Does it matter if your fiction is based on a mass illusion or a biased version of history that does not abide by facts that are readily available, well attested, and documented? Maybe but isn’t fiction in itself fictive and no account of any historical period can cover everything. There must be selection and that introduces distortion. Your scale of importance differs from mine and an overlooked event or attitude may be vital to the whole history.
The long short story by Claire Keegan ‘Small Things like These’ is a case of a true false novellatisation of history. I was around in 1985 and I remember quite well the economic recession and cold weather that winter. I asked my wife who also read the story:
- Do you think that nuns at that time would have put a girl in a coal shed at serious risk of hypothermia?
- No, she replied, in 1965 maybe.
Social attitudes towards the church had changed in 1985 and at that time there would be an inquest. A cover up would be difficult if not impossible. This is hinted at in the story. Recollect that the nuns tried to blame the other girls in the institution for the incarceration and that Mrs. Keogh a reliable weather vane had got some hint from the nuns about the unreliability of Furlong. They moved fast, a phone call would be enough. Remember this : those nuns did not come from Mars. They were Irish drawn from the class that values respectability more that anything. Eileen Furlong is in that cadre and the author has indicated that. Strangely very few people have made an obvious correlation and they prefer to think of the ‘nuns’ as alien corvids. It’s perfectly clear that Furlong’s Christmas burden would receive a frosty welcome.
The mummers of Wexford have a St.Stephens day tradition of going about in fancy dress playing music and gathering money. One of their characters is called the Sugan Earl after a pretender Earl of Desmond in the 17C. Twisted hay ropes (sugan) cover the players. One asks oneself- ‘Is Bill Furlong’ a sugan liberal stuffed with bien pensant hay’? It is an Irish liberal cliche that if were only Protestants we would have avoided all the Catholic guilt. Furlong has been reared in a Protestant milieu , so there’s that. However there is the cold wind of modernity that is cutting the legs from under the natives.
“And then the nights came on and the frosts took hold again, and blades of cold slid under doors and cut the knees off those who still knelt to say the rosary.”....
"If some complained over Joseph looking overly colourful in his red and purple robes, the Virgin Mary was met with general approval, kneeling passively in her usual blue and white. “
Very well says you but what about the writing? For me the change in her usual style mars. The stripped out plainness of the prose loses the characteristic vigour displayed in her previous works which I enjoyed very much. There’s an alienating factor of a ‘voice’ that relates the story, seeming at times to be a local character a type of observing neighbour with limited education. There is just a soupcon of this, or is it just me.
“Now, Furlong was disinclined to dwell on the past; his attention was fixed on providing for his girls, who were black-haired like Eileen and fairly complexioned. Already, they were showing promise in the schools. Kathleen, his eldest, came in with him to the little pre-fabricated office on Saturdays and for pocket money helped out with the books, was able to file what had come in during the week and keep an account of most things. Joan, too, had a good head on her shoulders and had recently joined the choir. Both were now attending secondary, at St Margaret’s.
The middle child, Sheila, and the second youngest, Grace, who’d been born eleven months apart, could recite the multiplication tables off by heart, do long division and name the counties and rivers of Ireland, which they sometimes traced out and coloured in with markers at the kitchen table. They, too, were musically inclined and were taking accordion lessons up at the convent on Tuesdays, after school.”
‘Fairly complexioned’ is a local usage, “multiplication tables and long division”. ‘Pon my word they’re fierce scholars altogether.
The truth needn’t be Gothic but in Ireland we love those images of a porteress sister with a great iron ring with a multitude of large keys for locks that yield unwillingly, drawn from the depths of sable robes. Did 10 or 20 or 30 thousand girls pass through those institutions? The McAleese report which took 6 months and covered the available paperwork opts for the lower figure. Others demur but consider this common sense idea: if you were getting headage payments from the state for some of the girls would the figures given by the nuns be inflated or otherwise?
Mummers:straw men/sugan earl
2 comments:
Well, well. I read the book over a hot afternoon in August 2022. It was the first time I'd read any Claire Keegan and I was very very taken by the quietness of the whole thing and the story of a man being courageous in an unshowy way. I did think before I read it, "Here we go, let's bash the Catholic Church again", but Keegan convinced me of her story. I didn't check the dates or the facts, and I have only a vague idea that there were these things called Magdalene Laundries at some point in the recentish past. The book beguiled me as a small fable, rather than something that had roots in a time I knew. As I always do when reading about other people's moral bravery, I doubted I could do what the central character was doing. One day I will read it again with the new perspective you have given me. I wonder if you have read Keegan's most recent, about an Irishman who becomes engaged to a French girl. I found it exceptionally disappointing, a piece of feminist agitprop.
Mother and Baby Homes were a general feature everywhere, generally run by religious of all Christian denominations. In Ireland they carried over from British administration. In Keegan's story I discern not very far beneath the surface a counter narrative. It is not really a feel good story . The hints that we get coming from Eileen show us that she essentially approves of the repressive aspect of the Magdalene Laundry which might keep in check girls whose families have let them run wild.
I'm going to re-read 'So Late in the Day' and post on it. You'd imagine as the classic Frenchwoman of fiction she would be delighted by frugality and not being put upon by rascally grocers. As to the ring, leaving that behind would have cost her a pang. Is Keegan indulging in a sly subversion of 'serves him right the miserable mean man'. Maybe.
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