The stock allusion to the Decameron caused no little flutter in the Senate, but was skilfully negotiated by Senator Johnson: ‘I do not think it has any great reputation as a book, and so with regard to many other books’, and by the Minister for Justice: ‘some of Boccaccio’s stories, I understand, are quite excellent, e.g., the plaintive tale of Patient Griselda.’
The Bill as originally drafted provided for complaints to be made with reference to obscene publications via recognized associations, something in the style of the Irish Commercial Travellers’ Federation, a kind of St Vincent de Paul de Kock Societies. In so far as this clause was spewed out of the Dail and actually not reinserted p.r. by the Senate, any individual is now in theory entitled to lodge a complaint on his own bottom. But as this would entail his procuring five copies of the work for submission to the Board, he finds himself obliged, precisely as the original Bill intended, to cast around for some body whose interest in the public state of mind condones, more amply than his own, a small outlay. And behold the Catholic Truth Society, transformed into an angel of light, stands at his right hand. Precisely as the original Bill intended.
The Register of Prohibited Publications is a most happy idea, constituting as it does, after the manner of Boston’s Black Book, a free and permanent advertisement of those books and periodicals in which, be their strictly literary status never so humble, inheres the a priori excellence that they have annoyed the specialist in common sense. I may add that it is the duty of every customs official in the Saorstat to exhibit on demand this Register to the incoming mug.
Part 3 sets forth with loving care the restrictions on publication of reports of judicial proceedings. No longer may the public lap up the pathological titbit or the less frigid proceedings for divorce, nullity of marriage, judicial separation and restitution of conjugal rights. No sports less indoor than these engross, even in our evening papers, such space as survives the agitation of protective tariffs, subsidies, monopolies and quotas and the latest snuffles from the infant industries at Drogheda, Navan, Dundalk, Mullingar, Westport, Edenderry, Slane, Ennis, Athy, Newbridge, Nenagh, Portarlington, Tuam, Mallow, Thurles (two syllables), Arklow, Aughrim, Portlaw, Killaloe, Enniscorthy, Carrickmacross, Carrick-on-Suir, Ballyboghill and Bray, e.o.o.e.
Part 4 enshrines the essence of the Bill and its exciting cause, in the general heading tactfully enveloped among the ‘other purposes incidental’, the prohibition namely of publications advocating the use of contraceptives, blushing away beyond the endurance of the most dogged reader among the Miscellaneous and General. France may commit race suicide, Erin will never.
And should she be found at any time deficient in Cuchulains, at least it shall never be said that they were contraceived. Thus to waive the off chance of a reasonable creature is no longer a mere mortal sin, but a slapup social malfeasance, with corollary in the civic obligation to throttle reason itself whenever it happens to be ‘flung’ into a form obnoxious to the cephalopods of state. The pure Gael, drawing his breath from his heels, will never be permitted to defile his mind with even such fairly clean dirt as the Black Girl in her Search for God so long as he can glorify his body to the tune of half a dozen byblows, white as pthisis, in search for a living. This yoke will not irk him.
Such is the cream of a measure that the Grand Academy of Balnibarbi could hardly have improved on. Even if it worked, which needless to say it does not, it would do so gratis, an actum agere regardless of expense. For the Irish are a characteristic agricultural community in this, that they have something better to do than read and that they produce a finished type of natural fraudeur having nothing to learn from the nice discriminations of Margaret Sanger and Marie Carmichael Stopes, D. Sc., Ph. D., F. R. S. Litt., etc. Doubtless there is something agreeable to the eye in this failure to function to no purpose, the broken handpump in the free air station. Paley’s watch in the desert is charming, but the desert in Paley’s watch still more so. Whether a government of the people by the people can afford these free shows is another matter.
Finally to amateurs of morbid sociology this measure may appeal as a curiosity of panic legislation, the painful tension between life and thought finding issue in a constitutional belch, the much reading that is a weariness exorcised in 21 sections. Sterilization of the mind and apotheosis of the litter suit well together. Paradise peopled with virgins and the earth with decorticated multiparas.
The Register as on the 30th September 1935 shows 618 books and 11 periodicals under the ban. Among men, women and for all I know children of letters writing in English, the most liberally advertised are: Aldous Huxley, the Powys brothers, Maugham, John Dos Passos, Aldington, Sinclair Lewis, Wyndham Lewis, William Faulkner, D. H. Lawrence, Wells, Chaucer (Eve), Kay Boyle, Middleton Murry and Mae West. Irish authors deemed from time to time unwholesome are: O’Flaherty, O’Casey, O’Leary, O Faolain (no apostrophe), Shaw, Clarke and Moore (George). Foreign writers distinguished in all English versions are: Döblin, both Zweigs, Gaston Leroux, Gorki, Leonhard Frank, Roth, Rolland, Romains, Barbusse, Schnitzler, Hamsun, Colette, Casanova, Céline, all contributors to the Spanish Omnibus, Jarry, Boccaccio, Dékobra and the incomparable Vicki. With regard to scientific works it need only be said that all the most up to date enchiridions both of marriage and of love are here, from Bertrand Russell’s to Ralph de Pomerai’s. Of the banned periodicals perhaps the most keenly missed have been, pending the expiration (if any) of the Prohibition Order: Ballyhoo, Health and Efficiency, Broadway and Hollywood Movies, Health and Strength, Empire News, incorporating the Umpire, Thompson’s Weekly, and True Romances.
My own registered number is 465, number four hundred and sixty-five, if I may presume to say so.
We now feed our pigs on sugarbeet pulp. It is all the same to them.
10. An Imaginative Work!
The Amaranthers. By Jack B. Yeats.
The chartered recountants take the thing to pieces and put it together again. They enjoy it. The artist takes it to pieces and makes a new thing, new things. He must. Mr Jack Yeats is an artist. The Amaranthers is art, not horology. Ariosto to Miss — absit nomen!
The moments are not separate, but concur in a single process: analytical imagination. Not first the old slum coming down, then the new slum going up, but in a single act slum seen as it is and other. ‘The effect of the Innkeeper, framed with white lace, red ribbons running up like rays to the left and right of him, with the water dripping from his forelock, over the penthouses of his brows, was bold.’ As discovered it is bold. Or awkwardness in a bar: ‘One or two lifted their hats lightly, or ironically, from their heads. One took off the grey kid gloves he was wearing, blew into them and put them away. One bent a light cane into a half hook, then let it spring up and caught it in his palm.’ Who has seen with this light, or irony, since — abest nomen.
The irony is Ariostesque, as slight and as fitful and struck from the same impact, between the reality of the imagined and reminiscence of its elements. The face remains grave, but the mind has smiled. The profound risolino that does not destroy.
The discontinuity is Ariostesque, proceeding from the same necessary indifference to flowers on the table-centre on the centre of the table, from the same respect for the mobility and autonomy of the imagined (a world of the same order if not so intense as the ‘ideal real’ of Prowst, so obnoxious to the continuity girls). Of the two themes, in whose coalescence the book ends, the Amaranthers and James Guilfoyle, the first is invaded by the play in the ‘Hope On’, then dropped for a hundred pages; and the second broken into three by the episodes of Ohoh and Pensamiento. An imaginative adventure does not enjoy the same corsets as a reportage.
There is no allegory, that glorious double-entry, with every credit in the said account a debit in the meant, and inversely; but the single series of imaginative transactions. The Island is not throttled into Ireland, nor the City into Dublin, notwithstanding ‘one immigrant, in his cups, recited a long narrative poem’.
There is no symbol.
The cream horse that carries Gilfoyle and the cream coach that carries Gilfoyle are related, not by rule of three, as two values to a third, but directly, as stages of an image.
There is no satire. Believers and make-believers, not Gullivers and Lilliputians; horses and men, not Houyhnhnms and Yahoos; imaginative fact, beyond the fair and the very fair. ‘God is good, so why not Brown?’
The landscape is superb, radiant and alive, with its own life, not the hikers’. There was a stage ‘suggestion’ in the Old Sea Road: ‘The sky, sea and land are brighter than the people.’
The end, the beginning, is among die hills, where imagination is not banned, and Gilfoyle saying to the Amaranthers, their cowering skyscraper days over: ‘You begin to stop emptying your heads, every time they begin to fill with thoughts, and then you will begin to think, and then you will stop thinking and begin to talk. … And then you will stop talking and begin to fancy, and then you will stop fancying and begin to imagine. And by that time it will be morning.’ He has been through it, and so he knows.
11. Intercessions by Denis Devlin
With himself on behalf of himself, with his selves on behalf of his selves. Tour d’ébène.
Which is a relief now that verse is most conveniently to be derided (or not) at the cart-tail of faction or convulsed on the racks of disaffected metres or celebrating the sects, schisms and sectiuncles that have had all the poets they are likely to want in this world at least. The relief of poetry free to be derided (or not) on its own terms and not in those of the politicians, antiquaries (Geleerte) and zealots.
But the poets have always played push-pin in the country of Bentham.
Its own terms, that is terms of need, not of opinion, still less of faction; opinion being a response to and at least (at best) for a time an escape from need, from one kind of need, and art, in this case these poems, no more (!) than the approximately adequate and absolutely non-final formulation of another kind. Art has always been this — pure interrogation, rhetorical question less the rhetoric — whatever else it may have been obliged by the ‘social reality’ to appear, but never more freely so than now, when social reality (pace ex-comrade Radek) has severed the connexion.
As between these two, the need that in its haste to be abolished cannot pause to be stated and the need that is the absolute predicament of particular human identity, one does not of course presume to suggest a relation of worth. Yet the distinction is perhaps not idle, for it is from the failure to make it that proceeds the common rejection as ‘obscure’ of most that is significant in modern music, painting and literature. On the one hand the ‘Unbefriedigt jeden Augenblick’, the need to need (‘aimant l’amour’), the art that condenses as inverted spiral of need, that condenses in intensity and brightness from the mere need of the angels to that of the seraphinns, whose end is its own end in the end and the source of need:
Let me be always in this state of grace
Keep me going on bribes like this, the unfinished handwork of sunset
Be to me also for a sign
Of burgled outhouses round an inviolable family stone
As a priest uncertain among his mysteries when a bending candle-flame provokes forbidden images.
And on the other the go-getters, the gerimandlers, Davus and the morbid dread of sphinxes, solution clapped on problem like a snuffer on a candle, the great crossword public on all its planes: ‘He roasteth roast and is satisfied. Yea, he warmeth himself and saith, Aha, I am warm.’
The only suggestions therefore that the reviewer may venture without impertinence are such as have reference to this fundamental. Thus he may suggest the type of need (Braque’s is not Munch’s, neither’s is Klee’s, etc.), its energy, scope, adequacy of expression, etc. There seems no other way in which this miserable functionary can hope to achieve innocuity. Unless of course he is a critic.
The Dives-Lazarus symbiosis, as intimate as that of fungoid and algoid in lichen (to adopt the Concise New Oxford Dictionary example). Here scabs, lucre, etc., there torment, bosom, etc., but both here and there gulf. The absurdity, here or there, of either without the other, the inaccessible other. In death they did not cease to be divided. Who predeceased? A painful period for both.
This Gospel conte cruel is taken to suggest the type of dilemma that caused these poems to be written. It is stated with the bareness of an initial theme in what I take to be the earliest in date: Est Prodest.
Frightened antinomies!
I have wiped examples from mirrors
My mirror’s face and I
Are like no god and me
My death is my life’s plumed gnomon.
This is the type, the identity made up of cathexes not only multivalent but interchangeable, the ‘multiplicate netting/ Of lives distinct and wrangling/ Each knot all other’s potential.’
This position formulated in Est Prodest with the singleness of a melodic line recurs at various degrees of tension and elaboration in the other poems that compose this volume (with the possible exception of Bacchanal and Argument with Justice, which appear to belong to a different and in the terms of this simplification very much less interesting order of experience) but nowhere with such passionate intricacy as in Communication from the Eiffel Tower, where it is developed round the superb dream bisticcio: Gobethou-Gobenow, through its fundamental modes of love, death, act and thought, to the most remarkable adequacy and finality of expression.
Apprehension becomes china eyes become
A wavering plainchant trappist digging his gravesods
One sod per diem, and he stiffens as the vivid sweat
Stings in the roots of his hair.
Under the pierlamps cold wind and leavetaking and sad eyes
Other side of the gangway always …
A boy embittered when summer rain smells fresh on hot limbs and
Desire trapped in a girl’s wet hair breathes
Or a bored mechanic polishing and he mutters
Caught by sight of his face in one of a million rollers
Or the bewilderment of the strong and fair covertly noting
A beloved forehead suave as styles of a maize becoming
Restless and stained
Or no news yet from emigrant sons …
Night my pure identity that breathe
One in all breaths, absorber of all breaths
Night that géstate in symbol-troubled women,
Dumb breeders of being
Wombed in your cathedrals let us watch
Till the forgotten matutinal colours flame
Various the rosewindows through …
If I knew of any recent writing to compare with this I should not do so.
If only the 8 in the last line had been left on its side. So: ∞
Apart from this major poem, related to those that lead up to and away from it very much as Apollinaire’s Chanson du Mal-Aimé to the other Alcools, and with the exceptions suggested above, the insistence with which the ground invades the surface throughout is quite extraordinary. Extraaudenary. Passages which even on a fourth or fifth reading seemed to sag, as even the most competent linkwriting is bound to sag, eventually tighten into line with those of more immediate evidence. This was very forcibly my experience with the third stanza of Gradual, adduced in the Times Lit. Sup., in a tone of exhausted disapproval, as indicating mental confusion and technical ineptitude.
It is naturally in the image that this profound and abstruse self-consciousness first emerges with the least loss of integrity. To cavil at Mr Devlin’s form as overimaged (the obvious polite cavil) is to cavil at the probity with which the creative act has carried itself out, a probity in this case depending on a minimum of rational interference, and indeed to suggest that the creative act should burke its own conditions for the sake of clarity.
The time is perhaps not altogether too green for the vile suggestion that art has nothing to do with clarity, does not dabble in the clear and does not make clear, any more than the light of day (or night) makes th
e subsolar, -lunar and -stellar excrement. Art is the sun, moon and stars of the mind, the whole mind. And the monacodologists who think of it in terms of enlightenment are what Nashe, surprised by a cordial humour, called the Harveys, ‘the sarpego and sciatica of the Seven Liberall Sciences.’
First emerges. With what directness and concreteness the same totality may be achieved appears from the exquisite last stanza of The Statue and the Perturbed Burghers, which with its repetition of ‘crimson and blind’ and the extraordinary evocation of the unsaid by the said has the distinction of a late poem by Höderlin (e.g. ‘Ihr lieblichen Bilder im Tale…’):
The tendrils of fountain water thread that silk music
From the hollow of scented shutters
Crimson and blind
Crimson and blind
As though it were my sister
Fireflies on the rosewood
Spinet playing
With barely escaping voice
With arched fastidious wrists to be so gentle.