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A Second Life for A Second Life: The 1994 and 2010 Editions of Dermot Bolger’s Novel

Helen Penet
p. 57-69

Résumés

Cet article propose de comparer les deux versions du roman de Dermot Bolger A Second Life, et de montrer comment ce roman reflète les changements qui ont eu lieu en Irlande entre l’édition de 1994 et celle de 2010. Dermot Bolger était alors loin de se douter que, plus de dix ans après la publication du roman remanié, le rapport final de la Commission d’enquête sur les Mother and Baby Homes n’aurait toujours pas répondu à certaines des questions soulevées dans les éditions de 1994 et de 2010 du roman. Parmi les changements introduits lorsque Dermot Bolger a donné une seconde vie au roman, certains sont des phrases entièrement nouvelles ou des passages plus longs ; d’autres sont des retouches de l’original leur donnant une tournure légèrement différente ; d’autres encore sont des suppressions de mots ou de phrases entières. Certains reflètent simplement une plus grande sensibilité dans le choix des mots, comme le remplacement systématique de « vraie mère » par « mère biologique ». Les changements que cet article analyse se répartissent en trois catégories : une plus grande insistance sur la situation des mères célibataires et la honte qu’elles ont dû ressentir ; des passages qui visent à mettre en évidence comment le pays a laissé perdurer cette situation pendant si longtemps, et comment cette situation a (et n’a pas) changé dans l’Irlande de 2010. Enfin, un certain nombre de changements à la fois subtils et plus significatifs reflètent une meilleure compréhension en 2010 de la souffrance des mères et des enfants adoptés de ne pas connaître la vérité. Ce besoin désespéré de savoir et d’avoir des preuves ou des témoignages qui étayent cette connaissance prend un éclat particulier pour le narrateur-protagoniste dont la profession de photographe est étroitement liée à l’idée que la photographie peut fournir une preuve irréfutable.

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1In his author’s note to the 2010 edition of A Second Life, Dermot Bolger describes having seen a performance of a one-act play by Jennifer Johnston:

  • 1 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life: A Renewed Novel, Dublin, New Island, 2010, p. ix-x.

The superb actress Rosaleen Linehan entered, sat down, and commenced her monologue. But after ninety seconds she stopped and did something incredibly brave. She looked at the audience and said, “Excuse me; I got off on the wrong note. I think I will start again.” She quietly walked off stage, turned around, came back on and mesmerised us for the next hour.1

  • 2 Ibid., p. ix.

He also describes how, when he wrote A Second Life in 1993, his personal life was “chaotic and pressurised” and the themes explored in the novel, in particular the adoptions forced on single mothers in institutions in Ireland, were nothing more than “the undercurrents rippling through Irish society”.2

2Despite the novel’s national and international success, Bolger had always opposed its reprinting saying:

  • 3 Ibid.

I kept thinking of the courage of Rosaleen Linehan on stage that day saying, “I got off on the wrong note.” I know that – amid all the pressures of my busy family life, my myriad writing and other commitments at that time and the fact that I was trying to capture a moving object by tapping into the psychic mood of the period as birth mothers and adopted children started to make their voices heard – I also had got off on the wrong note.3

  • 4 Ibid.

3This article proposes to compare the two versions of the novel, and to show how A Second Life: A Renewed Novel (2010) reflects the changes which have taken place in Ireland between 1993 and 2010, as “the wall of silence caused by this mindset was being eroded by individual voices in 1993 […] but the physical walls behind which the adoption files were kept remained as high and impenetrable as ever”.4 Little was Bolger to know that over a decade after the reworked novel’s publication, the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes would still have failed to answer some of the questions raised in both his 1994 and 2010 editions of the novel.

4Of the changes introduced when Bolger gave a second life to the novel, some are entirely new sentences or longer passages; others are tweaks of the original giving them a slightly different twist; others are suppressions of words or whole sentences. Some simply reflect a greater sensitivity in the choice of words, such as the systematic replacement of “real mother” with “birth mother”. The changes this article aims to understand fall into three categories: a greater insistence on the situation of unmarried mothers and the shame they were made to feel; passages which aim to home in on how the country allowed the situation to endure for such a long time, and how that situation has (and has not) changed in the Ireland of 2010. Finally, a number of both subtle and more significant changes reflect an increased understanding in 2010 of the suffering for both mothers and adopted children around not knowing the truth. This desperate need to know and to have proof or evidence which will back up this knowledge takes on a particular sheen for the narrator-protagonist whose profession as photographer is tied up with the evidential role understood to be played by photography.

5A Second Life is the first-person narrative of Sean Blake, a professional photographer, married and with two children, who decides to seek out his birth mother after recovering from a coma brought on by a car crash. His birth mother, Lizzy Sweeney, has made a new life for herself in Coventry, is married and has three daughters, but has never come to terms with having given up her son, Paudi (in the 1994 edition), Francis (in the 2010 reworked novel). Sean’s research takes him to St. Martha’s Convent in Sligo where he was born, and where his mother was forced to give him up for adoption. While his search brings him face to face with a number of painful realities, including finding Lizzy too late, the novel ends with a greater serenity for Sean, and the scattering of Lizzy’s ashes back in her hometown, overseen by her son and both his birth mother’s and adoptive mother’s sisters.

  • 5 Ibid., p. xi.

6The story told in the updated 2010 novel is not markedly different from that initially told in the 1994 edition, but, as Bolger puts it in the foreword to the new edition, “[the] Ireland of 1993 was changed utterly from the Ireland of a decade before and is almost unrecognisable from the Ireland of today”.5

Shame and secrecy

7A number of the changes introduced in the 2010 rewriting of the novel make it clear that women who were forced to give birth in institutional settings were made to feel ashamed of finding themselves in this position. The updated novel also spells out that this shame radiated outwards from the unmarried mother to pervade many aspects of Irish life. The enforced secrecy surrounding the pregnancy and the birth is also accentuated to the point that the mothers end up doubting their own worth and even their own existence.

  • 6 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, Dublin, New Island, 1994, p. 127.
  • 7 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 96.
  • 8 Ibid., p. 172.
  • 9 Ibid., p. 230.
  • 10 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 25.
  • 11 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 20.

8When Sean speaks to some other women who may be able to give him some information about his own mother, in the 1994 novel, one of them says: “[…] we were scared, we were made to feel guilty”.6 In the 2010 rewriting this sentence becomes: “We were shamed and made to feel ashamed”.7 The repetition of “shame”, both as the past participle form of the verb “shame” and as the adjective “ashamed”, insists on this aspect. The formulation “we were shamed” also reveals shaming as a deliberate act, not the collateral damage suggested by the use of “scared” in the original version. This aspect is reinforced by a number of additions to the later novel, such as Lizzy’s sister’s comments to Sean that “the nuns ingrained that into her: a sense of shame and secrecy”8 and that whatever “happened in that convent had crushed her sister’s spirit”.9 Even Sharon, Lizzy’s daughter, Sean’s half-sister, who only learnt of Sean’s existence after their mother’s death, develops an inkling of what took place in the convent, as revealed in this 2010 addition. In 1994, “Sharon knew her mother’s life had been a constant inspection”.10 In 2010, “For Sharon it seemed like her mother’s life had been a constant inspection, but an inspection largely carried on inside her own head, as if something in her past gave her a fear of authority”.11

9If the 2010 rewriting of the novel builds an awareness of the shame young girls like Lizzy were forced to feel, it also situates this shame in a wider context, where not only were unmarried mothers made to feel ashamed, but so were their children. Even the women who were unable to conceive their own children, and therefore had recourse to adoption, were made to feel ashamed of not being capable of fulfilling society’s expectations as to their procreative capacity. This idea is added in a wholly new passage of the renewed novel:

  • 12 Ibid., p. 199.

The shame that my adoptive mother had been made to feel because she could not conceive; the shame bred into me at having been passed from person to person after leaving this convent with the true details of my past sealed away inside a locked filing cabinet.12

  • 13 “The Sunday after they were married he had shown her the same photograph printed twice in the Sunda (...)
  • 14 Ibid., p. 22.

10The logical consequence of these mothers being forced to feel ashamed was the secrecy surrounding their pregnancies and their children’s births. The reworked novel sheds a new light on what it meant for these women whose stories were being forcibly silenced, as it suggests that women like Sean’s birth mother felt that their very existence was being denied. In a first reference to photography in the 1994 edition, Lizzy speculates on the infamous photograph of Stalin and his generals, from which a general who had fallen from Stalin’s grace has been airbrushed.13 She imagines the same thing to have happened to her in group photographs lining mantelpieces in her hometown: “She thought of all the homes in Dunross, the photographs of the eleven girls who made their confirmation in the 1948 class with a space which had appeared in the centre”.14

  • 15 Ibid., p. 87.
  • 16 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 71.

11The rewriting of the novel in 2010 leaves this reference intact, and adds a number of comments insisting on how her treatment led not only to her losing her son, but also to her losing her sense of self. When Sean first starts his search for his birth mother, his adoptive mother’s sister tells him, in the 1994 edition, that “[there] was a tiny scrap of paper inside [your clothes] with a girl’s name and an address”,15 and leaves it at that. In 2010, she not only provides this information, but suggests that leaving such a trace represented an assertion of her own identity, as she adds that “It was as if the child – at nineteen that’s all she was – just needed to leave her name, some proof that she existed, that she counted for something”.16

12The modifications discussed thus far indicate how Bolger wished to reflect the greater understanding in the Ireland of 2010 of the shame inflicted on unmarried mothers and their children. A second series of additions and other changes allow the reader to perceive some of the other changes in Irish society over the almost two decades which separate the two versions of the novel.

Ireland then and now

13As Bolger remarked in the foreword to the 2010 edition, even though he had not set out to write a novel about adoption, he was not unaware of it as an emerging preoccupation for many in Ireland at the time of writing the original novel:

  • 17 Ibid., p. vii.

A Second Life did not set out to be about the ongoing searches that were becoming more visible in Ireland in the early 1990s as adopted children desperately tried to unearth the truth about their birth mothers and to understand the plight of those young mothers who felt they had no option left but to sign away their children born out of wedlock. They were mothers who later found every door closed in their faces if they tried to make contact with – or discover the least bit of information about – the children who were perpetual absences in their new lives; children whose existences they were often too scared or ashamed ever to speak about to anyone, even to their own husbands.17

  • 18 Ibid., p. ix.

During the early months of writing A Second Life, often, when I turned on a radio or simply overheard conversations on buses, I realised that an ever-growing number of mothers and children separated during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s were now desperate to find out about each other. Despite huge obstacles, people were attempting to find ways to take the first tentative steps towards seeking out the stranger who was their parent or child, never sure if these approaches would be welcomed or rebuffed.18

  • 19 “The wall of silence caused by this mindset was being eroded by individual voices in 1993 – a decad (...)

14When he set about updating the novel in 2010, it may have felt as if the issues the novel had addressed back in 1993 were well on the way to being resolved. He refers in the foreword, indeed, to the treatment of the issue in mainstream cinema with Peter Mullan’s 2002 film The Magdalene Sisters.19 A number of the changes introduced in the 2010 version of the novel are a clear attempt to bring it up-to-date, and reflect some of the understanding which has been hard-won by campaigners such as those mentioned in Bolger’s foreword:

  • 20 In discussing the bodies which had been exhumed at High Park in 1993 Dermot Bolger commented that “ (...)
  • 21 Ibid., p. xi-xii.

[…] three survivors from that Magdalene laundry were seated outside the entrance, visible at last in the most historical site of Irish rebellion, defiantly collecting signatures for a petition to have a monument erected to the nameless woman20 cremated and transferred to that mass grave.21

  • 22 Sylvie Mikowski, “Gothic and Noir: The Genres of the Irish Contemporary Fiction of ‘Containment’”, (...)
  • 23 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. x.
  • 24 James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment, Notre Da (...)
  • 25 For a full list of these productions and further discussion, see Marie Mianowski, “Challenging Cont (...)

15In the first version of the novel, which was published “in the wake of the revelations regarding the Mother and Baby homes and the Magdalene Asylums”,22 these revelations were, in Bolger’s own words, “a moving object”.23 By 2010, much more was known about those institutions: James M. Smith’s book Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment24 had been published in 2007, and a number of plays, novels and artworks had addressed the issue.25 Some of the changes made in the 2010 novel reflect this greater understanding, but, as the shortcomings of the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes in 2021 have shown, many grey areas still remain. In 2010, as Bolger indicates in his foreword, there was a wider understanding of the Magdalene Laundries, but much less was acknowledged about the Mother and Baby Homes. While Lizzy’s story (both in the 1994 and 2010 editions) suggests that St. Martha’s Convent in Sligo fulfilled the role of a Mother and Baby Home, and was not a Magdalene Laundry, a number of changes introduced in the 2010 novel seem to assimilate it to these institutions.

  • 26 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 24.
  • 27 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 17.
  • 28 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 276.
  • 29 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 217.

16The 1994 edition has Lizzy return “from her duties”,26 when in 2010 she is described as returning “from working in the laundry”.27 The laundry is specifically referred to as a Magdalene Laundry in 2010, when Sean imagined being introduced “as your bastard nephew”28 in the 1994 edition, in 2010 he is introduced “as your bastard nephew who was born in a Magdalene laundry”.29

  • 30 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 129.
  • 31 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 98.
  • 32 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 128.
  • 33 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 97.

17A specific reference to the Magdalene Laundries as money-making institutions is also introduced in 2010 when “a convent in Sligo and then one in Meath”30 becomes “a convent in Sligo […] and then sent on to a bigger laundry in Cork because the nuns needed more workers there”.31 Similarly, revelations around the length of women’s stays in institutions such as these find their place in the 2010 novel. A comment in the 1994 edition which states: “Where I was, there was one woman twenty years there”32 becomes: “In the laundry where I had my baby one woman had been there for thirty-four years”.33 According to the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Mother and Baby Homes, even by increasing the length of stay to thirty-four years, the 2010 novel falls short of the lengths of some women’s stays in these institutions, as reported by Clair Wills:

  • 34 Clair Wills, “Architectures of Containment”, London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 10, 20 May 2021, (...)

One woman entered Bessborough in 1922, aged 20 years, and remained there until her death in 1984 – a period of 62 years. Another entered Bessborough in 1924, aged 21 years, and remained there until her death in 1985 – a period of 60 years.34

  • 35 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 90.
  • 36 Ibid., p. 171.
  • 37 Ibid., p. 199.
  • 38 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 257.
  • 39 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 200.

18Since 2010, and even more since the establishment of the Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation in 2015, the national awareness of the extent of the mistreatment of women in Mother and Baby Homes, as distinct from the Magdalene Laundries, has possibly made the additional references to Magdalene Laundries introduced in the 2010 version redundant. However, some of the changes introduced which refer to the difficulty for children adopted from Mother and Baby Homes to find anything out about their birth mothers, and vice versa, are prescient of the difficulties highlighted by survivor groups currently campaigning around the Final Report of the Commission of Investigation. There are at least three additions to the 2010 novel, where there had been no reference to the difficulty of obtaining one’s birth records in the 1994 edition: “the nuns have the records locked away”;35 “The religious institutions kept the details of all adoptions locked away and no political party had the guts to compel them to release any information”;36 and “the true details of my past sealed away inside a locked filing cabinet”.37 Alongside those additions, some modifications highlight this difficulty more acutely. The 1994 novel had a simple: “they’re now in a central office in Dublin”,38 which becomes in 2010: “they’re under lock and key: Fort Knox wouldn’t be in it”.39

  • 40 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 243.

19One final change in this category concerns the reluctance of the religious order to divulge the information Sean’s mother seeks, and the disrespect with which Lizzy’s request is met. The convent where she gave birth is described in the original text thus: “Sligo. Out the country somewhere. St. Martha’s”.40 In the renewed novel, we read:

  • 41 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 186.

Sligo. A convent called St Martha’s out in the countryside. Lizzy went back there one time when she ran away. She begged the nun in charge to tell her if you were alive or dead. The nun – a Sister Theresa – told her to mind her own business.41

  • 42 Ibid., p. 202.

The exact expression “told her to mind her own business” is repeated in another very similar addition to the 2010 novel: “My mother came back here one time. She begged Sister Theresa to tell her one fact about me, even just to say if I was alive or dead. The nun sneered and told her to mind her own business”.42

  • 43 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 154 (our italics).
  • 44 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 119 (our italics).

20A significant number of changes point to the radical shift which has taken place in Irish society over the lifetime of Lizzy and even of Sean. The 2010 novel seeks to keep pace with some of these changes, for example in the passages which refer to the number of children born outside of marriage: “Almost one in every fifth baby in the state was born to a single parent now. But where every parish had once had a girl drummed out secretly at night”43 becomes: “One in every fourth baby in the state was born to a single parent. Illegitimacy could now be talked about, people like me acknowledged. But whereas every parish once had some girl who was made to disappear at night”.44

  • 45 Central Statistics Office, Report on Vital Statistics 2010, Dublin, The Stationery Office, 2012, p. (...)
  • 46 Central Statistics Office, “Vital Statistics – Second Quarter 2021”, online: https://www.cso.ie/en/ (...)

21The numbers from the original novel are accurate, as the 1993 Central Statistics Office gives the number of births outside marriage as 20%. The 2010 Central Statistics Office report states that “[t]he number of births outside marriage that occurred in 2010 was 25,372 or 33.8% of all births”.45 So the 2010 version of the novel could have gone further than “one in every fourth baby” and said: “one in every third baby”. If we imagine a third life for A Second Life in 2021 (the latest year for which the Central Statistics Office has published the data), it would need to update the statistic still further, as in the second quarter of 2021, 40.9% of births took place outside marriage.46

22Another series of additions to the renewed novel reflect our greater understanding of the mechanisms behind the treatment of unmarried women in Ireland over the 20th century. The word “respectability”, which does not occur in the 1994 novel, occurs six times in the renewed novel, and is repeated no fewer than three times in one of the added passages:

  • 47 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 69-70 (our italics).

The Ireland she lived in was infected with a terrible virus called respectability. God got mentioned a lot, but it was not about loving your neighbours or eternal damnation: life was all about what your neighbours thought of you, about keeping secrets, avoiding scandal, giving no one the chance to look down on you.47

  • 48 Ibid., p. 199.

Maybe because respectability was the all-pervading cult in the world I grew up in. Any sin was acceptable – drunkenness, domestic violence – provided it was hidden away. Convents and asylums were necessary places where stains on respectability could disappear: places that people pretended didn’t exist, not places that you walked into and confronted things. During my childhood my adoptive mother’s great fear wasn’t poverty, it was losing respectability.48

  • 49 Ibid.
  • 50 Catherine Corless, “The Home”, Journal of the Old Tuam Society, vol. 9, 2012, p. 75-82.
  • 51 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 199.

23If our understanding of the overwhelming power of the cult of respectability had significantly progressed between the two versions of the novel, this is partly because of revelations which were only starting to come to light in 1994, the year of its first publication. As Bolger mentioned in the foreword to the 2010 reworked novel, it was in 1993 that “the order of nuns who had run the High Park Magdalene Laundry in Drumcondra applied for an exhumation license to remove the remains of one hundred and thirty-three women who had died while incarcerated in their laundry”.49 It was much later that revelations concerning the burial of children at Mother and Baby Homes came to light. Even if Catherine Corless’s research in Tuam50 was only in its infancy at the time of the updating of the novel in 2010, it is, as Bolger states, the role of the novelist to “have your antennae open to the discourse starting to seep out in your society”.51 The sensitivity of Bolger’s antennae no doubt led to the addition in the renewed 2010 novel of the following dialogue between Sean and one of the nuns at the school which now occupies the site of the convent where his mother gave birth:

  • 52 Ibid., p. 205.

“What about the women who died in childbirth or the stillborn children?”
“There used to be a plot for them, but it was the only site that really worked for the new extension ten years ago. We needed to dig up the bodies and cremate them. We planted a tree in their memory”.52

Photography and the truth – a dark room on a dark past

24The role of photography in both versions of the novel has already been mentioned briefly, with reference to Lizzy’s idea that she will have been erased from photographs in her hometown. This is one of many references to photography in the novel, partly because both the narrator and his father are professional photographers. On his tenth birthday, when Sean’s adoptive parents tell him that he was adopted, he seeks out the family album and blames the family photographs within it for lying about the truth he has only just become aware of:

  • 53 Ibid., p. 47.

I turned to the first page, which held the first ever photograph of me. It was taken among the sand dunes on Dollymount beach in summer. My mother is wearing a swimsuit and a bathing cap. I am three months old. She holds me up for the camera, her face showing pride in her son but also an anxiety to make me smile. Now I knew that this photograph was lying, because I was not her son.53

  • 54 Ibid., p. 234.
  • 55 Marie Mianowski, “Challenging Containment…”, p. 30.

Later, when Sean finally comes across the paltry traces of his mother’s time at the convent where he was born, he takes photographs of these “dumped, obsolete objects so tangled amid the undergrowth that they no longer looked like themselves”.54 As Marie Mianowski points out, it is through photography that “Bolger’s narrative discloses a landscape of power construed on erasure and invisibility”,55 and it is through photography that he restores visibility to women like Sean’s birth mother. Sean’s work on this series of photographs finally allows him to come to terms with the circumstances surrounding his own birth:

  • 56 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 299-300.

These were an elegy for the forgotten, the only monument to my true past which I could leave. But they were also my way of coming to terms with that past. […] In those long hours alone in that darkroom I had gradually allowed myself to remember and to accept.56

  • 57 Susan Sontag, On Photography, London, Penguin, 1977, p. 26.

25While this passage remains largely unchanged, some of the changes introduced in the renewed version of the novel give photography an even more prominent place. Susan Sontag comments in On Photography that “picture-taking serves a high purpose: uncovering a hidden truth”.57 The photographs Sean takes of the dumped cots and beds from the convent’s days as a Mother and Baby Home are an attempt to uncover that hidden truth, but some of the additions to the 2010 novel, in particular those in relation to Sean’s father’s photographic practice, suggest that the Ireland of the time was more interested in photography keeping a hidden truth well and truly hidden. Sean describes the photographs his father used to take thus (in a passage which is only introduced in the 2010 version of the novel):

  • 58 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 30.

The few examples of his early work that survive are like mirrors held up to the Ireland of his day. If that Ireland had seen them it would have done what any primitive tribe does when forced to confront themselves in a mirror – run away screaming.58

  • 59 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 72.
  • 60 Justin Carville, Photography and Ireland, London, Reaktion Books, 2011, p. 8.

26In another passage, also added in 2010, this expression “run away screaming” is again used to depict how Irish people would react if the truth were really shown to them in photographic form. The young Sean spends a summer working with his father’s employer, an Italian postcard salesman, who orchestrates the photographs used on his postcards to please the client. He drives around Ireland with a red plant pot in the back of his car and literally “plants” it in any décor. He describes his reasons for doing so in 1993: “They wanta the mountains and the lakes and the red”.59 Bolger’s fictional Italian postcards salesman seems to want to make images similar to those produced by John Hinde, described by Justin Carville in Photography and Ireland as “the patterned, repetitive similarity of each photographic image of Ireland that conforms to these stereotypical pictorial representations”.60 In 2010, he goes one step further:

  • 61 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 59.

So you want to show real life, Boy Genius. Well, tough shit, because nobody in Ireland wants to see it. They want mountains and lakes and a splash of red to hide anything unpleasant. They want to feel good about themselves and most especially they want to cover up bad things. The postcards you hate are the ones that sell in thousands. Do you know what sort of photographer you will be, Boy Genius? A starving one! Show Irish people the truth and they will run away screaming.61

  • 62 Ibid., p. 30.

27By the time Sean makes this discovery, his own father has given up on using his art to hold a mirror up to Irish society. Significantly, it is to become an acceptable adoptive parent that he agrees to conceal the truth. His photographic practice provides a perfect analogy of what adopting a child from a Mother and Baby Home was. Immediately after the passage about holding a mirror up to Irish society, another short passage is added in the 2010 novel: “To adopt a child from the Catholic Protection Agency you needed to show that you were a responsible adult with a proper job”.62 This is made even clearer in another passage added to the renewed text:

  • 63 Ibid., p. 126.

I had been the catalyst for this: he had needed to buckle down and show the adoption agency that he could be a responsible and conservative parent. The dates on the contact sheets ended the year they brought me home, when he accepted the responsibilities of being a family man, under the watchful eye of Mrs. Lacey of the Catholic Protection Agency.63

28Becoming a responsible and conservative parent meant that a photographer could no longer take the photographs which would really have shown what Ireland was like, but would have to limit one’s photography to the acceptable, respectable front, showcasing conservative, Catholic Ireland. Another 2010 addition makes this very clear:

  • 64 Ibid., p. 123 (our italics).

My only interest was in photography: something that should have brought us together but drove us farther apart. In his eyes there was no money in photographs: you started out by wanting to capture images so powerful that they stopped time and you wound up, if you were lucky, doing first communions and hating the job that had once been your passion.64

The 2010 edition of the novel thus underscores one of the reasons why so little was known, or officially recognised, of what was really going on in the country. Because no one was taking those photographs, the people most directly concerned by the consequences are, in 1993, in 2010 and indeed today, faced with a lack of certainty and difficulty in finding the truth.

  • 65 Ibid., p. 51 (our italics).

29A number of additions to the 2010 version of the novel weave in the idea of living a lie, and the consequences of this on one’s sense of identity. Sean ponders sharing the truth with his wife Geraldine, but a 2010 addition asks: “How can I say that I have been lying to her for years, that she doesn’t truly know who I am because I don’t truly know”,65 in which the repetition of “truly know” reinforces the interlinking of truth and knowledge, and the difficulty for survivors due to a historical lack of truthfulness and knowledge.

Conclusion

30“A second life”, the title of the novel, which is one of the few elements which remains unchanged from the 1994 edition to that of 2010, refers both to Sean’s “re-birth” after his near-fatal car accident, and to the life his adoptive parents granted him after his birth mother gave him up for adoption. In 1993, Bolger could not have known how changed Irish society would be just over a decade after the novel was first published, or that those changes would, partially at least, incite him to “update” the novel, and thus give it “a second life”. The updated novel reflects some of the knowledge Irish society had gained of itself in the intervening years, and reinforces the references to photography as a means to reveal this knowledge. However, Bolger could not have known in 2010 that revelations around Mother and Baby Homes would still not have been adequately addressed over a decade later, and that campaigners would still be fighting to “truly know”, as Bolger’s narrator repeatedly added in 2010, the truth. While the 2010 A Second Life provided a timely opportunity to revisit this story, one would like to think that if, in a further decade, a “third life” was given to the story, some of the issues which still surround truth, knowledge and redress for survivors of the Mother and Baby Homes would finally have been resolved.

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Notes

1 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life: A Renewed Novel, Dublin, New Island, 2010, p. ix-x.

2 Ibid., p. ix.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., p. xi.

6 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, Dublin, New Island, 1994, p. 127.

7 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 96.

8 Ibid., p. 172.

9 Ibid., p. 230.

10 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 25.

11 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 20.

12 Ibid., p. 199.

13 “The Sunday after they were married he had shown her the same photograph printed twice in the Sunday Express. It was of Joseph Stalin with a group of Soviet generals. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘how simple it is to make somebody vanish.’ In the second copy of the photograph one of the generals had been airbrushed out and a pillar superimposed in his place” (Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 21).

14 Ibid., p. 22.

15 Ibid., p. 87.

16 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 71.

17 Ibid., p. vii.

18 Ibid., p. ix.

19 “The wall of silence caused by this mindset was being eroded by individual voices in 1993 – a decade before films like The Magdalene Sisters were made” (ibid.).

20 In discussing the bodies which had been exhumed at High Park in 1993 Dermot Bolger commented that “All but one of these women’s bodies were cremated and reburied in a mass grave in Glasnevin Cemetery” (ibid.).

21 Ibid., p. xi-xii.

22 Sylvie Mikowski, “Gothic and Noir: The Genres of the Irish Contemporary Fiction of ‘Containment’”, Études irlandaises, nº 42-2, 2017, p. 99-100.

23 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. x.

24 James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries and the Nation’s Architecture of Containment, Notre Dame, University of Notre Dame Press, 2007.

25 For a full list of these productions and further discussion, see Marie Mianowski, “Challenging Containment in Dermot Bolger’s A Second Life: A Renewed Novel (2010)”, in Post Celtic Tiger Landscapes in Irish Fiction, London, Routledge, 2017, p. 28-42.

26 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 24.

27 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 17.

28 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 276.

29 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 217.

30 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 129.

31 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 98.

32 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 128.

33 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 97.

34 Clair Wills, “Architectures of Containment”, London Review of Books, vol. 43, no. 10, 20 May 2021, p. 3.

35 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 90.

36 Ibid., p. 171.

37 Ibid., p. 199.

38 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 257.

39 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 200.

40 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 243.

41 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 186.

42 Ibid., p. 202.

43 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 154 (our italics).

44 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 119 (our italics).

45 Central Statistics Office, Report on Vital Statistics 2010, Dublin, The Stationery Office, 2012, p. 8, online: https://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/releasespublications/documents/vitalstats/2010/annualreport2010.pdf.

46 Central Statistics Office, “Vital Statistics – Second Quarter 2021”, online: https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-vs/vitalstatisticssecondquarter2021.

47 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 69-70 (our italics).

48 Ibid., p. 199.

49 Ibid.

50 Catherine Corless, “The Home”, Journal of the Old Tuam Society, vol. 9, 2012, p. 75-82.

51 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 199.

52 Ibid., p. 205.

53 Ibid., p. 47.

54 Ibid., p. 234.

55 Marie Mianowski, “Challenging Containment…”, p. 30.

56 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 299-300.

57 Susan Sontag, On Photography, London, Penguin, 1977, p. 26.

58 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 30.

59 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 1994, p. 72.

60 Justin Carville, Photography and Ireland, London, Reaktion Books, 2011, p. 8.

61 Dermot Bolger, A Second Life, 2010, p. 59.

62 Ibid., p. 30.

63 Ibid., p. 126.

64 Ibid., p. 123 (our italics).

65 Ibid., p. 51 (our italics).

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Helen Penet, « A Second Life for A Second Life: The 1994 and 2010 Editions of Dermot Bolger’s Novel »Études irlandaises, 47-2 | 2022, 57-69.

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Helen Penet, « A Second Life for A Second Life: The 1994 and 2010 Editions of Dermot Bolger’s Novel »Études irlandaises [En ligne], 47-2 | 2022, mis en ligne le 08 novembre 2022, consulté le 13 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesirlandaises/13313 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesirlandaises.13313

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Auteur

Helen Penet

Université de Lille (Univ. Lille, ULR 4074 – CECILLE)

Helen Penet a obtenu son doctorat sur les auto-traductions de Samuel Beckett à l’université Paris 7 en 2002. Depuis 2003 elle est maître de conférences en anglais à l’université de Lille. Ses recherches actuelles s’intéressent à la littérature irlandaise et à la photographie des XXe et XXIe siècles. Elle a récemment publié des articles sur Hugo Hamilton et Dermot Bolger.

Helen Penet obtained a PhD on Samuel Beckett’s self-translations from Paris 7 University in 2002. Since 2003, she has been a senior lecturer in English at Lille University. Her current research focuses on 20th and 21st century Irish literature and photography. She has recently published articles on Hugo Hamilton and Dermot Bolger.

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