The unblooded author
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 17: Staying Alive
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Joanne Carroll
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Joanne Carroll's biography and other articles by this writer
The closest I have ever been to civil violence is about one kilometre. That is not very close, comparatively speaking. I happened to be in Dublin during the bombings of 1974, when three arteries out of the city were blown up during peak hour. Meanwhile, up the road in a country town just below the border with Northern Ireland, the same thing was happening at the same moment.
Like most writers, I wasn't involved personally, but other people whose stories I knew were. The residential house where I lived, next door to a night shelter which my group of youthful do– gooders also manned, was the nearest thing to a home that my fellow inmates, a dozen winos and semiretired prostitutes, had. As fate would have it, there wasn't a one of them lounging around that day. No, after jumping fresh from their beds at lunchtime or thereabouts, they'd all taken off for the city, up the Quays. So when the rumbling noise came down to us and was ignored, and when very soon after the news shouted in our ears – I have no memory of how, whether the radio was on or someone running in – that a bomb had gone off, adrenalin started pumping.
No doubt I left it to whomever it was who thought up plans of action to think up one. The first step required phoning our sister house, located in the thick of it. Thankfully, after an endless few seconds they answered. Then the impossible question: Could they go out and find our people, tick them off our hurried list? Drinking somewhere, some doorstep. Old Billy might be collecting money for looking after people's cars, try Gardiner Street. Mary Martin's lookalike said she was going with a friend up to Talbot Street, the worst possible place – but hopefully she was lying again to spare our blushes and had tried her luck up at the park instead, seeking employment of a casual nature.
And the waiting started. They trailed in slowly, one at a time. The hours went by. Meanwhile, next door the night shelter opened and the transient seekers after beds came knocking, all familiars, each greeted too with enormous relief. One of these, big Nelly, put the eyewitness spin on it. Yes, she'd been sitting in her usual doorway on Talbot Street all right, but no, Mary Martin's lookalike wasn't with her. At least, not as she recalled. Yes, she heard one of the old bombs go off. But she hadn't actually seen it, though it happened but a hundred metres away. She heard this sound, like, and thought it was a car backfiring and took another swig of Red Ruby. Who knows what would have happened to big Nelly, the brasser with a heart of gold, the cliché come true, if she'd been sober and capable of movement that afternoon?
By ten o'clock in the evening, every one of our dozen co– habitees had come home. And then we hovered around the radio, all of us, old Billy and me, the former or almost– former working women who were in their forties and fifties but looked closer to seventy, the ancient mariners of various merchant navies washed up on the streets years ago, all of us quietly listening, smoking. The names eventually came out – thirty– three had died, three hundred were injured.
One of the dead shared a name with my future husband. He was supposed to have headed down to Connemara early that morning. More phone calls. The phone number of the man– next– door to his borrowed cottage was ferreted out of someone's aunt, the country call made, the knock on the cottage door, and the call returned. I was lucky. Well, isn't that just typical of a writer? It wasn't me, it was the man himself who was lucky. Some other woman will never forget the loss of that terrible day.
Dublin itself took a long time to recover. It had been decades since there'd been war in the streets. No one of my age really believed the slaughter of the Irish War of Independence and the bloody Civil War that followed it. You hear about it, but you don't really believe it, do you? Suddenly Dublin was silenced. Suddenly it dawned on us that reports of bombings and shootings and God knows what else up there, across the border in Northern Ireland, where they all must be mad, were real. And possibly they might be as scared as us.
Who planted those bombs in Dublin and Monaghan? That remains an unsolved crime. No arrests. No court case. Though everybody knows who did it. That is usually the way in Ireland, particularly when it came to the so– called "troubles". "The dogs in the street know who done it." That's what they say. It's more than thirty years and the arguments go on, the missing files get curiouser and curiouser. There are reasons for not giving a direct answer sometimes. Sometimes peace is pricey.
SO THAT'S MY STORY and that's as close as I got. I could say I am part of the lucky generation, but that isn't quite true. Young boys my age went off to Vietnam, or else ran around with Commonwealth police after them. My parents' generation survived or didn't survive World War II, and my grandparents' got through both miserable affairs. So I am of the right generation of the right gender, but let's be honest and qualify it by saying so far. Who knows what the future might bring? War – like the poor – has always been with us.
It is easy to explain why Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms: he was there, driving an ambulance around the killing fields. And he wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls after his time embroiled in the Spanish Civil War. Primo Levi's masterpiece, If This is a Man, is almost too searing to include, the book he pulled out of his guts, remembering his time in Auschwitz. Erich Maria Remarque's fabulous All Quiet on the Western Front was so real that Hitler ordered it to be burned – Remarque and Hitler shared the same war, the same army, they just emerged with different ideas about it. James Jones' From Here to Eternity is a terrific read, and it too was forged the hard way, coming out of the direct experience of Pearl Harbor, and his posting to Guadalcanal poured into The Thin Red Line. Tolstoy wasn't in the Napoleonic wars, it is true – being too young – but he did spend some time in the Russian army in the 1850s, and he saw serious fighting at Sevastopol. One of the great moments of imaginative literature is when Prince Andrei is wounded in the field. Tolstoy also ran away with the best title. War and Peace is taken.
Explain why fevered novelists in the lucky West are scratching away at the war novel, or its close relatives. And coming out with some pretty good stuff. Has Sebastian Faulks lived through it? Or Brenda Walker? Or Pat Barker? Well, Barker was born in Yorkshire in 1943, so she doesn't quite fit in there, but let's say conscious memory would be next to nil. We've all heard stories, of course. Perhaps seen the ravaged faces. Is that enough? What about the creative writing teacher's maxim: Write What You Know. Like Jane Austen, for example. Maeve Binchy swears by it, and tells everybody else to swear by it, too. Having lived in Ireland for more than thirty years, I have all the time in the world for Maeve, one of the great characters in Dublin (there are a few). And I love her best books, as it happens. And actually I agree with her in principle. But still ...
War creeps in. Creeps into the consciousness of the writer, prowls around, a dark, mesmerising presence. Calamity is recommended by Aristotle, not as a general rule for life maybe but more as a handy tool for the poet. Perhaps it's as simple as that. Writers are the ultimate users.
I have used "the troubles" to trouble my conscience into working out the plot of a novel. Some years later, The Rhapsody of Sweeney was produced. Its writing caused me to bring into the light my own tribal prejudice, my quiet assurance that, though we liberal types didn't in any way condone all that dreadful killing and maiming, we were right in the first place, the only problem to convince the other crowd of their wrongness. I probably still believe it, truth be told. So much for catharsis. Yet now and then something happens and a little bell gongs, far away maybe, somewhere up in the hills while we're busy down in the valley, weeding or something, but we hear it dimly, pause for a moment as it sounds inside us.
There was once a Loyalist terrorist picked up and tossed in jail for a rather serious offence. He was "the enemy". While in jail, he met a few people, one man in particular – another Loyalist – who spoke different words to him. And he came out with a question growing in his mind. It might be that he was a pretty spectacular type of a man, not your common or garden terrorist. He wanted to make peace. He read and he thought and he listened. He could see that life hadn't been rosy for "the other crowd". This understanding didn't turn him into one of them – no, not at all. He remained loyal to his Britishness, loyal to his own people, until the day he died. He died early this year, far too young.
It occurred to me his heart might have broken. I can't say. The peace was hard, and a long time coming. He was John the Baptist crying in the wilderness for a long, long time. Many of his own side didn't like what he said, or disclaimed his terrorist past. David Ervine died before the final agreement came. But he was a bell that sounded. The voice of the true man, the genuine hero. A sound that has a way of echoing. He touched my consciousness many years ago, watching him move among the enemy, make forays into alien territory, speaking his piece to curious audiences in the Irish Republic. He got our respect. It would be too much to say I transferred anything of his fineness to my little oeuvre, but I can say he was one who taught me to hold back my pen from vitriol.