The Writer's Map
By BENEDICT KIEL Y
Benedict Kiely is literary editor of the Irish Press; he is also the author of several novels, of which the most recent, There Was an Ancient House (Methuen), was favourably reviewed in the Spectator, and elsewhere, last Lune, 0 UTSIDE this house on Rathgar Road, Dublin, no distance at all from where AE every Tuesday night once went up in his balloon in the delicate, cheering fumes of tea and high talk, the first real spring sun is shining.
If I had drawn this map two days ago my mood would have been different. It was all rain then on old railings that needed paint, on houses where old ladies, young on Mafeking night, peeped nervously from behind blistered doors, or,where young female civil servants. fresh from Killenaule, Cahirciveen or Cloughjordan, squeezed themselves into bed-sitting rooms.
Through the rain came a young Dublin poet, home from Barcelona, wondering why he came, telling stories of a London wedding with seven or eight notable poets present. What Dublin wedding, you wondered in the rain, would bring seven or eight Poets together, and if there could be such a wedding would the blessed bride ever recover from the shock?
But just this morning it is possible to believe that Ireland is a lively and lovely island and that her writers are taking cognisance of the fact. A few miles from here, farther out towards the mountains, our senior poet, Austin Clarke, his learned head humming with Gaelic assonance, may possibly be preparing his next acerb review for the Irish Times. My next-door neighbour is a man who has written a scholarly book on Brendan the Navigator. If I travel north as far as Stephen's Green I may meet the poet, Patrick Kavanagh, long green scarf down to his toes, his feet never quite at home on the unyielding pavements, never once in all the years since, as he says himself, Dublin taught him to be wise. His weekly lecture in University College has long ago beaten out Waiting for Godot as the city's greatest theatrical attraction. Farther north again I may meet Brendan Behan, who, conscious of un- counted generations of Dublin ancestry, feels that everything beyond the city's bus termini is bog and brushwood where Elizabethan armies whole once sank.
Beyond the Liffey in the Post Office building that once housed a revolution and now houses a radio station sits the novelist Francis MacManus, who has just published a book in Irish about travel in the US and hi:4 just had a play, Judgment on James O'Neill, on at the Abbey. A few offices away sits Mervyn Wall, who has just published a skit of a novel, No Trophies Raise, about the Civil Service and about a semi- religious secret society called the Warriors of the Cross which May or may not be the Rosicrucians. Under the same roof is another poet, another assonantal man, Robert Farren. Lennox Robinson and Donagh MacDonagh are anthologising Irish verse for the Oxford University Press. Mary Lavin, divided and a flat in town and a farm in green Meath by the Boyne and Bective Bridge, has just published a new book of short stories. Denis Johnston, working with US backing on a book on Swift, is speaking in an easy, intimate, witty way on Radio Eireann. Peadar O'Donnell has published a new novel, The Big Windows, which cries back to the pure, peasant simplicities of life in West Donegal and conceals effectively from anyone who didn't know it that Peadar has been a social agitator all his life. Sean O'Faolain appears for a gracious, gentlemanly moment to lecture to the Italian Institute on Carlo Levi and the writers of the South. Frank O'Connor is seen briefly in the course of a visit. From Crosshaven in Cork, where Drake's ships one time lay, Daniel Corkery, once mentor to O'Connor and O'Faolain, writes now and again a strong note about the meaning of nationalism. Sean O'Casey writes from Britain to tell the literary set among the students of Trinity College that Bernard Shaw was the third and only genuine Saint Patrick.
Below the Shannon in Listowel, in County Kerry, Bryan MacMahon, who wrote Children of the Rainbow, sets golden music to the old ballads and romanticises the tinkers. M. J. Molloy, the playwright, is probably working quietly some- where in the West and, much more surprising, Liam O'Flaherty is quiet somewhere in Dublin. Padraic Fallon is close to earth and sea in the ocean-eroded County Wexford. if I meet Martin Sheridan, of the Irish Times, we'll agree that writers in Dublin should meet writers in Belfast in a union of hearts, or heads even; and then we'll agree to go. but like Estragon and Vladimir we will stay where we are under the crooked tree that Sam Beckett stole from Yeats.
The University and Civil Service wits are writing wisely under pseudonyms or no nyms at all, in the new Leader. Through a book club called An Club Leabhar, writers in Irish have arranged that two to three thousand people will buy their books, whether they read them or not. An Archbishop hopes in writing that a certain periodical will help 'in grouping Catholic writers who will attempt to set forth a viewpoint based on sound Catholic social teaching.' The periodical is indeed Catholic in an Irish way, but somehow lacking in any- thing that could coldbloodedly be called writing.
The theological, clerical and scholarly reviews flourish. Nasty people might say that the theologians are the only people who have time to write in Ireland, the only people who feel perfectly at ease when expressing themselves. Studies, a valuable periodical, has changed from a historic, dull-brown cover to a bright new red one, as if, says the inevitable Dublin wit, the Jesuits who run it had taken to using lipstick.
This is all pleasant and gossipy, particularly when the sun is shining. Talk is a torrent, and talk at its best is always a beginning. The pint is still creamy and the grey juice of the barley runs with a light that ever pleases our eyes. Tea is eight and four the pound, but then AE has gone up in his last balloon and May grow his own tea plants now on some celestial, terraced hillside. Great things may be going on here under the surface. Patrick Kavanagh may write some poems; Brendan Behan may finish that book and see safely that it cannot be subjected to the space mishaps that make conundrums out of newspaper articles; Michael McLaverty, Francis MacManus, Mervyn Wall, and Bryan MacMahon may collaborate on the' great Irish novel. Dickens, in spite of the fact that he was a critic of the social order, which a learned man here thinks a novelist should not be, has not yet been banned by the censor. Anything may happen, but at the moment nothing much is.
'Let us drink, my friends,' as the Barcelona poet, Costafreda, says; 'death does not exist, the wheat will have its fruit and the woman will wait.' If the censor does not usk her to move on.
Let us meanwhile be glad for the first sunshine and the buds on these old trees. As any patriot is liable to say when the spirit takes him that way : 'We willarise again.'
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