The Irish in the Great War
Sir, – Irish readers may be perplexed, and others misled, by sporting
references in Keith Jeffery’s diverting account of Irish drama and the Great
War (Commentary, November 7). The last act of Sean O’Casey’s The Silver
Tassie, writes Jeffery, “is set during a post-war Victory dance at the
Avondale Football Club, a social milieu familiar enough to O’Casey from his
hurley-playing days with the Gaelic League before the war”. While it is true
that O’Casey played hurling, his consequent familiarity with the Gaelic
Athletic Association (not the Gaelic League) would have been largely
irrelevant to the world of Association Football.
The fictitious “Avondales”, of course, are not Gaelic footballers but soccer
players (their opponents include the “Primrose Rovers”, a playful alias for
Dublin’s Shamrock Rovers). No GAA club, I suspect, would have served wine at
a dance or compiled a roll of honour after the Great War. As Christopher
Murray shows in Seán O’Casey: Writer at work (2004), O’Casey was brought up
in a Protestant working-class enclave (East Wall) with two popular soccer
clubs, arousing a sporting interest “which fuels the plot of The Silver
Tassie”. Yet soccer, unlike Gaelic football, was popular among Catholics as
well as Protestants in Dublin, and both Harry Heegan and his rival Barney
Bagnal seem to be Catholics even if (in Jeffery’s words) this is “not made
clear”. Barney intones “Per omnia saecula saeculorum” in Act Two; Harry’s
father looks forward to “singin’ of the Adestay Fidellis” in Act One; and in
Act Three his mother informs Susie Monican (an evangelical Protestant
working in a Catholic hospital) that “Sister Peter Alacantara said we might
come up, Nurse”. Soccer, like the Great War itself, transcended sectarian
divisions by enlisting Irishmen of all denominations, a submerged parallel
at the heart of O’Casey’s great play.
DAVID FITZPATRICK
Department of History, Trinity College, Dublin 2.
Sir, – Keith Jeffery states that “extirpation” is too strong a word to use in
early Irish attitudes to official commemoration of the Great War and puts
quotes around the “Great Oblivion” as used by recent Irish historians to
describe this lack of acknowledgement.
However, the extensive online documentation by the National Inventory of War
Memorials at the Imperial War Museum and the signal absence of equivalent
local memorials in the Republic of Ireland does indeed confirm an absence at
a local level in the 1920s – Dublin is the exception, and the much later
memorial by Lutyens is located away from the city centre. There are more
memorials to 1916 and even to 1798 than to the 150,000 or more Irishmen who
served between 1914 and 1918. There are tens of thousands of memorials in
the UK, so the use in Ireland of the term “national amnesia” is perfectly
accurate and leaves one wondering about personal grieving and remembering in
a country with a long-term sense of history. National memorials in the
capital city hardly compensate on the long road to Tipperary.
IAN LEITH
Public Monuments and Sculpture Association, 127 Wood Lane, Chippenham.
Auden and prizes
Sir, – Sean O’Brien’s excellent review of Volume Three of The Complete Works
of W. H. Auden, Prose, 1949–1955 (September 12), requires a bit of
historical clarification, at least as regards O’Brien’s comment on the “very
funny story” in Edward Mendelson’s Notes. O’Brien says that Auden “could be
assiduous in his role as gatekeeper” for the Yale Younger Poets Series; and
“as a result no collections appeared in 1954, nor in 1955”. Auden, he says,
knew “that Ashbery had intended to submit a collection”, but found “it had
been missed off the shortlist”. Further, that “Chester Kallman had helped
overcome Auden’s own doubts about the work” (which was selected and
published as Some Trees). The matter is more complicated than that, and
Mendelson may be excused for knowing nothing about what happened.
What happened was this: I had submitted for the 1956 competition a collection
(Whatever Love Declares). I had been informed that the work was on the
shortlist of twelve poets. In about late March of that year my wife and I
were invited to dinner by Naomi and Arnold Weinstein, whom I had met when we
joined the English Department of New York University a year earlier. The
guest of honour was Auden, and it was to be an evening for the five of us.
At the last moment, while we were having aperitifs, John Ashbery showed up,
new to New York from Buffalo, as I recall, and recently acquainted with
Arnold. The evening commenced oddly, after Auden had asked about my wife’s
cheekbones: “Are you Hungarian, by chance?”. To which she replied, “Yes,
Hungarian by affiliation, I suppose, since my parents were Jewish, luckily
off to America in 1921 on their honeymoon. Their people were, after 400
years in north-eastern Hungary, gathered up, all but one who survived
Auschwitz in 1944, and sent into the sky in smoke and ash”. That didn’t
cause Auden to miss a beat; he went right on to say he’d surmised as much –
from her fine eyes, lidded with that epicanthic fold of the Jews, as he put
it, at least, like the Hungarians out of the Asian East. Our chit chat went
on, as he tried to recover himself, maundering about the Will-to-Live he
thought innate in the Jew per se, that inner strength needed for survival,
and such bosh, followed by “. . . whereas we pagans, we weakling goys, we
just lie down and die too easily”. Rather a strangely indirect sort of
apology, I thought.
Then the doorbell buzzed and Ashbery, a late invitee to make us six at table,
was admitted and introduced. Shaking his hand, Auden took in at a glance a
fine instance of his soft-spined “pagan”. What with Ashbery’s mewling,
mincing manner and self-deprecatory modesty, his very speech manifested the
goy gay persona par excellence. During our meal, Auden asked if he had any
poems, if he knew about the Yale Younger Poets first book series? Did he
not! Ashbery replied that he might not really have enough poems to assemble
for an entry, and in any case the Press’s deadline for submission was
several months past. Auden told him never to mind that nonsense about
application forms and deadline procedures: just staple the stuff together
and send directly to him. He wrote out his address in south Greenwich
Village. It didn’t need an epiphanic blaze of insight to see that the game
was over for twelve shortlisted finalists – the fix was in. We’d been
trashed, just like that! So I kept my trap shut. I knew it was wrong; it was
unfair; it was “Greek” morals, if you will. It would have taken a strange
miracle to ensure that those twelve books containing, say, seventy-five
years’ worth of scribbling in all, were even to be looked at. O’Brien cites
Auden’s “most fantastic difficulties” with that parcel of poets’ vain hopes.
Difficulty with the Italian postal service? In a pig’s eye. Nothing about
that contest appeared or was announced; nothing was ever returned by Yale’s
Press. Ashbery, for his part, reticent or not, ran on the inside track
against us from hour one: he had Auden’s lover Chester Kallman to vet the MS
of Some Trees. The rest is history.
JASCHA KESSLER
218 16th Street, Santa Monica, California 90402.
Mistaken identity
Sir, – I was gratified to read, in Hugo Williams’s column (Freelance, November
14), of the proper degree of shame I displayed on the BBC television
programme The Book Quiz when I failed to recognize a line from Auden’s
“Musée des Beaux Arts”. Mortifying, I’m sure. However, the humiliated party
was not me. I have never appeared on The Book Quiz or any similar programme.
I also know the poem. Perhaps Williams was referring to my aunt, the only
person I’m aware of who shares my name. She lives in Glasgow and is
fond of poetry but, at ninety years of age, rarely ventures out, even for a
television appearance.
ANNALENA MCAFEE
Fitzroy Square, London W1.
The ‘Protocols’
Sir, – Christopher Hitchens, in the course of his somewhat hysterical review
of Denis MacShane’s Globalising Hatred (November 21), declares that “the
infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion . . . are a mere fabrication, put
together by Eastern Orthodox Christian fanatics in the pay of the tsarist
secret police”. In their scholarly history of the pre-Revolutionary Russian
secret police, Fontanka 16, Charles A. Ruud and Sergei A. Stepanov subject
this oft-repeated claim to careful analysis, concluding that the Okhranka
had nothing to do with the production of this lurid booklet, which was
published in derisory numbers in Russia. Has Hitchens come across evidence
showing that the Imperial police did after all arrange its publication? If
so it would be of great interest to Russian historians, and one hopes he
will make the evidence known in the pages of the TLS.
Hitchens also refers to “the anti-Israeli American academics John Mearsheimer
and Stephen Walt”. I recently read their book The Israel Lobby and US
Foreign Policy, in which they consistently express enthusiastic support for
the state of Israel. Have they espoused a diametrically opposed view
elsewhere, and might Hitchens be persuaded to reveal where?
NIKOLAI TOLSTOY
Court Close, Southmoor, near Abingdon, Berkshire.
Gramsci
Sir, – The excellent piece by Ian Thomson on Pier Paolo Pasolini (November 21)
contains an imprecise translation of an important Gramscian concept. It is
misleading to translate “nazional-popolare” into “popular nationalist”:
Gramsci was an internationalist, whereas the adjective “nationalist”, in the
Italian political culture, denotes right-wing parochialism. Nationalists, in
fact, were those who incarcerated him. There is also one small grammatical
mistake in the Italian: it is “Lettere ai romani”, not “alle” romani.
VINCENZO RUGGIERO
Flat 12, 15 Fitzroy Mews, London W1.
Chypre
Sir, – In his review of Perfumes: The guide (November 21), Angus Trumble
writes that, according to the authors Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, “There
is apparently a ‘big-boned, bad-tempered Joan Crawford’ aspect to Mitsouko,
the otherwise luminous 1919 masterpiece by Jacques Guerlain”. In fact, the
bad-tempered perfume in question was Chypre by François Coty. Turin makes it
clear that “as has been said countless times before”, Jacques Guerlain took
Chypre and added “the peach note of undecalactone, quite a lot of iris and
probably twenty other things we’ll never know about”, creating an enduring
masterpiece which lacked the harshness of its predecessor.
Without access to the Osmothèque at Versailles, or the luck to find a vintage
sample, most of us will have to take Turin’s wor about Chypre. But a visit
to any department store perfume hall will reassure baffled readers of
Trumble’s review that Mitsouko retains its radiance, and its good temper.
ALISON MACDONALD
3 Cloudesley Place, London N1.
