NOVELIST Philip MacCann has been observing the state of contemporary Irish writing, and he doesn't like what he sees. Or so one gathers from his somewhat confused, and distinctly confusing, diatribe in the latest issue of the British magazine, Prospect.
The piece is called "Irish Writers Inc." and Mr MacCann begins by saying that though "the Republic of Ireland has advanced artistically" in recent years, "these changes are not easily achieved".
He then offers a brief canter through Irish writing in this century. Joyce, Wilde, Shaw and Yeats "all had to get out" from a "culture rotten with traditionalism", while in our time John McGahern's novels "were spread with Irish cliches like symptoms of literary disease: a high priest count, farms and bogs, Catholic guilt, psychosexual beatings". Apparently, these "cliches" should have no place in our literature, despite the fact that some of the most shocking revelations of the past year entail a high priest count involved in psychosexual beatings, with much attendant Catholic guilt.
Instead, Mr MacCann states, the correct literary approach was taken by John Banville, who from the beginning "sealed himself in his own Eurobubble against infection from local humbug". Obviously, a high scientist count is preferable to a high priest count. But Banville, it seems, was no use as an influence to "those who wanted to find a style which was fresh but also comfortable with contemporary Ireland".
Instead, Mr MacCann offers us Neil Jordan and Desmond Hogan, who "managed to be naturally Irish without having to assert it and became two of the most advanced stylists of the 1980s and 1990s". Sadly, Mr MacCann neglects to tell us what an advanced stylist exactly is, leaving us in the dark as to how we would recognise one if we saw one.
He also praises "the freshness of an utterly exiled and cosmopolitan mind" in Patrick McCabe, whose butcher boy "speaks with a suffering innocence unknown in previous Irish fiction". That will surprise anyone who has any knowledge of Irish fiction, and anyway what about the high priest count, psychosexual beatings and Catholic guilt in McCabe's most famous novel?
You'd think that Roddy Doyle, with his blithe disregard for old pieties, would fit the bill for Mr MacCann, but seemingly he's too successful - a "consummate smart mover" who reprecuts "all the glam and cash that Ireland's recent cultural growth can bring". (Do I detect a note of envy?)
Recent cultural growth . . . advanced stylists,. . . The essay is full of such undefined phrases. Of Dermot Healy's A Goat Song (which, we're told, "John Banville's son recommended for the Booker". Er, I think not), Mr MacCann simply asks "But is it any good?" Well, is it? And of Irish writing today, he declares: "There is tripe and there is some fine fiction. But is it art?" Well, if it's fine fiction, it's probably art, and if it's tripe, it probably isn't.
His final statement resoundingly declares: "Until there is some grander post post modernist world view, probably all writers can do is flash their trash." I have no idea what that means and I suspect that Mr MacCann hasn't, either.
I went along to the Gallery Press poetry launch in Waterstone's not so much to learn about the latest Peter Sirr collection or the final volume by the late Sean Dunne (fine though both of these are)as to celebrate the publication of Frank Ormsby's The Ghost Train.
I've long regarded this Enniskillen writer as one of the few outstanding poets to have emerged in this country in my lifetime, though the intervals between volumes (A Store of Candles, 1977; A Northern Spring, 1986; and now The Ghost Train) are a bit of trial for even his greatest admirers. Is he trying to be Ireland's answer to Philip Larkin, who also kept us waiting for ten years in between each new collection?
Still, it doesn't really matter when poetry of Larkin's and Ormsby's quality is the end result, and you don't have to be a die hard traditionalist to appreciate the elegant accessibility that marks Ormsby's verse and that makes the work of many others seem clotted and wilfully obscurantist.
It was nice to meet the man himself, who is as unpretentious as I'd imagined. Head of English at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, he was listened to in Waterstone's by (among many others) former Academical alumnus Derek Mahon. UP at the Arts Council offices in Merrion Square, a large number of distinguished and diverse people - including Sile de Valera, Maurice Harmon. Derek Mahon, Michael Colgan and Val Mulkerns were gathered to celebrate the official launch of ILE, which stands for Ireland Literature Exchange and which is a state supported agency for the promotion of Ireland's literature in translation.
Actually, it seems a bit late in the day for an official launch, given that ILE has been providing grant aid to translations for a couple of years now, but both ILE's chairman Micheal O'Siadhail and the Arts Council's Ciaran Benson rightly paid tribute to the generally unsung work of translators. John F. Deane, Michael Smith and Brian Lynch, who were making the work of foreign poets accessible to Irish readers when ILE was only a twinkle in someone's eye, know all about such unsung work.