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Overview
Curious and funny, tender and scathing, Nuala O’Faolain’s columns in the Irish Times were never less than trenchant and always passionate. Through the prism of casual, everyday encounters, O’Faolain digs into her subjects in ways that transcend topicality. Taken together, her years of commentary form a historical narrative, a chronicle of Ireland’s transformation by one of its sharpest observers and canniest critics.
Covering a vast array of subjects, A Radiant Life includes more than seventy entries, showcasing the unequivocal voice of Nuala O’Faolain, hailed by Irish Times literary editor Fintan O’Toole as “one of the greatest columnists to ever inhabit the English language.”
“O’Faolain . . . writes with such precision and individuality that she could make the copy on the back of a cornflakes packet compelling.” —The Guardian on Almost There
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781613120477 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ABRAMS, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 3 Months to 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The 1980s
Liberty and Showbiz
I was watching the other night the show that American television put on to celebrate the refurbished Statue of Liberty. The occasion was attended by Presidents Reagan and Mitterand and by loads of other people, all obviously freezing half-to-death on a windy platform in New York harbor.
It was fascinating, as always, to see what a nation chooses to display as expressing itself. You will recall that when the eyes of millions of viewers were upon us, at Ballyporeen, we – or somebody – settled on Derek Davis and some small Irish dancers to encapsulate the mystery of Irishness. The Americans have a great deal more confidence than we have when it comes to patriotic showbiz, as well they might. All the same, Liberty weekend was, from a European point of view, a very, very odd occasion.
For one thing, America's royalty, the stars, were playing amazing roles. President Mitterand was introduced by that well-known statesman, Gregory Peck; Robert De Niro, with a microphone that didn't work, introduced the Chief Justice, who in turn administered the oath of allegiance to thousands of new citizens in a simultaneous nationwide telecast.
This ceremony could have been the emotional highlight of the night. The Statue of Liberty stands for the millions of immigrants who founded modern America, and citizenship of the States is still the goal, the almost religious aspiration, of millions of people all over the globe. As the cameras panned over the new citizens you could see one reason at least why American-ness means liberty. There they were; people of all shapes, sizes, and colors, not knowing the words of the oath, yawning, shuffling, casually dressed. Nobody had drilled them into deference. They are, like the earlier immigrants, free now from lords and bishops and the oppression of class. They are equal; the old countries of Europe, even the socialist ones, have never achieved such an ideal. This is to put to one side, of course, the questions raised by the show's opening with a little African American boy singing the National Anthem.
Andy Williams and Mireille Mathieu demonstrated détente. The camera never got to the Secretary of Transportation – whose reason for giving a speech I didn't catch – so we never saw her. "I Want to Be in America" was danced with the marvellous Busby Berkeley-type precision that is one of America's real arts. Bob Hope was given a medal in the company of Elie Wiesel, chronicler of the Holocaust, Mr. Wang of computers, Kissinger, a token woman, and Irving Berlin, who not only typifies immigrant success but also wrote "White Christmas," America's folk anthem.
The video from Lawrence, Kansas, didn't show up. Coretta Scott King shivered in the audience along with Senator Robert Dole, Steven Spielberg, and a glowing George Shultz. Mrs. Mitterand looked as if she would never smile again. When President Reagan turned on the lights of the Statue of Liberty and no flames came out of her torch, I thought it was another technical hitch. In fact, they turned on the torch in a later part of the ceremony. And the flames didn't work.
But by then the viewer was reeling. The Fonz, a chillingly popular television star with close-set eyes, questioned a resettled Vietnamese teenager about Communism. The Communists, she said, were "cruel, stern, and ill-tempered" and she is very glad to be in the Land of the Free. Well, I don't know about ill-tempered. I'm not sure that the manners of the millions of people on this planet who live by Communism are even relevant. But the Fonz was overcome with emotion. So were the Reagans. Nancy had been in her misty-eyed mode from the very start and couldn't do much more. But the President got even more broken-voiced sincerity into saying "God Bless America" at the end than he had in the beginning.
The sanitization of good and evil continued. A crowd of extras, tastefully dressed as huddled masses, formed tableaux as Neil Diamond in two different shirts sang "Yes, to America." This dissolved into a barn-dance sequence about freedom, with girls in gingham dresses and boys in denim. Tactically, that was a mistake. The whole night was asserting that there was no one else in America before the ships arrived at Ellis Island, that the state was born of innocence and hard work, that America has no colonizing past. But you can't conjure up the settlement of the interior without reminding people of the aboriginals, the Native American, who were completely ignored on Liberty weekend and whose hearts are buried at Wounded Knee. I bet they thought the new Americans were cruel, stern, and ill-tempered.
It was a splendidly elitist night. Nobody was there because they matter in their own small community, or because they had spent a lifetime in the service of others. You had to be either a Republican politician or a top star to be allowed to talk. And when it comes to choosing between politicians and stars, the producers spoke for all of us, and brought on the real King and Queen, Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor.
The latter, and not the Statue of Liberty, was the evening's memorable woman; $265 million it cost to refurbish Liberty: Miss Taylor did it by willpower. When last seen, she was fat, she was sad, and she was visibly getting old. But in a scene of rebirth as stunning as the chrysanthemums coming back to life in E.T., she is now slim and beautiful and younger than ever. It was a joy to behold.
And it was joyous, too, to listen to Sinatra singing. Cracked and scratchy as his voice is now, it is still the voice of America. Millions of people courted to his music, danced, played his records to suit their moods, had babies to it, and will go on loving it as long as ballads survive. The producers of the show dissolved to a shot of the Reagans as he sang. But popular as they are, they are not as potent as Ol' Blue Eyes, and the camera returned to him. And so to the fireworks and the end of the show.
It was a new way of displaying power. What the English say with the Royal Family, what the Russians say with tank parades, what the Vatican says with St. Peter's, the Americans said with entertainment. The images were so familiar and benevolent, the verbal content was so irrelevant, that the state behind the glitter was forgotten, the state that bombed Libya and terrorizes Nicaragua and ignores the anti-nuclear movement.
State occasions – and Liberty weekend was a state occasion – usually say something. But Reagan's America baffled these expectations. It covers its idea of itself in sentimentality and gloss. And since most of us have reason to be grateful to America and do love it, we are inclined to take it at its own valuation. It seems bad-mannered to insist that what matters to us now is not the America that once gave shelter to our emigrants, but the modern America that exercises foreign policies to which we are vulnerable.
The Americans have every right to celebrate themselves. But do they extend the same rights to everyone else? Would they lend Sinatra to the Sandinistas to celebrate their revolution? That sense of the world outside its shores which America once had, the generosity toward ethnic identity which it exemplified, was altogether missing from Liberty weekend. Between the song and dance, the speeches betrayed an isolation, a wilfully simple self-approval, which no non-American can be happy with. Liberty is not their property, even if the Statue is.
The Irish Times, July 8, 1986
U2: The Myth & The Mystery
U2 are genuinely so marvelous that a certain amount of music penetrated through the sound at Croke Park last weekend. But, basically, there were slow numbers, fast numbers, and very fast numbers. You couldn't hear the words – not that it mattered, since everyone knew the words.
What survived the massive amplification and the concrete reverberations of the stands were tempo and beat. You lost the intros because the crowd had started cheering in recognition. You lost the closing chords, because they'd started cheering again. You lost the middles, because the songs were so well-known to the audience that they were singing along, so that your experience of "With or Without You" was far more of the two girls beside you bellowing it out in a Westmeath accent, slightly behind Bono's beat, than of Bono singing it.
Rock critics wrote about the concerts as if they were LPs, as if nuance was detectable. But whatever Croke Park was about, it was not about listening to music. What, indeed, was it about? For all the thousands and thousands of words I've read about last weekend's concerts, nobody seems able to explain just why U2 is the voice of the Zeitgeist. This is not to question the individual brilliance of the band's members. They are, each, wonderfully talented. But what are these orchestrations, these tempi, these developments of an opening theme, this level of difficulty or easiness, these sentiments – all that comes out of Bono and the others as they invent and shape a song – why is this meaningful all over the world? By what process does significance leave one kind of music or one performer or one band, so that it suddenly seems old-fashioned and irrelevant, and what happens to make the new band seem significant? On what level does rock music work? The audiences in Milan and Cork and Boston are quite different from each other: what is it in U2 that is meaningful to all of them? The words? The level of performance? Something no one can explain?
What journalism does, vaguely aware that there's a mystery here, is to divide the answer between descriptions of the music, "the Edge's driving guitar soars past the most committed drum solo that even Larry has ever attempted" kind of thing, and the biographical "Bono stared out into the hot New Mexico night" kind of thing. But these don't add up to any kind of intelligible discussion. Given the overwhelming importance of rock music in popular culture, it is a great pity that the newspapers, in particular, don't give more space to thoughtful writing about rock.
The "color-piece" writers, too, seemed to be in the grip of a benign myth, so much so that they referred to Sunday's rain, which made you wet, the same as any other rain, as "a light drizzle." The crowds were celebratory, welcoming their own back, cheerful, joyful, etc. Well, as a matter of fact, the concert I was at was a distinctly poignant occasion, precisely because U2 are from Dublin, and were the only four millionaires there. The kids in the audience looked so poor. They are poor. They were by far the least privileged crowd U2 have so far played to (Belfast at least is in a welfare state). In comparison to playing in Basel, it must have been like playing in Soweto. They were awfully young and thin and plain, as far as the eye could see, ungainly when they danced, keeping to their own groups, generally humble. The one thing they had was energy. It is a stirring sight to see 40,000 people jumping up and down in unison, but the unison would be just as complete for Ronnie Drew and "Alive, Alive O-O" as it was for "Where the Streets Have No Name." Unison isn't of itself about anything: you get it in Croke Park at a great goal the same as you get it at U2.
So what was distinctively "U2-ish" about the occasion? In what ways was it different from any other very popular, very well-hyped rock concert? The answer surely is only in a sad way, really. The members of the band are even more not one of us than, say, the Rolling Stones, because they were, once, one of us. The gap between them and their audience is felt, no doubt on both sides. The bouncers, terrifying as Alsatians, mark the boundary of worlds. Bono can bend toward us from the ramp, but never come among us. People talk of "national pride" being evoked by U2, but it is difficult to see just how any nation can take any credit for their talent or their luck. Rock concerts are a conspiracy to make musicians – the buildup, the lights, the shrieks seem like superior beings, but how do you believe in superior beings from Artane? The relationship between Ireland and U2 is far more complex than journalism admits.
The Irish Times, July 4, 1987
Irish Atheism
I was talking to a woman the other day, a single parent, who supports herself and her daughter by long, night hours of cleaning. She had just got a note from her daughter's school, telling her that she'll be making her First Holy Communion in June. This woman dreads the expense; it is not just the outfit for the little girl, but something presentable for herself that she has to get. Why, she wanted to know, can they not wear their school uniforms? Why indeed. As it is, I've met mothers who shoplift to clothe their children for these occasions.
However, the grumble about the clothes turned into a larger complaint. Had I seen, she wanted to know, the amount of money that children collect on their Communion visits these days? Fivers and tenners, single pounds are too small to offer. "Surely it's meant to be religious," she said, "not all about what you're wearing and how much money did you get?"
Well, yes. It is. But what interested me about her disgust at the secularization of this sacrament was that, as far as I know, she doesn't believe in God herself. She certainly doesn't practice the Catholicism she grew up in. So what's it to her, if the material is wiping out the spiritual?
She belongs to what I think might be quite a sizable number of people, former Catholics, who go along with the externals of belief, so that their children won't feel like outsiders. The implications of this position don't really worry her at all, and she wouldn't call herself a hypocrite. Neither would I use the word hypocrisy in this context. Whatever it is these people are doing, it is much more vague and instinctive and pragmatic than hypocrisy is.
It starts with marriage. Imagine a man and a woman, neither of whom would dream of accepting Catholic teaching on celibacy before marriage, or the procreative purpose of marriage, or anything else the Church might preach. They haven't been to Mass in years or to confession for decades. But they want to get married in a Catholic ceremony in a church, and they'll readily lie about their beliefs, even all the way through a premarriage course, to get that kind of wedding. They say that they don't want to upset the mammies and the grandas and so on, and, of course, that's true. But it is also true that their nonbelief doesn't seem to them an important thing, worth arguing about in the open. It is not a positive unbelief; it is not convinced atheism. It really just boils down to not liking and not practicing the religion they were brought up in.
And anyway, people usually get married so as to celebrate each other, and to say to the world, in the most solemn terms they know, that they commit themselves to each other. In this culture the vast majority of people don't know any terms more solemn than those arrived at during the history of Christianity. It takes real independence to turn one's back on this huge reservoir of meaningfulness, and to settle for the literalness of the registry office.
Next, there's the question of baptism. Again, the emotions cry out for the big gesture, and endorsement by tradition. A christening is a welcoming of the baby to this earth, and an induction of the new human being into the community, leaving aside its denominational aspect. And, in any case, I suppose that atheist parents think that it doesn't matter very much, because the baby doesn't know what's happening. Their own example of unbelief, they assume, will set the child right.
And so it all begins. But is it a good way to live – to see to it that the children appear to be Catholics, while steering clear of the whole thing yourself? To exploit their powerlessness? To send them out to Mass, while you stay in bed? To give them money for missions in which you don't believe? To accompany them proudly to First Communions and Confirmations, even though they have never seen you pray?
I see why people do this, of course. They want to give their children protective color. It is extremely hard on a child to bear the burden of dissenting from the majority. Only a few children in the country can get through the educational system without encountering teachers and schoolmates and schoolmates' parents who would make no bones about their hostility to unbelief. How could any loving parent ask a child to pay for his or her parent's views? Outside Dublin it is very difficult even for an adult to retain standing while eschewing communal practices.
The children know. They know that some of the people around them really believe, and they know that no one at home does. But they have to live as best they can by the double standard. It is only about religion that this arises. Whatever other convictions the parents may have, even minority convictions, like vegetarianism, or using Irish as the language of the home, the children will be reared by them, quite straightforwardly. After all, what else can you rear children by, except your own convictions? But few people will take the risk of not hedging their bets on this profound subject.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Radiant Life"
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Copyright © 2011 Nuala O'Faolain estate.
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Table of Contents
Note on the American Edition by Sheridan Hay,
Editor's Note,
The 1980s,
Liberty and Showbiz,
U2: The Myth & The Mystery,
Irish Atheism,
An Ugly Little War,
Power and Obedience,
Knowing Travellers,
The Mystery of the General Good,
The 1990s,
On Human Dignity,
Innocence Ruined,
The Other World,
Birth,
Housework,
Designer Poverty,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Women,
Being Free,
Horse-drawn Holidays,
A Radiant Life,
Don't Rain On My Parade,
Schools and Sadism,
Little Blessings,
Suffer the Little Children,
Temples to Trade,
Violence Against Women,
Questions of Relative Rights,
Sinatra,
The Robinson Presidency,
That Backward Glance,
Bloom's Dublin,
As for Love,
Consequences of Disempowerment,
Heading North,
On Sectarian Hatred,
The Vanishing Border,
Prayer Is Political,
On Northern Ireland,
2000–2008,
On Teeth,
A Cultural Patriot,
Landscape Transformed,
Different for Girls,
A Love Letter to Manhattan,
A World of Indifference,
Whose Life Is It?,
The Cliffs of Moher,
Dissenting Voices,
Feeling for Ireland,
Everyday Ireland,
On Old Age,
About Justice,
Spirit of Africa,
A Surplus of Social Capital,
Our Irish Heritage,
Memoir Is Artful,
A Life of Heroic Honesty,
Your Cheatin' Heart,
One Little Dog,
Airport Chapels,
Charlie Haughey,
An Unacknowledged Debt,
Patronizing Women,
Islam and the West,
Gross Bigotry,
Sex Matters,
Tribal Icons,
Marriage and the Constitution,
Humanizing Economics,
Nouveau Materialism,
A Generous Life,
Irish-American Culture,
A Social Contract,
On Citizenship,
Afterword by Fintan O'Toole,