Does Ireland’s literary heritage emerge from big families, sibling conflict, cultural discord — or is it fuelled by other elements?
WHAT makes a writer and, in particular, what is it about Ireland that produces so many writers?
The late poet Louise Gluck offered a theory which is the most plausible account I have read of how a child discovers an enthusiasm for writing and cultivating the skill of generating pithy, witty and effective lines.
Her piece was republished in The New Yorker recently.
She grew up, like many of us, in an argumentative family where parents and siblings around her were fond of sounding off but not so good at listening.
Faced with that you have to make your points quicker, shorter and sharper, and even then you don’t get the attention you need, so, at least for your own satisfaction, you write them down.
This theory fits my own development well.
So I conducted a quick survey of writers I know to ask how many siblings they have. My wife Maureen Boyle, a poet, has five.
Pádraig Ó Tuama, has five while Bernie McGill has nine but Wendy Erskine, Stephanie Conn, Byddi Lee, Cauvery Madhavan, Thomas Paul Burgess, Scott McKendry and Rosemary Jenkinson all have just one. That’s the pattern with Niamh McNally and Scott McKendry as well. So most writers that I could contact over the holiday have only one sibling, which doesn’t fit Gluck’s theory at all.
But many Irish writers have written about the clamorous family background in which they couldn’t get their say because they were talked over or shouted down.
It’s there in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where the boy Stephen Dedalus sits subdued and speechless while his father and his friends fulminate about Parnell or the Church.
In John McGahern’s writings we see the overbearing father who brooks no backchat from his bullied children. And such children are obviously going to harbour the responses they’d like to make and vent them elsewhere, whether in a secret diary or in his poetry or stories.
The psychological need to write is often born out of those circumstances.
I like that theory because I grew up in a small house in a family of six children and two parents. All of these people gathered round the dinner table or the fire in the living room were talkers and so much of life was a competition to be heard.
That context produces people who are literate, argumentative and floridly dramatic.
And another element in the Irish household is that there is always so much to argue about.
In my life the topics were the same as they were in the Joyce household two generations earlier, politics and religion.
The subjects were serious.
Wrangling with your father about whether you should go to Mass or whether the IRA campaign was justified would get a lot hotter than debates about football.
People are more argumentative when there is more at stake and in Ireland there has long been much to divide people.
In Civil War, one of his better short stories, Gerry Adams, who had nine siblings though spent most of his childhood apart from them, tells of a brother and sister growing old together. They fall out over whether the civil rights campaign is justified. Catherine thinks the protesters are stirring up trouble for no good reason, while Willie is glad ‘someone is standing up for us’.
These characters with their stereotypical, sentimentally related lives, become eloquent in rage.
Some Irish writers came out of small families and found their voice not in contention with parents or siblings but with the culture itself.
Edna O’Brien went to London where she could breathe and wrote about characters who lived an enthusiasm for being out of Ireland, away from the gossip mongers and moralists.
WH Auden’s elegy to WB Yeats has the line, ‘Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry’.
It wasn’t the siblings who were the spur to creativity but the whole difficult culture.
Bernard Shaw had a theory that education could be homeopathic, the treatment that claims to heal a condition by feeding you minuscule doses of a poison that would produce the very symptoms from which you are suffering.
So children should be taught nonsense, he argued, and they will cultivate their intelligence by working through the contradictions. Then when they come back and say, ‘But it’s not true that thunder is caused by clouds bumping together’ you embellish the theory a little further and gradually they overcome that nonsense too and by stages grow wiser and more knowledgeable.
In a way that is how we did learn at an Irish Catholic school.
In RE you learnt about creation in the Garden of Eden, Eve and the apple and all that. In biology you learnt about evolution. Neither account might have detained us for long if they didn’t directly contradict each other.
Schooling like this provided for more intellectual gymnastics than it might otherwise have done.
Ireland is changing, secularising. That society of two children families is still giving us plenty of writers.
The forum of dispute now is not the living room or the kitchen table but social media, and the writers of this generation perhaps want to step back from that and think more deeply than it allows.
Malachi O’Doherty’s latest book How To Fix Northern Irelan is published by Atlantic Books
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