Belfast. Review by Bill Doherty of Kenneth Branagh's film

 

I had always enjoyed seeing Kenneth Branagh in films and TV serialisations - Henry V, Peter’s Friends and Fortunes of War - and knowing he came from a Northern Ireland Protestant background, was interested in finding out what insights his new film Belfast would offer on the city’s recent violent past.   In this instance, Branagh had written the screenplay and directed the film but was not featuring in a cast given the ballast of authenticity  by  the Irish backgrounds of the principal actors (Judi Dench squeezes in courtesy of an Irish  mother).  The sense of place was endorsed in glowing reviews from Belfast-born critics who generally gushed over the film as a walk down memory lane.  The autobiographical load is carried by the eleven-year- old Jude Hill who portrays the young Branagh.  

The film opens with Buddy, the young Kenneth, being called into his terrace house by Ma as he plays in his working-class street and turns to face the camera waving a wooden sword in one hand and a metal dustbin lid, doubling as a shield, in the other.  The dustbin lid was destined to become emblematic of the Troubles as the female occupants of whole streets banged them to warn of incursions by the Army or the police.  An unheralded incursion by a violent mob shatters this idyll of childhood innocence and Ma sallies forth to pull Buddy into the safety of the house.  Visibly terrified, Buddy and Ma, crouching down, look out as the mob violently expels the few Catholic residents from this Protestant street.  Having set the contextual background which was to mark the next three decades of life in Belfast, the director focuses on Buddy’s family.  Pa (Jamie Dornan) is a contract worker who spends weeks at a time working in the south of England while Ma (Catriona Balfe) looks after the house and family. Since both came to acting after careers as prominent models and Dornan is best known as Christian in the 50 Shades film trilogy, questions have been posed about inappropriate glamourisation of proletarian Belfast.  Pa’s parents, Pop and Granny, are played by the fine character actors Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench, neither of whom need to move up from second gear for their undemanding roles.  Buddy has a teenage older brother, Will.

Three male-female relationships provide the framework for the film.  Pop’s persistent cough, references to past employment in heavy industry in England and recurring mentions of hospital appointments mark him as a participant in a parallel drama - Chronicle of a Death Foretold.   Enthroned in regal splendour on the outside WC, he dispenses folksy aphorisms to Buddy while Granny listens from the backroom, interjecting corrections to Pop’s narrative. Things are rather more strained between Ma and Pa, with his absences in England and his debts which she is laboriously paying off. Pa is keen to emigrate – Australia, Canada, England? – while Ma is rooted in the Belfast of her childhood.  Buddy’s eye is fixed on the clever, blonde girl who is top of his class and is inspired to greater academic efforts by the prospect of sharing a desk with her.  They bond as Maths adepts.

The dramatic tension over whether the family goes or stays tilts towards the exit with the advent of sinister Loyalist paramilitaries who give Pa the choice of joining or making regular financial contributions to the cause.  Buddy is coaxed into joining a mass break in and looting of a local supermarket by a mischievous cousin and Pa realises that his elder son is also in the paramilitaries’ net as an errand boy.  Buddy is rescued from an ugly hostage situation with armed Loyalists by the Army. The family dilemma is amplified as we see Will and Buddy at Sunday School where a mandible-chomping, Paisleyesque hellfire cleric belabours the metaphor of the fork in the road. The Leave metaphor persists in lighter moments in full colour where the family see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang at the local cinema and watch the scene where the eponymous all-purpose car is used to effect an escape from the white cliffs. Pop dies, as earlier signposted, and is remembered at an exceptionally lively wake. The film closes with the family boarding the airport bus and waving farewell to Granny as she stands outside her terraced house, having instructed them never to look back.  The final shot in colour shows the giant cranes of the Harland and Wolff yard illuminated against the night sky and features a dedication with a cosmopolitan touch, an echo of the title of the third volume in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet; Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta.  For those who left and those who stayed.

The screenplay was written by Branagh who also directed the work.  Haris Zambarloukos provides wonderful cinematography rendering almost all the film in flat, clean black and white with vivid close ups of strained and emotionally taut faces.  The musical soundtrack is dominated by another Belfast voice, Van Morrison, and the acting is uniformly excellent.  Criticism of the sanitised, superficial and sentimental portrayal of Belfast is deflected by the director’s contention that it is seen through the eyes of a young boy, but it fails to generate dramatic tension and the family’s debate on moving to the south of England for employment could just as easily have been set in Ancoats, Toxteth, Byker or Govan.  Set in a Protestant working class community like Branagh’s own Mountcollyer St. in the Tiger’s Bay district, it is a paean of praise to a pre-Troubles Protestant Belfast.  We watch Ma explain to Buddy that Catholics believe Confession wipes the slate of iniquity clean and that they souse themselves in Holy Water.  Whether this justifies burning them out their houses remains an unasked question as does which locals directed the invading mob to the Catholic houses.  The whole community seems to fall in quietly with the new dispensation of paramilitaries and barricades.  

This hollowed out Belfast, sprinkled with stardust and avoiding the issues that make it a unique British city may not only reflect the director’s addiction to saccharin and a shrewd eye for box office success but possibly a conscious decision to avoid meatier material.  There was an almost tangential indication that Pa was fearful his sons were being caught up in the paramilitaries’ net.  On Remembrance Sunday 2001, the 18-year-old Glen Branagh of Mountcollyer St., Tiger’s Bay, described as “a distant relative” of Kenneth, died when, according to a police witness, a home-made pipe bomb he was throwing into a crowd of Catholics exploded prematurely.  As late as 2018 young Glen, a member of the paramilitary Ulster Defence Association’s youth wing, was still being memorialised on a banner directed at the adjacent Nationalist New Lodge Estate.  A Glen rather than a Buddy as the central protagonist might have produced a more dramatic and revelatory film.  

In conclusion, Branagh’s film is a success in terms of cinematic virtuosity, strong acting and comforting sentimentality but in its exploration of the clamant social issues of the day is more Gone with the Wind than In the Heat of the Night.  A suggestion to which Branagh would probably assert “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!”.    

 

Bricks, by Gillian Southgate

.

BRICKS

 

The book, discovered at a Christmas fair,

Shows pictures of a brickyard in the cold.

The men wear braces, shirtsleeves, greasy caps,

Their brows are lined; they could be young, or old.

Each face is strained, resigned; the work is tough.

I marvel that they stood it; did they earn enough?

England expanded on these working men;

For centuries they broke their backs and hands

To raise the thronging buildings of this land.

The great, the gabled, chimneyed, terraced, tall,

The modest home, the Court, the Lodge, the Hall.

In Flemish bond, and English, England spread,

And now the brickies are all gone, all dead.

Yet in these red-leaved days of dying fall,

The sun recalls them, down the garden wall.

 This poem was one of the winning entries in a recent "The Oldie" Literary competition. A poem on the theme "Bricks" was the set subject of the competition. Congratulations to Gillian for once again having a winning entry in this monthly competition, and thanks to her for permission to post it on the blog.

How form and language act to produce and enhance meaning in W B Yeats’s poem “Leda and the Swan.” by William Doherty (See below for the text of the poem).

 

Even the gossip columnists of our most salacious contemporary scandal sheets can only cast covetous glances at the tales from Greek Mythology where unlikely couplings with explosive consequences abound. One such tale forms the nucleus of Yeats’s short poem “Leda and the Swan”, which compels the interested reader to explore the ways form and language produce and enhance meaning in this superficially succinct sonnet. There is no single Authorised Version of the Greek myths and the detail within any given story varies across the multiplicity of sources but, in essence, the Leda/Swan myth recounts how the Spartan queen Leda experiences serial impregnation by her husband and the Ancient Greek deity Zeus, who is transformed into a swan for the encounter. Subsequently, Leda gives birth to a quartet of characters who have key parts in some ensuing mythological dramas.

The title “Leda and the Swan” is a matter of fact, open-ended heading which to the uninitiated could herald anything from a short story for small children to a runner from the currently “mode-ish” stable of nature writing. My own slim volume of Yeats’s poetry includes it but without any explanatory annotation and intriguingly it escapes specific mention in a lengthy foreword by a later Irish poet who also harboured broadly nationalist sympathies, Seamus Heaney. “Leda” was published in 1923, a year when Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature and in the poem Among School Children which features in the same collection, he describes himself as a “Sixty-year-old smiling public man”. So, arguably, many readers would havebeen familiar with the cultural, philosophical and political soil in which the seeds of Yeats’s work had germinated and might have approached the poem expecting literary fireworks, possibly coming forearmed from the recent consultation of a reference book on the Greek myths.

The poem is short, 15 lines of equal length in total apart from one split line where the second half drops to the line below to produce another, albeit delayed, half line creating a possible signpost to a narrative shift. It comprises 2 quatrains and a 6/7- line final stanza. The language is simple with many short words which would not require the average reader to reach for the dictionary. This preponderance of short, brusque words allows the narrative to build the ambience of menace and tension for what, in this version of the myth, is essentially a rape scene. The narrative voice strikes a detached, clinical note like a pathologist forensically recording autopsy findings into a Dictaphone. The effect is reinforced by using iambic pentameter as the predominant metre, familiar to the English ear from myriad poemsand even favoured by Dickens who read many of his works in instalments to his public.Some empathy with Leda’s predicament is discernible in the metaphors “helpless   breast”,“terrified, vague fingers” and the hint of discomfiture in “body” feeling “the strange, heart beating  …”. There is a transition or tipping point in the sonnet with the first line of the final stanza where the opening phrase “A shudder in the loins…” closes the rape scene and turns towards its consequences. This compact, decisive phrase echoes the one introducing the narrative where “A sudden blow:...” heralds the immediately ensuing violent action and invites the reader’s full attention. The description of the assault on Leda emphasises the confused representation of Zeus, simultaneously divine, a swan and often presented in human form. Those whose interest was sufficiently piqued by the sonnet for them to “Google” the mating habits of swans would have learnt that Zeus has eschewed the elaborate swan courting rituals of rubbing and entwining necks in favour of human or Olympian direct action and that it is customary for the male swan to stabilise the female while mating by gripping the nape of her neck in his bill. The” breast upon breast” description of this coupling in the first quatrain is decidedly human and this focus on such a hybrid heritage may contribute to the varied nature of the offspring from this encounter. As a frequent visitor to the country estates of the Anglo-Irish gentry and a confessed swan enthusiast, (see The Wild Swans at Coole), the poet would have been familiar with the birds’ behaviour. Similarly, he would probably have been aware of swans’ post-coital rituals of endearment giving a discordant, alien finality to the last line of the poem where “…the indifferent beak…let her drop?”. Perhaps Zeus had foreknowledge of the later aphorism attributed to Galen “Post coitum omne animal triste est” and it came to mind as his testosterone storm abated.

The discipline enforced by the sonnet format is seen in the rhyme scheme in the first two stanzas abab, cdcd. These are all strong, masculine end rhymes although one line in each quatrain is allowed to run on and in both instances these are descriptions of the most overtly anatomically sexual phases of the narrative. This device softens the metaphors inherent in “…thighs caressed by dark webs…” and “…push, The feathered glory from…” The latter example of figurative language verges on the extravagant as the male swan’s sexual organ is diminutive, only emerging from the bird’s cloaca during mating although even among the leisured Anglo-Irish gentry few may have attained this depth of knowledge in the field of ornithological reproductive physiology. Poetic licence or not, “…feathered glory…” amplifies the sense of menace in the story and induces sympathy for the victim. The opening stanza in particular uses alliteration to rack up narrative tension. There are five words beginning with “h” in the last line and the repetition of the sibilant  “s + consonant" in “staggering”, “caressed”,“breast” and “still” and words ending in “s” “wings”, “webs”, “helpless” and “holds”. These sequences of short, emphatically ending words are unsettling and threatening and this added charge helps both to enhance meaning and expand the narrative content. The rhyming of “caressed” and “breast” strikes a discordant note augmenting the jarring nature of the opening stanza.

In the final stanza the rhyme scheme switches from the decisive abab pattern to the relative complexity of efgefg (if we fuse the split lines) and allows the narrative to introduce more nuanced ideas. The choice of the figurative word “engenders” moves the reader’s attention from the completed sexual act to its future consequences which are distant in time and inconsistently recounted. The strong alliterative “r” repeated in the opening lines “there…broken…burning roof …tower” preconditions the reader to the violently destructive ending to the siege of Troy. Line 3 takes him beyond that as it opens with the capitalised conjunction, and delivering the flat finality of Agamemnon’s fate as Nemesis cuts her swathe through the victorious, disputatious Greeks. Registering Agamemnon’s death in this manner implies the poem is aligned with the version of the myth where Clytemnestra, the king’s wife, is also his executioner. She is like her sister Helen, the casus belli of the Trojan War, a daughter of Leda, and was conceived during Leda’s sequential couplings with Zeus and her husband. This concise signposting concludes the theme of violence begetting violence which has sustained the narrative. Splitting line 3 creates a mechanism for a tangential rerouting of the story to impute acquiescence, agency and ultimately blame to Leda for her part in the rape. The accusation is initially veiled with the exculpatory “…mastered by the brute blood of the air,” whose staccato alliteration evokes repeated blows and overwhelming power and the more ambivalent “…caught up,” with both phrases being channelled by the repetition of a preceding “so”. The seed having been planted in the reader’s mind, the artistic stiletto slides between the ribs of Leda’s character as he is asked “Did she put on his knowledge with his power…”. In his later rather public preoccupation with sex, the poet did espouse the idea of a transfer of intellectual and spiritual capital between participants during the climactic moments of sexual intercourse. That is what is being implied here and was foreshadowed in the deployment of ”… vague fingers” and ”… loosening thighs” in the second quatrain.

Figurative language has allowed more meaning and vivid imagery to be squeezed from the spare allocation of words permitted by the form of this poem; the synecdoche of “…helpless breast…”,         “…terrified …fingers…” and the metaphorical “…white rush…”.

Both Leda and swans feature elsewhere in the context of the poet’s works, notably in stanzas II, III and IV of “Among School Children” where, inspired by addressing a class of young convent schoolgirls, he ruminates on a lost love whom he likens to Leda and ominously invokes comparison with the more contentious             ”… daughters of the swan…”. The swan is the object of contemplative scrutiny in stanza III of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen” and throughout “The Wild Swans at Coole” while the burning of Troy in “No Second Troy” is likened to the destructive trajectory of his beloved Maud Gonne’s politics.

The myth of Leda and the Swan has always provided moral cover for creative minds, allowing the portrayal of sex but deflecting opprobrium by introducing a mythological participant. Yeats explained his later preoccupation with the mechanics of sex with “When I was young my muse was old but now I am old, my muse is young.” The technical virtuosity exhibited within the confines of the sonnet format in the use of form and language both produce and enhance meaning in “Leda and the Swan” but knowledge of Greek mythology and of the mating habits of swans helps maximise its extraction.

 

Leda and the Swan

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

 

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

 

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

                                  Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

"Three Hundred Years of British Prime Ministers" A talk by Sir Anthony Seldon, 19 November 2021

 Like the convent girls in Yeats’s Among School Children the too, too solid flesh of the assembled, socially distanced Lit. Soc.  in momentary wonder stared upon a sixty-year-old public man, Sir Anthony Seldon, whose pandemically postponed tryst with the Society finally played out in the spacious surroundings of the New Hall.  His remit was to share his insights from his most recent work, The Impossible Office–The History of the British Prime Minister, published on the tercentenary of the office’s institution.

Our speaker began by reading out a charge sheet, in peerless, prosecutorial prose, against an anonymous British Prime Minister.  The topical resonance of these charges saw knowing glances exchanged among the audience and a tacit consensus emerged by telepathy that the lonely figure in the dock was Britain’s 55^th Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.  The complacent cognoscenti were startled by the revelation that the accused was our first Premier, Sir Robert Walpole; gratifying reassurance for Winchelsea’s ever-irrepressible band of traditionalists (motto; plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose).  Employing an engaging, front foot style of peripatetic pedagogy, which leant heavily on sustained Socratic dialogue, Seldon listed the questions he was proposing to answer on the Impossible Office: - Why was the post created?  Why had it survived particularly given the synchronous existence, in Britain’s case, of the monarchy?  Why had it proved a model for so many different countries?     

In the pre-Walpole era, powerful statesmen were no novelty but men like Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell and the Cecils (father and son) derived their power from the monarch and some duly discovered it could be arbitrarily removed.  The republican interlude which saw the apotheosis of the New Model Army and rule by the military outfitters, Cromwell and Son, remains unique in British political history.  Seldon considered that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 ultimately facilitated the advent of the Prime Ministerial office as the subsequent constitutional monarchs needed a trusty in Parliament to arrange the funding of the Royal Household.  Disaster is often the harbinger of major political change and Walpole’s ascent to the Premiership came in response to the financial crash which followed the bursting of the 18^th century speculative extravaganza that was the South Sea Bubble.  

Although the title Prime Minister only appeared in the 1850s and then as a sarcastic barb,  Walpole under the aegis of First Lord of the Treasury started to accumulate leadership powers – in National Finance, in Parliament and in Government. Other now familiar additions to Walpole’s work in progress followed; the Cabinet, political parties and the management of the nation’s defences.    Sir Anthony adduced several reasons for the continued survival of the office – successfully avoiding invasion, revolution, civil war and a major military defeat.  Constitutionally, being a unitary state rather than a federal one and the lack of a written constitution and an elected head of state also contributed to the longevity of the role.  To assuage any impatience among potential pub political pundits our visitor revealed his lists of achievement and failure.  The top tier of Agenda Changers read: -

1)      Walpole

2)      Pitt the Younger

3)      Robert Peel

4)      Palmerston

5)      Gladstone

6)      Lloyd George

7)      Churchill

8)      Attlee

9)      Thatcher 

Sir Antony emphasised the importance of the Max Factor i.e., political longevity in gaining access to this tier.  The second tier, close but no cigar, comprised: -

1)      Pitt the Elder (Chatham) 

2)      Lord Liverpool

3)      Earl Grey

4)      Disraeli

5)      Asquith

6)      Baldwin

7)      Macmillan

8)      Wilson

9)      Heath

10)    Blair?  

The audience was on tenterhooks for the Duds, who were

1)      Grenville

2)      Melbourne

3)      Aberdeen

4)      Rosebery     

Bonar Law, on whose funeral arrangements Asquith had approvingly commented how fitting it was that the Unknown Prime Minister should be buried alongside the Unknown Soldier, managed to evade capture by Seldon.  Consolation prizes for noble failure were awarded to Neville Chamberlain and Theresa May.  Able to draw on a professional lifetime’s immersion in high politics, Sir Anthony was prepared to divulge the ingredients for his recipe for a successful Premiership: -   

1)      Have a clear agenda

2)      A strong economy

3)      Moral seriousness

4)      An iron will

5)      Be beyond party

6)      High work rate

7)      Even temper

8)      Be a good manager 

9)      Enjoy good luck 

10)  Have good timing 

Some recommendations for improved performance by future incumbents included trust people more, rein in the Treasury and employ more professional, diverse and challenging advisers.  In a lively Q&A, Sir Anthony confidently fielded the host of questions rained on him by his enthusiastic hearers who clearly reciprocated his declared reverence for famously encephalised Winchelsea audiences.   

William Doherty 

"How Do We Help Writers?" Dr Alastair Niven's talk to our October Meeting

 

The healthy sceptics of the Lit. Soc. embraced the chance to test Auden’s assertion:

 "Private faces in public places

Are wiser and nicer

Than public faces in private places"

 as the Society held its first face to face meeting for months in the unfamiliar expanses of the New Hall. Alastair Niven addressed us on the theme of helping writers, drawing on his extensive experience with the Arts Council and as a Booker Prize judge. Few expected Tiptoes the Mischievous Kitten to be numbered among the most influential books in his literary life but we all had to start somewhere. Scanning the broader horizons of the British literary scene, he informed us that the U.K. had the most books published per capita (1 per 2,700) of any country in the world. 100,000 fiction works (novels, short stories) are published annually although this represents a 30% decline over the last 20 years. In our current plague years, independent bookstores have seen sales increase although the 13% increase in works of fiction has been partly offset by a decline in the non-fiction field. The plethora of publications is problematic in that many publishers cannot afford to market books. It is easier to pitch the work of glamorous, young authors. Our speaker was ambivalent about celebrity writers. While an established public profile might seem an asset, Alastair confessed that he considered recent ghosted offerings from the Clintons and Martina Navratilova as a literary nadir. Those members of the audience quietly nursing private literary ambitions would have been inspired by an unknown writer triumphing solely from word-of-mouth recommendations as in the case of Louis de Bernières and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Traditionally sales can be enhanced by the literary press e.g. The London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement or the review section of the former broadsheet press although this last has been a diminishing asset in recent years. Literary prizes provide an intoxicating cocktail of publicly acclaimed merit launched on a tidal wave of favourable publicity and can transform a writer’s career. Alastair’s stints as a Booker Prize judge each involved reading between 150 and 200 novels although he admitted some judges may have been less dutiful. He made a prescient observation on the post-Booker media ubiquity of Bernardine Evaristo, nicely anticipating a cartoon in the 29 October edition of Private Eye. Evaristo was the first black woman to win the Booker although female Asian authors have had previous successes. An intriguing contrast emerged in the commercial success of two winners whose works were both set in a proletarian Glaswegian milieu. Following his 2020 Booker triumph, Douglas Stuart saw the sales of Shuggy Bain surge from 80,000 to 800,000 while James Kelman’s 1994 winner How Late It Was, How Late only managed 40,000. Admittedly, Kelman’s uncompromising Glasgow argot offered no concessions to the mainstream Anglophone reader. In some fields, most notably the Peace Prize, the Nobel judges have made some controversial even contrarian selections and the 2021 Literature prize broke new ground as it was won by the Tanzanian novelist, Abdulrazak Gurnah, the first black African winner. Somewhat embarrassingly, the last African win was the white British-Zimbabwean Doris Lessing in 2007 (born to British parents in Iran). Although arguably a win for the global South, Gurnah’s best known work, Paradise, was published in 1995 and indeed made the Booker short list. This award followed accusations that the Nobel judges ignored the more vociferous critics of post-colonialism many of whom came from the global South.

Literary festivals, book launches and poetry readings provide platforms for publicising and selling books although sometimes mandating encounters in the farthest reaches of eccentricity. The novelist P. D. James filled a marquee with 800 people at Hay on Wye and declined any fee, requesting only a donation to The English Hymn Society. She was disconcerted to learn afterwards that the organisers’ donation was a princely £5! The author Simon Brett was left completely alone for an hour and a half in one festival hall while his organising host went for her lunch.

Our speaker’s conclusion was resolutely upbeat – there is no evidence of the imminent death of the book or of reading. In a lively Q and A session he was positive and open minded on anything that facilitated the public’s interaction with Literature, be it coffee shops in booksellers or even a McDonald’s in a public library.

 William Doherty