The 2011 Guardian obituary for its own Peter Lennon included remarks on the making of the documentary for which he remains best known, at least in Ireland. It mentions “the not unkind but at the same time agonizing record of two days spent with a priest nominated by the archbishop’s office” and that line recalled the time the film was finally exhibited on Irish television, as a curious relic.
2006
16 May, Tuesday
I’m watching Peter Lennon’s Rocky Road to Dublin (1968), which was heralded by a documentary on its making and reception last night. Just watching Michael Cleary sing The Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy to a ward of young women serves to remind one of something basic but not mentioned by Lennon – the sheer surrealism of life here (whether priest-ridden or in a time when priests are becoming extinct). Right now, Cleary is spoofing to some gravediggers. There was something rotten in the State indeed. But television lifted the veil of ignorance a long way.
As did the reduction in grinding poverty. By Lennon’s own later account, Samuel Beckett had told him not to bother with the film, as “they” were not “serious people”, which admittedly we are not. Why we are not is the subject of a different essay on this site, Blueshirts in Spain (see the link below).
In pandering to the laziest of misconceptions that exist among the English, Lennon interpreted Beckett’s advice to mean “when it comes to tough issues, my countrymen can be bafflingly skittish and unreliable” (in describing patriotism as a “truculent fever” it is only the patriotism of the colonized at which he sneers).
Though foolishly described by Emil Cioran as a complete Anglo-Saxon, Beckett in fact had not lost his Irishness, even to Lennon’s extent. Then again, he wasn’t writing for the English. His warning implied a wise Irish maxim (‘Don’t draw them on you’) but there is no sign that Lennon ever grasped his message about not inviting unnecessary hassle.
Any genuine understanding or portrayal of Ireland, kind or unkind, first requires a surreal eye, plus a grasp of a principle that is largely alien to the Saxon cultures. Reality should not be taken too literally. There are to be sure flickers of the surreal in Lennon’s memoir Foreign Correspondent (1995). One is his early description of Longford, which, given the resilience of local differences on this island, is unlikely to upset anyone who is not from Longford.
On Fair Day the main street ran with shit. These midlands people were not so much slow as disinclined ever to get started. In my short stay… my main source of insight… was the courtroom. It was in Longford that I discovered why… my mother regularly prayed that we be protected from ‘schemes’… Judging by the courts, the people of Longford were a collection of feuding, barn-torching, spell-laying, litigious rascals very high in the art of scheming.
It has long seemed evident, here at least, that the greatest cultural division in Ireland is really between east and west. (Longford is closer to the west.) At the time of writing, the nation is keeping an eye on a popular scandal starring two indiscreet Galway college lecturers. Bamboozled by the buttons involved in a video call, they were recorded meanly and slanderously bitching about their students. Even the Guardian has covered the story.
At this juncture I must confess to finding the west of Ireland somewhat depressing and somewhere to be rarely visited. My favourite experience in the retelling stakes happened in a pub in Clare. It was a night in the wake of a wedding and the bride asked the best man to sing a song, according a tradition known as the noble call. She then made the diplomatic error of telling them I was from Waterford, on the south coast. Booing by the classy patrons ensued, thanks to a disputed hurling match (which Clare had won) five years earlier.
In general terms, if it isn’t something cheaply comical in the news from the west, it’s yet another medical ‘misadventure’ costing the State a fortune in the courts or it’s the burning down of some premises the most agitated among the locals would have preferred to remain derelict.
Before my re-reading of Foreign Correspondent after a gap of twenty years or so, the only elements I could consciously remember therein were (a) that a large part of it was devoted to the Algerian war’s bloody impact on Paris and (b) that there was a row in a bar between the author and Peter O’Toole, that the row was provoked by Lennon, and that Beckett had to intervene. That was not the only time Lennon caused hassle in the Falstaff. It turned out Beckett also had to step in after Lennon had incensed Jackie MacGowran with a (revealingly) “priggish” review of a one-man show.
Occasionally misleading about historical facts, this sloppily written memoir is mostly devoted to Paris in the Sixties. My favourite howler is a reference to Buster Keaton turning down “the part of Godot” but anyway, it was there Lennon lived after leaving Dublin (and Longford) behind. On his way he took a ferry from Newhaven on the English south coast. Heading to France (sometimes known as the Continent) he then refers to “the white tumbled wake of the ship stretching away softly to the mainland” at another low point of the pandering. It shows the reader early on that, in more ways than the nautical, he does not know his arse from his elbow.
Though he may not have been a resourceful chancer, he too was one, not that he ever acknowledges that archetypal Irish category as directly applying to him. In Paris, a man from Kilkenny tells him of a lifeline opportunity to work as a school assistant, which was available to British college students. Telling him not to worry about the British bit, the man then asks, in an incredulous manner, if he has no one at home to forge a student card for him.
I remembered that Dublin abounded with chancers… and supposed I could find someone. “For God’s sake… can’t you chance it?”
Lennon got a student card back from Dublin in ten days, accompanied by an unsought fake professorial reference containing “a final masterly touch” in that it was written in green ink. In a contortion of logic, Lennon decides the French clerks processing his application thought Dublin was in the North and that the reference was thus the work of an eccentric professeur britannique.
Had he been capable of more profound reflection on his origins and compatriots, he would have seen the green ink for what it was. A flourish of exaggeration added just for the craic.
Dr. John Flynn 