Waking: An Irish Protestant Upbringing by Hugh Maxton Lagan Press 221pp, £7.95 in UK
When W.B. Yeats was composing his sonorous roll-call about the people of Burke and Grattan and Swift and Parnell - "we are no petty people. We are one of the great stocks of Europe" - it is unlikely that he spared a thought for his less privileged fellow Protestants. They lived in places not yet known to literature: Kenilworth Park, Dublin, and the little townlands of South Wicklow. Aughrim, Cronemore, Coolahullin, Mac reddin, Ballinaclash, Ballinatone - such names of unimpeachable Gaelic ancestry figure largely in this memoir of an Irish Protestant upbringing, though lesser divisions - The Blue Bank, The Field behind the Field behind the House, Dan's Wells, etc. - are in homely English.
It was in these places that Hugh Maxton or, to give him his familial name, Bill McCormack, grew up. On his father's side he was descended from Dublin Methodists; his mother's people, the Kings, came from Wicklow and belonged to the Church of Ireland. Moving between the city and the country, he knew the world of the small urban business and that of the hill farmer, and in both he was among people more interested in family affiliations than in history or politics.
He was born in 1947, the only child of his father's second marriage. His father was 49 at the time and when he died of a heart attack at the age of 63, Bill was 13. This sudden and unexpected death casts its shadow over the book. In the author's words: "The moment when such news breaks does not constitute a moment. All time, before and after, is altered in its order and its texture."
His mother, half his father's age, found a job. Bill, fortunately, had gained a scholarship to Wesley College, though his sojourn there, as a day-pupil, turned out to be "adequately the unhappiest time" of his life. In contrast, he recalls his primary education in Rathgar National School, also a Methodist establishment, with favour. Methodists, he writes, "had a major influence on my education, benign perhaps at first, but increasingly negative."
It is not the little family of three that most captures the attention in Waking but the holidays spent in his maternal grandfather's house in Cronemore: it was there that his soul had its "fair seed-time", to quote Wordsworth. He describes himself as a curious but ignorant boy: his memory is nothing if not retentive, for he claims to remember the drift of a conversation overheard when he was in his pram, aged two.
The observant youngster amasses a wealth of detail from these early years, but he doesn't trust it completely. "Nothing is remembered as it was," observes Maxton, "the process of memory corrodes or it enhances." He remembers Carty's Corner at Cronemore but can no longer identify it with precision, and in any case, as he states in one of the many aphorisms that stud the book: "Knowledge is only a limited form of truth."
Myself the offspring of a second marriage late in life, solemnised in the Church of Ireland, I read Waking with very great interest, and marvelled at the differences between two lives; but it is not the Protestant upbringing as such that makes the book so absorbing, nor the establishing of Carty's Corner and Kenilworth Park as shifting literary landmarks, but the continual tension between the dilemmas and confusions of the young McCormack and the cool, analytical intelligence of Maxton, united in a tone that is simultaneously confessional and sceptical. The writing is totally without sentimentality and enlivened with dry humour and provocative asides.
Of his two names he has this to say: "The two lives I have - Maxton and McCormack - do not constitute a division but rather define a problem. The problem revolves round a general Irish division according to which truth and beauty must ever beat odds. Look around - what passes for intelligence is philistine, and good taste is stridently anti-intellectual." That should stir the dove-cots.
Douglas Sealy is a critic and translator