*
Seán had meanwhile developed a crush on Mrs Jones and sighed at his failure to make any impression on her. Why, he asked me, when confessing this, were some women standoffish? Was it to do with power? I mentioned age, which set him brooding.
‘How old am I?’ he asked after a while. ‘Am I a hundred?’
‘No, no,’ I reassured. ‘Only ninety-one.’ I was glad he had a woman to dream about. After he died, I gave Mrs Jones a watercolour by Norah McGuinness to thank her for the kindness, which must, I guessed, have won his heart. McGuinesses, I saw, some time later, were selling well, so with luck Mrs Jones got a good price for hers.
Seán died two and a half years after Eileen.
They had made their wills at a time when the Church was forbidding Catholics to leave their bodies – ‘temples of the Holy Ghost’ – for research, which meant that Irish medical schools were in urgent need of such legacies, but in defiance of ‘Holy Mum’, as some fitful convert – possibly Graham Greene? – used to call the institution we knew as ‘Mother Church’, both had done so. This meant that once the research was done, the memorial services were over and I had scattered their ashes on similar grey days in Lake Gougane Barra, there was no place dedicated to their memory, so less reason for me to visit Ireland. I did so a few times, nonetheless, to judge literary prizes or see friends, although lively members of our diaspora were often easier to see elsewhere: Maura Teissier in Paris and Positano, Brian Moore in LA, and many more in London.
Then our LA connection ended too.
This happened during an economic dip, when UCLA invited senior professors to take early retirement in exchange for better pensions, since its pension fund was more solvent than the one for salaries.
Lauro accepted the offer, retired to London, and started to write livelier narratives, one of which was actually a novel and won a prize. Even when writing history, he now felt more free to vary his interests and topics. He also gave seminars at the École des Hautes Études, which meant that we needed to find somewhere to stay when in Paris. We did this by swapping a sojourn in Gloucester Crescent for one in the rue Saint Martin, where the American writer Edmund White then lived. We did this exchange several times and, in between house-swaps, did the same thing with the Italian theatre critic, Rita Cirio. She took our house for less time than we wanted to spend in her Paris flat, so, to make things fairer, she brought parties of friends with her. Her flat had a pleasant roof terrace, overlooking the Senate building, and both arrangements worked so well, that even when the connection with the Hautes Études ended, we went on spending time in Paris. The Eurostar has now brought it so close that we have almost as many friends there as in London.
*
April Blood, Lauro’s book about the 1478 conspiracy to murder the Medici brothers Lorenzo il Magnifico and Giuliano in Florence cathedral did well both with his academic peers and with a popular readership. He followed it with Scourge and Fire, an account of the struggle between Florentine Republicans, animated by Savonarola, and Medici partisans, who, though banished from Florence during the years covered by the book, were doggedly plotting to get back. Reviewers were surprised by Lauro’s view of the Dominican friar, who is often presented as an unlikable puritan but emerges here as an idealist. His end – he was hanged and burned at the stake – darkens his story. Yet it strikes me that to see him as a forerunner of today’s Liberation theologians brightens it with the reminder that the Church has, repeatedly, found the ingenuity needed to sidestep its own dogmatism. I saw this in action when the canon lawyer Neri Capponi advised Maura Teissier that if she had any Irish friends who needed their marriages annulled, they should apply not to the bigoted Irish hierarchy, but directly to Rome. This advice was on a par with his way of dealing with Italian tax collectors who, assuming that everyone lied, allowed for this when calculating what people were likely to actually owe the state. This, Neri noted, obliged all citizens to lie, since those who did not risked being excessively penalised to the detriment of their families.
‘So,’ we asked him, ‘one reaches for truth through falsehood?’
‘Why not?’
Well, since religion is the realm of paradox, indeed why not? ‘O felix culpa!’ goes the hymn celebrating the redemption necessitated by the Fall. The liking for happy endings may originate right there.
Scourge and Fire was Lauro’s tenth book and, as I write, he is finishing his eleventh.
*
Once freed from our annual commuting to and from LA, we were able to visit, among other places, Egypt, Syria, Cambodia, Turkey, Russia, Sicily and different parts of Spain. This was more fun than toing and froing between the UK and US. Also, from time to time, we separately enjoyed ‘freebies’, such as my visits to Japan, to the Adelaide Festival, and an earlier one to the lavish Harbourfront festival in Toronto, where the Faber publisher Charles Monteith turned up with his star writer, William Golding, and his wife, and encouraged me to join their group.
This was generous of Charles, since I had by then left Faber and gone to Allen Lane with my novel No Country for Young Men, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1980, when the prize itself was deservedly won by Golding’s Rites of Passage.
Charles was not only generous in this. He had been stoical ten years earlier when my first novel, Godded and Codded, had to be withdrawn because of a libel threat. That taught me the cost of words – mine and the lawyer’s. His were so expensive that I hardly dared speak to him.
‘Did you commit libel?’ he asked.
I wasn’t sure. True, I had taken something from life: a bed so infested with termites that the bed had become termites and termites the bed, and this, claimed the woman who was suing Faber, tied her to the novel, which presented her, she said, as ‘a ludicrous and lecherous female’.
‘The story’s fictional,’ I told the lawyer hopefully. ‘And the characters are composite. The bed’s a metaphor really.’
‘That’s worse!’ he told me. ‘If you’d stuck to truth we could have pleaded “fair comment”.’
It was too expensive to argue. Besides that, the litigant was a woman who had once, at a party, loudly described Honor’s and Seán’s affair in terms quite close to ‘ludicrous and lecherous’. Had I, consciously, been taking revenge? Guilt hovered. I had, undeniably, turned one of her own comic turns against her, whose lovers, she often joked, perhaps to forestall other people’s jokes, tended to be damaged. ‘My lot’, she liked to say, ‘are the halt and the blind. I seem to attract them.’ The words were hers! Could I claim that she had libelled herself? Better not try.
*
The question arises, why use reality at all? I can only say that, for me, it provides a ballast which allows the imagination to levitate. When grounded in everyday life, I feel able to write without too much planning, which is how I prefer to write. There is a fear of drying up, but there is also the hope of something unexpected happening on the page. I got the idea for No Country for Young Men from hearing of an old Dublin lady from a nationalist family who had gone astray in her mind and fancied the year to be permanently 1922. This scrap of gossip was a talisman. Explosive with parable to anyone who knew Ireland, it was also blessedly commonplace, as avatars ought to be.
The gossip used in Godded and Codded, in contrast, led to that novel’s being scuttled. Shaken by this, I eagerly agreed when Lauro suggested that we collaborate on a documentary history of women. Its title, Not in God’s Image, echoed St Augustine’s notion that ‘separately … woman alone is not the image of God; whereas man alone is …’ We spent a year and a half doing research in the British Museum, using law codes, court cases, wage scales, diaries and the like as criteria for judging ordinary women’s status. Our subtitle was Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians. As I educated myself in the history of domestic mores, the pleasure of seeing how societies work became a fillip to fantasy. I was learning a new trade, and the tricks of all trades are useful to novelists. I was interested too in the workings of the
Church which has so often controlled society and more especially women.
Feminism was in the air, and animated my novel Women in the Wall, which came out in 1975. Set in sixth-century Gaul, it focused on the role of convents in misogynist warrior-societies where they could sometimes provide women with a refuge from violence as well as scope for ambition, self-realisation, self-mortification and an aspiration to become deaconesses. Clearly my mind was partly on the quarrels of the Seventies. What drove the narrative, though, was a suspicion that violence like that described in the sixth-century chronicles was likely to be internalised by the women too. And, indeed, the particular story which I chose – that of Queen, later Saint, Radegunda – shows the nuns in her convent inviting in the very ferocity which their convent had been founded to repel.
*
Among new strings to the RC bow was left-wing Catholicism which grew increasingly courageous in the Sixties and Seventies. As priests became less diffident about criticising Rome and it began to be said that the Church was now frankly divided, I used my own perceptions about this in a long historical novel. The Judas Cloth is set in the last years of papal Rome before the Italians took it over in 1870. I got the idea from a pun made by the vicar general of a mountainous diocese in Ecuador, when his Indian flock teasingly called him ‘el Cardenal’. Not only did he deny having that title, he also reminded them that the princes of the Church who did have it had often afflicted the poor as cruelly as the weals (also called cardenales) left on peasants’ bodies when landowners beat them in the bad old days. As Pope John Paul II was then discouraging left-wing priests from engaging in politics, I felt that it was the Roman cardenales who had often supported right-wing causes who were most likely to provide good material for fiction.
‘But why’, people who despise that sometimes ask, ‘write or indeed read it at all?’
Well, we all have our habits. The English invade other people’s countries; Italians design elegant things; the French dream of revolutions, and we Irish tell stories to amuse and console ourselves.
*
And Again? was Seán’s last novel: published when he was eighty, it consoled him for his loss of hope in a Christian heaven by imagining an offer made by the gods of Mount Olympus to a man not unlike himself. The offer is to let him grow younger instead of older, forget his past, enjoy successive erotic adventures with his daughter, his grand- then great-granddaughter, and so on. The gods’ interest is in discovering whether humans learn from their mistakes and, as the younging protagonist – whose name is Robert Younger – makes the same ones again and again, the message can only be that they don’t.
Reviewers were surprised. It was unlike anything Seán had written before. ‘This rueful hymn to life’, Publishers Weekly concluded amiably, ‘is funny and sad and true.’
Eileen hated it. Her own writings had always aimed to hold on to her happiest and most intense experience when, in her teens, she discovered what seemed to be a still vital, Gaelic culture, surviving in the hills and islands of the west. Seán had shared the discovery, so turning his protagonist, Younger, into an Englishman possibly seemed like a double betrayal.
‘I don’t like it,’ she murmured to me behind the kitchen door. ‘His book! I just – don’t like it.’
What could I say to comfort her? I couldn’t think of anything. I may have agreed that the novel was – did I say this? – a mite self-indulgent. But I suspect I didn’t, since admitting his need to indulge himself could have made her feel worse. People were reading the book as we had by then, so we couldn’t put his impudent genie back in its bottle. I wasn’t keen either on admitting that the notion of serial incest came uncomfortably close to revealing wanton impulses which, though fictional, were recognisably his.
‘I don’t like it either,’ I said to show that I was, for once, completely on her side – and that ours was in no way a literary discussion.
‘No?’
‘No.’
She haunts me now: warily, sometimes leaving behind a tenuous shadow of herself. When I awake from wool-gathering or sleep, she – or the shadow – slyly conveys an awareness that she has been in and on my mind. Like the trespasser she used to be, she is elusive. And by the time I begin to focus, both she – and the certainty that it was she – have dissolved.
*
Seán’s last invention, then, was a Faustian fiction in which his alter ego could enjoy a new and scruple-free youth. ‘Daydreaming’ had, after all, been the favourite hobby he chose to name in his entry in Who’s Who.
Eileen, instead, enjoyed evoking the myths of the country’s youth. Looking through her papers, I found after her death that, despite her arthritic fingers, she had been working on a new collection of these.
*
As for my own love of fiction, I contend that trying to slip inside and understand an alien reality keeps the imagination supple. Perhaps, too, impelled by memories of childhood fears that I might not exist, I write to exist more, to extend my scope and get a better look at life than you do while living it. Like one of those high-speed trains that don’t stop at your station, it streaks by too fast. One has to piece together the broken images and try for new patterns – that’s fiction writing. In my case I suppose, too, that I write because Seán and Eileen did. Je suis un enfant de la balle – I ply my parents’ trade.
About the Author
Julia O’Faolain was born in London in 1932. Her novel No Country for Young Men was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She was brought up in Cork and Dublin, educated in Paris and Rome and married an American historian in Florence. She lived for many years in the US, and now lives in London. A major collection of her short stories will be published by Faber and Faber.
By the Same Author
SHORT STORIES
We Might See Sights! and Other Stories
Man in the Cellar
Daughters of Passion
NOVELS
Godded and Codded
Women in the Wall
No Country for Young Men
The Obedient Wife
The Irish Signorina
The Judas Cloth
Adam Gould
NON-FICTION
Co-editor with Lauro Martines:
Not in God’s Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians
As Julia Martines, translator:
Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence:
The Diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti and Gregorio Dati
A Man of Parts by Piero Chiara
Copyright
First published in 2013
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2013
All rights reserved
© Julia O’Faolain, 2013
The right of Julia O’Faolain to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–29494–7
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