The queen of sorrows
Redmond O'Hanlon on Are You Somebody?, the memoirs of Nuala O'Faolain, an unheld child who wrenched an inspirational story from her pain
Nuala O'Faolain's story is one of grief, loss, pain. Grief, loss and pain explored, deepened, transcended. Infinitely sad, at times despairing; sometimes conversational, sometimes poetic; sometimes brutal, often joyful, usually compassionate, always courageous, rich and life enhancing. It's a story of abandonment, recovery, of loss and hope, of great moments, even great years, engulfed by a sea of sorrows in which she so bravely swims.
But, as in the best memoirs, like Alexander Herzen's, say, it's the story of a human being wrestling with history, with an Ireland on the cusp of cataclysmic change where two notions of female destiny exerted their tragic pull on an eager, bright young woman, avid for life.
Something of an orphan, she was psychologically abandoned by a sad, alcoholic mother and by her father, the social columnist Terry O'Sullivan – always impeccably groomed to schmooze with the people he thought important; people who were somebodies, unlike his children. A talented, charming man who fell for a lifestyle which gave him a driver and endless good dinners, in an age when few rashers greased most Irish pans.
Where were all the celebrities as he lay dying? And what did it all bring him in the end? A flock of shattered sheep in disarray, not knowing what to do about the cataclysmic agony of a father they could have loved, given half a chance. And who never quite got around to loving them. O'Faolain tries hard to understand what he thought being a father meant to him; what fatherhood itself might mean.
Pain, too, is often orphaned, alone, with no place to go; its texture, quality and depth too private, beyond consoling, beyond articulation, unless you have an exceptionally empathic listener, like her friend, the wonderful Luke Dodd; or unless you have exceptional powers of expression which can seize listeners by the throat and make them attend. How often, in the middle of great psychic pain, do we cry out with Ecclesiasticus, “Oh what suffering is like unto mine?” “Or howl with Mother Courage and Nuala O'Faolain?”
Yet, it is pain that tells us we're alive, pain that has made us the complex, damaged persons we are. The great and dangerous male fantasy is to play invulnerable, as in the US after 9/11.In various studies of pain tolerance we are in the top three. We offer it up. Remain ”strong”, silent, hoping it‘ll go away – forgetting St Paul's words: “When I am weak then am I strong, when I am strong, then I am weak.” Though it can kill us, pain more often hones us, gives us depth, character, identity. Pain is a messenger, meaning an angel for the Greeks. An angel warning of danger, calling for radical change. It's fatal to shoot the messenger, crazy to stifle an angel's voice – as drugs, tranquillisers and myriad addictions do. I've known many, usually so-called “strong” males, who specialised in dodging it, to disastrous effect on their own souls and to those hoping, hopelessly, to engage deeply with them.
But, more importantly, pain can make us whole, if we let it be, over time; if we attend to it, honour it. Pain can be a real gift, if we're prepared to go down and mine it, diving deep, like Adrienne Rich, “to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail”.
Nuala O'Faolain does this, with absolute focus, with infinite patience. Her reward was the powerful reactions of those who became her wider family, in a community of pain; of those to whom she gave the permission, or courage, to dredge up their own unspeakable stories. Her writing brought meaning and warmth to her when all seemed lost. It brought clarity to murk, pattern to chaos, self-respect to apparent failure; language to catatonic silence; movement to frozen mourning. There's a Sufi sect whose evening ritual begins with the question, “What have I failed to mourn today?” A long, reflective silence follows. This is wisdom of a very high order. One suspects it's the sort of wisdom Nuala would understand more deeply after writing these books.
I was amazed to come across the following lines in her 2003 book Almost There: “I found out when I was a little girl that if you're crying uncontrollably, and want to stop, the thing is to do something useful with your tears – water a plant, say.” What a nourishing thought to have in your armoury at eight! And it's a thought implicit in the first 20 lines of the tenth Duino Elegy by Rilke, one of the greatest, most subtle poets of our epoch. I'd be inclined to translate the key lines as:
“We squander our pain, staring ahead at seeming-endless woe, wondering will it ever end.
But our sufferings are mere winter leaves, our dark evergreens – one of the seasons of our secret year – Not only a season,but a camp, a ground, a dwelling-place.”
Earlier, the poet hopes that one day, at “the end of grim understanding”, his “unremarkable weeping, his nights of grief might bloom”. But he wishes he'd accepted them more fully, let them have their way with him. And it's these very lines, in a weak translation, that were the only thing Nuala, that voracious reader, could read, over and over again, as her father lay dying. They brought great solace to her, and to me, when I read them years ago, in the depths of a long melancholia. They gave me the courage to stay with the devastation, to let them work on me as long as necessary, to trust that winter would come to an end; that blossoms might return. They even shocked me into writing poetry.
They may well have been the alchemy that transformed the bitter tears and rage of Nuala O'Faolain into something not only useful, but beautiful, too; something deeply moving that has helped thousands of us move more hopefully through Dante's dark wood.
Why did she feel it necessary to write her memoirs? She gives us three possibilities: she'd agreed with her publisher to do a short introduction to a selection of her Irish Times pieces and around then someone came up to her in a pub and said: “Are you somebody?” She began to ask if she was, in fact, somebody – somebody of value to herself or to anybody else – somebody behind her well known, self-confident public persona.
She had read the story of the brutality and neglect meted out to Imelda Riney's killer as a child. This seized her imagination and may have dislodged images of the damage done to her own family. And it was Christmas, that time of year when the Ghost of Christmas Past won't be denied; bringing back, if you're lucky, memories of warm, family nights around a roaring fire. Memories of love. But she was on her own, bereft of warmth; partnerless. A failure in her own eyes.
And what did the writing of her memoirs achieve? Firstly, it changed her and her initial story. Gave her back Life when she was mired in the silent inertia of Death. It opened up an isolated, “failed”, self to a community of pain; to so many others who wanted to hold her, hug her, meet her, thank her. I myself wanted to write to her about how moved I was by her enchantment with ensemble singing; to ask her to a Bach rehearsal and let her feel the transcendence from the inside.
But perhaps the most important thing for the nation, and, no doubt for herself, was that so many people were empowered to share their stories with her. The great thing about stories, especially painful ones, is that they are magnets drawing out further stories lying desperately below a frozen lake of shame and fear. And they can throw a blinding light on dark secrets whose insidious power grows greater through being hidden. On things we couldn't see because they were too close to us, part of our being.
So, when we come upon a story that is like, but not the same as ours, our blindness falls away. That's what aesthetic distance is about, it's why we need shape, metaphor, rhythm. And it's why extreme realism is so useless. It's why, in order to catch the conscience of the King, Hamlet asked the players to insert “something like” the murder of his father into their play, not an exact representation of it. Stories allow us assume our pain and turn it into something else.
And there was a further bonus: her memoirs clarified the murky diffuseness of her desolation, giving beautiful shape and pattern to chaotic fragments of a seemingly useless life. (I often think the role of beauty in healing is badly neglected.) She didn't just give it to us raw, nor let it all hang out; she cooked it, unearthing in the process two fine aces to augment the pair of twos dealt her in childhood. Enough to win most poker games. Yet she was still apologetic about the value of the enterprise: but just before the launch one of her angels said three little words to her “Stand by it, Nuala.” Golden, priceless words. Words that told her she was somebody.
In the Tao we read: “Because I have loved so much, I lose so much.” Nuala loved much and lost much: as did her mother. One of the most terrible, most beautifully understated memories is of a rare request from her mother to meet her. They're in a pub, she's 18. Her mother, who adored her father, has just found a letter from Carmel in her husband's pocket. Carmel was his secret mistress. “My breasts have got bigger,” she'd written, “You'll see when I get back”. Nuala writes, “We sat side by side looking at the letter on the smeary table... There was nothing she could do.” Some of the most powerful moments in the work turn on terrible abandonment, on monumental loss, her own, her mother's, and that of Don, her young brother – though I sense she may have been relatively privileged in comparison with some of the others.
In tragic time there's no nick, nor in these memoirs. And the family's losses are truly tragic; it's too late to repair most of them now. The intense beauty of the works is no mean consolation prize for her. It's not nothing. But then for most of us loss goes with the territory of love, it's part of the deal; endemic, built in, archetypal.
Little wonder she's so fascinated by Phedre, that great, incandescent queen, burning with visceral desire for her stepson, a desire that wreaks havoc on all around her. (Tell me your favourite play and I'll tell you where your freedom and vitality is most curtailed!) For one of the things the great tragic figures invite us to do is to measure our banal little daily lives against their intensity of being; to see what we can become if really test ourselves; if we live on the dangerous edge, as Nuala has done.
One of her mother's few bequests was the absolute value of the Grand Passion, which got her into a not-so-merry-go-round of alcohol and psychiatric illness when the marriage crumbled. We can sense that one of the fruits of Nuala's writing is the gradual discovery of the danger in such passion and her (slightly reluctant?) desire “to learn ordinary, daily love. If I could love more steadily than I ever thought I could – more than I ever saw done”. Aye, there's the rub, and the enormous challenge to a woman of passion, reared on great literature, but who wasn't held when it mattered.
But Nuala O'Faolain is a fighter who's deeply aware of time running out; of the approach of death; and she is brushed by the wisdom such awareness brings. In this she joins a great philosophic tradition – and Basil Hume, who, when asked what was so special about an Ampleforth education, said: “Madam, here we teach our pupils how to die!” And she joins Sophocles when he says: “Of happiness the crown and chiefest part is wisdom... This is the law, that, seeing the stricken heart of pride brought down, we learn when we grow old.”
Love, desire, connection haunt these early works. And the great times with Nell McCafferty, the exuberant Nell, with her wicked humour, her incorrigible exuberance. Here they are in Greece, walking through olive groves, crucified by the heat, “panting, purple in the face... then we saw a water trough... we threw ourselves into the cool mud around it.” When they finally crawled out, hair and clothes stuck to their bodies “covered in mud, moss and leaves. Nell said ‘Irish models take a break from the catwalk'.”
Nell's irreverence, her appetite for life was savoured in all its manifestations. “It was by far the most life-giving relationship of my life... I saw things through her absorption in them.” Yet, when the end was nigh things became grim indeed; silent, tight-lipped meals in frozen rage. “We were made helpless by our angers.” Angers going back a long way, ”from generation to generation, with no atonement”, as Sophocles so pitilessly puts it. Yet is still a believer in love, in spite of all the pain. She even hopes to be saved by it. The quest for love, like the quest for happiness, is a dangerous one. Perhaps we can only allow it happen, prepare the ground to receive it.
Nuala O'Faolain didn't take out any insurance policies against love, and this I think is what endeared her to so many of us, but not to all. I know a number of unreconstructed males who felt very threatened by these books and by the searing testimony of a liberated woman. So well they might. It's a huge challenge to us D- fathers. One friend felt it was the story of a messed-up life; I felt it was a heady challenge, a great story wrenched from pain by a Nuala full of grace and grit.
One of the many things I admire about her memoirs is that she's never afraid to show her vulnerability, her neediness, her seething jealousy. Her desperate need, at times, to be held. D W Winnicott, that great child psychoanalyst, insisted on the cruciality of good holding for the infant; physical, psychological, emotionally deep holding, so that the infant could count on her coming back after an absence. No holding, no trust, no play, no separation. His Good Enough Mother held her child well enough so that the child could become confident, creative and independent.
Nuala wasn't held, and couldn't believe her luck when years later she was actually loved for herself. Perhaps this is why her mother just refuses to go away. There's a chilling moment when a workshop leader asks people to draw the ground-plan of their family home. She drew a picture of the room in which her mother died! Terrifying in its implications.
That sad, derelict mother haunts this memoir; but ghosts ask questions and won't vanish until they're fully answered. Her story still gnaws at the entrails of Nuala's own life, and is at the heart of her rage. When her brother, Don, died, his family wanted to bury him in their parents' grave, she said: “They what? Why would they put him in with his murderers?”
Yet, strangely enough, I feel there's not enough rage in the memoirs. Perhaps a rereading of that great, savage play, Portia Coughlan, would help her to go further down. “A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. The beak that grips her she becomes,” says Adrienne Rich. I sense a terror here of going into the rage more deeply for fear the monster might destroy her. Maybe what's needed is the protection, the indirection and aesthetic distance of poetry or the novel.
She's already a novelist whom I heard lauded by France Culture, surely the most sophisticated cultural radio station in the world. It wouldn't surprise me if she were to write some great poems. The rage of the unheld child is at its most powerful and plangent when she recounts the story of trying to handle her rage at the love showered on his daughter by her partner, John, at the “we” from which she's excluded. How dare you love her like that! What about me? Do I exist around here? Am I not somebody?
Nuala O'Faolain's memoir, Are You Somebody?, was rereleased in early-2007. New Island Books, €13.99. Her previous works include Almost there, My Dream of You and The Story of Chicago May