New Ways to Kill Your Mother

by Colm Toibin

  You were running for office, or running the country. Ah, yes. But it denies something at the heart of life. At the heart of families, of countries, of political parties even. If that slight signal [that the child in need gives out] is not attended to, there is really no family, party or country. Because the oldest law on earth has been violated.

  Thus Barry subtly works the connection between a man who calls himself ‘the father of the nation’ and the domestic father, insisting on the failure of the latter as a poison that infects the nation. But he is also using elements in the career and personality of Charles Haughey as a metaphor for what is essentially a private ache. This might seem, as it did to some of the Abbey audience at the discussion, a sort of confusing battle between private and public, an invasion of Haughey’s privacy and the privacy of his wife and children, a distortion of the facts for mere artistic purposes, a dishonest and misleading play on public affairs while all the time masking a personal, private pain. Many of these accusations that were made about the play missed the point, which is that all fiction comes from a direct source and makes its way indirectly to the page or the stage. It does so by finding metaphors, by building screens, by working on half truths, moulding them towards a form that is both pure and impure fabrication. There is simply no other way of doing it. Most plays, novels and stories use the same stealthy process. Barry, by stealing Haughey, simply exposed an age-old system. Fiction, by its very nature, is a form of deceit. Hinterland inhabits beautifully and controversially the interstices between the world as we know it, raw and shapeless, and the world as imagined, tested richly and suggestively by private and hidden experience.

  Roddy Doyle and Hugo Hamilton: The Dialect of the Tribe

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  It seemed beyond belief that our neighbour Seamus Doyle, who tended roses, and his wife, Gretta, who went to Mass every day, had once led a revolution, that he had been sentenced to death by the British, and that she had, with two other women, raised the Tricolour, the Irish flag, over one of the main buildings of the southern town of Enniscorthy in the 1916 Rising. It seemed even more astonishing that Marion Stokes had been one of the other flag-raisers; she came to our house every evening during Easter Week 1966 to watch a drama on television about the events of fifty years earlier.

  She was the least likely ex-terrorist you could imagine, polite and sedate and distantly smiling. My uncle, who fought in the subsequent War of Independence and went on a hunger strike in prison during the Irish Civil War, also gave not a hint in his manners and his attitudes that he had, when he was young, taken on the might of the British Empire in pursuit of a dream that those around him viewed as foolish and fanatical.

  The third woman who put up the flag in the town in 1916, Una Bolger, was married to Robert Brennan, one of the leaders of the Rising; he later became Irish ambassador to Washington and a close associate of Eamon de Valera. (Their daughter was the novelist and short-story writer Maeve Brennan, who wrote for the New Yorker for many years.) Una’s brother Jim Bolger, also involved in the struggle against the British, was Roddy Doyle’s grandfather, the father of Ita, who tells her story and that of her family in Rory & Ita, which Doyle edited for his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.

  The story of the revolutionary generation in Ireland remains complex and powerful and difficult to tell. My uncle, who died in 1995, confined himself to chance remarks and jokes on these matters; I have no memory of our neighbours, who took part in the Rising, discussing their years as revolutionaries in private conversations. They were quiet and conservative people; their years of living dangerously made them grumpy, it seemed to me, rather than garrulous. But since the IRA ceasefires of the late 1990s, the commemoration of what happened has become easier now that the events are not re-enacted in Northern Ireland on a daily basis. When the Enniscorthy Echo, the local newspaper, celebrated its centenary, it produced a supplement with articles proudly stating that it was ‘once a hive of nationalists’, printing a photograph of Robert Brennan in paramilitary uniform, his wife standing behind him, and articles about Jim Bolger’s arrest for sedition in 1915 and my uncle’s hunger strike. All three worked for the newspaper, which, its centenary edition stated proudly, ‘assumed a notorious reputation with the authorities’ in the decade before the creation of the Irish Free State.

  In the 1940s, the Irish government asked those involved in the Rising and the War of Independence to write down their memories, which would be locked away until an indeterminate time in the future. More than seventeen hundred obliged, including Seamus Doyle and Robert Brennan. In March of this year, the archive was opened for the first time to scholars and researchers. Having read a sample of the accounts from Enniscorthy, including the memoirs of Doyle and Brennan, full of flat statement and unadorned prose, I found it fascinating to imagine the conditions under which the statements were written. These men sat down to record their memories in the relative comfort of neutral Ireland, in domestic harmony, in a world about which no one will ever, it seems, need to take further statements to lock away. Seamus Doyle must have walked in from his rose garden and sat quietly at a table in the front room of his semi-detached house to describe a meeting in prison with Patrick Pearse, who had led the 1916 Rising, shortly before Pearse’s execution. ‘He rose quickly when the door was opened and came forward to meet us and shook hands with us. He appeared to be physically exhausted but spiritually exultant … When the soldier was out of the cell Pearse whispered to us, “Hide the arms, they will be wanted later.” We then bid him goodbye.’

  ‘On the inception of the new state,’ Roddy Doyle writes in Rory & Ita, ‘Jim Bolger became a civil servant, at the Department of External Affairs … His first task was to sit outside a room with a gun while the new Minister, Gavan Duffy, was inside the room.’ Ita, Roddy’s mother, remembers that her father ‘never lost the idea of what he had fought for, but he wasn’t a diehard’. By the time she was born in 1925, three years after the foundation of the state, her father was working by day and studying accountancy at night. Roddy Doyle’s father was born in 1923 and was called Rory, the Irish for Roderick, after the patriot Rory O’Connor. O’Connor was one of four leaders, one from each province, taken out and shot a year earlier by the Irish Free State forces in the beginning of a series of reprisals in the Civil War. These executions caused immense bitterness among the opponents, led by Eamon de Valera, of the 1921 treaty with the British, which left the North behind under British control. In 1936 the poet Austin Clarke wrote:

  They are the spit of virtue now,

  Prating of law and honour

  But we remember how they shot

  Rory O’Connor.

  Rory Doyle’s own father, as a member of the IRA, was involved in burning down the Custom House in Dublin in 1921, but did not take part in the Civil War, although two of his brothers fought on opposite sides, one being killed in the war. ‘He couldn’t face up to fighting the men he’d been with; he just couldn’t do it,’ Rory remembers, ‘but he was still close to the Republican fellows who were causing the trouble.’ In 1926 his father joined Fianna Fáil, the party founded by de Valera, which held power in Ireland for much of the time between 1932 and recently.

  Roddy Doyle’s parents, then, being born in the short time after the struggle for independence ended and before the revolutionaries began to grow roses, are Irish versions of midnight’s children. Doyle has attempted to write a book about a most elusive subject, using their two voices; he has attempted to evoke ordinary life in peacetime amounting in its modest way to happiness. He has kept the revolution and its spirit in the background, placing instead his parents’ courtship, marriage, the raising of their children, their domestic life in the foreground. He has also attempted to capture their particular tone, interrupting merely to explain a small matter or move the story on, but never to argue with them. He is interested in the detail of things; the book is full of proper names, brand names, precise memories, simple anecdotes.

  He is concerned to dramatize a numb
er of subjects uncommon in Irish writing, including his own previous work – niceness, decency, love, harmony, gentleness, kindness, prosperity, gentility. Thus cooking and going to work in the morning, acquiring a first refrigerator or a first washing machine, the buying of a dress or a suit, the going to a dance or visiting friends, in all their mundane detail, are central events in the book, are allowed the space normally reserved for bitterness and violence in Irish books. This move into sweetness may arise partly from the genuine affection that Doyle feels for his parents, but it also comes from the sort of politics that has been central to his work from the beginning.

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  In November 1979, two months after the Pope’s visit to Ireland, Roddy Doyle, aged twenty, first came to public attention. He wrote an article for the magazine In Dublin stating that the Virgin Mary, who had appeared at Knock in the west of Ireland one hundred years earlier, had thereafter travelled to Dublin where she had, he was sure, given birth to Patrick Pearse, whose centenary we were also celebrating. The delay of two months between the two events, Doyle explained, was due only to the bad state of the roads at the time. Doyle’s remarks, funny and bitterly irreverent in a time of great piety, made him something of a hero for those of us who worked for the magazine. His status was much enhanced when he was denounced soon afterwards by the Irish-language magazine Inniu, which pointed out that there were countries in the world who knew how to deal with such blasphemies. Clearly they meant Iran, since the Ayatollah and his punishments were in the news every day. Doyle had taken a cheeky swipe at Knock, the very shrine the Pope had visited, and at one of the martyred icons of Irish nationalism at the same time.

  A year or two later, when the IRA hunger strikes were causing an upsurge of sympathy for the movement and its martyrs, someone told me that Roddy Doyle was writing a comic novel called Your Granny’s a Hunger Striker. Although brought up in the bosom of the Fianna Fáil party and the Catholic Church, I looked forward to the novel. Like many of our generation, I had had my fill of Irish piety and wished only for jokes on these matters. This was, perhaps, one of the rights for which the earlier generation had fought, and one of the inevitable consequences of their struggle, even if it did not seem like that at the time.

  Your Granny’s a Hunger Striker was never published, but in 1987 Doyle’s novel The Commitments appeared, followed by The Snapper (1990), The Van (1991), Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) and The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996). The novels, and the movies that were made from some of them, were original in their tone, fast-moving, sharp, irreverent. They also became, in the images they created of Dublin, immensely influential.

  The city of Dublin has always stood apart from the Irish nation. When Roddy Doyle’s great-uncle, Robert Brennan, heard in prison about the extent of the 1916 Rising in Dublin, his informant told him: ‘Dublin was grand. No longer shall we hear [the] jibe about the city of “bellowing slaves and genteel dastards”.’ By the time Rory, Roddy Doyle’s father, began his apprenticeship as a printer twenty-five years later, working with men from Dublin city, however, the city seemed to have returned to its old self. ‘It was an eye-opener for me, like being in a different country. The philosophy was profoundly anti-Republican, anti-Gaelic, almost anti-Irish. As far as they were concerned, they were Dublin men, not Irish. They bought and read English newspapers … They spoke of nothing but soccer, all the Dublin and English teams.’

  This, then, was the world in which Rory’s son set his novels, a world in which there was no mention of the struggle for independence or its legacy, and no mention of the conflict in Northern Ireland, at its most intense in the years the novels were published, and no mention of the Catholic Church. It was a world stripped of the props that readers most associated with Ireland, and filled instead with rock ‘n’ roll, much wit and shouting, and sex and swearing and soccer. It could have been Liverpool or Birmingham or Manchester, except for something absolutely central to it, which was the spirit of the city, which everyone who knew Dublin recognized. Making this image of the city popular, almost official, as Doyle did in these years, was a seriously political project in a country whose self-image was rural and Catholic and conservative and nationalist. In doing this, Doyle came in a distinguished line of Irish novelists who sought to reinvent Ireland, from Joyce, who placed a Jewish hero in his irreverent capital city in Ulysses in 1922, to John Banville, who made Irish history into a great burlesque and a set of comic sequences in Birchwood fifty years later. The novelists sought to reassemble the nation.

  In 1999, in his novel A Star Called Henry, Roddy Doyle came to deal for the first time with the nationalism of his grandparents and the heritage and history that provide the background to Rory & Ita; he made an effort to apply his comic skills to the lives of his grandparents. Henry, his hero, who plays a crucial part in most events in Irish history, is also a Dubliner who comes in contact with the members of the nationalist movement:

  They hated anyone or anything from Dublin. Dublin was too close to England; it was where the orders and cruelty came from … Ireland was everywhere west of Dublin, the real people were west, west, west, as far west as possible, on the islands, the rocks off the islands, speaking Irish and eating wool … they were more Irish than I was; they were nearer to being the pure thing.

  Rory & Ita quietly and subtly dramatizes the lure of this Dublin life and its softening effect on the nationalists who settled in the city after independence. Rory did not join the Fianna Fáil party because of his nationalist sympathies; he said he

  became involved in Fianna Fáil because I was born into Fianna Fáil. I never joined; I was born into it. I never joined and I never left. My father was one of the Republicans who followed de Valera when he founded the party in 1926 … Anyone who belongs to Fianna Fáil, just look at them; they don’t need a card – they are who they are.

  Fianna Fáil has managed since 1926 to be many things to many people. It soaked up nationalist energies, diverted the old brigade from fighting wars into fighting elections. In theory, it sought to restore Gaelic as the national language, to reunify Ireland, and to represent the lower middle class and the small farmers, but slowly it put most of its energy into staying in power. It began to represent big business and corruption. It managed to offer allegiance to both Brussels and Boston. My father, who was a staunch member, having also been ‘born into it’, always said that if you voted for the opposition, your right hand would wither away. He too believed that you could tell a Fianna Fáil person by looking at them. He, like Rory, put enormous energy into election campaigns and derived great pleasure from winning them. ‘Election campaigns are highly emotional – soaring adrenaline and non-stop hard work,’ Rory says. In 1977 Rory set about organizing the campaign to replace Conor Cruise O’Brien, who was a Labour member of the Irish parliament, with a Fianna Fáil candidate. ‘I’m sure he was a charming man to meet, but I never did meet him, and we took his seat,’ he says.

  Rory manages to be charming also, and mild-mannered and funny. Like many other ordinary members of Fianna Fáil, he embodies a certain low-key decency, excited by local rivalry as much as large ideologies, lacking zealotry. These are the very qualities that made the party very difficult to unseat. Even those of us who, despite being ‘born into the party’, loathe its politics, find it hard to dislike its actual members. This makes killing your Fianna Fáil father a rather onerous task; Roddy Doyle has been wise, perhaps, to try to do it to his with kindness.

  Despite Fianna Fáil’s interest in restoring Gaelic as the national language, neither Rory nor Ita took the matter too seriously. When Rory bought a new suit of Donegal tweed he wondered if he might be mistaken ‘for one of those Gaelic League people who went around talking Irish out loud. I wasn’t talking Irish out loud but I was going around in this lovely suit, and enjoying myself.’ So too Ita and her friends, when they were ignored at an Irish traditional dance, ‘ended up dancing with each other and more or less jeering and sneering at the Irish zealots around us’.

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  The father of the writer Hugo Hamilton also went around in the same streets and attended the same dances during the same years as Rory and Ita. But he did so, his son tells us in The Speckled People, ‘talking Irish out loud’ and becoming one of the ‘Irish zealots’ sneered at by Ita. Unlike the Doyles, who brought merely their deep affections and modest ambitions into the domestic sphere, Hamilton’s father in The Speckled People carried his politics into the house, burdened his family with his fierce views on Ireland, and made the home into a state under siege.

  Hugo Hamilton, who was born in 1953, published his first three novels in the early 1990s. They were set in Germany, where his mother came from, and dealt with the large subjects of history and treachery and memory. The tone was stylish and restrained and ironic, the drama subtle. It was as though his own upbringing in the Dublin middle-class suburbs in the years when nothing happened did not seem in itself worthy of his attention, being too quiet and settled, too contented perhaps to be useful to a novelist interested in large historical and political subjects. His two subsequent novels, set in the Dublin underworld, served to confirm that his own comfortable background did not offer him material for fiction.

  A happy childhood may make good citizens, but it is not a help for those of us facing a blank page. In 1996 Hamilton published a story, seven pages long, called ‘Nazi Christmas’ in a collection called Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow. It told a story that was so unbelievable that it could not have been made up. The three Dublin children in the story with a German mother are harassed by their neighbours. ‘It began with the man in the fish shop saying “Achtung!” and all the customers turning around to look at us.’ As the family in the story appear in public: ‘There was something about us that made people laugh, or whisper, or stop along the street quite openly to ask the most bizarre questions; something that stuck to us like an electronic tag.’ Soon the children are attacked and beaten up.