Lederhosen and Aran Sweaters
By James Lasdun
Published: June 8, 2003
THE SPECKLED PEOPLE
By Hugo Hamilton.
298 pp. New York:
Fourth Estate. $24.95.
The author of this painful, funny, densely beautiful memoir grew up in a household so at odds with itself and the world around it, the wonder is he was able to piece together any identity for himself at all, let alone write a book of such piercing cogency. As it happens, Hugo Hamilton has written several books -- literary novels as well as a couple of crime thrillers -- and the rare quality of this memoir owes much to his novelistic skills, not least his handling of the child's point of view throughout, with its luminously uncomprehending attentiveness to adult behavior.
The son of an Irish father and a German mother, the young Hugo finds himself positioned in life at an exquisitely uncomfortable angle, whereby almost every aspect of his existence, from his language to the clothes his parents dress him in (lederhosen and Aran sweaters), becomes a source of ridicule or agony. ''We're the speckled people,'' his father declares, translating the Irish word breac to describe the family's mixed lineage, but also referring inadvertently to the speckled bird of the Bible, shunned by all other birds. Being shunned is an abiding theme of Hamilton's childhood. For his Germanness he is taunted as a ''Nazi'' on the streets of postwar Dublin, and subjected to a relentless series of persecutions culminating in a mock trial in which he is cast as Adolf Eichmann. And for his Irishness, which under more normal circumstances might have helped matters, his outcast status is merely exacerbated: his father, Jack Hamilton, or Sean O hUrmoltaigh as he dauntingly insists on being called, is a nationalist of inflexible principles, engaged on a crusade to de-Anglicize Ireland and reimpose the Irish language on his fellow countrymen, who turn out to be uninterested at best, at worst downright hostile.
Undeterred, Jack sets up an Irish-only regime in his own home, forbidding his children to speak English, on pain of increasingly severe punishment. A prospective playmate is given an Irish exam before being allowed in. Hugo's brother Franz has his nose broken when his father beats him for uttering words in the forbidden tongue -- ''My father said he was very sorry, but the rules had to be obeyed.'' Later, as the father's rear-guard action grows more desperate, the children find themselves liable to be punished merely for listening in English to other children.
Among other things, ''The Speckled People'' is a superb study of the slippery nature of victimhood. The process is given a mad, splutteringly eloquent articulation at one point: ''In school they call you a Jew if you don't have any chewing gum to share. The British are called Brits and the Irish are called Paddies and the Germans are called Krauts and that's worse than being either British or Irish, or both together. They still call us bloody Krauts even though we're bloody Paddies. . . . One day they called Franz a . . . Jew Nazi and held him against the railings of the Garden of Remembrance. He had no chewing gum, so they banged his head until it started bleeding. Brother Kinsella punished them all for it, including Franz who did nothing, and everybody was laughing about that for a long time, punishing the guilty and the innocent together. Brother Kinsella said it was the only way to stop things happening again, to hit the victims and the perpetrators equally.''
Trapped in his ossified sense of himself as a little man taking a stand against ''letting the strongest languages win over the weakest,'' the father creates a prison for his own family. Between the rampant hostility outside the house and the tyranny inside, the children act out the paralyzing stress of their situation in the strange and pitiful ways that children do. In a delirious mixture of resistance, surrender and mimicry, Hugo begins compulsively blurting out English phrases. ''I couldn't stop saying 'don't forget the fruit gums, chum.' '' He decides to embrace his role as designated Nazi, perfecting his German accent so that he can ''be'' Eichmann. Looking for subjects of his own to tyrannize, he tries to ban his mother from speaking German in the kitchen, and persecutes a stray dog to the point of almost drowning it. He starts having violent asthma attacks. His brother puts stones in his ears to make himself deaf. Suffocation, silence, speechlessness or self-imperiling speech threaten them at every juncture.
A certain Quixotic idealism occasionally dignifies the father's struggles, while their comically cruel failure (a moment of near glory on holiday in his beloved Irish-speaking Connemara, where he delivers a speech celebrating the pure life of old Ireland, ends in farce when he falls into the outdoor toilet) makes him almost sympathetic, as does the belated apology he finally offers his children. And he of course, to adapt Larkin, was victimized in his turn -- bullied as a child for his own father's turncoat service in the British Navy, a source of deep shame to him. But his rigid fanaticism, not to mention his habit of foaming at the mouth when he grandstands, or the revelation that he has written an unsavory article on ''Ireland's Jewish problem,'' makes one reach for a figure more like Hitler than Quixote as the true analogy. And with the mother's story this point of comparison -- Hitler, Nazism -- becomes more than merely figurative, acquiring a literal presence in the narrative.