Journals: Belinda McKeon reviews two journals which reassure us of art's endless resources, even in times of great suffering, and of its utter indispensability.
In his 1924 work, Speculum Mentis, the philosopher R.G. Collingwood put academia in the dock. In the aftermath of the Great War, "in a world of desperate evils and among men crushed beneath the burden of daily tasks", was thought not a shameful indulgence, "the act of a traitor?" Amid crippling poverty and cutting grief, the air still heavy with the stench of death, how could "the mere discovery of interesting facts" be justified?
Not just academics, but thinkers, writers, artists - all who seek to excavate meaning with image and idea - must grapple with the same unnerving challenge; in a world where so many suffer, what use is art? Eighty years later, echoes of Collingwood's unease send a tremor through the considerable bulk of Irish Pages, the Belfast-based journal in which his words are quoted by the essayist Chris Arthur. Irish Pages, edited from the Linen Hall by Chris Agee, made an impressive début last summer, and this second issue, too, is weighty, provocative, and opulent with good writing. Like Brendan Barrington, the editor of the excellent the Dublin Review - now on its 11th issue - Agee has an eye for subtle patterns, an ear for oblique harmonies. This may be "the Justice issue" of Irish Pages, but there is a sense that the theme emerged from the writing, from the deepest preoccupations of poets, essayists, novelists and artists, rather than being forced upon them. The theme, rather, is gleaned in the reading, in the alchemy that can result when work from very diverse perspectives is well aligned.
What pervades the writing is a sense of order threatened, certainties destroyed, futures frightening and unpredictable. In Irish Pages, after an editorial and an opening essay (by Kentucky writer Wendell Berry) which identify the dangerous imperialism of the present US government, and the startling double-standards of the National Security Strategy published by the White House in response to the September 11th attacks, each piece, each poem seems darkened with apprehension.
That apprehension may be a specific one, its circumstances clearly enunciated, as in Seamus Heaney's absorbing account of translating, in the wake of the Twin Towers attacks, a Horace ode about unexpected thunder across a clear blue sky, or as in the work of two Bosnian poets remembering the siege of Sarajevo, or in Christian Salmon's essay, starkly detailing the "memoricide" of the Palestinian landscape, each tree, each home obliterated in warfare. Or sometimes it is a personal apprehension; in an extraordinary, intimate essay from 1955, the poet Samuel Menashe suffers agonies of survivor's guilt over the death of a young fellow soldier in the second World War, "a season of nightmares".
Indeed, war looms over almost every page of these journals; and on every page, too, the issue of the artist's relationship to injustice is writ large. In the Dublin Review, Edna Longley, taking issue with the idea of war poetry as a separate genre, reminds us that Wilfred Owen and T.E. Hulme, when injured in the first World War, returned, out of writerly obligation, to the trenches where they would meet their deaths. In an entertaining extract from a memoir in progress, John Montague remembers his days as a lecturer in Berkeley in the 1960s - but the slaughter of Vietnam formed the backdrop to heady student summers, and tear-gas was their future. Christina Hunt Mahony analyses the lack of Irish-American outrage at Martin Scorsese's stereotyping of the Irish as vengeful and violent in Gangs of New York as a worrying endorsement of, and an example of manipulation by, current American foreign policy. And, in a fascinating extract from the forthcoming second part of his biography of the poet, Roy Foster depicts W.B. Yeats's nervous support of the 1930s Blueshirt movement as a search for creative inspiration, as a rhetorical exercise without real political engagement, an ultimately fruitless dalliance from which Yeats emerged disillusioned and unheeded.
But are attempts at artistic engagement with political reality, as a rule, pointless? By turning to poetry, are we seeking what Molly McCloskey sought at the high-school reunion she describes in the Dublin Review - "to remember what it felt like to trust life"? To write responsibly, must poets take a strong stand, like the American, Robinson Jeffers, whose savage poems extolled war as a method of cleansing the world of selfish, evil humankind? Yet such anger seems fruitless too, and is ultimately forgettable; Jeffers died in 1963, and by 1965 John Montague, on a holiday trip down Highway One, is able to visit his "stark stone tower . . . now part of the tourist trail".
Among many striking poems in Irish Pages, John F. Deane's 'The Red Gate' captures the anxious choice the artist must make. To "swing open" the vibrantly coloured "bars" of the poem, to admit "the world again with its creeds and wars", to work at poetry amid "murmurings and sifflings" of atrocity, or to keep shut that barrier between reality and art? To do the latter would be to forget that, however difficult the subject, in confronting it, the artist gains the means to sound "the clear-souled drops . . . that would whisper you peace", to provide what Heaney calls "the upfrontness of the made thing" as a gift in uncertain times, or, as the late Eoghan Ó Tuairisc - another enlivening presence in Irish Pages - puts it, "to save a fragment of truth from distortion . . . in the old-fashioned brutishness of this universe".
Answering his own question in 1924, R.G. Collingwood concluded that thought was much more than the "mere discovery of interesting facts". Rather, he continued, "We may try to understand ourselves and our world only in order that we may learn how to live". These two journals, brimming with writing that is at once solemnly respectful of language and drunk on its richness, and promising to inebriate the reader in the same way, reassure us of art's endless resources in hard times, and of its utter indispensability.
Belinda McKeon is a journalist and critic
The Dublin Review, Number 11, Summer 2003. Edited by Brendan Barrington, 126pp, €7.50
Irish Pages, Number 2, Autumn/ Winter 2002/2003. Edited by Chris Agee and Cathal Ó Searcaigh (Irish-Language Editor), 247pp, €12