Informing Spirit

In 1996 Anthony Cronin poet, critic, novelist, former Fianna Fail cultural advisor and biographer of Flann O'Brien, published Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist. Graceful, witty and shrewdly perceptive, it is a major achievement and one of the finest books written by an Irish writer. Beyond that, it is also one of the best biographies published anywhere of anyone, an atmospheric and international study of one of the century's undisputed originals and a dazzling exploration of an individual formed by one culture, who sought and was absorbed by another.

Although extremely well received, there remains the sneaking suspicion that had any one else written The Last Modernist, the praise would have been louder, more reverential - and ongoing.

Cronin is his own worst enemy - too intelligent, too honest, too able, too cussedly practical and accessible, an alert, bookish character with a loping walk and a rasping voice who gives the impression of having been born wearing heavy-framed, thick-lensed glasses and a deer stalker. More irritated citizen than tormented artist, he misses little.

Yeats, Auden and Eliot are constants in his conversation. Cronin admires Yeats's practical contribution to Ireland and his involvement in politics. He sees no reason why an artist would not be as involved today but concedes it was probably easier in Yeats's day.

A favourite Cronin phrase when speaking of writers is "I like his mind" or, equally, "I'm not sure I like his mind." He is extremely analytical. No answer is easily given, it must first be tested. Often taken for granted, particularly as there are those who persist in seeing him as a political player, he has also paid for devising Aosdana, a cultural institution which has certainly made the life of a full-time artist in Ireland, at least possible. But for the population in general, Aosdana retains an elitest scent of cultural mafia about it.

Above all, there is Cronin's association with Charles Haughey. But the most interesting thing about this is that it reveals more about the former Taoiseach than Cronin, reiterating Haughey's deft ability to identify a clever, valuable, useful person. "I've never had any interest in party politics," says Cronin. "I do have one in political theory, or at least, ideas." He makes a couple of references to events which happened "when we were in government" and Cronin enjoyed the excitement of politics at first hand.

Few literary men appear as at ease with the notion of the writer as artist. There is no doubt he is conscious of his worth and, since his college days, has been aware of a status which became a destiny. In the late 1940s, he was hailed as "the young poet of the day" associating with Kavanagh, Behan, Peadar O'Donnell, MacGreevy, Flann O'Brien, Beckett - and, no doubt, never experienced the slightest frisson of intellectual intimidation.

The publication of A Question of Modernity in 1966 established him as a serious critic, building on a critical reputation he had quickly established as a freelance reviewer working in London where he had moved in 1954 and was to spend a few years before returning to Ireland.

Mention of his critical work on Joyce, which possesses a logic and lucidity not often common to Joyce criticism, and he seems pleased. "It was a landmark. Do you know, I think I was the first to say that Ulysses is a really funny book." In `The Advent of Bloom' he draws clever comparisons with Thackeray's Vanity Fair. Just as Cronin traces the father figure so evident throughout Beckett's work, he argues "the people of Ulysses are not a cross section of the bourgeois world: they are Joyce's father's world, that narrow world of drink and song, of debt and redemption, of vulgarity, wit and seedy gentility that his father inhabited."

Now 70, Cronin still has that aura of the Angry Young Man about him just as, some 40 years ago, he was one of the first of the angry young men. For many he remains best known as the author of a vivid memoir, Dead As Doornails (1948), but, when asked if he feels this book overshadows his work as a whole, he says: "I believe all of my books will live. I am happy with the books I have written." This may well be so, but that memoir is often referred to as the most enduring and accurate portrait of Dublin literary life of the 1950s. Cronin mentions his novels, The Life Of Riley (1964), "which I think is very good" and his sleeper book, Identity Papers (1979).

Ten years on from No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien (1989), and three years since the publication of his Beckett biography in 1996, Cronin shares his lunch in a small kitchen which is entered via a tidy room of books and looks out on to a window with a promise of a courtyard - and knows his literary legacy is assured. Somehow the scene is more evocative of Paris or eastern Europe than of Ireland. While the central thesis of the O'Brien book is that no one really knew the unhappy author of At-Swim-Two-Birds, The Last Modernist certainly unravels the enigma that is Beckett. Among its many strengths is that Cronin, who liked him, avoids presenting Beckett as a saint and refuses to glide over his more neurotic interludes such as his offence when an interviewer wrote the secretive Beckett "seems a little in doubt whether he should be described as a married man, but is certain there is no children."

What was it like researching the life of a man he knew? "I was struck by the fact that the more research I did, the more my original perceptions based on instinct were confirmed." Beckett emerges as a fascinating and confusing individual but even more remarkable is the depth of characterisation Cronin achieves in the portraits of Beckett's ill-matched parents, easy-going Bill and the austere, donkey-loving May.

Just as Beckett clearly loved his father, his more complex, often difficult relationship with his mother, is also, as proven by Cronin, to have been based on a deep, tormenting love. "Indeed, he (Beckett) almost sentimentalises the father and there is an empathy with the mother." Joyce is well drawn as is the poet Thomas MacGreevy whom Cronin regards as seriously underrated and the author of "five or six great poems" and he lists them.

Who are the great Irish poets? "Do you mean living or dead? I won't be drawn into reputations," he warns. He refers to his Sunday Independent column, Personal Anthology, in which he takes a poem, "it could be by anyone, Shakespeare, or Milton, or Yeats, as long as they're dead" and analyses the work, the art of practical criticism as demonstrated by a poet rather than academic. It sounds a brilliant idea and even better is the plan is to publish these articles in a book "for the Christmas market." It is impossible to overlook the intellectual arrogance and self belief, but there is also a dogged honesty and intellectual rigour. He admits to being "engaged with Ireland."

Put Cronin on a Questions and Answers panel, as he was recently, and among the oozing righteousness which immediately seems to shroud the proceedings, his cantankerous sense of fair play stands out. He may be impossible to know, difficult to like and often abrasive, but he is also commonsensical and, if relentlessly intellectual, determinedly confrontational, capable of kindness and old world civility, the sort of grump who will nevertheless remember a small child's name far quicker than a gushy well-wisher wearing a practised smile. A natural debunker of myths, he also has a quick sense of humour.

Cronin's latest collection, The Minotaur and Other Poems, was published last month, almost simultaneously with a literary summer school devoted to his work. Being the subject of a weekend seminar is an honour usually reserved for dead writers and Cronin's pleasure at such a premature feat is matched by obvious bemusement. Having always assumed he was primarily a poet, I remark as much - but this author of nine collections as well as his Collected Poems 1950-1973, counters, stating he is a writer, an artist.

At the heart of the new book is the title poem which denounces the "something caged and hidden, / Which no hero can ever root out, / However bloodied his sword, / And no new order suppress. . . The thicket of deceit, / The woven, thorny, maze / The labyrinth of lies, / Of law, of loyalties / In which we live our days." A practical reading of society has always been central to his poetry: "Why shouldn't poetry be practical? There is nothing that says art can not be commonsensical. Of course, it should have a point." Along with the outrage is a wryly romantic tone and, above all, an ironist's world view.

Interviewing him is like having a piano lesson with a teacher who loves music but frankly dislikes students. Most questions irritate him and he punches and pulls them apart, although he has done a vast amount of journalism - from 1976 to 1980 and from 1983 to 1987 he was a weekly columninist on this paper. "They were think pieces rather than opinion pieces and I got into trouble for being too political" - he balances an idealistic regard for journalism with contempt for most of its practitioners. "I personally have always thought the act of writing was a way of thinking."

Eye contact becomes tricky as he pounces and says, "You're not writing this down, this is what you should be noting." He believes interviews are too exposing: "I don't approve of this sense of disclosure. It's the great disease of our time. In Ireland curiosity is very intense. People are too ready to bare their souls and reporters are too interested in the life rather than the work."

I make the mistake of asking his father's name and, within moments, Cronin is accusing me somewhat unfairly of being interested only in writer's lives, not their work. "And it is the work which matters, not the life. My life is my own business." Still, it is worth trying to find out where Cronin the writer evolved from.

One of two sons, his father was a Wexford man who also worked for a time as a journalist and, in fact, began reporting for the Enniscorthy Echo during the week of the 1916 Rising. Mention of Wexford brings to mind a picture taken at actor Donal McCann's burial in which Cronin is to be seen paying his respects. "That wasn't me. I was in Mayo but this is always happening. People tell me they see me in places I haven't been."

Returning to the subject of his parents, he speaks warmly of them, creating a portrait of a gentle, vague man who soon exchanged journalism for a job as a solicitor's clerk, and a bright, practical mother who ran a couple of shops. "My mother was the earner. She was progressive, interested in natural foods, brown bread, spring water" His was not a country childhood and he points out that living in a small town is far closer to living in a city than the countryside - "everything is intensified."

As for early education, the young Cronin progressed along "the usual path - Loreto, the Christian Brothers and boarding school" at 12, to Blackrock College. "I was enthralled by Robert Browning and began writing poetry at school. I also loved the Waverly novels." History wasn't something to be learnt: "I imagined it." His early response to history was more romantic than factual.

Books always interested him as have painting, sculpture and architecture. Being in Dublin gave him access to the National Gallery. At UCD, he initially chose architecture, but soon switched to economics and history - and, not surprisingly, law. As has often been remarked, the verbally combatative Cronin seems a natural barrister. He laughs outright. "Austin Clarke said `he could have made a fortune at the bar'," he recalls. But he was never committed to it.

In Dead As Doornails he wrote: "In 1948 I had ceased to be a student and had become, for some reason, a barrister-at-law. It was a state in which I took no pride; indeed I was acutely ashamed of it for a number of reasons, some of them ideological and connected with whatever amalgam of anarchism and utopian communism I luxuriated in at the time, some to do with the fact I was a poet, in so far as I was anything that could be named, and thought the barrister-ship consorted ill with the practice of art and the necessary dooms attached to the calling."

Money has never seemed overly important to him. He lives modestly. It is easily to pick out his small dwelling. The books visible on shelves through the upstairs window give him away.

Many writers have become famous through talking about books they were writing. Cronin was quiet about his Beckett. It was only when it was published that people began to remember Cronin having mentioned "something about working on it." It is 600 pages and is arguably definitive in evoking Beckett's Ireland as well as the Paris where he would settle.

"I had thought about it a long time ago. But he was alive and well . . ." Following the O'Brien book, Cronin's publishers asked him for another biography and, after much thought, he began to read, research and later to write. Speaking of the O'Brien book with hindsight, Cronin says he is pleased with it but now thinks he was too reticient about his sexuality.

Given the time, what would he most like to do, or to have done? He brightens up, as he often does, alternating between charm and gruffness. "I wish I'd written a history of Ireland, to have been asked to write one. I enjoy writing history because it has a formal narrative. But well, no one has the money for that - you need enormous resources and a lot of time."

Unlike many writers, particularly Irish ones, he does not hurl abuse and is far less affected than many of his peers.

There is no act. He just says what he thinks. While far from mellow, he is fair-minded and can claim the necessary detachment to offer informed opinions - while reluctant to appear opinionated. "A society," he says, "is to be judged by the quality of its informing spirits and, in this sense, 20th century Ireland hasn't done too badly."

The Minotaur and Other Poems by Anthony Cronin is published by New Island Books