Literature and the lashers I am informed that there is no truth in the rumour that the Department of Education will shortly introduce the pitch-cap into our schools, though I cannot see any logical reason why it shouldn't. After all, if flogging makes children better students, scalping or half-hanging should turn them into geniuses. But if any of my readers is afflicted with a taste for literature I hope he or she will not neglect a preliminary course of toughening in an Irish school. Irish book reviewers, presumably toughened already, are more skilful with the leather and cane than with the pen, and their purpose in reviewing books would seem to be primarily to discourage readers as well as writers. Short on genius A few weeks ago John Broderick, one of our most gifted novelists, revealed to us that Bernard Shaw was the _only_ genius we had, Yeats and Joyce being merely clever men. At once I was turned into a small boy again, pleading with my elders and betters that Yeat wasn't so bad and Joyce, wasn't so bad. A week later another reviewer was telling us that there was no genius at all in modern Irish writing, dismissing not only John Broderick himself but Edna O'Brien, Anthony C. West and Anthony Cronin. After this swishing of the cane came a fiction reviewer who told us that Aidan Higgins' 'Langrishe, Go Down' was the besn Irish novel since 'At Swim Two Birds'. dismaying 'The Country Girls'. 'The Ferret Fancier', 'The Waking of Willie Ryan' and 'The Life of Reilly' as something less than also rans. Novel problem You'd think that all this brandishing of canes and letters would rouse a little compassion in Mr. Broderick, but no! Last week he was telling us that America had only one novel, 'Moby Dick,' and one novelist, Henry James. I am still not quite sure what this means—did Henry James write 'Moby Dick' or did America's only novelist not write a novel at all? Anyway, here is "Langrishe, Go Down," published by Calder and Boyers at 30/-, and the very first chapter shows that Mr. Higgins is a born writer, in love with language and what language can do. Here is the dying countryside round Celbrldge, beautifully rendered, with its dying, doddering population, who say "Indade" and "Good avening" in what I assume to be the Celbridge dialect of English. Very sad Three old sisters, Miss Imogen, Miss Lily and Miss "Hillen" (Celbrldge pronunciation of "Helen") live in a decaying house. Only one of them has ever had a fling with a man, and the centre of the book is a long flash-back to Miss Imogen's sad little _affaire_ with a worthless German student, and the book ends with Miss "Hillen's" obsequies. Sad, very sad! Quite shocking when you come to think of it, though I am afraid I never did get round to thinking of it, because I admired too much the charm of Mr. Higgins's Joycean paragraphs, and ended up with a vague feeling of self-indulgence as though I had been sucking Turkish Delight at a Requiem Mass. Shades of Greene In Mr. Higgins's novel the subject is nothing, the _treatment_ everything. In Graham Greene's new novel, "The Comedians" (Bodley Head. 25/-) the subject is everything, the treatment relatively unimportant. As usual in a Greene novel, we get a description of an unfamiliar locality, particularly the shadier aspects of it—this time a devastating exposure' of Haiti under its vicious and crazy dictator, Papa Doc—which, quite regardless of the merits of the story, has all the virtues of a good travel book or documentary. But along with this, there is also a group of excellently drawn characters, all presented in regard to their relationship with eternal truth, and one character representing what Mr. Greene thinks a good man in an evil world should be. Catholicism, with its tendency to exaggerate the importance of faith at the expense of morals, and sometimes failed to share his views about the goodness of his good man[sic]. I was relieved to find that the hero of this book was a Communist doctor. At the same time, I don't think this was my only reason for enjoying the book so much. I felt that the author's work was beginning to think through him, so that nowadays there seems to be a new gentleness and humour that promise fresh developments. Verse critics The "Sunday Independent" critic of the B.B.C, documentary on Yeats is the only one who has had the courage to attack Yeats's own reading of "Innisfree." I don't agree with him, but I like a man who does his thinking for himself. Others, of course, hnve attacked the verse-speaking of Brendan Kennelly and myself, among them the very generous critic of the London "Times," who ssys quite fairly that my speaking of the verse gets between him and the poem. What I wonder is whether you can speak _any_ poem without getting between some readers and it. After all a poem is not merely a number of words on a page. Song-mixture It is a rhythmical composition, like a song; it must be performed to be heard at all, and what the "reader" objects to in someone else's performance is that it differs from the ideal performance in his own mind, and the only possible criticism he can make is to perform it, himself. Old Irish-speakers, from whom I suspect I picked up my own way of speaking verse, spoke it in a sort of mixture of song and speech, with a very well-defined beat, and without using the large intervals that are necessary in prose. You would never have caught one of them saying as I once heard a B.B.C. verse speaker say "Shall I compare thee to a _summer's_" day?" which, apart from the fact that it shifted the beat was not the point that Shakespeare was trying to make anyway. Once I had to adjudicate at a Feis where a dozen schoolchildren recited Allingham's "Fairies." and they all said (with appropriate gestures) "_Up_ the airy mountain, _down_ the rushy glen" as though they were afraid I wouldn't know the difference between "up and "down" unless they illustrated it for me. But this sort of "expression" is more general than I once fancied. The Amerlcan poet, Robert Frost, denounced to me what he called Yeats' "parsonical" way of speaking verse "Listen!" he said "Where Shakespeare writes 'tell me where is fancy bred, or in the heart or in the _head_' you just have to make the distinction clear to the audience." I replied that I thought, an intelligent audience might be allowed to make the distinction for itself; after all Shakespeare wasn't giving a lecture on anatomy, but I didn't convince Frost. Tribal lays But Frost like ail the poets I have heard, spoke his own poetry beautifully, in a quiet dead-pan, Yankee drawl. Yeats, in spite of the 'parsonical' trick of turning up the end of a line and tying it in a neat bow, spoke his own verse better than any poet I knew though John Betjeman and Dylan Thomas ran him very close: Thomas's speaking of 'Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night' was almost unearthly. by FRANK O'CONNOR Sunday Independent, 1966-02-06