Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan.

Apart from a brief trip to the post-office I haven’t left the house since Monday. I have been quite content staying in with my music and books. I am still trying to finish reading Nausea but was pleased to put Jean Paul Sartre aside for a few hours yesterday when a book arrived in the post from a friend in Ireland. It is called Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. I hadn’t heard of Claire before, but I am very grateful to my friend because I absolutely loved this book. I’ll just tell you a little about the author. She was born in County Wicklow in 1968, the youngest in a large catholic family and was brought up on a farm. She published Antarctica her first collection of short stories in 1999 to great acclaim. Her previous book Foster won many awards and is on the curriculum of the school leaving certificate in Ireland. Small Things Like These is her most recent book, published earlier this year. I would describe it as a novella because you can read it in a few short hours, as I did yesterday. Published by Faber it is a very attractive book even to hold in your hand. The dust jacket design is from a painting by Peter Breugel the Elder called Hunters In The Snow. It is a desolate scene of an unsuccessful hunt and crows can be seen on the branches of bare trees. Crows also figure prominently in the pages of this book, and I see them as an ill omen. It is a very apt and clever design because it sets the scene and the mood of the book even before you have started to read.

The timing of this book arriving is perfect because it is set in the town of New Ross in the days leading up to Christmas 1985. The protagonist in the story is a coal & timber merchant called Bill Furlong. He was born to an unmarried mother who died when he was twelve. He was brought up by his mother’s kindly employer, a lady called Mrs Wilson. He worked hard to build up his business, got married and has five daughters. Although on the surface he has a happy marriage and feels quite lucky and content, he often wonders who his father is. He treats his workers well and shows kindness to those less fortunate, but his wife seems to think he is too soft and should just look after his immediate family because the economy was going through a tough time in 80s Ireland. One day while out delivering coal he makes a discovery that leads him to a moral dilemma. 

I won’t tell you anymore about the story because I hope you will read it for yourself. Some of the story makes quite grim reading, but I found the conclusion very spiritually uplifting. It is about having the courage to do what is right, rather than worry about what others may think. We know from history that evil thrives when people look the other way. I loved reading this book because of Claire Keegan’s style of writing. It is very simple. A lesser writer might have made the story three times as long. With Claire Keegan every sentence is to the point, concise and carefully constructed. Even so, the characters and landscape are portrayed beautifully. You feel that you know this place and people. I wonder if the youngest daughter Loretta was based on Claire Keegan herself because she seems to know her very well. 

There is a lot of symbolism in the story, apart from the crows. and just one sentence can contain a whole lot of meaning. In one scene Bill gets lost and sees an old man with a scythe cutting thistles and asks him where the road leads to, “This road will take you to wherever you want to go, son”. 

I learned a couple of Irish words reading the book. I think leanbh means baby and puckaun is a goat. Also, Bill’s friend Ned sings a song called The Croppy Boy. I looked that up as well and found the song came from the rebellion of 1798 and a croppy means a rebel. I wanted to hear the song and found a beautiful live version from 1965 by a singer I didn’t know called Anne Byrne who sounds to me like an Irish Joan Baez. I have shared it below if you would like to hear it. I can’t think of anything else to say now apart from that I highly recommend this book and I look forward to reading more stories by Claire Keegan.

The Croppy Boy - Anne Byrne

Van Morrison & Existentialism.

It is Monday afternoon. I haven’t written anything for a few days, so I thought I’d just tell you what I have been up to. I have been reading Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre. It has been a bit of a struggle. I’m not saying it is a struggle because it is a bad or boring book. It is because my mind keeps drifting off on tangents when I try to understand what Sartre is saying. Also, I have to keep googling the meanings of words, such as autodidact  or soliphism. The reason I ordered this book is as usual to do with Van Morrison. In a 2015 interview with Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times Van was asked what books influenced him when he was young, and he said.” Well, three important books for me. A couple of them were given to me by a window cleaner: one was Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac; the other was Zen Buddhism by Christmas Humphreys. And the third one I found myself: Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre. So those were the three books that influenced me the most”. I thought I would read Nausea because I have written extensively in the past about the influence of Kerouac & the Beat writers on Van, likewise Christmas Humphreys. (I found Humphreys quite a strange character actually. Although he was probably one of Britain’s leading experts on Buddhism in the 20^th century, he was also a lawyer and judge. It was he who prosecuted Ruth Ellis for the 1955 murder of David Blakely. She was the last woman to be hanged in Britain. He also secured the wrongful convictions of Timothy Evans and John Bentley. How Humphreys could be a practicing Buddhist while sending people to the gallows is beyond my understanding). 

I’m getting off the point. What I wanted to talk about is the influence of Existentialism on Van Morrison. I wasn’t exactly sure what existentialism is, so I googled that as well. It said, ‘Existentialism is a philosophical theory that people are free agents who have control over their choices and actions. Existentialists believe that society should not restrict an individual's life or actions and that these restrictions inhibit free will and the development of that person's potential’. 

Nausea was Sartre’s first novel published in 1938. It isn’t the first book by Sartre that I have read. Just after I finished college in 1974, I very much enjoyed reading The Age Of Reason which is the first book in Sartre’s Roads To Freedom trilogy. I also remember watching a highly acclaimed BBC TV series of Roads To Freedom around that time. The first time I ever heard Van’s song Tupelo Honey in the early 70s I thought he was referring to Sartre’s work. ‘You can't stop us on the road to freedom, You can't keep us 'cause our eyes can see, Men with insight, men in granite, Knights in armour bent on chivalry’. In his song The Meaning Of Loneliness on the What’s Wrong With This Picture album Van says, Nobody knows the existential dread, Of the things that go on inside someone else's head. He then goes on to say, well there's Sartre and Camus, Nietzsche and Hesse, If you dig deep enough, You gonna end up in distress, And no one escapes having to live life under duress, And no on escapes the meaning of loneliness. 

Melancholia by Durer.

Of the four writers he mentions in that line I wouldn’t say Hesse was an existential writer, (I think Van put him in because he couldn’t rhyme Nietzsche!), but the other three are major figures of existentialist philosophy. I think in this song when Van writes about loneliness he isn’t referring to the simple things like not having a girlfriend or anything like that, he means the loneliness of an existential crisis in a meaningless existence. Samuel Beckett is another writer who has cropped up in Van’s lyrics. He is someone else who viewed existence as absurd. Van released the album Born to Sing: No Plan B in 2012 and it includes Going Down To Monte Carlo which has the lines, Sartre said that hell is other people, I believe that most of them are, Sartre said hell is other people, I believe that most of them are, Well their pettiness amazes me, even after I've gone this far. The quote ‘Hell is other people’ comes from a play by Sartre first performed in 1947 called No Exit in which three characters Joseph Garcin, Inèz Serrano, and Estelle Rigault, arrive in hell to find that there is no hell fire or brimstone. They realise that just being locked up together for eternity is hell. They all laugh hysterically and say, "Eh bien, continuons..." ("Well then, let's get on with it.)

The original title Sartre had planned for Nausea was Melancholia based on a painting of that name by Albrecht Dürer which as you know is also the title of a Van song on the Days Like This album. Whether Van knew that or not I don’t know. Anyway, I have written enough for one afternoon. I might write more when I finish the book. I want to end on a cheerful note because all this existential stuff can be a bit depressing.

In the book, the protagonist Antoine Roquentin seems to overcome the debilitating tawdriness of his everyday reality when he hears jazz music. There is one song he particularly likes called Some of these Days. I wanted to hear it, so looked on youtube. The best-known version was by Sophie Tucker, but Roquentin describes the singer as a negress. I think he must have heard the version by Ethel Waters. I like it and have shared it below if you want to hear it. I think Van would like this song because he recorded Miss Otis Regrets which was originally an Ethel Waters song. I must say I find existentialism hard to equate with a lot of Van’s very spiritual music, so I think his interest might have just been a phase he went through. He is quoted as saying that he isn’t into all that stuff anymore. If you know of any other links between Van and existentialism let me know.

"Some of These Days" Ethel Waters