John Purser on a very strange week in Monaco

The National

3 days ago

For me it has been a joy. But I did encounter it at its very worst at a James Joyce Symposium, though I was there on account of Jack Yeats.
Yeats. It's a name to conjure with. WB Yeats, Nobel Prize-winning poet, mystic (in Sligo he is still known as Spooky Willy), and latterly alarmingly right-wing, almost war-mongering. There are many hundreds of theses and academic articles about him and his work. It's great work but it just doesn't need that amount of attention.
His brother, Jack, is held by many to be Ireland's greatest painter. He was a left-wing republican and is my favourite. Their sisters, Lily and Lolly, ran the influential Cuala printing press and publishing company and were also artists.
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And there was their father, John Butler Yeats, who was a fine portrait painter, a voluminous talker and letter-writer. and hopeless at bringing things to fruition.
I have a particular reason for liking Jack as it was on account of him that I was paid to spend a week in Monte Carlo – all travel and hotel covered – to launch my first venture into academe: The Literary Works of Jack B Yeats.
So far, so conventional. But Jack's writings were so unconventional that not only were they scarcely written about, they were scarcely available. I only knew they existed because he had given some to my great-aunt, the artist Sarah Purser, and were in our sitting-room bookcase.
The unconventionality of Jack's writings nearly cost me my PhD. I had handed in my thesis to Professor Peter Butter and was now, in some trepidation, knocking on his study door in Glasgow University.
His study was a large Victorian one in Sir Gilbert Scott's Gothic masterpiece. Peter was in an armchair behind a huge desk, armed with my thesis.
The walls were dark and book-lined. The tall windows looked out through their Gothic arches on to a quadrangle enclosed by soot-blackened sandstone walls tall enough to cut out much of the sky.
'It's very good, John. You've done a lot of work. Most interesting. But it lacks a proper conclusion.'
'Jack wasn't a man for conclusions.'
'Nevertheless, John, a conclusion is called for.'
'It wouldn't be right. I don't really think I need to add to what I've written.'
'You know John, when one writes a thesis one gathers the evidence and adduces the reasoning and one comes to a conclusion.'
'But that's not how Jack Yeats works. It's not a schoolboy essay, it's a reflection of his work as a whole. He thought and wrote by association.'
'Well John, a conclusion would be very useful.'
By which I was emphatically given to understand that, without one, there would be no PhD. To be fair to Peter, he was perfectly satisfied with the conclusion when it arrived. It started with the words 'Conclusions are foolish things ...' He was really very patient with me.
I got my PhD and, thanks to Derry Jeffares and the Princess Grace of Monaco Memorial Irish Library, it was published. I was duly invited to Monte Carlo to launch said book at the Twelfth International James Joyce Symposium.
But when I reached the Irish Library in the palace at Monte Carlo, nobody would touch the Jack Yeats painting I had brought and I had to hang it myself.
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Why? Only when I went to the harbour and looked down on an assemblage of hideous vessels, parked by pontoons, sleek super-yachts with their helipads, uniformed guards, protective gates, shiny everything and attendant aquatic toys (lilos, speedboats, jet-skis) and the occasional oiled human body if you got tired of playing with steel and plastic, did I understand the caution.
This was international mafia territory. Theft, masquerading under the name of investment, was the basic mechanism, vanity, exploitation and greed the fuel oils which kept it all functioning. It turned out much the same applied to the world of literary academe which was there in its hundreds, the majority American.
A week in Monte Carlo is, however, not to be sniffed at and I was also able to enjoy the company of Anne Yeats, WB's daughter, an artist herself and a real lady of great character and humour.
She had opened her house and her uncle Jack's papers to me. We got on and she, inundated with books about her father and her uncle's paintings, liked what I wrote about his writings.
Images of Joyce was the symposium topic but Joyce's living image was also there – his grandson, Stephen James, who launched into the biographer Brenda Maddox, furious at what he felt was her inaccurate invasion of family privacies.
His wife tugged in vain at his trousers to get him to sit down. I felt for him. The place must have seemed full of vultures plucking at the carcasses of his grandparents and, with a few fine exceptions, showing little feeling of love for the text (which text? – choose your weapons). In some cases Joyce was ignored altogether.
One leading speaker, passionate for Virginia Woolf, succeeded in avoiding Joyce for more than an hour. A session chairman from Philadelphia spoke entirely about himself.
A lady from Delaware spoke up for DH Lawrence and rubbished Joyce as a nature writer – but, thankfully, David Norris's brilliant rendering of a breaking Joycean wave caused her to withdraw with good humour.
As for the Women's Caucus (Shirley Conran among them, no men admitted), they fell out among themselves and that was the sum total of their report.
In the midst of Stephen Joyce's more formal address (mostly a vindication of his own life and recent involvement in the Joyce circus), a traduced American shouted across the auditorium: 'What the fuck is going on here?' and stormed out.
At the end, Anne Yeats, stately and dignified, quietly defended herself and her brother from Stephen's accusations that they were profiteering from WB's estate.
The accusation was totally false, never mind astonishingly ill mannered. Anne spoke calmly, but I was sitting with her and could tell her normal serenity and good humour were sorely tried. She was there for the same reason as I was – her uncle Jack, whom she recalled for us with modest, discerning and disarming affection.
The same words could be used of Jack Yeats's menu card he made for Sarah Purser's 90th birthday. He has depicted her as a girl above Dungarven Harbour, where she spent her childhood days.
She holds a bouquet of flowers in her hand, reflected in a mirror. The mirror itself has her artist's palette and brushes at the base, and the masks of comedy and tragedy at the top.
Above her outstretched arms, a little bird flies up into the sky, singing; and the wind in her skirt and in her hair suggest the fresh air of an early spring day. Just lovely.
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Images of Jack were there in the form of a stunning exhibition of his paintings gathered by Hilary Pyle. The Princess Grace of Monaco Memorial Irish Library was patient host to the symposium, but the Joyce circus kept mostly within its own little ring of sand, few visiting the library, few looking at the pictures.
Vibrant with colour and symbolic resonance, they outdid the exotic plants, the visual dramas of Monte Carlo and the filthy Med, with images more lively and lovely than anything else the conference had to offer.
Images of Joyce? Echoes, rather. A recital of Joyce songs and fine settings of chamber music by Geoffrey Molyneux, deserving of Joyce's own preference for them, was lovingly presented.
It stole into even the stoniest of academic hearts as though Bartell D'Arcy had shed his cold and sang for us the songs from The Dead – Joyce's masterpiece of a short story, made into a masterpiece of film by John Huston. One American who knew what he was doing.
There was also a virtuosic rendering of Finnegans Wake by two actors, a pianist and five geometric props from the Dublin Festival Company – at last the sound of Dublin and of Dublin's voices restoring to Joyce his native coherence.
I say 'restoring' because most of the papers given were desperately ambitious and hopelessly entangled in webs of too much meaning. Many were incoherent, not only in their content but in their presentation.
Some had not even been edited or timed to fit the slot available but were delivered in a relentless monotone from a heap of disordered papers for twice the allowed length.
These people were teachers of English literature. On the evidence of such performances, better if the subject were banned by law. The ghost of Joyce, I trust, remained indifferent, paring its fingernails if it had any left.
Jack loved the circus, but had there been a good old-fashioned ringmaster at the Monaco Symposium he would have had to crack his whip pretty frequently and there would have been threads of blood on more than one cheek.
Nonetheless, there were good things to remember: the two Irish professors David Norris and Gus Martin, entertaining as well as knowledgeable; and Claude Gaignebet from Nice, opening up a world of significance in the Joycean calendar in a few succinct French sentences.
As far as I could make out, only the French were at the French language session, it being delivered in the language of our hosts. Ah well.
Chiefly I remember Jack Yeats's painting Defiance. A man from the sea breasting the top of a cliff, confronted by a sunlit cormorant, bravely defending its own – yellow and blue struggling to a compromise in the midst of a wild canvas.
The battles over the territory of James Joyce had their dramas too, but poetic imagery such as that seemed largely to have gone out of them.
A condition of my visit was that I write up the event in a leading newspaper. The Glasgow Herald did me proud. I sent it off to the then director of the library, Georges Sandulescu (below).
He telephoned me from Monte Carlo to Skye. His voice was intimidating. 'I have just read your piece about the symposium.'
The tone of menace was unmistakable.
'I wrote what I thought.'
What I wrote is pretty much what you have just read. I was, I need hardly say, once more in a state of trepidation, having castigated most of the presentations.
'What do you suppose I made of it?'
'I have no idea.'
As it turned out, I didn't. 'It was wonderful! The best bit of writing to come out of the symposium! I have had six copies made for the palace.'
The bastard! He knew he had me and he played me like a fish.
Truth 6, Academic Mafiosi 0