The Irish Writers: Oscar Wilde by David Pritchard 📚
The Irish Writers: W.B. Yeats by David Ross 📚
The Irish Writers: George Bernard Shaw by David Ross 📚
A neat little set of literally mini-biographies – each about 200 pages and about 4"x6" – very easy to hold in the hand. Bought from a newsagent’s across the street from Trinity College in June 2025. Apart from their major works, I knew very little of these authors so these little biographies suited me just fine. Stray observations:
Ross is the better writer of the two. His command of context and content, and his style, simply made his two books more enthralling and readable. The first chapter of his Shaw book, “Two Cities,” summarizes in 11 pages the economic, historic, religious, and cultural conditions of London and Dublin. It is a confident, breathtaking summary that provides a context for the emergence of Shaw – and Wilde and Yeats – onto the cultural and literary scene.
The Wilde book compresses an awful lot into a small space. What it illuminated for me was how long it took Wilde to “become” Wilde. I did not know how relatively late in life his success came, with his discovery of plays and their witty, aphoristic dialog being perhaps his ideal literary form. I also did not know that his father also indulged in sexual misadventures, which brought stress, shame, and hard times to his mother and family. The sins of the father…
While Yeats and Shaw did not engage in sexual adventures in the same way, they had their own hangups and issues with women that distracted their wives and caregivers. Yeats sponged off of them, Shaw adored the adoration of his younger female correspondents while stringing them along and keeping his paper conversations a secret from his wife.
An irony that linked all three of these Irishmen: their desire to be active players on the larger literary stage of London. From Ross’s book on Shaw:
Of the three, Yeats was most involved with their home country. Part of his vision was to establish a modern Irish literature, written in English, and Ireland continued to be a prime source of his inspiration, even though he spent as much time in England as he did there. Wilde was not concerned with Ireland. Shaw never forgot that he was an Irishman, and like Yeats was a Unionist who believed in Home Rule. But, though much in his thought and writing is Irish, he did not feel the rootedness in Irish history and culture that Yeats felt and nourished. He wanted to reform not Ireland or England, but the world.
One of the blurbs says “ice cool, self aware, and very funny.” Definitely icy and detached. A witty novel of a young lower-class Irish woman in Hong Kong and her romantic and sexual adventures among higher-class striving junior professionals. The characters are so high-verbal and articulate that you could cut yourself on their casual, lacerating banter. Ava, the narrator, is so detached from her own life and needs that I felt equally distanced; as funny and sparky as she could be, I also wanted to shake her and tell her to grow up. Though that last page is really good: her body finally chooses what her busy mind has denied her. The last of the books I bought in Ireland.
Typical Ware genius of meticulous design and wit in storytelling: “The pane of 20 interconnected stamps shows a bird’s-eye view of a mail carrier’s route through a bustling town. Laid out in 4 rows of 5, the stamps depict the story through the 4 seasons from top-left to bottom-right.”
Took the morning deliberately slowly, let myself go down various online rabbit holes, and then BAM nonstop activity for 3 hours. I keep wanting to leave my old time management habits behind in retirement, but I don’t think I can.
Did my ankle and knee PT this morning, read another story in the latest First Line literary magazine, and started in on my inbox.
Since my semi-retirement in April and now full retirement, I’ve found that my much-vaunted and hard-fought-for productivity habits have totally unraveled. With no one imposing a deadline on me, I tend to get around to things when I want to do them. Which is, in its own way, very relaxing. I get to things, just not when other people want me to get to them.
I’m unsubscribing from some newsletters, or moving them to Readwise Reader app. I usually delete a lot of things that arrive daily, which are reminders from FollowUpThen or ads from local businesses I want to stay aware of.
On a day like today, where I have 50+ emails in the box, I like to sit and just plow through the inbox from top to bottom, put stuff in Google Tasks or Keep or Evernote, and then stop when the inbox is empty or I’m tired of doing it.
Note: Found this draft in my Marsedit folder – yipes! Must be over a year old by the time it sees print. Which makes it at least 2 years older than the previous Nova Scotia books posts. ACK. Lightly edited though it could be much better.
Final post! Almost a year after our trip was done and just before we start the next trip!
The only book 📚 I bought at the tourist shop at Hall’s Harbor, a great restaurant and mainstream gift shop, set in a picturesque postcard. Here’s a live webcam of the harbor.
I bought this book at the gift shop, which did not make me less conflicted about contributing to Nova Scotia’s Maud Lewis Art & Industrial Complex.
By any measure, her life was a hard one. Born with birth defects and rheumatoid arthritis, living in a harsh climate, with a husband who people suspected did not treat her well, in a ridiculously tiny house not built to stand that strong weather. We saw the actual house many years ago, transplanted to a permanent Maud Lewis exhibit in Halifax NS. It seemed an incredibly, ridiculously small dwelling for two people. But considering that they lived on the edge of – if not in – poverty, they lived as thinly as did their neighbors.
The poverty was made somewhat bearable by her discovery of painting and its ability to earn small amounts of money that contributed to keep her and husband Everett in the basics.
Her story was ill-served by the cliched and horribly dishonest movie “Maudie”. While Sally Hawkins’ intelligence and energy ennoble any movie, its portrayal of Everett was highly speculative and that’s not including Ethan Hawke’s awful performance. Look at some of the contemporary accounts of his interactions with reporters and Maud’s customers: he was a talker, a glib salesman, the high-energy front man. He may have been dour and sour behind the scenes, but wouldn’t that have that been more interesting to play?
Not to mention the total dishonesty about Maud’s daughter. Read Maud’s Wikipedia entry and you’ll see a more fascinating and complex story than the fable presented in the movie.
But by all means: buy the “Maudie” soundtrack. A more wonderful and melancholy set of songs I’ve never heard, and we have never tired of hearing it.
Back to the book: it’s a thin one that takes scenes from her art and juxtaposes them with actual pictures of those scenes and landscapes, representing perhaps what Lewis would have seen in childhood or out her tiny home’s window. Quotes dot the book from people who knew her. It’s not a lasting contribution to Maud Lewis’s story, but provides an interesting way to look at how she transformed pictures from life into pictures in paint.
Purchased in a bookshop in Galway because I had not yet purchased any books while in Ireland and I felt I really needed to. And lord, that gorgeous cover illustration by Sheelyn Browne. Viney’s book of natural history, fact, lore, memoir, prose poetry, and his own drawings originated from columns he wrote in the mid-70s when he, his wife and daughter moved “back to the land” in a rural area of County Mayo on the West Coast of Ireland. The book was originally published in 1996 and reissued in 2022.
The essays – one for each month of the year – serve as a naturalist’s notebook of poetry, observations, history, science, and life in a remote and empty area of country. I had quite a bit of trouble following the thread of his essays until it occurred to me to mentally insert a few lines of white space between topics here and there; seeing these passages as entries in a scrapbook (with no need for transitions) made the chapters as a whole make more sense.
The book is studded with wonderful bits of lore and fact: phenology is the study of nature’s calendar; “botanists have calculated that spring moves north across flat ground at roughly two miles an hour” while trees begin to redden from north to south at about 40 miles an hour; primroses bloom early (prima rose, the first rose) to capture light and moisture before woodland trees start to leaf. “Woodland suits primroses because moisture evaporates more slowly in the shade.”
Viney’s prose can be intensely poetic and evocative:
There are at least seventy sorts of blackberry along the hedges of Ireland now, some hauling themselves about with briars the thickness of my thumb and armed with hooked prickles of a medieval ferocity.
But the writer’s attempt to put his love into words sometimes makes the prose giddy on its own perfume:
How lush, by comparison, our ‘bleak’ Mayo hillside, how sprawling and coarsely tangled and seething with flies and bees! But down on the duach, at the margin of the lake, there was an echo of the spare and precious flora of seventy-seven degrees north. For eleven months of the year, the closebitten sward is a sodden green carpet mostly innocent of blossom. And then, in August, its wettest parts put up a flush of chaste and beautiful white flowers.
What impressed me was, even in the mid-90s, Viney’s chronicling of environmental change. The hillsides that had been unchanged since the years of the Famine were seeing more plastic as litter in the landscape and in the ocean, more roads, the disappearance of species, the fading away of older generations who knew and appreciated the old ways of living in harmony with a sometimes harsh but often beautiful nature.
Think of what it means to doubt the ’naturalness’ of weather. We have never been sure what it would do, but we could be fairly sure of what it would not do, on average and over a period. Given a windy winter like this one, we could count on ‘fickle’ nature not to do it too often or too catastrophically. But supposing we lost that assurance: supposing, after sixteen storms since Christmas, we had good reason for trusting that there would not be sixty more? …
It cannot help that the people who might make decisions about global warming are themselves so totally insulated from natural things and especially from weather. One sees them on television, being ushered beneath umbrellas from one heated capsule to the next. What can they possibly know of life amid wind and rain?
One of Liz’s uncles in Toronto used to work for the Viceroy rubber manufacturing company. She found this catalog of baby dolls, cars, and other rubber toys. Cute! Lifelike! Creepy!
