Who Dunne it?

William Scammell

HARP by John Gregory Dunne Granta, £13.99, pp.235 `H arp' is a word of abuse for Irish American Catholics, donated to the lan- guage by the same anonymous benefactors who gave us kike, wop, nigger, fag. Dunne tells us that he spent his first 25 years running away from the label and turning himself into a Princeton-educated snob. Earlier, seven years at St Joseph's, a parochial school in Frog Hollow, Hartford, Connecticut, got him off to a bad start. 'The line on Sister Robert was that she would hit you until you bled and then she would hit you for bleeding.' Dunne identi- fies with the Frog Hollow ethos, however, not the Yankee one over on the moneyed side of the tracks where his own family lives in a big house with a six-car garage. People like his father, a successful surgeon, may turn their backs on the past. But Dunne inherits

the true harp voice . . . the voice of a man with a chip on his shoulder the size of a California redwood . . . Let me emphasise that a writer's voice does not have to he nice, and if the voice belongs to someone of Irish extraction, it rarely is. I think this comes from an inbred hatred of the Brits, and by extension a distaste for all Protestants. The parochial schoolyard is a breeding ground of class hatred; it was there that I became suspicious of all authority, of anyone who would speak for me. The Irish voice . . . gets a kick out of frailty and misfortune; its comedy is the comedy of the small mind and the mean spirit.

The notion of American classlessness takes a terrible beating in this book. After Princeton, where he acquires 'the politics of an alderman, and social graces polished to a high gloss at the Hartford Gold Club', Dunne volunteers for the army and be- comes a PFC in a gun battery in Germany.

Two years as an enlisted man taught me that nothing had really changed since Waterloo . . . an army is predicated on class hatred; patriotism is only a convenient piety . . . I was a fuck-up in a social order in which the fuck-up was king.

Alongside this sociological perspective, and thematically bolted to it, there runs another about what it is to be a writer, namely 'an eternal outsider . . . nose press- ed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material'. In choosing to be one of the grunts, therefore, rather than an officer; identifying with the immigrant have-nots rather than with the parental success-story; and electing to be a writer rather than a lawyer or a doctor, Dunne votes for outsiderism thrice over. It's an old story, and a not altogether convincing one. Was Tolstoy an outsider? Henry James? Stendhal? Bellow? The cliché is susceptible of various interpreta- tions. Like Raban and Hare in this coun- try, Dunne strikes me as one of those writers who are in rebellion against their own prosperous, middle-class background, and who tend to project personal dissatis- factions on to society at large. This is not to deny all truth or vivacity to their reportage, simply to suggest that some brands of adversarialism can profitably be laid down on the analyst's couch and interrogated. In- this account 'outsiderism' sounds suspi- ciously like yet another style, one that can be picked up and worn like wife Joan Didion's Chanel suit, mink coat, and Bouvier dog or like the rather glitzy perambulations of Dunne himself jetting round the world, renting BMWs, staying at expensive hotels, dining with famous names, in order to file his next piece. (Paul Theroux's recent, much-praised novel My Secret History contains large chunks of equally unconvincing stuff about the writer's trade. Nabokov, I sometimes.

think, has a lot to answer for.)

When he's not coming on about aesthe- tics, however, Dunne writes very well indeed, notably on the series of sudden deaths that punctuated his life in prosper- ous middle-age. 'There is no good that can come from a telephone call at 4.30 in the morning' says the book's riveting opening sentence, and goes on to recount the suicide of his brother Stephen, the death by cancer of sister Harriet, the brutal murder of a niece by a jealous lover at the age of 22, and sundry other exits, culminat- ing in the news from a routine insurance- company medical that he himself has a `glitch', to wit a 'hemodynamically signifi- cant lesion' in the left anterior descending artery, and hence is a candidate for heart attacks, possible 'massive'. The story that follows, already familiar to readers of Granta, is as memorable as it is gripping, and fortunately has a happy ending, de- spite some heart-lurching moments along the way.

Several other topics feed into this auto- biography's confrontation between Thana- tos and the muse. One is the strangeness of America. His niece's murderer got just two and a half years in jail for 'voluntary manslaughter'. Meanwhile he notes a newspaper headline 'VIRGINIA AIR- CONDITIONS DEATH CHAMBER'. His own operation will cost him $40,000. 'Jumpers' are wrecking Volvos in their suicidal falls from New York skyscrapers, but are barely noticed in the press. "You got to catch a jumper in the air to make the paper," a photographer said.' Politicians are detestable, the `main-chancers' who work for them worse still, and the talking heads on TV, interpreting their doings, worst of all:

Plump of body, plump of mind, the cholesterol of smarm and self-importance clogging every mental artery, bloated blad- ders of hot air farting the most noxious kind of knowingness out through the cathode-ray tube.

Another topic is Roots. Dunne goes back to Germany to revisit his old army post, and finally back to Ireland itself, self-consciously in search of 'Poppa', the grandfather who

had set out in 1869, at the age of 12, to make his way in the New World. And make it he had, although perhaps with results, two generations later, that he might not have imagined, and would certainly not have appreciated.

The quest ends inconclusively, though with much fun and sharp perception along the way.

In a country of so many soothing hues of green, I wondered why Aer Lingus painted its jets with one the colour of bile.

Occasionally the style is flashy, as New Journalism tends to be (`Ah, sex, the last time this, the last time that, the last fucking hard-on'), and the bo- hemianism soft-centred (Dunne's rebel- liusness has bought him a piece of Bel-Air

and a Hollywood swimming pool), but in general Harp is honest and compelling. It would make an excellent large addendum to The Oxford Book of Death.