Those fascinated by the revolutionary Harry Boland - and they're not just the old guard, Aidan Quinn's stunning depiction of him in Neil Jordan's Michael Collins saw to that - will be pleased to hear that a new biography of him is on the way. Harry]Boland's Irish Revolution, 1887-1922 by David Fitzpatrick, professor of modern history at TCD, is due from Cork University Press this spring.
The recently published Harry Boland A Man Divided, by Andrew Brasier and John Kelly, disappointed historian Eunan O'Halpin who, writing in the Sunday Business Post, felt it did no useful service to the memory of Boland "a professional revolutionary whose personality, career and pivotal role as the close confidant of both de Valera and Collins plainly merit a serious biography".
Our own reviewer, E.D. Doyle, dwelt on Boland's attractive personality, as confirmed by Brasier and Kelly, and this characteristic will also be very much part of Fitzpatrick's book. "Boland's influence was the product of animal charm, gregariousness, native wit and a dash of ruthlessness. Though not intellectual in his manner, he was a clear thinker, a forceful orator and a graceful writer. "He was also a man about town, equally at home in Dublin, Manchester or New York, a bon vivant of varied tastes and among the most attractive yet elusive personalities of the Irish revolution," says CUP in its advance blurb.
Fitzpatrick, an Australian, got great acclaim for his book Oceans of Consolation; Personal Accounts of Irish migration to Australia, published by CUP in the mid1990s. His Boland book augurs well, particularly as it will draw upon thousands of letters from Boland - as well as diaries, police reports, memoirs and documents preserved in Irish, British and American archives, and in family possession. It promises to reveal the critical importance of fraternity in determining the course of Ireland's revolution and, given the author's track record, Sadbh won't be the only one eagerly awaiting its publication.
Sadbh has had a sad letter from a reader who feels she has been stung by a vanity press and wants would-be-writers to be on the alert. What are vanity presses? For those who don't know, they are the publishers you pay to publish your work, hence the "vanity" bit, as opposed to publishers who pay you to allow them bring out your work because they feel it has merit, literary or otherwise.
Vanity presses often advertise with wording along these lines: Attention all authors, have you written a book you want to see in print? Poetry? Memoirs? Stories? We can publish it for you, in a beautiful limited edition. Send an SAE for details . . . etc. What they want is your manuscript, regardless of its merit or of its interest to a general readership, and your money. They will duly publish your manuscript - sometimes in a poor quality, unedited volume - and usually send you all the books in a parcel: that is the end of their dealings with you. They do not distribute the books, they do not send them for review, and they do not do any publicity.
Unless the subject is of a specific local interest, such as the history of a neighbourhood, for instance, bookshops won't be keen to stock the books. And in the majority of cases - there is definitely the occasional exception - the media don't review self-published or vanity published books. If books conform to the Indian caste system, vanity press titles are the untouchables at the bottom of the pile.
If you really want to see your poems or memoirs in print, and all the mainstream publishers have turned you down, do the following. Photocopy your manuscript, get a printer to bind it, and you'll have copies you've made yourself to distribute among friends at a fraction of the cost.
The theme of this year's Kate O'Brien weekend in Limerick is "The Writer as Commentator and Critic". It opens next Friday and continues through Sunday. This is the 17th year that Limerick folk have been celebrating the work of the woman who wrote, among other titles, The Land of Spices and The Last of Summer. The proceedings will be officially opened by Maurice Manning at the Hunt Museum.
Speakers include author and journalist Robert O'Byrne; political commentator Fergus Finlay; New York-based journalist and writer Joe Queenan; director of The Hunt Museum, Ciaran MacGonigal and Father Hugh Duffy of Mary Immaculate College. The Kate O'Brien lecture will be given on Sunday by academic Terry Eagleton.
Sadbh notes the irony of a weekend commemorating a female writer which does not include a single female speaker in the line-up. Booking and information from 061312833, or www.geocities.com/kateobrien