"Shift"!! Those ACTORS said, "shift" - in PUBLIC!

Two telegrams tell the story of the opening night of JM Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. Both were sent to WB Yeats by flamboyant Lady Gregory, who was helping him run the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland's embryonic national theatre. He was woken up in Aberdeen by the first, sent at the close of act one: "Play a great success." Two acts later, she sent a second: "Play broke up in disorder at the word 'shift'."

According to William Fay, playing the lead, the audience had become "a veritable mob of howling devils" at this mention of a petticoat. Soon, "the uproar had become a riot". The mob was only prevented from storming the stage by the call-boy, who "had armed himself with a big axe... and swore by all the saints in the calendar that he would chop the head off the first lad who came over the footlights". (Samantha Ellis, The Guardian online)

You know, sometimes you just need a good call-boy and a big axe, and nothing else is going to do the trick.

 This week, in Irish Literature, we read two plays by J. M. Synge. The first one, "Riders to the Sea," is a quick punch to the solar plexus in one act. A mother and her two adult daughters, in the kitchen of their tiny little windblown, seacoast, dirt poor house, waiting for the news of the death of the last remaining brother. Read this one and weep. You won't be able to help it much.

But "Playboy"? Oh my oh my oh my. Believe me, the public mention of the name of a lady's undergarment is the least of the worries here. This is a bawdy, rowdy, hilarious, in your face and slap your pants ride into everything the polite people of the world want stopped. If you were born and raised in the particulars of propriety, this is not the sort of thing you want on the stage.

Set in a small village in County Mayo, The Playboy of the Western World is a lyrical comedy which tells the story of lonely dreamer Christy Mahon who wanders into a pub, claiming that he has killed his father. Captivating the locals with his tale of bravery he becomes an instant hero but it turns out that there is an unexpected twist in his tale. (London Theater)

Ha! "Unexpected twist" indeed. Spoiler alert. He didn't do it.

But it's worse even, than that. A country's fragile ego was at stake here. Ireland was getting sick and tired and tired and sick and shut yer face about it with all of this condescending claptrap coming at them from England's hoity toity mucky mucks. The national theater was somber, artistic and important, and th' divil take y' if y' don't understand that!

Ireland in 1907 saw itself as ready for self-rule and it expected its artists to promote the image of a steady, sober, self-reliant people. Instead, with The Playboy of the Western World, Synge gave them a play in which a village loon splits his father's head open with a spade, runs away, tells people he "killed his da" and is promptly installed as a hero by excitable women and drunken men. Worse still, this drama was staged not in some backstreet art-house, but at the Abbey, Ireland's national theatre, one of whose mission statements was to show that Ireland was not the home of buffoonery but of an ancient idealism. (Declan Kiberd, The Guardian, online)

Ireland, in all of living memory now, and for a long time before that, is a place where the unforgiving ocean's tide changes and the violence of it can be heard inside the kitchen of the praying mother's house. England hammers on the one side, colonizing, unmaking the Irish people and their mother tongue, and the bogs suck at the boots of anyone walking there. To have such a portrayal of the Irish, to make their most vulnerable country rubes the laughing stock of the theater ... it was too much.

 Some writers who had admired Synge's earlier work felt that now he had gone too far. "It is not against a nation that he blasphemes," wrote Patrick Pearse in a journal of the Gaelic League, "so much as against the moral order of the universe." The Irish Times's critic identified one cause of the trouble: "It is as if a mirror were held up to our faces and we found ourselves hideous. We fear to face the thing. We scream." (Kiberd)

So far, this all makes sense. (The Guardian's Kiberd does a great job of discussing all of this. Click on the link for "The Riotous History" of this play.)

But theater goers also rioted in New York and in Philadelphia when the play came to this side of the pond. This is a play about something horrible (a son killing his abusive father), which is made funny by the antics of the women who swoon over the scrawny, lying little twerp who has the gift of the blarney (and they're not exactly proper, those women).

Like Christy’s own tale of slaying his Da, the story of his injuries to Ireland’s good name continued to grow with the years. When the Abbey theatre took the play on tour to the United States, the clash between the idea of a pure nationhood cherished by Irish immigrants and what they saw on stage was even more pronounced. In New York missiles were thrown on the stage, and a hundred police attempted to keep order. Lady Gregory, who led the tour, received death threats; Theodore Roosevelt’s presence at the second performance ensured a more sedate reception. But when the company arrived in Philadelphia all hell broke loose, and the players were hauled into court by an Irish-American patriot who accused the company and the play of indecency. The case was dismissed when the judge learned that the accusers had not read the text. (Anne Saddlemyer, Oxford University Press, online)

Ah, for the love of Mike! The riots over this play tell the story of every purist, every fundamentalist, every rampaging, prohibition-championing, thin-skinned, small-minded, fear-mongering zealot of a lunatic that has ever drawn breath on this whole glorious planet. Would someone call the call-boy out here? And give him an axe!

Irish Lit: Poetry in Week Three

Scrambling to catch up, before the middle of the term!

We read Yeats in week three, and for our blog post, we're supposed to take one poem, and address a few points. They are:

1. What is this poem "about"?
2. Who is the speaker (or speakers) in the poem?
3. What is its tone or mood? Does the tone change?
4. Comment on any images in the poem.
5. Does the language itself have any notable features (e.g. is it plain or ornate, difficult or easy, colloquial or scholarly)?
6. Is the poem itself musical and rhythmical to the ear or is it more of a textual experience?

And now, for your entertainment, I shall attempt to do all of this on a high wire. No. Not a high wire. A high aware(ness) that this is my own personal public blog of ordinary me, me doing this, here, now. I'm going to talk about this poem without numbering my answers. I'm just going to talk.

It's not hard. It's Yeats.

It's not easy. It's Yeats.

Yeats of the old school. Yeats of the era of Serious British Education, the native Dubliner, Yeats. Yeats who longed to "build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language" because Yeats loved Ireland. William Butler Yeats turned his Ireland into words in stanzas, and these stanzas shimmer with his love.

The beauty of his poetry transcends time and space, and, I think, it even transcends Yeats himself. Here. I'll show you what I mean. This is a recording of his own reading of "The Lake Isle of Innesfree," -- he reads his poem in a completely dated and sonorous style which we, today, can find melodramatic and just a little silly. The text of the poem is below the imbedded video, so you can read along.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

(1890)

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, 

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: 

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee; 

And live alone in the bee-loud glade. 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, 

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; 

There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, 

And evening full of the linnet's wings. 

I will arise and go now, for always night and day 

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; 

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, 

I hear it in the deep heart's core. 

He sounds like he learned public speaking from men in black robes who stood in high pulpits or behind lecterns at the front of cavernous naves and classrooms, before the era of the false intimacy of the microphone. And, of course, he did. (Our era's public speaking all sounds like a revival tent meeting or a night club act, if you ask me. He's dated, but at least he's not trying to whip me to a fervor by shouting - then whispering - then shouting -  his emotional manipulations. He wants us to hear the poem.)

But it bothered me a little to hear his reading of his own poetry. His reading sounds as if he is trying to stay in speech, but he hears a tune in his head. It sounded like the reading of a canticle when you're used to chanting it musically. Maybe, though, he didn't hear a melody, but only the long, drawn-out rhythms of the inhale and exhale of a vacation at the lake. Maybe this is the slow pace of the kind of snoring a boy could do in a hammock in the yard.

His words could have been easily understood by the boy he used to be. There is nothing too scholarly or ornate to understand - at least, not if the listener has ever loved the peace of a place like that. But a boy in a hammock might not catch the exhausted tones of the man who wrote these words. It takes a man to know what sort of effort is meant by the need to "arise and go" - from a life of noise and stink of town, and from the constant clamor or too many people being too busy in a far too mechanized world. The boy would not wonder if that tired, sighing man might even be longing for the quiet and completely natural state of death itself.

From his own explanations of the poem (found here), it's easy enough to tell that this is him - his own self - Mr. Yeats - remembering a very real time and place, and the splash of water that made him feel like this memory made him feel. His own boyhood is being remembered. Like anyone whose family roots are visited in holidays and kept alive by a parent (in his case, a mother) who sang its songs to him, his love of Ireland is as deep as his own skeleton and muscles. There, he can have the sounds of crickets and bees. The lapping water of a lake at the edges of a lake sound like peace for him - beans growing where those bees are the loudest thing to listen to sounds like the best kind of noise in the world - especially when he's standing on the unyielding, grey pavement of the modern city, far, far from his deep heart's core. 

Ostentatious Pecksniffianism, I say!

Getting to it a bit late in the week this time ... that needs to change if my course load isn't going to bury me entirely, to be lost forever under a pile of hard-to-find videos (Masculinity in Film), hard-to-articulate, half-written theories (Modern Philosophy), and hard-to-put-down literature (Irish, old and new). Anyway, here's the week's blog challenge from the Man of Irish Letter and Lore:

As late as 1899 Robert Atkinson, the Professor of Comparative Philology at Trinity College, Dublin, said that stories such as those you've read this week and Irish folklore in general was "at bottom abominable", and that in ancient Irish literature it would be difficult to find a book "in which there is not some passage so silly or so indecent as to give you a shock from which you would not recover for the rest of your life."
What do you think might have been behind such a judgement, given that creative writers found the same books to be remarkable and stimulating? 

Um ... I don't know?

No.

I'll need to do better than that. There are no classmates sitting in this room, and therefore no one eager to show how much research she did on the topic before coming to class (there is always at least one Hermione Granger in class at Marylhurst - usually, there are several), and here in my office, late on a Saturday afternoon, there is no past master ready to discuss all the other things he knows about the topic. There's me. There's only me. Wondering about Robert Atkinson. Was the man being ironic? Is that actually a funny thing to say, what he said?

Apparently not.

Since I have to be my own Hermione for this one, I did a bit of reading. It turns out that Atkinson was no idiot! He was not, apparently, clowning around. And he knew exactly what he was saying, and to whom he was saying it. He made this poke-in-the-eye statement at the end of the 19th century, as an enormous wave of Irish language interest was taking the academic world by storm. He "outraged the Irish language movement with his disdainful dismissal of the entire corpus of early Irish literature" which he made during official testimony being given before the Vice-Regal Commission on Intermediate Education. He was not being funny, and he was not being overheard. He was being a pill. And when the reporters got hold of his statement, they included it in an article with the title, "Trinity's Attack on the Irish Language." They were not amused (O'Leary, 223).

In his 1994 Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, 1881-1921 Ideology and Innovation, Philip O'Leary calls this blasting from Atkinson a Pecksniffian charge, which was given and taken in completely earnest and serious intent. That's right. He called it Pecksniffian. (Go ahead. Say it out loud.) So I had to look that up! (Well, first I called across the hall, and asked The Great Husband, "What is Pecksniffian?!" He only said, "It's not good...." So then I looked it up.)

Pecksniffian derives from his Martin Chuzzlewit of 1844, in which Seth Pecksniff is a land surveyor and architect, though the author remarks that the only surveying of land he did was of the view of the countryside from his windows and that “of his architectural doings, nothing was clearly known, except that he had never designed or built anything.”

Wait. What? How is Atkinson being Pecksniffian? He has the credentials to talk about this stuff!  In fact, "in 1884 he became Todd professor of Celtic languages in the Irish academy. In Celtic studies Atkinson was a pioneer. He edited : The Passions and Homilies from the Leabhar Breac (1887); Three Shafts of Death (Tri Bior-gaoithe an Bhais, 1890), and also wrote introductions for many of the facsimiles issued by the Irish academy" (GluedIdeas.com). So ... he did not loathe all of Irish language. And his comments created a firestorm of rebuttal at the time. Surely he knew that this would be so. Surely he planned what he would say, in advance, on purpose. So what was the man on about? Why was he being so scathing in his testimony? What was behind such a judgement?

The only thing I can figure out is that the man was an Englishman in New York Dublin. He was not Irish. He was opposed and criticized in his day for his lack of facility with the Irish language ("Atkinson of T.C.D. // doesn't know the verb to be" ~ O'Leary quoting a critic, p. 224, in a footnote), and maybe he'd had about enough hostility from the uppity Irish. Maybe he just needed to be an Englishman. Aloud. In all of his own, personal, educated, over-bumptious ostentation. Besides, they warmed to him eventually. He got some very nice tributes after his demise. One person said, "There's many a person who criticized the work of Atkinson who doesn't do his own work half as meticulously as Atkinson did his." (That's another footnote in O'Leary) What was perhaps behind his excoriation of the wild and wonderful, crazy, raw, windblown tales of cows and women and childbirth and fearless magic? Well, maybe those things can be translated just fine - but they're just not proper for the young. They're just not proper.

If, "Manners maketh man" as someone said
Then he's the hero of the day
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say

Irish Lit: Week 1

 So ... apparently there IS a first time for everything. My instructor for the course, LIT420: Irish Literature and National Identity, has as part of the weekly requirement a blog post! No kidding! We are supposed to start a blog, use one we already have, or use his. And this means I'll have a whole list of other student blogs to add to my personal blog roll, which I think is very cool, but now I'm all nervous about other students and an instructor seeing my blogs, and two otherwise rather separate universes have just collided. The violence of this collision just about suits the material we've started looking at.

That's the poster from our course site (cool, huh!), and here's the theme for this week's blog post - a quote from Oscar Wilde.

“We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks." Oscar Wilde

I'm a bit stuck on the thought of being "too poetical to be poets." Or, rather, it's got its hook in me. Some kind of bent sliver. It's irritating, but I cannot yet see it well enough to pull it out. I will have to come back to that when I can find the words for what I can only feel at the moment.

"Brilliant failures" - nah. Not going to touch that one either. Not yet, and probably not ever. What else is history but a record of all the brilliance and all the eventual failings of all the peoples of all the ages and nations and kindreds and tongues? That's just a very Irish way to express it.

"The greatest talkers since the Greeks" sounds about right. I've known some Irishmen. They've all been talkers. It's the Irish who are full of blarney, after all. Ireland is where the leprechauns are clever chatterers who will not let you catch them lest they have to show you their gold - and be forced to surrender it to you. This is the isle where local bars keep the talkers sheltered from the local rain, under the eaves and in the warmth where they can ply each other with the stories they can tell.

 To say that the Pub is the center of Irish social life is merely stating the obvious. When its good, the craic is only mighty. Craic (pronounced crack) is that wonderful mix of drink, talk, good spirits, and exuberance that suits ceol so well. Ceol? Song.

Wilde wasn't inventing a national identity - he was just noticing it.

We are in the first week of the term. I know there will be a lot to discover about the words of these people. I already love several of those authors, and the one small classroom scene from War of the Buttons packed enough punch to have haunted me for a long time. The schoolmaster is having the children write in their native tongue. Their own language - and not the language of their English oppressors. To use the words of one's own people, in the language of one's own people - this is a humanizing and ennobling act of self-assertion. The words of the Irish will, I suspect, come to mean rather a lot to me this term. And since my instructor is a madman who requires public blog posts about our course material, all my friends and family will be here while I wrestle with this stuff.

After all . . .

my ancestors were Norse marauders

and my faith is practiced in an Anglican expression

so this is a bit like forming a friendship with a verbose garden gnome (who's really a mighty high king under a spell - and if I ignore that circumstance it will be to my own peril)

A Less Dim Bulb

Hurrah!! One constant and nagging problem, solved!

For as long as I can remember, I have needed and wanted and thought about and tried to design some system - some product - some technique - anything to keep my ideas where I can find them when I want them. Since I began a few weeks ago to wake up very early in the morning to write, more ideas than ever have been flooding into my brain, and a couple of days ago I realized what almost all of these ideas are. They're titles. These are things I want to write about, that's what they are.

Now, what to do ... what to do ... file cards? Some people live and die by their file cards. (I fondly remember the file card box I handed in to my Marriage and Family instructor, back in the day. I was the only one in the class that had decorated my box and cards, and the only one who had used an elaborate filing system so that my box of 3x5 cards was much more Byzantine meets Rococo in a Rose Garden than office product.) No. Not file cards. After I design my perfect system for filing, I'll never keep up with it. Too fussybusyfloweryfoofoo.

A white board? A chalk board? A bulletin board? The thousand and one sticky notes my boss uses at the library? Huh-uh. Same problem, less foo foo. I'd never keep up that system. The problem really is that my system already exists. It exists in my head. And all I need is a navigation technique for what's in there (and there's a lot of stuff in there!)

Well, one morning it hit me! So I've been trying it. And it works!

I use an ordinary (sewn spine - no staples - they rust) composition notebook of lined paper (because the lack of lines makes them less easily perused in after years -- thread over staples, and lines over blanks, courtesy of Mario Milosevic's writerly experience -- thanks, Mario!) I use a blue or black ink pen. I follow, as any chronic student type would, the faint red margin line on the outside edges, and this leaves me with a border. And so, every time I have an idea for a piece, I put ... no, I draw a little light bulb.

And now, when I am casting about for ideas, all I will have to do is leaf through a journal, looking for little light bulbs, and there, on the page, will be the stream of consciousness as context, the date on that entry, and a sweet little title, just waiting to be plucked and chewed on. It might not seem like an enormously important thing to many people, but for me, this light going on has extinguished a few decades of frustration. Hurrah!

The Season of Inconvenience

It's that time of year again. I'd like to think that my current state of "ACK!!!" would be nonexistent if I were not also in school, but I know it's not true. It's Advent. It's inconvenient.

Inconvenient to shop in the chilly rain or sleet. Inconvenient to find the decorations and wonder how on earth the camel became a cripple during his year of storage in the box of figurines. Inconvenient to do finals for school, or to prepare for the Christmas pageant during a highly inconvenient spate of surprisingly violent illnesses (for kids' parents, of all things!), and employment changes for kids' parents, and schedule craziness for kids' parents. (Maybe I should just gather up all the children after Thanksgiving and keep them together someplace safe.) It is inconvenient to relocate wrapping paper, or to paint the living room (a thing I might still attempt). I have no idea when I'll have time for Kringla baking. But I will have time. Always, in the end, there is enough time, and all in all, this is simply, inconveniently, the way it goes.

And why should it not be this way? After all, it's not particularly convenient to travel to a different town during the ninth month of one's pregnancy, and it's certainly not convenient to have a baby in a barn. It wasn't very convenient to have the holy oil profaned by the soldiers of Antiochus. It's not convenient to chop wood to bring in for heat, or to see to the animals during a storm. The season of lights happens because of the darkness -- and Advent brings us the most convenient thing of all.

Lamps in the temple. Baby in the stable. Candles in the windows. Such small things to conquer the powers of darkness. So inconvenient.

Monday Word Wonders: Hemingway

"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. 

If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer."

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), U.S. author. By-Line Ernest Hemingway, ed. William White (1967). "Old Newsman Writes: A Letter from Cuba," first published in Esquire (New York, Dec. 1934).