This year our trip was to Great Britain and Ireland. I want to deal with Ireland alone. Ireland, the land of poets and writers. Three Nobel prizes: W.B. Yeats. George Bernard Shaw. and Samuel Beckett. Three Nobel prizes and an uncrowned king: James Joyce. Ulysses is probably more written about than read. I myself have not yet tackled it. Even Harold Bloom in the Western Cannon recommends using a guidebook(s) in reading it.
I have always questioned why the hero of the Irish novel should be a Jew: Leopold Bloom. The better question in terms of Irish history is probably why not a Jew? Our tour guide suggested the answer is the legend of the wandering Jew. Ulysses is the Roman of the Greek Odysseus – the wanderer. Throw in oppression. murder. and resurrection. The Jew can stand in well for a microcosm of Irish history.
How did the wandering begin? The English subjugated the country and forbade the Irish their religion, language, and culture. For that matter, they forbade the education of the Irish. The great Trinity College, Dublin, was not open to Catholics. Is it any wonder Irishmen left their country? Many an Irishmen left to get a chance to fight the English. Just so did John Barry leave Wexford, Ireland to father the American Navy. Yes, my friends, he, not John Paul Jones is the father. John Barry is buried in St. Mary’s churchyard in Philadelphia. Still, that is not the cause of the great wandering. 1845 to 1849 is known in Ireland as the “Great Hunger”. Potato blight killed the potato crop giving rise to a great famine. Estimates of those who died of starvation are from 700,000 to 1,000,000. Another 1,000,000 who took to the ships died in those ships, thus giving rise to the name “Coffin Ships.” Millions more made it to America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South America. That is the great wandering.
Triumph: descendants of those wanderers made it to prime minister of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. All of us know of J.F.K. If you want to know more about the famine there is a Penguin historical book, The Great Hunger. However, I recommend Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine. Sometimes, maybe this time, fiction tells it better. Liam O’Flaherty is a second line (not second rate) Irish author most famous for The Informer, which John Ford made into a movie. In fact, Famine is dedicated to John Ford. Our tour guide was a bit shocked when I told him my friends do not refer to themselves as Irish-American but as Irish. They may very well take the American for granted, so perhaps we’re talking about the same thing. If so, then for me John Ford, the Irish American, is the greatest Irishman of them all. For me it isn’t Hitchcock, Renoir, Ozu, or you name it, but John Ford who is the greatest filmmaker who ever lived!
We photographed the Abbey Theatre. Actually the Abbey burned down and was replaced. What a theatre! Synge, O’Casey, Yeats, Shaw (although I associate Shaw more with England), Lady Gregory. You name it! I have written before that the Irish have a tendency to riot at productions of their theatrical masterpieces. So it was with J.M. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, and so it was with O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars. Our Dublin city guide said the riot in the latter case was because O’Casey referred to a shift or undergarment. Well, that’s partly true, but the riot was because O’Casey didn’t show the proper respect to the revolutionaries (I.R.A.). He showed people actually scared and unheroic. Bingo, a riot, but the Irish are nothing if not honest, and they soon came around, for both Synge and O’Casey.
Oscar Wilde is as good a place as any to bring up Protestants. Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin. The son of a famous Irish surgeon. The British introduced a system of what they called the Plantation Irish. These were Protestants who were given land or titles or money to keep an eye on Catholics. Wilde was probably descended from such a family. The system had it’s successes and failures. The “Iron Duke” Wellington was born of such a family. Reminded of his Irish birth, Sir Wellington responded: “If I were born in a stable would that make me a horse?” Having said that, their expression for it be that as it may, there is Charles Stewart Parnell, the Protestant leader of the Irish. Catholics revere him though both they and the church turned on him when he was involved in a scandalous divorce case. Regardless. at one end of O’Connell Street, Dublin, is “The Liberator” Daniel O’Connell, instrumental in getting Catholics the right to hold office, and, at the other end of the street is the Protestant Parnell. If only it were so simple!
In closing let us take note of the fact that this most musical of people have not produced (yet) a composer considered in the front ranks. However, I recommend to you Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924). In keeping with the spirit of this piece, you might want to try his Six Irish Rhapsodies on Chandos. If you like the rhapsodies you can move on to the symphonies, also on Chandos. This article may require a sequel because I have not even touched John McCormack the greatest (Irish) tenor of them all. Ireland – a land of truly remarkable people.