Tipperary: A Novel of Ireland

by Frank Delaney

  Once or twice, men fortified with drink stepped up and began an inspection. No man actually put his hands lasciviously on any woman (some constables lingered near), but they leered to the onlookers, and curved shapes in the air with their hands, and turned the poor creatures this way and that.

  My heart wept for these hopeful people. When an interested call came from a member of the public, the person on the podium looked eagerly toward that voice. How willingly they displayed themselves, even if the inquirer was merely having sport with them. And how dreadfully sank their smiles, men and women, boys and girls, when asked to step down, and they realized that another day had passed and they had no work to feed themselves or those at home.

  I have heard that the fair in Golden differed from most hiring fairs in that the barkers charged an “introduction” fee to anyone hiring from their booth. At other such events, the people for hire merely came into the streets and stood there, hoping for someone to offer them the desperately needed employment. In either case, I wished the hiring fair abolished. But it ranked as nothing beside what was to come that same week; and I still rage and wince at the memory of that occasion.

  In Golden, we had received word of a “good fair” to be held next day in the town of Mallow, in the north of the county Cork, some forty miles away. We arrived at about ten o'clock in the morning and our intelligence looked well-founded; this fair indeed promised well. Large crowds had already gathered; stalls of food smoked to the sky; music jingled here and there.

  Within moments of setting up our tent, we had patients—in fact, fifteen people lined up, and we began the day busily. I handed Mr. Egan every bowl and bottle he requisitioned; and I took money from every person with whom he consulted. One woman complained that the ointment he brushed on her skin had a sting to it; I dabbed her arms gently with cold water. A gentleman from Fermoy said his bunions had come back; I showed him how to burn them off with a candle taper.

  All through this, I had a question in my mind: What was this occasion? Why so many people on a day that had no seasonal or religious or holiday significance? Finally I had a chance to ask, and a couple said to me—indignantly, as though I should have known—“Shanahan!”

  For months, a search had been going on for a dreadful villain who had taken the lives of his wife and her mother and father. Today he would hang. He had been a surly and disliked fellow, with bad reports from all who had known him, ever since childhood.

  The hanging was scheduled for noon. I asked Mr. Egan, “Do you wish to see this?”

  “We have to stay. Afterward is when people will want us—their stomachs will be bad.” Then he asked, “Did you ever see anybody swing?”

  “No.”

  “No eating beforehand,” he said.

  At five minutes before noon a party of soldiers and Royal Irish constables escorted a cart through the crowd to the end of the Main Street. No drum rolled, no horn blew. The high sides of the cart had been covered with burlap to conceal anything inside; the escort—of more than a hundred men—seemed to me especially large, considering that this had been such an unpopular fugitive and thus an unlikely subject for a rescue attempt.

  This corner of Mallow was a well-known place of execution; a high wooden structure existed there permanently, ready to take the post and beam of the scaffold. In a matter of moments the gibbet of wood was raised. Over the beam they threw a rope with a noose.

  We were close by—because our stall had been set up there for the densest throng. The police and soldiers formed a ring around the gallows and then faced the crowd. Brusquely they pushed us back and back, until a wide circle had been cleared.

  When the flap on the cart was raised, it was impossible to see from any quarter, because so many police and soldiers stood around it. Soon, a man in foul clothing, the unfortunate Shanahan, was stood up, carried—he refused to walk—and then propelled up on the high platform, directly beneath the noose.

  The people buzzed when they saw him, and some jeered. Shanahan, looking nowhere, and to my eyes appearing more numbed than sullen, was manhandled to a point directly beneath the rope. He was small and fidgety, prematurely bald, about thirty-five years old, with bandy legs and dark eyes.

  A plump man with a beak of a nose drew the noose over Shanahan's head and arranged it round his neck, then chucked it tight, making Shanahan wince. By now a priest had climbed the platform, but Shanahan turned his head away, like a man who had already decided where he was going. The priest stepped down.

  I heard a noise like a wooden gunshot—and a wild cry. The lever had been pulled and the narrow platform dropped—and there, some yards from my face, in the gap beneath the trapdoor, hung Shanahan, in eternity. The shriek from him had startled me.

  He did not die. He hung there, twisting a little, his wrists secured behind him, his feet in his tied ankles moving up and down like those of a dancer at practice, his face turning this way and that as though he was trying to get his head out of the noose. Twice he looked into my eyes; twice I looked away. Of course there would be no escape, and after a few minutes Shanahan began to expire, his face turning blue, his lips foaming.

  Some cheers rose up, perhaps from the neighbors and families of the victims. Not many people joined in; all, like me, remained where they stood. For my part, revulsion overcame me. I had no feelings about Shanahan; I had not even known his name when I woke up that morning—but even at my twenty-three years of age, my entire spirit convulsed at the pleased deliberateness of the execution, and the waste of a life.

  People in general, I am convinced, know everything, even before they know that they know. At that point, by all the usual practices, that crowd should have turned away. Instead, everybody stayed fixed—they sensed another drama.

  The militia in front of the scaffold redoubled their attitude of sternness; the soldiers drew bayonets and the police aimed guns, and we were pushed back farther. A puzzled hum rose from the crowd—and then it grew to a shout, as a figure recognizable to us all was taken from the cart and manhandled up to the scaffold.

  Over the previous months, a long trial had been taking place in Cork, of a young land agitation leader, David O'Connor, accused of murder. All opinion called the accusation false; witnesses palpably committed perjury; the judge refused to hear respectable contradictory evidence; and the prisoner had been silenced when he tried to speak on his own behalf. At one stage in the trial, the judge had threatened to take the case back from the jury (all landowners, but some of them showing uncertainty) and himself pronounce verdict and sentence. So prejudiced had the trial appeared that delegates had been sent to London to request the attendance of observers at the appeal.

  Now no appeal would take place. The authorities had smuggled young O'Connor, a doctor educated in Spain, past the vigil at Cork Jail and would hang him here at Mallow.

  I looked at Mr. Egan. “Will they riot?”

  He shook his head. Most people sank to their knees in prayer—and I, to my shame, turned away. I could not allow myself to see young Dr. O'Connor die—and I was unable to eat again for two days.

  Those who have told me eyewitness stories of the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s talk of the quiet in the countryside, the absence of birds, the unbearably sad muting of the neglected animals. Such tales have been especially poignant when coming from musicians, who are bidden to fill places with enjoyable sounds. That afternoon in Mallow, all the fiddles and all the pipes ceased their playing. I have never heard such silence as I heard in that crowded, stricken place, and I never wish to hear it again.

  Capital punishment ceased in Ireland more than forty years ago, its abolition a by-product of the Catholic Church's opposition. Today, membership in the European Union precludes it. In English-occupied Ireland it happened everywhere, often at a whim.

  Contaminated juries, perjured evidence, selected and selective witnesses—many of the trials had more rigging than a sailing ship. Justice was not so much blind as blindsided.

  And the hangings caused a vicio
us circle. A landlord was killed. Local men were hanged in reprisal after sham trials. Another landowner got murdered—Irish roulette.

  Out of the multitude of commonplace miscarriages of justice rose a rebel spirit. Fair-minded people everywhere might have murmured horror when a Protestant and his family were slaughtered or burned out of their home. But a wrongly executed Catholic raised an outcry. Every unjust trial, every hanging judge, created a new hero-martyr. The ballads and laments found a new power base.

  In fact, they became a weaponry. And they helped to create the new voice of the majority. The purer literary impulses of the educated Anglo-Irish, such as Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and William Butler Yeats, had already been resounding. Their unique tone brought the English language to bear on the Irish imagination. Now the Catholic martyrdom in miscarriages of justice created a different Irish sound.

  In the fusion of the two traditions, the cool and educated Anglo-Irish styles and the raw, often ironic, mourning ferocity of the ballad tradition, was born a new Irish voice.

  My fortune has been to live through such comprehensive times. As I witnessed the great will to recover the country's land for the Irish, I also observed another and separate movement of restoration: the recovery of the native soul.

  By the turn of the century, many Catholic writers and poets had begun writing about the glories of ancient Ireland. They had not previously been allowed to write, they had not been allowed to read, they could be—and were—deported for owning books. I was present to observe how the Celtic world came to the fore once again, with many passionate declamations in verse and prose, with vivid translations from the Irish language into English.

  Great men were rising in all this. Some were already established in repute; some had yet to make their names but would go on to garner fame and respect. I met them, and in their company, I would recite a tale I had heard, as I believed that I should attempt to contribute. And I am pleased to say that I was often gratified by their evident acceptance of my performance—though it was always followed with a longer effort of their own, or else a lofty and steel-edged repudiation of my tale.

  Some of these literary figures planted themselves in my memory, not from works they had yet written but from force of presence. One day, the sixteenth of June 1904, I was sitting in a Dublin public house after a lunch of Gorgonzola cheese with a glass of Burgundy. It was late in the afternoon and I was writing in my Journal when I caught the attention of a young man in his early twenties. He was wearing light shoes, of a kind people usually reserve for playing lawn tennis, and he wore a yachtsman's cap. With a jaunty and confident air he slouched over to me.

  “What are you writing?” he asked me.

  “I try to keep a Journal,” I said, “though I fail to address it every day.”

  “No man's life is interesting enough for every day to be recorded,” he said. “Except mine.”

  “Do you have an exceptional life?” I asked him.

  “Exceptional. It gives me deep satisfaction. Today, for instance, I shall meet with a young woman who, of her own free will, shall yield up to me the mysteries of her existence.”

  He told me that his name was James A. Joyce and that he came of an ancient Irish family whose ancestral lands could still be found in south Galway. When I told him my name, he pronounced with great delight that I must be one of the “royal O'Briens of Munster.”

  Mr. Joyce said, “Therefore, I suppose you have a pound on you that I might borrow? By way of gratitude,” he added, “I will allow you to read me what you have been writing in your Journal.”

  I said, “I cannot; I have been transcribing a legend I recently heard about a deer, but it is unfinished.”

  “You are speaking to a man who believes that in Ireland the artist is the proud stag torn down by the vile hounds of the populace. And that metaphor, if metaphor it be, is certainly worth a pound.”

  I gave him the requested money. Mr. Joyce waved the banknote like a small banner, promised to pay it back, and said, “This may be the unit of currency that launches a great literary career.”

  “What do you intend to write?”

  “I have it all planned out,” he said. “After some pithy observations of my fellow-citizens here in Dublin, I shall write a memoiristic but brilliant satire on the human soul. Then I shall write a large novel, modeled on the wanderings of Odysseus, but it will be all about a man brought low in life by a woman. Inspired, of course, by Mr. Parnell.”

  To which I replied, “When you write, if you write, be sure to make it complicated. It will retain people's attention. I knew Mr. and Mrs. Parnell—they saw little that was simple in their lives.”

  Mr. James Joyce rose from the bench beside me, clapped a hand to his forehead, and cried, “My God! It is I who should be paying you for that incisive advice. ‘Make it complicated.’ I shall remember it all my life”— and he departed the public house with a gracious nod to the barman and the cry “Any word on the Gold Cup?”—for it was Ascot week and all of Ireland placed wagers on the horses that were running on that great racecourse.

  “It'll be tonight before we hear,” said the barman.

  Mr. Joyce departed—and sprang back through the door a moment later.

  “You must go and tell Mr. Yeats your story—he lives up on Rutland Square. He'd love to hear it; he welcomes all mythologies.”

  That afternoon, I did as young Mr. Joyce suggested; I called, unbidden, on the renowned poet Mr. Yeats. Ofttimes I had seen him, vague and flowing, in the streets of Dublin, wearing a voluminous black cloak and a floppy bow-tie and his great scarab ring.

  I was curious to meet him. People said many things—that he was arrogant; that he made poems out of works in other languages and did not acknowledge them; that he loved widely, though often with ladies who did not live in Ireland. When I came to his house, I found him on the doorstep; he was emptying tea leaves from a large brown teapot into the street drain.

  I introduced myself, and Mr. Yeats asked, “Why have you come to see me?” and I told him about meeting a young man named James Joyce.

  “He's so sarcastic. You can't take seriously a word that he says. He's always sending people to call on me even though he knows how busy I am; I think he does it to stop me writing. Did he try to borrow money off you? Don't give him a penny,” said Mr. Yeats. “Come in anyway.”

  At first he proved short with me, but then he behaved very graciously when I told him some of the story I was writing about Finn MacCool and the deer. I said that I had heard it on my travels and he leaned forward with great attention, his spectacles winking in the afternoon sun.

  Mr. Yeats then began to ask me questions about myself (he was five years younger than me), and I told him something of my life. He pronounced himself enchanted with the notion of my wandering hither and yon, healing people, and at the same time gathering stories and setting them down, and writing reports upon the world.

  “Oh, your life is a kind of poem in itself,” he said in his deep, booming voice.

  I was much complimented and said so.

  “And you look like a poet,” he said. “A man does not have to write poetry to have a poet's soul.”

  I pressed him on this point and he said, “Warmth of spirit. Love of humanity. These are poet's gifts. You have them abundantly.”

  I felt my heart opening up, and in a fit of confidence I related the story of my great unrequited love. At the conclusion I said that I had written many letters and none had been answered, that I thought of this lady night and day and that my courage had now abated.

  Mr. Yeats took off his spectacles, wiped them on his floppy bow-tie, replaced them, and began exhorting me.

  “I remake myself many times—to ensure that I am the bravest who will deserve the fairest. Feather yourself,” he said, waving a hand at me to indicate me head to toe. “Wear bright plumage. Present a wonderful facade to her. Women enjoy a dandy.”

  It had been three years, six months, one day, and twenty-two hours since
I had last seen Miss Burke, on the street in Paris as she dismissed me. I have already recounted how I brokenheartedly returned to Ireland via Holland. Mother, seeing my distress, had advised me to write to Dr. a'Court Tucker's house. I wrote many letters, all civil, some apologetic, none without the utmost courtesy, but I never received a reply.

  When I told this to Mr. Yeats, he said, “I like few men but I am comfortable with you. Therefore, why not seek her father? Can there be many men in London who go by the name of Terence Burke?”

  I told him that I already knew the gentleman's address, and had indeed sent letters there too.

  My only visit to England had thrust me into the fracas over Mr. Parnell—but when I returned to my family and narrated Mr. Yeats's advice, they supported his idea. Mother supervised all my clothing, and, days later, as I left for the train that would take me to Kingstown and the steamer to England, my father gave me a generous financial support.

  “New clothes. Shiny boots. Best foot forward,” he said. “Make her father see what a fine man you are.”

  Consequently, I enjoyed the good accommodation of Mr. Brown's hotel in London, and after a day of resting and walking and visiting a gentleman's outfitters, making sure that I was not prone to accusations of dishevelment, I set forth to the house of Mr. Terence Burke. It was my forty-fourth birthday, the twenty-first of June, and I hoped that this would be of good omen.

  A girl with red hair and many sun-freckles opened the door at 29 Alexander Street, Westminster, and I recognized—and said so—that her accent came from Cork. She called herself Mary, and after our little conversation about the pleasantness of her native county, she went to fetch Mr. Burke; not being a trained servant, she forgot to ask my name.

  Presently, the gentleman appeared, a tall, thin man, with spectacles pushed up on his forehead. I could at once see his daughter's resemblance to him; and although he seemed to have the slow movements of those who suffer chronic ill-health, he had a vigorous personality.