The senators’ rancour was almost certainly due to pique at finding that traditional Gaelic-speakers, whom, as patriots, they affected to admire, were neither as pious nor as genteel as they had wanted to think. Indeed, when one speaker read out examples of what he considered to be the book’s obscenities, another demanded that these be struck from the Senate records, lest members of the public start going through them in search of smut.
The year the tailor died, we took our usual holiday in Gougane, but, though we called to condole with Ansty (short for Anastasia) he had already been buried. Seán, however, wrote one of his best stories, The Silence of the Valley, about an imaginary visit to attend his wake.
Rereading extracts from The Tailor and Ansty, first published in The Bell in March 1941, I have just come on the tailor’s thoughts about animals. ‘There is a change somehow,’ he tells Cross. ‘The animals are getting more daring and more intelligent. They are thinking more and they are learning the way we think too. They are not stupid. It is we who are stupid to think they are …’
I was nine when I first read that. It impressed me then and still does, especially as more people seem to think like that now. Here in the West, anyway, animals have come up in the world.
Elsewhere in Cross’s book the tailor observes that, though a number of people who dropped into his cabin had written books and taught in universities, ‘the airiest, wittiest men that ever walked into me were the men who walked the roads’, adding that ‘if a man does not use his own eyes and ears and mouth and intelligence, he may as well be dead. There’s no man living can’t see a new wonder every day of his life, if he keeps his eyes open and wants to see.’
This implicit rebuke to bookishness reminds me of the prolific Maupassant’s claim that he himself didn’t need to read much because he found the raw material for his fiction by looking carefully at what was going on around him. He even trained both his mother and his valet to report to him on any drama they might come across which he could use in his stories. Perhaps the men who walked the roads performed the same service for the tailor?
Remembering this reminds me of my own mother’s zestful talent for providing writer friends with copy. Eileen had a flair for spotting promising situations and working up what she heard, and I now keenly regret failing to write a tribute, while she was alive, to her bravura when playing this rarely acknowledged role which bridges the oral and literary traditions. Both O’Connor and Seán based short stories on her field reports and, at least once, years later, so would I. The piece I thought of writing about her was to have been called The Straight Woman, in memory of those music-hall actors, known as ‘straight men’, who fed comedians lines designed to help make rehearsed witticisms seem spontaneous. Oliver Gogarty, a Dublin wit and poet, actually got her to give him cues like this at one or more of Yeats’s Irish Academy dinners. Perhaps all the old wits achieved their effects by such secret preparation? I remember reading that Mahaffy, who had been Oscar Wilde’s tutor at Trinity College and was a friend of Gogarty’s, had done something of the sort. So the tradition may always have been a collaborative one which the cult of an airy amateurism led artful wits to present as artless.
Gogarty was a surgeon as well as a poet, and one of Eileen’s less cheerful memories was of his chatting away while taking out her tonsils without an anaesthetic. He showed them to her at once and was about to take them to the next room to show them to Seán, when she managed to rally and dissuade him, since Seán might have fainted. Doctors who examined her throat later told her that the poet had done a perfect job. And he charged her nothing.
As her stories were often about acquaintances, libel actions were a risk. Publishers, in the Thirties and Forties, were almost always English and so subject to the harsh English libel laws. Yet Dubliners continued to sue and to risk being sued, and it is hard not to think that this activity was providing them with some of the buzz and challenge that conspiracy had done for earlier generations. It was sometimes seen too as a handy source of cash. Yet not all libel victims could or did sue. Take the case of Gogarty himself, recognisably the original of Buck Mulligan in Joyce’s Ulysses, but, although meanly lampooned by Joyce, who had sponged on him and then suggested the reverse in his novel, he did not sue. Perhaps, as Ulysses had been published in Paris, he couldn’t. Instead, in 1937 he was himself sued by an uncle of Samuel Beckett’s, who claimed that his grandfather had been described in Gogarty’s semi-fictional memoir as a usurer and a man partial to little girls. Gogarty had to pay £900 plus costs, which doubled his loss. Passing on the pain, like a character in La Ronde, he then sued the penniless poet Patrick Kavanagh who, in describing a call he had paid on him, had written in his memoir, The Green Fool, ‘I mistook Gogarty’s … maid for his wife or his mistress.’ Gogarty’s objection to this seems to have been that the text brought the words ‘wife’ and ‘mistress’ indecently close. Since the unfortunate Kavanagh had only recently come from his stony, Monaghan farm, his innocence seems blatant, especially as not only Joyce but also Gogarty’s own poems had portrayed Gogarty himself as a buck. One of those included in Yeats’s Oxford Book of Modern Verse which had come out in 1936 goes as follows:
I will live in Ringsend
With a red-headed whore,
And the fan-light gone in
Where it lights the hall-door;
And listen each night
For her querulous shout.
As at last she streels in
And the pubs empty out.
To soothe that wild breast
With my old-fangled songs,
Till peace at last comes,
Shall be all I will do,
Where the little lamp blooms
Like a rose in the stew;
And up the back-garden
The sound comes to me
Of the lapsing, unsoilable,
Whispering sea.
Though the poem defamed its author’s domestic arrangements more effectively than poor Kavanagh did, Gogarty got £100 in damages; the book was withdrawn, and Kavanagh, though he had been a frequent visitor to our house, must have decided that, as Dubliners were twisters, he would be one too and sue Seán for publishing a poem of his in The Bell without permission. Seán claimed that they had agreed viva voce that he could publish, but had no written proof. This must have led to speculation in the pubs, for, on running into Kavanagh in one of them, Michael Scott, the leading Irish architect of the day, asked him why he was being so litigious. The poet, in his splendidly gravelly and wistful voice, said, ‘I might make a few pounds.’ Scott immediately offered to supply these from his own pocket if Kavanagh dropped his action. Kavanagh took the money but went back on his word, so Scott said he’d sue him – and, as often happened in Dublin, the thing fizzled out. Libel threats, however, continued to amuse some and worry others, and I can still summon the perplexity I felt when, at breakfast one morning, Eileen laughed in relief on finding a sonnet in the Irish Times by a writer, called Arland Ussher, which called Seán a yahoo.
‘Thank God!’ she exclaimed. ‘Now that Ussher’s vented his rage he won’t sue over the hatchet-job of a review Seán published of his book.’
Alerted to the volatility of Dublin’s hungry jungle, Seán now arranged for the solicitor, Christopher Gore-Grimes, to vet for libel everything he was thinking of publishing. ‘Christo’, a yachtsman and a sportsman whose solicitors’ firm was well established, may have enjoyed the risk of finding himself maligned – libelled even – by writers with whom this activity brought him into contact. Honor Tracy, who was to arrive in Dublin in 1946, wrote satirical novels, one of which described a character based on him as having ‘bog water coming up through his Trinity accent’. Christo didn’t mind. And Honor, a woman of nerve, went on to provoke a Kerry parish priest who promptly sued the Sunday Times, where she had reported on the extravagance of his living arrangements and the cost of his new bathroom. The paper apologised on her behalf, whereupon she sued its proprietor and became the only person I ever knew
or heard of who simultaneously took on the Irish Church, the English libel laws and Kemsley newspapers and won. In those years of few jobs and less industry, libel actions were a lively form of gambling. My admiration for her was infinite. According to Google, she was awarded damages of £5,000. Think what that would have bought in 1954.
But before then a lot of Liffey water would flow under the bridges.
MY FIRST SUMMER IN FRANCE
Starting in 1940, The Bell was produced in what we called ‘the hut’, a small, pretty building at the end of our garden, covered by green shingles and containing a desk, books, a divan and a wide window. This looked out past several downward-sloping fields belonging to Captain Disney towards a pond where a solitary heron spent most of its time standing motionless on one leg. On the near side of the hut was a verandah, to which Eileen and I were sometimes allowed to bring a picnic. Usually, however, this territory was taboo, reserved for The Bell’s staff members, chief of whom was Harry Craig, who could put his hand to anything. He edited, subedited, wrote articles signed, according to need, with either his own name or a pseudonym, and queued for our bus tickets when we were taking a trip to Cork or, as we sometimes did, to Kilkenny. Over the years Harry helped Seán to make several garden features including a swing, a sandpit, a rose walk and a wooden seat the size of a cartwheel which encircled an old tree. He was also our star reader when we read each other poetry, as people in those years used to do. With a lilting Limerick accent and a penchant for love verse, he was a student at Trinity College, a parson’s son, and a known heart-breaker, for news of whom female voices would beg with shy insistence on the phone. I think my mistrust of charm, which would be re-activated years later when I grew up and began spending time in Italy, must have first started when dealing with Harry’s girls who breathed hot, furtive hope into my ear while pleading to have their calls switched to the hut.
This – Seán’s memoirs remind me – had not, at first, been on the phone at all. He had thought of it as a writer’s retreat, and, at the beginning, if someone rang who urgently needed to reach him, he had had to be summoned to the house by one of us walking out along Killiney Hill Road ringing a large cowbell which he had bought on a visit to Kentucky.
Soon, though, a phone extension was connecting hut and house, where Eileen and I briskly interviewed callers and weeded out time-wasters. Our life had grown busy and convivial, for we often had guests at lunch and tea, and regularly for open-house on Sunday nights. As a result, I became expert at making sandwiches and large salads of chopped beetroot mixed with US-donated corned beef which were our mainstay whenever we had to provide a meal in a hurry. Money was short, so, even on the Sunday evenings, no drink was offered until the end of the war, when Seán started keeping a barrel of Guinness in the back yard. Others, though, were hungrier than we, and men like Kavanagh were prepared to walk the ten miles from the city centre to Killiney just to drink tea and eat sandwiches, some of which they put in their pockets to sustain them on the walk back. Tea was scarce. The ration, half an ounce per person per week, was smaller than in England, but people who were hard up sold their coupons, so the rest managed. Unfair? Yes, it was. But large, needy families were probably better off than before, since now they had something to sell. Meanwhile fuel was next to non-existent, so we burned damp turf, whose smoke left a combustible deposit in the chimneys which sometimes caught fire and, in our case, left a crack in the living-room chimney breast which had to be covered by a decorative cloth.
In 1939 when I got my first bike, guests who arrived too early risked being asked to teach me to ride it. Harry Craig and a handsome Russian called Alexander Lieven were my favourite instructors, and the joy of their presence led me to drag out the learning process. Kavanagh didn’t volunteer but wrote jingles in my poetry notebook instead. Other visitors whose comings and goings I can’t date were Brian Inglis, Brendan Behan (definitely post-war), Valentine Iremonger, Conor Cruise O’Brien and his first wife, Christine, Norah McGuinness, Betty Rivers, David Marcus, Arthur Power and Geoffrey Taylor (formerly Phibbs) who took over as poetry editor of The Bell from Frank O’Connor, whose colleague he had been in Wicklow Library. Both used pseudonyms, Frank because when he was a librarian he didn’t want anything lewd he might write – Irish authorities often found life lewd – being traced to him. Taylor meanwhile had already shed his name when he got caught up in a small but lively scandal. This had involved Robert Graves and Laura Riding and, though it ended with her jumping out of a fourth-floor window and breaking – or not breaking? – her back, had started in Wicklow when the painter, Norah McGuinness, who was then Mrs Phibbs, went off with David Garnett, and Geoffrey took up with the American poet, Laura Riding, who was at the time living with Graves. The two shared her, and the story has more versions than a folktale.
The next thing was that Frank ran off – these were the words always used of such events – with the wife of the actor, Robert Speight. One thinks of the rape of the Sabines, with Mrs Speight looking beautifully lewd as the unathletic Frank tries to hold her aloft.
But perhaps he borrowed a pony and trap? Cars were scarce. Indeed, I doubt if any of our Sunday guests had one, though John Betjeman, who was press attaché at the British Embassy and, unknown to us, also worked for the British Ministry of Information, may have done so, and so must Sir John Maffey, the British representative, who came at least once. Betjeman’s letters, however, complain about having to take buses, so perhaps he didn’t run a car for long. He used to send Seán letters signed in cod Irish as Seán Ó Betjemán and once invited our whole family to lunch at his country house. Or so I remember it. Only now, reading his daughter’s edition of his letters, do I see what a drag this may have been.
‘I have to see pro-Germans,’ one letter complains to an English friend. ‘Pro-Italians, pro-British and, most of all, anti-British people … I have to go about saying “Britain will win in the end” and I have to be charming to everyone and I am getting eaten up with hate of my fellow beings as a result. The strain is far greater than living in London under the blitz.’
Oh dear. He was charming and, when I met him again with Seán in the Seventies, he still was. I hope that on those later occasions he was under less strain.
It is clear from his published letters that Seán, Frank and Kavanagh were in the pro-British category and so in no need of conversion. Despite – or because of – that, he got them occasional jobs on the BBC, each of which involved a trip to London and a chance for a breather away from what Seán called ‘the dull smother’ of wartime Ireland. He seems also to have helped organise the 1942 Irish number of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, which published work by all three, most memorably Kavanagh’s poem The Great Hunger, then promptly seized by the Irish police on the usual grounds of obscenity.
*
Inevitably, there was the odd row on our open-house Sunday evenings. After all, if you declare yours an open house, you can’t then restrict your guest list to people who get along with each other. And in the Forties there were plenty of reasons for Dubliners not to do that, especially if one of them had reviewed – or failed to review – books by others, or was on the Left or the Right, or despised our neutrality or had killed someone’s father in 1922 or 1923. But I, whose role was to hand around sandwiches and refill cups with tea, either never knew or have now forgotten why people got upset.
Once, though, our family got caught up in a row which I remember with unpleasant clarity. This did not happen on home ground. We were playing away.
In 1946 Seán, Eileen, my brother Stevie and I paid our last summer visit to our elected Eden, Gougane Barra, which, on that occasion, turned out to be more like the biblical one than expected. It bristled with sanctimony and a hiss of suspicions which, like the snake, crushed in old paintings by the Virgin’s foot, were of a frankly sexual nature. So there was a fall from grace ending with our being, if not quite cast out, pointedly ostracised. It happened as follows.
Seán had arranged to rent an old-style, though well
-appointed, horse-drawn caravan in Cork City and drive it slowly west to Gougane, pausing en route to shop, cook, eat, sleep, drop into pubs and look up old friends. This was a romantic idea and also a source of cash, since he sold accounts of the journey to one of the Irish Sunday newspapers which serialised them as we proceeded west, allowing us to buy copies from rural newsagents along the way, read about our doings almost as soon as they happened and admire their snapshots of ourselves, the hired mare and the caravan. A useful side effect was that locals stopped taking us for authentic tinkers at whose marauding approach they had better rush out and gather up their hens.
‘Are ye the Wards or the Redmonds?’ village outposts had been challenging us before the press enlightened them.
Originally neither Stevie nor I was to have come on the caravan trip at all. Instead we were to have stayed as paying guests with the Butler family at their house, Maidenhall, in County Kilkenny.
Seán and Hubert Butler, who would be hailed with surprise as a brilliant and insightful essayist when his collected writings were published towards the end of his life, were allies. Indeed some of his early essays had appeared in the Forties in The Bell. And Conor Cruise O’Brien, who delivered the eulogy at Seán’s funeral in 1991, would note that during the dark days of native Irish oppression, censorship and deference, three men had defended Liberalism. Of these, one was a Catholic, one a Protestant and the third, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, an agnostic. The three – Seán, Butler and OSS – had supported each other in many skirmishes, and Stevie and I had been happily parked with the Butlers on earlier occasions. Indeed, a nightmare which I used to get must connect with one such visit. In it I am trying to straddle a runaway carthorse whose back is so wide that I come close to doing the splits as I cling to its mane while it gallops through a small Kilkenny town. The horse has neither reins nor saddle. A rope has been tied around its middle and a voice, which I think of as belonging to Hubert Butler, is noting – as it may well have done in reality – that I bounce when trotting ‘like a pea on a plate’. I suspect this dream-memory was a conflation of two emotions: stress and indignation, arising from what happened when we left Maidenhall for Gougane.
Trespassers Page 9