Ellen McWilliams: Resting Places - On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution review - finding art in the inarticulable

How do you give voice to a history that is intimate to your own in one sense, whilst being the story of others whom you never knew? This is a question that Ellen McWilliams, in her highly moving and humorous memoir, takes not only seriously but as the stylistic basis of her work. An early rhetorical question she asks haunts the text: ‘who am I to speak?’ The consequences of asking this are twofold and, I think, important.

It conjures the anxiety of forcing the tragic narratives owned by others to conform to the pattern of a separate subjective language. But it also carries with it the weight of that age-old question: ‘Who am I’? McWilliams, in writing a memoir that goes someway in answering this, also attempts to address why the duelling compulsions to speak and stay silent on the history that shaped her delimit two opposing factions of her consciousness.   

As the title of the novel attests, this story involves the atrocities committed both before and during the Irish Civil War by the invasive forces of the British – as well as by the Irish against their own. McWilliams discovers, or more accurately rediscovers, the landscape of her childhood home of Enniskeane, scarred by a violence that seeps into the familiar fields that she played in and pricks at the blackberry bushes from which she used to gather fruit. These former resting places become, for the author, restless places, unstilled because unatoned for – and often unspoken about.

If the reader believes that they are getting a comprehensive history of the Irish Civil War and its consequences, they will have been misled by the title. There are moments where the horror of the Irish famine enters the narrative like a dull ache, or where the Dunmanway massacre of April 1922, around which the book cautiously revolves, causes the lyrical ease of the prose to fracture almost like a gasp. These, however, come in flashes and are almost immediately reabsorbed into a text that seeks to show how past grief can be reincorporated and reimagined into the written life. In this sense, the foreword by Andy Bielenberg, in which he details the sectarian violence that led to the murder of several Protestant men for actual or perceived allegiance to the loyalist cause, is a vital sounding-board to what follows. As he writes, the events he describes ‘were not always openly talked about in West Cork’ because ‘[s]ilence on such issues was often a useful mechanism to overcome differences’. Rather than push back against this silence – which might be a wounding in itself – McWilliams leans into the traces that remain of deeds unspoken.

This is interesting, given that her professional life as a literary academic is meant to make words work for us. As she writes, however, with characteristic clear-sightedness: ‘language fails us sometimes and there is nothing we can do about it’. For things to be written at all, some things must remain unwritten.

Merely papering over the cracks is – as we all know – an insufficient remedy to broken narratives. In McWilliams’ text, though, we get the sense that these cracks can be plugged (however imperfectly) by the pages of literature both old and new. A scene, for instance, from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton evokes the importance of the domestic object, freighted with familiar, familial weight, and provides an emotive insight into the devastation when these household gods are scattered in the aftermath of great violence. Many Protestant households, we learn, were looted and burnt during the massacres. Poetry seeps into the pages, including Yeats and Marvell: two very different poets who are still useful when you want to convey the reach of feeling. We also get references to a wide variety of academic work on literature from both within and without Ireland. And McWilliams is always generous in acknowledging her sources for providing something of a resting place: a space on the page that brings with it not only knowledge but an emotional outlet and a way of crystalising otherwise unthinkable ideas.

A lot of literary scholarship depends on the capacity to work on the comparative borderland between the written word and the personal resonances they inspire. McWilliams is clearly skilled in this practice and works to apply it to her written life. Her motherhood is a dominant strain in this work, which is at its most moving when it works to convey the depth of love therein. The interpretative lens she applies consists, not only of literary fictions, but of the lives of historical figures such as Oliver Cromwell. Married to a leading scholar on this contentious figure, it is perhaps not surprising that he some influence on the narrative shape. What is surprising, however, is precisely at which moments he is involved. The difficult art of breastfeeding, for instance, intersects with meditations on whether Cromwell received similar loving attention as a baby, and whether the lack of it contributed to his violent invasion of Ireland in 1649. There is an admirable capacity in McWilliams to test the limits of sympathy, well, to their limit. I must admit that the idea of her offering directions and a cup of tea to a Cromwell – freshly bloodied from yet another massacre of the Irish people – is rather unsettling. And yet, as this book teaches, we must lay our ghosts to rest in whatever ways we can. Perhaps the grounds of our own empathy are spacious enough for this.

This is a story told in fragments and there is a striking form of non-linearity to the thoughts of the book. Stories of McWilliams’ family – met and unmet – glitter unearthed like the quality of memory. Paths cross in the imagination or in reality. The book strikes me as an archive of household goods lovingly tended. I use the term ‘fragments’ advisedly. Sharp pieces of an increasingly crystalised history – the history of her home – seem to prick at her flesh throughout this narrative. This is evocatively described in the penultimate (and, to my mind, best) chapter. She concludes by thinking about how she will pass down this history to her son. Carefully, like a delicate object, McWilliams handles the ‘fragile kaleidoscope of history that has cast and coloured every fragment of [her] life, in panes of shade and vivid brights – even if [she] could not see it until now’. A stained-glass window is sometimes referred to as a leadlight. Beautiful and often sacred, they are held together by the same metal that makes bullets. In some ways, this is a fitting analogy with which to conclude these thoughts on the book. Held together because of a violent heat, what remains creates a resilient, faithful, and luminous opening that colours the gap between old and new worlds.

• Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution by Ellen McWilliams (Beyond the Pale Books, £15)
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