Finding Ireland: A Poet's Explorations of Irish Literature and Culture

Letter from Dublin, 1998:The Celtic Tiger

Letter from Dublin, 1998: The Celtic Tiger What has drawn me to Dublin once or twice a year over the past decade has nothing to do with the Celtic Tiger. Dublin is an incomparable if constantly threatened gem of Georgian architecture, the contemplation of which freshens one’s sense of pure form. Like the music of Mozart, Dublin’s streets and squares and monumental public buildings are a Euclidean fragment of the eighteenth century cast adrift in the perilous waters of the present. Its literary world is as contentious , and even vicious, as anywhere on earth, yet this is a city where poetry thrives. The theatre here, though tiny by comparison with London’s, is vital and innovative. Above all, Dublin is a stage where personality dominates and wit is savored through an ongoing network of conversations. Given the city’s complex and tragic history, in which hardship and disappointment have been the norm, it is not surprising that the dominant mode is irony. I can hardly recall a conversation in Dublin this summer when no one has mentioned the “Celtic Tiger,” that irritating catchphrase commonly used to describe the runaway Irish economy . This boom or bubble is transforming the country, in Tillinghast pt 1 2/4/09 1:45 PM Page 36 particular the capital city—and not necessarily for the better. While prosperity is obviously welcome, it is happening too fast. Before winning her independence from Britain in the 1920s, this country, with its large landed estates, was practically a feudal society . A commonly expressed witticism asserts that Ireland has leapt straight from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, bypassing the twentieth altogether. One might even enlarge on that exaggeration by asking whether the Romantic movement ever hit Ireland—in which case the leap forward began somewhere in the late eighteenth century. One strenuous dissenter to the unironic brave new world of Italian suits, penne and arugula, air-kisses and mobile phones, is the poet Derek Mahon, who last year published TheYellow Book, a sequence of twenty poems, most of them in rhyming couplets. Its title and many of its references evoke the fin de siècle of a hundred years ago: My attic window under the shining slates where the maids slept in the days of Wilde andYeats sees crane-light where McAlpine’s fusiliers, site hats and brick-dust, ruin the work of years. The place a Georgian theme-park for the tourist, not much remains . . . (“Night Thoughts”) (McAlpine is a construction company; “site hats” are what are called “hard hats” in America.) When one looks up to refresh one’s eye with a view of the Georgian rooftops and chimney pots that make the vistas in this city such a delight, the view these days is all too likely to be intruded upon by a building crane wheeling across the sky like some genetically modified praying mantis. It is all about money, naturally.Mahon comments resignedly:“foreign investment conspires against old decency, / computer talks to computer, machine to answering machine.” 37 Tillinghast pt 1 2/4/09 1:45 PM Page 37 Another poem from TheYellow Book, titled “‘shiver in your tenement,’” contrasts our moment to the literary scene in Dublin “long ago in the demure ’60s / before the country first discovered sex.” Familiar figures from those days, sporting widebrimmed black hats acquired from clerical supply shops, included the poets Patrick Kavanagh and Austin Clarke, the novelist and humorist Flann O’Brien, and the playwright Brendan Behan: “Those were the days before tourism and economic growth, / before deconstruction and the death of the author, / when pubs had as yet no pictures of Yeats and Joyce / since people could still recall their faces, their voices.” The poem speculates about the relation between art and repression:“Nothing to lose but our chains, our chains gone / that bound with form the psycho-sexual turbulence, / together with those black hats and proper pubs.” Mahon’s irony is frequently tinged with bitterness; the poem’s attack is provocative, reactionary, and uncompromising: “Those were the days; now patience, courage, artistry, / solitude things of the past, like the fear of God, / we nod to you from the pastiche paradise of the postmodern .” To return to the Celtic Tiger. Peter SomervilleLarge , in his excellent chronicle Dublin:The Fair City (1979, revised edition 1996), to which I am indebted, quotes Jonathan Swift’s animadversions in the 1730s on excessively rapid growth...