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1975: Maurice Leitch, Stamping Ground
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been better if we never had gone out in the first place’ (136). It is difficult to disagree with him. The use of repetition in Gone in the Head, its sense of stalemate, the unwonted air of randomness and irresponsibility which permeates the action, the devalued state of the subject, all have the immediacy and the seemingly artless absence of perspective to be seen in a primitive painting. Such features are all the more striking for pertaining to Northern Irish Protestants. This social group’s pride of possession and political superiority seem not to have had the desired effect on Cochrane’s demographic. Instead of a chosen people, the villagers seem a lost tribe, their wandering internalised, their way of life marked by a lack of control and a surrender to impulse, and their impaired sense of belonging even to each other a sly satire on the idea of being loyal and whether or not it begins at home. Supplementary Reading Unsigned review, The Times Literary Supplement, 18 October 1974 Maurice Leitch, ‘Obituary of Ian Cochrane’, The Guardian, 23 September 2004 Also Published in 1974 Jennifer Johnston, How Many Miles to Babylon?; John McGahern, The Leavetaking 1975 Maurice Leitch, Stamping Ground The setting of Stamping Ground is that of rural County Antrim where the author was born and grew up. Leitch (b. 1933) has published nine novels, two short-story collections and the novella Chinese Whispers (1987). Beginning with The Liberty Lad (1965), these works focus consistently on the dark side of his Northern Irish characters’ inner lives, with plots that probe obsession, sexual complications and violence. Among the most notable works of an oeuvre that has received less than its critical due are Silver’s City (1981), set in Belfast; Gilchrist (1994), about a renegade Protestant clergyman; and The Smoke King (1998), which deals with racism in Northern Ireland during the Second World War. Leitch’s other novels are Poor Lazarus (1969), Burning Bridges (1989) and The Eggman’s Apprentice (2001). The Valley is the setting of Stamping Ground, a location evidently close to the County Antrim towns of Ballycastle and Ballyclare. It is 52 THE IRISH NOVEL 1960–2010 summertime at mid-century (the year is 1950, which the nature of the action in this novel suggests is not as distant and unexceptional as simple chronology might indicate), and the living is easy. Or so it seems for the trio of young men who are the focus of the action – Harvey Gault, the son of a local landowner, ‘a Clydesdale’ (3) with respect to his physical bearing, though not his temperament; Mack McFarlane, a Gault employee and snake in the grass; and Frank Glass, a university student home on holiday (and the protagonist of Leitch’s first novel, The Liberty Lad). These three are first seen making hay while the sun shines on the Gault family farm, the Craigs, or rather taking a break after a morning working at that very job. Now their time is pretty much their own and they can sport and caper, activities that amount to typically homo-social horseplay and teasing, revealing as it sublimates an equally commonplace undertow of homo-erotic tension. The freedom the trio affects is no more than the sort of licence to perform claimed by cowboys when they come to town – there are a number of references to Westerns. Their behaviour seems rooted less in their own natures than in certain approved codes and rituals of maleness , so that when the Gaults’ seventeen-year-old servant, Hetty Quinn, appears, nothing apparently will serve the occasion but the staging of her mock-rape. Just about every exchange between the three is primed to elicit embarrassment, outrage or the threat of appearing unmanned. Frank is fully aware of this rustic ballet of verbal slap and dig, finds it puerile and potentially malevolent, but knows that the bonds of this version of male culture are such that he is not allowed to reveal that he has outgrown them. Mack manipulates the exchanges’ devious, destructive pleasure. And Harvey is ignorant. Not surprisingly, their maleness receives its comeuppance as events unfold in the course of the rest of the day and into the early hours of the following day (coincidentally or not, the duration of Stamping Ground is roughly the same as that of Ulysses, eighteen hours). The culminating action is Hetty Quinn’s actual rape. Not all the three young men participate in this act, but by the complicity of each of...