'Small Things Like These': contingencies and decisions

in

Latest in a series of essays about Claire Keegan’s novel Small Things Like These. Previously:

One of the greatest heroes in all literature has no name. He speaks just 76 words, and takes centre stage for all of a minute. Then he dies violently.

This man is a servant of the Duke of Cornwall in Shakespeare’s King Lear. He has served him 

Ever since I was a child,

But better service have I never done you

Than you to bid you hold.

What has prompted this rebellion against the most powerful man in the kingdom is Cornwall’s brutal assault on the old Duke of Gloucester: he has just gouged out Gloucester’s eye for helping the King. Our servant-hero cannot take this: his service and duty has to be to morality, and he challenges Cornwall with his sword. They fight, and Cornwall is wounded, but the servant is fatally stabbed from behind by Regan, Cornwall’s wife, and dies immediately. Two scenes later, we learn that Cornwall’s wound has killed him. A messenger states that this was done by

A servant that he bred, thrilled with remorse 

(in other words, fired up by horror for Gloucester).

Works of literature often deal with moral choices, moments in which individuals face choices of all kinds, not all as extreme as that servant’s, and not all with such an extreme cost. But the choice Bill Furlong has to make in Small Things Like These, presented to him by circumstance, also comes with a potential cost.

In my school this week, I gave a talk based on Brian Klaas’s book Fluke: chance, chaos, and why everything we do matters. He examines how small events or ‘contingencies’ can have profound impacts on people’s lives, often without their or others’ knowledge. If that particular servant had not been on duty that particular day in Cornwall’s household? Richard Flanagan’s extraordinary memoir, Question 7, which I have just finished, traces how a concatenation of moments shaped his own life:

From Question 7 by Richard Flanagan

Bill Furlong’s life is also shaped by contingency: the relationship between his parents, the fact his mother became pregnant at just that time, the decision by Mrs Wilson to take his mother in, and Mrs Wilson’s background and privilege (her ability to go against the mores of the monoculture). And then in this narrative, contingency continues: the whole story depends firstly on the moment in Section 4 when he goes to the convent to supply it with a load well before it was due, and, because he was not expected, proceeds unsupervised by a nun to the chapel, where he finds the young women and girls on their knees polishing the floor, and a girl with ‘roughly-cut hair’ comes up to him:

Mister, won’t you help us?

She keeps at him, and when he objects with

Haven’t I five girls and a wife at home?

retorts with shocking directness:

Well, I’ve nobody - and all I want to do is drown meself. Can you not even do that fukken much for us?

Then she hurriedly goes back to her polishing as a nun comes in. What if the nun had come five minutes earlier? The encounter disturbs Furlong, and that evening he has a sharp exchange in bed with his wife Eileen in which she uncharacteristically delivers a cheap blow referring to the trouble Bill’s own mother got into. She apologises. But Bill has made the connection, and from now on he can not un-think it:

Isn’t it a good job Mrs Wilson didn’t share your ideas? Where would my mother have gone? Where would I be now?

Throughout life we have such moments. Brian Klaas calls his Substack ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ after the 1941 Borges story of the same name:

The title refers to the nearly infinite possibilities of our astoundingly complex world, the notion that every decision in an interconnected existence is like us walking through a garden of constantly forking paths, creating new possibilities, but also closing off others.

(this is pure Richard Flanagan in Question 7).

In other literary terms we can think of Robert Frost’s famous poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ with its sly ending (based on the decision of his friend Edward Thomas to go to war0 which is too often taken at face value:

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

There are always roads not taken, some of which we did not even know were there. In my teaching notes on Small Things Like These, I suggest using Frost’s poem in class. A good point for that would be near the end of Section 4, when after leaving the convent Furlong comes across an old man slashing dead thistles with a bill-hook, like some version of the Grim Reaper.

‘Would you mind telling me where this road will take me?’

‘This road?’ The man put down the hook, leant on the handle, and stared in at him. ‘This road will take you wherever you want to go, son.’

This is a book of roads, of a journey, of forking paths, and of course right at the end Furlong takes the journey he has decided on, with the bare-footed girl, through the streets of New Ross. What will be the next fork of his life? Wisely Claire Keegan does not go there.

So at what point does he take his decision? Again I refer to George Saunders’s idea of ‘escalation’ in a story, moments which push the characters and the readers to a new state, from which there can be no going back. Clearly the first visit to the convent is one such escalation, because that night with his wife Furlong has moved to a (slightly) different state. Without that encounter perhaps the most important moment would not have had the effect it does, but he has been primed by the accusations of the girl with the roughly-cut hair. In Section 5, in the aftermath of that meeting and the ripples from his wife’s sharpness, there is a brief scene in which he goes to a neighbour’s house and has a vaguely erotic moment with the woman looking after the children (this is not in the film). He is prompted to imagine an alternative existence:

He stood for a moment taking in the peace of that plain room, letting a part of his mind turn loose to stray off and imagine what it might be like to live there, in that house, with her as his wife. Of late, he was inclined to imagine another life, elsewhere, and wondered if this was not something in his blood; might his own father not have been one of those who had upper, suddenly, and taken the boat for England? It seemed both proper and at the same time deeply unfair that so much of life was left to chance.

Part of what he carries with him into the next, decisive moment is that sense of the unfairness of chance in life, and his decision not to leave the girl Sarah’s life to chance, nor that of her baby son.

The moment which really matters is on pages 58+ of the current Faber UK edition. It starts with him going to open the coal house door, its bolt stiff with frost,

And he had to ask himself if he had not turned into a man consigned to doorways, for did he not spend the best part of his life standing outside of one or another, waiting for them to be opened.

Then he does open this door, and the horror of what he finds changes his life completely. His first instinct, understandably, is to retreat:

The ordinary part of him wished he’d never come near the place.

But that recurrent phrase is a giveaway: if there is an ordinary part, there must also be an extra-ordinary part, and it is indeed there, ready to be activated. Crucially, he has learned that the girl has a 14-week old son (as he once was, albeit not in such awful circumstances).

Has he now made the decision he acts on later? No, but another question is: can he ignore this, and if not, what does he do? Then we have the tremendous scene between him and the Mother Superior, superb in both the book and the film. Initially the nun seems successful in her smooth power-play, but she overplays her hand, and there is one particularly significant moment, as he watches the girl being taken away, and Furlong

Soon understood that this woman wanted him gone - but the urge to go was being replaced now by a type of contrariness to stay on, and to hold his ground … He sat on encouraged by this queer new power.

Inside him, something has shifted. Leaving the girl behind now will be a failure for him, a failure of what he stands for, and what those who minded him - Mrs Wilson, his mother and his father - when he was a child. Then he learns that the girl and his mother share the same first name.

Has he now made the decision? Claire Keegan is too good a writer to state this explicitly, but the final paragraph of the section reads

Deciding to say no more, Furlong went on out and pulled the door closed, then stood on the front step until he heard someone inside, turning the key.

He decides to say no more. What is going through his head as he pauses on the front step? He waits until he hears the sound of confirmation that the girls are being locked in.

In Section 6 Furlong goes back to Mrs Wilson’s house and the woman there notices his similarity to Ned. Again, Claire Keegan makes no immediate authorial comment. But he sits in the lorry just as he paused on the front step, and for half an hour lets what the woman said stoke his mind.

In the final section, there is a particularly moving passage after he looks in the barber’s mirror and searches for a resemblance with Ned, thinking of the 

act of daily grace, on Ned’s part, to make Furlong believe that he had come from finer stock, while watching steadfastly over him … Why were the things that were closest so often hardest to see?

Has the decision been made now? Or perhaps I can rephrase that: is there a decision to be made? Could Furlong really have not made the decision he did? I think of W.B. Yeats’s great sonnet about Maud Gonne, ‘No Second Troy’, in which he tries to come to terms with the fact that she could never wholly love him:

Why should I blame her that she filled my days

With misery, or that she would of late

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,

Or hurled the little streets upon the great,

Had they but courage equal to desire?

What could have made her peaceful with a mind

That nobleness made simple as a fire,

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind

That is not natural in an age like this,

Being high and solitary and most stern?

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

This is a poem composed entirely of rhetorical questions, and this is the line I regularly think of in terms of human behaviour:

Why, what could she have done, being what she is?

Once Furlong came by chance across the girl, could he have done anything other than he did, being what he is?