Essays: Early in this collection of previously published essays is a disarmingly frank one about a therapist analysing Bruce Arnold's relationship with his father. Arnold found himself considering the idea that Ireland might have provided "an all-embracing substitute for this giant figure", who disappointed his son on many occasions. This essay illuminates readings of other contributions, writes Vera Ryan.
There is little directly political writing included.
In the opening essay, the author meditates about the Spire in Dublin's O'Connell Street. He sees it as representing a country hugely changed from the one he started writing about more than 40 years ago when he first made Ireland his home. The tone is elegiac and accessible. Clarity, concision and ease of communication characterise Arnold's writing throughout.
His deep preoccupation with the relation of the individual artist to their country surfaces again and again and gives continuity to the collection. Several essays on Beckett - including those on the Cronin and Knowlson biographies, which capture the excitement on their publication - are energetic and insightful, although there was probably more pain in Beckett's relationship with Suzanne than Arnold suggests. The Joyce lecture given on Bloomsday 2000, in which Arnold's sympathies with Haines the Englishman are so revealingly expressed, also makes good reading. A vignette piece on Patrick Kavanagh and the retrieval of the rib a surgeon removed and kept, and a searching piece on Jonathan Swift, of whom Arnold has written a biography, make the central section on literature particularly enjoyable and accessible.
Essays by Arnold the art historian are in part three of the book and are impressive in themselves and as reminders of his considerable achievements. His interest in artists as people is sustained here. Articles on Orpen, written for Christie's Magazine, show his capacity to bring things vibrantly to life. Is it a little too generous to suggest that Orpen "changed by what he produced both the course and the quality of English art in the early years of the century"? Arnold's enthusiasms seem to me to make for less engaging reading than when he is in there battling away at the perennial question of identity. I enjoyed the vigorous questioning in essays like 'The Goose Girl Controversy', in which Arnold, ever the acute observer, outlines his involvement in the re-attribution of this painting.
Indeed the inclusion of the author's benign, commemorative words on such personalities as Jack Lynch, Norah Niland, Dorothy Walker and Derek Hill, to the exclusion of his analytical and often controversial political essays, may surprise Irish Independent newspaper readers. The title of the book, too, might create the expectation of more reference to the period of this Englishman's career when he was involved in epoch-making confrontation with leading Irish political figures and events. On the other hand, it is a relief that Irish culture is not defined as encompassed purely by the political.
Vera Ryan lectures in art history at the Crawford College in Cork. She is the author of Movers and Shapers: Irish Visual Art since 1960, published last September by Collins Press
The Spire and Other Essays in Modern Irish Culture. By Bruce Arnold, The Liffey Press, 280pp. € 16.95