An audiobook of the Inishowen stories of Charles McGlinchey offers a vivid voice from the past, writes Siobhán Long
Piseogs, poultices, cures for foot-and-mouth, the perils of an over-abundant crop, and the merits of sidestepping the evil eye - these are just a handful of the preoccupations of Charles McGlinchey (1861-1954), tailor and weaver, bachelor and ace chronicler of a life and time which he recognised was fast disappearing.
McGlinchey's tales of quotidian life in the Inishowen peninsula, from Binnion to Cluainte, Straid to Meentiagh Glen, and Ballyliffen to Sliabh Snaght, were meticulously transcribed by Patrick Kavanagh, schoolmaster in Gaddyduff National School in nearby Clonmany. If there was even a grain of truth in Cicero's assertion that "he who knows only his own generation remains always a child", then McGlinchey's picaresque recollections of a life well and long lived surely offers one of the most palatable routes to maturity - or at the very least, to some degree of enlightenment about where we've come from.
Desmond Kavanagh bore witness to his father's diligent collecting of stories from McGlinchey. It ran alongside his own schooldays like a parallel universe, his father's handwritten notes scrupulously and painstakingly documenting McGlinchey's ebb and flow, his colourful idiosyncrasies of phrasing and his resilient character. In the mid-1980s, having shared the contents of his father's manuscripts with his childhood schoolfriend, Seamus Heaney, who in turn alerted Brian Friel to their existence, Desmond Kavanagh found himself in the fortunate position of accepting an unsolicited offer from Friel to edit the collection. Friel's midwifery duties offered a lifeline to writings which might otherwise have languished in their handwritten form, far from the gaze of the general reader.
The McGlinchey collection has been compared to the best of the Blasket islanders' accounts of fast-disappearing lives and lifestyles. Peig Sayers, Maurice O'Sullivan and Tomás Ó Criomhthain chronicled island life with forensic attention to the particular, yet many readers parcel them up in the baggage of their secondary-school education, their colour and character sullied by the looming shadow of exam papers.
The Last of the Name is another beast entirely. First published in 1986, and now republished with a spellbinding accompanying audiobook (read in its entirety by Co Donegal actor Seán McGinley), it's a collection that will tickle the curiosity of anyone with an ear cocked to the foibles of the past and an eye on the follies of the present.
IN HIS FOREWORD, Brian Friel fingers the essence of McGlinchey's concentration on "the everyday, the domestic, the familiar". Despite 93 years of a life that coincided with Home Rule, the land wars, the 1916 Rising, two world wars and the atomic bomb, McGlinchey trained his attention on "the nuance of phrase, the tiny adjustment to a local ritual, the momentous daily trivia of the world of his parish", and in so doing, Friel suggests, offered "an exact and lucid picture of profound transition: a rural community in the process of shedding the last vestiges of a Gaelic past and of an old Christianity that still cohabited with an older paganism, and of a community coming to uneasy accommodation with the world of today, 'the buses, the cars, the silk stockings'."
McGlinchey bestows an account of life in Inishowen every bit as riveting as Sherwood Anderson's fictional Winesburg, Ohio; small-town life with all its webs of intrigue, peculiarities of character and quirks of nature.
Desmond Kavanagh, with a typical Donegal gift for understatement, admits to a certain tincture of satisfaction at seeing his father's fastidious collection published. In fact, it was the original publication of The Last of the Name that led to the foundation of the McGlinchey Summer School in 1998, to promote the local culture and traditions of Inishowen and the north-west.
"I remember, very early on, Brian Friel telling me that 'it would need to be a sensitive hand that would touch it'," Kavanagh recalls, recounting the pair's early discussions of how best to impose some order on his father's voluminous story collection. Recognising the recurring themes, the tidal patterns inherent in Charles McGlinchey's tales, Friel opted for a suite of 18 chapters, with titles that run from The Family to The Home, Emigration, Factions, and Landlords and Tenants.
Truly this was a worthy forerunner to The Sopranos, with all the intricacies and intrigue of local relationships (though somewhat less murder and mayhem).
"Brian was very taken by the rhythm of Charlie's own speech," Kavanagh says. "And he was extremely careful not to tamper any more than was necessary, in imposing a rigour to it that would give it book form."
Kavanagh's decision to release an audiobook edition of The Last of the Name was inspired, as it returns these piquant stories, with all their colour and wit, to their Co Donegal roots, where the peaks and valleys of the Donegal accent can be mined in earnest.
"I felt that we had to get Seán McGinley involved in the final journey of the book, in a way," Kavanagh says. "I had heard him doing a short BBC reading of an excerpt from the book many years previously, and I knew that he had the ear and the voice, and that no one could equal him as a performer."
MCGINLEY, MEANWHILE, HAS no doubt about what attracted him to the book in the first place. "I remember my grandmother on my mother's side, Mary Boyle, who was from between Dunloe and the Glenties in the Gaeltacht area of Donegal," he says. "She was a great storyteller and sean-nós singer, and she had that same ego-free quality in her storytelling that you just knew there was an authenticity to it. I think that's the most valuable thing in storytelling. While you might make allowances for a certain mythology that might evolve around a particular story over the years, the essential core of the stories is true. Their authenticity still stands."
Desmond Kavanagh's stewarding of his father's account of McGlinchey's stories has been a labour of love, but there is merit, he believes, in examining the past with an eye to the present.
"These days we have a tendency to deal more with the present and the future than with the past," Kavanagh says. "But I see in my own sons, who are now in their late 30s, that their attitude to the book has changed. They see the value in it now and are enthralled by it in a way that they weren't earlier. I think that the book has a role to play for people with a growing interest in looking back on their own lives, and recalling it for the next generation."
For McGinley, it is McGlinchey's voice that rings true, and this was the magnet that drew him to the book long before he became involved with the production of the audiobook.
"Like music, the more you hear the more selective you become, and the more you look for a genuine, original voice," he says. "For instance, [renowned Donegal musician] Johnny Doherty, in terms of fiddle-playing - there's utter simplicity about it, but it's hugely complex as well, but it doesn't have the ego. He doesn't indulge himself in his playing. I could say the same about [traditional singer] Joe Heaney and all those boys. They seem to cut right through all the nonsense and get to the point. There seems to be some universal truth there. I don't claim to have discovered what that is, but I think we all search for it in some way, whether consciously or sub- consciously. It's one of the driving forces for most people, I think, whether it be in their daily life, in music, in their work or in their friends."
McGlinchey's book is a bridge between past and present that McGinley insists is one worth navigating.
"Of course there's nothing wrong with 'the now'," he says, "but who we are, no matter who we are, it's the past that's brought us here. I think if we lose contact with that completely, we lose our compass, we lose a sense of who we are. Telling our stories to each other, whether musically or dramatically or any other way, if we do that with passion and integrity, then the universal nature of it will open it up to the world."
The Last of the Name, by Charles McGlinchey, as told to Patrick Kavanagh, is published as a paperback and audiobook by Collins Press