The Crying of the Wind: Ireland

by Ithell Colquhoun

The British surrealist painter and writer Ithell Colquhoun recalls episodes from her travels in Ireland as a young woman turning her back on the modern world and setting out across the unruly Irish countryside. Here, among the holy wells, monasteries and tumuli, she finds a canvas on which her sensibility and animist beliefs can freely express themselves. Her style is beguiling, her voice sincere, and through her unique perceptions we discover a land that is fiercely alive and compelling. It is a place where the wind cries, the stones tell old tales and the mountains watch over the roads and those who travel on them. By intuiting the eerie magic of Ireland, Colquhoun casts her own spell. She offers up a land of myth and legend, stripped of its modern signs, at the same time offering herself to the reader in this portrait of the artist as a young woman.

Genres: Travel, Nonfiction, Literature, History

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

About the author

British surrealist painter and occult author, and the only significant biographer of S.L. MacGregor Mathers.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

An invitation to finding the unexpected, arcane, mysterious in landscape and history. The U.S. tends to have fewer lasting or non-effaced marks of pre-christian culture, but reading Colquhoun's travel writing can subtly shift your relationship to any place, I think. This was probably written more as a personal journal, thus is even more unstructured and rambling than The Living Stones: Cornwall, so it's hard to claim as anything as useful (i.e. utilitarian) as a general guidebook, but if you know Colquhoun's work or enjoy rambling across Celtic landscapes with a great surrealist/occultist as guide, it's hard not to take great pleasure in both. It's worth noting that Colquhoun isn't exactly superstitious, or credulous, she just holds herself in an admirable state of openness. To myth, to mystery, to possibility. But not without a cynicism toward conventional or religious interpretation. Possibly the strangest passages concern barely-perceptible presences she and local legend attach to certain landscapes, but she never tries to pin them down or over-resolve them into something bland or laughable.

Our life to them is alien and disturbing, and they will protect themselves from it if need be, but their natural attitude is unconcern rather than hostility. They follow their own unthinkable life, mobile to some extent, yet rooted by impalpable threads to to some piece of earth as yet uncontaminated by urban enclosure, without mind, without emotion, without purpose as we know it. Who can assess their place in the scheme of things - are they relics of some earlier world? They exist, that is all we can say. We share the cosmos with them.

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ithell Colquhoun was a completely new name for me when I spotted this book on NetGalley recently, but I know now that she was a prominent British surrealist painter in the 1930-40s, as well as an occultist, poet and author of both fiction and non-fiction. The Crying of the Wind, originally published in 1955, describes her travels around Ireland and her impressions of the people she meets and places she visits. It’s the first of three travel books she wrote, with a book on Cornwall following in 1957 and then one on Egypt which has never been published.

Colquhoun bases herself near the village of Lucan on the River Liffey, to the west of Dublin. In each chapter, she sets out on a walk or an excursion by car to visit different parts of Ireland, including Glendalough, Connemara and Cashel. The structure seems a bit haphazard, with no real order or pattern to the places she visits, and the book definitely has the feel of a personal journal rather than something you could use to plan out your own travels. It’s an interesting book, though, and I did enjoy reading it. The descriptive writing is beautiful at times, as you would expect from a book written by a painter; here she describes the approach to Connemara’s Twelve Bens mountain range:

Across miles of mulberrydark bogland we drove towards them, the tawny of king ferns lining the ditches that bordered the road. Air of a wonderful transparency arched above us, blue washed with white gold. I did not regret our slow pace, enforced by the pot-holes in the road, since I could watch the mountains from gradually shifting angles.

Although Colquhoun includes some anecdotes about her encounters with Irish people, the way they live and the conversations she has with them, the main focus of her writing is on the beauty of the natural environment and on places of historical interest such as old churches, holy wells and remains of ancient forts and towers. She often laments the rate of progress and its effect on the natural world; when walking in the countryside, she is very aware of the noise of traffic on busy roads nearby and the sights of new housing developments and factory chimneys altering the landscape forever.

With her interest in the occult, Colquhoun spends a lot of time discussing the myths, legends and folklore of each place she visits. She believes in ghosts, spirits and supernatural beings and accepts their existence in a very matter-of-fact way.

Their forms vary; a friend described one she had seen on some downs in Dorsetshire as being ‘the size of a haystack, opaque but fluid at the edges, moving very quickly’; another is sometimes seen like a tower racing over wide sands on the north coast of Cornwall. I have myself seen in Cornwall one like a massive pillar of unknown substance, with filaments stretched from the top seemingly to hold it to the ground like the guy-ropes of a tent.

The Crying of the Wind is an unusual travel book, then, and also a fascinating one. I’ll look forward to reading her Cornwall book, The Living Stones, which is also available in a new edition from Pushkin Press.

[Chris Browning · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times this is hard going because it’s so dense with allusions and images it feels much the same as Goose of Hermogenes: a beautifully written and strange book whose meaning is sometimes deliberately obfuscated by the writer. But there’s magic in this prose, some extraordinary images and vignettes and as the book draws to a close and we get closer to themes Colquhon obviously feels far more passionately about, there’s an extraordinary vividness to the prose. I’ve never been to Ireland but want very much to visit with this book as a companion. A book that I am assured will grow in stature on rereading

[Carlton · Rating 3 out of 5]

In considering my response to this book, I obviously came looking for some echo of a supposedly simpler Irish past. I didn’t find it and would have been better reading Niall Williams’ books set around Faha. However I persevered, and whilst the book remains impressionistic, there are enjoyable passages.

Written in 1954 by an Englishwoman (born in India but returning to England at the age of four) about an Ireland that has now disappeared, I read this as a time travel book, to seek as the over quoted saying goes: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
Ithell Colquhoun writes differently in any case, often flitting from topic to topic from paragraph to paragraph, with little apparent link. I am hoping that this will work impressionistically.

Now over one third of the way through the book and I am finding it no more than a series of episodic descriptions of the daily travels of a visitor, with little effort to engage meaningfully with the residents, other than the “tinkers”.
But I always shrink from examining people on their traditional beliefs, feeling as I do that only long dwelling in and upon such ambience will reveal anything of value. (Page 75)
Although dated in style, I am not appreciating the romanticising of Ireland’s recent, or more distant, past. Maybe I’m just currently unsympathetic towards the mood that the author is striving to create. For example, on ancient monuments (Page 76):
In Cornwall I have always wished to garland the stone circles and offer flowers before crosses so ancient that they seem symbols of resurrection rather than of pain. But, alas, to deck a well there is no longer part of the century’s mind, and, if it is done, it is usually no more than a propagandist revival or antiquarian eccentricity – tolerated, indeed, only because the belief that might once have inspired it has now sunk too far below the surface to influence general action.
In Ireland it is otherwise, for some direct supersensual contact still endures, deeper than anything that can be expressed at rational level and able to formulate itself in traditional observance. A ritual plunge into the cosmic dream, the holy unconscious, is here a possibility yet, though less generally accepted than it once was.

Its datedness can also be gauged by reference to film stars: “Gregory Peck, Marlon Brando or whoever the current favourite of the screen may be.”

Loved the ink line illustrations, and although the few photos are poor resolution, they provide a contemporary view.

So why did I persevere with my reading? Probably because I found the style engaging, despite the lack of straightforward narrative, and the book does illuminate a different time.

[Juniperus · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to go on a bit of a quest to find this book; it isn’t available online anywhere to my knowledge (not even my dubious usual sites!) and physical copies go for upwards of a hundred dollars, but luckily I was able to get a card from my university’s library that allowed me to get another card to check it out from a different university’s library. So a whole lot of hype for a travelogue.

I’ve been on a bit of an Ithell Colquhoun kick lately, to the point that I can actually spell her name without verifying. She is most famous for her visual art, which straddles the line between surrealism and abstraction, and much of her literary work such as her novella The Goose of Hermogenes is rooted in the occult tradition to the point that the rest of the surrealist movement apparently found her annoying and kicked her out. I was curious what take such a mythic individual would have on a relatively mundane genre as the travelogue, and I did find The Crying of the Wind an interesting if a bit jarring read. It is jarring in that most of the book is a typical travelogue, recounting conversations with locals and visits to typical tourist sites such as Glendalough, interspersed with asides about the occult or the fairy realm. Fair, because Ireland as a nation has always embodied contradictions, most notably that between their Pagan past and the Catholic Church (syncretisms not unlike what Gloria Anzaldúa talks about in Mexico)! For example, Colquhoun goes into a detailed dive into the theories behind the fairyland before concluding they are “beings inhabiting a supersensual plane which interpenetrates the universe normally perceptible to human senses.” It feels tongue in cheek, but knowing her, it’s not.

Did I enjoy this occult tour of Ireland? I didn’t find it stunning the way my favorite travel writers such as Joan Didion and Vita Sackville-West can be, but it was certainly an interesting angle. Though well-intentioned, Colquhoun’s colonial British upbringing does show itself, which is perhaps expected for a book published in the 1950s, but there was a surprising amount of portraying the Irish as “noble savages” — in an odd way, this book felt quite orientalist at times. Nevertheless, I think I would enjoy travelling with Ithell, just because the attention she gives the local flora on every page reminds me of how much I geek out about plants whenever I travel.

[Theediscerning · Rating 3 out of 5]

By far the most readable and enjoyable of the three main Colquhoun books, this acts almost as one solitary narrative, a travelogue across Ireland. Starting in Dublin, she and friends soon drive west – towards Galway, and Clare Island, Tuam (almost), the very start of the Croagh Patrick pilgrimage at least, and so on. After a good few chapters of walking, skinny-dipping and driving around, it's back to Dublin, where once again her snobbishness (she cannot do with noisy plumbing, noisy traffic – noise much full stop) gets in the way. She ends, however, with a few more chapters in the more rural areas, as she explores the classic sites of antiquity, Tara, et al.

Someone across the three books said this was almost the most novel-like, showing the descent of the person interested in the travellers' car and the practicalities of Ireland to someone desperately seeking out prehistory, and feeling the seemingly evil spirit of certain places drawing her through the trees. That's so, but this is also more tentatively taking us towards the esoteric, not rushing after the wellsprings of Cornwall as her travel writing from her home there did so eagerly. As such, and because it seems to have been one trip in one fell story (although I have my doubts about that) it's much closer to the standard travel guide, and surely for many people Ireland is a place where you feel the legends and stone tapes and mist-filled memories more than many.

That doesn't make this something to be universally recommended, mind – I think this is evidence to back my opinion up that I'd have thoroughly disliked her and she me. I like the way she got so much writing out of such a remote corner of Ireland – showing that her soil holds much interest and history wherever you dig into it – but this is still certainly not for everyone. Three and a half stars, but certainly no more – and they're probably because of the stone walls and the grasses green, not the actual author.

[Alex Sarll]

A companion volume to The Living Stones, though one I found harder to love. Partly it's just that Ireland in the mid-twentieth century feels more written about than Cornwall, so the decrepit big houses and harried huddles of seminarians can't avoid a certain fug of familiarity. Then too, while the Irish and the Cornish both consider themselves distinct peoples, for the modern, mostly English reader it is undeniably more awkward to read Colquhoun blithely opining on the national characteristics of the Irish, or lamenting the (at this point relatively few) intrusions of modernity on good old days which, all things considered, don't seem to have been terribly good. All of this, too, as a visitor, not the inhabitant she became at Lamorna. But beyond all that, there's the wider sense that, at least through her own idiosyncratic lens, her Ireland was a sadder, tireder, damper place than her Cornwall. Still, once you get her away from musing on the grubbiness and natural grace of tinkers, and into the wilds and the ancient sites, the situation improves significantly. "I am glad not to be an archaeologist, for my lack of status allows me simply to enjoy myself among antiquities. I can interpret them according to my own morphological intuitions without reference to current orthodoxies or deference to any school of thought – even without strict regard to evidence." As in her paintings, it's with this attempt to capture and communicate the vibes she picks up that she soars.

(Edelweiss ARC)

[Haxxunne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of its time yet also timeless
—
Almost autofictional in its melding of the personal, the actual and the speculative, this is Colquhoun at her unfiltered best. The people, the built environment, the landscapes and the biology there are equally important, nature and culture combining to give us access to her very particular world: this is an Ireland equally of its time yet also timeless, the two existing not only side by side but also simultaneously, laid on each other like skeletal leaves, both visible, both distinct. The introduction says that, by the end of her life, Colquhoun’s output was so vast and so dense that it would be too much for any individual ever to take in; but here is a suitable beginning.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been on a bit of an Ithell Colquhoun reading jag recently, and of everything I've read of hers, this is the one I like the most. A snapshot of Ireland in the Nineteen Fifties, this is charming, occasionally very funny and as idiosyncratic as the author herself. It was a real pleasure to read this.

[Melanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The writing is of historical interest, especially if you are a fan of the artwork of Ithell Colquhoun. That being said, it reads a bit like diary entries. It's a short book, and the chapters do show some of Colquhoun's own interests and attitudes, but it's not a great read.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

immersive mix of author's travel experience across post-war Ireland in transition to a more modern world, but still abounding in myth and piseogs