Life in cities is not a spring but a river, or rather, a water main. It progresses like a novel, artificially.
The keynote of simple folk is bad manners, familiarity. They intrude on one's private soul.
In the dear dead days beyond recall, when I was in my prime as a film critic, the industry was booming. Hollywood, to give them their due, always called it the industry, through quite a few imagined it as an art form and went through several hours regularly at tiresome films in the sacred cause of art.
Undoubtedly, there are a number of well-developed, mainly female, stars helping Miss Taylor to hold the film industry together: Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg, etc. But such an insistence on cheesecake smells of bankruptcy.
I want to reveal in a simple way the usual - and unusual - life of the city; the corporation workman, the busmen, policemen, the civil servants, the theatres, Moore Street and also, what occupies so large a place in Dublin's life, the literary and artistic.
Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.
The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.
The second-grade films - where are they? No more are they made, and yet they were by far the best films for holding hands at, and wasn't this always the main purpose of the cinema?
Natural life, lived naturally as it is lived in the countryside, has none of that progress which is the base of happiness. Men and women in rural communities can be compared to a spring that rises out of a rock and spreads in irregular ever-widening circles. But the general principle is static.
Ay - 'The Green Fool' business, the libel action over the head of it - did me a lot of damage. It destroyed the momentum.
Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply.
In its truest manifestation, where it gives judgments, poetry is super-luxury. It would be interesting to see what would happen to a High Court judge if he were forced to follow the true poetic formula, doing the job for love, being forced into pubs for relief.
Young writers should keep out of pubs and remember that the cliche way of the artistic life is a lie.
