HOW is one to take this book? As an instance of literary scholarship aimed at enriching the field of literary criticism, the pieces gathered here are somewhat problematic. Perhaps the publication is primarily intended as an opportunity for the author to put another feather in his cap.
Prof Jeffares begins his Introduction with the remark: "I grew up in a city of talkers and self dramatisers." Well, at the risk of seeming invidious, one might remark that Images of Invention represents an act of self-dramatisation on Professor Jeffares's part. Sixteen of the twenty-two essays collected here were originally published in easily accessible periodicals and books, so that anyone desperate to consult the author on, say, "Swift and the Ireland of His Day", "Goodnatured Goldsmith", "Reading Lever", "Yeats and the Wrong Lever", or even "Yeats's Great Black Ragged Bird" would not have to work themselves into a sweat in order to locate the source in question.
The earliest piece dates from 1972; in fact, most of the articles previously published are pre-1986. In terms of literary findings, this is a considerably long time ago. Oddly enough, the author did not consider it worth his while to update his offerings, therefore he must still regard them as valid. Here one must beg to differ. The publisher must have thought that anything with Professor Jeffares's name on it will sell. He is probably right.
All those who, on the strength of his having addressed The Drapier's Fourth Letter "To the Whole People of Ireland", claim Swift as the first patriotic Irish writer should read "Swift and the Ireland of His Day". They will be shown how contest able the idea is. For to whom was he, as an Anglo-Irish Protestant, referring to as "the Whole People of Ireland"? Most likely not to the Catholic population, nor to the Presbyterians. Two further essays on Swift are offered here for the first time. One focuses on the Dean's poetry, the other on his letters. They merely rehash sufficiently familiar material and are strangely repetitive (for example, each one quotes the same poem to make the same point), as they recount Swift's life through his work.
Also sufficiently familiar, sad to say, are the materials recycled in a number of the pieces that follow: on Farquhar and Goldsmith (whose claim to being Irish writers puts one in mind of the Duke of Wellington's sagacious saying that being born in a stable does not make one a horse), Lady Morgan, Maturing and Lever. Often the tone is chatty, the form slightly too anecdotal, and there is a heavy reliance on the biographied.
The essay on Colonel Robert Torrens is, at least for me, as interesting as watching paint dry. What is it doing in a book about Irish writing? The man was not a writer at all. And what of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt? He was English to the marrow and had little to do with Ireland, apart from having been Lady Gregory's lover and penning Fand of the Fair Cheek (a dramatised episode from the Cuchulain saga) as well as The Land War in Ireland.
Two radio portraits (of George Moore and Somerville and Ross) are somewhat idiosyncratic and may be fun for those who savour the whimsical. Half of "Memories of Maud Gonne" is actually about the Gonne-Yeats letters, which Professor Jeffares has co-edited. "Joyce's Precursors" may be adequate for students at the Joyce Summer School, but represents another rehash job. But at least it is written with wit and zest. The concluding item is a superficial and maundering consideration of "The Realist Novel in Ireland: 1900-1945" that contains a wrong quotation from Eliot's "Burnt Norton".
For the blissfully uninitiated the book may be instructive. But will they be ready to part with £33 for it?
