YOU didn't have to be former member of the Fianna Fail Gang of 22 or a current member of the Progressive Democrats (same thing, really, I suppose) to be interested in A Sea Grey House, by Guy St John Williams, but if you do fit into either or both of those categories, it's more than likely that the book will intrigue you.
What am I talking about? Well, the book's subtitle is "The History of Renvyle House", and there was a period in the late Seventies and early Eighties when you couldn't swing a cat in this Co Galway country house hotel without clobbering a disaffected Fianna Failer. How do I know? I was the man swinging that cat and the people in danger of being clobbered included Seamus Brennan, Des O'Malley and Mary Harney. Charles J. Haughey, need I add, was nowhere in sight.
In other words, Renvyle House was a club for these politicians. Hugh Coyle was the genial host, and the TDs in question used the place as a weekend retreat, a holiday home, an excuse to play golf and a venue for escaping the unkind regime in Leinster House. Heady times, indeed.
You won't find any of this in Guy St John Williams's history (based on an earlier book by former Renvyle chef Gerry Lidwell), but the house has had other interesting associations - not least when it was the country home of Oliver St John Gogarty and when you were likely to bump into Augustus John, Lady Lavery or Somerville & Ross in the corridors. Oh, and it was the location for W.B. Yeats's honeymoon, too.
Mr Williams has also had long associations with Renvyle and though his style is a bit florid for my taste, he tells the story of the place well. You can get the book, which costs £12, from Renvyle House itself. If you're in the area, drop in for a copy.
Tell them Charlie sent you.
Alternatively, you could make your way to the Dingle peninsula, one of my other favourite spots in Ireland. While I'm not enamoured of creative writing courses (for reasons too boring to reiterate yet again), if one feels compelled to enrol in one, a house overlooking Inch strand seems a perfect venue.
There, from September onwards, you can attend one or all of four residential writing courses. From September 6th to 8th, Evelyn Conlon will be dealing with creative writing in general; from September 27th to 29th Sean Walsh will tackle writing for radio; poetry is Paula Meehan's topic from October 4th to 6th; and writing for theatre is being covered by Michael Harding from October 11th to 13th.
Each course costs £130 (including accommodation and meals) and if you want to know more, contact Abigail Joffe at Ballintlea, Ventry, Co Kerry (telephone: 066-9052), or the Irish Writers' Centre in Parnell Square, Dublin.
FORTY ONE years ago today, Waiting for Godot received its English language premiere at the Arts Theatre in London, and no one since then has captured the essence of the play quite as well as Kenneth Tynan did in his review of that production.
"A special virtue," he begins, "attaches to plays which remind the drama of how much it can do without and still exist. By all the known criteria, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is a dramatic vacuum. Pity the critic who seeks a chink in its armour, for it is all chink ... [It] frankly jettisons everything by which we recognise theatre. It arrives at the custom house, as it were, with no luggage, no passport, and nothing to declare; yet it gets through, as might a pilgrim from Mars. It does this, I believe, by appealing to a definition of drama much more fundamental than any in the books. A play, it asserts and proves, is basically a means of spending two hours in the dark without being bored.
"Its author is an Irishman living in France, a fact which should prepare us for the extra, oddly serious joke he now plays, con us. Passing the time in the dark, he suggests, is not only what drama is about but also what life is about ... His two tramps pass the time of day just as we, the audience, are passing the time of night. Were we not in the theatre, we would, like them, be clowning and quarrelling, aimlessly bickering and aimlessly making up - all, as one of them says, to give us the impression that we exist."
It's exhilarating to read again a great critic's first reaction to a great play, and I only wish I'd the space to quote the whole review.
I see that Nicholas Evans's hugely hyped The Horse Whisperers is now selling 25,000 copies a week in paperback. It's also been bought by Hollywood. Spare a thought, then, for Robbie Richardson, the farrier who came up with the original notion of the hero's mystical rapport with horses. He's also an author, but his book, The Horse's Foot and Related Problems, hasn't managed to enthral the world. "I blame it on my agent," he says.
THE Bulwer Lytton Prize is awarded annually by San Jose University for the worst opening line of a novel. It's in memory of the almost forgotten Victorian novelist, whose Paul Clifford begins "It was a dark and stormy night," which isn't a patch on this year's winner, Janice Estey. The first sentence of her novel reads: "`Ace, watch your head,' hissed Wanda urgently, yet somehow provocatively, through red, full, sensuous lips, but he couldn't, you know, since nobody can actually watch more than part of his nose or cheek or lips if he really tries, but he appreciated her warning." Er, yes, Janice.