IASIL members will wish to express their relief and reassurance at hearing that Brendan Kennelly, who underwent preventive heart surgery at the hands of Mr Nelligan in the Blackrock Clinic this winter, and is now making a good recovery - as he must do, with such a busy summer agenda. Professor Kennelly's 60th Birthday celebrations at Trinity College and later at Áras an Uachtaráin were among the warmest moments of last year's calendar in Dublin.
'If merit is measured at all,/Vulnerability is the measure.' These are the lines I remember best from the poetry that Brendan Kennelly was writing when I was a (wayward) student. Pardoxically enough, Brendan's own kind of vulnerability has always been an extraordinary source of resilience, just as his thinking involves a profound scepticism matched with great certainty about the imaginative life that underpin all true convictions.
As a teacher he has a joyful ability to reveal that life independently of any positive assertions and he has done this not only in universities but also in the schools and prisons of Ireland. His way of thinking - and of talking - is curiously trackless: less a philosophy than a form of self-knowledge that embraces both community and self. Yet the path from 'My Dark Fathers' to Cromwell describes a 'revision' in Irish sensibility as important as any in our generation, while The Judas Book adds uproarious hilarity to his criticism of life. Largeness of heart has always been the measure of his spirit, and it is especially good at this time to see it demonstrated that 'things within things survive' as he said they would.
Our good wishes (prayers if you like) must also go to Don Gifford, the author of the fabulously useful Annotations to Joyce's early writings and Ulysses, who has just had a triple by-pass operation. B.S.
The tremendous energy and output of Csilla Bertha and Donald Morse in the present session - as illustrated in the Conference section of this Newsletter - is the more to be admired since Csilla has suffered a great blow in form of serious illness affecting both her parents, who are now in need of constant care in a country where amenities in such cases are severely limited. The necessity of finding nursing help has put a great strain on their resources, and Donald has had to take up the option of early retirement from Oakland University. He will, however, remain the 'wandering scholar', especially in connection with the conference on the Fantastic in Literature and his long-standing Joycean interests. Csilla Bertha is guest-editor of the 'Irish Drama' Special Issue of the Hungarian Journal for Studies in English, to which several IASIL members are contributing.
Perhaps congratulations are in order for Pat Donlon, the Director of the National Library of Ireland who made such a different to this somewhat dishevelled treasure-house of Irish culture during her administration and who has now decided to resign after seven intensely active years of incumbency in view of health problems. Dr. Donlan's energy and skills will no doubt be absorbed by another project in Irish book-culture shortly. It is certain that her expertise must not be allowed to lie unused at a crucial moment in the development of scholarship addresing the history of the book in Ireland.
IASIL notes with sorry the passing of James Camlin Beckett, 1996 on February 12 of thisi year. He was buried in Ballinderry, Co. Antrim. Born in 1912, and educated a the Belfast Academical Institute and QUB, Beckett he spent eleven years as a teacher at the former before becoming a history lecturer at the latter in 1945. He took a personal chair in modern history at Queen's in 1958. His chief books include Protestant Dissent in Ireland 1687-1780 (1948) and The Making of Modern Ireland 1603-1923 (1965), along with histories of Belfast and of QUB (with Theo Moody).
Most interesting for the literary scholar were perhaps his study of The Anglo-Irish Tradition (1976), and an essay on 'The Irish writer and his public in the nineteenth century', in the Yearbook of English Studies, 2 (1981). He also contributed the literary chapter to A New History of Ireland, Vol. IV, in which he wrote of the class in eighteenth-century Ireland that he made his chief study, 'Every Irish Protestant, whatever his rank, felt himself to be a member of a governing society; and this sense of a common superiority to the Roman Catholic masses tended to weaken the force of class division within the dominant group. It produced a kind of aristocratic egalitarianism.' (pp.432-34.)
The impression created by that steely comment should be weighed with the sentiment involved in his account of the antecedents of the literary revival: 'So long as Irish writers had no such national public to support them, so long as they had to look outside Ireland to find a market for their work, it was hard to see how Ireland could develop a truly national literature, a literature that would be distinctly Irish irrespective of its subject matter'. (Hutner and Rawsons, eds., Yearbook [... &c.], p.113). His short life of the Duke of Ormond (Belfast: Pretani Press 1990) is an engaging study of an extraordinary man whom Irish scholars, other than Yeatsians, are all too much inclined to regard as a member of 'the other camp', as many also improperly regard this remarkable Irish man of letters.
The death of Paul Smith in the first week of January 1996 betokens a lost opportunity to do justice to an astonishing, uneven, courageous and utterly Irish writer in his lifetime. Born in 1920, the son of a brutal father and a courageous mother, he reputedly left school at eight and held the usual workingclass children's jobs until he successfully auditioned for a walk-on part, after which he became a costume designer, at the Gate. He was in London in the 1950s and briefly taught English in Uppsala, where he came to dislike the academic mentality sufficiently to prove that an ordinary man could write a novel.
His account of Dublin slum life during the 1916 Rising in Esther's Altar (1959) - reprinted as Come Trailing Blood (Quartet 1977), though unfortunately with some botched pages - won the admiration of Dorothy Parker who saw both O'Casey and Dostoevsky in it. The Countrywoman (1962), tells the story of his mother and ends with her death and burial in a pauper's grave.
Smith moved to Australia after a period in America unsuccessfully pursuing literary fame. He was declared bankrupt in a law suit concerning an alleged loan while receiving psychiatric treatment in Melbourne. Victor Bonham-Carter of the Royal Literary Fund helped him greatly when he got back to London.
'Passionate', 'naked realism', 'immensely virile' [sic], were some of the comments that greeted his debut novel. The Spectator thought him 'possibly the finest writer that Ireland has produced' and Anthony Burgess only rejected the word 'genius' because it was used too often about Irishmen. His novel Annie (1972) was highly praised by Kate O'Brien. Little in his favour has been said since.
Books Ireland remains the indispensable guide for Irish booklovers of all kinds. Edited by Jeremy Addis, with Alan Titley looking after the Irish section and more recently with features and interviews by Shirley Kelly, it commenced this year to showcase new writing and has elicited the support of Anthony Cronin and other practised hands along with contributions from the newest of the new.
In January of this year, Books Ireland celebrated its 200th Issue, and was congratulated by the publisher Colin Smythe in an advertising panel in that journal. The IASIL Newsletter now adds its own felicitations. Books Ireland can be ordered from Jeremy at 11 Newgrove Ave., Dublin 4; 353 1 269 2185; fax: 260 4927 [n.b., this is a new number]. Books Ireland is supported by both Arts Councils in Ireland. That's how good it is!
Bruce Stewart has been appointed Conseil Technique (Literary Adviser) to the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco, with responsibilities relating to the book collection as well as to the calendar of cultural events and the annual Conferences to be held there in the tradition established by Professor George Sandelescu. The PGIL aims as far as practicable to become an important and attractive stopping-place for Irish scholars and writers and a link in the internationalism of Irish culture. IASIL members are particularly welcome to participate in PGIL events, and developments at the Library will be posted in this Newsletter, as well as on the IASIL web pages and the Library's own web page at http://www.monaco.mc/pglib/ All contacts and enquiries will also be very welcome at <bsg.stewart@ulst.ac.uk>.