Are You Somebody?
Hello again, hope you are all still enjoying the great Irish summer! Have only had to put the heating on once in the past week, so now it’s positively tropical..
Spending so much time indoors due to the crappy weather has resulted again in my habit of re-reading books. Some of the stuff in my bookshelves has been there for years and I get into the habit of taking them down dusting them off and revisiting them. It’s always interesting to read something again when you are a few years older and have a few more years of experience and worldview under your belt; it also is a sobering reminder of what a callow, wet-behind-the-ears savage I was back in my twenties and early thirties
One such book is ‘Are You Somebody’, by Nuala O’Faoláin. I first read this book in my early years in London; I saw it on the kitchen table one Sunday evening when running out the door to the airport and I grabbed it without thinking; it had a beautiful drawing by Alice Maher on the cover – ‘Angel with Arms Akimbo’. I opened it in the departure lounge and devoured it right up until I got off the tube at Whitechapel where I was living at the time. It’s one of my favourite books, particularly from the perspective of being Irish and living abroad, and re-experiencing reintegration after moving back, and is written with a complete lack of sentimentality and touches of wry, well-observed humour, in spare and elegant prose.
O’Faolain spent the best part of her twenties and thirties in London, before reconnecting with her Irish heritage after spending a week at the Merriman Summer school in Limerick and subsequently moving back to Ireland for good. A celebrated journalist, writer and tv producer, she had been asked to write a preface to a collection of her writing for the Irish Times which was being published. The preface grew into a 200 page memoir; where O’Faolain looked back on her life, reflecting on her childhood, family, loss, negotiating romance and relationships,the literary scene of Dublin in the 1960’s, the detrimental effects of alcohol and the reality of entering her middle and later years alone. I did see her in person once; it was a day or so before Christmas in 2007 in Kevin & Howlin on Nassau Street in Dublin. She was in with a male friend, trying to find him a tweed sports coat for a dinner they were going to that evening. It seems to have been a challenging day for them; I got the sense that both were at the end of their respective tethers and were still managing to hold it together; otherwise I would have gone up and said hello.
I recently did a road trip to Sligo and Leitrim as research for a book of Irish folklore which I have been tasked with illustrating. I was reminded by a particular quote from ‘Are you Somebody’ while I was out there; O’Faoláin writes about the joy she experienced rediscovering Ireland’s culture, language and landscapes, while still being very conscious of the underlying darkness and sadness of its and her own personal history:
“I thought nothing was happening, then. But my head was filling with riches. The mosaic of the country was being assembled inside it. The mysterious valleys between Leitrim and the sea with their oily black rivers full of fat trout. The stretch of plain – deepest, silkiest green – out beyond Lissadell with its abrupt end at the fierce beaches, as indifferently beautiful as when the little curled ships of the Armada foundered on their rocks. The Shannon welling up silently into its round pot, and then changing character, discovering youth, prancing out towards Dowra to begin its long slide down the country. Down through the silvery-greys of the water-meadows, down past what were stone hotels, corn mills, old canal buildings, past the swans waiting beside half-submerged alder trees. In winter, when you get the train that crosses the Shannon river, it seems to go across the surface of a huge water into low country. In the wintry light, the train goes into the water and the water is steel, and carries the train. But Ireland isn’t just landscape, but history, and present society. There. was famine and brutality and emptiness in the country…..”
In 2008, Nuala O’Faoláin was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and gave an interview with Marian Finucane. ‘Are You Somebody’ essentially explained herself to herself, whilst put out there and presenting her to the world. The 2008 interview was essentially a farewell to her life, in her own words: ‘this is how it is for me now’.
The interview is bleak and searingly honest, and parts of it are very tough to listen to; but it’s well worth it. The link is below:
