Harvesting the past

Con Houihans columns from the Evening Press are missed by many, but now they have been gathered together in a collection called 'A Harvest'. Rosita Sweetman reviews

A Harvest
By Con Houlihan
Published by Boglark Press
€14.95

The opening of Con Houlihan's collection of pieces, A Harvest is so beguilingly honest you couldn't but be charmed, but for a man loved and cherished throughout Ireland, charm in a Houlihan oevure comes as no surprise. 

‘A Harvest' is a collelction  of Con Houlihan's ‘Tributaries' pieces from his Evening Press days –his once a fortnight focus on the life and work of some of the great artists and writers,  plus some shorter  pieces from The Sunday World and Magill, and cover every imaginable subject from Cezanne to the Famine, to Whitman and Wordsworth, Hemingway and James Joyce, DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy.

When these articles were first published they were quite unique, and were read by hundreds of people around the country,  who would otherwise have never dreamed of venturing into such ‘high brow' waters. Con Houlihan's genius, and the genius of the editor who gave him his head in the Evening Press, was to impart high brow information in a wonderfully relaxed way so that it's as if you are sitting fireside with the great man himself, with him chatting away about much loved, absent friends.  His familiarity with his topics, with his famous subjects, is a crucial ingredient in these pieces attraction. 

As one, grateful, reader said, “You gave me my third level education Con”.

Con, renaissance man par excellence is interested in history: the Famine here; despair on the Aran Islands, “It's a queer place, and indeed I don't know a place that isn't”; London in Boswell and Johnson's time when there were still hares in Soho; Iazak ‘The Complete Angler' Walton strolling out from his quarters in Fleet Street to the countyside just minutes away; the truth about the French Revolution “Was there a revolution at all or did France experience nothing more than massive and prolonged disorder?”; Ireland in the days of Frances Ledgewidge; of the land wars and farm labourers and the  Gaelic League, when everything was still to play for, unlike the Ireland of Paddy Kavanagh's time which “gave off a stench of stale porter”.

Then there's his fascination with America, from the earliest writers attempting to chronicle ‘their' vast continent (forgetting conveniently that the people, the American Indians,  to whom it had belonged and who had been so savagely butchered so that the settlers could move in), and then that modern and peculiar enemy of promise in America, of too much too soon. “Far more writers have been diminished by affluence than have withered away from poverty and lack of recognition”, or, as he writes elsewhere, “the fox did not acquire his awareness on a regularly sated belly”. Here he targets Ernest Hemingway, specifically  The Moveable Feast – “which  degenerates into a desert of boasting and calumny and falsehood”.

At the complete opposite end of the scale is of course one of his favourite painters, the wonderful Van Gogh, who changed the entire face of modern painting, yet died alone, penniless, and virtually insane, and it is through painters like Van Gogh, that Con Houlihan's perhaps greatest obsession emerges:  the creative instinct.

And that's not to forget Nature (“Nature never did betray the heart that loved her”) and Sport -  part of the weave and warp of the man from Castleisland.  It was of course as a wonderfully lyrical sports writer that Con Houlihan first made his name, as his friend Frank Greally who writes the introduction to A Harvest says, “Con's back page was sacred”.  He describes a group of friends waiting anxiously in the street in Ballyhaunis for a little Ford Anglia to arrive and disgorge that evening's paper, each friend then “branching off homeward in different directions. Con's back page column could only be read in the comfort of one's own home with a full pot of tea on the brew”.

For all of his multidunous old fans, who can no longer read him on the back page, A Harvest will be a very special treat.