God, or at least the Muse, moves in mysterious ways. I'm intrigued to learn that Danny Morrison, the man who gave us the immortal phrase about the Armalite and the ballotbox, has renounced active Republicanism for literature.
He told readers of the Observer about his conversion. In 1989, a few weeks after the publication of West Belfast (the first of his three novels to date), he was arrested for IRA activities and spent the following five years in Crumlin Road prison. While there he received a £3,000 grant from the Arts Council, and found that he had reached a spiritual crossroads.
"I discussed my dilemma with writer friends Dermot Healy, Tim O'Grady and Ronan Bennett. And I spoke to Gerry Adams about my divided self... I was going to become a writer."
I'm sure Gerry Adams and some other Sinn Fein comrades were sympathetic. One of the fascinating aspects of the recent Northern conflict is how little literature - well, writing, anyway - has come from the Loyalists and how much from their adversaries: poetry from Martin McGuinness, plays and movies from Ronan Bennett, short stories and memoirs from Gerry Adams.
Patrick Pearse would have approved.
It's a pity some writers don't find the opposite solution to Danny's dilemma and abandon literature in favour of... well, obviously not the Armalite, but perhaps line-dancing or rose-pruning or ditch-digging or even stockbroking.
Certainly I'd prefer not to contemplate yet another year in which countless Irish books that nobody with a titter of sense would be bothered reading are released by publishers trying to make a quick buck out of the world's passion for anything Irish.
Perhaps my wish will be granted. I've noticed a distinct weariness creeping into the comments of English reviewers on Irish books - along the lines of: oh, here we go again, more Irish blarney. More significantly, two British pundits, when offering advice on how to secure fame and fortune from writing, exhorted: Be Indian! A year ago they would have said: Be Irish!
I think this may be all to the good. If the embracing of anything Irish simply because it happens to be Irish comes to an end, it may mean that publishers will start demanding good books from Irish writers instead of accepting any old tripe, and that the public won't feel bewildered by the indiscriminate array of good, bad and entirely indifferent in the bookshops.
She new issue of the Irish literary magazine, Metre, has some good poems and interesting reviews. It also has an essay by Medbh McGuckian entitled `Horsepower, Pass By!: A Study of the Car in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney.
I read this once, then I read it twice, if only because I felt I hadn't got the joke the first time round - just as I felt when I first read Graham Greene's po-faced essay on Beatrix Potter. However, I didn't get it the second time round, either, and was faced with the appalling vista that this earnest, turgid analysis of motorised transport in the work of our Nobel laureate wasn't a spoof of daft scholarship but was actually for real.
Whatever turns you on, I suppose. What next, though? Existential Angst and Ennui in the Oeuvre of Patricia Scanlan?
Philip Larkin was fearfully alert to this kind of stuff; Jake Balokowsky ("my biographer") declaring to a colleague:
`I'm stuck with this old fart at least a year;
I wanted to teach school in Tel Aviv,
But Myra's folks' - he makes the money sign -
`Insisted I got tenure. When there's kids -'
He shrugs. `It's stinking dead, the research line;
Just let me put this bastard on the skids,
I'll get a couple of semesters leave
To work on Protest Theater.' They both rise,
Make for the Coke dispenser. `What's he like?
Christ, I just told you. Oh, you know the thing,
That crummy textbook stuff from Freshman Psych,
Not out of kicks or something happening -
One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.'
Myself, I think Seamus Heaney is just one of those old-type natural motorised guys.