Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

by William Kennedy

  Mr. Kiely’s novel is linked in subject matter to his book of short stories, The State of Ireland, published here in 1980. Most particularly it is linked to the novella in that collection, “Proxopera,” which is a small masterpiece about a bombing in a small town. But whereas “Proxopera” was constructed with great attention to plot and suspense, Carmincross is written as if plot and continuity were as inimical to the author as are the depredations of the British army and the murders by the Roman Catholic and Protestant fanatics of the North’s political war.

  Mr. Kiely creates Mervyn Kavanagh as a fat, bald, middle-aged storyteller, incapable of not interrupting himself. Kavanagh, “a reading man cursed with a plastic memory, who also goes to the movies, and watches television,” has a mind that “is a jumble sale, a lumber room, a noisy carnival.…” Add the fact that Kiely-Kavanagh is a man of great and curious erudition—in literature, history, myth, song, and barroom folklore, and what you end with is an incorrigible archivist, a manic associationalist.

  Now he’s with Fionn MacCumhaill, tracking Diarmuid and Grainne through mythic mountain heather, now with Helen of Troy and Olivia Newton-John; now with the MacDonnells of the Isles, foreign mercenaries with double-headed axes, hacking their way through medieval Ireland; now with Leila Khaled, wreaking havoc for Palestine; now with a half-dozen blacks setting a white girl on fire in Boston. At a oneness with all the violence of history, he finds vicious twists to the Irish-American ballads—“I’m dreaming of thee, dear little isle of the West, sweet spot by memory blest …”: this after the bombs go off.

  This style is the novelistic stream-of-consciousness writ large, the work of a man with a godlike view of history, and the didactic urge of an angry citizen for whom the tidiness of art (like “Proxopera”) is not enough. This man needs to sprawl cosmically, for how else can one tell the story of a heavenly garden decomposing into a backyard of hell? How else can the reader be made to see not only consequences but causes?

  Mr. Kiely has succeeded so often as an artist that he needs no further consecration; but I sense that this work will be viewed as something of a tract, a political argument in which the politics are not only implicit but also imposed. The thin plot is Kavanagh’s odyssey to the North from New York City, onto an airplane bound for Shannon, then to a nearby hotel where he will be reunited with an old mistress and a childhood pal, and where he will also meet people with whom he will eventually rendezvous at Carmincross.

  But the people, with the exceptions of a priest and a garrulous Fenian “hero,” who exist only to be satirized for their solipsistic immersion in Irish irreality, and the ex-mistress who is Kavanagh’s partner in sex and bedroom banter on their way to Carmincross, are chiefly complements, or contraries, of the Kavanagh point of view. When the book is not an argument it is a monologue, or a collage of actual, violent news stories, or a tissue of legendary or mythic tragedy, remembered in that plastic mind.

  John Montague, one of Ireland’s major poets and an old friend of Kiely’s, has described him as one of the most beloved of Irish writers who is “almost overcome by the variety of life.” This book is testimony to the truth of that observation.

  None of this lessens the book’s achievements, especially for Americans for whom the news of Ireland is always insufficiently reported, except when the roof is blown away. What is here, along with the bomb and the gun, is the madness behind them both—the eleven Protestant women, members of a militant organization in Belfast, who took a blindfolded fellow member, who had fallen from favor, into a room and, while wearing masks, beat her to death with bricks. When finished, some of the murderers went off discoing. Kavanagh observes that the women were rough types from the gutters of Belfast, but as the police noted, “they would never have gone so far if it had not been for the surroundings of political violence.”

  He cites two presumably Catholic teenage girls in Belfast “fighting for the possession of a pump-action shotgun so that one of them could take a crack … at a soldier,” and he appends to that the old women in Derry city who “on good evenings used to take their armchairs out of doors, so that they could sit in comfort and, from their grandstand seats, look down on all the lovely rioting.”

  Benedict Kiely loves the North, but, despite his great wit and exuberance of language, he must surely be one of the saddest men in Ireland because of what is going, and gone. No man not weighted with loss could summon the anger that is behind this book. He gives us the natural world, the evolutionary history, and the society that is in shreds within them.

  He also knows that Northern Ireland isn’t the worst place in the world. Lebanon’s violence is worse, Mexico’s earthquakes produced more corpses. But one good man killed in his innocence, one family bombed away by inadvertence, one town smithereened by men who derive meaning only from death, all deserve scrutiny and reverence.

  Just before Carmincross goes up, a young IRA bomber tries to give warning by alerting a young woman in a nearby town, telling her to call the police and spread the word. The woman assumes the man is a robber and does nothing. At length she senses the truth, but too late for Carmincross.

  “So,” writes Kiely, “are great deeds done or perpetrated in my homeland … in the name of God and of the dead generations.” And in these lines he fuses both his own sadness and the heroic, revolutionary rhetoric to whose cadences so much innocent blood is now blowing in the Irish wind.

  1985

  Freedom of the City:

  Clive Barnes Is Wrong About Brian Friel

  Clive Barnes’s recent review of Brian Friel’s new play from Ireland, Freedom of the City, spoiled my breakfast. I don’t know why I should be upset at an Englishman failing to understand an Irishman, but in this case we are talking to Americans, or at least Friel is, since his play is here in New York. Barnes was, and now I am. And Americans are so meagerly informed of the Irish situation that even one small puddle of misinformation, such as a particular paragraph by Mr. Barnes, which we will quote in due course, is too much to bear in silence.

  In the play, a woman and two young men seek shelter after their peaceful civil rights demonstration in Derry is broken up by force. They find their way, by chance, to the Lord Mayor’s quarters in what corresponds to city hall. One youth is a radical, one a naive liberal, and the woman, Lily, is a simple citizen, mother of eleven, who makes the protest march every week on behalf of her mongoloid child. Really she doesn’t know why she protests. She is not political, only angry.

  The trio is doomed, dead from opening curtain, a tactic Mr. Barnes did not like, suspense being foiled. But since we do not waste a lot of television energy wondering what is going to happen next, we are free to speculate on the why of their deaths, which seem to me Friel’s purpose; and a purpose fulfilled.

  But I am not really talking about the play, or about failed or successful dramaturgy, but rather about the reality on which the play is based, and Mr. Barnes’s grasp of it. I was in Ireland last year, Dublin and Belfast, doing some reporting, and saw the Friel play at the Abbey Theatre on the day I returned from the North. The play did not reflect the whole of the Northern situation; nothing short of an Irish War and Peace could begin to do that. But it was so close to certain fragments of the conflict that it often seemed like a transliteration of Northern actualities to the stage; and no bones broken in the move.

  Mr. Barnes, however, finds it an unlikely play—farfetched in its conclusion. The play’s Irish director said during a short chat that London’s critics did not take to Mr. Friel’s new work either. Since it is a harsh critique of English domination, this is not a surprise.

  Mr. Barnes points to the play’s irony and advises Mr. Friel that “Irony is much strengthened by likelihood. Can we really be expected to believe that the British Army would mobilize, against these three people, 22 tanks, two dozen armored cars, four water cannon and ‘a modicum of air cover’? The finding of the court (which exculpates, with notable finesse, the British Army for murdering Lily and the boys as they exit una
rmed and with hands up) is far-fetched, indeed, impossible.”

  So Mr. Barnes has already explored the limits of possibility in the behavior of people who live in, or militarily occupy, Ireland. Splendid. He must know, then, that the British army has used police-state tactics in dealing with prisoners suspected of IRA leanings—held them without trial, kidnapped them out of their beds without charge. (It is ironic—everything in the North is ironic—that the presence of the army is also a buffer between Protestants and Catholics, a pogrom preventive. “If only the bloody British army hadn’t come in,” a (Protestant) Unionist senator complained after one riot, “we’d have shot ten thousand of them by dawn.”)

  But the army did come in and some of its tactics have been a shame on Britain, as Mr. Barnes must know, since he understands the limits of possibility in Ulster. I refresh his memory of a book he has undoubtedly read, a first-rate piece of work called Ulster and put together by the Insight team of reporters from The Sunday Times of London. The book notes several examples of overreaction by the army, a phenomenon which, Mr. Barnes must know, from his readings in comparative American possibility, does crop up from time to time during military action: Attica, for instance, and Kent State.

  The Insight team summarizes the Compton report on British army atrocities committed on Irish Catholic prisoners this way:

  In sum, the Compton report left a number of questions unanswered and a number of anxieties unstilled. It nevertheless confirmed that citizens of the United Kingdom—innocent citizens because not proved guilty—who were also Northern Ireland Catholics, had been made to prop themselves against a wall by their fingertips, and to wear black hoods, and to hear frightening and deafening sounds, and to go without food and sleep, all for long periods. Whatever that meant for the moral health of the United Kingdom, its meaning for Northern Ireland Catholics was clear. Internment had been a grave injury: this was an irredeemable outrage. There could be no forgiveness for a state which did these things to their people. Its rulers could never be trusted again. For the great majority of Ulster Catholics, the State of Northern Ireland was dead.

  The courts, the police, the entire government structure in the North has been dominated by Protestant hierarchies for centuries and their bias in favor of things Protestant and English, at the expense of Catholics, is a given. This bias is at the heart of the Heath government’s efforts to make power sharing work—give the Catholics a share in deciding what happens to them, that is. A new government has been organized on this basis, but everyone seems to agree that its success is the least likely thing in Ireland’s future. Harmony never! Both Catholic and Protestant extremists are working diligently to see that no peaceful political solution interrupts their respective quests for mutually exclusive demands.

  The Catholic argument against legal injustice, which is one of Mr. Friel’s points, is supportable (in contrast to the internment) by a case which made the papers while I was there: the arrest of sixteen Protestant men in a “darts club.” This club was a front for a segment of an illegal Protestant army. The arrest turned up four handguns, three submachine guns and six thousand rounds of ammunition. The sixteen were promptly charged, tried, and acquitted.

  Nothing is really impossible in the North, particularly in the realm of violence, which is the only topic really well reported in the U.S. press coverage of the North. A Catholic senator was killed by a Protestant murder gang while I was there, as was his woman companion, a Protestant. She was stabbed twenty times, he thirty times, and his throat was cut. Newspapers dredged up comparison cases from the files: the man who was stabbed 110 times; the man who was beaten with a hammer on the head, the chest, the arms, the legs, each finger; the woman who was stabbed multiple times in the shape of a cross and her broken rosary beads stuffed into each wound.

  “The only thing that hasn’t happened yet,” a Belfast editor wrote in an editorial, “is the eating of the dead.”

  Protestants have no shortage of bizarre tales of the possible. The depredations of the Provisional wing of the IRA are endless; the bombing of Coleraine’s shopping district, for instance, was perhaps a miscalculation by the IRA, which was too ashamed to take credit for it. Yet random death is merely another kind of terror weapon in the North, and in Coleraine, six people died, all of them over sixty; thirty-three were injured, children among them, a living quotient of lost limbs, melted faces. The Provisionals have also given the army continuing reason to hate Catholics, the main point of their campaign being the killing of British soldiers, around four hundred the last count I heard.

  Though the Provisionals are representative of only a small minority of Northern Catholics, this, to hostile eyes, is a distinction without a difference. This too, is Mr. Friel’s theme: that you die for the wrong reasons in the North, are vilified for the wrong reasons, are mythicized or canonized in death for the wrong reasons; that the North, with a history that is an endless tissue of bigotry, malevolence, psychopathy, opportunism and stupidity, is a supreme bastion of wrongheadedness, a classical study in what a nation should not be.

  Mr. Barnes, finding Mr. Friel’s play “perhaps too luridly fictionalized,” would tone down the drama of overreaction and viciousness. He would prefer the North be made a more “likely” place.

  So would just about everybody in Ireland.

  1974

  Postscript: This was written as a letter to the editor in 1974, when Mr. Barnes was working as drama critic for The New York Times. The Friel play had a short run on Broadway, and the Times chose not to print the letter. It is published here for the first time. Mr. Friel’s latest play on Broadway, Dancing at Lughnasa, has been a great critical and popular success.

  PART FOUR

  Ten Latin Writers, Plus Translator

  Gabriel García Márquez:

  One Hundred Years of Solitude

  The Yellow Trolley Car in Barcelona: An Interview

  One Hundred Years of Solitude

  One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. It takes up not long after Genesis left off and carries through to the air age, reporting on everything that happened in between with more lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry than is expected from a hundred years of novelists, let alone one man.

  That man is Gabriel García Márquez, an Argentine of incredibly magical imagination.* His novel is an always accessible, surreal fable about the town of Macondo, situated somewhere in a Latin America that doesn’t exist, yet existed always. He tells the town’s story from founding to burial, centering on the lives of three generations of the Buendía family.

  Patriarch and founder of the town is José Arcadio Buendía. Once settled, he becomes mesmerized by the magic that the gypsy Melquíades periodically brings to Macondo—alchemy, magnetism, a magnifying glass, false teeth, ice—and spends his waking hours failing with a frenzy to invent anything of substance. He’s a fool, yet he concludes in isolation, aided by a sextant from Melquíades, that the world is round. The discovery is of no use to him or to anyone else in Macondo.

  Melquíades brings flying carpets and wears a hat like a flying raven, which a great-grandchild of José Arcadio Buendía remembers without ever having seen it. The patriarch and his wife, Ursula, the eternal mother of all generations, who lives to be 122, produce children whom they name Aureliano or José Arcadio, and these beget more Aurelianos and more José Arcadios, who form a clan. The clan endures from the time that Macondo is merely an oasis between the sea and the great swamp, through the advent of the gypsy miracles, the arrival of the first pianola, the rise of Christianity, the futile wars, the first train, the first telephone, the first motion picture, the sellout of liberal idealism, the rise of the banana plantations and the ensuing banana plague, the massacre of three thousand workers, the deluge, the dust storm, and the cyclonic wind that buries the town and the last of the family forever.

  The solitude of the title is the solitude of all men but also of Macondo
, which never bridges its isolation from the great world except briefly, when a boat arrives, a caravan arrives, a train runs for a time. But these connections are always momentary, just as the solitude of each character is relieved only for a moment by the intrusion of another person, usually bringing love or death. But then time passes, as mother Úrsula alone seems to truly understand, and the pox of solitude once more settles.

  Mr. García Márquez’s Spanish is translated to English by Gregory Rabassa with such fidelity and sensitivity to the imagination of the author that the two are like the twins José Arcadio Segundo and Aureliano Segundo who were so alike that even their mother could not tell them apart, especially when they secretly decided to call each other by opposite names.

  The book is like Finnegans Wake in its ambition to suggest all of man’s life on earth, but it is written in simple and beautiful prose, without the incomprehensibility of the Joycean portmanteau puns. It is like Thornton Wilder’s Skin of Our Teeth and Our Town in its reduction of all civilization to the family level, but without Mr. Wilder’s sentimentality and with infinitely larger scope and far more toughness. It is like Pilgrim’s Progress and all the morality plays, fused with a modern tongue and a horizonless surrealism.

  The magic of this grand book is in its strangeness. From the outset, when José Arcadio Buendía and his men wake in the middle of the jungle to find a Spanish galleon that is covered with petrified barnacles, embedded in stones, and adorned with orchids, life abounds with the inexplicable. In time people rise from the dead; ghosts grow old; a man is born with the tail of a pig; a plague of insomnia strikes the town; Arabs, Turks, and the wandering Jew pass through; and Buendía learns how to increase his weight at will. When he dies, it rains flowers.