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Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know: The Fathers of Wilde, Yeats and Joyce
by Colm Toíbín [2018]
I’ve always loved Irish wit and poetry and rebellious wordplay. My grandfather, Daniel Kelly, redhaired and bowlegged, had a mischievous wit and a twinkle in his eyes. My grandmother Lucy Kelly, although not Irish, loved my grandfather and ergo told Irish tall tales.
As a boy who was inclined to misbehave, I enthusiastically read Brendan Behan’s Borstal Boy. Later when I was twelve, an Irish poet of my mom and stepfather’s acquaintance, John Montague, took me a Clancy Brothers concert. I had already heard Ewan MacColl sing “Dirty Old Town” but now, live, I was hearing Liam Clancy’s bittersweet rendering of the song. I was ineffably moved by the song’s melancholic sense of love found and lost in the slums of Dublin.
Next summer my folks took me along for a weekend at Stinson Beach. They wanted me out of the cabin and my stepdad threw an anthology of poetry at me and said “go out on the beach and educate yourself.” I sat on the beach on a grey afternoon and read some poems to the Pacific’s waves. It was getting cold when I came across Yeats “The Second Coming.” I felt shivers, body and mind, in Yeats’ evocation of both the “loss of innocence” and inquiry of what “rough beast, its hour come round at last … slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” In high school I liked Catcher in the Rye until I read Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Somehow Dedalus’ refusal to conform seemed a far nobler thing than the surly whines of young Holden. Then, in the late sixties, as it seemed a Revolution was approaching, I read Padraig Pearce’s great insurrectionary poem “The Rebel.” Indeed. with Pearse’s poem ringing in my inner ears, I went to Ireland to try to join the IRA. Pearse’s lyrics contained a compelling call to arms against the British occupation of Eire. For his poetry, for his words, for his actions in the Easter Rebellion, he was executed and thrown into an unmarked grave.
And now in my hoary, long-toothed old age, I find solace in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, the novels of Kevin Barry, Niall Williams, and Claire Keegan. Last year with other avid readers, I read Joyce’s Ulysses. I was confused and confounded and delighted by that wondrous book.
All this is the background for a brief review of Toíbín’s book. Bob Heaney dropped the Irish poet and essayist’s book in my mailbox. I read it and my appetite for Irish wit and language and poetry was again whetted. Toíbín’s book is about Wilde, Yeats and Joyce and their often mordant absentee fathers. Their fathers were brilliant angry men, self-indulgent and destined for scandal. Their sons all came of age and into glory despite, or because of, their fathers’ dark shadows. To Toíbín’s credit there’s no Freudian nonsense here, just Irish true tales that give texture to the complexity of the soul and the imagination of these three great prodigal sons and, of course, their Ireland.
https://theglas.org/glas-meets-the-author-colm-toibin-29-04-2020/
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