The Croppy Boy

I cannot remember my first confession. That does not matter. Nor can I remember what I confessed at my last confession two weeks ago. That doesn’t matter either: God has absolved me of what I confessed, and that’s what really matters. But I remember my first sincere adult confession, at the age of twenty-one. I remember the books that I read which convinced me I needed to go. These were not sinful works that needed confessing, but neither were they articles of pious literature that were designed to inflame religious devotion. The first was James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, predictably enough, with its hellfire sermon and its gut-wrenching and harrowing confessional scene. The second, which I discovered a few months later in my university library, was the two-volume “authorized” biography by Piaras Béaslaí of Michael Collins, the Irish nationalist who was commander in chief of the Irish Free State forces until he was gunned down on August 22, 1922, at the age of thirty-one.