An appreciation of Dublin UNESCO City of Literature Lecture 2021
Published on 28th January 2021
I logged on to Professor Chris Morash’s “Knocking Nelson off His Pillar: Writers and the meaning of Statues,” the third Annual Dublin UNESCO City of Literature Lecture 2021 introduced by Dr Mary Clarke, Dublin City Archivist (now retired) and these are some of my thoughts.
Chris Morash is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing in Trinity College, Dublin and has published extensively on Irish culture and he looks quite relaxed in the Reading room in Pearse Street library with the rather ghostly looking head of Nelson in the corner. Morash is clear and precise in shipping his message to his audience and he brings them on an unexpected journey as he turns the pages delivering the views of eminent writers and poets revealing that they, somewhere along the line become aware that something in the community no longer fitted or served the culture and in their writing a healthy disregard for the passing of an old order began to bloom allowing for new voices to be heard.
Sometimes an artist’s words can be prophetic or they can linger long after change had taken place in the hearts of the ordinary people. Morash delved into how a writer’s words could change the interpretation and representation of a statue for ordinary people forever.
The professor tells us that poet Oliver St. John Gogarty thought the pillar to be the finest thing we had in Dublin, but he realised it was a milestone in the marking of the end of empire, something most Dubliners already knew. By the 60s the great Horatio Nelson had no relevance for Dubliners, and yet the Pillar was pivotal in their lives - as a meeting point marking the centre of town, a junction for the buses coming in from north and south of the Liffey.
John Banville wrote that hardly anyone noticed the pillar as an object in itself. Morash goes on to make reference to Joyce’s, Stephen Dedalus’s account of the total disregard the two elderly ladies in his plum parable had for the viewing point on top of the pillar. They nonchalantly sat eating plums, spitting the slimy stones through the railings and onto the street below.
We are then taken to the Dublin of W.B. Yeats and Austin Clarke. Yeats gave the statues in O'Connell Street new voices in his poem, Three monuments, which he uses to castigate the puritanically pious element of twenties and thirties Dublin and records the statues laughing at the pettiness in the public life of the day.
I tip my hat to Austin Clarke who recognises Nelson as a fitting figure to overlook, “a capital for the few”, in an independent Ireland where inequality and poverty was rife while the new state, like Nelson, turned a blind eye. Morash makes the poem current when he adds three simple words having described the imagery of the blind eye in Clarke’s world of inequality, three most poignant words “and in ours.” Throughout the lecture he draws attention to the idea that once you hear these things you can never unhear them. I found that intriguing as it explains the power of the spoken word.
Through a carefully chosen selection of works the professor tells us that writers have the ability to tear down old values and rewrite them. It strikes me that ordinary people have often gotten there first and recognise and adapt accordingly then the artists and writers follow, rewriting the new order, creating new stories, though many believe it’s the other way round.
Morash describes the late Eavan Boland as an astute chronicler of the city of Dublin. He finds in her writing a supplanting of the hero history of the, “iron orators and granite patriots” , with an unheroic history. In her poem, Unheroic, Morash sheds light on her Ireland, as she takes time-out, having climbed the back stairs of the Gresham Hotel where she worked, “wanting to look again into the patient face of the unhealed.” The 60s had finally arrived, change was imminent.
There is a period between a call for change and for tearing down statues when an urgent conversation is called for, perhaps allowing for an acceptable palimpsest (new word for me, a piece of manuscript on which later writing has been superimposed). Unfortunately the conversation re: Nelson’s removal went on for years until it was blown up. Today, statue review conversations are taking place all over the world.
The removal of art is a tricky thing and can be viewed as tampering with history. There was talk of Padraig Pearse as his replacement but I would prefer a different kind of hero, someone like Maureen Potter who epitomized Dublin wit, providing much laughter; appreciated and loved by all. There might even have been room up there for Christy, her imaginary sidekick, the long suffering quintessential Dublin chisellar but perhaps that’s going too far.
I have found out recently that my great grandfather (times four), Thomas Baker, was a stonemason on the Nelson Pillar project and it made me think of the work executed by sculptors, stone masons, craftsmen and labourers, and the toil that went into building of the great thing that went up with such a bang and I’m sorry for the loss of their effort and skill.
My father knew John Berryman, the prestigious American poet famous for his Dream Songs which included a poem about the pillar. He was in Dublin at the time and lived beside us. Morash tells us that Berryman’s take on Nelson’s destruction was, “nothing has changed for all these disasters O” , as the buses continued to run and everything went on much as before.
Berryman, a professor in Trinity College rarely passed Jack Ryan’s pub on Haddington Road but he was not alone, a popular haunt with an affordable pint but he suffered for it. My father said he was a harmless sort who lived too much in his head to the extent that on occasion he required assistance.
Nelson’s head has found a home in Pearse Street Library’s Reading Room. The heavy Portland stone head appears indifferent behind Morash as it peers out across invisible wireless waves into a sea of books. His skills, recorded in those books, as an Admiral and strategist can never be denied.
I wonder if he’s taken to parleying with the ghosts of old rebels thought to return to 144 Great Brunswick Street, now part of the library, as it was once a meeting place for the local IRA branch. A memorial plaque is on the outside wall of the library premises to members of B Company IRA who died in an ambush in 1921. In some ways the blowing up of the pillar and the rehoming of Nelson’s head in Pearse Street library has secured Nelson a place in our city's heritage.
Mary Clarke, City Archivist, hit the nail on the head when she said Dubliners remembered Nelson’s Pillar nostalgically, associated it with a world of childhood memories, a place where we could be happy for a while. The pillar belonged to our parents' and grandparents' era. They never took Nelson too seriously as like Gogarty they had witnessed the end of the empire and simply moved on.
I remember getting ready for school with my brothers and sisters on the morning of the explosion in 1966. My Mother told us that Nelson’s Pillar had been blown up and a huge bomb had destroyed the city centre sometime in the night. I could see she was anxious. We were amazed that a big bomb had gone off in our town and after a while did what all Dubliners do in times of uncertainty. We laughed it off.
Dublin kids skipped on the streets to the tune, “Up went Nelson in old Dublin” , and it wasn’t long before we heard our parents singing the Dubliners - Nelson’s Farewell - “Poor old Admiral Nelson is no longer in the air, toora loora loora loora loo. For fifty pounds of gelignite it sped him on his way toora loora loora loora loo.”
The great Luke Kelly would always preface Nelson's Farewell with the sensitive and beautiful Louis MacNeice poem, Dublin. The last line seemed to please Professor Morash depicting as it did Nelson on his pillar watching his world collapse and so the writer’s words become a powerhouse for change.
The state’s, “chiselled voice” , exemplifies old values with an arrogance found in the voice Richard Murphy gave Admiral Nelson in his sonnet, Nelson’s Pillar, and the same “verminous poor beggars around my plinth” can apply equally today. Clarke’s, “capital for the few” , and Yeats’s “greasy till” , are easily recognisable and today's artists and musicians are probably rewriting the modern skyline that's pierced by cranes.
My thanks to Chris Morash for the journey, and for getting me thinking about the incongruity in art. Dr Mary Clarke for some nostalgic downtime with Nelson’s Pillar, and Micheál Mac Donncha for his reading of his wonderful poem, Nelson i measc na leabhar, translated as Nelson Among The Books.
Submitted by Liz B. Pearse Street Library