Face off

While Malcolm was in the former American colony of Noo Joisey and in absentia, WordPress would seem to have re-arranged how photographs are inserted into posts. That Malcolm was somewhat jet-lagged after an eventful ride with Mustang Sally was a further confusion.

That means the two protagonists of that anecdote in the previous post went un-illustrated. While Malcolm works out what he is doing wrong, let’s hear it for Aelia Galla Placidia (above).

There’s a decent Wikipedia mini-biog of the lady, well worth a quite viewing — for she was a figure of considerable consequence. She is also mother  to millions — try the account on rootsweb for a taster. One way or another, she figures in the ancestry of many Europeans — and probably all of their hereditary rulers. She was, for example, Elizabeth II’s something-like forty-six-times-back great-grandmother.

Ravenna

The source of that image is the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia at Ravenna, which deserves to qualify as one of the wonder of early European art, recognised by UNESCO as:

the earliest and best preserved of all mosaic monuments, and at the same time one of the most artistically perfect.

Slide out of the Mausoleum, take a swift left past the Information Bureau into the Via Cavour, then right into Via di Roma, and there is the Basilica of San Apollinare Nuovo. [Aha! See! Malcolm is getting the knack of this insertion business!]

San Apollinare Nuovo was where W.B.Yeats was confronted by his:

sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

— another poem Malcolm was made to learn at Dublin’s High School for his Leaving Cert., and which has fertilised brain-cells ever since.

A note of dubiety

Despite that image of Galla Placidia having a prominent position in her eponymous Mausoleum (as part of the family group with her two children, Valentinian and Honoria), there are certain snippy critics who question whether it does in fact represent the lady.

Malcolm will have none of that. That is she, majestically, imperially, imperiously so, and no-one else.

Oh, and a further footnote …

One modern legend has it that Cole Porter visited the Mausoleum, came outside, looked up at the Italian sky, and had the notion for Night and Day. And if that’s not a good enough excuse …

The not-so-great and the not-so-good, no. 28: Naomi Royde-Smith

Good grief, Malcolm! It looks as if we haven’t seen one of these in an age! Are you sure of the count?

Thought not! So it’s E&OE.

It’s also something of an apology. And those are certainly in vogue this week.

In Malcolm’s case it happened because he indulged in a bit of fact-checking. He had fixed in his mind the attribution of:

I know two things about a horse
And one of them is rather coarse.

He knew, for sure, that was a Hilaire Belloc gem. No question. Except, of course, it’s not. It’s, as he noted previously, Naomi Gwladys Royde-Smith, circa 1928,

Who she?

Well, she was more than a small literary celeb in her day — and her day stretched from being born in Halifax, Yorkshire, in 1875, until her kidneys gave up, and she was planted in Hampstead cemetery as late as mid-1964.

She was the eldest of six daughters of Michael Holroyd Smith (so the later double-barrelled surname is an affectation) and Anne Williams of Penybont. He was the electrical engineer who in 1889-90 fettled up the City and South London Railway, the first deep bored “tube” in the world, which we now know — if not love — as the Bank branch of London Underground’s Northern Line. She was the God-fearing, Bible-reading daughter of a Welsh divine.

After schooling at Clapham high school and a Swiss finishing school, Miss Royde-Smith was living in Chelsea, and writing for the Saturday Westminster Gazette. A small-circulation “clubland” publication, the Gazette  was, to some, “the most powerful paper in Britain“. It had the patronage of Lord Roseberry at a time when Liberalism was riding high.

Almost a national treasure

From being a contributor, Royde-Smith was soon editing (with her sister, Leslie) the ‘Problems and prizes page’ and from there, and writing reviews, in 1912 she became literary editor — the first woman in Britain to attain such a position. And it was no small distinction: she promoted the work of a galaxy of rising literary stars — Rupert Brooke, DH Lawrence, Graham Greene.

At this time she was the inamorata (or bit-on-the-side) of Walter de la Mare who wrote her hundreds of love-letters. Reviewing Theresa Whistler’s biography of de la Mare, Jeremy Treglown was somewhat caustic about the reality of this involvement:

Another supporter was the beautiful Naomi Royde-Smith, literary editor of the Saturday Westminster Gazette – the only woman who held such a position at the time. They fell in love. De la Mare wouldn’t leave his family and wasn’t much interested in sex, although he was exasperatingly jealous of Royde-Smith’s other friendships. She continued to read, heavily edit and publish his stuff, and in other ways helped along the possessive and increasingly hypochondriacal author. It is clear, although Whistler is tactful about this, that there was a good deal of tough, instinctive calculation behind de la Mare’s Skimpole-like infantilism. Devoted to his own children (he was a pioneer of male nappy-changing), he was sulky and obstructive when his daughters came to marry. A generous man when he could afford to be, the balance sheet always remained in his favour.

‘Beautiful’ Royde-Smithmay have been but, as implied there, she seems to have swung both ways. She had a ‘close relationship’ with Rose Macaulay; and together they ran a coterie of literary lions ( Arnold Bennett, Yeats, the Sitwells, the Huxleys) at Royde-Smith’s Kensington flat. Virginia Woolf came visiting and recorded Royde-Smith:

… dressed à la 1860; swinging earrings, skirt in balloons … sat in complete command. Here she had her world round her. It was a queer mixture of the intelligent & the respectable.

Read into that what you wish.

When Rose Macaulay put Royde-Smith into her 1926 novel, Crewe Train, it was as ‘Aunt Evelyn’. The central character, Denham Dobie, is brought to London by her maternal Aunt Evelyn and seeks to come to terms with this alien literary sophistication. Macaulay, though, makes Evelyn Gresham both incisive and smart (in every sense) but also interfering, waspish and a gross gossip.

A man and a quieter life

The Liberal hour passed and gone, the Westminster Gazette expired on its 35th birthday, 31st January 1928. Royde-Smith needed new worlds to conquer.

One was the accession of a man into her life. At Lynton, in Devon, ten days before Christmas 1926, she married Ernest Gianello Milton, a mixed (in all kinds of ways) Italian-American actor, a regular with Tyrone Guthrie’s Old Vic company. Milton’s finest few minutes were to be as Robespierre in Alexander Korda’s 1934 The Scarlet Pimpernel.

Quite what the marriage involved is open to prurient speculation. The bride was aged 51, and a full fifteen years older than her new husband (though she continued to massage the age difference). When Theresa Whistler, writing that study of de la Mare, described the liaison, it was:

a triumph over unlikeliness by the strong-minded, romantic woman she was, and the histrionic, highly-strung, generous-minded actor. He placed her, for life, on a pedestal of admiration, though not by temperament drawn to her sex.

Ahem! Again, read between the lines.

Later years

Naomi Milton (as she now was) forwent the social life, and effectively “retired” — at one time the Mitons were living in a house which had once been Nell Gwyn’s: 34 Colebrook Street, Winchester (as above). She did a bit of art-criticism for Queen magazine, but her main occupation became the authoring of a string of some forty largely-forgotten novels, a couple of biographies, and four plays. Only one of the novels, The Tortoiseshell Cat, “a Good First Novel“, seems to have stayed in print (and that intermittently).

Her niece, Jane Tilley, described Naomi Milton in her later years  — first at Winchester, then a permanent resident of the Abbey Court Hotel in Hampstead’s Netherhall Gardens, as:

hugely amusing, chain-smoked, was large and uncorseted, and wore large patterns

The final novel, Love and a Birdcage, was published in September 1960, when she was in her eighty-fifth year, possessed of very poor eye-sight. Ernest Milton survived her by a decade.

All for want of a nail

Lynne Truss, in Eats, Shoots & Leaves, revisited the trial of Roger Casement, in search of a comma.

Roger Casement was tried, found guilty, sentenced and executed under the Treason Act of 1351. That was, and is (for it remains in force in English law to this day) quite an enlightened piece of legislation, in that it attempts to define and circumscribe what is involved in an act of treason. Essential to the conviction  was whether or not Casement had been

adherent to the King’s enemies in his Realm, giving to them aid and comfort, in the Realm[,] or elsewhere.

Notice that critical second comma: if it’s there, Casement was indeed guilty, and Mr Justice Darling was entitled to read that “giving aid and comfort” were words of apposition: that is to say, if one took the side of the king’s foes, one was a traitor irrespective of whether one was in or out of the kingdom. On the other hand …

Casement had done his stuff in Germany, not in the lands of George V. Once back in Ireland, still part of the United Kingdom, he had behaved impeccably, surrendering to the police, and obeying the law. Serjeant Sullivan, imported for the occasion and a stranger to English courts, argued the 1351 Act:

neither created nor declared an offence of treason by adherence to the King’s enemies beyond the realm.

The precise wording meant:

the giving of aid and comfort outside the realm did not constitute a treason which could be tried in this country unless the person who gave the aid and comfort outside the realm, in the present case in the Empire of Germany, was himself within the realm at the time when he gave the aid and comfort .

It took the keen eyes of two learned judges, and a trip to the Public Record Office, to spot there might, just might, be a second comma. Anyway, the mood of the time probably made Sullivan’s nit-picking pointless, and so Casement was condemned. Presumptions of innocence and guilt tend to get a bit clouded when matters are so politically polarised, as they were in 1916.

A Malcolmian aside

That picture has a history in itself.

The presiding judge, Sir Charles John Darling, invited Sir John Lavery into the Court. Lavery had to keep his materials out of sight while he sketched. The finished version (above) was not completed until 1931, and remained in Lavery’s studio until the artist’s death in 1941. Casement is put at the centre, straight in front of the viewer, who is thus rendered judge and jury.

The painting became part of the Irish National Collection, and is generally to be found at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery in Dublin, though it came to London for restoration work in 2003 — which was its first display in the United Kingdom.

Yeats, however, put the painting (or was he thinking of some sketches for it?) in The Municipal Gallery Revisited as early as 1938:

Around me the images of thirty years:
An ambush; pilgrims at the water-side;
Casement upon trial, half hidden by the bars,
Guarded; Griffith staring in hysterical pride …

How might this apply to the arrest, for perjury, of Andy Coulson?

Well, it might come down to a similar piece of pettifogging.

Another Malcolmian aside:

from the OED:

pettifogger, n.1

1. Originally: an inferior legal practitioner who dealt with petty cases; formerly occas. also as a professional name … (now hist.). Hence: a lawyer who engages in petty quibbling and cavilling, or who employs dubious or underhanded legal practices; a lawyer who abuses the law. Usu. derogatory.

Consider:

• Tommy Sheridan represented himself at his perjury trial.
• He called Coulson as a witness.His crucial question to Coulson was: Did the News of the World pay corrupt police officers?”
• Coulson replied, “Not to my knowledge”.

Coulson could answer no other way: he would have been incriminating himself, for corruption law makes both briber and bribe-taker guilty.

But, even now, Coulson has a get-out: it may be the NotW didn’t pay off “corrupt” coppers, but honest ones. The NotW had no knowledge whether the individuals receiving dosh were “corrupt” or not. The paper was serving the wider good,covered by the public-interest defence: a small technical offence to expose a greater one, etc., etc. And with one bound our hero is free!

Coulson the escapologist

Sheridan also questioned Coulson on why he had left the NotW. As always, he gave the noble answer.

There had been a crime committed by a member of the NotW staff: Clive Goodman had been done for intercepting Clarence House telephone messages, and for that went inside on a four-month stretch. At that stage the NotW management were maintaining that Goodman was the single “bad apple”.

Coulson had accepted “taken the ultimate responsibility and stepped down” for this “illegal phone hacking”, even though —perish the thought! — he had “no knowledge of it”.

That has been Coulson’s consistent stated position. Sheridan had pressed him further, particularly over Goodman’s connection with Glenn Mulcaire, he of the numerous records. Coulson denied he had any awareness at all of Mulcaire, did not even know the name until Mulcaire’s arrest: “I never met him, spoke to him or emailed him.” The £105,000 the NotW paid Mulcaire was inexplicable to Coulson: this, and other outgoings, had been “made without my knowledge”. Coulson believed that just “five other people” had had their voice-mails hacked. We now know (and many of us studying the US press had wind at the time — read down to Malcolm’s comment) Coulson was out by an underestimate by about 2,668.6%.

We also now know that, included in multitude of victims, was a wide swathe of Sheridan’s family and associates, all targeted by Mulcaire. The extended as far as Sheridan’s mother and Joan McAlpine (who co-authored  with Sheridan a book on the Poll Tax Revolt).

All of this, and far more, will be revisited if, and when Coulson is tried for any perjury. It is worth noting that, in the Scottish system, an arrest is not made until a pretty-convincing case has been prepared. Coulson has, most definitely, been arrested and charged.

What adds to the drama is that the Sheridan trial, and any wrong-doing by Coulson in that court, happened while Coulson was on the 10 Downing Street pay-roll. In other words, while Cameron was giving Coulson his “second chance”.

Meanwhile — and it must, surely, be coincidence — Cameron is also given a convenient let-out: he cannot answer any pointed questions at Leveson, for fear of muddying the waters of Strathclyde.

Malcolm’s headline

So, has Coulson been nailed this time?

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

The earliest versions of that date from around the time Edward III’s legal team was formulating his Treason Act.

It was already proverbial when John Gower used it in Confessio Amantis, around 1390.

Yeats reprised and ignorance recognised

As he has mentioned previously, Malcolm’s “other” bedside book is John Stubbs’s Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War. Boy! Is this a good ‘un!

A Malcolmian aside

One of the best (in all senses) reviews of Stubbs was that by Adrian Tinniswood’s in Literary Review. Malcolm insists on quoting the first two paragraphs:

When I was an Eng Lit student back in the early 1970s, a time when deconstruction wasn’t a proper word and everyone thought critical theory had something to do with physics, any attempt to mix history and literature was regarded with deep suspicion. Mightn’t it help our reading of ‘Easter 1916′ if we knew a bit about the rising itself, we asked tentatively? No, said our teachers: that would ‘lead us away from the poem’. Then didn’t Yeats help to explain Irish history? No: literary sources were unreliable. In any case, we weren’t there to study history. We were there to study ‘the Text’.

No matter what the work was or who produced it, that text existed in its own sealed world. Literature fed on itself, and external narratives, whether they involved Tudor politics or Wilfred Owen’s war or Thomas Hardy’s Dorset, were off the menu.

From which perspective, Malcolm recognises in himself, from  way back, a proto-deconstructionist. Or is that just an Irish, even a TCD kind of thing?

Taking that most glaring exemplar given by Tinniswood, Malcolm finds it impossible, even incredible, to dissociate Yeats from his historical and political context. Easter 1916 exists in a precise moment, even instant of time. Consider the dates:

• Back in February 1915 Henry James, who was editing a fund-raising anthology along with Edith Wharton,  had asked Yeats for a war poem. What James got was something between a bit of flannel and a flea in his ear:

I think it better that at times like these
A poet’s keep his mouth shut, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He’s had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

• Over the Easter weekend of 1916, Yeats was staying with Sir William Rothenstein at Far Oakridge, near Stroud. On Easter Monday (24th April) Yeats heard of the Rising. It seems that Yeats was a trifle miffed. He was a sworn IRB-man, and — in his own eyes, if none others — the Greatest Living Irish poet , so he felt aggrieved that he had not been consulted (as if Yeats could ever keep a secret). This was, though, a Great Irish Happening; and it required the Yeatsian touch, one way or another.
• Any remaining initial and subjective distaste was swept away when the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were dispatched by firing squads. He had affinities with Tomás Mac Donnchadha, who had paid his dues by dedicating a book of verse to Yeats. James Connolly, a fellow antagonist of William Martin Murphy, had stood along with Yeats on a number of issues. Yeats had known the Gore-Booths since 1894 on his first awkward visit to Lissadell — and now Constance Markiewicz, who had been Connie Gore-Booth, was under sentence of death. The most direct link was the execution of John MacBride, the estranged husband of Yeats’s enduring love, Maud Gonne.
• If that wasn’t the motivator, then came revulsion at the summary murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, and a consensus of national outrage shared by Lady Gregory and Yeats’s own family. On 11th May 1916 he wrote to Lady Gregory that he was trying to write a poem on the men executed — “terrible beauty has been born”.
• In all Yeats’s collections the poem has the subscription of a key date: 25th September 1916. Stephen Gwynn edited Scattering Branches, Tributes to the Memory of W.B.Yeats (1940), where Maud Gonne MacBride supplied its significance:

Standing by the seashore in Normandy in September 1916, he read me that poem: he had worked on it the night before, and he implored me to forget the stone and its inner fire for the flashing, changing joy of life, but when he found my mind dull with the stone of the fixed idea of getting back to Ireland, kind and helpful as ever, he helped me overcome political and passport difficulties and we travelled as far as London together.

Quite frankly, how one comprehends Easter 1916, outside of those contexts, escapes Malcolm completely.

Back to Tinniswood, en route to Stubbs

Sure, royalist stalwarts like Henry Jermyn, Endymion Porter and the archetypal cavalier Prince Rupert do put in an appearance. But the real focus of Stubbs’s book is the cavalier poets, that motley collection of royalist writers who gathered around the aging and irascible Ben Jonson in the late 1620s and 1630s and went on to seek their fortunes at court, simultaneously memorialising and mythologising its decline. The self-styled ‘Tribe of Ben’ – William Davenant, Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling and the rest – remain resolutely minor figures, both in literature and in history. Most are remembered for a single poem, like Sir John Denham and ‘Cooper’s Hill’, or even a single line, like Richard Lovelace’s ‘Stone walls do not a prison make’ or Robert Herrick’s ‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may’. Some aren’t even remembered for that. Can you recall anything Suckling wrote?

Err, yes, murmurs Malcolm:

Out upon it, I have lov’d
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather.

Time shall moult away his wings
Ere he shall discover
In such whole wide world again
Such a constant lover.

Which, sadly, goes to make Tinniswood’s point.

Dancing to the Drum

In the fastnesses of last night, Malcolm was embroiled in Stubbs’s Chapter 4, in which Suckling is off with Sir Henry Vane’s embassy (1631-2) to the wars in Germany. Marvelling at the rolling names of the protagonists — Gustavus Adolphus, Wallenstein, Oxenstierna — suddenly  a tsunami of guilt flooded over Malcolm.

He had “done” the Thirty Years War as a paper for the Irish Leaving Certificate, 1960. This required hours in a dusty classroom, having outlines and details drummed in by an excellent teacher. That was when the High School was at number 40, the top end of Dublin’s Harcourt Street: a totally unsuitable but magnificent building — rather than the present very suitable, but unprepossessing complex at Danum. Malcolm learned enough to take “honours” in the examination. And now? He cannot recall any of it. There are fifty-eight (fifty-eight!) battles and sieges of the War listed on wikipedia: at a pinch, Malcolm could name just the one — Lützen, and that because it involved the death of Gustavus Adolphus.

Deconstruction

To return whence we departed, nine hundred finely-chiselled words ago, Malcolm wonders about two aspects (other than his fallible memory):

• How did a protestant school in the Irish system manage to teach such religiously-loaded topic as the Thirty Years War? For Malcolm dimly recalls that, if there were a hero of that whole mess, it was the King of Sweden.
• How and why was the war in Germany taught in isolation, as a clinical experiment almost? Why were the wider, European dimensions — and the even more limited local perspectives — not better explored? Was it not made clear that perhaps 30,000 Scots were fighting the protestant cause in Germany, and when the rump of them returned they formed the hardest men of the Covenanters’ resistance in the Bishops’ Wars? Was a conscious link (if so, Malcolm cannot remember it, or he was too dim too perceive it at the time) made to the wars in Ireland that were about to explode?

Stubbs manages a sidelight on all that:

The death of Gustavus at Lützen — even more, all the more unbearably, at another moment of victory — was shattering to the militant Protestant cause; but also, less tangibly, hugely dispiriting to the admirers and followers of the direct, chivalrous approach the king had embodied. Sweden had been out-manoeuvred in the council chamber rather than outfought in the field. It is an irony that so many in the pro-Spanish element at the English court would belong to the side branded ‘cavaliers’ in the British and Irish civil wars, since their cold political realism in the early thirties had very little of the cavalier about it. It was a strong sense of irony, in fact, which saved Suckling from the excesses of grief for the fallen hero seen in other quarters. he had seen a little too much of statecraft to take the cause, or the blow it suffered in losing Gustavus, to heart. 

One last thing …

At the end of a long,and rather tiresome day, Malcolm finally got to the Irish Times property porn.

That is captioned:

… once the home of Iseult Gonne and Francis Stuart.

By definition, then, a nest of Nazi sympathisers — and, by any usual definition, traitors to Ireland.

Malcolm may one day blog again the extraordinary history of Maud Gonne MacBride and her very strange daughter — and that very strange daughter’s very odd husband.

For the time being, let it be noted that Larragh Castle (in fact, as the description and text of that Irish Times piece makes clear, no more than a tarted-up armed camp, a barracks, and a gaol) occupies a small, and disreputable place in modern Irish history.

The light of evening …

“Trelissick” may be an old grey mansion, but , alas, it does not scan. There is the odd silk kimono, or its fair approximation.

For the freak who sought a more personal element, Malcolm produces this bevy of beauties — most of whom have featured in this blog at one time or another. The Pert Young Piece, the Earth Mother, the Professor, the Lady in Malcolm’s Life …

Malcolm is, of course, the rotund potty type, far right. But still,

… one a gazelle.

Dissing the dirt

No UK paper, to Malcolm’s knowledge, carries the extended Sunday Doonesbury strip. To get his dose Malcolm has to go to Gary Trudeau’s web-site.

The up-side of that is the rolling ticker across the top of the page, the “mudline” of recent insults. These never fail to amaze for their bigotry (Glenn Beck, anyone connected to Fox News) or to amuse for their intensity.

One running at the moment is Matt Taibbi on Michelle Bachmann: completely batshit crazy … grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy…

Yummee, let’s have more of that!

To find the complete version of Taibbi’s rant refer to Rolling Stone. This is the bit from which Trudeau has extracted:

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you’ve always got a puncher’s chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she’s built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

The whole piece is titled:

Michele Bachmann’s Holy War

The Tea Party contender may seem like a goofball, but be warned: Her presidential campaign is no laughing matter

Taibbi sets about demonstrating both contentions. First the ridiculous:

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children’s show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing “launch” instead of “lunch” inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.

Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. “It’s your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!” she gushed. “You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard.” 

I said lunch, not launch! But don’t laugh. Don’t do it. And don’t look her in the eyes; don’t let her smile at you… You will want to laugh, but don’t, because the secret of Bachmann’s success is that every time you laugh at her, she gets stronger.

Then the scary:

Young Michele found Jesus at age 16, not long before she went away to Winona State University and met a doltish, like-minded believer named Marcus Bachmann. After finishing college, the two committed young Christians moved to Oklahoma, where Michele entered one of the most ridiculous learning institutions in the Western Hemisphere, a sort of highway rest area with legal accreditation called the O.W. Coburn School of Law; Michele was a member of its inaugural class in 1979.

Originally a division of Oral Roberts University, this august academy, dedicated to the teaching of “the law from a biblical worldview,” has gone through no fewer than three names — including the Christian Broadcasting Network School of Law. Those familiar with the darker chapters in George W. Bush’s presidency might recognize the school’s current name, the Regent University School of Law. Yes, this was the tiny educational outhouse that, despite being the 136th-ranked law school in the country, where 60 percent of graduates flunked the bar, produced a flood of entrants into the Bush Justice Department.

Regent was unabashed in its desire that its graduates enter government and become “change agents” who would help bring the law more in line with “eternal principles of justice,” i.e., biblical morality. To that end, Bachmann was mentored by a crackpot Christian extremist professor named John Eidsmoe, a frequent contributor to John Birch Society publications who once opined that he could imagine Jesus carrying an M16 and who spent considerable space in one of his books musing about the feasibility of criminalizing blasphemy.

This background is significant considering Bachmann’s leadership role in the Tea Party, a movement ostensibly founded on ideas of limited government. Bachmann says she believes in a limited state, but she was educated in an extremist Christian tradition that rejects the entire notion of a separate, secular legal authority and views earthly law as an instrument for interpreting biblical values. As a legislator, she not only worked to impose a ban on gay marriage, she also endorsed a report that proposed banning anyone who “espoused or supported Shariah law” from immigrating to the U.S. (Bachmann seems so unduly obsessed with Shariah law that, after listening to her frequent pronouncements on the subject, one begins to wonder if her crazed antipathy isn’t born of professional jealousy.)

It never ceases to amaze Malcolm that the United States, at one extreme capable of maintaining Harvard, Yale, Stanford — the finest schools on the planet, can also foster these madrassas, with the emphasis on the first syllable.  There’s even a hint of how Gove’s “Free School” notions are guaranteed to pan out for the UK:

Moving back to Minnesota, she and [her husband] Marcus settled in Stillwater, a town of 18,000 near St. Paul, where they raised their five children and took in 23 foster kids. Stillwater is a Midwestern version of a Currier & Ives set piece, complete with cozy homes, antique stores — and no black people. In short, the perfect launching pad for a political career built on Bachmann’s retro-Stepford image. Stillwater’s congressional district is the whitest district in Minnesota (95 percent) and one of the wealthiest in America (with a median income $16,000 above the national average).

… although she had volunteered for Jimmy Carter in her youth and had been an anti-abortion protester, she didn’t become a major player in Stillwater until she joined a group of fellow Christian activists to form New Heights, one of the first charter schools in America.

Anyone wanting to understand how President Bachmann might behave should pay close attention to what happened at New Heights. Because the school took government money, like other charter schools, it had to maintain a separation of church and state, and Bachmann was reportedly careful to keep God out of the initial outlines of the school’s curriculum. But before long, parents began to complain that Bachmann and her cronies were trying to bombard the students with Christian dogma — advocating the inclusion of something called the “12 Biblical Principles” into the curriculum, pushing the teaching of creationism and banning the showing of the Disney movie Aladdin because it promoted witchcraft.

If that seems too extreme for the Govian model in England, let us remember:

At least seven of the first 25 free schools given initial approval by the government have faith affiliations. These include a Sikh school in Birmingham, two Jewish schools and three with a Christian ethos.

The Haringey Jewish primary school, in north London, has plans to offer “partial immersion” in Hebrew with an additional teacher speaking that language in the classroom for parts of the school day.

Free schools must admit 50% of pupils “without reference to faith”. By contrast, existing voluntary-aided faith schools, which get state funding, can give priority to children of their own religion but cannot refuse others if they are under-subscribed. There is some unease over the prominent role of religion in the first wave of free schools, with critics saying it will lead to greater social segregation.

Quite how far these bigots can go stretches even Malcolm’s love of the surreal:

Bachmannites despise [the] I[nternational] B[accalaureate] because its “universal” curriculum refuses to recognize the superiority of Christianity to other religions. You and I might have thought William Butler Yeats, for example, was a great poet who died half a century before the Age of Aquarius, but EdWatch calls him a “New-Age Pantheism Guru” who was aggressively “undermining

 Christianity.”

What would they make of, say, William Blake?

 

 

Taibbi, for this piece and others, is definitely recommended.

So, to return to another parallel world where sanity has some role …

What’s Roland Burton Hedley III (as right) to tell us this Sunday?

Tuesday at Sotheby’s

Malcolm has noted previously how the Irish took to those portraits by Sir John Lavery. With good reason: Hazel Lavery was not just the best-looking, the most-fetching ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan’, she was also the most exchangable. Even allowing for inflation, if Malcolm had been able to cling onto a few, he’d now be turning a pretty profit.

This Tuesday Sotheby’s have their annual sale of Irish art.

They are putting up a nice pair of Paul Henrys (as below), which are sufficiently domesticated to fit any cottage wall (as if):

Henry must have had a one-man production line of such scenes.

Jack Yeats (brother of the more famous …) is there in in full vulgarity:

Another one to live with (provided you have a twenty-odd-foot long viewpoint for something 42 in by 36 in) is a magnificently voyeuristic Orpen…

Its original title was Digby Cave, and it represents a 1908 holiday at (of all exotic places) Margate. The two girls are Grace Orpen and Mabel Nicholson. As the catalogue note has it:

The Lady in his Life and Malcolm concur that this is a good one. Kentish beachlife must have been different in Edwardian times. In unimaginable circumstances …

The star of the show, though, is a Lavery lovely:

Her working title is “Lady in Brown”, which is good enough in itself. At a certain distance she fixes the viewer with that penetrating, aristocratic glint in her eye. Better still, the guy at Sotheby’s has been busy with his homework, and reckons he has identified The “Lady in Brown” (and, incidentally, by association enhanced the portrait’s value and significance):

This one belongs in one of those ancestral homes — Florence Court or Castle Coole —  which Malcolm visited last week. Even there, perhaps, it might be just another picture. On the end wall of the Sotheby’s gallery, she’s a stunner.

Gwendoline Bertie was, in passing, Anthony Eden’s mother-in-law. The artist John Spencer-Churchill was her son.

Confirming Irish prejudices

The English (Malcolm insists we be specific) proudly taught the world many things: “fair play”, concentration camps (in the South African war), most team sports, show trials …

Which brings us to:

The trial of Roger Casement

Whatever the testimony of “experts”, few in Ireland accept the Black Diaries as gospel. There are several good reasons for that:

• Previous form: the dirty tricks department had concocted material against Charles Stewart Parnell;
• The disconnect between the austere pubic man and his alleged private confessions;
• The curious way Parnell’s promiscuity must have been previously overlooked, and for so long, by so many;
• The happy coincidence that the Diaries became available at such a precise moment; and how they were used sub rosa to darken his character behind the judge’s bench.

D. George Boyce in the DNB has it this way:

There are several versions about precisely when and how the diaries were discovered, but they seem to have come to light when Casement’s London lodgings were searched following his arrest. By the first weeks of May they were beginning to be used surreptitiously against him. They were shown to British and American press representatives on about 3 May and excerpts were soon widely circulated in London clubs and the House of Commons. This could not have been done without at least an expectation that those higher up would approve, though Smith opposed any use of the diaries to discredit Casement’s reputation, as did Sir Edward Grey. The cabinet however made no attempt to stop these activities, the purpose of which was not to ensure that Casement would be hanged—that was inevitable—but that he should be hanged in disgrace, both political and moral.

Which would provoke the reasonable question: Why?

After all, there should have been an open-and-shut case against Casement.

He was arrested at Ardfert, too knackered to resist; locked up in Tralee gaol and then transported to the Tower of London. He freely confessed all of his actions and intentions.

He was duly found guilty of treason, and consigned to Pentonville Gaol, where he was hanged on 3rd August 1916.

So, again the reasonable question: Why?

There is one obvious answer: there was an essential flaw in the prosecution case.

Casement was prosecuted under the Treason Act of (what for it!) 1351, which declares traitorous:

If a man be adherent to the king’s enemies in his realm giving to them aid and comfort in the realm or elsewhere …

So, to make the conviction stick, the prosecution and the judiciary had to infer a comma:

in the realm(,) or elsewhere …

All of that is well-trodden legal history.

Today, hidden away in the Student Law supplement of The Times, Professor Gary Slapper lists his 10 “Classic law school witticisms”. Here is number 9:

In 1916 Sir Roger Casement had been convicted of treason and sentenced to death. His appeal had failed. He had one last hope — an appeal to the Lords — but only if it could be shown that “a point of general public importance” was at stake. There was just such a point of importance, according to Sir William Holdsworth, the author of a voluminous and classic history of English law. When Casement’s defence team put this to the prosecutor, the Attorney-General Frederick Edwin Smith, he rejected the argument with the withering rider: “I am well acquainted with the legal attainments of Sir William Holdsworth. He was, after all, runner-up to me in the Vinerian prize when we were at Oxford.”

Laugh? Until the throat catches.

So leave it to Yeats.

He’ll spell it out:

John Bull has gone to India
And all must pay him heed,
For histories are there to prove
That none of another breed
Has had a like inheritance,
Or sucked such milk as he,
And there’s no luck about a house
If it lack honesty.

The ghost of Roger Casement
Is beating on the door.

Shades of green
or how handling Michael Collins’s inamorata fuelled Malcolm’s drink habit

There are many enjoyable ways of irritating Malcolm, but two came together this week. One was a particular song; the other was a lapse of memory.

The link between the two was Four Green Fields.

Pub songs

The late Tommy Makem did a lot of good work, but his 1967 song, of which he was inordinately proud, grates on Malcolm. Makem in performance made it just a trifle too saccharine sweet and maudlin for Malcolm’s palate. The New York Times’s Neil Strauss implied something less than boundless enthusiasm, too, in his review of the 1999 New York Fleadh:

… backed only by an acoustic guitar, Tommy Makem bellowed a stentorian ”Four Green Fields,” the hallowed Irish leave-us-alone-with-our-beauty ballad he wrote in 1967, as the audience members pumped their hands in the air and sang in spellbound unison.

Perhaps Malcolm is being over-pernicketty here, but over the years he has fallen out of love for the whole Clancy and Makem Oirish soft-soap, which owes more to the White Horse, Greenwich Village, than Malcolm feels comfortable with.

He totally sympathises with Dominic Behan for what Liam Clancy did to The Patriot Game. Cutting the references to Connolly and de Valera changed the whole tone, making an apology for blood-sacrifice out of a much more bitter, darker, socialist text (here with both versions):

This Ireland of mine has for long been half free,
Six counties are under John Bull’s tyranny.
And still de Valera is greatly to blame/So I gave up my Bible, to drill and to train
For shirking his part in the patriot game/To play my own part in the patriot game.

Hardly a game

If anyone is not aware of the background to Behan’s song, it relates to the shambles that was an IRA attack on the RUC Brookeborough Barracks on New Year’s Eve, 1956.

Seán Garland’s dozen Volunteers rode a commandeered dumper truck into town, and parked too close to their target, thus warning the RUC men within (who would have been alert after previous IRA activity in “Operation Harvest”). Under covering fire, the Volunteers tried unsuccessfully to plant a mine, but were driven off by return fire from the RUC sergeant. The IRA men retreated to the mountains, recovering the badly-wounded Seán South and Fergal O’Hanlon, both of whom died, in Dublin’s Mater hospital, within hours, of “motor accident” injuries.

The main consequence of these events, apart from the ballads adding two more heroes to the pantheon, was Seán MacBride wrapping the green flag tightly round him, and causing the downfall of the Dublin coalition government and of his own political career.

The most beautiful woman in Ireland

MacBride’s mother, Maud Gonne, is the link back to what Malcolm expects is the origin of the “Four Green Fields” metaphor for the four Provinces of Ireland. She appeared in the title-rôle of a one-act play, Cathleen ni Houlihan, on April 2, 1902 at St. Teresa’s Hall in Dublin. WB Yeats (who would hardly have been neutral) later said of the performance:

Miss Maud Gonne played very finely, and her great height made Cathleen seem a divine being fallen into our mortal infirmity.

Euuugh!

The setting is the 1798 Rising, near Killala, at the moment of the French landing. The climatic moment, and mathematical centre of the play is:

BRIDGET: What was it put the trouble on you?
OLD WOMAN: My land that was taken from me.
PETER: Was it much land they took from you?
OLD WOMAN: My four beautiful green fields.

Immediately after that:

PETER: [to Old Woman] Did you hear a noise of cheering, and you coming up the hill?
OLD WOMAN: I thought I heard the noise I used to hear when my friends came to visit me.

We then are given the notion of the blood-sacrifice:

OLD WOMAN: … there were others that died for love of me a long time ago. MICHAEL: Were they neighbours of your own, ma’am?
OLD WOMAN: … There was a red man of the O’Donnells from the north, and a man of the O’Sullivans from the south, and there was one Brian that lost his life at Clontarf by the sea, and there were a great many in the west, some that died hundreds of years ago, and there are some that will die to-morrow.

Having thus name-checked the national martyrs, from Aodh Rua Ó Domhnaill to Donal Cam O’Sullivan Bere, not omitting Brian Bóruma mac Cennétig, she identifies herself:

BRIDGET: You did not tell us your name yet, ma’am.
OLD WOMAN: Some call me the Poor Old Woman, and there are some that call me Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The message:

Many that are red-cheeked now will be pale-cheeked; many that have been free to
walk the hills and the bogs and the rushes will be sent to walk hard streets in far countries; many a good plan will be broken; many that have gathered money will not stay to spend it; many a child will be born and there will be no father at its christening to give it a name. They that have red cheeks will have pale cheeks for my sake, and for all that, they will think they are well paid.

A terrible beauty

A powerful myth, but not one that Yeats created. Indeed, there is some doubt to what extent the play is his. Lady Augusta Gregory claimed the the opening scene, and that the rest was her and Yeats. Yeats himself would later wonder:

Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?
Did words of mine put too great strain
On that woman’s reeling brain?

There is, indeed, a direct link from Cathleen ni Houlihan to Easter Monday, 1916. Malcolm will return to that in a later posting, and try to ascertain where the notion began.

In this respect, one is either with Yeats or with Joyce. Yeats (who had briefly flirted with the IRB) knew the effect his play would have, and deliberately willed it. Joyce, according to Stanislaus in My Brother’s Keeper, “was indignant that Yeats should write such political and dramatic claptrap.”

So, with one bound, we are into the psychology of Pádraig Anraí Mac Piarais. Malcolm has long been exercised by this, and fortunately even the most extreme of Pearse’s apologists now have problems with it:

Many revisionists point to extracts from Pearse’s writings to support the blood sacrifice thesis. Yes, without doubt, Pearse’s use of language was often extreme, but also – and this should not be overlooked – typical of the age.

“Typical of the age”, perhaps, and frequently blamed on Sigmund Freud, though, as far as Malcolm can see, Freud’s key text did not become available until after 1918.

Beauteous Mary

Paul Muldoon suggests Pearse’s poem Christmas, 1915 takes the notion of blood-sacrifice a stage further:

Pearse is … only too conscious of the image of Christ in the arms of his mother, the mother being Ireland, the ‘pierced’ Christ Pearse himself … That the coming battle should be joined at Easter, when Pearse/Christ might be expected to triumph over death by welcoming it, was a brilliant piece of timing, one that assured the longevity of the term “Easter Rising”, and gave Pearse an emblematic status as the main rhetorician of Irish nationalism. I’m referring, of course, to Yeats’s distinction between rhetoric and poetry, one stemming from a quarrel with others, the other from the quarrel with oneself.

The truth is that it the blood-sacrifice seems particularly and sadly persistent in Irish myth and iconography (and, as promised above, a topic Malcolm will return to). In the context of Cathleen ni Houlihan, though, a more promising and immediate route is through Lady Gregory’s youthful reading of Sheridan LeFanu.

Translucent beauty

As we said at the outset of this entry, Malcolm was annoyed with himself because he could not immediately relate to the source of the “Four Green Fields” metaphor. He got stuck on Evie Hone’s 1939 stained-glass window (illustrated). Hone made this for the Irish pavilion at the 1939 New York World Fair. It then came back to Ireland, and, years later, was displayed in O’Connell Street, in the CIE head office. Then it went back into storage, before finally being accorded a place in the Government Offices at Upper Merrion Street.

There’s obviously a story behind Hone’s design: there is an earlier 1938 design showing Saints and Scholars with St. Colmcille, more typical of Hone’s religiously-inspired work. Who made the change to the more political motifs for the finished work?

Before Malcolm leaves Cathleen ni Houlihan and her small-holding problems, there are two other thoughts he appends.

Beauty and the beast

The first is a curious political inversion. Her image was conscripted by the British Government for recruiting posters, during the First World War, as these examples show:


The most beautiful girl in the Mid-West

Then came the stunning magnificence of the Irish maiden who featured on the Irish banknotes between 1928 and 1975. They went out of circulation in 1982, but the £100 design was used until 1996. She was derived from a portrait by Sir John Lavery.

The Notes Committee of the Central Bank of Ireland approached Lavery, an Ulsterman who had sided with the Nationalists, and whose house had been Michael Collins’s (of whom more in a moment) London base in the Treaty negotiations.

Here’s an account of the intention:

In preparing the portrait for the note, it was Lavery’s intention to produce a painting of Cathleen ni Houlihan, the legendary heroine who had been made popular by William Butler Yeats. Interestingly, Lavery was known to have in his possession at his death a portrait by Sean Keating, a young Irish artist, which was titled ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan’. It is possible that ownership of this painting predated his commission by the Note Committee and this work may have influenced his portrait.

Lavery worked on his portrait over Christmas 1927 and evidently sent a photograph of the painting to the Note Committee …

The final portrait shows ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan’ leaning on a Cláirseach (Irish harp), supporting her chin in her hand. She is dressed in simple Irish clothing, with the lakes and mountains of Ireland in the background.

The result was one of the most attractive (in all senses) currencies around: the high value notes (the “Persian carpets”) were exquisite.

In this case Cathleen ni Houlihan spoke with a distinct Mid-West twang, all the way from Chicago. When she married Lavery it was a second marriage for both of them. What causes much speculation is her relationship with Michael Collins and Kevin O’Higgins: was it more than flirtation? Collins certainly had a letter to “Hazel, dearest” in his pocket when he was shot. She went into mourning for his death. The current mode is that the relationship went unconsummated: this is, apparently, based on the assumption that, if had been been, the IRA would have shot her as a possible double-agent.

That ignores the obvious rider that Collins ran the gun-men and IRA intelligence.
______________________________________________

And if you must have Four Green Fields on your iPod, do as Malcolm does, and make sure it is Dick Gaughan giving it an authentic angry edge.