Straddling cultures in Dublin

HUGO HAMILTON occupies a unique niche in the formidable first rank of contemporary Irish letters.

Like so many of his compatriots, he began his writing career with some rather fine journalism, then moved on to short stories and five novels -- three set in Central Europe and two in his native Dublin. The latter books, “Headbanger” and “Sad Bastard,” are wonderfully and darkly comedic crime novels built around Garda detective Pat Coyne, whose life story carries intimations of Hamilton’s own.

What sets Hamilton distinctly apart from his contemporaries on the Dublin literary scene is the decisively hyphenate nature of his Irish-German identity. “The Harbor Boys” is the second volume of his memoirs in which the author ransacks the strange, melodramatic domesticity of a Dublin boyhood quite unlike any other. If this new book lacks the remarkably sustained lyricism of Hamilton’s 2003 memoir, “The Speckled People,” it’s because one of that volume’s technical achievements was an unforced evocation of a sensitive child’s language. “The Harbor Boys” carries the author’s story through adolescence and is, therefore, naturally more muscular, more harrowing and more compassionate. This volume, like the one before it, scrupulously avoids the memoir’s twin occasions of sin: sentimentality and cliche. (The former is a particular peril for Irish writers, who often rely on it as a stand-in for real feelings.)

A serious Irish memoirist dares to aspire to daunting company -- Yeats and Shaw, of course, but also Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Kavanagh, Louis MacNeice, Sean O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor. In fact, O’Connor’s two memoirs -- “An Only Child” and “My Father’s Son” -- probably are the most direct antecedents of Hamilton’s autobiographical explorations.

Hamilton was born in 1953, the son of an Irish father and a German immigrant mother. His father had been born Jack Hamilton but had changed his name to Sean O hUrmoltaigh to reflect his extreme Irish nationalist convictions. The elder Hamilton was an engineer, and his family was from the tiny West Cork village of Leap on the bay of Glandore. It remains a distant part of Ireland and, in those days, was even more so. The old ways and the old speech lingered far longer there than elsewhere. It’s a landscape of memories and secrets. There is great physical beauty and a dark history that cling to the place like mist in the hollows of morning. Famine memories linger and the struggle for Irish freedom and, later, the civil war raged with a particular ferocity. IRA assassinations of English collaborators continued into the 1940s. Sean O hUrmoltaigh liked to recall that his grandfather was one of Munster’s notable Irish language poets but refused to admit that Jack Hamilton’s father had died while serving in the British navy in World War I.

In Dublin, Jack Hamilton changed his name -- not an uncommon practice at the time -- joined an extreme nationalist splinter party, Aiseiri (“Resurrection” in Irish), gave frothing-at-the-mouth speeches in favor of Irish neutrality during World War II and, later, campaigned to have all Dublin street signs changed to Irish. Like many nationalists of his generation, he had an almost mystical belief in the power of the Irish language to redeem a people he believed was careening toward consumerism and homogenization. He regarded his three children as “weapons” in the language wars and forbade them to speak anything but Irish or German in their home and sent them to local Gaelscoil, where the classes were in the country’s native tongue. If the young Hamiltons slipped out of Irish, he beat them, breaking Hugo’s brother’s nose when he let slip English words picked up on the street.

“Irish people drink too much and talk too much and don’t want to speak Irish,” he told his children, “because it stinks of poverty and dead people left lying in the fields.... The Irish language reminds them of the big famine when they had nothing to eat except the old poems in Irish.”

Hugo Hamilton’s mother was born Irmgard Kaiser in the small Rhineland town of Kempen. Her father was a stationery store proprietor and her mother an opera singer. All were anti-Nazi, refused to join the party and practiced the quiet resistance Hamilton’s mother called “negative silence.” One sister, however, went further by opening her Cologne home to a Jewish fugitive who went about dressed as a nun. When Irmgard was caught trying to smuggle food to them, she was arrested and sent east to work.

After the war, she endured humiliation at the hands of occupying British forces, worked in the de-Nazification program and, ultimately, made a pilgrimage to Ireland, where she met and married Jack/Sean.

As her husband’s convictions harden into domestic tyranny, her affection for her children and deeply compassionate sense of humor become a kind of lifeline to the young Hugo, his brother Franz and their sister Maria.

She too is haunted by language and history, however. When the adolescent Hugo flees to his room after being unjustly accused of a household infraction, Irmgard forces her husband to go up and apologize, but what an apology:

“When my father comes to apologize, I refuse to speak to him. I don’t want reconciliation. I want to hold on to my anger. My moral victory. But my mother is there, pushing him into the room, forcing us to make up and shake hands. He holds my face and asks me to look him in the eyes. Then he embraces me and admits that he’s made a terrible mistake.... I can’t withhold my forgiveness any longer because he is close to tears with remorse. Then he stands back and smiles. He says he is proud of me and admires me for taking the punishment like a man, like Kevin Barry, the Irish freedom fighter, going to his execution. My mother says I’m such a brave person, like Hans and Sophie Scholl going under the guillotine for distributing leaflets against the Nazis.”

These are parents who will require their young children to wear Aran sweaters and lederhosen to school; there, they get beaten up -- a lot.

It’s no wonder that the young Hugo, who flees to Dublin harbor for a liberating summer job, finds both the history of Central Europe and the burgeoning Troubles in Northern Ireland recapitulated in his dealings with the local fishermen. He rebels -- plays the Beatles on his father’s treasured, home-built stereo instead of their Mozart, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and John McCormick, the latter singing in Irish, of course. Hugo steals the “instrument of torture” that the sadistic Christian Brother who presides over his Gaelscoil uses to beat his charges, provoking two days of mass interrogation and open rebellion. When their father orders Hugo and his brother to spend their summers studying for the next fall’s term, their mother organizes their escape to the nearby hills and covers for them.

Finally, there is a magnificent scene of adolescent resistance in which Hugo announces his desire to abandon school and become “nothing,” which provokes his enraged father to dump a bowl of stewed apples on his head.

What is remarkable here is how the young Hugo, who grew up speaking three languages in which he never felt fully at home, found his way through to a wholeness of identity in writing. As he said elsewhere, “In many ways it was inevitable that writing would become the only way for me to explain this deep childhood confusion. The prohibition against English made me see that language as a challenge. Even as a child, I spoke to the walls in English and secretly rehearsed dialogue I heard outside.”

There was also this: All the Hamilton/O hUrmoltaigh children suffered from nightmares, which their mother, who obsessively kept diaries and scrapbooks, dealt with thus: “Whenever we had nightmares in our family, she would get up in the middle of the night to take out a piece of paper and colored pencils. Here, draw the nightmare, she would say. Once you put it down on paper, you will never have to dream about it again.”

There’s a writer’s life and a writer’s origins in Hugo Hamilton’s compelling memoir.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com