Maud Gonne MacBride: Feminist, Agitator, Muse

 

Although I recorded this podcast - on the Irish Republican Maud Gonne (MacBride) - a while ago as part of Kellogg's Centenary of Women's Suffrage celebrations, it was recently re-posted as part of the college's drive to enrich the cultural lives of people stuck at home during lockdown. You can listen here for free.

Maternity Leave cultural digest: exhibitions

In the weeks before I return to work following maternity leave, I've been thinking of posting on here a list of the exhibitions and films I've managed to see -- and the books I've managed to read. The list is, unsurprisingly, not long, and I am abashed to say that I thought I would do far more reading during my six months 'off' -- although I was really fascinated to read Pandora Sykes discussing how having a baby had made her rediscover the joy of reading (and reading aloud) in the Sunday Times recently.


I did manage to go to some exhibitions, both locally and in London, and the baby came with me to all of them. When he was a few weeks old, and my husband was still on paternity leave, we went to a beautiful exhibition, Sculpture in the Vineyard, a the Bothy vineyard outside Abingdon. There was a really eclectic mix of exhibits, and we were really lucky to visit on one of those early autumn days when the sun is getting lower but still retains lots of warmth. We also got to taste some wine, and there was a gorgeous retro tearoom set up too. I'd really recommend a visit, and plan to go again (I think the event happens once a year around the same time).

As the baby got more wriggly and less sleepy, there was a bit of a hiatus in exhibition-going; but I did manage to catch the Sappho to Suffrage and  Story of Phi: Restricted Books at the Weston Library one afternoon while he was asleep (the Weston cafe has great baby-changing facilities, incidentally!). I always enjoy these mini-exhibitions, which act as a showcase of the wonderful collections of the library, and there are two great ones coming up: one on Babel and Translation and another on Maps.

In the new year we also got to see the wonderful exhibition on Modern Couples and artistic collaboration at the Barbican in London. My favourite part, in a huge exhibition that we had to whip round as the baby got restless (and set off seemingly a domino effect of whimpering with the other babies in the exhibition), was Picasso's lover Dora Maar's extraordinary photography. The exhibition also cleverly, and intricately, linked artists and writers in couples, trios and quartets -- often overlapping -- in a non-voyeuristic way, to suggest how webs of creativity are spun.

Baby with Blue Ball at 'Jeff Koons'. Boredom or the banal?

More recently, I saw two exhibitions that have surprising overlaps: Pop Art in Print at the Banbury Museum (blissfully for me, the baby was asleep and I had the gallery to myself -- but really it deserves a wider audience); and Jeff Koons at the Ashmolean. Seeing the Banbury exhibition helped put some of Koons's artwork in context, but it also made me think about the production line feeling of some of the work of that period. I wanted to see 'originals' of the Pop Art pieces, but of course in some cases these 'originals' did not really exist. Similarly, Jeff Koons's work interacts with the commodification of art but also harks back to the methods of classical painters such as Rubens, with their studios of artists. Koons's exhibition has had some mixed reviews, and I was left curiously flat at the end -- I didn't really experience the 'pleasure' that the self-curated exhibition was trying to stress; however I was very interested in his ideas of reclaiming the 'banal' as something that might be seen as comforting or event positive. And though I didn't enjoy the 'blue balls' series as much, aesthetically, as other pieces in the exhibition I could see how it engages with the viewer as both active participant and part of the artwork itself.

Just today I saw the latest exhibition at Modern Art Oxford: Penny Woolcock: Fantastic Cities. Again it was a brief run around (the little chap being rather startled by the audio), but the work explored in really interesting, and sometimes startling, ways the manner in which individuals can occupy the same spaces in cities but experience these spaces completely differently: making the story of China Mieville's The City and The City seem eerily prescient. This week, too, I had a quick scoot about the William Morris and the Thames exhibition at the River and Rowing Museum, Henley, which was full of beautiful fabrics which were not particularly fascinating to a five-month old. It made me desperate to get more Morris, and somehow to re-visit the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, which is brilliant (and free). I plan to return to the Henley Museum when I have a little more time (?!) to revisit that, and the permanent John Piper display, which has had new additions this spring (a ticket gives you a year's access to the Museum, as well as free parking by the river!).

The Accidental Royalist

I'm currently on maternity leave, and one of the (many) things they don't tell you about this period is that you'll have both no time to yourself and lots of time. Some days I don't stop; other days, when the baby is really sleepy (like now) you find yourself at home with lots of time on your hands!

It was on one of these afternoons a few weeks ago that I was approached by the Press Association to comment on the use of a passage from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby as part of a 'Royal Wedding' that I'd only vaguely heard about. Apparently Princess Eugenie was getting married!

My first instinct was to be critical; to undermine the choice of the passage with irony.

The context of the passage is interesting because it is describing the first meeting between Nick Carraway, the narrator, and Jay Gatsby, early on in the novel (so it does not occur between the lovers Jay and Daisy). Nick has been invited to a party thrown by the mysterious Gatsby, and doesn't therefore recognise him when he announces himself. So when Gatsby smiles 'understandingly, much more than understandingly', this is in the context of social awkwardness, trying to put Nick at ease for making the mistake of not having recognised or acknowledged his host. All of the impressions of Gatsby's smile are Nick's own, as are the majority of the impressions of the narrative as a whole, and the idealistic reading of this smile has more to say about Nick than it does about Gatsby. 

From 'Precisely' onwards, however, Nick collects himself and realises perhaps that it has been foolish to read so much into a smile; there is a sense, too, that he does not wish to be taken in by this nouveau riche stranger, and so he uses class-based commentary to belittle Gatsby within his own thoughts ('elegant young roughneck', and an 'elaborate formality of speech' which 'just missed being absurd'). Then we are told that Nick had already noticed Gatsby, not knowing who he was, and had already thought that he had been 'picking his words with care'. All of these subtle comments suggest that Gatsby is trying too hard to be part of the elite group that he has suddenly entered, and that he doesn't quite belong.

I'm not a fan of the royal family and so don't know much about Eugenie's partner, but it strikes me as a little strange that a passage that points to Gatsby's arriviste qualities, and puts them (at least towards the end) in a less than favourable light, should be used in the wedding service. The sense that Gatsby doesn't belong within the gilded worlds of West Egg and East Egg underlines Nick's characterisation of him here, and it is therefore strange that possible parallels with the royal family and outsiders might not have been noticed before selecting the passage. It's also a passage about self-perception, and about how one might wish to be seen in another's eyes.

Then again, when I tried to think about it more kindly, I realised that The Great Gatsby is one of those novels that people often read for the beauty of its language, and if we read this passage out of context it can be seen as a gorgeous description of unspoken communication between two people, which is why (I imagine) it was chosen. That this is between two strangers who each have their own agendas is, however, slightly difficult to ignore and therefore strikes an odd note. I also wonder why the decision was made to include the section after 'Precisely', unless there is a hidden humour here about the relationship between Eugenie and her partner -- perhaps she sees him as her 'elegant young rough-neck?' -- that people who don't know the couple wouldn't get.

The main result of this comment was that I -- the daughter of an Irish Republican -- ended up being quoted in, among others, the Sunday Mail, and becoming an accidental royalist. Sorry, Mum!

Remembering Richard Murphy

Anglo-Irish poet, memoirist and sailor Richard Murphy died at the end of January, aged 90. His work is not particularly well-known outside Ireland, but it is glorious in its evocation of twentieth-century Ireland, both urban and rural, its depictions of the beauty and trials of seafaring life, and the anxieties of the Anglo-Irish writer. In his sonnet sequence The Price of Stone, first published in 1985, he returned to the Shakespearean form -- both embracing and playing with the constraints and expectations of the sonnet form when others were moving towards freer models.

For Irish Studies Review I wrote about two recent re-issues of Murphy's work -- his memoir The Kick and his creative memoir In Search of Poetry, which details the writing process of The Price of Stone and includes some of the poems. You can access it here if you want to learn more about this remarkable poet and writer (the first 50 clicks get access to the full article). You can also read the Irish Times obituary of Murphy here.

Jez Butterworth's 'The Ferryman': the politics of the (Northern) Irish play

(Official poster for the West End transfer of Jez Butterworth's The Ferryman, at the Gielgud Theatre)

I didn't see The Ferryman during its first run, at the Royal Court Theatre; running from the end of April to the end of May, it famously sold out in one day. However, I was extremely lucky that my friend -- a culture critic and journalist -- took me to the press night of the West End transfer at the Gielgud Theatre.

'Press night' is a strange description for what took place, though; as the press had already (mostly ecstatically) reviewed the first production at the Royal Court, the 'Press night' actually consisted of the glitterati of British drama, tv, and showbiz: perhaps explaining the near-unanimous standing ovation at curtain call, and the chumminess of the audience with the actors on stage. But maybe what was also going on was something more complex and fraught -- something about what happens when an apparently 'Irish' play, but written by a non-Irish playwright, gets performed in the West End. I'm not sure if people quite felt able to respond honestly.

David Tennant was sitting next to me. I watched him, as slyly as possible, for evidence of his responses. A quick search tells me that Tennant's father, as I had thought, was a Church of Scotland Minister -- and also that Tennant is descended from Ulster Protestants, and that some of his descendants were members of the Orange Order. This is not to harp on about celebrity, but rather to highlight an example of what Sean O'Hagan pointed out recently in The Guardian: that some of the uncomfortable politics of The Ferryman -- an Irish play, written for a largely English (largely middle-class) audience -- have been glossed over by the press. Without giving too much away -- because The Ferryman is definitely worth going to see (it is the most gripping play I've seen in years, despite breaking my cardinal 'theatre rule' of lasting longer than the average film) -- the story takes place in 1981, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. However the focus is shifted to a large farmhouse in the countryside, with the head of the family trying to avoid his IRA past. Circumspect glances at my neighbour told me that in places the story was uncomfortable; that not all of the difficult topics could be glossed over by the play's humour (children swearing and drinking, a mad old auntie); and that he wasn't quite joining in with the general ribaldry of the occasion. Of course, there might have been many reasons for this; but it did make me wonder whether our general lack of understanding of, or interest in, Northern Ireland (as the recent election has shown) was writ large that evening -- our uncertainties and ignorance covered over with laughter and applause. It is not an accident that the easiest way to get a Pointless answer in Pointless is to mention a Northern Irish political party.

Just after going to see the play, I came across a very interesting blogpost by Patrick Lonergan entitled 'Is Jez Butterworth's The Ferryman an Irish play?' For one, as Lonergan points out, Butterworth isn't Irish; in fact, the main plot of the play is derived from the true story of the uncle of one of the actresses in the play, Laura Donnelly. Lonergan is at pains to point out that Butterworth's lack of Irish provenance shouldn't matter; however Sean O'Hagan is not as magnanimous, accusing the play of 'paddywhackery' and noting that 'Butterworth is an English writer grappling not just with the complexities of Northern Ireland politics and culture at a pivotal time in its history, but also with the full weight of the Irish dramatic tradition'. I'm not sure, however, that Butterworth is grappling hard enough with these things, and perhaps that's part of the problem. Critics have been at pains to point out that Butterworth's previous hit play, Jerusalem, dealt with English and Englishness; yet in a 2011 interview with The Guardian he rather backtracks on this, saying that what started off as a play about 'England and the English' ended up being more 'personal', and that though Jerusalem appears to be concerned with myth and history, actually his research for the play was far bittier and fragmented.

As an interesting point of comparison, both Lonergan and O'Hagan note the various Irish literary influences that Butterworth makes manifest throughout The Ferryman -- Yeats, Heaney, Friel and the playwright Tom Murphy in particular -- but on the other hand, this borrowing from a tradition through books rather than through living strikes them as somehow inauthentic. Can we access a culture just by reading around it? And yet, here's another problem. Why shouldn't Butterworth borrow from a tradition to write a play? Hasn't Western drama, from at least Shakespeare onwards, borrowed from other cultures to tell its stories? Both O'Hagan and Lonergan reference Brian Friel's play Wonderful Tennessee in their critiques of The Ferryman, but what both of their commentaries, and the play itself (perhaps by accident), kept returning me to was that famous line from Friel's Translations (1980):

Hugh: I will provide you with the available words and the available grammar. But will that help you to interpret between privacies? I have no idea.

Certainly, the broad brushstrokes in the depiction of Northern Irish Catholic characters in The Ferryman suggest a move away from the 'privacies' of subtle, tribal, communication that Friel describes in Translations: instead we are in a world where everyone tells stories, where the priest is compromised, where rebel songs are sung and where everybody drinks. But then again, are we so far from the depictions of Irish characters on-stage in 'London Irish' plays like Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane or even Conor McPherson's The Weir -- an Irish play, undoubtedly, but certainly capitalizing on the continual demand for Irish plays on the London stage? And yet, what we have in the case of The Ferryman is an endless circle, one encouraged by British and Irish alike. By writing about the Irish, the British are in danger of reviving the stereotypes that prevented the Irish from asserting their own cultural autonomy; by criticizing these same attempts, the Irish risk closing off their culture to outside influence, or wider cultural discussion. And this is without even mentioning the complex cultural and political paradigm of the North! I'm sure that some people in Ireland would think that I, as an academic working in Britain with an Irish mother, shouldn't even be commenting on such a difficult subject. But if I was to hazard a conclusion, it would be this: that had Butterworth written a more nuanced play, which delved more deeply into the social and cultural politics of the North, we would probably be asking fewer questions.

And that's without even discussing the accents!

It's Oscars Season! Adjectives are rife!

 Over the last few weeks, in dull, dark January, I've been to see four films: A United Kingdom, Paterson, Manchester by the Sea and La La Land. In my personal opinion, I would rank them, from best to worst (as follows): Manchester by the Sea, A United Kingdom, La La Land, and then Paterson. In recent run-downs of film listings in well-known newspapers, these four films were described as: 'bleak' (Manchester), 'stirring' (United), 'joyful' (LLL) and 'Indie whimsie meets profound' (Paterson): all were given five stars. Although I don't wish to harp on too much here about how disappointing I found La La Land (very!), or how faintly ridiculous I found Paterson (particularly as someone who loves poetry), what I am in danger of doing -- just like the critics themselves -- is casting a film in a certain light and then influencing the way everyone watches it. For some reason, this tendency to apportion an adjective to a film and then stick with it, despite the fact that the film might alter its mood many times, is particularly prevalent during Oscars Season.

As English literature students, we were always told to avoid using adjectives and adverbs -- particularly ones that provide a shortcut to an argument without providing additional support. Obviously, journalists need to put forward a point of view, and they need to write in soundbites; otherwise they wouldn't be doing their job. Nevertheless, I can't help but think that such soundbites sway the way we receive and review films ourselves. We want to see La La Land as joyful, rather than (as one critic, buried far down the search engine results, described it) 'superficial': when enough people use the same term, that other voice is drowned out. It also leads to some uncomfortable moments. When my husband and I left the cinema after watching La La Land, we whispered the word 'boring' to each other, afraid that the Ryan Gosling-obsessed cinema-goers would give us a tongue-lashing. (Here's another word I can think of to describe 'The Gosling': over-rated. And here's another: average.) But in a post-truth, post-Brexit, post-Trump era, a film that comes along promising an 'intravenous shot of joy', as another critic put it, will deliver this: even if it doesn't, not really.

On the other end of the scale, to describe Manchester by the Sea as merely 'bleak' is to dismiss the complexities of moods, tone and character that are expressed and teased out throughout this wonderful film. If I had to choose one way to describe the film, it would be 'redemptive'. Yes, the story-line is unbearably sad, but there are funny moments too, and moments of kindness and deep love. We learn far more about the relationship between the characters played by Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams in two scenes than we do about those played by Ryan ('The') Gosling and Emma Stone in La La Land. Maybe we don't watch the second one for character development. But there isn't much else there, because there are hardly any other characters in this film. I feel churlish criticising it so much: it's obviously a well-meaning film, and I really wanted to love it. But I feel it's a film for our times: times in which we expect so little, that we're happy with any crumb of 'joy' we're given. When I want joy in future I'll take Gentlemen Prefer Blondes -- every single time.

Sabbatical number 1

I'm writing this post in the final stretch of my first term of sabbatical leave. I was really lucky to be able to spend the term away from Oxford -- the below is my view -- but I didn't write this post to gloat. The sabbatical leave is an odd fish. People here (in France) don't seem to understand what it is (although that might be my bad French); it is nice when they mistake me for a student on her gap year, though. I looked it up (does Google translate count?), and the word for sabbatical is more or less the same... 'Sabbatique': that's what I thought! Although perhaps it has a different meaning?!

Before I began my sabbatical, my brother (who's an historian) sent me a link to a blog article, 'Seeking Sabbatical Advice', written by someone about to go on her first term of sabbatical leave. As far as I can tell, she wasn't offered much in the way of advice. This is telling. I'm not sure that there is much of a template for these things. For me, it was a great excuse to catch up on writing deadlines, to work on my new book, and to clear my inbox. I finally cleared my inbox today – for about 2 hours – but there is something oddly frightening about a screen that declares 'Inbox: 0 items'. It immediately, perversely, makes me want to run back to civilization. At the same time, I'm enormously admiring of a colleague (and friend of mine) who told me he keeps to a '<5' email inbox. That will definitely be my mantra going forward. Of course, a sabbatical is surely, mostly, about making resolutions you will never keep. Plus ça change...