Greta Garbo: Divine Star by David Bret. Robson Press, £20
Greta Garbo wasn’t the first Hollywood superstar, but she was certainly the first to stand up to the industry’s overlords and insist on doing things her way.
The actor, born poor in Sweden in 1905, arrived in Los Angeles at 19 with an MGM contract initially worth $100 a week. Once there, the studio boss Louis B Mayer declared that Garbo was too dowdy and ordered her off the lot until she smartened up. Her response, which set an ominous precedent, was that if Hollywood didn’t like her as she was, she’d finish up her “US holiday” and go home.
Mayer would have gladly sent this stroppy foreigner packing, but from the get-go the “Viking Venus” was enormously popular and minted millions for MGM. Garbo starred in 24 films (10 of them silent), and most of them followed a template: ageless siren, kept by or married to an older man, falls for handsome stranger in an exotic location.
Privately, Garbo was boldly bisexual and part of the so-called “Sapphic set” in Stockholm, Weimar Berlin and anything-goes Hollywood. She never married, hated socialising, despised the press and was almost psychotically private – the often-quoted line “I vant to be alone” is entirely fitting. “I hate fuss,” she said once. “I only want the opportunity to make good pictures.”
Along the way she racked up four Oscar nominations and, because she lived like a miser and banked or invested most of her earnings, was rich enough to walk away from Hollywood whenever it suited her – which she finally did in 1941. She then spent another half-century travelling, often incognito, when not hiding out in her luxurious Manhattan apartment.
Two decades on from her death, Garbo endures as an icon, even if most of her films are little known today. As a career study, David Bret’s capable biography adds little new to the subject of Greta Garbo, movie star, and the photo selection is budget-consciously skimpy. However, there are lots of fascinating details (not all of them footnoted, it must be said) about Garbo’s recruitment by British intelligence to snoop out Nazi sympathisers in Hollywood. According to the book, she was instrumental in persuading King Gustav of Sweden to give asylum to more than 8,000 Danish Jews. And after the war Garbo was reportedly debriefed by Churchill himself. Kevin Sweeney
Dion Boucicault: Irish Identity on Stage by Deirdre McFeely. Cambridge University Press, €79.20
Dionysius Lardner Boucicault (1820-1890) was the most prolific playwright in the English language during the Victorian age. His biographer, Richard Faulks, lists 152 stage works, many of them curtain-raisers and after-pieces, the majority being skilful dramatisations of popular English and French novels. He remarked, famously, that “plays are not written, they are rewritten”.
Boucicault retains his place on the stage almost entirely because of his “Irish Trilogy” – The Colleen Bawn, Arrah-na-Pogue and The Shaughraun – but, in this critical study, Deirdre McFeely also looks at less commercially successful plays on Irish topics, such as The Rapparee (London, 1870), The O’Dowd (London, 1880) – a rewrite of Daddy O’Dowd (New York, 1873) – and Robert Emmet (Chicago, 1884), all of them fascinating in the context of the reception of Boucicault’s Irish plays by different socio-ethnic groups in England, Ireland and the US.
In New York, an association of influential “Irish and Irish-American residents” presented Boucicault with a statuette of himself as Conn in The Shaughraun because of his “authentic” presentation of Ireland, but author and play were excoriated in the Irish World, which required that drama claiming to be Irish must overtly express opposition to British rule. It was anathema to this New York newspaper that the Dublin public could accept what they believed was such a politically subdued work.
Even though an 1867 Fenian atrocity at Clerkenwell was in the recent past, British audiences attended The Shaughraun in their thousands. Why? Because of its strong plot, its racy language and its captivating characters – what better reasons for buying theatre tickets? McFeely most interestingly demonstrates Boucicault’s increasingly strong nationalistic stance in his later Irish dramas. The political material in The O’Dowd was “a direct response to Parnell and the Land League” and its comparative failure is ascribed to its theme transcending its theatricality.
McFeely is not so scholastically detached as to let us forget that Boucicault’s plays are fun and that he was a master of pithy dialogue and comic inventiveness. This is a wonderfully well-researched and discerning book, placing Boucicault as a much more politically motivated playwright than previous critics have ever suggested. Christopher Fitz-Simon
Irish and English: Essays on the Irish Linguistic and Cultural Frontier, 1600-1900 edited by James Kelly and Ciarán Mac Murchaidh. Four Courts Press, €55
It is often said that the past is a foreign country. That is certainly true of Ireland, with the added complication that not only is the past a foreign country but the majority therein spoke a different language.
The academics James Kelly and Ciarán Mac Murchaidh set out to map another Ireland in Irish and English: Essays on the Irish Linguistic and Cultural Frontier, 1600-1900, through scholarly essays which chart the ebb and flow of Irish and English over the centuries and which give an invaluable insight into what one might call the back-story of Ireland’s two official languages. The editors set out their agenda by stating that “the collection seeks not only to assist, where possible, with the clarification of the disputed chronology of language change, but also to break new ground by exploring the attitudes, actions and contexts that determined which language(s) people used, the forces that shaped the type of language (the words, sentences) to which they had recourse, and where and how they accessed linguistic knowledge”. By examining the work of individuals and their cultural influences, the authors highlight those “attitudes, actions and contexts” in action in a population that changed from using Irish as its first language to English.
The material can be, on occasion, a challenging undertaking for the casual reader; however, it is also very rewarding. Marc Caball’s essay on William Bedell, for example, gives a fascinating account of the man and his influences. This can be read simply as a study of an important cultural figure, an Anglican cleric with an interest in languages, who undertook the translation of the Old Testament into Irish to spread the Protestant faith among Irish speakers.
But there is also the larger irony that his work, in the wake of Vatican II 300 years later, “was used for daily Mass in the Gaeltacht areas in the absence of a Roman Catholic Irish-language Bible”.
Other essays offer similarly intriguing narratives into Ireland’s cultural heritage, with material on the importance of manuscripts to native culture, the interplay between English and Irish in verse and the role of the Catholic Church and Protestants in the uses of the language. Pól Ó Muirí
