Poet Patrick Deeley’s memoir, The Hurley Maker’s Son, has been hailed for its evocative, sense-filled recollection of a Galway childhood. Deeley was something of a misfit, dreamer and a loner, and his days were filled with both an openness to nature in the Callows surrounding his home outside Loughrea, and a fascination with the machines, implements, and above all else, the language of his father’s workshop, where his father would talk of the bas of a hurley or the felloes of a cartwheel, and where “the machines didn’t so much eat the timber as chew it into the shapes he wanted before spitting out the leftovers”.
The Hurley Maker’s Son is a celebration of rural life and of the unspoken bonds of love in a family, a moving elegy for a father killed early in life by an accident, and a meditation on the experiences that are the making of a writer.
It begins with death. In 1978 Deeley, then 25 and a teacher in Dublin, returns to his childhood home to bury his father, who was struck by a tree he was felling. Why did Deeley choose to begin the memoir with the death of his father? “It gave me a standpoint to measure everything else against, a chance to celebrate his life, not his death. Everything could be refracted through his death. A life gains definition through death; it gains a resonance, and the book is full of small things. Maybe they gain a greater significance when you realise the tragedy that happened later.”
Laurence Deeley was an expert hurley-maker who tried, with little success, to teach Patrick the trade. While his brothers took to carpentry easily, Patrick “felt at cross-purposes with every knacky implement”.
He would find solace in the Callows, and his experience of nature was “sensual and exhilarating. I saw the world of nature as a monster, a beautiful monster, a monster in the sense that we were caught up in its clutches, there was no escape from it, except through death, and that the monster didn’t care about the good or the bad in a person. It had its own logic, the circle of life and death, how they feed off each other. The barbarism of nature, that touched me as a child. In one way it was an uncaring, woolly thing, but it had its own deep intelligence which I couldn’t tap into.”
The Callows was a place Deeley could go to get away from his father’s workshop. “I wasn’t good at his craft, but I loved the language of the place. The tools and machines were beautiful, but obsolete, really by then. Old planes, old spoke-shales, old routers, and then there were the wooden shapes that he made, the plain statements of wooden objects, as I would put it. When I came to write poems I wanted to make clean statements, ‘clean as a piece of timber,’ he would say, for example. I wanted to catch the grain of things, to make poetry fluent, so I found myself falling into that. His language became my language. I was fascinated by his craft even though I wasn’t very good at it. It was a case, really, of the dream against the deed. I didn’t know it as a child, but it was a case of the poet trying to shape words to catch what the carpenter was doing.”
Deeley was aware early on of the difference between his mother Mary’s speech and Laurence’s. “My mother was a farmer, she came from a farming background, so she would use farming terminology or old figures of speech. She would say things like ‘how soft the wool grew on you’, in other words, ‘did you come down with the last rain shower?’ My father didn’t care about farming, so he used the industrial language of timber and machines and sawmills. He was using language that caught that idea of shaping, and people who came to him used the colloquial, farming language of the place, so that there was a marriage of two languages. I liked the contrast between his use of that language and hers.”
The family was undemonstrative. Although there was “an abundance of love”, but his parents “would have been embarrassed by any expression of love, but that’s not to say they didn’t feel it.” Deeley recalls that Laurence could be impulsive and playful, and used to dance on rooftops much to Mary’s horror.
“He used to dance on the roof to ask her, in front of the whole parish, really, to ask her to tell him that she loved him, and he would shout it down to her until she was forced to do it because he wouldn’t stop dancing and it was dangerous on a little narrow parapet of a chimney.”
Deeley writes that after one such occasion, his parents exchanged a look “that I knew only to be adult and fierce,” and he tells me that “they had a very close relationship. They did go upstairs on certain afternoons when we were kids. We noticed it but didn’t know what was behind it.”
Mary was devout but “she was worldly too. She would hold her own with people. She believed in giving as good as she got. She was very direct. She was old-fashioned in her belief in the church, but that was shaken when sexual abuse cases came to light.
“We had a Station in the house and a priest came, and she engaged him in conversation, an unwilling one on his part, about the sexual abuse of children, and how disgusted she was. She wouldn’t let it go, and she said how shaken she was in her faith. That wasn’t an easy thing to do, for a woman to speak out against the parish priest or against any priest at a Station in her own house. When she was reprimanded by some other woman later, the woman asked how she could speak that way to an educated man like the priest she said, ‘You don’t have to go to college to know what’s right or wrong.’”
The memoir has a non-linear structure, and has a poetic sense of connectedness. “It’s a bodily experience. I’d like to think that it’s fresh. Ted Hughes said that you write to take fuller possession of the reality of your life. When I first started writing poetry as a teenager, I began to write in images without any argument. I harked back to those as a way to stimulate memories. Those old bits of failed poems were helpful to me in triggering memories. It was a bit like pulling a root out of the ground and finding it attached to another root and so on it goes. Memory is a root, Octavio Paz says, and I found that to be the case here.”
It wasn’t easy, though. “Prose is a job in a way that a poem isn’t. I was a great sprinter as a kid, not so good at the longer races. The prose became a work of endurance, a real thing you go to even when you aren’t inspired. You go to your room and you face the wall and do the work.”
Patrick Deeley will be reading from The Hurley Maker's Son on Saturday, June 25th, at 6.30pm at the Presbyterian Church in Kells as part of the Hay Festival Kells.
Patrick Deeley, The Hurley Maker's Son (Doubleday Ireland) £12.99
Niall McArdle is a writer and critic. His short story, Nineteen Ways to Say I Love You, was shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Awards. He blogs at niallmcardlewriter.wordpress.com
