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Many
chapters are devoted to John's years in boarding school
and his discovery of sex. The first I had no problems
with (though an investigation into a robbery is a bit
drawn-out), but the descriptions of masturbation are
predictable and include the single instance of downright
bad writing: "I pedalled madly, like a racing
cyclist, my heart pounding, elated, triumphant, because
I knew it was within reach. And then it burst like a
rainbow shower of sweetness all over me..."
Furthermore, his sexual experiments with his sister are,
to say the least, unlikely.
But
compared to what is very good here, such reservations
are insignificant. The central relationship, the ups and
downs of First Love, the evocation of a lifestyle that
still survives in rural Ireland, have all been written
about before, but seldom as successfully as here. Don't
wait ten years to buy this book.
New
York Times
May
1972
New
& Novel
By
Martin Levin
The
Clay Grew Tall
By
Eamonn McGrath.
245pp.
New York
Herder
& Herder. $6.95
"My
name is John Foley," says the narrator. " I am
11 years old. I live in Wexford on a farm. I do not like
it. My father and brother like it. I don't. They don't
like me because I don't." Which about sums up the
interpersonal relationships in this low-keyed novel of
an Irish adolescence.
John
is repelled by his hard-drinking father. He is kept at
arm's length by a withdrawn mother "who hardly ever
smiled and sang only when she was alone." Partners
in a loveless marriage, father has good reason to drink
and mother to brood. Things take a turn for the worse
when the boy is sent away to school, and the number of
bullies expands from two to infinity - but John
develops, despite the cruelty of his schooling. Faced
with true hatreds (e.g., a sadistic headmaster), his
antagonism for his father mellows into love.
The
time of the novel is the 1940's - but its climate is
almost Dickensian, soaked in the aroma of country pubs
and the extroverted brutality of an earlier day.
West
Cork News
Friday
May 18, 1990
Claire
Hopper talks to Inchydoney-based author Eamonn McGrath
whose novel has just been re-issued.
A
novelist who writes to make sense out of chaos.
When
I arrived he was lost in thought, gazing out over the
sandy expanse of Inchydoney strand, making the most of a
few moments silence.
Author,
Eamonn McGrath enjoys his own company. As a child,
spending much time alone, he learned the knack of being
happy with himself. It is a boy's growing self-knowledge
set against an imperfect relationship with his father
which is the theme for his strongly autobiographical
novel, Honour Thy Father, recently republished by
Blackstaff Press.
"My
own father died when I was still at school and I felt I
never really knew him as a person at all. That's not my
father in the book because I did not know my father but
whatever people say, what you write has to be
autobiographical, it's out of your own experience it
comes anyway."
He
talks quietly but thoughts arrive rapidly and are
investigated with a surgeon's thorough skill. Constantly
his eyes are drawn to the sea as if needing to rest on
the long ocean horizon to concentrate his mind.
Childhood
experience has served him well in lending an honest and
truthful note to Honour Thy Father. Set in Co.
Wexford where he grew up, his beautifully written
account deals with themes of an Irish country boyhood, a
loveless marriage, rural small-mindedness, school
brutality and adolescent sexuality. His compassionate
writing, however, propels the reader into the centre of
John Foley's confusing world and his soul searching
struggle to forge his own identity.
"Yes,
I suppose it was therapeutic to write it in a way. I
mean, why does one begin to write at all? It is out of a
feeling that you must out some kind of order on life.
Life is chaotic and you must out some order on it so
that you can understand it. After my father died and
when I got married, I realised I hadn't really known him
and so I began to investigate all of that. The book
helped me to get it into some kind of perspective."
In
the book, the father is closer to the land than to any
of his family but the child cannot understand why until
he matures. "in the country, men had this
relationship with the land, it was very strong. I
remember my own father had a real love for it, he was a
different person when he was on the land or talking
about it. It was a close, earthy feeling."
"My
own father was a very affectionate person but he could
be cantankerous when he had some drink taken. He was a
countryman and went on sprees with his friends, but he
was a hard worker and a very successful farmer, not a
drunkard like the man in the book."
"You
know as a child yourself, you hear an argument between
your parents and you build it up into something immense
whereas the parents themselves may have resolved the
thing before the day is out but a child can't cope with
those kind of things, they only have a child's
judgement. A boy must test his manhood against his
father but I didn't understand that at the time.
Now
in his sixties, Eamonn McGrath has taught English at
secondary level for the past thirty five years and
teaches at Clonakilty Community College. "The
frustrating thing I find about teaching is that I have
endless patience with other peoples' children but at
home I find myself over reacting to my own."
"You
know , the one thing in life you get no great training
or preparation for is bringing up a family. It's on the
emotional level that you fail alot. Looking back it's
easy to say you should have done this or that but
nothing we do is perfect. Things are haphazard, like
life itself. Parents can never do everything
right."
Eamonn
and his wife Joan have seven children, two girls and
five boys. His eldest son, Garvan, a member of the RTE
Repo
ertory
Company, recently read extracts from the Honour Thy
Father on radio. "Yes it was an emotional
experience at the time, I kept wondering what kind of a
parent I was I"
Honour
Thy Father is
never nostalgic and the author has little sentiment for
the past, preferring the present. "The great thing
about today is that everyone gets an education. In my
childhood the attitude was that you never really needed
it because you were going to work on the land, although
it was a social cachet for well-to-do farmers to send
their sons to college for a year. It wasn't to learn
anything, just to be able to say that he had been there.
A job was the important thing."
Eamonn
has always written, ever since he was at school when he
used to compose satirical ballads about events there and
secretly pin them on the notice board for an
appreciative readership. Today he works in a small room
in his home at Inchydoney.
"I'm
fascinated by new technology. I write straight on to a
word processor. I wouldn't think you'd write better with
a pen, it's what's in your head that counts. It's a job
to keep up with your thoughts once you get going. I
can't understand it when people say they write something
once and that's it. I'm inclined to revise a lot, to
keep paring down, I never add."
His
prose is elegant. He laments failing standards in
literacy and hates sloppy writing. Teachers do care, he
says, but English is being thought differently these
days.
His
second novel, The Charnel House, will be
published by Blackstaff Press in November. It is based
on the lives of a group of people living in an
institution. He adds no more than that, hoping people
will read it for themselves. He has a substantial amount
of work in the pipeline, including one book on the
controversial topic of incest. He would like to write
something about school but is not sure whether it stirs
him enough.
The
Observer
3rd
January 1970
Troubled
Lives
Novels
by Claire Tomalin
...
A
different outpost figures in Eamonn McGrath's Honour thy
Father, a study of a classic Irish boyhood. If
everything here seems familiar, it is told without
posturing and in a direct and graceful manner. Father is
a decent man, a good farmer with one vice, drink, and an
unhappy marriage made when he was 50 to a reluctant
young bride urged on by her family. His son John, the
narrator, is bright and sensitive, suffers from the
conflicts at home and hates the farming life. His mother
sends him away from home to the Fathers, where the usual
humiliations, fights and dramas happen. Brother Tom
stays to work the farm, little sister Moll, with whom
John long enjoys an innocent incestuous relationship, is
outgrown. Father becomes old and ill and more
understanding: then dies and is mourned. Both the Irish
rural background and the scene of changing perspective
between parent and child are soberly dealt with: a quiet
and truthful book.
IRISH
NEWS
15
May 1990
Honour
Thy Father
Eamonn
McGrath
Paperback:
£4.95 stg.
Publication:
April 1990
A
bare, painful story of Irish youth
First
published in 1970 Honour Thy Father has now been
republished by Blackstaff Press as a forerunner to
Eamonn McGrath's next novel, The Charnel House,
due for publication in Autumn 1990.
Honour
Thy Father is the
story of John Foley's journey from childhood to early
manhood. Along this difficult path he goes through the
whole range of emotions which we probably all have
experienced.
John's
journey is made all the more difficult by the fact that
he is born into an apparently loveless marriage, has a
strained relationship with his drunken father and shares
none of the affinity for the land so apparent in his
father and brother.
Comfort
and support come in the shape of a strong and loving
mother, and a tomboyish sister. His salvation from a
family life of bickering with his father is a boarding
school education. Although no bed of roses in itself,
this option nonetheless proves infinitely preferable to
the ongoing squabbles at home.
IT is
then that John begins to find some tolerance for his
father's way of life. Here he also experiences his first
taste of the pain and join of teenage love.
Towards
the end of his journey, John comes not only to tolerate
his father but to understand and even love the man.
Primarily,
as the title suggests, a story of one boy's relationship
with his father, but many other themes are covered.
Life
at boarding school with all the bullying and unfeeling
rules, is out under the microscope. Then there is John's
gradual sexual awakening, with all its feelings of guilt
and fear. We also get an insight in to the life at the
time (pre-Second World War) of a rural Irish community.
Eamonn
McGrath used simple direct language to bring his novel
impressively to life. Honour Thy Father is a
sometimes bare, even painful story of Irish youth,
struggling to grow in an often hostile environment beset
with suspicion.
If
Eamonn McGrath manages to attain the same high standard
in his next novel, it will be well worth the twenty year
interval.
Stephen
O'Reilly
Andersontown
News
Saturday,
30th June 1990
Literary
hat-trick for Blackstaff
......
Eamonn
McGrath is the lesser known of the two writers I have
mentioned, but Honour Thy Father, first printed in 1970,
is the better book. As its title might suggest, this is
the story of one John Foley, son of a County Wexford
farmer, and his relationship with his father, the spirit
of which is reassessed as the novel progresses. As the
son struggles towards independence h becomes,
paradoxically, more attached to his father, and in one
sense, the writing becomes a form of pilgrimage, as well
as working out a separate identity. The early years of
the narrators life allow for some very typical Irish
literary scenes - pub interiors, failing marriage
between suffering mother and drunken father, school life
- and there was a feeling that some if the author's
concerns were a little dated, but the resourcefulness of
the writing, the accuracy of the observed speech, and
the honesty with which aspects of adolescent sexuality
and rural life are treated, recommend themselves. This
is a splendid first book, and well worth a read.
Domhnal
Mitchell
RTE
GUIDE 29/09/1989
Father
and Son
BOOKTIME
is, obviously, as varied a programme as the books on its
radio shelves.
But
starting on Monday, comes a book with more than one
distinction to its name. It's the longest Booktime ever
recorded, and written by a father, it's read by his
actor son.
Honour
Thy Father by
Wexfordman Eamonn McGrath is a book that somehow slipped
past the literary looking glass world. First published
in 1970 by the late lamented riverrun imprint of Alan
Figgis, it is now out of print.
A
fact of life for many books, deserving and undeserving,
but extraordinary in the case of this rich,
semi-autobiographical novel, whose child narrator
transfixes the reader from page one, with the
vulnerability of Dicken's Pip, and the Irish vitality of
Muiris O'Suilleabhain.
Eamonn
McGrath insists that the book is only very loosely based
on his own and that the usual disclaimer was put in,
and, just as usually, disbelieved by neighbours and
acquaintances.
But
the central relationship, that of bookish son and
roughcut, hard-drinking father, is fairly close to the
fact.
"I
grew up in the '30s when few self-made farmers saw the
point of losing a working son to prolonged education.
Land itself was all the point they could see. I was the
youngest son and my mother fought all the way for
me to go to secondary school and then to stay
there."
Few
Irish writers have depicted boarding school life as
graphically and as economically as McGrath does. The
truth that emerges from his account lies in his enviable
ability to write down the physical owrld that a child
inhabits - completely different place from the one an
adult knows.
Honour
Thy Father
produced by Daniel Reardon is a neglected Irish classic.
The Booktime slot goes a good way towards redressing the
debt.
The
Times
23
June 1990
Paperbacks
Honour
Thy Father
, by
Eamonn McGrath
(Blackstaff
Press, £4.95)
Classic
story of growing up in County Wexford among provincial
narrow-mindedness, boarding school brutality, adolescent
sexuality; and a boy struggling for a better
relationship with his father.
THE
SUNDAY TIMES
1970
Freshmen
Honour
Thy Father by Eamonn McGrath/Figgis 35s
Julian
Symons
TWO
GOOD FIRST NOVELS GREET THE NEW YEAR........
Eamonn
McGrath's Honour Thy Father comes from a Dublin
publisher, Allen Figgis. It is an account of growing up
somewhere in County Wexford, and of a timid intellectual
boy's changing relationship with his hard-drinking
illiterate father, often remarkably vivid, and in the
end moving without ever being sentimental. The long
opening chapter, with the child John Foley waiting
patiently and the miserably to be taken home while his
father drinks steadily in a pub with genial local
characters, sitting in the pub kitchen after closing
time, and eventually rattling back in a bone shaking car
to the farm where they live, sets the tone perfectly.
Life
as a boarder at College looks like an escape from the
farm. But this too has its terrors, the French bed made
for him on the first night, bullying, a total
confusion of mind and body from which masturbation
(known to him as " The Game") provides the
only release. The transition from John's hatred of his
father to his sympathy with his awkwardly expressed
desire for love is also finely done. Seeing his father's
coffin lowered into the ground, intellectual John -
Stephen Dedalus minimus you might say - is concious of
his own inadequacy.
The
father-son relationship is the heart of the book, but
the college scenes and characters are excellent in a
more conventional way, and the innocently incestuous
feelings of John's sister are very well conveyed. In
other hands much of this might have been
commonplace, but Mr. McGrath writes such delicacy and
generous openness that it comes up new. |
