Ghost Light

by Joseph O'Connor

  ‘Perhaps indeed,’ Synge said, ‘but I did not write it different. Or “differently”, as I think you must mean. And when I require a lesson in dramaturgy I shall fly to you, Miss O’Neill, for we all value the treasures of wisdom you contribute so ceaselessly on the subject. In the meantime, perhaps you would condescend to speak the actual text as it appears on the page rather than the superior one which appears to exist in your head.’

  ‘If it doesn’t exist in my head, Mr Synge, then it doesn’t exist at all.’

  ‘I see we have a philosopher as well as a playwright.’

  ‘And I see you’d prefer a parrot.’

  ‘Miss O’Neill, I have appealed to you and now I give you fair warning. You are a professional who is remunerated on the basis of compliance –’

  ‘If you think, Mr Synge, that you are going to lord it over me in that manner, then let me tell you – You have your porridge.’

  ‘Miss O’Neill, would you take a grip of yourself –’

  ‘You have your porridge, my buckshee!’

  ‘The girl is only giving an opinion, sir,’ intervened an electrician named Dossie Wright who was occasionally put in a loincloth and told he was a warrior when a crowd scene needed bulking out. He was a skirt-chaser who would risk dismissal and consequent beggary if he thought a grope might be attainable as reward. It was said admiringly among the scene-painters that he would ride a scabby duck and once or twice there had been backstage incidents involving angry fathers or husbands, for Mr Wright had played Mr Right to many. ‘It’s not that any of us would want to be acting the maggot,’ he continued, in his slow-witted-but-well-meaning-prison-officer’s voice. ‘But it’s ourselves has to do the playing. And that’s a different sausage from the writing. And if Miss O’Neill wants the thing explained, I think it poor order it wouldn’t be. That’s Dossie Wright’s point of view on the matter.’ He blazed on her a look of almost violent affability as he fumbled with the yard of cable he was holding.

  ‘If one may be of assistance,’ began Yeats, with priestly quietness. ‘What Mr Synge has in mind –’

  ‘What one has in mind is an actress passably capable of committing to memory the text one has written, and then speaking it without the emission of saliva over the front stalls. Is this asking too much? Or merely too much of your good self, Miss O’Neill? Might you do me the enormous and doubtless undeserved courtesy of looking at me when I address you, do you think?’

  ‘Perhaps, Mr Shakespeare, you would illustrate your meaning.’

  ‘I am sorry? Are you now smoking? Would you extinguish that cigarette, please?’

  ‘I will extinguish it when I am good and ready, my little man cut short. And since you are the world’s blessed expert on my never-ending faults, you would be doing me a great obligement entirely to mosey up here onto the stage and give us out the line in the way that suits you best for I am sure all of us in the company would get a chuckle out of it anyhow. Wouldn’t we, ladies and gentlemen?’

  ‘No no, Miss O’Neill, I have a better idea. Why don’t you come down here and I shall give you a pen and you can rewrite the entire piece to your liking.’

  ‘You know where you can stick your pen.’

  ‘I shall fetch Lady Gregory,’ he warned.

  ‘I was talking, Your Majesty, about your inkwell.’

  Yeats arose slowly and splayed his fingers on the seat-back before him, like a senator about to commence a funeral oration. His sharp Roman features were sternly arranged and he wore his sense of the moment like a mantle. The monocle had been set in the place that ophthalmology intended. It was going to be a difficult few minutes.

  ‘If one may, Synge?’ he murmured.

  The playwright nodded back morosely.

  ‘That will be enough out of you, Miss O’Neill,’ said the poet.

  ‘I’m only saying,’ she said, ‘and I amn’t being listened to. And playwrights screeching away at me like a zoo full of chimps.’

  ‘That will do you now, Miss,’ Yeats snapped.

  He waited for utter silence to descend on the gathering, like a man expecting a train he knows for certain is coming but might take a little time to arrive. One glove he unbuttoned and unhurriedly removed. Then, blinking like a cow, he regarded her. She was interested to see exactly how he would rise to the occasion, for by now she had noticed a sort of poignancy about Yeats: that there was in him, as in most men, no matter their class, a small, bright unease about relative position, that his envy of Synge’s inheritance, the air of tattered lordliness, the fluency in old languages, the savoir-faire, the rumoured trustfund, had taken a form she would often see again, that of wanting to be the nobleman’s cornerboy. It was a kind of love, perhaps, but it was other things too. She ground out her cigarette in a goblet.

  ‘We appear to be experiencing a difficulty,’ he said reedily. ‘A difficulty of recognition. A difficulty of blindness. Well, no matter. It is to be expected. This can occur when our instincts are underdeveloped. We become mired in capriciousness, the false belief that we have earned importance. This man’ – he pointed the monocle at Synge – ‘is a genius. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Yeats,’ mumbled two of the actors.

  ‘What is he? All of you!’

  ‘A genius, Mr Yeats.’

  ‘Yes. That is correct. He is our Aeschylus. Our Ibsen. He is one of the very magi, belittling himself in our stable. We are the swine, the kine, the cud-chewers at the apotheosis. We are the excrement in the straw. What are we?’

  ‘Excrement, Mr Yeats,’ replied one of the walk-ons obediently. Nobody turned to look at him.

  ‘Yes. We are ordure. We are expellable. Vileness. And when you, and you – and especially you – are deservedly long forgotten and part of the dust, the works of this Homer shall be glorified. He shall ride our wingèd horse into the sunbursts of Olympus whilst your … bicycles rust in the pawnshop. We are none of us worthy – I say none of us, mind – to fasten the very lacing of his brogue. And when you are old and full of weariness, the best any of you will have to recollect of your miserable, futile huckstering existences is that once you were in the presence of a Titan. You will fetch down the very script you now besmirch by your egregious dribblings, from the shelf upon which it will have rested for years – perhaps decades – and the ancient hearth of our muse shall scald you for shame that you did not kneel when you had the opportunity of genuflection.’

  ‘I say Yeats, old man, I think you’re being a little too –’

  ‘Be quiet, Synge!’

  He turned again to the actors, a sneer of derision making him appear taller, and pushed a hand through the flop of his hair. ‘You pitiable, counter-jumping ingrates,’ he continued grimly. ‘You boils on the thigh of a peasant.’

  ‘Ah, here,’ said Dossie Wright.

  ‘You are an irrelevance, Wright. A vacuum. A hole. You are all of you a surplus population. Whoreson zeds. Unnecessary letters. Sans the work of this genius you are … umlauts!’ He said the last word lavishly, pretending not to enjoy it. There were mystified glances. Someone released an unfortunately audible belch.

  It was only at this point that Yeats vacated his place, striding heavily, sombrely, towards the lip of the stage, and slowing even more markedly the closer he got to it, like a battleship approaching a mutinous colony. The tone he was aiming at was more-sorrowful-than-angry but it came out as disdain mixed with rage suppressed, which was so remarkably similar to his customary mode, for everything from reciting a lyric to ordering a mop-lady where to mop, that it was difficult to know if he was being completely serious or was giving a comically deprecating imitation of himself in an effort to explode the tension. It was only when the cape was flung desultorily over the stiffened left shoulder in the manner of a toreador about to pose for a portraitist that it became clear he wasn’t playing for laughs.

  ‘God’s Wounds,’ he said quietly, seeming to peer at his hands. A stupid onlooker might have formed the notion he was talking to his fingers. In fact,
it was his way of letting you know that you weren’t worth the exertion of looking at. ‘Can you face yourselves? Truly? Have you the audacity to exist? Is there no crevice, no nook, for you to slither into and expire? You bits of sucked sugar-stick. You abattoir’s effluvia. You would make of the Holy Grail a spittoon.’ Here he raised his furious eyes, his ancient, glittering eyes, and they had nothing in the way of gaiety. ‘You wastrels of the precious. You squanderers. You bawds. You stains left on a pew. You vague … dampnesses. I weep when I think on the riches you have wasted. Alone, in my rooms, I weep. You will enunciate these pearls of our art as Mr Synge intended or you may streel yourselves back to the … cabbage-patches you belong in. Do I render myself comprehensible to you?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Yeats.’

  ‘Good. That is good. I shall now resume my seat. And you shall recommence from scene three. And you shall speak the lines accurately. And if there is another solitary twitter of insurgency out of yourself, Miss O’Neill, I shall personally take a stick to you before flinging myself upon the mercy of the court. The tuppenceha’penny fine I should receive for doing what your mother should have done would be a farthing too severe, in my view.’

  ‘You have your porridge, Mr Yeats, if you think you’re talking to Molly O’Neill like that …’

  ‘No! You have your porridge! Now eat it!’

  Sunday is their day; she takes the quarter-to-eleven from the city. It is a standing arrangement, but he reminds her of it by letter. They roam the furzy slopes of Killiney Hill or lie among its alpines looking down at the bay. The setting has the dual advantage of being Wordsworthian and discreet. Here they can be alone, almost certain of privacy. They feed one another the wild berries that grow near the obelisk: fraughans in the vernacular, but she calls them ‘purple grapes’. It becomes one of their euphemisms, a love phrase charged with intimate meaning. The fairy-woman and the vagabond, their transgressive liaison. It is like a scene from a folk tale, the seed of one of his plays. But who is emancipating whom?

  Sometimes he recites the lyrics he has written for her: his gifts. ‘I wrote another poem on you last night,’ he confides, as though he had somehow imprinted it on her flesh. But these verses are rarely sensual, are often oblique. Only seldom does he tell her, shyly, like a boy, how much he likes to see her ‘in light summer clothes’. At such moments, strangely, she has a powerful sense of his brokenness, of how difficult he finds it just being alive. There are days when he looks at an oak and sees only the makings of a coffin. He has no memory of his father, who died when he was a baby.

  She pictures the cancer that is in him as a militia of tiny lights moving slowly around his innards, leaving no corner unscarred. She sees herself extinguishing a single one of them every time she does him a kindness. It has something to do with a sermon she once heard as a girl in the great vaulted bastion of St Nicholas of Myra church. The priest had said grace was a gathering of candles waiting to be lit by the sinner. It has stayed with her always, this evocative depiction, even as her faith gives inevitable ground to the editings and adjustments that come with adult life. God, providence, the balm in Gilead – they need to be met halfway.

  If he coughs in her presence, she blesses him silently. If he gasps, she sends him a prayer. As though observing a vast city at the approach of dawn, she sees the lights of his cancer flicker out one by one. She envisages his lungs – radiant with pain – and the snuffer of her benignity sets to its work. If she could only touch them – physically touch them – the air in them would sweeten and cleanse and renew, and the flames that always scorch them would puff into nothingness like wicks pinched out by her fingers.

  She encourages him to eat, to drink if he wishes to; he was raised with a puritan’s views on alcohol. He has gone into public houses while on his rambles around Wicklow, where he talks with the tinkers and trampers and poachers, but has never truly escaped from the notion of his rearing, that drink is the devil’s doorway. Porter is healthy, a tonic, she tells him. Her mother has given birth to eight children in her time and often says a nightly glass of porter was the only reason she had been able to do it. It was also, remarks her grandmother, in a meaningful way, the only reason half of them had been conceived.

  He gains a little weight in their first months together. He abandons his talk of Switzerland. There is a clinic in the Alps for people with his condition, where they feed you up with strudel, stuff you like an archduke, and force you out to walk in the cold mountain air and to listen to yokels with alpenhorns. He laughs as he tells these stories but she can see he is afraid. He is often wild with gaiety when frightened.

  He can be jealous, furiously so, if he senses a rival in the picture. She is not to talk to other men, never to take one by the arm. Dossie Wright, especially, is to be shunned, he insists. And there are others against whom he advises unceasing caution. Musicians are untrustworthy. Many have unspeakable diseases. Medical students are debauchers who ‘dangle out of actresses’ and brag of their seductions, of innocents ruined. He is not himself a dangler, a stage-door Johnnie. No gentleman would inveigle a girl by holding out false hopes.

  He is not conventionally handsome; that goatee makes him appear shifty. A face like a blacking brush, as Sara sometimes puts it. He looks faintly like a typical Irishman in an old Punch cartoon: beetle-browed, mercurial, recently down from the trees. But he is not a typical Irishman: he loves to listen. His few true confidantes have all been women. (‘People like Yeats who sneer at old-fashioned goodness and steadiness in women seem to want to rob the world of what is most sacred in it.’) She talks to him about her clothes, about hats and gowns, her difficult sister, problems with money, arguments at rehearsal, ghastly ‘digs’ she has stayed in, grim tours around the provinces, her painful menstruation. He arranges for her to attend an eminent gynaecologist in Dublin; cannot bear the thought that she would be in needless pain. As a child she had been sent to an orphanage following the death of her father, for her mother so suddenly widowed had been unable to cope. She tells him stories of the beadles, the bible-study, the gruel, how she escaped and ran back to Mary Street, begged her mother to allow her to remain. Her later life as a shop-girl in Switzers drapery: she tells him about that, and he listens as though entranced. She smokes like a soldier. He nags at her to stop.

  She finds him so queer. He is ‘highly-strung’, he informs her. Every writer is. This is the price of art. She knows the price of art, has been paying it for some time. Some of the love poems she has inspired seem like howls of grief.

  He talks to her about Paris, about Germany and the Aran Islands, where the people are serious and allow you to be alone. He longs to show her Brittany, Normandy, Inishmaan. Everything will be better when they marry, he promises, though his mother has often wondered aloud, as he himself has wondered in silence, how he and any wife could manage on a writer’s pittance. This appears to be Mother’s way of making it clear that the family silver will not be subsidising love in a garret. He hungers for the success that can give them independence. To escape from Glenageary, to make his own way: the need comes to fume in him like a lust.

  He is working on a strange piece, set in a hamlet in Mayo, about a storyteller who bludgeons his father and somehow becomes a hero when he makes a boasting song of the crime. The play is sending him mad; he is afraid to follow whatever instincts he has about its shape and its poetry and its savagery. He has been trying to conceal his uncertainty with what he calls ‘strong writing’, but is beginning to discern that this is a cheat, that form and content must be inextricably wedded. It must be what it must. It is not a pantomime or a parable. And if people do not like it, it still must be itself. He comes to feel there is a great role in it for his changeling girl. His ‘Pigeen’, as he has taken to calling her.

  They discuss this role. He listens while she talks. She is adaptable, amenable. Which changeling is not? She thinks he is a genius. He tells her that she is. She loves his dedication, his monkish graveness. Beside him, even severe old Augusta Gregory ca
n seem a high-kicker auditioning for a cabaret. He talks about his characters as though they were real. ‘I wrestle with that playboy,’ he jokes bleakly, but he means it. It is as though these voluble buckos and fiery-tongued beauties were to be encountered any evening on a stroll through Mother’s garden.

  One warm Sunday evening on Killiney Hill, he reads her a few soliloquies of the play set in Mayo. A bachelor is a ridiculous figure, he recites, ‘like an old braying jackass strayed upon the rocks’. He looks up at her hopefully. Is that the right tone? Is it true? Is it funny? Will they laugh?

  He claims to his changeling that he writes out of the desire for consolation, that something in story-making eases him, assuages his demons. But it also exhausts him. He has to be careful. (‘A man cannot work with the cream of his brain for more than six hours at a sitting.’) Late at night he goes to his study in the stilled, dark house and looks at what he has written that day. A quarter-measure of watered whiskey, and he reads over his pages, and the crippled old Labrador snores on the campbed that is set beneath a tapestry of hunters. She can picture the room, the green shade on the lamp, the leather-mounted blotter on the sea-captain’s desk, a Waterford vase of buttercups from the railway embankment wilting on the bedside table. The dim mullioned window, the soft scratch of his nib, his shirtsleeves unbuttoned like a gambler’s at a table where the game is running on long. Sometimes he looks out at Dalkey Quarry in the moonlit distance, or he listens to the servants moving quietly about the house. Where are they going so late? What are their stories? Why do they pause by my door? The rasp of the match and the small globe of flame as he lights a last bowl of tobacco.

  He knows there is only one thing that separates us from the beasts: it is that everyone carries an Eden, an inner realm of silence, and this is what some call the soul, having no other name for it. The point is to allow people to reach it, be blessed by it, even briefly, to save them from the filthy undermurmur of living.