This is ‘the solid world.’ The Korean War and the Cuban missile crisis are seen as a background only. McGahern has recorded the changes, certainly, in Ireland of the 1950s. The old poorhouse has become the Rest Home for Senior Citizens, the teacher is no longer paid at the back door once a week by the priest’s housekeeper, the ‘strange living light of television’ has replaced, in most homes, the red lamp in front of the Sacred Heart. After the war, when Britain had to be rebuilt, ‘the countryside emptied towards London and Luton.’ Later, the site-workers mostly came back, and headed for overcrowded Dublin. But the problems of education, opportunity, ‘the narrow rule of church and custom’—how far have they been solved? They are all, as McGahern sees them, aspects of the idea of home, which has to be left behind, but can never be got away from.
This, of course, is one of Stephen Dedalus’s most intractable difficulties in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He escapes painfully from the nets of home, as his destiny requires, and McGahern pays a tribute to Joyce in ‘The Recruiting Officer,’ where the Christian Brothers going down to the beach might well be the same ones that Stephen sees, on the same strand at Dollymount. In this story, too, the narrator suffers, like Joyce’s Dubliners, from a paralysis of the will, and (all the more perhaps because he is a teacher) ‘a feeling that any one thing in this life is almost as worth while as any other.’
McGahern’s women, and, above all, his young women, are more enterprising by far than the men and have modernized much more readily. Love between the sexes, however, is more awkwardly treated than the long-standing, sometimes reluctant affection between friend and friend, brother and brother, fathers and sons and even old dogs and their masters. When we love, McGahern says, we know nothing about each other even if we are able to go through the ‘low door’ of submission to each other’s wishes. We assemble love and become absorbed in it, and then ‘wake in terror in the knowledge that all we have built is terminal, that, in our pain, we must undo it again.’
McGahern is a realist who counts every clean shirt and every pint of Guinness but who writes at times, without hesitation, as a poet. This is only possible because of his magnificently courteous attention to English as it is spoken in Ireland. There are no characters in these stories as sinister as the child-beating father in McGahern’s novel The Dark (1965), who sleeps in his son’s bed, or as tragic as the dying mother in The Leavetaking (1974). He has deliberately set himself the task of showing, in everyday incidents, the grief and tension they only just conceal.
Times Literary Supplement, 1992
Fried Nappy
The Van, by Roddy Doyle
This is the third and last of Roddy Doyle’s novels about the Rabbitte family of Barrymount, an unprepossessing council-estate suburb of North Dublin much like Kilbarrack, where Doyle was born himself. Barrymount, although by no means a foul rag-and-bone shop, is a place for dreams to start. In The Commitments young Jimmy Rabbitte decides that Ireland is ready for soul music and gets his group together. Just as there seems to be a chance with a recording company, they desert him one by one. In The Snapper Sharon Rabbitte, drunk in the car park at the Soccer Club Christmas do, gets pregnant by that fucking old eejit Mr Burgess—the father, what’s more, of a friend of hers. Still, the family will help to look after her snapper, and she can always pretend she’s had a night out with a sailor. In The Van Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. is helping to run a fish-and-chip van. It ends up a wreck. All these could be called success stories. What matters is the strength to believe in possibilities. There is hardly any of the bitterness here that the past generates. Barrymount, as Doyle shows it, is not much interested in the What Happened Shite.
The Van is Jimmy Sr.’s book, but since The Snapper he has become a much weaker figure. He is a skilled plasterer, but his firm has let him go. He no longer has a car, hangs about the public library (where they’ve run out of Action Packs for the Unemployed), and fixes things about the house—one at a time, though, to make them last. His relationship with Darren, the youngest son, the clever one, has deteriorated. When he tells the argumentative Darren not to forget who paid for the dinner that’s in front of him, Darren answers: ‘I know who paid for it. The State.’ But Darren wishes he had not said this.
Jimmy Sr.’s tools are not likely to be needed again.
Jimmy Sr. had a mug for work that he’d had for years; he still had it. It was a big plain white one, no cracks, no stupid slogans. He put two teabags in it; used to. My God he’d never forget the taste of the first cup of tea in the morning, usually in a bare room in a new house with muck and dirt everywhere, freezing; fuck me, it was great; it scalded him on the way down; he could feel it all the way. And the taste it left; brilliant; brilliant. He always used two bags, squeezed the bejesus out of them…After a few gulps he’d sip at it and turn around and look at his work…Then he’d gulp down the rest of the tea and get back to it. The mug was outside in the shed, in a bag with his other work stuff. He’d wrapped toilet paper around it.
Jimmy Sr. would normally say ‘jacks paper,’ but not in this passage, where we need to feel his respect for the mug. This surely is what Doyle means when he says he wants to show his characters thinking, rather than himself writing.
He prefers, however, to write largely in dialogue. As a teacher in a Dublin Community School he knows how people talk, but a teacher’s viewpoint is not what he wants. The dialogue is heard in concerted passages, and Doyle has a range of dashes, longer dashes, and exclamation marks that act as a kind of musical notation. The language itself, like James Kelman’s Glaswegian, has its repetitions and limitations, but is subtle when you get to know it. Jimmy Sr. notices at their dinner, when they’re talking about what’s happening these days, that ‘the twins called Thatcher Thatcher and Bush Bush but they called Gorbachev Mr Gorbachev: that said something.’ Tom Paulin has said that Doyle ‘pushes Irish English to wonderful imaginative extremes,’ but doesn’t mean by this quite what you might expect. Doyle is a wordmaster and you have to trust him, and do trust him, as to when the right word is ‘Jaysis’ and when ‘Jesus’ or ‘Good Jayesus,’ and the distinction between Hiyeh, Hiyis, and Howyeh. ‘Fucking’ (which is usually taken to have lost any meaning at all) is an indicator in this novel of character and situation. Veronica, the mother, never uses it, and there is a swearbox on the kitchen table in consideration of Gina, Sharon’s snapper. All agree with this on principle. ‘Bitches,’ says Sharon to her young sisters, ‘if Gina starts usin’ ditty language I’ll kill yiz.’ Jimmy’s great friend Bimbo, a bakery worker, ‘hardly ever said Fuck,’ and this establishes him as what he is, a mild nature, a sensitive. His doorbell plays the first bars of ‘Strangers in the Night,’ although there doesn’t seem much point to it when his house is the ‘exact same’ of all the others in the street and you could hear a knock on the door anywhere in the house.
Bimbo, then, dispenses with Barrymount’s metalanguage, and Jimmy Sr. himself knows there is a time and place for it. On Christmas morning, for instance, he is stuck making conversation with Bimbo’s old mother-in-law.
Maybe she hadn’t said anything. Maybe she couldn’t help it; she couldn’t control her muscles, the ones that held her mouth up.
He heard feet on the path.
—Thank fuck!
It was out before he knew it. And she nodded; she did; she’d heard him; oh Christ!
She couldn’t have. No, she just nodded at the same time, that was all. He hoped.
Doyle takes a risk with the structure of his new book, which is more complex than the other two. It starts in a low key, reflecting Jimmy Sr.’s empty days. About a quarter of the way through, Bimbo, too, is let go by his bakery firm and puts part of his redundancy money into a fish-and-chip van. With no wheels, no brakes, no engine, no water, no electricity, filthy, too, almost beyond purification, the van might stand for the valiant illusions of Barrymount. Neither Bimbo nor Jimmy Sr. knows even how to peel a potato. But they open up for business, and the book’s action gets into gear w
ith demonic scenes of frying and spilling and beating the frozen cod, hard as chipboard, against the rusty freezer. The family lend a hand as the van becomes a kind of fortress under siege. The fellow from the Environmental Health is on their track. Kids try to disconnect the gas canisters. One of Gina’s nappies gets fried in batter (‘it’d look like a piece of cod, folded up,’ says Bimbo to the raving customer). All these splendours and miseries keep pace (the year is 1990) with Ireland’s successes in the World Cup.
The country had gone soccer mad. Oul’ ones were explaining offside to each other…There were no proper dinners being made at all. Half the mammies in Barrymount were watching the afternoon matches…The whole place was living on chips.
Parked outside the Hikers’ Nest for the quarterfinals, the reeking van reaches the height of its earthly glory and Jimmy Sr. takes home £160 on top of the dole. ‘And then they got beaten by the Italians and that was the end of that.’
After this dramatic check comes the third movement of the book. The publishers have accurately described The Van as ‘a tender tale of male friendship, swimming in grease and stained with ketchup’. With the decline of the chipper trade comes a falling-out that we wouldn’t have thought possible. Bimbo—or perhaps it was his wife Maggie, one of those destructive women with a grand head on her shoulders—comes to believe that he’d do better with the van on his own. Jimmy Sr., once again, is let go. Roddy Doyle, however, has an impeccable sense of endings. We last see the two of them by night on the strand at Dollymount, the place where Stephen Dedalus recognized his destiny. They’re knee-deep in the freezing water (‘Jeeesus!!’), shoving drunkenly at the poxy van that has come between them and that, Bimbo confusedly knows, must be committed as a sacrifice to the sea. Even so, ‘You’ll be able to get it when the tide goes out again,’ says Jimmy Sr.
The Commitments has been filmed and the film rights of The Snapper are sold. When they get round to The Van, let’s hope they can find a way of conveying the delicacy of human feeling in this book and, above all, in its last scene.
London Review of Books, 1991
To Remember Is to Forgive
Excursions in the Real World: Memoirs, by William Trevor
What is the real world in which William Trevor is making excursions? Is it County Cork, ‘sunshine and weeds in a garden at Mitchelstown, Civic Guards in the barracks next door, a tarred gate…dark limestone steps in Youghal, and a backyard tap in Skibbereen’? Or (which is not the same thing) is it his memory of these places? And is his fiction more or less unreal than what he calls ‘the bits and pieces of experience’ that lie behind it? Never let it be thought that Mr Trevor, to all appearances the most crystal clear of writers, will make the answers to these questions easy. As he notes in his memoir, Excursions in the Real World, he became aware very early ‘that black and white are densities of more complicated greys.’
He was born William Trevor Cox, in Mitchelstown, in 1928. His family belonged to a minority: the small-town, not-well-off Protestants who were without much of a place in de Valera’s new Catholic Ireland. His father was a bank clerk, so too was his mother, the first ‘lady clerk’ to be employed by the Ulster Bank. The love and hatred between the two are described to their bitter end in the essay called ‘Field of Battle.’ She, perhaps, expected too much from life; he was too undemanding. The father’s job took the family from place to place. ‘Behind the lace curtains that had been altered to fit windows all over the south of Ireland life stumbled on, until it stumbled to a halt.’ The mixture of tenderness and detachment here is entirely characteristic of Mr Trevor.
Cork was the first city he knew and his first idea of an earthly paradise. He writes lyrically about ‘the waitresses with silver-plated teapots and buttered bread and cakes’ at Thompson’s and the Savoy, and above all of his twice-yearly visits to the cinema—‘Clark Gable and Myrna Loy in Too Hot to Handle. Mr Deeds Goes to Town.’ There is irony here, of course, even if it’s of an indulgent kind, but with it comes the recognition of the human need to escape through the imagination: ‘The Gentlemen’s lavatory in the Victoria Hotel had to be seen to be believed, the Munster Arcade left you gasping.’ In much the same way, the dispossessed in Mr Trevor’s fiction (for example, in his recent pair of novellas, Two Lives) console themselves with what they know must be always out of reach.
The essays are more or less in chronological order, though they are memoirs only, not a full-fledged autobiography. After the childhood in County Cork came boarding school in Dublin, a school of which young William and his brother had hoped great things, but which turned out to be ‘a part of hell in which everyone was someone else’s victim.’ In describing a stomach-turning school dinner, Mr Trevor keeps, as always, strictly to the date and period (1941): the greasy, yellowish soup has to be swallowed from tumblers made of Bakelite.
Unassumingly, almost apologetically, he is revisiting his past. His years at Trinity College, for which he makes no great claim, are followed by his first jobs as an assistant teacher in Armagh and as a copywriter in the seedier West End of London. On the whole, he laments change, although we can’t tell quite how seriously, and searches, as most of us do, for evidence that what was once part of him has not perished entirely from the earth. We last see him taking a walk up Ireland’s Nire valley, between the Monavullagh Mountains and the Comeraghs. There he finds, ‘in the chilly air and sheep scratching for nourishment,’ a defiant Nature. ‘You would swear that this Ireland all around you has never been different.’
Mr Trevor also, of course, remembers people. In these marvellous sketches from the life, he feels it necessary to suppress, or at least to keep in order, his genius as a writer of short stories. But, as in the stories, there is a magical sense of time passing, and his own life passing with it, as his perspective alters. His first teachers are preserved as they seemed to him as a little boy. Miss Willoughby, pedalling against the wind on her huge black bicycle, was severe, Evangelical, and unapproachable. Young William was not one of her chosen few. Miss Quirke, a pink-cheeked farm girl from Oola, had a seemingly endless store of knowledge, perhaps from an encyclopedia, and a calm voice. ‘Mathematical subjects were less distasteful than they had been. Even geography had its moments, though admittedly not many.’ But even though he once took the valves out of Miss Willoughby’s bicycle, and tried (quite unsuccessfully) a practical joke on Miss Quirke, he recognized them as beings not quite of this earth. During his time at St Columba’s (the last of his schools) he observed, as a puzzled adolescent, the headmaster’s wife: shy, awkward, and academic, ‘fingers tightly interlocked behind her back when she crept, crablike, into Dining Hall or Chapel.’ Some secret was guessed at, but not discovered until many years later.
In the essay called ‘A Public-House Man’ he is a bewildered trainee copywriter, still somewhat in awe of Marchant Smith, his formidably heavy-drinking boss. ‘Sarzy’ (an essay about Frances Sarzano, a middle-aged, half-Italian waif) takes us on to London’s Soho and Fitzrovia in the late 1950s.
In all these re-creations, Mr Trevor shows an exceptional power of forgiveness. Henry O’Reilly, the farmer who once taught him to snare a rabbit, was known as the laziest man in Ireland, but seemed to him the nicest. Marchant Smith was a ruinous bully, but at least he employed the otherwise unemployable. Sarzy soon became impossible, but she was an innocent, and innocence is a quality Mr Trevor highly prizes.
He tells us in his introduction that from the very beginning he has used anything in his writing that was useful. What has been especially useful to him has been his empathy with the defiantly eccentric, the non-communicators, the old—sometimes left alone while their houses fall to pieces about them—and with all who despair but do not care to admit it. There are moments, too—his greatest to my mind—when (in the novel The Old Boys, for instance, and the story ‘In at the Birth’) he lets himself leave the earth altogether, but these are not the concern of Excursions in the Real World.
This delightful book, which seems so relaxed as to be
almost casual, is in fact a serious confrontation between Mr Trevor and his memory. A writer, he says, must be able to separate himself from his identity as a human being. He must stand back, and that means exile. This is the most important lesson that Stephen Dedalus has to learn in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but Mr Trevor goes even further than Joyce. Stories derive from memories, but they can equally well be memories of anywhere and anyone. ‘Real people and real places,’ he writes of Samuel Beckett, ‘got him going.’ ‘The likeness of Thomas Farrell, stationmaster of that time, is not forgotten…But there is hardly any doubt that in some other place, with different recollections, Beckett would have succeeded as well.’ Here, in his well-mannered, entirely persuasive way, William Trevor is claiming sovereignty for the writer over his source.
New York Times Book Review, 1994
Sunny Side Up
The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields
The Stone Diaries (though there are in fact no diaries, they are said to have been lost) because everyone raised in the Orphans’ Home in Stonewall Township, Manitoba, is given the name of Stone; because Mercy Stone’s husband, Cuyler Goodwill, works in the limestone quarries; because her neighbour, the dour Magnus Flett, comes from the stony Orkneys; because Mrs Flett is killed when she falls against the sharp stone corner of the Bank; because for all of us the living cells will be replaced in death by ‘the insentience of mineral deposition.’ A train of imagery, then, which recalls the mermaid metaphors ‘giving off the fishy perfume of ambiguity’ in Shields’s last novel, The Republic of Love. The present book is just as readable, but more disconcerting.
A House of Air Page 39