Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“YOU CAN’T READ THIS BOOK” by Nick Cohen (4^th Estate / Harper-Collins $NZ34:99)

           

The Berlin Wall fell, Soviet Communism vanished unlamented, Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history” and open liberal democracy triumphed. Now there would be no more censorship of ideas. Free discussion of what was really important would be unimpeded. To reinforce the fact, social media, Twitter, Facebook and so forth played their part in evading the censorship of the remaining dictatorships and helping to bring them down. Think of the Arab Spring and all those young people in Libya and Egypt texting and tweeting and posting and circumventing state propaganda.

So we live in an age of unparallelled freedom of expression, right? It’s only a matter of time before other closed societies succumb to it.

Thus goes the current popular myth.

But Nick Cohen’s isn’t having a bar of it.

Controversialist and columnist for The Observer, Cohen is an angry man and has written a polemic to prove it. No friend of the Hard Left, he rejoiced in the fall of  European Communism and shared the hope that a new world was a-dawning. Now he isn’t so sure and he sees censorship reasserting itself. Intimidated authors and publishers censor themselves for fear of retaliation by powerful individuals who can sue the life out of them. Terrorists can issue effective death threats to silence their critics in press and print. Oppressive governments are able to seduce democracies into approving of their censorship, because trade is more important than human rights. (Think the Great Firewall of China.) And the Internet revolution is not necessarily as beneficial for free speech as some may think.

Making a survey of this new age of censorship, Cohen divides his book in three parts.

The first part he calls “God”. It examines the ways in which Islamist extremists are able to intimidate and silence their critics even in West. Cohen takes it for granted that in the West there are at least some bigots who dislike Muslims because of their race. While he deplores them, they are not the cause of his ire. Cohen is most shocked by the attitude of the liberal-left. When the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, says Cohen, the liberal-left failed to forthrightly defend Rushdie and the principle of freedom of speech. Instead, they continued to talk as if the West, heirs to powers that once practised imperialism, should express “sensitivity” to Islamic views. Cohen accuses them of failing to modify the “identity politics” they had learned in the 1960s. They appeared to genuinely believe that anyone who criticised an Islamist death threat was simply a blinkered, Eurocentric neo-imperialist who didn’t understand Muslims. For Cohen, their acceptance of the idea that Islam itself should not be “insulted” was no more than a replay of the type of Communist censorship that once claimed dissidents should not “slander” the Soviet state.

Further riling Cohen is the fact that there are genuine Muslim reformists, who would amend the worst aspects of Muslim culture (especially in regard to the status of women). But they are being silenced by those same militant Islamists whom Western liberals mistake for the true voice of all Muslims. So “identity politics” enables censorship to be carried out by threat, whether Islamists target novelists, Danish cartoonists or Muslim women. And publishers now self-censor, for fear of retaliation. Censorship includes, after all,  the failure of some books to ever appear, as well as the suppression of some books which have already appeared.

The second part of You Can’t Read This Book Cohen calls “Money”. Noting the rise of the super-rich, Cohen surveys the ways in which the wealthy can intimidate newspapers, publishers and authors by injunctions and the threat of long and expensive libel cases, which only the rich can afford. Money causes self-censorship. Here Cohen points the finger at the English legal system. While England is a democracy and its citizens are comparatively free to express their ideas, English laws of libel are such that complainants are favoured. Defendants’ words have to meet very tight standards indeed to prove that they are non-libellous. Consequently, when rogue Icelandic bankers, Robert Maxwell, representatives of dictators or associates of Russian gangster-capitalists wish to defend their “reputations”, they choose to do so in London courts. It’s not because the British judicial system is more fair. It’s because, in matters of libel, the British judicial system favours the rich.

Scornfully Cohen dubs London “A Town Called Sue”.

He gives the classic example of Roman Polanski. After drugging and raping a 13-year-old in America, Polanski fled the country and took refuge in France, which does not have a strong extradition agreement with the United States. An American magazine, Vanity Fair, ran a long piece about Polanski which contained one brief and incidental negative anecdote about him. Polanski sued. Did he have the case heard in America, where the magazine was written, published and largely distributed (and where he would have been arrested for rape)? Of course not. He waited until a few copies of Vanity Fair were sold in England, then he was able to claim that he had been libelled in England and have the case heard in London. (He gave his testimony via a video link from Paris. England has a strong extradition treaty with the USA.). Polanski won his case, and was awarded a large sum and costs.

Countering this woeful example, Cohen also chronicles the case of a robust critic of cranky “alternative” medicines who was on the point of being sued for libel, and financially ruined, by a group of chiropractors and homeopaths. Fortunately a massive Internet campaign drew attention to his case and British judges, embarrassed by all the publicity, suddenly retracted their pre-trial rulings and threw the case out. Amazing how a little adverse publicity suddenly made them reinterpret the law.

Cohen’s third, and surprisingly briefest, section is called “State”. This is not an account of the way dictatorships and other non-democratic states still censor. We may take that for granted. Rather it is a critique of the idealistic notion that the Internet can circumvent state censorship by making all information freely available. The reality is that supporters of dictatorship and repression can use the Internet as well as democrats. Did you really think that only nice liberals, who want to improve the world, can read the 20,000-plus stolen American State Department cables that Julian Assange and Wikileaks made public? Secret policemen read them too. Cohen argues that Assange’s chosen representative in Belarus was a supporter of that country’s dictatorship. He promptly alerted the secret police to all the names of Belarus dissidents who were referred to in the cables which Assange had forwarded him. Whereupon the secret police drew up death lists to deal with them.

Thanks Wikileaks.

This example takes Cohen some way away from his chosen subject of modern censorship, but it does remind us what a life-and-death matter the flow of information can be. Cohen quotes with approval George Orwell’s dictum that, in the democratic West, left-wing activists “often play with fire without really knowing what fire is.”

As you might have guessed by now, I find most of what Cohen says persuasive. He is clearly on the side of the angels, and he makes a good case for recognising the continuing power of censorship. Nevertheless, You Can’t Read This Book is a polemic and as such there are parts of the book that trail off into windy and non-specific rhetoric. This often happens when journalists try to make a whole book out of ideas that might be better examined in a series of feature articles.

There is also sometimes a certain confusion of aim and principle. Cohen takes his stand on the Enlightenment notion of freedom of speech, which allows him to concentrate on the suppression of ideas and legitimate discussion. But once of twice he has to acknowledge that freedom of expression has its seamy side. There is a curious passage in which he laments the lost world of British literacy, in which newspapers once limited the amount of salacious material they printed when it came to sensational court cases involving sex, and in which even tabloids aimed at working-class readers had long articles with big words in them. (You won’t find anything like that in The Sun now.) Implicitly Cohen notes the corrosive effects of widespread pornography, and suggests that not all things freely expressed are necessarily healthy. He is fully aware that most of our “free” media float in a sea of sensational trivia which acts as a distraction from, and deterrent to, the discussion of anything important. But he does not pursue this reality in detail and returns to his high-sounding (and sometimes strident) attack on the censorship of ideas.

Let’s not condemn him for his zeal, however. There are moments when his intellectual honesty forces him to admit things he would probably prefer not to admit. Like his friend and mentor the late Christopher Hitchens (to whom this book is dedicted), Nick Cohen is a “new atheist”, no friend of organized religion, and a foe of Christianity. But in discussing the impact of militant Islam upon Western journalists, he notes that many journalists, who wish to make a name for themselves as “edgy” controversialists, are only too ready to attack Christian churches, but wouldn’t dare to say similar negative things about Islam, for fear of retaliation. In other words, Christianity has become the “soft target” of pretend controversialists who know they are risking nothing.  Cohen also notes that in real terms, and especially in African states undergoing Muslim takeover, Christianity today is the world’s most persecuted faith.

But you won’t hear this discussed in our media. Self-censorship rules and the issue isn’t one that many journalists wish to know about.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“THE CHIEF – The Life of William Randolph Hearst” by David Nasaw (first published 2000)

Reading a piece of polemic written by a journalist, and in part concerning the self-censorship of newspapers, reminds me of the biography of a press tycoon from the past, who was very adept at censoring his hired editors when it suited him.

There are some larger-than-life American figures who are best known through the medium of fiction.

Many postings ago [see index at right], I gave an account of T. Harry Williams’ big biography of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, the politician probably best remembered now as the model for the fictitious Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men.

Similarly, and fairly or unfairly, the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) is now best remembered as the model for Charles Foster Kane in Herman Mankiewicz’s and Orson Welles’ brilliant but historically questionable movie Citizen Kane. Some readers might also know that Hearst was the model for the millionaire Jo Stoyte (Joseph Panton Stoyte) in Aldous Huxley’s last really good novel After Many a Summer (although I note that the Wikipedia article on Hearst isn’t aware of this fact.)

Hearst was somebody worth writing about, even by people who couldn’t stand him.

David Nasaw spent ten years researching and writing his detailed biography The Chief, which runs to more than 600 pages of closely printed text. But it’s hard to read any of it without mentally comparing Hearst to Kane (and Stoyte). Fittingly, Nasaw devotes a whole chapter to chronicling the impact of Citizen Kane on the real Hearst, and gives at least some of his longer endnotes to After Many a Summer.

Parts of the story are familiar through the fictions. Hearst inherited his first millions – he didn’t earn them. His father George was largely absent from his life. His mother Phoebe was over-protective and manipulative. When he broke into journalism and began buying newspapers, young Hearst was a political progressive, as so many Republicans were in the age of Teddy Roosevelt. He was a trust-buster, a champion of labour unions and the friend of the new European immigrant masses who were pouring into 1890s America. Later, as his millions piled up, he became an obsessive collector of art, animals and literary lions, whom he hosted in his many castles and mansions. All this is true of the fictional Kane, too.

Hearst’s early journalism was vigorous, sensational and muck-raking. Unlike most of his circle and social class, Hearst wasn’t an anti-Semite and had many Jewish friends. (The fictional Kane is given a Jewish friend called Bernstein.) But even in his early progressive days, the jingoism was there. It was Hearst more than anyone else who stirred up Americans to fight the unnecessary Spanish-American War and acquire an overseas empire while pretending it wasn’t an empire at all.

As Hearst got older and his newspaper empire became more embattled by rivals, his politics moved further to the right and became quite cranky. He spent much ink telling the world that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal was just creeping Communism. Like so many Establishment Americans in the 1930s, he preached isolationism and gave Hitler the benefit of the doubt until the very last moment. Towards the end of his life he was an ardent supporter of Senator Joe McCarthy.

For these reasons, he came to be regarded by the liberal-left as Public Enemy Number One. The movie Citizen Kane was structured as flashbacks after the funeral of its Hearst-like eponymous character. In fact, Hearst was still very much alive when it was made, and at least part of the purpose of the film was to take his reputation down a few pegs and suggest that he belonged to a past age.

Apart from his public life, there was also the peculiarity of his private life. His 50-year marriage to Millicent Hearst was amicable and produced five sons who all seemed to get on well with both their parents. But Hearst broke with convention by separating from his wife without divorcing her, and spending 30 years living with his mistress Marion Davies.

All this was an open secret. Not even Hearst’s newspaper rivals ever mentioned the fact in print. The polite fiction was kept up that Hearst and Davies were “just friends” who happened to be together whenever Hearst was hosting parties at his North California castle San Simeon (often starring guests such as George Bernard Shaw, H.G.Wells or Winston Churchill). One later commentator called Davies “America’s best-known kept woman.” Davies had been a reasonably talented comedienne in silent and early talkie movies. Hearst created a production company called Cosmopolitan Pictures specifically to promote her, and spent many millions trying to build her up as a major film star - but with very limited success. This was like the fictional Kane’s attempt to build up his second wife as an opera star; but the film’s depiction of the woman as an amiable but talentless bimbo was not a fair representation of Davies, who was a reasonably bright and witty woman.

Nasaw’s book is a real biography, not a hagiography. He chronicles Hearst’s colossal arrogance, political stupidities and bullying of perceived enemies. Hearst clearly ran a blacklist, giving instructions to the editors of his newspapers on which public figures they should boost, which they should lampoon or otherwise write about negatively and which they should never mention. Nasaw covers both the implosion of Hearst’s newspaper empire in the 1930s, and Marion Davies’ embarrassing descent into alcoholism.

Having noted this, though, there are times when Nasaw seems to be as kind to Hearst as he possibly can be. He rather too hastily dismisses the unsavoury rumours that surrounded the death of the film producer Thomas Ince. In 1924 Ince died suddenly while part of a party enjoying Hearst’s hospitality on board one of Hearst’s luxury yachts. Ince’s body was hastily brought ashore and cremated before a memorial service was held. Rumour had it that Hearst had gone berserk when another guest, the notoriously randy Charlie Chaplin, made a pass at Marion Davies. Protecting exclusive rights to his 27-year-old mistress, the 61-year old Hearst got a revolver and accidentally shot the innocent Ince dead, mistaking him for Chaplin. He had the money to cover this manslaughter by bribing a coroner to sign a death certificate before the hasty cremation. Apparently he also had the money to pay Ince’s widow a fabulous sum for life, and send her off on a very long holiday.

This story became Californian legend. It provided part of the plot of Huxley’s After Many a Summer and all the plot of the 2001 film The Cat’s Meow. Nasaw skids over it very quickly, which is odd, given that he is prepared to make detailed comparisons with other fictional versions of Hearst’s life.

There is, however, one thing about The Chief which is both chastening and instructive. Fictional versions of Hearst present him, in old age, as lonely, unfulfilled and miserable. This depiction is very consoling for those of us who are not multi-millionaires. It’s so comforting to think the rich can’t buy happiness. Even Citizen Kane runs with this popular mythology. The reality appears to have been that Hearst, secure egotist that he was, suffered no doubts about himself, was quite a cheerful old man in private, and died happy.

How very annoying.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

ARE PRINTED BOOKS A THING OF THE PAST?

Well, are they?

This particular question is a sub-section of the general notion that other media have now taken over from print. We are, so the current argument goes, all going to be reading off screen rather than off paper. As I am encouraging you to do at this very moment.

There is an anecdote that Nick Cohen recycles in his polemic You Can’t Read That Book. It has been very popular among advocates of the new electronic media.

In the early sixteenth century there was a monk who objected to the new-fangled movable-type printing that had been unleashed by Gutenberg. He wanted to defend the exacting art of hand-written illuminated manuscripts, which scribes had for centuries produced in monasteries. So he wrote a polemic attacking the crudity of print. But he wanted his polemic to have the widest possible circulation. So he sent it to the printers.

This is taken as an example of un-self-conscious hypocrisy and self-contradiction. At the very least it is paradoxical.

We now have similar paradoxes at the interface of literal physical books and their electronic equivalents. For a decade, Victoria University of Wellington has produced, on-line, an annual anthology of New Zealand poetry called Best New Zealand Poems. It has been hailed as an embracing of the new electronic media by an old literary form. What is more up-to-date than producing an anthology on-line? But when the annual anthologies of  Best New Zealand Poems had appeared for a decade, how was the fact celebrated? Not on-line, but by the production of real, physical, printed-on-paper book called The Best of Best New Zealand Poems (edited by Bill Manhire and Damien Wilkins, VUP, 2011).

As I pointed out when I reviewed this excellent collection for Landfall Review On Line, it is interesting that even in this electronic age, only a physical book is seen as having the prestige to represent the celebration of something.

Hypocritically, as I use an electronic medium to witter on further, I would defend the superiority of physical books over their on-screen shadows.

I could give you some practical reasons for this.

Whenever I’ve read a lengthy scholarly text in electronic form, I’ve noticed what a pain it is trying to flick back and forth to check such things as end-notes. (No problem with a physical book, as you can stick a literal bookmark where the end-notes are, for ready reference). Similarly, I could point out that, while literal physical books may burn in a fire (as may your computer or reading tablet) they are never in danger of having their battery or other power-source fail. Etcetera. Etcetera.

On the other hand, those who think physical books are superseded would immediately tell me how much physical space they take up, and how much more convenient their little square tablet is, holding the text of thousands of books. The American Library of Congress in the palm of the hand. And I would have to admit that, as a real book-bibber, I am fundamentally loyal to real physical books for purely aesthetic reasons rather than practical ones. I love the pleasure of handling their weight, inspecting their covers, enjoying the quality of their  paper, seeing their spines lined up on the shelves etc.

I do not think printed books are going to disappear in a hurry, however. Not only will it take quite a while yet for electronic books to penetrate the whole publishing-and-reading market, but physical books are still things that millions of people love as objects-in-themselves. I believe they will continue to be produced for that reason alone – in the same way that hand-crafted works of art still exist alongside mass-produced art.

Indeed, I believe that printed books will last longer than printed newspapers, which are well on the way to being replaced by other news platforms.   

Something New

We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books

“AFTER THE LOCKOUT” by Darran McCann (4th Estate / Harper-Collins $NZ24:99)

           

St Patrick’s Day is this week, so I make it my business to read an Irish novel hot off the press – and a solid piece of work it proves to be, too. After The Lockout is a very good historical novel and the debut of an Irish writer in his early 30s.

I commend historical novels for how well they enter imaginatively into the ethos of a past age. This is not the same as saying that I expect historical novels to be balanced works of history. It is for historians to try to find some balance and perspective from the surviving records. Historical novelists should strive to recreate how people once thought, felt and acted; and not pretend that they necessarily saw the world as we see it. In other words, historical novelists have to show some historical imagination. If their characters’ views are partisan and unbalanced, then even good historical novels can go ahead and be partisan and unbalanced. And, as it happens, After The Lockout is highly partisan.

In a nutshell, this is a lament for the left-wing socialist Irish republic that never was, and a howl of despair at how it came never to be.

The time is late 1917. The First World War is still raging and Irish soldiers are involved in it, even if there is no conscription in Ireland. It is more than a year since the abortive Easter Rising of 1916, which is already fast being transformed in a powerful nationalist myth. Some young Irishmen are preparing for an armed struggle against English rule.

Victor Lennon is a 27-year-old man who has just been released from jail for his own part in the rising. But he is less than starry-eyed about the event and more than a little contemptuous of naïve nationalists. In fact Victor believes (as the novel’s title indicates) that for Ireland’s future, the nationalist rising was far less important the big industrial strike and lockout that happened in Dublin just before the world war broke out. Victor wants class war, not nationalist war. His heroes are the socialists Jim Larkin and James Connolly – not the Irish Volunteers and Irish Republican Brotherhood who planned the rising. As the Bolshevik revolution had just happened in Russia, he declares himself a Communist and burns to spread the Marxist word. (The novelist is surely aware that, accurately or inaccurately, most of us pronounce “Lennon” the same as we pronounce “Lenin”).

But first he has to go to his home village in County Armagh to sort out some personal problems connected with his drunken, poteen-distilling father Pius.

And here the novel’s personal conflict plays out. Ruling the village is a particularly tyrannical parish priest, Fr Stanislaus Benedict – a vain and petty puritan who stands on his dignity about such matters as his official title. He supervises parishioners’ morality with a gimlet eye. Drunkenness, fornication and dancing after hours receive public rebukes which are usually obeyed submissively. Confession is a weapon and excommunication often threatened. Cardinal Logue, Primate of Ireland, has warned his priests that they must be particularly vigilant about these Bolshevik and socialist propagandists who are corrupting people’s morals. Fr Benedict takes him seriously. When Victor Lennon returns to the village and is hailed as a hero for his part in the Easter Rising, Fr Benedict smells trouble, especially as Victor is in no time preaching the Communist gospel.

The plot develops between the polarities of the priest and the young Communist, heading for a very public conflict and (it has to be admitted) a rather melodramatic finale.

En route, however, Darran McCann takes the temperature of Ireland in 1917. Remember, this was before the War of Independence (1919-21) and Civil War (1922-23) had happened; but McCann dramatises a lot of the fault-lines that would crack open in those conflicts. With Victor, there is the socialist ideologue who thinks social revolution should come before national independence can mean anything. With Fr Benedict there is the voice of Catholic conservatism which would shape the Irish Free State and the early Republic. There are differing shades of Irish nationalism in the supporting characters, including the curate Fr Daly who seems more aware of the church’s social teaching than his boss is. There is also awareness that a possible partition of Ireland is looming. Armagh, where the story is set, was later to be on the wrong side of the border when the artificial British statelet of “Northern Ireland” was created. After the Lockout also takes note of the powerful and destructive influence of drink on Irish manhood. It is seen to be as much of a determinant in Ireland’s political history as ideas have been.

Darran McCann is on Victor Lennon’s side more that Fr Stanislaus Benedict’s side. You can tell this from the way the story is narrated. Victor speaks in the first-person and the present tense - an easy invitation to identify with him. Fr.Benedict is presented in the third-person and the past tense, with much ironical description to deflate his pomposity.

Yet McCann is too skilful to make his characters wholly black-and-white. The puritanical priest’s backstory reveals somebody risen from low down the social heap, fiercely concerned with his parishioners’ souls and often capable of more astute judgement (about, for example, the village’s amateur prostitute) than the young agitator is. Fr Benedict has also had experience of supporting peasants in the old “Land War” in which they wrested property off landlords. He is depicted as a malign and reactionary force, but he is not as ignorant of social change as Victor Lennon assumes he is.

Victor Lennon may burn with a zeal for social justice, but he is profoundly flawed and often his own worst enemy. He regularly drinks himelf stupid. He can’t control his sexual urges, swyving with the local slapper while at the same time expecting the local schoolteacher to take seriously his declarations of love. Above all, he misreads the local peasantry and keeps treating them to textbook Marxist diatribes for which they aren’t ready and in which they aren’t interested. He does not have the sense to realize that, when peasants have only just won ownership of their land, the last thing they want to have sold to them is Communist collectivisation.

Surprisingly, the novelist also shows Victor sharing unthinkingly in the prejudices of his age. Victor cheers with the proletarian crowd when he sees newsreels of the “nigger” boxer Jack Johnson getting what he deserves at the hands of a white challenger. Victor tells the woman he’s courting that the only flicker he’s seen that was a real “work of art” was Birth of a Nation (in case you didn’t know – the film that encouraged the re-formation of the Ku Klux Klan). Most by-the-numbers historical novelists would have had their protagonist denouncing racism to keep in the good graces of their readers. Darran McCann assumes his readers are sophisticated enough to recognise autres temps et autres moeurs when they see them.

This is a novel of very sharp observation, flawed only by its ending. It probably helps to have some prior knowledge of Irish history when reading it. There genuinely was a radical left in Ireland in the early 20th century and, when the Civil War came, most of the radical left were in the IRA fighting against the new Free State. Later, some radical-left IRA men left memoirs, in permanent mourning that the independent Irish state turned out to be conservative and Catholic rather than collectivist and socialist. More recently, Ken Loach’s 2006 film The Wind that Shakes the Barley fostered the myth that the IRA of the Irish Civil War era was predominantly left-wing. But this was strictly a myth. For even if Ireland’s hard-left were in the IRA, they were only a minority of the Civil War-era IRA, which was overwhelmingly nationalist rather than Marxist. It couldn’t help being so when it was led by the archetypal Catholic conservative Eamon de Valera.

Darran McCann may in part be lamenting the red-socialist dream that never became a reality (in Ireland or anywhere else); but he knows that history doesn’t really allow replays. When the stern priest declares “The Russian experiment…. is sure to end in horror”, both the author’s and our sense of historical irony will tell us that, sad to admit, the priest proved to be right. Victor Lennon is the true voice of a particular attitude at one moment in Ireland’s history. But the moment passed and Ireland never had a social revolutionary phase.

After the Lockout helps to explain why not.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.

“THE BLACK SOUL” by Liam O’Flaherty (first published 1924)

After the Lockout reminds us that a small group of young Irishmen wanted a socialist Ireland at the time of the struggle for Irish independence. One of them was Liam O’Flaherty (1897-1984). He fought in the “Tan” war against the British and, with some mates, raised a red flag over one of Dublin’s buildings when the new Free State was heading for civil war. Of course he was on the IRA side of the civil war. For many years he was a member of the Communist Party, and every so often made controversial statements about the wonderful things being achieved by the Soviet Union. In old age, however,  he was reconciled to the Catholic church in which he had been raised.

I have a particular soft spot for O’Flaherty, party because he is now so unfashionable. Some of O’Flaherty’s vivid short-stories (such as The Sniper and The Rockfish) still turn up regularly in school anthologies. His most famous novel The Informer (1925) has remained in print. But you’d probably have to scour second-hand book-stores to find his other titles. His The Puritan (1932) is an angry diatribe directed at Irish sexual repressiveness, and his Famine (1937) is one of the best popular novels about the 1840s Irish famine. They sit in battered second-hand editions on my shelf.

O’Flaherty was once regarded as a major writer and had an international reputation. The Informer was filmed twice (there was a silent version made in England in 1928; and the famous version John Ford made in Hollywood in 1935). Surprisingly, the French were interested in his books too. In the 1930s, two of his works were filmed in Paris studios with French actors, The Puritan, and Mr Gilhooley (the latter under the title Derniere Jeunesse). I’d really love to see what the French made of The Puritan which, film reference books tells me, retained its original Dublin setting. Imagine Jean-Louis Barrault as a Dubliner!

O’Flaherty has slipped off the literary radar partly because of his style. He works in bold brush-strokes and broad melodramatic situations. Irony is of the crudest sort. Reading Famine, for example, I was reminded of raw peasant tales like Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don. O’Flaherty didn’t do Modernism, or the type of finely-calibrated self-referencing gamesmanship that now wins literary applause.

For this very reason, I commend The Black Soul to you as both period piece and curiosity. It was the first novel O’Flaherty wrote (although the second to be published) and it is melodramatic in spades.

An Irish soldier, damaged and disoriented after his experience in the Great War, tries to settled on one of the Aran Islands. So far so autobiographical, as Liam O’Flaherty himself was a native of the Aran Islands and served in the British Army in the Great War before being invalided out with “shellshock”.

The ex-soldier is known only as The Stranger, although at one point we are told that his name is Fergus O’Connor and he comes from Dublin. The Stranger is fiercely anti-clerical, despairing, and sees no real purpose in life. His nerves are shattered. He is severely depressive and often refers to himself as “the Black Soul”.

For a year (the novel is organized in four sections corresponding to the seasons), The Stranger lives with a mismatched peasant couple. The wife is tall, stately and beautiful and is known ironically as Little Mary. The husband is a deformed, ugly, red-bearded dwarf whom everyone calls Red John. Husband and wife have never slept together. Little Mary hates Red John. Sexually starved, she longs for a lover. The Stranger is attracted to her, but is disdainful of the superstitious peasantry with whom she associates. For a while he attempts to court the pious Catholic (and middle-class) daughter of his anti-clerical drinking mate O’Daly.

Eventually, however, the sensual appeal of Little Mary is too strong and she and The Stranger sleep together. When he realizes he is a cuckold, Red John goes berserk. In the violent denouement, played out of the island’s windy cliff-tops and booming sea caverns, The Stranger fights and kills Red John. Then, with the help of O’Daly, The Stranger and Little Mary are able to flee from the island and set off for a life together. Liberated sexual love, the ending suggests, has freed The Stranger from his crippling confusions and given him a purpose in life.

I have not hesitated to tell the whole plot here because The Black Soul is less interesting for its fable-like plot than for the crude and raw energy of its style. You can see that, with a tall beautiful peasant woman called Little Mary and an ugly peasant dwarf called Red John, O’Flaherty is more interested in creating archetypes than psychologically-rounded characters. Here is all the sexual beauty of the hardy Irish peasant woman; and there is all the intellectual crudity of the domineering Irish peasant man – and in between, there is a shattered Irish intellectual not knowing which values to adopt. You could stretch as point and see the Aran island on which the story is set as symbolic of all of Ireland – repressive, bound by tradition and a good place to escape from.

Yet in truth, this is the novel of a young man who hasn’t quite found his voice. The Stranger – sexually attractive to the peasant woman – is clearly the author’s surrogate. As well as sharing elements of O’Flaherty’s own biography at the time, he is like the type of male fantasy-figure D.H.Lawrence used to create – sexually potent and immensely attractive to women (think Mellors the game-keeper, Lawrence’s big fantasy compensation for his own practical impotence).

There is grave confusion about whose viewpoint O’Flaherty is adopting. Sometimes in The Black Soul, The Stranger stands in judgment on the uncouth peasantry and we are clearly meant to endorse his judgments. At other times, he is depicted as brain-damaged and slightly demented. The novel is written in brief, declarative sentences and littered with purple-prose descriptive passages of waves crashing, Atlantic winds howling and cliffs towering, all of which are presumably intended to symbolise great primal forces of nature at work in the characters’ souls.

In short, the young man writing this novel is still finding his subject, and the novel is a little out-of-control and over-wrought in style.

Yet, as I scribbled them into my reading notebook, it found some pungent passages.

Take this one, when The Stranger has just failed to engage intellectually with yet another peasant. In a nutshell, it expresses the tragedy of the Irish Catholic-raised anti-clerical:

“  ‘Ah,’ he said to himself, ‘he has no intellect. That’s what it is.’ And he cursed God for having given himself a strong intellect until he remembered that there was no God and became still more depressed because he had nobody to blame for his sorrow.”

Then there’s this acute observation on peasant mores:

“The peasants of Rooruck, like all peasants and rustics and small townspeople, loved the sensation of somebody in their village being dead or sick or murdered or accused of murder or gone mad. They did not read newspapers, so the pleasure of talking scandal and trying to foist crimes and immoral habits on each other was their only harmless pleasure.”

I doubt if this particular peasant and small-town fault is peculiar to the Irish.