The God Squad, Paddy Doyle (1988)
Paddy Doyle had a Catholic upbringing. A bad one. A very bad one, because he was raised from early childhood by sadistic nuns. His relatives didn’t want him after his mother died of breast-cancer and his grief-stricken father committed suicide, so he was sent to an Irish “industrial school” run by the church. At the age of four he had found his father’s corpse hanging from a tree in the garden, which gave him nightmares for many years. But he didn’t get any sympathy or love from the nuns. Instead he got this:
Mother Paul slammed her cane onto the table in front of her.
“Strip, child,” she shouted.
I began to take off my clothes. First my heavy grey jumper, then the grey shirt.
“Come on, come on, I haven’t all day. Get those trousers, boots and socks off immediately.”
I stood there shivering, a combination of cold and fear. My ribs protruded through my skin as though I was undernourished. My skin was white except for red patches where I had been hit or jabbed by the cane.
“Get on that table,” she demanded.
I lay on it naked, allowing my arms to hang over its side until I was told to bring them onto the table and down either side of my body. She gazed at me, a perverse grin on her face.
“Roll over onto your face and let this be a lesson to you.”
Her long cane whistled through the air and in the moment before it made contact every muscle in my body tensed and I became rigid. I squirmed and the first vicious blow stung, but I did not cry out.
“Never, never must you assault a holy nun in that manner.”
A second, third and fourth painful lash of the bamboo, and I could feel my skin burning. For some reason I cannot understand I refused to cry out. The number of times I was struck increased until it was impossible to count, just as it was difficult to separate one blow from another. I remained silent, until the pain became unbearable and I finally screamed. I was being struck everywhere from the back of my neck down to my heels. – Chapter One
That’s a memory from about 1958, when Doyle was seven. He’d been hungry and called out to one of the trains that were loaded with sugar-beet at a station just outside the walls of St Michael’s Industrial School in Cappoquin. A kindly driver or fireman had thrown him a sugar-beet and he and his friends had broken it into pieces and started eating it raw. Then the sadistic nun Mother Paul had intervened, accusing him of stealing the beet, hitting him with a cane and terrifying him with the school dog, a Jack Russell called Toby. Doyle cracked and fought back, kicking the nun in the shin with his boot. And so he was ordered to strip and was beaten viciously with the cane, as described in the extract above.
That was the pattern of Doyle’s childhood: beatings, beratings, psychological bullying and sadism, threats of burning “for ever and ever” in the fires of Hell, constant hunger, cold, fear and deprivation of sleep, plus an episode of sexual abuse by Mother Paul, who knocked him down a flight of stairs shortly afterwards. When things changed, they only got worse. He developed a bad limp, had to leave the friends he’d made at the industrial school and go into hospital, where he underwent painful operations and brain surgery. And all the time he was haunted by memories of his father’s suicide, which the nuns had tried to repress with beatings and denials.
In short, The God Squad is Misery Lit with a capital M and capital L. The trouble is that it isn’t very good misery lit. I’d like to report that Doyle had turned the suffering of his childhood into powerful prose and moving stories. But I can’t, because he didn’t. He isn’t a very good or evocative writer and his suffering didn’t inspire a classic of autobiography and of insight into cruelty, childhood and the human condition. You can learn about all three things here, but the prose doesn’t make it a very easy or aesthetically enjoyable experience. You’ve seen an example of his literary shortcomings above: “My ribs protruded through my skin as though I was undernourished.” But he’d already established that he was undernourished. He’d been eating raw sugar-beet, for Heaven’s sake, which was why he was about to be beaten so viciously. The sentence should have gone simply: “My ribs protruded through my skin.”
The book has lots more writing that could have been better expressed and stronger to read. Yes, it was a bestseller in both Ireland and Britain, winning Doyle praise and prizes, but I think that voyeurism for victimhood and hostility to the Catholic church must have been a big part of that. So Paddy Doyle’s biggest contribution to literature may have been indirect, because his misery memoir was possibly the biggest inspiration for a true literary classic: Sunny McCreary’s My Godawful Life (2008). It’s a classic of comedy, satirizing the genre of misery lit with a verve and invention that left me incredulous at times. I kept asking: “How does he keep making things more ridiculous and still keep it all funny?” In fact, not just keep it funny: make it funnier. Sunny starts life living in a bird-coop in Ireland, being hit with ever larger and spikier objects by his brutal drunk of a father, and assisting his paralyzed prostitute mother service her clients. At school he’s tortured, beaten and bullied by nuns called Sister Himmler and Sister Torquemada. Then things get worse. And worse again. And worse still. When he becomes addicted to helium he thinks he’s hit rock-bottom, metaphorically speaking (literally speaking, he’s bobbing about under the ceiling, full of helium). He’s wrong. Things get worse yet again.
So I think My Godawful Life is the funniest book I’ve ever read. It’s one of the most inventive too. I don’t like using the word “genius” about people in the arts, because it’s an over-used word. But sometimes I feel compelled to use it. The comic genius behind My Godawful Life, a Brit of Irish origin called Michael Kelly, showed more of his invention and literary skill when he wrote a book about wrapping Roy Orbison in clingfilm. Like helium addiction, that’s an example of how he can come up with comic combinations that seem crazy but work perfectly. Yes, you feel: that’s just what the Universe has been working towards for billions of years. Roy Orbison being wrapped in clingfilm. You can read some of the stories that preceded the book – and much more besides – at his website: “Michael Kelly’s Page of Misery”. The stories are both weird and wonderful. Like Clark Ashton Smith, Kelly should be famed and celebrated around the world as a master of the English language. But perhaps, like Clark Ashton Smith again, he’s too good for that.
Papyrocentric Performativity 