“Lots of fun at Finnegan’s Wake”
The Drinking Life
Seven nights in a row, an Irishman comes home drunk. Each night, he finds increasingly irrefutable evidence that another man has been in his house. On the seventh night, he finds the man himself in his bed. But each night his wife concocts increasingly implausible explanations. Drunk, the husband is in no condition to argue and so takes the adulterous wife’s explanation at face value. A woman devotes herself day in and day out to “the sup”; she drinks it constantly; never will she stop this habit. A tipsy hod-carrier falls off a ladder, suffers a head injury, and dies. His wake occasions still more drinking, as is the custom. As a sign of respect for the deceased, the mourners place samples of his preferred beverages at his head and feet. Whiskey (in Irish, usquebaugh) is the “water of life”;1 so the mere proximity of it revives him, and the erstwhile corpse joins in the celebration.2 Merry tunes such as those accompanying these lyrics make the use of alcohol among the Irish seem endearing, part of their fabled charm; but unlike the unnamed imbiber in “Seven Drunken Nights,” Dicey Reilly, and Tim Finnegan, some characters in Irish fiction go over to the dark side via “the drink.”
Alcoholism researchers have studied the stereotypical association between the Irish and alcohol thoroughly, but without definitive results. A survey of work done in the field shows that many researchers see strong ambivalence in the attitude of the Irish to alcohol. Even trying to discover whether the Irish do in fact drink more than other ethnic groups seems fraught with complications. First there is the question of what group is to be used to serve as a basis for comparison: natives of other European Union countries, or the Irish abroad as opposed to the Irish at home? Then there is the surprising piece of information that there are more teetotalers in Ireland than there are in other European countries. This complicates matters statistically, in that if A has four drinks and B has none, then their average consumption is two drinks, which seems moderate—except that A, having consumed four drinks, might be drunk. Multiply the drinking habits of both A and B over a whole population, and statistical complexities ensue.
Then there is the problem that the Irish tend to drink away from home rather than at home, which means that (statistically again) the Irish pay more of their income for alcohol than at-home drinkers do; but this does not necessarily mean that pubgoers in Ireland drink more than dinnertime drinkers in, say, Italy. And then there is the perennial problem of self-reporting; it is said that American doctors automatically double a patient’s self-reported alcohol use. But given the acceptability of alcohol consumption in Ireland, it is possible that, like boastful fraternity brothers on a Monday morning, Irish self-reporters may attempt to measure up to the national reputation and thus exaggerate their drinking in morning-after tales. With all these factors operating, it is hard even for the expert to say definitively how much the Irish drink.
There does, however, seem to be a consensus among alcohol researchers that the Irish drink differently from some other ethnic groups. In A Hair of the Dog: Irish Drinking and American Stereotype, sociologist Richard Stivers suggests that drinking rituals of all sorts not only mark life’s milestones (birth, marriage, death) but also are part of everyday life in Ireland. Drawing on evidence from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland, England, and Scotland, Stivers cites evidence that alcohol was used to reward children for good behavior, to validate “bargains and transactions … especially at fairs and markets,” and, referring to his title, “to relieve the effects of past drinking episodes.”3 So, like Dicey Reilly of song, some Irish people mark not only rites of passage but daily events with a dram (or two). Further the custom of drinking apart from meals, often instead of meals, exacerbates the effects of alcohol in a way that, for example, wine drunk with a meal may not.
Of the many drinking rituals that Stivers describes, the one with most relevance to fiction and drama involves the pub. The pub serves as both “meeting place” and “recreation center” for a community,4 and its regulars are connected by both trade and neighborhood ties. In the pub there are many rules and rituals, but the most important of them is treating or buying rounds: “This norm of reciprocity made all men equal and bound them to each other. A man was obligated to buy drinks for his friends, as they were for him. The norm of treating cut across class boundaries and occupational lines and permeated both the public and the private sectors of life. It was a symbol of group integration and an affirmation of male identity.”5 This custom is almost a guarantee of consumption to excess, not to mention wasteful spending. If two men walk into a pub, each must treat the other; if only one treats, the rule of reciprocity is broken and the recipient of the treat is diminished in his companion’s eyes and in his own. So at least two drinks per man must be consumed in any given pub visit. Then should a third man walk in, a third round must commence, followed, perhaps, by a fourth, fifth, or sixth as more arrive; as the ritual continues, the first two drinkers are particularly in danger of drinking too much. Ending the ritual is difficult, as it should ideally be done at a point at which all the men in the group have measured up to the “norm of reciprocity,” thus asserting their membership in what Stivers calls the “bachelor group”6—a group made up, for various complicated reasons, of married men as well as single.
In addition to gender solidarity, class solidarity is also maintained by not only the pub rituals but also the practice of drinking itself, especially public drinking, and there are historical, sociological, and psychological factors dating back at least two centuries that cause this to be so. Historian George Bretherton explains how, particularly in the rural areas, the nineteenth-century temperance movement was associated with the Protestant Ascendancy and with the landowning classes. Rural landowners had a great deal to gain if their tenants remained sober, and so the point of temperance became to provide reliable workers. Anything beloved of the landlords was anathema to the tenants; plus Protestant reformers defined abstinence in terms of banning the drinks that the Catholic lower-class population drank, while permitting the drinks favored by upper-class Protestants. Thus, abstinence, or even moderation, came to mean allying oneself with the landholding classes and their religion and against one’s own class and faith—clearly an unacceptable situation.7
In urban areas, according to sociologist Joseph Gusfield, attempts to limit drinking were also class-based and economics-based. Gusfield begins his essay with Oscar Wilde’s witticism “Work is the curse of the drinking class.” The drinking class (the urban proletariat, lower-class, and Catholic) resented the attempts of the urban equivalents of those temperance landlords, the business and factory owners (middle- to upper-class and Protestant) and their minions, to control their celebratory rituals in the interest of increased productivity. Social controls on drinking imposed from above were intended not to benefit the individual drinker but to provide for a docile and efficient urban working class. One big problem, according to Gusfield, was “the Saint Monday phenomenon, absenteeism or drunkenness of workers after the weekend. Unaccustomed to a time sequencing that required planning and pacing of the total daily agenda, workers continued to declare holidays and sought to work when they saw fit rather than follow the systematic organization of daily and weekly time that the industrial process made dominant.”8 So not only was drinking, for the urban worker, a chance to relax with his mates in the pub, it was also a way of asserting class solidarity and defying the employer’s control over the worker’s after-hours time. Moreover drinking was the worker’s way of asserting his right to carnival, “with its licensed release from … prohibitions,”9 instead of the perpetual Lent required by the business model of behavior.
Removing from the office to the pub had not only gender and social implications but anthropological ones as well, according to psychologist and anthropologist Marianna Adler: “Before the 1830s, the shared practice of daily drinking was a primary symbolic vehicle for the generation and affirmation of the social relations of community that formed the basis of English preindustrial society.”10 The ritual of shared drinking reasserts the group solidarity involved in the “reciprocity and communality” of treating.11 Had the landlords and the industrial tycoons understood the anthropological meaning of drinking to the drinkers, their better course of action might have been to share in the ritual rather than try to control it. Adler points out that “the mutual obligation to treat at drinking extended beyond the community of status equals. Employers were also expected at ritually defined times to supply drink to their employees,” and this process “linked men of unequal status in relations of exchange.”12 Disrupting this link by placing landlords and management on the opposite side of tenants and workers made abstinence or moderation look like an attempt by the former to control the latter, which had the paradoxical effect of making the latter drink more to assert group solidarity.
The conversation on the Irish and alcohol involves writers and artists as well as medical, historical, anthropological, and sociological investigators. For the purpose of discussing fictional characters, whose blood alcohol levels cannot be tested, alcohol abuse can be defined as a character’s drinking to a point that affects other characters, triggers plot events, and/or develops a theme of the work. Two well-known literary examples are a pair of stories in James Joyce’s Dubliners, “Counterparts” and “A Little Cloud.” The central characters, Farrington and Little Chandler, respectively, fit the definition of alcohol abusers. In addition the drinking habits of each of them develop one of the central themes of Joyce’s work, the inferiority of Dublin life.
The Lesser Life: James Joyce’s Dubliners
One of the key themes in Dubliners by James Joyce (1882–1941) is the limited way in which his characters live, for which Joyce blames Ireland. Even in Ireland’s principal city, he felt, there was no possibility of living fully. The sobriquet of the main character of “A Little Cloud,” “Little” Chandler, calls attention to this recurrent theme in the collection: “He was called Little Chandler because, though he was but slightly under the average stature, he gave one the idea of being a little man.”13 During the course of the story, Chandler comes to believe himself a man of small mind and spirit, in contrast to the greatness he perceives in his old acquaintance, Ignatius Gallaher, recently returned from London.
The key term, however, is perceives. The story is told from the third-person limited viewpoint; the viewpoint character is Little Chandler himself, so the reader knows only what he thinks. Chandler believes that in his eight-year absence from Dublin, Gallaher has “got on,” experienced the kind of success that would be possible only to those who leave Ireland. In Ireland Gallaher had been “shabby and necessitous”; in England he “had become a brilliant figure on the London press” (57). Chandler believes this because Gallaher says so; there is little corroborating evidence other than his “travelled air, his well-cut tweed suit and fearless accent” (57). His pose of worldly sophistication is swallowed whole by Chandler, who has little experience of the world and therefore little basis for evaluating the truth of Gallaher’s traveler’s tales. All that is really known about Gallaher is that he can afford one well-cut tweed suit and an evening of drinks; everything else is Chandler’s interpretation of what he says and does.
As Chandler ponders the self-proclaimed achievements of his old friend, he thinks with “gentle melancholy” (57) of the ambitions that he once had to become a prominent literary figure himself. He owns a collection of books of poetry and often considers reading some of his favorite poems to his wife, “but his shyness had always held him back” (58). The reader has no way of knowing how his wife would have reacted to this poetry reading, and neither does Chandler. But his wife and their baby become convenient scapegoats for his unfulfilled ambitions. Like Joyce himself Chandler comes to believe that living in Ireland is antithetical to artistic accomplishment: “There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away. You could do nothing in Dublin” (59).
Instead of attempting the hard work of artistic creation, Chandler thinks gloomily of what might be his “poet’s soul” (60) and what of his (possible) talent might yet be developed at his ripe age of thirty-two. He imagines rave reviews of his yet unwritten poetry and tries to decide which formulation of his name would be “more Irish looking” (60), thus more likely to connect him with the greats of the Irish Literary Revival then in the process of putting Ireland on the world’s literary map. He does not, however, write any poems. He leaves his office as a poet manqué resigned to his fate as an office functionary. In this spirit he enters Corless’s bar, where Ignatius Gallaher awaits him. His reveries about his supposedly lost literary career deepen his regret, and by the time he returns home from the bar, he is in a state of suppressed rage, which triggers an angry outburst directed toward his infant son. His experiences in Corless’s bar explain why this happens.
Chandler tells Gallaher that he, Chandler, “drinks very little as a rule” (61), and his reaction to the crowd at Corless’s suggests that at least he drinks at Corless’s very little. He thinks of the bar as a sophisticated place, attracting a sophisticated, multinational clientele of theatergoers; this is not Chandler’s “local,” where he is comfortable and the habitués familiar. Thus he is out of his element as he enters the bar, and Gallaher has the advantage on him. Their meeting at the bar, combined with Gallaher’s boisterous gregariousness, initiates the drinking ritual, with no possibility of Chandler’s ordering a milder drink than even the “very much diluted” whiskey that Gallaher aggressively orders for him (61). Gallaher drinks his own whiskey undiluted, which—along with the rapidity with which he causes the drinks to be placed before them, his thirst masked as bonhomie—marks him as a hard drinker, unlike the more abstemious Chandler.
The inevitable toast ensues, and the drinking begins. Gallaher finishes the first drink rapidly, while Chandler “sipped a little” (62). But the time spent on just one drink is too short a visit for old friends, and neither Gallaher nor Chandler suggests a meal. So the second drink follows hard upon the first. As does the third. This intake is excessive for a small individual such as Little Chandler. But Chandler matches Gallaher drink for drink, lest he be thought of as less manly than his friend. And during these three drinks, consumed in rapid succession, his manhood is taking a battering. Gallaher’s competitive stance when Chandler enters the bar—“leaning with his back against the counter and his feet planted far apart” (60)—is paralleled by his verbal aggression, demonstrated in all his conversational topics. His goal seems to be to prove himself the bigger man in every way: better traveled, more sexually experienced, worldly wise. This, of course, puts Chandler in the role of the provincial, the hometown boy, married young, monogamous, reliable, and therefore, to Gallaher (and soon to Chandler himself), a failure. Chandler does not have the emotional distance—or, after the first drink, the sobriety—to evaluate Gallaher’s grandiose claims and takes them at face value.
Chandler’s moderate alcohol consumption has heretofore made him a decent companion (he has “an odd half one or so” with old friends [61]); but mainly it allows him to be a reliable worker and a passable husband and father. But once Chandler is outside of three whiskies, these virtues seem tepid indeed. So when the work/pub/home triangle is complete, his self-perception is irrevocably altered. Hearing about Gallaher’s sexual adventures, he compares his wife, Annie, to the supposedly more erotic, certainly more exotic, European women of what might be Gallaher’s imagination only and finds her wanting. It is no accident that Chandler thinks about the English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), who was indeed the embodiment of at least one form of the artistic life: testing the limits of experience, especially with regard to sexuality. Living dangerously, as Byron did, does not necessarily produce great art in and of itself; but neither, Joyce’s story suggests, does living tepidly.
Although Joyce himself believed that Dublin and creativity were mutually exclusive, the case of his character is much more complicated. Chandler may not be the possessor of a great talent, and Gallaher may not be an exemplar of the creative life. Corless’s bar is surely not the locus of male conviviality but is a battlefield on which alcohol is as much of a weapon of male self-aggrandizement as is bragging speech designed to establish pecking orders. His own ego battered, Chandler takes out his frustration as the lower man in a hierarchy on one even lower than himself: a young boy. Such behavior is “little” indeed.
The short story “Counterparts” has a similar structure to that of “A Little Cloud.” Farrington moves from office to pub to home, with a similar result. Low-level office work (he is a law copyist) unmans him; his size and strength is disproportionate to the unchallenging nature of his job. It is as if the urban desire for middle-class respectability has trapped a big, strong man, who would be more at home under the open sky, into wielding a pen as a scrivener. Worse, he is under the thumb of Mr. Alleyne, urban remnant of the Protestant Ascendancy, his “piercing north of Ireland accent”14 the voice of authority in Farrington’s work life.
Unlike Little Chandler, Farrington shows signs that he is a problem drinker already. His anger at his situation in the office triggers “a sharp sensation of thirst. The man recognized the sensation and felt that he must have a good night’s drinking” (71). The connection between Farrington’s emotions and his alcohol consumption is thus established. Rendering the situation more serious is the fact that Farrington, husband, father, and sole support of his family, cannot afford the number of drinks that might be involved in buying rounds. He hopes to complete his work so well that he can get an advance on his salary but undercuts that very plan by sneaking out of the office to the bar on the pretext of using the bathroom. At O’Neill’s he is clearly a regular, on a first-name basis with the waiter; his fast glass of porter is followed by a caraway seed serving the function of a breath mint. It is clear that there is no social gratification to this visit but rather a gratification of his need for alcohol only. The time is midafternoon, and Farrington has no justification for interrupting the workday with this leisure activity, which has become a compulsion. This is just the sort of behavior that the temperance movement in Ireland sought to discourage, as it made for inefficient workers and thus unprofitable businesses.
Upon his return to the office, the impact of the porter makes him “confused” and so less capable of completing his assigned copying task (73). It is then that he conjures his fantasy of the bar as great good place, as compared with the gloomy environs of the office and even of twilight Dublin itself: “The dark damp night was coming and he longed to spend it in the bars, drinking with his friends amid the glare of glass and the clatter of glasses” (73). Fiscal reality intervenes as he considers possible ways to bankroll this venture. He has spent his last money on the earlier glass of porter. He has lost hope of the advance on his salary, as the task he has been set is clearly impossible to complete, what with the time of day and the influence of the porter. Could he borrow enough from the waiter, Pat, to subsidize his drinking? Probably not. Why not, then, pawn his watch chain?
Borrowing money to drink in a pub is clearly a poor move economically. But in order for the pub visit to perform its designated function—bolstering Farrington’s increasingly shaky sense of self—he must have enough money to engage in two key pub rituals: storytelling and standing rounds. Farrington is to this story as Ignatius Gallaher is to “A Little Cloud”: the barroom braggart. In the story he tells to the appreciative audience in the pub, Farrington casts himself as a veritable hero of the Celts in challenging the authority of Mr. Alleyne. This triggers the appreciation of one Nosey Flynn, which he expresses by treating Farrington, which in turn sets up a reciprocal obligation in Farrington to treat Flynn. Then two more drinkers, O’Halloran and Paddy Leonard, come in, hear the story again, and begin a new round by treating the group. Not to respond to this ritual of reciprocity requires the drinker to leave the group or, if he accepts drinks without himself treating, to be considered a “sponge” like Weathers (79). Farrington, then, the man of the hour, “told the boys to polish off that and have another” (77). Then Higgins comes in, hears the story, and the whole process begins anew. Like Ignatius Gallaher, whose meeting with Little Chandler was only the first of the evening, the men regroup and go on to several other pubs for more rounds. At this point Farrington has had much more to drink than Chandler did. In the former story, it is easy for the reader to count Chandler’s drinks (three); but with all the treating and pub-crawling, it is not easy to determine how much alcohol Farrington has consumed, and that is the point—neither can he. Farrington has certainly drunk more than he should have and much more than he can afford.
The point of all this activity has been to bolster Farrington’s shaky sense of himself as a man, threatened as it is by his lack of success on his job and Mr. Alleyne’s bullying. But at this point events occur that threaten his manhood in ways that even alcohol cannot soothe, sending him home furious. First there is the perceived rejection by an English girl. Then there is his loss at the pub game of arm-wrestling; worse still, he loses to Weathers, the sponge (80). Farrington’s position in the bachelor group had already been challenged by O’Halloran, who, regarding a proposed trip “behind the scenes” at the theater to meet “some nice girls,” says that “Farrington wouldn’t go because he was a married man” (78). All these affronts have a cumulative effect. He can now prove himself a real man only by continuing to drink. The night of drinking concludes with, yes, another drink, the custom being to take one for the road; then all head to their various homes.
Farrington does so in the worst possible mood: “He was full of smoldering anger and revengefulness. He felt humiliated and discontented: he did not even feel drunk and he had only twopence in his pocket. He cursed everything. He had done for himself in the office, pawned his watch, spent all his money; and he had not even got drunk” (80). He may not feel drunk, but he is drunk, and with consequences: loss of prestige within the peer group; loss of the watch, as he does not have enough money left to redeem it; and perhaps loss of his job. The violent feelings spill over into an act of domestic violence directed against his young son at home. Like Little Chandler’s son, Farrington’s child is a scapegoat, a target of booze-fueled rage.
Twenty Drunken Years: Roddy Doyle’s Paula Spencer Novels
Much has changed in Dublin from the time of publication of Joyce’s Dubliners to the beginning of the literary career of Roddy Doyle (b. 1958). But alcohol still figures in the lives of the Dubliners of fiction, as does ambivalence about the drinking life. In Doyle’s novel The Snapper, the second of his Barrytown Trilogy, the pub plays the role described by Richard Stivers in A Hair of the Dog. It is the center of public life in Barrytown, the go-to destination for men to gather and escape the crowded conditions (and the world of women and children) in their tiny homes. But in the Dublin of Doyle’s fiction, the pub is also frequented by young women, and Sharon Rabbitte’s excessive drinking on a certain night leads to a situation in which she is incapable of giving consent to a sexual encounter and is raped. Such is the lure of the pub that Sharon continues to drink to excess throughout her resulting pregnancy. On the one hand, the Barrytown pub is warm, convivial, lots of fun; on the other hand, it is the breeding ground for all manner of social ills, including unplanned pregnancies.
Nevertheless the overarching message of all three Barrytown novels is a positive one. Despite the difficulties the characters face (some of which they create themselves), this is a community that pulls together and offers its members hope. All three novels show characters drinking to excess but managing the consequences in a way that is relatively harmless and, in the case of Sharon’s “snapper,” even life-affirming. These three novels are not, however, Doyle’s only work dealing with alcohol use and abuse. In his paired novels The Woman Who Walked into Doors and Paula Spencer, the microhistory of the Spencer family reflects larger and more ominous social trends with regard to alcohol use, especially among the urban poor.
Since The Woman Who Walked into Doors is told in the first person, Paula is the reader’s only source of information. Her ability to express herself is limited by a number of factors, however: her lack of education, her inability at this point in her life to understand her own role in her fate or to comprehend causes of her own behavior, and, of course, her drunkenness, which impairs her judgment at the time and her recollection thereafter. She does understand that her drinking has become problematic, in that she takes steps (largely unsuccessful) to control it. She sets herself rules for when and how much she drinks, for example, not until after her youngest child Jack goes to bed—resulting, predictably, in Paula’s efforts to get Jack to bed earlier and earlier. She also concocts elaborate schemes for locking away the alcohol and “losing” the key. Nevertheless her drinking has reached the point of physical dependency: “I don’t enjoy it, the drinking. I need it. I shake. My head goes; I have small blackouts. I start sweating patches of sweat.”15 And later: “My eyes are glueing. I have to scream. My joints are stuck. I’m made of sore cement” (113). If the definition of literary alcohol abuse is drinking that has consequences for the drinker and others, triggers plot events, and/or develops a theme of the work, then Paula is by all three measures, as she often describes herself, an “alco.” Moreover the novel is thematically concerned with the role of alcohol in Irish life in general as well as Paula’s own.
Other family members drink, and little if any disapproval is expressed, nor are social sanctions imposed on the drinker. Except for her sister Carmel, who, according to Paula, saved her (188), concern for privacy appears to trump concern for Paula’s well-being and that of her children. Even the doctors and other members of the hospital staff who examine and treat her after her many emergency-room visits for domestic abuse inquire only casually into the circumstances of her life. The behavior of these medical professionals suggests that “this kind of abuse is deeply embedded in the very fabric of a patriarchal Irish culture.”16 The doctors and nurses do not ask Paula directly if she has been abused (which would, in her mind, leave her free to answer; volunteering the information is against her idiosyncratic personal ethics). The emergency room staff members accept her excuse of her own drunkenness to account for her injuries as if it were the most natural thing in the world, if a failing at all a venial one, for a young mother to have such “accidents.” Not only do they “indirectly endorse abusive behavior,”17 they do not even appear to see the drinking as an issue. The Irish medical system treats her and releases her as if her condition were equivalent to a bout of influenza, regrettable but inevitable. Indeed the whole society colludes in “‘turning a blind eye’ … to domestic violence.”18 The same blind eye is turned to her and Charlo’s drinking.
Because of the first-person narrative viewpoint, the reader is never in the mind of Charlo, so there is never a definitive answer to the question of why he drinks or why he batters his wife. Paula is too drunk herself to register much that is implied by Charlo’s actions. Her own problem drinking develops over the course of the marriage, but her problem with Charlo’s drinking begins on their wedding night. His behavior is absolutely stereotypical. Excessive alcohol use in rite-of-passage rituals means that there is no possibility of his drinking moderately enough to make the night a memorable one for Paula (or even for himself). Paula waits for Charlo with no certainty that he will actually appear to consummate their new marriage: “I went up to the room upstairs and sat on the bed. I wanted Charlo to come in now. Before it was too late. Before he got too drunk. Before he went off somewhere with the brothers” (143; emphasis added). Instead of devoting himself to his bride, Charlo allies himself with “the brothers,” the bachelor group, drinking so much that he “came in at about three o’clock and blacked out before he hit the bed” (147). Granted the wedding night was not a sexual initiation for either of them; nevertheless Charlo’s spending it with the boys rather than with his wife sends a clear message of her relative importance in his life. No surprise, then, that he will spend many a night at his local, Campions, leaving Paula home alone with the children.
As the novel continues, it is never quite clear, as if Paula does not actually know, what Charlo does for a living. He does not seem to have a steady job and so must get money for alcohol from pickup jobs, the dole, criminal activity, or a combination of all three. That the last two are the most likely is suggested by the episode of the burning money. It is hard to imagine that a person of limited means who had worked hard for his cash, digging ditches, say, would burn it to torment his wife. In addition whatever Charlo does for a living cannot be time dependent, as his alcohol use renders him unfit for any sort of labor involving punctuality or time management. Charlo’s failure in the world outside the home, combined with his socializing with the bachelor group, accounts for his domestic violence. As in Joyce’s two short stories, the same pattern applies: a man goes from work to pub to home; at work he is underemployed and dissatisfied; in the pub he finds some satisfaction; but even there he is only one of many, not the dominant male. Only at home is he the strongest person. His misguided efforts to prove his own masculinity lead to violence. The alcohol lowers his inhibitions against his anger, the only emotion men like him allow themselves to acknowledge.
The question arises, is Paula a facilitator of Charlo’s drinking and the ensuing violence? When she first meets him, she discounts the significance of his alcohol use: “He’d been drinking. I could smell it but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t drunk” (4). She even sees drinking as a sign of affluence: “He had money, I knew he did. The smell off his breath told me that” (10). The first time they make love, they are both drunk (21). Later she finds his drinking part of his charm: when he has a hangover, she sees him as “funny … a laugh”; when he misbehaves while drunk, she forgives him—“No bother” (148). Only eighteen, she does not see his drinking as part of a larger pattern of deviant behavior, including his being “a skinhead … up in court three times and in St. Pat’s once” (22). The “St. Pat’s” reference is explained to her later. While Paula regards it as “not really jail” because it is “only for kids” (52), Charlo explains that it is indeed jail and that he had been there for robbery. So St. Pat’s must be juvenile detention, a harbinger of future trouble for Charlo. Paula’s father picks up the signals, but like eighteen-year-olds everywhere, she thinks she knows better. So it is only a matter of time until she is on the floor, looking up at “Charlo’s feet, then his legs, making a triangle with the floor” (5).
Why would a woman stay in a violent situation such as this? Not only does Charlo face no consequences for his behavior either in terms of his marriage or the larger society, Paula implicitly condones it by continuing to have reproductive sex with him, resulting in five pregnancies, one of which is lost to the violence and the other four of which result in children who further tie her to their father. Depression makes her drink; alcohol makes her more depressed. Paula endures the abuse for seventeen years. At no point does she seek outside help, whether from the legal system (she fails to prosecute, for example, for the loss of the baby Sally), from the mental health system, or from the medical system. In blaming herself and in seeing her situation as hopeless, she plays out the script of an abused woman, trying to placate her abuser while simultaneously further arousing his anger. When Paula is finally driven to act to protect Nicola, the way in which she gets rid of Charlo increases his hostility, thus perpetuating the cycle of violence.
Divorce is not possible for Paula. The events of The Woman Who Walked into Doors begin with her and Charlo’s first meeting in 1973 and continue through the seventeen years of her marriage, until 1990; the referendum legalizing divorce in Ireland passed in 1995. Paula could have separated from Charlo and fails in her responsibility to her children by not separating them from him. But does she have any responsibility to the larger society to alert someone in authority to Charlo’s capacity for violence? When he kills the hostage, it is clear from the way he does it that Charlo’s uncontrolled anger has been displaced onto Gwen Fleming. Is Paula at some level responsible for Gwen’s death? Apparently she does not think so, because the murder and subsequent killing of Charlo by the police do not set her on the path to recovery, at least not for a long time.
At the beginning of Paula Spencer, it is 2005, Paula’s forty-eighth birthday, and she has only been sober for “four months and five days.”19 The year covered by the book, to her next birthday, chronicles the changes in Paula’s life as she tries to stay away from the bottle. Due to her disease, she has missed a good many maturational stages, and this year is a time of accelerated psychological growth as she tries to make up for lost time and repair damaged relationships. One commonly accepted measure of competence is the ability to perform independently the basic activities of daily living appropriate to one’s situation. For Paula her year is devoted to mastering time, which in her case means earning money; to developing a healthy relationship with food instead of a sick dependence on drink; and to repairing the family relationships broken by her alcohol use.
Large blocks of time have gone missing for Paula, and like an Irish Rip Van Winkle, she reenters a world that is very different from the one she left when she married Charlo. Since she has for all practical purposes lost those years, she is in perpetual catch-up mode. She is astounded, for example, to realize that Phil Lynott, front man for the rock band Thin Lizzy, has been dead for nearly twenty years and that Bono and U2 have long since picked up that musical torch. The reference to Lynott and Thin Lizzy is more important than it may first appear. For one thing the band was mentioned in The Woman Who Walked into Doors by way of a poster in Paula and Charlo’s kitchen (166); apparently both were fans. For another thing Thin Lizzy’s breakout hit was a rock version of the Irish drinking song “Whiskey in the Jar.” And for a third, Phil Lynott died young, at thirty-six, of the combined effects of drugs and alcohol. Paula is not as far behind the times in never having taken the Luas, at the time a new tram system supplementing the buses and trains upon which she depends; it opened to passengers in 2004, only a year earlier. Her life experiences have been few and narrow; she has, for example, never ventured far afield from Dublin, not even to Belfast, about two hours by train. A larger issue is that she has missed not only her peak earning years but also her peak mothering years.
So one of Paula’s main developmental tasks at age forty-eight is to master time. As a member of the lower class in service to higher classes, she must accommodate herself to her superiors’ schedules. Her cleaning jobs are planned around the activities of her bosses: daytime for the private houses, evening for the offices. The time management skills necessary to complete these cleaning jobs were beyond her when she was drinking, and a drunk is useless to any part of the economic system other than as a consumer for the liquor industry. Now she can manage a complex schedule and get to the right houses on the right days. She can take on extra side jobs (like cleaning the arena) and even experiences a modest degree of success in being promoted from cleaner to cleaning supervisor. Though this may be a distinction without much of a difference in terms of salary and job prestige, it does reinforce her efforts at sobriety. Paula notices repeatedly that in the Ireland of 2005, eastern Europeans have largely replaced the Irish in these jobs; but she understands that her low status is a consequence of her own behavior. Mastering time enables her to make money, which in turn makes her proud. She knows she has enough money for food shopping; she is saving for a computer, and “her work is going to pay for it” (44). A more complex task is to make up, as far as she can, for lost time. Paula’s alarm clock is set for seven-thirty during the week, so she can wake up Jack and even see Leanne before she goes to work on the weekends. These activities reassure her that she is “still a mother” (11). But Jack and Leanne are really too old to benefit from the organized, child-centered household that Paula is trying to institute now. So her second line of defense is to mother them through food.
A big part of Paula’s recovery has to do with redefining her own relationship with food, which would help her with her belated goal of mothering her children properly. One of the key tasks of a mother at which she noticeably failed was to see to it that her children were fed regularly and appropriately. If a mother makes the food herself, so much the better, as the whole process of selecting food and preparing it in the children’s preferred ways is a major way to express love and food is at the heart of many people’s fondest childhood memories. But the whole task of feeding a family is more complex than it might seem to anyone not accustomed to doing it. One must have the money to buy nourishing food and if that basic need is met, the time management skills to keep the refrigerator stocked. Then there is the issue of the food preferences of each member of the household. Organization is more important as the complexity of a recipe increases: one must have not some, but all the ingredients to hand and be able to manage time sequencing in such a way as to prepare a dish correctly. One cannot do any of these things effectively when drunk.
Heretofore Paula has failed miserably at this central task of motherhood. At the height—or depth—of her alcohol abuse, a pathetic scene occurs involving her “local,” now resurrected as Finnegan’s Wake, and Jack when he was a “little fella”: “He stood outside that pub … waiting for her to come out. He stood in the rain. He often did it. She brought crisps out to him, and Coke with a straw. Like it was a treat. There you are, love” (16). Potato chips and Coke hardly constitutes an appropriate dinner for a child, and this episode would be a grievous abnegation of maternal responsibility even if it only happened once; but Paula remembers that Jack often did this (and in the rain). Now she feels guilty, as she should; and in her recovery she tries to do penance for this sin of omission by reasserting her position as a mother in the kitchen.
Her ambivalence about this role centers on her refrigerator. A housecleaner by trade, Paula is something of an authority on the subject of refrigerators, and she knows that the one given to her by her oldest child, Nicola, is a fine one, better than those of many of her clients. But the refrigerator’s presence in her household rankles. “It’s a good fridge…. It takes up half the kitchen. It’s one of those big silver, two-door jobs. Ridiculous. Twenty years too late. She opens it the way film stars open the curtains. Daylight! Ta-dah! Empty. What was Nicola thinking of? The stupid bitch. How to make a poor woman feel poorer. Buy her a big fridge. Fill that, loser. The stupid bitch. What was she thinking?” (3). The fact that the fridge is too big underlines her lost mothering years. Then the fact that it was a gift from Nicola underlines the daughter’s greater financial success and reverses the roles of parent and child in that Nicola is implicitly instructing Paula in her domestic role rather than vice versa. Paula also suspects that one of Nicola’s motives in buying the refrigerator is to give the daughter an excuse to spy on her mother by looking not for alcohol—both Paula and Leanne are alcoholics and so would hide it—but for the mixers that would betray its presence. Finally a large, fully stocked refrigerator requires more money than Paula has or has ever had at any one time, so the refrigerator always seems empty despite her best efforts.
Despite these difficulties Paula takes upon herself the task of making soup. She has found that, since she stopped drinking, her appetite has improved, and she has learned for the first time as an adult to appreciate the taste of food. But her main inspiration for the soup is her belated desire to care for Leanne, whose malnourished state terrifies her. As a culinary task, soup is a good choice, as the only indispensable component of soup is water; the rest of the project involves whatever suitable ingredients are in the refrigerator, in any order. And while the chopping, mixing, and cooking certainly require time, time management is more flexible in making soup than in making other dishes. Soup can simmer for an hour, or two or three, once all the ingredients are in the pot and on the stove. It is hard to fail at soup-making.
But it is certainly possible to fail at completing the emotional transaction that the soup is intended to generate. When a cook has undertaken a complex culinary project, the reinforcement for that would be the diners’ conspicuous gratitude for and enjoyment of the meal. Family dinners, however, can be disappointing in this way; the beneficiaries of the kind act are often less appreciative than they might be, distracted, uninterested, or simply not hungry. They may even choose to engage in acts of passive aggression by refusing to eat the food. In Jack’s case any of the above could be true. Instead of responding enthusiastically to Paula’s offer of the soup, he eats bread and cheese (93), which certainly appears to be a rejection of her efforts. He could merely not be in the mood for lentil soup, but he could also be wary of responding to this overture of maternal love. Having been disappointed in this relationship many times in the past, it is possible that he does not trust his mother in that long-neglected maternal role. His refusal of Paula’s penitential offering shows that he is not ready to forgive her for that long-ago pub “meal.”
Worse still is Leanne’s reaction. Paula’s initial impetus for making the soup is her fear for her daughter’s health: “Leanne is skin and bone…. Leanne is dying” (86). Providing homemade soup for Leanne is Paula’s attempt at giving her “alco” daughter an opportunity to eat rather than drink. Leanne, however, comes home with an “off-licence bag” (98), a bottle of Smirnoff’s vodka for drinking at home, an indication that she has a different agenda. Like her brother Leanne rejects Paula’s effort, observing that the soup smells like “something burning” (98). When the encounter becomes violent, the evening deteriorates into a major disaster.
One of the prime tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous is that the recovering alcoholic must, to the extent possible, make amends to those damaged by his or her drinking, and Paula is trying to do this. Not only did she have the soup ready for Leanne, she had it in Leanne’s “special bowl,” her favorite one (100). Paula understands the significance of what she is doing: “The bowl wasn’t the point. The soup wasn’t even the point. The woman bringing the soup to Leanne, holding the bowl in front of her, not shaking—the woman was the point” (100). There is no guarantee, however, that the damaged person will be in the mood to forgive at the moment that the recovering alcoholic is ready to ask forgiveness. Leanne eventually drinks the soup, but her behavior, like Jack’s, undercuts Paula’s attempt at making amends. Similarly with John Paul, her attempts to establish a relationship with him, overcome her revulsion for his partner, Star, and become a conventional grandmother to their children are efforts to correct the wrongs of the past.
With Nicola, however, Paula is at a loss. Unlike the others she seems to need nothing that Paula can give; indeed Nicola gives to Paula. Nicola’s self-sufficiency, and even her generosity, grate on Paula. For her to remake the film of the past, revising the mothering process, her children have to play their part in the drama of repentance. Nicola, it is clear, has no desire to do so, has in fact sealed herself off from any feelings regarding either of her parents. This self-protective mechanism works well for her but not for Paula, who would like to have another chance to mother this unmotherable young woman. Nicola’s competence as wife, mother, and professional means she has somehow managed to travel far beyond any point of meaningful connection with Paula.
As the novel ends, Paula has improved in her ability to do ordinary life activities and made efforts to repair her relationship with her children and sisters. She looks almost ready to take a first step into the rest of her life. Yet she is still organizing her life around alcohol; the not drinking is as absorbing to her as the drinking was, and she will never be as she would have been had she been able to drink moderately or abstain. She is still living with the consequences of her own and Charlo’s alcohol abuse. Her old injuries still hurt: three of her four children are obviously damaged, and one, the baby Sally, is dead. Because she has missed years of possible financial and educational development, poverty and low social class seem to be her lifelong fate. Apparently the “Celtic Tiger economy … has not benefited underprivileged groups” such as marginally employed cleaning women.20 Others, however, are doing better than Paula is. Her daughter Nicola seems to have transcended the limitations imposed on her by nature and nurture and is living a middle-class life, and one of Paula’s sisters is buying an investment property in Bulgaria; they can grab the tail of the Tiger, but Paula cannot.
The remaining question is this: given Paula’s dismal history with her husband, can or should she take a chance on Joe? In the earliest stages of this relationship, she is more assertive, more in control, than she was with Charlo. She is not nearly as sexually attracted. She will not be having children with Joe. She is honest, disclosing her alcoholism up front. But her recovery is still, and possibly always will be, fragile. And Joe is himself the survivor of a failed marriage. Paula knows very little of him as the novel ends, and so it is not clear whether he represents hope for the future. Perhaps the new name of Paula’s local, Finnegan’s Wake, suggests rebirth for Paula, as it did for Tim Finnegan. Doyle has written trilogies before and may again to trace the further development of this character.
According to James Joyce, the solution for the limited life available to his characters in Dubliners, as to himself, was to leave Ireland. Little Chandler and Farrington believe themselves to be trapped where they are, but Joyce’s own life demonstrates that they were not. However, for the real-life counterparts of Chandler, Farrington, and Paula Spencer, emigration will not help and perhaps may exacerbate their alcohol abuse. Habits, social customs, and genetic tendencies are all packed in the emigrant’s baggage. For others not so burdened with debilitating problems or able to overcome the ones that they do have, the emigration experience offers as much hope as it ever did. And with travel more convenient than ever, a return to Ireland is more likely than not. Emigration was once an act of desperation; now international travel is so commonplace that, at least for the most successful, it can almost be seen as commuting. The decision to leave is still difficult, the pain of those left behind is still real, but all of it can be reversed with the purchase of a ticket. Emigrants can go home again. But when they return from America, they return in a new incarnation of themselves as “Yanks.”