This
week I was invited to join a small dinner party, and found myself at a table of
mostly strangers, seated next to a very amusing man who apparently lives both
in Ireland and Montreal, turn about. He didn’t bother to tell me himself, but
it turns out that this man, Denis Sampson, has written several books, one of
which my host gave me as I left.
The book is called A Migrant Heart, was published in 2014
by Linda Leith Publishing of Westmount, and acknowledged support in its
publication from the Emerging Publishers Programme of the Canadian Council for
the Arts. This appears to be Sampson’s fourth published book, the earlier works
having ended towards literary criticism of Irish writers, he later moving closer
to the art of the memoirist, of which this book is an excellent example.
I was slightly put off when the
memoir opens with the author still in his pram, and when I had reached page 20
and the story had taken the author only to the age of five, I was beginning to
feel that he should get on with it. But I had already discovered that this man
can write, I mean he can really write, and I was kept going by the sheer
elegance of the prose, and the air I took from it that this was all that mattered
to this writer, and I should really persist if I wanted to be rewarded.
I have finished reading the book, and
I think it worth writing about not only because of its beautiful, calm and
measured language, but for an entirely surprising reason, namely, that Denis
Sampson and I have lived in some particulars very similar lives, migrant lives,
and that my view of such a life stands at the far opposite pole from his.
The burden of his story is that he
has never been able to decide where he lives, or even where he belongs. At one
point (page 166), he writes: “I now knew that I had not settled in Montreal,
though I had lived there for 18 years.”
A man who was having a problem making
up his mind? Much more than that: this
is a memoir about a man who has never been able to detach himself from the
little place in the West of Ireland where he was raised and nurtured. But it is
even more than that: he speaks of dragging his wife and child to France so that
he can fulfil the urge he had to assert himself as a European. By page 228, where
he is acknowledging a new revelation, “that the opposite of attachment is not
detachment, but betrayal,” I was wondering whether I could possibly be bothered
finishing the book. He had been flagellating himself throughout, and it all
seemed entirely unnecessary, to my way of thinking.
I should confess here my own
experience: unlike Denis Sampson, I was not born in a forgotten hole of the Old
World, mired in a feudal social and economic system, but in a flourishing part
of the New World. His back-story almost matches mine in one particular. His
grandfather was born in Dunedin, New Zealand in 1867. My grandfather arrived
from Northern Ireland thirteen years later and settled even further south in a
small farming village on the Southland Plain. He died when my Dad was ten. We
moved to the nearest city, Invercargill, when I was seven, and our boast was we
were “the southernmost city in the British Empire.” A foolish boast, but true.
Denis was caught up in a
Catholic-dominated world, of which he became for some years an enthusiastic
participant, such a world as had me thinking as I read it “the poor kid, how
terrible, what a dreadful legacy.” This
is the boyhood he has never been able to leave. I lived at home until I was 20, when I went
north to Dunedin for a new job with improved prospects. I had a week or so of
homesickness, put it behind me, and have never suffered a twinge of nostalgia
for my early upbringing, not a suggestion of it, ever since.
I married when I was 22, and thirteen days later we left New Zealand, with
the intention of returning. We never made it back until 25 years later, but we
couldn't settle to resume life there. We
deliberately brought up our four kids in a way so as not to impose anything on
them, leaving them to make heir own choices as they grew to adulthood. This laissez-faire attitude is another aspect
of our lives that stands at the far pole from Denis’s experience.
In fact my experience has convinced
me that all this stuff about the need for roots is nonsense. You carry your own
roots within you, you establish them with your life, day after day, your
friendships, your achievements, no matter where they occur, no matter how far
from where you were born and raised.
Denis comes close to admitting it:
“I thought how ridiculous this is, searching for
my roots like a third-generation Irish-American when I know perfectly well my
family history for generations. Once antiquated considerations of pedigree are
stripped away what is a family tree anyway? A fiction embroidered from some
facts: a myth of coherence, of orderly succession, of belonging.”
Denis comes close to admitting it under pressure
from his eldest son, talking about the younger son and the problems he might
have when arriving in Montreal.
“But Dad! It just takes a
short time until you get to know your way around. One city is like any other
city…..”
“I think it took me the
most of twenty-five years,” I said in hope that the big numbers would have some
shock value.
“Cm’on, Dad! You get to
know some people. Maybe a few months.”
“There are many times I thought
I was over it…..Maybe I never got over it.”
“What are you talking
about? You have a house and plenty of friends….”
“Well, let’s put it this
way. In twenty-five years I felt I lived through a century and a half. You
can’t really know what I mean by culture shock.” The solemnity of my declaration
is lost in the jokes from the other end of the table.
Much
as I admire Denis’s prose, and sympathize with his evident wish just to keep on
writing, to keep examining his life, endlessly, if necessary, just for the
pleasure of writing, I find myself out of sympathy with this sort of nostalgia
for things past. It is the more amazing to me because there is plenty of
evidence in the book of how much he has involved himself in Montreal life, taking
part in demonstrations for this or that, keeping in touch with changes in the
political atmosphere, and so on. There seems like no good reason for him not to
accept his Montreal life as his life, once and for all.
But then, he could respond: that’s
easy for you to say. You haven’t lived my life.
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