Kevin Whelan: I'm bruised inside from the punches I've pulled

                                 Dublin, 3 October 2005

Getting it off my chest

I'm bruised inside
from the
punches I've pulled.

          --Kevin Whelan

From an excerpt of Alan Bennett's diaries published in the London Review of Books, 1 January 2009. Bennett writes, "24th May [2008]. Cleaning out some shelves, I find a note from Kevin Whelan dated Dublin 3 October '05. It's a poem.... I'd have liked to have written that, though I've no idea who Kevin Whelan is."

Possibly this Kevin Whelan? Please let me know.

UPDATE: The correct answer is below! Thanks.

Comments

[KEVIN WHELAN]

KEVIN WHELAN WRITES: It was with great delight that I found myself quoted by Alan Bennett in his LRB Diary for 2008; he is my favourite living writer. Those who dismiss his work as 'twee' or even 'cuddly' are fools: some of it is about as 'twee' and 'cuddly'
as badger cornered. Check out his Talking Heads monologues, those carefully crafted portrayals of people on the margins of society, misfits, the lonely and the timid and the broken. Bennett writes about their lives with such compassion. My poem is very much autobiographical--lots of us 'pull our punches'--but I think it applies particularly to some of his characters.

I am an Irish writer based in Galway, and the author of two published books: Izzy Baia: Autism, Life and other Unsolved Mysteries, and a novel, A Wonderful Boy: A Story of the Holocaust [both Mercier-Marino, Dublin].My namesake is a highly regarded historical geographer and the author of The Tree of Liberty, among other books.

I am represented by the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency, Rosney Mews, Upper Glenageary Road, Glenageary, Co. Dublin.

[KEVIN WHELAN]

KEVIN WHELAN AGAIN:HERE ARE A FEW OF MY APHORISMS:

Impeccable manners: kindness in a bespoke suit.

Cynicism: the wisdom of the disappointed.

When science or advertising discovers a way for men to be men and remain fully human, it will be a huge step. Until then, we're all going to be in a lot of trouble.

We are what we remember.

I like to think that when we die and pass into our new life, all our deepest questions will be answered--and all our Earthly answers will be questioned.

It is true that God cannot change the past, but it also true that we can always change our attitude to it.

Stephen Fry once said: "Never regret the things you've done, only the things you haven't done". My opinion of him has never recovered from reading this idiocy. It clearly has not occurred to Fry that one of the things he might have regretted not doing is regretting some of the things he did do, not least walking out on Simon Gray's play 'Cell Mates' in 1995, a departure the production never fully recovered from [it subsequently folded some weeks later].

The successful become successful from making a number of mistakes and learning from them; the unsuccessful remain unsuccessful from never learning from theirs.

When you really love someone you understand a fundamental thing: It's all about them. You, with all your faults and weaknesses, grow from this; and this knowledge that you have made a good and lasting impact on another's life, even when the loved one is with another...well, that's not bad, is it?

[KEVIN WHELAN]

KEVIN WHELAN: I'd rather be paranoid than know it's true.(This is from my first book Izzy Baia: Autism, Life and other Unsolved Mysteries, and relates to an incident in there.)

[KEVIN WHELAN]

KEVIN WHELAN ON PRAYER: Perhaps knowing how to pray is like knowing how to swim: You never know when you might want to. Or need to.

Having religious faith is not unlike the irrepresible urge to gaze in wonder at beautiful women: I just can't help myself and it feels right.

Where is the fun, the mystery, the poetry, in atheism? It appears to be a cold, gimlet-eyed approach to life, a kind of intellectual Darwinism that eschews a sense of brotherhood with a "tough luck--it's all about the survival of the fittest." A certain Me Me Me moral selfishness. Imperfect as many people of faith are, and as a very inadequate Christian, when at church a plate is passed around--as it was some years ago for victims of an earthquate in Pakistan--the congregation readily gave up whatever they could afford to help their Muslim brothers and sisters. Where do atheists gather when charity is needed? I'm not saying that atheists cannot be deeply good and moral people--the late Studs Terkel and Kurt Vonnegut come to mind--but there is an intellectual coldness to the philosophy that I find quite repugnant and intellectually unsatisfying.

[Kevin Whelan]

KEVIN WHELAN: A loving heart closes all distances.

Bitterness is a fruit that is always in season.

Loneliness: soul cancer.

Yesterday is gone; tomorrow hasn't happened; today is all we have.

[Kevin Whelan]

KEVIN WHELAN: A loving thought closes any distance.

Bitterness is a fruit that is always in season.

Loneliness: soul cancer.

Every act of kindness is a prayer.

[Kevin Whelan]

KEVIN WHELAN ON BEING A WRITER: Occasionally I will meet someone I haven't seen in some time and they will ask me I am 'still' writing. Well, it is kind of them to even ask, but I wonder are doctors, for example, ever asked such a question, eg. "So, still practicing medicine, eh? No offense, but maybe you should think about doing something practical with your life. Ever thought of being a writer?"

[Kevin Whelan]

KEVIN WHELAN ON CONTEXT BEING EVERYTHING: In Galway recently it was not an uncommon sight in William Street to see a tall, thin American reading aloud from the Bible. Well, Galway is always a very welcoming place for, er, eccentrics of every stripe. This American visitor is generally ignored, or else he receives not unkind glances of the 'he's gotta be nuts' variety. But take him from the street to the Augustinian Church a few hundred yards away, and let him stand on the altar to read aloud to his heart's content, and no one would think it the least bit odd or eccentric.

Similarly, in Eyre Square, in the very centre of Galway, it is not uncommon to see winos drinking, indifferent to the looks they get from both native Galwegians and passing tourists.
If you were to sit there in public swigging from a wine bottle, you would almost certainly be on the receiving end of similar attention. However, put out a picnic blanket, take two glasses from a basket, pour a glass for yourself and one for a friend, and immediately the setting is changed: It's okay now. You're picnickers. And as we all know picnickers can't possibly be winos.

[Kevin Whelan]

The entire world can be found within a one mile radius of wherever you are right now. Every possible human type is to be found there, if you look hard enough: the ambitious, the slovenly, the good, the cruel, the generous, the mean, the bully and the bullied, the lover and the unloved, the newly in love and the brokenhearted.

Put another way: A man born and raised on the the west coast of Ireland might not, on the face of it, have much in common with a man of the same age from, say, Sierra Leone. But if both men are fishermen, then there will be an immediate bond of recognition, a commonality of experience.

And if they are writers you can be certain they will soon get around to bitching about other writers who are more successful, or bitching about their agents or their publishers or...I could go on but I won't. But that's that wonderful contradiction in terms called 'the literary community' for you.

Sometimes I wish I knew how to fish...

[Sedulia]

Kevin, I think you need to start your own blog!

[Kevin Whelan]

KEVIN WHELAN: DEFINITION OF 'HELL': Helplessness before the suffering of someone you love.

[KEVIN WHELAN]

KEVIN WHELAN ON 'RESPECT': People will treat you the way you let them treat you. It took me a long time to learn that.

ON HELPING OTHERS: You cannot help someone to change unless they want to--it took me a long time to learn that too. The only person you can really help to change is yourself, and that's never easy. But perhaps in changing yourself for the better you can be the catalyst for change in others.

ON FIRST LOVE: Even now, over twenty years later, I think about her everyday. And perhaps sometimes I enter her thoughts (and I hope in a good way). I think that such all-consuming love is like a fire that never goes out; tiny embers still glow no matter how much time has passed.

[Kevin Whelan]

3 CERTAINTIES: 1. You live and learn. And if you're living, you're learning; and if you're learning, you're living.

2. There is a time and a place for everything.

3. Anything can happen.

[Kevin Whelan]

On 'Death': The circumstances of another's death should not be the defining point of their life ("She was too young to die"; "He had everything ahead of him".

While we are living our lives are being defined all the time; we do not always know how valuable our words and actions are on others, on the world itself.

[Mike.]

Kevin,

Found an account of Sartre's visit to Galway in the Times archive?

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/the-misfits-when-sartre-met-huston-in-galway-1.1232398

I'm including the text in case you haven't a subscription. If you haven't and you want to, you can use mine for research when you're in here.

DID YOU hear the one about the French philosopher and the Hollywood film-maker? It sounds like a bad joke, but sometime in 1958 John Huston, then living in Co Galway, hit upon the idea of making a film about Sigmund Freud, and, having already directed Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit on Broadway, he approached the Frenchman to write a script.

Sartre had, of course, no little talent for dramatic writing and he took to the task with gusto, no doubt impressed by the $25,000 fee. Huston's idea was to depart from the traditional biopic approach and instead make Freud a kind of intellectual detective story, following the hero down the back alleys of the unconscious to his theory of psychosexual development - a descent into the subconscious somewhat like Dante's into hell. Huston must have thought the man who wrote that hell was other people was top man for such a task, but in truth, Sartre would not strike one as the obvious choice. His ideas of man as free moral agent could not abide subconscious impulses.

Existentialism, at least in part, was, Sartre wrote, "a way of showing that a host of complex intentions that Freud places in the unconscious can be found in lived experience". Of course, that sounds like a much better film! Nonetheless, Huston trusted Sartre. Perhaps, from his American point of view, one European intellectual couldn't be a whole lot different to another. He was confident Sartre was "the ideal man" and that he had "read psychology deeply, knew Freud's work intimately and would have an objective approach". This, notably, is a confidence not shared in any way by Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre's biographer. But, true to his advice to Simone de Beauvoir - "we must try everything, we polymaths" - Sartre seemed happy to follow Huston's notion, and, after a slow start, worked through 1959 until the autumn, by which time he was ready to bring the fruits of his labours to Huston at St Clerans in Co Galway.

"Galway Existentialists" was the sub-headline in An Irishman's Diary in The Irish Times on September 29th, 1959, which told of how "over the past few days M Jean Paul Sartre and M John Huston have been putting their heads together at Huston's new place in Co Galway and putting the final polish on M Sartre's 400-page screen script for Huston's film on Freud". Proving that you should never believe all that you read in the papers, nothing could be further from the truth. There was a script long enough for a five-hour film, but polish, final or otherwise, did not feature on Sartre's faintly absurd and doomed trip to Galway, which was to be the nail in the coffin of his involvement in the picture.

The idea of a Paris flaneur tramping the bogs to the Irish outpost of a riding-and-shooting hearty such as Huston is the kind of irresistibly doomed enterprise that certain dramatists love - and so it proved to be. The two, prime examples of their types, managed to combine misunderstanding and mutual bafflement on a grand scale.

SARTRE'S FIRST LETTER back to Simone de Beauvoir in Paris hints at the privations of country life: "I'm going to send you a telegram . . . the bedroom phones don't work." At this point in the sojourn he is somewhat stoical - "I can't say I'm bored . . . it's worth living through this once" - and rather playfully casts himself in a Le Fanu-esque gothic situation, writing, "I haven't left this huge barracks of a place, though from my windows I can see vast green fields which . . . must stretch for miles and miles". And in these fields the homesick boulevardier sees "the master of the house" on horseback, "tearing by the house at a canter wearing a cap". A little donkey gamboled behind, "making a farce of the whole thing". The oddness of the house also discomfited the philosopher. Trinkets and mementos from Huston's travels cluttered every room: "authentic but uncongenial neighbours". In his room alone Sartre cites a wooden Christ from Mexico, Italian lamps, a Hindu Shiva, Japanese screens and a "real fake" Picasso, as well as "surely the world's ugliest Monet". There is very little of life here, Sartre concludes, "except for the house, which is expanding beneath our feet . . . a work in progress".

Ominously for their shared enterprise, Sartre's intellectual sympathies did not extend from the house to its owner. Their working relationship was a series of misunderstandings. While Huston admired Sartre's ability to make notes of his own words as he talked, he felt "there was no such thing as conversation with him. You'd wait for him to catch his breath, but he wouldn't". This, together with the bafflement Sartre's rants in speedy French unfailingly induced, were evidence for the philosopher of Huston's supreme vacancy. "He settled not to contemplate the state of his soul in the Irish countryside but to evade taxes . . . He is literally incapable of talking to his guests," he complained, not realising that his host simply could not get a word in edgeways. The result of these daily conferences was always the same: everyone, even though all spoke French, "had a glazed look". "Sometimes," writes Huston in his autobiography, "I'd leave the room in desperation . . . When I'd return, he wouldn't have noticed that I'd been gone."

There was little personal warmth either. Sartre wrote of Huston's "infantile vanity" that made him don red dinner jackets and ride horses "not very well". Huston was equally complimentary of this "little barrel of a man . . . as ugly as a human being can be. His face was bloated and pitted, his teeth were yellowed and he was wall-eyed."

Those very teeth led to a moment worthy of Woody Allen, when Sartre complained of a sore tooth. Huston, who for all his embracing of Ireland clearly could not give up that American fetish for dental hygiene, recommended a swift trip to civilisation, or Dublin at any rate. Sartre refused to go to any such lengths to save a mere tooth and headed to Galway, where Huston, tellingly, knew of no dentist. He emerged from the chair of a local dentist within minutes, the tooth pulled. This gave Huston the immortal reflection: "A tooth more or less made no difference in Sartre's cosmos" - perhaps existentialism has advantages.

THE IRISH LANDSCAPE did not, either, prompt tourist board-type prose from Sartre's letters. He found, to his credit, that there was no misery in the place - "simply poverty and above all death". Everywhere "stubborn little walls enclose plots of land . . . Everywhere you go, ruins, which range with no warning from the 6th century to the 20th . . . Only the presence of grass proves that an atom bomb wasn't dropped there . . . one step away from lunar, precisely the interior landscape of my boss, the great Huston."

Against all odds, the end of the Galway episode came with agreements on revision. But, when Sartre made them back in Paris, the script was even longer. Evidently, he saw "no reason why the film shouldn't be eight hours long". Eventually, it fell to Huston, Wolfgang Reinhardt and Charles Kaufman to cut, trim and synthesise the script. The process took six months. Afterwards, Huston sent the script - now a mere three hours - to Sartre in Rome. In what Huston describes as a "letter full of recriminations", he made it clear he wanted nothing to do with the film, and refused a credit and reputedly never saw it.

Sartre was by no means the final difficult collaborator on the Freud project. Huston went on to cast Montgomery Clift, by then severely the worse for drink and drugs, none of which stopped him from trying to rewrite his own scenes. So poor was Clift's memory for lines that Huston had to write them on labels and stick the labels on props and door frames for him to read, the knowledge of which ensures some scenes are difficult to watch with a straight face. Clift's talent does come through in the film, though. As Huston notes: "Monty's eyes light up . . . He looked like he were having a thought. He wasn't, Christ knows."

In the end, Huston got his intellectual suspense thriller, released in 1962. Freud: The Secret Passion, to give the full hysterical title, is a curiosity. Its focus, Freud's sexual theories, are by now his most exploded work. The film's concision uses all the familiar tropes of movie psychoanalysis: exaggerated neuroses, memories unearthed under hypnosis which, once known, become miraculous cures. Clift's Freud is himself an Oedipus, pursuing the truth that will curse him and, in his erroneous extrapolation of his own experience into a general theory quite without foundation, humanity. But, the speciousness or otherwise of Freud's so-called discoveries, and their usefulness as metaphors, is the kind of thing you'd need a fortnight in Galway to discuss.

[Sedulia]

This is hilarious! Thank you! About 20 years ago I actually stayed in Huston's house, which had become a very nice hotel. It was lovely. I remember a fashion magazine doing a feature on Anjelica Huston there.