rACTS AND rlCTIONS IN ALL THREE GENRES
145
of boots and shoes and
to
waste his life in drink, I
to
attend University
College, Dublin and the Royal Irish Academy of Music as a student of
Latin, English, and lieder. My parents went
to
Tullow in the frail hope
of protecting Tim from his weaknesses and
to
live with my mother's sis–
ter Ciss and her uncle Martin Coady. September [946 seemed a good
moment to bring my memoir
to
an end.
What was there in my experience that could conceivably amount
to
a book long or short? Why would anyone write a book on material as
flimsy as that? Well, the answer is, I think, that at the time, of course,
or at virtually any time during the past thirty years, the subject of
Northern Ireland has been an international issue.
If
you see people mur–
dering each other and doing this virtually on television for the last thirty
years, the question arises: if they have proclaimed themselves Christians,
what do they think they are doing? Why are they murdering one
another, and with this degree of ferocity? So, the matter might be
claimed to have some slight degree of interest. When I came
to
teach at
New York University, it was occasionally put to me that my experience
of growing up as a boy in a small town in the north of Ireland might be
of slightly more than provincial interest.
The matter became for me of particular relevance when several years
later the Irish Republican Army had one of its major military successes,
in a manner of speaking, by bombing and blowing up the very house in
which we had lived, the police barracks. They also succeeded, tragically,
in killing a young girl who lived next door
to
the bombed-out barracks.
The question then gradually arose as to the possibility of my writing a
short book on the subject of my experience, and my editor at Knopf,
Gordon Lish, found my conversational reminiscences of childhood
interesting. Besides, the mayhem in Northern Ireland at the time raised
questions that I might address. Catholics and Protestants were killing
one another in Belfast, Derry, and other towns . Why? Were they really
quarreling about the theology of Transubstantiation and Papal Infalli–
bility? Lish thought that I might write an attractive book, part memoir
of my childhood, part historical and political elucidation.
My own motive was different. I had become bored with my own
style, a style that had issued from the kind of literary comment that I
had been making in books for many years. I started finding my sen–
tences predictable, rhythmically uninteresting. And I thought that if I
were to continue writing at all, I would have to acquire a new style. I
thought, wouldn't it be splendid if I could extend my range of tones so
that whatever its effect on readers might be, it might make me less
weary of myself, less bored with sentences.
