"By the Lake," John McGahern: "a great stillness" in the Irish countryside

John McGahern (2001)

"The morning was clear. There was no wind on the lake. There was also a great stillness. When the bells rang out for Mass, the strokes trembling on the water, they had the entire world to themselves."

"A great stillness" begins John McGahern's last novel By the Lake (2003; he died in 2006) in which the quiet Irish countryside plays an equal, if not greater, part in the telling of the story than the lives of its characters. Yet this pastoral novel of unassuming title in which not much happens is a pleasure that rewards a slow and steady reading.

That's not to say that the small human dramas of rural life don't loom large to these folk; their comings and goings and loves and losses and jealousies are important to them, but the hay must still be cut and the animals fed.

"On the television forecast of the night before, the map of Ireland was shown covered with small suns, like laughing apples. Soon after midday all the small meadows were tedded. By evening the mown grass rustled like hay to the touch. The next day they were swept into rows. The swept ground between the rows had already turned golden. Because of Jamesie's anxiety Ruttledge went round the shore to bale his meadows first. Kate came with him to help stack the bales. Though balers were a familiar sight in the meadows for years, Jamesie watched in a kind of disbelief as the cumbersome red machine gathered in the loose rows and spat them out in neat tied bales."

Such an unhurried life appeals to the Ruttledges, who forsake London to live by the lake to raise sheep and cattle. The gossip Jamesie courts his Mary, and "the Shah" is the town's richest man driving the country lanes in his Mercedes. It would be difficult to imagine much less of a plot than the simple yearly progression of haying and lambing, shearing and, yes, slaughter. Yet that is precisely what happens, and the regularity with which these characters attend to the ordinariness of their lives becomes the motion of the story.

"The Shah rolled around the lake with the sheepdog in the front of the car every Sunday and stayed until he was given his tea at six. Some days during the week he came in the evenings as well. On dry Sundays he liked to walk the fields, and to look at the cattle and sheep and the small wooded island out in the back lake where the herons nested, and to look across the lake to the acres of pale sedge of Gloria Bog, which ran like an inland sea until it met the blue of the lower slopes of the mountains where his life began, the stunted birch trees like small green flowers in the wilderness of bog."

As one reviewer notes, it's hard to suppress a yawn at the announcement of "yet another great Irish novel." By the Lake may be one, although one whose charms may not be readily apparent. At base level, the novel reminds us that the hurry-up world in which most of us find ourselves in is the artificial one: the reviewer concludes that "it's easy, though sad, to imagine readers who will find this an interminable bore. A lake is not a river, after all; it doesn't go anywhere."

Those expecting great events or major happenings in the slow progress of the seasons will likely be disappointed. Near its calm shores and with its unassuming humanity, By the Lake offers reassurance, and a great stillness.

F.A. Nettlebeck: "that's what makes the jukebox play"

Fred A Nettlebeck (1950-2011)

"From the Tear Stain Lounge"

F.A. Nettlebeck

the angels don't give no

change when you pay

your dues so hang onto

that box of wine and a

few favorite photos it

won't get no better just

because you're in the

club and a university

has your shitty poems

locked away in a climate

controlled room some

of your best friends are

dead and this ain't the

same country you went

junkin' with your grandpa

in so you might as well

stay and listen to a few

more sad songs the wars

and hatred will always be

king but because she was

your first choice and you

ain't with her that's what

makes the jukebox play

F.A. Nettlebeck has gone on ahead a few yards, just scouting the country as it were, looking for a new place to set his box of wine. He might have been an American poet in the style of Han Shan (Cold Mountain), describing a world of jukeboxes, booze, and sand instead of rivers, villages, and mountains. An observant reader gets the idea that Fred really wouldn't care for that comparison, though -- Fred was too much cantankerous flesh and bone and blood to be quiet about such things.

His poems are loud American declarations, and some are the observations made between drunks in a dive bar. They are poems real enough to make you squirm with the 101-proof kick of American truth. When Bukowski comments "he was a fraud of an artist, and a fraud of a human being," it's the sound of another poet whistling past his own rep and wondering where Fred hid that half-empty bottle of Evan Williams. It's around here somewhere.

F.A.'s friend Stephen Kessler writes a tribute to the poet who "was organizing swap meets and supporting a family of five on virtually no visible income" but always writing and drinking: At the end he was brought down not by his liver, as I expected, but by a spinal infection that surgery could not repair. He was left paralyzed but clearheaded enough to ask to be taken off life support, a decision that seemed to me both reasonable and courageous.

Kessler is also honest enough to acknowledge Nettlebeck's transgressions and out-of-control behavior, so "obnoxiously uncool" at one point that Kessler writes I fled the scene as soon as possible. I couldn’t abide that kind of behavior — by now it is so passé and cliché, no longer amusing nor the sign of some Bukowskioid or Kerouackian genius. Alcoholism may be an illness, but so what.

Happy Hour

Here's more of Kessler's clear-eyed tribute:

... Fred, as Nettelbeck was known to his friends, was a loyal comrade and a no-nonsense partner in conversation, but I can’t say he was easy to get along with. Born in Chicago in 1950, he came to LA with his family as a boy and grew up in Inglewood, gravitating to the bohemian shores of Hermosa Beach and to the sun-baked streets of Watts for his cultural education.

At 20, during what’s now called “the mimeo revolution,” when hundreds of little journals were springing up across the United States, he started his own magazine, Throb, which featured writings by and interviews with such then low-on-the-totem-pole and under-the-radar bards as Charles Bukowski, Gerald Locklin and Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.

In the later years of his career as a publisher he put out a series of tiny folded pamphlets called This Is Important with a half-dozen or so texts by distinguished renegades like William S. Burroughs, Tom Clark and Wanda Coleman, among others. Fred would photocopy a few hundred of these little poem-bombs and place them like evangelical propaganda in unlikely places like Laundromats and public rest rooms—a guerrilla assault on a-literate complacency.

...What I saw in him, beyond the belligerent drunk, was an artistic brilliance and drive to create that nothing could stop. I found a lot of his writing to be too harsh and hardboiled and vulgar for my taste, but it was also powerful, unique and honest, formally inventive and tight and true to his experience, so I couldn’t escape its integrity.

Like the music of Howlin’ Wolf or Albert Ayler, the novels of Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Hubert Selby Jr., the lowdown assemblages of Ed Kienholz or Robert Rauschenberg, Nettelbeck’s verse might at first puzzle or repel, but you could, if you paid attention, feel its soul and its peculiar beauty. Unsentimental yet sensitive as hell, his lines were a conduit for an unruly current of discontent and chaos barely contained beneath the surface of civil society. His alienation was both intelligent and visceral, and his ear for the tones of contemporary American speech impeccable.

No Place Fast, 1976. Bug Death, 1979. Americruiser, 1983. His literary magazine, This Is Important (1980–1997). Happy Hour, 2010: Forty years of poetic sleight-of hand. Fred's manuscripts, poems and papers are now at the Ohio State University archives. The irony of Fred's words winding up in a climate-controlled room of their own, I'm sure, must provide hours of hilarity between those two loudmouth drunks at the end of the bar -- and then provoke an argument over who pays for the next round.

"Artificial Paradises," Baudelaire: "briefly illuminated by the inner sun"

Originally published in France, in 1860, under the title ‘Les Paradis Artificiels’ (Artificial Paradises), Charles Baudelaire’s classic of drug writing is a blend of personal insight, translation, and morality discourse. The edition used by this review is the 1996 Citadel Press book, translated by Stacy Diamond. The following review is provided with kind permission from Psychedelic Press UK and was written by Rob Dickins.

The Citadel Press edition includes On Wine and Hashish (1851) and Artificial Paradises, which includes The Poem of Hashish, Baudelaire’s revised version of the aforementioned text and An Opium-Eater, which is an adapted translation of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) and its sequel Suspiria De Profundis (1945, published in fragmentary form). This review we will concentrate on Baudelaire’s writing on hashish and wine in order to elucidate the author himself more clearly as opposed to unpinning his reaction / translation of De Quincey, which is a separate project in itself.

Charles Baudelaire was an early precursor to the French symbolist movement of the late nineteenth century. The literary movement was a reaction to realism and placed a lot of emphasis on the power of dreams and the imagination as tools for communicating ideals through symbols. Synaesthesia was one the great tools of the symbolists and Baudelaire wrote of hashish: “By graduations, external objects assume unique appearances in the endless combining and transfiguring of forms. Ideas are distorted; perceptions are confused. Sounds are clothed in colors and colors in music.” (Baud 50). Baudelaire utilised the dream as the symbolic ground of the drug experience, which in the case of this edition of Artificial Paradises incorporates wine, hashish and opium.

For instance, he discusses the existence of two types of dreams. The ‘natural dream,’ which is connected to the individual memory and the ‘hieroglyphic’…“which has no bearing on, or connection to, the character, life and passions of the dreamer” (Baud 39). Hashish intoxication, he contends, belongs to the former. One need only take a quick glance at LSD writing from 100 years later to see that this very distinction is retained and expanded into psychological terminology; the ‘personal unconscious’ and the ‘transpersonal’. Further intertextualities will also be explored later in this review.

“What man has ever known the profound joys of wine? Whoever has had a grief to appease, a memory to evoke, a sorrow to drown, a castle in Spain to build—all have at one time invoked the mysterious god who lies concealed in the fibers [sic] of the grapevine. How radiant are those wine-induced visions, brilliantly illuminated by the inner sun” (Baud 5)

The above quote, taken from On Wine and Hashish perfectly illustrates the symbolic dynamics of drug intoxication that Baudelaire employs. On the one hand, you have the drug of which the author says therein inhabits a god. There is much recourse to Bacchus and Orpheus in his discourse on wine, which conjures images of an ancient lineage and romantic embodiment. On the other hand, you have the individual’s “inner sun” that can perhaps be read as symbolic of a soul and it is the interaction of these two ethereal elements, as character, that produce the experience of intoxication.

However, while wine is treated as an equal to humanity, with its own distinct historical aura and cast as having a personal relationship with its drinker, hashish is portrayed in a much darker light. Hashish, unlike wine, is “anti-social” and he spends much more time examining its disadvantages and describes the hashish experience, rather than as a personal relationship, as an “invasion”. In the revision for Artificial Paradises’ The Poem of Hashish, Baudelaire introduces the idea of the “the Spirit of Evil” as possessing the individual and writes: “If the Spirit of Evil is allowed to grasp but a single hair, it will lose no time in carrying off the whole head.” (Baud 33). Yet, while this seems a million miles from modern cultural (though perhaps not legal) understandings of hashish, Baudelaire at other times seems very astute: “The simplest words, the most trivial ideas, take on new, bizarre appearances; you are even amazed at having previously thought them so simple. Incongruous connections, coincidental resemblances, interminable puns, and comic sketches provide endless delight.” (Baud 42). But it is his personal moral ascription to hashish that highlights these facets in a negative light; for Baudelaire hashish is solitary and thus anti-social, having a disastrous effect:

“But alas, the morrow! The terrible moro! When the feebleness of your body, the nerves worn thin to the point of breaking, the irritating urge to cry, the weak state of both mind and body—to the point you are incapable of attending to any duty—tell you that you have played a forbidden game” (Baud 71).

Baudelaire outlines stages of the hashish intoxication. Firstly, words and ideas take on bizarre new meanings: “Then the hallucinations begin. External things, forms and images, swell to monstrous proportions, revealing themselves in fantastic shapes as yet unimagined. Instantly passing through a variety of transformations, they enter your being, or rather you enter theirs” (Baud 19). Interestingly, this raises an important question. Very similar motifs are used in psychedelic literature, empathetic identification with external objects, but are elements of the two experiences the same? Or, perhaps, is it a restrictive model of language that is unable to break out of certain modes?

Baudelaire stamp, 1951

There seems to be a general disagreement as to whether hashish should be classed as a psychedelic; however, using literature as a tool for asking the question, it appears to clearly class them together. Baudelaire even recognises the importance of ‘set and setting’, the great psychedelic mantra, as he recommends hashish should be taken “in the most favourable circumstances and in pleasant surroundings” (Baud 16). Not to mention his repeated emphasis on time distortion. And also: “Objectivity, which has produced a number of pantheistic poets and all of the great actors, assumes such force that your confused perceptions cannot distinguish your own being from that others” (Baud 20). Is this what LSD researcher Stanislav Grof might call an expansion of consciousness? The explanation of the mechanics differ, from a realignment of perception to an expansion of consciousness, but the result is categorically similar.

In the climatic stage: “All philosophical problems are resolved” (Baud 21) and “All contradiction is resolved. Man becomes God.” (ibid.). He argues that one is filled with a sense of power, and not love, and a superiority over the others around you, for they can’t understand where you are: “I would bear up with fortitude, I resolved, and disguise the overpowering impulse to succumb to total sedentariness. All of the carriages in my neighbourhood were taken, so I steeled myself for a long walk through the streets, surrounded by the discordant din of carriages and the stupid conversation of passers-by, a whole sea of triviality” (Baud 48). This is a fascinating connection. By reaching the point of contradiction resolution, which is more recently explored as a divine experience in psychedelic literature, Baudelaire saw it through hashish as being anti-social. However, a degree of separation between the individual and his fellows underlies both perspectives; the two take on the same division.

According to Baudelaire the paradises are artificial because using drugs is like replacing real gardens for scenery painted on canvas. However, he writes: “If the production of wine were ever to cease, its absence would create a void, a vacuum more terrible than all the excesses and offences for which it is blamed” (Baud 8). And, on the other hand, he believes no state should endorse hashish precisely because he believes it is anti-social. Baudelaire’s discourse is very statist and, for all his beautiful imagery and exquisite use of language, one cannot escape his own pervading sense of moral and social boundary. His skill, however, lies in elucidating the dream quality of the hashish experience while maintaining his own perspective; the text never allowed to be taken over by “the Spirit of Evil”.