irish Taoiseach until his recent defenestration in Dublin, emerges here as a political fixer of Tammany Hall vintage, one with an extraordinary capacity to absorb impertinence and humiliation from all parties in this Byzantine process. As one who elevated muddling through into a high art, he was a particular favourite of Powell’s. Former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Peter Mandelson is sometimes ‘shitty’, but always absurd.

And the chairman of the constitutional negotiations, former US Senator George Mitchell, added a touch of Yankee class to the whole endeavour. With his old fashioned manners and his Liberace smile, Mitchell was a solid packhorse during many tense months of political standoff between the parties. Reading through his own memoirs from 2001, one is sometimes astonished to recall that Mitchell was twice offered a seat on the US Supreme Court by President Clinton, once in 1993 when Byron White called it a day, and again in 1994 when Harry Blackmun retired, only to decline both offers so as to keep the Northern Ireland brief. Having listened to nearly three years of Paisley’s evangelical scurrilities, at times he must surely have longed for the happy slog that is a life devoted to parsing the American federal tax code in the marble palace.

II

This material is just the antipasti compared to Powell’s main course, which is his depiction of Prime Minister Blair in real time, or ‘Tony’ as he refers to him throughout. Blair is the central presence in the book, and Powell gives scholars an important, if largely unreflective insight into the peculiarities of his premiership. As the youngest man to become Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812 and the first since Ramsay MacDonald to hold the office without any previous ministerial position whatsoever, Blair was neither house-trained nor especially deferential in his attitude towards policy formulation. Up to 1997, Northern Ireland policy was handled by a butcher’s dozen of officials in Whitehall and Belfast. If you were lucky, co-ordination came from the cabinet secretary and more immediately from the foreign and defence private secretaries in Downing Street. Blair took an axe to these structures in 1997, centralising policy around Powell and ruthlessly cutting the Ministry of Defence out of the picture. Their new impotence became clear on the day he formally apologised to those who were wrongfully convicted of terrorist charges in the 1970s and when he established a new tribunal to inquire into the killing of 13 civilians in Derry in 1972, decisions which had long been opposed by the Ministry of Defence.

Blair’s handling of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) still remains a great puzzle however, and Powell’s book does little to explain the problem. Blair showed none of the steeliness in Northern Ireland that would become his trademark when faced with Milosevic in Kosovo, Mullah Omar in Afghanistan, or the Hussein crime family in Iraq. All of the major studies of the peace process have shown Blair to be something of a soft-touch in his dealings with Adams and McGuinness, someone who allowed them to define the scope of the process and the tone of the negotiations far more so than even the Irish Government thought wise. (Blair was intensely irritated for example by the Irish Government’s insistent characterisation of PIRA as ‘a colossal crime machine’ after 2001. In one Irish account, he is said to have told the Taoiseach in his best Fettes accent, ‘This was, um, you know, um, unhelpful, really.’) He craved a deal from the first minutes of his premiership and declined numerous chances to extort one from Adams for fear that he might split the PIRA, regardless of the reality that they were already split since 1995.

Powell’s book amplifies this general sense of Blair’s fluffiness. This is best reflected in the extraordinary informality that characterised some of his major judgment calls. Prime Minister and Taoiseach apparently agreed an amnesty for some of the grossest murderers in Northern Ireland’s low-key civil war on a stairwell around 5 am in Castle Buildings in Belfast in 1998. Powell himself tried to cobble together a timetable for the disarmament (but not disbandment) of PIRA while being ferried around various ‘safe-houses’ in west Belfast by one of Adams’ flunkies in a battered Toyota. His drivers forbade him to tell the local police of his movements.

The grave issue of possible collusion between UK security forces and loyalist terror gangs was first formally discussed in Downing Street while Blair and Ahern took part in an episode of Masterchef. Sadly again, the issue of recovering the remains of those abducted, tortured, and secretly buried by PIRA in the seventies was hardly discussed at all. As such, the acoustics if you like of the negotiations between the UK and PIRA remained hopelessly skewed in the latter’s favour. Dean Godson’s exhaustive account of this process, Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism, showed that as befitted a lifelong bully, Adams himself only ever succumbed under pressure and threat. Thinking of the millions he had extracted from vengeful Irish-American millionaires since 1994, he was terrified of various American envoys like Mitchell Reiss who could suspend his fundraising visa with a simple phone call to the State Department. Mohammed Atta’s obliteration of downtown Manhattan on September 11th had the kind of pedagogic effect on him that had eluded Powell for the previous four years. PIRA cashed their chips and decommissioned shortly afterwards.

One is left with the feeling that the more sensible parties in the mainstream of Northern Ireland would have survived if Blair and Ahern had pushed Adams harder and faster to disband his paramilitary wing, an argument Powell dismisses at the end with a fatuous claim that the ‘Nixon goes to China’ principle shows that the more extreme parties are better at making deals stick. This is true, one is tempted to reply, if their competition is hung out to dry.

Powell’s account suggests that we have to add unpredictability to the previous charge of fluffiness levied above. He tells us at one point that Blair became bored with Adams and McGuinness’s unending pleas for more time to square their militant flanks. He apparently felt that he was wasting his time with the monkeys when he should have been addressing the organ grinder. Blair asked Powell whether he should talk to the top-brass of PIRA himself, the so-called ‘Army Council’, in the hope that the roar and dazzle of his Clause 4 charisma might seal a deal. In the end he chose not to, but Powell must surely have warned him that he would be going up against at least two certifiable sadists here, Brian Keenan, the gun-nut whose contribution to inter-community amity lay in extorting rockets from Gaddafi in the early eighties, and Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy, the pig farmer-cum-millionaire in whose large house Irish police recently found a functional torture chamber. One is left wondering just what Blair would have said to them.

In these reckless instincts, unlike so much else about him, Blair followed a squalid path laid down by his predecessors. Like him, they too were tempted by bold wheezes that would lead to some unspecified ‘breakthrough’. Harold Wilson foolishly met with PIRA in 1972, lying to the Irish Government about his intentions to boot, thereby simply prolonging their campaign for no recognisable return. Against the advice of the local police, Edward Heath thought that the Paratroopers, the most notorious regiment in the British Army, would make good peace agents in Derry in 1972. He seems to have been the only one who was surprised when they massacred 13 unarmed civilians that same year. (The transcript of the telephone call placed by the distraught Irish Taoiseach Jack Lynch to Heath’s private office the evening of the killings still shocks the conscience three decades later. The transcript can be found online.)

Yet it was Mrs. Thatcher who established the gold standard for prime ministerial hubris. In 1983, during a discussion at Chequers about the auxiliary security functions of the Army in Northern Ireland, her mad left eye seemed to swivel and she suddenly asked her Irish counterpart if he would consider a joint population transfer as a definitive solution to the violence. As recounted in the then-Taoiseach’s memoir, she mused aloud to him, ‘What was that man’s name again, Garret? That 17th century fellow…yes, Cromwell, that was it.’ The Taoiseach suggested an emergency tea break.

Powell’s overt sensitivity to the so-called ‘burdens of history’ serves merely to warp and cripple. In some cases, this spurious regard for historical grievances is just a cover for indulging tribal myths and self-pity. Powell fell head first through this trap door in 1997. His vapid historical introduction in this book shows signs of this neurosis as do his myriad lectures about the literal quality of the Protestant mind, or the more convoluted register allegedly favoured by the extreme nationalist constituency. Such clichés flattered their fathers, but did little to sharpen the diplomatic perspective and simply reduced him to the status of a headwaiter for whichever group could push itself to the front of the queue. At least readers were spared another invocation of Heaney’s much overworked line about hope and history rhyming, a favourite of Bono, Clinton, and Mandela. Then again, like God, New Labour didn’t do poetry.

III

Powell’s book betrays a kind of cherubic optimism that is all the more alarming considering the realities of life in Northern Ireland today. Throughout his account, he blithely assumes that peace is in fact a reality, and that the worst problems have now been bypassed thanks to Tony’s tireless tact and his own hard graft in the monasteries, B&Bs, and slum pubs of west Belfast. Almost none of Blair’s initial calculations proved sustainable however between 1997 and 2007.

The two moderate political parties there, the Ulster Unionist Party on the unionist side and the Social, Democratic, and Labour Party on the nationalist, were gradually bled dry by the enormous attention Powell gave Adams and Paisley. The constitutional arrangements agreed in 1998 under Senator Mitchell’s chairmanship were cutting edge consociational democratic structures designed to facilitate partnership amidst the centre parties. This finally collapsed last year as both extremes accepted the keys to the kingdom. Powell accepts no meaningful responsibility for Blair’s failure to protect the vulnerable centre by squeezing the village toughs whose noisy demands filled the PM’s nightly red boxes.

Powell’s cheap moralising should be read alongside Paul Bew’s moving last book, The Politics of Enmity, which is in many ways a threnody for the political world Powell so casually cast aside. With a more focused British Prime Minister, Bew suggests that the centre might have held and the world might have been spared the sight of Paisley’s triumph. Powell is also silent on what is perhaps the biggest problem facing the next generation in Northern Ireland, namely the constitutional formula agreed by all parties which permits a change in the state’s constitutional status if 50 percent of the population plus one solitary extra voter plump for same in a local referendum.

As Richard Bourke points out in the chilling envoi of his book, Peace in Ireland: The War of Ideas, such a simple-minded majoritarian calculation would cause mayhem all over Ireland should it ever be activated. Powell is too busy drawing threadbare parallels with the Tamil Tigers and the PLO to give much thought to this problem. British statecraft has not been without its detractors in our own time of course. That veteran Labour curmudgeon Denis Healey once said that the chief legacies of British diplomacy in the modern era were minimal: the popularisation of Association Football and the term ‘fuck off’. Watching Powell brandish the medals of his defeats, it’s hard not to feel that Healey had a point, or that someone is going to be back in that battered Toyota before too long.

John-Paul McCarthy is a DPhil student in history at Exeter College who is working on Gladstone’s intellectual life.

Thomas Kinsella
Selected Poems
Carcanet, 2007
126 pages
£9.95
ISBN 978-1857549034

At first glance, the steeple on the cover of Thomas Kinsella’s new Selected Poems, luminescent against an azure sky, might be native to Rome.  On closer inspection, the architecture’s stately simplicity suggests Georgian Neo-Classical, perhaps a relic of Colonial America.  An observer with a taste for analogy might comment on the steeple’s striking resemblance to a kitchen table pepper canister.  And with that, we are in Upper Mount Street, Dublin, looking at St Stephen’s church.  Kinsella had a view of this church, nicknamed the “Peppercanister”, from his Percy Place home, and the Dublin press he founded in 1972 was christened after it.

That the Dublin cover image, by Stephen Raw, can take us on such a diverse, international journey appropriately illustrates the rewards of Kinsella’s poetry. Kinsella was one of the first Irish poets after Yeats to display a stubbornly internationalist scope, while remaining steadfastly loyal to a locality.  His environs have been consistent, both in situation and imagination.  Born in Inichore in 1928 and educated at University College Dublin, Kinsella left his city and his civil service job in 1965 to take up the post of Writer in Residence at Southern Illinois University.  Yet, unlike Dublin’s infamous literary exiles, Kinsella spent the next two decades dividing his time between Dublin and the US, a transatlantic commuter, before re-settling in Dublin, and later County Wexford.  The imprint of a single city on a life of poetry has been realized, again by Raw, in the iconic image of a Victorian Dublin street-map on the cover of Kinsella’s Collected Poems (2001).

Selected Poems, together with two new Peppercanister publications, Man Of War and Belief and Unbelief,published in June, usefully remind us of the continued industriousness of this important twenty-first century poet.  With a career that has spanned half a century, Kinsella’s bibliography is now comparable with figures in modern poetry such as Yeats, Williams and Pound.  In acknowledgment of his vast literary achievement, the Mayor of Dublin conferred upon the poet an Honorary Freedom of the City of Dublin this year.  Thus honoured, Kinsella is in eclectic and esteemed company, with previous recipients including Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, rock band U2, and Mother Teresa.

Recognition from his native city is a fitting reward for the long, intimate homage to Dublinthat has marked Kinsella’s poetic career.  The Selected Poems stylishly and a-chronologically demonstrates the poet’s urban devotion.  Baggot Street of the 1950s, a hothouse of creativity where Kinsella met the renowned composer Seán Ó Riada, and his first publisher at the Dolmen Press, Liam Miller, is evoked throughout the collection.  As Kinsella renders it in “Baggot Street Deserta”, “Dreamers heads / Lie mesmerised in Dublin’s beds”.  A contemplative daylight walk through the city is the setting for the exquisite love poem “Phoenix Park”.  “Nightwalker” is built around a nocturnal city peregrination, reminiscent of the oft-retraced path of Bloom and Dedalus. The spirit of the author of the original Dublin night-walk, a looming and palpable predecessor to Kinsella, is fittingly summoned “In silk hats…stern jodhpurs…On his big white harse”.

The Dublin of Kinsella’s childhood is recalled minutely and intimately in his poetry of the 1970s, most notably in New Poems (1973), and the fifth Peppercanister publication, One (1974), in which his home at “38 Phoenix Street”, in the Ballyfermot district, is granted specific testament.  Place-name poetry is an established trope of Irish verse, with its roots in the Gaelic dinnseanchas tradition.  Establishing senses of place is important to this poet, as attested by the 1990 volume of lyric reminiscences, Personal Places; urban street-name poetry is a decidedly Kinsellan breed.

Kinsella creates close and suffocating household environments in “A Hand of Solo”, “Ancestor” and “Tear”, particularly as he remembers his grandmother.  Generational distance and miscomprehension are compounded by perfunctory intimacies, as the young protagonist is drawn into a greeting embrace:

My eyes were squeezed shut against the key
In the pocket of her apron. Her stale abyss…
‘…You’d think I had three heads!’

In “Tear”, the young Kinsella is sent into the “chambery dusk” of his grandmother’s deathbed.  As with so many of the poems in this sequence, which opens with a reverie on the moment of a falling egg (“Hen Woman”), time is subtly and sensitively suspended.  The juvenile deliberation over deathbed etiquette (“Was I to kiss her?”) is drawn out, and reluctantly resolved: “Snuff and musk: the folds against my eyelids, / carried me into a derelict place / smelling of ash”.

Yet this intricate, localised aesthetic coexists with a sense of staggering worldliness. Kinsella’s poetic scope extends to the national and international, and he does not withhold criticism of the modern world, with which his city becomes increasingly integrated.  We are reminded in “Nightwalker” that for the early years of his productivity, Kinsella was a poet with a day-job, synchronising with the human masses as he is physically compelled to “lie down with them all soon and sleep, / And rise with them again when the new day / Has roused us”.  The pedestrian protagonist is a postmodern Prufrock, disconcertingly nameless, faceless and humourless.  He is “a brain in the dark and bones out exercising / Shadowy flesh.”  Desperately seeking self-affirmation, gazing into the sea, he hears the whisper of a bird: “I have seen the sun go down at the end of the world. / Now I fly across the face of the moon”, in an echo of Prufrock’s oceanic vision.  The one certainty with which he exists is an intangible anxiety: “I only know things seem and are not good”.  In scathing satire of a complicated, endemically Irish blend of myth, devotion and commercialism, the iron statue in Dublin Harbour to whom the protagonist directs his most virulent apostrophes has the faces of the Virgin Mary, Kathleen Ni Houlihan (a version of Mother Ireland, immortalised in poetry, song and a play by W. B. Yeats), and “Productive Investment”.  The poem ends with an allusion to a recurrent Finnegans Wake acronym, in a triad worthy of a Beckett stage direction: “hesitating, cogitating, exit…”.

Nightwalker and other Poems (1968), the first collection after Kinsella’s move to the United States, marks a formal departure in his work.  From here onwards, the influence of American modernism is evident.  Earlier dabbling in Elizabethan love poetry (see “Soft to your Places”), and the Audenesque lyric (see “Mirror in February” with its memorable close “I fold my towel with what grace I can, / Not young and not renewable, but man”), feel far removed, as Kinsella follows Williams, Pound and Roethke, in looking to the long sequence as a vehicle for formal experimentation.  Visually, his poetry becomes more interesting, and the page a more pliant canvas.  The elegant, sonorous voice of the early poetry is submerged, and we hear a range of surprising interjections, such as the Taoist aphorisms in the magnificent “Tao and Unfitness at Instiogue on the River Nore”:

Move, if you move, like water.
…
Respond. Do not interfere. Echo.

From the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, a conscious retreat from public eloquence into internal, Jungian exploration, in Peppercanister sequences such as “Songs of the Psyche”, in some way accounted for his reputation of being unreadable. Selected Poems is judicious in its modest but representative coverage of this period, which is characterised by a troubling and relentless preoccupation with earthly decay and human mortality.  In “Artist’s Letter”, such a preoccupation turns an innocent revisiting of papers into a baffling vision of artistic cannibalism:

And when we have
been nicely eaten and our parts
spat out whole and have became
‘one’, then we can settle our cuffs
and our Germanic collar…

In Selected Poems, the digestion (to be consistent with Kinsella’s theme of consumption) of A Technical Supplement (1976)is made more palatable, with the removal of early, explicit, fragments depicting slaughter and dissection.

A clarifying distinction is worth making: to be unread is a less culpable predicament for the contemporary poet than to be unreadable.  Kinsella’s status as the former is in a large part explained by his method of publication since the founding of the Peppercanister Press.  Intricately designed pamphlets with limited print runs were issued in pairs, to mark occasions, such as the death of his close friend, Seán Ó Riada, in A Selected Life (1972).  With this personal project, literally homegrown, Kinsella showed himself to be unconcerned with commercial trends and maintaining a wide, casual readership.  “It is as though Clarke courted obscurity”, Kinsella wrote in the introduction to the Selected Poems of Austin Clarke, his predecessor in upholding a private press, as if in ironic anticipation of similar accusations against himself.  The Peppercanister Press continued to issue “draft publications”, with a maximum print run of 500, distributed in conjunction with the Dedalus Press in Dublin.  Difficult to locate, most readers would first encounter them in small combined volumes such as One and Other Poems (1979), and From Centre City (1994), distributed in the UK by Oxford University Press.  A result of this idiosyncratic printing history is that there are few poets writing today whose Selected and Collected editions, which bring the Peppercanister pamphlets together, are more necessary, or more eagerly anticipated.

Any selected edition of Kinsella’s poetry will necessarily interfere with the increasing governance of long sequences, unity and oneness in his work.  Selected Poems shows discretion in largely avoiding the wrath of practised Kinsella readers.  It is difficult to dispute the primacy and importance of the sequential collections Nightwalker and New Poems, which receive 60 pages – a third of the volume – between them.  Of the Peppercanisters, some of the pickings are so slim as to render the poems meaningless; one wonders if it would have been astute to forego the isolated fragments from The Familiar (1999) and Godhead (1999) in favour of a cohesive sequence such as “One Fond Embrace” (1981), or The Pen Shop (1997), in its modest entirety.  Butcher’s Dozen (1972), the first Peppercanister, is unsurprisingly omitted.  A bold and heavily criticised response to the Widgery Tribunal of Inquiry into the British Army shooting of thirteen civil rights demonstrators, this poem unravels in pulsating rhyming couplets (“A month has passed. Yet there remained / A murder smell that stung and stained.”)  Unrestrained in its vitriol, and the most overtly partisan of all Kinsella’s works, Butcher’s Dozen undeniably makes for uncomfortable reading.  However, the satire occasionally penetrates to an exhilarating level, and the work is a significant landmark in Kinsella’s career; its absence is felt in Selected Poems.

This collection demonstrates a subtle shift from the personal and psychological focus of his middle period, to a more civic sensibility in Kinsella’s later poetry, from the officiously entitled “Administator” and “Social Work”, to the selections from last year’s Marginal Economy.  Three offerings from that understated volume provide this Selected Poems with an elegant close.  “Marcus Aurelius” is a well-poised and unromantic political allegory, in which the central figure is a familiar twenty-first century contradiction, “a baffled humane…in his Imperial predicament”.  He is nonetheless subject to the torments of passion, and in the third fragment, the narrator relates with dry distance how, on hearing of his wife’s affair, Marcus “had the gladiator killed / and his wife bathed in the blood.”  The standard of Marginal Economy, and the simultaneous publication of two new pamphlets, leave the reader willing the onset of the next collected edition.  It seems 2007 has been a fruitful year for Kinsella, honoured bard of Dublin city, and, as the title to one Peppercanister reminds us, Citizen of the World (2000).

Sarah Bennett is a DPhil student in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford. Her thesis is on Irish and American poetic exchanges in the late twentieth century.

Peter Hart
Mick: The Real Michael Collins
Macmillan, 2005
485 pages
ISBN 1405052635

Fearghal McGarry
Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero
Oxford University Press, 2005
442 pages
ISBN 0199276552

Garret FitzGerald.
Ireland in the World: Further Reflections
Liberties Press, 2005
254 pages
ISBN 1905483007

The circumstances of the Irish revolution and subsequent civil war between 1916-23 continue to be debated by historians and by citizens in the contemporary Republic of Ireland. Biography, though increasingly frowned upon in certain academic settings as clumsy and inherently triumphalist, remains potentially the most potent method for excavating the Irish past. Three recent titles assess the work of major personalities who helped create the modern Irish state. Mick: The Real Michael Collins deals with Michael Collins (1890-1922), IRA supremo, financial Wunderkind and the Free State’s first martyr. Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero deals with Eoin O’Duffy (1892-1944), the infant state’s domineering chief of police in the 1920s, prophet of cultural purity in the 1930s and ultimately Ireland’s most peculiar specimen of fascist ideology in the 1940s. A third, a selection of historical essays by a former Irish Prime Minister, Garret FitzGerald (b.1926), illustrates the way the legacies of the Irish revolution continue to haunt contemporary life. Taken together, these three works can assist those interested in taking the pulse of historical consciousness in an increasingly wealthy, urban and globalised Ireland.

Hart’s Mick: The Real Michael Collins vividly fills many of the gaps in our understanding of ‘The Man Who Won the War.’ Hart offers a fascinating portrait of Collins’ life in pre-war London, the circumstances surrounding his decision to go to Dublin rather than Chicago in 1916, his extraordinary self-confidence as a committee-man from 1917 onwards and his emergence as the most aggressive (if not the most eloquent) proponent of ‘a shooting war’ from early 1919. The overall effect of Hart’s labours will, no doubt, delight the experts as much as the wider reading public. (Admirers of Hart’s earlier work will, however, be struck by his decision to use a more demotic, slangy prose at times).

The quietly menacing figure who emerges from Hart’s detailed chapters demolishes the romantic images of Collins constructed by Tim Pat Coogan and Neil Jordan. Where Coogan’s biography offered us a lost leader, distinguished by his political naiveté and national devotion, Hart has chronicled the relentless ascent of a profoundly ambitious man who ensured that he remained on the right side of the many splits he helped to engineer. In the recent film, Jordan’s Collins was an altogether more conflicted, even existential figure, one who showered his lover with roses while his ‘boys’ showered the denizens of Bewley’s café with all together more lethal offerings. Hart’s description of Collins’ careful assembly of his Squad suggests, however, that he was not a man prone to regrets, especially not for ‘putting a gun in young Vinny Burn’s hand’ as Liam Neeson opines at one point in the film. Hart’s book should also redirect attention to Brendan Gleeson’s evocative screen portrayal of Collins in Jonathan Lewis’ film The Treaty.

Like Hart’s portrayal, Gleeson played Collins as a brooding, monosyllabic fixer, someone whose prodigious work ethic ruled out all distractions save husky, male bonding sessions in Vaughan’s hotel or the occasional recourse to strong liquor. To follow Hart’s Collins through his myriad roles as Volunteer, Minister for Finance and Irish Republican Brotherhood president is to appreciate the acuity of Frank O’Connor’s depiction of the intellectual rigidity of the revolutionary generation. (O’Connor, like Pearse’s Murder Machine, blamed an educational system that was based almost totally on rote learning).

One is struck in each of Hart’s chapters by Collins’ extraordinary lack of imagination or intellectual curiosity. Hart includes one of the Free State civil servant Kevin O’Shiel’s marvellous anecdotes, which involves Collins responding to one of AE’s (George Russell) ponderous monologues about the nature of the ‘cosmos’ with a rather ungracious ‘But what is your point, Mr Russell?’ Even those nursing quarrels with AE’s mystical ruminations are justified in feeling that Collins’ obtuseness here constituted a poor reward for the old man’s lifelong support for the literary revival. The impulsive, primarily quantitative intelligence of the character at the heart of this book suffers from comparison with his contemporaries.

It would be difficult, if not impossible to imagine this character pondering the example of America’s constitutional structure like de Valera did with his Cuban security guarantee in 1920 and later with the 1937 Constitution. Collins’ fellow negotiators were reluctant even to give him the credit for the famous paper that predicted the emergence of the modern Commonwealth of Nations. Could we picture him hunting through New Mexico for Indian artistic treasures in the 1940s, matching IRA bibliophile Ernie O’Malley stride for stride, the voracious culture vulture described in Richard English’s IRA Intellectual? Might Collins’ epistolary output have matched Desmond FitzGerald’s angst-ridden letters to French intellectuals like Jacques Maritain had he been spared that banal death in the Mouth of Flowers? Hart’s book suggests not. Indeed, one is left with the distinct impression that, had Collins’ brief premiership not been so abruptly terminated by assassination in 1922, the infant state might have been an even more insular polity than the one that actually emerged.

Collins would most probably have insisted on the dominance of a centralized finance ministry with even more stringency than either subsequent prime ministers like W T Cosgrave or Eamon de Valera did. Hart’s Collins had a visceral commitment to the pre-political rituals of the IRB dating from his London years. In all likelihood this organisation would have been even more troublesome to the new state had his death not resulted in its almost instantaneous collapse. Arguably, his death also removed the government’s least imaginative thinker on Northern Ireland.

Failing to heed the lessons of the Home Rule riots of 1886 and 1912-14, Collins showed little understanding of the fact that violent actions (real or imagined) against northern loyalist interests invariably resulted in the persecution of isolated Belfast Catholic communities. Reviewing Hart’s classic analysis of the West Cork IRA, The IRA and its Enemies, Tom Garvin writes that Hart’s book made the 1919-21 armed campaign seem very similar to the Provisional IRA’s sectarian ‘war’ in Northern Ireland. One gets a similar sense of uneasy déjà vu in this book.

Hart itemizes the chilling ways those who design a violent campaign can never hope to control it once it begins. He chronicles the sectarian, squalid nature of certain murders between 1919-21; the murder of Frank Brook in 1920, the accidental murder of an innocent vet on Bloody Sunday or the shooting dead of Constable Laurence Dalton after he had annoyed J. J. Walshe during a raid. The callousness of this latter killing even shocked Collins’ Dublin Castle confidante, David Neligan, who argued, ‘personal antagonism brought about this man’s death.’ Hart also notes the vicious campaign against Protestant families undertaken by local IRA units at this time, often carried out without any recourse to their political masters, who routinely refused to take any responsibility for these deaths even after the circumstances became known. Hart ends by invoking the ghost of Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish Home Rule Party in the 1880s, as the nearest political analogy for Collins’ vertiginous rise and fall. Ultimately, it remains difficult to sustain the comparison between Hart’s myopic, young-man-in-a-hurry and the aloof master of Avondale who declined Gladstone’s version of an Irish constitution with astonishing froideur in the late 1880s.

The detail of Hart’s biography suggests an altogether more unnerving parallel with the career of Lenin. Lenin’s theory of the ‘vanguard’ seems eerily applicable to Collins; the isolated, evangelical advocate of violence as the sine qua non of political revolution. He remained unfazed by the fact that his views on assassination and inducing general mayhem as a deliberate tactic lacked the support of most of his cabinet colleagues and Dáil Éireann deputies at the time he began to implement them. His career proves the profundity of former PIRA commander Seán O’Callaghan’s contemporary insistence that small, unrepresentative groups can, if sufficiently organised and ruthless, utterly dominate political events.

Professor Hart’s vivid book concerns itself formally with a man who started life as a farmer’s son in 1890 only to be buried as the youngest prime minister in western Europe in 1922. Yet, this book is important not just in the way it brings a new maturity to our understanding of one individual. It ultimately constitutes a frightening vindication of Baldwin’s warning about the price a country almost always has to pay in the aftermath of government by a ‘dynamic force.’ The ironies inherent in Collins’ legacy are subtly traced through the career of his self-professed successor, Eoin O’Duffy, in Fearghal McGarry’s elegantly executed biography; Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero.

Irony becomes the trope of choice in a biography like this, which deals with the career of an individual who brought contradiction to positively operatic levels. The measure of any man is to be found in the manner by which he navigates contradiction. O’Duffy seems scarcely to have tried. Through McGarry’s cool prose, we are invited to savour the ravings of an alcoholic proponent of perpetual sobriety amongst the populace. We follow O’Duffy, the devout Marian Catholic, in his regular attendance at the predatory homosexual Mícheál Mac Liammóir’s notorious soirées in Dawson Street. His democratic rhetoric in the 1920s takes on a whole new meaning as we watch this pro-Treaty volunteer rationalise the constitutional settlement as breathing space for the IRA so that it could import more guns.

This scourge of republican paramilitaries in the 1920s spends the early 1940s soliciting their support at the height of war when a Nazi invasion seemed probable. During his years as an opposition party leader in the 1930s, he tries to appeal both to large ranchers and their rivals amongst the smaller farmers in the midst of the self-imposed agonies of deValera’s economic war with the British export market. By the end of McGarry’s analysis, this self-professed organisational supremo, whether as head of the Irish police force or leader of various fascist fronts throughout the 1930s, can be seen to have comported himself almost always in the spirit of Churchill’s most famous barn yard image – the bull who carried around his own china shop. The only thing that can be said for certain at this point is that Mick Collins’ mortification would have been acute had he lived to see the fruits of his anointment of O’Duffy as ‘the coming man.’ Above all other things, Collins liked a winner.

O’Duffy’s early IRA career is explored against the background of Monaghan’s bleak sectarian geography, where he bore direct responsibility for the killing not just of British soldiers, but for the squalid murder of ‘informers,’ elderly Protestants, overly zealous Redmondites, simple minded farm hands and recalcitrant poitín hustlers between 1919-21. His Garda commissionership is assessed in the context of the first government’s organisational prowess and political bravery, especially in not arming the new recruits. He emerges as an Iago to Kevin O’Higgins’ ever more manic Othello until 1927, though McGarry hints that the Minister for Justice had just about enough of O’Duffy before his own assassination that year. O’Duffy’s career as leader of Fine Gael and subsequently the Blueshirts is thoughtfully explored against the tumultuous class conflicts of the 1930s as exacerbated by the Treaty split.

McGarry offers a sensitive analysis of O’Duffy’s mercurial fascist ideas. He traces them back to the disappointments and resentments inherent in the new state as well as to O’Duffy’s personal inadequacies and frustrations. All of these factors calcified around an altogether more sinister admiration for a variety of European strong men by the 1930s. O’Duffy’s trajectory from noisy defender of the infant state’s institutions as Garda Commissioner to the blimpish harlequin of the Spanish Civil War vividly dramatises that gloomy, illiberal, anti-democratic aspect of modern Irish political culture so vividly explored by Tom Garvin.

McGarry offers several arresting portraits of key players. Eamon de Valera emerges from these pages as a glacial presence at the heart of the infant state: as a prime minister distinguished by a pitiless sang-froid. This is evident in his decision to cashier O’Duffy in 1933, in his no-nonsense approach to farmers who refused to pay land annuities (his Government sent bailiffs to impound their assets), or in his legislative refusal to allow Spanish ships to take Irish recruits to Spain during the civil war there.

In a bizarre scene, the poet Patrick Kavanagh turns up at one of O’Duffy’s wartime conclaves. These usually attracted an eclectic mix; as McGarry described it, ‘Some were anti-Semites and fascists, others were cranks motivated by vanity or grievance, while some-lured by the singing, dancing and free drinks on offer at the Red Bank- were only there for the beer.’ Kavanagh’s bitter critique of the chauvinism inherent in the Catholic nationalist political synthesis had reached its poetic zenith in the 1930s. The pointed question he posed in 1944 in his poem ‘In Memory of Brother Michael’ still resonates:

Culture is always something that was
Something pedants can measure
Skull of bard, thigh of chief
Depth of dried up river
Shall we be thus forever?
Shall we be thus forever?

It’s a safe bet to say that he was in attendance at this meeting for refreshment purposes only.

Ernest Blythe’s pungent journalism throughout the 1930s betrayed an ever more emphatic disillusionment with parliamentary democracy and all that it entailed. His irritation with the cumbersome nature of the system was arguably first apparent in 1923. In response to a demand at cabinet that three soldiers be arrested for outraging the innocence of the daughters of a Kenmare doctor, Blythe professed himself ‘not particularly revolted at what seemed to be merely a case of a couple of tarts getting a few lashes that did them no harm.’ Blythe’s airy dismissal of due process here was paralleled elsewhere, especially in the increasingly apocalyptic analysis of Desmond FitzGerald, who peppered his correspondence with dire predictions of Bolshevism and anarchy in a Fianna Fáil governed country. McGarry reminds readers that FitzGerald’s impassioned anti-communism extended to wearing the fascist blue shirt while sitting in parliament.

McGarry’s analysis suggests that readers should be grateful that FitzGerald’s legacy is to be found in his progeny, rather than his principles. Though his own political career fizzled out after 1932, his son Garret was the independent state’s eighth prime minister and its political man of letters sans pareil. Since his premiership ended in 1987 amidst diplomatic success and financial penury, Garret FitzGerald has declined the role of ‘lion in winter,’ preferring instead the life of peripatetic academic. His latest collection of essays, lectures and reviews, Further Reflections; Ireland in the World demonstrates the depth of his commitment to historical analysis and the manner in which the legacies explored in the previous two books still dominate Irish intellectual endeavour.

Indeed, echoing the sentiment of Banville’s forlorn hero in The Sea, it is easy to imagine FitzGerald declaring that ‘the past beats inside me like a second heart.’ In his articulation of a creatively imprecise theory of Irish federalism and his passionate, career-long assault on the pretensions of insular Irish nationalism, especially in its PIRA form, FitzGerald fils resembles an Irish version of the late Canadian federalist Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1919-2001). His negotiation of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985 showed, however, that he was more astute in his handling of Mrs Thatcher than M Trudeau.

If FitzGerald’s account of his father’s ministerial career in the 1920s is an altogether more euphonious one than that offered by McGarry, his other essays, however, contain more than enough by way of compensation. His economic analysis of the growth of Irish separatist tradition rescues an important subject from its various polemicists. This same cool approach to modern Irish history informs his subtle analysis of David Lloyd George’s evolving Irish policy since 1916, the death of the Irish language as seen through baronial records or de Valera’s mutually exclusive political aims since 1918. By far the most striking essay here is his analysis of Ireland contemporary security policy, viz., ‘neutrality.’ Here FitzGerald makes a passionate case for Irish membership of NATO and for an end to a policy of military abstention that glorifies the messy 1939-45 experience.

Reflecting on his experience as President of various EEC Councils of Ministers in the 1980s, FitzGerald argues, ‘I could never regard our decision to opt out of western European defence and to rely for our defence exclusively on a combination of other states in the formulation of whose policy we have no say as being in accordance with our dignity as a state, or with our moral responsibilities.’ His advocacy here is helped immeasurably by his demonstration of the mortifying similarities between contemporary Irish security policy and those of war-torn Tajikistan. For a spell, both countries were unique in being members of the Conference on Security and Co-Operation, but not members of the NATO-led Partnership for Peace. FitzGerald’s magisterial analysis of contemporary EU-US relations contains all the dialectical sensitivity that distinguished his 1990 report on the Israel-Palestine conflict for the Trilateral Commission.

FitzGerald is a unique Irish political figure on a variety of levels. He was the first Irish foreign minister to chair EEC summits in French and Spanish, both of which he spoke with aplomb. He had the misfortune to be the first Irish chief executive to receive his seals of office at a time when even the most seasoned commentators predicted imminent bankruptcy for the state by the end of fiscal year 1982. The singularity of his career is not to be found in these discrete facts, however, but rather in the manner in which he personified the state’s ultimate rejection of the political ethos that sustained Michael Collins, Eoin O’Duffy et al, most emphatically in Anglo-Irish relations.

FitzGerald, hailed as a ‘peace child’ by his republican godparents in 1926, offers an alternative way to engage with the legacy of history that stresses the self-defeating nature of the narrow Irish nationalist project. He seeks to remind us of a truth that neither Collins nor O’Duffy ever fully assimilated, a truth which the Irish mind has become expert at evading since independence. Though an island people, our fate is inextricably linked to the main. Our horizons do not suddenly contract at Dublin Bay and neither, ultimately, do our responsibilities.

John-Paul McCarthy is a DPhil student in history at Exeter College, where he is writing a thesis on W. E. Gladstone’s intellectual life. His biography of Irish cabinet secretary Maurice Moynihan is forthcoming from Cork University Press.

Robin Haines
Charles Trevelyan and the Great Irish Famine
Four Courts Press, 2004
640 pages
ISBN 1851827552

The ‘Great Famine’ (1845-50) will be familiar to anyone acquainted with Irish history. The scale of the catastrophe itself — roughly one million of a population of eight million perished, and a further one million emigrated — can hardly be underestimated. Nor can the long-term effects. Th population haemorrhage (mainly to the U.S. and England) that began during those years continued until the 1980s. All of this might seem unrecognisable to a country which is currently enjoying unprecedented economic success, a success which seems to have encouraged a collective amnesia regarding the darker episodes of Ireland’s history.

Nonetheless, in academic circles at least the Famine remains a subject of earnest scholarship, as Haines’ book illustrates. Sir Charles Trevelyan was the Permanent Head of the Treasury during the Famine years, and as such occupied a role akin to a purse-keeper. Ultimately, all questions regarding how much public money should be spent on relief for the victims of the crop failures went through Trevelyan and his bureaucratic brethren in Her Majesty’s Treasury. His role made him a pivotal figure for historical inquiries.

Accordingly, in tackling Trevelyan’s role in the Great Famine, Haines has entered an historiographical minefield. The Famine, as a subject of academic research, has consistently exposed the polemics of Irish history-writing, from John Mitchel’s overtly nationalist verdict that ‘God sent the blight but the British government sent the Famine’, to more recent ‘revisionist’ accounts which have tended to sanitise the event and argue that given the scale of the disaster, there was little the government could have done to prevent further death and suffering. Haines is concerned here with ‘revising’ the received view of Trevelyan, a result of the ‘half-truth, innuendo and careless repetition’ which has found its way into the secondary literature on the subject. Over six hundred pages, Haines attempts to undermine the prevalent view of Trevelyan as a dictatorial civil servant with undue influence over Famine policy who was imbued with the doctrines of classical laissez-faire political economy, racial prejudice against the Irish, and a providential view of the catastrophe as an ‘act of God’. These opinions and approaches combined to convince him that the Famine must be allowed simply to ‘run its course’. Instead, Haines’ central question is more fundamental: why is it primarily Trevelyan who has attracted the condemnation of history for the inadequate government response to Ireland’s humanitarian crisis? Haines is correct to stress the sloppiness of some research relating to Trevelyan’s policies, and to expose the negligent way historians have simply borrowed ‘facts’ from seminal articles without ever taking the time out to consult original source material. Her own scholarship is impressive. The work consists almost entirely of Trevelyan’s letters, supplemented by correspondence with the other protagonists involved in Famine relief. Her research challenges the view that Trevelyan was the key influence on the government’s Famine relief policy. She concludes that the ‘scrutiny of the unpublished and published correspondence demonstrates the extent to which Trevelyan, although an influential adviser, was carrying out the wishes of his departmental head during the Famine—first Goldburn, then Wood. They, in turn, were guided by the advice, both political and economic, of their respective cabinets’.

Haines’ scrutiny suggests that the view of Trevelyan as the central relief administrator cannot be sustained. Instead, she contests, he was a centrally placed civil servant who was caught between the manoeuvrings and machinations of his political overseers in Westminster and the governing elite in Dublin Castle. It seems that Trevelyan often bore the brunt of barbs that were aimed at his superiors, barbs which historians have incorrectly taken as reflective of Trevelyan’s character. Trevelyan’s devotion to his job cannot be called into question, nor can the difficulty of his position. He found himself liaising between Westminster and Dublin Castle, an unhappy partnership at the best of times, and arbitrating disputes within the Irish executive and the various committees, boards and commissions set up to respond to the Famine. Despite all this, he still found time, in dealing with the embryonic Irish herring industry, to have some Norfolk cured fi sh sent to Ireland to ‘excite the emulation of the Beginners in the Sister Country’ because ‘all the specimens I have received from Ireland […] have been of the most execrable kind’. It is a credit to Haines’ comprehensive scholarship that Trevelyan’s role can now be seen in all its gruelling, painstaking, everyday detail, as well as providing a valuable insight into the demands shouldered on well-placed Victorian civil servants.

Disappointingly, Haines devotes very little time to Trevelyan’s career and views outside his Famine-related work in the Treasury (only ten pages, for instance, are devoted to the thirty-eight years of his life before 1845). This is a pity, since Trevelyan had a distinguished career in India both before and after the Famine where he was involved in schemes aimed at economic improvement and had expounded forthright views on educating the native Indian population using an English system. Haines refers at one stage to his efforts to convince William Empson, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, that he was qualified to discuss problems relating to land tenure and the consolidation of small holdings in Ireland because he had served his apprenticeship on the subcontinent and was involved in serious land disputes there. In the Upper Provinces, where he had worked as settlement officer, he had presided over an area where smallholdings had ‘existed in great perfection’, he noted. In Ireland, by contrast, he felt they had proved disastrous. Haines does not expand on the comparisons Trevelyan draws between India and Ireland at all, nor does she pursue a line of inquiry that might have delved deeper into his Indian experience and the infl uence this bore on his dealings with Ireland. She also does not address other relevant biographical facts. With the exception of his views on India, Trevelyan wrote a number of pieces on pauperism in London in the guise of letters to the Times or as addresses to charitable organisations. This is a real oversight since his views on the problem of poverty in London and on ‘development’ in an imperial context would surely shed invaluable light on his approach to famine-stricken Ireland, a country which was both a part of the United Kingdom and yet resistant to the imposition of English ‘norms’ of improvement and development (much as India was).

More generally, Haines is reluctant to engage with the ideological influences that informed Trevelyan’s approach to policy, and pays little attention to the wider debates or movements of ideas that would have inevitably affected someone as well-educated and well-placed as Trevelyan. This is in contrast to most recent work on the Famine, which has focused on the ideological forces that constrained the government’s intervention in the Irish economy during the crisis. Historians have pointed to the influence of classical political economy, to prejudiced ideas about the Irish, and to the predominance of evangelical providentialism. All of these ideological forces are said to have infl uenced the government in pursuing a policy of limited state intervention in Ireland, and to favour the more hard-headed policy of ‘local responsibility’ whereby an amendment to the Irish Poor Law in late 1847 shifted burden of relief from the central government to the local ratepayers in Ireland. Haines is evidently unconvinced by most of these arguments. In particular, she not persuaded of the view that Trevelyan’s reading of the Famine was that of a ‘Whig moralist’ and ‘providentialist’. She is no doubt correct to stress that ‘providentialism’ — a belief in the machinations of God in the affairs of man — was not the sole preserve of the Whigs, but applied equally to Robert Peel’s Tory government which had overseen the fi rst year of Famine relief. However, this evidence does not disprove the fact that Trevelyan was a providentialist nor does it dispel the view that Trevelyan was a man driven by ideas which infl uenced his policy-making. He may not have been as influential as some historians have argued, but neither he nor the cabinet ministers he served under were immune to the influence of these political ideals.

Haines is most convincing when she debunks the view that Trevelyan was an arch-racist (though perhaps we do not need to be reminded several times that he was an ‘avid collector of Irish protest songs and nationalist literature’). It is an interesting fact but hardly establishes that he positively celebrated all things Hibernian. Her principal point, which is well sustained in this book, is that Trevelyan’s principal animus was directed against the Irish land-holding class rather than Irish Catholic tenants and smallholders. His assertions about the profl igate, slothful Irish landlords were commonplace amongst British politicians and reflected Victorian views about the educative, morally influential role of social elites. If the Irish tenants were averse to independent self-improvement and hard work, the blame lay primarily with their social superiors. Despite her claims that this work is for ‘general readers and specialists alike’, it will primarily be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century Ireland. The sheer size of the book and the level of detail it provides will put off those with a more general, non-academic interest in the Famine. Moreover, the work is so consciously aware of its role in a wider academic debate that knowledge of recent work on the Famine is essential to an understanding of Haines’s intentions. In terms of her desire to lift the ‘veil of dogma’ surrounding Trevelyan, Haines has demonstrated that his role has been exaggerated in the past, and that he was much more at the mercy of his political superiors than has previously been supposed. She has, however, failed to argue convincingly that Trevelyan was not a ‘moralist’ who rationalised the government’s Famine policies as God-given opportunities for Irish economic and social regeneration.

Ciara Boylan is an Irish DPhil student in Modern History at Exeter College, Oxford. Her research interests include nineteenth century Irish intellectual history.