Holidaying With Dad During the Divorce
His car is a nervous breakdown,
scattering chrome along the motorway.
He gasps through panic attacks
in tunnels and medieval towers.
The falconry display goes on regardless
and eejits in velour have a crack
at each other with plywood lances.
I’m in a fugue state, headphones glued
to me as mum calls to accuse him of kidnapping.
Come for a drink, he says.
No. Retreat to the Travelodge,
dry my one pair of decent flares
rancid from days of rain,
in the mysterious trouser press.
My anger flits and shifts
like a clot of starlings.
He presses into my hands
some Günter Grass,
and Sylvia Plath –
time-capsule messages
in a language we don’t share,
and the evening heaves
with the bellows of cows
taken from their calves.
A hasty response to Jessica Traynor’s third collection, Pit Lullabies, might assume from the title her focus to be on mining. This wouldn’t be entirely wrong, but Traynor has a richly figurative sense of that activity. Addressing a daughter over a period stretching from foetal scan to birth and beyond, she is broadly concerned with the value as well as the control of darkness. “Try to be the shape that holds the dark,” she advises at the end of Pit Lullaby IX. This exhumation and valuing of the dark may be connected with the breaking of silence and the exposure of institutionalised forms of maternal and child abuse that have been the Irish writer’s preoccupations in some of her previous work. Darkness exhumed, like silence broken, becomes a bright and vital force.
In Holidaying with Dad During the Divorce, Traynor presents a realist’s perspective on the dark side of parenthood and childhood, paring away the imaginative allusiveness of her technique in the 10 Lullabies. The narrative, served by a straightforwardly explanatory title, moves fast, reflecting, perhaps, the internalised “fugue state” of the persona. Autobiography shouldn’t be assumed: there may be a novelist at work here, capturing a few key moments of crisis in a highly credible fiction. The fiction might turn out to be comic: it begins with an observation that could be the reassuring start of a series of jokes: “His car is a nervous breakdown.”
The joke is soon over. “Scattering chrome along the motorway”, the car seems not merely the symbol of a man “falling apart” and a marriage dissolved. It’s self- destruction in action, and the narrative centre turns out to be the daughter’s ability to hold herself together.
Although Traynor achieves a fiercely casual teenaged voice, she avoids any temptation to flippancy. The moments of connection between the three characters emphasise their individual separateness: the pain is different for all of them, and, in the case of the father and mother, its differing modes of expression perhaps reveal the gulf (of education, of articulacy?) that contributed to their marital breakup.
The father’s nightmare intensifies in the need to negotiate “tunnels and medieval towers” during panic attacks. So the well-intentioned educational visit becomes, for the daughter, primarily an experience of the father’s emotional disarray. She turns her anger on to the “eejits in velour”, her language registering the potential violence of the mock-battle in which they “have a crack / at each other with plywood lances”. The comments demonstrate vividly how a culture of tourist “experiences” is meaningless and bloodless – a pasteboard recreation of what never happened.
While the father maintains a certain self-control and the daughter summons her own strategies against disintegration, drying her “one pair of decent flares” in the trouser press of a Travelodge, the mother, in an earlier phonecall to her father, is shown to have reached a point of wild desperation. The accusation of kidnapping seems excessive, although not impossible, at first. But the ensuing narrative refutes that possibility, and there seems to be a certain dim redemption for the father-daughter relationship in those “time-capsule messages / in a language we don’t share”. The work of the two writers he presses on her, Günter Grass and Sylvia Plath, she now realises will be of value to her, and, even without the shared cultural language, the father has at least known enough to know this.
The last three lines, though, return the emphasis to the mother’s emotional rawness. It seems she might have lost custody of the child. In any event, possibilities of contact through the fine mesh of language are erased as “the evening heaves / with the bellows of cows / taken from their calves”. The poem strikes a helpless, feral note, and ends where it has to, where there’s simply no word left for the narrator to add.
