In a desperate attempt to read at least one book by an Irish writer before the end of the month, I remembered that I had Claire Keegan’s novella – well, effectively a short story, So Late in the Day, on my Kindle. Last year, I read Small Things Like These and loved it. I admired Keegan’s ability to tell a story in a deceptively simple manner and pack it full of meaning, without a single seam showing, in a masterclass of pacing. When I picked up So Late in the Day, I was expecting a similar length (don’t ask me why), a similar structure and a similar effect and was surprised on a number of counts. There’s so much here that is trademark Keegan and beautifully done, and yet there is a bluntness at work, too, and arguably less complexity than in Small Things. Anyway, let’s begin at the beginning.
The story concerns Cathal who we meet on what appears at first to be a normal afternoon at work. But it’s immediately apparent that something cataclysmic has happened. He can’t concentrate on his work, he needs time out in the men’s washroom, his boss awkwardly offers him time off, and he spends the afternoon mechanically sending out rejection letters. When it’s time to go home, he gets the bus (with an aside that he wondered whether it wouldn’t come) and resents a woman trying to make small talk with him. And fatally, another woman gets on whose perfume provokes a narrative shift to the past.
About two years ago, Cathal met Sabine at a conference. She’s half-French, neatly dressed and living in Dublin. Cathal invites her to Arklow where he lives and although ‘Things were lukewarm on her side at the beginning’, Cathal keeps up a steady pressure until a relationship develops. Sabine seems charming – amenable, generous, and a good cook. But there are financial issues which niggle Cathal. ‘He’d seen her pay four euros for an ordinary-looking head of cabbage’, and once when she forgets her purse, Cathal is obliged to pay ‘more than six euros’ for some cherries. Still, there’s an unspoken plan unfurling here because despite the expenditure, he asks her to marry him. Or more precisely he says ‘Why don’t we marry?’ Sabine is not impressed by the unromantic phrasing and ‘it took more than three weeks and some persuasion on his part before she finally relented.’ Then Cathal makes a more serious error. They find a ring Sabine likes but it requires adjustment – a cost that Cathal hadn’t banked on, and which when the ring is ready, he wants to refuse to pay.
“Do you think I’m made of money?” he’d said – and immediately felt the long shadow of his father’s language crossing over his life, on what should have been a good day, if not one of his happiest.’
The hint towards a dysfunctional childhood sparks the potential for sympathy with Cathal, but in the one memory Keegan gives him from his past, that sympathy is entirely obliterated. Cathal remembers returning home with his brother from university and the two of them sitting at table with his father. His mother is there making them all pancakes. She serves the three men first, and then when she comes to sit down herself, the brother kicks her chair out from under her. As she sprawls in broken crockery and spoiled food, they all laugh at her.
So now we know what we’re dealing with. Keegan carefully manipulates the reader, who might have been inclined to feel sorry for Cathal, towards more intense outrage because his external circumstances have proved to be misleading. Sabine, it turns out, has been making similar emotional calculations, prompted in part by a conversation with one of Cathal’s work colleagues, Cynthia.
“She said things may now be changing, but that a good half of men your age just want us to shut up and give you what you want, that you’re spoiled and turn contemptible when things don’t go your way.” […] It occurred to him that he would not have minded her shutting up right then, and giving him what he wanted.’
And so Keegan’s slow reveal brings us – relatively quickly, in fact – to this place of character shaming for Cathal, who not only fails to prevent the slow car crash of his relationship, but clearly doesn’t even understand what has happened to him. There are enough hints along the way to inform us that he feels this to be a failure of Sabine’s love; an act of trickery on her part. Not only has he wrecked something he wanted, he’s not going to learn from the experience either.
When I finished the book, I felt… I don’t know, a little uneasy. I wanted a different perspective on the matter and so I went and found Mr Litlove, a man who has been known at times to be careful with his cash and perplexed by failures of relationship. It took me a moment to persuade him that he didn’t want me to ‘just tell him what happened’ as the effect of a Keegan story is at least fifty percent in the way it’s told. But he relented, and by the time I’d finished I could see a certain flicker of protectiveness in his eyes. What if, he suggested, Cathal’s problem is not that he hates women, but that he is entirely ignorant of the mechanics of a relationship?; that his heterosexual maleness and a particular kind of traditional upbringing have stranded him in a place where he isn’t even in a relationship to himself? I’ve heard Mr Litlove describe the inner landscape of masculinity in similar terms before. It sounds to me like a kind of obscure wilderness, in which a man might be attacked by emotions suddenly charging at him from behind bushes, unless he exerts a constant vigilance. There is no map, only this dangerous and uncertain territory that he knows he must traverse, because somewhere on the other side he’s heard there’s a legendary place of love and comfort. A relationship, therefore, can be seen as a kind of holy grail myth.
‘If you don’t know what you want,’ Mr Litlove said to me, ‘how on earth do you negotiate for it with the other person?’
I took these thoughts back to the text and realised that Keegan had made Sabine exceptionally clear about what she wanted. She’s had to be persuaded against her better judgment into the relationship with Cathal, and Cynthia’s words give her a crystal clear judgment to pass against him. This was for me the first part of the story where I felt unease. Relationships are places where we rarely know very clearly what we want because the public self we present to the world – competent, sensible, wise, pragmatic – is not at all the self that we send into the relationship. That role gets handed to our inner, vulnerable, damaged twin. But Keegan needs this clarity in Sabine in order to thoroughly condemn Cathal, to show him up in his worst light, to make this charge of misogyny stick.
And then what should turn up in my inbox but an article from the School of Life about the way in which we are so often not in touch with ourselves.
It’s possible to spend a good deal of our lives with our attention trained firmly outwards. We might be chairing back to back meetings, drawing up budgets or traveling from one location to another – and all the while have little active sense that we are – in fact, in the background – exhausted, enraged, jealous, heartbroken or nostalgic. The people and situations that made us so could have disappeared long before we develop any active sense of what they provoked in us. We might be the stated owners of our whole beings; yet we consciously inhabit only a very small part of ourselves.’
The cause of this is, of course, our childhood experiences:
We tend to realize how we’re feeling only to the extent that other people once took an interest in how we were feeling, especially in emotions that may not have appeared entirely ‘normal’ or ‘good’. Perhaps, as children, we expressed occasional wishes that granny would die, that the school would burn down or that we could get rid of our younger sibling. It’s the mark of a sound parent to be able to bear to listen to such complexities without censorship – which in turn allows the child to be less frightened of, and readier to explore, the less well-lit corners of their own minds. The central legacy of having been heard by others is a greater capacity to hear oneself.’
That incident with Cathal’s mother and the pancakes shows a negative variation on this dynamic, in which bad and ugly emotions have been validated at the expense of humane ones. The mother, entirely silent, never gets to express her reproaches, her hurt, her silence. There are no relationship consequences to endure from this awful behaviour, because there is no real relationship. We see how this translates into Cathal being solipsistically entrapped in his own mind. He hears himself, but is incapable of hearing other people.
Seven years ago, I wrote a post in which I questioned the black-and-white thinking, as I saw it, of the widespread condemnation of men that arose out of the #metoo movement. It wasn’t because I felt that men needed to be excused or ‘forgiven’ in any way, but because I felt the situation was complex. A few hours after posting, I incurred the rage of a woman blogger, who attacked me so violently and repeatedly in the comment section that I closed this blog down. It was, in effect, the end of that first era of my blogging life. But I felt it showed one thing very clearly: rage doesn’t work as a tool for change. Rage just makes people shut down.
Claire Keegan is her usual careful, thoughtful self in this novella. She’s clear that it isn’t all men; she’s clear that it’s mostly men from a particular era (though Sir Gareth Southgate in The Richard Dimbleby Lecture seems to be saying that the situation today is as bad if not worse for young boys as it’s ever been). But it’s very easy in this story simply to condemn Cathal and write him off. And I think that if we do want things to change for the better, we’re going to have to approach the situation with more psychological complexity. Finally I pinpointed my unease with So Late in the Day. That flashback scene with Cathal’s mother is one of unquestionable abuse. But Cathal’s crimes – his tightness with money, his lack of romantic feeling, his emotional constipation, his desperate lack of insight – indicate a hopeless and pitiable man, but not necessarily an abusive one. Does Keegan want us to see that? Or does that powerful scene from the past insist instead on his absolute culpability?
