Uninspired Tourist

ALTHOUGH WILLIAM TREVOR now lives in the South-West of England, he was born and raised an Irishman. His novels and short stories are infused with a powerful concern and sympathy for the landscape and people of Ireland--especially for its writers. Who better than Trevor, then, to guide us on a tour of Irish writers and their evocations of landscape? It is a tour which takes the reader from the earliest murmurs of monks and gypsies (anonymous stories told long before the introduction of the English to Ireland) to the contemporary voices of young Irish and Northern Irish poets. Accompanying the text is a generous assortment of related photographs. But it is a tour--packaging, like so many picturesque towns, the landmarks of Irish literature into one slim volume.

In the introduction to this, his first work of nonfiction. Trevor succinctly and modestly states the nature of the tour:

This book is not an academic investigation of either Irish literature or the inspiration of landscape. It is a writer's journey, a tour of places which other writers have felt affection for also, or have known excitement or alarm in.

He proceeds with a chronological collection of anecdotes, poems and prose excerpts, lacing them with intermittent comments of historical or thematic relevance. There are many gems, such s the powerful, gruesome early Gaelic poem called "The Old Woman of Beare":

Time was the sea

Brought kings as slaves to me

Now I fear the face of God

And the crab crawls through my blood

And, much later, in the nineteenth century, when the English had for centuries been shaping Ireland's history, the visitors sent home many reports. Their comments surfaced both in English guidebooks such as "Ireland: it's scenery, character, etc," and in the writings of Scott and Thackeray. Thackeray wrote, "Directly you see it, it smiles at you as innocent and friendly as a little child."

In W.B. Yeats' works about his favourite haunts, Trevor says there is "an instinct for places" and "the genius of the artist who is capable of using the parochial to illuminate the human condition." In excerpts from his poems we see the ruined abbey of Corcomroe in County Clare and, later, the forbidding Norman tower in Galway: "An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower" which Yeats made his summer house. And in "Reveries over Childhood and Youth." Yeats reminisces about Lissadell House, the home of a favourite Anglo-Irish family:

I longed for a sod of earth from some field

I knew, something of Slizo to hold in my hand. It was some old race instinct like that of a savage...

Trevor tends to connect his chosen selection of writings with rather dry, cursory remarks. But in more extended passages, such as the fascinating and powerfully-felt paragraph comparing the literary aspects of England and Ireland in the nineteenth century, Trevor's voice takes on the tone of a refreshingly enthusiastic, rather than a dutiful, guide. For example, talking about the playwright Sean O'Casey, Trevor says that:

For him [Dublin's] landscape was essentially a landscape of people, of features shaped by guide and scrounging, of quick eyes and lips, of dignity preserved through tragedy.

And when Trevor finally reaches the writers of his generation and of his best genre (the short story)--Elizabeth Bowen and Michael McLaverty for example--the distinctive voice of the author at last comes through:

In spite of the recurring accent on solitariness that echoes through Irish literature, you can never count on being entirely alone in Ireland's empty places. And beneath those peeled-off surfaces nothing is quite what you might expect.

UNFORTUNATELY, these instances of insight are rare in Trevor's text. The author's personal stamp is too little evident in this tour, he defers, rather, to the role of editor and prompter. It is, in a sense, too thorough a tour--one which takes us into too many obscure nooks and crannies of the Irish literary landscape. And too often these unremarkable "bits and pieces" detract from the more important voices--limiting our visit to Swift, for example, to a few rather trivial verses in praise of gardens. The result, then, of this compilation is a thinly disguised anthology. It includes, for the sake of thoroughness, a host of contributors that should be, and for the most part have been, anthologized but that are not appropriate to such a brief tour as this.

It is a shame that Trevor has declined an excellent opportunity to chronicle one writer's Ireland, that he has shied away from the unabashedly personal and biased tour of Irish writers which this might have been. A journey such as this one, through the uneven evolution of Irish literature, is sorely in need of a provocative guide--a Kenneth Clark figure who would unashamedly saturate the text with the vagaries of personal taste. A Writer's Ireland is, rather, a dry, thorough skimming that leaves us without the real flavor of Ireland that so strongly pervades Trevor's fiction.