*
Since Eileen had resented both my not going to Portugal and my taking off for other places, I suspected her of testing me when, in 1988, she rang me in London to say she was going to hospital and needed me to come straight to Dublin to be with Seán. She had made such requests before, and I had always come. This time, I had a house guest and didn’t. Misinterpreting the situation, I took it that her anxiety really was about Seán. But as their housekeeper had offered to move in and look after him, I couldn’t see why he needed me to be there as well. He and Eileen, having good health insurance, made so many trips to hospital that I thought of these as routine, and, oddly, she didn’t disabuse me. With hindsight, I now guess that she feared to worry him, as he could have been listening on the telephone extension. Sometimes, moreover, she could be fiercely demanding – less for herself than, as I assumed to be the case on this occasion, for him. They propped each other up, as ageing couples must.
At this time, Lauro and I were juggling a tricky life style. Our house – a Victorian wreck when bought the previous year – was only now ready to be redecorated so that I could let it before the spring term started in LA so as to bring in enough income to cover whatever rent we would have to pay there. With this in mind, I had stayed in it while Lauro was in the US, and struggled to keep the builders from taking on other jobs before finishing ours, as builders like to do. Even now they were behind schedule, so I was reluctant to leave London, though I would have if I had known how ill Eileen actually was. Perhaps she had been too ill to argue when asked whether their housekeeper, who had had training as a nurse, wouldn’t be more help to Seán than I could be.
‘Well, wouldn’t she?’ I pestered.
Eileen sighed and put down the phone.
She died in the small hours the next morning. Seán’s mind gave way under the shock and never quite recovered. This, however, was not clear at first, for though he was nearing ninety, he could still be funny, as though mimicking a younger self. Indeed, when I flew to Dublin to help with her funeral and memorial service, he seemed to be on the mend.
Lauro, Lucien and I spent Christmas and New Year with him, and watched anxiously when he grew paranoid or mistook me for Eileen. His personality was now as volatile as a kite, and he grew angry when discouraged from wandering into the streets late at night, as he liked to do when he couldn’t sleep. He tended to have stuffed hundreds of pounds in loose bundles into his coat pockets and flew into a rage when told that this was dangerous. Dún Laoghaire, local people kept warning, was not the sedate place I had known years ago. It was now full of druggies. Even churches had to be locked because of people shooting up in their gardens.
When we finally left, first for London and then LA, where Lauro was still teaching, letters from Seán’s neighbours caught up with us to report that a woman had been visiting him, and had persuaded various literary hosts that he was eager to attend their functions and needed her as an escort. This, warned the neighbours, was destabilising him. What was more, she was arousing him sexually. They had seen her do so through his and their front windows. And when the housekeeper remonstrated with him and he chased her into the street, attacked a neighbour, then had to be confined in St John of God’s mental hospital, fresh letters accused the temptress of having, literally, driven him mad. The doctors, however, put his troubles down to a series of small strokes and a lack of folic acid. They said it might not be safe for him to be let out of hospital for months.
Meanwhile, his house was burgled by well-briefed thieves, who reached it through another empty one whose back garden adjoined his. They must have had a van nearby, for they moved a hunt table and a two-tiered glass-fronted book case through both gardens without being detected. After that, with or without the housekeeper, there could be no question of his moving back there to live.
Helen Fahy, our generous neighbour and friend, was immensely supportive when I flew back to visit Seán in St John of God’s and to vet the secure nursing homes to which its doctors were prepared to release him. Aclare House, the one he chose, was close to the Fahys, so Helen became a target for frequent, unannounced visits. Yet even when he forgot having already dropped in on her twice on any given day, then did so a third time, she welcomed him warmly and once the Aclare House staff decided it was safe for him to come out she drove him and me all over Wicklow to see the familiar scenery, after which the three of us had numerous lunches and teas in his favourite hotels. Over one such meal he told us what he thought had been happening while he was in St John of God’s. He had, he gravely stated, been confined in ‘a colony of blacks run by priests’. He proffered this as an accurate account of his experience, but seemed relieved when we managed to convince him that it amounted to a dream.
Interestingly, he had allegorised his confusion by turning the doctors who had locked him up into priests, and fellow inmates into blacks. The old Republican distrust of the clergy, plus an Irish sense of ourselves as perennial victims, help explain these notions, though Helen and I wondered whether the bit about blacks could be a theft from Roddy Doyle. Either way, the past was dominant, and we noticed that what gripped Seán’s attention, and burrowed through it like a thorn through wool, was an increasingly early past. Early and angry. The schoolyard jeer, ‘Cowardy, cowardy custard/ Stick your head in the mustard’, which he disconcertingly took to chanting, seemed to be aimed at himself.
For how long, I wondered, had he been angry? And afraid?
He had, I remembered, been subject to nightmares as long as I had known him and might in his youth have suffered from what is now called post-traumatic stress. In the late Seventies, when I visited him and Eileen in their last house, in its small, cruelly metaphoric cul-de-sac, she used often to be upstairs in bed, knocked out by the painkillers which would eventually kill her, while he, below in their living room, cheered himself with gin. I would go up and down, chat with each, try to comfort each and exchange the small doses of gossip which are often what the housebound crave.
During these visits his mind tended to take plunges into memory, and in the course of one he shyly revealed that in May 1968, when the French anarchic maelstrom had briefly made travel impossible, he and Kick found themselves stranded somewhere near Paris. Kick by then had terminal cancer, so they were enjoying a last fling – or perhaps no more than a memory of one – when private sorrow was overtaken by the événements, which prevented their getting back to their homes as planned. Unknown both to them and me, we could easily have run into each other, for I may not have been far from their hide-out. Lucien and I were spending the summer with Chantal, a French friend who has a son his age. The boys were boarding at a local riding school, while she and I stayed close by in a house which she had rented near the Forest of Fontainebleau. The idea had been for the four of us to lunch together at the weekends, then ride in the forest, or else visit nearby châteaux like the exquisite Vaux le Vicomte, which had been the model for Versailles. And this is what we did until the fine May morning when Chantal, who worked for Radio Free Europe, turned on the radio at breakfast time and, hearing the news, took a piece of bread in one hand and her car keys in the other and drove hell for leather to her office in Paris to cope with it.
Some months later she would have to leave still more urgently when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia.
*
Eileen liked to dissect her past and, when Seán grew deaf, she enjoyed chatting with people who dropped by and were prepared to join her in doing so. After the move to Dún Laoghaire the droppers-in were different from those I had known in Killiney, though some old friends, like David and Ita Marcus, came by, and so did American visitors, the writer, James Plunkett, and neighbours like Helen Fahy who rarely arrived ‘with one arm as long as the other’. This Irishism refers to the practice of bending one’s arm to accommodate a gift. Helen’s was usually a home-made cake.
Talk, though, was what interested Eileen. ‘Can you tell me’, I remember her asking a historian who sometimes came, ‘how my Gaelic-speaking gr
andmother came to lose her property?’
‘How do you know she had any?’ I asked, for I thought of rural Gaelic speakers as likely to be penniless.
‘She used to ride to hounds,’ Eileen told us proudly. ‘And she had a bit of land. But somehow she lost everything quite suddenly. She was so terrified of Protestant clergymen that if she saw one approaching, she would cross the road. Why do you suppose that was?’
‘Tithes,’ said the historian who, it strikes me now, may have had this conversation with Eileen before. ‘She must have failed to pay them.’
‘Tithes?’ marvelled Eileen, playing her part.
‘Yes,’ he reminded her. ‘Until the 1870s everyone had to contribute to the upkeep of the Protestant Church – the Church of Ireland, as they still call themselves. But back then it was still the established church and everyone had to cough up money to keep it going.’
‘Even Catholics?’
‘Catholics, Dissenters, Jews, everyone. If they didn’t, they could be fined.’
‘So you think that’s how she lost her bit of land.’
‘I do.’
‘God help us, weren’t they savage when they had power.’
*
In 1990 Lauro and I spent six weeks at the Villa Serbelloni, the Rockefeller Foundation on Lake Como, where we were each granted a residency to get on with our writing. Meals were designed to enable us to ‘interact’ and, while my neighbour and I at one of these were trying to do so, he brought up the topic of paedophilia, which he said was rampant among RC priests. I was incredulous.
‘That surely can’t be true?’
‘I’m afraid it can,’ he insisted. ‘From what I hear, they’re all at it!’
Perhaps I looked peeved, for his query as to whether I planned ‘to return to the fold’ was acerbic.
Hoping to avoid a religious wrangle, I remarked that, whether or not one believed the Christian story, belief seemed to do wonders for those who did. Then I quoted what a Catholic journalist had told me, about how a priest from Cork had described his experience under torture in Buenos Aires. ‘My Christian faith became very real to me,’ he had told her. ‘In such suffering Christ is almost physically present …’
To change the subject, I turned to the man on my other side. He, however, had been listening and wanted to talk about the Pope’s charisma which was also being described as ‘physical’. Well, I told him, I had gone on the journalists’ train to Knock in County Mayo which was said to have been one of the more magnetic of John Paul II’s appearances.
‘And felt the magnetism?’
‘No. Just the crowd’s excitement.’
‘So how explain that?’
I said I thought crowds generated it themselves, as sports fans did.
‘Going back to what you say about paedophilia,’ I said to the first man, ‘if it’s true …’
‘It is.’
‘… the Vatican will lose support.’
A shrug.
We left it there, for I wasn’t sure I wanted that to happen, since the Church had comforted some people, viz., the priest from Cork.
It didn’t comfort Seán though. He, who had struggled against it when it was at its domineering worst, died in 1991, yearning for belief in an afterlife which evaded him, and feeling the ire of a man who has paid dues to a club which welshes on commitments.
*
I was upset when Mrs Jones, who ran the home where he died, told the press that he had gone back to the Church. I didn’t believe her, for he and I had discussed his disbelief – and the distress it was causing him – quite close to the end.
A more down-to-earth truce, however, worked out better.
In 1978 the Lord Mayer of Cork, Gerald Goldberg, invited him to accept the Freedom of the City: a move designed to patch up quarrels with long-dead Corkonians. At first Seán refused the offer but, when it was repeated ten years later, accepted it. Sadly, when the day came, he was not well enough to travel, so I went to Cork to represent him. Meanwhile in 1986 he was elected Saoi, a newish honour then (I think Sam Beckett was the only one to have it before him) and still defined today as the highest one which Irish artists can confer on one of their number. Patrick Hillery, then president of the country, came to the house to present him with a torc – a Celtic ornament – which symbolised it. Garret FitzGerald visited too.
*
For as long as Seán could be taken for drives, visits to Killough remained a ritual. I don’t know whether anyone still lived there, but he took a wry pleasure in pausing at its gate to stare, probably not at what was before him, but at a remembered self aged thirty-three, which was the age he was when he and Eileen moved there. A few years later, it was the house he came home to when he had been betraying her with Elizabeth Bowen.
This reminded me of one of his own short stories.
‘An Inside Outside Complex’ is about a man who, having fallen out with his wife, brings her a peace-offering. It is a mirror which proves too big to bring through her door, so is left leaning against the hedge outside her window. As the two look out of this and see themselves looking in, their conflicted need to be together and apart is briefly resolved. It is a perfect metaphor both for the way Seán’s yens did and did not work, and on how the mirror of narrative changes what it reflects.
*
Sometimes, standing with him at that gate, I too slipped back to a time when he used to exorcise the thrills and terrors which Eileen’s stories conjured up. These, being gleaned from the Gaelic, had come either directly from native speakers in West Cork or from tales collected by the Irish Folklore Commission, which she translated, retold in English, and sold to the Oxford University Press in the Fifties.
Once, she told me, she asked a woman from whom she had got some fairy tales whether she herself believed in fairies, but the woman was too proud to admit this.
‘Yerra no!’ she denied. ‘I don’t. But mind, they’re there all the same.’ This answer enchanted Eileen – and showed that belief in Ireland had often been dodgy.
*
Whenever I was back in LA, Helen Fahy sent me reports on Seán’s health, along with warnings that Maurice Harmon, a UCD professor, who was writing his biography, would read any letter I sent.
‘So write nothing private,’ she warned.
This recalls another short story, one by Robbie McCauley, and is about a man writing about a writer he has not met – which makes him an unconvincing Boswell. When the story opens, though, the writer is to visit him and will, with luck, reveal something of himself.
Setbacks accumulate when the academic learns that he has been mispronouncing his guest’s name – which, when colleagues find out, will turn him into a laughing stock. Next, the guest has a stroke and dies.
Setback or bonus?
Bonus, of course. Now nobody need know about the mispronounced name, and the biographer can write what he likes and footnote it with the claim, ‘learned in a private interview’.
*
‘So,’ Helen repeated, ‘write nothing private.’
But nothing was private now for Seán, whose ability to read or think flickered unreliably. Worse: old letters to friends, most of these now dead, would be quoted in the biography. He had sold them to the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, where biographers could consult them whenever they chose. Gossip, in a town like Dublin, would lose nothing in the telling.
*
Recalling the reticence of Antonin Artaud’s sister when I, as a brash doctoral student, wanted access to facts about her brother’s life, I felt retrospective shame. And, on reading about the venom which James Joyce’s grandson displayed when scholars wanted to make use of Joyce’s family papers, I realised that relations between relatives and biographers are bound to be fraught, with self-interest on both sides masquerading as pietas.
Maybe it’s as well, I tell myself, that fewer people now write letters at all. Think of what happened to Joyce’s ‘dirty’ ones to his wife when they were left with Brandeis University on the
understanding that nobody was to copy them. People did. They memorised, took furtive notes, and wrote down their unreliable recollections. So in the end it was thought safer for Dick Ellmann to publish the letters openly and officially, since this, at least, deprived poachers of the glee of the chase.
So now the ‘dirty letters’ display their ancient, salivating excitement on the Internet.
*
With considerable rue, then, I made my letters to Seán impersonal, knowing that the experience of slitting open the envelopes would probably bring him as much – or little – pleasure as an exchange of views about anything at all. Even before his breakdown, I had seen him puzzle for up to half an hour over a single page.
Eileen, who unlike him had stayed mentally sharp until she died, had concealed his mental deterioration from me, which was what made it impossible for him to join Lauro and me while we were still commuting between London and LA
However, once settled in Gloucester Crescent, I suggested that he pay us a visit, and offered to give a party for him and invite anyone still alive whom he would like to see. His old friends, V. S. Pritchett and his wife, Dorothy, were living just around the corner from us in Regent’s Park Terrace, so would surely come. I was hoping to replicate a dinner party we had given for him in the Seventies, which had been attended by Elizabeth Bowen, John Betjeman and some friends of my own. Cecil Day-Lewis and Jill Balcon were to have come, too, but Day-Lewis died just days before that first party.
The second one never happened – or rather did not include Seán, although he had claimed to be looking forward to it. At first this was due to his doctors’ warning that he might have a fit when the plane took off and create a disturbance, which could oblige the pilot to return to the airport. They then got the idea that if a strong young man were to travel with him, to handle any trouble which might arise, he could come. Mrs Jones volunteered her son for the duty, but, for reasons which I was never told, Seán now backed out. VSP and Dorothy came to dinner anyway and we had a good, if slightly subdued, evening.
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