The reason for leaving was that no sooner had we been dropped off with our hosts than Stevie fell ill with something troublesome, whereupon the Butlers got in touch with our parents asking them to come back and take us away. Which they did. But as Knockaderry had been let for two weeks, we couldn’t go back there. So willy-nilly the caravan became a home from home for myself and Seán as we headed west, while Eileen and Stevie stayed in hotels and tried to keep pace with us by taking buses in the same direction. It was a rainy summer, so we were held up by floods and took refuge where we could, while doing our best to cope with rural setbacks, like the one when the mare got so bloated that she couldn’t get between the shafts, and rustic wags – a Cork speciality – assured us that the way to deal with this was to stick the prongs of a pitchfork in her belly. I forget how we solved her predicament, but don’t remember anyone doing that.
Then real trouble struck. On reaching Gougane we found that the recently arrived English writer, Honor Tracy, whom Seán had met through John Betjeman, was waiting at our hotel, which had no room to offer her. Small boys had already been sent in various directions to ask if any cabin had a spare room or bed. None did. It was the height of the tourist season; no booking had been made for her and she clearly had not been expected. Equally clearly, my mother was put out by her presence, and, judging by subsequent developments, some of the Dubliners staying in the hotel lost no time informing anyone who didn’t know that Seán and Honor were thought to be what is now called an item. I, who was too priggish – and worried on Eileen’s behalf – to admit to myself that I had guessed this, clung to the belief that their friendship was as innocent as the one he enjoyed with Mother Hogan. Honor was a touch too plump, and I thought of this as veiling her subtler attractions. At the same time I was drawn to her myself. She had a thrilling laugh and a directness which astounded me, since Irish women then were rarely straightforward about anything. Indeed, apart from Jasmine, she was the only person I knew who not only spoke her mind, but did so with wit and relish in a seductively musical voice.
Seán sometimes described her as looking like a Maillol sculpture and had once produced a photo of one to show what he meant. It reassured me. Men, I supposed then, wanted women to look like Greta Garbo, whereas Honor must have been one and a half times her size. Her hair was an agreeable carrot colour, and her amused smile had a perfection which, in those days of bad dentistry, you hardly ever saw. Earlier in Dublin, she had – I guessed even then – set out to charm me because she knew that Seán and I were close. Saying so makes her seem as calculating as an old-time villainess, like Madame de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons or Henry James’s Madame Merle. Perhaps she really was like them and had to be, precisely because she didn’t look like Greta Garbo. Or perhaps stating things candidly, as I am now trying to do, is always a form of betrayal. The vague, shifting view of her which I had held at the start was probably closer to the way things were. It is also more charitable. But then, as we were starting to learn, Honor did not aim to depend on anyone’s charity. She would take what she wanted if she could.
When we had parked the caravan in the hotel yard, found someone to look after the mare, and were wondering what to do next, I could tell that my parents felt uncomfortable. Perhaps they were remembering that shortly before Honor first arrived from England, they had received a letter warning them that she was a dangerous woman who had bewitched the famous orientalist, Arthur Waley, under whom she had worked in the Ministry of Information. Perhaps the letter-writer had worked there, too, and been trained as an informer. The word seemed to carry no stigma in England. The Ministry sounds, doesn’t it, like of something in a book by Orwell and almost too appropriate for such a letter? I forget the precise words this one used, and whether, indeed, it was anonymous, but remember clearly that they described Honor as having insinuated herself into Arthur Waley’s life and ruthlessly taken it over. She was likely, said the letter-writer, to do this again with someone else, so the Irish, who were unaccustomed to snakes, had better look out because she was an accomplished one. I remembered Seán and Eileen laughing over the letter and wondering whether it had been sent as a joke or by someone whom she had displaced. Probably a woman. The thought made me wish I need never grow up.
Adults were hard-hearted, and when you dealt too closely with them, you discovered that you were too. I had recently noticed that Jasmine, who was now sixteen, was changing. She had grown friendly with a girl from the village called Marge, who spoke exclusively in slang. Excruciatingly repetitive, and, to me, largely unintelligible chit-chat made the two of them giggle uproariously, while the previously fastidious Jasmine seemed to have been replaced by a slut. Somehow I knew that most of their coded silliness had to do with sex.
Meanwhile, in the Gougane Hotel, someone voiced a suggestion which had been nibbling at all our minds. It was that Honor could sleep in the caravan while Eileen shared a room with Stevie who, though no longer as sick as he had been, might need to be near her. Seán would then have the other room which had been booked, and I could sleep on a settle in one of the cottages which turned out, after all, to be available.
Whether Seán slipped from his bed that night and into the caravan, I don’t know, and perhaps neither did anyone else. But, true or not, word must have got around that he had, for over the next few days we were ostracised. Picnics and shooting expeditions were planned in our hearing. But, although the locals knew that Seán was handy with a gun, he was not asked to join them, and when a banquet was arranged to eat the game the shooting parties had bagged, we alone, of all the hotel’s guests, were not invited to that either. Instead, we sat in another room with Honor and chose our dinner from the everyday menu. It was like The Scarlet Letter. A penitential occasion. Oddly, even my mother was excluded from the festivities – unless, from pride, she had voluntarily joined the ranks of the outcast. She might have done. I still don’t know. But the thought strikes me that perhaps we had been invited to the dinner – after all, the hotel-owners were old friends – but that, somehow, it had been delicately conveyed that things would be easier if we came without Honor, and that we had refused this condition. The leader of the zealots, a now dead professor from University College Dublin (UCD) called McHugh, might have dragooned the shooting expeditions, but he would have had little or no clout when it came to interfering with hotel arrangements.
My main contribution to the state of play was an attempt the next day to stop Stevie accepting bottles of lemonade – ‘minerals’ – from the otherwise ill-disposed guests. I think of them now as the morals police who, either because they had had a change of heart and hoped to repair the breach with us, or because, on the contrary, they wished to deepen it, deliberately drew Stevie into their camp. He didn’t understand what was going on, but being a pretty child with great, violet-blue eyes, long lashes and curly hair, was used to being petted by strangers and couldn’t see why he shouldn’t take what was on offer. Poor Stevie! My attempts to coerce his loyalty backfired, and he was soon dodging our party and cadging handouts from our opponents.
Meanwhile, it rained. Floods made the roads impassable; and until they cleared, there could be no question of our returning to Cork City. What I can’t now remember is whether Father Traynor was part of the gang which sent us to Coventry. Was he even still alive? I know he died shortly after the tailor did, and that was in 1945, so it is more than likely that he wasn’t.
Yet, among the images jostling in my memory of that visit, his wistful-but-friendly face is omnipresent. It brings to mind my parents’ memories of their college days and of the dances to which he used to sneak from his seminary, relying on Seán’s giving him a leg up later to help him climb back in. Surely he, who had liked having his cake and eating it too, would not have condemned Seán for wanting the same thing? Or would he? He might. After all, what he had always wanted was to be a married priest, but while Pius XII was pope and McQuaid was the Irish primate, it was clear that no such hybrids would be sanctioned. So Traynor could well have
felt jealous of Seán’s freedom, as well as indignant at his failure to cherish conjugal comforts for which he himself continued to hanker with decreasing hope.
His dilemma interested both Frank and Seán, each of whom wrote stories about it, as it would soon be safer to do when, with the arrival of television and easy foreign travel, Irish society gradually grew less introverted. Soon fiction would no longer be frowned on for using the word ‘breast’ instead of ‘chest’, and Christo Gore-Grimes, when assessing libel risks, would come to the conclusion that, as thinking evolved, the question writers should start asking themselves would no longer be ‘could so-and-so sue’ but ‘would he?’
Looking still further ahead: in the Sixties the Second Vatican Council would give serious attention to the needs of priests like Traynor, though in the end nothing would actually be done.
Oh dear! Or as Great-aunt Kate always said, ‘Wirrasthrue’, meaning ‘Mary’s pity’, which I took to be a cry for help to the top female power who had, as always, a lot on her plate.
*
As we left Gougane I felt sorry for everyone except the morals police: for Eileen and Honor and Father Traynor – whether dead or alive – and Seán and even greedy little Stevie, who had drunk so many chemically coloured minerals that he got sick. Meanwhile I managed to deceive myself about what might or might not have gone on in the caravan and would – I would learn later – go on for some years in various venues in a world which was opening and expanding before us, now that it was 1946 and the Emergency over.
I don’t know whether Seán or Eileen ever went back to Gougane, though his short story, The Silence of the Valley, creates a counter-reality in which Traynor and Honor are more vigorously and entertainingly themselves than anyone had been on that visit. Neither Seán nor Eileen nor I appear, but the story sketches Dinny Cronin, the hotel proprietor, with graphic precision. Stevie is there, too, excitedly watching Dinny fish for eels, as he had done in earlier summers, by throwing chickens’ guts into the lake, then netting the black, phallic shapes which converge on them, and which the fictionally born-again Traynor seems to resurrect in the kitchen by throwing them on a pan so blazing hot that, though dead, they leap and ripple in the torment of a dance not unlike that of the damned in innumerable last judgements.
Officially Seán and Honor soon broke up, but the following summer both accepted publishers’ contracts which led to their travelling on the Continent, and years later, when I was sitting with friends in a Dublin bar, the two came down the narrow stairs from a second-floor restaurant, and it was clear that they had been dining together. Discretion in Dublin was hard to achieve.
For a while Honor rented a small, stone Gothic Revival tower on the edge of Killiney village and lived there in ambush. She possibly aimed to stage a replay of what may or may not have happened in the caravan, but the village had Argus eyes and I can’t believe Seán braved them often, if at all.
‘What have you to lose?’ I imagine her teasing him. ‘Everyone thinks you’re a sinner, so why not sin?’
People did think that, and when she wrote satirical pieces about Ireland for The Observer and the Sunday Times, they said, ‘She could never have dug up so much dirt by herself. Seán must be helping her. He’s letting down the country!’
Sometimes, when I boarded the 59 bus, she would be sitting in it, and I would have to decide fast whether more gossip would be generated if I did not join her than if I did. At first I usually did, but later, after she had been away for almost a year in Japan doing research for a book, it seemed easier not to, as conversations were tricky, and the simplest exchange could sound loaded, even ‘How are your parents?’, ‘Fine thanks’, ‘Give them my regards.’
Contrasted with my frets, her poise was flawless. As we would see when she challenged and defeated Kemsley newspapers (this took four years), she was patient when she wanted something. And she wanted Seán. His identity, however, had been forged in his youth. It may not have been bliss to be alive and active in the Irish Civil War, but it had been unforgettable, and his relations with Eileen had been part of it, so he couldn’t give her up. She was his witness and memory, or so I concluded. Moreover, being volatile, possibly to his regret, he seemed to feel a need to be pinned down. I don’t know how he conveyed this, or why. Perhaps it was to reassure us both – or in the hope that I would reassure Eileen.
Yet, at the end of his life, he was again dreaming of Honor and telling me sadly, ‘She was the best of the lot.’ If asked, though, about Eileen, he would retort with aplomb, ‘She is in another category.’ His tears in the rue Montpensier seven years after the Gougane visit must have had to do with his yearning to reconcile the irreconcilable. Like Laocoön and his sons struggling with Athena’s serpents in the Vatican sculpture, Catholics of his generation had tied themselves in knots.
As for Gougane, I don’t think my parents can have gone back there, since from 1946 on they took their holidays abroad. I, however, went back twice, first when Eileen died in 1988, and again three years later when Seán did, to scatter their ashes in the lake. Gougane is the source of the River Lee, so I liked to imagine the ashes being washed down to Cork City, past the site of the picnic where Eileen had been shot in the neck by a Black and Tan, then out into the Atlantic Ocean which she had crossed, possibly a touch tremulously, two years after Seán did, to keep their appointment to meet again and marry in Boston.
Meanwhile in 1947, when my school nuns arranged for me to spend my summers with a family living high in the Savoy mountains, I found what seemed for a while to be an Eden of my own.
*
At about the same time, our attention became riveted on some very Irish wrangles which began to target Hubert Butler, whose plight recalled that of Dreyfus in that, as a Protestant, he belonged to an unpopular minority. He was less vulnerable than the Frenchman, though, both because he wasn’t in the army and the charge against him was not spying but what would now be called ‘spreading disinformation’, which, as a friend of mine would learn decades later, could land a man in jail.
Although Butler was an Anglo-Irish Protestant, and Seán a Catholic policeman’s son, their careers had similarities. Both were born in 1900, opposed censorship and held beliefs which alienated their own communities.
Like Seán, Butler got a travelling scholarship after finishing his university studies, and, having earlier learned Russian, chose to spend the years 1934 to 1937 in Yugoslavia learning Serbo-Croat, while Seán spent his fellowship years at Harvard working on Celtic studies. Compared to Slavic languages, this choice sounds insular but, remembering how hope perished in the Civil War and that Seán had fought on the losing side to the bitter end, one sees that the dry tussle with Celtic philology may have offered needed respite. Happily, just as he began to see that his true vocation was to be fiction, sales of stories to The Dial and the Hound and Horn in 1927 and 1928 enlarged his world and led to fruitful friendships with both Richard Blackmur, the Hound and Horn’s editor, and Edward Garnett at Cape.
Butler’s field of study had been chosen for calmer reasons – but the calm would not last. He himself noted that his sympathy for the Irish War of Independence was part of a wider interest in the break-up of empires which, in the wake of the Great War, spawned a dozen or so small nations whose hopes and outlook were similar. One of these was Croatia which got its independence at the same time as Ireland and was beset by similar clashes of culture and religion. So Butler knew about clashes.
He could not, however, have foreseen the rage that his discoveries would unleash in the Irish Catholic press when he went back to Croatia in 1946, read the wartime newspapers available in the municipal library of Zagreb, and learned that Archbishop Stepinac, whom the Catholic Church was presenting as a living martyr for the faith, had collaborated with war criminals during the years 1941 to 1945. Worse, Stepinac had been hand-in-glove with ‘a Nazi-installed puppet regime which had waged a genocidal crusade against non-Catholics’. Butler did not report this at first. On the contrary, he ga
ve a circumspect talk on Radio Éireann which drew criticism for what he had not said. He had not mentioned Catholic suffering at the hands of Tito’s Communists. When reproached for this, he replied that one could hardly refer to the Communist persecution without mentioning ‘the more terrible Catholic persecution which had preceded it’. This was a red rag to the bull-headed. The Standard, a vehemently Catholic Irish weekly paper, foamed at its many mouths, and its editor and foreign editor wrote diatribes against Butler and Radio Éireann. As neither editor knew any Serbo-Croat, they could only rely on theory: Catholics did not support forced conversions, so Stepinac could not have connived at those of two and a half million Serbian Orthodox. QED.
Butler then went back to Zagreb and found out more.
In 1952 he was invited by Owen Sheehy-Skeffington to attend a meeting at which the editor of The Standard was to give a talk on ‘Yugoslavia – the Pattern of Persecution’. At the end of this, Butler rose to reply to the speaker, but the moment he mentioned the persecution of the Serbs, the nuncio, of whose presence he had been unaware, stalked ‘magisterially’ out and the meeting was closed. Butler’s native County Kilkenny hastened to dissociate itself from his failure to grovel, as the Irish normally did, to the papal representative. ‘All the local government bodies of the city and county’, he reported, ‘held special meetings to condemn “the Insult”.’
Later clashes were more venomous, and later findings more damning. Members of the Croatian Catholic clergy turned out to have connived in genocide; then when the war ended, helped smuggle wanted war criminals out of Europe. One of these was Artukovitch. A former Minister of the Interior in the ‘viciously anti-Serb Orthodox Christian and anti-semitic Ustashe regime in Croatia’, he had been the master mind behind the campaign in which 750,000 Orthodox and 30,000 Jews were massacred, and 240,000 Orthodox forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism. After the war, as Butler would later discover, Artukovitch had escaped to Austria and Switzerland and then, in 1947, to Ireland ‘with the connivance of the Catholic Church and the Irish Government. A year later, armed with an Irish identity card, he left for the US.’
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