New Ways to Kill Your Mother

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