Book description
In the summer of 1939, as a two-year-old in London, I was given
away by my parents to a Chelsea friend and taken on the Irish Mail to
Dublin.' Thus begins this extraordinary memoir by travel writer and
novelist Joseph Hone, one of eight children farmed out by impecunious
and inebriate parents, who was raised at Maidenhall in County Kilkenny
by the historian and essayist Hubert Butler and his wife Peggy, sister
of Tyrone Guthrie of Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan. The story is
told through a cache of letters discovered on Hubert Butler's death
between he and his friend 'Old Joe', Little Joe's grandfather and
biographer of Yeats and George Moore, upon whom fell the financial
responsibility for his grandson's upbringing. This account of Joseph
Hone's childhood and youth during the 1940s and 50s in rural Ireland,
among the privileged and artistic elite of his generation living
down-at-heel if comfortable lives in a newly emergent state, is an
enthralling reminder of the happenstance and precariousness of all our
lives. Like William Trevor, Joe was boarded out at Sandford Park in
Dublin and then at St Columba's, both of which he documents in loving
and comic detail, gaining as much stimulation from his home
environment as from the excesses and disappointments of these
single-sex establishments. He writes with feeling and insight of the
lives of those in his circle and beyond - his teachers and foster
parents and friends - working as an assistant for John Ford during the
making of The Quiet Man, and finding himself as the writer he was to
become. This numinous work of autobiography and self-interrogation
bears comparison with Nabokov's Speak Memory or Frank O'Connor's An
Only Child. It will take its place as a classic of the genre while
illuminating unknown corners of Ireland's cultural landscape. "A
brilliant, often hilariously funny, and above all, beautifully written
story." Irish Arts Review. "An invaluable account of an
unusual upbringing and a wonderful portrait of two Irish men of
letters..." 5 stars - The Dubliner
Joe Hone is the author of eight novels, including The Private Sector,
Summer Hill and Firebird, and four books of travel writing, from The
Dancing Waiters to Duck Soup in the Black Sea, both of which gather
material commissioned during his time as overseas correspondent for the
BBC. He now lives and teaches in Oxfordshire in England.
