AUTOBIOGRAPHY: Help Me to a Getaway: A Memoir by Knute SkinnerSalmon Poetry, 248pp, €15
HELP ME to a Getawaytells of American writer Knute Skinner's sojourns in Europe on the eve of the 1960s. This is a time before cheap flights; when Skinner travels to the Canaries, it is in the bowels of a steamer, with Spanish soldiers – en route to the war in Spanish West Africa – being sick all around him. It is a world before the widespread availability of phones, when aerogrammes and letters are the primary mode of communication.
At one point a shopkeeper shows Skinner tea bags, informing him, “It’s a new American thing. It will never catch on here”. We are reminded of the oppressiveness of a London where “police actively spy on public toilets”. There are the shadows of the Cold War – the author attends a CND march addressed by Bertrand Russell, and evokes the tensions created by the Gary Powers spy plane incident.
Skinner opens with his arrival in Cobh after an eight-day voyage during which passengers enjoyed “dances and language classes”. He then travels on the soon-to-be-defunct West Clare Railway. His accounts of Dereen and Kilconnell are gentle and affectionate, describing “men dressed in suits at work in the fields” and local folk beliefs. When a hare appears as a priest is blessing a new grave, his friend Brendan tells him the “hare was a soul”.
From his base in Clare he heads north, where the narrative lapses into touristy fluff – we learn little other than the manner of serving butter in a café and that the Giant’s Causeway is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Skinner often exhibits a Pooterish obsession with food which makes his narrative drag. On the other hand, he frustratingly lets slip stories that might have made fascinating reading.
When he visits his mother’s home in Copenhagen, he concludes she “must have grown up under privileged conditions. I wondered what prompted her to move so far away”. The question is asked, but not explored.
The book lifts with the introduction of his friend Mortyn, in many ways the true heart of Skinner’s tale – gay, promiscuous, mischievous, he appears as a Dean Moriarty to Skinner’s Sal Paradise.
When Skinner’s relationship with his repressed fiancee, Georgie, falters (“I try to recall when, if ever, I’ve seen a wild side to Georgie”), he finds himself opening Mortyn’s letters before those from his lover. In the Canary Islands, when Skinner receives a terse letter calling off the engagement, he promptly sleeps with a local hooker he has befriended.
Help Me to a Getawayfeatures Skinner's poems, which nail events and moods in a way that his prose fails to do. The statement "I have seen not just lakes, mountains, and valleys but a spiritual landscape. I can't describe it in words, but what does that matter? Wordworth has already done it," invites the question of why he bothered at all. We are often told something is "exciting", or that a person is "excited"; but the excitement is not transmuted into language that thrills.
There could have been better editing; we find “I wish Mortyn were here to discuss it with us” followed a few lines later by “I miss the discussions I wish I were having with Mortyn”. JP Donleavy’s name is misspelt. And at a CND rally, Paul Robeson “sings a few songs”. Which songs? We are not told. All of which is a pity.
Skinner at his best is an amiable raconteur, and his accounts of his romantic interludes with lovers such as the obsessive Dutchwoman “Joke”, “the virgin who is hot”, have charm and wit. His portrait of a world in flux has value, but aches for a lyrical lift that, for a poet, is curiously missing.
Liam Carson is the director of the IMRAM Irish Language Literature Festival. His memoir, Call Mother a Lonely Field, has just been published by Hag's Head Press
