Opened Ground

ramblings about books

The best book I read this year was Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, by Patrick Radden Keefe, about the death of Jean McConliffe. I read it after watching “I, Dolours”, the wrenching documentary former IRA member Dolours Price participated with on the understanding that it wouldn’t be made public until after her death (a promise kept.) It’s on Hulu. I strongly recommend you watch it. The interviews are done by Ed Moloney, whose A Secret History of the IRA is also excellent.

I’ve been to the Republic of Ireland many times, with my mother’s parish group (an experience I am likely to repeat, as my many attempts to suggest we go to Ireland on our own or at least not on the godforsaken Air Transat have been immediately refused.) I have been to Northern Ireland only once. We had a Protestant bus driver who provided his own running commentary on the sights and it only nearly came to blows with our extremely elderly Catholic group a few times. It was also when I first read Moloney’s book, which, in retrospect, wasn’t the smartest doorstop of a book to be lugging around Armagh and Belfast.

Since both of these books deal with IRA atrocities, I would like to take this opportunity to state that the British government committed literal genocide during An Gorta Mór, which I grew up being taught was an unavoidable tragedy caused by a simple biological happenstance and not a deliberate series of policies which could only have resulted in an unthinkable amount of Irish death and suffering (my own ancestors coming to Canada during the resulting mass emigration.) The British were a nightmare colonialist nation (not you, British readers, you’re lovely) and none of the sectarian violence of the nationalists was operating in a moral vacuum. Just so we’re clear!

In the wake of Say Nothing, which is, again, not a light read, I found myself wanting to hide under a blanket and read Seamus Heaney. I often feel this way. I was fortunate enough to meet him in college, and hear him read from his work in one of the most beautiful voices I have ever heard. He was perhaps the most famous poet in the world, so it seems silly to be like “consider reading some Seamus Heaney,” but if you haven’t, Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996, is an easy way in.

Many, many poets have emerged from The Troubles, but there’s a reason Heaney’s radical openness to the world and acceptance of humanity have meant so much to so many. I’m just going to share one of my favourites now, which is not about sectarian conflict but about aging:

The Guttural Muse

Late summer, and at midnight

I smelt the heat of the day:

At my window over the hotel car park

I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake

And watched a young crowd leave the discotheque.

Their voices rose up thick and comforting

As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up

That evening at dusk - the slimy tench

Once called ‘the doctor fish’ because his slime

Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it.

A girl in a white dress

Was being courted out among the cars:

As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs

I felt like some old pike all badged with sores

Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life.

It’s lovely, isn’t it? I was thinking about how, if I found out Seamus Heaney was a bad person, what that would do to how I feel about his poetry. I love Ted Hughes’ poetry and I love Philip Larkin’s poetry, and they were both nightmare people (mostly the latter, Hughes was just a bit of a shit, whereas Larkin was truly awful.)

(The next bit of this deals with child sexual assault, so nope out if you’re not able to read about that right now.)

This is when we dovetail with the other book I’m reading, which is Fiona McCarthy’s extremely shocking biography of Eric Gill, who was a genius and a monster.

Gill, if you are unfamiliar, was a sculptor and an artist and a typographer, whose exceptionally beautiful Stations of the Cross sculptures can be seen in Westminster Cathedral, and whose work, in general, is everywhere.

His monstrosity is not a rumor, McCarthy simply read and accurately quoted from Gill’s own diaries, which recount his sexual assaults on his sister, his teenage daughters, and his dog. His eldest daughter, Petra, who died at the age of 92 in 1998, did not consider herself to be in any way negatively impacted by her father’s actions, which is her absolute right. The below is one of Gill’s more famous drawings, a study of Petra’s hair, known as “The Plait.”

They’re not going to chisel his sculptures off Westminster Cathedral, though I would be fine if they did.

McCarthy’s biography was criticized, when it came out, for being oddly bloodless and straightforward about Gill’s monstrosity. This is not inaccurate, but my experience of the book makes me think that it was really the only way to write about Gill, if one is going to write about Gill at all. It spawned endless discussions about separating the art from the abuser, a conversation we will be subjected to for the rest of our lives.

I do not have an answer to that question. Fuck Eric Gill, though.

I hope you are enjoying your holidays, if you are fortunate enough to have some.

I love you each very much.

Nicole