‘Anne Enright’s work blows wide open our tradition and traditions’

I begin with short quotations from three bird poems that link to the occasion of this launch, here at the Museum of Literature Ireland, and its subject, Anne Enright’s new novel The Wren, The Wren.

First:

‘I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

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Of the rolling level underneath him steady air…'

Second:

‘It’s not for the common birds that I’d mourn,

The black-bird, the corn-crake or the crane,

But for the bittern that’s shy and apart

And drinks in the marsh from the lone bog-drain.’

Third:

‘berry

glance

leaf

twisting into bird

high-tailed

from hedge

to hand

she was mine

the wren,

poked out

from the cup

of my fist

and was still’

This first excerpt I cited is by Gerard Manley Hopkins; these are the opening lines of his poem The Windhover, published in 1918, decades after Hopkins’ death. Poet and Jesuit priest, Hopkins lived in 85 and 86 Stephen’s Green (now home of the Museum of Literature Ireland) from 1884 until his death of typhoid in 1889. His election as professor of classics at University College was, as he wrote to a friend, the centre of ‘an Irish row’.

During his years in Dublin, in his top-floor bedroom with its views of the garden and of the distant Dublin hills, he wrote some 28 poems, including his desolate dark sonnets with their searching explorations of psychological distress – ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/ Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.’

[ Anne Enright: ‘People that go around complaining they don’t win prizes … I always think of Trump and Georgia’ ]

The second poem is from Thomas MacDonagh’s fine The Yellow Bittern. This was published in his Lyrical Ballads of 1913 and is a version of the classic Irish poem An Bonnán Buí by the 18th-century poet Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna. MacDonagh, a BA and MA graduate of University College Dublin, was also appointed to a lecturing position in English here in Stephen’s Green from 1911 to 1916. One student remembered his lectures as ‘never relevant and invariably interesting.’ MacDonagh famously lectured on the subject of Jane Austen before leaving for his position in the garrison at nearby Jacob’s biscuit factory, and leading to his execution on May 3rd, 1916.

The third poem, which readers will discover for themselves in The Wren, The Wren, is by Phil McDaragh, father of Carmel, grandfather of Nell, and is dedicated to Carmel. Phil leaves his family and Irish home not for military endeavours but for a new life and new wife in America. His poems, these McDaragh/Enright compositions, which include a great and mischievous Yellow Bittern translation, are interwoven deftly – both aurally and textually – throughout this novel.

*

We’re celebrating this evening Anne Enright’s magnificent The Wren The Wren, and saluting a peerless writing achievement that includes eight novels: The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, The Gathering, The Forgotten Waltz, The Green Road, Actress, and The Wren, The Wren; her collections of short stories The Portable Virgin, Taking Pictures, Yesterday’s Weather; her non-fictional works Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood and No Authority: Writings from the Laureate of Irish Fiction; and her agenda-setting, fiercely intelligent essays that have provided us with such sustenance and good company, not least in these challenging past years.

Focusing on the achievement that is The Wren, The Wren, already extensively and justly acclaimed by reviewers and readers, this is a novel that moves confidently into very many subjects, and subtly changes them, one subject being the question of inheritance.

To quote from Nell late in the novel, on watching her grandfather on television: ‘The man in the other chair opens his mouth and my entire family comes out of it’; this is Carmel’s ‘take’ on that same television clip: ‘Nell was coming through her dead grandfather, in flickers’. And from Nell again, ‘the connection between us is more than a strand of DNA, it is a rope thrown from the past, a fat twisted rope, full of blood.’ Meantime Imelda, Carmel’s sister, has ‘grown old in the story of their parents’ lives. It was such a greedy story and so small’.

But in speaking about inheritance, and summoning some of the writing ghosts of this place, Newman House, this evening, I do so in the joyful recognition that Anne Enright’s work blows wide open our tradition and traditions: truly ‘no man-fathomed’. The Wren, The Wren is most of all itself and a narrative about resilience, endurance and new beginnings, where love brings recognition and understanding, as well as fury. It is also gloriously and mercifully very funny.

The reading journey of this book undoubtedly has episodes of ‘ache and grief’. The opening chapters relate what Nell calls ‘her little adventure in abjection’ (one might add Hopkins’ term, ‘cliffs of fall’). The spiralling emotions between mother and daughter, Carmel and Nell, are exceptionally well depicted in unforgettable scenes, and the dreadful violence of the badger Old Brock scenes is also deeply revealing in terms of narrative character – the making of a poet rather than a priest.

Lovers of Anne Enright’s fiction always have favourite lines, and favourite words: the writing in this novel glimmers and glistens and also resonates and reverberates long after one has finished reading the poetry of her prose. These are a few personal favourites of lines and scenes that linger: Nell on being a young adult, ‘I was making my way out in the big bad world, and for some reason this involved a lot of staying in.’ Or Nell on Carmel, ‘I go back upstairs and hug my mother who gives me anything I want, but only if I can tell her what it is.’ I could have chosen so many from Carmel; here’s just one example that conveys the young Carmel’s spirit: ‘Her mother and Imelda were draped in matching black mantillas under which they plied little handkerchiefs with embroidered corners, while Carmel stuck to a packet of Kleenex and the truth’.

Ten years ago this autumn, in an evening of conversation with the late and great folklorist Bo Almquist and writer Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, we merrily reclaimed some of the triads of Ireland, those age-old proverbs. One is ‘the three things that can’t be learnt’; in its original Irish: ‘Trí rud nach féidir a fhoghlaim, fonn, féile agus filíocht’. Filíocht is of course ‘poetry’; féile one can translate as ‘hospitality’ or ‘generosity’; the more elusive fonn is ‘a mood, disposition, style’ (and also the Irish word for ‘desire’). All of these things, ­ fonn, féile agus filíocht, are gifts we receive in abundance from writer Anne Enright but above all the word that comes to the fore of my mind this evening is ‘warrior’ – ‘warrior writer’, including and not exclusively ‘warrior daughter’, ‘warrior mother’, ‘warrior teacher’ and ‘warrior friend’.

I’ll finish with one last poetic excerpt from The Wren, The Wren – a personal favourite – McDaragh/Enright’s translation of ‘The Scribe’s Lament’ ‘Is scíth mo chrob’.

The poem begins: ‘I’ve a crick in my paw from scribbling/My pen scuttles across the page’.

And ends:

‘My small pen can’t stop its dribbling

Across one and the next shining leaf

For the benefit of all good reading men

I suffer cramp and spasm, ache and grief.’

On behalf of all good reading women and men, our deep gratitude to Anne Enright for making new, and for our very great benefit.

This speech was delivered by Margaret Kelleher at the recent launch of Anne Enright’s The Wren, The Wren at the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI). Margaret Kelleher is Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama at University College Dublin and is a board member of MoLI