Rewriting History - Eir
Rewriting History
Address to the Federation of Historical Societies
Excel Heritage, Tipperary
Saturday 13 October 2001
Mr Mayor, Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: thank you very much for inviting me to address your federation. I have long been a member of the Tipperary Historical Society and I enjoy my membership number 85.
In terms of local history, this invitation could not have been more appropriately located from my personal point of view. The most crucial slice of my own history happened fifty yards away from here. It remains the most vital thing that has happened to me - it will never change. And it’s this - I was born in Nurse Ryan’s Nursing Home here in Market Street. So far as I know, the birth passed without incident - the Guards didn’t have to be called; the parents didn’t faint; the doctor and midwife survived the day.
Therefore, this occasion gives me an advantage I rarely enjoy and which I intend to relish. I’ll illustrate it with a true story about the playwright, Donagh McDonagh, who was also a District Justice. He was sitting in a court when a man was brought before him on a serious charge. The man appeared to have no representation.
McDonagh asked him, ‘Who’s your solicitor?’ and the accused replied, ‘I have none.’ McDonagh asked again - ‘Have you a barrister?’ and the man said, ‘No, no barrister neither.’
Now at that time, in and around Blessington, there were quite a few strange religious groups and this accused was more or less a one-man sect. So, when McDonagh asked him a third time and said, ‘You’re on a serious charge here today. Who’s going to represent you, who’s going to plead your case?’, the man replied with shining faith, ‘The Lord God will be my advocate today. God will plead my case.’
Donagh McDonagh withered him with a look and said, ‘Listen. If I was you, I’d get someone who’s a bit better known locally.’
That’s our point, isn’t it - ‘better known locally’. That’s why we’re here - because you are involved with what is known locally. And because ‘better known locally’ is for me something deep - a matter of identity; a matter of the past and therefore the present and the future; a matter of who I am because of what I came from.
When I got this invitation from Mary Alice, I accepted immediately, because it seemed to me a good opportunity to think aloud in front of people who were likely to understand what I was saying, even though I’m coming at your subject from a totally different direction. Because what I want to talk about (and this is why I’ve called this talk, ‘Rewriting History’) is the importance of local history to the process I earn my living from, what is now called - and I don’t like the term too much - creative writing.
I want to structure this talk in three ways. First, I want to discuss what the term ‘local history’ means as I interpret it for myself - where it begins: what it ranges across: where its cut-off point is for me. Next, I want to address the surprising presence of history on this intimate scale in literature in general - with, of course, a special eye on Irish writers. And thirdly, I want to observe out loud how local history has shaped me and helped me, the part it plays in what I write, in what I do, in how I earn my living, not just as a novelist and non-fiction writer, but - and sometimes surprisingly - in broadcasting.
On the earliest page of the 2001 edition of the Tipperary Historical Journal, you will find, quite appropriately, a list of the Officers and Committee of the Society for the previous year. The first thing you notice is the names - names such as Marnane, O’Duibhir and O’Dwyer, Condon, Kinnane, O’Donoghue, Ryan, Gleeson. These are names I grew up with in my ears, these are Tipperary names; this therefore, at first glance, is a Society run by the People.
Look across then at the Contents page and you see the topics - “Hurling in Mid-Tipperary pre-1884”; “Presbyterianism in the Fethard area (1690-1919)”; “the Nenagh Mutiny, July 1856”. This material is evidently of the people. And since the topics are so pointed, so specific, of so little possible interest outside the county, we may conclude that it is for the people.
Look further in, look across the range of articles in all the Society’s years of publication, commencing, if I’m right in 1988. By any standards, this is a wide editorial force. This kind of history may root anywhere, from the first and deepest reaches of time - a stone arrowhead, a Bronze Age Mound, an Iron-Age post or post-hole. It can come almost up to date - there was, I recall, a well-statisticized history of District Nursing up to 1974. As far as Tipp’s Historical Journal is concerned, there seems no textual limit to what the publications may range across - excavatory or artefactual history, social or cultural history.
Its cut-off point, therefore, is only in the vertical. We should not, for example, expect to persuade them in, say, Mayo to take an interest in Clonmel Grammar School. In other words, local histories and the proceedings of county and more localised historical societies, knowing they can’t expect to prove of equal interest outside their county or town - local history societies are concerned with that most passionate of areas: inner space.
Sean O’Faolain once told me in an interview that the reason the Irish were such good short story writers is because they were interested in the intimate drama, the lace-curtained window, the street, the pump, the shop counter, the creamery talk, the pub: this is the ‘inner space’ I mean. It’s very powerful. James Joyce had a stated belief that ‘in the particular is the universal’, that in the story of any one man there dwells the story of all.
Likewise, the history of a county can be the history of the nation in microcosm - especially in Ireland. Thirty, forty years ago, the World Health Organisation considered Ireland the perfect location for epidemiological study - because it is much easier to track a disease’s course in a society if the staple factors such as climate, diet, economics, social behaviour, are, within tolerances, more or less common to all.
Similarly, using those models, local history becomes, thereby, national history - but writ smaller and, most importantly, without the diffusion that happens when we have to tell that history to people who are not Irish. (That diffusion is, as we all know, something at which we excel.)
But when we consider our county, our parish, our townland, our road, our field, our farm, our village, our village street - that’s a purer distillation. We don’t have to worry about the opinions of outsiders, therefore we don’t have to gild or colour. It’s as if it’s a different truth, a more important truth, with no public relations in it. This is in the family, so to speak.
Now - as with the World Health Organisation approach, we can examine ourselves more fully, see our origins more clearly when we inspect the past here beneath our individual feet, contained within boundaries we can easily encompass.
Furthermore, and this is something I find truly exciting, if what became a national event had a local, traceable root - such as, say, the founding of the GAA, or, an interest of mine, Father Mathew’s Temperance Crusade starting in 1838 - then you’re bound for glory. The local identity becomes the national identity and the national one the local. Nice thrill as a boy to hear in a Radio Eireann play the line - ‘Father Mathew? Ah, a good man - but a bit narrow-minded.’
To me, these self-contained, localised origins would amount to the whole point in being an active member of a historical society. And were I back living here, I would certainly take part - go on field trips, attend talks, whatever. Because I would see this as an enquiry into my own identity, into who I am and what I came from.
We’ve never gone much on psychoanalysis in Ireland - and indeed Carl Gustav Jung, who with Freud, remains, despite all attack, one of the twin pillars of psychoanalytical examination, said the Irish were unanalysable - too much imagination, too much of a tendency to turn myth into fact. (To which I say - well, what else would you do with it?)
And yet - and Socrates wasn’t the only one to say it - the unexamined life really isn’t worth living. As far as Ireland is concerned, from what I can see, it’s still not so much how we think of our lives but that we think of them at all. (Bear in mind please that I’m speaking from the point of view of someone who explores character either through people I invent or people whose lives I scrutinise - both of more later.)
As a nation, we haven’t yet sufficiently examined our own national history to stop the consequences we have all seen. We didn’t find out enough about ourselves in time to stop us passing down bad legacies. The Spanish historian, George Santayana, has been quoted until he must be rotating in the earth: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfil it.’ I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase. But the first half of Santayana’s remark never gets quoted and I think it’s the more interesting part - he said, ‘Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness.’
For my money, retaining for examination and re-examination the events of our parish’s past is a dead-on definition of retentiveness.
Therefore - how do we examine the past of our own place in order to find out about ourselves? How do we get clues to our behaviour? How do we find in the past the signposts to the future? To make it blunter still - how do we learn in order to improve?
We can’t do it in national history - because national history, like all history, is written by the winners. Many of us had the experience of growing up here, in the next county to Cork, and never reading the name ‘Michael Collins’ in our history books. Read a standard history book used in secondary schools in England and you will be astounded to find how it glides over ‘the Irish question.’ Or maybe you won’t be astounded.
I think we do have a place of greater truth. There is no resisting - no varnishing - the truth of local history. We don’t need to dress it up. We don’t need to use it for anything other than telling us about the way we were. Its weakness is its strength - it’s too small and intimate to be worth distorting.
Therefore, for me, the history of my own county, of my own parish, of the people and the things that happened to them, ultimately tells me more about me than the history of my whole country. It’s more direct, it’s closer to me, it’s clearer and it’s in my blood. The more I retain of what I know of the past of the place I call home - the more I can progress in what I have chosen to do.
I don’t want to make this sound too lofty, too grandiose. That’s not what I feel - what I feel is practical, accessible, realistic. On the very simplest level, the history of my county is a fabulous - in every sense of the word - source of raw material for me. Who could not find the birth of an epic in - to take one example - Sean Ua Cearnaigh’s account of the Kingstons and Buckleys of Skeheenarinka, down near Ballyporeen? Or my own grandfather’s account of women kneeling in the street, uttering curses like prayers, outside Sadleir’s Bank down the street here when it collapsed in 1856?
This point - the use of local history to tell us our own story via one of the vital means we use, that of literature - takes me into my second theme this morning: the presence of history, on this intimate scale, inside literature in general.
It is pretty powerful. It informs the most powerful literature we have, the agreed root of all western literary invention - the classic literature of the Greeks. Literary of course - as distinct from oral: but at the same let us not forget that the storytelling tradition was local.
There’s a poem I like by Patrick Kavanagh called ‘Epic’: he describes how he, the poet, has ‘lived in important places, times/ When great events were decided, who owned/ That half a rood of rock, a no-man’s land.’ He describes the local battle with pitchforks to claim that patch of land - the Duffys and the MacCabes slugging it out in Monaghan. He says, ‘That was the year of the Munich bother. Which/ Was more important? I inclined/ To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin/Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind/ He said: I made the Iliad from such/ A local row.’
No matter where you turn in literature and - perhaps unsurprisingly - in Irish literature, there is a local history of some kind. Why should there not be? Sufficient authorship has depended upon national histories. Sometimes, obviously, they will merge. As you know, Canon Sheehan found the drama of the parish important and his events neither begin nor continue free of reference to history. In novels like ‘Lisheen’ and ‘The Graves of Kilmorna’, he’s actually dealing with the local versions of what became some of our great historical themes - land unrest, the national question itself. His priests are often like those who actually led people here through the Land War in Tipperary - the texture is absolutely local, deployed to paint a picture of humanity.
The great novel of County Tipperary, ‘Knocknagow’, actually intensifies the focus. When Mr Henry Lowe opens his eyes on Christmas morning, it will eventually be to focus them on land agitations and the desire for land reforms that are echoed in actual events that happened here, in this county, in the Land War. Even though he changed and tailored the events as he wrote about them - or more likely, being a good novelist, allowed his memory to have dressed them in bright colours - Charles Kickham made no attempt to hide the fact that he was taking the history of Tipperary as he knew it around Mullinahone and Slievenamon and using it to fulfil that good definition of the novel - ‘a portrayal in narrative of the human condition.’ About three years ago I re-read ‘Knocknagow’ and I found impossible to avoid the impression that I was also reading history.
This, of course, proves something very interesting by way of possibility. And it confirms a remark which the English novelist, John Fowles, made to me several years ago. He told me that when he was travelling to a place he didn’t know, and if expecting to stay there for a duration, he not only brought with him a guide book to that island or port or city, he also brought, were he to find one, a novel set in the place, preferably by a writer native to there.
I know what he meant on the primary level. When you read the proceeds of such an experience, you get not only the sense of the place, you also get the spirit. And perhaps that is really something that the study of local history does: it raises the spirit - and the spirits - of our dead and their doings.
If you begin to apply this inquiry on a wide scale, lovely things happen. You find Somerville and Ross, although I am still uneasy at some of their take on the rest of us. You find Frank O’Connor. There’s a story of O’Connor’s I particularly like called ‘The Cornet Player Who Betrayed Ireland’ and it absolutely depends on the history of Cork as he knew it.
It’s about a little boy whose father was Cork’s finest cornet player. He’s highly political and all the street boys follow their father’s politics - Parnell, William Smith O’Brien and so on. But a dreadful betrayal happens - the father bows to pressure and agrees to play in the brass band to welcome the rival side. How can a lad ever lift up his head after such a betrayal?
I suppose the thing I love most is when an Irish writer, who draws on local history, becomes internationally reputed. Take James Joyce. Look at ‘Ulysses’. It is suffused, completely shot through, with, at the very least, local knowledge. We know that he plagued people back at home, and anyone who ever visited him from Dublin with questions: - what are the names of the shops down along Talbot street? Could a man drop down into a cellar area over the railings from the street and not hurt himself?
But as well as personal engagement, there’s local history in Joyce too. There’s a slight problem with ‘Ulysses’: because it’s a metropolitan book, it gets more caught up in national history than it might were it set in, say, Longford or Westmeath. For example, although it was reported in the papers, the Viceregal cavalcade that gallops jingling through Dublin on the sixteenth of June 1904, to the fete in Sandymount wasn’t a national event. Yet, you can see how, were it to happen in another, smaller location, its existence would have stimulated a modern enquiry by someone writing a paper for their historical society journal.
And if there is a historical society in Glasnevin, might some member not wish to do something about the house and its ‘shuttered, tenantless, unweeded garden’ near the cemetery where Childs was murdered, as is observed by Mr Power, Martin Cunningham, Mr Dedalus and Mr Bloom, occupants of a carriage in the funeral cortege of poor Paddy Dignam?
Look further. When the Reverend John Conmee gets to the Malahide Road, his thoughts stray to ‘Lord Talbot de Malahide, immediate hereditary lord admiral of Malahide and the seas adjoining.’ Joyce is, of course, having his usual crack at the aristocracy. But Father Conmee’s thoughts continue - and they encounter a pure piece of local history. And I would bet that not one but several pieces have been written about this in local history annals. Father Conmee is thinking about Mary, the first Countess of Belvedere, and the jealous husband, and anyone here from Mullingar or anywhere near Lough Ennel will know the story of the Jealous Wall. Joyce famously visited Mullingar - we have the right to assume he found the story there.
Joyce is a very good illustration of my theme because of his fame, his international reputation. If we look at others as famous, such as, say, Dickens, we find also that his sense of the local past is huge. To read Dickens is not simply to read of social conditions in England in the nineteenth century - it is also to read of the conditions before then, in those places. ‘Our Mutual Friend’, for example, opens with something I, as a member of a historical society, would kill to write about if I found it applied to where I came from - the description of a man who made his living fishing corpses from the River Thames.
Ernest Hemingway devoted his most famous novel, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, to a local event - the blowing-up of a bridge in the Spanish Civil War, and throughout the novel you find stories, often narrated by one of the characters, of atrocities and heroics that were purely local, never would, never could have made it to the national pages. But without question, any local historian living near that bridge or its replacement, in Tipperary’s terms, a Des Marnane, an Eddie Dalton, a Father Christy Dwyer, might one day regard that event as a suitable case for treatment.
I find all of this immensely attractive but not at all surprising. This, where we live, is the earth beneath our feet; our blood is here, the DNA we come from is in the graves of the countryside. Local history is the breaking down of that DNA - the contents pages of any historical society’s proceedings, monthly or annual, provide the molecular structure of our past. It’s as simple and as enjoyable as that and that is why I get such a kick out of opening the Tipp Historical Journal when it arrives.
Plus - I’m always looking to it for raw material. All writers are scavengers. Never tell a writer a story. He’ll write it. I hear the most extraordinary things for no reason - or so I assume - other than that I meet people. they find out or they know I write for a living and they tell me a story. Thus, I address my third and final theme - the use of local history in my own work.
I’ve said how much I love reading the papers in the Tipp Historical Journal. There’s no question in my mind - and I know this from the quickening of excitement - that I am reading also for possibility. In there, I may already have found, and will one day undoubtedly find, a typically well-researched, typically readable piece of local history that will spark a novel, a play, a screenplay or a short story from me.
I’ve done it once already in non-fiction, by which I mean once, specifically, in a single-theme film for television. The English poet, John Betjeman, spent quite a lot of time in Ireland. He always said our place-names were music to a poet and he used the language we use in a lovely, lively way. ‘Bells are booming down the boreens/White the mists along the grass/As the Julias, Maeves and Maureens move between the fields to Mass.’
Betjeman has a long poem called ‘Sir John Piers’; it’s a fine poem, in five parts and it tells a famous story of criminal conversation. I don’t know whether ‘crim con’, as it’s called, is still on the statute books: I remember a case of it - criminal conversation is the law under which a man runs away with another man’s wife. It’s hardly criminal - but it does give great conversation.
The Sir John Piers case happened in 1807 in the Lyons Estate at Celbridge, now owned by Tony Ryan of GPA. Lyons was owned by Lord Cloncurry and he had a young wife. Piers, for a bet, seduced the wife and Cloncurry sued Piers. Betjeman found the story in a local historical publication called ‘The Annals of Westmeath’ and he wrote his poem about it.
Many years later, I found the Betjeman poem and followed its trail - and was duly rewarded. It became a BBC documentary and I was able to do quite a bit of extra research - and I found out something extra. Lord Cloncurry had lands adjoining Piers’s lands down on the shores of Lough Iron. I’m fairly certain that Cloncurry himself, the cuckolded husband, was the man with whom Piers had the bet - because he sued Piers for criminal conversation.
It was a sensational case. The transcripts of the trial sold thousands of copies every afternoon in Dublin. Cloncurry won - and as damages he was awarded Piers’s lands, which just happened to adjoin some of his own. You lose some, you win some, so to speak.
Some of you may have seen a series I did for the BBC called ‘The Celts’. Let me remind you how that began. A teacher in a little village called Hochdorf, smaller than Golden, a Mrs Renata Liebfried, a local teacher much like my own mother, got into conversation with a local farmer while she was out walking her dog. He showed her that his plough-blades were breaking on some rocks. Frau Liebfried was a member of her local historical society - she was a hobby archaeologist - and she had a look at the rocks.
She knew they were different. She knew she’d be told these were Roman rocks and she felt they weren’t. So she began to ring the museum in Stuttgart - if any of you have been there, you’ll know what an impressive place it is. She rang them on and off for ten years; they weren’t interested - ‘they’re Roman rocks’.
Then one day, a new archaeologist on the museum staff, Dr Jorge Biel, youngish, lively, answered the phone to Frau Liebfried. He heard the passion in her voice and he went out to have a look. Biel knew the moment he saw the place - this story still gives me shivers of excitement - Biel knew the moment he saw the place that Frau Liebfried was right. he sank a trench and to cut a long story short, he found the richest Celtic grave ever - the grave of the man with the golden shoes.
This was a great chieftain who had died in 552 BC and was given a huge ceremonial funeral. They decked him out in gold, they dug a huge tomb for him, they gave him plaid to wear, drinking-horns for himself and his companions in the next life, a cart to carry all the cooking and eating utensils he would need, a cauldron with four hundred litres of mead.
When I came to write the book that went with the BBC series, what else could I begin with but that story?
But that’s non-fiction - and the connection between non-fiction and local history won’t surprise any of us. What is a complete joy to me, though, is how, in everything fictional I’m writing, I already know the power of local history.
To date, I’ve developed two strands of novels - one strand deals in Ireland, one deals with how the events of the second world war linger. Let me take that first.
The year before last, for pure research purposes - I needed people being caught in a confined space for tension - I travelled by train from Venice to Berlin and back again. On both occasions. This was a sleeper train. I broke my journey in Munich and went to see some contacts who were to take me to Dachau. They didn’t. They refused. They’re both keenly interested in history and I was writing about the Holocaust. They told me the people around Dachau, even though it’s now a monument, don’t want to know. Not only that - where there is an interest in local history in the vicinity of one of the death camps, the camp will never be mentioned. Ravensbruck, Saxenhausen, Belsen - never.
As to the fiction I wrote about Ireland - I am spoiled for choice. It is proving impossible to keep local history out of my work, to such a degree that I recently found myself taking a major career decision - that once I have finished this cycle of Holocaust novels, all my fiction will from then on have an Irish root.
Look at what’s available to me. You know it better than I do. You know, you research, you track, the events, the heroes, the elopements, the battles, the arrowheads, the ground beneath your feet. I’ve already drawn on the history of the linen industry, the demesne at Thomastown castle, a village murder in County Waterford, the Herrema siege at Monasterevin; those are the ones I remember - and even though I can’t bear to read my own books once I’ve written them, I know they’re riddled with references to things you would classify as ‘local history.’
And here’s the bizarre thing. This is the absolute truth and I prefix that caveat because what I’m about to say sounds at first immodest. In the vast majority of the local history I’ve drawn on, I’ve done virtually no research. Yet - and readers tell me so - it feels authentic. It’s the best compliment I can get. I’ve tried to explain that I do no research, but nobody believes me. You probably will - when I tell you that I don’t need to. The information is already there. Indeed, part of the reason I came here today is that it’s already there.
How did it get there? I don’t know. Osmosis, maybe. The Spanish have something they call the ‘duende’ - the spirit of the country that comes up through the soles of the boots and seeps into the bones and makes flamenco dancers and guitarists.
Lovely thought - but I’m not going to rely on it. Anyway I don’t need to - because I can always turn to the Tipperary Historical Journal, and all the others I can get my hands on. Mr Mayor, Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for inviting me back to my home town. ENDS.
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