A sound man, Brian O'Nolan, none sounder, not least for his opinion of Synge. In his guise as Myles na Gopaleen in this July newspaper - or do I mean August? - he had the following to say of the wretched concocter of that miserable broth, intellectualised stage-Irishry.
"A lifetime of cogitation has convinced me that in this Anglo-Irish literature of ours (which is for the most part neither Anglo, Irish nor literature) (as the man said) nothing in the whole galaxy of fake is comparable with Synge. The comic ghoul with his wakes and mugs of porter should be destroyed finally and forever . . . We in this country had a bad time through the centuries when the English did not like us. But words choke in the pen when one comes to describe what happened to us when the English discovered that we were rawther interesting peepul, ek'tully, that we were nice, witty, brave, fearfully seltic and fiery, lovable, strong, lazy, boozy, impulsive, hospitable, decent and so on till you weaken . . ."
The Dublin mob was not wrong to riot over a play of Synge's, merely in its choice of work. The Playboy of the West- ern World is not so bad: but the unspeakable Riders to the Sea is perfectly dire, an unparodiable parody penned in subKiltartanesque esperanto, a farrago of patronising sentimentality and self-conscious posturing which should have prompted the Dublin mob to hang up Synge by his nostrils and to force him to listen to his gibberish - and the big winds, they do be a-beating a-this way and a-that, until they do be coming together, and there does be a crashing of the waters, and they be mighty, and no man could be within and not be drowned, as Padeen Mike was drowned, etc. etc. etc., - until Synge begged for mercy, and was shown none.
Little logic
Riders logically should have killed the theatre off in this country for all time, yet miraculously, it forms one of the hinges around which the history of drama in this country turned; which only goes to show how little logic there is to history. In fact, after Playboy, Synge's greatest actual contribution to the culture of this country was probably his journalism, which, like the above sequence from Myles, is quoted - and quite extensively - in The Oxford Book of Ireland, just recently published.
The title, The Oxford Book of Ireland, suggests a broader trawl through the writings about this country than the book actually contains: the editor Patricia Craig has drawn only on material which has appeared in book form. Journalism, unless it has been collected and presented in covers, is therefore not included, and that is a pity. And so too is the absence (as far as I could find) of any reference to the experiences of the hundreds of thousands of Irishmen and women who served in two world wars, though there are numerous extracts from IRA memoirs.
Zany connections
What is included, fortunately, is the best poem about the troubles which I know of - "Hamlet," by Ciaran Carson, which conjures up the dark madness and the strange homicidal humours of Belfast better than any other work I know. Zany connections, rambling like pub-talk does, link a shooting in 1922, the origins of the name the Falls, a tin-can rolling down Balaklava Street, Hamlet's undiscovered country, (another round arrives), the Girona is sunk, a bomb-disposal officer faces death . . . and so on. It is a poem steeped in wisdom and in the lore of West Belfast and Ciaran obliquely captures the conversational ways of its pubs brilliantly. It is also quite beautifully constructed, a perfect little timepiece, with its tiny cogs and flywheels meshing with exquisite precision. For the life of me, I do not understand why Ciaran Carson is not nationally celebrated; perhaps because he doesn't write about potato drills, his emotions are complex and he defies simple categorisation.
Donkey-ownership
He and his work dwell in the heart of the troubles, but there, delightfully on the fringes, is Michael J. F. McCarthy, who nearly 90 years ago was reflecting on the differences between Catholics and Protestants in the matter of donkey-ownership. Somebody, it seems, had done a donkey-census, or maybe we should call it an ass-count, and had produced the remarkable statistic that Antrim, the most Protestant county in Ireland, had only 783 asses, while Tipperary had 17,000, Cork 20,000 and Mayo 25,000. Unfortunately, the excerpt in The Oxford Book of Ireland concludes before he gets round to providing any thoughts on that matter - but maybe he didn't in his original article, "Irish Land and Irish Liberty." In contemplating the disdain of the Ulster Protestant for the donkey, he might well have compared it with a comparable dislike of turf as a fuel. Catholics burn peat, Protestants do not.
It is unlikely that the ghost of Michael McCarthy will be gracing the public readings from The Oxford Book of Ireland at the Bank of Ireland in Foster Place at 7.30 p.m. sharp, cohosted by Fred Hanna, whose bookshop was recently declared Bookshop of the Year in Britain and Ireland. Ciaran will not be present, but amongst the contributors reading their works will be a brace of Irish Times writers, Nuala O Faolain and John Banville, plus Nuala Ni Dhomnaill, Colm Toibin, Joe O'Connor and Anthony Cronin.