Recently on a trip home to Belfast I decided, after twenty years or SO, to take a run over to the upper north side of the city where I grew up. It wasn't a wise thing to do. The bus-ride took me through the streets and avenues and parks which I knew like the back of my hand. They were still there hut the change was immense and shocking. '[he place, which was once a canton of mixed faiths and none, had survived sectarian warfare, but the scars were everywhere: two churches hoarded-up and in a state of serious neglect, the main arterial road sporting windy self-service stations, fast-food joints, hangars of discount stores, terraces converted into flats and entire houses left deserted. I took the bus back into town, flaming over what had happened.
Reading Patricia Craig's magnificent anthology of Belfast replays this experience a hundred times over. From 18th century travellers to 19th-century politicians to 20th-century writers, Belfast physically changes in the mind's eye, recorded by this bounty of extracts Ms Craig has shaped into an extraordinarily coherent history of the northern capital. The seeds of disaffection are here, as well as the intimate, incoherent reasons for loving the place: the righteous dismissal of Paul Theroux as much as the human warmth of Kate O'Brien.
Here is Theroux (1983): "I had never imagined Europe could look so threadbare - such empty trains, such blackened buildings, such recent ruins: Dangerous Buildings - Keep Clear. And bellicose religion, and dirt, and poverty, and narrow-mindedness, and sneaky defiance, trickery, and murder, and little brick terraces, and drink shops, and empty stores, and barricades, and boarded windows, and starved dogs, and dirty-faced children - it looked like the past in an old picture".
Thanks, Paul, and whatever yer having yerself, as we say. This, however, is the adorable Kate 0 Brien, twenty years earlier in 1962: "Yet Belfast is not hard. It is not a city of brisk here-and-now: it is not spruce and forward looking; it does not roar and rush night and day towards the 1970s, the 1980s. On the contrary, its pace is easy, and it trails its immediate past and Victorian haphazardly almost too indulgently. Walking the streets alone, especially at evening, I have experienced a sharp, unlooked-for melancholy, and an inexplicable sympathy with the untidy streets and people".
What shows forth so powerfully in this book of wonders is just how difficult it is to pin a place down. Belfast, more than any other European city, has been stereotyped to death; its complex history in permafrost; its geo-cultural life a~ a port, haven, hell-hole and spectacle dumbed-down before the term was even invented. Here Caroline Blackwood's hauteur (why do people become real snobs when Belfast enters the frame?) gets the better of her (1973): "And day after day - post-war, just as they had pre-war - in the wealthy suburbs of Belfast the wives of the industrialists went on reading the Bible, drinking sherry and eating scones". No doubt, but many were also having the time of their lives, as C.E. Brett remarks (1978): "Below the grimy and conventional surface, it was a city bursting with a stimulating life of its own, fed by the conflicts hidden not far below the surface".
That life is well documented in this anthology. To quote from Craig's introduction: "From the current policy of decimation, sweep away the whole architectural heritage of Belfast, and stick up replacements as repellent as you can make them", down to "all kinds of enduring indigenous graces, the city's mountainy background, a special kind of urban elan, along with psychic inheritances both salutary and oppressive", Belfast is not "just about loss". Patricia Craig's anthology says why.
ò Gerald Dawe's new collection of poems. The Morning Train, has just been published. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin