The Blue Lough

A walk into the Mourne Mountains this morning brought home how bad last month's fires had been.
I'd seen the huge areas of scorch damage a few weeks ago when walking along the Brandy Pad, but this morning's walk past Annalong Wood was through some of the worst damage.
Much of the wood is now charcoal, large open spaces giving a clear view over to the other side where there used to be a curtain of forest.
Some of it has survived but the rest will have to be replanted, hopefully with native species this time rather than ubiquitous pines.
Further on up large tracts of scrubland are blackened and the recent heavy rains seem to have washed away the charred heather and even the topsoil in which it grew to expose the rocky ground beneath.
Even though I walk this route more than any other in the Mournes the landscape was a new one to me, the surrounding peaks were the same but the ground around them had physically changed.
The silence was more intense than ever, no crickets or bird song, just a couple of cawking ravens on the slopes of Slieve Binnian.
I went on up past a little mountain called Perscy Bysshe, past a cluster of bog cotton in one of the pockets of undamage heather and sat on the shore of the Blue Lough, pictured above.
On the opposite shore were the steeply inclining slabs of Slievelamagan but even up here there was evidence of scorch damage... and then among the charred soil I saw a couple of green shoots.
It might take a few years but the mountains will recover, despite the crisp packet-dropping, boot-eroding (my own included) and cigarette butt-incinerating efforts of those who come here.
Another encouraging thing was a small stunted tree that I always look out for along the path leading to Percy Bysshe was still there. I didn't see it on the way up, but its well off the path and hard to sight sometimes, camoflaged agains the surrounding heather.
But coming down again I saw that it was still there, like the only stage prop in Waiting For Godot, standing stunted but surviving in the fire-blasted mountain heather surrounding it.

Nemonymous Night by DF Lewis

The act of reading any novel requires a willingness on the part of the reader to submit to the author’s vision, but this novel makes demands that go well beyond what is usually expected.
To “get it” you must be totally tuned in to the frequency on which author D. F. Lewis is working. Failure to do so will leave you floundering in an undulating sea of words.
Plot? Not so much.
A couple of kids turn up missing in an unnamed English city, but then they are found. Or maybe they aren’t. The entire population has been overcome by a dream sickness in which reality and time seem to warp. And then there’s this business about a carpet, which might or might not be magic?
Okay. But . . .
Then characters swap identities and are barely rooted in one another’s perceptions, while the time streams in which they exist undulate, cross over one another, and twist back in on themselves.
Any pretense at a linear narrative into which you can place events and relate them to one another has been abandoned. As such, the terrain of Nemonymous Night seems to be the unconsciousness where dreams intersect with reality.
But whose unconsciousness? Perhaps it is a matrix where the dreams and psychic flotsam of different people mingle in an attempt to construct an agreed-upon version of reality before drifting off?
As you’ve probably figured out by now, I never quite tuned in to D. F. Lewis’s frequency.
Comparisons with Douglas Adams, Philip K. Dick, and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake suggest themselves as literary reference points, but don’t let fmailiarity with those fool potential readers into a sense of complacency.
Nemonymous Night is not an easy read; however—and here’s the rub—it’s entirely
readable. If you got through Dylan’s Tarantula and thought it was a seamless masterpiece and that Beckett’s The Unnamable is a bit light for your tastes, then by all means, give this one a try.
If you have no idea what I’ve just spent many paragraphs attempting to express, perhaps you ought to move on to another book.
This review was written for an first published on the New York Journal of Books.

Truth or Fiction by Jennifer Johnston

Novelist Jennifer Johnston is the daughter of playwright, broadcaster and journalist Denis Johnston who died in the 1980s and whose artistic peak came in the 1930s.
He worked as a BBC radio correspondent during the Second World War in the Middle East and mainland Europe - Italy, the Balkans, France, Austria and Germany - and was one of the first journalists to enter a liberated Nazi concentration camp.
He was also a philanderer, having numerous affairs and leaving Jennifer Johnston’s mother, when the future novelist was still a child, to marry another woman and start another family.
So there is no great mystery on who Desmond Fitzmaurice, the central character of Truth or Fiction is based on.
He is a former playwright who worked as a journalist in the Second World War and who left his first wife (he maintains that she kicked him out) and their young daughter for another woman and had a second family.
Caroline, a journalist, is sent from London to interview the ageing and long-forgotten writer at his Dublin home to dig up some juicy gossip and reassess his career.
She is a reluctant interrogator, going through a mid-life crisis, and quickly finds herself being dragged into Fitzmaurice’s domestic dramas and regaled with tales of past adultories and even a murder.
On reading this novel it would seem that Jennifer Johnston had a difficult relationship with her father. Fitzmaurice’s daugher from his first marriage, who seems to be the fictional counterpart of the novelist and who we hear about but never meet, is said to hate her father.
And the portrayal of Fitzmaurice is less than endearing as he comes across as selfish and only interested in how he will be remembered by history, displaying contempt for his various spouses and romanticising an affair that he said he once had.
There is a theatrical feel to the narrative with Fitzmaurice playing back tapes of himself recalling about his affair, a knowing nod to Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett, a contemporary of Denis Johnston.
Caroline is skeptical about Fitzmaurice’s accounts of his past and begins to resent his confiding in her and being forced to become a participant in his domestic tribulations.
There isn’t really that much depth to this novel and most of its intrigue lies in the knowledge that Fitzmaurice is broadly based on Johnston’s late father.
Given the richness of Denis Johnston’s life and the plentiful source material that he left behind - particularly in his war memoir Nine Rivers From Jordan and the philosophical The Brazen Horn - his daughter could have produced a much more layered and interesting fictional portrayal.
But then maybe producing such a slight novel and unflattering central character is saying as much about her attitude to a father who it seems she didn’t really like.

The Candle of Vision by George Russell (AE)

It was a seemingly disparaging and throw-away line in Samuel Beckett's Murphy in which a minor character was reading The Candle of Vision by George (AE) Russell that led me to this 1919 publication.
Russell was a contemporary and confident of WB Yeats and one of the leading figures of the Celtic Twilight, a literary movement which Beckett's mentor James Joyce derided in Finnegan's Wake as the 'cultic twalette'.
There is scant reference to Russell in the various Beckett biographies I have, mostly name checks, and one instance when Russell, as editor of a magazine, rejected a poem submitted by Beckett early in his writing career.
In terms of subject material and style the two would seem to be miles apart - Beckett's stripped down prose depicting alienated characters who become increasingly detached from the physical world with little evidence of anything beyond that, while Russell uses flowery language to retell the other-worldly visions he says he experienced.
The Candle of Vision is Russell's account of his life as a mystic and recounts many of his visions.
Russell, possibly aware of the distrust of a self-styled mystic that many people will feel, outlines his case for belief in visions.
"We experience the romance and delight of voyaging upon uncharted seas when the imagination is released from the foolish notion that the images seen in reverie and dream are merely the images of memory refashioned; and in tracking to their originals the forms seen in vision we discover for them a varied ancestry, as that some come from the minds of others, and of some we cannot surmise another origin that they are portions of the memory of Earth which is accessible to us. We soon grow to think our memory but a portion of that eternal memory and that we in our lives are gathering an innumerable experience for a mightier being than our own. The more vividly we see with the inner eye the more swiftly do we come to this conviction." (P56)
In many ways I found his thinking and reference to an 'eternal memory' to be quite Jungian and his mysticism seemed to echo the Swiss psychologists' theories about the unconsciousness and the 'collective unconsciousness'.
And like Jung, Russell seemed to have arrived at a basically gnostic world view
"I cannot assume that the sudden consciousness of being in the air was absolutely the beginning of that episode any more than I can imagine a flower suddenly appearing without plant or root or prior growth; nor can I think that blind motions of the brain, in blank unconsciousness of what they tend to, suddenly flame in to a consciousness instinct with wild beauty. To assume that would be a freak of reasoning. (P82)
The Candle of Vision should come with a reality warning for those of a sceptical nature who will find their eyes rolling repeatedly but I found this to be a fascinating insight into the minds of a character whose name is often mentioned along with Joyce, Yeats and Beckett but who remained as a footnote in history.
Russell was also a poet and I remember seeing a dusty but beautifully bound collection of his poems in a secondhand bookshop for £10, which I wish I'd bought because the following day the shop was burned down.

Murphy by Samuel Beckett

The eponymous anti-hero is a dysfunctional Irishman living in London with a prostitute. He is more obsessed with his inner self than with the reality and is barely able to function in society. He cuts himself off from the world best when he ties himself, naked, to a rocking chair and rocks himself into a transcendental meditative state. However, Murphy agrees to seek work so that his lover, Celia, can come off the streets.
Other characters come to London seeking Murphy, including a woman who believes she is engaged to him and that he is working hard to make a better life for them, and Murphy’s former teacher. These characters provide a slapstick element to the novel.
Murphy finds work in a mental institution where is in awe of the patients who he treats with “respect and unworthiness”. He admires them because they have cut themselves off from the absurdity of the modern world.
Beckett writes: “The nature of outer reality remained obscure… The definition of outer reality, or of reality short and simple, varied according to the sensibility of the definer. But all seemed agreed that contact with it, even the layman’s muzzy contact, was a rare privilege. On this basis the patients were described as ‘cut off’ from reality, from the rudimentary blessings of the layman’s reality, if not altogether in the severer cases, then in certain fundamental respects. The function of the treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable balanced manner, and comfort himself with the society of others in the same predicament.” (Murphy p101).
According to one of Beckett’s biographers, Deirdre Bair, he was struggling to find a direction for the novel until October 1935 when he attended a lecture by Carl Jung where the psychologist said that a poet had the capacity to dramatize and personify his mental contents
Quoting from Jung’s lecture Bair writes: “When he creates a character on a stage, or in his poems or drama or novel, he thinks it is merely a product of his imagination; but that character in a certain secret way has made itself. Any novelist or writer will deny that these characters have a psychological meaning, but as a matter of fact you know as well as I do that they have one. Therefore you can read a writer’s mind when you study the characters that he creates.”
(Samuel Beckett by Deirdre Bair (P181).
That could go a long way to explaining Beckett’s intense obsession in Murphy and more starkly in his later novels with the inner worlds of his characters who are alienated from society.
In Murphy it appears that Beckett wants to disguise his insights and darker preoccupations by padding them out with a series of slapstick set pieces and comic asides. A swami who cast’s Murphy’s horoscope for him is described as being “famous throughout the civilized world and the Irish Free State”.
And at the end, following Murphy’s death – by accident or suicide is never made clear – he leaves instructions that his ashes should be brought back to Dublin and flushed down the toilet in the Abbey Theatre. However, the man carrying his ashes instead goes to a pub and gets drunk and ends up throwing the ashes at someone during a brawl.
“By closing time, the body, mind and soul of Murphy were freely distributed over the floor of the saloon; and before another dayspring greyened the earth had been swept away with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit.”
(Murphy p154)
This early novel maybe suffers from having too many superfluous characters and smart-arse prose but at its core there is deeply disturbing insight into Beckett’s mind.

Les Années Lumière

Les Années Lumière (Light Years Away) stuck in my mind for 25 years after I accidentally saw it on late night television when I was a teenager.
It was possibly the west of Ireland landscape and the mystic elements of the plot (although at the time I had no real interest in mysticism) that made it stick in my mind.
It took me a long time to track it down, eventually securing it via an online Spanish retailer, under the title A Años Luz – which is in English with Spanish subtitles.
Apart from the landscape there is very little in this film to define it as Irish. It is based on a novel by Swiss writer Daniel Odier, who also writes under the name Delacorta on whose novel the film Diva was based. Les Années lumière was directed by Swiss director Alain Tanner and its main characters are played by English actors Trevor Howard, whose character is called Yoshka Poliakeff, and Mick Ford who plays Jonas.
I don't think the original novel is available in English so I can't say if that is why it was set in Ireland. The opening scenes were filmed in Dublin and although the city is never named it makes no attempt to disguise the cityscape along the banks of the Liffey before the days of the Point and the International Financial Services Centre. We even see Jonas sleeping in a bus shelter with ‘SLF’ graffiti scrawled upon it.
The rest of film looks as if it was filmed in Connemara and most of the supporting actors speak with Irish accents.
We are told that Yoshka's father was Russian but that is the only reference to nationality in the film. He is obsessed with his ‘life’s work’ but is secretive about it, kicking out his former lover, Betty, 10-years earlier because she tried to find out what he was doing. She and Jonas subsequently become lovers.
Jonas travels to Yoshka's derelict filling station set on an isolated road beside a scrap yard where the old Russian sets him a series of pointless tasks.
He stands by the petrol pump for days waiting for a customer - a new road has diverted traffic away from the filling station. When a customer eventually comes Jonas discovers that the petrol pump doesn't actually work.
Yoshka then asks Jonas to clean up the scrap yard but when he does so tells him that he hasn’t done it right and tells him to put it all back the way he found it.
When Yoshka is injured he gets Jonas to dig a hole in the ground and bury him up to his neck and leave him there for three days. When he is dug up again all his wounds have healed.
The scene with Yoshka buried up to his neck and the desolate landscape in which the two central characters torment one another, perform pointless tasks and wait around a lot has clear Beckettian parallels.
Yoshka is like a Zen master whose tasks seem to be aimed at setting Jonas on a higher path and eventually they begin to discuss meditation and dreams.
“Every human being is a universe,” Yoshka tells Jonas.
The younger man’s apprenticeship is eventually complete and Yoshka reveals that he has spent his life studying birds in an effort to learn the art of flight but that he needs an eagle to complete his studies.
Jonas heads off into the mountains ¬- stopping at a 1980s disco where he gets into a fight over a girl - to trap an eagle and bring it back to Yoshka.
He completes his task and the old man tells him that he plans to fly off ‘beyond the galaxies’ on the wings he has been working on. However, before he can do so the eagle escapes and kills all the other birds in the shed where Yoshka has spent his life working.
On a stormy night he takes off but the next day he is discovered dead in a field, his eyes plucked out. Perched nearby, Jonas sees the escaped eagle.
Les Années Lumière is an intriguing film with some great scenes and intriguing characters and but somehow it doesn’t really come together in the end. Like a Beckett play you get the impression that there is something else going on at a deeper level but it never really becomes clear what this is.

Francis Stuart

I read Blacklist Section H by Francis Stuart again during a recent holiday. I first bought it more than 25 years ago and must have read it a dozen times since. It is a book I keep going back to and coming away with something new each time. I have spent quite a bit of time and money tracking down Stuart’s novels over the years, many of which are now out of print, and there are now about 20 on my book shelf.
I even tracked the author himself down in 1997 to do an interview following the publication of his last novella King David Dances. He was 95 at the time when I visited him at his home in Dublin and he was very hard of hearing and had trouble walking. Never-the-less he sat patiently with me for more than an hour and half and I'm sure he sussed out that there was more than mere journalistic interest to my questions.
It was quite surreal to hear him talking about his final meeting with Samuel Beckett in Paris when they were both in their eighties, or about conversations he’d had with WB Yeats and Liam O'Flaherty in the 1930s, and according to his biographer, Kevin Kevin Kiely, he was even introduced, briefly, to James Joyce in a Paris cafe.
However, there is always something slightly awkward about admitting that your favourite writer is Francis Stuart for he is still derided by many as a Nazi propagandist. And let’s face it there is no getting around it, Stuart went to Germany in 1940 to teach in Berlin and went on to broadcast propaganda to Ireland on behalf of Nazi Germany.
Blacklist is autobiographical but written in the third person as if Stuart was trying to stand back and dissect his own life - in particular as to how he ended up living and working in Berlin during the Second World War. Detractors who accused Stuart of being a Nazi collaborator labelled Blacklist as an attempt at self-justification, however, there is too much going on here for it to be a simple as that. Stuart goes out of his way to portray himself as flawed and selfish but with painful insights into his own psyche.
From a scene in Berlin, Stuart’s narrator, H, comes across a street in a former Jewish district and contemplates the fate of the Jews under the Nazis (this would have been in 1939 before the ’final solution’ had been fully implemented).
He writes that H “had to experience , in his own probably small degrees, some of what they suffered and, on the one level, even more because he could not claim their innocence. He had long suspected that his destiny bound him to them in a manner more obscure than their present defenders… He also realised that he would go to certain lengths in association with their persecutors, in violent reaction against the mores of home, thus ensuring that his condemnation would not, unlike theirs, arouse any sympathy.”
Stuart is a complicated character and seems to have had the attitude of ‘whatever everyone else is for I’m against it’. He was born to Irish parents in Australia in 1902 but his father took his own life when Francis was an infant. He was brought back to Ireland by his mother where he was brought up by his unionist relatives in the north until he went to public school in England. Despite his Protestant/Unionist background he married Iseult Gonne - daughter of WB Yeats’s muse Maud Gonne - and became a Catholic and a Republican who smuggled guns to Ireland for the IRA and was interned by the newly formed Free State government in the 1920s.
His novels from the 1930s seemed to almost anticipate what would actually happen to him in later life. His narrators go out of their way to align themselves with fringe elements or commit acts that ensure their isolation from society. It is from this position of isolation that Stuart seemed to believe that writers and poets would be able experience the imaginative counter currents in which great art is produced.
In Blacklist Stuart defines H’s situation shortly after his arrival in Berlin: - “Time: Deepest winter, 1940. Situation: uncertain, compromised, companionless, cold to freezing… Alternatively: alone and free and passionately involved in my own living fiction, imaginative participation unimpaired, unpredictable possibilities.”
Stuart equates great art with suffering and isolation and his novels are constantly name checking novelists, poets and painters who were pushed to the fringes of society or endured mental or physical suffering to produce great art – Van Gogh, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Keats, DH Lawrence, Osip Mandelshtam and Emily Bronte.
Infact, Emily Bronte actually appears in one of Stuart’s most original novels – A Hole in the Head – written in the 1970s and set in a fictional version of Belfast, where a severely mentally disturbed writer, recently abandoned by his wife, arrives in Troubles-torn ‘Belbury’ with Emily, who is as real to him as the people who exist outside his mind.
I think you almost have to buy-in to that ‘outsider’ philosophy to understand Stuart, otherwise you would simply label him as the equivalent of the schoolboy who got caught smoking behind the bike shed when he knew it was wrong but tried to justify it by saying he did it all in the name of art. The criticism would be valid if Stuart had simply produced vacuous, self-serving novels after his years in German but even his fiercest critics had to grudgingly concede that there was a certain depth to them.
The 1940s novels The Pillar of Cloud and Redemption jar against the conventional narrative of post-World War II history – which for the most part has been set down by the victors. Stuart’s his ‘late-harvest’ books (written when he was in his seventies and eighties) – A Hole in the Head, Memorial and The High Consistory ¬- challenge conventional morality and often jolt you into questioning values that most people would not consider questioning. And if you can get hold of them Pigeon Irish and The Coloured Dome, written in the early 1930s, are worth reading, not least because they seem to articulate the very philosophy that Stuart was subsequently accused of manufacturing to justify his decision to go to Germany a decade later.
However, the jumping off point has got to be Blacklist Section H, but be warned it could turn in to an obsession.