Books: For brilliant Creedon, home is always where the heart is...

Recent reviews in praise of John Creedon’s new book, This Boy’s Heart, refer to it as a memoir. But I don’t know.

It’s not just Creedon wearing his heart on his sleeve, as the title might suggest. Home, as the proverb says, is ‘where the heart is’ and truth to tell, and fair play to him, it’s more about Cork than about the author.

The title of the opening chapter, for instance, ‘Where the Sacred Heart is’, portrays the essence of many an Irish home with the picture of the Sacred Heart, and that’s just pure Cork, boy. It’s all done with buckets of humour, too.

Here’s the thing about Cork humour: it’s very rhetorical: an unashamed statement of pride of place, enunciated in a self-deprecating kinda way, what the academics refer to as the ‘humility topos’. To you and me, an ability to laugh at ourselves, a cardinal virtue to be treasured.

There’s even humour in the chapter headings of This Boy’s Heart - ‘A Rogue is Born’, ‘Away with the Manger, etc.

There’s humour and humour, though: and just as the Greeks got their cure through tragic catharsis, we had enough tragedy in our own history, for which humour was the antidote - not the urbane, filtered civilised type, but the rustic, carnivalesque, bawdy, racy of the soil, bodenstandig, to use the term favoured by Celtic scholar Heinrich Zimmer.

The highlights of that glorious decade 1960-70 are parsed over - JFK’s visit, Pope John XXIII and Vatican II, Mohammad Ali, Eurovision - all experienced in Inchigeela Dairies in the heart of Cork city, rus in urbe, sure, where else would you get it?

“These scenes are drawn from one decade in my life - 1960 to 1970 - and are set between the intense exotica of city-centre streets and the open meadows of the Irish countryside,” starts Creedon.

He shares fond memories of times and places and people that helped form us, inform our present and help us shape our future.

The time and place of the opening sentence is soon followed by the profoundly simple, honest, frank, unassuming proclamation: “I grew up amongst a loving family in a country I dearly love”; followed by a formal, almost liturgical, “So it is with deep humility and gratitude that I offer this personal memoir” - not the kind of rhetoric he would have heard on Shandon Street, but would have, maybe, from the Doms on Pope’s Quay.

Then he distances himself somewhat from the ‘personal’: “Some names and locations have been changed”, as though the author is pointing out this is not ‘my story’, not even ‘our story’ but, ‘the story’ - an attempt to celebrate the perennial truths of the human condition, of love, aspiration and appreciation, as all great art does, “and laugh and cry and laugh about it all again”.

All of this may look simple, but it isn’t.

Creedon’s art of storytelling is subtle, more than just a good laugh, taking the piss, as it does, out of the gravitas of high-falutin’ memoirs; replacing the bombast, hyperbole and self-righteousness with litotes, deliberate understatement for effect, and all the more effective for that.

If you want people to listen to you, don’t shout. Just lower your voice. Literature, storytelling, be it written or oral, is fundamentally the art of words and John Creedon has that in sleáns.

In his musings on the essence of memoir, he appears sceptical of the scientific accuracy of the genre, and rightly so, for it is neither fact nor fiction, but faction, people and events of past times and places, reflected on through the prism of later perception:

“...how do we know that a memory is a genuine eyewitness of an event? Perhaps we are actually recalling a well-polished story, memorised from the telling and retelling of others?”

Now there’s the conundrum about memoir, something for the dilettantes in Le Chateaux to mull over as they sip their Chablais. Let the author be assured that the story he tells transcends the individual and the local to the universality that reflects the human condition as all great art does.

Before he was even five, the author has a vivid recollection of seeing John F. Kennedy in June 1963, as his motorcade “swept past the top of our street... a nice man with his lovely smile, white teeth and American tan”. So impressed was John with the teeth that he mentioned them again more than halfway through the story: ‘... JFK’s white teeth were a sure sign that the Kennedys had done well for themselves in America”.

I remarking the same thing to myself as I observed the scene at the foot of Summer Hill and still fondly recall how our old school pal, poet Michael Davitt, later put it: “Ghaibh macra miotail JFK tharam i gCorcaigh; / Cuimhním ar a straois fhiaclach chollaí.” The introduction is topped off with pure Cork yet again: “A time when this boy’s heart was as light as the wild winds that blow.”

Traditional memoir and autobiography tend to run chronologically, and in a competitive metier the date of birth seems to be put further and further back. Tongue in cheek Creedon may be, when he claims “I can visualise events that occurred before I was born”, and in that he goes one better than Samuel Beckett, who says he can his own actual birth “and as far as I can recall it wasn’t a very pleasant experience”.

John’s own birth parodies Tomás Criomhthain’s: dríodar an chrúiscín, deireadh an áil: “... I was huge. My sister Norah claims I was 12lbs at birth. Even in the new money that’s still 5.44kg: a fine-sized turkey or two healthy babies”.

While it is unlikely that actual conversations are ed verbatim after a gap of 56 years, Creedon records the following one his father had at the North Cathedral with an old schoolfriend from Inchigeela, when he himself was but ten years old:

“How’ru, Connie?”

“Erra, only average, Tommy. Cuíosach gan a bheith maíteach, mar a dhéarfá (Average without being actually sick, as they say.)”

“Why? What’s wrong with you, old stock?”

“Yerra, the usual. AND I hit the big five-oh today.”

“Jaysus, are you fifty, Connie?”

“I am, and ‘tis downhill all the way to the grave from here on in.”

This is a formidable piece of writing and I can’t resist in indulging in it. The rustic salutation (‘How’ru’) stops you in your tracks [there’s your rus in urbe for you] and the dialectical ‘Connie’ (for ‘Cornelius’ or ‘Conchubhar’) with its noble classical connotations, reminds us that in Cork ‘they speak Latin like a vulgar tongue’, as the colonist said. ‘Erra’, from the Irish ‘Dhera’, a depreciative interjection, a kind of stoical acceptance. ‘Old stock’ remains a familiar greeting in Cork, from the Irish ‘seana-mhuintir’, I venture to suggest. Jaysus’ is no taking the name of the Lord in vain, but used to astonishment, shock, under the guise of divine imprecation. The grand finale of the conclusion is the Cork version of the essence of Plato’s teaching: ‘All philosophy is learning to die.’

This is the finest example of Hiberno English I’ve ever read, either by way of translation of the Blasket classics by distinguished scholars, or the sentimental stage Irishness of Synge.

This corrects Corkery’s canonical teaching that ‘the Irish never made their own of the cities and towns...’ The entire narrative is speckled with the Hiberno-English of canúint and culchie caint in a natural, authentic, unpedantic, unpatronising way.

How’s this for openers: “By a mere bowl-hop, I can call myself a Norrie”; “It was 1967. I was eight and had just recently quit the fags”.

I have no hesitation in suggesting that Creedon’s artistic vision equates with that of the bard himself in his ‘All the world’s’ a stage lines, when Creedon writes: “Our shop provided a stage where an endless cast of characters created the soundtrack to our childhood. The streets seemed full of smallies and shawlies, and every one of them was a storyteller.

These subtleties of creative reading are endearing: the half-said thing that stimulates memory and imagination and warms the heart.

This Boy’s Heart is a work to be cherished and reread, by virtue alone of its invocation and alignment with aspects of the human condition, of all of our experiences on life’s journey, for better for worse.

Creedon’s father’s humour and his mother’s charity stay with him, will resonate with many, and console those Dagenham Yanks and others who had to forsake de banks.

Reading this, you’d think the Battle of Kinsale never happened, a mere temporary setback, a strategic pulling back to Céim an Fhia and Kilmichael, the Hidden Ireland eventually reasserting itself culturally in Cork with Ó Riada and Ó Ríordáin.

Creedon’s rebel proclamation may serve as a wake-up call to those academic institutions who still classify the works of Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney and (probably) now, Creedons (Cónal and John) as ‘Anglo-Irish’.

It’s about time they copped on to the fact that The Hidden Ireland has emerged from the shadows to take its place among the nations of the world. Up the Rebels!

This Boy’s Heart: Scenes From An Irish Childhood, by John Creedon, Gill Books, €22.99. Available in all good bookshops.

Tadhg Ó Dúshláine is a poet and an academic writer, who was a Senior Lecturer in Modern Irish in Maynooth University, where he spent 40 years.