Shestories

In bed-and-breakfasts across Ireland, Nuala O’Faolain would meet women who ” throw sugar on the fire, to get it to light, and wipe surfaces with an old rag that smells, and they are forever sending children to the shops.” Then they would turn and question O’Faolain: “And did you never want to get married yourself?” For any one who has stayed in those same bed-and-breakfasts and has the desire to move from the guest’s sitting room into the family’s kitchen, O’Faolains‘ memoir Are You Somebody? is just the ticket.

Yes, it is a sad story. Born the second of nine neglected children to an alcoholic mother and a philandering father, Nuala’s refuge was the word. In fact, when she was asked to list the most important events of her life, being born came up as number one, and learning to read was number two. She read her way through a scholarship to University College, Dublin, followed by another scholarship in Medieval English at the University of Hull in England, followed by another which took her to Oxford. Along the way, Nuala rubs elbows with Philip Larkin, John Berger, Kingsley Amis, Seamus Heaney, J.B. Preistley, among others. You may be wondering where the sad comes in.

Nuala O’Faolain is a woman who came of age in the early 60′s in Ireland. Caught between the emerging woman’s movement and a country that outlawed divorce, Nuala struggled. After spending the night with her lover at one ill-reputed boardinghouse in the suburbs of Dublin, a carload of Catholic vigilantes crawled beside her as she walked towards the bus stop. Irish girls just didn’t do this sort of thing. Nuala did it a lot. In fact, at times she comes across as the Irish version of Moll Flanders. Until she paused to write an introduction to a collection of her columns from the Irish Times, Nuala had never stood back and taken a good look at herself. The Irish Times readers knew her as an opinion columnist with a confident voice; daughter of a well-known Irish journalist, Terry O’Sullivan. However, Nuala realizes “My private life was solitary. My private voice was apologetic…I had no lover, no child.”

In her memoir she comes to terms with her private life and her apologetic voice.

This book is not a sentimental portrayal of an Irish woman. It is not rich in the Irish English idiom, as we get from the likes of Frank McCourt. Are You Somebody will not will not make you run to your travel agent and purchase a one-way ticket to Dublin. However, in the reading of this book you come to know her and her Ireland, which in the end, she holds very close to her heart.

She closes her memoir walking the Burren, a lonely stretch of land in the west of Ireland, alone on Christmas Day. She never explains why she is there alone on that day of all days. Nuala O’Faolain does not have to. If you read this heartfelt memoir, you will understand her solitary soul, and you will walk with her.

So many of the stories which come to us out of Ireland are, quite simply, sad. From Joyce’s “The Dead” to McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, we read of people who are, if not figuratively, then literally, impoverished. It is a lovely surprise, then, to come across Twenty Years A-Growing by Maurice O’Sullivan. In this memoir of his childhood and coming of age on the Great Blasket Island off the Southwest coast of Ireland, the only reason a reader might be inclined to put the book down is to board the jet to go there.

Shortly after his birth in 1904, O’Sullivan’s mother died. His father, unable to care for the infant, places him in an orphanage on the mainland until he is six years of age. Upon O’Sullivan’s return to his island home, the child begins to learn not only his way around the small island he now calls home but also the Irish language itself. His account of his next fourteen years circles around days of fishing, hunting,and general boyhood mischief. But O’Sullivan writes just as the Irish storyteller, or shanachie, speaks, having acquired this rare gift while growing up at his grandfather’s side. The reader sits, as Maurice does, as a young boy at his grandfather’s hearth for the first time and listens to the old man sing a song in Irish to a hushed room. Along with Maurice, we go out on a dark Halloween night to hunt puffins on a treacherous cliff ledge, listening in the moonlight to the huge rollers coming in from the Atlantic and crashing into the wall of rock. And we leap with joy at the schoolmaster’s announcement that there has been yet another shipwreck and take off across the hills “leaping with delight” to claim what bounty we might. The shanachie’s craft of putting the listener right into the story is Maurice O’Sullivan’s own.

What sets this apart from other Irish stories is that this memoir was written in Irish and then painstakingly translated by Moya Davies and George Thomson for the English reader. This work is a piece of creative non-fiction which is an extended example of “crack”, which in the Irish idiom means entertaining conversation. A Blasket Islander would compliment someone’s abilities at crack by remarking that “He is very good at shortening the road.” Interesting turns of phrase are found on every page in Twenty Years A-Growing. For example, when exhausted from one of his late night romps around the island and asked if he wants to go to bed, O’Sullivan proclaims “I wanted no more than the wind of the word, for I was blind with sleep.”

The importance of this book, however, goes much further than a simple good read with interesting language. The last 23 inhabitants of the island, which was once home to over 300, were relocated to the mainland in 1953. Massive immigration had left only a dwindling number of elderly residents who could not be cared for properly on the island. Blasket Islanders are no more. All that remains of the vibrant little village O’Sullivan describes in such detail are its ruins. Twenty Years A-Growing , O’Sullivan’s only piece of published work, gives us a picture of a way of village life in Ireland that is no more.

But while it was there, for O’Sullivan, there was more joy than sadness in it. There was no poverty on the island; in fact, the Irish language, which was spoken exclusively on the the Blaskets, does not even have a word for poverty. The Irish islanders “would never let anyone want here.” The author leaves the island himself to become a policeman on the mainland, but he returns for a visit two years after his departure, and he takes the reader back with him. In this way, he closes his memoir with the scene as he opens the door to his father’s house one more time.

“When I returned home the lamps were being lit in the houses. I went in. My father and grandfather were sitting on either side of the fire, my grandfather smoking his old pipe.”

They will always be there, just like that, for O’Sullivan, who has told his story so well that these people will remain equally embedded in his readers’ minds.

Every New Year’s, I resolve to read more.  With the new millennium, I was particularly determined, so I started a reading list; not a list of books to read, but a list of books read. I bought a lined journal at Barnes & Noble, and being a methodical person, I proceeded through the alphabet. I first read Austin, Pride and Prejudice, and then Buck, Come My Beloved, Cooper, The Pioneers, Dreiser, An American Tragedy….you get the idea.  When I finished one, I would return to the quiet stacks in the public library  where I had picked up Dreiser and move down the shelf to the writers’ whose names began with E. Oh,  Elliot —what a lovely surprise….I’d forgotten all about her!  ….. and I went home with Adam Bede.  So, being this avid reader, I have been reading about Kindles and talking it over with my husband. Do I want one or not? Maybe…maybe not….but maybe and if so, maybe for Christmas.  Maybe.

But back to my reading list. In 2009, I began working on the Modern Library List which I stumbled upon  on the internet. The Modern Library actually has two lists; one was created by the board, and the second by readers. When I first printed them out, I (methodically) checked each book I had already read, realizing that I had already read about a third of the books listed. Each one I had checked  is one of those books I have never forgotten. ….Forster’s Howards End, Wharton’s Age of Innocence,  Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany, Fowles’ The Magus….to name a few.

So last week on my lunch break  I walked over to library on the campus where I teach to pick up a copy of The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder – a work which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 and is , impressively, on both the board’s and the reader’s list. I had no idea how large or small it would be – would it be another a Magus or  A Turn of The Screw ? – as I made my way to the even-quieter-now stacks and walked slowly past my old familiar friends who reside around PS 3545 neighborhood. There it was – a little yellowed paperback nestled between Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth. The edition my campus library offered is from The Pocket Library, which published it in 1959 and originally sold for 35 cents. I had to handle it very carefully, as the first two pages are already separated from the binding…but I understand this as I am also in my fifties and need to be handled rather carefully.  I loved how this fragile little yellowed paperback felt  in my hands.

I also loved reading it; three pages into I realized I had to slow down. Mr. Wilder writes sentences like this:  She was one of those persons who have allowed their lives to be gnawed away because they have fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of civilization. Sentences like this must be lingered over and then the idea presented needs to be considered and assessed. This remarkable writer also sporadically injects ideas like this: The Marquesa would even have been astonished to learn that her letters were very good, for such authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds and those productions which seem remarkable to us are little better than a day’s routine to them. I stop, reread, and grin for I imagine that Thornton just winked at me, his reader,  and had a little laugh at  himself.

My love of reading is a combination of things. To be perfectly honest, the going and getting the book for free at a library has a great appeal to me.  Due to my preference for the older writers, the books I seek are usually right on the stacks waiting for me.  And I am quite certain that I would not find anything as  intellectually challenging as Mr. Wilder’s story about the five people who met their maker on the Bridge at San Luis Rey on a current bestseller list. The  little book itself with its yellowed pages,  deteriorating binding,  and pocket size, gives it character – similar to stepping into  a house with  half a century behind it  versus one that has only just been built.

So I think – clearly –  I am not a candidate for a Kindle. Not yet , anyways. But I must go now –to return The Bridge at San Luis Rey and pick up a copy of Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas.