"An Occasion for Sin" by John Montague

"An Occasion for Sin" by John Montague (1964, 12 pages)

The Irish Quarter: A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

John Montague

''The only true madness is loneliness, 
the monotonous voice in the skull 
that never stops 
because never heard.''  John Montague

John Montague, first occupant of the Irish Chair of Poetry, was born in 1927 in New York City to Irish born parents.   His family moved back to Ireland and Montague had a rural Irish upbringing and is now regarded as one of Ireland's greatest living poets.  

Have you ever liked a book so much that you kept it on your nightstand, not so you could it in bed but more so you would see it first thing in the morning when you got up?   That is how I feel about The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories by William Trevor. "Occasion for Sin" by John Montague is included in the collection.    

There seems to be a lot more guilt and anxiety about sex in any form in the Irish short story than a sense of its part in the joie de vivre.   This seems to spread itself far and wide.   Love and sexual passion rarely seems to last long or end well.   People seemingly are inculcated with a sense of guilt or sin at any feeling of sexual instinct.  This does not mean there is not plenty of sex in the Irish short story, it just means the people feel guilty about it and a punishment often occurs for the sinner.   An attractive woman  who causes men to look at her not through her own behavior or dress but just by her looks is somehow made to feel she is a sinner.  Even marital sex often seems to be a guilty pleasure and that guilt often ends up poisoning relationships in the stories.   This is what John Montague's great short story, "Occasion for Sin" is, at least in part about.

"Occasion for Sin" is a "Catholic Expression", it is an expression often used by Catholic priests in their homilies (at least here in the Philippines it is-) to mean an event which either involves a physical or a mental sin.    This story is about a French woman married to an Irish man.   The man is gone at work a lot, they have no children and when he buys her an old car she starts going to the beach a lot.   The woman is quite attractive and  French to boot.   It was the custom to change into your bathing suit on the beach while somehow not exposing yourself at all.   At the same time she woman goes to the beach there is a young group of Catholic priests in training (Catholic priests take a vow of celibacy).   They begin to gradually talk to her and become friends with her.   One day a kind of strange seeming man with a bit if of an "off" feel to him reproaches her and says she has caused an occasion of sin in the young priests by causing them to have lustful thoughts.  She never flirted with them or acted in any way not in accord with how a respectable married woman should act, in France at least.   She is very upset over this accusation, talks to her husband about it and ponders for a long time.   She is a Catholic also but remember she is French and that means something exotic to young Irish men.   

I see why "Occasion for Sin" is considered a classic short story.   It is a superb work of art that captures much of the guilt of the Irish attitude toward sex.   

I would happily read more of Montague's short stories.   

Please share your experience of John Montague with us.

Mel u

"Which is More Than I Can Say For Some People" by Lorrie Moore

"Which is More Than I Can Say For Some People"  by Lorrie Moore, (1998, 20 pages)

A Story by a great Contemporary American/Irish Writer

Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore (USA, 1957 Irish Born mother) is one of the leading writers of fiction in the USA.  She is the author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital (never read it but you got to love the title) and three highly regarded collections of short stories. In 1998 she won Irish Times Literature Prize for International Fiction for Birds of America.   I admit I never heard of her until I began to see her name mentioned by several Irish writers in interviews as one of their favorite contemporary short story writers.    Yesterday I was looking through For the Love of Ireland by Susan Cahill (wife of Thomas Cahill the author of How the Irish Saved Civilization, an interesting imperfect book that overlooks the Byzantine Empire but that is for another day).   For the Love of Ireland is a very interesting book that is two thirds literary anthology and the rest a travel book in which Cahill tells literary tourists (as I will be one of these days!) how to see the places in the literary works and the lives of the writers.   I was very happy to see a perfect for me to read now story by Lorrie Moore in the collection about a mother and her adult daughters tour of Ireland.   As Cahill says, it shows Moore's affinity with "dark Irish humor, that mixture of hope and defeat that defines the shape of many Irish writers' art".  

I see why so many people love the work of Lorrie Moore from this wonderful story (OK and I admit I wanted to be along for the ride on the mother/daughter tour of all of the Island!)   Moore does a great job framing the story and getting us interested with and in-sympathy with both the mother and adult daughter, whose relationship is one of love but not without its troubles.   

The daughter works for a company that runs classes that helps American students do well on the standardized tests that students take in their last year of high school that colleges use in determining  who gets in, the better the score, the  better school you can go to.  (Same sort of classes are given here in the Philippines and my oldest two daughters have been to them).   She was strictly a back office worker and analyst but she is such a well thought of employee that she has been given a big promotion, which will involve a lot of traveling and public speaking promoting the classes.    She has always had a fear of public speaking and when the company offers her an extra vacation as a reward, she, with a push from a kind of domineering seeming mother, decide they will go to Ireland (where the mother has roots) with the mother's idea being the daughter will kiss the Blarney Stone and thus overcome her fear of public speaking.   

The story artfully  mixes in the life history of the daughter (failed marriage begun to overcome grief over dead dog) with the trip to Ireland.   The daughter knows a visit to kiss the Blarney Stone is kind of the lowest form of Irish tourist activity but her Mother insists on it.   Moore totally brought the trip alive for me.   I felt the excitement when the plane landed at Dublin International.   The mother sort of invited herself along on the trip as a driver as they planned to rent a car and only she knew how to drive a car without automatic transmission.   

Moore does such a wonderful job describing the Irish countryside it almost hurts me to read it wondering if I will ever really see it.   

"Abby saw immediately that to live amid the magic feel of this place would be necessarily to to believe in magic.   To live here would make you superstitious, warm-hearted with secrets, unrealistic.   If you were literal or practical you would have to move-or you would have to drink".

(OK now I am getting a clue why so much drinking in the Irish short story!)

Moore just does a great job describing the drive around Ireland (Yes I admit I am getting more and more jealous of them!)  She really develops the characters and the mother-daughter relationship perfectly.   We see how the mother still sees her adult daughter as a child in need of lots of advice (not that the mother is the perfect one to give advise, especially about men) and the daughter kind of likes being back in the role of a child and kind of resents it also.   This is all just so perfect I see why everyone loves Moore.    Tension mounts as they cross into Northern Island and see all the young men with machines guns patrolling the town.  (Sometimes we have had the same situation here in Manila and it is a bit scary to see truck loads of young men barely adults with machine guns in the streets of the city).  

The story reaches its  peak at the peak of a mountain (I can see why Moore is such a sought after teacher of classes on creative writing) when they get to the Blarney Stone.  It is a totally tacky tourist thing with short men wearing leprechaun uniforms etc.    We see beneath the mother's  mask of bravado/provider of wisdom because of something that happens there.

I really really enjoyed this story.   I left it with two things in mind, read the three short story collections  of Moore and skip the Blarney stone if I ever make it to Ireland.  


Moore teaches at the University of Wisconsin.   There is very interesting interview with her on The Paris Review web page

Please share your experiences with Lorrie Moore with us.  I shall be returning to her work soon.  


Mel u

"Foils" by Desmond Hogan

"Foils" by Desmond Hogan  (1979, 16 pages)

The Irish Quarter Year Two

:  A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

March 11 to July 1

Desmond Hogan Week-June 18 to June 24

Day Five

Word Counts and some Meta-Remarks

Co-Hosted  by Shauna Gilligan

"Words.  Words perfectly formed but sounding like a culture I knew nothing about, a language I could speak but not understand".   Happiness Comes From Nowhere

"The harrowing loneliness in her voice, in her eyes, was unmistakable"-from "Foil"

Introductory Post by Shauna Gilligan

Previous Posts on Desmond Hogan

Today is day five of Desmond Hogan week on The Reading Life.   Today I shall only post on one of the 34 stories collected in Lark's Eggs:   New and Selected Stories.   I want to talk about a few other related matters also first.  Also I want to invite any and all to join in through a guest post or a post on their own webpage.   This is not a closed event.

What is my methodology here?

In this case I am treating the collection as what is sometimes called a "found object".  By that I mean I will treat the book as if I did not know anymore about the author other than his name.   The stories are individuals works of art, often written decades apart.   I am looking at the stories one at a time for that reason but I am also looking at the collection as a whole.  What is being conveyed about life, the world, history, society in this work.   I want to see how the author uses his ideas and material, how much he is rooted in one narrow culture and how transcendent he can be seen as.   I see the author of this collection as a cultural chronicler of non-centrifugal  history, as one who sings of those out side mainstream culture while evidencing an incredible range of clearly autidacticly acquired knowledge.   The author of this collection of stories knows things not taught in school. Of course like any largely self educated person, the question becomes does he know also what is taught in the standard world he is not a citizen off.     He is kind of a chronicler of Desolation Row.   He voluntarily lives among people who have no clue as to his inner nature, maybe he thinks no one does and he knows people regard him as strange so he has given up on High Tea at the Oriental Hotel in Singapore.   I will try in each post to look at how the stories work, what they say to me and why I think they matter.  I will not always devote a lot of space to retelling the plots of the stories.

I will try in time, maybe, to answer the question of "OK what is so great about these stories".  

There is a very strong possibility Desmond Hogan Week will be extended beyond seven days but I will keep the name.   

One thing I have come to really like about reading with the Kindle application on my Ipad is the ability to search for words.   Sometimes the repeated appearance of words can give you an insight as to what is going on below the surface.    Here are some of the word counts on Larks' Eggs:

Home 100 times

Lonely or alone 89 times

Death 68 times

Father 200 times

Mother 100 Times

Travel 138 times (this search found also Travellers as part of the count)

Ireland 100 times

Dublin 100 times

Galway 68

Gypsies 28

"Foils" is a story about deep loneliness, about being different and knowing it but not knowing why you are different.   It is about growing old, about death,isolation and permanent loss.   It is about the other objectified as a Protestant in a Catholic place.   In his introduction to an edition of Dracula Colm Toibin says it is the religious divide that produces much of the Gothic/dark magic feel to Irish literature.   This arises from a division of the community into two very different groups, seemingly very much alike and looking the same but with a deeply rooted suspicion and real fear of the other.  

"Foils" is told in the third person.   There really are only two characters, one is an old Protestant spinster who "looked unreal.  Like a rag doll.   She was a reminder of the Protestant stratum that once dominated the town, a remnant of it".   She has lived alone since her sister died.   She was a familiar figure always in black, sitting in the same spot on the benches.  There is one other person who regularly set on the benches, a boy who was always totally absorbed in what he was reading.   They ignore each other for a long time until one day there is a fair of some sort from whose enjoyment their nature excludes them both.  The woman reaches out to him with questions about his family.   It turns out that Miss Duffy also has a knowledge of the world of books and "outdated authors".   Her and her sister had been inseparable and Miss Duffy was found clutching her sister's dead body.   Sometimes she drifts into recollections of her sister.   Only her religion sustains her.   

Miss Duffy begins in a very fragmented way to tell her life story to the boy who slowly pieces it together as best he can.   Then the boy sort of vanishes from his spot near her on the bench and she hears nothing off him until she learns he was committed to a mental hospital after attempting suicide.  Neighbors tell her the boy had been under a severe mental train and acutely lonely for the last few months, the time when she came to converse with him.  Life has become more and more unreal for Miss Duffy and even though she knew the boy well, perhaps next to her sister and a boyfriend she had long ago, better than she had known  anyone else in her life, felt no sympathy for him.  She has lost this capacity to age and isolation.    While the boy is in the hospital, Miss Duffy is sent by a relative to a hospital as it is felt she could no longer take care of herself, for years she had been living in squalor in the house her and her sister once kept perfectly.   Word comes back in a while that she has died but the event does not really register with anyone.   

Hogan has perfectly created two lives, to intersecting lives, two lines that cross briefly, one to terminate and one off into the unknown.  The story is about how those who do not fit in sort of seek out or find each other.   It is about what happens when you lose your anchor in life.   There are a number of great lines in the story.  I will try to look at some individual sentences of Hogan later on.

  Lilliput Press press publishes Hogan's work and offers two of his works as E-Books.   I found their catalogue totally fascinating.   They are the premier publishers of Irish related books, located in Dublin and established in 1984.

Mel u

Shauna Gilligan on The Ikon Maker by Desmond Hogan

A Guest Post by Shauna Gilligan

Today I am very happy to announce that Shauna Gilligan, author of Happiness Comes From Nowhere has honored The Reading Life with a post on Desmond Hogan's landmark first novel, The Ikon Maker.    Those new to the work of Desmond Hogan should first read Shauna's introductory post from Day One of Desmond Hogan Week.  During the week I will post on a number of his famous short stories and Shauna will return with a post on Hogan's classic novel, The Ikon Maker.  

The Irish Quarter Year Two

:  A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

March 11 to July 1

Desmond Hogan Week-June 18 to June 24

Day Five

Introductory Post by Shauna Gilligan

Previous Posts on Desmond Hogan

Guest Post by Shauna Gilligan

Desmond Hogan’s The Ikon Maker: A Mother and Son through Themed Lenses

(c) Shauna Gilligan

Please contact shauna@shaunaswriting.com for permission to quote from or reproduce part or all of this article.

Based on elements in my paper “The search for a face”: Suicide, emigration and notions of belonging in Desmond Hogan’s The Ikon Maker” presented at Belonging: Cultural Topographies of Identity (UCD 8-9 June 2012), my second blogpost on Desmond Hogan  briefly explores how he uses the themes of emigration and suicide to explore a mother-son relationship in his first novel The Ikon Maker.

The Ikon Maker was first published in 1979 to critical acclaim with the highly innovative Irish Writers Co-operative founded by Fred Johnston, Peter Sheridan and Neil Jordan.[1] Along with Jordan’s Night in Tunisia, The Ikon Maker was an early success and hardback editions of both books were published in the UK. In 1979 The Ikon Maker was a New Fiction Choice in the UK. The novel made the front page of the Times Literary Supplement in January 1981 with a review of Hogan’s dramatization of the novel.

In The Ikon Maker, Hogan tells the story of Susan’s search for her son Diarmaid who has emigrated to England, partly as the result of the trauma of losing a close friend, Derek, to suicide. As the novel progresses, Susan comes to acknowledge the complicated friendship between Diarmaid and Derek and in doing so, comes to a new sense of self (and sexuality) by reflecting on her relationship with George, her (now dead) husband.

Literary critic George O’Brien in ‘Introduction: Tradition and Transition in Contemporary Irish Fiction,’ described the function of the novel in Ireland as

“carrying out one of the form’s most significant historical tasks by holding, at a critical angle, a mirror to the nature of society.”  

Hogan’s fiction does exactly this. In early reviews, critics claimed that with The Ikon Maker that Hogan “made an auspicious debut in painfully twanging the umbilical cord of a generation” (Kevin O’Connor, Sunday Independent) and “penetrated, with what seems like absolute accuracy, the thought process of a middle-aged woman.” (Kevin Gray, Irish Times)

THE IRISH WRITERS’ CO-OPERATIVE COVER OF THE IKON MAKER (1976)

Susan of The Ikon Maker is symptomatic of the key role of the mother in Hogan’s writing. As a mother, she is, on the surface, an insider: she makes dresses for the wealthy people of the village; goes on dates with the milkman. Yet, it is by association with outsiders – with Derek through suicide, with Diarmaid who disappears – that Susan is seen as an outsider herself. Mrs Conlon, a neighbour of Susan’s who later becomes a good friend, watches Diarmaid out the window at the same time as Susan is watching him. The women mutually observe one another. The experience, we are told, “was embarrassing. They both turned away – and probably both in some way had realised they were looking at a misfit.” (Hogan, 34 – all quotations in this post are from the Faber and Faber 1993 edition).

Later, Susan goes on a picnic with Diarmaid. She decides to wear the same dress she wore on her return visit to Galway in 1943 with George, thus augmenting her love for both the (temporary) return of her son and for her new sense of self-as-widow. Hogan shows the shift from insider to outsider:

“Mrs Conlon could have looked out her window now and deemed both of them misfits.” (Hogan, 50) 

Having a son gives Susan social status and a sense of belonging; his departure and subsequent silence takes this away. His brief return serves as a cruel reminder of his absence (to Susan) and of Derek’s absence (to Diarmaid). Throughout Susan’s life, the males around her provide a sense of identity. Choices her husband and son make connect and disconnect the bonds of history to her present. Diarmaid’s departure and lack of communication echoes the time when her husband, George, left for Chicago (“fed up with Ireland” (Hogan, 15)), leaving her pregnant (with Diarmaid). Susan’s thoughts constantly link her past (George) with her present (Diarmaid) until both disappear and her future as a woman alone is her present. In doing so, Hogan’s highlights how history, fate, society and the individual are inextricably linked.

As the novel progresses and Diarmaid leaves for England again, Hogan uses staccato sentences to build up Susan’s emotion, and antithesis where he sets the moments of Diarmaid’s departure against what she is left with. We can see Hogan’s poetic patterning of language below where the contrast of kissing ‘slenderly’ with the train leaving brings home both characters’ sense of alienation:

With forty pounds he went back to England.

Curlews cried in the bog next to Ballinasloe station.

A taxi man looked harassed – no work maybe.

They kissed – slenderly.

The train left.

She walked away.

(Hogan,66)

Hogan links the two Irelands – that of George (1940s) and that of Diarmaid (1960s) – through Susan’s recurring worry about when Diarmaid will come home and how long he might stay. Her real fear is that her husband’s fate of emigration and death will also be her son’s fate. Because she struggles to pin down an emotional sense of her own past, Susan anchors her sense of personal history and belonging in her understanding of that of Ireland. As she travels through England she meets Diarmaid’s male and female lovers and many of his friends but she never finds him. The themes of alienation, emigration and suicide are well-reflected on the 1993 Faber and Faber edition of the novel:

THE 1993 COVER OF THE IKON MAKER (FABER AND FABER)

At home in Galway, Ireland, alone yet with a new sense of self, Susan receives Diarmaid’s postcards and letters from places further afield than England: Yugoslavia, Greece. His last communication with her takes the form of a letter addressed to “Mammy”, inviting her to join him and his lover Michael, a writer, in Yugoslavia. It is signed with “Please write soon, Love, Diarmaid,” to which Susan – now alienated from her son – writes back to say she “couldn’t come.” (Hogan, 145).

Hogan concludes the novel with reference to the lack of communication between them. So much so that Susan seems to become the landscape around her, just as Diarmaid’s friend Derek had done in death. By the end of The Ikon Maker Diarmaid has found himself a new home (Yugoslavia) and family (Michael). Susan, on the other hand, is alone and bitter in the landscape to which she belongs.

In time people ceased asking questions.

They didn’t want to know anymore now.

The idea of a boy in an anorak with a Rolling Stone album under his arm which was once revolutionary was now old-hat.

They didn’t need to know about Diarmaid.

Most knew he didn’t write, and if he wrote it was very infrequently, so with time, as Susan’s spirit grew bleaker and her hair greyer, she became among the fields, the houses, and the lack of Guinness bottles, just another local tragedy. (Hogan, 150).

The Ikon Maker Dublin, Irish Writers’ Co-operative, 1976

(Other editions: London: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative, 1979; New York, G. Braziller, 1979; London, Pulsifer Press, 1987; London, Faber and Faber, 1993.)

All quotations in this post are from the Faber and Faber 1993 edition.

Lilliput Press have confirmed that they will re-issue The Ikon Maker in spring 2013.

Recent works of Desmond Hogan’s can be purchased directly from his publishers Lilliput Press, Dublin, Ireland.

Bibliography: Further Reading

George O’Brien, George. “Introduction: Tradition and Transition in Contemporary Irish Fiction.” Colby Quarterly, Volume 31, no.1, March 1995, p. 5-22.

---

[1] Others such as Steve Mac Donogh and Leland Bardwell became involved after the first year.  

End of Guest Post

End of guest post

Born in Dublin, Ireland, Shauna Gilligan has worked and lived in Mexico, Spain, India and the UK. She holds an MA in History from University College Dublin having also studied English as an undergraduate. She is completing a PhD in Writing at the University of Glamorgan, Wales and occasionally lectures in NUI Maynooth in Creative Writing.

As part of her research, she is examining suicide and writing processes in a selection of novels by and in a series of interviews with Irish writer Desmond Hogan.

Her work has been published in The Cobalt Review, The Stinging Fly (online), The First Cut, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writingand in The Ulster Tatler’s Literary Miscellany. She has given public readings of her fiction in Ireland and USA and has presented on writing at academic conferences in Ireland, UK, Germany and USA.

Her first novel, Happiness Comes From Nowhere  will be published shortly.

  Lilliput Press press publishes Hogan's work and offers two of his works as E-Books.   I found their catalogue totally fascinating.   They are the premier publishers of Irish related books, located in Dublin and established in 1984.


Shauna Gilligan's post is her intellectual property and is protected under international copyright laws.

Mel u

The Maid by Yasutaka Tsutsui

The Maid by Yasutaka Tsutsui  (1972, 205 pages, translated by Adam Kabat)

The Maid is the second novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui I have recently read.  Prior to this I posted on his interesting The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.   Just like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, The Maid is a work in the paranormal genre with a bit of science fiction about a young woman with special powers that set her very much apart from most people.   Of the two works. I prefer The Maid.


Yasutaka Tsutsui (1934, Osaka) is considered one of the leading writers of science fiction in the Japanese language.   He has received numerous awards and has several well regarded novels including Hell and Paprika. 


Not too surprisingly, The Maid, set in contemporary Japan,  is about a maid.   What is special about this maid is that she can read minds.   Based on these two novels, Tsutsui seems to develop one concept and work it in various situations.   The maid is only 18 when we first meet her and the story is told by her in the first person.   Nanase has always been able to read minds, she does not even think it is an unusual ability.    The fun in this novel is seeing into the lives of the people who she works for as she moves from job to job.   Through her perceptions, we see below the masks of civility worn in contemporary Japan into the darker recesses of the lives her employers.   We see children with contempt for their parents, wives and husbands planning affairs and we listen in as one of her male employers wonders whether he could get away with raping her.   Most of the time people are thinking about sex, their standing in the world and brooding about how bad their lives are.   None of the employers comes off very well.

She works for a total of eight families, each one with their own chapter.   I thought the most interesting parts of the book were in her first encounters with the members of the families when she was sort of sizing them up.  She works for all sort of people, from professors to artists to retired businessmen but it is the women who run the families in most cases.   She is attractive and that causes her problems.   Some of the employers try to be nice and some do not even acknowledge she is a person but over all the employers come off looking bad.   The Maid never seems to find any good or morally sound thoughts in anyone or any family or marital  love.   There is a sort of a feel to this book of  "OK let us expose how evil people really are".   I enjoyed reading  about the different families and the concept was interesting.



In the interests of full disclosure I was provided a free copy of the is book.    The publisher, Alma Books, has a very interesting and quite diversified catalog.  


This is my forth year to participate in Dolce Bellezza's Japanese Literature Challenge.   There are lots of great reading suggestions on her web page and among the many reviews that will be done by participants.


The next Japanese novel I will read is Okei by Mitsugu Saotome, set in late 19th century Japan among warring clans of Samurais. 








Mel u

Desmond Hogan Week Day Four

The Irish Quarter Year Two

:  A Celebration of the Irish Short Story

March 11 to ?

Desmond Hogan Week-June 18 to June 24

Irish Travellers 

Day Four

Shauna Gilligan's Posts on Desmond Hogan

My Posts on Desmond Hogan


"some secrets were given to the Gypsies to preserve against centrifugal history and some to Kabbalists,  the Templers, the Rosicrucians"  -Gravity's Rainbow


The Traveller community in Ireland experiences social exclusion and discrimination at all levels of society. Travellers live with the daily reality of being refused access to a range of services including shops, pubs, hairdressers and laundrettes. 


I think some secrets were also given to the Irish Travellers and there is no one but Desmond Hogan to tell us these stories.   I would say he is as non-centrifugal a writer as you are likely to find.  


This week (and possibly longer) I will be posting in a number of short stories by Desmond Hogan.   There is some very good background information in Shauna Gilligan's introductory post on Hogan and I suggest those new to his work read it first.  


Today I will post on two of Hogan's most famous stories, "Caravans" (in his 2010 interview on RTE Radio he said he thought this was his best story) and his "Winter Swimmers".  People from the cultural or ethnic group called Irish Travellers figure prominently in these stories.   My first incorrect thought  was that it was an Irish expression for Gypsies but that was totally wrong.   I now knew if I am to go far at all in my understanding of these two stories, I must educate myself a bit on the "Irish Travellers"..  


I have learned enough about the history and climate of Ireland to know that it does not behove me to jump in with any sort of claim to real knowledge of the Irish Travellers.   I read a number of articles on them and found none better than the one on Wikipedia.  I will simply quote a bit from it first:

Origins

The historical origins of Irish Travellers as an ethnic group has been a subject of academic and popular debate. Such discussions have been difficult as Irish Travellers left no written records of their own.^[In 2011 an analysis of DNA from 40 Travellers was undertaken at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin and the University of Edinburgh. The study provided evidence that Irish Travellers are a distinct Irish ethnic minority, who separated from the settled Irish community at least 1000 years ago; the claim was made that they are distinct from the settled community as Icelanders are from Norwegians.^[20] Even though all families claim ancient origins, not all families of Irish Travellers date back to the same point in time; some families adopted Traveller customs centuries ago, while others did so more recently.^[21] It is unclear how many Irish Travellers would be included in this distinct ethnic group at least from a genetic perspective.

There is evidence by the 12th century the name Tynkler and Tynker emerged in reference to a group of nomads who maintained a separate identity, social organization, and dialect.^[18] The genetic evidence indicates Irish Travellers have been a distinct ethnic group in the Ireland for at least a millennium.

Language

Irish Travellers speak English and sometimes one of two dialects of Shelta, Gammon (or Gamin) and Cant. Shelta has been dated back to the 18th century, but may be older.^[22] Cant, which derives from Irish Gaelic, is a combination of English and Shelta.^[15]

[edit]Religion

Travellers have a distinctive approach to religion; the vast majority are Roman Catholics with particular attention paid to issues of healing.^[23] They have been known to follow a strict ethos called 'The Travellers Code' that dictates their moral beliefs and can influence their actions.^[24]

[edit]Education

Traveller children often grow up outside of educational systems.^[25] The Irish Traveller Movement, a community advocacy group, promotes equal access to education for Traveller children.^[26]

I

[edit]Health

The health of Irish Travellers is significantly poorer than that of the general population in Ireland. This is evidenced in a 2007 report published in Ireland, which states that over half of Travellers do not live past the age of 39 years.^[28] Another government report of 1987 found:

From birth to old age, they have high mortality rates, particularly from accidents, metabolic and congenital problems, but also from other major causes of death. Female Travellers have especially high mortality compared to settled women.^[29]

In 2007, the Department of Health and Children in the Republic of Ireland, in conjunction with the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety in Northern Ireland, commissioned the University College Dublin's School of Public Health and Population Science to conduct a major cross-border study of Travellers' welfare. The study, including a detailed census of Traveller population and an examination of their health status, is expected to take up to three years to complete.^[30]

The birth rate of Irish Travellers has decreased since the 1990s, but they still have one of the highest birth rates in Europe. The birth rate for the Traveller community for the year 2005 was 33.32 per 1,000, possibly the highest birth rate recorded for any community in Europe. By comparison, the Irish national average was 15.0 in 2007.^{[31][not in citation given]}

On average there are ten times more driving fatalities within the Traveller community. At 22%, this represents the most common cause of death among Traveller males. Some 10% of Traveller children die before their second birthday, compared to just 1% of the general population. In Ireland, 2.6% of all deaths in the total population were for people aged under 25, versus 32% for the Travellers.^[32][33] In addition, 80% of Travellers die before the age of 65.

[edit]

End of quotes.   Reading other articles on Travellers I learned they are very closed in, they almost never marry outside their groups, they face wide spread discrimination in Ireland (they are most common in the Galway area.)  One survey I read said 70 percent of the Irish would not be friends with a Traveller and would be appalled if a family member married one.   Many communities use laws against vagrancy to keep them out of their community and they are often stereotyped as petty criminals.  There are laws in Ireland to protect their civil rights but the general attitude toward them is very negative.  I could find no writers of Traveller background though there are a number of well known boxers.   Travellers have their own language and even when they speak English or Irish they have their own argot.  Some think their culture goes back as far as the 5th century.    Travellers are outsiders by definition.   The government approach, in an ironic reversal of roles putting the Irish in the role of the cultural oppressor, is to try to assimilate the travellers into mainstream Irish culture.

To understand Hogan's work one needs to at least know who the Travellers are and in the end we may find they do in fact know a secret we can learn from Hogan.  If not him then no one.


"Caravans"   

"Caravans" is told in the first person by an adult man of indeterminate age.    The man is just getting out of the September River.   There is an older Traveller man standing next to him.  He lives in a "cream ochre ledge-top Yorkshire wagon with a green dado, near the river".    In the context I know "dado" must mean the cloth covering of the wagon but I Googled it and the word was not found.   I am taking it this must be Travellers argot.   This shows how with just one word Hogan opens up a new to 99.999 percent of us world.  The old man has been living in the field in his wagon for 14 years but he has to move now as there has been trouble with the neighbors, some of it his fault.    The narrator is not a Traveller but lives in a nearby caravan. (OK not totally sure of that assertion)  Neighbors file complaints of Travellers sometimes and drive them out.    Here is the heart of the experience:


"In my first few weeks living in a caravan I realized that living in a caravan there was always the laceration, the scalding of a nettle on you, the fear of a briar, the insult of a settled person".   


On the other side, in a caravan he noticed things in nature that settled people miss.    Living in a caravan parked by a busy road at night you realize how in danger you are.  (The life expectancy of Travellers is significantly lower than the Irish population as a whole.)   Children run from travellers, as they have been trained to do.    


There are so many marvelous lines in this story with a world in them.   "Dogs were often digging for pigmy shrews in the field". (this is spelling of the standard "pygmy" in the text).   The narrator often sees the old man who was beside him when he got out of the September river.    He goes to the United States and comes back (no idea why-this is part of the wonder of Hogan, so many mysteries, when you are an outsider you are used to lack of knowledge and in a while you may learn to like it).   He sees the man riding his horse up to the river to swim him.   The travellers fear the IRA for they tar and feather travellers, easy to fear what you do not understand and the travellers do not care about politics of outsiders.    


There is just a huge amount to be learned from this story about Travellers.   I loved this, not sure why.

"Every year settled travellers in Ireland-buffers-made a long walk to commemorate  the days of travelling.   One year it was Dublin to Down-patrick, County Down.  Despite the insults, the contumelies heaped against Travelling people, you keep on walking".

A great story on every level.


"Winter Swimmers"


"Here's to the storytellers.  They made some sense from these lonely and driven lives of ours".


There are lots of images and mentions of swimming in the stories of Hogan.   Swimming in a river is a way to escape from the land, from out earth born existence.   Travellers are also called, this is a pejorative expression, "Tinkers" based on the notion that all traveller men repair pots. often do fight and even kill one another but they do not fight with anyone else as it would bring ruin on the whole caravan.   The same man appears to narrate this story, maybe I am on weak  ground when I say we should not see him as a Traveller.   Part of the issue is travellers look just like everyone else they just live in a different way so even travellers do not always know each other.   The narrator is asked if he is a buffer or a traveller.  (per Irish census figures, there are about 25,000 travellers in Ireland)   Every morning the man swims in the river.  There are numerous words in this story that are new to me, just as "spate river", meaning fast flow.  There is a very interesting line about what the narrator sees as he is being dragged along by the flow of the river.  "In Ancient Ireland they used to eat bowls of rowan berries in the autumn".   There are rumblings in more speculative web pages that Travellers are descendants of old Druadic communities that went underground when Christianity took over Ireland. There are secrets the Travellers are not telling us.    There are references to homoerotic encounters in the story.  Here is another new to me word "tamacadaming roads".   Here is another very interesting passage, (horses are very important to Travellers and are a big factor in older Irish literature in general), I tried to find the meaning of "horse gou" and "feak" online but did not.  

"Look at the horse's gou" he said referring to a second Shetland pony a boy with skirmished hair was holding, "Would you like to feak her?"

I was wondering what this meant, what does feaking a pony mean (OK and I hoped my first guess was wrong!)   The narrator speaks of being sexually haunted by the men and women, girls and boys he  had slept with, we go to a Teddyboy's funeral (another subgroup)   The narrator at 16 tried to kill himself with sleeping pills,   he speaks of groups of traveller boys as a "harem of them", making us wonder as to the sexually implications of this. There are scattered sexually ambiguous images throughout the story.    Travellers trash is called "spoor".


I have not tried to retell the plot of this story, in a real sense there is not one.   There are secrets not told in the buffered world in this beautiful story.   It is also simply a lot of fun to read.   






Mel u