New Ways to Kill Your Mother (22 page)

The controversy surrounding the play thus centred on the use of Haughey as a central character and the distortion of the facts for dramatic purposes. It simmered in the newspapers and on radio and came to a head at a post-show discussion in the Abbey Theatre on 20 February 2002. The actors, the director and the theatre’s literary manager took part, the author watching from the wings.

Jocelyn Clarke, the literary manager, remembers ‘an unusually full post show discussion house’ in which the first speaker from the audience disagreed with the director’s statement that the play had ‘grace’. ‘The characters,’ she said, according to Clarke, ‘were small-minded and petty, especially the politician, and his relationship with his wife and son was not credible.’ Clarke remembers that a young man then stood up ‘and wondered how Barry could use the life and figure of a still living politician for his play – what right had he to do that to Charles Haughey’s family, and to a lesser extent Brian Lenihan’s family’. Clarke set about defending the play:

I replied that
Hinterland
was not a biographical drama about Charles Haughey’s life and times but about an imaginary politician whose life and times were based on figures and events in Ireland’s recent political history, which were very much in the public domain. That a playwright chooses to write a play about a political figure whose life story has similarities to the story of a living or dead politician does not make it a play about that politician’s life or career.

‘The audience,’ Clarke remembers, ‘grew more restive.’

‘That’s not true,’ cried somebody. ‘It’s about Charles Haughey,’ shouted somebody else. ‘It’s all been in the newspapers.’ I replied … that it had not been Barry’s intention to write a play about Charles Haughey. Indeed,
Hinterland
should be seen in the broader context of his work, and his ongoing theatre project to explore a nation’s history through the prism of Barry’s own family and its history. It could be argued that
Hinterland
is a biographical play in the sense that Barry primarily uses elements from his own biography rather than Haughey’s or any other politician’s and that as far as I was aware Haughey was still happily married, and he has several sons, none of whom suffer from a mental illness.

Thus the ambiguities surrounding the play and its intentions were spelt out. Its emotional shape came from the author’s private life and that of his family; some of its detail came from the public domain, from aspects of the life of the former Taoiseach. Some of the audience believed that the author had no right to confuse the two, and the play had been damaged by the confusion. The theatre’s literary manager suggested that to see
Hinterland
as solely about Haughey or as a distortion was a fundamental misreading of the play.

Act 2 of
Hinterland
centres on Jack’s father-fed neurosis and Johnny’s affair with Connie, the woman whom the audience recognized as Terry Keane. The act opens with Jack trying to hang himself. When Daisy comes in on this scene, she says to her husband: ‘Listen, you can be the king that ruined his country but I won’t let you be the father that ruined his son.’ And it is this sense that the personal is all that matters that impels
Hinterland
, with Daisy as a sort of chorus, musing always on the career of her husband as a father rather than as a party leader. His neglect of his son is offered as an event that supersedes politics, but stands for the rot at the heart of the public realm as well:

You were running for office, or running the country. Ah, yes. But it denies something at the heart of life. At the heart of families, of countries, of political parties even. If that slight signal [that the child in need gives out] is not attended to, there is really no family, party or country. Because the oldest law on earth has been violated.

Thus Barry subtly works the connection between a man who calls himself ‘the father of the nation’ and the domestic father, insisting on the failure of the latter as a poison that infects the nation. But he is also using elements in the career and personality of Charles Haughey as a metaphor for what is essentially a private ache. This might seem, as it did to some of the Abbey audience at the discussion, a sort of confusing battle between private and public, an invasion of Haughey’s privacy and the privacy of his wife and children, a distortion of the facts for mere artistic purposes, a dishonest and misleading play on public affairs while all the time masking a personal, private pain. Many of these accusations that were made about the play missed the point, which is that all fiction comes from a direct source and makes its way indirectly to the page or the stage. It does so by finding metaphors, by building screens, by working on half truths, moulding them towards a form that is both pure and impure fabrication. There is simply no other way of doing it. Most plays, novels and stories use the same stealthy process. Barry, by stealing Haughey, simply exposed an age-old system. Fiction, by its very nature, is a form of deceit.
Hinterland
inhabits beautifully and controversially the interstices between the world as we know it, raw and shapeless, and the world as imagined, tested richly and suggestively by private and hidden experience.

Roddy Doyle and Hugo Hamilton: The Dialect of the Tribe

1

It seemed beyond belief that our neighbour Seamus Doyle, who tended roses, and his wife, Gretta, who went to Mass every day, had once led a revolution, that he had been sentenced to death by the British, and that she had, with two other women, raised the Tricolour, the Irish flag, over one of the main buildings of the southern town of Enniscorthy in the 1916 Rising. It seemed even more astonishing that Marion Stokes had been one of the other flag-raisers; she came to our house every evening during Easter Week 1966 to watch a drama on television about the events of fifty years earlier.

She was the least likely ex-terrorist you could imagine, polite and sedate and distantly smiling. My uncle, who fought in the subsequent War of Independence and went on a hunger strike in prison during the Irish Civil War, also gave not a hint in his manners and his attitudes that he had, when he was young, taken on the might of the British Empire in pursuit of a dream that those around him viewed as foolish and fanatical.

The third woman who put up the flag in the town in 1916, Una Bolger, was married to Robert Brennan, one of the leaders of the Rising; he later became Irish ambassador to Washington and a close associate of Eamon de Valera. (Their daughter was the novelist and short-story writer Maeve Brennan, who wrote for the
New Yorker
for many years.) Una’s brother Jim Bolger, also involved in the struggle against the British, was Roddy Doyle’s grandfather, the father of Ita, who tells her story and that of her
family in
Rory & Ita
, which Doyle edited for his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.

The story of the revolutionary generation in Ireland remains complex and powerful and difficult to tell. My uncle, who died in 1995, confined himself to chance remarks and jokes on these matters; I have no memory of our neighbours, who took part in the Rising, discussing their years as revolutionaries in private conversations. They were quiet and conservative people; their years of living dangerously made them grumpy, it seemed to me, rather than garrulous. But since the IRA ceasefires of the late 1990s, the commemoration of what happened has become easier now that the events are not re-enacted in Northern Ireland on a daily basis. When the
Enniscorthy Echo
, the local newspaper, celebrated its centenary, it produced a supplement with articles proudly stating that it was ‘once a hive of nationalists’, printing a photograph of Robert Brennan in paramilitary uniform, his wife standing behind him, and articles about Jim Bolger’s arrest for sedition in 1915 and my uncle’s hunger strike. All three worked for the newspaper, which, its centenary edition stated proudly, ‘assumed a notorious reputation with the authorities’ in the decade before the creation of the Irish Free State.

In the 1940s, the Irish government asked those involved in the Rising and the War of Independence to write down their memories, which would be locked away until an indeterminate time in the future. More than seventeen hundred obliged, including Seamus Doyle and Robert Brennan. In March of this year, the archive was opened for the first time to scholars and researchers. Having read a sample of the accounts from Enniscorthy, including the memoirs of Doyle and Brennan, full of flat statement and unadorned prose, I found it fascinating to imagine the conditions under which the statements were written. These men sat down to record their memories in the relative comfort of neutral Ireland,
in domestic harmony, in a world about which no one will ever, it seems, need to take further statements to lock away. Seamus Doyle must have walked in from his rose garden and sat quietly at a table in the front room of his semi-detached house to describe a meeting in prison with Patrick Pearse, who had led the 1916 Rising, shortly before Pearse’s execution. ‘He rose quickly when the door was opened and came forward to meet us and shook hands with us. He appeared to be physically exhausted but spiritually exultant … When the soldier was out of the cell Pearse whispered to us, “Hide the arms, they will be wanted later.” We then bid him goodbye.’

‘On the inception of the new state,’ Roddy Doyle writes in
Rory & Ita
, ‘Jim Bolger became a civil servant, at the Department of External Affairs … His first task was to sit outside a room with a gun while the new Minister, Gavan Duffy, was inside the room.’ Ita, Roddy’s mother, remembers that her father ‘never lost the idea of what he had fought for, but he wasn’t a diehard’. By the time she was born in 1925, three years after the foundation of the state, her father was working by day and studying accountancy at night. Roddy Doyle’s father was born in 1923 and was called Rory, the Irish for Roderick, after the patriot Rory O’Connor. O’Connor was one of four leaders, one from each province, taken out and shot a year earlier by the Irish Free State forces in the beginning of a series of reprisals in the Civil War. These executions caused immense bitterness among the opponents, led by Eamon de Valera, of the 1921 treaty with the British, which left the North behind under British control. In 1936 the poet Austin Clarke wrote:

They are the spit of virtue now
,

Prating of law and honour

But we remember how they shot

Rory O’Connor
.

Rory Doyle’s own father, as a member of the IRA, was involved in burning down the Custom House in Dublin in 1921, but did not take part in the Civil War, although two of his brothers fought on opposite sides, one being killed in the war. ‘He couldn’t face up to fighting the men he’d been with; he just couldn’t do it,’ Rory remembers, ‘but he was still close to the Republican fellows who were causing the trouble.’ In 1926 his father joined Fianna Fáil, the party founded by de Valera, which held power in Ireland for much of the time between 1932 and recently.

Roddy Doyle’s parents, then, being born in the short time after the struggle for independence ended and before the revolutionaries began to grow roses, are Irish versions of midnight’s children. Doyle has attempted to write a book about a most elusive subject, using their two voices; he has attempted to evoke ordinary life in peacetime amounting in its modest way to happiness. He has kept the revolution and its spirit in the background, placing instead his parents’ courtship, marriage, the raising of their children, their domestic life in the foreground. He has also attempted to capture their particular tone, interrupting merely to explain a small matter or move the story on, but never to argue with them. He is interested in the detail of things; the book is full of proper names, brand names, precise memories, simple anecdotes.

He is concerned to dramatize a number of subjects uncommon in Irish writing, including his own previous work – niceness, decency, love, harmony, gentleness, kindness, prosperity, gentility. Thus cooking and going to work in the morning, acquiring a first refrigerator or a first washing machine, the buying of a dress or a suit, the going to a dance or visiting friends, in all their mundane detail, are central events in the book, are allowed the space normally reserved for bitterness and violence in Irish books. This move into sweetness may arise partly from the genuine affection that Doyle feels for his parents, but it also comes
from the sort of politics that has been central to his work from the beginning.

2

In November 1979, two months after the Pope’s visit to Ireland, Roddy Doyle, aged twenty, first came to public attention. He wrote an article for the magazine
In Dublin
stating that the Virgin Mary, who had appeared at Knock in the west of Ireland one hundred years earlier, had thereafter travelled to Dublin where she had, he was sure, given birth to Patrick Pearse, whose centenary we were also celebrating. The delay of two months between the two events, Doyle explained, was due only to the bad state of the roads at the time. Doyle’s remarks, funny and bitterly irreverent in a time of great piety, made him something of a hero for those of us who worked for the magazine. His status was much enhanced when he was denounced soon afterwards by the Irish-language magazine
Inniu
, which pointed out that there were countries in the world who knew how to deal with such blasphemies. Clearly they meant Iran, since the Ayatollah and his punishments were in the news every day. Doyle had taken a cheeky swipe at Knock, the very shrine the Pope had visited, and at one of the martyred icons of Irish nationalism at the same time.