As a child, Sinéad Morrissey had the run of what is now the campus of the University of Ulster at Jordanstown. There can hardly be a place less inviting of memoir than this cold, rainswept expanse of playing fields and student housing, even after Ciaran Carson began The Star Factory in an outside toilet. Still, the moment when Morrissey jumps in the unattended diving pool, dark and bottomless, is so perfectly observed as to transport the reader into that rare space between memory and sensation, in which mind and body share the words we take for experience.
Among Communists takes its title from the politics of Morrissey’s parents, who were both, for her childhood at least, committed to the dream of a workers’ revolution, never mind the fact that, as Morrissey drily observes, neither parent seemed to work much. Morrissey’s mother came to the international left in rebellion against the circumstances she grew up with in England. She also comes across as someone with an intense capacity to feel, which makes her life in the north of Ireland of the 1970sand 1980s an existence she was destined to flee.
Morrissey’s Belfast father was shaped by his own father’s socialist republicanism. His was a life of curious privilege, a university lecturer whose major commitment was to argue the point, whatever the subject. Morrissey has an older brother too, who flits through the early pages and fades as adolescence intensifies the particularity of Morrissey’s own perceptions. The curious constellations that make any family shine bright in Morrissey’s writing, which often combines the directness of poetry with the self-reflection of prose. This is by turn, captivating and unsettling, not because the memoir reveals any terrible truths, but because it reveals the world in its delicate complexity, the fragility of which is magical and mournful.
Reading the memoir, I was reminded of the many strange sects the North has been home to. Besides the communists, the evangelists, the anarchists, the skinheads, the punks, the esperantists, the animal rights activists and the members of CND all raised their voices, each over the other. There was a strange liberty in this confusion, which Morrissey well captures.
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Among Communists pictures this North as a pressure cooker of weirdness, the surreal mannerisms of class and education absurd in the face of the wider disintegration. What else was there to do but take part in a play of your own making, Morrissey entering this drama as a child actor, her account of the strange scenes around her making Among Communists a classic of memoir, and of Irish writing.
The book is not perfect, and tails off when Morrissey moves to Dublin, where she studied at Trinity. The account of Oxford might better have been left aside, while the story of her summer job on the German island of Juist reads like a stand-alone essay. This other blustery edge of Europe has some of the same self-satisfaction of the provincial North, but it takes the reader from the core of the memoir, which is Morrissey’s earlier childhood.
In this, Among Communists is superb. The gentleness with which Morrissey draws the filigree complications of the said and unsaid that connect any family together is exceptional. This is where Among Communists reveals itself as the work of a poet, not so much in the richness of its language or allusion, but in the scouring clarity that Morrissey brings to her subjects, the primary of which is her earlier self.
There is humour in the book too, and kindness, and a definite love in the family, however that changes by the book’s end. And there is joy, especially in those unrehearsed moments when the starchy rhetoric of party and class mutes before the sheer fact of life. One of the book’s best parts is when Morrissey remembers a Party party, the dancing, the smoke and the sweat of bouncing along to Free Nelson Mandela, the workers’ utopia drummed out by the clatter of feet.
In his great fantasy of Venice, Italo Calvino had Marco Polo imagine different versions of the city to entertain the court of Kublai Khan. There, a city of memory gave way to a city of desire, a city of trade to a city of the dead, and all the same place, from various perspective, Invisible Cities a study of love and absurdity. It may seem strange to think of Venice in Belfast, the river Farset paved over and no St Mark’s but Marks & Spencer. Still, Among Communists has something of Calvino’s peculiar freedom, expressing an attitude of observation that rhymes quietly with poetry, Morrissey’s memoir a revelation of a writer and her experience, alone, as she puts it, as all children are in their families.
Among Communists by Sinéad Morrissey is available now from Dubray Books
