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Nearing
the end of ‘The Speckled People’,
Hugo Hamilton’s new ‘memoir of a half-Irish
childhood’, I had to check the cover for this
subtitle (missing from the title page proper, with
British Library catalogue information absent inside;
my copy’s filed in my library under fiction)
to reassure myself that its pages were indeed fact.
After so many Irish autobiographies churned in the
wake of Frank McCourt’s deservedly popular recollections
in which ‘everything that’s fact actually
happened’, as McC more or less mused, I approached
Hamilton’s contribution warily. I can’t
believe it’s not a novel.
In
its recurring seaside imagery-the writer grows up
in a hazily postwar Dublin that gradually expands
as late as Bloody Sunday for an indeterminate chronology
reflecting personal recall-Hamilton’s memories
ebb and flow steadily. The detachment of that view
‘like a glass of blue-green water at the bottom
of every street.’ The commitment to recording
this and many more interior land and seascapes creates
a much less garrulous narrator than McCourt. Hamilton’s
more charmless tales of poverty rarely mention the
outside world for grand stretches of prose. Insularity
constricts another Irish Dedalus.
His
gift lies in being able to suspend the revelations
that await his adolescent self regarding the secrets
of his German immigrant mother and his Irish-Ireland
father. He casts upon the earlier scenes of his childhood
foreshadows of what haunts, in his estimation of his
mother’s perspective on her adopted homeland,
in a place where the natives’ observations hover
between admiration and accusation. The delicacy of
the spoken word battles against the look, the assumption,
the half-smile. Inescapably, Hugo and his family refuse
with ‘the silent negative’. They know even
if they keep to themselves their maternal family’s
anti-Nazi actions. Their foe? The Irish who unrelentingly
sneer at their ‘Nazi’ presence. Hugo and
his family also defy the English; while the great
majority of Irish have become lost and speechless,
after the famine unable to hear the conversations
of their dead-the buried Irish speakers they have
forgotten as their ancestors. Most Irish ignore the
‘future’ of Ireland: those in the Gaeltacht
and even in Dublin who believe still in the Ireland
Hugo’s father determines must exist.
Irish,
he reasons, can only revive if de-anglicisation converts
the city. Hugo’s father (after visits from Gearóid,
a fellow evangelist and a successor to Joyce’s
Citizen) becomes, in his son’s description: ‘Happy
and proud one minute, sad and angry the next, because
not everybody in Ireland is doing what he told them
to do.’ In the Ó hUrmoltaigh house, only
German and Irish could be spoken or heard. Outside,
in the domain of Bearla, few friends can be found
to play with Hugo: for their Irish is not good enough,
or mostly non-existent. His father’s schemes
to import German toys meet with failure: money can
be found, it seems, among the Irish for pink cakes,
drink, and tinned food but not for woodwork crafted
with paint, lacquer, and pride. His mother’s
attempts to sell these imports as Imgard plus her
Cork husband’s surname relayed in her heavy Rhineland
accent meet with similar lack of profit. The family
grows, the older children bearing German first names
and the later ones Irish ones, but all have little
to live on but the father’s income from a rather
ambiguous task: electrifying the countryside for the
ESB.
So
the years pass, and the revelations of the mother’s
and father’s past emerge piecemeal in Hamilton’s
meticulous but unflaggingly evocative rendering. Outside
their house, the sea paces and Dublin bustles; within,
Irmgard confronts an Irish reticence conveyed through
her husband and his visiting relatives of a place
where so much remains beneath the surface, where ‘words
never touch ground’ or become audible. The wife
of Máirtin Ó Cadhain teaches Hugo at
the bunscoil. By no accident, the author of Cré
na Cille provides Hamilton with his persistent controlling
metaphor: listening to the voices presumed dead. Choosing
to talk of the past to a present of diminished yet
still chattering comrades, and residing in an ambiguous
future. Hamilton enters this conversation.
Hugo,
after a visit to the Dingle Gaeltacht, finds that
the Brother at the Irish-speaking school near the
GPO trots him out as ‘a living example of how
history can be turned back.’ Hugo leaves school
only to see Pearse again proclaiming the Republic.
(It’s the on-site re-enactment for the RTÉ
film of the Rising.) On the 50th anniversary, perhaps
his father’s history will prove a dream from
which all Ireland will have chosen to awake?
The
opportunities reveal, as his mother instructs her
children, both the rise of the fist people and the
word people. The killer language-the hate of Hitler’s
harangues, the jeers of the Irish against she whose
family defied the Nazis, the rhetoric of prejudice:
these appear as Nelson’s Pillar explodes, as
the North follows, as Hugo’s father’s collusion
with Gearóid’s right-wing paper Aiséirí
emerges. Against this, the dying language-Hugo’s
father, crushed by the Troubles and his neighbour’s
derision of Irish-Ireland, finally starts tuning in
the English programmes. Added to this tension: his
realization of the compromises made by his mother
to survive in Germany, and the hurt she carries with
her into a strange nation where they are all ‘speckled
people’, Breac. Barm-brack: half-Gaelic and half-not.
German raisins in an Irish loaf. One sentence summarises:
‘One day they called Franz [Hugo’s brother]
a f[-]n Jew Nazi and held him against the railings
of the Garden of Remembrance.’ Fueled by such
events, Hugo’s discovers his own potential for
hatred, his own weariness with carrying on the Rising
and ignoring taunts in wars of words, and his own
confrontation with sudden ironic death.
I
refrain from giving away all of Hugo’s revelations.
But in his dramatisation of killer vs. dying languages,
of conversations among the dead spoken and of silences
withheld by the living, Hamilton presents a muted
tone but a vivid assortment of vignettes. Contrasting
what Gearóid insists upon, ‘the daily
uprising’ for 1916, against the setting Hugo’s
father constructs for his family in his quest for
a more Irish-Ireland, we can learn from his characters.
So much against the British that he looks towards
Germany for love and lore, his father stands for one
kind of resistance. His idealism balances and jousts
against his wife’s own divided personality, a
coping and caring woman placed within a postwar terrain
where most call her the enemy. As you will read, Hugo’s
father and mother both re-invent themselves while
hiding away from speech their inner pasts, their early
selves.
Like
many surviving rebels against the state, his parents
remodel themselves imperfectly. At the cost of their
own happiness, they look to ideals and dreams to form
a better future for their children. One of whom no
longer Seán Ó hUmoltaigh but still somehow
that young gaelgoir, has survived to tell his own
tale of endurance and determination to resist.
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