Re: Joyce, Episode 35. Mulligan's Milk

Levels of respect: for women, doctors, and the Irish language.

Associated Press: Frank Delaney writes exquisitely of longing

by SUMMER MOORE

"The Matchmaker of Kenmare" (Random House, $26), by Frank Delaney: Frank Delaney shows the romanticism in his roots by telling a moving tale of love, angst and Irish superstition during World War II in his new novel, "The Matchmaker of Kenmare."

Ben MacCarthy is searching for his wife, who has disappeared without a trace. A writer for the Irish Folklore Commission, Ben travels to Ireland to track and document stories and legends – and chasing rumors of his lost love.

One day, Ben is sent to the home of Kate Begley, who arranges marriages. She uses self-proclaimed "magic," which includes reading the palms of her potential clients.

The novel is primarily a story of longing, and Delaney uses his grasp of language to illustrate the feeling.

Delaney describes the scene as Kate, who lives in Kenmare in a house overlooking the ocean, tells the story of how her parents were lost at sea when she was very young.

"Sitting in the sunlight, with the same deadly sea beating down there, racing like a herd of dragons along the rocky shores and snarling up at us as though we might be their next meal, we leaned on our chairs toward each other and exchanged views of eternal seeking."

Ben decides to accompany Kate to France to work as a spy. He is so enamored with her that he blindly follows her every time she calls. Even though Ireland is technically neutral in the war, Ben and Kate are thrown into violent situations in a volatile continental Europe.

Although "The Matchmaker" is a sequel to Delaney's "Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show," it reads like its own story in the form of a letter from Ben to his twins (he's never met them). Ben's tale is both an account of what happens to him and proof of how telling the story forces him to grow.

"Every story costs you something; as you tell it, you give it away," he says.

Delaney grabs the reader from the first paragraph with his comfortable and nostalgic style. His metaphors are so visual, readers can taste, smell and see the action. His words make us want to pack up and move to where "on a balmy summer night in the high northwest of Ireland, twilight lingers forever; the sun scarcely leaves the sky."

The Writer's Life: “If there’s a verse that keeps echoing in your head write it down; it’s telling you something.” Now read one that haunts me:

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;
They brought me bitter news to hear, and bitter tears to shed;
I wept as I remembered how often you and I
Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.
And now thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest
A handful of gray ashes, long, long ago at rest;
Still are thy gentle voices, thy nightingales awake
For Death, he taketh everything but these he cannot take.”

For many years I had known only the first four lines; then I discovered the second four, all translated from the Greek by a teacher at Eton College, England’s poshest school. The original poem was written by Callimachus, the 3rd century poet and librarian from Alexandria, and the word “Carian” refers to the birthplace of Heraclitus, the famous philosopher whose death is lamented in the two verses; it might as easily have been “Anatolian” but it wouldn’t scan. Speaking of which, the penultimate line doesn’t scan, and that’s why I’ll now never get the damned thing out of my head because I’ll always be trying to write that line in a way that scans.

Bonus extra: William Cory, the Eton schoolmaster who did the translation,wrote to a friend, “Life is short; let us love one another; there is nothing else worth living for.”

Re: Joyce, Episode 34. The Re: Joyce Rap

Frank Delaney offers a special surprise in honor of James Joyce's Birthday.

The Writer's Life: Have you heard of a “commonplace book”? These daily tweets, “The Writer’s Life,” are my Commonplace Book."

First, a mea culpa: how often have I said that no matter how well you know something,e.g., a quotation, check it when you’ve typed it? A reader, Ken Fletcher, has pointed out to me that I mixed up the Bronte sisters and their authorships. It’s now corrected and thank you, Ken.

Commonplace Books: They were first a tool of self-education, used by people who had newly learned to write. They kept – often elaborately decorated -notebooks for noting down interesting, arresting and useful phrases, comments, jokes, quotations, proverbs that caught their attention in a commonplace day. Then it developed into something unnecessary but quite stylish, a means for ladies and gentlemen of education to capture words and illuminations that flew in the air abovetheir heads. Writers have always used them, if not necessarily calling them commonplace books; an idea comes to you – write it down. And it’s handy (I’d say essential) to have a notebook where all such write-it-downs appear.

I’ve known more than one person who kept a commonplace book. One or two have even been published; and it stands to reason that from a commonplace book you learn a great deal about the person who keeps it. And, though The Writer’s Lifeis not the first commonplace book on the Internet, it’s cool to think that a private, if not intimate, literary practice that has been in play for a number of centuries is now active in the most modern mass communication tool that we possess.