New Ways to Kill Your Mother

  The story was written in that distant style that Hamilton used in his first three novels, where all judgement is withheld and the emotion, coiled and ready to spring, is buried in the coolness of the tone. His memoir The Speckled People, a best-seller in Ireland, has that same masterfully suppressed rage. It is as artful and deliberate in its textured use of voice as Roddy Doyle’s book is intentionally artless. The world here is viewed through the eyes of a child who does not judge, merely details and describes. But each detail and each description convey enormous and carefully measured levels of concealed emotion and blocked-out pain.

  Language itself has been the ground of the child’s suffering, not only the language of his mother, which causes the events of ‘Nazi Christmas’ to be retold here as memoir, but the English language itself, which the father has decided his children should not speak or listen to, even though it is the only language spoken in their Dublin suburb. The father wishes his children to speak and hear Irish, and in order to fulfil these wishes he will need to keep them away from the outside world, from radio and television and popular music and playmates. He will also need to mould them according to the ideology that he has decided to bring home, unsoftened by the atmosphere all around him, by the city of Dublin in all its diversity, but also by the spirit of compromise that took over from the revolutionary spirit in Ireland as soon as the British departed.

  The debate between Hamilton and his father is the same debate as occurs between Gabriel Conroy and Miss Ivors in James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’. When Miss Ivors encourages Gabriel to go to the west of Ireland on his holidays, Gabriel tells her that he wishes to go to the European continent instead, ‘partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change’. When she challenges him with ‘And haven’t you your own language to keep in touch with – Irish?’ he replies, ‘Well, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language.’ Finally, she accuses him of being a ‘West Briton’.

  In his memoir, Hamilton adopts the style of Stephen Dedalus in the early pages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in which the world is described through the eyes of a child: ‘When you’re small you’re like a piece of white paper with nothing written on it,’ he writes. ‘My father writes down his name in Irish and my mother writes down her name in German and there’s a blank space left over for all the people outside who speak English … My father says your language is your home and your country is your language and your language is your flag.’

  The Hamiltons, an island of non-English speakers in a West British city, imported Aine, a servant from the west of Ireland, whose tasks included the speaking of Irish, which is her first language, to the children. ‘What good is that to them?’ Aine asked when Hamilton’s mother insisted that she speak only Irish to them. That is the question that haunts any account of the slow decline in the use of the Irish language over the past two centuries. ‘Irish doesn’t sell the cow,’ is the reason advanced why the language was abandoned in favour of English by family after family until it was spoken as a first language only by a small number of people along the west coast of Ireland.

  ‘By the late 1970s,’ the historian J. J. Lee writes in Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society, ‘the population of the real Gaeltacht … was calculated to be only 32,000, compared with more than ten times that number at the foundation of the state.’ The official Gaeltacht was, during all these years, much larger than the real one. In the late 1980s, when a friend of mine made a journey through the parts of Ireland officially designated Irish-speaking, he found that the most mountainous regions of County Kerry, completely uninhabited, were marked as Irish-speaking by the government. He supposed that the rain came down in Irish and the wind blew in that language, and when snow began to descend it changed its name to sneachta as it hit the ground. But there was no one listening.

  No historian of the language’s decline has managed to explain why those who wished to sell cows did not become bilingual, why so many abandoned the language completely. The economic argument, Joe Lee has written, would

  strictly speaking … explain the acquisition of English, but not the loss of Irish, unless it be assumed that Irish brains were too small to accommodate two languages, or that the Irish were simply too lazy, or too utilitarian, to be bothered with the less materially useful one … The burden of the small language did not suffice to prevent Sweden, or Norway, or the Netherlands, or Flanders, from exporting successfully to Britain, from growing more rapidly than Britain since the late nineteenth century, and from overtaking British living standards in the course of the twentieth century.

  Lee suggests that one reason why Ireland adopted English with such zeal had to do with the sheer intensity of emigration to both Britain and the United States from the time of the Great Famine. Parents needed to do something radical to prepare their children for separation. It is also possible that the levels and grades of poverty were so enormously varied and so minutely structured – and knowledge of Irish was associated with poverty – that abandoning the language was a way of moving upwards, however strangely and imperceptibly.

  In the years after independence, while Irish remained associated with poverty in the west, in the rest of the country it became associated with school, with long hours of a grammar badly taught and only half-understood by some of the teachers, with politicians beginning and ending their dull speeches with a few words of the language. ‘The children,’ Joe Lee writes, ‘were given no incentive to master Irish as a living language, only as a dead one. The charade of Irish language tests for public employment, when everyone knew the language would hardly ever be used again … inevitably left its mark.’ Irish, for those who knew it and loved it, was, in the words of Arland Ussher, ‘the great language of conversation, of quips, hyperboles, cajoleries, lamentations, blessings, cursings, endearments, tirades. Its unsuspected rhythm had even given an intimate and personal quality to the great Irish writers of English. It was the winged word in its flight that was beautiful. Stuffed and mounted on the page of a school book, it stank.’

  Thus when Roddy Doyle’s father wanted to be made permanent in his state job as a teacher, finding himself ‘the only man in Ireland qualified’ for a vacancy to teach printing, having both the experience as a printer and the technical knowledge, he had to do an Irish test, although all his teaching would be done in English. When it came to the oral part and he was not doing too well, the examiner said to him, ‘ “What is this at all? Sure, any of the labouring men down in Connemara can speak Irish.” So I said, “Why don’t you get them to teach printing?” At that, he hit the table a belt of his fist, nearly broke it, and I was thrown out.’ Rory got the job only on the insistence of a trade unionist who said: ‘ “The apprentices are sent to the school by their employers to learn printing, not fuckin’ Irish. My man is fully qualified to teach printing, and if that man isn’t reinstated, you won’t have any apprentices next Monday.” ’ Such were the battles fought for strange freedoms by the first generation to be born in the Irish Free State.

  At more or less the same time in another part of the city, Hugo Hamilton’s brother Franz had learned some words of English and was innocently singing them to himself as their father was digging in the garden. The father ‘hit him on the back of the head so that Franz fell off the wall and his face went down on the bricks. When he got up, there was blood all around on his nose and mouth.’ His nose was broken.

  My father said he was very sorry, but the rules had to be obeyed. He said that Franz was speaking English again and that had to stop. Then my mother and father had no language at all. My father went outside again and my mother brought Franz upstairs. Even when the blood stopped, he was still crying for a long time and my mother was afraid that he would never start talking again.

  Hugo, too, brought English words into the house. When he repeated a line from a popular advertisement, his father picked out a stick from the greenhouse and prayed ‘that he was doing the right thing for Ireland. We kneeled down and asked God how
many lashes he thought was fair and my father said fifteen.’ Since the children could be punished for listening to English, even if spoken by neighbouring children, their playmates had to be imported from the few like-minded families in the city:

  Even they thought it was stupid to play in Irish and didn’t want to come back again, even for the biscuits. You couldn’t be cowboys in Irish. You couldn’t sneak up behind somebody or tie somebody to a chair in Irish. It was no fun dying in Irish. And it was just too stupid altogether to hide behind something and say ‘Uuuggh’ or ‘hands up’ in Irish, because there were some things you could only do in English, like fighting and killing Indians.

  Thus Stephen Dedalus’s famous musings on the relationship between Ireland and the English language are subverted and played with. When Stephen encounters the English dean of studies in Dublin, he notes: ‘His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.’ By the end of the book, however, Stephen discovers that the disputed word ‘tundish’, which the Englishman had never heard in his life and knows only as ‘funnel’, is not an Irish word at all: ‘I looked it up and find it English and good old blunt English too. Damn the dean of studies and his funnel! What did he come here for, to teach us his own language or to learn it from us? Damn him one way or the other.’ And in Samuel Beckett’s play All That Fall, the questions surrounding Irish and English are offered further mocking glosses. When Mr Rooney says to his wife, ‘Sometimes one would think that you were struggling with a dead language,’ Mrs Rooney replies, ‘Well, you know, it will be dead in time, just like our own poor dear Gaelic, there is that to be said.’

  ‘The relationship between language and national identity is notoriously complex,’ Joe Lee writes:

  Without language, only the most unusual historical circumstances suffice to develop a sense of identity. Those unusual circumstances existed in Ireland for perhaps two centuries. As that phase broadly characterized by the reality, or the memory, of an obtrusive imperial presence, of a national revival, of a struggle for independence, draws to a close, the importance of the lost language as a distinguishing mark becomes more rather than less evident. As circumstances normalize, only the husk of identity is left without the language.

  Perhaps the importance of Roddy Doyle’s Rory & Ita, besides the efforts to revive domestic bliss as a subject for Irish writers, is to suggest that Irish identity in a time of normality is almost miraculously and unselfconsciously intact, so much so indeed that neither Rory nor Ita has occasion to mention it, nor the reader to notice either its significant absence or its obvious presence. It is simply there in how they think and speak, how they remember, how they live. It is part of Doyle’s tact that he does not draw any attention to this, but he is too political a writer not to have deliberately left it like that.

  ‘It is,’ Joe Lee continues, ‘unusual for descendants of a destroyed culture to join in the disparagement of a lost language. It smacks of a parricidal impulse.’ It does indeed. It offers Hugo Hamilton a whole new way to kill his father, not only by telling the story of his own persecution in the name of the destroyed culture, and by telling of his discovery of anti-Semitic articles, written by his father in 1946, in the bottom of a wardrobe, but by doing so in an English sonorous and refined, perfectly modulated and moulded. And in a final chapter he can struggle with language until he has it by the throat, and offer one more blow for Irish freedom: he can describe his father’s death with some of the same conjuror’s relish with which the young Alexander pictures his stepfather’s death in Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander. Hamilton’s father was stung by bees, who re-enact rather more violently what he has been doing subtly in his book:

  Maybe my father was not meant to be a beekeeper. Maybe he wasn’t calm enough to be a father. Maybe the bees knew he was still fighting and thinking about the time when he was a boy and nobody liked him except for his mother. Maybe they could feel anger in the air from the time when Ireland was still under the British, or when Ireland was free but could remember nothing but being under the British. Maybe they could smell things like helpless anger, because they kept trying to kill him.

  When the father ran out into the street, screaming in Irish, the ‘neighbours ran back into their houses because they were scared of bees and scared of the Irish language’. Soon afterwards, he died of a heart attack. ‘People said there was nobody like my father left in Ireland now,’ Hamilton comments. His tone is held so carefully in check that the reader is not sure whether to laugh or to cry. But, either way, it is clear that on his father’s death, one of the last and strangest vestiges of the Irish revolutionary spirit was laid to rest.

  Part Two

  Elsewhere

  Thomas Mann: New Ways to Spoil Your Children

  Thomas and Katia Mann had six children. It was obvious from early on that Katia most loved the second child, Klaus, who was born in 1906, and that Thomas loved Erika, the eldest, born in 1905, and also Elisabeth, born in 1918. The other three – the barely tolerated ones – were Golo, born in 1909, Monika, born in 1910, and Michael, born in 1919. Erika remembered a time during the shortages of the First World War when food had to be divided but there was one fig left over. ‘What did my father do? He gave this fig just to me alone … the other three children stared in horror, and my father said sententiously with emphasis: “One should get the children used to injustice early.” ’

  Some things ran in the family. Homosexuality, for instance. Thomas himself was gay most of the time, as his diaries make clear. So were three of his children: Erika (also just most of the time; she made an exception for Bruno Walter, among others), Klaus and Golo. Suicide was a family theme too. Both of Thomas Mann’s sisters committed suicide, as did his sons Klaus and Michael, as did the second wife of his brother Heinrich. Also, gerontophilia. Bruno Walter was almost as old as Erika’s father when she had an affair with him; and in 1939 Elisabeth married the literary critic Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, who was thirty-six years her senior.

  And then there is the small matter of incest. Much interest in this was fuelled by incidents in Thomas Mann’s own work. In her useful and sympathetic book about the Mann family, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain, Andrea Weiss writes: ‘Just how much Katia and Klaus Pringsheim loved each other was the subject of public gossip and private distress, especially when Thomas Mann, married to Katia for only a few months, used his wife’s relationship with her brother as the basis for one of his novellas.’ The novella, The Blood of the Walsungs, dealt with the incestuous relationship between a twin brother and sister; Katia’s father attempted to have the story suppressed.

  Such rumours also existed about Erika and Klaus, much encouraged by Klaus’s play on the subject, The Siblings, and made their way into Gestapo reports when the siblings went into exile and FBI reports about them once they arrived in America. (In the mid-1920s Klaus helped to keep things in the family by having an affair with Erika’s first husband, Gustaf Gründgens.) In his novel The Volcano, Klaus allowed the character based on his sister to marry the character based on his father. In Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner, the hero, Pope Gregorius, marries his mother – who is also his father’s sister.

  In his diaries Thomas Mann explored his own sexual interest in Klaus: ‘Am enraptured with Eissi,’ he wrote in 1920, when Klaus was fourteen (Eissi was his nickname), ‘terribly handsome in his swimming trunks. Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my son … It seems I am once and for all done with women? … Eissi was lying tanned and shirtless on his bed, reading; I was disconcerted.’ Later that year he ‘came upon Eissi totally nude and up to some nonsense by Golo’s bed’ and was ‘deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body; overwhelming’. He used some of this same language to describe Jacob’s interest in the young Joseph in Joseph and His Brothers, and in the novella Disorder and Early Sorrow, written when Elisabeth was seven, the relationship
between the bookish father and his young daughter, clearly based on Mann’s relationship with Elisabeth, is heated and fervid enough to make any reader marvel at what a wonderfully daring imagination the old magician was in possession of.

  By the time Hitler came to power in 1933 Thomas Mann, at fifty-eight, was in possession not only of this daring imagination but of the Nobel Prize, which he had received in 1929. He lived in a large and beautiful house in Munich and owned an idyllic summer house on the Baltic that he had built three years earlier – a house subsequently requisitioned by Goering. Mann had a reputation as the most serious-minded and respectable German alive. He enjoyed his fame and his family, his bourgeois comforts and his mornings alone in his study writing essays and fiction. The Manns lived well, their son Golo later wrote, thanks to the Nobel Prize and the tremendous earnings of The Magic Mountain. They took trips, they ate and drank well, and two large cars stood in the garage: an open American car and a German limousine. When they went to the theatre, the chauffeur waited in the lobby with their fur coats at the end of the performance. This style of life, which they went to no trouble to conceal, made their growing number of political enemies hate them all the more.

  Thomas Mann was unprepared for exile. In a letter, he wrote: ‘I am too good a German, too closely involved with the cultural traditions and language of my country for the prospect of a yearlong or perhaps life-long exile not to have a hard, ominous meaning for me.’ He was so unprepared that, on leaving the country less than a month after Hitler became chancellor, he failed to take his diaries and the pages of the novel he was working on. Publication of the diaries would have considerably dampened the warm welcome he was to receive in America.