This is an odd book; what appears to be a conventional narrative of the Irish childhood experience, tragedy laced with indomitability, is disconcertingly interspersed with essays about the writers and literature which have influenced and affected the author - essays that could come straight from the folders of an undergraduate.
Edith Newman Devlin grew up in a Dublin slum in the 1930s with a fierce father and a chronic lack of money. So far, so predictable. In most accounts of such childhoods in Ireland the Catholic Church generally plays a black and irrevocable part, a frightful yoke stifling all loving and natural impulses. The difference here is that she was a poor Protestant so her story has a different spin. But when the spinning stops the consequences are the same and there are pain-filled descriptions of her life as a churchgoing Protestant girl trying to keep up appearances, desperately trying to hide her origins in order to attain the standards and snobbery of the Protestant middle-class society in which she found herself when she went to Alexandra College.
The Catholic church's presence is felt throughout her childhood if only by the fanatical efforts of her father to avoid its baleful and baneful influence. He - a Northern Ireland boy, a petty officer, oh well named! - who married a girl from Cork, lowered himself, in his own eyes, to become gate keeper at the Lodge of St Patrick's Hospital (Swift's Hospital for the Insane), up at Kilmainham. He emerges as a harsh, neurotic monster, doing the best he could as he saw it but his blinkered vision was a dreadful one for a child to have to live under.
Yet somehow this little tyrant, presented without flinching, is shown also as pathetic and admirable in his fight to retain his identity among his feckless neighbours. Like the Unionists I grew up among, he was a bully because he knew no other way to be, fighting his corner against all comers when that corner wasn't worth a hill of beans.
There are terrible moments in the book: St Patrick's was a private hospital then, for the rich mad, as Grangegorman was for the poor, and Edith Gaw, (as she then was) grew up literally on the edge of Bedlam, its mad inhabitants a fact of her life.
When she was five her mother died and she never again heard the word mother mentioned. It was as though she had never existed and the absence is like an amputation. The book is permeated with the bitter loss; the search for consolation underwrites every page.
But the language is always unvaryingly brisk and often didactic and one wonders whom she is addressing; it's as though the reader is from another planet. "If you look at the map of Ireland you will see that in shape she has her back to England and Wales", or "The Northern Ireland question created by the Unionists was not solved". But then again, the Dublin that she presents does seem to be from another planet; Trinity College in the 1950s, St Stephen's Green, the city itself, are shown labouring under a dispensation that has utterly vanished.
Like all autobiographies, this is a book about the condition of exile, a struggle to make the past yield its meaning and as a testament it is touching. But the power of a work of art derives not from its components but from a quality of synthesis which finally can't be analysed. Here there is no synthesis. Nothing is transformed or transmuted through the gift of language. The prose is leaden and the necessary complexity, the precise fitting of parts which brings harmony to the business of literature is missing. She makes little attempt to interweave her secondary life, that world of books and poetry and literature which underwrites her waking life, into the main narrative. There are recompenses. And, that the author survived such a childhood and emerged as the woman she presents herself as in her book is a tribute to the resilience of the human sprit.
Polly Devlin is a writer and broadcaster. Her book of short stories, The Far Side of the Lough, was recently republished. Only Sometimes Looking Sideways will be re-published next month by the O'Brien Press.