The Star Factory

by Ciaran Carson

  Praise for THE STAR FACTORY

  ‘An indispensable, genre-defying book.’

  Tom Adair, Irish Times

  ‘Wonderfully winning, both as a self-portrait and a portrait of the city.’

  Paul Muldoon, Times Literary Supplement

  ‘Carson has written a maze-like autobiography of sorts… It twists and weaves about like the most piquant of jazz solos… Carson’s Belfast is an almost dream-like location, a palimpsest of vanished and vanishing places.’

  Michael Glover, Independent on Sunday

  ‘The book I’ve read and enjoyed most recently is The Star Factory by Ciaran Carson, who has dispensed with all the rules… He has gone diving into a word-bath, a memory-bath, and come up with something really special.’

  Bernard McLaverty

  ‘If Seamus Heaney is the voice of rural Ulster, Ciaran Carson is the laureate of the urban North.’

  Terry Eagleton, New Statesman & Society

  ‘A book to re-read and savour.’

  Patricia Craig, Independent

  ‘You probably won’t read anything as good this year.’

  Marie Claire

  ‘Carson possesses a wonderful gift not given to the ordinary mass of men. He can summon the freshest of colours from behind cobwebs.When he is gripped by some parenthetical thought or impulse, he casts off its brackets and lays it down in open, fluid integration.’

  Observer

  ‘What we are given here is autobiography in the present tense, a stream of consciousness and remembrance where the past is present in the act of writing. The result is wonderfully vivid and eclectic.’

  Glasgow Herald

  ‘Dazzlingly written, with verve, wit, and exacting powers of description and recall, it’s the highly unconventional autobiography of one of Northern Ireland’s very best poets.’

  Publishing News

  ‘An idiosyncratic, strange, mazy book to challenge notions of structural decorum, and offering the steps to a dance that, though wild enough, is in the end a critique of chaos.’

  Sebastian Barry, The Times

  ‘Carson is a poet and the language never ceases to delight, but most pleasing of all is the vision of Belfast that emerges, as personally recreated as Joyce’s Dublin.’

  Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times

  ‘Through autobiography, reportage and a feast of other elements, Carson presents the divided city as a metaphor for human uncertainty and hope, with the decaying landscape frequently a source of poetic beauty. The prose is often rapturously inventive.’

  New Scientist

  ‘What a stylist he is! …An astoundingly rich book, leaping with love and scholarship.’

  Brian Case, Time Out

  ‘Ciaran Carson’s The Star Factory is a collection of evocations and sketches of Belfast: not a social history, but a book of snapshots… Every theme that might be a matter of lives and deaths is resolved in a photograph, a personality, an anecdote, an etymological diversion.’

  Denis Donoghue, London Review of Books

  THE STAR FACTORY

  Also by Ciaran Carson

  The New Estate and Other Poems

  Belfast Confetti

  The Irish for No

  The Twelfth of Never

  First Language

  Opera et Cetera

  The Pocket Guide to Irish Traditional Music

  Last Night’s Fun

  Inferno

  THE

  STAR

  FACTORY

  CIARAN CARSON

  AN APOLLO BOOK

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in Great Britain by Granta Books 1997

  This paperback edition published in 2019 by Apollo, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © 1997, Ciaran Carson

  Ciaran Carson has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmissions of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (PBO): 9781838933654

  ISBN (E): 9781838933661

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  Acknowledgement

  I am grateful to Tess Gallagher for her many editorial suggestions

  CONTENTS

  Praise for THE STAR FACTORY

  Also by Ciaran Carson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Acknowledgement

  Publisher’s Note

  RAGLAN STREET

  FROM ABBEY ROAD TO ZETLAND STREET

  THE MODEL SHOP

  MOORELAND

  THE GENERAL POST OFFICE

  MILLTOWN CEMETERY

  THE BUNAGLOW

  THE TITANIC

  THE STAR FACTORY I

  THE FRONTIER SENTINEL

  THE NEW OXFORD BILLIARD HALLS

  THE GREAT NORTHERN RAILWAY

  OWENVARRAGH

  RADIO ULSTER

  BALACLAVA STREET

  THE ULSTER CINEMATOGRAPH THEATRES

  O’NEILL STREET

  WHITE STAR STREET

  THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY REDEEMER

  ELECTRIC STREET

  THE CLYDESDALE SUPPLY COMPANY

  LIBRARY STREET

  THE PANORAMIC PHOTOGRAPH COMPANY

  ST PETER’S PRO-CATHEDRAL

  BARRACK STREET I

  BARRACK STREET II

  SMITHFIELD

  BRICKLE BRIDGE

  THE STAR FACTORY II

  MAGNETIC STREET

  THE GLASS FACTORY

  McWATTERS’ BAKERY

  Acknowledgements and Permissions

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  I’m writing this the day after returning from Ciaran Carson’s funeral in Belfast. He had a proper requiem mass, though he wasn’t to my knowledge conventionally religious. It was led by an Indian priest, such is the state of Irish vocations, and was accompanied by traditional Irish music, for flute, voice, fiddle: Last Night’s Fun, The Battle of Aughrim, The Mist Covered Mountain. The singer Pádraigín ní Uallacháin sang a heartbreaking, acapella version of Uirchill na Chreagain, or Creggan Graveyard, a vision of a promised land written by a poet in 18th-century Armagh, then as now a place of tension and loss. At the end of the service Paul Muldoon read, conversationally and carefully, Frost’s After Apple Picking.

  For I have had too much

  Of apple-picking: I am overtired

  Of the great harvest I myself desired.

  Muldoon’s quiet recitation spoke eloquently of friendship – he had known Carson for over forty years – and a shared commitment to an art they both had made their own.

  The cremation took place five miles out on the east side of the city, with more formal ritual, including an entire decade of the rosary, which took me back to my childhood, kneeling miserably on hard linoleum through nightly recitals of the prayer cycle. But then the whole congregation sang the traditional Scottish ballad The Parting Glass and there weren’t many dry eyes in the bleak crematorium chapel:

  But since it falls unto my lot that you should rise and I should not

  I’ll gently go and softly call, goodnight and joy be with yo
u all.

  All the music and the poetry had been chosen by Ciaran in the months before he died. In that time, after he’d been told his lung cancer was terminal, and after a few fallow years, he wrote his last book in a sudden blaze of creativity. Still Life, a set of seventeen meditations on paintings, returns to the long lines and long forms of his great early collections Belfast Confetti and The Irish for No. His poetry publisher Peter Fallon delivered the finished book to his family just after Ciaran died. He had so wanted to read at the launch of the book, which he missed by ten days. At the end he was dreaming aloud, seeing writing on the walls. In those final months he met awkward expressions of sympathy with the words ‘It is what it is’.

  That stoicism and knowledge that the end was coming permeates Still Life:

  A line of blue hills is contoured like a monumental sentence.

  It’s beautiful weather, the 30th March, and tomorrow the clocks go forward.

  How strange it is to be lying here listening to whatever it is is going on.

  The days are getting longer now, however many of them I have left.

  And the pencil I am writing this with, old as it is, will easily outlast their end.

  Peter Fallon, the proprietor, editor, designer, and manager of Gallery Books, who brings so many handsomely produced volumes of Irish poetry into the world, published Ciaran Carson’s poetry for thirty-five years. I was the publisher of his prose for only ten.

  If I can claim a footnote in literary history it may be that I cajoled Ciaran Carson into writing prose books. I had read The Irish for No at the recommendation of Colm Tóibín (the name I drop was not then famous) and the opening lines were enough to make me feel I’d been hit and woken up:

  Horse Boyle was called Horse Boyle because of his brother Mule;

  Though why Mule was called Mule is anybody’s guess. I stayed there once,

  Or rather, I nearly stayed there once. But that’s another story.

  This was not well-bred literary poetry about rural Ireland or marital agony. I discovered that this ribald genius of a city poet had another life as a gifted musician and that he had written a small booklet about Irish music in his capacity as the Traditional Arts Officer of the Irish Arts Council, which was then his day job. That and a few short articles in specialist journals persuaded me that he could write a wonderful book on the subject if he was given his head. I wrote to him and we met in the Crown Bar in Belfast. I’d booked the hottest restaurant in Belfast – this was in 1992, and not a lot of research was needed to find where the local bourgeoisie were eating – but after a couple of pints in the Crown he insisted that I should instead come home to eat with Deirdre and the children. It was a wonderful night, the talk, the food, the music: Ciaran’s flute came out, and I think Deirdre played her fiddle. I know we drank a lot, we talked so much and I am no great talker, but I had the time of my life.

  The book that Ciaran wrote in response to this commission, this badgering, is a mesmerising book about the making of music and may be the best book in any genre I’ve ever published. Last Night’s Fun happens to be about Irish music, but it’s about the joy of improvisation and the craft of any musical tradition and the business of drink and food and travelling that is a central part of musical life, even in elite orchestras. If you love African-American jazz, as I do, it speaks across the Atlantic and across cultures. It’s about music that can vanish on the air, gifted musicians and performances that were only recorded in evanescent fragments. The first chapter opens with the frying of an Ulster breakfast after a good night performing in some County Antrim pub and flows into a meditation on an accordion player called Joe Cooley, of whose performances there are a few fugitive recordings in lo-fi mono and who is remembered now by a single posthumous album released in 1975. Ciaran described it as ‘one of the best recordings of Irish traditional music ever made’. Cooley came back from America before he died and toured for a while in the West of Ireland, where he was caught on tape a few times playing and speaking. Rereading that chapter this afternoon I am reminded that Cooley died of lung cancer in 1973, and wonder if he, like Ciaran, smoked rollups for most of his life.

  Loyalty in publishing is a fickle thing, difficult to sustain if you are an editor who isn’t the proprietor of his own company. I moved to Granta in 1996, where I had a very benign and intelligent proprietor, Rea Hederman, who trusted me and allowed me to trust my instincts, which on the whole earned enough to justify his faith in me. At Granta I published Carson’s The Star Factory and its successors, Shamrock Tea and Fishing for Amber, and his translation of Dante’s Inferno, a salty, colloquial version jammed with Hiberno-English idioms, which has established itself as one of the finest attempts on that epic ever made in English.

  When I moved to Faber – I had a young family by then, and responsibility for an independent company’s list was becoming a strain – that creative association with Ciaran came to a juddering halt. A revered literary institution can go through phases of regression, and Faber had turned a new page and drifted a very long way from the open and inquisitive modernism of its founding editor.The lack of comprehension of Carson’s work, of any idea that its refusal of boundaries and categories might be worth embracing, was dispiriting. It carried the stigma of not being like anything else. I was given a free hand with more conventional forms of non-fiction, but there was no place for Ciaran Carson’s prose at Faber. The guilt I felt at being forced to drop him was corrosive.

  *

  The Star Factory, the first of a sequence of indefinable books, is not a predictable memoir, nor a survey of a city, but it is most certainly about ‘the ongoing, fractious epic that is Belfast’, and it is very much about Ciaran Carson’s life. It is a homage to a city of dying crafts and trades, and to the small histories and places being slowly obliterated by a changing economy and the literal violence of car bombs and forced expulsions and security barriers. It is also an act of rescue, of trams, mills, shipyards, rural fields on the city margins, postmen (like Ciaran’s Irish and Esperanto-speaking father) on their walks, of obsessive, exalted lists – of the components of a steam locomotive, the iron and glass and wood of the demolished Great Northern Railway Station, the names of shops, techniques, funerary monuments, children’s games, model aircraft, of the precise Piranesian look and feel of the scaffolding and machinery on a building site, of the shrubs in the undergrowth on waste land that formed the border between a Catholic and a Protestant estate. There’s a precise description of the complicated logistics of a traditional pre-funeral wake in a small terraced house.

  Ciaran always had a certain taxonomic mania about him, loving to discover how things work and the names of their parts, and he was a collector: of watches, maps, pens, books and much more. Towards the end of his life he acquired elegant suits, and he was laid out wearing one of them in the front room where he wrote almost all his work.

  *

  The Star Factory is full of lyrical memorials to his childhood and the family to which he was so close, and to growing up in a city of industries that had mostly vanished by the time the book was published in 1997. The greatest of them all, the shipyard of Harland and Wolf, and its last few dozen workers, was saved from final closure a few weeks before he died, the yard’s huge yellow-painted crane surviving like the lintel of a vast city gate and in countless miniature copies of itself sold to the tourists who come to Belfast for the ‘experiences’ of the Titanic and Game of Thrones.

  The Star Factory is unavoidably about a city marked by invisible frontiers, dangerous turnings, unspoken fears and a lurking kind of segregation. But those divisions and hatreds seem, in the book at least, manageable and latent in that period of the fifties and sixties, part of an urban labyrinth through which an exceptionally imaginative child could wander. Belfast is a dream city, partaking of the magic of the first films that Ciaran ever saw, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Wizard of Oz, though it is also the nightmarish city of Odd Man Out, where Carol Reed set his delirious film of a doomed man tryin
g to escape after a botched robbery. After 1969 all that wandering became more and more unthinkable, as a less than alert night-time stroll home from a city centre pub like the Crown could be fatal, the wrong heading east or west a signal of communal allegiance to men cruising for revenge.

  Yet Ciaran stayed in the city and from his house in North Belfast he wrote some of the best poetry to come out of Ireland since the death of Yeats. Seamus Heaney knew what he was doing when he anointed Carson as the first chair of the Queens University centre that bears his name: keep your friends close, your peers closer.

  In Last Night’s Fun, Ciaran quotes the accordionist Tony McMahon, who produced Joe Cooley’s only album, writing about the last tune on the disc, ‘The Sailor on the Rock’: ‘when you play this track, listen between the notes for the great heart that was in this man’s music.’ Read this book and Carson’s other work, and hear a very great heart.

  Neil Belton, Publisher

  October 2019

  RAGLAN STREET

  It is cold and dark, and I am standing facing my father, who is seated on the ‘throne’ of the outhouse. I am the age where our heads are level with each other. I am there because I did not want his call of nature to interrupt the story he’d been telling me. So he continues, phrasing it between puffs of smoke; and the red glow of his cigarette-end, as he draws on it, illuminates his face sporadically. Brief looks of dialogue are exchanged before we vanish again, overtaken by the realm of his voice, which extends beyond the cramped dimensions of the outhouse into the space of memory and narrative. As the words unreel from him, his cigarette becomes a visual aid, and its animated lipstick blip draws time-lapse squiggles on the 3-D blackboard dark; or, as a continuo between these imaginary pictures, he makes curvy waves of possibility which punctuate or illustrate the story’s rhythm and its tendency to gather into ornate runs and turns. I see it like some instant-recall hologram in all its cursive loops and spirals of DNA red neon. The writing fades as instantly as it is written, but our too-slow brains retain its after-image on our retinas, just as the words of the beginning or a middle section linger on throughout the predetermined narrative: predetermined, yet always new, because each telling of the story is rehearsal, and gains different subtleties of emphasis each time round – the cistern whispering, for example, at some appropriate Cold War moment, or the Niagarous flushing which signals the end of an important episode, where the hero falls into a waterfall.