“The mind-forg’d manacles I hear” – Invisible Imprisonments of Mind and Body in The Crock of Gold

 

Many students travelling with me in Ireland this semester are Criminal Justice majors.  They are taking a class in their area of study and seeing (or not really seeing) the Irish Guarda (police). They also hope to tour a prison.  They have noted that there seem to be fewer prisons, and it would appear that the police presence is not as visible on the streets as one might find in the states.  I think they use cameras for surveillance more, which is an interesting difference.  I wonder if the long history of law enforcement, from what some would call an occupying and oppressive force, creates a desire for a less visual presence of authority. 

In James Stephens’ The Crock of Gold, the police that come to arrest and imprison the Philosopher are a bumbling, comic, absurd lot. They are like a slapstick retelling of the old Keystone Cops.  For Stephens, part of the police officers’ problem is that they enforce un-natural law. The Philosopher, who is also a comic representation himself states “I do not see any necessity in nature for policemen, . . . nor do I understand how the custom first originated.  Dogs and cats do not employ these extraordinary mercenaries, and yet their polity is progressive and orderly” (93). The novel suggests that there needs to be a balance in all things, and yet it clearly presents the importance of the heart (instead of just the head), the passions (instead of only reason), and the “divine imagination” that can be awakened in all of us (rather the rigidness of mundane reality and law). 

At the end of the book, Angus Og (an old Irish god) has been reawakened, replacing the foreign gods (like Pan), and the newer man-made forces like the police. He tells his people “The dark people of the Formor have ye in thrall; and upon your minds have fastened a band of lead, your hearts are hung with iron, and about your loins a cincture of brass impressed, woeful!  Believe it, that the sun does shine, the flowers grow, and the birds sing pleasantly in the trees.  The free winds are everywhere” (140). In this hopeful conclusion, the Philosopher is freed from prison, and the people are freed from the prisons they have constructed in their minds.  We could hope the same for ourselves.

 

 

 

 

Good Craic at Minnie's

 

“Good craic at Minnie’s tonight” echoed down the dark, cool streets. “Indeed it was” was the reply.  True enough. An evening of trivia in “table quiz” fashion with music, banter, and an exuberance of Irish hospitality, all in support of the Augustinian Foreign Missions, sponsored by the Dungarvan Friary Church, was unquestionably the event of the week for me. My table partners, who identified themselves as Mary, Kate, and Ashley, were top prize winners. I was delighted by their clever game playing: listening to the talk at other tables, carefully writing their answers down so others might not see, and then whispering the same answers to friends that were struggling to solve an anagram or riddle. It was all in good fun and for a good cause. The music sections of the quiz, where the crowd was encouraged to sing along (until the music stopped) and then were asked to record the verse that followed, never really worked.  Or maybe, it worked wonderfully.  The crowd never stopped singing, and so the answers were revealed to all.  “That’s the fun of it!” said Mary, Kate, and Ashley. “No one can stop singing!”

What's in a Name?

 In Dungarvan, there is a wealth of eating establishments, a bevy of coffee shops, and a multitude of public houses. In each, there is rich and plentiful conversation. I’ve tried to record (in writing) or reconstruct a few that I’ve heard today.

Conversation heard at Ormond’s Café:

What’s the difference between a Blaa and a Bap?
Did you mean the Breakfast Blaa?
Yes, is it a Bap?
Well, no..
What is it then?
Well it’s like a Bap, but here we name it a Blaa.
So it is a Bap then?
No, no.. A Bap’s a Bap and a Blaa’s a Blaa.
Well then, what’s the difference?
I don’t rightly know. Do ye want one then?
Well, if it’s a Bap, I’ll have one.
Ok then.

The rhythm and sound of the language here is wonderful, but I can’t rightly say exactly why it’s so enjoyable to listen to.  It’s like playful banter. It’s like music.  It’s fun and it’s quick witted. It seems to depend on questions and to steer clear of resolution. It delights in itself.

Conversation heard at the Enterprise Bar:

Billy, who was that girl in here yesterday?
What do you mean?
Who was she?
That’s Marianne, that.
Oh yes, that’s a darlin’ name, that. Is she a local girl?
Never-you-mind that, there.  She’s too young and too good for ye.
Too good you say Billy?
Yes, it don’t take much, by God, for the likes of you.
Ah Billy, you’re painin’ me.  That’s not right.
Well I should give you a pain, for all you gives me.

Both conversations, in the café and in the bar, were dotted with laughter and dramatic expression.  The conversations sparkled. The repetitions resonated.  It was appealing to me on what seemed to be a subconscious level.

Seamus Heaney writes a poem (or many poems) about the sounds of Irish language and the etymology of English names and phrases in Ireland. The words and the sounds of the words have meanings. In “A New Song,” he emphasizes the importance of language beginning the poem with “I met a girl from Derrygarve / And the name, a lost potent musk, / Recalled the river’s long swerve” (1-3). Here, the name of the place, and not the name of the girl, has the effect. The word Derrygarve, like Dungarvan, has a deep historical meaning associated with it.  I know (or think I know) that Dun stands for fort.  I suspect that garve stands for a bend in the river. Derry is a proud Irish name in the North. To come from Derrygarve conjures up poetic meaning. To come from Dungarvan is to come from a location whose very name speaks a grounded and ancient sense of place.

Upstairs at Downey’s

 

Downey’s is a place I’ve been before. The craic is grand and the session playing is spontaneous and authentic. It is the place in Dungarvan that is best known by outsiders as a U2 bar, where the band has visited, and “your man” Bono has been more than once.  In Dungarvan itself, it may be best known for its warm hospitality and a tradition of “bucket singing.”  That is something I may have time to get to in the future.  I can tell you are intrigued.  Right now, I’m interested in telling you about upstairs at Downey’s.  I’ve never been upstairs before last evening.  It seems on Tuesday nights a group gathers upstairs to recite poetry, sing songs, and tell stories. A colleague of mine from Mercyhurst and I had the honor and privilege of being invited upstairs to witness it for ourselves.  To me, it was magical.

Mr. Power, a family name well known in the area as one-time brewers and many times voice of Irish patriotism, was the master of ceremonies. To get us started, he recited two Shakespearian soliloquies in dramatic fashion including from Richard III:

Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;

And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house

In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;

Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;

Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,

Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

Of course he recited the full version.  We also heard a sonnet recited by a young man, some poetry recited in Irish by an older gentleman, a song by Sarah McLauchlan sung by a visiting young lady, and some original compositions by others as the guitar was passed around the group.  What a beautiful and meaningful way to cap off our first full day in Dungarvan. My hope is there will be many more opportunities to go upstairs at Downey’s on a Tuesday evening.  When the time comes, maybe I’ll even have the moxie to recite.

Back to the Dẻise

 

Tomorrow evening about 24 people from Mercyhurst University in Erie, Pennsylvania will be heading to Ireland.  We will go to Dungarvan, in County Waterford, known historically as The Dẻise, and home to Mercyhurst Dungarvan since 2010.  I’m proud to say I was with the first group who travelled there from Mercyhurst. I’m also humbled to say that this year will not only mark the 15^th anniversary of our relationship with Dungarvan, but also my third time of having the privilege of bringing our students to study there. They are in for a treat. Dungarvan is a lovely seaside town with lovely people. It is the perfect homebase for our students to experience the hospitality and culture of Ireland.

This year many of the students are Criminal Justice majors, but we also have a contingent of English majors and others who will take classes in Criminal Justice, Irish Culture, Irish Literature, and Ethics. We will journey out on short excursions to Dublin and Belfast, and we will travel to the west to visit Dingle, Galway, and the Cliffs of Moher. It will be magical.

How fitting that students in my Irish Literature class will start by reading James Stephens’s novel Crock of Gold, a work chock-full of mythology, folklore, philosophy, and Irish humor. I’m excited to read it again. We will of course also read some Joyce, Yeats, Heaney, Synge, and other great Irish authors. What a delightful way to transition into spring!

Oscar Wilde - Man of Fashion and Letters

       


 While we are not reading Oscar Wilde in this travelling class, my lord we should be.  If only time permitted.  There are some sites in Dublin associated with Wilde, and so he is doubly worth thinking about.

We remember Wilde as a critic, a poet, an essayist, a dramatist, a letter writer, and a novelist who lived his life his way, as an eccentric genius, full of enthusiasm, decadence and flair, which ultimately ended too soon, and indeed most tragically.

If we begin at the beginning, it is easy to see that Oscar Wilde came by his eccentric genius honestly.  Wilde’s mother, whose name was Jane Frances, demanded that everyone refer to her as Francesca Speranza. She felt her poetry (she was a poet) was so infectious that if the public was exposed to it, they would catch her poetic fever, and it would spread through the country like a contagion.   She repeated this so regularly that she became known as Francesca Speranza Influenza Wilde.

The reputation of Wilde’s father, a famous eye and ear doctor in Dublin, in the Merrion Square neighborhood of Dublin (where there is a lovely statue of Oscar Wilde reclining on a rock) was even more widespread that his son. His fame, involving chlorophorm, an ex-lover, and a lengthy trial is too complex to get into here. It does serve to show that the Wilde men do not fare well with litigious lovers.

Take warning, Dear Oscar.

We know very little about Oscar as a child, other than from his mother. She, who seems to be attached to impressive names, dubbed her second son, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.  A flair for extravagance is rooted early in Oscar as well. An early piece of his writing comes to us as a letter to his mother while at summer camp, age 13. 

Oscar Wilde Statue - Merrion Square Dublin

It starts thus:

“Darling Mama,

The [clothes] hamper came today and I never got such a jolly surprise.  It was more than kind of you to send it, though the flannel shirts you sent are . . . not mine.  Mine, as you may remember, are the one quite scarlet and the other that divine lilac shade . . .”

Not the typical note one might get from a young lad at summer camp, but Oscar Wilde, my friends, was in no way typical. He was certainly a man of fashion.

At Trinity College in Dublin, Wilde became attracted to the Aestheticism movement, and thus he decided to always surround himself with beautiful things, and here is when he decided to make his symbol the lily.  When asked why he chose the lily, he respond by saying “Because it is the most beautiful, and useless thing in the world.”

When Wilde finished his time at Trinity, he also, in essence, finished his time in Ireland, moving to Oxford England to escape the confining and claustrophobic atmosphere of Dublin. James Joyce, his fellow Irishman, who we will hear about in our next reading, would heartily agree with these sentiments.  In Oxford, Wilde did well in his classes, but they did not take up too much of his time, as he spent much of his time furnishing and refurnishing his rooms.  Again, surrounding himself with beauty as well as variety.   After one of his great refurbishings (and there were many), he noted “I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.”

In his 20s Wilde was known mostly for his entertaining wit at parties, his extravagance in dress, and his connection to the aesthetic movement. He had a successful speaking tour in America, where he notoriously presented a lecture to miners (in a mine mind you) in Leadville Colorado, where he spoke about the beauty of ornate silver.  He followed his presentation by drinking whiskey with the men.  He was a huge success.  Even so, he returned to England as a 28-year-old man who was still unsure of what he would do for a career.   

In part because of his well-documented travels in America, Wilde was a favorite topic in the newspapers, and as such, gossip and rumors began to spread about him, particularly that he was spending too much time with young men, and not enough time with young women.  In the Victorian age to be a homosexual, and a public figure even more so, was not tolerated by the ass…… by the puritanical moralists.  Family members and friends encouraged Oscar to find a wife.  Particularly a wealthy one.  He was successful, . . .  successfully marrying the wealthy Constance Lloyd, successfully designing her gown for the wedding, and successfully giving her two sons.  The marriage, though, was not ultimately successful.  Oscar preferred the company of young, intelligent, beautiful men, who shared an interest in the arts.  He was living a double life.

And so in 1890 Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Like much that was produced by Wilde, it created a sensation.  On one level, It is about a dashing young man and his pursuit of sensual pleasures.  Dorian Gray continues to look young and beautiful throughout the novel, even though his actions become more and more unacceptable to society and to himself.   It might be an ingenious commentary on the problem of seeing oneself in art. Indeed, a portrait that Gray keeps hidden in a remote upper room, takes on the physical costs of his actions and becomes hideous to look at.  And while the opening preface suggests that art and morality should remain separate, that art is for art’s sake, there seems to a theme in this novel about the problem of living the double life, or a warning about selfish hedonism.  At the end, mm Gray can no longer bear to look at the rotten image of his inner self that the portrait represents, and so in an eerie and delightful gothic moment, in his attempt to slash the picture, he instead just slashes himself.

Lord Alfred Douglas, a young beautiful man who also was the youngest son of the Marquis of Queensbury, impressed Wilde by saying he had memorized large passages from the work.  Lord Alfred Douglas was charming, and reckless, and he loved vexing his father, the Marquis of Queensbury.  Wilde and Lord Douglass became inseparable.

Now the Marquis of Queensbury, is a towering figure in the sport of Boxing.  If you know anything about boxing…..well you have me there….but I do know this…. there is something called the Queensbury rules.  They are named for him.

Not surprisingly Queensbury wanted his son to graduate from Oxford with a fine reputation, and thus he began tyrannizing his son.  The son used his relationship with Wilde to pester and enrage his father.  And indeed, it was clear to many that Lord Alfred Douglas was doing just that: Using Oscar Wilde.  In a way, we could say that:  Lord Douglas was good looking on the outside, but rotten inside. 

During this time Wilde pumped out may of his greatest works :Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) A Woman of no Importance (1893) and The Importance of Being Earnest a story that is in part about living the double life in (1895).  Like Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest was a sensation.

Indeed, The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the funniest, wittiest, pun-filled (I did say Pun –filled) play you will ever see.  It questions whether marriage is a plague, or just a dull responsibility.  It skewers Victorian prudery and pretensions, and it presents a life of triviality, decadence, and the double-life as a life of liberty.  Both central male characters in the play have secret identities and activities.  Jack is Jack in the country and Earnest in the City.  Algenon is Algey in the City and Earnest in the country.  Neither is exactly Earnest.

In an attempt to cut Wilde down as he came to the height of his fame, Queensbury heightened his attacks on Wilde by leaving a calling card addressed to “Oscar Wilde, posing as a Sodomite” at his club for all the members to see. At least that is what is what was recorded as evidence by the judge.  The national Archives shows the original copy saying  - (either because Queensbury was in a rage, or in a rush, or just … ignorant) “Oscar Wilde Posing Somdomite – or Oscar Wilde posing a Somdomite”  - I’m not sure what either of those means….but it sounds compelling.  Anyway… Even though it created some embarrassment, we are told Wilde would have never done anything about it, but Lord Douglass egged him on demanding that Wilde take out a slander suit on his father, which Wilde finally agreed to do.  The trial did not last long and a second trial did not end in Wilde’s favor, Victorian England and all that rot. 

Ultimately, for his “Gross Indecency” The Judge sentenced Wilde to “Two years Hard Labor.”   This tragic sentence was a disaster for Wilde.  His name was removed from the playbills and he was pressed to sell most all of his beautiful furniture and possessions, including his blue china, to pay lawyer’s fees.  Worst of all, his time in prison weakened his heath immensely.  While he did not die there, he did not live long after his release. 

In a squalid Paris Hotel, Wilde died in poverty, without his beloved beautiful surroundings.  One of the last witticisms Wilde gives us is from this deathbed:

“My Wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death.  One or the other of us has to go!”

But that isn’t the witticism I wish to leave you with.  Instead, let us turn back to the trial, whereas the Marquis of Queensbury leapt up and accused Wilde stating “You are in the gutter and you are dragging my son there too” – Wilde, in his erudite elegance retorted “We are all of us in the gutter, sir, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

 

 

Dog and Bear: Who Wins? (Who Cares?)

 

Near the end of Waverly, after Edward and Rose are married, they agree to “spend a few days at an estate which Colonel Talbot had been tempted to purchase in Scotland as a very great bargain” (367). It seems after the old Scottish estates were ransacked by the English, they could acquire them at a great discount.  Clever Brits.  It reminds me of the white flight – slum lord – urban decay - gentrification schemes we have seen (and are seeing) in the States. Anyway, after Colonel Talbot partially restores Tully-Veolan, and the Baron of Bradwardine is being shown his former ancestral home, there is an interesting exchange between Colonel Talbot and the Baron of Bradwardine.  As the Baron surveys the grounds, and sees the two great bears that previously adorned the gates returned to their rightful place, he exclaims, “While I acknowledge my obligation to you for the restoration of these images of bears as being the ancient badge of our family, I cannot but marvel that you have no where established your own crest, Colone Talbot, whilk is, I believe, a mastiff, anciently called a talbot” (369).  After a bit of poetry, Talbot assents that his crest would include a dog, and follows with “if crests were to dispute precedence, I should be apt to let them, as the proverb says, ‘fight dog, fight bear’”(369).  I found that a bit odd, or hard to make sense of, and even stranger that our editors didn’t include a footnote to help explain. While bears are not found in Scotland (at least not in modern times) there are some family crests that include the rampart bear or the bear’s head.  The dog image for Talbot makes me think of an English bulldog.  The bear could be symbolic for Scotland in a similar manner, but it isn’t as obvious to me.  That leaves us with the quote” fight dog, fight bear.” It seems there is an old Scottish proverb “Fight dog, fight bear; wha wins, deil care.”  I think that means who cares which wins.  Deil, I’m guessing, means the devil.  The devil may care, or nobody cares.  In a few pages we find out that Talbot has been restoring the estate for Waverly, who has purchased it to restore to the Baron, and who [Waverly] will inherit it as he has married the Baron’s daughter, Rose.  Who cares?  It’s all good.  No harm done. All the loose ends are tied up, and the Baron even has his old drinking vessel in the shape of a bear restored to him.  A toast is made to “The prosperity of the united houses of Waverly-Honour and Bradwardine” (374), and likewise the jacobite lays downs with the English.  The fight is over, and it seems who won doesn’t matter. The Devil may care.