Workshop Frame

Workshop for Cahal Dallat's poem 'Grandfather'

Elizabeth: Can we just kind of clarify the story for one who is not very good at narrative?

Duncan: That's for us to do then, yes, in a sense, isn't it?

Chris: Well there's a symmetrical story isn't there, a story within a story. The poet is taken out by his grandfather to dowse.

Elizabeth: He's taken out by, OK, you think he's taken out by his grandfather himself?

Chris: Yeah, and grandpa knows ... he knows that there is a burn.

Elizabeth: But the narrator isn't finding it.

Chris You know, I'm talking about an underground spring, but he can't find it, and the grandson is getting heartily bored by implication of walking around while grandfather's going on with his stick presumably. And all he can say, you're as bad as your Da, presumably because he's getting bored and impatient.

Elizabeth: Or not finding it, you're not finding it.

Chris: ... Or not finding it. Then one last go and then this time he gripped my arm to the elbow and the twitching ... moves. And then the last stanza ...

Elizabeth: And the father ...

Chris: And the father ... So he repeats the event, Later in the day I came across the same stretch with my Da and asked if he knew where the water was below, and he told me how to ...

Elizabeth: Yes but what's this, at the beginning of the second stanza one's perhaps high with hopes, one's with the notion he hadn't all left.

Leona: The thing is the grandfather can dowse and it's a talent that he wants to pass on, you know he thinks it should be genetic, he thinks his children should be able to carry this trait, this talent on. So he takes the grandson out. He himself, the grandfather, knows where the water is and so he's testing to see if the grandson's got the talent.

Chris: Ah, right, yes.

Leona: And the same thing happens as when he took his son out: they can't find it until the grandfather takes control. And it's really the grandfather's talent that finds the water.

Elizabeth: But I'm confused by the beginning of the second stanza. You know, for me there's then an elision of two different events. It's as if somebody, we, somebody, are going out with the grandfather not being there. Or am I just missing something?

Chris: Sorry, I don't understand ...

Elizabeth: Well one is perhaps high with hope. Perhaps there's a notion, the notion ... Oh I've just understood it. It's the idea that there was a ...

Hugh: Because he hasn't got long to live.

Elizabeth: Right, I've got him leaving a notion.

Hugh: No. No no. The notion, he hadn't long to live.

Elizabeth: No, I've got us with the notion that it hasn't been long since he went away. That's how I'm reading that one. I'm just misreading it. Sorry. He hadn't got long left. He hadn"t long to live.

Duncan: I'm interested in the body contact thing, in the fact that he says you're as bad as your Da, then one last go, "he gripped my arms at the elbow and this time it leapt." Now he walked to and fro. Nowhere does it say actually that the granddad himself did any divining. It doesn't actually say that.

Chris: Perhaps he gave the stick to the son.

Duncan: Well the son has got it because he's the one walking to and fro ...

Chris: That's right because he planted himself in his chair ...

Duncan: But he's there to grip him though and this time it leapt.

Leona: Well, he gets up and does that.

Elizabeth: He gets up, yes. He gives up.

Duncan: And then the dad says the same thing, except there's a slight difference, isn't there in the body. He took my wrists in his hand which is closer in a sense, you know, genetically perhaps and also in a sense possibly also emotionally closer, but it's an interesting thing that it's as if it's either that the grandfather is transmitting a power

Elizabeth: or that he's faking it …

Duncan: Or that he's faking it, but I mean it's a very interesting ambiguity. It's an interesting ambiguity because you never ever see the grandfather actually doing it whereas the son is capable of it once and the father is capable of it once, and therefore you think that perhaps maybe it is the younger generation that's capable of the divination, while maybe it's the older. There are images of impotence and of sterility in the older man, or stasis at least.

Hugh: You mean right at the beginning of the poem where he's sat on his settee as I played "bounded" No, bounded means something different.

Elizabeth: I don't know, I mean he turns wood, there's something about the image of the connection with water, the muslin with ends dipped in water.

Duncan: Well you see the dad says ...

Elizabeth: If that's not ...

Duncan: No, well, maybe the once when he gave up and took my wrists in his hand.

Elizabeth: Gave up waiting. Not gave up divining. Gave up waiting for me to be able to do it in the same way that he gives up waiting for ...

Duncan: Well, OK, but is it significant though that there's never any mention, I mean he cuts the wishbone, but there's no mention of him actually finding water either.

Elizabeth: I think that's perverse Duncan. I think we have to take it that he's the one who knows how to do it.

Duncan: I think it probably is I think it probably is perverse, you know, now that you say it.

Elizabeth: Your interpretation I mean, not anything else.

Duncan: Well you're as bad as your Da. One last go. It could still be said by somebody who can't do it themselves but are relying upon the younger generation to be helpful about this thing.

Leona: I don't know why we'd read it that way; well maybe ...

Chris: What, do you think he's being defeated by this?

Duncan: Well I'm just saying. Somebody needs to contradict me.

Hugh: He knows that it's there, but I take Duncan's point.

Chris: We don't know that he's actually found it.

Duncan: Someone needs to say there's clear evidence in this poem that the grandfather can divine water and then I will be quiet. But until such a time that people actually point to that then you know it's something.

Elizabeth: Well the only successful divinations that occur are ones where the grandfather is actually running the show.

Duncan: Yeah. But holding his respective younger generations.

Hugh: As you say, he's running a show. It's a show. There's an exercise of power going on in this poem as well isn't there? He sits there, he waits and so on and both the son and the father get bored, can't do it, and he comes along and he grips them by the wrist or the elbow and he makes it happen. There's something both awesome and also rather unpleasant or a bit controlling about this whole thing.

Duncan: It's interesting though that he takes his son by the wrists but he need only take his grandson by the elbows and I think that's significant too.

Hugh: Yes I agree ...

Elizabeth: Yes. It suggests that if you'd worked at it Cahal, you might have actually ...

Hugh: Well it's difficult to fit in your elbow in the last line.

Elizabeth: I mean they say we can all do it, they say we could all do this actually, that we do have it, you know, it is a faculty that people have.

Chris: The dowsing, yeah.

Leona: If they can reach through to it. If they can let it happen.

Elizabeth: Mmm. I mean I know somebody who works for the Geological Survey and who spends most of his time now on a commercial basis logging information in bore holes that are being drilled because people are building or whatever and he gets asked out to come and do various measurements in bore holes for working drills or for other reasons. But he said he can do it and he says that actually you can, you know, use coat-hangers.

Leona: Clothes-hanger, yes, people use clothes-hangers.

Elizabeth: Yeah, a metal thing actually can be better apparently than a wooden thing.

Hugh: But to return to the poem I am more and more convinced by Duncan's reading.

Elizabeth: Well let's listen to it ... You're convinced by Duncan's reading? Is this a first, Hugh?

Hugh: Not quite. No I just think that "Sure he'd have known the run of a burn rom the Hospital Field ..."

Elizabeth: "Sure he'd have known." So in fact he doesn't need to be divining it because he knows it.

Hugh: Yeah ...

Chris: So he's testing.

Hugh: Yes. I think it's a poem about that. I feel it's a poem about control.

Elizabeth: But it doesn't mean to say that it's a poem that means that he hasn't got the power.

Duncan: I don't believe he has either.

Hugh: No I'm not sure that that's actually where the poem's going because the poem's is not interested in that really. The poem is interested in the relationship between the grandfather and the grandson initially, and actually them, well this is a replay of the grandfather and his son, i.e. my father as it were. I think that's where the poem centres its focus. If the poem had wished to be about divining and the power of divining it would have written more about that. It doesn't write very much about it.

Chris: Yeah, I agree.

Hugh: We start in the first stanza in a very very precise evocation, don't we, of the kitchen, with him just sitting there as a presence and the boy playing within a sort of boundary.

Duncan: And the implicit presence of water in that first stanza.

Hugh: Yes, that's a good point, yeah.

Duncan: Underneath isn't it? You know, suds guttering out.

Elizabeth: Although the suds coming out from the washing machine is not actually, you know, pure water that you go out and divine for because you need ...

Duncan: No, but it's implicit ...

Chris: But it's a sort of medium of the poem isn't it?

Duncan: This man surrounded by water in a sense.

Leona: And in any case it's not about them needing water. They don't need water and if they did need it he knew where to find it. It was about trying to discover whether he'd passed something on to his children, to his family.

Duncan: Well maybe he never had it.

Hugh: The more benign reading of the poem is exactly what you said, Leona. The slightly cooler reading of the poem I think is more about control. Whatever the poet intended, I mean I think that's what's actually there.

Elizabeth: Well that line about he'd have known the run of the burn ... is a question isn't it? It could be used to question whether or not the grandfather actually ...

Hugh: But it defines the testing ground doesn't it? It defines the fact that this was what he must do, to find out whether in fact the son and grandson had this power. Maybe a third interpretation is possible and that is that it's the impatience of the grandfather, one last go, you're as bad as your Da, interfering, grabbing hold of the hands rather than perhaps maybe make a whole afternoon of it ...

Elizabeth: Let the boy find it.

Duncan: He might have found it, and as well as that, well no maybe just the once when he gave up, and took my wrists in his hands, I mean that's a complete real turn-off image as far as he's concerned, you know.

Elizabeth: Grandpa only took him the once actually, once took him ... He didn't repeat the experiment did he?

Hugh: It's a single test.

Duncan: So there's a fourth strand there. Impatience. A judgment.

Elizabeth: So in fact the father at the age of seven was being kind of told you're no bloody good and then like he's waited thirty years ...

Hugh: To do that to the grandson. Dreadful old man.

Chris: It gets a bit dark here doesn't it?

Elizabeth: It's true actually, it does, it does.

Chris: It is, I mean I think that's the nexus of the poem. It is about a relationship over generations.

Ducnan: ... power, yes.

Elizabeth: But nothing is said about the grandfather.

Chris: No, but his presence is just there. He's a past and present isn't he? I mean he's there, he planted his chair and sat down to wait.

Hugh: And it's right from that very first word, sat on a dining room chair he had turned himself, you now, the words placing himself at the beginning of the second line is very strong isn't it?

Elizabeth: I think that's a bit tenacious, I think that's a bit too ...

Leona: It means he's made the chair.

Elizabeth: Yeah, but I mean, you know, I don't think I don't think that's such a big deal. OK, he'd made the chair himself.

Hugh: But the placing of words in a line is a delicate thing isn't it?

Leona: I wonder how much one's own relationship with a father and a grandparent might colour one's perception of the theme of the poem.

Duncan: Well again, you see, you have this completely self made. He makes his own chair. It's all coming from him. He is the origin. He is the founder of all this authority and this magic and this power. It's all with him.

Elizabeth: Well I can't imagine he churns the butter or puts things in the washing machine though.

Duncan: No, but he sits there guarding.

Hugh: He's a patriarch, while that all goes on by unnamed and unseen women. It's very male, I mean the whole thing is about male isn't it? The orange groves Patrick has grown ... The women are notably absent.

Duncan: Yeah. But it is an interesting link.

Elizabeth: So it was Patrick?

Hugh: Yes it was. But all I'm saying, sorry, without any judgment, it's just that this poem is about men isn't it?

Elizabeth: Yeah.

Duncan: I like the images, lime house, boat shed, coffin shop, with the link between the shape of a boat and a coffin.

Elizabeth: What's a lime house? Can anybody tell me?

Hugh: Preserving ... lime ... vitamin C ...

Elizabeth: Or is it the lime plaster that you kind of build with?

Chris: Well you do but lime was also used to put in pauper's graves. Quicklime.

Elizabeth: Lime house, it's in American songs isn't it. The poet will have to tell us in a few minutes.

Poet (Cahal): Then lime house has moved. It's down the East End isn't it?

Elizabeth: The coffin shop.

Hugh: Or a lime house reach.

Duncan: Well that was the warehouse then, that's just lime.

Hugh: ... What lime is used for ...

Elizabeth: Patrick is a disappointment. You see Patrick ought to have been out fighting the war. But there's something wrong with Patrick so he's at home growing oranges ... So that all the boys are not making it according to grandfather's view.

Poet (Cahal): Well now that's very interesting …

Duncan: But this is Ireland though.

Poet (Cahal): We weren't in the war.

Duncan: The Irish weren't in the war.

Elizabeth: So the only significance of growing orange groves is that you couldn't get oranges then.

Duncan: Sorley volunteered didn't he? Oh that was the previous one wasn' it?

Elizabeth: So why would he grow oranges? Because you couldn't get them.

Poet (Cahal): Just because he was eccentric.

Hugh: Can you grow oranges in Northern Ireland?

Elizabeth: You mean there's no significance in that line whatsoever?

Poet (Cahal): It's a bit odd.

Hugh: Can you grow orange groves in Northern Ireland?

Duncan: You can grow anything in a south-facing garden.

Elizabeth: We are going to have to kind of bring the poet in quite soon.

Leona: The thing about orange groves, growing oranges in Ireland, I mean that would be something that wouldn't be apt to come to fruit. It would be unlikely to come to fruit in the same way that the dowsing hasn't come to fruit in the second and third generation. So perhaps it does have a reinforcing effect.

Duncan: Mmm. That's interesting, there. We don't know how successful Irish orange groves are, statistically.

Poet (Cahal): Not very …

Elizabeth: But all the same it's a kind of pansy thing for a boy to do isn't it, you know, orange groves, don't you think?

Duncan: If he was a boy.

Elizabeth: Patrick was presumably a boy rather than a girl.

Leona: Could have been a man.

Duncan: No, I get the feeling of a man.

Leona: It could have been a middle-aged man.

Elizabeth: I mean, you know, a male person.

Duncan: It could actually have been the grandfather's dad, I don't know, well then the war, no. It would be a relative, yes.

Elizabeth: Patrick is one of my dad's generations actually. Patrick is the same generation as my dad in my view.

Leona: Like an uncle or something.

Duncan: A bit young to be growing, well no, maybe.

Leona: But growing anything that grows in groves isn't home-based, it's agriculture.

Duncan: The problem always with a slightly realistic poem is you don't know what to bring in, what actually is a relevant internal connection and what isn't.

Elizabeth: Well it's up to the poem to kind of describe that really.

Duncan: The coffin shop definitely I think speaks for something.

Chris: Yeah, well because it relates to his sense of fatality.

Duncan: Well also to the carpentry.

Elizabeth: To his sense of his grandfather's mortality. Yeah, that's right. But also the sort of carpentry, yes.

Poet (Cahal): There we are, yeah, some very good readings, things that may not have been ...

Hugh: Intentional.

Poet (Cahal): Well it's not that it's intentional but I went through this exercise of … it started off as several stanzas of descriptive stuff, trying to convey the kind of person you've got, and then got rid of all the detailf and left it with a story which conveyed that balance between fond recollection and responsibility, you ought to be able to do this … and 'control' might be a word for it, certainly 'authoritarian' is. And the fact that he sat in the kitchen every day, drove my mother mad. You know, he'd come in from the workshop and just plonk this chair there and sit there ... and get his cup of tea, while all the other stuff, as you say, was going on ...

Duncan: Yes, somebody had to fill the washing machine.

Poet (Cahal): And "lime house: is just where you put slaked lime, limestone, you put it in and you pour water on it and it bubbles up furiously.

Elizabeth: Actual stone, bits of stone?

Poet (Cahal): Yeah, and turns into whitewash.

Duncan: Oh whitewash.

Poet (Cahal): Well it turns into a great white gelatinous mixture which you then sell by the bucket for people who want to whitewash their houses. Or if you fall into it, as you know, you dissolve.

Duncan: You get preserved don't you?

Poet Cahal): No it does the opposite to that.

Chris: That's what they used to do ...

Hugh: Yes ... Sort of burn you ...

Poet (Cahal): The rest was pretty much as it was. But it was the idea of a test and it was the idea of discovering later that this was something he'd been harping on about for, say, the thirty years since my dad had failed, you know? And Patrick's orange groves were another one of many ambitious disappointments for our family in Ireland.

Duncan: Who is Patrick? Your uncle? Yeah.

Chris: But I mean... It's so bizarre isn't it ... I'd have thought they were doomed ... you know, in that climate ...

Elizabeth: Well the Sitwells had a vintage didn't they. I mean the Sitwells were making wine until the year before last.

Poet (Cahal): Not so far north ... more south west.

Duncan: Well we had a very nice ...

Poet (Cahal): I mean the only interesting thing to come out is the question of whether he could or couldn't and I'm not sure whether that gives a coloration to the poem or not. If he couldn't it was particularly mean to be torturing generation after generation, so I'd have to presume the balance, assuming that he wasn't an absolute monster, the balance is in favour of the fact that he could, I mean as far as the poem goes. And it wasn't like there was some big mystique going on, it was just a commercial thing ... it was something that he'd made money out of all his life.

Duncan: Had he?

Elizabeth: He couldn't believe that you couldn't be taught.

Poet (Cahal): But it wasn't even 'teach' because there is no knack. I mean people either find out they can do it or not ... My Da couldn't do it, then maybe I could do it now, right, that's it, so you've just lost that, whatever it was, you know, as if it were some talent. But not that he wanted the talent to say "hey we're really mysterious, we can do this," just because clients would pay him money to go out on the farm and dig a well.

Duncan: Do you think it would help to say that he could do it?

Hugh: No, no.

Poet (Cahal): That's what I'm not sure about. I'm not sure that it takes ...

Elizabeth: I would never have queried it.

Poet (Cahal): But if some people do, does it alter it because it's a portrayal of somebody who is testing to see if this is their ... yeah, I mean one could argue from logic and say why would he do that if he'd never had it himself. But to bring in the detail that it was one of his many occupations, like all the others, seems to be a bit mundane and therefore I think you could leave it open. If somebody sees it as this is somebody who expected people to be able to do this even though he couldn't do it himself?

Elizabeth: Yeah. It's also such a symbolic idea isn't it, you know, can you or can you not.

Duncan: The one line actually, the cutting the wishbone shaped hazel twig, does imply that he was reasonably professional at it.

Elizabeth: We all know that it's a hazel twig you have to use though ... except that a coat-hanger is better.

Poet (Cahal): I don't think I would even know it was a hazel twig except that a I read a lot Yeats.

Hugh: I think it's a poem that grows as you look at it, doesn't it, because it doesn't offer itself to be anything other than just a description, but the whole of the issues about the relationships sort of emerge in an understated way actually from what's there in the poem, so I rather like it.

Elizabeth: It is quite understated. It doesn't have a climax and it doesn't have a thrill actually.

Hugh: No it doesn't have a thrill.

Elizabeth: Because it avoids that thrill that, you know, we townies might think, which is what did it feel like when that thing twitched for real which I take in my reading it did, it really did, it wasn't just him doing it. You would feel it, at that point you would feel it happen ...

Hugh: My reading's not that.

Poet (Cahal): But you can't answer that from the perspective of the poem anyway. You can't answer it.

Chris: It's ambiguous isn't it?

Poet (Cahal): You can't say he faked it or I really felt the jump because that says well you're being fooled, and you have to say well I don't know. And my dad has the same story and he doesn't know.

Hugh: ... I remember the grip, I remember the grip.

Chris: ... significance of it ...

Poet (Cahal): And something happens but is it electrical, is it physical, is it bluffmanship, is it

Elizabeth: psychological, psychosomatic?

Poet (Cahal): I suppose it you were doing it further you'd say well if he was really looking for it why would he do something that made it happen because that would only have fooled you into thinking you were. But there you go … Or whether that was only to show that when he was in touch with you it happened and when he wasn't it didn't.

Duncan: Yeah. The power going through him.

Hugh: But I think that's good that it's left there because that issue is genuinely left, isn't it, as it were in life, and the poem leaves it.

Elizabeth: Could you think of a different title? I think it's a pretty boring title.

Poet (Cahal): It's a very boring title. I was ... No, well because it's not a punch-line kind of poem, you know, it's not a poem that's arriving anywhere and therefore it just sort of says 'A Portrait of my Grandfather' and you can take what you like out of it rather than ...

Duncan: Except then it's also about yourself and your dad too. It's a bit restricting, the title, isn't it in a sense? Yet, that's right. You focus on the grandfather and not on mythology, yes.

Hugh: I don't mind the title.

Elizabeth: Great.

Poet (Cahal): Thanks very much.