Cassandra Voices

Tag: Jonathan Swift

  • The Journalist as Public Intellectual

    Many of those featuring in this series wrote top class journalism, including Albert Camus, Noam Chomsky, Voltaire and George Orwell. None of them, however, are pre-eminently or exclusively associated with their journalism. There is one intellectual who is however. That of course is Christopher Hitchens – the non pareil journalist of our recent age, and perhaps the last of the just.

    The purpose of this essay is not to deal with types of journalism or codes of ethics, or to deal with the complex relationship between editors and proprietors, and indeed now social media exerts control over journalism. Instead, I seek to identify which hacks, from Fleet Street or otherwise, have singularly, through the restrictions and obsession with news and sensation, stood out to become true Public Intellectuals.

    There has never been a greater need for a mass circulation public intellectual. I open this debate by suggesting five choices, at least two of whom displayed superiority in this arena to Hitchens.

    The Criteria

    A Journalist-Public Intellectual must seek the truth, understand the nature of fact-gathering and vocationally support speech rights even at the outer limits. He or she must also form a bulwark against the degradation of language. In this respect the Promethean storm of social media opens the door to ever more unregulated and unfiltered opinions, often deliberately orchestrated by far right-wing or absurd woke viewpoints to enforce wrecking ball compliance and control.

    It begs the question: compromised by corporate control how can a journalist in the mainstream press now become a Public Intellectual?

    Recently I visited my friend Patrick Healy éminence grise of Irish Public Intellectualism in Amsterdam. He is a retired professor of architecture, painter, writer and a global authority on Karl Kraus. So let us get to the first of my five choices. The first greater than Hitchens and Swift greater than all.

    1. Karl Kraus

    In my piece The Austrian Mind I omitted Kraus given the challenge of writing on him, as Jonathan Frantzen in effect suggested in his interpretation of certain of his texts in The Kraus Project (2013). How do you grapple with so protean or unclassifiable an intellect? He seems almost incomprehensible in the present age.

    Kraus acted as editor from 1899-1936 of the leading Viennese magazine Die Fackel (The Torch) which he used as his own personal soapbox. He was the exclusive writer from 1911 onwards. People feared his intemperate pen. A satirist, polemicist, aphorist and playwright, writing in the Golden Age of literary Vienna, which ended very abruptly. All shortly emigrated and dead. The fate of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth.

    His targets, not unlike the later Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, was the mediocrity of the Austrian Bourgeoisie and above all their distortion and abuse of language, particularly his fellow journalists. He could often be seen for half an hour trying to work out the insertion of a comma in Café Mozart!

    In his book on Kraus Frantzen primarily deals with an essay on the German national poet Heine, where with very effective pastiche Kraus crucifies Heine and by implication those like him, saying: ‘Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.’

    He was a scathing aphorist and two of my favourites are applicable to our own age. First, is the idea that ‘corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.’ The second is also quite relevant: ‘Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.’

    Reading the entirety of Die Fackel is an experience not unlike an extended viewing of Peter Cooke’s four great impersonations of English archetypes, judge, football manager, naturalist and rock star for the Clive Anderson show shortly before his death. Peter Cook was also Lord Gnome, the proprietor of Private Eye. He employed Ian Hislop and was by indirection a journalist and public intellectual. In fact, his impersonations, his support of and informal and sometimes formal contributions to Private Eye make him an intrinsic if not central choice.

    Krauss epic play The Last Days of Mankind (2015), which Patrick Healy has translated, is an attack on press barons, hacks facilitating, through mass orchestration, Populist bellicose hysteria, and the First World War. Its uneven tone demonstrates his evolution from aristocratic condescension to social democrat. The play is a mammoth fifteen hours long for voices or rather a voice best read by Kraus, or as a substitute Patrick, attacking stupidity in all directions.

    Die Fackel also attacks psychoanalysis as a quack science; antisemitism, though his own antisemitism as a self-loathing Jew is also evident; corruption, not least the police chief of Vienna who he forced out of office; the pan-German Populist movement; laissez-faire economic policies; and numerous other subjects.

    He dies at the very precipice of collapse, of natural causes, after a self-enforced interregnum when he suspended publication with the rise of Hitler, only for one last push of part of an extended essay The Third Walspurgers Night (1936). Its essential argument is that through their devotion to the pastime of palaver and tactics, the social democrats had facilitated Hitler’s rise and had lost all material gains. He despaired at their belief ‘they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.’ Consequently, the essay supports the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor Dollfuss, as anything other than Hitler was needed. Historic desperation.

    The opening paragraph of the essay is devastating in its implications for today I interpose.

    As to Hitler, [read Trump or any other contemporary ‘strongman’ leader] I have nothing to say. I am aware that as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp the phenomenon and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations. They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly – but mistakenly – expected to take a stand; and who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to “stick his neck out”. But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor but may also prevent the associated, ….?

    The rest of the essay deals with the propogandists and the facilitators primarily Goebbels [read Musk, The Daily Mail, and indeed other legacy media].

    The best reading of Walpurgis Nacht as Patrick Healy suggests is that satire is as the Roman genre par excellence satura tota nostra est – and should point not only in the direction of rhetorical agility, but also use mockery, insult, indignation etc, fusing the voice of the moralist and the skill of a standup comic. Indeed, the word also a meaning of stew bringing all ingredients together.

    1. Jonathan Swift

    The only equal of Kraus as a Journalist-Public Intellectual, and thus also greater than Hitchens in the pantheon is, in my view, Swift. Incontestably, the greatest satirical essay in the English language is A Modest Proposal ((1729). Kraus was in fact pleased to be compared to Swift on the basis that false modesty was the most arch kind of hypocrisy.

    Swift’s essay argues, in light of a policy of Malthusian liquidation, that rather than allowing children starve to death a profit could be made that would contribute to the common weal. Apparently informed by an American friend, the author says that children make a very fine dish. A passage towards the end of the essay perfectly encapsulates much of the awfulness of that time, and our own:

    I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food, at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.

    Swift wrote other great journalistic tracts such as The Tale of The Tub (1704) and in a golden age of satire his skills were venerated. His exact contemporary Alexander Pope, particularly in his epic poem The Rape of the Lock (1717) stirring up the upper classes, was more lyrical than trenchant. In fairness Pope’s wonderful Dunciad (1728-43) castigates stupidity in all its manifest forms and is dedicated to Swift. Indeed it was possibly partly written by him. It is also apposite to our time. Two quotes suffice.

    How with less reading than makes felons scape, less human genius than God gives an ape

    And out of context but an elaboration of the above.

    To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead.

    Consider also the final book of Gulliver’s Travels, where ‘Yahoos’ – a term that has entered the lexicon as a pejorative description of humans – describes lawyers and judges in the following unflattering terms:

    Judges… are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.

    Or

    It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly.

    1. H.L. Mencken

    In Kraus’ own time only the legendary muckraking American journalist H.L. Mencken is comparable. He wrote a fantastic treatise on The American Language (1919 and revised) and was the bugbear of the American bourgeoisie of his time. In colourful terms Mencken referred to the religious right in his day as ‘gaping primates, anthropoid rabble’, and the ‘boobiesie’. Famously through the Baltimore Sun he briefed Clarence Darrow to defend the teacher accused of the criminal offence of teaching Darwinism in the Scopes Trial (1925).

    Darrow’s opponent as prosecutor was three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan won, but Darrow won the moral victory not least in his devastating cross examination of Bryan on expert lessons from the Bible. The verdict was reversed on appeal. One week later Bryan died and Mencken penned his infamous obituary of William Jennings Bryan to a chorus of disapproval. Here is a flavour of it:

    Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. … He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

    The thread that unites Kraus, Swift, and Mencken is fearless satire and rhetoric and opinion of the most audacious type, built on the defence of rationality against institutional, governmental and fundamentalist abuse.

    1. Christopher Hitchens

    Hitchens could not write a bad sentence, a line Edmund Wilson used about Scott Fitzgerald. The towering achievement of his gifted polemics is in my view  The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), which he argues that he ought to be arrested for war crimes. There was an equally famous and blasphemous text about the ostensibly good Mother Therese of Calcutta The Missionary Position (1995). Irreverent journalism of this type is now sorely lacking!

    1. Ryszard Kapuscinski

    The book on the Islamic Revolution in Iran Shah of Shahs (1982) or his equally famous book on the fraud that was Haille Selassie The Emperor (1978) are eye-witness accounts, and rightly lauded. He had no fear, like Hitchens, of wading into dangerous territories, but his wisdom is contained in other more reflective books.

    Whereas learning about the world is labour, and a great all consuming one at that. Most people develop quite antithetical talents, in fact-to look without seeing, to preserve oneself within oneself.
    Travels with Herodotus (2004)

    Or best of all in Imperium (1993), his best book and a summation, he writes:

    Three plagues, three contagions threaten the world. The first is the plague of nationalism. The second is the plague of racism. The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.

    All three share one trait a common denominator an aggressive all powerful total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that waits its sacrificial victims.

    The final word is left to Karl Kraus, who I regard as the second greatest journalist of all time, after Swift:

    Those who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.


    Feature Image: Suzy Hazelwood

  • Meeting Samuel Beckett’s Genius in Person and his Plays

    Undeniably, Ireland has produced some of the finest creative writers in the history of the English language. From the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) through to Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), who ultimately abandoned English in favour of French, a body of work has expressed a contradictory national character.

    A recurring theme in Irish writing has been what a therapist would refer to as abreaction – the expression and consequent release of a previously repressed emotion. Thus, the drama of colonisation and sectarian division enthralled a global audience, at a remove from what is often the painful direct experience of a dysfunctional state and troubled society.

    On the other hand, we have seen little in the way of philosophical wisdom in Irish letters, apart from George Berkeley (1685-1753), and Edmund Burke (1729-1797) at a stretch. So Ireland must make do with imaginative writers as intellectuals: our novelists of departure, and poets of abstraction.

    I had the good fortune to encounter in the flesh arguably the last in the line of towering figures, Samuel Beckett, in a café in Montparnasse, Paris in 1982.

    Ireland had just won rugby’s Triple Crown in what was then called the Five Nations, before succumbing to the French team at the Parc de Princes, and Beckett was primarily inclined to banter about rugby and cricket with his countrymen. It must be stressed that he was a charmingly convivial person, and while austere, decidedly good company; even when pressed to do so he sedulously avoided discussion of his own work, preferring to muse on the artistic contributions of others.

    That slightly detached dignity, captured in John Minehan’s award-winning photograph was exactly as I found him. A kind and decent man, who concealed a madness arising out of intense creativity. A burning gaze alone revealed the creative fire that raged inside.

    The Last Modernist

    Beckett was the last of the great Modernists. His crucible and training ground was the Paris of James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, as well as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It is a great pity that Beckett never had the chance to meet the author of The Great Gatsby – that great work exploring the vacuity of capitalist aspirations. Fitzgerald matched him for pithiness, although he lacked the same profundity.

    Those were heady days on the Seine, albeit Beckett was late to the party. He acted as a sort of amanuensis to Joyce, assisting him, in a way that is still unclear, in the completion of Finnegans Wake (1939). At one level he seems to have operated like a staff nurse, or what today we call a carer, leading Joyce – who was almost blind by that stage – to his final statement of total incomprehensibility, or brilliance, depending on your viewpoint.

    Photographic portrait of Samuel Beckett as a young man.

    Yet Joyce’s torrent of words – full of richness and fecundity – the psychobabble of tongues and the fiddling with language, had a depressing effect on Beckett aesthetically. It is widely agreed that the latter’s early works, such as Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), and Murphy (1938), did not scale the heights of his post-World War II masterpieces.

    Similarly, I would argue the polyglot innovation found in Joyce’s final work is a form of literary escapism of limited relevance in this dark age of casino capitalism. Linguistic accuracy in marshaling facts is what I prize most highly, and Beckett delivered powerfully in this regard.

    Beckett laconically described the relationship between the two literary titans in the following terms: ‘James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring in as much as he could. I am an analyser, trying to leave out as much as I can.’[i]

    Irish Bluffers

    In my experience the Irish often display a tendency towards loquacity and linguistic chicanery. Unfortunately this provides scope for bluffers and often brings a resistance to facing up to the truth. Too often we take refuge in the deliberate self-deceptions of lyricism, or display a love of rhetoric and bombast that permits falsities.

    As Seamus Heaney puts it in the poem ‘Whatever You Say Say Nothing’ (1975):

    O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
    Of open minds as open as a trap,

    Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,

    Having said that Joyce in his early work, particularly Dubliners, captures some of the spoofing that is still a feature of life in the city, particularly evident politics, where the theatrical pseudo-debaters of hucksterdom are out in force.

    Perhaps if we Irish were better listeners, and concentrated on using language with greater precision, we would not have dug ourselves, collectively and individually, into the awful hole we found ourselves in when the Banks crashed in 2007.

    Uncharacteristically as an Irishman, Beckett is famous for the compression of language, which may explain his departure into French. Not a word is wasted in his writing; but like Joyce, words are sometimes re-invented or used in novel ways. Thus Beckett mangles and distorts language, stripping it to the bone to devastating effect, yet generally enhancing our understanding of it.

    I cannot say I have enjoyed reading all of his oeuvre. The later works, particularly the plays, are heading towards the extinction of language itself, and offer an unsparingly bleak take on both art and human communication. I should add that all of this was in marked a contrast to the chatty and open person I encountered in Montparnasse.

    However, the quartet of plays, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapps Last Tape and Happy Days bear the unmistakable hallmark of genius, a commendation that should also apply to All That Fall, a play for radio memorably dramatized by Michael Gambon in 2013.

    In my view the only playwrights his equal over the course of the twentieth century have been Eugene O’Neill for his A Long Day’s Journey into Night (which is also an exercise in Irish psychosis); Arthur Miller with Death of a Salesman and The Crucible; and perhaps David Mamet for Glengarry Glenn Ross; as well as the best of Bertolt Brecht. Indeed, Brecht was the only twentieth century dramatist of comparable stature, and even then he falls short in my view.

    I would argue the only real modern rival – and that excludes the Bard of Avon –  to Beckett’s Godot or Endgame is his near Irish contemporary Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Surviving an Irish upbringing is never easy. It is perhaps no coincidence that Wilde died a broken man in Paris having endured imprisonment in Reading Gaol – immortalized in verse – his downfall coinciding with the Importance of Being Earnest becoming the toast of London.

    Beckett preserved his genius to the end through an intelligent exile, the default option for Irish creatives and intellectuals. Yeats died in France. Beckett and Wilde in Paris. Joyce in Zurich. Most Irish writers get out Hibernia – ‘the land of winter’ which the Romans chose to steer clear of – if they can.

    In my experience the Irish can be a deeply malicious lot. Anything goes and always has. Our downfall, collectively as a nation, lies in the art of cutting tall poppies down to size, and destroying national heroes. Thus the great nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891) was driven to an early grave for an affair out of wedlock with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea.

    Charles Stewart Parnell, driven to an early grave.

    Not all artists, it should be emphasised, lack wisdom and judgment. Beckett aged gracefully and is now buried in modest Parisian grave, where he is treated as a French writer and a hero of the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France, where he demonstrated true courage.

    The Novels

    Moving on to the novels of Beckett, including the famous, or infamous, post-War trilogy of novels: Molloy (1951); Malone meurt (1951), Malone Dies (1958); L’innommable (1953), The Unnamable (1960). It is here we see a gradual dismantling and delimiting of language. In my view by the time of The Unnameable the artifice has gone too far and the conceit frankly tiresome.

    My favourite novel, suffused with humanity, is Company (1980), which was part of an Indian summer of later works. Company, and indeed Worst Ward How (1983), also demonstrate the compression of language of the greater plays, as well as a playful sense of humour, something he is often unfairly accused of lacking.

    Company is a lyrical and profound statement of his childhood in Leopardstown. Coincidentally, I was born just up the road from Beckett’s childhood home – not two hundred yards away – although not to the same conditions of privilege.

    The compression of language at times in the novels is aphoristic and the statements on the human condition act like gelignite in their exactitude: ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on,’ from The Unnameable, and in the and in the 1983 story Worstward Ho – ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’

    There is an effortless font of ridicule in this. Woody Allen would have a field day, as he did in his essay on Irish writers.

    In Our Times

    I am not a literary critic and do not pretend to be one, so I am appropriating Beckett’s legacy for my own purposes.

    It is clear to me that in our post-truth universe we require searing honesty rather than linguistic chicanery of a sort that provides us with ‘known unknowns,’ associated with the former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. We need to concentrate on that which matters, which is the truth, forensically researched and conveyed with precise language – and barbed if necessary – thereby providing an accurate portrayal of the human condition and the challenges we confront.

    The extent to which Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou, the great Marxists or post-Marxists of our age, quote Beckett is revealing, although less surprising in the case of the latter given he is French. They quote Beckett to couple both absurdity and engagement, and to demonstrate the effective use of language.

    Thus every lawyer committed to the truth, particularly a criminal defence lawyer, would do well to read and absorb Beckett in order to focus precisely on what is chosen to be said and, equally importantly, left unsaid. Beckett also helps us to recognise the nuances and tropes of language.

    Moreover, a close reading of Beckett embeds a faculty for detecting bullshit: contained in his works you will find an unstinting focus on the essentials to human life.

    What do you mean when you say this? What do you mean by what you say you mean? What do you mean by what you say or said or said then? Why did you do what you did? Who are you, and what do you say you have done?

    Cross examination techniques are of course a poor excuse for a Beckettian aphorisms, but the importance of a literary appreciation in a lawyer should not be underestimated.

    Samuel Beckett in 1977.

    Swift Return

    Other great Irish writers besides the Modernists are also relevant to our present dark age, Jonathan Swift above all else. The Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral received a disappointing sinecure after a controversial career as a journalist in London, where in carrying out his duties he alienated a large amount of influential people. The culmination of his rage arrives at the end of his life in the totemic work: ‘A Modest Proposal’.

    The conceit of that piece, based on acute recognition of the Malthusian capitalism operating at the time, and contempt for absentee landlords, is that rather than letting the poor die in increments it would make ‘economic sense’ to eat their babies whole. This was the ultimate cost benefit analysis approach to law and economics, still evident in our dangerously commoditized world.

    Finally, another Irish Nobel laureate, W. B. Yeats is also relevant in this regard, not for the Romantic murmuring of Innisfree, nor the more insightful political poems surveying the grubby inception of the state – ‘And add the halfpence to the pence. / And prayer to shivering prayer’ – but for the mystical poems from 1919 onwards, with their anticipation and exploration of the totalitarianism on the horizon.

    Thus in ‘The Second Coming’ (1919) Yeats anticipates a world of immoderate extremism that has returned to haunts us.

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    he falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    So notwithstanding a tendency towards bluffing and linguistic chicanery, Irish writers have much to offer. Above all Beckett. He reminds us to be precise and exact with our words, while anticipating the age of extremes we have entered – a dark age of neo-liberal meltdown and capitalist excess, with fascism rearing its ugly head again.

    Illustration by Malina/Artsyfartsy

    [i] Mel Gussow, ‘BECKETT AT 75- AN APPRAISAL’, New York Times, April 19th, 1981, https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/19/theater/beckett-at-75-an-appraisal.html

  • Can the European Project be Kept on Track?

    Czech border police snoop along the rail carriage as we pass the frontier from Germany. They seem to linger outside our compartment long enough to survey the light pigmentation of the young Dutch couple and this Hiberno-Norman specimen inside, passing by without seeking identification.

    White skin remains a passport – carte blanche – to unspoken liberties in ways most of us carriers hardly understand; a darker hue, with an out-of-date visa, might bring quiet indignities inside a dank room in some god-forsaken border-town.

    Born in the city of Brody, near Lviv in present-day Ukraine in 1894, the novelist Joseph Roth wrote: ‘a human life nowadays hangs from a passport as it once used to hang by the fabled thread. The scissors once wielded by the Fates have come into the possession of consulates, embassies and plain clothes men.’ A melancholic alcoholic and wandering Jew, Roth committed suicide in Paris in 1939 before the cosmopolitan Old Europe he had evoked was consumed by the flames of racial hatred.

    Human lives are dangling like threads from passports in Europe again as borders perceptibly harden: the sword of Damocles hangs over the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland, while in the UK at large, drawers are being scoured for the birth certificate of that long-lost grandparent that will yield the Paddy-pass. Throughout Europe, dour forms of patriotism exclude diversity; even in liberal, social-democratic Scandinavia shutters are coming down, as the Far Right surges.

    Entirely open borders might be unworkable, but widespread anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe is rarely based on any rational assessment of the pros and cons of migration, but appears as an unconscious turning away from the world. After all, the European population is aging and many countries are short of workers in fields indigenous populations are reluctant to enter.

    Racists identify the physical features of classes of people with defined cultural traits. This error is often a product of isolation, usually emanating from individuals living in ethnically homogeneous areas, especially small towns. Demagogues prey on those left behind by free-wheeling market economies, but the imagining of ‘them’ and ‘us’ is not purely economic in origin. It is also linked to a patriarchal sense of traditional family units being undermined by liberated women, open sexuality and even dietary choices. The ‘person of colour’ is another unwelcome intrusion of a modern world in flux.

    Thus Hungarian President Viktor Orban’s offer to make women who bear four or more (presumably ‘pure-blooded’) children exempt from taxation is a chilling reminder of a time when women’s bodies were pressed into service for the imagined community of the nation. Across Europe an irrational fear of a ‘promiscuous’ Semitic ‘other’ is used to stoke hatred by unscrupulous politicians.

    There is also a growing reassertion of the nation state, beyond Brexit. Thus the French government has withdrawn its embassy from Rome in the wake of the Populist Italian administration’s outspoken support for the revolutionary gilets jaune ‘yellow vest’ movement.[i]

    Is this a turning of Europe’s mythological gyres: a cycle of one hundred years of recovery and prosperity, before decline and confrontation? The continent really needs to outgrow the truculent teenager phase, and instead rise to the challenge of making our way of life sustainable, and ultimately assist other parts of a world we have made in our own image of nation states.

    Any retreat into sullen autarky appears untenable unless most of us are prepared to revert to being small farmers. We are, nevertheless, right to wonder whether European institutions have been overtaken by shadowy lobbyists serving multinational corporations. Big brands are strangling small enterprise, homogenising streetscapes, and upholding the grand theft of in-built-obsolesce underpinning our model of economic-growth-without-end. It begs the question: what keeps the European dream on track?

    Romantic Travel

    An extensive rail network is perhaps Europe’s greatest asset, and guarantor of a fluid community. Like the capillaries of a great oak, it connects the high branches of Scandinavia to the roots of Italy, and beyond. Whether high-speed behemoth, or squealing rust-heap, train-travel permits a form of contemplation distinctively European; where a delay is simply an invitation to read one’s book, engage in light conversation with travelling companions, or fix lunch.

    I wonder whether future generations will experience the slow transitions in scenery, the fading grandeur of old world stations, and the whistle of the guard to set you on your way. Perhaps railways will give way to electric pods or warp drives, but I fear the best-laid techno-Utopian plans of Elon Musk and others will only cater to a select wealthy few. The benefits of railways, a technology that catalysed the Industrial Revolution, altering life on Earth forever, are likely to endure.

    As Minister for Transport the current Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar described train travel as being for romantics.[ii] This suggests it is sensible to depend on stifling airports with queues and intrusive searches, before the deep vein thrombosis and ear-popping altitude of air travel. The rapid conveyance of tourists to safe spaces in historic cities has brought uniform hotels, chain restaurants and stores selling the same products, in different selfie locations.

    For those unable to afford air travel there are bus services leaving from anonymous stations on the asphalt fringes of cities, before cramped seating and desolate road stops. Otherwise, there is the false freedom of a car, wheeling at high speed along a motorway from which nothing can be seen, and where road deaths are a permitted tribute to the car gods evoked by advertisers. All other passenger experiences pale by comparison with a train journey.

    Sail-Rail

    At times even I, a born-again railer, weary of train travel in Britain. The effects of a decidedly unromantic privatisation are apparent in the sardine can-spacing between seats, the gaudy plastic furnishings, and staggering crowds at peak times, which no doubt make bean counters beam. Wholescale privatisation of an inherently monopolistic service seems to have been the height of folly.

    Unmistakably London.

    Ticket prices are jarringly expensive too. For example, a journey of eighty-odd miles from Oxford to Birmingham costs over £38 one-way. A return costs much the same, which is of little use if you aren’t going back on your tracks.

    There are cheap deals if you reserve in advance – though not on the Oxford-Birmingham line as it happens. A one-way ticket from Oxford to London is available for under £10, compared to the standard rate of £27. But booking weeks in advance negates the old world appeal of train travel, which is to turn up at a station, purchase a ticket and catch the next available service – setting off on a whim perhaps, along with a picnic basket.

    One of the great mysteries of this life is how the Sail-Rail deal between the UK and Ireland has endured into present, unromantic, times. I can simply turn up at Dublin Port, purchase my ticket which includes the price of the ferry, before catching a train at a flat rate from Holyhead – with marginal increments depending on distance and speed of ferry – to anywhere in the UK. Very occasionally, after Christmas, or at summer’s end, there is insufficient space on the ferry for all passengers, but this is rare indeed. I only book in advance to avoid the small handling fee charged by Irish Ferries when you purchase at the Port.

    Going Sail-Rail from the UK is even easier, as you purchase your ticket at any station – without the handling fee – just like a regular ticket. The full price of approximately €50 between London and Dublin may not be as low as the ludicrous cost of some plane tickets – a form of transport which, perversely, is not subject to the added cost of VAT on its fuel. But by the time you have born the cost of the Stansted train to London (usually costing £18), having avoided the crushing two-and-a-half-hour cheap bus alternative, you won’t be thanking uncle Michael.

    Last time on Sail-Rail I went as far as Oxford, met friends for a lavish Indian supper, before wobbling cheerfully back to the station to resume my journey to London. At such times the Sail-Rail pass seems like a golden ticket inside Willy Wonka’s factory, as bemused attendants waive you onwards.

    On the Irish side, the main inconvenience is the lack of a decent public transport connection between Dublin city and Port, which has no trains running along the tracks out to it. The 7.15am 153 bus from Westmoreland Street won’t even get you to the Port in time for the 8am sailing. Alas, the Dún Laoghaire-Holyhead connection, conveniently linked to a DART rail service, came to an end in 2015.

    The other annoyance is the apparent unwillingness of the UK train companies to align their timetables with the arrival of the ferries, often meaning delays on arrival in insalubrious Holyhead. Contrast this with how on some European train-ferry lines – between Sicily and the Italian mainland, and Denmark and Germany – trains actually mount a ferry and trundle out the other side.

    Delays, usually on Wales’s underfunded Arriva line, may require a longer stretch in the less than charming entrepôt, on an otherwise underrated coastline. The town’s appeal has changed little since Jonathan Swift’s 1727 evocation:

    Lo here I sit at Holyhead
    With muddy ale and mouldy bread
    All Christian victuals stink of fish
    I’m where my enemies would wish
    Convict of lies is every sign,
    The inn has not one drop of wine
    I’m fasten’d both by wind and tide
    I see the ship at anchor ride
    The Captain swears the sea’s too rough
    He has not passengers enough.

    Holyhead notwithstanding, it is now possible to travel in one day, using Sail-Rail and Eurostar, from Dublin Port, via London Euston, proceeding by foot to King’s Cross St. Pancras, to Brussels or Paris. I dream of more links from Holyhead to major UK cities, especially London, and perhaps even a high speed spur through Wales. That might tempt a few more romantics out of taking flights, and make life on our island seem less insular.

    Inter-Rail

    Last month I purchased an Inter-Rail pass, giving me five days of unlimited travel within a month throughout Europe for €300; albeit with some high-speed lines (especially, inconveniently, in France if you are arriving from Ireland) requiring a reservation, and/or the payment of a supplement. There are, however, reductions available on ferry prices, and with an overnight journey you only need to use up one day of your allotment.

    Having taken the Eurostar from London on the new service to Amsterdam, I proceeded immediately to Hamburg, Germany’s understated and cosmopolitan second city. I then headed north, through Denmark, crossing the Copenhagen-Malmo bridge into Sweden, arriving above the snowline in Oslo. I had not maximised my first three day’s travel, but made it as far as I needed.

    Cross-country skiing near Oslo, Norway.

    After enjoying an all-too-brief cross-country skiing trip with Irish friends now resident there, which included another short train journey into the hills, along with our skis, I returned south. This time taking two days (overnighting in Copenhagen) to get to the Czech Republic.

    Arriving in a continental climate with further snow cover, I proceeded east by train out of Prague towards the Jesiniky mountains. This involved a journey on one of a growing number of private lines – the Leo Express – which provides a degree of pampering and efficiency beyond that associated with the state railway company, Cesky Drahy, and cheap deals if you book in advance.

    At first blush, this would suggest partial or limited privatisation brings benefits. But I rather suspect that once this neo-liberal genii of de-regulation is let out of the bottle it will be reluctant to return. I expect further calls (in a subservient media) for privatisation in the name of efficiency, preceding a carve-up unfavourable to Czech rail-users, with ‘uneconomic’ lines phased out – as occurred in the UK – and prices hiked, once the ‘dead wood’ of the state company is phased out of existence.

    The Czech Republic is endowed with almost ten million kilometres of track, giving it one of the densest networks in the world, and making it a Mecca for train-lovers. Most people, even those living in rural villages, can reach their place of work without a car. The capital, Prague, also has two metro lines and an extensive tram network. It still costs a pittance to get to the airport by Metro and feeder bus.

    But more and more Czechs are embracing car culture, in part, no doubt, due to the skillful advertising of this ‘indispensable’ source of freedom. A way of life is being jeopardised by the appeal of autonomous vehicles, but for the moment the railway blood still flows.

    Jesiniky Mountains, Czech Republic.

    ‘the enemy within’

    In a worryingly development last January a seventy-one year-old man, Jaromir Balda was sentenced to four years imprisonment for terrorism. He felled trees to block railway lines, pretending Islamists were responsible by leaving messages at the scene proclaiming Allahu Akbar – ‘God is great’ in Arabic. Two passenger trains hit the trees, but fortunately no one was injured. The far-right sympathiser admitted he had hoped to spread fear of Muslim migrants.[iii]

    One may assume Balda – like the really murderous Anders Breivik in Norway – considered his actions a form of tough love to his countrymen: waking them up to the danger posed by the ‘enemy within’ – the miniscule Islamic population of the Czech Republic, a country that has, by and large, displayed an unsympathetic attitude to the plight of refugees, especially those with darker skin.

    This racism can partly be attributed to long-standing antipathy towards the indigenous Romany (‘gypsy’) people. In contrast, the pale-skinned foreigner, ‘the ex-pat’, is treated with deference, and a little envy, albeit marauding stag parties have sullied the reputation of the English at least.

    Balda’s choice of target was darkly symbolic, potentially evoking fears in day trippers from rural parts into cities; and among city dwellers who take trains all the way to remote regions, along with their bikes and skis. This gives way to the delusion of safety offered by the autonomous car journey, and further fracturing of community.

    Inter-continental

    Three years ago I travelled by train and bus from Portugal as far as Ukraine, on what was a redemptive trip, fulfilling an ambition to visit the former Soviet Union. Crossing the border from Slovakia into Trans-Carpathian Ukraine a distinct culture came into view. At the interchange of Çop trains halt on account of the different rail gauges used on either side. Stalin had ordered this inconvenience in order to slow down invading armies, and prevent people from easily escaping. An enduring cultural fault line is the result. It felt as if I had reached the limit of a Europe I know as a backyard I have not fully investigated.

    I hope to continue regular overland peregrinations, ideally by train, but the cost seems to rise each year, with further privatisations on the horizon. I fear that as train connections lapse, the life blood of Europe will cease to flow. Then we will experience the false freedom of driving our cars on anonymous highways, or taking flights to green zones in historic cities, conveniently cleared of native populations that don’t fit with the desired impression the authorities wish to leave.

    As Europeans grow wary of diversity it is worth considering the vital role played by railways in fostering community and tolerance. An annual holiday by train ought to be available to anyone living on the continent, even those on a peripheral island that tore away its tracks after independence. Connecting Europeans, in real comfort, to cities, mountains and the sea is perhaps the greatest service the railways still provide, and with continued intermingling our heterogeneous communities might seem more inviting.

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    [i] Angelique Chrisafis, ‘France recalls Rome envoy over worst verbal onslaught ‘since the war’’, 7th of February, 2019, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/07/france-italy-ambassador-macron-di-maio-salvini-second-world-war, accessed 18/2/19.

    [ii] Online Editors, ‘Leo Varadkar: ‘I’m romantic. I love the railways. I had a train set as a kid’’ April 3rd, 2014, https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/leo-varadkar-im-romantic-i-love-the-railways-i-had-a-train-set-as-a-kid-30152502.html, accessed 18/2/19.

    [iii] Untitled, ‘Czech pensioner jailed for terror attacks on trains’, January 14th, 2019, BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-46862508?fbclid=IwAR1rLbhjW_fpVyao8MjooDZe4muAR8bYCyyg5I_x1JzL6HytguW0PPoPFPU, accessed 18/2/19.