Séamus Brennan, 1948 - 2008

(Photo: Michael D. Higgins, Julian Gough, and the late Séamus Brennan, at the NUIG Alumni Awards Gala Banquet, on March 1st 2008. Photo by Aengus McMahon.)

The funeral of Séamus Brennan, the Fianna Fáil politician and former government minister, was held yesterday. Given that there's hardly a page of Jude: Level 1 that doesn't feature a prominent member of Fianna Fáil inciting vast crowds into a homicidal xenophobic frenzy, taking bribes from property developers, or using an illegally held firearm to try and kill a defenceless orphan, it's only fair to say that Séamus Brennan was one of the good guys. He stood up to Charlie Haughey when that was a dangerous thing to do, and he tried to clean up a corrupt and scandal-banjaxed Fianna Fáil when the task seemed impossible.

I met Séamus Brennan, for the first and only time, earlier this year. We were both receiving awards from NUIG (or University College Galway, as it was when we were there, back in the early Middle Ages). My award was for my contribution of the term "Ardcrony ballocks" to Irish literature. His was for his contribution to Irish politics, which was considerable. As Ireland's Minister for Transport in the early 1990s, he had broken the (state-owned) Aer Lingus monopoly on flights to Britain, and thus freed a tiny and struggling Irish airline called Ryanair to survive, then thrive. (The young, and the non-Irish, cursing at the 3 euros they've just paid for a small bottle of water on their 1 euro Ryanair flight, will not be aware that air travel out of Ireland, until Séamus Brennan's reforms, was far, far too expensive for 90% of the Irish population. Which was the only reason there was anyone left in Ireland by the early 1990s... My generation had to emigrate by bus.) Later, he was a highly regarded Minister for Social and Family Affairs. When I met him, this year, he was Minster for Arts, Sport and Tourism (the ever-mutating ministry which appears in Jude: Level 1, thinly disguised as the Ministry for Beef, Culture, and the Islands).

The NUIG Alumni Awards ceremony was a black tie affair, Gala Ball and all, and my noble punk spirit was seething after the third round of photographs, "Stand there", "Sit there", "Hold the award a little higher."

I said to Séamus Brennan (who was patiently cooperating, changing seats when asked, standing up, sitting down), you must get awfully sick of these events, I'd imagine this must be astoundingly boring for you. No, actually, he said. Politicians are always handing these things out, but we never get to keep one. In fact, I think this is the first award I've ever received. And it's a great feeling, it's a great honour.

He was so pleased, and humble, and as a result dignified, that I felt like a spoilt little shitehawk for not accepting the award more graciously. So I amended my attitude, and my mood improved enormously, and I had a great night, with my beloved and my family, feasting and dancing and generally knocking seven kinds of crack out of it.

I also talked quite a bit that night with Séamus Brennan, and with the blessed Michael D. Higgins, another former Minister for the Arts, and former recipient of an NUIG Alumni Award (and a former lecturer of mine, in sociology, who used to put the Labour Party's noble redistributionist policies into action by buying me coffee and buns in the canteen after lectures, when I was seventeen and staaaarving). We talked about everything from Beckett to Braveheart, and Séamus Brennan came across as a gentle, thoughtful man, at peace with himself. The shoptalk of two Ministers for the Arts gives a very entertaining insight into the peculiar mix of glamour and grind in the job. At one point, Séamus passed on Mel Gibson's best wishes (from a party the week before) to Michael D. (Michael D. Higgins had, as Minister, helped Mel shoot Braveheart here in Ireland by loaning him, among other things, the Irish Army.) I also heard some very entertaining stories about paperwork and three-foot-high piles of receipts (which reflected very well on Mel Gibson, and less well on some of our much smaller, native Irish film makers.) A mighty night.

Séamus Brennan was diagnosed with cancer a year ago, so he must have known he was dying that night. (Or dying a little faster than the rest of us, as Beckett would probably point out.) He still managed to bring something to the party.

I liked him a lot. May he rest in peace.

Kassel Rocks.

I spent last weekend in Kassel, pretty much spang plumb in the middle of Germany.

Why Kassel? Well - for reasons I may explain later - I wanted to visit the town which the young Samuel Beckett visited so often. (Between the ages of 22 and 26, he made eight lengthy visits to Kassel.) Beckett went there to see his cousins, the Sinclairs, and in particular Peggy Sinclair. Peggy and Sammy (as the kids  in the neighbourhood knew him - they thought he was American, or English) had one of the all-time great disastrous relationships. He writes very cruelly about Peggy in his first book, More Pricks Than Kicks, and very tenderly in one of his late plays, Krapp's Last Tape. That's blokes for you.

She died of TB in 1933, and the Sinclairs returned to Ireland. Beckett never returned to Kassel after Peggy's death.

Many years later, a doctor in Kassel, Gottfried Büttner, wrote, care of Beckett's publishers,  to say how moved he had been by a performance of Happy Days. Beckett wrote back, mentioned his connection with, and affection for, Kassel, and asked about the city. Beckett had heard much of it had been destroyed in the war. (The RAF smashed Kassel then burnt it, using high explosives and incendiaries, in late October 1943. Ten thousand people, the vast majority civilians, died as the medieval city centre was consumed in a firestorm.) I have a great affection for the RAF (after all, my dad served in it, and his RAF medals are on display in my parents' house, right beside my great grandfather's IRA medals). But I do wish they hadn't deliberately burnt down quite so many cities full of civilians. 

Anyway, Beckett asked Dr. Büttner to find out if the Sinclairs' old neighbourhood had survived (it had, being a few stops by tram away from the town centre... which reminds me of my favourite German word. Strassenbahnhaltestelle. It means... tramstop. And that is why German translations of English books are always 30% longer... Strassenbahnhaltestelle. For tramstop. Jesus.). They continued to correspond regularly for many years, and even met up a few times in Paris. Beckett said he could never go back to Kassel, too many memories.

A highlight of the trip was meeting the Samuel Beckett Gesellschaft (or, in English, SamSoc), and many of their friends. All together, an amazing bunch of people. Frau Büttner very kindly allowed me to visit her house, and see the portrait of Peggy Sinclair by Karl Leyhausen. (Leyhausen, unable to make a living as an artist in Kassel, went to Paris shortly after painting Peggy. Unable to make a living there either, he killed himself in 1931. He was 32 years old.) The photo of it here doesn't do it justice. A gorgeous, lively oil painting, it looks like it was painted last week. The scarf hops and pops in blocks of colour. You worry the paint might not be dry. But it's over eighty years old.

Blogging Live from a Cave near Paris

 

I'm just outside Paris for a few days, helping adapt Jude: Level 1 into a stageplay for the Galway Arts Festival later this year. Very, very exciting. I'm working with Conor Lovett, the best Beckett actor of his generation, and Judy Hegarty Lovett, who directed him so brilliantly in the Gare St Lazare Players' production of Molloy, and indeed in the entire Beckett trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable).

Anyone who can adapt The Unnameable (fondly known even by many Beckett fans as The Unreadable) into totally gripping theatre can do anything.

We spend all day underground, in a cave cut into the chalk hillside. Looking up at the chalk-and-flint arches above us, as a heater slowly warms the dark space, I feel rather as early Christians must have in the catacombs, if they ever put on theatre. ("Waiting for God", now in its two thousandth triumphant year!)

Conor and Judy think the cave was probably built by the German army during World War II, perhaps as a bomb shelter, perhaps to store ammunition. (The Germans also placed a rather large gun on the nearby hill, a couple of hundred yards away, overlooking the Seine. Didn't work, the Allies made their first successful crossing of the Seine about two miles upriver from here.)

We've invited some people out to see Conor as Jude tonight, in the cave.  It'll be a short (55 minute) demo version, read rather than acted. Then we'll ask the audience for their responses, and suggestions.

Then we all go for dinner together. Theatre rocks! It's all talking and eating! Beats the shite out of sitting on your own, writing novels.