School days rememberedOh, would that boys and girls throughout secondary schools in Ireland felt they had, as young sophisticates, to read or at least be seen with the Book Pages of The Irish Times.
That would be Sadbh's idea of Heaven. It's what young sophisticates did at Inst. in Belfast when Derek Mahon was a pupil.. The book pages they felt were a must were those in the London Observer, as Mahon remembers in a wonderful essay in the latest issue of the Dublin Review. Called Yeats and the lights of Dublin, it conjures up schooldays at the large Belfast city-centre grammer school best known for its old boys' rugby club, Instonians, which, remembers Mahon, always provided at least one or two names in the Irish International XV. With poets Ferguson and Allingham among its former pupils Inst. had a strong literary tradition. Another old boy was Charles Monteith, director of Faber and friend of TS Eliot, whose books graced the school library, signed "for the boys of Inst" by the poet himself. Teaching them English was J. W. Boyle, a Dubliner and a Protestant, known as Basher because he had the frame and features of one who could fight his corner and who enthralled them with tales of how he had occasionally seen Yeats on the streets of Dublin. "Boyle had an insider's knowledge of Dublin personality, folklore and anecdote, and his idea of teaching 500 years of English literature was to race through Shakespeare and the rest in the first term and spend the remaining two terms on a close study of Yeats. No doubt I exaggerate, but that's how it seems in retrospect." Recalling his excitment about reaching the page that contained 'Sailing to Byzantium' is enough to make readers of the Dublin Review rush to re-read it. Also evoked are Mahon's Trinity days, attending lectures by Alec Reid, founder of the literary magazine, Icarus, who often conducted informal tutorials in O'Neill's bar on Suffolk Street or had students out to his home in Ballybrack where he and his wife, Beatrice, served special "tea" (bottles of stout). One wonders if in these Points-beset times today's third-level students have such fun as is evoked on these pages. The magazine's current issue also has Michael Hofmann on translating Joseph Roth and Seamus Heaney on the making of a poem.
The Dublin Review No 8, Autumn 2002
Monaco salutes McCann
Irish writer Colum McCann is no stranger to shortlists of prestigious literary awards. He's figured on that for The Irish Times, the Booker, and the IMPAC prizes. Now he's won a big one - The Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Award. Tonight, Prince Albert of Monaco will garland McCann with the award, at a gala dinner at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo. The €15,000 prize has been created to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the death of Princess Grace. McCann already has a number of awards under his belt - a Rooney prize and two Hennessy awards. The selection committee that picked McCann, author of the short story collection, Fishing the Sloe Black River, and the novels Songdogs and This Side of Brightness, included Seamus Heaney and A.W.B Vincent, who founded the Ireland Fund of Monaco in the late 1990s. It will obviously be all go in Monaco this weekend as a contingent of Irish book folk are simultaneously hitting the principality for a symposium organised by the Princess Grace Irish Library. They'll be mulling over all manner of matters associated with the Irish book world in the appropriate setting of the library, which houses many of the rare editions of Irish books collected by Princess Grace after her state visit to Ireland in 1961.