Time Pieces by John Banville

Author:John Banville
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

*1 Maurice Craig doubts the suggestion that the White House in Washington is a copy of Leinster House. However, the architect of the White House, James Hoban, was born in County Kilkenny, studied architecture at the Dublin Society’s School, “where in 1780 he was awarded a prize for ‘stairs, roof &c,’ and in 1792 won the White House competition.”

*2 I remember the archaeologist Máire De Paor telling me back in the 1980s how at some public event or other she had buttonholed Charles Haughey, our then Taoiseach—who prided himself, rightly in some respects, on being a man of culture—and urged him that the state should purchase a collection of precious Georgian silver that was in danger of being lost to the country at auction. The reply she got, delivered with the famous Haugheyan snarl, was that “the Brits are welcome to their bloody spoons.”

*3 Who, I notice, pops up repeatedly in these pages, rather like the figure of Punch in a puppet show; and in fact, when I think of it, he did bear something of a physical resemblance to that cudgel-wielding mischief-maker of the fairgrounds of old.

*4 It might seem that Ó Gráda is more alive to the social disparities of the time than Maurice Craig. However, Craig, too, has no illusions about the contrasts between the life of the aristocracy and of the populace at large in Georgian Dublin: commenting on how much of the old city was still intact when he was writing his book in the late 1940s, he writes: “Poverty had been to a large degree the preservative, and no one can regret the economic improvement which soon afterwards began.”

*5

The window is wide

On a crawling arch of stars, and the night

Reacts faintly to the mathematic

Passion of a cello suite…

*6 Mother of my dear lost friend, the late Caroline Walsh, who succeeded me as books editor at The Irish Times. Caroline I still miss, for her kindness, her gaiety, her irreverence and integrity.

*7 Cicero, who saw much more of Behan than I ever did, judges him to have been a “Bengal”—a chancer, that is, as in “Bengal Lancer.” Among his many accomplishments, Cicero has a mastery of rhyming slang.

*8 I also spotted him one day in the window of Parsons bookshop; he was literally in the window, for he had climbed on to the sloped display shelf and was sitting there, elbows on knees, among, and on, the books laid out for sale, intently scanning the pages of the London Magazine. He was quite a sight, in his hobnailed boots, with his battered hat on the back of his head, mouthing disparaging comments and pretending not to notice the stares of the passers-by. At heart they were all show-offs, even the gruffest of them.

*9 The other day on my shelves I came across a long-forgotten postcard-sized Georgian Dublin: Twenty-Five Colour Aquatints by James Malton, published by Dolmen, and with a foreword by—who else?—Maurice Craig. You see? Everything hangs together.

*10 One day Beaverbrook was dictating an editorial

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