The End of the Tour - David Foster Wallace Imagined

I am an unabashed fan of David Foster Wallace. I like the self-deprecating humour and sharp observation of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. I love his highly technical and insightful pieces on tennis - especially the essay on Michael Joyce. And I bow in awe before the cornucopia that is Infinite Jest. I'm not mad about his footnotes but that's a foible I'll accept because it's a small price to pay for the quality of everything else.

The End of the Tour depicts a promotional road trip with Wallace and the Rolling Stone writer (and Wallace memoirist) David Lipskey following the release of Infinite Jest. Jason Seger absolutely nails Wallace, capturing the slightly shambolic physical nature of the beast. He also captures the caged wariness of a writer who always seemed too thin-skinned and sensitive to survive in this world. The dialogue is based on Lipskey's recordings of their discussions and it exposes the uncertainty and anguish that was his constant burden. Aside from the big questions a lot of interesting incidental stuff comes up in their chats such as his reasons for wearing his bandana - sweat absorber and security blanket. Anyone interested in what made Wallace tick should check it out but it also exists in its own right as an absorbing road movie. I found it on iTunes but I'm sure it's available elsewhere.

 

 

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The End of the Modern World by Anthony Cronin

A slightly edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 17 July 2016.

When the dust settles on Anthony Cronin's career I suspect that he will be remembered chiefly for Dead as Doornails, his classic memoir of Dublin literary bohemia of the Fifties and for his highly-readable biography Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. Despite a substantial output, his reputation as a poet doesn't seem to have acquired the heft of near contemporaries such as Heaney, Longley, Mahon or Kinsella. He is best known for RMS Titanic, his poem "about the death of an old school morality or decency.” In 1986 Thomas Kinsella omitted him from his capacious New Oxford Book of Irish Verse. A very pointed snub. It has been suggested that he went to London at a crucial stage in his career and thus fell out of favour with our parochial literary establishment. Or perhaps his versatility as a man of letters is looked askance at in a specialist area.

The End of the Modern World is ambitious in its scope. It is no less than a sustained elegy for the decline of the west. The poem is an expanded and amended version of a collection of sonnets first published in 1989. It now contains 179 sonnets - 18 more than the original, and some of the earlier sonnets have been amended. Cronin is not for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in, he aims at reason not rhyme and his sinewy iambs often feel more like declamatory prose than poetry. He describes his work as a "psychic history of western civilisation". The tone is sombre throughout and it concludes with the empty triumph of materialism and intimations of the essential meaninglessness of life. We are far removed from the romantic myth of Adam and Eve and a Paradise Lost:

The sun, a crucible of nuclear rage,

Knows nothing of such ends, it thrummed out rays

Of heat until the ooze transformed itself.

The nearest comparison is to T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. In addition to their eloquent pessimism, both are replete with borrowings from literature, both lament the death of romantic love and they both occasionally let the poet intrude into his poem ("I must keep my iambic beat").

The key to understanding Cronin's poem is Browning's Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came. This poem also inspired Stephen King's highly lucrative Dark Tower series of book - an irony that Cronin I'm sure appreciates as his poem laments the triumph of brute capitalism. There are specific references to Roland and the Dark Tower within the poem, and many oblique ones. The final sonnet paints a picture of Manhattan and its skyscrapers, those symbols of materialism, that give the Dark Tower its contemporary shape:

Money's convulsions too are life-giving,

Neutral, imply no purpose in our hearts,

But blazed upon this rock to make Manhattan

Rise in resplendence, such a culmination

Just as Childe Roland involves a journey and a quest, Cronin's poem is a trip through Western civilisation going back to Roman Times, beginning with the invention of the plough:

Until the mould-board plough dragged through the mud

From there we are taken on a ride through feudal society, the cult of courtly love and the growth of the great manors, and the French Revolution. Ireland gets a look in via the Famine:

The horror of their hunger, so reflected

Even by burnished mirrors of rich corn

Was what they fled from in dumb multitudes.

Literary figures emerge regularly. Section two Of the sequence opens with a meditation on Milton, and Baudelaire and Byron also appear. Cronin is much possessed by sexual matters and he grimly records the transition from the brutal to the business-like with just a little courtliness in between.

Newspapers dangled girls like carrot bunches

The range of allusion to historical events is very broad, and abrupt changes occur with little transition - like Pound's Cantos. Mussolini "hung by the heels", scenes from Auschwitz, Robert Kennedy's funeral, Gaughin in Tahiti, De Sade's sexual prowess, Elvis's penchant for white panties all form part of his journey.

Sonnets 152 to 155 are all new and it's not difficult to see in them Cronin's ambiguity about his own role within the dark tower as Haughey's arts commissar:

A padded door, to lunch with Evil in

An inner sanctum. And of course he loved it,

While Cronin may have supped with the devil, his poem also contains many references to the hardship he endured by abandoning the Bar for a literary career:



The admonition from the EBS

Which threatened to uproot me every month,

The ESB which threatened instant darkness



This has a topical feel to these lines. His tireless advocacy for state subsidies for artists is based on bitter experience. But his concluding sonnets suggest a despair at the impotence of the arts in the face of the all enveloping power of capitalism:

A passionless acceptance reigns within

These air-conditioned spaces which absorb

To the faint murmur of a distant duct

The last assault waves of the avant garde

 

 

 





New Island Books

€11.95

pp. 96

John P. O'Sullivan

 

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Bill Griffin - the Oilman of Allihies

 

 

A slightly edited version of this profile appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 19 June 2016

The North Mon in Cork in the late Fifties was a fine breeding ground for hurlers but not for artists. Its robust and philistine regime did not encourage such airy notions. The young Bill Griffin had an aptitude for art but little outlet for his fledgling talents. When Griffin tried his hand at a few nude studies via two compliant cousins ("who were into art") his efforts were uncovered by a Brother correcting an English essay. Physical retribution followed as the skill of the drawing did not compensate for the flagrant inappropriateness of the subject matter.

Griffin grew up in Blarney Street in comfortable circumstances. His father was a dental mechanic with literary leanings who enjoyed an occasional pint with Frank O'Connor in Phil Moynihan's bar in Sunday's Well. His earliest encounter with art was seeing his father make little models from spare plaster. Like many artists he is mildly dyslexic and left school at 14 : "there's not a word in the English language I don't know how to spell a dozen different ways." Over the next few years he took a series of short-lived jobs while trying his hand at drawing and painting. He began mixing with real-live Cork artists such as Willie Harrington, John Burke and Maurice Desmond in Kealy's (a long-gone bohemian bar close to the old Examiner office). He showed one of his sketches ("a little drawing I was proud of") to the famously irascible Burke (then teaching in the Crawford College of Art). Burke tore the sketch into pieces in front of him saying: "don't give up the day job". Griffin didn't actually have a day job, having been sacked recently by Ford's, but discouraged he headed for London. Cork lads of his generation knew the route well: the Innisfallen to Fishguard and the train to Paddington.

His art aspirations caught up with him again in London. He was arrested for smoking marijuana and was incarcerated briefly in the cells of Marylebone Police station. There he bumped into Henrietta Moraes, muse and model to Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, and later girl-friend of Maggie Hambling. She was in for burglary. They had a brief affair, or as Griffin puts it "I banged a tune out of her". She introduced him to the Colony Club and to Bacon and his set. Bacon sneered at his paint-splattered shoes telling him "you don't have to have paint on your shoes to be an artist". Griffin's ready wit didn't let him down as he responded "it does if it's your only pair." He found Bacon unfriendly but became particularly close to George Dyer, Bacon's ill-fated boyfriend. Dyer was a snappy dresser and he passed on clothes to the impecunious Griffin. "When I came home to Cork I was wearing Dyer's suit with a yellow shirt and pink tie". But life in London was hard, a spartan studio in Ladbroke Grove proved too expensive and survival became moot. He headed up to Yarmouth to work in the burgeoning off-shore oil drilling business. Art was pushed into the background as he found he had an aptitude for rig work: "I loved the physicality of it and I understood the technology better than the Yanks."

Oil exploration began off Kinsale in the early Seventies and Marathon Petroleum was looking for labour locally. Griffin was a step ahead of the posse. The legendary tool pusher Gerry Gunther hired him as a roughneck, based on his brief Yarmouth experience.The oil business, like the IT business today, is a true meritocracy and if you're good you'll thrive. Griffin quickly moved from roughneck to derrickman, from derrickman to assistant driller, and then to driller. He developed a particular expertise in directional drilling, whereby the suppleness of the drill string is exploited to enable you to drill almost horizontally as well as vertically. This arcane skill took him all over the world - initially working for American companies but eventually he bought two oil rigs and worked for himself. A downturn in oil prices killed off this business and he quickly discarded his overalls and donned a business suit - travelling the world as an oil consultant. He ended up in Iraq working with the Irish company Bula Resources on the Oil for Food scheme.

On his 50th birthday he decided to quit. In Iraq he had witnessed at first hand the corruption involved in the oil business and the suffering and death that resulted amongst the ordinary people. "I suddenly saw the kind of industry I was in and I didn't like it." He resolved to return to Cork and have a go at the art thing.

His old Kealy's friends Harrington and Desmond were supportive. "Willie (Harrington) was by far the most sympathetic" and "Maurice (Desmond) helped me sell paintings." He took no art classes but just rolled up his sleeves and started painting. He literally rolled up his sleeves because after some initial dabbling with paintbrushes he decided he would paint exclusively with his fingers - "ten digits yearning for expression". It's not a technique that's common in the art world. "It just became easier for me" he explains, "I can use ten different colours at the same time if I feel like it". His first break was in a group show in Saint Fin Barre's Cathedral - where the Dean Michael Jackson (now C.I. Archbishop of Dublin) became an early supporter. He was spotted there by John P. Quinlan of the Vangard Gallery. Quinlan gave Griffin his first opportunity by offering him a one man show. Quinlan explains: "I did so because I liked his story and wanted to give him a break". Griffin remains grateful: "to this day I appreciate what John did for me".

He then made a fortuitous trip to Allihies. His brother has a large house there and he came down to paint for a week. That was nine years ago and he's still there. He met a local teacher, Deirdre Ni Dhonnchadha, and they both liked what they saw. "I think I landed on my feet" he says with a smile. She's also "a virtuoso tin whistle player" he informs me proudly. Ni Dhonnchadha is the niece of the legendary fiddle player Denis Murphy, Sliabh Luachra royalty.

Griffin is burly, he's bearded, he's bushy-haired, he's wildly unkempt, and he's extravagant in word and gesture. What characterises him most is his unwavering good humour and his infectious enthusiasm for life in general and the arts in particular. His role in Allihies is far more than that of another artist plying his trade. He seems to function as a kind pf power station for the arts in the parish. He organises the annual pantomime, he writes and performs one man plays (which he tours abroad), he organises exhibitions for himself and other artists in the Copper Mine Museum Gallery and he generally adds to the gaiety of nations. At present he is involved with Ni Dhonnchadha in running the annual Michael Dwyer Festival in honour of the renowned tin whistle player who lived locally.

Coming to art by an unconventional route and not caring a lot about the niceties of technique and compositional decorum, Griffin is often described as an outsider artist - or even by some as a naive artist in the manner of the Tory Island school. While Griffin doesn't quite bridle at this suggestion, he is quick to dismiss it. "I think my work is very sophisticated". He featured in Gemma Tipton's exhibition of outsider art in the Crawford a few years ago. "It was me she picked as her anchor tenant". He is not short of venues for his work and when he's not showing at his local Copper Mine Gallery has shown at the Triskel, the Vangard, and the Crawford in Cork, and at the Wexford Opera Festival. He sells well, his current show sold 13 pieces on the opening night. He bats aside all attempts at interpretation of his painting. He sees these ostensibly representational works as pure colour exercises. "In essence if you turn them upside down they will work as abstract paintings"."It's all about getting colour on the canvas". I point out similarities to the work of James Ensor but he says he's never heard of him.

For his current show Griffin tells me that he is "using the whole village as a gallery". The 60 odd paintings are on display at the Copper Mine Gallery, O'Neill's pub up the road, and a disused schoolhouse nearby. Wild and scenic Allihies is worth a visit at any time of the year but if you get down there in the next few weeks you will have the added pleasure of entering the colourful world of the Oil Man of Allihies.

The Copper Mine Museum Gallery

Allihies, Co. Cork

Mon-Sun: 10am-4.30pm

Tel.: 027 73218

John P. O'Sullivan

 

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Nothing on Earth by Conor O'Callaghan

A slightly edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on 29 May 2016

If I were an idle billionaire I'd occupy myself by suing the blurb writers of Ireland under the trade descriptions law. There are serial offenders out there such as Colm Tóibín and Joseph O'Connor but this careless puffery has reached epidemic proportions amongst well-known writers in our incestuous literary world. Whatever happened to "truth is beauty"? The first line on the front cover of this book is a puff by Donal Ryan, Conor O'Callaghan's stable companion at Random House: "Strange, beautiful and quietly terrifying" it advises us. Now I don't claim to know Donal Ryan but if he finds this book terrifying he must have led a very sheltered life. If he finds it beautiful then truly beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And as for strange, I can only concur.

This is a first novel by O'Callaghan who is a poet and academic - creative writing is one of his areas of expertise. He has a few poetry collections under his belt and a contribution to that tedious debate about Roy Keane: "Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Irish World Cup Blues: A Fan's Story".

His book opens with a dire warning from Leviticus about the dangers of sex during menstruation. Now there is sex in the novel, and indeed menstruation, but the link between them and any subsequent dark consequences is extremely tenuous. (I should point out that this review is full of spoilers.) Perhaps we shouldn't be taking the quote too literally but unfortunately it prefigures the book as a whole which seems like a patch-work quilt of non sequiturs.

The action is divided between the interior monologue of a sexually shifty priest, who could be an unreliable narrator, and descriptions of the lives of four characters uneasily residing in a house on a ghost estate near a small town. The only character to come alive is the priest so there is a basic problem about caring too much about the ultimate fate of the four estate residents: a couple with an almost silent daughter and the wife's sister. The sister, Martina, seems ripe for diversion but this leads nowhere except for a few jousts with the night watchman. Apart from the two discreetly written sexual encounters most of the action seems desultory. There's a lot of sunbathing - that rarest of Irish activities. We don't get to know the characters so that as they disappear one by one we are benignly indifferent. There's no attempt to justify their disappearance with prior intimations - either from within or without. One moment they are part of the action, the next they are not. And the sun bathing continues. The disappeared are never discovered and we are offered no clue as to their fates. There are hints of dark doings: doors opening, taps flowing, mysterious writing and unexplained noises. We must use our imagination I suppose but we are never engaged enough to bother. The priest seems to be shifty but innocent of any wrong-doing. His interior life is occasionally given to sexual musings, suggesting he is imperfectly adjusted to a life of celibacy. However, his interactions with the Gardai seem unlikely and the dialogue has a false ring "You run off and process some parking tickets".

At times the author's attempts to suggest the mysterious is plain confusing. If I were teaching creative writing I would use page 21 as an example of gratuitous obfuscation:

"The girl's mother was not 'Helen', but Helen will have to do for now. She did have a real name. It was, once, a matter of public record. What was it her real name? Nobody seems sure any more. There were even moments, towards the end, when Helen wasn't entirely certain herself."

O'Callaghan can certainly write but I am not sure he can tell a story. There is a hole in the heart of his narrative. There are promising dabs of colour, a pub scene, a grisly (and gristly) dinner party, a feckless landlord, a subtle description of oral sex - but in general nothing much happens and then the characters disappear. And the priest sweats on.

Doubleday Ireland

Pages 175

RRP: €16.99

John P. O'Sullivan

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Cymbeline at the RSC

 

I do enjoy my occasional visits to Stratford-on-Avon - a town dedicated to Shakespeare and tourism, with some decent restaurants (especially the Scullery) amidst the twee shops. It's great for strolling around with interesting buildings, some nice walks along the Avon, and along the canals where there's plenty of barge activity. And of course each visit must be build around an RSC production. This time it was Cymbeline, a play I had never seen performed before. The only bit I know is the famous lament for Innogen: "Fear no more the heat o' the sun ..." - often recited at funerals. I remember Hilton Edwards declaiming it at the funeral of Micheál Mac Liammóir. Perusing the cast list beforehand I see that Cymbeline (the King of ancient Briton) is played by a woman. Also, one of his long lost sons, is also played by a woman. Ho, hum. Now Cymbeline is one of these slightly annoying plays by Shakespeare where the audience must work hard on suspending their disbelief as one of the characters adopts a disguise as a member of the opposite sex - in this case Innogen, the main female character. Twelfth Night has a similar scenario. It's quite clear to all of us that it's the same person but not of course to the characters in the play. So adding to this confusion by changing Kings to Queens and sons to daughters is compounding Shakespeare's confusion. Also, a large proportion of the cast are black which seems historically dubious if politically correct. As I'm on the subject of appearances, the actor playing Posthumus (Innogen's beloved) is small and wimpy while the aspiring and despised lover Cloten is tall, imposing and far better looking. Open your eyes girl.

But these are all superficial criticisms, the production generally is more like a pantomime than a play. The language gets lost, often literally, as the director Melly Still introduces French, Italian and even Latin dialogue - projecting the English version on the walls of the set. Still is a designer by trade, and she's accompanied by Anna Fleischle another designer so guess what - there's an emphasis on design elements and a deeply eccentric assortment of costumes: tutus, caveman outfits, sharp suits etc. Shakespeare should be all about the language but it gets buried amidst the alarums, excursions and pyrotechnics - smoke, streamers and percussion. The story, such as it is, gets lost along with the language so we settle back and enjoy the colour, the music and the movement. There is one beautiful, lyrical interlude where the lament for Innogen is accompanied by sweetly apposite music. Otherwise it's fun and spectacle but hardly what I wanted from an RSC production. Two stars.

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