Tom Paulin

Tom Paulin

Or Charlus as McGahern would call youwhen we stacked up stories with Heaney– all fun a great geg pure pleasureI’d think of this village near Donegal town– Mountcharlus they say in those partsnot Mountcharleswhich was how one editor at Faberused to sign every letter he sent(was it Dunn who wonderedhad you somehow acquired a peerage?)then I’d try hard to...

Late July, hot and humid, I set out for Belfast via the small Shropshire town of Wem. Why Wem? Well, I’m working on a book about William Hazlitt, and feel the need to walk some of the ground he trod. His father, the Reverend William Hazlitt, ministered to a small ‘decayed’ Presbyterian congregation here. Hazlitt spent part of his childhood and youth in a house in Noble Street. The small meeting-house beside it is now a hotel garage, but it’s the site of one of the most famous moments in English – perhaps I should say British – Romantic prose. Here, Hazlitt painted his father’s portrait – the old Irish radical holds an open book which his son says is Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, an early work of aesthetics. He spent many days on the portrait, and one evening he laid down his brushes to go for a walk. It was then that he heard the news of Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz and in a state of huge, irrecoverable elation saw the evening star set ‘over the poor man’s cottage’. It’s a Wordsworthian spot of time, a historical moment in the prose Prelude which Hazlitt’s readers assemble from his collected works. Out of piety and curiosity I wanted to see where it happened and to walk the road to Shrewsbury, where Hazlitt set out in 1798 for the momentous meeting with Coleridge which liberated his imagination and enabled him to become one of the masters of English prose style. Though he calls that year ‘the year of Demogorgon’, it’s not a date that strikes any historical chord in England now. And neither does the name Wem. It seems appropriate that this neglected figure should have grown up in this sleepy forgotten town.’

They’re back in that boring house a house that looks all garage where she’s given him another hard on while saying no not now not today she’s such an untidy package so why can’t this randy louse pull all the strings together and not end up in a marriage? but when she drives away he’ll think good riddance and blame her untasted mousse on his hated Hindu neighbour

Metamorphoses 3, 1-136

If Cadmus is the Age of Reason – and he is if Cadmus is the State – and he is if Cadmus is Descartes with a scalpel – maybe so then Cadmus must also shadow Locke with his shovel a shovel loaded with decaying sense but always new and stainless like the idea of rights – rights not duties be it said – yes brother

so Locke hires a surgeon...

In the introduction to her excellent – indeed seminal and unprecedented – anthology of Ulster prose, Patricia Craig remarks that for her collection Northern Ireland is to be regarded as ‘a geographical rather than a political entity; it consists of seven counties, not the partitioned six or the historic nine. Donegal seems to be inescapably part of the “North”, whereas Cavan and even Monaghan have a less decided orientation. I cannot, for example, think of Patrick Kavanagh as a Northern writer, any more than I would wish to allocate Peadar O’Donnell to the South.’ Donegal is part of the North, yes, but it’s also the place many Northerners go to escape from ‘Norn Ireland’, as we sometimes call it, mimicking one of the province’s accents – an accent Gerard Manley Hopkins termed Chaucerian. Outside the tight wee six is another county famous for its healing powers, a mountainous, often boggy, lough-shining region wedged between the Border and the Atlantic. In the summer months, this particular coastal village is full of Northerners who make merry with those few Southern visitors who return here annually. We gaze out at the blue enormous bay, its long curving marram strands, its islands and roshans and purple hills with the white quartzy dome of Errigal beyond – we stare out and agree that this must be one of the most beautiful places in the whole world. The moist light moves and zings like a Jack Yeats painting – in a different climate these immense empty strands would be lined with concrete hotels. Seasoned and seasonal visitors, we mellow out into the illusion of dwelling in the place. And because we come back again and again, we remember our childhoods here and watch our children swim and play just as we did back in the Fifties when things were intensely peaceful, the fish more plentiful, the crabs ready to be hoked in sackfuls.’