The world in words
Through his conversations with Patrick Kavanagh, Donegal weaver Charles McGlinchy gives us a glimpse of a forgotten Ireland when superstition ruled, the land was everything, and life was fuelled by words and stories. By Edward O'Hare
When a life story is passed to readers through the hands of not one but two of the most eminent figures in modern Irish literature, it is bound to be worth listening to. The Last of the Name is a book with no single author, but three creators. To begin with, we have the words of Charles McGlinchey, a weaver and tailor who lived in the remote Donegal parish of Meentiagh Glen on the Inishowen peninsula from 1861 to 1954. Then we have Patrick Kavanagh who, while working as head teacher at the Gaddyduff National School in Clonmany, transcribed the many affectionate conversations he had with Charles McGlinchey. Lastly we have Brian Friel, who has taken the pages left behind by Kavanagh and turned them into the present book.
The combined skills of these three men – McGlinchey as storyteller, Kavanagh as recorder and Friel as editor – have produced a memoir that is a true classic of its kind and a generous glimpse of a forgotten Ireland.
Like Patrick Kavanagh's poems, Brian Friel's work as a playwright is famous for its delicate examination of language, the interaction between place and memory and how people deal with change. In his introduction to The Last of the Name, Brian Friel explains how he came to recognise these same preoccupations in the words of Charles McGlinchey. Brian Friel describes McGlinchey as a Janus figure, who faced both the past and the future at once. For almost a century, he sustained what Friel calls an “Olympian” ability to overlook events outside his own life by concentrating entirely on the “everyday”. Brian Friel suggests that Charles McGlinchey coped with the inevitable changes that marked his age by monitoring with a remarkable intensity the myriad minute ways in which the familiar world around him altered forever.
It is Charles McGlinchey's personal way of dealing with the passage of time and its consequences that gives this memoir its unique structure and its unfailing power to entertain. McGlinchey sees no reason why he should coldly set out events in their chronological order when he can plunge ahead into a funny story, a song, an account of a long-dead custom, a reminiscence of a colourful event or a description of a local character who has suddenly returned to his mind. His remarks were never intended for publication, so the memoir has all the warmth and candour of a wonderful, freewheeling public-house conversation. Ultimately all the simple happenings that Charles McGlinchey recalls become something much greater. As Brian Friel observes, “his concentration on the familiar... the tiny adjustment to a local ritual, the momentous daily trivia of the worlds of his parish gives us an exact and lucid picture of profound transition”.
The sheer amount Charles McGlinchey managed to retain in his memory makes The Last of the Name extraordinary. He witnessed the comings and goings of seven generations and could remember all the individuals he ever knew with astonishing clarity. The lyrics of ballads and the words of the prayers he heard as a child came back effortlessly to his lips as he spoke to Patrick Kavanagh. His 94 years saw the Home-Rule crisis, the land wars, the 1916 Rising and both world wars, and yet he makes no mention of these since they had little direct impact on his home town. The fact that he was so removed from the main action of Irish history bestows a magical sense of timelessness on his recollections.
As a study of language itself, The Last of the Name is fascinating. Charles McGlinchey received only the briefest of educations which gave him a basic ability to read Irish and English. Aside from his time at school, he does not mention any other occasion when words as marks and symbols on paper played any great part in his life. The prevailing theme of the entire book is the primacy of spoken language. All of Charles McGlinchey's knowledge has been derived from what he has heard and what he has been told. From his childhood days listening to the legends of Fionn, Oisín and the Fianna, to the blessings made by old people, to the stories told around bonfires on warm summer nights, Charles McGlinchey lived in a world that was sustained and enriched by the power of the spoken word. For those of us raised in a time in which every emphasis is on the visual and words are merely used to fill the gaps between images, it is disconcerting to return to an age in which language, the only means of communication, was used like a precision instrument.
What is important for Charles McGlinchey is not the quantity of words he employs but the selection of the precise ones. He puts great value on the sound and flavour of an exact phrase. The memoir also derives much strength from the simplicity with which subjects are treated. The ‘Dear Summer' of 1817 and the Great Famine of 1845 are given a five-paragraph chapter in which McGlinchey describes such scenes as a father and child begging at windows for potato skins and the discovery of the body of an itinerant with his mouth choked with weeds, which place us in the very midst of that unimaginable horror.
Personal losses are also treated with supreme economy. The deaths of McGlinchey's brothers Neil and Patrick are given only a sentence each but the statements are no less affecting for their brevity.
At the heart of The Last of the Name is the land. The memoir shows us a time when man worked in complete harmony with the earth, alert as much to its needs as to his own. Charles McGlinchey is never nostalgic about his struggles and those of his ancestors, but he does give an impression of the great satisfaction they enjoyed before the incessant drive towards material wealth became a sickness in society. The most valuable possessions in those years were stories, and McGlinchey had an apparently infinite store of these. A favourite tall tale is told about a man called Sean Mac an Meirge who owned land near the Isle of Doagh. Fond of a tipple, he would frequent a nearby inn, drink all day and then arrange to be carried home before dawn. Soon he ran into debt and to pay for his porter he began to sell parcels of his ground to the landlord. One night he made the usual declaration that he wished to be carried home. Dismayed when the landlord ignored his demand, he asked what was going on, only to be told he had no home to go to. “You have no more land left to drink; it's all mine now,” the landlord said.
Some of Charles McGlinchey's finest stories concern the manufacture of poteen. He relates how early police called “revenue men” were called in to seize illegal poteen stills. On one occasion, the revenue men recovered many gallons of poteen which the they were supposed to dispose of by pouring it down a grate. A superior officer came from Buncrana to see that this was done. This officer was not long departed before the poteen was retrieved from a large tub concealed beneath the grating and both revenue men and locals enjoyed a hard-won drop.
Besides the stories told merely to entertain, there are those passed on to keep old injustices from being forgotten. Charles McGlinchey mentions one Colonel McNeil who brutally evicted his tenants, attacked funerals and drowned people. McNeil would also attend the Pollan fair, an important annual gathering, and kidnap young women. In the year 1709, some men from Ardagh put an end to McNeil by beating and then castrating him, and McGlinchey tells of how McNeil lingered on in agony for days and “tore the walls out of his house when the devil took him”.
The meticulous way in which Charles McGlinchey has preserved all of these tales demonstrates that people of his generation needed stories for a higher purpose, to give order to the unending chain of life reaching back into the shadows of prehistory. The Irish people of Charles McGlinchey's memories were closer to pagans than christians. Priests were considered only guests in the community along with their faith. Instead, the region was the domain of superstition. The graves of still-born children were unlucky places, hares were witches in another guise, the tongues of dogs and foxes were prized for their healing powers, a seventh son or daughter could work magic and men set fire to gunpowder on the backs of cows to stop the fairies from stealing their milk. Ghosts and spirits ran riot, like the dreaded Archie Rua who was banished by a Fr Corr in 1784. In place of medicine the people had “piseogs”, cures associated with particular animals, and the plants that grew in the locality. Old people claimed the power to read the weather and ribbons were used as a means of keeping the Evil Eye at bay.
Never too grim and brimming with fine humour, The Last of the Name is the testimony of a man who lived a long time and retained an overwhelming sense of wonder all his years. Charles McGlinchey was the last of a generation for whom the world was an inconceivably large place, but who loved and respected their small corner of it and were content to remain there. Some of the visions the book summons to mind – such as an aristocratic big-house family's tearful burial of their pet monkey in a specially-made coffin – are hauntingly strange. Others, like the sight of the whole of the Inishowen peninsula filling with light as the people placed candles in the windows on the dark morning of a Christmas Day, are unforgettably beautiful. These are the lost moments of our past which never find a place in official history books, but which can now be appreciated once more.
For more information on Charles McGlinchy and the Mc Glinchey Summer School, which takes place the last week of June, visit www.mcglinchy.ie