MEMOIR: Light on Distant Hills: A Memoir,By Cathal O'Searcaigh, Simon Schuster, 269pp. £12.99
LIFE INTERRUPTED, life thwarted, life deflected from the smooth course we unrealistically assume it should take – that’s meat and drink to memoir. The form’s abiding story is that of loss, its typical scenarios those of exile, breakdown or abandonment, its artistic ambition recuperation. And loss creates a sense of difference, so that, to risk a mighty broad generalisation, it might be claimed that memoirs record the making and effects of difference and how they are socially negotiated.
Cathal O'Searcaigh's memoir, Light on Distant Hills: A Memoir– his first book in English – is at a certain tacit level no exception to memoir's general shape and trajectory, although that does not at all compromise the distinctiveness and interest of its material.
Covering the first 20 years of his life, it is a brightly-coloured detailing of not only the way of life and cast of mind into which he was born, in the remote townland of Mín A Leá near Gortahork in the Donegal Gaeltacht, but of the growth of his own poetic sensibility, fostered alike by family circumstances and his natural surroundings. Growth in imaginative self-awareness, in turn, is also dovetailed with, and fortified by, the author’s discovery and embrace of his sexuality.
The book ends with a sojourn in London, in the course of which both his poetic personality and sexual identity are consolidated, and he returns to his native place committed to the life of a gay Irish-language poet – a path as incontrovertible as it was unprecedented.
Under the aegis of his dual minority status, “Charlie”, as he calls himself throughout, with the poetry of Cavafy to show him the way, takes the “perilous but promising journey back to my own Ithaca”.
Important as his “short, liberating spell” in London was, it’s the life of the home place that occupies the bulk of the book. More than merely a local habitation and a name, home is a richly evocative landscape, a culture in the shape of a topography, a countryside so imposing as to reproduce itself in the mentalities of its inhabitants as a principle of continuity, a unique world view and a source of what, in a typical dualistic formulation, is termed “an earthy commonsense mysticism”.
The degree of intimacy between this landscape and the growing Charlie forms one of the main expressive structures of his story, though the outsider may be prompted to wonder if it's not the family's apparent isolation that brings about such intimacy. It's true that there are neighbours to hand, and that some sense of community is conveyed. But it appears that Charlie did not experience that sense through the medium of familiar social forms like the church, the GAA club, visits to extended family, music-making or those regular occasions of céilí for which rural life in remote regions has been prized since we first encountered Peig.
Primary school is the one institutional experience dealt with at any length, and it comprises yet one more dismal chapter in that venue’s long history of intellectual humiliation and physical abuse, though Charlie was not all that apt a student either. He fares better at the Tech, where at least the English teacher is more sympathetic and less crudely systematic.
The effective absence of the public realm makes it difficult not to think of life having been lonely for young Charlie. He seems to have had hardly any friends his own age; even the lads with whom he had his first sexual encounters all say they're only waiting until the real, heterosexual thing comes along. Yet, isolation and loneliness are not words to be found in Light on Distant Hills. An only child, he was the best of pals with his paternal grandfather, who lived with the family, and his relationship with his parents is striking for its lack of the usual inter-generation angst and drama, and for its degree of closeness (at the age of 10 he was still sharing their bed). Michael, his father, was to the world at large a small-holder and labourer; in himself, however, he was a reader, a man of language and learning, a cultivated spirit and devotee of Robert Burns who delighted in his son's poetic baby steps. If the time his father spent working in Scotland went hard with Charlie, what is recalled of it are the heaps of books harvested from Glasgow's second-hand bookstalls.
As for Charlie’s illiterate, manic-depressive mother, the often bewildering moods and claims arising from her being “an inveterate traveller in the otherworld”, where she has to do the bidding of various local fairy hordes, are offset by the author now thinking of her “more as a rustic mystic than as somebody with a wild, bad dose of the nerves”. It’s as though loss as such is less the point than the possibility of its imaginative reclamation.
Indeed, imagination is a shaping force at least as powerful as memory in Light on Distant Hills. The book's visionary title suggests as much, and in case there's any doubt, we are informed on the opening page that, "evoking a lost domain of emotions and experiences requires one to be a fabulist and a conjurer. In that sense, this memoir is both a confession and a fictional artifice".
The past is both a repository of factual data and an occasion of imaginative play. And language, of course, is the vehicle to convey the desire to have it both ways.
Not surprisingly, the language here is what one expects of a poet, heightening and vivifying the presence of just about everything, from a tilly lamp to a falling star, and perhaps for some tastes a bit over-active in the simile and metaphor departments.
And ultimately it results in a series of paradoxical effects – an airy intensity, an unrehearsed knowingness, a histrionics of the everyday. These effects cast an illuminating light on the book as a whole, showing the reader a richly impoverished, innocently erotic, worldly unworldly realm where childhood is a romance, the road usually not taken is the way to go and Gaeltacht is envisioned as something of a Shangri-La.
George O’Brien is a professor of English at Georgetown University, Washington, DC