Where are the Women?

People who know that I spent ten years+ researching, teaching and writing about women’s writing (especially Irish women’s writing) would be justified in asking this question as they look back through my blog to date (all 6 entries). A survey like the ones I used to conduct on book review pages would reveal an overwhelming predominance of references to men in this blog to date. I believe this is accidental, but I’ll admit that it’s interesting, given the accusations of gender imbalance that I used to fling around with such abandon – and justification, it has to be said.

On the other hand, a blog lends itself to spontaneous, random and occasional observation, so should it be constrained by ideology or bias one way or another? I think not. This blog began in a spirit of responding to whatever stimulus came my way, and that's how I've written it. Nevertheless, being aware of the slippage has brought me full circle, back to Virginia Woolf. Or maybe it’s the slow progress of that room of my own that’s done it, causing me to delve into past essays, articles and stories, teaching and research notes, minutes from various committee meetings, reminding me of past convictions. It could even be the strong appeal of the circular form that brings me back to Woolf, who wrote that ‘ a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.’

... and then there’s Yeats.

A friend who is too shy - or maybe too busy - to leave a comment (re Colum McCann) sends an email reminding me that Yeats said it’s easier to break stones than to write.

And so he did. Here it is, in “Adam’s Curse”

“ ... 'A line will take us hours maybe;

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow-bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kind of weather;

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.’ ...

Yeats is a man who’d know quite a bit about the turgid and the overblown; but he’d also know everything worth knowing about the sublime, and about revelation, vision, ambition. But, poor man, he often comes in for criticism. I was on a guided tour of the city once (yes, Dublin – there’s no law against Dubliners doing this; in fact, I’d recommend it - you’d be surprised what you might learn) when the guide began to mock him. Ah, leave Yeats alone, I said. The tourists were surprised. I’d listened with pleasure while various other figures from the national pantheon were derided by this guide, a witty and impassioned person, but you have to draw the line somewhere. I always feel that Yeats needs defending. Being posh and shortsighted and prone to wearing his heart on his sleeve makes him an easy target – look at George Moore, comparing him to an umbrella left behind at a party. And let’s face it, Moore didn’t have much to crow about in the physique department.

Another time, I heard a woman giving out yards about Yeats.

Ah, leave him alone, I said - it's getting to be a bit of a habit, this - What have you got against him? He was a terrific poet.

But a terrible person! she said.

How did she know this? She'd read Roy Foster's biography, both volumes, and that was the conclusion she'd drawn from them. So there.

The dead are terribly vulnerable to this sort of judgement; especially dead writers, don't ask me why. Yeats is the very one who wrote, 'Let them be, they're dead and gone ...'

I’ve always had a soft spot for Yeats. His poetry, which is the one thing we know for sure about him and the only thing that matters, helped me through those hidjus teenage years when No-One-Understood. I used to copy his lines onto sheets of paper and carry them around. He had his struggles, his failed loves and disappointments, his wilderness years. But he was the real thing. He came back, time after time, better than ever. We should all be so committed. And so lucky.

By the way, the poet Stephen James Smith has a words-and-music version of ‘September 1913’ that’s well worth a listen: http://www.stephenjamessmith.com/Audio.html

He and Enda Reilly are making an ep of old Irish poetry, including this track.

On viewing the page with loathing

Going through these old boxes of notes is a chastening experience. I’d forgotten how bad my early attempts at writing were. I suppose it’s progress, of a kind, to be able to recognize putrescence in your own work. There are writers I know who hold on to successive drafts of manuscripts in the hope that some day someone – preferably a wealthy university in America – will buy them for their archive. Personally, I’d be more likely to pay to keep mine OUT of an archive – of any kind.

And yet. It’s comforting, as Margaret Atwood says in her introduction to The Paris Review Interviews Vol. 3 (ed. Philip Gourevitch) to know that even the immortals write what she calls ‘clunkers’ from time to time. One of the joys of reading the interviews is, as she points out, the knowledge that ‘I am not the only one who has viewed the page with loathing’ (ix). One of the tenets of any writing workshop for beginners is the reminder that nobody gets it right first time. Talent isn’t everything, we say, we all have an apprenticeship to serve. Even Joyce and Beckett wrote some pretty turgid stuff in the beginning: they had trouble finding publishers. Nobody bought their early books except their families and friends, who weren’t always thrilled about the contents. They had no money. They lived on handouts, they borrowed money and clothes and places to live, felt despair. I think it's safe to say that they sometimes drank a little more than is now considered healthy. It’s not all prizes and book tours and glamorous readings, you know. You learn it by doing it, and that means you have to be willing to embarrass yourself. Over and over again. It takes time. It might take years.

There’s a great story about Pablo Cassals: After a concert, a fan came up to him and said, “I’d give anything to be able to play (the cello) as well as you do.” Cassals said, “I gave it my life.”

Still and all, I don’t feel inclined to offer any of my own personal tat to future readers just so that they can feel better about themselves, thanks very much. There’s something wonderfully exhilarating about shredding it, bringing it to the recycling centre and leaving it there. It’s probably not ecologically sound to be driving all that distance to recycle paper, but there, that’s twenty-first century Ireland for you. And there’s a pleasing symmetry to the notion that my most earnest and clunky confusions will be compacted and recycled, along with zillions of other ideas, statements, queries, opinions and the odd shopping list; that it might even return to my desk in some future ream of paper: virginal, expectant. Ready.

Occasional Revelation

At Cúirt this weekend I was impressed by Colum McCann, whose writing I love. It’s a risky business, going along to listen to someone whose work you admire - they don’t always measure up, in person. I needn't have worried. CMcC said quite a few things worth thinking about, among them being that he has no patience with people who complain that ‘writing is difficult’. Building roads is difficult, he said. Setting up an event like this one is difficult. Everything’s difficult. For him, writing means that you sit in the chair and fight, but ... he quoted DonDeLillo: ‘we are the benefactors of occasional revelation’. And look at the life we get, he said: travelling to festivals and readings, meeting new people. Looking back to an earlier post, about the arts and the economy, and all the talk about financial survival, it is important to remember the unquantifiable benefits of being a writer and a reader, not least being the company we keep, both in our minds and at events like readings and festivals.

CMcC also spoke about the imaginative risks writers take. He quoted Kurt Vonnegut: ‘We (writers) have to continually be jumping off cliffs, and developing our wings on the way down.’

Who needs an audience? (2)

Who needs an audience? (2) (The arts and the economy)

Of course there were other issues raised during the Irish PEN debate that interested me. Here are a few of them:

Declan Kiberd: How many artists in Ireland manage to support themselves without doing other kinds of paid work? Impossible to know, but probably 200 or less. How many people are employed in areas that rely on artistic production, such as publishing, galleries, libraries, arts administration, the universities? Again, it’s impossible to know, but probably 10, 000 or more.

Arthur Lappin: We need to persuade a small number of people (who have enormous power) of the importance of the arts themselves. During the boom we got a lot of buildings, possibly too many (now that we don’t have the money to run them) because we understand buildings: they offer photo opportunities, the laying of foundation stones, ribbon-cutting ceremonies etc. It's harder to explain the importance of the processes of art. We need an 'enlightenment campaign'.

And: what is the reasoning behind continuing massive subventions to e.g. the Abbey, while phasing out funding to established theatre companies like Barrabas? We lose so much through the closure of such companies: vision, experience, people who are willing to take risks with new work, years of growth.

Gerry Godley: We’ve been given an opportunity to move the arts up the food chain of public discussion, engaging with the broader topic: “Renewing the Republic”. (Go to www.ncfa.ie for more)

As for the question of whether or not writers should get involved in the larger national conversation: William Wall, in his Ice Moon Blog : “Irish writers – outsiders no more” points out that writers are citizens, like everyone else. (http://homepage.eircom.net/~williamwall/williamwall/Ice_Moon_Blog)

Who needs an audience?

At a debate on “The Arts and the Economy” last Thursday evening (15^th April), hosted by Irish PEN, one of the speakers suggested that artists need to think about their audience. There was some bristling at this. A woman stood up to declare that an artist’s first engagement is with the self, and out of that comes an engagement with the world. An audience is by the by, she said.

This interested me. I think many writers shy away from considering an 'audience', as if such considerations lessen the artistic value of the writing. But bear with me for a minute: at workshops I always talk about reading, ask people to think about what reading is for, what they like to read themselves and why. A fundamental part of the workshop process is about learning how to read like a writer, but also how to write like a reader. By that I mean going right inside the world you’re making on the page, as far in as it’s possible to go. Drawing Virginia Woolf’s imaginary curtains; creating John Gardiner’s ‘vivid, continuous dream’. But the worlds we build with words – on the page, on a computer screen, to be spoken by actors on screen or stage – would be wasted if no one came along to share them. Why go to all that effort, only to create the literary equivalent of the ghost estates that now litter the country, thanks to the geniuses who ‘lead’ us?

Without writers, there’d be no readers. Without readers, there’d be no writers. Chicken, egg. Egg, chicken.

(For those of you who wonder why ‘Libran Writer’, there’s your answer.)

The debate was well-informed and thought-provoking. Can the arts rescue the economy? To what extent should artists engage with the economy? When will the Revolution begin? One speaker was keen for it to start immediately, with the audience departing en masse for the Dáil; but it was late and everyone was tired ...

The panellists were: Arthur Lappin (film & TV producer), Declan Kiberd (literary critic & Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at UCD), Gerry Godley (musician & broadcaster, spokesperson for the National Campaign for the Arts), Claire Doody (Cultural Odyssey) and Aidan Burke (the Arts Council). Marita Conlon McKenna was the chair. Contributions from the floor came from writers, publishers, filmmakers, and representatives of the Arts Council.

Anyone who hasn’t been there yet, go to the National Campaign for the Arts website: http://www.ncfa.ie

A Room of My Own

This is a good time to start a blog, as we begin to turn our garage into a writing room for me. It’s a thing I’ve hankered after, for as long as I can remember, but in a busy house, packed to the rafters with people and their stuff, it never seemed feasible. The garage is our overflow space. But recently we found woodworm out there, then the roof started to leak. I can take a hint as well as the next person – if we have to take everything out, treat the wood and change the roof, we might as well add a floor, bookshelves and a few electric sockets while we’re at it. The skip has arrived. The clearing has begun.

This process is sure to disturb more dust, cobwebs and ghosts of former lives than any sane person would want. A quick survey of the junk that has to be cleared: stuff that came back with us from the US, twenty years ago. Warped vinyls, toys, a school trunk. Fossils (literally). An inordinate number of boots, not all in pairs. A crate full of rackets, balls, kites, buckets and spades. A wicker rocking dog. And behind the toolbox, the old tins of paint, the rollers and the trays: boxes and boxes of old notes, drafts, unfinished stories, notes from a previous academic life, an abandoned Ph.D. What should I do: read through them? Salvage some? Or take the plunge and junk them without looking?