Who benefited more from these exchanges? The Brits one assumes
Who benefited more from these exchanges? The Brits, one assumes. Fleeing the "gloom" and the "drab insularity" of England (poor England), they were inspired by "the vigour and light, the colours and delicacy, of France". For the French had, I bet you didn't know, "a certain way of looking at art, of treating artists, and of living". Duncan Grant managed to give Picasso a helping hand, however. In February 1914 he "discovered some rolls of wallpaper in the closet of his Parisian hotel that Pablo Picasso was able to use in seven collages, now considered to be among his most significant creations Duncan's gift ... added a new dimension to Picasso's work." The doubters among us should be satisfied with this kind of detail, which pads out the book and frequently achieves an effect of bathos.Time and again the authors teeter into portentousness and banality. They spend half a page telling us how Lytton Strachey falls over and hurts his leg.
They assure us too often that Proust was "clearly an important reference point for many members of the Bloomsbury group". A good editor should have patted away this flab and corrected the errors of spelling, punctuation and fact The Palais Royal, for instance, is not on the Left Bank And who paid for the wallpaper? I think we should be told.. This great big doorstep of a book demonstrates the size and breath of the genre called "Irish Fiction" Inevitably, some names are missing. But with almost 100 writers, collected on over 1,000 pages, this is not a selection which can be taken up lightly. Nor, as Colm Tibn's equally heavyweight introduction shows, is it simply a romp through the Irish imagination from Jonathan Swift to the gay thirtysomethings of the European Union (though it is this, too) The presence of the editor is everywhere. His singular eye encompasses an extraordinarily wide range of subject and viewpoint.
And despite so many voices speaking English in tones which extend from the early 18th century to today, the work is indefinably "Irish". Always there is some shared difference, with that particular take on words, history and personal experience somehow locating an accent and recognising an identity which spreads across divisions of time and class. Tibn's introduction is thoughtful and thought-provoking, a marker which the reader may return to again and again. Whether reading Maria Edgeworth or John McGahern, one remembers the claim that "The purpose of much Irish fiction is to become involved in the Irish argument and the purpose of much Irish criticism has been to relate the fiction to the argument." Reading Daniel Corkery, Frank O'Connor or Benedict Kiely shows how so much Irish fiction is "awash with national and intellectual mood".
Writers as different as Edith Somerville, Elizabeth Bowen or Sebastian Barry recall Tibn's question of whether the Irish can write "well or easily about happiness"; or indeed, about sex. Sometimes Tibn forces his own arguments. Reading stories about the Catholic middle class, one wonders about the editor's claim that there was "something heroic" in Kate O'Brien's determination to describe her world, or whether Sean O'Faolain's images of new wealth and liberalism really was "forcing things". Elsewhere, an extract from Francis Stewart's Blacklist Section H exposes a less written-about aspect of the Irish mindset. Published when the author was in his late sixties, the "novel" recalls his fascination with Nazi Germany and his eventual joining of the war effort there to broadcast propaganda for the Fascist cause. As with all Stewart's best-forgotten works, the writing is leaden, his characters and detail non-existent. Yet the book is fascinating, not, as Tibn claims, because it is "his masterpiece", but because it is so true, a gawky forerunner to the avalanche of thinly fictionalised memoirs pouring out of publishing houses today. Thus the editor's attempt to link Stewart's stance as outsider with the genius of Samuel Beckett is too much to bear.
