A Migrant Heart by Denis Sampson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Migrant Heart by Denis Sampson Chris Arthur A Migrant Heart, by Denis Sampson, pp. 238. Montreal: Linda Leith Publishing, 2014. $16.95 (paper). At the end of the 1980s, when Denis Sampson was teaching at the Université de Caen, he and his family were living in a centuries-old farmhouse in Normandy. Sampson describes himself sitting in the cobblestone yard in a beach chair, reading The Engima of Arrival. As he is drawn into this compelling “novel in five parts”—though Sampson wisely questions whether V.S. Naipaul’s thinly disguised autobiographical reflection is really fiction—he finds that, for a time, it becomes “a kind of prayer book.” Throughout A Migrant Heart, memoir is interlaced with such literary electrocardiographs. Their lines show the extent to which literature has been a formative influence on the author’s life, often to the extent that it seems to serve an almost religious function. It is not just Nai-paul who provides him with his sacred texts. Irish writers have a special place in the reader’s heart that Sampson explores with such disarming openness—John McGahern and Brian Moore, for example, figure prominently—but it is clear he has engaged with literature far beyond any merely national boundaries. Quite apart from the light it sheds on how leaving Ireland and returning to it can incise powerful feelings of attachment and betrayal on the psyches of its migrant natives, there is much to recommend in Denis Sampson’s book, simply in terms of the insights it offers into the impact of reading on a life. At one point he says, “The most intense reading, as the most intense writing, comes out of our hidden life, and so it is that writing about reading is a form of memoir.” Without any of the distracting flourishes of an approach that over-dramatizes self realization—a temptation some, indeed many, memoirists give in to—A Migrant Heart modestly, but lucidly, explores the hidden life, reflecting on the intensities of reading and writing that have done so much to mold its author’s identity. The cover of A Migrant Heart features a stunning photograph of a single swallow caught on the wing. The picture is apt both for the way in which swallows symbolize migration, and because of how swallows glimpsed in Normandy remind Sampson of seeing the birds at the farm in Ireland where he grew up. He describes the French birds as “my madeleine,” taking him back to his childhood world beside the Shannon. The cover illustration also brings to mind Horatio Clare’s A Single Swallow (2009), a mix of nature writing, travelogue, and memoir that tells the story of following—by train, motorbike, canoe, ship, and on foot—the migratory route of the birds from Africa to Europe. It would be interesting to know how many human Irish “swallows” there are—people who, for a whole variety of reasons, live most of their lives away from the country but make regular returns, often over considerable distances. Denis Sampson is one of them. Not only does he chart the geography of his move from Ireland to Canada, his many returns to his birthplace, and occasional diversions to other countries, he [End Page 146] also explores the inner dynamics of this migratory life. He takes readers on a journey less obviously arduous than the one undertaken by Horatio Clare, but no less epochal. This is a memoir of moving honesty and depth. It carries the glint of wisdom in the cadences of its recollections and reflections. Much of the charm of the book comes from the acuity with which Sampson recalls his Irish childhood, and the intelligence he brings to bear in understanding how it has influenced the person he has become. Considering his family’s farm, he suggests, The long isolation of that house in its own world by the lakeside, in its many layers of withdrawal and inwardness, gave me a sense of something beautiful and a training in contemplation. It also gave me something else; a detachment, a turning away towards reading, and the contemplation of natural beauty, and also a suspicion of people’s motivations and the forces...