A Colder Eye

...The life and works of Yeats also modulate through all the chapters...

...He always embodies Skelton's phrase, "friskajollyyounkerkins": an infectious enthusiasm, like Falstaff's...

...In A Colder Eye electronics and amanuenses have brought the information about Ireland into Ken-ner's Baltimore aerie...

...Yeats is an Irish wizard through whom played the country's wild legends about banshees and giants on the one hand and the Augustan literature of England on the other...

...To illustrate this notion, Kenner takes a cruel and unnecessary swipe at Richard Ellmann's biography of James Joyce...

...no: what ne'er was thought save by him, to which we bring our somewhat bedazzled assent...

...The disturbances at the Abbey and the disturbing variegation in the reports made what Kenner calls "a bag of cats" whose mewling reverberated forever...

...A meditation about Irishry is an attempt at the impossible, like trying to arrange into its individual conversations the babble filtered through a telephone exchange...

...The moment the game is perfect the game disappears...

...It is almost as though devils and fairies and ghosts, the supernatural shades of the Irish imagination, are making fun of you: "They are sending you the Perfect Game/ which is no game...

...Yeats into the action: the former as patron of the arts and translator of Gaelic, the latter as impresario and listener to the rhythms of Synge's words...

...His sentences (as Henry James would say) have a brogue in them as they break...

...There are many other such consultants...

...he muses as Flann O'Brien merges into the text...

...I heard the dull click of the balls touching, and ran into the house like one pursued...

...All is related back to the convoluted common inheritance of the Irish language and sensibility...

...His crones are the old women from the impecunious farms, girls from the plays of Synge...

...Perhaps the eye is that of the lens rather than of Yeats's tombstone...

...In his previous books, especially Dublin's Joyce or The Pound Era, the impression is of omnivorous reading converted by inspired concentration into exegetical genius...

...He is an artist who discovers "now what oft was thought, to which the poet brings new adequacy of expression...

...His tempo and tone vary to suit the mood...

...The result is a cold eye: a glazed, almost unearthly stare like that from a corpse...

...He charts the melange of reprisals and accusations and out of an instance of Dublin scandal divines the origins of Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and O'Casey...

...The set-piece in A Colder Eye that forms the focus of Kenner's ideas is the chapter about the riots during the opening nights of Synge's The Playboy of the Western World...

...Kenner began his career with a book about G.K...

...A Colder Eye proceeds to give us sections on each of these major figures, as well as giving space to less-well-circulated names...

...Indeed, to print as opposed to speaking an opinion will be to land in court...

...He has now eschewed ink and paper, traditional impedimenta of the scribe, in favor of the computer console...

...Brilliant, yes, but is it plausible...

...Andy Warhol once said that everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes...

...From this A Colder Eye builds the thesis that Irishry means a congenital mistrust of the written word...

...The fracas at the Abbey Theatre symbolizes both Irishry and the birth of Irish literature...

...If you insist on putting identifiable people in books you do well to stay out of town when the town is Dublin...

...It will give him a bogus sense of power...

...And Kenner entranced begins to sound like the Shakespearean magus: "Foi who is this that comes treading on my dreams...

...The book's subject is Irishry...

...Ireland is still a nation of the oral epic, great conversational confections which if written down would be libelous...

...No longer like Falstaff, living off his wits, the critic will have only the fake potency of Prospero, living off his spells...

...Listen to this: "It was the rioting had launched John Synge into seminar immortality, like, as the man said of someone else altogether, a shot off a shovel...

...Beckett's tramps are the raconteurs of a Dublin bar, talkers whose conversation is endless because conclusions are not allowed to be reached...

...He is a conductor both in the orchestral sense (organizing a din into order) and in the electrical sense (betaking power from Modernism's gods and channeling it into us...

...Weaving about this triumvirate is a throng of other artists, leaving the impression of Ireland as a chaos of competing egos...

...A COLDER EYE: THE MODERN IRISH WRITERS Hugh Kenner/Alfred A. Knopf / $16.95 Roger Lewis There is a touch of the artist about Hugh Kenner...

...An Irish Fact is something your interlocutor will tell you because he thinks you want to hear it...

...A Colder Eye was pecked out at the keyboard...

...Ulysses makes Dublin the center of the world: a universal city in which not only history but the whole of literature convenes on June 16, 1904...

...Named after Yeats's epitaph ("Cast a cold eye/On life, on death"), perhaps it will become Kenner?s...

...A Colder Eye, like the pyramids, is a communal project, with Kenner the overseeing Pharaoh cramming it with treasures...

...Kenner, like Isherwood, edited nothing from his gaze...

...Kenner himself is a man of paradox: a critic who has earned the title of artist, a commentator frequently cleverer than the people he is conscripted to explain...

...The result is disconcerting, it is too perfect...

...Reading A Colder Eye, I felt like Chesterton playing croquet: "It is logically possible to play too well to enjoy it at all...

...With all of literature in the memory bank of the machine, the critic at the controls will be able to feign omniscience...

...As the English love lords, says Kenner, the Irish love lawyers...

...Ireland is a land of intrigue where drama usurps truth, which in any case, as Wilde knew, is rarely true and never simple...

...Synge embodied both Shakespeare and the half-forgotten myths from the country's bogs...

...Lawsuits sleep like serpents in Ulysses...

...His discovery is that criticism need not be a meek and waspish craft but that it ought to rival literature itself in its audaciousness...

...Kenner, like Vladimir Ashkenazy, plays and directs these days simultaneously...

...Kenner reckons that in interviewing Dubliners, Ellmann was too prone to take his contacts at their word...

...This is the feeling left by the book Kenner has written...

...To say this is to invoke his notion that Finnegans Wake is a cadaver shivering with insectile local life...

...All this served to make Joyce's self-imposed exile less the artistic gesture of Stephen Dedalus and more the prudent avoidance of litigation...

...By using a technological marvel to compose his latest book, however, Kenner is in danger of becoming like the writer in Gore Vidal's Deluth...

...The provenance of Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett, these authors have in common careers in which they tried to slough off their heritage by writing about little else...

...A Colder Eye is the best work of literary criticism to have been published in many years, but it does mark a troubling trend in its author...

...His play also brought Lady Gregory and W.B...

...Ireland the country merely serves as a repository for a nation of vociferous eccentrics whose manners are now explored...

...But the cognomen was redolent of a proletarian stew...

...We can seldom guess where his arguments will lead: they unfurl like shreds of cumuli or else shoot and spark like storms...

...Chesterton's use of paradox and all his subsequent work has sought to locate the ingenious twists and conundrums that lurk in other artists...

...Reading him is to watch a great imagination let loose in print...

...In Dublin, everyone wants to be famous all the time...

...Writing affixes words, disallowing the happy metamorphosis of speech which can otherwise alter and change to suit each context and each telling...

...Kenner isn't a handmaiden to the writers he talks about, he is one of their company...

...Ken-ner's account of all the real facts and Irish Facts present in the myriad reports of this event is a cabaret act in addition to being a skilled critical disquisition...

...He adopts the idiom of those he talks about: here he is a virtuosic table-talker...

...The most famous plaintiff was Oliver St...

...He is becoming too clever...

...His preface nods obeisances to his host of helpers: John V. Kelleher, whose letters have been "pillaged shamelessly, without quotation marks," Walt Bilofsky, Jim and Marrietta Gillogly, who manned the computer software which eased the book into existence...

...The forename was acceptable, with its tinge of an Elizabethan rake...

...John Gogarty, forever aggrieved at being immortalized as stately, plump Buck Mulligan...