Working
with Autobiography
Beata Pi¹tek,
Instytut Filologii Angielskiej, Uniwersytet Jagiellonski, Kraków
This
paper will present a brief survey of the critical writing on autobiography,
with a focus on the work of Carolyn Steedman, who is interested in autobiography
as a form of literature and historical writing. The purpose of the paper,
however, is to present a particular text: An
Irish Navvy: The Diary of an Exile by Donall MacAmhlaigh. I will try to
present its literary merits as well as its possible uses as a complement to the
accepted historical accounts.
There
has been an ongoing discussion about where to place autobiography as a genre,
with its position between history and poetry still not determined. Critics
writing at the beginning of the 20th century pointed out that
autobiography was not a reliable source for historians and biographers, as they
found it too subjective to be trustworthy and placed it side by side with
popular fiction. (Bradford 1906: 239-70). Literary critics, quite predictably,
dismissed autobiography on the grounds of its factuality. Unless it recorded
the life of an otherwise famous writer or philosopher, such as Saint Augustine,
Jean- Jacques Rousseau or Henry Newman, it was not deemed a worthy subject for analysis.
It
was only in the mid-20th century, with the emergence of the so-called
‘new history’ i.e. one that embraced working-class experience, women’s
experience and that of other ‘minorities’, that it was recognised by historians
that subjectivity may actually be an asset to autobiographical writing and that
it may compensate for factual distortions.
R D Altick, writing on the merits of autobiography as a historical
source, points out that in fact autobiography may be a better source of
information about the period when it was written than about the period written
about. (1965: 94-102)
In
a study of The Forms of Autobiography,
published in 1980, William Spengemann points out that autobiography as a
literary form may resort to a limited range of modes of expression; it will
either be a historical self-explanation, philosophical self-scrutiny, poetic
self-expression or poetic self-invention (1980: xvi-xvii). He also
distinguishes two modes of expression in autobiography, depending on the
relationship between the agent and the writer: thus an autobiography may be
written from a perspective, looking back at a life and analysing critically,
describing how the author changed from the man he was into the man he is now;
or it may be written as you go along, with no distance of time, more like a
diary.
More
recently, cognitive science and psychology have drawn attention to the role of
narrative in the processes of ordering experience. The conceptual metaphor of
life as a journey underlines Susan Egan’s work on Patterns of Experience in Autobiography published in 1984, where
she demonstrates four patterns of narrative derived from mythology, as
predominantly used to order autobiographical texts. She identifies, among others, the journey ‘from innocence to
experience’ as a typical pattern used to represent childhood memories, and ‘the
heroic journey’ to represent youth. Egan pointed out that these patterns enable
the author of autobiography to condense and clarify complex experiences into a
comprehensive narrative. The element of a journey or progress from one point to
another is also taken up by Paul John Eakin in How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (1999), where he
concentrates on the psychological processes involved. He starts from an analysis
and definition of the SELF and claims that ‘self’ is less of an entity than a
kind of awareness in process. He points out that identity formation is
difficult to pin down because it is an ongoing process.
Eakin
refers to Landscape for a Good Woman by
Carolyn Steedman, first published in 1986. Carolyn Steedman is a professor of
Social History at the University of Warwick, a historian with a passion for
literature and a deep interest in writing, history and autobiography. Her
publications include Policing the
Victorian Community (1984), Strange
Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority 1780-1930, and in
1992, Past Tenses: Essays on Writing
History and Autobiography. It is this last book that examines the
similarities and differences between history and autobiography. As for the
similarities, the author notes that they are both narrative and fiction in that
‘they both present variation and manipulation of current time to the reader’ (1992:
48). They differ, however, in that:
…historians have as their stated objective exhaustiveness (finding out
again and again, more and more about some thing, event or person), and they
proceed upon the path of refutation by pointing to exceptions or the
possibility of an exception.
The practice of historical inquiry and historical writing is a
recognition of temporariness and impermanence, and in this way is a quite
different literary form from that of autobiography, which presents momentarily
a completeness, a completeness which lies in the figure of the writer or the
teller, in the here and now, saying: ‘That’s how it was’, or ‘That’s how I
believe it to have been.’ (ibid: 48)
It
was Steedman who discovered, edited and introduced a working-class woman’s
autobiography first published in 1928, Jipping
Street by Kathleen Woodward. Steedman values the book for moving away from
the sentimental portrayal of a ‘poor-but-honest’ working-class life, with the
mother as the ‘martyr saint’. In Jipping
Street the mother-daughter relationship is highly ambivalent, full of
resentment, sometimes violent (1928: 119).
Steedman investigated Woodward’s account and discovered that she did not
really grow up in Bermondsey, but in the less impoverished Peckham, and that
there are a number of factual inaccuracies in her life story. Steedman warns
the reader that the book should not be read as history, but as case-history
because:
‘Details of time, place and politics
are used by Kathleen Woodward to construct a psychological narrative rather
than a historical one, and because of this, the meaning of the events described
is of a different order from that of the very same events when written about
elsewhere’. (1992: 120)
She
points out that in the psychological narrative truth and order do not matter in
the same way as in history, and she demonstrates the value of autobiography as
psychological narrative, as psychologically true and as such as a valid source
for a historian. She explores the possibilities of that genre in her own
autobiography Landscape for a Good Woman (1986).
Steedman describes writing that book as a way of coming to terms with her own
past. She speaks about writing as a psychological process, an act of cognition.
It was through writing Landscape for a
Good Woman that she discovered that she was not only an unwanted, but also
an illegitimate child. However, apart from being this personal act of
cognition, this book is also her statement about cultural studies. The book,
among other things, is written as a challenge to Richard Hoggart and cultural
criticism that ‘had made solid and concrete the absence of psychological
individuality’. (1986: 10) Steedman criticises the historians writing about the
working class for their ‘refusal of a complicated psychology to those living in
conditions of material distress’. (ibid: 12).
The autobiography that I would like to focus on here is interesting both
as a work of literature and history, and also revealing about the psychology of
the author. An Irish Navvy: The Diary of
an Exile by Donall MacAmhlaigh, translated from the Irish by Valentin
Iremonger and published by Routledge in 1964. This is the information from the
title page and I would like to begin with a closer look at what significance it
may have for the reader. A navvy is ‘a person employed to do hard physical work
like building roads and canals, especially in the 19th century’,
says the Collins Cobuild Dictionary, and if you have ever read anything on the
Irish workers in Britain, you will probably have noticed that since the second
half of the 19th century navvying had been the kind of job that was
chiefly done by the Irish. As for the second part of the title, the word
‘diary’ informs us about the genre and the mode of expression; we can expect a
day-to-day record of a life rather than a carefully constructed and
premeditated vision of a life recollected from a perspective of time. It is a Diary of an Exile. Here the Collins
Cobuild says that exile is ‘the state of being forced to live away from your
country, especially for political reasons’. The reader will also need to note the
fact that this text was translated from the Irish, so even though as a diary it
is a valid source, being a first-hand account, it is mediated by the
translation and that might have altered the style and idiom of the original.
The text is, however, prefaced by the translator, who after giving a few facts
from the author’s life, comments: ‘It is a remarkable piece of documentary
writing, but it bears all the marks of the creative artist in its attention to
detail, its shrewd observation both of person and place and, not least, in its
author’s ability to tell a story well. In the original, a further
characteristic was evident in the author’s awareness of, and interest in, the
texture and rhythm of the language in which he wrote.’ (An Irish Navvy viii-ix)
Before I turn to the text to present its literary merits, I
would like to give you the few facts about the author that can be found in the
preface. Donall Mac Amhlaigh was born near Galway (in the West of Ireland) in
1926 and as a teenager moved to Kilkenny with his family. He left school at 15
to go out to work, first in a woollen mill then on farms and in hotels in the
West of Ireland. He joined the Irish army and when he left it in 1951 he faced
severe unemployment.
The
diary covers the six years from 1951 to 1957, opening with him replying to an
advertisement and getting a job in a hospital in Northampton. After the
hospital he moved on to harder but better-paid jobs in construction, railways
and so on. He moves a lot, mostly in the Midlands, partly because the jobs sometimes
last only a couple of days, partly because he is driven to search for better
pay or better living conditions. In his diary, he records the details of each
job, sometimes with such minute descriptions that you could use it as a manual
for removing and laying railway tracks, for example, but he also records personal
details and a character sketch of every single Irishman he ever worked with. At
first, he seems shocked by the differences between life in Ireland and in
England, and that shock triggers some shrewd observations on the English and
the Irish, on wealth and poverty and their consequences on personal lives and
happiness. The diary ends in 1957. At the time of its publication the author
was living contentedly with his wife and two children in Northampton and
working on a construction site. He died in 1989.
I would like to illustrate the literary merits of An Irish Navvy with selected extracts from the diary. Later on I am
going to analyse, again referring to the text, Mac Amhlaigh’s discovery of his
identity.
The attention to detail, mentioned by the translator, results in
interesting and frequently moving descriptions like the one of his first
moments in England:
I stood on John Bull’s territory
for the first time in my life on Tuesday morning when I got off the Irish Mail
at Rugby. I don’t count Holyhead for that’s really Welsh and there was as much
Welsh spoken there as there was Irish on a fair day in Derrynea. I lost my
friends in the customs hall and I never saw them again. And what a to-do there
was about our bags! You’d think that we were carrying priceless jewels instead
of the few old rags we had. There was one man who shoved onto the counter an
old battered case that was tied with a bit of rope to keep it shut.
‘What have you got here?’ said the customs officer.
‘Yerra, nothing at all,’ said my lad with a grin.
‘Open it up, all the same,’ said your man.
‘Sure it’s hardly worth my while,’ said the lad.
‘Look here, you’re only wasting both our time. I can’t let you
through until you open up that bag.’
‘Fair enough,’
said my lad and drew out of his pocket a bloody big knife with which he cut the
rope around the case. The lid jumped up just like a Jack-in-the-Box and out
leapt an old pair of Wellington boots that had been twisted up inside it. Devil
the thing else was in the case – not even a change of socks.
(An Irish Navvy pp 5-6)
The above extract is an example of a carefully constructed scene. The
author moves from the general ‘first day on John Bulls territory’, signalled
with a worn-out term ‘John Bull’, to the particular, the contents of a suitcase
of one of the Irish immigrants, ‘an old pair of Wellington boots’, which is not
a worn-out phrase, but a touching and moving image. The attention to detail is
further emphasised by the careful selection of adjectives and verbs in the
description of the suitcase. And finally the use of the dialogue brings the
reader closer to the event described, reducing the distance, making the scene
more authentic.
Mac Amhlaigh also uses this technique in reverse when he moves from the
detailed descriptions to more general remarks that record his philosophical
reflections. At some point between navvying jobs, he worked in a foundry in
Northampton and one day he was made to work indoors:
I caught a few glimpses of the furnaces that melt the iron
and it filled me with terror just to look at them. Had there been the
screeching and wailing of the souls of the damned, it would have been Hell
itself. For the life of me, I can’t understand how a man can spend his days in
such places when there is work to be had out under the health-giving blue sky.
But, of course, habit is what does it. If you were born and brought up in a
hole like a rabbit, you’d never know that there was any life other than the
darkness and the crampedness.
(An Irish Navvy p 80)
The details of the foundry are endowed with symbolic meaning. This is
not a highly original vision of Hell, but Mac Amhlaigh is clearly drawing on a 19th
century metaphor here, with the factory presented as the place of eternal
punishment. Whether he is quoting from Beatrice Potter’s Peter Rabbit is less obvious, but given his wide reading, also
possible.
Mac Amhlaigh’s remarks about the English are witty and humorous and in
one instance he even makes up a dialogue to illustrate a point, which, I think
shows how conscious a writer he is:
There are plenty of English
country-men here – swede-bashers as they are called – and to hear them talking
you’d think you were listening to ‘The Archers’.
There’s a great difference between them and country
people in Ireland. I have to say that
this crowd are very like the ‘yokels’ that you come across on funny postcards.
Every man of them has a big red face, a slow unintelligent gait of going and a
mode of talking as queer as anything you ever heard. They can’t converse
together without screaming and roaring and you’d think they had the mentality
of children. They go on and on about the same thing until anyone listening to
them gets browned off with their nonsense. Like this (and I don’t exaggerate):
‘I’m goin’ Banbury a week next Sattidy, George.’
‘You ain’t, are you?’
‘Yis, I am, you know.’
‘Cor, you don’t arf git about, ‘Arry.’
‘Well, George, you see what it is, it’s when you got a
moo’bike, it’s easy git around.’
‘Yis, ‘Arry, you got sumpin’ there. When you got the ol’
transport, you can git round about the country, but when you ain’t, you’re
jiggered. I always say a car or a bike is an ‘andy thing fer gitting around
with.’
‘I know it is,
George.’
(An
Irish Navvy p 138)
Mac Amhlaigh’s concern with language is not only literary. Apart from
being a very conscious writer, he is also preoccupied with whether and how
people speak Irish. In this diary the Irish language becomes a means of
national integrity and thus an important component of the author’s identity.
The title is not accidental, for Mac Amhlaigh being Irish and being a navvy is
central to the definition of self. He cultivates the Irish language, which, by
the way, is not his mother tongue, he laments the deterioration caused by the
English borrowings, and he also teaches his friend to speak Irish.
Another crucial element of his Irishness is belonging to the community
of the Irish in England. He works exclusively with other Irish navvies, attends
dances in the Irish Clubs, goes drinking a lot in Irish pubs, and on Sundays he
goes to mass. The spirit of community is very strong in all those activities.
It is when he is with other Irish people that he really enjoys himself; telling
stories, recalling people and places back at home seems to help get over the
nostalgia of living in a foreign country. It is when he is with his people that
he experiences ‘the sheer joy of life’.
Apart from language and community, religion is another constituent of
Irishness in this autobiography. Mac Amhlaigh attends church and resorts to
prayer in moments of crisis, but he keeps it very private. He seems to be very
sensitive about how his faith and the attitudes of the Irish may be perceived.
Here is an account of a day spent working with an old man from Cork that is not
at all free from irony:
He was one of the most talkative
men I ever came across – leaving aside some of the bucks that are always
holding forth down there at Hyde Park Corner. And the outlandish talk that he
went on with! What matter but that he meant every word of what he said. Little
was troubling him but the number of Irish who were losing their faith over
here. His brother’s daughter was coming to no good in London, if you could
believe him:
‘Yerra, boy, I calls on her there lately to remind her of her
obligations and she only laughed at me. Coming out of the bath, she was.
‘’There you stand,’’ sez I, ‘’with your hair half-wet, washing and batting and
drifting away from the rites of the Church” ‘. I am not sure that he didn’t
think that there was some connection between bodily cleanliness and the loss of
faith.
(An
Irish Navvy p 38)
The other constituent element for the author’s identity and fundamental
value in this book and in his life as it emerges from the book, is work. The
work that he does is hard; he is an unskilled labourer who works outside even
in winter. But the fact that he enjoys working and prides himself of being good
at what he does endows the Navvy with great dignity. He does not elaborate on
this, but from occasional remarks, you see that physical effort has a
therapeutic function for him. After a period in London when he was trying to
help a younger man find a job, he can’t wait to get out into the country: ‘As
soon as I got to the job, I was started off digging a trench. It was a gorgeous
morning and after a while I felt as light-hearted as a lark.’ (An Irish Navvy p 124) On another job he
remarks: ‘It’s a long time since I worked so hard but it’s good for me; I feel
better already.’ (An Irish Navvy p 139)
Mac Amhlaigh strikes the reader as patriotic and proud; the Irish
community in this diary is very tightly knit and the world of the Irish navvies
seems to be a microcosm. However, it is not isolated and unaware of the other
culture. For one thing, it is against the background of English society that
the flaws of the Irish become more conspicuous. Mac Amhlaigh is particularly
critical of drinking and fighting. A few of his mates never make it home for
Christmas, but spend all their money in a London pub instead, and later suffer
from remorse, as well as other ailments. The rows and fights between the
natives of Connemara and Dublin are shown as pathetic and detrimental to the
reputation of the Irish. MacAmhlaigh’s remarks about the English are
surprisingly free from prejudice. He notes the relative poverty of his country,
but refuses to blame it all on the English invaders. He is genuinely embarrassed
when the old man from Cork starts going on about Cromwell in the house of some
friendly English people who had offered them tea on a rainy day. Moreover, he
is impressed with the Welfare State and particularly with the polite and
concerned attitude of English doctors to their patients, and he points out the
arrogance of Irish doctors. In general he is more critical of the Irish ruling
classes and blames them for the poor condition of his nation.
Even with these reservations, the image of the Irish community that
emerges from my brief extracts is sentimentally idealised. However, I do
believe that this idyllic vision of the Irish is a result and evidence of
something more than just the author’s patriotism and homesickness. My claim is
that Mac Amhlaigh’s insistence on the merits of the Irish community reflects
the prejudice against it prevalent in the English community. Every line of this account that presents the
Irish as friendly, clever and witty seems to be written perhaps consciously, but
more probably not, against the legacy of the Victorian response to the first
and largest wave of immigration from Ireland. In the post-Famine years the
Irish were blamed with all the possible vices, from being unhygienic and
spreading diseases to bringing wages down and teaching the English poor how to
survive on potatoes alone. The Victorians considered the Irish to be
intellectually inferior and incapable of learning, their resistance to
assimilation being blamed on their religion, language and community life. What
the witty and sensitive diary of the Irish navvy does is to undermine that
vision and give us access to a subjective version of how it really was.
In conclusion, I would like to return to the question of style; this
diary strikes the reader as authentic and genuine and the explanation might lie
in the style. A O J Cockshut in The Art
of Autobiography in 19th and 20th century England uses style as a criterion
to determine an author’s sincerety. His question is ‘Is the personality
conveyed by the style of writing recognisably the same as that described?’ and
he claims that in the great autobiographies ‘there is a perfect unity here
which goes far beyond any conscious intention, and which is a witness to the
truth of the interpretation of the self.’ (1984: 216) I hope that the extracts
quoted above show that unity.
¡
Altick R D (1965) Lives And Letters: A History of Literary
Biography In England And America New York
¡
Bradford G (1906) Biography
And The Human Heart Boston
¡
Cockshut A O
J (1984) The Art Of Autobiography In 19th And 20th Century England. Yale
University Press
¡
Eakin P J (1999) How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves
Ithaca & London:
Cornell University Press
¡
Egan S (1984) Patterns
Of Experience In Autobiography Chapel Hill & London:
University of North Carolina Press
¡
Mac Amhlaigh D (1964)
An Irish Navvy. The Diary of An Exile. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul
¡
Spengemann W C (1980)
The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes In
The History Of A
Literary
Genre New Haven & London:
Yale University Press
¡
Steedman C (1986) Landscape
For A Good Woman London: Virago
¡
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(1992) Past Tenses: Essays On
Writing Autobiography And History London:
Rivers Oram Press