When The Hungry Grass was first published in l969, there was one review that made me laugh. It was by a priest and in it he said: "I don't know anything about Richard Power, but if he's not a priest, he knows a sight too much about us."
No, Richard Power was not a priest but Victor, one of his younger brothers, was and it was through him that Richard had, as it were, access to inside information. It was also something that Victor told him about that was the inspiration for The Hungry Grass. The parish priest of one of the poorer country parishes died suddenly and the bishop sent his secretary, a younger priest, to wind up his affairs. When the secretary opened the safe in the parish priest’s study he found a number of jam-jars packed with tight wads of grubby bank-notes. He was so shocked that he ran out into the yard and was sick. This story sparked something in Richard’s imagination: what kind of man was that parish priest and why was he hoarding this money? The Hungry Grass charts the search for an answer to this question.
So Richard Power was not himself a priest. However, he once said to me – perhaps a little enviously? – that the ideal job for a writer would be as chaplain to a community of contemplative nuns. The chaplaincy was not an option: instead he worked for the civil service. Looking back at that time, it seems to me that the Irish civil service must have been the biggest patron of the arts since the Medici: every civil servant seemed to be an artist, a writer, a sculptor, a poet, you name it. Richard’s desk had previously been occupied by Flann O’Brien, of The Third Policeman. While being a civil servant had its advantages: you could be sure of a roof over your head and food on the table, it also meant that free time for your “real” work was limited to the left-overs of the nine-to-five job and at the period that Richard was writing The Hungry Grass, our six children were aged from ll years old down to a few months, so peace and quiet at home were hard to come by.
An old friend of mine who came to stay with us said after a couple of days, only half jokingly, “It isn’t flowers your guests need on their dressing-table, it’s ear-plugs!” For a few days Richard tried staying on to write in the office but this didn’t answer. Eventually we managed to work out a more or less satisfactory timetable: Weekends Richard kept for the family – he was a wonderful father; Mondays to Fridays I fed the children before he got home in the evening then the two of us had a quiet meal together and he wound down for a couple of hours. About 9 o’clock when the children were finally in bed, and the house was comparatively quiet, he would write for a couple of hours – long-hand, this was before the days of computers and he never really took to a typewriter. I had to admire the self-discipline that this involved.
Asked once how he set about writing a novel: did he plan it beforehand or did he just start to write and follow where this led him, he compared the process to lighting a fire. Lay it carefully, he said, first the lighters then the kindling, then the coal and if you have done that properly, then you just have to strike the match and the fire will burn. He also kept notebooks, in which, rather in the style of an artist’s sketchbook, he jotted down snatches of dialogue or phrases that occurred to him.
“Write about what you know,” aspiring novelists are told and Richard drew heavily on his own family history in writing about the Conroys. An enduring presence in the background is Fr Conroy’s old home, the Conroy family’s farm, Rosnagree. I don’t remember that we are ever told in what part of Ireland it lies, but members of the Power family will at once recognise the Power family’s farm of Graigrush, in Co Waterford, outside Dungarvan, at the foot of the Comeragh mountains. And not only the farm, but in the thumbnail sketches of outlying members of the Conroy family they will recognise uncles and aunts and cousins of the Powers.
But given that the novel opens with the death of Fr Conroy, there is a more sinister presence evident in the book, what Fr Conroy (and the Power family) called the Family Monster, the sudden heart attack which cuts down the men of the family in their prime and which is embodied more explicitly in the nameless figure with the scythe which appears in the final pages. Richard himself died only months after the publication of The Hungry Grass just 10 days before his 42nd birthday.
As well as a love of the Irish countryside, Richard loved the Irish language. His interest had first been kindled when he visited his grandparents, who would speak in Irish when they didn’t want the children to understand, and later when he was a pupil with the Christian Brothers at Synge Street, where they were taught Irish by an exceptionally gifted teacher. He spent the six months before our wedding living on the Aran Islands on a scholarship provided by Gael Linn and felt, so he told me, that this had suddenly reinvigorated his connection with his Irish roots. In fact, his first writing, as a student, was in Irish and I suspect that it was this subliminal sense of the vividness and immediacy of the Irish language that infused his writing in English.
It has been said that the most valuable asset for a novelist is a troubled childhood. When Richard was l5, his father, who had gone to the UK to start a new job and had just written to arrange for his family to join him, died very suddenly of a heart attack and the family was left in dire financial straits. After The Hungry Grass, Richard began to consider a semi-autobiographical novel but soon abandoned the idea. That memory of that period of his life, he said, was still too painful to write about.
Instead, he had begun to work on a satirical novel about the civil service. You wouldn’t need to invent anything, he said, it would write itself, from the senior member of the service whose tame seagull roosted on top of the filing cabinet in his office, to the junior member, whose time-keeping was so appalling that he began to fear for his job, so one day he got hold of the attendance book with its incriminating evidence, put it in a large envelope and posted it off, addressed: “To the Emperor of China”. It’s a real pity this book remains one of Irish writing’s might-have-beens; there have been times in recent years when the country could have done with a good laugh.
Richard’s untimely death was not only a great loss to his family, but a significant loss to Irish literature in both languages, as acknowledged by Máirtín Ó Direáin in the poem he wrote in memory of Richard. To those of us who loved him it is especially heart-warming for the rich gift he left us in The Hungry Grass to be recognised with this reissue.
This is an edited version of Ann Power’s speech at the launch of Apollo’s reisue of The Hungry Grass by Richard Power in Dublin on September 27th, 2016
