There isn’t any science to any of it.

We found Black dead drunk slumped over his desk the Tuesday morning. Bottle of compound beer emptied by his screen and several more rolled off to other places. People crammed into the room to see and right away began trying to bring him to. I said:

"Why not let him be? The guy's just won is first sale."

But it wasn't a popular sentiment. 

We had spoken and knew each other a little. Both of us had joined up to the compound the same day and waited in reception together. He was at his snout plenty, scratching it, rubbing it over. He wore a full pressed suit and tie owing to how he had just come from work. He was sanitary for a badger but there was a lot of something came masked by his cologne and I couldn’t be sure but it seemed he sported a black eye. The receptionist brought me through to the interview room first of everyone to meet the three recruiters behind the desk.

"We have to prevent certain types making their way in here." They told me. "We have to ensure we don't get any kinds who just show up, take in a few meals, enjoy something of a holiday only to leave. Then there are the types on the run from the law, from debt collectors, from their wives." They asked me what my job had been.

"I worked in freight. A stevedore. The guys that load and unload ships. I was one of those." As it happened I had worked in advertising but it was no concern of theirs.

"We've decided to put you on probation. We need you to prove you really want to be a part of what we're working for here. It's no party. We're a no nonsense operation. We all chip in, quite often above and beyond. For that is what it takes. It gets tough. There are early mornings. Late nights. The crops require constant care and attention. Are you sure you still want it?"

"I definitely want it."

"Another thing is we have to confiscate all you've brought with you. In the commune we share everything equally."

"You mean my car?"

"Yes, the car."

"That's all right."

"And everything else too. You no longer own anything."

Afterwards Black told me he made the mistake of coming forth with how he had been a salesman. On account of how lying was behind him. The compound was to be his fresh start. He opened his wallet and showed me a photograph of his house, of his old car and his boat. He told me he hadn't sold them, he had given them away. That was all a part of it. These things were but symptoms of his illness. This place was the cure.

I met him again about a week and a half later. I was out in the field spraying the sprouts for flies. He passed me coming back in, still wearing that full suit. The rest of us were all in the casual sweatshirt and jeans type get-up they handed out at registration. He said to me:

"I can't understand they haven't given me anything else to wear. It's all I have with me. They keep washing and handing it back. I thought they'd supply us with a toga or robes or something. I feel like a real weirdo in this."

He showed me a photo of his son, Martin. He kept talking about this kid. He seemed the difficult type. He was a cellist. In the photo it seemed like the boy was looking right through me. But he could do no wrong by Black. He was only the one half badger. He lived back out there with Black’s ex-wife. They had helped him through much of the drinking and the clinic but had been dead against his hanging it all up to join a commune.

The three behind the desk had informed Black he had a month to pull in two large in sales or he was out. That was his probation. He had to sell the vegetables. Then after that it was three large. All this farmed produce needed to go toward paying for irrigation, electricity, the kitchens. They needed someone to sell it.

He sat by his desk early morning into the evening.

"Afternoon miss, I only called to inquire if I might be able to interest you in the finest, the best value for money organic produce from right here in the..." Then he went back and redialled.
"Good afternoon mam. I wonder am I talking to the manager of the shop. That's, yes, that's fine too. Well, I was calling to see if I might be able to interest you in the very finest, the very freshest..."

"You look like you're on tough detail." I said. I poured him a coffee.

"It's not easy either. Try selling vegetables from a hippy commune. Everyone believes all we do around here is sit in circles smoking pot beneath the oak trees."

"That or worse."

"Worse, exactly. Go try selling groceries from a drug addled sex farm. But I can do it. Two large in a month, I have to. I have to do it. I can't go back out there. It's cut throat."

He utilised age old techniques peppered with new methods like what he told me was neuro-linguistic programming. He only mentioned positive things. He made sure their answer to his every question was yes. It coaxed favourable chemicals out of the brain. It set lucrative patterns of speech. Then, each night, the managers brought him in for a full report. He produced his flow charts and projections. It usually ran till late. We would some of us stay up and listen outside. I couldn’t take much. It felt bad hearing a badger go through that kind of thing. They are proud animals and that sounded awfully demeaning.  

I tried talking with him some at suppertimes. He talked about being a failed painter. He was a failed poet too. Everyone in sales is deep down something else. But when he visited the west, or the countryside, and he stood alone beneath a ferocious yawning sky in every direction, with an equally ferocious sea out before him, that was the only time he was content. He gave that a lot of thought. So one evening he had packed up his car and told his wife it was all done with. That was where the black eye came from.

Then the Monday night he strode in suit jacket over one shoulder, tie loose and already somewhat drunk.  He had his figures all printed. He was sure and reminded them that he was the king. Yessir. Sale agreed. He had picked out his preferred bed in the full time dorm. Preference in pillow too. He yelled a whole lot about commission. That they didn’t know with whom they were dealing. That there had been a masterclass gentlemen. Kind of thing you can’t teach. It went on. He lectured them just as long as it pleased him then slammed the door in his wake.

A few of the stoats helped him to his room and he was allowed sleep it off. There was a whole lot of hot air but in the end nothing further was done about it. He hadn't drunk any more than his commission got him anyhow. I was put on cleaning duty. He had gotten through two cartons of cigarettes, the nine beers and a hip-flask and there was ash everywhere. He had really enjoyed himself in there. I for one was glad he had made the sale. I would have missed him. And when it came down to it we were all of us in the same boat.

I cleared up the charts and sales sheets and finally a chocolate bar wrapper and a receipt. It was a credit card receipt. It was in the name of Martin Black and it had just paid out two large. I pushed it to the bottom of the bag.

They moved him by the window in the main dorm. He got himself a bedside locker at that. And a couple of days at ease, they didn’t even call upon him to work crops. He hunched over the fence afternoons in shirtsleeves rolled up and watched us. I tried to make out how his face seemed but a badger is inscrutable. Thursday came by the first of the month. I visited the office on cleaning detail and he was back in there. His suit jacket caught the light handsomely. He had the coffee machine emptied already by ten am.

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Samuel Beckett's style.

You leave both your albums at home, I said, the small one as well as the large one. Not a word of reproach, a simple prophetic present, on the model of those employed by Youdi. Your son goes  with you, I went out.

This, excerpt from ‘Molloy’, might be one of the few instances in Beckett wherein we get something like a glimpse behind the curtain. Notoriously vague as to the explanation of anything he ever wrote, “If I knew what it was about”, he said, “I would have said it”, Beckett is an artist of pure form, almost perhaps to the extent of which the ensuing content might take its import purely by relation to it. In that it ensues. In that something must ensue from form. Throughout the development from the post-Joycean pyrotechnics of ‘More Pricks than kicks’ through to the clipped monotone utterances of the very latter stage, much more striking than the fixation upon the paring down of prose there can be traced the development of a simple, almost binary relation running through close to every sentence. Nowhere is this more visible than in his mid to the beginnings of his latter work, a period encompassing in particular The Trilogy and The Four Novellas.

No less than the sense that these works are made up from endless heaps of meandering digressions, each superceding the last, to no discernible end other than to have something told, we are indoctrinated quickly into pleasant familiarity with the peculiar timbre, a constant cadence establishes itself through these pieces and we acclimatise ourselves to a pattern, a sequence of patterns, presented as fiction. 

Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps I shall survive Saint John the Baptist’s Day and even the Fourteenth of July, festival of freedom. Indeed I would not put it past me to pant on to the Transfiguration, not to speak of the Assumption.

A typical Beckett phrase the like of this makes a scaffold of its dead language, the cliché, in this case two; I would not put it past me and not to speak of. To this foundation can be added anything, any flight of fancy or self indulgence or, as in this case, technical nous, (the echoes between John the Baptists fate and resonant images from Bastille day or quirks like festival of freedom and pant on),  in full confidence that it can be easily stomached thanks to this grounding in the banal.  This banality Beckett becomes dependent on to clear a path for him, both through the gluttonous stylistics that marred his early work , forcing it into a palatable, dare we say it, bite sized, shape, and also imbuing the narrator with some sense of normalcy, even if it’s only the pretence that he’s too exhausted to bother with thinking up a more interesting way of saying it.

The Trilogy represents the summit of Beckett’s prose because it’s the point where he has honed this sense of dead language past the near catatonic lists of ‘Murphy’ and ‘Watt’ and established it as perfect counterpoint to the sudden linguistic tangents his sentences constantly shock us with. He has abandoned both the urge to dazzle the reader and to numb him into submission and introduces a new sense of tongue-in-cheek, nurtured through Mercier and Camier and the Four Novellas, in which any horror or any significant incident is punctuated with a certain kind of knowing grin.    

One of these days he will astonish us all. It was thanks to Sapo’s skull that he was enabled to hazard this opinion and, in defiance of the facts and against his better judgement, to revert to it from time to time.

There are no less than six cliches in the above phrase and in The Trilogy, a steady reliance upon cliché develops, particularly in the first two books. Cliches are the bread and butter of the sandwich, sentences frequently kicking off with some or other platitude or using one to conjoin two or more eddying streams of prose. A large part of the quality of Beckett’s writing comes from not being able to guess where it will have gone by the end of the sentence, let alone the following one, or the narrative, and this goes as much as anything for the rhythms.  Cliché invests the same sense of cold, almost mathematical, language for which he had previously struggled with lists and drawn out variables, while initiating a particular form based in the appearance of spontaneity or off-handedness. It’s as if each sentence, or phrase, is started off, or built around, a stock  dead frame and then, once the floor has been given it, is allowed wander at random off in any direction until it eventually dies, at which point we begin anew.  Practically the only way this can be arranged into a narrative of any progression would be in the first person, struggling to tie narrative ends together through acrobatics of lateral thinking. These acrobatics, or rather the relation between these and the dead language, become the point of the prose.

The use of cliché emphasizes the notion of given ‘stock’ language, handed to, or even enforced upon, the user. A lack of all thought, personality or any welling up of feeling into verbal expression. A phrase with a seemingly universal significance which actually serves to express nothing. Moreover, its use here is so self conscious that  it almost actually achieves what Beckett had so long striven for and so often referred to. In hanging the structure of his prose from it, cliché, by its emptiness, by its communication of linguistic vacuum even extending to thought, robs every phrase of any hope of actual, verifiable communication. Something which by its very nature expresses that there is nothing to express and no way to express it. 

Scrupulous to the last, finical to a fault, that’s Malone, all over.

That’s the bright boy of the class speaking now, he’s the one always called to the rescue when things go badly, he talks all the time of merit and situations, he has saved more than one, of suffering too, he knows how to stimulate the flagging spirit, stop the rot, with the simple use of this mighty word alone, even if he has to add, a moment later.

The more you read a sentence like this, trawling for cliché, the more blurred the lines become between what it is you’re after  and what might possibly qualify. Parts of sentences such as ‘he’s the one’ or ‘knows how to’ or ‘a moment later’ carry that sense of having come packaged almost as much as ‘stop the rot’ and this extends deeply into every phrase. No longer is it a case of cliches peppering otherwise creative prose and a safe juxtaposition, but  the very same prose, even what could be called ‘high’ Beckettian prose, verging almost on poetry, begins to read suspiciously.

He would stand rapt, gazing at the long pernings, the quivering poise, the wings lifted for the plummet drop, the wild reascent, fascinated by such extremes of need, of pride, of patience and solitude.

There’s little doubt that a significant part of Beckett’s reputation as a writer comes from passages the like of  this, pointing to a keenly poetic bent, never fully satisfied with his attempts at poetry.  But no longer does it appear devoid of cliché. Aside from ‘he would stand’ and anything else someone might be able to spot, the sense of a kind of banality in cadence rings very much true. Gazing at the…, the…, the…, the… Extremes of …, of…, of… and…

The sense of all language being cliché.

What writing in the French drew out of Beckett was the sense that he had lost all language , had mummified his natural English with the straightforwardness of a Romance Language while at the same time setting down a kind of French that seems it’s been translated from an English text. 

Anthony Burgess was fond enough of the following phrase from ‘Murphy’ to  return to it time and again as an example of how ‘satisfactory’ Beckett’s English was.

The leaves began to lift and scatter, the higher branches to complain, the sky broke and curdled over flecks of skim blue, the pine of smoke toppled into the east and vanished, the pond was suddenly a little panic of grey and white, of water and gulls and sails.

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WB Yeats and what we talk about when we talk about Ireland.

Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel and Fionn McCumhail has precious little to do with the price of onions. You’re probably never more Irish than when you’re stuck watching windscreen wipers on the commute home, listening to Sean Moncrieff. But if someone were to ask you what it means to be Irish you might not say that.  The idea of a national identity is something we probably only encounter at the match, when some local band makes it big abroad or when we slate ourselves over how little we protest compared to elsewhere. In other words, it’s only really when we’re set beside another country that we see what makes us different. Our national identity for almost the last hundred odd years is the story of us differentiating ourselves from another country and no one had more say in that than the poet WB Yeats, who celebrates his 150^th Birthday this year.

            Different people take different things from the old stories. Cuchulainn has appeared in everything from the Guardians of the Galaxy comic book to Final Fantasy video games. The Táin has been illustrated by Louis Le Brocquy and re-told by Thomas Kinsella and Ciaran Carson, not to mention the album by Horselips. It’s the same way you’d explain to a tourist how Fionn McMuchaill built the Giant’s Causeway. These stories are still alive in strange and sometimes very modern ways. The phrase; ‘let me sing you the song of my people’ is an internet meme some long time now but, to paraphrase Voltaire, if there wasn’t any song any more, it would be necessary to invent one. While we all know Yeat’s role in this, the thing people don’t tend to talk about too much is what a singularly strange man he actually was, even among poets. Yeats had this massive role to play in what Ireland means and perhaps the largest influence on him came from the occult, which is something often briefly touched on but never really discussed. This is interesting because without this unusual obsession he would probably never have achieved what he did. It was the combination of all three of his obsessions: nationalism, poetry and the occult that lead him to playing the role he did in defining how we thought of ourselves as a culture.

 It was in 1884 that Yeats read a book called The Occult World by AP Sinnett.  The book aimed to introduce Theosophy to Europe from the East and pretty much right away Yeats became convinced of the reality of this aspect of the occult and in particular of the teachings of one Helena Blavatsky. Blavatsky was a world famous mystic who had founded the Theosophical Society based on what were up till then secret Indian and Tibetan teachings. Theosophy is an esoteric pursuit which places a single, divine, universal mind operating behind all teachings and cultures and determining all events, all of which an adept much work to uncover for himself. “The mystical world is the centre of all I do and all I think and all I write”, Yeats wrote in 1894. It seemed it was maybe a little too much at the centre of things for him. Yeats was eventually excommunicated from the Theosophical Society by Blavatsky for taking part in practical experiments, something strictly forbidden. As a reaction to that, his next move was to join up with a group called The Order of the Golden Dawn, a much more hands-on mystic sect which numbered among its ranks Aleister Crowley, probably history’s most famous Satanist. This group encouraged members to actively experiment in order to demonstrate their power over the material universe and Yeats experimented freely on his friends and acquaintances, writing of having undergone some pretty shocking visions. The thing about all of this is how often throughout his life he mentions this kind of thing as a chief influence on this thought. Thankfully it wasn’t the only one.

                   Around the same time, Yeats became one of the followers of Douglas Hyde’s Gaelic League. The league strove for the De-Anglicisation of Irish culture and the promotion of a national Celtic identity. Yeats thought the best way to do this was to write the old stories of the Irish people, but in English, the language in which, he said “modern Ireland thinks and does its business”. According to Yeats, folk art "is indeed the oldest of the aristocracies of thought ... it is the soil where all great art is rooted." Combining this belief with his fascination with the occult led to Yeats focusing on the supernatural aspects of Irish folk life, in contrast with many other writers of the time. Clearly still under the influence of the Theosophists, Yeats continued to announce things like: “The fairies are the lesser spiritual moods of the universal mind, wherein every mood is a soul and every thought is a body." Yeats devoted the book Celtic Twilight to taking this particular aspect of folklore and transforming it into poetry.  His book Mythologies delves deeper, incorporating his own visions of spirits, while at the same time helping to establish him as the preeminent collector of Irish folklore.

                   To say Yeats arrived at the national poetic agenda alone is a little unfair. There were actually plenty of segmented little groups working away at the cause.  One such group was called the Young Irelanders; Thomas Davis, John Blake Dillon and Charles Gavan Duffy numbering among them, and they worked hard at trying to promote national poetry through the romantic ballad, which they saw as the supreme form of public art. These were not the songs of the people, but instead more of a high-brow invention, intended more for the parlours and the salons. Yeats was introduced to the Young Irelanders and their books by the revolutionary John O’Leary and by that time their aim was not just national ballads, but to encourage a national identity, unifying the country behind a single cultural idea. Yeats straight away realised that these men weren’t anything like great poets and seemed to believe a lot of things contrary to his own views. In his lecture “Nationality and Literature”, published in 1893, Yeats states that all national literature is maturing from epic to lyrical, like a tree which “grows from unity to multiplicity, from simplicity to complexity” A young nation, not yet fully formed and yet to achieve national and cultural unity, is still at the epic stage. It’s the epic which forms a unity and defines social structure, rather than the lyrical. Yeats saw the epic legends as the ideal way to represent a fledgling social consciousness as they are “made by no one man, but by the nation itself through a slow process of modification and adaptation, to express its loves and its hates, its likes and its dislikes.” Ancient art would be a unifying national force because it speaks to the people’s unconscious identity. Yeats believed the way to achieve this in modern times was to rekindle a relationship with the folk and mythological themes with which, we know, he had a particular relationship.

                   It was around then that Yeats began calling himself “The Celt” and put himself forward as a kind of update on the traditional idea of the Celtic bard. Celts had already been given a special place in the zeitgeist at that time by people like Matthew Arnold, who, in a culture awash with dichotomies like masculine/feminine, emotional /intellectual and natural /industrial, ascribed to Celtic culture a feminine, natural and emotional character as opposed to the masculine/ utilitarian Teuton, and within that Celtic culture, bards were a kind of custodian of culture, knowledge and even prophesy. The thing was, William Butler didn’t actually have any Celtic blood in him whatsoever. He came from the middle class Protestant Ascendancy. To get around this, he rejected an ethnic idea of the Celt and instead tapped into the idea of a hazier, cultural ancestry, combining Theosophy and Paganism and claiming it as “the only true religion of the Irish.”

                   What you start seeing in Yeat’s poetry and plays from then on is a combination of the heroic, the epic and the transcendental. There’s another world, another condition to be achieved. I’ll stop here and flag the fact that this pretty much the MO of every practicing religion since the dawn of time too, but there are singular Theosophical elements you begin to notice emerging. The most obvious example of his combining poetry, nationalism and the occult is the poem “To Ireland in the Coming Times.”, written in 1892. After claiming his place in a list of national poets, he continues to link Ireland’s past with what is to come and highlights the role of art in this. Artists are the only ones who can talk about “things discovered in the deep/where only body’s laid asleep” and their work alone can bring about a supernatural world “For the elemental creatures go/About my table to and fro,”.  The occult is mixed in with the mythological, pagan and artistic with “elemental beings,” and “Faeries dancing under the moon/Druidic land, Druidic tune.” The idea of Ireland as a mystical, other-worldly place, peaceful, feminine, emotional and profoundly “Celtic”, far from the grinding, industrial horrorshow of Europe, becomes a core theme in poems like ‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’ and “Into the Twilight”.  The transcendence of the individual into this quasi-spiritual realm doesn’t only mirror the nation transcending into freedom and cultural identity, but also the transcendence of the world into a higher supernatural plane. Oisin venturing to Tir Na N’og is another example, as is Cuchulainn’s Fight With The Sea.

                   As he grew older, Yeats tried to distance himself a little from the pagan and occult themes in his work, from the stories of automatic writing and the famous séances, maybe after criticism from people like Auden, calling it “the deplorable spectacle of a grown man obsessed with mumbo-jumbo of India.” I happen to think it makes his work more interesting, more layered and if we really are thinking of Yeats when we think of Irish Mythology and Irish culture as a whole, asks more questions about the role the occult and Theosophy had to play. Maybe Dan Brown could get a thriller out of it.  

Alan Walsh.

 This post was originally for the blog over at the Irish Literary Festival

If you enjoyed that, I've written a novel, Sour, retelling an old Irish myth as a modern murder story:

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Summer at Maghermore : A Short Story

It was early and no one was anywhere near the shore but for an old man sat against the rock nearest the tide, draped in a long towel, who watched out for the light to break. It was still a little like night to venture out and he sipped from a flask he had brought to warm him at that hour. The first call of gannets had woken two surfers inside of their camper van and they sat, with tea, and watched the old man, wondering why he was out alone so early and on such a remote stretch of beach.

"He’s trying to kill himself," one surfer said.

"Why do you say that?"

"No one would arrive out here so early. He’s working up courage, drinking from that flask, maybe rum. He seems unsteady."

"Then why did he change into that swimsuit? Why the towel if not to dry off?"

"Who knows what occurs in the mind of a suicide? Maybe he wishes to seem normal, like it might look an accident."

They crouched behind the wheel of the van with the light off so as not to be noticed in all of the silence and darkness. The only thing to move was the low branch stooped over the old man’s rock and the loose strands of seaweed in the breeze. The gannets and gulls began to circle more frequently and the light began slowly to come in. When the water was lit well enough to make out, the old man folded his towel down into the bag where he had packed his clothes and placed his flask on top of the rock beside it. He began walking out toward where the water washed the first pebbles on the shore.

"There, he’s going to do it. We can’t just allow it to happen."

"He doesn’t look anything like drunk. He’s just testing the temperature."

They both silently got out of the van to watch from the shade, keeping sure to remain very still. The old man stood a while with the water reaching only his ankles. He adjusted his shorts, tucked up underneath where his belly hung, and crouched down to place his hands into the foam. He brought water up to rinse through his hair and down his face, doing this a number of times. He ventured out a little deeper, knee deep and then to his waist, and allowed the tide lap his belly and upper arms while he looked out at the sky gradually changing colours.

"Where are you going?"

"I’m going down there. It’s probably even a crime to stand by and watch someone kill themselves, doing nothing."

"You don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s just taking a dip."

The man craned his knees to have the water cover his chest and then wash over his shoulders. That early it was still cold enough to throw you off if you didn’t take enough care. He went through this motion a couple of times, then finally dunking his head the whole way under to come up again wet all over. Sure of his footing now and far enough from the shore, he pushed forward into a forearm stroke, letting the water catch his weight under the belly and kicking hard as he could manage it. It churned water high in every direction, his strokes weren’t quite timed to replace one another in the water and his kicking legs weren’t strong enough to breach the surface and push him on. He floundered sideways, unable to bring his following arm round in time to keep afloat and kicked down to touch the bottom again. He stood a minute out as far as the water reaching his shoulders and took a few heavy breaths. He washed some more of the tide through his hair. Bending his knees further, he let the tide lap up to his lips and nose and pushed off again, horizontal to the shoreline, this time with greater effort and more foam thrown up about him. His legs kicked harder and he forced his arms on through the water ahead. But he was already off course, and soon heading diagonally out from the tide to where the bottom began to slope off. The push and thrashing soon tired the old man. He quit to stand still a while again, but he had ventured a little far out of his depth. His shoulders dipped under quickly to his surprise, taking his head down under as well and he had to reach right away into another forward splash, even out of breath, to make it in close enough to shore to touch down.

"He doesn’t know about us. He thinks he’s all alone out here. He can’t even hardly keep afloat. It’s still almost dark and there’s no one for miles."

"He’s teaching himself to swim."

"Why would anybody do that at this hour, miles from any possible help? At that age."

"Maybe that’s why he’s out here."

"He’s well into his eighties easy. He was unsteady getting out there across the stones to start off with. Hazard to himself. There have to be laws against people acting out of recklessness with their own well being."

"There aren’t any people out in the water at this time. No one to pay him any attention back on shore either, to get unduly worried. He can concentrate freely."

The old man was back down into another stroke, this one a little sharper, tighter to the line of the tide. He seemed not to kick as much froth up around him either. A number of gulls had settled on the moving surface, content to drift and watch. He only made a couple of feet along before having to touch down again and catch his breath. He knew he was doing it all wrong, that his timing was off, he was pushing too hard and without any grace. Stood deep in the tide, he tried to figure out how to better it with his next go. He waded out a little deeper and practiced moving just his arms, each over the shoulder in turn, slowly as he could, for imagined in this lay the key. Then, remembering what he had seen others do, he began rolling his head from side to side in the water, breathing in one side and out the other. He stood in place and did this a little while. The younger surfer watched him, shaking his head. The man took another breath and lunged forward again, this time in the opposite direction. Again, he kicked up a lot of froth and began to stray diagonally outward, but it seemed a little more contained a motion than before. He couldn’t maintain it for very long and hadn’t gotten the breathing right. He lacked the strength to keep stroking any length and had to stop to again pretty soon. The younger surfer shook his head some more.

"You know he’ll be back out here tomorrow morning."

"He looks that type."

"And we’ve taken the place up by Maghermore. So we won’t be here."

The light had by then come in enough that the rock, the trees and camper van and both men were clearly visible and the old man, seeing them, wet his head one final time in the foam and began to stride his way back into shore through the water. He reached the stones and collected his bag and his flask from the rock, made his way back up the shingle slope and past the camper van, saluting the surfers with a nod as he went. Both of them nodded in return.

In a little while, they had suited up and prepared the boards, they’d locked up the van and headed down to the shore themselves. It was still early but the waves were starting to come in a little harder and break with more force. They paddled out far enough and caught what they could, but the waves weren’t as lively as they had been earlier in the month. That was why the younger surfer has suggested moving on up to Maghermore, where it was said to be rougher. They had planned to pass the summer there but had left it too long. He brought his board out past the furthest rock and let the sea rise and drop him until he felt there was enough in it to try and make it back in on. Each time he did it, though, it tapered off and he was left wishing he had left it longer. A few of these and he had given up. He relaxed and watched his partner fight to drag some life out of the waves, sometimes even getting a little. He sat on the surf board, flat on the surface of the water, and thought about that old man, wondering if he’d be out there the following morning and if he’d ever succeed in teaching himself to swim. It was too dead to surf. He paddled back into shore and lit a fire back by the van. He dried himself off and began to prepare breakfast.

If you enjoyed that, you might like my novel, Sour, an old Irish myth retold as a modern murder story:

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10 ways to get your short story published in a magazine.

Getting your story published in a magazine is a great way to showcase your writing ability, get your name out there and grab the attention of editors, agents and publishers. Once you're writing to a good standard, it shouldn't be too difficult to get noticed by the magazines, but in many cases writers try the same things again and again to no benefit. I've compiled a simple list of points that should help set you up for a successful submission. 


1) Read the magazine you're submitting to.
This sounds pretty obvious. It's not all that obvious to many writers. Read at least a whole issue, ideally, read more. What this will do is give you a pretty clear insight into what the editor likes. He or she is your target market. Your YA tale of forbidden school-yard werewolf romance, no matter how well written, won't appeal to someone only publishing gritty social angst stories. It's all too easy to shoot off multiple emails to lists of magazines with a copy-and-paste intro and an attached word doc of your story. You're playing the game a little like a lottery there and chance are you'll get pretty much the same results.


2) Pitch the story in your intro email.
This is maybe not so obvious. Editors of these magazines aren't always working full time and have a limited amount of hours to trawl through submissions so a quick pitch, outlining tone really helps. A simple few words out to suffice, think clickbait. This doesn't need to be a synopsis. "Alexandra and Wesley are classmates united by an unusual preference for dog treats. Mr. Jeffries wants to know why they never meet during a full moon." 


3) Address the email correctly. 
Be specific. People can tell when they get blanket emails. Address the editor by name, mention the magazine, talk about the style and themes the magazine goes in for and why your submission would fit in exactly. This shows you've taken the time to get to know the publication and that you actually care about where you get published. 


4) Care about where you get published. 
This seems pretty obvious but only submit to magazines you're actually interested in. You might find a publication run out of someone's backyard shed, using a combination of fonts making it look like a ransom demand, you might happen upon a magazine where they dedicate a few pages to the opinions of the deranged, blinkered or worse. Look for magazines you actually like and respect. 

5) Show the piece around to people before submitting. 
Writing is a solitary endeavour, but as soon as you submit something it no longer stays that way. The whole process of getting a story out to people, in whatever medium, is highly collaborative, so get used to working with others in getting your work the best it can be. Show it to honest critics. Friends who fawn over your prose are no good to you. The ones who sit you down and list how and why a thing isn't working are invaluable. The greatest mistake a writer can make is thinking 'this person just doesn't get what I'm saying'. Your job as a writer is to make people get what you're saying. Feedback and second and third and ninth drafts is part of what you do. This will help massively. 

6) Use standard formatting. 
Comic Sans, random bold text, font size experimentation, trying out different margins, spacing, colour as ways to express your individuality are out. You express yourself through the words. The rest should be as undistracting as possible. 

7) Read as many short stories as you can. 
Read the greats, of course, Carver, Hemingway, Alice Munro, Chekov and so forth, read them to bits, but read younger, current writers too. Be aware of how people are writing now. Find your own voice. 

8) Tell a story.
I know, I know, but vignettes, exercises in prose styling, crazed narrative experiments and 'what-if' fan fiction is tough to find a home for. Very tough. Know what your story is, know what it says. Make sure it has a beginning, middle and end, conflict, and all the things a good story ought to have. When you're a seasoned pro you can turn around and mix it up.

9) Submit to one magazine at a time. 
Wait for their response. Worst case scenario is not two rejections, it's two acceptances, for then you must contact one magazine with the bad news and know that they will never entertain an approach from you again. Be respectful to the magazines, try and forge a bit of rapport, follow them on twitter, retweet them. 



10) Keep trying.
This doesn't mean keep sending the same story with updates. If a story doesn't make the cut in a magazine bite down on the fact and embrace it. Most of the time you won't be told why. The reason is either the piece is totally wrong for the magazine, the upcoming issue is dedicated to a particular theme and your story doesn't fall within it or it simply wasn't good enough. If it wasn't good enough, that's okay. It means you need to work harder. As a writer you'll always need to work harder. Craft what you do. Show it around. Beg, plead for criticism and when you get it, take it on the chin. Someone hating your piece  and you addressing that makes you better. Someone liking it just keeps you at the same level. 


Hopefully, these are of help, I'd be delighted to hear any other tips.  



If you found that interesting, maybe you'd like my novel, it retells an old Irish myth as a modern murder story:

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Someone ought to fire off a pistol.

Someone ought to fire off a pistol.

   Seems to me all of you think I’m just going to accept my mud-pile under all those flowers and a work-a-day headstone, far off any trouble in the old family dump of remembrance looking out over the bay.  Well that isn’t to be.

   I demand a tomb all to myself.

   I won’t be hidden away someplace tranquil. I want to be right at the action, yes even after death.  I will take my rightful place inside the city limits. Bang at the centre. Claim me the best possible spot. Obstructing traffic, disturbing locals and interfering with the property market. A place everyone sees me daily. One safe from the drunks, the cats, the weather, tourism and new architecture.  Someplace Northside. Big ugly and gold and it needs to be an eyesore. I’ll have pillars in the Corinthian style, thank you kindly. Carvings of inconsolably bereaved angels, frantic in their grief, to attend the sacrilege of a world getting on without me. We’ll have a sculpture of me right at the top. Herculean, a cosmic beauty and wild with passion. I picture me glaring down in gold with fire and majesty at the people below buying their carrots and fish cakes. Yes, two three weeks the same people cried out dry at the wake will skip past the thing mindlessly on the way to Aldi. We know that. Worse if it grew into some God awful annual family ritual. Torturing generations on a wet Sunday.

   All my possessions you can wrap for the poor. That or burn them. Now I think about it a pyre sounds apt. Include all my clothes, my favourite music and unflattering photos. Put in my clarinet and my correspondence case and my recipes. Then throw in my paintings, cushions and any gifts anyone ever gave me. In go my love letters, given and received. Include the Jack B Yeats for it is a damned fake anyhow. Burn it all up on the front lawn some hour most poor folks are already at work and ensure the smoke blows toward wealthy districts. Leave it respectfully burn out long as it naturally takes. Days if need be. And if the thing rages out of control then guide it towards the homes of the neighbours I liked the least. Maybe that’s a little harsh. Just their flowerbeds.  

   The funeral isn’t going off in St. Patrick’s, but St. Michaels, central Dun Laoghaire. Set out from there on an extended procession, kilometres long. I will be brought to my final rest inDublin at hellish inconvenience to everyone. Procession to be numbingly slow and accompanied by one of those New Orleans brass bands I saw go off well once in a black and white movie. Sickly quantities of incense, clouds of the stuff, hanging thick everywhere and bewitching the sinuses. Forests of tropical flowers spewing pollen into the hot air. Long, indecipherable bursts of Latin right out of the book of Revelation, ferociously declaimed. Try and find some priest blessed with old world panache when it comes to labelling the wicked.

   At mass: The very best wine. No less than four eulogies but there is no upper limit. Cash is ready for hiring a young and beautiful whore to throw herself in hysterics onto the coffin right at the climax. You don’t have to go through with that one. Test how it feels on the day. I just liked the idea is all. Put pennies on my eyes just in case there happens to be something to that old ferryman story. No time to take chances. Go right ahead and laugh at this sentiment till it’s your own turn. Then after they sink me into the mud someone ought to fire off a pistol. At this sound everyone has to scatter. Fill in the earth double time and be done with the whole affair. Any lingerers: jail them for loitering. Keep one cop on hand for that.

   Distribute anything surviving the pyre in order of seniority based on who loved me the most. Measure this by whoever it is works hardest seeing out all of these last requests. It can’t cost too much to have someone keep score of that.

   On to the Obituary. Don’t imagine this is going on your regular style page along with all of the regular guys who couldn’t think of anything better than the regular. I demand a half a page minimum. One in each major broadsheet and two in any pair of tabloids you want. Make that full page in the tabloids and right at the front. Full colour photograph, doctored devilishly, of myself partying with Peter O’Toole, Behan, Francis Bacon, the Archbishop of Dublin, throw in a couple more like that, then maybe a group of exotic looking women and indistinct further characters on behind us. Alongside this in fat, Arial black, emboldened type:  NATION MOURNS HER FAVOURITE SON. Or maybe:  IRELAND LOSES A RARE GEM.

Then start out on the written part:

   Michael ‘Bolivar’ Coughlin. A simple man. A beautiful man, (this is to run verbatim, otherwise I will haunt the very last of you right into madness ) passed from this world still raging against the forces that conspire to suck us all down.  And he did it all with the grace and dignity fitting the more handsome examples of our wildlife, like the swan in low flight or wild hare on the bounce. His art, tragically burned by his grief torn family, is lost to us forever. All we do know was the sight of it caused Beckett to cease writing and Tarkovsky to begin making films. A known hellraiser in the capital’s bars, he loved nothing more than retiring to a distant spot on Inis Mór to contemplate the great matters among the buttercups.

   He spent his final days exiled to his garden flower-beds, something people seem to think the elderly ought to have foisted on them. Why people think nurturing delicate things to life is a task for those drawing to an end mystified the great man. Maybe there was a poetry to it but if so he was too exhausted digging to ponder it. The beauty of flowers never mattered a damn to him. Far as he could tell the same colours were now available on food-packaging and tracksuits. You never heard of plants or flowers in those same colours called garish.

   And here you have the front page article in the Times the following day. Somebody knows a copy editor in there who can swing it, I forget the name.

   “They finally dropped the rain-wet flag over the Dail on a drizzling Tuesday which turned out to be his last. Three bright green stripes over the silhouette of a dove. The flag Coughlin had designed himself after liberating the nation. It flapped with splendour and poetry above the vast cascading banners flanking the imposing yet simple hearted likeness of Michael ‘Bolivar’ Coughlin commemorated on the front of the building. So named because he had rid the island finally and completely of the hated oppressor: its own political class, using only charm, guile, art, rhetoric, romance  and bravado.

   Beneath the banners gathered many exotic looking women, visibly bereft. Behind them, fully military guard of honour flanking the President. Between these and the main gates; gardai, international dignitaries, the press, great thinkers, one or two foreign kings and a retinue of archbishops, prime ministers, artists and bards. Stood to attention with the rest of the country as the national anthem came through over the courtyard tannoy the same as the nation’s airwaves. Two city centre parades, book-ending a week of national mourning.

   How they contained a wild spirit like that to the garden is a wonder to itself. Some kind of family coup. Gentlest one you ever could think up. Small matters like the answering of his fan letters or when some visiting Nobel laureate arrived, from the few that still even remembered him, that he had to have someone there to help on his robes. The blood red Jaguar remained his, for a time. Then they let him know he was unroadworthy. Not even the car.  Nobody paid him any heed any longer. He went unrecognised out among people. He took a walk down a main street. Not even a hello. He could simply go to the town and visit shops. He went and bought the food it damn well pleased him to. Like maybe Swiss Roll instead of the carrots he set out for, or soap, or motor oil. Then he would place it on the kitchen table where everyone expected carrots and it wasn’t ever the case he just forgot the things he had been sent for.  They took away his whiskey. They replaced his cigarettes with medicines.

   Finally they holed him up. They jailed him, called it a hospice. He expected that. Claim was it would keep him comfortable. His jailers were gracious Asian women in white and blue. They kept him drugged and helped him into and out of the regulation clothing. He got shown a whole lot of television intended to keep him in a vegetative state. Quiz shows and the horses. But on he raged. He was wildfire. The nurses loved him. They fought to bring him is tea, serve him his pills. They snuck him toffees and cigarillos from the outside world. He came to miss those visiting Nobel laureates. The jaguar too. He even missed the gardens. Turned out flowers weren’t worse than garish clothes people had on.

   Leave it there. Pull any of that off and I'll try and get you those lottery numbers from the beyond. Don't bother checking any accounts, there isn't a cent. Just try and have history record me how I like. Only add that he is survived by his wife, Brida, whom he loved each day sweeter than any sensation he ever knew, his daughter Annette and his son Colm, who visited his bed each night until the end in the high dependency unit, St. Vincent’s hospital, and looked right into his father’s fading eyes though it agonised the both of them.

Alan Walsh

This piece was originally published in The Moth magazine in 2013

Glasnevin Cemetery image courtesy William Murphy

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Why Ireland's most famous female character is also a feminist icon.

That Deirdre of the Sorrows is still one of the most famous of the old stories in Irish folklore speaks volumes, I think, for how we see the downtrodden, the innocent and, in particular, women in Irish culture. That might come off a glib and sweeping statement but you have to wonder has all that much changed since the story was first told in Pre-Christian Ireland.

Setting the scene
The story goes that Deirdre was trouble before she was even born. The mystic druid, Cathbad, on hearing shrieking from within her mother's womb, advised the baby be killed, predicting it would be too beautiful and bring war and mayhem to the men of Ireland. Conchobar Mac Nessa, the king of Ulster, at this point steps in and takes the child as his own, as I guess  kings were able to do then, promising to keep her safe from causing any trouble.

The tables turn
Conchobar brings Deirdre up in seclusion, with only an old maid for company, with the intention of marrying her himself when she's old enough. Now, so far this is all tapping into some pretty on-the-nose themes of women as property, women as the downfall of men, women as helpless to decide their own destiny and also as a gateway to some kind of chaos if left unchecked, which rings true with a lot of older myth, only even going back to as far as apples in gardens. What's interesting next is the turn the story takes. The scene is set, Chekov's pistols are mounted securely on the mantelpiece, but now we start seeing things from Deirdre's perspective.

Deirdre takes control
She tells the old maid that she dreams of meeting a young man with hair as black as a raven, skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood. Fair enough, this could be seen as her only character motivation being defined by men, which doesn't help us as far as the Bechdel test goes, but I guess these were different times. The old maid, Leabharcham, says she might be able  to help out here and introduces Deirdre to a young warrior called Naoise, from the Uisneach family. Well, right off the bat, Naoise wants no part of this, knowing she's promised to the king, but it's not like he doesn't have eyes and can't see how outrageously beautiful the girl is. She finally convinces him to run away with her by jumping on his back and shaming him into doing it. What I find interesting about this is it shows her taking control. There are strong, powerful female characters in Irish mythology, Queen Medb being the foremost example, but here we see a young woman, controlled and dominated by men, breaking free of her own will and bending that of a young man to do what she wants. Sadly, this doesn't work out that well.

The action part
Conchobar learns of the escape and rallies troops to chase Naoise and Deirdre down. Meanwhile, Naoise has called in his brothers, some of the best warriors in the country, and the gang of them cavort from county to county trying to hide from Conchobor's soldiers, finally straying to as far as Scotland. Knowing this could go on forever, Conchobar offers a truce, saying Deirdre and Naoise and all his brothers can come back to Ireland and even back to his castle, without threat of retaliation, to work things out. Unfortunately,  when they arrive, Conchobar has his chief warrior, Fergus, kill Naoise and all his brothers and immediately marries Deirdre against her will. 

Things get worse. They won't get better. 
The story finishes up with Deirdre in a chariot, riding along between both King Conchobar and the warrior Fergus. She's defeated, she's broken, she's owned again. She took her shot and it couldn't have gone worse. The king turns to Deirdre and asks her, "Is there anyone in all of Ireland you could possibly hate more than me?"
"Yes." She replies, "Fergus, who killed Naoise and his brothers."
"Then," says Conchobar, "I will share you with him, as a punishment."  Here's where it ends. Deirdre, on hearing this, can't bear to be owned and shared and passed around. It's been said Deirdre represents a woman's need for independence, she expresses that here in the most powerful way imaginable. As the chariot is pulled along, it approaches a low hanging rock, just as it moves beneath, Deirdre raises her head, catches  the rock and is decapitated. The tale ends here.  Tragically, Deirdre has finally asserted her will in the ultimate way. She won't be owned. She won't be made queen against her will. Nor will she be shared. 

Women in Ireland.
Interestingly enough, at the time the story first emerged, women in Ireland enjoyed a position which would have been the envy of those in Greece or Rome or the East. They could own and breed livestock and, thus, make  a living for themselves. They weren't completely subjected to the man and his family on marriage either. Yet they were still unable, as were men, to own property, it being owned by the king, and were still trapped within the conventions of a society still totally governed and operated by men. Deirdre's attempt to break free of that and her final, devastating act, represent a struggle for independence still manifested today across the world and here at home in a multitude of  unresolved issues. 


If you're interested in Deirdre, maybe you'll like my novel, which retells her story as a modern murder story:



Image courtesy of Druid Synge

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