Report, Report, Tribute, Report...
1.
Report 1
Yes - thank you for asking - doing very well now.
As all the world knows... I do not do Stiff Upper Lip. So, be glad you were not around.
Here in Yorkshire I have quietly recovered from eye surgery x 2. Turns out I have two eyes.
Reached the stage where I take the new eyes to the optician, to find out what they can do.
Reading glasses - what a marvellous invention...
2.
Report 2
The first book read with the new eyes
and the new glasses was...
Bew, Paul. 2016. Churchill and Ireland. Oxford University Press.
Not part of any great plan. That book just happened to be on top of the waiting pile of books.
It is there because Paul Bew's book is much cited in other works recently read - for example in Between Two Hells: The Irish Civil War, by Diarmaid Ferriter, 2021.
And Paul Bew has paused, to add a footnote to his own book, at the bottom of a fairly recent posting, September 4, 2023, on the Churchill Society web site...
'Confession
I have here a confession to make. I
think now I should have openly stated at the start of my book Churchill and
Ireland (Oxford, 2016) that both my parents, one a Belfast Protestant and the
other a Cork Catholic, were members of Churchill’s army in the Second World
War. They were both doctors—my father, Dr. Kenneth Bew, a lieutenant in the RAF
and my mother, Captain Mary “Paddy” Leahy in the Indian Medical Service, which
was then an integral part of the British army and something of an Irish
fiefdom. This is why I quite like the
underlying concept of Churchill’s draft 1934 film script for movie mogul
Alexander Korda, that the mixed-marriage tensions of an
Irish-Catholic/Protestant couple might be dissipated by a decision to join the
British army.
More profoundly, as the decision of both
my Irish parents to support the British war effort was the sine qua non of my
existence, I have never been able to suppress my lack of enthusiasm for Irish
neutrality in the war against Hitler. Perhaps as a consequence I have never
been able to admire the policy of Irish neutrality. I can accept, of course,
that, given the historic legacy of Anglo-Irish bitterness and tension, it may
well have been politically impossible to bring Ireland into the war against the
Nazis, even after the Americans joined in...'
Paul Bew's 'Confession' is interesting and important - and these issues I have explored in depth elsewhere. But I am not sure that it adds much to the robust and readable book that is Bew, Churchill and Ireland... It certainly does not detract from it.
(His note does add to the long list of novels and dramas about the archipelagic experience that find resolution in mystic marriage...)
3.
Tribute to Patrick Maume...
What strikes me now, about Bew, Churchill and Ireland, is the Dedication...
'To Patrick Maume
who has revolutionized the art of Irish
biography'
And Paul Bew's Acknowledgements, p vii, begins, 'I owe a very great debt to Patrick Maume...' his 'scholarly sympathy for all shades of Irish life...' 'his wise conversation...'
We can quarrel with terms. The art of Irish biography. The science of Irish biography. The traditions of Irish biography.
Our traditions can be combative, in complex ways. It is rare for a writer to write a biography of someone they despise, and to understand our traditions we need first of all to understand the uses of hagiography. And then, let combat commence. But I have said enough about that elsewhere.
Our thanks to Paul Bew for giving us this tribute to the work of Patrick Maume.
Patrick Maume's approach is, indeed, scholarly, patient, kindly, non-judgemental. But is not afraid to make... assessments. His approach is not insular - Patrick Maume's knowledge of networks within Ireland is extraordinary, of family, friendships and enmities, influences. But he is always aware that these networks stretch beyond Ireland - there is always, as we say nowadays, a diasporic dimension. And Patrick Maume shares his extraordinary knowledge in patient and kindly ways.
As Paul Bew says, we can now follow Patrick Maume's work for the online Dictionary Of Irish Biography...
https://www.ria.ie/research-programmes/dictionary-of-irish-biography/
4.
Report 3
I particularly remember one of my
encounters with that distinctive Patrick Maume voice - my reading of his book...
Maume, Patrick. 1993. “‘Life That Is
Exile’”: Daniel Corkery and the Search for Irish Ireland. Belfast: Institute of
Irish Studies, The Queen’s University of Belfast.
I thought then, this is different, this is calm, this is helpful...
I read that book as part of my presentation on the notion of 'Hidden Ireland', a notion now enshrined in many titles - notably, in interdisciplinary dialogue, by Bob Scally and Charles Orser...
Scally, Robert James. 1995. The End of
Hidden Ireland: Rebellion, Famine, and Emigration. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Orser, Charles. 2006. Unearthing Hidden
Ireland: Historical Archaeology and Anthropology at Ballykilcline, County
Roscommon. Bray: Wordwell.
But I particularly valued Patrick Maume's approach to Corkery, because I wanted to follow Corkery into a study of Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin / Owen Roe O'Sullivan...
And that one poem, whose title has not settled down... The poet asks the blacksmith to make him a spade.
The Irish language specialists use the first line of the poem - and speak, and write, of it as “A Shéamais, déan dom” (‘Seamus, make for me’)...
Seamus Heaney's version is called 'Poet to Blacksmith' - Heaney is, of course, aware of the text's complexities, and signals that. But he dials it down, and Ola Larsmo, for the Nobel Prize Committee, dials it down even further...
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1995/heaney/article/
My approach dials it up.
That poem by Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin is one of the most extraordinary and dense pieces of writing in world history. A while back, during the lockdowns, I began to write up my notes on that one text. When my notes reached 20 pages, I decided to put them aside...
Patrick O'Sullivan
November 2024
