Verbal Magazine

It’s Good to Talk…

Its easy enough to listen to another person talking because, I suppose, in time your turn to speak comes round.

It’s hard to listen without speaking for long periods, and that is where oral histories come from, from a writer who is prepared to listen. Of course there will be questions and repeats in the process of getting the other’s voice right, but the final story on the page, if it is to work, has to offer up, or be, the uninterrupted work of the speaker, as accurately as possible. There is a negative slant these days to writing that takes on the oral voice. Oral renderings are seen as somehow beneath the true acts of prose. Yes, in fiction and autobiography it’s often forgotten that much of what accrues on the page comes from other people, both familiars and strangers, outside of the writer. And there is another person, outside of the writer, on whom the success of the prose depends, the reader. What’s forgotten is that the act of writing is a product of good manners, among other things, on the part of the reader. They are willing to sit quiet for an age, listening, as it were, at one remove, but when the prose before you is the rendering of another voice - that is not the writers – then the good manners extends, beyond the reader, to the one who has written the speaking voice down.

The writer has to listen. The draw to the self has to be overcome. And this takes a great deal of generosity on behalf of the writer. They have to suspend their own accent, their own experiences, and give way to the tone and beliefs of someone outside themselves. It was through these oral historians that not only myths and stories - but actually word usage was handed on to in the next line. Writing, they say, killed off memory. The story of how writing came to Ireland is in the Book of Breifne.

Ceannfaellad, highest nut in the wood, a son of the high king of Ireland, was struck a severe blow to his head in a war in Armagh, a blow that left part of his brain, exposed, outside his skull .He was taken to Tuam Drecuain, a university in West Cavan at Ballyconnell, which was made up on three branches of learning; law, surgery and clan history, with all of these disciplines depending on the bards, because the bards remembered the laws for the other three.

Dallan, the blind one, the main surgeon at the university, operated on Ceannfaellad, and cut off the part of the brain that had been struck and exposed. It was the part of the brain with which you forget things. Ceannfaellad woke in the morning, and was driven astray because now he had to remember everything .Everything he saw, everything he encountered, every word he heard, went echoing through his head, and so he was driven to write down all he knew, so that he might have peace of mind. And that was how writing came to Ireland.

For the bards the new act of writing was seen as stealing memory. It marked the end of the bards’ time in court.

Writing was set up for all time hence - written in stone - while the other, oral form of memory was fluid, and ever changing, and not to be trusted. Writing, the new discipline, was seen as a concrete manner of fixing the laws. Some of the bard’s memories were written down by the new elite, hence the Gaelic annals, but the chief new discipline was the bible, and the bards were pushed to the side once their stories had been told. In time, they were seen as superstitious, pagan and backward; but over the years they went on remembering everything that the law givers had overlooked; the stories of cures, neighbours, of nonheroic loves, the everyday, the banal, the small wars.

It is to the bards, in fact, that we actually owe the novel and the memoir, because they fought against the fixed laws of writing and against the author as a source of power - both governmental and historic. It was women writers who first went against the law by allowing imagination back into the process. What is called imagination is actually returning to that other form of memory; the fluid, the unfixed, the handing on of untold stories that were considered beneath contempt and unbelievable, by the powers that be.
Authentic meant belonging to the more powerful side, but there was another form of authenticity out there in the wings.

And so, at last, I arrive to Barnacle Soup by Josie Gray and Tess Gallagher. If Josie Gray is the Bard, then Tess is the writer who knows her debt to memory, in this case, his memories. I first read these pages in proof and I remember stepping back mentally into Ceannfaellad’s world when I encountered Josie’s scar in the beautiful story A Fiddle in the Boat…

‘I would spit on my finger and rub it across the scar, then five minutes later I’d have to wash my face and the cure would be rinsed down the sink.

That scar has travelled everywhere with me by now. It still runs like a sword blade wound between my two eyes and down my cheek. I told my oldest grandson in America, who watches a lot of movies, that I was in a cavalry unit as a young man in Spain and got it in a duel over a Spanish woman.

Once I let a woman believe I got it from a German in a trench. Another time, I just said, “What Scar?” The woman took her finger and followed the scar down my face in a way I still remember. Scars are an encouragement to lies. I’ve carried mine so long, everything I say about it is nearly the truth.’

This is a story Ceannfaellad would be proud of – nearly the truth – because all writing and speech patterns of telling occur after the deed, or as warnings, before the thing happens that you are afraid of. In between we haunt the periphery. There is recounting of what has happened, and the unsure knowledge of what lies ahead. The reader nods at ‘nearly the truth’ – knowing the business at hand – two souls are jostling with one scar, the scar of memory. It is memory brings words into being. To tell another’s story means silencing your own, but in the act of writing and reading; another person’s story becomes the guide to your own. Tess loved listening to Josie’s version of his life, and Josie loved telling Tess what he could remember. It is out of this act of listening and telling that the book accrued.
In the gaps you can hear Tess try to remain silent as Josie heads down another road. I hope he keeps going. And that her ear and hand are at the ready to follow him down. In Barnacle Soup the act of writing adds to memory. As for the £30,000 that got lost in the process, that is another matter, for the tribunal. We’ll leave that to another day.

Good luck to them both. Now I’ll stop talking.

Barnacle Soup, by Tess Gallagher and Josie Gray is published by Blackstaff and available in the shops now. Keep an eye out in next month’s Verbal for our exclusive interview with Tess Gallagher.

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