ELIZABETH BOWEN continued
A wealthy friend encouraged her to see a well- known Austrian psychiatrist, and even paid for the sessions. The doctor was supposed to “cure” Bowen. The sessions ended after several visits when the author did not concur with the psychiatrist that traumatic events in her early life caused her stuttering.
Records of Bowen’s speech were kept in the archives of the British Council in the form of internal memos, which are most revealing about her stuttering and how she handled it. Following her successful lecture tours for the British Council in the years following the War, there were questions as to her suitability for continued lecturing on account of her stuttering. The memo in response answered, “She is a most successful lecturer with a most successful stammer.”
Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page, a 2003 biography by Maud Ellman 2003, “Elizabeth’s famous stammer, which emerged during her father’s mental illness, consistently balked on the word ‘mother’. But the bereavement that scarred her speech also galvanized her writing.”
DERMOT BOLGER ”I was caged by a terrible stammer. To be
a child so afflicted back then was to suffer daily public crucifixions."
- DERMOT BOLGER
Dermot Bolger was born in Dublin in 1959. Dermot’s writings (especially novels and plays) usually strive to convey the experiences of working-class Irish people who feel alienated from society. His first novel, Night Shift, was published to much critical acclaim, and is now noted for having introduced many of the themes that would resurface in later novels. His 1990 novel The Journey Home was a highly controversial bestseller in Ireland, and deals with a Donegal family in which members take diverse political and socio-economic paths after the Irish War of Independence. Other novels include The Woman’s Daughter, Emily’s Shoes and External Affair.
Bolger has always been open in interviews about his struggle with stuttering. In fact, right before the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Irish Association of Speech and Language Therapists, he wrote an op-ed “My Stammer Made Me Feel Like the Greatest Fool ….. Now I Make My Living Giving Public Lectures”, which appeared in the Irish Times on May 1, 2019.
continued on page 43 42
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