The World of Penelope Unbound

Nora Barnacle’s ‘buried life’

by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment on Nora Barnacle’s ‘buried life’

Joyceans remember Joyce’s birthday on February 2, and the world celebrates Bloomsday on June 16. But despite her role as partner, wife and muse to Joyce, Nora Barnacle’s milestones rarely get a mention, even though she served as a model for some of Joyce’s most memorable creations – Molly Bloom in Ulysses, Bertha Rowan in Exiles and Gretta Conroy in “The Dead”. March is Nora’s month. She was born 140 years ago on March 21, 1884, in the maternity ward of the Galway Workhouse.

Even though my recently published novel, Penelope Unbound, is a counterfactual narrative, I document Nora’s early years faithfully in the opening chapters of the book. It is only after the eloping couple arrive in Trieste in 1904, that I depart from the known truths.

At that stage, I step in and play Goddess, separating the lovers and forcing them to live their lives apart. In the novel, Nora stays in Trieste, works as a domestic servant and finds a new relationship. Joyce moves on to Fiume where he teaches English at a naval academy. He returns to Trieste in 1907, but by that time, Nora has migrated back to Dublin and has become the owner of Finn’s Hotel. Joyce marries Amalia Popper, one of his English language students, abandons his writing and becomes an opera singer.

As a result of these altered circumstances, the world around Nora and Joyce also changes. In this new reality, Ulysses is never written and Dubliners remains unpublished.

Even so, the guiding Joycean literary influence in Penelope Unbound are the stories in Dubliners.

Perhaps the most famous story from the collection is “The Dead” described by the New York Times on its centennial publication as “maybe the finest story in the English language”.

If there was ever proof needed how much of Nora’s life found its way into Joyce’s work, then it’s here.

The story depicts a married couple, Gabriel and Gretta Conroy, who are attending a party to mark the Epiphany (January 6, 1904) at the house of Gabriel’s aunts in a large house on Usher’s Island in Dublin. Gabriel is nervous about a speech he has to give later in the night – he’s afraid the guests will find his literary references ridiculous and pretentious. After the meal and the speech, there is music and in the story’s pivotal scene, a tenor sings “The Lass of Aughrim”. Gretta becomes transfixed by the song. Sensing her preoccupation, Gabriel enquires what is wrong and in an “outburst of tears” she tells him why the song has affected her so much.

When she was a young girl in Galway, she was romantically linked to a young man called Michael Furey. When he heard that she was leaving the city, he had stood in the pouring rain outside her window and had sung to her. She rushed downstairs to him and urged him to go home or he would get his death. “But he said he did not want to live.” At the time, he was already ill, and some time afterwards, he succumbed to his illness. “I think he died for me,” Gretta says.

The admission of his wife’s secret grief, about which he knew nothing, and the intensity of her feelings, both chills and haunts Gabriel. “He had never felt that himself towards any woman, but he knew such a feeling must be love.”

The story of Michael Furey chimes almost exactly with Nora Barnacle’s youthful biography.

Michael “Sonny” Bodkin, from Prospect Hill in the city, was Nora’s teenage sweetheart. She was 15 and Sonny was 18 and a student in University College Galway, when they met. According to Nora’s Galway biographer, Padraic O Laoi, she was very impressed by his “gentility and manliness” and became very attached to him..

The opportunities for courtship for teenagers were then very limited, according to O Laoi, so Nora would visit the Bodkin sweetshop at Prospect Hill and there “throw eyes” at Sonny as they “chatted and joked and passed small pleasantries”. But after only a year, Sonny was stricken with TB. He was sent to the County Infirmary but his medical treatment was not successful and he died there on February 11, 1900. He was buried in Rahoon Cemetery two miles north west of the city.

Sonny was not the only bereavement Nora had suffered. Her first crush, aged 13, was on another Michael – Michael Feeney, a neighbour boy she’d grown up with, who was a few years older. At 16, Feeney contracted typhus, developed pneumonia and died in the Galway Workhouse in 1897.

These early deaths had a profound effect on Nora. She met Joyce a mere four years after Sonny’s death, and she confided in him about it. It’s likely that she showed the him the shop at No. 2 Prospect Hill where she flirted with Sonny, when Joyce visited the city in 1909. And in 1912 on a second visit, she took him to Sonny’s grave.

She must have also told him about Michael Feeney. It appears that Joyce combined details from both of these experiences for the character of Michael Furey in “The Dead”.

But as Brenda Maddox’ s biography, Nora, notes: “It hardly matters where he got the facts for ‘The Dead’. Joyce rearranged and patterned his materials to suit his art and his ear.”

Sonny Bodkin was Nora’s “buried life, her past”, Joyce wrote.

That buried life was commemorated in Rahoon Cemetery earlier this year when President Michael D Higgins unveiled a plaque at the Bodkin vault to honour the real-life associations that informed Joyce’s fictional masterpiece. In doing so, the president said he was acknowledging “something incredibly important” – the influence of Nora Barnacle’s “sense of recall and her sense of embedded memory” on Joyce’s life and work.

Photograph: Nora Barnacle as a teenager in Galway c 1895-1900

The World of Penelope Unbound

Mr Barnacle – take your pick!

by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment on Mr Barnacle – take your pick!

In my recently published novel, Penelope Unbound, which splits James Joyce up from his wife, Norah Barnacle, and gives both of them an imagined life apart, I had to indulge in some literary matchmaking. My first task was to find a new wife for Joyce. I paired him off with Amalia Popper (see blog of October 10) a young woman he’d taught in Trieste, and for whom he held a romantic torch. His poetic fragment about unrequited love, Giacomo Joyce, was supposedly inspired by Amalia.

But that was only one half of the story. I also had to find a new romantic partner for Norah Barnacle. Somehow, I couldn’t imagine she’d be alone for long.

One of the fictional contenders for her hand was the Italian modernist writer and reluctant businessman, Italo Svevo, who, in real life, was a friend of Joyce’s (pictured together above). He came to Joyce for English lessons in Trieste in 1907.  As the friendship developed, Svevo (a pen-name ; his real name was Ettore Schmitz) admitted to Joyce his own literary ambitions. 

He’d written and self-published two novels, Una Vita (1893) and Senilità (1898), which had sunk without trace . The ignominy of this, and his burgeoning career as a businessman working for his wife’s paint manufacturing business, led to his abandoning his writing.

When Joyce read Svevo’s ignored early work, he proclaimed him a fine novelist, the equal of Anatole France. But he was too obscure a writer himself to be able to do much to aid his pupil’s literary efforts.

For his part, Svevo provided Joyce with lots of material for Ulysses. As Joycean scholar Terence Killeen notes, much of what Joyce wrote about Leopold Bloom’s Jewish background came from Svevo. “On the most basic level Joyce derived information about Jewish customs and perceptions from Schmitz (Svevo); he constantly bombarded the unusual Triestine businessman with queries about such matters. Schmitz, though he was not even formally a Jew by this stage, had experienced enough of that world as a child and a young man to be able to pass on a great deal of knowledge.

“There is also good reason to believe that elements of Bloom’s character derived from Schmitz. Bloom’s diffidence, his not entirely thoroughgoing cynicism, his gentleness, his reasonableness, the breadth of his sympathies, all seem to be characteristics that Schmitz shared.”

(Joyce also borrowed Svevo’s wife’s name, Livia, and her hair, for the Anna Livia of Finnegans Wake.)

However, after a gap of 25 years – described as “one of the longest sulks in literary history” – Svevo returned to writing and produced his masterpiece, La Coscienza di Zeno, (The Conscience of Zeno) in 1923 when he turned to Joyce again. This time, Joyce, living in Paris as a celebrated author after the publication of Ulysses, was much better placed to be of assistance. He helped to get Zeno published and turned the book into a literary success.

The Conscience of Zeno purports to be the journal of a man undergoing psychoanalysis, written at the behest of the analyst, and then published by the analyst to avenge the patient’s termination of his treatment.

Zeno Cosini, a Trieste businessman now in his late fifties, is a “hypochondriacal, neurotic, delightful, solipsistic, self-examining and self-serving bourgeois, a true blossom of the mal du siècle,” writes critic James Wood. ”The novel we are reading is supposed to constitute his memories.” 

Zeno recalls his attempts to give up smoking as well as his farcical attempts to find a wife. He goes through the four Malfenti sisters but ends up marrying the one he at first found the ugliest. He also describes his forays in business – Zeno is a terrible businessman who accidentally does very well.

“The entire novel must be read in the light of the comic paradox whereby Zeno thinks he is analysing himself while at the same time being certain that psychoanalysis lacks the means to analyse him. And given this paradox, what are his confessions for? ” writes Wood.

The novel, one of the first to challenge and mock psychoanalysis in the early 20th century, was an enormous success, thanks in no small part to Joyce’s promotion of it. Though perhaps not well known here, The Conscience of Zeno is considered a masterpiece of Italian modernism.

But that’s just mere real life.

None of this happens in Penelope Unbound.  Instead, Norah and Jim get parted; Joyce never meets Svevo. And it’s Norah Barnacle whom Svevo befriends. She ends up working in the Svevo household, first as a servant then as a governess to Svevo’s daughter Laetitia. 

And then? Well, you’ll have to read the book to find out.

The Conscience of Zeno was published 100 years ago this year; Italo Svevo was born on this day in 1861.

Photographs: (Top) James Joyce and Italo Svevo. (Below right): Norah Barnacle, a1926 portrait by American photographer Berenice Abbott.

The World of Penelope Unbound

Finding a new wife for James Joyce

by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment on Finding a new wife for James Joyce

Penelope Unbound, my new novel from Banshee Press, imagines an alternative life for Nora Barnacle without James Joyce. One of the challenges of writing speculative fiction is dealing with the domino effect. In other words, once you start tinkering with one life, all the other lives contiguous to it start to change too.

In the universe of Penelope Unbound, Joyce’s Ulysses has not been written, Dubliners has not been published and James Joyce and Nora Barnacle are no longer together.

As author of this universe, it was my job to find new partners for both of them. It’d be a spoiler to write at any great length here about Nora’s new partner, apart from revealing that he, like many of the characters in the novel, is a real person.

The other challenge was in finding a new wife for James Joyce. I chose Amalia Popper – pictured above – who was one of his many female English pupils in Trieste and who is generally considered to be the fantasy love object in Joyce’s short narrative fragment Giacomo Joyce, posthumously published in 1968.

Amalia Popper was born in 1891 into a prominent Jewish family in Trieste. Her father was a businessman, her mother a painter. Hers was a privileged upbringing, with a first-rate education supplemented by private tuition in English with Joyce. When she met Joyce first in 1908 she would have been 17 and in the last year of high school, although she studied with him again for entrance exams to university.

In Giacomo Joyce Joyce describes in elliptical terms his infatuation with the unnamed “lady of letters” who is pale of cheek, with ” long lewdly leering lips”, and eyes that “dim the breaking East”. He notes her “cobweb handwriting, traced long and fine with quiet disdain and resignation, a young person of quality”.

He is painfully uncertain in her presence, outside of the teacher/pupil scenario.

“I rush out of the tobacco shop and call her name. She turns and halts to hear my jumbled words of lessons, hours, lessons, hours: and slowly her pale cheeks are flushed with a kindling opal light.”

As the narrative continues his voyeuristic desire quickens. “I hold the websoft edges of her gown and drawing them out to hook them I see through the opening of the black veil her lithe body sheathed in an orange shift. It slips its ribbons of its moorings at her shoulders and falls slowly; a lithe smooth naked body shimmering with silvery scales.”

But the infatuation remains just that, and his feelings undeclared. At the end of Giacomo Joyce, the mystery” lady”, wearing a red hat and carrying a furled umbrella, walks out of his life.

But that was not the end of Amalia Popper’s association with Joyce.

In 1929, over 20 years later, she became Joyce’s first Italian biographer and translator. Joyce’s brother Stanislaus had commissioned her to write an essay but she opted instead to translate some of the stories in Dubliners – “Araby”, “A Little Cloud”, “Counterparts”, “Eveline”, and “The Dead.”  Joyce revised and corrected the translated texts and in 1935 they were collected in Araby (pictured above) accompanied by a brief, authorised and, by all accounts, rather anodyne biography.

Given that Giacomo Joyce is a catalogue of the pains of infatuation, it’s ironic that Araby was chosen as the title of the translations. (It’s not clear whether Popper chose the title or Joyce insisted on it.) Either way, the story from Dubliners is perhaps Joyce’s most heart-rending take on the theme of unrequited love – a young boy who undertakes an odyssey to buy a trophy for the girl he’s afraid to approach.

If it was Amalia who titled it Araby, perhaps, subliminally, she knew of Joyce’s feelings and this was a nod to them. But that’s in the realm of speculation and I’ve done enough of that already!

However, if you were looking for the perfect literary wife for Joyce, Amalia Popper would have been a prime candidate. She was an intellectual, a scholar of Latin and Greek, with an abiding interest in literature. Conversely, Nora Barnacle left school at 12, never read Joyce’s work and in the early days of their association felt he’d have been much better off giving up writing and taking up singing as a career. But then, marriages are rarely made with such qualifications in mind.

Amalia Popper left Trieste in 1910 to study at the University of Florence. She subsequently married Michele Risolo, who was to become prominent as the editor of the Fascist newspaper Il Popolo di Trieste, and who was disapproving of the link between his wife and Joyce, even as she was translating his work. When Giacomo Joyce was published a year after her death, he consistently denied his wife was the mysterious woman described in it.

Amalia continued working as a translator, teacher and newspaper critic until her death in Florence after a long illness in 1967.

Penelope Unbound will be launched in Cork on Thursday October 12 at Waterstones @ 7pm, and in Dublin on Tuesday October 17 at Hodges Figgis @ 6pm.

News and Events

Nora with an H

by Mary Morrissy1 Comment on Nora with an H

With only a month to go to publication date (October 5), I’m in author’s limbo. Penelope Unbound is out of my hands but not quite born yet. However, I do know what the cover looks like – some very clever graphics from Anna Morrison – and some great endorsements from fellow writers – thanks to Jan Carson, Kevin Power, Lisa Harding and Nuala O’Connor. There’s now nothing to do but wait until it’s launched.

The novel from Banshee Press is about Norah Barnacle. Just her. Not James Joyce, but as you can see from the cover, it’s impossible to escape his presence in the novel. It’s impossible to escape his presence, full stop! Even so, Penelope Unbound is a speculative fiction which imagines a life for Norah Barnacle without James Joyce.

It’s a “what” if tale. In it, I play the Goddess and split the pair up just after they arrive in Trieste in 1904. Joyce left Norah at the railway station when he went off to scare up funds and accommodation leaving her to guard the luggage. She waited the best part of a day for him to come back. In real life, she waited, but in Penelope Unbound she doesn’t.

I give Norah a completely different life without Joyce, although I do grant them a reunion – in Dublin 11 years later – but you’ll have to buy the book to see how that goes.

Eagle-eyed readers (especially all my old sub-editor pals out there) may notice that “my” Norah Barnacle has an H at the end of her name. This is not just a fictional device to emphasise the speculative nature of the book. In fact, according to Brenda Maddox’s biography, Nora, she was christened Norah, and before she met Joyce, that is how she spelled her name. It was he who insisted she change it – perhaps in deference to his literary hero Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House?

So I unwind the clock and stick with the spelling she used as a young woman in Galway and the early part of her stay in Dublin. In her early letters to Joyce, she still signs herself Norah, but at some stage in 1904 she becomes Nora, perhaps when she became Jim’s (as she called him. )

While society demanded that women relinquish their family name on marriage for centuries, being asked to alter or change your first name is something different because it is so tied up with your singular identity. In this case, it was only a different spelling, but it created a before and after in Norah/Nora Barnacle’s life. This may very well reflect the truth of their situation – Norah and Joyce’s meeting certainly changed both of their lives.

But by insisting she change her name, Joyce became the “author” of her new identity as Nora.

And that’s the one we’re still using 119 years later.

Penelope Unbound is published by Banshee Press, October 5, 2023.

History

A scientific refusal that began in Cork

by Mary MorrissyLeave a Comment on A scientific refusal that began in Cork

Artificial Intelligence, like climate change, is one of those topics that keeps on bubbling to the surface of the news agenda and then subsiding again. Perhaps because, as T.S. Eliot noted in “Burnt Norton,” in the Four Quartets – “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” ( Interestingly, when I scoured the Internet for that quote it was ChatGBT that supplied the source.) The latest turn in the AI public debate came in May when Professor Geoffrey Hinton (75), above, resigned from his position as Vice-President and Engineering Fellow at Google, claiming he’d changed his mind about the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence. 

“I’m sounding the alarms, saying we have to worry about this,” he told an MIT hosted digital conference shortly after announcing his resignation. Although Dr Hinton has long believed that computer models weren’t as powerful as the human brain, he now fears they are already outperforming humans.  

“Whenever one [model] learns anything, all the others know it,” Hinton said. “People can’t do that. If I learn a whole lot of stuff about quantum mechanics and I want you to know all that stuff about quantum mechanics, it’s a long, painful process of getting you to understand it.”

AI can also process vast quantities of data — much more than a single person can.  “AI models can detect trends in data that aren’t otherwise visible to a person — just like a doctor who had seen 100 million patients would notice more trends and have more insights than a doctor who had seen only a thousand. “ 

But in the wrong hands, Hinton sees artificial intelligence as an “existential threat. ”I think it’s quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.”

The rational answer might be to stop developing AI further but  Hinton says this is naive and unlikely. “If you’re going to live in a capitalist system, you can’t stop Google [from] competing with Microsoft.”

What makes Hinton’s U-turn so troubling is that he’s a deep learning pioneer who shared a Turing Award (the equivalent of a Nobel in the field of computer science) in 2018 for his research on neural networks.

He is colloquially known as a “godfather of AI”. Which is ironic because he’s a direct link to the 19th century mathematical logician George Boole (1815-1864), whose research earned him the moniker the “father of computer science”. Boole was Geoffrey Hinton’s great-great-grandfather.

An untutored genius, Boole believed that logical relations could be expressed in symbolic form. This idea would later grow into his major contribution to science: to explain the process of human thought in precise mathematical terms. Boole’s symbolic logic proved eminently suitable for the design of modern computers.

Boole was the first  professor of mathematics at Queen’s College, now University College Cork. He was married to Mary Everest (1832–1916), a niece of geographer and British Surveyor General of India, Sir George Everest (after whom the mountain was named). Mary was a self-taught mathematician and educationalist. The couple lived in Cork until Boole’s death in 1864 and their five daughters were all born in Ireland.

To say they were a brilliant and accomplished family is an understatement.

The eldest daughter Mary Ellen Boole married Charles Howard Hinton (great grandfather of Geoffrey Hinton) in London in April 1880. A mathematician and writer of science fiction, he pursued research in visualising the geometry of higher dimensions. Mary Ellen lectured in and wrote poetry and was an early advocate of voluntary euthanasia. A year after the sudden death of her husband in 1907, she committed suicide. Some time before she had written, “Life is something that has within it the privilege of ending when we choose. When life becomes a burden it is everybody’s right to exercise that privilege.” 

Her sister Margaret Boole studied painting and was the mother of the renowned Cambridge physicist and mathematician Geoffrey Ingram Taylor, who led research in fluid mechanics and the quantum theory of radiation. 

Alicia Boole Stott was the third of the five daughters, born in 1860. After her father’s death, the family moved to London but Alicia remained with relatives in Cork for a further seven years. Despite having no formal education in mathematics, she developed an interest in four-dimensional geometry through her brother-law-Charles Hinton. From the age of seventeen until her death, she made several important discoveries in this area. She learned her mathematics at her mother’s knee and worked alone on her geometric pursuits. But in 1895, she began a collaboration with Dutch professor Peiter Schoute, who helped to publish some of her work.

Another sister, Lucy Everest Boole, was a lecturer in chemistry at the London School of Medicine for Women and the first woman elected a Fellow of the Institute of Chemistry. She was the first female co-author to have a paper read before the London Pharmaceutical Society. She died prematurely in 1904 aged 42.

The youngest Boole sister, Ethel, Voynich (b.1864) became a revolutionary and activist. She travelled in Russia (1887–9), giving music lessons in St Petersburg, associating with families of political prisoners, and rendering medical assistance to the poor suffering under Russia’s tsarist rule. She also composed music and wrote four novels. The first of these, The Gadfly (1897) was an immediate international success and was made into a film in the Soviet Union with music by Dmitri Shostakovich.

The creative/inventive gene continued through the generations of the Boole family.

Leonard Boole, Alicia’s son, invented a portable X-ray machine, an artificial pneumothorax apparatus, and a system of navigation based on spherical geometry. He was also a medical doctor, a pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis. 

George and Mary Boole’s great-grandchildren include Howard Everest Hinton, a distinguished entomologist; William Hinton, a Marxist writer; and Joan Hinton, a nuclear physicist and one of the few women scientists involved in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos. The devastating consequences of the bombing of Hiroshima converted her into an outspoken pacifist. In 1948 she gave up physics and went to live in Maoist China.  (Interestingly, neither Joan Hinton nor any of the other female scientists feature in Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film Oppenheimer.)

Geoffrey Hinton belongs to the next generation of scientific explorers in the family, now turned refusenik.

George Boole’s biographer, Prof Desmond MacHale, has written that Boole’s name will live on as long as digital computers continue to operate. Boole would have been delighted, MacHale notes, if he’d known how all modern communication – whether of data, text or images – comprises strings of the Boolean symbols 0 and 1.

But would his delight have extended to AI?

Or would he have sided with his great-great-grandson, Geoffrey Hinton, who has voted on AI with his feet.

Photograph: Geoffrey Hinton. http://www.cs.toronto.edu

History

Bossing the Nightshift

by Mary Morrissy6 Comments on Bossing the Nightshift

Cover versions get a bad press. They’re rarely as good as the originals, or the originals as you remember them. They often try too hard to be tricksyly different. But one exception to the rule for me has been Bruce Springsteen’s version of “Nightshift” from his latest album. Only the Strong Survive is Springsteen’s 21st studio album and is made up of fifteen “soul music greats’. It came out late last year and, though I’m not a die hard fan, I’ve been revisiting this track for old times’ sake.

The Boss’s take on “Nightshift”, which was the last gasp of funk/soul from 70/80s band The Commodores, doesn’t mess with a good thing, although his chastened 73-year-old voice gives what was a smooth R & B inspired track, a more brawny melancholy. https://youtu.be/GsTKEQzLkmw

Or is that just me?

The lyrics of “Nightshift” (released in 1985) celebrate soul greats Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, who had both died the previous year. The song imagines them reunited, gigging together on a celestial nightshift. 

Gonna be a long night
It’s gonna be alright, on the nightshift
You found another home
I know you’re not alone, on the nightshift

Back in the 80s, when The Commodores were charting with the track (straight after Lionel Ritchie had left them for a solo career), I was literally on the night shift, working as a sub-editor in Dublin newspapers. There was nothing even vaguely celestial about the 8pm–4am shift. 

Politically and historically, these were dark years. As journalists, we maintained ghoulish vigils for hunger-strikers, warned of hurricanes and snowfalls that came in the wee small hours, charted the late-night casualties of sectarianism, war, air travel, cars and drink. Our job was to sit in deserted newsrooms waiting for the bad news to come.

On our nightshift, you were alone.

There was plenty of time to consider your debt, your broken heart, your unfulfilled ambitions, as you sat awake in the graveyard hours keeping watch while the normal world slept. And to wonder what the hell you were doing with your life. A time designed for existential angst.

Coincidentally, in the past week, two former colleagues of mine from The Irish Times and this era – Noel McFarlane and Liam McAuley – who’d have done their fair share of these shifts in their time, have passed on to the great subs desk in the sky. It gives added poignancy to the Springsteen track, and the memories it evokes. At our age, nostalgia has a treacherous undertow – the loss of companions who shared those times with you.

Despite the fact that it’s an elegy, “Nightshift” is paradoxically, a bouncy number. It has a danceable rhythm and a breezy, feel-good, optimistic mood – essentially a kind of “we’ll meet again” vibe.  So, I’m hoping. . . the promise of an afterlife is one of the last vestiges of religious belief to die.

Over 35 years on, I’m living with the legacy of those long ago night shifts. I still keep ridiculous hours. Late to bed, late to rise.  

But as Elaine Stretch memorably sang in the gnarly Stephen Sondheim classic – ” I’m still here!” And in the words of another classic from the now forgotten 1960s musical, The Roar of the Greasepaint, the Smell of the Crowd – “And I’m feeling good.” (Covered by Nina Simone, Michale Bublé, George Michael and a raft of others.)

Fiction

Cooking the books

by Mary Morrissy2 Comments on Cooking the books

Even with the enormous growth of recipes online, there’s nothing quite like the heft of a cook book to anchor you in the kitchen. The stains of previous attempts – failed and successful – may shrivel and wrinkle the paper or stick the pages together – but they are testament to the fact that you have a culinary history. (That said, I, for one, am grateful for Yotam Ottolenghi’s cook books with their padded-cell covers and sheeny, stain-resistant pages, which acknowledge that preparation and cooking is a messy job. ) But cookbooks are not mere functional how-to guides; they’re emotional journeys.

When clearing my mother’s house after her death, the hardest items to jettison were her cookbooks. She was a great cook and baker, though I suspect her skills hadn’t come to her naturally. She went to classes in the School of Catering in Cathal Brugha Street as a young wife and her bible was All in the Cooking, a workaday volume of recipes for everyday life full of family stalwarts – lots of dripping, as I recall – on which a whole generation of 50s kids were raised. Her edition was falling apart – a sure sign that it had been pressed into service – and she had bound it in corrugated cardboard covers to keep it together. It was stuffed-full of transcribed rogue recipes, written in her own hand, as well as clippings from newspapers and magazines.

There was also a couple of big, bold, full-colour productions among her cook books, probably gifts. These were essentially coffee-table books from a time when cooking transitioned from being a practical virtue to a spectator sport, and colour printing came into its own. One I recall is The Hamlyn All Colour Cook Book, which, when I went searching for it online, I discovered was authored by Mary Berry. Interesting how the notion of the celebrity chef hadn’t quite happened in 1970 when this book was published. The Hamlyn volume is an illustrated social history of its time. It features a compendium of aspirant recipes for the upwardly mobile. Black Forest Gateau, Swiss Fondue, Chilli Con Carne, Prawns in Marie Rose sauce – dishes that are now being studiously deconstructed in an ironic way by the master chefs of today.

One book I came across in my mother’s things that I wasn’t familiar with was Full and Plenty by Maura Laverty. As I leafed through it I was amazed to discover that long before the Nigel Slaters and Nigella Lawsons of this world, Irish author Maura Laverty had written a cross-genre cookbook.

Hardly surprising since Laverty (1907-1966) was first and foremost a fiction writer, and creator of Ireland’s first TV soap – Tolka Row – in the 1960s. Born in Rathangan, Co Kildare, Laverty, one of nine children, led a colourful, if sometimes financially precarious life. Her father was a farmer on a two-hundred-acre holding, but his gambling ruined the family financially. He then set up a drapery business, but this enterprise also failed. Eventually, he died, and his widow turned to dressmaking to support herself and her children.

Maura moved to Spain as a teenager and acted as governess and later secretary to Princess Bibesco, a rich socialite and writer, who was born as Elizabeth Asquith, daughter of British prime minister Herbert Asquith. She subsequently became a foreign correspondent in Madrid, and wrote for one of the city’s newspapers, El Debate. She returned to Ireland in 1928 to marry James (Seamus) Laverty and in 1937 joined 2RN, the forerunner of RTE. She later became head of women’s and children’s programmes and substituted as the station’s “agony aunt”. When her husband ran into financial difficulties, she supported the family of three children, and became the breadwinner when the marriage broke down.

Writer Nuala O’Faolain recalls meeting her in the 50s. “Maura was in the world of Ireland and Dublin… she knew how to earn good money .She got me my first ever professional job, passing on a commission to research authentic recipes for the new Bunratty Banquet. . .but I used to feel loneliness coming from her. Three children were growing up on the proceeds of her hard work. Where was her husband ? A husband was never mentioned.”

Despite her acumen with money, Laverty never lost the feeling of financial hazard.  In 1946 she wrote:“Someone asked me the other day if I were getting a touch of arthritis in the first and second fingers of my right hand. I’m not, it’s just that my fingers are getting that way from having to keep them crossed all the time.” 

Her best known novels are closely autobiographical. Her debut, Never No More (1942) is based on her childhood recollections of life with her grandmother. It was well received by critics and came with an enthusiastic preface from Sean OFaolain. She followed it with Alone We Embark (1943), a novel about marital infidelity, which, although temporarily banned by the Irish censor (not apparently on moral grounds but for its depiction of harsh living conditions) won the Irish Women’s Writer’s Award. Her third novel, No More than Human, another semi-autobiographical work set in Spain, was published in 1944.

According to the Dictionary of Irish Biography, she may have drawn on her impressions of Dublin’s poor during a period living in the Fitzwilliam Lane area for her final novel, Lift Up Your Gates (1946), the story of Chrissie, a young girl growing up in the slums. However, her biographer Seamus Kelly, suggests that she might have also relied on personal experience. It’s believed that she was sent, aged 9, to live with a childless couple for two years, in Hardwicke Street in Dublin’s north inner city, which would have placed her there in the middle of the Easter Rising.

Laverty also wrote numerous children’s stories and a collection of her fairy tales was published posthumously in 1995. On top of that, she wrote three other cookbooks – Flour Economy (1941), commissioned by the government to teach housewives how to cope with wartime rationing. Kind Cooking (1946) – illustrated by artist Louis le Brocquy – and Feasting Galore (1952).

But the authorial voice in Full and Plenty (1960) is not of a woman of letters leaning on her prodigious reputation. In the introduction she writes – “The preparation of food has always been to me what literature or music or painting is to others” – as if she’d never written herself.

As food and design historian Rhona Richman Keneally remarks, the book was “part home economics manual, part fiction, part creative memoir, part assortment of historical and folk tales”.

“Unlike Laverty’s novels, which were banned or decried because they approached controversial subjects in a graphic way, her cookbooks could be successfully subversive in part because of their genre: they could fly under the radar, seemingly innocuous as mere accumulations of cooking instructions,” Kenneally adds.

The book showcases Laverty’s accomplishments as an author and playwright, but it never talks down to its audience. “Cooking,” she tells her readers, ” is the poetry of housework.”

Full and Plenty is set in the fictional Ballyderrig where the “author” of the cookbook, or the persona she adopts, lives, so that we see the recipes as belonging to characters she writes about. Each section is introduced with a short story in a playful mood, in which the featured food plays a part, sometimes fleetingly, sometimes centrally. In the “Bread” section, Mrs Feeney is in a tizzy because her 35-year-old son has got engaged and is inviting the fiancee to tea. Mrs Feeney can’t bake a cake to save her life, though she’s a champion bread-maker. However, the prospective daughter-in-law Anna is a “college-trained cook with classy notions about dressed-up dishes.” Mrs Feeney drafts in her controlling neighbour Mrs Donnelly to make the fancies, but when the “scornful college-trained cook” arrives, it’s Mrs Feeney’s soda bread she admires, while passing over Mrs Donnelly’s iced sponge and marble cake.

“I always think it’s in the cooking of plain food that a real cook proves herself,” Anna says to the assembled company, which includes Mrs Donnelly. “Any child could make a sweet cake that will pass. . . But there’s no way of disguising badly-made soda bread.”

The match with the mother-in-law is assured and Mrs Donnelly slinks away unnoticed.

“Fish” features a conscientious fishery board official who’s seduced into eating a poached salmon (poached in both sense of the word) in the home of his arch-enemy, Barney Malone, the local who’s been thieving fish from the local river. “Vegetables and Salads” tells the story of a middle-aged landlady Lottie Fenton, who won’t serve onions to her new lodger, Hugh Doherty, because they have painful associations; her first love dumped her because of her oniony breath. (As an “uninstructed orphan”, Lottie didn’t know “that a glass of milk sipped slowly or a mouthful parsley chewed leisurely” will destroy all evidence of onion-eating.) But one day, while Lottie is at the dentist, Hugh breaks the taboo by cooking stuffed onions the way his mother did and is caught in the act. As with most of these tales, all ends well when Doherty, a 50-year-old man holding a torch for his landlady, overcomes the horrified reaction to the transgression. With an apron still tied around his ample middle, he strides masterfully across the kitchen, takes Lottie in his arms and declares his passion.

Statia Dunne nabs the local doctor with her famous stew in “Meats, Poultry and Game”.

“Canapés, Sandwiches and Toast” features Nan Clery, housekeeper to widowed seamstress Rose Brennan, who has to support a family of four on the proceeds of her dressmaking business. (A familiar figure for Laverty after her mother’s experience – and then her own.) Tied together by circumstances, the two women form a partnership that lasts 30 years and is closer to a happy marriage than a mistress/servant relationship. It was a configuration not uncommon in the Ireland of the time, an extended and well-functioning female household. “She (Nan)helped to lay out Tessie, the youngest, when she died of meningitis. She packed Lena’s trunk for her when she went off to be a nun. She knitted six pairs of socks for Paddy to take to Africa when he got his job in the gold fields. And she helped to dress Clare the morning she married the Dublin insurance man.”

This piece, written in the first person recounting the story of these two women, assures the reader that most of the recipes that follow are from Nan Clery’s repertoire. As in her other writing, Maura Laverty drew very closely from life, while at the same time maintaining the “fictional” world she’d created in Full and Plenty.

“A close reading of the language and storylines in these works highlights the remarkable abilities and positive impact that Irish women could and did have in the domestic sphere and beyond,” Rhona Richman Keneally observes. “Evident also is the resourcefulness with which women could and did adapt to evolving economic circumstances and incursions of modernity, and the sense of accomplishment that could come with housework – and especially cooking – if contemplated as a means of empowerment not oppression, and as a vocation unequivocally warranting deep appreciation and respect.”

Interestingly, my mother’s copy of Full and Plenty is absolutely pristine. It doesn’t look like she ever used it. Maybe she just read the fictional and memoir bits? Maybe it was another unwanted gift?

I have yet to try any of the recipes. ( Statia Dunne’s doctor-winning stew would be good place to start, I think. ) But it has made me curious about this gifted, versatile Irish writer, who subverted form to become an early pioneer of food fiction.

Above: Maura Laverty in 1963. Photograph: Courtesy of RTE Archive.

Art

Sheares Street, here I come!

by Mary Morrissy7 Comments on Sheares Street, here I come!

I am in the midst of a fresh round of sending out a newly-minted manuscript to the few publishers who will accept unsolicited work. This is the most joyless part of the writing process, particularly if, like me, you don’t have literary representation i.e. an agent. In these beleaguered times, it’s as hard – if not harder – to get an agent than it is to find a publisher. And you discover there’s a reason why being a literary agent is a full-time job. It is a full-time job.

The agent-less writer loses a great deal of writing time juggling with the bureaucratic demands of the literary world, trying to decipher and comply with all the different requirements of publishing houses running open submissions. Full manuscript or excerpt? Long extract, short extract? Tell-all synopsis with blow-by-blow account of the action, or bare bones of the plot? Reveal spoilers? Or not? Full pitch document, or one-line elevator pitch?

It’s a whole new language to learn.

And if you’re applying to agents, it seems that often they’re asking you to do their job for them. Who is your reader, how would you market your book, what other books is it like? (None, you hope.) Didn’t I write the bloody thing, you want to shout, isn’t that enough? But the answer is no.

And this is just the sending-out stage. At the other end of the process is rejection. And so dire is the state of affairs that you get to value a rejection because it means someone has actually read the MS. In the main, the more frequent response is zilch, nada, a deafening silence. (There are honourable exceptions to this trend, but they are few and far between.)

Is there any other business that treats its clients, its “producers”, so very badly? I doubt it.

But I didn’t mean to launch into such a full-throated howl about the woes of the literary world. Because in the midst of this dismal process, I got some good news. Unsolicited good news of an artistic nature.

How rare is that?

The only surprise is that it had nothing to do with writing.

Early in summer 2021, Cork City Council ran a community-based art competition encouraging people to explore the South Parish and Marsh areas of the city. The idea was to invite the public to submit drawings that captured the area’s unique architectural features. Eight winning drawings were selected to be used as permanent markers for a guided route and these were printed on handmade tiles made  by ceramicist Bernadette Tuite. – https://bernadettetuite.com

The council arranged walking tours of the area in advance of the competition and I went on one of these and decided to throw my hat into the ring. I chose to draw a decorative finial on the front gable roof of the Mardyke Bar on Sheares Street – a small winged feature that most casual visitors might miss. You have to look up to see it!

In my youth I did some drawing and painting, but in the intervening years I’ve spent more time looking at art rather than doing it. My design was chosen as one of the winners, and now it sits – at knee height – on the corner of Anne Street, with a bar code you can use to find out more information about the building and the area. The chosen route has eight stops and celebrates the smaller details of historic urban architecture including wrought iron railings, sash windows, intricate stone carvings and fanlights. (Other tile markers are placed at Nano Nagle Place, James Street, the Red Abbey, Wandersford Quay, the Mercy Hospital among other locations.) For further information go to Marsh and South Parish Orienteering Project on http://www.corkcity.ie

Although I’ve always enjoyed the process of writing, I realise, as I get older, how exhausting the associated activities around it are. I’ve been writing for 48 years, and published for 36 albeit with some long gaps between books, so this is not a hobby, not a career (if you’re to measure a career by the level of monetary award), it’s really closer to a life investment. And like any investment, you’re eternally vigilant about it. There is a constant pacing of yourself and your creative energy against the march of time and the march of fashion in the book business. And business it is.

Doing my little pen and ink sketch was so simple, so uncomplicated in comparison, divorced as it was from all the sensations of extreme application, striving and anxiety I’m so used to in writing. There was no sense of pressure. I did it with no expectation at all.

And the upshot of it is that I now find myself immortalised on a ceramic tile on the corner of Sheares Street and Anne Street in Cork – not bad for a blow-in, and a blow-in from Dublin at that!

My place is assured, in case I never get a blue plaque for the old writing.

History

Janis Ian and the Rose of Tralee

by Mary Morrissy6 Comments on Janis Ian and the Rose of Tralee

It was the summer 1977. I had just moved into my first flat – a tiny bed-sit, which took up the back reception room of a small terraced house in Tralee. Two elderly sisters lived there (when I say elderly, that’s the perception of my 20-year-old self – they were probably the age I am now!) Their hair was set in iron perms and they wore blue nylon housecoats to spare their clothes. We shared an entrance hallway and a bathroom; they shared an overweening interest in my social life. Under the house rules, gentleman visitors were expressly forbidden. And if you managed to smuggle one in, there wasn’t much hope of anything happening given the monastic single bed, the scanty availability of contraceptives, and, I was sure, the presence of one of the sisters with an ear trumpet to the wall.

I don’t know if the sisters ever got to grips with my erratic schedule – I was a cub reporter with the local newspaper so I kept uneven hours – but since they were creatures of habit, I soon learned their patterns and knew the evenings when the coast was clear. I made the most of it.

Not that the most was very much – it mainly consisted of playing records at young men. My sound bible of that year was Janis Ian’s “Between the Lines”. Everything about this album spoke to me, the complicated, clever lyrics, its poignant mood, Ian’s soulful, melancholy voice and, it has to be said, its air of romantically grandiose self-pity. That was absolutely fine by me; that was where I was at.

I remember playing the signature track from that album, the Grammy-winning “At Seventeen” to one suitor I was particularly keen on, who blithely dismissed it as juvenile and glib. I was quietly outraged. Little did he know – this was a test and he had failed gloriously. If you didn’t like Janis Ian, I didn’t like you.

What made his verdict more shocking was that very few people of my acquaintance (particularly of the female variety) actively disliked “At Seventeen”. If anything, it attracted too much identification.

It’s a song that voices the feelings of teenage wallflowers, ugly ducklings with acne who are oppressed by popularity politics at school, whose names are “never called when choosing sides at basketball”, who have to invent lovers on the phone to make up for the lack of action in the romance department. Trouble was even tall, thin, blonde, sporty girls who had oodles of boyfriends and no shortage of invitations thought of “At Seventeen” as their song and they would sing mournfully along when it came on the radio.

It was a case of “At Seventeen” – c’est moi .

They seemed to miss the irony that girls like them – the “rich-relationed home town queens who marry into what they need” – were Janis Ian’s target, not her audience.

Over the years, I’ve been a devoted follower of Ian’s – though, I must admit, that for the suitable suitor test, I moved on to “Rumours” by Fleetwood Mac and “Blue” by Joni Mitchell.

Throughout the 70s and into the 80s, however, I bought and savoured and sang along with all of Ian’s oeuvre – “Stars”, “Aftertones”, “Night Rains”, “Restless Eyes” and my own favourite, the concept album “Miracle Row”. Concept album – doesn’t that date both Janis and me! I saw her live twice – once in Vicar Street, Dublin, in the 90s and again in the early Noughties in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where I happened to find myself teaching.

The daughter of radicals – her parents were on a FBI watchlist – Janis Ian was a precocious talent. She wrote her first song at 12 and signed her first recording contract at 13. As a teenager, she partied with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin – and survived! Both of them, heavily addicted, warned her off drugs and steered her away from dealers. She was friends with Nina Simone and James Baldwin, she did backing vocals for Leonard Cohen and James Brown.

Most people don’t class Ian as a protest singer, but her first album in 1965 (recorded when she was 14) featured “Society’s Child” about an inter-racial teen romance, which was considered so controversial that 22 record companies rejected it, and radio stations in the south of the US banned it from the airwaves. One radio station in Atlanta which included it on its playlist was burned to the ground and Ian was spat at on the street and heckled during performances. But it was championed by composer Leonard Bernstein and became a hit. Ella Fitzgerald dubbed her the “best young singer songwriter in America”.

She’s had two long breaks from recording, one after the breakdown of a violent first marriage, and again in the mid-90s, when she was defrauded by a business manager which meant there was no money for studio time and the proceeds of her live work were going to the IRS. But as she sings in the title track of her latest album, she’s still here.

It’s her first CD in 15 years, and she says it will be her last. Aged 71, she’s on a major tour of the US, after which she’ll devote herself to writing, but there will no more studio albums. For old times’ sake, I bought “The Light at the End of the Line” and although I’d lost track of her after “Breaking the Silence”, her “coming out” album, of 1992, I was delighted to find that although this is is a sparer, harsher sound than those lush, lyrical early albums, she still speaks to me.

This is a voice that has earned its melancholy, its bitter-sweetness and its anger. She hasn’t lost her edge. One of the tracks on the farewell album, “Resist”, a no-holds barred anthemic howl against misogyny, has been roundly boycotted by radio stations across the US for being too “sexual” and she’s been trolled and harangued on social media about it. Plus ca change.

Meanwhile, back in late summer of 1977, while I was quoting lines of hers at the suitors – “love was meant for beauty queens and high school girls with clear-skinned smiles who marry young and then retire,” my permed landladies were hosting a real-live beauty queen. It was the annual Rose of Tralee festival and one of the Rose contestants was staying in the house, chaperoned by one of the sisters. Chaperoning was a hands-on job, requiring strict supervision of the contestant and management of her social and moral diary, assisted by upright young men from good homes who acted as their escorts. (The language of “chaperones” and “escorts” makes it seem more like a Jane Austen novel than a 20th century beauty pageant.)

But the Rose of Tralee organisers were insistent the contest was not just a flesh parade, but a more wholesome enterprise. Inspired by a 19th century parlour song, contestants were required to embody the purity and innocence of the original Rose.

She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summer
Yet, ’twas not her beauty alone that won me
Oh no! ‘Twas the the truth in her eye ever beaming
That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee.

Imagine my surprise then when one night coming back to my bed-sit in the early hours, I came upon “our” Rose in the darkened hallway, in full ball gown regalia, creeping up the stairs, stilettos in one hand, leading her escort with the other. I was pretty sure she wasn’t going to be playing records for him.

The landladies were fast asleep; content that their chaperoning duties could be put to bed. I couldn’t believe my luck. Here was a juicy news story right on my doorstep; both the escort and the Rose would be drummed out of the competition for such licentious behaviour. But I suspected, given the importance of the festival to the local economy, that this was a story that might get buried. And I’d certainly get evicted if I spilled the beans about the transgression. So I opted for judicious silence.

There were tactical advantages to keeping it to myself. The secret could be used as ammunition in the future, I thought, if I was ever to be challenged on one of my gentleman callers.

Top: Janis Ian performing at the RDS , Dublin, in 1983 – Photograph: Kevin McMahon/Irish Times.
Above: Janis Ian today – Photograph: Peter Cunningham..
Art

She came so far for beauty!

by Mary Morrissy1 Comment on She came so far for beauty!

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As followers of this blog will know, I’ve been involved in mounting a retrospective exhibition of the works of Dublin painter and designer Una Watters (1918-65) – see unawattersartist.com, a site about Una that I curate. One of the first followers of that blog was my Australian friend, Helen Ferry, a painter herself, who became a fierce fan of Una’s work, as we searched for her “lost” paintings through the site with a view to setting up the retrospective exhibition – Una’s first in over 50 years.

That show – Una Watters: Into the Light – has attracted a wide variety of visitors, from Dublin – Finglas, in particular which features in many of the works – and Ballinasloe, Co Galway, where Una spent summers with her husband, the writer Eugene Watters (Eoghan O Tuairisc). But none of them are quite as far-flung as Helen, who decided she couldn’t miss the opportunity to see the exhibition “live”. She arrived in Ireland from Oz on St Patricks Day – right into the middle of the parade in Dublin, as it happens.

Although she missed the opening of the exhibition (March 10) she will be here for a reception to mark the final week of the show tonight – Wednesday, March 30 @ 7pm at the United Arts Club – where art historian Dr Roisin Kennedy (UCD) will give a short talk about Una’s work. All welcome!

Meanwhile, here is Helen with her favourite painting from Una’s retrospective, Girl Going by Trinity in the Rain ( 1959). Why does she like it? “It’s the driving rain,” she says. ” I can feel the texture and temperature of it and I feel I’m right under that umbrella.” And Helen, as an Australian, LOVES the rain. Even though she has just come from a deluge in Sydney!

You can see this and all the other works at Una Watters:Into the Light at the United Arts Club, 3 Upr Fitzwilliam St, Dublin 2. The exhibition continues until April 2.