Reading Rites: Books, writing and other things that matter

By Evelyn Conlon

‘Evelyn Conlon’s voice is instantly recognisable:

wise, funny, insightful (inciteful, if that’s a word) and irrepressible.’

Lia Mills

In Reading Rites, Evelyn Conlon brings her characteristic wit and keen intelligence to the task of exploring her writing life, drawing out the events, people, books and concerns that have helped to make her the writer she is. 

Using the lens of her own life as a starting point, she considers a vast array of subjects, including education; the effects of the Catholic Church, particularly on the lives of women; the legacy of historical moments such as 1916; and, through it all, the power of books to free us, to offer understanding, and to help us to see outside and beyond ourselves.

Part memoir, part manifesto, Reading Rites is full of the sharp observation, restless questioning and hard-won wisdom that make Conlon one of Ireland’s finest and most compelling writers.

 ‘These essays amount to an alternative history of social change in Ireland …

each one manages to keep faith with the truth of public speech.’ 

Sean O’Reilly

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blackstaff Press Ltd
• Release date: Nov 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781780733739

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Then there were books

When I was young, living up a small road in County Monaghan, my reading pilgrimage began. Once I’d received the gift – for that’s what it was – I believed that it would always be there, although how a child could be sure of such a thing is baffling. Not everything turns out as expected. But there it was, this reading; a reliable stanchion, an explainer of how to view the everyday or escape it. No matter what distractions, good and bad, there would always be books to fall back on, to lift mundanity up towards a star of importance, to join me to outside places.

I was already cognisant of a world larger than the one I inhabited. Courtesy of the visiting emigrated relatives and their children – at least one batch every summer holiday, and others scattered throughout the year – we were given pictures, accents and conversation from all sorts of places, particularly London, New York, Washington, Florida, Toronto. And Belfast, which, ludicrously, always seemed further away than the other cities and more intriguing because of that. I now understand that this was because the adults were only getting used to the border newly foisted on them. Belfast had been their closest city before this, and in their lifetimes it felt as if it had been taken away from them. I knew both my grandfathers and one grandmother – their dates of birth were well before the notion of partition had been bandied about. Indeed, my father’s birthday preceded it, and my mother’s coincided with it first being mooted.

Arriving visitors, from both far away and near by, created their own unique carnivals, some noisier than others. And then there was the glee, a lot of cooking and tea-making, the gradual relaxation of established boundaries, the endless conversation, and eavesdropping. When the visitors left there may have been a bit of sadness – more on some people’s part than others, and more at the departure of some than of others – but then there was the settling back into our own lives, the rustling of things back to normal, while making space for the new things that had been learned. And a return to the loyal books that had been left waiting, less frequently opened, semi-neglected. With luck, there were new ones added.

I was well prepared for emigration; I could take my pick of destinations. It still surprises me that I live in Ireland. It was never my intention to do so, but circumstances dictated that I would, and maybe I’m not sorry now.

My growing-up took place first in a country two-teacher school, then on to the ten-miles-away town of Monaghan to St Louis Secondary School, where all our subjects were taught through Irish, to the mainly Gaeltacht boarding caliíní who came from around the country, and to the few day pupils – scholarship holders, like me, among them. I loved every day of my St Louis adventure, a fondness nailed down when I learned how to skip classes that didn’t interest me. But when I mitched, I didn’t merely waste time (if mooching happily down streets, noticing and wondering, can be called wasting time). Instead, I regularly visited the library, a pokey upstairs set of rooms beside the courthouse, and buried myself in strange, wonderful other worlds. Did the librarian wonder about my timetable?

It was there I first learned that some books are not particularly worth reading and some are mind-blowing, becoming necessary foundations for our ways forward, even if we forget where we first read them. I wasn’t, of course, familiar with Schopenhauer nor his words on this matter, but I learned their truth anyway:

The art of not reading is a very important one … A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

And it was in the back corner of one of those dusty rooms that I found my first book set in Australia. I don’t remember what it was, but it certainly upped my interest when we came to Tír Eolas an Astráil – Geography of Australia.

Stories get told in different ways, bring with them the camouflage of the writer’s eye. The chameleon activity of the writer is what gives a story its poise, its particular attitude. Readers get to be part of this, without having to worry about how it’s done. When I became a writer, I learned that fiction and fact-telling live on completely different streets. Once, when struggling with the tone of a requested essay, I tried to convince myself that, as a fiction writer, I have to create truthful non-truths, but that when writing non-fiction, all I have to do is remember. This turns out not to be the case, unless one embraces entirely the route of Joe Brainard, who, since the creation of his book I Remember, almost owns the two words.

Dear Joe Brainard,

I remember that when I finished my Leaving Certificate, on a Thursday, I didn’t know if it would be rude to leave home on Friday, or if I should wait until Monday. I remember that I came to Dublin with my university scholarship but that it didn’t work out. For me.

I had read John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University and, heaven help me, I had believed it. I might have got away with that notion, might even have found a corner for myself, learned something and passed a few of their exams. But it was 1970, the first year that all the arts students had moved from Stephen’s Green out to Belfield. If you think that Belfield is soulless, confusing, scary today – and some students do – just imagine it when the trees were only twigs, planning to die as quickly as possible, with the lecturers looking every bit as reticent as the students, all enveloped by the smell of drying cement. You would think that they could have had preparatory classes, some minor explanation, even, of what buildings were what, but oh no, that didn’t happen. I wandered about, bumping into identical corridors, wondering if I would ever find my way out of the maze. I was at the lecture where the man said, ‘Look to your left and to your right, one of you will pass.’ Or maybe it was ‘two of you will fail’. But if you didn’t have the nerve to look either left or right, it was time to drop out.

Years later, I met a man, now of some serious academic standing, who told me he had been my tutor, and that he could tell me things I had said all that time ago. It’s a terrible pity he didn’t communicate some of that when I was there. Listen, I didn’t even know what books you were supposed to buy from the book list. I didn’t know what a tutorial was. And I didn’t have a neighbour, or a neighbour’s child, to enlighten me. It may have been the most miserable experience of my life.

I got a job in the coffee bar and began to plan my escape. But I must thank the confusion and the consequent spectacular failing of the students – surely I cannot be the only one – because without it there are many roads I would not have taken.

I should admit that my farewell may have been hastened partly because running away had climbed high up my next plan. This took the guise of heading to Australia by boat. Looking back now, the fickleness of how that was achieved is shocking. But of course, I do not regret wandering around Australia for three years, travelling in a combi van between places and working at whatever was available.

When I write about this adventure – and what a one it was, undertaken well before Australia became a lightly taken destination – I will only use I and not we, because, although I was in a relationship – in so far as a person in their late teens has the ability to judge what that means – I do not have the right to speak for anyone other than myself.

I turned my hand to everything from office work to waitressing (often both at the same time to finance the next trip), cleaning toilets, barmaiding and sales work a few times (at which I never lasted beyond the second day). I worked briefly for a wildlife trust outfit, but come payday they informed me that they had no money and wondered if I wouldn’t stay on in a voluntary capacity. Yeah, right. They were way ahead on the intern practice.

Having lived in Brisbane and Mount Isa – a mining town that boasted the longest milk run in the world (cows couldn’t survive near by) – my return to Sydney brought the best job imaginable: writing the entries for the Geography Encyclopedia of Australia. There were about twenty of us employed to work on this marvellous collation, but one afternoon the London publisher pulled the plug, and all those wonderful handwritten/typed pages were dumped somewhere. It was never completed and wouldn’t ever be commissioned now because of the victory of electronic versions over such books. I worked in a room with three other people, made lifelong friends and still wonder when I see it on a map if a hill is undulating or not.

Howard Jacobson, in his introduction to In the Land of Oz, talks about his first sojourn there, which happened, coincidentally, at more or less the same time as my own. He’s sorry that he may have ruined Australia for his first wife. You feel he’s sorry that he might have ruined optimistic love, which is a fair enough regret to have. He didn’t ruin it for his second wife, Rosalin Sadler, who inhabits every page of the Oz book with a truly sceptical hilarity. When Jacobson was well into his third marriage, Sadler said, in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, ‘I am delighted he has finally had the recognition his wit and technical skill deserves. But it will always be a tremendous challenge to my intelligence and humanity to endorse his disreputable, preposterous, engaging and vigorous progress.’

I’ve written a novella, How Things Are With Hannah These Days, about a ship journey to Australia. The central character is absolutely not me. But I do rather imagine that she could be someone I remember from Dublin Airport the morning of my departure for London/Southampton, en route to Australia. A man and a woman, her brother and his wife, and their mother were all leaving. The wails were ferocious. I wonder whatever happened them. I never saw them again, not even on the ship. Strange, that – maybe they stayed below crying. Or maybe they rushed off to the bar at the end of their meal sittings. Of course, the novella has shadows of reality in it; true things, if you want to call them that. I wanted to write a story about people getting caught away forever, rather than one about chosen emigration. I didn’t meet any of those people my first time around in Australia, not being even remotely interested in Irish emigrants. It wasn’t until I returned twenty-four years later that I followed that path of interest.

I did a lot of growing up during those three years, partly because of my age but also because of the dizzying variety of my experiences. And it was the early 1970s. Enough said.

There are moments in a male life in which the boy becomes the man; they are important moments. They could be on a football field, in a bar, at a film, or at a family gathering at which an older man says or intimates some small thing that points towards spectacular freedom. Because, after all, isn’t that what growing up is about – learning what is needed for when you are free of the fetters of childhood? Because so much of 1970s society appeared to disparage women’s lives, it was not quite the same for us. The reaction of many was to bury themselves in triviality. In workplaces all over Australia I could hear myself scream, ‘Girls, stop it, stop it, it will get you nowhere.’

I had a brief flurry of finding the women I wanted to emulate at an International Women’s Day march in Sydney in 1975. I carried an embarrassingly unartistic slogan about sweeping changes, tied between two kitchen brushes. Heaven knows I knew little about sweeping at the time – it took ten minutes or so to clean the small apartment on Lavender Street, my almost-bedsit that overlooked the harbour.

On returning to Sydney, after an eighteen-month wander, I had done the flat hunt, had indeed put down a deposit on a reasonably sized, not-too-suburban apartment, and went to get the keys from the estate agent. A different man than the one I had previously dealt with came to the desk, a handsome man now that I think of it, but then I thought he was old. Good lord, he might have even been forty. We got into a conversation about the Vietnam War – he had been a serious anti-conscription protester. I told him about the two men I had met in Brisbane. One, Gunther, had a tattoo on his arm that read, Vietnam, Who Me?, so I had presumed that he was an objector – he certainly had the hair for it – but then found out he had been conscripted and had gone. The other, Gunther’s friend Lloyd, whom I’d also met and thought the gentlest of souls (he made the punch for my twenty-first birthday), turned out to have won medals in that war. What on earth did you have to do to win medals?

The estate agent was interested in places I’d been in Australia that he’d only seen on maps. He liked having the outdoor cinema in Normanton explained to him (stunning light, changing the screen as the sun dropped behind it; indeed changing the story, mosquitoes eventually winning the evening). And as for Mount Isa, he raised his eyebrows, not the first or last time I’ve had that particular response. I talked about the last time I’d been in Sydney, nearly two years previously; about changing job one time so that I could take the ferry to work, even though it meant adding hours to my commute. He remembered there was a bedsit about to come on their books, one-third the size of the flat I had just agreed to take, but it had a view. Would I like to go see it? And I did, and there was no catch, except of course that I lost my other deposit, but it was worth it. My last year in Australia was spent taking a quick look at Lavender Bay before breakfast, staring at the harbour any time day or night, letting it steal my heart, for who could resist it?

I was made for hopping on and off ferries. Getting the day into perspective to the sound of ropes being thrown over the side to hitch the boat to the wharf; watching as passengers walked on and off as matter-of-factly as their counterparts, ten thousand miles away, jumped off the Rathmines 15 bus. The first Sydney ferry, steered by sails and oars, was built by convicts not long after 1789, and went as far as Parramatta. I often took that journey for the history of it. Lavender Bay