Who will be the great immortal - Heaney, John B, or Raffles?
In attempting to answer I must indulge in some digression.
You will remember the one-time RTÉ presenter Mike Murphy, he of Yowsa Yowsa Yowsa fame, who at one point reinvented himself as patron and critic of the arts.
As sort of rite of passage on his leaving RTÉ, this Mike Murphy presented a series of programmes on Irish writers, on the stated understanding that their work was more likely to endure. Some of these writers were quite famous and some were relatively obscure, but they all had one thing in common: none of them was apt to violate the technical rules of their craft and so none of them produced work likely to offend the sophisticated critic.
Conspicuous by his absence from this roll-call of writers most likely to endure was John B Keane.
Not surprisingly, really, because John B Keane as folk essayist and folk playwright was both in terms of his subject matter and his style likely on occasion to offend the sophisticated mindset.
But I am rather of the opinion that, rightly or wrongly, John B’s melodramas will be performed and some of his humble essays read when most of those technically perfect writers on Mike Murphy’s list will be very much forgotten.
I mention all this to highlight the fact that there is a superstition in some exalted circles that only literary fiction and its equivalent in the other art forms survives the ravages of time. But history exposes this superstition for the lie it is.
Naive, folk and popular works of art stand at the very least as good a chance of survival as the more technically correct works of art.
I might mention that by the standards of his day, Van Gogh was a naive artist. I might also point out that this idea that only art of the most proper kind survives is an idea that begets a considerable amount of corruption.
Because just as there will always be unforgivably naive ‘artists’ who turn out work in an entirely dated style, there are also many cunning ‘artists’ whose only virtue is that they know how not to fall foul of the current rules of the game.
Seamus Heaney is a very nice man with enlightened politics, but I am tempted to say that all those admirable qualities of his are more a liability that a help in that foolish quest of all artists for ‘immortality.’
Ironically, Seamus Heaney’s best chance for immortality may abide in those few poems of his where he gently sounded the nationalist drum. The question remains: who has more the stamp of immortality? Seamus Heaney or Raffles?
I am confident in any event that the fictional sleuth - the apotheosis of Victorian materialism - will outlive them both.
John Murphy
The Leap
Churchtown
Mallow
Co Cork
