A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 15 September 2013.

Eimear McBride's first novel is not for the faint-hearted.  They'll be reaching for the smelling salts in the book clubs of South County Dublin.  When you get get over the shock of the radical style you'll find yourself immersed in a world that is disturbingly violent and sexually transgressive.  It took nine years to get into print.  Publishers loved it but couldn't see a market for its twisted syntax and its dark, dark themes.  Eventually a small English publishing house took a punt and it has been rewarded with critical acclaim in such august literary organs as the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books.  A lengthy review by Adam Mars-Jones in the latter is positively effusive in its praise.

It took me three abandoned attempts to get past the first few pages.   But I stuck with it and around page nine lost my fear and began to enjoy the strange and exhilarating ride.  There are Joycean touches.  The early baby-talk has echoes of Portrait of the Artist and the limited punctuation (not a comma in sight) and stream of consciousness suggest the concluding soliloquy in Ulysses.  But it's a long long way from the bovine carnality of Molly Bloom.  Beyond the stylistic strangeness, beyond the familiar tropes of repression and depression in rural Ireland, beyond the absent father, the  violent mother, the handicapped brother, and the abusive uncle lurks the story of a country girl relishing her sexual abasement.  We get an early hint of it in her ambivalent reaction to her uncle's opening foray when she was fifteen. Mixed in with the violence and pain of the rape were occasional darts of pleasure.  And subsequently she became complicit in her uncle's selfish and relentless pursuit of gratification.  Maybe the violence associated with her sexual awakening became a requirement for satisfaction.  Either way, the book describes an escalating scenario of sexual violence that would do the Marquis de Sade proud.

A thread running through the book, and one of the sources of the narrator's angst is the plight of her older brother.  Afflicted with cancer as a child his development has been impacted by various operations leaving him with mild mental and physical handicaps.  She observes and is made wretched by his plight as they both grow up.  One particularly poignant scene in the schoolyard sees the eager but inept boy being sneered at by his peers during a football game.  But the nihilism and the alienated sexual freneticism of the narrator are not fully explained by anything depicted in her bleak background.

McBride is a dark pointillist.  Her short sentences, frequently merely a word or two, coalesce to create a horrific world where religious superstition and bullying are the norm and sexual encounters are nasty, brutish and not short on violence.   The rat-tat-tat of these sentences are like drum beats cranking up your emotions.  There's an incantatory feel to them.  The absence of conventional syntax, of subject, predicate, and object, gives your imagination room to roam within the cryptic dabs of meaning.  It sounds flakey but works in practice.  The book will arouse powerful emotions in anyone who accords it the respect of reading it with attention.

This cry of pain from the halls of hell is a tour-de-force.  It's difficult to see where McBride can go next - if anywhere.  This might be a one-off masterpiece rather than the first step in a literary career.  More Harper Lee perhaps than Edna O'Brien.

I know little about McBride or her background.  She grew up in Ireland and lives in England, and had a brother who died relatively young. After finishing the book it was relief to see that she has listed her mother among the acknowledgements.  First novels can be autobiographical but it ain't necessarily so.  You'd be horrified to think that the author has come close to some of the experiences delineated in this powerful and disturbing book.  Fiction can sometimes be just that.


Galley Beggar Press
Pages 205

John P. O'Sullivan
Eim

The Dublin Galleries - Strategies for Survival

Sean McSweeney and Writer (Photo:  Paddy Benson)

The epicentre of the Irish art market is a car park off Kildare Street in Dublin 2.  Park your car there and you will find most of the major players within a radius of 200 metres.  These include the big three auctioneers: Adams, de Veres and Whytes and three of the most prominent commercial galleries:  Taylor Galleries, the Kerlin Gallery and the Oliver Sears Gallery.  The RHA is nearby and the lower end of South Frederick Street has a cluster of smaller galleries including the Leinster Gallery where I once picked up a gem by George Campbell.  As well-fed and watered barristers wend their way back to their Mercs from the clubs and restaurants around Stephen's Green they may be distracted by the sight of a Paul Henry in the window of Adams; or further down Kildare Street they might catch a glimpse of one of Sean McSweeney's moody bogscapes in Taylor Galleries.  Lubricated for artistic appreciation and careless of cost some may arrest their progress to add to their collections.

During the good times the juxtapositioning of these auction houses and galleries formed a lucrative nexus.  The auction houses made money both from dead artists, like Yeats and Dan O'Neill, and from the resale of such popular living artists as Robert Ballagh and Donald Teskey.   A Ballagh painting entitled My Studio was sold at Whytes for €96,000 in 2004.  At the galleries prices were adjusted upwards (mostly at the artists' behest) to reflect what they were achieving at auction.  And so the art boom was born.  Such was the feeding frenzy that the government was forced (Ballagh was a prominent advocate) to introduce a droit de suite scheme (artists get a percentage of auction price) to redistribute some of the largesse from the auctions.  The scheme was confined to living artists however and to work sold for more than €3,000.  Its net result was to make rich artists richer.  An irony not appreciated, I suspect, by the left-leaning Ballagh.  The single biggest beneficiary from the scheme was the hardly impecunious Louis le Brocquy (while he was still alive).

But those halcyon days are over.  The former profitable symbiosis between gallery and auctioneer has broken down as both parties struggle to capture their share of a dwindling market.  The recession has hit very hard.  Slower to slump than the property market it has now surpassed it in the severity of the decline.  Most involved would agree that prices have dropped by more than 50%.  The hardest hit has been work by living artists (there are exceptions, Basil Blackshaw's work continues to do well), and of those the more abstract suffer the most.  For example, a Felim Egan bought for €10K in 2007 sold recently at de Vere's for €3.5k.

But the hard times are much harder for the galleries.  Art continues to sell briskly at all the auction houses - albeit at sharply reduced prices.  The same is not true for commercial galleries selling contemporary art.  Galleries cannot just reduce prices for prominent artists as to do so would cause real problems with previous purchasers of these artists.  Some galleries will sustain the illusion of maintaining prices but will be quick to do a deal at a substantially reduced cost.  Face has been saved, and reputations secured.  However, the buying public in general are looking for bargains at auctions and neglecting the galleries.


So how are the galleries dealing with the sharp downturn in their fortunes?  Surprisingly there have been few casualties in Dublin.  The Rubicon has moved the centre of its operations to Brussells but still maintains a Dublin office.  Otherwise all the main Dublin galleries are still trading although many have cut down the number of solo shows and there has been a plethora of group shows featuring gallery artists - a kind of greatest hits approach.  Cork has not been so lucky.  Its two commercial galleries, the Fenton and the Vangard have perished in this chill wind - although other factors influenced the Fenton's closure.  These galleries frequently hosted sell out shows during the boom times - showing artists such as Tony O'Malley, Charles Tyrrell, and Sean McSweeney.  It's a sad sad situation that our second city, and erstwhile European City of Culture, can't sustain a commercial gallery.

The galleries that have survived have had to adapt.  It was customary for Taylor Galleries to sell out shows by its celebrated roll call of artists.  These days the red dots are sporadic at best, although there's still the occasional exception such as Sean McSweeney's last show.  John Taylor acknowledges the decline in the market and maintains that both his gallery and many of his artists are "living off the fat" of the good days. .  He relies on the Irish market almost exclusively and has had to devise strategies for the changed times.  He is reluctant to reduce prices as he feels this would be unfair to earlier buyers.  However some of his artists are changing to smaller formats to make their work financially accessible.  He also plans to open an original print section some time in 2014.  This would sell etchings and lithographs made by gallery artists and selected outsiders.

Hidden behind a discreet door in a lane off South Anne Street, the Kerlin Gallery is (according to Lonely Planet) "the ultimate statement in cool".  It doesn't exactly employ a barker to draw in the casual passerby.  Art for them is a serious business.  I remember an early visit when I was puzzling over some work by abstract artist Sean Shanahan.  "This is not for beginners" I was informed by director David Fitzgerald.  And he wasn't joking. Inside you'll find mainly conceptual and abstract art from a mixture of Irish and international artists.  Sean Scully is the jewel in their crown but you'll find work by fashionable conceptual artists such as Liam Gillick also.  A lot of the work it shows is more suited to museums than the domestic market.  You could surmise that the Kerlin has been the least impacted by the recession of all the Irish galleries.  It has always looked abroad for sales and it regularly attends art fairs in London, New York and the European mainland.  They are currently showing work by Willie Doherty, Liam Gillick and others at Art Basel and by Sean Scully in Mougins in the South of France.  They also have a  substantial backer in share holder Patrick McGillen, which may insulate them from total dependence on the market place.  Requests for information about how they're managing in the current climate are ignored by director John Kennedy.  Their published accounts take advantage of the veil available to small companies.

The Oliver Sears Gallery is the new kid on the block.  It has taken over the old Ib Jorgensen premises on Molesworth Street - opposite the Masonic Lodge.  The gallery opened in 2010 in the teeth of the economic gale.  It has built up a stable of substantial contemporary figures such as Hughie O'Donoghue, Colin Davidson, Patrick O'Reilly and Donald Teskey.  The latter has been one of the best-selling artists in the country over the past five years.  Although trading has been tough they have still managed to turn a profit in 2012 - albeit a "modest one" according to its owner.  Sears is not afraid to mix his media, frequently showing furniture and recently putting on an entire craft-based show.   A straw in the wind for a change in the market direction may be the opening of SO Fine Art Editions beside Keogh's on South Anne Street.  This is being run jointly by Sears and Catherine O'Riordan, late of the Graphic Studio Gallery.  It specialises in original prints, photography and sculpture.  The owners are hoping that art lovers loath to make the big investment in oil paintings can find satisfaction in these less expensive options.

Outside the Golden Triangle around Stephen's Green (or now perhaps, as Oliver Sears suggests, the Bermuda Triangle) other commercial galleries are trying different things.  The Kevin Kavanagh is increasingly looking abroad for sales as is the Green on Red - attending art fairs and putting in the hard yards.  The Cross Gallery, on Francis Street, has opened a coffee shop to get people onto the premises.  Hillsboro Fine Art in Parnell Square is not solely dependent on the Irish market or on Irish artists.  Over fifty percent of the artists they sell are non-Irish and include such luminaries as Anthony Caro and Gerhard Richter.  Of their Irish artists Michael Warren continues to sell well in Europe.  Also, owner John Daly finds that his core Irish buyers remain loyal and continue to snap up certain artists - he cited Paddy Graham as an example.  Other artists attached to his gallery are working on a smaller scale, or on paper, to keep prices down.  Daly's biggest financial headache is his handsome property which he bought at the height of the boom.

The key difference between the auction houses and the galleries is that art is purely a commodity to the auction houses.  They are not interested in developing and nurturing the reputations of living artists.  A vibrant gallery scene is important for the continuing health of Irish art.  Without them our artists will blush unseen and many will become discouraged.  Times like these separate the dedicated from the dabbler.  Living off the fat of the good years is not a viable long-term model for the galleries.  They must  now work harder to promote their artists.  Most have upgraded their web sites to extend their reach internationally.  Searching out markets abroad and providing less expensive options for buyers are the primary strategies for survival.  It's too early to tell whether these are sustainable tactics.

Bob and Roberta Smith at the Butler Gallery

Soap Box at the Butler Gallery

This review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 25 August 2013.Bob

Bob and Roberta Smith is one person - the English artist Patrick Brill.   This may seem a tedious affectation except that he did at one stage collaborate with his sister, who is indeed called Roberta.  So in a display of lingering filial loyalty he has retained her name, along with his own pseudonym.  Clear?

He is showing at the Butler Gallery until early October and at various other locations in Kilkenny during its arts festival.  Consciousness raising is his game and the tools of his trade are text-based paintings in vivid colours.  Ar these merely "the written hectoring slogans of any half-educated urban dweller" as one critic has stated?  Or will they change your life as the curator has intimated?  Decide for yourself.  Participation is encouraged.  Jump on the inviting soap box and make a speech. Marvel at the misspellings in the letter to the UK education minister Michael Gove.  Be affronted by the juxtaposing of Rosa Luxembourg and Julie Burchill as feminist icons.  Appreciate the respect for the wonderful Louise Bourgeois.  Bring the kids, they'll enjoy the bright and playful nature of the show

Butler Gallery
Kilkenny
Mon-Sun: 10am-5.30pm
056-7761016

John P. O'Sullivan

Mary Lavin's Reputation

Mary Lavin

A slightly edited version of the following article appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 25 August 2013:

The pellucid perfection of James Joyce's Dubliners has set the gold standard for Irish short story writers.  The genre has been mined productively for the past hundred years by such major writers as Frank O'Connor, Seán Ó Faoláin, Elizabeth Bowen, William Trevor and John McGahern.  Recent years have seen Kevin Barry unearth the twisted and violent denizens of his netherworlds.

Is Mary Lavin a major writer?  Time has not been kind to her reputation and I doubt that this book of essays, edited by Belgian academic Elke D'hoker, is going to restore it - notwithstanding some fine contributions and an introduction (albeit a slight one) by Colm Tóibín.  The causes of her slide from favour are various.  Her small domestic dramas were perhaps washed away by the feminist tide.  Frank O'Connor's suggestion that she wrote about "the life of the kitchen" can't have helped.  She was largely apolitical, arriving in Ireland after the nationalist ferment had died down, so she ceded that ground to O'Connor and Ó Faoláin.  She had a good solid middle-class upbringing so she was denied access to working-class colour.  Her world was narrow and circumscribed.  She described the petty concerns of small-town Ireland: the lives of quiet desperation where appearance and respectability were more important than freedom.  From a post-feminist perspective she hardly rocked the boat - maybe her jaundiced view of the emotional development of the average Irish male was too subtle for the sisters.  Also, the central role of the priest in her world now seems quaint.  Some of her stories have not aged well - the language often seems strained and the conclusions contrived.  Character and colour were the focus rather than plot and language.  In A Wet Day, for example, the character of the smug priest is well wrought but the plot device of the mislaid thermometer is improbable.

The most impressive essay in the collection is a review of her oeuvre by Maurice Harmon, an English professor at UCD.  He quotes Seán Ó Faoláin's sobering conclusion that writers as great as Chekov and de Maupassant will be remembered for a mere handful of their stories.  The same, he avers, is true of Mary Lavin and suggests that the stories of hers that endure include: The Will, Happiness and The Becker Wives.  Lavin herself considered The Will to be her best story.  Some may find the heroine's hysteria a little unconvincing but then the torments of Purgatory don't seem as alarming to us today.

Lavin's own story is an interesting one.  Born in the USA in 1912 to Irish parents, and transplanted to rural Ireland when she was ten, Lavin retained an outsider's beady eye for the foibles of the middle-classes in our small towns.  She enjoyed a conventional education in Loreto College and afterwards at UCD.   After a spell teaching she married William Walsh.  He died in 1954 a mere eleven years after their marriage and left the writer with three young daughters and a farm in County Meath.  She was so overwhelmed with grief that she was unable to write for the next four years.  After 15 years of widowhood, and stories about widows, she married her childhood sweetheart Michael Scott, a laicised priest.  The next 20 years or so were the happiest and most productive of her life.  Her mews in Lad Lane became a haven for writers as disparate as the lionised Frank O'Connor and the young, unpublished John McGahern.  She was a familiar figure around Baggot Street, stocky and serene, always dressed in flowing black.  After Scott died suddenly in 1991 she went into a steep decline and died in 1996.

Although she had a modest reputation at the time her first husband died, the real change in her fortunes came when she began to have stories accepted by the New Yorker in 1958.  This happened through an intervention by an unlikely source.  She had been writing to J. D. Salinger about the American market and he encouraged her to submit stories to them, just as Frank O'Connor and Maeve Brennan had done.  In addition Salinger, a made man at this stage, wrote to William Maxwell the fiction editor suggesting Lavin as a contributor.  This resulted in 16 of her stories being published by them over the next 18 years.  The essay by Gráinne Hurley on her relationship with the New Yorker gives a fascinating account of the degree of intrusion that they practised and she permitted.  That she had to abide by its rigorous house style is not unexpected.  That she allowed wholesale excisions (15 pages in one case) is surprising.  But that she actually removed or changed characters at her editor's behest is a tad disturbing - turning some of her stories into virtual collaborations.  I suppose a young family trumped artistic preciousness.

She used her own family and circumstances as source material right through her career.  Happiness is a prime example.  In it a widowed woman with three daughters enjoys a close relationship with a priest, who visits regularly and even stays overnight occasionally.  The family are not in awe of him and treat him like any regular man.  In a racy touch, unusual for Lavin, the widow even moves around the house in her slip in front of him.  Lavin famously was never banned, unlike almost every one of her worthwhile contemporaries.  This deviation from her usual decorum may have been as close as she ever got.

Mary Lavin's centenary year in 2012 passed with barely a ripple.  There were a few low-key events in Navan Library.  The death of her daughter, the journalist Caroline Walsh, may have cast a pall over any planned celebrations. Her Selected Stories is out of print. This is a shame.  It would have been a good time for an enterprising publisher to produce a new selected stories and so help to revive interest in this neglected chronicler of small-town Ireland.

Irish Academic Press
222 pages
€24.95

The Hunt Mueum and the Nazi Hunters

A slightly edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 11 August 2013:


John Hunt
The Man, the Medievalist, the Connoisseur

The mean-spirited, and unsubstantiated attack on John Hunt's reputation by the Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) has already been repulsed by US academic Lynn Nicholas's report - commissioned by the Royal Irish Academy in 2007.  This book routs any stragglers.  The original attack came in 2003 in the form of a letter from the SWC to President Mary McAleese.  It suggested that the Hunt Museum contained items looted by the Nazis from Jewish families.  Various investigations and reports failed to find a single item that substantiated this accusation.  Nicholas's report in 2007 described the SWC's allegations as "unprofessional in the extreme".  President McAleese administered the coup de grace when she declared that "The SWC had diminished the reputation of the late Simon Wiesenthal".

But the SWC weren't letting go.  In 2008 it published The Hunt Controversy:  A Shadow Report by Erin Gibbons, a BA in History and Archaeology, based in Galway.  This time the attack had moved from dubious artefacts to dubious friends.  A lot of the report chronicles the people with whom Hunt dealt over the years and infers that he shared their political beliefs.  One example (from numerous others) of the quality of the 'evidence' employed by Erin Gibbons and the SWC was the suggestion that Hunt was close to Adolf Mahr, Director of the National Museum of Ireland, and undoubtedly an ardent Nazi.  This closeness consisted of three letters exchanged between 1933 and 1939 concerning items Hunt was trying to sell to the National Museum.  Mahr dealt personally with all acquisitions so Hunt as an art dealer had no option but to deal with him.  He was also dealing with the directors of the Victoria and Albert and the British Museum during this period.  The Irish Military Intelligence files (all of Mahr's mail was intercepted) from the period do not contain any personal correspondence between the two.  Also, Hunt's name does not appear in Mahr's list of 43 "dependable friends" in Ireland.


The real mystery behind all this is motivation.  Why would they attack such a man?Certainly he made good money trading but even a cursory study of his life shows scholarship, dedication and enthusiasm far beyond mere avarice, and a benign indifference to political matters.  The art historian Ciarán McGonigal, who has a skeptical view of the quality and provenance of the Hunt collection, concedes that Hunt's love of archaeology and antiquities was genuine and that he was "a man of immense personal charm".  If there is a chink in the armour of righteousness that surrounds the Hunts it lies in their alleged involvement with a group of smooth operators from Sotheby's in the infamous dispersal of the Pitt-Rivers collection.  It's a murky story involving the making of copies and the selling of originals from the embargoed collection, which was housed in a Farnham museum.  Nicholas Shakespeare, in his biography of Bruce Chatwin, suggests that the Hunts had connections with this group.  Sotheby's remarkably maintained no archives prior to 1972 so much remains in the realms of speculation. Shakespeare also makes it clear that despite these dubious transactions the Hunts did not share Captain George Pitt Rivers fascist politics and that he was "not aware of any evidence of anti-Semitic views on their part".  On the contrary they had made repeated efforts to smuggle a Jewish family (Philip and Anna Markus) out of Germany before the war broke out.  A converted Catholic, Hunt was very religious and carried a crucifix on his person at all times.  The letters and testimony of friends confirm his utter integrity and various institutions around the British Isles can vouch for the generosity of his bequests.  Whither the villain?  And why the witch hunt?

It would be a shame to let this controversy overshadow Hunt's many achievements and his colourful life-story.  The O'Brien press have pulled out all the stops in a richly illustrated and beautifully designed volume.  While Brian O'Connell's take on Hunt verges on the hagiographical occasionally, he nonetheless has a fascinating tale to tell and is not afraid to dispel some myths.  He clears up any lingering doubts about Hunt's family origins.  Despite what was generally believed, and perhaps encouraged by a Brit living in Ireland in a politically fraught time, Hunt had no direct Irish antecedents.  After building up an antiques business in London, himself and his wife Putzel moved to Ireland before the outbreak of World War Two.  His wife was German and they feared, needlessly according to O'Connell, her internment.  They left their Buckingham mansion at Poyle Manor and moved into a modest nineteenth-century farmhouse on the edge of Loch Gur in Limerick where they lived for the next 13 years.  This was a convenient base from which Hunt could embrace his passion for archaeology.  He got involved in various excavations as an unpaid assistant to Professor Seán P. Ó Ríordáin from UCC (where he also completed an MA in Archaeology).  Following various digs he moved on to an ambitious scheme to renovate Bunratty Castle for use as a tourist attraction in the region.  He undertook this demanding assignment with no salary apart from the provision of rudimentary living quarters.  It resulted in an obscure ruined castle on the Shannon being turned into Ireland's biggest fee-paying tourist attraction outside Dublin.

But all the while he and Putzel were continuing their dealing in antiquities, and building up a formidable private collection.  A feature of Hunt's dealing life was the number of unsolicited gifts he made to various institutions, always aiming to house artefacts where they rightly belonged.  While you could argue that this was greasing the wheels for his commercial transactions with the same institutions, he was clearly not a money grubber.  His character, as evidenced by this biography and by the numerous letters and friends quoted, was one of extreme probity.  One example of this probity and generosity was the returning of a priceless miniature altar piece, once belonging to Mary Queen of Scots, to the Jesuits who had originally been gifted the precious object by the condemned monarch.

His final act of generosity was to bequest his personal collection to the State. The Hunt Museum in Limerick is a fitting monument to a gentle, scholarly, and hard-working man.  Looking through its collection recently it struck me how many crucifixes and Christian artefacts it contained.  Hardly the kind of objects you'd acquire through the looting of Jewish households.



The O'Brien Press
Pages: 335
RRP: €29.99

John P. O'Sullivan