'Missing Persons' by Clair Wills
By the middle of the twentieth century the population of the Irish Republic was probably the most institutionalised in the world.
Clair Wills’s authority for making this statement is unquestionable, as a distinguished historian of books like That Neutral Island: a history of Ireland during the Second World War. But Missing Persons - or, my grandmother’s secrets is different: it is intensely personal, and while she has done much research into her own family, in many areas this has failed, or been inevitably unsuccessful. The book is about absences, and silences, particularly around the central story of a cousin she did not originally know she had.
Mary was the ‘illegitimate’ daughter of her uncle Jackie and Lily. What strikes me most in this narrative is the sheer sadness and pointlessness of the fates of all concerned. Why did their lives go wrong? Precisely because of the attitudes engendered and stoked by the most significant institution in Ireland until relatively recently, the Roman Catholic Church. Just how did shame about sexuality become so destructive to the individual lives of so many people in our history?
This relatively short book circles around these subjects, taking in on its way Wills’s own experiences (including the death of her infant son), trying to find a coherent explanatory narrative. But in the end she knows this is not possible: the lives of these victims of religious belief, class constraint and dismaying poverty are often beyond our retrieval:
The past was disavowed … knowledge and understanding were buried so deep that all we have left are puzzles and enigmas.
Later, Wills writes that her uncles ‘lived their lives in the negative’ and in a moving passage towards the end of the book she imagines the lonely life of Jackie as an agricultural labourer in Essex and Suffolk: all she knows for certain, because he told his sister this, is that he hated fish and chips.
This book for me forms a kind of loose cluster with Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These and Fintan O’Toole’s We Don’t Know Ourselves: a personal history of Ireland since 1958: I have written a piece comparing those two apparently very different books (and O’Toole interviewed Wills in the New York Review of Books). Although Wills’s focus is on Ireland in the early to mid parts of the twentieth century, the attitudes behind the embedded institutionalisation of this society carried through towards its end, and drive Keegan’s narrative set in New Ross in 1985. You only (try to) suppress something if you are aware of its dangers, and all three books are about that suppression, and that underlying knowledge. Clair Wills’s final sentence is:
What my grandmother’s secrets reveal is the underlying weight of the knowledge of that violence.
And before that she echoes Fintan O’Toole’s central idea in his book:
I think that what the stories of all those extra-marital pregnancies really unfolds is the meaning of what it is to know. If I look back at that photograph of our summer holiday in 1966 what I see is a group of children who were already, if you like, learning to read complex texts full of gaps and riddles. And behind them stand adults who knew about the missing people, indeed who were responsible for them being missing, but couldn’t bear to know what they knew.
This is key also to Claire Keegan’s book, in which Furlong comes to knowledge about his own past, and then in the final pages acts on this, carrying forward his realisation that he cannot live with integrity if he does not respond to his knowledge.
In Missing Persons Clair Wills also comes to a generous level of knowledge. The whole book is an act of loving attention to lives that were not lived as fully as they deserved to be.